Day 144: The Highlanders Episode 4

Perhaps the most significant part of this story is the fact that it introduces the Doctor's new travelling companion, a young Scot called Jamie. The major thing that's curious about this is how little the character actually appears in this story. I'll grant that it isn't like Katarina, or Dodo, both of whom were suddenly thrust upon the audience, but instead here we get a secondary character in a run of the mill adventure who is suddenly given the potential to be a companion. It's a brave move, particularly as it means that the audience, although they will to an extent know who the character is, is being expected to trust this new character as a protagonist. And one of the other interesting things is that he was explicitly introduced because they liked the character, given that they already have a young male lead in the form of Ben to take the action scenes. This shows great faith in the way that this character will develop on our screens, and it means that the series is continuing to change, even though it's already changed a fair deal, just in order to find the right combinations of ideas to work as a television programme.

And speaking of that, we also bid a vague farewell to something else this episode, the 'pure' historical stories, i.e. the adventures where the Doctor and co. encounter history and no other alien menaces. They've been written out of the series due to being too dull for audiences of the time, but that is selling them short massively, because they can be incredibly interesting and fun. Marco Polo, for instance, brings with it a great deal of knowledge of Asian culture, and we also get stories like The Myth Makers or The Romans, which take known historical quantities and play with them, creating a great deal of humour in the process. And then we get The Massacre, which is a genuinely good piece of television drama, with an absolutely brutal ending. But, we must accept the fact that some things, whilst they work for some, may not work for others, and so we bid a fond farewell to the pure historicals, and we say thank you for educating and entertaining us every once in a while over the past 144 days.