Doctor: Patrick Troughton
Companions: Jamie, Zoe
Creators: Malcolm Hulke & Terrance Dicks (Writers), David Maloney (Director), Derrick Sherwin (Producer)
Season 6

What's the rating?

Must See. The best of Doctor Who.

What's interesting about it?

The 10-episode epic exit of Patrick Troughton's doctor, in a manner much more glorious than was ever meant to be. Written by a Thatcherite-conservative (Terrance Dicks) and a socialist (Malcolm Hulke), the politics of the story are intriguing, to say the least.

The first two episodes are a perfect mystery: Our time travelers land in the middle of World War I and events proceed quite quickly and brutally as the military tries to deal with strange civilians appearing out of nowhere. It's a very direct story, with just the occasional hint (memory lapses, strange goings on) that something is not quite right here. The cliffhanger of episode one is quite the nail biter, and the cliffhanger for episode two is one of the more intriguing and better-handled of any in the history of the show.

The mystery doesn't end there. Even five episodes into this 10-episode behemoth we have only the slightest idea of what is going on, but the questions are so intriguing and the story and action move along so smoothly that we are simply carried along.

This is a story that should be experienced without spoilers, so I'm not going to say much other than that you should absolutely watch it.

Contrary to pretty much every other classic Doctor Who fan on the planet, I'm not the biggest fan of Patrick Troughton. For me, with him every moment I see an actor acting, unlike William Hartnell or Tom Baker, both of whom simply became The Doctor. Nonetheless, this story contains the finest of Troughton -- at the end, when he must call in the Time Lords to fix the situation but then does his absolute best to escape from them in a desperate ploy, these are the moments where I believe he is The Doctor, and that he is very scared. If only there had been more such moments in Troughton's run.

This story provides the first portrayal of the Time Lords, and it's perhaps the most interesting approach taken, with subsequent Time Lord stories not being so compelling. Here they are somewhat indifferent gods, dispensing judgment and punishment without breaking a sweat.

This story was on the brink of destruction by the BBC, at the point when they were convinced to stop wiping tapes of the classic stories. We have much to be thankful for that this one survived.

What do others think?

Universally considered a classic.

The Doctor Who podcast #200 (interviews with both writers!)
Doctor Who: The Writer's Room podcast #10