A slight story deserves a slight review, I think. Like Black Orchid the season before it, The Kings' Demons is only half the length of most of its contemporaries. The chief problem I saw with it was that it didn't seem to realize this restriction until the start of the second episode.

The first part starts promising enough, with a historical setting that seems rendered fairly well and some guest characters whose actors are doing an able job. King John (or rather his facsimile) was a highlight for me, with his cruel, plummy tone lending itself well to his florid dialogue. ("Your words are more generous than your purse...")

The Master's demasking at the end of part one is also a bit of a fun conceit, though it was easy to see coming. His affected accent and slight mumble as "Gilles" both makes him difficult to understand, and makes him stand out a little as odd. I must say, it's also odd (and slightly disappointing) that Nyssa went out just a few episodes too soon and missed one last rematch with the man who stole her father's face, something the show never really fully reckoned with. Missed opportunity.

Things go off the rails in part two, I'm afraid. With not very much time left in the story at all, we see the Doctor and company fail (badly) at keeping the trust of the lord of the castle and his family, kind of get his cousin killed unless I'm misremembering something, and then escape without ever letting them know what really happened.

There's also the interesting matter of Kamelion. The Master's explanation leaves the question of whether he's fully sentient or not rather muddy, and his introduction is, as a whole, pretty rushed. I fail to understand why exactly he's invited to stay on the TARDIS at the end of the story. I think Tegan has the right idea!

So, half good, half bad. A familiar thing at this point...

This story is difficult to appraise at times. It's host to some genuinely compelling character drama focused on 11, Amy, and Rory; it has a really fun mystery going on; the slow invasion and the domestic scenes it allows are both enjoyable. It just really sucks that the episode crashes and burns at the final hurdle. This is generally attributed to behind-the-scenes drama. Could it have been worked around regardless? Maybe... but it'd be a rare director and producer who could actually pull that off, if so.

All things considered, it's worth noting that The Power of Three is still watchable despite this problem, and for all that it has a frustrating ending, I'd say it's still decent on the whole. It has its fair share of memorable moments and also does a pretty good job of setting up the Ponds' imminent departure.

The Mind Robber is a wonderfully bizarre story which takes the madcap, no-breaks production pace of 60s Doctor Who and uses it to its advantage. The surprise requirement of a fifth episode when The Dominators was cut down left Derrick Sherwin scrambling to write an introduction to the story. As a matter of happy accident, this resulted in an exceptionally good and surreal first episode. Peter Ling might not have liked it, but I certainly do.

Frazer Hines' surprise case of chicken pox is also played off with astonishing naturalism, using the nature of the Land of Fiction to briefly recast Jamie which works out brilliantly as a fix. This plays into the obvious meta tendencies of this story, which seems to flirt openly with acknowledging the Doctor as a fictional character in his own right.

The adventures in the Land of Fiction are great too; I love the sets and the variety of bizarre characters that the TARDIS team run into. This is one of the best stories of 60s Who, without a doubt.

The sophomore outing for the Thirteenth Doctor is an interesting litmus test for the era as a whole. Its cinematic style of camera movement and the sheer size of its environments definitely wowed me the first time that I watched it, and the beat-by-beat of the story is competent for the most part. I do feel that we begin to see some problems emerge here, though, mostly related to characterization.

For one thing, The Ghost Monument seems like it doesn't quite understand why the Doctor does and believes the things she does. Case in point, the "No guns, never use 'em" maxim which she lays down on her companions. Of course, even a casual viewer will remember previous instances of the Doctor shunning firearms. What Ghost Monument seems to lose track of is that this long-held policy is ultimately one of harm reduction, of refusing to be the first person to escalate a given conflict, and valuing words over weapons. Considering that we're dealing with non-sentient sniper bots who are already shooting at the gang in this instance, however, none of these points really apply. The Doctor's scolding of Ryan after he doesn't quite manage to take them all down makes my eyes roll, because it feels like the episode has remembered the form of the Doctor's principles without actually recalling their function.

I was also surprised, on the first watch, to find that relatively little happens in the way of characterization for the companions in this episode. Their reactions to their first arrival on an alien planet are curiously muted in comparison with previous companions, which feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. Yaz and Graham don't get a lot of discrete character beats aside from showing mild concern at Angstrom's trauma or Epzo's dog-eat-dog ethics. Ryan gets a little more, but the one major moment, his rushing out to fight the sniper-bots, feels very much at odds with his more cautious and deferential characterization in the previous episode. By this stage in most other seasons of NuWho, one already has a clear idea of who the companions are as people, and how they'll react to new situations. At this stage, I could not say the same about this TARDIS team, and that really perplexed me.

To round off this stream of consciousness with a more positive note, my favorite moment from this episode is the second scene, where Yaz wakes up on Epzo's spaceship to find the Doctor already in full crisis mode. It's very nice stuff.

Altogether, a decent story on a structural level, but it has enough dragging it down that I can't say I outright like it.

Very much a game of two halves. It's one of the best-looking serials of the 60s, and the regulars are on some of their finest form. The scene where the Doctor and Victoria have an honest talk about loss and grief is something that is very rare in the Classic series, but oh so welcome. This is among the most iconic outings for the Cybermen, ever, their sneakiness and villainy following up on The Moonbase. The opening acts are tense and well-paced.

Then along come episodes three and four, and the pacing seems to go haywire. It also goes without saying that there is some seriously racist crap in this story, especially in the way Tobermann is written. It makes it rather hard to enjoy. On balance, I'd still call it a good story, but it could have been great if it had avoided these things.

Now here's a story I loved on first watch, and only grew on me with time. Oxygen is a real gem, and I've been glad to see it getting some more serious attention and appraisal in the years since its broadcast.

One of the things that makes this story so unique is its uncompromisingly "realistic" take on space travel. Rather than some sort of cosmic ocean, here we see the vacuum as an antagonist in and of itself, even if an unconscious one, and are reminded of the fragility of human existence, hugging the skin of our blue planet. The frozen corpses throughout this episode are really grim stuff, especially for Doctor Who, but used so well that it never comes across as gauche.

And there's the political angle, of course. This is probably the most uncompromisingly anti-capitalist story in Doctor Who's history (with perhaps The Sunmakers as the only exception, as in this one they just give the bosses an earful instead of chucking them off a building). Capitalism, like the vacuum, is presented here as an impersonal force that's utterly inimical to human life. The difference, in the end, is that capitalism was created by humans, and so it can actually be vanquished.

That aside, Bill and the Doctor are both fantastic in this one, between the Doctor's blindness (and what a twist at the end!) and poor Bill grappling with what seems to be her most dangerous adventure yet at this point. I was biting my nails over the scene where she appears to get electrocuted by her suit, back when I first watched this.

An incredibly cold, scary, isolated story - and with a nice message to boot. It's one of my favorites of its era.

It was by this point in Flux that I began to get worried that the story was biting off more than it could chew. Due to its short length and the large number of moving parts, it was inevitable that some parts were going to end up feeling a little bit cluttered. This episode ended up feeling more like a fever dream.

There are some individually interesting elements, like the Doctor's flashbacks to a siege of Atropos that she cannot remember. I was hopeful at this point that we would get a full accounting of who Jo Martin's Doctor really was and her place in the timeline, something which was never fully borne out, but at the very least this episode did not disappoint me. Getting flashbacks for characters where the incidental characters are replaced by visions of their friends acting not quite themselves was an interesting choice which I did enjoy. As a final happy note, I did think Bel and Vinder's pining was cute, even if the dialog was a bit off, and Dan and Diane's scenes were too.

Aside from those aspects, I didn't enjoy this one very much. It's a story where, paradoxically, so much goes on, but it doesn't feel like much happened. It develops the mystery hooks of the season without seeming to have anything particularly new or unique to say for its own sake. Spinning its wheels and waiting for Village of the Angels to come along.

All in all, a bit of a mess, which was enjoyable on broadcast but with the benefit of hindsight now just seems kind of pointless.

Maybe this would be 5 stars for me if I knew what Bridgerton was...? Alas, I'm habitually uncultured. What I do know is that this episode is great fun. Jonathan Groff was an unknown to me, but he is a revelation as Rogue, who immediately charmed me. I do hope that we'll get to see him again soon, as his blooming romance with the Doctor was pure delight for me.

As the story lives and dies on this relationship dynamic, the villains end up feeling curiously incidental. The Chuldur are... fine. They mostly look good, though it drove me crazy that their beaks weren't connected to their mouths in some way. For shame! (This is not a serious criticism.)

I thought Ruby's side plot was pretty good until her new friend ended up being a Chuldur. Nice twist, but a shame to lose what seemed like a potentially great character dynamic. The fake out where we're led to believe she died is classic RTD, though I'm not entirely sure why it's here.

Minor quibbles aside, I think this holds together as a solid to strong episode, and it may grow on me with time, especially after further appearances from Rogue. Please? Please?

I think The Christmas Invasion is a pretty clever introduction for the Tenth Doctor on RTD’s part. By holding him in reserve for most of the episode we’re confronted with a world where the Doctor isn’t there to save the day - something Russell would return to with even more devastating effect in Series 4.

It’s nice seeing Rose manage things on her own and show off what she’s learned, even though it’s not enough to take the Sycorax down at the end of the day. Her acting as solo lead for most of the episode lets us catch up on her relationships with Jacky and Mickey a bit further, and shows Billie Piper’s chops as a leading actress.

Harriet Jones’ heel turn is a major sticking point for many viewers of this episode, and I agree that the way this pulls such a 180 from what we learn of her in Aliens of London/World War Three is a bit rough. Still, though I think I would have preferred at least one more Harriet appearance in between that two-parter and this episode to give us some more time to build it up, I do think it’s realistic. Showing the fallibility of our leaders is right in line with RTD’s skepticism toward the political class that we see in so many of his other episodes, and for what it’s worth, it is emotionally affecting in this case.

We could argue if the Doctor is right or not to do what he does in destroying her career, but it doesn’t feel to me as if the text is asking us to side with him on this. Coming as it does right after his “No second chances” moment with the Sycorax leader, we see that this new Doctor can be just as ruthless with his favorite species as he is with the aliens of the week. I believe this is the start of the arc that we see conclude in Waters of Mars and The End of Time, where this Doctor grapples with his tendency to play god with history.

Finally, as a Christmas episode, this story captures the vibes of the season and makes for great holiday viewing, even aside from the episode’s individual merits. I rate it quite highly.

Having been stuck with an Earth-only story format by the outgoing production team, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks were left with the interesting question of how to get the Doctor into space again. An outright 180 at the start of Season 8 would have most likely been a bad idea, so instead we see a single outer space story among a season that's still otherwise earthbound. Commissioning Malcolm Hulke to write it was an interesting choice, but not necessarily a poor one. He manages to make a fun twist out of leading us to believe that it might be another "colony imperiled by aliens" story, before pulling the rug as we come to understand that IMC are the only real villains of the story.

Well, aside from the Master. His presence almost feels a bit incidental, but it is really funny how he reacts to the Doctor's presence, for the first time caught on the back foot because the Doctor wasn't supposed to be there for this particular scheme.

Although by no means remarkable, as a first sojourn into space for the Third Doctor this story is fairly good. I don't tend to think about it or rewatch it very often at all, but it does its job well.