Welcome to my Doctor Who Guide!

My goal for this blog is to create a comprehensive compendium of Doctor Who by my personal metrics, which is to say tailored to me. While many such guides exist, in this project I am seeking to create a precise inclusion and categorization of information which I have not found (and of course meaning no disrespect because it would be disingenuous to claim I found no knowledge and inspiration from such things). Thus I will outline my approach to summarising such a vast and inconsistent universe.

Firstly, I will be limiting my summarising to the television canon - of course, it is dangerous to claim any concrete canon in Doctor Who but I will only be considering events which were present on the television show. This limit is important to me because frankly, to include everything that has happened in every format of the extended Doctor Who universe, so to speak, adds a great deal of confusion. I do not plan to add to an already confusing timeline, at least in approaching the more general summaries. If I ever get to adding any Big Finish, novelization, comics etc. I plan to keep those separate rather than intermingle the information.

Further, my familiarity lies with the show and I won’t be so disingenuous as to claim I could take on trying to summarise anything else at this time. My hope is to at least be consistent in the arbitrary rules I have made up and to apply them in such a way as to avoid confusion. For example in regards to any timelines I will tend to regard the regular appearance tenure. Of course, I can’t ignore what in the future is added onto the past but my solution to this is to perhaps consider this separately so as to be less contradictory and I will say it again confusing. (let us briefly consider some synonyms: bewildering - too strong and makes me feel as if I’m making some impassioned speech about someone's behaviour, perplexing - too academic “yes sir it is perplexing indeed how this author goes on”, confounding - perhaps but sounds rather stern like I’m a schoolmaster astounded at how you keep up this tomfoolery, flummoxing - a fun word but rather feels as if I’ve pulled out a thesaurus, befuddling - honestly I’ve unnecessarily thrown this one in because it is another fun word to say but rarely do I work it into my life, complicated - well this one is actually suitable. Conclusion: I need to expand my vocabulary without facing pretension).

Another quandary I had was the definition of a companion, I have been perhaps more liberal in this than my personal definition for the ease of categorization. It should also be evident that this is not a spoiler free environment, though perhaps if you have self control you should be able to limit yourself to each section. The exception to this being the episode guides, where of course the intention is to provide insight before watching or to become irate at my opinions - as you please. I will also make no claim to impartiality but my hope is it will be abundantly clear what is a personal comment (though I am perhaps less critical than I ought to be - please don’t expect a lot of harsh takes, this is a project of love).

Lastly, this is a living document so to speak, although I will share in completed chunks (horrid word) I expect I will be updating leisurely as I work my way through so as to at least make some progress. And of course, past content is not above editing. I offer no timelines and surely it will not be hasty as my time sadly has other commitments.