With Doctor Who fans, you’re sort of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t. You change how you do something and you get as much backlash as you did people clamoring for the change in the first place, and the same if you then go back.
16 Likes
That’s the most shocking/ controversial opinion I’ve seen on this thread for months! 
10 Likes
Judging by a few comments on my videos recently, not thinking that the Tom/Hinchcliffe/Holmes era is solid gold start to finish perfect seems to be a controversial opinion.
My favourite (on a video where I give Pyramids of Mars 4/5 and say I can never really consider it the full 5) was, “This is getting out of hand now.”
4/5 and still not good enough!
I do like that run, I think it’s strong and it has some absolutely belters in it. It has a very shaky start though, which I find fascinating considering the legacy that triumvirate have. But I guess any attempt at nuanced discussion about something people have spent 50 years not seeing any flaws in will, on some level at least, be considered “controversial”.
12 Likes
Oh yeah, S12 is by far the weakest Hinchcliffe era season. Ark and Genesis are the only truly great stories of that season. Robot was still Letts, but Sontaran Experiment is middling, and Revenge of the Cybermen is dull as hell. S13 and 14 I think are pretty all around solid, but even then there’s still Planet of Evil and Android Invasion. So I do think Hinchcliffe is the best era of classic Who, but it isn’t perfect, nothing is.
8 Likes
Michael Grade was right.
9 Likes
Definitely unpopular, but honestly, from where the show was at in the late Davison era and into the Colin Baker years, I’d question why we were still funding its production too.
2 Likes
I might agree to some extent in the early 80s, but based on the quality of seasons 25 and 26 (and I would say 24 as well, but that’s my controversial opinion), I couldn’t disagree more!
It’s a tragedy the show was cancelled when it was at its most creative and innovative since the Hartnell era. But then again it gave us the Wilderness Years so I can’t be too sad!
11 Likes
My opinion is based on the McCoy era. Sorry.
14 Likes
Oh. You’re one of those. Someone who doesn’t like the McCoy era. Well that was after Grade was gone.
6 Likes
It’s okay… I’ll just be over here, with my furry cheetah people and my Kandyman… 
14 Likes
It’s okay people, I’m meeting up with @monkeyshaver tomorrow. I’ll set him straight…
9 Likes
I took the TARDIS into the future, actual footage of tomorrow’s meet up
7 Likes
Sylvester McCoy played the spoons on me once. It was a single tap, but it counts.
14 Likes
Honestly, after watching his blu-ray interview, I don’t mind a lot of what he was saying. Could he have gone about his tactics better back in the day? Absolutely. But what he was saying about the show in general, he wasn’t that off-base. Doctor Who was very dated compared to other popular sci-fi franchises and considering he would have preferred that the show was modernized and made more adult in theme, I’m not against that at all.
5 Likes
I disagree on the basis that I enjoyed watching the show at the time. But I know that not everyone agreed with me.
I agree that it’s a controversial opinion that could stimulate much debate, though.
7 Likes
He sometimes takes those spoons to Big Finish recordings, or at least, he used to. I often wonder just how many people Sylv has spooned!
Anywayyyyyyy, getting on topic, controversial. Hm. Probably not most controversial, as I’m not sure what of anything I ever say or think is controversial (my name’s not Lawrence Miles, after all!), but here’s something people don’t usually like me opining.
I think that a lot of the reason that general audience folks didn’t gel the same with Capaldi and Whittaker’s runs as Doctors is down to those two being skewed far more towards the approach that Classic and Wilderness Who tended to have with the Doctor, as opposed to NuWho. To such an extreme that the reaction to Whittaker’s run seems to prove that the TV show as it exists now cannot return to that approach without having to cut off a fair chunk of those people.
13 Likes
That’s interesting - I agree with Jodie, especially series 11, but not sure how Capaldi was more like Classic than NuWho?
I am definitely more of a NuWho fan and I love Capaldi’s era.
7 Likes
Early Capaldi, I can see it more than late Capaldi. A lot of shades of One and Six in their respective early days are there in Twelve’s character in Series 8. There’s definitely less of a series story/plot arc in Series 8 compared to most before it in the modern series (though there are definitely character arcs). Series 9 all I can figure is that it has fewer but longer stories with all its two-parters. But overall I think the 12th Doctor fits more like modern series Who than classic Who.
12 Likes
Series 8 very much lends itself to comparisons to where Colin was aiming for, starting off as the Doctor. To go in on being this unaware, snubbing and actually slightly insensitive person who sort-of learns how to ‘modulate’ that a little bit. Where Colin has that controversial first-story-at-end-of-preceding-season… Peter has, well, everything up until Mummy on the Orient Express.
Even Series 9 has elements of that, but tempered a bit by a slightly more ‘can be read as neurodivergent in modern-day light’ aspect with things like the cue cards.
Deep Breath hanging that question of ‘did the Doctor watch that Half-Face Man jump, or did he shove him out the door, or did he talk him into jumping?’ isn’t quite strangling Peri, but it’s defo up there in the level of things Six and Seven would do that actually could irk casual audiences in terms of ‘oh, that is not what I am used to, this is not what I recognise the Doctor as usually being’.
And then you get to the quips in Into The Dalek about the soldiers wading through goop that is dead people, including their friend they watched die just two minutes ago. That’s not massively far from Six in Vengeance on Varos making his quip after the acid-bath section.
(Of course, I should emphasise - general/casual audience. I don’t think this notion applies to anyone dedicated like us, not least because we’re all immersed in several decades of thousands of writers doing things at this stage.)
17 Likes
I don’t get how Thirteen hearkens back to Classic Who.
5 Likes