War Games retrospective

One thing I absolutely want to touch on is The War Games, which I've probably gotten more material out of than should be legal (but then again it's a freakin 4-hour long story). The last episode of that serial changed everything blah blah blah, and everyone thinks that that's the important one. To the series, yes it is, just like, say, "Innocence" is a very important episode for Buffy. But take "Hush," for example, a Buffy episode that's very good and very famous, and what happened in the overall story arc? Buffy and Riley found out each other were demon-fighters. Given that Riley is, well, not the most well-remembered of Buffy's love interests, I think it's safe to say that history has judged the episode awesome due to its own individual merit ("Nobody can talk!") rather than what it contributed to the overall story.

Likewise, The War Games 1-9 is a pretty awesome run of episodes on their own merit. The slow reveal of information (and yes, I have my gripes about the pacing) means that this serial actually evolves over the three months it was on the air. All too often the cliffhangers are solved within five seconds of the next episode and then don't contribute significantly to the plot. The best serials tend to get around this. Even the weaker cliffhangers in The War Games aren't completely worthless: yes, they run away from the Romans easily enough, but the fact that there are Romans there is just as much of a cliffhanger as the threat that they pose.

It's not The Caves of Androzani, of course; in some ways it's the exact opposite of Caves. The Fifth Doctor dies running away from a bloodbath that he can't stop, whereas the Second Doctor dies because he's willing to stay behind and clean up a problem he already solved. In fact, there are some interesting ties between The War Games and The Talons of Weng-Chiang; human pawns of alien monsters kill lots of innocents, and one of the villains is a time-traveller.

Ultimately I think the problem with The War Games is that it's at least 4 episodes too long. While one episode of running around after the Doctor and the War Chief recognize each other might be acceptable just to keep the tension up, the fact of the matter is that they pretty much dance around each other for almost half the serial before an actual conversation takes place.

The best parts of The Time Meddler were the ones where Hartnell and Butterworth squared off directly. My biggest question is why Troughton and Brayshaw got so few scenes together, considering this.