War Games 6

So, it was a filler episode, but a pretty cool filler episode nonetheless.

Best part: Doctor in a military coat. Never happens.

Worst part: Well, it's the Von Wiech scene where he hypnotizes Moor. You can decide which is worse; when he gets Moor to give him the monocle when Moor should know better, or immediately afterward, when the zoom-in on his face exposes the scar make-up.

I better get it out of the way: the scientist mentions the Time Lords. Okay, so there are these guys running around with space-time travel machines, and the War Chief is one of them, and the Doctor's remarkably good at operating their machinery. Well, it could be that all time-travel machines have similar enough controls that the Doctor can work the magnets out; the War Chief has a Mac and the TARDIS is a PC.

Since this was a filler episode, I really don't have a lot to say about it. The fights were poorly done, the one-upmanship between the War and Security Chiefs is starting to get a bit stale, and the Doctor spends most of this episode doing what he does best: running down corridors. That's about it. I'm going to take this opportunity to yak at length about regeneration, because we all know this serial ends with one.

First of all, let's look at what caused the Doctors to regenerate and the actual regenerations themselves.

The Tenth Planet: the Doctor's body pretty much wears out. He stumbles back to the TARDIS, fiddles with the controls, collapses, and turns into somebody else.

The War Games: the Time Lords change the Doctor's appearance and send him gurning into a black hole of sorts, but not quite in that order.

Planet of the Spiders: the Doctor collapses from radiation poisoning. Another Time Lord shows up to give his regeneration a start. This serial is pretty much "Buddhism 101 with Spiders." What we get after this regeneration is the most eccentric Doctor of the lot.

Logopolis and Castrovalva: the Doctor falls off a tower. His future self helps him regenerate, and most of the Castrovalva, episode 1, sees the Doctor alternating between "catatonic" and "insane."

The Caves of Androzani: the Doctor regenerates, unaided and inside the TARDIS, for only the second time. He states that he "might regenerate," implying that it might not happen. After a sequence inspired by "A Day in the Life," we end up with the most unstable Doctor of the lot.

Time and the Rani: the TARDIS gets shot down (wait what?) and the Doctor apparently dies in the crash and regenerates (wait WHAT?)

The Movie: The Doctor gets shot, killed, stays dead for several hours, and then emerges from a tomb of sorts wrapped in a shroud and looking like "...& I" in a wig. Only one of these things is not a hideous departure from established canon.

"The Parting of the Ways": Doctor absorbs the energy from the Time Vortex and regenerates, standing up, inside the TARDIS.

"The Stolen Earth": the Doctor gets shot by a Dalek gun and regenerates, standing up, inside the TARDIS.

The End of Time: the Doctor absorbs a fatal dose of radiation, does a huge farewell tour, and regenerates, standing up, inside the TARDIS.

Note that the 5th regeneration (Davison to C. Baker) is the first one where nobody helps the Doctor regenerate (Hartnell helped himself when he did whatever he did with the TARDIS). The 6th regeneration is the first time he does it unaided and unconscious. In the 7th regeneration, he's freaking dead.

Regeneration used to be treated as an important thing, not "whoops, fell down the stairs this morning, now I've got a new face because the old actor's got to leave." The Doctor's connection to the TARDIS and the other Time Lords used to be important, not "they're all dead, and I'm actually going to take steps to keep them that way whenever given the chance."

The point I'm trying to get to is that the Doctor used to have to earn his regenerations. I'm not saying Tennant wasn't all noble and good in his last episode, but the show's kind of written itself into a corner by not having a moral authority greater than the Doctor, and I kind of hope that Moffat and whoever gets to write 12 take him to darker places because of this.

The other point I'm trying to get to by way of the previous point is that in Troughton's final serial, he really, really has to be the good guy. He's got to be the hero all the time, but in this show he actually has to be the martyr. The situation's going to have to get so grim that he has no other choice but to call in the Time Lords, and they will exact a strict price for their services.

(Of course, that's what should happen. What we'll get, as you'll see, is Time Lords and regeneration tacked on as an ending to what could have been a great, well-paced 6-part story.)