Day 274: Inferno Episode 3

The major reason why this serial is so well remembered is not due to overconfident scientists, or terrifying monsters, but instead due to the fact that the Brigadier wears an eye-patch for a portion of the serial. It's because the Doctor finds himself sent to a parallel universe, where everyone is evil because England is now run by a fascist regime. Which is nice. But the major point of this is that there exists a new feeling of discomfort because we're seeing characters that we know and love twisted beyond all recognition into something completely wrong.

But we have to consider context. This serial comes at the end of series 7, Jon Pertwee's first. The audience will have only known Liz for approximately 5 months, which isn't quite enough time for us to build up a strong enough relationship with her to be uncomfortable with her being evil (although the sentiment still stands). We then get Sergeant Benton, and whilst we will get to know him as a regular UNIT character in the future and it is uncomfortable to see him be ruthless, all of this is retrospectively added as we've barely got a chance to know the character aside from him being in the background a couple of times. It's only the Brigadier who we can claim that the audience has enough of a prior relationship with to be fully made uneasy by, but even then, it's still not been that long that we've known him and we've been uneasy with the character since the Silurians incident. So my hypothesis is that although this twist is rather nice, all of the impact has been retrospectively added by viewers coming to the serial later after already encountering the characters and knowing them for some time, instead of the viewers at the time who would have just seen it as a world where people occasionally wore eye-patches.

Unfortunately, I can't remember what impact this twist had on me when I was a kid. Through cultural symbiosis/Doctor Who: The Television Companion I was already familiar with UNIT and things, and I knew that they were a big deal, so perhaps I wasn't an ideal control to see what impact it would make. Or perhaps my hypothesis was wrong. But one thing that I do know is that this entire concept wasn't the big thing to make an impact on me. And in 2 days, we'll find out what that was...