It's where the show went from there that really hurt it.
I know this is the fan consensus view but I've always struggled with it.
For me Season 22 feels like a more complete and rounded season than any of Davison's seasons were. There's kind of a closure to Attack of the Cybermen, Mark of the Rani, Two Doctors and Revelation of the Daleks that there just wasn't with Resurrection, King's Demons, Arc of Infinity or Time-Flight.
Apart from Timelash (which I think gets overblown mainly because it aired so soon after the cancellation announcement and thus made the perfect scapegoat of why the show was judged terrible), the worst you could say about its stories is they were often one-trick viewings.
Also in terms of the season's notorious crimes, I don't think it's anywhere near as guilty of alienating continuity excesses as Season 20 and Warriors were, I don't think the Doctor is any more of a thug in it than he was back in Season 13 or indeed Season 6, and I don't think it's even as mean-spirited, morally confused or tasteless as Season 21 was.
I will grant that Peri in this season is one of the worst companions (and she wasn't bad at all in the previous season) and has almost the worst dynamic with the Doctor (which I think had a negative effect on how his violence was viewed. When Tom Baker acted violent, we understood it was usually in protection of Sarah, but Colin's seeming callousness to Peri makes it harder to accept that). Also I think the season was the worst blend of Season 21's gruesome violence, with Season 17's flippancy.
But in any case Season 22 was only going where Season 21 and 20 had pointed. It didn't start an obnoxious strain that wasn't there before, and frankly based on taking the lead from The Twin Dilemma, it was a better season than it realistically should've been (it was a comedown from Caves of Androzani of course, but then that story was an exception to the rule anyway).
I emphasise Season 22 because it's the last season where I think JNT had full control of the series, before the BBC interference drove the show even further off the rails.
Now it depends on if you hold that Season 22 was especially bad and violent enough to force the BBC's hand to suspend the show. Personally I think that was a convenient excuse for Michael Grade to reach for, and if the quality of the show was any incentive for Grade or Powel to crucify the series, again I don't think Season 22 would've made much difference because I don't think it was worse than JNT's previous seasons.
Nor do I think the ratings drop during Attack of the Cybermen is as bad as the ratings drop from Time-Flight to Arc of Infinity. I don't think anything different could've been done after Season 21 that wouldn't have resulted in the cancellation. Infact it's largely down to JNT's media savvy that the tabloid and fan backlash against the cancellation was strong enough to get the BBC worried enough to win the show a reprieve of the borrowed time it had. I don't particularly rate him as a producer, but that's one area in which things would've been worse for the show if in other hands.
Okay so Trial of a Time Lord. Yes it's a bit of a pig's ear of a concept and suggests a production team turned stale and losing sight of the casual audience (well at least that's the consensus view, but personally when I was a beginner fan at age 11, I didn't find it that hard or impenetrable to follow).
However, the opening ratings figures suggest it wasn't given a chance anyway and the public had lost interest before it even aired, so I don't think Trial itself did damage to the show's perception.
Maybe this proves Season 22 did damage to the public perception of the show, but for me the season's ratings just don't bear that out, or at least if they do then Season 20 and 21 have to be judged failures too. My guess is that with the show being constantly rescheduled, viewers got fed up of being stood up, or maybe just assumed the show wasn't coming back.
I do think despite everything, there are some things worth salvaging about the Trial season. The Vervoids story was kind of fun, I thought.
Season 24 was awful, but again, it's not like in the circumstances it could've ever been a contender.
Now I'm not convinced Season 25 and 26 were quite the return to form they're billed as, but I do think there were successes that made it worth it, and those successes were brought about partly by the limitations they were under. Shortened seasons, serials and greater concentration on editing forced them to actually get the Doctor and companion out of the Tardis, lose the usual soap scenes and actually have the hero being proactive and decisive in a way he simply hadn't been since the Tom Baker years. We were getting away from slow, static stories like Terminus into ones that actually had some life and spontaneity and intrigue.
Furthermore restrictions on violence did seem to force the writers to use their imagination and innovation more in a way that you could never claim was true of Warriors of the Deep's mindless derivativeness. Plus the fact the show was facing the end meant that a story like Remembrance of the Daleks became a satisfying, poignant capstone to the Daleks rather than just another unending chapter in their exploits. Ditto for Survival regarding the Master.
The thing for me is that for much of Tom Baker's run, the character of the Doctor had an intrigue and mystery, and even an ambiguity. We saw darker, more alien streaks to the Doctor with Tom. His threats to shut down Davros' life support in Genesis, his deal with the devil in Planet of Evil, and again in The Invasion of Time and Logopolis, his cold detachment in Pyramids of Mars when Scarman is killed, his releasing of his ruthless inner id in The Deadly Assassin's Matrix scenes, his being tempted by the power of the Key to Time.
All of this for me was lost completely in the Davison era. We saw the Doctor becoming domesticated, being a bystander in staid, motionless stories, or outright exposed as rigidly unfit for purpose during a massacre that he was sure to be unable to prevent. The only story that I think conjures the mystery and ambiguity of the Doctor during that period, is The Five Doctors.
I do think that anything else following on from Davison could've been just the same demystified business that saw the show and its hero lose more and more intrigue. What we got instead with Colin and McCoy (and even to a lesser extent the Valeyard) kind of got that ambiguous, mysterious, alien quality to the Doctor back. And personally I think if the show had lost that, it would have lost it forever.
Paul McGann IS the War Doctor in my fic
http://dalekwars.blogspot.co.uk/
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bh_tafe3
8 years ago
I actually like Trial, but there were a lot of mistakes made. I'm probably the only person on earth who doesn't mind season 24, mainly for Nostalgic reasons. Season 25 had two of my faves : Greatest Show in the Galaxy and Remembrance of the Daleks. I also liked The Happiness Patrol, possibly owing in part to being an Australian who has no idea who Bernie Bassett is. Season 26 I think is over rated. Fenric was good, but the rest was a bit of a mess.
Season 22 I just take as a show that was in a hole and digging deeper. There were massive mistakes made in conception: Colin's ridiculous outfit, his caustic (to the show) interactions with Peri after the piss poor impression he'd made in Twin Dilemma, and overall mean spirited tone of the whole season. There was simply nothing given to make Colin endearing in the slightest. We didn't know his character and Peri isn't giving us an "in" either. It's just hard to engage with.
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