Doctor Who: The Sixth Doctor Era (1984-1986)

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've reached the Sixth Doctor era of Doctor Who. Yay!

I can't believe that this logo's lasted for three Doctors now. Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker all had two logos and two opening credit sequences each, but this terrible looking neon tube logo just won't die! They did give it a bit of a glow though, plus they swapped in Colin Baker's face and threw in some colourful weirdness for the camera to fly through, seeing as he was the gaudy Doctor.

Underneath this SPOILER warning you'll find reviews for all 11 Sixth Doctor stories and inside those reviews you'll find spoilers. But only for what you've been reading so far, I won't say a word about future stories. Except for in the next paragraph where I'll mention something entirely innocuous about Army of Ghosts.

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I have a rating system now, rating systems are cool. Mine is especially ingenious because it's based on how much I cared about a story on a scale of 1-9, with a point or two added or subtracted for elements that impressed or disappointed me. For instance, if I was watching a really boring story, and suddenly the Ghostbusters turned up in a cameo and started quipping and destroying things with their proton packs, I might think that was worth a couple of extra points. Actually no, that's just reminded me of the scene from Army of Ghosts where the Tenth Doctor starts singing the theme so that's definitely minus points.

10	Just ignore this rating, I'll never give it to anything.
9	A little bit better than most of my favourites.
8	One of the best episodes ever, except for those that get 9s.
7	An average score in a more perfect world.
6	It's got minor issues but nothing that seriously damaged my enjoyment.
5	Took on all distractions and won.
4	Took on distractions and fought them to a draw.
3	Took on distractions and lost.
2	Possibly not bad, but definitely not my kind of television.
1	Much worse than conventionally bad television.

1984 - Series 21
136	The Twin Dilemma	4 parts	4
It probably seemed like a really smart idea at the time to give the last episode of season 21 over to the incoming Doctor to give people a chance to get to love him before the series disappeared off TV for a few months. The plan went wrong for two reasons though: first, it killed the anticipation to see how the new Doctor played the role, second, the guy was an unlikeable murderous lunatic in this story who only succeeded because his mentor stepped in and sacrificed his life to take the villain down for him. When a new character starts out by trying to strangle the woman that the Fifth Doctor just died to save, it doesn't endear them to the audience. Of course he is the Fifth Doctor and all the rest of them, it's the same person, so with that in mind I found it actually pretty tragic to see him this way. I didn't give a single damn about the plot, the kidnapped twin mathematical boy geniuses (double Adrics, what the hell were they thinking?), the birdface people, the psychic slugs, any of that. But I did care about the Doctor struggling with his regeneration madness and his unpredictable reactions to things kept my interest. Plus it helped that his behaviour actually gave Nicola Bryant something to do. With so many scenes of the two of them alone and Colin Baker acting loud enough to be heard over his coat, she had to be more interesting than Nyssa and Tegan typically were just to hold her own. I think they got the tone wrong, as the two of them went straight back to being flippant again after he literally strangled Peri, but I felt that the writer was just shy of telling an interesting story here about the Doctor struggling to find himself in a new egotistical persona. Six should've totally come out in that black coat that Colin Baker wanted at the end, to show that he'd got his sanity back and to draw a line between the person who attacked his friend and who he was going be from then on. Keeping the ugly multi-coloured coat was a huge mistake for story reasons and just in general. He needed the Brig to show up, shake his head and make him try again. Also, they pulled the 'the aliens will do X and then they'll be a threat to the entire universe' thing again and it's getting stupider every time. Blowing up a star to scatter eggs across space will not doom the universe, or even a single galaxy, and they would've had much more success just carrying the eggs to other planets with their FTL capable spacecraft. That said I'm not a child genius, so what do I know?

1985 - Series 22
137	Attack of the Cybermen	2 parts	6
The Cybermen came back! Again! It would've been more of an event back when there were seven years between appearances instead of just one or two. Attack of the Cybermen was the first story of season 22, the year they decided to screw with the format a little, doubling the length of episodes and halving the number of parts. Unfortunately, this also screwed with the pacing a bit, as the writers no longer had to bother having anything interesting happen in the first 25 minutes to set up a cliffhanger. Fortunately, the Sixth Doctor himself was a lot better in this serial, even if writer Paula Moore was more interested in telling a story about a space mercenary, jewel thieves, and a pair of escaped Cybermen slaves. And by 'Paula Moore' I mean script editor Eric Saward, who disguised his name so that he could get around the Writer's Guild rules and submit a script to his own show, but couldn't disguise the fact that this was obviously one of his stories. It's got the anti-hero badass, tons of characters divided up into their own separate side plots, gritty violence (someone shot a Cyberman through the mouth hole!), and the Doctor himself picked up a gun before the end to sort a situation out. Though it also had so many continuity references that I had to double check to make sure it wasn't another anniversary year, and this was apparently due to continuity consultant Ian Levine's influence. The serial even went as far as mentioning that the events of The Tenth Planet were going to happen next year, even though Tenth Planet took place in a '20 years from now' sci-fi future we never reached. Plus the Doctor finally got the Tardis' chameleon circuit working... after landing in the exact same place that it broke in An Unearthly Child. Well, it was kind of working. Another clue that Eric Saward wrote this is that he brought his character Lytton back from Resurrection of the Daleks, who was one of the few people to survive that bloodbath. I feel like I should hate the character on principle, seeing as he was a cool mercenary with a secret agenda who kept people guessing his true motivations right to the end, but he was actually pretty likeable, so I can't. Plus he spent a lot of the story hanging around with Brian Glover, who did a good job playing a thief whose day started off as a crime drama and then took a turn for sci-fi halfway through. Though hang on, Lytton: Seemed to be working with his crew at first. Revealed that he was an ally of the Cybermen. Turned out to actually be a double agent... ...hired by a race on a world the Cybermen planned to blow up. Ultimately died helping the heroes. He was just Kellman from Revenge of the Cybermen again! Except unlike earlier Cybermen stories, this actually did something with the Borg-like body horror aspect of the villains, with Lytton himself going through conversion at one point. In fact, they may as well have been the Robotmen in most stories. I also liked those two prisoners who spent the serial trying to escape from a traditional sci-fi alien labour camp (the kind where captives spend all day hitting rocks, also featured in stories like The Dominators and Destiny of the Daleks). Though it did bother me that the Cybermen were keeping human prisoners... right up until the reveal that they were partially cyber-converted! I did not see that coming. Another thing I didn't see coming was that their plotline went absolutely nowhere. Cutting them out would've made zero difference to the story. What they needed was for Peri to be trapped up there with them, an actual main character I was invested in, then they could've served the purpose of getting her to the Cyberman base. There was no need for The Doctor and Peri to both meet the Cryons separately, which is a crap name for aliens that live in extreme cold by the way. They also had crap makeup, as they looked like they had plastic bags over their heads. But the biggest problem for me wasn't the way the supporting characters kept getting killed off without doing anything, or the alien makeup, or the way it felt like a backdoor pilot for a Lytton series, or even all the people trampling over the inside of the Tardis again (it used to be a sanctuary!), it was the bloody music. The serial's soundtrack was sabotaging it at every turn by being terrible.
138	Vengeance on Varos	2 parts	5
I kind of had my hopes moderately up for this one, because it seems to be considered the closest thing the Sixth Doctor ever got to a Caves of Androzani, but I wasn't overly impressed. There were three sides to it: the behind the scenes political drama, the married couple's commentary, and the running around dark hallways, and it could've really done with less of the last one. It didn't have the imagination or budget to support its 'The Crystal Maze meets The Running Man' concept, so the characters were solving puzzles like 'is this obstacle illusionary?' and 'is this obstacle illusionary?' Plus, like Peri said, "All these corridors look the same to me." The serial got far more interesting to me when it cut behind the cameras, as it revealed that the Governor was stuck in the same broken democratic system that had the public tricked into continually voting to maintain their Sun Makers-style situation, putting them at the mercy of a greedy alien businessman. Plus then it added another layer to it by actually cutting to the reactions of two of the people watching the jailbreak on TV, showing how they voted, how they reported on each other to the government, and how they were kept pacified by the bread and circuses of the televised executions and other such horrific entertainment. I'm not used to this kind of thought-provoking sci-fi in my classic Doctor Who! It was almost like I'd put a moderately good episode of first season Sliders on instead. The serial had actual social commentary and it was about things and Peri got turned into a bird... wait, that doesn't quite fit. It was a more original trap than being tied to some train tracks, but I would've been more impressed if they'd given Peri something to do instead of making her a damsel in distress again. Sure the Doctor had his own distress too, but it was a lot more satisfying to watch him get out of trouble by faking his death and then pushing people... I mean letting people fall into a vat of acid, than it was to watch Peri do nothing.
139	The Mark of the Rani	2 parts	4
Before this marathon I'd seen maybe two stories from each of the classic Doctors, and for Six that was The Mysterious Planet and... well pretty much just that actually. So I hadn't seen Mark of the Rani before, but I'd seen the follow up Time and the Rani (years ago) and I'd seen Anthony Ainley ham it up, so I had my concerns about what I was in for. Especially as both her stories shared the same writers, Pip and Jane Baker. The eponymous Rani is yet another rogue Time Lord with a stolen Tardis to add to the list (so that's the Monk, the War Chief, the Master, two of the Doctor's mentors kind of, I suppose Omega was almost there, plus there's Professor Chronotis if you count Shada, Romana was building a new Tardis, I bet that guy with the cockney accent from The Armageddon Factor has one...) Anyway, the Rani's gimmick is that she's an amoral mad scientist (and a woman). She doesn't give a damn about power, she's already got a planet of her own, which is why I guess she gave herself a name that means 'queen' instead of calling herself 'The Alchemist' or whatever. Though with time travel you never know; maybe her name does mean 'mad scientist' in Gallifreyan and she just married a raja in the 1600s. One thing I'm sure of is that she didn't impress when I first saw her in Time and the Rani, so I was surprised to find I actually liked her as a character here. I was expecting her and the Master together to be a pantomime nightmare, with the two of them twirling their moustaches and coming up with eeeeeeeeeeeeevil plans, but she was the opposite of a hammy cackling villain. She just wanted to be left alone so that she could make people crazy in the name of science, and she definitely didn't want to be dragged into the Master's vendetta against the Doctor. Plus they actually built a unique Tardis console room set for her, with a cool time rotor made of connected metal rings. The serial itself felt a little bit like a film crew having fun down at a steam museum, but I found it watchable enough and at this point in Doctor Who I'd learned to take that and be grateful for it. I have absolutely nothing to say about it though; it's been two months since I saw it and the plot had faded from my mind after two minutes. Though I do remember that I thought the tree transformation landmines were pure fantasy bullshit that had no place in the series... until it occurred to me that transformation of organic matter into another form is what the Doctor does every time he regenerates. He's never regenerated into a tree though, which is good because it looks really dumb when a tree tries to save people by grabbing them with its branches. Wait, hang on, Attack of the Cybermen had people turned into Cybermen, Vengeance on Varos had people turned into birds, and this had people turned into trees. Was this an actual thing they were doing this season? Was this deliberate?
140	The Two Doctors	3 parts	3
Here's one thing The Two Doctors taught me: if you start your Sixth Doctor story with the Second Doctor and Jamie on an adventure in their Tardis then you'd better have a damn good story to follow it! (They didn't). Also, I can forgive them for giving Troughton Davison's old Tardis console instead of his own, because it's what they had in storage. But then they started talking about dropping Victoria off, which would put the scene somewhere in season 5, and doing a job for the Time Lords, which would put the scene... nowhere, because he was on run for his entire incarnation, and as soon as Jamie learned about the Time Lords they wiped his memory and dropped him off home! There is a fan theory that this is set after The War Games, with the Doctor and Jamie doing missions for the Time Lords after his trial but before his regeneration and exile, and... sure okay, that kind of makes sense. It's not impossible for the Time Lords to pull that off, or even implausible, with the crap they get up to later. In fact, I've got a fan theory of my own to explain the different console room as well: he decided to use a different console room for a bit. Shame there's no fan theory that could make the rest of the story work. The first problem I had with it is that it's a three-parter in the season of double-length episodes, which basically means it's a six-parter except worse. The last story this long was The Armageddon Factor six years earlier, back when they were still on their first Romana, so they'd reintroduced a problem that was fixed for Davison-era. I guess this was due to having 13 episode slots to fill this season, meaning that they had to have at least one three-parter or else there'd be a slot left over. They couldn't have just produced an extra 45 minute episode, that would've been crazy; Doctor Who would never work in that format! The second problem I had is that it was a multi-Doctor story which barely put the two Doctors in a scene together. The Three Doctors rose above its mediocre story due to the fantastic performances by Pertwee and Troughton, but this didn't have that advantage. Plus the Second Doctor and Jamie got to play off each other for a few scenes near the start and then they were split up as well! Most of the time the Second Doctor was either out of the action or out of character and neither was very satisfying to me. The third problem I had is that this was their 'send the crew off on a holiday to Europe' serial this season, which meant they padded it out with lots of running around outdoors. Plus the story had to be adapted to suit the location they'd chosen and it came off feeling very arbitrary. There's no reason this serial shouldn't have taken place in Spain, but there's no reason for it to have been set there either. The fourth problem I had with it is that it was a nasty off-putting story, and I'm not just talking the scenes deliberately intended to put viewers off ever eating meat again. Shockeye was continually trying to eat companions, a Sontaran was badly burned and blown up, the comic relief got stabbed in the gut with a knife, and the Doctor killed the Androgum by covering his head with a net and smothering him with cyanide. That's the second person he'd killed with cyanide by this point! But I did at least learn something from it all: I learned that the writer was a vegetarian. This was written by Doctor Who legend Robert Holmes, whose stories were all over the place at this point. He went from The Ribos Operation (ranked 103 out of 241 in that Doctor Who Magazine poll), to the abysmal Power of Kroll (#212), to the acclaimed Caves of Androzani (#4), to the rubbish Two Doctors (#138). I really wanted this to be one of his good stories, but it was a real disappointment to me and a waste of potential. In fact, I'd probably rank it last out of all the Colin Baker stories, below Twin Dilemma, Timelash, and whichever one you hate most. The transformation in this serial was... the Second Doctor being changed into an alien gourmand with a capacity to eat so damn much that his sixth incarnation put on weight. This story's so gross that I was actually relieved and grateful that they didn't have the Second Doctor eat anyone before the transformation wore off. I realise that a Time Lord eating a human isn't technically cannibalism, but... no.
141	Timelash	2 parts	4
This was Horns of Nimon level dumb, but not quite as enjoyable for me. Partly because scenes of Six and Peri arguing in the Tardis weren't ever going to be as fun as Four, Romana and K9 hanging out, even though they put them in harnesses and had them swing around the console with a wibbly effect on the footage. They tried the harness and camera filter trick a second time when the Doctor went abseiling during his side-quest to collect the crystal in the tinsel dimension, but the scene still felt like it took forever. On the plus side I thought the smurf robots with yellow hair and melodic voices were awesome. Well, they were the good kind of rubbish. I also liked the reveal that this actually the sequel to a Pertwee serial that never existed, like a Monster of Peladon without a Curse of Peladon, even if they didn't do much with the idea. Though I remember back when I first watched Face of Evil thinking that it would've been cool if it was Pertwee's face carved into a mountain instead of Tom Baker's, and here I actually got my wish... kind of. Not quite as impressive as a mountain, and that pose they decided to use is... interesting. I also kind of liked the scene where the Doctor spent ages trying to convince Peri to leave the Tardis so he could sacrifice himself, then once she was finally gone he discovered that HG Wells was in there too and had to admit how screwed they really were. It wasn't a great scene but it was a nice conversation. Though it was spoiled a little by how they kept going back and forth on whether or not the Tardis is indestructible. The Doctor keeps saying that it is, even in this story, but then in the same scene he acted like it wasn't. But seeing as he couldn't be bothered to reveal how he survived his desperate ploy to save the planet, literally telling Peri "I'll explain later", I'm just going to go and assume that with the shields up the Tardis basically is indestructible. The missile hit it, nothing happened. Speaking of HG Wells, he was in this story! In fact, he was hanging out with the Doctor so much he arguably counts as being the first celebrity guest companion! HG Wells is one of those people who pops up occasionally in sci-fi series, sometimes so that that the events can give him inspiration for his books (like here), sometimes because he's a time traveller himself (or herself). He's been in the New Adventures of Superman, Warehouse 13 and Legends of Tomorrow off the top of my head, but there are probably more examples as he's a tempting guest character for time travel series. I know Doc Brown and Marty never met him though, as they never leave Hill Valley. The transformation in this serial was... Peri almost getting turned into a grotesque half-lizard creature so that she could be the perfect mate for the Borad after he'd killed everyone. Eww. Though I must have missed the part where he explained why wiping out the entire planet was a crucial part of this plan. Anyway, this meant that Peri had to spend another serial locked up as a damsel in distress with her beautiful appearance in danger. But at least Nicola Bryant didn't have to wear prosthetics this time. The Borad's makeup was unusually good though I thought, even if they didn't quite manage to hide the seam. They got a good actor too, which kind of made up for the fact that the character was a lunatic and not a particularly smart one. Sure he said that he was immensely intelligent, but the Doctor straight up told him that he's going to reflect an ageing ray at him and gave him plenty of time to do something about it, but he just sat there and eventually got aged to death. Which was pretty damn harsh thing for the Doctor to do, especially considering he couldn't bring himself to gun down Davros a few stories ago. But it's okay, as he'd actually killed the Borad's clone! I don't even want to think about how the clone figured into the lunatic's plan to be alone with Peri. The Doctor had a trick to get rid the Borad for real though, surprising him with his own reflection and then dropping him through the tinsel dimension into Earth's past, so that he could become the legendary Loch Ness monster! As much as I didn't like the Doctor ageing the guy to a skeleton, letting a genocidal super-scientist loose in Scotland seems worse somehow. Plus they did the real Loch Ness monster already, in Terror of the Zygons, and he looked much more the part. I should probably mention something about Paul Darrow's daft overacting, or the Doctor building an invisibility device, or the goofy alien snake puppet who decided to nuke the planet because they were being stingy with their grain, but I'm still thinking how the Borad reacted to seeing his own face at the end. If he banned mirrors because he couldn't stand his hideous reflection, why the hell was he so keen to transform Peri? Was he going to put a bag over her head or something?
142	Revelation of the Daleks	2 parts	5
The Daleks were all over the Sixties and Seventies, but the Eighties Doctors only got the one Dalek story each and I can never remember which is which because they all have a long title beginning with 'Re' and ending with 'of the Daleks'. But there's another pattern in the last few Dalek serial titles as well, as 'Genesis', 'Resurrection' and 'Revelation' are all fairly Biblical names. I guess they had to knock that off with after this one though, as Genesis is the first book of the Bible and Revelation is the last. But I kind of hope they'll bring the tradition back for the Chibnall era, and name all the new Dalek episodes after Harry Potter or Game of Thrones books. Revelation of the Daleks may have been directed by the guy who did Caves of Androzani, but it was written by script editor Eric Saward and man you can tell. Seward wrote the first serial this season as well, so he's the reason that Colin Baker's first full year as the Doctor started with him gunning down Cybermen and ended with him gunning down a Dalek. With a submachine gun. Plus Saward invented a ton of his own side characters and gave them side plots again, except this time there were more of them and they were weirder: Takis and Lilt, security officers at the Tranquil Repose semi-funeral home. Mr Jobel and Tasambeker, an asshole embalmer played by Clive Swift and the student who inexplicably adored him. Natasha and Grigory, who broke in to look for her dad. Kara and Vogel, the sycophantic manager and her obsequious assistant. Badass mercenary knight Orcini and his unhygienic squire Bostock Davros' spinning head and his Daleks. And the terrible DJ who kept popping up, played by comedian Alexei Sayle. Man, I hated that DJ. The serial was a (barely) interconnected web of stories that the Doctor and Peri were dropped right in the middle of. Well, not quite in the middle, more to the side of them. A few miles to the side really, and the two of them barely did anything once they finally turned up and met the other characters. Serials like this make me wonder, what is it about the Doctor being missing from a classic Doctor Who story that bothers me so much? I had no problem with The Christmas Invasion and Turn Left, and Blink's one of my favourite stories of the modern series, but for most of this marathon I only started to give a damn when a Doctor got involved. I guess it might be because Christmas Invasion and Turn Left are about what happens when the Doctor's missing, and Blink has the Doctor's influence felt throughout. This, on the other hand, gave the Doctor plenty of screen time and barely any influence. He wasn't even the catalyst for events, like in Caves of Androzani. It felt like the scenes with the Doctor and Peri were thrown in to give the main actors something to do while the real story happened, and with a few changes to the ending Seward could've cut them out entirely. The episode might have actually been better for it because then I wouldn't have had to watch them spend an entire 45 minute episode walking through a forest and climbing a wall. It would've been even easier to cut Jobel and Tasambeker's subplot as they both died before the resolution. But the other characters I actually liked quite a bit, especially Kara, Vogel and Davros, who was a real smart ass git in this story. Plus he was apparently hiding somewhere else for the story while his fake decoy did the talking, which is... well I'd say 'unusual', but the Borad did basically the same thing in the last serial. Though Davros took the extra step of making his decoy look like his severed head on a table (for a laugh I suppose). Orcini was alright too, even if he was basically the Lytton for this story: the veteran mercenary who was tougher than everyone and knew what he was doing (except he donated his fee to charity). The trouble is, every time I started to get into their drama, that bloody DJ would pop up again and take me out of it! I'm sure that he was supposed to be annoying, but as long as I was the one being annoyed I don't see that it makes any difference. Plus Davros' plan to make a statue of the Doctor that was too light to hurt him and then drop it on him when he turned up was just dumb. For one thing, why not just use it to kill him? He could've solved that problem right there. For another thing, how the hell could Davros know what the current Doctor looked like? He's a time traveller, there is no 'current' version of the guy unless you're the Time Lords, who always seem to be in sync with him. For this story, people were being transformed into... Daleks! It even included a scene where a man begged his daughter to kill him while simultaneously ranting about the purity of the master race. But they were also being transformed into dinner (again). Davros was cleverly selling people their own dead relatives to eat and this was somehow enough to eliminate famine from the galaxy (at least they didn't say 'universe' this time). But was okay to blow his facility up because the plants growing around it could also eliminate famine from the entire galaxy. So that was convenient, though does mean they'll have to rename the planet from 'Necros' to 'Soybean Alpha', or whatever.

1986 - Series 23: Trial of a Time Lord
143	The Mysterious Planet	4 parts	7
First I have to mention that they made a new arrangement of the theme for this serial and I hate it. Changing the opening at the start of a new season is good, changing it into a weaker version that deteriorated into sounding like a stuck record from my nightmares by the time the episode title came up is bad. Fortunately, the rest of the soundtrack was a lot more bearable for me, but then I've always like Mega Drive game music. The Mysterious Planet is the first part of the format-breaking epic Trial of a Time Lord serial. This isn't the first season to have an overarching story, as they had the Key to Time saga a few years earlier, but it is the first and only one to have a framing device, with the Doctor on trial, giving commentary throughout the stories to the court. Which for me was a big plus, as I like commentary tracks. The episodes themselves claim that this story is actually called Trial of a Time Lord parts one to four, though it was titled The Mysterious Planet on the scripts and the novelisation and that's what everyone calls it. These particular four parts were written by Doctor Who legend Robert Holmes, returning for his penultimate story after impressing with Caves of Androzani and repulsing with The Two Doctors. I think I might have guessed even if I hadn't seen the credit come up at the start, as I could see elements of his previous work in there. For example, smart people being chosen to serve a robot overlord is an idea he used in his first story, The Krotons. Also, the two mercenaries, Glitz and Dibber, reminded me of con men Garron and Unstoffe from The Ribos Operation (except they were more inclined to snipe innocent people with a rifle). A lot of Holmes' stories had a double act like that. The serial started with the most expensive and impressive model shot in Doctor Who history, as the Tardis docked with a giant red space station. The Tardis doesn't typically dock with anything, but they made an exception this time because they wanted to impress audiences after the long hiatus between seasons. They even used motion control cameras to make it look properly cinematic! Though when it came on during the marathon I almost thought that Twitch had put Red Dwarf on by mistake. After arriving the Doctor walked through a door and surprise, he was in the Gallifrey version of This Is Your Life, where they show episodes from your past and you have to defend your choices or face execution. He'd been trying so hard not to break the Time Lords' rules in stories like Timelash, but they got him anyway and this story was a flashback to why... kind of. It also set up how crappy the Doctor's situation was, as he was trying to plead his case to people who'd steer his Tardis off course and use him when it suited their purposes, but then strictly forbid his interference to help others whenever he found himself in a crisis. By their laws the Doctor was guilty, he couldn't win this. I noticed two things during this serial: nobody was getting transformed into anything and it never really dragged for me. But the big glaring problem with The Mysterious Planet is... hmm. Can't think of anything just yet. I think that's why I'd put it as my favourite Sixth Doctor serial: not because it had a great story, but because it had fewer flaws. Though it definitely kept me entertained, especially when the giant robot was on screen. I loved that guy even more than I liked the androids in Timelash, and unlike them, his robot costume was actually really good! The characters without robot costumes were pretty good as well, on either side of the framing device (though the ones either side of the robot were a little... peculiar). The Valeyard especially was a great antagonist and it was great that the Doctor was allowed to be more of a heroic protagonist. He was even being nice to Peri on occasion. It's called The Mysterious Planet (well it's not, but shut up), but from early on there were clues that this was actually taking place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. That kind of bothered me the first time I saw the serial years ago, seeing as I'm pretty fond of my world, but I've seen the planet blown up and evacuated so many times now in Doctor Who that I've accepted it as being something that just happens every now and again. Plus given how crappy the future had been the other times the Doctor dropped by, the humans were probably asking for it.
143	Mindwarp	4 parts	5
I had no idea Hotline Miami's look was inspired by Doctor Who. Mindwarp is an interesting serial because at a certain point the Doctor realised that he has no memory of how the events played out and I have exactly the same problem right now. Though I do have a vague recollection of Brian Blessed in a samurai costume inhaling the scenery before demolishing what was left with ear-splitting sonic shockwaves every time it was his turn to act. The Mysterious Planet was a story about the Doctor's past and this was a story about the Doctor's present, or as close to it as they could get without the court watching themselves on surveillance cameras. This time the twist was the Doctor joined the villains for much of the story, either because he was faking, he had his mind temporarily scrambled, or because the recording was tampered with, and because of his amnesia, the Doctor himself had no idea which is true. You'd expect the last episode to finally reveal the truth, but nope, I never got to know what really happened. I don't suppose it really matters though, as what's important is that the Time Lords chose to take the Doctor to his trial just as he was going to rescue Peri. Actually it's worse than that, as they used Brian Blessed to kill her... kind of. It's funny, after a whole season of people trying to transform her and other humans into weird alien things, Peri was finally killed by a weird alien transferring their own mind into her perfectly human body. She got Brain of Mobius'd by a slug alien called Kiv of the same race as Sil from Vengeance of Varos. He was in it too (with better prosthetics) and I couldn't quite understand why they chose him of all characters to bring back... until I learned that the two stories had the same writer. I also learned that Kiv was played by Christopher Ryan from The Young Ones! He was apparently in the revival series too and I had no idea until now. Nicola Bryant had mostly been called upon to look concerned and argue with Colin Baker up to this point, but her final moments on screen finally gave her an opportunity to show a little more of her range by playing Kiv in Peri's body. She wasn't actually doing an impersonation of that character, which was a bit weird, but what she was doing was so unlike Peri that it made me sit up and pay attention. For a moment I thought they should've kept her as a recurring antagonist, but then I realised that a good person taken over by the mind of a villain was exactly what the Master was during this decade. Overall I'm going to rate this story as 'okay' and rank it as my fifth favourite Sixth Doctor story. Some people would argue that the trial scenes during this season are repetitive, disruptive and not all that witty (with the Doctor continually calling the Valeyard a bunch of childish names), but I think I would've been less interested in this story without them. And I wasn't all that interested even with them there to be honest.
143	Terror of the Vervoids	4 parts	4
This was the final 'Terror of the' story in classic Who, after Terror of the Autons and Terror of the Zygons, not that they had anything to do with each other. Though the first two were the opening serials for the Third and Fourth Doctor's second seasons respectively, so they had that in common, plus they were my fifth favourite story for each of those Doctors, so there's that as well. Terror of the Vervoids really screwed that pattern up though. It was a bit like a worse version of The Robots of Death as it was a murder mystery on a sci-fi vehicle which gave the identity of the villain away in the title (kind of), and I didn't even like the good version of Robots of Death all that much. I feel like the similarity between the two stories must have been deliberate (or at least noticed before the final draft) as a character mentioned that they intended the Vervoids to be used as slave labour to replace robots and Robots of Death was all about a society that relied on robots for labour. Though I did like some things about the serial, the most surprising of them being new companion Mel, played by light entertainment star Bonnie Langford. Or old companion I guess, because this was a flashforward to a time when she was... will be a veteran Tardis traveller. One of the side-effects of Colin Baker's departure is that they never got around to filming a scene featuring Mel meeting the Doctor for the first time, and that makes her unique among companions. Well, aside for Susan, and the Brig if he counts as a companion. I had fuzzy memories of seeing Mel once before in Time and the Rani, but I wasn't sure of what to expect here. I definitely didn't expect her to be basically dragging the Doctor into solving the mystery. It was such a big change from the last few years of companions to see someone who had a genuine enthusiasm and interest in having Doctor Who adventures. In fact, I don't remember any companion being this hyped since... I dunno, Vicki maybe in season 2? Man Vicki was great. I just wished I could've shared Mel's enthusiasm, because this story kind of sent me to sleep. I also wished that she'd stop screaming, because it kept waking me up! I don't care if Langford had the ability to scream at the right key to transition properly into the credits theme, it's not a skill I needed to see her demonstrate. Plus the problem with Mel being the proactive one is that it made the Doctor seem less than interested in helping out. I know that was the point, as the Matrix had been edited to make him look bad, but this was a glimpse at a more likeable future version of the Sixth Doctor who'd calmed a little, dialled down the egotism and turned up the charm, and the edits spoiled that a bit. Almost as much as him still wearing the bloody coat did. I also liked the Vervoid makeup... ... on the partially transformed assistant in the box. Even though she was a total red herring who only showed up for the sake of a cliffhanger. The other Vervoids, on the other hand, looked... a bit dodgy. Not everyone agrees on what exactly they resembled, but they sure resembled something. What else did I like? I liked the Doctor spotting the translator clue. I liked the Doctor being clever with the information he chose to say out loud. I liked that he deliberately carried an unloaded gun so that the killer would take it and threaten him with it. I just like the Doctor being smart in general really. Though if he was really smart he would've shown the court The Ultimate Foe so they could've seen the verdict and all gone home early, instead of showing himself genociding plants and immediately getting the charge against him upgraded. Though just the fact that he had future stories to show the court should've given them a clue where the trial was going. I'm not keen on them letting him spy on his own future like that though. The Christmas Carol format of Trial of a Time Lord meant that after the past story and the present day story they needed one set in the future, so I get why they let the Doctor browse through his future stories to pick a good one, but I was waiting for the part where they said they were going to wipe his memory of it afterwards and it never happened. I guess when he finally finds himself on this ship he's going to have to decide whether he's going to use his knowledge to get a better outcome, or if he's going to keep the timeline intact and repeat the things he watched himself do. Aside from attacking the communications equipment with an axe I mean.
143	The Ultimate Foe	2 parts	6
Doctor Who is often at its best when dealing with imaginative concepts and 'what if's, and the final serial of the Trial of a Time Lord arc explores the idea: 'What if the overzealous prosecutor we've been watching in the last few stories was actually the Doctor's dark side extracted from the future on a mission to kill his past self to extend his own life?'. Pip and Jane Baker have gotten a lot of criticism for their scripts (if you asked fans to rank Doctor Who's 'Baker's, they'd likely be right at the bottom, under Colin Baker and Bob Baker), but I have to admit, they took on a ridiculous job here. The entire season so far, twelve episodes, had all been leading up to this point, the outcome of the Doctor's trial, and now Doctor Who legend Robert Holmes had returned to script the big conclusion: an epic confrontation between the Doctor and the Valeyard in the Matrix, with Sabolom Glitz, Mel and the Master all getting involved. But then he tragically died after writing the first episode, meaning it was up to someone else to take over. Script editor Eric Saward took on the task, coming up with a story that led up to Holmes' planned cliffhanger ending, but producer John Nathan-Turner wasn't keen on that. He thought that after 14 episodes viewers probably wanted an ending already, and that turned out to be the final straw that caused the already frustrated Saward to quit the show, one episode before the end of the season. So the first half of The Ultimate Foe was by one of the most beloved Doctor Who writers ever and the second half was written by two of the least loved... in a hurry... without them even being allowed to know how the story was supposed to end. And honestly I think they did a pretty good job at tying everything together and getting the ball to the goal. It was not a brilliant two-parter on either side, but it did have its moments. The Master, in particular, was great in this one, as he showed up at the last moment to simultaneously save the day, get either the Valeyard or the Doctor killed, and take over Gallifrey! Plus I loved the scene where he tried to hypnotise Glitz and when it didn't work he immediately shifted to plan B: dragging out a chest full of treasure instead. There were three big revelations in the story, with the first being that the Valeyard was the future Doctor... kind of (they didn't really explain him). This broke the unwritten rule that Time Lords meet each other in order, but then multi-Doctor stories always do. The other big revelation was that the Gallifrey High Council were the ones who wiped out Earth and tried to hide the evidence. Those Time Lords have been gits once or twice the past, with Gulliver murdering the Lord President, Batman's butler getting the Doctor killed to save Omega, Borusa kidnapping the Doctors to get immortality so he could rule forever etc. but this was a real step up for them. It pretty much put them on the same level of villainy as the Daleks and Cybermen. The trial went much the same way the one in the Second Doctor's era did, with the Doctor being unable to defend himself against charges of meddling because he clearly does that. It was a difference in philosophy between him and the Time Lords that could've only be resolved if one of them changed. And in this case, it was the Time Lords that changed, as the Doctor managed to change the story to being the Trial of the Time Lords and tore down Gallifrey's leadership with a righteous speech! Well, it was a team effort really between him and the Master, but it was still a great performance by Colin Baker that would've redeemed him in the role for me if I'd ever had a problem with him. It's a damn shame really, as it showed that with more good scripts he could've been really great in the role. It's also a real shame that Robert Holmes wasn't around to write for Sylvester McCoy's Doctor, as he could've used the help. Oh right, the third big revelation was that Peri's alive! Undoing her horrible fate should've really been a good thing but it actually kind of wasn't. I know that Nicola Bryant wasn't impressed, as she'd had the most memorable and dramatic exit since Adric and they went and took it away from her. But it did at least provide a delayed payoff for Mindwarp's unresolved ambiguity. I felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and here it finally did. Though there is one thing about the episode that bothers me. The Matrix is a computer system that can simulate a virtual reality when you plug your mind into it... so how the hell were people just walking in and out of it through a door?

CONCLUSION

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The Sixth Doctor era was all about metamorphosis, with people getting turned into birdwomen, dogmen, lizards, Androgums, trees, Vervoids, Daleks and Cybermen. Plus a slug alien appeared to have his mind put into Peri's body, but that was just edited footage.

But the main transformation was the Doctor himself, who'd changed from the friendly Five to the egotistic Six and was supposed to be on a journey to becoming a better person, or at least that's how Colin Baker was playing him. We got a little bit of that in his final season, with him being nicer to Peri in The Mysterious Planet, and his slightly more mellow and charming future self showing up in Terror of the Vervoids, but sadly his evolution was cut short when he was booted from the series. So the Sixth Doctor we got was kind of a dick.

The main thing that the Fifth and Sixth Doctors had in common was that they were each dramatically different to their immediate predecessor. The Fourth Doctor was the wacky interesting Doctor so they made Five the bland one, the Fifth Doctor was the nice, likeable Doctor so they made Six an unloveable git. He even nearly choked his companion to death during his first episode, which is forgivable due to the fact he was insane at the time, but it's still not a great way to introduce your hero. Though the two Doctors did have another thing in common and that's they had plenty of arguments in the Tardis.

Plus they struggled a bit to dominate situations like the others Doctors did. For all his bluster and ego Six rarely got chances to impress, I never thought 'this guy is going to run rings around these people' like I did with Four and Seven, and he spent his entire second season being judged by the Time Lords on his failures. I think the worst episode for this was either Mindwarp, where he spent the whole story helping the villains, or Revelation of the Daleks, which felt like a backdoor pilot for a Davros series which he'd been awkwardly shoved into, but there aren't many stories I felt he was awesome in. Any story which ended with him gunning down enemies with a gun or poisoning them with cyanide was a story in which he lost as far as I'm concerned.

Not that I hated Six. In fact, I thought Colin Baker did a great job of bringing back the alien eccentricity that Five was missing. The most aggravating thing about the Sixth Doctor era for me was that... well, it was that the stories were kind of bad, but the other most aggravating thing was that I could see the potential right there in Baker to really knock it out of the park if they'd given him some good material. They kind of did at times during in his last season, especially with the righteous speech he gave to the court at the end, but the rest of the time the guy was trying to salvage weak scripts with his enthusiasm and hammy scene-stealing personality. Whether he made them bearable or just came off as overbearing is debatable, he wasn't the most subtle of Doctors, but then the others didn't have to worry about their performance clashing with their gaudy coat.

It's amazing how they found an actor with the potential to bring the right combination of charm, egotism and eccentricity for the role, and then consistently sabotaged him with that bloody clown suit. Anyone with eyes could see it made him look like a joke, but they doggedly stuck with that costume from the end of Davison's run to the first episode of McCoy's. March 1984 to September 1987 that coat lasted. The trouble with dressing your hero like that is it's constantly making a statement, and that statement is "This guy is trying too hard to come off as quirky and seems to be incapable of realising how dumb he looks." And the trouble with giving your protagonist bad taste and having him dress like a colourful umbrella is that when you've got a bland overlit console room and two of the worst dressed companions, you're really admitting that you have bad taste. Also, your show ends up looking bad.

Speaking of the look, even though they kept the same console room and it was still part of the gritty JNT/Eric Saward 'Uzis and light entertainment stars' era, this run had a very different feel compared to Davison's seasons. I guess that was partly due to the change in episode length, partly due to Colin Baker's performance and partly due to a much smaller Tardis crew. A less crowded Tardis meant that they didn't need to show the interior so much anymore. Also, no companions meant no side plots... well, fewer side plots, as Saward still liked to bring in his antihero mercs to steal the Doctor's limelight.

Some Doctors, like Four and Five, travelled with so many people that it's hard to say that any of them were the companion for that era. Others had one companion that stood out from the rest and stood with them for most of their run, like Two and Jamie, and Three and Jo. But Six's companion was Peri, she had no competition. Sure he travelled with Mel for a while too, but her adventures took place during a season that never existed.

Perpugilliam Brown: There are three types of companions: the Vicki and Mel type, who love exploring time and space, the Ian and Barbara type, who endure it so they can get back home, and then there's the Tegan and Peri type, who don't seem to enjoy themselves but stick around anyway for some reason. I got why Peri chose to spend three months with Five, but her time with Six was not the fun vacation she signed up for and she seemed more like his employee than his friend. It was like the only reason she stayed with him was out of a sense of guilt and obligation after he sacrificed being Peter Davison to save her life. She was in over her head, frustrated, and spent a lot of time as the damsel in distress. And that American accent she had... well, it was getting better I suppose.

I do plan to write some words about Mel as well, but I'll save them until next time.


My top three Sixth Doctor serials:

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1. The Mysterious Planet (7)
2. The Ultimate Foe (6)
3. Attack of the Cybermen (6)

Robert Holmes' final serials weren't spectacular, but with this batch of stories they didn't need to be to dominate my top three. Though thanks to him Pip and Jane Baker also made it to second place.


Bottom three Sixth Doctor serials:

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1. The Two Doctors (3)
2. Terror of the Vervoids (4)
3. Timelash (4)

Robert Holmes made it to the top of the worst serial list as well, with Pip and Jane Baker coming in second place again! No sign of The Twin Dilemma though, weirdly. On either list.

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COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, my classic Doctor Who marathon enters its final three seasons as I review all 12 Seventh Doctor serials.

But for now I'm done with typing. It's your turn to do the typing, so stick some words in the box below if you've got opinions on the episodes or feedback on my reviews.