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When the BBC broadcast a special edition, colored of “The Daleks” to celebrate Doctor WhoOn last year’s 60th anniversary, apart from the current edition down to a reduced runtime, the serial was largely left as is, apart from a cute trailer at the end to tease the next 60 years of adventures in time and space. With his second take, this time on Patrick Troughton’s iconic outing as the Second Doctor in “The War Games”– things are very different. A lot different
Aired on BBC 4 in the United Kingdom earlier this week, the color TV special assumes Doctor WhoThe latest story in black and white – taking a four-hour saga and reducing it to just 90 minutes – took the opportunity to weave in answers to questions WHO fans have had for years at this point, creating something of an insane checklist of pointed references and acknowledgments to the future of the show that are now, in some ways, definitive parts of Doctor Whocontinuity in continuous evolution. Here are three of the biggest tweaks and changes added to the process.
The warlord and teacher
Probably the biggest theory played with, “The War Games” in color specifically made a connection between the original story and Doctor WhoThe immediate future of the other is much more explicit: that of the main antagonist of the series, the Warlord, was none other than an incarnation of the Master himself. During the appearances of the Warlord in the colorization, the recently updated soundtrack has incorporated contemporary. WHO composer Murray Gold’s iconic Theme “Vainglorious Master”.– and when the Warlord is executed by the Time Lords upon his arrival in the climax of “The War Games”, you can also briefly hear the telltale sound of Doctor WhoModern regeneration SFX of his body is dragged.
While it was always established in the original story that the Warlord was a renegade Time Lord, for years ancillary material and novelizations have tossed back and forth the idea that he is an early incarnation of the Time Lord. who will eventually take the mantle. of Maestro (the implication is now that he did so initially with Roger Delgado’s incarnation of the character). Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, who wrote “The War Games”, continued to note in their own Doctor Who Target episode novelization that the Master and the Doctor were the only renegade Time Lords to flee Gallifrey with their own TARDIS, implying that the Warlord and the Master were, indeed, one and the same. But then original novels as part of the Virgin New adventures The books also treated the Warlord as a distinct character, one who survived the events of “The War Games” and eventually regenerated into various incarnations, much like the Big Finish audio dramas establishing previous incarnations of the Master separated from the Warlord.
The process and the faces of the doctor
Once a particularly random alteration in the climax of the story comes during the trial of the Doctor of the Time Lord. Having concluded in agreement with the Doctor that there were many dangers in the universe worth facing despite his policies of non-intervention (embellished here from the original with extra clips from other Doctor Who stories), the Time Lords still choose to punish the Doctor with exile on Earth and forced regeneration, offering the Doctor several choices of potential visages. However, in the colorization, these faces—all of which the Doctor still rejects for various reasons—are no longer just random unknown identities. Instead, the Doctor is offered the opportunity to regenerate into the faces of many of his future incarnations beyond the third Doctor, as the Time Lords project images that us We know that they are in fact the XII (rejected as “too old”), the Tenth (“too thin”), the Thirteenth (“too young”), and the Eleventh (simply described as “that will not do at all! “) Doctors.
This is a particularly odd addition, considering there wasn’t really any particular theorizing or desire that these faces had any particular connection to the Doctor beyond the Time Lords offering them to him at the time. It’s not like Doctor Who didn’t explore the idea of the Doctor having incarnations beyond those we were already familiar with – we had plenty of examples from the infamous faces glimpsed in ‘The Brain of Morbius’ to contemporaries. WHOThe addition of incarnations such as the “War Doctor” of John Hurt between the Eighth and the Ninth Doctor, or “Fugitive Doctor” of Jo Martin and other incarnations before the Doctor of William Hartnell. But it’s a funny joke at the moment that the doctor has little desire to have someone with many faces that we know will eventually end up later in life.
The Regeneration of the Second Doctor (and UNIT Dating)
The “War Games” colorization culminates with an almost entirely new addition, using rotoscoped footage of Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee’s Doctors to establish the exact moment of the second Doctor’s regeneration. Here, after the trippy sequence of the Doctor’s face contorting through a shadowy void from the original series, the action cuts to the interior of the TARDIS, where, sitting in a chair as he hears the flashes of his companions having left, the Doctor braces himself as he glowers. with regenerative energy, transforming into his next incarnation. As we recently coveredThe second Doctor’s off-screen regeneration has been covered in other ancillary material outside of the show itself (Time Lord-sanctioned scarecrow firing squads this time, alas), but now the moment itself has been brought into line with depictions of regeneration as seen in Doctor WhoThe modern era, for better or worse.
But that canonization isn’t the only fannish nod the new scene makes. As the newly regenerated doctor checks to see by the time exactly as he lands – before we cut to Pertwee’s first scene from ‘Spearhead From Space’, collapsing from the TARDIS into Oxley Woods – the TARDIS displays briefly flash back and forth between the 1970s and 1980s .This in itself is a nod towards another long Doctor Who the fan theory, the so-called “UNITED dating controversy.” Although many of the Third Doctor’s adventures appear to be contemporary to his broadcast in the early 1970s, two mentions of dates surrounding the career of one of his closest allies, Alistair Gordon Lethbridge -Stewart – the 1968 Second Doctor story “The Invasion”, which established the existence of UNIT and promoted Lethbridge-Stewart to his famous rank of Brigadier, which was installed around 1979; and the 1983 Fifth Doctor story “Mawdryn Undead”, which says Lethbridge-Stewart retired from UNIT in 1976 – throws continuity into disarray.
There have been several attempts to at least acknowledge, if not exactly fix, the perceived continuity error over the years throughout the TV show itself as well as other media tie-ins (Doctor Who at the time, for the most part, it largely treated the Third Doctor’s time on Earth as occurring in a similar time frame to its issue), so while it’s not the first time there were naked on the screen to the controversy, it is the first time in a while we have seen explicitly addressed, although the answer is, hilariously, to have the TARDIS throw its metaphorical hands in confusion.
What do these changes mean? Doctor Who?
At least in the case of the two stories adapted so far, colors are not the only way to experience these serials – both the original versions of “The Daleks” and “The War Games” are available on physical media. and streaming at this pointSo despite the “confirmations” this last colorization brought with him, anyone who wants to see the original stories sans-embellishment can do so.
While on the surface many of these changes and “retcons” are minor in the grand scheme of things, the fact that the scope of these colorizations has quickly grown between “The Daleks” and “The War Games” beyond embellishment cosmetic and condensation paints. an intriguing figure for what future colors could tweak, since each new colorization brings with it an attempt to make even more connections through Doctor WhoThe vast, and often contradictory, continuity. Just what stories might come next—and what changes might come with them—remains to be seen. As always with Doctor Whotime will tell.
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