The Deadly Assassin
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| 088 - The Deadly Assassin | |
|---|---|
| Doctor | Tom Baker (Fourth Doctor) |
| Writer | Robert Holmes |
| Director | David Maloney |
| Script editor | Robert Holmes (uncredited) |
| Producer | Philip Hinchcliffe |
| Executive producer(s) | None |
| Production code | 4P |
| Series | Season 14 |
| Length | 4 episodes, 25 mins each |
| Transmission date | October 30–November 20, 1976 |
| Preceded by | The Hand of Fear |
| Followed by | The Face of Evil |
The Deadly Assassin is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts from October 30 to November 20, 1976.
Contents |
[edit] Synopsis
The Doctor answers a summons and finally returns to his homeworld, Gallifrey, seat of the Time Lords. However, when the President of the High Council is assassinated, he becomes the prime suspect, while an old enemy lurks in the shadows, pulling the strings.
[edit] Plot
The Fourth Doctor has arrived on Gallifrey after receiving a mysterious summons from the Time Lords. Along the way, he has a precognitive vision about the President of the Time Lords being murdered.
As soon as the TARDIS materialises within the Gallifreyan Citadel, an alarm sounds and it is surrounded by soldiers. Their leader, Commander Hilred, reports to Castellan Spandrell. Both note that the TARDIS is a type 40, which is no longer in service. Since the arrival is unauthorised, the soldiers are ordered to impound the TARDIS and arrest the occupant. The Doctor overhears this, and realises that the Time Lords did not summon him. Someone has gone to great lengths to set him up.
Spandrell goes to see Coordinator Engin in the Archives Section, leaving Hilred in charge. Hilred and his troops enter the TARDIS, but the Doctor manages to sneak out and make his way to a service lift that leads to the main tower. A soldier is present, and threatens to place the Doctor under arrest. However, the soldier is quickly killed by a phantom-like figure who disappears before the Doctor can get a good look at him. The Doctor sends the lift on its way, in an attempt to fool the soldiers into thinking he has fled deeper into the Citadel. All of this has been observed by the Doctor's old adversary, the Master, who is wearing a black hood that conceals his features. "Predictable as ever, Doctor," he snorts, before returning to the shadows.
Chancellor Goth arrives outside the TARDIS to see the situation for himself. Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor is watching a news broadcast by a reporter he recognises as Runcible (whom the Doctor nicknames "the Fatuous"), a classmate from his days at the Academy. It is revealed that the President is set to retire, and he is to name a successor before he does. Runcible is talking to Cardinal Borusa, one of the Doctor's former teachers. He asks Borusa who the Presidential successor will be, but Borusa brushes him off.
The TARDIS is transmatted to the museum, and the Doctor takes the opportunity to steal a set of traditional Gallifreyan robes to mingle with the crowds. Meanwhile, deep within the archive tower, the Master, revealed to be horribly emaciated, confers with an unseen accomplice. He says that the trap has been set, and they must make sure the Doctor dies quickly.
At the Panopticon, the disguised Doctor briefly converses with Runcible before the outgoing President makes his entrance. The Doctor scans the area and notes a camera stationed on an unguarded catwalk. He also spots a sniper rifle next to the camera. The Doctor fights his way to the catwalk, warning that the President is about to be killed. Unfortunately, for the Doctor, the assassin is actually among the delegates. He pulls out a pistol and shoots the President dead. The crowd sees the Doctor on the catwalk with the rifle and assume he is the assassin.
The captured Doctor insists that he is innocent. Eventually, Spandrell starts to believe him and orders Engin to assist him in an independent investigation. Meanwhile, Goth and Borusa debate over the Doctor's impending trial. Goth notes that the election for a new President will occur in forty-eight hours, and he is eager to see the Doctor executed before then. Borusa, however, wants to ensure that the Doctor receive a fair trial, according to law. The Doctor surprises everyone by invoking Article 17: he will run for President, which will mean he can only be tried if he loses the election. The Master and his assassin are not pleased with this turn of events.
The Doctor returns to the scene of the crime with Spandrell. They discover that the sight on the Doctor's rifle was fixed, making it impossible for this weapon to have killed the President. They conclude that the real assassin would have been caught on tape by a nearby video camera, but when they inspect the camera, they find the shrunken body of the technician inside. The Doctor then realises that the Master is behind this. Runcible attempts to take the tape from the camera to the archives for review, but he is killed by a spear to the back.
The Doctor realises that the Master sent the Doctor the premonition of the assassination through the Matrix, a vast computer which turns thought patterns into virtual reality. He decides to enter the Matrix as a means of tracking the Master. Engin warns him that if he dies in the virtual world, he will die in the real world as well.
The Doctor enters the Matrix and finds himself in a forbidding landscape of crumbling white cliffs and sparse vegetation. The disembodied laughter of some unknown presence echoes off the canyon walls. The Doctor is then engaged in a series of surrealistic sequences. First he nearly walks into the open jaws of a hungry crocodile, who simply disappears into thin air. He is then attacked by a masked samurai warrior and falls from a cliff into unconsciousness. He revives upon an outdoor operating table with a masked surgeon standing over him. The surgeon tries to inject him with a subtance from an extremely large hypodermic needle. The Doctor pushes the surgeon away and runs off to find himself in the midst of a World War I battle. Shell and machine gun fire is heard and gas canisters explode all around. A soldier and his horse stumble out of the smoke wearing gas masks. The Doctor runs bewildered until he comes upon a train track, the rail of which closes upon one of his boots and traps him. A group of three masked men appear and one attempts to run him down with a mine train.
The train disappears before hitting the Doctor and he works his foot free. The Doctor realizes that his surroundings are but an illusion and tries to deny their existence, but passes out from the strain. Recovering consciousness he becomes aware of the two large black eyes of his unknown adversary in the side of a cliff, telling him that he is the creator of this world and that there is no escape. The Doctor, dehydrated and thirsty, hears the sound of running water, but when he attempts to dig into the ground to locate its source he is greeted by a red-nosed clown peering through a window, laughing at him. He is then strafed by machine gun fire by a masked pilot in a biplane, eventually receiving a bullet wound in the leg. The Doctor tries to deny the existence of the wound, and it disappears. However, the disembodied voice of the assassin reminds him that this is his reality, and his rules, and the wound reappears. The Doctor declares that he will then fight the assassin in his reality.
In the real world, Engin tells Spandrell that the Doctor’s adversary is using a lot of energy to maintain the virtual environment, so the Doctor can defeat him if he provides an adequate distraction.
Inside the Matrix, the dry barren virtual environment merges to a thick, sticky jungle, and the assassin soon appears dressed as a big game hunter, a meshed veil obscuring his face. The assassin concludes that the Doctor will need water, and, leaving his backpack behind him, goes off to contaminate the local supply with poison from a small bottle. The Doctor finds the assassin's backpack and takes a grenade and some twine, setting up a makeshift booby trap. The assassin returns and trips it, setting off an explosion which wounds him in the abdomen.
Fearing that his protégé might lose, the Master sends a hypnotised guard to kill the Doctor's physical form.
Back inside the Matrix, the Doctor continues to be hunted through the virtual jungle. Coming to the pool of water, he finds dead, floating fish and the empty bottle and realises that the water has been poisoned. He finds a small amount of uncontaminated water and drinks it through a reed, then uses the reed and some thorns off of a nearby tree to make a blowgun, dipping the ends of the darts into the remnants of the poison from the bottle. The Doctor climbs up into a tree and shoots the assassin in the leg with a dart. The assassin fires his rifle and hits the Doctor in the arm, causing him to fall out of the tree. Ripping his pantleg open to reveal a potentially fatal wound, the assassin injects himself with an antidote while the Doctor again escapes.
In the real world, the hypnotised guard makes his way to the Matrix chamber, but Spandrell manages to shoot him before he can sabotage the Matrix link.
Back in the Matrix, the Doctor has made it to a gas-filled marsh, where the assassin reveals his true identity: Chancellor Goth. Goth tries to shoot the Doctor but ignites the marsh gas, setting himself on fire. Goth falls into the water to extinguish the spreading flames. The Doctor comes out of hiding to confront him, but is caught by surprise by Goth and tackled. Intense hand-to-hand combat ensues, with Goth seeming to gain the upper hand. He attempts to drown the Doctor.
However, the strain of fighting and keeping up the virtual reality overcomes Goth. The Doctor breaks free and hits Goth over the head with a large stick. The Master, realising that Goth has been effectively defeated, decides to hedge his bets and tries to trap the Doctor in the Matrix by overloading the neuron fields, even though this will also kill Goth. Engin manages to get the Doctor out, but Goth is not so lucky. The Master then injects himself with a hypodermic needle.
The Doctor and Spandrell, accompanied by soldiers, manage to make their way to the chamber where the Master and Goth were accessing the Matrix. They find the Master slumped in a chair without a pulse and Goth dying. Goth reveals that he found the Master, near death, on Tersurus. The Master was nearing the end of his twelfth and final regeneration. Goth went along with his schemes mainly for power: he knew the President had no intention of naming him as a successor, but if a new election was held, he would be the front runner. Before he dies, Goth warns that the Master has a doomsday plan.
When Spandrell relates the story to Borusa, the Cardinal orders that a cover story be created to maintain confidence in the Time Lords and their leadership. The official story will be that the Master arrived in secret to assassinate the President, and Goth heroically tracked him down and killed him but perished in the attempt. The charge against the Doctor will be dropped on condition that he leave Gallifrey.
Attempting to piece together what the Master and Goth were planning, the Doctor inquires as to what becoming the President entails. He is told that the President has access to the symbols of office: the Sash and Great Key of Rassilon. As Engin plays the records of the Old Time, which describes how Rassilon found the Eye of Harmony within the "black void", the Doctor realises these objects are not ceremonial. The Doctor inspects the hypodermic needle, and realises that it contained a neural inhibitor. The Master is still alive.
The Doctor, Spandrell, and Engin arrive at the morgue, to find that the Master has revived and killed Hilred. Armed with Hilred’s staser pistol, the Master seizes the Sash from the President's corpse and traps the three in the morgue. The Doctor explains what he has deduced: that the Eye is actually the nucleus of a black hole, an inexhaustible energy source that Rassilon captured to power Gallifrey, and the Sash and Key are its control devices. The Doctor deduces that the Master was planning to steal this energy to gain a new cycle of regenerations. However, if the Eye is disrupted, Gallifrey will be destroyed and a hundred other worlds will be consumed in a chain reaction.
Inside the Panopticon, the Master makes his way to the obelisk containing the Eye. He unhooks the coils that connect it to Gallifrey, and is prepared to access the energy. The Doctor makes his way to the Panopticon via a service shaft. The Citadel begins to quake, and cracks appear in the floor. The Doctor and the Master fight, until the Master loses his footing and falls into a chasm. The Doctor reconnects the coils and saves Gallifrey, although half the city is in ruins and many lives have been lost.
The Doctor is now free to return to his TARDIS. He bids farewell to Borusa, Spandrell, and Engin, but also warns that the Master may not be dead. He had harvested some energy from the obelisk before he was stopped, and may have been able to channel it. As the Doctor’s TARDIS dematerialises, Spandrell and Engin witness the Master sneak into his own TARDIS and make his escape. Spandrell concludes that it is only a matter of time before the two enemies cross paths again.
[edit] Cast
- Doctor Who — Tom Baker
- Borusa — Angus MacKay
- The Master — Peter Pratt
- Chancellor Goth — Bernard Horsfall
- Co-Ordinator Engin — Erik Chitty
- Castellan Spandrell — George Pravda
- Commander Hilred — Derek Seaton
- Gold Usher — Maurice Quick
- Runcible — Hugh Walters
- The President — Llewellyn Rees
- Time Lords — John Dawson, Michael Bilton
- Solis — Peter Mayock
- Voice — Helen Blatch
[edit] Cast notes
Bernard Horsfall guest stars as Chancellor Goth. He had previously appeared as an unnamed Time Lord (credited as 'Time Lord 1') in the serial The War Games prompting some speculation that they were the same character. Other parts played by Horsfall in Doctor Who were Gulliver in The Mind Robber and Taron in Planet of the Daleks.
[edit] In print
| Doctor Who book | |
 |
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| Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin | |
|---|---|
| Series | Target novelisations |
| Release number | 19 |
| Writer | Terrance Dicks |
| Cover artist | Mike Little |
| ISBN | 0 426 11965 7 |
| Release date | 20 October 1977 |
| Preceded by | Doctor Who and the Mutants |
| Followed by | Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang |
A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in October 1977.
[edit] Continuity
- This is the only serial in which the Doctor does not have a companion. This was reportedly at Tom Baker's request as he wanted to try a solo adventure. In addition, some have suggested that the production team hoped to discourage Baker's interest in solo serials, but his enthusiastic reaction to the scripts seems to have belied this.
- Although this story was well-received, the experiment of the Doctor without his companions was never repeated. Robert Holmes later stated how difficult it was to write a script without anyone for the Doctor to share his thoughts and plans with (the character is seen to talk to himself more than usual).
- The planet Tersurus, where Goth says he found the Master, is seen in the 1999 charity spoof Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death. How the Master arrived there in an emaciated state is described in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel.
- The character of Borusa reappears in The Invasion of Time, Arc of Infinity and The Five Doctors. In each subsequent story, the character is played by a different actor, the character having regenerated.
[edit] Notable additions
- This is the first story to state that the number of times that a Time Lord can regenerate is twelve. Oddly, none of the Time Lords who are killed in this story are seen to regenerate, although the Doctor does qualify (in The War Games) that his people can live forever "barring accidents"
- The source of the Time Lords' power and that of the TARDIS is the Eye of Harmony, the nucleus of a black hole that lies beneath the citadel on Gallifrey. The Eye (or a link to it) is seen inside the TARDIS in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie. Whether the Eye survived the destruction of Gallifrey mentioned in the 2005 series is not clear.
- One of the artefacts that controls the Eye of Harmony is the Great Key of Rassilon, a large ebonite rod. Confusingly, there are two other Keys of Rassilon mentioned later in the series. One, also known as the Great Key, whose location is known only to the Chancellor, resembles an ordinary key and is a vital component of the demat gun (The Invasion of Time). The other, simply called the Key of Rassilon, gives access to the Matrix (The Ultimate Foe).
[edit] Production
Working titles for this story included The Dangerous Assassin (which Holmes changed to "deadly" because he thought it "didn't sound right"). The final title is a tautology: a successful assassin must, by definition, be deadly. However, since Time Lords can in general survive death, and the assassin's victims do not, he is perhaps "deadly" in that sense.
[edit] Outside references
- The story was largely inspired by the film and book The Manchurian Candidate, down to the inclusion of the CIA.
- The serial begins with Tom Baker doing a voiceover introduction referring to Time Lords in the third person, over a text crawl similar to that seen in the opening of Star Wars (although The Deadly Assassin predates the premiere of Star Wars by six months). The 1996 television movie, Father's Day, Army of Ghosts and Doomsday are the only other stories so far that begins with a voiceover.
- See also: Simulated reality
[edit] Broadcast and releases
The cliffhanger to Episode 3 — where Goth holds the Doctor's head underwater, drowning him — came in for heavy criticism, particularly from television decency campaigner Mary Whitehouse. She often cited it in interviews as one of the most frightening scenes in Doctor Who, her reasoning being that children would not know if the Doctor survived until the following week and that they would have this strong image in their minds during all that time. Upon future showings of this story, the freeze-frame at the end of this episode was cut, so as to make it less frightening for younger viewers. The VHS video release of the story restored the clip, albeit with a reduction in picture quality
[edit] External links
- The Deadly Assassin episode guide on the BBC website
- The Deadly Assassin at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
- The Deadly Assassin at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
[edit] Reviews
- The Deadly Assassin reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
- The Deadly Assassin reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide
[edit] Target novelisation
- Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
- Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide
- On Target — Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin
| Gallifrey television stories | |
|---|---|
| Second Doctor: | The War Games |
| Third Doctor: | The Three Doctors |
| Fourth Doctor: | The Deadly Assassin • The Invasion of Time |
| Fifth Doctor: | Arc of Infinity • The Five Doctors |
| Sixth Doctor: | The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet • Mindwarp • Terror of the Vervoids • The Ultimate Foe |
| See also: | Time Lord • Eye of Harmony • Gallifrey (audio series) |
| The Master television stories | |
|---|---|
| Third Doctor: | Terror of the Autons • The Mind of Evil • The Claws of Axos • Colony in Space • The Dæmons • The Sea Devils • The Time Monster • Frontier in Space |
| Fourth Doctor: | The Deadly Assassin • The Keeper of Traken • Logopolis |
| Fifth Doctor: | Castrovalva • Time-Flight • The King's Demons • The Five Doctors • Planet of Fire |
| Sixth Doctor: | The Mark of the Rani • The Trial of a Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe |
| Seventh Doctor: | Survival |
| Eighth Doctor: | Doctor Who |
| Minor appearances: | The Caves of Androzani |
| See also: | The Curse of Fatal Death |
