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.

but yeah, look at this cool alien:

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

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"

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...

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.

ah, what a lovely vacation to Metebelis III

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIV90EzxzfQ

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

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 💫
====================

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Now with recommendations for 10 entire seasons!

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).

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

(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....

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

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)

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

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.

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