The Deadly Assassin begins with a Star Wars-esque caption scroll providing a general background, segues into a Manchurian Candidate-esque political thriller, and then goes into a virtual reality world called the Matrix. It was first broadcast in 1976, meaning that it pre-dates both Star Wars and The Matrix.
Blah blah Time Lords blah blah boring MP soundalikes blah blah. The serial came under fire at the time for two reasons: 1) the third episode, which I'll get to later, and 2) the fact that it turned the Time Lords from the mystical all powerful race that they'd been ever since their introduction in 1969, into a bunch of doddering old men. This revision certainly goes a long way towards explaining why the Doctor left their society, but it left a lot of viewers upset that the great and powerful Time Lords had been reduced to a bigger version of Parliament.
The setup is excellent: the Doctor's coming back to Gallifrey because the President (not the Prime Minister! odd for a British show) of Gallifrey is resigning. En route he gets a vision of the assassination, and the astute viewer will note that in this vision, the Doctor is the one holding the gun. He gets to Gallifrey, sneaks past the guards for no adequately explained reason beyond the fact that the Doctor sneaks past the guards on every planet he ever goes to, and arrives in what appears to be the only large room on the planet. This is where the President will resign, but the Doctor notices a rifle protruding from the shadows up above. He goes to investigate, picks up the rifle, aims, fires, and the President drops dead, and the credits roll on Episode One. Brilliant! Did the Doctor just assassinate the President of Gallifrey? Tune in next week and find out!
Episode two: no. No he didn't. In fact, in a shot added to the reprise from the previous episode, we find that he was actually aiming at the real assassin. After being arrested and using a legal loophole to wriggle his way out of being vaporized on the spot, he enlists the security chief who arrested him to help prove his innocence, which he does by entering the Matrix. It's right about here that all the credibility of this serial begins to wash away.
Episode three is a big filler episode set in the Matrix, with the assassin hunting the Doctor. It ends with a "violent" fight and a freeze-frame of the Doctor's head being held underwater. This drew fire from some people who thought that children couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
Episode four contains a revelation that the New Who writers must by now be desperately wondering how to wriggle out of: Time Lords have a total of 13 lives. Also, the Master, who is the villain of the piece (this isn't a spoiler - he's called "Master" in the first episode and they find a trademark shrunken doll in episode two), holds a gun on the Doctor, says something along the lines of "No more delays, now you die," and stuns him. Stuns. Him. After saying he wouldn't delay the Doctor's execution any further. Then he returns to the aforementioned only big room on the planet where he raises a monolith that nobody noticed before, ever. He and the Doctor fight while the camera shakes a lot and styrofoam falls from on high, and then he falls down a big crack in the floor. End of story.
Rrrrgh.
Long story short, if he were still alive, Robert Holmes could probably sue the Wachowskis for $zillions, and the story goes all wonky about halfway through episode two and never really recovers.
I'm trying to figure out why this story is held in such high regard. It derailed the Time Lords forever, featured Tom Baker talking to himself because he didn't have a companion, and reintroduced the Master in his most absurd plot ever (I'm going to lure the one man who knows I exist to Gallifrey, frame him for a murder he can easily prove he didn't commit, and then while nobody's looking, steal stuff from the dead President, enter the grand chamber and blow up the planet).
Okay, the Master's mask is good by 1976 standards. Hell, if they could have just made the jaw move a bit more when he spoke, it might have even been good by 1977 (read: Star Wars) standards. It had tubes for pumping blood over the face and everything, but this wasn't used because of the poor lighting. It's the "the regeneration limit is capped at 12" story, the continuity fans' favorite story. I kinda like the sets on this verison of Gallifrey better than all the subsequent ones (espcially Arc of Infinity). And it's a story of political intrigue first broadcast in a time of political intrigue. We got a companion-less story, and the first story set mostly on the Doctor's home planet. And the acting, which is usually fairly good on Doctor Who, is better than average here. Is The Deadly Assassin well-remembered for the sum of these perks?
Bottom line: it's a good story, but it's no Talons of Weng-Chiang, which was broadcast only a few months later. I'm not entirely sure Deadly Assassin deserves to be on the top 10 list. Top 20, absolutely. Top 15, probably. Top 10 intact stories, maybe.
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