A Quick Guide to Classic Who Season 26

0:00 [Music] tumbling through. You don't know where you land. It's so dark in mythology. Treasures of history to be found. The legends of time. All the hand works remain only. [Music] Season 26 was the end of the road for

0:45 classic who a tragedy in itself, but it's made even worse because it was the best season since Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe left more than a decade earlier. When I said that each of Sylvester McCoy seasons was better than the last, I was not kidding. If there had been a season 27, then season 26 could have been the beginning of a new Doctor Who golden age, but it wasn't. This is another four-story season. There were almost no scenes in the TARDIS. Script editor Andrew Cartell saw it purely as a device to get the Doctor and Dace to the next adventure. J&T generally preferred showing it as a home with companion bedrooms and full scenes, but Andrew Cardinal got his way. The first story is Battlefield, aka alternate reality techno night battles

1:31 in the near future. It's the near future because as a unit story, they needed it to be set in the future so people could argue about timelines for years to come. It's traditional at this point. The villain was played by Jean Marsh, who played Sarah Kingdom in 1965. She and Jacqueline Hill, who played Barbara, were the only companions to return to the show as other characters. Gene Marsh was also John Perwee's ex-wife and played the villain in Willow, using pretty much the same performance as this. I'm not complaining, though. She's great. Seek out those who hold Excalibur and take the sword from them. And if they resist, give them an honorable death. I need that baby alive. I must perform the

2:19 ritual that will exile the child's spirit into oblivion. I swear that you shall ru this day if you live. She's playing Morgane Lefay who comes over from the alternative reality. She brings with her Morrid and his evil knights and they seek King Arthur who's in suspended animation in the spaceship at the bottom of the lake. and the doctor is slash was slashwillby Merlin. This marks the last time the brigadier appears in Doctor Who on television. He's mentioned from time to time, appeared in books and audios and turned up in the Sajin adventures, but never again on the main show, old or new. And yes, I remember that dimensions and time exist, but it hardly counts.

3:06 I'm going to talk about it later on. Assisting the doctor is a bigger team than usual. There's some unit soldiers, the Brigadier, his replacement, Brigadier Bombber, one of Arthur's knights, also from the alternative reality, and a local teen that Ace developed some accidental lesbian subtext with the helpful knight, Anselin, is played by the guy who played King Arthur in Army of Darkness, which is probably another alternative reality. I think Morane is one of the best one-off villains in the show. She's honorable to a fault. She will try to destroy the planet, but if her son drank a lot in your bar, she will pay the bill by restoring the landlady's sight. She brings forth a blue monster called the Destroyer, which for the time it was

3:52 made and the budget looks amazing. And as you can tell by its name, the Destroyer's job is to file insurance claims. Now, this is a complete copout at the end, but overall, it's good. If this had been in any other season in the last 10 years, it would probably been one of the better stories. But this season is so strong that it's a weak link in this one. Next up is Ghost Light. The most confusing story in classic who. Originally, it was supposed to be set in the house of Longar and Gal of Fray and would have been about the doctor's relatives, explain time lord relations, and mostly been about the Doctor, but they decided to keep the idea of interpersonal relations in a mad old Gormanghasti house, and instead make it about a camp alien life cataloger who can't handle evolution.

4:39 The original idea for the story eventually became one of the more controversial Doctor Who novels. By the way, it introduced the looms. The idea that Galafrans don't use sexual reproduction and instead use existing genetic material from family members and weave a new person. There are no fathers, daughters, sons, or mothers, but everyone is a cousin. If you've listened to my Twatti who reviews, you know I adore the idea because it's interesting, but I know not everyone cares for it. Anyway, ghost light. It's Victorian England, and the doctors brought Ace to a mansion that in her time terrified her, so she burned it down. He hopes to show her what happened that left it being terrifying without getting her consent first. The house was already abandoned when she burned it down, just

5:26 so you know. Anyway, in the Victorian era, Josiah Smith, a minor gentry, lives there. He's obsessed with evolution and wants to murder Queen Victoria and take her throne. There's also a clergyman who hates evolution and begins to dee evolve. The daughter of the disappeared original owners of the house, the housekeeper, Mrs. Pritchard. There's always room for pineapple chunks. And Neanderthal Butler, and a hunter who's been driven mad by seeing something terrible. The thing, this glittery alien who looks like a disco Frank Finlay. The alien is called Light and is supposed to look like an angel, but I don't see it myself. Light is there to catalog all life on Earth. But every time he finishes, life is changed and evolved. So he gets a bit

6:11 miffed. All organic life will be eradicated in the Firestorm. And when this world is destroyed, no more change. This one's good. It's definitely good. Very good. But it's one of the most notoriously difficult stories to follow. Partly because chunks of the script were removed. Plus, his grasp of evolution is often incoherent. But don't let that stop you from watching it. Ghost Light is brilliant. I just wonder what Lungar would have been like as a TV story. Ghost Light was the last classic who story produced, and this was the last part filmed. You changed like the rest of this ferminous planet. You adapted to your situation to

6:57 survive. Well, you'll never change [Music] again. The next story is the seventh doctor's masterpiece, The Curse of Fenrich. You think long story lines that are only connected in retrospect are a new show thing? Think again. Fenrich is an old enemy of the doctors and many stories since Ace was introduced are connected to him. Ace wasn't blown to Ice World by an explosion. Fenrich did it. Fenrich left clues to his involvement in Silver Nemesis using a chess set. And on top of

7:42 that, in this story, Ace gets to meet the mother she hates as a baby that she adores. This is the most moddish story of the classic show. It's the height of World War II, a British naval base. There's a Viking crypt nearby and a curse that lays heavy on the sea of a local landmark, Maiden's Point. Fenrich is the last of the great old ones in the classic show. His original name, Hastur, the Unspeakable. Fenrich can possess the wolves of Fenrich, descendants of the Vikings who settled here years ago. There is an army of hemivores, vampires originally from the future, living off the coast of Maiden's Point. Anyone who gets too close becomes one of them and waits for Fenrich's command to rise and attack the land. One of the nicest

8:29 subtle touches is the different historical clothes the heaves are in. They've been taking people for a long time. In the middle of the military base, an XP of Alan Turing is working a codereing machine to defeat the Nazis. But what happens if it's used to break a message left in a local crypt? And why are a group of Russian soldiers attacking the base? This is the height of the TV7th doctor's manipulations and generally being immoral. He's been manipulating everyone. And in this, he goes so far as to make Ace believe that we let her die to win because he needs to shatter her faith in him. Neil, if you want the girl to live, kill her. [Laughter]

9:18 The time lord finally understands. A similar idea was done in the god complex with Amy, but with Ace, it was far more brutal. Plus, seven has a history of doing things that can seem to be emotionally abusive. And in the books that came later are worse than being emotionally abusive. This is brilliant. Probably the second best Doctor Who story of the 80s after the caves of Andrewani. It's not perfect, but then again, Doctor Who never is. But if you can see beyond the occasional bad dialogue or stilted performance or awful special effect, you can see some of the best work in the classic show. You can easily view Fenrich as a precursor to the Moffett style of New Who. And you can just as easily view the last story of season 26,

10:03 survival, as the precursor to the Russell the Davies. We have the modernday workingclass London, a companion who's been the driving force of the stories in a way that is not often done in classic who and a story that's very local to her. They're in Perry Veil, Ace's home, and people have gone missing. Locals, friends of hers, and there's a sinister black cat stalking around and sometimes turning into a puppet. The people are being taken by the cat, a kitling, to the planet of the cheetah people, a planet of wear cheetahs who live to hunt and kill. They're not a race in the usual sense of the word. People who spend too long on the planet slowly turn into were cheetahs. The locals from Perry, the doctor, and Dace were brought to the planet to be hunted

10:48 and killed, but instead are taken to the leader of the cheetah people. It was me, the master, the whole time. The master has been infected with the planet and is slowly becoming one of them. Ace 2 is beginning to show signs when she develops yet another lesbian subtext heavy friendship with a one-story character. This time though, the subtext wasn't an accident. This is the only time that Anley was allowed to play the master as dark, serious, and scheming as he wanted. And it's a best appearance since the keeper of Tracken. Okay, interesting stuff. This is one of the few stories where the doctor wins by actual full-on pacifism and not lip service to it. He wins via refusing to fight. We've got to stop. We've got to go.

11:34 Not this time. Yes, we can. If we fight like animals, we'll die like animals. If we fight like animals, we die like animals. The Cheetah people weren't supposed to look like that either. The writer, Rona Monroe, had scripted a subtler and more human look. And she was the only woman to write a script for Classic Who. Quite why she's not been asked to work on New Who baffles me. She's still working on TV today. This is yet another time the master should die, but doesn't. He's left alone on the cheetah people's planet with no TARDIS and the planet is destroying itself in a display of volcanic death and is literally about to explode. He of course turns up later and

12:20 goes, "Hi, I'm not explaining it." At least he would have if the show wasn't cancelled, but canled it was. They had begun work on season 27 by the time they found out. And here are some of the things that were planned at the time. Ace would have left in a Gal of Fray story and gone to the Time Lord Academy. a controversial idea which I'm okay with, but she's nowhere near smart enough. The new companion would have been a highclass thief and safe cracker, a little like Lady Christina from Planet of the Dead, but hopefully better. McCoy would have regenerated allegedly into Richard Griffiths. And to me, losing the regeneration was the biggest tragedy about the cancellation. With a new doctor, the BBC might have been encouraged to give the show a few more years before cancing it, like they

13:06 had done when Colin Baker left. Maybe if the BBC had allowed J&T to move on, we could have had a new producer, ready to put their mark on the show and bring it into the '9s. Remember that by then we had the first people who had grown up with the show, getting higher up jobs in television. We could have had a young, hungry producer who was a fan. Who knows how many more years the show could have gone on for. Maybe it could have won back the public. Maybe the BBC could have given the show a decent budget eventually. Well, that last one's impossible. But that's all a bunch of whatifs. I just know that if the show had continued, I would have chosen Richard O'Brien for the eighth doctor, and I would have had him dressed just like that. Some of the early ideas for season

13:52 27 were eventually turned into audio adventures by Big Finnish. in the same way as the Lost Colin Baker stories. So, if you're interested in them, go buy them. Season 26 is a very strong season. Easily the equal to the best in the show's history, and it's probably one of the most accessible places for a new Whoan to dive into the classic show. Now, I'm not ending this here. I'm doing two more videos, both concentrating on Doctor Who between 1989 and 2005. One will be about what happened on television and the other will be books, audio and the net. So join me next time when I finally talk about a fix within. We see a Doctor Who and soap opera crossover and meet doctor number eight.

14:38 [Music] Super sweet. I need a dream.