The Classic Doctor Who Thread (1963 to 1989/1996)

[By Jove its holmes]

Fact of the Day: Tom Baker was the first DW series lead who wasn’t a veteran of the Second World War. He had the mercy of a late birth.

Topic

[Dave]

We rewatched Sleep No More recently and it was better than I remembered. I think it’s one of those episodes that works better the second time around when you have a fuller idea of what’s going on.

[tombow]

You mean The Beginning DVD box set, released 30th January 2006, BBCDVD1882, containing An Unearthly Child, The Daleks, The Edge of Destruction and a 30 minute reconstruction of Marco Polo? 

oh…I think that’s the one. Grabbed it impulsively in HMV, looking forward to getting into it!

[Ben Saunders]

There are only a couple real stinkers, fans of things love to exaggerate just how “bad” mediocre things are. The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe & Kill The Moon & In The Forest Of The Night are the only Moffat era episodes I remember simply not liking at all. The Gatiss stuff is definitely D tier, although I like the Robin Hood episode honestly. It’s fun.

Oh and Twice Upon a Time I guess but I really just pretend that didn’t happen. Dr Who was cancelled immediately after the credits rolled on The Doctor Falls. Sad really.

[Warbodog]

The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe & Kill The Moon & In The Forest Of The Night

Agree on two, but Kill the Moon was another one I didn’t mind that much. The Doctor’s gleeful “the Moon’s an egg!” let me roll with the stupidity, like Picard cracking up at the absurdity of TNG’s offensive Irish episode.

I just remember finding most of series 9 and 10 not very fun and annoying in places, but definitely some bright spots.

[Ben Saunders]

This is such a genuinely satisfying moment. Zoe’s bubblewrap dress is something else though.

[Ben Saunders]

A nice nod to how common it was for video communication to be used in the Troughton era, they were doing it all the time, and in black and white too, a very tasteful bit of nerdy fanservice

One of the most genuinely horrible things the series has ever done, and somewhat understated.  Something that really sticks with you.

Is that subtle eyeshadow on Davison, very 80s.

[Doomitron]

I have always liked the “After all, that’s how it all started” ending. Its funny with the Doctor gets the presidency again when they do absolutely nothing with it, Colin Baker had to remind Saward about it at the beginning of Trial so he’d reference he got deposed in a throwaway line, that’s how redundant that was. Although apparently they did a Big Finish story where the Time Lords called back 5 to act as president and its really good, I haven’t listened to it though.

[Ben Saunders]

Yeah, the ending of The Five Doctors is all smiles.

Interesting to realise that “I’ll explain later” is a Sawardism, Fivey says it in just about every episode, and Three says it at the end here.

Davison loves to act like he’s going to go one way down a corridor then decide to go another way, or to toss a coin and disobey it, etc. He does that all the time too.

[Rushy]

There are only a couple real stinkers, fans of things love to exaggerate just how “bad” mediocre things are. 

I think people just have different criteria for what makes a truly terrible episode. I don’t feel like exaggerating when I say I could write off about half of the Moffat era episodes as total rubbish. 

[Doomitron]

Interesting to realise that “I’ll explain later” is a Sawardism, Fivey says it in just about every episode, and Three says it at the end here.

Those aren’t even the best example of it, wait until you get to Timelash.

[Ben Saunders]

Warriors of the Deep next, one I’ve seen multiple times for some reason. Davison fans must really love eating shit.

[Ben Saunders]

Why does Davison hate his companions? Why is he so snarky? It’s genuinely unpleasant. Is he trying to be funny?

[Rushy]

Why does Davison hate his companions? Why is he so snarky? It’s genuinely unpleasant. Is he trying to be funny?

IRL Davison felt that his Doctor should only travel with Nyssa, and it eventually bled into the show with his clearly displeased reaction at Tegan’s return. 

In universe, he’s probably got a love-hate relationship with them. Tegan is a complainer, and Turlough literally tried to murder him. 

[Doomitron]

Tegan is half the reason Davison’s era is even watchable half the time.

[Ben Saunders]

I remember liking her a lot more the first time I watched through this era. But I don’t remember Five being as much of a prick either.

Warriors of the Deep really doesn’t build up to the Silurians at all. Just boom, there they are in medium shot two minutes into the episode. They don’t build up to the Sea Devils either because they name them in dialogue almost immediately. They could have at least made their appearance a surprise but they didn’t. This is one of the most obvious scripts I’ve ever watched, which I guess is a change of pace from the more obtuse stuff the show was doing around this time.

“Oh look, a gas that is deadly to marine and reptile life. I wonder if this will come in handy later”.

“Face it, Tegan. He’s drowned!”

[Rushy]

Time Crash Five is basically the completion of Davison’s evolution into a version of the Doctor that has zero fucks left to give

[Doomitron]

Yet somehow he’s remembered for being the nice one, which is probably entirely Time Crash’s fault because 10 goes into a soliloquy about how 5 wasn’t grumpy which he absolutely was.

[Warbodog]

I thought his reputation was the ineffectual pacifist depressed at being surrounded by death.

[Rushy]

Yet somehow he’s remembered for being the nice one, which is probably entirely Time Crash’s fault because 10 goes into a soliloquy about how 5 wasn’t grumpy which he absolutely was.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Davison played it like a younger version of Hartnell, and I can definitely that. 

[tombow]

I started watching The Daleks for the first time tonight, just seen the first 3 eps. I love the evocative look and feel of the city, and how cheekily cunning the Doctor is cooking up the mercury thing to stay.  The “primitive people living in long term conflict with spooky tech people” theme reminds me a lot of Face of Evil (the first Leela story), I’m guessing it influenced it somewhat. I was laughing a lot at the struggle with the Dalek and how they built up tension with it’s horrific appearance when they open it. I can only imagine how much people’s minds were blown seeing all this on early 60s TV.

[Warbodog]

It was obviously exciting for kids, but there was no shortage of gloopy alien monsters in films, and some on TV like Quatermass in the 50s.

/spoilsport

[Ben Saunders]

Please enjoy these vertically stretched images from an article on Enlightenment I was reading on my phone

[Dave]

[Professor Flibble]

Idk why anyone’s ever taken this edgelord’s opinions seriously. 

[Dave]

I don’t know who that is, but generally I think it’s accepted form when someone dies to not immediately insult them for having hung around too long.

[Professor Flibble]

She wrote that TARDIS Eruditorium thing, not that I’ve ever read it or would want to read it. A pretentious arsehole who says some very wild, usually quite nasty and baseless things about the cast and crew. And for some reason, people willingly feed her ego. She’s just a self-important bully.

[Ben Saunders]

I’ve been reading the TARDIS Eruditorium, and while a few of the posts are undeniably pretentious and I don’t agree with all of them, I see no reason to attack them over anything. Saying Nick Briggs can be an uninspired writer isn’t a controversial opinion, and I don’t feel like doing research into if Janet Fielding is a TERF or not – ignorance is bliss.

[Dave]

Some corners of fandom can be very nasty and negative.

It makes me appreciate all the more that we don’t have that kind of outlook here.

[Doomitron]

Checked quickly to see if I ever used a source from an ‘Elizabeth Sandifer’ for either the Second or Sixth Doctor Wikipedia articles I edited so I could promptly replace it with a non-shithead, but thankfully her academic expertise must’ve eluded me both times.

[Flap Jack]

Fucking hell. If Richards had done things that were genuinely immoral I can understand making a “complicated legacy” comment when you hear that he’s died, but not if the negative side was just that you thought the BBC Books range was mediocre!

Elizabeth Sandifer has written genuinely great critical essays about Doctor Who for her “TARDIS Eruditorum” series that Flibble mentioned (if you’ve been around on Who social media long enough you may have been linked to her pieces while she was still writing under her deadname, IIRC Andrew Ellard was the one who made me aware of her), but at the same time she has some absolutely bizarre and off-putting hangups.

The things that spring to mind:

– A number of years ago she decided that she would no longer write essays about Big Finish stories, despite it being a standard feature of the blog to take detours into expanded media. She planned to write about “Master” for a bonus essay in the collected version of the 7th Doctor essays, but she changed plans before it was out. This may have been a response to Big Finish platforming transphobes like James Dreyfus, but the only time I saw her directly answer why, she just said she found Big Finish’s output to be too derivative and uninteresting to cover, and compared it to the MCU.

– She hated the Chibnall era so much that she initially ended the TARDIS Eruditorum at the end of the Moffat era, but when news broke that RTD would be returning as showrunner, she complained about it on social media. Her reasoning being that RTD’s stuff was guaranteed to be worth writing essays about, but due to the sequential nature of the blog, she would have to cover Chibnall in full if she wanted to cover RTD2. Like she actively resented the fact that one of her favourite TV shows gave her a reason to be interested in it again.

– On Twitter at one point, MrTARDIS tweeted something positive about a Chibnall era episode, and she got into his replies to say that he can’t possibly like the episode in question because it was objectively bad. He argued back, and in response she essentially just repeatedly denied the existence of subjectivity, while also making quote tweets and subtweets suggesting he was trolling and borderline harassing her. This was the moment where I decided my feed would be better off without her posts.

[Professor Flibble]

I’ve been reading the TARDIS Eruditorium, and while a few of the posts are undeniably pretentious and I don’t agree with all of them, I see no reason to attack them over anything. Saying Nick Briggs can be an uninspired writer isn’t a controversial opinion

Saying Nick Briggs helped John Hurt waste the last years of his life and using Justin Richards’ death as an opportunity to slag him off, I don’t think that’s just a little bit of harmless criticism.

[tombow]

I really like that Sandifer blog. I’ve read it quite a lot for it’s episode reviews and Alan Moore analysis. I bought her political ebook ten years ago too. I remember her becoming a controversial figure during the “gamergate” online fights for sticking up for a trans person who was on the right side but had a bunch of historic weird online behaviour bought up by the “bad people” to discredit them. I remember thinking it was a bit of a shitshow on both sides tbh – the gamergaters were bad, but the battle against them attracted some odd people who’s behaviour and internal conflicts were too easy for the bad side to mock. 

Anyway I’m still watching The Daleks and I’ve picked up some more possible influences –
The tribe leader saying “fear breeds hate, hate breeds war” sounds like what Yoda says in the Star Wars prequels “fear leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side, etc” and the basic idea of being turned into a fascist cyborg with a funny voice

Saru’s race in
Star Trek Discovery – a nice pacifist race sharing a planet with a ruling cyborg race who persecutes them, and there being twists in what happened in the past between the two

maybe this one’s a bit tenous, but Back to the Future when the peaceful pacifist guy is incited into fighting by them threatening his girlfriend?

[tombow]

Checked quickly to see if I ever used a source from an ‘Elizabeth Sandifer’ for either the Second or Sixth Doctor Wikipedia articles I edited so I could promptly replace it with a non-shithead, but thankfully her academic expertise must’ve eluded me both times.

she spent the first few years of her writing career as Philip before transitioning (not a secret, her old books are released under that name)

[Doomitron]

There’s no Sandifer in any of the sources I compiled regardless.

[Jonathan Capps]

Some corners of fandom can be very nasty and negative.
It makes me appreciate all the more that we don’t have that kind of outlook here.

[Dave]

Ha!

[Technopeasant]

I remember her becoming a controversial figure during the “gamergate” online fights for sticking up for a trans person who was on the right side but had a bunch of historic weird online behaviour bought up by the “bad people” to discredit them. I remember thinking it was a bit of a shitshow on both sides tbh – the gamergaters were bad, but the battle against them attracted some odd people who’s behaviour and internal conflicts were too easy for the bad side to mock

In an era without privacy that is all any Internet dust up is going to be. Which is why people should probably focus less on the biographies and more on the contentions in any given debate. Seeing how noone has a monopoly on vice or virtue. Not that Gamergate in particular had any real contentions to actually speak of.

[Professor Flibble]

What an absolute prick.

[Dave]

“But let’s not make this all about me.”

[Flap Jack]

I’m pretty sure this is how Elizabeth Sandifer remembers the “don’t be a piece of shit while you’re alive” meme.

[Nick R]

For all that I might sometimes disagree with Elizabeth Sandifer’s opinions, IMO she’s is by far the best Doctor Who critic out there (in my experience it’s not even close), and I hope her excellent Sandman/Gaiman piece wins the Hugo.

In this case, I have no opinion on Big Finish/Justin Richards. I generally think that it’s fair enough to bring up  criticisms of someone’s work after their death, but it’s a bit tactless to post that as a direct reply to a death announcement. And as Flap Jack said, “A complicated legacy” is the sort of phrase that has certain connotations, and that probably makes the whole thing come across more harshly.

But for fair context, Sandifer’s other posts in that thread after the initial “A complicated legacy…” one included a note of sympathy to Justin’s family and friends, which seems genuine enough:

As storms in Doctor Who fandom teacups go, I think this one ranks quite low on the Levine-Miles-Roberts scale.

[Dave]

“Anyway, my sympathy to his family and friends” is the redeeming part?

[Ben Saunders]

Some asshole in a community I’m in died recently and it really stretched the whole “don’t speak ill of the dead” concept to its limits for me. Guy was a prick but everybody was like ohh what a loss and essentially lying about how great they were. I just didn’t say anything but was very close to being like “are you sure we’re talking about the same person here?”

Obviously this doesn’t apply to the Big Finish writer who apparently just stayed at his post too long or something

[Doomitron]

Some asshole in a community I’m in died recently and it really stretched the whole “don’t speak ill of the dead” concept to its limits for me. Guy was a prick but everybody was like ohh what a loss and essentially lying about how great they were. I just didn’t say anything but was very close to being like “are you sure we’re talking about the same person here?”

Spill the beans.

[Spaceworm Jim]

I like Sandifer’s blog but I haven’t read it for a while. She’s always come across as dead pompous though, yeah. Her  book on They Might Be Giants was a bit of a wasted opportunity (co-written with Alexander Reed, mind).

I just saw Frontier in Space for the first time and really enjoyed it. I’ve always had a bias against Pertwee due to my family hating him and me being expected to follow suit. But he comes across as really kind in this story, and in what I remember of his last two series in general. I have a whole new appreciation of his interpretation of the character.

[Spaceworm Jim]

Is the edit function broken? It keeps making me reply instead of editing. And that space I’ve left between ‘Her’ and ‘book’ is doing my head in.

[Ben Saunders]

Frontier In Space is a good ‘un, the Pertwee era is a pretty consistently high quality throughout and the man himself is always putting in a strong performance. His friendship with Jo is especially delightful, and Jo is incredible in Frontier, particularly when she fights the Master’s hypnotism. Very good aliens, the Draconians, and some interesting and believable space politics. Spoilers for Planet of the Daleks I guess, but it’s just a shame the insane cliffhanger of the Master teaming up with the Daleks doesn’t go anywhere, and the following Dalek story has nothing to do with it.

[Spaceworm Jim]

Oh no worries about Planet of the Daleks spoilers. It was literally the first story I saw in 1994 or something. Hiding under the table as I was meant to be in bed. When I got caught I said ‘what IS that?’ while pointing at the TV. My mum said ‘that’s Doctor Who’ and I said ‘oh, like the knock knock joke!’ and my tiny twenty year old mind was blown.

[Professor Flibble]

I would have maybe some amount of respect or generally any consideration for El Sandifer if she’d ever actually made any meaningful contribution to Doctor Who or the conversation surrounding it. As far as I’m aware, all she’s done is write some essays as an outlet to personally slag people off and provide no evidence to back up her claims, and supposedly that gives her carte blanche as some very important figure in Doctor Who fandom. No. All it means is she can use the death of a writer as an opportunity to get a little jab in about his Doctor Who work and how supposedly mediocre it is. Oh, yeah, condolences, whatever. She thinks she’s above basic human decency cause she’s some hoity-toity academic. But her opinion is completely irrelevant. She’s not done anything to earn anyone’s respect. She’s never been interesting. It’d be one thing if Justin Richards once told her she was very smelly or something, but somehow I doubt that happened.

[Dave]

I’ve always had a bias against Pertwee due to my family hating him

I laughed at this. What did he do to earn your family’s ire?

[Author]

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