For all that it has its share of rubbish bits, I really like season 12 and I can understand why it has classic status. Once we get past Robot and into the proper Hinchcliffe/Holmes stuff, there is a palpable change in the show. The Doctor, Sarah and Harry are plunged into situations which are small (if crucial) parts of much larger events off-screen. A lot of this is Bob Holmes' genius for sketching in whole worlds and histories with a few well-chosen phrases. Revenge of the Cybermen may be a bit naff on-screen, but the hints we get about the history of the Cyber Wars make it seem like we're just glimpsing part of a much bigger, richer and deeper story. The same goes for The Ark in Space, with its mythical future of humanity and connections to later stories, The Sontaran Experiment, which manages to subvert the future history we've only just learned about, and most especially Genesis of the Daleks, in which the sense of being one page out of a long history is a central part of the story. Indeed, it's arguably the only "historical" story not set on Earth.
The joy of this is not about actually setting out some definitive Doctor Who mythos, as if such a thing were even possible let alone desirable. Rather, it's the same sense of half-glimpsed, far-off vistas that Tolkien evokes so wonderfully in The Lord of the Rings. Of course, Tolkien had to actually develop his feigned history in detail over decades before writing that great work - but then, he was no Bob Holmes.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2010-03-20 12:31 am (UTC)The joy of this is not about actually setting out some definitive Doctor Who mythos, as if such a thing were even possible let alone desirable. Rather, it's the same sense of half-glimpsed, far-off vistas that Tolkien evokes so wonderfully in The Lord of the Rings. Of course, Tolkien had to actually develop his feigned history in detail over decades before writing that great work - but then, he was no Bob Holmes.