I think the thing I enjoy about the black and white period of Doctor Who is that it’s so much more ambitious than the later eras. Ambition returns in a form during the ’80s, though for different reasons and to different results. There’s a distinct difference, though, between the day-to-day approach to stories during the ’60s and ’70s.

During the Hartnell era, nearly every story was high-concept speculative fiction of some sort. Here’s the story where everything is as alien as it possibly can be; here’s the one where the TARDIS and its occupants shrink; here’s the one where we revisit a location hundreds of years later, to see the consequences of the Doctor’s actions. Even when they’re not speculative, they’re still high-concept: here’s the one introducing a meddling counterpart to the Doctor; here’s the musical; here’s the ridiculously long and serious epic.

Troughton curtailed that trend a bit, with a bigger focus on pulp “monster of the week” storytelling. There was still room for a few speculative stories, like an acid trip to the land of fiction or to a place where all the wars in history are being fought at once. In general, though, energy was devoted to creating new creatures to frighten the kids — preferably recurring ones. Repetitious, yet fun.

Pertwee turned the show into a spy show with aliens and mad scientists, with the Doctor as the hero with the cape and the gadgets; every week there was a new evil scheme to foil. The one story that’s really stood out to me during this era is Inferno — a story where the Doctor visits a parallel Earth in order to witness what happens when he fails, then has to relive the nightmare back in his own reality. It’s almost like a Twilight Zone episode. Though the costumes and set design kill it for me, Carnival of Monsters also is pretty imaginative; it deals with the TARDIS materializing inside a miniaturized habitat trucked around the galaxy by a couple of carnies. Likewise, The Green Death is basically an allegory for the environmental movement.

Tom Baker is kind of where the series loses itself. The early, Hinchcliffe era is dominated by pastiches of whatever Hammer horror movie happened to be in theaters at the moment: travel from Sherlock Holmes Land to The Mummy’s Tomb Land to Frankenstein Land. Slap onto that a deliberate attempt to arbitrarily rewrite series continuity for short-term dramatic ends, and you’ve got a horrible mess — one which, to note, the hardcore fans generally consider the “golden era” of the show. It’s horribly dull; instead of putting creative energy into new concepts to explore, or even into creating new and original monsters to play with, or even-even new threats to London every week, this era funnels its energy into tearing down and rebuilding the series itself — whereas the stories framed by this new and hypothetically improved series are both unoriginal and told in the driest, most self-serious manner possible. The arrogance and ill handling of this era, more than anything, are what bother me about the ’70s stories.

After the BBC dumped Hinchcliffe and Holmes, with the suggestion that the show pull its head out of its ass and do something positive for a change, Graham Williams took over and generally lightened the tone of the show, turning it into a campy romp. He introduced K-9 and Romana, and hired Douglas Adams first to write for then to manage the writing of the show. The series became loopy and irreverent, and although the production values began to go down the toilet, at least the series was original and vibrant again.

Baker’s final season coincided with a complete change of direction for the show, with the oft-reviled, usually misunderstood John Nathan-Turner taking over the show. Granted, JNT had a lot of weird ideas about the show; he was a master at getting the show made, not at managing the creative side. As far as he was concerned, that was the script editor’s job. Whenever he was graced with a script editor with a strong plan for the series, the show was nearly as strong as it ever was. When the script editor was an uninspired douchebag who was more interested in squabbling with the producer than in drawing out a plan (or even managing the scripts), the show was about as awful as it ever was. Season eighteen was Bidmead’s turn, and his idea was an entire season dealing with the concept of entropy. The result: an uncannily consistent and well-conceived string of episodes, in some ways harking back to the Hartnell era.

When Davison came on board, the show was still coasting from JNT and Bidmead’s smash debut: full of intriguing experiments, carried by a continuing storyline, and even graced by a historical or two — for the first time since season four. It only took about a season, however, for new script editor Eric Saward to exert his own entropy on the series. Don’t draw out a solid plan, don’t seek out new and talented writers, don’t commission enough scripts, don’t edit what you do have — then see where the show winds up. It’s not that the rest of Davison’s and the start of Colin Baker’s eras don’t present some interesting ideas; it’s just that they’re isolated within a series that doesn’t know what it’s doing or why, and within individual scripts that haven’t received the care they require. By season twenty-two, there’s not a good story in the bunch. It’s this, more than anything, that gives Colin Baker the poor reputation he has — and it’s this that nearly got the series cancelled, for the first time.

After Michael Grade gave the production team a year and a half to get its act together (I believe those precise words were used, somewhere or other), they returned with Trial of a Time Lord. As it happens, Saward had spent that time doing… almost exactly nothing. He and JNT came up with a grand concept for the season; I guess that’s one thing. When production began, however, lo — no scripts! Last minute scrabbling and angst and anger. Result? Colin Baker got fired, and the show received one last warning.

What they did then — besides hire McCoy, who was at least very well-received at the time (even if current fans consider him the antichrist, for some reason) — was install a new script editor. As it turns out, Andrew Cartmel had almost no experience even with professional writing, much less managing the narrative direction of a TV series. What he had was a sense of perspective. His first season was a period of postmodern weirdness that fans couldn’t and can’t tolerate. Still, it was one of the most imaginative and downright intelligent periods in the show — the first breath of fresh air since Bidmead, and probably the most ballsy thing the show had done since the ’60s. Then when Cartmell settled in, watched all the old (surviving) episodes, and got a hang for what had been done before, he made a deliberate effort to bring back the ineffable qualities that he perceived had been lost over the intervening years (read: during the Hinchcliffe era). He put more of a focus on characters and long-term story, and went out of his way to find and nurture the brightest new talent available. Result: if you ignore the production and occasional casting problems, the series ended on a high nearly equal to its inception.

Now, the integrity and vision that Davies brings to the show should be self-evident. With his deliberate focus on “big ideas” (“Queen Victoria, a werewolf, and kung-fu monks!”) as a framework for character development and long-term continuity, it’s like a blend of the best from the ’60s and the late ’80s — albeit lacking a bit on the speculative end.

It’s this, here, that leads me to constantly compare the New Series to the ’60s series — before color, before the watering down and tearing down and budget and ego and focus problems. I seriously think you could watch the first six seasons, then the final three, then skip right to the new series, and not miss much of anything important.

Apply the above discussion to the Big Finish audio range and you’ll also be able to weed out the essential problems there. Whenever they do go for the big, brave, simple ideas — Scherzo or Natural History of Fear or Omega or Davros — they hit gold. Most of the time they’re content just to waddle forward with cookie cutter plots involving the Doctor and Companion arriving on X world with X political or social problem, that they need to solve. That Big Finish outwardly requests new writers not to specify what Doctor and they’re writing for should give an idea where they’re going wrong. It’s not about ideas or characters; it’s all about plots. Commodity.Words and actions taking up two hours of space, and leaving no one fictional or actual the better.

That’s not to say that Doctor Who has ever been particularly deep or substantial; it’s a children’s TV show. That, however, is all the more reason to be childlike. It’s a series about wonder and fear and finding new perpectives from which to view the world — all presented in the simplest, most digestible form. It’s basically a trainer for how to feel awe and respect for the world around us — and then to subvert it. When it (or anything else) doesn’t hit those goals, the world is deprived a little bit more.