N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
Whilst I know that strictly speaking this isn’t the end for the Seventh Doctor, let’s just say (if I may paraphrase the Fourth Doctor) that the moment is being prepared for. As it might be some time before I watch his regeneration in the TV movie, I considered it wisest to mark down my thoughts with the bulk of Sylvester McCoy’s run still fresh in my mind.
“Time for a quick adventure then back for tea.”
The Doctor, Dragonfire: Part One
In much the same way I’d speculated that there was a parallel universe where Slipback did not exist and that season twenty-three began with The Nightmare Fair, is there yet another alternate dimension in which Michael Grade got his way and Revelation of the Daleks was the final classic Doctor Who adventure? If so, we would have missed out on many great Doctor Who stories from a slew of new writers.
The Happiness Patrol may just be a bit out there for some (personally I love it), but who would argue that stories such as Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric don’t deserve to be discussed in the same breath as some of Doctor Who‘s classics? (Doctor Who fans of course — that’s who!)
“This is the real McCoy, this is.”
Glitz, Dragonfire: Part One
It’s also nice that much of the extra footage that was cut from the broadcast episodes survives. Extended edits of Silver Nemesis, Battlefield and The Curse of Fenric have been released over the years and while unfortunately the Ghost Light master tapes were wiped the workprint edition on the Blu-ray is a welcome extra. I’m hoping for extended versions of Remembrance of the Daleks and The Happiness Patrol when Season 25 gets a HD makeover.
Whilst I admit I was unsure of Sylvester McCoy’s performance in the outlier Time and The Rani, even by subsequent story Paradise Towers I could see that it was settling down into something special. By Remembrance of the Daleks, with a year under his belt, McCoy has pretty much nailed it and his final season only enhanced my appreciation of how good a choice for the Doctor he was. (That it reminded me greatly of how much I’d enjoyed the New Adventures is something I’ve repeated ad nauseum over the past few months.)
It’s a shame the show was curtailed when it was. Perhaps more so than at any time since Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks were in charge of the show, Doctor Who in the late 80’s had something to say. Whether the theme was nuclear disarmament, racism, a musing on Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the message, just as Letts and Dicks understood, never got in the way of telling a good story. Andrew Cartmel tells an amusing story on one of the Battlefield DVD extras about he wrote a long speech for the end of the story. When he saw it rehearsed, he realised it went on a bit and he and John Nathan-Turner reined it in!
Judging from the interviews on Survival DVD extra Endgame Andrew Cartmel and fellow writers Ben Aaronovitch and Marc Platt seemed to have plenty of good ideas to take the show into the 90’s. (I really must check out Big Finish’s Season 27 Lost Stories.) Sylvester McCoy too seemed keen to do another year.
As it was, into the wilderness we went …
