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Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way or another
I am sure it did my physical health no favors to stay up late with an old serial of Doctor Who (1963–), but the mental health benefits of watching Sylvester McCoy face down a tough crowd of gods with misdirection and timing are incalculable.
Dark carnivals are older than Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney, or even Robert Wiene, but The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988) may have the edge on metafiction with the insatiable audience of its Psychic Circus, a sort of austerity Nielsen family impassively consuming crisps and popcorn as they rate the gladiatorial parade of desperate or starstruck acts, among them a sly intergalactic explorer, his youthful companion light-years from her planet, and an earnest anorak of a superfan still chattering about his complete memorabilia right up until the ringmaster picks his melted glasses out of the grease spot of his failed turn in the spotlight. Grounded in the desert wastes of Segonax, the circus which used to be an emblem of freedom and imagination has been parasitized into a blood-engine of amusement on demand, cannibalizing punters and performers alike: "So long as you entertain us, you may live. When you no longer entertain us, you die." The conceit could only feel more on the nose if it had aired for the program's untimely cancellation rather than the finale of its next-to-last-until-revival season.
Fortunately for metaphor, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy has more than self-satire going for it. Beyond the Doctor-companion parody, T. P. McKenna's Captain Cook makes a wickedly funny foil in his own right, a crashing colonial fossil whom even death cannot prevent from perpetrating one more long-winded, self-aggrandizing anecdote of his exotic travels, while the "unusual little specimen" of Jessica Martin's Mags, so initially docile for her punk-streaked Goth-chic, turns out the kind of recklessly delightful ally with whom Sophie Aldred's Ace, even without a good rucksack's worth of Nitro-9, can take on killer clowns with laser beams and high-kick a zombie at the endless eye of a well. The truculent stallholder played by Peggy Mount leaves off crabbing about vagabond riff-raff and hippie weirdos and beams in approval at Gian Sammarco's Whizzkid in his chipper jumper and bow tie until this Carter-esque innocent on a bicycle, too, asks her the way to the Psychic Circus. "Everyone who's up to no good goes there. We locals wouldn't touch it with a barge pole." When it was still the pride and delight of the star-ranging circus folk whose merry prankster bus weathers among the dunes like the sold-out promises of the '60's, her disdain might have come off as plain conservative prejudice; under the new management of the Sunday-suited, stone-faced trio in the otherwise deserted stands, it is obviously the forewarning of a horror film. Whatever permeates the candy-floss posters and canvas-swathed shadows of the circus, it has split the original troupe between those like Ricco Ross' Ringmaster and Deborah Manship's Morgana who enable its mechanism out of survival and those who have been destroyed in resisting it, like the tragic lovers of Dee Sadler's Flowerchild and Christopher Guard's Bellboy or the even farther gone case of Chris Jury's Deadbeat, a broom-pushing burnout whose cryptic mumblings veer off in fright from the fortune-teller's crystal ball as if he's glimpsed in it something even more fearful than the Hanged Man her pack turned up for the Doctor. Most willing of all its servants is the baleful harlequin of Ian Reddington's Chief Clown, whose Glasgow-grinning whiteface and delicate double-voiced gestures seem designed to induce coulrophobia in anyone who didn't enter the big top with it, like Ace who had to be half-cajoled, half-dared past her touchy reluctance to take a chance on the Psychic Circus. "I've never liked clowns," she declares, which feels like a joke in itself considering who she's traveling with. From his introduction trying to teach himself out of Juggling for the Complete Klutz through the finale where the transparent patter of conjuring tricks turns suddenly to the real thing, as old and strong as an amulet snatched up through a smash of illusions, the serial showcases the quirky, slapstick side of the Seventh Doctor which cannot be separated from his restless, dangerous responsibilities, murmuring as a wind of chaos picks up around him, "Things are beginning to get out of control quicker than I expected." He rattles an optimistic tattoo on a pair of spoons, blinks at a ball that went up and never came down, drops all of his juggling clubs at the blasé revelation that a successful performance only means "you last longer." His Tarot card comes true, but he might as accurately have drawn the Fool strolling out to the brink of disaster, the Magician with his mountebank's table of props. Accused of being an old hippie himself, he flashes a self-deprecating peace sign. Despite the climactic identification of its antagonists as the "Gods of Ragnarok," the serial makes little use of Norse myth beyond the visual name-drop of runestones demarcating the boundaries between layers of time, but I might have to waive my firelike default of Loki to accommodate a dark-haired little man with a paisley scarf and a Panama hat and a funny umbrella not breaking stride as a dread realm self-destructs behind him, the trickster who brought down the house. "La commedia è finita!"
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was written by Stephen Wyatt, directed by Alan Wareing, and part of the tantalizing, short-circuited continuity of script editor Andrew Cartmel, and if its pacing is odd—the first of its four episodes plays more like a prologue than a slow burn, while its ending wraps up so fast it seems to be missing more than one beat—its production design is wonderful. Instead of a safe distanced gloss of futurism, it jumbles itself up with displaced components of the past like one of the unmooring soundscapes that Mark Fisher loved to write about, a confused and curdled nostalgia. We can be treated to the iconically sfnal sight of the pennants of the Psychic Circus fluttering against a cloudless sky in which a ringed planet ghosts like a daymoon, topped almost to camp by the addition of an alien biker gunning his space hog toward the tent like a hard rock album cover, but the circus itself is trapped in a degraded loop, as slightly unreal as if reconstructed from Ace's childhood memories of "kids' stuff" that was at once "naff" and "boring" and "creepy." A hearse full of white-faced clowns isn't scarier just because some of them are robots, but their use of colorful kites to hunt down desperate fugitives makes the sense of a nightmare, painted eyes staring down out of the sun. The ringmaster raps and freestyles echt '80's, but the robo-conductor which guards the derelict bus recites as it strangles intruders, "Any more fares, please? Hold tight, please. Ding, ding," like a murderbot by Flanders and Swann. Behind the billowing curtains are stones as old as shed blood, and behind the stones? Ace and the Doctor arrive at the circus thanks to a piece of mechanical junk mail which materializes inside the TARDIS to project its canned spiel, but they'll walk away from it only because a nazar of blue and white glass functions exactly as it folklorically should. The effect is an unsettling collage, recognizably put together wrong. No wonder the gods in their human guises look like the dead hand of a squarer age of TV. The worst fate the circus reserves for its victims is not obliteration, but conformity: "That's what you like, isn't it? Taking someone with a touch of individuality and imagination and wearing them down to nothingness in your service." Even the Doctor, we are warned by someone who should know, can't hold out forever against their hunger, their boredom, and their fickle, vaporizing tastes. And yet the story doesn't feel like it's meant to wound its audience, the one on the other side of the fourth wall or the Internet Archive as the case may be; it feels like double-speaking, which is what Seven does best, no less weird and entertaining for what it might be warning between the lines. The Doctor does an escape act. Ace activates a half-dismantled robot with the characteristically resourceful and violent mutter, "This thing had better work or I'll kick its head in." There are stilt-walkers and an astonishing request for an unissuable ticket in double time. Even around the inevitable quarry, the location shooting looks odd and dry and real. I imagine I would like a poster for the tour of the Boreatic Wastes, but I'll pass on the early collection of Ganglion pottery. This imagination brought to you by my local backers at Patreon.
Dark carnivals are older than Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney, or even Robert Wiene, but The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988) may have the edge on metafiction with the insatiable audience of its Psychic Circus, a sort of austerity Nielsen family impassively consuming crisps and popcorn as they rate the gladiatorial parade of desperate or starstruck acts, among them a sly intergalactic explorer, his youthful companion light-years from her planet, and an earnest anorak of a superfan still chattering about his complete memorabilia right up until the ringmaster picks his melted glasses out of the grease spot of his failed turn in the spotlight. Grounded in the desert wastes of Segonax, the circus which used to be an emblem of freedom and imagination has been parasitized into a blood-engine of amusement on demand, cannibalizing punters and performers alike: "So long as you entertain us, you may live. When you no longer entertain us, you die." The conceit could only feel more on the nose if it had aired for the program's untimely cancellation rather than the finale of its next-to-last-until-revival season.
Fortunately for metaphor, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy has more than self-satire going for it. Beyond the Doctor-companion parody, T. P. McKenna's Captain Cook makes a wickedly funny foil in his own right, a crashing colonial fossil whom even death cannot prevent from perpetrating one more long-winded, self-aggrandizing anecdote of his exotic travels, while the "unusual little specimen" of Jessica Martin's Mags, so initially docile for her punk-streaked Goth-chic, turns out the kind of recklessly delightful ally with whom Sophie Aldred's Ace, even without a good rucksack's worth of Nitro-9, can take on killer clowns with laser beams and high-kick a zombie at the endless eye of a well. The truculent stallholder played by Peggy Mount leaves off crabbing about vagabond riff-raff and hippie weirdos and beams in approval at Gian Sammarco's Whizzkid in his chipper jumper and bow tie until this Carter-esque innocent on a bicycle, too, asks her the way to the Psychic Circus. "Everyone who's up to no good goes there. We locals wouldn't touch it with a barge pole." When it was still the pride and delight of the star-ranging circus folk whose merry prankster bus weathers among the dunes like the sold-out promises of the '60's, her disdain might have come off as plain conservative prejudice; under the new management of the Sunday-suited, stone-faced trio in the otherwise deserted stands, it is obviously the forewarning of a horror film. Whatever permeates the candy-floss posters and canvas-swathed shadows of the circus, it has split the original troupe between those like Ricco Ross' Ringmaster and Deborah Manship's Morgana who enable its mechanism out of survival and those who have been destroyed in resisting it, like the tragic lovers of Dee Sadler's Flowerchild and Christopher Guard's Bellboy or the even farther gone case of Chris Jury's Deadbeat, a broom-pushing burnout whose cryptic mumblings veer off in fright from the fortune-teller's crystal ball as if he's glimpsed in it something even more fearful than the Hanged Man her pack turned up for the Doctor. Most willing of all its servants is the baleful harlequin of Ian Reddington's Chief Clown, whose Glasgow-grinning whiteface and delicate double-voiced gestures seem designed to induce coulrophobia in anyone who didn't enter the big top with it, like Ace who had to be half-cajoled, half-dared past her touchy reluctance to take a chance on the Psychic Circus. "I've never liked clowns," she declares, which feels like a joke in itself considering who she's traveling with. From his introduction trying to teach himself out of Juggling for the Complete Klutz through the finale where the transparent patter of conjuring tricks turns suddenly to the real thing, as old and strong as an amulet snatched up through a smash of illusions, the serial showcases the quirky, slapstick side of the Seventh Doctor which cannot be separated from his restless, dangerous responsibilities, murmuring as a wind of chaos picks up around him, "Things are beginning to get out of control quicker than I expected." He rattles an optimistic tattoo on a pair of spoons, blinks at a ball that went up and never came down, drops all of his juggling clubs at the blasé revelation that a successful performance only means "you last longer." His Tarot card comes true, but he might as accurately have drawn the Fool strolling out to the brink of disaster, the Magician with his mountebank's table of props. Accused of being an old hippie himself, he flashes a self-deprecating peace sign. Despite the climactic identification of its antagonists as the "Gods of Ragnarok," the serial makes little use of Norse myth beyond the visual name-drop of runestones demarcating the boundaries between layers of time, but I might have to waive my firelike default of Loki to accommodate a dark-haired little man with a paisley scarf and a Panama hat and a funny umbrella not breaking stride as a dread realm self-destructs behind him, the trickster who brought down the house. "La commedia è finita!"
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was written by Stephen Wyatt, directed by Alan Wareing, and part of the tantalizing, short-circuited continuity of script editor Andrew Cartmel, and if its pacing is odd—the first of its four episodes plays more like a prologue than a slow burn, while its ending wraps up so fast it seems to be missing more than one beat—its production design is wonderful. Instead of a safe distanced gloss of futurism, it jumbles itself up with displaced components of the past like one of the unmooring soundscapes that Mark Fisher loved to write about, a confused and curdled nostalgia. We can be treated to the iconically sfnal sight of the pennants of the Psychic Circus fluttering against a cloudless sky in which a ringed planet ghosts like a daymoon, topped almost to camp by the addition of an alien biker gunning his space hog toward the tent like a hard rock album cover, but the circus itself is trapped in a degraded loop, as slightly unreal as if reconstructed from Ace's childhood memories of "kids' stuff" that was at once "naff" and "boring" and "creepy." A hearse full of white-faced clowns isn't scarier just because some of them are robots, but their use of colorful kites to hunt down desperate fugitives makes the sense of a nightmare, painted eyes staring down out of the sun. The ringmaster raps and freestyles echt '80's, but the robo-conductor which guards the derelict bus recites as it strangles intruders, "Any more fares, please? Hold tight, please. Ding, ding," like a murderbot by Flanders and Swann. Behind the billowing curtains are stones as old as shed blood, and behind the stones? Ace and the Doctor arrive at the circus thanks to a piece of mechanical junk mail which materializes inside the TARDIS to project its canned spiel, but they'll walk away from it only because a nazar of blue and white glass functions exactly as it folklorically should. The effect is an unsettling collage, recognizably put together wrong. No wonder the gods in their human guises look like the dead hand of a squarer age of TV. The worst fate the circus reserves for its victims is not obliteration, but conformity: "That's what you like, isn't it? Taking someone with a touch of individuality and imagination and wearing them down to nothingness in your service." Even the Doctor, we are warned by someone who should know, can't hold out forever against their hunger, their boredom, and their fickle, vaporizing tastes. And yet the story doesn't feel like it's meant to wound its audience, the one on the other side of the fourth wall or the Internet Archive as the case may be; it feels like double-speaking, which is what Seven does best, no less weird and entertaining for what it might be warning between the lines. The Doctor does an escape act. Ace activates a half-dismantled robot with the characteristically resourceful and violent mutter, "This thing had better work or I'll kick its head in." There are stilt-walkers and an astonishing request for an unissuable ticket in double time. Even around the inevitable quarry, the location shooting looks odd and dry and real. I imagine I would like a poster for the tour of the Boreatic Wastes, but I'll pass on the early collection of Ganglion pottery. This imagination brought to you by my local backers at Patreon.
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Even around the inevitable quarry, the location shooting looks odd and dry and real.
IIRC, shooting this one on location and outdoors in a tent for the interiors was a last-minute production change turned happy accident-- the tv studio had unexpectedly had to be shut down for asbestos removal.
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Everything I have seen of the Seventh Doctor, I have frankly loved. I need to see the rest.
IIRC, shooting this one on location and outdoors in a tent for the interiors was a last-minute production change turned happy accident-- the tv studio had unexpectedly had to be shut down for asbestos removal.
I saw that! Felix culpa big time. Like a practical effect, it looks simultaneously so much more real and not.
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(Sophie says now that several things that went on during their time wound up in the BBC's health & safety manual under How Not To Do It.)
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Agreed that it's just as well that he wasn't on fire, but I feel it would still have been somehow in character if he had been.
(Sophie says now that several things that went on during their time wound up in the BBC's health & safety manual under How Not To Do It.)
(I am not actually surprised to hear it.)
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Thank you. It was drawn from an inference in the serial, but also behind it is probably a goddess speaking in Peter S. Beagle's The Folk of the Air (1986): "I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in my name, the young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn's roots. I am rut and flood and honeybees. Since you asked."
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The novel itself is uneven—I have never been sure if it would be funnier and/or scarier for the reader who has ever lived in Berkeley or belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism, both of which feature centrally with serial numbers thinly filed off—but it's weird and numinous and even if it doesn't all hang togther in the same plot, its language is wonderful and the otherworldliness of its goddess and the uncanniness of its magic distinguish it from the run of urban fantasy it sounds like when described and the parts that hurt most in it are people, not anything they can call up from time or outside of it, and some of them are also very funny and beautiful, too. I don't love it the same way as The Last Unicorn, but I discovered it in college and its human characters are as good as its nonhuman ones and I love the effective stage direction, "A Winnebago the size of a rural airport filled the windshield."
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That is truly marvelous in a Douglas Adams sort of way.
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". . . and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first."
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I grew up on this book and its two sequels Deep Wizardry and High Wizardry (there are now many more sequels, but they didn't exist between 1983 and 1990) and they remain extremely important to me; there are affirmations about the universe in them that I agree would resonate with you.
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The "New Millennium" editions are, I believe, only available as ebooks from her site - but the originals are all in print and available in the usual formats and the usual places. So new readers have a choice as to which ones they want to try. I like the originals - but those are the ones I read first, long ago!
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(I was excited just to see you'd randomly quoted Seven in your entry header; I am now incoherent because it wasn't random after all. My childhood love for Seven and his imaginative, weird, metaphorical, angry era doesn't always lend itself to words, so I'm very glad for yours. And that you enjoyed it!)
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*hugs*
Thank you so much. I did, and I am glad to have been able to put words around it. My attachment to Seven was much later acquired, but very definite.
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Have you watched Delta and the Bannermen? It gets a lot of mockery, but I think its take on alien biology is fascinating, and for some reason I really enjoy the Fifties flavor.
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Thank you! Four and Seven are the Doctors I have somehow seen the most of, which seems to be working out for me, although I will always take suggestions.
Have you watched Delta and the Bannermen? It gets a lot of mockery, but I think its take on alien biology is fascinating, and for some reason I really enjoy the Fifties flavor.
I have not, but as soon as we had finished The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
[edit] I was charmed from the minute it became clear the show would never have the budget for Disneyland, so crash-landed instead in a holiday camp in Wales.
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XD (I know this is - wisely - not directed at me. But I saw it! lol)
Since you're reading Peter at the moment, have you ever seen Kinda, Snakedance, Enlightenment, Frontios or Castrovalva? (Five does a different kind of weird to Seven, and Peter didn't always appreciate those so much, but I and a lot of other fans including Steven Moffat and Rob Shearman do, and I'm pretty sure you would too.) Caves of Androzani is still in the running for the best regeneration story. Give Robert Holmes the chance to kill the Doctor and he goes all out for a kind of anti-colonialist Jacobean revenge tragedy IN SPACE, and it is one of Peter's best performances (not that he's not always good).
I already persuaded you to Varos for Six, and, alas, poor Six, he had better luck on audio! If you do want some more Six, Revelation of the Daleks is very well done, and Terror of the Vervoids is an enjoyable Agatha Christie in space type episode (with bonus Honor Blackman).
One is probably the one I love the most after Seven in some ways - the first TARDIS team and their initial first series as inherently one long serialised adventure are strangely comforting and wonderful. The production team never let the fact that they were filming not only in 1960s BBC limitations stop them, but in the beginning they were shoved into an archaic and too-small studio at Lime Grove and still thought big. If you haven't ever seen the first ever episode, you should. (The next three eps of An Unearthly Child have cavemen. I like them anyway, but most people do not, lol. The skins the actors wore apparently came with genuine fleas.)
I find it hard to rec things for One from a non-Who position, as well as avoiding longer serials and all the serials that don't exist. The Romans (you'd get what the source material was, lol), The Space Museum, The Time Meddler. (if The Myth Makers was ever found, I'd be waving it at you right away but it's 100% lost. I have read the novelisation and heard the audio recordings that survive). I think you'd like The Tenth Planet (I've only watched it once, so I'm hazier on it, but I feel like you would) - it's missing most of the last episode, but it's been reconstructed reasonably and some sequences survive, including one of the most important in DW history. (OBv. hazards and slowness of very elderly TV, but this era has a great deal of charm and more imagination and varietry than pretty much any era after until the 1980s.) The Aztecs is probably my favourite & is high up in my all time list of classic who serials - time travelling dilemmas & lovely use of all four TARDIS team members, especially Barbara, while the Doctor gets a charming subplot, but, as you can guess from the title, it comes with a warning for the fact that even if 1960s UK TV weren't horrible at brownface anyway, they really didn't have a stash of South American actors of any kind to hand. so YMMV upfront, although John Lucarotti was evidently going hard on the 'to educate' bit of the BBC mantra.
Two is even more burninated, but Pat TRoughton was so wonderful. If you haven't already seen The Mind Robber, you should try it. My other faves of his are all pretty long, but but but The War Games may be 10 parts but it's still amazing and there are slower-paced two parters. (It was written in alternating parts by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks and that seemed to really work - each part moves and uncovers a deeper layer.) The go-to for almost everyone as fave for Two is Tomb of the Cybermen, which I have mixed feelings about, but it is genuinely eerie and survives and is only four parts. (I love the INvasion, but it's 8 parts with 2 missing - so MUCH of Pat's run is like this.) Enemy of the World is a six parter, but it's whole, it was found in 2013, it's really great, ditto te Web of Fear except someone kidnapped episode 3 to sell to a collector before they could send it back to the BBC. (It's all go in the burninated TV world.)
Three has a lot of six-parters. The ones in space are very beige and often dull, but sometimes they have Roger Delgado and for that I can forgive them anything.
Try: Spearhead From Space, Terror of the Autons (Roger Delgado on earth and in 4 parts), and The Green Death is six parts, but it's a Doomwatch-type delight. ("Gone to get you a maggot!" "I'm up on the slag heap with the professor!" "I never thought I'd fire in anger at a dratted caterpillar..." "Fellow's bright green and dead!") Oh, The Daemons, which is 5 eps and gets woolly towards the end, but it's overall v enjoyable and riffs on your kind of source material.)
My true love with Three, though, is s7, which after Spearhead, are 3 seven parters. I think they each are, in different ways, really interesting and great, but I get that you do not necessarily want to watch a whole series of 1970s TV to find out whether or not you agree. If you can find space for a 7 parter, though, the last serial of that season, Inferno is genuinely something special and I think you would love it. (Silurians, the second, is also great in lots of ways, but it is very slow and it depends on how you feel about kazoos. But then I also dearly love The Ambassadors of DEATH so I am just reccing you the whole season, aren't I? Ignore me...)
I know lots of people here have talked about Four - Horror of Fang Rock, City of Death, Androids of Tara, Stones of Blood, State of Decay, Warrior's Gate and Keeper of Traken, maybe The Ark in Space strike me in particular as being potentially interesting to you as well as good, and if you have patience for a six-parter, Genesis of the Daleks is worth it, not just because of its position in the Lore. And I'll wave Chris Boucher's Image of the Fendahl about here again, because nobody else will and I think you'd probably appreciate it. (My underrated fave!! XD)
*ahem*
*sidles out, looking shifty*
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I actually have! It was not my introduction to Doctor Who, as that would inevitably have been some unremembered Tom Baker on PBS, but I went back for An Unearthly Child after being surprised by Hartnell when the Harvard Film Archive ran Escape (1948) as part of their complete retrospective of Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 2011. I want to say I watched it with my father, who had never seen it, either. I am sorry to hear about the authenticity of the fleas.
It should go without saying, but you can be shifty in my comments any time.
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I am sorry to hear about the authenticity of the fleas.
I think it was harder on Alethea Charlton and Derek Newark, lol.
It should go without saying, but you can be shifty in my comments any time.
♥
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Delta love!! ♥
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I suspect it of being basically sillier than most of the other Seventh Doctor stories I've seen, but it was full of wonderful touches like the commentary of the bees, the beekeeper himself, and Ray who felt so much like a potential companion, even a potential dry run for Ace (more fix-it, less blow-up) that I was not surprised to read behind the scenes and see that her character had been conceived as such. The scene in which the Doctor retrieves the hostages of Mel and Burton from Gavrok struck me as essentially Seven, in that he has nothing on his side beyond a cold rage of justice and a refusal to be deterred by intimidation or insults and he has calculated correctly: despite all of Gavrok's threatening contempt, the Doctor takes his companion and the innocent bystander of the camp director out of there unharmed. And I respect Gavrok's actor for playing the entire scene while apparently chewing on a raw ham hock.
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It took everyone a little while to get into their stride - by and large, s24 is much lighter than the next too, but there are still some big ideas.
And Delta does have so many great touches. I'm very fond of it myself (not even for childhood reasons!)
The scene in which the Doctor retrieves the hostages of Mel and Burton from Gavrok struck me as essentially Seven, in that he has nothing on his side beyond a cold rage of justice and a refusal to be deterred by intimidation or insults and he has calculated correctly:
That's always struck me as the moment in s24 when Seven truly arrives. *nods* Ray is lovely! I'm glad we got Ace, but it is interesting to wonder what they'd have done with Ray, rather than the time-displaced pawn-of-Fenric Ace, which Ray could hardly have been.
Goronwy is good. Some fans speculate he might be a time lord or other alien, and who knows? Maybe he is just in touch with his bees. XD
I like Mr Burton, too. A rare authority figure who adjusts to an alien invasion (two, benign and hostile) and steps up, despite everything.
And I respect Gavrok's actor for playing the entire scene while apparently chewing on a raw ham hock.
Don Henderson is reliably great. My of my flisters had a nice time following him about old TV.
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First Doctor
An Unearthly Child Episode 1 (& part of 2 if you like) - the first episode. It's lovely. (I am not going to deter you from watching the other 3 eps if you want. I even like them, but as I said earlier, they feature a lot of cavemen and are not popular. Wild first serial choice. Nothing changes. XD)
The Aztecs
The Space Museum
The Time Meddler - all 3 of these are good and all deal interestingly with actual time travel issues and debates (see my Aztecs note above, tho).
The Romans - DW's editor saw Carry on Cleo and went, "I'll have some of that." Not as great as Cleo obv, but a lovely time nevertheless. (Best watched after you've met this TARDIS team, see above.)
The Tenth Planet (1 ep partially missing) - not an ep to start with for One, because it's his final story and William Hartnell's condition was already deteriorating and he's absent for some of what we do have as well. It's the first Cybermen story, the first proper base-under-siege story, and it's eerie and the tension between the Cybermen who want to 'save' the humans and the humans who feel pity for what the Cybermen have done to themselves is interesting. Also Ben and Polly who are otherwise unfairly burninated.
The War Machines is also great if you're liking One. And Ben and Polly intro, also non-burninated.
Second Doctor
The Mind Robber - if you haven't already watched this (you might have done??) - it's the trippiest 1960 episode there is. It might all be a dream, who knows? (5 eps)
Tomb of the Cybermen - for my caveats see above, but everyone else would rec it and it is marvellous for Two himself and the Cybermen are very eerie and great again.
6 parters, but very good (and Web has lost an episode): Enemy of the World - future spy shenanigans and dopplegangers and surprisingly great. Recovered in 2013.
Web of Fear - the Yeti are in the Underground - v good, v creepy, funny furry monsters, a weird enemy and the Brigadier arrives (that is the episode that was stolen and sold).
And I know, I know, but because it is amazing and if you're ever up for it: The War Games - epic 10 part finale, where the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land in the trenches in WWI but everything is way weirder than it seems and the layers peel away and away until finally the Doctor has to face his own people for the first time. Also for fans of this TARDIS team (adorable): contender for one of the most heartbreaking endings. It also explains a LOT about Three.
Third Doctor
Spearhead From Space - alien invasion story, but 4 parts, good place to start, shot on film for emergency/strike reasons, introduces the marvellous Liz Shaw and the Doctor exiled to Earth to work with UNIT.
(As I said, I love season 7, which this kicks off, and if you like the THree-Brig-Liz combo, I recommend the whole thing, despite the 7 parters of 70s slowness. They're all really into ethical dilemmas and this TARDIS team has a very adult, smart feel. But also, the last one, which is:)
Inferno (7 parts) - don't drill into the centre of the earth! The Doctor has had enough of his exile, there's green goo (of course) and a parallel earth (for pretty much the only time in DW), and a day the Doctor cannot save.
The Terror of the Autons - (4 parts) HELLO ROGER DELGADO. ♥ (Also the lovely Katy Manning.)
The Daemons - (5 parts) but occult shenanigans in yr 1970s quaint village, with the Reverend Masters, a white witch and the BBC trying to interview the devil, and even the Doctor must believe in some magic, maybe.
The Green Death - ecological horror with GIANT MAGGOTS in Wales, thanks to the horrors of capitalism and AI and closing down the pit. (6 eps)
Fourth Doctor
The Ark in Space (might well have influenced Alien even. Also. bubblewrap ahoy.)
Horror of Fang Rock - I know this has been recced to you, the lighthouse one, with Leela and a green blob.
Image of the Fendahl - more occult goings on, but Chris Boucher style (I've said enough on this one. I love it, everyone is like, it's fine, it's not that great,
Stones of Blood - occult shenanigans again! But also Amelia Rumford, who is one of the most awesome guest characters.
Androids of Tara - shameless and wonderful Zenda pastiche. ("Next time I shall not be so lenient!")
City of Death - Douglas Adams, Julian Glover, actual real Paris. You will have been recced this, but if you haven't seen it yet, I have to second the rec.
State of Decay - Vampires!
Warrior's Gate - one of the most deeply weird ever, in the best way, I think. defies description. (These two form a sort of loose trilogy with Full Circle coming first. That has a very cool SF theme; personally I don't find it as great as the other two, but if you like the s18 vibe, which you might, it's worth knowing.)
Keeper of Traken (I'm having a sudden feeling you might have watched this? But it's an SF fairy tale with a serpent in the utopian garden.) Again, this forms a sort of loose trilogy, with Logopolis (Four's final, fighting entropy, adventure) and Castrovalva, Five's first story, but they can all still be watched individually. Logopolis and Castrovalva are more closely linked.
Fifth Doctor
Castrovalva - The Doctor goes nowhere in the style of MC Escher.
Kinda - sort of Buddhist/anti-colonialist fable? Studio bound but nevertheless weird and compelling, especially "YOu can't mend people!" (Have you watched this? YOu may have done?)
Snakedance - sequel to Kinda, also v good, entirely different setting.
Enlightenment - the Eternals race sailing ships in space. This is actually the third part of a trilogy (again) - Mawdryn Undead, which I ought to have recced because it features not only two time periods, two Brigadiers, and the world's worst assassin, but an alien undead David Collings with spaghetti on his head almost getting to play the Doctor. (The second installment, Terminus is also kind of cool and well directed by B7's Mary Ridge, but it isn't as entertaining as Mawdryn or as good as Enlightenment, but if you're enjoying yourself, the whole trilogy is a fun watch.)
Frontios - giant woodlice vs a desperate colony at the end of the universe. I love it. ("Frontios buries its own dead.") (Others would disagree, but hey.)
caves of Androzani - probably not the best place to start with Five, but it and Peter are both very good indeed, as I said.
Sixth Doctor
Revelation of the Daleks - giant funeral planet and Daleks, what could possibly go wrong? Not a personal fave but very well done indeed and a good guest cast.
Terror of the Vervoids - as I said, low-level fun Agatha Christie mystery, the most standalone part of the Trial arc.
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Just to defuse expectations, all recommendations remain subject to the thing where for whatever reason it is harder for me to watch significant amounts of television than film, but I appreciate the time and thought that went into this list! We appear to have stumbled onto an extensive but incomplete cache of classic Who on the Internet Archive, by which I mean we discovered last night that it contains multiple reconstructed serials including Shada, but is missing the entire final season of the Seventh Doctor as well as, hilariously, because for obvious reasons I felt like rewatching it, Vengeance on Varos.
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I have even less expectation of the longer ones I included, but Two is so badly burninated, and there were a couple others i couldn't not mention no matter how slight the odds on lightning striking in the right place for it to happen. Fyi is all. ♥️
Have fun with the stash - even if it has the bad taste to exclude both seven and varos!
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I do like Mary Morris.
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The only ep I can think of offhand that I would recommend (I have many I love but that doesn't make them good) is Robots of Death, but you've probably already seen that one.
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There was in fact an absolute lack of quarries!
The only ep I can think of offhand that I would recommend (I have many I love but that doesn't make them good) is Robots of Death, but you've probably already seen that one.
Predictably, I loved it. (And some time later, wrote fic.)
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I forgot you'd read it! Several ice ages have come and gone since 2017. Enjoy the fic!
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reads and delights
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*hugs*
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Blissful, all of it.
Nine
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Thank you!
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I would definitely give it a shot. I am extremely fond of Seven as both a character and a Doctor.
(What did you love about Five? Despite having just enjoyed Davison's memoir, I have seen very little of him as the Doctor and sufficiently long ago that what I have is the sense of liking him, not any details of why.)