Doctor Who Is CLASSIC!: The King's Demons

 It's time for another edition of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC!,  an intermittent series of posts about everyone's favorite space/time travelling show from the 20th century.  

Today's post takes us back to 1983 and the 20th season of Doctor Who.  

While most stories in the classic era were 4 half hour installments, today's tale is a 2 part adventure.

Starring Peter Davison as the Doctor, here is The King's Demons.  

The place is England,  the time is March in the year 1215.  

King John is visiting the castle of Sir Ranulph Fitzwilliam. 

The entertainment is a medieval joust which is interrupted by the strange appearance of a mysterious blue box.  

The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough exit the TARDIS and find their sudden arrival is NOT the cause for consternation one might expect in the 13th century.  

The King with his aide Sir Gillis Estram greet their arrival warmly as the King declares the visitors as "friendly demons" and express his intrigue at their "blue engine".   

The Doctor quickly susses out that King John and Sir Gillis are not who they claim to be and Sir Ranulph Fitzwilliam is suspicious as well. Those two guys are acting kind of weird and the last anyone in the castle heard, the King was back in London.  

There shenanigans and stuff going on. (Even with only 2 half hours to fill instead of 4, we still have some classic Doctor Who filler to meet the run time.) 

It turns out Sir Gillis Estram is...  (Ta da!) the Master.  

("Estram" is an anagram of "Master".)  

And... 

King John is really Kamelion, a war weapon found by the Master on Xeriphas, which can be mentally controlled and used to adopt disguises and personas. 

Here's the plot: King John acts like a total dick totally offending the various noblemen who will go on to sign Magna Carta so they don't and that is that for the foundation of democracy.  

This seems like a fairly small potatoes kind of thing to involve the Master.  So why is the Master doing this? It's not made plain so I'm guessing out of boredom or just a case of the "evulz" or whatever. 

The Doctor engages in a battle of wills with the Master to wrest control of Kamelion away from the sinister Time Lord. 

And he does. Yay? Yeah, why not. Yay!  

Kamelion is his true self, the plot to stop Magna Carta is foiled and the Master escapes to never be heard from again.

(Until the very next episode, "The Five Doctors".)   

The Doctor welcomes Kamelion aboard the TARDIS to join Tegan and Turlough on their adventures through space and time.

And it is a glorious partnership as Kamelion has ever so much fun with the TARDIS crew as they scamper around the far reaches of the galaxy and all through time and...

No, he doesn't.  

Kamelion never shows up again until season 21's "Planet of Fire" where he is written out.  

The Kamelion robot is not some skinny actor is a robot suit but is in fact an actual robot. Unfortunately the guy who built this robot didn't write down any instructions on to work the robot which became a problem when the robot creator died.   

"The King's Demons" is clearly a time filler before the bigger spectacle of the 20th anniversary special "The Five Doctors" comes along.  

I'm trying really hard to remember what Turlough and Tegan contributed to this story and I'm guessing not much. I do recall Tegan complaining about how cold the castle is owing to her very short light material dress.  Tegan should know by now that the Doctor isn't very good at navigating the TARDIS and should be better prepared for any number of environmental challenges. 

(Companions never seem to learn this. In the 11th Doctor story "The Hungry Earth", Amy Pond has to keep justifying her provocatively short ensemble: "I was dressed for Rio!")  

The Doctor gets put Peter Davison's fencing skills to use for a good ol' sword fight so there's that.  

So that is that for this post of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC!. 

Next month I will be back with another post about a Doctor Who episode from the 20th century.

And in December, we've got a Christmas special coming and that means a new post of Doctor Who Is NEW!