Would you say the fifth doctor is the most human acting doctor !

Would you say the fifth doctor is the most human acting doctor .

No.

His Doctor just seemed on the one hand, as programmatic as he ever was as a character, only his programming seemed to be more defective than ever, before or since.

The most obvious case in point being the moment in Warriors of the Deep where he decides to set the base's nuclear reactor to overload.

No rational human could possibly make sense of why he thought that was a good idea, and no-one should really waste their time. It's just a cipher character being badly written.

I think he was often badly written in a way that left his motivations seeming petty, braindead, and making very little sense, nor feeling at all believable. Which really I can only put down to the mess of petty, conflicting writing agendas between Saward, JNT & Levine, making an indecisive disastrous mess of the character.

And because of which, he just seemed like a malfunctioning, sociopathic android to me.

The trouble is, a lot of fans mistake his depressingly limited characterization for integrity.

I think his love for cricket though was rather human like I still say he was more human like then the fourth .

I would say I probably like Season 19's Fifth Doctor more than the miserable, cynical, petty Fifth Doctor of Seasons 20 & 21.

C'mon he did act more human then the sixth seventh or fourth

My friend bill agrees with me a tardis expert he was designed to be similar to Tristan from all creatures.

But braver.

Here is a link to a page titled the fifth doctor the human doctorhttps://olddoctorwho.com/the-doctors/peter-davison-human-doctor-5-2/

Kind of.

Which is probably one of my biggest gripes with the character as at times, he doesn't feel like the Doctor and more of stand in. Seriously, if it had flowed from Tom to Colin to Sylvester it would have felt more in sequence whereas Davison just feels like a completely seperate human character.

No offence to Davison as he is a great actor and the few moments he did get to shine (Earthshock, Enlighenment and Androzani to name a few) He proved he could be a great Doctor. (Also, watching him in Campion, his character there felt more Doctorish than 5.)

There are plenty of stories from his era that I like, but it is still my least favorite period of the original series.

C'mon he did act more human then the sixth seventh or fourth

No. I always got the sense Tom's Doctor had thought through his actions for the greater good. Which to me meant that while he wasn't human, he still represented the best human qualities. Likewise with Sylvester's Doctor.

Davison, I only really got that sense from him on a good day.

On a bad day he seemed either on autopilot or like someone who'd been brainwashed by some insane suicide cult that'd convinced him to let the bad guys win.

Doctor7 wrote:Here is a link to a page titled the fifth doctor the human doctorhttps://olddoctorwho.com/the-doctors/peter-davison-human-doctor-5-2/

I think to be honest, the article kind of runs in a rose-tinted way with what JNT ideally intended, and turns a blind eye to the behind the scenes conflicts with Saward that I think confused and soured that ideal vision of the character.

Indrid Mercury wrote:Seriously, if it had flowed from Tom to Colin to Sylvester it would have felt more in sequence whereas Davison just feels like a completely seperate human character.

Indrid Mercury wrote:Also, watching him in Campion, his character there felt more Doctorish than 5.

I completely agree on both!

Yes, he was more humanistic I think. He didn't have many moments (if any) where he felt distinctly alien (at least not that I can recall) in the way that most of the other Doctors did, and as the saying goes: 'To err is to be human', and in that sense he seemed a little more vulnerable and less confident, which makes him seem more ordinary, therefore less extraordinary, ergo more human.
I think the notion of representing the best that humanity has to offer is something that extraordinary people do, the fifth doctor to me wasn't particularly extraordinary.

Ronnie wrote:I think the notion of representing the best that humanity has to offer is something that extraordinary people do, the fifth doctor to me wasn't particularly extraordinary.

Well I've made no secret of my belief that (whether you want to principally blame JNT or Saward more) the Fifth Doctor was very much a case of an unfit for purpose production team rewriting the Doctor in their own image.

Makes sense to me.

Ronnie wrote:'To err is to be human', and in that sense he seemed a little more vulnerable and less confident, which makes him seem more ordinary, therefore less extraordinary, ergo more human.

Actually coming back to this, it's occurred to me that even this aspect could've worked.

The points on which Davison tends to err seem to be where he's retreading the traits of Pertwee's Doctor, who could also at times be a bit of an annoying do-gooder, fuddy-duddy who often still preferred the spare the rod approach when it came to the Master.

Which gets me thinking that despite this, Pertwee's Doctor worked, and some ways because of this trait as much as in spite of it. A frustration with the Doctor's failings and stubbornness is in a way still engagement with the character as a real person who can be a real pain in the arse, so that he's not just a hero who's doing what we expect, hope or predict, and because of that, the drama can still go either way, which can add to the anticipation.

But furthermore it galvanizes us for those moments where he actually does decide he's going to finally kick some ass like we hoped. The best example of this in any era is probably Remembrance of the Daleks where his final revealing of his ruthless ace up his sleeve comes as a real, great sucker-punch moment and gives us the pay-off we want but didn't expect.

So in a way that should've been the case with Davison too. The moment in The King's Demons where he's pleading leniency for the Master, revving us up for the moment he decides he's just through with him in Planet of Fire.

The problem is, this just seemed something the writers were clueless about applying in the required balance necessary to work. Nothing about how it was applied seemed judged right, well-chosen or showed any maverick thinking that gave us the confidence this Doctor was a maverick (because certainly the makers weren't). The worst traits and failings got taken to Sawardian pathological extremes, (in ways that made Davison's Doctor seem sometimes too negligent and sociopathic to be real or relatable), and there almost was no possible corrective anymore. The damage was done.

And I think that's what I feel about the Davison era. Much of it just seemed to be spent hanging on and waiting for the era to actually finally work, which it only finally did in the eleventh hour after all the damage was already done.