Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor Era (1987-1989)

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've reached the end of classic Doctor Who! This is it, these 12 serials I'm writing about here were the last ones I watched during that two-month Twitch marathon I sat through. That also means that they're presumably the most vivid in my mind, dramatically increasing my chances of remembering things that happened in them!

I definitely remember how glad I was that they'd changed the bloody logo. RIP that terrible neon tube logo, 1980-1986. I get the impression this 3D rendered opening title sequence isn't many people's favourite, especially considering how dated the effects look now, but I'm just happy that it was something different (plus I like the chunky metal WHO). It was nice to get a new arrangement of the theme as well, even though it's far from being my favourite.

There will be SPOILERS below, so if you don't want episodes ruined by a stream of spoilery opinions you'd best leave the article alone for now. Though I'll only ever be spoiling backwards, never forwards, so I'm going to resist the temptation to bring up Asylum of the Daleks or The Magician's Apprentice while writing about Remembrance of the Daleks.

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I don't typically give out review scores, but it seemed a shame to review a block of stories without including a way to easily compare them. The score measures my level of giving a damn, based upon the theory that good episodes would've held my attention better than poor episodes, though I'll also add or subtract a point or two if they impressed me or screwed something up. So the scores are not only entirely subjective, they're also heavily influenced by what mood I was in and how tired I was when I watched the story! And I saw these during a marathon so I was plenty tired.

10	[UNUSED].
9	For emergencies only.
8	The Trouble with Tribbles, Blink, Sleeping in Light, those kinds of stories.
7	Good solid enjoyable episode.
6	Fairly good.
5	Watchable enough, kept my eyes on the screen.
4	My eyes found more interesting things to look at.
3	I was barely even following what happened.
2	I either turned it off or really wanted to.
1	People dancing in moth costumes.

There's no more 7s or 8s left to come, but three of these stories are going to earn 6s. So there's something exciting for you to look forward to. In fact, the scores for McCoy's run ended up evenly split between 3s, 4s, 5s and 6s, which is... tidy.

1987 - Series 24
144	Time and the Rani	4 parts	3
Doctor Who Magazine's 50th Anniversary poll ranked this as being the second worst episode of the entire classic series (just above The Twin Dilemma), which means it's considered to be the absolute worst episode of Sylvester McCoy's run as the Seventh Doctor. I love to agree with polls (who doesn't want to fit in with the group?), but in this case I just can't. I'm sorry... this is only my second least favourite McCoy story. But oh man this serial was bad. I'm glad that Doctor Who had lightened up a bit by this point, and they had a Doctor and companion who enjoyed each other's company, but the Doctor in this story was a clown, the companion was straight from a pantomime, and I found it impossible to find anything in the plot I could take seriously. It didn't help that McCoy's dialogue was filled with mixed metaphors and malapropisms to the point where I was grateful whenever they cut away from the Doctor to show me what the other characters were up to. They wouldn't give Colin Baker a final season so they had to squeeze the regeneration into the very start of this story, with McCoy wearing his coat and a wig. Which means I can now add 'falling over in the Tardis' to the list of causes of death, which currently reads: old age/Cybermen energy drain, Time Lord punishment, giant spider cave radiation, letting go from a radio telescope, and spectrox toxaemia. The saddest part is that it means that the Sixth Doctor's final line was "Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice." A new Doctor meant more regeneration madness and this time the main effect seemed to be bad acting, though he soon developed memory loss as well after the Rani dosed him with an amnesia drug. It seems like the serial had a similar effect on my own mind, as I'd been chatting about the story with a friend who was watching it too, and when I checked the chat log to steal my opinions I found I'd been calling her 'The Mara'. Probably because she was played by Kate O'Mara, now that I think about it. I have to admit, I didn't hate the Rani dressing up as Mel to trick him while he was drugged, mostly because I found her costume to be hilariously bad, but it probably not something you want to do if you intend your beleaguered TV show to retain any kind of dignity. Also they swiped the comedy scene where he was choosing a new outfit to wear for the rest of his life from The Twin Dilemma! The plot was a little bit like The Time Warrior, with the Rani kidnapping scientists from Earth's history for her project, but instead of giving the locals guns and a robot to keep them obedient while she worked, she'd covered their quarry with traps and stuck a ball filled with deadly insects above their pool. I have to admit, I thought the visual effects for the landmines was surprisingly good, as they captured the victim in an energy sphere and then bounced them into a cliff to explode (because just exploding on the ground would've been boring). It was a shame though that Mel survived one by pure fluke when her mine landed her in water, as that's got to be the absolute least satisfying way to get a character out of a death trap (aside from saying 'it was all a dream', or having her walk out with her singed hair standing on end like a cartoon character, or... actually there's plenty of worse ways she could've been saved). Unfortunately the visual effects in the intro featured some terrible untextured CGI and ended with the Tardis crash-landing in a rainbow. The scene was basically the opposite of the fantastic motion controlled effects shot that opened the previous season, because this was way too early for the BBC to be using computer rendered effects in place of physical models like this. I mean, this aired in 1986, just two years after The Last Starfighter revolutionised movie effects by rendering its space battles on a $15 million Cray supercomputer, and right about the same time the NES came out. Though the music was pure Nintendo 64; the orchestra hits made me want to turn the episode off and play Perfect Dark for a bit instead. It seems to me that any Doctor Who story that ends with a bunch of famous scientists from history gathered in the Tardis console room is likely to be camp garbage and this serial didn't prove me wrong. It did try for a bit of a Star Trek moral at the end, with the guy throwing away the Rani's antidote to the insects because "our people should meet their own challenges, if they are to survive,"... but then the Doctor said the line "Time and tide melts the snowman," and I was just grateful to have a blissful two minute break before the next serial started.
145	Paradise Towers	4 parts	3
Paradise Towers was the first story commissioned by new script editor Andrew Cartmell and right away I could tell something had changed. I didn't much like Time and the Rani but at least it kind of felt like it Doctor Who. This, on the other hand, felt like it was written by a kid who was trying to remember a story they'd read in an issue of 2000 AD. Either that or an episode of Lexx. The core of it was different and interesting, but what ended up on screen was dumb and full of cartoon characters. And then they all teamed up to fight an overacting zombie at the end. Doctor Who had been casting adults to play teenagers since the start, so I couldn't tell whether the Kangs were meant to be young or just feral and childish, but either way I found them tough to watch (especially when they opened their mouths and the future slang started coming out). Then there were the Caretakers, who were clearly adults, but had a mental age low enough to fall for the Doctor inventing new rules saying they had to close their eyes and give him time to escape. I get that this society had collapsed and everything had gone a bit Lord of the Flies, but these folks were a step away from going full Kinda in a way that made me feel like the series was being aimed at a much younger audience at this point. Doctor Who's always been a family show designed to get children hiding behind the couch, but this is first episode I've seen that didn't seem like it was meant for adults at all. I have to be honest, the first time I tried watching the serial I found it so cringe-worthy that I gave up after 15 minutes and turned it off. They'd somehow found the perfect combination of writing, acting and music to make a scene unbearable. Before Doctor Who I'd never seen a TV series with a 16-bit video game soundtrack before and now I hope I never do again. But I was so curious about what caused these people to be living like this that I went back and watched what I missed and now I'm still just as confused! Everything was so vague, especially the timeline of what happened there. Sure they explained that the skyscraper's architect was crazy and hated people living in his buildings, and that everyone who wasn't fighting age was moved there during the war a long time ago, but that just raised more questions! Were they all trapped inside Paradise Towers? If so, why? Were the doors locked? Was the city outside destroyed by the war? Was there even a city outside, or were they just on an asteroid out in space somewhere? Why had they been left alone all these years? Why did no one even bring up the possibility of the Doctor calling for someone to pick them up? They didn't seem overly shocked to see outsiders arrive, but no one was curious about where they came from. Where were the Kangs getting their hair dye from if they'd been entirely cut off for years? Also how were they all still getting enough to eat? Some of the Rezzies had resorted to cannibalism, Pex was considered to be muscular, and the Kangs were very impressed when the Doctor showed them the vending machine, but on the other hand, choc chip cookies were abundant, so what was their food situation? Why were the three groups split by sex as well as age? They said that youngsters and oldsters were moved there, so where were the male Kangs and Rezzies? Why were there no women working as Caretakers? Also, did they not bring over any children younger than the Kangs? It set up an interesting mystery which seemed to be leading to some kind of reveal, but nope. It also felt that it was going to have some kind of Twilight Zone moral or point to make, but not really. Cannibalism is bad, bullying is mean, tower blocks do little to foster a sense of community, zombies are bad, that's what I got out of it. I didn't entirely hate the serial though. I liked Pex kicking down doors and trying to impress Mel (even if he was a cowardly cutlet), I liked the robot in the swimming pool, and I didn't think it was a terrible idea to include a group who worshipped the rules despite being disinclined to try to read them all, never mind understand them all. But for me this was the worst McCoy story.
146	Delta and the Bannermen	3 parts	4
Man, I was dreading this one. The premise of the Doctor and Mel winning a ticket from Ken Dodd to join blobby aliens on a space bus trip to Disneyland and ending up in a 1950s holiday camp in Wales instead is the opposite of anything I'd ever be interested in. It's like they were trying to come up with something I'd find harder to endure than Time and the Rani and Paradise Towers. Trying too hard in fact, as they made it too obvious what they were up to. But I somehow didn't hate this one! Even thought it was a damn mess, the American spies were entirely superfluous, Ray was mostly there to audition for the role of companion, and the music was almost as bad and inappropriate as in Paradise Towers. Plus that beekeeper was just weird. I think one thing that really helped is that it's a three-parter of 25 minute episodes; a combination the series gave up on after Planet of Giants way back in season two. Classic series two-parters usually ended too abruptly for me, the four-parters tended to drag a bit, and anything more than that started getting ridiculous. But three parts gives the story time to breathe and fits a three act structure. It's the perfect solution that only took them 24 seasons to come up with! The main reason they had longer serials, I think, was to spread the cost of the sets over multiple episodes, so I was prepared for this one to look a bit cheaper. In fact I was expecting the Seventh Doctor era to look a bit rubbish in general compared to earlier serials. But it didn't really, especially not this story, with all its outdoor scenes. Of course the location filming meant a lot of shots showing characters getting from A to B, but at least this time the Doctor had a motorbike. I was really not looking forward to scenes of Mel hanging out with the purple blobby aliens on the tour, especially when the singing started, but the driver actually turned out to be one of the most likeable characters in the end. I was shocked that the story didn't try to squeeze any awkward humour out of the aliens trying to fit in on 50s Earth at all. Instead it blew them all up, which was kind of a jarring tonal shift. Then it went right back to the comedy music afterwards! The Fifth and Sixth Doctor eras got pretty nasty at times, but I can't think of many serials where a busload of innocent tourists were blown up to show how menacing the villains were. I feel like the (surviving) characters should've had more of a reaction to that. Also I have concerns about the guy who turned himself in an alien with the royal jelly baby food so that he could stay with Delta and her rapidly growing kid. If their goal is to repopulate her species then there's a considerable amount of incest in that family's future. Also it's yet another transformation and I thought they were done with that in the Sixth Doctor era!
147	Dragonfire	3 parts	5
When this one came on it was like Twitch had accidentally put a proper Doctor Who episode on by mistake. Even the music sounded fairly decent. Dragonfire was about an exiled supervillain with ice powers, basically Mr Freeze (complete with tragic love story), who was being held prisoner in his own lair (which was actually a spaceship) thanks to the xenomorph robot guarding the ship's key inside his head. But treasure hunters were also after the key, due to the fact that someone drew a map to it and said it was treasure, and one of them was Sabolom Glitz! It was nice to see him back again in his third and final appearance in the series, complete with striped sideburns. No Dibber this time though and he wasn't in The Ultimate Foe either now that I think about it; I'm starting to worry about the guy. Fortunately Glitz decided to team up with the Doctor for this job, who happens to be one of the few people in space and time who'd actually try to befriend a xenomorph, and the friendly robot guard decided not to kill them with rubbish looking laser effects. Instead it used his eye lasers to power a computer system in the Fortress of Solitude so that a holograph of Superman's mom could explain the plot. Then the xenomorph went off, saved a little girl from people with rifles in an inverted Aliens scenario, and was tragically murdered shortly after. R.I.P. xenomorph alien, the true hero of this story. Sadly the Doctor didn't actually do a whole lot to defeat the villain himself this time, just told Mr Freeze that his home planet was gone and so there was no chance of getting that revenge he'd been planning for the last 3000 years. The guy took it badly, opened the curtains and let himself get Raiders of the Lost Ark'd by the local star in a surprisingly gruesome effects scene. I spotted so many movie references in this that it is has me wondering about all the ones I probably missed. The villain was called Kane, like the bloke played by John Hurt in Alien, and Glitz' ship was called the Nosferatu, I suppose they kind of count. Well old ship I mean, seeing as it blew up and he inherited a flying space city complete with a supervillain lair and a café to replace it. What it with this season and busloads of innocent people getting blown up anyway? Oh plus there's Dorothy, who was blown away to another world by a (time) storm! Can't believe I nearly forgot the giant Wizard of Oz reference. Except she goes by the name Ace, which should've made her the worst character but somehow didn't (I was glad when she stopped yelling it though). Ace... was interesting. Sophie Aldred's perhaps not the best actor they've had playing a companion, though anyone would struggle with playing a troubled teenage girl written by adult men for a family TV show where she wasn't allowed to swear. But she was immensely likeable, had great chemistry with McCoy and her character was unusually complicated. All I learned about Mel over the last two seasons was that she was "about as boring as they come" and that she was a computer programmer, and I got the 'computer programmer' part from a wiki because I don't think it was ever mentioned. But after three episodes Ace already had a backstory and I knew that she hated her parents, she was an amateur chemist, and she got suspended from school for blowing up the art room with enhanced nitroglycerine. Plus the Doctor's had many skilled and practical companions before, but Ace was the first and only one to travel with a backpack! Granted it was mostly so she could carry her homemade explosives, but the idea of actually packing some useful gear is so obvious it's amazing no one else ever does it. The Doctor's got his bottomless pockets full of junk sure, but he's always coming across situations where could do with something more useful than a yo-yo. Like here for instance, where he really needed a brain. He was apparently supposed to be climbing down to a lower level to get around a blocked path, but they neglected to show any of that on screen so it looks like he decided to dangle from his umbrella over a chasm for a bit. When Ace came across the same problem she just got a rope ladder out of her bag, problem solved. Also the thing about Ace is that she was clearly bothered by things, she got angry, she got scared, she had all kinds of issues, but she never screamed. I really liked Mel when she first appeared in Terror of the Vervoids, but the way she'd been written this season means there's no way I can see Ace as anything other than an upgrade. Plus I like her Dave Lister jacket.

1988 - Series 25
148	Remembrance of the Daleks	4 parts	6
I was surprised when I learned Remembrance of the Daleks was the first serial of McCoy's second season, as I expected his run to gradually improve as it moved away from Time and the Rani, not make a sudden leap in quality to one of the best stories of the classic series. This went straight to my top 10, just below stories like The Deadly Assassin and, uh, The Mysterious Planet. It was the last of the 'Re' trilogy of Dalek stories, with every title starting with a word like 'Resurrection' or 'Revelation' just to confuse me, and it brought Davros and his buddies back for one final massacre in the classic series. Though this time it was mostly Daleks that died, as they still had that civil war going. It was kind of the opposite of the other two stories though in a lot of ways, as despite having multiple factions fighting it out, this time the Doctor's past, his choices, and his doubts were at the centre of it, and man that was such a big improvement. The episode redefined the Seventh Doctor as a darker, more manipulative character with a hidden agenda... who still struggled to get his stuck umbrella out a door while he was telling people what to do. He hadn't lost all the humour and what was left was much less embarrassing. Another difference is that this time the companion actually got to do something, so Ace was wrecking Daleks with a charged baseball bat and a rocket launcher. She wasn't successful enough to diminish them as a threat, but she would've made Barbara proud. This was the series' big 25th anniversary story, so they'd packed in at least as many references to classic stories as Attack of the Cyberman had, most referring all the way back to An Unearthly Child. Thankfully the Tardis had gone back to Totters Lane in 1963 not 100,000 BC, so Ace struggled with 60s money and found a book on the French Revolution like Susan had instead of visiting the Cave of Skulls. The serial was still treading on dodgy ground though, as it showed what happened at Coal Hill school right after Ian and Barbara got kidnapped, and revealed that we didn't know the full story of what the Doctor was doing on Earth in that first episode. Turns out that he'd got his hands on a stolen Gallifreyan superweapon and decided to hide it in London 1963. Funny how that fact didn't come up during his trial at the end of The War Games or in Trial of a Time Lord. It wasn't all references to the pilot episode though as the story also had a 60s proto-UNIT with a 60s Brig wannabe and a 60s Liz Shaw clone as science adviser! Except unlike the real UNIT stories, we know exactly what year this was supposed to take place. Shame I wasn't able to really buy that they were in 1963. Doctor Who usually shines when it comes to historical stories, but all the location shooting and the 80sness of the production made it hard for me to really accept it as taking place the same time that the first episode was shot. Though the story did actually make use of its setting by looking at the racism of the time, with Ace finding a "No coloureds" sign in Mike's boarding house. There was an early clue about his dark side right at the start, as one of his first lines to Ace was "Are you from somewhere else?" Plus it didn't quite occur to me at first that this wasn't just the year the first episode took place, it was also the year that the Doctor had lived on Earth for a few months; it only clicked with me when he walked into the café next to the junkyard and actually knew the people who ran it. That led to a great scene where the Doctor had a discussion about the potentially horrific consequences of big (and small) decisions with Geoffrey from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air! That all became very relevant when it was revealed that there were two Dalek factions and two human factions and they were both divided by their feelings on racial purity, while the Doctor was divided on his decision to wipe them out. Though they sure rushed Ace's realisation that Mike was actually a 60s Mike Yates working for the other side; they should've let that penny drop a little slower. The story handled Davros' reveal much better, with the obvious candidate turning out to be a creepy little girl with a voice modulator while the real Davros was hiding in a ridiculous ball-shaped shell. I don't know why they were being so sneaky about what side he was leading, because it made zero difference, but maybe that was the point. A Dalek civil war is villains vs. villains and trying to ally with someone who hates the 'other' isn't going to end well for you. And then it ended with the Doctor blowing up Skaro, which was a bit excessive. I've lost track of which retcon they were up to with regards to who was living on it, so I'm going to assume it was a blasted radioactive wasteland with nothing alive, animal or vegetable, aside from Daleks, but it would've been nice to get confirmation of that. Especially considering I saw The Daleks and Planet of the Daleks just a few weeks ago, where the Thals eventually reclaimed their world and seemed to be doing quite well. It seems that by the time of this story the Doctor had decided that it would be wrong to wipe the Daleks out of history by touching two wires together, because their crappy behaviour had brought other races together to fight them, but blowing up them up whenever he saw them was just fine. They're mass produced irredeemable evil whose only purpose is to ruin everyone else's day, they're a space virus, they're the morally safe enemy it's fun to kill. And man they got some good explosions out of them this story, in space and on the ground. The Seventh Doctor and Ace really got a chance to shine here but my favourite character from it will always be the Special Weapons Dalek.
149	The Happiness Patrol	3 parts	4
The Seventh Doctor era seemed to have two kinds of serials: relative normal Doctor Who tales like Dragonfire and Remembrance of the Daleks and absurd stories built on interesting ideas and bizarre characters, where everyone had nicknames and pink hair, like Paradise Towers and The Happiness Patrol. This was actually somehow weirder and more dreamlike than Paradise Towers though, with a kind of candy-coloured noir feel and a moody harmonica soundtrack. It was halfway to being a Joker episode from Batman: The Animated Series at times; it had some Tim Burton to it. I'm fairly sure I liked it more than Paradise Towers as well, but it's hard to tell. One thing I did like was the Doctor deliberately visiting a troubled colony with the intention to fix it. Over seven lifetimes he'd gone from landing somewhere and trying to get himself out of trouble, to landing somewhere and trying to help out, to fighting evil wherever he found it, to actively looking for problems to solve. I also liked the scene of the Doctor talking the sniper down, and him outwitting his executioner. The guy was kicking ass all over the place in this story in fact. An effective Doctor is the best Doctor. But I had problems with it as well. For one thing, there was no sense of the city being more than a few very nice looking sets for me. Partly because of the lighting, partly because of the shiny studio floor where the streets and pavement should be, and partly because of how the Doctor just seemed to appear wherever he wanted to be. One minute he was a prisoner of the Kandyman, next he was visiting Helen A at her office; it was like every location was on the same block. Also, this is what the Kandyman looked like: For years I'd been wondering what the deal with this guy was. I'd seen him on Doctor Who documentaries, in magazines and on the internet, and I knew he was a lunatic killer robot that looked like he'd punched his way out of a giant pack of liquorice allsorts, but I didn't know why. What situation would ever justify Bertie Bassett showing up on Doctor Who as a deranged droid? Turns out he was just a lunatic killer robot with a candy theme, probably because he worked as an executioner in a candy-themed murder kitchen, nothing more complicated than that (though I did learn that his outer shell was actually candy and could be melted by lemonade). The thing about this particular colony was that it was all about enforcing mandatory cheerfulness through a combination of sickly sweet decor, pink wigs, soulless lift music, and aggressive culling of the miserable. Maybe not the most realistic premise for a Doctor Who story, but it's not a huge stretch to imagine that a government plan to make everyone happy would result in something superficial, infantile and tasteless. But the story didn't quite work for me, because it had two messages: 'you can't force people to be happy by painting things pink and feeding them sweets', and 'happiness is nothing unless it exists side by side with sadness', and they don't really work together. These people had plenty of sadness; they weren't living in shallow hedonistic bliss, their colony was a saccharine nightmare city of misery! They just weren't allowed to express it else they'd get hunted by the Happiness Patrol. Really the message should've been 'governments should try to make people happy by addressing their problems, not covering them with glitter'.
150	Silver Nemesis	3 parts	6
Silver Nemesis was the series' big 25th anniversary story, so... wait, I thought Remembrance of the Daleks was the 25th celebration. It seems that Remembrance got all the references and this got the title (25 years is a silver anniversary). This is not the most well-loved serial in the McCoy era and considering the other stories he got that's saying something. That poll I'm always checking placed it as the fifth worse Seventh Doctor serial, putting it in the bottom 15% of stories overall. But Doctor Who fans are overlooking one thing: it's actually good. I'm not sure what people's problem is with it, because for me it ticked all the necessary boxes for being an entertaining Doctor Who tale: The Doctor's choices had an impact on what happened and he was an active participant in the plot who had to earn his victories. It had a sense of humour without being an outright farce. It had Cybermen versus Neo-Nazis versus a crazy archer witch from the past in a race to get their hands on yet another Gallifreyan superweapon that the Doctor had some involvement with. Ace was in it and she blew up a lot of Cybermen. I'm sure many folks disliked the way the Cybermen died so easily, with their weakness to gold exaggerated to the point where a gold coin from a slingshot will straight up kill them, but I like explosions more than I like Cybermen so I'm considering that to be a positive. Plus Polly was killing them with a spray bottle full of nail varnish remover in The Moonbase, so c'mon! People may have also disliked the Doctor using the Tardis to teleport all over the place, hopping around in it even more than he did in Logopolis, but I'm considering that to be a good thing in this case as well. Maybe because even at this point it was fairly unusual for the Tardis to be anything but the magic wardrobe he walked out of at the start of a story, so it made a change. Overall I thought this was a well-paced dramatic exciting funny three-parter that almost made sense at times. I still don't get why Nemesis was in Peinforte's tomb, but the story moved so fast that I didn't care. It only really dragged for me when Lady Peinforte took a limo ride with the celebrity guest. Actually, this one had two celebrity guests, as the jazz musician at the start was played by himself. Funny how the Doctor used his jazz tape to jam the Cybermen transmissions in this after teaming up with a blues musician in the last story. That could've been a theme running through the whole season... but I'm glad it wasn't. Ace did point out at one point that the resolution of the story was almost exactly the same as in Remembrance of the Daleks, with the Doctor programming the Gallifreyan super-weapon to wipe out the ships around Earth, but it was different enough that it didn't bother me, lampshaded or not. He didn't even mock the Cybermen over the radio and rant about "unlimited rice pudding" this time, so they were barely similar! To be honest my biggest problem with this story was the Doctor feeling that his screw up with Nemesis may have triggered World War 1, World War 2 and Kennedy's assassination. That's a hell of a lot of guilt to retroactively lay on the hero. Fortunately, his total guilt was expertly assessed by the future distillation of his evil side in a trial a few stories ago, and if the Valeyard didn't bring it up when he was trying to get the Doctor executed for meddling, I have to assume that Nemesis's actual influence was minimal. The Cyberman may have lost their head cannons by this point, but my headcanon works just fine.
151	The Greatest Show in the Galaxy	4 parts	5
I wasn't looking forward to this one for all kinds of reasons. My feelings about circuses and clowns are similar to Ace's, I'm not keen on bad 80s rap either, plus worst of all it was by the same writer as Paradise Towers. I could really tell as well, as it was in the same zone of weirdness and most of the characters had names like Flowerchild and Whizz Kid. But I thought the circus tent set was great, the evil robot clowns were actually alright and I'll take bad 80s rap over fake 80s slang, even if it did remind me of the DK Rap from Donkey Kong 64 (what is it with the McCoy years and Nintendo music?) The reason the circus tent looked so good was because they found themselves without a studio while they were cleaning out the asbestos, so they just put up an actual (tiny) circus tent in a car park and filmed in there instead. Though the Tardis interior actually made an appearance in this after taking the rest of the season off, so who knows where they filmed that. It looked like they also shot in a quarry, as the entire first episode was about the Doctor and Ace's journey to the eponymous Greatest Show. There have been a few serials like this that took their damn time getting to where the action was; sometimes it worked for me (Castrovalva), sometimes it didn't (Revelation of the Daleks), and here I think it worked. Part of the reason for that is that it turned the story into more of a three-parter with a prologue, and I like my three-parters (the other part of the reason is that I'd rather hang out in the wasteland with the killer robot bus conductor than go to a creepy circus). It also helped to build the surreal vibe, as even though this has the exterior shots that Paradise Towers was missing, all that was outside for miles was dusty emptiness and a fruit-seller who complained about all her customers being weird, and that seems like an unusual place for a circus to be. Plus it introduced the other contestants, like Captain Cook the intergalactic explorer and the asshole on a trike and proved they weren't just another part of the circus, there to trick the Doctor and Ace... unless they were. Why was it that the only people going to this famous circus was a handful of eccentrics, including one who was basically the definition of a stereotypical fan? Why was there no one else in the audience when they got there except for a miserable family? Why was the circus bringing new people in to perform only to kill them the moment the audience got bored? I'm not into digging into stories too deep trying to find the hidden subtext because I feel like half the time if you find one it's because you projected it there yourself, but like Paradise Towers and The Happiness Patrol this was so detached from reality that it all felt like an allegory for something. I got distracted trying to figure out the metaphor and who all the characters represented. The obsessive fan Whizz Kid was fairly obvious, as he talked about knowing the show wasn't as good as it used to be despite never seeing it for himself (I've seen almost all of classic Doctor Who now and he was right). But if he was meant to be the Doctor Who fan who kept dissing the Seventh Doctor era, then does that mean the Greatest Show in the Galaxy was meant to stand in for Doctor Who itself? Was the family in the audience supposed to be the series dwindling viewers, now bored, jaded and impossible to entertain for long? Does that mean that the talent coming in represented the writers, formerly fans themselves, who came in with enthusiasm and a feeling that they could do it better, only to be pushed into the limelight by the veteran staff to suffer the criticism and burn out? My thoughts are... nah it's not really a metaphor. Not all of it anyway. I just can't see a writer on his second script and a script editor in his second year coming up with a story about how they used to have fun on the show in the olden days before they "took everything good and bright about what we had and buried it". But thinking about what it all could mean did keep me entertained during a serial that wasn't always grabbing my attention. It eventually revealed that the hippies who ran the circus had sold out to the Gods of Ragnarok, which explained most of the weirdness... though not all of it. Nothing could explain how much of a dick Captain Cook was; even the Master would've been like "Dude, what's your problem?" after some of the stuff he did, like throwing his sidekick into the ring with the Doctor, with the lights rigged to trigger her werewolf transformation. You know, I think Mags was actually the first proper werewolf in Doctor Who. It's okay though, there was nothing supernatural about her, she was just an alien from the planet Lycanthropy IX. Uh, I mean Vulpana. I'm glad she survived the story and got a happy ending by the way, with all the crap she went through. Speaking of the ending... the ending wasn't so great. I like the Doctor being smart and coming up with clever ways to win, but having him time his magic show so that it finished at the precise moment Mags kicked the medallion out of Cook's hand was almost as absurd as him then using it to reflect the Gods of Ragnarok's eye lasers back at them. The dude's good and he has a few time superpowers, but he's not precognitive. I liked that he had absolute faith in Ace though, and that he could walk away from an explosion like a boss. Also, I had two big problems with the Gods of Ragnarok, well one minor one and one massive one. Minor problem: the Doctor acted like he'd fought these guys a bunch of times already and yet I've never seen them before. Sure he has off-screen adventures, but these were an off-screen recurring villain, and that seems a little much. Major problem: the word 'Ragnarok' gave McCoy many opportunities to roll his 'r's twice in a row and he did not neglect them. Best in small doses that.

1989 - Series 26
152	Battlefield	4 parts	6
Battlefield to me felt a bit like a lost Hinchcliffe-era Fourth Doctor script they'd dusted off and adapted for the Seventh Doctor era, by replacing Sarah Jane with Ace and aiming it at a younger audience. It was like half UNIT story, half kids TV, though I can't quite pin down why. Maybe it was the cheesy elements, maybe it was the slightly dodgy direction, maybe McCoy's performance (he seemed to struggle with angry acting) or perhaps it was the daft music. The serial really needed a soundtrack by Queen. It's a shame really because I found a lot to like about it: it was well paced, full of enthusiasm, and the Brig was the best he'd been since Terror of the Zygons. The original Brig I mean, not Brigadier Bambera (played the actress who played the female version of Dave Lister in Red Dwarf!) This was his final appearance in the series and they were really foreshadowing that he wasn't going to make it out this time right up to the point he ultimately sacrificed himself in the Doctor's place... and survived. I'm glad he did as well because there was really no need for him to die. But if he had to go out here, successfully killing a demon about to devour the world with bullets would've been the way to do it. Especially with these as his last words: Destroyer: Pitiful. Can this world do no better than you as their champion? The Brig: Probably. I just do the best I can. The demon had surprisingly decent makeup as well. It's fitting that this is one of the rare Doctor Who story that takes place in the 90s, as the thing looked straight out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It couldn't actually do anything, but it stood still and looked menacing like a boss. Though the main villains in this were Morgaine and Mordred, and the fact that it took 26 years for Doctor Who to finally bring in Arthurian mythology, twice as long as it took to introduce the Loch Ness monster, possibly says something about how much us British folks actually care about that particular legend. They had to bring in another convenient nuclear missile convoy like in Mind of Evil just to keep things interesting. Morgaine was a surprisingly interesting villain, considering that she was an evil sorceress, as she declared a ceasefire to honour the dead, healed a woman's sight to pay for her son's drinks, and was ultimately talked down. In fact, I feel like they should've taken more time to explain why letting her have Excalibur was such a bad idea. Also, I liked how she wasn't a fish out of water on Earth; she understood everything, she just had to interpret it into concepts she was more familiar with. It's a shame that the heroes weren't so interesting to me, with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart really overshadowing Brigadier Female-Lister when he finally arrived midway through episode two, and Ancelyn barely getting anything to do. Plus Shou Yuing seemed to have been bolted onto the side of the plot so that Ace would have a friend to hang around while the Doctor was with his friend the Brig. There are plenty of reasons why a teenager who shared Ace's hobby of blowing things up might be at a hotel near an archaeological dig and I feel like the serial should've picked one and told me about it. Also, there was Merlin, who didn't show up in person, except he did because he's the Doctor apparently. Possibly the first time that the good wizard in a fairy tale turned out to be him. This was also the first time I can think of that the Doctor ever ran into the consequences of his future self's actions, though it wasn't all that different from the times that everyone already knew him from his past self's actions in stories like Face of Evil and Timelash. It was a bit of a change from him dealing with all the Gallifreyan superweapons he'd left lying around when he was younger though, plus he couldn't be the master manipulator pulling all the strings this time, seeing as he didn't know what was going on and his future self was a step ahead of him. He still managed to pull a Greatest Show in the Galaxy at one point though, as he seemed to know exactly when Ace would bring the item he needed through a portal. Though there is one thing I don't understand: When Arthur died, Merlin left a note hidden under his helmet for his past self to find many years in the future, after the body had long since decayed to dust. What I don't get is: why didn't the note decay? Oh I forgot to mention that this story featured a new Tardis console room! The Doctor's went with a 'curtain with some white circles printed on it' configuration this time, which is pretty bad, but probably better than a bluescreen background would've been. I knew the series had budget problems but it's a bit tragic that they'd apparently scrapped the Tardis set before the last season was even over. But at least they still had Bessie! Though what series did this ending come from? Despite it being a couple of episodes away by helicopter, everyone turned up at the Brig's house, including the new Brig, and the female characters all decided to go shopping and leave the men to make dinner. In Doctor Who. I kept expecting someone to say something about marriage being a battlefield.
153	Ghost Light	3 parts	3
Battlefield was a fairly traditional Doctor Who serial that could've worked with any of the Doctors really, but Ghost Light was another one of the weird ones that this era was full of, all about the Seventh Doctor being sneaky and working through another one of Ace's issues. It was also the last of them, on the production side at least, as this was the final classic Doctor Who story filmed. This is one of the serials I was curious about from the start, because I'd heard that it was incomprehensible on a first watch and I took that as a challenge. It wasn't quite what I expected though, as the basic plot was fairly clear: folks from an ancient survey ship had sealed their boss Light away and taken over a Victorian mansion with the intention of killing the Queen and taking over the British Empire. The Doctor released Light to stop them, but he couldn't handle his survey being so out of date and was going to blow the planet, so the Doctor had to talk him to death, Captain Kirk style. Also, Ace was tormented by guilt and fear because she'd burned down the house when she was 13. Simple! It's just the everything else that got no explanation. How was the priest turned into a monkey? What was the radioactive snuffbox about? Why were there maids packing revolvers that came out from behind a door on schedule like the figures in a cuckoo clock? What brought the bugs to life? Why did the occupants freeze at night? What drove the hunter mad? What the hell was the deal with Control? There was so much unexplained and underexplained weirdness going on in this that the Doctor actually exclaimed "Even I can't play this many games at once!" at one point. There were apparently two problems that led to this situation: the script was dramatically cut down to fit into three episodes and the Doctor was testing Ace by this point instead of explaining things to her, so the explaining didn't happen. I've decided that three-parters are generally pretty much the perfect length for a classic Doctor Who story, but this one really needed an extra 25 minutes to put the exposition in. Or something even better than exposition: satisfying payoffs that made things evident in retrospect. Like, there was a scene where the hallway of stuffed animals give Ace a guilt trip and she heard the sound of modern fire engine sirens. That was a bit weird, but it made perfect sense later once Ace confessed that she'd been scared of Light's ghost in the house as a child, burned the place down, and was still freaked out about the experience. The story needed more moments like Ace's confession; scenes that make you think 'ah, so that's why they locked the hunter in a room with a radioactive snuffbox!' On a production level though they knocked it out of the park. When the script worked it really worked, with some clever dialogue that the actors delivered well. The sets and costumes also looked fantastic on this one, except for when I couldn't see them. I'm not sure a screen's been invented that could show the shades of black needed for this serial, but when they got it right it had as much atmosphere as a moderately sized gas giant. Plus there was something about the visuals and the plot that made me feel like I was watching someone play a creepy old point and click adventure game, but in a good way. The serial did keep my attention but I have to deduct points due to the fact that it's broken to the point where you need a guide to really understand it. Which is a pretty major flaw for me, because I don't like David Lynch stories. Sure Warriors' Gate had a similar problem and I gave that a much higher score, but that's because I enjoyed that one more!
154	The Curse of Fenric	4 parts	5
Before this marathon I'd only seen about two serials for every Doctor, and for McCoy the ones I'd watched had been Time and the Rani and The Curse of Fenric (and maybe Battlefield). But all I could remember about this going in was that Ace's friends became vampires, a church was attacked by sea monsters, and a vicar lost his anti-vampire crucifix defence because the terrible things his own side was doing in the war had eroded his faith. Oh plus I remembered the Doctor strolling right into a military base, typing a letter authorising his visit and forging two signatures simultaneously right in front of the people he was trying to trick, I wasn't going to forget that. That's some S-Rank Doctoring right there, ultimate cheekiness. Troughton couldn't have done it better. But now that I've watched it again... I'm still having trouble keeping it all in my head. After years of stories padded out to fill their episode count they went the other way here and made a serial so complicated and stuffed full of ideas and story threads that it barely slowed down enough to make sense. It had a lot to get through and not a whole lot of time to spare to connect the dots, so it relied on the Doctor knowing more than he let on to justify why he was visiting any particular location. I eventually gave up trying to keep track of what he was doing and why and just tried to enjoy the scenes as they came. It didn't help that the characters like the English commander had like three different agendas going at once. Plus it had a professor working on both a codebreaking machine and the Viking runes in the crypt under the church... which was also the source of a natural chemical weapon along with being the burial place of the cursed Vikings and the location of Fenric's flask. Also, there was a team of Soviet agents and an ancient sea vampire from the distant future, and it felt like all of them had switched sides at least once by the last episode! Even the Doctor turned on Ace at the end to break her faith in him, for reasons. Man, I haven't even mentioned yet that Ace made friends with her grandmother and her cute baby, who turned out to be the mother she's always hated, then set up her own existence by sending them to London to escape the vampire invasion. So she was also working through her issues (and falling in love with a Soviet soldier) while the rest of it was going on. Twitch showed the four-part version of the story, so that's what I watched, but there's also a special edition movie version with ten minutes of extra footage that presumably gives it all a bit more space to breathe. Feels like they should've gone with an extra hour. There was a lot I liked about it though, such as the Doctor and Ace looking for an emergency chess set (and sensibly checking the one they found for dynamite). I also liked the scene where the Doctor used his faith in his companions to ward off vampires, though I had to appreciate that one retroactively as I didn't know he was saying their names while watching it because the dialogue was too quiet. I did pick up on some of the names the vicar said earlier while researching the cursed Vikings though: "Sarah, Martha, Jane, Clara, Annie". If only that last name had been something like Rose, Amy or Yasmin. First thing I'll do when I become showrunner is give the Doctor a companion called Annie. Second thing: Doctor Who/Cowboy Bebop/Mass Effect crossover. Also, the serial did do a good job setting up the threat of Fenric himself, cleverly tying him into earlier stories in a way that retroactively fixed previous annoyances like Ace and Lady Peinforte's time travel, and brought a new significance to the Doctor playing with the chess set in Silver Nemesis. Though he was another unseen enemy that the Doctor had apparently been facing for years off-screen; they'd just done that with the Gods of Ragnarok in Greatest Show in the Galaxy! Though to be fair his defeat happened in a much more interesting way, which tied in with Ace's issues and her growth as a person while travelling with the Doctor. It felt like she'd turned a corner at the end of this story, and she was ready to finally return to Perivale to confront her issues directly. It's funny though that despite the Doctor's vampire-repelling levels of faith in Ace and his ability to predict the exact moment she'd arrive to bail him out in Greatest Show and Battlefield, here he withheld information and underestimated her, with the result that she nearly screwed everything up by being too smart at the wrong time. Though no one could've predicted her bizarre flirting technique when she seduced that solider.
155	Survival	3 parts	4
This is it, the last story of classic Doctor Who. I had mixed feelings about reaching the end of the Twitch marathon and having no more scheduled Doctor Who to watch the next day. On one hand, I was tired and glad to finally be free of the self-inflicted obligation to sit through seven hours of Who a night. On the other hand, I was also a bit hungry. Compared to Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric, Survival was a nice simple, straightforward tale of cat vultures and teenagers being abducted from the suburbs to a planet on the verge of exploding that turned visitors into teleporting cheetahmen when they succumbed to their violent impulses. Though I suppose the Master was there too, so that was a bit of a complication. It started with the Doctor deciding to hunt an alien cat creature that had been going after Ace's friends in Perivale and decided that he needed to find the perfect bait... so he spent a decent portion of the first episode chatting with comedians Hale and Pace about brands of cat food in possibly the first scene in Doctor Who history to take place inside a convenience shop. Hale and Pace are a comedy double act, by the way, so John Nathan-Turner managed to squeeze in two more celebrity cameos before the end. I'm not sure why the writer thought it was a good idea to make the first part of the serial all about the Doctor hanging out in a street trying to track down Sabrina the Teenage Witch's creepy animatronic cat, while the perfect bait (his suburban teenage companion) was out getting chased around a playground, but it was almost a nice change to see him in such a mundane setting. I say 'almost', because I'm 90% sure I saw a bit of this serial as a young child somehow and as my only exposure to the series it pretty much defined the whole show for me. My mental image of Doctor Who growing up was that it was a kids' sci-fi series starring a bloke covered in question marks who had a time machine but always seemed to be investigating something mysterious in the present day suburbs for budgetary reasons. Well, until I finally gave the TV movie a shot anyway... It's interesting that it took until the very end of the series for a writer to acknowledge that when human companions return home months or years after they left, friends and family are going to notice. Though in this case Ace was more than happy to let her family keep on wondering, and her friends were all disappearing as well! Ace vanished due to an old enemy of the Doctor's pulling her across space and time to manipulate him, but her friends disappeared due to an entirely unrelated teleportation phenomenon... because another old enemy of the Doctor's wanted to manipulate him. Turned out that the Master had gotten himself in a bit of a situation and needed the Doctor's help to get back out of it. Again. The Master was stuck on cat world with a bad case of yellow eyes and the resulting urge to hunt prey was interfering with his ability to make elaborate schemes. When finally escaped to Earth the most cunning plan he could think of was to dress one of Ace's infected friends in a daft looking suit a few sizes too big for him and then go off on a killing spree. Because I guess in 80s Perivale yuppies were the top of the food chain. Unfortunately, the poor kid was lured into a game of motorbike chicken with the Doctor and the two of them drove into each other and exploded, proving the Doctor correct when he said: "If we live like idiots we'll die like idiots." But fate loves the Doctor, so he survived the massive explosion and was launched unhurt onto a convenient pile of trash. Actually, his line was "If we fight like animals, we'll die like animals," which he yelled out twice while successfully resisting the urge to brain the Master with a nearby skull. He'd come a long way since season one, where he was happy to inflict concussions and skull fractures across time and space whenever Ian wasn't around to stop him. Though the way the scene was edited really bothered me for whatever reason. I feel like he should've teleported back to Earth midway through saying it, instead of saying the whole line again from the start when he arrived in the street. Out of 26 seasons of classic Doctor Who that's the one editing change I'd make given the option. Well, the first of them anyway. Fun fact: much like The Caves of Androzani was directed by the only director to come back for the revival series, Survival was written by the only writer to return: Rona Monro. This... wasn't as good as Caves of Androzani. Though the script apparently has some lesbian subtext in it that went completely over my head while I was watching it. Possibly because I couldn't see the actress's subtle performance through the giant cat head she was wearing. It was probably for the best really, as I'm not sure I like the implication that if you give into your unnatural feelings on the lesbian planet you turn gay forever, start murdering people, and then the world explodes. The serial struggled a bit for a number of other reasons unrelated to actors looking ridiculous wearing fursuits in the heat, like the characters being fairly aimless for a good part of it, the planet blowing up for no reason and comedians showing up to discuss cat food, but it sort of worked for me. I didn't find it boring. Plus it had a point to make, with the Doctor struggling to control his anger again like in Battlefield, and putting his own philosophy of working with others to benefit everyone against the Master's belief in the survival of the fittest. The serial also made the argument that it's better not to hunt and kill the weak and that's a good message for the series to go out on. That and "Don't move! Stay still! Don't run! Stay still! I told you to stay still!" Also, they learned about the cancellation early enough to dub new lines over the ending (recorded on the show's anniversary in fact), so the Seventh Doctor era got to go out with something much more poetic and fitting than: "Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice.": There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do! Ace.

CONCLUSION

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If there's one thing I gained from marathoning the Seventh Doctor seasons, it's a massive appreciation for Murray Gold. I mean I liked him well enough already, but now that I've heard Keff McCulloch I understand how bad the revival series' music could've been. Not that I really dislike McCulloch's music, I just think it belonged in an N64 game and not a TV series. I was surprised by how good the era looked though, possibly because I kept hearing about how stretched the budgets got, and because my most vivid memory was of Doctor hanging out in the suburbs in Survival. Sure everything was shot on video by this point and it looked like a kids' show from the late eighties, but episodes like Delta and the Bannermen and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy used location filming to look as big as a decent Pertwee story.

You can split Doctor Who up into different eras based on the producer and script editor (or just the executive producer for the revival series), with each era having a slightly different tone to it and a different approach to making the series. But John Nathan-Turner had been stuck with the producer job since Tom Baker's final year and Eric Saward had been script editor for pretty much the entirety of the Fifth and Sixth Doctor's seasons, so the series hadn't properly regenerated since Castrovalva. This isn't the only reason that Andrew Cartmell's era as script editor felt so damn weird to me, but it's one of them. Cartmell encouraged writers to come up with fresh ideas and different approaches, trimming away the clichés and worn out tropes, and the result was that the Seventh Doctor's run was a bit mad, experimental and occasionally pretty terrible. But it was also more interesting, imaginative and vibrant than the series had been in years, and not just because of all the neon colours.

The Seventh Doctor himself became a compromise between the old and new (once he'd got past his irritating pratfalls and mixed proverbs phase), as the enthusiastic writers suggested he could be something more special, like the reincarnation of a legendary Time Lord born from a loom, or literally God, but producer JNT reined them in to keep him mysterious. He ended up darker, funnier, more secretive, and more on top of things than the last few Doctors (he never had to pick up a pistol and shoot someone once), but he also managed to get through his entire run without any major hints that he was anything more than an ordinary rebel Time Lord slipping through. Which I'm grateful for, because I like that the thing that makes the Doctor so special isn't that he's the chosen one or anything like that, it's that he left his secluded world, learned to give a damn, and then kept on learning. Also, he's really clever.

McCoy was perhaps not the greatest or most charismatic actor to play the role (especially when he was supposed to be angry), but he brought some of Troughton's clownishness back to the role while also coming off as more intelligent and capable than Five or Six did. The Seventh Doctor is often described as being a chess master and a manipulator, using people as pawns, but I'm not sure that's entirely true. He didn't come off as a super mastermind to me, he just had full control of his Tardis, a list of things he wanted to do and ideas about what to do about them, instead of always randomly dropping into situations blind. The one time he literally played chess he won by cheating and he admitted to Morgaine he wasn't playing chess with her, he was playing poker. In fact, he came off as a bit of a magician to me, who put on a show to misdirect people. He sometimes screwed up and was a clumsy idiot on occasion, but I could never be sure it wasn't part of the trick and it was never clear how much he knew and how much he was bullshitting. He was a guy who kept his cards to his chest and an Ace up his sleeve, and most of his manipulation was for the benefit of her education

Some people don't like it when the Doctor is too capable and it seems like nothing can touch him, but personally I'm the opposite. Sure I liked Hartnell's Doctor getting into trouble he couldn't necessarily handle, but judging by the ages mentioned on screen, he'd been travelling in his box and facing off against the greatest evils the universe has available on a daily basis for 500 years by his seventh incarnation (474 of those years somehow happening off-screen), and the idea that his luck had bailed him out that consistently is immensely unsatisfying for me. Either he'd become just that good or he should've ran out of regenerations centuries ago, so every time I saw him saved from certain death by something outside his control (or a pile of trash) I cringed. Plus I like watching the Doctor run rings around people and take them down with ingenious solutions like an intellectual One-Punch Man!

Though I was less keen on him coming into situations with his cards held so close to his chest that even Ace was out of the loop, like in Curse of Fenric. Mostly because it meant that the story could just jump from place to place without bothering to explain why to the audience. It worked great in Remembrance of the Daleks (and I liked the Fourth Doctor pulling it in Invasion of Time), but I generally like to know what's going on in a story! That's one of the reasons I liked Battlefield, because it inverted it. The Doctor had met the villains before, but he met them in his future, so they knew him but he had no idea what he was facing and no plan. Though they didn't know that.

Another thing I didn't like was the question mark pullover, but it's hard to complain too much after what Five and Six were wearing. Seven had that question mark umbrella too, but I'll let him off for that because he used it as a prop, like the Fourth Doctor did with his scarf, and anything that makes a Doctor more like Tom Baker is a good thing in my book. Like having an ass-kicking protégé as a sidekick for instance.

The Seventh Doctor only really had two companions during his time, but he did meet up with an old friend along the way one final time, so I'll write a few words about him as well:

Melanie Bush: We never got to see Mel's first trip in the Tardis, she was the first in medias res companion since Susan, but she had a great introduction to the series during Terror of the Vervoids, which showed that she was smart, enthusiastic, proactive, and curious... and then her Seventh Doctor stories happened. The problem with Mel is that the series didn't seem to know or care who she was, there was no substance to her at all, so she was just there to scream before cliffhangers and keep the Doctor company until the next companion turned up. Plus she had the worst dress sense since Sarah Jane Smith, often dressing like the horrifying personification of campy light entertainment.

Dorothy McShane: Ace was special for the exact opposite reasons to Mel: she was the only companion to leave the Tardis for unknown reasons off-screen, and the series very much gave a damn about who she was. It was nice to finally watch a companion who had character growth and a story arc of their own who didn't exist just so that the Doctor had someone to rescue and argue with! Stories like Ghost Light and Curse of Fenric were as much about her issues as anything else going on, and that didn't use to happen unless someone was getting written out. She was a fighter, not a screamer, and like Leela and Romana she was the Doctor's protégé. Except he trained and pushed her to overcome her fears and reach her potential, making a far happier, well-balanced pyromaniac.

Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart: It seems wrong to count the Brig as a companion because most of the time the Doctor was hanging out in his base joining in with his adventures. But he was the ultimate authority figure ally to the Doctor, with a dry wit and a stiff upper lip, and even though they had their disputes (like when the Brig blew up the Silurians), when the shit hit the fan he had the Doctor's back. Despite being the head of an intelligence agency he could be counted on to risk his own life to save the Doctor while the Doctor was saving the world for him, and he did it like a big damn hero with a glued-on moustache.

My top three Seventh Doctor serials:

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1. Remembrance of the Daleks (6)
2. Silver Nemesis (6)
3. Battlefield (6)

Nope, no Curse of Fenric, I gave its spot to the far more deserving Silver Nemesis.


Bottom three Seventh Doctor serials:

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1. Paradise Towers (3)
2. Time and the Rani (3)
3. Ghost Light (3)

I guess I don't appreciate weird as much as some other people.

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NEXT TIME

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, my long Classic Doctor Who ordeal concludes with my final thoughts and additional lists as I use the power of spreadsheets to determine once and for all which of these first eight Doctors was the greatest!

You should write a comment and leave some feedback. I find I'm generally more interested in other people's opinions when they're written underneath my articles and chances are someone else is going to want to read them too.