The Third Doctor's era
(1970-1974)
Jon Pertwee
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The Third Doctor's era(1970-1974) |
Jon Pertwee |
A Review by Kevin McCorry 19/3/98
I've noticed that the five seasons with Jon Pertwee have been criticized in recent years by letter-writers to science fiction genre magazines and in reviews to the Guide. Though Pertwee is my favorite Doctor and his era is therefore the one I most fancy (with the Davison one coming next), I have to admit I see where the arguments about the era's formulaic predictability come from.
What always was a bugbear to me about the Pertwee stories is their often excessive length. The optimum length for a Doctor Who adventure tends to be four episodes, presumably why this became the norm in the Tom Baker years. And it is true that the more successful and appealing Pertwee entries, to my mind, are the 4-parters, most notably the Auton stories, Day of the Daleks, The Three Doctors, Carnival of Monsters, The Time Warrior, and Death to the Daleks. Though some of the 6-parters are fast-paced enough or contain sufficiently interesting plot twists to hold a viewer's attention in one sitting, among them The Sea Devils and The Green Death, most are excessively padded with repetitive chases, failed escape attempts, etc.. I've never been able to sit through more than an hour of The Ambassadors of Death, The Mind of Evil, Colony to Space (sleep-inducer), or Frontier in Space. The fact that the former two of these stories are only available in black and white does not help. Though Planet of the Spiders contains the most extensive chase ever in Doctor Who, the remainder of the story drags like a slow spider on a floor. As a 4-parter, the episode would have been far more exciting.
I can also understand the criticisms of the UNIT background to the stories. For one season, maybe two, it was interesting. Beyond that, it became as repetitive as the Master in Pertwee's second season and the addition of recurring types of guest characters made the stories even more formulaic. First, there was the gung-ho military man, if not the Brigadier, then Major Baker, General Carrington, Trenchard, the Marshal, General Finch, or Dan Galloway. Next was the pompous scientist who resents the Doctor, including Lawrence, Taltalian, Stahlman, Kettering, Winser, and Whittaker. Most prolific were the obtuse and/or stuffy politicians and bureaucrats, such as Masters, Brownrose, Chin, Styles, Walker, and the Prime Minister himself. Whenever a supporting guest makes his appearance, one easily pigeon-holes him into one of these types, and the fate of the character is known immediately. The pompous scientist dies. The military type either dies senselessly, or redeems himself in death, or is court-martialed. And the politician is only there to thwart the Doctor's effort to spur or stop the Brigadier's troops and is neither humbled nor humiliated.
But visually, the vibrant color, the contrast of the exotically colored aliens on green, Earthly soil, Pertwee's dashingly flamboyant costumes and bright yellow Bessie with Pertwee's performance as brusque, charming, daring, introspective, and tender and vulnerable always at the appropriate times still clinch the Pertwee era as my favorite for Doctor Who.
A Defining Era by Michael Hickerson 2/6/98
Jon Pertwee's tenure as Doctor was one of the most successful and well remembered. But his years in front of the camera seem to cause universal strife among the fandom about their relative merit (or lack thereof) much same as the debate over the relative merit of the seventh Doctor's era.
Why all this controversy over one five year period in Who's history? A look at the third Doctor's era answers this question easily enough.
I enjoy the Pertwee years quite a bit. Well, let me clarify that a bit. I enjoy the first half of the Pertwee years a great deal. Pertwee starred in 24 stories in his reign as Doctor and you can pretty much divide them down the middle in terms of the overall quality of storytelling. The first twelve stories have what are considered to be the classic stories with one or two less than stellar stories being the exception rather than the rule while his final twelve you see some rather pedestrian stories with, one or two great strories standing above the pack. It's an interesting dichotomy and one of the reasons I think we as fans are so divided on whether or not the Pertwee years are actually considered good or bad. But one thing is certain--the Pertwee years always entertained.
There were some basic, unifying themes that most of the Pertwee era stories addressed. One was that humanity was it's own worst enemy. Time and again, it's not the alien invaders who pose the biggest threat to humankind, it's ourselves and our own short sightedness.
Another recurring thread was the reliance on a strong supporting cast. Before they became the Doctor's comedic foils, UNIT was a hard-edged, interesting military unit. The clashes of opinion between the Doctor and the Brigadier in the Silurians are ample evidence of this. Also, while Benton may have been a bit annoying at times, he was at least consistently portrayed. And just as the Hartnell years were defined by the Daleks and the Troughton years by the Cybermen, so are the Pertwee years defined by their premire villain--the Master. As played by the inimiatable Roger Delgado, the Master was a wonder to behold. The plots shown here showed a manipulative mind and a patient one. There was also the sense of there being more to the Doctor/Master relationship that was hinted at but never brought to fruition due to Delgado's tragic death.
But it was always the third Doctor who defined his era. No longer content to sit on the sidelines and allow his companions to define the action on the show, the Doctor dove into danger left and right. He was arrogant at times, but he never lost his basic humanity and connection to his companions. Pertwee did a masterful job of making the Doctor someone you wanted to smack for his arrogance at one moment, but tugging on your heart strings the next.
In real life, Pertwee was probably amazed at the love the fandom had for his show. In interviews, he was always a real person, never the distant Time Lord we saw on screen. He was humble. As the years passed by, Pertwee became the elderstatesman for the show, defending it and promoting it. He attended conventions, appeared in The Five Doctors and Dimensions in Time, and much more. He fought for legitimate fan conventions, even writing an apology letter to DWM for failing to appear at a convention.
As on screen as the Doctor, in real life Pertwee was a gentleman. And one that is sorely missed by the Who fandom. Thankfully, he left us a rich, complete era that has us all talking to this day.
An overview of the third Doctor's era by Owen A. Stinger 5/8/99
Having, over the past couple months, viewed the entire Pertwee era, I thought this would be an apt time to add my review of the era to the Guide.
After watching all the Third Doctor stories back to back, I came to realize that really the Pertwee era should be considered in three parts: the prologue (season 7), the era proper (seasons 8, 9,10), and the epilogue (season 11).
Season 7 is considered by many fans to be the best, for it's mysterious and dark atmosphere, and serious tone. Season 7 can be characterized by: a rather erratic, irritable, and pompous Doctor; an infallible Brigadier, head of a more serious and militaristic UNIT, and capable of having a serious one on one conversation with the Doctor and actually comprehending what the Doctor says; Liz Shaw, perhaps the most adult companion, a brilliant scientist herself, maybe even the Doctor's earth-bound equal; and finally, dark, serious stories that challenged the viewer, and featured genuinely chilling scenes and suspenseful cliff-hangers. All of these qualities make for some of the best Doctor Who material ever, and one sometimes wonders why the rest of the era couldn't have been that way. Well, remember that most of the scripts were already commissioned by the time Barry Letts came on board as producer, so it wasn't really until the next season that his style really started to show through. Season 7 was a masterpiece, and it achieved what the new production team set out to do, revamp Doctor Who was a more adult-oriented show, but perhaps (at least from a production stand point) it had gone too far in that direction. There were no characters for the general audience to identify with and latch on to. The Brigadier was very militaristic, Liz was very scientific, there were no real UNIT regulars yet, and even the Doctor wasn't always accessible.
What Barry Letts and Terrence Dicks did in the following three seasons (the "era proper") was lighten the show's mood?considerably. Liz Shaw was replaced by the bubbly Jo Grant, the Brigadier was more personable, even cracking a smile every once in a while, there were the jolly "big brother" types Mike Yates and Sergeant Benton, and then of course, the Doctor himself became more easy to identify with, and the comedic element of the program was increased dramatically, albeit at the expense of the some of the horror element.
Working with the earth-bound premise that Letts and Dicks had created, the Doctor in exile, the show moved constantly forward throughout the era. While the whole of season 8 was spent battling the Master, and season 9 saw the Doctor doing more good deeds for the Time Lords, working towards his redemption, and then finally getting his freedom back at the start of Season 10.
The last chapter in the era proper followed a quite logical course. Once the Doctor's exile had been lifted, he quite naturally wanted to continue his wanderings, this time with Jo Grant in tow. This section of the era consisted of the near seamless story arc starting with Carnival of Monsters and culminating in Planet of the Daleks, with the season ending superbly with the travelers' return to Earth, their reuniting with UNIT, and Jo Grant's leaving in The Green Death. The stories in the arc gelled perfectly, and it's almost frightening to find how moved you are by Jo's exit and the Doctor's reaction to it. So ends the Pertwee era proper.
Then we have season 11, the epilogue. Here, one almost cannot help wonder why Doctor Who was continuing, with the long held premise of the exile on earth, and loving companion Jo Grant both gone, where would the series go? Well, we weren't the only ones wondering. It seems that Letts and Dicks didn't know what to do either. Even though the Doctor was now free to roam the entire universe at his leisure, he still chose to stay on earth and remain UNIT's scientific advisor. The Letts/Dicks team was clearly running out of steam. By this time the Third Doctor was a mere shadow of his original pompous, irritable self. He had mellowed considerably, and genuinely seemed to be growing old.
Pertwee's final moments and his regeneration into Tom Baker's Doctor are often panned as the weakest transition in Doctor Who's history. However, when one watches the Pertwee era straight through, back to back, the camaraderie and empathy of the "UNIT Family" really become effective, and its gradual demise, first Jo, then Mike Yates, then the Doctor himself, evokes genuine emotion, thus making the third Doctor's regeneration one of the most moving.
So sizes up the era in nutshell. My opinions? First of all, Jon Pertwee's Doctor is, without a doubt, the greatest Doctor of them all, rivaled closely by Tom Baker. He was both suave and brilliant, alien yet personable, and all the time, completely believable. My other ratings are as follows:
Best prologue story: The Silurians. (This is
tough decision. They're all fantastic)
Best Master story: Frontier in Space (second runners up: The Mind of Evil, The Sea
Devils)
Best Dalek story: Planet of the
Daleks. Most would put Day here. Sorry, but Planet is just more entertaining, never mind how
derivative it is.
Best UNIT story: The Daemons.
You get the complete UNIT family, with plenty of characterization for all
of them. (Second runner up: The Green Death)
Best
epilogue story: Monster of Peladon. Much better than
it's prequel, this one sees the Third Doctor's character return to his
former glory, and it's a nice heroes versus villains story, with excellent
three-dimensional characterization of the Pels, with the addition of the
miners.
Best story overall: This is really hard, by I'd have to say The Silurians, by a nose, followed by The Daemons.
Worst story overall: The Time Warrior. Sorry, I know this is a favorite, but
is just bores! I actually fell asleep trying to watch this one. Many will
be surprised not find The Time Monster here. I
actually like The Time Monster. OK, its rather
silly at times, but isn't that usually the case with Doctor Who?
Anyway, Roger Delgado's Master was wonderfully evil in this one, and the
segment with the two TARDIS's inside one another was extremely
entertaining.
Worst Master story: The Claws of
Axos. The Master was actually alright is this one, but in the end it
was just another "The Master joins up with another alien race to take
over/destroy the world" plot.
Worst UNIT story: The
Three Doctors. The Brigadier was horrible in this one. OK it made for
some interesting humor. It's just a pity it couldn't have been from
someone else. Watch the Brig in this one after watching Inferno or Ambassadors of Death -
instant cringe.
Worst Dalek story: Death to the
Daleks. Not much to said about this one. It?s interesting once, but
doesn?t stand up to repeat viewings.
Afterthoughts. I also viewed Robot along with my Pertwee era package, as it too was produced by Barry Letts. Many have said that this was the Brigadier's worst. I must disagree. While he did bumble his attack on the Robot, he at least had some intelligent dialogue with the Doctor for the first time in while (in Planet of the Spiders, he didn't even know what ESP was for God's sake!) It has also been said that this a Third Doctor story without the Third Doctor. I can understand that viewpoint, and it would have been a fantastic Pertwee serial, but Tom Baker's presence just is so overwhelming, that the entire atmosphere of the story is different. No, this was indeed the start of an entirely new era. Of interesting note, the Fourth Doctor and Hinchcliffe/Holmes produced Terror of the Zygons was, in my opinion, a superb UNIT story, with excellent three-dimension characterization for the Brig, portraying both his serious and lighthearted sides. It's a shame we couldn't have had one more UNIT story in the same vein.
And that's about it. Perhaps the greatest era in Doctor Who's history. While it didn't feature some of the all out masterpieces of the Holmes era, (Pyramids of Mars, Deadly Assassin), it also didn't feature any massive flops (Horns of Nimon, Meglos, Four to Doomsday, Season 23, Season 24 etc. etc.). Dicks's story telling was always entertaining, and Letts was a competent producer. The era started well, was established well, and ended when it needed to, to make way for the next era.
Sorry Jon but... by Jonathan Martin 24/6/01
I'm sorry all you Pertwee fans but the time has come: it's about time someone pointed out that Jon Pertwee's Doctor, and his era, isn't as marvellous as they think it is.
The main problem is: He and the era are completely shallow after season seven. But It's actually a very promising start:
It could only get worse during the next season. And it certainly did:
Yeah, I'm afraid it was quite a turnaround. You can see how shallow the third Doctor was by reading descriptions of him - they only ever mention his clothes and his car and his gadgets- that's because there wasn't much else!
In Pertwee's era, the show became something it wasn't, and I'm surprised that his fans can watch other eras of the show.
I mean no disrespect to Jon Pertwee - I never met him but he was a great actor and comic, and by all accounts a very kind and generous man, but it just seems as if Doctor Who became an outlet for his interests, and this quickly led to self-indulgence, and spoilt his era.
"Is he a longshanked rascal with a mighty nose?" by Terrence Keenan 22/10/03
All eras have their fans and detractors. It took a long time for the Graham Williams era of Tom Baker to get any love. The twelve serials of Sylvester McCoy have been fought and argued over since they've been broadcast. The black and white era is either championed as classic Doctor Who (due to what's remaining) or slagged off as boring, slow, badly acted trash that Color Who improved on without much effort.
Jon Pertwee's era is no exception. In fact, his era has seen the biggest change in general opinion out of all the Doctors.
My first exposure to Pertwee was from Public Television -- like many a US fan -- in broadcast order. The first four stories sold the hype I'd heard about the whole Pertwee reign. From there, things could only go downhill. I found it odd that the stories varied in quality going forward (For every hit like The Mind of Evil, there was a turkey like The Daemons) but with a very consistent portrayal of the Doctor. I wasn't much of a Jo fan, but Sarah was a very familiar face, and Liz Shaw excelled. First impression was that the Pertwee era was very good.
Pertwee, a comic actor, took the role of the Doctor seriously. Now, I've never met the man in person, but I have the feeling that Pertwee just played himself with the volume turned up. It was an arrogant, blustery Doctor, but one who would open himself up and show a softer side to those he cared for. He was a man of passions and in his own way, an anti-establishment character, but more willing to work within channels than say the more Anarchy-minded 2nd and 4th Doctors. I think that this is where the "Tory Doctor" label gets applied to Pertwee's incarnation.
If you want to divide up Pertwee's five years, I see a three way split: Season 7, Terror of the Autons through The Three Doctors, and then Carnival of Monsters through Planet of the Spiders.
Season 7 is exceptional. There is a confidence about the stories and the format. Just as important, they pushed the format in interesting directions in order to show its flexibility. The more fantastical elements are shelved in terms of realism. Character and themes are at the forefront. This is a season brave enough to have a real downer ending (The Silurians), drop the Doctor into a real world setting (Ambassadors) and destroy the world (Inferno). The theme of man being his own worst enemy shows up. And we have a Doctor dealing with a lash up relationship with a paramilitary organization that might not agree in terms of methods. He's also less willing to work through channels and more willing to take an independent route.
The second era, The Master Era (he's in 7 of the 11 stories), solidifies the formula approach, but doesn't try to push it as far as in the previous season. Even the excursions off Earth follow rote -- all missions for the Time Lords. There is still confidence in the format, but less so in the stories, so harder ones -- The Mind of Evil, The Day of the Daleks -- are mixed with cozier ones -- The Daemons, The Time Monster. Pertwee's Doctor becomes more rigid in character. He works within the system far more, and is more pointlessly rude to everybody.
From Carnival of Monsters till Planet of the Spiders, shows the show drifting along. The confidence in the format, and in the stories is waning due to changes in the ongoing Who plotlines, but not completely gone. There is no reason for the Doctor to keep coming back to Earth, yet there he is. Pertwee goes on autopilot -- the scripts are written that way, except for two. Only in Carnival of Monsters and The Time Warrior, do we see something different. Pertwee's Doc is far less arrogant in Carnival of Monsters, and also a bit more alien. The Doc in The Time Warrior shows a joie di vive in mixing it up with Irongron and Linx. Not only does he want to help out, he wants to do it with style. Arrogance is replaced with sarcasm, wit and humanity -- traits that would appear in Tom Baker's Doctor.
You can see similar declines in terms of companions. During season 7, the Doctor's companion is Liz Shaw. She's the first non screamer, intelligent companion in the show, and works seamlessly with this Doctor. Alas, she only lasted one season and was replaced by a bubbly, gung-ho flibbertigibbet named Jo Grant. Jo screams, gets into trouble, needs to be rescued. Liz could handle herself. Jo never got the chance, except in The Mind of Evil. Sarah Jane Smith is a Jo clone with a working class accent during Pertwee's last season.
Of course, you can't talk about Pertwee without talking about UNIT. UNIT is embodied by the character of Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart. Look at the Season 7 Lethbridge-Stewart. This is a smart, calm in the midst of crisis leader. He does the occasional slow burn, but is not prone to shouting every five seconds. He's also a political person, understanding the games of government far better than the Doctor (and just as frustrated, too!). The prime example being the end of The Silurians. Alas, after season 7, Lethbridge-Stewart is pretty much a companion figure with a gun and troops. He asks lots of questions, acts pretty dense, yells a lot and seems incapable of making any correct decision on his own. Such a shame, from believable leader to chucklehead in five seasons, with the characterization in The Three Doctors being rock bottom. (Note: this isn't to say I'm not a Brig/UNIT fan. I am. The decline deeply depresses me.)
The weird thing is, even though I've brought up a lot of negatives, I still find the whole era (except for the Peladon stories, which are painfully boring) very watchable. There is a confidence to everything, even when the stories are crap. The Daemons may be complete bollocks, with a stupendously dumb ending, but I can still watch it and not be bored. Planet of the Spiders does have parts (the Metebelis 3 two legs scenes) that make my skin crawl, but the last two episodes are so damn good. And when this era is good (Season 7, Carnival of Monsters, The Mind of Evil, The Sea Devils, The Green Death, The Time Warrior) it's really good. It's what makes Who so damn special.
Cold Tea by Thomas Cookson 29/5/06
Recently, in my last article, and in my thoughts on Doctor Who since then, I'd been toying with the idea of how Doctor Who could have been perhaps 'better' if it had ended earlier - feeling there was something ugly that grafted its way into the show that could only have been cut off by pulling the plug on the series before it got a chance to ferment. Maybe if Season 17 had been the last season of Doctor Who. Imagining a parallel universe where the New Adventures range were exclusively about the Fourth Doctor and Romana, and in which the 2005 revival featured Christopher Eccleston as the Fifth Doctor, rather than the Ninth, if the evident but unexplained absence of Romana since Horns of Nimon made the events of the Time War that much more sad and poignant (with the permeability of Gallifrey as seen in The Invasion of Time, being more firmly lodged in the memory). If the Dalek/Davros saga had been wrapped up neatly in Destiny of the Daleks (Davros in custody, the Dalek empire blocked by the Movellan forces, but not yet vanquished), if Adric never turned up, the Anthony Ainley Master had never gotten a chance to come alive, let alone dominate the show, if we'd never had to experience either the soft Doctor or the obnoxious Doctor, or for that matter the sight of the Doctor becoming redundant as the mercenaries took his place in the heroic scheme of things.
Then changing my mind and thinking perhaps Season 19 would have been a good ending; that way we could have still got to enjoy Earthshock, Black Orchid and Kinda, and we could experience the Anthony Ainley Master for only four stories. We could have seen Peter Davison's brief tenure as the new age, sensitive Doctor without having to witness his character become incompetent as he did in Warriors of the Deep. On the contrary we would have only seen Davison at his most capable, not only defeating the Cybermen and Tereptils, not only resolving the Kinda situation without bloodshed, but also vanquishing the Master twice in Castrovalva and Time-Flight. The season said goodbye to Adric and returned Tegan home and mildly suggested at the end of Time-Flight that the Master was as good as dead. Time-Flight even had a nice reference to UNIT just to give it that one more spin of the wheel, final episode feel; of course it was a pretty embarrassing episode otherwise but I think it had potential for drawing Doctor Who to its final conclusion. That could have been an appropriate ending, and a lead into a New Adventures book range featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, and then 2005 would have seen the series' revival with Christopher Eccleston as the Sixth Doctor (with Nyssa possibly killed in the Time War).
But why did I want it to end early? What was it about the program I wanted to place at such a bargepole distance, and could I really seriously claim that none of this had been the case in the earlier eras of Doctor Who? Well the chief element I hated was the Doctor's softness and incompetence that seemed to show up, not only in Warriors of the Deep, where he lets everyone die before he acts, but whenever the Master turns up, reminding us how incapable the Doctor is at vanquishing his old foe, and rubbing salt in the fact that half the time the Doctor isn't even trying to tackle the Master because it is against his non-violent principles.
But of course the Master turned up far more frequently in the Third Doctor era, so my argument on that front seemed to go out the window, and as I pondered further, I realised that actually there was much about the Pertwee era that I found unpleasant.
To sum it up, as I saw it there was a turn in the Pertwee era to a far more calloused and cold-blooded approach to storytelling. The UNIT backdrop itself sets us up for that cold-bloodedness, since the soldiers in UNIT are merely nameless cannon fodder to be killed off in extravagant fashion. Enter the Master and now we have a mass murderer who frequently escapes to return again - and so killings take place without reason and are not redressed with any kind of justice or retribution. In fact, by the time of The Time Monster, the Doctor has ceased to care really about the lives taken so far or about the fact that the Master will kill again once released from Kronos, and goes and has the Master released anyway. Now this feels so fundamentally wrong to me on so many levels: the Doctor isn't pleading merely for the Master's life to be spared, he's pleading for the Master himself to be set free and unleashed to wreak terror and destruction upon the universe once more. And that just showed a horrific apathy on the Doctor's part. It's not even a case of the Doctor's pacifist principles holding him back; he seems to genuinely not care how many people or planets the Master destroys, as long as his old college friend doesn't suffer a bit of not-very-nice punishment whilst the rest of the universe is kept safe from him.
And after a while I started to notice the other aspects of callousness that characterised the Jon Pertwee era - or should I say aspects of callousness that I'd always noticed but never really wanted to admit to being there because... hey, it's Doctor Who. But I can't ignore it any longer: overlooking the stories involving the Master killing people or of UNIT soldiers suffering the usual high turnover, and still the Pertwee era is largely callous. In Planet of the Daleks we land on a world that the Daleks have devastated with the usual plague missiles. Episode two strongly conveys how the Spiridon people were besieged and invites our sympathy, but what happens to the Spiridons in the end? Wester makes a grand sacrifice to save them all, the rest of the Spiridon slaves are taken below into Dalek headquarters and are then never seen or mentioned again, presumably all killed in the ice volcano that the Doctor initiates, but the fact that they are so quickly forgotten suggests that no-one's really meant to care if they all died; after all, once the Doctor leaves, the planet remains under Dalek control, so the point of it was never to liberate the Spiridons. Of course the threat to the whole galaxy posed by the Dalek army and their invisibility does dwarf and overshadow the plight of the Spiridons, but I don't like how the episode goes one further and practically burys the plight of the Spiridons from view.
In The Green Death, the cliffhanger to episode 3 is resolved when Jo is saved by the timely intervention of one of Stevens' agents, who had snuck in only to get bitten by the maggot and then later died, off screen, but not given the kind of coverage that suggested his death meant something. Even the death of Stevens himself just seems indulgent, and the Doctor's quickness to be resigned to Stevens' refusal to leave with him just suggests that the writers only wanted a sacrifice to end it quickly and not a moment wasted on mourning the character before we move to the wedding party, not even a few tender dying words. People may praise the story for being one of the most emotionally resonant but to me its focus on the emotional qualities of characters is very selectively compassionate which makes it feel slightly more heartless. Death to the Daleks likewise features a forced sacrifice of an easily hateable character, and plenty of death wrought by savages, with no reason behind them, and the sight of the Doctor goading a root to blast a Dalek just seems too sadistic to me. Likewise the sight of a burning Exhilon who has been hit by the giant root seems just as needlessly lingered on as most of the shootings of the Sea Devils; it doesn't convey the drama or jeopardy it should and just seems straight-forwardly ugly.
Even in Season 7 I thought there was an element of callousness, which I've wrestled with but ultimately been able to justify. The scene in Spearhead from Space where the Doctor has his weapon ready to finish off the Nestenes, but is having a drawn-out chat with Channing whilst the Autons are continuously gunning down soldiers and civilians often struck me as a callous disregard for the dying, but on reflection I can put it down to vying for time and trying to put the enemy at ease before making his strike. His unjesting remark in The Silurians that he would be happy if Professor Lawrence will die in the plague, can be considered as dark characterisation of a Doctor who holds grudges, just like how the Doctors before him had a certain moral ambiguity - and certainly the death of Lawrence is shocking enough to shatter any notion that we should be taking any pleasure in his death, just because the Doctor may. And the scene in Inferno, episode two, in the resolution to the cliffhanger where a UNIT soldier is mauled by the Primord brute whilst the Doctor looks on, I realise now that the Doctor doesn't help the poor soldier because it would be futile anyway.
A few more things to clarify- Back in 1996, the American TV Movie had peaked my renewed interest in the series. But at the same time, the BBC had discontinued many of the videos, and a lot of the videos that remained undeleted were Pertwee episodes, and so I was left with them as the only desireable choice- I really wanted to see The Dalek Invasion of Earth and the whole of Genesis of the Daleks, but they were gone from the shelves. I suppose it's no wonder then that because back then I watched the cavalier violence of The Sea Devils and Resurrection of the Daleks, it wouldn't be long before I turned away from Doctor Who, to Star Trek, which seemed to display far more respect for life and the art of restraint. Over the years I did turn away from Star Trek as I saw its whole presentation of interactions as being far too formalised, stuffy and reserved: a tyranny of manners enforced by unbelievably uptight people, although Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is still my favourite film of all time (The Omen, Dark Water, Nikita and Get Carter are also in my top five, in case you were wondering). Doctor Who appealed to me again when I was 17 and became a member of the local fan club and got to see many of these stories I'd yearned to see, because as a show, it offered me a much more warm, chummy and "do as you please" presentation of conversing and socialising than Star Trek did.
The fact is that I'm staunchly of the opinion that Doctor Who wasn't this cold blooded before the Pertwee era - not to this degree anyway. In the black and white era, the body counts weren't that high: The Mind Robber was a wonderful example of the "Everybody lives!" kind of story; the horrors of a fascist future are conveyed far more effectively by the harrowing sight of people's homes being vandalised by the secret police, than by killings per se. In the Patrick Troughton era, characters and their emotions very much mattered: at the end of The Mind Robber, the Doctor pulls his former captor to safety in a way that I only wish Pertwee had done for Stevens in The Green Death. The deaths of most of the guest characters in Evil of the Daleks and The Web of Fear were meant to count for a lot: we got to know those characters, and when they died it really conveyed the hopelessness of the situation.
I'd argue in fact that the Troughton era was as emotionally resonant as the New Series. Listen to Edward Waterfield's dying moments in Evil of the Daleks, or better still the moment where the Doctor has to break the news of his death to Victoria, or the sheer misery of Victoria's grilling by her Dalek guard for not eating her food, and you're listening to moments that grab you by the heart and don't let go. Throughout Victoria's season there is plenty of human elements to her characterisation, whether her charming and humoured discussion with Jamie over the short skirts worn by women of the future in The Ice Warriors, or her nightly talk with the Doctor about her father's death in Tomb of the Cybermen, or the scene in The Web of Fear where she has gone out alone onto the underground railway tracks to look for Jamie and the Doctor whilst Professor Travers observes sadly "that boy and the Doctor are all that child's got in the world." Even after Victoria left, there was still room for poignancy in the warm final goodbyes in The War Games.
Of course the Second Doctor was ruthless: I'd say of all the incarnations of the meddling and crusading Doctors, that he was probably the closest to being an out and out terrorist, based on his violent and inciteful actions in Power of the Daleks, Evil of the Daleks, The Dominators, Seeds of Death and The War Games. But I was okay with that, because at the end of the day, a terrorist is someone who cares very much for vanquishing whatever they see as an amoral enemy and protecting the underdog as they see it; he was a Doctor who killed, destroyed entire armies of invaders because he cared. I don't think the violent treatment of the Daleks or Ice Warriors is what I'd describe as glorified because the violence was conveyed in such a vivid and gut-churning way. Or to put it another way, the violence was so full-blooded that I couldn't call it cold-blooded.
And to a degree yes I am relieved that the Doctor gradually developed out of this violence, and now and again showed a better way of resolving conflicts, that he dares attempt the peaceful approach to the Silurians and the Sea Devils in a way that few others would have had the courage to, and how he refused when the guerillas of Day of the Daleks tried to convince the Doctor to assassinate Reginald Styles for them, thinking they can coax him to their methods, from one terrorist to another perhaps? For me, with the Doctor's character, anything goes - and that's why I was okay with the fact that the Ninth Doctor adopted the role of a terrorist again, blowing up buildings, letting Cassandra die, even taking hostages in Bad Wolf - as long as the script can justify his actions or his inactions. What I struggled with was how often in the post-Troughton years, his inaction towards various threats didn't have that sense of justification, it was simply rigid dogma. He refuses to get violent with the Master or Davros or the Sea Devils because the fans would be in uproar about it if he did, or because the writers really wanted to use the Master again. Mind you I suppose if I worked at it, I could put the Doctor's abhorrence towards using violent methods down to a desire to make amends for his violent past or because he became sick of killing.
I think to a degree on this front I have re-evaluated my opinion of the Fifth Doctor. Certainly in considering the way Pertwee gave the Master that get-out-of-jail-free card in The Time Monster, I've come to realise that the Fifth Doctor was nowhere near as incompetent as that in dealing with the Master. In fact, the Fifth Doctor does vanquish the Master nearly every time: he leaves him marooned in Castrovalva, he brings the Master's TARDIS into a crash landing on Xeraphin, where the marooned Master will probably end up being killed by the Xeraphin, and when all else fails he lets the evil bastard burn alive, and future incarnations of the Doctor still can't seem to get rid of him either. It wasn't that the Fifth Doctor was incompetent, it was that the writers couldn't let his enemy stay vanquished. I've even come to terms with some aspects of Warriors of the Deep and I've come to not be so arrogant as to think that, if I were in the same situation as the Doctor, I'd find his decision to bring a sure and painful death to the Sea Devils any easier to make, just like I'm not sure I ever could have shot Davros in the head if he was at my mercy.
After using terms like "softie" and "bleeding heart" to describe the Fifth Doctor in my last article, I feel now that I was being mean-spirited and cold-blooded myself, like some Viz character looking at the Doctor's pacifist ways and declaring "thar Doctor, 'e sounds laike a reight poof!". The truth is, often my favourite films play on that human characteristic of mercy and of being unable to take life, like in The Omen, Sweet Sixteen and Nikita. I could even live with the fact that the Doctor waits until everyone is dead whilst he wrestles with his conscience. But I still, at the end of all that, really hated the Doctor when he brutally cut down the words of one of the survivors as she urges him to use the gas, and he calls her a pathetic savage; this is a woman who is scared of dying, her colleagues all murdered brutally in an unprovoked attack (and unprovoked is the key word), and she is probably also worried about the fate of her family, and the Doctor decides to be a git and stamp all over her assertion of her right to survive. And yes I do think it makes the Doctor a hypocrite. And there's something else: the Hexacromite Gas is something that the Doctor kept under his hat as a solution; he was duplicitous, and really the moral outrage should have come from the survivor and that's why I feel the episode has its heart in completely the wrong place, and why I find it such a self-righteous, oppressive and unpleasant viewing. What should have been a challenging story of questioning the Doctor's beliefs and methods is simply treated as another opportunity for the Doctor to rant inanely about how violent and pathetic we all are as humans, but done in a graveyard of dead humans just to make him that extra bit offensive.
But wait a minute I'm talking about the Pertwee era aren't I? So yes I think that 'cozy' is too light a criticism of the Third Doctor era. It was 'cozy' in a nasty way: the laugh and a joke at the end of a bloodbath. After the Master has caused all those deaths in Terror of the Autons and looks likely to strike again the Doctor cheerfully declares "I'm looking forward to it." It was cozy in its formulaic, cliched characters without mind or heart that showed up the soullessness of it. Formulas and condensed plots that ran right over the lives of its characters and kept them down because it had to have a rushed conclusion. Like the Doctor's disheartening giving up on making peace with the Sea Devils in the last episode, for no other reason than that it's the last episode and the writers need a quick solution. In later eras, yes, Tom Baker had a callous attitude to the deaths around him and a stiff upper lip, but at least the script acknowledged this, as he pointed out in Pyramids of Mars: the situation is too drastic to waste a moment's grief, whilst the Pertwee era was simply stiff upper lip for the sake of simple Britishness, and there's no air of drasticness if the Doctor actually gives the Master a get-out-of-jail-free card. The deaths mean nothing to him; it's all just a game. Okay I suppose The Silurians and The Sea Devils did acknowledge that the deaths of human characters so far had to be forgiven and not over-stressed if there was to be a chance at making peace with those who killed them, and thereby preventing a war that might destroy thousands of innocents on both sides.
In the same way the fact that the Fifth Doctor was ill-suited for the violent nature of the universe, which was something acknowledged by the stories, and developed to the point of tragedy in the tail end of Season 21. In the same way the same theme of the Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways is rather acknowledged when after the Doctor stressed so strongly "the choice I've got to make for everybody: die as a human or live as a Dalek." In the end the Doctor clearly realises that it is never his place to decide what is really better for the humans by condemning them all to death - and all this in an episode in which not only is the viewer expecting the Doctor to press the switch with self-righteousness, but in which the whole Reality TV modern media is put under judgement for its celebration of bitchiness and controversy and its view of nice people as being 'mediocre' or 'worthless' by comparison (as the Doctor says to Lynda 'do you think anyone votes for sweet?') and in which to see the Doctor choose to be mediocre and not rise to the challenge to do something drastic when he really needed to, is very refreshing and allows me to forgive the deus ex machina ending out of the desperation to find a better way. The Third Doctor era makes no such acknowledgement of the consequences of the Doctor's sticking up for the Master's 'fair treatment'. The Doctor honestly doesn't seem to care who the Master kills.
I suppose all things considered, my favourite Pertwee story outside of Season 7 is Carnival of Monsters, because whilst it has a certain coziness and typical cartoonish portrayal of politicians, it has a low body count, but plenty of atmosphere and horror all the same, features no sign of the Master and makes a rather intelligent use of xenophobic politics. Actually I quite enjoyed The Three Doctors too; after the first episode there aren't really any deaths, even characters who normally would be killed off are spared in a refreshing way (like the scientist who doesn't listen to the Doctor and tries to escape his own way from Omega's lair; normally characters like him are sure to end up dead) and above all Omega has a method to his madness and the hero and villain actually have dialogue to understand one another rather than score points off one another.
I could argue that the Tom Baker era did occasionally inherit a similar cold bloodedness from the Jon Pertwee era; to me Robot represents a final swansong for UNIT soldiers being 'as loyal as they are stupid' and dying namelessly in huge numbers. Revenge of the Cybermen has the occasional cold-blooded moment too: the Doctor finds out a way to cure the Cybermat disease, but he takes his time to reveal it. Instead of immediately radioing it to Harry in the sickbay, he takes the long walk over to the medical bay before saying what it is, allowing the passed time to sign the death warrant of poor Warren. Planet of Evil to me featured more of the unnecessarily high body count of nameless cannon fodder.
The Invasion of Time features a thoroughly nasty scene where Leela and her fellow savages kill two Gallifreyan guards without warning, simply for blocking their way to the Doctor. Worse still is that the Doctor himself doesn't say anything about it (and yes I must confess I did have a problem with seeing the Doctor blow away Sontarans with a ray gun - and in regards to my 'anything goes' point above, I just feel that the episode failed to create any sense of jeopardy or grit at all in its invasion plot, and therefore the Doctor resorting to violent measures just seemed completely unmitigated).
Terror of the Zygons saw the Doctor kill off the Zygons quite needlessly and cavalierly - though by the same token it did flesh out the human characters before killing them, and if people weren't happy about the way that The Sea Devils overlooked the initial casualties on the sunken ships, in favour of a peaceful and forgiving resolution, then Terror of the Zygons offered a more eye-for-an-eye alternative in which those similar deaths of oilrig men did matter and were gladly avenged.
But in many ways, although as mentioned above, the Tom Baker era was perhaps as stiff upper lip as the Pertwee era, in its own way, the Tom Baker era did bring back an investment in characters in the high mortality environment. The dead characters in Genesis of the Daleks matter because of what they represented of values- whether Gharman and Ronson's democratic idealism, or Davros's desperate fascism. Similarly the fatally-flawed characters of Pyramids of Mars and Horror of Fang Rock share tragic fates based on those flaws - whether ignorance, greed or oversensitivity, of which Shakespeare would be proud, and even the henchmen villains of The Deadly Assassin and Talons of Weng-Chiang have a poignant death as they reveal how they became seduced by their blind faith in the main villain.
But Tom Baker's Doctor also brought back elements of Troughton's more drastic crusader character. His final confrontation with Magnus Greel in Talons of Weng-Chiang is a perfect summary of the Doctor's methods of trying negotiation with the enemy first before resorting drastically to brute force and to perhaps kill when all other avenues are surely spent. Similarly his entrapment of Sutekh in the time tunnel and ageing him to death showed us a Doctor who was far too wise to the unreasoning evil of his enemy and whose mercy was all spent. Similarly The Deadly Assassin completely reinvented the Doctor's relationship with the Master - even going so far as to suggest that in an untelevised adventure the Doctor had actually caused the Master's burnt, mortal-coil condition, and by the end of the episode, the Doctor is glad to see the end of the Master for all the death and terror he has wrought. Yet he had his merciful moments indeed: he refused to play God in Genesis of the Daleks, and then in Destiny of the Daleks he is prepared to blow up Davros, but ultimately shows his moral superiority by turning him over to the authorities to be tried properly instead.
The Peter Davison era was in many ways an attempt to recapture the Troughton era of the TARDIS as a family unit with its own poignant and emotional moments and a nasty universe portrayed in unflinching detail, although of course the Doctor's sensitivity and repellence of violence was much more Pertwee-esque, as was the recurring presence of the Master. The trouble for me was that it was generally more indulgent than straight for the jugular: the emotional material was more Australian soap opera than an effective homage to the Troughton era. The early scenes of Time-Flight in which the characters discussed Adric's death seemed too half-hearted to me. And the violence of course tended to reach for the high body counts that characterised the violence saturated 80's action flicks that were popular at that time (more on that later...) and although I feel that in many ways Warriors of the Deep and Resurrection of the Daleks showed some excellent writing (I must say I love the early scene in Warriors of the Deep where the Doctor remarks 'I let them down before and I suspect I'll do so again', as a lovely moment of dramatic irony; the Doctor already knows this is going to end badly, but he still doesn't know how much it will hurt when it does), but unfortunately they were both characterised by people dropping like flies and an ultimate air of pointlessness to it all.
I might stress actually that I think my criticisms could be more defined as saying that Davison's first season was where the soap-opera emotions lay, whilst the body count tended to be low, and in his last season the companion scenes did improve tremendously, becoming more refined, but it was at this end of the spectrum that the body counts went wild. I'd also stress that I thought Earthshock was indulgent in the right way and I enjoyed it immensely, The Caves of Androzani I can't dispute as being a top ten story, Kinda is a strange one that's gradually growing on me, and I even quite liked Planet of Fire. Above all, I'd say that whatever the quality of the Doctor's dialogue, Peter Davison was almost always superb in the role (there were moments in Time-Flight where he was a bit shit though but with a script like that, it probably couldn't be helped); he gave it great passion and spirit and to my mind he was the last really great performance as the Doctor until Eccleston arrived on the scene.
And then of course was the obnoxious insensitivity and bitchiness of the Colin Baker era. Colin's Doctor was supposedly a throwback to the kind of vigilante terrorist that Patrick Troughton's Doctor had been, and a more ruthless and less sensitive answer to the ineffectualness of the Fifth Doctor. But to me it never came across well. In Vengeance on Varos he is probably the closest to the role of a terrorist, using sabotage and even murder to bring down a corrupt regime. The trouble is that often his stories didn't convey the type of universe that was in need of a Doctor like him; even the shocking nature of Varos didn't quite convey that viciousness. The plot deficiency didn't help to bridge the lack of urgency and so the shocking moments lacked the glue to make them more than what they were. The look of the episodes was colourful, like a light show, when it should have looked gritty, stony and cruel.
I feel that in many ways Colin Baker's performance was ill-suited for the role. He would have been a great Doctor if his stories and his character were more like that of the Big Finish audios, where he is more of a jolly soul, a compassionate hero with the skills of verbal persuasion. But the kind of Doctor he was supposed to convey for the TV show was a different kettle of fish and was far from the mark. The Sixth Doctor shouldn't have been so comical, immature or beamy; frankly he never came across as being a terrorist or a psychotic. To my mind he was the kind of Doctor that John Malkovitch should have played: someone more Master-like with a menacing presence and sense of malice and a Victorian upper-class contempt and verbal brutishness that delighted in being insensitive, didactic and interrogating, and who felt volatile for it. Instead he just had the on and off moments that failed to bring about a fully-formed character. Therefore the psychotic moments just passed, the moments where he took violent action were vague in terms of his emotional response to his own actions, and the bickering scenes just felt like filler, and seemed to simply get stuck in the rut of the un-progressive type of scripted interaction whereby if characters aren't being nasty to one another then they're not interesting. (I was initially worried about the series going down that same path again when it came to the Rose/Sarah jealousy spat in School Reunion.)
I think maybe it was when the Ninth Doctor era came on the scene that I realised why fleshed out characterisation, emotional content and a sense of urgency were so important to the series: a sense that every life matters and someone like the Doctor has to fight hard to preserve life. And I came to realise why, as a result, a lot of the Pertwee era felt so hollow and cold, and sometimes downright nasty by comparison.
But I'll have to stop myself there and recheck my overview of Doctor Who, and unfortunately that would leave my argument looking a bit thinner than it does now. The fact is that whilst the 'cold-blooded' aspect became perhaps concentrated in the Pertwee era, that was hardly where this aspect started. No, it started as early as the Hartnell era. Now in many ways the Hartnell era did share the kind of poignancy that the Troughton era did, and a kind of seriousness that other eras lacked.
But stories like The Chase and The Ark to me are nasty examples of how the Hartnell era could come across when it had no heart: stories in which the more nasty and unpleasant characteristics of the First Doctor were laughed off, and stories which seemed rather akin to the comic strip style, with plenty of violence and chortles in equal measure. The deaths of many of the Monoids and their human agent in The Ark just seem so heartlessly done, and even snidely done in the case of the Monoid who is killed when the Refusians blow up his ship with him on board. The Monoid wasn't armed, the Refusians were capable of shaking him out of the ship before blowing it up; they could have easily restrained him but kept him alive, and the scene where the Monoids turn on each other and resolve the power play of the story by shooting one another feels like a nasty Sawardism twenty years ahead of its time.
In The Chase, the scene where a Mire Beast attacks the city and eats one of the Aridians, I strongly feel is one of the nastiest and most discomforting scenes in the whole of the series. Not least because the Doctor actually pushes the poor soul into the path of the Mire Beast in the first place and then pulls Barbara away as she tries to rescue the Aridian. I suspect it was trying to say something about the Doctor and Barbara needing to be more ruthless to escape and to stop for nothing, but I say it could have been done in a more emotive way, and the fact that it wasn't and didn't even spare a thought for the moment just sticks in my craw; if at least the Doctor had said something or if the camera had cut away it might have worked, but instead the scene just comes off as thoroughly sadistic.
So it looks like my idea of cutting off Doctor Who after a certain point was bollocks from the very beginning. I think what it all comes down to is that there was an idealised kind of Doctor Who that only a few stories actually managed to live up to, and from that perspective some of the ones that drop behind that ideal can be so frustratingly mediocre or terrible. The preserved ideal version of Doctor Who is probably the top 10 stories in the Outpost Gallifrey reader's poll (maybe even the top 20 or top 35). It's the pivotal stories like Genesis of the Daleks and The Deadly Assassin that really draw out the scope and mythology of the Doctor Who universe, use intellectual, ethical ideas and leave compelling imponderables. Its UNIT stories like The Web of Fear where for once the sure-to-die minor soldier characters get the fleshed-out characterisation and soul they deserve. Where adventures are as vast, surreal and as boundary-breaking as Inferno and City of Death, or the compelling vision of compassion in an amoral world in The Caves of Androzani. It's the high class of Talons of Weng-Chiang and Evil of the Daleks, it's the good versus evil of Pyramids of Mars, it's the sci-fi extravagance and in-depth psychology of Robots of Death.
At its root I think the eras of Doctor Who can be summed up as particular forms of art: the William Hartnell era is experimental art, the Patrick Troughton era is pulp, the Jon Pertwee era is mainstream, the Tom Baker era is baroque, the Peter Davison era is indulgent, the Colin Baker era is exploitative, the Sylvester McCoy era is off the wall, the Paul McGann film is style over substance, the New Series is mainstream again.
To be more specific, the Hartnell era style was a combination of naturalist, surrealist and melodrama, using music, image and Susan's hysterical whining to convey its soul. The Troughton era was sci-fi pulp, in that it used extravagant fantasy environments like a living biomass, full of compelling characters and nobility, and good versus evil conflicts; it was golden age science fiction, but with a certain street-level of dialogue between the Doctor and his companions. Evil of the Daleks and The Web of Fear particularly seemed to benefit from the use of authentic dialogue (not something that is often associated with Doctor Who). The Fourth Doctor era was baroque in that it had very bohemian, very traditional and Victorian gothic aspects; it also showed Doctor Who going to its height of maturity and development with very intellectual ideas at play and very literate scripts, and stories that could be poetic and complex, with twists and turns and humanistic ideas.
The Third Doctor era was mainstream in a formulaic way: the plots followed similar paths, the intelligence of the Doctor was emphasised by surrounding him with dumb and narrow-minded characters. It was mainstream in a different way to how the New Series is mainstream. The New Series is mainstream in a modern way: it panders to a lot of populist elements, it concentrates heavily on emotional material and the ties between characters' empathy, but it also has high demands to live up to, as does most TV that isn't Reality TV these days, and it tries to be sophisticated and please its audience every second with humour, tension and post-modern winks.
The Third Doctor is mainstream in a more 70's way. The 1970's was a lot more stiff upper lip, and mainstream children's TV could be seen as being undemanding back then. It was just boy's own. It was Dad's Army up against sci-fi comic villains. It was James Bond without the misogyny or the licence to kill.
I must say to me the 70s and the 80s were in general a nasty, cold-blooded era of popular entertainment, or at least on the cinematic front (actually I've always been aware that music of the era was on the whole positive, extrovert and humanistic, and I'm coming to realise that a lot of TV of the time was too, such as Fortunes of War, Tenko and Mike Leigh's TV plays). To me the action films, slasher flicks and vigilante flicks of the 70's and 80's were far more violent, mean-spirited and macho-conformist than anything since. By the same token, most films were exceedingly negative: general 70's films like Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Shivers and A Boy and His Dog were the worst kind of scab-picking films about the ugliness of humanity and seemed to delight in anti-intellectualism, misogyny and in telling us that we're all irredeemable scum who don't deserve to live. 1984's Red Dawn is one of the most horrifically cavalier, propagandist, conformist and manipulative films I've ever seen, and the fact that its character subjects are teenagers only makes it more ugly. Teen movies promoted the same kind of empty gulf between macho conformity and reclusive maladjustment with its pent-up frustration, anti-social attitudes and tyranny of manners.
To my mind Doctor Who and Star Trek during this time did absorb some of these qualities, but not all of them, and that is what makes them in many ways a refreshing example of how things weren't all bad from a media standpoint back then. The Star Trek films and the Next Generation series may have lived by a tyranny of manners, but they also carried with them a deep respect for life that was absent from most cinema of the time. In the same way whilst Doctor Who had the high body counts, it also had a positive outlook and a refusal to succumb to a tyranny of manners or a masculine conformity. Whilst it seemed to me that Doctor Who had to frequently kill umpteen number of people to make a point, Star Trek could do an episode like City on the Edge of Forever and make its whole impact based around the death of just one guest character.
But, by the same token, a character like the Doctor could go and just talk to anyone easily and freely, regardless of whether he knew them or not, regardless of their gender and not worry about coming across as imposing, invasive or annoying. The characters of Star Trek would not do that; they would have to make their ways of meeting people that much more formalised and even in their own interpersonal relationships they would keep at a huge distance from each other and make interactions brief, as though they needed to give each other an almost perpetual degree of personal space and alone time, which to me is not a healthy view of how to make a community and let people be at ease with each other and themselves.
Well I suppose going down the Doctor Who versus Star Trek debate, it is clear that one of the benefits of Doctor Who is that it tended not to take itself so seriously as Star Trek. And yes the Pertwee era did play a part in this, as it did bring us a jolly and undemanding Doctor Who that didn't leave itself open to heavy analysis by pretentious fans like me. Fans have told me on other boards to stop analysing Doctor Who so critically and to just accept it as comic strip fun and enjoy it for what it is without complaining. The problem is that when I catch a glimpse of the version of Doctor Who that's in the golden age sci-fi of the Troughton era and in the baroqueness of the Tom Baker era, I can't help but get depressed when elsewhere Doctor Who seems to be actually giving full ammunition to all its naysayers. That's why I feel embarrassed when I watch the ridiculous events of Time-Flight and one of Bertie Basset's scenes from The Happiness Patrol, because it seems to confirm the despondence of the rest of society towards the irredeemable naffness of Doctor Who.
Likewise when old fans of the show screamed and shouted about the prurient and vulgar nature of the burping bin in Rose, I had barely noticed and couldn't even remember what they were talking about. I laughed at them for being so uptight, and then when we had to endure three episodes of farting aliens I felt under siege by dumbness and was turned over to the naysayers for a while. Likewise I scoffed at the attitudes towards the Doctor and Rose's sexual tension; some absurd remarks suggested that to have a companion who looked hot was in itself a total blasphemy to the series, but then we got the painfully-contrived, overstated and completely out of the blue love triangle of The Long Game, where all of a sudden the Doctor actually was trying to get into Rose's pants and was being obnoxious in an alpha male way to Adam, and I absolutely hated it.
Likewise the suggestions that the series was getting over-emotional in a stagnating or 'manipulative' way were ones I really looked down upon, because Doctor Who is meant to be a compassionate series and that's what I loved about Father's Day and the season finale: it was about the feelings of people and how everyone matters, and I don't know at what point such an approach to emotional drama became easy to tag as 'manipulative' but I hated that critical attitude. The worst for me was reading a curmudgeonly critic describe the Doctor's distraught reaction to Rose's apparent death in Dalek as an un-Doctorly 'overreaction'. But when The Christmas Invasioncame along I felt myself drowning in the whole emotional mopeyness of it all and like the naysayers, I was nostalgic for the days when Doctor Who's plots didn't keep coming grinding to a halt just so that Sarah could have a laboured relationship discussion with her boyfriend.
The thing is that by the same token, the New Series has allowed the old series to get heavily talked down by comparison. Now the emotional focus of the New Series has opened up detractions of the old series for being emotionally detached and two-dimensional in its characterisation. Again I would say to those naysayers, "go and look at the Troughton era", but people are more likely to remember the Pertwee era these days, and that does confirm to many that the old series didn't care about fleshing out characters or emotional investment - that it was just a disposable action-adventure with disposable characters. People could say that the only charm of old Doctor Who was its wobbly sets (even in flattery), and we know that's not true. We know that Doctor Who dealt in important themes and morality, but a quick look at the detached violence and killing of the Pertwee stories, as well as the black and white nature of the Doctor/Master rivalry suggests that actually none of the show's morality was to really be taken seriously.
Furthermore recent online criticisms of the New Series suggest that Doctor Who is liberalist propaganda of the most absurd kind. The "villain turned sympathetic bleeding heart" element of Dalek or Boom Town, is often described as new age political correctness gone mad, in comparison to the more cynical old series. I imagine that if the internet had existed back in the 1970's, similar arguments probably would have been brought up against The Silurians and The Sea Devils. The problem for me is that in The Time Monster the Doctor really does live up to the label of an insufferable liberal do-gooder idiot letting the country go to the dogs by giving more rights and freedom to the criminals... Practically to a tee.
The trouble is when I see Doctor Who fall so short-sightedly into these potholes I just want to scream "But this show can do much better than that! This show is supposed to be far sharper than that! It's supposed to be far more sophisticated and heartfelt! The Doctor is far more capable and vigilant than that!" In short I do find it depressing to see just how great Doctor Who can be when it really reaches for the heights, and then to see how crap it can be when it really plumbs the depths, and proves those who criticise or dismiss the show as being right. I live and breathe the best of Doctor Who; I love what the show is capable of at the idealistic level: it can have so much imagination blended with danger that really stays with me. But all the clutter of it makes me realise that if anything Doctor Who is a very tough love.
I would say that on my point about Doctor Who being a 'tough love' series that I think one thing about Doctor Who that makes me want to persevere with that love with ease is its capacity for change and reinvention. And it is perhaps through looking at the New Series that I've realised the beauty of the show's capacity for reinvention. That is Doctor Who for a new generation of fans, who might not like or be prepared to give a chance to the old series. Even though that thought bothers me a little for reasons stated above, it is still wonderful that the new generation gets a full and immediate definition of this version of the Doctor Who universe with its powers of the TARDIS, the absence of the Time Lords, the new and improved Daleks with more soul, and no backstory necessary really.
In the same way, whatever was wrong with the Pertwee years, the Tom Baker years seemed to put back on track. The Tom Baker era immediately gave us reinvention: we saw the Daleks reinvented as being less stilted and static as they were in all the Pertwee Dalek stories. They were turned into being truly savage and sadistic and indestructible, and with potential to destroy all life in the universe just to satisfy their hatred. Gallifrey was also reinvented in a more cynical light, and we saw the Master reinvented as a truly hate-ridden creature, and the relationship with the Doctor reinvented too. If the burnt state of the Master was really the Doctor's doing, it suggested that we didn't even have to consider the Doctor/Master 'friendship' in the Pertwee episodes as canon.
This reinvention aspect is one that's therefore useful to fans like me who love one era of Doctor Who, but hate the other eras and want nothing to do with them. It allows Doctor Who to become a far easier love for fans like me. I'm glad that the reinvention is such a major aspect of the show again after the 80's seemed to tie the show to its own past like a ball and chain. So that's where I ultimately stand. My favourite eras of Doctor Who are the Troughton and Tom Baker eras, with the Eccleston and Tennant eras becoming immediate favourites too. The cold-bloodedness of the First and Third Doctor eras puts me off, and the continuity-heavy nature of the Doctors of the 80's makes me reluctant to consider them favourites because the continuity and dogma completely cripples their potential for reinvention.
But just to correct myself: I used the word 'hate' above when describing the Pertwee era, and I don't think that's the right word for how I feel about the era. Neither is 'dislike' - probably more like I find it difficult to accept, I'm reluctant to embrace it at present. I've vented about my problems with the Pertwee era now, perhaps now the air is cleared I'll go on to accept and enjoy it for what it was. To give a few more words on the Pertwee era: Pertwee himself gave a superbly straight-laced performance as the Doctor, and I've never seen him slip in his performance. Even in most of the promotional stills he keeps completely in character. Sure it was easy to make plenty of fun of the size of his nose, particularly when watching his hall of mirrors moment in Inferno, but I only ever do it in jest. I'd say that in terms of the Doctor Who ideal, if it wasn't for some of Pertwee's stories we wouldn't have ever seen the Doctor's character develop into that of an open-minded man of peaceful resolve, and Inferno is still one of the best Doctor Who stories ever.
I'd also say that the era tended to have a great visual aesthetic, (at least outside of seasons nine and eleven) and on that front it did the comic strip style with justice; sometimes even the CSO added to the comic strip feel wonderfully, as did Delgado's grand performance as the Master. I'd even go so far as to say that now and again I remember a comical moment from the era and it makes me smile - whether in The Silurians where the Doctor gladly invites himself into Keith's house, or in Frontier in Space where the Master does a bit of travel reading of The War of the Worlds.
I could go on but I've said more than a mouthful already... The bottom line is that I struggle with the Pertwee era. I have problems and issues with it and at the same time I really want to like it, even if it can't be in the realms of love.