Doctor Who: Season 21 Recap

This season started off dull and bad, but began to work its way towards the absolute pinnacle with Caves of Androzani. Peter Davison has stated that had he had more stories like Caves over his three years with the show, that he would have considered staying on for an extra year. Interesting note, Davison is the last Doctor until Christopher Eccleston to choose not to return to the show.

A season featuring Caves can never be considered all bad, but the creeping problem of bad writing started to show its ugly head in this season. Things were trying to build off the established continuity a little too much, and it would only get worse in the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy eras. They weren't trying anything all that new. They had hired an unofficial continuity adviser in Ian Levine, and I think this was a bad choice, for he would constantly give them things to work off of from the past, but the writers would always take his suggestions and make them make absolutely no sense. What we end up with is a bad combination of back references, but poorly researched back references...or back references that don't even help the stories. It wasn't even that bad in this season, but it only got worse.

JNT made a bad choice in having the first Colin Baker story at the very end of the season. The first season he produced, Barry Letts was there to watch over things. This was his first regeneration handled alone, and he kind of panicked that people wouldn't want to tune in the next season if he didn't let them know how the new Doctor was going to work. Unfortunately he let them know, and people didn't want to tune in the next season.

NEXT TIME: Return to Totter's Lane