I was 12 when I first discovered Doctor Who. I was flipping through the TV channels (manually) and stumbled upon an episode of 'The Sontaran Experiment.' I had no idea what I was looking at but it was love at first sight. Another example of scifi that was more like horror, a grotesque monstrous alien was methodically torturing humans in the distant future on a barren, empty Earth in order to study them in preparation for an alien invasion. Rapture.
It was so different than anything I'd ever seen before; dark, strange, eerie, futuristic, macabre, scary, bleak and wonderful. I couldn't take my eyes off it. A week later, they aired 'Genesis of the Daleks' and I was hooked.
I tuned in every week. Mad scientists, insane computers, evil gods, shapeshifting bodysnatchers, murderous robots, a planet full of Time Lords, secret android duplicates, diseases that turned you into monsters, malevolent sentient plants, giant insects that laid eggs inside you that would hatch and eat their way out (a year before 'Alien'). It was everything a 12 year old boy could want.
I didn't know it then but the first three seasons or so of Tom Baker were so damn good because Baker, script editor Robert Holmes and producer Phillip Hinchcliffe had consciously decided to make the show more 'sophisticated' to attract an older audience. Three years later, activists complained about how violent and frightening the show had become and Holmes and Hinchcliffe were forced out. The show was never the same. But for those few years, it was nightmarishly perfect.
I love Star Trek from the 1960s, but this was so much more visceral and creepy. The alien bad guys in Trek were essentially human, just with different ears or forehead bumps. And it wasn't just their appearance that was human. The Klingons, the Romulans, and later the Cardassians, the Ferengi, et. al, each had a culture, a civilization, their own cuisine, even fashion. You could engage them in diplomacy. Whereas the aliens in Dr. Who had none of that. They were ruthless monsters who simply wanted to eat you alive. You can't negotiate with the Daleks, even if you were their creator. I think this made Doctor Who superior to Trek. Certainly more horrific. Not coincidentally, the best thing to happen to Star Trek the Next Generation was the Borg, who followed the Doctor Who approach of "aliens as monsters" so closely that you could mistake them for Cybermen, the original zombie cyborg race.
Today, while viewing 1970s Doctor Who, I need to actively ignore the budgetary constraints that were blessedly invisible to my adolescent eyes. Such is the price of adulthood. But damn, I still love those episodes.
Heresy dude! Wash your mouth out 
