If you’ve been following me for awhile, then you know I like Doctor Who.  Something I’ve been wanting to do for ages, but have never decided to follow through on is watch everything.  The show started on 23 Nov 1963, ran through 6 Dec 1989.  It tried coming back in 1996 (didn’t work), but then came back for good on 26 Mar 2005.

In all that time, there were a total of 862 episodes.  97 of them from the 1960’s are missing, and are no longer viewable in their original format.  There are however fan reconstructions of these 97 episodes, so it’s possible to watch everything, albeit not all in their original form.  862 episodes are a LOT to watch.  I know that.  I tried once before to watch all of it, but got bogged down in the 60’s reconstructions (which can be hard to take at times, even for hardcore fans).

I’m trying this again, but the difference this time is that I’m not trying to watch entire stories at once, which can take hours at a time.  This time what I decided to do is tackle a single episode per day.  Of the several hundred episodes made in the classic era (1963-1989), nearly all of them are 25 minutes long.  I decided to lean into that, and watch just a single episode per day.  I find this will be far easier to deal with, especially when I hit the hard to watch stuff.

Anyway, I started a few days ago, and I will be tweeting about the episodes one per day.  I also figure if I tweet about them vs trying to write huge blog entries, it won’t seem like such a daunting thing.  For a single (maybe 2 or 3 if I go long) tweet, marking that episode’s viewing will be much more palatable long term.

By my calculation, since I started on 18 Aug 2021, I will finish all the existing episodes on 28 Dec 2023.  That also does not account for the currently made, but unreleased series of episodes ending the run of Jodie Whittaker, and the episodes coming from the next Doctor after that, which will also happen before I get to the end of this marathon.

I do not plan on blogging about these, but I may post some collective post with my tweets embedded.  Have to see how I feel about that.  I also don’t know if I want to clog this blog with Doctor Who posts, as I like the variety of content that is here.

(UPDATE: I did decide to keep a log of the tweets on my site here – you can see the summary page here).

Anyway, I will be tweeting from my @JoeSiegler account using the hashtag #DoctorWhoMarathon.   Below is the intro set of tweets when I announced I would be doing it.

Just reminded of this…  “This should provide adequate sustenance for the Doctor Who Marathon”.