Doctor Who and the Silurians

Amid the enforced seriousness of "The Silurians" is one, delightful, chuckle-worthy line. As the Doctor prepares to fix the nuclear reactor, he announces that he's "fusing control of the neutron flow". But of course!

When "The Five Doctors" was made in 1983, The Third Doctor was heard to utter the line "I've reversed the polarity of the neutron flow". JNT was later lambasted for his adoption of this 'catchphrase', because it only ever appeared once during the Pertwee years, in "The Sea Devils". Not that the Doctor ever claimed it was a catchphrase. He doesn't follow the expression with the words "as I always used to say to Jo Grant" or even give the Brigadier a knowing wink to indicate this is an age-old tradition. There's nothing to say he was ever fond of uttering this line in the same way that nobody pretended "Great balls of fire!" or "The car's in dock so I've got to go by bus" was a famous old line. But the Doctor DID "reverse the polarity" you know - in practically every story.

The interesting thing about our condemnation of "The Five Doctors" for apparently mis-remembering a favourite line is that, aside from the exact wording, it gets it absolutely correct. Just a story on from the Doctors shenanigans with fusing neutron flow he sorts out the drill head in "Inferno" simply be "reversing all systems". A story later and he's at it again, repelling the Auton invasion of Earth by convincing the Master to reverse everything. In the Daemons he "reverses the polarity of the feedback oscillator" and in "The Mutants" he busts Professor Jaegers machine by cunningly switching two sockets around, not to mention the wretched "particle reversal" process he won't shut up about. He may not actually use the PHRASE "reverse the polarity" very often, but the fun in watching most Pertwee episodes is in seeing him solve each problem the same way but dressing it up slightly differently each time. "Huh! He's just reversing the bloody polarity again, the old fraud!"

And each time everyone present glances around in astonishment as if the solution was completely ingenious. "It's not such a daft idea, it's been done before!" reasons Greg Sutton in "Inferno". You can't help but think that, in the Doctor Who Universe, if every problem had been tackled by simply reversing everything each time, they'd probably have sorted out whatever it was on 90% of occasions. There's even the odd throwback to the Third Doctor's bogus science post-Pertwee era; not only is it reprised in "The Five Doctors", but a few years before in "City of Death", the Doctor completely revolutionises Kerenski's experiment by simply swapping two sockets around.

In the seventies, every Doctor Who problem was solved by simply throwing everything into reverse; the delight was in the less than subtle way this was disguised each time. But to complain that the Third Doctor only ever "reversed the polarity of the neutron flow" once is to simply be picky. He did it all the time, just not in so many words.