Invasion of the Dinosaurs

… And nobody really knows what the dinosaurs actually looked like, do they?

I said in my Green Death review that we were saying goodbye to the UNIT era. I thought then that it was appropriate it ended with clinking glasses and the Doctor disappearing off on his own in Bessie, his most faithful companion in all his time on Earth. Well, I just didn't know what I was talking about, evidently.

How's about Mike Yates pulling a fun on the Brigadier, eh?

And while we're about it, how about the Brigadier risking mutiny by rescuing the Doctor from a senior officer?

What, indeed, about a story where all the Green Utopianism that's typified the Dicks/Letts era becomes a government conspiracy to commit global genocide?

Everything's cracking up. The halcyon days are gone. Even Bessie's been put in the garage, passed over for something spangly and futuristic. (Why not just stick some fold-out wings on his jaunty Edwardian roadster? Is he scared he'll have Dick Van Dyke on his doorstep, threatening litigation?)

The crucial thing is, for quite a while we don't know that Operation Golden Age are mass murderers in waiting. In fact, even at the end their leaders seem to see this as a point of philosophical debate. Of course, the scheme itself is so loopy it strains credulity - but if it seemed more credible, might it also seem more reasonable?

For at least half the story, there's the chance the Doctor is on the wrong side - and perhaps there is an ambiguity even at the end. The fact that the story ends with two men, however dangerously minded, getting beamed back to the Jurassic era, and apparently to the Doctor's satisfaction, only underlines this.

In fact, Mike's continued harping on to his superiors about the Doctor - not fingering him as a threat so much a potential ally - implies the Time Lord has been a dangerous inspiration to our sad captain. The Doctor spent all that time trying unsuccessfully to encourage a cosmic outlook in his young companion, but perhaps it rubbed off on the wrong person.

I don't know the circumstances that led to Mac Hulke leaving the series' writing roster (a lust for conference centres seems improbably involved) but it almost feels here that he's exposing, fatally, the ideological problems of UNIT and the Doctor. The question of what the Brigadier might try to achieve if his mandate was active rather than responsive (and just what are all those scientists developing at the research centre in The Time Warrior?) haunts this surprisingly grim tale.

A part of me really wants the Pertwee era to end with the Brigadier's complete disillusionment with the British establishment and his resignation from UNIT, perhaps to form his own splinter group. In Wales. With Nancy and her nut roast. Watching Troughton and Pertwee in sequence made me particularly curious about the Brigadier as a character, from the way he accepts the Doctor at face value to his conversation with the sceptical Liz Shaw, plus everything we read between the lines.

This is quite a good story for the Brigadier, insofar as it doesn't reduce him to a Nigel Bruce Dr Watson, but any real insights into his mentality are forever deferred. The big omission is  Lethbridge-Stewart's closing chat with Yates. But then the show has set up and then skipped these sorts of conversations, ever since The Silurians.

The Doctor arrives a week later than he intends to, and we all come close to being rolled back and nixed. (We would be in even more trouble if Sarah Jane a Smith hadn't stowed away the week before.) What would UNIT do if the Doctor finally made up his mind and returned once more to wandering time and space. And what exactly do they do with Professor Whitaker's time machine after he's gone? Hello, UNIT dating controversy.

Our hero is ready to go. He finishes the story with an almost exact re-tread of his invitation to Jo to Metebelis III. Only this time, instead of being oblivious, his friend can't stop herself listening to him. (She presumably hasn't heard how little the last paradise planet turned out to resemble the brochure.) And the series has shifted already, so that when they come back to the modern day, it feels alien and unfamiliar. As if we're seeing through Sarah's eyes now that she's stepped outside the everyday.

Can you believe this is the first time we've seen the Third Doctor in modern London? The first and only time, I believe. No stalking down Whitehall with Liz Shaw, or sipping espressos in Soho with Jo Grant. It makes him seem even more out of time, waiting at a bus stop with his frills out and his magnifying glass swinging on its pendant, yet somehow even more of that era - a glam Doctor, a combination of John Steed, Gambit and Purdey, a man who could be scientific adviser of UNIT forever if he didn't feel the need to tempt Sarah Jane to sample the higher dimensions.

There's a fair bit of padding in the last couple of episodes, including a superfluous chase in the woods. But I don't think I'll ever feel too harshly toward a story with lots of location filming. There are some gorgeous shots of the Doctor framed by woodland foliage that take us right back to Spearhead from Space. This is a Doctor who has come to feel and look strangely at home on Earth.

Not for long. The Police Box is beckoning. It's time for Sarah to meet the Daleks...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Time Warrior

Nowadays, by which I mean 1974, it strikes me as slightly odd that I used to remark so much on the bad-tempered old Third Doctor. I remember a lot of people in Jon Pertwee’s second season getting the sharp edge of his tongue, and then some hard words for Day of the Daleks’ Controller, as well as bureaucrats fighting The Sea Devils and experimenting on The Mutants. But as if mellowed by the charm of Jo Grant, or perhaps the impervious Master (no use shouting at him), the Doctor’s been getting increasingly sweet-natured and tolerant.

I suppose it depends on who’s rubbing the nape of his velvet jacket the wrong way; any civil servant or wunderkind scientist with a jacked-up ego was ever liable to have the air taken out of their tyres. Perhaps it was the frustration of memory loss, or the thought that he'd never see Jamie McCrimmon's hairy knees again. In this story you might expect him to be more irritable once more, given the big events of The Green Death: strange to find him on Earth at all, really.

And to be so tolerant of the Brigadier, going through one of his bumptious phases, and Professor Rubeish’s  fiddle-faddling, not to mention an investigative reporter smuggling herself into a 'top secret' government think tank as if it was a tupperware party. She's only there because scientists working on government related research are mysteriously going missing! But then that's suddenly the key to Pertwee's Doctor: suave and cool and jokey when everyone else is getting aerated.

That's the delight of the Doctor's scenes with our two testosterone-tastic warriors, Lynx and Irongron, and particularly the latter, who bellows and stomps about and swings his sword in all directions. When the Doctor's disguised as a robot and Irongron suggests chopping its head off, the Doctor suddenly becomes the unflappable upper class gent: 'Isn't that a bit unsporting, old man? I mean, sitting ducks and all that...' It's a playfulness I fondly remember from the days of his previous incarnation – although, catch this Doctor pretending to be a fool. He'd sooner drag up in a pair of old tights.

There's another rather Troughtonish moment when the Doctor is chucking stink bombs over his shoulder at Irongron's troops; not with the schoolboyish pleasure that the Second Doctor would have taken, but with quiet contentment all the same. He's almost whistling to himself as he dispatches an army – a very, very small army, yes, but it's the Doctor who really makes us see that. He's rather affronted when Sarah Jane implies he might have caused some permanent damage with his gas: he's not a soldier. He's just having fun.

Taken entire, this rather muted performance sometimes under-sells the drama of The Time Warrior. Even when he's not onscreen, we very rarely get a real sense of menace from Lynx the Sontaran – his 'ocular' hypnotism of Sarah Jane Smith notwithstanding. Lynx doesn't seem to pose a great threat to the world: we never get a real sense of what effect his 'time meddling' will be, nor does anybody really seem to care overly about the scientists he's abducted from the 20th century.

In fact, the story has a weird effect, like a rather crudely taken photograph. Everybody at the centre of the shot – essentially the Doctor, the villains, and the new girl in town – are acutely in focus, but the other elements of the composition range from slightly to extremely blurry. It's the Brigadier I feel sorry for. A few years ago, it felt as if he and the Doctor were co-stars of this series, and now he's basically required for thirty seconds in episode one, to set the scene and raise an eyebrow. Nick Courtney plays the scene with good grace, but the Brig in conversation with Lynx is a missed opportunity.

As would Lady Eleanor in conversation with Lynx. Or, indeed, with Bella Emberg. Lady Eleanor is just short of being one of the Pertwee era's great female characters – few and far between though they are. In Season 10, we had none at all in The Three Doctors, the lovable Shirna in Carnival of Monsters, the President of Earth (okay, I'll admit, that's not bad) in Frontier in Space, one rather soppy Thal in Planet of the Daleks and Nancy, the companion that never was, with her deadly mushroom bake and existential flute-playing (or whatever it is Clifford says she's doing with her instrument). Eleanor is strong, wise and charming; I could also wish for a bit more of the Mary Berry of her day, Meg, played by Sheila Feay and a really bizarre wig.

But the woman of the match is obviously and incomparably Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Katy Manning is irreplaceable, and without an eye for Doctor Who history, you might worry about the show after her departure. Remember when they recast Jamie for an episode? Remember when Vicki's place in the Ship was taken by Katarina? But Sladen walks into the show and owns it, instantly. 'Oh, I could murder a cup of tea!'

It's funny, because Robert Holmes wastes no time on any of Sarah's background. It should be fairly pitiful that all we know about her is that she's a journalist with an aunt, and that she frequently says, 'Ooh, men!' like a character from Acorn Antiques. But he gives Sarah so much to do and say, that between Holmes and Sladen, Sarah Jane is vividly there, from the get go, and she's there by accident, as all the best companions are.

She took a chance, a wrong turning or a right one, and there it was – an unexpected new friend, unexpected new trouble, a man who looks like a currant bun with legs, and a man who takes it all in his stride.

Of course the Doctor doesn't get all grumpy with her. He knows a new best friend when he sees her...

Coming next, a story I've never seen... Apparently it's just 

called INVASION!! (Deja vu...?)

The Green Death

She's off.

It feels like ages since Jo Grant came into the Doctor's life and began changing things. In those earlier stories, she quite often bears the brunt of his bad temper – and she in turn doesn't quite 'get' him. It's not until Colony in a Space that she can accept the Tardis is real, that he's not a fantasist. And to be fair, even a mad alien scientist in an Edwardian cape is a bit of a leap to one who travels  in time and space.

Perhaps it's a change of view for Jo – that scientists can be as heroic and crusading as soldiers. After all, her original ambition, facilitated by her Uncle, is to join the services – and before falling for Professor Jones, she tries dating Captain Yates. (Can't quite see that relationship going places.) Since then, she's been a humanising force on the Doctor, who has generally cheered up and calmed down. In return, she's become a woman of the universe, to the extent that she can reject the Master's hypnotism and generally talk down to him, before walking out of the Tardis doors, alone, into the alien night of Spiridon...

I still don't think she was ever quite on the same page as him though. Not like Zoe, for instance, who bravely stowed away in the Doctor's old sea-chest to discover the Universe. Jo's travels in time and space tend to be accidental and slightly reluctant. She's not fazed by them – she disputes with planetary colonists and rude-looking aliens without hesitation. Jo is always self-assured, passionate and morally certain: to coin a phrase, down-to-earth. But generally that's where she wants to be. 'There's only one little world I want to see right now,' she says, almost wearily, after all the fun on the Planet of the Daleks. 'Home.'

We're so used to show-runners' arcs these days, the original series can seem rather rackety and thrown together by comparison. But this season, beginning with The Three Doctors' liberation of the Tardis and its crew, travels rather satisfyingly to this announcement of Jo's. The Green Death is the story in which Jo Grant leaves not just the Doctor, but UNIT – and if it wasn't for Professor Jones, it might not have been such a clean break. The Doctor is clearly on the threshold of a new life away from Earth, and one feels rather certain that's not a life Jo would have joined him in.

From the Dawning of Aquarius to her stack-heeled boots and now, her passion for environmentalism, she's associated with the here and now. 'Well,' she says about the Tardis in Frontier in Space, with flippant prophecy, 'I'm never going in that thing again.'

Not that she hasn't learned from her adventures. I've reflected a couple of times on the visions of future Earth she's had: over-developed, uninhabitable, unsustainable, even ungovernable, threatened by fear and greed and waste. These are thematic connections rather than literal ones – Jo never even witnesses the ministerial self-interest that hands complete control over to Global Chemicals in Episode Two. But a lot of care has been taken with references back to Jo's arrival. Only the production team of the time and fans of today can really appreciate these: when Jo talks about her job description being 'tell the Doctor how brilliant he is,' for instance, she's quoting a line from three years earlier!

It feels a far cry from some of the 1960s seasons, where individual stories shine but the lives of the regulars – and their ongoing stories – are treated with ambivalence. The overriding feeling with the Jo Grant era, for me, is that the writers believe in the strength of their leads, in the security of this family (in part, because of the actors performances), and enjoy throwing them into new situations. In all the years I've been watching Who in sequence, this is a moment when it really feels like a series rather than a show. It would have made a perfectly fitting last story for the Master, too. As it is, it brings to an end the chronicles of that UNIT family.

What about the Doctor, though? If Jo Grant was a reluctant traveler in time and space, the Doctor has been reluctant to leave without her. After bridling so long at his confinement, it feels as if his main tie to the Earth and his main excuse for not returning to a bootless existence among the stars has been suddenly taken away – and after his solitary voyage to the fabled Metebelis 3 (has nobody ever said how brilliant that planet's name is?) he seems grateful to scramble back to Earth, to a world of mines and silly disguises and mathematical flautists called Nancy. Where exactly does he belong?

Yes, he's changed. He's at risk, you might think, of losing his Doctorishness, his capacity to transcend the present day. Yet that's exactly what his extra-terrestrial, mystical blue sapphire connotes: a very 70s sort of transcendentalism, requiring a physical bauble (whereas in the 60s they just did it, lived it, breathed it) but still effective. His conversations with BOSS, where he seems to take real pleasure in disdainfully scuppering its plans, are good to see and great to watch. And despite the coming departure of his longest ally, Pertwee seems more comfortable than ever in this scene – baiting a disembodied voice (but what a voice!).

So perhaps, he's off too. Perhaps this is just what he needs. But to where, and with whom? Who could possibly take the place of Katy Manning's consummately performed Josephine Grant...?

Scarier than any story this season, but also cosier and camper (escape in milk float to hippy commune, for example), this is a strong story by a team with real fondness for the world they've constructed - and a forlorn recognition that nothing goes on forever.

The Time Monster

In my blog last week, I talked about the unsinkable Jo Grant, and her ability to remain sunny in the continually reconfirmed knowledge that planet Earth in the future is a cosmic shithole run by total bastards. How does she remain so buoyant, I wondered, when others like myself find it hard enough to deal with an office job and the daily round of news headlines? Then this week, Jo unexpectedly crumbled.

'What happens if the Master wins?' she asks the Doctor. Chaos, he explains, on a grand scale, and it depresses Jo. 'Makes it all seem so pointless, doesn't it?' she says. Perhaps the banality of the Master's evil has hit home – the imminent catastrophe doesn't only mean death and destruction: it's a universe without meaning.

This is the prelude to the Doctor's childhood reminiscence, the story of how his blackest day was redeemed by the hermit on the mountainside, who taught him to see 'a heaven in a wild flower'; that is, the 'daisiest daisy'.

It's the first casual chat the Doctor and Jo have had since The Mind of Evil, and it's a rare moment of the Doctor dropping the 'Who' for a moment. In referring to past troubles, it recalls a fatherly moment in the tombs of planet Telos; in describing the countryside of home, it connects with a much earlier tale of burnt orange skies. We have a better sense than ever of who the Doctor is – paternal, happy in that role (he looks entirely at ease, telling stories in that prison cell), drawing on a lifelong wonder at the universe, empathy with the figure of the mountain hermit.

Here's the anchorite in his new form, perched on the side of the mountain that is our planet in a single era. Does that 'black day' he's so cagey about still threaten him? He worries at his circuitry and drinks his tea. Or reassures his friend with a story. Meanwhile, upstairs, his childhood friend is seducing Ingrid Pitt and planning the death of the actual Minotaur in order to – what?

It's not clear. The Master has a Tardis – i.e., the run of Universe – and can inveigle his way into any position he likes. He begins the story by trying to tame a god-like being from outside space and time. It does seem like an awful lot of hard work, especially given how things when he tried it last month, and that he must know the result will probably be chaos anyway, a mirror of his own megalomania. This is a story where Roger Delgado really lets rip, strutting up and down and cackling to himself. Entertainingly, but not becomingly. 

What's the nature of this madness? It's a story about messing about with time, and produces some of the most surreal and comic images of the whole series. There's capacity for exploration of some huge ideas, about how we use time and chronology to sort the Universe into order, to give our lives meaning. 'The whole of creation is very delicately balanced, Jo...' 

Or perhaps chronological narrative is a fantasy, and the Master plans to liberate himself from an illusory world into a state of naked existence. True enlightenment?

This is a sort of sequel to The Daemons. The Doctor was rather adamant in that story that science was a superior way of looking at reality, but in this story he can remotely interfere with the Master's Tardis by balancing a cup of tea on a wine bottle and making some mystical passes. The Tardis itself – pressed into use in a climactic moment that makes it suddenly seem more wonderful than it has since the 1960s – is indestructible, telepathic, illogical. The authors of this story leave us in no doubt: it's not just a spaceship – it's an idea that has somehow gained material form.

Now, The Time Monster is a bit over-extended, and sometimes the dialogue is a bit weird (like someone who's seen a lot of TV but never met a human being), but it has some amazing performances, from Dean Lerner and Miss Babs to Roger Delgado and Ingrid Pitt. It has that audacious Doctor Who spirit ('Who cares if the money's run out? We're going to have a bird-god-monster from another dimension destroy the city of Atlantis!') and the real sense of camaraderie that is unique to Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning ('Glad to have you aboard, Miss Grant.' 'Glad to be aboard, Doctor!').

And even if it doesn't really explore those ideas about time, meaning, madness, the life of the mind ('I shouldn't listen too hard to my subconscious thoughts, Jo, I'm not too proud of some of them'), it nonetheless suggests that there are two responses to the meaninglessness of existence and the daily toll of unhappy feelings. You could try and Master it, by chucking out the structure and narrative. Or you could tell a story about it. Better yet, you could throw yourself in and Doctor the story. Same mountain, different view.

There's also bags of extreme CSO. I think it really is the Pertweeiest Pertwee story.

Inferno

One of the striking things about Inferno - which, at only the fourth story, concludes this first season of the new Doctor - is that unlike the other three, it doesn't obviously rip off (or rather, homage) anything from Nigel Kneale's Quatermass serials. It's also remarkable for being quite unlike the Doctor Who of previous seasons, and what was to come. It's a fascinating story that rewards re-viewing.

Okay, so there is an initial family resemblance to the TV work of Nigel Kneale, and particularly his famous creation, the rather Doctorish Professor Quatermass. We're in another sinister industrial unit, and we're digging into the surface of the Earth. It's almost a reimagining of The Quatermass Experiment, heading in the opposite direction - trespassing beyond human experience, uncovering a violent potential in ourselves.

And at this point, whilst it would require a heavy rewrite, this could have been made with Patrick Troughton's Doctor. The green ooze that possesses and transforms men into monsters is not a million miles away from the stinky seaweed that did similar stuff in Fury from the Deep. It would actually feel quite derivative if this was Patrick Troughton poking about in machinery and arguing with the base's hotheaded boss.

But Inferno takes things in an entirely new direction for Doctor Who. It is closest in genre to the dreamlike tales of the Celestial Toyroom or the Land of Storybook Characters that the 1960s toyed with so memorably. Here is the programme's cosy set-up (only four stories in, albeit over twenty actual episodes) inverted. The Inferno disaster itself becomes almost secondary to the actual story. You could easily substitute the events of Spearhead or Silurians here. It's a nightmare world.

You couldn't tell this story with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe - or rather, you could, just about (evil Jamie, evil Zoe) but it would have about as much substance as a toot on a recorder. Liz and the Brigadier belong to 'our' world, and that they are different tells us, immediately, how different this other world is and how high the stakes. It's more fun - more exciting - and there is more potential in our understanding of those characters, even if we fans can get more from our speculations than the writer gives us in dialogue, the emphasis being more on drama than psychology.

It's the new Doctor's first Tardis trip, and it takes us somewhere more alien than Dulkis, to his biggest challenge in a long time - alone and friendless, with no handy gizmos, no means of escape or even shelter (how different it would be if the whole Tardis had transported him), trying to win the trust of a paranoid people. The most shocking thing is that he succeeds, but also fails, horribly - escaping with his life but no-one else's. I'm watching The Mind of Evil this week, and there's a subtle allusion to Inferno, the Doctor describing a fiery apocalypse as a memory that still haunts him.

Jon Pertwee's Doctor is less mercurial than his predecessor. Having to defend himself in that kangaroo court seems to have hardened his character - he's loud, flamboyant, outspoken, angry. He no longer sneaks about in the background or covers genius with bluster. But in this season, we've seen him new facets of his character that are compelling. Put through several ordeals, he remains eminently himself, a loud voice in favour of peace. This story alone stretches Pertwee's performance: he's a stellar leading man, and he makes the Doctor a vital, convincing character.

It's strange - looking back from the vantage point of Season 8 - seeing what a strong character Season 7, necessary for a 'dark mirror' story like this. It's telling stories its previous era never could, or never tried to. It's ignoring all the easy choices - Daleks, Cybermen, Yeti. Inferno demonstrates how many elements it can draw into one story - and make work: the Doctor's role at UNIT but also his desperate longing for escape, his sense of our world as home, the scale of the threats he can predict, his limited powers, and what our world is like without him.

And a last word should go to Caroline John, who leaves us on a laugh - a laugh at the Brigadier (after telling him, 'I don't quite care for your tone!') and the Doctor (who she has watched take his opportunity and fly away from our world in his mysterious Tardis, or did he die?). She's an amazing performer and I've loved her portrayal of Liz. One more season of this team would have been wonderful - going into the strange relationships of the characters, in these lovely long, slow, wintry stories of folk horror and our fragile planet. And more Liz Shaw, and Liz in space, and Liz saying goodbye. It's a credit to these four marvellous stories that they leave us wanting more.

The Ambassadors (TWANG!)of Death

In the past fortnight, whilst watching the Third Doctor's tangle with the British Space Programme, I decided to renew my acquaintance with its progenitor, Professor Bernard Quatermass. While the Doctor was dealing with a mysteriously empty space rocket, I watched (and read, in Penguin) about the Professor dealing with a mysteriously empty space rocket, and not longer after the Doctor went heroically into space to deal with the problem himself, the Professor went heroically into space to deal with his. I don't know if fan fiction has yet recorded the meeting of these two great minds, perhaps in the lounge of some Marylebone pub, but what with their shared experience of ancient inhabitants of Earth, uncanny meteorites, possession, sinister factories and deadly plant creatures, they wouldn't be stuck for conversation.

Just so long as they weren't later joined by the Professor's journalist friend, Hugo Conrad (played marvellously by Roger Delgado). That might have been awkward. (There's a less exciting but somehow more apt casting connection between the two worlds, in the form of Cyril Shaps: in Quatermass II, he's the technician who guides the Professor in his rocket toward the mysterious Thing on the dark side of the Earth - in Doctor Who, he's Viner, landing a rocket with a bunch of other astronauts to dig up the Tomb of the Cybermen, and even more appropriately, he's a discredited scientist blackmailed into helping the villains in - The Ambassadors of Death!)

The more you watch, the more you gasp in disbelief at the ideas, plot twists and images half-inched by Doctor Who (though interestingly, unless I've miscalculated, only in the Second Doctor's adventures and onward - even The War Machines doesn't feel that much like a Nigel Kneale story). And who can blame them? One of the fun things about Doctor Who is that the Doctor himself is fairly unique as a protagonist, and it's fun to drop him into other people's stories and see how he messes them up. The Doctor's alien qualities give a very specific and interesting twist to And The Silurians, The Ambassadors of Death and, of course, Inferno, whilst The Web of Fear, Spearhead from Space and The Seeds of Doom (to name the three most Knealeian stories) benefit from a more flamboyant, flippant or eccentric hero.

The Ambassadors of Death is a terrifically fun story, albeit with only a couple of lapses (somewhere round the middle, and right at the end). It plays off adult viewers' memories of Quatermass as much as it explores its child viewers' expectations. Much as it does steal from Nigel, there's lots of evidence here that the production team care about Doctor Who as a discrete entity with a particular moral stance: so, immediately following And The Silurians, we have a benevolent alien race and a highly negative depiction of military paranoia. When I was watching it, I kept waiting for the Brigadier to be given something to do - it's still weird to have him in every story - and suddenly he got it, stumbling upon a conspiracy of British Intelligence, arrested by his own men and obliged to make a getaway in Bessie. There's no overt connection made between this story and the last, but I think perhaps this is where the Brigadier realises that the Doctor is right: he sees his own paranoia in a dark mirror.

The action is brilliantly directed, and everything seems to take place in a decidedly moody winter's landscape. Bessie's hood is up, Liz Shaw makes sure to keep her hat on, and of course, the Ambassadors are careful not to unzip their space suits. It's bitter! The Doctor's in a terrible mood throughout the story, which somewhat detracts from the action - he takes himself so very seriously, all of a sudden, and there's really not enough banter between him and Liz Shaw, even when she brings him a mug of tea in his redesigned Tardis console room and he can't take his eyes off the telly. I've decided Liz has entered my pantheon of great Doctor Who companions. I want there to be hundreds of spin off novels about her.

Like all good companions, she exists on the fault-line which runs through Doctor Who between high seriousness and high camp. Her performance is wonderfully intense - helped along by some freaky, Ghost Stories for Christmas video effects when the Ambassador temporarily takes his hat off to her - but her outfit wouldn't look out of place on Lulu at Eurovision. Meanwhile, her fellow technicians look soberly into camera while droning on about the space ship intercepting the Doctor's rocket, as though heavily sedated. Jon Pertwee, too, is playing it very straight - but presumably he can't see how rudimentary is the video effect overlaying him into a giant segment of satsuma. And how else can you respond to Docteur Tartalian (never the same accent twice).

However much Doctor Who is inspired by Quatermass, it is always itself, always somehow ludicrous, funny and frightening in its own special way. And along with all that comes something Quatermass doesn't have - aliens who come in peace.

Oh, and Sergeant Benton's arrived!

Doctor Who and the Silurians

Like a holographic image, perspective is crucial with Doctor Who. From a certain angle, it appears to be a single, coherent structure: a series of adventures about a hero with a changing face, stretching continuously across five decades and more. This illusion is preserved because of certain choices by production teams - unlike John Steed of The Avengers, the Doctor never actually experiences the same adventure twice (despite his earliest stories being unavailable to audiences immediately they were broadcast) and changes in cast and location are woven into the series with various attempts at dramatic seriousness (the sadness of a companion leaving, the upheaval of a Doctor's regeneration).

It's all a complete illusion, of course. Successive writers brought their interpretation of the character to the script, the script editor ensured nothing jarred too badly, the actor incorporated it into his performance, and the fans did the rest.

I thought about this illusion again this week, when some friends were discussing how best to watch Doctor Who if you were entirely new to it. I, typically, found myself on the fence. (Ouch.) I couldn't help agreeing that the chronological viewing experience is not really 'orthodox' or even very representative. There have never been more than a small handful of viewers who have seen the show in that way, and it was never made for them. Every audience of the show has had a successive, idiosyncratic, partial, selective and slightly mistaken idea of what the Doctor was doing before the current adventure.

That's how I saw the show. I was six when the series ended, and ten when I became a fan. I watched stories based on their availability at my local library, or based on relatives' decisions at Christmas, completely out of order till 2005.

But there is something alluring about that idea of an ongoing narrative. Like the idea that Ian and Barbara introduce an element of humanity into the Doctor's life which make him the man he is today, or that the Second Doctor and Jamie travlled as agents of the Time Lords between stories. The illusion is particularly strong during Season 7, when some attention has been given to the Doctor's relationship with his new surroundings.

This wonderfully dark (in all senses) story, and particularly its ending, are a moment of lost innocence for the Doctor. For a hundred years or so, it seems, he's been the one in charge - the hero of the hour, with young humans aboard his Tardis, who generally do what he says. Now he's like a companion to the Brigadier, somewhat subservient to his priorities and his morality. In this story, his trust is abused and the slightly starchy young human - with whom he was so matey when they encountered the Yeti and Cybermen - turns out to be disobedient, somewhat powerful, and rather dangerous.

The Brigadier becomes an interesting figure, partly because the writers are not very interested in his psychology, and therefore he comes off as slightly unreal - perhaps even unwell. In The Web of Fear, he's impressively open-minded. In The Invasion, we see that he has established this military 'unit' to deal with the unexplained. By Spearhead from Space, despite his charm, he is something of a loner. He replies to Liz Shaw's scepticism with the practiced calm of someone who has trod a solitary path for quite a while. He is waiting for his one true ally, the Doctor, to come back.

But he treats the Doctor - whose change of appearance he finds impossible and then credible within a short space of time - with suspicion, even as a child. The pair behave as if it was the same early days of their friendship, but in fact they are increasingly uncertain of one another. In this story he trusts the Doctor throughout, in spite of all hell breaking loose. He is patient to the end. But the Doctor learns not to mistake that for friendship.

This is the story of the Doctor being taken to the Wenley Moor research station by the Brigadier, much as the Doctor once took his companions to new and mysterious places. The Brigadier has an impressive eye for weird shit waiting to go off - the eye of a fanatic, almost. And not only are the Silurians an unknown 'weird shit' quantity for all concerned, but the Doctor himself proves to be a dangerous quantity. The Brigadier saves his life and provides the resolution to the story. The Doctor, by contrast, nearly gets the Brigadier killed.

It's a fascinating new development in the life of a man who used to be carefree and now finds himself involved in other people's lives: Liz, the Brigadier, the planet Earth, the Silurians. The Doctor is involved in a bigger adventure now - the ongoing history of the human race. At one point, he recklessly gambles humankind's safety, hoping to set history on a new course, a 1970s or 1980s Earth shared by humans and intelligent reptiles. The denouement is not merely a revelation about the Brigadier's powers, but also the Doctor;s disempowerment.

Of course, it's all in my mind. Jon Pertwee doesn't know how matey he used to be with the Brigadier. He doesn't realise how much things have changed for them - and Malcolm Hulke doesn't know that the Doctor will end the season by meeting a dark mirror of his friend (or begin the next season with his own dodgy doppelganger turning up). It's all a product of watching the series in sequence, a series made by people deeply engaged with its possibilities, its ideas of morality and terror. The effect is perverse and illusory - but also fascinating.