As part of the 60th anniversary celebrations, the Beeb released The Daleks in Colour, an edited down, colourised omnibus of the second Doctor Who serial (and the earliest one they can currently show, due to an absurd copyright dispute). It wasn't terribly good. So I greeted the news of The War Games in Colour with cautious interest. The War Games is one of the best 60s serials, and while it's overlong, it's entertaining across all ten episodes, which is no mean feat.
Cutting a story down from four hours to ninety minutes means a lot has to go in the bin, even more so when new footage has been generated to swish things up. Still, The War Games is a story with plenty that can be chopped; while the padding is all enjoyable, it's still padding, put in to stretch out a story that had to fill the gap of two late in the day. It's an important story, though: Patrick Troughton's final story; the last of the monochrome era; the introduction of the Time Lords and the Doctor's exile to Earth.
The War Games in Colour, fortunately, works. It's a vast improvement on The Daleks in spite of taking more liberties with the original material. Visually, it's a massive step-up from The Daleks; part of this is down to better quality of the original footage, but a lot of it is down to more consistent and logical colouring work. A large chunk of the story being set in familiar historical locations means that there are realistic colours to try to recreate, but even the alien locales, in the War Games headquarters and Time Lords' capital, a less over-the-top than the Dalek cities while still making the most of the incredibly late-60s psychodelic design.
The music is also an improvement on whatever was going on in The Daleks, with much of the original score surviving, albeit somewhat remixed, although there's still a weird tendency to make some scenes sound like the worst excesses of 80s Who. (This sort of thing has been happening since the 90s patchwork release of Shada.) Musical cues are also used to highlight story connections, in a cheeky but obvious retcon: it's made abundantly clear that the War Chief is now meant to be considered an earlier incarnation of the Master. While the use of both the original Master theme and the Murray Gold one are obtrusive, due to being entirely out of keeping with the rest of the score, I'm completely in favour of the idea. I've always been in the War Chief = Master camp, so it's nice to have some validation of this on screen (with plausible deniability if you don't like the idea).
It's certainly a pacier version of the story, and while this means you can comfortably enjoy it all in one sitting, it also means the story loses a great deal of its original atmosphere. The original serial had a slow build-up of foreboding as the extent of what was happening was revealed, while here everything is explained at breakneck speed. Whole chunks of the story are excised, and while a lot of this is just capture-escape-capture stuff used to bulk the original serial out, it also makes the story and the Aliens' plot seem a lot smaller. Lady Jennifer is scarcely in it now, which is frankly a crime.
The most notable changes come at the story's climax, highlighting an old issue with how The War Games is viewed by fans. We tend to treat the first nine episodes as an extended prologue for the last one, when the Time Lords show up, put the Doctor on trial and sentence him to exile and a change of appearance. With so much of the preceding plot removed, the focus is even more heavily on the ending, with the majority of extra material added here. There's new CGI material throughout, most strikingly a outside look at the Aliens' base, and while it all looks great, it's so clearly of a different style and grade to the original footage that it sticks out like the proverbial tender thumb. This is ratcheted up a notch when we're approaching Gallifrey, making the final scenes feel even more separate to the rest of the story.
The biggest change, of course, is the addition of the regeneration. Originally, all we got was Troughton spinning away into blackness, pulling faces until his image was obscured completely. The net time we saw the Doctor, he was played by Jon Pertwee, tumbling out of the TARDIS at the beginning of Spearhead from Space. Now the entire trial is rejigged – much more effectively, in fact – and the story ends with a full regeneration sequence, put together using archive footage, rendering and new effects. On the whole, it works, and gives the Second Doctor a rather more dignified send-off than he got before. Where this leaves the old “Season 6B” theory is anyone's guess, as there appears to be even less of a gap for the Doctor to nip off for some extra adventuring than there used to be, but entire eras have been shoehorned into less feasible places. The only thing I'm not keen on is the substitution of the Tenth to Thirteenth Doctors for the Doctor's parade of possible faces. Something like it has been done before by fans, of course, but in an official story it's a bit too knowing. (It would have been more fun to stick in photos of some of the actors who were considered to take over from Troughton.)
At the end of the day, though, whether you want to consider this the “real” events of The War Games or ignore it completely is up to you. As an alternative version of the story it works, providing a punchier, far shorter yet still effective adventure, while the 1969 original still sits there, untouched and ready to watch.
