Who Reviews The Three Doctors by Tony J Fyler

Three is a magic number for Tony.

When Doctor Who turned ten, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had an unusual idea to kick off the anniversary season – smash the timelines together and have all three Doctors in the same story. Such a thing had never been done before. It would require an epic-level threat, something beyond even the Time Lords to sort out. And it would be a fantastic opportunity for relatively new fans to get a glimpse of the Doctors they might never have previously seen.

That, ladies, gentlemen and groovy people, was a friggin’ masterstroke.

As it turned out though, that was only the first of a number of masterstrokes that would be bottled like lightning in the story simply known as The Three Doctors.

The story, by the ‘Bristol Boys,’ Bob Baker and Dave Martin, would take us back to Gallifrey for the first time in colour, and would show us Time Lords in trouble, rather than, as The War Games had done, Time Lords as all-powerful arbiters of what could and couldn’t be allowed to happen. In the creation of Omega, the boys gave us the first real plank of Time Lord mythology, before even the first mention of Rassilon. In doing so, for the first time, The Three Doctors gave us the idea of Gallifrey and the Time Lords as a planet and people with a complex history of their own, rather than their previous simple existence as godlike watchers over the infinity of the universe. They had a beginning, a moment when their society changed forever – and it was Omega, at least at first, who was responsible for their existence as the lords of time. Masterstroke number two – giving the Doctor’s people a flawed and complex history over which fans could obsess for the rest of their lives.

It’s a matter of record of course that William Hartnell had a much larger role in the original script than he ended up having in the on-screen version. And while it might be true that more Hartnell would have made for a more legitimate claim to be the three Doctors, it’s also equally possible that more Hartnell would have clogged up a script that would have been forced to get to the point far faster had he been more present. But masterstroke number three became almost immediately obvious when you got Pertwee and Troughton on screen together – making the different incarnations of the Doctor dislike each other. Genius – sheer, scene-eating genius, especially when one considers the huge differences in character between the three incarnations, and the huge differences in character of the three actors too. For much of the mid-section of The Three Doctors, that’s why you’re on the ride – to see the interaction between the incarnations. It’s a thing that has gone on to be the lodestone of every multi-Doctor story since. Which versions, if any, will get on with each other, and which will strike sparks off the personality of the others? If you’re any kind of Doctor Who fan, you want to know, want to see them react to one another, and in The Three Doctors, you can’t take your eyes off them.

Masterstroke four you can identify in two words: Stephen Thorne. Omega was a part unlike any other that had gone before it – we’d learned of powerful, meddlesome Time Lords in the past, in terms of the Monk and the Master, but this was like coming across Abraham or Moses and finding he was angry – it had a breadth and scope to it that needed an actor of superlative power. Enter Stephen Thorne. While he utterly embodies the ranting megalomaniac from the dawn of the Time Lords, it’s actually when he realises, he’s trapped in the world of anti-matter as an incorporeal force of pure will that Thorne nails Omega to the screen and to the memory centres of fans forever.

That scream.

That howl of inchoate, primal, heart-rending, tantrumming despair is a thing that perhaps one wouldn’t necessarily have expected from a Doctor Who villain in 1973. But more than all the ranting, that scream makes Omega a multi-layered villain for whom it’s possible to feel pity. Yes, absolutely, he has megalomania at his core, and he does terrible things to achieve his goals, but in that scream, he becomes a wounded animal, determined to survive, determined to return, determined to get what he believes is his due – and in that understanding of him, it’s possible to see him as mistreated by those who reaped the benefit of his sacrifice, which makes him much more complex than he could have been. Thank you, Stephen Thorne, for that unparalleled scream.

You could argue that masterstroke four was the Doctors agreeing to take on Omega’s burden so that he could be free – they might bicker endlessly between themselves, but the core of the Doctor’s personality is in that moment, when they’re prepared to sacrifice themselves to free another being from pain and suffering. I absolutely wouldn’t fight you if you chose to make that case, because in a story to kick off the tenth season of the show, that heartfelt reminder of what makes the Doctor special, what makes them worth admiring and following and listening to, whether they’re a crotchety old man, a recorder-playing clown or a dandified gadget-freak feels timely, and like a vindication of your fandom. You can look at that scene and go ‘Yep. That’s why I’m a Doctor Who fan,’ and be fairly sure that event he Not-We will get the point. Noble self-sacrifice to set a suffering fellow creature free – masterstroke four.

Masterstroke five? Making it all count for something. We all love a good Doctor Who yarn in and of itself of course, but using the Doctor’s success in defeating Omega’s plans to drain Gallifrey of all its energy as the key to reversing the Sherwin-era decision to ground him on Earth in the 1970s (or 1980s) is a perfect pay-off, and feels like a vindication within the story. For the first time since he ran away, what we get at the end of The Three Doctors is the Time Lords reclaiming one of their own, not for censure and punishment, but for thanks, for gratitude, and for, however grudgingly, perhaps a recognition that his renegade lifestyle has taught him useful things that he couldn’t have learned if he’d stayed among them. It’s the first real time we get a sense of acceptance coming from the Time Lords, an understanding that the Doctor will do what he does – but that his hearts are fundamentally in the right places. That gives us an ending that feels right for a birthday party, and opens up the universe of time and space to us, as to the Doctor, for the rest of Season 10 and beyond. It ends the story on a high, and promises interstellar thrills and chills again, after the alien-of-the-week format of Season 9.

That’s a whole heck of a lot of masterstrokes to fit into one four-episode story, but The Three Doctors manages it.

Now of course, it would be a foolish fan indeed who claims The Three Doctors is perfect – the gellguards in particular are a low-spot in the history of even Pertwee-era monsters (which, let’s not forget, includes the Axon-creatures and that flapping bird-thing known as Kronos in The Time Monster). And the effects which bring the gell into our dimension? Also, well dodgy. The Time Lords, by being delivered on 1970s budgets, are brought down off their high horses and made to feel… well, a bit naff, really (though you can equally argue this was a factor in the Doctor’s getting sick of them and running off to see the universe). The decisions which lead to the premise of the show make no sense whatsoever – it takes a colossal amount of energy they don’t have to send three versions of the same Time Lord to co-exists – breaking, or bending the laws of time while we’re at it, whereas presumably, sending an entirely other Time Lord in a Tardis would drain little if any of Gallifrey’s remaining energy, so there’s a strong whiff of scripting convenience about the whole thing.

But on top of all the masterstrokes, which together amount to a whole new kind of Doctor Who story (the multi-Doctor story), The Three Doctors is also peppered with superb moments of dialogue – Cromer, …and we are all together boop boop be doop, I should have been a god, Fancypants, Scarecrow, a dandy and a clown… it’s all in this story, and in perhaps the ultimate celebration of the bonkers, hokey wonder of the show, the universe is saved, ultimately, by a recorder. Arguably, in the first ten years of the show, that’s peak Doctor Who, all wrapped up in four episodes of a story which broadens the Doctor Who universe enormously, gives most of the regulars something to do – it’s perhaps a shame they couldn’t’ cram a Delgado cameo in there, but that would probably have detracted from the power and the newness of Omega as the Big Bad – and leaves you glued to the screen throughout and feeling, at the end of it all, like you’ve watched an utter celebration of your favourite show that leaves you vindicated for loving it. Set against all that, the criticisms that parts of it make no sense and parts of it look hugely silly, tend to burn away like the spite of a spoilsport when confronted with a really good time.

If you want to experience The Three Doctors at its best, it’s all fresh and sparkling on the Season 10 blu-ray box set. It’s surprisingly worth a re-watch, because while it’s utterly of its time, the number of new things it brings to Jon Pertwee Doctor Who will take your breath away, and the performances from the likes of Pertwee, Troughton and Stephen Thorne will blow your mind all over again.