David Maloney, “Doctor Who: The War Games” (Season 6, 1969)
One of the longest stories in the “Doctor Who” television series, totalling ten episodes, “The War Games” marks a significant transition in the show’s direction and evolving narrative. It saw off all the regular actors playing the Doctor and his crew, Jamie and Zoe, in the same adventure at its very end, with no actor to carry a character into the show’s next season. At the end of Episode 10, the Doctor is shown spinning off into a void, undergoing a change forced on him by the leaders of his people, the Time Lords, who are finally named in “The War Games” – previous stories only hinted at the Doctor’s mysterious alien origins – with no indication as to what he will look like in future adventures. In Episode 10 also, the Time Lords condemn the Doctor at the end of his trial (for violating Time Lord law forbidding active interference in the affairs of planets outside the home Time Lord planet) to naughty-corner exile on Earth in the 20th century; for good measure, they take away or seal up his memory of how to rev up the TARDIS and zoom off again. The Doctor is clearly not someone to be trusted to keep his hands out of the biscuit tin holding the keys.
Apart from all this, there’s no indication otherwise in the first eight episodes at least that this is going to be the last adventure for the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) in his second incarnation, or for Jamie (Frazer Hines) or Zoe (Wendy Padbury). The TARDIS dumps the three into No Man’s Land somewhere in northern France (near Ypres) in 1917: they are lucky to escape being blasted by bombs or machine-gun fire into somewhere even the TARDIS cannot reach, thanks to being picked up by one Lady Jennifer (Jane Sherwin) in her ambulance, who with her friend Carstairs (David Savile) promptly take them to British Army headquarters where senior officers there equally promptly label Jamie a deserter and his friends German spies.
From there, Doctor and Company are forced to waste precious time narrowly escaping execution and being shot at by not only British, French and German forces fighting on the northern French front but – after passing through a series of mystery cloud mists – being attacked also by Roman legions, US Civil War combatants. After many hair-raising incidents in apparently different periods of time despite never having to travel more than a few kilometres by van, the trio is finally able to deduce that they, and all the people they have met so far, are part of a “war games” simulation in which armies from different eras of Earth’s history have been kidnapped to another planet and forced to fight by unnamed aliens planning to conquer the universe with a super army made up of survivors of these games. In this, the aliens are being aided by a renegade Time Lord, the so-called War Chief (Edward Brayshaw), who uses his own time-travelling machines to kidnap and transport soldiers. The aliens also possess so-called “processing machines” which they use to brainwash and condition soldiers to obey orders and fight without question. Nevertheless, some soldiers across the various time zones in the simulation have been able to resist their conditioning and have formed resistance groups; however, these groups so far have been unable to unite and form a combined army capable of overthrowing the aliens and the War Chief who himself plans to use the aliens to advance his own megalomaniac agenda.
A student of 20th century world history will readily see that this scenario mirrors attempts by colonised people across the post-1945 world to overcome Western colonial imperialism by forming independence movements and guerrilla armies. Even so, these independence movements were not always united and disagreed on how to achieve their objectives. In many cases, bitter wars that could last years were fought against colonial occupiers, and captured fighters and those suspected of aiding them could be imprisoned in concentration camps and subjected to extreme forms of torture. At the same time, “The War Games” also includes fears about brainwashing and mind control, again reflecting Cold War stereotypes and rumours (later turning out to be true) that intelligence agencies like the CIA were conducting mind control experiments on innocent subjects using hallucinatory drugs, hypnosis, electroshock therapy, isolation and sensory deprivation.
Eventually the Doctor and his friends are able to bring together the various resistance groups through their leaders – one of whom includes the hilariously short-tempered Mexican Civil War guerrilla fighter Arturo (Michael Napier Brown) – and manage to foil the aliens’ plot with Carstairs co-ordinating groups of soldiers to shoot the aliens’ communication units hidden in the various time zones. The aliens then threaten to ramp up their oppression by using a neutron bomb and, pretending to switch sides, the Doctor brings the resistance leaders to the aliens’ headquarters. (Thus, a favourite weapon of imperialists – decapitating the resistance movement – is avoided.) In the meantime, the aliens and the War Chief have disagreements among themselves, culminating in the War Chief assassinating the alien Security Chief (James Bree) and the War Chief himself being cut down by the alien War Lord (Philip Madoc) after the latter has uncovered the power-hungry Time Lord’s true aims.
Once the whole shebang is over, or nearly over, the Doctor is faced with the problem of returning all the soldiers – and poor Lady Jennifer stuck mid-story in the US Civil War time zone as a nurse – to their proper time periods: a task far beyond the Doctor and his hard-working (and inaccurate) TARDIS, and he is forced to beg the Time Lords to bail him out. This of course means having to face up to his own grubby past. The Doctor tries to evade capture but after the Time Lords have returned everyone to the right time zones, they catch him and his friends and bring them all to the Time Lord planet (at this point, not named as Gallifrey). The War Lord is put on trial, with the Doctor as first witness, but the trial is almost derailed when the War Lord’s guards appear in the War Chief’s machine and go on a rampage to rescue the War Lord. The aliens are caught up in a force field and executed, and their home planet is imprisoned in a similar force field. After sorting out that problem, the Time Lords pack Jamie and Zoe back to their own time zones, erasing all memories of their travels with the Doctor, and put the Doctor on trial for stealing the TARDIS and breaking the Time Lord code of non-interference. The Doctor vehemently defends his actions by insisting that there are many alien species in the universe who, like the War Lord and his species, are out to conquer and colonise other planets and subjugate their peoples, and his actions have prevented or ended such conquests and enslavement. After deliberating on the Doctor’s arguments, the Time Lords somewhat reluctantly agree that evil should be resisted and fought, and the Doctor may well have a part to play in that – hence his exile to Earth.
In a plot as labyrinthine and padded as the War Games simulation it portrays, all main actors do very good work, and Troughton displays the full range of his character, in the Doctor’s seeming fawning and ingratiation with the aliens, his heroism and his concern for others which ironically brings about his own end. The characters of Jamie and Zoe in particular are shown to have come a long way since they first met the Doctor, with each of them displaying fine leadership qualities. Of the non-regular characters, the most outstanding are the icy War Lord, the sinister Security Chief and the War Chief: each of them is a distinctive villain in his own way, and Madoc practically owns the screen and turns the air temperature right down to minus zero every time he appears. True, the story may be longer than it needed to be, with repetitions of the capture-escape-recapture formula in settings limited by the show’s budget, but the direction keeps the pace brisk and constant. (The story had to replace two other stories of 4-episode and 6-episode lengths that fell through.) The cheap sets and special effects are offset by some excellent camera shots and direction which privilege the villains – they get plenty of screen time on their own and with one another – and give ample time for audiences to boo and hiss at them.
Of course, once again, with a story as complex as this one, and run on the proverbial shoestring budget, there’s much that happens off-screen and viewers do need to use their imaginations to tie up apparent loose ends. This adventure is best seen in its entirety as a full-length movie, not episode by episode each week over nearly three months as would have been the tiresome practice for audiences back in the 1960s with no videorecorders or streaming (which would account for the low viewing numbers in Britain at the time), and at least two or three viewings might be necessary to appreciate the many messages about the ethics of colonisation, enslavement, resistance and intervention in situations of oppression.
Truly this is an adventure that sees off Troughton’s Doctor and company Jamie and Zoe in fine style, even if sadly, and sets up a new narrative for the Doctor in his third incarnation as an exile on Earth.