A dandy, a clown and a zoom call walk into a TARDIS…
Made as the series’ tenth anniversary special, The Three Doctors is both a milestone and a pivot point, the story that saw the Doctor’s enforced exile to Earth – a production decision as much as a narrative one – lifted and gives the programme back its freedom to roam time and space. The Third Doctor’s tenure had started with a bold new format – in glorious technicolour – but despite the production team’s heroic creative efforts, the show was beginning to bridle against its earthly constraints and yearned to wander the cosmos once more.
It begins, as many Pertwee-era stories do, at UNIT HQ, where cosmic phenomena have a habit of popping by uninvited. When a strange psychedelic CSO oil spill appears and starts abducting scientists, soldiers and even poor old Bessie, it’s clear the universe has come a-knocking – but which universe exactly? The Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney), gamely trying to manage what he still insists is a military outfit rather than an interdimensional travel agency, looks to the Doctor for help – only to find the situation escalating far beyond even the Doctor’s experience. Faced with a threat even they can’t counter, the Time Lords reluctantly bend their own laws and pull the Doctor’s previous selves out of the timestream to help. It’s a clever conceit – both from a narrative and production standpoint – and one that allows the series for the first time to place all three Doctors into the same bizarrely warped landscape: a bleak antimatter world of quarries, BBC resources and a good deal of nerve.
Although it has quite a lot to juggle, what with the Time Lords, multiple Doctors and a big villain, The Three Doctors doesn’t overlook this era’s more ensemble approach. The Brigadier and UNIT get to come along, not just for the ride, but to give the undercurrent of bemused exasperation that anchors the flights of fancy and fallibility of the visual effects in something character driven. Everyone gets just enough to do – and while the Brig may spend most of it grumbling about the decor, his instinct to treat everything from antimatter traps to pocket universes as a logistical problem gives the story a grounded counterpoint to the multiversal hijinks.
Of course, overshadowing everything is Omega – not merely the villain of the piece, but a walking lore dump, a foundational figure in Gallifreyan history, given theatrical, if occasionally hammy form by Stephen Thorne. There’s a tragic, operatic quality to Omega’s bluster and bombast and the bleak irony of the revelation of the nature of his existence is a bold tonal swing in a story otherwise intended to be a celebration of the series’ 10th anniversary. Omega is revealed to be the ultimate Cartesian villain: he thinks, therefore he is – and therefore so is everything else. His realm exists only because he believes it does, a universe conjured from sheer mental effort. But that same principle has, unknown to him, become his prison too. Omega can shape reality at will, yet cannot will himself back into the universe that abandoned him. It’s not his power that undoes him – it’s the unbearable contradiction of absolute control and total isolation. His rage isn’t madness; it’s metaphysical grief. The mask, the voice, the thunderous declarations – they’re all camouflage for the terrible realisation that he’s the only thing in his world that isn’t quite real. His fate – undone not by violence but by the devastating collapse of his own assumptions – feels genuinely mythic in a way the paucity of the effects can’t really diminish.
That The Three Doctors had such a strong villain is a welcome bonus, because the selling point of the adventure is, of course, the trio of Doctors sharing the screen together for the first time and the story probably would have emerged as a fan favourite regardless of who the bad guy was. William Hartnell’s failing health meant he could only appear via pre-filmed inserts – reduced to a handful of tart interjections from the Time Lord equivalent of a Zoom call over patchy Wi-Fi. It’s a neat production trick, for sure, and the story never feels unbalanced or patched together because of it, largely because what Hartnell does get to do is perfectly pitched and leaves the limelight open for the iconic double act of the 2nd and 3rd Doctors. Patrick Troughton picks up right where he left off, with an effortless performance that crackles with charm. His verbal sparring with Pertwee’s more imperious Third Doctor remains the story’s best feature – not just for the comedy, but for the way it lets us see the Doctor’s different selves collide without collapsing. Their repartee is one of the story’s undoubted highlights, setting the template for multi-doctor stories forever more.
The Three Doctors isn’t without its scruffy edges, but they’re mostly a byproduct of the period rather than failings unique to the story. The antimatter bubble monsters – bulbous, slow-moving and faintly bemused – may not rank among the programme’s most menacing creations, but they serve their purpose with a kind of lumbering dignity, like McDonald’s Grimace with a particularly virulent skin condition. The production design in Omega’s domain is ambitious even when it overreaches, and while a few pacing issues creep in across the four episodes, the structure never collapses under its own weight. If the story falters anywhere, it’s in holding back from exploring Omega more fully – he’s arguably too grand for the screen time he’s given, a towering figure slightly squeezed by a conventional format. His impact can be measured in the lingering expectation that he was far too good and far too big an adversary to leave as one-and-done. Of course, return he would – albeit only, apparently, for significant anniversaries, although future appearances would struggle to tap into the Shakespearean fury and tragedy of the figure the way The Three Doctors does.
Happily, The Three Doctors ends up becoming more than the sum of its impressive parts. It’s an exercise in nostalgia, yes – but also one that reshaped the show’s identity, further lifting the veil on Gallifrey and The Time Lords and changing the nature of the show forever. The Three Doctors marks the point at which the show starts deliberately building a mythology, setting in motion the background storyline of Gallifrey and the Time Lords that would ebb and flow through every future era of the show.
It’s a modest epic, fuelled more by affection than ambition, that quietly reaffirms Doctor Who’s greatest strength: the ability to grow older without growing stale – and to meet every new version of yourself with a mixture of exasperation, curiosity, and the occasional begrudging respect.
