But equally, this continues to be a really effective way of handling a need for Tuesday content. God, what am I going to do after next week when I'm out of Last War in Albion to run? (Write more Last War in Albion, probably. The five entries I'm running now were some of the most fun I've had writing in the last year.)
Spearhead From Space: Fun, and with some great images, but a story we’ve largely allowed the VHS/DVD/omnibus versions of to replace the episodic structure. Watched as episodes one notices that the new Doctor doesn’t “debut" as such until well past the halfway mark, leaving Nicholas Courtney to hold down the fort. And only the mannequin scene provides us the Autons we know and love. A well-shot and reasonably fun story, but little more. 7/10
The Silurians: By most accounts a mispaced buildup with a fantastic final episode, it is in fact a subtle and lively buildup with a disaster of a final episode the implications of which have to be ignored because otherwise the Doctor becomes the willing employee of the casually genocidal. But this is splitting hairs - either way, it doesn’t quite work despite the good bits. 6/10
Ambassadors of Death: Whitaker and Hulke are both fantastic writers, and there’s more Whitaker in this story than people give it credit for. Unique among the UNIT stories in that it’s fundamentally hopeful and based on a sense of wonder, the thing the series most loses in this season and, really, the Pertwee era at large. A myriad of wonderful visual images, and John Abineri and Ronald Allen anchor it with two of the best guest performances the series ever had. A few decisions jar in relation to the rest of the series, but on their own merits hold up fine. (The bread van and the teleporting) Unlike any other Pertwee story - marvelous. 9/10.
Inferno: Not a bad story, but simply not the classic it’s believed to be. The parallel universe sequence is one of the most hackneyed ways of extending a story imaginable, and it amounts to the “we’re running out of ideas, let’s give all the actors different parts" runaround most series do midway through their third season. To see the Pertwee era doing it in its fourth story is an ill omen. With the added indignity that once back from the parallel universe in a blur of narrative momentum Pertwee has to spend most of the last episode modeling his death pose. Yes, Courtney and John are fabulous, but can anyone actually identify how the parallel universe plot impacts the resolution at all? I’d like it more if everyone else would agree to like it less. In reality, fairly average. 5/10
Terror of the Autons: The series is pulling itself apart at the seams as it tries to decide if it’s a gaudy, glam rock spectacle or a serious-minded action adventure show. But in the course of that comes this, a story where the contrasts between the two approaches end up balancing perfectly to produce something quite remarkable. It falters frequently - neither the Master nor the Doctor quite work in it - but when it’s on its game, and it is more often than it isn’t, it’s absolutely phenomenal. 8/10
The Mind of Evil: Tedious action heroics. Doctor Who is not well served by trying to be Doomwatch. Fleeting moments of glory, but they’re fleeting - the highlight is when the Keller machine is a stupid looking alien, as it’s where Doctor Who plotting finally takes hold. Otherwise, this is the point where the show moves furthest away from its actual premise and risks becoming a generic show that wouldn’t have survived the Heath government. 3/10
The Claws of Axos: The fact that it doesn’t come close to dramatically working is balanced by the fact that it’s the most visually and medially astonishing thing Doctor Who has done since the Hartnell era. Suddenly the series goes from trying to do Doomwatch to trying to make Earth as strange as it used to make alien planets. So much doesn’t work, but so much does that it sets the tone for the entire era. So the sublime and the ridiculous in equal measures. 5/10.
The Colony in Space: Awkward in places, but it doesn’t get nearly enough credit for trying to reinvent the space style of adventure for the post-War Games era. It quietly stitches together the “gritty realism" of much of the Pertwee era to date with the emerging glam stylization into something that makes a compelling and confident case for what Doctor Who can be in the early 1970s. 8/10
The Daemons: For neither the first nor last time in the Pertwee era the inventiveness of the premise covers a desperately poor script. This is mispaced at every turn, the ending doesn’t work, and it turns out the reason everyone on the show spoke so highly of it was that they rather enjoyed their holiday. Still, despite its… difficulties The Daemons does finally nail how to do the von Danniken story and the ancient god story, both of which are mainstays of Doctor Who for the rest of the 1970s. Being first is almost as good as actually being good? 6/10
Day of the Daleks: Another Pertwee story with immense successes and immense flaws, in this case the flaws fairly obviously being the Daleks themselves. The story Louis Marks wanted to write is marvelous, if, like many Marks scripts, just a bit wooden. The story we got drips with the cynicism of “oh let’s just shove some Daleks in it." 5/10
The Curse of Peladon: Oh, this is fun. I mean, this is just fun. Redeeming old monsters, great visual design, ideas the series has never tried before (a quasi-medieval planet!), some great performances. This is just a big, sloppy bit of fun that takes Colony in Space’s approach, tightens it to four episodes, and goes just a little trippier. Let it never be said the Pertwee era can’t work. Just that it rarely does. 9/10
The Sea Devils: Many of the standards of the Pertwee era done the best they’ll ever be done. It’s too long, and the Master doesn’t improve The Silurians any, but this is solid, confident, and the one to dust off and show people what the standard issue UNIT story looks like despite not actually having UNIT in it. Unfortunately, Doctor Who still just isn’t that good at being a straight action-adventure military show. Hints that the script had a larger ambition are largely squandered on boat porn. 7/10
The Mutants: It’s a hot mess, but a charming hot mess full of ideas. Like The Claws of Axos it doesn’t work and has more ambition than execution. But there’s at least more execution here and the ideas are intelligent. Difficult to praise but easy to love, which is a statement that applies to more of the Pertwee era than it should. 8/10
The Time Monster: It’s strange, we’re so much more forgiving of bad pacing and sloppy storytelling for stories that don’t go too far and get a bit silly. But there’s nothing here that supposed classics of the Pertwee era don’t do just as badly. This story rather gets at the truth of the Pertwee era - its highs aren’t as high as other eras, and its lows aren’t as low. This isn’t actually the worst the era can throw at us, but it’s down there. And still it’s reasonably fun if you’re in a mood where silly romps are OK. Just a bit below par. 4/10
The Three Doctors: Oh my giddy aunt! There’s so much to love here, isn’t there? Baker and Martin’s unceasing torrent of ideas meets an occasion that needs to go as big as they want to. The design matches their ambition for once, and you’ve got Patrick Troughton as the main guest star. Much as I want to complain that he’s not really playing his Doctor so much as a parody of it, he’s just as good at that as anything else. The worst that can be said about it is that it feels like a Pertwee story, and even I admit that I should just get over myself on that one. 10/10
Carnival of Monsters: I feel like I should have dinged The Three Doctors to 9/10 just so that the degree to which this improves on it can be highlighted. It’s basically perfect, after all, isn’t it? A brilliant script, well-acted, and the sort of thing that only Doctor Who can do. Robert Holmes finally comes into his own here. If this isn’t your cup of tea, you’re probably in the wrong fandom. 10/10
Frontier in Space: Well, yes, the pacing is shot, but what else is new with Pertwee-era six parters? It tries, and its scope and sweep almost covers up the fact that it’s just a sequence of prison cells. One of the best examples of Doctor Who doing big sci-fi on a tiny budget and getting the balance right, with some jaw-droppingly good moments. Sleepy and not quite a classic, but very fun, even if one can’t help but feel like Delgado deserved a better final outing. 6/10
Planet of the Daleks: It succeeds at its lack of ambition admirably, and it’s not like rolicking Dalek thrills in the classic Terry Nation style had been seen in recent memory. It does successfully dust those off and do them as well as they can be done in the 1970s. But it’s still just Doctor Who and the Daleks with Pertwee subbed in for Cushing. It’s easy to see why they made it. It’s tough to see why you’d sit down and watch it now. 3/10
The Green Death: Oh, you want to love it, don’t you? The maggots are so good. BOSS is so good. The final scene is so good. And there’s probably a cut-down edit of it that consists of just those bits that’s also so good. Unfortunately, what we have is another Sloman-Letts Curate’s Egg of misjudged tone and vapid spectacle. I want to love it. I even almost do. Almost. But not quite. 6/10
The Time Warrior: The condescension with which Sarah Jane is treated is just about ameliorated by how well and quickly Lis Sladen gets her teeth into the role, leaving a well-paced and at times very funny Robert Holmes script. If you ignore Sarah and look at everything going on around her you have a classic of the era. Unfortunately, the condescending glee the script treats the idea of a feminist trying to stand up to the middle ages is there, and it just hurts. 7/10
Invasion of the Dinosaurs: Like much of Malcolm Hulke, it tries so hard. But the six-part structure and the fact that the answer to “who’s in on the conspiracy" is “everyone who’s not a regular," and then the inclusion of Mike Yates is blown early on just kills the momentum. It’s not ruined by the effects - it’s ruined by the fact that it’s an unambitious mess that consists of “well, Malcolm Hulke writes UNIT and giant lizards well, so let’s do it again" and nothing more. 4/10
Death to the Daleks: It’s fitting that GallifreyBase’s standard for 1/10 is “I’d rather listen to a tape of leaf-blower noise," as leaf-blower noise, turned to a low volume, would provide a white noise background almost as good for falling asleep as this story. But that means this story is better than the leaf-blower, so it must be a 2/10.
The Monster of Peladon: The nadir of the Pertwee era, and one of the all-time turkeys of Doctor Who. A well-done four-parter is stretched to six parts with no ambition and the best ideas taken out. Condescending, unintelligent, and, most damningly, barely watchable. Excruciatingly bad. 1/10
Planet of the Spiders: At the heart of this is a very basic problem: Barry Letts was a crappy writer. Around that is the basic self-indulgence of the story. There’s so much that’s good here, but it’s drowned in the problems that plague this entire era all appearing in some of their worst and most tedious forms. The result perfectly sums up the Pertwee era: entertaining but unsatisfying. An interesting but failed experiment comes to an end. 5/10