Doctor Who: Tom Baker - Complete Season One Blu-ray Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, June 21, 2018

A pop (culture?) quiz of sorts was posited in our Doctor Who: Series 10 Part 1 Blu-ray review , when I mentioned that even devoted Whovians might have a momentary pause or two if asked to list in order all of the actors who have played the venerable title character of this insanely long running BBC series. Just in caseassignment wasn't challenging enough, here's another: can you name what two signal achievements Tom Baker, the so-called "Fourth Doctor", has to his name, one directly related toand the other a kind of interesting sidebar data point? Therelated item is probably pretty easy, and in fact generally well known to a lot of diehardfans: Baker holds the record as having portrayed the good (if sometimes curmudgeonly) doctor the longest, in a tenure that lasted from roughly 1974 to 1981. The second item is a bit more arcane, but additionally separates Baker from the rest of hispack: by my non-scientific cursory research, I believe Baker is the only actor (and/or actress) to portray the Doctor who burst onto the feature film scene with a performance that garnered not one but two Golden Globe nominations. Baker's turn as the nefarious enchanter Rasputin in Franklin J. Schaffner's 1971 Nicholas and Alexandra received a lot of attention at the time of the film's original release, and while Baker was kind of strangely overlooked in the Best Supporting Actor Oscar sweepstakes that year, he did score a Golden Globe nomination in that award's category for Supporting Actor, along with another nomination for Most Promising Newcomer (a nomination he kind of ironically shared with "Alexandra" herself, Janet Suzman). Despite this widely acclaimed major feature film debut (Baker did have one previous film credit to his name, a "filmed play" version of Shakespeare's, from 1967), Baker had a bit of a rough spell after, appearing in only a handful of projects over the subsequent couple of years. Kind of humorously, at least for those who are amused by the vagaries of show business, it wasn'tor any of its immediate follow ups that garnered Baker the offer of playing. Instead, it was 1974's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad , the sort of film most actors would hardly consider optimum material for a "demo reel". What's kind of interesting about bothand, at least in terms of the casting of, is that Baker was the unrepentant villain in both films, rather than the putative (if sometimes curmudgeonly) hero.There are five so-called "serials" contained in this first season ofadventures starring Tom Baker,and. My hunch is longtime Whovians who haven't yet seen the Baker outings will probably find the Daleks and Cybermen arcs the most consistently interesting. One thing to keep in mind with regard to all of the episodes in this set is that they are at times almost hilariously low tech looking, with obvious studio set work (like the Ark) interspersed with location footage of various British environments. The kind of underlying goofy element includes the very depiction of the Doctor in this season, with Baker adorned with a huge floppy hat, velveteen purple waistcoat and muffler that makes this "Time Lord" indeed look like a refuge from another time period  namely, the Summer of Love in San Francisco, circa 1967.The show's technical aspects (in terms of things like "special effects") is kind of charmingly old school, but partthe charm of this series is how the stories actually often manage to carry the show past some of its presentational deficiencies. (As will be noted below in the Supplements section, some "serials" offer updated special effects, but anyone expecting state of the art CGI had best temper their hopes.) You can still occasionally feel Baker and his cohorts feeling their way in their new roles, but the Daleks arc especially is kind of thrillingly nostalgic at times (and by then, everyone was pretty comfy with their interpretations). I have to say that for me personally, the lo-fi aspects of this era ofactuallythe Cybermen arc. The Capaldi Cybermen episodes literally made me laugh out loud, and probably not in a good way, simply because the "sock over the head" "makeup" was so hilariously anachronistic to the otherwise relatively glossy production elements. Here, the Cybermen just kind of blend into the generally smaller scale production design efforts, and so the disconnect is perhaps not as unintentionally humorous.