The Space Museum
“No future. No future. No future for you.”
In the post on The Web of Fear a few weeks back, we touched upon how most Doctor Who stories come with a couple of attached facts. Facts through which fans tried, consciously or otherwise, to “fix” a serial’s position within the first draft of fan history. It’s also true that many Doctor Who stories, like many works of popular art that continue to attract new audiences long after their creation, accrue similar reputational cliches. Just as you can know that Citizen Kane (1941) is regarded as one of the finest films ever made, and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) as one of the worst, without having seen either of them or even having much idea what happens in them, the relative reputations of, say, The Caves of Androzani and The Twin Dilemma (1984) follow them around as surely as the latter followed the former in transmission order.
The Space Museum was the first Doctor Who story I watched knowing in advance that some people didn’t think it was very good. There had been others I’d seen knowing that previous generations of fans had venerated them. But the kind of stories that fans weren’t so keen on didn’t tend to make it to the BBC VHS range in the 1980s.1 Doctor Who Magazine also tended to accentuate the positive in its coverage of the show. While some remarkably negative reviews had run of new stories in 1986 and 1987, everything before a certain point had a generic beloved status, in part due to its inaccessibility meaning that no one was able to assess anything.
That didn’t change exactly in 1988, but in that year’s Christmas issue, the one after the series’ silver anniversary, warning shots, of a kind, were fired. A precursor to the kind of fan battles over relative quality and the status of various eras of the now defunct show in relation to each other that would dominate much of 1990s fan discourse. The starting gun of that discourse, in a sense, was a fun and funny article called Twenty Five Years of Turkeys credited to the pseudonym Sid The Rat2 and which picked out a bottom ten of Doctor Who’s history.
