Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Era (1996)

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I finally get to stop writing about that bloody Twitch Doctor Who marathon I watched over the summer. I'm all out of classic episodes now, but I do have some a few lists for you and maybe some final thoughts. Also, the 1996 TV movie wasn't actually part of the Twitch marathon or the classic TV series, but it didn't seem right to leave out the Eighth Doctor, so I'm giving you a bonus review as well! You probably guessed that already from the title though.

It's weird how the Eighth Doctor's run ended just as soon as it began, but his logo stuck around in continuous use longer than any other. This slightly modernised version of the Third Doctor's logo introduced here went on to be used for things like books, DVDs and Big Finish audios relating to the classic era for 22 years, until everything was unified under the gold Jodie Whittaker logo this year. Which is good, because to be honest this is maybe my favourite logo of all of them, classic or modern.

There will be SPOILERS beyond this point for the TV movie and I might even throw in the odd spoiler for the classic series, but I'll not spoil anything that might happen during the revival series. Not even that.

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I'm only doing the one review this time, but I'll give it a rating just for the sake of consistency. Episodes are judged on how much I gave a damn about them while watching, not their objective quality, though I'll add points if they had stand out moments of greatness, and deduct them if I noticed real problems with them.

10	It's a 1-9 scale really, this is just here so I can feel happier about giving out 9s to trash.
9	Because I'd give Discovery's What's Past is Prologue a 9 and that's a long way from perfect.
8	This is what I give to great episodes when there's a story I like better than them.
7	This means it was a good episode. I didn't 100% love it, but I've got no real complaints either.
6	I liked it for the most part, moderately good episode.
5	Not bad, kept me entertained and my attention didn't stray.
4	My attention strayed.
3	My attention left the room and got some food.
2	Could not care about what was happening at all.
1	Like something you'd see on a 'worst episodes ever' list, except worse.

This is going to be a little different to most of my classic Doctor Who reviews, because it was the only thing I watched that night and it wasn't even a six-part serial, so just this once it wasn't a gruelling test of endurance for me! Might have had an influence on how much I enjoyed it.

1996
156	Doctor Who (The 1996 TV Movie)	1 part	4
I'm going to start by saying something nice about the movie: it had some amazing direction and cinematography. Well okay not really, it was a TV movie produced for Fox in the 90s, but after two months of watching classic multi-camera TV done on the cheap, this felt like a Stanley Kubrick movie by comparison. It relied on the visuals to tell the story a bit more than the series did too and wasn't so wordy, especially at first. Plus the music was pretty good too, I loved the new gigantic steampunk console room, Paul McGann was good in his Wild Bill Hickok cosplay outfit, and the Master correcting Grace on her grammar in the ambulance was perfect, so there's five nice things I've said about the movie already. And it never bored me, which I've learned not to take for granted. But there's a major flaw with this movie that really hinders what it was trying to do: it's a terrible introduction to Doctor Who. And I know what I'm talking about here, because the TV Movie was my proper introduction to Doctor Who. I'm not even talking about the way it started off with the McCoy playing the Doctor and didn't have him regenerate into McGann until twenty minutes in, that was the least of its problems. In fact, I think it was a good move! I'd probably seen single digit minutes of the series before watching the TV movie the first time, but I knew that Sylvester McCoy was the Doctor in the series and it seemed to me that if he was in the movie then it must be legit. That was a big factor in why I decided to watch it in the first place. His resurrection tied in with both the Master's rebirth and Grace's concerns about life and death, and without it this would've been a different story. Everyone got to die and come back before the end, it was a theme, so it wasn't like the Doctor's regeneration was awkwardly shoved into a plot where it didn't belong. Plus McCoy's appearance meant that the Seventh Doctor finally got to take that bloody question mark pullover off before he died! To me the first half was the best part of the movie, unnecessary Frankenstein comparison aside, due to its focus on the Doctor and his problems (dying, memory loss, not having shoes). Even though we already knew who the Doctor was thanks to the narration at the start, so there was no mystery there for anyone. But even if you consider the regeneration story to be taking time away from the main plot, there was still a good 45 minutes or so afterwards to tell a regular Doctor Who tale once he'd recovered his wits; plenty of time to give new viewers an opportunity to learn just what the Doctor was about and why they should care about him. This is where they really screwed up for me, as the movie didn't show off the Doctor being Doctory. He didn't time travel onto a strange new world and help out, he didn't come up with a way to stop an invasion or fight monsters, he didn't even use his intelligence and cunning to outwit a villain. He said a whole lot of bullshit, they got that bit right, but other than riding a bike, swiping an ID, stealing a clock and wrestling with the Master he did nothing in this movie. In fact, it was Grace that somehow knew how to rewire the Tardis console to stop it from wiping out the Earth, which was the threat in this story. The Eighth Doctor came off as a completely unimpressive hero to me during my first watch all those years ago, and with my curiosity satisfied I decided that Doctor Who wasn't my kind of thing and didn't need to watch any more of it. It took until 2010 before I gave Doctor Who a proper second chance and watched Matt Smith's first season. In the meantime, I stuck with things like Star Trek and Stargate, where the heroes actually went into space and their stories weren't entirely about inexplicable fantasy nonsense. There's another flaw for you: it felt like the writer took a 'stream of consciousness' approach to the plot, coming up with any sci-fi bullshit off the top of their head as they went. It made it bloody difficult for me to follow what was happening at times and even harder to care. And it didn't help that the audience surrogate, Grace, didn't give a damn about any of it no matter how much the Doctor tried to convince her it was important. Apparently, the Eye of Harmony is a magic McGuffin that powers the Tardis, lets you see through someone's eyes, can restore memories at a distance, lets a Time Lord steal another's body, and resurrects the dead if you time travel backwards with it open. So it's basically a literal consciousness streaming device now that I think about it. The downside is that while it's open it disrupts the molecular stability of the local planet and, if it's the eve of the millennium, blows the whole planet up at exactly midnight to the second (PST). Plus the movie introduced Skaro, the Master, Gallifrey, the Time Lords and the Daleks in the teaser, and the mythology accumulated from there, but it didn't take a moment to explain things like why the Master was now a CGI slime snake that could possess people and slime others with their spit. The result was that the movie made it seem like the series' backstory was a complicated mess you needed to understand before you could enjoy new episodes, which is the opposite of what a pilot wants to be doing. Especially as the classic series was really stingy with its revelations, taking 356 episodes just to reveal that the Doctor's homeworld was called Gallifrey! Classic Doctor Who is not a series that requires a lot of foreknowledge to jump into and enjoy. What's worse is that the TV movie didn't just drop a ton of mythology on viewers, it changed it. Old school fans wouldn't have been watching thinking 'hey I know all this', they would've been wondering why the Daleks of all people were the ones that executed the Master for his crimes, how the Doctor had an interaction with them which didn't involve them all exploding, why the Eye of Harmony was in the Tardis, and why the Doctor was half-human now. And why he was kissing Grace. It's probably for the best that this didn't become a series, considering how much potential there was for them to mess with DW canon. According to the internet, the original plan for the series was that the Doctor would've fled Gallifrey after his brother, the Master, took over as President. He would've been searching for his missing father, Ulysses, and would've been getting advice along the way by his dead grandfather Borusa, whose spirit lived inside the Tardis. I don't believe that any of this was the plan anymore by the time the movie was made, but I have a feeling they would've found some other mad direction to take it in. Also, we would've gotten Spider Daleks. But with the TV movie being a one-off, the 2005 revival was able to continue on from the classic series like it'd never ended and include Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor into continuity! The movie did introduce one other element that has stuck around though: the opening credits with the actor's names and the Tardis flying through the time vortex. Though the movie also has asteroids flying around in there for whatever reason. I blame Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Oh right, this is a regeneration story, so I'm able to add 'a heart surgeon who wouldn't listen to him' to the list of the Doctor's causes of death, which currently reads: old age/Cybermen energy drain, Time Lord punishment, radiation in a giant spider cave, letting go from a radio telescope, spectrox toxaemia and falling over in the Tardis. That makes this the first time a companion killed a Doctor with their ineptitude! Though Grace was more of a love interest really... Funny thing is, there were nine years between the movie and the revival series, meaning that the Eighth Doctor technically had the longest run as the current Doctor out of all of them. Especially if you count it as being the time between on-screen regenerations.

CONCLUSION

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Uh, I don't really have much to write here after just one story. The Eighth Doctor seemed like a nice enough guy, more of a romantic hero than an indignant action scientist or a cunning clown, and he was really into shoes. Plus he could still ride a motorbike competently like Seven liked to do, so he hadn't lost that ability between regenerations, and he also retained Four's skill at pickpocketing.

He very almost had two companions, but not quite, so I can't write about them either. But I can mention that Seven left him a bloody nice Tardis console room. I guess the guy had finally gotten bored looking at that backdrop with all the circles printed on it that he had last time we got to see the room and decided to go all out with the redecorating.


My top three Eighth Doctor serials:

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1. Doctor Who (4)
2. Doctor Who (4)
3. Doctor Who (4)

Bottom three Eighth Doctor serials:

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1. Doctor Who (4)
2. Doctor Who (4)
3. Doctor Who (4)

Probably my least controversial ranking.



SERIES CONCLUSION

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It doesn't seem right to me to review an entire classic Doctor Who marathon and then stop without saying a few more words to sum up what I about what I thought about the series overall. Or the 261 hours of it I watched at least. Man, that's a lot of hours. I'm lucky I came away remembering any of it really, never mind enough to come up with some kind of overhead view of it all in my head.

So I went looking through my screencaps folder trying to find a single image that defined classic Doctor Who for me, something classy and iconic I could use to kick off my first paragraph.

But in the end, I went with this shot of a cliffhanger ending with Susan screaming in a fake jungle and the promise of more jungle screaming to come. Mostly because I barely took any screencaps, I didn't know I was going to be writing up all these reviews! But also because this is what a lot of what the classic series was: an adventure serial where at least one of the characters was severely traumatised by something every 25 minutes. Usually the teenage girl played by an actress in her twenties.

I was a little disappointed by how insubstantial a lot of the serials were. There was more going on than people being chased down corridors by monsters and getting captured, it was telling actual stories, but my experience of 60s sci-fi is shows like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone and I think I was expecting more allegory, social commentary, or just some kind of point to each story. Beyond 'evil corporations are evil'. Plus it taught me next to nothing about science and history! Granted part of the reason for that is because a lot of the historicals were lost, but it sure abandoned being educational in a hurry so that it could tell more stories about Cybermen and robot Yetis attacking various bases instead.

But the heart of the show was the interaction between the characters and when they got it right the series was producing gold. The plot didn't have to be all that if the dialogue was witty and the actors delivered it well. This is why I had I had so much trouble with the Fifth and Sixth Doctor eras, as the folks in charge overcompensated after Tom Baker's reign of trolling and focused too much on drama over comedy. I'm not saying Doctor Who shouldn't take itself seriously, I'm saying the classic series wasn't very good at it.

Spectacle wasn't its strong suit either and the series tended to make a fool of itself whenever it relied too much on visual effects. Or used them at all.

Not that I found the visuals to be a barrier to enjoying the show. I'd be lying my ass off if I said that the cinematography ever matched the modern series and the Sixth Doctor's coat was hard to get past, but it wasn't generally an unpleasant show to look at. Plus I can take rubbish dinosaurs and obvious bluescreen if I'm into the story... usually (that prawn monster in The Invisible Enemy left me in pain from laughing so much).

I was actually fascinated by what they were able to achieve with the time, money and equipment they had, especially in those early seasons. I don't just mean all the planets, spaceships, castles, and prison cells the series visited, I mean the scenes of characters talking to each other on a soundstage. For a show that used to film an episode in an afternoon with two cameras and barely any retakes in its early days, it was actually pretty slick and the performances were solid. Serials like Spearhead from Space, City of Death and Caves of Androzani showed how much untapped potential the series could've unlocked with the budget to shoot on film, a few genius writers and a couple of directors who shot in a more modern style. Also if they'd had HD cameras from the future they could've shot it in HD! But overall I think they did bloody well to get ambitious sci-fi stories done under the limitations they had.

Though they had a trick to get better value out of their sets, and that was to make long serials, padded out to fill all the assigned slots. Not so bad when you're watching one every week, less good if you try to binge-watch them. I wish I could say that the extra time spent in one place made the stories deeper, with more time for world-building, but that wasn't my perception. I did appreciate the surprisingly strong continuity though, with characters referring to things that happened episodes or even entire serials ago.

I've gotten used to dreading any new spin-off, adaptation and reboot and how it's going to screw up the continuity of something I like, but I found myself in the reverse situation with classic Doctor Who. I started properly watching the series in 2010 when Matt Smith took the role, so for me the Steven Moffat era is true Doctor Who and I came into this hoping that the classic series didn't contradict it too much. But nope, they actually fit together very well, and it was cool seeing elements I was familiar with being introduced for the first time.

This is kind of why it drives me mad when people talk about how it's necessary to reimagine franchises to drop the complicated continuity and attract new fans. As a Battlestar Galactica fan I'm not about to claim it never works, but old Battlestar might as well be a different franchise entirely and the new series had to build an emotional connection with its audience from scratch. These classic serials I just watched, on the other hand, were about the actual Doctor and the actual Tardis and everything in them was part of the mythology that has been building up for 55 years. I never felt that I had to watch it all first to appreciate the new series at all, nu-Who has generally been smart with its continuity references, but watching the modern series first helped me to appreciate the classic series because it's been so faithful to it. The knowledge and investment in the universe carried over. It's all true Doctor Who. And I think overall I enjoyed it.


The series gave me a lot of serials to rank, I watched about 140 of them by the end, but I think I've worked out what my favourites were. It was easy really, I just checked the Doctor Who Magazine 50th anniversary poll and then picked the stories everyone else hated.

My top ten classic Doctor Who serials:

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1. City of Death (8)
2. The War Games (7)
3. The Face of Evil (7)
4. The Deadly Assassin (7)
5. The Stones of Blood (7)
6. The Mysterious Planet (7)
7. Remembrance of the Daleks (6)
8. Silver Nemesis (6)
9. The Time Warrior (6)
10. Invasion of the Dinosaurs (6)

Actually, it turned out to be a fairly normal looking list. I'm really glad that popular stories like City of Death, The War Games, and The Deadly Assassin ended up so high, as it should really help my credibility. Face of Evil and Stones of Blood aren't typically rated so highly, but people seem to like them, so that's not so bad.

The thing I loved about Face of Evil is Leela... but also that it showed off the Doctor at his best, and Stones of Blood pulled a 'surprise, this is now a Douglas Adams-style comedy about AI judges greatly annoyed about being freed from centuries of dull captivity' trick halfway through that left me sitting there stunned, wondering what the hell just happened.

Also, I'm sorry about The Mysterious Planet and Silver Nemesis, but I wasn't told in advance that I was supposed to hate them. I'll try to enjoy them less if I ever watch them again. Though according to my calculations, the biggest point of divergence between my ratings and fan opinion was... The Dominators, which I consider to be the 15th best classic Doctor Who story and everyone else considers to be total crap.


Bottom ten classic Doctor Who serials:

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1. The Web Planet (1)
2. The Edge of Destruction (3)
3. The Keeper of Traken (3)
4. An Unearthly Child (3)
5. The Gunfighters (3)
6. The Tenth Planet (3)
7. Nightmare of Eden (3)
8. Snakedance (3)
9. The Ark (3)
10. Paradise Towers (3)

Try to contain your shock about Web Planet topping the chart. I guess that I'm not a big fan of Hartnell episodes in general though, which is a shame because I really liked the characters. The Fourth Doctor's Keeper of Traken seems a little out of place in that company, but it really did bore the crap out of me.

But the biggest divergence between my taste and fan opinion down this end of the list was for The Seeds of Doom, which turned out to be my 12th least favourite classic Doctor Who story. That's the one where the Fourth Doctor fights plants, not the one where the Second Doctor fights his way through foam.


My classic Doctor era ratings:

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Thanks to the miracle of spreadsheets, here's what you get if you average all my scores across each Doctor's run. This is what maths thinks my favourite eras were:

Second Doctor	5.2	I think the problem here might be that they animated classic lost stories like Power of the Daleks but not things like The Space Pirates. It's like rating Four without counting Underworld.
Fourth Doctor	5.1	I'm actually surprised the Fourth Doctor made it this high because it means that the universe is working. I tried taking Shada out to see what happened, but he didn't slip.
Third Doctor	5.0	5 means 'watchable' on my scale, meaning that Three has been scientifically proven to be the most watchable Doctor.
Fifth Doctor	4.6	A bit of a drop for the Fifth Doctor era, but fourth place isn't bad. I mostly gave him 5s but he was dragged down by stories like Snakedance and Warriors of the Deep.
Sixth Doctor	4.4	The Sixth Doctor avoids last place! I gave the guy a lot of 4s, but The Mysterious Planet bumped him up a little.
Seventh Doctor	4.4	He's just 0.08 below Six, but it's enough. Sorry Professor, but you got outplayed by a lunatic. Seven got equal amounts of 3, 4, 5 and 6, so at least he was consistently all over the place.
Eighth Doctor	4.0	Eight's average score isn't really a surprise as he only had the one story (and it wasn't very good).
First Doctor	3.9	See, this is what happens when you have a Web Planet.

In fact, while I've got my spreadsheet open I'll even give you some season ratings as well. You can never have too many long lists of very similar numbers:

Season 14	5.8	With The Deadly Assassin and The Face of Evil the other seasons didn't stand a chance.
Season 23	5.5	The Trial of a Time Lord season cheated by only having four stories (or one, really).
Season 06	5.3	Two's last season got a big boost from The War Games.
Season 07	5.3	Three's first season had no real disasters but it did end in an Inferno.
Season 25	5.3	Seven's era wasn't great overall, but I did like Remembrance of the Daleks and Silver Nemesis.
Season 08	5.2	With Roger Delgado in every story it's no surprise this ranked so high. Claws of Axos though....
Season 17	5.2	A mediocre season elevated by City of Death (would've been higher if Shada had been finished).
Season 16	5.2	The Key to Time season did well thanks to my love of The Stones of Blood.
Season 05	5.0	I gave every episode of Troughton's second season a five, so I suppose this was to be expected.
Season 09	5.0	Pertwee's third year would've been higher if The Sea Devils had better music.
Season 11	5.0	Time Warrior and Invasion of the Dinosaurs gave Sarah Jane's first season a good start.
Season 15	5.0	Did well thanks to my inexplicable appreciation of The Invisible Enemy and The Invasion of Time.
Season 21	5.0	The Fifth Doctor's final season was easily his best, with Frontios and Caves of Androzani.
Season 13	4.8	Tom Baker's second season said farewell to the Brig in Terror of the Zygons.
Season 10	4.8	Pertwee's penultimate year featured Three Doctors and a Carnival of Monsters.
Season 12	4.8	I wasn't as keen on Genesis of the Daleks as most, but it was better than The Sontaran Experiment.
Season 04	4.8	Troughton's first season barely exists, but I liked the animated Power of the Daleks.
Season 18	4.7	Tom Baker's final year wasn't his best, and Warriors' Gate couldn't keep it from the bottom 10.
Season 22	4.5	I'm a little confused why Colin Baker's first season isn't lower.
Season 26	4.5	I wasn't as keen on McCoy's final season as a lot of fans, with Ghost Light really dragging it down.
Season 19	4.4	I wasn't all that keen on Davison's first season either.
Season 20	4.3	Or his second. I even threw in The Five Doctors as a bonus to be nice, but it didn't help.
Season 02	4.3	Hartnell's second season had The Romans and Dalek Invasion of Earth, but Web Planet hit it hard.
Season 01	4.0	I liked Reign of Terror and the start of An Unearthly Child, but they couldn't save Hartnell's first year.
TV Movie	4.0	But just to put these average ratings into context, here's where the TV movie that I didn't hate sits.
Season 24	3.8	Man, McCoy's first season was a train wreck, with Time and the Rani and Paradise Towers.
Season 03	3.7	Only three stories exist and two suck. Shame Myth Makers and Daleks' Master-Plan hadn't survived.

What I've learned from this is that there aren't really enough stories in each season for this to work properly. They're all so close that I could change a serial's rating from a 5 to a 4 and the season it's from would plummet.


But I'm going to put the spreadsheet aside now and rate the first eight Doctors myself, using my own judgement. Because you can't tell how good a Doctor is by his episodes. I'm going to rank them based on a number of different factors, such as:

1. How much I liked them.

Actually, I'm pretty much just going with that. I'll not overcomplicate things by judging their competence and hair volume.


My classic Doctor ranking:

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Of course, none of the Doctor's incarnations were objectively better than the other as the regeneration process scrambled his cells in a way that resulted in him possessing slightly different strengths and weaknesses each time. So the ideal Doctor would be some kind of amalgamation of all of them, balanced in a way to optimise their best traits.

But that's creepy, so I'll just say which ones I liked most:

1. Fourth Doctor: He basically set the template for all the modern Doctors with his mad genius and wit.
2. Second Doctor: He also contributed a lot to that template with his clownish persona concealing a vast intelligence.
3. Seventh Doctor: He wasn't the most charismatic of Doctors but he played the game better than almost any of them.
4. Sixth Doctor: He had some rubbish stories and he was stuck with the coat but he brought the eccentricity back.
5. Third Doctor: He was more 70s action scientist than he was the Doctor, but he was still a very watchable hero.
6. First Doctor: Hartnell had his moments but he was let down by 60s TV production and his illness.
7. Fifth Doctor: The opposite of formidable, but he occasionally got to show that he really was the Doctor.
8. Eighth Doctor: I liked Eight, but his movie didn't exactly give him a chance to shine.

I can't just end this on a list of the Doctors though, I need a list of villains to go with it or something. Everyone likes to be reminded of all their favourite villains, and nothing reminds you of something quicker than finding it's not on a list.


Best Villains:

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Oh man, I don't know. Roger Delgado's Master is obviously #1 but after that I struggle to remember them all. I ain't going to start ranking them, but if I was, these would be contenders for my top 10:

• The Monk from The Time Meddler.
• Cyborg Bond villain Tobias Vaughn from The Invasion.
• That smart-ass git Davros.
• Irongron and Linx from The Time Warrior.
• Time-fragmented one-eyed space monster Scaroth from City of Death.
• Crazy computer Xoanon from The Face of Evil.
• The surprisingly honourable Morgaine from Battlefield.
• The Boatyard Graveyard Farmyard Scrapyard Knackers' Yard Brickyard Backyard Railyard Stackyard Valeyard.
• The Dominators and their Quarks.
• The crew of slavers in Warriors' Gate.
• The Chief Clown and Captain Cook from Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

Plus there's the villains inThe War Games and The Caves of Androzani. Oh and Tlotoxl from The Aztecs, he was a real bastard. Doctor Who's had some good villains over the years. But what about the Doctor's companions...


Best Companions:

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1. Duggan.
2. The rest.

Right, I'm done.

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COMING SOON?

That's it, no more classic Doctor Who. It's all over. Not that I'd rule out writing reviews for one or two of the newer episodes at some point in the future. I ain't reviewing all of them though, I'm not making that mistake again!

Do you have any thoughts about the TV movie or the classic series in general? Would you want to see me review other series in blocks of episodes like this? Your feedback is appreciated!