26 – Twenty-Sixth Season – Sylvester McCoy

Battlefield

This is where Arthurian legend meets Doctor Who. The Doctor receives a distress signal in the TARDIS, though it is never clear (to me at least) who sent it. In any case, the TARDIS lands in England, and the Doctor and Ace are picked up by an archaeologist (Warmsly) who is working on a dig in the area by Lake Vortigern. The name is a clue as Vortigern was a 5th century British warlord, and in some tales named as the father of Arthur. And right in the same areas there is a UNIT convoy carrying a nuclear missile. And then knights appear in and start fighting, and the area starts to experience blackouts. The UNIT leader is Brigadier Winifred (the name is a variation on Guinevere) Bambera, who is trying to sort things out, but Geneva calls Lethbridge-Stewart and tells him that the Doctor is back, so the old Brigadier dons his old uniform one more time and takes charge. There seem to be two sides in the conflict among the knights, with a knight named Ancelyn (the name is distorted version of Lancelot) fighting against the other knights led by Mordred. And Mordred’s mother Morgaine is some kind of sorceress. And the Doctor is taken by both sides to be Merlin. And he might be, only it is in the Doctor’s future if that is the case since he has no memory of being Merlin in his past. Lake Vortigern is supposedly the lake where the Excalibur was thrown after Arthur’s death (?). It turns out they find Excalibur in a spaceship under the lake along with what appears to be the body of Arthur, but is not a body any longer it is dust. So somehow Morgaine, Mordred, and the others have actually crossed over to here from a another dimension sideways in time.

In addition to Nicholas Courtney returning as the Brigadier, Jean Marsh made her third appearance in Doctor Who as Morgaine, the sorceress. Sher appeared previously in The Daleks’ Master Plan as Sara Kingdom, which also marked the first appearance of Nicholas Courtney, though not as the Brigadier. He plays an intelligence agent named Brett Vyon, and is killed by Sara Kingdom! And in The Crusade Jean played Lady Joanna, sister of Richard I, who was offered in marriage to the brother of Saladin. And this would be Nicholas Courtney’s final appearance in Doctor Who, though the character of the Brigadier makes a brief cameo appearance as a Cyberman years later in Death in Heaven.

As for this story, you have to allow some leeway for them to create a way to bring King Arthur’s world in to our world via other dimensions, but it is a nice enough story and one in which magic is real. The Doctor brings up Clarke’s Law which says hat any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and the claims to Ace that the converse is also true: Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. So Ace drawing a chalk circle on the floor to stay inside does turn out to protect her from Morgaine. But there is a big glaring issue with this story, and it is with Bambera. She is supposed to be the actual Brigadier in charge of this convoy and leader of the UNIT soldiers, but as soon as *THE* Brigadier shows up she meekly walks away and starts a love story with Ancelyn. Even in 1989 someone should have said “Hey, wait a minute…”

Also, this season would continue Andrew Cartmel’s plan to make the Doctor more mysterious. That he might have been Merlin is part of it, but he is being shown as a master manipulator who has been at this longer than we previously suspected, and he has wide-ranging plans that we know little about.

Reviews

Ghost Light

I found this a bit confusing, though certainly very atmospheric. The Doctor and Ace land the TARDIS in an old mansion in 1883 and spooky things are going on. Ace scandalizes people with her relative “undress” as her ankles and shoulders are visible, so she is taken to change into a proper Victorian dress that covers everything. And the Doctor is being particularly domineering to Ace, which is a bit disturbing. They meet a man who seems to be an explorer type, then he is hustled away, and appears to be a captive, and is perhaps being tortured, or at least ill-treated. There is a butler named Nimrod who is odd-looking, and we later learn he is a Neanderthal, so clearly there has been some time travelling. The master of the house is Josiah Smith, and he is promoting Darwin’s theory of evolution, and he is visited by another man who is clearly an opponent of those views. And in the basement there is an odd-looking room which seems to contain some aliens who attack the people who go there.

Eventually we learn that an alien expedition lead by a glowing person called “Light” has come to Earth to catalogue all of the life-forms, and upon completion of this project Light goes to sleep. But one of the aliens gains control and places Light in hibernation. This alien becomes Josiah Smith and he is evolving into actually being Josiah Smith, a Victorian gentleman. This occurs in an insect-like way as his outer “shell” of skin and clothes is cast-off and becomes an empty, lifeless “husk” And Ace is very disturbed because she now recognizes this house as one she entered 100 years later, and sensing it was evil she burned it down. And she is pissed because the Doctor is now forcing her to confront her fear about this place. The Doctor manages to release Light, that creature is upset because the catalogue is already out-of-date because life on Earth keeps evolving. He would like all of this to stop, and his plan to do this is to destroy all life on Earth so that nothing can change ever again.

I found this story confusing and hard to follow, and I suspect that might be because it had too many threads to work out in only three episodes. It might have been a great 4-parter, or perhaps fewer plot elements in a 3-parter. But it felt like you needed to have a guide in hand to follow the plot.

Reviews

The Curse of Fenric

Reviews

Survival

Reviews

Review of Sylvester McCoy

Ace

The Brigadier

Season 26

 Save as PDF