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Doctor Who | Season 8 

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

Doctor Who Guide 

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

Doctor Who | Season 8 

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

Doctor Who | Season 8 

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

Doctor Who | Season 8 

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

Doctor Who | Season 8 

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)

Doctor Who | Season 8 

it feels weird that I'm simultaneously 20.27% of the way through and 35.05% of the way through the series

Classic Doctor Who, money 

gosh hecking darnit.

I saw the blu ray special edition of Season 12 available at a local store for $80, and thought that was a bit steep.

But now I find out that they're selling for over £250 in the UK, and my local store has just run out of stock ::<

Classic Doctor Who | Season 8 

I just finished watching The Daemons. It was good!

And that concludes Season 8!

Wooo!

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Now with recommendations for the first 8 seasons!

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

The copy of Day of the Daleks that I have advertises itself as having new special effects and new dalek voices.

I was initially very concerned about the replacement of the dalek voices, but then... I heard the original:
youtube.com/watch?v=2A4E8eI-6Y

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

And "Day of the Daleks" gets a Highly Recommended rating from me!

I had to remind myself that "Highly Recommended" doesn't mean "the best story of the season", it means "if you only watch one story in this season, this is the story to watch".

(Of course, now there are a couple of seasons with multiple highly recommended stories, so that idea kind of breaks down a bit... hmm)

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

So yeah... Day of the Daleks is not the most amazing story. But it is an enjoyable romp.

It's also incredibly difficult to come up with a synopsis for it

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

heck, I didn't realise it had been 8 days since I last watched any Doctor Who.

But today I'm watching The Curse of Peladon. This is the first story since Claws of Axos that I remember watching as a child.

I'm enjoying it!

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

I also am really glad the Master isn't here...

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

The Curse of Peladon is really, really good.

Except the first episode is a bit too slow, so I can't give it a Highly Recommended rating.

Classic Doctor Who | The way I'm thinking about things 

By default, every story gets a "Maybe" recommendation.

If it's not very good at all, then I downgrade it to "Don't watch".

If it exceeds my expectations, then it gets upgraded to "Watch".

If it exceeds my expectations AND the answer to the question "If I only watch one story from this season, should I watch this one?" is yes, then it gets upgraded to "Highly Recommended"

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

I'm really enjoying that the stories have gaps between them now.

They've moved away from what the early episodes did ("We have to show every moment!"), and are letting there be spaces of time that aren't shown, where the Doctor and companions could be doing all sorts of things

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

The Sea Devils has another instance of someone using "dark" to refer to someone, where nowadays we'd say "dark haired"

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

a "problem" for my guide:

Seasons 8 and 9 have been so much more watchable than Seasons 1–7, which means there are more recommendations for these stories.

Perhaps I need to increase my standards, to make sure I don't end up recommending basically everything from the 3rd and 4th doctor...?

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

I'm really enjoying The Master's presence in The Sea Devils – if this was done without The Master, it would probably be just "The Silurians.... but in the ocean instead of a cave". But because The Master is there, the story has a lot of extra depth and interest...

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

My favourite scene from this story was definitely this one: youtube.com/watch?v=a-dXZePMOX

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 | The Mutants 

Now I'm watching The Mutants...

Oh, an actor who isn't white!

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 | The Mutants 

Here he is, playing Space Chess™ with one of the other guards

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 | The Mutants 

I like that this is a story about a collapsing empire, that's actually pretty cool

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 | The Mutants 

one of the cameras in this scene is weirdly distorted:

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 | The Mutants (spoilers!) 

Hooray!

Cotton, the Black Character™, ends up in charge of the Sky base, and aims to do the right things and leave the native people alone.

That's much better than the previous stories with black characters, who are often the first to die.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 | The Time Monster 

*starts watching The Time Monster*

Atlantis!
...again!?!?

this is the 3rd Atlantis!

Classic Doctor Who | Season 9 

Season 9 has the honour of being the first season of Doctor Who where I recommend *every* story in the season.

I'm tempted to downgrade one of the stories just to make that not the case, but I probably won't.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | The Three Doctors 

The Three Doctors is so good. It's a great story in general, but it's also a great season opener and a great anniversary story.

The major conceit is that there's a problem so big that the timelords have crossed the Doctor's timelines together, so the first 3 Doctors can help out.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | The Three Doctors 

Seeing Troughton and Pertwee interact in episode one was really cool, but in the second episode they're seperated, and seeing their different approaches to things (both as actors and as different characters) is great

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | The Three Doctors 

I do wonder what the scripts would have been like, if William Hartnell had been healthy enough to participate more.

(As his health had degraded significantly in the 6 years since he left the role, he was only able to sit in a chair and read a few lines for the story, he wasn't able to be active or remember too much of a script)

Classic Doctor Who | Some stats 

I've now watched 333 episodes (39.17% of the total number), and recommended just over half of them.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 (death mention) 

Yesterday, I watched Carnival of Monsters – it's fun, but it feels like it should do something more with the political plotline.

Today I'm going to watch Frontier in Space, which is the last story to feature Roger Delgado as the Master before his unfortunate death in an accident. He was intended to show up one last time in the next season, but this never came to be.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | Frontier in Space 

The Draconians are really cool aliens – they have a lot of political flexibility, unlike a lot of other non-human-shaped aliens.

My only frustration is that I was starting to headcannon them as a single gendered species, until suddenly one of them was pointlessly sexist.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | Frontier in Space 

but yeah, look at this cool alien:

Follow

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | Planet of the Daleks 

"Courage isn't just a matter of not being frightened. It's being afriad and doing what you have to do anyway".

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | Planet of the Daleks, not what actually happens, food 

Spiridon: "Ah I see you've been infected with that deadly fungus... let me drizzle this on you"
Jo: "What is it?"
Spiridon: "Hot sauce... I do love having mushrooms for dinner"

Classic Doctor Who | Meta 

Thinking back over Season 9, and I'm probably going to downgrade The Time Monster to a "maybe", because thinking back on it in retrospect I'm realising that it was a confused mess and lots of things didn't make much sense or were boring.

Like the Master summoning someone from atlantis to help him control Kronos, and then immediately revealing that he can already control Kronos....

Or the Doctor creating a time interference device from some cutlery and a wine bottle...

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | Planet of the Daleks 

I finished Planet of the Daleks (after taking a couple of weeks off, I guess?)

I'm probably going to just give this a Maybe. It's fine, but I'm just kind of sick of 6 episode long dalek stories where the middle episodes feel like padding. This story definitely could have been told in 4 episodes, and it would have been much better.

Plus, they wouldn't have abandoned a few plotpoints partway through.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | The Green Death 

ah, what a lovely vacation to Metebelis III

youtube.com/watch?v=OIV90Ezxzf

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 | The Green Death 

ah gosh.... that scene where the Doctor says goodbye to Jo... I'm crying...

Classic Doctor Who | Season 10 

And that's the end of Season 10.

This season had THREE highly recommended stories. That's a lot!

Jo is almost definitely one of my favourite companions of the Doctor (and I actually have Katy Manning's signature, somewhere)

I'm excited for next season, though, as it introduces Sarah Jane Smith, a companion who I haven't seen any episodes of for years...

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

Want to watch Classic Doctor Who, but only the best stuff?

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Now with recommendations for 10 entire seasons!

Classic Doctor Who | stats 

It's been 255 days since I started rewatching the classic series.

In that time I've watched 355 episodes.

I am now 41.76% of the way through the entire series.

Of what I've seen so far, 185 episodes (52.11%) are recommended for watching.

I have now watched 69 stories (nice).

Classic Doctor Who | stats 

if I continue at the same rate, I'll finish watching the whole thing at around this time next year.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 | Death to the Daleks (cw: racism) 

(have I really made no comments about this season yet??? well, in short: the introduction to the Sontarans in The Time Warrior was great)

"The peruvian pyramids are one of the great mysteries of Earth – that no primitive man could have built such a structure. Well now we've solved it! [It was aliens]"

wow....

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 | Death to the Daleks (cw: racism) 

maybe.... if the Peruvian Pyramids couldn't have been built by primitive man.... the most obvious explanation is that the Peruvians weren't "primitive"

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 | Death to the Daleks 

I really don't like this story.

The Daleks don't feel threatening, and that feeling is amplified by the fact that lighthearted (and borderline comical) music plays every time they enter a scene.

On top of that, none of this story feels new or fresh. I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but I haven't been surprised by anything.

(except by what happenned to trap the Doctor and Sarah on the planet Exxilon in the first place)

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 | Death to the Daleks 

Something that Terry Nation always does in Dalek stories is make the environment a threat, and I feel like that makes the Daleks feel weaker.

To prove this, lets look at every Dalek episode up to this one:

The Daleks, by Terry Nation
— features a very dangerous swamp full of monsters
The Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terry Nation
— features crocodiles in sewers, zombies on the streets, and a man-eating creature at the mines

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 | Death to the Daleks 

The Chase, by Terry Nation
— centred around all the dangers the characters face while trying to escape the daleks
The Dalek's Master Plan, by Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner
— dangerous plants, dangerous people on Earth under Mavic Chen's employ.
The Power of the Daleks, by ✨David Whitaker✨
— this story has no dangerous flora or fauna, and it's tense and terrifying.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 | Death to the Daleks 

The Evil of the Daleks, by ✨David Whitaker✨
­— as above
Day of the Daleks, by ✨Louis Marks✨
— the daleks are kind of masterminding things, so this does feature a bunch of non-dalek enemies
Planet of the Daleks, by Terry Nation
— Nation returns and writes a story with.... dangerous flora and fauna on a planet.
Death to the Daleks, by Terry Nation
— once again, the aliens on the planet are really dangerous

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 | Death to the Daleks 

I've given this story a "Don't Watch" rating, the first "Don't Watch" for the entirety of the Third Doctor's era.

Because unlike the other mediocre stories in this era, this one is not merely boring. It's also a rehash of previous stories, and has undertones (and overtones) of racism. There's absolutely no reason to watch it.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 

Just 2 more stories until the end of the 3rd Doctor's era.

I love Jon Pertwee's Doctor. But I am glad the era's ending and we're shifting on to someone else – I think I'd get completely sick of the 3rd Doctor if there was another entire season of him. Not because he's bad, but because I like change. I like having new companions frequently, I like having new doctors, I like having new enemies.

Which makes me worry about Tom Baker's upcoming 7-seasons-long era…

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 

I finished The Monster of Peladon.

It was well made, but felt... insincere?

They were trying to make The Curse of Peladon again, but with a slightly different twist.

I gave it a "Maybe", because it wasn't a chore to watch.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 | Spoilers for Curse of Peladon and Monster of Peladon 

it's also annoying that they undid something cool:The Curse of Peladon makes a point of making the ice warriors seem to be villains, but turn out to be protagonists – a shock to an audience who had only ever seen them as villains.

But The Monster of Peladon just makes them villains again, and it's... boring.

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@BatElite there's half as many episodes per season, and the stories are really good, and none of them are missing bits

@lizardsquid And I'm guessing you have more motivation to get through it as a result?

@BatElite definitely!

I'm not dreading watching any of the episodes that are coming up, so it's easy to motivate myself to watch them.

Classic Doctor Who | Season 11 | Death to the Daleks (cw: racism) 

@lizardsquid now I just want a DW episode that deals with that but like-

‘No of course it wasn’t built by aliens—I met the people that built it, they’d be frankly pissed off small minded racists in the future are claiming all their hard work and architectural advancement was ‘aliens’

Or the just go back in time and see people building said pyramids/ancient architecture.

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