The first thing I have to confess today is that after Gallifrey One, I completely lost track of when I was supposed to be posting. What with my kids’ crazy spring schedule, the thirty-nine inches of snow we got in February that are now trying to melt off within a two-week span, and the siren call of my fiction writing, the blog simply fell off the radar.

It doesn’t help that I hadn’t put anything on my 2019 calendar that hadn’t dripped over from 2018 when I adjusted for my Series Eleven posts. Thus, here we are, a week late and a blog post short.

As I look ahead now, I realize that I’ve quite enjoyed the “Bad Reputation” series, and I’d like to continue it. So let me walk you through my decision-making process, and share what’s to come for the rest of the year.

First I had to clean up my spreadsheet. It had been a few years since I created it, and the list of “untouched” stories—those I had neither reviewed nor watched as part of a Nu- or Retro-View—was cluttered with updates. Once I figured out which stories were still fair game, I found the i09 ranking for each of the forty-nine remaining adventures.

It turns out that each of the seven Classic Doctors (here I’m not counting McGann, because I’ve talked about both The TV Movie and the Big Finish audios a great deal already) has at least one story in the bottom 20% or so—including the one rated dead last. Clearly I still have my work cut out for me.

The next step in the process is to decide which Doctor’s stories are most under-represented on the blog. In the past couple of years, I’ve done a decent job of evening the field; unreviewed portions of various Doctors’ tenures range from 23% to 38%, whereas when I first began, the range was 33-82%. I have another ten months of 2019 in which to reduce both the gap and the totals even more.

Because of the sheer volume of the televisual canon in his era, the Fourth Doctor gets the lion’s share of the resulting schedule, taking four of the ten slots. Interestingly, three of those four are part of The Key to Time. By the end of 2019, then, only The Pirate Planet will remain unreviewed from that season.

The rest of the entries jump around a little more. Neither Troughton nor McCoy get a look-in this year (though McCoy will be first in line for 2020), but the other four Doctors get one or two stories each, keeping one or two months between the T. Baker entries.

So without further ado, may I present to you the 2019 review schedule, continuing the Bad Reputation™ series:

27 Mar 19   The Androids of Tara
24 Apr 19   The War Machines
22 May 19   Timelash
26 Jun 19   The Stones of Blood
24 Jul 19   Terminus
28 Aug 19   The Monster of Peladon
25 Sep 19   The Armageddon Factor
23 Oct 19   The Space Museum
27 Nov 19   The Hand of Fear
25 Dec 19   The King’s Demons

If you feel so inclined, you can use this schedule to plan a watch-along so that you can form (or refresh/revise) your own opinion on each story before my review posts. There are a lot of these that I haven’t seen in a really long time—some just because I haven’t felt the inspiration, and others because I’d rather not.

Of course, who knows how my tastes will have changed in the meantime? I look forward to sharing impressions with you all!