Who Review: The War Machines

Doc... tor... Who... is... re... quired... Bring... him... here.
-WOTAN

Swinging London, 1966. The Beatles are about to release Revolver, and Doctor Who is about to change forever. This is the last "intact*" Hartnell serial, and really the only time that the First Doctor gets to spend four episodes in the present day. So it's already going to jar a bit with everything that comes either before or after.

*actually, due to censor cuts, about two minutes of footage are missing. The DVD release has ingeniously covered this up by patching in different shots from elsewhere in the serial over the soundtrack.

The plot: The Doctor and Dodo land in 1966. The Doctor gets goosebumps when he looks at the Post Office Tower, and he learns that a computer named WOTAN lives at the top. WOTAN has the unique ability to figure out what "TARDIS" means (because Doctor Who exists in the Whoniverse. Q.v. Remembrance of the Daleks). It also has the ability to control people. It amasses an army of thought-slaves and starts building War Machines, which basically look like overly cumbersome Daleks. They go on a rampage until the Doctor stops one of them, reprograms it, and sends it to annihilate WOTAN.

Firstly, we have this bizarre notion that the Doctor is a respected scientific authority on Earth. This is really down to the writer, Ian Stuart Black, who takes it as read that the Doctor's a celebrity everywhere he goes. This doesn't sound out of place in the new series, or indeed at the latter end of the UNIT era, but in 1966 it's a bit strange.

The second bizarre notion is the one that a computer capable of taking over the entire world takes up an entire room. No wait, this is 1966, so that's perfectly natural. What's bizarre is that the concept of all the major computers on Earth being linked together seems to foreshadow the internet to a really creepy degree.

Thirdly, this serial has a very early case of companion hypnosis. Dodo is brainwashed by the machines and ordered to recruit the Doctor. Interestingly, later in the serial, the Doctor brainwashes one of the machines and orders it to kill WOTAN and the thought-slaves who helped brainwash Dodo. (Yeah, he has an ulterior motive, namely saving humanity, but still it seems like revenge is suddenly/still in the Doctor's playbook.)

It's a UNIT story without UNIT. The army gets called in and obliterated, leaving the Doctor to save the day. Again, this is the only time Hartnell does something like this.

I give The War Machines a score of 7/10. It has a fairly decent pace, and Hartnell seems perfectly comfortable doing a contemporary story. You can go on about this being the end of an era, but honestly, between Peter Butterworth's Troughtonesque performance as the Monk in The Time Meddler and the movie starring Peter Cushing as Dr. Who, Hartnell's been on borrowed time for an entire year by this point. The UNIT formula is laid down here, four years early, and frankly, the UNIT years themselves rarely top this.

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