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Doctor Who: The Deadly Assassin: Part One starts as the Doctor (Tom Baker) suffers from premonitions about the assassination of the Time Lord President, the TARDIS materialises on his & the Timelords home planet Gallifrey. There he evades the capture of the Chancellory guards led by Commander Hilred (Derek Seaton) aided by a mysterious person dressed in a black cape, the Doctor sneaks back inside the TARDIS just before it is transducted into the Gallifrey Capitol to a museum as an example of an antiquated Type 40. The Doctor then steals a ceremonial robe & gains entry to the Panopticon where the Time Lord President is due to resign & name his successor but he is shot dead on the Panopticon stage before he has the chance & the Doctor is the prime suspect...

Episode 9 from season 14 this Doctor Who adventure originally aired here in the UK during October 1976 & was the third story from Tom Baker's third season playing the Doctor. Directed by David Maloney this was a significant story in the history of the Doctor, his origins & his race of people. The script by Robert Holmes was originally called The Dangerous Assassin & there are various notable aspects to it. Firstly it's the first & only Doctor Who story not to feature a companion after Sarah Jane Smith left during the previous story The Hand of Fear (1976), the Doctor's next companion would be Leela who would be introduced during the following story The Face of Evil (1976). Secondly The Deadly Assassin really tries to give the Doctor some background, who he is, where he came from & what his people are like. Set on his home planet of Gallifrey which had only been seen in glimpses before in stories such as The War Games (1969) staring Patrick Troughton from season six & The Three Doctors (1972) staring Jon Pertwee, before the Timelords had been portrayed as almost god like beings which is totally undermined & undone in The Deadly Assassin. Generally speaking most fans of the classic series seem to like The Deadly Assassin which is fine & I have no problem in saying that it's very enjoyable but it's not a story that I personally consider a classic & can name many, many Doctor Who stories which I much prefer. I actually quite like the Doctor as a mysterious figure, as a renegade alien fighting for good & stopping evil so I am in two minds about The Deadly Assassin. On the one hand it's good but on the other it devalues everything that came before & after a little bit. Just my opinion but I'm sticking with it, so sue me.

Entirely studio bound The Deadly Assassin has good production values, the sets are good & the Timelord robes & headdress attire is pretty impressive although the Prydonian Timelord seal emblem seen in The Deadly Assassin is the same design as the Vogan's emblem in Revenge of the Cybermen (1975) from season twelve due to cost cutting. Strangely this opening episode of The Deadly Assassin lasts for little over twenty minutes including opening & closing titles rather than the standard twenty five like the rest of this story & the Tom Baker era in general.

The Deadly Assassin: Part One is a good opening episode with a fair amount going on & a story based around the politics of another planet, it's good entertaining & intriguing fun & well worth a watch.

(Note: A Review Of The Four Episode Serial)

The Deadly Assassin.

It's the story that changed Doctor Who forever. Coming nearly half-way through its original run, it was the story that forever altered the show and its mythology. Writer Robert Holmes (along with producer Philip Hinchcliffe and the production team) crafted four episodes that remain among the most watched and talked about it in the history of the show. Looking at the story, it's not surprising.

Deadly Assassin is the story that gave us the Time Lords as we know them, after all. For six years, they'd been non-existent. At the end of the Troughton era, they had arrived on the scene very lordy and powerful. They had maintained that presence throughout the Pertwee era and into earlier seasons with Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor. They had been like a mountain range, magnificent and looming but distant. In the summer of 1976, that all changed in a heartbeat.

To say this story changed everything would be an understatement. If it involves the Time Lord, chances are it came from Holmes' scripts. Be it Rassilon as the founder of their society, the Eye of Harmony, the Doctor's TARDIS designated a Type 40, even the twelve regeneration limit (which caused fandom so much consternation a few years ago) all come from here. That's also true of design and costumes as Roger Murray-Leach's Seal of Rassilon and James Acheson's high collars became the definitive presentation of the Time Lords. The sense of them as an isolated, even dull people watching over the rest of the universe presented for the rest of the series which informs New Who decades on can all be found here.

Not that it was apparent back in the summer of seventy-six. It is only in retrospect that it's visible for at the time the burgeoning fandom hated it. Jan Vincent Rudzki's now (in)famous review of the story crying out "What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?" sums up reactions to it at the time rather nicely. Time has shown how important the story was to be as generations of writers across different media have used it as the basis of how the Doctor's people should be. Concerns over its portrayal would give way to it being the norm, perhaps demonstrating how what is once radical becomes commonplace?

The funny thing is that much of that is window dressing. The references that become all important aren't plot points but throwaway lines. The various artifacts of Rassilon and the presentation of the Time Lords, yes, but as part of the larger plot and story. All these things serve a purpose in context: telling the story set out in Holmes' script.

That story is a thriller. Forget all the lore: The Deadly Assassin is a thriller first and foremost, albeit a sci-fi one. The 1970s was the era of the political and conspiracy thriller from The Three Days Of The Condor to The Parallax View and All The President's Men. It was the era that spawned theories about the JFK assassination in the wake of Watergate and the revelations of nefarious government activities in the United States. Britain was no exception to that and the decade was to spawn questions about efforts to remove Harold Wilson from Downing Street or how much remained hidden about former Soviet spies in high places. It was the birth of the age of conspiracy and here's Doctor Who in the middle of it all.

When the conspiracy thriller angle comes up, it's customary to mention The Manchurian Candidate. Richard Condon's 1959 novel and its 1962 film adaptation are classics of the genre, of that there is no doubt. The film's influence is apparent in the opening episode especially as the Doctor races to stop the President's assassination. The portrayal of Runcible and the media coverage also owes more than a debt to Manchurian Candidate. Of course, the Master's presence as a villain with mind control powers would further seem to prove the point.

It isn't the most powerful or only influence on the story, however. The aforementioned JFK assassination hangs over the story with many echoes throughout from a second gunman, a framed assassin with a misaligned weapon, murdered witnesses, and missing evidence. While Manchurian Candidate informs the opening of the story, the basic plot owes it debt to a much older thriller. The plotline of a man returning to his native land and soon framed for murder while trying to foil a plot to destroy it comes not from Richard Condon. It's the plot of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps which was published in 1915 and famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. The Hitchcock influence is especially apparent in the Matrix sequences with its nightmare-scape including a biplane chase. That sequence also draws on the short story The Most Dangerous Game, further demonstrating the influences on the story are far more than a single source. What Holmes does is bring them together as perhaps only Doctor Who can.

Even with the passage of four decades, The Deadly Assassin remains a unique story in the annals of Doctor Who. It is a story that singlehandedly reshaped the show's mythology and the origins of its lead character. On a pure story level, it drew on various genre elements and recent events to present a science-fiction political thriller. It stands then as a prime example of what Doctor Who can do and why it's lasted more than fifty years.

For the first time in the history of the programme, the Doctor finds himself without a companion. (Sarah Jane had made her final appearance in the previous story and Leela would not appear until the next). The serial, in fact, has an all-male cast without a single female presence. It would appear that the Time Lords have a patriarchal system of government with Time Ladies excluded from the higher echelons of power.

"The Deadly Assassin" is set on Gallifrey, the Doctor's home planet, to which he has returned following a mysterious summons from the Time Lords. The plot, which owes something to the film "The Manchurian Candidate", involves a plan by the Doctor's old enemy, the Master, to assassinate the President of the Time Lords. The Master may also have at least one ally among the planet's ruling elite. (This was the first time the Master had appeared since the Third Doctor adventure, "Frontier in Space", and would be the last until the penultimate Fourth Doctor story "The Keeper of Traken" from five years later.) As in some of his other scripts for the programme, such as "The Sun Makers", scriptwriter Robert Holmes takes the opportunity to use "Doctor Who" to comment on real- world politics. This is particularly clear at the end where (much to the Doctor's disgust) high-ranking Time Lord politicians concoct an untrue "official version" of the events surrounding the assassination in order to prevent some unwelcome facts from coming to light. This may have been Holmes' comment on the assassination of President Kennedy, which has also given rise to many conspiracy theories.

This was also the story in which it was first established that a Time Lords are mortal and can only regenerate 12 times; previously it had been assumed by most viewers that they could go on regenerating indefinitely. It is notable, however, that although several Time Lords are killed in this serial, none are actually seen to regenerate. Are we to assume that they had all already used up their twelve lives? Or did Holmes simply ignore this point for the sake of the story? A plot involving assassination would make no sense if the dead President could simply rise from the floor in a new body and continue as before. (As I was saying before I was so rudely murdered……)

This is one serial where the series' famously parsimonious budget becomes all too apparent. The Time Lords, it would appear are a powerful race of beings, and also a conservative one, with a system of government which is not only patriarchal but also hierarchical, with several ranks within their leadership. (Besides a President we are also introduced to officials with the titles "Castellan", "Commander", "Coordinator", "Chancellor" and "Cardinal"). A ceremonial occasion such as the resignation of one President and the nomination of his successor should be a splendid piece of pageantry, but of course the BBC did not have the wherewithal to create such an occasion, and the ceremony we actually see is a very low-key affair, set indoors in a bare room. Even the formal robes of office look tatty. As a result we do not get any sense of a society with its own distinct culture and institutions. At the end of the story we learn that although the Doctor has managed to foil the Master's dastardly plan to destroy Gallifrey, half of the planet's capital city is in ruins and many lives have been lost. All we see of this disastrous event, however, is a few bricks falling off a wall without hitting anyone.

The serial, however, also has its good points; the plot is an ingenious one and the programme-makers manage to generate a good deal of suspense, with some particularly effective end-of-episode cliff-hangers. The story has been described as "politically literate and cynical", and it certainly shattered my previous vision of the Time Lords as being (with the exception of a few bad apples like the Master) a wise, benign, almost god-like race. Clearly, technically advanced races can be just as self-seeking and back-stabbing as any humans.