A Quick Guide to Classic Who Season 17

0:17 the piece Doctor Who season 17 run from the 1st of September 1979 until the 12th of January 1980 Mary Tom chose not to return as Romana so rather than have her leave off-screen the production crew made use of the fact that she was a Time Lord and regenerated her off-screen there's a very subtle difference they didn't need

1:02 to come up with a new character name she didn't trip over a brick of got hit by a car or anything she just decided to regenerate and because Douglas Adams was in charge that means hilarity yes hilarity as Romana regenerates into multiple forms gets the doctor's opinion in each of them and finally chooses when he can live with a lot of Princess Astra you can't go around wearing copies of bodies we're not going back to actually oh now this scene is led to the creation of many theories and even more questions but I'm not gonna go into them here this is the new Romana deal with it k9 elf's was a new voice because John Leeson didn't come back this season he's been replaced but David brierley the first story of the season

1:50 is the four-part destiny of the Daleks the last Doctor Who script credited the Dalek creator Carrie nation there were serious issues because of additions and changes Douglas Adams made to the script and by the time Douglas Adams had left the show Terry nation and moved to California and was too busy to work on Doctor Who again what's going on as the doctor and harmonica involved in a warped in the Daleks and the mo Valens the mo villains are an ultra logical race of battle-hardened disco robots not to be snide here but if logic told them that looking like futuristic drag queens would helping them victory than the logic would appear to be flawed Daleks have no concept of their God the moe villains and the Daleks have

2:36 been at a stalemate for centuries because they're both creatures of pure logic and therefore unable to I think each other yes the Daleks pure logic you know I'm pretty sure that everyone involved in this story had at least heard of the Daleks before but from that concept you wouldn't know it dialects are about as logical as Alec Baldwin face-to-face with a gay photographer they're powered by malice rage and fear so first a problem with the story it really should have been a Cyberman story sure where they're not a perfect fit with the ultra logical thing either but at least they're supposed to be logical in a way the Daleks have decided to reanimate Davros from cryogenic suspension so we can win the war for them even though Davros was killed at the end of Genesis the Daleks

3:22 just a flesh wound and how does Davros intend to win the war well a few things like Dalek suicide bombers I really like destiny of the Daleks it's stupid as hell but it's the fun kind of stupid the more villains are one of the most ridiculous looking races ever seen in the series and it's beautiful that from once it's not down to the special effects it's all costume but I like to think that's because the costume designer put all their talent in - OH - amazing outfit I love it Davros is played by David Goodison and she gives the single worst Davros performance of all time in the history of the universe this moment is unique

4:16 in fact he's the only not brilliant Davros the show has ever had so congratulations the next story is the four part city of death this was the first story to film outside the UK they had four days of location filming in Paris this is considered the Graham Williams and Douglas Adams's your masterpiece and for the most part it's well deserved the script is very witty and clever my dear I don't think he's as stupid as he seems idea nobody could be as stupid as he seems an alien called scar earth was trapped in an explosion of primordial earth millions of years ago even though for the story to make sense that really should be billions of years ago and away years and years ago there was an explosion and SCARA a splinter throughout time into exact replicas of himself each is in a different time and

5:03 they all work together throughout history to make sure the present-day incarnation has the money needed for time-travel experiments so he can eventually go back in time and save himself now usually that wouldn't be a problem but Scott's been breaking the law killing people and if he succeeds then all life on Earth will be wiped out so he's got to be stopped stopped for the dr. Romana and a one-man punching machine slash Tintin look-alike called Duggan the guest cast is uniformly great scar earth is played by Julian Glover from the crusade and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and his wife is played by Kathryn shell from space 1999 episode 4 attained the single largest audience for any episode of Doctor Who with 60 million viewers it's

5:48 impressive but remember there was no recording episodes no iPlayer no torrenting no DVDs and there were only three TV channels and one of them was on strike at the time so bigger audiences than today were to be expected now you know for all the witty quotable lines clever ideas and great performances this has some really basic problems the biggest one is when Scarth reveals that he's not a human but tearing off his human mask and revealing his real head which is obviously much larger than the mask and has a single eye right where he couldn't see out of this is the story where John Cleese turns up visiting the Louvre possibly playing himself I'm not really sure and since it has no cool to be here the art applies in effect that it's easy

6:38 this story is the best of this version of Doctor Who had to offer high-concept sci-fi comedy that's best and from that we go down a bit in The Creature from the pit this could easily be in the worst story of the season all the elements are right there the story is stupid the characters are ridiculous the setting is laughable Germano looks like half a Baba crossed with a Christmas cracker but a few things save it one some of the comedy actually works one of my favorite Tom Baker moments is when he's thrown into the pit and attempts to climb back out with the aid of a mountaineering book it's in Tibetan but

7:28 your mileage may vary and how funny that is the second thing is Tom Baker's reaction to the creatures design he's trying to communicate with it and then this wonderful eye one of the few who really likes the creatures design it's very alien and when it comes to jokes in Doctor Who I am very forgiving the third thing that saves it from in the worst story of the season is the presence of the horns of Neyman later on the TARDIS is landed on the planet Cloris rich in plant life but poor and metal the ruler lady a dress that controls all the metal and uses a giant creature in a pit to maintain order and within four episodes she's been dethroned in a rebellion very typical and not that great the nightmare of Eden is at least interesting and fairly unique the TARDIS ends up in a luxury

8:15 space liner they meet up with the scientist who's brought a machine that he claims makes detailed records but the planets he's visited of course it turns out to be something more like the viewing device that the doctor in Jogja trapped inside during Carnival of monsters and after there's a spaceship crash the device releases some pretty silly monsters called mandrels also on board someone is smuggling a very addictive space drug and it's totally connected to the Machine and the mandrels but I'm not tell you how just know it's unusual this is the story that pretty much ended this era even though there's still one or two to go literally one or two depending on how you see it an away this is the story that ended the Graham Williams era the production and filming for it was so stressful that the director walked off

9:01 the set after clashes with Tom Baker Graham Williams took his place and shortly afterwards resigned his producer this is fairly average for season 17 meaning it's below average over all the horns of name on is the last story of the season but not the last one I'll talk about it's four episodes long and it's basically the underwater menace to Menace harder it's good ancient Greek crap an insane plot and a villain that rivals are off when it comes to over-the-top acting that guy was offered the role of the doctor before Tom Baker and he turned it down

9:47 just saying this starts office theseus and the minotaur in space and then it mostly stays as Theseus and the Minotaur in space with slight story alterations such as the Minotaur being a name on one of a race of parasitic aliens that want to create an intergalactic Empire and each people's souls the minor tour in the god complex was mentioned as being related to the name on I don't know if that was another attempt to get a name recognition without paying the original creators but how the mine interacted was pretty nigh on ish this was the last story the composer Dudley Simpson worked on he was a regular in the show for many many years he pretty much invented the sound of the show for the seventies whenever he heard the weird moody music that sometimes barely sounded like music that was

10:34 usually Dudley Simpson this is one of the classically bad stories and even the production team knew it they weren't too worried though no season can be perfect and the season finale was coming an epic six-part or filming and location in Cambridge University it had featured boating a Time Lord prison mind sacking orbs and a ship that becomes the doctors biggest fan then the production strike happened with literally days of recording left to do all the location rock was finished and big chunks of the studio stuff this left shatter a half-finished story but bizarrely a half-finished story that has more life than some of the finished ones it was released on VHS with linking material of Tom Baker explaining what happened in the missing scenes superfan

11:19 Ian Levine commissioned his own animated reconstruction which is arguably better than some of the BBC's commissioned animated reconstructions of missing stories there's a flash animation where the 8th doctor remembers that he forgot to do something the late seventies and so grabs Time Lord president Romana and they finished the adventure together and finally there's a book adaptation by Gareth Roberts who wrote the Shakespeare Code that introduces new who elements such as guest character Claire being an incarnation of Clara in the doctors timestream if you take the last one his cannon then it opens up a disturbing possibility what if what we saw on the unfinished show was how things were before the great intelligence in Clara entered the timestream and the book was afterwards what if Clara replaced people who had previously existed ending their lives before they were born and living

12:06 their lives for them I wonder what other characters from the classic show didn't exist after that myself I prefer the Eighth Doctor and Romana version but the book does bring up questions if the story was finished I expect it would have been the second best story of the season I'm pretty sure it would have been no city of death but it's also pretty far from a horns of name on her creature from the pit so that's it for season 17 I'm mostly not great here with one obvious huge high point both Douglas Adams and Graham Williams left once the season was completed leaving John nathan-turner to take over and he'd bring the show second biggest facelift with them it's not quite as big as when three arrived but it's not that far off join me next time when we'll see Romana

12:51 and k9 depart and the doctor regenerate we'll need the least popular companion thus far and an old adversary will return you