Did Tom Baker really stay too long?

[Volpone]

Tom Baker and Matt Smith are, for my money, the two actors who most make me believe a man is an ancient alien. In particular, Baker had a nice bit in the beginning of "Pyramids of Mars," where Sarah is goofing with him and he gets very distant and strange.

Working through the old series for the first time in decades and the early Peter Davison episodes aren't bad. The costume isn't great, but they play up the cricket aspect enough with the character that I'll tolerate it. And Davison gives us bits of 1 and 2 very well in mannerisms. He reverses the polarity a couple times, but isn't particularly convincing as 3. Anyway, my point is that he is a markedly different Doctor than 4 and he shows potential for his take on the character, but they never really give him scripts that let him work with it.

Then you get into Colin Baker and you can see him working his ass off with what he's given, but you just can't polish a turd. The writing is bewildering, the costume is embarrassing. I'd love to have seen an episode where the story makes sense and the character isn't written as overtly rude so he could just play the arrogance in mannerisms and such--maybe put him in more or less traditional morning dress. (There's an episode or two where he gets out of the coat and you don't quite realize how horrible the waistcoat is so you picture the striped trousers as grey instead of yellow and ignore the bright red spats and if he'd just had a dark coat you'd have a pretty classic Doctor costume.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I'd love to have seen an episode where the story makes sense and the character isn't written as overtly rude so he could just play the arrogance in mannerisms and such.

Vengeance on Varos.

 

[Ithekro]

The Sixth Doctor is sort of reasonable in the Two Doctors. And he doesn't wear the coat (too hot in Spain). Plus one gets the nice banter between him and Toughton, who is always good to have around.

So far all the actors that play the Doctor have come out as being the Doctor. None of them have actually failed to be the Doctor. My likings lean more to Two, Four, and Eleven of late. I know people who vastly perfer Three and Twelve. Some like One, Six, and Nine. Some like Five, Seven, and Ten. Eight rarely gets mentioned unless they follow the audios, but McGann seems like a good Doctor.

 

[Timewalker]

Eight rarely gets mentioned unless they follow the audios, but McGann seems like a good Doctor.

I have never listened to any of the audio adventures, so my opinion of Paul McGann's Doctor is based on the movie, the webisode "The Night of the Doctor," and McGann's brief appearance in "The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot."

McGann was superb from the get-go. He nailed the character of the Doctor perfectly. It's an absolute shame that he didn't get a TV series to really show what he could do with the part, and we fans are the poorer for it.

Tom Baker will always be my favorite, but I suspect that McGann would have overtaken Davison as my second favorite, with no trouble at all.

 

[Ithekro]

He did fine with his version of Shada. Having heard/seen both Baker and McGann's versions of that story. You basically have what they got done with before the strikes stopped production as told with connecting narration by Tom Baker, and then you have the audio version that takes into account the Five Doctors (which used a scene from Shada to take the Doctor out of time and space) to which the Fourth Doctor and Romana miss that adventure...the Eighth Doctor remembers, eventually that he was suppose to do something, and goes back to Gallifrey to pickup Lord President Romana and K-9 and goes to where they left off after punting up the canal.

 

[The Four Doctor]

Tom staying long enough to be THE DOCTOR for much of John and Jane Public did hurt the show in the long run. It's better that the actor not stay so long that his image sticks in the public mind.

 

[Timewalker]

Tom staying long enough to be THE DOCTOR for much of John and Jane Public did hurt the show in the long run. It's better that the actor not stay so long that his image sticks in the public mind.

So it's better that he just be a one-season wonder like Eccleston?

It's a pretty common thing among Whovians that the first Doctor they see tends to be their favorite, or at least high on their list.

Everyone's got their favorites, and are undoubtedly glad for however much time that actor played the part, whether it's a movie and a webisode, a single season, or seven years.

 

[Ithekro]

Tom Baker was the Doctor long enough that, at least in the United States, where they ran on PBS mostly reruns of his seven years, with the later seasons of Pertwee then Davison, Colin Baker, and McCoy, the popular ones were the Tom Baker episodes, to the point that if a random person saw an episode of Doctor Who in the United States in the 1980s it would probably have been Tom they saw. So that when parody comes up in the 80s and 90s, its always the Doctor with the long multi-colored scarf. That image really didn't get challenged for the general public until David Tennent and Math Smith started appearing a lot on BBC America.

 

[Timewalker]

Tom Baker was the Doctor long enough that, at least in the United States, where they ran on PBS mostly reruns of his seven years, with the later seasons of Pertwee then Davison, Colin Baker, and McCoy, the popular ones were the Tom Baker episodes, to the point that if a random person saw an episode of Doctor Who in the United States in the 1980s it would probably have been Tom they saw. So that when parody comes up in the 80s and 90s, its always the Doctor with the long multi-colored scarf. That image really didn't get challenged for the general public until David Tennent and Math Smith started appearing a lot on BBC America.

It depends on the PBS station. I'm in Alberta, and the PBS station we got was Spokane, Washington. I started watching Doctor Who in 1982, when they were running the Key to Time sequence (btw, if you're ever trying to introduce someone to Classic Who, "The Pirate Planet" is not a good choice; only a promise made to a friend kept me watching long enough to get to the excellent "Stones of Blood"). KSPS aired The Five Doctors even though they hadn't yet finished the Tom Baker episodes, but since it was near the end of his run, I didn't feel too chronologically dislocated.

KSPS ran the Davison episodes, then the Pertwee ones, then finally the Hartnell and Troughton stories. Keep in mind that this was sometimes 6 days/week, with regular single episodes on weekdays and a whole story on Saturday night. I don't recall whether the Colin Baker stories were shown out of synch with their original broadcast times, but Sylvester McCoy's stories were pretty much caught up.

So by the end of the '80s, I'd seen all of the Classic Who stories available then, from the First through Seventh Doctors. Of course they did show more of the Tom Baker stories, more often than the others, but I certainly didn't mind that.



As for nuWho... sometimes it's been on CBC, but more recently on the Space Channel, which is not part of my basic cable. Since I subscribe to Netflix Canada, I might as well just wait for it to show up there, since the only thing that would really induce me to subscribe to a cable channel for one program would be if Clara leaves.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

The Sixth Doctor is sort of reasonable in the Two Doctors.

Thats because Bob Holmes was writing him. And Peri was also not the bimbo that everyone wants to bang, too, in that story.

So far all the actors that play the Doctor have come out as being the Doctor. None of them have actually failed to be the Doctor. My likings lean more to Two, Four, and Eleven of late. I know people who vastly perfer Three and Twelve. Some like One, Six, and Nine. Some like Five, Seven, and Ten.

Agreed. Even the wretched Warrior is wonderfully played by John Hurt, and comes off as a war-torn Hartnell-like figure.

Eight rarely gets mentioned unless they follow the audios, but McGann seems like a good Doctor.

You don't know what you're missing. He's amazing in BF. Except for...

He did fine with his version of Shada. Having heard/seen both Baker and McGann's versions of that story. You basically have what they got done with before the strikes stopped production as told with connecting narration by Tom Baker, and then you have the audio version that takes into account the Five Doctors (which used a scene from Shada to take the Doctor out of time and space) to which the Fourth Doctor and Romana miss that adventure...the Eighth Doctor remembers, eventually that he was suppose to do something, and goes back to Gallifrey to pickup Lord President Romana and K-9 and goes to where they left off after punting up the canal.

See, here I don't agree - McGann just doesn't quite deliver Doug Adams' material the way Tom Baker did in the released portions of Shada.

Really, they should never had made that animation/audio adaptation of Shada with 8. If they'd waited, then they'd get the ultimate version with Tom Baker himself performing. Now there's a Lost Story they could've sold in a great deal.

 

[Volpone]

1) For some reason, RetroTV skipped "Vengeance on Varos." :/
2) At the risk of being a smug turd, the first time I saw "The Two Doctors," I watched it with Patrick Troughton and Colin Baker (true, they were sitting on a stage and I was surrounded by thousands of other fans at the Minneapolis Armory, but it's still pretty cool).
3) I'm glad it wasn't just nostalgia, RE: "The Two Doctors," I mean, yes, there were some clunky bits in it that didn't make sense, but I still found it a lot stronger than a lot of the previous episodes.
4) For that matter, I just wrapped up "Timelash" today. Unfortunately, I pretty much missed the first half--a friend from college was on the phone up to 6 minutes into it and then I was beset by reception problems and spend most of the remaining hour fighting with my antenna and cable. That said, the second half was fairly strong. I mean apart from the Doctor kind of just forgetting about Peri (but that kind of fits this incarnation's persona) and it didn't really make sense why his portrait (as #3) was hidden in a wall (or why there was a mirror hidden behind his portrait behind a wall), but he acted like The Doctor. I just kept watching it and thinking "It's such a shame he's dressed like a rodeo clown."

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I hate, hate, hate Timelash. Its an awful story for DW, and one of the worst episodes I've ever seen.

 

[Marc]

I hate, hate, hate Timelash. Its an awful story for DW, and one of the worst episodes I've ever seen.

Read a claim once that Paul Darrow's over acting in Timelash was a return for Colin Baker's over acting in the Blake's 7 episode City On The Edge Of Forever.

 

[ATimson]

Really, they should never had made that animation/audio adaptation of Shada with 8. If they'd waited, then they'd get the ultimate version with Tom Baker himself performing. Now there's a Lost Story they could've sold in a great deal.

At the time, Baker had (repeatedly?) told Big Finish that he wasn't interested in playing the Doctor again. They had no reason to suspect that Baker would change his mind ten years down the road

 

[Timby]

It's a pretty common thing among Whovians that the first Doctor they see tends to be their favorite, or at least high on their list.

It's funny you say that, because my favorite (Troughton) is actually the last one I got around to watching, and the first one I saw (Tennant) is near the bottom.

 

[Timewalker]

It's a pretty common thing among Whovians that the first Doctor they see tends to be their favorite, or at least high on their list.

It's funny you say that, because my favorite (Troughton) is actually the last one I got around to watching, and the first one I saw (Tennant) is near the bottom.

It's something that a lot of people have said over several decades, long before the nuWho series started.

But yeah, it doesn't always follow that the earlier they are in a person's viewing history, the higher on the list of favorites. Tom Baker was my first Doctor, he's my favorite, but Paul McGann leapfrogged several places easily (I'd seen all the Classic Doctors before the 1996 movie came out). And Matt Smith isn't the most recent Doctor I've seen, but he is firmly at the bottom of the list and I suspect he will stay there.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Matt Smith was often, if not always, the best part of every episode. Even the worst episodes have him trying his best to save the material, and always is entertaining and addictingly good. Its too bad his last series and a half failed him.