Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor's 15 Greatest Stories

8. The Deadly Assassin

Through the millennia, the Time Lords of Gallifrey led a life of ordered calm, protected against all threats from lesser civilisations by their great power. But this was to change. Suddenly, and terribly, the Time Lords faced the most dangerous crisis in their long history.

For Nu Who fans intrigued by the mysterious of Gallifrey, this episode is definitely for you. One of Doctor Who's greatest writers - Robert Holmes - peeled back the mythos behind the Time Lords and created iconic characters like Chancellor Goth and Borusa. It also showed the Time Lords at their worst as they're seen here to be fuelled by tradition and the passion of politics and power. It's easy to see why the Doctor abandoned his home planet many years earlier. The Deadly Assassin is also infamous for the long-awaited return of the Master. Wisely the show didn't pick another actor actor to replace the late Roger Delgado, at least in the traditional sense. Instead, the story picks up the Doctor's nemesis at the very end of his life, a skeletal figure fuelled by revenge. He frames the Doctor for the assasination of the President of the Time Lords in one of the show's greatest cliffhangers to date and Peter Pratt plays a dangerous, shadowy figure that is truly a thing of horror. A brutal, violent and mind-bending story and the first to not feature a companion, The Deadly Assassin is a bold attempt to do something different and has been rarely bettered.