30 Years of The Five Doctors.

[SiHart]

Possibly the best ever anniversary story is 30 years old today. What do you think of it?

[Terry Leptil]

It's a very good, nice little adventure to commemorate the 20th anniversary. It may have seemed a risk to recast the First Doctor but Richard Hurndall pulled it off nicely. There's so many memorable moments with the return of old faces and the Third Doctor gets to see the Cybermen (shame they didn't do a scene where he interacts with them). However, I feel things could have been better if Tom Baker had decided to appear and they'd used the Auton scene.

7/10

[Andrew Curnow]

It's impossible not to love really, isn't it. Who other than Terrance could have produced something quite so loving, and appropriate, and just fun? It was the perfect story for the time, when you could get away with recasting the first Doctor, and just to see a Yeti on screen was thrilling, and when things were that bit more innocent perhaps. We can all, I'm sure, reel off loads of famous lines from this one, and we all I'm sure have our favourite bits - and maybe that's part of it's charm, that there's something there for everyone.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

It does very much seem a "best of" mashup story - and must have been hard to pull off. It has to have little bits of everything in to please the crowd.

What I'm going to say is quite shocking, but it was in some ways good that Tom wasn't involved. Just because having so many Doctors, the story seems stretched between them.

I remember fondly watching it though - high point was probably the well executed Raston wrobot.

Also remember the ending where Borusa is entombed within Rassilon's trap quite chilling.

As an adult, I quite like how the Games of Rassilon in a way reflect back on the War Games, only played out for entertainment (of the Timelords) over building an army.

Low points has to be the Castellan ... when the Doctor says of him "Now, you saw his reaction to the Black Scrolls. It wasn't that of a man discovered, but of sheer disbelief" you want to go "meh, he wasn't that good an actor". Thank goodness his deathscene was off camera.

And 30 years on, I still don't get how "easy as pi/pie" solves what's essentially "the Adventure Games with frickin' lasers". [Gronda gronda]

[MacNimon]

I think what was special about The Five Doctors (apart from being an enjoyable story in its own right) was offscreen...it was a time when we were beginning to get an insight into the background and making of the series in a way we were never privvy to before, thanks to those early days of DWM (in particular), Starburst and the likes. Before DWW was launched in 1979, DW was just another tv series but thanks to Marvel we were getting a chance to get under the skin of the series in a way we weren't able to before, and really gain an appreciation of what was going on.