Taking just a moment on February 22nd (or 2/22/22 as hardened Tour professionals call it) to celebrate the legacy of the most important actor in whole of the classic series of Doctor Who. This is not mere hyberbole on the part of the Tour Brain Wizards. Only to say that, once the Daleks ultimately set the course for the show, the most pivotal point in the history came on November 5th, 1966 when Patrick Troughton got up off the Tardis floor, danced a little jig, and set off to face the Daleks, again, in The Power of the Daleks.
If the second incarnation of the Doctor had not only worked, but worked brilliantly, Doctor Who today might be a mere footnote, a fondly and progressively less remembered oddity of the 60’s consigned to the dustbin of history, known better for those little pepperpots than anything else, with fuzzy 405-line fragments of episodes salvaged from episodes sold overseas (surely the BBC themselves would’ve junked the episodes–as they almost did anyway) and the occasional nostalgia piece written on a parked Geocities site accessible only through the Wayback Machine.
If that sounds a bit dire, reflect on any IMDB search which references a series you’ve heard of, but only as a reference in relation to another program. Doctor Who could’ve been one of those, but thankfully for all of us it wasn’t, and Troughton is to thank for that.
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Strictly speaking of course it’s not all deuces wild on 2/2/2022, but in 200 years when everything really locks in, hopefully whatever Nth Dimension wonder which succeeds the Wayback Machine can surface this post, and remember.
