Here’s a list of who’s who in ‘The Matter of Reality’.

THE THIRD DOCTOR (Jon Pertwee)

As part of his sentence from the Time Lords, the Doctor was forced to begin his exile on Earth with a new face. He arrived on Earth in ‘Spearhead in Space’. The Third Doctor was confident, bold and brash, but with a soft paternal side, reserved for those he cared about. While exiled, he became allied to the extraterrestrial task-force U.N.I.T. and helped them combat living plastic Autons, Sea Devils and polluted giant green maggots as well as the fellow renegade Time Lord known as the Master. Eventually he was allowed to travel again, and on one such trip to Metabellis III in ‘Planet of the Spiders’ received a fatal dose of radiation, prompting him to regenerate…

JO GRANT (Katy Manning)

Despite failing her science exams, Jo was hired by U.N.I.T. as the Doctor’s new lab assistant in ‘Terror of the Autons’. What she may have lacked in scientific knowledge, she made up for in bravery and heart. She faced the Master numerous times, eventually confounding his attempts to hypnotise her. She was proposed to by the King of Peladon and went to find help on Spiridon when the Doctor had been shot. She left the TARDIS to marry Clifford Jones and became an environmental activist in ‘The Green Death’. When the Shansheeth fabricated the Eleventh Doctor’s death in ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ story ‘Death of the Doctor’, she attended his ‘funeral’, teamed up with Sarah Jane Smith and helped free the Doctor. She was last seen heading off to catch a hovercraft to Norway.

MIKE YATES (Richard Franklin)

Right-hand man to Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart throughout some of U.N.I.T.’s most fearsome alien encounters, Mike Yates first met the Doctor in ‘Vengeance of the Stones’ before being promoted to captain in ‘Terror of the Autons’. Mike was a cool-headed, easy-going soldier. He destroyed the hideous Auton doll that was attacking Jo; was trapped within the heat barrier created around Devil’s End by Azal the Dæmon; and was brainwashed by the BOSS computer to kill the Doctor. Perhaps reeling from this, Yates turns traitor in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’, coming to believe in Operation Golden Age – that human advancement and pollution should be stricken from the Earth. Allowed to quietly resign from U.N.I.T., Mike later alerted Sarah Jane Smith in ‘Planet of the Spiders’ to strange goings-on at a Buddhist retreat that turned out to be the start of a universal invasion by giant spiders.

© Tim Bradley, 2020