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)

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

The BBC just released this amazing trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqgaRb3Le5Q

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 ::<

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!

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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A4E8eI-6YM

(and here is the new voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxgTuhMxk14 )

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)

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

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!

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

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.

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"

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

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

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...?

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...

ooo, a hovercraft!

My favourite scene from this story was definitely this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-dXZePMOX4

Now I'm watching The Mutants...

Oh, an actor who isn't white!

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

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

one of the cameras in this scene is weirdly distorted:

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.

*starts watching The Time Monster*

Atlantis!
...again!?!?

this is the 3rd Atlantis!

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.

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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.