11 Times Doctor Who Reinvented Itself

Sylvester McCoy's 7th Doctor had debuted a year earlier, but it's in Remembrance of the Daleks, at the start of the classic series' Season 25 that we really see the hallmarks of his version of the character come to the fore. The 7th Doctor moves from being a somewhat clownish buffoon to a more proactive and aggressive champion of time.

No longer content to simply wait for trouble to find him, the Doctor begins to actively plan the downfall of his enemies. He manipulates the Daleks into destroying themselves in this story, and takes down the Cybermen in the same way later in the same season.

The production team also began to seed the idea that there was more to the Doctor than we knew--that he wasn't merely a Time Lord who had run away from home. The cancellation of the show just a couple of years later meant that these ideas were never fully developed--at least not on television--but still it all represented a new direction for the program.