The Deadly Assassin Part Two

The one where the Doctor discovers his arch enemy the Master is back...

A naughtily re-edited reprise shows that it wasn't the Doctor who shot the President at all, it was an unidentified assassin with a pistol. Dudley Simpson's gorgeous funereal score adds to the grandiose occasion and eventual chaos here, reflecting both the magnitude of the event, and its deadly outcome.

And so the Doctor seems to have been framed, found with a sniper's staser rifle in his hands. I did wonder why the President didn't regenerate after being shot, but after researching the properties of the staser within Doctor Who fiction, I discovered that stasers can act as a regeneration inhibitor, as detailed in the 2000 novel The Ancestor Cell. The Doctor is immediately arrested and scheduled to go on trial in the next 48 hours, but not before Hilred puts our hero through a particularly nasty bout of questioning. It's a surprise that the supposedly civilised Time Lords torture their prisoners by stringing them up by the wrists and inflicting increasing levels of pain on them (the technological equivalent of the medieval rack). It's also revealed that the Doctor is to be executed by vaporisation.

The Doctor tries to get Castellan Spandrell on his side by attempting to convince him of his innocence, that he was trying to warn the President all along, rather than shoot him. Engin claims that precognitive vision is impossible, which goes against my presumption with the last episode that Prydonians can see into the future. But it soon becomes apparent that the Doctor had the premonition beamed into his mind courtesy of the precognitive properties of the Amplified Panatropic Computer, which tries to divine future events by collating the living experiences of all departed Time Lords. In that case, why don't they just dial up the late President's electro-chemical record to see if there are any clues as to the identity of the assassin? Maybe the President saw the face of his killer before dying, or at least a vital clue to further the inquiry.

Before all this, the Doctor pulls a fantastic trick from up his sleeve by announcing himself as a Presidential candidate under Article 17 of the Gallifreyan Constitution, which automatically grants him a guarantee of liberty, which means he cannot be tried and executed (yet). Very clever! The Doctor bides his time waiting to unveil his legal loophole, in the meantime doodling caricatures of his accusers!

When the miniaturised (Action Man) body of Runcible's technician is found in the barrel of the TV camera filming the Presidential resignation, it becomes immediately clear who the Doctor is up against: the Master! He's introduced into the narrative quite gently and calmly, which is a surprise as the Master's return is a huge deal. We haven't seen him since the final episode of Frontier in Space (three and a half years), and we know that Roger Delgado was dead by 1976, so we clearly have a new actor playing the Master now.

The "new-look" Master is a scarred, mottled, mutated monster, but we can still tell it's the Master because he has nothing but vengeance and hatred on his mind. "You do not understand hatred as I understand it," he tells his mystery collaborator. "Only hate keeps me alive. Why else would I endure this pain? Nothing else matters." Something terrible has obviously happened to the Master's physical form, looking as he does like something out of the Phantom of the Opera's nightmares. The Master wants revenge on both the Doctor, and the Time Lords, but it's interesting that the Doctor refers to all this as The Final Challenge (perhaps alluding to The Final Game, the planned but aborted last adventure of Season 11 which would have seen Jon Pertwee's Doctor face Delgado's Master one last time). Even this early on in Doctor Who canon, the ongoing battles between the Master and the Doctor are seen as a perpetual conflict representing some kind of mutually agreed game of life (or death) between them. Maybe it all began as early as the moment they each stared into the Untempered Schism: the Doctor ran away, the Master went mad...

The Doctor decides to mentally enter the Matrix, the repository of all Time Lord knowledge, to try and find the point where the Master intercepted the APC's "premonition". Remember, the Doctor is still trying to convince Spandrell he's been framed at this point, so the Doctor entering the topsy-turvy world of the Matrix - the part of The Deadly Assassin that everybody remembers and loves - is actually a secondary part of the plot. It's the Doctor trying to prove his innocence to one man, rather than his entire people.

The Matrix is a weird and wonderful world of Wonderland-like whimsy, but with a deadly twist. It's a place where anything and everything can happen (or nothing at all, as we see in The Timeless Children!), where sense and logic have no reasonable place. Once within, the Doctor immediately gains his scarf, which he doesn't have on in the "real world", and which he has a very definite use for when he tumbles down a slope and needs to pull himself up. It's as if the Doctor had a premonition that he'd need it...

In the final few minutes of the episode, the Doctor's experiences in the Matrix see him tackle a rubber alligator, a dangerous cliff edge, a Shaolin warrior, a killer dentist and his giant needle, wartime bombs, and finally being trapped on a railway line with an engine racing toward him. All of these experiences are being controlled by a mysterious figure, possibly the Master but more evidently the Master's unidentified accomplice. The Doctor was a fool to venture into his domain...

First broadcast: November 6th, 1976

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The revelation that the Master is back, to carry out The Final Challenge!
The Bad: The Action Man technician in the camera barrel, complete with gripping hand and fuzzy hair.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆

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

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

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