Weird to think I’m one season away from finishing the run of the original series. I may just go back and rewatch some of them, though I won’t blog about it.
The first serial of S25, REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS, set in 1963 at Coal Hill School, where the series originally started. The Doctor’s working as a janitor, Ace has a room in a local boarding house and the Daleks are lurking around hunting for a McGuffin the First Doctor buried their years earlier. It’s a deliberate callback to the series’ roots, though with some dark twists, such as British white supremacists — including a nice guy Ace is crushing on — allying with the Daleks as a way to keep the white race on top. 
It’s a good serial that estabilshes once and for all that Daleks can climb stairs. In some ways it foreshadows more recent seasons of the current series: the Doctor is capable of playing a long game and hiding his real agenda even from his companions. Russell Davies has cited the off-screen destruction of Skaro as the beginning of the Time Wars, though as the Daleks have long spread across space, it doesn’t feel like that big a deal. “Saturday television viewing continues with adventure, in a new science fiction series.”
The second serial, THE HAPPINESS PATROL, is a blatant shot at then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, set on a dystopian Earth colony where the poor are kept down but everyone has to go about smiling … or else. Rather than simple execution by the eponymous enforcers, the worst offenders go to the laboratory of the Candyman.
For a Brit of my age, the sweets making up his body are quite recognizable.
The Doctor and Ace, of course, are not down with this arrangement … even though Mrs. Thatcher is decades in history’s rear-view mirror, this one still works. “Ace is as happy as possible, given the distressing nature of universal truth.”
The weak link in an otherwise excellent season is SILVER NEMESIS in which the Doctor, Nazi Anton Differing, a time-traveling British noblewoman and the Cybermen are all caught up in the pursuit of the Nemesis comet, which turns out to be an ancient, intelligent, Gallifreyan superweapon (but from what we see, all it can do is blow shit up, which isn’t much of an accomplishment). Annoyingly rather than gold dust clogging Cybermen’s breathing systems, this assumes gold is kryptonite, killing them at a touch. Once again, I can see foreshadowings of the future series (though obviously that’s not what they were going for) when Lady Peinforte hints cryptically about the things she’s learned from Nemesis about the Doctor’s ancient history, the secrets hasn’t shared. I understand the goal was to restore some mystery to the Doctor’s backstory; if so, they succeeded. ““Doctor … who? Young lady, d0 you really think you know?”
For the final serial the Doctor and Ace visit the Psychic Circus, THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY. Ace, being clown-phobic, isn’t enthused and it turns out the circus is, of course, more than it seems. Why is it performing for an audience of three? What’s the meaning of all the eye symbols? What will happen when the Doctor’s throw into the ring? Why is everyone working at the circus so scared? Weird circuses are no end of fun when they’re done well, and this one was. “Every interesting person is mad in one way or another.”
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