What Was Your First Doctor Who Episode

[DoubleWide]

Back in the mid 1970s, I was looking in the TV Guide for something interesting to watch after the news. I saw something called "Doctor Who" at 10:30 CST and it was labeled science fiction which was good enough for me. :D Listening to the opening theme for the first time was interesting, then the title "The Ambassadors of Death." I was amazed from the beginning and surprized when it didn't end after the first episode. Tuning each night to follow the story became a priority with me, I also knew I had to tell my brother about this show when the first story ended. Then disaster struck, instead of part seven, my local PBS station showed something else. :mad: After two hours, the network signed off for the night. It was over 20 years before that serial aired again in this part of the country again :( , I read the novelization, but still wanted to see the ending. My brother saw "Inferno" as his introduction, the local PBS station only hadthe rights for the first 3 seasons, it didn't return until Tom Baker & "Robot." Since many fans say the first actor to protray the Doctor is their favorite, mine would be Jon Pertwee.

[Zero Hunter]

I am not sure of the episode but I know it was the Tom Baker era Doctor. I remember watching it ever week on the local PBS station all the way through from the 4th Doctor until just a little bit into the 7th when the station stopped showing it.

[TCJohnson]

When I was growing up, they would show all the parts of one story as one movie every Saturday night. And when they showed all of them, they would go back to the beginning. Did this all the way through highschool so I saw all of them at least twice.

Occasionally I would see it on tv while channel surfing and think that it looked stupid. Then one day on a friend's recommendation I sat through an entire episode. It was the Face of Evil, a Tom Baker episode and the first appearance of Leela. I was hooked. Besides the humor, I just loved the way that the Doctor tried to do right not just by his friends but by his enemies as well. That was so unique for me and I loved it!

[Captain Sarcasm]

My dad used to watch Doctor Who with me when I was little, but I don't remember too much of it. The first ones I can remember were the 4 episodes that begun the 'Key to Time' arc in season 16.

[Artemis1]

I never watched Dr. Who.

[Donald M.]

I never watched Dr. Who.

Post count +1! Yay for you! :rolleyes:

Anyway, I don't remember what the first episode I ever saw was, but it was definately a Tom Baker ep. I must have seen most of the Tom Baker episodes from when they were shown every saturday on my local PBS after Lawrence Welk. Watching these two shows every saturday was a happy ritual for my grandmother and I for several years. This was no more that a couple of years after the episodes originally aired in the UK and I was young, very young, still in diapers young, so my memories are understandably vague.

[Rob Imes]

MY first exposure to Doctor Who was around 1980 when my brother bought me a hardcover book "The Adventures of Doctor Who" which had the story "Genesis of the Daleks" in it, which he read to me. I think Marvel had just started publishing Dr Who in Marvel Premiere, although I didn't see those issues, only the plugs for it in the "Bullpen Bulletins."

Then a little later I saw bits of the TV show on (I think) TVO (TV Ontario, Canada). They were "Nightmare in Eden" and "City of Death," two of the later Tom Baker stories. It was a bit strange to watch because it wasn't quite like what I was used to. British TV would often shoot outdoor scenes on film and indoor scenes on videotape (Monty Python once had a skit lampooning this). But to an American viewer like myself, videotape was something I associated with daytime soap operas and sitcoms, not science fiction dramas. So, whenever I'd see a videotape scene of Doctor Who, it felt like I was watching a soap opera, not the type of images that I had formed in my head from exposure to Doctor Who in prose format.

To me, back then, Tom Baker WAS the Doctor because I didn't know about the previous actors playing the role. So, when Tom left, and I saw a bit of an episode with Peter Davison as the Doctor, I was totally turned off by the idea and basically forgot about Doctor Who for the next several years.

I didn't really become a Doctor Who fan until around 1989-90 when the local PBS station began playing the shows regularly. The first one I saw, appropriately enough, was the first story, "1,000,000 B.C." (a.k.a "An Unearthly Child"), although I missed the first ten minutes or so. I was just flipping channels and there it was. I knew almost immediately that it must have been an impossibly-old episode of Doctor Who, long before Tom Baker made the scene, probably because I recognized the TARDIS. I threw a blank tape in the VCR to start recording it, and kept doing so for the next year or so!

After that first Hartnell episode, the PBS channel played a mix of Trougton, Colin Baker, and McCoy episodes before settling in to playing all of the stories in chronological order starting from Jon Pertwee's first episode (1970) to McCoy's last (1989) and then going back after that to play the Hartnell and Troughton stories. (And then they played "Blake's 7" after running out of Who stories to run.)

[Jamboon]

Let me see if I can remember this. My first Doctor Who episode was, oh, all of about five weeks ago when I watched the first episode of the current series on the CBC. I vaguely remember liking it quite a bit and have kept watching ever since.

[Sanagi]

I have no idea which one, but it was probably a John Pertwee era episode.

[Bard]

I happily remember the episode and it's details: it had Tom Baker, and Mary J was mad and wanted to go home, but he got a call from the Time Lords and had to let her go.

Tom will always be my favorite Doctor. I love his cavalier outlook on adversitites.

"Want a jelly baby?"

[DLFerguson]

Tom Baker's first Doctor Who adventure: "Robot". I saw it sometime during the 70's where it was shown on WOR9 (Now UPN) on Saturday afternoons. Naturally this was before VCRs TIVO or multiple re-airings of an episode so I tried like hell not to leave my house on Saturdays until I watched that weeks episode as I was scared to death I wouldn't make it back in time.

[Matt]

No real idea but I'm fairly sure it was a Pertwee episode ... maybe 'The Mind of Evil' but that's just a guess.

[Tami]

I wish I could remember which story was the first, but after discovering it on PBS in the 1980's I was hooked. My addiction was so bad that my brother bought me my own TV for my bedroom (he was annoyed that he could not use the family TV when Dr. Who was on), along with an autographed picture from a Tom Baker episode. :)