Doctor Who Blog

Doing The Pilgrimage

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One great thing (among thousands) about post-2005 Doctor Who is that we are reminded once again is that it’s a television series, with one episode following on from another. Doctor Who, for much of the faithful who stuck around after the show went off the air in 1989 and waited the fifteen years, had become almost an anthology series. With VHS (and later DVD) releases releasing stories in a random order (one from 1976, another from 1983, another from 1965…) and fans whimsically cherry picking their collections for whatever story meets our fancy at a particular time, we had lost touch that Doctor Who stories were originally viewed sequentially.

A number of friends over the years have been doing “the pilgrimage”—watching the series from the very start at An Unearthly Child and going all the way through every episode (listening to audios for missing stories). When I talked to Gian-Luca Di Rocco about his pilgrimage last year, he had just managed to watch 15 seasons worth of Who and was at The Stones of Blood. My buddy Jim was somewhere in the Davisons. I applaud their intestinal fortitude.

I decided to do my own version of such a pilgrimage last year. It’s lazier—I’m like the guy who comes in on the last five miles or so—but nonetheless has me watching Who sequentially. When I became a fan back in 1984, I was watching Tom Baker episodes of Doctor Who every night at 6 on WNED in Buffalo. I decided to go back to my roots and watch every Tom Baker story in order.

I have to be honest, I didn’t think I would do it. I watched Robot with a little effort but The Ark In Space sat on my DVD player for over a month. But then I watched episode three and suddenly something clicked for me. Suddenly I was excited by watching the Doctor I grew up with and wanted to watch more stories. I became a convert to the cause. It’s such great fun. First of all, you discover with cherry picking episodes, you watch a lot of the stuff you like and a lot of the stuff you’re nostalgic for. Watching it sequentially, you catch the stuff that misses your radar screen. Moreover, you become excited to watch those stories. I couldn’t wait to watch Revenge of the Cybermen. I’ve only ever seen it maybe once in the past 20 years and I was keen to see it again. I liked it a lot, in spite of the awful Cybermen voices (I think the Restoration Team should do a version with Nick Briggs revoicing Christopher Robbie). Similar interests in seeing stories like Horror of Fang Rock, The Sun Makers, Season 17 and the E-Space Trilogy have carried me forward.

My Tom Baker pilgrimage has given me lots of opportunities to discover stories I haven’t seen in years, even decades. Sometimes, my feelings are mixed—Terror of the Zygons isn’t that good though it boasts lovely design, direction and a gorgeous monster—and sometimes I’m genuinely surprised at how much I love something— The Seeds of Doom, a story I hitherto had no feelings toward one way or the other, has become one of my favourites

There are also lovely opportunities to discover nuances you don’t see without the bigpicture. Is it just me or do Sarah and Harry have a thing going on? (It’s probably me.) Isn’t the Doctor and Sarah just the most amazing Doctor-Companion team ever? (It makes the shock of the end of The Hand of Fear all the more palpable.) Could Louise Jameson be the best actress in the classic series? Did Graham Williams basically get rid of every halfway decent director during his reign as producer? Isn’t it incredible how much tough-guy stuff Tom Baker’s Doctor gets away with during the Hinchcliffe stories? (And yet he remains incredibly likeable). How is it that Lalla Ward can be so damn sexy just by pulling a face?

You come to appreciate all sorts of things about these stories. Destiny of the Daleks has astonishingly good direction, as does The Leisure Hive. The acting talent in The Creature From The Pit is really surprisingly good. The Horns of Nimon has a really great script (that’s let down by everything else).

There’s so-so stories (The Invisible Enemy), forgotten gems (The Face of Evil, The Masque of Mandragora, Creature From The Pit) and just plain exciting fun stories (Planet of Evil, The Power of Kroll). And there’s the stories that are just stunningly, unbelievably good: Pyramids of Mars, The Seeds of Doom, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, City of Death…I could go on. Watching them in sequence makes you really savour how very good the best stories are.

Real life crises of work and other situations caused me to take a 10 month break from the pilgrimage (it didn’t help that it was The Key To Time season which I had reviewed extensively a few months earlier in Enlightenment) but I came back to it a month ago with a vengeance, burning through The Power of Kroll, The Armageddon Factor and Season 17. I just finished watching The Leisure Hive and I adored it even as I experienced the whiplash of change to Doctor Who.

With the end of my pilgrimage in sight, I don’t know if I’ll continue on with Davison and go forward, or go all the way back to Hartnell. I’m also pondering doing a similar WNED-inspired pilgrimage of watching the Pertwee era. I don’t care. Right now, I’m on a pilgrim on a journey. My goal is reminding myself how much I love Doctor Who.

3 Comments...

Great fans think alike! What a coincidence! I too have recently started back at the very begining and began to watch every story that is available to me. Even though I do have various episodes on VHS the current pilgrimage I am undertaking is just what has been released on DVD. Currently I am at The Aztecs, one of my favourite Hartnell stories. While I don’t yet own every DVD available (I am currently 24 titles behind) I do purchase a couple every month. I ussually watch one episode at a time a few days a week. It is true that there will be times when I will practically have to force myself to watch it. (coughcoughThe Web Planetcough!) Its funny that you wrote this article around the same time I decided to the same thing. Since it has been stated that the plan is to have all available episodes on DVD by the end of 2013, and the fact that it will be the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, it will be the perfect opprotunity to start it all over again. An Unearthly Child?...see you again in 3 years.

Posted by Doug Grandy  on  08/26  at  08:34 PM

Earlier this summer I did a pilgramage through the Pertwee and Tom Baker eras (twelve years worth of Doctor Who covering all of the 70’s and into the 80’s).  One of the many things I took away from it is just how much the NuWho refernces and pays tribute to the old series.

Posted by Javier  on  08/29  at  05:26 PM

My marathon took about 18 months, timed perfectly with a viewing of The End of Time earlier in the day that The Eleventh Hour aired. It didn’t include just the tv series with cd’s for missing episodes, but I also supplemented it with four seasons worth of Paul McGann Big Finish audios (to give him a proper era in my running through the show), The Pescatons, Slipback, and a few of the missing stories that would have been made for the original Season 23 (which were released just in time). It’s the longest and most “complete” marathon I’ve done, but about the 4th time I’ve done a Who-from-beginning-to-end marathon.

Posted by Luca  on  08/30  at  01:45 AM

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