Sneak Preview: The Three Doctors

This isn't going to be a proper review, but I felt it worth inserting something for two reasons. First, the book covered in my next post, The Empire of Glass, explicitly follows on immediately from The Three Doctors; so this is the right place for the original Doctor's involvement. Second, this was the first time I ever saw William Hartnell playing the Doctor, back when I was eight years old.

I already knew Patrick Troughton's Doctor - he was my first - and understood the concept that would later come to be known as regeneration. But the man in the triangle on the monitor was another matter. He seemed impossibly ancient, impossibly far away, nothing like the Peter Cushing Doctor who I had pictured as the original thanks to the Dalek movies.

Of course, in one sense he was impossibly far away. Hartnell was very ill by the time this was made, more ill than he himself knew. When the production staff contacted him to see if he was up for taking part in the tenth anniversary story he enthusiastically agreed; but when they called back some time later, after work on the scripts was underway, and spoke to his wife, she had to explain that there was no way he could learn lines or stand up to the rigours of shooting. They spent some time rethinking during which they figured out what would be possible; a major rewrite followed.

The end result gives very little of the flavour of Hartnell's Doctor, beyond a certain grouchiness, and to anyone who knew what he had been like during his tenure it must have been a bittersweet experience to see him again after six years but so unwell. Few would hold this up as one of his finer performances in the role - he had to sit and read his lines, either from cards or from an autocue (a device invented by original associate producer Mervyn Pinfield) - but it was certainly a worthwhile exercise, regardless. It honoured one of the men who had made Doctor Who (and the Doctor himself) great, it demonstrated that the show was able to work as 'event TV', and for millions of children who weren't around from the beginning it opened a window on the past, extending the Doctor's history back into myth.

Of course, we were never going to see any of that myth. Old black and white episodes didn't get repeated, and anyway, nice as it was to see Troughton again, Jon Pertwee was now the Doctor. I didn't notice when Hartnell's death was announced a couple of years later, but it would have had little impact on me anyway.

The world turns, certainties change. Nine years later, when I had stopped watching new episodes, I did get the opportunity to see Hartnell in action. I remembered the feelings I had watching The Three Doctors and made sure I saw The Five Faces of Doctor Who season, starting with An Unearthly Child...

A Confused Chronology, part 13: Revisiting the Show's Past
One question that has to be asked is this. If the Time Lords of Pertwee's era can find his first incarnation, why, diegetically, do they not enact the denouement of The War Games almost four years early? And I think my own answer has to do with Gallifreyan Mean Time.

The only reason the Time Lords can find the first and second Doctors during the Omega incident is because of the summoning during The War Games. If they then go back and arrest the Doctor earlier in his timeline they are messing with cause and effect. Just gathering the three incarnations of the Doctor together breaks the First Law of Time, regardless of memory wipes, and that's a much simpler temporal twist. This is part of why Time Lords hate to meet each other out of order: it can mess things up good and proper. There is, effectively, a metatime clock on Gallifrey by which Time Lords measure their own chronology, and they have to keep in synch.

And besides, the Doctor has already been punished.

A harder question is, why do the second and third Doctors look up to the first Doctor as the one with the wisdom? Despite appearances they are older than he, after all, and have more experience. The reasons in our world are clear to see, of course: Hartnell being older makes his Doctor a natural for the sage role, and the fact that he's unable to do more than speak means he is pretty much limited to giving advice; so writing good advice for him to deliver is only respectful. Maybe, in-universe, it's a matter of personality combined with current events rather than a respect for wisdom.

Hartnell's Doctor is certainly more authoritarian than Troughton's, and while this would usually rub the anarchic second incarnation up the wrong way, the latter has already been at loggerheads with the third. Perhaps he sees his predecessor as the lesser of two bossy evils, recognising that - despite the insults - he is the only one of the three to keep his temper in check.

As for Pertwee's Doctor...well. He has been exiled to Earth, and is annoyed at the incarnation who got him put there. When another Doctor - unable to physically interact and so less of a threat to his ego - offers words of reason without putting him down, it gives him an opportunity to de-escalate a childish confrontation without losing face to his Troughtonic rival.

If I do a Pertwee marathon I'll be revisiting this one again, but for now it's time to return to the earliest aftermath of that story...

Next Time:
The Empire of Glass.