Welcome to another year of the blog!

Ten years ago this week, I published my first post ever, and somehow—although less frequently these past few years—I have managed to continue posting regularly for an entire decade. Although I know it’s not widely read, I truly appreciate everyone who stops by to read, comment, and/or vote in my reader polls. Thank you for joining me on this ride!

This year I will continue my recent tradition of reviewing Classic stories using a loose, overarching theme. For the first couple of years I used a theme, it was Bad Reputation. Last year I switched to Hidden Gems. To decide what to do this time around, I looked over the thirty-or-so unreviewed stories remaining in my spreadsheet, and started where I always do: which Doctors have the largest proportion of stories left?

Interestingly, the release of animated reconstructions for two more Troughton stories (The Faceless Ones and The Macra Terror) has changed the results of that calculation a fair bit from my previous pass. The resulting distribution is much more even than I’d anticipated; rather than five Fourth Doctor stories, I only have three, and none of the seven Classic Doctors is left out.

Once I’d determined how many stories from which Doctors I needed, I looked at the available stories’ ranking on that good ol’ six-year-old list from io9. That’s when I realized I still had several both highly-ranked and poorly-ranked stories yet to review. So this year, I’ll be exploring the extremes: the best and the worst, the highs and the lows. The sequence goes per Doctor, rather than per ranking, so there’s some back-and-forth, and come clustering, but hopefully we’ll still end up with an interesting mix.

Without further ado, then, here is the schedule for 2021. As ever, reviews will post on the fourth Wednesday of each month. I look forward to sharing the Highs and Lows of Classic Who with you all!