Doctor Who

Doctor Who and the Fantastic:The Daemons

Doctor Who with the Daleks, Jamie accuses him of ignoring this principle and threatens to leave him because he treats everything as “a game.” Yet game playing is a key element in the story’s definition of humanity. When the Doctor treats three Daleks with the human factor, they start to play games, wheeling the Doctor around the room, playing trains and roundabouts, and calling him “dizzy Doctor.” More important, they do not possess the quintessential Dalek quality of unquestioning obedience , and the final battle is punctuated by isolated Dalek voices asking “Why?” whenever an order is given, rather than the traditional response “We obey.” Since the infected Daleks look like all the others, the emperor orders all the Daleks to pass through the apparatus, which, however, the Doctor has reversed so that it implants the human factor, resulting in a rebellion that destroys the city. The hilarious effects of Daleks developing a sense of humor thus have serious consequences, and Waterfield dies in the final battle. After the death of her father, Victoria leaves with the Doctor and Jamie, with the result that in the next story, The Tomb of the Cybermen, the Doctor encounters another archenemy on an alien planet in the future accompanied by a Scottish highlander and a Victorian gentlewoman. Doctor Who and the Fantastic: The Daemons Only in The War Games (1969) does the Doctor reveal his identity as a Time Lord. He needs help to resolve the situation at the end of the story and calls in his fellow Time Lords, who force him to return to his home planet and stand trial. Although they developed the technology for time travel, they forbid its use to change history, and they accuse the Doctor of breaking “the law of noninterference.” Although they accept his plea about the need to combat evil in the universe, they sentence him to change his appearance once more and 29 Jim Leach exile him to Earth in the twentieth century, since he seems to have a special interest in this “primitive” planet. He thus loses the power to operate the TARDIS, and the third Doctor is confined to Earth, where he battles alien invasions while working as a scientific advisor for UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce). At the same time, two other significant changes affected the development of the series. Previously, the seasons ran for almost the whole year, but the third Doctor’s first season consisted of just four stories amounting to twenty-five weekly episodes, allowing for higher production values, without, however, completely eliminating the often unconvincing special effects for which the show was notorious. Even more important was the decision to make the new series in color, with the goal of breaking into the U.S. market, which finally happened in 1972 when Time Life Films bought seventy-two episodes. By the time of The Daemons, the Time Lords have relaxed their restrictions on the Doctor, restoring the use of the TARDIS for missions as their agent, but he continues to work for UNIT, and these Earthbound stories make him seem less alien despite the new knowledge of his origins. Although Jon Pertwee was best known as a comedian, he developed a more serious persona than Troughton, and his more action-oriented approach led to comparisons with James Bond. For some viewers, including Verity Lambert, who had left the series in 1965, this radical reworking of the formula violated the spirit of Doctor Who. She felt that “the show lost a lot of its poetry and ambiguity” because “all the mystery that was so much a part of its beginning was now gone” (Haining 1987, 64). For Lambert, the Doctor had attracted audiences because he was “so totally anti-establishment,” but the third Doctor became “the person the establishment rang up and said, ‘Help us out, Doctor!’” (Bentham 1986, 98; Haining 1983, 24). Yet the Doctor himself is very uncomfortable with 30 Doctor Who this situation and repeatedly denounces the overhasty use of force and the restrictions imposed by bureaucratic thinking. One strange consequence of the Doctor’s confinement to Earth is that present-day Britain as depicted in the series is more technologically advanced than the one with which viewers were familiar, and the nation even has a successful space program in The Ambassadors of Death (1970), presumably based on the work of the British Experimental Rocket Group, who sent the first men into...