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“All right, I’ll confess… I confess you’re a bigger idiot that I thought you were.”

Call me a bluff old traditionalist, but the fourteenth season of Doctor Who remains my very favorite. With four stories I would consider all-time classics, and only one sorta-stinker, this year in the life of Who is the very definition of “firing on all cylinders.” It features Tom Baker at his magnificent best, producer Phillip Hinchcliffe and Script Editor Robert Holmes at the height of their confidence and quality control, and production values that, while generally modest by most “sci-fi” standards, are still decently-funded, downright lush at times and, perhaps most importantly, generally do not try to over-reach their grasp. Beyond merely producing great stories, this team also made their most permanent mark on the Who mythos with this, the prototype of all Gallifrey stories yet to come, and established many of the “rules” of Time Lord society that even the shiny-sexy new BBC series still lives by. Written by Holmes himself – who is widely considered to be Doctor Who’s finest scribe – “The Deadly Assassin” (1976) is a bit clunky in spots, but sublime nonetheless.

En route to his home planet of Gallifrey, the Doctor (Tom Baker) receives a mental projection of the assassination of the standing President of the High Council of Time Lords. Once he arrives, he is accused of the crime himself, and uses a legal technicality to avoid execution. He deduces that someone has been using Gallifrey’s powerful computer Matrix to manipulate events, and has himself wired up to the machine, entering a bizarre computer-based reality in order to unveil the ultimate villain of the piece: his old enemy the Master (Peter Pratt), now a shriveled, skeletal husk draped in a shroud, bent on destroying Gallifrey and revitalizing his physical form.

Among the “lore” introduced in this story is the limit of twelve regenerations per Time Lord; Rassilon as the founder of Time Lord society, the Doctor’s TARDIS being referred to as a “Type 40,” the introduction of the Doctor’s old schoolmaster Cardinal Borusa, and the use of the Gallifreyan symbol, a bit of Celtic-inspired design work that was in fact previously used in the story “Revenge of the Cybermen” (12.5, 1976) as a symbol of the planet Voga. This general portrayal of Gallifrey will carry through for the rest of the classic series, and beyond.

Meanwhile, the Master – the default villain of the Jon Pertwee era, where he was played by the wonderful Roger Delgado – makes the first of only three appearances in the Tom Baker years, though he’ll make up for lost time in the Peter Davison epoch.

“The Deadly Assassin” is a bit of an unwieldy beast, actually. It works far better when viewed as four individual episodes (preferably viewed a week apart) than watched all in one sitting. The first two episodes are political intrigue in the mode of The Manchurian Candidate, as everyone in the Special Features goes to great lengths to point out. Episode three is surrealism of a type not seen in the series since the Patrick Troughton story “The Mind Robber” (6.2, 1968), while the final episode features a chunky info-dump and then sprints to a convoluted finish like some cheap sci-fi movie shot on videotape. Huge swaths of “The Deadly Assassin” are utterly magnificent, but “cohesive” is not a word that really applies. The Doctor’s extended journey through the “computation matrix” of Gallifrey’s mainframe computer is shot on film, giving it a much more expensive and polished look, and is rather finely evoked by director David Maloney. Yes, it goes on too long, but there is some striking imagery, and the episode unfolds with very little dialogue, unusual for this generally chatty series.

But much of the story seems rushed and ill thought out. Despite all the talk about regeneration, Time Lords get murdered left and right and no one breathes the “R” word in any of these cases. (It’s almost as if Holmes is trying to say that regeneration only comes into play with a natural “death,” but this is of course totally at odds with the Doctor’s experiences.) It’s reasonable to conjecture that that the guards’ stazer weapons have been crafted to disrupt/overcome the regenerative process, but what about poor old Runcible, who gets a big knife in the back?

A much bigger problem arises in episode four. The Master’s entire plan hinges on the Time Lords being ignorant of what Rassilon had accomplished, and considering much of what he did to be apocryphal. The implication of this is that they are totally oblivious of the central power system of their own planet, which is what makes time travel possible! This reaches a ridiculous plateau when the powerful Eye of Harmony – which the Time Lords had considered to be a legend – turns out to be stored just underneath the floor in the central room of their highest seat of power. Have these guys never read a blueprint?

Most of this kind of thing got retconned away in future stories, but “The Deadly Assassin” does make the Time Lords look a bit like dolts. Indeed, and mostly for this reason, “The Deadly Assassin” is somewhat controversial among hardcore fans. Prior to this, throughout the first thirteen years of the series, the Time Lords were rarely seen, and generally portrayed as god-like beings that possess tremendous powers, which they choose not to wield due to a stance of non-interference. Whereas “The Deadly Assassin” portrays them more as stuffy old academians who complain of stiff joints and bad hips. To those American viewers weaned on early ‘80s PBS broadcasts, and who mostly saw Tom Baker’s episodes first, this was just “the way it was,” and didn’t know it represented a fairly large paradigm shift. But many long-time British fans saw it as a betrayal of the Time Lord legacy, and revile it to this day. In retrospect, it does seem as though writer Holmes was so anxious to subvert the Time Lord’s god-like reputation (and play up his own political satire, much of inspired by the Kennedy years) that he went a bit overboard. The Time Lords are, after all, supposed to be one of (if not the) greatest civilizations in the cosmos. But that’s not the impression given here.

Having said all that – I still think “The Deadly Assassin” is a bona-fide gem. The story is intelligent and crafty, bristling with clever and quotable dialogue (“Vaporization without representation’s against the constitution!”). Tom Baker was smack in the middle of a string of sublime performances that would define his Doctor, and provides ample evidence for those (like me) who proclaim him the greatest Doctor of them all. “Assassin” is, in fact, unique in classic Who as the only story in which the Doctor has no companion, and while I wouldn’t want it like this all the time (as Baker reportedly did), Tom does pull off the solo act with aplomb.

The production design, by the great Roger Murray-Leach, is simply magnificent, with the Panopticon set being one of the defining structures of the Doctor’s home planet, the walls looking like cut green glass. Future Oscar winner James Acheson provides the superb costumes, including the now-traditional bat-wing plastic collars that have become emblematic of the Time Lords. In fact, from a visual standpoint, the entire story is exemplary, with the exception of the Master’s rubbery, unconvincing skull-mask, though Peter Pratt gives a fine performance from underneath it.

And then there’s the Matrix. Yes, everybody loves to point out how similar it is to The Matrix, and while it would be interesting to see if the Wachowski Brothers are Who fans, the fact is that false realities such as this were a staple of written science fiction for decades, and was exactly the type of SF trope that Holmes loved to mine for his stories. It is really just a convenient plot device, but does provide the series with one of its most vivid episodes ever. The only niggling question about this sequence is that, given that it involves only Time Lords, why is all of the imagery (airplane strafing runs, trains on railroad tracks, Aussie bush hunters) so Earth-based?

Extras-wise, “TDA” is a nice, if unspectacular package, The Matrix Revisited (can’t believe they resisted the urge to call it Reloaded) is a standard-but-enjoyable 30-minute “making of” doc, which, among a more general overview, also examines the negative attention this story received from conservative groups who maintained that the show had become too violent. The Gallifreyan Candidate features two “experts”—Stacy Gillis and Andrew Shail—who outline Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate (and the subsequent film) and how it influenced this story. Gillis loses points for mis-using the word “unique,” and also for the dreaded pronunciation of the word “nuclear” as “nook-yoo-lar.” But Shail has some interesting comments, and the piece is disposable but vaguely interesting. The Frighten Factor is an odd little featurette (of a type all too often crowding the Who DVDs these days, which seem to be trying to explain the appeal of the classic series to those who have found their way over from the David Tennant version) in which a few varied participants try to explain what makes the show scary. Included are former script editor Terrance Dicks, “Doctor Who Expert” Alex Lydiate, church minister Peter Cavanna, Doctor Who Magazine editor Tom Spillsbury and others, spearheaded by educational psychologist Lucy Lewis, who is, I must say, very easy on the eyes. Even so, this is of minimal interest and made even more unsettling by the appearance of ‘70s producer Barry Letts, interviewed during his recent battle with cancer, and looking terribly unwell; he has since passed away.

The amiable Audio Commentary features Tom Baker, producer Philip Hinchcliffe, and actor Bernard Horsfall (Chancellor Goth). This is certainly a very listenable, entertaining track, and as usual Hinchcliffe does most of the heavy lifting, providing the majority of the nuts-and-bolts information. Horsfall is nicely enthusiastic, and Tom gets in a few good stories, though mostly falls into his usual habit of saying “yeah, yeah, yeah,” when other people make comments.

Also included are the usual Radio Times Listings (PDF), Photo Gallery, a brief Easter Egg (a vintage trailer for the story), and the quite-good Production Note Subtitles written by newbie Niall Boyce.

In the end “The Deadly Assassin” is many things to many people, but this reviewer considers it – for all its odd flaws – to be one of the most impressive entries of the classic series. Its place in Who history is undeniable, and it fairly exudes confidence and verve. It is a rare combination of elements, and if it is not quite more than the sum of its parts, then those parts are at least very impressive indeed.

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