Good morning, faithful viewer! I’m so glad you joined me today, because we are about to embark on a very cool story. One quick question before we start, to give you a hint about which old familiar face is appearing in this episode: According to Doctor Who, what do soldiers do when they retire?
At the very start of this serial, the TARDIS gets caught in a warp ellipse clear out of nowhere. The ellipse, caused by a starliner trapped in time, is the result of someone trying to capture either the TARDIS or the Doctor. Either way, it’s bad news, and the Doctor winds up abandoned–with no companions and no TARDIS–smack in the middle of the 1980s. While that might sound like dire straits to some, it was actually the best thing that could have happened to the Doctor. With no idea what to do or how to get back to his TARDIS, the Doctor decides to consult the math professor at a local public school…who turns out to be none other than Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, retired!
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Strangely, the Brig doesn’t remember the Doctor at all–and not just because he doesn’t recognize the Doctor’s new face. Amnesia or not, however, the Brig is still as clever and brave as he ever was, and he’s exactly who the Doctor needs to help get back to his TARDIS and find out who’s trying to steal it and why.
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In case you haven’t worked out the riddle at the start of this recap, faithful viewer, here’s the answer: According to Doctor Who, retired soldiers teach math. If it was good enough for the Brig, it was good enough for Danny Pink, I guess. And can I just say: I’m so happy to see the Brig again, I can’t even believe it. No matter how dull it got in Jon Pertwee’s time, with all the sitting around at UNIT HQ and no traveling in the TARDIS at all, I never minded it very much when the Brig was around. He’s shaved off his infamous mustache since his retirement, but he’s still a handsome devil, and still brave, calm under pressure, and still (regrettably) paternally chauvinistic. And in meeting up with the Brigadier, we also get to find out what happened to some of our old UNIT chums: namely, John Benton and Harry Sullivan. For the record, Benton’s a used-car salesman now, and Sully is doing top-secret government ops. It’s strange to think that it was about ten years’ worth of episodes ago that we were hanging out with the likes of Benton and Sully and even poor Mike Yates in every single episode. And now, they’re just distant memories…funny how time goes.
Photo credit, http://www.bbc.co.uk
On a more scientific side of things, I feel that it’s worth mentioning that a key plot point used in this episode was a principle known as the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. If you have trouble remembering technical names (and frankly, the BLE is quite a mouthful in itself), it’s the principle that states that a person cannot come into contact with his/her past or future selves without causing a cataclysmic burst of energy. First mentioned by the Third Doctor in “Day of the Daleks,” used to heartbreaking effect by the Ninth Doctor in “Father’s Day” (and utterly ignored by the Eleventh Doctor in “A Christmas Carol”), it proves extremely useful in this serial, and is in fact the key to unraveling the Brigadier’s unexpected amnesia.
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Before I sign off, I must talk about something rather unpleasant. I mentioned before that this serial marks the return of an old companion–most likely in celebration of the twentieth anniversary coming up–but this serial also marks the return of an old enemy, one that I never expected to see on the show again. This serial marks the return…of the Black Guardian.
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And before you ask: No, he is not being played by Ronnie Wood. He’s just got a raven on his head. Don’t ask me why.
I know that when we last saw the Black Guardian, he vowed revenge on the Doctor for denying him access to the Key to Time. But honestly, I never expected him to follow through on his threats. It seemed to me that an entity of as much power and omniscience as the Black Guardian–or the White Guardian for that matter–couldn’t have much of an attention span. As soon as he’d finished telling the Doctor how he would destroy him and so forth, I’d imagined the Black Guardian had gotten distracted over some interplanetary war or another and forgotten the Doctor completely.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Black Guardian’s back, and more than that, he’s got a mortal accomplice right inside the Doctor’s own TARDIS.
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That’s another thing that I definitely should mention, faithful viewer…I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing yet, but it’s definitely significant. The Doctor gets a new companion in this serial. His name is Turlough, and he’s one of the students at the public school where the Brigadier works…or at least, that’s his cover story. His real story is that he’s a Trion alien stranded on Earth–for reasons that have yet to be explained–and he’s got himself a berth on the TARDIS. The Doctor is happy to have him–in fact, he seems incredibly excited to have him around. Whether that’s because of his superior knowledge of alien tech or because the Doctor’s just pleased to have a guy on the TARDIS again remains to be seen. What is true is that the Black Guardian has recruited Turlough to kill the Doctor, and the Doctor has no idea.
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Well, this is a new development. We’ve never had a companion with ulterior motives before…unless you count Clara in “Dark Water/Death in Heaven,” but that won’t happen for another thirty years yet. It’s a tense situation, faithful viewer…I can’t wait to see how it pans out.
Stay tuned ’til next time, faithful viewer, when the Doctor and his companions land on a hospital ship befouled with germs and corporate corruption in equal measure…
An American Whovian in TV Land 