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.

The Hand of Fear Part Four

The one where the Doctor asks Sarah to leave...

After three very middling episodes, this fourth and final part takes a real nosedive, which is a shame considering its greater significance in the canon. Right from the outset there's some very dodgy effects on display, including the thankfully brief CSO lift down to the thermal caves, and the really cheap-looking Kastrian sets by Christine Ruscoe. Nothing looks real or solid, the finish on certain sections is ham-fisted and careless, and it all looks very unconvincing. And to top it all, Elisabeth Sladen puts in an eye-wateringly OTT performance, screaming and moaning her way through some pretty ropey writing.

The Doctor and Sarah manage to avoid a series of cheap-looking booby traps to get Eldrad to the regeneration chamber. But once activated, it appears as though Eldrad has been pulverised, yet there's one more trick up writer Bob Baker and Dave Martin's sleeves: Eldrad lives again, and is regenerated into the form of a big hulking male Kastrian. And this version has none of the elegance, beauty or eloquence of the female one. No, the male Eldrad is played by Stephen Thorne, so naturally all hope of subtlety and nuance goes out the window.

The Hand of Fear Part Three

The one where the hand of fear becomes a woman of substance...

All this mention of the alien hand regenerating just makes you think about Time Lords, and wonder whether there's something Gallifreyan afoot (or ahand!). Of course, there isn't, but back in 1976, when viewers didn't know what to expect next, maybe some were expecting Eldrad to be a Time Lord, or even the Master in disguise!

As if he's read my review of episode 2, Watson decides to call in the military to take Eldrad out, and with just one emergency phone call, manages to convince Air Command to launch a nuclear strike on the complex. So that's the director of a nuclear power plant calling up the British Armed Forces and ordering a nuclear assault on a nuclear reactor with 10 minutes notice. I had no idea the people in charge of our power stations had such influence!

The Hand of Fear Part Two

The one where a nuclear power plant is evacuated twice in one day...

For once, a central control room in Doctor Who is a hive of activity, a hubbub of noise, mild panic and ferocious industriousness. The moment we see Nunton's control centre, it is awash with chatter, alarms and movement, which makes a change from all those sparsely furnished and staffed control rooms we usually have (my mind immediately goes to Space Control in The Ambassadors of Death, or the Space Defence Station in The Android Invasion). In particular I like the gentleman at the front right of shot who frantically taps away at his typewriter like Liberace, then flies from the room with his haphazardly prepared report!

Miss Jackson is rather striking too, a woman who seems unflappable in a crisis and manages to look stunning at all times, played by model and dancer Frances Pidgeon (also director Lennie Mayne's wife). She seems very loyal to her boss Professor Watson, refusing to leave him alone when everybody else has evacuated, but in the end rather haughtily obeying his order to get out. Brave, loyal, beautiful, and with an attitude to boot - she'd have made an ideal Romana!

The Hand of Fear Part One

The one where the TARDIS lands in an exploding quarry...

I must admit I'm totally baffled by the opening scene of this episode. It's a busy opening sequence with lots of information being imparted, but in booming voices that I find quite difficult to understand. It seems to be a man dressed in a beige duvet and hood wandering around pushing not quite enough buttons for the task at hand, talking to a disembodied voice which I also find tricky to make out. The scene seems urgent, and I just about get the gist that someone or something has escaped in a spaceship, which they then blow up, but the detail is lost on me.

Almost five minutes into the episode, the TARDIS materialises in a quarry (a real one this time!) and out steps Sarah Jane Smith in the worst outfit any companion has ever worn, ever! She looks utterly ridiculous in this Andy Pandy outfit, and I can't for the life of me understand what either the character or the actress were thinking agreeing to wearing it on public television. It's truly appalling, although Elisabeth Sladen must have liked it enough to wear it again, in 1993's Dimensions in Time (with added beret). She even made her poor daughter Sadie wear a version of it in the same year's documentary Thirty Years in the TARDIS!