N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
The twentieth season of Doctor Who may not have had the highs (Castrovalva, Kinda, Earthshock) nor the lows (well, Time-Flight) of the Fifth Doctor’s first season in the TARDIS, but, Arc of Infinity aside, it’s a pretty solid run nevertheless.
I remember far less of this season from my childhood than season nineteen. Indeed the return of the Mara and a glimmer of a memory of the Master’s TARDIS as an iron maiden were about all I really could recollect when I first re-watched these stories back in the 90’s.
“Enlightenment was not the diamond. Enlightenment was the choice.”
The Doctor, Enlightenment: Part Four
The season is dominated by the Black Guardian trilogy, of which Enlightenment might just squeak it for me, although the return of the Brigadier was a welcome one — even with its headache-inducing UNIT timeline bending!
It’s a pity season twenty didn’t get its big finale: it would’ve been interesting to see how Eric Saward’s original plans for his Dalek story would’ve slotted into the season — although we didn’t have too long to wait to see what we’d missed!
We didn’t know it at the time but, as the show approached its twentieth anniversary, there were fewer than 100 episodes of twentieth-century Doctor Who remaining.
With the exception of a few minutes of The Curse of Fenric — probably caught when my Mum was flicking through the channels trying to find Corrie — it would be almost ten years before I saw any of them.
"My favourite Fifth Doctor stories (so far) are Castrovalva and Earthshock."
