ClockworkOcean wrote:If it took off, I might even be happy to just let the memory of Classic Doctor Who rest in peace and follow Doctor Omega instead.
As someone who became a fan during the wilderness years, I'd mostly always taken it for granted the show had ended, it probably wasn't coming back, and it was of a particular era.
I suppose I felt unhappy that there were still some loose ends about the Daleks, Davros and the Master that would never be entirely satisfyingly resolved.
But then maybe that was just the nature of the beast that the Doctor's fight would always go on, but would be in the realms of the imagination now. Even at 11 I knew TV had changed and that Doctor Who was something past that probably wouldn't work in the 90's.
I guess the TV Movie changed that and made a modern comeback seem frustratingly, slightly more possible. Something began to feel more empty with Doctor Who gone. There seemed a missing element of ambition to British TV in the 90's. Why couldn't it do stuff like The Dalek Invasion of Earth now? Why was most of the new sci-fi the BBC attempted like Invasion Earth or Crime Traveller so drab and difficult to watch?
Then of course there was Big Finish showing what was still possible with the show, and reigniting the sense of injustice of what was taken away, and how good Colin could've been if he hadn't been shit-canned.
I think however when it came to the show's announced comeback, I was in my 20s and a bit past caring. I think I was infected by the whole culture of having a too clever by half 'knowing' attitude to TV and older shows' predictable tropes. Classic Who had kind of become to me something I was very insecure about and something I thought was only securely represented well by the narrow DWM proscribed top ten list of stories that still held up as something I could point to as up to 'modern sophistication'.
I think in the end my main feeling was that in a landscape of Eastenders and Reality TV shite, it'd just be nice to have something adventurous to look forward to on TV again. And at first New Who was it.... and then gradually it just became everything I despised about TV. And then by Last of the Time Lords it went one further and became something sinisterly cultish. and then finally the Moffat era retroactively erased any reason I had ever still cared about the RTD era.
In hindsight, maybe we needed the revival to happen just to get it out of our system to see it tried. and certainly for some of the RTD sycophants, they were desperate for the show to somehow regain its street cred and for the world to understand the show they loved to almost cultish degrees.
But really, maybe it just had come to its natural end with Remembrance of the Daleks and Survival, if not all the way back on City of Death.
I think I agree though that a worthy substitute could've made all the difference, and allowed the old show to be something we could consider preserved in legend, it's hero untainted by the intellectual rot of New Who.
I mean maybe Doctor Who could've stayed dead in 1989 but the BBC still could've done a modern spin-off show, maybe a late night Dalek series akin to the Dalek Empire audios could've worked. Or maybe the Sarah Jane Adventures could've worked perfectly fine if it was the only follow-on to Classic Who we ever got.
Or maybe even if An Adventure in Space and Time had been made into a series and been about either the making of the show, from era to era, or had frankly just been a reboot of the Hartnell years from scratch.
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