The Deadly Assassin is the third serial of the 14th season of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 30 October to 20 November 1976. It is the first serial in which the Doctor is featured without a companion, and the only such story for the classic era.
The Doctor has a precognitive vision about the President of the Time Lords being assassinated and goes to Gallifrey to stop it. At the Panopticon, a Gallifreyan ceremonial chamber, he notes a camera and a sniper rifle on a catwalk. The Doctor fights his way to the catwalk, but the assassin is among the delegates and shoots the President dead – the crowd assumes the Doctor is the killer. Under interrogation, he maintains that he has been framed; Castellan Spandrell believes him and orders Engin to assist him in an independent investigation. The Doctor announces that he will run for President, as liberty is guaranteed for those running for office during the course of an election.
He realises that it was the Master who had sent him the vision through the Matrix, a vast electronic neural network which can turn thoughts into virtual reality. Entering the Matrix, the Doctor confronts an assassin who reveals himself as Chancellor Goth; the Master tries to trap the Doctor; Engin gets the Doctor out of the Matrix. They arrive where the two were accessing the Matrix, and find the Master pulse-less and Goth fatally burnt and dying. Goth reveals that he found the Master, nearing the end of his final regeneration, and went along with him for power. Dying, Goth warns that the Master has a doomsday plan.
The Doctor finds that the President has access to the symbols of office: the Sash and Great Key of Rassilon. As records describe how Rassilon found the Eye of Harmony within the "black void," the Doctor realises that the Eye is actually a black hole's nucleus, an inexhaustible energy source, and the Sash and Key are its control devices; the Master's plan is to steal this energy to gain a new cycle of regenerations; however, if the Eye is disrupted, Gallifrey will be destroyed.
He also realises that the Master injected himself with a neural inhibitor that mimics a deathlike state. The Doctor, Spandrell, and Engin arrive at the morgue, where the Master seizes the Sash from the President's corpse and traps the three. Inside the Panopticon, the Master makes his way to the Eye and unhooks the coils; the Doctor arrives via a service shaft. Quakes and cracks appear in the floor. The two fight, until the Master loses his footing and falls into a chasm. The Doctor reconnects the coils, saving Gallifrey.
The Doctor bids farewell but warns that the Master may not be dead, as he had already harvested some energy. As the Doctor's TARDIS dematerialises, the Master sneaks into his own TARDIS and escapes.
Production
Following Elisabeth Sladen's departure, Tom Baker told producer Philip Hinchcliffe that he wanted to do a story without a companion.[1]Robert Holmes said that it was difficult to write the script for The Deadly Assassin without anyone for the Doctor to share his thoughts and plans with, which was the usual role of the companion.[citation needed] Working titles for this story included The Dangerous Assassin (which Holmes changed to "deadly" because he thought it "didn't sound right"). The final title is a tautology: a successful assassin must, by definition, be deadly. However, since Time Lords can in general survive death, and the assassin's victims do not, he is perhaps "deadly" in that sense. According to the text commentary on the DVD, Holmes argued that the title was not a tautology, stating that there were plenty of incompetent assassins.
The cliffhanger to Part Three—where Goth holds the Doctor's head underwater in an attempt to drown him—came in for heavy criticism, particularly from the 'clean-up TV' campaigner Mary Whitehouse. She often cited it in interviews as one of the most frightening scenes in Doctor Who, her reasoning being that children would not know if the Doctor survived until the following week and that they would "have this strong image in their minds" during all that time.[6] After the episode's initial broadcast, the BBC apologised to Whitehouse and the master tape was edited to remove the original ending.[7] The edited episode was included when the story was repeated on BBC1 from 4 to 25 August 1977[8] seen by 4.4, 2.6, 3.8 & 3.5 million viewers.[9]
Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping wrote of the serial in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), "The reputation of The Deadly Assassin rests with its violence and its revelations about the Doctor's people and their culture. Politically literate and cynical ('We must adjust the truth'), the serial is the definitive text on the Time Lords. The Doctor's journey into the APC net ... is a visual and intellectual tour de force of hallucinatory images."[10] In The Television Companion (1998), David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker reported that at the time of broadcast several viewers took issue with the serial's portrayal of the Time Lords, finding it a contradiction of the small details that had previously been dropped about the Doctor's home planet, but over time its reputation became more positive. The pair themselves called it "a truly remarkable story" and praised the reintroduction of the Master.[11] In 2010, Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times awarded the serial four stars out of five. He described "the Master's putrid skull and split bangers for fingers" as "the most revolting images presented on teatime TV" but was positive towards its supporting characters, though he did criticise the Matrix sequences for being more earthly rather than alien, despite them being constructed from deceased Time Lords.[12]The A.V. Club reviewer Christopher Bahn praised the plotting and Matrix sequences, calling it "well-crafted all around".[13]
In 2010, Charlie Jane Anders of io9 listed the cliffhanger to the first episode—in which it appears the Doctor shoots the president—as one of the greatest cliffhangers in the history of Doctor Who.[14]Den of Geek named the cliffhanger to the third episode as one of the ten best Doctor Who cliffhangers, praising the freeze frame.[15] In 2013, Starburst also chose Part Three as one of the "Top Ten Doctor Who Cliffhangers".[16] In 2018, Digital Spy described Part Three as "the show's most controversial cliffhanger".[17]
Analysis
Tat Wood suggests it is "blindingly obvious" that the story was largely inspired by the film and book The Manchurian Candidate.[11]
A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in October 1977, entitled Doctor Who and The Deadly Assassin.
Home media
This story was released on VHS in March 1989 in edited omnibus format in the US only. It was released on VHS in episodic format in the UK in October 1991. It was also re-released and remastered for the WHSmith-exclusive Time Lord Collection in 2002 with a better-quality freeze-frame cliffhanger for Episode 3. The Deadly Assassin was released on 11 May 2009 on Region 2DVD. The serial was released in issue 52 of the Doctor Who DVD Files on 29 December 2010.
It was released on Blu-Ray as part of the Time Lord Victorious box set.[18]
