Doctor Who: Countdown To 50- Week Nine

THE THREE DOCTORS
So, in eight months and three weeks' time, we might see The Eleven Doctors turn out to be the 50th Anniversary Special. If that's the case, it's always a good job to take a retrospective on classic multi-Doctor stories just to see how successful such anniversary outings can turn out to be. We'll start, then, in the first week of our Jon Pertwee Third Doctor month by assessing the 10th Anniversary tale, The Three Doctors...

In all brutal honesty, this story doesn't quite fare as well as many fans remember it. There are four 25-minute instalments that make up the adventure, and its narrative takes a while to get running. It transpires that the sinister Time Lord Omega is threatening the fabric of reality from beyond the Void, and with the Doctor's TARDIS immobilised by a dark force at UNIT Headquarters, the Time Lords must rally his two past incarnations to help him. Sure enough, Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor enters the TARDIS control room once again come the end of Part One, and we even get a choice bit of advice from the ill William Hartnell's First Doctor as well.

The problem is, while the quarrelling between three incarnations of the Doctor must have seemed thrilling and innovative at the time for fans, now it just makes for a needless deviation in an already slow story. By the time the Second and Third Doctors settle their differences, we're halfway into the second episode, and still no closer to solving the mystery. I'm all for new content to look ahead to the show's future rather than indulging in too much nostalgia, yet the writers clearly struggled with the balance here.

Nevertheless, the anniversary adventure to celebrate ten years of Who did have its strengths, particularly in the on-screen chemistry of Pertwee, Kate Manning (Jo Grant) and Troughton that sheds new light on the series' mythology. Come the fourth episode's end, we're set for ten more years of new adventures in the TARDIS, a surefire strength of the story as a whole if there ever was one. Doctor Who: The Three Doctors may not be perfect, then, yet it at least set a strong precedent for future multi-Doctor adventures, and the writers would only get more intelligent from this point onwards...

NEXT WEEK: SPEARHEAD IN SPACE