Bye, bye Five

[promethia_tenk]

Have gotten through all of the Fifth Doctor. Probably my favorite writing of any Classic Who I've seen so far has been in this era (and Four's last season).

Tegan came out from behind to become the best companion, but I rather want a lot of Big Finish with all of them. Preferably some where everybody is a bit less crabby.

And I don't know if Five is my favorite, but I will fight anybody who says anything mean about him. And his magical foster home for tragically orphaned alien princesses.

In lieu of further commentary, please accept this picture of Peter Davison:



Damn, boy.

For my own amusement, I have been ranking all the companions as I watch. My criteria for ranking them is pure squee level, so this does not take into consideration things like general quality of stories and arc:

1) Leela
2) Tegan
3) Liz Shaw
4) Ace
5) Sarah Jane
6) Turlough
7) Romana
8) Nyssa
9) Adric
10) Mel
1000) Harry Sullivan
45024) K9

Comments

[owlboy]

Right, I feel like it's quite a bold and experimental bunch of stories but it doesn't advertise that about itself and the scale of the experiment goes unnoticed by people.
Like, the fact that he willingly sacrifices himself for the sake of one person and isn't even sure he can regenerate after was an entirely new idea then. It's not just about switching into a new body when the old one wears out or he trips and falls in a hole or something in the process of saving the universe-- with all the emotional weight of changing his shirt. There's personal stakes in regeneration and the Dr can be uncertain about his own survival, he is also now just as dependent on his human friends to keep going as he is on time lord biology.
The basis of the modern Doctor's simultaneous existential dread and drop-of-a-hat suicidality basically starts 20 years into the show.

And he makes sense as a self-correction after both Three and Four's increasingly fractured and abusive relationship with Gallifrey, I think. Like the Time Lords had pushed Four near to the point of justifying genocide and radically altering history for them, so he slams on the breaks and goes off to be relentlessly nice and play Space Dad with the humans instead. There's a precedent for Eight's refusing to be a pawn in the War.

[promethia_tenk]

Lol, so, since I originally wrote this post I've gone completely obsessive and Five is my new favoritest thing ever.

Like, everything you say there, and then what other Doctor would defeat evil through Buddhism? I keep thinking about Castrovalva as a metaphor for Five's whole run and having a lot of feelings about the poetry of empty spaces?!!?! And the whole fucking thing with Turlough where the Doctor pretty clearly saw that there was something shady going on with him and took him in anyway!?!?! UGH FREAKING UNASSUMING PERFECT BASTARD can i keep him?

so he slams on the breaks and goes off to be relentlessly nice and play Space Dad with the humans instead. There's a precedent for Eight's refusing to be a pawn in the War.
I feel like Five is making me more patient with Thirteen as well?

[owlboy]

>>I feel like Five is making me more patient with Thirteen as well?


I was thinking that as I wrote the post above lol. Like I can see the parallels between those two.