Much as William Hartnell bears the mantle, and the burden, of being the First Doctor, Sylvester McCoy wears the title of the Last Doctor. With hindsight, we know that Doctor Who eventually returns, in fits—the one-off “TV Movie” of 1996 featuring Paul McGann’s sole outing as the Eight Doctor—and in starts—the still-ongoing BBC reboot from 2005 onward, with seven (or so) Doctors of its own. But in late 1989, with cancellation confirmed by the time the final episode, “Survival,” airs, McCoy’s Seventh Doctor appears to be the end of our beloved Time Lord’s regeneration.
To be absolutely certain, Doctor Who‘s cancellation has nothing to do with Sylvester McCoy’s affable, energetic, and, as his three seasons wore on, steely presentation of the Gallifreyan miscreant. Drama and politicking behind the scenes at BBC Television Centre drive the decision alongside ratings that suffer worse than normal when the venerable Saturday afternoon show moves into direct competition with Coronation Street, the ITV juggernaut soap opera nearing twelve thousand episodes of Mancunian heartbreak to date. For all the claims from BBC Head of Series Peter Cregeen and others that the show just needs time to regenerate, if you will, to recapture the imagination of the audience through absence, they have in McCoy an actor capable of just such renewal, which even the most die-hard fan would have to admit the series requires by 1989.
One could make the case that Doctor Who has been undergoing “renovations” since John Nathan-Turner takes over as producer in 1980 to start Tom Baker’s Season Eighteen. Ever after, change becomes the watchword for the series, with Nathan-Turner having Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor oversee a herd of youthful companions as opposed to the more restrained counts for the Third and Fourth Doctors, while Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor throws the proverbial toys out of the pram and challenges the audience to accept him (they don’t). In comparison, McCoy seems a return to form, to normalcy, with but one companion at a time and a Seventh Doctor who is eager to please. But all the rejiggering fails to shore up viewing statistics or to convince the suits in charge that the series deserves to continue, and there’s a sense of desperation throughout McCoy’s run, an overarching knowledge that the series hangs on by a thread, having almost been canned prior to Colin Baker’s final season.
Based on the overall strength of McCoy’s twelve stories, all overseen by Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel, there’s little evidence that any change would have sufficed to convince the upper floors of Television Centre that Doctor Who still had life, vibrancy, and strong contemporary relevance. Well, fine, discounting the fact that McCoy’s time on the series starts by having Kate O’Mara dress up as Bonnie Langford…
Pip and Jane Baker’s opening story for Season Twenty-Four, “Time and the Rani,” brings back the delightfully amoral Rani (Kate O’Mara), last seen in a verbal sparring match with the Master and the Sixth Doctor, but rather than cold and calculating, she takes a page from the Master’s bumper book of hapless plans and tries to create a giant brain capable of controlling time, for which she needs the Doctor’s intellect. To secure his help she takes advantage of his regeneration disorientation and pretends to be Mel (Bonnie Langford), down to the curly-frizzy red hair and enormous shoulder pads capable of bending space-time on their own. That she looks more like Lucille Ball than Bonnie Langford is no fault of O’Mara’s, nor is the essentially ludicrous plot, but the story does introduce us to McCoy’s Seventh Doctor in a generous manner. His nature is revealed as easy-going, with a gift for both physical and verbal legerdemain, both in keeping with McCoy’s talents. He (McCoy as much as the Seventh Doctor) seems uneasy with technobabble or excessive scientific solutions, particularly when he can talk his way out of just about any situation instead.
Given this preference for words over action, it’s telling that the second story, Stephen Wyatt’s “Paradise Towers,” leans more heavily into social science and anthropology than any story prior (though “Kinda” kinda comes close). The Doctor must unite the disparate tribes of residents in a futuristic high-rise building to stand against the, um, zombie fascist architect imprisoned in the basement; it’s the thought that counts, and though there’s plenty of action, or at least running, and prim and proper cannibals, it’s still at heart a story that resolves itself more through the Doctor’s influence than his direct intervention. Even the remake of Hi Di Hi!, also known as “Delta and the Bannermen” by Malcolm Kohll, posits the Seventh Doctor as an organizer, a leader, a peacemaker in this story of ’50s puppy love, alien package tours, and intergalactic assassins.
In short, this is not a Doctor who does things. This is a Doctor who meddles behind the scenes, fixing leaks in time and space as they happen. At least, that is, until the Daleks show up.
Season Twenty-Five starts to show signs of Nathan-Turner and Cartmel changing the character, inveterate tinkerers that they are, towards a harsher, more mysterious tone—by all accounts, with McCoy’s tacit blessing. Ben Aaronovitch’s “Remembrance of the Daleks” stands as one of the best stories of the Seventh Doctor’s run, an ostensibly nostalgic return to 1963 London, replete with a visit to I.M. Forman’s scrap yard, that turns the Doctor from responding to disasters to proactively cutting them off at their source. Accompanied by new companion Ace (Sophie Aldred), the Doctor returns to his beginnings to complete a plan set in motion by the First Doctor, a very long con that sees the Daleks travel back in time to secure an artifact of immense power. It’s a trap, planted by the Doctor; the artifact destroys Skaro, and theoretically the majority of the Dalek species. It’s a far cry from a Doctor reticent to intervene, a vision that does not square with our understanding of the First Doctor, nor of any subsequent regeneration, all of whom have shied away from taking that step.
The dissonance is striking, all the more so given the quite kindly and frankly lovably bumbling nature of the Seventh Doctor to this point. And as if to make sure the audience knows this is an intentional shift, the Seventh Doctor does it again with the Cybermen two stories later, in Kevin Clarke’s “Silver Nemesis,” billed as a “25th anniversary” tale both airing on and taking place on November 23rd, 1988, the silver anniversary of the first airing of “An Unearthly Child.” Different foe, same result, with the Doctor having set a plan in motion hundreds of years in the past resulting in a living statue plummeting to Earth, pursued by a seventeenth century noblewoman given the key to time travel by the Doctor, a group of Fourth Reich wanna-bes, and the menaces from Mondas. As with the Daleks, the Cybermen unwittingly take possession of a device that proceeds to destroy the Cyberfleet and, one assumes, the remainder of the Mondassian diaspora. If the series is coming to an end, the Doctor is taking care of some unfinished business, while at the same time trying to hint at unseen depths in the Time Lord.
If there’s a quibble to be had with McCoy’s time as the Seventh Doctor, it’s that he doesn’t wear the more callous approach as well as he does the more curious one. There’s a particular lightness to the Doctor in his first season, a joviality that reminds viewers that the series can be exciting and still fun, tense and still pleasant; the final two seasons lean far more heavily into the weightiness of being an ancient arbiter of time and space, or at least they try to. Having characters like Lady Peinforte (Fiona Walker) in “Silver Nemesis” threaten to reveal the Doctor’s behavior during the “old time, the time of chaos,” does carry some frisson, suggesting that there’s more to him than meets the eye after twenty-five years of travel in the TARDIS, but it falls flat; the audience has already suffered through a Sixth Doctor who behaves in manic and unexpected ways, who carries a well of discontent within him. The Fifth Doctor, too, has suffered for his, and prior regeneration’s, sins more than amply. Heavy, brooding, and unknowable are not the qualities Doctor Who needs after a quarter-century, particularly not when signposted by events that take place off-screen and carry no emotional heft for viewers.
The final three stories of the Seventh Doctor’s run in Season Twenty-Six prove far more successful, if only because they lean heavily into Ace rather than the Doctor himself, a signal change from the Doctor-forward approach that dominates the series’ run. Across “Ghost Light,” “The Curse of Fenric,” and “Survival,” by Marc Platt, Ian Briggs, and Rona Munro respectively, we see a more complete portrait of a companion than we have ever seen before—even if much of it stems from the Doctor’s overly-paternalistic attempt to force her to confront her past. Though the stories vary wildly in terms of their actual effectiveness—”The Curse of Fenric” is an all-time great episode, while “Ghost Light,” for all its noble attempts to convey Victorian horror, collapses under the weight of its utterly inscrutable plot, consigning it to the same category as “Underworld” and “Terminus,” stories that just never get out of their own way—they all successfully develop Ace, a plucky teen from Perivale whisked by time storm to Ice World, where she meets the Doctor.
Despite companions appearing in all but one story (two if you count “Mission to the Unknown,” which also lacked the Doctor), they’ve never really driven Doctor Who. Certainly, Ian and Barbara always wanted to go home and Tegan just wanted to make her flight, but, especially from the Second Doctor onwards, they’ve just been along for the ride, and while some stories require a more active companion to initiate the punch-ups and others require a companion especially skilled at getting captured, a case can be made that they’re broadly interchangeable. Not so with Ace, and the feeling of continuity between the three stories rivals any succession of Dalek or Sontaran appearances for generating audience interest across stories. The companion has always been spun as the “audience identification” figure—the Doctor being a hero above comparison—and this mini-trilogy attempts to answer the question many viewers have had: what would traveling with the Doctor actually be like? How would it change a person? Sadly the actual costs of such companionship do not get fully explored, even in “Survival,” which takes Ace back to Perivale to find that she’s been declared missing by her mother after months away, but it’s a step towards newness, towards a real change in the series that would have been fascinating to see manifest more fully in future seasons.
Sophie Aldred quite shines as Ace, particularly in the final season, and her portrayal deftly brings the audience along as Ace confronts her fears (clowns, haunted houses), her anxieties (she meets her mother, whom she can’t stand, as a baby!), and her desires (freedom from the boredom of Perivale, to be a whole person). Aldred never forgets that her character is still a teen, a child in many ways, but she brings a maturity to the role that squares with Ace’s development. Throw in her absolute willingness to perform many of her own stunts, some more fraught with danger than others, and we have in Ace the most complete presentation of a companion in the show’s entire run.
Bonnie Langford performs yeoman’s work easing viewers into the Seventh Doctor’s era. Mel, despite her almost aggressive optimism, comes across as better grounded than McCoy’s Seventh Doctor in those early stories, as much due to regeneration psychosis as to the character itself being a corrective to the dour Sixth Doctor. Both “Paradise Towers” and, especially, “Delta and the Bannermen” seem custom tailored to Langford’s talents—there’s genuine joy on Mel’s (and Langford’s) face as she sings doo-wop standards with a space bus full of aliens on the way to Disneyland in 1959. The character’s leave taking, in Ian Briggs’ “Dragonfire,” wherein she teams up with Tony Selby’s superlative Sabalom Glitz, feels a nice exit, one that deserves to be followed up on in a season that never comes.
Indeed, more than anything, Sylvester McCoy’s time as the Seventh Doctor feels unfinished. Though, per Paul Kirkley’s Space Helmet for a Cow, he wanted to stay on for three seasons tops, Nathan-Turner conditioning his third season return on a fourth season contract as well, there still feels like so much more for the character to have done. Nathan-Turner and Cartmel’s plan to heighten the character’s mysterious origins never really gets off the ground, being essentially dropped in the final season, and the Seventh Doctor, save for a delightful reunion with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and one-off confrontations with the Daleks, Cybermen, and the Master, refrains from engaging with any of Doctor Who‘s copious lore or store of villains. Their absence makes for refreshing viewing, to be sure, after years of going back to that parched well, and with a new stable of writers and a bracing take on the title character, Doctor Who looks poised to break new ground in 1989 with McCoy at the helm. “There are worlds out there,” the Seventh Doctor says to Ace as part of his final lines on the show, and it’s simply a shame that we don’t get to see them with Sylvester McCoy and the Seventh Doctor.
(Details surrounding the cancellation of Doctor Who sourced from Paul Kirkley’s Space Helmet for a Cow.)
Post 166 of the Doctor Who Project