The Deadly Assassin

Contemporary fan reaction to "The Deadly Assassin" has now, quite rightly, passed into legend. The DWAS publication which cried out "What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?!?" still exists for all to see, whilst the owner of those outraged comments has now ducked out of the limelight, albeit still to be seen lurking in the shadows of the occasional Tavern.

That such vilification and callings that the story marked "the end of Doctor Who" is now so thoroughly baffling is an indication of both the weight of time that has since passed, and the changing tide of opinion we have since become accustomed to. Back then, organised fandom was a relatively new property and there hadn't been a backlash of such proportions previously. But watching "The Deadly Assassin" today, it isn't surprising that people got worried; it joyfully hit the very heart of the only mythology Doctor Who had at that point. Without the Time Lords, fans at the time (such as they were) would be as knowledgeable about their show as the average Joe tuning in on a Saturday evening; it was about a trampishly dressed traveller roaming Time and Space with a flapping girl. Take away "The War Games", and Doctor Who had no history with which the early fan historians could take their inspiration from. And "The Deadly Assassin" took away "The War Games" in every sense possible.

To see why, you need only watch "The War Games" which portrays the Doctors race as nothing less than invulnerable, all-powerful Gods. They can inflict pain at a glance, "live forever" and erase someone from time and space at will; if a single fictional being could be given a greater power, I'd like to know what it would be. But if the fans at the time who cried heresy had stopped for one moment to appreciate what a contradiction this was to every aspect of their series, they would applaud "The Deadly Assassin" for re-writing a gigantic faux-pas. There can be absolutely no place in the Doctor Who Universe for the Time Lords 1969-style; it goes against the very principles of the series (even the Doctor had disproved magic, ironically in then-fan favourite "The Daemons") and the fact that the vulnerable, mistake-prone Doctor was supposed to come from this race of super-beings didn't seem to provoke any feelings of an inconsistency either. Why was the Doctor different? Why couldn't he have sorted out the Ice Warriors by zapping them out of the time-stream? And, more importantly, how could the series ever be a viable prospect when its hero had (or, at the very least, was from a race with) such super powers?

"The Deadly Assassin" was unlike anything before and is more or less unlike anything since, yet in a sense was a story entirely true to the Doctor Who way of thinking; in a Universe where everything has a cause and effect and a genuine scientific explanation, every Loch Ness Monster is an armoured alien cyborg and every bit of Osiran magic is attributed to a superior blend of tribiphysics, "The Deadly Assassin" was simply revealing the decayed, unmysterious truth behind the magic-seeming facade around the Doctor's race. There could be no other way, just as there could be no other reaction at the time the story went out. Fans have scorned major U-turns in Doctor Who's history ever since, which begs the question how anything can be wrong in a fictional Universe. If Peter Grimwade says the Brigadier retired in 1977 with equal dramatic license as the production team of the early seventies, why is HE wrong just because he made the claim later? Perhaps in the past when we've proclaimed a writer or producer wrong, we should instead have taken the new information, which was always as valid as any previously given, as having made US wrong, and set about righting ourselves.

We did, eventually, get used to "The Deadly Assassin" school of history re-writing, and it now seems a testament to the story's position as an all-time classic that we can weather and accept anything. The nearest reaction we have endured since was to the TV Movie's little contribution to the myth, half-human and "Doctor not asexual" hi-jinks. By then of course, we'd learnt that the onslaught of such brazen punched holes through the tapestry of our laboriously worked out chronology were there to be delicately repaired; we could find a way round. After all, he didn't use his tongue did he? Perhaps he snogged her because he was confused or something? And being half-human might explain away a few things in the past. By '96, and it had taken long enough, we'd at last learnt to accept change not only to the show but to what we previously thought we "knew". For that we can thank "The Deadly Assassin".