I was reading another blog - okay, Lawrence Miles' blog. Considering the man's got nothing but venom to spew at Steven Moffat, I kind of wonder what I was doing over there. But anyways, at one point in one of his posts, he argued that none of the Previous Nine could have possibly stepped in after Tennant and filled his shoes.
(He also argued that Tennant was the only Doctor to date to bring something new each season. 1) Bupkis, and if more Troughton stories existed, I could prove it. Also: McCoy, who went from a bumbling clown who played with spoons to the third most important Time Lord in history, but only five guys and a dog saw any of his stories. 2) even if it were true, so what? Tennant's also the only Doctor to do more than one season since Buffy, so why should we be surprised?)
Anyways, the reasoning for Tennant's mega-popularity boils down to: yup, the show itself is treating the Doctor like a sexy god (and it's all Moffat's fault, incidentally). Ergo, we're all screwed, the show can't hold up under the weight of its own mythology, etc, etc.
Yeah, okay, except in 1974, there was an entire generation of kids who thought the Doctor was nothing more than a dandy who hung out on Earth a lot. Having him suddenly turn into Tom Baker and go gallivanting off across the stars was kind of a huge upheval. And then Tom went and stuck around for a whopping seven years and nobody batted an eye.
Now, the underlying point was that Tennant's departure puts the show at its most volatile point since 1984. Um, what? Yeah, I toss around the phrase "Davison Renaissance," but come on, the Fifth Doctor never really crawled out from under the Forth's shadow.
One point I'd like to get out of the way here before I get to the main point of this post: yeah, if Tennant did seven years, the show would die the moment he left it. Does this mean that Tennant's a better actor than Tom Baker? Perhaps; does it mean that his was a better Doctor? Hell no. You have one Doctor who's able to waltz across space and time willy-nilly like a lonely god, compared to the Other Nine who weren't so powerful... where can you go from there?
Okay, main point: the Troughton rule. Do three years and get out. Hartnell did it, but not by choice. Troughton had to be lured back for a third year. Pertwee ignored it; his last season was pretty bad. Baker ignored it, but I doubt you'll find a single fan who thinks seasons 15-18 were better than seasons 12-14. Davison abided by it, and is fairly well-remembered today (helped considerably by, oh, "Time Crash," though The Caves of Androzani routinely topping polls tends to help). Colin Baker was fired. McCoy was technically fired. McGann was technically fired. Eccleston quit after one season for reasons we'll probably discover right after everyone stops caring - in other words, any day now. Tennant did three seasons and a bunch of specials. I sincerely hope Matt Smith does four seasons, if only because his first one seemed to be a case of Moffat very gently transitioning to his own style from RTD's.
But anyway, a cruel fan might suggest that, just like Tennant is (supposedly) impossible to follow, so too did Tom Baker wreck classic Who for staying as long as he did. It is true that the First Four are generally well remembered and the 80s Doctors not so much... but that could have just as much to do with bad casting and bad scripts. (Could. Could is the very much key word here. I refuse to knock anyone's acting unless it's jaw-droppingly bad, and that's not the case with any of the Doctors, ever, not even the really bland ones or the ones who seemed to equate "act" with "ham it up.") What nobody can argue is that ratings dipped below 10 million shortly after Tom left, and never returned.
Since fandom in general tends to like the Davison years these days, we shouldn't immediately say "oh, JNT was a lousy producer and the scripts were uniformly bad, except for Caves." A much more logical explanation is this: in the years before the internet, fandom was a very different thing. If you didn't see Invasion of the Dinosaurs when it was first broadcast, you wouldn't be able to see it until roughly the same time Jurassic Park came out. Yikes. Re-runs were unheard of before Tom Baker left; after, they were very rare. Now we have endless repeats, plus most of the classic serials on DVD, so we can compare every niggling detail if we want to. We could even - God help us - count the number of times someone says "what's that, Doctor?" or "run."
The point is this: if your first exposure to Doctor Who was in 1975, or 1978, or even 1980, Tom Baker would be the One True Doctor. Your friends might be able to name Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee, and maybe one or two episodes or key character traits, but Tom Baker had been the Doctor for as long as you could remember. In 1981, the thought of someone else playing the Doctor would be akin to a sudden annoucement that Leonard Nimoy was sick of playing Spock, and thus the role would be recast for Star Trek II.
And that was a problem.
There's not a Doctor Who fan today who is unaware of at least one pre-Tennant Doctor, who does not have the opportunity to see one of the Other Nine in action. That was emphatically not the case in 1981, the BBC's Five Faces of Doctor Who stunt notwithstanding. We know the series has existed before Tennant, and even before we saw a frame of Matt Smith, we were sure it could survive after him as well.
This, then, leaves us with the question posed by this post's title. Tom Baker's reign as the Doctor ran from season 12 through the end of season 18. By the end of season 14, most of his best serials had already been made. Getting him off the show at the beginning of season 15, as Phillip Hinchcliffe might actually have intended to do (but then Hinchcliffe got fired and has since remained resolutely mum about how his season 15 would have gone), would of course have made the show a fairly different animal today. Yes, ratings probably still would have declined under the JNT/Saward stewardship. Yes, the show probably would have been cancelled. There might have even been an American TV movie followed eventually by a British revival that tried to copy as much of Buffy as it possibly could. We'd have lost City of Death, but beyond that, nothing much probably would have changed.
To recap: 1) when Tom Baker left, he took a lot of fans with him, but I'm in no way suggesting that the length of his tenure was directly responsible for the show's cancellation eight years after he left. 2) if he was going to check out at a decent point in his career, it probably would have been at around the three-season mark. Although frankly, The Talons of Weng-Chiang probably wouldn't have worked as well if it had been a regeneration story, and neither The Invasion of Time or The Armageddon Factor were particular high notes for him to ride out on. 3) the show is bigger than any one Doctor. David Tennant's departure was not the end of the world. Moffat might have done himself a bigger favor by not trying to ape RTD so very much, but I'm still confident that the next season will be good.
(He also argued that Tennant was the only Doctor to date to bring something new each season. 1) Bupkis, and if more Troughton stories existed, I could prove it. Also: McCoy, who went from a bumbling clown who played with spoons to the third most important Time Lord in history, but only five guys and a dog saw any of his stories. 2) even if it were true, so what? Tennant's also the only Doctor to do more than one season since Buffy, so why should we be surprised?)
Anyways, the reasoning for Tennant's mega-popularity boils down to: yup, the show itself is treating the Doctor like a sexy god (and it's all Moffat's fault, incidentally). Ergo, we're all screwed, the show can't hold up under the weight of its own mythology, etc, etc.
Yeah, okay, except in 1974, there was an entire generation of kids who thought the Doctor was nothing more than a dandy who hung out on Earth a lot. Having him suddenly turn into Tom Baker and go gallivanting off across the stars was kind of a huge upheval. And then Tom went and stuck around for a whopping seven years and nobody batted an eye.
Now, the underlying point was that Tennant's departure puts the show at its most volatile point since 1984. Um, what? Yeah, I toss around the phrase "Davison Renaissance," but come on, the Fifth Doctor never really crawled out from under the Forth's shadow.
One point I'd like to get out of the way here before I get to the main point of this post: yeah, if Tennant did seven years, the show would die the moment he left it. Does this mean that Tennant's a better actor than Tom Baker? Perhaps; does it mean that his was a better Doctor? Hell no. You have one Doctor who's able to waltz across space and time willy-nilly like a lonely god, compared to the Other Nine who weren't so powerful... where can you go from there?
Okay, main point: the Troughton rule. Do three years and get out. Hartnell did it, but not by choice. Troughton had to be lured back for a third year. Pertwee ignored it; his last season was pretty bad. Baker ignored it, but I doubt you'll find a single fan who thinks seasons 15-18 were better than seasons 12-14. Davison abided by it, and is fairly well-remembered today (helped considerably by, oh, "Time Crash," though The Caves of Androzani routinely topping polls tends to help). Colin Baker was fired. McCoy was technically fired. McGann was technically fired. Eccleston quit after one season for reasons we'll probably discover right after everyone stops caring - in other words, any day now. Tennant did three seasons and a bunch of specials. I sincerely hope Matt Smith does four seasons, if only because his first one seemed to be a case of Moffat very gently transitioning to his own style from RTD's.
But anyway, a cruel fan might suggest that, just like Tennant is (supposedly) impossible to follow, so too did Tom Baker wreck classic Who for staying as long as he did. It is true that the First Four are generally well remembered and the 80s Doctors not so much... but that could have just as much to do with bad casting and bad scripts. (Could. Could is the very much key word here. I refuse to knock anyone's acting unless it's jaw-droppingly bad, and that's not the case with any of the Doctors, ever, not even the really bland ones or the ones who seemed to equate "act" with "ham it up.") What nobody can argue is that ratings dipped below 10 million shortly after Tom left, and never returned.
Since fandom in general tends to like the Davison years these days, we shouldn't immediately say "oh, JNT was a lousy producer and the scripts were uniformly bad, except for Caves." A much more logical explanation is this: in the years before the internet, fandom was a very different thing. If you didn't see Invasion of the Dinosaurs when it was first broadcast, you wouldn't be able to see it until roughly the same time Jurassic Park came out. Yikes. Re-runs were unheard of before Tom Baker left; after, they were very rare. Now we have endless repeats, plus most of the classic serials on DVD, so we can compare every niggling detail if we want to. We could even - God help us - count the number of times someone says "what's that, Doctor?" or "run."
The point is this: if your first exposure to Doctor Who was in 1975, or 1978, or even 1980, Tom Baker would be the One True Doctor. Your friends might be able to name Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee, and maybe one or two episodes or key character traits, but Tom Baker had been the Doctor for as long as you could remember. In 1981, the thought of someone else playing the Doctor would be akin to a sudden annoucement that Leonard Nimoy was sick of playing Spock, and thus the role would be recast for Star Trek II.
And that was a problem.
There's not a Doctor Who fan today who is unaware of at least one pre-Tennant Doctor, who does not have the opportunity to see one of the Other Nine in action. That was emphatically not the case in 1981, the BBC's Five Faces of Doctor Who stunt notwithstanding. We know the series has existed before Tennant, and even before we saw a frame of Matt Smith, we were sure it could survive after him as well.
This, then, leaves us with the question posed by this post's title. Tom Baker's reign as the Doctor ran from season 12 through the end of season 18. By the end of season 14, most of his best serials had already been made. Getting him off the show at the beginning of season 15, as Phillip Hinchcliffe might actually have intended to do (but then Hinchcliffe got fired and has since remained resolutely mum about how his season 15 would have gone), would of course have made the show a fairly different animal today. Yes, ratings probably still would have declined under the JNT/Saward stewardship. Yes, the show probably would have been cancelled. There might have even been an American TV movie followed eventually by a British revival that tried to copy as much of Buffy as it possibly could. We'd have lost City of Death, but beyond that, nothing much probably would have changed.
To recap: 1) when Tom Baker left, he took a lot of fans with him, but I'm in no way suggesting that the length of his tenure was directly responsible for the show's cancellation eight years after he left. 2) if he was going to check out at a decent point in his career, it probably would have been at around the three-season mark. Although frankly, The Talons of Weng-Chiang probably wouldn't have worked as well if it had been a regeneration story, and neither The Invasion of Time or The Armageddon Factor were particular high notes for him to ride out on. 3) the show is bigger than any one Doctor. David Tennant's departure was not the end of the world. Moffat might have done himself a bigger favor by not trying to ape RTD so very much, but I'm still confident that the next season will be good.
Final word: I'm not saying "oh, Tom should have left earlier." If he had, the only thing that would be really different is that instead of being remembered as the guy who saved the show after Tom left before screwing it all to hell, JNT would simply be remembered as the guy who screwed it all to hell.
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