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.