“It’s time to start all over, make a new beginning.”

As I’ve said before here, sometimes the most celebrated Doctor Who stories are both the hardest and the least interesting to write about. They’ve been done. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in Doctor Who fandom can sketch the standard appreciation of Genesis of the Daleks in a few moments - “Do I have the right?”, Michael Wisher’s extraordinary performance as Davros and so on and so forth. It’s that ease that paradoxically makes writing about such a serial difficult. At least in the absence of new material - say fresh behind the scenes documents - that alter our collective perspective as a fandom.

I think the last time anyone really had an impact on how I view this story was when a pre-showrunning Steven Moffat pointed out that this story was being shot both when Robot went out, and when The Ark in Space Part Two scored Doctor Who’s highest chart position of the twentieth century. Thus it was while making it that Tom Baker fully became Doctor Who.