Praise your least favorite era, criticize your favorite era

Least Favorite Era: You all know it is the 12th Doctor era. The best thing is Michelle Gomez as Missy, an absolutely fantastic version of The Master.

I'll have to think about the other option.

Husbands of River Song is one I have some very mixed feelings about. I joke about how "Hydroflax" sounds like a breakfast cereal that you just add water to (well it does, lol) and how can you take cereal seriously as an antagonist, but I should work on coming up with less superficial criticisms.

I was thrilled to see the Doctor getting time for a romantic moment with anyone really, but I think you're very right about that running contrary to the dynamics of much that had come before. I mean, it was a lovely wrap-up but it really was too neat and too easy in a way, and it did feel kind of disconnected from the series.

Well, I dunno - if you're going to get me to see the beauty of 12 and Clara, I may not have a least favorite era anymore, lol. I've come around to Missy too, thanks to Big Finish. At first I found her very hard to take seriously but the audio series has been great, I've been able to take her very seriously even with the Mary Poppins jokes.

It's really only about four stories between Pyramids of Mars and Deadly Assassin, but for a little while I thought the show wasn't living up to its potential of going to interesting places. Antarctica is out of the way but you don't really need a TARDIS to get there. The show made up for it, though, starting with the absolutely glorious trip to Gallifrey.

I guess one of the worst things about that era was them recasting K-9 as if none of us would notice, lol. I still do actually find those episodes harder to watch because of that.

As much as I adore Series 9, I don’t think we got to see the “golden days of the Doctor and Clara” as promised. They’re a fantastic TARDIS team, but spend the majority of it apart and two episodes Clara isn’t even in it. Would liked to have seen more of that; the only real examples are Sleep No More, where they’re electric together, and Face the Raven, which is mainly exposition about Clara’s demise. I’m discounting Hell Bent because it’s very much after the fact.

The same goes for Series 4, with the Doctor and Donna. It’s a testament to Catherine Tate and the character that she shines, despite spending 7 of her 13 episodes either without the Doctor or opposite another companion(s). Would love to have seen more of these best mates travelling the universe together. Big Finish has stepped in nicely, but Doctor and Donna content is still sorely lacking, given her short run in comics and books too.

Series 11 is good, but it can be great with a different running order. It’s all there in the episodes, it’s just not broadcast as such. It feels like a series of two halves, that should be strengthened.

1. The Woman Who Fell to Earth
2. The Ghost Monument
3. The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos *
4. The Witchfinders **
5. The Tsuranga Conundrum ***
6. Arachnids in the UK ****
7. Demons of the Punjab *****
8. Rosa ******
9. Kerblam! ******
10. It Takes You Away ******

* It’s not really a series finale, is it? It’s pushed to the end of the series for no real reason, yet it’s actually a loose trilogy with the preceding two episodes and would be stronger as such.
** The Doctor attempts to get the fam to Sheffield, but hasn't quite got to grips with the TARDIS, not to mention the ongoing repairs from the Doctor's regeneration and attempted materialisation on Desolation.
*** It’s a story that makes more sense pre-Sheffield.
**** The fam eventually get back to Sheffield and solidify themselves as Team TARDIS. If I could edit the episode, then I think this should have a small tweak where we see Yaz pick up her Grandma's watch.
***** Again, if I could edit the episode, then I think get rid of the present day scenes between Yaz and her Grandma. Yaz mentions she was given the watch and it's a lucky charm for her, appropriate given her new lifestyle!
****** Seeing the four of them together as a proper team that’s been built up throughout the series. Three standalone episodes that showcase the things Doctor Who does best. The real arc in the series is Grace’s passing and Graham coming to terms with that, which is what you get in It Takes You Away, therefore it makes for a nice, understated end to the series. The final scene where Ryan calls Graham “grandad” also gives us nice closure that leads in nicely to Resolution and Ryan’s dad coming on the scene.

Least favourite I’d have to have a think about; it’s all Doctor Who, I love it.

Okay, so my choice for "least favourite" is one that I don't hate, it's just the first weak section of the series IMO, directly following the heights of The Daleks' Master Plan and The Massacre. But I could say something nice about each serial:

The Ark - Elephants! And the ping-pong ball in the mouth as a Monoid eye.
The Celestial Toymaker - The trilogic game is neat.
The Gunfighters - The simplicity of "the Doctor has a toothache" as a driving plot point is funny to me, as is the punny title "A Holiday for the Doctor."
The Savages - The guy who absorbs the Doctor's personality does a good job of playing William Hartnell.

As for favourite, gosh, I have no idea. I really liked Series 8 of the new series but it bugs me to no end that future folks (like the soldier from Into the Dalek) were in the Nethersphere and nothing came of that at all. And I really like the whole UNIT era but almost every serial is an episode or two longer than necessary (and it sucks that they threw away Liz so quickly, even if I love Jo Grant).

(Also sidebar, I agree with timegirl - a two-hander with Capaldi and Coleman would be a great choice, especially if set right at the beginning of their time, pre-Robots of Sherwood, when they're sort of still getting to know each other!)

I find the McCoy era a dog's breakfast of wasted opportunities and overly ambitious stories that didn't really pay off. However... I love how Andrew Cartmel managed to look at Sylvester McCoy's performance in Season 24 and worked on scripts so that they built on his strengths as an actor: underplaying scenes so they become even more dramatic and reducing the comic buffoonery that we saw so much of earlier giving us a Doctor who was unassuming but genuinely mysterious.

Right...

The Williams era should have been a time of branching into a new direction for the show, exploring proper SF ideas and giving us some delightful literary pastiches. However... what we got was a lead actor with an overblown ego and delusions of grandeur, a production team hampered by inflation, strikes and a mostly absent set of script editors. Frankly, it's a wonder that anything was made at all.