Time For A Bit Of Classic Who!

[philosoraptor42]

There's been this thing recently where newcomers to Doctor Who are getting upset whenever the actor playing the Doctor changes and instantly complaining about the new replacement. They are also realising that the one they like the best often has some connection with when they began to watch the show. "That was MY Doctor" they say.

I can get behind this theory pretty easily because personally MY Doctor has always been Sylvester McCoy. A lot of old school Whovians thought he was a bad choice, but for me he defined what Doctor Who is supposed to be. This Doctor had a mixture of silliness and darkness to him. He has an odd way of speaking which I did not realise at the time was a result of him covering up his remote Scottish accent. As a result he has a tendency to roll his rs which is actually something I've always loved about his performance.



The first Doctor Who story I ever saw was "Remembrance of the Daleks", but I hadn't realised at the time quite how important it was that I came to Doctor Who at that precise time. My first ever Doctor Who storyline was also a number of other firsts:
- The first (and actually the only) Doctor Who story where Sylvester McCoy confronts the Daleks.
- The first Doctor Who story to actually SHOW how Daleks get up stairs.
- The first Doctor Who story to feature Ace as the fully fledged new companion.



I thought Ace was great straight away. Sure, she was a tomboy essentially. She wears a black bomber jacket, she makes explosives and she can handle a baseball bat pretty well. She's a companion who is prepared to face right up to a Dalek shouting "Who are you calling small?" She actually has a love interest in "Remembrance of the Daleks" but I wasn't concerned with that and was happy when it didn't work out. After all, at just five years old I wasn't interested in lovey-dovey stuff.

I had a brief stint working my way through re-watching some of the series I saw as a child. I've also checked out a few other Cybermen-related classic Who storylines.


Doctor Who - Dragonfire

Okay, sorry, what? This cannot be Doctor Who. It is so ridiculous obvious that it is a television studio and a very brightly lit one at that. Doctor Who is being offered a treasure map (seriously?) and his companion is loudly and enthusiastically hamming it up like a cheery enthusiastic primary school drama teacher.



The introduction of Ace here is just weird. This is the first story where she turns up, but she doesn't become the companion until the very end. She's only just met the Doctor, but she gets started right away calling the Doctor "Professor"; a trend that would get existing Whovians extremely annoyed.

Anyway, it turns out that she is randomly living on a planet in outer space in the distant future, but she actually comes from 1980s Perivale (a suburb of London). Having been kicked out of school for causing an explosion there, it seems she then accidentally caused a time storm in her bedroom using her A level chemistry knowledge (though apparently she failed A level chemistry).

Anyway, there's an interesting moment where the old companion and Ace both come face to face with a dragon (one of the most ridiculously blantant "man-in-suit" moments I've ever seen, even in Doctor Who). The previous companion instantly lets off a high-pitched scream, as if on cue. But meanwhile Ace stops in her tracks and puts on this haunted stare. Ace is character who certainly gets frightened, but she generally holds her ground.



It's awkward to tell whether Ace is supposed to be working class or middle class. She has lines that suggest she's more on the common side, but whether she delivers them that way is a bit hit and miss. It might be argued that she's a posh-voiced actress who cannot deliver working class lines convincingly, or it could be argued that she's playing a middle class character who pretends to be more common than she really is to seem tough and cool. One pretty strong argument for the latter is that, while she has a bomber jacket covered in badges, one of those badges is a Blue Peter badge, lol!

The story is also infamous for its ridiculously forced cliffhanger. Sylvester McCoy randomly lowers himself down the edge of a cliff by his umbrella (which has a question mark hook for a handle) for no reason at all. He then appears to be slipping down. He gets straight back up in the next episode and it's never clear why he was ever hanging off the edge of a cliff in the first place.



It was interesting to see how Ace first arrived in Doctor Who, but this must be one of the most boring Doctor Who stories I have ever seen. I'd never realised before how much the quality picked up in the next story, "Remembrance of the Daleks", nor how awful things had been before.



Doctor Who - Genesis of the Daleks

Naturally I have already seen "Remembrance of the Daleks" a million times and I think its an absolutely wonderful Dalek story, so I decided to skip that one here. However, I would absolutely recommend it to anyone. "Remembrance of the Daleks" is pretty definitely my favourite Doctor Who story of all time.

However, I decided to try out a classic Dalek story to see how well it stands up by comparison to Remembrance of the Daleks. I checked out "Genesis of the Daleks", the first story to ever feature the creator of the Daleks: Davros.



Many people keep saying that Tom Baker is the best Doctor, but I must admit I'm not seeing it. I mean sure he has random things in his pockets and he likes jelly babies a lot, but I'm feeling like he's a little over-hyped.

Here we have the typical situation where we are shown aliens who look exactly like humans. It seems that the Kaleds, knowing that they are going to mutate as a result of the horrific war they've been waging with the Thaals, decide to take matters into their own hands. They decide to try to engineer their species' progression to minimise the damage. However, an evil genius called Davros is taking this as an opportunity to develop the Kaleds into cold unfeeling creatures wholly lacking in mercy.



I saw "Resurrection of the Daleks" which also featured Davros and there's some kind of Kenny from South Park thing going on in Doctor Who. "Oh my God! They killed Davros!"

Odd canon issue here. Davros questions the Doctor for details of previous victories against the Daleks. He reveals a number of things, but the method of stopping the Daleks that Baker describes in relation to the Dalek invasion of Earth is not from the storyline with William Harnerll. Instead he talks about the Daleks' weakness to the magnetic pull of the Earth's poles. That is the weakness from the tv movie starring Peter Cushing!

Now sure, I suspect with the BBC not actually repeating old episodes all that often, people were probably more familiar with the movie. But does that make Cushing's tv movie (where his character is literally called "Doctor Who" - as opposed to "the Doctor") part of canon? I don't think we're supposed to be believe Tom Baker's Doctor is lying in this scene.



Genesis of the Daleks is okay, but it's no Remembrance of the Daleks. Remembrance of the Daleks still remains my favourite Dalek storyline of all time (including NuWho stuff - though I did love the "Dalek" ep of NuWho). Annoyingly I'd basically seen the most important element of the story in little clips of old Doctor Who episodes. The Doctor is given a major moral dilemma in this story and its a really cool moment, but it's actually quite a short moment and in the scheme of the story as a whole I didn't think it really had much weight.

Genesis of the Daleks is a good Doctor Who story and well worth checking out, but I've come to expect a lot better than this from ClassicWho. If I were to recommend a ClassicWho Dalek story which isn't contaminated by enormous levels of nostalgia, I'd have to pick "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" with William Hartnell. Sure it's old, slow and dated, but I love it all the same.




Doctor Who - The Happiness Patrol

This is definitely a step down in quality from the "Remembrance of the Daleks" storyline, but it's nothing like as slow and boring as "Dragonfire" and Ace is still awesome. On a planet in the future, the government has a strict rule that everyone must always be happy. Anything negative or sad is banned and punishable by death.

I'd heard that this was supposed to be a critique of Thatcherism, but Thatcher would certainly have no trouble letting experience sadness. It's not until towards the end of the final episode that we finally have a confrontation with the Doctor which gives us some idea how Thatcher might have any relation to the dictator on this planet at all. I mean sure, we see protests by workers, but that's hardly unique to Thatcher.



Some people have been really annoyed by the villain "the candy man", a villain who makes sweets which kill people by overwhelming their senses. The problem seemed to be that he is a man made out of sweets who looks almost exactly like the Bertie Bassett figure found on packets of Licorice Allsorts.

But I must admit that as a child the idea of this weird monster who, from what I could tell, turned people into sweets (I did say I was young at the time) was an extremely creepy concept. Some villains come across more creepy when you are children, while others are creepy no matter how young you are. But it mustn't be forgotten how vital it is to Doctor Who that it feature genuinely sinister bad guys. That is why the introduction of "the Silence" in recent series (terrifying creatures who you forget you have seen when you stop looking at them) fit the Doctor Who mould so well. Still, coming back to it this time, while I still think the Candy Man is pretty cool even in spite of his high pitched squeaky voice (nostalgia reigns supreme!) I still recognised that he was a rather more comedic character than I remembered. The Doctor stops him with lemonade. Twice! I mean, I know the Doctor can stop Daleks with a jammy dodger, but the Candy Man's level of threat drops significantly when he's actually taken down the exact same way, twice.



The use of comedy is great here too, mind you. I particularly like the bits with the census taker, Trevor Sigma.
Trevor Sigma: Galactic Census Bureau, I ask the questions.
The Doctor: You ask the questions?
Trevor Sigma: I'm sorry, that's classified information.

The Happiness Patrol is a really good Doctor Who story. It's not Sylvester McCoy's best, but I'd still highly recommend it.


Doctor Who - The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

This storyline is creepy as hell. The story takes a long while to actually get going, but what we DO get is a clear sense that something is seriously wrong with the Psychic Circus which Ace and the Doctor are visiting. This is Doctor Who with evil clowns and our first view of the main evil clown is when we see a black hearse driving along and see him revealed within when he winds down the driver-side electric window. Meanwhile we see other workers from the circus making a run for it but, apparently, being tracked by kites with a giant eye painted on them.

Creeeeeepy!



An evil circus is a fantastic setting for Sylvester McCoy's doctor. A wonderful combination of comedic and sinister as hell. And things only get creepier as the story goes on. The Doctor meets up with another traveller and there's an interesting contrast between him and the Doctor.

While both the Doctor and the traveller they meet travel seemingly out of curiosity, the Doctor cares a great deal about what and who he finds while this other traveller is clearly out for everything he can get. Ace trusts the Doctor a great deal but she knows that he has a lot of secrets. She doesn't know who he is really. This other traveller seems to have a companion too and it seems clear that he would happily ditch him companion the moment he gets tired of her. Both companions are in a similar position in that they are relying on the traveller who is taking them along for the ride and while Ace has more reason to trust the Doctor, seeing this strange parallel cannot help but make her question her situation.



The Greatest Show In The Galaxy begins with a cheesy rap and some may find that deeply offputting. I personally found it a lot of fun (nostalgia alert!) However, no one can help but love the explosion at the end. Sylvester McCoy does one of those "walking away from the explosion" moments towards the end. Explosives actually represent a really impressive element of McCoy's era. Sure, the budget is cheap as all hell, but when they blow something up BOY do they blow it up. (I think there's a good reason why they made Ace an amateur explosives expert.) However, towards the end of this one they made the charges a bit larger than intended, but Sylvester McCoy, being cool as all hell, just walks on barely flinching at all. Awesome!



Just to make a quick side-note about explosives in McCoy's era. One of the DVDs I watched had an extra talking to an explosives expert regarding both NuWho and ClassicWho. He takes a few awesome scenes from "Remembrance of the Daleks" and actually notes that these were explosions that they would not ever be allowed to do these days. The explosions were taking place in clearly recognisable areas of London and the idea of getting permission to use explosives that powerful in the middle of London in this post-9/11 era (not to mention post-7/7 era)? Not a chance. Just another reason to love McCoy's era and "Remembrance of the Daleks" in particular. (Okay I'll shut up about that now.)

"The Greatest Show In The Galaxy" has a few bits of bad acting and its notably cheap, but it really puts proper horror and tension into Doctor Who. Sure, it takes a long while to move the story forward, but there is no let up in the mood of this piece and I have to say that watching this as a grown up, it is STILL disturbing. With the low budget you could easily distance yourself and if you were wandering in and out of the room while it was playing you might not see what the big deal was, but if you sit down with and let the music and the performances and the (admittedly low-budget) imagery pull you in, you will most likely find yourself deeply unsettled. This is one of McCoy's better ones. DO check it out.