“So when the rainy season comes I hang my head/For all the things I've seen and done and sung and said/
And when my tears are dry/I hold my head up high/
And feel the rain.”

The Aztecs has a rep. In DWM’s 2009 survey of the then 200 Doctor Who television stories it came 57th. Which is a remarkable achievement for a monochrome historical adventure absent any marquee elements. Every one of the 1960s stories to place above it had the kind of obvious selling point - Daleks, Cybermen, regeneration - that can obscure a serial’s actual qualities and enlarge its appeal in posterity. In 2014’s post golden jubilee survey The Aztecs ranked 61st, which, with the addition of five years worth of stories to the series’ tally, is actually an upward movement. Again, it was the highest rated monochrome serial without an obvious hook. Although its inobvious hook - being the story where Doctor Who first tries to grapple with the situational ethics of time travel, one where original companion Barbara attempts to change history by impersonating a god - is perhaps enough of one for certain sections of fandom, who might instinctively draw a direct line from it to then more recent episodes such as The Fires of Pompeii (2007) or even The Waters of Mars (2009).

Precedent is an odd thing in Doctor Who discourse. Something that can be invoked to justify or recontextualise twists and turns in new material. It can do that both in terms of onscreen continuity - e.g. the Doctor’s faces in The Brain of Morbius (1976) becoming simultaneously a justification for, and a more stable data point after, The Timeless Children (2020) - or in terms of the kinds of stories being told: Such as when someone on the internet forced me to suggest that the existence of Marco Polo (1964) at least implied that having Doctor Who stories revolve around a single historical celebrity was not a recent phenomenon, and thus was not an example of the first decade of the new century “dumbing down”. Sometimes it can even manage to be both at the same time, such as in how The Aztecs’ serial’s charming subplot of a romance between William Hartnell’s original Doctor and the retired Aztec woman Cameca was used to justify a greater emotionality in the Doctor’s interactions with other characters, once the series’ C21st revival really began to lean into such things.

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The Aztecs slow upward movement in fan recognition in that same decade and change is indicative of its trajectory across known fan history. When the Target book came out in 1984 DWM acknowledged only, and even while giving the book itself a good review, that “As historical stories go, The Aztecs is one of the better ones”.¹ TV & Satellite Week a magazine that had come into existence in order to print the schedules for non BBC and ITV television channels, previewed its 1990 showing on BSB, by saying it is “Set in 1430s Mexico and features stunning costumes”. Almost none of which seems either accurate or relevant. (I presume they were copying from a press release.)²