Seventh Doctor Review

Seventh Doctor

Seventh Doctor

Doctor: The Seventh Doctor

Companions: The Brigadier, Mel Bush, Ace McShane

Sylvester McCoy transforms the role of the Doctor into the universe’s most mysterious and unpredictable man putting on a brave new spin to the Doctor.

The Review

Here’s the scores for the stories

The Curse of Fenric: 10/10

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy: 10/10

Remembrance of the Daleks: 9.25/10

Battlefield: 9/10

Survival: 8.5/10

Silver Nemesis: 8.25/10

The Happiness Patrol: 8.25/10

Dragonfire: 8/10

Delta and the Bannermen: 8/10

Paradise Towers: 8/10

Ghost Light: 7.5/10

Time and the Rani: 7/10

The Seventh Doctor came in at a creative low point for Doctor Who, out of gas creatively. His first season the Doctor was a pretty generic figure just given some odd quirks for the seeming reason just to make him weird. That all changed with the introduction of Ace and the show’s dramatic late 80s revival. There’s something intoxicating to me about McCoy, he at once seems jovial and interested in stagecraft much like the actor himself, but he is one of the fiercest Doctors in condemning evil. So often they cut to the Doctor and his face is filled with unholy rage at whichever dark plotter he’s facing. The Doctor always seems to know more than he’s letting on, even when he’s putting cat food on the sidewalk. Through it all, he’s resolutely punk, leading rebellions and lying in the park with Ace listening to jazz music. The Seventh Doctor successfully made the character back into a man of mystery, and I adore McCoy’s skillful portrayal.

Now, his best moments.

5. The Doctor’s early rage and takedown of Gavrok in Delta and the Bannermen presages what is to come for the character. The Doctor doesn’t pull any punches in denouncing evil, and this is an earlier sign of that.

4. “Unlimited rice pudding!” The Doctor’s first chess master story comes in Remembrance of the Daleks, highlighted by his sneering battle of wits with Davros. In one fell swoop, the Doctor deals the Daleks their greatest defeat.

3. “is that honor?” The Doctor talks down Morgaine in Battlefield from launching a nuclear weapon describing the impersonal horror that it will cause, devastating her so completely that she backs off. Unlike many ‘good guy talks sense into evil’ speech, this one feels earned.

2. The Doctor (and McCoy himself) show off magic tricks and showmanship in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, with the Doctor holding rapt the attention of the Gods of Ragnarok until he is able to defeat them. It’s the perfect mix of the Seventh Doctor’s clownish sensibilities but his deadly cunning underneath.

1. The showdown with Fenric in The Curse of Fenric is one of the Doctor’s greatest moments across all their incarnations. Starting with the Doctor’s desperate monologue that evil doesn’t need a name to be evil, it concludes with the Doctor breaking Ace’s heart to save the world. Never has the Doctor seemed more cruel, but the day is saved.

In-universe the reasoning for the Doctor’s sudden change when Ace joins the TARDIS are a bit suspect, but I think we can point to his worrying about the danger of Fenric. Some of the Doctor’s era feels like we should know about epic missing stories, creating the Hand of Omega, or the first time that the Doctor trapped Fenric. More than anything, it affirmed to be the value in the classic series and distilled it to its essence: Doctor Who is about squaring up and facing evil, with the benefit of time and space travel allowing for stories set in a bizarre alien circus to a small English town in World War II. Through it all, the Seventh Doctor may just be the greatest champion of good and righteousness, even if he has to break a few eggs to get there.

8.479/10 An era that saved the reputation of Doctor Who

Season 26 Review

Season 26

Season 26

Doctor: Seventh Doctor

Companions: The Brigadier, Ace McShane

The final season of the classic series concludes with one all-time classic and some stories approaching that

The Review

Here’s the scores for the stories

The Curse of Fenric: 10/10

Battlefield: 9/10

Survival: 8.5/10

Ghost Light: 7.5/10

The Seventh Doctor enters his final form with his dark brown coat, a look I absolutely adore. Ace also gets the most character development for a companion since…Romana? Maybe even earlier. The jewel is The Curse of Fenric, simply one of the finest stories in show history, good vs evil, vampires, British and Russian soldiers on a coastline, what more could you want? Underrated is the fun romp of Battlefield, clashing UNIT together with King Arthur in exciting ways. Survival and Ghost Light especially leave more to be desired, but with McCoy and Aldred at the helm, what fears could there be? It’s a shame there was never a real resolution to Ace’s arc (until 2022 apparently), but this season proved itself worthy to keep the torch alive.

8.75/10 Not quite as good as Season 25, but still above average for the 80s

Survival Review

Survival

The hunt is on

Story 155, Episodes 693-695, Season 26 Episodes 12-14

Doctor: Seventh Doctor

Companions: Ace McShane

In the final classic story, we see the Master one last time in a tale whose philosophy seems a bit undeveloped.

The Review

The Doctor mulls over the situation

What I enjoy the most about Survival‘s beginning is how mundane it is, the Doctor and Ace traipsing around lower-class Perivale, the Doctor on the hunt for black cats. I don’t know how he does it but Sylvester McCoy portrays a man who knows far more than he lets on, but seems often uncertain in the moment. The theme ‘survival’ is about survival of the fittest, exemplified by a sergeant who runs a self-defense class and is always going off about ‘kill or be killed’ and all that. Ace and the Doctor are sent to a planet of the cheetah people, but it really is a temporary home for I guess the ‘cheetah force’, a powerful thing that turns people into cheetahs who are all about hunting when hungry. Ace nearly is turned into one, and as she’s transforming can now hear Kara, who reverts back to a human when she dies. The cheetah virus is…well, toxicity? Aggression? I’m not quite sure.

The Master in the thrall of the cheetah

In order to give personification to this force, the Master is here. Honestly, I’m not quite sure why, and his scheme is simply to escape the cheetah planet where he is trapped and then, take of the world with hoodlums? The Doctor and Master do have a climatic duel but the Doctor is sent back to Earth because…he rejects being an animal? Don’t get me wrong, Survival is still a fine story, and I enjoyed seeing Ace’s troublemaker friends from Perivale. While The Curse of Fenric seemed to be so definitely about facing evil incarnate, ‘the hunt’ and ‘cheetah force’ seem frustratingly out of reach. It functions better than most other stories as an ending to the classic series with finally taking on the Master again, but Survival is no classic.

Survival‘s name is incredibly apt, as Doctor Who would indeed go on to survive, though radically changed. I’m not sure there’s a meta message beyond that, but it does conclude an impressive amount of character work for Ace.

8.5/10 Somewhere out there, there’s danger, injustice, and tea getting cold.

The Doctor still has work to do

The Curse of Fenric Review

The Curse of Fenric

The march of the Haemovores

Story 154, Episodes 689-692, Season 26 Episodes 8-11

Doctor: Seventh Doctor

Companions: Ace McShane

The story of Ace and the Seventh Doctor comes to a dramatic climax in one of the most stunning, ambitious, stories of the classic series.

The Review

Ace discovers the chess board

There’s a growing horror that builds throughout The Curse of Fenric that is unlike almost any other classic series. I think the best comparison is The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, except this takes place in a quintessential location: a small British village during World War II. When it arrives, there’s no particular reason for the Doctor to be here. Soon though, the plot unfurls: ancient Viking inscriptions, a British commander so desperate to defeat the Nazis he’ll become one, a scientist obsessed with the Ultima Machine, a revolutionary new computer. Somehow, the inscriptions hold power and sway over the Commander Millington. All the while, two girls turn into vampires, and soon out of the ocean walk disfigured people that look like barnacles are attached to them. Suddenly, the Ultima machine starts spitting out lists and lists of names, and then ‘Ingigia’ before with the flash of lightning and vampires at the gates, evil is unleashed. Fenric is here. The horrifying score throughout the story builds the sense of menace, and few Doctors have captured the underlying anger and rage better than McCoy.

You must have faith

Often, the best stories often having something spiritual to them. This isn’t about God or religion, but it’s about that crucial quality of faith. We all want to have faith in something or someone. For the Russian soldiers they truly believe in the cause of the Soviet Union (interesting politics for 1989 here), but the preacher lost his when his sainted Britain started bombing the Germans too. For Ace, her faith was in the Doctor, completely, until the cruel moment where the Doctor shreds it completely in front of Fenric, on the verge of destroying the planet. Ace loses her faith, allowing the last vampire to destroy Fenric rather than doom his future Earth. The final piece is that Ace met her mother as a baby, the woman she hates and despises. She asks the Doctor how it could be, but finally has the confidence in herself to swim in the sea. The Doctor had to break her faith in him but gave her something greater, confidence in herself. Fenric is presented as simply evil, the Doctor saying that’s not even it’s real name, it’s in a sense the devil. Faith is the only thing that can defeat the devil, but the only faith we can be sure in is our own strength and courage.

Curse of Fenric is an all-time classic, a top 5 classic story without a doubt, a triumphant work that showed, yes, Doctor Who still has its ability to challenge and inspire.

10/10 There are a few confusing elements, but it really doesn’t matter in the drama and the horror.

Dangerous undercurrents? Not anymore

Ghost Light Review

Ghost Light

Light himself

Story 153, Episodes 686-688, Season 26 Episodes 5-7

Doctor: Seventh Doctor

Companions: Ace McShane

The Doctor tries to get Ace to conquer her fears in a story that scarcely makes any sense.

The Review

Within the house in Perivale

I’d heard before watching this story that Ghost Light famously was incomprehensible. I am glad to say that is absolutely the case. Really, I can kind of see what they were going for here, but this is the rare classic story where I think we really could’ve used another episode. The Doctor takes Ace to an old house in Perivale 100 years before she saw something there that seriously frightened her. The Doctor is curious about a malevolent presence she sensed there, but in a deeper way wants Ace to fight her fear. That plot thread doesn’t quite get realized because the whole thing is just kind of a mess. It’s a story about evolution, albeit in the most bizarre way possible, starting by featuring a reverend who finds Darwin’s theory absolutely absurd, and gets de-evolved into an ape because of it. There are so many tiny plot threads its hard to keep track of them all, such as that our main villain Josiah is occupying the house after displacing and brainwashing the previous resident.

Ace feeling used by the Doctor

Light, the glowing guy, is the leader of some survey expedition of Earth. There’s also Control, a weird woman whose purpose I don’t quite understand. Several people like the Neanderthal Nimrod were preserved for millennia before being reawakened by Josiah, an intergalactic collector. Somehow he has ‘evolved’ into a Victorian gentlemen, the time’s apex predator, and wants to assassinate Queen Victoria herself. Light is upset that life keeps evolving making his survey of it incomplete, there’s some parallel with him and the captured moths Josiah has, but it isn’t completely borne out. Really, the story is just incredibly confusing, overstuffed, and unclear. It’s a shame because I am just loving everything Sylvester McCoy is doing, it is such a fresh take on the Doctor, unimposing but extremely cerebral and a fiery edge to him. If only I knew what was going on.

Ghost Light is about evolution being good, and how we’re all evolving and changing, and then a whole bunch of Victorian gobbledygook thrown in there.

7.5/10 I can’t give it a much higher score if I don’t know what’s going on, can I?

Final filmed scene of the classic series

Battlefield Review

Battlefield

The Brigadier sticks up Morgana

Story 152, Episodes 682-685, Season 26 Episodes 1-4

Doctor: Seventh Doctor

Companions: The Brigadier, Ace McShane

Doctor Who meets Arthurian Legend as UNIT makes a very welcome appearance in a story that never lets up on the fun.

The Review

Ancelyn and Brigadier Bambera

It has been a long time since we’ve gotten a proper UNIT story out of Doctor Who, and it delivers. Delightfully, UNIT actually has cultural diversity benefiting it being an arm of the United Nations, and we meet the current Brigadier: Winifred Bambera played quite successfully by Angela Bruce. The Brigadier feels better here than Mawdryn Undead, which makes sense as that part was originally for Ian. We see him married in retirement, but the moment he catches wind of the Doctor he has to go back to being a soldier. For his final appearance in the show proper, it’s a great farewell, as the Brigadier stares down the Destroyer (an evil blue demon who doesn’t actually do much destroying), he says he is likely not Earth’s best champion but he’ll try his best. The two Brigadiers are both respectful of one another, and it’s also fun to see women in UNIT! Ace also makes a friend in Shou Yuing, one of the few Asian women in the classic series.

Morgaine and Mordred menacing…Merlin?

In classic Doctor Who fashion, the villains are Morgaine and Mordred of legend, who are of course inter dimensional warriors tracking down the spaceship of Arthur stuck under an English lake. Even more delightfully, everyone immediately pegs the Doctor as Merlin, and it’s confirmed he will be Merlin in his future. The Doctor now has a brown coat which I love and is now one of my favorite Doctor outfits. It’s a fun little inversion to last season where the Doctor seemed to have a secret past we didn’t know about, here it’s a secret future leaving the Doctor confused. Morgaine plans to fire a nuke, but the Doctor talks her down by explaining how dishonorable that would be and she relents. Now, Battlefield can feel a bit sloppy at points, and the true nature of the Arthurians isn’t revealed, nor their fate (they just get locked up by UNIT forever?). Still, it’s a blast, and who can hate Ace emerging from a lake wielding Excalibur?

Battlefield gives us a classic UNIT romp that is pleasantly diverse, and puts the Seventh Doctor in more unusual positions. I only wish the Destroyer did some more, you know, destroying.

9/10 Not perfect, but a very fun outing

Ace delivers Excalibur

Season 25 Review

Season 25

Season 25

Doctor: Seventh Doctor

Companions: Ace McShane

For the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary Season 25 makes an uneven but bold leap back into excitement and success.

The Review

Here’s the scores for the stories

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy: 10/10

Remembrance of the Daleks: 9.25/10

Silver Nemesis: 8.25/10

The Happiness Patrol: 8.25/10

One of the all-time great Doctor/companion dynamics is formed in Season 25. The Seventh Doctor finds his footing, no longer a generic character only defined by the weird mixed metaphors thing, the Doctor here enjoys stagecraft and acting like a clown but is always calm and collected on the inside. Compared to the Second and Fourth Doctors who often pretended to be idiots to be underestimated, the Seventh Doctor doesn’t do that, he’s always looking to entertain, to be a showman. As Sylvester McCoy was naturally a showman, it’s a perfect and obvious evolution. Meanwhile, Ace is simply a revelation, she’s kick-ass and adorable all at once. The Doctor secretly is just as punk as she is, and he’s basically the coolest teacher in the world for her. While classics like the Daleks and Cybermen seem uninteresting, the best story comes from killer clowns. Who knew?

8.925/10 A massive leap in quality and a smashing success

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Review

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

Ace’s fear: clowns

Story 151, Episodes 678-681, Season 25 Episodes 9-12

Doctor: Seventh Doctor

Companions: Ace McShane

For the first time in years, Doctor Who delivers a masterpiece of a story, perfectly melding Sylvester McCoy’s talents with an epic, well-directed tale.

The Review

Cool Doctors don’t look at explosions

It’s finally here, the next truly great story after Caves of Androzani which feels like a lifetime ago. The Doctor and Ace find themselves drawn to the Psychic Circus, a rather cheap looking tent on a very barren but sufficiently alien looking world. The build up to the circus is excellent, with the Doctor and Ace encountering a crazy biker and then T.P. McKenna’s perfectly played Captain Cook and the goth young werewolf Mags. Captain Cook is dressed like an old British colonialist, and is some intergalactic explorer, constantly having boring anecdotes all ending with how actually bored he was. The combination of Cook and a circus are both perfect foils for the Seventh Doctor, last season he cut a very generic figure, here this is the first story that simply must be a Seventh Doctor story. In fact, once the circus’ overlords the Gods of Ragnarok are revealed, the Doctor distracts them with some skills we know Sylvester McCoy possesses himself.

Gods of Ragnarok

Ace has less to do than usual with this excellent cast of characters, but she still holds her own and is always wonderful on screen. We have Deadbeat, formally Kingpin, the leader. There’s the Ringmaster and Morgana, supposedly in a relationship chafing under their rule. There’s Bellboy, the reject who created the circuses’ robots. There’s a ‘super-fan’ of the circus, a perfect parody of nerd culture that manages to not be disrespectful. Seeds sown in part one come back in part four in brilliant ways, and finally, we must discuss the Chief Clown played by Ian Reddington. Emotionally turning on a dime, always fearsome, he is the truest villain of the story. Despite often looking like it’s someone’s home video, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is fresh, bursting with new ideas, an evil circus perfectly suited to the Seventh Doctor. I almost forgot what great classic series stories felt like.

The premise seems ridiculous, the sets bargain basement, but incredible ideas and performances and direction make this an absolute classic and remind us that at its peak Doctor Who is absolutely the greatest show in the galaxy.

10/10 Finally, another perfect story. It’s been years in real life time. I think Doctor Who is going to have a great 1989.

The Cantankerous Cook and the awesome Mags

Silver Nemesis Review

Silver Nemesis

The Cybermen are on the scene

Story 150, Episodes 675-677, Season 25 Episodes 6-8

Doctor: Seventh Doctor

Companions: Ace McShane

It’s the 150th story, and the 25th anniversary of Doctor Who, and we get a breezy story with neo-Nazis, Cybermen, and bizarre references to the Doctor’s secret past.

The Review

Sunday in the Park

I’ve heard a lot of negative things about Silver Nemesis, but for me, this is where the Doctor and Ace relationship really snaps into place. Ace is the Doctor’s apprentice in being punk, heck, the story starts with the two taking in a jam session of jazz music. The plot is at once complex and at once inconsequential, there are four factions, the Doctor and Ace, a group of neo-Nazis out of exile in South America, the cruel witch Lady Peinforte from the 16th century, and a bunch of Cybermen are here too. There’s some fun interplay as the groups play off of each other. I’m a sucker for Cybermen, but they’re really pretty disposable here, the Cybermen don’t feel like a legitimate scary threat but just another alien threat. Still, I like their design here and getting trolled by jazz music is great even though like Remembrance of the Daleks they ignore tons of chances to shoot the Doctor. The neo-Nazis are interesting in how blatantly political it is, but Lady Peinforte takes the cake for most interesting villain.

Lady Peinforte and Richard

Lady Peinforte is a caricature, but I don’t mind, she’s a weird lady from 1638 obsessed with the MacGuffin of the story: the ‘Nemesis’, a living metal comet the Doctor set up. In one amusingly bizarre detour she and Richard are picked up by a mega rich American researching her family past who is incredibly confused by them. The other part of this story is heavily implying the Doctor knew and hung out with the Time Lord founders, and that Peinforte has ‘figured out his secrets’. There’s one shot where McCoy looks like he’ll explode with fury on her, but then he calms down when the Cyber-Leader says he does not care about all that. Even the ending has Ace asking the Doctor who he is and he mischievously shushes her. Really, I enjoyed Silver Nemesis because of how well-paced and plotted it was, and the dynamite chemistry between McCoy and Aldred. This might just be the best Classic pairing, others, Six and Peri especially have shined in Big Finish but not the show, these two are on fire.

It’s a weird story to celebrate the 25th anniversary (complete with the Queen herself making an appearance), but it’s easy breezy fun.

8.5/10 Nothing revelatory, but undeniably a good time.

Welcome to Windsor

The Happiness Patrol Review

The Happiness Patrol

Things are looking a bit happier!

Story 149, Episodes 672-674, Season 25 Episodes 5-7

Doctor: Seventh Doctor

Companions: Ace McShane

The Happiness Patrol is a more refined Paradise Towers, with a more formed Seventh Doctor showing off his punk side.

The Review

The Kandyman!

I knew that Ace was a counter-cultural gal, but I never could’ve guessed the Seventh Doctor would be the most punk Doctor. The Twelfth Doctor is a bit too cool to feel authentically working class, but the Seventh Doctor leading an underground rebellion against an oppressive regime just seems to fit perfectly. He even gets paired up with folksy harmonica player Earl, the largest role for a Black man in the show in who knows how long. Just like the girl gangs of Paradise Towers, it’s women who roam the streets here, but it’s the bizarre pink dressed women of the titular Happiness Patrol. Led by Helen A they’re psychopaths all the way down, blasting ‘killjoys’ away and giggling all the time. Most bizarre is the giant Kandyman, literally made of candy, a sadistic robot with an amusing high-pitched voice. I don’t quite understand what he’s doing here, but he’s never boring.

Helen A and Fifi

The keys holding the story together are the Doctor and the villain Helen A, who fits right in the mold of every narcissist evil grandma you’ve seen as a villain. Supposedly based off of Margaret Thatcher, I’m not knowledgable enough to know if the parody holds but I love Shelia Hancock’s performance. Sylvester McCoy once again surprises with his dramatic rage, this Doctor’s quiet fury at evil comes across as scarier than bluster from other Doctors. Ace doesn’t get too much to do, and there’s also. very under-used subplot with the ‘pipe people’, the indigenous aliens of this colony who are kind of forgotten about. The story really earns its keep as the Doctor viciously rips apart Helen A’s ‘happiness’. This is the most underground/punk/left a Doctor Who story has felt, and I was here for it.

There are some weird plot threads that don’t seem to go anywhere, but this story is different not just for the sake of being bizarre and different, but using sci-fi for real world commentary.

8.25/10 It’s a bit nonsense at times, but I had a lot of fun

The cliffhangers are getting worse and worse though