Doctor Who Did The Terminator - Twice

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Doctor Who did The Terminator. Not once. Twice.

Long before James Cameron’s killer AI and mechanical apocalypse, The War Machines (1966) introduced WOTAN, a centralised computer intelligence linked to global systems, trusted to run everything… until it decides humanity is the problem.

An Artificial Intelligence which wakes up and decides humanity is the problem.
A machine network that wakes up and builds robotic enforcers?

Doctor Who explored all of it decades earlier.

But what makes this story fascinating isn’t just the similarity. It’s the attitude.

Where The Terminator gives us John Connor and the human resistance, The War Machines gives us:
• The British civil service
• Emergency cabinet meetings
• And an elderly Edwardian scientist calmly dismantling a machine uprising through logic and imagination

This isn’t an action nightmare. It’s a Hartnell story.

In this video, we explore:

• How 1966 viewed computers and “perfect logic”
• Why WOTAN’s philosophy reflects 1960s faith in rational systems
• The design of the War Machines and what it unintentionally reveals
• Why the story feels strange today — and why that strangeness matters
• How Doctor Who turned a machine apocalypse into something uniquely British

Today, any AI takeover story is automatically compared to The Terminator. But in 1966, Doctor Who was working from a completely different cultural mindset.

And that difference changes everything.

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