Doctor Who Fandom Challenge Day 8: Least Favourite Season

[miss_s_b]

(a list of the questions and links to all the answers can be found on this entry)

Season 18.

There are some stories I am very fond of in Season 18 (Keeper of Traken, for example), and my first memory of anything ever occurs at its end. I would point out that this is "least favourite" rather than "most hated".

Nevertheless, my reasons for picking season 18 are twofold. Firstly, when you watch it, you can see that Tom's heart is not in it any more. He can't even be arsed to phone it in for some episodes, and for those where he IS there he alternates between utterly manic (where he would have been quirky and charming in previous seasons) and morose and grumpy.

Secondly, the show's been Bidmeaded. The serious scifi leavened with wacky humour of the Adams years has been replaced with po-faced pretentious bollocks. Also, I really really detest Warrior's Gate. And, you know, Adric.

Comments

[shishmish]

Urgh, Adric.

That's all I really have to say on the matter. He is only one of two companions I hate (some I might find annoying but not enough to hate) - the other being Rose (she takes top place for companion I could do forgetting).

[magister]

Interesting. Warrior's Gate is one of my favourite stories. I'm also rather fond of State of Decay.

Other than that though, I pretty much agree with you, Tom is very much not himself, although because he was seriously ill through much of the series, to the extent that all he could eat was baby food and he had to have his hair permed as it went straight.

Bidmead's approach does not really work for me - the series stops being fun. On the other hand, it does still have a nostalgic appeal to me.

My least favourite series would probably be either 9 or 20. 9 feels like a great falling away from how the Pertwee era opened only 2 years earlier. Psychologically complex characters from the likes of The Silurians and Ambassadors of Death are now a thing of the past. The slippage towards this had started the previous year with Chinn in Claws of Axos, who reminds me of Peter Glaze in one of the Crackerjack end of show sketches. In season 9 this becomes exaggerated with the likes of Cotton, Stubbs and the Marshall in The Mutants - it's always a bad sign when the main villain in a six part story does not even have a name - Trenchard in The Sea Devils and more people than you could shake a stick at in The Time Monster. In short, it's a season the highlight of which is Day of the Daleks. I think that says a lot.

As for 20, most of it feels very lack lustre and too dependant on past stories, with little of interest done with the characters who are brought back. Snakedance I like very much, while Enlightenment stands out more because of the surrounding mediocrity than any excellence of its own.

Of the two, I'd probably say that season 9 is marginally worse, but it's a close run thing.

[andrewhickey.info]

18's actually a favourite of mine, though I also love the Adams period. Warrior's Gate is an acquired taste, but State Of Decay, Keeper and Logopolis are all wonderful.

My own least favourite is probably either series 5 ("Oh, look, it's another base under siege") or 8 ("Oh look, it's the Master, again")

[pmoodie]

Season 18 is a pretty dull and joyless slog, but at least the production team had some new ideas and a vision for the programme, even if it was a largely pretentious one. I still think I prefer it to the previous season though, which was just blehhh.

My least favourite has to be season 24, because after 14 years of watching the programme regularly, this was the one that finally made me feel embarrassed to be watching Doctor Who. The combination of Mel and then McCoy was like a one-two punch to the gonads, it was all too clear that the production team had run out of enthusiasm and were totally out of touch. Awful, ghastly, unwatchable dreck. In my humble opinion! :)

[drunkwriter]

I still think of Keeper of Traken as: "the one where they wander about for three episodes and then the Master's in it." No amount of novelisation re-reading or DVD viewing can get anything about that story to stick in my head apart from the scenes inside the Melkur and the Master's body-snatching bit.