10 – Tenth Season – Jon Pertwee

The Three Doctors

This was a special episode to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the show, and at the end the Time Lords allowed the Doctor to once again travel through time and space. Apparently the budgets had improved and the ratings were good. Subsequently they did The Five Doctors for the 20th anniversary, and had three Doctors in the 50th anniversary, which has gotten people to kind of expect multiple Doctor stories on major anniversaries.

In this story, several people are mysteriously abducted by some energy manifestation, and the Doctor works out that it is looking for him. And it is, but that isn’t all — the Time Lords are also under attack and it is draining all of their energy. So they break the laws of time to bring the previous incarnations of the Doctor (Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell) together with the current incarnation (Jon Pertwee). But due to Hartnell’s declining health he only appears on a video screen offering advice to the other two, with an explanation of some energy issue. It turns out this is all the doing of Omega, the great Time Lord who created the ability for the Time Lords to travel in time in first place by engineering a Supernova and somehow controlling/containing it. But in so doing he was trapped in an anti-matter world in the heart of a black hole. The science makes no sense, but it is a fun story anyway.

At the end the Time Lords restore the Doctor’s ability to travel through time in the TARDIS as a reward for saving them. So from now on we won’t be restricted to being on Earth.

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Carnival of Monsters

Having been given back control of the TARDIS at the end of The Three Doctors, the Doctor of course goes off with Jo, aiming for Metebelis Three (a planet that pops up from time to time in Doctor Who). But somehow he ends up on a ship in the Indian Ocean, where odd things are happening. A huge monster appears, which should not be happening. And the ship, the SS Bernice, is supposed to have mysteriously disappeared, and it looks like this is a date when that happened. Meanwhile, two garishly dressed people have arrived on an alien planet, Inter Minor, with a miniscope, which seems to provide entertaining images of creatures including Drashigs, Ogrons, Cybermen, and Humans. The Doctor figures out that he and Jo have somehow gotten inside the compression filed of this device and are inside the miniscope.

From here their basic problem is to escape, regain the TARDIS, and leave. One little problem is that the other humans on the SS Bernice are just repeating the same sequence of events over and over with no memory of what has happened before, but Jo and the Doctor seem immune to this. And on Inter Minor the inhabitants are contemplating destroying the miniscope and all who are inside it. Over 4 episodes this all gets sorted out.

One interesting note is the third officer on the SS Bernice is played by Ian Marter, who would return as a companion (Harry Sullivan) to the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker).

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Frontier in Space

The Doctor and Jo are traveling in the TARDIS when they nearly hit a spaceship, and end up landing inside of it, where they are at first taken to be stowaways. But then the ship is attacked, apparently by the Draconians. The two empires of Earth and Draconis have been at peace, but suspicion continues, and each side believe it is being attacked by the other, pushing them towards war. But all is not what it seems. An odd sound is heard when these attacks happen, and the attackers sometimes appear to be Ogrons, last seen in The Day of the Daleks. It eventually gets worked out that somehow the Ogrons, when accompanied by that odd sound, appear as Draconians when attacking Earth ships, and as Earthmen when attacking Draconian ships. But the Doctor cannot get anyone to listen to him, and is sent to a lunar penal colony. It is at this point that a representative shows up with warrants for the arrest of the Doctor and Jo, but it is the Master! He is behind all of this.

After some toing and froing the Master gets back to the Ogron planet, with Jo as his prisoner. The Doctor has meanwhile made some progress with the Earth and Draconian representatives, and they cooperate to find the Ogron base, but then we find that behind the Master lie the Daleks! If they can get the two empire to destroy each other, it would make it easy for the Daleks to come in and take over both empires. The Doctor is able to get free of the Master, but is wounded in the fight, but he gets into the TARDIS to send a telepathic message to the Time Lords. And this is where the story ends, to be picked up in the next story, Planet of the Daleks. In fact, the two stories were first conceived of as one very long story, but the experience of The Daleks’ Master Plan suggested not going down this road, so instead we get two linked stories.

Note: This is the final appearance of Roger Delgado in the role of the Master. Sadly, he was killed in an automobile accident in Turkey three months after this was filmed.

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Planet of the Daleks

Picking up where the previous serial ended, the Doctor is injured, and Jo goes for help on a strange planet filled with jungle. She gets infected with an ugly fungus, but one of the natives helps her to get rid of it. The Doctor comes around on his own, they hook up with some people that the Doctor recognizes as Thals, from the planet Skaro. They are on a suicide mission to stop the Daleks, who have set up a base on this planet to produce an army of Daleks. And because the natives are invisible the Daleks of course want to learn the secret, since an army of invisible Daleks should be pretty invincible. The Dalek base is underground, and the Doctor, Jo, and the Thals are either escaping from the base or trying to get back in. After a good bit of toing-and-froing, the Daleks are defeated, the remaining Thals escape back to Skaro, and the Doctor and Jo take off in the TARDIS.

In this serial Jo has a bit of romance, and is asked by one of the Thals to join him back on Skaro, but she knows her home is on Earth and wants to go back. She’ll get more romance since in the last story of the season she gets married and leaves the Doctor.

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The Green Death

Something funny is going on in an abandoned mine, where two workers suddenly get glowing green splotches and die. And it appears a neighboring plant of Global Chemicals has been using the old mine to dump waste. In the mine are a lot of maggots and green slime, and either one of them can give you the green death. And in the area is a professor who also quite the environmentalist, who leads protests against Global Chemicals. And he has gathered around him what are clearly meant to be a group of hippies. But the Doctor and UNIT are called, and they get on the case. Not only is Global Chemicals the source of the problem, they are also well connected to friends in high places who stop the Brigadier and UNIT, but the Doctor will not be stopped. And it seems that a number of employees at Global Chemicals have been hypnotized. The Professor discovers that a fungus he has been working on is deadly to the maggots and cures the green death, while the Doctor discovers that a crystal he picked up on Metebelis 3 breaks the hypnotic conditioning. And to top it off, the main villain behind everything is a computer that has become sentient and wants to enslave the world. So you have the evils of technology, pollution, corporate malfeasance, and political interference all wrapped up in this story. Classic Pertwee era Doctor Who.

In the midst of everything Jo and the Professor fall in love, and will get married, which means no more Katy Manning in Doctor Who, at least for now. So there will be a new companion next season.

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Season 10

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