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The fourth season of the BBC's time-travel saga Doctor Who has rocketed to a demented conclusion. And now there's no more Who until Christmas, or even longer outside the U.K. But fear not — before Doctor Who was a new-millennium phenomenon, it ruled the British airwaves for a quarter of the last century. And some of your grand-dad's Doctor Who episodes are actually still worth checking out. Here's our complete handy guide to old-school Doctor Who for new-Who fans. With some spoilers.
Step one: Discover Ace, the Proto-Rose.
The last couple of years Doctor Who was on the air in the late 1980s, the writers started experimenting with the often-boring relationship between the Doctor and his cute travel companion. They introduced Ace, a rebellious teenager with a love of explosives. At first, the Ace-Doctor relationship was just a little spicier than the traditional Doctor/ambiguous-friend pairing, but over time it became a lot more. The Doctor started putting Ace through a series of tests and forcing her to confront her fears. She, in turn, started questioning the Doctor's goals and methods more than any companion before her. The Doctor-Ace relationship provided an inspiration for some of the more fully realized companions of today, like Rose.
The final three Ace stories are all on DVD, and they're probably the best way for fans of the RTD era to delve into the new series. (Ignore the horrendous opening credits, the mostly cheese-tastic incidental music and the worse-than-usual special effects.)
In "Ghostlight," the Doctor takes Ace to the haunted house that freaked her out when she was a kid, except they visit it in the Victorian era and she discovers she had good reason to be freaked out. "Ghostlight" is full of weird clever touches and riffs on Victorian naturalism and the absurdity of the British explorer archetype. (And a lot of that stuff ends up being less than meets the eye, sadly.) But at its core, it's about Ace confronting her deepest fears and getting closer to being the Doctor's equal.
And then in "Curse Of Fenric," the Doctor takes Ace to World War II England, where she meets her own mother as a baby and discovers that someone has been manipulating her all along. But "Curse Of Fenric" is mostly the episode steps up and starts being the clever one — there's a fantastic moment halfway through where the Doctor is counting on nobody figuring out the secret of the Viking runes. And he doesn't realize Ace has figured it out ages ago, because he's understimated her intelligence. Finally, in "Survival," Ace returns to her juvenile-delinquent roots and discovers that all her old friends have gotten sucked into a planet that's basically a weird parody of the "survival of the fittest" world the stupid adults in her life were trying to prepare her for all along.
These three stories stand the test of time quite well, and they show Ace growing and developing as a character, whose inner life is just as important as the Doctor's latest scheme. (A fourth Ace story, "Remembrance Of The Daleks," is also on DVD and has some nice moments.) Supposedly if the show hadn't been canceled, we would have learned the reason the Doctor was putting Ace through so much trauma: he was grooming her to become a Time Lord. The following season would have seen Ace enrolling in the Time Lord Academy on Gallifrey. (Her story continued in a different way in a series of novels, but a radio play, "Death Comes To Time," did show her going through a sort of Time Lord training.)
Step two: Sample the Baker era.
And yes, by "Baker era," I do mean "Tom Baker." I would never advocate anybody putting themselves through the torment of watching any of Colin Baker's mid-1980s tenure as the Doctor. Tom Baker played the Doctor from 1974 to 1981, and his manic (and sometimes menacing) portrayal was huge in England and won over American audiences. His portrayal degenerated into schtick after a few years, but at first he was the edgiest, funniest and most unpredictable of the Doctors.
I was surprised when I interviewed Julie Gardner, executive producer of the new Who, and she mentioned that showrunner Russell T. Davies had given her a list of classic Who episodes to watch before they relaunched the show. The list was all Tom Baker, instead of the later stories I'd been expecting: "Pyramids Of Mars," "Talons Of Weng-Chiang" and "City Of Death." (I wouldn't recommend "Talons Of Weng Chiang," though: the racial stereotyping is actually painful to watch.)
The best Tom Baker stories remain fresh because they're all about improvisation. Tom Baker is constantly improvising his performance, keeping the other actors on their toes. And his Doctor is written as the most improvisational as well. He's constantly being backed into a corner and bluffing his way out, making plans that fall flat and then making up new plans on the spot, and building gadgets out of scrap. And it's really in the Baker era that the show's scripts become so multi-layered that any child watching will probably miss half of what's going on. (And still love it.) Here are the Tom Baker episodes that actually hold up, weak special effects and all:
Step three: Check out some other classics.
I'm pretty confident that if you've followed steps one and two, you should already be a fan of the classic series. At that point, you should be open to sampling a lot of the other stories from the show. Here are a couple of ground rules:
1) Don't watch any story over four episodes long. (Or about 90 minutes.) While there are a few notable exceptions, by and large the longer a Who story gets, the more it gets padded out for length. Even some four-episode stories tend to have a third episode where the Doctor is locked up for twenty minutes or gets captured and escapes a couple of times. The show's producers frequently dragged out stories for longer than they deserved, in order to save money on sets and costumes. A few possible exceptions: "Dalek Invasion Of Earth," "Doctor Who And The Silurians" and "Inferno."
2) Stay away from the black and white 1960s stories until you're well and truly indoctrinated. There are some definite gems remaining from the 60s, including the aforementioned Dalek invasion story and "Tomb Of The Cybermen," but the first two Doctors' adventures haven't aged as well, by and large, as the rest of the show. Not just because of the old-movie look of the black and white, but also because they were filming literally an episode per week, with a couple of sets, and most of the episodes have a very stagey quality to them. They're basically stage plays on film.
3) Try to take breaks between episodes. I should have mentioned this earlier. When I lived in England as a kid, we would have a week between 25-minute episodes, and those silly cliffhangers would feel all-consuming. A lot of stories feel stretched out and slow if you watch them all in one sitting, but they feel urgent and super-fast if you watch them an episode at a time. Although the Tom Baker stories were frequently shown in "movie" format in the U.S., with all the episode breaks edited out, and they seemed to hold up fine. (I remember watching a 7-part Jon Pertwee story in "movie" format, and I nearly clawed my face off.)
That said, here are a few other stories that are on DVD that are especially worth checking out for people who are new to the classic series:
Okay, that's my advice for new-Who fans. What do you think?
Ace toy photo by Decepticreeps on Flickr.
Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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