The seventh Doctor's era (1987-1989)

Sylvester McCoy

• Fall and Redemption by Robert Smith?
• A Review by Mike Morris
• A Review by Terrence Keenan
• A Review by Paul Williams

Fall and Redemption by Robert Smith? 10/10/01

The New Adventures were about many things. They were about growing up, they were about both losing and keeping childhood heroes and they were a reflection of the decade they spanned. But fundamentally, they were about the seventh Doctor, the master manipulator, the destroyer of worlds, Time's Champion, the Ka Faraq Gatri, the man that monsters have nightmares about and the funny-sad clown who just wanted to entertain children.

Following the hints in Seasons 25 and 26, the NA Doctor evolved and developed beyond the original Cartmel masterplan, becoming more and more complex and manipulative. The editorial team laid down some strict rules concerning the Doctor: he was to remain a mystery, a larger-then-life force and unless you were a 900 year old Time Lord yourself, you weren't going to write his internal thoughts. This gave the Doctor a mysterious and unknowable quantity, as well as bringing much needed focus to the companions. However, despite a great deal of companion angst, the NAs never lost sight of their central character.

Partly this was because the companions came and went (and came back again), while the Doctor never changed. Partly this was because they'd inherited a character who couldn't put a foot wrong, in terms of characterisation. Andrew Cartmel's background had been in comics, so it's no surprise that the seventh Doctor was much more of an archetype than his predecessors. Nothing as mundane as a superhero, of course, but the character was both robust and flexible, allowing multiple interpretations, but always feeling consistent.

With Ace's teenage angst and Benny's wit being similarly strong character-defining traits, the writers were blessed with a TARDIS crew who were virtually writer-proof. A lot of work had gone into the setup behind the books, with a mixture of obvious and subtle story arcs playing themselves out and a well-developed future history playing in the background. This gave the stories a great deal of internal consistency and plausibility. They reigned in the concept a little in terms of space, but they made up for it in character.

In Love and War, it's suggested that the unborn seventh Doctor deliberately piloted the TARDIS into the Rani's beams so that the sixth Doctor might pass and the seventh come into existence. It's said that Time herself needed a champion and it was the seventh Doctor who would arise in the hour of the universe's greatest need to save countless millions in ways the sixth couldn't.

And, it must be said, he really does. He makes decisions no other Doctor seems capable of - the destruction of Skaro is the biggest, but there's also the manipulation of Ace in The Curse of Fenric to save the future of Earth. The New Adventures let this idea run and run, so the Doctor was manipulating not only his enemies but his friends as well. In fact, the Doctor in the early New Adventures seems to set himself up with a series of pseudo-companions, as though he's putting the pieces together to prevent some vast intergalactic catastrophe. Not only do we have characters who were almost companions like Kadiatu and Ruby, but there are former companions we've (almost) never heard of like Miss David in Warhead.

The manipulation of the companions meant that we were in for a lot of TARDIS angst over the years. Things reached something of a head in No Future, where Ace out-manipulated the Doctor and a truce was reached. However, the Doctor still made questionable decisions, often placing the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few. Here was a character who felt the weight of responsibility that the Doctor had to carry with him over the centuries. He held countless lives in his hands and often had to choose who would live and who would die. And without seeing his thoughts directly, we were left wondering if he agonised about those decisions or not.

The Fall of the seventh Doctor was a slow one. He murders Ace's lover in Love and War, he lets a mad villain wipe out a whole solar system in The Pit and he shoots a villain in the head in Lucifer Rising. All were done with the best of intentions and saved billions of innocents in the process, but it's little wonder some fans felt that the NAs had strayed from the original concept.

Human Nature saw the first steps to redemption. The human Dr Smith lives an ordinary life, falls in love and ultimately has to sacrifice himself to restore the Doctor who can save the world. Benny believes the Doctor to be unaffected by the pain he's caused, but at the end, the Doctor weeps in the TARDIS. It's a rare admission that the taciturn seventh Doctor had human feelings of his own, but it went a long way to restoring the character.

Head Games (and Millennial Rites, its twin) dealt with the sixth Doctor's death in more detail, seeing the dark creature he'd become. It also showed how far the companions had evolved by contrasting them with the innocent Mel. However, The Also People saw that the seventh Doctor had a price to pay, with the promised death of one of his companions.

So Vile A Sin saw the price being paid, with the death of Roz and the terrible effect this had on the Doctor. It was around this point that the Doctor's Redemption began in earnest. Eternity Weeps presented the Doctor as a force of nature and the death of a former companion indicated that his days were numbered. The Room With No Doors dealt with the alleged murder of the sixth Doctor, only to reveal that it was all a manifestation for the guilt the seventh felt. The Doctor lies buried in a grave, but literally and symbolically claws his way up to the light.

Lungbarrow, the final New Adventure to feature the seventh Doctor, saw the Doctor's return home to face his greatest fears. We witnessed his discovery about his true nature, the family he'd left behind and the mature and peaceful character who would next appear in the opening of the telemovie. The Doctor had dealt with his faults and made amends and was ready to face his fate.

It's the story of the seventh Doctor that made the New Adventures both so powerful and so controversial. The Doctor was not just an hero, but a character, as he had to become for the transition to novel form. This gave us a more complicated and less trustworthy Doctor, but it made him more human in many ways. By taking the Doctor apart to see what made him tick, the NAs gave us the most intricate and complex portrayal of the Doctor ever seen. The burden of history, both fictionally and metatextually, was behind him, giving the writers an instant level depth to draw upon.

The various TARDIS crews were a godsend to the writers. The Doctor and Benny were completely writer-proof, but Roz and Chris and the original Ace were also easy to use. Excellent writers (and there were quite a few) could take any characters and make them interesting, but the setup allowed the vast majority of medium-good writers to insert these characters into their stories and give them a more mythic feel. The NAs also fed upon themselves, with writers feeding off earlier ideas from previous books and communicating with each other to great effect. The end result was a powerful, intricate story that wove throughout history and the series.

Doctor Who has always been a product of its time. The New Adventures gave us a Doctor for the nineties. They hit exactly the right tone that decade called for, in an age where heroes were more complicated than ever before and moral issues were varying shades of grey.

Every new Doctor is a reaction to the old and the eighth Doctor was no exception. He was a subtler character than the seventh, but he embraced life and threw off the shackles of responsibility the seventh had carried. The BBC Books gave us a fresher character, although they were saddled with the opposite situation to the NAs. Almost nobody could get either the eighth Doctor or Sam right and there was no strong throughline for the books to hold onto. This made a refreshing change after seven years of the NAs, but they didn't put much in their place.

The NAs changed Doctor Who forever and ultimately for the better. Their very controversy showed that Doctor Who was still relevant in a more complicated and less innocent age and the complex characters of the Doctor, Ace, Benny, Chris and Roz provided the source for many interesting Doctor Who tales. With a host of recurring characters and their own mythology, the NAs took the best elements of the series and made them better. Even the elements they couldn't use, such as the Daleks and the Valeyard, were only made stronger by their absence.

To quote from the afterword in Deceit,

"It is crucial to demonstrate that Doctor Who still has the potential and the adaptability to support new stories: that it's a concept at least as fresh today as it was in 1963 [...] we may never see Doctor Who on network television again, and in that case the New Adventures have to be ready to take most of the strain of pulling Doctor Who forwards."

A Review by Mike Morris 19/11/01

What's always struck me about the McCoy era is the extremity of reactions it tends to provoke. You either like the McCoy era, or you don't. No middle ground. It seems acceptable to like Remembrance and nothing else, but there really does seem to be camps on this; the McCoy era killed Doctor Who, and the McCoy era revitalised Doctor Who. Just to make things more complicated, both these camps seem to have good ammunition. Anti-McCoy factions can point to low ratings, the stinkers we had to sit out every now and then (because the McCoy era was so short, a bad story like Silver Nemesis is far more damaging than, say, Time-Flight is to the Davison era), the abandonment of solid plotting, the surreal/silly elements introduced, and the increasingly complex storylines. Oh, and the fact that the Beeb cancelled the series is also quite persuasive. Pro-McCoy people, on the other hand, can talk of the realism that the show rediscovered, the political threads added, the changing of the Doctor^Òs accepted past, the - er - increasingly complex storylines, the redefining of existing mythologies, and the rejuvenation that spread to the New Adventures and beyond. So, is the McCoy era good or not?

Largely, I think the McCoy era was a good one, but I'm not quite as convinced of its brilliance as others. There are several points I want to make. One thing I should say is the issue of ratings and cancellation. Doctor Who has, as a TV program, been pushing up the daisies for twelve years now. I'm not sure that the question of ratings, and the cancellation, is relevant any longer. I don't watch Doctor Who stories as a historical exercise, I watch them for enjoyment, and if they're far too complex for the average viewer I couldn't care less. Doctor Who isn't for the average viewer any more, it's a video and DVD series for a niche market. That it was originally made for the whole of the UK is immaterial. So lets not confuse the question "was the McCoy era good?" with the question "did the McCoy era make for accessible family programming?" That question was relevant ten years ago, but it's not any more (until there's a new series, anyway, he said more in hope than faith).

Broadly speaking, yes, the McCoy era was good. After a disastrous start it made shaky progress until Season Twenty Five, when it found a definite niche. The McCoy era was also a star which burned brightly but half as long. The development it went through in the space of twelve stories was astonishing. By the time we got to Ghost Light, Fenric and Survival the era had already reached masterclass stage, and had it continued a new direction would have had to have been found again. Survival manages to encompass every theme the McCoy era ever addressed, and it would have been a hard act to follow.

But it wasn't perfect, even in those later stories. Great as it was in conception, the era often fell down in its realisation. There are some facts with which it's hard to argue; that the McCoy and Aldred often gave uneven performances, that many brilliant concepts were let down by lazy plotting, that the Doctor had his fare share of ludicrous dialogue, that - dammit - Ghost Light is overcomplicated, and that Season 24 was part of the era and can't just be ignored. Similarly, it's hard to argue that the density of stories was unparalleled, that some storylines were of a level of intelligence and ambition that the series had never come close to achieving before, that the relevance of stories like Survival was a brave direction to take, and that The Curse of Fenric is astonishing, not just in the history of Doctor Who, but in televised sci-fi as a whole. For newness and originality it's really only rivalled by two other Doctor Who stories, Warriors' Gate and Kinda.

Season 24 has always got something of a bum rap as far as I'm concerned. It's often been called silly, and childish, and pantomime. Much of the blame for this falls on Time and the Rani. An amazingly bad opening serial, it struck a blow against the new Doctor from which the season never really recovered. The Doctor is unlikeable and unfunny, Mel screams endlessly, the plot is nonsense and the only saving grace are some neat CGI bubbles. Handy direction too, but Who has never sunk this low.

After this, though, the last three stories aren't nearly as bad as supposed. Paradise Towers gives us a Doctor who's largely serious (and even downbeat), who doesn't spout malapropisms, and is actually quite likeable. Delta and the Bannermen is marvellous, a story which inhabits every cliché of the 'nice people against nasty aliens' plot with glee and conviction, and emerges as a squarely entertaining piece of fun that champions escapism inan exhilirating way. Dragonfire is let down by lazy logic and some excruciating moments of post-modernism (or cosy self-referential crap), but at its core is a nice tale built around a marvellous villain, with some memorable scenes.

Of course, there are ongoing problems. The season makes no bones about being aimed squarely at children, and why not? But it frequently crosses a line that Tom Baker once referred to, between being a "child's programme" and a "childish programme". There are too many pantomime performances, too many actors having a laugh rather than taking their role seriously (hello, Richard Briers). Many jokes are bad slapstick, rather than wit. Mel is there, and although she's not too irritating for Paradise Towers and Delta, it's still Bonnie Langford and Mel's still relentlessly two-dimensional. And then there's the Doctor.

At its heart, the conception of the Doctor wasn't so bad. Okay, so the malapropisms didn't work, and they were quickly dropped. He falls over a bit too much as well. But essentially this is a clown-Doctor, a brief which worked for Troughton. The bottom line is that Sylvester isn't as good an actor as Troughton. He tries too hard, and is often completely unconvincing. At times nothing short of brilliant (the confrontation of the Bannermen, talking Kane to death in Dragonfire), he's frequently hammy. And this is a factor that never really goes away. McCoy's Doctor gave us many brilliant moments, but the only story where he's totally at home is The Curse of Fenric. Even in Ghost Light there's the atrociously over-acted "forget the survey and go" scene, and then there's all that rolling of r's and whatnot. McCoy never really managed to totally inhabit his role as the Doctor, and there are frequent moments where you just don't believe in his character; although these moments do decrease over time, with odd throwbacks (was Sylvester on drugs during the filming of Battlefield?)

The important thing that Season 24 manages is to jettison the Saward-era baggage. This actually begins during Time and the Rani, with the quick, jumpy, almost nervous direction of Andrew Morgan being something unseen in the series. And McCoy's Doctor is so different to Colin Baker's that, by the end of Part Four, the previous era is forgotten, the slate is wiped clean. Unfortunately, the new era looks even worse. The rest of the season just can't recover; it heads more or less in the right direction, but flounders a frequently and takes a fair few wrong turns. Still, I maintain that Season 24 is nowhere near as bad as its reputation, and certainly isn't the worst season ever (23 and 11 vie for that honour in my book).

The jump made to Season 25 is a big one. It's a season book-ended by two marvellous stories, let down a little by one atrocious three-parter and another that isn't as good as it should be. But it's a fine season. Remembrance of the Daleks is - rightly - a well-loved story. It redefines the role of the Doctor as a setter of traps, a Doctor who's always one step ahead; it returns mystery to a serial, and also wraps up the Dalek continuity that goes back to Genesis. Once more, the story has a frenetic pace, nicely counterbalanced by some downbeat scenes, and the political undercurrent is understated but nice. Remembrance of the Daleks is a crucial entry in the McCoy canon, and gets better with every viewing.

The season's other classic is Greatest Show, a psychedelic and iconic story that shows the confidence the production team had gained at this stage. JNT's rather dull idea to "do a story in a circus" is recast as a macabre black comedy, and the production goes for every concept with its teeth. There's not much of a plot, just a revelling in the weird, the mysterious and the unexplained. Who are the Gods of Ragnarok? What's the medallion? How does Captain Cook arise from the dead? Why do the clowns drive a hearse? This is the first time that a Doctor Who story ever had the guts to ask questions and not provide answers, giving us instead a story full of memorable images. It may be a parody of Doctor Who production, but if viewed that way it's rather uninteresting. Greatest Show works because it doesn't dwell on its central conceit, but loses itself in its own world. The only exception is Whizzkid, who seems meaningless except as a Doctor Who fan parody, and leads to some moments that don't ring true (Morgana ushering him into the circus, for example). Greatest Show also improves with age, and the imagery remains effective. Bellboy's death is one of Who's greatest moments.

In the middle is a nearly-man and a mess. The Happiness Patrol is as ambitious a project as Doctor Who ever attempted, and it very nearly works. But there's too much running around, too many ideas not followed through. The Kandyman is a great villain, but he spends an episode stuck to the floor with lemonade. The waiting zone is a lovely idea, but it isn't worthy of the screen time it gets. The late show at the forum just disappears from the narrative. The Happiness Patrol is nearly, nearly great, but just has to content itself with good. That isn't to say I don't love it; its ambition and the scene with the two guards alone make it fabulous, but there's so many other good bits. The 'fondant surprise' death is genuinely disturbing, and final confrontation between the Doctor and Helen A is just magnificent; who would have thought watching a monster of a woman weep over the death of her murderous pet would be so heart-rending?

No, the problem lies in the fact that the storytelling elements are sometimes deficient. For every belting scene there's a silly bit with that go-kart, or Priscilla P being captured off-screen.

Silver Nemesis is, meanwhile, the pits. A dodgy remake of Remembrance, it's the McCoy era's second great black spot; we might retitle it "When Cartmel's Ideas Go Bad". It's a meaningless rehash of all of Cartmel's notions - the Doctor's not just a Time Lord, he sets plans, there's political commentary, there's magic and mystery, the Doctor allow the enemies to destroy each other. Silver Nemesis is an effective way of showing just how wrong Cartmel's masterplan could go if the writing isn't excellent. Whereas a substandard Hinchcliffe story is tiresome, a substandard McCoy story is embarrassing. And boy is this substandard. The Doctor behaves like an imbecile, the TARDIS hops meaninglessly from place to place, two period people wander around meaninglessly, some Neo-Nazis are included in it for no real reason, Cybermen fall over if confronted by someone with a gold tooth. Then there's all the rubbish with the Queen and an American tourist... ugh. It^Òs a difficult one to watch. And an anniversary story too.

Still, Season 25 is, compared to what came before it, astonishingly good. But it also has a finality that other seasons never had. Foes like the Daleks and the Cybermen are vanquished once and for all, and The Happiness Patrol and Greatest Show had a real completeness to them. They feel epic and unique, rather than like routine stories which could be rehashed next week. These two factors - quality and finality - op up in a big way in Season 26.

And Season 26 is just astonishingly good by any standards. After a mediocre opening there are three stories of stunning quality, three stories with flawless visual effects, with adult themes, with great casts, with pretty much anything you could wish for.

Before this is Battlefield, another story where Cartmel's ideas fail to mesh into anything convincing. Nowhere near as bad as Silver Nemesis, Battlefield is still a mess. People seem to wander around without any real logic, giving us some memorable moments but no coherent storyline. McCoy really hams it up in this one, and some of the design isn't as good as it could be; the underwater spaceship looks like a game-show set. Then there's a scabbard which goes from being incredibly important to irrelevant, a great monster who spends an episode making funny colours in a room somewhere, a silly bit where McCoy threatens to kill someone and some excruciating direction. Lost in this are some fabulous moments; the Doctor's description of nuclear war, Morgaine "getting the tab", and the Brigadier's meeting with the Destroyer is rather wonderful. A mediocre story all the same, with irritating bits about the Doctor's future incarnations and meaningless references to Merlin thrown randomly in.

From there we have the Great Triad of the era. It begins with Ghost Light, that fascinating look at Victorianism and evolution. Of course, the one charge laid at Ghost Light's door is its inaccessibility. Fair enough. Upon showing the story to a non-fan friend, however, a different criticism emerged. "It^Òs the most complicated piece of crap in the world," he said, which didn't surprise me all that much, but his follow-up was more interesting. "It's trying to do everything. It's got all these ideas floating around but can't be arsed actually dealing with any of them. Just tell me a story, stop trying to be clever."

And I was surprised to find myself thinking that he was at least partially right. Ghost Light is a historical, set in Victorian England, but it's fundamentally different from any previous Who historical. Ghost Light is about Victorian England in a way that say, Talons, isn't. It touches on the racism of the day, on imperialism, on conformity, on the darkness behind the veneer. Its other theme of evolution is in a way a counterpoint to the Victorian mentality that people must change to fit in with the world, that the only correct "change" is to conform. Evolution is a fundamentally opposed to this, as it is about the world changing to accommodate the people in it. And Light is the ultimate personification of this mentality, a creature who will destroy everything because it doesn't fit in with his world-view.

That is Ghost Light's great strength, and yet also its weakness. It's so broad that it renders any other stories about Victorian England irrelevant, and yet it doesn't really get its hands dirty with any of its secondary themes - because rather than comprehensively address one issue it's busy introducing another. It touches on repression, but it doesn't actually deal with it in any real way, contenting itself with Ace's "scratch the Victorian veneer" comment. The Doctor mentions "turning all the atlases pink" but the issue of imperialism only really figures for ten seconds of the story, relegated to a metaphor for conforming. Ghost Light does too much in one way, but not enough in another. The result is an astonishing piece of television, but one that dismisses the topics it raises rather too quickly; and as an entry in the Doctor Who canon it casts a long shadow over any other similar stories.

In a way that's fine, because there's no reason that Doctor Who should deal with Victorian England repeatedly. However the following two stories are about questions that are innately involved in every Doctor Who story. In spite of the quality of the stories the series was cancelled at the right time, because in The Curse of Fenric and Survival it had reached a natural end. The drafts of seasons 27 and 28 were very largely concerned with Gallifrey and the Time Lords and "the dark side of human nature", which had already been addressed in Ghost Light and Survival. Apart from some incestuous Gallifrey-lore it's hard to see what they could have added.

The Curse of Fenric features the Doctor taking on "Evil from the Dawn of Time". Not an evil; Evil. The lot. The works. It's interesting that any subsequent mentions of Fenric in Who fiction have attempted to make him less important, because with the universal force of evil defeated the Doctor has very little else to do and his subsequent adventures are irrelevant. It's a bit like Batman killing the Joker in the first film; what's he got left to take care of after that?

And there's more. The Curse of Fenric addresses the two sides of the Doctor; the hero that we know and trust, and the manipulator that "walks in eternity". In its conclusion, it resolves those themes. The Doctor, we see, is on the side of his friend. The Curse of Fenric is very much the seed for the chess-playing antihero of the New Adventures, which is odd, because its message is the opposite. The Doctor defeats Fenric because he's not playing chess. He defeats him because he can see past the colour of the piece to the real person inside; to Fenric they're pawns but to the Doctor they're people. And although the Doctor manipulates Ace he manipulates her in an un-chess like way, by understanding her affection and disappointment and sense of inferiority and her love for him. The Curse of Fenric answers that question of "whose side is the Doctor on?", an argument then duplicated (not completely irrelevantly, but there was overkill nonetheless) by dozens of New Adventures.

And then there's Survival. It's a marvellous climax to the series, a marvellous ending, but it is an ending. The Doctor is, essentially, a pacifist and a wanderer. Survival's two themes are pacifism and home. At the end the Doctor wins by refusing to fight and realising where his home is (Earth or the TARDIS, a nice bit of ambiguity). In that sense the two main motivations of the Doctor's character are dealt with. The Master is the antithesis of the Doctor, whose means of survival is to kill off competition, and who is eventually defeated because he won't help the Doctor and because he doesn't have a home to go to; a belief system which leads him to savagery. He's killed off at the end, and that's another key motivation of the Doctor gone.

So; was the McCoy era any good? Yes. Did it kill off Doctor Who? Well, yes, in the sense that it concluded the series as we knew it. The New Adventures (particularly before Human Nature) found themselves fleshing out arguments that had already been had. Since then, the books have frequently searched for a new direction; The Doctor as a force of nature, the Doctor as magic-realist hero, the Doctor trapped in a continuity-heavy universe, the ineffectual Doctor, and often a return to the good old days of just telling a story (remember them?). Recently, we've hit a reset switch, which in a way is an admission that all the important questions have been answered.

So the McCoy era was responsible for the death of the series, because its stories went further than any other previous stories had and dismissed the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master and ultimately the Doctor himself with a finality that no other Doctor Who story ever had before. But the era killed Doctor Who only in the sense that it effectively brought it to a conclusion. The televised series didn't really die, it ended. Properly.

I love the McCoy era for many reasons, but I think that's the most important of all.

A Review by Terrence Keenan 3/12/02

If you had asked me about six months ago what I thought about the McCoy era and the subsequent Virgin NA book line, I would have responded with something along the lines of "irredeemable flaming horse shit".

After posting my thoughts about the silly McCoy flamewars on RADW, I felt obligated to dive back into the McCoy Era and see if old opinions still held up or whether or not I was young and stupid.

I still think the McCoy era is deeply flawed, although I can understand why some people champion the 12 TV stories and the Virgin line so much.

There's not much to say about season 24. It's a comedy season, mostly. The whole tone of the season is set the moment you have Kate O'Mara in Mel-drag in Time and the Rani. I should have enjoyed this season. Hell, I think season 17 is brilliant with its mix of humor and drama. However, the humor in season 24 is forced. And in this comedy season, we have a vaudeville performance by Sylvester McCoy. I'm probably in the minority who thought the malapropisms were not all that bad. It's just that instead of acting, there's just lots of mugging and general silliness for the camera by both Doctor and others. By default, I rate Dragonfire the best of a very weak season because of all the film critic references in the names, and one of the better leaving scenes for Bonnie Langford's Mel. Time and the Rani and Delta and the Bannermen are horrendous, and Paradise Towers falls apart by not having a director understand the ideas in the script. Also, season 24 benefits from a minimum of continuity references/tie-ins to past stories.

From there the powers that be (JN-T & Cartmel), stuck with a very silly Doctor of their own creation (via BBC intervention), tried to make him something more, a super-evolved Doctor on a mission, willing to do whatever's necessary to beat the bad guys. A Doctor with deep, dark secrets. A champion of time.

And it's incredibly wrong.

Here's a good explanation as to why its wrong, courtesy of the very funny and insightful Completely Useless Encyclopedia by Chris Howarth & Steve Lyons:

"It used to be that the Doctor was a simpler wanderer in space and time who quietly slipped away from his own people in a broken down old TARDIS. Nowadays, we have to believe that, on the way out, he stockpiled all the Time Lords¹s greatest weapons in case he needed them to commit genocide against the Daleks, Cybermen, Etc. In the course of one such plan, he sealed the Nemesis statue into a comet and sent it into an orbit that returned it to Earth every 25 years. Each time it passed, it caused disasters: In 1913, it was on the eve of the Great War, 1938 was the Eve of World War II, and 1963 was the assassination of President Kennedy... But let's get this straight: the Doctor unleashes a weapon that causes the two biggest wars in history and the murder of a respected politician, then brings the Cybermen to Earth to kill yet more people, all so they'll reassemble the Nemesis status and trigger it against themselves...."

Jon Blum on both Outpost Gallifrey and on RADW makes the argument that all the Doctors previously had been treated with contempt by both companions and enemies until the final two seasons of McCoy. (I'm generalizing his point, but this is the essence of why he thinks McCoy is the best Doctor of all.)

The reason that the Doctor is a hero is because he's not perfect or Godlike. He does make mistakes, and because he does, it makes his victories all the more satisfactory.

In order to make the "Time's Champion" scenario work, you need a Doctor who has the gravis to make this believable. And this is McCoy's failure. McCoy, unfortunately, never had the acting chops (or time, rehearsal and shooting time were minimal, in his defense) or scripts to have this idea come across effectively. Tossing off dialogue bits like "And didn't we have trouble with the prototype" don't cut it for me. Nor ideas like the alleged Evil From The Dawn of Time in Curse of Fenric -- a shallow concept in itself -- being beaten with a rigged chess puzzle and a deus ex machina ending work either.

McCoy's three best stories from the last two seasons -- Ghostlight, Survival and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy -- stay away from the Time's Champion/mysterious Doctor concept, and instead focus on the Doctor's relationship with Ace (an overrated companion at best, but that's another review). Ghostlight and Survival are both variations on the idea of evolution gone awry. GSitG was about Doctor Who, fandom and the BBC. All three feature McCoy's strongest performances in the role.

Of the remaining from seasons 25 & 26, you have two sheer abominations -- Battlefield & Silver Nemesis -- two overrated mediocrities -- Remembrance of the Daleks & The Curse of Fenric -- and The Happiness Patrol, a cousin of GSitG, as it could be viewed equally as disaster or genius. And although I can see where other reviewers here have found merit -- Rob Matthews, Joe Ford & Mike Morris -- IMHO, the faults are far too visible to overcome any positives.

With the books, I see the same problems. The stories that turn me off are the ones laden with the Ka Faraq Gatri/Time's Champion/making-deals-with-death-and-pain-and-other-eternals nonsense. The best of the Virgin line either hint at it (Love and War), steal the good parts and dump the rest (Set Piece, Left-Handed Hummingbird) or ignore it all together (Transit). Unfortunately, the novels concentrated on bad companions -- Bernice Summerfield, New Ace -- soap opera angsting and working with concepts that were boring (The Dark Time of Gallifrey, The Pythia). Call me old school, but in the end, the Doctor should be taking on the enemy head on, with the joie di vive of winning the battle, the reason I rate Transit the best of the NAs (I defy any true Who Fan to not have a smile on their face the moment the Doc calls the alien program in Transit Fred).

Anyhoo.... I see the seventh Doctor's era as flawed by a bad concept, the whole Time's Champion/Dark Doctor idea, which to me seemed a reactionary attempt to redefine a Doctor who would have been forever labelled by the tag of silly.

There are some good stories in the McCoy/7th Doc era, but those are the ones which ignore a bad concept and stick with what make the Doctor great, a hero with flaws, a Time Lord who is all too human and mortal.

A Review by Paul Williams 26/6/07

I have decided to review the era of each Doctor, inspired by reviews on this site which have forced me to reconsider previously held opinions. Divorced from their contemporary context, each era is being constantly reassessed as more people become aware of the stories therein. Often this is a bad thing as episodes which succeeded in entertaining at the time of transmission are now being torn to shreds but the McCoy stories, seasons 24 and 25 especially, which received bad reviews at the time are now regarded more positively by fans.

I would like to consider the views of contemporary audiences as well as later evaluations and am undertaking the reviews in reverse order based on viewing figures. The average number of viewers for a McCoy story is 4.83 million, placing him right at the bottom of the pile. The alarming dip in viewing figures began with the previous season and would end with the show's unannounced cancellation, proving that Michael Grade's announced cancellation was merely a suspended death sentence.

The scheduling of McCoy's stories opposite Coronation Street suggested that some senior figures at the BBC did not want Doctor Who to survive. Perhaps that is why they forced John Nathan-Turner to stay as producer against his wishes.

JNT and the new script-editor, Andrew Cartmel, realised the need for an overhaul of the programme. They attempted to do this by reintroducing mystery to the character of the Doctor, providing genuine character development for his companion Ace and commissioning experimental stories that would not have been made in any previous era. All three of these have been taken up in the new series of Doctor Who. In the 1980s, only the development of Ace was successful, a fact often forgotten due to her longevity in the New Adventures series of novels that followed.

I think it was Robert Holmes who said that audiences have short memories. To make the Doctor more mysterious it was only necessary to avoid references to his past. Three years spent not mentioning Gallifrey and the Master would have younger viewers growing up without any knowledge of Time-Lords or the Doctor's origins. Instead, we have the hysterical Lady Peinforte bleating about secrets and hints throughout Remembrance of the Daleks that he was something more than a Time Lord. References lost on most casual viewers. JNT has often been accused of pampering to the fans during the fifth Doctor's era but here we have the unnecessary and, in some cases embarrassing, returns of the Cybermen, the Brigadier, the Rani and Glitz. Six of the fourteen stories featured the return of an old adversary or friend with only the Daleks being integral to the plot. Against this is the production of stories such as The Happiness Patrol and Paradise Towers that require no pre-knowledge of Doctor Who whatsoever.

The shorter seasons, of just 14 episodes, made it harder for the production team to experiment. Four episodes of failure can disappear in a 26 episode strong season; in these seasons Time and the Rani and Battlefield comprised a quarter of the annual output. This cut in episodes also ensured less public exposure to Doctor Who and it is noteworthy that McCoy's Doctor and his adventures received less national media publicity than his predecessors.

Risk-taking was high and in the hands of inexperienced writers. Only Pip and Jane Baker had written for Doctor Who before this era. Arguably, only Robert Holmes and Eric Saward had emerged with any credit as writers from the two previous seasons, and neither could be used again, but this lack of experience tells, especially given Cartmel's own status as a newcomer. A commission for someone like Christopher H Bidmead might have bridged the gap with that extra knowledge of how to write Doctor Who successfully. To Cartmel's credit, three of the new writers were hired again, even when their first attempts were not successful. All of them tried their best, with some superb dialogue at times and ambitious scripts that often proved too complicated for their broadcast slots.

Most Doctor Who stories are best watched in weekly episodes. By contrast, Remembrance of the Daleks, Ghost Light and Curse of Fenric are much better when watched in a single sitting. They also benefit from a repeat viewing. When broadcast over four or three weeks the plots become difficult to follow.

British audiences were slowly adapting to the American-style single episode and full-length movies. Season 22 had detected this, albeit with 2 episode stories, and the new series has capitalised on it. Seasons 24-26, especially the last two, were perhaps broadcast in the wrong format. To the fans, with videos and latterly DVD's, to dissect stories over several viewing this did not matter. The person tuning in for the odd episode had less opportunity to get hooked on the programme than in previous eras.

It's interesting that many of the stories are now getting positive reviews on sites like this. After its initial transmission, university students were writing to DWM complaining that they didn't understand Ghost Light. That's probably because it's one of the few Doctor Who stories to be constructed thematically and really needs to be seen in its entirety.

Television audiences did not warm to the McCoy stories at the time. The casting of big-name actors - Richard Briers, Hale and Pace, and Ken Dodd - did more harm than good. There's no point in using star names to bring in viewers if the end product fails to entertain them. Also the above names suggested that Doctor Who was becoming comedy when, in fact, the stories were best described as bizarre (The Happiness Patrol, Greatest Show in the Galaxy), horror (Curse of Fenric, Survival) or traditional (Dragonfire, Remembrance of the Daleks, Silver Nemesis). Whilst there were some comic moments, a few unintentional, the era was intended to be serious. The manipulative Doctor of Remembrance of the Daleks, the scene with the soldiers in The Happiness Patrol, the battles with the Gods of Ragnarok and Fenric and the confrontation between the Doctor and the Master on the Cheetah planet demonstrate the path that Cartmel chose to tread. His own contributions to the New Adventures range expand upon this.

Due to the tight budget constraints, it further seems unwise to spend money attracting famous actors rather than investing in other aspects of production. Having said that, the special effects were generally good throughout the era. The creation of the Haemovores and the Destroyer are particularly impressive.

Other aspects of the production failed. The direction and lighting of Paradise Towers removed much of the suspense from the script and The Happiness Patrol also failed to achieve, through no fault of the writers. Its monster, the Kandyman, symbolises a perception that Doctor Who had degenerated into silliness by this stage but actually there's nothing worse than anything in the Graham Williams era or some of the Hartnell stories. After Time and the Rani, there wasn't a dull McCoy story and little evidence of padding or pedestrian plotting. It's the first era which can be said to have had a vision for the development of both the Doctor and his companion. Many of today's television series and serials, including the new Doctor Who, are frequently structured in this way to provide links between different episodes.

Final verdict on McCoy's era is that it tried hard, sometimes too hard, to be different, contained a disproportionate number of bad stories and would have benefited immensely from longer seasons with longer episodes broadcast at a more favourable time. I think it's also fair to say that the production team and the writers were not always in sync and that the era paved the way for genuinely new Doctor Who, first in print and then back on television.