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Captain
Mike Yates
(1971 - 1974) |
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| Richard
Franklin |
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Richard
Franklin was a Lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade before
becoming an actor and joining RADA in 1963. After
leaving
RADA he worked for a time in an advertising agency. He then
worked for the Century Theatre appearing on stage
mainly in Shakespearean roles. Television
appearances include The Saint, Dixon of Dock Green and in
1966 Crossroads. He then spent a year and a half with the Birmingham
repertory theatre. In 1970 he appeared in the BBC antiques show Going
for a Song. After Doctor Who he had a small part in Blakes
Seven and was a regular in the YTV soap Emmerdale.
He returned to the role of Mike Yates in the 20th anniversary
special "The
Five Doctors" in 1983. He also wrote and starred in The Doctor
Who spin off play "Recall UNIT" for the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe in 1984.
Unfortunately Richard Franklin died in December 2023 at the
age of 87.
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 Joining
UNIT as a sergeant, Mike Yates initially worked as part of UNIT’s ‘clean-up
crew’, making sure that any alien technology left over
after UNIT operations against the Nestene Consciousness ("Spearhead
From Space") or the Silurians ("Doctor
Who and the Silurians") was cleared up, until he met the Third
Doctor and Liz Shaw when he was directly assigned to UNIT HQ about
a year after The Doctor joined UNIT. Having proven his worth
when he helped The Doctor, Liz, The
Brigadier and Sergeant
Benton save the world from conquest by insane actress Nancy Norton
in a reality that they themselves accidentally created by travelling
back to the past ("The
Eye of the Giant"), Yates was
promoted to Captain following a confrontation with C-19, a renegade
government department collecting alien technology, Benton -
although the more obvious candidate given his longer time with
UNIT - recognising that Yates was better suited to the political
aspects of the promotion than he would be ("The
Scales of Injustice").
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| The Mind of Evil |
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Having
received the promotion to second-in-command of UNIT, Mike
quickly demonstrated a different outlook to military life
compared to The Brigadier. Mike had very modern ideas and
had very little time for military protocol, including saluting,
much preferring to get on with the job in hand with casual
efficiency. Although The Brigadier had faith in him as a
soldier, Mike still experienced some difficulties in his
position at times, such as his first experience at independent
command - The Doctor having been temporarily transferred
to Russia to investigate alien activity there while The Brigadier
went to Geneva to explore recent evidence that suggested
corruption in UNIT -, resulted in UNIT being infiltrated
by the CIA under the command of the mysterious Control, Benton
nearly being killed by a bomb that had been planted in The
Doctor’s lab, and losing Britain's supply of cobalt-60
when the CIA tried to undermine a British attempt to trap
the invading Waro, although his colleagues recognised that
circumstances were all outside Mike's control and Mike himself
vowed to do better next time ("The
Devil Goblins From Neptune").
Despite
his awareness of his responsibilities, Mike was generally
easy-going and made his courage clear more than once. He
was also very rarely phased by anything, neatly summing
up The Doctor’s description of the threat facing them
when trapped in the village of Devil’s End as an alien
that could be ‘either too small to see or thirty feet
tall, can incinerate you or freeze you to death, turn stone
images into homicidal monsters and looks like the devil’ ("The
Dæmons"). Regardless of the threat facing him, Mike
was always willing to stand up for what he beleived in,
once even defying orders when The Brigadier and Benton fell
under the influence of the mysterious Ragman - Mike apparently
slightly protected from its influence as he was still slightly
'off-balance' after a recent assault - to investigate an
alternative connection to the current crisis despite The
Brigadier's orders to remain in their current location,
buying The Doctor enough time to identify and defeat the
Ragman's power ("Rags").
He
was well respected by the troops and especially Sergeant
Benton, generally trying to treat his men with respect for
their personal qualities rather than automatically issuing
orders simply because of his higher rank, although he was
willing to use it when his relationship with The Doctor’s
female assistant Jo Grant was concerned. Despite this he
and Benton respected each other and they made a very effective
team, to the point where Mike was once ashamed when he asked
Benton to collect a file for him when there were other soldiers
available to do the job even if Benton didn’t mind
taking the order ("The Devil Goblins from Neptune").
This was very noticeable during one of the occasions when
they were trying to defeat The
Master and were trapped in
the village of Devil’s End by a heat barrier while
The Brigadier and the rest of UNIT were on the other side,
leaving just the two of them to help The Doctor and Jo before
The Brigadier and the rest of the troops can arrive at the
village ("The Dæmons").
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| The Claws of Axos |
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Despite
being a soldier he did have a very sensitive and romantic
side to his nature and he cared very much for Jo, so much
so that on a number of occasions he was there for a shoulder
for her to cry on when she felt hard done by. He enjoyed
her company both while on and off duty even though occasionally
he teased her. They were generally good friends, even though
Mike would have liked his relationship with Jo to go further,
but they were occasionally interrupted by other matters,
such as Jo accompanying The Doctor on a supposedly brief
test flight of a seemingly-repaired TARDIS that took them
away from Earth for several weeks ("The
Curse of Peladon" and "The
Face of the Enemy"). On one occasion Jo and Mike were
set up on a blind date with each other, but the date itself
never happened as they invited The Doctor to join them and
he offered them a trip in the TARDIS instead, resulting
in Mike being temporarily brainwashed when they arrived
on the planet Nooma during a conflict when he was actually
killed by the natives, falling under their control as a
zombie-like being until The Doctor was able to restore him
to life ("Speed
of Flight") (It was later implied
that Yates was with The Doctor and Jo when they subsequently
visited Karfel - their original destination - and encountered
Magellan, a scientist who would become the Sixth
Doctor’s
enemy the Borad ("Timelash")). Whether this had
any significant impact on their later relationship is unclear,
but available information suggests that they had no dates
after this.
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| Day of the Daleks |
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Mike
worked best as a free agent and he relished in the task
of being an undercover agent to infiltrate Global Chemicals.
However, this did lead him to have a few problems when he
was hypnotised by BOSS, a megalomaniac computer seeking
to control the world ("The
Green Death"). Although
The Doctor was able to break BOSS’s conditioning,
after a period of leave to recover from his experiences,
Mike continued to suffer from mental difficulties, being
sent on lighter missions to ‘ease’ him back
into operations with UNIT. During one of these missions,
Mike encountered the Fifth
Doctor while investigating events
in a small village - the Third Doctor being currently off-planet
- ("Deep
Blue"), although the two worked well
together despite Mike’s confusion at The Doctor’s
explanation for the out-of-sequence encounter, and The Doctor’s
knowledge of Mike’s future actions, exposing the presence
of the alien Xaranthi as they tried to transform the village
population into human/Xaranthi hybrids to rebuild their
society, although Mike’s later instability may have
been ‘aided’ by the fact that he was forced
to kill several hybrids when they threatened to attack others
before The Doctor could cure the transformation.
Increasingly
pushed to the brink, and seduced by the peace he experienced
while visiting uninhabited areas of the planet, Mike went
on to become involved with Operation Golden Age, a plan
to turn back Earth’s history and erase all but a few
of the human race. On returning back to duty he not only
betrayed UNIT and The Brigadier but also endangered The
Doctor’s life when he used his position as a trusted
and loyal member of UNIT to sabotage The Doctor’s
equipment - although he had briefly tried to convince his
superiors in Operation Golden Age to ask The Doctor for
help rather than killing him -, his actions also endangering
The Doctor’s new assistant Sarah
Jane Smith. After
he was exposed, and because of the unfortunate circumstances,
The Brigadier arranged for the misguided Yates to be given
a period of extended sick leave and the chance to retire
quietly, recognising that his present actions didn’t
negate the person he’d been in the past ("Invasion
of the Dinosaurs"). Mike was later given a unique
chance at redemption when he invited Sarah
Jane Smith to the Buddhist
meditation centre which he was staying at, alerting UNIT
and The Doctor to the existence of a group at the centre
who have been in contact with the Giant
Spiders of Metabelis
3 who were attempting to increase their mental powers and
so free their Great One. It was during the Giant Spiders
attack that Mike is injured and then cured by K'anpo, the
Buddhist meditation centre's leader, who also turns out
to be not just another Time Lord but The Doctor's former
Time Lord Guru, K’anpo assuring Yates that he still
had a good heart before he departed to regenerate ("Planet
of the Spiders").
Mike’s
last televised appearance was as an illusion created by Rassilon to ward off the Third Doctor during the 1983 20th
anniversary story "The
Five Doctors", Mike appearing
with an illusion of Liz Shaw at the same time, although
The Doctor saw through the deception. In other media, the Fourth
Doctor spent some time with Mike in the early twenty-first
century when he was ‘between companions’ after Leela left him ("The
Invasion of Time") and before
he could finish building his new K9 ("The
Ribos Operation"),
Mike responding to an advert in a paper that seemed specifically
addressed to him, encountering The Doctor’s housekeeper
Mrs Wibbsey in a small house called Nest Cottage. Although
The Doctor had no memory of placing the ad, he nevertheless
told Mike about his fights with a mysterious race of telepathic
hornets that had been haunting Earth for centuries, the
hornets preying on the darkness in men’s hearts to
take control of them as part of their plan to take control
of Earth until The Doctor had managed to contain their hive
in various stuffed animals. Although the hornets tried to
prey on Mike’s inner darkness to convince him to help
them, manipulating his inner resentment of the impact The
Doctor had had on his life when he knew so little about
the Time Lord in the hope of using his contacts in the government
to expand their ability to control Earth - The Doctor realising
that they had influenced him to place the ad to lure Mike
in -, The Doctor was able to break the hive queen’s
influence on Mike long enough to escape their hive, shrinking
the queen down into nothing and trapping the hive in a stuffed
zebra that he could destroy. ("Hornets'
Nest").
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| Invasion of the Dinosaurs |
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During
a later encounter with UNIT in the seventies, the Seventh
Doctor learned
that Mike had rejoined UNIT after some time recovering from his past issues,
but was now working undercover in terrorist organisation Black Star, who
believed that they were being secretly brainwashed by government signals
in various broadcasts (Ironically, while they were correct about the purpose
of the signals, the signals had actually been created by The Doctor’s
old enemies the Vardans ("The Invasion of Time") in alliance with
the Meddling
Monk ("The
Time Meddler")). At the conclusion of the
fight with the Vardans and the Monk, although he eventually sided with The
Doctor and his old colleagues, Mike resigned from UNIT, explaining to The
Brigadier that he had come to sympathise with Black Star’s ideals about
government suppression of information even if he objected to their methods.
He met The Doctor again in 2010 when he was invited to the wedding of The
Doctor’s companion Bernice
Summerfield in the village of Cheldon Bonniface
("Happy
Endings"), during which it was revealed that Mike had ‘come
out’ and was now involved in a relationship with another man (Although
it was never specified if he was gay or bisexual).
The
character of Mike Yates may have started out small but he
grew in importance and as he played more and more key roles
he was eventually considered a companion. |
