Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror

The Doctor vs. The French!

The Reign of Terror is the last serial of the first season of Doctor Who. It aired from August 8 to September 12, 1964 and it is six episodes long with two missing episodes in the middle. So, once again BBC's incompetence will make my viewing pleasure go down a little bit unless the two promised animated episodes are the missing episodes. That would be nice.

When I hear "Reign of Terror" I think of the French Revolution. So, I'm going to assume that, at the end of the last episode when Ian Chesterton made the Doctor angry, the Doctor decided to take him home. However, things will of awry again. The way things always go awry in Doctor Who. That or Earth is a TARDIS magnet at all times.

Maybe she likes humans?

Three Hours Later...

Wow! This was a pretty interesting episode. Probably because I'm really interested in the history of the French Revolution and peripherally interested in the rise and fall of Napolean Bonaparte. All of this features heavily in this serial. In fact, one could say it's the plot.

The story begins when the Doctor angrily lands the TARDIS on Earth (thinking it's Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright's time in England) and promptly tells Ian and Barbara to get out.  Ian talks the Doctor into getting out the the TARDIS with them to make sure they're in the right place (by offering to take the Doctor out for a drink), and they discover they're in France. The group wanders around outside the TARDIS for a time and get lost in the woods until people direct them to an empty house which they promptly break into.

Once inside the house, they discover it's a safe-house for people trying to escape the Reign of Terror and the French Revolution on their road out of France. Then, two people arrive at the house having escaped Madame Guillotine and one of them knocks out the Doctor. This is the weakest the Doctor is for most of the episode.

French soldiers come, they kill the two guillotine-escapees and arrest Ian, Barbara, and Susan. Then they light the house on fire with the Doctor in it. The Doctor is saved by a kid who had initially alerted the cast to the fact that they were in France. After talking to the kid about where the soldiers are headed with Ian, Barbara and his granddaughter, the Doctor sets out to rescue them.

Yeah. With peppy music.

Meanwhile, Ian is placed in one cell with a captured Englishman, and Barbara and Susan are placed in the worst cell because Barbara spurned the advances of the jailer. The Englishmen had been wounded and he asks Ian to give a message to a man named John Stirling who can be found through Jules Renan at the sign of "Le Chien Gris" (which means The Gray Dog... I think). Barbara and Susan immediately decide to try to find a way to escape, but they're strength quickly fails them.

After Ian's cellmate dies, a government official named Lemaitre shows up. Lemaitre demands that Ian tell him whatever the Englishman told Ian, but Ian refuses. Lemaitre still crosses him off the execution list, but Susan and Barbara are still sent off to be beheaded. However, they get rescued by Jules Renan and his friend, Jean.

The Doctor meanwhile takes a stint as a road worker after he pisses off the guy in charge of the work crew where he stages a mutiny. Ian plots his own escape from jail just as the Doctor enters a city and uses his jacket and a fancy Roman ring for the costume of a Regional Officer of the Provinces plus some parchment and writing materials. He goes to the jail to free his friends, and they are all gone one way or another.  Lemaitre hears the Doctor's inquiries and invites him to go see Robespierre who is bat-shit insane. Somehow the Doctor gets a second invitation. I think this says a lot about the Doctor.

Well all of the Doctor's friends get themselves nearly captured again. Ian is rescued by Jules Renan. The Doctor convinced the jailer to let Barbara go. When the Doctor tries to free Susan too, Lemaitre confronts him and forces the Doctor to take him to find Renan and company. When they do, you find out that Lemaitre is John Stirling (Yeah... not surprising at all) and Robespierre is about to be overthrown by the government who will then put Napolean Bonaparte and two other people in charge of France.

The Doctor and company rush to get Susan and high-tale it out of there using Lemaitre/John Stirling to get them to the TARDIS on his way to Calais. Everything works out find and in the end we get this great quote from the Doctor ending the first season of Doctor Who:

"Our lives are important — at least to us — and as we see, so we learn... Our destiny is in the stars, so let's go and search for it."

Next time: Season One overall review of Doctor Who.