N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
Pretty much everything about Doctor Who’s 25th season improves upon the previous one. It’s more confident, the balance of light and shade is better and Sylvester McCoy has found a groove somewhere between the mischievous and the manipulative that can’t help but remind you of Patrick Troughton’s wonderful Second Doctor.
It’s fair to say that a certain degree of nostalgic-fuelled hindsight has informed my enthusiam for season twenty-five. I came back to Doctor Who just as Virgin Publishing’s The New Adventures (often referred to NAs) began to be published and I loved that monthly fix of new Doctor Who in the early 90’s. Eventually catching up with the television stories that informed it, viewed in isolation I perhaps didn’t see just how much of a forerunner some of the stories were, but watching them in order for the first time for this marathon has enabled me to realise just how many elements were there on-screen.
If there were hints of this in season twenty-four, there’s plenty of NA-like fun to be had in the show’s 25th anniversary season, be it the darker, more scheming yet still playful Doctor, a dash of post-modernism or the omnipotent ancient evil from the dawn of time trope. That the stories are, on the whole, also very good helps — and even the weakest, Silver Nemesis, has its moments.
It may well have been nearing the (temporary) end of its life on television, but for me, 90’s Doctor Who feels like it really began in 1988.
"My favourite Seventh Doctor stories so far are Remembrance of the Daleks and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
