So I've finally reached the end of the road with the Third Doctor. Early last week as I was nearing the end, I'd lamented that I haven't gotten as far in Classic Who as I'd originally wanted to. However, I realized that i was roughly 380 episodes into a 700 episode show - more than halfway done! - it just doesn't feel that way because the first six seasons are twice as long as the subsequent one. It's more like I'm at the end of season 17 of a 32 season show.

That said, I'm glad I have another couple of years worth of Classic Who left, especially since a lot of the other shows I've been watching in my 20s are coming to an end. I'm gonna state a tentative goal of finishing all of Classic Who before I turn 30 years old in June 2021, but I guess we'll see how realistic a goal that is. It's entirely possible that future me will look back on this declaration and laugh derisively at my hubris. I am the same guy who wanted to get through all of the Third and Fourth Doctor eras this year.

This season feels somewhat disconnected from the rest of Three's era mostly because of the absence of Jo Grant and the introduction of Sarah Jane Smith. The dynamic is so different that it alters the feel of the show, though not in a way that's bad. I'm glad that UNIT got a couple of stories here, but I'm disappointed that the Brigadier and Benton largely faded to the back. The trade off is that the arc with Mike Yates is one of my favorite things the Classic series has done so far. Overall, I can definitely feel the show existing in a state of transition into the format of what a typical "Fourth Doctor" story would be, even though I haven't seen any of the Fourth Doctor so I can't say that definitively.

Like the previous ten seasons, the serials are available to watch via streaming on Britbox. This season had five stories, and due to the irregular way I watched this season over the course of nearly two months, I had some trouble making a truly informed call in creating my ranking.

( I had to face my fear, Sarah. I had to face my fear. That was more important than just going on living. )

The two fills I'm actively working on for buffyversebingo have mutated into what may be the longest one-shots I've ever written (like, probably over 10k words each). I'm hopeful I'll have them both done this week and then produce works that are more... restrained in order to get a bingo. I'm fairly optimistic about this since none of the other prompts on the potential rows have made my brain fire off the way these two have for some reason.

I've finished a couple of old drafts and thrown them up onto AO3, one from a Fictober fill I mostly finished but forgot about entirely, and the other being the original beginning for a longer, bizarre character study fic that would pretty much be impossible for me to finish as originally intended because I'm so far removed from the context in which I wrote it and the story was relevant:

Just Killing Time (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, Jesse Walsh/Ron Grady, M, 1204 words)
The Woman with the Lyrical Name (Pretty Little Liars, Aria Montgomery, G, 352 words)

I also was... inspired... by Planet of the Spiders to write some Doctor Who fic involving the scene where Mike Yates was tied up and left in that bedroom:

An Embarrassment of Friendship (Classic Doctor Who, John Benton/Mike Yates, E, 2857 words)

I'm honestly really happy with how inspired I am to write Who fic in general, though I'm intentionally holding off on tackling the two Christmas stories I want to write until it's closer to the end of the month since I want to be in a better headspace for it. I've also been toying with the idea of mirroring my who stories on Teaspoon, but I know that site has some past baggage that I haven't been able to parse out at all since I didn't get into Doctor Who until 2012, and I don't know how beneficial it would be since the four fics I've written are all currently up on AO3 and I don't know how active Teaspoon is anymore.

Going through my drafts, I found an Osomatsu-san fic that currently clocks in at 2600 words that I'm really mad I didn't finish at the time, since it captured the character voices in such a specific way that I've have to rewatch chunks of the show to even approach again. I think what held me up was that I was still very nervous writing romance that wasn't of the "confession at the very end of the story" variety, and along with finally finishing those two Hetalia fics I have open, this might be the story I want to finish and post this year the most. I have a handful of works that I'm not particularly proud of, so it'd be nice to polish off material that I can genuinely look back on with pride years later.