The Deadly Assassin Part Four

The one where the Master tries to destroy Gallifrey in order to extend his own life...

Has Dr Who ever looked so beaten and bedraggled as Tom does at the start of this episode, following his fight with Goth in the water? The sight of Tom's soaked and wilting curls and his torn and bloodied clothes proves the Doctor has been through hell and back, all in order to try and prove his innocence to Spandrell - which, incidentally, he doesn't strictly do. Spandrell ends up simply believing the Doctor because of what he goes through in the Matrix, and is also willing to believe that Goth is a traitor, without any physical evidence at all. Maybe he was disposed to the Doctor's truth all along, which makes me wonder whether all the Matrix scenes were actually necessary!

Goth is sacrificed by the Master, and left burnt and charred on the brink of death. To make matters worse, the Master calls Goth a "poltroon", a word so unusual and archaic that I had to look it up (it means coward, derived from the 16th century Italian "poltro", or sluggard). The Master is nothing if not well-educated in archaic Earth linguistics...

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).

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 Deadly Assassin Part One

The one where the Doctor returns to Gallifrey as a criminal on the run...

Right from the start this episode is different to anything that's gone before. Opening with a sombre voiceover by Tom Baker/ the Doctor (making it sound like one of his 1978 Late Night Stories!), warning us that the Time Lords of Gallifrey are about to face the "most dangerous crisis in their long history", it features a slightly shoddy version of the famous Star Wars "opening crawl", a whole 14 months before it appeared on cinema screens in the UK (although scrolling text had already been used as a recap device as far back as the Universal Buck Rogers serials of 1939, which served as inspiration for George Lucas. It makes me wonder whether these serials inspired director David Maloney too).

The Doctor returning to his home planet of Gallifrey is pretty monumental stuff in the grand scheme of things. We've visited Gallifrey before, of course - first in The War Games, subsequently in Colony in Space and The Three Doctors - but we've never had a story actually set there, or centred on its people quite as much as this. The Deadly Assassin is a major serial in the Doctor Who canon, the first to delve into the Doctor's past life seriously. The Deadly Assassin is the classic series' equivalent of The Timeless Children.