Doctor Who: 10 Times The Doctor Went To War

5. The War Games

War Games Classic Doctor Who Second Doctor
BBC

1969's epic ten-part The War Games saw the Second Doctor and his companions stumbling into a battlefield populated by soldiers from throughout Earth's history.

Believing they had arrived in World War I, the TARDIS team soon realised this war was being fought by out-of-time Redcoats, Romans, and a mysterious 'War Chief'.

In Westworld-esque 'War Zones' designed to look like Earth battlefields, the War Chief had kidnapped these soldiers to gauge their fighting prowess. With only the strongest surviving, they would make for a mighty army to conquer the universe.

Traversing these War Zones and surviving the various factions warring with each other, the Doctor infiltrated the control centre and learned a shocking truth. The War Chief was a renegade Time Lord.

The Doctor realised that the only way to send the soldiers back to their own time and stop the War Chief was to contact his own people. To save the day, he surrendered to the Time Lords.

Placed on trial for stealing a TARDIS and interfering throughout time and space, the Time Lords forced the Doctor to regenerate again and banished him to the Earth he'd sworn to protect.

Despite this being our first look at the Time Lords, this wouldn't be the only war they would participate in...

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Eden Luke McIntyre is a Scottish writer, editor and script consultant, with an MA in TV Fiction Writing. He writes content for TV, radio, stage, and online, and was appointed as a BBC Writers Room Scottish Voice in early 2020. Eden can usually be found rambling about Doctor Who, The Beatles, and obscure things that no one cares about.