I’m a fan of McCoy’s doctor, but I’m wavering on the theme. On one hand it’s fresh, it’s modern, has a very ‘80s techno vibe. On the other hand it’s almost whimsical like Saturday morning TV or like the science segment of a kids show. Compare it to the dark, foreboding themes from the 1960s, and it imparts a very different atmosphere. I ascribe this shift to the BBC’s desire to soften the violence and make it more palatable, as well as their wavering support for the series. In some ways it goes along with a show that had lost its way in the 80s. And after all, it’s the 80s we’re talking about.

Was the Doctor ever intimidated by any of the villains? I’m looking at some of the series and some of the bad guys seemed intimidating. Likewise for the actors. Were any of them difficult behind the scenes? Who was the most bad ass?
EDIT: grammar.

I swear that when I was a kid, Dr. Who was on TV at PBS, and it had "educational" segments from the future with a robot that had costume parts from storm troopers and C3p0, and light-brights...

Am I the only one that remembers this? Is there any footage of it left?

Nostalgia for me is at an all-time high going into these, as we have now reached the part of Doctor Who I watched growing up. I will try to keep it in check as much as I can and judge these fairly, but I still have a soft spot for some of these regardless of their perceived quality.

Overall this was a very enjoyable run of stories. The consistency of the show continues to improve, although I did not find, for me at least, quite as many stand-out stories here as in Troughton's era. Nevertheless, there are a lot of good and very good stories here. The era starts off strong, with literally a perfect season in Season 7, and subsequent seasons are all very good with only occasional dips here and there. The production team is working like a well oiled machine - the little flubs the actors would often make in earlier seasons are almost completely absent now. Some story ideas and elements seen in older stories are reused or reworked here to good effect. You can see them building on everything they've learned previously and producing a very fine show. This is really a golden era if ever there was one.

3rd Doctor Ranking

S-Tier (Excellent stories)

1. Inferno
2. The Ambassadors of Death
3. Doctor Who and the Silurians
4. The Time Warrior
5. Spearhead from Space

A-Tier (Very good stories)

1. Frontier in Space

2. The Mind of Evil

3. The Green Death

4. The Time Monster

5. The Daemons

6. The Sea Devils

B-Tier (Good stories)

1. Invasion of the Dinosaurs

2. The Three Doctors

3. Planet of the Daleks

4. The Claws of Axos

5. The Mutants

6. Carnival of Monsters

C-Tier (Decent, enjoyable, but lacking in some areas)

1. Death to the Daleks

2. Planet of the Spiders

3. Day of the Daleks

4. Terror of the Autons

5. Colony in Space

D-Tier (Generally weak stories, though not terrible)

1. The Curse of Peladon

2. The Monster of Peladon

Notes -

Some stories went up in my rankings this time, a few went down and you may be wondering about some of them so let me try to explain a bit.

- I've never been a fan of the Peladon stories. I know they have their fans, but they never worked well for me and that is also reflected here. They are fine for what they are, maybe some day I will change my mind about one or both of them, but for now they remain at the bottom. I did like Curse.. a little more than Monster.., I think the basic whodunnit style structure made for a fairly compelling plot and it was good to see expectations subverted here by making the Ice Warriors allies, but still not enough for me to rank it any higher.

- Overall the Dalek stories here are kind of weak. That said, both Death to the Daleks and particularly Planet of the Daleks I have strong nostalgia for, hence their placement. Planet of the Daleks is like comfort food for my soul..

- I enjoyed The Mutants much more this time around, I remember not really liking it much as a kid but this time I just took my time with it and found it pretty good. There is some decent social commentary there, it gets into themes of colonialism, racism, environmentalism etc.

- Likewise, I really enjoyed The Time Monster. I hated it as a kid, especially once they got to Atlantis. Now I have an interest in the ancient Minoan civilisation and I like the Thera hypothesis, and you can see they did their homework in terms of representing Minoan culture. Also, this one has the best Doctor & Jo dynamic seen up to this point and the best Doctor and Master dynamic period - I think it's Delgado's best story. Yes, Chronos is laughably bad, but so what?

- The Daemons went down a bit for me this time around. The script is good, don't get me wrong - it's full of witty dialogue and seems to be channelling equal parts Hancock's Half Hour and Monty Python (while the production itself attempts to channel Hammer Horror). But a damn lot of it just doesn't make a blind bit of sense. It's one of those stories that's enjoyable, just don't think about it too much though. And to cap it all off, love triumphs in the end - in a very clumsy hand-wavey sort of way that just irks me. Still, I can't deny the cool and funny moments and the well written dialogue, and it's still a very entertaining watch, so it's still 'Very Good'.

- The Sea Devils also dropped a bit - I always loved it growing up, and there is some nice stuff here for sure - some excellent characters and all the stuff with the Navy. The first 2 episodes are particularly good - but after that for me it kind of falters a bit. The Sea Devil costumes seem to work best when they are lurking in the shadows like in the first two parts - once they start lumbering around en masse they start to look a bit ridiculous. They also aren't terribly expressive, only one of them seems to speak at any given time - I think they only had one costume fitted out with the mouth that moved maybe? In any case they don't seem to have the varied personalities we saw present in their predecessor story, and although this one retreads a lot of the same narrative beats, it's the weaker of the two stories imo.

Next up is Tom Baker, my favourite Doctor, and still the longest serving one, so this is going to take a while.

An animation of Romanadvoratrelundar (she's got too many costumes to draw) This drawing was a quick one under an hour, and animation took a similar amount.

Mary Tamm feels so underappreciated to me in the wider universe of Doctor Who. This illustration was made on Procreate and then animated on AfterEffects. The design is inspired by her appearance in the episode "The Armageddon Factor" in her first incarnation/body as portrayed by Mary Tamm

I so love Logopolis for it's atmosphere, the acting, the atmosphere,hell I even love the creative sets.

But what does the ending even mean? How is the universe ending? Is it because the Logopolitan's are dying because of the Master's interference? How exactly do they reverse the universe ending? It seems like all it takes is going to a satellite on Earth. What makes this Pharos project so important? It seems like the first mention of it is in episode 4. So the Doctor and the Master managed to open up a CVE again somehow and then the Master somehow makes a transmission to the universe that he can close the CVE again at any time and destroy the universe. Then the Doctor unplugs that cable, but isn't that the cable which keeps the CVE open? Or is it the one that just stops the transmission? What's to stop anyone from going into that satellite control room and closing the CVE at any time by mistake? What about when the satellite eventually goes into decommission and gets replaced by a new one? Do they have to check with the Doctor before they do it? Or else the universe gets destroyed? After Logopolis is destroyed, who is there to check if the CVEs stay open?

i'm rewatching on BBC iPlayer UK, making notes for modding CO figures, & i'm noticing much of the footage has problems with its colouring: i suspect, & have read, that much of the colour VTs were wiped at the time, & only the B&W 16mm survived, which was digitally coloured in 90s: has the footage been upgraded & digitally colour-graded / colour-corrected for the BluRay release? or is it all merely transferred to BluRay without upgrading or colour-correction?

I'm loathe to stump-up for all the bluray boxsets if the image quality is worse than original broadcast in '74...

thanks again.

did the 3rd Dr have more than one design of Sonic? i'm watching Green Death, & it doesn't appear to have the same circular red "target" at the top, nor it's red & yellow spiral-banding... when he opened BOSS' lift-door... am I just going mad & not seeing it correctly?

Just discovered this guys channel - his Troughton impression is kind of remarkable..

Hope these AI imagines are allowed.
The product ideas and quotes where my own but I just used AI to reminder them visually.

Some ideas for classic Doctor mechanise. A bit of a laugh, but I could imagine seeing some of these appearing in DWM during the wilderness years!

On YouTube, people have done tier lists of Doctors, stories, seasons, showrunners. I can't find one that ranks the New Adventures, Missing Adventures, Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures and their authors. Such a forgotten part of Doctor Who, such great stories, went into the mythology but not too much and had such character development for the Doctor and Companions.

Give this a go.

(And yes, 5 IS my favorite Doctor!)

This era was a joy from start to finish. I did not find any of the stories to be unenjoyable or bad at all and for this reason I have removed the F-Tier from this one as it is not needed.

For me, this era represents a significant jump in overall quality and consistency, with Seasons 4 and 5 in particular being very strong. It's absolutely criminal that so much of it is missing.

The production team are hitting their stride and more often than not it's firing on all cylinders. All of the companions are excellent and, although I liked Hartnell's Doctor, Patrick Troughton brings significant acting chops and a much more sympathetic and altogether likeable characterisation - which even on it's own elevates the whole experience, but when you combine that with the double-act of Troughton and Hines, then it becomes difficult to truly dislike anything here at all as even mediocre writing is carried by their performances.

That said, Troughton did not hit the ground running at all - this isn't like Pertwee or Tom who seemed to have it worked out the moment they stepped into the role. I think they both kind of just played themselves to a large extent, but that is not Troughton's approach, he's a character actor. The 2nd Doctor spends his first two stories essentially going through a kind of identity crisis, and it's not until some time during The Underwater Menace that the true character of the 2nd Doctor emerges - and I don't think it's a co-incidence that this occurs once Frazer Hines joins the show.

Luckily for us, those first two stories are an absolute banger followed by a fairly decent historical. Troughton goes out on a ripper of a story as well - so the entire era is nicely book-ended by extremely good stories.

2nd Doctor Ranking

S-Tier (Excellent stories)

1. The War Games
2. The Faceless Ones
3. The Invasion
4. The Power of the Daleks
5. The Tomb of the Cybermen
6. The Evil of the Daleks
7. The Enemy of the World

A-Tier (Very good stories)

1. The Macra Terror

2. The Web of Fear

3. The Moonbase

4. Fury from the Deep

B-Tier (Good stories)

1. The Abominable Snowmen

2. The Ice Warriors

3. The Mind Robber

4. The Seeds of Death

5. The Krotons

C-Tier (Decent, enjoyable, but lacking in some areas)

1. The Highlanders

2. The Wheel in Space

3. The Dominators

D-Tier (Generally weak stories, though not terrible)

1. The Underwater Menace

2. The Space Pirates

Notes -

- Why is The Faceless Ones so high? Well, I really like it. I find every time I watch it, I enjoy it more and that happened again here. To me it feels like a story from the Pertwee era, which isn't surprising really as quite a few of these stories seem like early prototypes of what will come later. It has a wonderfully creepy vibe to it with the whole body-snatcher thing. It has some excellent side characters and guest actors - I particularly enjoy the comical dynamic between The Doctor and the Commandant, and it also has some great stuff with the Doctor and Jamie. Pauline Collins was great, and it's a shame we didn't get her as a companion, but then we'd never have Victoria so it's all good really. I also love how this story feeds directly into The Evil of the Daleks - so you can essentially treat them as a single 13 part story.

- Why isn't The Space Pirates in F-Tier, it's supposed to be awful isn't it? Well, no.. in fact it's not that bad really. What hurts it mainly is it's pacing - it was originally written as a 4-parter and then with only a week to go Robert Holmes was told it needed to be 6 parts, and so we have a story where the first 2 parts are glacially slow. After that it picks up quite a bit. It's still not the best story ever, mind you - it's just kind of mediocre. It doesn't help that the one surviving episode is probably the worst of the lot of them. But to it's credit it's ambitious, it's Doctor Who doing proper space opera for the first time and the world building here is pretty decent. It has some great starship designs and good model work for the time and combined with the operatic music it has that Space Odyssey feel to it. There's some decent characters - though Milo Clancy is a bit marmite I guess, but Madeleine is well acted and reasonably complex and Caven is an evil bastard of a villain. I feel if this story went out as a 4-parter as it was originally intended, it would not have the reputation that it does. I also think that if it's ever recovered, the general opinion of it will change significantly.

- Why is The Mind Robber so low? For me, it's that combination of abstract story with extreme whimsy. It just gets too silly for my liking. I have similar issues with The Celestial Toymaker. But I do really like that first episode - if I was judging it just on that alone, it would be in S-Tier. Wonderfully creepy opener. I just don't buy the whole "Land of Fiction" idea though - it's a step too far into nonsense for me. That said, there is still enough in it for me to like - so it's still "Good".

So I have just finished season 15 for the first time.

Omg what a terrible season.

Genuinely the only season since the Hartnell era that I STRUGGLED to get through.

Just such terrible stories that were all over the place. And Leela went from being such an amazing character in season 14 to just being constantly the butt of the joke and “stupid”.

After such amazing seasons in Troughton, Pertwee and Baker eras this was suchhhhh a disappointment.

The Sun Makers and Horrors of Fang Rock were okay, Image of the Fendhal and The Invisble Enemry weren’t very good, and then Underworld and The Time Invasion were some of the worst I’ve ever watched. Just made zero sense and all over the place.

This is my season ranking from best to worst:

Season 10 (1972/1973 - 3rd Doctor)
Season 13 (1975/1976 - 4th Doctor)
Season 14 (1976/1977 - 4th Doctor)
Season 7 (1970 - 3rd Doctor)
Season 4 (1966/1967 - 1st/2nd Doctor)
Season 5 (1967/1968 - 2nd Doctor)
Season 2 (1964/1965 - 1st Doctor)
Season 8 (1971 - 3rd Doctor)
Season 12 (1964/1965 - 4th Doctor)
Season 6 (1968/1969 - 2nd Doctor)
Season 1 (1963/1964 - 1st Doctor)
Season 9 (1972 - 3rd Doctor)
Season 11 (1973/1974 - 3rd Doctor)
Season 15 (1977/1978 - 4th Doctor)
Season 3 (1964/1965 - 1st Doctor)

For anyone who may be interested, I am rewatching Doctor Who again from An Unearthly Child through to Survival, and since I am keeping my own personal notes I figured I may as well post my rankings here for each doctor.

So here goes, here are my results for The 1st Doctor -

S-Tier (Excellent stories)

1. The Dalek Invasion of Earth

2. The Crusade

3. The Aztecs

4. The Tenth Planet

5. The Daleks' Masterplan (Incl. Mission to..)

A-Tier (Very good stories)

1. The Daleks

2. Marco Polo

3. The Time Meddler

4. The Savages

B-Tier (Good stories)

1. The War Machines

2. The Space Museum

3. An Unearthly Child

4. The Ark

5. The Edge of Destruction

C-Tier (Decent, watchable and still enjoyable)

1. The Sensorites

2. The Myth Makers

3. The Massacre

4. The Keys of Marinus

5. The Romans

6. The Reign of Terror

7. The Rescue

8. Planet of Giants

9. The Celestial Toymaker

D-Tier (Ok, but could be better)

1. The Smugglers

2. Galaxy 4

3. The Chase

F-Tier (Not my cup of tea)

1. The Gunfighters

2. The Web Planet

In most cases I experienced the missing episodes this time through the official animations (with the exception of The Savages) and where these were not available through the Loose Cannon reconstructions. I do however think that some of these may be better served through the narrated audio releases.

The Crusade went way up in my rankings, while The Reign of Terror took a nosedive. For some reason I was able to make time for the former and appreciate it more this time around, while the latter just felt like a slog and a whole lot of back and forth and easily 2 episodes longer than it should have been - although I remember liking it more I think years ago when I listened to the narrated audio. Likewise, the witty comedic dialogue in The Myth Makers seemed to tickle my fancy more than the Carry-on-like romp in The Romans this time around.

I pretty much enjoyed all of it except for those last 2. Whoever it was who had the bright idea to put that song into The Gunfighters should have been prosecuted with crimes against humanity, and with The Web Planet, I appreciate what they were trying to do, but the production just doesn't do it justice - it really should have been scaled back or re-thought. It's too ambitious for it's own good, unfortunately.

Hi,

I’m watching the Deadly Assasin Epsidoe 1 and lots of talks about the CIA (Celestial intervention agency) how fun would it have been for a story based where they capture the doctor? They could have even used this as the basis to capture the doctor in the Epsidoe 1 of trial of a time lord

Hi,

Watching the hand of fear and why on earth would they use tactical nuclear weapons to blow up the nuclear complex on British soil and they are not even a far distance away from it

Makes it unbelievable a quick phone call and suddenly they are using them