The Honest Courtesan

Since last summer, Grace and I have our late-evening time where we get stoned and watch sci-fi shows. We started with Deep Space Nine, then Farscape, then Babylon 5. And now, thanks to Lorelei Rivers’ gracious loan of her complete set of the classic series, Doctor Who.  I was inspired by my friend Mike Siegel’s tweeting last year of HIS viewing of the classic series to do this thread, which I am going to try to keep going for as long as possible while we watch the ENTIRE SERIES from 1963 to the present.

FIRST DOCTOR

Season 1  (Producer: Verity Lambert  Story Editor: David Whitaker)

An Unearthly Child, like most pilot episodes of sci-fi or fantasy series, was a bit awkward getting started; the whole caveman thing had already been done to death by 1963, and I’m glad the Doctor didn’t stay as cranky, grouchy, paranoid and downright rude as he was in this one.  Cantankerous is one thing, but that was beyond the pale.  When one is familiar with a series, re-watching old shows often causes one to think of the funniest things; this time, I couldn’t help thinking about how poor Ian’s car must’ve eventually been towed and impounded after he left it parked across from the junkyard for two years.

In The Daleks we meet the iconic villains for the first time, but they’re a pale shadow of the menace they eventually become.  Not only are they unable to leave their city, they can be stopped by the simple expedient of interrupting their contact with the floor.  They’re also fairly easy to physically overpower, and both their travel machines and the living Daleks within are relatively fragile.  But it’s nice to hear them scream when pushed into open holes in the floor, or whine and plead pathetically when inadvertently poisoned by their superiors.  I have sometimes wondered what happened to the Thals, though; we know they still existed in the 26th century, but never see them again after that.

The Edge of Destruction is the first episode in which something goes dramatically wrong with the TARDIS.  There are more of these in the first three seasons than ever again in the series, obviously because the Doctor hasn’t yet learned to manage her despite his vocal protestations to the contrary.  This, like a lot of things in the First Doctor’s era, makes a lot more sense from the perspective of a fan looking back at the stories in the light of later-established canon.  In this thread, I’m going to do that quite often.

Marco Polo is the first of the ’60s serials that were taped over by the cash-strapped BBC and therefore had to be reconstructed from the soundtracks (which all managed to survive).  This one uses (color!) production stills to illustrate the story.  When I first watched it with Lorelei I was worried that seven episodes without motion would be a slog, but it was surprisingly watchable.  The story, like all the historicals, was entertaining enough, but nothing to write home about.  Zienia Merton, who played 15-year-old Ping-Cho, later portrayed Sandra Benes in Space: 1999.

The Keys of Marinus had some interesting bits, but I’m not sure whether the writer really approved of the morality of a giant mind control machine controlling the entire population to make them “good” like Clockwork Oranges, or trying to subtly present it as a philosophical issue.  After all, the villainous Voords covet the damned thing as a means of conquering their planet, and it is destroyed in the end (good riddance).  Also, the “efficient” legal system is presented as a terrible thing, which hints at writer Terry Nation’s views; the totalitarian Federation of Nation’s later creation, Blake’s 7, has both a similar legal system and a means of subjugating the population (though in that case it’s accomplished via drugs in the food and water).

The Aztecs is an historical, but it does let both Ian and Barbara demonstrate their competence, and displayed a surprising degree of ethical complexity (“human sacrifice is bad” vs “we can’t interfere in their culture”).  It’s also fun to watch the sly old Doc romancing the elderly Aztec lady in order to get the information he’s looking for from her.

The Sensorites is the only serial in which the writer (Peter Newman, in his only gig for the show) actually gives Susan something to do rather than scream, cry or get in trouble.  It’s a shame, because she’s probably the most underused, misused character in the entire series.  The story itself is interesting in that the Sensorites are timid and frail and don’t want to hurt anyone, and the only real villain is a single ambitious Sensorite politician who takes advantage of his people’s timidity like a wolf in the fold.  Much later, the Tenth Doctor says the Oodsphere is not far from the Sense-Sphere, and implies that the timid, telepathic Ood are related to the Sensorites.

The Reign of Terror is slightly more interesting than other historicals to me personally because my first paternal ancestor in New Orleans moved there to flee the actual Reign of Terror.  The two missing episodes were replaced by animated versions, an interesting technique which is also used in “The Tenth Planet” (and probably some of the missing episodes from the Troughton era, though we haven’t got to those yet).  I’m not entirely sure why they picked this serial to fix rather than, say, “The Crusade” or “Galaxy 4“.

Season 2  (Producer: Verity Lambert  Script Editor: David Whitaker)

Planet of Giants is notable in that it’s more than just the common ’60s sci-fi plot, “wow, we’ve shrunk!” The shrinkage is just a complication to the Doctor’s mission to save the Earth from ecological disaster, rather than the sole plot focus.  Also, this is the first episode of the second season and the second episode in which something goes dramatically wrong with the TARDIS (see “Edge of Destruction” further up the thread).

The Dalek Invasion of Earth is a pretty dark serial, from the moment we see the sign prohibiting the dumping of corpses into the Thames.  It’s clear that this is fairly early in the Daleks’ expansion because they’re using stopgap measures such as antennae to run on broadcast power from their ships (rather than whatever kind of self-contained power system they come up with later), and converting humans into cyborgs to handle physical tasks.  Once again, Ian and Barbara get to demonstrate their competence, and when Susan, now grown into a young woman, falls in love with a member of the Resistance, The Doctor resolves her dilemma for her by just leaving her behind.  IMHO that’s the most glaring loose thread in the entire series: we never find out what happened to her, ever; even though she returns as an adult in “The Five Doctors“, she says absolutely nothing about her life or what has been happening in the 20 or more years since she last saw her grandfather.  I mean, it isn’t like they even need the same actress, because she can presumably regenerate.  Or they could’ve had a story where the Doctor meets her kids (his great-grandchildren).  But one way or the other, the cutoff is brutal.  Another flaw within the episode itself is that the Daleks’ plan is startlingly silly; why must it be Earth they convert into a mobile planet?  That kind of idea was handled much better in both “The Pirate Planet” and “Frontios“, not to mention “The Stolen Earth” (which vaguely implies some connection).  I do like that in later episodes taking place further in the future, the Dalek invasion is mentioned as part of history.

(Script Editor: Dennis Spooner)

The only real purpose of The Rescue is to introduce Vicki, Susan’s replacement as teen companion; the secret of Koquillion is pretty obvious from the first time we see him.  Ian and Barbara are basically the ur-companions, the prototypes of the two most enduring kinds of companions on the show: the twentysomething, competent, attractive woman and the twentysomething, competent young man who acts kind-of as the Doctor’s action surrogate.  But early on there was usually a female teen, presumably for audience identification since it was originally considered a “children’s show”.  By the time the Third Doctor arrived on the scene, that was mostly phased out and the generic companion was a competent, attractive, twentysomething woman (occasionally augmented by a similar young man).

The Romans is IMHO the best of the historicals, largely because it isn’t really trying to be serious.  There are plenty of comical moments: Barbara accidentally knocking Ian out, Nero chasing Barbara around the palace, the Doc pulling an “emperor’s new clothes” trick, the Doc and Vicki refusing to believe that Ian and Barbara went to Rome as well, and best of all the frequent points wherein one of the separated travelers just barely misses encountering one of the others.

The Web Planet isn’t actually meant to be funny, but I can’t help laughing.  Every classic Who fan learns to ignore the cheap sets and the rubber monster costumes, but the ones in this episode look like something out of a grade-school play.  All the insect people have characteristic body language (designed by a choreographer, who plays one of the Menoptera), and in combination with everything else they’re just silly.  When Lorelei and I saw this one we got the giggles (especially when the Optera emphasize everything they say with a little hop), and since I was stoned when I watched it this time I found it even funnier.  Grace and I are now having a great time gesticulating wildly when talking to each other.  That’s one of the charming things about Classic Who; even many of the bad episodes are fun.

The Crusade had 2 intact episodes & 2 reconstructed ones, so it was easier to watch than the full reconstructions.  I recognized Jean Marsh even in a blurry still, and when Julian Glover as Richard I was onscreen I kept asking myself “Where have I seen him before?”  The man has had a LONG acting career, 1959 to the present.  But I recognized him from several episodes of The Avengers and as Colonel Breen in Quatermass and the Pit.  Both Marsh and Glover also return in later Doctor Who episodes.

The Space Museum is the first serial that really has the Doctor Who vibe to me.  It’s hard to put it into words, but there’s a certain feel to classic Who which is absent in the first season (and, truth be told, in scattered episodes of all doctors thereafter); the only other First Doctor serials which have it IMHO are “The Ark” and “The War Machines“.  Part of it is the complexity of the story and the cleverness of the “precognition” plot device, but part of it is harder to define.  One of the things I like best about this one is its philosophical examination of what I call “The Tyranny of Prophecy”: trying to avoid a foreseen disaster could potentially cause it, so foresight can be paralyzing.  It’s a rare depth to find in something that at the time was considered a kid’s show.

In The Chase, the Daleks capture (and claim to have invented, yet can’t replace it right away) a working time machine and use it to hunt the TARDIS.  Despite the danger it’s really a pretty light serial, with some genuinely funny moments at the Empire State Building and in a spook house attraction of the then-futuristic year 1996.  But the most important point of the story is that Ian and Barbara decide to use the captured Dalek timeship to return to their own time.  They are without a doubt among my favorite companions in the entire 6-decade run of the series; I can’t think of many companions I esteem more highly, and Steven’s such a pale replacement for Ian it’s stunning.  We hear no more about them until 2010, when in the Sarah Jane Adventures episode “The Death of the Doctor“, Ian and Barbara are revealed to now be married Cambridge professors who haven’t aged since the ’60s (no doubt due to those weird TARDIS malfunctions, similar to but less extreme than the fate of Captain Jack Harkness).

(Script Editor: Donald Tosh)

The Time Meddler certainly isn’t a great serial, but it’s notable as the first appearance of another Time Lord and another TARDIS, thus laying to rest the intermittent claims by the old liar that he invented the TARDIS himself.  I at first considered that The Monk might be The Master, before he had yet settled on that moniker, then when I saw “The War Games“, I reconsidered until “The King’s Demons“, which features a Master scheme pulled straight from The Monk’s playbook.  So now I’m really unsure; it’s certainly possible The Monk could be an early incarnation of The Master, but I’d hesitate to declare that with any certainty.

Season 3  (Producer: Verity Lambert  Script Editor: Donald Tosh)

Galaxy Four is what in the old pulp days used to be called a “pot-boiler”, something written just to “keep the pot boiling” (ie keep the lights on, keep the bills paid). It’s not great, but not bad either, just your basic Doctor Who episode.  The theme of the physically-attractive beings actually being ugly inside, and the physically-repulsive beings actually being noble and good, is not uncommon in fantasy of the period.  I did cheer when the bad girls got left behind on the soon-to-explode planet, though.

Mission to the Unknown can be described by a lot of “onlies”; it’s the only single-episode serial, the only story with none of the regular cast or even the TARDIS; the only story that can’t stand on its own; and probably a few others I’m not remembering right now.  It’s a prequel to the mammoth “The Dalek Master Plan“, and was also intended by writer Terry Nation to be a pilot for a new series (which never happened, thank goodness) of future humans vs Daleks without the Doctor’s help.

(Producer: John Wiles  Script Editor: Donald Tosh)

Is The Myth Makers an historical?  Sure, it takes place during mythological events, but there are no gods, aliens or other weird phenomena, just humans doing human things as in the other historicals.  From the moment Priam decides to rename Vicki “Cressida” the rest is pretty much a foregone conclusion, though I did rather enjoy the dry humor of all these heroes (especially Paris and Odysseus) being depicted as having feet of clay and egos too large for those feet to support.

At 12 episodes, The Dalek Master Plan is arguably the longest of the serials (a case could be made for the Tom Baker “Key To Time” season with 26 and the Colin Baker “Trial of a Time Lord” with 14), but it’s noteworthy in several other ways.  It’s the first serial in which a companion (actually, two if you count Sara Kingdom [Jean Marsh], who certainly has more screen time than the placeholder Katarina) dies in action, and features first Christmas episode (Part 7, “The Feast of Steven”).  It’s also unusual in having two comic relief episodes in the middle as a break from the “heavy” story, and it features the first appearance of Nicholas Courtney, who later plays The Brigadier for several decades (here he’s basically Danger Man in space).  Grace and I had a good time mocking the terrible costumes of the alien delegates (which include “Carrot Face”, “Crash Test Dummy”, and “Traffic Cone Stack”), but I must say the guy playing the evil, megalomaniacal politician Mavic Chen did his best to subtly telegraph his character’s total derangement, from the finger-to-face thing (which may have been the origin of Doctor Evil’s similar mannerism) to his complete disregard for the danger posed by his violently-psychopathic allies.  If you ever wanted to see a human bitch-slap a Dalek, this is the serial for you.

In The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve, The Doctor basically vanishes at the beginning of the first episode and leaves Steven to bumble his way into a conspiracy against the Huguenots in Paris, 1572, reappearing just in time to drag his hapless companion back to the TARDIS to flee the scene.  The only really noteworthy part is the half-episode-long denouement, in which Steven angrily denounces the Doctor’s refusal to interfere with a massacre and storms off the TARDIS in London, 1966.  For a brief time, the Doctor visibly crumbles, and we see him as a fragile, lonely, vulnerable man afraid of facing the future alone; it’s the first revelation of the psychological and emotional need which causes him to seek out companions in every incarnation.  One short comment in this scene provides our first indication that all is not exactly peachy between the Doctor and his people, because he mumbles that he “daren’t” go home.  Of course Steven soon returns after a “coincidental” meeting with a possible descendant of the woman he feared killed in the massacre.

(Script Editor: Gerry Davis)

The Ark is one of my favorite First Doctor serials, and has a number of “firsts”.  It’s the first episode set very far in the future (10 million years or more), and in fact takes place further into the future than any other in Classic Who; “Frontios” seems to take place in the same period, but it isn’t until 2005’s “The End of the World” that we get a definitely-later setting.  It also features our first glimpse of a future dark age, the first example of future humans employing a servitor race who turn out not to be as willingly-enslaved as it might seem (a theme echoed much later in the Ood), and the first clear hint that the TARDIS knows what she’s doing even if the Doctor doesn’t.  It isn’t often, especially in these early shows, that the TARDIS moves in time but not in (relative) space, and I can’t think of any other serials at the moment where the action is split evenly between two time periods, the first two chapters in one and the last two 700 years later, with events precipitated by the Doctor’s blunder in the first part; the cliffhanger at the end of part two may be the most effective one of the entire Hartnell era.  The Monoid makeup is as cheap as usual, but extremely creative and effectively weird-looking.

(Producer: Innes Lloyd)

The Celestial Toymaker definitely needs its missing episodes to be redone with animation; the nature of the story makes it difficult to follow with just sound and (a very few) stills.  It’s the Doctor’s first encounter with a godlike opponent, and Dodo gets to display her cleverness, people-skills, and legs (her miniskirt was a first for the series).  It’s one of a number of 3rd-season serials in which the ailing Hartnell seems to have intentionally been given much less screen time than his companions (including a long segment where he doesn’t appear at all because The Doctor has been made invisible), the first step toward replacing him completely not long afterward.

The Gunfighters has its amusing moments, but it’s basically just a light historical that isn’t as entertaining as “The Romans“.  Some of the “East London trying to be American West” accents were almost painful, which gives me an idea how my UK friends must hear bad American attempts at English accents.  This is one of the few First Doctor serials which were completely intact back in the ’80s, and was therefore part of the first package of ’60s Who the BBC made available in the US.  I remember seeing it on US TV about ’86.

The basic story of The Savages is the most classic one in time-travel fiction, considering it appeared in the very first time-travel story (H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”): in a futuristic society, technically-competent rulers feed on a subject population.  The high-tech vampires are of course hoist with their own petard when they drain The Doctor’s life energy into their leader, who is infected with both the Doc’s conscience and some of his mannerisms (the actor playing the leader provides some brief comic relief with his spot-on impression of The Doctor).  The warring factions want Steven to stay as their mediator because the Doc won’t; that’s for the best because Steven is among the least-interesting companions in the entire series.  The only ones I like less are Melanie, Vicki, Adric, Victoria, and Turlough).

The War Machines is the first serial to entirely take place on contemporary Earth, and it’s surprising how much of the “feel” of the classic UNIT stories it already has.  The plot is a basic “hero vs world-dominating computer” one any sci-fi fan should recognize from stories ranging from Colossus to The Terminator to numerous Star Trek episodes from this time period, but the details make it interesting.  We pick up two new companions, Ben & Polly, and lose Dodo in what is among the most unceremonious companion-dumps of the entire series (she doesn’t even say goodbye in person, just sends a short “Dear Doc” letter; Liz Shaw’s later dump in “Terror of the Autons” didn’t even get a note!)  But it’s the fact that WOTAN knows who the Doctor is (and what TARDIS means) without being told that has the widest implications for the canon.  Since WOTAN has access to even secret databases, it’s clear (yes, I’m retconning, get used to it), it clearly knows about The Doctor from Torchwood (established 1879), from the proto-UNIT army operation which helped the Seventh Doctor against the Daleks in 1963, and probably from secret government records from WWII; this means that in some ways, WOTAN actually knows more about the Doctor than he knows about himself, since those adventures, while in WOTAN’s past, are in The Doctor’s personal future.  The series doesn’t always handle these timeline-mismatches very well, but when it does it’s incredibly satisfying to old nerds like myself.

Season 4  (Producer: Innes Lloyd  Script Editor: Gerry Davis)

The Smugglers is pretty weak even for an historical; it’s the penultimate historical and the penultimate First Doctor episode.  But it is interesting to see just how much less the Doc protests Ben & Polly barging into the TARDIS (< 1 minute) than he did protesting Ian and Barbara doing so (> 10 minutes plus intermittently through the whole serial).  Alas, the idea that everyone in the 17th century would mistake Polly for a boy because she’s thin and wearing pants strains the credulity of even a person willing to suspend disbelief sufficiently to enjoy a show about a bunch of people wandering through time and space in a phone booth, and as an anarchist I find it difficult to consider tax evasion (which is what smuggling is, after all) a serious enough menace to warrant The Doctor’s attention. In 2011 the story got a prequel, “The Curse of the Black Spot“, in which the fate of Captain Avery (whose lost treasure is this tale’s McGuffin) is explained at last.

The Tenth Planet is the first Cyberman episode and the last First Doctor episode.  It’s set in the then-future year 1986, when space travel is more common but not yet easy and relatively safe.  While Ben is helping the men of the Antarctic base fight the invaders (who, BTB, are rocking costumes that are shockingly-bad even for ’60s Who), Polly is caring for the ailing Doctor, who has collapsed from what looks like a heart attack.  After the Cybermen are defeated by a deus ex machina, the Doc retreats to the TARDIS and dies.  I have a lot more to say about the true nature of Mondas, the Cyberman homeworld, but it must needs wait for my discussion of “Rise of the Cybermen“; what makes this serial most interesting to me is that nobody in ’66 imagined that the show would still be going when that imaginary future date arrived.  Doctor Who is one of the few sci-fi shows that has existed for so long, it’s now repeatedly crossing its own timeline.

SECOND DOCTOR

In fact, it crossed its own timeline again last year, thanks to the very next episode, Power of the Daleks, set in the year 2020.  Patrick Troughton is the newly-regenerated Second Doctor, and he arrives on the planet Vulcan in time to discover that a scientist has salvaged a Dalek spaceship from a “mercury swamp”.  For those unfamiliar with the planetary name “Vulcan” (outside of the Star Trek reference), it was a mythical planet in our own solar system, inside the orbit of Mercury.  So in this version of 2020, humans already have colonies on other planets in our own system.  At this time, humans have never seen Daleks, but given that the ship turns out to be a mobile Dalek factory (presumably, the Dalek-creatures were in suspended animation awaiting travel machines to be built), it stands to reason that the ship (which lay without power in the swamp for over 200 years) was part of an expedition scouting Earth for conquest.  I was very pleased to see that the Daleks were still running on static electricity, thus clearly less advanced than those which invade the Earth 142 years later. It’s not often the writers exercise that kind of care in maintaining the show’s timeline.  One fan observation: Daleks chanting “I am your servant” is actually more horrifying than their usual “Exterminate!”  As an aside: it’d be interesting for some writer to explore an alternate timeline in which the Daleks did invade Earth around 1800, as they were apparently planning to; Napoleonic-era troops vs primitive Daleks with the Doctor assisting is a pretty cool scenario.

The Highlanders is the last of the original-style historicals, which after this vanish until they start up again with the Fifth Doctor episode “The King’s Demons“.  Unlike modern historicals, these early examples contained no aliens or monsters, but if they’d all been this much fun I’d have liked them better anyhow.  The new Doctor shows himself to be a loveable rogue, getting through the adventure by means of disguise, pickpocketing, dazzling people with bullshit, and outright lying.  And Polly reveals herself to be a woman after my own heart, getting by on her feminine wiles.  In the end Jamie becomes the first companion who is first invited aboard freely rather than barging in, stowing away, or needing rescue.  In the ensuing episodes the Doctor’s judgment is proved good, as Jamie is intelligent, very loyal, and extremely intuitive.

The Underwater Menace is another pot-boiler (see “Galaxy 4” upthread), writer Geoffrey Orme was clearly a fan of old movie serials, because this story borrowed a lot of their tropes (Lost civilization! Our heroes fed to the sharks! Mad scientist! Secret passages!) But the familiar plotline gives both new Doctor and companions space to shine in.  All in all, this one reminded me very much of some Pertwee-era stories, which is a good thing.  One major complaint: the BBC reconstruction was slipshod in comparison to fan reconstructions, which is pretty sad, give their comparative resources and the fact that the BBC charged for this half-assed job.  Very few stills, and no subtitles explaining action not visible in those stills.  Not even proper titles on the half-reconstructed episodes.  Bad show, BBC.

The Moonbase takes place in 2070, so the show will have to hit its centennial before crossing that timeline.  The Cybermen are back, in dramatically-improved costumes, and though the convenient destruction of their home planet is mentioned, their convenient escape from it is not explained.  Apparently one of the things they’ve done in the 84 years since their last appearance was improve their prosthetics.  It’s interesting that at this stage, the Cybermen are so few in number that they have to operate as terrorists rather than as an invading army as they do later.  And yes, any device capable of controlling large-scale weather patterns on Earth could most certainly be used as a weapon.  And Polly demonstrates her intelligence by inventing the weapon used to defeat them!

Aside: It’s no secret that Star Trek ripped off the Cybermen and turned them into the Borg, right down to their catchphrase, “Resistance is futile”.  Coincidentally (OR IS IT?), the Borg first appeared in May 1989, only 3 years after their fictional first appearance in Who.  Later, In New Who, the writers stole the Borg back by including some of their characteristics in the revamped Cybermen.  Personally, I think such borrowings are cool and fun in both directions.

The Macra Terror features an interesting alien, a race which is intelligent but apparently not technological because they rely on human colonists, mind-controlled via human technology, to do their work, and have no weapons to fall back on when the Doctor literally jams up the works.  The propaganda jingles coming out of speakers everywhere to motivate the drugged workers hearkens back to Brave New World, Ray Bradbury, and the practices of certain modern technotyrannies.  All in all it’s a much better episode than one would think for a serial whose TV Guide synopsis could’ve been “The Doctor fights giant crabs who have enslaved humans.”  Up to this episode I had trouble deciding whether I liked Ben or Polly more, but after this one it’s definitely Polly.

The Faceless Ones is among the best of the Troughton stories; it starts with a bang and has a lot of great “Doctor baiting bureaucrats” content.  The chief bureaucrat here may be familiar to fans of The Prisoner as the only other guy besides Leo McKern to play the new #2 more than once.  The aliens’ plot has some genuine twists, Jamie demonstrates his intelligence and adaptability, and the story has a fine example of the grand Who tradition of well-developed minor characters.  It also has the best companion departure of the series so far, with Ben and Polly torn between going home and continuing to roam with their friends, and hugs all around.  Best touch of all: we find at the end that the adventure was actually taking place in the same few days as “The War Machines” (ending July 20th, 1966; see upthread), so the Doc, Ben and Polly all actually exist in two places at once, albeit miles apart in different parts of London.  The series is rarely so careful with timeline crossings, so it’s fun to see.

Ben and Polly occupy the marginal zone between companions I really like and companions I find merely OK; Polly’s at the bottom of the section I call “mostly brainy chicks” (just below Romana I) and Ben is at the top of the “OKs”, just above Peri, with Donna Noble between them:

Sarah Jane Smith
Josephine Grant
Leela of the Sevateem
Ian Chesterton
Barbara Wright
Martha Jones
Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Zoe Heriot
Romana II
Jamie McCrimmon
Rose Tyler
Nyssa of Traken
Elizabeth Shaw
Romana I
Polly Wright
Donna Noble
Ben Jackson
Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown
Harry Sullivan
Dorothea “Dodo” Chaplet
Tegan Jovanka
Susan Foreman
Steven Taylor
Melanie Bush
Vicki Pallister
Adric
Victoria Waterfield
Vislor Turlough

Polly’s brighter than Ben but not as bright as Rose (whom she’s otherwise very much like), and Ben is brave but not as competent as Jamie (though more so than Harry or Steven).  Years later in 2010, Sarah Jane Smith tells Jo Grant that they now run an orphanage in India.

(Script Editor: Gerry Davis and Peter Bryant)

At the end of “The Faceless Ones”, The Doctor discovers that the TARDIS has been stolen from Gatwick Airport, and this begins Evil of the Daleks, my favorite Second Doctor serial so far (and it’s going to be hard to beat it).  The plot is complex and interesting, with a number of well-developed characters including Kemel, the mighty-but-mute Turkish bodyguard who teams up with Jamie to do a surprising amount of damage to the Daleks.  The story winds across the UK and Skaro, in three different time periods, and includes lots of surprises including our first sight of the Emperor Dalek and The Doctor playing “train” with baby Daleks into whom he has implanted human personality traits.  The finale is an actual Dalek civil war which sets them back so badly, we don’t see them again until Season 9.  I wish all the reconstructions were as good as this one: the soundtrack is crisp, the still photos clear and high-res, and the fans even used computer animation to recreate a number of scenes in which the characters are only seen from a distance so faces don’t matter.  Top marks!

Season 5  (Producer: Innes Lloyd  Script Editor: Victor Pemberton)

Tomb of the Cybermen is the first episode of the 5th season, and looks to me like an example of a writer realizing that it probably wasn’t a good idea to kill off his creations in their first appearance and looking for a credible way out of that corner.  An archeological expedition in a future century (25th maybe?) does what nearly all archeological expeditions in sci-fi or fantasy shows do, namely rushes into a mysterious tomb pell-mell despite the warnings of a wise man and thereby releases a powerful menace.  The head of the expedition claims the planet Telos is the home of the Cybermen, but after their awakening their leader explains to The Doctor (whom he knows as a dangerous enemy from their records) that the survivors resettled there after the destruction of Mondas.  The serial prominently features two tropes which appear a lot in Doctor Who: a megalomaniacal scientist who collaborates with villains because he thinks he and his buddies should rule Mankind, and Brit actors playing cowboy-type Americans with bad American accents.

(Script Editor: Peter Bryant)

I might’ve enjoyed The Abominable Snowmen more had I been able to actually tell what was going on, but it was absolutely the worst of the reconstructions so far, a complete failure featuring a badly-distorted soundtrack, very few extremely low-res pictures, and no explanatory captions.  We had to consult fan sites to figure out what had actually happened, especially in the last 3 episodes of 6.  It’s the first serial of the series to take place in a non-contemporary 20th century setting (Tibet, 1935), and I’m not sure how a Tibetan lama managed to build an army of robots, even if it did take him 200 years to do it.  Plus, I honestly don’t find the Great Intelligence all that interesting as a villain.  Victoria Waterfield is the most annoying companion yet; she’s spoiled, willful, and no help at all.  Honestly, the only reason I can think of for the Doctor to keep her around is that her father, who died helping the Doc defeat the Daleks, asked him to take care of her.  And Jamie clearly has a crush on her, but she’s pretty and he’s young so that’s a foregone conclusion.

The Ice Warriors is one of those Doctor Who serials in which the setting and the interplay between the “goodies” is much more interesting than the “baddies”.  The titular villains are discovered frozen in a glacier and the humans foolishly revive them (as in “Tomb of the Cybermen” only two serials back), at which point they try to (all together now) TAKE OVER THE BASE.  But the background is far more interesting: humans have precipitated global cooling by producing food chemically rather than by farming, and scientifically-illiterate politicians deciding it was a great idea to replace CO2 producing vegetation with immense housing projects.  The main conflict of the episode is not humans vs Martians; it’s authoritarians vs libertarians.  The humans have the power to stop the attackers from the very beginning, but won’t use it because the computer is programed with the precautionary principle and they won’t act without the computer’s permission.  It’s up to the freethinkers, led by the Doctor, to say “screw the computer, this is our only chance”.  BBC promotional materials of the time date the serial to the year 3000, but since other stories say the 2nd Ice Age started around 5000, we must assume that the efforts to forestall the glaciers depicted here actually worked for a couple of millennia.  In stories set in later time-periods (such as the 4th Doctor serial “The Ark in Space“) we see that the schism between obedient, submissive-to-authority stay-at-homes and independent, chance-taking explorers has widened to the point where they’re almost separate races.

Aside: Jamie’s evident distress at having to endure icy conditions in three adventures in succession, while also trying to pretend that as a Highlander he’s not bothered by cold, is quite amusing.  Speaking of Jamie, he has really climbed the companion quality ladder in my estimation as I’ve seen more Second Doctor stories.  Before, I’d seen too little of him (mostly in “The Five Doctors“) to really make a judgment.  He’s brave, whip-smart, adaptable and incredibly loyal to The Doctor even when he disagrees with him.  I was especially impressed by his courage and resourcefulness in “Evil of the Daleks” and “Enemy of the World“, and I like the way the Doc seems to think of him as the son he never had or, possibly, as like the son he did have who grew up long ago.  After all, we don’t know whether Susan was the Doc’s granddaughter via a son or a daughter.  In general, I tend to lean toward “daughter” because of his obvious fondness for young women even when he isn’t romantically involved with them (more on that when we get to Jo and Sarah Jane).  Anyhow, as of the end of Season Five, Jamie is right below Ian and Barbara in my estimation of companions.

The Enemy of the World is yet another example of Doctor Who crossing its own timeline.  But despite being set in the futuristic year 2018, the serial is very much an example of the spy show craze of the 1960s, complete with an international supervillain trying to take over the world from his secret base via high-tech means; a lady agent a la Emma Peel; jet-setting around the world from Australia to Eastern Europe; an international, multicultural cast; our heroes using disguises and false credentials, etc.  I wouldn’t have been surprised to see James Bond drop in to assist.  Jamie fits surprisingly well into this milieu, and lots of twists, turns and doublecrosses make it as much fun as Goldfinger.  And did I mention the supervillain, named Salamander, is a dead ringer for The Doctor?

(Producer: Peter Bryant  Script Editor: Derrick Sherwin)

The Web of Fear was so much fun for me!  It’s the predecessor to the UNIT stories that I dearly love, right down to the presence of Lethbridge-Stewart (here only a Colonel, but already demonstrating the character that made him a fan favorite).  There’s some disagreement about exactly when the story takes place, but it’s based entirely on the fact that Professor Travers says it’s been 40 years since he saw the Doctor & Company in Tibet (in “The Abominable Snowmen“).  I prefer to avoid the chronology headache by simply recognizing that it’d be no surprise for an old man in a stressful situation to make a simple math error upon meeting old friends who still look like they did when last he saw them decades ago and half a world away.  I’m not sure how the Great Intelligence got all those yeti robots to London, though; I reckon it just had them walk there from Tibet, mostly at night.  Even the Channel would’ve presented little impediment since they’re basically puppets of an alien force rather than electronic robots.  Going back to the UNIT vibe, the Doctor’s interaction with Travers’ scientist daughter reminded me very much of the Third Doctor’s interaction with Liz Shaw.  As usual, Jamie is a trooper and Victoria screams a lot and causes trouble by doing stuff she’s been warned against doing.

Fury from the Deep is a decent little sci-fi thriller; though the identity of the menace becomes pretty clear in the first episode, its exact capabilities are unclear for a time.  The “unbeatable monster vulnerable to one simple-but-inobvious thing” is a very old monster trope, even predating the sci-fi genre as we know it, but I can’t help thinking that making Victoria’s frequent screaming the one effective weapon was some kind of sly joke on the writer’s part, especially since the serial was her exit from the series.  I mean, if they were going to have high-pitched sound be its weakness, they could’ve had Jamie play the bagpipes or the Doctor amplify the output of his sonic screwdriver, which makes its very first appearance within five minutes of the start of the serial!

Victoria Waterfield is, as of the end of Season Five, my least-favorite Doctor Who companion (But don’t despair, Victoria fans; she won’t always be at the bottom. Turlough is coming in Season 20). I’m not especially averse to “damsel in distress” situations in general; they’re rooted deep in the psyche of our species and can serve valid dramatic purposes.  But I have a big problem with characters whose only narrative function is to be a damsel in distress in every friggin’ episode.  And Victoria doesn’t just get abducted and/or threatened by monsters, oh no; half the time she causes the problems by wandering off or going into places she has been specifically warned are dangerous.

Doctor: Victoria, don’t leave this base, there are BEMs outside.
Victoria (after wandering off): Oh no, a BEM! {screams a lot}

If you accept “Downtime” as canonical, five years after “Fury from the Deep” (1980), Victoria was possessed by the Great Intelligence and made to set up “New World University”.  It then inhabits first the school’s mainframe, and in 1995 the young-and-growing internet.

The Wheel in Space is another Cyberman episode in which a small group of Cybermen attempt to take over a remote outpost (in this case a space station) in preparation for invading the Earth.  The only aspects that set it apart are the introduction of new companion Zoe, a child prodigy educated by the state in what seems to have been an abusive process that gave her superhuman math skills and incredible competency in the sciences, but left her emotionally stunted; and an odd plot complication in which the base commander seems to have cracked up from stress.  Neither he nor the others seems to know anything about the Cyberman attempt on “The Moonbase” only 9 years prior, nor their historical attack on Earth in 1986; the only way this makes any sense is if Earth governments get even more obsessive about “security” and secrets in the next half-century and insist on covering up any and all alien attacks, so that even personnel whom one would expect to have clearance on such matters (like the commander of a frontier outpost) are kept in the dark.

Season 6  (Producer: Peter Bryant  Script Editor: Derrick Sherwin)

The Dominators is…not very good.  It features yet another aggressive alien race who believe that their high-but-not-all-that-high technology is THE MOST ADVANCED IN THE UNIVERSE and they therefore have the right to conquer and even just murder others for fun.  Most of the action revolves around the alien officer trying to keep his wildly-violent assistant from destroying everything in sight, and The Doctor trying to convince the rulers of Dulkis (the planet the Dominators have invaded) that he’s not a flying saucer crank.  The one really notable thing about the episode IMHO is the incredible badness of the Dulcian costumes; I’ve seen better costumes in a grade-school pageant.  All the male Dulcians wear what look like baby-doll dresses made from old curtains (the rulers have slightly more dignified long dresses made from old curtains), while the women wear something that looks like a Victoria’s Secret closeout over a leotard.  The costumes are so distractingly bad it was sometimes hard to pay attention to the dialogue.

The Mind Robber is dramatically better than the two previous episides; it marks the first major TARDIS malfunction of the Troughton era.  Our heroes are sucked into a weird world of fantasy in which they meet fictional characters (I recognized Gulliver right away) and the Master of the place (alas, not The Master), a prolific boys’ book author from 1926, wants The Doctor to replace him as the ruler and prisoner of the domain, which is entirely created and managed by imagination.  The scenario is one of the strangest in the entire series; The Doctor encounters nothing similar again until Series 8, and the fanciful places depicted then are not as clearly explained.  Finally, I must say I appreciated Zoe’s cheesecakiness in that spangly catsuit on top of the console.  Hel-lo Sweetie!

Since I had never seen any Second Doctor serials before (not that I can recall, anyway), my only exposure to Zoe had been in “The Five Doctors“, which was much too crowded for anyone to really be noticeable.  But it didn’t take me long to grow fond of her while watching the 2nd Doctor serials.  She’s intelligent, competent, as steadfastly loyal as Jamie, and a great team player; I think the triad of 2nd Doc, Jamie and Zoe is one of the most effective combinations (in the sense of getting things done) in the entire 6-decade run of the series.  In addition to all this she has an engaging personality and is very nice to look at; I was quite sorry to see her go, and it tugged at my heart that the Time Lords stole her memories of travelling with The Doctor.

(Script Editor: Terrance Dicks)

Since The Invasion was the very first UNIT story and I have an especial love for that era of Doctor Who, I really wanted to like it more than I did.  This isn’t to say it was bad; it just didn’t live up to my expectations.  I liked the fact that the Cybermen, who at this stage of their development aren’t much more advanced than Earth people (except in cybernetics and space travel), were not invincible, and could be taken out by bazookas, grenades & missiles even if they are imprevious to small arms.  I also liked Zoe’s using her wits to calculate the formation of the missiles to take out the whole Cyber fleet, and to melt down the computer receptionist like any good ’60s sci-fi hero (like Captain Kirk and even #6 from The Prisoner).  And I loved loved loved the Brigadier’s cool demeanor in the face of danger and his unerring instincts of when to trust The Doctor and his companions (even if it was purely an act of faith) and when not to (more about the latter when we get to “The Silurians” in a couple of weeks).  My biggest complaints about the serial were its overreliance on the badly-overused trope of “megalomaniacal scientist cooperates with villains because he wants to rule the world“, and the anticlimactic destruction of the Cyber bomber by a Russian missile our heroes just waited around for.

The Krotons started out with an interesting mystery and then proceeded to do almost nothing with it.  I very much liked its anti-authoritarian message, “Question authority and distrust rulers who claim the ‘right’ to tell you what to do.”  And the idea of a crystalline life-form was similar to things being done at the same time in Star Trek.  But there just wasn’t enough action for four parts, and I would’ve liked…something more.  More resistance from the aliens maybe, or a longer fight, or a more complex subplot.  Something.

The Seeds of Death is one of the best 2nd Doctor episodes.  Like its predecessor “The Ice Warriors“, the interaction between rival groups of humans (in this case, the play-it-safe, stay-at-home T-Mat fans and the risk-taking, space-exploring rocketeers) is more interesting than the fight with the aliens, but in this case the alien plot is also interesting: the badly-outnumbered, technologically-stagnating Martians use biological warfare from a high beachhead (the moonbase) the play-it-safe crowd can’t reach.  The episode has good action and really engaging characters in the best Doctor Who tradition, and it even passes the Bechdel test (unless you count Martian invaders as “men”) when Zoe and the chief T-mat expert Gia Kelly hatch a plan to defeat the enemy.  Kelly is a far better “strong woman” character than most American writers can manage; she knows her shit and knows she knows it, and effortlessly demands respect without being a pompous bitch with a car-battery-sized chip on her shoulder.  Zoe is once again the key to defeating an alien invasion fleet, though it’s the Doctor who misleads that fleet with a bogus signal to take advantage of their very marginal fuel reserves by tricking them into a false trajectory with insufficient fuel to correct.  Most sources say this story takes place in the 21st century, but that’s clearly incorrect; Zoe is from 2079 and T-Mat is unfamiliar technology to her.  Also, a “21st-century ion rocket” is among the exhibits in the space travel museum.  No, this is clearly the early 22nd century, and humanity’s pulling back from its solar colonies and scrapping its space fleet is obviously what set the stage for the Dalek invasion of 2164 only a couple of decades (maybe even only a few years) later.

(Script Editor: Derrick Sherwin)

The Space Pirates reminded me of paying for something with a chipped credit card: “Do Not Remove Card…Do Not Remove Card…Do Not Remove Card…REMOVE IT NOW! REMOVE IT NOW!”  It was really slow for the first few episodes, then everything kinda happened at once.  None of the “twists” were really surprising, either.  The guy who was obviously the evil mastermind turned out to be the evil mastermind; the guy who died conveniently turned out not to be dead; the guy whom the martinet blamed for everything because he was an outlaw turned out to be as he represented himself to be; and the chick the martinet trusted turned out to be in league with the baddies because she was merely a poor innocent female who had been duped by the chief bad guy.  This one’s chief virtue: being flanked by two great stories.

(Producer: Derrick Sherwin  Script Editor: Terrance Dicks)

The producers really wanted to send the Second Doctor out with a bang, and they absolutely succeeded in doing so with The War Games, a massive 10-parter which yet moves faster than some 4-parters.  The pacing is much more “modern” than that of the older serials, and nearly every cliffhanger is a real cliffhanger (eg the Doc in front of a firing squad) rather than just a monster reveal or some such.  The villains are really villainous, the minor characters engaging, and the sense of dread around the Time Lords (named herein for the first time in the series) was palpable.  And I don’t care what anyone else thinks; the War Chief is clearly an earlier incarnation of The Master, right down to the grooming he favored for several lifetimes.  His scheme is very Mastery (trying to conquer the galaxy while letting others do his dirty work) and even the way he threatens to kill The Doctor fits in with his later “calling card” of matter compression.  Way back in “The Time Meddler” I mused about The Monk, but perhaps that character is just too different to be The Master, more just a nuisance than a dangerous (if often charming) megalomaniac.  When the Time Lords later warn Doc #3 about The Master, the messenger refers to an old grudge which could totally be based in the ruination of the War Games.

Up until recently, Patrick Troughton was the only major incarnation of the Doctor I had no solid opinion on, because there were very few complete stories of his era available for syndication when our New Orleans PBS station, WYES, was carrying them in the ’80s.  Like most Americans of my general age, the first Doctor Who I saw was the Fourth, because that’s when the BBC started making them available for syndication in the US.  WYES got such good response they acquired the Third Doctor episodes and (as they came out) Fifth Doctor then later (about ’85?) as many First Doctor episodes as they had intact, which wasn’t many.  But IIRC they only included one Troughton story in that package, and I honestly can’t recall which one it was.  So the only time I saw Troughton was in “The Three Doctors“, “The Five Doctors“, and “The Two Doctors” (what imaginative names y’all come up with, Beebers!) and that just wasn’t enough to form a reasonable opinion.  But now I’ve seen his whole run, I definitely include the Second Doctor in the top half of my preference ranking, below #11 and above #12.  I don’t think it was intentional, but the first five doctors kinda follow a pattern of development which corresponds with their position rather than their apparent age.  The First Doctor, who is young for a Time Lord, is often very childish and petulant.  The Second is more like an adolescent, often very unsure of himself and prone to bullshit his way through situations in which he’s totally out of his depth.  He is often clearly afraid (even terrified) of the situations he lands in, then will suddenly summon his courage and do something crazy-brave.  The Third is like a young man just out of university, overconfident and kinda macho, while the Fourth is like a man in his thirties, full of deserved confidence and sure of his abilities.  The Fifth shows the beginnings of that middle-age uncertainty and self-doubt, but after him the pattern breaks down. More on all this in a couple of days.

Season 6B

There’s something of a mystery about the Second Doctor.  First off, there are a number of times we see him later (“The Three Doctors“, “The Five Doctors“, “The Two Doctors“), and he always demonstrates remembering the end of “The War Games” even though he is supposedly forcibly regenerated right away.  In two of those appearances he’s accompanied by a clearly-older Jamie.  The Doctor himself is also visibly aged in those same two stories.  When we first see the Third Doctor, he has several devices (like a TARDIS tracker) and skills (martial arts) he didn’t have before.  His age has increased by 300 years from the occasion when Doc #2 says he’s 450 to the time Doc #4 says 750.  And on a number of occasions in the tenure of Doc #3 and Doc #4, the Time Lords demand he perform a covert mission for them, something clearly “black ops” that they want plausible deniability of (“Colony in Space“, “The Curse of Peladon“, “The Mutants“, “The Three Doctors“, “The Ark in Space“, “The Brain of Morbius“, and most notably “Genesis of the Daleks“).  Plus, once the TARDIS is back in operation after his exile, it is much more reliable and he’s much better at controlling it.  There’s also the small but IMHO important detail that when the Fourth Doctor shows Sarah Jane a steampunk-looking control room we’ve never seen on camera before, he calls it the old control room; it’s full of clutter, including the Second Doctor’s beloved recorder.  All of these details add up to one inescapable conclusion: there’s a very long period, possibly centuries, between the televised end of “The War Games” and the moment we see the Third Doctor stumble out of the TARDIS to begin his exile on 1970s Earth.  During this period the TARDIS was repaired and he learned to pilot her much more effectively; he aged visibly and picked up many new skills and tools, and probably had a lot of adventures he name-drops in later incarnations; he picks up an older Jamie (perhaps Zoe too?), restores his memory, and takes him on missions, and for most of this period he’s using the “old” control room (ie “old” to Doc #4, but not to us because this part of his life was never shown to viewers).  The televised adventures of Doc #4 (specifically, “The Deadly Assassin” – notably the only classic story in which he works sans companions) gives us the missing part of the puzzle: there is a super-secret Time Lord black ops group, the Celestial Intervention Agency (CIA, ha ha) which does sneaky stuff the High Council wants to pretend they had nothing to do with.  So what seems to have happened is this: the CIA recruited Doctor #2 after Jamie and Zoe were sent home, but before the actual execution of his sentence, offering to defer his sentence (and shorten his exile, something like a plea bargain) if he’ll do them “a few favors”.  So they fix the TARDIS, let him keep it (remember, it was originally stolen from them), give him extra equipment and training, and even (eventually) let him recover Jamie, for whom he seems to have an especial, paternal fondness.  During this period he probably fought The Master many times, which not only explains their obvious history but also perhaps explains why The Master burned through all 12 regenerations in the same time The Doctor (who isn’t exactly frugal with his lives) only used up four.  Maybe the Master was also a CIA agent at one time before going rogue?  It would explain where The War Chief got ahold of not one but several TARDIS machines (not to mention the opportunity to dig in the Time Lords’ secret files for esoteric knowledge he displays a number of times, especially in the Pertwee era).  Anyhow, this is not originally my theory; fans devised it and it became semi-canon due to being used in a novel by none other than Terrance Dicks.  In this thread, I’ve merely discussed the aspects of it I find interesting, and added a couple of thoughts of my own.  If I were going to write Who novels, they’d totally take place in this period.

So when does “The Invasion” actually take place? The Brigadier tells The Doctor it’s been four years since they’ve met, referring to the events of “The Web of Fear“.  But as I mentioned in that critique, there’s some controversy about when that takes place.  If we take old Professor Travers’ word for it, it has been 40 years since the events of “The Abominable Snowmen“, which would put “The Web of Fear” in 1975 and “The Invasion” in 1979, and the rest of the UNIT stories following in the 1980s, which conflicts with later continuity over and over, and not just starting with the 20th season episode “Mawdryn Undead” as some writers claim; “K-9 and Company” (which is canon despite its silliness) had already introduced issues two years before, and there were some others here and there.  On top of all that, there’s plenty of contextual evidence in the Third Doctor episodes that they’re taking place at least close to the then-present (early ’70s) rather than the ’80s.  Pop-culture references and fashions abound, Mao is still alive, etc. So I prefer to treat Travers’ “40 years” statement as a math error on the part of an excited old man, assume “Web” takes place in 1967 and “The Invasion” in 1971, with the 3rd Doctor stories then taking place after it (each basically a year in the future) and the 4th Doctor and after setling into a timeline parallel-but-contemporary to our own.  That of course creates its own issue with “The Invasion” in particular: Mondas doesn’t come back until 1986, so how are there more advanced Cybermen invading the Earth in 1971 even though nobody in 1986 remembers?  Maybe the Cybermen from the later colony known as “Planet 14” got ahold of time travel, went back to the late 1960s on a one-way no-return mission, built a small fleet, and invaded the Earth in an attempt to wipe out all life before the return of Mondas in 1986 so that the weird inexorable energy-drain deus ex machina effect won’t destroy their planet this time?  That would explain why the Cyber fleet is so small and no second attempt is made over the next 15 years; they only had one shot and screwed the pooch, thanks to the Doctor, Zoe and UNIT.  Since UNIT is classified and they were already working up a cover-story at the end of “The Invasion” (as we are specifically told they did after “Web”), nobody without a high security clearance knew in 1986 that the Cybermen had invaded before.  It’s not a perfect retcon repair, but I think it covers everything.  As Lorelei Rivers would say, “Plot hole plastered!”  But then there’s all that space travel going on in stories set in the 1980s, ’90s, and early 21st century, including suborbital passenger rocket planes in the 2010s (“Enemy of the World“), the Vulcan colony in “Power of the Daleks“, and numerous manned missions to Mars and Jupiter in the 3rd and 4th Doctor era (as we’ll see later in “The Ambassadors of Death“, “The Android Invasion“, etc).  I think we can explain that all away with one very simple fix: the accelerated space program of these shows was due to Cyberman technology (more advanced than that of Earth in the areas of cybernetics and space travel) captured from International Electromatics after “The Invasion”.  But in my theory, the Cybermen in that story had travelled back in time from a later era (maybe even from after the events of “Tomb of the Cybermen” in the 25th century) and therefore all that space exploration was based in one single incident of intrusion from the future.  Once we understand that, what happened becomes obvious: the Cyberman time-invasion was detected and prevented in the Time War later.  That’s why Doctor Who stories taking place before the Time War have advanced space exploration from Earth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, whereas those taking place after the Time War do not.  The Cybermen’s one time machine, probably captured from the Daleks, was caught and destroyed by the Time Lords (or the Daleks themselves), thus wiping out the timeline created by the Cyberman invasion of 1971, including all that advanced space travel and robotics, now remembered only by time-travelers who directly experienced it. Anyhow, that is my head canon and y’all can feel free to borrow it.

THIRD DOCTOR

Season 7  (Producer: Derrick Sherwin  Script Editor: Terrance Dicks)

It was so lovely to see Spearhead from Space again, for the first time in something close to 35 years.  The UNIT era, both Pertwee and Baker stories, is my favorite era of Doctor Who, so watching these is like visiting an old friend one hasn’t seen in a very, very long time.  This is of course the first color serial, which also meant the Beeb had to up its game regarding sets and costumes, at least somewhat.  Pertwee is my third-favorite Doctor (after Tom Baker and David Tennant) and, as is not unusual after regeneration, behaves even more roguishly than usual, even to the point of stealing an eccentric physician’s clothes and car!  The Brigadier later insists the Doc return the car, but the stolen clothes are his regular outfit for a long time afterward.  Speaking of the Brigadier, he really demonstrates the power of his instincts when he recognizes the Doctor as his old friend despite the dramatic change in appearance.  This is the first time we see that Time Lords have two hearts and very alien blood chemistry.  As for the monsters, the Nestenes, I’ll say more about them in my critique of “Terror of the Autons“; this time out they basically just serve as a good, basic creature-threat that showcases the changes in the series’ format.  Fans of other classic British sci-fi may note the plot’s resemblance to that of Quatermass 2.

(Producer: Barry Letts)

The Silurians is one of my favorite Third Doctor episodes, despite its problems.  I mean, did the writer just look at a chart of geological history and pick the era named for his favorite tribe of ancient Britain?  Because there were no reptiles yet then and it was far more than 200 million years ago (though admittedly, “The Silurians” sounds better than “The Jurassics”).  But as a Lovecraft fan I love the idea of an ancient and sophisticated reptile race with seemingly-magical powers ruling the Earth aeons ago.  I also really like the way that the two factions of humans (“kill the monsters!” and “they’re intelligent beings with as good a claim to this planet as ours”) are exactly paralleled among the Silurians.  So rather than the reductive trope of “invading monsters” or “barbaric humans wanting to destroy anything different from them”, we instead get a nuanced interaction between two hostile civilizations, each wanting to preserve itself while struggling with their instincts vs their intellects.  Best of all, in this story it isn’t really The Doctor who’s thinking most clearly but rather the Brigadier.  The Doc is so blinded by his own commendable desire for peace that he refuses to see that the hope for that peace was destroyed when the xenophobic Silurian second-in-command kills the wise leader to take his place and then attempts to release a genocidal plague on humanity.  The fact that there is virtually no opposition to his takeover clearly demostrates that the majority of Silurians sympathize with his POV.  The Brigadier is willing to listen to the Doctor until the Silurians demonstrate that they cannot be trusted, at which point he seals them into their base, to the great anger of The Doctor.  It’s a great, not-at-all-pat ending which still has the power to provoke discussion half a century after it first aired.  Finally, we later discover that when The Doctor accuses the Brigadier of genocide, he was not really thinking things through; would a race which had once dominated a whole planet have only one survival base?  Highly unlikely, and as we later find out, not at all the case.

The Ambassadors of Death is the weakest Doctor Who episode of the 7th season, and among the weakest of the Pertwee era overall.  Part of the reason is structural; it’s pretty slow and especially drags in the middle, and what action there is mostly seems to have been added by the story editor in an attempt to rectify the plodding pace.  But more of the reason I personally found it weak (YMMV) is that it inserted several big burrs under the saddles of continuity and logic.  Why would aliens from another star system land on Mars if they wanted to contact Earth people; wouldn’t the Moon make more sense as a staging area?  And what about the Ice Warriors?  I’ve only seen this one once before, and that was late on a Friday night over 35 years ago when I was probably falling asleep, so I kept thinking maybe the Ice Warriors were involved, but nope; supposedly Earth people managed not one but seven missions to the Red Planet without ever encountering its advanced, spacefaring and hostile inhabitants, who were still trying to invade the Earth as late as 150 years after this.  And why did these advanced aliens, not interested in war with Earth, submit so meekly to control that they were even willing to murder innocents (an act which they later claim deeply disturbed them)?  The best thing about the episode (other than the general goodness generated by The Doctor, Liz and The Brigadier) was the portrayal of the insane General Carrington; actor John Abineri managed to portray him as a dangerously xenophobic loose cannon in the mold of General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove, yet still evoke sympathy for him as a deeply mentally ill person when his plans collapsed and our hero saved the day.  All in all, not a very good serial, but still far better than most of the serials of the mid-’80s.

Inferno is one of the best 3rd Doctor serials, full of action and tension.  The “evil universe” plot device borrowed from the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” calls attention away from the fact that the savage “primords” don’t really make much sense, and allows all the regular cast to chew scenery as the evil counterparts of their usual characters (I especially loved watching Courtney as the eyepatch-wearing “Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart”).  Though the mad scientist pursuing his pet project at all costs is a familiar trope in the series, Professor Stahlman crosses over from merely obsessed to wholly evil, willing to lie, commit sabotage, and even kill rather than let his drilling project even be slowed for safety reasons (much less stopped).  I did find the menace to be too exaggerated, but again, that’s hardly unusual for Doctor Who; I suspect the mirror world survived, and we see it again in “Rise of the Cybermen“.  The idea that the evil universe was about a day ahead in drilling (due no doubt to their brutal fascist efficiency), giving the Doctor what amounted to a look into the future, was brilliant; using many of the same lines verbatim was a nice touch.

As friends and regular readers know, I am not a fan of “slash fiction”, nor do I go around “shipping” random characters in fantasy franchises.  But I’ve been a sex worker on and off for literally my entire adult life, so I’m pretty attuned to sexual signals.  With that in mind, I have a few words about Liz Shaw. I think she made an excellent companion for The Doctor: intelligent, educated, sophisticated, and competent.  She’s the only companion (unless you count the UNIT team, which I don’t) I can think of who never once rode in the TARDIS, and she’s in the top half of my favorite companions (as of the end of season 7):

Ian
Barbara
Zoe
Jamie
Liz
Polly
Ben
Dodo
Susan
Steven
Vicki
Victoria

In some ways, she’s like an older, more socially-adept Zoe, but there’s a big difference in the way the Doctor relates to her.  As I said earlier, the Third Doctor is much more traditionally “manly” than his predecessors: he’s tall and bold, wades into fights rather than shrinking from them (and gives a good account of himself when he does), and is often confrontational.  So I don’t think it’s a bridge too far to suggest that The Doctor had an intimate relationship with Liz.  Look at the way they interact: they often smile gently at one another, and he often touches her shoulder, hair, or even face in a very tender fashion that she clearly does not find unwelcome.  While she often bristles at orders from the Brigadier, when The Doctor says he agrees, she immediately accepts.  And then there’s that sudden, seemingly-unprovoked return to Cambridge, which is exactly what one might expect after a breakup.  Lest you think I’m interpolating, watch how The Doctor interacts with Jo Grant in later episodes (there’s a good comparison scene in “The Curse of Peladon“): it is clearly fatherly rather than romantic.  The way he touches Jo, speaks to her, and even looks at her is completely different from the way he interacts with Liz.  Obviously the Doctor is incredibly older than any of his human companions, but Liz comes across as very mature while Jo is very girlish, which I think changes the pattern in his mind.  More on this when I write about Sarah Jane Smith.

After UNIT, Liz may have worked in the Nineties and Oughts for an agency called the Preternatural Research Bureau (P.R.O.B.E.), if you accept the movie series (still starring Caroline John and penned by future Who writer Mark Gatiss) as canonical.  But even if you don’t, by 2010 she was back with UNIT and posted to their top-secret moonbase, perhaps an early version of the one seen in “The Moonbase” 60 years later.

Season 8  (Producer: Barry Letts  Script Editor: Terrance Dicks)

Terror of the Autons features an even more unceremonious companion-dump than “The War Machines“; at least Dodo sent a “Dear Doctor” note.  Poor Liz just gets “Since Miss Shaw went back to Cambridge…” before Jo Grant is introduced.  The monsters du jour are the Nestenes, whom I’ve called the most vanilla of Doctor Who aliens: like vanilla ice cream, they work best as a vehicle for other ingredients of a story.  The last time we saw them was in “Spearhead from Space“, a vehicle introducing a new Doctor, a new companion, and a new format; the next time will be “Rose“, the episode relaunching the entire series in 2005.  This time around, they’re being used by The Master, in his first appearance under that alias; the story also introduces a new companion, Josephine Grant (with one of the Brigadier’s best lines of all time).  Plot nerds may note that the climax of this story, the Third Doctor’s first meeting with this version of The Master, takes place at a radio telescope, paralleling the 4th Doctor’s first conflict with the ’80s Master, whose climactic scene also takes place at a radio telescope.  If it was a coincidence, it’s an elegant one.  It also launches a loose season-long arc with The Master as the chief villain of each story.

The Mind of Evil is the first episode in which The Master demonstrates the MO for which he is later most notable: installing himself in some kind of position of power and authority months or even years before The Doctor catches up with him.  In this one his alias is “Dr. Emil Keller”, the inventor of a machine designed to remove evil from the minds of condemned criminals, like an instant Clockwork Orange machine (Kubrick’s movie of Burgess’ 1962 novel was in production when this serial was written/filmed).  The extent of the Master’s plan is impressive; it not only involves the machine, but also a nuclear missile and a peace conference.  And like so many 3rd Doctor episodes, it’s packed with action from the UNIT crew, Jo Grant (who demonstrates that she ain’t just a pretty face) and the Doc himself.  We learn that one of The Master’s greatest fears is The Doctor laughing at him (psychoanalyze that!) and we see what it looks like when the TARDIS is only translating for the Doc rather than companions as well.

The American agent in The Claws of Axos is the first of several young men Jo seems interested in before she finally finds Doctor Jones on “The Green Death“.  The usual 8th-season gang is here, including The Master, and one of the guest cast is the sort of insufferable bureaucrat we love watching The Doctor puncture because they’re so untouchable in real life.  This one is practically the prototype for such creatures: self-important, self-centered, sociopathic, and so absolutely secure in his own rectitude he co-operates with a kind of space vampire which intends to feed on the Earth with the help of The Master and human greed.  As will happen again many times over the next several decades, The Master gets in over his head and is forced to help The Doctor defeat the monster he himself unleashed.

Colony in Space is the first serial of the type I mentioned while discussing “Season 6B“, wherein the Time Lords draft the Doctor for a black ops mission they want plausible deniability for.  They don’t even bother to explain things; they just seize remote control of the TARDIS and put him where they want him, leaving his curiosity to do the rest.  I saw the script as a commentary on colonialism: two different Earth groups (agricultural colonists and representatives of a megacorporation that wants to strip-mine) are fighting over a planet that doesn’t even belong to them, dismissing the inhabitants as “primitives” though they are actually the remnants of a civilization so advanced it once developed a weapon that could induce supernova in any star, without even having to leave their own planet!  The Time Lords detected The Master going there and discovered he had accessed their secret files on the planet (maybe in his own CIA days?) and knew about the weapon.  The serial has a lot of good action and the mining company boss is almost as evil as The Master.  One big plot hole: if the high priest knew all along that the super-weapon was the cause of his race’s biological and intellectual degeneration, why didn’t he destroy it before it was too late?

The Daemons is one of my favorite Third Doctor episodes, and I can only explain some of the reasons.  For one, I love the classic sci-fi thing of “most myths and legends are distorted memories of ancient alien visitation”; the way it’s used in this story in particular reminds me very much of Quatermass and the Pit, one of my favorite horror movies.  The interplay between The Master and the local white witch is classic Who, as is watching both Time Lords delving into magical lore.  The frustration of the UNIT technician asked by The Doctor to build an impossible gadget is a fun but not distracting source of comic relief, and the Brigadier’s trust that the Doc knows what he’s talking about is such a joy.  As a person who assigns loyalty a very high status among the virtues, I love seeing the Doctor’s companions and friends trusting him and sticking up for him, especially when the jeep hits the heat field.  And in the best ’60s-early ’70s tradition, the computer-like baddie (not an actual computer, but subject to hyper-Vulcan cognitive rigidity) is defeated by confusing him so much he has a meltdown; we earlier saw Zoe do this in “The Invasion“, but this time it’s Jo in “cosmic innocent” mode (doing the right thing instinctively rather than by figuring it out).  And the ending is simple, but fun.

Season 9  (Producer: Barry Letts  Script Editor: Terrance Dicks)

Day of the Daleks was the first Dalek episode since the 4th-season “Evil of the Daleks“, thanks to Terry Nation giving up on the idea of a separate Dalek TV series (which, let’s be honest, was a terrible idea in the first place).  Some view “Genesis of the Daleks” as the first direct action of the Time War, and maybe they’re right, but it was surely in response to bat-shit-insane Dalek nuttery like this, in which they time-travel back to the 22nd century from the 26th in order to reconquer the Earth because they’re angry that the Earth empire is kicking their asses in a war in the 26th.  I say “reconquer” because actual 22nd-century Daleks had already conquered the Earth but were defeated and driven away with the help of the First Doctor.   And how does the Third Doctor find out about all this when his TARDIS is on the blink?  Because 22nd-century resistance fighters steal a Dalek time machine to return to the 1970s in order to assassinate a man they mistakenly believe paved the way for the invasion.  Confused?  I wasn’t because I’ve practiced thinking about time-travel loops and paradoxes since the first time I watched Star Trek and Planet of the Apes (yes, I mean the originals of both).  But I imagine a lot of people were, which may be why this isn’t the most popular of Pertwee serials.  One thing that did annoy me about this story was the missed opportunity for the Doctor to meet a 22-year-old Susan, now one of the leaders of the Resistance.  Can you imagine Jo’s reaction to a woman of her age saying, “I’m the Doctor’s granddaughter?”  It would’ve been so sweet.

The Curse of Peladon is the second instance of the Time Lords seizing remote control of The Doctor’s TARDIS and sending him on a black ops mission without bothering to brief him.  The episode is kind of Agatha Christie in that there are a bunch of interesting characters in a remote place on a dark and stormy night, then the murders and attempted murders start.  But unlike Agatha Christie, it’s pretty clear from square one who the main villain is, and it doesn’t take long to figure out which of the alien delegates he’s plotting with.  I love the fact that in this time (the 39th century) the Ice Warriors have become a peaceful race, but I have to wonder about why the Time Lords give a plugged nickel about this backward planet joining the Galactic Federation.  My guess?  Given that “The Dalek Master Plan” is just over a century in the future, the Time Lords want the Federation as strong as possible for the coming war because they’re already planning for the inevitable conflict with the Daleks.

The Sea Devils is another pot-boiler; it’s not bad, but it doesn’t break any new ground at all and could easily have been trimmed down to four episodes without losing anything.  It features The Master bamboozling another ambitious bureaucrat in order to exploit another ancient race’s beef with mankind, but this time the Royal Navy is taking UNIT’s place because the monsters here are a less-intelligent aquatic variety of Silurians (The Doctor helpfully states they should’e been called “The Eocenes”, probably in response to a barrage of angry letters from paleontologists after the broadcast of “The Silurians” two years prior).  The whole shindig mostly seemed like an extended recruiting video for the RN, with opportunities for Pertwee to play with vehicles as he loved to do.

And now for something completely different:

The Monty Python connection continues in the very next story, The Mutants, which begins with the “It’s” man running through underbrush.  Once again, the Time Lords draft The Doctor to run an errand for them, but this time they at least send him a package to deliver rather than simply hijacking the TARDIS without warning.  As in “The Curse of Peladon” upthread, I think their scheme is motivated by the desire to have more allies against the Daleks in the future, in this case the angel-like evolved Solonians.  The concept of alien beings who are only humanoid in one of several life-stages is an interesting one (that we’ll see again much later), and it plays out against the backdrop of an apartheid system in which representatives of Imperial Earth are the “Overlords” of the less-technologically-advanced Solonians.  The villain of the piece, the Marshall, is a racist colonial official who sees the locals as literally subhuman, so disposable that he’s willing to commit genocide in order to advance his own career.

Longtime readers know I’m not overly impressed with special effects; I’d much rather watch a cheap old scif-fi show with a good plot, engaging actors, and shitty special effects than a modern special effects spectacular with a tired plot and cardboard characters.  But there’s a limit to everything; some Doctor Who effects are so distractingly bad my brain focuses on them instead of the story, and I can’t enjoy the show as I should.  The hull breach scene in “The Mutants” was like that (couldn’t the Beeb even afford a wind machine?) but that was only one scene, which was quickly forgotten.  Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for The Time Monster, in which an intriguing plot device and some fun characters were badly overshadowed by the menace: a literal god capable of destroying the entire world and maybe even all of creation (though The Doctor has a bad habit of exaggerating such things), represented on screen by…a guy in a chicken suit with a Greek helmet either running around the set or suspended above it on wires, wildly flapping his wings while making noises like an agitated magpie.  I first saw this one in the mid-eighties and I forgot nearly every other detail but that one.  I mean, couldn’t they have used a psychedelic light-thing as they did for an unnatural being in the next episode?  Or even a distorted version of the face from the conclusion?  Suffering Sappho, anything but the chicken man!  IMHO it’s absolutely the worst Doctor Who effect of all time, and that’s a high bar indeed.

Season 10  (Producer: Barry Letts  Script Editor: Terrance Dicks)

Besides the “psychedelic light thing” I mentioned above, The Three Doctors also had sets (accompanied by tinkly music) which made Grace think of some kind of magical Christmasland setting, with the result that my stoned self got the giggles, thinking of Omega as a sort of deranged, vengeful Father Christmas.  That having been said, being stoned slows my racing thoughts, so I was able to understand the recorder thing this time (which I couldn’t the last time I watched this serial in the ’80s, probably while half-asleep).  But those details aside, I was pleased with how this 10th anniversary episode turned out; I thought the presence of multiple incarnations of The Doctor was handled better than it was in the not-dissimilarly-themed “The Five Doctors” a decade later, and IMHO the Brigadier stole the show with his confusion over the Doc having “changed back”, his very British reaction to his first visit to the inside of the TARDIS, and his refusal to accept that the entire UNIT HQ had been transported to another universe.  And I thought the premise of a universe whose only law is the will of its creator was brilliant; it’s conceptually related both to other Doctor Who plots and a number of other science fiction stories I’ve found fascinating.  Though I know the established canon says Omega and Rassilon were contemporaries, Omega seems much later in my mind because he’s spoken of as an historical character, whereas Rassilon is spoken of like a Biblical patriarch.

Carnival of Monsters is an excellent example of a “light” Doctor Who story.  The universe isn’t threatened, not even a single planet; the only real villain is an ambitious politician who plans his coup about as well as a disgruntled university student might.  And the only people in real danger are the ones trapped in the “miniscope” along with a bunch of monsters.  The main conflicts are the Doc trying to get out of the machine and the two carnies tangling with officious puritanical bureaucrats who take a dim view of entertainment.  Stories like this, which are more funny and whimsical than exciting or scary, add flavor to a sci-fi or fantasy series; everything can’t be our heroes facing imminent doom in every single episode.  Note: Ian Marter (John Andrews) later plays 4th Doc companion Harry Sullivan.

Frontier in Space is one of my favorite Third Doctor serials. It’s a classic space opera, with the heroes rushing to and fro in spaceships trying to prevent an interstellar war between the Earth and Draconian empires.  The Draconian makeup is among the best in Doctor Who, easily as good as most Star Trek franchise aliens two decades later (and better than many).  And speaking of ’90s sci-fi, note that the Earth-Minbari war in Babylon 5 had the exact same cause as the first Earth-Draconian war here: an Earth ship firing upon an alien ship that they mistakenly believed was about to attack.  The characters are well-developed and well-played, and Roger Delgado’s portrayal of The Master reaches its perfection in this one, which makes his untimely death just a few months later so much more poignant.  In fact, I think my favorite Delgado-Master moment of all is the scene where he tries to hypnotize Jo, but she defeats him by filling her mind with nursery rhymes and he gets so annoyed he changes tactics (twice).  The story continues in the next 6-parter, making the whole a 12-parter equal in length (and far superior in quality) to “The Dalek Master Plan“.  Fans have also pointed out parallels with the original Dalek serial, since this is the first time we’ve seen the Thals since that one.

Unfortunately, Planet of the Daleks, the second half of this 12-part story, isn’t nearly as good as the first half.  This isn’t to say it’s bad, because it isn’t; it’s just average ’70s Doctor Who, which pales in comparison to the awesomeness of “Frontier in Space”.  Even though it was intentionally written that way, the absence of The Master feels like an omission, especially because it was revealed in the previous two episodes that he was working with the Daleks; it’s unsurprising that there’s a fan myth that he was written out due to Delgado’s death (he wasn’t; the death was later while on location for a different gig) because it sure feels like that.  As mentioned above, the story runs parallel to the original “The Daleks” storyline, including the Thals; the nicest part of the whole serial for me was discovering that The Doctor is a legendary figure among the Thals due to his exploits in the former story some 2000 years prior.  While confirming his identity to the Thals he even mentions Ian, Barbara, and Susan by name, which is a nice touch.  And I really like stories where The Doctor’s exploits are the stuff of legend, which are much less common in Classic Who than in New Who.  Other than that: lots of gadgets, running around, narrow escapes, Daleks yelling a lot, etc.

The Green Death is another of my favorite Pertwee serials, and the last to feature my second-favorite companion ever, Jo Grant.  There’s so much to like about this one it’s hard to describe it all in such a tiny space; at the bare bones, it’s just another story rooted in then-current concerns (in this case, pollution and industrial automation), but it uses that as a canvas for a really excellent show.  Jo demonstrates a little of everything we love her for: her cleverness, her “cosmic innocence” (serendipity!), her courage and above all her heart, especially as demonstrated in her mourning the death of the sweet-natured coal miner Burt.  He and the other minor characters are all well-developed, and guest star Professor Jones especially comes across as very real. The Brigadier gets to display why of all British Army colonels he was the one promoted to head of UNIT: military men aren’t generally noted for the open-mindedness necessary to handle alien menaces, but the Brig socializes freely with the denizens of a commune run by hippies with PhDs.  The megalomanical computer is as different from WOTAN (or any of the other megalomaniacal computers we meet over the years) as any human character differs from others, and I love its habit of humming Beethoven and Bach to the distraction of its human half.  But most of all it’s The Doctor, who tops off plenty of action and a turn as a Monty Python “pepperpot” with a genuinely moving portrayal of the mixed feelings a parent has when a beloved daughter leaves the nest; his sneaking away from her engagement party at the end does more to showcase his deep loneliness than any other scene since the end of “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve” in Season 3, and provides us with a powerful reminder of something it’s often easy to forget: for all his humanity, The Doctor is still not of this Earth.

The Third Doctor had the best companions on average than any other Doctor, and it’s not even close; Liz Shaw is near the top, Sarah Jane Smith is the top, and Jo Grant is a very close #2.  And even the “quasi-companions” like Brigadier & Co are better than a lot of the less-interesting (or even downright annoying, hi Victoria and Turlough!) companions in the show’s 6-decade history.  But how do I love Jo?  Let me count the ways.  I love her courage, loyalty, and resourcefulness.  I love the fact that Katy Manning understood a woman doesn’t have to choose between being attractive and competent, a fact many self-declared “feminists” forget.  I love that though she was sometimes the damsel in distress, at other times she was the one who saved The Doctor.  I love her quality of “cosmic innocence”, my term for characters who instinctively do the right thing, often seemingly by accident, without always knowing why they’re doing it.  I love her personality, especially the way she often smooths feathers The Doctor has inadvertently ruffled, sometimes even interrupting him to avert disaster by undercutting his abrasiveness.  But most of all I love the relationship between her and the Doc; it’s obvious he sees her as a daughter-figure, and she sees him in a complementary manner rather than rebelling.  All of this makes her departure especially poignant; besides all the human factors, there’s a narrative rightness to her departure.  For three years we’ve seen that Jo, for all her love of The Doctor as a father-figure, wants a romance; her interaction with a number of younger male characters during that time clearly signals an openness to that kind of relationship, so unlike other cases in which a companion leaves for a man (Susan, Vicki, Leela), Jo’s romance with Dr. Jones and leaving the Doc’s side to marry him doesn’t feel forced or pasted-on; it feels like a natural narrative growth that is very believable and very real, all the more so because some of us wept to see her go.  Naturally, some of this comes from the fact that Katy Manning is a genuinely warm human being who was loved by all of her co-stars, including Roger “Master” Delgado!  Such a dynamic cannot help but color the interactions of the characters they play onscreen, and The Doctor’s evident sorrow at her leaving was in part Pertwee’s own sorrow at Manning’s departure.  One final note: since Doctor Who was still viewed as a “children’s show”, there was a very real possibility that Katy would be typecast as a “children’s actress” after her departure; she decided to head this off by posing for an infamous but very coy nude shot draped over a dalek (and wearing the sort of fab boots she often sported on the show), for a 1977 issue of Girl Illustrated.  Upon hearing of the pic, Pertwee said “Typical Katy!” I’m sure most of y’all have seen it, but here it is in case you haven’t.  Jo returns after almost 40 years in an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, and the two have an adventure with the Eleventh Doctor.

Season 11  (Producer: Barry Letts  Script Editor: Terrance Dicks)

The Time Warrior isn’t a particularly notable Doctor Who serial; it’s neither especially good nor especially bad.  What makes it notable is new companion Sarah Jane Smith (not especially impressive here, but grows into a fan favorite), a new race of enemies (The Sontarans, who return many times, especially in New Who), and a new title sequence, the blue “time vortex” effect that first introduced US fans to the series.  Oh, and a real biggie: the name of the Time Lords’ planet, Gallifrey, is mentioned for the first time.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs is a very basic Doctor Who serial whose implications and details are more interesting than the story itself.  Visually, the special effects have definitely improved since the “chicken man” nadir; the dinosaurs are puppets which are about two steps below stop-motion but definitely better than dudes in rubber suits.  The “Whomobile” makes its debut, though this is about as much as we ever see of it, and the optical “time shift” effects are good for ’70s TV.  Mad scientist plots usually ignore the question of where all the money for the secret base and all the high-tech gadgetry came from, but this one has a cabinet minister diverting government funds to the project.  And the possibility of characters developing PTSD or even complete breakdown from the ordeals inflicted upon them by villains, which is usually completely ignored in adventure shows, is here an important plot point as Mike Yates suffers from the damage inflicted on him by BOSS in “The Green Death“.  But the biggest plot hole in typical “mad science” plots is the complete irreproducibility of the mad scientist’s devices (in this case a working time machine in the 1970s); here it seems to be a variation on Professor Kerensky’s work (which we later see in “City of Death“), perhaps combined with tech from the stolen Cyberman time machine they used to set up “The Invasion” (made available to Professor Whitaker by the minister).  If that’s the case, all work leading up to the device (which is itself destroyed in the climax) would have been erased in the Time War, like the borrowed space travel tech.

Death to the Daleks is…not especially memorable.  It’s neither especially bad, nor especially good, nor even especially Dalek; it’s probably the most pot-boilery pot-boiler in the entire run of the 3rd Doctor.  It’s pretty obvious that Terry Nation was kinda tired of his most famous creations and was just basically “phoning it in” here for a paycheck.  Even the “Tower of Babel” plot (an advanced civilization’s downfall is caused by its own hubris in the form of building some wondrous super-installation) was borrowed from Malcolm Hulke’s “Colony in Space“.  The only notable things about it are 1) the Daleks switching their energy weapons for slug-throwers due to the energy drain; 2) The Doctor telling Sarah that the Daleks’ motive power is now psychokinetic (it started as static electricity and later graduated to broadcast power); and 3) we see the first signs that The Doctor sees Sarah Jane as a woman rather than a girl; his interaction with her is more like his interaction with Liz than with Jo.

I like most of Brian Hayles’ scripts for Doctor Who, but the two “Peladon” stories are an exception.  I just don’t understand why I’m supposed to care about this backward feudal culture; I might’ve felt differently had the society depicted in The Monster of Peladon showed even the slightest progress in the 50 years since “The Curse of Peladon“, but if anything it’s just grown worse.  That’s true of the narrative structure as well as the society: while the first seemed to be a badly-executed Agatha Christie pastiche, this one was a “Scooby-Doo” pastiche, in which the greedy villains create a fake ghost-monster in order to scare the superstitious away from their profit-making scheme.  And as in Scooby-Doo stories, the identity of the villains isn’t exactly a surprise saved for the end.  The serial suffers even more badly than usual from what I call “small planet syndrome”, wherein everything of interest on an entire planet happens within walking distance of the landing site/beamdown point/stargate/etc; are all the trisilicate deposits on this entire world located in the Holy Mountain?  As in the previous tale, Alpha Centauri is an annoying hysteric badly in need of Valium, but this time the plot doesn’t give the Doc’s companion much to do either.  And everybody in the story is so ineffectual at managing anything that it’s abundantly clear that the villains would’ve totally gotten away with it all if not for that meddling Time Lord.

For the second time, the producers of Doctor Who managed to send an outgoing Doctor off with a bang. Planet of the Spiders is not only the best serial of its season, but one of the best of all 3rd Doctor stories and among the best stories of the entire series.  There are so many things to love in the serial it would almost be easier to list the parts that aren’t good, if I could think of any.  So I’ll just mention the great stuff that pops into my head.  First, I love the absolute weirdness of the whole thing; it’s one of the things I adore about British sci-fi and fantasy.  I mean: giant psionic spiders on a very distant planet 1000 years in the future home in on a perfect mind-amplifying crystal taken by the Doctor and use the psychic energy created by a meditation group at a Buddhist meditation center run by a retired Time Lord living as a Tibetan lama (who leaves everday administative duties to his tulpa) in order to create a bridge across spacetime via which they can come and go from their world to 1970s England.  Ho. Lee. Shit!  I would love to have had the opportunity to get high with Robert Sloman, who also wrote “The Daemons“, “The Time Monster“, and “The Green Death” (all great and highly memorable stories, though “Time Monster” was marred by truly awful special effects, which isn’t the writer’s fault).  But wait, I’m not done!  As a continuity nerd I was very pleased with all the connections (the Doc’s boyhood mentor, the Metebelis crystal, a letter from Jo, Yates’ mental breakdown) to earlier stories (including one by a different author).  And the extended vehicle chase sequence in part two (involving Bessie, the Whomobile, an autogyro, a hovercraft, and a speedboat) had Grace and I cheering out loud; it was included as a gift to Pertwee, who loved getting to pilot vehicles in a show.  The conclusion, in which The Doctor gives the Great One enough rope to hang herself, was brilliant and far more effective than some other technobabble resolution would’ve been, and the regeneration sequence with Sarah Jane, the Brigadier, and the Doc’s old teacher in attendance, was touching and satisfying.  Absolutely top marks.

I long considered Jon Pertwee my second-favorite Doctor, right behind Tom Baker.  Then I saw the David Tennant episodes and he edged in between them, but now I’ve rewatched the Pertwee era I may have to rethink that again (after we rewatch Tennant later this year).  There’s just so much to like about the Third Doctor.  I love his courage and his refusal to run from a physical altercation.  I love his willingness to laugh at his own self-importance when it’s skewered by Jo or Sarah, and his warm, almost brotherly relationship with the Brigadier (they still love each other even when they fight).  I love his willingness to change his kit as the need arises; while most other Doctors rarely change costume, the 3rd has a number of different suits following a similar style, plus he’ll wear work coveralls, space/diving suits, disguises, and even drag as needed.  I love his boyish delight in vehicles, and his approachable warmth.  And as I wrote about the 2nd Doc, my appreciation of the 3rd is enhanced by the fact that the UNIT era is my favorite era of Doctor Who.  It’s especially tough to follow really strong portrayals of the Doctor; devoted fans probably know Hartnell said Troughton was the only man who could succeed him; Pertwee had to be stronger still to follow Troughton, and Baker had to be the powerhouse he was to follow Pertwee.  I’m sure part of the reason Davison felt so weak to me is that he was standing in the shadows of giants, and that was even more true of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy as the show degenerated under John Nathan-Turner’s mismanagement.

FOURTH DOCTOR

Season 12  (Producer: Barry Letts  Script Editor: Robert Holmes)

Robot was the very first Doctor Who serial I ever saw, 40 years ago this summer. Like many Americans, my first exposure to the series was when our local PBS station (WYES in New Orleans) picked up the series in syndication, starting with the 4th Doctor.  It was obvious that I was watching something in media res, what with the Doctor’s regeneration scene and our being given a bunch of characters we were obviously supposed to already know.  But despite the bad special effects and the rather tired Frankenstein plot, I was intrigued enough by the characters and their interaction to watch “The Ark in Space” the following Saturday night at 10:30; that one baited me much more strongly, and by “Genesis of the Daleks” I was completely hooked.  I probably saw “Robot” 2-3 more times in repeats over the ’80s so I know it pretty well, but watching it directly in sequence as we did on this viewing gave it a new dimension.  In view of that, here are a few in-context observations: once again the villains are “progressive” scientists who think they’re more qualified to run everyone’s lives than they are (and are willing to commit genocide to achieve it), and once again we see technology clearly based in stuff harvested from the Cyberman invasion of 1971 which disappears later.  Even given that, I think a disintegrator weapon of that power level is far too advanced to be believable, and the technology vanishes away as the end credits roll, never to be seen again, not even in the hands of the Cybermen.

(Producer: Philip Hinchcliffe)

As I wrote above, The Ark in Space was the story which first got me really interested in Doctor Who.  The Wirrn had a lot to do with it; those who have read my book Ladies of the Night already know that I’m interested in astropelagic life forms, but the Wirrn have the added parasitic trait of absorbing the memories of their victims.  Naturally the bad costumes threw me off a bit (do the Wirrn really locomote by bouncing on their tails?), but the character interaction, especially between The Doctor and Sarah Jane, won me over.  In fact, the scene where the Doctor helps her get out of the conduit after being stuck (“I don’t need your help!” “Yes, you do”) is one of my favorite scenes of the entire series; it really shows the special relationship between them.  Another thing I noticed, even on first viewing 40 years ago, was that the TARDIS appears to follow along “currents” in time to bring The Doctor exactly to the times and places he’s needed.  He arrives on Nerva exactly as the Wirrn brood are about to break out and feed on the hibernating humans.  A week later and he’d have been too late; a few weeks earlier and he might not have noticed anything amiss.  The chances of hitting exactly the right day in a stretch of 10,000 years is too incredibly improbable to be an accident, especially considering that the planned Sontaran invasion of Earth in the next story was going on the same week (after 10,000 years of nothing).  I suspect the Doc’s arriving just in the nick of time to stop two catastrophes had a lot more to do with the Time Lords than with Harry’s monkeying with the control panel.  Given that the Time Lords are telepathic, that monkeying may have even been, shall we say “externally provoked”?  One last thing: unless the Wirrn eggs take 5000 years to hatch, I doubt the queen’s sabotage had anything to do with the “alarm clock” failure; the Silurians had a similar problem without Wirrn intervention.  System degradation is just a natural result of even a self-repairing system operating on that kind of timescale without intelligent surpervision (more on that in the next serial).

The fact that the events of The Sontaran Experiment take place the same week as those of “The Ark in Space” – after 10,000 years of nothing – suggests to me that the two are somehow connected, like perhaps the Wirrn hitched a ride on the Sontaran ships or something.  I’m willing to accept small Dickensian coincidences; ER Burroughs was also a big practitioner of them.  But this much strains credulity.  I also have to give the side-eye to the notion that a disaster major enough to vaporize every building in the area (leaving no ruins at all) would nonetheless leave a complex, finicky device like a teleport receiver completely functional.  And powered.  After standing in the English rain for 10,000 years.  My only way to plaster that plot hole is to say that The Doctor was lying to Sarah about this being London (it certainly isn’t the first occasion he was less than truthful, nor the last) and the transmat station is really in the middle of nowhere as it appears, chosen for some unknown technobabble reason, with self-repairing systems.  Of course, that still doesn’t explain why, with all the Earth to choose from, Styre chose to land within walking distance of the only functional transmat station on the globe.  Holy Small Planet Syndrome, Batman!

Genesis of the Daleks has been consistently voted among the best Doctor Who stories of all time, and often the best.  And that is not hype.  By the time I finished watching it for the first time 40 years ago, any concerns I had about the series’ low special effects budget had completely evaporated, and I knew I was hooked for life.  For starters, it’s easily Terry Nation’s best Dalek script ever, and IMHO the small stage has a lot to do with that; other Dalek stories try to show us the threat and often fall flat, but this one just presents the monsters’ origin in a purely local conflict and relies on the viewers’ knowledge of what they will become to do the rest.  In that way, it’s very like a good horror movie: shadows and implications are far more powerful than even well-executed rubber monsters.  The production doesn’t even bother trying to hide the scenario’s resemblance to the nightmare of Nazism, nor does it sugar-coat the situation: when the curtain goes up in part one the very first thing we see is a group of people being machine-gunned, followed soon after by the gruesome sight of corpses propped up behind barbed-wire to make the trenches look fully manned.  Emotionally, it’s like being slapped in the face and then almost immediately having a bucket of ice water dumped on one’s head.  The portrayal of Davros could easily have been played so heavy-handedly it would’ve been cartoonish, but nope; Michael Wisher does a fine job of presenting a horrifyingly psychopathic megalomaniac in such a way as to be believable.  Davros’ cool, calculated lying and emotional manipulation will be very familiar to anyone who has ever had to deal with a psychopath in real life, yet when he loses his temper it is crystal-clear where the Daleks’ histrionic screaming when angered comes from: this is a being so deranged he wants an entire universe populated solely by creatures made In His Image.  We often use the expression “playing God” in a hyperbolic fashion, but Davros is doing it literally; this is a man so unhinged he looks at the universe and sincerely believes that he could do a better job.  I’ve written a lot about Davros here because he is the dark sun around which the other story-elements revolve, but there’s so much else here I could probably do a feature-length essay.  The Kaleds aren’t wholly evil, just subject to the same collectivist urges as humans, and some of them are horrified to realize the abomination they’ve talked themselves into enabling thanks to words like “patriotism” and “purity”.  The moral dilemmas are very real, and Tom Baker’s “Do I have the right?” speech is one of the finest moments in the history of televised science fiction and fantasy.  The often buffoonish Harry rises to the occasion admirably, and Sarah is clearly terrified in more than one scene, yet shows her mettle by doing what needs to be done anyhow.  The early scene in which the Time Lord hijacks the Doctor’s journey paints a clear picture of their own moral lapses, and the ending isn’t remotely a neat “good job all, on to the next adventure!” tied up with a pink ribbon.  Plus: there are no slow spots in this six-parter.  Do yourself a favor: If you haven’t seen this one in the past few years, watch it again.

I had forgotten just how good Revenge of the Cybermen is!  Too many of the earlier Cyberman stories followed the same plot, but this one is much more complex and the double-agent ruthlessly murdering people at the behest of both Cybermen and dissident Vogans gave the story an element of Cold War-flavored political realism often lacking in Doctor Who.  Filming the story in real caves rather than papier-mache sets made a huge difference, and even when I first saw the episode 40 years ago I noticed that the Cybermen’s claim to be unemotional was more propaganda than honest fact.  But it’s the characterizations which really carry this one; all the political figures are well-drawn, and double-agent Kellman is the kind of quiet sociopath that can justify almost any abomination if it advances his own agenda.  But it’s the Fourth Doctor who really shines most brightly here; if I wanted to pick one serial that most clearly demonstrates his character, this would be the one.  The Doctor quotes are so memorable I surprised Grace by quoting the one about the Cybermen being “a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers” word for word despite not having seen the show since the ’80s.  You’ve also gotta love the Doc shouting “HARRY SULLIVAN IS AN IMBECILE!” at the top of his lungs after Harry causes an avalanche.

So, about Harry.  Some companions actively add to the series; Sarah Jane, Jo, Ian, Barbara, Zoe, Jamie and others fall into that category.  Some actively detract from the shows they’re in by foolishly or even maliciously causing trouble; I’m looking at you, Turlough and Victoria.  But others are sort of around zero; they neither add much nor subtract much, and could almost be replaced by a different companion from the same category without changing much.  Harry Sullivan is in that category, along with Dodo and Susan.  Harry is like Susan in that he’s intelligent and educated (he’s a freaking MD, for gooness’ sake!) but also kind of accident prone and clueless.  So I don’t actually dislike him, but I’d rather he not get in the way of that special Doctor-Sarah Jane dynamic.  So, here are the companions in my order of preference, as of the end of Season 12 (short-term or occasional companions not included):

Sarah Jane
Jo
Ian
Barbara
Zoe
Jamie
Liz
Polly
Ben
Harry
Dodo
Susan
Steven
Vicki
Victoria

The Brigadier and UNIT are special, to be discussed later.  Harry is still working for UNIT in 1979, when “The Android Invasion” takes place; the next time we hear about him is from Sarah Jane, who mentions his work in vaccine development.

Season 13  (Producer: Philip Hinchcliffe  Script Editor: Robert Holmes)

Terror of the Zygons is the last Doctor Who serial that fully qualifies as a UNIT story.  There are a couple of others later this season, but apparently the cash-strapped BBC didn’t want to pay Nicholas Courtney to appear as the Brigadier in them, and they are noticeably less for his absence.  When the show does bring him back (in 1983’s “Mawdryn Undead“) it’s in a decidely unheroic role; we had to wait until after Courtney’s death for New Who to give his character an appropriately heroic sendoff.  Otherwise, “Terror” was much better than I remembered; I’ve always liked the Zygons as villains and would’ve liked to see them again in Classic Who.  Baker has by now fully inhabited his character; Sarah Jane shows off her quality of never missing a damned thing; and even Harry is OK, though I don’t mind seeing him go.

Planet of Evil is another Fourth Doctor serial which is better than I remembered; in fact, it was much better than I remembered, so much so that I was scratching my head trying to remember why I didn’t like it before.  This whole season featured homages to classic horror movies, and of course this one was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  But it’s the whole planet which has a dual nature, and the “evil” side of that nature involves the same kind of truly outré British sci-fi weirdness as I mentioned in “Planet of the Spiders“.  The idea of this planet as existing in the twilight zone between two universes is more fantasy than sci-fi, but there’s nothing wrong with that in Doctor Who.  That The Doctor is “not without influence” with a powerful being from “Outside” (to borrow a Lovecraft term) is a return to the days where viewers realize there’s a great deal The Doctor isn’t telling his companions, and that at least some of what he isn’t telling isn’t at all nice.  This script provides an excellent example of what I call the Doc’s “bamboozle power” which allows him to establish himself as an authority wherever he goes (all Time Lords seem to have it to one degree or another), and Sarah Jane really shines when Harry isn’t getting in her way.  Maybe one of the things that annoyed me decades ago was their calling the dangerous stuff “antimatter”, when it’s clearly something much weirder (even to the point of strange gravity effects), but that’s not unusual in British sci-fi of the period; IIRC they did something similar in Space: 1999.  And speaking of that show, note that the Controller, Salamar, is played by the Scottish actor Prentis Hancock, who was Paul Morrow on 1999.  Hancock also played a largish role in “Planet of the Daleks” and small ones in a couple of other serials.

Pyramids of Mars is the third serial in a row that I found better than I remember it. I’ve always liked this one, but there were some elements (like the puzzles) that seemed weaker in my memory than they actually are.  The story was of course inspired by The Mummy (1932), but also by the then-recent discovery of photographic artifacts in Elysium on Mars which resemble pyramids.  Once again The Doctor battles a godlike being, and though he goes by “Sutekh” and fits into Egyptian mythology, our hero clearly states he is also known as “Satan”.  So this serial is actually “The Doctor vs The Devil”, and the Horned One is winning right up until the end, when his own overconfidence proves his undoing (as it should be).  This is an unusually grim story, with a high body count: everyone but the Doc and Sarah are dead and the house burns down as well, and though the dialogue is tight and excellent the Doctor himself makes few jokes and barely even smiles.  The resolution is brilliant and the treatment of causality is as tight as the dialogue, but in all of that there’s a contributor to the “UNIT Dating Controversy“, as Sarah Jane clearly states she’s from 1980 and the Doctor later confrms that.  In light of my exhaustive retcon on this topic, I choose to cast that as a sort of dramatization error.

The three previous serials were all at least slightly better than I remembered them, but I’m afraid The Android Invasion isn’t.  There are a couple of mildly-interesting plot points, and The Doctor and Sarah Jane are fun to watch even when the script is weak, but that’s about all the positive I can say about this story, by Terry Nation back in pot-boiler mode again.  The two biggest gripes I have about it are, firstly, just how cowardly and few in number are these aliens?  Why do they need such an elaborate scheme to spread a bacteriological weapon?  Hell, Nation’s more famous creations, the Daleks, manage that by dropping germ bombs from orbit.  If they need ground-level dispersal, how about a few random androids dropped in major world capitals, infecting strangers in the street, rather than one big easily-targeted clump?  But worse than that was the Nicholas Courtney snub; a UNIT story without the Brigadier isn’t much of a UNIT story.  They had Benton and even Harry there, but the base is under command of Mother from The Avengers?  By all the Muses, WHY?

As mentioned above, the entire 13th season of Doctor Who featured homages to classic horror movies, and none toed the line more closely than The Brain of Morbius, which parallels Frankenstein right down to the destruction of the monster by a torch-bearing mob of locals.  The torch-bearers are members of the Sisterhood of Karn, a sect of Gallifreyan witches who follow their own school of mental discipline and live on Karn, another planet in the same star-system, whose civilization was itself, I suspect, originally an ancient colony of Gallifrey settled before Rasillon’s time.  Their power is so great they can actually teleport the TARDIS into their sanctuary via combined force of will, and drag passing spaceships to their doom (like their brothers the Time Lords, the Sisterhood’s morality is alien).  The serial is most notable not for its overall They Saved Hitler’s Brain! plot, but for a host of little details fleshing out the mythos and characters.  Beside the Sisterhood and its Elixir of Life (I’m sure any resemblance to the Bene Gesserit and their Water of Life was strictly intentional) there’s also Karn itself, Morbius, and “mind-bending” (Time Lord psychic wrestling).  No, I don’t consider the mystery faces former incarnations of The Doctor; they’re pretty clearly Morbius’ various selves, and IMHO any other interpretation is just silly.  The only exception (besides the identifiable pics of the Doc’s past selves) is the dude in the tricorner hat, who could be the First Doctor as a young man (he’d have been about 200-ish when such hats were fasionable on Earth).  Similarly, the idea that the show takes place in some future time merely because Solon is from Earth’s future ignores the fact that Time Lords drag their acolytes all over spacetime; just because Solon was born in the future doesn’t mean he can’t live and die in the past.  I mean, Vicki was born in the 25th Century CE and grew old & died in the 13th Century BCE, right?  But above all, it’s the Doc and Sarah team which makes this fun to watch; she even drops a none-too-subtle hint that she found the Doctor very attractive in both his 3rd and 4th incarnations.  This is definitely one for the fans.

The Seeds of Doom is one of my favorite Fourth Doctor serials, but it isn’t really for the story.  I mean, carnivorous mobile alien plants are interesting, but we’ve seen them before in lots of sci-fi from Day of the Triffids to Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors to the Avengers episode “The Man-Eater of Surrey Green”.  No, it’s the characters that make this one so much fun; both The Doctor and Sarah Jane are in top form, and the Doctor even hints at their special relationship by calling her his “best friend”.  Six-parters often lag a bit in the middle, but not this one, which is packed with action in every episode.  Even the minor characters are interesting, most especially the flower artist Amelia Ducat, whose entertaining eccentricity deserved (but never got) a return engagement.  The only thing that really mars the serial IMHO was that it was a UNIT story without the Brigadier, which proved extremely distracting because it was obvious whose lines were originally intended to be his.  It’s not that I think every story set on contemporary Earth needs the Brigadier; I certainly don’t miss him in, eg, “Image of the Fendahl” or “The Stones of Blood“.  But doing a UNIT story without the Brig and then obviously inserting ersatz replacements is both disappointing and just plain uncool.

Season 14  (Producer: Philip Hinchcliffe  Script Editor: Robert Holmes)

The Masque of Mandragora is another of those serials in which the fun and pleasure derives from the details and flourishes rather than from the plot (which is interesting enough but not essentially different from the plots of two dozen other Doctor Who serials).  The Doctor and Sarah Jane demonstrate the wit and alchemy which made him many fans’ all-time favorite Doc and her many fans’ all-time favorite companion; the young Duke and his advisor come across as real people; we get to see the inside of the TARDIS beyond the console room and thus get the first inkling of just how huge it is; and speaking of the console room, we get the first view of the lovely Victorian-style “old” control room (which, judging by the on-screen evidence, was last used by Doctor #2 in “season 6B“).  Another “first” in this episode: it’s the first on-screen explanation of how companions can speak and understand languages they either don’t know or can’t possibly know.  Every sci-fi or fantasy series needs some universal translator, babel fish, translator microbes or the like, but it’s often just left unexplained.  Here it’s portrayed as a telepathic gift of the Time Lords, shared with companions, possibly (later established as canon) with the help of the TARDIS herself.  Too bad a few lazy writers forget about this later.

The Hand of Fear is another of my favorite Doctor Who serials, and not just because it gives my ATF companion an excellent departure scene.  First, it’s another of those stories in which the TARDIS clearly puts The Doctor exactly when and where he is needed; just imagine if the titular object had been found by one of the quarry workers, with no Doctor around to deal with the resulting menace.  I really love Liz Sladen’s variations on “Eldrad must live!” which make it sound as if it were something Sarah Jane actually believes rather than just the stereotypical “mind control” monotone I found annoying even as a child.  The power plant director was a nicely-developed character, and since even UK fans not alive in the early ’50s are no longer familiar with the reference, this is Andy Pandy:

Many British sci-fi writers (I’m looking at you, Arthur C. Clarke) are enamored of absurdly-long timescales and technology still working after a time when literally any unprotected physical object should have crumbled into dust, and Doctor Who writers are no exception.  I simply cannot accept the premise that complex devices, synthetic liquids and even recordings would remain intact after 150 million years in an environment so hostile it even gives the TARDIS issues after a mere few hours, but fortunately we have an out: The Doctor lies.  He tells Eldrad that he won’t take him back to his own time, but he knows damned well that since his own people were the only ones who could deal with him in the first place, they’re the only ones who can really be trusted to deal with him now.  So he takes him back to (relatively) soon after the execution.  My evidence?  Besides the fact that everything is still working, the Doc himself lets it slip: “nobody has been here for thousands of years.”  Thousands.  Not millions; not tens of millions.  I think he inadvertently stated what he’d actually done.  But the ending is certainly one of the best companion departures ever, and indicative of the personality change from Doc #3 to Doc #4.  Both of them have the urge to basically run away when a deeply-beloved companion goes her own way, but Doc #4 has to pretend it was his own idea rather than accept consciously that SARAH JANE IS LEAVING HIM.  Even on first viewing way back in 1981, I recognized this as a lover’s quarrel of very classic outlines: she is upset and wants attention while he wants to play Mister Fix-It, so she gets upset he’s not paying attention to her and he’s all “What the hell is eating her?”  So she’s going to “pack her goodies and go HOME!”  The resolution is tender and bittersweet, and the only reason I didn’t cry is that I’ve seen her future and know she’ll be back, and that the Doc won’t forget her.

After rewatching the Third Doctor episodes with Jo Grant, I was open to reconsidering the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Sarah Jane was only my favorite companion because she was my first. But after a rewatch…nope!  Sarah Jane really does deserve her status as the most popular companion in Doctor Who history, the only one popular enough to carry her own series for several seasons.  There are lots of good reasons for this: she is extremely intelligent and never misses a damned thing, so despite not having Time Lord knowledge she often catches things The Doctor misses.  She’s crazy-brave, and I don’t mean fearless; even when she’s clearly terrified of something she needs to do, she does it anyway.  She has a great personality, and seems very real, not like an invented character at all, right down to the little personality contradictions most real people have, but fictional characters often lack.  But more than anything else, IMHO, it’s her chemistry with The Doctor that everyone (including me) loves. From their first adventure (“The Time Warrior“) she’s able to follow his lead almost unerringly, and by the 13th season she can move almost like his shadow (sometimes even responding to subtle, unspoken cues).  When they look at each other, their special bond can be felt through the screen and across a bridge of decades, and when the Fourth Doctor calls her his “best friend”, one really believes it.  What’s more, the nature of this friendship is clearly intimate.  It’s there as early as “Death to the Daleks“, but by “The Ark in Space” it’s hard to miss unless one refuses to see it.  She comments in “The Brain of Morbius” about finding both 3rd and 4th incarnations attractive (accompanied by a sweet look in his direction) and their parting at the end of “The Hand of Fear” is pretty obviously a lover’s quarrel.  She’s the only companion he ever tries to visit again, and though she isn’t home he leaves her a major present (her own K-9; see “A Girl’s Best Friend“).  And her conversation with Rose in “School Reunion” (2006) leaves very little doubt (if any remained by that point).  But why?  Sarah Jane is the same age as Jo, yet the Doc clearly didn’t see Jo in that way.  Why the difference?  I think it all boils down to personality.  As a Time Lord who has already lived about 10 human lifetimes, any human is going to be much too young for him by any objective standard.  What I mean is, a 75-year-old woman would be essentially the same as a 25-year-old in comparison to 750.  So it all comes down to maturity, as I pointed out when discussing The Doctor’s relationship with Liz Shaw.  Jo comes across as a girl, but Sarah Jane is a woman, probably in part because she was orphaned at a young age and her Aunt Lavinia seems to have been a very permissive guardian; though young, Sarah has been taking care of herself for over a decade by the time she meets the Doc.  And though I hesitate to get all Freudian, one isn’t exactly surprised to see a woman whose father died before she was old enough to even know him, and who had no father-figure thereafter, drawn to a much older, extremely competent and protective man who is nonetheless young at heart.  Her youthful wardrobe choices (frankly, often bordering on the juvenile) are not a sign of immaturity; rather, they read to me like something she’s doing so alien menaces will underestimate her and thus give her a strategic advantage.  And it works; this “mere girl” often catches the baddies completely by surprise with her courage, skill and quick thinking.  All of which is to say: Sarah Jane is nonpareil.  As of the end of Season 13:

Sarah Jane
Jo
Ian
Barbara
Zoe
Jamie
Liz
Polly
Ben
Harry
Dodo
Susan
Steven
Vicki
Victoria

The Deadly Assassin is notable less for its plot (which is interesting enough, but nothing to write home about) and more for the staggering number of “firsts” and concepts it introduced to the Doctor Who mythos.  It:

• is the first story to take place entirely on Gallifrey
• is the first story (and the only one in Classic Who) in which The Doctor has no companion
• features the return of the Master
• shows the Time Lords’ political structure
• introduces Rassilon, the Eye of Harmony, the Matrix, the 12-regeneration limit, and Borusa
• introduces The Celestial Intervention Agency, and the powerful implication that The Doctor was at some point involved with them or even worked for them.
• explains that the TARDIS is not just old, but an antique, specifically a “Type 40”.

I’m probably forgetting something in this embarassment of canonical riches, but I think you get the idea; Robert Holmes was invaluable to the development of the mythos.  Baker wanted to prove the Doctor could hold the show sans companions, but succeeded in proving the opposite: the companion is necessary so the Doc can explain technobabble or new monsters or whatever to them in order for the audience to know about them.  Otherwise the writers have to insert logical absurdities like a Time Lord explaining a basic bit of Time Lord technology to two other highly-ranked Time Lords or The Doctor uttering bizarre lines (again, to peers) like “We Time Lords are telepathic”.  Imagine a scene where a computer geek explains the internet to two other computer geeks, or a human character says to two other humans, “We humans have opposable thumbs”.  It’s just dumb.  So above all else, companions perform the narrative function of asking The Doctor questions about things we in the audience need explained; that’s why they’re typically human and more often than not contemporary to the viewing audience.

The Face of Evil is a fine serial that is among my favorites.  It has an interesting story, a thought-provoking premise, and some really fun dialogue and Fourth-Doctor antics.  In the best tradition of the show, it also has well-rounded and well-drawn characters, most especially Leela, who becomes The Doctor’s new companion via the time-honored method of barging into the TARDIS without his permission.  The show has always had its share of comedic elements, but in this season they become a little more overt, and this story is a fine example.  It’s hard to explain exactly what makes this one so good without explaining the whole plot, but one example of its depth is the way that all the major Sevateem characters are extremely intelligent, perceptive, and quick-thinking despite being ignorant and low-tech; all too often adventure shows confuse low technological development with stupidity, and portray “savages” as being dull-witted when, in actuality, the stupid are more common in advanced societies, because in primitive ones the stupid tend to die.  One little complaint:  When I saw the story for the very first time 40 years ago, I immediately asked, “When did The Doctor have time to stop by and attempt to repair that computer just after his regeneration?”  Because as far as we know, either Harry or Sarah was near him practically every minute for about a year after.  It has been suggested that when he starts to go off alone in “Robot“, he actually did go off and returned before anyone noticed.  But the TARDIS clearly goes nowhere in that scene; Sarah Jane is banging on the door the whole time and there’s no fade, just noise.  The only thing I can figure is that “The Ark in Space” isn’t really immediately after “Robot”, and he stopped to “repair” Xoanon while Harry and Sarah Jane just hobnobbed with the crew for a few hours, then they moved on.

The Robots of Death is another of those serials which is more interesting for its details than for its plot. Somebody figuring out how to circumvent robots’ anti-killing failsafes (Asimov’s First Law or equivalent) is not an unusual scifi trope, and we’ve seen it before in the series (as recently as “Robot“). That the human doing so is a psychopath who thinks he’s a robot is new, but not as interesting as the setting: a mining machine as big as a battleship crawling across the surface of a desert world to mine sandstorms for valuable minerals.  The icing is that the thing is so damned big it can’t stop moving while out on the desert, else it will sink into the loose sand (presumably, it also extracts nuclear fuel from the sand while sifting for the precious minerals).  One couldn’t have asked for a better first outing as a companion for Leela; though she has little opportunity to engage in combat, she gets to show off her instincts enough that the initially-skeptical Doctor begins to realize that she really can sense danger long before anyone else.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is not just one of my favorite Fourth Doctor serials, but one of my favorite Doctor Who serials of all time.  Though it’s a six-parter, there’s so much going on it needs the extra space.  As a Sherlockian from way back I’m already predisposed to enjoy anything set in Victorian London, and in case you miss the homage the Doc wears a deerstalker hat.  I share Holmes’ (Robert, not Sherlock) love for classic horror movies, and this one was clearly inspired by The Phantom of the Opera.  The Whovian weirdness is just as fascinating as that in “Planet of the Spiders“: a 51st-century Australian war criminal uses the deeply-flawed time travel apparatus of a scientific dark age to flee into the past with a homicidal cyborg and pose as an ancient Chinese god while trying to recover his time machine, which was stolen by soldiers…whoa!  And that’s not even including the giant rats and high-tech vampirism.  But as is so often true in Doctor Who, what really makes this one so amazing is the characters: The Doctor and Leela are at their very best, pathologist Professor Litefoot and theater owner Henry Gordon Jago are absolutely delightful characters with wonderful chemistry, and Li H’sen Chang, despite being a villain, is portrayed with great compassion, especially after his monstrous patron abandons him to die and he realizes that he has been deceived for decades into performing acts of horrifying evil.  All of the character interactions are a joy to watch, but most especially those between Leela and the Professor, who doesn’t quite know what to make of her.  And the dialogue!  This one has more quotable lines than almost any other story I can think of; I’ve always been especially fond of Litefoot’s explaining tea to Leela.  Just an absolute great time all around.

Season 15  (Producer: Graham Williams  Script Editor: Robert Holmes)

One of things I love about Robert Holmes as Doctor Who story editor is his love for the horror genre, which The Doctor fits very well into.  The Horror of Fang Rock is another example: it’s the story of a malevolent haunt at an isolated lighthouse, only the haunt is an alien rather than a traditional spook.  The alien in question is a shapeshifting Rutan, often mentioned as the eternal enemies of the Sontarans but never shown onscreen except in this one single story; this leads me to conclude that Earth is well behind the Sontaran lines because we see them in quite a few stories.  The Doctor is finally beginning to defer to Leela’s abilities as a huntress, though he’s still obstinately dismissive when she senses something amiss (even though she’s invariably right).  She also gets to display her high intelligence; despite having no background whatsoever in science or technology, she is able to quickly absorb what the Doc tells her about electricity, ships, Rutans, etc and draw logical conclusions from the model.  It’s one of The Doctor’s character flaws that he’s unwilling to accept that despite being a “savage”, she’s easily as intelligent as Sarah Jane, if not more so (considering Sarah has the advantage of at least understanding what science is).  Overall: a good, solid tale with well-drawn characters even in minor roles.

I’m going to start my thoughts on The Invisible Enemy by mentioning all the good things about the episode: K9

OK, now that’s out of the way, I can share my thoughts on what may well be the worst 4th-Doctor serial. It certainly has the worst special effects: they’re still not quite as bad as “The Time Monster“, if for no other reason than representing an actual god by a man in a chicken suit running around flapping his wings is worse than representing a powerful but not godlike intelligent virus by a man dressed as a giant prawn wiggling his feelers about.  And though the models are well-done, they were actually used amateurishly.  Also, cameramen: if the breakaway line of a prop is clearly visible in your viewfinder before it’s supposed to have broken, you might want to call the director’s attention to that.  But while “The Time Monster” had worse effects, it had a much better story than this one.  The basic plot was intriguing: an intelligent virus whose only corporeal component is a microscopic “nucleus” is a great concept that could’ve led to an amazing story, but nope: everybody seems to have fallen down on the job.  Virtually every aspect of production from script to video editing seems to have been rushed.  The plot is full of holes; for example, it’s supposed to take place in the year 5000, but we just got done with a story (“The Talons of Weng-Chiang“) describing a very different world in that time, and many, many future-set stories depict humans with an empire millennia before this one rather timidly postulates the first extrasolar expansion.  I don’t really expect canonical consistency from the show in general, but I do expect it from my ATF script editor.  I’m not too upset about Kilbracken holographic duplication being called “cloning” (see also “antimatter” and “galaxy”), but the way the whole duplication-shrinking-injection-exploration plot was executed looked like science-fantasy make-believe I would’ve orchestrated with the other neighborhood kids (“this closet is the shrinking chamber, and this ditch is the artery, and…”), as haphazard and rushed as everything else about this serial, including the contradictory explanations for Leela’s immunity that the resolution hung on.  Special kudos to Baker and Jameson for somehow taking the whole thing seriously enough for the show to go on.

Robert Holmes’ swansong as script editor was Image of the Fendahl, not a great episode but certainly a very good one.  It’s another of the horror-film-inspired plots Holmes did so well, this time following Quatermass and the Pit even more closely than “The Daemons” did.  The premise is set up well and the follow-through, while not perfect, is competent and entertaining.  The on-screen representation of the Fendahl isn’t bad, and I love that they left the audience to recognize the implication that the Medusa myth was inspired by the Fendahl rather than spelling it out (one female-formed creature controlling twelve separate serpentine entities who are nonetheless part of her, and meeting her gaze “freezes” the victims in preparation for a fate worse than death).  Naturally there are a number of myths and traditions said to owe their origin to the Fendahl, including Gallifreyan ones, and we learn yet again that the Time Lords aren’t at all nice (and willing to go to great lengths to cover up evidence of their own crimes; they may have even inadvertently set in motion the events which spawned the Cybermen).  But as is so often true, it’s the characters who make the show: every damned one is well-drawn and well-acted, from the Professor to Thea to Mother Taylor and her son.  I especially loved The Doctor’s combining the mundane with the ridiculous (his “recipe” for fruitcake) to jar the old white witch out of her state of shock, and Leela is in absolutely top form, overwhelmed from the get-go by the powerful psychic evil of the Fendahl and yet courageous enough to do what must be done, and extremely protective of both The Doctor and the old lady.

(Script Editor: Anthony Read)

The Sun Makers is a great example of a particular category of Doctor Who stories: those that don’t actually make a lot of sense, but are so entertaining one really doesn’t mind. The idea that aliens using economically-enslaved humans as a slave labor force would find Pluto (which needs both artificial suns and artificial gravity to make it habitable) more “suitable” than, say, Ganymede, requires far more than the villain’s say-so to seem reasonable, and where the hell are the rest of the human race?  Is this the solar flare period?  But somehow, that doesn’t matter because The Doctor fighting and defeating tax authorities is both awesome and satisfying, Leela is never uninteresting, and K9 gets to show his stuff.  The whole thing is kinda tongue in cheek, and the villain one of the slimiest ever.

Underworld would probably be a better Doctor Who serial had they not looted its budget to give to the other shows this season. But even so, it isn’t exactly, bad, just…pot-boilery. And it has lots of interesting features: one of them is another megalomaniacal computer (or as The Doctor puts it, “another insane object, another self-aggrandizing artifact”) warping a humanoid culture by pretending to be a god, though for some reason The Doctor doesn’t point out the similarity to Leela’s background.  Another is the Doc arriving just in time to assist at the end of their 100,000 year quest; is it the TARDIS at work again, or is it the Time Lords trying to fix a situation they caused by their own interference?  Presumably, this takes place in the very distant past, because Rassilon lived a very long time ago (we’re given various estimates, but probably something like 10 million years) and this is only 100,000 years after that.  One more point most don’t consider: the human brain does not have unlimited memory storage, maybe 1000 years max; any humanoid living longer than that (we’re told the Time Lords have far more powerful brains, but I mean the Minyans) would be forced to either stop forming new memories altogether, or else write over old ones to make room.  100,000 years of constant regeneration would therefore be remembered as a long, dreadful nightmare of disjointed memories, with the more remarkable memories of their lives before the Quest at the far end.  I also suspect the original crew was much larger, but slowly lost to accidents they couldn’t regenerate from (judging by Tala, some on purpose).  It’s rare to see a writer recognize just what a nightmare quasi-eternal life would actually be.  One final note: The Doctor describes K9 as his “second best friend”, which I see as a lovely tribute to his still-powerful love for Sarah Jane.

He does it again in the very next serial, The Invasion of Time.  I liked it better this time than the last time I saw it 30-someodd years ago, but I still can’t say I liked it very much because there were far too many plot holes.  The first among them is, who in blazes are the Vardans?  Why have we never heard of them before?  Clearly their powers are innate (product of mutation or genetic engineering) rather than technological, else the Sontarans would simply have stolen the tech and dispensed with their services.  And given that not even the Time Lords can stop that power without inflicting Armageddon on their homeworld, why are they working for the Sontarans in the first place?  Why are Gallifrey’s active defenses so worthless?  Can’t they time-loop individual ships orbiting right above them, or does it only work on entire planets thousands of parsecs away?  Don’t they have any kind of anti-weapon field (like the one in the TARDIS) they can drop over the citadel if need be?  Why are Gallifrey’s main defenses practially unguarded, and why do they look like Soviet industrial washing machines from the 1950s?  How the hell can K9 access the Matrix?  And how the hell did the Vardans infiltrate the Matrix?  I’d have bought that had The Master been involved, because it was previously demonstrated in “The Deadly Assassin” that he had cracked the secret; however, if he was originally supposed to be involved he was written out before production began.  On top of all that, though I understand why The Doctor was behaving so erratically, it was still extremely irritating for the first three parts, and Leela, who deserved far better, was dumped almost as unceremoniously as Liz Shaw via a romance which we were shown absolutely no signs of until the moment she reaches for Andred’s hand.  All in all, this looks like a botched execution of a potentially-interesting story.

Louise Jameson, Robert Holmes and Chris Boucher had the unenviable task of creating a successor to the mighty Sarah Jane who didn’t feel like either a pale imitation or a failed attempt at “new and improved”.  They succeeded admirably; few others could’ve done as well.  Leela and Sarah Jane are not very much alike, except in all the ways that count: they’re both beautiful, incredibly intelligent, extremely observant (in Leela’s case, preternaturally so), very loyal to The Doctor, dependably competent in their areas of expertise, absolutely worthy of The Doctor’s trust and have lovely, winning personalities.  Leela is a textbook noble savage: though she is a huntress and warrior who views everything through the lens of armed conflict, her heart is good and she is unfailingly kind to the weak and innocent.  She herself has a marvelous innocence and purity, much like Jo Grant; she tells it like it is and accepts whatever The Doctor tells her with a childlike faith, yet her mind is skeptical and she can quickly build a mental model of unfamiliar concepts from whatever information she’s given.  Leela is the kind of person I’d want behind me in a fight, and her Amazonian sexiness (those LEGS!) was not lost on either my teenaged (at first viewing) or middle-aged (at present) self.  Companion ranking as of the end of Season 15:

Sarah Jane
Jo
Leela
Ian
Barbara
Zoe
Jamie
Liz
Polly
Ben
Harry
Dodo
Susan
Steven
Vicki
Victoria

Season 16  (Producer: Graham Williams  Script Editor: Anthony Read)

The 16th season of Doctor Who took the form of a season-long story arc involving a quest for the six segments of the “McGuffin of Time” (oops, “Key to Time”), a premise the Fourth Doctor seems to find as silly as I do.  It nonetheless works as a narrative device to connect six stories of different genres together into a larger whole.  The first, The Ribos Operation, is a Robert Holmes (fresh from handing over script editor duties to Anthony Read) tour-de-force in the form of a caper flick which is possibly one of the most underrated Doctor Who stories of all time.  The story is driven by the engaging, well-rounded characters Holmes was so good at creating, portrayed by good actors under competent direction.  The Doctor’s anti-authoritarianism is on full display here from the get-go: first he rejects the “White Guardian’s” quest (until compelled by a none-too-subtle threat), then he objects to being saddled with a companion against his will (judging by Romana’s math, it has been 9 years since “The Invasion of Time”), then he happily arranges to break into the local equivalent of the Tower of London, followed by hobnobbing with con-men for the rest of the story and ending by displaying the pickpocketing skills we haven’t seen since “The Highlanders“.  The aforementioned con-men are loveable rogues in the mold of Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, “honest” scammers who prey specifically on the wealthy and tyrannical, and the long conversation between Unstoffe and “Binro the Heretic” is a jewel, an absolutely perfect example of why I love classic Doctor Who (and a number of other British adventure shows of he same period).  One final note: what kind of “good” and “light” involves threatening someone with a fate worse than death for refusing conscription by a being who could easily choose someone else for the job?

The second “Key to Time” story is The Pirate Planet, a hard scifi (atypical of Doctor Who) opus penned by the late, great Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame.  It has an incredibly imaginative premise and some really intriguing concepts with a horrifyingly-evil villain and just a sprinkling of the humor for which Adams was renowned.  The technological level of said villains is what I would call τ-level, like the early Time Lords or at least approaching that: temporal stasis, massive engines capable of instantly transporting mind-boggling masses across space nigh-instantaneously, and gravitational engineering capable of compressing entire planets into tiny volumes (like smaller-scale versions of the Eye of Harmony).  Throw in a long-term version of Kilbracken holoduplication, a psychic gestalt, a sci-fi satire of the ludicrous and impossible promises politicians make about economics (and the real costs of such policies), a villain who uses absurd and apparently deranged behavior to hide an incredibly-brilliant mind, K9 vs another dangerous robot pet, and probably half a dozen other features I’m forgetting, and you have one of the best of all Fourth Doctor serials, and certainly among the best of all Doctor Who stories in the whole 60-year run.

The Stones of Blood is the third Doctor Who serial in the “McGuffin of Time” (oops, did it again!) series, and takes the form of a horror movie.  Alas, script editor Anthony Read isn’t as fond of the genre as his predecessor Robert Holmes, and it veers pretty sharply from genre to become a sort of faux courtroom drama in Part Four, which definitely hurts its quality (the monsters being just big, limbless rocks kinda does that as well).  It’s not a bad story, just an average one, and it does have a few notable points: for the first of only two times in six parts, the Key to Time segment actually plays an active role in the story rather than a passive one; Part One ends in a literal cliffhanger; and for (IIRC) the first time we’ve got a pretty obviously queer character in Cessair of Diplos, who has for millenia surrounded herself with women and avoided male company (even by resorting to violence when necessary).  It’s not too surprising there were so few queer characters in classic Who; I mean, it was largely viewed as a kids’ show and the Beeb wanted The Doctor portrayed as asexual even with companions whose relationships to him were pretty clearly portrayed otherwise.  One more thing: it was really nice to see a female big baddie for two stories in a row, and both of them strong female characters, not just masculine characters played by women.

Every story in the 16th season of Doctor Who was of a different genre; The Androids of Tara is a swashbuckler, specifically a pastiche of The Prisoner of Zenda.  The “Key to Time” segment is found in the first few minutes of Part One and thereafter plays virtually no part in the goings-on, wherein Mary Tamm gets to play THREE characters beside Romana, Peter Jeffrey (Inspector Trout in The Abominable Dr. Phibes) gloriously chews the scenery as the wicked, Machiavellian Count Grendel, and The Doctor gets to show off his swordsmanship while K9 floats in a boat in the moat.  It’s a mistake to think about this one too hard or take it too seriously, but it’s loads of fun; just pop some popcorn and view it as a double-feature with the 1952 Stewart Granger/James Mason version of Zenda.

The penultimate segment of the “Key to Time” is more than just a McGuffin in The Power of Kroll, perhaps the only Doctor Who story in the form of a kaiju movie; in fact, it could be said that the segment was also the main antagonist, though that dishonor more correctly goes to Thawn, the violently-racist refinery manager who sends defective weapons to the native “Swampies” in the name of an activist group trying to help them, in hopes they’ll attack the refinery and be killed.  Actually, “native” is incorrect; the Swampies are only “native” to this swamp moon in the same sense as Southern Amerind tribes were “native” to Oklahoma: they were forcefully deported there by the Colonial government of their native planet so Earth people could steal their land, and are now facing a new incursion from the descendants of those colonists, who wish to harvest hydrocarbons they have discovered a use for.  The story of course takes place during the Earth Empire period, a convenient way for writers to talk about the horrible way European settlers displaced and mistreated the native populations of places they colonized (see also “Colony in Space” and “The Mutants“); in the ’60s and ’70s, sci-fi and fantasy provided a way for writers to discuss such topics without alarming nervous network censors who would’ve banned straight talk as “controversial”.

The Armageddon Factor is the concluding serial of the “Key to Time” saga; unlike the others it doesn’t fall neatly into a film genre, though it’s mostly kind of a technothriller with some elements from more traditional war movies.  Kinda.  It features all the action of a four-parter cramed into a six parter, and there is no real attempt to hide either the identity of the villain or his motives.  The story is by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, not exactly the best Doctor Who writing team but usually capable of producing a script that doesn’t seem like it was written by a committee.  Had this been produced as an ordinary four-parter in an ordinary season it would’ve been fine, if unremarkable, but as the conclusion to a season-long Big McGuffin story arc it’s a meandering, unsatisfying dud that doesn’t make a lot of sense, with a Big Villain approximately as frightening as a papier-mache mask who can be defeated by the simple expedient of saying “no” and breaking a plastic prop, thus dispersing the SOOPER WEAPON back into McGuffin-ness.

Season 17  (Producer: Graham Williams  Script Editor: Douglas Adams)

Destiny of the Daleks was the first “in sequence” Dalek story in over a decade to actually add anything to the Dalek mythos, and is in a way a direct sequel to “Genesis of the Daleks” (their origin story) due to its focus on Davros.  It has some interesting elements, most especially the stalemate with the Movellans (whose design I also rather like) and Romana’s near-panic reaction to the Daleks screaming at her (remember, she’s barely out of school and has never met them face-to-eyestalk before).  However, that pasted-on Romana regeneration sequence at the beginning was both disappointing and just plain dumb, and the idea that the Movellans would allow such an obvious fail point in the design of their warriors strains credulity far past the breaking point.  Alas, though Douglas Adams was a crackerjack writer, he wasn’t much of a script editor; as a result, the 17th season had greater than its share of weak, flawed episodes, starting with this one.

The very next serial is a perfect example of what I mean by a “flawed” one.  City of Death has an intriguing premise, entertaining dialogue, a compellingly-nasty villain, some really cool sci-fi concepts, and exactly the right amount of humor.  However, Adams apparently failed to include quite enough dialogue or action to fill 100 minutes of screen time, and the director unwisely chose to fill the shortfall with footage of The Doctor and Romana running back and forth across Paris (bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to CCTV footage of Baker & Ward on a date).  Still, it doesn’t ruin a story with pretty good special effects (other than the Scaroth mask) and some genuinely funny moments, including a cameo appearance of John Cleese and Eleanor Bron as art snobs and the running joke of the muscleheaded PI Duggan suddenly leaping in from off-camera to punch someone The Doctor is trying to talk to.  Continuity nerds like myself also note that Professor Kerensky’s work bears a strong resemblance to that of Professor Whitaker in “Invasion of the Dinosaurs“, with both most likely relying on stolen Cyberman tech harvested from International Electromatics post-“The Invasion”.

I’m not sure why so many fans feel The Creature from the Pit is an exceptionally-bad Doctor Who serial; hell, it’s not even the worst one this season.  I’m not saying it’s great, mind; it’s just a basic Who story, IMHO just a bit above pot-boiler level, with pretty typical special effects for its time and suffering from a pretty typical case of “small planet syndrome” (how can one noblewoman, not even a queen or empress, dominate the entire economy of a high-medieval planet?)  But the basic idea of a planet without appreciable quantities of metal in its outer crust, leading to all metal being as valuable as gold on Earth, is a good one, as is the idea of creatures whose technology is very high but extremely elegant, with few things humanoids even recognize as technology.  And Lady Adrasta is a good villain of the power-mad psychopath variety, worthy of The Doctor’s intervention.  I also like that the ambassador, while the victim of Adrasta’s evil lunacy, is not entirely without shadows himself, as he’s willing to flee the neutron star impact without bothering to tell anyone about it.  Finally, the astrologer is a good, fun, well-rounded character.  All in all, I’d rate this one as no gem, but more entertaining and far less repetitive than its dreary successor.

It’s not unusual for sci-fi writers to use their stories to discuss social issues, and Doctor Who is certainly no exception.  Sometimes the writing goes beyond discussion to proselytizing, and sometimes to outright preaching. And then there’s Nightmare of Eden, which qualifies as outright propaganda that could’ve been shown in a DARE class; it couldn’t have been sillier had The Doctor broken the fourth wall, pointed at the audience, and said, “Don’t do drugs, kids!”  Look, I know it was 1979, and the Drug War had not yet ramped up to “Just say no” and “fried egg metaphor” levels, nor destroyed nearly as many lives as The Doctor (twice, almost verbatim) says the fictional vraxoin has.  But the Doc has always been as anti-establishment as they come; he hangs out with criminals and counterculture types, and an uncountable number of his enemies (including in this very serial) are cops and cop-types, so it’s both disconcerting and offensive to see him used to promote authoritarian myths such as instant addiction (it happens to the pilot) and to hear him speak approvingly of the horrific idea of incinerating a planet’s entire biosphere to stop people from getting stoned.  It’s especially sad because some of the concepts here aren’t bad, though they’re lost in writer Bob Baker’s usual slipshod plotting and apparently-random date assignment.

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: I like The Horns of Nimon.  Yes, it’s campy as hell, but remember that it was first broadcast in December 1979, with Christmas falling between parts one & two. In other words, it was an intentionally silly frolic for the holiday season, basically a sci-fi Christmas pantomime, in much the same way as “The Power of Kroll” the year before, the middle parts of “The Daleks’ Master Plan” 14 years earlier, and the Christmas episodes of New Who three decades later.   But the campiness and intentional overacting disguises some powerful science-fiction concepts and a truly horrifying villain race: creatures who move from planet to planet using the inhabitants’ greed (for money, knowledge, power, or whatever) to trick them into providing safe haven and supplies for an advance scout to establish a bridgehead for swarms of parasites who suck every drop of life-energy from their host worlds and then move on, leaving a lifeless, utterly-depleted husk behind.  This is the same MO as the Fendahl, creatures which so terrified the Time Lords they destroyed their entire world, then much later covered the whole thing up so even their own descendants wouldn’t know about it.  The two stories are a great example of how the same premise can serve either a horror or comedic implementation depending upon the choices made by writer, producer and director. And make no mistake: this story isn’t funny because it was incompetently produced; it’s funny because it was meant to be funny, and it succeeds in that respect.

It’s a truly Adamsian irony that the best DoctorWho serial of Douglas Adams’ run as script editor was the one that wasn’t finished, and that irony is compounded by the fact that Adams thought it wasn’t very good.  But IMHO he was wrong; Shada is a fun, satisfying story which makes several welcome additions to the mythos, most especially the character of Professor Chronotis, an extremely elderly Time Lord, one of The Doctor’s teachers from the Academy, who retired to Cambridge in Newton’s time but has never been noticed as impossibly long-lived because Cambridge is just too discreet for that.  He’s an absolutely charming character, and I think it’s very sweet that The Doctor has periodically visited him throughout the 20th century at least (and was remembered by the Porter).  I love that senility in Time Lords often exhibits as an inability to keep tenses straight, and the incredible eclecticism of his personal library.  I love the Professor’s obsession with tea (a very Adams touch) and the whole story’s clear delineation of the difference between “criminal” and “evil”, in such sharp contrast to “Nightmare of Eden“.  I love Chronotis’ complete disregard for arbitrary rules that make no sense to him, so much like both The Doctor’s and my own weltanschauung, and the way that their refusal to be bound by such is the thing which allows them to defeat a real menace.  Skagra is a perfect Adams villain, a completely potty super-genius who, upon coming to the conclusion that there was no God, decided to invent him (out of his own self, of course).  We watched the ’90s reconstruction with linking narration by Tom Baker, but there’s a newer version available in which the unfinished parts were completed with animation.  There’s a lot more I could say, but I think you get the message: “Shada” is kinda great.

Season 18  (Producer: John Nathan-Turner  Script Editor: Christopher Bidmead)

Since the 18th season of Doctor Who was the first in the long reign of John Nathan-Turner, the incompetent producer whose mismanagement allowed the show to slide into ruin and eventual cancellation, it’s appropriate that every story of the season revolved around themes of decadence and corruption, starting with the season premier, The Leisure Hive.  Turner was hostile to any tool The Doctor might use to solve plot complications, most especially K9, who gets written out of this story in the first few minutes.  But other than that the serial is a standard Who tale, neither extraordinarily good nor extraordinarily bad, with pretty standard villains driven by a pretty standard motivation, who are foiled by the timely intervention of the Doctor and his judicious use of technobabble.  One interesting note: the fact that The Doctor and Romana are in very few scenes together would seem to indicate that this was filmed during one of the “off” periods in the on again/off again Baker/Ward romance, and the director was doing his best to keep them apart.

It’s the cactus.

I was trying to figure out exactly what makes Meglos arguably the worst Doctor Who serial of the Tom Baker era, and definitely among the worst of all time, and I decided it had to be the cactus.  I mean, the premise is definitely interesting and classically Whovian: a super-advanced society destroys itself by creating the ultimate weapon, leaving nothing but a wasteland (and an eerie structure) behind.  The power source for that weapon ends up on a less-advanced nearby planet, whose inhabitants both worship it and use it as a power source for the entire planet.  Then the last survivor of the dead race comes to reclaim his property without regard for the fate of the “primitives” who depend on it.  Sounds good, right?  So whose idea was it to make the big villain, the last survivor of an ancient race whose power can challenge that of the Time Lords, a literal potted plant?  I don’t mean a vegetable creature unable to ambulate well, but equipped with manipulative tendrils a la Audrey II; nor do I mean a weird creature with mental powers so great it doesn’t need physical limbs, oh no; I mean an actual (plastic) cactus in an ordinary pot, which cannot move or otherwise influence its environment except via (telepathic?) speech.  The super-advanced, incredibly-elegant technology?  Controlled from a room stocked with old gear from some back room at the BBC, equipment clearly designed for humanoids.  Not cacti.  Who lack opposable thumbs.  So how did these literal potted plants build anything, much less a weapon that makes the Death Star look like a BB gun?  They seem to have no means of affecting their environment other than by threatening and/or paying humanoids to do stuff for them.  Even if you try to save it by imagining Meglos as an interloper merely posing as a Zolfa-Thuran, and imagining that the real builders did indeed have thumbs, that still doesn’t explain why Meglos is an actual cactus.  In a pot.  Which has to be moved around by extras from the Monty Python “Spam” sketch.  In his pot.  And why does he need a human host, rather than just a humanoid?  Why go all the way to Earth when it would’ve clearly been easier to merely grab a Tigellan from right next door?  I mean, I reckon we can’t really expect clear logic from a LITERAL POTTED PLANT, but that in itself presents a thorny problem (sorry) in taking Meglos seriously.  And K9?  Still useless as per JNT’s wishes.

K9 was back to functional status in the next story, so naturally JNT had to demand that one of the monsters literally knock his head off with a log.  Other than that, Full Circle is a pretty good episode despite a few rookie writer mistakes.  The secret of the marshmen is not obvious, and it’s quite satisfing when revealed; it’s also another good example of The Doctor pulling out the props from a society whose “leaders” keep the people in ignorance of some Great Truth “for their own good”.  The story also works well in setting up the arc that shapes the rest of the season, and in furthering the theme of decadence (a whole civilization built on a single Big Lie, spending countless generations working toward a Day of Destiny that would never have come without The Doctor’s involvement).  Finally, it gives us another stowaway companion in Adric, the first new companion of the JNT era and the first male companion since Harry Sullivan.

The very next story of the 18th season also focuses on a decadent culture confined to one small area around an ancient beached spaceship and ruled by a triumvirate with dark secrets, but State of Decay is much more Classic Who in its tone and details, in large part because it was written around ’77 by veteran Who writer Terrance Dicks rather than some neophyte dragged in as Guest Puppet by JNT and heavily-rewritten by Chris Bidmead.  In fact, the director rejected an attempted Bidmead rewrite which tried to make it into something other than the Hammer tribute it was intended to be, and said he’d only direct the original Dicks script rather than the JNT-approved exsanguination of the tale.  This is also why it’s the only story of the season in which K9 is fully functional rather than wrecked or entirely missing.  In-universe observation department: It seems to me the Great Vampire was originally from E-space in the first place, because the ancient record says the vampires “appeared from nowhere” and multiplied (as he created followers), then after their defeat the Great One vanished again, leaving not even his (mathematical? quantum?) shadow behind.  Given traditions, this basically casts E-space as Hell (the Hydrax is even dragged down into it), an incredible setup which has, sadly, been ignored by writers for 40 years.

Warriors’ Gate is one of those Doctor Who stories that I really want to like more than I actually do.  It has a lot of the weird Whovian story elements I really enjoy: a ship from a technological dark age is stranded in a weird void which defies normal expectations, and is dominated by the medieval-looking citadel of creatures gifted with the power to traverse spacetime without technology.  Unfortunately, it also has too many flaws, from the hackneyed, uninteresting villains to the confusing timeshifts to the inadequate explanation of the world beyond the mirror, to JNT’s obsession with getting rid of K9 (this time permanently), to Tom Baker’s phoned-in performance (due to illness), to Romana’s rather sudden departure which appears to have been triggered by a reluctance to return to Gallifrey.  In short, it’s probably best to file this one with all the other scripts of the John Nathan-Turner era that could’ve been a lot better had they been consistently edited and competently produced.

I’m not overly fond of ranking things in the first place, beyond “this is one of my favorites” or “that is one of the worst”; most of my “favorites” lists are in chronological or alphabetical order for just this reason. So ranking companions isn’t easy for me, and Romana is harder to rank than most for a number of reasons. First and most obviously, there are two of her and they’re not exactly equivalent.  Next, she’s the first companion following the triumvirate of best companions ever: Sarah Jane, Jo, and Leela, and as I’ve previously noted that is an uphill climb from square one.  Next, Mary Tamm was only the second person to play a regularly-recurring role as a Time Lord other than the Doctor, inviting comparisons to the late, great Roger Delgado, and the first person to play a Time Lady specifically in other than a small supporting role.  So I’ve tried to be as objective in my assessment as possible, though that’s nigh-impossible.  Comparing the two Romanas to each other is a lot easier than comparing them to other companions, so I’ll start there. Most Whovians I know like Mary Tamm as Romana I better than Lalla Ward as Romana II, but I’m the opposite; I’ve known far too many know-it-all graduates whose degrees still feature wet ink, yet think they know more about everything than people who’ve been actually Doing The Thing for decades (or in this case, centuries).  And Romana I reminds me a bit too much of those people, though to Tamm’s credit she played the part well and did a good job of portraying Romana’s gradual recognition of the fact that there’s no substitute for experience.  I also like the way she often deflates The Doctor’s inflated view of himself, though of course Romana II still does that (albeit in a less prickly way).  Romana II is more personable & “fun”, and has grown up a bit, feeling more late-20s than “show me your ID” (in comparable human terms).  Sometimes she’s a bit too eager to please The Doctor, though, leaving it difficult to determine whether what we’re seeing is Romana herself having grown to respect him or Lalla Ward making eyes at her then-boyfriend (the same thing makes it hard to know whether to “ship” the Doc & Romana II; is that energy Doc/Romana or Baker/Ward?)  And of course when their famously-stormy relatonship was in a “cold” stage it was very, very apparent on screen.  All things considered, then, I put both of them with the other .”brainy chick” companions, thus:

Sarah Jane
Jo
Leela
Ian
Barbara
Zoe
Romana II
Jamie
Liz
Romana I
Polly
Ben
Harry
Dodo
Susan
Steven
Vicki
Victoria

Though I’m still a bit iffy about whether I like Romana II over Jamie.

The Keeper of Traken is one of the best stories of the John Nathan-Turner era, which is to say it would be a “pretty good” story in other eras.  Unfortunately, two of the other best stories follow it in rapid succession, with 7 seasons still left to go after that (though the last 4 are mercifully short, with only 4 stories each). “Keeper” introduces Traken, “A whole empire held together by people just being terribly nice to each other.”  The Trakens’ power rivals that of the Time Lords, though their technology focused on elements we would call “mystical” rather than on dominating capital-T Time, with the effect that the whole place is characterized by peace and harmony.  Naturally, Turner & Bidmead could not allow such a lovely place to exist in their sandbox, so they poop on it in this story and then bury it in the next.  The story is not without its flaws; Melkur has been there for decades, yet nobody in this advanced society before poor doomed Tremas thought to inquire why it survived so much longer than others of its kind?  And nobody except the Keeper himself saw a great big statue lumbering about in the council chamber during a solemn hearing?  Sure.  All snark aside, Traken is clearly decadent in its own way, much like Gallifrey and other ancient societies; its rulers maintain the forms while abandoning their principles, and are therefore ripe for the plucking by a being like The Master, who blazes a trail of destruction through this serial and the next which would already make him one of history’s greatest villains even before considering any of his previous atrocities.

Logopolis is a good, solid story with which to close out the Fourth Doctor’s era.  It’s not a great Doctor sendoff like “The War Games” or “Planet of the Spiders“, but it’s certainly a good one, much better than “The Tenth Planet” and dramatically better than the non-event regenerations of the 6th & 7th Doctors.  It introduces the TARDIS cloister bell to the mythos, and, with the Watcher, calls back to the previous regeneration story (which also featured a Time Lord coexisting with his own future self).  This story and the next demonstrate that Christopher Bidmead, like Douglas Adams before him, was a much better writer than he was a script editor, which is probably why JNT didn’t allow him to write more than two serials.  The best part of the tale was getting to see the new incarnation of The Master in action; Anthony Ainsley was an excellent choice for the role.  Not only does he physically resemble Roger Delgado to some degree, he also borrows enough from Delgado’s portrayal of the character to make it clear they are the same person, while yet adding his own spin and turning up the malevolence to 11.  Spending decades as a barely-mobile, badly-decayed husk of a man who can’t even leave his TARDIS seems to have made him even nastier, more brutal, and more sinister than before, and leaves us eager for his next appearance.

It’s no surprise that Tom Baker as the 4th incarnation of The Doctor is my favorite; he’s the single most popular Doctor to this day, played the part longer than anyone else, and was the one whose episodes were first widely broadcast in the US. But on this rewatch I really tried to be as objective as possible, leaving open the possibility that he might be displaced by someone else.  Nope; he handily took the position again, and by the end of re-viewing his debut season there was no doubt.  Part of the reason, I think, is that he handily combined aspects of his three predecessors (apparently without even trying, because it has been said that Baker’s Doctor was to a large degree Baker himself): he mixed the First Doctor’s anti-heroic qualities with the Third’s heroic ones & the Second’s clownishness while raising all of their underlying anti-authoritarian qualities to their reasonable maximum.  He displayed the Third Doctor’s comfort with physical action and combat, the Second’s refusal to take pomposity and bureaucracy seriously, and the First’s tendency to go off on people who irritated him, while adding his own special brand of showmanship and clearly establishing that while brilliant and undoubtedly good, The Doctor in any incarnation is at least a bit mad.  While the next few incarnations seemed dedicated to distancing themselves from the Fourth’s portrayal, the 10th-12th instead built upon it, which is probably why I like all of them so much.  As I pointed out once before, the first five incarnations are, in some ways, like five stages in a man’s life with the Fourth being like a man in his thirties, full of deserved confidence and sure of his abilities; in this way, too, it’s no surprise that this Doctor is still so popular, even forty years after relinquishing the role, that he warranted a guest appearance in the 50th anniversary show.  So to recap, as of right now, my order of preference is:

Tom Baker (#4)
David Tennant (#10)
Jon Pertwee (#3)
Matt Smith (#11)
Patrick Troughton (#2)
Peter Capaldi (#12)
/William Hartnell (#1)
\Peter Davison (#5)
Christopher Eccleston (#9)
Sylvester McCoy (#7)
Colin Baker (#6)

For those who missed my previous comments on this topic: I only judge on the TV show, not audio dramas or books, which is why McGann & Whittaker aren’t included (I haven’t yet seen enough of the latter & there simply ISN’T enough of the former) and Colin Baker is at the bottom.

FIFTH DOCTOR

Season 19  (Producer: John Nathan-Turner  Script Editor: Eric Saward)

While the Fourth Doctor’s exit wasn’t as spectacular as his predecessors’, the Fifth Doctor’s entrance was outstanding. In general, the stories which introduce new Doctors are average at best; “An Unearthly Child” is pretty bad and “Evil of the Daleks“, “Spearhead from Space“, and “Robot” all hover around “adequate”, but Castrovalva is one of the best Peter Davison episodes.  Unlike the aforementioned stories, it’s a direct continuation of the regeneration serial, with events picking up exactly where they left off (and not just as a recap as in “Robot”).  The basic premise is not only clever and intriguing, but also builds on concepts introduced in “Logopolis” and poses philosophical questions about the nature of reality and free will, while giving us a really good look at how the Master’s new incarnation operates.  It really is too bad that Bidmead didn’t write more stories, because he clearly had a good grasp of what made a good Doctor Who story; he just couldn’t competently edit others’ stories to uphold those principles.

(Script Editor: Antony Root)

Since most US Doctor Who fans had never seen a regeneration before, we were pretty nervous after the sydicated broadcast of “Logopolis”; I remember that my then-girlfriend was very critical of Peter Davison, referring to him as “that wimp” who had replaced our Doctor.  So when we saw “Castrovalva” (winter ’83 in the US, IIRC) I was somewhat heartened, but the following week Four To Doomsday dashed my hopes.  Compared to the first post-intro serials of the previous four Doctors (“The Daleks“, “The Highlanders“, “The Silurians“, and “The Ark in Space“), “Doomsday” was astonishingly bad; I’m unsure how a story so silly, larded with continuity errors and plot points that made absolutely no sense at all, made it past JNT and intermittent script editor Antony Root.  And it only gets worse on review; as a neophyte Whovian almost 40 years ago I already saw tons of problems, and on our recent review it got even worse, to the point I was shouting questions at the TV.  Why does the TARDIS translation function not work for Australian Aborigines?  Or is it that ancient Greeks and Chinese speak modern English?  How can The Doctor think Monarch is super-advanced when he hasn’t even figured out how to build an FTL drive?  What history class taught the writer that the Mayans lived 5000 years ago and that there was an identifiable Chinese culture in the early Holocene epoch?  And why are these supposedly prehistoric cultures apparently identical (even in language) to far later cultures?  If the Ubankan poison destroys all organic matter, how is it made in their own glands?  How the blazes does Tegan manage to move the TARDIS such a conveniently-short distance when starting it at random generally results in it ending up not-even-Who-knows-when-and-where?  Why are both Tegan and Adric so intolerably awful?  And are we supposed to believe Monarch is over 35,000 years old and has spent most of that time flying back and forth between the same two points, ruling over androids like a happy little megalomaniac because Earth, like every other goddamned terrestrial planet and rocky asteroid in the fucking universe, is rich in silicon?  (Grace was more charitable than I and suggested he spent all but a couple of weeks before each arrival in suspended animation).  All in all, this is absolutely one of the worst Fifth Doctor stories, and among the worst serials of the entire 60-year run of the series.

(Script Editor: Eric Saward)

Kinda is one of the better Fifth Doctor era stories, based in the sort of mystical Doctor Who weirdness that made the ’70s so grand.  It’s set in the Imperial Earth period writers use to discuss colonialism on Earth, but this time The Doctor’s intervention helps nip the colonization in the bud rather than trying to fix it after it has already been established.  As in “Planet of the Spiders“, a lot of the imagery and symbolism are drawn from Buddhism, and the main villain is a very thinly disguised sci-fi version of an evil spirit.  The story isn’t without its problems, though, so I’m not sure why some writers hold it up as a paragon among Who tales.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s very good and very enjoyable, but it ain’t flawless by any stretch.  Some elements seem to have been included as though from a checklist found in an anthropology textbook, and the characters are to a degree treated as archetypes rather than individuals, with Adric faring especially badly and Nyssa seemingly abandoned because the writers didn’t know how to fit her in.

(Script Editor: Antony Root)

The Visitation is a good, basic Doctor Who story which, like so many others, is more notable for its details than for its plot, which could be described as “In X historical location, The Doctor defeats aliens plotting to take over the world.”  Even the mind-control and engineered plague aspects are pretty typical.  What makes the story most interesting IMHO is the character of actor-turned-highwayman Richard Mace, part of the long Who tradition of single-story characters who assist The Doctor in the adventure at hand while being fun to watch.  The story is most notorious for giving JNT an excuse to destroy the sonic screwdriver; he apparently believed heroes should never use tools.  One wonders if he also felt Batman’s utility belt was a “cheat” and Robin Hood should have to do without a bow and arrows.

(Script Editor: Eric Saward)

I think the main reason Black Orchid gets so much hate is that it isn’t really a Doctor Who story.  All the charcters are there and it takes place in an historical setting, but that’s all.  It isn’t like the series hasn’t done sort of weak Agatha Christie-esque tales before, but at least in those cases it was on an alien planet and involved monsters and aliens; hell, when The Doctor later actually meets Agatha Christie there’s an alien monster involved!  But this one just has a plot borrowed from a BBC period costume drama, complete with the costumes.  Some regard it as an historical like those featured in the First Doctor’s era, but I disagree; those stories always revolved around famous historical characters and events, and this one doesn’t.  So, to sum up:

• No alien settings
• No alien creatures –
• No weird phenomena
• No sci-fi devices
• No actual historical people or events
• Not even a sonic screwdriver (thanks JNT)

In short, not a bad story, but not Doctor Who either.

(Script Editor: Antony Root)

Earthshock is one of the best, if not the best, of the Fifth Doctor serials.  The adversary is once again the Cybermen, still obsessed with conquering their human cousins, though this time their plan is a sound one: detonate a doomsday bomb smuggled onto Earth, then mop up the survivors with a small but significant commando force smuggled in as cargo on an earthbound freighter, with the whole operation taking place during an interplanetary summit conference of Cyber War allies, so as to take out the leaders of all their enemies at once.  Ever since their first appearance, the Cybermen’s numbers have been relatively small (all but the first couple of stories taking place after the Cyber Wars, which nearly wiped them out), so all of their schemes have been guerilla actions rather than the full-scale operations seen in later years.  But this is probably the largest Cyber force since “The Invasion” to get so close to victory.  The story isn’t without its JNT-era flaws, such as The Doctor’s annoying and distracting argument with Adric in part one which highlights the latter’s immaturity and petulance, and detracts from his sacrifice in part four by making it look like all he really cared about was once again demonstrating how clever he is.  But that doesn’t detract from the action, in which even Tegan takes a break from her usual sulking and bitching to participate, and The Doctor demonstrates that though he’s a man of peace, that doesn’t mean he won’t look you in the eye while shooting you multiple times in the heart with your own weapon at point-blank range should the need arise.

Some of you may have noticed that in the above writeup I neglected to mention what is probably its most notable point: it’s the first story since “The Daleks’ Master Plan” in which a companion dies in action. The companion in question is of course Adric, and JNT, in a rare moment of good judgment, had the final episode credits roll in silence, without the usual end theme, as a memorial.  Alas, even this tribute couldn’t make me care much about the character, whose death seems to have resulted less from an act of heroism and more from a singleminded need to prove he was right, as indicated both by his last words and his argument with The Doctor at the beginning of the story (driven, again, by his pathological need to be correct).  When I first saw this serial in the ’80s I was in my late teens and at the time I wasn’t terribly impressed with Adric at any point in his travels on the TARDIS, but now seeing it again in my fifties I found him deeply dislikable.  He’s a childish, spoiled, petulant little know-it-all whose social intelligence is as low as his intellectual prowess is high, and like so many irritating characters of the JNT era he doesn’t even have a redemption arc; he’s as annoying on the day he dies as he was on the day he stowed away on the TARDIS, and at no time in between does he display any redeeming qualities worth mentioning.  The only reason he ranks above Victoria in my estimation is that he doesn’t cause trouble by his own foolish actions as often as she does.  Still, that puts him second from the bottom as of the end of season 19, below even Vicki.

(Script Editor: Eric Saward)

Time-Flight was a lot better than I remembered it from the ’80s; I still wouldn’t call it a great story, but it’s entertaining and has a fair helping of the sci-fi weirdness that makes Doctor Who unique. Sure, it’s pretty hard to believe that there were any plains in the Greater London area in Jurassic times flat enough to land a Concorde on (much less take off again), but the show asks us to accept more farfetched ideas on a regular basis, so I’ll go with it.  Besides, I like this incarnation of the Master’s habit of going beyond his old trick of fake identities to actual disguises, and usually good enough ones to fool viewers watching each serial for the first time.  It seems to indicate that The Master has grown so used to The Doctor always showing up to ruin his plans, he wants to at least make it a bit harder to know who he’s tangling with.  Writer Peter Grimwade also gave us two fine, memorable guest characters in Captain Stapley and Professor Hayter, both of whom provide invaluable assistance to The Doctor in their own very different ways.  One last small point: though this isn’t a UNIT story, it was a very nice touch to have the Doc tell the airport officials to call UNIT to verify his identity, and UNIT urging them to give him anything he wants.  It’s both a nice bit of fan-service and a handy cut through red tape.

Season 20  (Producer: John Nathan-Turner  Script Editor: Eric Saward)

Arc of Infinity is one of those stories that doesn’t actually make much sense, no matter how one looks at it.  Why is Omega’s TARDIS parked in Amsterdam in the first place?  I mean, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of places with lots of water that aren’t in the middle of major cities on planets known to be frequented by Time Lords who have defeated him in the past.  And I can’t even begin to figure out the odds against The Doctor just happening to run into a companion he just lost a few months before in a city she’s not known for hanging around.  And isn’t the High Council’s decision to execute the Doc to stop someone else’s schemes just a bit precipitate and unethical, considering there’s no reason to suspect Omega’s confederate can’t simply steal another biodata profile?  If that had happened, would they have executed the new target as well?  Why are the guards given weapons that can not only kill Time Lords, but prevent regeneration?  I mean, wouldn’t just killing the current incarnation serve the purpose of stopping them so they could then be arrested or whatever?  After watching Colin Baker’s scenery-chomping performance as the captain of the guard, what made JNT think he’d be a good actor to play The Doctor?  Why is it that the citadel’s defenses are still so shitty after “The Invasion of Time“?  And is there so little power on an entire planet of Time Lords that nearly anybody can drain all their energy reserves?  I found myself asking “Why?” so many times when watching this one, I lost count.  About its only good point was not having Turlough to annoy us yet.

The only problem with Snakedance is that it’s totally unneccesary; it’s the Doctor Who equivalent of one of those sequels to Hollywood blockbusters which tells exactly the same story with exactly the same main characters (including the villain) with slightly different details.  It’s a sequel to “Kinda“, and like that story it’s based in an interesting concept with interesting details; however, like far too many Hollywood horror movies, it kind of mucks things up by trying to “explain” the origin of a supernatural menace, thus grounding a grade-A monster solidly in pretty standard technobabble.  Of course, Adric is missing from this one, but then Nyssa was missing from the last, and Tegan is still the Mara’s vessel (though this time she has a sidekick).  In short, an entertaining story if you don’t mind repetition, but definitely a pot-boiler and not the exalted example of Doctor Who writing some pretentious critics like to pretend it is (for reasons I as both a writer and critic cannot comprehend).

Mawdryn Undead is an enjoyable serial despite its obvious flaws; I mean, why in the world was the beamdown point of the transmat capsule the gardens of a minor English public school which just happens to have an alien student and a teacher who used to be the director of UNIT?  But that didn’t really matter because I was happy just to see our beloved Brigadier again, as I’m sure many fans were.  Writer Peter Grimwade was obviously motivated to give fans some closure regarding the Brig, who had been unceremoniously dumped in season 13 without even a word of explanation (even to actor Nicholas Courtney); I wish he had been able to come up with something more heroic, but at least this story explained the mysterious and cover-up-sounding statement that the Brigadier was “in Geneva” for months on end.  Given the love fans had for that character, I rather think Grimwade was intentionally setting up Turlough to be hated when his very first act in the show was to wreck the Brigadier’s classic 1920s motorcar; as the owner of a mere replica of such a vehicle, I can only imagine how infuriated I’d be if some stupid boy wrecked my real one while joyriding!  And then while lying near death, said stupid boy makes a deal with the most pointless, useless, uninteresting Doctor Who villain of all time, the nigh-impotent Black Guardian, whose only power seems to be growling threats at people while appearing via communcations devices.  That all having been said, the concept of an orbit in time is a really intriguing one, and the consequences of stealing Time Lord technology in a foolish quest for immortality are very satisfying.  It’s also good to see death presented as sometimes a good thing (rather than the popular but immature view that it’s always evil); in this respect see also “Underworld“.  All in all, this is a necessary story, if not a great one.

Terminus appears to be a solid story that somebody – either the writer himself, or script editor Eric Saward, or producer John Nathan-Turner – decided wasn’t exciting enough, and so needed a stupid, scientifically-idiotic, completely nonsensical subplot grafted to it like one elk’s antler sewed onto a chicken’s left wing.  The result is such a complete abomination that I have little choice but to treat it almost as two different stories.  In the basic tale, which would’ve comfortably fit into three parts (two without the annoying Black Bogeyman sequences), Worst Companion Ever Turlough sabotages the TARDIS in flight so its failsafes cause it to materialize inside (?) the “nearest” (what exactly that means to a TARDIS in flight is anybody’s guess) ship, which unfortunately happens to be the 35th-century equivalent of a leper ship approaching an immense space station whose name the story shares.  Somehow Nyssa gets the disease even though Tegan is the one grabbed by the “Lazars”, and after a rather nice striptease excused by her fever she discovers that the place is run by an evil corporation which enslaves secondary cases to act as orderlies because said corporation is the only source of the drug that keeps them alive, and that though the promised cure really does work, it’s administrated so sloppily it kills most of the people it’s used on.  After she is cured, Nyssa gets one of the best companion departures in Doctor Who history: Like Superman, she is an incredibly good, moral, ethical being who keenly feels the tragedy of being the only survivor of her entire planet, so she vows to use her powers (of bioengineering) to take over the hospital, manufacture the drug on-site so the secondary cases are no longer slaves, and apply proper diagnostic and therapeutic procedures so as to turn Terminus into a real hospital that can stop a scourge ravaging the entire Galactic Federation.  Wow!  This could’ve been among the top 40 Doctor Who stories of all time, but no; someone decided to focus instead on a psychopathic kid willing to commit multiple murders to save his own skin from a powerless blowhard, then to introduce a plot complication so scientifically-illiterate it’s outstanding even in a genre (pop sci-fi) noted for regular infusions of scientific illiteracy.  Here goes: the Big Bang was not just “the greatest explosion in history”; it created everything, not just matter.  IOW, it also created spacetime itself, and that is what’s expanding.  There is no “center of the universe” which exists in three-dimensional space or even classic Einsteinian four-dimensional spacetime; no matter where we choose to point our telescopes, everything is moving away from everything else.  Put simply, the original n-dimensional (some theories say n > 10) “center of the universe” is ≈ 14 billion light-years away from wherever you might happen to be, in a direction you not only cannot define, but which may no longer even exist.  Look, I know this is really hard, and even professional astronomers have trouble explaining it to people who don’t understand quantum mechanics as thoroughly as I understand the principles of baking.  But is it too much to ask that sci-fi writers refrain from pretending that there is some definable spot on which one could erect an historical marker saying “center of the universe”; that it’s occupied by an immense yet pretty low-tech derelict spaceship somehow older than matter itself (?) which some company from our galaxy just happened to discover before some race like the Time Lords despite its incredible remoteness, and decided to use for a hospital of all things despite it being literally 14 BILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM EVERYTHING, and that if said ship’s engines (still functional after a length of time 100 times longer than the already-impossible amount of time Kastrian equipment is supposedly still functional) were to be fired up it would…somehow…destroy all of spacetime?  Could we just not?  Holy “Kill the Moon“, Batman, but this is awful.

20th-century beauty contests used to have an award called “Miss Congeniality”, voted upon by the contestants themselves and bestowed upon the nicest, sweetest, friendliest girl, regardless of how she did in the official contest rankings. Well, Nyssa is definitely the “Miss Congeniality” of Doctor Who companions. She’s an unusually-nice person from what The Doctor once called “A whole empire held together by people just being terribly nice to each other.”  I can’t recall her ever saying a cross word to any of her travelling-companions and indeed, she was usually the one to try to make peace in the TARDIS when The Doctor, Tegan, and Adric inevitably got on each others’ nerves. Her main fault as a companion was that she was so nice she usually thought the best of everyone other than The Master, and even he only earned her enmity by literally murdering her father and then wearing hs body like a stole suit of clothes.  Alas, niceness isn’t necessarily interesting from a dramatic point of view, so while Nyssa is the companion I’d be most likely to entrust with the combination to my safe or the keys to my TARDIS, and the one I’d call on first if I needed to build a Giant Space Vibrator, as a companion she falls among the other “brainy chicks”: a little below Zoe and Romana II, a little above Liz and Romana I.

The Black Blowhard is back again in the next story, Enlightenment; like its predecessor it clearly shows the signs of editorial interference, but unlike its predecessor that doesn’t turn this one into the Doctor Who narrative equivalent of the Batman villain Two-Face.  Indeed, “Enlightenment” is one of that solid second tier of Who tales, not one of the real greats but a solid member of the set.  The Eternals are not only interesting creatures; they’re natural foes for a renegade Time Lord, and their need for human lives to provide them some respite, any respite, from the numbing, empty abyss of Eternity would have been a rich source of story ideas had some other TV writer in the past 4 decades had the imagination to mine it.  The race itself is also an interesting sci-fi concept; it’s the same marriage of old and new that I think makes “steampunk” designs fascinating.  Really, the only bad parts of the story involve the Guardians, to whom I’ll now pivot: First off, why is the White Guardian so pathetic?  From the very first time we met him in “The Ribos Operation“, he’s done nothing but make demands and issue threats, exactly like the Black Guardian.  Neither of them seems to have the power to actually do anything other than wave carrots and sticks around, though the White Guardian here also demonstrates the additional ability to dangerously drain every erg of energy from the TARDIS in order to mumble a vague warning (wouldn’t a cosmic telegram have been both more efficient & more effective?) while the Black Guardian can form a three-dimensional image and dance around in the way of his beam.  And why did White Hat agree to let Black Hat give VAST COSMIC KNOWLEDGE to whichever Cosmic Psycho won the Fastest Cosmic Psycho race?  Why does Turlough’s “share” of this GODLIKE WISDOM amount to little more than the moral of a “Davey and Goliath” cartoon* plus a way to set the Black Bully’s dress on fire?  Does JNT really think the audience is so dull that we’ll accept, “Sorry, I can’t hand this guy over to death while he’s right there looking at me” as some kind of divine ethical revelation, redeeming this bipedal moral vacuum in our eyes?  On 2nd thought, maybe it’s a good thing that writers have forgotten the Eternals; maybe the Guardians will stay forgotten with them.

*I think the closest modern equivalent is Veggietales maybe?

The King’s Demons marks the return of the historical tale to Doctor Who: It’s a story in which known characters from history play a major part (unlike “Black Orchid“, which features no known historical figures).  But while the historicals of the First Doctor’s era never contained any sci-fi or fantasy elements other than the presence of time travelers, this one has The Master (in disguise again, of course) and a creepy animatronic robot.  It’s only a two-parter, but The Master’s scheme is so limp one wonders if he pulled it out of a notebook of fiendish plots he devised while still in Gallifreyan Grammar School; indeed, it’s so Monk-like I have to rethink whether maybe I was wrong to so quickly dismiss The Monk as an early incarnation of The Master.  And then there’s the robot, Kamelion, which way back in 1985 (when the 21st season was first being broadcast on our local PBS station) I kept annoying my viewing-companions by bringing up while we watched (“Where’s that stupid disguise-robot? Didn’t The Doctor welcome it into the TARDIS?”) until it finally reappeared just for long enough to be a plot complication in a later story (which might even earn it a “worse companion than Turlough” judgment if I counted masses of microchips as companions, which I don’t.  Not even K9.)

Speaking of K9, one of the indicators that “A Girl’s Best Friend” is canon appears in the very next story, The Five Doctors, the 20th anniversary special, wherein K9 warns Sarah Jane not to go out without him.  She of course ignores him and is thus alone when grabbed by the time scoop, just as an adult Susan apparently was; the Brigadier is with the Second Doctor, though like Sarah Jane and the Fifth Doctor and Company they appear to be abducted from the present (rather than the past like the First and Third Doctors or the 22nd century like Susan).  Liz Shaw, Mike Yates, Jamie and Zoe all appear only as illusions, so they don’t count, but the Brigadier’s appearance leaves all kind of questions, such as why is he back in uniform and looking like he did in the ’70s despite this apparently taking place after “Mawdryn Undead” because he remembers Tegan, even though he lost his memory soon after meeting her in 1977 and didn’t regain it until after he shaved off his mustache and let his hair go grey? Did the events of “Shada” and the presence of Professor Chronotis’ TARDIS cause the “time eddy” which trapped the Fourth Doctor and Second Romana?  Doesn’t Susan have anything to report from the 2180s about the postwar reconstruction of Earth?  Why the hell does Borusa keep burning through his regenerations if he’s that obsessed with immortality? Whom do we credit with keeping Turlough’s role to basically just standing around, writer Terrance Dicks, script editor Eric Saward, or the Muse of Narrative Necessity?  Should we judge this one against the 10th anniversary special (“The Three Doctors“), the 50th anniversary special (“The Day of the Doctor“), or the execrable and abortive 30th anniversary (of a then-cancelled show) whatsis (“Dimensions in Time”), which will never be mentioned in this thread again (and if you’ve never seen it, I beg you not to be so unkind to yourself as to seek it out and watch it)?  Or should we just get good and stoned and enjoy the cast reunions without thinking too hard about any of it (except the ending, which exemplifies one of my favorite themes, “Immortality is a crock of shit and anyone who thinks they want it isn’t actually thinking very hard.“)  Whovians in the US actually saw this one at the same time as UK fans, IOW before we saw any other part of Season 20, which left us mercifully in the dark about who Turlough was and caused OCD people like myself to keep expecting the Raston warrior robot to turn up in at least one Third Doctor story when we later got to see those in syndication, only to discover that Doctor Who writers, like The Doctor himself, have a tendency to lie to us.  And that’s all I have to say.  I think.

Season 21  (Producer: John Nathan-Turner  Script Editor: Eric Saward)

The one single word which best describes Warriors of the Deep is “lackluster”.  It’s not bad, but it isn’t good either; it’s kinda like the narrative equivalent of the meals I make when I see too many leftovers in the fridge and decide to combine them in a sort of goulash.  So…definitely not unpalatable, but also not memorable.  It was nice to see the Silurians and Sea Devils again, in the sense that “nice” is often used when we can’t think of a more complimentary word.  The Doctor, military base, enemy agents, invasion, monsters immune to bullets, companions doing little other than serve as hostages or impediments.  And the weapon used to defeat them at the end was clearly telegraphed in the first few minutes of part one.  Blah.  Oh, one more thing: why does The Doctor have such a blind spot when it comes to Silurian warmongers?  He recognizes warmongering in every other species, yet somehow always wants to give it a pass when it’s Silurians planning literal genocide.

I realize that saying The Awakening is the best of the 5th Doctor two-parters is rather faint praise, given that the only other two contenders are “Black Orchid” and “The King’s Demons“.  But it really is a fun, compact little story in an era of Doctor Who mostly characterized by weak scripts, deeply-stupid story elements apparently added to “jazz things up”, infuriating scientific and mythos illiteracy, and two-part-worthy scripts crammed into four parts.  Unfortunately, the story lacks the strong guest characters the series is known for despite having three good candidates for that kind of development, but the Malus is an interesting villain and its energy-gathering avatar in the TARDIS is quite creepy.  It’s also kind of neat that script editor Eric Saward seems to have inserted enough callbacks to his own script, “The Visitation“, to turn this one into a kind of loose sequel to that one.  As usual, Tegan is sulky, Turlough is a coward and The Doctor is very sarcastic, but we expect all that by this point.

Frontios is an interesting story badly marred by JNT’s obsession with destroying The Doctor’s tools.  Obviously, the TARDIS can’t be destroyed, either in-universe or out; in-universe it has long been established that no ordinary physical force (and certainly not a mere meteor strike) can badly harm the TARDIS, much less completely obliterate it (except, absurdly, for a hatrack without a scratch).  And out-of-universe, a show about a time traveller wouldn’t work too well without a time machine (they didn’t do completely without it even during the Third Doctor’s exile).  But JNT thought the best way to generate publicity was to come up with some exaggerated disaster (like a “second Big Bang”) and then tell Radio Times about it.  And so we get a stupid and completely unneccesary “disaster” subplot (a la “Terminus“) grafted Frankenstein-style to an otherwise interesting, intriguing sci-fi premise, in this case insect creatures with the power to control gravity, mining a planet to carve out a vast gravitational lens that will focus their power to act as a gravity engine with which to drive the whole planet.  Setting the story in the same distant future as the First Doctor serial “The Ark” was a nice touch, and the thing of the Tractators dragging injured people down into the ground and then using them as parts of a machine was so utterly horrifying I can’t help but wonder how it would’ve been handled by the masters of Doctor Who horror, Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe.  The “race memory” thing could’ve been handled better, but it was a nice Lovecraftian touch in a story with more than a whiff of Lovecraft (hideous monsters hollowing out a planet is very reminiscent of Lovecraft’s dholes, and of course the enormous timescale).  The writers even appear to be trying to salvage Turlough here, but it’s much too little, much too late.

Speaking of Turlough, I don’t really feel it’s necessary to wait until after I write about his exit in “Planet of Fire” to discuss just how bad he is. Literally no other companion in the entire six-decade history of Doctor Who was quite so awful; even Victoria’s trouble-causing was due to her being a spoiled, willful child, rather than a narcissistic psychopath who, had he not been exiled on Earth, would undoubtedly have grown up to be a politician.  And no, being under the Black Buffoon’s influence is no excuse; the villain would’ve had no power over him had he not prioritized his own escape from exile over the life of a complete stranger he knew nothing about. Turlough is neither stupid nor (as we find out in “Planet of Fire”) apolitical; he knows damned well that “My enemy is pure evil” is the oldest excuse in the freaking book for justifying atrocities against opponents.  Yet he just accepts it and would’ve murdered The Doctor in cold blood had not chance intervened. He then repeatedly attempts to strand him, wreck the TARDIS, and otherwise harm him without regard for either his life or those of two young women who never harmed him.  Even after the Black Bully runs away crying “It’s not fair, it’s not fair!” Turlough keeps displaying his cowardice and self-centerdness in story after story.  In short: No, no, no.

Resurrection of the Daleks confirmed a suspicion I’ve had ever since recently rewatching “Earthshock“: I like the Fifth Doctor best when he’s violent.  He’s so much more serious than his four predecessors, even solemn (except when he’s being a tad hysterical), that a more aggressive, even violent mode of action works well for him.  I’ll say more about this soon, but for now I’ll just point out that watching him (and others) pushing a Dalek out of a third-floor loading bay to fall to its death was almost as satisfying as watching him pump multiple rounds from an automatic into a Dalek creature outside of its casing.  The time corridor was very cool, even if the reason the Daleks set it up was a bit hand-wavy (wasn’t there some easier place to quarantine the lethal virus?) and I definitely experience a bit of Schadenfreude at seeing the mighty Daleks so depleted in numbers that they’re forced to employ human mercenaries (just as they had to employ Ogrons during the Dalek Wars of the 26th century). Davros’ histrionics are always entertaining, though given that he has never been both alone and free to act at any time since he created the Daleks (rewatch both “Genesis of…” and “Destiny of…” if you don’t believe me), when did he create that mind-control weapon?  I reckon he could’ve been saving it as an ace in the hole and only used it once the Daleks proved they were exactly as treacherous and psychopathic as he had made them (which is to say In His Image), but still.  And the ending, in which Davros is hoist with his own petard, is probably the most satisfying climax of the JNT era even if we know that, like all top-notch supervillains, he will somehow escape certain death.  And then there’s the denouement, in which Tegan departs for a reason that should really be more common for companions: revulsion at a staggering body count.  She’s an average modern, not a warrior; seeing that much death close-up must be incredibly traumatic (I suspect more than one former companion later received treatment for PTSD).  And Tegan has never exactly been one to stoically endure, which makes me wonder why she’s lasted this long.  One detail I almost forgot: the Daleks scheming to create a duplicate Doctor to assassinate the High Council should definitely be considered one of the early moves of the Time War; it seems both sides were engaged in these “Cold Time War” maneuvers before the hot war broke out.

I know Tegan is a reasonably-popular companion, but I’ve never understood why.  She’s sulky, whiny, suffers from a permanent case of what is now called “resting bitch face”, and isn’t usually very helpful (though in her defense, she’s not an ankle-twister, nor does she go around wearing a T-shirt with “Please abduct me” on both front and back).  But neither is she a “co-ordinator” as her creator, Christopher Bidmead, apparently intended.  She just…mostly “occupies time and space” as my friend Grace likes to say.  And given that she and this (apparently young and handsome) Doctor tend to bicker like a married couple, and he seems to favor her without any particular visible reason (and clearly takes her depature harder than any other since Sarah Jane’s), I think we have a smoking gun despite the lack of any other “shipping” clues I noticed.  This interpretation makes that distanced, stiff-armed handshake departure especially stinging, as is evident from The Doctor’s facial expression when it happens (and what looks like repressed anger in the next two serials).  So all in all, then, she falls (for me) at the very bottom of the middle tier of companions, not great but not an actual problem like those in the bottom tier (of which Susan represents the top).  So as of the end of Season 21, here’s my ranking (it’s too soon to include Peri):

Sarah Jane Smith
Jo Grant
Leela
Ian Chesterton
Barbara Wright
Zoe Heriot
Romana II
Jamie McCrimmon
Nyssa of Traken
Liz Shaw
Romana I
Polly Wright
Ben Jackson
Harry Sullivan
Dodo Chaplet
Tegan Jovanka
Susan Foreman
Steven Taylor
Vicki Pallister
Adric
Victoria Waterfield
Vislor Turlough

Years later, we hear from Sarah Jane that Tegan is back in Australia, working as an activist for Aboriginal rights.

Was JNT on vacation or sick or something during Season 21 of Doctor Who?  Because every serial of the season other than the first and last was good, even if “Frontios” had that stupid TARDIS disaster which was apparently a shared nightmare generated by Turlough’s race memory and The Doctor’s telepathy acting in concert.  I say this because the useless and dangerous Kamelion, who apparently hasn’t left the broom closet into which The Doctor stuffed him after bringing him aboard at the end of “The King’s Demons“, is perfectly intact to cause more trouble in Planet of Fire despite supposedly having been blown up two serials earlier.  One of this story’s virtues is that we finally find out Turlough’s story just prior to jettisoning him, and his psychopathy now makes sense because he apparently comes from a planet which, like ours, is ruled by duplicitous psychopaths obsessed with spying on every other humanoid race in the galaxy.  Turlough both hides important information and outright lies up until the very end, yet the Doc still somehow considers him a friend, displaying his fifth incarnation’s greatest flaw: he’s a pathologically-bad judge of character.  And speaking of flaws, the whole sequence where Peri joins is pretty forced and serves no particular narrative function other than to get her aboard.  But none of this detracts from a really smashing story of The Master’s latest scheme, played out against the backdrop of a culture warped by colonization (by Turlough’s people, not Earthmen).  The Master’s predicament is both funny and satisfyingly just, and though he appears to die at the end we know that, like Davros in the previous serial, he’ll be back again because you just can’t keep a good supervillain down.  One final detail: I suspect neither writer Peter Grimwade nor script editor Eric Saward intended it to sound this way, but…did anyone else beside me catch the strong implication, while Peri is talking in her sleep in part one, that she is having a nightmare about her stepfather molesting her?  Society at large was becoming much more aware of that issue in 1984, but it was considered a “family” show so I’m unsure.

Three of the first five Doctor Who regeneration stories are the best or very close to the best stories of that Doctor’s run: “The War Games“, “Planet of the Spiders“, and The Caves of Androzani.  It was penned by veteran Who writer (and 4th-Doc script editor) Robert Holmes, a horror-film buff who often used themes or imagery from classic horror movies in his stories.  This time around it’s The Phantom of the Opera: a brilliant madman who hides his horribly disfigured face behind a mask and lives in a labyrinth whose secrets are known only to him, becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman and thereby causes his own downfall.  Like nearly all Holmes scripts, the characters are beautifully developed and even some of the baddies may be sympathetic.  This one is a pure tragedy in which every single male character (including The Doctor) dies, nearly all of them as a direct result of their own choices, and absolutely everybody except The Doctor and Peri were villains of one kind or another.  The downfall of the primary villain is both satisfying and inobvious (observant viewers could see it coming, but it wasn’t clearly telegraphed), and the character who serves as the primary agent of that downfall was chillingly Machiavellian and dispassionate.  The fact that The Doctor is dying throughout the entire story, having been poisoned in the first few minutes of part one, produces an undertone of melancholy throughout the whole serial, similar to the atmosphere which pervaded “Logopolis” (where it was created by the presence of The Watcher); moreover, The Doctor loses.  He saves no one except Peri, and events would have played out much as they did had he never even showed up on the scene; if anything, his presence actually made things worse.  The theatrical qualities of the production were accented by the villain Morgus’ use of Shakespearean asides (apparently the result of serendiptitously-misunderstood stage directions), and the use of plasma weapons (which perform and sound much like 20th-century machine pistols) creates a visceral sense of raw violence that’s missing when stereotypical “ray guns” are used.  A final bittersweet note: we lose the 5th Doc soon after Davison finally found the exact right tone and style for the character, and the story’s only major flaw is that his replacement is allowed to speak.

Those who’ve been following this thread for a while may remember that the 5th Doctor’s position in my estimation was so close to that of the 1st that I couldn’t make up my mind before rewatching the oeuvre of each in full. Well, now I’ve completed that and (envelope please) it’s the Fifth over the First, by a hair.  At the end of season 20 I was leaning the other way, but season 21 changed my mind.  In his first two seasons (with the notable exception of the Eric Saward-penned “Earthshock“), Davison’s Doctor was often apparently timid, nervous, and even indecisive, which made his humorlessness seem to be evidence of a lack of strong character.  But as he developed in season 21, I came to see him for what he was: a resolute man of action who was serious not due to a lack of humor, but rather because he was a good, moral man whose career all too often required him to kill, all too often in a brutal, close-up manner, and despite that picture he wasn’t a Bondian psychopath and was therefore deeply wounded by what he had to do.  In this sense, the Fifth Doctor becomes a sort of transitional character between the “Ages of Man” progression I observed before and a new development arc running from #5 to #9.  The Fifth Doctor begins to regret the violent course his life has taken (and even says so after Tegan leaves him over it at the end of “Resurrection of the Daleks“); the Sixth appears to have suffered a complete mental breakdown over it, leading to narcissism, sociopathic detachment, abusive behavior toward Peri, and even fugue episodes; the Seventh becomes secretive & Machiavellian; the Eighth becomes pragmatic enough to choose to become the War Doctor; and then the Ninth has to deal with that unnumbered incarnation’s legacy, partly by forgetting what he did and even that he existed at all. Given that, my ranking as of today is:

Tom Baker (#4)
David Tennant (#10)
Jon Pertwee (#3)
Matt Smith (#11)
Patrick Troughton (#2)
Peter Capaldi (#12)
Peter Davison (#5)
William Hartnell (#1)
Christopher Eccleston (#9)
Sylvester McCoy (#7)
Colin Baker (#6)

I haven’t seen enough of 8 & 13 to rank; others may shift on review.

SIXTH DOCTOR

It’s no secret that I think John Nathan-Turner was the worst producer of Doctor Who and the Sixth was the worst Doctor, but I’m really trying to be objective (edibles help) when rewatching the 6th Doc shows.  So I’m going to force myself to start each discussion of those stories by saying something good about it.  Alas, the only good thing I can think of to say about The Twin Dilemma is that it isn’t as bad as the 12th Doctor story “Kill the Moon“.  From the first few minutes of part one (in which we are introduced to the titular characters in all their assholiness and the new Doctor insults all five of his predecessors and attempts to murder his companion) to the last scene of part four (in which the new Doctor, ostensibly addressing Peri but functionally breaking the 4th wall to deliver a message from JNT, says “This is my show, and fuck you if you don’t like it”), this story has absolutely nothing to recommend it, even in a “so bad it’s good” way (because in addition to everything else, it’s so boring I had to fight to stay awake).  If I tried to number all of its faults I’d be here all morning, so let’s just throw out a few Socratic questions: Why do the Jacondans insist on being ruled by aliens (first a renegade Time Lord and now Slug Man)? Why in Rassilon’s name did a Time Lord decide to rule these losers in the first place, and why go through all that trouble to abduct the Bobbsey Twins (“Romulus and Remus” indeed) to perform calculations any Time Lord worth his TARDIS (or any decent 21st-century mainframe) could’ve performed in a trice?  What kind of insanely-stupid plan is this anyhow?  Just how astronomically and mathematically-illiterate was every single person who read this trash prior to starting production?  Did none of them ever take a basic astronomy class, read an article about satellites, hear the phrase “Trojan orbit”, or even, I dunno, maybe pass within three meters of an old copy of Sky and Telescope?  Does anyone have an idea of how low the chances of even one of a paltry few million eggs ever landing on an inhabited planet at any time within the next few million years would be?  The idea that this constitutes “conquering the universe” would be hilarious if it weren’t like something dreamed up by a megalomaniacal 9-year-old.  And if there was any action in this flaming dumpster of a serial, I must’ve missed it while drifting off or sipping tea.

Season 22  (Producer: John Nathan-Turner  Script Editor: Eric Saward)

The premise of Attack of the Cybermen is excellent, and in the hands of a competent producer and script editor, with a star who wasn’t an annoying clown, it could’ve been a top-notch Doctor Who story; even as-is it was entertaining except for this ersatz Doctor constantly picking on his companion and basically assisting the actual heroes of the story (the Cryons) in their plan.  The story is a direct sequel to “The Tomb of the Cybermen” and, if you accept my interpretation, to “The Invasion“; the stolen time machine was apparently used to launch two history-changing missions, a large one to 1971 and a smaller one to 1985 (a similar plot device was used in the same decade to link The Terminator and its first sequel).  Another nice bit of fanservice was that the TARDIS materializes in the same junkyard as we first saw it in 22 years earlier; the score uses a bit from the Steptoe and Son theme, which is then inappropriately used even in dramatic scenes for the rest of the story because…the new Doctor is a clown and the whole broken chameleon circuit thing is played for laughs in an otherwise serious and extremely violent story (including multiple, though bloodless, decapitations)?  Also, the writers clearly fail to comprehend what a mercenary is, because The Doctor apparently expected Lytton to violate his contract and side with the Cybermen just because EVIL?  Or something?  Anyhow, Grace liked the sort-of creepy fairy vibe the Cryons had going, which was reminiscent of some ’60s portrayals of aliens in the series (see “The Web Planet“).  But I do have to nitpick a bit; for creatures whose bodies boil above zero Celsius, they seemed awfully comfortable touching beings with 37-degree bodies.

Vengeance on Varos features an interesting dramatic device unique in Classic Who: a couple of characters who do not directly interact with any of the other characters, thus serving as a quasi-Greek chorus.  Alas, that’s the only thing unique about this serial, which is otherwise little more than a substandard ripoff of “The Sun Makers“.  Both stories feature the diminutive, sadistic, mobility-impaired agent of a powerful alien super-corporation who economically dominates an intentionally-isolated colony of captive humans by undervaluing their labor; in both stories said agent stages elaborate, theatrical, televised executions of “troublemakers”, partly as warning and partly as entertainment for the masses; and in both stories the rulers are defeated when a computer readout displays information breaking the corporation’s hold on the enslaved populace.  But in “The Sun Makers”, that message is a ruse engineered by the Fourth Doctor surreptitiously reprogramming the master computer, while in “Vengeance on Varos” the message is legitimate and would have come whether the Sixth Doctor had arrived to walk around self-importantly or not; he’s little more than an observer of the events.  Even the message itself makes little sense; the first part reveals a circumstance which would lower the price of the ore, but it’s followed by one saying the demand has risen and instructing the agent to pay any price for it?  What?  This is even more economically-imbecilic than the “money tree” school embraced by most modern politicians; just because the writers employed one classical dramatic device it doesn’t mean they need to resort to deus ex machina, and even if they did, couldn’t it have been one that at least made sense?  And speaking of nonsense, have the writers forgotten that The Doctor is Gallifreyan, not English?  It therefore makes no more sense for him to mock Peri for being American than it would for him to mock Tegan for being Australian or Jamie for being Scottish, but of course those two incarnations of The Doctor weren’t portrayed as obnoxious twatwaffles.

Mark of the Rani is one of the few 6th Doctor serials to make it up into the ranks of “pretty good” Doctor Who stories, mostly because it’s so much fun to watch The Master sparring with new villain The Rani, a renegade Time Lady exiled for her biochemical experiments.  Unfortunately, as the introduction of a new recurring character, the story is a bit of a bust due largely to two major errors: First, The Master is so much fun to hate that he’s going to outshine any guest villain (and sometimes even The Doctor); in this case the contrast between The Rani’s plain rudeness, The Doctor’s adolescent obnoxiousness and The Master’s sinister but polished good manners (“My Dear Rani, allow me to introduce Miss Perpugilliam Brown…”) is stark and highly unflattering to Doc and Rani.  Second, other characters’ dialogue about her bordered on Mary Sue territory; when an experienced writer wants to show that a character is brilliant, they show us rather than having other characters repeatedly and unnecessarily waxing poetic about her (and it’s nearly always a her) brilliance.  I mean, were we repeatedly told that Cessair of Diplos (and most recently, Timmin in “The Caves of Androzani“) were brilliant?  Nope, because it wasn’t needed, and neither was it needed for a character who has operated under The Doctor’s nose in his own “home turf” (Earth) for centuries, and has invented a mine that can instantly turn people into trees.  Also: if the writers were trying to make The Doctor look extra-bad, they succeeded; other than his sabotage of The Rani’s TARDIS, he has little to do with her defeat (which was mostly due to The Master’s interference), mostly because he’s too busy fanboying over George Stephenson and ignoring the fates of bystanders.  And when The Master insulted the Doc with a more eloquent paraphrase of “You’re ugly and your Mother dresses you funny,” I laughed out loud.

I’m actually quite sentimental, so I rather enjoyed seeing the Second Doctor and Jamie back in action again in The Two Doctors, a tale whose setup provides some of the strongest evidence of the “Season 6B” scenario in the whole series.  Just the fact that he and Jamie are both clearly older (bizarre comments about Victoria notwithstanding), and the fact that he talks clearly and directly about the Time Lords, would already be enough, but to ice the cake he is directly stated to be acting as their errand-boy.  Since the story is by my favorite Doctor Who writer, Robert Holmes, I wish I could say a lot more good things about it, but honesty prohibits.  Though only a year earlier he had penned the exceptional “The Caves of Androzani“, Holmes’ health was failing by this point (he died the following year, in the middle of season 23), and his powers were apparently deserting him; his trademark had aways been beautifully-developed guest characters, but this time the only one like that is the moth-collecting headwaiter with thespian aspirations.  Holmes was a vegetarian, and clearly intended this to be a parody of meat-eating, but while it isn’t nearly as over-the-top offensive as “Nightmare of Eden“, it’s still far too ham-fisted to be worthy of Holmes; the third part is especially clumsy, and ends with the Doctor coming very close to breaking the fourth wall as he decides he’s going to follow a “healthy vegetarian diet from now on” and demands Peri adhere to it with him, apparently allowing her no choice in the matter.  That the cannibalistic Shockeye repeatedly refers to humans as “lower animals” despite knowing that they have language, writing, culture, and technology, fails as an animal rights analogy and instead coes across as a commentary on racism, which is ironic given that the plot entirely hinges on the premise of biology as destiny, with the humanoid Androgums (I hate that word) unable to rise above their genetic inheritance despite being given advantages their fellows lack (anyone who’s ever read 19th and 20th century racist apologia will recognize the premise).  And though it’s a small detail in comparison, I must note that while I’m willing to accept TARDIS manuals in English (many times in the series) as being the product of TARDIS translation for companions, how the hell can a very ordinary alien chef who has never been in the TARDIS understand cookbooks in Spanish?  The Sixth Doctor is even more callous than usual in this one, and the focus on Peri’s delightful anatomy (often in full jiggle) as a distraction from his obnoxiousness is even more obvious than usual.

I’m not sure why Timelash is so unpopular; it’s no gem, but it’s a good pot-boiler, certainly no worse that the general run of Doctor Who stories and better than the average in the JNT era.  I mean, sure, the H.G. Wells thing is a bit silly, and the implication that the inspiration for The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Invisible Man all came from this adventure is even sillier, but that kind of silliness has appeared regularly in the series from 1963 to the present.  And my nerdy heart loves references to the adventures of previous Doctors (#3 and Jo Grant!) even when they’re not strictly necessary to the plot.  Also not strictly necessary to the plot was Peri cheesecake, but I’d rather look at her than at the Sixth Doctor’s garish clown costume any day, especially since after this one they seem to have covered up her bazooms and legs more assiduously in response to pearl-clutching from viewers and the self-appointed “watchdogs” who were so powerful in the ’80s.  I’m not sure why, of all the places they could’ve picked in the entire universe, the time corridor went to 12th-century Scotland; I mean, if you were a deranged technotyrant trying to permanently dispose of your enemies, wouldn’t the past of some barren planet or gas giant have been more effective than potentially changing some inhabited planet’s history and thereby attracting the attention of the Time Lords?  But really, similar criticisms could be applied to at least 90% of alien invasion stories in sci-fi, so we should probably just shrug and roll with it.

Revelation of the Daleks is the only 6th Doctor story to make it into the top ranks of Doctor Who serials; it’s fun, creepy, has some great guest stars, and writer Eric Saward (like several others in the show’s history, a much better writer than script editor) even managed to create some Robert-Holmesian memorable guest characters.  Fallen-future-Knight-Templar-type-turned-assassin Orsini and Alexei Sayle’s DJ (who attacks the Daleks with a weapon firing “a concentrated beam of ROCK AND ROLL!”) were especially wonderful to watch, as was Eleanor Bron’s treacherous and astonishingly-oleaginous Kara.  The Doctor isn’t much more useful than he is in most of this season’s tales, literally spending the entirety of part one wandering around in the snow looking for a way into an immense necropolis, but he does manage to help the assassin, the DJ, the CEO and the Daleks (!) defeat Davros’ hideous plan to create a new race of Daleks financed by sales of Soylent Green to famine-stricken developing worlds.  Peri does as much here as the Doc does, while covered up neck-to-toe in blue; given that color’s long association with prudishness and censorship, one can’t help but view her costume as a deliberate mockery of the bluenoses (see what I did there?) who complained about her wearing what any ordinary twenty-something girl was wearing back then.  Davros does seem extremely well-informed about the economic and sociopolitical conditions of the 47th century (including recognition of Orsini and an obviously exhaustive file on The Doctor, down to his newest face), but given that it seems to have been decades since his apparent death while escaping prison (in “Resurrection of the Daleks“), I’ll hand-wave that in service of what was really a very fine script that gave Colin Baker very little opportunity to chew the well-above-average scenery.

Season 23  (Producer: John Nathan-Turner  Script Editor: Eric Saward)

The Trial of a Time Lord is the longest Doctor Who serial ever, clocking in at a massive 14 parts and thereby beating “The Daleks’ Master Plan” by two.  It was, in fact, the entire 23rd season, inviting comparisons with the “McGuffin of Time” storyline of season 16.  That one could be counted as 26 episodes if you’re so inclined, but the stories are far more separate and distinct than those of this season, which also has on-screen titles clearly stating this is one 14-part serial.  It contains three individual stories within it, surrounded and permeated by a frame which makes very little sense as presented due to there being too many cooks involved, the master chef literally dying in mid-prep, and the kitchen manager getting into a colossal cutlery-hurling row with the restaurant manager, quitting as dinner was about to be served, and taking the dessert with him.  But if you’ve followed this thread for this long you know I can’t just throw up my hands and abandon an entire season to the dustbin; I’ve come up with an interpretation I think (hope) will please most.  Let’s enumerate the problems first.  Since when do the Time Lords operate from remote space stations?  Why not on Gallifrey proper?  When is this supposed to be taking place?  Even the Time Lords use linear time in their day-to-day existences, and yet this whole supposed plot centers around something that won’t happen for 2 million years yet?  Are we really supposed to believe that the Time Lords intended to “hide” a planet by moving it only 2 light-years and calling it something different?  On the cosmic scale, that’s like me trying to “hide” the saltcellar by moving it 2″ on the tablecloth and then calling it “pepper”.  Sorry, but no London underground station will exist in 2 million years, especially since the Time-Lord-caused disaster only happened 500 years before (leaving 1.9995 million years of habitation) for changes to occur). And the only three books that survived were all in English and from the 19th and 20th centuries?  How the blazes does The Doctor know about an adventure which hasn’t happened yet (as the Inquisitor herself points out), and how does he know Melanie despite never having met her?  How can the Valeyard prosecute The Doctor for a crime that hasn’t yet been committed?  For that matter, is Gallifreyan law so alien that he’s allowed to twice change the charge in mid-proceedings?  There are more, but those are the major ones.  The explanation hinges on two things: the events of parts 5-8 (collectively entitled “Mindwarp”) and 13-14 (collectively entitled “The Ultimate Foe”).  We’ve seen The Doctor, The Master and others enter the Matrix before (in “The Deadly Assassin” and “Arc of Infinity“), and it was a mental process accomplished via trance and headgear, not a physical process accomplished by walking through a literal door.  And thereby hangs the tale: the Matrix-entering process could be viewed as going through a door, but only symbolically; put another way, the only way anybody could enter the Matrix by passing through a door is in his own mind.  The Sixth Doctor was never psychologically stable; he has always been subject to fits, outbursts, wildly-erratic behavior and even fugue episodes.  And when he suffered one of the latter (albeit induced by the alien mind probe) in “Mindwarp”, it got his companion (to whom he had often been abusive) killed in an especially-horrible way.  I think that proved too much for his unstable ego, resulting in a complete mental breakdown in the form of a paranoid delusion of his own alter ego (or in Freudian terms, superego) correctly accusing him of being responsible for her death.  And since we know he already felt guilty for the excessive violence of his life (conclusion of “Resurrection of the Daleks“), it’s not much of a stretch to imagine his anthropomorphized sense of guilt (The Valeyard) also condemning him for the events of “Terror of the Vervoids” and rolling that together in Kafkasque proceedings which can only make sense by the bizarre rules of dreams and delusions.  The latter story isn’t from his future at all, but from his recent past: apparently after losing Peri he rushed off and immediately recruited a new companion; given the first thing we see of Melanie is her trying to “fix” and “help” him, it’s not too difficult to imagine that she saw he was deeply wounded and wanted to help, making her an easy mark for companion recruitment.  Then on their first adventure out he was forced to commit actual genocide, smashing his already-fragile connection to reality and spawning an elaborate fantasy in which the Furies of his own making are personified as other Time Lords (with the truth seeping out in the end as The Valeyard is identified as part of his own mind); the Matrix can be physically entered like a soundstage for psychodrama; and Peri is conveniently revealed to have been rescued by a heroic warrior-king, married him to become a queen, and lived happily ever after as in all good fairy tales.  His deeply-unwell mind thus resolves all the issues, including the unsolved mystery of the planet Ravalox by misidentifying it in his fantasy as his favorite planet, Earth, complete with flimsy “evidence” (books and subway platform) that have no actual bearing on events, but merely serve as window-dressing for the allegory (we know the events were basically real because Sabalom Glitz reappears in “Dragonfire” with the mentally-stable Seventh Doctor).  In the end, his problems aren’t actually resolved, merely patched up, as revealed at the last moment when his Inner Prosecutor breaks the fourth wall to stare directly at the audience and laugh.  He has, in a very real sense, won because in the very near future The Doctor is killed and his dark side, personified by The Valeyard, begins to “take over his remaining regenerations” by becoming first the dark, Machiavellian 7th Doctor and then, eventually, the stone-cold War Doctor.  I don’t think Glitz is really present at the end; The Doctor is using him to represent his scoundrelly, rule-violating side.  That The Master is not really there is clear even from what we see on the screen; given their long relationship he’s a natural as part of this kind of extended delusion.  But Melanie is, I think, present through the whole thing (though he doesn’t see that at first), which is undoubtedly unfolding in the TARDIS and may even contribute to the accident that kills him at the beginning of the very next story.

Peri (short for “Perpugilliam”, whatever THAT’S supposed to mean) Brown isn’t among my favorite companions, though I don’t really dislike her either; mostly I feel sorry for her, because she’s like so many other women I’ve known: much too sweet and attractive to be hanging around with the loser she seems committed to “fixing” despite his abusive, misogynistic behavior.  This isn’t to say I believe they had a romantic relationship; frankly, I can’t picture the 6th Doc engaging in any kind of sex that doesn’t involve his own hand and a mirror.  But it’s pretty clear that Peri became extremely attached to the Fifth Doctor very quickly, and when he changed for the worse she just couldn’t let go no matter how many times he implied (or even said outright) that she was stupid, fat and uncouth.  Considering all this her pointless, preventable death, on an alien world far in the future where her family will never know what became of her, was even more tragic, and the attempt to slap a fairy-tale ending on it even more jarring.  Perhaps worst of all, the producers treated her as badly as The Doctor did, giving her a good brain and a pleasant personality, then mostly using her as cheesecake to distract attention from whatever the hell it was they thought they were doing with the main character.

SEVENTH DOCTOR

Season 24  (Producer: John Nathan-Turner  Script Editor: Andrew Cartmel)

The death of the 6th Doctor once appeared on a list of the weakest sci-fi deaths, and I have to agree; even a character so disliked deserved better last words than “carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice”, and a better exit than falling off an exercise bicycle.  But BBC politics and budgets being what they were at the time, and JNT being what he was, and Colin Baker demanding a season when offered a story, it was what he got.  And boy, the shrinking budgets sure showed in the 7th Doctor era, starting with Time and the Rani, the first serial.  All TV shows are products of their times, and Doctor Who is no exception, but most of the time in the 1st-6th Doctors’ tenures it wasn’t constantly, blatantly obvious in ever single serial.  Alas, that cannot be said of the 7th; every one of his 12 televised adventures screams “It’s the ’80s!” from start to finish, especially the music and special effects (which is sad, because both had steadily improved with the years); in this 24th season premier it was even in the fashions (leg warmers, neon colors, big moussed hair…) to the point that I honestly wondered if the Beeb hadn’t borrowed most of the production team from MTV.  The story itself isn’t much to speak of; though Kate O’Mara’s performance as The Rani (especially when impersonating Mel) was entertaining, the writers don’t really seem to know what to do with her despite being the ones who created her in the first place.  Her plan in this tale isn’t a subtle, devious one involving biochemistry as in her introduction; rather, it’s a grandiose “I will remake the Universe according to my OWN VISON!!!” scheme of the sort we expect from The Master, right down to baiting The Doctor to come and interfere due to pathological overconfidence (which is 180 degrees from her previous well-planned operation right under the Doc’s nose for centuries).  The other characters aren’t particularly compelling either; for a character who is supposed to have a well-above-average brain Melanie sure screams a lot, and boy am I glad they quickly dropped that schtick of The Doctor mixing up his cliches, because it was extremely irritating.

I’ve heard from many people that it wasn’t really Colin Baker’s fault that the Sixth Doctor was so awful; it was mostly JNT’s weird fixation on introducing annoying, obnoxious male characters (first Adric, then Turlough, then an incarnation of the Doc himself) as if he were going to give them a redemption arc, and then…not redeeming them at all, or else making a very limp pretense at the last minute before jettisoning them.  I’m also told the Sixth was much better in the radio dramas, and I believe all of that.  However I said at the beginning of this thread that I’m only counting the TV shows as canon; anything else would require making this project a full-time job for several years.  And on TV, the 6th Doc was a rude, obnoxious, hostile, unbalanced, narcissistic, abusive, misogynistic shithead whose claims to caring about others ring very hollow indeed, and who mostly wanders through his adventures as a clown-suited observer while childishly mocking his companion.  The only way I can even accept him as a “real” Doctor in my head-canon is to see his blatant psychopathology as part of a larger character arc, and the only reason I even bothered with that is, a few of his stories were pretty good.  In any case, he’s solidly at the bottom of my Doctor list, and extremely likely to remain there.

One intrinsic problem of the serial format in general is the urge to stretch the action out to fill a larger number of episodes.  In ’60s and early ’70s Doctor Who this usually meant stretching the action of what should’ve been a four-parter into six or even seven parts, and in the 7th Doctor era it meant stretching three-parter scripts into four parts.  But Paradise Towers is even worse: it’s a four-parter (100 minutes) that contains about 45 minutes of worthwhile content at best.  The rest is mostly people running away from each other and giant slow-moving roombas, or else chanting nonsense, yelling at each other, or having tea while looking for the swimming pool.  The latter is the actual cheap plastic hook this shabby, waterlogged overcoat of a story was hung on: Melanie wants to go swimming and The Doctor jettisoned the leaky TARDIS pool rather than, you know, fixing it.  So they go to an apartment complex in order to use their supposedly super-fab pool which looks basically like the pool in any decent hotel in any developed country on present-day Earth.  And when is this supposed to be?  The Doctor says the building was designed “way back” in the 21st century, which coupled with the run-down state of the place would seem to indicate this is the 22nd, which would explain who the “in-betweens” went to fight (Daleks) and why nobody checked up on them for what seems to be well over a decade (it can’t be much more than 20 years or they’d all be older than they are).  But other plot points seem to indicate the building was used for these refugees soon after completion.  Are all the male children drafted into the caretaker corps and the female children given to the Kangs?  And what kind of silly name is “Kroagnon”?  Was the building next door designed by “Neanerthal”?  On top of everything else, this mess is also hopelessly boring.

Delta and the Bannermen was the first decent 7th Doctor serial.  Unlike “Paradise Towers” and “The Happiness Patrol“, it’s silly in a good way, from the time-traveling space bus carrying disguised alien blobs to Disneyland, to the proto-companion who always has the right tool, to the absurdity of the bus accident, to the terrible fake American accents reminiscent of ’60s Who.  It’s not unusual for “light” Who episodes to still feature horrific carnage (even genocide), but for some reason it feels jarringly gratuitous here, most especially the wanton murder of a busful of goofy, rock-and-roll loving aliens who posed no threat to the villainous Bannermen.  And of course the “instant kid, just add plot device” trope is so badly overused in science fiction as to constitute a flaw in itself, though The Doctor helping Delta and the princess to save themselves was a nice bit.  All in all, it’s in that “fun but no gem” stratum of the show; it just looks extra-good after one dud story and one of the worst shows of the whole 60-year run.

Dragonfire is the only actually good story of season 24, and the beginning of a long, loose arc that isn’t resolved until “The Curse of Fenric” two years later.  It has too many flaws to be considered great, but it’s entertaining and thought-provoking, the two qualities I value most in a Doctor Who story, and makes more sense than any story since “Revelation of the Daleks“.  The presence of Sabalom Glitz marks this tale as set in what I’ve dubbed “The Age of the Twelve Galaxies”, some 2 million years in the future, a technological dark age in which culture has been mostly static for many thousands of years and humans seem to have mostly forgotten their Earthly origins.  It’s a fantasy landscape that bears more resemblance to the Star Wars universe than to conventional sci-fi settings, and an even more notable underlying resemblance to “sword and sorcery” settings such as Middle-Earth or Conan’s Hyborian Age, complete with (what might as well be) wizards, demon lords, magic, ancient treasures (with maps, natch), and of course dragons.  I’m not fond of the character of Sabalom Glitz; though he was the last creation of the King of Characterization, Robert Holmes, the author died before the rough outline could be properly filled in, so Glitz becomes little more than a stereotype, a distorted echo of Holmes’ loveable rogues from stories like “The Ribos Operation“.  Unfortunately, this is an early example of a major problem in the last few seasons of the classic program: substituting sketchy cardboard cutouts and inane ’80s stereotypes for the well-developed characters the show had always been known for.  There are also too many directorial and/or editing errors (“I’ll just climb over this rail and hang by my umbrella for no apparent reason!”) and frayed loose ends (couldn’t The Doctor have at least noted the impossibilty of finding a delinquent teen from 1987 London in this fantastical setting?) for this to be great, but it’s a bellwether for better stories to come.

You may have noticed that I didn’t say anything about Melanie’s departure in “Dragonfire”; that’s because there’s very little to say.  Melanie isn’t the worst companion in Doctor Who history, because she isn’t superlative in any way at all.  She’s a cipher, a nonentity, a placeholder-companion who appears from nowhere without explanation for no apparent reason, and departs into The Unknown with very little explanation for no apparent reason.  While with The Doctor she contributes little other than screaming; she neither helps nor hinders him, and it would make no difference if Steven (who ranks just above her in my estimation) or Vicki (who ranks just below her) were substituted, or if the Doc were just alone.  While companions are a narrative necessity, Mel basically stands around in a T-shirt bearing that label.

Season 25  (Producer: John Nathan-Turner  Script Editor: Andrew Cartmel)

Given the weakness of the Third Doctor‘s Dalek stories, it’s interesting that the Dalek stories of the Fourth through Seventh Doctors were all among the strongest of those Doctor’s tenures.  Remembrance of the Daleks was no exception, in part because it made use of what should have been a common story mechanism in the series but never was: what might be called a “temporal roundabout”, The Doctor circling back to an earlier point in his career to take care of unfinished business.  Although it has been 25 years for the viewer and something over 500 years (over six lifetimes) for The Doctor, that matters little to a time traveler who can simply circle back to November 1963, apparently about a month after he left with Susan, Ian, and Barbara, to finalize a plan that couldn’t have worked except for all the intervening adventures because it required a Dalek attempt to travel back in time from the 49th century to steal something they literally couldn’t even imagine existed in the 20th.  That the First Doctor was able to leave Gallifrey with a weapon of such power, and later enact a devastating scheme with it, is one of the first signs of the so-called “Cartmel masterplan”, in which The Doctor is revealed to be “more than just another Time Lord”, but common interpretations of the onscreen hints and intentional hand-tips (perhaps including Cartmel’s own ideas and certainly those of Chris Chibnall) betray unimaginative three-dimensional thinking.  The Doctor’s “moreness” doesn’t require clumsily-inserted and continuity-wrecking forgotten lives and God-given special status in the past because we’re dealing with a race of time travelers; rather, his specialness resides mostly in his future as the War Doctor, the Oncoming Storm and Destroyer of Worlds.  Actions on the scale of some of The Doctor’s, both onscreen and alluded to later, especially in (but not limited to) the Time War, send echoes through time that would be noticed by those sensitive to such things, and cause trembling in the web of causality that would be noticed even by some not so gifted.  We don’t know what the CIA’s capabilities are, but my guess is that The Doctor didn’t actually “steal” the Hand of Omega; he was given it by a CIA agent from the Time War era (possibly even the Second Doctor in Season 6B) to set up a trap to destroy Skaro.  The story thus becomes another of the early battles of the Time War; the Time Lords failed to stop the creation of the Daleks in the first place (“Genesis of the Daleks“), so this is the fallback plan, once again arranged via the famous renegade and sworn enemy of the Daleks in order to give the High Council plausible deniability.  But while the Fourth Doctor agonized over the choice and in the end couldn’t bring himself to murder baby Hitler, the Seventh has become far harder and darker (The Valeyard won), and doesn’t hesitate to set the Daleks up.  The fact that the plan ultimately fails to stop them (possibly via a trick borrowed from the old “Perry Rhodan” pulp series, setting up a decoy homeworld as a target for super-powerful enemies to destroy) doesn’t change the fact that The Doctor willingly executes the plan his predecessors couldn’t bring themselves to.  Other than all this, the story is a solid one; Ace gets to show what she’s made of, and the UNIT parallels and callbacks (callforwards?) are fun and satisfying.  Oh, and one more thing (yes, this is a retcon; I hope you’re used to them by now): it seems likely that The Doctor’s interaction with this proto-UNIT military group is the primary source of WOTAN’s knowledge of The Doctor.

Before I even start discussing The Happiness Patrol, let’s get this out of the way: “Thatcher” is not a magic word that transmutes rubbish into gold.  There are lots of Doctor Who stories which criticize politicians and/or political and social issues; some of them are good and some are not.  And a weak story with silly plot devices doesn’t magically become good just because it (badly) attempts to satirize something you have strong negative feelings about.  I’m an anarchist; I deeply dislike all politicians, Thatcher included, and that still doesn’t impair my ability to know crap when I smell it.  This serial is boring, irritating, and has the stupidest monster in the entire six-decade run of the series: a sentient Bertie Bassett robot literally made out of candy, as though Cartmel and JNT got high as kites on some really good acid and thought they were producing a fantasy for preschoolers in which The Doctor saves Candyland from the Purple Pieman.  If I say any more I’ll just get angry, so let’s just leave it there.

The Silver Nemesis wasn’t as good as this season’s Dalek serial, but it was better than I remember it.  The reason I disliked it on first viewing still stands: too many foes for a three-parter.  But on review I can appreciate how The Doctor plays them against each other, and would’ve had a lot more difficulty facing any of them alone because they were uninterested in cooperation and instead expended most of their energy in taking each other out.  The story also heavily leans on the mythos, so the casual viewer (at the time I didn’t understand nearly as much of the back-story as I do now) might see it as making The Doctor too powerful; on review I see it as a continuation of the same Time Lord strategy as I discussed in “Remembrance of the Daleks“, though more directly because it’s pretty obvious that it was the Second Doctor who launched the Nemesis into orbit, during his “black ops” CIA days.  And the whole “Doctor plays chess against unseen opponent” schtick only makes sense in light of “The Curse of Fenric” a year later.  The story could still have been better-developed, and why someone decided that “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” needed four parts while this very big picture only needed three is unfathomable.  But seen as part of the Seventh Doctor’s entire oeuvre, it emerges as one of the best stories.  One last thought: I believe these Cybermen are contemporary, in other words it has only been a year since the destruction of Mondas and they are still plenty riled up about that.  Apparently this fleet was an expeditionary force that was away from homeworld when the disaster came.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy isn’t.  In fact, the only thing that keeps it from being the worst show of this season is the existence of “The Happiness Patrol“.  Its main issue is an unusually-acute case of something that was a major problem from season 23 on: substituting undeveloped ’80s stereotypes for characters.  And since this one’s entirely character-driven, it’s like watching an episode of The Young Ones without the laughs.  We’ve got the riot grrrl, the leftover hippie, the socially-awkward computer geek, the rapper, the leftover Victorian explorer, the punk chick, the xenophobic pepperpot with questionable ideas about food, the biker, and even the hopelessly-nerdy fanboy (because the best move for a show in danger of cancellation is to mock its audience).  And sorry, but these are some of the most boring, useless villains in the history of Doctor Who (though still not as impotent as the Black Guardian).  Did I miss the explanation of where that amulet came from and why they employed such weak methods of defending it?  Oh, right, there wasn’t one; no doubt it came from the Land of Narrative Necessity on the wrecked space hippie bus along with Mel, only she left and cut in line by two seasons.  Worst of all is what this turkey stole from two much better stories: an episode from “The Silver Nemesis“, and the word “Ragnarok” from “The Curse of Fenric” where it belonged to hang on three stone statues which had absolutely nothing to do with Norse mythology.

Season 26  (Producer: John Nathan-Turner  Script Editor: Andrew Cartmel)

It’s sadly ironic that the very last season of Classic Who had the most consistently high quality since Davison left.  They’re not all perfect by any stretch, but they’re all entertaining and the creators seem to have at last remembered what the show was about.  The season premiere was Battlefield, the first story set in a near future (1997) since the UNIT era, and so fittingly features the return of The Brigadier (as a consultant when The Doctor reappears; this is two years after his adventure in “Downtime“).  The plot is satisfyingly old-school and even features a guest star we haven’t seen since the First Doctor’s time: Jean Marsh, here playing Morgaine (yes, that Morgaine) as a refreshingly-honorable villainess whom The Doctor talks into calling off her plans for world conquest by explaining what late-20th-century warfare has become:  wholesale slaughter with no room for Arthurian-era notions of honor and ethics.  The most interesting aspect is that all the Arthurian characters (who reside in a parallel dimension) recognize The Doctor as Merlin while also agreeing his face has changed.  But it’s pretty clearly spelled out that this is a future Doctor who remembers the events of this adventure and leaves a letter for his past self.  I therefore figure it must be the Eighth Doctor, since we only ever see (on TV; I’m aware the audio plays exist) his first and last adventures, with nothing but a big set of question marks in between.  All in all a good serial, with the stars finally fully inhabiting their characters in a way that seems consistent and genuine.

Ghost Light is one of those Doctor Who stories I like despite its problems.  One of those is the lack of adequate exposition; while it’s fitting and proper in horror for the central entity or phenomenon to be left largely unexplained, that doesn’t work as well in science fantasy (even when it takes the form of a horror tale, as this does) because what the brain is “looking for” when viewing sci-fi is different than what it craves when viewing horror (which is part of the reason opinions on Space: 1999 are so divided, but that’s a topic for another day).  For example, I find it difficult to believe that Light’s biological survey of Earth took so long that he could never complete it due to evolution, and how can a scientifically-inquisitive race capable of interstellar travel not have ever encountered evolution before? Furthermore, what are Josiah and Control, really? Artificial life-forms built to serve, enslaved natural forms, or something else?  And how can they “evolve” at will?  Given that the house was built atop the ship, why did Josiah wait until 1881 to emerge?  But somehow, it works anyway, probably because the weirdness of the whole thing is compelling; a Neanderthal butler named “Nimrod” is worth 10 points by himself.  And the interaction between Ace and The Doctor, especially when she realizes he has violated her trust by coercing her into a terrifying situation for the second time (the first was in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy“), is so good it makes me willing to give most of the bad stuff a pass.

The Curse of Fenric is not the final serial of Season 26, but it serves the same function as a 21st-century season finale, pulling together all the threads from the (3-season-long) arc; in that sense alone it’s a groundbreaking television story, concluding a series that started as a classic ’50s style BBC television serial with a glimpse of what adventure series would evolve into in the 21st century, as viewing became less of a hit-or-miss affair and story arcs came to routinely spread over a season or even multiple seasons (thanks at first to VHS and later to digital recording, then streaming).  The actual season finale, “Survival“, then becomes an epilogue to the big story, a “post-credits scene” if you will, hinting that despite appearances there is still more to come.  But it’s in “Fenric” that we finally get to see what the apparent plot holes and loose threads from earlier seasons were about: how a troubled 20th century teen and an evil 17th-century sorceress were able to time-travel and meet The Doctor, who the Doc’s unseen chess opponent was in “The Silver Nemesis“, and several other coincidences and conundrums. At the same time, “Fenric” is firmly rooted in the series’ mythos and history: The Doctor has a long history of fighting godlike opponents (The Celestial Toymaker, The Great Intelligence, Kronos, Sutekh, etc), and this isn’t the first time we’ve seen such a being manipulating the descendants of people it had managed to gain control of in a long game intended to free itself from imprisonment by the Time Lords (it was the whole basis of “Image of the Fendahl” as well).  The premise that magic is just technology we don’t understand is classic Who, going back at least to “The Daemons“, which is why I’m a bit disappointed that when the writers wanted vampires they invented the “haemovores” instead of simply using the established Whovian vampire myth from “State of Decay“.  Perhaps the two are really related?  After all, the “Ancient Haemovore” is from the future, perhaps the same fantasy-era of 2 million years hence where Fenric dumped Ace, a setting certainly befitting the ancient King Vampire.  After all, the whole “faith repels mutants” thing is a bit shaky.  It’s also annoying that the writers weren’t allowed to use the word “Ragnarok” due its being hung inappropriately on creatures from a far inferior story who had absolutely nothing to do with Norse Mythology, but that, alas, is an intrinsic problem with the television format, and not the writers’ doing. Finally, the story highlights both Ace’s incredible native intelligence and The Doctor’s increasing darkness: his obsession with controlling events and keeping his secrets actually makes things a lot worse and gets many more people killed than were strictly necessary.  It’s a problem which started with the Fifth Doctor and continues into New Who, and thus serves as another bridge between the 20th- and 21st-century versions of the show.

As I wrote above, despite being the final episode of classic Who, Survival is more like an epilogue to the big story, a “post-credits scene” if you will; it’s the last appearance of Anthony Ainley’s version of The Master (my second-favorite after Delgado), the last appearance of Ace (my favorite companion of the JNT era) and the last story starring the Seventh Doctor (my second-to-last favorite incarnation), though he does return to make the ’90s “Doctor Who” movie official.  “Survival” is a fairly run-of-the-mill story, not bad but not especially good either, which might’ve stood out better had it not come at the end of a run of strong serials.  The idea of a living planet which turns all who come there (even Time Lords) bestial is a good one, though it’s underdeveloped and the plot device that only “cheetahfied” people can instantly teleport themselves any distance (and back), even to other worlds, is kind of absurd as presented.  But The Master is more subtly, coldly evil here than we’ve seen him before, Ace’s struggle to balance ape with angel results in a fine performance by Sophie Aldred, and The Doctor’s closing voiceover, promising both Ace and the audience that despite appearances there was more to come, was a nice if anticlimactic close to a 26-year run.

It’s a testament to Sophie Aldred’s talent that Ace ranks as high in my estimation as she does, higher than any other companion introduced under JNT’s misrule, and even relatively higher than The Doctor she was associated with (a tough trick indeed).  Ace’s character required careful handling; she was introduced, like most late ’80s characters, as an ’80s stereotype (albeit with a couple of odd hooks), and in the hands of a less-competent actress and story editor could easily have remained so or even devolved into an irritant.  Instead, she consistently matched (in stories like “Remembrance of the Daleks” and “The Curse of Fenric“) or exceeded (in all the bad ones) the quality of the productions in which she appeared, and evolved from an incredibly brilliant but deeply-troubled and not-well-educated (except in chemistry) teenaged delinquent into a complex, interesting character with a superbly-agile mind who is repeatedly misused, deceived, lied to and underestimated by a Doctor too obsessed with his own agenda to consider whether maybe he should consult her before making decisions for her as though she were a child and leaving her out of the loop under the apparent assumption that she’s too stupid to help.  At times, their interaction resembles that of the Fourth Doctor and Leela, though #4 eventually stops underestimating Leela and #7 demonstrates more apparent concern for Ace’s feelings (whether he actually feels that concern is another matter).  In many ways, Ace is a lot like Leela: incredibly high intelligence combined with a warrior’s spirit and a huntress’ instincts.  She’s also like a female Jamie, so I’ve placed her midway between the two in my ranking. As of the end of Classic Who:

Sarah Jane Smith
Jo Grant
Leela
Ian Chesterton
Barbara Wright
Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Zoe Heriot
Romana 2
Jamie McCrimmon
Nyssa of Traken
Liz Shaw
Romana 1
Polly Wright
Ben Jackson
Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown
Harry Sullivan
Dorothea “Dodo” Chaplet
Tegan Jovanka
Susan Foreman
Steven Taylor
Melanie Bush
Vicki Pallister
Adric
Victoria Waterfield
Vislor Turlough

In 2010, perhaps 20 years after the end of her travels with The Doctor, we hear from Sarah Jane Smith that she has her own NGO, named “A Charitable Earth”.

EIGHTH DOCTOR  (Producer: Peter V. Ware)

Fans waited 7 years after the end of season 26 for more Doctor Who, and the only thing they got during that period was a terrible “30th anniversary special” in 1993, about which the less said, the better.  Then in ’96 came the US-produced TV movie Doctor Who; because the Peter Cushing movies exist and it’s not unlikely there may be another theatrical Who attempt, I prefer to refer to this as a story by its subtitle, The Enemy Within.  Judged beside other televised Who tales, it’s pretty average; the regeneration is well-done, though precipitated by a very ’90s kind of nihilistic death for the 7th Doctor: gunned down in an alley by a gang actually attacking someone else, and he just happens to get in the way.  This is where the now-cannical idea that Time Lords keep regenerating for a while after rebirth got started, and it serves as a useful plot device by which the new Doctor convinces the lady doctor that he is in fact the old Doctor she accidentally killed on the operating table.  It’s also the first time we see the console room as big as it later normally is, making the expansion a 7th-Doctor contribution.  Two changes I’m glad did not stick: calling the heart of the TARDIS the “Eye of Harmony” (the name of the central power source on Gallifrey) and giving it all sorts of new powers; and the deeply-stupid (and very US sci-fi) claim that The Doctor is half-human like Mr. Spock.  Fans have debated what is to be done with this idea; my answer is, “Forget it, fans, it was Fox”.  If you must have an in-universe explanation, here it is: The Doctor Lies.  Often and flagrantly.  There was also considerable kerfuffle at the time around the on-screen kiss, but I simply regarded it as showing what I’ve suspected was going on since at least Liz Shaw.  Another change from Classic Who was of course better special effects and better music, both of which I was very happy stuck around in New Who (the music had been slowly improving in the ’80s until it took a nose-dive in the McCoy era).  Another change I’m glad didn’t stick: Eric Roberts’ dreadful portrayal of The Master, though I did appreciate that he still carried the glowing green eyes marking his “beastification” from “Survival“; perhaps that connection was what gave him the ability to slither back from literal ashes?  Though I won’t rank the Eighth Doctor because there’s simply not enough to judge, what we did see of him was reassuring, very much in keeping with tradition and more like the Third Doctor than any other.  In the end, I’m glad the pilot wasn’t picked up; the Americanization would’ve only grown worse, and as it is the movie paved the way for a proper BBC revival.

The main reason I dislike the 7th Doctor is that he’s largely a “new and improved” version of the 6th, an abusive sociopath with the rough edges sanded off and a new coat of friendly-paint.  He’s also the next incarnation of The Valeyard, with all that entails.  The Seventh Doctor is much more interesting to watch than the obnoxious Sixth: like The Master, he uses (generally) good manners to cover his schemes and deceptions.  The fact that he’s doing it for a higher purpose is small consolation to the people who get killed in the process, and while his adventures have often come with a very high cost in lives, since the very beginning, most of the time the Seventh doesn’t even make a show of caring.  Worst of all, he doesn’t just limit himself to scheming against undoubtedly evil foes like the Daleks and Cybermen, oh no; he’s perfectly happy to subject Ace, an emotionally-vulnerable young woman who trusts him, to ordeals he believes are “for her own good” as though she were a child, completely without consulting her or asking for her consent, and often by lying to her or even openly bullying her.  Nor is this behavior merely a question of ethics: even viewing the matter through a purely utilitarian lens demonstrates how destructive his mindset is.  In “The Curse of Fenric“, his refusal to take her into his confidence or even to allow for her prodigious intellect makes the situation considerably worse and results in many more people being killed than if he had simply not assumed she was a slow-witted, untrustworthy child.  It’s true that this character is a natural development from what we’ve already seen in the Fifth and Sixth Doctors, but that doesn’t mean he’s the kind of person I’d trust, befriend, or even invite over for tea.

I’m not sure how the Eighth Doctor was characterized in books and audio plays, but it doesn’t really matter because I’m not considering those in this thread anyhow.  In my head-canon, the Eighth Doctor’s personality continued the progression of increasing darkness from the Fifth Doctor’s seriouness to the War Doctor’s stone-cold utilitarianism to the Ninth Doctor’s brokenness.  The Eighth must therefore incorporate even more Master-like qualities than the Seventh, softened only by the fact that his ends are basically benevolent rather than malevolent.  If we’re to accept that the Eighth spent decades being Merlin, that fits; though Merlin is generally considered to be on the side of “good”, his schemes and intrigues were every bit as Machiavellian as those of the Seventh Doctor, and there’s no nice way to explain what he enabled Uther to do to Igraine.  The oldest stories even present Merlin as the son of an incubus (ie, of non-human origin despite appearing human), a being saved from being completely malevolent only by the prudence of his mother.  At some later point, once the Time War started in earnest, he “skirted the edges” for many years, avoiding his duty while his own people lay waste to the universe in a war caused by their own refusal to do anything about a gathering evil until it was much too late.  During this time he…well here, I’ll let him tell you:

Even though it’s a “minisode”, only 7 minutes long (and not released until the 50th anniversary celebrations in 2013), Night of the Doctor is an important chapter in The Doctor’s story and more entertaining than many full-length stories in both the classic and new Who.  It features the return of the Sisterhood of Karn, unseen since 1976, in a perfect little gem of a story in which the dying Eighth Doctor’s regeneration is guided by the Sisters and he must make a difficult choice: continue to feel good about himself, or do what must be done.

NINTH DOCTOR

Series 1  (Show Runner: Russell T. Davies)

The 40th anniversary celebration of Doctor Who came two years late, but was worth the wait: the series was revived in 2005 with a new Doctor whom new audiences learn about only gradually; even his regeneration sequence was unseen until “Day of the Doctor” eight years later.  Rose was a pretty basic story in the new 45-minute format, where a whole tale is told in one part except for the occasional multi-part story and the big season-long story arcs which first appeared during the Seventh Doctor’s tenure. As I’ve pointed out before in my discussion of “Terror of the Autons“, the Nestenes are the most vanilla of Doctor Who villains and therefore perfect for a story introducing a new Doctor, a new companion, a new TARDIS console room, and a whole new series without confusing things even more with a complicated, backstory-laden villain like The Master or even the Daleks.  But right off the bat, we hear about the Time War and begin to get glimpses of the very big picture which links the new series to the previous one.

The new series of Doctor Who wasted no time in demonstrating that, as in the old series, some of the episodes would feature more than a little humor with the adventure.  The End of the World is a very basic Who tale (villain is willing to kill others in a profitable scam) with better-than-before special effects and some good, memorable characters who are then killed off as soon as we start to care about them (I especially loved the tree lady).  This is the first appearance of the Face of Boe, with no hint about how central to the narrative he will later become, as well as the first appearance of the “Year Five Billion” era.  The setting as presented is, of course, absolutely absurd without some retconning; the idea that any species can or will last five billion years in a recognizable form is far more ridiculous and impossible than anything else ever presented in the series, including “Kill the Moon“.  It’s like portraying an ordinary house of cards as still standing after a century of hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods; species simply aren’t that stable, and neither are cultures, machines or vinyl phonograph records.  But there’s a clue in those records, assisted by the fact that we never see the years 4 billion, 3 billion, 2 billion, or 1 billion: relativistic travel.  My theory is that the human civilization in this fantastically distant future derives from one single colony ship sent out in the reasonably-near future, say the 22nd century (and therefore with strong memories and “fresh” artifacts of 20th-century Earth) to travel to another galaxy at relativistic speeds; it missed its target due to some mishap and kept traveling until some failsafe triggered and woke up the crew and passengers after 40-something years ship time…and 5 billion years sidereal time.  They founded “New Earth” (seen in later stories) and got in contact with other civilizations of the era, gaining thereby fast FTL travel, and some of them (from which Cassandra is descended) recolonized the long-abandoned Earth, long after the humans who stayed behind have all risen and fell countless times, and eventually died off.

In the JNT era of Doctor Who, the creators brought back the old historical episodes in a new guise: rather than The Doctor meeting some historical figure and having a purely non-fantastical adventure with them, now we see fantastical adventures in which historical figures (such as H.G. Wells or George Stephenson) play a part.  In The Unquiet Dead it’s Charles Dickens, assisting the Doc against ghosts who are really gaseous alien creatures coming through the Cardiff Rift, which plays such a major part in Torchwood later.  This one’s a good, solid Who tale following the classic plot of “supernatural events have a sci-fi explanation”, featuring a wonderful, well-drawn and well-acted character in the person of the psychic maid Gwyneth (played by Eve Myles, later Torchwood‘s Gwen Cooper) who heroically saves the day at the cost of her life.

The first two-parter in the New Who era also turned up the volume on the comedy aspects with aliens who look like more monstruous versions of the Spielbergian “grays”, regularly farting due to wearing human-suits with zippers in the foreheads.  Aliens of London/World War 3 introduces the Slitheen, a family of mobsters with yet another nonsensical reason for invading the Earth.  But since the story is clearly intended to be light (giggling aliens and goofy chase sequences that wouldn’t be out of place in Scooby-Doo), and I like that the aliens are shown to be criminals from a diverse race, rather than interchangeable representatives of an entirely-evil species, I’m willing to give the silly plot a pass.  Furthermore, it’s about time the mundanes in Doctor Who realized that aliens are visiting considering how many freaking times they’ve done so since the mid-’60s.  And you’ve gotta admire Russell T. Davies’ willingness to establish that The Doctor installed a backdoor in the UNIT website that lets him fire missiles at any target he likes, in this case 10 Downing Street.

With the Slitheen invasion, Davies reintroduced the UNIT-era practice of setting contemporary stories just a little in the future, and in Dalek he revisits the Troughton-era practice of setting some of them just a few years later than that.  This one was broadcast in 2005 but takes place in 2012, and wastes no time in making the Daleks scary again (and heading off the old “stairs defeat Daleks” joke).  This is accomplished partly by good direction, partly through Murray Gold’s potent music, partly by keeping the Dalek’s crazed shouting to a minimum, and mostly by showing us exactly what a single Dalek can do.  Some of these powers are probably Time War upgrades, but others (the versatility of that toilet-plunger arm and the ability to hover) are things they must’ve always been able to do, but special effects were previously inadequate to show onscreen.  Besides killing many people, the Dalek also throws a bomb into the apparently-popular view of The Doctor as asexual, and the story ends with a shockingly-brutal comeuppance for the human villain which echoes the end of “The Caves of Androzani“.

The Long Game introduces a period of Doctor Who future history which has become increasingly necessary as writers have become increasingly lazy with their satire: the era centering around 200,000 CE, which I’ve dubbed the “Everything Old is New Again” period.  The story depicts a future in which late 20th/early 21st century culture is replicated with somewhat higher technology on a bigger canvas, even to the point of having the same kind of media-centered world driven by the same kind of newsmedia (and as we see later in “Bad Wolf“, the same kind of game shows), the same kind of music and food, etc.  The dialogue strongly hints at this period as coming at the end of a many-millennia-long dark age, and in its depiction of a future human society totally dominated by an alien corporation represented by a single extremely-vulnerable entity who is defeated by sabotaging its machinery, the story is little more than a remake of “The Sunmakers” on a bigger canvas.  It’s the first disappointing story of New Who, made more so by the fact that the second part (later in the season) isn’t that great either.  PS: At least one Classic Who story appears to be set in this same era: “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy“, whose characters are all ’80s stereotypes.

Father’s Day is the show which most clearly demonstrates why I don’t like the 9th Doctor very much: he’s so wounded he allows his love for Rose to seriously impair his judgment.  And while I can forgive that in humans, I can’t forgive it in a being with godlike powers whose mistakes could literally destroy the world.  As Spider-Man’s uncle pointed out, “With great power comes great responsibility”, and taking his 19-year-old girlfriend back in time to see her dad’s death would already be incredibly irresponsible even if he hadn’t compounded it by then taking her back to the same point again while her past self is still in view.  I knew from the second this started that it was an unbelievably-bad idea, and I’m not a thousand-year-old alien time traveler from the most advanced planet in the universe.  To cap it all off, he can’t even bring himself to fix his own mistakes when the answer is literally circling the block in front of him; instead, he leaves that to a very ordinary (albeit exceptionally intelligent) working-class guy without any advanced PhDs from 10-million-year-old god universities.  None of this is to say that this is a bad episode; it’s a really good episode, just not a good Doctor.  And it clearly depicts the horrific (if fantastical) consequences of letting such a person loose with a time machine.

The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is definitely my favorite Ninth Doctor story.  Part of that is because I have a fondness for horror stories and this one is pretty horrifying, with an explanation I didn’t see coming a parsec off.  The historical setting is perfect for the tale, both leads are in top form, and their dialogue is tight and well-written.  But they’re well-matched by the guest stars, most especially Captain Jack, the most charming rogue to appear in the series for many a year; I’m a great deal older and more experienced in such things than Rose, but even I would’ve had to employ some effort to resist his flirting.  And had the creators not had other plans for him, I think Jack would’ve made the best “young man of action” companion since Ian.  Best of all, the happy ending feels natural, not at all a deus ex machina, disappointing cheat, or pasted-on technobabble; it proceeds smoothly and naturally from the problem which caused the horror in the first place.  Top marks!

Boom Town is a light episode which acts as a bumper between two very serious two-parters. Though the looming danger is very real, The Doctor interrupts it before it actually gets underway, and the second crisis appears rather unexpectedly near the end and is quickly resolved by our heroes.  Most of the time is spent on character development, and it’s hard to take the Slitheen completely seriously, especially when the scheme at hand involves…blowing up Cardiff to generate a wave for a space surfboard.

This isn’t completely a throwaway episode, though; as a sequel to both “Aliens of London” and “The Unquiet Dead“, it provides a taste of just how interconnected the stories of New Who will grow to become.  And the Cardiff Rift is revealed as much more than a one-episode plot device.

Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways wasn’t a bad story, but it certainly wasn’t strong enough for the first regeneration story of the revived Doctor Who series.  This future era isn’t really interesting enough to be the venue for a quarter of the season, and the game show satires couldn’t feel much more dated if they had spoofed To Tell the Truth and You Bet Your Life.  That everything was run by the Daleks wasn’t bad, though IMHO it’d have been better kept as a cliffhanger reveal.  I do like the wicked humor of the new race of Daleks being created from the losers of game shows, though I think it would’ve been better to show that the contestants weren’t random, but rather sentenced to the games for disobeying any of an uncountable number of laws; that seems a more Dalekian notion than random sample.  Also, the new Daleks being openly religious fanatics was brilliant, especially since their unwavering beliefs in their own purity and superiority, and their demands for instant and unquestioning obedience have always revealed a quasi-religious weltanschauung.  And though I’m not especially a fan of special effects spectacles, the Dalek invasion scenes were both breathtaking and what I’ve always imagined Dalek invasions as being actually like.  I felt the resolution of the “Bad Wolf” mystery was a bit anticlimactic given the existence of the malevolent Norse deity Fenric as a time-manipulating enemy in the Who mythos; for the phrase to be one suggested by happenstance was a bit of a letdown, especially coupled with the convenient but unsatisfying cause of The Doctor’s death.  I did really enjoy the business of Mickey and Jackie teaming up with Rose to brute-force the TARDIS console open with a heavy truck, though; it was just the right amount of comic relief in an otherwise rather grim episode.

The Ninth Doctor is not among my favorites; he only barely beats out the Seventh in my estimation, and the only one below #7 is the execrable #6.  The primary reason for my dislike is simple: every time he smiles or jokes it comes across as forced and startlingly insincere.  I’m unfamiliar with Eccleston’s other work, but he’s fine in dramatic or action scenes, and it seems highly unlikely that the creators would intentionally cast a bad actor when they were trying to revive a series.  I must therefore conclude that the “fakeness” of this Doctor’s attempts at lightheartedness was strictly intentional on the actor’s part, because he’s been deeply damaged by his experiences in the Time War and hasn’t yet learned to compartmentalize that pain and anger and only unleash it when needed, as the 10th Doctor later learns to do.  His war trauma is also likely the cause of his poor judgment when it comes to anything involving Rose; it seems natural that a man who’s lost almost everything would cling like grim death to what he has left. But just because I understand the reason a person might act in a certain way doesn’t mean I have to like or accept it, especially in a hero.  Nowhere is my discomfort more acute than when Doc 9 displays jealousy of Rose, especially toward Mickey; his bullying and mockery of the much younger man is childish and very difficult to watch, and in combination with his flagrant emotional manipulation of Rose (especially in the first few episodes) it makes him look, frankly, like a domestic abuser.  The Doctor is often less than kind toward his companions, but this is waaaay over the line.

TENTH DOCTOR

The first adventure of a new incarnation of The Doctor usually isn’t all that great, because it’s more focused on establishing the character than anything else.  The Christmas Invasion is fairly typical of its type in that respect, better than “Robot” or “Time and the Rani“, but not as good as “Castrovalva“. Though it ends pretty strongly, with The Doctor showing what he’s made of and the big Torchwood reveal, the first part with the “pilot fish” doesn’t really make much sense, and I rolled my eyes at cribbing the aliens’ name from Shakespeare.  Said aliens are superstitious and culturally primitive, and appear to use technology without really understanding it; they seem to be a scavenger race which steals an eclectic mix of technology from others, and even their ship is built into a large meteoroid rather than being constructed from scratch.  This episode marks the first time Rose attempts to use the Doctor’s bamboozle power, and though she fails, it demonstrates just how much she’s already grown from her travels.  This is also the first Christmas special, beginning a NewWho tradition.

Series 2  (Show Runner: Russell T. Davies)

New Earth shares both a time period and a villain with “The End of the World“, and thereby supports my theory of what the whole “Year Five Billion” setting is all about.  The basic plot is interesting and different, in that the subsidiary villains are actually motivated by a desire to do good, but can’t or won’t recognize that their chosen means are morally reprehensible.  But The Doctor’s statement that the hospital’s medical science is “a thousand years ahead of its time” in the year FIVE BILLION is a pretty clear statement that they’ve started all over again from a relatively low (21st or 22nd century) point; “Gridlock” later supports this theory as well.  But neither do so as clearly as Cassandra’s continuing use of antique technology and the flashback to her youth, featuring a cocktail party scene with customs and costumes that wouldn’t be out of place in the 20th or 21st centuries.  These are obviously people who originated in a time not long after ours, taking their culture with them to a future time when all other humans are gone except from textbooks on prehistory and the most ancient memories of the Face of Boe, who in this story evolves from a bit of color into an important and enigmatic character, a giant question mark floating in a jar.  All in all, “New Earth” is one of those not-so-good tales with interesting details.

Tooth and Claw is the first New Who story to feature that glorious Doctor Who weirdness I love so much; I mean, how could I not like a story in which The Doctor uses a steampunk moon laser designed by Prince Albert and focused with the Koh-i-Noor, to fight a werewolf and his warrior monk henchmen who want to infect Queen Victoria with lycanthropy?  IN SCOTLAND?  It’s one of the new-style historicals which started with “The King’s Demons“, and I was quite pleased with the portrayal of Queen Victoria.  I was, on the other hand, not amused by Rose’s acting like a dumb teenager when she’s been growing up so nicely.  The 10th Doctor really starts to show us who he is in this one, and I like it; we also finally get to see where Torchwood came from and what its mission is.

When Doctor Who returned to US TV, I was working in New Orleans, had no TV, and was crazy post-Katrina busy.  Then I got in this weird headspace about not wanting to start the new series until I’d caught up with the classic one.  Well, one thing led to another, and even though my best friend Grace was watching them, I was kinda just aware of their existence rather than actually viewing.  So the first time I actually sat down to watch them was when Lorelei Rivers invited me to do so with her in autumn of ’16.  And even though that was only five years ago, when Grace and I sat down last week to watch School Reunion, I could not for the life of me remember who the villains were or what their evil plan was (bat-creatures turning kids into little supercomputers so they can collectively act as one big supercomputer to find the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything).  The reason I couldn’t remember is that it’s just a McGuffin to provide a reason for The Doctor and Rose to run into none other than Sarah Jane Smith (with K9 even!) and for a classic Whovian with an especial fondness for her, that eclipsed everything else in my memory.  Liz Sladen is pitch-perfect as the now-56-year-old Sarah Jane, who hasn’t seen The Doctor since “The Five Doctors” in 1983, and is sad and disappointed and hurt that he never returned after dropping K9 at her door in 1978.  If there was any doubt among fans about the nature of The Doctor’s relationship with either Sarah Jane or Rose, this episode shatters that, because both the dialogue and the ladies’ obvious jealousy (until they both realize that their shared experiences make them friends, not rivals) leave absolutely no room for any other interpretation.  Another controversy that the episode cleared up was that the new series was not a “reboot” of classic Who, but rather a continuation.  David Tennant really cements himself as one of the top Doctors in this one, displaying both a complex range of emotions and a beautiful chemistry with the other players; we really believe he and Sarah have a history, and…everything else.  Absolutely one of the best 10th Doc tales.

“School Reunion”, as Sarah Jane said of The Doctor, was a hard act to follow, but the show succeeded brilliantly with The Girl in the Fireplace, a beautiful gem of a story that transcends both Doctor Who as a series and the sci-fi genre.  The explanation for the goings-on is a bit farfetched (do all 51st-century ships have the capacity to open stable time doorways, or was this some kind of research ship, or…?) but the story is so enchanting and beautiful and unusual that the rationale becomes unimportant.  It looks at a question not often considered in time-travel stories (though it should be): what does that travel look like from the perspective of those left behind?  While that theme is often explored in the Moffat era, it was new at this point: to The Doctor it’s mere minutes between visits, to the Madame de Pompadour it’s years each time.  And though we are shown the obvious reason, to her the sporadic but always timely appearance of The Doctor every time the robot “monsters” appear to terrorize her, makes him look like a guardian angel; no wonder she falls in love with him.  In addition to its other virtues, this story is the first time (though not the last, as we’ll soon see) a sex worker is prominently (and positively) featured in a Doctor Who story, and that means a great deal to me.  One last thing: I love that the casting director went through the trouble of actually casting an actress who really looked like the Madame; since most people couldn’t picture her in their minds, that was an extra bit of love.

If you remember “The Tenth Planet“, you’ll recall that Mondas wasn’t merely another Earthlike planet; it was an exact duplicate of Earth, down to the continental configuration (given the way its depicted onscreen, it had a retrograde rotation).  Since no explanation is given for why this “evil twin” of the Earth drifted out of the solar system and then returned many thousands of years later, or why it even existed in the first place, I’ve always assumed that it was no mere planetary twin, but an alternate Earth from a mirror universe which somehow came into ours and was expelled from the system as part of that process.  The fact that The Doctor knows about this but won’t elaborate suggests the Time Lords were involved, possibly as part of the war in which the fifth planet was destroyed and that fact hidden from the rest of the galaxy.  If this is true, the alternate Earth depicted in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel is also an alternate Mondas, and the way the “original” Cybermen developed on Mondas may have been similar to the way these alternate Cybermen developed in their world.  As I previously stated in reference to the Daleks, the creators managed to make the Cybermen scary again, especially by focusing on the horror a person converted against their will would feel at their plight, and turning that into a much more effective weapon than gold.  The scene in which The Doctor senses Mickey is watching and directly gives him instructions right in front of the Cyber Controller is just about perfect and both allows Mickey to come into his own at last, and redeems The Doctor for mistreating him in the past.  Mickey’s decision to stay here because this world needs him and his native one doesn’t is bittersweet but totally right, especially in his gently but firmly telling Rose that he’s no longer going to subsidize her having her cake and eating it, too.  Moreover, the alternate version of Rose’s father shows us more of the mettle we saw in “Father’s Day“, and thereby makes his early demise in Rose’s world that much more poignant.  Given that this world appears to be soft-fascist (Great Britain is a republic, corporations are openly intertwined with government, and there’s a curfew enforced by the military) one has to wonder if it isn’t the same alternate we saw in “Inferno“; after all, the Third Doctor did have a greater-than-typical tendency to exaggerate the scale of disasters, and it seemed unlikely even in 1970 that the volcano created by the Stahlman project would destroy the entire world.  However, it certainly would’ve caused the downfall of the government which sponsored the project, and the astronomical rebuilding costs would’ve given wealthy corporations an inroad into more hands-on control, as we see depicted in this story.  Plus, as Doc #11 would say, dirigibles are cool.

The Idiot’s Lantern is the creepy tale of a face-stealing alien who lives in the television.  As that description might suggest, it effectively draws on childhood nightmares for the main conflict, supported by the more realistic fears of older kids trapped in a household with an abusive parent.  That parent in this case is a menace to his entire neighborhood, with his ruthless enforcement of conformity by the time-honored method of snitching to the cops.  Given that the cops in this case are acting under the direction of Torchwood the story fits solidly into the season-long Torchwood arc, despite otherwise being a solid, spooky standalone.  Best of all: the 10th Doc demonstrates that despite his general joviality, he is still the War Doctor under the skin and just as utterly terrifying to evildoers.

Some Doctor Who creators feel that the series lost something over the years as the mysteries evaporated in the glare of familiarity; for example, the Time Lords seemed a lot more menacing when they were shadowy figures of whom The Doctor was clearly terrified, rather than a race of pompous politicians obsessed with their own gravitas.  But the way to solve that is not to claim The Doctor is an exceptional or even unique God among gods (sorry, Messrs. Chibnall & Cartmel), nor to destroy all his tools to “make things more interesting” (sorry, Mr. Nathan-Turner); it’s to make the monsters scary again.  As I’ve written elsewhere, “In true horror, there is little to no ‘explanation’, because the unknown is far more horrifying than any trite Hollywood ‘origin’.”  And while that’s less true in horror-tinged science fantasy than it is in straight horror, the horror elements are considerably enhanced by leaving some things unexplained.  That’s a large part of why The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit is so good; in it, The Doctor fights a being who appears to be the traditional Devil, right down to the horns, the lies and temptation, and the ability to possess others, despite being chained in the deepest pit in the Cosmos since primordial times (and according to Him, since before the creation of the world).  Unlike previous explanations for “horned beast” myths (including “The Daemons” and “Pyramids of Mars“), this one doesn’t explain away the being as “merely” a malevolent member of an extremely ancient race whose technology resembles magic to our comparatively-primitive minds; instead, it offers a bunch of mutually-contradictory half-explanations which The Doctor himself rejects as impossible, and leaves the whole mystery tantalizingly unsolved at the end.  Even though The Doctor drops the whole dungeon-planet down an immense black hole, we know that won’t really destroy this primordal horror, and it will still be waiting down there, forever.  Even the bounds of its own fictive universe cannot entirely contain it; it is a huge question mark taunting the viewer with its refusal to adhere to the laws of reason or satisfy our need for an explanation.  In all, it bears far more resemblance to Prince of Darkness than to Quatermass and the Pit.  One final thought: a lot of the credit for this two-parter’s atmosphere goes to the fine Murray Gold score, which is also a large part of NewWho’s magic formula for making the Daleks and Cybermen frightening again.

Love and Monsters is one of the first “Doctor lite” episodes, which soon became a normal feature of the series, showing how The Doctor affects the lives of those around him, often to their detriment. It has been noted in stories before (and will be again) that The Doctor is at least a stormy petrel, and at worst a harbinger of doom; in this story, five people who came together due to their fascination with him have their lives destroyed by an alien who is hunting him.  At the same time, the story is funny and (believe it or not) sweet; it’s a strange mixture which is not uncommon in the series and somehow works despite (or perhaps because of) the emotional tug-of-war. It even has a couple of rather dirty jokes, which have definitely not been common in the past.

The main problem with Fear Her is best stated by paraphrasing Captain Kirk: “What does a god need with a starship?”  I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept that a being powerful enough to turn huge numbers of people, including a Time Lord and his TARDIS, and supposedly the entire population of the Earth, into figures in a two-dimensional drawing by a child, is somehow not powerful enough to communicate with its siblings or find its spaceship.  And even if for some hogo bullshit reason it needs a spaceship, why couldn’t it simply have Chloe draw one and then materialize it, as it was materializing the apparition of her abusive father?  And if these damned things are so numerous yet that powerful, why aren’t they major players in the universe?  They’re easily as powerful as the Time Lords and more so in many ways, so why have we never seen them before and never see them again?  The whole thing looks to me like an example of a writer so much in love with his own ideas that he doesn’t bother exploring their implications before setting them to paper or pixels.  And if all that wasn’t irritating enough, the whole flag-waving Olympic torch thing is just so incredibly silly it would mar a far better episode than this.  The only character I even cared about was the sweet road repair guy who was so proud of his work.

The conclusion of the second series of the revived Doctor Who was among the best stories in the entire 6-decade run.  Army of Ghosts/Doomsday wasn’t content with merely closing the season-long Torchwood arc; it also spun Torchwood off into its own series, concluded the “mirror world” sub-arc which arguably has its roots in the late ’60s; wrote out the very first companion of NewWho; clearly and unambiguously showed The Doctor as being in love with his companion for the first time; introduced a new faction of Daleks, the Cult of Skaro, who have names, imaginations, and even a sense of humor; and even brought in a “Bad Wolf” reference from last season, just for good measure. This one depicts a disaster of truly Biblical proportions: Torchwood, in its hubris, decides to mine a spatio-temporal rift for energy, ignoring the End Times side effect of what seem to be ghosts walking around, everywhere in the world, while simultaneously trying to pry open something which could not be more clearly Forbidden if it had a big tag saying, “Dear Pandora: Do Not Open. THIS MEANS YOU! Love, The Gods”.  The result is of course Armageddon, stopped only by the Prophet of Gallifrey (whose warning, naturally, went unheeded) performing a Great Spell which literally sent them all to Hell.  The battle scenes are truly epic, the fantasy-science is actually coherent and consistent, and even the Torchwood director whose singleminded fixation on “Queen and Country” precipitated the whole thing gets her moment of redemption.  Mickey and Pete are revealed to be kickass warriors, Rose’s shattered family is reunited across two worlds, and The Doctor’s farewell to her is deeply moving and narratively completely right.  This is how you do a Doctor Who story that shakes the Pillars of Heaven and puts your name among the immortals while yet respecting and building upon the existing mythos, rather than attempting to trash it all and rewrite it in your own image and likeness; too bad BBC politics are such that someone who somehow missed this lesson was yet hired to teach the class a decade later.

NewWho treated companions rather differently than Classic Who did; in the ’60s The Doctor was unable to reliably return them home once they walked into the TARDIS, and in the Pertwee era they couldn’t leave the Earth if they wanted to.  But most of the companions all the way through the ’80s were either orphans or else wanderers by nature, and while a few family members were mentioned or even seen from time to time (Jo’s well-connected uncle, Sarah Jane’s aunt Lavinia, Peri’s stepfather) they did not really become supporting characters in the show as in NewWho. In-universe, this is due in part to The Doctor being much better at navigating the TARDIS than he used to be (except when the plot requires otherwise), and in part due to the Doctor feeling a greater need for familial connection due to the loss of Gallifrey.  Out-of-universe, I think it was a choice to recreate the sense of complex connection to contemporary Earth that made the UNIT era so good.  But in any case, Rose was the very first companion in NewWho, and therefore having to deal with disapproval from a companion’s mother was a relatively new experience for The Doctor.  And though she does a lot of growing up while traveling with him, she’s still not really completely grown up at the end; she still makes a choice that will distract and hinder the Doc’s effort to save the world out of purely irrational, emotional reasons.  This is not a criticism; humans are human, and many of us might’ve made exactly the same choice.  But it is part of the picture that is Rose, and given that, this is the only happy ending she could possibly have, though she can’t see it that way.  Because in the end, what he said to her in “School Reunion” is absolutely true: “You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I can’t spend the rest of my life with you.”  And yet she is too much in love with him to do what she should do, so her departure becomes one of the most wrenching in series history.  Prior to that, Rose is definitely one of the companions who adds to the show rather than merely occupying time and space or actively causing trouble.  She still doesn’t make it into my top stratum, though; she’s securely in the “mostly brainy chicks” section. As of Series 2:

Sarah Jane Smith
Josephine Grant
Ian Chesterton
Barbara Wright
Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Zoe Heriot
Romana II
Jamie McCrimmon
Rose Tyler
Nyssa of Traken
Elizabeth Shaw
Romana I
Polly Wright
Ben Jackson
Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown
Harry Sullivan
Dorothea “Dodo” Chaplet
Tegan Jovanka
Susan Foreman
Steven Taylor
Melanie Bush
Vicki Pallister
Adric
Victoria Waterfield
Vislor Turlough

Rose is not, however, gone for good; throughout series 4 we see various examples of her appearing in the background, and she finally manages to manifest herself in the alternate timeline created by The Trickster’s intervention in “Turn Left” and is soon reunited with The Doctor himself, albeit in a way she could never have anticipated.

Series 3  (Show Runner: Russell T. Davies)

I need to judge The Runaway Bride by the standards of Doctor Who Christmas episodes, because after all I invented that rule myself.  But I have no criticism of the comical aspects of “Bride”, which are indeed funny; my problem is the fantasy-science aspects, which are not quite as bad as those in “Terminus“, but bad enough.  I’m not going to complain about the McGuffons, because making up imaginary subatomic particles whose primary function in the universe is to close plot holes in lazy writing is so endemic to post-1970s science fiction that I could fill a long-form article with examples (kicking off with Star Trek: The Next Generation).  No, my main problem here is one that could’ve been solved by simply consulting even the most basic child’s book about the structure of the Earth: the temperature and pressure at the center of the Earth would destroy any spaceship in instants, much less four and a half billion years, especially since we are told the ship was disabled and without power (so no force-fields or the like) and we see later that it’s not an exceptionally strong design made of unobtanium or any such dodge.  At least in “Underworld” the planet in which the ship is embedded is very young, very small and extremely soft; in here it’s the freaking EARTH.  Furthermore: if Torchwood really had the kind of power it would take to drill to the center of the Earth the resulting disaster would be far worse than the doom released by the Stahlman Project in “Inferno“, and even the attempt to do so in the middle of freaking London would attract far too much attention to keep quiet.  How is water supposed to get anywhere near the bottom of a hole that deep without just vaporizing?  Etc, etc.  I guess “miles down in the Earth’s crust” just wasn’t flashy enough, guys?  I’m also getting rather annoyed with the series’ refusal to even attempt to match fictional races’ weapon technology with transport technology with other technology, and does every monster in NewWho have to come from “the beginning of time” when even the Time Lords have only been around for a few tens of millions of years and therefore had no part in the formation of the Earth?  “The Satan Pit” did primordial menaces (the TARDIS couldn’t even translate the alien language, remember?) correctly; this one is just silly.

Smith and Jones is definitely better than its predecessor (and certainly features a better companion), but that doesn’t mean it’s good.  The plot has been used before in Doctor Who (alien cop-types hunting alien criminal-type among human bystanders; dangerous hijinks ensue) and this one doesn’t add anything other than the Judoon, an entire race of dull-witted, unimaginative cops whose technological level appears to be whatever is required by the script; in this case, they apparently have the power to teleport an entire hospital to the Moon (and gently return it later) while maintaining an air bubble around it, but not the power to recycle the oxygen?  And harassing Martha individually earns compensation, but harassing the whole hospital in the first place doesn’t?  What?  What?  Episodes introducing new companions are often pretty weak, but I expect more from the Doc than lying around, literally letting himself be killed by an alien criminal, and then hoping fervently that the cops put things back the way they found ’em while not making the slightest effort to ensure it.

Unfortunately, once Russell Davies hit upon the idea that saying a monster race was from “The Dawn of Time” gave him license not only to give them all sort of powers that didn’t need to be explained, but also to make those powers so extravagant that every one became a VAST COSMIC MENACE instead of just a villain, he decided to use this trope in as many episodes as possible.  When I first watched these with Lorelei, I even shared that observation with her because I (incorrectly) guessed it was something to do with the season-long story arc.  Whatever does he even mean by “The Dawn of Time”?  Because honestly it sounds to me like typical Time Lord self-aggrandizing puffery meaning, “Before we imposed our brand of order on this galaxy and others within our reach.”  That having been said, the trope works a lot better in The Shakespeare Code than in most of the others it’s used in, because the idea that magic is a kind of science predating Gallifreyan notions of rationality has been used before, most notably in “The Daemons” but hardly limited to it.  Despite the world-shaking menace posed by these three primeval witches, the story is a fairly light one, going on right under the noses of late 16th-century Londoners without their noticing.  It’s a new-style historical which is really more of a love letter to Shakespeare than anything else, with more references to academic facts and obscure trivia about the Bard than I’ve heard in one place since my 4000-level Shakespeare course at UNO in the ’80s.  And therefore, despite my complaints at the start, I really liked this episode very much, especially in its portrayal of Shakespeare as a rare genius (he figures out where Martha and the Doc come from, and is even immune to psychic paper), hinting that Martha was the Dark Lady of the sonnets, centering the plot around the “lost” play Love’s Labor Won…all of it was clearly a Shakespeare fan and student making a Doctor Who story function both as a good adventure for the regular audience and a special treat for those of us with degrees in English Lit.  Oh, and one last observation: “Why is Queen Elizabeth I angry with The Doctor?” has got to be the longest-term joke setup in the series’ history.

If Russell T. Davies thinks he can distract me from a really weak Doctor Who script that doesn’t really go anywhere (except in one scene) by showing me a basket of kittens, he’s right.  I mean, despite my tough-as-nails demeanor I certainly can’t be expected to not get all girly when presented with cute baby kittens.  But they’re one of the few redeeming features in Gridlock, which is basically a minisode stretched to 45 minutes.  Beside the kittens, the scene of The Doctor going between cars is a lot of fun, and all the sequences with the Face of Boe are excellent; I especially like that Sister Hame (surely she deserves that title now?) repented for her misdeeds by pledging herself to lifelong service to the Face, because that very much fits her character.  But couldn’t the Face find some power source in 24 years to open the motorway doors?  How about the cars themselves, with their apparently-endless power?  Obviously Hame can leave his side for short periods, and there are plenty of people not trapped in the motorway he could’ve telepathically directed.  He was a lot more resourceful than this on his own show. I’m not fond of heroes just kind of sitting around during a disaster, waiting for someone else to come along and fix it; if I were, I might not dislike the Sixth Doctor so much.  The only other interesting thing about the episode is that it once again demonstrates that this culture isn’t far removed from the 21st century.  The Macra, on the other hand, shouldn’t be recognizable in any way, shape or form after five billion years (evolution is slow, but not that freaking slow), and why do the couple dressed as the characters from “American Gothic” have English accents?  You may consider that a nitpick, but the kittens are a small detail too.  Did I mention the kittens?  Well, at least the anti-drug message is not so overdone this time.

The “hard act to follow” rule doesn’t only apply to Doctor Who companions and Doctors, but also villains.  At the end of “Doomsday” we see the named Daleks of the Cult of Skaro performing an “emergency temporal displacement”, and we find out where and when they displaced to in the first few minutes of Daleks of Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks: New York City in the late 20s, where they take over construction of the Empire State Building to implement a plan that really doesn’t make a lot of sense.  The Doctor’s means of defeating them doesn’t really make much sense either (and requires him to suddenly develop an immunity to the heavy radiation which has killed him in the past), but it’s undeniably interesting to watch the show’s comment on how fanatics shoot themselves in the foot by violently denying obvious facts that conflict with their irrational beliefs.  The American accents aren’t at all bad this time, and there are two interesting, engaging supporting characters we really care about: the wise, forward-thinking Solomon and the astonishingly-unprejudiced Tallulah.

During the Tennant era, two official stories were produced by animation rather than live action; they were both broken into multiple parts that add up to a full episode in length, but are not considered part of the regular season. The first of these, The Infinite Quest, features Martha and was broadcast during Series 3; this guy suggests viewing if after “Evolution of the Daleks”, so that’s what we did.  I found it a pretty standard Doctor Who story, neither especially good nor especially bad, but since that’s also the case with the Star Trek animated series from the early ’70s I was unsurprised.  The animation was similar to that used in First- and Second-Doctor era reconstructions, and didn’t really add or subtract anything from the story, the only time the advantages of animation were used was in the depiction of the insect people and the spaceships, plus The Doctor flying on the bird-robot-monster thing.  It also features my favorite running joke of the Tennant era, “Don’t do that” (said to companions badly attempting accents).

Since bringing in Rose’s family worked well in Series 1 and 2 of the revived Doctor Who, Davies turned it up in Series 3 with Martha’s much larger family.  While Rose only had an interfering mother, a jealous semi-boyfriend and a dead father, Martha has a sister, a brother, a dangerously-interfering mother divorced from Martha’s father, and the father’s trophy wife; their interactions were far more interesting than the action of The Lazarus Experiment, an otherwise ho-hum iteration of the classic “mad scientist experiments on himself and turns into a monster” plot which goes back at least to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Am I the only one who is annoyed when sci-fi transformations are not only instantaneous, but involve huge gains and losses of mass without explanation?  And writers: I’m pretty sure there are no scorpion-like animals in the phylogenic line of humans (same to you, Star Trek), so there are no scorpion genes to reactivate.  The main purpose of all this is to let Martha show The Doctor that she’s companion material (he makes it official at the end) while convincing her mother he’s an enemy.

The connections between Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy go back to when Douglas Adams was writing for the show in the late ’70s, so even though 42 is also approximately the number of minutes of action in a NewWho episode, I don’t think anyone with even superficial knowledge of the Hitchhiker’s universe could possibly believe the use of that specific number as the only Who title ever to consist solely of a numeral was anything like coincidental (especially given this Doctor’s Arthur Dent reference in his very first outing).  The story itself was a good, action-packed tale, not bad but not especially great either, in which The Doctor demonstrates the lengths to which he’ll go to save a companion from certain death, and the danger posed by Harold Saxon to our hero specifically.  One gripe: all stars could be considered “alive” in that they are born, live, age, and die; what makes this one different is that it’s intelligent, which I hardly think would’ve registered anything on a “scan for life” developed on Earth and based on even 42nd-century standards of “life as we know it”.  So The Doctor’s attacking the captain for failing to do the impossible is hardly fair, though her cutting corners everywhere else certainly is a valid criticism.

Human Nature/The Family of Blood is an interesting, moving Doctor Who two-parter.  It contains a few too many loose ends to be considered a great episode; primary among these is, who are these creatures in the first place?  What are they capable of?  And why is The Doctor more afraid of them than he is of Daleks, Cybermen and a host of other menaces he’s never resorted to hiding from?  If they only live for three months, how can the parents be alive at the same time as their progeny?  Etc, etc.  But the monsters are really just a setting for an examination of what it means to be human, and a look at the costs of leading the kind of life The Doctor – and, more importantly, his companions – by necessity must. I felt angry on Martha’s behalf, a soon-to-be-MD forced to work as a domestic and endure racism in order to save the man she loves.  I felt a great fondness for the young psychic student who protected The Doctor’s…mind? Essence? Soul? in the watch and brought it to him when the time came.  I found the conclusion, in which we discover just how much of that dark Valeyard part of the Doc’s personality is still there, waiting to be tapped when necessary, utterly horrifying yet strangely compelling.  And the epilogue, in which the ageless Doctor attends the funeral of his former student, moved me to tears.

Blink appears on a number of lists of the scariest television episodes of all time (though not this one, because I hadn’t yet seen “Blink” yet), and that’s no hyperbole; it is certainly the scariest Doctor Who episode of all time.  This is the first appearance of the Weeping Angels, who are never as terrifying again as they were in this one, partly because the story unfolds through the POV of an ordinary person, like “Love and Monsters” (only scary instead of funny).  The Angels are yet another race said to hail from “The Beginning of Time”, which I’ve decided to interpret as meaning “from a period earlier than the Time Lords chose to police”, which would explain why they suddenly popped up in the present after the Time War.  But the Angels are a perfect example of what such creatures should be like; not just creepy and dangerous, but fundamentally weird and wrong like the Fendahl or the Great Beast.  Episodes featuring such abominations should always be as deeply unsettling as possible, and feature as much “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” stuff as possible.  Fortunately, Steven Moffat is very good at that sort of thing; it was IMHO his strongest advantage as showrunner later.  Alas, most writers, even good writers, aren’t as adept at handling time loops and unsynchronized timelines, which is why scenes like the concluding one, in which The Doctor meets Sally Sparrow for the first time a year after her adventure with him, are so rare outside of Moffat’s long and beautiful River Song arc.

The very first scene in Utopia ends with Captain Jack Harkness clinging to the outside of the TARDIS while she frantically flees from him to the literal end of the universe, hundreds of trillions of years in the future, after most of the stars have gone out…and it doesn’t really slow down after that.  We discover that Rose’s resurrection of Jack at the end of “The Parting of the Ways” has made him into a living “fixed point in time”, an abomination to beings like The Doctor who can perceive such things, and frightening enough to the TARDIS that she actually tried to shake him off.  They materialize in one of the last human colonies, a place so absolutely littered with 21st-century technology (diesel engines, chain-link fences, submachine guns, paper photos) that it’s pretty obvious that they, like the people of New Earth, are actually the descendants (perhaps a thousand years later) of the passengers of a colony ship launched in the late 21st or early 22nd century to travel at relativistic speeds.  But this one is so impossibly far in the future its arrival in this time can’t even be accounted for by “normal” relativistic travel, because the universe simply isn’t big enough, unless they did something like intentionally aiming for an empty patch of sky and not stopping until they arrived somewhere.  Or, maybe it fell wibbly-wobbly through the huge time crack which a certain supervillain opened to this general time period in the next episode?  The mythic setting is well-supported by wonderful characters, especially the apparently-kindly Professor Yana (masterfully portrayed by Derek Jacobi) and the charming insect-lady Chantho.  And the revelation of Yana’s true nature, foreshadowed under our very noses by “Human Nature” and the recap of the Face of Boe’s last words, is one of those powerful moments of drama which burns itself into your brain, aided by the force of the Murray Gold soundtrack; when I first saw this episode with Lorelei and Yana pulled out that watch, I instantly knew who he was and reacted with something like “HO-LEE SHIT!!!” because it’s pretty hard to surprise my racing, analytical brain with an ordinary plot twist.  But I honestly didn’t see this one coming (a tribute to good writing and very fine acting), and even in review the moment of revelation gave me a frisson.

One of the things Russell Davies did really well was preparing for the season’s big arc with small cues in nearly every episode.  In series 3 it was references to a rising political star named Harold Saxon; there are even “Vote Saxon” posters visible in the contemporary Torchwood episode “Captain Jack Harkness“, and that he’s a villain becomes obvious in “42” due to Martha’s phone call to her mother.  Of course, his identity as THE Doctor Who villain of villains has to wait until its very effective reveal in “Utopia“.  That identity, plus the slow buildup to The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords, plus the story’s use of the kind of timeline mismatch I wish were a great deal more common in the show, plus the effective gathering of seemingly-unrelated threads from “The Lazarus Experiment” and “Human Nature“, predisposed me to enjoy this two-part Götterdämmerung blockbuster even if it hadn’t been so good on so many other levels.  The Master’s plan is, of course, classic Master: establish himself as an authority figure somewhere months or even years before The Doctor arrives, so that he can use the established bureaucracy and henchmen of the system to his advantage.  But in this case he outdoes himself, bringing the entire force of the UK government and UNIT under his control, and amplifying his mind-control powers to suppress resistance.  It’s hard to imagine a bigger plot than this one, in which The Master out-Davroses Davros by turning the entire future human race into his own version of Daleks, named after mythical goblins from Gallifreyan fairy tales, then brings them back in time to destroy their own past in order to fulfill his most megalomaniacal scheme since “Logopolis“.  And this time there’s no quick fix; with both Jack and The Doctor imprisoned and rendered powerless, the only person who can defeat The Master is Martha, taking an entire year to implement The Doctor’s plan to use his enemy’s own superweapon, the massive Archangel telepathic network, against him in the clearest demonstration to date that by most standards by which such things can be objectively measured, Time Lords are indeed gods.  PS: I’ve always maintained that The Doctor isn’t the only renegade Time Lord with companions, and in this one, we get to see that The Master can rely on his as dependably as The Doctor can.  And one little gripe: if The Master couldn’t fix the fused TARDIS controls in 18 months, how could The Doctor do so in what seems a relatively short time?

At the very end of “Last of the Time Lords”, The Doctor bids goodbye to both Captain Jack (who returns to Torchwood after revealing a piece of information that, unbeknownst to him, tells The Doctor how The Face of Boe knew so much about him) and Martha, who is done playing second fiddle to Rose.  But we’ll soon see these two companions together again, when Martha returns as a guest star in several episodes of Torchwood starting with “Reset“.

I’ve noticed that the companions I esteem more highly tend to be those who have longer runs; the mighty Sarah Jane had three and a half seasons, Jo Grant had three, etc. This makes sense because over time the actress has the time and space to more fully inhabit her character (obviously this also applies to male companions, but there aren’t as many of them), but it’s usually not as noticeable as it is with Martha Jones.  Now, don’t get me wrong; I liked Martha from her first appearance in “Smith and Jones“, but my regard for her grew as time went on.  After “Human Nature” I decided I liked her better than Rose; when the mission required shop-girl Rose to be a school cafeteria lady for a few days, she moped and complained as though it were beneath her.  But when the mission required actual physician Martha to not only scrub floors, but to do so for three months in an environment where she was dismissed as less-than-fully-human, she controlled her righteous indignation and did what she had to do like a grown-up.  In fact, unlike Rose (see “Tooth and Claw“), Martha is always a grown-up.  I don’t mean a wet blanket; Martha is as fun-loving as anyone.  But she understands how to conduct herself in an appropriate manner for an environment. However, even that left her pretty solidly in the middle of the “mostly brainy chicks” pack until her post-companion character development, starting with her very mature, amicable parting with The Doctor at the end of “Last of the Time Lords“, then in her Torchwood guest run, and finally in her triumphant return in “The Sontaran Stratagem” and “The Doctor’s Daughter“; at that point she rose to the top of that group, among the all-time greats:

Sarah Jane Smith
Josephine Grant
Ian Chesterton
Barbara Wright
Martha Jones
Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Zoe Heriot
Romana II
Jamie McCrimmon
Rose Tyler
Nyssa of Traken
Elizabeth Shaw
Romana I
Polly Wright
Ben Jackson
Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown
Harry Sullivan
Dorothea “Dodo” Chaplet
Tegan Jovanka
Susan Foreman
Steven Taylor
Melanie Bush
Vicki Pallister
Adric
Victoria Waterfield
Vislor Turlough

Series 4  (Show Runner: Russell T. Davies)

Voyage of the Damned was the 2007 Christmas special, so I’m willing to let the increasingly-annoying “most aliens look and behave almost exactly like contemporary humans” trope alone for now (especially because this one’s clearly influenced by Douglas Adams, specifically, his 1998 Monty Python-influenced computer-game-turned-Terry Jones novel Starship Titanic) and concentrate on all the things it got right, which were many.  Adams isn’t its only influence; there’s more than a whiff of Python, and after the ship is hit by the meteor swarm the plot owes a great deal to 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure:  During the Christmas season, a cruise liner is wrecked by a natural disaster enabled by its owners’ financial difficulties, and in the aftermath a motley group of passengers must make their way through the wreckage to safety.  As is typical for many of the series’ stronger entries (this one has the action of a two-parter in one extra-long episode) the show is an emotional roller coaster, alternating between very funny or sweet moments and very moving ones.  In particular, this story exemplifies the grand Who tradition of giving us interesting, well-drawn, likable characters we really care about, and then killing them.  The incredibly-ignorant tour guide, the working-class couple who won the cruise as a prize, the young midshipman trapped alone on the bridge, the cyborg whose name and courage both dwarf his stature, and of course proto-companion Astrid Peth, are far more interesting than yet another batch of killer robots (who remind me of “The Robots of Death“), and at least most of the deaths aren’t pointless.  The emotional jerking-around continues right to the end, with the tense yet very funny scene of the flying cruise liner barely missing Buckingham Palace while Her Majesty waves at The Doctor from the rooftop, and our hero doing his best to give the few remaining characters some kind of parting gift.  But one has to wonder what Series 4 would’ve been like had the brave, resourceful Astrid survived to become the new companion instead of the brash, abrasive Donna.

As should be clear from the preceding, I’m not exactly a Donna fan.  But one must give credit for her ingenious (yet ill-considered) plan to find The Doctor again after realizing it was foolish to turn down his invitation at the end of “The Runaway Bride“.  I mean, not even LINDA thought of the strategy of investigating every weird thing they can turn up, because sooner or later the Doc will turn up also investigating one of them.  The scene in Partners in Crime where the two end up meeting while snooping around “Adipose Industries” separately is one of the funniest scenes in the entire 6-decade run of the series, especially coming as it does at the end of a long sequence where their efforts exactly mirror one another’s without either realizing the other is there.  That and the fact that these are probably the cutest Doctor Who monsters ever, and that the chief villain is basically an evil Mary Poppins, and that Donna’s grandfather turns out to be the sweet old news vendor from the preceding episode, and we have a recipe for a story it’s hard to dislike.

Though The Doctor has mentioned “fixed points in time” before, what that actually means is fully explored in The Fires of Pompeii.  The cynical way of describing it is, “a plot device which allows Doctor Who writers to have it both ways”, but in-universe it could be defined as “events so entangled with the web of time that there’s no way for any creature who actually exists in that web, including Time Lords, to change them without triggering some kind of Armageddon”.  Due to the Pyroviles’ tapping of Vesuvius, the only way for The Doctor to stop their plans from destroying the entire human race is to destroy the tap and allow the volcano to erupt, with historic results.  And yet, he only has to let the city be destroyed; he can and does save one family whom history doesn’t even remember.  I think the fact that Donna is the one who reminds him of this, thus allowing him to save at least one person from a disaster (which has become kind of a fixation with him), is what really endears her to him despite her often-obnoxious interaction with him.  I love the running joke that the TARDIS translates the time travelers’ use of Latin phrases into Celtic for the ears of actual Latin speakers, and it’s interesting to see the future 12th Doctor, Peter Capaldi, in a different role in the show.

I’m not exactly sure why I dislike Planet of the Ood.  It’s probably in part that the whole “it’s OK to enslave these beings because they are born that way, but not really” thing was already done to death in Doctor Who before it was cancelled the first time in 1989, and partly because even setting the considerable moral problems aside, chattel slavery on that scale doesn’t even make any economic sense in a world where robots exist, especially considering the abhorrent “processing” necessary, which is itself an issue.  I mean, holy shit, what disciple of Mengele even came up with the idea of lobotomizing a sentient being to install a translation device?  And how in Darwin’s name would something like that even evolve in the first place, even in a predator-free environment?  How did they even gather food in a state of nature?  Because presumably they need to feed the giant brain thing, just as ants feed their queen; did the evil corporate guys feed it, or did it just somehow exist without food for 200 years?  Maybe they were genetically engineered to be that way by some long-lost ancient race?  If so, maybe a hint at that from some boffin-type would’ve been nice.  And how the hell do they know how to turn humans into Ood?  What?  What?  Even in horror, we need more information than this; in science fantasy, it’s just irritating and distracting.

The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky is for the most part a pretty run-of-the-mill alien invasion two-parter; though the Sontarans’ plans for the Earth is at least somewhat novel, it once again ignores the fact that this would actually be much easier to pull off on an uninhabited planet, unless Sontarans’ clone farms actually need billions of tons of decaying biomass to run properly.  We’ve also got the typical sociopathic mad scientist cooperating with the aliens for his own self-aggrandizement, yay.  But the story is redeemed by two factors: it’s the first UNIT story in 19 years (12 years in-universe), and The Doctor is brought in by Martha Jones (who’s now working for UNIT thanks to a recommendation from him).  UNIT now clearly has a great deal more money, and their flying command carrier, the Valiant, designed in part by The Master, makes its first appearance on the side of the goodies.  And Frema Agyeman’s performance as Martha here, especially her easy familiarity with The Doctor, cemented her character’s high ranking in my companion list.

Martha shows her stuff again in the next episode, The Doctor’s Daughter, when a ride home in the TARDIS turns into a trip to the 61st century which drops the travelers into the middle of a civil war among colonists.  The war is conducted by soldiers pumped out by machines which instantly clone young adult soldiers from donor DNA, program their brains with the necessary knowledge and skills, and even put uniforms on them; the titular character (played by the daughter of 5th Doctor actor Peter Davison) really is The Doctor’s daughter in a genetic sense, and it’s a pity that the ending, which seemed ripe for a sequel, was never followed up.  Another flaw: given what Donna discovers about this war, how is the general (played by Nigel Terry, who was King Arthur in Excalibur) so old?  Do the clones continue to rapidly age after popping out of the machine?  Because if so, that seems like a major problem with equipment designed to start a colony; otherwise, the technology in the episode all feels of the same level, which is unfortunately not the rule in Doctor Who.  Contrary to The Doctor’s fears when they first met, Martha & Donna get along well, and Donna proves her value both practically & emotionally.  And I love the knowing, “Oh, honey, you’ll see eventually” look Martha gives her when she declares she will travel with the Doc “forever”.

Doctor Who has done Agatha Christie pastiches before; “The Curse of Peladon” roughly fits the formula, and “Black Orchid” follows it right down to the English country house in the 1920s.  But The Unicorn and the Wasp does those one better by making this a neo-historical in which The Doctor and Donna meet Christie herself on the day of her disappearance in 1926.  In real life, it seems the abortive “disappearance” may have been an ill-considered plot by the great lady herself to get rid of her cheating husband by having him suspected of her murder.  But in Doctor Who it was the work of…a giant space wasp which set about murdering people because it absorbed the plots of her first six novels from its human mother via an alien telepathic device kind of like the ones used by Arcateenians, and Christie’s amnesia was genuine and caused by feedback from the device when the giant space wasp died.  Yes, it’s as silly as it sounds, but everybody plays it absolutely straight, which makes it actually a lot of fun.  Most of the characters are adapted from the game “Cluedo” (“Clue” in North America); the first victim is Professor Peach in the library with the lead pipe, etc.  And the plot itself appears to have been inspired, early ’60s sci-fi comic style, by the cover of a 1950s paperback edition of the Hercule Poirot adventure, Death in the Clouds.  And to head off smarty-pants viewers, The Doctor even produces a facsimile edition of the book published in the Year Five Billion.  On paper.  Proving my theory about the people of that time being refugees from the early 22nd century once again.  Oh, and did I mention that the dialogue is absolutely littered with references to the titles of Agatha Christie novels? (Sparkling Cyanide, Appointment With Death, N or M?, etc).

Those who have been following this thread closely have probably noticed that I’m not counting what might be called “quasi-companions” with the “full-time companions”, because I consider them a horse of a different color. In this category, Captain Jack Harkness falls right under The Brigadier, who in turn falls just under one of my favorite Doctor Who supporting character of all, River Song.  Since I do like her so much, and I’m an unrepentant bibliophile, and I used to be a librarian, and I’m a huge horror fan with a particular affinity for stories about Darkness (with a capital “D”) and Shadows (with a capital “S”), and for stories in which Dream is a separate reality from the waking world, it should come as no surprise that I like Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead so much.  In addition to everything I already mentioned, I need to say again that I really wish more Doctor Who writers understood how to handle time travel narratives as well as Steven Moffat does; as a rule, The Doctor tends to meet other time travelers in sequence with his own timeline, so they both remember exactly the same encounters in the same order.  But there’s absolutely no reason this should be so, and Moffat gets this.  River’s slow realization that despite her many years of loving The Doctor, he hasn’t even met her yet at the time of this adventure, is both heartbreaking and beautifully portrayed by Alex Kingston, whose facial expressions tell us even more than her words, especially once she realizes that all the time she’s known him, he knew exactly when and how she would die.

I’ve hinted before that I maintain a separate ranking of what might be called “quasi-companions”, those who only travel with The Doctor for a short time or intermittently, and therefore can’t be properly compared to full-time companions.  As I wrote before, River Song is at the top of this list, followed by The Brigadier and then Captain Jack; next on the list is Mickey Smith, who really comes into his own after meeting his counterpart in the parallel world, and is a total kickass UNIT agent by the time he marries Martha Jones.  After him, I’m not counting single-story characters who appear in the same story as a regular companion and never travel in the TARDIS (like the tree lady in “The End of the World“), but I do count ones who fill the companion role in specials.  So the whole list is:

River Song
The Brigadier
Captain Jack Harkness
Mickey Smith
Astrid Peth
Wilfred Mott
John Benton
Lady Christina de Souza
Mike Yates
Sarah Kingdom
Katarina

In some ways, I like Mickey & Wilfred better than the companions they’re associated with. And the only reasons Clyde Langer isn’t on the list are 1) he never travels in the TARDIS; and 2) he’s actually Sarah Jane’s companion rather than The Doctor’s. If he were a Doctor companion he’d be above Wilfred, maybe even above Astrid (hard to judge because we see much more of Clyde).

The Davies era was a Golden Age for those who like a lot of horror in their Doctor Who; several episodes per season were genuinely scary, and series 4 had a block of them starting with “Silence in the Library” and ending with “Turn Left”.  The one in the middle, Midnight, managed to be one of most chilling of the entire series, and managed to do so with only one main set, a bare minimum of special effects, a really effective score, and some very fine acting.  This intensely claustrophobic little thriller has zero gore and doesn’t even show the monster, a sort of malevolent genius loci with the power to possess material life; the horror is intensified by the fact that, for a change, The Doctor loses control of the situation at the outset and never regains it.  It’s one of the few episodes in which he actually loses; he doesn’t save any lives, doesn’t defeat the monster, and never even finds out what it is; furthermore, he almost loses his own life in the bargain, and is only saved by the heroic intervention of the bus hostess, who despite being one of the chief drivers of the passengers’ panicked, paranoid hostility from the outset, finally realizes just in time that The Doctor’s analysis of the danger is correct.  One subtle contributor to the terror is a Davies specialty (it also pops up in Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures); namely, the use of folkloric motifs which tap into a very deep, old, primitive, irrational part of the brain; in this case it’s the idea of “stealing a person’s voice”, and not even The Doctor is immune.

Another Davies specialty is the interaction of companions.  In Classic Doctor Who and post-Davies New Who, it was extremely rare for two companions who don’t travel with The Doctor together to even meet each other, much less share an adventure together.  But there are many Davies-era stories in which companions, including Captain Jack and Sarah Jane, meet; in Turn Left, Rose not only returns, but has more screen time than The Doctor!  When Donna is targeted by a beetle-like entity belonging to The Trickster’s brigade, creating a parallel world in which she never met The Doctor, he dies fighting the Racnoss Empress and is therefore not around to defeat the many threats which followed over the next two years.  Sarah Jane and Martha are killed in the events of “Smith and Jones“, every member of Torchwood is killed defeating the Sontarans, London is destroyed by the crash of the Starship Titanic, and the impending cosmic disaster from the upcoming season finale causes cracks in the structure of time which allow Rose to slip through from her parallel world to show Donna just how pivotal she is and convince her to accept UNIT’s help to fix her past self’s mistake and restore the timeline.  This is a powerful episode culminating in moments of sheer horror (augmented, again, by Murray Gold’s masterful scoring) when The Doctor and Donna are suddenly surrounded by iterations of “Bad Wolf” and realize that the nightmare isn’t over; it’s just beginning.

Russell T. Davies wrapped up his tenure as chief steward of the Whoniverse with a sprawling, powerful, Götterdämmerung epic which was simultaneously an episode of Doctor Who, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures, and featured every companion and many of the supporting cast of the entire 4-year Davies era across all three shows.  And The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End (unlike earlier reunion shows such as “The Five Doctors“) actually utilizes the guest cast effectively rather than mostly having them standing around admiring The Doctor’s brilliance and/or falling down embankments.  And whereas those other reunions might have multiple incarnations of The Doctor, this one has three simultaneous incarnations of the same Doctor.  The villains are of course the Daleks, displaying a terrifyingly-high level of technology (just barely below that of the Time Lords), and Davros (rescued from the Time War by Dalek Caan at the cost of his own sanity) displays the extent of his own derangement, carrying his vision for his creations to its logical conclusion (as first revealed in “Genesis of the Daleks“).  Davros has always been a master manipulator, with the ability to twist the truth to suit his own ends, as he does here by pointing out that The Doctor turns his companions into weapons (“How many have died in your name?”)  But even he could not foresee that in seeing the totality of Time (and thereby gaining the power of prophecy), Dalek Caan would also gain understanding of exactly what abominations his entire race actually are, and decide to work behind the scenes to undermine Davros’ plans by manipulating Donna’s timeline to turn her into his own anti-Dalek weapon.  Rose and Mickey are magnificent; Martha is really magnificent; Torchwood is magnificent (though Gwen and Ianto are cleverly sidelined in the 2nd part by Toshiko’s virtually reaching out from beyond the grave to save them from the Daleks, thus leaving the stage to Jack and the other companions); Sarah Jane is MAGNIFICENT (and even K9 gets to play a role!); Donna saves the day; the technobabble flies fast and furious; the Doctor’s hand (cut off way back in “The Christmas Invasion“, found by Jack and kept for the last year by The Doctor) saves the day (yes, I know I said Donna did; same difference); Rose gets her own human version of The Doctor who can grow old and have children with her; Martha goes back to UNIT (though Jack is trying to get her to come over to Torchwood); we are shown just how powerful a TARDIS is when properly crewed; the scoring totally ROCKS and is possibly the best in the entire series; and in true Doctor Who tradition, our emotions are violently jerked around from fear to despair to joy to exultation to sorrow, that last as Donna is rewarded for her actions by suffering the most terrible fate ever to befall a companion.  Absolutely A+ in nearly every way.

Some people may feel that having one’s memories of the absolutely best, most important, most enlightening months of one’s life stolen away without one’s consent, stripping away the equivalent of a decade or more or personal growth with them, is better than death. The Tenth Doctor is apparently among them, due to his Time-War-trauma-born fixation on saving absolutely every single life he can; I am not. Under his influence, Donna went from being an awful, brash, loud, incredibly shallow person I would never have invited around for tea, to a deep person full of empathy, compassion, and insight. And while her importance had much more to do with her position in the Web of Time (thanks in large part to the machinations of Dalek Caan), the fact remains that she was better in every conceivable way for her travels with The Doctor before her transformation into the DoctorDonna doomed her. It’s hard to tell whether she’s genuinely refusing the removal of those memories to save her biological life; she keeps saying “No no no”, but she doesn’t really resist very hard and we know Donna has the backbone to refuse if she was really opposed. So it’s really difficult to gauge if The Doctor’s telepathic surgery was really against her consent, but it’s awful no matter how you slice it. As for my judgment of Donna as a companion: even though she improves, she’s still not really a lot of fun to watch except in her comic relief moments. So I’m putting her between Polly and Ben, at the top of the “OK but no stars” range:

Sarah Jane Smith
Josephine Grant
Ian Chesterton
Barbara Wright
Martha Jones
Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Zoe Heriot
Romana II
Jamie McCrimmon
Rose Tyler
Nyssa of Traken
Elizabeth Shaw
Romana I
Polly Wright
Donna Noble
Ben Jackson
Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown
Harry Sullivan
Dorothea “Dodo” Chaplet
Tegan Jovanka
Susan Foreman
Steven Taylor
Melanie Bush
Vicki Pallister
Adric
Victoria Waterfield
Vislor Turlough

The Next Doctor may very well be my favorite Doctor Who Christmas episode of all.  The villains are the Cybermen, a few of whom escaped the Void into which The Doctor cast them at the end of “Doomsday” when the walls of the worlds began to break down due to Davros’ machinations in the preceding episodes.  They fall into 1851, where the technological resources are insufficient to build a full-fledged cyber conversion plant right away; so instead they build a gigantic steampunk “Cyber King” run by the brain of a malevolent Dickensian workhouse manager who views children only as work units.  But that’s not what makes this one so good and so much fun; it’s the titular character, a Victorian gentleman who believes himself to be The Doctor right down to having a companion, a “sonic screwdriver”, a “TARDIS”, and a lot of anachronistic knowledge.  The interplay between this good, heroic man and the real Doctor is wonderful and brilliant and would have cemented the 10th Doc’s high ranking in my list had the previous three seasons not already done that.

Planet of the Dead is a pot-boiler; its sole purpose was to keep interest in Doctor Who alive between seasons.  This doesn’t mean it’s bad; it’s actually a lot of fun.  It’s interesting to see a threat which is dire but not malevolent (the creatures are unintelligent); the characters are interesting and engaging, and The Doctor putting in a word to get the two unemployed young men jobs with UNIT is a nice touch.  Yes, this is a UNIT story, which always adds fun; the scientific advisor is one of the best guest characters ever, and I loved that he and the officer were fanboying/girling all over The Doctor on the phone.  It was little touches like that which made this one notable, including fanservice like references to “Robot” and pretty clearly establishing that Professor Quatermass exists in the Whoniverse, as previously hinted at in “Remembrance of the Daleks“.  There are also lots of other little references tying the story into the greater continuity, including The Doctor’s clearly being deeply upset by what he felt he had to do to Donna, and the psychic lady’s premonition of his impending death.  But I’m sorry, I just did not like the proto-companion, Lady Christina; I can smell a sociopath a mile off, and I suspect The Doctor can as well because though there was obviously mutual attraction and he made lots of comments about how well they worked together, in the end he refused to take her with him based on a rather flimsy excuse which has never actually stopped him before.  Though he didn’t know about it, her flippant abandonment of her partner at the beginning of the episode says a lot about her; obviously she couldn’t have done anything against the cops on the spot, but neither do we have even a hint she’s going to try to rescue him or even get him a lawyer after she gets away, which to me says that when The Doctor was captured by far more dangerous enemies than cops (Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans…) in the future, she’d be off in the TARDIS with no more than a “Sorry, lover” tossed over her shoulder, just as she did here.

The second official Tennant-era animated story was Dreamland; it was broadcast just a little before Tennant’s two-part finale, but I thought the viewing advice I mentioned before was good, so I placed it here, before “The Waters of Mars”.  I’m not a fan of so-called “3D” computer animation; I like neither the stiffness of the character models nor the weird, bobbly sort of way they move (which reminds me of Gerry Anderson’s “Supermarionation”, only cheaper-looking and less fun).  But after a while, I’m usually able to kinda get used to it and enjoy the show.  One thing I did like about this one over “The Infinite Quest” was that they actually took advantage of the animation medium to create aliens that would’ve been much more difficult and expensive to depict in live action, and including David Warner in the cast (probably the greatest living movie villain now that Christopher Lee has gone), even as just a voice, definitely wins points in my book.  The episode itself is a pretty basic Doctor Who story, neither especially good nor especially bad, and in the grand Who tradition offers an explanation for an historical mystery, in this case the whole Area 51 flying saucer crash legend, complete with Spielbergian “greys”.  Fun game for Americans with sharp eyes: spot the errors and anachronisms, such as an I-25 sign in 1947.

After The Doctor’s guest appearance on The Sarah Jane Adventures, he seems to have tooled around himself for a while, eventually ending up on Mars in 2059; in The Waters of Mars he must once again face the conflict between saving lives and backing off from interfering in “fixed points in time“, in this case the destruction of the first Earth colony on Mars, which shapes future space exploration.  The episode is tense to the point of harrowing; the monsters are horrifying and will stick in your head long after the show is over; the script is properly respectful to established Who continuity regarding the Ice Warriors (unlike “The Ambassadors of Death“); and most importantly, the story demonstrates exactly why it’s a bad idea for The Doctor to travel without companions for very long.  Indeed, it’s especially important now that the other Time Lords are gone (at least for the moment) because without the grounding influence of mortals, Time Lords begin to become so megalomaniacal they ignore laws of nature as they do mere laws of man. That raises the rather horrifying possibility that, had he not developed the habit of traveling with others (thanks to Susan, Ian, and Barbara), The Doctor might eventually have become much more like The Master.  There’s one final, but extremely important detail here: the commander says she was inspired as a child to become a space explorer when she saw different stars in the sky, and her parents were killed by the Daleks; given that the Earth being stolen by Daleks in 2009 was not part of future history before the Time War, when contemporary Daleks first invaded Earth in the 22nd century, this means that the Time War not only rewrote history (and thus some Doctor Who continuity), but also created new “fixed points in time” which didn’t exist before, thus unraveling the Web of Time and reweaving it in a different pattern, at least where Daleks and Time Lords are involved.  No wonder so many creatures from The Dawn of Time suddenly started appearing.

Russell T. Davies’ tenure as chief steward of the Whoniverse went on for a year and a half after its huge finale, so the last encore had to be pretty spectacular, and The End of Time delivers.  The Doctor has known for over a year that his “song is ending” (as the Ood expressed it), and more recently he was told what the omen of his imminent demise would be: “He will knock four times“.  When the newly-reborn Master (now with sho-nuff supervillain powers such as super-speed and energy blasts thanks to a properly comic-bookish destructive interaction of the process his cult [because of course he has one] uses to revive him and the potion with which his long-suffering wife was attempting to destroy him) bangs out a beat of four on a garbage can, we naturally assume that this is the fulfillment of the omen, but instead it’s someone else entirely:  Donna’s grandfather Wilfred, playing the companion role here, who has apparently been guided to his destiny by a mysterious Time Lady whose identity is never revealed, but whom I personally suspect is The Doctor’s actual daughter, Susan’s mother, a member of the High Council opposing Rassilon’s scheme to end the Time War by destroying spacetime itself so the Time Lords become the only beings in existence, in an elegant reflection of Davros’ scheme from “The Stolen Earth“, with the mystery woman as the counterpart to Dalek Caan.  Oh, didn’t I mention Gallifrey is back, and that during the Time War the desperate Time Lords resurrected their greatest leader?  Did I also forget to tell you that Rassilon the Terrible was also the one who drove The Master mad when he was just a Time-tot by sending that quadruple drumbeat into his head so the Time Lords would have something to get a fix on in order to pull their decadent arses out of the fire of their own making?  And that The Master’s revenge results in his momentary reform by foiling Rassilon’s whole plan and thereby sending Gallifrey back to its demise?  Well, I did tell you it was a hell of an encore, and like all encores it includes curtain calls as the dying Doctor visits all the people he’s loved in this incarnation, though always at a distance:  he leaves Wilfred a winning lottery ticket for the newly-wedded Donna (who inadvertently played a part in the preceding proceedings); rescues Luke Smith from being hit by a car while observed by Sarah Jane; saved Martha Jones and Mickey Smith (now married and working for UNIT) from a Sontaran sniper; nudges Captain Jack (drowning his sorrows in a space bar) toward Midshipman Alonso from “Voyage of the Damned“; and attends the book-signing of Verity Newman, the great-granddaughter of the woman he loved in “Human Nature“, who has turned his notebook into a novel; and even slips back to New Year’s Day of 2005 to look upon Rose, who has yet to meet him.  All in all, the whole is a powerful, touching, satisfying end to one of the greatest eras in Doctor Who history, and one which not only sets up the 50th anniversary but gives us an idea of why Queen Elizabeth I was angry at him.

If you’ve been reading this thread for a while, you probably recall that David Tennant is my second-favorite Doctor after Tom Baker, and our recent review merely confirmed that. Part of the reason is that many of the elements of his personality resonate with qualities I love in the Fourth and Third doctors; like both of them he’s an Action Doctor; like the Fourth he’s very magnetic and forceful, and even sometimes scary when enemies provoke him to righteous anger; and like the Third he’s much more human than some of his other selves, capable of great love and kindness, and doesn’t really hide or deny his sexuality (if anything, he revels in it to a greater degree than in any other incarnation).  I love his humor and his sincerity, and I respect that he’s much less willing to blatantly lie than in most of his other lives.  As I’ve said before, it’s difficult to parse out how much of my appreciation of a particular Doctor is due to his portrayal vs how much derives from the writing and script supervision, but with Doctor #10 I have the contrast with #9, under the same showrunner, and that contrast is very sharp.  Above all else, I think it’s the realness of Tennant’s Doctor which endears him to me; for the most part he’s like a real person rather than a character, like someone you might actually know and love, and the way he mourns for the passing of one particular part of his long life, despite knowing that his life as a whole will continue, is something I can deeply relate to in my own experience.

ELEVENTH DOCTOR

Series 5  (Show Runner: Steven Moffat)

As I’ve pointed out before, stories introducing a new Doctor are rarely very good, and some are just plain bad.  But The Eleventh Hour is an exception; in fact, it’s really quite good.  One of the reasons these shows are usually lackluster is that the creators are concentrating on introducing a new Doctor, often a new companion, and sometimes even a new producer or head writer or the like, so there just isn’t enough bandwidth for an interesting villain or a compelling plot.  But “The Eleventh Hour” has a new Doc, new companion, new villains, new showrunner, and still manages an excellent tale.  The usual post-regenerative weirdness actually contributes to the plot rather than detracting from it, serving to help establish the new companion’s character; for only the second time in the entire run of the series we have a companion whose entire life has been influenced by The Doctor from a young age (the first was, of course, Susan).  And I think the fact that so many people in Amy’s small town recognize the “Raggedy Doctor” as Amy’s “imaginary friend” is a brilliant piece of storytelling, with obvious echoes of “The Girl in the Fireplace” (the more so because Amy, like the Madame, is a sex worker).  The climactic scene, in which The Doctor defeats alien cops by inviting them to review their records of past invasions, introducing himself, and then simply saying, “Run”, was absolutely magnificent, and Moffat’s trademark time-skipping is something the series should’ve had more of from the beginning.

Various factors pull me in different directions regarding The Beast Below.  On the one hand, I love callbacks and glorious Whovian weirdness, so a story about the residents of the UK fleeing the solar flares of established future history by building a supersized city-state on the back of an astropelagic creature (see link in previous tweet) and having the future Queen know about The Doctor from “family history” (including his complicated relationship with Queen Victoria) put a lot of weight on the “plus” side of the scale.  However the “minus” side has some heavy weight as well: bad math (eight ruling queens of one name in barely over 1000 years?); poor continuity-keeping (putting the solar flares in the 31st century or thereabouts violates far too many other “future history” episodes to count); “frozen culture” syndrome (compare current British culture to that of the 11th century and then tell me you believe it’ll look basically as it does now in the 31st); and far too much emphasis on style over sense (the Smilers were far too reminiscent of the execrable “Happiness Patrol” from the 7th Doctor’s run, and so indicative of a totally deranged society I didn’t actually give a damn if they lived or died).  I did like the new Doctor’s practice of explaining his seemingly-magical observational abilities, and Amy is already showing her mettle even though she’s just barely started her travels with The Doctor.

Victory of the Daleks is what one might call a “plot-boiler”, an episode whose main purpose is to introduce some new series element, such as a new companion (or, in this case, a “new Dalek paradigm”).  Other than that, it’s just a pretty basic story with a very schoolboy plot (“What if Churchill had super space Spitfires at the Battle of Britain?”) but it also has some good character-defining moments for both The Doctor and Amy, and a beautifully-drawn guest character in the person of Dr. Bracewell.  It also has the first hint of the importance of the “crack in time”, because Amy doesn’t remember the Daleks from “Doomsday” or “The Stolen Earth” and The Doctor realizes nobody remembers a giant Cyberman stomping around London at Christmas, 1851.

How did I forget how good The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone is?  Probably because it needs repeat viewing to savor all the goodness; even on this rewatch I kept pausing it to repeat scenes. In order to keep the Weeping Angels scary for their second appearance, Moffat dramatically increased their numbers and gave them a new power appropriate to creatures from “The Dawn of Time”:  the ability to come through their own images, which would already be the stuff of nightmares in print before it’s compounded by depicting them on your TV screen (try thinking of that while watching this alone at home on a dark and stormy night.  You’re welcome.)  The Church is an exceptionally cool future history development (I really like the way the writers have fleshed out the 51st century setting), and it’s great to see a sci-fi writer thinking about how artificial gravity, that ubiquitous feature of sci-fi starships, would actually behave if it existed.  But the best episodes are character-driven, and this one is no exception.  The Bishop is interesting, Angel Bob is horrifying, and Amy shows that she was born to be a companion with that incredible blind walk to safety.  The interaction between her and River is so especially delicious on re-watch, knowing both characters’ stories, that I almost want to re-watch those scenes again just to savor them, and River is just so River here I am forcefully reminded of exactly why I love her so much.  The grafitti on the home box as a way of contacting The Doctor is a brilliant illustation of both her trust in him and the way time travel would work, and the words needed to sufficiently describe my feelings about her panache would turn this into porn.  One of these days I’m going to show up at a convention dressed as River; I’ve already got the hair and the nose, and I know where I can borrow the shoes.

What makes Vampires of Venice interesting certainly isn’t its plot, in which yet another thoroughly-nasty alien species with yet another conveniently-ambiguous level of technology uses yet another displacement from its home to justify yet another attempt to conquer Earth in yet another picturesque historical period using perception filters yet again to appear as human.  The aliens are yet another explanation for vampires, whose leader is yet another insect-like queen with an immense brood of offspring who tries to confuse The Doctor with talk of genocide when he’s about to ruin her nasty scheme. The technobabble explanation for why they don’t show up in mirrors is pretty good, but the explanation for how they transform humans into their own kind is absurd.  And yet the story works because of the characters: this is Rory’s first trip in the TARDIS and it’s interesting to watch him adjusting; and the day is saved not by The Doctor, but by the heroic boatbuilder sacrificing himself to blow up the vampire brides.  But did the writers just completely forget that there are about 10,000 alien pirahna-mantis-things loose in the canals of Venice?  I mean, they can’t repoduce, but they will certainly be a menace until they die off.

Amy’s Choice is an entirely character-driven episode; the imaginary menaces don’t even show up until it’s halfway through, and the plot hinges upon Amy’s desire to “have her cake and eat it, too”.  There’s also a competition between Rory and The Doctor to each win her to his “side”, a fact which the villain (who appears to be The Valeyard again, proving that The Doctor still hasn’t completely integrated him yet) uses to his advantage by setting up a false reality vs dream dichotomy which it takes The Doctor quite some time to see through.  Though the conflict is certainly one that needs to be addressed, I can’t help think it could’ve been handled better; the story isn’t bad, but it’s kind of humdrum and both scenarios seemed pretty unbelievable to me (especially the “cold star”).

When featuring a recurring foe, Doctor Who writers need to mind they don’t simply hang new window-dressing on the same old framework.  The tendency to do so hurt both Dalek and Cyberman serials in the ’60s and ’70s, so one would think Chris Chibnall would know better than to do it with the Silurians, in The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, their first appearance since 1984’s “Warriors of the Deep“.  Chibnall isn’t really a bad writer, but he frequently indulges in some very lazy habits, and this is a perfect example; it’s almost as though he was trying to remake the original “Silurians” serial beat for beat with modern pacing and special effects, with a few plot devices borrowed from other serials (such as “Frontios“) just to spice it up.  Hibernating Silurians interpret human mining as a threat?  Check.  Main Silurian leader wants peace, but military leader wants genocide?  Check.  Scientist studies captive humans?  Check.  Doctor is mostly blind to Silurian warmongering and blames humans?  Check.  Problem isn’t really solved, just passed to future generations of humans?  Check.  I could go on, but I’m sure you can see it.  Then at the end, the writers conspire to shock the viewers out of our “We’ve seen this before” complacency with a seemingly-pointless character death and a sudden development in the season arc.

Series 5 of NewWho was dominated by character-driven stories, but Vincent and the Doctor is almost purely about characters, and advertises it right there in the title.  The episode addresses mental illness in an unusually frank manner for a fantasy series in which illnesses are generally curable by some technobabble panacea (or a wave of the increasingly-powerful sonic screwdriver), even to the point where the monster itself, despite a cursory attempt to give it a “real” explanation in-universe, is in actuality a symbol for Van Gogh’s psychosis: the story is thus an allegory of the artists’s struggle against an invisible but very real monster that only he can see.  And at the end, Amy must face the hard, cold reality that sometimes, it is impossible to save someone from the monsters that torment them, even if you can clearly demostrate to the afflicted person exactly how much they mean (or will eventually come to mean) to others.  This is a very moving episode, one of the best of the Smith era, and I’m glad they were able to fit it into the arc.  Some of you may be familiar with this 1971 hit by Don McLean (from his American Pie album); even those who aren’t may enjoy it as topical, lovely, and sad:

The Lodger is a kind of companion piece to “Vincent”; while the latter examines The Doctor’s interaction with a most extraordinary person, this one features his interactions with very ordinary people.  As in the preceding episode, the menace is both nigh-incidental and largely allegorical, an example of a theme which was common in Classic Who but largely ignored in NewWho: the struggle of individual people against a system which aims to dehumanize individuals, reducing us to parts of a machine and callously disposing of those it cannot use.  The point is driven home by the fact that The Doctor cannot use any of his technology against it: the TARDIS is out of reach and the sonic screwdriver would alert the monster to his presence (hence the clever-weirdo detector thing he builds), and the menace (a parasitic entity pretending to be part of normal life, and accepted by most as such) is ultimately defeated by two ordinary people being true to themselves.  The bulk of the story, though, is just Matt Smith’s Doctor being himself, with all the weirdness that entails.  Two final notes: I always enjoy when an episode contains little refences to other episodes, in this case the Van Gogh exhibition postcards. And I like the exploration of the extent of The Doctor’s telepathic abilities, including the “info dumps” and talking to a cat.

I wanted to like The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang much more than I actually did.  This is not to say I disliked it, because that wouldn’t be true; however, given the quality of Tennant’s season finales, and the participation of River Song, and the resolution of the “Cracks in Time” thing, and the timey-wimeyness, it should’ve been one of the best stories of the Smith era, and wasn’t.  There’s still a lot to like here, such as including most of the season’s guest characters, the plausible explanation behind Rory’s return and his superhuman devotion to Amy, River’s awesome tactic for getting The Doctor’s attention (and her execution of the Dalek pleading for mercy), the inclusion of Little Amelia Pond, etc.  But the disaster was much too exaggerated in scale and wasn’t even treated consistently onscreen, and the resolution was both kind of silly and blatantly metatextual; the whole thing practically screamed “I don’t like the scenario I inherited from the previous showrunner wherein alien visits to Earth are common knowledge, so I’m going to write that out of continuity.”  And even that would have been better had it been better explained; I’ll buy that time travelers can retain memories of beings “deleted from history”, but for those deleted things to leave behind physical evidence such as engagement rings, not to mention leaving the causal nexus undisturbed (if the Weeping Angels never existed in the first place, what caused the Byzantium to crash?) is unworthy of Moffat, who’s usually better at time paradoxes than that.  I mean, from a cosmological point of view there’s no way to get a metal-rich terrestrial planet without previous generations of stars.  No, the only way I can accept any of this is by interpreting it as a memory-thing, wherein somehow the victims of the cracks were removed from memory but not existence itself; that fits in with the way Amy is able to pull The Doctor back into existence.  I’m not sure exactly how that might work, but it’ll do for now and my brain will fill in the details later, probably with the help of some good cannabis edibles.  One final brickbat/bouquet pair: though I get what Moffat was trying to do with the Alliance, the list didn’t really make much sense because most of the included races don’t have time travel and others just didn’t belong (The Slitheen? Really?)  Daleks, sure.  Sontarans, definitely.  And the whole plan depended on the Nestenes’ mental powers, which makes this the first time that race isn’t a purely vanilla foe.  But most everybody else (including the Cybermen) were just there to pad out the spectacle, and the story would’ve been better without them.

Series 6  (Show Runner: Steven Moffat)

Series 6 and 7 of NewWho were liberally sprinkled with short “minisodes”; some of them are just extra scenes of regular episodes, whereas others (such as “Night and the Doctor” and the Comic Relief minisodes “Space” and “Time”) are generally amusing little standalone vignettes which develop the characters and show us what life in the TARDIS is like when The Doctor and his companions are not battling monsters or facing imminent doom.  Some revolve around dates with River Song that, again, don’t involve menaces but do involve historical personages such as JFK, Marilyn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra, or even persons widely believed to be mythical (such as Father Christmas).  A number of them take place during Amy and Rory’s honeymoon, during which period The Doctor seems to take them to various amazing places and then leave them to be alone while he goes off to have adventures of his own; it’s during one of these that “The Death of the Doctor” takes place, which we know because he specifically tells Sarah Jane and Jo that he has left Amy and Rory on a honeymoon planet.  These little stories are in the DVD sets, and are a lot of fun; among other things they show us that this Doctor, despite his pretense of asexuality and cluelessness about women, is quite the Casanova, and his aversion to being sexual with Amy is due to his still seeing her (deep down) as the little girl who fed him fish fingers and custard.  Note that in “Flesh and Stone” he even kisses her on the forehead, a gesture we’ve seen before with Jo and Zoe, two other companions he seems to view in a similarly paternal manner.  You don’t really need to watch these, but I would recommend you do, in this order; among other things, they lead right into the next full episode.

British creators have always been more willing to mix genres than their American cousins, resulting in productions like Space: 1999 (the first season is straight horror with sci-fi trappings) and of course Doctor Who (fantasy and often fantasy/horror with sci-fi trappings).  But every so often Doctor Who is willing to veer off squarely into a genre, and A Christmas Carol is a perfect example of this.  As I’ve said on multiple occasions, I judge Christmas episodes more loosely than others because they are clearly intended to be more whimsical (for the most part).  And given that this incarnation of The Doctor, with his goofy mannerisms, his Pee Wee’s Playhouse TARDIS console, and his schmoozing with the Rat Pack, is already more whimsical than any of his other selves since #2, it’s hardly surprising that his first Chrismas outing is a naked homage to Dickens (right down to the setting) that feels like it was co-written with the late Terry Pratchett, prominently features fish who swim in clouds and fog, and involves The Doctor reforming a villain by taking him out for adventures every Christmas Eve throughout his childhood and adolescence.  It’s lovely and beautiful and sweet and silly (in a good way) and is the only serious challenger to “The Next Doctor” as my favorite Christmas episode.

Moffat continued his run of strong season openers with The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, a two-parter so big and eventful it feel like a season finale, but is actually a continuation of the plot from the previous season, which observant viewers recognized wasn’t over even though it seemed to be.  This was the continuation of a trend from the Davies era of increasingly-huge arcs; by Season 6 it has grown so big that there are barely any episodes which aren’t part of it, reaching well into seasons 5 and 7 like the Web of Time itself.  Unfortunately for Moffat, this proved impossible to top in later seasons, and difficult to even follow; Chibnall’s sophomoric efforts at one-upmanship succeeded only in annoying or angering the fan base and necessitating the later return of Davies to clean up the mess (as of this writing it is unclear exactly how he’ll do that).  Even taking this story by itself, there’s a lot to love and be impressed by: starting a story with The Doctor inviting his wife, his closest friends, a short-term companion nobody knew about, and his 200-years-younger self to witness his own assassination on the shores of a lake in Utah is a pretty bold move, but the rest doesn’t disappoint.  Richard Nixon, Apollo 11, the show crossing its own timeline again in the opposite direction, beautifully-executed time loops, the scariest Doctor Who villains ever, super-creepy tunnels, River Song in general and that amazing dive into the swimming pool in particular, Canton Delaware III, creepy vision-based quasi-magical stuff in the same general vein as the Weeping Angels, and quite possibly the best, most satisfying example ever of The Doctor’s turning an enemy’s own power against it…wow.  And under it all, the clear truth that beneath his baby face and whimsicality, this is still the War Doctor.

Curse of the Black Spot is a good, basic Doctor Who tale of such classic lines (supernatural menace turns out to be alien, and not even actually a menace) that it could have been filmed with almost any of the Doctors. In fact, it’s a prequel to the First Doctor serial “The Smugglers“, in which some of Captain Avery’s former shipmates go looking for the treasure The Doctor throws overboard in this story; of course nobody knows that, because everyone who was present either went off in the TARDIS or in the alien ship from which the “siren” came.  It’s a fun adventure whose only real contributions to the main season arc are an appearance of Madame Kovarian and the backstory for why The Doctor’s allies at Demon’s Run included a crew of 17th-century pirates with a starship.

The Doctor’s Wife is one of those lovely Doctor Who stories which, like “The Deadly Assassin“, effortlessly introduces a number of new concepts that augment the mythos rather than trying to overwrite it (a la Nathan-Turner, Cartmel, and Chibnall).  So it should come as no surprise that it was written by Neil Gaiman, a writer’s writer who has earned the admiration of his fellows by making his virtuoso performances seem easy.  We’ve known since the very beginning that the TARDIS is alive, and that she communicates in practically every episode by translating alien and/or historical languages into English for our ears.  But we’ve never before been privileged to hear her speak directly to The Doctor, so for the first time we get to hear confirmation of things we always knew such as, “I always took you where you needed to be”; that she had “stolen” The Doctor from Gallifrey by leaving her doors unlocked so he could take her rather than another TARDIS; and that deleted rooms are never really deleted. Gaiman also introduces the concept that at least some Time Lords and Ladies can change sex during regeneration, and that “message cubes” (first seen long ago in “The War Games“) can act as a sort of “black box” for TARDISes.  The action is interesting and fun, but it’s mostly just there as a means of giving the TARDIS (who names herself “Sexy” because The Doctor so often refers to her as “you sexy thing”) a way to speak that both the Doc and the viewer can hear and understand without making that a permanent ability (as a less-careful writer might be tempted to do).  All in all, this one is among my favorites, not just among 11th Doctor stories or NewWho, but including all the stories in the entire 6-decade history of the show.

The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People is a very well-disguised major part of the main series arc.  Up until the very end it seems to be a standalone with only superficial connection to the big picture (as in the two previous episodes), and it wasn’t even written by the showrunner as major parts of the arc tend to be.  The one clue that this is not an “accidental” (because as the previous episode confirmed, there aren’t any truly accidental ones) arrival is a very subtle one whose significance is not revealed until the end: at the beginning The Doctor proposes dropping Amy and Rory off for fish & chips while he does “other stuff”, and Amy refuses.  We of course soon forget that seeming throwaway detail until the end, when we find out exactly what The Doctor didn’t want them to see.  This is the episode that for me begins to shift my opinion of Rory as a companion; my estimation of him went from “eh” to “there’s something to this guy” in “The Big Bang“, but it wasn’t until this story that we really see him as a case of still waters running deep.  The reason?  Because I interpreted Rory’s sympathy for the plight of the gangers as the product of his own memories of what it was like to exist for 2000 years as an “almost person”, an “imitation” of a “real” individual who nonetheless had all the emotions – including the noble ones like devotion and self-sacrifice – of the “real” thing.  The story could’ve been scarier and more suspenseful had there been more confusion about which was which (a la The Thing), but I don’t think that’s actually what the writers were trying to do here; they were opting for something more philosophical which explained Amy’s Schrödinger pregnancy, set up “A Good Man Goes To War”, and served a vital part of connecting the whole season together, and they succeeded admirably; the final scene especially hits like a gut punch.

In A Good Man Goes To War, we see that despite his baby face and whimsicality, #11 is still the War Doctor, and that for all his sanctimonious preaching about not being a killer, he’s perfectly capable of destroying an entire Cyberman battle fleet just to make a point.  He’s also able to raise an army from across time at short notice, including Silurian troops (led by Madame Vastra, who later becomes one of the best supporting characters in the history of the series) and the space pirates from “Curse of the Black Spot“.  This is, both literally and dramatically, the central story of the massive three-season arc showing not only how terrifying The Doctor has become and the lengths both his enemies and many people who think of themselves as good will go to destroy or neutralize him; it’s when we begin to suspect who The Silence actually are and what their part in destroying the TARDIS was, and finally reveals who River Song really is.  Since I have a very fast brain I’m rarely surprised by such plot developments, but in my first viewing with Lorelei a few years ago I was kept guessing up until we finally understand the significance of “The only water in the forest is the river”.  This is also the story in which Rory comes into his own, boldly striding through a freaking Cyberman command ship in his centurion outfit to deliver The Doctor’s message.  His fierceness in pursuit of rescuing his wife and child was both thrilling and admirable, and I loved Amy’s telling baby Melody about her father (in terms easily mistaken for a description of The Doctor).  Hell, there’s very little about this one I don’t love:  River’s speech to the Doctor is moving and right; the disgraced Sontaran, Strax, is welcome comic relief; the Doctor’s humiliation of “Colonel Runaway” reveals that his sadism in “The Family of Blood” was not a one-off; and the Headless Monks are quite possibly Moffat’s most utterly horrifying creations, the Weeping Angels notwithstanding.  Just an absolutely spectacular show, one of the best and most satisfying of the 11th Doctor’s entire run.

As I’ve pointed out before, really strong episodes are a hard act to follow, so one strategy is to make the follow-up stories very different in tone.  Let’s Kill Hitler adopts that strategy in its further exploration of how Melody Pond becomes River Song; while the central themes are very serious and extremely central to the big “Silence will fall” arc, the general tone of the episode is lighthearted and funny, at times verging on slapstick.  It’s not flawless by any means; that Amy and Rory’s best friend growing up was a juvenile delinquent named Mel should ideally have been referenced in previous episodes taking place in Leadworth, rather than revealed all at once in this story.  And I’d have liked a little more information about how Melody survived as a kid on her own from the time we see her regenerate in New York in January 1970 to the time we see her as a young schoolgirl in the late Nineties; I suspect there was a whole incarnation there, and that she chose to regenerate again after finding her parents (because as we’re shown, Time Ladies have more control over their regeneration than Time Lords do, and she seems to have chosen to appear as a child to blend in and be close to Amy and Rory).  But I’ll let that slide because the rest is so much fun: a time-traveling, shape-shifting robot controlled by tiny future people whose mission is to surreptitiously torture Bad People at the end of their lives.  “Get in the cupboard, Hitler!”  River admiring her new body in the mirror, coming on to The Doctor while trying to kill him, and generally behaving like a psychopath.  And a very, very clear demonstration that the 12-regeneration limit definitely applies to The Doctor, despite Chibnall’s later claims of infinite regenerative capability.  This one’s just a blast from start to finish.

The “kid with godlike powers” trope was done so perfectly in the 1961 Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life” that every later attempt at it would’ve probably been better left undeveloped.  But NOPE!  Night Terrors is much better than “Fear Her” because it’s much less complicated, the kid is both much younger and much less powerful, and the story is neither trying (clumsily) to insert subtext about domestic violence nor double as a PR commercial for some public spectacle.  But “better” is not the same as “good”.  The episode isn’t actually bad, but it’s certainly lackluster, and its positioning between two strong entries eclipses any luster it does have even more.  It’s a pot-boiler and nothing more, without even an important contribution to the season arc.

One of the things I really like in NewWho is its willingness to explore the human costs of sci-fi situations.  Variant timelines being erased by the heroes’ actions have been a part of time-travel stories since H.G. Wells was still alive, and Doctor Who is certainly no exception.  And while the erasure of a timeline full of suffering is a good thing on the cosmic scale, nobody seems to consider what it would feel like emotionally to know that you as you are will cease to exist, and another version of yourself will come into being.  The Girl Who Waited corrects that oversight: due to a simple mistake at a futuristic medical facility meant to ease the suffering of people with a virulent terminal disease, Amy is trapped in a time-stream where 36 years passes in the short time it takes The Doctor and Rory to reach her in the TARDIS.  The Doctor can correct the situation and bring back “past Amy”, but that means “future Amy” will never have existed, and all her waiting will be – in her own mind, at least – for naught.  And it’s Rory who must make the decision.  The full emotional impact of the dilemma becomes especially stark in comparison with the more typical treatment of the problem in “The Mad Woman in the Attic“, in which old Rani happily consents to being erased so that her younger self can have a happier life.  And again, while in the big picture it’s for the best, Rory is the one who had to talk to one version of the woman he loves through a closed door and tell her that he can’t save her because he has to rescue her younger, sweeter, prettier self.

I think the main problem with The God Complex is that it wanted to be big and important, but was really just “eh”.  Trapped people, alien who feeds on emotion, Doctor must save them, the end.  This one is a minotaur (said to be related to the Nimons) who feeds on faith, so The Doctor has to destroy Amy’s faith in him to defeat it (as he destroys Ace’s in “The Curse of Fenric“, though more gently).  But there are lots of plot holes; eg, why does the creature instantly starve to death when Amy loses faith?  Why does an alien prison ship look like an ’80s hotel (because “We could use this location cheap” is not an acceptable answer) even though the dialogue marks the time as contemporary?  And why does the situation, which was no worse than many others, upset The Doctor so badly that he says goodbye to Amy and Rory, gets them a house and car as a parting gift, then spends the next 200 years figuring out how to avoid his fate while traveling solo and “waving at them through time” as we saw earlier this season?

IMHO Closing Time would’ve been a much better story had the creators remembered that there are continuity nerds in the audience who get really agitated from stuff like a Cyberman ship being buried under London “for centuries” even though the original Cybermen first visited Earth in 1986, the alternate-world Cybermen weren’t created until 2007, and the Cybermen don’t have time travel.  Or a couple who never had sex until sometime in the second half of 2010 having a roughly 6-month-old baby by April of 2011.  Other than problems like that (which can, after all, be explained away by the Cyber ship “falling through time” a la “The Next Doctor” and “The Lodger” being said to occur in 2009 rather than 2010, because the 11th Doctor seems less concerned with crossing his own timeline than his predecessors; after all, his very first screen adventure takes place in 2009, before the Tenth Doctor even died, and then there’s the next episode, in which the criss-crossing begins to look like the snow after a slalom race, or like this sentence, for that matter, because you’ve probably already forgotten that this comment is entirely parenthetical), this episode is fairly amusing, what with The Doctor’s conversations with “Stormageddon” and the continuation of the “Craig is vexed because everybody loves The Doctor” running joke from “The Lodger” (which I already linked ICYMI).  Confused?  Now you know how my brain gets trying to fit all these interactions into my mental model, which it automatically does whether I like it or not, even when stoned.  And we didn’t even get to River Song.

In the last few minutes of “Closing Time”, we look in on River Song the day she receives her PhD; apparently Madame Kovarian and Company allowed her the kindness of letting her finish before abducting her, reactivating her deep conditioning, and stuffing her in a spacesuit to assassinate the man she loves at a “fixed point in time” (which we’ve already seen from the POV of an older River and a younger Doctor, Amy, and Rory).  It’s highly unusual for a season finale to be a one-parter, but The Wedding of River Song is really more like the third part of the season opener, moved in timey-wimey fashion down to the end of the season.  As I’ve mentioned before, Moffat’s view of the Whoniverse is much more fantasy than science fiction, and this episode illustrates that perfectly with its bizarre, overlapping, Pratchettesque anachronisms; as a lover of the mythology of trains, I was especially enchanted by the network of high-speed steam railways on Roman aqueducts running all the way from London to the US “Area 52” in th Great Pyramid near Cairo.  Now, the concept of history disintegrating like this just because somebody refuses to shoot somebody else is, frankly, absurd, and not really worthy of Moffat; “fixed points in time” only make sense if they cannot be changed (as in “The Fires of Pompeii“), rather than should not; it should’ve been impossible for her to refuse rather than merely inadvisable.  But I’m sure I’ll think of some explanation someday, and I’ll definitely try because the story is otherwise a lot of fun, and as I’m really quite sentimental under my adamantine exterior, I’m kind of a sucker for fictional weddings.  This one ties the story of the strange River/Doctor romance together with a big fancy bow; the way in which The Doctor escapes while satisfying the demands of the Web of Time is nothing short of brilliant, with the answer in plain sight for half the season; the reveal of what the Headless Monks do with their heads is utterly horrifying and only deepens the resemblance of their creepy “sufficiently advanced” technology to black magic; and Dorium Maldovar’s revealing that The Question which so terrifies The Silence they’re willing to risk everything is in reality the punchline of a half-century-long shaggy dog story, is only matched by Amy’s reaction to the realization that she’s The Doctor’s mother-in-law.  P.S. – That The Doctor reacted to the news of the death of his old friend The Brigadier by recognizing that he should stop running and finally face the prospect of his own death was sad, touching, and dramatically perfect.

Series 7  (Show Runner: Steven Moffat)

The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe was an enjoyable Christmas cookie of no great substance, mostly notable for The Doctor’s fervent attempts to build family-like connections to others while keeping the secret that he’s still alive.  Continuity nerds may also be amused by the tree-harvesters coming from Androzani Major, a planet we haven’t heard mentioned since the Fifth Doctor’s swansong.  But this is as good a place as any to point out that while he’s good at keeping time loops and similar strangeness straight, Steven Moffat is terrible at synchronizing those knots with any calendar connected to the real world.  Whenever he tries to coordinate spans of time with real dates, we get messes like the nigh-instant baby in “Closing Time” or the concluding scene of this taking place almost two years after its predecessor (which would be the end of 2012), then the following July being the start of a year-long contemporary-setting adventure (“The Power of Three“) followed by Amy & Rory’s departure in…2012?  So when those of you interested in such things read the book I’m going to include all of this stuff in, you’ll understand why I have to make assumptions like “Amy was exaggerating” in order to get anything to jibe with a calendar for a world of linear time.

One example of Moffat’s refusal to coordinate his stories with the calendar is set up in the next episode, Asylum of the Daleks, or rather in its five mini-prequels collectively entitled “Pond Life”, which set the date of “Asylum” as August (2012?)  And yet the year-long “The Power of Three” must start in July to possibly get the later-season episodes in by their official 2013 dates.  By this point, Moffat knew he’d be writing Amy and Rory out and facing the perennial “hard act to follow” problem, so he shakes up our perception of them a bit by introducing short-lived marital problems (which, given the couple’s bizarre lifestyle, are only unrealistic in their ease of resolution), and also by sneakily and punnily foreshadowing the new companion in the person of “souffle girl”.  It’s not really clear when this story takes place, but since it’s after the Time War but before the end of the Siege of Trenzalore I figure late 49th century; that matters because it also marks the beginning of The Doctor’s plan, hinted at the end of the previous season, of wiping himself out of every database in the universe so he can “step back into the shadows” rather than casting a titanic one himself.  The story is fairly interesting in itself, but like several others in NewWho is less important as an adventure and more important as the setup for the big season picture, including the departure of Amy and Rory, the new companion, the Seige of Trenzalore, and the 50th anniversary events Moffat has been leading up to since “The Eleventh Hour“.

I’m not directly featuring most of the “minisodes” from the DVD sets, but this one is important enough to the big picture that I want to emphasize it:

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is the apparent result of Chris Chibnall deciding to write the episode of Doctor Who he would’ve most enjoyed when he was 12, right down to the title.  Ancient astronauts!  Dinosaurs!  Ordinary dudes flying a spaceship!  A clearly and unambiguously evil baddie!  Killer robots with comical personalities!  Queen Nefertiti!  An Allan Quatermain ripoff!  A guy adventures with his dad!  So despite the fact that it was first broadcast in September, I’m going to apply the looser standards of Christmas episodes: fun fluff, judged as such.

As I’ve pointed out before, Doctor Who is generally sci-fi tinted fantasy or horror; it’s so rare that the show does hard sci-fi I had to go all the way back to Doc #4 to find one I noted as such in this commentary.  But A Town Called Mercy definitely belongs to the genre in its use of believable future technology (rather than magic disguised with sci-fi electroplating) to address real-world issues like the morality of war, the location of the line between justice and vengeance, and the complex and nuanced morality of real humans rather than the usual black hat/white hat morality of televised adventure fantasy.  Ben Browder (John Crichton from Farscape) leads a solid cast as the highly-principled marshall of Mercy, a town in the US “Old West” dedicated to the principle that everyone deserves a second chance, and that lynch mobs are no substitute for due process.  It’s a very underrated story with an extremely satisfying payoff, and Amy demonstrates once again why The Doctor should not travel alone for long.

The Power of Three ratchets up the date confusion even more; if we accept every on-screen date and every statement made by Amy and Rory, “Asylum” takes place in August ’13, “Dinosaurs” in June ’14, then this one starts the following month and ends in July ’15 despite there being what look like Christmas lights in the background and Rory having said (in “Dinosaurs”) that he’s 31, which since he was born in 1989 would make that story set in 2020 and this one ending just this past summer, just in time for the next story, which is specifically said to start in 2012.  Unless they’re counting subjective time, which could mean all bets are off since Amy says they figure they’ve been with him about ten years in all {throws up hands in despair}.  Ignoring all that, the story itself is pretty “blah”, and ends by explaining a fascinating mystery away with a bog-standard alien plot that The Doctor defeats with a wave of his magic wand (oops, “sonic screwdriver”).  What makes the story interesting (though it has far too many problems to be really good) is that we get to see The Doctor coming into the companions’ lives rather than vice-versa.  The scenes where the trio run off to have silly untelevised adventures (that basically amount to jokes) make sense dramatically, because who would ever travel with The Doctor if it was all getting threatened, mind-controlled, captured, and zapped?  There must be more fun than fear, else they’d all have nervous breakdowns ere long.  And the Doctor’s conversation with Rory’s dad, Brian (who falls above Wilfred in my list of quasi-companions), foreshadows the events of the next episode. Outside of the running off in the middle of parties to have secret adventures, there’s more than a whiff of Third Doctorness about this one (though he also ran off during a party once, sans companions), which is appropriate because it introduces into Doctor Who canon the character of Kate Stewart, a UNIT bigwig who uses a truncated version of her surname to avoid drawing attention to the fact that she’s the daughter of The Brigadier, and judging by her apparent age was born during the Third Doctor’s time with UNIT.  Kate first appeared in the direct-to-video production “Downtime“, which despite its unofficial status fits comfortably into the canon.

If there were such a thing as the Platonic ideal of a disappointing Doctor Who episode, The Angels Take Manhattan would be it.  Moffat was in the unenviable (though largely self-inflicted) position of having to write out the best, most popular companions of the entire run of NewWho, but apparently couldn’t bring himself to kill them and had kind of written himself into a corner by making them unwilling to stop themselves.  Now, I can think of a really easy, satisfying way to do that, but A) I’m not Moffat, and B) he already closed that route off in “Asylum of the Daleks” for a rather weak payoff, so he’d have needed to write a different adventure reversing Amy’s sterility and…chose not to.  So instead he gave us a lot of stuff that should have made this one great: River Song, the Weeping Angels, a hardboiled-detective aesthetic, timey-wimey stuff, a moving look into the depth of Amy and Rory’s love…and then wasted them.  All of them.  The characterizations were still right on (though The Doctor’s disproportionate anger at River for something that wasn’t her fault was both jarring and, IMHO, off-beat), but the explanations and situations were a hopeless muddle.  Since when can the Angels possess existing statues?  And even if they could, wouldn’t that be limited to stone, not copper on steel?  And statistically there is never a time that at least somebody isn’t looking at the Statue of Liberty; there might be a few seconds now and again they weren’t, but certainly not long enough for it to walk across the damned city with thunderous tread.  Plus how did they keep their prisoners in.Winter Quay alive for decades?  Did the angels prepare them meals, then leave their trays at their doors and knock?  Even given that the TARDIS can’t return to 1938 NYC, why couldn’t The Doctor just land in Philadelphia and rescue Amy and Rory by train?  If the problem is The Doctor as well, why not just send River?  Or if 1938 is the problem, given that River can send the MS to Amy, how about a letter arranging them to meet the TARDIS in, say, Boston a year or two later?  I’m sure there was a way Moffat could’ve made their exile make sense due to, say, the paradox of the book’s existence, but he didn’t do that; it appears to me he was getting tired and thinking less clearly, having expended all his creative energy by this point and therefore being forced to limp along on weaker material for the next 3 seasons.  All that having been said, the ending was still sad and sweet, and there’s a lovely epilogue not included on the discs.

After the loss of Amy and Rory, The Doctor does what we’ve seen him do before: he runs off somewhere and sulks for a long time.  In this case, the place he runs to is late-Victorian London (by the dates we’re given, from 1888 to 1892) where, in keeping with Moffat’s preference for the whimsical and fantastic, he parks his TARDIS on a cloud and creates an invisible spiral staircase almost all the way down to the ground (the last few meters are a fire-escape-type ladder), then proceeds to stomp around town, occasionally making bah-humbug noises.  The people he makes them to most are Madame Vastra, the lesbian Silurian detective Conan Doyle is supposed (in-universe) to have based Sherlock Holmes upon; her human wife and assistant Jenny; and their butler, the disgraced Sontaran Strax, all of whom we first met in “A Good Man Goes To War“.  All of this mythos is set up before The Snowmen in three minisodes (available in the Series 7 special features), wherein we see the trio trying to engage their friend again, even to the extent of making stuff up.  Incidentally, it’s dumbfounding to me that the “Paternoster Gang” was never spun off on their own, especially after Liz Sladen’s death ended The Sarah Jane Adventures.  They had great chemistry, and their stories are a perfect mixture of adventure, fantasy, and humor (as evidenced by their appearance in “The Snowmen”).  I don’t really have much to say about the story itself because it’s pretty boilerplate Doctor Who, entirely a vehicle for character introduction and development; aside from the Paternoster gang and Scrooge McDoctor turning back into our hero (with a new, more grown-up TARDIS console room), we get the introduction of a new companion, the anachronistic Clara Oswald (AKA “Souffle Girl”), who died the first time we saw her and does so again here, thus giving The Doctor a mystery to solve in order to boot him out of his hermit sky-cave and to try to distract us from the fact that despite clearly being built as the “perfect companion”, she’s a poor replacement for Amy.  The only other interesting thing about this one (beside being a mid-season Christmas special) is that it features the origin of the Great Intelligence, whom The Doctor will battle again (or already battled, from his POV) in 1935 Tibet and then 1967 London, the latter being the adventure in which he first met then-Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, leading to the formation of UNIT.  The story also provides an interesting origin for the weirdness of the Great Intelligence’s plans (to conquer the world with snowmen and to invade the London Underground, because it “thought-mirrored” The Doctor’s 1967 Underground lunch box).  Honestly, it does make a kind of sense, as long as you don’t think about it too hard.  Plus it’s a Christmas episode, so looser standard.

It’s not surprising that The Doctor behaves this way; as River Song has pointed out, he hates endings, and Amy and Rory are the best companion couple in the entire series, beating out even Ian and Barbara due to their easy friendship with The Doctor and the comfortable way they mix “real life” with “Doctor life”.  Individually, each is a top-drawer companion; Amy is the only companion in NewWho to make it into the ranks of the immortals (just below Sarah Jane and Jo Grant, above even Leela and Ian), and Rory falls just below Martha and above Ace (making him the highest-rated male companion except for Ian, beating even Jamie).

Sarah Jane Smith
Josephine Grant
Amy Pond
Leela of the Sevateem
Ian Chesterton
Barbara Wright
Martha Jones
Rory Williams
Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Zoe Heriot
Romana II
Jamie McCrimmon
Rose Tyler
Nyssa of Traken
Elizabeth Shaw
Romana I
Polly Wright
Donna Noble
Ben Jackson
Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown
Harry Sullivan
Dorothea “Dodo” Chaplet
Tegan Jovanka
Susan Foreman
Steven Taylor
Melanie Bush
Vicki Pallister
Adric
Victoria Waterfield
Vislor Turlough

There are so many reasons to love them, both as people and as characters in an adventure show, that I could write an entire essay on it, but the primary reason in both cases is that they’re so real, not like dramatic devices at all.  We see them at home and interacting as a couple; we see Amy getting visits from her daughter, River, who even calls Rory “Dad”.  We see scenes of their growing up together and watch their relationship blossom, grow and weather storms.  We also see them mature, though Amy was a strange, solemn child even when she first met The Doctor, and we get an unusual number of opportunities to see that little girl, and not only in flashbacks.  I especially love that maturity in the way they are comfortable with fitting The Doctor into their lives without any “three’s a crowd” vibes; the understandable jealousy and awkwardness at first present in their interaction is the product of their minds and emotions adjusting to an extremely weird situation, and after all they’re only 21 at the time, and grow out of it.  But as I pointed out before, Rory is the definitive example of still waters running deep; he’s quiet but much more intelligent than Amy will admit (until she’s older), and when Amy or his daughter are in danger he shows what he’s made of.  But that’s unsurprising, because as anyone who’s been a sex worker for as long as I have (since 4 years before Amy was born) can tell you, that’s the kind of man it takes to form a lasting relationship with a sex worker: one who trusts his wife when she says he is the one she loves. What, you didn’t notice Amy started out as a sex worker?  At 19, she works as a “kiss-o-gram girl”, obviously code for a “strip-o-gram girl” (the kind of stripper who is hired to show up at guy’s offices or homes for birthdays and such rather than working at a club).  Did you note her list of costumes?  Sexy cop, nurse, nun…yep.  And that of course is another reason I love her so much, and why I’m willing to forgive more of Moffat’s sins than I otherwise might: Amy is portrayed as a person, not a stereotype.  Though she’s certainly a sexual person she’s not hypersexual, and her job is just a job, one she eventually replaces with modeling, then with writing; in the real world (rather than the fantasies of wankers, prohibitionists, and prohibitionist wankers) sex work is a job usually taken because it’s lucrative and flexible, and moved past when the sex worker finds something she likes better.  Amy is pragmatic, beautiful, and comfortable with herself and her sexuality; it’s not at all surprising she did stripping for a while.  In the big picture, I think she and Rory were exactly what the 11th Doctor needed to balance his whimsicality and detachment from reality: Two real, beautiful, grounded, strong, intelligent, loyal best friends.  It’s no surprise at all that he – and we – feel their loss so keenly.

The Bells of St. John starts with an intriguing mystery: after The Doctor spends some undetermined amount of time looking for Clara Oswald in order to clear up the mystery of how the same person with the same name and the same mannerisms can exist 3000 years apart (even visiting the 1990s and the early 13th century, but not simply looking her up on Google), she calls him on the TARDIS phone.  Not the one inside, but the fake police telephone on the outside; she claims the number was given her by some woman in a shop, and then the action quickly pulls the viewers’ attention away to an interesting little tale of paranoid horror in which the wifi is stealing people’s souls.  The villain, unrevealed until the end but pretty obvious early on for those paying attention, is the Great Intelligence again, one episode and 121 years after “The Snowmen” (or 46 years after “The Web of Fear” if you prefer), with its first plan that isn’t at least somewhat silly.  Incidentally, the Intelligence’s attacks are fairly evenly spaced: 43 years between the first two, 32 years between the middle two, then 46 years between the last two.  So we should expect another attack sometime in the 2050s or thereabouts, which I’m sure The Doctor will handle just as easily as he does this time, defeating the villain and saving hundreds of people while literally sitting at a cafe, sipping coffee.  But those of us with brains that zero in on gaps and holes are left wondering: who gave Clara the TARDIS phone number at exactly the right time?

The Rings of Akhaten takes one of the basic Doctor Who plots (Doc takes companion to see some spectacle, companion gets somehow involved, world-threatening menace appears, Doc severely underestimates danger, companion saves the day with a combination of cleverness, pluckiness, and sometimes Mary Sueness) and tries to dress it up with some truly awesome visual effects and space-motorbike antics.  But Doctor Who has never been about special effects, so even though this one doesn’t exactly try to cover up “a tired plot and cardboard characters” with “look at all the pretty pictures!” it’s still a pretty basic, pot-boilery episode, like leftovers served on fine china with a lovely table-setting.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about Doctor Who is its willingness to do episodes in genres other than sci-fi tinged fantasy or horror.  Cold War is the show’s take on ’80s technothrillers, as an Ice Warrior is defrosted on a Soviet nuclear submarine in 1983 and decides to use its nuclear missiles to start World War III.  Besides being a pretty tense (and fairly claustrophobic) suspense story, the episode is notable for three main reasons: 1) the presence of David Warner (who dominates and improves anything he appears in) as a pop-music-loving scientist; 2) the first appearance of an Ice Warrior since the Pertwee era; and 3) the show crossing its own timeline again; 1983 was the Fifth Doctor’s era, and while the 11th Doc was in that submarine, the 5th was busy running around with Tegan and Turlough and solving the mystery of what happened to The Brigadier.  I like these looking-back stories very much, despite their potential to make me feel old, given that I was already an adult university student at the time.

The following episode, Hide, is also a timeline-crosser; it takes place in November 1974, during the Third Doctor’s time with UNIT (which is probably how he knew about the ghost-hunters and their work); in fact, he even uses a blue Metebelis crystal to amplify the empath’s power.  The episode starts as a very effective horror story, and remains so even after The Doctor figures out that the terrifying “ghost” is actually the test-pilot of an early human time travel experiment (which, as we’ve seen before, produced quite a few bad outcomes before they eventually got it right in the late 51st century).  But then the story suddenly goes off the rails at the end; somebody apparently decided that what this chilling tale really needed was a pasted-on happy ending for the monster, thus violently yanking the story out of its genre instead of explaining it as some kind of creepy time-thing (like maybe a distorted echo of the time traveler herself) or even just leaving it as a mystery.  Better to just hit “stop” at The Doctor’s “aha!” moment.

There’s very little point in any TV series episode which is not a series finale of trying to create drama by killing off a bunch of characters or destroying some vital plot device, because as soon as they do, the viewers immediately know that the whole thing will be revealed as a dream, fantasy, simulation, delusion, or whatever.  The Enterprise isn’t really going to blow up, the Batcave won’t really collapse under Wayne Manor, the leading lady isn’t going to die in an alien attack, etc.  And when the show involves time travel it’s even obvious how the catastrophe will be undone, eliminating even that bit of suspense.  Because of this, Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS is actually kind of tedious; we already know from the moment The Doctor promises to give his beloved timeship to the unscrupulous businessmen (who are already an overused trope in the series) that he’s lying (as he does again when he threatens to use the self-destruct), and even if Clara dies she’ll just pop up again somewhere else as she has twice before.  By the admission of both writer and showrunner, the episode was really just an excuse to do a much better, more interesting look at the vast extent of the TARDIS than they got in “The Invasion of Time” when they were kids, and it does succeed in that respect.  Plus, the story gives us one of the most subtly psychopathic villains in all of Doctor Who: a man who uses traumatic amnesia to convince his own brother that he’s an android, so he can steal the captaincy of a two-bit savage vessel, belongs in Dante’s 9th Circle.

The Crimson Horror is a perfect example of why the Paternoster Gang should’ve been spun off into their own series.  What a fun episode!  Adventure, suspense, action, a mad scientist with a fiendish plot, and humor, all with tongue gently in cheek; it’s like an episode of The Avengers set in Victorian Yorkshire, complete with Diana Rigg!

But this time, she isn’t the kickass lady in black leather (a role taken by Vastra’s wife Jenny); instead she’s the diabolical mastermind, a brilliant chemist and engineer planning to eradicate the human race so her eugenically-chosen few can inherit the Earth, a la “Operation Golden Age“.  But she doesn’t do it with sterile claims about ecology and all, oh no!  She’s also all about the “social purity”, saving mankind from sin and degradation, and Rigg disappears into her scenery-chewing character so completely I ddn’t even recognize her until the end credits rolled.  Absolutely one of the best Matt Smith standalone stories.

As I pointed out much earlier this year, the Borg from the Star Trek universe were ripped off from the Cybermen.  But starting in Nightmare in Silver, Doctor Who ripped off the Borg in kind by incorporating some of their characteristics back into the revamped Cybermen.  The chief borrowings are the Cybermen’s ability to adapt to weaponry on the fly; the elimination of the need for cumbersome conversion machinery by accomplishing conversion with “cybermites”, tiny insect-like machines which convert victims into Cybermen (just as the Borg use “nanoprobes”); and the removal of all individuality from Cybermen by the substitution of a collective consciousness called the Cyberiad (like the Borg collective), rather like a universal Cyberman internet with consciousness and (metaphorical) teeth.  The story also introduces a new element of Whoniverse future history: another series of Cyber Wars, clearly later than the 24th century Cyber Wars in which the Cybermen were defeated with “glitter guns”, which were only resolved by the ultimate scorched-earth policy: the total destruction of every world they touch (not at all dissimilar to the Vorlon’s doomsday campaign to eradicate the Shadows in Babylon 5).  “Nightmare in Silver” takes place roughly 1000 years later; after considering all the established overlapping events of Whovian future history, it seems the most likely time for these wars was the 42nd century, with this episode taking place in the 51st (so the Cybermen at Trenzalore can be the new ones).  The story itself is otherwise fairly standard Cyberman fare: The Doctor must destroy a hidden Cyber army ready to sweep out and conquer the universe, etc.  This isn’t the first time The Doctor has used a chess match as part of his strategy to defeat an opponent of godlike power (in this case the Cyberiad, trying to take over his brain), but it is the first time he’s had to worry about protecting actual children while doing so (Sarah Jane’s sidekicks are very competent teens, not smartass kids).

The Matt Smith era ended with a trilogy of episodes with titles in the formula “____ of the Doctor”, each of which ties up some of the many loose threads of the 11th Doctor’s monumental three-season arc. The first of these, The Name of the Doctor, is technically the season finale (the other two are considered specials) and both resolves the “Impossible Girl” arc, and allows The Doctor to say goodbye to River Song in a way his goodbye-hating self can manage.  The latter is because Madame Vastra forges a psychic “conference call” across time which includes River’s avatar in the Library’s computer system, and said avatar follows them psychically to the site of The Doctor’s tomb on Trenzalore.  Exactly when this is, is uncertain, but it has been long enough for the wrecked TARDIS to degenerate via “size leakage” into a gigantic police box shape containing the deceased Time Lord’s grave: a raw wound in time representing the tracks of all his centuries of travel across spacetime.  The Great Intelligence of this future time has itself learned to time-travel, and upon entering the time-wound is splintered into fragments all along The Doctor’s time-stream so it can interfere with his life and undo all the good he’s done.  This of course raises the question of whether the past incarnations he’s fought are these splinters, or whether there are genuine past incarnations before this distant future which can still battle him.  But in any case, Clara must follow the entity, splintering herself into many selves all along his timestream (of which he only remembers two) in order to put things right.  The only ones I can clearly identify are directing the First Doctor to the right TARDIS rather than the one Susan chooses; somehow helping the Seventh Doctor in “Dragonfire“; and apparently assisting the Fourth Doctor at some point in “The Invasion of Time“.  Of course The Doctor has to somehow enter his own time-stream and rescue her; personally I think it’d have been better for him to simply track down her nearest “splinter” and take her as his companion, given that each splinter seems as real as the original.  The relationship between the two has grown into an unmistakably romantic one, complete with hand-holding, intense looks, mild jealousy from his wife, and intense jealousy from the TARDIS, playing mother-in-law:

The introduction to this episode is weirdly meta, with Clara breaking the fourth wall to admit to us that she was created to be the perfect companion, seemingly before the whole splintering thing.  I have no explanation for this at this time, but otherwise I did enjoy the story despite its flaws; after all, Moffat had quite a few loose threads to pull together while also introducing new elements (in this one, the existence of the War Doctor), and to do so while presenting a good story, and he succeeded pretty well.

Day of the Doctor was the 50th anniversary special, and it surpassed the previous anniversary special, “The Five Doctors“, in both scope and substance by a wide margin.  While “Five” was fun enough, “Day” was complex, cinematic, and tackled deep, complex themes.  While it’s de rigueur for anniversary specials to feature multiple Doctors, this one returns to the density of “The Three Doctors” and avoids the companion glut of “Five”, while still managing to give all the past Doctors cameos, including a cameo appearance of the incoming 12th Doctor; and introduce a previously-unknown but narratively-necessary incarnation (well-played by the legendary John Hurt); and give the most beloved Doctor of all a mysterious and charming cameo at the end; and bring back one of that Doctor’s best villains (unseen since 1975); and give UNIT a major role in the story (as it should have), including Kate Stewart; and set up a new and interesting arc while telling the long-untold story of the last day of the Time War; and show us exactly how the Tenth Doctor managed to marry Queen Elizabeth I (thus placing this as one of his last adventures before regeneration); and give Billie Piper an important and not-at-all superfluous role; and set up the return of the Time Lords; while still allowing a few more threads to be gathered up in the Christmas special to follow.  So as you can tell, I liked this one a lot; truth be told, it was hard not to like.

In Matt Smith’s swansong, The Time of the Doctor, Moffat succeeds in combining the whimsicality of a Christmas special with the large-scale, serious drama of a regeneration story.  Combining the two must’ve been difficult; Davies didn’t even attempt it.  And I daresay no writer can fail to be impressed by the way he tied up the many loose ends still hanging after a monumental three-plus-season arc, even though it took three consectutive blockbuster episodes to do it.  In this one we finally understand who The Silence are and where they got their weird powers; how they’re connected to The Church; why both organizations opposed The Doctor in the first place; why the Daleks were willing to ally themselves with others, both for the Pandorica scheme (is that cooperation how some of the non-time-traveling races got there?) and the Siege of Trenzalore; why Trenzalore is important in the first place; how The Doctor avoids death when he has no regenerations left (a plot point Chris “I’m smarter than everybody else!” Chibnall chose to completely ignore just a few seasons later, just as he ignored Clara’s on-screen observation of the First Doctor and Susan stealing the not-yet-a-police-box-looking TARDIS rather than inheriting it from some imaginary pre-first incarnation); how the Time Lords managed to escape their doom; why the name of the series is “The oldest question in the universe“; and why everybody is so terrified of The Doctor answering it.  IMHO, this story does a much better job of explaining The Doctor’s importance to the history of life, the universe, and everything than Chibnall’s attempt to cast him as a God among gods, a sort of universal natural law preordained to be important rather than achieving importance via his own efforts, a triumph of essentialism over the spirit of sentience.  I’ll say more about that when the time comes, but in the spirit of timey-wimeyness I wanted to include this foreshadowing in the proper place so I can refer back to it later.  Anyhow, this huge story of The Doctor’s defense of Trenzalore (with the help of the Papal Mainframe) against the most powerful evil forces in the universe, is clearly symbolic of the struggle of free-willed individuals (with the help of institutions that can be used for either good or ill) against the violent collectivist mobs who want to either reduce free-willed beings such as Humanity to machines serving the state (Daleks and Cybermen) or see them frozen into static changelessness by their own ancient, immutable natures (the Weeping Angels).  And the fact that The Doctor does so by keeping a promise, and protecting one small town as its resident Santa Claus and superhero, is just the frosting on the cake, and proves that when humans really do meet other sentient beings in the universe, we’ll need a much larger word than “humanity” to describe that amazing, inspiring quality by which sentient beings act as a bridge between ape and angel, between the finite and the infinite, between the concrete and the Divine.  And after all this grandiosity and density and beauty and wonder, there’s that bittersweet moment in which the dying Doctor sees the best friend of this long, long, incarnation, an idealized Amy Pond, who welcomes the essence of this Doctor into Eternity while another part of him continues on as THE Doctor.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who wept, and if I’ve done my job I’m not the only one weeping again now.  But even if not, Moffat certainly did his.  Standing ovation.

At first, I was skeptical of the idea of a 26-year-old playing The Doctor, especially in the wake of my second-favorite Doc David Tennant, but Matt Smith not only rose to the occasion but smashed all expectations, coming in just behind the mighty Jon Pertwee in my estimation.  The gap between them isn’t very wide, either. Smith did what all the best Doctor actors do: combining character traits from past Doctors he admired with his own idiosyncracies (including some parts of his own personality), then infusing the amalgam with the qualities common to all of his incarnations.  Though the Eleventh Doctor may have had the youngest face and the most whimsical manner (up to the look of the TARDIS itself), the viewer soon begins to realize that he’s definitely the oldest Doctor to date, more like a charming old man behaving in a silly fashion to amuse grandchildren than an actually silly person.  His morality also resonates very strongly with me; like him, I’m a person who strongly believes in being nice until it’s time not to be, at which point one does what one must to accomplish what must be accomplished.  It’s not really very different from the Tenth Doctor’s morality, but one could clearly see it in #10’s eyes most of the time, whereas #11 is better at pretending he isn’t really the War Doctor, until he proves he is.  But of all the Doctors, I think the Eleventh is also the best at both understanding and demonstrating love, and that includes love of all kinds: friendship for many, paternal love for Amy, romantic love for River, love of humanity shown at Trenzalore.  It’s that fierce passion which transforms and sanctifies his capacity for violence into something terrifying, yet holy: the alchemy of time, experience, wisdom, and most importantly the love and loyalty of those who care about him, has at last fully changed the Valeyard’s poison running through his veins for centuries now, into medicine for an ailing universe.  And by knowing when to nurse and when to amputate, this Doctor, nearing the end of his natural life, at last fully realizes the “healer” meaning of his chosen title.

TWELFTH DOCTOR

Series 8  (Show Runner: Steven Moffat)

Alas, Moffat seems to have expended all of his creative energies in the massive Epic of the Eleventh Doctor, and had very little left for three seasons of the Twelfth.  While he seems to have rallied a bit in Series 9, Series 8 was largely directionless except for the pasted-on scenes of dead characters (from all over spacetime, apparently) meeting Missy in “Heaven”, and the loose “fairy tale” thematic arc (which I’ll say more about later).  The 12th Doctor’s first outing, Deep Breath, is, as is typical for such stories, rather weak, and doesn’t actually make a lot of sense.  It opens with a scientifically-ridiculous scene which is, unfortunately, par for ths season’s course: a tyrannosaurus standing upright (which it might not actually have been able to do, but we’ll let that slide) would’ve been about 5 meters tall, not about 90; they weren’t nearly big enough to swallow the TARDIS, and if Moffat wanted to do a kaiju episode (there is a precedent) he should’ve chosen some fantasy creature.  And it doesn’t get any better after that.  He rips the plot off directly from his own (dramatically better) “The Girl in the Fireplace“, right down to the ship being the “sister ship” of the one in the previous story; he then has Clara (who knows The Doctor has had many forms) be afraid, distrustful, and even angry at him for dying; the Paternoster gang is so underused here (in contrast with “The Crimson Horror“) they seem like mere padding; and the payoff is virtually nonexistent.  Even the title is kinda forgettable.

The main story of Into the Dalek is interesting enough, but nothing special (though it does introduce another “good Dalek” who will show up again).  But the scenes set in Clara’s life on Earth toll the cloister bell of a growing problem with the character.  As I pointed out before, Clara is a very metatextual character; whereas all fictional TV characters are created by a writer and brought to life by an actor or actress, Clara’s status as a dramatic device is unusually naked.  She starts out as a “Mary Sue”-like “perfect companion” who does everything she’s supposed to do, exists almost like a subroutine throughout The Doctor’s entire life, and actually knows this and can sometimes break the Fourth Wall to talk about it.  Then when Moffat (and new Doctor Peter Capaldi?) decided there should be no romantic elements to their relationship, she immediately changed her feelings and an external love-interest conveniently appeared in the person of Danny Pink.  When Moffat decided he didn’t like her being a nanny, she suddenly and without explanation turned into a schoolteacher at none other than the Coal Hill School, where Ian and Barbara taught Susan.  This could’ve been explained as Impossible Girlishness, but wasn’t; it was just sort of left there as if it made self-evident sense.

Though the main arc of Series 8 was the “Promised Land” arc, the season also followed a looser pattern in which most of the episodes were either based on or took the form of legends, fairy tales, and children’s fantasies.  Moffat always has a kind of thing for childhood fears which is visible in many of his scripts (statues coming alive, things under the bed, etc), but in this season it’s both more overt and applies to episodes he didn’t write himself; some of the stories are so far into the realm of fantasy that they completely leave science behind, and the sci-fi veneer is thinner than a coat of paint.  The first example is of course the Godzilla-sized dinosaur in “Deep Breath“, but the next is more subtle; in Robot of Sherwood, The Doctor takes Clara to meet Robin Hood, whom he keeps annoyingly insisting is mythical throughout the episode despite clear evidence that he isn’t (I’m reminded of Sarah Jane’s similar behavior in “The Eternity Trap“).  But his obnoxious behavior doesn’t stop there, oh no; instead, he insists on constantly attacking and belittling Robin in a very off-putting and extremely un-Doctorly dick measuring contest, not unlike his Ninth incarnations’ behavior toward Mickey Smith.  I understand that this Doctor is supposed to be different from Matt Smith’s portrayal, but this is so different he’s like a mirror-universe Evil Doctor, missing only the eyepatch; The Doctor should never be so awful that another character (in this case, Robin) comes off as the main hero.  I’m afraid that interaction eclipses everything else, including the main plot (which is kinda weak and derivative anyhow, with echoes of “The Time Warrior” and “The King’s Demons“) and what looks as though it was intended to be the main (and very metatextual) theme: about how sometimes, real flesh-and-blood heroes can grow into legends so large that the real people behind the legends are completely overshadowed.

The fantasy theme continues in the next episode, Listen, wherein The Doctor becomes obsessed with the idea that the unseen presences we notice even when we think we’re alone – the things that give us the feeling we’re being watched, or that raise the hairs on the backs of our necks, or that we imagine hiding under our beds – are not actually The Silence at all (as he previously said they were), but actually some other creature so tenacious and changeless he imagines they’ll be the last things standing at the End of the Universe, a scenario depicted under Davies as being pretty bleak and sparsely-populated, but which grows increasingly crowded under Moffat.  So he invents some cockamamie device which is supposed to allow Clara to navigate the TARDIS to some critical point in her childhood, but instead results in their reaching her boyfriend’s childhood, then said “end of the universe”, where they just happen to run into one of said boyfriend’s descendants, who happens to be another lost time-travel pioneer (as in another story whose title consists of a one-word imperative) from the ridiculously-near future.  After that they end up in the childhood of The Doctor himself, where Clara finds him sleeping in the same barn he must have viewed as a safe haven, because we’ve already seen him return there 900 years later at a time of crisis.  The explanation of The Doctor’s obsession with this childhood fear isn’t especially satisfying (why become obsessed now?), but it’s much better than the notion that he had neither parents nor proper childhood and that his origins are lost in Gallifreyan prehistory.  There’s one more subtle revelation here: since the events of “Day of the Doctor”, it’s now apparently possible to travel into Gallifrey’s past again.

As I pointed out recently, I’ve always loved that Doctor Who creators are willing to explore other genres.  But there’s a caveat: they need to be done well, and Time Heist wasn’t.  It wants to be a caper flick, and I guess it does succeed in being that.  But it does not succeed in being a good one.  For a caper flick to succeed, both the security the gang must overcome and their methods for doing so must be believable, and this story fails on both counts; this security seems far too weak for “the most secure facility in the galaxy”, and The Doctor’s methods for circumventing it seem to rely more on luck and timey-wimey foreknowledge than on the criminal mastermind plotting which makes such stories fun.  Compare Stanley Kubrick’s early film The Killing, or if you want a much closer parallel, the Farscape episode “Liars, Guns and Money” (in which our heroes rob a high-security sci-fi bank).  In contrast, this one is disappointing, and the reason The Doctor commits the heist in the first place is eye-rollingly precious.

If you want to see a fine example of how much Moffat’s showrunning ability declined in this season, you need look no further than The Caretaker, in which the Twelfth Doctor attempts to solve a mystery by being “normal” (a la “The Lodger“), and by invading the “normal” life of a part-time companion (a la “The Power of Three“).  It really drives home the apparent plan to make the Twelfth Doctor as diametrically opposite the Eleventh as possible; while the running joke in the referenced stories is that everybody loves The Doctor, the “joke” (for lack of a better word) here is that The Doctor is an incredible arsehole to everybody, most especially Clara’s boyfriend Danny Pink, whose intelligence he constantly insults without reason.  Oh, there’s a tacked-on reason, but it doesn’t ring true; honestly, it just looks like the same kind of puerile masculine jealousy that contributed to my dislike of the Ninth Doctor.  And the alien menace (such as it is) has been done so many times before it provides no distraction to his behavior at all.

Series Eight is one of the low points of Doctor Who, lying at a similar depth to the Chibnall era and the lowest part of the John Nathan-Turner era.  And the worst episode of the season, the absolute nadir, the Mariana Trench of the Whoniverse, is Kill the Moon.  I’ve alluded to its absolute badness many times in this thread and other Whovian conversations from the past.  But now it’s time to discuss why it’s so bad.  First and foremost is its blatant scientific idiocy; my friend, astrophysicist Mike Siegel, goes into depth about it in this video:

But just to summarize the highlights: gravity doesn’t act like that; the stated mass of the creature is a minuscule fraction of the Moon’s mass; the “eggshell” just vanishing is absurd; the newly-hatched chick immediately laying an egg much larger and 10 billion times as massive as itself is even more absurd; and various lesser issues.  IIRC he also addresses the idea that the giant spiders must be one-celled to be parasites corresponding to germs.  And the idea that the moon’s status as a giant egg could somehow have gone unnoticed despite a century of selenology is at least as silly as flat-earthism, extreme even in a season devoted to legends and fairy tales.  If the story had been handled well, placed in some distant corner or the universe without a nearby spacefaring civilization, and had not picked apparently-random numbers for its math, this could’ve fit well as a sort of Whovian pastiche of the fanciful tales of Lord Dunsany, similar in tone to “A Christmas Carol“.  But as a canonical part of Whovian history, set in a very near future Earth and surrounded by many other stories (including an important one set only 11 years later) which take place on a cratered moon identical to the one we can see in the sky tonight, it lands like a turd on a tablecloth, spoiling everything around it for absolutely no reason.  As for the social aspects, The Doctor’s rationale for taking a schoolkid into danger is both dumb and paper-thin, and his high-sounding rationale for refusing to help is just as bad.

Mummy on the Orient Express was the first good episode in Series 8 (though “Listen” wasn’t actually bad); it isn’t without its flaws, but they aren’t so egregious as to swamp the fun like a backed-up septic tank.  The idea of either aliens or future humans making spaceships in the form of famous or infamous Earth vehicles is not a new one in Doctor Who, and as one who has always been fascinated by trains and mummies I was naturally more inclined to forgive the faults.  That the villain was mysterious and the monster’s motivation novel were big plusses, as was the fact that The Doctor’s arseholiness in this one was at least a put-on for a good reason.  The story also continues yet another loose theme of this season: this Doctor’s unusually-adversarial relationship with soldiers.

Flatline is IMHO the best standalone episode of this very weak season.  The creatures are weird and interesting, and the way they kill their victims utterly horrifying; also, the Twelfth Doctor takes another step in his evolution from “complete dick” to “likeable curmudgeon”.  But it’s the little things (no pun intended) that make this one so enjoyable (okay, I lied, that was totally intentional); the idea of the TARDIS shell shrinking due its energy being drained by the invaders is ingenious, and The Doctor’s methods of getting around it are fun to watch, especially Clara carrying “My Little TARDIS” around in her purse and the Doc doing an Addams Family “Thing” number to get off the train tracks.  The show has a long tradition of pompous bureaucrats getting in the way, and we’ve got one of those here too.  And perhaps best of all, for the duration of this episode Clara is back to being the “Impossible Girl”, so we get to forget about duplicitous emo Clara for 45 minutes.  It’s great when companions learn from The Doctor, and it’s clear she has been because her plan to save the day is absolutely brilliant.

In the Forest of the Night isn’t quite as bad as “Kill the Moon“, but it’s definitely a runner-up.  Its badness is of a much quieter variety than the blatant, shouty badness of “Moon”; if both were toasters, “Forest” is one that comes on but doesn’t actually toast, while “Moon” is one that blows up and sets your kitchen on fire.  The easiest way to examine this one’s crapitude is to simply list its rather bizarre premises:

• that trees are an effective protection against fire (which might come as news to anyone from California);
• that we needn’t ever worry or do anything to protect ourselves from environmental catastrophes, because magic trees will appear overnight to save us;
• that a 30-megaton cometary impact is sufficient to shatter the Earth; and
• that people just forget major catastrophes such as wars (which might come as a shock to ex-soldiers with PTSD).

Humans don’t keep having wars because we “forget” what they were like; we keep having them because we let people who don’t have to fight them (or send their sons to die in them), and who even profit from them (politically or financially), start and manage them.  But you know what humans do quickly forget?  Dreams.  Which are a constant theme in this season from beginning to end, giving us a (soon-to-be-discussed) means of fitting these fairy tales into the greater continuity.

Apparently, Moffat reserved what little showrunner mojo he could muster in this season for the finale, Dark Water/Death in Heaven, which finally resolves the mystery of the “Nethersphere” and reveals the true identity of “Missy”, the mysterious hostess of “Heaven” who also gave Clara the TARDIS phone number way back when she was having wifi trouble.  Her plan this time not only fits in with a season devoted to fantasies and fearful bogey tales, but also provides a bookend to her last huge Armageddon scheme.  You may recall that in that one, she transformed the entire future human race into Dalek-like creatures in order to conquer 21st-century Earth; in this one, she transforms many of the past human race (ie the dead) into Cybermen in order to conquer The Doctor.  Because in this one, it isn’t just the story elements which are drawn from myths and stories, but the form of the tale itself.  Missy plays the part of the Tempter, the Serpent of Genesis; she creates this huge army of overwhelming power, which now that the Time Lords have backed into the Shadows could prove the ultimate power in the universe, and then hands control of it to The Doctor, like Frodo offering the One Ring to Galadriel.

And like Galadriel, he passes the test by giving up that control to destroy the mechanism by which the Cybermen were, and are continuing to be, created.  The most interesting thing about all this is that the whole point this time was to tempt The Doctor, apparently in a gambit to bring him over to the Dark Side so they can once again be friends.  It makes sense in a megalomaniacal, psychopathic kind of way: “I miss my oldest friend, so because I can’t turn good I’ll just turn him evil.”  The idea of the superhero and his arch-nemesis being friends, either in the past or future of their struggles, is a very ancient one, going back at least to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and it serves to tie the season together thematically and connect it to the rest of Capaldi’s era, in which the primary arc involves the weird, complex relationship of the Last Two Time Lords still at large rather than sequestered in self-imposed exile on a hidden Gallifrey.  There are some off-key notes now and again; Danny Pink deserved a lot better and more believable exit than he got, especially considering we’ve been shown that he still has the reflexes of a warrior, and such men don’t generally die like careless children while crossing the street.  But in the end he demonstrates the qualities that made him a fine character who deserved a lot better than the duplicitous, dishonest Clara.  And best of all, the late Brigadier is given one last posthumous chance to be heroic, drawing a salute at last from his old friend and tears from my (and I suspect many other) eyes.  His fate is left a mystery at the end; presumably he self-destructed like the other converted dead.  But one must wonder if Missy didn’t allow strong minds to escape the hivemind by design, as part of the plan to appeal to The Doctor; this hivemind is clearly unconnected to the “Cyberiad” of the post-51st-century Cybermen, and not nearly as strong at controlling individuals.  Plus, why even bother to upload all those minds to her “Nethersphere”, even troubling herself to travel up and down The Doctor’s timeline to accomplish it, unless she wanted at least some of them to have at least some free will?  Otherwise she could’ve simply saved the trouble and let the hivemind run all the individual units rather than downloading minds into them.  Clearly, tempting The Doctor was the whole point of the entire project for her, because otherwise she could simply have started over again with more “Cyberpollen”.  The fact that she doesn’t demonstrates she has other things in mind, possibly due to her regeneration; unlike The Doctor’s later gender-swap regeneration, Missy fully leans into her femininity, fully embracing, enjoying, and exploiting it rather than basically ignoring it as the Doc later does.  This isn’t to say that Moffat foists some silly “girls are nice and boys are bad” stereotype on her, oh no; Missy is every bit as evil as her past incarnations.  But she also values interpersonal relationships in a way her past incarnations did not, which not only makes sense but paves the way for the rest of her character arc, a development with its roots in her initial portrayal (and the plans the creators had for that incarnation) way back in the Third Doctor’s era.  So it’s a shame that Chibnall later squandered that rich inheritance, as he did with basically every other part of the Mythos.  One last note: the UNIT protocol making The Doctor president of Earth during alien-invasion cataclysms is kinda brilliant and is a logical development of both the character and UNIT.

Even in a season where we’ve been asked to accept immense moon-dragons and instant forests, having Santa Claus show up to help The Doctor against an alien menace is pretty daring.  But in actuality, Last Christmas is both far more believable and far less insulting to viewers’ intelligence than the earlier tales, because it takes place almost entirely in a dreamscape conjured up by predatory aliens who may or may not actually exist as physical entities.  I mean, we’re told and shown that they have physical bodies, but while in the dreamscape they can be stopped by physical barriers, in the “real” world they seem not only able to enter locked rooms, but also to transcend time and space.  It’s a nice, creepy Christmas tale, owing far more to Dick than to Dickens, and perfectly blends humor and horror in a story where Danny Pink returns from the dead to save the day by sheer personality force.  But if the “dream crabs” are truly able to track people across spacetime by their images in others’ minds, and enter rooms despite physical barriers like a Whovian version of the Hounds of Tindalos, why aren’t they a constant and ongoing menace?  We are told it’s because The Doctor wandered into someplace they exist, which happens to look exactly like the volcanic planet from Clara’s induced dream at the beginning of the preceding episode.  But what is that place?  I think the answer lies partly in that weird new navigation interface gizmo on the TARDIS console; if it works by thoughts and seems to home in on bad dreams (as seen in “Listen“), I think we have an answer not just to the local question, “Where did the crabs come from?” but also to the much larger question, “What drugs was the showrunner on while doing this season, and where can I get some?”  My working theory is that this device didn’t quite work as The Doctor planned, but in reality took the TARDIS in and out of the Land of Fiction and its border-areas and penumbras all season long, thus allowing adventures in realms of pure fantasy (“Kill the Moon” & “In the Forest of the Night“); the legendary past (“Robot of Sherwood“) and future (“Mummy“); and “real” (within the fictive TV universe, natch) places haunted by monsters from realms of dream or fantasy (“Deep Breath“, “Listen“, “Time Heist“, and “Flatline“).  And since Missy was following the TARDIS, she could go places ordinarily inaccesible to her own TARDIS, just as The Doctor once allowed his TARDIS to be towed by hers long ago when she was a he.  Maybe that’s how she conceived of and implemented her master plan (sorry ’bout that) of the season, which is drawn straight out of some of the oldest nightmares of the human race and uses as its framework one of our oldest myths: the idea of a physical afterlife in which the dead live “lives” of a sort, much like those we know on this side of the Styx.  In Capaldi’s next two seasons these themes continued to a lesser degree, perhaps indicating a continuing influence of dreams, imagination, and storytelling.  But they no longer dominated the landscape as they did in this season, which was probably for the best.

Series 9  (Show Runner: Steven Moffat)

After an extremely weak season, Moffat was mostly back on his game in Series 9, which opened with a strong offering in the form of The Magician’s Apprentice/ The Witch’s Familiar, featuring the return of Davros for the first time since “Journey’s End“.  The story introduces a new element to the show’s mythos: the “Confession Dial”, which serves as a Time Lord’s last will and testament, and plays a big part in the series finale; we are told it is traditionally delivered to a Time Lord’s closest friend on the eve of his final day, and The Doctor has his delivered to none other than Missy, continuing the theme of their relationship being very complicated.  The thing I like best about this story is Missy’s refusal to be put into a rigid box: she is capable of fulfilling her traditional duties under Time Lord custom while yet being her evil self, and for defending her right to be considered his closest friend (sorry, Clara) and demanding to be considered his arch-enemy (sorry, Davros) at one and the same time.  Right behind it is the demonstration, via both Time Lords’ actions in the prologue and Act One, that despite their human appearance these beings are essentially gods, capable of acts of terrifying power just to get others’ attention if so inclined.  The concept that an individual Dalek’s words and emotions are translated via their neural interfaces into speech and action acceptable to the Dalek State is nothing short of brilliant, and introduces a new element of horror into the mythos surrounding The Doctor’s oldest enemies.  It’s almost like a very grim riddle:

Q: What’s worse than encountering a Dalek?
A: Being a Dalek.

This is how a clever writer puts his stamp on an existing mythos like the Whoniverse: by adding elements that build upon the existing mythology, not by tearing everything down and putting some new jerry-built mess in its place.  And the aforementioned isn’t the only horrific element this one adds, oh no; we also learn that Daleks are engineered to keep on living until their bodies totally succumb to entropy, so if they aren’t killed in battle they can go on existing long after aging has made them no longer useful to the Dalek Empire, at which point they are literally thrown into the sewer and left to rot.  And the eventual revelation that The Doctor was one step ahead of Davros the whole time, and planned to use his enemies’ own collectivist atrocities against them, was just…{chef’s kiss}.  The only important complaint I have is that the Impossibly-Meta Girl has now apparently abandoned teaching because it no longer serves the season arc, and appears to be working in some capacity for UNIT.

Under the Lake/Before the Flood is a good basic Doctor Who tale, reminiscent in many ways of ’70s serials with a strong horror element.  It has too many flaws to be a really great tale, but nothing that really gets in the way of enjoyment (though I would’ve liked at least an attempt at an explanation for why the TARDIS couldn’t translate the alien runes, and a suggestion of how these four words were enough to guide a rescue ship to a very specific location on a distant planet they presumably have no other hints about).  It seems pretty obvious that these aliens’ technology is extremely weird, and honestly looks a lot more like black magic; I can’t help but think the Third or Fourth Doctor would’ve had some words about how and why that was so, and Moffat’s refusal to insist on that in scripts under his tenure is a major flaw of the Capaldi era.  Good points: the ghosts are extremely creepy, the time-loop is well-handled, and UNIT still being around in the early 22nd century is a game-changer.  Alas, “dead Doc is really a machine” has been done before.

Moffat seems to have a fixation on the Japanese “magical girl” genre, because he keeps giving us characters who fit therein to a greater or lesser degree.  And apparently he didn’t feel Clara was enough for Series 9, because we also got The Girl Who Died/The Woman Who Lived, featuring the origin of “Me”, a character barely interesting enough for one episode, much less three (she’s also the main antagonist of “Face the Raven“).  What’s supposed to be interesting about her is that due to The Doctor being unable to let her die after she plays a pivotal role in his scheme to repel alien invaders from her 9th-century Viking village, she ends up biologically immortal (doesn’t age, but can be killed) after he reprograms one of the invaders’ regeneration devices to work on humans.  And thereby hangs the tale, because once again we’ve got one of those extreme cases of tech mismatch. So these invaders are at a starship/transmat/ray gun level of technology, but they have more powerful regenerative technology than the Time Lords?  Does that mean each and every one of their warriors is equally immortal?  Is the healing device also immune to entropy?  Because as I’ve pointed out every time we get one of these “throw lots of zeroes on the end and call it good” timescales, that’s flatly absurd.  A few centuries?  Sure, I’ll give you that.  But > 1000 years (by “Face the Raven”) is already pushing it, and Moffat isn’t even close to stopping there.  But we’ll get back to that when the time comes; the only thing I really liked about this one was the recognition that an “immortalized” human still has normal human memory capacity, which is something less than about 1000 years.  However, I doubt that would result in someone losing the memory of her own name, since it’s connected through too many schemata (memory structures) to lose so easily.  But that one saving grace isn’t enough to save the story from uninteresting characters, magical tech, comic-opera Vikings, and a painfully-transparent plot by evil Lion-o in the second part.

The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion was the other outstanding two-parter of this season, standing solidly alongside the premiere.  It’s a sequel to “Day of the Doctor“, following several years after that story (I figure 2017), and partaking of the same scope, with action divided among three different fronts from the US to the UK to Central Asia.  Kate Stewart gets to deliver her dad’s most famous line (though in a situation she should never have been in without heavy backup, given the conditions), and we get to see the return of Osgood, the highly-principled Doctor fangirl who grew so close to her Zygon duplicate nobody could tell them apart.  The character’s integrity is demonstrated by her refusal to tell even her hero which one she is (after one was murdered by Missy in “Death in Heaven“), a plot element which not only sets up the story’s resolution, but is also both an allegory of it and a pre-refutation of Chibnall’s essentialist weltanschauung: a person’s identity depends not upon their birth, but rather upon their choices and their treatment of others.  It doesn’t matter whether the Osgood in this episode was born human or Zygon, because either way they’re still Osgood and Osgoodness trumps either Humanity or Zygonity (that becomes even more true at the end, with the revelation of the new seal on the pact).  This is one of the most powerful antiwar stories in the entire 60-year run of Doctor Who, made so in part by the brilliant allegory of the “Osgood boxes” and in part by showing the Zygons as just as morally complex as humans: just as divided between wanting peace or wanting war; and just as fearful or subject to reason.  And The Doctor’s antiwar speech, delivered to these youngsters by an old man who has seen more carnage than they can even imagine, is icing on the cake.

Sleep No More really wants to be scary; it even takes the form of “found footage” as in The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, and ends with the nigh-obligatory “THE MONSTER ISN’T REALLY BEATEN, MWUAHAHAHAHA!” of late-20th-century US slasher franchises.  And I’m not saying it doesn’t have some good, creepy moments, because it does, especially in the first half.  But for me personally, it’s not easy to get into the proper headspace to find a story scary, and stupid distractions that get my brain overworking in a different mode such as “Hypevolved sleep mucus? AYFKM?” or “Does Mark Gatiss really not recognize that there’s half a continent between Japan and India?” or “Space stations don’t just fall out of orbit; an orbit is already falling,” or “Neptune’s gravity is only about 10% above Earth normal” make it impossible, even if the story does borrow the “deadly video recording” thing from The Ring.  This one would’ve probably been better in the previous series, where its monsters could’ve been explained as cousins of the “dream crabs“.

Face the Raven is a lot of frosting for very little cake.  As I wrote before, “Me” was barely interesting enough for one episode, let alone three, yet here she is again (and not for the last time); furthermore, it was glaringly obvious from the beginning of the episode that the death sentence on Rigsy was just to bait The Doctor into a trap.  The “trap street” concept was interesting enough, but I did something almost exactly like it in a D&D campaign way back in the early ’90s, so for me it wasn’t quite enough to hang a whole episode on.  And the whole thing about Clara getting stuck with the black magic hot potato was too much the product of bad judgment (both Me’s and Clara’s) to be really tragic, which IMHO kinda ruined the death scene, turning it from the result of Clara doing something brave to a nihilistic, pointless death not unlike that of the Seventh Doctor (only he could regenerate).  Yes, I said “black magic”; by this point, Moffat wasn’t even trying to come up with technobabble explanations for seemingly magical monsters and powers any more.  Got an evil spirit, demon, curse, or the like?  Just slap the adjective “quantum” on it and call it good; as long as the CGI is fancy enough, nobody will ask what it has to do with whatever you’re portraying onscreen.

Heaven Sent/Hell Bent was a double episode which, while not perfect by any stretch, had a lot of great moments.  At the end of “Face the Raven” The Doctor was teleported away into a bubble universe where he repeatedly dies and relives the same few days over and over.  Though I understood the significance of the word “bird” and The Doctor’s narration about time wearing away even the mightiest of barriers, those of you unfamiliar with century-old children’s literature may never have seen the frontispiece from Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind.  There are fans who imagine that The Doctor can somehow remember all of this, but of course that’s almost as silly as the idea that “Me” would be the last being standing at the End of Everything; we’re clearly told he appears in the machine in exactly the condition he was at the end of “Face the Raven”, which includes memories; if that weren’t so he’d have performed each loop with increasing efficiency (a la Groundhog Day) and wouldn’t have needed to leave hints to himself.  I don’t think Moffat really understands numbers at all; obviously he knows a billion is larger than a million, but the actual timescales involved here are clearly beyond his comprehension; else he wouldn’t ask us to believe the idiotic assertion that a piece of not-all-that-advanced alien technology could still be operating at a point shortly before the Heat Death of the Universe.  Obviously, it also means he has no idea at all what the Heat Death of the Universe actually entails, else he wouldn’t imagine a girl hanging out in a chair on a planet to be a plausible feature of such a scenario, and would furthermore comprehend that such a point must be unreachable even by TARDIS because it is defined as the state of maximum entropy.  In a less-objective vein, the idea that the last two beings left standing on Doomsday would be two of the most insufferable Mary Sues ever devised in fiction is a notion straight from the titular mythological realm of the second part.  But just roll your eyes at this stuff (not to mention The Doctor suffering karmic payback for what he did to Donna) and enjoy the incredibly satisfying scenes of The Doctor’s return to Gallifrey and facing down the Panopticon guard, the High Council, and even Rassilon himself, and winning.  My favorite bit is probably the “line in the sand”, followed by the one where the guards all decide where their loyalties lie.  Of course, one need also ignore the deeply-dumb reason the Time Lords are willing to do all of this; I hardly think beings so advanced wouldn’t have more effective methods of interrogation, and the whole “hybrid” thing is so ridiculous I have a tendency to forget it’s meant to be the main arc of the season.  I’ve pointed out before that being a good writer and being a good overseer (story editor/showrunner) are two different skills, and the Capaldi era clearly demonstrates that:  Moffat remains the former while losing his mojo as the latter.

A perfect example of Moffat’s withering mojo is the mess of Clara Oswald.  When his mojo was still powerful, his quest to create the perfect companion gave us Amy Pond and River Song, one of the best companions and the best quasi-companion respectively.  But then, in trying to outdo himself by creating the GREATEST COMPANION EVAR! he instead fell flat on his face and gave us someone slightly less interesting than Donna Noble and only barely above Ben Jackson.  Little if any of this failure can be attributed to actress Jenna Coleman, who appears to have ably played what she was given; the problem is that Moffat couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted her to be.  When she first appeared as “Souffle Girl” I really liked her, and though she was a bit too perky as the Victorian governess, had she remained that way she’d still have been better than she ended up.  21st-century not-very-tech-savvy-babysitter Clara was OK, and was even showing signs of possible future greatness until the 11th Doctor regenerated into the 12th, after which Moffat seems to have gotten his plans mixed up and couldn’t remember whether the girl on screen was a time-splinter of the Ur-Clara or the Ur-Clara just acting like a fragment of a complete personality.  She changes professions without preface or explanation, goes from being strong and independent to being a satellite of two different men and lying repeatedly to both, then to strong-but-damaged hanger-on in search of a definite personality.  Clara is the first of a degenerating line of companions who are simply descriptions rather that fully-formed characters, similar to the walking stereotypes of the John Nathan-Turner era; though Clara is better than Bill and much better than Melanie or the 13th Doctor’s placeholders, by Series 9 she’s still much more a narrative mechanism than a real person, a gender-reversed proxy for the showrunner, delivering lines that clearly come straight from his needs as a storyteller rather than growing organically from the character’s own personality.  In the end, she’s little more than a Mary Sue, liked by everyone and saving the day for no discernible reasons.

The preceding having been said, Moffat’s writing, like the old grey mare, ain’t what it used to be by Series 9.  He’s always been a fantasy writer rather than a sci-fi writer, and though his ability to cloak the former genre in the trappings of the latter has never been as well-developed as that of Russell Davies or other prominent Whovian writers, his other writing gifts have made up for it.  But by The Husbands of River Song, even that has begun to wear thin.  The final River story (from The Doctor’s POV) should have been marvelous and memorable, but it’s mostly a fantasy farce more akin to Time Bandits than Doctor Who (only a lot less funny).  The story’s only real saving grace, however, is a huge one: the interaction between River and The Doctor is so absolutely wonderful that the relative meh-ness of the episode in which it’s embedded tends to be forgotten with time.  I loved The Doctor’s repeated attempts to make his own wife recognize him, frustrated by her stubborn refusal to recognize that she might not actually know all of his faces; I loved her carrying pictures of all of those faces; I loved the sad, sweet revelation that due to the Eleventh Doctor’s personality she really thinks he doesn’t love her, because “You don’t expect a sunset to admire you back”; and I loved The Doctor’s refutation of that with a simple “Hello Sweetie”.  And I loved loved LOVED everything from the crash onward, with The Doctor doing everything he can to make their last night together as special and magical as possible.  The rest of the episode recedes into the background alongside, like a cheap set behind a beautiful performance.

Series 10  (Show Runner: Steven Moffat)

Because there was no regular season of Doctor Who in 2016, the 2015 Christmas episode was followed by another a year later, The Return of Doctor Mysterio.  The title plays upon the fact that in Mexico, the name of the show is Doctor Misterio, which to the Anglo-American ear sounds like a superhero name.  I’ve argued before that in many ways, The Doctor is in fact a superhero, and his adventures follow many of the conventions of the genre (though some more than others).  But this episode does so directly by giving us an actual comic-book-style superhero, created when an eight-year-old comic book fan encounters The Doctor in the mid-nineties and ends up with genuine superpowers as a result.  The year of rest seems to have restored Moffat’s own superpowers to a degree, because the episode is a clever homage to the genre, with engaging characters and dialogue, and fun bits like The Doctor “figuring out” that Clark Kent is Superman.  It’s a shame nothing’s been done with The Ghost since; I think he’d have made a worthy supporting character like the Paternoster gang.

In general, stories introducing new companions tend to be rather plain, because, like stories introducing new Doctors, the focus is on character rather than plot.  Up until now, Moffat has managed to buck that, giving us a slam-bang companion intro in “The Eleventh Hour“, and a pretty interesting one in “Asylum of the Daleks” (though he cheated there, by splitting the intro between three different episodes).  But The Pilot is a more typical companion-intro episode, with a threadbare menace containing just enough substance to sugar-coat the big info-dump horse pill which makes up the bulk of the episode.  That’s because it isn’t just introducing the new companion, cafeteria lady Bill Potts, but also introducing new viewers to The Doctor, and confusing established viewers by showing us that he has gone back in time to the 1960s and established himself as a university professor (like his old mentor Chronotis), where he has quietly existed as a contemporary of his earlier selves for 50 years while guarding a mysterious vault hidden beneath one of the university buildings, apparently after taking an oath to do so.  The conflict involves another of Moffat’s technologically-inconsistent aliens, so advanced a mere fragment of one of their ships can travel across spacetime in pursuit of the TARDIS, yet…uses rockets to land at other times?  There are a few nice garnishes to hide the episode’s mediocrity, though: The Doctor has photos of River and Susan on his desk, and we see Movellans for the first time since 1979.

Presumably, when screen writers recycle the plot of a really shitty story, they do so in hopes that what they produce will be better than the source material.  But more often, the plot itself is too weak to support whatever new and improved elements they want to hang on it, so the resulting product still isn’t all that great.  Smile follows yet another group of colonists fleeing the imperiled Earth (it’s not stated this is the solar flare period, but evidence seems to point that way) for a new home, who are then hoist with their own “smart” petard.  Though the murderous microbots are said to have gone astray due to bad programming, it wouldn’t take much of an error to make that happen, given that the rulers of this period seem to be obsessed with imposing emotional conformity on their subject populations and summarily executing those who frown too much (as on “Starship UK“).  The “authorities” who chose the population of “The Ark in Space” went one step further, selecting mostly people who appear to follow a discipline of emotional self-suppression.  The “Vardy” microbots are a pointed commentary on the dangers of robotic servants eavesdropping on our every word and mood, but I’m afraid the point was made too subtly to reach those most in need of it.

Thin Ice is the first really good episode of Series 10; beside having a very classic Who kind of feel and setting, and a hissable villain, it moves along at an exciting, yet comfortable pace and has a lot of interesting dialogue.  I have a fondness for stories in which the monster is not the villain, so I’m inclined to gloss over the question of how Lord Sutcliffe’s ancestors managed to trap (or even detect) anything this big in the 18th century (or maybe even earlier); given that it should’ve died under those conditions, one must also wonder if it isn’t related to the very similar monster in the Torchwood episode “Meat“, which suffers a very similar fate 200 years later in an episode with a similar conflict (though because this one’s submerged, The Doctor can free it).  Though I do like this one very much, I must say I’m very tired of Moffat’s using the idiotic and clearly-untrue bromide that “humans forget every weird event” to present big CGI spectacles against historic backdrops without having to explain why they aren’t part of history.

Knock Knock is a good, basic, creepy story which follow’s one of Moffat’s favorite formulae, “The Doctor invades his part-time companion’s regular life”.  Given that the menace is a very localized one and Bill’s fate isn’t weirdly intertwined with The Doctor’s as Amy’s and Clara’s were, the fact that something so bizarre happens to her specifically of all the students in the UK seems to indicate that the artron energy which infuses people’s bodies as a side-effect of traveling in the TARDIS acts as a “weirdness magnet”, drawing the person toward the kind of stuff which happens on Doctor Who.  This would, of course, explain why Sarah Jane Smith kept having weird adventures for decades after parting with The Doctor, and why Rose of all people could actually travel via “cracks in time”.  But back to the story at hand: the “every 20 years” thing is a basic horror trope, as is “creepy old house eats people” and “weird gothic family intrigue with complicated relationships”.  But it’s a bit unusual for the haunt to actually be non-malevolent creatures misused by a human motivated by a child’s understanding of love (connecting this to another favorite Moffat theme, “kid with magic powers”).  Alas, the ending is badly marred by another common sci-fi trope, “menace totally vanishes without aftereffects”; where did the bugs go?

Some Doctor Who episodes (such as “Kill the Moon“) are loudly, flamboyantly bad, whereas others like Oxygen are quietly, subtly bad, like vegetables that appear fresh when you buy them but then go bad in your fridge a day or two later.  The writer’s Who history is uneven, including one good story (“Flatline“), one pretty-good one (“Mummy on the Orient Express“), and one bad one (“The Girl Who Died“).  And then there’s “Oxygen”, which looks like the result of the author scanning the Cliff’s Notes for both The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Das Kapital at 3 AM and getting them confused while trying to hammer out an entire script that was actually due at 5 PM the day before.  One book he definitely did not crack open is one on astronomy or chemistry, else he might’ve learned that oxygen is one of the most common elements found in stony asteroids, right up there with silicon (another element bad Who writers seem to think is rare).  It’s so common, in fact, that it would be a by-product of mining a large fraction of asteroids.  And in other cases, it could be reclaimed from carbon dioxide exhaled by the crew.  At any technology level sufficiently advanced to allow interstellar travel, oxygen would simply not be this kind of an issue unless the machinery broke down, which would’ve also made a much better, more suspenseful story.  Moreover, at that level of technology, any evil corporation which didn’t want to bother with life support would simply use robots (we’re shown they have that technology) supervised by a skeleton crew, and it’s economically idiotic to charge the crew for air (which would decrease crew efficiency by diverting their focus from the work at hand to conserving oxygen) rather than paying them slightly less to cover that expense.  The idea that the incredibly imprecise “breaths” would be used as an official unit of measurement rather than precise ones like meters or seconds betrays a level of scientific ignorance shocking in a scifi program, and the zombie thing is so overdone as to be genuinely boring.  But of course attention to facts would’ve made it harder for the writer to present a sophomoric morality play about business being intrinsically evil, instead of a story that might actually provoke thought.

Extremis is IMHO one of the best episodes of the Capaldi era, surpassing its two successors in the “Monk” trilogy (which are themselves quite good) by a comfortable margin. It turns on a very well-disguised Classic Who trope, “seemingly magical phenomena turn out to have a scientific (and usually alien) origin”, incorporating elements from Lovecraft (the cursed book which drives readers mad), The Name of the Rose (Catholic clergy keep an enormous, labyrinthine library of forbidden books), and even The Matrix (though this rationale for the simulation makes far more sense than the one in the movies, which stole both their central motif and their very name from Doctor Who).  The incorporation of the “Pope Joan” myth was clever (if a bit silly), which fit in nicely with the clever-but-silly treatment of the Pope showing up in Bill’s flat.  That’s silly in a good way; the episode contains just enough humor to lighten its extremely dark subject matter.  The revelation that The Doctor’s prisoner is Missy (and how that came to pass) is handled well, and the resolution, with the shadow-Doctor sending the record of the whole adventure to the real Doctor, is brilliant.  Best of all, the script gave me a concise formula for stating an element of my own personal morality: that acts of apparent goodness are only truly virtuous when performed “without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis”.  It’s a rare piece of fiction indeed that helps one to articulate existing beliefs, and I suspect it may have opened a few viewers’ minds to this Truth.

The Pyramid at the End of the World is another good example of how to craft good sci-fi rationales for creatures straight out of fantasy, with powers that appear to be black magic; this is especially true because some of those explanations don’t appear until the second part, The Lie of the Land.  It wouldn’t take much adjustment to turn this one into a Sword and Sorcery tale: a cult of evil sorcerers uses a magic crystal apparatus to predict the end of the world so they can offer a devil’s bargain: human obedience in exchange for their “protection”, but the pact must be freely agreed to by someone with the power to make such a contract.  Of course, this is also pretty clearly an allegory of authoritarian government: “We will PROTECT you in exchange for your obedience.”  Contrast this smooth, powerful allegory with the ham-handed, spelled-out-in-monosyllables message of “Oxygen“, and you may better understand why I find the latter so offensive in a show capable of producing the former.  There are a few sour notes: the narrative setup of the lab accident relies far too much on coincidence and incompetence (especially on the part of the hung-over guy), and The Doctor’s blindness was also much too convenient, like an element inserted into finished scripts in order to tie the season together; this served to weaken the narrative foundation of “The Lie of the Land”.  That having been said, the explanation for the need for “pure” consent – the revelation that the Monk’s mind control projectors rely on amplifying the exact feelings of the consent-granter – is good and satisfying (clearly, projecting desperation or strategy to the whole population would’ve made the world much harder to control), and helps to make Bill’s means of defeating them far less sappy than it otherwise would have seemed.  I also really thought Missy’s attempts to be helpful while still failing to understand the value of human life was well-played and believable, though there was a fine network of threads connecting her thought-processes with The Doctor’s unneccesary glee at how he and his men deceived Bill.  And finally, “The memory-manipulating aliens made everybody forget them so news of the defeat could not potentially reach other worlds under their domination” is a helluva lot more solid and satisfying than Moffat’s usual “Humans are so dull-minded they soon forget giant monsters tromping through London or magic forests appearing overnight.”

The last two standalone episodes of the Capaldi era were both about small groups of historical soldiers trapped far from home by hostile aliens, but they’re actually not very much alike.  In Empress of Mars, the soldiers are from the height of the British Empire in 1881 and the hostile aliens are Ice Warriors, one of whom the soldiers discovered in suspended animation in South Africa.  The story is a good one, both on its own merits (good action; interesting, well-developed characters on both human and Martian sides; fun Victorian stuff; a great intro; a fantastic setting; and a horrifying Martian weapon) and due to its ably resolving the conflicting accounts of Ice Warriors from the Troughton and Pertwee eras.  To summarize: Mars died approximately around 3000 BC, and the Ice Warriors sent several missions to Earth, all of which either failed completely or resulted in the crews going into suspended animation.  One was the rescued warrior from this episode, who tricked the Brits into helping him dig up his Queen and countrymen, but once they realize Mars is dead they accept The Doctor’s help to be evacuated to a new home by benevolent aliens represented by none other than Alpha Centauri from the “Peladon” stories, clearly implying that the Ice Warriors who appear in those stories are the descendants of these refugees, while the Ice Warriors seen in “The Seeds of Death” were another group who awakened from suspended animation to find a dead Mars, and the original “Ice Warriors” first encountered by the Second Doctor were another crew left in suspended animation in a glacier from the failed colonization attempt of roughly 3000 BCE.  As a continuity nerd, a good retcon like this, which pulls everything together and then builds on it while invalidating nothing, is a joy to behold.

The small group of historical soldiers trapped far from home by hostile aliens in The Eaters of Light were the survivors of Rome’s 9th Legion, which was mostly slaughtered by an extradimensional monster in the 2nd century on the future site of Aberdeen, said monster having been allowed to come through a gateway protected by a cairn, by a misguided young Pictish priestess who failed to realize just how much worse said monser was than possible Roman conquest.  As you can probably tell from this synopsis, this is one of those tales just chock full of glorious Whovian weirdness; it may in part be due to the fact that the writer, Rona Munro, is the only writer to date who has penned scripts for both New and Classic Who (she wrote the very last Classic episode, “Survival“).  The story has a lot of fascinating elements, of which I think the best one may be another take on the idea that a haunting is a distorted perception of a phenomenon from a dramatically-slower time stream, as in “Hide” but auditory rather than visual.  There was also a lot of attention to historical facts most people are unaware of, such as the youth of the typical Roman or Pictish soldier and the Romans’ different view of homosexuality from modern people.  The whole thing has a haunting, mythic feel to it that I think will result in it aging very well, and eventually being widely viewed as one of the best Capaldi episodes.  If you didn’t think much of it the first time you watched it, try it again with all this in mind and I think your opinion of it will improve.

Though the preceding wasn’t written by Moffat, the concept of adjacent areas or timelines in which time moves at different speeds (or even different directions) is one he’s almost as fond of as the theme of The Doctor inadverently making women wait years for him.  But he’s never combined them in as spectacular a fashion as he does in World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls.  Though the basis of the multiple timezones (1056 of them) is a bit hard to swallow (how does one “reverse” Newtonian thrust without thrusters at the front, and if said reverse thrust was powerful enough to escape the gravity well of a black hole, it seems unlikely it would take something like 2000 years to escape, not to mention where the hell would one get the fuel to run such engines for millennia?)  But the world-building was so impressive (and, at the risk of overusing the word, mythic) that I’m inclined to suspend disbelief.  The venue is a Mondasian colony ship, presumably launched in the 20th century because the first Cybermen we see are of the original variety shown in “The Tenth Planet“, complete with a neat, subtle retcon of why the costumes were so very bad.  And speaking of retcons, the timing works to support my theory about the Second Cyber Wars being in the 42nd century, because that would be about the time this episode ends, with the ship finally pulling free from the black hole and releasing a new horde of Cybermen into the galaxy.  Having two versions of The Master appearing at once is a logical development which nicely parallels the two versions of The Doctor in the very last scene (leading into Capaldi’s swansong), and Missy gets to demonstrate that despite temptation to keep being bad, she really is on the road to reform, and the end is played beautifully, leaving the viewer to recognize for him- or herself that Missy’s actions are ironically virtuous because though she did not intend it to be so, they were performed “without hope, without witness, without reward”.  The fact that Chibnall not only chose to ignore her character arc, but to completely erase and invalidate it, is one of his greatest sins against the series, and the fact that he thought we wouldn’t notice is one of his greatest offenses against our intelligence.  As for Moffat, why does every single female companion and quasi-companion in his tenure (including Missy) have to exit by dying, when only 4 companions in the entire pre-Moffat run (Katarina, Sarah Kingdom, Adric, and Peri) left that way?  I specify “female” because Nardole’s death is a little ambiguous, occuring offscreen and at an uncertain time after episode’s end.  Rory’s dad doesn’t, and I reckon an argument could be made about Madame Vastra and Clara’s young charges in “Nightmare in Silver”.  But it’s still a bit creepy and Pygmalionesque that Moffat keeps creating “perfect” female companions and then murdering them.

Companions are, as I have pointed out many times in this thread, a narrative necessity; without them, exposition takes the form of The Doctor uttering ridiculous lines like “We Time Lords are telepathic” to other Time Lords. But if a companion feels like nothing but a stock character, the discerning viewer is disappointed; we want the characters to feel like real, flesh-and-blood people we might actually meet. And while Moffat gave us some truly amazing companions in the beginning, he started to falter in Series 7 and by series 10 he was completely spent. Bill Potts and Nardole weren’t bad companions like Turlough and Victoria, nor even constant annoyances like Adric, Mel, Steven, or Tegan; they were just zeroes, barely above Dodo and slightly less interesting than Harry or Peri. The main problem is that they’re less characters than character descriptions; even Moffat himself seems to have recognized this near the end, when (in a moment of brutal honesty in “World Enough and Time“) he has Missy refer to them as “Exposition” and “Comic Relief” (immediately after introducing herself as “Doctor Who”). Unfortunately, Nardole isn’t actually funny, and though Bill is an effective expository character, she simply isn’t anything else. The only things we ever learn about her appear to have been picked from an online listicle called “How to Develop New Characters in Your Fanfic”, and not even being turned into a Cyberman and then a ghost makes her any more interesting than she was as a cafeteria lady.

In Twice Upon a Time the reluctant-to-regenerate 12th Doctor ends up at the South Pole in December 1986, and has an adventure with the reluctant-to-regenerate 1st Doctor which involves The Brigadier’s grandfather, the ghost of Bill Potts, and a guest appearance by the good Dalek “Rusty” from “Into the Dalek“, who has been holed up in a tower in the ruins of Villengard for some time, taking pot-shots at anyone who happens by.  The story doesn’t actually have an antagonist per se, except for The Doctor’s own stubbornness; what he assumes to be a nefarious plot turns out to be nothing more than archivists from “New Earth” trying to record the memories of every human who has ever lived.  I have to agree with The Doctor here; a recording of a person’s memories is not the person, and certainly not equivalent to the soul; that’s a reductive view which ignores a great deal of what we know about personality.  If I write an autobiography, I have “uploaded” part of my memories to a storage medium and anyone who reads that book then “downloads” those memories to his own brain; does that mean part of my “soul” is now in that person?  Thoughts, yes.  Souls, no.  The writing of fiction is braver than most realize; it reveals one’s fears, fancies, and fixations to anyone who reads that fiction (most of the stories in my own collection The Forms of Things Unknown are extremely revealing).  In Moffat’s case, we see a preoccupation with metaphysics; religious sects (especially ones descended from Catholicism) are persistent adversaries (and sometimes allies), and he often seems to be looking for ways to build an afterlife credible to science-fantasy-loving atheists (first negatively in “Dark Water“, then positively in this one; I’d say that one he wrote during Davies’ run, “Forest of the Dead“, also contains what looks like an earlier version of this same theme.  In any case, “Twice Upon a Time” is a very representative example of the Capaldi era: not great overall, but with good fanservice and truly moving emotional content, here the Christmas Truce of 1914, an event I can never see depicted without crying my eyes out.  Coda: this is the last episode scored by Murray Gold, whose masterful music was a major contributor to the success of NewWho.

Reviewing the Capaldi episodes leave my previous appraisal of their ranking unaffected; here it is as a reminder:

Tom Baker (#4)
David Tennant (#10)
Jon Pertwee (#3)
Matt Smith (#11)
Patrick Troughton (#2)
Peter Capaldi (#12)
Peter Davison (#5)
William Hartnell (#1)
Christopher Eccleston (#9)
Sylvester McCoy (#7)
Colin Baker (#6)

It would be unfair to include either McGann or Hurt in the ranking, because we only got a taste of each on the screen; I’m saving my thoughts on Whittaker for my analysis of her character, which will appear just before Christmas, but I’ll summarize it as “higher than some of y’all might like and lower than others might hope”. As I’ve pointed out before, it’s difficult (sometimes extremely so) to separate one’s opinion of a given Doctor from one’s opinion of the shows in which that incarnation appears; it seems likely that my high opinions of the top four were at least colored by my high opinions of the seasons in which they appeared, and my low opinions of the bottom two likewise. So I had to think pretty hard about the various aspects of Capaldi’s Doctor I like in order to judge them against the aspects I dislike, then decide whether Series 8 was worse than seasons 19-21 in aggregate and separate all that from my fuzzy views of the Davison Doctor. Luckily, both of them were encumbered by lackluster companions, so I was able to disregard their influence pretty easily. The 12th Doctor is in many ways a great deal like the 1st; both project crusty, grumpy, and even intimidating old wizard type personas, yet both are very immature in some ways. Both choose to represent themselves as learned authority figures to a much greater degree than any of the others except the 3rd (with whom the two share white hair and a wizardy vibe), and both are the first in a regeneration cycle. In the end, the 12-5-1 order was an extremely close call, a photo finish I can’t promise never to revise.

THIRTEENTH DOCTOR

Series 11  (Show Runner: Chris Chibnall)

The difference in the music was the very first disappointment I felt when watching The Woman Who Fell To Earth.  It was about on par with other stories introducing new incarnations of The Doctor, neither especially good nor especially bad.  Unfortunately, as is the case with women entering any field previously dominated by men, it had to be twice as good to be considered half as good.  Before the premiere, I was neither excited nor upset by the concept of a female Doctor; I disagree with both the bean-counters and the “RUINING MY CHILDHOOD!” fanboys, because as a writer and critic what I want and expect from a classic science fantasy series is good storytelling, not submission to popular demands from loudmouths in either of the big Manichean culture war camps.  So when I first watched this one three years ago and then reviewed it three days ago, I tried to judge it against its peers (other Doctor Who episodes) rather than against weird politicized expectations from people who care more about posturing than about the Whoniverse.  Fortunately, I was aided in that by the fact that I don’t read fan materials or keep up on “buzz”; any exposure I have to others’ commentary on the series is either from friends or from stuff they happen to mention or retweet.  So my viewing experience is unusually free of noise, just as it was in the days before the internet.  One thing I was concerned about was Chris Chibnall as showrunner; though I’d enjoyed a number of his scripts, I’d also seen enough flaws to be concerned about his ability to actually helm such a big, powerful ship.  So with all this in mind you may understand why the first thing I noticed was Murray Gold’s absence.  My best friend Grace was a professional musician and Lorelei is a self-described “score nerd”, so in addition to noticing the deficiency myself I had their comments to help shape my own perception as one who loves music, but has no formal education in it.  Grace’s analysis sums it up: instead of standing out as Gold’s work does, the music is now pretty typical of what one hears on other contemporary scifi or adventure series: not bad, but nothing worthy of notice or comment.  My only other important complaints at this point in reviewing are: 1) I really wish they’d had or allowed Jodie Whittaker to lean into the strangeness of a person who’s been male their whole life suddenly and unexpectedly changing their gender; the way Missy was handled was perfect IMHO, and I’d have liked to see something more like that than what we got, which barely even acknowledged the change; 2) it seems a shame to kill off the most interesting of the four people who help the Doc here, the brave, clever, witty Grace; and 3) I really hate the new costume, the most awkward-looking mess since the 6th Doctor’s clown suit, and definitely more of an eyesore than the goofy-but-not-garish outfits of the four previous NewWho Doctors.  Most of the comments I’ve made about this one apply equally well to The Ghost Monument, which feels more like a second part to the intro episode than a standalone story, given that the first leads directly into it as The Doctor inadvertently drags new companions Graham, Ryan, and Yaz along on the quest to recover her TARDIS at some indeterminate time in the future on a planet which, like Villengard, is the former site of weapons-manufacturing factories which were eventually hoist with their own petard.  The title of the episode refers to the TARDIS herself, which has briefly appeared in the same location every thousand days since “ancient times”, thus serving as an (intermittent but notable) landmark.  This one is, like the first, neither especially good nor especially bad; there was some good Doctory patter and a few chuckles, but Chibnall was trying much too hard to make the supporting characters sympathetic to have any time to make them actually interesting.  And how come the very first thing the mind-reading bandage monsters pick up on from The Doctor just happens to be the central tenet in Chibnall’s plan to remake the mythos, when not a single one of many mind-reading creeps has ever seen anything even remotely like it before, with the possible exception of Lady Peinforte from “The Silver Nemesis” (if you squint hard)?

Rosa is quite possibly the foamiest episode of Doctor Who ever made; we’re shown about halfway through that the villain is incapable of actually harming anyone due to a V-chip in his brain, so his plan mostly revolves around making the main guest character miss her bus.  The rationale of this “plan” seems to rest in the “butterfly model” of time travel proposed by Ray Bradbury in “A Sound of Thunder“, that the web of time is so delicate, stepping on a butterfly in the Jurassic can change the history of humanity.  But Doctor Who has never used that model; if anything, it uses a flexible model in which a traveler is much more likely to become part of the events he’s trying to disrupt.  In fact, that happens here, when The Doctor and friends become part of events by…riding on a bus.  For an appreciable fraction of the episode’s runtime.  Furthermore, we’ve seen The Doctor actively ridicule the butterfly model, when Bill brings it up in “Thin Ice“.  On top of that, it’s more than a little insulting to the many thousands of dedicated civil rights activists who worked for decades against bigotry and legal discrimination to pretend that the success of their movement was due to one single lucky break, and that preventing that break would destroy the whole movement so that legal discrimination would still exist thousands of years in the future when, in actuality, the best the villain could possibly hope for was to change future history books to name a different bus driver or shift a date by a few weeks.  Discussing social problems is a time-honored sci-fi tradition, but only interesting when done well.

Arachnids in the UK is a good, basic Doctor Who creepshow in the classic mold, but though one might be tempted to compare it to “Planet of the Spiders“, it bears a much stronger resemblance to “The Green Death” from one year earlier.  Both could be synopsized as “An unscrupulous corporation secretly dumps toxic waste into a coal mine, resulting in the mutation of harmless arthropods into very dangerous giant forms.”  In both, The Doctor must directly confront the CEO of the polluter company, but in “Arachnids” there’s no diabolical supercomputer because by 2018 Western countries had basically surrendered to those anyhow.  Instead of a mastermind, this one has a Trump-like sociopath who believes himself to be a mastermind.  I’m not going to gripe about it being biologically impossible for spiders to grow so big without significant physiological redesign, because the statement that they’re genetically engineered (plus toxic waste) is IMHO sufficient hand-waving for the venerable “giant bug” plot, which goes back at least to the 1950s.  I will, however, gripe that they’re much too heavy to run across ceilings as shown, because they don’t actually do it by some kind of super-magnetism (sorry, Peter Parker), and just because CGI lets you show that when giant rubber spiders or forced perspective didn’t, doesn’t mean you should.  Also: the horde of spiders was much too easily dealt with.  On the plus side: the Trump character was a good, hissable villain; Graham is already distinguishing himself as the most interesting of the three companions; and the dialogue was fun.

The Tsuranga Conundrum wasn’t actually bad.  Of course, it wasn’t actually good, either; it wasn’t actually much of anything, except maybe a decent example of what a TV script written by committee looks like.  I’m not sure who decided the monster should be something like a tiny, cute, CGI Tasmanian Devil (the Looney Tunes kind, not the actual animal), and the climax should be a very Looney Tunes “creature eats bomb, puffs up when it explodes, and smoke comes from its mouth”; however, that’s what we got.  The rest mostly followed the formula of Star Trek: The Next Generation filler episodes: “Several not-very-well-developed characters we’ve never seen before, will never see again, and don’t really care about, experience drama, assisted by the regular cast members”.  And will somebody please call the 1970s and tell them to come and collect their “pregnant man” trope, which is so far past its sell-by date that it’s gone past merely “rotten” to “completely mummified”.  On second thought, my first line was wrong; this one is actually kinda mildly bad.

Even generally-bad eras of Doctor Who enjoy a few exceptional episodes; for the Chibnall era it’s Demons of the Punjab, which is not only the best episode of the entire Chibnall run*, but among the best Doctor Who episodes of all time.  In pursuit of mysteries of her grandmother’s youth that the old lady won’t discuss, Yaz convinces The Doctor to investigate and the team ends up in the middle of the 1947 Partition of India.  Every character in the story is well-written and well-acted: if Whittaker’s Doctor and her three companions had felt this real and compelling in most stories, they’d be among my all-time favorites rather than way down in the “blah” range.  The Doctor’s gender switch receives exactly the right kind and amount of attention, Graham demonstrates the wisdom and compassion which define him, and Yaz & Ryan are pitch-perfect.  But all of them are actually here to support the supporting cast, who are little short of magnificent: the story of this one small village where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs have lived alongside each other in peace for generations being torn apart by the actions of politicians, religious fanatics, “angry men on the radio” and radicalized young men, is both powerful in itself and also as an example for our own times (and I do not mean only on the Indian subcontinent).  Prem’s impassioned speech at his “stag night” moved me to tears, and Graham’s attempt to comfort him, when he already knows the young bridegroom is doomed to die, is the seal on that very powerful scene.  The story the aliens tell The Doctor, about why they do what they do, is almost as powerful despite the fact that the actors are in armor so the effect is accomplished by voice acting alone, and by Jodie Whittaker’s reactions to the revelation that she was wrong about them.  In the end, the only negative thing I can say about this episode is that it is so good, it makes the rest of the Chibnall era look even worse in comparison, because it demonstrates how much better all the other episodes could’ve been had the available resources been recognized and used as they should’ve been.

*I have absolutely NO fear this statement will be invalidated by anything in series 13, which I haven’t yet seen at the time of this writing.

Those of you who’ve been following this thread for a while may recall that I’m not especially fond of the “Everything Old is New Again” setting of about the year 200,000, which looks a lot like the early 21st century with higher tech on a larger scale right down to having versions of CNN, “reality” shows, and, as we discover in Kerblam!, Amazon.  We’re not specifically told that this takes place in that time, but everything fits, including the technology to teleport things directly into or out of the TARDIS (which is why I also put “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” in this period).  Of course, this whole scenario makes less than zero sense: any technology capable of teleporting an object to any point in a galaxy would also be able to materialize a copy of said object directly from a mathematical model of the object, at a far lower cost in energy (and why spend the extra energy to teleport that creepy robot with the package?) and eliminating the need for a moon-sized warehouse because the object doesn’t actually exist until the customer orders it (Amazon already uses a lower-tech version of this same strategy with “print on demand” books).  For this plot to work, you’d need to dramatically reduce both the technological level and the area they cover, but that still wouldn’t change the fact that it’s a silly plot in the first place, and that had The Doctor simply paused to wonder, “Why the hell did the computer make me a janitor?” or just, you know, started at the top as she later decides to do anyhow, the episode would’ve only been about 20 minutes long.  And is it wrong of me to wonder how switching more of the company’s functions from automation to humans is going to help anything when it was a human employee who caused the problem and the automated systems which called The Doctor and helped her to defeat the terrorist?  The whole episode falls apart as soon as you start thinking about it.

The Witchfinders isn’t exactly bad, but it’s not all that good either.  As I’ve pointed out before (and the Doc herself points out in the last scene), there’s not really much point in splitting hairs about technology vs magic or aliens vs demons when the aliens in question are hostile and malevolent; look like Lovecraftian tentacled monsters until they possess somebody, after which they look like undead; use powers that are essentially indistinguishable from black magic; and were imprisoned in a cursed hill since time immemorial by other supernatural-seeming beings by the power of what basically amount to spells engraved on a sacred tree.  So why constantly waste time, energy and (most importantly) possible local sympathy every time somebody struggles to put the situation into terms they can understand?  The Doctor is not going to win support by arguing about terminology, and she certainly isn’t going to turn 17th century English people into rationalists by repeatedly correcting them.  Also: did anyone else but me have trouble suspending disbelief about King James I wandering around Lancashire in disguise with only one bodyguard, participating in witch hunts?  When I first saw this I kept assuming it was some kind of trick, disguised alien or whatever.  One thing I did like was that the writers finally decided to recognize that as a woman The Doctor should encounter obstacles she didn’t really have to worry about as a man.  This should certainly happen in most episodes set in Earth history, but it doesn’t.  I also liked Graham’s attempts at posing as an authority while actually deferring to The Doctor.  And you may also enjoy this lesser-known funk song by Carl “Kung Fu Fighting” Douglas, inspired by the 1968 Vincent Price movie of the same name (AKA “The Conqueror Worm”):

It Takes You Away appears to be the result of the writer, Ed Hime, (who also penned the justly-reviled “Orphan 55“) submitting a script written after watching Labyrinth on acid to the committee.  I think it wanted to be a horror story, and it easily could’ve been had it been competently written (a Murray Gold soundtrack would’ve helped as well).  But while good horror is steeped in the Unknown, this one hastens to explain every single creepy thing, and does so very badly.  The lurking monster in the woods is revealed as the misguided act of a shockingly-abusive parent (who seems completely unrepentant at the end), and the instigator of the goings-on is revealed as…a magic frog, in the single most disappointing depiction of a god since the Chicken Man.  The god in question is something like an anti-demiurge with an Ed Wood-style name, and is “explained” by quite possibly the most ridiculous bit of fairy-tale hokum the series has ever tried to shove up our nostrils instead of simply admitting that it’s the master of another bubble-universe, a pale imitation of the being in the vastly-better “The Doctor’s Wife“.  And why did the Frog God decide to pick on this dude in rural Norway, of all the beings in the entire universe?  No clue; the one bit of explanation which was actually necessary to the plot was completely glossed over with the apparent implication that Norwegian dude’s grief over losing his wife was so monumental it broke the laws of physics, or something.  It was all so bad I just couldn’t care about the giant piranha moths.

Chris Chibnall’s style of showrunning is like the behavior of a tomcat moving in on another tom’s territory: first he kills all the kittens, then pisses on everything to mark his turf.  So it isn’t surprising that The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos doesn’t feature even as much as a cameo from a Classic Who monster or villain as every other season finale in NewWho had thus far, opting instead for the first villain of Chibnall’s territory, the despicable-but-not-really-very-interesting “Tim Shaw”.  Yes, this was a season finale; you can be forgiven if you didn’t notice because there isn’t much of a season-finale feel about it.  The only big or impressive thing about it is Chibnall’s gall at asking us to suspend disbelief for such a patently ludicrous premise, that beings of such godlike power would nonetheless ignorantly believe that the first humanoid they’ve ever seen since coming to this planet must be a god, as though they were “natives” in a racist ’60s sitcom.  Yes, Chibnall wants you to believe that beings who can pull a “Pirate Planet” number on distant worlds with the mere power of thought, surpassing even the power of the post-Time War Dalek Empire, nonetheless lack any kind of critical thought at all, so their power is exceeded only by their gullibility.  And yet all it takes for the Doc to wreck their misplaced faith is to call attention to it?  Did Chibnall even bother to think this out?  Or was he just going for a 1980s US kid show vibe, complete with heartwarming conclusion where misguided troublemakers announce they’ve learned from their mistakes?

Chibnall seems to have sort-of realized how unsatisfying his first attempt at a “season finale” was, so he tried again with the New Year Special (was he too good to do a Christmas special like Davies and Moffat?) and deigned to use a monster created by someone else, namely a Dalek.  However, the main reason he did so seems to have been to distract viewers from his wanton murder of UNIT, a part of the mythos which has existed since 1968 (which we’ve been told will still exist in the early 22nd century, though obviously not in the Chibnallverse).  Resolution (see what he did there?) has a few mildly-interesting elements, but is otherwise pretty cut-and-paste.  Like, would it have hurt him to say where “Hope Valley” was, who was involved, and why they didn’t just burn the Dalek mutant instead of carrying out this weird ceremony?  And why send the Moorish guy to Polynesia, which was not known in the Middle East or North Africa (the only places I can figure a battle involving tribes of those apparent ethnic compositions might have taken place in the 9th century) instead of South Africa?  Plus, the whole idea of a Dalek surviving being cut into three pieces and buried for 1200 years, and then being able to teleport its long-decayed parts together, is just silly; it’s a sci-fi organism, not a demon lord from a Conan novel.  Now, don’t get me wrong; I like sword & sorcery stuff as much as the next nerdy girl who ever cosplayed as Taarna.  But Chibnall seems determined to use D&D-like settings even in stories where they’re a poor fit, and if he wanted a Hyborian Age setting he should’ve designed one, because historians actually have a reasonably-good picture of what the 9th century was like, especially within the spheres of influence of the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate.  Look, I know I’m being nitpicky now; it’s my way when a writer insists on being willfully obtuse and mismanaging a property he’s inherited without regard for its legacy because he imagines he can “improve” it (I won’t even rewatch the second season of Space: 1999).  When writers are proceeding in good faith and commit the occasional blunder, but are still putting out a basically-fun show, I tend to intentionally overlook their mistakes or may even help plaster the plotholes (as I’ve done many times in this thread).  But when faced with the creative equivalent of criminal negligence which sometimes crosses over into outright vandalism, I feel no need to be patient or extend the benefit of the doubt.  And in this case, doing so wouldn’t help much anyway, because we’re specifically told this is a period Dalek rather than a time-traveling one, so I’m unwilling to suspend disbelief about its being able to rebuild itself from junk and a few millennium-old parts when Hartnell-era Daleks absolutely couldn’t do that.  And I’d rather get some of this out of my system before wading into Series 12 so I can maintain at least a semblance of objectivity.

Series 12  (Show Runner: Chris Chibnall)

In order to keep myself grounded, I’m going to handle Series 12 the same way I did season 22: By forcing myself to start my discussion of each episode by saying something good about it.  The season started with the two-part Spyfall, a fairly exciting James Bond pastiche (signalled up front by its title, a play on the title of the 2012 Bond franchise entry Skyfall).  And really, as long as the story stays within the bounds of Bondian pastiche, it’s fun and entertaining; it’s only when it wanders outside of those bounds that it starts to smell.  The psychopathic supervillain is good, though I think Doctor Who writers should stop stealing plot elements from The Matrix now because everything worthwhile in that film was already stolen from either Doctor Who or the oeuvre of Philip K. Dick.  But as Bond villains are known for utterly absurd plans, it’s not out of place here.  It’s also kind of nice to see some timey-wimeyness here, though I have to say Chibnall’s handling of it is less like “Blink” and more like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure without the laughs.  The insertion of Ada Byron and Noor Inayat Khan feels less like a natural plot development and more like Chibnall’s working from a checklist, the more so because the fact that both women died quite young (Byron at 36, Khan at 30) is ignored in favor of an implied “grrrl power!” vibe, in line with Chibnall’s preference for descriptions and checkboxes over character development.  The story also launches a season-long theme of stories devoted to commentary on elements of the early 21st century, this time the ubiquity of “smartphones” and the surveillance web they make possible.  I’m sure by now y’all are waiting for the other shoe to drop, so here it is: the kitten Chibnall murders in this one is the development of The Master’s character along the lines originally planned for the Roger Delgado incarnation, which Chibnall simply discards without comment because he’s so much smarter than every other Doctor Who writer since 1963, he prefers to recycle another writer’s version (namely Davies’, because the “Spy Master” isn’t all that different from the “Harold Saxon” Master).  I have no complaint about the Spy Master’s strategy, because embedding himself within formal systems and then taking years to establish a power base before confronting The Doctor is classic Master going all the way back to 1971.  So why not use that?  Chibnall clearly isn’t averse to wibbly-wobbly timelines, so why didn’t he simply respect the Missy developments and make this an older, pre-Time War version of the character?  It would’ve been great; the viewers would’ve slowly realized what was up as this Master’s dialogue revealed that he didn’t remember anything after the Delgado days, and at the end of his arc he could’ve suffered whatever accident turned him into the walking corpse who faced off against the Fourth Doctor.  But of course that would’ve obstructed Chibnall’s spray, making it harder for him to indelibly mark his territory; it was much easier to just ignore everything that came before, as is his wont.

The best thing I can say about Orphan 55 is that I don’t seem to hate it as much as most of the Whovians I’ve seen comment on it. It’s the next example of the season-long “elements of the modern world” arc, in this case climate change; that’s a venerable subject in Doctor Who, so since we’re given no specific date I’m placing it in the same timeline as the “haemovores” from “The Curse of Fenric“, which The Doctor says are what man will evolve into, when the Earth is “rotting in chemical slime” after “half a million years of industrial progress”.  The monsters in this one are similar to Torchwood‘s “weevils” in a number of ways as well, so there might be a connection there.  But any goodness in this story must be borrowed, because everything else is either bad or dumb or both, from the recycled subway station ID gimmick to the astonishingly-bad tech mismatches to the dueling psychopaths and very JNT style phoned-in stock characters to The Doctor breaking the fourth wall at the end to say, “Hey kids, give a hoot, don’t pollute!”  Probably the worst thing of all is the “hopper virus”, which wouldn’t have been a bad concept for this setting had anyone in the writer’s room had even a vague notion of what viruses are, or grasped that portraying them as goofy CGI creatures that the Doc can catch with her bare hands and keep in a sack makes “The Invisible Enemy” look like a brilliant concept with stunning effects in comparison.

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror is a good workmanlike entry, which due to the stunning incompetence of the rest of Series 12 makes it the second-best episode of the season (after “Can You Hear Me?“) It’s what I call a “new historical”; originally historicals were episodes in which The Doctor and company landed in the midst of some historical event (such as the Reign of Terror) and/or met historical personages, with no alien or fantastical elements in sight.  But starting with “The King’s Demons” the real events and/or people were bedeviled by aliens or monsters The Doctor needed to defeat so history could continue on course.  In this case, the titular character is joined by his rival Thomas Edison when alien scavengers want to enslave Tesla to keep all their stolen and salvaged tech running because they’re too dumb and lazy to do it themselves.  It’s an interesting, different villain motivation, and the characterizations were fun; my only gripe is the fairly minor complaint that the script seems determined to ignore that Tesla’s dream for Wardenclyffe went far beyond mere wireless telephony and faxing.  The reason J.P. Morgan cut his funding was that Tesla wanted to even transmit power in this way.  Had he succeeded your cell phone would never need recharging; it would operate on limitless free power sucked from the “ether”.  And while that doesn’t tie in with the season’s theme because we don’t have it yet, I still feel as though The Doctor could’ve said more about the promise of it and called attention to how brilliant Tesla was for imagining it.

Since I’m starting every review of Series 12 by saying something good about the episode, I’ll start this discussion of Fugitive of the Judoon by saying how much I enjoyed seeing Captain Jack Harkness again.  He’s one of my favorite quasi-companions, and his charm just lights up the screen; even though he’s just here to provide foreshadowing, I loved his interaction with Graham and it was good to see him in action again after the execrable “Miracle Day“.  Alas, that’s all I liked about this turd on a paper plate.  Let’s start with the Judoon, whom I’ve always disliked since their debut in “Smith and Jones“, when I described them as “an entire race of dull-witted, unimaginative cops whose technological level appears to be whatever is required by the script.”  Their next big role was in The Sarah Jane Adventures, wherein I pointed out that they’re “always highly irritating to me as a lifelong, diehard anti-authoritarian.”  So it suffices to say that this episode was more of the same, only worse.  I’ll leave most of the discussion of the “Timeless Child” rubbish to the story it most dominates; for now I just want to point out that due to Chibnall’s murdering-and-pissing behavior, it’s impossible to accept what we see on screen here as valid without also invalidating a score or more of actually good episodes, most recently all three of the “…of the Doctor” stories which celebrated the 50th anniversary.  In “The Name of the Doctor” we’re told a Time Lord’s tomb contains a gate to his whole timeline, and shown that it starts with the First Doctor; Clara isn’t duplicated all the way back to the Age of Rassilon, and she guides him to the TARDIS (not yet a police box, because it became stuck in that shape upon landing in 1963).  Then there’s “Day of the Doctor“, in which all of our hero’s incarnations to date (thirteen, not umpteen) appear; finally, in “The Time of the Doctor” he cannot regenerate until the Time Lords grant him a new cycle.  And these are just the first four I thought of; there are many others we’d need to eject from canon to enshrine Chibnall’s as the ruling narrative.  For example, why is a Time Lord agent using Judoon to chase the False Doctor, and if she’s a Time Lord official how can she not know about the Time War?  The holes are so enormous and pervasive that it’s impossible to judge this episode on features outside of that massive coup attempt, because its reek permeates the entire episode like cat spray in a hoarder’s flat.

Praxeus fits into the “elements of the modern world” theme by revolving around plastic pollution; it isn’t nearly as bad as “Orphan 55” because A) The Doctor doesn’t break the fourth wall with a heavy-handed moral statement; and B) the story is better, though the characters are still descriptions rather than rounded personalities and I couldn’t actually care about any of them.  Of course the praxeus disease was ridiculously virulent, but that’s extremely typical of sci-fi diseases so no points off there.

Can You Hear Me? is the best episode of Series 12.  It’s not as good as the previous season’s “Demons of the Punjab“, but that’s a high bar.  The story is interesting and the implementation suitably creepy; Mr. Fingers is a creature worthy of Moffat and the references to other godlike adversaries The Doctor has faced in the past were welcome, if done a bit heavy-handedly.  The committee seems to have misplaced their checklist for at least part of the writing process, so the episode would have worked with at least some of the other Doctors and companions (always a good thing).  There are a few gaps in logic (such as what the original connection between The Doctor, the villains and the girl from Aleppo is supposed to be), but those aren’t atypical in even good Doctor Who stories so it’s no big deal.  One also has to wonder if there’s a connection between these dream-manipulators and the “Nightmare Man” from The Sarah Jane Adventures, and I need to add that Chibnall’s insistence on repeatedly portraying cops as heroic defenders of the weak borders on the offensive, especially in a show whose hero has always been very anti-authoritarian, at a time when more public attention is finally being paid to the serious problems of police brutality and corruption.

I really wanted to like The Haunting of Villa Diodati more than I did.  My undergraduate degree is in English, specializing in the English Romantic period (with special attention to Blake, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley).  The tale of the night Frankenstein was born is so well-known most people with even a rough framework of cultural literacy have at least heard of it, and it’s probably the single most often dramatized and fictionalized private party in all of human history, going back at least to 1935:

The ’80s gave us two big-screen adaptations, Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986) and the less-fantastical Haunted Summer (1988).  But every version tends to confuse the novel with the classic Universal version of the story, and “Diodati” is no exception.  That’s not really a gripe because The Bride of Frankenstein is one of my favorite movies, so though the idea of a Cyberman being the inspiration for the story is definitely stretching things a bit, it doesn’t really bother me as much as Byron’s pursuit of “Mrs. Doctor” supposedly precipitating Claire Clairmont’s estrangement from Byron as though she were a 21st-century woman, when the reality was considerably messier, uglier, and more tragic.  This practice of turning real, interesting historical women (including Byron’s daughter Ada) into quasi-anachronistic two-dimensional “feminist” puppets is one of The Chibnall Gang’s subtler (but still nasty) habits; another one (also on display in this episode) is their insistence on representing the invisible as some very visible and tangible CGI creature humans can hold in their hands.  Here it’s the Cyberium, presumably the ancestor of the “Cyberiad” from “Nightmare in Silver” and the descendant of the “history computer” from “Tomb of the Cybermen“; it’s a transitional technology from the definitely-a-mainframe technology of the 25th century to the definitely-decentralized “collective consciousness of all Cybermen” of the 51st, so I can’t legitimately claim that making it a physical object that can be stolen and sent back in time, and needs a physical host, is an error.  I can, however, legitimately wonder why they sent it back in time instead of just destroying it when their enemies also have time travel and can track the damned thing; furthermore, I must point out that having only one of such an important instrumentality is a rather unbelievable oversight (are the Cybermen religiously opposed to backups or something?) and a critical strategic flaw, and despite my own logic “we stole the Cyberium and sent it back in time” hits my brain much like “we stole the Internet and sent it by rocket to Mars” would.  And how does the Cyberium enable its host to hide itself via massive perception filters when we’ve never seen Cybermen demonstrate the use of such filters?  They’ve always been pretty in-your-face sorts of monsters, unless I’m forgetting something.  One last thing: given The Doctor’s previous lack of resistance to romancing Queen Elizabeth I and Marilyn Monroe, how are we to take her resistance to snogging Byron?  The Doctor’s always been depicted as pretty straight; does this mean even as a woman she’s still only attracted to women?  Or does it mean she’s not sure what to do with a female body and would rather just avoid the problem (which would work against the whole “Timeless Child” thing)?  Or are we just returning to the puritan-friendly view of The Doctor as asexual?

Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children was almost half good.  Though two-parters generally tell one story, this one instead takes two completely separate stories, one pretty typical Doctor Who and one a canonical abomination, and weaves them together, then adds some sappy bullshit about an Irish cop that’s clearly meant to be deeply symbolic, and spreads the mess into two separate episodes.  The result: two misbegotten messes instead of one decent episode and a narcissistic, nihilistic nightmare (infused with more of Chibnall’s cop-worshipping codswallop).  The “Cybermen” part of the dog’s breakfast would’ve made a decent, if unremarkable, Doctor Who adventure, up to the moment when The Master gets involved, after which we’re treated to what Chibnall seems to have believed would be a Götterdämmerung to trump Russell Davies’ triumph in “The Stolen Earth“.  Before that point, it’s an interesting, even suspenseful adventure in a future time-period we haven’t seen before, the Second Cyber Wars; after The Master appears we are horrified to discover that of all the loose threads left by Steven Moffat, the one Chibnall thought was most worthy of exploration was the inane “Hybrid” prophecy which supposedly terrified the Time Lords and precipitated their torturing the Twelfth Doctor to stop the “union of two mighty warrior races standing over the ruins of Gallifrey”.  It’s a stain on Moffat’s reputation that he provided Chibnall with an avenue for his vandalism of the mythos, so he bears at least some of the blame for this toxic rubbish.  Partial blame for the “Hapless Child” portion can be traced back to Andrew Cartmel, the 7th Doctor’s story editor, who originated the unimaginative and 3-dimensional idea that “The Doctor’s ‘moreness’…require[s] clumsily-insertedand continuity-wrecking forgotten lives and God-given special status in the past rather…[than] in his future as the War Doctor, the Oncoming Storm and Destroyer of Worlds.”  The reason this is so offensive to me (and many others, though they may not be able to articulate the reasons for their discomfort) is that it’s a denial and negation of everything The Doctor stands for and has ever stood for.  Chibnall wants us to believe that the person who once said, “An ordinary man…[is] the most important thing in creation“; the being who has demonstrated time and again that choices and actions are what make people special rather than bloodlines and titles; the show that has for six decades given us people inspired by our hero’s example to become heroes themselves; and the philosophy that proudly and defiantly declared that genes and past history are far less important than choices and principles in determining who and what a sentient being is; are all lies, hypocrisies, and delusions because the Whovian TRUTH as revealed in the Book of Chibnall is that biological essentialism rules, line of descent trumps everything else, and the only reason The Doctor is so awesome is that he/she/they is/are a mysterious, eternal, God among gods from the Outside to whom all Time Lords owe their ability to regenerate, Praise Be Upon Him/Her/Them.  It’s an ugly, toxic, reductive Weltanschauung, and one which Russell Davies, in his second turn at the helm, will need to refute in order to restore the series’ soul, which Chibnall appears ready to sacrifice on the altar of whatever-the-hell principles he thinks should replace the humanistic, individualistic ones which have always guided it before.  And then, after aborting the good story thread with hybrids and doomsdays and death particles, and taking a sledgehammer to canon, he mixes the whole thing with creepy copaganda implying that this lifelong anti-authoritarian is really more like a cop than anything else, then clumsily stapling on a badly-implemented cliffhanger ending in which the Judoon (who are more like actual cops) suddenly and magically develop the technology to teleport themselves directly into the TARDIS to abduct The Doctor and throw her into jail for eleventy-zillion years.  I’m probably forgetting a host of other sins and problems, but I’ve said all I can; now I feel like I need to go take a shower.

I just loved seeing Captain Jack back in action for the entirety of Revolution of the Daleks rather than only for a little part as in “Fugitive of the Judoon” (I’ll bet most of you had already guessed I’d start with that).  He steals every scene he’s in, starting with the First Act (or prologue; the sloppy composition makes it hard to classify) in which he rescues The Doctor, who has apparently reacted to Chibnall’s telling her all she’s accomplished has nothing to do with actually being a brave, indomitable hero by discarding her spine and resolve in favor of meekly submitting to perpetual imprisonment.  The Doctor I know has been locked up in worse situations more times than I can easily count, and has escaped every single time within a relatively short period.  It’s not always minutes or hours; sometimes it’s been days, and there are probably a couple of occasions when it was weeks or months.  But even when the jailers were the most powerful civilization in the known universe (his own), and the only avenue of escape was blocked by a diamond wall, he immediately set to work escaping, despite having a rough idea of how impossible it was.  But contrast The Doctor’s behavior in that trap (constantly thinking, constantly moving, always working toward escape) to her behavior in this one (head bowed, submitting to demands of her jailers, meekly waiting and counting the days), then remember that though the Gallifreyan prison-trap was for an objectively-longer time within that universe, The Doctor only experiences a few days of it.  To his mind, the escape took a few hard days whereas here, it takes decades and involves nothing other than waiting like a Disney princess for Prince Charming to come along and rescue her.  I don’t actually think Chibnall’s view of the situation was quite that sexist; I think he just believes that life is a series of experiences which “just happen” to hapless people who can never rise above their basic natures (villains can’t reform, heroes must be born heroes, companions are just descriptions, etc).  But given that this very uncharacteristic behavior was first displayed by the first female incarnation of The Doctor, it sure looks like a standard damsel-in-distress narrative.  Luckily, her characterization following the escape is much more on-target; in fact, I’d go so far as to say that her scheme for getting rid of a Dalek army is right out of the War Doctor playbook: a huge, impossible scheme which couldn’t possibly work, but is still believable because The Doctor is just that awesome.  In fact, it’s a great deal like the way the Doc defeats the Daleks in “Doomsday“, including a visual callback when the Daleks rush into the disguised second TARDIS.  The way the scout Dalek from “Resolution” returns from its own remains is far more believable here than the way it returned before, and involving the Trumplike corrupt businessman from “Arachnids in the UK” was a good touch, especially given the dearth of interesting recurring characters under Chibnall and the fact that villains using corporate fronts as a means of invasion is a very old Doctor Who trope, going back at least to “The Faceless Ones” (though “The Invasion” is probably more like it in tone).  The evil politician made me cringe every time she drooled the word “security”, so it was very satisfying when she’s hoist with her own petard later in the show, and it was a relief to see that Chibnall’s creepy reverence for cops is as inconsistent as his other guiding principles (for lack of a better term).  Possibly the most frustrating element of the episode, though, is the way the writers finally let Ryan be interesting and real just before he leaves the series; this is not an unusual problem in Doctor Who, but it’s extra-frustrating because we’re losing the grounded and dependable Graham and the all-grown-up Ryan while keeping the kinda-creepily-codependent Yaz.

The quality of Doctor Who companions has been dropping since the departure of the Ponds in 2012; given that the trend continued when Chibnall took over from Moffat, and that it’s not dissimilar to what we saw under John Nathan-Turner in the 1980s, I suspect that the decrease in companion quality has more to do with some kind of top-down pressure from the BBC in both cases. It may not even be the same kind of pressure; as a rule, interference with the creative process by the business-suited Philistines who write the checks is never good for a movie or TV franchise, regardless of what those empty-headed suits think they’re accomplishing. Replacing Doctor, showrunner, and companions all at once is also a risky move; it worked well at the launch of Season 7, but that was in part due to factors like the switch to color; the relative strengths of star Jon Pertwee, Producer Barry Letts, and script editor Terrance Dicks; and the link to earlier seasons by The Brigadier. By contrast, the transition to Season 19 was far rougher, despite JNT having had a whole season at the helm before replacing both Doctor and companions. I think it also might be a mistake in such situations to go from one companion to three, but that in itself is insufficient explanation for the relative weakness of either the 5th or 13th Doctor’s TARDIS crews. Of Doc 13’s three, Graham is the strongest; he’s grandfatherly, grounded, and remarkably wise and open-minded, and given better material he might’ve risen higher in my estimation than he did (just below Donna, just above Clara). His stepgrandson Ryan suffered similarly; at the very end he showed promise by becoming only the second companion in NewWho (after Martha) to part with The Doctor voluntarily, but up to that point he was given very little with which to develop his character. Even his mild disability was largely ignored between his first appearance in “The Woman Who Fell To Earth” and his exit in “Revolution of the Daleks“, leaving him mostly in the “strong, steady, quiet young man” role. As such, he’s just a little less interesting than Harry Sullivan, and slightly more interesting than Bill Potts.

Series 13  (Show Runner: Chris Chibnall)