The War Games
(Season 6, Dr 2 with Jamie and Zoe, 19/4/1969-21/6/1969, producer: Derrick Sherwin, writers; Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, director: David Maloney)
Rank: 8
'I've just had a sudden thought about the doctor's exile. You know we only really exiled him because we couldn't stand the sound of that blasted recorder? Well, what if we didn't send him far enough away? What if he takes up, I don't know, the electric guitar or something?!? Maybe we should send him to Vortis or Raxacoricofallapatorious to be on the safe side?!'
It’s the end #2 - and the moment wasn’t so much prepared for as inevitable consequence of everything the series had been gearing towards for six years. Even the Doctor can’t keep running away forever and the production team are running out of affordable places to send him. So there’s a new regime in town: a new setup, where The Doctor will end up UNIT’s scientific advisor and help defeat aliens in a more cost-effective way on Earth. It’s all change: Patrick Troughton has worn himself out after three years and wants to do other things, while Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury don’t want to go on without their friend. This is the last story to be made at Dr Who’s original regular haunt, Lime Grove before moving to TV centre (well most of the time: next story ‘Spearhead From Space’ is a rare exception filmed on location thanks to a strike as it happens, but that was the plan). What’s more, when the series comes back after a six month rest it’s going to be in colour in line with other BBC TV programmes planned for the new decade. The series will never be the same – and might not be around at all if the ratings keep falling, with the new-look season seven very much a last gasp chance saloon to turn things around (the series was never going to end here, despite the tying of loose ends, but there was a real worry that ‘Inferno’ would end up as the last story). But now Terrance Dicks, the still fairly new script editor still in his 30s and fresh to TV and his temporary caretaker producer Derrick Sherwin (who covers this story and the next one while Peter Bryant is off sick) have multiple problems. How do they come up with a story that manages to send a proper epic goodbye to the 2nd Doctor era, dovetail nicely into the 3rd Doctor era (at a time when Jon Pertwee hasn’t even been cast yet), manages to tell a satisfying story in its own right and manages to pad out ten whole episodes (for season six in 1969 has seen more collapses than any other in the history of the show and the last sixteen episodes are all last minute substitutes, stretched to breaking point to pad out time. One is a story named ‘The Impersonators’ and one ‘The Carrions Of Time’, by Malcolm Hulke and David Whittaker respectfully. Some sources suggest another. See ‘The Space Pirates’ for more on this sorry saga). To honour so many changes this end of season story needs to be so much more than just another story, it needs to honour the last three, even the last six years of Dr Who folklore. And it does.
There were a number of
fairly panicked meetings as the end grew nearer. It was Sherwin who, puzzled
that Dr Who had never been given a ‘series Bible’ outlining all the facts about
the main character (because he was meant to be a mystery!), suggested an ending
where things had got so out of hand that The Doctor would finally cal on his
own people for help and that maybe it could be them exiling The Doctor to Earth
for ‘interfering’, an idea eagerly seized by Terrance. Now he just had to write
the beginning. With time ticking though he knew he couldn’t pad out ten
episodes by himself to he turned to his friend and one time landlord Malcolm
Hulke to help him out (each writing an episode every two-three days, which
meant the entire ten episode story was done in around a fortnight). Hulke – who
seemed to bear no ill will for having a story turned down last minute which
started this mess in the first place - had already co-written ‘The Faceless Ones’ (with his pal David
Ellis, who gets an in-joke name-check as a Major in this story) and knew the
series well and Dicks chose him partly because he was a ferociously fast
typist, partly because he lived nearby for quick meetings, partly because he’d
be fun to work with, partly to give an old friend some work as a thankyou for
the years it had been the other way around, but also because Hulke had a
different way of seeing the world to Terrance which had resulted in some lively
conversations over the years. Hulke was a card-carrying member of the communist
party who had happily clashed with Dicks’ more mainstream views during many a
jokey discussion over where the world was heading during the era of the cold
war. Dicks would usually take the American stance, that capitalism was better
and fairer but Hulke believed the core values of communism were fairer, that
everyone shared in everything (even if Russia is was and always has been a poor
example of the communist ideal as created by Lenin in 1917). Dicks believed in
empire and expansionism and wanted the cold war to break into all-out war so
the capitalists could win (it’s one of the reasons he came up with the UNIT
idea of The Doctor helping soldiers); Hulke believed that only peace at all
costs would truly set people free(it’s one of the reasons he becomes the person
most critical of the UNIT format and the writer most likely to send it up). So
‘The War Games’ grew naturally out of the discussions they were having anyway,
written in such a hurry that the two men would alternate episodes, often
providing each other with the most ridiculously overblown cliffhangers that the
other had to get out of and which see-sawed between two extremes of view. Is
war good or is war bad or something in between?
War! What is it good for?
Dr Who episodes mostly. It’s symbolic, perhaps, that the last 2nd
Doctor story has him running around and playing soldiers as so many of the 3rd
Doctor scripts to come will (and just as the 1st Doctor’s last
story, ‘The Tenth Planet’, is a
prototype Troughton ‘base under siege’ style tale). The idea of war versus
peace is something that’s been running through this series like words in rock
since the beginning, when cavemen declared war on each other and warlike Daleks
beat up pacifist Thals, only the wars we’ve seen on screen till now have all
been either skirmishes between countries in our past or big epic battles
between imaginary planets (sometimes with Earth) in the future. No story has
dared to show what most 1960s viewers would have thought of as a real ‘war’
till now – a world one, fought not between trained soldiers and idealist rebels
but ordinary men (and a handful of women), with notably youthful soldiers pawns
in a game their elders are playing. More by accident than design the pair of
writers hit on a theme that’s been running across a lot of this decade’s
stories: what will happen when the children of the 1960s grow up into adults?
Dr Who was one of the few safe places where parents and children can watch
television together. For the adults peace at any cost is a terrifying notion,
with several stories about how peace at any costs is impossible and an alien
concept that feels like its beamed in from another world and can only lead to a
dystopia. For the children it’s a utopia, a chance to do things properly, with
kindness and acceptance, without living to the values of capitalism and
commerce and fighting the wars their parents and grandparents fought. So far
we’ve had stories that have taken both extremes of view: ‘The Dominators’ and to an extent ‘The Abominable Snowman’ and ‘The Daleks’ are about how being a pacifist
won’t work, that it will always leave you open to being bullies and that
whispering voices in your ear telling you to meditate are subversive ‘aliens’
trying to infiltrate you and make you weaker. But then we’ve also had stories
that have taken the other tack and shown that having a war every generation or
so solves nothing, that the children of the 1960s refuses to die in a war the
way their parents and grandparents did: ‘The
Sensorites’ shows war to be a series of misunderstandings, ‘The Space Museum’ has a bunch of children
kick-starting a revolution, ‘The
Dalek’s Masterplan’ shows war to be futile, ‘The
Ark’ has the Monoids being cruel to the Humans because the Humans had
already been cruel to the Monoids in s never-ending cycle and ’The Savages’ shows what happens when
the elderly drain the life out of the young by sending them to fight their
battles. So rather neatly we end up where we started in ‘An Unearthly Child’ where war is,
depending how you look at it, something that’s so natural and deeply ingrained
into the human psyche that it’s always been there across time and something
that’s pointless, that never changes a thing and always has mankind go round in
circles. What better timing than to finally answer the question at the start of
the decade where the teenagers of the 1960s will become adults themselves and
either grow towards war or peace? And at a time when the cold war is hotting up
again and we might well end up in World War III anyday now? (Take note of the
‘neutron bomb’ the War Lord threatens to use to destroy all human resistors,
not the first time a metaphor for the nuclear bomb has been used (see the very
similar all round ‘Dalek’s
Masterplan’ and it’s ‘time destructor’).
So what is the final verdict?
Well, Dicks has the final say, writing most of the final episode himself, with
an impassioned plea from The Doctor about how there is ‘evil that must be
fought’ but there’s also a sense of Hulke at the back of the timelords, putting
him on trial for ‘interference’ (as if Dicks is parroting his friends’
objections to having The Doctor affiliated with the armed forced). And by doing
that the pair of them give the Troughton the perfect farewell. As The Doctor
who fought more monsters per minute of screen time it would be a terrible end
to have him defeated by yet another alien being trying to invade the Earth, but
defeated by his own people and a metaphorical debate over the endless
repetitive cycle of war? That’s a worthy final end
‘The War Games’ starts as what seems to be a return to the historical story when the Tardis lands in Ypres in the middle of World War One and for the most part it’s delivered straight for two episodes with the sort of eye-watering detail only Who can do (they film it in the trenches created for the equally accurate film ‘Oh! What A Lovely War!’, add the right period tin mugs and book of King’s Regulations for fighting and make everything exactly how it would have been – bar the rats, with Troughton threatening to quit on sight if he saw one, given that his real job in WWII was rat-shooter). It is, so everyone fighting seems to think, ‘the war to end all wars’. But we sitting at home know there will be at least another war. And then the story shifts, episode by episode, until we find out that we’re in a fake world separated into regions by a fog that wipes the memories of everyone fighting (a fog that looks not unlike mustard gas. Dicks might well have got the idea from the folk tale ‘The Angel Of Mons’, where a platoon at Ypres ‘disappeared’. Odds are they were slaughtered without leaving witnesses but a more romantic idea has them disappearing in a cloud up to Heaven, ‘too pure’ for this word, where they live in peace still). Sadly we don’t see them all but we know from the board that there are twelve zones, all full of soldiers from Earth thinking they’re fighting ‘the’ war, oblivious to the others. Most of the choices came from director David Maloney who asked his two sons what they thought the most ‘exciting’ world conflicts are and they came up with these: Ancient Greeks fighting Troy (from 450BCish), Romans (from 100ADish), The 30 Years War (1618-48), The English Civil War (1641-45), The Jacobite rebellion (1745), The Peninsular War (1802-08), The Crimean War (1845), The American Civil War (one with a rare specific date for this particular battle, 1862), The Boer War (1899-1902), The Russo-Japanese War (1905), The Mexican Civil War (1910) and WWI (1914-1918). All these troops from all these time periods look different in terms of generation, ideals and equipment but they share one thing, that they are noble warriors who’ve lost sight of why they’re fighting and are now just fighting blindly for a murkier, mysterious force at the heart of this story without being able to see the bigger picture, one that’s clouded by fog both symbolically and physically (man fights simply because man ‘is the most vicious animal of them all’). What’s interesting is what’s missing: WWII was perhaps still too close to home for an audience where a majority of people watching would have lived through it and maybe fought in it, while cold war battles in Vietnam and Korea might have been a bit too on the knuckle for the metaphor, but this is a series about time travel and there are no wars from the future either: the hint is both that we are at real risk of blowing ourselves up in the very next conflict we fight and that we still have the chance to say no, that the future is not yet set in stone. However the dates themselves almost don’t matter: what does is the fact that mankind seems to fight a war every generation or so like clockwork, with time standing still in a war (where every day is the same so that most soldiers lost track of the days, where everyone hopes to be home by Christmas but don’t know what year and where things will never be the same again once you’re home). And war changes you and the way you see the world forever, with many dead and the survivors haunted by living for the rest of their lives. It brings out the worst in men, that struggle to survive at all costs, alongside traits of friendship, decency and bravery (just look at how even Jamie is filmed as if he’s scary, when a Redocat is thrown into his prison cell and he moves forward, menacingly, with a pikestaff). It’s time to break the cycle. This isn’t just the Doctor on trial, it’s an entire generation and asks the question ‘what are you going to do when you grow up and take charge? Will your hippie principles stay intact under strain? Will you appease monsters? Or will you finally be the ones to break the cycle?’ Remember this is a story being transmitted while the teenagers watching might well have had friends or relatives being conscripted to fight in Korea and Vietnam - which parents were determined had to be fought and children were equally determined were anachronistic - with the very real worry that, ‘thanks to our ‘special relationship’, Brits might be next. It really is a very powerful message, the thought that all war is pointless and we’re all being manipulated into fighting it.
No wonder too that they
chose WWI as the ‘main’ one we see – a war where even learned historians aren’t
quite sure how we ended up in, thanks to a random assassination and a bunch of
treaties that were meant to keep the peace). There’s a general thought amongst
historians that while something that happened even a few seconds ago (like you
reading the beginning of this sentence) is technically ‘history’ by having
happened, ‘real’ history is something that’s half a century old. Only then can
you see all the causes clearly, can understand all the ripples and see things
come to light that people wouldn’t have been aware of at the time. That half
century is up for WWI and yet still nobody was really any the wiser. It seemed
to achieve nothing, except the resentment over the reparations in Germany
accidentally causing the rise of Hitler and WWII. ‘The War Games’ is notable as
being the first Dr Who story set in the past that someone at home watching
could conceivably have lived through (unless they were very young in the late
Victoriana period of ‘Evil Of The Daleks’
perhaps, but its doubtful any of those 90-year-olds would have been watching
telly). They don’t dare go near the second world war yet (too soon, too sad,
too controversial) but by starting off in the trenches ‘The War Games’ does put
on screen a world that grandparents who had lived through events half a century
earlier would gave recognised so this story feels more directly confrontational
as a story that’s being fought between generations: the ones who believe that
war is good in the right circumstances and those who will fight the idea of any
amount of fighting with every fibre of their being.
What’s unique about ‘The
War Games’ is the way that it shifts tone almost imperceptibly, episode by
episode, so that all the ideals you hold dear in part one have long ago gone
out the window by part ten. While this is a story as varied in location as
previous epics ‘The Chase’ and ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ the plot
itself is a lot more focussed than either. This isn’t a ‘chase’, nor an ‘escape’
but a story where the layers keep peeling away to reveal something bigger. The
story starts off as a very granny-friendly view of war, as something terrible
but inevitable, with lots of plucky reliable Brits fighting heroically with
honour for all the right reasons. Nobody who fought in the real First World War
could possibly complain about how they’re portrayed here: everyone does their
duty, everyone does their best without shirking their responsibility and come
together to fight a common implacable foe. It’s an extension of the 2nd Dr’s
speech in ‘The Moonbase’ about how
he can’t sit back when there’s evil in the room, that there are ‘monsters that
must be fought’ and which tap into his Doctor’s moral crusade to keep people
safe. This is, in so many ways, an honourable war and despite being all of
thirty-four (by far the youngest script editor on the series so far) Terrance
is old school enough to want to honour the past quite genuinely and, having
been aged 11 when WW2 ended, remembers enough about what war was like to bring
the murky mixture of hope and hopelessness on screen by making this a real
old-fashioned fight between good and evil. However Terrance is also, if not
quite a child, then at least a young adult of the 1960s and with Hulke throwing
bits in as ‘The War Games’ pulls back, episode by episode, it becomes something
bigger, more ambiguous and more hippie friendly. The soldiers’ morals are
beyond question, but the people in charge who decide what wars to fight, when
to send troops in to their death and don’t fight in these wars themselves have,
well, alien intentions and care nothing if people live or die – and that’s not
heroic at all. The closer the Doctor gets to the heart of this story the
further we get from WW1 and the ideal that war is a worthy cause and the closer
we get to the theme of people fighting blindly simply because they’re following
orders and have forgotten all the right and moral reasons that made them pick
up a rifle in the first place. They’re literally brainwashed, fooled into
fighting a foe that isn’t really there, ‘conditioned’ to see enemies to keep
the war wheels turning. ‘The War Games’ asks the big question that’s been at
the heart of this series for six years: why do we have to fight at all? Isn’t
there another way? And not in a cheeky ‘stuff you grandma!’ type way but as
part of a serious ongoing debate: why should all those brilliant and brave
people risk their lives and how much better would the world be if they were
still around living out to old age? The War Lord argues that all these
people would have died in their own wars anyway, that violence is too ingrained
in the human psyche, but that was then. Surely that isn’t now?
Though both music
festivals are still a few months in the future ‘The War Games’ picks up on
something in the air across 1969 and is caught right in the middle between
‘Woodstock’ and ‘Altamont’, a story that’s hopeful that the 1970s will see the
children grow up and put an end to all wars, along with the sneaking feeling
that war is such a natural part of man’s nature that to believe that this is
the first generation that will never go to war is just wishful thinking. This
is a story that hopes we can have millions of people together in support of
peace listening to anti-war protests in the music (Woodstock is the second ever
show by CSNY, the most Dr Whoy of bands standing up for justice and equality
against the monsters and adults in charge, as well as a band called ‘The Who’)
and one where violence is such a part of life it can’t be sustained (Altamont
was a free festival by the Rolling Stones where a number of naïve optimistic
ideas, such as hiring hell’s angel bikers to be security staff, went wrong and
a black concert-goer was stabbed, just as the Stones – who took the stage hours
late to a disgruntled audience – played their song of manipulation ‘Under My
Thumb’). The beginning of the 1970s is on a knife-edge: which way is it going
to go? Will the hopefulness overcome the cynicism, or will the naivety leave a
generation open to being controlled and invaded? In context it feels as if the
1960s itself is being put on trial alongside the character who embodies their
spirit more than anyone. At story’s end, The War Lord defeated, the Dr contacts
the timelords as he’s too big a foe to remain on the loose but legs it himself
before they can get there in the hope of escaping – however the Dr, and the
series, had dodged his responsibilities for too long and the question that
keeps coming up remains unanswered: what will this generation, what will this
series, do in the event of a war? Will they fight or look the other way? Will
they recognise that the other side are people just like themselves or believe
propaganda that turns them into monsters? The Dr himself makes a great speech
about how there are some things that are so evil they need to be fought and he
speaks out against his people’s policies of non-interference, but equally he’s
not just following orders and doing things even when they cause harm the way
the soldiers we’ve just seen in those other wars are; he’s choosing which
fights to pick, which threats are just too evil to risk winning.
The moment when The
Doctor works out what’s going on and we see the Tardis crew and their
Brigadier/Liz trial run Lt Carstairs and Lady Jennifer (played by the
producer’s then wife, one of the better of the many uses of nepotism in the
series as she’s really good) from WWI attacked by Roman soldiers is brilliant.
It’s a game changer, the moment the story goes from being just another Dr Who
story to something bigger and more important. It’s also the sort of thing only
Dr Who could do, mixing and matching time zones and having one set of soldiers
fight another. After all, it’s the sort of thing I used to do with my toy
soldiers: long before I saw this story I’d mashed my English and American civil
war soldiers up and soon I had my Ice Warriors, Daleks and Cybermen models
joining in too (I would have had The Sontarons fighting in Crimea but, you
know, some juxtapositions are just too silly). It also chips away at a bigger
issue: so many wars were fought to class, with the rich people in charge hiding
safely in their bunkers and the working classes of both sides fighting, ‘lions
led by donkeys’, as quite a few historians have said. How’s that going to work
now that the 1960s revolution has turned class on its head and people are
starting to see that they have more in common with peasants from a foreign land
than homegrown millionaires?
Gradually the war motif
slips away to be replaced by a bigger mystery: who made all these people fight
each other and why? It needs to be a big answer – and it is. ‘The War Games’ is
brilliantly plotted so that every time we think we’ve reached the villain of
the piece something in the story happens so that we find out there’s a bigger
villain behind them working their puppet strings. Noel Coleman’s General Smythe
is, for all the 19teens dating, clearly a Nazi thug working with the same
xenophobia and precision as the Daleks they inspired, treating war as a
competition he really wants to win. Behind him though is James Bree’s Security
Chief, a more senior ranking officer whose posher and more removed from the
fighting, treating the wars as a chess match. Above him is Edward Brayshaw’s
War Chief, a scary starey-eyed man whose so removed from human emotion and life
that he feels like the most evil humanoid we’ve ever seen in the series so far
(just beating Salamander in a tense wresting final), treating war as an
experiment of human nature. And then behind even him is The War Lord, only the
second timelord ever seen in the series – and what’s more he’s the first person
to actually use the word ‘timelord’ in normal conversation, treating the wars
as a human would treat insects. Phillip Madoc, who was the hippie Eelok in ‘The Krotons’ a few months before, is back
having grown a beard and looks so completely different it’s hard to believe
he’s the same actor, now cold and hard and determined, zealous for lack of a
better phrase (it’s the best of many, many brilliant performances he gives
across this series). The thrill of this story is watching The Doctor uncover
the mysteries one by one and move up the chain of command, from the camp
commandant in the first episde who has the power to have him shot, to the
high-ups he answers to that turn out to be fellow time lords, each with more
control than the last, until we reach the timelords on Gallifrey themselves,
like distant emotionless headmasters, with the power to rule over everything.
Future stories will see Robert Holmes (who hated all authority figures with a
passion) overturning the timelords and making them more ‘new testament’, a
corrupt and squabbling bunch of people just like us, but here, in their first
ever appearance (on their still un-named planet) Terrance (who has a lot more
respect for authority) has them as the universe’s highest powers, old testament
Gods who see all and judge everything. Having The Doctor fighting for his life
and his morality is the perfect end to the Doctor who truly made standing up to
bullies a crusade but who occasionally went too far.
There’s a sense, in ‘The
War Games’ that man should have outgrown these tendencies to fight just because
someone tells them to by now and a lot of the Dr’s back story that’s only been
sketched in the past six years comes into focus here because he’s the same:
faced with taking orders and doing his duty he runs away to explore the universe
rather than invade it. He is a child of the 1960s, born in 1963, for all that
he’s hundreds of years old. Perhaps the biggest in a whole tsunami of changes
this story is that we finally see through the mystery of who the Doctor is and
learn about his past, sneaking away in a stolen Tardis (which, amazingly the
timelords give back to him when they exile him and even though he can’t work
out. Do they know they’re going to ‘release’ him for some work on their behalf
in the future?) Despite being such a newcomer to the series Terrance Dicks
totally gets what Dr Who is was and always will be about, writing in a
backstory that makes perfect sense of everything that’s come before, without
taking away from the series ethos (he’s always been an outsider observer who
likes getting his hands dirty when he can’t help himself and good people are
dying; he’s like a wildlife cameraman who can’t help but rescue the animals he’s
supposed to only be filming. And there are a lot of postmodernist references to
having The Doctor judged through ‘filming’, from the square box the Doctor
beams to the Tardis – filled with his memories as part of his request for help
– to the Nixon-like bugging of the baddies to listen in on conversations they
weren’t privvy to). The revelations don’t put an end to the series the way they
could so easily have done (and which ‘The
Timeless Child’ arc helped kill off) but instead leave the Gallifrey we see
in the last episode (still un-named till 1973) as a planet full of mystery and
wonder, a place we’re desperate to come back and explore in the colour era of
the series (though even so it takes a while before we get there: seven years to
be exact). You need a strong ending after dedicating two and a half months of
your life to this story – and it is. It really is. We learn so much, more than
we have in one go about The Doctor before, but it’s all a natural organic part
of a story that’s got too big for The Doctr to solve on his own and couldn’t
really end satisfactorily any other way.
The final verdict against
the Doctor though is mixed. The timelords really don’t approve of the War Lord,
magicking him out of existence in a puff of some of the earliest (certainly the
coolest) computer graphics seen in the series so far. He’s a being at the top
of the food chain who uses his powers for bad, to turn people against each
other, who still dreams of power even though he already has so much of it –
more than any of the people fighting under him. He’s the arrogant Nazi who sees
the universe as his plaything and the timelords can’t allow him to live so they
rewind time as if he’d never been born (a timelord scifi mirror to the very
brutal near-execution The Doctor nearly suffers in the episode one
cliffhanger). However the timelords hate the Doctor’s idealism too, putting him
on trial for interfering (ironically if they’d agreed with him and gone after,
say, The Daleks there might not have been a time war). And what’s the verdict?
The Doctor isn’t killed but is instead sentenced to exile on Earth (in
practical terms so Terrance and friends can save on the costs of creating alien
planets every few weeks), putting the Doctor in a position of fighting
defensively not offensively, given an army to help stop threats to the people
he loves rather than getting involved in the affairs of strangers halfway round
the universe. Even though its a solution that in so many ways kicks the can
down the road for the future to solve, it’s a fitting end to this era when this
Doctor has fought so hard for so long. It’s an ending which, whatever side of
the war fence you sit on, manages to agree with you, both rewarding and
punishing The Doctor for his views. The
result is a much more adult and nuanced debate about war than the often
one-sided polemics we get in other Dr Who stories (the hawks in the canon are ‘The Daleks’ and ‘The Dominators’ while the doves
are ‘The Sensorites’ and ‘Galaxy 4’ to name just a couple each). Having
this story a co-write between two old friends is a great move more writers
should follow: you really feel the tension between two world views as the
debate at the heart of this story is acted out on screen, ebbing and flowing
episode by episode until the two friends agree to meet in the middle: war is
necessary but only as a last resort, there’s nothing brave or heroic about
starting them, precisely because a lot of the people who fought in them and
lose their lives are brave and heroic.
It’s an utterly brilliant
backdrop against which to give a tearful goodbye and a highlight of a most
topsy-turvy season. There’s just so much tension, so much drama, so many twists
and turns in this story, that it holds your attention even across ten episodes.
Forget the war motif if you want (though that is, admittedly quite hard with so
many soldiers running around): ‘The War Games’ is just a cracking story in
general, with some of the best writing in the show’s long history. A lot
of fans will tell you this story is overlong with too much padding but I’m not
one of them; practically every scene is fulfilling some function and if there’s
a lot of being captured and escaping, well, for once I don’t mind: one of the
biggest practical horrors of war is being separated from those you love and
having to rely on complete strangers for your own safety so I can put up with
it in this story more than most. A quick word for the cliffhangers in this
story too which are some of the best and, like all the best Dr Who examples,
are usually resolved in a way the viewer would never have been expecting and in
a way that changes the entire shape of the story – not least because the two
old friends writing this love giving each other impossible seeming conundrums
to solve (the Dr being shot by a firing squad, a WW1 ambulance being charged by
Roman chariots, Jamie being gunned down just as he arrives with help, the walls
of the SIDRAT closing in on the Dr and suffocating him, the moment when The
Doctor appears to have sold out his friends and everyone on all sides hate him
and the episode nine forcefield around the Tardis just as the Dr and co are making
their final escape).
However it’s not just a
jigsaw puzzle done for telly. I find ‘The War Games’ the most emotional of all
the 335 different Dr Who stories. All the more because it’s in a nonchalant,
underplayed, stiff-upper-lip can’t-be-helped type way than the rather broader
strokes emotional heart-tugging that goes on in a lot of the modern stories
(where the most intimate moments of the Dr’ and companions’ lives tend to be
accompanied by a 50-strong choir warbling in the background; they did this to
the 2024 ‘colourised’ version too unforgivably, though it’s otherwise not bad
at all). This is, to date, the only time in the show’s history when the Doctor
and companions have all knowingly left in the same story (given that nobody
truly knew that ‘Survival’ was an
end or ‘The TV Movie’ a one-off),
leaving an entirely clean slate for the next season and giving this story a
funeralic air as we wave goodbye to so many things at once. It’s a
heartbreaking goodbye: this is a Doctor who doesn’t want to go or lose who he
is, who tries everything he can to wriggle out of danger and uses his dying
gasps to confront his own people in a brilliant speech. Jamie and Zoe are
returned to their own time, against their will, knowing that they will probably
never see the Doctor again (although his line that ‘time is relative’ and they
yet might is such a powerful tearjerker). What’s so awful is that they both
forget him, bar their first adventure together and – much like Donna’s
brain-rewiring in ‘The Stolen
Earth’ – they end up right back where they began, all influence of The
Doctor gone. Jamie has grown from the boy of ‘The
Highlanders’ to a man who’s loyal to a fault and commands his own platoon
in this story free to think for himself and with a head now so full of ideas,
wiped. Zoe has gone from being the emotionless computer we first met contrasted
with The Cybermen in ‘The Wheel In Space’ to
a fully rounded character so emotionally aware she’s always risking her life
for her friends. They don’t just lose their friendship, they lose who they are
and all the good the Doctor did for them and what’s more they know this when
they walk away. It’s arguably the saddest scene in the entire series, with Zoe
giving an awkward little wave and Jamie putting on the brave face that we know
well, after three years, is a bluff and he’s trying hard not to cry. All three actors
shine in their last story, even if it’s a shame they don’t spend longer
together (half the story is one of them trying to track down the others).
It never gets talked about
quite what a risk that was changing all three cast members either: Dr Who was
struggling in the ratings across season six and the re-set button for season
seven was a last throw of the dice rather than a natural extension of what had
come before (and this time in colour!) Most producers/showrunners naturally
feel more people are going to be persuaded to watch their series if there’s
someone they recognise in there from before, whether that be the likes of Ben
and Polly, Sarah Jane or Clara tagging along with their new doctor and
everything isn’t just tied up in one neat bow (the closest is ‘The End Of Time’ as Davies passes things over to
Moffat, but even that doesn’t hit quite as hard as we had a year of The Doctor
being companionless). The original plan was to stagger things out across 1969 too,
giving Jamie a story where he becomes his own Scottish laird or the only man
left behind to run a colony of females in the far future, both of which (extra thankfully
in that last case) fell through, with plans also to hold Zoe over to be in Jon
Pertwee’s first series (not quite sure how that worked practically given the
end of this story and the way the whole of next story ‘Spearhead From Space’ is about a
poorly Dr getting old friends to recognise him, but Zoe is the one companion
who could have done Liz Shaw’s job for her, albeit seeing off monsters with
less of a scientific bent and more of a childlike glee, turned down only when
Wendy Padbury realised how sad it would be turning up for work without her two
best friends). Their final goodbye is gut-wrenching (I’m so pleased the
i-player ‘Tales From The Tardis’ gave the pair of them their memories back at
last). All three bring their A-game to ‘The War Games’, Troughton’s Doctor more
at the heart of the story than he usually is with lots of opportunity to show
off everything that’s made his turn in the Tardis special: great moralistic
speeches, hilarious comedy moments and even a brief return to the harder-edged manipulative
schemer style of Salamander (when it looks like he’s sold everyone out and got
them captured). Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury are superb too, out of their
depth from pretty much the first scene, but loyally doing everything the Doctor’s
taught them along the way to rescue each other and survive, just like the
soldiers they’re alongside, which only makes the way they say goodbye all the
sadder. There’s a particularly superb scene, that sums them both up well, where
Zoe hatches a plan to dress up as a
resistance leader. Jamie insists on doing it, but Zoe talks over him, giving
him ideas of what to say throughout, refusing to give up being in charge. All
three save each other repeatedly (‘Oh you clever, kind girl!’ says The Doctor
as Zoe risks her life to rescue him from prison), from everything, until even
they can’t save each other anymore. This is one of the funniest and sweetest of
Tardis teams and it’s so hard to let them go, not least because this is a rare
case in Who where none of them want to, they haven’t fallen in love or found a
noble cause to champion. They want to be together forever. And we want them to
be too.
Dicks and Hulke were very
different as writers but they had one thing in common; they were both really
good at making believable characters come alive and this is a story packed with
lots of them (forty-seven separate speaking parts, though juggled across all
ten episodes for budgetary reasons, a record!) Amazingly – and even more so
after coming from ‘The Space Pirates’
– everyone is perfectly cast and everyone gives their all. None more so than
Patrick’s son David getting his first lines on TV with an excellent turn as
half-brainwashed soldier Private Moore in an ‘audition piece’ given as a favour
to dad to help boost the lad’s career (it’ll pay off in spades: see ‘The Curse Of Peladon’ for his return when he’s
a rising star (sharing a flat with Colin Baker!) and ‘Midnight' when he’s the accolade of
‘the sort of brilliant actor who was always going to be in Dr Who one day
either even if his dad hadn’t been it’. Jane Sherwin is excellent as Lady
Jennifer and David Savile as Lt Carstairs, both believable war heroes who do a
lot with fairly small roles, both decent people doing the right thing
automatically before learning the truth and doing the ‘real’ right thing,
because they’re both good people. David Weston (playing Russell) was so
overjoyed at being cast in his favourite show he cancelled his honeymoon to
play the role. The baddies are chilling, each one so different to the last,
cold-hearted schemers who nevertheless all have very different reactions to
being accused of crime. I’m not the first fan to compare their sentencing to
that of chief Nazis at the Nuremberg trials following the end of WW2 and Dicks
nails the range of emotions: the bargaining, the pleading, the name-calling,
the in-fighting, the possibly genuine guilt and remorse. Every baddy comes in
different shades and even The War Lord, the ice-cool practitioner behind it all
who’s never raised his voice, is brought to his knees howling in pain from a
timelord eye-zap, breaking at last temporarily, before still angrily rounding
on the court and denying their right to exist (as really happened at
Nuremberg). The timelords too are perfect, with Bernard Horsfall and future
stage Who Trevor Martin schoolteacher types who deliver the Doctor’s verdict
with the manner of someone who starts ‘I’m not angry with you, just very
disappointed’. Rudolph Walker, an early
juicy role for a black actor on any TV never mind Dr Who, excels as Harper, set
up to be the villain but really the saviour as he risk his life helping The
Doctor escape (and surely a Hulke invention). The closest to a bad performance
the whole story is Michael Napier-Brown as Mexican bandit Vila (did I mention
how closely Dr Who was linked to Blake’s 7?!) but even he’s right for the
scenes he’s in, the comedy relief buffoon who can’t see the bigger picture and
just wants to fight anyone and everyone.
It helps that everything
is so well put together. Dicks, knowing perhaps that The Doctor was going to be
in one place for a long time to come, writes in a dazzling array of locations
but all are lovingly shown. The locations are superb with Sheepcote Rubbish
Tip, Brighton, making for an impressive replica of Ypres and the surrounding
woodland perfect for Roman chariots and doubling as the Scottish Highlands (or
perhaps the redcoat Jamie sees when he’s returned was on holiday there and
Jamie had to trek back home slowly, like Sarah in ‘Hand
Of Fear’? The timelords do get things wrong after all!) Other scenes were
shot in Eastden, Westdean and Westmeston, lasting nearly a full week (it’s why
the three regulars barely appear in the last episode of ‘The Space Pirates’). They
go to town on props and costumes too, with a replica WWI ambulance, a roman
chariot and multiple period weapons, not to mention some ‘period graffiti’
spotted in a research book (a reminder of how individual expression is curtailed
by war?) The interior sets by Roger Chevley are fab too, with some great
contrasts between the sheer misery of where the soldiers fight at the front,
the luxurious surroundings of where the commanding offices send orders from
round the back and the nicely psychedelic war room up above (?) where
everything is full of futuristic swirls (he also provided the drawings of the ‘potential
Doctors’ who look remarkably like future Doctors 11 (young), 10 (thin) 6 (fat)
12 (old) and 7 (incredible looking!) Interestingly there are no female options.
Chevley based the psychedelic processing room designs on a nightclub he’d been
to in Covent Garden, ‘Middle Earth’ (the one The 1st Doctor visits
in ‘The War Machines’ perhaps?!) They
also remind
me of the swirls in Irwin Allen’s ITV rival ‘Time Tunnel’, where two scientists
Greg and Doug travel through time and land in a different war each week
(sometimes two an episode when they’re under-running), which is very like ‘The
War Games’ (the theme there too is that, future or past, man always seems to be
at war, if only with himself. The only difference is there’s no bigger baddy behind
it all). A lot of the things we come to think of as a ‘natural part of Dr Who’
are created here, including the ‘original’ shape of the Tardis before the
chameleon circuit got stuck in the shape of a police box (the war lord calls
his a ‘SIDRAT’ to keep the secret from the viewer a bit longer, standing for a
‘Space and Inter-Time Dimensional Robot All-Purpose Transporter’ in Hulke’s
novelisation of the story but really ‘Tardis’ backwards, as you’ve probably
guessed).
Nothing really goes wrong
though: ‘The War Games’ is one of those stories where, despite very much being
out of everyone’s comfort zones and doing things the series had never done
before at speed, practically every decision it makes is spot-on and the urgency
of a ticking clock actually helps this show. No one is over-thinking this
they’re all being driven by instinct and those are all spot on. Dr Who is
always a series that works best when it’s juggling multiple points of view and
few stories do that as well as ‘The War Games’, which makes you see the best
and the worst in everyone involved. It’s hard to imagine what a surprise that ending
must have been and what impact it had too: these were the days before spoilers
and leaks, before fans taking photos on location, before Radio Times articles
that gave the game away, nothing: this really was a surprise to everyone who
wasn’t a close friend with someone in the production team and/or cast. It still
seems like an incredibly daring move now, long after the exile has been lifted.
Despite being written in a hurry and having such a big job to do that would
have broken more experienced writers, there’s nothing rushed or slapdash about
this story. ‘The War Games’ is a towering achievement, an epic that starts off
big and keeps getting bigger until it ends up the most important Dr Who story
since the first one, a run of episodes where everything changes forever, albeit
in a story about how for mankind nothing ever changes. Big on action sequences,
but bigger of mind in the ideas that drive it all and even bigger of heart,
there’s no other story in the Dr Who canon quite like this one. My favourite of
all the ‘acclaimed 100% Dr Who masterpieces’ ‘The War Games’ is a story I will
fight to the death to defend, for all that it’s about the importance of peace.
Beautifully written, lovingly made, exquisitely performed, everyone brings out
the stops to make this an epic and it really is the perfect goodbye to an era,
a reminder of everything the series stands for and always will. Things clearly
had to change – episode eight got 3.5million viewers, the smallest ever in the
show’s history and for most of this sixth year it had fallen into a rut (there’s
a six month break, the longest in history, till its back again which many thought
would kill it off. The replacement, following a break for Wimbledon, is the
first British screening of ‘Star Trek’, a series that very much leans on the
same non-interference ‘prime directive’ view as this story) – but for one brief
moment this series feels perfect just the way it is. A battle it might have been
to get this story made, but everyone very much wins the war. Brilliantly too,
in an era when so much is lost, the longest Troughton story and the second
longest Dr Who story ever, survives complete. They even found a much sharper
copy a few years ago (used on the DVD) that’s amongst the best looking prints
of all the 1960s tapes. How wonderful is that?
POSITIVES +This seems
like a good point to mention the TARDIS/SIDRAT dematerialisation sound effect,
given that we hear it a lot in this story, perhaps more than any other given
how many Tardises (Tardisi?) are on screen. A cross between a scientific
instrument pulsing at random and a poetic life-form trying to communicate via
an alien telephone line, it’s one of the greatest achievements by the
Radiophonic Workshop. If you come to these stories in order the sheer thrill of
hearing someone we don’t know being accompanied by that sound effect we know backwards
after six years lets you know that you’re in for something special. We see a
lot of Tardises in this story at last too (we’ve only ever seen the Monk’s before
this and that was disguised as a sarcophagus), almost as a consolation prize
for the fact we won’t be seeing the Tardis in the series for a while once the
Dr gets exiled to Earth. Some fans are disappointed by the rather generic
‘trouser press’ design too but I rather like it: these are Tardises as
functional vehicles, straight off the conveyor belt, used by villains without
imagination, as if they’d just been to the Gallifreyan Argos warehouse and
nicked a load off the conveyor belt. It’s so different to the magical home that
is the Doctor’s Tardis, a case of what we’ve come to think of as ‘extraordinary’
reduced to the ‘ordinary’.
BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘We
hardly ever use our great powers. We consent simply to observe and to gather
knowledge’. Zoe: ‘And that wasn't enough for you?’ Dr: ‘No, of course not. With
a whole galaxy to explore? Millions of planets, eons of time, countless
civilisations to meet?’ Jamie: ‘Well, why do they object to you doing all that?’
Dr: ‘Well, It is a fact, Jamie, that I do tend to get involved with things’.
‘War Crimes’ (1998) is a short story by Simon
Bucher-Jones from the first (prose) ‘Short Trips’ anthology and set in the
moment in episode ten when the 2nd Doctor, Jamie and Zoe make a
break for it. In this version of events they weren’t captured by the timelords
again straight away but have time to uncover a conspiracy where the timelords
were complicit in what The War Lord was up to. Unable to send everybody home
instead they recycled the off-worlders into Cybermen-like hybrid machines, one
of which goes back to his home planet where his people, afraid of him, kill him
outright. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive just in time for his last breath.
The 2nd Doctor, on trial for his life, is appalled at such treatment
and hypocrisy, the revelation inspiring his fiery speech later in the episode.
A neat bit of continuity but it’s too short to fully have a life of its own.
‘World Game’ (2005) is a sequel. again by Terrance Dicks. in which The Doctor is given one last job to do before his exile on Earth (well, technically he’s given a couple, ‘The Two Doctors’ being the other apparently, but this book is about the first). ‘The Players’ are back from, well, ‘The Players’ (see ‘Victory Of The Daleks’ for more on Dicks’ 6th Doctor novel) and have turned The Napoleonic Wars and The First World War into a gambling event. The Doctor is sent to sort it out. The timelords are really ticking him off by this time, not least when they give him a ‘Romana’ style companion, the snooty Serena, for company (usually the 2nd Doctor gets on with anybody and everybody but these two don’t like each other at all). It’s a decent enough story, but it does feel odd the timelords getting so involved in the events of what is to them just a backwater planet and the bickering and weirdly gratuitous sex scenes seem out of place in a Troughton tale (Serena’s, I hasten to add, not the 2nd Doctor’s!)
’The Nightwalkers’ (#934-#936, running across the
first three weeks of November 1969 – there was no Who script again until
January 17th 1970), in which the timelords finally track The Doctor
down and turn him into Jon Pertwee (well, a faceless blob in the last panel
given they hadn’t got Pertwee’s likeness yet but it’s really quite effective).
This excellent farewell was already
covered pretty comprehensively under ‘Human Nature/Family
Nature’ as it features a similar set of creepy scarecrows. It’s
a truly epic way to bow out, The Doctor appearing on gameshow ‘Explain My
Mystery’ and being lured into a timelord trap, his days on the run now over (who
gets his plush hotel room then? That’s what I want to know!)
Previous ‘The
Space Pirates’ next ‘Spearhead From Space’
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