I'm a bit late to the party as well. Gosh, it's difficult... To me, the Third Doctor era always encapsulated that indefinable magic of the show during those early decades. What is
Doctor Who? Well, it goes something like this... It makes for a very good baseline. At the time I'm writing this -- with the moon waxing in the east and sonnets sung to the north -- I'd say... Season 8 for me too. The only story that doesn't quite work for me I
know is because I read
The Doomsday Weapon first. And even still, it's worth watching for the confrontation at the end between the Doctor and the Master which sums up both characters
beautifully ("I want to see the universe, not rule it." vs. "One must either rule or serve, that's a basic law of life."). Outside of that, where to begin? We've got the first appearance of Delgado's Master, the Keller Machine, Axos, the Doomsday Weapon and a rendezvous with a being that could be the Prince of Darkness himself. What's not to like?
Favourite stories from each season?
Season 7 - The Ambassadors of Death is a story I love to bits... as a four-parter (which you can see in this
shameless plug). Unaltered it has to be
Inferno
. There's so much going on in this story and Don Houghton's on hand to ensure that it all retains a sense of impact. There's something genuinely apocalyptic and brutal to the Inferno Project. The longer the story goes on, the more it feels like things are spinning irrevocably out of control and nothing can stop it. Even at the end, it doesn't feel like a victory. More just a delay, until something else paws its way into the Earth. A deeply compelling drama.
Season 8 - The Mind of Evil. Juggling the Keller Machine at Stangmoor, the Thunderbolt gas missile and the peace conference between the American and Chinese delegates, it manages to be a very deftly written tale about fear. More than any other story previous, the Doctor and UNIT feel very much a part of what's going on globally in the world during this time. It feels current and they don't feel out-of-place within it. If he's going to be stuck on one unenlightened planet in a cosmic backwater (a planet, incidentally, with characters we're very quickly learning to care about), he's going to make the very most of it.
Season 9 - The Curse of Peladon. I think this might just be the most seamlessly created alien world since we touched down in the petrified forests of Skaro in 1963. There's a sense of history to Peladon and its inhabitants that just seems to leak from the television screen. It defies every effort to make it just another Planet of Hats. Atmospheric, intelligent, it's a must from Season 9. Incidentally, it's got one of my very favourite wryly delivered lines, coming from Izlyr to Jo when she notes his aide's rifle: "Unfortunately, in order to preserve peace... It is necessary to survive."
Season 10 - Frontier in Space. True, it's pass-the-parcel with the Doctor and Jo in terms of plot progression, but I can't help but really enjoy the universe Malcolm Hulke is trying to build here. The
Blake's 7 fan in me can't help but look at the little tidbits here and there, thinking that if you nudged it all just a little in the wrong direction, you'd have the Federation, easy. It's a cosmos on a knife's edge, ready to jump one way or the other and held in place by a few wise people. The Draconians make one hell of a first impression as does their home planet, Draconia, and I'm glad that they found a life in comics and most recently, BF's
Paper Cuts.
Season 11 - Invasion of the Dinosaurs. This could so easily have just been a gimmick, but like
Ambassadors, it ends up being a lovely, complex adventure story. This time about the idealism of all sorts of people...
and dinosaurs.