The War Games: Ranking - 8

 

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, as even the Doctor can’t keep running away forever. War! What is it good for? Dr Who and not much else. I find ‘The War Games’ the most emotional of all the 315 different Dw stories and counting and all the more because its in a nonchalant, underplayed 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). This is, to date, the only time in the show’s history when the Dr 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. Now it never gets talked about quite what a risk that was– DW was struggling in the ratings across season six and the re-set button 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 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 Russell passes to Moffat, but we’d got used to seeing the Dr travel alone by then). The original plan was to do that with this story 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 (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). However when Patrick Troughton handed his notice in for the end of the season early, getting out after three heavy years of paying the Dr, both of his co-stars knew that it was an end of an era and elected to leave alongside him. In addition Dr Who, like most of the programmes made by the BBC in 1969, was moving to colour at the start of the new decade, with ‘The War Games’ the last story to be shot in black-and-white, which makes a far bigger difference than you’d think (monsters no longer skulk in shadows but parade in broad daylight), so this really does feel like the end of an era in so many ways. 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 DW folklore – a task made harder by the collapse of three scripts towards of season 6 at the absolute last minute that leave a lot of episodes to fill at short notice (six of them are filled by ‘The Space Pirates’ and a whopping ten by this story). 

That’s something that would be daunting for anyone – for new script editor Terrance Dicks, still in his 30s and finding his feet making TV, its a huge undertaking so he brings in his old friend Malcolm Hulke for the first time, the pair writing alternate episodes in order to make the deadlines as close to the wire as DW ever came. Despite being new to the series, Terrance goes all-out with this story, making the most of the chance to do all the things DW has never been able to do until now just in case it was the last time anyone would ever be able to do them and give the series a sort of ‘ending’, just in case negotiations to carry on for another year fell through. One of those ideas is putting the theme of war versus peace centre stage, 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. One of the big themes of DW in its first six years, sometimes in the foreground but more usually in the background, is the big worry about what might happen when the 1960s hippie youth come of age and take over from their parents and start running the world differently to them. For the adults its 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 (as early as the second story the Thals are a portrait of pacifist hippies out of their depth). For the children its 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. DW is one of the few family series being made in Britain that had to cater to both sides at once and with this being the very last DW story of the 1960s its an obvious theme for the series to start talking about again (for more or less the last time: maybe because DW is such a child of the 1960s that it was long assumed it might not last very far into the 1970s: even today this show’s zeal, idealism, its embrace of changing times and individual eccentricity makes it the most 1960s TV series imaginable, apart from the special case of ‘The Monkees’ maybe).Which raises another point. ‘The War Games’ is notable as being the first DW 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. 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 2^nd 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 Dr’s moral crusade to keep people safe. This is, in so many ways, an honourable war and despite being all of 34 (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 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 Dr gets to the heart of this story the further we get from WW1 and the closer we get to the theme of people fighting blindly 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. Slowly we move to other wars, Terrance consulting his three sons’ history books and asking them for ideas on what wars they most wanted to see, ending up with Romans, Redcoats and English and American civil war soldiers. All these troops 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 (which cleverly just happens to looks a lot like poison gas). Written against a backdrop of continued cold wars in Vietnam and Korea, which parents were determined had to be fought and children were equally determined were anachronistic, ‘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? 

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. 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. 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 hi duty he runs away to explore the universe rather than invade it. Perhaps the biggest in a whole tsunami of changes this story is that we finally see through the mystery of who the Dr is and learn about his past, sneaking away in a stolen Tardis. 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); the revelations don’t put an end to the series the way they could so easily have done 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). 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 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 (I’m not the first fan to compare The War Lord’s sentencing to that of chief Nazis at the Nuremberg trials following the end of WW2), but they hate the Dr’s idealism too, putting him on trial for interfering. And what’s the verdict? The Dr is 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 Dr 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 and even though its a solution that in so many ways kicks the can down the road for the future to solve, its a fitting end. 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. 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 s I can put up with it in this story more than most. 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 enacted on screen, ebbing and flowing episode by episode (to put it crudely other stories show that Malcolm Hulke is a true blue pacifist who believes there’s always a peaceful solution to be found, while Terrance Dicks loves a good battle, even though he’s no warmonger) 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. A quick word for the cliffhangers in this story too which are some of the best and, like all the best DW 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 and the episode nine forcefield around the Tardis just as the Dr and co are making their final escape). The result is a much more adult debate about war than the often one-sided polemics we get in other DW stories (the hawks in the DW canon are ‘The Daleks’ and ‘The Dominators’ while the doves are ‘The Sensorites’ and ‘Galaxy 4’ to name just a couple each). 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. 

You feel for every supporting character you meet along the way, with a guest cast who all shine – none more so than Patrick’s son David getting his first lines on TV with an excellent turn as half-brainwashed soldier Private Moore and Bernard Horsfall’s schoolteacherly timelord who delivers the Dr’s verdict with the manner of someone who starts ‘I’m not angry with you, just very disappointed’. The locations, with Sheepcote Rubbish Tip standing in for the trenches (a lot of WW1 props were left by the film-makes of ‘Oh! What A Lovely War’ for the DW team to re-use; however as it was a dump most of the time and there were actual rats during filming!), are superb however tough they made filming (there’s a thought that Troughton was still half-thinking of signing on for another year despite handing in his notice, until seeing a rat during filming), while a lot of the things we come to think of as a ‘natural part of DW’ are created here, including the ‘natural’ 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). And the end is incredibly moving, whether you’ve only seen this story, followed the last series when Zoe joined, been there since the 2^nd Dr took over or from the very beginning, as two of the Dr’s most loyal companions are forced to say goodbye and sent back to their own times, all their memories of their time with the Dr past their first adventure wiped. No scene in DW makes me cry buckets more than the one where our trio have tried to flee Gallifrey in their Tardis, only to find it pulled back by timelord power and Jamie and Zoe are led away with one last tearful wave goodbye, as if they’re naughty pupils being expelled by a bunch of hall monitors. Their final scenes, back in the sets of ‘The Highlanders’ and ‘The Wheel In Space’ as they blink confused, trying to remember, before moving on to their old lives without the Dr, is gut-wrenching (I’m so pleased the i-player ‘Tales From The Tardis’ gave the pair of them their memories back this month at last). This is one of the funniest and sweetest of Tardis teams and its hard to let them go, not least because they all bring their A-game to ‘The War Games, Troughton’s Dr 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 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 Dr’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. So what goes wrong then? Not a lot. I’d have liked a better ending to the ‘war’ part of the story so that we actually got to see the supporting characters get a proper goodbye in their own times instead of just fading away in a fog. The idea of soldiers from different centuries all blindly fighting each other is one of the most striking in the show’s history (that thing about the ordinary and the extraordinary clashing head-on again, even in something as banal as war) that I wish we’d seen more of it than a couple of Romans from stock footage, some extras with appalling Southern American accents and a recycled costume from ‘The Highlanders’. It’s a real pity that our last shot of Troughton is him gurning as he fades away into blackness, without any regeneration shown on-screen (enough of a loophole to give fans the credible idea that the Dr escapes and retrieves Jamie to have the adventures seen in ‘The Five Drs’ and ‘The 2 Drs’ – and allow them to still appear in TV Comic over the longer-than-usual seven month break between stories; in truth, of course, its because while the production team are pretty sure about Jon Pertwee being the natural heir they haven’t quite finalised the contract yet). 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 nd the urgency of a ticking clock actually helps this show. Despite being written in a hurry and having such a big job to do it 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 DW story since the first one. Big on action sequences, but bigger of mind in the way its put together and even more than that big of heart, there’s no other story in the DW canon like this one. My favourite of all the ‘acclaimed DW masterpieces’ ‘The War Games’ is a story I will fight to the death to defend, for all the peace-loving aspects of the script.

+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 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, its 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 sarcophagus before this), 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.

- It’s a shame we don’t get to see more of Gallifrey on its first appearance than a trial room, a prison cell and an odd bit of corridor by a pool of something acid-looking (just like the bits between worlds on ‘The Crystal Maze’) because, while we get to see a whole lot of it in colour in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ and beyond, this set is the last one in the monochrome era and the production team make the moment of every last nook and cranny, shooting in shadows and with a colour scheme that’s all sharp contrasts. Most of ‘The War Games’ is shot like a war film, with lots of close-ups on people when they’re up to something and we’re meant to wonder what they’re really thinking, before pulling away for the big fights. This last episode though is a film noir, a stylised world where the timelords stand stock still and all the movement comes from the Dr and companions desperately trying to run away.