Happy New Year, everyone! We made it to 2020!
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been doing reviews of Classic era stories under the Bad Reputation umbrella. That’s been a great deal of fun, and there are still a few stories that I haven’t reviewed that would fit well into that category. But I thought that it would be nice to change things up this year, and go a different direction.
Enter “Hidden Gems”! For 2020, I’ll be reviewing stories that are neither revered nor reviled, the workhorse stories of the second quartile. These adventures don’t show up in the standard “Best of” lists, nor in the “Worst of” ones, but are still generally decent stories. Using the same list from io9 as a reference, I wanted to look at stories that fall in that 25-50% range. With 254 titles from which to choose, that gives me stories ranking #63 to #127 to work with.
I also wanted to continue to keep my distribution of Doctors as even as possible. Using my handy-dandy spreadsheet, I chose order of Doctors by what would maintain the most even proportion of as-yet-unreviewed stories across all seven of them. I let that order take precedence over the 2nd-quartile requirement, so I’m fudging a bit on the Seventh Doctor, and stretching things utterly with the Third, using the stories that fit my criteria most closely within the bounds of those available.
So for those of you who might want to watch along, here’s the schedule for 2020. Reviews will post on the fourth Wednesday of each month.
| Hidden Gems | ||
|---|---|---|
| January: | Ghost Light (io9 #53) | Seventh Doctor |
| February: | Warriors’ Gate (io9 #87) | Fourth Doctor |
| March: | Planet of the Daleks (io9 #147) | Third Doctor |
| April: | Revelation of the Daleks (io9 #113) | Sixth Doctor |
| May: | The Sontaran Experiment (io9 #101) | Fourth Doctor |
| June: | The Daleks (io9 #76) | First Doctor |
| July: | Mawdryn Undead (io9 #63) | Fifth Doctor |
| August: | Survival (io9 #91) | Seventh Doctor |
| September: | The Curse of Peladon (io9 #153) | Third Doctor |
| October: | The Mind Robber (io9 #99) | Second Doctor |
| November: | The Brain of Morbius (io9 #110) | Fourth Doctor |
| December: | The Time Meddler (io9 #79) | First Doctor |
That’s a good list. The Time Meddler and Ghost Light are actually my favorite stories for those Doctors’s eras. So, is Revelation of the Daleks actually, but it has a lot less competition and I have to be in the right mood for it – I’d recommend Big Finish’s The Marian Conspiracy (or The Pirates or The Wormery if you are feeling more experimental) over anything that the BBC ever did with Six.
With the others, it is hard to argue against the importance of The Daleks to the series. Warrior’s Gate is very interesting conceptually and very weirdly shot (BBC Science Fiction meets Last Year at Marienbad, which will either work for you or not). I’m not sure it is wise to watch Planet of the Daleks so close to The Daleks – and its also a bit unfair to the original to watch them in that order; I don’t think it is terribly controversial to say either that PotD is a bit derivative or that Terry Nation liked to recycle ideas. The Brain of Morbius is almost the definition of gothic Doctor Who. And I’ve always just enjoyed The Sontaran Experiment, Mawdryn Undead, Curse of Peladon, Survival and The Mind Robber.
I think you have a fun year ahead.
I didn’t actually start to warm to “Ol’ Sixie” until after I’d started listening to his Big Finish stories, so I’m in complete agreement with you there.
Now that you mention it, this does make for a rather Dalek-heavy year, doesn’t it? Ah, well. Those are the unreviewed stories I had to work with. 🙂 I’m looking forward to this batch of stories, too—especially after all those Bad Reputation ones. It’s been a while since I’ve watched most of these!