N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
Not even its lacklustre finale can prevent Season Nineteen being my favourite season of Doctor Who.
True, objectively I can see there have been stronger, more consistent seasons, but none of those come with the same level of nostalgia. This is the only season I can say I definitely watched all the way through as a kid and retained some memory of each story. (Yes, even Time-Flight, albeit only that it contained the Master’s return.) This time around my son and I have roughly mirrored its broadcast over the past three months, posting our thoughts 37 years to the day since each story’s final episode was transmitted.
It’s not all nostalgia. There are some bona fide classics — Castrovalva, Kinda and (even with its faults) Earthshock would all rank highly on my list of favourite stories.
I’ve liked how it’s evoked the early period of the show by linking them together with a reference to the previous story. Nyssa’s collapse at the end of Four to Doomsday, Tegan’s referring to her possession by the Mara, the Doctor’s reading Black Orchid at the beginning of Earthshock … The only time it doesn’t really work is in Time-Flight, where the grief over Adric’s death might have worked better if they’d allowed a bit more time to have elapsed.
Whilst I understand the arguments against it, I’ve also enjoyed the so-called “Crowded TARDIS” feel. I liked it in the first couple of seasons with Ian, Barbara and Susan/Vicki and I liked it in 2018 with Ryan, Yasmin and Graham. It does mean the spotlight has to be divvied up a bit — Tegan in the first half of Kinda, Nyssa in Black Orchid, Adric in Earthshock — and finding enough plot for them all to deal with can be tricky (hence Nyssa’s absence from much of Kinda), but on the whole I think it works quite well, especially with the Fifth Doctor, who seems to be much more of a milder, co-operative chap than his booming predecessor.
But I can’t deny nostalgia has been an enormous aspect of my fondness for this season. It’s like being eight all over again!
"My favourite Fifth Doctor stories (so far) are Castrovalva and Earthshock."
