☄ Classic Doctor Who ☄
====================

Want to watch Classic Doctor Who, but don't want to slog through the boring episodes?

Check out my guide!

https://averylychee.neocities.org/doctor-who/

Now with updated recommendations for the first 5 seasons! That's 209 episodes!

"How long did it take you to watch each season so far?"

Season 1 — 17 days
Season 2 — 18 days
Season 3 — 29 days
Season 4 — 39 days
Season 5 — 35 days

Seasons 3, 4, and 5 were hit the worst by the missing episodes, which is why they took so much longer to watch (the reconstructions truly are a slog, and I honestly can't recommend very many of them).

In the next season, only 2 of the 7 stories are missing episodes, so I should get through it faster.

And the seasons after that?

Well, they stopped making ~43 episodes a season, and reduced it down to ~25

Additionally, from Season 7 onwards, there are no more missing episodes.

So these timings will most likely get shorter

Currently watching The Dominators, the first story of Season 6

I loved it as a child, but now I'm rewatching it and it's boring. The only good thing about it is the Quarks:

Gods, the people on this planet are so intolerable – their answer to everything is to wait.

They're intended as a parody of Hippies - they're peaceful, but completely useless.

And it just makes the entire story frustrating

"Not to worry, the planet is safe. There's just going to be a localised volcanic erruption on the island."

"Aye, maybe so, but we happen to be ON the island"

The Dominators gets a "maybe" from me – it's not awful, but also it's not great.

A tangent: The Dominators is better than The Keys of Marinus, which I gave a "Highly Recommended" rating. I consider "Highly Recommended" to answer the question "if you only watch 1 story from this season, which should you watch?", rather than say which story is the best.

Next up: The Mind Robber, which is a story I know I've seen but I remember nothing about it.

In the second episode of the Mind Robbers, they had to add a scene at the last minute – the actor for Jamie was ill, and so they replaced him with a different actor. But they needed to explain why his face changed between episodes.

Luckily, the story is already set in a weird hallucinatory reality, so it's relatively easy to explain.

Aside: I've stopped putting the story name in the CW, because the Content Warning was getting too long. If this site was structured more like Tumblr, where the posts are rather wide, then I'd definitely make the post title the full thing, but this UI isn't wide enough

"yes, we saw 2 women walk into the building - one fair, one dark"

heck, you wouldn't hear that nowadays – people would think you're describing their skin colour!

The villain in The Invasion has a huge moving wall that hides a secret machine, and the wall takes several seconds to open or close. I'm surprised he hasn't been caught with it open

Did you know: they didn't copy the footage from the previous week's cliffhanger scene for the start of the next episode. They re-performed the scene, on a new tape.

Earlier on, this was very obvious, but it's been much less obvious with the last 2 seasons!

Interesting tidbit I just read about The Invasion (which I've nearly finished watching now) – this was the last story to feature the cybermen until 1975 (7 years later)

Both The Invasion and The Seeds of Death have women being proactive – it's interesting to see the progress between 1963 (where the women were mostly screaming and running away) and 1969.

I'm not enjoying this season as much as I hoped I would...

If I had skipped the reconstructions, I probably would be enjoying it more, but now? It's starting to feel formulaic.

Interestingly, this matches opinion of the time – none of this season is particulary bad, it's just starting to feel same-y

I'm watching The Space Pirates.

It's the only story of Season 6 that's mostly a reconstruction, and gods... I had forgotten how miserable it is to watch these.

The Space Pirates is one of the worst combinations:

* a relatively slow paced story
* full of clichés
* that is mostly missing, so you have to watch it as still images

The last episode was better than the others, but still... not worth watching.

On to the last story of the 6th season (and of the 2nd Doctor): The War Games

💫 Classic Doctor Who 💫
====================

Want to watch Classic Doctor Who, but don't want to slog through the boring episodes?

Check out my guide!

https://averylychee.neocities.org/doctor-who/

Now with recommendations for all the first and second doctor stories!

I'm 3 stories in to season 7, and while I really like Petwee's Doctor, and the Brigadier, and liz shaw, and the concepts behind the stories...

they're really way too long and slow paced.

Spearhead from Space was great, but both The Silurians and The Ambassadors of Death are 7 episode stories that really should only be 4 episodes.

It took until Season 12 for them to realise that 4 episode stories worked much better

Also: I don't understand why the stories are 7 episodes instead of 6.

A 6 episode format would aleviate at least some of the pacing problems

a 4 episode story is 1.5 hours total, which is a reasonable amount.

A 6 episode story is 2 hours and 24 minutes, so it's already longer than a feature film.

A 7 episode story is nearly 3 hours long.

The Ambassador's of Death is really a good example of why you shouldn't make a story that long – for example, there's a whole plotline where, after Liz is captured, she attempts an escape, only to be caught and re-captured just before she can get back to the Doctor.

And the story spends at least 5 minutes on these scenes, which do not progress the story at all – the situation at the end of the scenes is exactly the same as what it was at the start.

I finished Season 7!

Inferno was much better than I remember it being, but still felt one episode too long.
I really enjoyed the parallel universe stuff this time around.

Thankfully: no stories after Inferno are this long (unless you count trial of a timelord as 1 story instead of 4)

We're now up to the danger zone: the last time I tried to watch through the classic series, this is where I stopped.

(I won't make a big announcement post this time, since it only took me 2 weeks to get through this season)

In the early seasons, the theme music (and much of the stock incidental music) was arranged by Delia Derbyshire.

But because Ron Grainer composed the main melody, she was not allowed to get co-writer credit "just" for coming up with the iconic sounds.

So she remained uncredited for her work on the theme until the 50th Anniversary episode.

This season introduces The Master.

And heck, I had forgotten how sinister Roger Delgado's portrayal of him was...

I've now watched a third of the episodes!

There's so much more violence in the classic stories – in one scene from "The Mind of Evil", UNIT attacks a castle prison that's been taken over by convicted criminals.

There are 15 onscreen deaths from the firefight, and it's implied that there are more off screen.

You'd be hard pressed to find a scene in the modern series that contains more than 5 deaths*.

*that aren't like... something explodes and kills everyone

The Brigadier: *just manages to save the doctor*
The Doctor: Thank you, Brigadier... but do you think for once in your life you could manage to arrive BEFORE the nick of time?!

I'm now up to The Claws of Axos, which is the last classic doctor who serial I watched *before* doing this whole watch-through thing.

I remember it being very good!

Speaking of memory: this is the extent of my recent memory.

With the exception of a few stories, I haven't seen any of the remaining classic episodes since 2004, so my memories go from being "remembers most of what happens" to "has vague recollections of a few frames"

Both Terror of the Autons and The Claws of Axos have been given a Highly Recommended rating. It's been quite some time since there have been 2 Highly Recommended stories in one season

I've decided to retroactively change the rating for The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

It was "Maybe", and now it's "Watch"

Mostly because: I still remember it strongly, several months later. So even though it's a bit too slow, it's worth watching

I'm partway through episode 2 of The Colony in Space, and I'm worried this is going to end up being really racist...

.... it starts getting super weird in episode 4

I can't tell whether the Master being in this story makes it better or worse

And sadly, The Colony in Space breaks Season 8's streak of recommended stories.

It's meandering and not that interesting, and would have been much better if they had removed the plotline about the Master and cut it down to 4 episodes (instead of 6)