The tenth season of Doctor Who marked a fateful change for Jon Pertwee's tenure as the Doctor. Katy Manning departed as companion Jo Grant after three seasons, and the actor playing the Master, Roger Delgado, was tragically killed in a car crash. Pertwee made the decision to leave at the end of the following season, his fifth in the role. Producer-showrunner Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks both also decided to move on, though they'd also stay on into the start of Season 12 to oversee the transition to a new team.
The first task for Season 11 was to find a new character and actress to follow in Katy Manning's footsteps, a formidable challenge given her popularity in the role: at that time, she was the second-longest-serving companion. Actress April Walker was cast in the new role but she and Pertwee had no chemistry and she was quickly dismissed (with full pay for the season). Letts was approaching panic mode until a fellow producer recommended him a young actress he'd recently cast in Z-Cars, leading to a fateful meeting between Letts, Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen. Pertwee was so taken with Sladen's performance that he stood behind her and gave up a thumbs-up to Letts.
History now records Sladen as the most popular Doctor Who companion of the Classic era, and maybe the most popular overall. She would have one of the longest runs in the show's history (three and a half seasons), return for an anniversary special, appear in a pilot for a spin-off show and then, in the Modern era, make multiple appearances alongside David Tennant's Tenth Doctor before getting her own TV show, which ran for five seasons and 53 episodes (featuring further guest appearances by Tennant and Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith), easily making her the most prolific companion of them all.
Her arrival on the show is a bit of a mixed bag. Like Jo before her, the writers came up with a great job and abilities for Sarah - she's an investigative journalist, good at making people feel at east and trusting of her and great at research, handy skills for a companion - but have a tendency to forget about that at times and she just runs around screaming at things and getting captured. Fortunately, she suffers from this far less than Jo and her skills prove useful multiple times through this first season. Her chemistry and repartee with Pertwee is also not as great as it would later be with Tom Baker, but they still spark off one another reasonably well.
The opening story, The Time Warrior, introduces Sarah and sees her join forces with the Doctor to investigate the mystery of scientists going missing from a facility under UNIT protection. Robert Holmes starts the story as a standard UNIT mystery but pivots hard (UNIT fails to appear after the first episode) to it becoming - amazingly - Pertwee's only period story. Aside from the start of Carnival of Monsters, where the Doctor mistakenly believes he's on a 1926 steam ship in the Indian Ocean, none of the Third Doctor's other stories take place in Earth's past. They're all in the near future, distant future or on an alien planet, making this a unique story in his era.
The bulk of the story takes place in the medieval period, with robber-baron Irongron (David Daker chewing the scenery with relish) joining forces with crashed Sontaran warrior Linx (Kevin Lindsay). In return for helping Linx fix his golfball spaceship, Irongron receives advanced weapons to help him conquer the neighbouring castle. The Doctor and Sarah decide to stop Linx and Irongron from changing the course of Earth's history. This is a splendid story, with Sladen immediately making a positive impression (at one point taking the Doctor prisoner because she thinks he's a villain, an unusual spin for a first companion story) and Irongron and Linx sparking so hard off each other as a villainous double act I'm surprised the set didn't catch fire. Holmes's script is witty enough to almost be considered a comedy, and the supporting cast is surprisingly accomplished, including the mind-boggling sight of Boba Fett and Dot Cotton working together (Jeremy Bulloch and June Brown, natch). It's a pacy and funny story which establishes the Sontarans, in their very first appearance, as a popular foe, mainly due to the success of the prosthetics, which are unusually excellent for Doctor Who in this era. Alongside Day of the Daleks, a very underrated story, and easily Season 11's high point.
Invasion of the Dinosaurs is, very easily, Doctor Who's most hopelessly ambitious story. Malcolm Hulke is gleefully writing cheques the BBC vfx department is not only unable to cash, but could never in a million years even start to think about cashing. He literally has things like a tyrannosaurus rex engaging the British Army in running battles on the streets of Central London, a pterodactyl attacking the Doctor in a parking garage and a confused stegosaurus materialising in a London Underground station. Obviously, none of this is remotely going to work or be convincing, and you have to respect the sheer insanity of them even trying, whilst goggling at some of the worst special effects in all of Doctor Who's history.
Still, when it's not trying to be Jurassic Park on a 1974 BBC budget, the story has its high points. The opening sequences, filmed at ridiculous o'clock in the morning to show London's streets utterly deserted (something that wouldn't work at all now), are very effective. London under alien attack and the Doctor having to defend it is a very rich idea for Doctor Who, following Season 2's The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Season 5's The Web of Fear and Season 6's The Invasion, and so it proves here. As a Malcolm Hulke joint, the serial has a deep bench of very well-drawn characters, with convincing motivations and competing agendas. It's a also a full-blown UNIT epic, with the Brigadier, Benton and especially Yates all having some excellent scenes. Sarah also gets some prime storylines, especially in the latter half when, to stave off six-part-itis, Hulke pivots the story into being what appears to be a post-apocalyptic space opera! There are several long stints without any dinosaur effects at all (ropey or otherwise), when the story becomes quite engrossing. Then, inevitably, they decide to have two dinosaurs fighting each other on a London high street and it all gets a bit silly. This story is crying out for a Day of the Daleks-style special edition to try to fix its glaring vfx limitations.
Death to the Daleks sees Terry Nation return and assemble a script out of what appears to be prefabricated flat-packs of his storytelling's greatest hits. So we have Daleks (natch), a crashed spaceship with a crew of marooned soldiers (almost directly lifted from Planet of the Daleks in the previous season), a mysterious alien city (mirrored from the Daleks' first appearance) and an exploited civilisation of locals who are divided into potential allies and enemies. This is all so rote you could fall asleep for the middle two episodes, wake up and be able to perfectly tell everyone what happened. However, there are some promising ideas here. The planet Exxilon drains the power of all ships that pass near it, and early scenes of the TARDIS losing power and the Doctor having to crank open the doors are entertaining (unless you start pondering how the power loss doesn't cause the TARDIS's internal dimensions to collapse and oh no I've gone cross-eyed). Even better are the newly-arrived Daleks finding their weapons don't work and having to nervously join forces with the humans for their own protection, since a Dalek without a working gun or defences is just a very slow target.
The idea of the Doctor and Daleks joining forces for a story is a bit under-developed though, with the two only briefly cooperating (and mostly offscreen!) before the Daleks are able to restore their dominance (through the comical medium of the Daleks re-arming themselves with machine guns and test-destroying a model TARDIS), whilst the Doctor undergoes an overlong game of The Crystal Maze to uncover the secrets of the alien city. There's some amusement here, but it's all a bit passionless. The human starship crew are severely under-developed compared to last season's Thals (and actor Julian Fox stares at the camera so much it's hilarious), and the Daleks are extremely inept. One explodes after being hit by an Exxilon native like three times using its bow as a club, and another self-destructs after some prisoners escape rather than trying to recapture them. There's some dumb fun to be had here, but not much more.
The Monster of Peladon is a sequel to Season 9's Curse of Peladon, but two episodes longer despite only having about half the plot. As its set fifty years after the events of Curse, most of that serial's cast of characters also fails to return, though fortunately we do get the return of Ysanne Churchman's outrageously bonkers vocal performance as Ambassador Alpha Centauri, who does a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the story watchable. The cast is game, and it's good to see the Ice Warriors back to being villains even if it's a bit of a shame that The Curse of Peladon's attempts to give them more depth has been ignored. The serial feels less like a sequel than a retread of the original, complete with debates over whether sightings of Aggedor are real or not and the wisdom of Britain Peladon joining the European Union Galactic Federation. There are some good elements to the story, but these are weighed down by its unwieldy length and pedestrian ultimate villain.
Planet of the Spiders is a strange story. It starts off with the Doctor straight-up killing an innocent guy in one of his experiments (however inadvertently), which he doesn't seem too concerned about, before being drawn into mysterious events at a monastery where Mike Yates is convalescing after the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Giving Yates a redemption arc here is a good idea, and he has some good material (as well as a very flash car). John Dearth, with a splendidly villainous voice, also has a good punt as the villainous Lupton, but he runs out of story material about two-and-a-half episodes in and then spends most of the rest of the time standing around like a lemon. The alien spiders are also a mixed bag vfx-wise, sometimes coming across as menacing and threatening (arachnophobes should beware this story) and sometimes looking like overgrown Halloween decorations. Still, Invasion of the Dinosaurs has reset the baseline for vfx quality this season, so in comparison these spiders look state-of-the-art.
The story also has some quite ridiculous padding, most notable in Episode 2's infamously insane/inane chase sequence, which takes up half the episode and sees the use of the Doctor's new hovercar, Bessie, a gyrocopter, a speedboat and a mini-hovercraft. It's all very silly but somewhat entertaining. More fatal are the sequences set on Metebelis III with the downtrodden human natives/slaves who are just itching for an inspiring speech by the Doctor before rebelling. Some of the worst "yokel" accents you'll ever hear in your life can be found here, along with some of the worst acting ever seen on all of Doctor Who. Atrocious stuff.
The story does recover towards the end, when it takes on more mythical overtones as the leader of the spiders, the Great One, fills the Doctor with overwhelming fear and he has to confront that fear to defeat her...at the cost of his own existence. Cue a touching regeneration scene as the Third Doctor bids farewell to Sarah and the Brigadier, and we get our first glimpse of Tom Baker as the soon-to-be legendary Fourth Doctor. Changes are coming...
Season 11 (***) of Doctor Who is, unfortunately, Pertwee's weakest. Only The Time Warrior emerges as a clear winner here, with the other four stories all having their moments but also a lot of weaknesses that prevents any of them really impressing. A clear winner of the season is Elisabeth Sladen, who impresses as Sarah Jane (even if her best is yet to come), whilst Pertwee gives a more restrained, modest and emotional performance as his end approaches. The result is a watchable, solid, but rarely outstanding season of Doctor Who.
The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD. A Blu-Ray release is planned but has no confirmed date at the moment.
- 11.1 - 11.4: The Time Warrior (****½)
- 11.5 - 11.10: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (***½)
- 11.11 - 11.14: Death to the Daleks (***)
- 11.15 - 11.20: The Monster of Peladon (**½)
- 11.21 - 11.21: Planet of the Spiders (***)
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