9. Lynda Baron- Enlightenment
"Foolish ephemeral!" When the starting point for your character is a feathery hat and britches, you don't really have much of a choice. Either you ham it up, or you're the one wearing a feathery hat and britches who isn't hamming it up. The best of actors (and Johnny Depp) have found it impossible to resist the allure of the Jolly Roger, and Lynda Baron, playing Captain Wrack, an Eternal engaged in the race for Enlightenment, is no different. She actually has licence to be doubly ridiculous, since not only is she playing a pirate, but she's also a lady. A lady pirate. A piratical overlady. Thus her performance is an assortment of pouts, eye rolls and cackling. Like, an insane amount of cackling. Whole scenes go by where she just cackles. It might be a record. Seriously, if Guinness are reading (as I've no doubt they are) I'm willing to sit with my stopwatch and count the number of minutes she spends cackling in relation to the number of minutes she doesn't spend cackling. You would be shocked and maybe appalled that an actor could mould their performance out of nothing but cackling. She stands out because the early 80s in Who saw a comparatively toned down Doctor in Peter Davison, and a brace of hard sci-fi stories that lacked the outright silliness necessary for some proper old-fashioned scenery chewing. Baron's performance is the first sign of a tension between that beige vision of the show and producer John Nathan-Turner's instinct towards panto, which started to show itself here. While most of the actors interpret the Eternals with deliberate oakiness, Baron plays Wrack as a spoiled little girl, an illusion that would be complete if she hadn't been squeezed into the most cleavage enhancing corset in the history of 1983 science fiction serials. It's a taste of things to come- well, the performance, not the cleavage.
Most OTT Moment: One of the cliffhangers is just her talking to camera. "You've lost! All that awaits is your ultimate destruction!" It's a 'great' cliffhanger because it makes you think- 'damn, is she saying this to me?' And then she starts cackling, obviously. It's kind of terrifying. And kind of...several other things too. The lads out there know what I mean. Right lads? Right? And a note for future Doctor Who producers: if you're ending an episode with a character talking to camera, that's probably a sign that you've gone a little bit over the top.