The Third Doctor - Jon Pertwee
There's a lot to love about the Third Doctor. Notable at the time for being the first Doctor in colour, he was a dashing man of action, a practitioner of Venusian Aikido and a gadgeteer par excellence. Of course, he was also crippled by the actions of the Time Lords (read BBC budgeting) and thus unable to travel in space and time for a couple of years. He also had the Brigadier, which allowed the show to engage in an ongoing pragmatism vs compassion debate.
Doctor Who and the Silurians
Speaking of that debate, it was perhaps most obvious in Doctor Who and the Silurians, an episode which expanded the clash to include the bureaucratic forces of Whitehall, thus creating a three-way tension - the Doctor's desire to do what was right regardless of the cost, the Brigadier's to do what was expedient to protect the world, and the civil servants' to do whatever didn't hurt the bottom line or the public image - which played off against a troubled first encounter between humanity and its predecessors on Earth, the Silurians.
This being said, the Pertwee years had several strong stories, including Inferno and the two Peladon stories.
On audio, the Third Doctor is perhaps best represented through the Companion Chronicles narrated by Captain Mike Yates - The Magician's Oath, The Vengeance of the Stones and The Rings of Ikiria - ultimately one of the more tragic companions, whose idealism led him to become an enemy in The Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which hadn't been done before.
The Fourth Doctor - Tom Baker
And now, the big one. Tom Baker had the longest run of any Doctor, and the longest scarf. He was a vast presence, literally and figurative, with his towering frame and booming voice, and the vast energy with which he filled the screen. In his later years the show was becoming increasingly doubtful of its own seriousness, with many nods to camera and some dodgy serials; like The Invasion of Time, which cemented the Time Lords not as distant cosmic observers, but as bureaucratic idiots who couldn't fight off an invasion without the Doctor and have an unnerving love of inflatable plastic furniture. On the other hand, when it was good...
City of Death
Many to choose from for Tom - Genesis of the Daleks is overlong, but excellent, and Pyramids of Mars and State of Decay represent the Gothic flair which served the Fourth Doctor well - but my pick of the bunch is City of Death, aka Doctor Who writes off a trip to Paris. The plot - later recycled, with bits of the unfinished Shada, by writer and script editor Douglas Adams for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - is a lovely conceit (an alien present in multiple times across Earth's history, from his perspective concurrently, seeks to raise capital for time experiments by persuading artists to create multiple copies of their greatest works and then storing them to be sold as the original in a later time), and the dialogue sparkles.
A shout out is also due to The Key to Time, an ambitious and partially successful attempt at introducing a significant arc plot into the show.
In audio terms, I would go with the quartet of stories The Sands of Life, The War Against the Laan, The Dalek Contract and The Final Phase, in large part for the cracking dynamic between the Fourth Doctor and the disingenuously named 'Cuthbert', played by David Warner (who also played an alternative version of the Third Doctor in the superlative Sympathy for the Devil).
There's a lot to love about the Third Doctor. Notable at the time for being the first Doctor in colour, he was a dashing man of action, a practitioner of Venusian Aikido and a gadgeteer par excellence. Of course, he was also crippled by the actions of the Time Lords (read BBC budgeting) and thus unable to travel in space and time for a couple of years. He also had the Brigadier, which allowed the show to engage in an ongoing pragmatism vs compassion debate.
Doctor Who and the Silurians
Speaking of that debate, it was perhaps most obvious in Doctor Who and the Silurians, an episode which expanded the clash to include the bureaucratic forces of Whitehall, thus creating a three-way tension - the Doctor's desire to do what was right regardless of the cost, the Brigadier's to do what was expedient to protect the world, and the civil servants' to do whatever didn't hurt the bottom line or the public image - which played off against a troubled first encounter between humanity and its predecessors on Earth, the Silurians.
This being said, the Pertwee years had several strong stories, including Inferno and the two Peladon stories.
On audio, the Third Doctor is perhaps best represented through the Companion Chronicles narrated by Captain Mike Yates - The Magician's Oath, The Vengeance of the Stones and The Rings of Ikiria - ultimately one of the more tragic companions, whose idealism led him to become an enemy in The Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which hadn't been done before.
The Fourth Doctor - Tom Baker
And now, the big one. Tom Baker had the longest run of any Doctor, and the longest scarf. He was a vast presence, literally and figurative, with his towering frame and booming voice, and the vast energy with which he filled the screen. In his later years the show was becoming increasingly doubtful of its own seriousness, with many nods to camera and some dodgy serials; like The Invasion of Time, which cemented the Time Lords not as distant cosmic observers, but as bureaucratic idiots who couldn't fight off an invasion without the Doctor and have an unnerving love of inflatable plastic furniture. On the other hand, when it was good...
City of Death
Many to choose from for Tom - Genesis of the Daleks is overlong, but excellent, and Pyramids of Mars and State of Decay represent the Gothic flair which served the Fourth Doctor well - but my pick of the bunch is City of Death, aka Doctor Who writes off a trip to Paris. The plot - later recycled, with bits of the unfinished Shada, by writer and script editor Douglas Adams for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - is a lovely conceit (an alien present in multiple times across Earth's history, from his perspective concurrently, seeks to raise capital for time experiments by persuading artists to create multiple copies of their greatest works and then storing them to be sold as the original in a later time), and the dialogue sparkles.
A shout out is also due to The Key to Time, an ambitious and partially successful attempt at introducing a significant arc plot into the show.
In audio terms, I would go with the quartet of stories The Sands of Life, The War Against the Laan, The Dalek Contract and The Final Phase, in large part for the cracking dynamic between the Fourth Doctor and the disingenuously named 'Cuthbert', played by David Warner (who also played an alternative version of the Third Doctor in the superlative Sympathy for the Devil).
No comments:
Post a Comment