Ed Ranks Doctor Who Spinoffs

Hey, that new season of Doctor Who premiered yesterday. Cool, huh? Did you think ranking Doctor Who Companions was enough? It's obviously not, because I'm going to do this ranking too because I'm ranking EVERYTHING, remember? It's in the title of the website.

About as enjoyable as eating shards of glass.

13. K-9 (2009 Series) - I watched about three minutes of this supposed Doctor Who spinoff before I had a desire to stick sharp objects in my eyes and ears. But then I realized that I could just change the TV station instead and go a less drastic route. Good move, Ed.

12. Class - I've watched zero minutes of this and the concept alone makes me go, "Oh, is this like a fake Buffy the Vampire Slayer copycat set in the Doctor Who universe?" Whatever. The only way I'd be interested in a spinoff about Coal Hill School is if it was set in the 1960s version of the school with Ian and Barbara rather than a 2010s version. Who watched Series 8 and said, "Yeah, I want more of this awful bullshit"?

11. Doctor Who Stage Plays - They had Doctor Who stage plays back in the day, including Curse of the Daleks, The Seven Keys to Doomsday, etc.  Nobody cares about these. What classically trained theater actor would want to ramble on about planet Skaro? Oh wait, a lot I guess since a whole crapload of Doctor Who actors over the entire run of the series have been classically trained. Derek Jacobi and Julian Glover need something to do when there are no Shakespeare productions running.

10. The Sarah Jane Adventures - I watched one episode of this and didn't like it at all. The computer thing is stupid and reminded me of Teletraan I. How can they name another character "Rani" and not explicitly make constant references to the Doctor Who villain of the same name as an in-joke? Beyond the one episode I suffered through, I've also seen little clips of it on YouTube, such as the times that the Doctor or the Brigadier had cameos. Why would Nicholas Courtney cameo on this show rather than the real Doctor Who? That would have been much more entertaining to have one last Brig episode. Let's not ever speak of that horrible abomination of him becoming a graveyard Cyberman. I usually like to pretend Doctor Who Series 8 never happened. Seriously. It was bad.

Not quite cinematic masterpieces.

9. Reeltime/BBV Semi-Licensed Spinoff Videos - Have you heard of these? They include such classics as Wartime, PROBE, Auton, Shakedown, Dæmos Rising, and the self-parodying Do You Have A Licence To Save This Planet? ("Licence" is not misspelled, that's British English). I was about to rank these lower, but then I smiled thinking about the last one of the bunch. I don't think a single second of the Sarah Jane Adventures ever made me smile. These were all direct-to-cassette tape productions from Reeltime and later BBV Productions (definitely not BBC) that are quasi-Doctor Who stories but without the rights to use the actual character of "the Doctor." It's not that they are "rip-offs" per se, but that they have what could be called "complicated licensing issues."  For instance, Who villains such as the Autons, Zygons, The Great Intelligence, and Sontarans (and companions such as UNIT characters) appear in these videos because individual writers, rather than the BBC, owned these characters and granted Reeltime or BBV the right to use them. Add to that the fact that many past Doctor Who actors such as Jon Pertwee, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and a bunch of the companions appeared in the videos... and they took on an almost legitimate quality to them as an unofficial, semi-licensed continuation of the series during the dark years of the 1990s when there was no TV show. These videos were always super low budget and cheesy with wobbly sets. Which, you know, kind of makes them more similar to the original Doctor Who than the 2005 relaunch. And no matter how bad they were, every Reetime or BBV production was infinitely better than Series 8's "Kill the Moon." Have I mentioned yet that I hate Series 8?

8. K-9 and Company - The first real attempt at a Doctor Who spinoff beyond the 60's movies, K-9 and Company assumed that you loved a the robotic dog companion and Sarah Jane Smith so much that you'd love to see them pair up in their own TV series, despite the fact that they were never actually together as characters on the show. There was one episodes - a Christmas-themed pilot featuring a weird Pagan cult. Uh, Merry Christmas indeed? Despite the fact that the show was never picked up, it did become canon and Sarah Jane and K-9 being a thing together was seen again in The Five Doctors, School Reunion, and so on.

7. Doctor Who Webcasts - When Doctor Who was close to being brought back, but not quite there yet, the BBC was playing with using Webcasts to produce new Who content. These were mainly just audio stories with a small number of re-used drawings shown over and over again to provide a visual element to the audio.  Webcasts like Death Comes to Time tried really hard to be ground-breaking, but are really just an out-of-continuity mess that try too hard with only a few okay ideas. Real Time was completely forgettable (whatever the Cybermen did in this episode was surely better than making their Series 8 rain zombies), and all I remember about Scream of the Shalka was that the Master was inexplicably the Doctor's robot companion.

6. BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures / Past Doctor Adventures / New Series Adventures - These are technically separate book series, but they're all licensed BBC spin-off books which are supposedly about the "untelevised" adventures between the adventures you have seen on TV.  They're kind of the sequel to the Virgin New Adventures and Missing Adventures, which I haven't talked about yet because those books are better. And just for simplicity's sake I'll throw the two 1980's Target novels Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma and Harry Sullivan's War in with these series as well even though they're not. Why? Because they are orphan books with nowhere else to put them. Target mainly made novelizations of aired TV stories, but for some reason also did two new stories. Fun, huh? 

Worth it for this meme though.

5. Those Weird-Ass Peter Cushing Dalek Movies - These are 1960s cheesy B-Movies at their best/worst (depending on how to want to define best or worst).  Easily both of these awful films could be episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, wanted more for his creations than small-screen, black-and-white portrayals. And so did the general public in Britain. Most Americans have no idea that "Dalekmania" was just as big in the UK as Beatlemania was in the US. So the creators of these films just took the first two Dalek episodes of Doctor Who that had already aired and turned them into crappy films where "the Doctor" was "Doctor Who" and he was a mad human scientist rather than an alien. Ugh.  At least he's not disgustingly inhuman and computer animated.

 4. Big Finish Audio - Big Finish Audio had the great idea of using the original Doctor Who actors and having them lend their voices to "missing" Doctor Who adventures. It was a novel idea, but after like 20 years of doing these episodes they're clearly hurting for ways to work all of this stuff into any sort of continuity. Just how many missing adventures did the Doctor have? Am I to really believe that between two episodes of this TV series that aired a week apart that the Doctor really had hundreds of adventures with entirely new sets of companions before going back to who he was hanging out with before and never mentioning it?  Still, these audio stories do have some good ideas in them - which is why sometimes ideas from them have been stolen and adapted for the new series (e.g. Spare Parts being used for Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel). I'll also briefly include in here other pre-Big Finish Doctor Who audios, such as Slipback, The Paradise of Death, and The Ghosts of N-Space. Because I have nowhere else to put them and they don't deserve their own category. Just like none of the episodes of Series 8 deserved to be greenlit.

Behold this guy.

3. Doctor Who Comic Strips - I'm just going to lump together all Doctor Who comics here. That includes the mediocre-to-terrible 1960's ones with little thought or continuity from TV Century 21, TV Comic, Countdown, and TV Action; as well as the more well-thought out stories from Doctor Who Magazine, and more recent entries from IDW and Titan Comics. The ones from Doctor Who Magazine (also previously known as Doctor Who Weekly and Monthly) are especially what I'm referencing as being good and deserving of this high ranking. Doctor Who is perfectly fit for comic book adventures, and it's a natural medium. Without these comics, we'd have no idea what onomatopoeia to use for the sounds the TARDIS makes (the answer: "Vworp"). Comic book legends such as Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore started off earlier in their careers with Doctor Who comic strips, prior to making classic stories like Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Comic characters like Abslom Daak absolutely deserve a chance to move on to the TV series (his quarter of a second cameo in Time Heist doesn't count... obviously, it's Series 8). 

2. Torchwood - Torchwood would rank #1, if not for "Miracle Day" tarnishing the entire rest of the show. It also doesn't help that it tried way too hard to be "R-Rated" and adult. I understand the purpose of killing off main characters. It helps to show that the threat is real and that any character could die at any time (well, not Jack Harkness, because the whole point of his character is he can't die). But Torchwood seemed to want to kill EVERY damn character and was left with nobody left, which kinda hurts the show. It was a great idea to give Captain Jack his own spinoff show. If any Doctor Who character was screaming for a spinoff it was Jack Harkness. But after its first two seasons, Torchwood got lost and killed off characters to create "big moments" without really thinking about the consequences of it. You know, like how Series 8 killed off Osgood to create a big moment and then brought her back with a shitty and convoluted explanation the next season because Steven Moffat cares more about some stupid twist for one episode than he does about continuity or planned out story arcs that make sense. But I digress from Torchwood, whose last two seasons show how RTD could also just run out of ideas.

Dancing with a skeleton on the moon. Okay.

1. Virgin New Adventures / Missing Adventures - These are the best Doctor Who spinoff stories. When the initial run of Doctor Who ended in 1989, fans needed something to fill the void. Several things helped to do that. The Doctor Who Magazine comic strips continued without the show. BBV did their crazy low budget movies that looked like they were filmed in a backyard. But nothing helped to fill the void better than the Virgin New Adventures (new stories featuring the Seventh Doctor set after the TV show ended) and Virgin Missing Adventures (past Doctor stories set in-between old episodes).  These books were published between 1991 and 1997 and to some degree continued the "Cartmel Masterplan" that the TV series was adding in the final few years of its original run (adding some darkness to the Doctor and making his backstory somewhat mysterious). At times the New Adventures went too dark or tried too hard to be "adult" by killing off characters or having sexual situations, but the overall tone was usually pretty good and sort of the tone adopted by the 2005 relaunch. You absolutley need the Virgin novels as a bridge between the 1980's Doctors and the brooding post-Time War Doctors. The Virgin novel, Human Nature, was easily adapted for the two-episode arc of the Third Series of the relaunch (Human Nature and The Family of Blood). In 1997, things came to an end though as Virgin lost the ability to license Doctor Who stories and the BBC started doing their own novels. They were not as good.