Doctor Who Is Classic: Robot and Terror of the Zygons

 

Today's post is another installment of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC where I post about episodes of Doctor Who from the classic era.

The first episode for today's post is Robot. 

No, not The Robot of Doom.

Or Mystery of the Robot. 

Or even The Robot. 

Just...  Robot.  

So here's how I have some fun when I watch the episode, I provide commentary that leaves off "the". 

If someone says something like, "The robot smashed through the wall", I will change it to "ROBOT smash through WALL!" 

"The Brigadier needs the Doctor to stop the robot" becomes "BRIGADIER needs DOCTOR to stop ROBOT!". 

Hilarity just ensues. Well, it does for me.

Andrea was tired of it by episode 2.  (Well, what does she know?) 

Anyway, Robot is about a robot (well, duh!) who is being used by a group of evil scientists to assemble a world destroying weapon in a bid for the evil scientists think they're better at running the world than stupid people.

The robot... excuse me, ROBOT becomes enamored with Sarah Jane Smith which introduces a King Kong element of pathos to the proceedings.  

Robot is unique for Doctor Who that other than the Doctor himself, there is nothing of alien origin in this story. The menace is all home grown right here on Earth.  

The story is the first adventure with Tom Baker as the 4th Doctor. It's a standard issue 3rd Doctor/UNIT type story but a good transition to the new guy with his bohemian fashion sense and a quirky approach to problem solving.  

The story also introduces Ian Marter as Dr. Harry Sullivan who will join the Doctor and Sarah Jane as a companion. 

Before Tom Baker was cast as the Doctor, the producers were looking at a possible return to the grandfather type we got with William Hartnell. Marter was cast for the function of being able punch people as needed. With Tom Baker being a relatively young man quite capable of punching people if he needed to, Sullivan's role became extraneous.

Which may account for his departure with the next story for this post, Terror of the Zygons which aired at the start of Tom Baker' 2nd season as the Doctor.   

But Ian Marter wasn't done with Doctor Who. He wrote several novelizations of Doctor Who episodes.    

Terror of the Zygons is also the last appearance (at least for a long while) of Nicholas Courtney as Bridgadier Letheridge-Stewart. Since the story takes place mostly in Scotland, the Brigadier sports a kilt for a few scenes. 

This is the story that introduces the Zygons who would be brought into modern Doctor Who in the 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor. The Zygons have a pretty frightening appearance despite the limitations of 1970's TV and the notoriously cheap BBC budget.    

Remember in the episode School Reunion when Sarah Jane tells Rose Tyler she met the Loch Ness Monster? Yep, Terror of the Zygons is where that happened.    

Both stories suffer from the usual problem of classic Doctor Who stories with a lot of padding and running about to justify taking 2 hours to tell 1 hour's worth of story.  But both are significant milestones in the history of Doctor Who, introducing perhaps the most iconic of Doctors in the form of Tom Baker and one of the scarier alien threats ever to plague the Doctor.  

My next installment of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC takes us back to the 3rd Doctor (as well as the 1st and the 2nd) with The Three Doctors. That will be posting early in April.