Priest of Death (The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve Episode 3)

The one where the Abbot of Amboise is murdered (or is it the Doctor?)...

I find it odd that Steven should care so much about the Sea Beggar. I mean, the audience must barely care at all, but Steven has no real reason to care either way if he lives or dies. By his own admission, he knows next to nothing about this period in French history, so how does he know that the Admiral de Coligny isn't supposed to be assassinated in the Rue des Fosse St Germain? To try and prevent the assassination might be the automatically humane response, but he is a time traveller - he needs to take a step back and consider the impact of dabbling with established events (it's not as if he hasn't got experience in such things - his run-ins with the meddling Monk should have taught him enough).

The truth is, Coligny didn't have a very pleasant final 48 hours on this earthly plain - the assassination attempt depicted in Priest of Death resulted in him losing a finger and shattering an elbow, and he was finally dispatched during the infamous St Bartholomew's Day (not Eve!) massacre by being run through with a sword, thrown out of a window into the street, and finally beheaded.

But Steven doesn't know all of this, so why try to stop it? For all he knows, the Admiral is meant to die in the street. His sudden concern feels like a false attempt by writer John Lucarotti to involve him in the story more. The Steven of the last two episodes would just want to find the Doctor and get back to the TARDIS.

Speaking of Steven: his attitude to women can be so old-fashioned. He can be terribly patronising, verging on the misogynistic. The way he speaks to Anne is so condescending. She might have a stereotypical "local yokel" accent, but she's not stupid. Steven speaks to her like she's a little girl, just as he sometimes spoke to Vicki. However, Vicki gave back as good as she got, it was like a sibling rivalry they had between them. But thinking back to the way Steven spoke to Vicki in The Time Meddler, and how he always seems to think other people are in the wrong, his self-righteousness can sometimes really wear on me. And to be fair, it's not always in the writing - Peter Purves's delivery can make it sound even more exasperatingly patronising at times. "Good girl..."

The relentless politicking in Priest of Death can get a little tiresome too. It's written well, and performed wonderfully by a top-flight cast, but it really isn't all that interesting. I have to wonder how engaging the young audience of 1966 found it: straight after the flash-bang-wallop excitement of The Daleks' Master Plan, the audience is then plunged into a densely written historical costume drama which hardly features the Doctor at all, and centres around the attempted assassination of some French nobleman 400 years ago. With barely any humour or action, The Massacre comes across as a pretty pedestrian affair. No wonder ratings fell by more than 25% over the course of the serial.

Of the terribly earnest guest cast, I particularly enjoyed Barry Justice's King Charles IX, a monarch who just wants a bit of peace - both nationally and personally! He hopes the marriage of the Protestant Henry of Navarre to his Catholic sister Margaret will bring peace to France, while all the time simply wanting to relax and play tennis at his palace (he has a new racket you see!). He gets easily frustrated by the politicking of his counsel of Tavannes, Teligny and Coligny, and is also being browbeaten by his mother, Catherine de Medici. The scene between Justice and Joan Young is great, full of tension and exasperation. The matriarch ridicules her son, undermines his position, and he responds with increasingly desperate exasperation. Justice makes Charles a highly strung and weathered man (Charles was only 22 at this time), while Young is wonderfully imperious as Medici. Justice only appears in this one episode sadly (even more sad is Justice's fate: 14 years later, he would commit suicide at the age of just 39).

As a massive fan of John Lucarotti's work in Season 1, it's been a mixed bag listening to The Massacre because I get the feeling some of the writer's trademark quality was diluted in Donald Tosh's rewrites. There are snippets of dialogue which smack of classic Lucarotti, that lyrical beauty he bought to people's mouths. In episode 2 there was a beautiful line from Coligny - "You see shadows where there is no sun" - and in episode 3, he says: "Kings are recognised only by the power they wield". These are only brief glimpses of Lucarotti's true skill, which is so abundant in Marco Polo and The Aztecs but which seems lost and drowning here.

And what of William Hartnell? He is often praised for his performance as the Abbot of Amboise in this story, and he does indeed turn in a suitably effective performance, devoid of the Doctorish verbal tics we are so accustomed to. Neither does he fluff a line, not once. But even though Hartnell is now back from his holiday, the Abbot still does not feature all that much before he is murdered (off-screen) by angry Huguenots. The character feels pointless, superfluous to what is going on - the fact he is a double for the Doctor does not add much, if anything, to the plot. It only serves to make us think the Doctor is involved, but as soon as we learn of his death, we know he can't really be the Doctor. The entire "Doctor's double" strand is a wasted opportunity, an underwritten narrative cul-de-sac.

As Steven flees through the streets of Paris with an angry mob on his tail, I'm glad that the next episode is the last for this serial. I'm keen to move on, back to "proper" Doctor Who.

First broadcast: February 19th 1966

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Barry Justice and Joan Young are great together in their short but entertaining scene.
The Bad: The Abbot of Amboise is a narrative dead-end.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Bell of Doom...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: War of God (episode 1); The Sea Beggar (episode 2); Bell of Doom (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/2013/09/the-massacre-of-st-bartholomews-eve.html

The soundtrack to The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve is available on CD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Massacre-Peter-Purves/dp/0563552611