The Three Doctors

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Site added: 29 December 2004 · Last updated: 12 July 2007

Made to mark the series’ tenth anniversary, Doctor Who: The Three Doctors finds Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor teaming-up with the Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell incarnations to battle a universe-threatening foe.

There is but a brief Dalek appearance in this episode, but it remains an all-time favourite, uniting the Doctor’s first three incarnations together in one adventure. William Hartnell, who played the first Doctor, was by this time too ill to play a full part in the story, so he was seen only on a video screen – but the iteraction between the second and third Doctors is wonderful to watch.

Omega (played by Stephen Thorne) is the Time Lord who gave his race the power necessary for time travel. Long presumed dead he is actually trapped in an anti-matter universe inside a black hole, and is scheming an epic revenge.

Set in UNIT HQ, Omega’s domain and a chalk pit, Bob Baker and David Martin’s yarn is both nonsensical and more wildly ambitious than the BBC effects unit could possibly visualise. This is so much the case that the best moments come with the metaphysically chilling scene in which Omega is unmasked, and in the bickering rivalry between Pertwee and Troughton.

Sadly Hartnell was seriously ill with arteriosclerosis, so his brief scenes were all taped in a day and played on a monitor in the TARDIS, the reason given that the First Doctor is trapped in a ‘time eddy’.

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