The Doctor has been finally tracked down and captured by his own people, the Time Lords. Found guilty of interfering in the affairs of other planets, he has been exiled to the planet Earth in the late 20th Century, his TARDIS disabled and even his knowledge of space/time travel blocked. He's also forced to regenerate. Arriving on Earth, the new Doctor joins forces with his old ally, Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT), just in time to help thwart a series of attacks on the planet by aliens, obstinate scientists and even its ancient, original inhabitants.
If you're going to start watching Classic Doctor Who, probably the optimal entry point is the start of Season 7. Originally airing in 1970, this was the first season of the show to be made in full colour and to adopt a restrained episode count of 25-26 half-hour instalments. It's also the first season not to have any missing/destroyed episodes (earlier seasons have gaps that have been bridged by animated reconstructions or audio tracks). It's also, uniquely in Classic Who's 26-year run, the only time we get a new Doctor and a new companion at the same time. The season also acts as a reboot of the premise, with the Doctor now exiled on Earth and working with UNIT to face down a series of hostile threats as he tries to either escape or earn his freedom by doing good deeds for the Time Lords. Finally, it's very good, and sometimes even said to be the single finest season of Doctor Who, although I think that's a bit more of a stretch.
The decision was also made to make the show more action-packed, taking inspiration from James Bond and the much higher-budgeted, glossy shows made by ITC (The Prisoner, The Saint, UFO, Thunderbirds and so forth). The Third Doctor is as likely to disarm an enemy (non-lethally!) by using Venusian Karate then to talk them down, and his favoured way of resolving a situation is to build a fancy machine and "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow." Unable to use the TARDIS, the Doctor instead gets around with a car, Bessie, a vintage roadster he updates with a huge number of space age gadgets. The scripts also have a little more humour, and take advantage of their larger casts with numerous recurring UNIT characters on hand, as well as the Doctor and his various companions in this era. Compared to the six seasons that came before, it was dynamic, fast-moving and pacy.
Compared to 2025, the pacing feels considerably less dynamic. Season 7 consists of just four stories rather than the normal five, meaning that the stories had to be significantly longer than was normal. Only the opening serial, Spearhead from Space, is the standard four episodes in length (equal to two modern episodes). The other three all clock in at seven episodes apiece, which is on the longer side even for Classic Who (only three stories in the whole run of the series are longer, all earlier on). Subsequent seasons have more four-parters and their longest stories never rise above six episodes, with even those being phased out before the end of the 1970s.
Spearhead from Space gets things off to a strong start. We meet the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, suffering from post-regenerative disorder/stress. It's fortunate that he is quickly found by UNIT and the Brigadier (played splendidly, as always, by Nicholas Courtney). UNIT's own new scientific advisor, Liz Shaw (Caroline John), is quickly sidelined by the Doctor's superior knowledge, but holds her own intellectually and has a sardonic sense of humour that is quite entertaining. The serial introduces the recurring menace of the Nestene Consciousness, a powerful alien intelligence that can animate plastic to serve its needs, resulting in the onslaught of murderous shop dummies, the Autons. There's a reason why Russell T. Davies borrowed heavily from this story when he relaunched Doctor Who in 2005 with the episode Rose (even down to re-staging the shots of shop dummies coming to life and bursting through windows). This story also looks superb, as a result of being the only Classic story to be entirely shot on film and hence to get a full, native HD upgrade. The guest stars are pretty good and the four-episode run keeps things ticking over nicely.
The Silurians - more technically Doctor Who and the Silurians due to a titling error - also introduces a new, recurring element in the mythology with the titular Silurians, intelligent, humanoid dinosaurs who went into suspended animation when the Moon was captured into Earth's orbit, causing global disturbances. Awoken tens of millions of years later, the Silurians are understandably annoyed to find the planet overrun by apes, but are divided on how to handle the problem, with one leader willing to try diplomacy, another violence and another caught between. The Doctor and UNIT are drawn into the crisis when the Silurians tap a nearby power plant to aid in their revivification.
Although its seven-episode, three-hour runtime feels a little steep, it actually makes some interesting shifts in the story to avoid feeling too dull. Early episodes deal with a manhunt for a single Silurian after it is cut off from its fellows, the middle episodes revolve around the Doctor trying to broker a deal, and the conclusion revolves around a genetically-engineered plague the militant Silurians unleash upon humanity. The story has a strong moral core as the Silurians are shown to be a complex society of individuals who do not always agree with one another, and the Doctor has to try to talk UNIT down from blowing up the Silurian base. Some bad production values aside (a dinosaur stalking the cave network is definitely writing cheques the BBC's vfx department can't even hope to cash at this point), this is a complex and rich story with a lot of thorny questions and no easy answers. It is let down a little bit by the plague being resolved off-screen with some blink-and-you-miss-it dialogue.
The Ambassadors of Death sees a manned mission to Mars returning to Earth and almost immediately being hijacked by unknown forces for their own ends. The Doctor and UNIT find themselves in a battle of jurisdictions and wills with the British government and also the unknown assailants, all the while trying to negotiate a possible alien first contact situation. To be honest the main story is a bit bobbins and the serial has the worst pacing of the season, but this is made up for by the show's first employment of Havoc, a specialist stunt team. Previously, stunts on the show were handled by the show's own personnel, who were not well-versed in this area. This story goes berserk with frankly unnecessary but hugely entertaining fight sequences, hijacks, explosions and a use of helicopters that boards on the gratuitous. This story not only went overbudget but vapourised it, possibly explaining why the subsequent serial is so claustrophobic and doubles up most of the cast to save money. Everyone looks like they are having a lot of fun, so it's hard to criticise it too much for the number of times UNIT is tactically defeated by a bunch of East End thugs for hire, or why the aliens put up with a ludicrous amount of manipulation from small-minded criminals.
Inferno has sometimes been cited as the best story of the Pertwee era, and one of the best serials in Doctor Who's history. I wouldn't go quite that far, but it's the highlight of the season. The Doctor is drafted in to help assess a huge drilling project that is tunnelling deep into the Earth's crust to generate cheap energy. Intriguingly, the Doctor has another and more personal agenda, which is to use the energy that's being released to help repair the TARDIS. The initial episodes set up possible sabotage at the project, and the complex political intrigue between the project's leader, drilling advisor, the government oversight official and UNIT, who are handling security. Just as that is threatening to get boring (pun unintended), the Doctor is blasted into a parallel universe where Britain is a fascist state. Scenes of the Brigadier, now the evil Brigade Leader (without his moustache, in an amusing inversion of Star Trek's approach), and military commander Liz Shaw subjecting the Doctor to Nineteen Eighty-Four style interrogation, remain fairly disturbing. This is also one of Pertwee's finest hours, as the Doctor has to remember his compassion for saving lives even extends to these darker versions of his friends. Nicholas Courtney in particular gives an absolutely chilling performance as the Brigade Leader, and Caroline John is outstanding as both versions of Liz in what turns out to be her swansong from the show. The ending is one of Doctor Who's most powerfully bleak moments, and is terrifically-written and acted.
Season 7 of Doctor Who comes with all the caveats of watching a season of television produced by the BBC on a very tight budget in 1970: production values rarely rise above adequate (overuse of cool-looking helicopters aside), some of the guest stars are sublime and some others are hamming it up like panto dames, effects shots are mostly risible, and the shooting on video results in some iffy lighting set-ups. But, overlooking the production weaknesses, the ideas are often very strong, the scripts are often quite smart and the performances by the regulars are excellent. Pertwee's Third Doctor is a little pompous and arrogant, but he is also moral, a firm believer in science and diplomacy, and if you're up against an alien invader, there's nobody else you'd rather have at your side.
The seventh season of Doctor Who (****½) 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 and Blu-Ray.
- 7.1 - 7.4: Spearhead from Space (****½)
- 7.5 - 7.11: The Silurians (****½)
- 7.12 - 7.18: Ambassadors of Death (***½)
- 7.19 - 7.25: Inferno (*****)
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