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What The Hell Happened?

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« on: July 17, 2011, 08:13:13 pm »

This story is often voted as the worst ever in the history of Doctor Who, but it immediately followed The Caves Of Androzani, which is often voted the best ever story in the history of Doctor Who. What do you think went wrong in the space of a short few weeks? Was it the writing? The acting? Both? Or are both stories totally under/over rated?
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« Reply #1 on: July 17, 2011, 08:49:00 pm »

I think it comes down to several factors. It was the end of a season, which means most of the budget would probably have gone, so visually it wasn't great. It was also a launch story for a new Doctor which means it is bound to stand out amongst others, and so it gets that much more scrutiny. They introduced a new Doctor and made him horrible (at least at the beginning) and the acting throughout from most of the cast was awful.

I think that if it had aired mid season as any other old story and they had brought in a better cast, it would have gone mostly unnoticed and would be nowhere near as low rated as it is. I don't think it is the worst. But then I don't think COA is the best either.
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« Reply #2 on: July 18, 2011, 02:57:32 pm »

Definately an interesting topic. I think that it comes down to the mindset of the writers and the fact that they wanted them to be so different. On the one hand with Caves, they had a really popular Doctor making his final appearance and they needed him to go out with a bang, so they had to make sure they had a brilliant story which was fitting of his tenure. Then on the other hand with Dilemma, the story needed to take a back seat because the focus had to be on the incoming Doctor and making him stand out apart from Peter Davison and get the audience to quickly get to know him. On top of that, they decided to make him so vastly different, so a bulk of the story was made up of him being shouty and mean and introducing this whole new character, so they weren't really even writing for a character that they were that used to.

There was far more riding on TTD than there was TCOA and they are worlds apart, but I think that is mainly because the writers took a big risk with something that ultimately didn't pay off
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« Reply #3 on: July 19, 2011, 01:59:57 am »

Well, there's also the fact that The Caves of Androzani was written by one of the best Who writers ever (in my opinion).  I don't know if Anthony Stevens wrote anything else, but on this showing I wouldn't rate him too highly.

The JNT years did tend to be very uneven.  The highs would certainly have been highs in any period of the show, but it tended to be interspersed with some very poor stuff.  There are a lot of reasons for this, including budget (this one definitely didn't look as if it had much of a budget) but that sort of roller-coaster did happen, if not usually in quite such an extreme way.
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« Reply #4 on: July 21, 2011, 05:54:21 pm »

I think it comes down to just being a badly written story. I don't think this could have been saved by any other Doctor being in the role, or any more budget being added. You can polish it up as much as you like, but it just isn't a good story
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