N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
So, it’s taken a bit longer to get through than the first, but that’s two seasons down!
The standard wasn’t quite so consistently high second time around (although my word the ratings were! – topping the 10, 11, 12, even 13 million mark on many occasions). But even if the quality wasn’t always there, if anything the ambition levels moved up a notch in season two. I can think of no other show that would have even attempted a run of serials such as The Romans, The Web Planet and The Crusade.
“I happen to be a very curious fellow.”
The Doctor, A Battle of Wits
In a sense I’ve been lucky that so much of these first two seasons of Doctor Who has survived: only 11 episodes out of 81 are currently missing from the archive; for seasons 3, 4 and 5, a whopping 79 out of 128 episodes are gone. That’s going to mean much of the next few months of my Doctor Who viewing will be spent in darkness.
With the notable exception of Marco Polo, I have pretty much been able to see what the show was able to achieve; for many of the stories soon to come, I will only be able to imagine it.
Next episode: Four Hundred Dawns
