I might be completely reading too much into things, but Sawyer also does seem to play into some unsavory stereotypes regarding transmasculine and AFAB nonbinary folks- ultimately being silly, childlike people who are incapable of functioning in the real world. Like, yes, physically and voice-wise we tend to get read as younger if we’re not on hormones but that doesn’t extend to *behavior* like they did with Sawyer. I’m certain it wasn’t intentional and the child-coding is ultimately a bigger issue, I think, but the Vibes were indeed Off as I played through the game. All in all thanks for this analysis and bringing up this one thing that made me deeply uncomfortable playing but I wasn’t able to put into words at the time! As others have mentioned the game does also have a tendency to abruptly go into weirdly dark or uncomfortable situations without warning which is unfortunate bc the premise is awesome :(

While I never did play this game (didn't interest me, not a fan of dating sims, though I do appreciate the interesting concept of this one and Hatoful Boyfriend), the talk about liking certain characters but not their mechanics (or vice-versa) is one thing that got to me in Marvel's Midnight Suns in particular, though also sometimes gets to me in other games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. I was interested in several of the characters heading into Midnight Suns due to general knowledge or exposure over the decades, even if some didn't seem like a good fit for the story (Spidey, Captain Marvel, etc.), but the game did such a great job of characterization, including building relationships and highlighting similarities between various characters, so I just fell in love with some (Magik! Nico Minoru! That Ghost Rider! Morbius?) but I didn't like to bring certain ones along for missions because their mechanics just did not jive with my playstyle/the way I think. I was lucky that there weren't really any characters I disliked in the game (Deadpool can be grating at times, but seemed well balanced here). As mentioned, I sometimes have similar issues with DA/ME games, where you want to have a certain spread of classes/abilities in your party (a lockpicking rogue, a healing mage & a tank for DA, a biotic and a tech for ME) that I sometimes ended up with a party leaving out one or two faves because they doubled up a role and didn't cover another, etc. As for the main rant, I can understand the anger. Even if Sawyer is meant to be a university student (I still lived at home through my college years, so I don't find it that unusual), I also was pretty young, not even legal drinking age for a majority of that (I'm Canadian, so it's lower than 21), so that doesn't make the idea of romancing a uni student better. It would be nice if more games had more delineated "friendship" vs "romance" lines - where you could improve your platonic bond with characters without essentially romancing them - though I guess a romance sim isn't the best place to look for that.

I appreciate you and your take and the way you explained it I’m going to use that in the future

9:16 so you didn’t think he was just a guy in college that was my first thought

i love this story

I was lucky enough to get the DVD of this signed by Elisabeth Sladen. It was nice to see K9 briefly appear after the failed TV Pilot for K9 and Company. It was a shame Tom Baker wouldn't come back, although it was an interesting use of un-used footage of The Doctor and Romana going punting in Cambridge and a waxwork model for press photos. Overall it's still a fun anniversary episode.

Richard Hurndall played The First Doctor

Loved this adventure! When I first watched it, I had only seen the 4th and fifth Doctors adventures. This adventure succeeded in making me hungry to learn more about the first three, especially the one that looked like Moe from the 3 Stooges whom I’d only seen in Omen. As for the first Doctor, I hate how people harp on and over analyze his “misogyny” I feel he is more arrogant and disdaining than anything else. The first Doctor had moments of talking down to everyone feeling they were not living up to their potential and involving themselves in childish endeavors leading to evil and being victims. He kidnapped two people in his first adventure and very reluctantly let them leave when they had a chance to go home. The companions changed and softened him up. By the time he meets the 12th Doctor, he is at the end of his first incarnation where he likelynreverted to his harder, original traits before accepting his end. This review is very good!

This is the first Doctor Who story I ever saw, the next being the TV Movie. And I'm still a fan hehe.

Have you seen Peter Davidson in the BBC adaptation of "Campion"? I think the fifth Doctor would have been better had it been nearer to his Campion. Susan was passing for about 14 or 15 in her guise as a human schoolgirl, of course she could have been any age as a trainee timelord, Carole Ann Forde was in her mid 20s when she played the part in the sixties

Sometimes some characters were made for different age groups or for people who specifically are into being stalked. Most dating sims have one character that just sucks specially because it’s not for you.

I am showing my age, but Tom Baker was my Doctor Who, as well as Jon Pertwee. Interesting choice!

Five Doctors is one of those texts from my childhood that I love unconditionally. Its flaws and my own critical faculties cannot touch it. I hope we all have a few of these.

This was one of two Doctor Who VHS I owned as a kid (the other being Dalek:The Early years) I think I picked it off shelf for similar reasons to you… I thought I’d check out 5 doctors at once to save time.

Classic!

There's a great Big Finish audio called The Five Companions.... Which takes place during The Five Doctors.... It's like a fantastic extended cut if The Five Doctors. Check it out.

Sadly,Richard Hurndall died only a few months after this was originally transmitted in April 1984😢🎩

Not seen The Guardians Trilogy Vera?! Wow as Zaphod Beeblebrox said, Boy have you missed out! Turlough was introduced in a way no companion had ever been introduced and never will again I suspect. Totally explains the relationship between 5 and Turlough. Also, no spoiler, but a return of a former favorite is the highlight of the first story, Mawdryn Undead.

I wish Sarah Jane had stayed as awesome as she was with the third Doctor. I don't like the fourth. Sarah Jane turned into a damsel he kept insulting Romans 1 bc he couldn't deal with a women who was his equal so he got Romana 2 a time lady damsel

I have read that shortly after making this Hurndel died

This game made me write again. I felt so in love with my character I wanted to give her a story.

I like how if you search Google for "the deadliest killing machine ever devised," the first result is Raston Warrior.

Well, at least Borusa can still have a love-life.

I watched this on first broadcast at a friend's house back in '83. A bunch of us nine-year olds gathered to watch and I swear it was the most exciting television event of my childhood. We loved it and talked about little else for weeks afterwards. It holds up surprisingly well watching it now, but I will always love it for how much that first viewing captured my imagination and gave me so much joy and so much to talk about.

Nice review nice episode

I just realised, when you mentioned it, how subversive Shaun of the Dead's ending is.

For me with Susan they didn’t properly explain where she was when captured cause the doctor left her in the future so it would’ve been nice in her only return to the show tell us where she was pulled from or how she got back to present time I wouldn’t need a whole scene devoted to it but just a few lines of explanation when she meets the recasted first doctor like when and where she was taken from

Okay, my PBS station got this one in the 90s, and I HAD to have it on VHS. And then DVD. And then the updated, special edition DVD. And the next one. And had to see Riff Trax do it in the movie theaters (honestly, they were a let down for me, though). I LOVE this story to bits. I've lost count of how many times I've seen it. I can quote large parts of it from memory, and was doing so when you made references to story beats. For the constraints on its production, it turned out well. There's a SAGA about Tom Baker and why he isn't there (and the hijinks the cast got up to with the waxwork borrowed from Madame Tussaud's for the promotional photos). This was THE story I used to show my friends in high school, on that original VHS, when I would introduce them to the series. And it hooked them each time (I would also show them Tomb of the Cybermen just after, so that might have helped, I will admit). We had so many in-jokes based on this one episode. Is it the best Doctor Who ever? No. Is it the most fun? For me, yes. It's Doctor Who distilled down, as only Terrance Dicks could do. And yes, poor Sarah Jane. They tried so hard to make it look like a steep hill, and she acted her socks off to try and sell it. I can suspend my disbelief for Elisabeth Sladen. Everyone is on form here, and pairing Tegan with Hurndall's Doctor was a brilliant move. Turlough and Susan stuck in the TARDIS? Not as much, but that did give rise to one of my friend group's long-running in-jokes. I think, in terms of watching it cold, it depends on when within fandom you saw it. I don't think it would work as a gateway episode now the way it did in the 90s for me with my friends. Doctor Who was largely off-air - just a handful of PBS stations had it. So what we did get was random VHS tapes, PBS, if we were lucky to have a station that carried it, and the '96 TVM with McGann, if you happened to catch it on Fox the night it aired (and record it onto a VHS tape to show people later). So any episode could be someone's gateway into the fandom/watching the series. When I saw it, it was between two other Saturdays with episodes from completely different Doctors on either side (I *think* there was a McCoy on one side of it, but it was 1994, so my memory isn't exact). Armageddon Factor was my first Key to Time story. We just all kind of accepted that we might not understand everything going on, and that was half the fun of it.

I saw it on the telly when I was 10 (the original broadcast, because I’m old). I loved it so much. Still do. And Tegan was the best companion, and not just because she was Australian.

I don't usually comment much, but I just wanted to say your hair looked really good and on point in this video.

If you were, for example, ten years old in 1983 I can confirm that The Five Doctors was the most ridiculously exciting piece of television imaginable. There was a special edition of The Radio Times (the BBC listings magazine) and a reasonable amount of publicity. It even boldly proclaimed to be the *first time* you got to see what is inside a dalek (conveniently forgetting various glimpses in 60s stories and the mutant embryos in Genesis). JNT was milking the nostalgia all season 20 with every story more-or-less having a recurring monster or element of the past. This was definitely the cherry on the trifle.

Another odd thing caused because of Tom Baker's absence is for a photoshoot to advertise the special they have Tom Baker's wax work from Madam Tussauds.

Ah, the Five Doctors. Shown as a feature length episode as part of Children in Need. Can't tell you how excited 8 year-old me was for this one. To complete the process of demonstrating how ancient I am, at the time this was shown we had two televisions in the house, but only one of them was colour. The other was a tiny little black and white Ferguson portable. An hour after the Five Doctors started, the A Team was starting on ITV (3rd of 4 - count them, 4(!) channels available to us back then). I was desperate to watch the Five Doctors in colour, my brother was a big A Team fan. My mother chose to compromise - we'd start watching the Five Doctors and when the A Team started I'd go and finish the Five Doctors on the portable TV. I argued (I still think rightly) that as this was a one-off and the A Team was on every week I should get the colour TV for the whole thing, but to no avail. And then the Five Doctors started and we all - including my brother - got so engrossed in it we all forgot about the A Team, so I saw the whole thing in colour. Once - we didn't have a VCR at that point - and I didn't get to watch it again until it was re-released on VHS seven years later. It didn't disappoint me in 1990, and it never has since... On the wider points, the Fifth Doctor gets to shine in this story and wouldn't have done so if Tom Baker had agreed to appear. The original version of the story had the Fourth Doctor doing most of what Davison gets to do in the final show (there were rumours of the Fourth Doctor turning evil, but I think that's an exaggerated version of the brief mind control Borusa has over the Fifth in the finished product). Use of the Shada footage seemed inspired at the time. And beyond exciting - Shada at this point had almost legendary status. The quasi-mythical missing story that, had it been completed, would have been the greatest Doctor Who story ever. Easy to forget this now, because now that we've seen finished versions of Shada it looks more like what most final stories of Doctor Who seasons back then tended to be - a little bit tired, a little bit rushed and heavily padded to reach it's run time. On Hurndall, to be fair to him he wouldn't have been given the access to footage of Hartnell or the preparation time that Bradley got thirty years later, so I think he does pretty well. If memory serves he'd appeared in an episode of Blake's Seven and his performance was sufficiently reminiscent of the First Doctor for him to be offered the role for this. Legend has it that he died before he got paid, too - quite the indictment of the BBC at the time given that he died a full six months after the Five Doctors aired. I agree that the sexism is definitely evident in this story, and would argue that it's worse here than Twice Upon a Time because at least in that one it's done deliberately and played for laughs. Then again, Who is always a product of its time and whilst we should have known better in 1983 I think it's fair to say we mostly didn't. Doesn't make it OK, but we can understand it. That said, shout out to Terrence Dicks. As was usually the case with Who he had very little time to write this, he had a huge number of moving parts to bring together and that was before the relatively late re-write to accommodate Tom Baker's absence. Dimensions in Time apart, we are blessed with a pretty good crop of anniversary shows; the pressure to produce something worthy of the occasion must be immense and Dicks (and possibly Hulke, but I think it was Dicks who wrote both The Three and the Five Doctors), Moffatt and Davies all largely pulled it off. Odd coincidence, but certainly for the Three Doctors, Five Doctors and Day of the Doctor a recurrent theme is the writer not being entirely certain when writing which Doctors would be in play, or of having to work around changes late on; Hartnell's illness caused his role in TTD to be dramatically cut short; Baker's absence from TFD has already been mentioned, and at one point when he was wriitng the Day of the Doctor Moffatt only had Jenna Coleman contracted to appear (although I'm not convinced, whatever he says, that he genuinely thought Smith wouldn't do it) - not to mention his attempts to woo Christopher Eccleston into an appearance. Worth also noting that Baker now says he regrets not coming back; he had a fairly tough time post-Who getting away from the character and that, combined with the quick and unpleasant end to his marriage to Lalla Ward, made him quite resentful towards the show. It came just that bit too soon for him. Going on far too long now... Will end by saying that there is a fairly commonly held opinion that multi-Doctor stories aren't especially good, but I think that's entirely unfair. Again, let's set aside Dimensions in Time. Other than that, it's really only the Two Doctors (which came about because Patrick Troughton had so much fun making the Five Doctors, which is lovely, but perhaps not the best reason to write a story) that lets the side down. And yes, I'm including the joyously hot mess that is the Power of the Doctor in that. I can happily sit down and watch any of them at any time (to be honest, as I was still only little when it first aired I have far more affection for the Two Doctors than I know it deserves so it's really only Dimensions in Time that I will never watch again.) OK, judged purely as pieces of drama they are somewhat lacking, but they're not really trying to be that. They are fan service in the best possible sense of the word and I will always love them.

100% my thoughts exactly. I also cost to watch this ad my first classic who...i have also been waiting since 2008 for the raston warrior robot to return

06:51 But the First Doctor was often condescending and paternalist to Susan (ok, that's his granddaughter), and to Barbara, especially at the beginning, before he starts to respect her. OK, we're talking 60 years ago, but it is there. I made a point of watching all of classic Who after I discovered the series. Yes, even black and white, except some episodes that simply cannot be found, or are reconstructed so poorly as to be unwatchable. It's worth it, even if some of them are better than others. Of course, it takes a while, and I didn't even go to the novels or audiobooks... Don't miss The Aztecs, The Myth Makers, and The Gunfighters. Those are the ones that first come to my mind among the oldest ones, and as such those that probably many people has not seen. but not the only ones that are good.

Baker even refused to do the promo photoshoot. Thankfully for the BBC, his waxwork from Madam Tussauds was more cooperative.

Yeah...I feel like it's really the script for Sawyer that gives that "Wait, why are YOU here? Where are your parents?" vibe. Because they could be a young-looking college or grad-school age character; that's fine, people like that exist. But the word choice is what's really suggesting "17 at most". And maybe that's because they wanted a character younger players would want to interact with, as some people are saying, but...IDK, if you're going to have a dating sim with a wide range of target player ages, maybe at least let people select their age at the start and be given different options based on that? It could even be kind of neat to have the same characters at, like, 18-20 vs. 26-28.

The first time I got to see this was when Rifftrax Live did it a few years back. Got to enjoy classic Who, AND hear the MST3K alums riff it! Two of my favorite shows in one! My wife and I were the youngest people in the audience by at least a decade, and from most of the other audience ractions, I don't think they knew what Rifftrax was, and were not impressed by it.

Otherwise known as The Four Doctors and The Fourth Doctor Stock Footage. 🤣

Jon Pertwee is my favorite of the classic doctors, and the reason why is his instant chemistry with both his companions and his arch nemesis.

I liked Turlough, but in the 90s when the internet was new I met some guys who really shipped Doctor/Turlough. Like Doc-lough? Never occurred to me, but it was an interesting ship. Has only slightly less on-screen promotion than Thasmin. I've seen the 5 Doctors multiple times, and the worst part is Sarah Jane's fall. Outside of that it's fun. WAY better than Power of the Doctor, which I just think is way to over the top into just becoming stupid. IMO.

If this was your first classic story, what was the second? Any of these performances convince you to start with their era?

When I was 10 years old Doctor Who broke my heart. I learned that Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, my Doctor, wouldn’t be appearing in the Five Doctors. But I was told that it was because he didn’t want to. That upset me so much, whatever the truth of it was. It was like being disappointed by a parent. I never thought that I’d feel that way again. Until now. Because RTD has broken my heart. For 45 years Doctor Who has been my favourite programme. My room is full of books and toys. It's made core memories and defined my life more than I realised. Fourth wall breaks so the characters know they are fictional and there are zero stakes (don’t even come at me with Deadpool, Doctor Who is not f**king Deadpool!) Introducing the supernatural? “If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting” - H G Wells That last season, that finale, he DELIBERATELY laughed in our faces. "ha ha, nothing makes sense or means anything, isn't that funny" No. It's hateful, and cruel, and he BETRAYED OUR TRUST. I'm so angry and sad and broken I can't even convey it.

Oddly, there was an actor called William Hurndall, who actually appears in the First Doctor story The Gunfighters opposite William Hartnell. I don't think the former is a direct relative of Richard Hurndall though.

For American viewers, there’s a third weirdness to the context of this special. In addition to Baker being absent and Hartnell being replaced, most people in the US were watching Doctor Who on PBS at the time, and PBS had not yet gotten the license for Davison’s stories. I watched this when it aired in ‘83, but at that point I’d only seen the Fourth Doctor and some of the Third Doctor, because those were the only ones PBS had license to. So not only did I have no idea that Hurndall wasn’t Hartnell, I’d either never seen One or Two before or only seen them in The Three Doctors, I’d never seen Davison before [or does he appear at the very end of Logopolis? I’ll hand in my Whovian card now 😉] and *_the_* Doctor, as far as I was concerned, is written out in the first 10 minutes. It was _wonderful_ and amazing and great fun and full of lore, but also very confusing. 😁 [My local PBS aired complete stories on Sundays, so the entire run of Four takes less than a year, and Three + Four is only 65 weeks, so I think I’d seen the entirety of Four, in order, then they looped back around to the oldest stuff they had license to and I was a couple seasons into Three when The Five Doctors aired. I don’t think I’d seen the Three Doctors yet, frex. IIRC, they then resumed airing Pertwee the week after this special, then Baker, and then when they finished Baker the second time (from my perspective) started airing Davison. So it was a year or two after the Five Doctors when I finally saw a Fifth Doctor episode. It’s also possible that my local station hadn’t looped back to Three yet since I’d started watching, and I’d only seen him when visiting my grandparents (their local PBS aired single episodes 2+ nights/week-I don’t remember the schedule now, just that even with long visits I almost never got to see a complete story, but some of that might’ve been that I think it was on at dinnertime so I wasn’t always allowed to watch). In any case, I’m certain that I saw a full run of Four followed by a full run of Three followed by a full run of Four before seeing Five-Six-Seven, and that I hadn’t seen any regular eps of Five at the time The Five Doctors aired.]

Engagement for the engagement god!

Thank you for another great video I really liked this story

Hey Vera, The Five Doctors is one of those stories that (mostly) all Who fans love, but would never rank it up there amongst the best. Its a fun romp and endlessly rewatchable, let's just not mention Sarah and the slight incline of doom! 😊

We need more of the Raston Warrior Robot . Their battle with the Cybermen.

I had the exact same thinking as you, with it being my first classic Doctor who story. It was because I didn’t have access to anything else and I came across a DVD of it at newbury comics and just thought it was awesome. I should go back and rewatch it now that I’ve jumped around classic Who, I don’t think I’ve seen it since that initial watch.