The Six Best Doctor Who Stories From the Tom Baker Era (Part II)
(Part One)
I was honestly, surprised by last week’s episode of Doctor Who. It actually evoked an emotional response from me. Hatred. Disney Doctor Who dragged the Pyramids of Mars through the slime just by them touching it. That is what kicked off this list in case you are wondering.
3. Seeds of Doom
This is the last of the Third Doctor stories, or at least it may as well be because it very much feels like one of the Jon Pertwee episodes. The 1970-1974 years were influenced by the most dominant voice in British Sci-Fi TV, Gerry Anderson. Sure he made kids’ shows but that is what Doctor Who was back then. The thing about Gerry Anderson is that he himself was strongly influenced by the sixties spy show craze. During the Pertwee years, Doctor Who had the spy show feel to it. The Doctor was all about the running and punching and gear porn back then. It’s also why he became a pseudo-government employee working for an organization with a silly acronym, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (U.N.I.T.) a UN organization consisting exclusively of the UK military.
This is also the final U.N.I.T. story. They would show up again now and then but the relationship wasn’t there anymore. The Doctor was no longer part of that community, he was just visiting old friends after this one.
None of the old UNIT characters were available because their actors were no longer under contract and had work elsewhere. So, no Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, Captain Yates, and especially no Harry Sullivan.
There is an amazing discovery in the Arctic, a cricket ball painted and gorped up to look like a big seed. Photos are immediately sent to the British government because deal with it. The Doctor takes one look at it and immediately takes a plane to Antarctica instead of the Tardis. Admittedly the TARDIS was pretty unreliable at this point in the show’s history and his odds of actually getting to where he wanted to go weren’t good. However, this story allegedly started life as an episode of The Avengers (Steed and Peel version), so this could be a leftover.
The scientists had ignored the Doctor’s warning not to touch the cricket ball and one of them paid the price. He was now turning into a Nigel Kneale-type plant monster. So this was basically The Thing except that wouldn’t be in theaters for another eight years. Granted this one might have been influenced by the original story by Campbell, Who Goes There. Anyway, the Doctor informs the other scientists that they may have doomed the Earth. The seed pod was a Krynoid, a hyper-invasive, hyper-aggressive plant life that will destroy all mammalian life on any planet the pod hatches on.
There is a human antagonist to deal with as well. Simon Chase is a billionaire eco-terrorist who really wants all animal life to die so plants can thrive unmolested. Indicating his knowledge of just how many species of plants require a symbiotic relationship with animals to survive and reproduce is non-existent. Meaning he’s basically a Green. Back then his views were so goofy it was safe to make him a strawman, today Chase would be up for prime minister.
The Doctor is a lot more physically aggressive in this serial. Frequently knocking out or overpowering the henchmen sent after him, again a lot like the Third Doctor.
This story feels like it was inspired by The Day of Triffids as well as Who Goes There, except the plant zombies didn’t get that far in this one. I think it’s a resemblance to that 1963 film that is responsible for its popularity. I’ll be honest, it’s not one of my favorites but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong for liking it. It’s just personal taste. And at six episodes there was too much filler.
2. City of Death
I remember I was having lunch at my favorite Italian restaurant and finishing up Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for the first time when I realized I was already familiar with the plot. “Douglas Adams has ripped off Doctor Who, again,” I laughed.
In that pre-internet world, I didn’t know that Adams had written this serial under the pseudonym David Agnew. For that matter, I didn’t know that he’d written Pirate Planet under his own name. There was no IMDB back then so you either had to have an eidetic memory or be the king of the Gamma Males to know shit like that.
I’m not going to say that Douglas Adams ran out of steam early but he did heavily mine his early work for most of his career.
City of Death had an intriguingly 1970s science fiction concept behind it. That twelve of the all-time great thinkers in human history who had done the most to advance the human race were actually a single alien. The Adams touch was that this alien had had an accident with a warp drive and had split himself into 12 entities, still dis-unified but still whole to a degree. He was advancing the human race with the view of building a time machine and getting back to the moment of his accident to prevent it.
This would be a real problem for humanity because this accident provided the energy that started all life on Earth.
As this was an Adams episode the writing was crisp, funny, and inventive. Julian Glover really brought the good here as Scaroth, the alien responsible for painting the Mona Lisa. This is probably my personal favorite of the Tom Baker years. It had everything I loved about that period and it still holds up.
However, I will defer to the general view of what number one should be.
- Genesis of the Daleks
I recently covered this for another article and found I was basically rewriting it. So I’ll just reprint it instead.
The Daleks first appeared in December 1963 in the show’s second serial and promptly rescued Doctor Who from ratings oblivion. The cancelation ax had been getting sharpened but was quickly tucked away again when the viewership blew the roof off. “Diving behind the sofa when the Daleks appeared” became a cultural touchstone for British kids.
There is no possible way that modern children can understand what these pepper pots with plungers brought to the party because they have imagination muscles that have atrophied from lack of use. There was a time when kids needed to fill in a lot of blanks themselves and we did. Something like the Daleks or the Klingons weren’t terrifying in and of themselves, they were just imagination building blocks that we would use to build our own elaborate structures.
I went through it myself. When I was a very little kid the Peter Cushing Doctor Who movies showed up on Creature Features Theater. Since I was absolutely forbidden to watch Creature Features, any movie in that timeslot was automatically terrifying, that was where I first ran into them. I can get why the kids from across the pond loved and feared the Daleks. Because it was fun to be frightened of them.
For the next eleven years, the Daleks would show up without fail once a year but by 1975, that had become a problem. The showrunners had done just about everything they could with the Daleks. They were out of ideas and anything they came up with looked a lot like something they had already done. Finally, Terry Nation decided to do one of the most boring things you can do in fiction. An origin story.
Genesis of the Daleks is today regarded as one of the best Doctor Who stories in its entire sixty-year history. It’s still worth a watch.
The feel of the narrative was the product of both post-war worlds. In 1975, The Great War was still the Old Man’s War. The unmitigated horror of the trenches was a living memory. WWII vets were still in their 40s and 50s, for them, there was less time separating them from their war than now separates us from the Gulf War. The thousand-year war on Skaro was a combination of the two.
Audiences for the first time got to see the pre-Daleks. The Kaleds were a race that had already lost its thousand-year war with its enemy race, the “Thals.” Chem-bio attacks had inflicted genetic degeneration on the Kaleds. They were destined to become Cthuloid horrors. The Kaled military scientists had taken over and their chief Davros had conducted acceleration experiments to determine what their future was:
Once that bleak news was absorbed Davros set about creating the Mark III Travel Machine, AKA the Dalek.
Davros started cloning the Kaled mutants en masse but with “improvements.” The Daleks would not be burdened with compassion, pity, mercy, or love. They would not be capable of choosing between good and evil because Davros had turned them into reflections of himself. A creature that was entirely one of super-ego with no Id or Ego at all.
At one point the Doctor poses a question that Davros finds fascinating.
The Virus Question defined the character of Davros. Given a chance, he would commit universal genocide. He’s entirely beyond the pleasures of the flesh. His body is a resented container for keeping his brain alive. He exists solely for the expansion of his mind and the actualization of his ambitions.
He was in short, the first Dalek.
He was a classic Brain supervillain. His physical weakness meant nothing because of the horrifying power of his mind.
The Doctor is faced with the same question he asked Davros. He had the option of genciding the entire Dalek race. He decides not to, and the fascinating part is he seems to regret it for the rest of his life.
Genesis of the Daleks is often held up not just as the best serial of the Tom Baker years but the best Doctor Who story of all time. It was a cold, dark trip into the heart of evil.
However, Russel T. Davies has found a flaw with it.
“We had long conversations about bringing Davros back, because he’s a fantastic character,” Davies said as part of an interview broadcast in Doctor Who Unleashed, which accompanied the release of the short scene on the BBC iPlayer.
“Time and society and culture and taste has moved on. And there’s a problem with the Davros of old in that he’s a wheelchair user, who is evil. And I had problems with that. And a lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil. And trust me, there’s a very long tradition of this.”
This is the price of doing business with a company as monolithicly evil as the Walt Disney Company. You aren’t merely required to repeat lies.
You must make yourself believe them.
Pretty much the antithesis of the Fourth Doctor
When polls are conducted on these things, Doctor Who fans pretty much always name Tom Baker as the number one Doctor of all time (unless you are a goth chick).
This became kind of a problem for the show. He was the Doctor for seven years, this gave him too big of an impact. There was a whole generation of Gen-Xer kids in Britain that only remembered him in that role. He was the only Doctor the show’s American fans had ever known. And honestly, the show was out of gas when Baker left in 1981. It needed a new Doctor by then. The three actors who followed him weren’t really in a position to put their own stamp on the part without consciously accepting or rejecting his portrayal.
Doctor Who needed to go into the vault for a decade and some change just let memories of the Doctor with the giant scarf fade. Now it needs to go into the vault long enough to let other memories fade.
Where to watch: Hard media is available to some degree but the price is too high. You can stream on Britbox for a subscription or TubiTV for free with commercials.
