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Season 03 / Story 027 / Production code BB
The War Machines
The Doctors?: William Hartnell
The Companions: Dodo Chaplet | Polly Wright | Ben Jackson
Other Main Characters:
Ian Stuart Black: Writer
Kit Pedler: Writer
Michael Ferguson: Director
Innes Lloyd: Producer
When the TARDIS arrives in London, 1966, the Doctor visits the Post Office Tower, having sensed evil emanations from the building. There, he meets Professor Brett, who demonstrates his revolutionary new computer, WOTAN, standing for Will Operating Thought Analogue. Designed as a universal problem-solver, this machine can actually think for itself. Moreover, it is shortly to be linked up to other major computers around the world - a project overseen by civil servant Sir Charles Summer.
All is not as it seems, however, as WOTAN has decided that humans are inferior to machines and should therefore be ruled by them. Exerting a powerful hypnotic influence, it initiates the construction of War Machines - heavily-armed, self-contained mobile computers - with which to effect its plan of world domination. The War Machines prove more than a match for troops, but by establishing a magnetic force field the Doctor is able to capture one of them. He then reprograms it to destroy WOTAN.
Now back in her own time, Dodo decides to leave the Doctor at this point. However, the Doctor soon finds himself with two new companions - Brett's secretary Polly and her merchant seaman friend Ben Jackson - whom he inadvertently whisks off in the TARDIS when they come aboard just as it is about to dematerialise
4 episodes:
- 25/06/1966
- 02/07/1966
- 09/07/1966
- 16/07/1966
Script available in print from Titan Books.
