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Sixth Doctor era-1987-89
Phoenix Lazarus
Posts: 17,306 Forum Member
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What did you think of the Sylvester McCoy era, companions Mel and Ash, and the stories of that time?
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Phoenix Lazarus
Posts: 17,306 Phoenix Lazarus
Posts: 17,306
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Only if you ask the question again, but this time with the highlighted errors corrected
As for sylvester as a doctor, he went from a comedic buffoon & a OMG what has happened to this show kind of a doctor (but i stuck with the show & sylvester out of loyalty) but redeemed himself to be a good actor to play the role & brought a very dark & cunning side to the doctor i had never seen previously.
Although tom baker remains my favourite doctor of all time, i have enjoyed every single actor to have portrayed him who have all brought their own unique style to the role.
Oh, and Mel's screaming!
Tom is my all-time favourite too!
I think The Fourth Doctor was the most alien of all the Doctors so far. Very Time Lordish. That's how I see Peter Capaldi playing the Doctor when he comes along properly at the end of August.
i found mel's screaming, in most part, obligatory and completely unnecessary rather than to emulate fear or dramatic point.
i don't get the 'time lordish' comparison a lot of people make. I think the doctor's character is very un timelordish and the reason why he ran away.
i will agree that that 4 was the most unhuman like of the incarnations at that point.
I loathed it all. I'm not one of those people who thinks it got better as it went on, I thought it was amateurish, ill-conceived garbage all the way through. I could only bring myself to watch it again for Nicholas Parsons and some quite good scenes with Daleks blasting things.
There were some great ideas, some of which have been continued in New Who; a darker Doctor hiding a long hidden secret; a complicated companion from a troubled family; and the suggestion that Ace hadn't met the Doctor by chance after all.
But there simply wasn't the sophistication in the writing or the production to effectively realise them at the time. What we ended up with was a Doctor and companion who couldn't act, cheap production values and desperate attempts to be quirky that just didn't work.
I watched Survival again recently. There are whole segments that feel like a cheap fan-made movie. That's pretty much how I felt about the show at the time.
It wasn't even worthy of CBBC. Just awful!
Don't get me started on Ash though, OP. Genuinely can't put into words what I thought about that character.
:kitty:
Oh, that reminds me, personally think Survival has it's moments too.
Yes, I think at times during The Seventh Doctor Era, there are some pretty crap stories.
The sets aren't all that, either. Looks like Mark Curry and Yvette Fielding knocked them together in one afternoon!
I concur with all of the above.
I also stopped watching after being a fan since I could remember (from Pertwee era) and while it was never cool to be a Doctor Who fan it did have a degree of kudos. After McCoy took over, even that degree of kudos vanished.
A TV program does not need to be very good at all to be a marked improvement on Time and the Rani. I didn't totally hate Paradise Towers though. If anything I'd rather watch that again than supposed "classics" like Ghostlight or The Curse of Fenric. I consider both of them to be a jumbled mess of motifs, themes and right-on "issues" cobbled clumsily together for no other reason than for the writers to show off just how clever and avant-garde they supposedly were. Anyway, even if there had been one or two good stories in Seasons 25 and 26 (I don't think there were any but that's by the by), they wouldn't make up for the unmitigated crud of The Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis and Battlefield. If I'd been BBC1 Controller I would have cancelled Doctor Who myself after watching them, and then I'd resign for allowing any license fee money to be wasted on them.
A concession to feminism, one presumes, by having a female assistant who is feisty and fights back, rather than just getting herself lost or kidnapped, scream for help and having to have things explained to her. Also an attempt to create a young character a lot of teenagers would find cool-although an internet check on Sophie Aldred, who played her, shows she was 25 to 27 years old, during her years with the show.
The writing and performance in Ghost Light, where you can absolutely see the Doctor transition from trying to puzzle out what's going on in the house, to being the one pulling the strings and making the house play by his rules, is beautiful to watch, and I think should be more of a template for modern stories - the Doctor shouldn't just suddenly have a revelatory insight that solves all the problems.
Tbh, I was being facetious there as there is no companion called Ash. ;-)
No direspect to McCoy - he tried his best, bless him. He still has fond memories and speaks well of it today!
But the BBC weren't exactly helpful were they?
I was quite relieved when it was rested to be honest. It's the ONLY time in my life that I felt embarrased admitting to watch it to my friends!! (I was in my late 20's)
I quite like McCoys doctor I think he plays him well but is let down by the writers who do actually come up with some good ideas but seem to struggle with having them play out on screen.
Ace was alright she was a prototype Rose really,the big problem once again was the writers,they clearly didn't have a clue about how a teenage girl would speak and it showed.
On the whole I thought Sophie Aldred did the best she could with some often cringe worthy dialogue
There were a lot of good story ideas in there (Paradise Towers has a great script, and it's only really the fact that every casting, design, acting and production descision was wrong that stops it being a classic, for example, while Ghost Light was a noble attempt at creating a genuinely clever and layered story that was designed specifically for the emerging VHS/watch it again to find the clues market, with Platt's only mistake being that he forgot to include a solution amongst all of his mystery).
Stories like Delta were a commendable attempt to make Who fun again after the insufferable faux-grittiness and oftentimes just plain nasty Saward era.
And with his tendency to bring in new or emerging writers, and the attempts to build upon and expand the mythology of the show, it really felt that under Cartmel Doctor Who was a show that was finally moving forward again, rather than constantly looking back as it did in the continuity porn of the late Davison/early Colin era.
And it's a cliched point to make, but yeah, Survival really did feel like the building blocks for the Rose/Powell Estate dynamic that made Doctor Who such a resounding success when it returned, so in that sense Cartmel was arguably decades ahead of his time in his vision for what would make the show work.
So, yeah, there were some very good intentions behind the scenes, and it's hard to hate something that is so clearly trying so hard.
But, really, for as much as its heart was in the right place, and for as much as Cartmel had the right ideas about how to salvage the show... it just wasn't really very good, was it?
Fenric, Rememberance and parts of Survival were great, no doubt, and since The Destroyer is one of my earliest TV memories I'll always have a masochistic soft spot for Battlefield, but the rest of it just doesn't work.
As lovely as they are as people, and as good as they have been to the fan community over the years, Sylv and Soph were very poor actors. Budget problems obviously contributed, but it's hard to watch a Seven story without thinking just how... cheap it all looks - the "fan video" comment above really hits the nail on the head there. And while it was nice to see JNT step back a bit, his tendancy to go for gimmicky guest stars to get headlines really hit its nadir with Ken Dodd. Then there was the woeful opening sequence/theme tune, the terrible incidental music, the poor effects (sure the budget was slashed to next-to-nothing, but other eras of Classic Who have done more with less - it feels more like a "that'll do, we'll just colour the sky pink with science later on" deal than a genuin labour of love), and, hell, even the Beeb rarely bothered advertising that a season had even begun...
It just wasn't very good. I think, given another season or two (or, more importantly, if shown a little bit of faith/money by the beeb) Cartmel could well have made some truly great Doctor Who. But seasons 24-26 weren't it.
But, still, they had good intentions.