#the deadly assassin
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
I love how the classic Doctors always have to have that himbo episode.
#third doctor#jon pertwee#3rd doctor#fourth doctor#tom baker#4th doctor#fifth doctor#peter davison#5th doctor#sixth doctor#colin baker#6th doctor#doctor who#classic who#classic doctor who#himbo#doctor who and the silurians#the deadly assassin#planet of fire#the two doctors
498 notes
·
View notes
Text
Imagine being an average Gallifreyan, just minding your own business, watching the news when the president is assassinated. You can’t believe that just happened, but you keep watching because you want to see if they figure out who did it. As you watch you hear some names that sound vaguely familiar. It takes you a while, but you remember where you recognize them from. It’s those two weird kids from the academy that constantly cheated off of each other and one of them blew up your desk once. And now apparently they’re assassinating the president? You hope they don’t show up to the class reunion
#had an idea then got way too into it#(also theta was the one who blew up the desk)#(you can disagree but I’m right)#doctor who#the doctor#the master#theta sigma#koschei oakdown#academy era#doctor who academy era#the deadly assassin#fourth doctor
414 notes
·
View notes
Text
'peak doctor who' peak doctor who was in 1976 when they had a full episode of the fourth doctor running around in a forest in an undershirt while soaking wet and bleeding . it's been downhill from there
68 notes
·
View notes
Text
the deadly assassin fanart! it is true.....i am becoming...a classic who snob
bonus little guys under read more
#doctor who#classic who#fourth doctor#crispy!master#thats his nickname right..lol#the deadly assassin#VERY FUN EP especially part 3#im (slowly) watching the seed of dooms right i kinda want to do fanart for every serial i watch :))
178 notes
·
View notes
Text
OH. MY. GOD.
I’m having a fucking blast.
#He’s wearing the time lord robes#This is the type of necessary content I signed up for when I started watching Classic who#food for my soul#classic who#doctor who#fourth doctor#the deadly assassin#having anything take place on Gallifrey is still wild for me
21 notes
·
View notes
Text
BTS Of "The Deadly Assassin"
30 notes
·
View notes
Text
Doctor Who - The Deadly Assassin
#the deadly assassin#doctor who#fourth doctor#crispy master#decayed master#classic who#classic doctor who#doctor who girlie
37 notes
·
View notes
Text
cool aliens and time travel??? nahhhh who needs that. the deadly assassin has over an entire episode of slutty, sweaty and bloody tom baker running around a forest. this is what doctor who is about guys
51 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Killer Cats of Gin-Seng
In Survival, the last regular serial of Classic Doctor Who, the Doctor and Ace visit a planet of humanoid cats called “Cheetah People”. The Cheetah People are highly telepathic: they can mentally control and inhabit their pet cats, and they can even teleport between planets. Most notably, one of them is played by Lisa Barrowman, better known as Bernice Summerfield.
But this wasn’t actually the first time that humanoid cats had been set to appear in Doctor Who. In 1977, script editor Anthony Read commissioned his former collaborator David Weir to write the Season 15 finale, a four-part serial set on Gallifrey. The request was to explore society outside the Capitol with an emphasis on morality, a theme which Weir had written well in the past. So he pitched a story about Gallifreyan civilization of humanoid cats.
The Gallifreyan cat-people would have mirrored real-world cats’ dual penchant for both sophistication and savagery: they would appear advanced and civilized until the Doctor wound up in one of their elaborate gladiatorial displays! Weir delivered his scripts on time, and production proceeded to the point that Dee Robson designed costumes for the cat actors.
Ultimately the story was cancelled: Weir, by all accounts an excellent screenwriter, dramatically overestimated the show’s VFX capabilities and budget. But executive producer Graham Williams later mentioned the idea at a fan convention, so it became well-known in fandom (albeit under the false name The Killer Cats of Geng Singh). As a result, when Survival finally brought cat people to screens, fans naturally canonwelded the two.
One of these fans was Adrian Middleton, editor of the Apocrypha fanzine. Here’s how Apocrypha issue 1 covered the cats:
Apocrypha on the Killer Cats
THE GIANT CATS -16,000,000
The first intelligent mammalians on Gallifrey evolved from its version of the sabre-toothed Tiger. These giant cats developed a rudimentary form of empathic communication, which allowed them to influence the actions of their prey.
Over an extended period of time, the cats developed a finer telepathic ability, allowing them to actually control other species. This became a necessity as feline culture grew, as their physiological form prevented the use of tools to build or write with. Thus, in spite of their intelligence, the cats could not establish a true civilisation without anthropoid assistance.
FELINOID CIVILISATION -14,000,000
Early Gallifreyan hominids soon became the tools of feline culture. The first buildings on the planet were built by hominids but designed by cats, taking the form of vast stone arenas, in which the cats would use lesser species for sport - hunting and killing for pleasure rather than survival.
HOMINIDS -14,000,000/-13,980,000
Forced to live alongside saurian and feline predators, Gallifrey's first hominid tribes evolved as creatures of guile and stealth. Communities were established using primitive communications. These hominids were the cave-people, the tree-people, and the river-people.
THE FALL OF THE GIANT CATS -13,980,000
The hominid tribes had at first been easy prey for the cats, easily manipulated as a supply of muscle and food. Ultimately, however, the development of feline culture accelerated the development of hominid culture. Being made to use their hands and having the telepathic parts of their minds manipulated awakened a new sense of purpose within them. Seeing the cats as their slavers, they rebelled, exposing the cats to a coup so bloody that the species was all but wiped from the face of the planet.
THE LEGEND OF THE VANISHING CATS -13,800,000
It is rumoured that, after their defeat by the hominids, the giant cats fled to the mountains, where they hoped to restore their numbers (perhaps in an effort to restore their power over the hominids). Often hunting parties would venture into these mountains, bringing back the occasional cat. It seemed that the mental strength of the hominids had come to match their feline contemporaries.
Other psychic powers were attributed to the cats, including the power of teleportation. In Gallifrey's southern hemisphere, atop one of its highest mountains, there stands a crudely erected stone circle. Gallifreyan archaeologists determined that this was built by the cats themselves. Legend states that the giant cats emigrated by mass teleportation to another worlds. Few giant cats were seen from this time on, and those that did appear bore no telepathic powers. However, smaller domestic cats, or Kitlings, retained this ability.
WHY LINK THE KITLINGS FROM 'SURVIVAL' WITH THE KILLER CATS OF GALLIFREY?
The 'cat' theme is one that has been expanded on greatly in recent years. Colin Baker's cat motif and 'I am the cat that walks alone' slogan, followed by Eric Saward's novelisation of 'Slipback', set a pace followed by 'Survival' and the 'Cat's Cradle' trilogy.
Upon learning about 'The Killer Cats of Ginseng' by David Weir, everything seemed to fit into place. Cats can't exist everywhere in the universe, they have to come from somewhere - we have Earth cats, and Gallifrey has telepathic or empathic cats, just like the Kitlings.
Commentary
Since the 90s, a few stories have referenced the killer cats idea. Gary Russell’s VMA Invasion of the Cat-People mentions “mercenaries of Gin-Seng” alongside the Cheetah People in a list of felinoid species (hence the “canonical” spelling); there’s a similar offhand mention in Big Finish’s Erasure. But there’s only been one actual appearance of one of the cats: Daniel O’Mahony’s Faction Paradox short story “The Return of the King” (pdf).
“The Return of the King” is a prelude to the author’s 2008 novel Newtons Sleep. In that book there’s a glimpse of “the nocturnal delegations of the wild things, whose sharp bright teeth and claws gleamed in the dark of their robes.” The prelude elaborates,
[Time Lord Thessalia’s] oracle stays at the window, seething playfully below his hood. He has fiercely intelligent eyes, neither as sharp nor as bright as his scar. His mouth is a succulent white smile in a lightless face. His people have nothing but contempt for the rituals of the Great Houses. She’s little better than prey to him, a bloodless snack for his long teeth and hungry mind. He breathes, honeyed air purring out of the cavities of his body.
A killer cat kept as a Time Lord’s personal oracle … as @rassilon-imprimatur once noted, a funny recontextualization of The Mark of the Rani’s reference to the Lord President’s “pet cat”!
This was my first exposure to the killer cats, so I always took it for granted that they’d always had psychic or oracular abilities. But in fact, as best as I can tell, there was zero hint of this in the original serial. I tracked down every published description of the story, and they all amount to the same few repeated bits of information: Gallifrey, humanoid cats, and a gladiatorial arena. Richard Bignell ultimately told me, “No summary of Killers of the Dark exists. Even David Weir couldn’t recall anything about it when I spoke to him.”
So when “The Return of the King” features an oracular cat-man, it’s not just a reference to the unmade Classic serial. It’s a reference to fan interpretations like Middleton’s which canonweld that serial with the psychic Cheetah People.
And in some ways, it seems to be referencing Middleton’s version specifically! In “The Return of the King”, the above quoted memory is interrupted by commentary:
Your first oracle? ‘My last.’ You think? But his kind were vanishing from the world. ‘They were escaping the War. They could see it coming.’
Compare:
Legend states that the giant cats emigrated by mass teleportation to another worlds. Few giant cats were seen from this time on, and those that did appear bore no telepathic powers.
And so Middleton explains how the cats vanished in O’Mahony’s telling, and O’Mahony explains why they vanished.
Afterword
While we’re on the topic of why, why did O’Mahony choose to revive this specific idea in “The Return of the King”?
One of the places I checked for Killers of the Dark details was issue 336 of Doctor Who Magazine. Imagine how thrilled I was to find that the relevant “Accidental Tourist” piece, located one page after a Faction Paradox ad, was written by none other than O’Mahony himself!
Part of his reflection was particularly striking. He recaps the wild undefinedness of the Doctor’s backstory, a topic I’ve discussed before on this blog. But in his telling, the uncertainty extends past The War Games all the way to The Deadly Assassin.
After all, The War Games declared that “the Doctor’s people are the Time Lords”, but “who are the Time Lords?” was still left undefined. In the Time Lords’ many subsequent appearances, they were simply walking plot devices, and lore details were left to the wayside. Contradictions were rife. Who was Rassilon to Omega? Is their planet called “Gallifrey” or “Jewel”? Who or what on earth are the “First”, “Second”, and “Third Time Lord” who exiled the Doctor?
It was The Deadly Assassin which first dove into the details by featuring the Time Lords like they were any other of the show’s alien cultures. And for this, it was widely panned: “the fans had voted it the worst story of Season Fourteen and published reviews vociferously attacking its ‘betrayal’ of the Time Lords. The BBC practically disowned it, physically vandalising the master tape to placate Mary Whitehouse.” In other words, the stage was all set for a discarding of Holmes’ Time Lords.
O’Mahony writes in his conclusion,
The Deadly Assassin could have remained a one-off, its vision of the Doctor’s homeworld set at odds not just with the Gallifrey stories of the past but also those of the future. The Killer Cats of Geng Singh was the last chance to slip the leash. Williams loved the Time Lords but he had a raft of other ideas he could have put into play, not least the frustratingly deferred Guardians who were clearly intended as a new rung of the series cosmology above and beyond the Time Lords. The premise of Killer Cats was also to counterpoint the Time Lords with another Gallifreyan species – a race of humanoid cats that delighted in bloodthirsty gladiatorial contests alongside a highly refined culture. This wasn’t cribbing from The Deadly Assassin, this was building something new that would expand the newly-forged mythology of the series. In fact, with the cat-people on board and the Guardians waiting in the wings, the possibilities for Time Lord mythology were fluid. It might be possible to return to Gallifrey and find something new and exciting each time, different Gallifreys, with a mutable and ever-expanding history.
However, thanks to Killers of the Dark’s cancellation, Williams and Read were left with a slot to fill on short notice, and for The Invasion of Time they ultimately turned back to Holmes’ ideas. The Deadly Assassin wasn’t discarded or undermined, it was reentrenched.
This was the real moment that the Time Lords as we know them were crystallized: a real-world anchoring of the thread. This was when the whimsically-named planet “Gallifrey” definitively transformed into the rationalistic, stagnant, bureaucratic Homeworld that would feature in the Faction Paradox series.
Because in FP, by the time Grandfather Paradox enters the scene, the Great Houses are total strangers to whismy. It’s only through the course of the War that their understanding of the cosmos is broadened and stranger things begin to return to the Homeworld (with great vengeance).
By showing us a cat in the flesh, O’Mahony is finishing the housekeeping: just as the Intuitive Revelation banished the Pythia, the Eremites, and the Carnival Queen; just as the Grey Eminence unwrote Gallifrey’s first childbirth; and just as the Eternals “despaired of this reality, and fled their hallowed halls” at first hint of conflict – the Killer Cats have to leave to set the scene for the War to come.
P.S.
In Baker’s End, Tom Baker wound up “the King of Cats”. What does this imply about the Other?!?
#Doctor Who Apocrypha#the return of the king#daniel o'mahony#archival#effortpost#newtons sleep#60s who#for archival purposes#only#no copyright infringement intended#will remove upon request#baker's end#the deadly assassin#killer cats of gin-seng#the invasion of time#fourth doctor#survival#faction paradox
49 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Deadly Assassin 1976
10/10
I love this episode. I'm very partial to Gallifrey episodes and Master episodes, so this one is a win. Tom Baker gives a spectacular performance of course. I also like seeing the corrupt side of timelords as well.
#tom baker#fourth doctor#4th doctor#the deadly assassin#classic doctor who#classic who#doctor who#the master#crispy master#crispy!master#peter pratt#show review
40 notes
·
View notes
Text
watched The Deadly Assassin for the first time and have some thoughts
So can the Doctor see visions of the future? That or the Master put the vision in his head but it’s still fun to consider
Idk why, I always thought the CIA were from the EU. Got absolutely jumpscared seeing them in this serial
When they originally made this serial, was it planned that only the Doctor could regenerate or is Runcible just completely ignorant? Not to mention the master murders a bunch of time lords in one hit each so maybe the doctor was supposed to be an outlier?
when first watching part 1 I watched the whole credits to see if they played the second half of the theme and they label crispy as the master , effectively spoiling the whole thing . thanks credits
does four get tortured this much normally or have I just been watching the wrong serials (I’ve only seen genesis of the daleks and now this one) . Always associated it with 8 but maybe it’s just the x4 curse. unrelated but if those are supposed to be Gallifreyan prisonerwear then why does it look so comfortable like I genuinely want to wear that
random Italian timelord? Why not? does this mean there’s Gallifrey Italy
it took my a stupid long amount of time to realise the Barbiegirl timelord was Cardinal Borusa
the whole fever dream sequence when four first arrives in the matrix was really well done for the effects they had at the time, it really felt frantic and disoriented, largely in part of Tom baker’s acting
my fear of needles is clashing with my need to laugh at the size of it like that’s not medically acceptable sunshine
idk I really want to poke crispy in the eye. It’d probably like make a squelching noise or something
why do people ship 8/crispy? Is an eu thing I’m missing or something ?
As for that infamous cliffhanger, I’m impressed the show got this aggresive to be honest. Part 3 was literally Tom baker covered in his own blood and sweat stumbling around around the Quarry. peak doctor who
overall? One of the best dw stories I’ve ever seen. Great mystery, impressive action for the time, time lords, dark tone, and brilliant acting across the board. 10/10
#doctor who#fourth doctor#the deadly assassin#classic who#tom baker#the master#crispy master#gallifrey#time lords
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
Me every morning when I wake up.
#doctor who#classic who#fourth doctor#tom baker#the deadly assassin#i’m really speeding through season 14#This is some good shit
21 notes
·
View notes
Text
I love the deadly assassin, fw the bdsm in it heavy
#doctor who#classic doctor who#fourth doctor#tom baker#thoschei#dr who the deadly assassin#the deadly assassin
12 notes
·
View notes
Text
You know I had to do Deadly Assassin fanart.
He's just too fine.
#fourth doctor#tom baker#4th doctor#doctor who#classic who#classic doctor who#doctor who fanart#fanart#digital art#the master#crispy!master#the deadly assassin
23 notes
·
View notes
Text
Doctor Who - The Deadly Assassin
#fourth doctor#the deadly assassin#classic doctor who#doctor who#doctor who girlie#classic who#4th doctor#the master
35 notes
·
View notes
Text
"the deadly assassin" was a good fuckin' time, always enjoy me some Master, and it was fun to see Gallifrey! first time i've seen it! very British, very pompous, did not expect to unironically love the gallifreyan robes with the big swoopy headpieces, would love to cosplay that shit
lotta whomp-the-doctor in that series, too; episode 3 is very very nightmare fuel - that bit where he steps in the egg = yeuch
and no companion - always fun to see the doctor with nobody to really smart off to - he gets irascible
i loved it!
27 notes
·
View notes