When the BBC aired a special, colorized edit of “The Daleks” to celebrate Doctor Who‘s 60th anniversary last year, aside from the actual edit down to a shortened runtime, the serial was largely left as-is, aside from a cute trailer at the end to tease the next 60 years of adventures in time and space. With its second take—this time on Patrick Troughton’s iconic exit as the Second Doctor in “The War Games”—things got very different. Very different.
Airing on BBC 4 in the UK earlier this week, the special colorized TV movie take on Doctor Who‘s final black-and-white story—taking a four-hour saga and trimming it down to just 90 minutes—took the opportunity to weave in answers to questions Who fans have had for years at this point, creating something of an insane checklist of pointed references and acknowledgements to the show’s future that are now, in some ways, definitive parts of Doctor Who‘s ever-evolving continuity. Here’s three of the biggest tweaks and changes added to the proceedings.
The War Chief and the Master
Arguably the biggest theory played with, “The War Games” in color made in particular one connection between the original story and Doctor Who‘s immediate future much more explicit: that one of the serial’s major antagonists, the War Chief, was none other than an incarnation of the Master himself. Throughout the War Chief’s appearances in the colorization, the newly updated soundtrack incorporated contemporary Who composer Murray Gold’s iconic “Master Vainglorious” theme—and when the War Chief is executed by the Time Lords upon their arrival in the climax of “The War Games,” you can even briefly hear the telltale sound of Doctor Who‘s modern regeneration SFX as his body is being dragged away.
While it was always established in the original story that the War Chief was a renegade Time Lord, for years ancillary material and novelizations have bandied back and forth over the idea that he is an early incarnation of the Time Lord that would eventually take on the mantle of Master (the implication now being that he did so initially with Roger Delgado’s incarnation of the character). Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, who wrote “The War Games,” went on to note in their own Doctor Who Target episode novelizations that the Master and the Doctor were the only renegade Time Lords to ever flee Gallifrey with their own TARDIS, implying that the War Chief and the Master were, indeed, one and the same. But later original novels as part of the Virgin New Adventures books would also treat the War Chief as a distinct character, one who survived the events of “The War Games” and would eventually regenerate into different incarnations, as would Big Finish audio dramas that established earlier incarnations of the Master separate from the War Chief.
The Trial and the Faces of the Doctor
Once particularly random alteration in the climax of the story comes during the Time Lords’ trial of the Doctor. After concluding in agreement with the Doctor that there were many perils across the universe worth confronting in spite of their non-intervention policies (embellished here from the original with extra clips from other Doctor Who stories), the Time Lords still choose to punish the Doctor with exile on Earth and a forced regeneration, offering the Doctor several choices of potential visages. However, in the colorization, these faces—all of which the Doctor still refuses for various reasons—are no longer just random unknown identities. Instead, the Doctor is offered the chance to regenerate into the faces of several of their future incarnations beyond the third Doctor, as the Time Lords project images that we know are in fact the Twelfth (rejected as “too old”), Tenth (“too skinny”), Thirteenth (“too young”), and Eleventh (simply described as “that won’t do at all!”) Doctors.
This one is a particularly weird addition, considering there wasn’t really any particularly theorization or desire that these faces had a particular connection to the Doctor beyond the Time Lords offering them up to him in the moment. It’s not like Doctor Who hasn’t explored the idea of the Doctor having incarnations beyond ones we were already familiar with—we’ve had plenty of examples from the infamous faces glimpsed in “The Brains of Morbius” to contemporary Who‘s addition of incarnations like John Hurt’s “War Doctor” between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors, or Jo Martin’s “Fugitive Doctor” and other incarnations prior to William Hartnell’s Doctor. But it’s a funny joke in the moment that the Doctor has little desire to have any of several faces we know they eventually end up with later on in life.
The Second Doctor’s Regeneration (and UNIT Dating)
“The War Games” colorization climaxes with an almost completely new addition, using rotoscoped footage of Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee’s Doctors to establish the actual moment of the second Doctor’s regeneration. Here, after the trippy sequence of the Doctor’s face contorting across a shadowy void from the original serial, the action cuts to inside the TARDIS, where, sitting in a chair as he hears flashes of his departed companions, the Doctor braces himself as he glows with regenerative energy, transforming into his next incarnation. As we recently covered, the second Doctor’s off-screen regeneration has been covered in other ancillary material outside of the show itself (no Time Lord-sanctioned scarecrow execution squads this time, alas), but now the moment itself has been brought in line with depictions of regeneration as seen in Doctor Who‘s modern era, for better or worse.
But that canonization isn’t the only fannish nod the new scene makes. As the newly regenerated Doctor checks to see when exactly he’s landed—before we cut to Pertwee’s first scene from “Spearhead From Space,” collapsing out of the TARDIS into the Oxley Woods—the TARDIS’ displays briefly flicker back and forth between the years 1970 and 1980. This in and of itself is a nod towards another long-running Doctor Who fan theory, the so-called “UNIT Dating Controversy.” Although many of the Third Doctor’s adventures appear to be contemporary to their broadcast in the early 1970s, two mentions of dates surrounding the career of one of his closest allies, Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart—the 1968 Second Doctor story “The Invasion,” which establishes the existence of UNIT and promoted Lethbridge-Stewart to his famous rank of Brigadier, which is set around 1979; and the 1983 Fifth Doctor story “Mawdryn Undead,” which states that Lethbridge-Stewart retired from UNIT in 1976—throw continuity into disarray.
There’s been several attempts to at least acknowledge, if not exactly fix, the perceived continuity error over the years across both the TV show itself as well as other tie-in media (Doctor Who at the time, for the most part, largely treated the Third Doctor’s time on Earth as taking place in a similar timeframe to its broadcast), so while this isn’t the first time there’s been nods on-screen to the controversy, it’s the first time in a while we’ve seen it explicitly addressed, even if the answer is, hilariously, to have the TARDIS throw its metaphorical hands up in confusion.
What Do These Changes Mean for Doctor Who?
At least in the case of both stories adapted so far so far, the colorizations are not the only way to experience these serials—both the original versions of “The Daleks” and “The War Games” are available on physical media and streaming at this point, so despite the “confirmations” this latest colorization has brought with it, anyone who wants to see the original stories sans-embellishment can do so.
While on the surface a lot of these changes and “retcons” are minor in the grand scheme of things, the fact that the scope of these colorizations has quickly grown between “The Daleks” and “The War Games” beyond cosmetic embellishment and condensation paints an intriguing picture for what future colorizations could tweak, as each new colorization brings with it an attempt to make even more connections across Doctor Who‘s vast, and often contradictory, continuity. Just what stories could come next—and what changes could come with them—remains to be seen. As always with Doctor Who, time will tell.
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