Day 182 — July 1st 2021
The Time Warrior Parts Three and Four
The Time Warrior — Part Three
Having kept Doctor Who and Sarah Jane apart for so long it was obviously going to be a big deal when you bring them together again. I’ll apologise up front because this is probably just going to be a great big appreciation post for the pair of them.
I reckon they missed a trick by cutting to the cliffhanger in Part Two when they did — it would have been much more effective to end it on Sarah Jane revealing to Doctor Who that she’s there to kidnap him. It’s such a unique moment, and not the kind of thing we’ve ever seen a companion do before. It’s followed by a great interrogation between the two;
Sarah Jane: ‘Yes, but we’ll come to that later. Now then, why are you
helping Irongron?’
Doctor Who: ‘My dear girl, I’m not helping him. Linx is. I’m trying to stop him.’
Sarah Jane: ‘Linx?’
Doctor Who: ‘Yes, perhaps you’re lucky enough not to have met him yet. Nasty, brutish and short just about sums him up.’
Sarah Jane: ‘There was a strange looking knight with Irongron.’
Doctor Who: ‘Yes, well, he’d have looked even stranger if he hadn’t been wearing space armour. He comes from a planet where the surface gravity is many times than of Earth.’
Sarah Jane: ‘A man from the stars?’
Doctor Who: ‘Mmm hmm.’
Sarah Jane: ‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’
Doctor Who: ‘Because I never lie. Well, hardly ever. You ever heard of UNIT?’
Sarah Jane: ‘You work for UNIT?’
Doctor Who: ‘In an advisory capacity, yes. Well, they asked me to look into this question of the missing scientists for them.’
Sarah Jane: ‘But I thought you were responsible for that.’
Doctor Who: ‘My dear girl, I don’t go around kidnapping scientists.’
It’s electric watching Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen bouncing off each other. I’d be tempted to say that having a new girl on the scene makes him raise his game, but I think that’s probably me projecting onto the performance. It is great, though, to see him in such good spirits considering that we’re not watching the start of a new season for him — we’re watching the final days of the last one. The Time Warrior was recorded at the end of the tenth production block and held over (as Carnival of Monsters had been the year before) but I don’t think it shows at all. Doctor Who here feels like such a different beast to the one who drove off into the sunset at the end of The Green Death, and you get the sense that some time has passed for him.
If the sparring between the two of them is a great watch then it serves as set up for the real showcase of their friendship — the moment where they sit at a table together and Sarah Jane finally finds out a bit more about the stranger she’s been suspecting of wrongdoing. She has a complete change of heart after this and it’s not hard to see why — I’m not sure Pertwee’s Doctor Who has ever been more disarming than he is here.
Sarah Jane: ‘You’re talking as if you weren’t human.’
Doctor Who: ‘Yes, well, the definition of the word humanity was always a rather a complex question, wasn’t it?’
Sarah Jane: ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. Are you or aren’t you?’
Doctor Who: ‘If you mean am I a native of the planet Terra, the answer is no,
I’m not.’
Sarah Jane: ‘Well, what are you then?’
Doctor Who: ‘Me? I’m a Time Lord.’
Sarah Jane: ‘A Time Lord?’
Doctor Who: ‘Yes, that’s right. And my people are very keen to stamp out unlicensed time travel. You can look upon them as galactic ticket inspectors,
if you like.’
On my last marathon this was the episode which finally sold me on the Third Doctor Who. I’d spent four seasons thinking he wasn’t as bad as I’d expected but still not up my street, but this was the moment I finally realised that he’s as much a wonderful Doctor Who as any of the others. I took to this incarnation far easier this time around — with caveats — but this scene still has the same magical effect.
There’s another moment a bit later on which is just as lovely; it’s when he’s stood atop Sir Edward’s castle, throwing his stink bombs at the raiders below. In theory it’s a nothing scene. It’s not supposed to showcase anything special about the character, and it’s not especially a chance for Pertwee to shine. It’s merely there to serve a function. And yet there’s something about it which feels more charming than almost anything else he’s done in the series so far. It’s helped, I think, by the figure of Elisabeth Sladen jumping up and down beside him, desperately trying to see over the battlements. I’d not noticed it before but he throws one of the bombs for her to hurl over the side, and that made me love the scene even more.
But enough about our regulars! There’s a risk that I may just end up going on about this pair forever. There’s other bits in this episode which are brilliant too, and chief among them is Linx . He’s not been especially menacing up to this point. Yesterday I praised the silly little flag he plants in the ground, but although he’s in some ways the straight man to Irongron’s more outlandish character, he’s been a bit feeble. Here, though, that illusion gets shattered.
When his patience with Irongron finally runs out he smacks him to the ground and it looks genuinely powerful. Doctor Who says that a Sontaran is — and their spaceships are — ‘tremendously powerful for its size’, and this is the first time we’ve really had a sense of that. And it’s accompanied by some of the best dialogue in the story, which is saying something for an already densely-packed script;
Linx: ‘I should have known better than to look for interest in a struggle
of primitives.’
I praised the dialogue plenty yesterday but it would be remiss of me not to mention Irongron’s description of Doctor Who in this episode, which is also brilliant;
Irongron: ‘Is this Doctor a long shank rascal with a mighty nose?’
Linx: ‘That is how he would appear in human eyes.’
I’m going with another 8/10.
The Time Warrior — Part Four
There’s something of an odd structure to The Time Warrior, in that a lot of the ‘epic’ stuff you might expect to find in the final episode — a siege against a castle, a fight between Linx and Irongron, Doctor Who and Sarah Jane becoming friends and working together — all took place in Part Three, which leaves us with a slightly unusual set up for the last 25 minutes.
That’s not to say that there isn’t any action in this episode, just that it’s all on a generally smaller scale than you might expect for the resolution. Doctor Who and Linx briefly go toe-to-toe, and the former has an extended battle with Irongron, both dressed as a knight and on his own desperately avoiding the bullets of his enemies. And then, of course, the entire castle blows up at the end! I’ve noted lots of things which are a recurring occurrence in the Pertwee era; high-tech scientific establishments, obnoxious bureaucrats, country yokels and people falling off tall things among them. But I’ve just realised we can add ‘blowing up a key location at the end of the narrative’ to the list, too. It happens in The Dæmons, Day of the Daleks, The Green Death and here, too!
The slight downside to it being a recurring way to end the stories is that they seem to get slightly worse at it every time. The church at the end of Season Eight looked fantastic (so much so that I’m sure Berry Letts has said they received letters of complaint about causing damage to an old building), Auderly House in Day of the Daleks looks pretty decent, too. The Global Chemicals complex is an accurate model of the real-world location, but it does look like a model. For this serial they’ve not even bothered to build a model, we cut from a shot of the castle to some footage of an explosion in a quarry! It’s a bit of a let down after a story which has been really well produced right up until almost the very end. I’ve a vague recollection that the DVD might include an alternate ending which does feature a castle, but I’ve been watching today on BritBox.
A big part of the beauty is the castle — the location used for this story is fantastic. You don’t tend to get castles in this condition now, where parts of it are overgrown and genuinely look old. So much work has gone into preserving and restoring these historic monuments and while that’s obviously a great thing it does rob them a little of the beauty seen on screen here.
My favourite shots of the castle aren’t even ones from the serial itself, but rather a series of images taken for the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special showing Sarah Jane being pursued by Linx along the overgrown battlements of a castle. These shots are so embedded in my mind that I was genuinely a bit surprised to discover they don’t correlate to any actual scene in the story — I’d have put money on remembering such a sequence.
I think I said this during The Curse of Peladon, but I’m surprised New testament Who doesn’t do more stories set in medieval castles given the abundance of them here in South Wales. Watching this story has only reinforced my desire to see more like this — I think we’ve only really had the one since 2005 (although lots of other stories shot in bits of castles).
One last thing to note for this story — I’ve grown to really like Professor Rubeish as the tales has gone on. He was annoying in the first episode, but he’s proven himself reliable and capable as the tale has gone on, and he’s been the source of plenty of laughs. I’m surprised they don’t seem to have brought him back in any other stories. If nothing else I’d have had him pop up in The Sarah Jane Adventures as an occasional annoyance…!
A 7/10 to round this one out.
