The Time Warrior: Ranking - 60

 

The Time Warrior

(Season 11, Dr 3 with Sarah Jane, 15/12/1973-5/1/1974, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Alan Bromly)

Rank: 60

   'Hello Irongron, we're The Normans - and we've just made a fantastic pact with The Rutans for a load of futuristic technology to wipe you English out. Of course, its turned all our troops green, but we've blamed all that as a side effect of the stinky cheese we have all been eating and so far nobody's thought to question it. Except, oops...Unfortunately we've just been stopped by a longshanks rascal with a mighty grin and a scarf that would have taken our full herd of cattle to knit, so we're feeling vulnerable. How about  quick peace deal instead then, eh? And then we can team up and smash the Spanish! Oh wait, no, hang on, they've teamed up with The Mara to make The Armada and our ships have all been sunk by a giant pink snake. Oh well, back to the drawing board!'

 

  

 Or ‘A Gallifreyan timelord in Lord Irongron’s Court...With Sontarons’. Not many DW stories can be summed up in one sentence – certainly few good ones – but when that one line is ‘a potato headed alien invades a Medieval Castle’ you know you’re in for something special. Despite the title ‘The Tine Warrior’ is one of those stories that’s really pretty timeless – not just because its the sort of story that would go down well in any of the 60 years this show has been on the air but because its all about how times never change (its just the people in them wear different clothes). DW’s first trip back in time for a massive seven years (give or take being dropped into a miniscope zoo, but that was in the future via a timeloop so it doesn’t count, honest!), many fans had forgotten that the Tardis could even go back to the past. Writer Robert Holmes was himself not at all sure about this commission from old friend Terrance Dicks, especially when he leafed through a children’s book on castles and struggled to work out how to make his story interesting and historically accurate, then decided to create a new alien and throw him into the mix to see how the humans reacted, in much the same way other writers threw the Doctor at time periods. Linx, our first Sontaron, is still my favourite of the tinpot warriors we get to meet, Kevin Lindsay throwing himself whole-heartedly into the part despite a heart condition and turning his Sontaron into more than just the simple soldier he was in the script (the director, wondering out loud if he was pronouncing ‘Sontaron’ right was told at rehearsals ‘If anyone should know how to pronounce it it’s me – I am one!’; actually Holmes’ intention was ‘Sontar-on’ not ‘Son-Tar-on’ but you don’t argue with a warrior) As much as they’re a clone race, more often than not played by Kevin Lindsay anyway in future stories, Linx has an extra layer of sarcasm and wit that the others don’t have and a temper twice the size that he is. Surprisingly we’ve had very few out-and-out fighters in the alien races we’ve seen in DW: most tend to be sophisticated, stealthy or at the very least chatty, while even the Daleks and Cybermen come with back stories that fleshes out just why they ended up in their metal or cybernetic casings that makes them more than mere soldiers. The Sontarons though are as straightforward as they come: they’re bred for war, any war, though its one they’re fighting with The Rutans that takes precedence – Earthlings are just collateral damage in their endless fight (though I find it amazing that we’ve still never had a full Sontraon-Rutan match on screen in all these years). New Who has enjoyed taking their straightforward obliviousness and single-mindedness and turning them into a comedy monster, but here in particular its the Sontarons’ ruthlessness and willingness to win at all costs that makes them so dangerous (because if they die in battle nobly then great – its the best way to die - and they know there’s another million clones waiting in the wings anyway). Even Davros or Cyber Controller want to save their skins when things get hairy, but not the Sontarons. It makes sense they should first meet up against the regeneration who is in so many ways the most peace-loving of the Drs (despite or perhaps because of working for UNIT), the one who in every story is determined to do everything to prevent all-out conflict (before the brigadier blows people up, though he’s barely in this story). Maybe its no surprise we end up with comedy characters like Straax from here though: Holmes’ scripts were often tongue-in-cheek and the first classic cliffhanger (when Linx finally takes his helmet off) is one of the series’ best gags (we’ve got so used to seeing Sontarons now that its somewhat lost on us, but the fact that the alien has a helmet-shaped head after 25 minutes of fevered behind-sofa speculation of what might be underneath it is hilarious). It feels as if Holmes was told to go away and write about marauding medieval peasants and decided that marauding aliens were much more fun, even if they are basically the same thing. For this is one of those DW stories that’s all about perspective and your place in the food chain: to his people in medieval England Irongron is a near-God, a lord who keeps them them safe and fights all their battles, a shark in a duckpond. To Linx he’s a primitive like all the other humans, someone easily manipulated into doing his bidding, a minnow in a drop in a puddle insignificant compared to the real battle against the Rutans. To a timelord, though, both are primitive for even thinking in terms of war still. Notably both sides are closer foes than they seem and each treats the Doctor in exactly the same way for all their technology because neither gets the point of what life is for (the Dr spends a lot of this story being captured by both; just to ram the point home about what an alien he is this is the first story that refers to his home planet as ‘Gallifrey’ – yes even though we’ve been there already its never referred to by name) After all, Linx is what the Doctor could have been had he been less moralistic, an exiled alien sent to Earth in a timezone he finds primitive and where all that brainpower is used to simply make weapons to blow other primitive people up (just as Irongron is a less moral – and hairier – Brigadier with all the military might of his local area at his command). Usually Holmes is up to some sort of disguised political commentary as mischief and his off-the-wall submission of his script breakdown alone shows (to date still the only one delivered as if it was being sent by the alien itself; given Dicks and Holmes’ close friendship it was pretty much a given that it was going to be commissioned but the BBC do like their official paperwork) uses a lot of Vietnam phrases like ‘gook’ ‘pow’ and ‘zap’ (not used onscreen). The Vietnam war was in its 19^th year when this story went out in 1974 and winding down (there’s an official ceasefire in 1975) and the general consensus was ‘what was the point of that then, eh?’ The war was seen as a folly, when people died for not much gain, especially on a lefty series like DW and the general sense in this script is that wars are just a by-product of mankind’s medieval mindset that somehow continued to become an anachronism in the present and it takes someone learned and noble like The Doctor to see through the stupidity of it all. And then there’s Sarah Jane, the new companion, who gets a memorable debut working on a story for her newspaper about disappearing scientists and who reckons The Doctor is a bit dodgy, sneaking into the Tardis to see what he’s up to. Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks created her to be a more proactive companion than Jo, one who was an outspoken feminist who had a curiosity that matched the Drs without as much need to be protected and Sarah’s at her best in these early stories, full of spiky put-downs covering up a vulnerability and fright (as much as fans love the 4^th Dr-Sarah pairing and as great as Elisabeth Sladen is bouncing off Tom Baker, her character is never quite as fully dimensional again past this season). Holmes’ reaction to this new character is to throw her so far out of her comfort zone poor Sarah’s ideals and belief in equality take quite a hammering and after a first episode of fighting for equal rights the plot sends her back in time to a point where women practically didn’t have any: her much quoted line ‘You’re living in the Middle Ages!’ to the servant girls keeping out the way of the battle fought by the men, before realising where she is, is one of the best lines in a script full to the brim with delicious quotes. As much as the script makes her a figure of fun for most of the story, running to keep up with what the audience already knows, these aren’t cruel put downs either: its the men in this story who don’t seem to have evolved much in a thousand odd years, with the Brig and UNIT just a higher-tech version of the Medieval soldiers battling over land and keeping their ‘local’ territory safe from invaders; actually women have come a long way, as Sarah shows (we never have met a female Sontaron to date, for instance, if there even was one once). Unusually for Holmes, who tended to be brought in at the last minute or worked on DW alongside other projects, he had a lot of time spare to write this story and it shows: this may well be his cleverest script for the series and one that he’s clearly spent a lot of time thinking about, with all the contrasts and themes there in plain sight but never getting in the way of a rattlingly good story. It’s a great debut for Elisabeth Sladen who manages to make Sarah the middle ground between Liz Jo and Leela to come, bright without being brainy, cute without being gullible and brave without being savage. It’s an even better one for Jon Pertwee who, for pretty much the last time, looks as if he’s having great fun, perfectly at home running round castles and out-mouthing humans and Sontaron alike (I so wish he’d had more historicals – this is his only one despite being the Dr for five years; by way of contrast Hartnell did eleven in three years). Yes there are more complex DW scripts than this one, yes the sub-plot about the missing scientists gets a bit wasted (for a while it looks as if the script is going to be a repeat of ‘The Time Meddler’ and be all about the Doctor preventing past man getting his hands on future equipment, before Linx becomes more interesting as a foe), the sub-plot about building a robot doesn’t really go anywhere (it breaks rather too easily) and Irongron’s hordes aren’t anywhere near as interesting as he is (David Daker is just the right side of caricature and very much a 1970s English ‘lad’ , so much so you half expect to watch ye medieval football while drinking ye medieval beer). However its a lot of fun, looks amazing on screen like most other DW historicals and makes a lot of serious points along the way too.

+ Cheshire’s Peckerton Castle is the first of a handful used in DW down the years (as both Irongron’s castle and his Wessex rivals, shot from different angles) and its one of the best: it might seem strange to describe it as a ‘very mediaeval English castle’ but if you’re not from round these parts you’d be surprised how much they vary and how many have been rather obviously repaired in later centuries, with the effect of looking as if someone’s poured several different limited editions of LEGO into one project. As it happens its a Victorian ‘fake’ designed to look as if its from The Middle Ages, but an impressive one perfect for time-travelling shows like this where it needs to look ‘new’ (well, ish) not a hulking ruin. Amazingly its the furthest North in the UK that 20^th century DW will ever go to film (yes, even the Scotland of ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ was filmed in Sussex). Even better, though, are the studio sets of the inside which fit perfectly with what the outside looks like. For a start, they look really well-lived in; so many TV programmes, from the ever-excellent Merlin down to its darker cousin Game Of Thrones down make the mistake of having castles look smart the way they do when tourists walk round them rather than lived in the way they did when dozens of people called them home. Note how it looks like Linx’s space ship (another highly impressive prop, round like a golf ball) which is basically just his own portable castle too, complete with thick layers to keep invaders out, another of this episode’s throwbacks to how nothing really changes in past, present or future.

- Pertwee hurt his back in an acting job years before DW, and it was the sort of injury that was intermittent and flared up suddenly from time to time. You can tell that its giving him gyp across much of season 11 (its one of the reasons he left the part he loved so much at the end of the year, along with the BBC cruelly turning down his request for a raise) and nowhere more than in the fight scenes for this story. Usually Pertwee would do all his own stunts unless really outrageous (and even then he’d try to give them a go) but the brawl in the castle where he gets thrown round Irongron’s castle alternates between him walking round much more gingerly than normal and his usual stunt double Terry Walsh in an all-too-obvious wig.