Bad-ass title sequence aside, the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era is the period that nearly broke Doctor Who. Same as the Lennie Briscoe era of Law & Order. It’s where the show found its successful formula, settled in, and learned to coast. This is Doctor Who at its most dangerously comfortable. (Note how many people perceive this era as “correct” Doctor Who, and extrapolate or compare its tendencies to the show as a whole.) It’s not until circa 1987 that the show started to get systemically weird again, in a way that let the show continue to grow and breathe and live (Much like seasons 18-20 of Law & Order!), and led into its modern-day incarnation. (Unlike Law & Order!)

It’s not that the era is awful; it doesn’t do much for me, but there are some nice parts (Deadly Assassin, say). If I’m hard on it, it’s less about the era in itself than about the negative influence it had on the show going forward. Like, if after Hinchcliffe and Holmes left, the show had gone in a wildly different direction again, then fine. Things change; they move on. We try things, then we try something else.

But this is where the show achieved a sort of stasis, both in terms of its future creative momentum and its public perception. It’s not even the most interesting stasis they could have picked for the show. Yes, let’s rip off a popular horror movie and put the TARDIS in the middle. Inspiration incarnate. What galls me is how quickly this became What Doctor Who Is, and anything that varied from the formula was wrong. It’s so daft that even the serials within the Hinch/Holmes era that don’t match the template (e.g., Android Invasion) are considered awful, no matter what neat ideas they may bring to the table. They’re different, so they’re wrong.

Which, for a show like Doctor Who, which more than any TV program I can think of, embodies and glorifies change, is very nearly a profane mode of thought.

Again, it’s not like the Hinch/Holmes vision is invalid. It’s as worth exploring as anything, and resulted in a few epiphanies (Deadly Assassin, again). But then it had to keep moving, and it didn’t. It started into a downward spiral of trying to maintain or replicate or work against these few months of production. All of Doctor Who became a precursor to or an attempt to return to this supposed glory period, when the show had become so very small and isolated. It nearly destroyed everything.

There are other weird things that crystallized here as The Way Things Are Meant To Be, even though they never really were before. Like, the way old-school fans today muse and scoff about the notion of story arcs and long-form storytelling. Doctor Who stories are all supposed to be self-contained! That way you can watch them in any order and nothing matters! But… until season 13, that was never the case. In the 1960s, serials all ran into each other; characters often harked back to events from weeks earlier, even if it was a different story entirely. The Hartnell era is full of rather complex character development. The Pertwee era makes far less sense out-of-sequence, as stories are constantly referring to what happened before, and B-plots develop over the course of multiple seasons. (See the Mike Yates thread in the last couple of seasons.) The Doctor’s situation, and its relation to the Master’s situation, are in a state of continual development. It’s all vibrant, alive. Then after Barry Letts moved on from his supervisory role in season 12, the show just became a movie-of-the-week thing, with little to no context. And, Bidmead and Cartmel aside, this largely became the status quo for the remainder of the original run.

Then there’s the cast makeup. Pertwee had changed the dynamic by turning the Doctor into an individual action hero — the star of the show, rather than the anchor of an ensemble cast — but he still was surrounded by an expanded regular or semi-regular cast, to flesh out storytelling as needed. This is I think an element that allowed the Pertwee era to be so much more sophisticated, on a narrative level, than what had come before: it had more roles to employ, in a greater number of capacities — and you didn’t necessarily have to use them all, every week. It’s even more of an ensemble than it was before. Hinchcliffe and Holmes strip that right away, especially after the Letts legacy of season 12, and again basically boil the show down to the bare necessities and divorce it of any greater context or narrative potential or significance. One Doctor, who now is very clearly the show’s hero rather than a catalyst for the main character(s), and one lady who’s largely there to make the Doctor look smart and give him someone to talk to.

To my view, this is just as damaging a systemic collapse as the absolution of continuity. We’re going down a path to an unsupportable level of stasis, which will lead to the exact kind of irrelevance that plagued the show throughout the 1980s. Granted, someone of greater creative talent could still elevate the show, as happened in seasons 18 and 24-26, then again from 2005. But if you will, the entropy had now set in. Everything else would be a struggle, and the show’s end was ordained. What had to happen in 2005, for the show to work again, was to strip away most of the damage done during seasons 13-14, and return it to a model more closely aligned to the last time the show worked under its own steam — namely the Pertwee era. Which Davies has made a point of declaring, over and over, what he was doing. Making a new Pertwee era. Ergo his quoting the start of Spearhead at the start of each new series.

The Pertwee era was, more often than not, about something larger than itself. It used Doctor Who as a platform for social, political commentary. Explorations of colonialism, capitalism, indigenous rights, apartheid, consumerism, the military industrial complex, environmentalism, early feminism, isolationism. Dicks and Letts go on the record that they felt there was no point in telling a story unless it was about something. And then there’s the Malcolm Hulke influence.

By comparison, the Hinch/Holmes goal was to “scare the little fuckers,” as phrased on one of the DVD extras. And it largely approached this narrow goal through borrowed glory, hollowing out existing horror stories and putting the TARDIS in the resulting cavity.

This is not as sustainable a mission. It’s a smaller view. It’s an easier view. It’s a safe template because it means you can just plug things in without having to worry about any greater significance.

This is the era when Doctor Who began its descent into irrelevance because of its conscious self-isolation from structural and thematic elements that would allow it to meaningfully grow or adapt.

This is where the cult of No Meaning finds its roots.

No continuity in MY Doctor Who!

No character development in Doctor Who.

No cultural commentary.

No political commentary.

The Doctor must be the sole hero.

The sole assistant must keep to her place.

The show must not challenge my preconceptions or make me think about anything other than plot.

Doxtor Who is entertainment only. It must not try to engage me in a discussion. It must hew to my specific desire.

This is poisonous.

From here, development becomes a simple question of how “light” or “dark” the show can afford to be, which leads to decisions like putting Eric Saward in control for half the 1980s.

Though you lose a few nice trinkets here and there (The Deadly Assassin, season 18, Douglas Adams), the show would be so much better off to just regenerate Pertwee into McCoy. I honestly don’t think you lose much, and you retain the momentum built up through the first 11 years, that the following 12 so thoroughly squandered.