New Doctor, same logo, same music, and same opening titles pretty much as well. I'm guessing that they recreated the title sequence from scratch as all the stars and lens flares are different, but giant Peter Davison face aside you'd have to watch them side by side to really notice. I guess they wanted to reassure viewers that they were still watching the same show.
Contained within this very article you have on your screen right are 20 individual reviews covering all three of the Fifth Doctor's seasons and the Five Doctors anniversary special! But not The Twin Dilemma, I'm saving that for next time. There's also a lot of SPOILERS beyond this point, but only for stories that had already aired at the time of the review you're reading. So I may mention something about how a companion came on board, for instance, but I'll not even hint at how they're ultimately going to leave until they're gone.
I've always avoided rating things in the past because I struggle with it, but I gave it some thought and I think I've come up with a 1-9 rating system that even I can apply consistently:
| 10 | Why 1-9 instead of 1-10? Because it's easier to give out 9s than 10s. |
| 9 | In the top 1% of episodes I've seen from series I like. |
| 8 | In the top 10% of episodes I've seen from series I like. |
| 7 | I'd give this an 8 but it's not quite special enough. |
| 6 | Pretty enjoyable. |
| 5 | My attention generally didn't wander too far. |
| 4 | I was drawing pictures on my notepad. |
| 3 | I was watching a documentary on something else simultaneously. |
| 2 | K9 and Company. |
| 1 | Everything on screen is unambiguously horrible. |
While I'm throwing out statistics, the most common rating for classic Doctor Who stories so far has been 5, as I've given it out to 33% of stories. Fascinating.
| 1982 - Series 19 | |||
| 116 | Castrovalva | 4 parts | 5 |
 Castrovalva wasn't the first regeneration story to have the Doctor sidelined for a while due to him being temporarily mad, or asleep, but it was the first to have him carried through a forest by his companions in a box made out of doors. With the new Doctor literally unravelling... his scarf (thankfully it was the rubbish one), and wandering around the endless Tardis corridors doing impersonations, new companions Nyssa and Tegan got a chance here to actually have conversations and solve problems! Which I liked, even though they were solving things like how to look up the manual on Tardis teletext, with lines like: "If. My dad used to say that 'if' was the most powerful word in the English language. If. I F! Stands for index file!"After seeing the rest of their episodes I think this might be the most likeable and useful they ever got as companions. Adric, not so much, as he was held captive by the Master for most of the serial, generating projections with Logopolitan reality-warping maths in his head. In fact, the whole town of Castrovalva turned out to have been generated by his Logopolis maths bullshit, which wasn't exactly a satisfying explanation for the M.C. Escher weirdness going on there. Though somehow that didn't bother me as much as it probably should've. It's definitely not bothering me as much right now as the music is. Even now, 74 days after watching the serial, the soundtrack from this story is still there in my head, waiting to jump out again and drive me crazy. And I can't even lower the score for it, because the music worked just fine in the episodes themselves. It was a nice laid back story to introduce the nice laid back Doctor, all about his team trying to find him somewhere to relax so that he could get his marbles back in order. Sure they nearly pulled an Edge of Destruction and flew the Tardis right into the Big Bang, but they get that sorted out before anyone even went crazy and stabbed their bed with scissors. I'd already seen two or three stories from every Doctor before watching them all in the marathon, and for Five that was Castrovalva and The Five Doctors, and I still remembered all the twists. But it kept me entertained regardless, which was nice. I also remember that I had no idea at all the Portreeve was the Master in disguise first time around, even though I was very familiar with Anthony Ainley's face by that point with all the times he'd appeared to laugh into the camera. I've never seen a pantomime, but his performance here is what I imagine panto villains are like, and I don't like it. | |||
| 117 | Four to Doomsday | 4 parts | 3 |
| To me, Four to Doomsday is always going to be the story where the Doctor's stranded out in space, and pushes himself to his Tardis by throwing a cricket ball at a ship's hull and catching it again. That bit was cool, plus I liked the surveillance drone floating eyeball effect, but the rest of it sadly wasn't so great. I mean it had an interesting premise, with the ship full of ancient humans from various Earth cultures throughout history, all transplanted into robot bodies, but it just didn't do a whole lot with it. It felt like that part of a Bond movie where Bond is a guest of the villain, except dragged out for several episodes, and in this case the villain was very keen on robots in traditional dress performing their traditional entertainment. I didn't hear anyone say that the Doctor had arrived just in time to watch a special event, so the impression I got was that they were always dressed like that and they'd been watching half-naked robot wrestling every day for 12,000 years. In fact, it wasn't just their clothes that hadn't changed, as they hadn't developed a new culture or even adopted a common language in all that time. Maybe I was supposed to take that as an effect of losing their organic minds, I don't know. Fortunately, Tegan could inexplicably speak 12,000-year-old Aborigine (it was her Australian super-power)... which would've seemed more impressive to me if they weren't already speaking to an ancient Greek guy at that very moment thanks to the Doctor allowing them to share his Time Lord gift for universal translation. The serial also revealed that she's also a surprisingly talented artist:  But overall this was an immensely dull episode for me. I kept waiting for The Doctor to show up and entertain me, but all I got was this guy who looked like he'd wandered away from a cricket match. At this point, it felt like they'd taken the wit and humour from the Tom Baker era and replaced it with nothing. Plus Adric really needed to stop siding with the villains to gain immortality already. The Doctor should've let him go ahead and be turned into a robot to teach him a lesson. | |||
| 118 | Kinda | 4 parts | 4 |
| This one is a great serial to watch if you're into trippy high-contrast dream sequences, military officers behaving like children and the BBC's best attempt at a giant evil snake. It was like being locked in a room full of crazy people, but they're all a different kind of crazy. It's weird is what it is. Turned out that the weird title actually referred to the primitive locals hanging out in the forest. Fortunately, they weren't the body paint and human sacrifice type this time, though they were telepathic like the ones in Colony in Space. Which was fitting really, as there was a Pertwee-era 'everything in the future will be crap' human base on the planet too. My first clue that humanity wasn't particularly enlightened during this time period was when they mentioned that kidnapping people was standard procedure. One of them was alright though, and spent most of the story hanging out as a guest companion, meaning that the writer had to find something for the others to do. So Adric hung out with one of the villains and did everything wrong, Tegan slept through most of the story and Nyssa slept through all of the story. To be fair, Tegan did have an adventure in her dreams where she was tormented by weirdness, like her own duplicate. I've doubted her competence in the past, but here she couldn't figure out which of her was the real one! I think this is the point where she finally snapped after the events of the last few stories and gave in to the madness. Or gave in to a snake monster in the dream dimension called the Mara at least, who possessed her body and came with a matching tattoo. But Janet Fielding only got to play evil and use her English accent for five minutes before it slithered off to possess one of the Kinda for the rest of the story. Meanwhile one of the officers at the crappy future base went absolutely crazy, apparently without any help from the Mara. He had the whole spectrum of crazy covered in fact, from 'playing with dolls' to 'rigging the entire base to explode', but that was easily solved by exposing him to a Kinda surprise that mends people. With that sorted out they just had to defeat the Mara without just letting Adric kill the person within using his tiny BBC budget mech (it even had fold-out arms like the Quarks in The Dominators!). The solution the Doctor came up with was a ring of mirrors, which I guess fit the supernatural nature of the creature, but didn't fit the fact that it became a hilariously ridiculous inflatable snake monster.  Whether the story was any good or not is debatable (check the number at the side for a clue to what I thought about it), but I think it's fair to say that the acting was pretty good, with the actors playing the two military officers giving a convincing portrayal no matter their current level of sanity. The Kinda women also did a great job with what they were given, coming across as the adults in the room for this story. Makes me wonder if it was a just a coincidence that 'Kinda' sounds like the German word for children. But there was one scene where the Doctor seemed to not know a simple magic trick and that felt like a metaphor for the whole Fifth Doctor era to me: he's the Doctor that can't do the magic tricks. | |||
| 119 | The Visitation | 4 parts | 4 |
| I don't know when the Tardis started making that chime sound whenever it arrived somewhere (sometime in Tom Baker's last season maybe?) but at this point I just wanted it to stop. Also I realise that the Tardis does what the Tardis wants, but the Third Doctor got the thing to return to the corner of his lab at UNIT HQ consistently and the Fourth Doctor was making short hops all over the place, yet the Fifth still hadn't managed to get Tegan to Heathrow yet after all these tries? I do like how the Tardis had an actual interior in this era though, with rooms and corridors that don't look like they were filmed on location in a disused hospital. It made it feel more like an actual ship instead of just being half a room with a console in the middle. Anyway, this serial was written by Eric Seward just before he came on board for a long run as script editor, and it definitely belongs in his era. He inherited a Tardis packed so full of companions that no one really knew what to do with them all, and then introduced a guest companion for the Doctor to hang out with instead! In fact, he brought over a character from his radio plays, a Victorian detective called Richard Mace, and turned him into a theatrical highwayman. I get why he'd wanted to use the guy, because he was more interesting than the regular cast, but giving him all the best lines didn't do a whole lot to fix that. Shame that the villains were far more generic, with their evil scheme to wipe out humanity and take the planet for themselves. Not to expand their empire or because they needed a new homeworld, or anything like that. The three of them just needed a place to lay low from the space police. The leader tried to explain why it had to be this planet in one scene, but the Doctor shut down every one of his rubbish justifications until he changed the subject. At least stopping them gave the Doctor a chance to be part of history again and burn down another famous city; he loves doing that. Though the ending kind of relied on the audience already knowing about the Great Fire of London and that it started in Pudding Lane to get the significance of what happened. 13,200 homes, 87 churches and St Paul's Cathedral were lost in that fire, but I imagine for a lot of viewers outside the UK the most horrific consequence to the story was that Doctor lost his sonic screwdriver. Producer John Nathan-Turner asked Seward to get rid of it because he didn't like how he had a magic wand to get himself out of trouble and wanted him to seem less powerful... and then in the same story the Doctor managed to override a computer and open a lock without it with no trouble at all. Turns out that even in 1666 you can can shoot at a locked door to open it, but only if you aim a couple of centimetres above the lock for no apparent reason. I kept waiting for the explanation for how that worked but it never came. Speaking of convenient shortcuts, Nyssa actually made a short hop in the Tardis to rescue the Doctor in this story! I think that must be the first time that ever happened in the series... well except for when Romana did it Shada, but that doesn't count. It's something that writers typically avoid doing because if the heroes can just use the Tardis to get everywhere it makes things too easy. Not that there was anything difficult about the situation the Doctor was in, he just couldn't bring himself to damage the nice stained glass windows to get out. | |||
| 120 | Black Orchid | 2 parts | 5 |
| Two pseudo-historicals in a row! The last time this happened was The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Horror of Fang Rock, and they were in two separate seasons. Though actually I'm wrong about that, because in the end Black Orchid turned out to be a straightforward historical with no science fiction elements at all! I believe that there were only twelve of these kinds of stories in the series' entire 55 year history and Hartnell got ten of them, so this would've been really unusual at the time. In fact, this was the first historical since The Highlanders 15 years earlier, and also the last the series ever had. I don't know why the folks running the show thought it'd be a good idea to have a story about the Doctor and friends having a holiday, playing cricket and going to a fancy dress party in a fancy house with no alien invasions or robots or threats to the entire universe, but it turns out that they were right, it was. Personally, I thought it was great to see this Tardis crew just hanging out, smiling and enjoying each other's company for once, without all the arguing and complaining. Adric got to wear a slightly less terrible costume, Nyssa got to meet her doppelganger and do some split screen acting, and Tegan actually got to be happy for once! Plus it was nice to see the Fifth Doctor being competent at something for a change. He sucked at piloting the Tardis, fighting, talking people out of things, delivering cutting insults and saving the day, but he was a damn fine cricketer. Shame that when the cricket was over he managed to get lost in a mansion for the rest of the episode one. There was a mystery in this story though, and a murder, and a monster, and even some Curse of Peladon-style secret passageways, but that all only really took over halfway through. The stakes were incredibly low for once, but I prefer it when the consequences are less than apocalyptic in a story, so that was fine with me. Plus the serial looked great, as historicals often did. It was a nice little two-parter for the nice Doctor, and I like how he solved his predicament by just inviting the police officers into the Tardis so that they'd believe him. It's just a shame he didn't keep hold of that box from Kinda so that he could fix George's messed up mind before he fell off the roof. | |||
| 121 | Earthshock | 4 parts | 5 |
| After another seven year break the Cybermen finally came back! I was expecting to see these guys show up a lot more often in the classic series considering that they're A-list Doctor Who villains second only to the Daleks and the Master, but it seems it was mostly Troughton's Doctor they had a problem with. They skipped Pertwee's run entirely and they only showed up once per Doctor after that. Well, aside for The Five Doctors, but that had Troughton in it so it doesn't count. I'm not complaining though as I'm not really a Cyberman fan to be honest. Cybermen stories haven't typically been that great and the two I liked most (Tomb of the Cybermen and The Invasion) had more focus on the human villains than the folks in the silver suits with handles on their head. The Cybermen weren't particularly interesting in this story either but they were more entertaining, mostly because their commander was fairly chatty and seemed to have retained a personality.  It's a shame that this story was 50% people wandering through caves and hallways because it often threatened to develop into something really good. I still found a lot to like here though, like the Alien-style first episode with the soldiers disappearing off the motion tracker, and Tegan and Nyssa both eventually grabbing guns and shooting Cybermen (but only one each, and then they were both useless again). I have to admit that Adric's death also worked for me, possibly because the story did something really unusual in that it made an effort to make him likeable beforehand. Plus I already knew his death was coming and I even knew how he was going to die, but I didn't expect silent credits with the broken star in the background.  In Adric's defence, who could've predicted that the freighter would time-travel back 65 million years? What the hell kind of engine malfunction causes that to happen? Also, to be absolutely pedantic, the Earth wouldn't have been in the same place back then (In fact it would've been well out of danger even if the ship had jumped to 65 minutes earlier). On the positive side, this tragic event did give the Doctor the opportunity to add 'extinction of the dinosaurs' to his list of major historical events he was involved with, right underneath 'the Great Fire of London' and 'the creation of all life on Earth'. He could've also updated his list of places where he'd been suspected of murder, because it happened again here! | |||
| 122 | Time-Flight | 4 parts | 5 |
| Doctor Who Magazine voters put this as their least favourite Peter Davison serial, so I'm going to have to disagree with them again. I mean sure it's a bit of a rubbish story and the soapy monsters were terrible, but I enjoyed it overall. Maybe because of the heroic Concorde pilots that joined the Doctor's mission and actually pulled their weight despite being understandably clueless. I also liked the sceptical professor who was so closed minded he was immune to hypnotism, but eventually came around in the end... when he sacrificed himself to be absorbed into a gestalt intelligence and materialised as a telepathic projection to rescue the Tardis. It... got a bit weird. Funny how this was the second story in a row to take place millions of years in Earth's past, though sadly they arrived just 75 million years too early to save Adric. They got there just in time to run into the Master though, though it took them a while to realise it. You know, I still have no idea why he was in that terrible makeup.  It eventually devolved into the Master and Doctor holding each other's computer boards hostage and making a trade, then some bullshit happened, the Master's Tardis was inexplicably knocked all the way back to the aliens' homeworld, meaning that the gestalt life force he stole will regenerate and... whatever, it all worked out. Happy ending. Ironically the whole plan relied on the Doctor getting to an exact point in Heathrow Airport in a hurry, the thing he'd been trying to do all season and failing at. But he got there in the end, meaning that Tegan finally had the opportunity to leave the crew and go to work, arrange her aunt's funeral, grieve over Adric or whatever. I didn't actually expect her to do it though! I was sure that the character stayed on for much longer, so this was a bit of a surprise ending for me. It was a bit of a surprise for her too as it turned out that she didn't mean to quit travelling with the Doctor, he just saw her walk away and assumed she was done. Whoops. | |||
| 1983 - Series 20 | |||
| 123 | Arc of Infinity | 4 parts | 5 |
 This one set itself up to be a letdown right from the title. They should've called it Arc of Amsterdam really, because that's what it kept cutting back to. Though it did finally let us see what's behind the round things in the Tardis! Plus we got an actual explanation for why the Cyberman were able to attack them in the console room despite the Tardis's state of temporal grace last story: "nobody's perfect." This was Doctor Who's 20th anniversary year, and I loved The War Games and The Deadly Assassin, and Invasion of Time was pretty decent too, so I was reasonably hyped for a trip back to Gallifrey (especially as the Doctor was called back like two seasons and a regeneration ago). But my first clue that something wasn't quite working here should've been when I saw they'd downgraded the architecture and dropped the Deadly Assassin look. Though the Time Lords themselves were still wearing those 'seldom-worn' ceremonial costumes, and I could've sworn I saw the Sixth Doctor dressed up as a guard... The story did have a bit of Gallifreyan intrigue, with the mystery of who the traitor was (Alfred the butler did it), and Nyssa got a brief moment to shine as the Doctor's sole companion when she attempted to save his life, but really this was more interested in the crew's holiday to Amsterdam. Uh, I mean Tegan's cousin's holiday to Amsterdam, where he ran into Omega's lab by pure chance. Lucky he did too, or else Tegan wouldn't have been captured as well, and then she wouldn't have been able to give the Doctor a clue via the Matrix, and he wouldn't have been able to find Omega and gun him down in the street. I don't mind coincidence so much when it's used to set up interesting situations, but when it enables the heroes to stop a catastrophic antimatter explosion at the last moment then that's just crappy storytelling in my opinion. Of course when the Doctor got the clue from Tegan he had to find the place she mentioned, which meant a lot of running around on location (because he couldn't just ask someone for some change for a phone call). Then when he finally found Omega, the dude got away and they had to chase him... which meant a lot of running around on location. It was distracting enough in City of Death and that was a great story; in this it just sapped my will to keep watching. Also, Omega's handmade henchman looked dumb. | |||
| 124 | Snakedance | 4 parts | 3 |
| With Tegan gone the series was all set up for some 70s style single-companion adventures: just the Doctor, Nyssa, and all of time and space. But it turned out that Tegan's departure from the series was just a cunning trick by producer John Nathan-Turner to drum up some publicity, so for this story she was back on board and she'd brought her snake bullshit with her. Which means that the returning classic villain for this story was... the Mara from last season's Kinda. I've found that some of these stories have been easier to write about than others, depending on how clear an image I still had of them in my memory after all this time, but my most vivid memory of Snakedance is of not paying attention. I held in there for an episode but by the second part every time I tried to point my eyes at the screen they just slipped right off it again. I'm fairly sure that was Martin Clunes though, doing a great job of playing a spoiled git who was as disinterested with the story's mythology as I was. Trouble is that the story was all about mythology, legend, rituals and traditions etc, to the point where there was even a Punch and Judy show about the defeat of the Mara at one point, so I suppose it never stood a chance with me. The fact that it was actually about something makes me wish I cared more, but not a whole lot happened worth caring about. First the Doctor was ignored, then he was imprisoned, and it wasn't until the last episode that he started making any headway. I don't like it when the Doctor's powerless and rubbish; he really needed to make himself a new sonic screwdriver already. On the plus side, I did like how it ended with him doing the correct process to actually defeat the Mara during a ceremony where they traditionally play acted the steps that temporarily defeated it in the past.  To end this as abruptly as the serial did, it started off tedious but by the end it was laughable. | |||
| 125 | Mawdryn Undead | 4 parts | 6 |
| Mawdryn Undead had problems. It didn't do a great job of explaining how people ended up in different timelines, it made a mess of the near-future timeline of the Pertwee UNIT episodes by having the Brig retire 4 years before Sarah Jane started travelling with the Doctor, it had far more shots of the Brig wandering around spaceship hallways than any story needs, and it added yet another character to the Tardis crew (complete with a uniform he'll be stuck wearing until he leaves). Plus even though the Doctor's big dilemma in the story got a whole episode it still felt like it was sprung on the character at the last minute. I was a little surprised that the Doctor was given a choice to sacrifice his future lives to save others from an eternity of suffering and he immediately said nope! Though he did eventually agree to do it for Nyssa and Tegan, after the aliens realised that the story had gone three whole episodes without a villain and they needed to step up and blackmail someone. Well okay, there was amateur assassin Turlough and his boss the Black Guardian (the returning classic villain for this story), but the Doctor couldn't exactly fight their cunning scheme to drop a rock on his head because he went the whole serial blissfully unaware of it.  BORE DB OR ED BO BOREDBORED BO REDB OR ED BO REDBOR ED BOREDBOREDBO RE DBOREDBOREDBOREDBO RE DBORED BO RE DB OR ED BO RE ED BORE DB OR EDBO RE DBOR ED BO RE DBOR EDBOREDBOREDBO REDBOR ED BOREDBOR EDBO RE DBOREDBORE DB OR ED BO RE DBORED BO RE DB ORED BOREDB ORED BORE DBOREDBORE DBOR EDBO RE DB OREDBORE DB ORED BORE DBOR But it picked up after that I thought, especially when the Doctor and the Brig met up. For a series all about time travel it sure took them a while to do a story that took place during two relatively close years simultaneously like this, with two simultaneous Brigs! Granted his appearance in this wasn't on the level of his earlier stories (or one particular later story), but man it was nice to see the guy. Twice. It was also cool to see him interact with the Fifth Doctor and have a nice 20th anniversary flash of episode clips when he got his memory back. He was five for five after this, making him the only character to have met all the Doctors so far. The ending where the two Brigs just happened to meet at the exact right millisecond to give off an energy blast equal to eight regenerations was absolute bullshit though. It was good that they'd been setting up dire consequences all serial, Chekhov's Gun had been fully loaded in that respect, but the Doctor being saved against impossible odds by a completely chance occurrence instead of any cleverness on his part was immensely unsatisfying. Especially when he could've just thrown the immortal aliens into the sun earlier and let 15 million degrees Celsius sort out their problem. Plus the pulsating spaghetti brain effect wasn't great to look at. | |||
| 126 | Terminus | 4 parts | 3 |
| Terminus served three purposes: it wrote Nyssa out of the series, it gave viewers some fanservice as Sarah Sutton lost clothes as it went on, and it sent me softly to sleep. Oh, also it continued Turlough's Black Guardian arc, which again involved a lot of anxious shouting at the glowing crystal in his hand. I liked Turlough, he was rubbish. I haven't got a lot of strong opinions about this story though, because it just kind of happened on screen without pulling me in at all. Groups of people slowly made their way from one side of a spooky dark spaceship to another and then it ended. It wasn't dull enough to make me suffer like Snakedance, and it wasn't dumb enough to make me smile like The Horns of Eden. There were two things that caught my attention though, one bad and one good: The bad: they just couldn't resist adding a twist where a: the ship caused the Big Bang, and b: if it fired up its engines again it would destroy the universe. I mean seriously? Classic Doctor Who really needed to sort its perfectly normal spaceships out, as they kept time travelling to cause major incidents like Event One and the destruction of the dinosaurs for no good reason.  As departures go, Nyssa's wasn't as memorable or dramatic as Adric's, but was a step up from what poor Leela got. People were suffering on the ship, she had the science skills to save them, so she decided to stay. Plus her last line to Tegan was perfect though, and perfectly delivered: TEGAN: She'll die here.Uh, it sounded better in context. The friendship between those two didn't get as much screentime as it could've had over the last two seasons, but when it worked it worked. | |||
| 127 | Enlightenment | 4 parts | 4 |
This is a good story if you like the idea of the Doctor and his companions hanging out on a boat and doing nothing for four episodes. To summarise the events of this four-parter:
It wasn't a lot of story for four episodes, and the first two parts were basically spent setting up the mystery and revealing the race. It reminded me a little of Carnival of Monsters at times, mostly because of the weirdness going on aboard an anachronistic vessel, except things seemed to play out much slower. Plus this time once the mystery was done with there wasn't any reason to think about the brainwashed human sailors it spent all that time with any more, they were a part 1 concern. Also, while I'm complaining about things, solar sails don't work that way, you'd need a much much bigger sail. There was a lot to like about the serial though. I liked the sets for instance, with even the Tardis console room looking great with the lights dimmed. I liked how Tegan didn't reward the creepy Eternal for his persistence, even though his weirdness was due to him being an immortal being who lives in the trackless wastes of eternity and takes his identity from the imagination of the humans around him, rather than him just being a dude who can't take a hint. I liked the few scenes of the Fifth Doctor actually demonstrating Doctory behaviour, like when he flipped a coin to make a choice, then flipped it again when it didn't give him the answer he wanted, and when he realised there was a limitation to the captain's telepathy and thought that was... interesting. Also, there was a scene where he compared celery and eventually decided to replace his own (presumably still the piece he took from the imaginary town of Castrovalva) with an equally imaginary piece from an Eternal's ship, but I completely missed that myself. Someone had to tell me about it later. Also, I liked Turlough. I never really hated Adric, but I didn't hate this guy more. Especially once he'd quit breaking the Tardis. Though if I was the Black Guardian, I would've turned my crystal phone off a long time ago, because damn. Every time Turlough had a problem or needed to voice his feelings about murdering the Doctor out loud, out came the crystal again. But then if I was the Black Guardian I'd be doing a lot of things differently; I wouldn't be cackling at the screen and wearing a bird on my head for one thing. | |||
| 128 | The King's Demons | 2 parts | 4 |
This serial started pretty well I thought, with the Tardis crew mistaken for demons and invited to hang out with King John as they investigated the mysterious happenings transpiring in medieval England. Sure the history was a bit wonky, but they didn't have Wikipedia back then and who has time to read books? I've decided that King John pulling out a lute and regaling his court with some ye olde Iron Maiden was also a good thing, even if it did give the soundtrack ideas. Plus I like any episode where the Doctor has a swordfight, especially when it comes with lines like:RANULF: He is said to be the best swordsman in France.But then the second half just kind of fell apart into chaos to me, as it rushed to quickly clear away all the interesting plot lines so that the Doctor could have a battle of wills with the Master over control of a shape-shifting robot. Though it did at least confirm that the Fifth Doctor actually has willpower. The Master looked terrible in his last disguise back in Time-Flight, but his makeup in this was pretty good I thought, and almost served a purpose this time as well. Shame that the accent sounded terrible, but hey he's from Gallifrey, what does he know about French accents? Also, the Master's always been about gaining power, saving his own hide, and occasionally killing the Doctor, so why was he meddling around trying to sabotage the Magna Carta? Even the Doctor thought it was out of character. I heard someone suggest that instead of the Master they should've brought back the Meddling Monk for this one, and that makes so much more sense! Screwing with history is what he does, he would've been another classic villain for the 20th anniversary, and the Master was coming back soon for the Five Doctors special anyway so they could've saved him until then and made his appearance feel like more of an event. Plus he wouldn't have been wearing a disguise, so there'd be no need for the scene where he revealed his true face and no one cared. Someone who wouldn't be back for The Five Doctors was Kamelion, whose prop was such a disappointment for the production crew that after bringing him onto the Tardis at the end of this story, they decided to just ignore the character and pretend he wasn't there. Overall, a pretty disappointing finale for the Fifth Doctor's second year, especially because the story actually seemed to be working at first. It wasn't actually supposed to be the finale though, as they had had another story called The Return planned, but an electricians strike during the production of Enlightenment meant that they needed to nick the serial's studio time to finish it. Would've been nice if they'd done the same thing back when Shada needed finishing. The Return wasn't abandoned though, as it became next season's Resurrection of the Daleks. | |||
| 1983 - 20th Anniversary Special | |||
| 129 | The Five Doctors | 1 part | 5 |
 A one part story at last! It's a bloody miracle. Though it is feature length, so it's basically a four-parter in disguise. I think the big anniversary multi-Doctor stories have to be a bit bolder and dumber than the typical serial because they're a celebration and when you've got that many classic characters back it'd be a crime to not have fun with them. Though maybe not this dumb. Fortunately, Sarah Jane's clothes were so terrible that they made the rest of the story seem a lot more sensible by comparison... aside for the scene where she fell down a slight grassy hill and had to pulled back up with a rope. And the scene where a teleporting ninja robot in a bodysuit blew up Cybermen with harpoons. And the scene of the Master playing hopscotch...  Really I have to be impressed that this story was as good as it was, considering how bad it was, and the fact they were still pinning down who was going to be in it while writing it.   I could keep complaining about things, like how (matte paintings aside) the Death Zone on Gallifrey looked like a reasonably nice part of Wales, and how Borusa recruited the Doctor four times over and sent the Master to help them, yet every one of them made it into the tomb separately with little problem and no need for their companions. He was perhaps overestimating the challenge of this particular task. But I can't ever dislike a story where the Master was actually trying to help the Doctor and none of them believed him, where the legendary Rassilon who gave his name to every artefact on Gallifrey finally turned up (kind of), and where the Castellan was taken away to endure the mind probe. Plus after three other stories where he turned out to be innocent, Borusa finally got to be the villain! The git. The moral of the story: don't trust anything to do with immortality that you find in a guy's tomb. That's a big red flag right there. | |||
| 1984 - Series 21 | |||
| 130 | Warriors of the Deep | 4 parts | 3 |
 They were just a little late to make it in time for the 20th anniversary, but the Silurians and Sea Devils came back! I hadn't seen these guys since the Pertwee era, mostly because in each of their appearances he failed to make peace between them and the humans, and they got killed. Anyway, in this story he failed to make peace between them and the humans and they all got killed... hang on. The Silurians and The Sea Devils were both fairly epic and expensive looking stories with plenty of location shooting, this on the other hand not so much. It was all very confined within an ocean missile base during Cold War II. Though it still would've looked fairly good I reckon if they'd had the time or money to light it right. I'd been dreading 80s Doctor Who because I'd heard it was really overlit, but so far it's mostly just been this story. I mean I didn't think it looked terrible, but it's clear that corners had been cut. They didn't even have time for the actors in the pantomime horse sea monster costume to rehearse. They didn't even have time for the paint on it to dry. It's pretty bad when the monster had to kill on touch because it couldn't do anything but stumble forward (and if the Silurians and Sea Devils had been able to walk faster in their costumes this could've been a two-parter).  On the plus side, I liked the bike jacket base uniforms (even if they did remind me of Andromeda).  Another positive was the way it used Turlough, making him the pro at escaping from captivity but not so quick to do the dumb hero thing when the odds are against him. It made him look competent while also letting Tegan actually seem more enthusiastic and heroic by comparison. Shame that I couldn't summon any enthusiasm for what was happening myself. I know everything was against the production crew on this one, but there should've been another way. | |||
| 131 | The Awakening | 2 parts | 5 |
| Part of the trouble with The Awakening is that I keep getting it mixed up with The Visitation, because they were both full of people in period dress getting mind controlled by an alien visitor. I need to remember that The Visitation was the one actually set in the past and The Awakening was the one where they were just way too into reenacting it. The Awakening was another one of those two-part stories that set up an interesting set of mysteries in the first part, with the town full of obsessive role players, the strange crack in the church wall, sparkly asterisks invading the Tardis, and the kid from the past.  Also, Tegan's family must have been cursed at some point, because her aunt was killed by the Master, her cousin was turned into a zombie by Omega, her granddad was trapped in a village of lethal LARPers, and none of this had anything to do with her travels with the Doctor. Plus now that I think about it, the airport she was trying to get to had that time rift over it sucking in planes as well. She was one of the few companions that kept dragging the Doctor into her weirdness. | |||
| 132 | Frontios | 4 parts | 6 |
I'd only seen two Fifth Doctor stories before this marathon, but I knew a few things about the era going in. Like I knew that Five had a crowded Tardis with his everyone bickering, I knew that Adric was going to blow up and kill the dinosaurs and I knew that Caves of Androzani was supposed to be amazing. I also knew that at some point the Tardis' interior was going to end up scattered across a cave and it'd be pulled back together afterwards with telekinesis, and that sounded like the absolute dumbest thing since Sarah Jane's costume in The Five Doctors. Out of all the Fifth Doctor serials, this was the one I was dreading the most. I was dreading it like I'd dreaded Carnival of Monsters during Pertwee's run and The Mind Robber back in the Troughton era... and like them it actually turned out to be one of my favourites. The Fifth Doctor was pretty good in this story though and I noticed he was operating at a more Doctorish level than usual. The way he took charge to save people in the hospital, his "and you did ask me what I think," response to the leader, and him pretending that Tegan was a robot was all great (he got her cheap because of the accent and the walk's not quite right). Plus the story actually made use of the other companions too, with the stealth mission on the ship and Turlough using the hat stand to threaten the settlers and dissuade them from executing them. Then halfway through the ridiculous looking bug monsters turned up and it went a bit downhill. It didn't help that they were called 'Tractators', because it made them sound like a cross between a tractor and a potato, and poor Mark Strickson had to yell it over and over in distress when Turlough's race memories kicked in. It's not a great sounding word to be yelling out loud in terror, drooling at the mouth... but then what is? And Turlough himself lost points here for getting the security chief killed by being an idiot around the mining machine. But overall I'd put this as my favourite Fifth Doctor story so far. | |||
| 133 | Resurrection of the Daleks | 2 parts | 6 |
| Damn, two episodes rated '6' in a row; people were right, this really was Davison's best season! This was also my favourite two-parter so far, but it cheated by actually being a four-parter with the episodes glued together. The proper double length two-parters didn't appear until the following season. Dalek serials get rarer the further you go through classic Who, and I'm at the point now where Doctors only got the one Dalek story. But they've also been getting better, so it's quality over quantity. The downside is that they all began with the letters 'Re' from now on, which makes it hard to remember which is which (I was having enough trouble keeping Day of the Daleks, Death to the Daleks and Destiny of the Daleks straight). Oh, plus I guess it's a rule that they all had to have Davros in them. I should probably be annoyed by the mandatory Davros appearance continually stealing the Daleks' spotlight, but it's hard to complain when his first appearance was the point that Dalek stories started getting good. He added the extra complication that made them more than one-note bad-tempered Nazi bumper cars, as they both schemed to use each other... for as long as it suited their purposes. In this case, the Daleks needed him because it turned out they'd lost that war against the disco robots with the silver dreads and they were suffering from a bit of a plague. He was only too happy to help out once they'd freed him from space prison, because he needed allies. Plus he needed them to stand nearby with their back turned, as it turned out he had a mind-control gadget built into his chair that must have been there all along, even though he didn't use during any of the other times it would've been helpful. The Daleks were also working with human-looking mercenaries, for some reason, who were basically there to provide more cannon fodder for the endless slaughter. Pretty much everyone but the Tardis crew and a few of the mercs died in this one, including the friendly bomb disposal crew, the prisoners, the prison wardens, the Daleks, and some bloke who was just out by the river and had nothing to do with anything. Oh, plus the Dalek double agent who betrayed the Doctor (but then unbetrayed him) managed to die while pressing a self-destruct to kill even more people. Even Davros got double killed, as he was infected by the Movellan bioweapon and then blown up... right after being the only villain to successfully talk the Fifth Doctor out of gunning them down. I'm not surprised Tegan just walked away from the series at the end of the story, so traumatised that she didn't even marry someone she'd barely met. Before she left she explained to the Doctor that travelling with him wasn't fun anymore, which is a surprising amount of self-awareness from the writer, script editor Eric Saward. On a happier note, at one point the Doctor was kidnapped and his mind scanned so that the Daleks could make a duplicate to go assassinate some Time Lords on Gallifrey. Which is bad, because he spent a whole quarter of the story helpless, but also good, because it proves he still remembers the previous 21 seasons; I saw clips from them on the TV screen! The worst part about the serial were the helmets with the Dalek eye-stalks on, the best part was the Dalek getting pushed out of a window and exploding. Everything else, the script, the direction, the acting, was pretty good for a straight-forward action thriller. It didn't drag, it didn't get distracted with backpackers in Amsterdam, and there were absolutely no rubber snakes. Overall I'd put this as my favourite Fifth Doctor story so far. Sorry, Frontios. | |||
| 134 | Planet of Fire | 4 parts | 5 |
 I know the reason why the crew always filmed lots of shots of people running around every time they shot outside England, they wanted to get their money's worth from the scenery, but it never made the stories any more fun to sit through. It probably wasn't much fun for the actors either this time, considering the heat they were running around in. I can't say it didn't look expensive though. Planet of Fire was a story about volcano worshippers struggling with the revelation that their gods were just aliens who used their world as a prison planet... sort of. I mean it kind of happened around the other stuff going on and all the gravitas that Peter Wyngarde was channelling into the role of the religious leader wasn't enough to make me care about his problems or his tragic fate. Though it's funny how the worshippers on Sarn here and the Sisterhood of Karn from Brain of Morbius both had a sacred fire that healed people (even if the folks on Sarn left theirs set to 'sacrifice', because if there's one thing that Doctor Who needed at this point it was more human sacrifices). It was also a story about Turlough meeting his long-lost brother and almost saying more than two lines to him. At least they finally took the time to examine his mysterious past in any way, and they couldn't have left it any later as his was his final serial. It was very nearly his chance to be the solo companion for a story as well, but then Peri turned up. Oh, plus Kamelion I guess, who'd been hanging out just off screen for the last year since his first appearance in The King's Demons.  Five might have been the 'nice' Doctor, but here he also became the only Doctor to mercy kill a companion. It had to be done though, as it was the only way to stop the Master from ever taking him over again... well, except for killing the Master himself, which was the very next thing he did! I realise that the guy has always been a massive threat but if the Doctor absolutely had to be the judge, jury and executioner on this one, couldn't he at least have given him a more merciful death than being burned alive? Oh right, my opinion on the episode: I found it dull, it bored me. But for all the story's flaws, it still featured a scene where the tiny Master had to scurry around his console room like a mouse to escape Peri (I'm counting that as a positive). Plus "Gullible idiots" is one of the best punchlines Ainley was ever given, especially coming after so much sustained con artist bullshit by Kamelion pretending to be the Master pretending to be the Outsider. | |||
| 135 | The Caves of Androzani | 4 parts | 6 |
 I said earlier that before this marathon I'd only seen two Fifth Doctor stories: Castrovalva and The Five Doctors, but what I didn't mention that I'd also started to watch this a few years back as well. I got through the first part, put the next episode on to see how they resolved the firing squad cliffhanger ending, and decided I was done with it. Because 'they were replaced with identical androids off screen' has to be the cheekiest, most insulting way to resolve a cliffhanger I've ever seen in this series, and I've seen something like 450 cliffhangers now. But I sat through it all this time, and yeah it was pretty decent. Probably the best story of the Davison era in fact, though for me it's almost neck and neck with Resurrection of the Daleks. One of the things that really dragged it down for me though, is that the Doctor didn't actually do a whole lot in it. Over the course of four episodes he:
But if you're not that bothered about seeing the Doctor do stuff and just want to see terrible people scheme themselves to their mutual deaths, this one has you covered. The Doctor was just the catalyst for the whole situation to explode on its own, while he was entirely focused on saving himself and Peri. Plus there were no ray guns this time either, as apparently Uzis come back into fashion in a big way in the future. There was no shortage of assholes firing loud submachine guns at each other here. It felt like a story from a different series. Not because of all the infighting and factions plotting against each other, that's been part of Doctor Who's DNA since An Unearthly Child, but because the style of direction seemed to belong to a different era. More than one era in fact, as despite the majority of the story being shot in a more modern style, the evil executive had a habit of talking to the camera in a way that only Shakespearean characters and Deadpool can typically get away with. I can see why Graeme Harper's the only classic Who director to return for the modern series though, because he's quite good at it. I was expecting the story to get a bit preachy about the evil of the rich taking drugs to extend their life, but as far as the story was concerned the spectrox was just an extremely valuable resource. The only people harmed in this story were the ones involved in getting the stuff... so basically everyone, aside from Morgus' assistant and Peri. Even the Fifth Doctor died, but on the plus side, he got a way better exit than Three and Four did. So I can add 'spectrox toxaemia' to the list of causes of death, which currently includes: old age/Cybermen energy drain, Time Lord punishment, radiation in a giant spider cave, and letting go from a radio telescope.  By the way, something didn't look right to me about the costume in this scene, so I did a little research and discovered that it's a different shirt and jumper, with green on the inside of the collar and some extra red stripes. But the change happened four stories back in The Awakening. Not a moment too soon really, seeing as Six would be getting a whole new costume for the season finale: The Twin Dilemma. | |||
CONCLUSION
I'm suddenly very worried about the Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who. I mean I had my concerns from the moment Chris Chibnall was announced to be showrunner, but this run of stories, more than any of the news, photos or trailers for series 11, has given me cause for concern about where the show is going this year. If Chibnall's going for a more Davison-era feel, with a less eccentric Doctor and a crowded Tardis, I'm not sure I'm going to be all that into that.
The problem with the Fifth Doctor, I reckon, is that they decided that Tom Baker had defined the character for so long that they had to do something entirely different with the next one. But the trouble with making someone the opposite of the best Doctor is that it's not likely to bring you closer to the ideal. In fact, I found it hard to see Davison as the Doctor a lot of time because of how toned down his alien eccentricity was. There were flashes of Doctorishness in there sometimes, like his "And you DID ask me what I think," interjection in Frontios, and his coin toss and celery studying in Enlightenment, if I squinted I could see a bit of Troughton in him, but he didn't keep me watching just to see what he'd do next. It's like they dressed him in a cricket outfit with a bit of celery on his lapel and thought 'well our job here is done'.
I hated that costume by the way, partly because it was obviously a costume. The first two Doctors had a similar attachment to their outfit, but at least they resembled actual clothes, and Three and Four had an iconic style instead of a single look. But producer John Nathan-Turner basically wanted the main characters to always look like they did in the marketing and the merchandise, so Turlough was perpetually dressed like a schoolboy, Tegan was stuck with a flight attendant uniform for a season, and the Doctor was prepared for a cricket match to break out at any moment. What made it weirder is that the Doctor actually had a resigned 'I guess I'll get used to it' attitude when he found the costume, like he knew he'd be forced to wear it for the rest of his run if he put it on. Later Doctors formed a strong attachment to the first face they saw after regeneration, does the same thing happen with the first jacket they wear?
Anyway, what didn't help is that Nathan-Turner had dialled back the humour when he took over for Baker's final year and that continued throughout Davison's run, so he wasn't a very witty Doctor either. He rarely played the fool to confuse and annoy people, he didn't seem to be having much fun, and his sick burns were first degree at worst. Plus the stories got pretty grim at times, with lots of people running around with Uzis and high body counts (they even killed the kid genius!) I can understand why they wanted to make Doctor Who less of a cartoon, stop the jokes from undermining the tension, and get some of its self-respect back, but the series didn't raise the quality level of its stories to make up for the reduction in charm. When the entire universe is being threatened once or twice a season you can't play that too seriously, or else it's just sci-fi schlock on a BBC budget.
The Fifth Doctor was also perhaps the least impressive of the Doctors, especially considering the amount of experience he'd accumulated by this point. He charged into situations with the same enthusiasm and energy but seemed in over his head when it came to saving the day. I don't just mean he was a bit more concerned and less sure of himself, which is also true, I mean that I wasn't wondering how he'd figure a way out of a situation, I was wondering how fate was going to save him. He was a slightly de-powered Doctor without the cunning, the quick wit, the action hero skills, or even the sonic screwdriver to get him out of trouble. I get that they wanted to make things harder for him, but he didn't always rise to meet the challenge, and that made him less than fascinating to watch. This was a guy who couldn't solve the problem of finding change to make a phone call. He was very good at identifying and then yelling out precisely what kind of danger he was in though.
It's a shame really because Davison came across to me as one of the better actors to play the Doctor and he was certainly up to playing him in a Doctory fashion when he was given a chance to do so. He also played him as a very likeable Doctor, with the occasional burst of frustration, and a surprisingly honest one as well. The guy was always telling people about his Tardis and inviting them inside, which just felt weird to me. But I suppose there was the space for it for once as unlike most Doctors he had an actual interior to his Tardis! He also had an annoying chime sound playing whenever it landed though, so it's a trade-off.
I never really thought that Hartnell had too many companions, possibly because the Doctor wasn't an actual superhero by that point, and Ian and Barbara were more like equals, but I really felt it here. The writers struggled to find something for them all to do, so sometimes they'd just hang around in the Tardis, and not in an active 'I'll use the computer to look up the data and stay in touch over the comms' kind of way you see in everything these days. Nope, they'd just build a gun to shoot a harlequin reaper android, or have a nap or whatever. Plus they were maybe the least likeable group of companions so far because they were all designed to be argumentative and whiny without the humour to balance it. Turlough complained every time he wasn't taken home, Tegan complained whenever they didn't end up at Heathrow, Adric complained because he was a teenager. Part of the reason I enjoyed Castrovalva and Black Orchid so much was because for a short while it actually seemed like they liked each other.
Speaking of the companions, this is what I thought about the companions:
Adric: It's fun to dunk on Adric, but to be honest I hated his costume more than I ever disliked him. In fact, I thought he worked alright as a solo companion for the Fourth Doctor for the first few minutes of Logopolis, before the Tardis filled up with other people again and he returned to the role of arrogant smart-ass boy genius who was wrong and did the worst thing. I've seen a few people criticising the actor, but I think the writing was far more to blame as he was rarely written to be likeable.
Nyssa of Traken: The girl genius on the crew was perhaps the most traditional of the Fifth Doctor's companions, though she got sidelined more than most. In stories where she had a chance to shine, like the first half of Arc of Infinity, she was great. The rest of the time she was... there. Plus the writers did next to nothing with the fact that the Master killed her dad, stole his face and then (inadvertently) destroyed her entire world. If any of Five's companions deserved to walk away from the series with her very own K-9 to cheer her up and keep her company, it was her.
Tegan Jovanka: On paper Tegan probably sounded like a great idea, as she was just like Ian and Barbara, who got roped into Tardis adventures against their will and couldn't get home. But instead of being an ordinary person who rose to the occasion during her epic voyage, formed a bond with her team, and became formidable, she was an ordinary person who complained a lot, got captured, and was tormented by a snake in her brain. There was potential there with her friendship with Nyssa, but they barely did anything with it, and in the end she became one of the only companions in the history of the series to leave because it stopped being fun.
Vislor Turlough: Funnily enough, the cowardly car-thieving git who spent a third of his run trying to murder the Doctor and the rest of it trying to save his own skin actually got the happiest ending of all Five's companions! No robot dog for him though. Turlough was another character who didn't really live up to his potential (plus he spent a lot of time yelling at a glowing crystal in his hand for help), but I found him surprisingly likeable. He made the others look like better people by comparison, in a good way, and I found it hard not to root for the guy when he clearly had to fight bloody hard to overcome his own selfish instincts whenever he chose to risk his neck.
Kamelion: The flipside of Turlough, who ultimately couldn't overcome an evil influence and had to die. I'm sure it must say something about this era of Doctor Who that they introduced a robot shapeshifter with a daft name who could've been played by any actor, a different light entertainment guest star every serial, but instead they left him in a back room for a whole season and then killed him because the one guy who knew how to program the entirely unnecessary gimmicky robot prop died in a boating accident. Anyone who says Adric is the worst of all companions is forgetting Kamelion, because at least Adric occasionally found the willpower to not betray the crew.And there was also Peri, but she continued travelling with the Sixth Doctor so I'll write about her later.
My top three serials:
- The Caves of Androzani (6)
- Resurrection of the Daleks (6)
- Frontios (6)
Bottom three serials:
- Snakedance (3)
- Warriors of the Deep (3)
- Terminus (3)
COMING SOON
Please feel welcome to leave a comment! Or many comments if you want to leave your opinions on separate serials individually, whatever works for you.
I found the Fourth Doctor to be most entertaining, but the Fifth Doctor is the one I'd want to travel with if I somehow got yanked away in a time machine against my will. I'd be a rubbish, useless companion, but he'd probably try to make me feel better after I'd inadvertently started a war by having an ill-timed panic attack or something.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure?
DeleteStatistically speaking you'd have a 1/3 chance of being killed along the way and a 1/6 chance of being stuck with the Sixth Doctor instead after he dies to save you. There would also be a serious risk of you getting a snake in your brain if you took a nap.
Honestly, if I could sleep well again just by surrounding myself with mirrors, I'd love it.
DeleteI know everything was against the production crew on this one, but there should've been another way.
ReplyDeleteNice.
I didn't watch the Twitch marathon but from your description of the snake in Kinda it looks like they didn't use the remastered cgi version for some reason. I haven't seen the new one, so I don't know if it's any better.
ReplyDeleteOnly Fools and Horses also did an episode in Amsterdam. Someone has mashed together that and Arc of Infinity to create an unofficial BBC crossover that's probably more interesting than the latter is, despite being two minutes long.
"Fun" Warriors of the Deep fact: the sea-monster-horse was played by the actors who also played Dobbin the pantomime horse from Rentaghost. And you probably have no idea what Rentaghost was. I barely remember it.
The Awakening is the first Doctor Who story I remember watching in its original broadcast. I'm sure I watched some before that, but it's the first one of which I have a clear memory. Or rather, I have a clear memory of Peter Davison being sucked into a crack in a wall, but close enough.