While the BBC aired a special, color edit of “The Daleks” to celebrate Doctor WhoThe 60th anniversary last year, without the original planning down to a short running time, the series was left largely as it is, except for a nice trailer at the end to tease the next 60 years of adventure in time and space. In its second take—this time with Patrick Troughton’s outing as the Second Doctor on “War Games”—things have been very different. A lot different.
Broadcast on BBC 4 in the UK earlier this week, a color TV special will begin Doctor WhoThe final black-and-white story—which took the four-hour saga and cut it down to 90 minutes—took the opportunity to piece together the answers to the questions. WHO fans have been for many years at this point, making something of an absurd checklist of specific references and thanks for the future of the show now, in a way, specific parts of the game. Doctor WhoContinuity that appears regularly. Here are three major tweaks and changes added to the process.
War Chief and Commander
Undoubtedly, the biggest theory played with, “War Games” in color is made mainly by a single connection between the original story and Doctor WhoThe immediate future is very clear: that one of the main antagonists of the serial, the Warlord, was none other than the reincarnation of King himself. In every appearance of the Warlord in the color application, the newly updated song is combined with modernity. WHO Composer Murray Gold’s famous theme “Master Vainglorious”—and when the War Chief is killed by the Time Lords at the climax of “War Games,” you can even briefly hear the defining sound of Doctor WhoModern SFX as his body is dragged.
While it was always established in the original story that the War Chief was a renegade Time Lord, over the years the sequels and novels have gone back and forth with the idea that he is the first incarnation of the Time Lord to eventually take up the mantle. of Master (which is now said to have done originally with Roger Delgado’s incarnation of the character). Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, who wrote “War Games,” went on to comment themselves Doctor Who The episodic novels purported that the Master and the Doctor were the only Time Lords ever to escape from Gallifrey with its TARDIS, meaning that the Warlord and the Master were indeed one and the same. But later original novels as part of Virgin New Adventures the books would also treat the Warlord as a separate character, one who survived the events of “War Games” and would eventually be reincarnated in a different body, just as the Big Finish audio dramas would have established the King’s previous incarnations apart from the Warlord.
The Case and the Doctor’s Face
There was an unplanned change in the climax of the story during the Doctor’s trial of the Time Lords. Having concluded in agreement with the Doctor that there were many dangers in the universe to be faced despite the policies of non-intervention (embellished here from the original with additional clips from others. Doctor Who stories), the Time Lords still choose to punish the Doctor with exile to Earth and forced regeneration, giving the Doctor several options for possible visas. However, in coloring, this face—all of which the Doctor rejected for various reasons—is no longer just a random identity. Instead, the Doctor is given the opportunity to regenerate himself in the face of many of his future incarnations beyond the third Doctor, as depicted in the Time Lords project we they know in fact the Twelfth (rejected as “too old”), the Tenth (“too young”), the Thirteenth (“too young”), and the Eleventh (described simply as “that will never happen!”) Doctors.
This is an odd addition, considering there was no idea or desire for these faces to have a special connection with the Doctor beyond the Time Lords giving them at the time. It’s not the same Doctor Who hasn’t explored the idea of the Doctor becoming more fleshed out than we’re used to—we’ve had plenty of examples from the evil face depicted in “The Brains of Morbius” to today. WHO‘s addition of incarnations like John Hurt’s “War Doctor” between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors, or Jo Martin’s “Fugitive Doctor” and other incarnations before William Hartnell’s Doctor. But it’s a funny joke when the Doctor no longer has the desire to have the few faces we know they eventually end up with later in life.
Regeneration of the Second Doctor (and UNIT Dating)
The “War Games” colorization culminates in an entirely new addition, using rotoscoped footage of Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee’s Doctor to capture the true moment of the second Doctor’s regeneration. Here, after the triple sequence of the Doctor’s face shifting in shadowy space from the first series, the action reaches inside the TARDIS, where, sitting in a chair as he hears the flashes of his companions, the Doctor braces himself as he shines. with regenerative powers, transforming into his next incarnation. As we recently covered, the second Doctor’s on-screen reimagining has been included in some ancillary material other than the show itself (no Time Lord-scarecrow team-up confirmed at this point, alas), but now the moment itself has been delivered in its own right. a display of renewal as seen in the Doctor Who‘s the modern era, for better or for worse.
But that canonization isn’t the only nod to the new scene. As the newly regenerated Doctor checks to see when sure enough—before we get to Pertwee’s first scene from “Spearhead From Space,” exiting the TARDIS to Oxley Woods—the TARDIS shows have been on and off throughout the 1970s and 1980s. nodding his head in the other direction for a long time Doctor Who fan theory, the so-called “UNIT Dating Controversy.” While many of the Third Doctor’s adventures seem to date to their run in the early 1970s, there are two mentions of the dates surrounding the career of one of his closest associates, Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart—the 1968 Second Doctor story “The Invasion,” which establishes the existence of the UNIT also promoted Lethbridge-Stewart to his prestigious rank of Brigadier, which is placed around. 1979; and the 1983 Fifth Doctor story “Mawdryn Undead,” which states that Lethbridge-Stewart retired from UNIT in 1976—disrupts continuity.
There have been a few attempts to at least acknowledge, if not outright correct, the perceived continuity error over the years in all of TV shows itself and other inclusive media (Doctor Who At the time, for the most part, the Third Doctor’s time on Earth held the same amount of time during its broadcast), so although it’s not the first time there’s been a nod on screen to this argument, it’s the first time in a while that we’ve seen it clearly addressed, even if the answer is, ironically, the TARDIS throwing its symbolic hands up in confusion.
What These Changes Mean Doctor Who?
At least in the case of both stories adapted so far, colorization is not the only way to experience these serials—both the original versions of “The Daleks” and “War Games” are available on social media and streamed here. point, so despite the “validation” this recent coloring has brought, anyone who wants to see the real news sans-embellishment can do so.
Although many of these changes and “retcons” are minor in the grand scheme of things, the fact that the scope of this coloring has grown rapidly between “The Daleks” and “War Games” goes beyond cosmetic embellishments and thick paint. It’s an interesting picture of what future color installations may be capable of, as each color installation brings an effort to make more connections across the board. Doctor WhoIt’s a big, and often controversial, thing to do. What stories may follow—and what changes they may have—remains to be seen. As always with Doctor Whotime will tell.
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