The War Games, pt 2

General Smythe is evil. Captain Ransom is a sycophant enabler. Lt. Carstairs is actually a decent human being. One wonders if on some level, The War Games isn't a subversive morality play on the evils of authority. Smythe can't just give evil orders; he has to hypnotize Ransom into following them. Which he does, and he's averaging twice an episode now. A uniformed officer giving evil orders probably couldn't actually make it to the air in 1969, certainly not a British officer, so Smythe's constant use of hypnosis must be the writers' attempts to get around that.

Okay, now the obvious one. Who fired that shot??? Was it the redcoat? The implication is that he wandered into the WWI zone from the Highland zone, so how did he end up at the execution station, if that was actually him? (Wild mass guessing: was it the Master, eager to let events play out so he could mess with the Doctor a lot on Earth in the coming four years?) It's actually a guy in a Civil War outfit - I can't remember if this is Private Moor or not, and he doesn't appear again for the rest of this episode, so we'll just have to see. For a show that lingers on details - constant hypnosis, everyone talking about mist and memory loss - the two seconds we get of the sniper are confusing, to say the least.

Next up: Jamie not immediately slitting the redcoat's throat is probably due to a combination of the manners he's picked up over the past two and a half years and the squeamishness of the BBC censors. So why doesn't the redcoat immediately attack Jamie, especially if he's from 1745 and the Highlanders haven't been routed yet? Given that the character dies in the next scene, he could have been wearing, say, a Civil War uniform. Or better yet, have him be an American from the Revolutionary War. That'd give him an excuse to shoot at the Brits. (No, wait, can't have an American hero on the very British Doctor Who unless they have boobs and are completely useless. Even Jack Harkness has to be from the future and pronounce "estrogen" wrong.) Admittedly, no-one from 1777 would actually be a good enough shot...

What, they didn't bother to search the Doctor's pockets before trying to execute him? If they had, they would have found a recorder that doubles magically as a telescope!

4:02: Look! Bessie shows up before the Third Doctor does. Clever foreshadowing indeed...

6:12: Troughton shouting at people looks an awful lot like Troughton maybe possibly forgetting and remembering his lines. Though if the anecdotes of Jon Pertwee from The Three Doctors are anything to go by, the man had a habit of making it up on the fly. Works here.

Smythe disappears in a black box that's roughly TARDIS shaped. That could have been a cliffhanger in and of itself, but now I'm quibbling. After ranting about the pace at which the illusion starts to crack in the last episode, I'll say that this time around things are much different. The entire episode is escape/capture/escape, with the "defection" of Carstairs and Jennifer being the only real plot point. Still: ROMANS!!! But even "Holy #$%&, ROMANS!!" becomes less impressive when we meet a redcoat and a Civil War sniper first.

...because, Jim, it's not "Holy #$%&, ROMANS!!!" It's "guys are going to try to kill us. They just happen to be Romans. Also, the mist sent us back in time...?"