4th Doctor Hype

Ducking for cover but bear with me.

TB isn't my favourite Doctor, However, he and everyone else involved in the show's production are consistently good for 5 years, even Underworld has its charms.

I detailed my feelings about Season 17 in its own Thread.

Then Season 18 comes along TB doesn't even attempt to hide his boredom, LW is even more off-putting then she was in Season 17, an instantly annoying new companion, and then the show talks down to the audience with an almost completely nonsensical script WG.

Regards

mark687

He's not my favourite Doctor either. I just admire the way he embodies the role both off and on-screen. With Tom Baker and Matt Smith, it's like they simply are the Doctors they played.

For older fans, I think a significant portion of it was when we met him. For a lot of American fans of my generation, Tom Baker was THE Doctor, and as the t-shirt says, you never forget your first Doctor.

I was aware that there had been predecessors, but he defined the role for me. So, nostalgia is a part of it, but I don't think nostalgia alone could account for his enduring popularity were there not something greater behind it.

I didn't discover Big Finish until 2012, but when I did, I got into it in a big way. It was really everything I wanted out of Doctor Who. I enjoyed it so much that I was nervous to return to what had previously been my favorite. What if it was just rose-tinted nostalgia? To employ a Doctor Who phrase, the memory cheats, and this wouldn't be the first time I went back to something I had loved as a kid to discover that it had really been pretty awful. Could I appreciate the Baker era as an adult?

Yup. It’s still great. Not all of it, of course, anything of that length is going to have some stinkers, but I still love Baker’s Doctor. He’s fun to watch, and charming and bonkers. As wolfie observed earlier in the thread, he had a very long run, and that allowed him to tell more stories and more kinds of stories than any other Doctor. He didn’t define his era, he defined Doctor Who as a whole.

Wit, charm, the ability to put on a series performance throughout an episode while regularly cracking jokes in a way that doesn't diminish the atmosphere. The unique voice. He's simply great.

It's not just his Doctor....the man is interesting and hilarious whenever he opens his mouth.





For a long time I called him my favorite (and I'm really not sure who the 'first' was), but at this point, I have a hard time rating them. In the original series, I felt that the later docs suffered somewhat from scripts despite their own abilities. Big Finish has remedied that.

That makes more sense. Though I don't agree with it.

It's a shame you don't personally 'get it'. But it's not fundamentally not-gettable. I totally get it. It's clever as opposed to clever-clever. It's one of my favourite stories. The cliffhanger to part three is, for me, one of the most perfect Doctor Who moments ever.

I've always maintained that I'm with the brig on this ("Splendid chap, all of them") but a lot of my favourite stories are from TB's time on the show. As others have said, he was the Doctor at a time when the show experienced a peak in quality and audience and was a terrific ambassador for the role as well. Playing the character for over a quarter of the original run didn't hurt either, I imagine.

I think the 4th Doctor era was an adventurous but not preposterous one where it was safe to feel almost guaranteed of a good story and an interesting one, and I think a substantial part of that might have been companions who were increasingly something to reckon with in their own right. The stories feel like they don't have to worry so much about the companions and are thus at liberty to come up with more interesting dilemmas than centering on who will fly the TARDIS if The Doctor is indisposed or companions being taken in by simple ruses, and so forth.

I think Tom has a fantastic voice and a profound ability to convey emotions to the audience no matter what he's doing, and more than any other performer to play The Doctor, I feel like I can trust his cues as to what I should be feeling about a situation. His Doctor seems very straightforward and honest, and a bit less murky and complex than other Doctors can seem at times. The 7th Doctor is an utterly charming fellow but I wish it felt safe to take him at face value very often.

I do associate those 4th Doctor expectations very much with childhood viewing, but mainly I think nothing's really ever come along to change my opinion of the 4th Doctor in all these years, in contrast to the way my association of 6th and 7th Doctors with a certain quality of stories has been massively rejuvenated by the care Big Finish has taken in giving them good stories. I've come to expect really good stories with them in the audios whereas that was not my expectation with the TV series. With the 4th Doctor, perhaps the "Not now, K-9" routine is starting to stale a bit, but I think Tom and everyone are generally doing such a fine job keeping up a fine tradition that my youthful impression of the 4th Doctor as "the best Doctor ever" (if only by a little) really hasn't been tarnished any.

I'm not gonna give you flack, just tell you....TWWWWWW.

seriously, 4 is not my favorite, but he is a solid 3rd, behind 3 and ole sixie.  Cause he was America's first Doctor who, the stories were great, the comedy and drama was great, the companions were adorable(Liz Sladen was my first love, and Leela my first lust. I know, way TMI), and he was just brilliant as the doctor.

Question, where does he rank in comparison with the original doctors? if He aint in that top 5 then, you might have a bit of bias over something, just sayin.