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And Finally . . . It’s Not All Good, Is It?
Actually, It Is
Consider, as we have already done on several occasions, that we are discussing a television show whose active life span consumes no less than thirty-three years out of the fifty since it was originally broadcast. That is some two hundred and fifty separate stories, themselves divided between single stand-alone adventures (the majority of this century’s offerings), two-parters (especially popular during the early 1980s), and, for the majority of the show’s career, four, six and occasionally even more weekly episodes.
The technological logistics of such a schedule are not something we want to delve into here. Suffice it to say, between 1963 and 1989, the Doctor Who team was charged with constructing the equivalent of a 90- to 120-minute movie for broadcast every month to six weeks, across up to half a year (or more)’s worth of television. And to do so with a budget that would barely afford one prosthetic limb in the modern show. Unanimous in their agreement, cast, crew, and even audience members admit that it’s astonishing that there was even a show being made under those conditions, let alone one that has now outlived every other non-soap operatic program of its, or many subsequent, generation.
Of course, it’s not all good. We probably wouldn’t love it half as much if it was.
What, however, constitutes a bad episode of Doctor Who? Is it enough simply to look at the cast list and dismiss any episode that features a belligerent red-haired companion? No, because this would then deprive us of the pleasures of The Awakening (1984), Dragonfire (1987), and The Doctor’s Wife (2012).
Audience viewing figures are no guide at all. As the show approached its late 1980s denouement, its reach scarcely equaled one in sixteen Britons; in fact, the twenty-sixth season opener Battlefield (1989) was the first of three successive episodes that would attain the worst viewing figures ever in Doctor Who’s entire history.
Just 3.65 million tuned in to see the Doctor and Ace meet the legendary King Arthur; while a barely more substantial 4.1 million joined the fun for the two stories that followed, and when one considers what they were (Ghostlight and The Curse of Fenric), one can only assume an entire nation had been overwhelmed by an absolute morass of poor judgment. These figures represented the worst run the show ever experienced and were a primary cause, of course, for its cancellation at the end of this season.
But that does not mean they were lousy episodes, any more than we can possibly countenance any of the other seemingly easy targets that await our attention.
Either episode with the word “Rani” in the title and anything written by Pip and Jane Baker.
The 1996 TV movie.
The Gunfighters, that misremembered First Doctor doodle that could almost be subtitled “the one with the singing.”
Love & Monsters, the undigestible turkey that is also remembered as “the one with the singing”; indeed, worse than that, it’s the one with the band, the one with the Electric Light Orchestra fixation; the one with barely any Doctor or Rose or reason for existing beyond allowing writer Russell T. Davies to squeeze a clumsy oral sex joke into the final scene, while Peter Kay, one of Britain’s most popular character-comedians, is squeezed into a costume so atrocious that one could almost believe it was designed by a nine-year-old.
A Town Called Mercy appears to have been built on the suggestion that it was time the Doctor returned to the Wild West, but creators, crew, and cast got so excited about the idea that they forgot to shoehorn in a story around the puns and pathos. Oh, and why did the cyborg Gunslinger look identical to Kryton, Red Dwarf’s ice-cube-headed robo-butler, relaxing between takes of that show’s “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” episode?
We cannot even countenance the blanket determination that almost any episode featuring either the Sixth or Eleventh Doctors falls into a creative black hole whose sole purpose is to likewise devour the viewer’s own joy and will to live. Except we should point out that even the readers of Doctor Who Magazine (issue 413, October 2009), voting on the merits of the first two hundred stories broadcast, weren’t exactly falling over one another to sing the praises of the Sixth Doctor. Nor the Eleventh, although in fairness to him, he had yet to appear on our screens, so judgment needed to be reserved.
Now, bear in mind that the survey included both surviving and “lost” episodes, meaning people were voting on stories they may never even have seen outside of telesnaps or a Target novelization. Remember too that supporters of the Sixth Doctor (his own good self included) have done a remarkable job in causing fandom to reassess his two seasons in recent years. Still, The Twin Dilemma finished two hundredth out of two hundred, closely followed by the same team’s Timelash, and Love & Monsters wasn’t that far down the list either.
Yet popular wisdom and personal taste rarely coalesce, meaning anybody reading this book is as entitled to their own opinion as anybody else. Somewhere out there, a middle-aged Whovian sleeps beneath life-sized posters of Amy, Mel, and Turlough, watched over by a River Song action figure and dreaming that the Rani has just joined ELO.
Which in turn means that the true answer to your question can only be answered by sitting and watching (or listening, reading, or otherwise assimilating) every single episode, and not caring a fig for what anybody tells you.
And if you start now, you should be finished just in time for the next season.
Whorp whorp!