Seventh Doctor favorites

I fully expect to be the only person voting for Time and the Rani.

Top two contenders for me are Remembrance of the Daleks and Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

Remembrance is the best of a poor era, and Remembrance has many faults.

I think it’s an interesting era, and a strong one. Despite the comedy leg, spray tan and wimpy Pex, Paradise Towers can be chilling. Delta and the Bannermen is just fun. I’m always game for Greatest Show in the Galaxy and season 26 stands up well.

Season 26 has 4 good stories which makes it his most consistent though Sylv is sometimes poor in them, sadly. His shouting in Battlefield is cringe inducing but the stories themselves make the best Who season in a long, long time at that stage.

I like The Happiness Patrol quite a lot FWIW, it's certainly up there for me.

I felt that Sylvester's time on the show marked a real renaissance, a new direction for the way the stories were told and less reliance on old favourites. Equally, special effects were becoming more accessible. Therefore, pink alien skies, animatronic monsters and a limited form of CGI bolstered the visuals in certain ways. I love his time on the show and felt that with a little promotion, kinder scheduling (ie: not opposite inexplicably popular soap opera 'warmth and grit'), Doctor Who really could have acquired a new lease of life. Even the much lamented Series 24 is instantly a new-look show, and beyond Time and the Rani, the scripts held a new form of cleverness about them: on the surface, family friendly lightness Michael Grade appeared to be asking for - underneath, as dark a subject matter as ever before.

Paradise Towers is a good example of that. Bright haired street gangs, cuddly old ladies, comedy caretakers and robots. Underneath that, the street gangs are vicious and temperamental, the cuddly old ladies are smiling cannibals, the caretakers are covering up wanton murders and the robots are regularly to be seen transporting corpses to their true master.

Remembrance of the Daleks is a massive story, epic in scale, featuring loads of twists and surprises for general audience and fans alike. Only their inconsistent voices lets things down a little, but the new McCoy/Aldred partnership is instantly adorable. And Davros!

The Curse of Fenric - even the fanzines at the time (this was before the internet) put their hatred of the show to one side for this one. Up there with the best of 'classic Who', this tale of legends, blue-veined monsters, vampire girls and Ace's faith in the Doctor severely tested proved that there was a lot of life left in Doctor Who ... but it was too late.

I've picked a story from each series because I wouldn't be able to make up my mind otherwise. Dragonfire, Greatest Show, Happiness Patrol, Ghost Light and Survival are all 'bubbling under', as they say.
 

1. It's over too soon - should have been a six-parter.
2. Ace should have been allowed to keep the supercharged baseball bat - 'Wicked!'
3. 'Counter-Measures' Series 1 should have started broadcasting on BBC1 the following week.



Seriously, what's not to love about 'Remembrance'? For me it's the top* Seventh Doctor story by some distance, a classic in every way.
Daleks in a great plot, effects that looked good then and still do, links back to 'An Unearthly Child', the old question of changing history revisited, social comment, emotional depth for Ace, brilliant guest characters with 'spin-off' written all over them...

(*'Ghostlight' is my favourite McCoy-era story, but that's me voting with my M.R.James ghost-story-fan hat on as well. As a pure 'Doctor Who' story, 'Remembrance' is the winner. I hope that makes sense! )


EDIT: My three votes are: Ghostlight, Remembrance and Season 26 - 'Battlefield' is patchy but I still like it, then the final three stories are all excellent.

A lot of tr flaws come out through the production, much like with Warriors of the Deep. One scene has a cleaning robot whizz past with a leg comically sticking out the back.