Doctor Who: The First Doctor Era (1963-1966)

I realise that I've been slacking a little bit when it comes to this sci-fi review site of mine. "Next on Sci-Fi Adventures I'll be writing about Deep Space Nine's Rivals," is basically what I said at the end of my last post, and then I disappeared entirely for six months.

What happened was that I got distracted with other things, some of them important, some of them less so. Like that Doctor Who marathon that Twitch was showing a couple of months back for instance. Until then my exposure to the classic series had been pretty pitiful, I'd seen maybe two stories from each Doctor, so I'd always felt like I'd missed out on an important part of British pop culture and there was a gaping hole in my sci-fi knowledge. Then Twitch announced it was showing the entire classic series (more or less) for free over two months and I figured it was an opportunity I couldn't miss. In fact, I even watched some of the stories that they skipped, if there was anything still surviving of them to watch.

Turns out that 8 weeks of 16 episodes a night is actually quite a lot to sit through. But I somehow made it through and my evenings were finally my own again. Then I had my second bad idea!

I had no intention to write about any of the serials for Sci-Fi Adventures because I wouldn't be able to rewind to the stories to check things, getting good screencaps would be a pain, and there was something like 140 of them, so I didn't bother writing up proper notes, or coming up with reviews as I went along. But then afterwards it occurred to me that this was it, I'm never going watch all these stories again, this was my one and only chance to ever write about the whole of classic Doctor Who like this. So I've gone and written mini-reviews of every story I watched using whatever notes and screencaps I did take, the chatlog of conversations I had while watching, and anything that was left in my brain after a few months. I can definitely relate to the Doctor's memory problems now; a lot of the series is still in there but it took a bit of prodding to come out.

What you'll find below are my first 19 reviews covering the whole Hartnell era. I didn't write a synopsis for any of them but I did include some SPOILERS. I'll only be spoiling up to the serial you're currently reading though, so I'm not going to go into a rant about Dodo or whatever midway through The Aztecs.