Watching Doctor Who: Season Sixteen

Hey everyone, let’s go looking for the Key To Time! It’ll be fun!

I’m currently watching the classic series of Doctor Who on Britbox, attempting to watch all 26 seasons in 26 weeks. For my take on previous seasons: season 1, season 2, season 3, season 4, season 5, season 6, season 7, season 8, season 9 , season 10 , season 11, season 12 , season 13, season 14 and season 15. I’m collecting my thoughts as I go in a Twitter thread.

When I was younger, we used to go on summer holidays to a relative’s static caravan at Borth, which is on Cardigan Bay in mid-Wales. Those were the days when you wouldn’t have a TV set in the caravan — if you could afford something like that, then you could afford better holidays than a Welsh caravan park — but there was a communal utility building on the site which had a TV in it. Back in those 70s summers, the BBC had begun repeating one or two stories from the most recent season of Doctor Who. What this means is that I can definitely place myself in that room at around 7pm on Thursday 16th August 1979 when episode 2 of The Androids Of Tara was repeated as I remember being there for that cliffhanger. Amazing the memories nostalgia can shake loose, but if a future time traveller needs to snatch me from my timestream at an early age, there you go. (And if you’re interested in which classic stories got repeated and when, this list will enlighten you)

But, let’s get back to the stories themselves as that’s what we’re here for and there’s a limit to how many of my childhood memories I can recover for this. As I mentioned last time, Graham Williams wanted to have a series that gave the Doctor some sense of purpose, rather than just roaming the universe and stumbling into trouble and so he came up with an overarching story to give him a motivation. The Key To Time — which is different from the Great Key Of Time found stuck under a desk at the end of season 15 — is in a convenient six parts, meaning the search for each part becomes the focus of each story this season.

Well, sometimes it’s not a very clear focus. The parts are essentially MacGuffins and the quest for the parts is this year’s way of explaining why the Doctor and Romana get out of the TARDIS in the places they do. There are occasional pauses to remind Romana…