I could tell it was going to take me a long time to finish The Witch Hunters - I'm still less than halfway - and having used up my buffer during the half term holidays a delay was always on the cards. However, that doesn't mean I have to post nothing! I've made a few observations in my head as I went along during this marathon that haven't really fitted into any of the ongoing reviews, so I thought I might perhaps present a pot-pourri of pointless pondering for your perusal, a heterogeneous hodgepodge of half-baked homilies, a... ahem. Well. Never mind. On with the motley!
Style
When I started (with modest goals, intending to cover the first three serials and then see what happened) I knew roughly what I wanted to say, although I was open to my opinions changing when I watched the stories again. Since then I have been winging it. Most of the time it's fun; just occasionally it becomes, briefly, a chore. Part of what keeps it enjoyable, though, is that I've allowed myself plenty of freedom in what I write - and how I write it. Occasionally I'll change the format and do something like my review of Sentence of Death, or, more recently, Campaign. Less radically, I might waffle on at length about a related TV program, or an actor, or focus on details of the direction as I did with The Velvet Web.
All very well, you might say; but the review blogs I get the most out of tend to have a consistent formula. I always know where I am when reading one of Doc Oho's reviews, for instance - and that's not something you'll ever find here. Yet this is a review blog - unlike, say, Elizabeth Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum - so you're only presented with a smidgen of the political and social context; and you're not even going to get much of the personal view of life from my perspective until mid-Troughton, when my three-year-old self starts watching. So, why would anyone read this?
I dunno. Still, some people do, so I'll carry on with the easy path and hope it carries on pleasing some of the people some of the time!
Enjoying the Show
I spend a lot of time with Doctor Who. Since Christmas, just counting new stories and ones I've not experienced since I was a child, I've watched Terror of the Autons, Kinda, Snakedance, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and Day of the Daleks; I've heard Last of the Titans, Home Truths, The Drowned World, Peri and the Piscon Paradox, Tales from the Vault, Invasion of the Daleks, and Return of the Daleks; and I've read two Short Trips collections (Life Science and A Universe of Terrors), The Clockwise Man, Sting of the Zygons, Autonomy, two IDW collections (Fugitive and Tesseract), and a variety of DWM comics (along with the rest of the magazines they came in). I may have missed one or two from that list, but you get the picture. This marathon - and this blog - is not the be-all and end-all of my Whoing. (and I'll have to make sure my spellchecker doesn't get it's hands on that!)
I wouldn't spend so much of my time and money on the show if I didn't love it. And conversely, because I invest so much in it, I fully intend to get good value out of it. Now, a couple of times when people have pointed out negative aspects to stories that I have reviewed positively, I've more or less agreed with them. Except... well, I've generally (and subconsciously) put those aspects in the best possible light. Sometimes - as with Who Discovered America? - a story is so bad that the only fun I can have is in ridiculing it or re-imagining it; but more often a bit of wooden acting can be treated as the manner of a reserved or nervous character, or an underambitious story can be recast as a light break from the more meaty stuff.
I'm not a Pollyanna - that would be fatal to the reviews! - but I do approach every story with the attitude that I'm going to enjoy it.
Goals
I have (or rather had) two goals for my marathon. I am committed to this blog until the end of The Tenth Planet; after that, I'll review how I feel about carrying on. The first goal is to finish the initial production run (the stories with Susan) within a year. That means at least another 21 posts before the eighth of June, which is looking doable but without much leeway. The second goal is to finish Hartnell before the Fiftieth Anniversary, which means something like a further 140 posts after that; and to be frank it's already clear that it's not going to happen. C'est la vie. It's more important that I continue to enjoy writing than try for an impossible schedule.
And that's all for now. I'll talk a bit about the handle 'elvwood' and the name of the blog (among other things) next time I do one of these.
Which, at the rate my reading is currently progressing, might be sooner than you would hope...
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