THE WAR GAMESHasn't February raced by? We're now in the final week of our Patrick Troughton/Second Doctor month of 50th Anniversary celebratory retrospectives, wrapping things up with Pat's final adventure The War Games. This was the fateful story that saw the character's off-screen regeneration into Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor via a rather trippy head-spinning sequence that won't soon be forgotten by fans.
More than that, though, The War Games is equally famous for being the first Doctor Who story to introduce key lore in the series that would become vital to its storylines in the years ahead. Firstly, we discovered the Doctor was a Time Lord (and a few stories later we would know he came from Gallifrey) and worse still, he was on the run from his own race for stealing a TARDIS time machine from them. We had always known ever since An Unearthly Child that the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan had shunned their society for unknown reasons, yet now we discovered the true meaning why this protagonist felt he could never return home.
What a thrilling twist it was, then, to have the Time Lords' influence felt in the ninth episode and appear fully in the season finale. Sure, the rest of The War Games is a decent historical Great War adventure, yet it's those concluding instalments that make the most impact. In particular, Frazer Hines' Jamie and Wendy Padbury's Zoe's heartbreaking realisation that they were about to lose their own memories of the Doctor and indeed that their closest friend seemed to be walking to his death were masterfully portrayed by the show's writers. The War Games serves as a fitting finale for Doctor Who's three leading stars and a dramatic première for the Third Doctor to boot, testament if ever proof was needed that the show can blend various intricate plot elements into one cohesive blockbuster as it does to this day in adventures such as Asylum Of The Daleks and The Angels Take Manhattan!
NEXT WEEK: THE THREE DOCTORS
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