The War Machines is the tenth and final serial of the third season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in 4 weekly parts from 25 June to 16 July 1966.

This serial marks the departure of Jackie Lane as Dodo Chaplet and also the first appearance of Michael Craze and Anneke Wills as new companions Ben and Polly.

The TARDIS lands in London, near the Post Office Tower, where the First Doctor and Dodo meet Professor Brett, the creator of WOTAN (short for Will Operating Thought ANalogue).

In four days' time, WOTAN will be linked to other major computers across the world to take them over, including those of the White House, Cape Kennedy and the Royal Navy.

Major Green, the chief of security in the Tower, is also taken over, and sends WOTAN's control signals to Dodo at the nightclub via telephone.

The Doctor sends Ben to investigate the area around the nightclub, where he discovers a War Machine, now fully assembled.

Ben goes to the Post Office Tower and drags Polly out of the WOTAN room as the Machine enters and attacks the immobile computer.

[1][3] Instead of a title overlay, after the "Doctor Who" logo has faded, the screen shifts to a solid background containing four inversely coloured rectangles aligned down the left-hand side (reminiscent to an old-style computer punched card).

All of the lettering displayed in this titling sequence is shown in a typeface based on the numeric E-13B font that was then in common use for magnetic ink character recognition.

[3] The War Machines is an early example of the use of real-life news presenters in cameo roles for dramatic effect; the BBC newsreader Kenneth Kendall appears as himself on a television in a pub, and the voice of radio announcer Dwight Whylie is also heard.

[3] Actors in The War Machines who subsequently have parts in later Doctor Who serials are Sandra Bryant and John Harvey, who appear in The Macra Terror (1967); John Rolfe, who plays Sam in The Moonbase (1967) and Fell in The Green Death (1973); and Frank Jarvis, who plays Ankh in Underworld (1978) and Skart in The Power of Kroll (1978).

[11] The 16 mm film telerecording copies held by BBC Enterprises were also the last of their kind to be destroyed, surviving until early 1978, shortly before the junking of material was halted by the intervention of fan Ian Levine.

[13] Currently, this is the only complete serial featuring Michael Craze and Anneke Wills as Ben and Polly that exists in the BBC archives.

[citation needed] In 2009, Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times praised the contemporary edge taken with The War Machines, though he wrote that the plot was "mechanical" with several improbabilities.

[8] DVD Talk's J. Doyle Wallis gave The War Machines three out of five stars, calling it "serviceable" with WOTAN and its henchmen lacking depth.

Club reviewer Christopher Bahn, on the other hand, described the plot as "pretty good if not a classic, with an appealing B-movie sensibility—this feels like a better, if equally cheaply made, version of the kind of movie featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000."

[19] Johnathan Wilkins of Dreamwatch gave the serial a score of 9 out of 10, calling it "something of a forgotten masterpiece", mostly due to Hartnell's performance.

[20] In 2013, Ben Lawrence of The Daily Telegraph named The War Machines as one of the top ten Doctor Who stories set in the contemporary time.

He praised the concept of WOTAN using telecommunications to threaten humanity at a time when domestic telephone lines were becoming commonplace, and considered the serial's strength to lie in connecting directly with the TV audience by placing menace in a familiar setting.

Writer Robert Smith considered that The War Machines posited a network of computers at a time when the development of ARPANET was still only being discussed, and that the serial anticipated the dominance of the Internet by 35 years.