War Games 9

If An Unearthly Child was one episode of awesome followed by three episodes of dull caveman adventure, surely The War Games is nine episodes of crazy hijinks followed by one episode of exposition. Broadly speaking, the majority of Doctor Who tends to put its wacky hijinks in the middle episodes and wrap everything up nicely in the last one. But the story, really, is over here. The fatal SIDRAT flaw is only introduced at the beginning of this episode and frankly it diminishes the War Chief's character to make him dependent on the Doctor instead of sympathetic towards a fellow renegade Time Lord.

The Doctor confesses to Zoe and Jamie that he is a Time Lord (or rather, that the Time Lords are his people; the War Chief seemed rather convinced in the previous episode that the Doctor was a former Time Lord). Frankly, the Doctor doesn't start tossing his "Time Lord" title around until the Movie, and then the New Series. Surely, Pertwee, Baker et al don't justify their actions by saying "TARDIS, Time Lord, yes!" ("Fires of Pompeii.") If I wanted to be really pedantic, Season 23 is called Trial of a Time Lord. This could be the first time the series really starts hammering home the "Doctor is a Time Lord" meme. (Alternatively, Brayshaw could have fluffed his line.)

Big complaint: "What a stup..." no, that one's too obvious. How about that "throne" the War Lord and War Chief sit in? Or the rather obvious slo-mo shot of Troughton's tear-less trouser?

This is the end of Doctor Who as the 60s knew it. The following episode was the very last one ever in black and white, and it (and the two preceding it) ripped away a lot of the mystery surrounding the Doctor.

Surely no television show today could go 6 years without revealing that much about its lead character. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's a good thing or not.