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Originally Posted by ray gower  Doctor Who, then, was totally new: Real drama, where the good guy was only slightly less scary than the monsters, his companions were dreadfully ordinary and not always safe even with the good guy.... |
I think that's one of the things that first got my attention. Even the first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw (from The Invasion of Time) was intriguing in part because (as it seemed) the Doctor betrayed his people to an invading force... hardly your typical "hero" in filmed (let alone televised) sf! So when I finally had a chance to see the Hartnell stories some years later (at least, all of the complete stories that Lionheart was sending out to American broadcasting at the time), and saw the first episode... I was very taken with this take. Hartnell's Doctor was untrustworthy (at least, in many ways), and could be every bit as dangerous and shifty as any of the threats they ran into... yet he was a complex character; the latter something each of the following actors kept up with the role... and even the Doctor as played by Pertwee and Baker wasn't always on the up-and-up, for that matter.
And yes, no few of the stories remain good stories still. They may seem a bit
naïve at times by our standards, but they're frequently solidly-told stories, with a great deal of charm, wit, and intelligence to them, for all their technical flaws....