Cities Made of Song, 1965

Turn! Turn! Turn! by the Byrds

"To everything (turn, turn, turn) / There is a season (turn, turn, turn) / And a time to every purpose, under heaven.​"

1965 was a hell of a year for music. I was challenged in picking just one to highlight for this year's installment thanks to the competition. Dylan put out Like a Rolling Stone this year, and two of my absolute favorite jazz albums, A Love Supreme by John Coltrane and Free for All by Art Blakey, both dropped. Of course, my guilty pleasure, the Beatles, put out their absolute best in 1965 with the album Rubber Soul, which contained a number of stone cold classics that could have competed for the honor. At the end of the day, however, I leaned once again toward a song that could connect back with the material I'm marathoning: Turn! Turn! Turn! by the Byrds.

In researching this post, I was surprised to learn that Pete Seeger, whom I've always admired, was the original writer of this song. (Though one could always argue the actual lyricist was King Solomon.) Seeger was really ahead of his time in writing this. If you'd told me that Gene Clark had written it the day before it was recorded in 1965, I probably would have believed you. It's perfectly suited for the emerging counterculture of the time, which may explain why it got its second life as one of the year's top pop hits. This really isn't miles away from psychedelic rock, too, broadcasting the trend that was about to overtake the musical landscape over the next year. It's a lovely, gentle song... and very catchy, too. I've cursed myself to have it stuck in my head all week at this point.

Seeger was a pacifist, of course, but I was surprised to learn that Terry Nation was, too. Looking back, I was far too hard on him when I reviewed The Daleks back in 2017. The way Ian riled the Thals up to fight in the later parts of that serial stuck in my craw a bit, but I discovered recently that Nation didn't like it, either. In an interview in 1966, he admitted that he wrote in Ian's lines for that scene out of necessity and felt conflicted over doing so. "It was against all my beliefs – but I made him say it. There were lots of 'turn the other cheek' letters from viewers, but it is a problem that we all have to face. I don't have the answer."

Though I've had a giggle or two at the recurring idiosyncrasies in his work, I've grown to appreciate Nation's work a lot more in viewing his early Dalek serials. He admits in the same interview that he was just in it to write fun adventure stories and didn't excel at "sociological drama", which is totally understandable. He still turned in dozens of episodes for the show, most of which I've really liked so far. If I want sociological drama, I'll try Paul Cornell or Steven Moffat. Every other day, I'll happily settle for this.

I don't know if it's to Nation's credit or to Dennis Spooner's that the story I'm currently taking an intermission from ends with a very firm pronouncement on the wastefulness of death and war, but either way, I find myself admiring Nation more than I did when I started three years ago.

Pacifism as a topic is going to turn up again and again throughout this marathon. The Doctor is the rare sort of protagonist for an adventure series who tries to solve problems through smarts rather than through violence, and I'm personally inclined to prefer that. We'll track this question through the decades, but for now, I'll let it rest by the wayside and just rock out.

"A time for love, a time for hate / A time for peace, I swear it's not too late."

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 8 April 2020.)

The Daleks' Master Plan, episodes 1 - 7 [Doctor Who, Story 21, Part 1]

The Daleks' Master Plan, episodes 1 - 7, by Terry Nation & Dennis Spooner

13 November - 25 December 1965

​At the start of my marathon, I went sequentially between the episodes making up a serial and did a sort of play-by-play of my reactions. After a little while, I gave up on this, finding that it felt a little "paint by the numbers" and gave me little room to get creative. For this story, I feel I have to make an exception by going in a more strict chronological order. I mentioned before how it's not even like a serial, it's more a season in its own right, packed with mini-stories, like The Keys of Marinus or The Chase, but on a far grander scale. (And no, I'm sure the author at the helm is not a coincidence.)

I wonder if viewers at the time were a little surprised when that Dalek story from before returned after a few weeks of Ancient Troy? It's a unique happenstance during the Classic series, and my first feeling going into this serial is that something is terribly wrong with Doctor Who. We've never seen a companion injured like Steven has been, and all around there is a desperate sort of air as the TARDIS arrives on Kembel.

(An aside: How odd is it that the Doctor doesn't just have medicine in the TARDIS? After getting into so many scrapes alongside his companions so far, you'd think he would have learned. All I can think of were the anti-radiation gloves drugs from The Daleks. Maybe that's all he had? It beggars belief.)

My immediate reaction to the most recent addition of the crew is how out of her depth she feels. Adrienne Hill injects about as much life as she can into a pretty bare character prompt. Katarina is a woman out of time, and she seems to have just been jettisoned (cough, cough) into the wrong television show. Still, I appreciate how throughout these first few episodes, William Hartnell does his very best to seed in some very plausible affection between the Doctor and his new companion. It makes what comes next all the more nasty.

But before that, we meet Bret Vyon, our direct link to the story of Mission to the Unknown, as he is busy searching for the missing Marc Cory. And oh, how my heart stopped to hear his voice. That's the Brig! But, no. He's not the Brigadier, not yet. This character is a very different man, ruthless, willing to lie to achieve his goals, and certainly no friend of the Doctor's. No matter all that, the sound of a familiar voice appearing unbidden in the blurry depths of an episode long lost brought a smile to my face. It's nice to meet you, Nicholas Courtney.

Bret gets a good characterizing moment early on, when reacting to Katarina's suspicion at his offer of antitoxic tablets to improve Steven's condition. Exasperated, he retorts, "I hate to see anyone die through stupidity." Though he's all business and absolutely focused on his goal, this is still a man who does what he thinks to be right. It's very humanizing.

After briefly watching him wearing his mask of false bonhomie for a televised interview in the first episode, we are introduced to the real Mavic Chen when he greets Zephon in the Dalek base. He positively radiates smugness, as if knowing something everyone around him does not. One gets the sense that this man is playing a hundred different games, all at the same time, and it makes him feel very important. From the reactions of those watching his interview, we know that the Solar System has its share of cynics, but by and large the people seem to be under his spell. It's terrifying knowing what he's plotting while they go trusting him to their deaths.

I give Terry Nation a bit of stick for his more idiosyncratic writing choices, but he does seem to have had a genuine hate and fear of authoritarianism, and I read Mavic Chen as an explicit condemnation of self-serving politicians. The Daleks have him pegged almost right away, saying "His ambitions exceed his usefulness." Kevin Stoney brings that to life magnificently. I do still wish the yellowface hadn't been done. I accept its presence as an unfortunate fact of British television of this period, but it does still make me uncomfortable every time Chen is on screen.

Meanwhile, with the TARDIS imperiled by the Daleks and their pyro-flames (very cool imagery, that, by the way) Katarina and Bret flee the machine with a recovering Steven, and run into the Doctor. Bret's very keen to get lost, but the Doctor has an absolutely great moment shouting him down. "Now will you shut up! Sir?" It put the biggest grin on my face. And later, when Bret calls him a very brave man, he totally waves it off. It would be unimaginable during An Unearthly Child that the Doctor would be the one insisting that the evil before them must be fought. Hartnell really has come leaps and bounds with the character by this point. He receives far too little credit for making the Doctor into the character they are today.

His Doctor also gets another chance to wear a disguise, infiltrating the meeting of the evil masterminds while disguised as one of the delegates, then nabbing the core of the Time Destructor and running when the alarm is tripped. This is also the sort of thing that will become commonplace in the Doctor's playbook, but I'm struggling to remember an instance of it before this point. Well, there was The Reign of Terror, and that bit was pretty fun, too. I'm glad to see it done again.

At the start of the next episode, we get a little foreshadowing of Chen's fate when Zephon is exterminated for his incompetence. Chen still doesn't seem to take it to heart and continues along as he did before, seemingly sure of his invincibility. With the suspicion put forward that the core's thieves were Earthlings, he takes responsibility for heading back to Earth to use his resources there to track them down. The sheer cheek he has, BSing the Daleks. You have to admire it. The Daleks, meanwhile, bring Chen's stolen ship, piloted by our heroes, down onto the aptly named Desperus, which looks a lot like the jungle we were just in. The parts of the episode we spend on Desperus lack somewhat in incident, at least until the cliffhanger. Katarina is in peril, being held hostage by a desperate man. But we've been through this drill a million times, haven't we? Surely she will find a way out?

Well... no. Shockingly, we're made to watch at the start of the next episode as Katarina, possibly not even knowing what she's doing, hits the airlock's release and ejects herself and her captor into space to die. This is dark. Like, really dark. The Doctor and Steven are stunned, too, and the Doctor gives a fitting eulogy, but it's all over far too quickly. I'm left with a sense of unease, wondering about the implications of Katarina's sudden arrival and even more sudden departure, but the message is clear: no one is safe anymore. Who's next? Bret? Steven? Maybe even the Doctor?

Unbeknownst to them, by the time that they arrive at Earth, their situation has already been complicated by Chen discovering Bret's involvement and dispatching an apparently highly skilled and effective agent to kill the three on sight. It's all too real when Chen says, after she's gone, that "A heroic war cry to apparently peaceful ends is one of the greatest weapons a politician has." Life, it seems, is cheap in these games politicians play, or at the very least in this serial, as another man (ostensibly an ally at first) is shot dead by Bret upon the heroes' arrival at a lab facility. Not long after, the agent sent by Chen, Sara Kingdom, guns down a shocked Bret while the Doctor and Steven run for their lives. When she tells her comrade to aim for their heads, it's easy to think that either of our heroes could be next on the chopping block, when divorced from all future knowledge.

When Sara tries to pursue, of course, she's caught up in a scientific experiment and thrown across the galaxy to a swamp planet called Mira (groan) along with the Doctor and Steven. Though not the most thrilling of planets design-wise, the invisible creatures living there are done convincingly. I'm glad this episode in particular is still intact so that we can see the footprints being made in the mud and the other effects surrounding the Visians. Sara seems quick to surrender to pragmatism in the face of adversity, agreeing to work with the Doctor for the time being. Her unwillingness to believe their story is understandable, as is her distress over killing Bret, who we learn to have been her brother. The story doesn't get much time to reflect on the human toll of this latest murder, since Sara is back in the cave sharpish as the invisible creatures on the prowl again. As are the Daleks, who soon turn up on the planet to corner the three. When the Doctor turns to the camera and says "I'm afraid, my friends, the Daleks have won," we almost believe it. Nothing seems to have gone right all throughout this serial, and the Daleks seem far more dangerous than they ever have before. The almost comic portrayal of them from The Chase is a distant memory at this point.

Still, it's a mercy the Daleks of this period seem more inclined to take prisoners. When they try to reel in the three, the Doctor manages to instigate what I'm pretty sure is the first "MY VISION IS IMPAIRED" moment in the series by smearing some mud on the lens of the Dalek taking them captive, and they split for the Daleks' pursuit craft. This leads to an amusing scene where Mavic Chen and the Black Dalek bicker over their mutual failure to capture the Doctor and his friends up to this point. I had a good chortle when the Black Dalek observed of Chen, "You make your incompetence sound like an achievement." Politics, everyone!

Eventually, of course, they are actually captured - lest we forget that this is Doctor Who - and the Doctor manages to bluff his way into providing Chen with a fake Time Destructor core before splitting back to his TARDIS with Steven and Sara in tow.

This half of the serial is capped off by the ever curious Feast of Steven, which seems to garner mixed reactions from most corners... An inconsequential runaround, for sure, but it was Christmas after all. Couldn't very well have more senseless killing going on while everyone's about to sit down for a turkey dinner. There are a lot of great moments in this episode, such as when the Doctor refers to himself as "A citizen of the universe, and a gentleman to boot," which I think is a great encapsulation of the character. I'm even a little charmed by the breaking of the fourth wall at the end, if I'm being honest. It's an utterly bizarre way to leave off on The Daleks' Master Plan for now, just another curious change of tone in what is becoming a long series of the like.

So far, I'm captivated, and I'm eager to see how the end of this serial is realized on the screen. With the cynical and gloomy atmosphere of it all, though, Feast of Steven is at least a nice palate cleanser. Maybe a musical interlude will help, too? Our 1965 musical pick is coming next, and after that, a brief look at a trilogy of Sara Kingdom audios from Big Finish.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 5 April 2020.)

The Myth Makers [Doctor Who, Story 20]

The Myth Makers by Donald Cotton

16 October - 6 November 1965

​

Talk about whiplash. From the unremitting grimness of Kembel's jungles to this, I'm most certainly thrown through a loop. I have to imagine contemporary viewers might have scratched their heads at this, too. Where did the Daleks go? It goes without saying, for anyone who has seen it, that The Myth Makers justifies its own existence very quickly. After the first few scenes of a japing Achilles and Hector battling while a bemused TARDIS crew looks on, I glanced over at the credits on the Wiki, sure that this was a Dennis Spooner serial, only to find it was a newcomer at the helm, Donald Cotton. This story truly is reminiscent of The Romans in tone as well as setting, and (dare I say) is the even better of the two.

While in The Romans we met characters (read: pastiches) based on archetypes seen in Roman dramas of the period, our guest cast for The Myth Makers are all already known to us, personages from the works of Homer, and so instead of comic exaggerations we're treated to funny twists on the characters. Odysseus as the ruthless bully, Cassandra as the paranoid priestess, Paris as the whingeing princeling... Each and every one of them is sketched beautifully, and anyone passingly familiar with the source material will spot (and appreciate) that upon viewing.

These characters, and their interactions and feuds with one another, drive a number of humorous scenes where the main cast don't even need to be present, though when they are, it adds another dimension to the story, forcing Homer's characters briefly out of the narrative they're living in. You can tell Hartnell, O'Brien and Purves were all having a lot of fun with it, too. Hartnell always seems to shine in historical stories. I recall that he had trouble engaging with the technobabble that was fed to him for more scifi oriented serials and that he once named The Reign of Terror as his favorite.

Speaking of the main actors, though, we have to talk about Vicki's goodbye. It's easy to draw a parallel with Susan's departure a season before, when Vicki departs the TARDIS team to stay with Troilus in the 2nd millennium BCE. I will say that although Vicki seemed to cotton onto Troilus before I even knew he was in the story, some due care is given to sketch their relationship over the succeeding episodes. It is sudden, but it isn't all bad, and her leaving to found Rome with Troilus and Aeneas is a fun detail when considering her first adventure with the Doctor was The Romans. But the fact that her sudden departure was a result of off-camera drama resulting from friction with new producer John Wiles leaves a bitter taste, one made bittersweet by the fact that it's lovely Vicki we're saying goodbye to. I took a little time to warm up to her fully, such that I was almost shocked when I realized just how very sorry I was that she was leaving. She was such a fun and charming companion; I'll miss her terribly.

The serial comes dangerously close to coming off the rails in the last episode, but doesn't entirely. The hard left turn from comedy to tragedy is a startling one, but one that just about works. I knew going in, but I was still shocked and fascinated by the tone shift. The sack of Troy is almost served better by not being in motion; the viewer's imagination is forced to run wild thinking of what the cunning Greeks are doing to this charming, orderly city where we were joking around the episode before. No one's laughing when Odysseus and his men haul Cassandra away, or when Steven is seemingly mortally wounded. It makes the first three episodes stand out in contrast, and prepares us for what's to come, in a way.

To put a bow on it, The Myth Makers is a surprising and quite wonderful addition to Doctor Who, and certainly one of the best serials we've seen so far. Though I say bow, it's too late to say woe to The Daleks' Master Plan, the first seven episodes of which I will cover next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 31 March 2020.)

A Word on Verity Lambert

A Word on Verity Lambert

​

Before moving on to The Myth Makers, I'd like to spend a moment reflecting on Verity Lambert's tenure as producer for Doctor Who. Every so often, when someone who has left an indelible mark on the program departs, I'll pause at that spot in the marathon to make one of these posts.

Aside from the actors and actresses who have played the Doctor, it's impossible to think of somebody who has left a deeper impression on Doctor Who than Verity. As she was the steward of the show through its first two years, everything I loved about those two years can ultimately be regarded as her responsibility. I'm not well-versed in the production history of this era beyond what I've seen dramatized, but I know based on her time, her place, and her level of accomplishment, Verity must have been a real badass to make it in the BBC "boys' club", and not just that, but make something truly special in the process. The fairly even quality of the show across Seasons One and Two (bar a handful of aberrations) attests to the work of somebody with a fine eye for detail and a clear vision of what Doctor Who had to be.

Verity Lambert's Doctor Who celebrates the joy of discovery, and it pours out of almost every episode, no matter whether that episode happens to be a successful one or not. She and her production team put an immense deal of care into what could have just been another Tuesday job for them, another 25 minutes to put out the next Saturday, but never in all 18 of the stories that I've watched so far have I felt that due effort wasn't given. I sense that the show has, at this point, lost someone very special, so it's with excitement (but trepidation) that I enter what comes next.

John Wiles, ball's in your court.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 31 March 2020.)

Mission to the Unknown [Doctor Who, Story 19]

Mission to the Unknown by Terry Nation

9 October 1965

​
What can I say to inaugurate such a prodigious set of episodes as this? Thirteen episodes of television is a hell of a lot to wrap one's head around. I almost feel it's more appropriate to treat The Daleks' Master Plan, and all its attendant hangers-on, as a season unto itself. My first thought entering it before starting this episode, is that the notion of them successfully stretching the idea across the entire span of those thirteen episodes seems fanciful at best. The Chase couldn't even really do it across six, and isn't this just a grittier version of that, writ large?

If there are cracks in this edifice, then I can't see them from this low vantage. Mission to the Unknown is a fairly able episode to start off with, and I reminded myself while watching that this was never intended to be a standalone, and that the only thing keeping it from being The Daleks' Master Plan Episode 0 is that it's separated from it by a different serial in between. So simply on its merits as a part of a larger serial, it holds up alright and stands as a good teaser to the larger story to come. Edward de Souza does good as Marc Cory (licensed to kill) in the lieu of one of our regulars or the titular frontman, though understandably he gets only about twenty minutes to be characterized. You can't begrudge the work he does, though, and his sheer desperation to get the message off Kembel is sold quite well.

The Varga plants are absolute nightmare fuel, the idea of having your body taken over by a plant reminding one of those fungi or worms that infest certain slugs and other creepy-crawlies. The idea of it happening to a person is stomach turning, so it's small wonder that it's undersold in this episode. Having read the novelization of The Daleks' Master Plan from the 1980s about a year and a half ago (it includes this episode as part of its inaugural section), it was a small letdown from that author's rather visceral descriptions of the creatures, though the imagination still runs wild... Even the jungle of Kembel sounds hostile, with the cacophony of alien noises filling the air in it setting me on edge while the surviving astronauts were stalked by Vargas and Daleks.

Also noteworthy is the assembly of hostile aliens we see in the Dalek city. It occurs to me that we've never seen such a motley assortment of different kinds of alien on the show in one place. It does a good job of selling the scale of the universe (even if Terry Nation occasionally seeming to mix up star systems and galaxies does not), and we are grounded of course by the sight of the Union Flag on the humans' spaceship, which is a nice touch.

All in all, an intriguing start, but we will see whether the legend outstrips the actual serial once we get into the meat of The Daleks' Master Plan soon. But first, speaking of legends, The Myth Makers.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 30 March 2020.)

Galaxy 4 [Doctor Who, Story 18]

Galaxy 4 by William Emms

11 September - 2 October 1965

​
After the north of England, we find ourselves far away on an apparently dying world. Curiously enough, this world isn't even in Galaxy 4 (Galaxy Four? I see this is a point of contention) as that is just the point of origin for our Drahvin antagonists. Why didn't the catalogers/anoraks/whoever just call this serial The Drahvins or something? Most odd. What's also odd is that this is the only story so far which I've gone into without retaining any knowledge of fan opinion whatsoever. I have to say, I sort of understand why. Galaxy 4 is not a bad story by any measure, but it is strangely lacking in incident of any kind. Aside from a few fun set pieces it chiefly just plods along at a leisurely pace for the course of its four episodes.

I'm pretty sure at least that the core "twist" that the Drahvins are the baddies is not actually meant to be a twist as such, but without that central narrative tension all that really drives the story forward is the imminent disintegration of the planet they're stood on. This isn't so bad, but does leave us with only the occasional moment of action or dialog while that eventuality draws closer. This is yet another case of a story which I think would be significantly improved by having it all still in the archives. The surviving clip from the first episode, and of course the recently recovered Air Lock, show that there's a lot going on with Stephanie Bidmead's performance as the villainous Maaga in particular. The moment when she describes watching the deaths of the Rill and the TARDIS team with such delicious relish in our single surviving episode is easily the serial's best, and suggests that it would be at least a bit more visually arresting if we could see the rest of her performance in motion.

The Rills are a bit monotone, but look interesting, and the Chumblies are of course adorable. Steven gets a pair of really great moments, once while trying to change the mind of a Drahvin drone, and the other while grilling the Rill in the last episode, showing his cynical side. Otherwise he's on the sidelines here, forced to as a result of last-minute writing changes, which is a pity. Vicki is great as well ("I observed, collated, concluded, and then I threw a rock!") and the Doctor at least seems to be having fun.

Overall, I'd say it wasn't a waste of time, but I certainly hope Mission to the Unknown is a little more of a rousing watch.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 26 March 2020.)

Doctor Who, Season Two

Here I am again. Pardon the delay, I came the long way round.

I've decided that since I lost my notes for The Chase and The Time Meddler a while back (I watched them in September 2018), I won't write full posts for them, but will instead expand the summaries here, which I'll be including as I did in the Season One roundup. This may disappoint as these are two of the more oft-cited Sixties stories for the show, but I hope you'll all understand.

Season Two was a great journey, and even though the gap between now and when I watched it is so great, and was filled with some rather personally tumultuous times in my young life. Sitting in just such a time as I am now (as are we all I suspect), the time seemed appropriate to finally dedicate myself to resuming my marathon, and starting it by reflecting on a season which I look back on watching quite fondly.

We began zonks ago with Planet of Giants, a quirky sidestep of an adventure that brought our miniaturized heroes to then-modern Britain to solve a mystery surrounding some dodgy Monsanto business. Although not completely remarkable, it is still a quite good story that feels more a part of the last season than this one, and at a mere three episodes is a great way to digest a strange little Hartnell gem on a short time budget.

1964 was closed out with the monumental Dalek Invasion of Earth, which left me feeling very impressed. This is of course the blueprint for every subsequent "monster invades Earth" plot that Doctor Who would enjoy, and as blueprints go, it really is a pretty good one. Though not a top ten story for the classic series per se, I found it a highlight for this particular stretch of episodes and will surely revisit it, in all its epic splendor, in the fullness of time.

The Rescue came and went almost before I knew it was there, but left me smiling. I'm guilty of being more used to the punchy pacing of modern Who, and this serial felt very much up my alley as a result. Vicki gave a good first impression, and the story offered a nice breath of fresh air after so very many Daleks and the departure of Susan.

It's hard to find a bad thing to say about The Romans, which was a remarkably funny pastiche of 20th century Roman dramas with plenty of great moments for the whole cast. The lyre concert in Nero's court still stands out to me to this day as one of the funniest moments in the program's history. This one is, like the season's sophomore serial, due a rewatch someday.

The Web Planet did not leave me as cold as it does some other marathoners and veteran fans, though all the complaints lobbied about it are certainly fair. This story does very little to make the viewer feel at home, which I suppose must be the point, but it certainly comes on a little too strong for many. At parts it even came on too strong for me. Still, I left it with an opinion just this side of positive, and am curious to see how it measures up when I watch it again another time.

The Crusade certainly has its fair share of highlights, but suffers greatly from being mostly lost. The performances of Julian Glover and Jean Marsh do a lot to buoy what might otherwise be a fairly boring historical, and its cultural depictions are hardly in the best of taste, particularly in a post-9/11 climate. Maybe the rest will be dug up from the sands of the Syrian desert someday and will elevate my opinion from merely good, to great.

I really wanted it not to be true before I watched it, but The Space Museum is sadly the lodestone weighing this whole season's average down. Apart from a brilliant first episode, the remainder is, as I said, rather a letdown from its high starting point. I'm still proud of myself for taking the time to sift the gold nuggets from this particular stream and find the best qualities of the serial, which was, at the very least, fun to deride.

The Chase is where I left you all behind, of course, so I'll slow down and expand on a few of my thoughts. While overall a fair story, I think the lack of cohesion in what should have been a full-on farewell for dear Barbara and Ian left me feeling slightly underwhelmed. Not to say I disliked this serial by any means, but I expected just a little bit more. After a funny start (even though Britbox scandalously excluded the Beatles bit!) I found being with the Aridians a bit of a chore, and only started to enjoy myself by the time the crew arrived at Mechanus. (Has groaning at Terry Nation's exceptionally literal names been overdone already?) Though it concluded on a delightful note, I felt this story took just a little bit too long to make it there.

Fortunately, I could depend on The Time Meddler to let me end the season on a high note. From the off, it's packed with action and clever writing which both kept me entertained even while marathoning its segments in one sitting. The exception of course being the Vikings (looking a fair bit more like members of ABBA than Scandinavian warriors), who stop being particularly funny after attacking the Saxon women. Aside from this one bum note acting as a downer on this story, I still had loads of fun, and it was amusing to recall that the reveal of the Monk's TARDIS would have been such a very big deal at the time. I quite enjoyed Steven but have not, I think, had quite the time with him to grow accustomed yet. This story deserves the reputation of a classic, for sure.

All in all, this season was loads of fun, and though it's now retreating into memory, at least it was a very good one.

Here's the score breakdown:

Planet of Giants - 7.67
Planet of Giants - 8.00
Dangerous Journey - 8.00
Crisis - 7.00

The Dalek Invasion of Earth - 8.83
World's End - 10.00
The Daleks - 8.00
Day of Reckoning - 9.00
The End of Tomorrow - 9.00
The Waking Ally - 8.00
Flashpoint - 9.00

The Rescue - 8.00
The Powerful Enemy - 7.00
Desperate Measures - 9.00

The Romans - 8.00
The Slave Traders - 8.00
All Roads Lead to Rome - 8.00
Conspiracy - 7.00
Inferno - 9.00

The Web Planet - 6.17
The Web Planet - 9.00
The Zarbi - 4.00
Escape to Danger - 7.00
Crater of Needles - 6.00
Invasion - 6.00
The Centre - 5.00

The Crusade - 7.50
The Lion - 8.00
The Knight of Jaffa - 7.00
The Wheel of Fortune - 9.00
The Warlords - 6.00

The Space Museum - 3.75
The Space Museum - 9.00
The Dimensions of Time - 2.00
The Search - 2.00
The Final Phase - 2.00

The Chase - 6.00
The Executioners - 7.00
The Death of Time - 6.00
Flight Through Eternity - 5.00
Journey into Terror - 6.00
The Death of Doctor Who - 5.00
The Planet of Decision - 7.00

The Time Meddler - 9.50
The Watcher - 10.00
The Meddling Monk - 9.00
A Battle of Wits - 9.00
Checkmate - 10.00

Best episode: World's End (The Dalek Invasion of Earth, pt. 1) - 10.00
Runner-up: The Watcher (The Time Meddler, pt. 1) - 10.00
Worst episode: The Search (The Space Museum, pt. 3) - 2.00

Season Two average: 7.18

Best guest performance: Peter Butterworth as the Meddling Monk (The Time Meddler)

Best special effect: That housefly! (Planet of Giants)

Best musical score: The Chase (Dudley Simpson)

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 25 March 2020.)