(The universe is now a more colorful place)
This is the first appearance of the Autons, the first appearance of the Third Doctor, the first appreance of Liz Shaw, and the first color episode, so in many ways it's a landmark episode. While the plot is pretty good, what I really enjoyed was not the Autons but two other things: the usual post-regeneration Doctor wackiness, and that in this episode folks noticed that this guy is an alien. Well, OK, two more things, for a total of four: Liz Shaw is a highly educated and intelligent woman, and several things occur that, waaaaay in the future, happen again with another Doctor.
It opens with the TARDIS appearing in the woods and a man we all recognize as Third but must have been a stranger to the audience when it first broadcast, staggers out and collapses. The gentleman in question winds up in a local hospital where the medical staff are perplexed by an x-ray showing two hearts and the lab is upset thinking that the doctor is sending fake blood for analysis for a practical joke. The hospital scenes between the shooting of Seven and the regeneration into Eight somewhat repeat this, except back in 1970 the medical staff were actually paying attention to what they were seeing rather than in 1996/1999 (the Doctor Who TV movie was broadcast in 1996, but was set in 1999) when the doctor stubbornly insisted the images were wrong, a double-exposure, and then proceeded to get lost in alien anatomy. The Doctor was much safer with the folks able to admit they were out of their depth and experience.
The Brigadier shows up, expecting Doctor Two, and not being familiar with regeneration (I don't even think they called it that, yet) hasn't a clue who this guy is, but puts a guard on the police box out in the woods anyway. Third does the usual delirious in-and-out-of-consciousness bit, towards the end of which we realize he's faking at least some of it. When everyone goes away he sneaks out of the room and into the doctors (medical, not Gallifreyan) locker room where he takes a shower. While he paraded around mostly undressed and damp a tattoo is noticeable on his right forearm:
This isn't from the same episode, I don't know which one it came from, actually, but it's another view of it:
Now, the real life story is that Jon Pertwee got a tattoo of a cobra in his younger days, allegedly one drunken night while he was in the Navy. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, because, you know, alcohol can make a lot of things seem like a good idea. No one in this episode ever mentions it. So far as I know, no one in the show ever mentions it. But way down the line, in The Doctor's Wife, Eleven mentions the Corsair and his/her snake/ouroboros tattoo, apparently also on the right arm. It makes me wonder if there's a potential retconned backstory involving the Corsair and the Doctor getting drunk and the Doctor tattooed with a snake of his own just after Two regenerates into Three and all the passing out business isn't regeneration but hangover. Given that the usual story is the Time Lords forced a regeneration then dumped him on Earth that does sort of mess with the timeline, but I'm sure something suitably timey-whimey could occur.
Next, the Doctor needs to get dressed. So he steals a selection of clothes from those left in the room by the medical doctors. Where have we seen this before do we see this again? The Eleventh Hour, with Eleven raiding doctors' lockers. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This has got to be the result of the current writers/producers being long-time fans of the show. Hell, Matt Smith wasn't even born when Jon Pertwee was stealing an opera cape from an eccentric medical guy but his clothes stealing in The Eleventh Hour was clearly a repeat of what Pertwee did.
The Doctor does manages to re-establish his bona fides with UNIT and the Brigadier, meet his new companion assistant Liz Shaw, discovers the Time Lords have disabled his TARDIS, and, oh yes, deal with an alien menace threatening the Earth. We don't realize it at the end, but the surviving Nestene polyhedron power unit thingy will feature in another story down the line, the first episode of the next season, The Terror of the Autons.
