A Battle of Wits (The Time Meddler Episode 3)

The one where we discover the Monk has his own TARDIS...

While I like the new energy Peter Purves has brought to the show in his exuberant performance as Steven, I do take issue with his merciless cynicism. He's a space pilot from the future, but takes an inordinate amount of time to process the fact that time travel is possible, and that he's in the 11th century. At the start of this episode, Vicki decides to look for a secret passage through which the Doctor might have escaped the locked room, but he immediately pooh-poohs the idea. While Vicki is being practical and resourceful, Steven prefers to take a somewhat defeatist point of view. How long that lasts I don't know, but Maureen O'Brien has brought little Vicki on so far since her debut in The Rescue just six months earlier. Vicki is no longer the lost and frightened little orphan of Desperate Measures; now she is a seasoned adventurer who thinks outside the box and knows what's what. She's grown up.

Which is why the supposed "loss" of the TARDIS to the tide affects Vicki so much. Again, Steven doesn't seem too bothered - he takes the pragmatic approach of accepting the TARDIS is gone and moving on - but if he just stopped and processed it, he'd surely realise the pickle they're in. O'Brien gives Vicki a wistful sadness as she considers the loss of the Ship. "You don't know what the TARDIS meant," she tells Steven. To Vicki, that police box was her world - her home, her shelter - and the Doctor is the only family she has. She has to face up to losing the only sure things in her life, and I'm glad writer Dennis Spooner gave space and time to this moment.

While I find it hard to swallow the idea of the Doctor heaving open a heavy secret door and then scrambling along a damp tunnel to the outside, it allows William Hartnell to rejoin the story after his week's sabbatical. He revisits his friend Edith at the Saxon village, who seems to have recovered from her assault by the Viking marauders remarkably quickly. It's a shame, because it kind of unravels the good, brave work put in last week in the suggestion of what the Vikings did to Edith, who was left traumatised by the attack. Here, she's back to normal, and the one line which could have spoken volumes - "You've not been my only visitor tonight" - is sadly thrown away by Alethea Charlton and not picked up on at all. Later in this episode, the Monk pays a visit to the Saxons very early next morning, and seems to disturb Edith and Wulnoth in bed (if the sight of Michael Miller's fulsome chest is anything to go by). Edith really has gotten over her supposed sexual assault with the greatest - and most insipid - of ease.

During his conversation with Edith the Doctor is remarkably free and easy with his future knowledge of the Viking invasion and the Battle at Hastings. This is a different Doctor to the one who castigated Barbara for trying to interfere in Aztec history. Although he is not interfering here - indeed, his objective is to stop the Monk's meddling - he's definitely being somewhat reckless with the facts of history (or at least the history books - is he suggesting something different happened, or that he only read it in a book himself?).

Now, what about that meddling monk? Well, he's called the Monk here, but he's only really dressed as a monk to suit his disguise while he executes his plan at the monastery. There's no evidence he is a monk, or that he dressed as a monk before he arrived in Northumbria, or that his adopted name is the Monk (just as the Doctor isn't a doctor). He is only dressed in a monk's habit to suit his needs in this story, but the fact the Doctor calls him the Monk suggests that is how he has referred to him before (it's really rather exciting that the Doctor and the Monk know each other of old). When the Monk reappears in The Daleks' Master Plan, he's still called the Monk and dressed as one too, even though he has no reason to be. It's puzzling, isn't it? Does the Monk have a kink for monks' habits and tonsures?

In the wider Whoniverse the Monk has been given the name Mortimus (in the 1994 novel No Future), and hasn't always been referred to or dressed as a monk (eg, the 1983 DWM comic strip 4-Dimensional Vistas, in which he was referred to as the Time-Meddler). Returning to A Battle of Wits, the Doctor tells the Monk: "You can drop the monk's act", suggesting it is a disguise rather than an identity ("No more monkery!"). The scenes between Peter Butterworth and William Hartnell are lovely, as we watch two seasoned actors bounce off one another with obvious joy, dancing around one another verbally. To me, there's absolutely no reason why the Monk can't be an earlier incarnation of the Master - he and the Doctor know one another of old, and the Monk's modus operandi is to subvert and alter the course of history, seemingly just for the hell of it (he attempts something similar in The King's Demons).

There is one character trait of the Monk's which is distinctly non-Masterly, and that's his humanity. The Monk takes time to care for Eldred's wounds, administering penicillin and ruing the fact he can't carry out a blood transfusion. The Monk may not care very much for these injured Saxons, but he cares enough to help a wounded man. His plan is to meddle with the course of history, not necessarily kill anyone. He has a heart, a soul and a conscience - all things it might be argued the Master doesn't (or didn't then!). Nevertheless, maybe the Master is just a nicer guy in this incarnation, and the vengeful, cackling, beard-stroking murderous miniaturising psychopath doesn't kick in until Peter Butterworth regenerates into Roger Delgado? Who knows...?

The Monk has written his plan as a tick list of stages he must complete. The list is sweetly naive and childlike (1. Arrival in Northumbria; 3. Sight Vikings) but betrays a ruthless side. Stage 5 is simply to "Destroy Viking fleet", which he lists among the more everyday tasks of positioning an atomic cannon and meeting King Harold. The Monk's plan is more disturbing because of its blinkered simplicity. He's a man on a mission, a man with a list of tasks he intends to tick off one by one. It's just so happens that list of tasks involves altering the course of human history (in eight easy steps!).

The Monk also displays a violent side when he smacks Ulf over the head with a flimsy piece of plywood (does the job, though). When we see the Doctor do the same to Sven, I raised a reassuring eyebrow to notice how much extra vigour and spite Hartnell puts into it. As I've said before, the First Doctor is by far the most violent of them all!

The cliffhanger is a corker, one of the most memorable of the Hartnell era, as Steven and Vicki stumble upon the Monk's TARDIS. This is a major turning point in Doctor Who history, because we learn that there are other time travellers out there, there is more than one TARDIS (the Daleks' time machine wasn't a TARDIS, although it did seem to be dimensionally transcendental), and they look the same (the Monk prefers the same desktop theme as the Doctor, obviously). But wouldn't Vicki not automatically assume they'd found the Doctor's TARDIS rather than think it was another one? Her assumption that the Monk has a TARDIS is a bit of a leap, albeit a correct one!

First broadcast: July 17th, 1965

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The reveal of the Monk's TARDIS at the end is one of the era's most memorable cliffhangers, part of a story packed with newly-introduced mythology by Dennis Spooner.
The Bad: Steven and Vicki caper about doing very little until the end. And the smudging of Edith's assault disappoints too.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Checkmate...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: The Watcher (episode 1); The Meddling Monk (episode 2); Checkmate (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/2013/08/the-time-meddler.html

The Time Meddler is available on DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Time-Meddler-DVD/dp/B0010S3PUS