The Deadly Assassin Part Three

The one where the Doctor is the subject of a manhunt in the Matrix...

The Doctor really does go through it in this episode. And so, for that matter, does Tom Baker, as our hero is hunted through the Matrix by what turns out to be the Master's accomplice, Chancellor Goth (surprise, surprise!). David Maloney directs this episode with real style and scale, and even if it occasionally lacks pace, there's no denying it looks utterly convincing. He manages to make the grounds of a boarding school and a chalk quarry in Surrey look like the far-flung tropics, thanks also to the subtle underscore of chirruping cicadas in the background.

Despite the unusual theme of this episode - almost entirely set within the Matrix, apart from the occasional side-step to see what the Old Boys of the Panopticon are up to - it's a real shame that the memorably surreal aspects of the Matrix are quickly forgotten in favour of a run-of-the-mill manhunt. In episode 2 we had a Shaolin warrior, giant dentists' needle and a shambling gas-masked corpse, and at the start of this episode we get the fantastically unsettling image of a clown laughing maniacally from beneath the ground (oh, how that image upsets me).

But apart from that, an inexplicable icky bird's egg and a non-threatening giant spider, most of the episode centres on a visceral game of survival of the fittest, but without the weirdness of before. It's interesting that most of the wacky things we remember about the Matrix in The Deadly Assassin take place right at the end of episode 2, with only really the crazy clown in episode 3 (although I do love the effect of Goth's giant eyes in the hillside).

The best set-up of the episode is when Goth uses a Stampe biplane to nosedive and shoot at the fleeing Doctor, coming back again and again for one more shot at our hero (that biplane was known as the most used aircraft in the history of film-making, and was used in movies as late as 1999's The Mummy). Maloney had obviously seen Hitchcock's North By Northwest, and ably tries to recreate that famous shot of Cary Grant fleeing from the crop duster on a fraction of Hitch's budget.

Tom Baker must have suffered himself during the filming of these scenes, shot over five days at the height of the sweltering summer of 1976 (the highest temperature recorded that season was an energy-sapping 35.9 degrees Celsius, earlier that July). We see him scrabbling up sheer slopes, sliding down others, racing across open sun-baked ground, climbing - and then falling out of - trees, and then tumbling around in water, which cannot have been the cleanest of environments, especially in that heat. In fact, when Goth shoots the Doctor and he falls out of the tree, I really feel for Tom because it looks damn painful! It's rare that we seen our hero look so bedraggled, exhausted, near-defeated in a physical way, sweaty, bloodied and injured. The Matrix may be a dreamscape, but just like in a dream, it all seems very real at the time.

The Doctor deals with bullets, poison, dehydration and exhaustion in this episode, but by the end manages to turn the tide slightly more in his favour, rather cleverly using his adversary's own weapon against him, which is very traditional. Fashioning a blowpipe from bamboo, he fires a thorn tipped with the poison Goth used to spoil the drinking water at his enemy, weakening but not quite defeating him.

The Doctor's ingenuity continues to prevail when he tricks Goth into firing his rifle while surrounded by flammable marsh gas, and the scene where Goth appears to burn to death in the flaming water is really well executed. And when the charred Goth rises up out of the water to grab the Doctor from behind, it puts me in mind of the ending of the film Friday the 13th when the corpse of Jason Vorhees surges out of the lake to grab Alice!

Fisticuffs ensue - a hallmark of the Hinchcliffe era - and the Doctor and Goth hammer away at each other like they're in a WWE ring, until the bad guy gets the upper hand and appears to drown our hero. This last image, a freeze frame of the Doctor drowning, was what so upset TV clean-up campaigner Mary Whitehouse, and I can kind of see why. There are plenty of moments in Hinchcliffe Who that I think may have touched or overstepped the mark when it comes to family viewing, but this one is particularly well executed, thus even more convincing. It's that brief shot of the Doctor's arms and legs flailing helplessly as Goth holds his head underwater. No wonder Hinchcliffe concurred and curtailed the final shot, the rest of which is now lost forever in the great editing suite in the sky.

The Deadly Assassin part 3 is sort of legendary in Doctor Who history, and rightfully so. But the way it gently forgets the weirdness of the Matrix environment and becomes a rather run-of-the-mill tropical manhunt is rather disappointing. I'd like to have seen more surreal moments peppered throughout, adding to the unpredictability and strangeness of the Doctor's predicament. As it stands, it becomes a pretty standard Jungle Jim adventure.

First broadcast: November 13th, 1976

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The first half of the episode - with the giant eyes, the cackling clown and the killer biplane - is really weird, exciting stuff.
The Bad: The second half of the episode is quite disappointing after what's gone before, although admittedly directed very well. Oh, and Goth's stuntman is really obvious at the end!
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 05

NEXT TIME: Part Four...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Four

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: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-deadly-assassin.html

The Deadly Assassin is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Deadly-Assassin-DVD/dp/B001UHNYWI