"Battlefield" is the first serial in the doomed 26th season of "Doctor Who", which was to prove the last season of the programme's original run. And, like a lot of "Doctor Who" serials, the plot doesn't make a lot of sense. The Seventh Doctor and Ace find themselves battling various characters from the Arthurian legends. Now you might think that a bunch of warriors from the Dark Ages, armed only with Dark Ages technology, would not worry a Time Lord unduly, but in this version of history the evil sorceress Morgaine, her son Mordred and their followers are beings from another dimension with awesome powers at their disposal. Morgaine's motive for coming to twentieth-century England is to recover the sword Excalibur, currently hanging over the fireplace in the local pub, but she also threatens to unleash a being known as the Destroyer of Worlds on Planet Earth. With a title like that it is pretty obvious what his party trick is, but it is never explained why either he or Morgaine want to destroy the Earth or what they hope to gain by doing so. Wouldn't it be a lot easier just to take Excalibur and leave? But then, if she did that, there wouldn't be much of a story.
I won't set out the rest of the plot, because it doesn't make much sense. I will freely admit that Sylvester McCoy was not my favourite incarnation of the Doctor, but he did suffer under the disadvantage of having to cope with some awful scripts, and while "Battlefield" is not quite the worst from this period- "The Curse of Fenric" from later in the same season would take some beating- it is nevertheless pretty bad. About the only thing I liked about this serial is that it brought back, for his final appearance in the series, one of my favourite characters, Nicholas Courtney's Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of UNIT, a frequent feature of the programme in the late sixties and seventies. He is a by-the-book army officer who can seem like a narrow-minded stickler for discipline, but nevertheless possesses considerable reserves of courage and decency. Here he is called out of retirement to assist the Doctor and Brigadier Winifred Bambera, his successor as commander of UNIT.
The termination of the series at the end of this season meant that this was the only appearance of Angela Bruce's Brigadier Bambera. (A pity. She had the potential to become an interesting character). There is little about the serial as a whole, however, to convince me that the BBC1 were altogether wrong in their decision not to commission a twenty-seventh season. 4/10.
