So guess whose back to watching Doctor Who! I was glad to have the break, since I feel like it allowed this season to feel like it's own thing separate from the previous one. A season with a major story arc also served as a nice way to really zero in on the show and take a break from everything happening in the world right now. Suffice to say, the concerns I expressed last season appear to be (mostly) unfounded as I found this season to be pretty consistently strong. Not to the same level of, say, season 13, but I found every story to be either great or at least pretty good, and there was nary an Underworld among them.

On one hand it feels like the Fourth Doctor era has been flying by, but taking a step back I realized that the only Classic Who content I've consumed this year is the Fourth Doctor era - and it has felt like quite a lot. So I guess I have some small sense of just exactly how long his run on the show really was. At five seasons Jon Pertwee was leaving, but Tom Baker still has two more seasons under his belt. And this is easily the lightest of Four's seasons so far. Hell, even the contents of those silly bootleg outtakes don't feel so out of place in the contents of the canon material. That's not necessarily a bad thing - in particular, it feels like the show has a much better handle on how to utilize K-9. I'm really looking forward to where the show continues to go tonally over the next ten (!!) seasons.

Like the previous fifteen seasons, the serials are available to watch via streaming on Britbox. This season had six stories, and was a bit interesting to rank since this season as a whole felt very cohesive.

( Oh, well, I'd love to stay and see you try, but you know how it is. Places to go, people to see. )