Doctor Who: Every Tom Baker/Hinchcliffe Era Story Ranked From Worst To Best

8. The Face Of Evil

This story seems a lot like it was weaning Tom Baker off of his pedestal after his solo adventure, The Deadly Assassin, by giving him a dual role and turning him into what savages spend many episodes praising as a God (spoilers - he turned out to be most powerful computer ever built). But the result is nonetheless brilliant. This era is known for giving science fiction explanations to gothic horror magic (i.e. robot mummies in Pyramids of Mars) and this story goes one step further by giving viewers a sci-fi exploration of religion. As such, it's testament to writer Chris Boucher, the only writer of the Hinchcliffe era who got to pitch his story ideas like usual for Doctor Who. Hinchcliffe and Holmes planned out story ideas and plots ahead of time, resulting in the consistency in tone that this era is known for. While this story has its James Bond moments (the Doctor being slowly lowered into a pit of flesh eating bugs and being strapped to a table as a disintegrator beam timer counts down...), they are done so well that they work in the story. Which itself is done so well that it even makes the segments of savage politics interesting. Overall, this is the point in the list where the stories transition from "acceptable" into "incredible". From here on in, many of the stories have ended up as number one on lists of favourite episodes of the show. This era is uncontested in creating milestones for the show and an era which wouldn€™t return to such consistency until the final season of the show, 12 years later.