The Six Best Doctor Who Stories of the Tom Baker Era
A friend recently asked about Doctor Who stories for his son. While the current Doctor Who is unwatchable pig vomit, there was a time when the BBC made a deliberate effort to overcome any of the shortcomings of a production budget by concentrating on the quality of the story and the actors’ performances.
The Tom Baker years of Doctor Who produced some of the best stories in the sixty-year history of the show. There’s a reason some of us were excited in 2005 when the show was brought back.
During the Hartnell era, the lore was a mystery box. You didn’t know anything about the Doctor’s background. A lot of people assumed he was a human from the future. “Who” wasn’t his last name it was a question the audience was meant to ask. It wouldn’t be until the final serial of the Troughtman period that the audience found out the Doctor is a Time Lord (albeit one in renegade status). When Jon Pertwee took over the role, the show kind of drifted into a Gerry Anderson pastiche. He was a technology-focused man of action who did a lot of Miss Piggy-type karate chops.
But Tom Baker was the first Doctor to bring something that felt genuinely alien to the role. He liked us humans well enough, but he absolutely wasn’t one of us. He came across as a being who had had a human described to him once but had never actually seen one.
The Fourth Doctor’s stories were reflective of the New Wave style of science fiction stories. There was a greater emphasis on psychological and social motivations during this period that de-emphasized science. While Doctor Who had started life as a demi-educational program, these pretenses were largely dropped about the time Jon Pertwee first said, “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.” But never entirely, at least not before the 2005 reboot.
Since Russel T Davies has made the very odd decision of bringing back Sutekh as the enemy for the first season of Disney Doctor Who, I will start this listicle with…
6. Pyramids of Mars (1975)
For those that don’t know, the original Doctor Who didn’t really have individual episodes but multi-episodes serials, It would usually take four episodes to complete a serial but a big one could take six. Some of the earlier serials went on for a lot longer.
This serial was inspired by gothic horror of Hammer Film’s The Mummy, as a result, the body count was a little higher than usual.
In 1911 an Egyptologist named Scarman (played creepily by Bernard Archard), B&Es his way into a pyramid in the Heinrich Schliemann-approved fashion of blasting his way through various irreplaceable strata layers in order to reach something dramatic. His Egyptian workers flee in racially insensitive cowardice and then Scarman gets blasted by a green ray of light.
Meanwhile at the English country manor house of Scarman, a villainous Egyptian cultist in the standard garb of morning coat with a fez has set up shop. A friend of Scarman accuses the Egyptian of being villainous and gets shot for it. He really didn’t think things through.
Meanwhile, the TARDIS is meant to be landing at UNIT’s headquarters but while landing in the right place is pulled off at the correct time by a powerful something. The Doctor and Sarah Jane investigate and promptly find the guy who’s been shot as well as the guy who is shooting at him. Cut off from the TARDIS the three head to the lodge of Scarman’s brother who is fiddling with a marconiscope that has just received a message from Mars, “Beware Sutekh.”
The Doctor provides exposition. There was once a powerful race of godlike beings called the Osirans. They inspired the Egyptian pantheon. Sutekh decided to destroy all life in the universe for the usual reasons and his brother Horus imprisoned him on Mars.
The rest of the story is the Doctor trying to foil Sutekh’s plan to escape. He succeeded but the Doctor came up with a fairly clever way to destroy him. It’s one that frankly leaves him no means at all of returning to be this season’s villain but Davies is ignoring that.
Pyramids of Mars was an intimate story built on ancient cosmic horror very much in keeping with the show’s Quatermass roots.
Intriguingly this serial had been shot and broadcast a year before the pyramid-like structures at Cydonia, Mars were photographed by Viking. They didn’t know they were there when they shot the episode… OR DID THEY!?!?!*
5. Robots of Death
The title is terrible but that’s the only thing wrong with this story. Originally it was called the Storm-mine Murders. You know how I said the Tom Baker stories were based on New Wave Sci-fi? Yeah, forget all about that because this serial was as old-school as you can get. A small team of human supervisors are aboard Frank Herbert’s spice harvester harvesting away at a super expensive something or other only found in storms on this planet. The harvester is run entirely by Isaac Asimov’s robots and like the R Daneel stories, there’s murder afoot.
As usual the Doctor and Leela arrive just in time to become the prime suspects.
The most obvious suspects for the murders are the robots but since their core code is based on Asmiov’s Laws the rest of the crew views this as impossible. It’s a blind spot. It’s a terrific little Ten Little Indians scenario.
There are a lot of people who place this as their favorite of the classic episodes and while it’s not mine they aren’t wrong for doing so. The script kept the tone of tension was ratcheted up tight until the very end. Yeah, it was obvious who the culprit was but it still worked.
This serial did everything it possibly could do to overcome the limitations of its budget. Art Deco was beginning a serious revival at that time and that works great with robots. There was a whole bunch of shows don’t tell about their society. These people were quite possibly the only useful hard-working people in it because everything else is done by robots for them. You get an air of civilization that isn’t too far from falling apart because of its people’s indolence. I know exactly what that looks like now.
4. The Horror of Fang Rock
That title on the other hand works just fine.
Lighthouses are a fantastic setting if you are in a mood for gothic horror. These castles of the coastline stand their stoic, lonely, endless sentinel duty guarding the lives of those plying their trade on the unforgiving seas. Cold, remote, isolated, and a bunch of other adjectives useful for describing the effects of isolation dementia, they make a lovely spot for a story filled with dread, fear, and just the right amount of shock.
Fang Rock is an island with a lighthouse around the turn of the last century. The three characters working for HM Coastguard are quickly established as stereotypes of Dim Manager, Old Curmudgeon, and Young Spark that is too young to die and will.
The writer demonstrates some skill that the current writers of the show can only dream of, by having the old guy and the young guy argue about the benefits of oil light versus electric light. This will be important when the electric light inexplicably fails.
The Doctor and Leela arrive, they are dressed for a turn-of-the-century weekend at Brighton but they missed of course. They arrive just as a meteor has been seen in the sky. It’s not a meteor but you already guessed that.
Shortly after this a yacht going far too fast in a sudden fog crashes into Fang Rock and sinks providing the story with a fresh supply of warm bodies ready to be made cold as soon as we find out their backstories.
What really sells this story is the atmosphere, which is scrupulously maintained throughout. There are a few of you who have already worked out that this story was based on the poem The Ballad of Flannan Isle which is based on the mysterious disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from the Flannan Isles in 1900. The Doctor quotes the poem at the end of the serial.
“Though three men dwell on Flannan Isle
To keep the lamp alight,
As we steer’d under the lee, we caught
No glimmer through the night.”
A passing ship at dawn had brought
The news; and quickly we set sail,
To find out what strange thing might ail
The keepers of the deep-sea light
….
And, as we listened in the gloom
Of that forsaken living-room—
A chill clutch on our breath—
We thought how ill-chance came to all
Who kept the Flannan Light:
And how the rock had been the death
Of many a likely lad:
How six had come to a sudden end,
And three had gone stark mad:
And one whom we’d all known as friend
Had leapt from the lantern one still night,
And fallen dead by the lighthouse wall:
And long we thought
On the three we sought,
And of what might yet befall.
Like curs, a glance has brought to heel,
We listened, flinching there:
And looked, and looked, on the untouched meal,
And the overtoppled chair.
We seemed to stand for an endless while,
Though still no word was said,
Three men alive on Flannan Isle,
Who thought, on three men dead.
Culture!!!
You guessed it, I’m over my word count for blogging today and this is now a two-parter.
(Part II)
