The War Machines Episode 3

The one where the Army mounts an assault on a Covent Garden warehouse...

The design of the War Machines is both unwieldy and impressive at the same time. Raymond London's tank-like inventions are certainly formidable physically and defensively: as well as club arms that smash (mainly tables or empty crates), they have flammable gas-spraying guns, a miraculous radio signal that can jam rifles and machine guns, and a blinding headlight. These machines look and act like the all-conquering behemoths that they are, and they're certainly more convincing than their 1980s cousins, the Cleaners from Paradise Towers.

On the minus side, they're somewhat too clunky and bulky to convince me that they can take over the world. They certainly don't have stealth on their side (the incessant chirruping computer noises put pay to that), and I can't imagine how they'd actually get through a normal door, or down a narrow alley, or along a third-floor corridor, or even over an uneven patch of land. They have a range of about 30ft (or is it yards?) with their weaponry, but that's not good enough to catch every human being on the planet. WOTAN has an ambitious plan, but it needs a bit of work if it wants to conquer every major city in the world.

Nevertheless, WOTAN poses one of the realest threats the Doctor has yet faced. Its plan seems unstoppable, and one by one, it is recruiting as many of the Doctor's allies and innocents as it can - Brett, Green, Krimpton, Dodo, and now Polly! Anneke Wills gives us some great "possessed" acting, and Michael Craze goes all out as the true hero of this story, the vulnerable but tough Cockney ruffian. When he is betrayed by the hypnotised Polly and dragged before Major Green and the War Machine, you genuinely do not want him to be subjugated or killed. Ben Jackson has quickly become the audience's true hero.

The warehouse scenes take up the bulk of the episode though, and we spend a lot of time with Ben trying to escape, or wake the hypnotised Polly from her WOTAN-trance. When he finally does make a break for it, the look she gives him as he looks back is wonderfully well done - Eric Mival's canny editing removes the need for dialogue between them, but you can still hear their thoughts: Ben is pleading with Polly not to give him up, and perhaps come with him, but while Polly is too influenced to totally break free of her trance, she still allows him to escape, with her wide-eyed little-girl-lost expression. There's a look between them which says all of this, and it shines a light on how they retain a close understanding during their future adventures with the Doctor.

Major Green describes Ben as "an enemy of mechanised evolution", which is pure Kit Pedler. Doctor Who's own scientific advisor would go on to expand his thoughts and fears about mechanisation and replacing man with machine with his next creation, the Cybermen, but you can see the origins of the silver giants here, in The War Machines.

Meanwhile, the Doctor continues to fiddle about doing very little except clutch his lapels at Sir Charles's house. The Doctor really should have more of an active part in the investigations at the warehouse, but it's obvious that William Hartnell's failing health at this stage prevented any high-energy scenes for the Doctor. The Hartnell of 1964 would be in there with Ben, creeping around the Burrows warehouse, but his Doctor of 1966 is much less proactive. He sends the almost complete stranger Ben off to do his work for him, and potters about with the equally as unfamiliar Sir Charles on the periphery of the story, at least until the last five minutes.

The Doctor gets actively involved in the story thanks to Ben's frenetic report, and it's both truthful and heartening to see the Doctor believe Ben's outrageous story, and side with him. The Doctor has seen too much to ignore what he's hearing, in contrast to Sir Charles's more cynical (but equally as truthful) disbelief. However, I wonder why the Doctor doesn't automatically think the Daleks might be involved when Ben speaks of a "killer machine" and hypnotised slaves?

And so everybody converges on the Burroughs warehouse at Covent Garden, including an impressive turnout for the military. Director Michael Ferguson yet again impresses with his energetic and ambitious introduction of the Army, arriving by the truckload with their rifles and machine guns. This is another first for Doctor Who, and it feels like a UNIT story in the Hartnell era - a jarring but exhilarating thought! This would all have been so exciting for young boys to watch back in the summer of '66 - soldiers, guns, bombs and tanks, in that creaky old Doctor Who! This is a totally different Doctor Who, which feels much realer and truer than the adventures on cardboard alien planets or in Earth's dim and distant past. This is Doctor Who for the ITC age (but without the budget and gloss).

There's an awful lot of fighting in episode 3, between the Army and the War Machine and its slaves, pieced lovingly and skilfully together by the Restoration Team from clips and outtakes taken from elsewhere to fill the holes edited out by censors and damage over time. The scenes are repetitive and a little tedious after a while, but at least we can see something of what the fans recorded live all those years ago. And then we get that spine-tingling cliffhanger, as the War Machine trundles inexorably toward the Doctor, but instead of cowering and running away in fear (and banging his head on the set, as William Mervyn does!), our time-travelling hero stands resolute against the oncoming threat. In fact, he clutches his lapels and steps forward, towards the machine, in defiance. And as the searching light of the War Machine bares down on the Doctor, the end credits roll and we have to wait until next time to see what happens.

Never has William Hartnell looked more heroic, or more the Doctor. Or should that be, Doctor Who?

First broadcast: July 9th, 1966

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: That cliffhanger. It still maintains its power decades later.
The Bad: Although it's directed well, there's an awful lot of footage showing the War Machine knocking over pointless walls of empty grapefruit crates, or firing smoke at nothing in particular. There should be more footage of it posing a real threat (like the bit where it smashes through the warehouse doors), and less of it pretending to be frightening.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode 4...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 4

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-war-machines.html

The War Machines is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-War-Machines-DVD/dp/B001BKYAY0