I know how the Second Doctor made his exit onscreen has been a debate over the years on the forum. Was his exile a death, did he have another life before his exile working for the Time Lords etc etc etc.

However, watching through Troughton's last Season, I often wonder if there could have been a better way to finish off his era and I wanted to put this out for discussion.

What sort of swansong would you have liked for him aside from the one he actually had?For me, I would have liked to see the Second Doctor do something he had done best during his era and for me there should have been only one contender for villain-the Cybermen!

Like Hartnell and The Daleks the Cybermen seemed to crop up time and time again during his era so what better than one final flourish with the adversaries that helped sum up the memories of his era.

Okay, there is the fact Hartnell also ended with the Cybermen so maybe another foe like The Ice Warriors or one third and final encounter with The Great Intelligence.

I think Troughton's Doctor could have saved the Universe in a big way without the Time Lords help and had some suitably heroic finish to see him to his regeneration. A regeneration that this time would have been seen onscreen.

So what do you guys think? Any other ways you would like to have seen Troughton leave or do you think what was actually shown was suitable enough?

Well considering War Games is one of the best stories ever, finally showed the Time Lords and it was a perfect sendoff for Troughton.

Yeah, I'm totally happy with The War Games and it stands up there with The Caves of Androzani as one of the best swansong stories in the show's history, none of the other's come close. Loved the concept of the varying war zones aa it not only added a sense of chaotic mystery to the story but added a fun aspect to it. Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury, one of my favourite Who teams, made great use of their final story by giving some of their best performances yet. I loved the War Lord of the WWI zone, bleedin' creepy fellow.

So yeah, I wouldn't replace it with anything, as I feel what we got was a true gem and I certainly couldn't think of a better idea for Troughton to have bowed out on.

I don't think The War Games can be bettered. It's one of the few from that era that I have strong memories of. It's huge in terms of its impact on the show's development because it introduces the Timelords. It's suitably epic in scope, with the Doctor, in an act of compassion, ultimately sacrificing his freedom and current personality so the Timelords could repatriate all the warriors and soldiers back to their home time periods.

I have often wondered if Troughton's Doctor turning into Pertwee's was a regeneration or a transformation. After all, regeneration is when the body is worn out or badly damaged. In Troughton's case neither applies. I suppose the Time Lords forced a regeneration by some means unknown. Whichever way you look at it, I think The Wargames was the perfect way for Troughton's reign to end.

The war games is one of my favourites. A perfect end to the trougton era. I like the season 6b theory though. http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Season_6B

This was one of the reasons I started this thread.

I will point out, which I should have done at the top, that I too like The War Games. It sags a bit in places due to it's length and the padding is unbelievable in places but once you know the background to the story you realise why that is. The last episode is amazing and it serves it purpose for what the production team at the time decided to do and yes, it did give us the Time Lords, so that was good too.

For me, though, I would have just preferred a story with a proper regeneration on the end. I think it's a disappointment we never see the regeneration itself and because Spearhead In Space is such a radical departure from what had gone before, it does feel a kind of an alienating experience with few references in the story to what had happened to The Doctor(Though this did come later, off course). Everything was so new it feels almost like a new show. (Maybe that was the idea at the time)

So I would have preferred a bit more of a link between the two stories and a proper regeneration would have helped that. I also agree with above post about exactly caused the change. We know The Time Lords had the power to change his appearance but was it an enforced change via just their power alone or did they in effect just kill him?

I have no issues with the War Games especially in the context of the story issues they were having with Season 6 and having to extend the length of the War Games as a result, though I did not think revealing the Doctor to be a Time Lord was a good idea (I know I am in the minority on this).

As for your idea about the Great Intelligence they did consider a story with the Great Intelligence and would have been Jamie's final episode but that was abandoned due to a dispute involving copyright for the Quarks. As for the Ice Warriors I don't think having an Ice Warrior episode 2 stories after the Seeds of Death would have worked.

Whatever it should have been, it should have been made as a colour test, so flashbacks could've have been used in the first Pertwee story!

When in 1969 did BBC One start making colour shows, where the initial transmission would have been black & white, with the colour version not shown until a repeat maybe 6 months down the line?

A good BBC example would be Series 1 of Python, where all episodes were made in colour, but the first few episodes were shown in B & W.

To be fair not all of the studios in TV Centre at the time of The War Games' production were colourised. Just three were in full colour (studios 6, 7 and 8, of which only 6 and 8 were large enough for a drama series like DW - indeed, Doctor Who would use these two studios amongst others in the 70s and 80s.) At the time of The War Games being made, studios 1 and 3 were shut for refurbishment - I can't remember which one but one of these opened midway during WG's production and the final five episodes of WG were made in that studio using the EMI 2001 colour cameras (though with the PAL colour subcarrier switched off). Studio 4 would follow in 1970. To give you an idea for how short of studios the BBC were in this timeframe, the time taken for converting a studio with the size and complexity of say, studio 3 would be about 3-4 months. (As a vaguely related sidenote, studio 1 at TVC was shut for three years between 1988 and 1991, for an asbestos removal programme and for a huge upgrade - some of the equipment in there including the cameras before the upgrade were the original colour cameras - again EMI 2001s - installed in there in the summer of 1969! When they were installed, Patrick Troughton was the Doctor, when they were taken out, Sylvester McCoy was. When the studio came back online, the show had been axed/suspended/whatever fandom are calling it this week.)

Lime Grove would have to wait until the summer of 1970 to be colourised (even then not all studios there were ever converted to colour, some just abandoned), and Riverside would never be equipped for colour, having been scheduled for closure in March 1970. The BBC Television Theatre and the Alexandra Palace studios were both not designed to produce drama series like Doctor Who, one being for audience shows like Crackerjack and (later on) Jim'll Fix It and Wogan. The other was by then only suitable for the new Open University programmes the BBC was required to do, and would not be equipped for colour until about 1976.

So there were just not the facilities at that time for Doctor Who to be made in colour, only half of the final *proper* Troughton story was made with colour cameras. That's not to say that the studio gallery was back online - it may have been routed to another studio's gallery which may have still had black and white vision mixing equipment. Maybe even routed to a black and white videotape recorder in the basement of TV Centre (the location for all the BBC's VTR equipment until the early 1990s). The BBC, for sales and also practical reasons, only made complete series of one programme in either black and white or colour, not switching from one to the other mid-run, except continuing programmes like Grandstand, Panorama or even continuing dramas like Z Cars (which didn't go colour for some weeks after November 1969, for the same reasons as TWG, this is why programme producers had to pay more for working with colour, because the staff - whose salary came out of the programme's budget - demanded more pay to work in colour and also because colour equipment at that time was at a premium).

Not going to copy above post but thanks for that, very interesting.