N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
I might have taken a couple of breaks whilst watching it, but for me season five of Doctor Who has been the strongest since the first.
“Why is it that we always land up in trouble?”
Victoria, Fury From the Deep: Episode 3
Bracketed by a couple of Cybermen stories – one flawed, one solid – we’ve met the Great Intelligence and the Yeti, “Ice Warriors”, an evil doppelgänger and deadly seaweed – it’s truly been ‘the year of the monsters’.
I’ve also seen off the majority of Doctor Who‘s missing episodes. There are a couple of gaps in season six (notably The Space Pirates), but fortunately the majority of it survives in the archives. It’s been an unusual experience – “watching” the show in the dark sometimes – but thanks to those memory blind spots, it has meant a lot of stories have seemed new to me and some, such as The Abominable Snowmen, have been nothing short of revelatory in terms of how good they’ve been.
Still, for me, Doctor Who has almost always worked best televisually, and so I’m grateful that for six out of the seven remaining Second Doctor stories I’ll be using my eyes as well as my ears!
