Classic Who: the appeal of the Fourth Doctor
Saturday, 19 July 2008 22:45![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_complexAs promised, now that I've watched every single one of his stories, I want to draw together my thoughts on the Tom Baker era, and why the Fourth Doctor is, and always will be, 'my' Doctor.
History
I would always have said he was, if asked, I think. Weeellll - there was possibly a period a year or so ago, when David Tennant beat him in a Doctor Who Magazine poll, and I thought, "Yeah, actually - maybe that's fair. Maybe it's just nostalgia-value that makes me think I like Tom Baker so much". But now that I've gone back to the source material? No. No, it really isn't fair, and it really isn't just nostalgia. I mean, Tennant is great, certainly. He puts on a good show, and he comes a very close second. But next to the sheer power and charisma of Baker, even he is eclipsed.
What's odd is that although I was obviously watching his episodes as a child (hence vague half-memories of the Nimons and The Keeper of Traken), I seem to have seen remarkably little of the Tom Baker era since then. This is the totality of what I actually recognised and could consciously remember having seen before as I went through them all this year:
So, now that I have seen his full oeuvre, what is it that makes me think he is such a bloody great Doctor? Well, in a way it hardly needs examining, because he is so widely recognised as brilliant in the role, and so many people have analysed why that is extremely effectively. (The Wikipedia article has a decent stab, for a start). But what the hell - I'll have a go anyway, because it's fun to do.
Characterisation
His energy, his exuberance and his enthusiasm have to be some of the biggest draws. Going round space with the Fourth Doctor is fun. Tom Baker loved it, the Doctor loves it, his companions love it, and we all love it, too. He's charming, and funny, and unconventional; much like a slightly over-excited little boy.
But his appeal isn't just about silly jokes and clownish capering, enjoyable though that may be. Those are part of a character which conveys above all a sense of joy and wonder at the Universe, and a love for the incredible things in it - established in particular in his early Ark in Space speech about humanity being 'indomitable'. And they're also about building a sense of trust. One of the most fundamental tenets of the relationship between the Doctor and his viewers (so beautifully inverted and explored in both The Invasion of Time and Midnight) is that we must trust him completely: to do the right thing, to save the day and to come out smiling, ready for another adventure. Between Four's blustery self-confidence and his obvious love for humanity, this is never in doubt (except when the script wants it to be, of course): we know that we can place ourselves safely in his hands, and no matter how bad things seem to get, he will always, always have just one more trick up his sleeve.
The bright and accessible side of Four's character, though, is really effective because it is played off against an underlying sense of darkness and distance. Otherwise, it would get tiring very quickly. Even when he's playing the fool, he often actually turns out to be doing it to throw people off their guard (much as Ten does, too, of course). And meanwhile, there are moments of real darkness (like in Genesis of the Daleks, at the beginning of Pyramids of Mars or a lot of season 18) or anger (facing off against the Deciders in Full Circle comes to mind) that very clearly convey both his awareness of what is at stake in the situations he is encountering, and his sense that he must take responsibility for sorting it out. Again, this is about the viewer's trust. For all that he presents as a happy-go-lucky bohemian, the Fourth Doctor also leaves us in no doubt about the strength of his moral compass, and his commitment to righting wrongs and making the Universe a better place.
Linked with that is his alienness. Of course, his crazy eccentricities are part of the fun, too, and clearly Tom Baker was immensely capable of bringing out that side of the Doctor's character, and having a great old time with it in the process. But the Doctor's alienness is not just about him being a bit weird and funny. Again, it's about establishing his burden of responsibility. For it to be so obvious that he is the hero who can save the day, he needs to be different from us, and from the characters around him. He needs to be cleverer, and more perceptive, and more knowledgeable, and more powerful. He needs to be unpredictable, and at times completely unfathomable. Baker's Doctor gives us all those things in spades: but at the same time, he doesn't overdo it to the extent that we are, literally, alienated. His alienness is tempered by his warmth and charisma; and I think the balance between the two comes out best in his relationship with his only ordinary, human companion - Sarah Jane. One moment in season 12 that really made me fall for his Doctor came in Revenge of the Cybermen, when he is reunited with Sarah Jane after they've both spent most of the last two episodes apart and facing extreme peril. Her reaction is very human: "Doctor! It's good to see you!" But even though he's explicitly gone back to the Nerva space station in order to rescue her, his is more confused: "Is it?" Once she's reminded him of the value of emotional interaction, though, he immediately catches on with an "Oh - well...", one of his best dazzling grins and a matey, if slightly awkward, punch on the arm. That kind of moment shows us his alienness, but it also keeps it within reach of the audience. And it means that when we do see him engaging with his burden of Time Lord responsibility in a way that the humans around him cannot share, our knowledge of his potentiality for warmth and good humour helps us feel his loneliness and pathos in a way that would otherwise be lost.
Another plus with Four is his capacity for physical suffering: getting into fights, getting tortured and getting knocked out.
This drops away as his era progresses, I presume mainly as a result of Mary Whitehouse's campaigns against the darker and more horrific aspects of the series at the time. But early on it seems to happen practically every five minutes. In the first episode of The Masque of Mandragora alone, he gets knocked out twice, held at sword-point, pushed off a horse, threatened with the rack and taken to be executed. This is great stuff - and not just because it is incredibly sexy to watch him getting dirty and sweaty as he wrestles with his opponents, wincing orgasmically as he is tortured or groaning post-coitally as he regains consciousness (though that is certainly part of it for me!). On a more strictly character-driven level, it also demonstrates very vividly the extent of the Fourth Doctor's love for the universe, and his commitment to righting the wrongs that he sees in it. He doesn't just save the day - he's ready to undergo real personal torment in order to do so. And if he's prepared to do all that in a white, puffy-sleeved Mr. Darcy shirt, so much the better! :-)
Fundamentally, the character of the Doctor is always attractive. Even when he's a crotchety old man or a self-aggrandising boor, he's still the hero-figure, and can ultimately be trusted to do what is right. But for me, the specifics of the Fourth Doctor's character make his incarnation the most appealing of all. He's exciting and unpredictable, but not dangerous; charming, but not superficial; and immensely clever and powerful, but not invulnerable. It's a heady cocktail.
Fannish drooling
And yes it helps, too, that he is HOT! I'd not really thought of him that way before my recent Baker-fest. In fact, if you'd asked me a year ago which of the Classic Doctors I fancied the most, I'd probably (without having thought too much about it) have said Peter Davison: because he is the most conventionally-attractive, and because I did kinda have a crush on him as a child. (Add the more recent Doctors to the mix, and David Tennant is the obvious winner: although I have time for Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor, too). Tom Baker, meanwhile, is not conventionally attractive by any measure. The Greek masters did not tend to include bulging eyes, ginger sideburns and prominent hooked noses when they were sculpting images of the gods. But almost any face would become attractive with the Fourth Doctor's charm and energy behind it. And he does happen to push some of my personal buttons pretty hard.
He's off to a good start simply by being From The Seventies. That's the decade I was born in, and, perhaps for that reason, I've long fetishised it: particularly for its music, its clothes and its slightly bedraggled innocence. While other kids my age were into Madchester and Acid Trance, I used to sit up in my bedroom painting my finger-nails orange, and listening to The Sweet, T-Rex, David Bowie, KISS, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. I would buy old Seventies pop annuals, and spend hours poring over their music and fashion pages. I wore strings of beads and my mother's old smock-tops; and at the age of fifteen I actually made my own pair of pink denim flares, because at that time you could not buy them in the shops for love nor money. Tom Baker fits very nicely into that aesthetic, as I've already noted in my icon (in case you're unaware, the text comes from T-Rex's Telegram Sam). With his bouncing curls, his slightly retro-looking clothes and his general bohemian demeanour, his Doctor wouldn't look at all out of place at a Led Zeppelin gig.
There's also a rather Wildean aspect to him, for double teenage-fixation win! I'm sure the Wikipedia article is right to say that his costume was modelled after Toulouse Lautrec's pictures of Aristide Bruant - but the hat he wore for his first couple of seasons also bears a distinct resemblence to Wilde's hat in this famous series of studio portraits:
Since Tom Baker had been playing Wilde on stage shortly before he took over the Fourth Doctor role, that may well be a conscious reference: and of course Wilde was only drawing on the same Bohemian aesthetic that Bruant after him, and Byron before, had done in any case. It's all good. There's also some degree of physical resemblence, especially in profile:
All told, then, he taps very effectively into a number of my heady teenage crushes: and indeed, it's worth wondering whether bohemian-looking men with long curly hair appealed to me so much as a teenager because I had already spent my formative childhood years bonding with the Fourth Doctor. What fun, then, to come full circle, re-visit him as an adult, and let that childish admiration spill over into full-blown womanly lust!
Companions
For all his great characterisation, his charming grins and his unruly locks, though, even Baker couldn't have carried the show on his own. The Fourth Doctor is also my favourite because he had some of the best companions ever to feature on Doctor Who, and some of the best stories, too. Sarah Jane combines pluckiness, inquisitiveness and real independence of character with a sweet innocence that really brings out the warm and caring side of the Doctor. Romana (both of them, but especially II) is bright and independent too, though in a rather more alien way - and, for exactly that reason, can cut the Doctor down to size when she needs to. In fact, he can play his exuberant little-boy-on-a-big-adventure role all the better while she is around, precisely because she is there to rein him in when he gets too big for his boots. K-9, of course, plays much the same role: but I've covered him elsewhere.
The stories: top five
As for the stories - they're not all perfect, but Tom Baker is lucky enough to have served in one of the most consistently-strong eras of Who script-writing there has ever been. Almost all of them are immensely worth seeing, but among them my five personal favourites would be:
1. The Deadly Assassin - a slight odd-ball of a story, but that's probably what makes it stand out. It takes the Doctor's character to some fascinating places, writes new rules for the programme, and just happens to be fantastically sexy, too. :-)
2. Genesis of the Daleks - rightly acknowledged as a classic. Like Assassin, it treads innovative ground, really establishes the range and depth of the Fourth Doctor's character, and benefits from a remarkably tight and engaging script. One of the few Who six-parters I've seen that really does deserve those two extra episodes.
3. The Masque of Mandragora - very intelligent and witty script, lots of dashing heroics, sumptuous production values.
4. The City of Death - a romp in Paris, with Four and Romana II at their very best. Great supporting characters, fascinating concepts and a winner of a script.
5. The Hand of Fear - a nice, clear, uncluttered story-line; beautiful dynamic between Four and Sarah Jane; interesting ambiguity around the character of Eldrad; excellent secondary characters.
Very, very close also-rans, which I feel mean for excluding, are Logopolis and The Stones of Blood. But you can't have everything. The presence of three stories from season 14 in there probably does make that my favourite: but then again the absence of any from season 13 shouldn't be seen as a slight against that. In fact, it's quite possibly the single most solid season of the period: but just doesn't quite have any of the stand-out stories that might make it into a top five.
Bottom five
Naming a bottom five is rather harder, since there simply aren't very many weak Fourth Doctor stories. The first two are pretty obvious contenders, but after that it is really a question of 'least good' rather than 'worst':
1. The Invisible Enemy - starts well, but loses direction badly; poor script; disappointing scenes inside the Doctor's body; giant prawn. Not saved by introduction of K-9.
2. Underworld - again, early promise gives way to a lacklustre story. Drab back-projected caves do not help.
3. The Sontaran Experiment - just padding, really.
4. The Power of Kroll - has its moments, but doesn't make the most of the supporting cast; Swampies and Kroll both a bit lame.
5. Full Circle - nice ideas and some good moments, but the script overall is somewhat pedestrian.
The first three there are by my least favourite Who writing team of this era (Bob Baker and Dave Martin), while the fact that the top two are both from season 15 is a fairly accurate reflection of my feelings about that season as a whole (with the honourable exception of Invasion of Time). But actually even Bob 'n' Dave make it into the top five, too, with Hand of Fear. In fact, although I said after watching Genesis that that is the story I'd first recommend to someone who'd never seen any Classic Who before, on further reflection, I've actually changed my mind about that, and would now make it Hand. Genesis is great, but it does to some extent rely on a previous knowledge of the nature of the Doctor's relationship with both the Time Lords and the Daleks, as well as a willingness to engage with a lot of quarries, corridors and model shots. Hand of Fear, on the other - um - hand, stands alone extremely effectively, and also does quite a number of new-viewer-friendly things: e.g. focusing on a really lovely Doctor-companion relationship, striking a neat compromise between a largely Earth-based setting and still showing that the TARDIS can travel in time and space, and offering plenty of really good-quality special effects and costumes. So, for all their faults, on the basis of Hand of Fear I'm prepared to cut Bob Baker and Dave Martin some slack after all.
And now?
Well, one thing's for sure: this is not the end of my Who Odyssey. When I started out in January, my stated intentions were thus:
So I'll certainly carry on, and I may well be moving towards just aiming to see every surviving episode and have done with it. On the basis that it's taken me about six months to work through the entirety of the Baker era, and that that constitutes roughly a quarter of surviving Classic Who, that should mean I have at least 18 months' worth of good television to enjoy: possibly longer if, as I suspect, my interest starts to drop off a little as I come up against stories, companions and indeed Doctors who don't appeal to me on quite the same scale.
What's the game-plan, then? Well, one thing I've definitely discovered during the past few months is the joy of sequential viewing. Classic Who might not have placed quite the same emphasis on season arcs as New Who does; but if you watch stories in isolation, you miss character development (especially for the companions), technical development (i.e. the introduction of new story devices and special effects), a sense of balance within seasons (i.e. variety in story settings and styles) and of course in some cases actual season arcs (e.g. seasons 16 and 18). I was particularly struck in the case of the Tom Baker era by just how clearly his seven years do break down into three distinct sub-eras (driven by changes in producers and chief script editors), each with their own dominant style and story priorities - and this would be much harder to pick up on from isolated, random story-viewings. So I do want to keep seeing stories in sequence as much as I can. But then again, that's not always practically possible - and in any case, all Classic Who stories do stand perfectly well on their own.
In practice, then, I'm going to save sequentialism for selected periods in the programme's history, but sacrifice it to convenience elsewhere. My first priority is going to be Sarah Jane Smith: a) because she is pretty much the only person in the entire Whoniverse who is guaranteed to cheer me up in the absence of the Fourth Doctor, b) because there is of course a new series of The Sarah Jane Adventures starting in the autumn, which looks incredibly exciting and c) because if I watch through her stories with Jon Pertwee sequentially, that means that I'll finish off by seeing Jon Pertwee regenerate back into Tom Baker - which is a very comforting prospect. I've already started on that little project, and reviews will follow shortly.
My second priority will be to go back to the William Hartnell era, and watch that as sequentially as it is now possible to do. I may well save that treatment for Patrick Troughton as well. But, in the meantime, I shall also be joining Lovefilm, and simply placing all DVDs of the Third, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors that have been released to date on my 'want list'. Whether I'll then trouble to fill in the gaps once I've worked my way through all of those is a decision I'll make - ooh, in about a year's time, I should think.
History
I would always have said he was, if asked, I think. Weeellll - there was possibly a period a year or so ago, when David Tennant beat him in a Doctor Who Magazine poll, and I thought, "Yeah, actually - maybe that's fair. Maybe it's just nostalgia-value that makes me think I like Tom Baker so much". But now that I've gone back to the source material? No. No, it really isn't fair, and it really isn't just nostalgia. I mean, Tennant is great, certainly. He puts on a good show, and he comes a very close second. But next to the sheer power and charisma of Baker, even he is eclipsed.
What's odd is that although I was obviously watching his episodes as a child (hence vague half-memories of the Nimons and The Keeper of Traken), I seem to have seen remarkably little of the Tom Baker era since then. This is the totality of what I actually recognised and could consciously remember having seen before as I went through them all this year:
- Genesis of the Daleks (via a TV repeat)
- The Deadly Assassin (via a TV repeat and previously at OUWho)
- First couple of episodes of The Face of Evil (at either Bristol DocSoc or OUWho)
- Last episode of Underworld (via a TV repeat)
- First episode of Horns of Nimon (at OUWho, I think).
So, now that I have seen his full oeuvre, what is it that makes me think he is such a bloody great Doctor? Well, in a way it hardly needs examining, because he is so widely recognised as brilliant in the role, and so many people have analysed why that is extremely effectively. (The Wikipedia article has a decent stab, for a start). But what the hell - I'll have a go anyway, because it's fun to do.
Characterisation
His energy, his exuberance and his enthusiasm have to be some of the biggest draws. Going round space with the Fourth Doctor is fun. Tom Baker loved it, the Doctor loves it, his companions love it, and we all love it, too. He's charming, and funny, and unconventional; much like a slightly over-excited little boy.
But his appeal isn't just about silly jokes and clownish capering, enjoyable though that may be. Those are part of a character which conveys above all a sense of joy and wonder at the Universe, and a love for the incredible things in it - established in particular in his early Ark in Space speech about humanity being 'indomitable'. And they're also about building a sense of trust. One of the most fundamental tenets of the relationship between the Doctor and his viewers (so beautifully inverted and explored in both The Invasion of Time and Midnight) is that we must trust him completely: to do the right thing, to save the day and to come out smiling, ready for another adventure. Between Four's blustery self-confidence and his obvious love for humanity, this is never in doubt (except when the script wants it to be, of course): we know that we can place ourselves safely in his hands, and no matter how bad things seem to get, he will always, always have just one more trick up his sleeve.
The bright and accessible side of Four's character, though, is really effective because it is played off against an underlying sense of darkness and distance. Otherwise, it would get tiring very quickly. Even when he's playing the fool, he often actually turns out to be doing it to throw people off their guard (much as Ten does, too, of course). And meanwhile, there are moments of real darkness (like in Genesis of the Daleks, at the beginning of Pyramids of Mars or a lot of season 18) or anger (facing off against the Deciders in Full Circle comes to mind) that very clearly convey both his awareness of what is at stake in the situations he is encountering, and his sense that he must take responsibility for sorting it out. Again, this is about the viewer's trust. For all that he presents as a happy-go-lucky bohemian, the Fourth Doctor also leaves us in no doubt about the strength of his moral compass, and his commitment to righting wrongs and making the Universe a better place.
Linked with that is his alienness. Of course, his crazy eccentricities are part of the fun, too, and clearly Tom Baker was immensely capable of bringing out that side of the Doctor's character, and having a great old time with it in the process. But the Doctor's alienness is not just about him being a bit weird and funny. Again, it's about establishing his burden of responsibility. For it to be so obvious that he is the hero who can save the day, he needs to be different from us, and from the characters around him. He needs to be cleverer, and more perceptive, and more knowledgeable, and more powerful. He needs to be unpredictable, and at times completely unfathomable. Baker's Doctor gives us all those things in spades: but at the same time, he doesn't overdo it to the extent that we are, literally, alienated. His alienness is tempered by his warmth and charisma; and I think the balance between the two comes out best in his relationship with his only ordinary, human companion - Sarah Jane. One moment in season 12 that really made me fall for his Doctor came in Revenge of the Cybermen, when he is reunited with Sarah Jane after they've both spent most of the last two episodes apart and facing extreme peril. Her reaction is very human: "Doctor! It's good to see you!" But even though he's explicitly gone back to the Nerva space station in order to rescue her, his is more confused: "Is it?" Once she's reminded him of the value of emotional interaction, though, he immediately catches on with an "Oh - well...", one of his best dazzling grins and a matey, if slightly awkward, punch on the arm. That kind of moment shows us his alienness, but it also keeps it within reach of the audience. And it means that when we do see him engaging with his burden of Time Lord responsibility in a way that the humans around him cannot share, our knowledge of his potentiality for warmth and good humour helps us feel his loneliness and pathos in a way that would otherwise be lost.
Another plus with Four is his capacity for physical suffering: getting into fights, getting tortured and getting knocked out.
This drops away as his era progresses, I presume mainly as a result of Mary Whitehouse's campaigns against the darker and more horrific aspects of the series at the time. But early on it seems to happen practically every five minutes. In the first episode of The Masque of Mandragora alone, he gets knocked out twice, held at sword-point, pushed off a horse, threatened with the rack and taken to be executed. This is great stuff - and not just because it is incredibly sexy to watch him getting dirty and sweaty as he wrestles with his opponents, wincing orgasmically as he is tortured or groaning post-coitally as he regains consciousness (though that is certainly part of it for me!). On a more strictly character-driven level, it also demonstrates very vividly the extent of the Fourth Doctor's love for the universe, and his commitment to righting the wrongs that he sees in it. He doesn't just save the day - he's ready to undergo real personal torment in order to do so. And if he's prepared to do all that in a white, puffy-sleeved Mr. Darcy shirt, so much the better! :-)
Fundamentally, the character of the Doctor is always attractive. Even when he's a crotchety old man or a self-aggrandising boor, he's still the hero-figure, and can ultimately be trusted to do what is right. But for me, the specifics of the Fourth Doctor's character make his incarnation the most appealing of all. He's exciting and unpredictable, but not dangerous; charming, but not superficial; and immensely clever and powerful, but not invulnerable. It's a heady cocktail.
Fannish drooling
And yes it helps, too, that he is HOT! I'd not really thought of him that way before my recent Baker-fest. In fact, if you'd asked me a year ago which of the Classic Doctors I fancied the most, I'd probably (without having thought too much about it) have said Peter Davison: because he is the most conventionally-attractive, and because I did kinda have a crush on him as a child. (Add the more recent Doctors to the mix, and David Tennant is the obvious winner: although I have time for Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor, too). Tom Baker, meanwhile, is not conventionally attractive by any measure. The Greek masters did not tend to include bulging eyes, ginger sideburns and prominent hooked noses when they were sculpting images of the gods. But almost any face would become attractive with the Fourth Doctor's charm and energy behind it. And he does happen to push some of my personal buttons pretty hard.
He's off to a good start simply by being From The Seventies. That's the decade I was born in, and, perhaps for that reason, I've long fetishised it: particularly for its music, its clothes and its slightly bedraggled innocence. While other kids my age were into Madchester and Acid Trance, I used to sit up in my bedroom painting my finger-nails orange, and listening to The Sweet, T-Rex, David Bowie, KISS, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. I would buy old Seventies pop annuals, and spend hours poring over their music and fashion pages. I wore strings of beads and my mother's old smock-tops; and at the age of fifteen I actually made my own pair of pink denim flares, because at that time you could not buy them in the shops for love nor money. Tom Baker fits very nicely into that aesthetic, as I've already noted in my icon (in case you're unaware, the text comes from T-Rex's Telegram Sam). With his bouncing curls, his slightly retro-looking clothes and his general bohemian demeanour, his Doctor wouldn't look at all out of place at a Led Zeppelin gig.
There's also a rather Wildean aspect to him, for double teenage-fixation win! I'm sure the Wikipedia article is right to say that his costume was modelled after Toulouse Lautrec's pictures of Aristide Bruant - but the hat he wore for his first couple of seasons also bears a distinct resemblence to Wilde's hat in this famous series of studio portraits:
Since Tom Baker had been playing Wilde on stage shortly before he took over the Fourth Doctor role, that may well be a conscious reference: and of course Wilde was only drawing on the same Bohemian aesthetic that Bruant after him, and Byron before, had done in any case. It's all good. There's also some degree of physical resemblence, especially in profile:
All told, then, he taps very effectively into a number of my heady teenage crushes: and indeed, it's worth wondering whether bohemian-looking men with long curly hair appealed to me so much as a teenager because I had already spent my formative childhood years bonding with the Fourth Doctor. What fun, then, to come full circle, re-visit him as an adult, and let that childish admiration spill over into full-blown womanly lust!
Companions
For all his great characterisation, his charming grins and his unruly locks, though, even Baker couldn't have carried the show on his own. The Fourth Doctor is also my favourite because he had some of the best companions ever to feature on Doctor Who, and some of the best stories, too. Sarah Jane combines pluckiness, inquisitiveness and real independence of character with a sweet innocence that really brings out the warm and caring side of the Doctor. Romana (both of them, but especially II) is bright and independent too, though in a rather more alien way - and, for exactly that reason, can cut the Doctor down to size when she needs to. In fact, he can play his exuberant little-boy-on-a-big-adventure role all the better while she is around, precisely because she is there to rein him in when he gets too big for his boots. K-9, of course, plays much the same role: but I've covered him elsewhere.
The stories: top five
As for the stories - they're not all perfect, but Tom Baker is lucky enough to have served in one of the most consistently-strong eras of Who script-writing there has ever been. Almost all of them are immensely worth seeing, but among them my five personal favourites would be:
1. The Deadly Assassin - a slight odd-ball of a story, but that's probably what makes it stand out. It takes the Doctor's character to some fascinating places, writes new rules for the programme, and just happens to be fantastically sexy, too. :-)
2. Genesis of the Daleks - rightly acknowledged as a classic. Like Assassin, it treads innovative ground, really establishes the range and depth of the Fourth Doctor's character, and benefits from a remarkably tight and engaging script. One of the few Who six-parters I've seen that really does deserve those two extra episodes.
3. The Masque of Mandragora - very intelligent and witty script, lots of dashing heroics, sumptuous production values.
4. The City of Death - a romp in Paris, with Four and Romana II at their very best. Great supporting characters, fascinating concepts and a winner of a script.
5. The Hand of Fear - a nice, clear, uncluttered story-line; beautiful dynamic between Four and Sarah Jane; interesting ambiguity around the character of Eldrad; excellent secondary characters.
Very, very close also-rans, which I feel mean for excluding, are Logopolis and The Stones of Blood. But you can't have everything. The presence of three stories from season 14 in there probably does make that my favourite: but then again the absence of any from season 13 shouldn't be seen as a slight against that. In fact, it's quite possibly the single most solid season of the period: but just doesn't quite have any of the stand-out stories that might make it into a top five.
Bottom five
Naming a bottom five is rather harder, since there simply aren't very many weak Fourth Doctor stories. The first two are pretty obvious contenders, but after that it is really a question of 'least good' rather than 'worst':
1. The Invisible Enemy - starts well, but loses direction badly; poor script; disappointing scenes inside the Doctor's body; giant prawn. Not saved by introduction of K-9.
2. Underworld - again, early promise gives way to a lacklustre story. Drab back-projected caves do not help.
3. The Sontaran Experiment - just padding, really.
4. The Power of Kroll - has its moments, but doesn't make the most of the supporting cast; Swampies and Kroll both a bit lame.
5. Full Circle - nice ideas and some good moments, but the script overall is somewhat pedestrian.
The first three there are by my least favourite Who writing team of this era (Bob Baker and Dave Martin), while the fact that the top two are both from season 15 is a fairly accurate reflection of my feelings about that season as a whole (with the honourable exception of Invasion of Time). But actually even Bob 'n' Dave make it into the top five, too, with Hand of Fear. In fact, although I said after watching Genesis that that is the story I'd first recommend to someone who'd never seen any Classic Who before, on further reflection, I've actually changed my mind about that, and would now make it Hand. Genesis is great, but it does to some extent rely on a previous knowledge of the nature of the Doctor's relationship with both the Time Lords and the Daleks, as well as a willingness to engage with a lot of quarries, corridors and model shots. Hand of Fear, on the other - um - hand, stands alone extremely effectively, and also does quite a number of new-viewer-friendly things: e.g. focusing on a really lovely Doctor-companion relationship, striking a neat compromise between a largely Earth-based setting and still showing that the TARDIS can travel in time and space, and offering plenty of really good-quality special effects and costumes. So, for all their faults, on the basis of Hand of Fear I'm prepared to cut Bob Baker and Dave Martin some slack after all.
And now?
Well, one thing's for sure: this is not the end of my Who Odyssey. When I started out in January, my stated intentions were thus:
"I don't think I'll ever try to be a completist, because I know that would involve sitting through an awful lot of dross. But Operation Classic Who is go! ...at least until New Who begins again in the spring."But d'you know, I think that may have changed. Certainly, New Who season 4 has been and gone, and by the time it arrived Classic Who was no longer something to 'tide me over' until it came back, but rather a fearsomely strong contender which many weeks was better than its 21st-century cousin. And in any case, it's now nearly two years until we have New Who back on our screens as a regular series. If the best the BBC can offer us in the meantime is Bonekickers, then it would be crazy not to continue taking advantage of the massive back-catalogue of quality television (yes, with some dross, I know) that is Classic Doctor Who.
So I'll certainly carry on, and I may well be moving towards just aiming to see every surviving episode and have done with it. On the basis that it's taken me about six months to work through the entirety of the Baker era, and that that constitutes roughly a quarter of surviving Classic Who, that should mean I have at least 18 months' worth of good television to enjoy: possibly longer if, as I suspect, my interest starts to drop off a little as I come up against stories, companions and indeed Doctors who don't appeal to me on quite the same scale.
What's the game-plan, then? Well, one thing I've definitely discovered during the past few months is the joy of sequential viewing. Classic Who might not have placed quite the same emphasis on season arcs as New Who does; but if you watch stories in isolation, you miss character development (especially for the companions), technical development (i.e. the introduction of new story devices and special effects), a sense of balance within seasons (i.e. variety in story settings and styles) and of course in some cases actual season arcs (e.g. seasons 16 and 18). I was particularly struck in the case of the Tom Baker era by just how clearly his seven years do break down into three distinct sub-eras (driven by changes in producers and chief script editors), each with their own dominant style and story priorities - and this would be much harder to pick up on from isolated, random story-viewings. So I do want to keep seeing stories in sequence as much as I can. But then again, that's not always practically possible - and in any case, all Classic Who stories do stand perfectly well on their own.
In practice, then, I'm going to save sequentialism for selected periods in the programme's history, but sacrifice it to convenience elsewhere. My first priority is going to be Sarah Jane Smith: a) because she is pretty much the only person in the entire Whoniverse who is guaranteed to cheer me up in the absence of the Fourth Doctor, b) because there is of course a new series of The Sarah Jane Adventures starting in the autumn, which looks incredibly exciting and c) because if I watch through her stories with Jon Pertwee sequentially, that means that I'll finish off by seeing Jon Pertwee regenerate back into Tom Baker - which is a very comforting prospect. I've already started on that little project, and reviews will follow shortly.
My second priority will be to go back to the William Hartnell era, and watch that as sequentially as it is now possible to do. I may well save that treatment for Patrick Troughton as well. But, in the meantime, I shall also be joining Lovefilm, and simply placing all DVDs of the Third, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors that have been released to date on my 'want list'. Whether I'll then trouble to fill in the gaps once I've worked my way through all of those is a decision I'll make - ooh, in about a year's time, I should think.
