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Post by GC on Jul 12, 2024 14:08:48 GMT
As suggested by Servo.
Give us your top 5 and bottom 5 Tom Baker stories then. And perhaps throw in what you think is the most underrated Tom story.
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Post by iank on Jul 12, 2024 22:05:04 GMT
Top Shada Talons Ribos Operation City of Death State of Decay
Bottom Underworld Leisure Hive Logopolis Traken Hand of Fear
Most underrated - Difficult as many of the later ones are woefully underappreciated. Ribos and Decay should both be more feted than they are, and Nimon is ridiculously hated when it's great fun.
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Post by heccy on Jul 12, 2024 23:39:21 GMT
Top Five Genesis of The Daleks. Pyramids of Mars The Brain of Morbius Horror of Fang Rock. The Keeper of Traken.
Bottom Five All of Season 17. The broadcast version.
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Post by rapscallion on Jul 13, 2024 10:27:34 GMT
Best 5 = 1. The Robots Of Death 2. The Talons Of Weng Chiang 3. Logopolis 4. Pyramids Of Mars 5. Genesis Of The Daleks
Bottom 5 = 5. The Sun Makers 4. The Armageddon Factor 3. The Power Of Kroll 2. The Creature From The Pit 1. Underworld
Under-rated : Actually, I'd say Revenge Of The Cybermen seems to be under-rated these days. I always thought it was really popular, but that seems to have flipped on it's head in recent years.
I also think The Stones Of Blood is pretty fantastic and rather under-rated but despite my love for it I couldn't quite squeeze it into my top 5. Far too much great competition.
Guilty pleasures : The Invisible Enemy and The Horns Of Nimon.
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Post by Future-Diver on Jul 13, 2024 15:11:58 GMT
Top Tom:
City Of Death The Talons Of Weng Chiang The Robots Of Death The Ribos Operation Shada
Bottom Tom:
Revenge Of the Cybermen The Invisible Enemy Underworld Meglos The Android Invasion
Underrated: The Armageddon Factor
N.B. This was the hardest list to make because I love all of the Fourth Doctor serials, even the five I included in the Bottom list.
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Post by GC on Jul 14, 2024 0:44:44 GMT
Top 5
Terror of the Zygons Pyramids of Mars The Talons of Weng-Chiang Robots of Death The Brain of Morbius
Bottom 5
The Armageddon Factor Meglos Nightmare of Eden The Creature from the Pit Underworld
Underrated
Revenge of the Cybermen/Destiny of the Daleks
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Post by Servo on Jul 14, 2024 11:22:12 GMT
This one was the most difficult. Seriously it was difficult to get it down to only five top picks.
Top 5
The Horror of Fang Rock Pyramids of Mars The Talons of Weng-Chiang Robots of Death The Brain of Morbius
Bottom 5
Underworld Meglos Creature from the Pit The Power of Kroll Robot
Underrated: The Android Invasion/The Androids of Tara.
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Post by GC on Jul 14, 2024 14:53:07 GMT
This one was the most difficult. Seriously it was difficult to get it down to only five top picks.Top 5 The Horror of Fang Rock Pyramids of Mars The Talons of Weng-Chiang Robots of Death The Brain of Morbius Bottom 5 Underworld Meglos Creature from the Pit The Power of Kroll Robot Underrated: The Android Invasion/The Androids of Tara. I found them all equally difficult really, mainly cos I haven't seen a lot of these stories for years and I suspect my opinion on them may change if I ever get round to watching them again. You know how you go off things...
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Post by sadako on Jul 14, 2024 23:14:18 GMT
Top 5: Genesis of the Daleks State of Decay The Seeds of Doom Horror of Fang Rock City of Death
Bottom 5: The Armageddon Factor The Leisure Hive Underworld The Invasion of Time The Creature from the Pit
Underrated: The Android Invasion/Destiny of the Daleks
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Post by Bowties on Jul 17, 2024 13:23:23 GMT
My top Tom Baker stories:
The Ark in Space,
Genesis of the Daleks,
Robots of Death,
The Sun Makers
And The Keeper of Traken.
Shoutout to Robot, the Key to Time season, Destiny of the Daleks, and Logopolis.
I’m not really keen on Underworld. I just didn’t enjoy it as much as the Sun Makers.
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Post by WildcatMatt on Jul 20, 2024 21:24:56 GMT
Top Five Tom Baker 5. The Brain of Morbius 4. Genesis of the Daleks 3. Pyramids of Mars 2. The Robots of Death 1. Talons of Weng-Chiang
Out of all the Hinchcliffe/Holmes homage scripts, this one is probably the most unsubtle in terms of its Frankenstein riffs. That doesn’t stop it from putting a nifty spin on it and adding to Time Lord lore with the Sisterhood. Thankfully they get the tone exactly right and everything turns out perfectly. And we get an easter egg that includes a shot of a young Graeme Harper to boot. Terrance might have hated what was done to his scripts, but there’s no way the original was going to be this fun.
I’ve said quite a few things about Terry Nation under other Doctors. For me, one of the things that makes Hinchcliffe a god among men is that he put the squeeze to Terry to come up with a Dalek story that was actually fresh – and Terry delivered. It’s easy to overlook the retconning because what we get hangs together so well. Davros is a potent adversary – watching him verbally fence with the Doctor is a treat and the slightly underplayed performance gives him so much more menace compared to the raving version we get later. I could have done without the end shot with the Doc, Sarah, and Harry pretending to float in space on the Time Ring, but everything else works.
Pyramids is one of Sarah Jane’s strongest outings, and it’s all the better for it. Great guest cast, marvelous set designs, solid direction. The power of Sutekh’s will is palpable, the tension between the Scarman brothers is touching, and the mummy robots are economical. A classic!
Robots gives us the country house murder mystery framework we never knew we needed. Chris Boucher does a great job in feeding us just enough to flesh out the characters and situation as we go, such that the ecosystem the Doctor and Leela get dropped into is both digestible and plausible. The Robophobia is a nice touch, and getting used to Leela is woven right in with getting used to the crew and the Vocs. The helium trick is maybe a little iffy, but the rest is sublime.
One could argue that Robert Holmes has delivered better scripts than Talons, but he never gives us better characters than he does here. That they seriously considered a Litefoot/Jago spinoff tells you a lot. Holmes delivers a tour-de-force in mystery, maniacal time travellers, and a homicidal android to boot. The atmosphere is perfect, the dialog is top-shelf, and the direction is sympathetic. Really, the only letdown is the rat, but the production team worked around it fairly well.
Bottom Five Tom Baker 5. Underworld 4. The Invasion of Time 3. The Power of Kroll 2. The Invisible Enemy 1. The Horns of Nimon
In a lot of ways, Underworld gets a bad rap. A lot of that comes from the pioneering work of what we would today call a “virtual set” where almost everything is keyed out. Much like I give props to Web Planet for trying something and failing, I give Underworld props for giving it a try. The problems I have with the story are how a lot of its back half is a muddle with too much to-ing and fro-ing for little to no effect. And I’m a little tired of the cliched insane computer at this point.
When I watched Invasion of Time for the first time at age 15, I thought it was great fun. Tom’s OTT performance in the front half, all the cat and mouse with the bad guys, the TARDIS actually feeling like it’s endless inside, and Leela showing up the Shobogans. Since then my opinion has hardened a lot. I still enjoy the Doctor in his lead-lined room, but I think about how much damage this story does to the Time Lords. That’s the part I hate most. At the end they’re no longer this awe-inspiring, all-powerful race, they’re just another bunch of schlubs that wear funny headpieces and gowns. You can draw a direct line from this to Colin Baker’s speech about the Time Lords in Trial.
And that’s before we deal with the budget woes – the shots that should have had retakes, the hasty and arbitrary shot setups for many of the corridors. And then there’s the brickwork TARDIS bits. The biggest problem with them is they don’t do enough (anything?) to sell it, explain it, or contextualize it. It’s jarring and a reminder of just how hard up they were at the time.
The Power of Kroll is really that it manages to be less than the sum of its parts. The swamp monster idea is okay. The concept of the natives isn’t bad. Hell, the Swampie chant is kind of infectious at times. I think the biggest letdown is pretty much everything inside the refinery. It’s uninteresting, the sets look cheaper than usual, and everyone seems to be painting by numbers. Sigh.
The idea for Invisible Enemy was never going to work as it was conceived. Maybe if Robert Holmes had written it along the lines of Morbius and it had been mounted with the right tone. But that was never going to happen. And I know there’s a part of fandom that loathes this story for foisting K9 on us, but I’m not in that camp. It’s still not enough to redeem it.
Horns of Nimon is dire. Some of that is the production asking more of the sets than they could deliver. A lot of it is the guest cast which is uniformly bad. None of it has to do with the outfit that Romana is wearing.
Underappreciated Tom Warriors’ Gate The Armageddon Factor
I’m naming two of these for Tom, because I can.
Warriors’ Gate is a mindbender with a lot of handwaving, but that doesn’t matter. It’s another example of what happens when everyone delivers. The plain white everywhere is a fascinating change that’s unexpectedly oppressive. You have the slavers and the Tharils, neither of whom are lily-white, and the idea that the slave ship is so dense it’s disturbing local spacetime is a really cool idea. All the back and forth behind the mirrors giving different viewpoints in time is a nifty physical analog to what the script is asking us to do in thinking about the multiple factions.
The direction is fantastic, and I never realized until I watched the DVD extras that the lights in the opening shot are the actual studio lights and that caused a gigantic row over something that’s ultimately stupid. But it looks good, it’s innovative – if JN-T could have maintained that kind of standard through the Davison era we’d think very differently about ‘80s Who. But at least we got this.
And finally the Armageddon Factor. This is another one I first saw when I was 15 and at the time I loved it because the whole thing is bonkers. The whole thing with Shap and the Marshal, the transmat, the Shadow as this creepy dude wearing pantyhose on his head (with a run in it, no less). The appearance of Drax out of nowhere. The sound effect of the stretching time loop that somehow manages to make an appearance in Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face”. The infamous rehearsal footage from White Powder Christmas (or was it Good King Memorex?):
Doctor: “It’s mindless now, clicking towards oblivion. How long, K9?” K9: “Insufficient data.” Doctor: “Yeah, you never f*cking know the answer when it’s important.”
It’s all held together by Tom’s magnetic performance and that bubbling styrene faux key segment. Since then I think there’s a lot out there that’s better than this one, but I haven’t lost my soft spot for it.
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Post by markhev1966 on Jul 22, 2024 0:46:39 GMT
Top 5 City of Death The Talons of Weng Chiang Pyramids of Mars Genesis of the Daleks The Seeds of Doom
Bottom 5 Shada Stones of Blood (due to eps 3 and 4) The Invisible Enemy Nightmare of Eden Horns of Nimon
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Post by WildcatMatt on Jul 23, 2024 19:03:40 GMT
Bottom 5 Shada Stones of Blood (due to eps 3 and 4) The Invisible Enemy Nightmare of Eden Horns of Nimon Stones of Blood really did go off the rails, didn't it?
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Post by profh0011 on Jul 25, 2024 16:14:56 GMT
You can draw a direct line from this to Colin Baker’s speech about the Time Lords in Trial. Milton Johns' "Kelner" is such a MASSIVE come-down from George Pravda's "Spandrell". Spandrell was an intelligent, reasonable "cop", while Kelner is a self-serving, CORRUPT A**H***. These 2 characters really provide such a shocking contrast, to point up that The Time Lords do seem to be on their way down. (I think both are terrific actors, and these roles are, for me, their most memorable. Johns once played Adolph Eichmann! Typecasting?)
Kinda sad, as John Arnatt's "Borusa" comes across as more likable than Angus MacKay's.
I HATED "The Invasion of Time" the first time I saw it, because, I didn't know what was going on, and after 4 years of watching Tom Baker's Doctor go from erratic to erratic, I wondered, had he finally completely lost his mind? Incredibly, Leela never lost faith in him, and watching The Doctor skipping thru a corridor as a way of telling her "Don't worry, I'm still me" showed that despite the outward appearance of his actions, he still had great faith in her... he just couldn't TELL her. She winds up being as much the hero in this story as he does.
As with a lot of mystery stories, once you know what's going on, it becomes an entirely-different expeience. This got infinitely-better once PBS began running it UNCUT instead of butchered (although the movie edits weren't bad, generally also with more material than the earlier versions cut for commercial time).
It may have been sudden, but I can actually believe in the mutual attraction between Leela & Andred. I mean, they're kinda in the same job, and if anything, she's better at it than he is. (Heh.) Leela is a rare character in that I genuinely did not like her on first exposure (me coming in, in the middle of a story being run out o sequence-- idiot PBS programmers), but who has continued-- TO THIS DAY-- to grow on me each time I watch her over decades. I don't know if any of that has to do with Louise Jameson being the only actor on the show I ever had a nice one-on-one chat with.
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Post by WildcatMatt on Jul 25, 2024 22:49:23 GMT
Milton Johns' "Kelner" is such a MASSIVE come-down from George Pravda's "Spandrell". Spandrell was an intelligent, reasonable "cop", while Kelner is a self-serving, CORRUPT A**H***. These 2 characters really provide such a shocking contrast, to point up that The Time Lords do seem to be on their way down. (I think both are terrific actors, and these roles are, for me, their most memorable. Johns once played Adolph Eichmann! Typecasting?) I like Castellan Kelner as a character. His obsequiousness is smarmy AF but it does make for a comment on the Time Lords that such a weaselly wuss could reach that position. It's that boyish smile, I suppose. If you use Invasion of Time to reflect back against Deadly Assassin, it illuminates how brilliant and subtle Holmes was in his writing. Almost every speaking role invokes a specific class marker of some type and it's brilliant in its gently applied commentary on British law and it's application. (Sun Makers is much more blatant of course.) The time crunch that produced the scripts for IoT (two weeks from zero to edited?) meant there wasn't much opportunity for subtlety. At the conclusion of DA, we're left with this picture of the Time Lords as an allegory for contemporary British government: Corrupt in places, but held together by competent functionaries out of sight. They're still powerful and at arm's length. IoT suggests this power is mostly an illusion provided by all the technology they've built up over the centuries that is taken for granted. Is Anthony Read still around? I'd love to hear him talk about his concept of Time Lord society... Kinda sad, as John Arnatt's "Borusa" comes across as more likable than Angus MacKay's. I thought McKay's Borusa was just right: a prickly old professor; this is also one of the more subtle parts of Holmes' scripting. We see Borusa through the Doctor's eyes and it's a clever arc. At the beginning, we're prompted to see him as this stuffy but respected and brilliant educator-turned-bureaucrat. When they first meet in the story, Tom's Doctor clearly displays some amount of hero-worship toward him; quite possibly he was the teacher the Doctor most wanted to impress as a student. And slowly as the story moves on and the glint peels off of the Time Lords, the same happens with Borusa specifically. When Borusa orders the coverup, the Doctor is absolutely shocked and he never seems to have Borusa on such a high pedestal again. Not completely though, as the ending shows that even after that, the Doctor is still hungry for Borusa's praise. (note to self: do a post tracing this thread through the Borusa stories) With IoT though there's much less distance between the two. I almost wish they'd chosen another character, although I understand why they'd want to use a preexisting relationship that would have been still reasonably recent in viewers' minds. I HATED "The Invasion of Time" the first time I saw it, because, I didn't know what was going on, and after 4 years of watching Tom Baker's Doctor go from erratic to erratic, I wondered, had he finally completely lost his mind? Incredibly, Leela never lost faith in him, and watching The Doctor skipping thru a corridor as a way of telling her "Don't worry, I'm still me" showed that despite the outward appearance of his actions, he still had great faith in her... he just couldn't TELL her. She winds up being as much the hero in this story as he does.
It may have been sudden, but I can actually believe in the mutual attraction between Leela & Andred. I mean, they're kinda in the same job, and if anything, she's better at it than he is. (Heh.) Leela is a rare character in that I genuinely did not like her on first exposure (me coming in, in the middle of a story being run out o sequence-- idiot PBS programmers), but who has continued-- TO THIS DAY-- to grow on me each time I watch her over decades. I don't know if any of that has to do with Louise Jameson being the only actor on the show I ever had a nice one-on-one chat with.
I'm certainly willing to accept a Leela-Andred thing on paper. I just wish Williams and Read had been willing to accept Jameson's "no" to come back for Season 16 and properly written it into the script. Because you're absolutely right, there is room there for it to work and also an opportunity for her on the spot to essentially be a security consultant and so it could be an opportunity plus possible romantic interest rather than "I fell head over heels for this person yesterday". And yes; I agree wholeheartedly that Leela is an underappreciated companion. A lot of it is having to stand in the shadow of Sarah Jane right next to K9 and having to be burdened with the broad brush of fandom that is drawn across the whole of the Williams era.
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