Written by Tom
[So we’ve officially finished reviewing Doctor Who Season One in its entirety. Might as well do some overall conclusions and sketch out some final thoughts before we venture onto Doctor Who 2.0 {which, given our analysis of the show so far, should actually be Doctor Who 3.0 at least, but you get my point}.
Part One: But Wait a Minute, Is This Actually Where Season One Ends?
Before we start though, let’s do a little bit of admin that’s going to prove very useful for our analyses of the first few serials of Season Two. Firstly, let’s ask ourselves a question that feels like it should be obvious: do the Doctor Who episodes running from “An Unearthly Child” to “The Reign of Terror” actually constitute Doctor Who Season One?
There are multiple ways of defining what a season of television is. By far the most common definition is that a season of television is a single block of episodes produced under the same banner which all air in sequence one after another, usually on a weekly basis. Each season is then separated from each other by a large period where the show isn’t being broadcast. Ergo, Doctor Who Season One consists of the serials running from “An Unearthly Child” to “The Reign of Terror” because these aired in the same weekly timeslot one-after-another before stopping for a few weeks, this break in the broadcast marking the end of the season and its return marking the beginning of Season Two. Simple.
Classic Doctor Who does challenge this paradigm though. Take, for example, the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who which started airing at the end of one year and finished airing at the start of the next, taking a break in the middle so that people wouldn’t miss a few episodes during Christmas and New Years. No-one’s really going to claim that “The Brain of Morbius” and “The Seeds of Doom” actually constitute Doctor Who Season 14 purely because Christmas forced there to be a small gap between them and the rest of Season 13, surely?
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FNORD 