The Deadly Assassin: Part Two

Review of all 4 episodes:

Many fans rate this as one of the best and they are correct to recognise the huge quality of this story as well as its importance in building (and changing) the folklore of the Time Lords and The Doctor. It has everything, Tom Baker on top form, a classic villain, sparkling dialogue, humour, action, material which is important in the history of the series as well as some fresh and unnerving ideas. All this is done with brilliance in direction, acting and writing.

The Doctor has been called back home to Gallifrey. On his way there he has a pre-cognitive dream in which he appears to assassinate the Time Lord President. When he arrives he has to go on the run as he is presumed to be a criminal. He then tries to prevent the President's assassination but instead is made to look like the assassin himself. Behind all this, it turns out, is his old arch- enemy The Master. Now at an end to his cycle of regenerations (we are told Time Lords have a maximum of 12) his body is extremely emaciated but his evil and cunning are as strong as ever.

The Master, played now by Peter Pratt, looks and sounds great and his dialogue and Pratt's acting are excellent. There is also a host of superb and perfectly acted guest characters. The wonderful Borusa, Spandrell, Goth, Runcible and Engin are all fabulous. This adventure is also somewhat unique in that there is no companion for The Doctor.

The section of the story where The Doctor enters 'the matrix', a technically created world which seems real and has real dangers (sound like a forerunner of the film The Matrix to anyone?) is surreal and extremely innovative and clever in its different and interesting creativity.

A real all time classic story. 10/10

Each time I watch this, I am blown away by the absolute majesty of Doctor Who from this era, and The Deadly Assassin in particular. Every single thing about this episode is on point the writing, plot, acting, visuals, sounds, even the fact that the Doctor is companionless, without any friends to rely on. I love the moment when he realises it's the Master he's facing on their shared home planet, Galifrey.

Tom is sensational, with absolute command of the role, I don't think he had been better, just astonishing, for many, myself included Tom will forever be The Doctor. Watch this, you'll know why.

Peter Pratt was marvellous as The Master, adding a whole new creepy dimension to the character, but plaudits to the designers for making him so repulsive and terrifying, those eyes!

What a story though, how advanced were they to create the Matrix, the scenes there, wonderful, surreal and terrifying.

Those involved in this production got it spot on, absolutely superb viewing. 10/10

We can't go on together, with suspicious minds, and we can't build our nightmares, with World War One mines, so if an old friend I know, stops by to say hello, I'll see suspicion in your eyes, and wait for it all to blow.

"I'm just a patsy," Lee Oswald claimed after his arrest following President John Kennedy's assassination, and the Doctor makes a similar claim to Castellan Spandrell (George Pravda) of having been framed following his arrest for the assassination of the Gallifreyan president as episode two of "The Deadly Assassin" begins with a literal bang and continues with fine performances and the crackling dialog of Robert Holmes's witty, often biting script for this iconic "Doctor Who" story that indeed bears acute resemblance to then-recent real-world events back here on Earth.

The death of the Gallfreyan president sparks a constitutional crisis as he had not yet named his successor prior to his resignation. Chancellor Goth (Bernard Horsfall) insists that a presidential election must be held within 48 hours and that the trial of the just-arrested Doctor must be held immediately. Both Spandrell and Cardinal Borusa (Angus MacKay) protest but Goth holds firm, maintaining that "the Time Lords must not be seen to be leaderless and in disarray" and, in a telling slip, that "the assassin must be tried and executed before the election."

Why not? The Doctor was caught red-handed with a rifle at a camera station up on the catwalk above the Panopticon floor, imagery suggesting both "The Manchurian Candidate" and the JFK assassination (Oswald's "sniper's lair" on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository).

But in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot, a hand can be seen raising a pistol--not a rifle--just prior to the shooting, thus planting a seed of skepticism. Nevertheless, the trial proceeds with the Doctor's fate nearly sealed--until he postpones that fate by announcing, per Article 17 of the constitution, his candidacy for the presidency, which, despite Goth's protests, buys him enough time for him and Spandrell, who had admitted his doubts to Coordinator Engin (Erik Chitty), to investigate the crime scene.

At the Panopticon, they find evidence, albeit hardly conclusive, to support the Doctor's claim that he had been shooting not at the president but at the real assassin holding the pistol. Previously, the Doctor had had Spandrell fire the rifle; he does, but he cannot hit the target because the telescopic gunsight had been altered to compromise its accuracy, lending credibility to the Doctor's claim that he couldn't have hit either the president or the actual assassin.

Accompanying them is Runcible (Hugh Walters), the television commentator sent to fetch the photographic evidence, still in the camera at the sniper's lair, that could corroborate the Doctor's claim. Poor Runcible. First he discovers why his cameraman had disappeared: He had been shrunken to the size of a toy action figure. Then he himself is killed as a black-cloaked figure absconds with the photographic evidence.

Two real-world points concerning the JFK assassination. The Warren Commission investigating the assassination found puzzling evidence that the telescopic gunsight on the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle connected to Lee Oswald had been mounted originally for a left-handed shooter but had been fitted with shims to accommodate Oswald's right-handedness, suggesting a deep dive by Holmes, a World War Two combat veteran and former police officer, into assassination arcana to produce a key plot point regarding the Doctor's guilt or innocence.

This extends to the photographic evidence Runcible is tasked with retrieving. In March 1975, motion-picture footage of the JFK assassination taken by amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder made its first national broadcast on American television. The "Zapruder film," the most revealing--and shocking--of the home movies taken during the shooting, became the most famous home movie ever, its frame-by-frame scrutiny the most intensive in history. (Well, except maybe by obsessives bent on finding "goofs" in movies and television shows, but I digress.)

Widespread exposure of the Zapruder film prompted the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976, which concluded in 1979 that conspiracies were "probable" in the assassinations of both JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., revelations that, for Kennedy, contradict the Warren Commission's lone-gunman conclusion and thus have conveniently fallen down the memory hole in the same way that the Time Lords are later seen to have covered up inconvenient facts as "not to be seen to be leaderless and in disarray."

Back in the Whoniverse, a skulking presence, whispered talk between a cloaked conspirator and a horribly disfigured entity calling for the Doctor's quick death and the destruction of the Time Lords, suspected tampering with the Doctor's data extract in the APC (amplified panatropic computations), and the tissue-compression device (first unveiled in "Terror of the Autons") that shrunk the cameraman all add up to Master's (Peter Pratt) machinations. To confirm that, the Doctor is willing to enter the APC, which is the Matrix long before "The Matrix," to uncover proof of a conspiracy masterminded by his sworn enemy.

As the Doctor, Tom Baker is as engaged and convincing as he has ever been, supported by strong performances by Chitty, Horsfall, and MacKay. Pravda, at the center of "The Deadly Assassin" as an analog of Frank Sinatra's Bennett Marco in "The Manchurian Candidate," is also engaged with an impassive but inquisitive, sometimes droll manner; however, his Czech accent tends to obscure key line readings, thus neutralizing some of Holmes's most incisive and pointed dialog.

Fortunately, David Maloney's sterling direction is just compensation. The "Doctor Who" stalwart frames his shots with keen perception, locked into the cadences of Holmes's script and its delivery by savvy performers, driving the suspense and interpersonal conflicts that make this second episode a triumph of conspiratorial skullduggery.

POINT TO PONDER: Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept only facts and opinions you agree with. It is extremely difficult to avoid. Are reviews "helpful" only if they validate your confirmation bias? Are they "not helpful" if they contradict it? Thanks to the pervasiveness of confirmation bias, a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down is essentially useless as an indicator of whether a review is or isn't "helpful."