The Time Warrior

"Your species has a primary and secondary reproductive system. It is an inefficient system, you should change it."
-Lynx, on discovering that women exist on Earth.

Okay. First off, as a kind of right-of-center cynic/quasi-libertarian, some people might expect me to frown on the Third Doctor. After all, that era's producer, Barry Letts, self-identified as a "trendy lefty liberal" on one of the DVD commentaries, and the Third Doctor's stories are far and away the most politically charged. That is to say, they're rockin' sci-fi stories about a small group of people who prevent alien invasions every week, with political undertones.

The fact that I just referred to the episodes as "rockin" should be a giveaway; I don't hate the Third. He's one of my favorites. Behind Troughton and Baker, of course, but still. And the pacing is sometimes godawful (see any serial from Season 7), but that's more or less par for the course for Doctor Who.

See, I like political stuff when it's done right. Er, correctly. (Michael Moore, take note; you could learn a thing or two.) And 99% of the time you can appreciate the story without really worrying about the politics.

For the record, the two most political Third Doctor serials were, in my opinion, Doctor Who and the Silurians, and The Green Death. (Invasion of the Dinosaurs doesn't count.) So if you want to avoid the politics, just don't watch those serials.

Okay, anyway, the political talking points of The Time Warrior are colonialism and feminism. The series puts an already advanced-for-our-time alien into the middle ages, and then sends the series' first female lead who can look out for herself more than 50% of the time along with the Doctor to sort it all out.

So the alien guy is providing the evil and improbably-named Irongron and his equally-improbably-named lieutenant Bloodaxe (you cannot make this stuff up) with single-shot muskets from circa the American Revolution. This causes trouble for the local lord, who is not evil, just infirm and incompetent. His lady-Macbeth-esque (but in a good way) wife sends Hal the Archer (played by Jeremy Bulloch - Star Wars fans know him as a certain iconic badass before his character's coolness quotient was raped to hell by Attack of the Clones... er, I digress) to shoot Irongron, because 14th century assassination plots didn't really need any thought. Fett, er, Hal runs into Sarah Jane Smith, a reporter from 1974/80 (I will not discuss the UNIT dating controversy here), and all hell breaks loose.

It's a Robert Holmes script. There are two things you must know about Robert Holmes. 1- he loved terrifying the crap out of small children. (He'd get more of a chance to do this when he became Script Editor the following year.) 2- he doesn't like killing off female characters. Thus, all of his scripts feature very few women (...okay, except The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but come on, eight of the ten women killed by the villain were killed before the serial even started) and the women who do show up are usually rather strong roles. Sarah Jane Smith is no exception, nor is "Lady Macbeth", nor, in her own way, is the jaded serving wench Sarah encounters in the fourth episode. Point is, Sarah Jane is probably one of television's stronger female characters of the 70s. And she's generally awesome for it.

Okay, summary/ramblings over. Down to brass tacks:

Effects: ugh. See, this is the problem with color. You could get away with incredibly low-quality crap in black-and-white. You can't in color. Not helping matters is director Alan Bromly's decision to signify the destruction of Irongron's castle with stock footage of a quarry explosion.

Politics: in case I didn't make it clear, this serial has a near Buffyesque style of feminism some 20 years before Joss Whedon became a household name. I'm not talking "women don't need men," fish and bicycles here, just some nice, very strong female characters. Gone is the era of the companion being strapped to the railroad tracks or threatened with the circular saw.

Stunts: mostly because the most impressive swordfight takes place whilst the Doctor is encased inside a suit of armor (i.e, it's easy to put in a double), the stunts get a B rating, which is about as high as they're ever going to get. There's also a nice, if strangely-timed, chandelier swing.

Anyway, bottom line is, it's a rockin' story sans most of the familiar 3rd Doctor elements - Jo's gone, UNIT's barely in the picture, the Master's a no-show... but it's still good.

Next week - my favorite Doctor finds an ark in space in... The Ark in Space