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UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Task Force) headquarters is
apparently under attack by an alien being from a black hole, homing in
on our time & space travelling hero Doctor Who (Jon Pertwee), UNIT's
scientific advisor (at least concerning such agendas as alien invasion).
So he locks himself, along with companion Jo Grant (Katy Manning) &
Seargeat Benton (John Levene) into his time machine TARDIS (Time And
Relative Dimensions In Space - a machine that can transport him almost
everywhen, everywhere, but looks exactly like a London Police Box ...
& it's bigger on the inside than on the outside). But the good
Doctor's own race, the Timelords, are also under attack from that same
being, & they come to the conclusion, that the only man who can help
them now is the Doctor. But for a case as grave as this one, one Doctor
might not be enough, so they summon a previous incarnation of the Doctor
(Patrick Troughton, henceforth called Second Doctor) & have him
materialize to aide our Doctor (the Pertwee-version, henceforth called Third
Doctor for reasons to be explained later). When that still doesn't
help, they even summon an even earlier version of the Doctor (William
Hartnell, henceforth called First Doctor) to gieve the 2 of them
pointers via tv-screen. So, it is soon decided the Third Doctor has to
face the alien being, & soon he - along with Jo Grant - is sucked to
a planet inside the black hole, where they meet up with scientist Tyler
(Rex Robinson), who was sucked to this place earlier, their car Bessie
(also sucked there earlier), & are soon abducted by the aliens
inhabitating the planet. But the monster back on earth is not inactive
in the meantime, soon sucking all of Unit's headquarters (& that's a
pretty big mansion) to the planet too, so along with our Third Doctor,
Jo & Tyler, soon the Second Doctor, Seargeant Benton, Brigadier
Letheridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) & Ollis (Laurie Webb), a
gamekeeper of little importance to the plot are prisoner to the superior
alien intelligence on the planet inside the black hole. Soon, our
Doctors find out that the whole alien world inside the black hole just
has to be an illusion conjured up by the alien, who is in fact Omega
(Stephen Thorne), an inventor who actually gave the Timelords the power
of timetravelling in the first place but who many millenia ago
disappeared in a supernova. But not only that, Omega himself has also
long ago ceased to be as a corporeal being & now only exists by his
own will, making him immortal - & he wants deadly revenge on the
Timelords, thinking they have abandoned & betrayed him, & should
he have to destroy the whole universe in order to destroy them, little
does it matter to him. But somehow our 2 Doctors manage to infuriate the
superior intelligence of Omega enough to find his vulnerable spot &
with the emerging energy turn the black hole into a supernova, seasing
Omega to be & returning everything to normal. By &
large, when Jon Pertwee took the lead in the Doctor Who
television series (1970 - 1974), the scripts were - despite (or because
of) the occasional over-the-top idea - solid science fiction, that
actually made sense within the parameters of the genre, & they were more
mature than the stories given to his predecessors in the lead, Patrick
Troughton or William Hartnell. This self-congratulatory episode however
is rather an exception to the rule: Despite the occasional good idea
(e.g. a being only willing himself to be), the script is very
muddled, not really thought through, & everything is further
complicated by the fact of the many elements that (for some reason) just
had to be integrated into the plot: It just borders on the impossible to combine all the 3
Doctors, plus Jo, Benton & the Brigadier, plus the Doc's car Bessie,
plus UNIT headquarters plus an alien world inside a black hole, into a
comprehensive, satisfying plot. Some of Jon Pertwee's & Patrick
Troughton's antagonistic dialogues are pretty amusing, though. William Hartnell, by the way, was
supposed to have a bigger role in this one, but a grave illness
prevented him from doing more than sitting in a studio & reading
lines from a teleprompter. This would be his last tv-appearence before
his death.
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