The Chronic Rift

I just completed watching the run of season ten featuring John Pertwee.  This season had a lot going on in the Doctor's life, from meeting his younger selves to getting back his ability to travel in time and space to the last appearance of Roger Delgado as the Master to seeing the departure of his beloved Jo Grant.  The story has its up and downs, but overall this is one of the best seasons in the entire series, including the current ones.

"The Three Doctors" - This is still the benchmark by which all future Doctor meetup stories have to match and have failed to do.  The first three Doctors must combine their forces to defeat the crazed exile Time Lord, Omega.  So worth it for the interaction between Pertwee and Troughton.  And even though he wasn't up for the rigors of filming a complete episode, the scenes with Hartnell interacting with the other two are priceless.  Hartnell, though ill, still had a commanding presence on screen.

"Carnival of Monsters" - Robert Holmes is my all time favorite Doctor Who writer.  He can take the most ridiculous premise and make it cool.  This is clearly the case with this story.  We would see it again in a few years with the Tom Baker story, "Nightmare on Eden."  The Doctor and Jo are trapped inside the wiring of a machine that collects and stores various environments for the viewing pleasure of more "civilized" races.  It's a dopey story, but Holmes makes it work with his snappy dialogue and awesome characterization.

"Frontier in Space" - This is one of my all-time favorite stories.  It's straight-up space opera as the Doctor tries to find a peace between the warring Draconians and humans.  What he doesn't realize is that this war is being fueled by the Master and the Ogrons.  Many complain that this story runs too long, but if you watch it as I did, in the original weekly format, it flows nicely.  That's a big problem with many of the Doctor Who serials, people watch it in one sitting and miss out on what was great about the story.

"Planet of the Daleks" - This is a great example of what I just said above.  I always thought of this story as the weakest of the season.  I'm not a huge fan of the Daleks and I thought that Terry Nation simply phoned this in, but I'd never seen it in a weekly format.  In doing this, I got so much more out of it and while I still maintain it's the weakest of the season, it's much better than I originally thought.  Coming off the events of the last story, the Doctor and Jo stumble on a plot by the Daleks to unleash a powerful force on the galaxy.

"The Green Death" - I've seen many episodes of the Pertwee Doctor many times, but for some reason, this gem always escapes my regular viewing.  It might have been that I didn't have a decent copy, but that changed last year when Keith gave me a DVD copy along with "The Three Doctors" and "Carnival of Monsters" for my birthday.  This is a fantastic story doing something Doctor Who doesn't do enough of, commenting on the human condition and how we relate to our world.  The Doctor goes up against a corporation that is contaminating the planet and creating deadly maggots that are about to go into a larve state and begin a metamorphosis into something much more deadlier.