gordon@uw-june (Gordon Davisson) (09/24/84)
In response to your questions about Jon Pertwee, here are a few facts and
probably even more conjectures:
1. In Patrick Troughton's final story, "The War Games", the Time Lords are
revealed for the first time. The Doctor is forced to ask for help from them
and in the end they force him to regenerate and exile him to Earth, taking
the dematerialiser circuit (?) from his TARDIS, along with the knowledge he
could use to build another one. In "The Three Doctors" his exile is lifted
as a reward for his saving them from Omega's power drain, but in the interrim
they call upon him during his exile to do certain tasks.
2. The Master stopped appearing in the Baker stories because the actor who
played him, Roger Delgado, died in a tragic car accident in 1973. (This also
explains why he looked different at best in "The Deadly Assassin" et al: he
was played by a different actor.) Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado had been
close friends; and the death of the latter was in fact one of the reasons that
Jon Pertwee decided to leave the show.
3. Funny, I like those same stories because even though the bad guys are so
offensive, they seem like real characters and have reasons behind their of-
fensiveness. I suppose the reason these types of characters were so common in
the Pertwee era was that was thetime that Malcolm Hulke was the most prolific.
He liked to write stories where even the bad guys had reasons for what they
were doing which weren't evil from their point of view (e.g. "The Sea-Devils").
Could you be referring to the various bureaucrats in some of the episodes?
One type of person Hulke couldn't stand was a bureaucrat, and he made this
known on several occasions.
"My name is Romanadvoratrelundar."
"I'm so sorry about that; is there anything we can do?"
--The Ribos Operation
The Great Green Arkleseizure
Jamie Green
{decvax,ihnp4,allegra}!uw-beaver!uw-june!gordon
(Put "To Jamie" in the subject line)