A Quick Guide to Classic Who Season 6

0:13 mythology treasures of history season six of classic who sees the end of my favorite doctor my favorite companion and one of the show's best friends black and white doctor who has the dubious honor of on average having the later episodes looking worse than the earlier ones there's a few financial related reasons

0:59 for that most of the bbc didn't have the budget cut with inflation but also because black and white hit a lot of the visual problems with the show many of the crapper sets looked a bit better the plastic weaponry wasn't quite as obvious it even added a certain eeriness to the show none of this was deliberate it was just cheaper to shoot in black and white and most of the country didn't have color tvs in a way anyway season 6 is 42 episodes and if you're expecting a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy joke no there were seven stories and ran between the 10th of august 1968 and the 21st of june 1969. it opens up with one of those stories perfect for accidental double entendres the five part that dominators the tardis crew land on the planet dulcas where the aforementioned dominators with their robots the quarks

1:45 are planning to do terrible things probably involving whips while the peaceful inhabitants of the planet debate whether they should do something in return if any surviving patrick trout story should have been destroyed it was this one literally the only good thing about it other than the main cast are the jokes you can make about patrick trout in battling space dominatrixes it's ironic that you could probably play this in an s m dungeon and there'd be complaints that it's a bit too cruel yeah i'm not a fan nice beaver thank you i just had him stuffed and from the crap to the glorious my favorite doctor who story of all time the mind robber it's five episodes long and features the tardis crew lost in the land of fiction

2:31 which of course means that everything's [ __ ] demented from the destruction of the tardis and a shot that launched a great many male heterosexualities and female homosexualities over the years to the whole first episode taking place in a white void with only the main cast to jaime losing his face forcing the doctor to piece it together wrongly meaning fraser heinz gets replaced for an episode this story is weird brilliant and has more imagination than the whole of new who combined i'm actually not crapping on knew who with that comment choose any seven random seasons of classico and this story has probably got more imagination than them combined too from that we go to another classic the invasion an eight-part epic where the cybermen again do what the daleks did already invade the earth they even team up with kevin stoney who played mavic chen the

3:18 amalgam of racism from the dalek master plan to do it two of the eight episodes are missing so on the dvd release they've been animated in a rare piece of form the animation is not totally terrible good work the story is probably a bit too long but it's still a classic and besides it introduced his unit and promoted colonel lethridge stewart to brigadier a rank that he told until his last appearance in who over 40 years later in the sergeant adventures he appeared in stories with the second third fourth fifth and seventh doctors on screen the fact that he never appeared and knew who was practically a crime see i'm trying to be moderate i didn't call for russell or stephen to be arrested this time and then stephen tried to make amends by giving his daughter his job via space

4:03 nepotism after those two great stories it's back to the not very good though like many things such as scabies it's better than the dominators the crotons was the first doctor who script written by robert holmes he was by far the best writer in classic who he wrote the two stories that are considered the best in the show's history and was script editor when the show was at its height the man was a legend unfortunately his first and last step for the show wasn't very good i suppose if his career teaches us anything is that chris chibnall might become good someday the crotons are yet another evil alien that's trying to replace the daleks and the public affections and because you've likely never heard of them they failed sounding like something you put in soup didn't help either the crotons is four episodes long and it's about these massive crystal aliens

4:49 who are in suspended animation like all evil alien creatures in suspended animation they gain power by eating people's brain power and by looking [ __ ] ridiculous i was so much younger then next up is the seats of death not to be mistaken for the seeds of doom which is a tom baker story featuring very different green things that'll kill you this is six parts long and it's the first script from terence dix probably second only to robert holmes when it comes to important writers in the show's history the ice warriors are back and like the cybermen are copying the daleks they are copying the cyberman the ice warriors are attacking a moon base and it's up to the tardis crew to save the day this really feels like the missing story from season 5. of course if they put it

5:36 there then they'd have to change the name of the show from doctor who to base under siege by monsters with patrick trouten this story also features the return of the patented patrick trout and evil foam which i know you're all ecstatic about i know i am no one can out hack that man when foam is involved this is another one of the stories where the doctor does [ __ ] that would make new hugo weak at the knees the doctor incinerates some ice warriors with homemade heat rays and redirects an entire fleet of them straight into the sun truly the doctor is the man who never would [ __ ] you doctor's daughter it's a good solid story nothing really special but the direction was less pedestrian than normal we had some interesting angles in this holy pointless but brilliant shot of a

6:22 countdown there is no need for this but it's [ __ ] brilliant second to last for the season is the space pirates and it's yet another bad one yet another bad one by robert holmes it's six episodes of faffing about in space is doctor who attempts to be star trek slash attempts to parody star trek while every second character attempts a comedy accent there's the captain played by sims from adam adamant what is our arrival time still 90 minutes to go sir we are going to be too late again which is just what the [ __ ] and then it gets silly when they introduce a grizzled 1870 space prospector rubbishy newfangled solar toasters off-beaten random characters are kind of a thing for robert holmes

7:07 so i'm hoping this was just the dry run for the much less stupid offbeat random characters we put in stories later on this might not have been so bad but it seems like the tardis crew are barely in the story for most of it this story is mostly lost and oblivion can have it but if it is found maybe like enemy of the world it'll get re-evaluated but i doubt it last up is trouton's dalek master plan the single longest regeneration story 10 episodes long that's almost as long as the whole season during the sylvester mccoy era a race of aliens called the warlords and when you call yourself the warlords you're kind of limiting your race's choices in future anyway they decided that humanity are kick-ass at war and so kidnapped a bunch of human soldiers from different time periods and allowed them to continue

7:54 fighting their wars convinced they're still on earth eventually the warlords hope to turn them into an army they can use to conquer the galaxy given how powerful they seem to be i'm not entirely sure whether they chose soft squishy humans over agrons or raston or most aliens in doctor who but what the hell the first nine episodes are solid though they're very very long they introduced the war chief the first evil time lord to wear black be cap and have ridiculous facial hair it's been suggested that he was either the inspiration for or an earlier incarnation of the master and the production design is brilliantly sixties the amazingly pointless type of sixties anyway after nine episodes the doctor realizes he can't handle the situation alone and uses one of the timeler distress cubes that turned up in the

8:39 doctor's wife to signal the time lords and i'm going to stop talking for a few moments if you don't know what happens and you want to go and watch it then please go and watch it if you want to spoil it then stay you have a few seconds to decide because the war games episode 10 is one hell of a [ __ ] wham episode what follows is the second best episode in doctor who history the time lords arrive slowing times the doctor can't escape and without missing a beat destroy the warlords from history as in they never existed they then put the doctrine trial for interfering with other species as history now these aren't the ridiculous and easily defeated time lords of later classic who or they get their asses handed to them

9:24 of the daleks time lords of new who these guys are basically techno gods they can kill with a thought wipe you from history and are almost omnipotent the doctor is rightly terrified of them and then in later who they were ruined so much that the doctor could just waltz into gallifrey and conquer them if he felt like it anyway the time lords find him guilty and sentence him to regeneration basically they execute the second doctor they wiped the memories of his two companions adventures and send them back to where and when they first met the doctor for zoe that was the wheel in space for jaime that's being hunted and possibly killed by the english and then they exiled the doctor to the earth in the or 80s it's a massive what the [ __ ] episode and i [ __ ] loved it

10:10 i once ran into bernard horsfall who played time lord one it was at a convention and i really confused the pearl man because i squead over his performance in this the man was most famous in doctor who for playing the villainous chancellor goth in the deadly assassin one of the two stories that he considered the best in the show's history and i only wanted to talk to him about a bit party to the years earlier he was about 80 at the time and i'm not sure he even remembered he was in the war games now this might sound like i was trolling but no time lord one and episode 10 of the war games is my favorite time lord character writes the doctor of the master i suppose that the sign of an uber sad fan when one of your favorite characters doesn't even have a name and only appeared in one episode though i suppose time lord one could have been chancellor goth anyway that's it for the second doctor

10:56 he came back three times after that and eventually i'll get to those stories he was also probably forced to do some dirty work for the time lord secret service after the trial and before the forced regeneration but i'm sure i'll talk about that around the time he appears with colin baker season six was a very uneven year it had some awful stories and some greats and ended on a mind-blowingly high note not for the character but in quality join me next time as doctor who discovers color we meet the third doctor and deal with the season with no time travel measure the mystery

11:48 you'll need to be angry if you kill me i'm a genius genius