Four Episodes
Aired between 30th Oct 1976 and 20th Nov 1976
Written by Robert Holmes
Produced by Phillip Hinchcliffe
Directed by David Maloney
Synopsis
On his way back to Gallifrey, the Doctor has a premonition about the Time Lord President being assassinated by his own hand from a balcony with a rifle.
He is naturally concerned about this and does all he can to speed the TARDIS onwards to his home planet.
As it happens, the President of the High Council of Time Lords is at that very moment preparing for his final ceremony, to step down from his role and elect a successor.
The Doctor's TARDIS lands in the underground security area of the citadel (the city where Gallifrey's Time Lords reside). It's not long before it's noticed by security. Commander Hildred calls it in, noting it especially unusual as the TARDIS is a Type 40, a rather obsolete model. His boss, the Castellan, orders the TARDIS to be breached and the inhabitant arrested.
The Doctor sees the guards going about unlocking his door and writes a quick note for them, managing to sneak past as they enter the TARDIS.
The guards search for the Doctor and one of them finally finds him, but is shot dead by someone skulking in the shadows as he is about to apprehend the Doctor. The figure runs off before the Doctor can discover who it is.
The Doctor capitalises on the dead body by leading the remaining guards on a false trail, buying himself time to sneak back to the TARDIS and plan his next move.
Meanwhile, Castellan Spandrell reads the Doctor's note, warning them of an upcoming assassination, and orders Hildred to transduce the TARDIS to the capitol for further analysis, unaware that he's giving the Doctor a free ride.
From a secret hiding place, two shadowed figures watch on security monitors with interest...
The resignation ceremony begins to get underway, with the High Council donning their official robes of office and gathering in the Panopticon, an amphitheatre where the great announcement will be made.
Local media is being coordinated by a weedy looking guy called Runcible, who clearly loves the pomp and pagentry and is happy to speculate live on air about the High Council society.
During all the preparations, the Doctor sneaks out of the TARDIS and manages to steal a couple of high council robes.
He gets into the Panopticon, where he meets Runcible who turns out to be his old class mate at the Time Lord Academy. Runcible is a bit dismissive of the Doctor, seeing him as a bit of a reprobate, but passes the time civilly whilst he waits on his camera operator giving him a signal from the gallery above. The Doctor looks towards the gallery to see a staser rifle in place on the railings (staser rifles kill Time Lord's outright). The Doctor rushes towards the stairs, alerting Chancellery guards who give chase.
The President puts on the final bit of his gown and remarks that the presidential pardon list, a tradition to be read out at the end of a President's reign, will certainly shock some of the other Time Lords. The doors open and he walks towards the Panopticon.
The Doctor manages to loose the guards and reaches the balcony. The camera is left unmanned, and so is the staser rifle. As the president descends the stairs...
...the Doctor suddenly picks up the rifle, aims and shoots.
The President falls to the floor, dead and the Doctor is quickly arrested and imprisoned.
The High Council call an emergency meeting, as the Presidents death is made all the more serious seeing as he was killed before he could name a rightful successor. The protocol dictates that there must be an election as soon as possible, but Chancellor Goth (who was tipped as the favourite for succeeding the former President) calls for the Doctor to be destroyed as soon as possible to stop the presidential pardon from making him exempt from execution.
The Doctor is put on trial with Chancellor Goth overseeing the prosecution. They don't take long to determine the Doctor's guilty and go to execute him when he invokes article 17, claiming his right to stand as a candidate for the Presidency.
Cardinal Borusa accepts the claim and the High Council give the Doctor 48hrs to prove his innocence otherwise he will be executed.
A short time later, the two shadowed figures meet again. The first informs his colleague, a skeletal husk type figure, about the Doctor's claim to candidacy. The husk seems unsurprised, and hints that he knows the Doctor well.
With time ticking away, the Doctor goes with Castellan Spandrell, Hilred and Runcible to the Panopticon.
There, he tries to convince them of his innocence by demonstrating that he saw the rifle on the balcony, went up to it and saw the assassin in the room below - one of the High Council. He aimed the rifle and fired at them, but the shot went wide. It seems that the sights of the rifle were intentionally put out of line.
Sure enough, the Doctor's original blast mark is there on the wall. The Doctor speculates that the Video Camera belonging to Runcible's crew would have caught a picture of the assassin. Runcible goes to look at the camera and finds his cameraman, shrunk down and hid inside it.
Runcible is distraught, having never seen anything like it, but the Doctor has.
He explains it's a hallmark of the Tissue Compression Eliminator, a tool the Master is known to employ.
They send Runcible off to get the backup video tapes but he returns a short time later with a knife in his back.
To check the Doctor's story, Castellan Spandrell takes them to see Coordinator Engin who manages the APC Net, also known as the Matrix.
It is a vast collection of Time Lord minds that act as a huge database of knowledge and can even predict the future. All Time Lords are linked to the Matrix by data extracts taken from them at the time of death. The Castellan asks Engin to check for records on the Master, but comes up empty handed. The Doctor says that the Master simply altered the records, but Engin is adamant that the Matrix cannot be wrong and there will always be records.
The Doctor speculates that Master somehow accessed the Matrix from a different location, found that the President was about to be assassinated and beamed it into the mind of the Doctor in order to manipulate him to turn up on Gallifrey and thereby get framed for the assassination.
The Doctor decides that if he hooked his own mind up to the Matrix, then he could find the whereabouts of the Master's back door and therefore reveal his hiding place. Engin protests as it's normally hooked up to dying minds and the results on healthy Time Lord tissue cannot be known, but the Doctor is insistent. Despite a momentary bout of pain, the Doctor's transfer is complete and he leaves his body behind on the table, whilst his mind goes into the Matrix...
...The Matrix looks just like a quarry on earth, but the Doctor finds that it's full of dangerous things like bombs and samurai,
It turns out the real assassin is currently in the Matrix too, and is able to manipulate the environment like a nightmare.
The Doctor runs from the assassin but is eventually trapped on a train line, as the assassin drives a train, full speed, at him.
He cannot get his leg out and braces for the worst, but the train never arrives, it's an illusion like the rest of the Matrix.
The Doctor spends a long time running away from the assassin nonetheless, dodging:
clowns,
doctors
strafing biplanes
and a big game hunter. Each one of them is the Assassin in disguise.
Outside the matrix, the battle of wills is taking its toll on both the Doctor and his hunter who are both hooked up to machinery, feeding their Artron (Time Lord) energy into the machine.
Inside the Matrix, the Doctor hides in the jungle and manages to sneak over to the assassins equipment, taking some of it to set a booby trap whilst the assassin goes off to poison the local water supply, denying the Doctor use of it.
The assassin goes back to his equipment and sets off the trap, narrowly avoiding the explosion, with only minor injuries. He continues to hunt the Doctor but the explosion has bought him time to fashion a blow dart so he can use poison needles that grow in the jungle.
As the hunt draws to a climax, the Doctor shoots the assassin in the leg with the dart, but the assassin wounds the doctor by shooting him in the arm.
Outside the Matrix, both of their bodies are in danger.
The Master, fearing defeat, sends one of the Chancellery guards to the APC room to sabotage the equipment. The guard goes to the room, pretending to report some information, and dallies in the room whilst the Castellan and Engin fret over the Doctor.
They manage to spot the guard going for the controls and kill him just in time.
Back in the Matrix, the Doctor flees through a swamp full of marsh gas and hides just the other side of it. The assassin follows him but the doctor tricks him into stopping in the swamp and revealing himself. The assassin is Chancellor Goth!
Goth calls for the Doctor to show himself. The Doctor creates a distraction that makes Goth shoot. The shot sparks the marsh gas and sets Goth on fire, disabling him.
The Doctor goes to make sure Goth is finished but they end up in a big brawl, with Goth holding the Doctor's head under water, in triumph telling him he's finished.
Oddly though, he seems to be suffering from a drop in power, and releases the Doctor who rises from the water and promptly clobbers Goth over the head with a big stick!
Goth is thrown out of the Matrix, much to the Master's annoyance. In fury, the Master works to increase the power and trap the Doctor in the Matrix. Goth, still connected to the Matrix himself, begs for his Master not to do it as the feedback of energy could kill him. The Master goes ahead anyway, causing a fire to break out near Goth and burns him alive.
Over at the APC room, the circuits begin to spark and Engin is frantic with worry that the Matrix will be lost, but Spandrell won't let him shut it down whilst the Doctor is inside. Lucky for them, the Doctor manages to escape and tells them both about Goth and tells them they must find him quickly.
Using the logic of tapping into the Matrix somehow, the Doctor gets Engin to show him and the Castellan the service ducts and old tunnels underneath the APC Net. They soon find the pirate Matrix couch with goth blistered and burnt on it, next to the dead husk of the Master. Shockingly, Goth is still alive. Whilst the Doctor asks him about the Master's plan, Goth goes into the back story of how he found the Master on the planet of Tersurus. He was at the end of his regeneration cycle and desperate to get to Gallifrey. He told Goth that if he got him there, he would help him get the presidency and share his knowledge.
The Doctor questions why Goth agreed to do this, seeing as he was going to be named successor. Beside the fact that the Master had hypnotised him into it, Goth was power hungry anyway and was told by the President himself that he wouldn't be named successor, so he went along with the plan to kill him. With that information off his chest, Goth dies, leaving the bigger question of the Master's plan unanswered.
Castellan Spandrell, Engin and the Doctor go to see Cardinal Borusa and tell him of what had happened, clearing the Doctor's name. Borusa is unhappy at how the truth sounds as he believes the people of Gallifrey will start to distrust the High Council if Goth's betrayal is revealed. He concocts a story that the Master did it and Goth died a hero, taking the Master with him. To cover up the truth, Borusa instructs Spandrell to have the Master's body shot with a staser, and the Doctor is to go with Engin to put some data into the Matrix on the Master.
The Doctor obeys, but is uneasy about not knowing the Master's plan. He is certain that the Master wouldn't just accept death. He follows his logic on why he would use Goth to claim the presidency. Engin is baffled, saying all he would gain are the ceremonial relics of the President's office, the Sash and Rod of Rassilon.
Elsewhere, Spandrell calls Hilred and delegates the order to shoot the Master to him. Hilred agrees to do it, but passes Spandrell a syringe that he found in the tunnels below the APC net as they were searching them.
The Doctor learns from Engin that Rasillon, like Omega, was a great Time Lord scientist and managed to tame a black hole in its infancy. This black hole, on the brink of a super nova, affectionately called the Eye of Harmony, was stabilised so it gave off unlimited energy and placed at the heart of Time Lord Society, in the Citadel underneath the Panopticon.
Spandrell turns up and show the Doctor the syringe and things fall into place. The Doctor realises that the Master used the syringe to inject a neural inhibitor into himself, stopping all signs of life for a bit to fool them. He intends to gain the sash and rod of Rassilon to unleash the energy in the Eye of Harmony thereby renewing his own regenerative cycle.
Knowing this, they rush to the tomb, where they find that Hilred has been reduced to the size of an action man and the Master is very much alive. He shoots the Doctor and Castellan with his staser and forces Engin to give him the sash of Rassilon from the dead President's body.
With everything he needs, the Master mocks that he's only stunned the Doctor and Spandrell so they can see the end of the world, and he shuts them in the tomb so he can release the Eye.
Working quickly, the Doctor finds an old vent shaft leading back to the Panopticon and fights past falling masonry to get there as the Citadel begins to crumble around him. Once on top, he gets into a fight with the Master, who is trying to remove the restraining bolts from the now risen Eye of Harmony. The Panopticon cracks into chasms, and the Master eventually falls into one, allowing the Doctor to retrain the eye once again.
In the aftermath, they go see Cardinal Borusa again, who is appalled at the damage done. He does acknowledge and thank the Doctor however, referring to his days as his instructor at the Academy. He gives the Doctor 9 out of 10 for effort.
The Doctor smiles and thanks him, even though he's been told in no uncertain terms to leave Gallifrey once again.
The Doctor is led by Engin and Spandrell back to his TARDIS. On the way they speculate what could have happened to the Master, but Engin is certain he couldn't have survived, but the Doctor speculates that he might just have absorbed enough energy from the Eye to keep him going for a bit.
As they watch the TARDIS dematerialise, they turn around to see a funny out of place grandfather clock, and alarmingly see the Master's withered hand closing it's door. He's clearly alive. Spandrell says that they'll both head off into the galaxy which isn't big enough for the both of them. The Master's TARDIS dematerialises, with the image of his scarred face laughing.
Trivia
- This story has the first mention of Type 40 TARDIS, the Time Lords as we now know them, Cardinal Borusa, the Matrix, the fact that they have thirteen lives, Rassilon, the Eye of Harmony and Artron Energy
- Talking of Time Lord culture, the symbol used by the Vogons in Revenge of the Cybermen was re-used here as the seal of Rassilon. It became iconic from this point on and was used by the Time Lords again and again
- Tom Baker said he wanted to do the show on his own, but Phillip Hinchcliffe wouldn't let him. He did give him this one show however, whilst they finalised the auditions for the new companion
- This is a thinly disguised recap of JFK assassination. The gothic golden era angle though is The Manchurian Candidate, a story about brainwashing and a patsy assassinating people
- It's interesting to see the scrolling text a year before Star Wars did it, and Robert Holmes invented the Matrix thirty years before Keaneu Reeves entered it!
- The biplane used was also used in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Mummy
- The cliffhanger for episode 3, showing the Doctor being drowned came to the attention of Mary Whitehouse. The show had considerable complaints about the scene and she used her influence to put pressure on the Doctor Who production team. In response, Phillip Hinchcliffe was moved to a different show at the end of the season.
What worked
- The Time Lord regalia (full)
- The idea of the APC Net
- The look of the Master
- Coordinator Engin
- The history of Gallifrey and Rassilon
What didn't work
- Why doesn't Runcible regenerate when he's stabbed?
- The tissue compression action man
- Castellan Spandrell
- The fact that all the High Council have metallic makeup on their nose and lips
- The entire idea of Runcible and TV Gallifrey!
- The plot explanations are a little bit convoluted
- The Doctor talking to himself
Overall Feelings
This story was always going to be tough as it notably lacked any companion in it, leaving Tom Baker to do most of the leg work, and also explain everything. Robert Holmes, as excellent a writer as he is, got off to a tough start by having him skulk around for an episode to hide the fact that he wasn't shooting at the President. Now, I'm sure even in 1976, even if the end result was shocking, people didn't really believe it. It's a good payoff, but at the expense of the Doctor talking to himself and stupid comic relief to break up the silence.
By episode 2, we get Castellan Spandrell as a companion, but, I'm sorry to be so personal, he had zero charisma in that role. It was so lifeless and boring for 99% of the episode.
Episode 3, although we get to learn about the matrix, we also get a full episode of running around in a quarry. Pointless filler that barely moves the plot along.
Episode 4 is a lot better, but it's like Sherlock Holmes and a very dull Doctor Watson trying to figure something out that needs tons of exposition and people taking it as read that whatever idea the Doctor hypothesises, will be exactly what's going on.
Fandom holds this story as a good one, and if you look at all the Time Lord history, politics and legacies that will be used in the future, then yes, it is good. Even the story, although a bit far-fetched is okay, but 3/4 of the acting is dire - thank god for Engin who is my favourite in this story by far!
I won't be watching this one again for a long time.
Rating
6 out of 10
Rewatchability Factor
3 out of 10
Watch this if you liked...
- The End of Time (Doctor Who, The Specials)
Finally! You can get the reference! If Goth were to scare you in the Matrix, what would he appear as?
