‘The Underwater Menace’ is ridiculous and I love it anyway, David Whittaker very much ploughs his own furrow, and ‘The Mind Robber’ raises the possibility that Doctor Who is a self-aware entity.
However I feel that this does a great disservice to a subgenre I’m going to call ‘Weird Troughton’, defined by being an outlier from the series format or featuring Troughton still working out the role (so ‘The Highlanders’, despite being a historical with no science-fiction elements, counts because Troughton is still trying out strange and fun things with the character). However, having first experienced a lot of Troughton stories as audio there’s still a lot to admire in his expressive vocal performance.Īlso something potentially counterintuitive here is that I’m picking a story outside of the Base Under Siege format that dominated Season 5, which for many people is their platonic ideal of Doctor Who. There’s something counterintuitive about choosing a Troughton story with almost no existing pictures because so much of his performance is visual. With the script doing the same for the characters, ‘The Aztecs’ shows us that comforting does not have to equal light. It’s also a well-made show, and if anything the improved picture quality has been cruel to Barry Newberry’s backdrops – not for lack of detail, but for picking out the folds in the material. The Aztecs are shown to both practice human sacrifice and meet writer John Lucarotti’s description of ‘a highly civilised and cultured race’. The original TARDIS crew, who have hit their stride now, are included in this. You understand their motives even if you don’t agree with them. It’s all very morally murky yet comes away feeling generous.Ī lot of the characters are flawed and interesting. To escape, Ian has to fight to the death, Susan has to avoid an arranged marriage, and the Doctor has to pretend to romance an Aztec woman who might have the key to letting them reach the TARDIS again.
The Doctor rails against changing history, the High Priest plots to reveal Barbara’s ploy. In this story Barbara is mistaken for the goddess Yetaxa, and attempts to use her influence to stop the practice of human sacrifice. ‘The Aztecs’ is a great example of Doctor Who that can be both familiar, endearing and brutal. Also worth mentioning is that this list is incomplete these are not the only stories I watch for comfort, and indeed sometimes that’s not the reason I watch these stories.
These stories work for me and it’s unlikely they will work completely for someone else. This list is very much subjective, some of it is down to which Doctor Who videos I could afford when I was 10. Sometimes you need something familiar and well-worn to unwind with. As a result, here’s a list of Doctor Whostories – one chosen per Doctor – that I put on for comfort. I mean, it’s not like absolutely everything is terrible right now, but certainly a lot of things are and we could all do with a break.