Best Cliffhanger: The Troughton Years

[Jason Thompson]

Since the Hartnell years cliffhanger thread has been quite successful, let's continue. What are your top five Troughton era cliffhangers?

[Larry]

1/ Ep 6 of Invasion The Cybermen emerging from the sewers

2/ Ep 9 of The War Games - the Doctor and companions trying to escape from the Time Lords

3/ Ep 1 of The Mind Robber, with the TARDIS seeming to blow apart

4/ ep 2 of Tomb of the Cybermen with the Cyber controller saying you belong to us.

tbh with so few episodes to chose from i can't think of a 5th one as all the others are pretty much the same.

[Ssarl]

Power of the Daleks 2 'I am your servant!' This one is so chilling. It's so wrong to see everyone fawning on a Dalek and determinedly ignoring the Doctor's voice of reason. It's particularly off-kilter coming after Hartnell, who could shout down officious types who were meddling in danger. Not this time...

The Abominable Snowmen 4 'Come in, my child.... you have no alternative'. From the Telesnap Archive alone, I could picture this in my mind so vividly. I imagine it to be so very eerie.

The Evil of the Daleks 5 (Daleks playing trains) for similar reasons to Power 2. It's so incongruous that it manages to be unsettling and ridiculous all at once.

The Invasion 6 (Cybermen storm St Paul's) Because of course this one.

Not sure about the fifth... there's a lot of others that are very good, but not as great as these four. Hard to pick a standout.

[SiHart]

Obviously The Mind Robber pt 1 is brilliant- it's so damn odd, and must have been crazily amazing in 68.

I love the end of The Krotons pt 1 too- the root searching out Troughton, who's backing away in panic... lovely stuff.

Power of the Daleks 2 for the reasons Mr Ssarl has pointed out is fabulous.

Seeds of Death pt 5 with Troughton in the foam is amazing comic/ tension work!

And The War Games pt 9 is wonderful!

[J.R. Southall]

I'm going to be a sour-puss and just choose a single favourite again, and for much the same reason as last time (in fact, I've just written an article in which I talk about all of this at length! But it shan't see print for another three months, so I think I'm on safe ground talking about them here...).

It's the end of the second episode, and up until this point, we've been given to believe that the Doctor and company are in a certain, specific location, and that the weirdness that's been creeping in at the edges of the story is most probably evidence of aliens interfering on Earth (watching it retrospectively makes all of this totally moot, of course). And then a rabbit jumps out of a hat and all of a sudden, we are once again 167 hours away from finding out if everything we thought we'd worked out about the story and its location so far, is completely wrong.

I just love the cliffhangers that make you think, Is anything that's happened so far really what I thought it was?

It's The War Games Episode Two. The fact that One and Nine have such lovely cliffhangers as well is just a bonus. I completely adore The War Games!

[Ssarl]

It's got quite a nice collection of garden variety cliffhangers throughout, as well. 'It's my duty to shoot you!', The Doctor as a traitor (a rare cliffhanger genre, that!), the menacing yet ridiculous shrinking box, the entire resistance being shot down in a wonderfully abrupt way... brilliant.

Plus a good number of them are solved by throwing a smoke bomb and running away, which is marvellous.

[Rob McCow]

Good choices - especially from The War Games!

One that always struck me as bizarre (not really the best though) was towards the end of Evil of The Daleks. The Doctor has converted three Daleks to the Human Factor and they've been demonstrating their playful nature to Jamie and the Doctor. Suddenly, Maxtible arrives and says "Yes, a most amusing game don't you think, Jamie?"

DOES Jamie think the game is amusing?! IS Maxtible telling the truth, or does he actually think that the game is NOT amusing?! WHY didn't he ask the Doctor what HE thought?! WAS Maxtible wearing hit top hat at this point?

It's the kind of cliffhanger that keeps you guessing.

Aside from that, Mind Robber Pt1 is definitely up there with the best. And Power of The Daleks pt5 must have been unbelievably exciting at the time, with the promised Extermination-fest on it's way as the Daleks pour out of the factory.

[Ian Lethbridge-Stewart]

I'd better get this one in on behalf of Mr Cox:

The episode of The War Games which ends in the Doctor appearing to have betrayed the resistance with the War Chief saying "A nice neat little package for us to dispose of"

[Anthony Williams]

1. The Mind Robber - Episode 1 - The TARDIS breaks up, Jamie and Zoe are left clinging to the console, while Zoe screams upon seeing the Doctor calmly floating through the void - WOW! What an absolutely bizarre cliffhanger, at the end of what was most possibly THE most surreal episode of Doctor Who EVER. I absolutely love this.

2. The Invasion - Episode 6 - after six episodes of build-up, the Cybermen's invasion of Earth has finally begun, and we are left with haunting images of Cybermen outside St Pauls, and walking through the streets of London - the last time an alien race invaded Earth en-masse, it was in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but that was set in the future, and we never saw the invasion itself. Here, we are treated to the invasion, on contemporary Earth. And it's done REALLY well. Absolutely superb!

3. Fury from the Deep - Episode 1 - Victoria is trapped inside the oxygen store, and is helpless as a mass of foam and seaweed surges forward towards her - this is one cliffhanger that I can't imagine actually working too well on-screen. Yet, on audio, it's perfect. A fantastic level of tension, with a description that allows the imagination to run wild, really picturing the seaweed lashing out at Victoria. Lovely imagery here!

4. The Power of the Daleks - Episode 2 - "I AM YOUR SEEEEER-VANT!" - thinking about this in the context of the time, anyone who had been watching Who regularly would've been surprised by that. The last time we saw the Daleks, they were attempting to destroy the universe with the time destructor. Before that, they were chasing the Doctor and his friends through the universe to try and destroy them. Yet, here, they're proclaiming their servitude to a group of humans - just what are they up to?

5. The Underwater Menace - Episode 3 - "Nuzzink in ze vorld can schtopp me now!" - so unintentionally comical. Yet, this is why I love it. Zaroff is certain of his victory - will the Doctor and his friends be able to save the day this time?

[Jason Thompson]

Excellent suggestions so far. Here's my selection:

The Power of the Daleks episode 4: Three Daleks are given the run of the colony, but slowly we realise there are 4. Lesterson is amazed and appalled when he realises there are indeed four, and the Daleks are reproducing. As he explores deeper in the capsule he finds, as do we, that not only are they reproducing, they are doing it en masse, and the situation is orders of magnitude worse than we ever thought....

The Power of the Daleks epsiode 5: We knew it was coming, but now the Daleks are emerging, and the chaos will begin...

The Tomb of the Cybermen episode 2: The previous Cybermen stories both ended episodes with the purely visual element of the Cybermen. Now this episode not only serves up the most visually iconic emergence of the Cybermen, but shunts it into the main action of part 2. The cliffhanger comes a few minutes later, as the Cybercontroller calmly announces: 'You belong to us. You shall be like us'....

The Invasion episode 6: A cliffhanger so good it is even presented as a separate act in the episode, preceded by a fade to black. Just brilliant.

The War Games episode 2: For the reasons already stated. Huh? What? Romans?

[Andrew Curnow]

I'm not too familiar with some of the Troughton cliffhangers, due to so much of his stuff being missing, so there may be some absolutely brilliant ones that I've missed!

The Macra Terror part 2 - the man on the screen is dragged off by a claw, and it's clear that 'control' is not in control at all. The Macra are in control of the camp!! (And all this despite there being no such things as Macra...)

The War Games part 9 - I particularly like the haunting way that Carstairs vanishes waving goodbye, and then!! Then, it all kicks off - Time Lords! It must have been a l-o-o-o-o-o-n-g week waiting for part 10 back in 1969!

The Wheel in Space part 2 (also seen at the start of part 3!!) - weird floaty alien egg things... What?! And then-- bash!! A cyberfist shoots through!

The Invasion part 6 - wot Jason said!

Power of the Daleks part 1 - "Polly, Ben - come and meet the Daleks." Cobweb-covered pepperpots, apparently dead.... And then suddenly, a creature crawls across the floor. They - are - still - alive!