Tat Wood suggests 'The Time Warrior' was the manifestation of 'Dicks' plans to get the series back doing what it did when he arrived before all the Earthbound UNIT stories' (Tat Wood, About Time 3 [expanded 2nd edition]; p.405), a vision of 1960s Doctor Who and of the Pertwee era with which Rob Shearman concurs: 'Doctor Who hasn't really done history since the days of Troughton' (Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman, Running through Corridors 2; p.147). It's not quite so clearcut as that though. Tat Wood actually sees the strongest precedent for this story's plunge into the past as 'the 1920s sequence from Holmes' previous script' (Tat Wood, About Time 3 [expanded 2nd edition]; p.407) 'Carnival of Monsters', while David J Howe and Stephen James Walker happily throw 'the similarly titled The Time Monster from season nine' (David J Howe and Stephen James Walker, Doctor Who: The Television Companion, bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/timewarrior/detail.shtml) into the period mix.
Howe and Walker stumble onto the really interesting point, however, which is the 'relatively small number of stories falling into the pseudo-historical category'. 'The Time Monster', 'Carnival of Monsters' and 'The Time Warrior' may well be the only stories across Pertwee's five seasons (or 14 stories) to feature locations in Earth's history (and I accept the first two requite pretty significant inverted commas around the phrase, but Atlantis and the SS Bernice do have all the trappings of a historical location), but that doesn't actually make his era that unusual. True, having apparently only written a story set in the past under duress, Holmes is going to catch the bug, featuring 'Pyramids of Mars', 'The Masque of Mandragora' and 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' in the three Hinchcliffe/Holmes seasons (and indeed in the only two of those where he was commissioning from scratch - so you could make that 3 out of 12 rather than 3 out of 17 stories if you liked), but Troughton only had 'The Highlanders' (in Who terms a historical rather than pseudo, but we're chucking them all together for this), 'The Abominable Snowmen' and 'The Evil of the Daleks' across his three seasons (though I fancy you could also throw 'The War Games' in there for 4 out of 21 stories) and Graham Williams's three seasons will feature only 'Horror of Fang Rock' and 'City of Death' (or 2 out of 17 or 18 stories).
It's really John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward who'll redeploy history as a significant element of Who's arsenal, Peter Davison's three seasons featuring 'The Visitation', 'Black Orchid', 'Mawdryn Undead' and 'The King's Demons', plus, at a stretch, 'Enlightenment' and 'The Awakening' (or 4 (or 6) out of 20 stories), with Andrew Cartmel only making the big breakthrough in Season 26 (with 'Ghost Light' and 'The Curse of Fenric' making up half the stories).
Annoyingly, it turns out the lowest common denominator for all the stories featuring each Doctor is 360360. However, to give a sense of how they compare with each other, here's the numerators for each x0.0001:
William Hartnell 16.3710 rough per story chance: 0.46
Patrick Troughton 6.8640 rough per story chance: 0.19
Jon Pertwee 7.7220 rough per story chance: 0.21
Tom Baker 4.2900 rough per story chance: 0.12
Peter Davison 10.8108 rough per story chance: 0.30
Colin Baker 9.0090 rough per story chance: 0.25
Sylvester McCoy 15.0150 rough per story chance: 0.42
Christopher Eccleston 10.8108 rough per story chance: 0.30
David Tennant 11.0110 rough per story chance: 0.31
Matt Smith 13.8600 rough per story chance: 0.38
Peter Capaldi 12.3552 rough per story chance: 0.34
Jodie Whittaker 9.8280 rough per story chance: 0.27
Of course, it's a slightly unfair comparison because it excludes stories with a lot of period trappings, such as 'Curse of Peladon', 'The Ribos Operation' or 'A Christmas Carol', but then it also includes stories with a mere snippet of history like 'City of Death' or 'Blink', so...
Anyway, if we accept it roughly works, Pertwee actually comes out ahead of Tom and Troughton and it's basically the whole period from 'The Highlanders' to 'The Visitation' that's the anomaly.
Which probably means something. Buggered if I know.
For something on slightly surer footing, here's the page for Doctor Who and the Time Warrior.
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