Doctor Who: The Time Warrior (1973)
Anyone who says that plots from the old Doctor Who series are slow-moving and stodgy in comparison to the stories featured in the revival of the show should look to “The Time Warrior” for correction; the old series could move quickly when it wanted to. Here we have an alien crash-landing in medieval England; the aforementioned alien warrior entering into an agreement with and providing advanced weaponry for the local feudal lord; scientists going missing from the twentieth century; and the Doctor and UNIT getting involved. All in the first nine minutes.
By a complete coincidence I watched this serial not long after the new series tried its hand at a Sontaran episode. The comparison smiled on the original. For just one aspect of this, compare the characters who align themselves with the Sontarans in the respective stories. “The Time Warrior” gives us Irongron, one of the series’ best villains: a powerful and ruthless feudal lord whose rich and witty dialog is the equal of any fictional bad guy. The new series gives us a whiny, annoying and easily-bamboozled teenager. Old school Who wins this round.
Getting back to “The Time Warrior”, this serial never seems to rate very highly with fans, but I’ve never been quite sure why. This story features two things that writer Robert Holmes was particularly apt at creating: excellent dialog and memorable, fun characters. The plot itself is a really nice blending of the historic setting being touched by the fantastic. And it’s an extremely intelligent script. Even with all the different factions and characters, everyone’s motivation makes perfect sense. While the story and dialog are often very much over the top, everything still logically fits together.
As for the DVD itself, the first thing I must report is that the picture and sound quality are excellent. This won’t come as news to purchasers of earlier cleaned-up Doctor Who DVDs, but the image quality seemed especially good this time. Kudos to the Restoration Team.
The DVD commentary with star Elisabeth Sladen, script editor Terrance Dicks and executive producer Barry Letts is a lot of fun and informative although it (and the production note subtitles) fizzle out towards the end. I, for one, was amused that even though production ended for this serial over thirty-four years ago, Barry Letts is still in charge of the other two participants.
While I was watching, I started jotting down memorable lines of dialog to use for the title of this review. I was forced to stop fairly early on for fear of simply copying the entire script verbatim into my notebook. I have no doubt that if you were to print out this script, pin it to the wall and then throw ten darts at random, you’d end up hitting at least nine excellent quotes. If you want to see how the old series got by with great writing and no money, look no further.
This review was originally posted in July 2008.
