Doctor Who: Subterfuge

The third in a set of three stories that sees the Seventh Doctor up against various renegade Time Lords, this time it's the turn of the Monk. It's the strongest of the three, with the only real weakness being the “24 hours earlier...” style intro, which does nothing for the story and one can only assume was added in because the director felt that the beginning was a bit dull. Which wasn't how I found it, although that could be because this plays into my tastes in stories.

It sees the Doctor visiting Churchill (played as usual by Ian McNeice) in the run-up to the 1945 general election, just after the war had finished in Europe. Which, for those unfamiliar with British political history, was the one he lost, heralding Clement Attlee's government and the creation of the NHS and the welfare state. This means that the wartime dynamic of the friendship between the Doctor and Churchill is no longer in place... even if the latter doesn't realise it.

The story itself is one in which almost everyone, except Churchill, is double-crossing someone else, some for good reasons, and some not. It's a delightfully complex story, although not so much so as to make it difficult to follow, even if it takes a while for all the character's motivations to become clear. Rufus Hound is having fun as the Monk, here more interested in changing history for political ends than purely for the wealth he normally seems interested in. He's arguably not even the main villain, despite his prominence in the story, and, in this case, that helps things along.

There are science fiction elements in the story, to be sure, but they aren't hugely prominent; it's more of a story of political skullduggery and... well... subterfuge than a straight-up sci-fi tale. Of course, it's crazy - we all know history didn't really unfold this way, but then the British didn't employ Daleks in WWII, either. All set against the background that, nonetheless, we know that, this time, Churchill has to lose...