The Ten Year Pilgrimage

FAQ

What is this?

A plan to complete a Doctor Who “pilgrimage” slowly over the span of ten years, beginning on 23 November 2023 and ending on 23 November 2033.

What is a pilgrimage?

In Doctor Who fandom jargon, the “Pilgrimage” is the act of watching all of Doctor Who in order from beginning to end. For some people this just means the “classic” (1963-1989) series, but for some people it means everything. In this case I’m using the term to mean everything from 1963 up til... whatever is current or most recent as of 23 November 2033.

How do I join?

There’s nothing to join! This is just an idea for how you might want to watch Doctor Who. You “join” by watching Doctor Who. If you want to do some more “joining”, try watching and discussing with your friends. If you are a social media user, on a platform that uses hashtags, maybe you can get the #TenYearPilgrimage hashtag going. Start a movement.

What about spin-offs?

Sure, why not? If you would like to watch K-9 and Company in 2028 then I will not stand in your way. I’m not sure yet whether I personally will. I didn’t account for any spin-offs in the calculations when I was making this plan but you could slot those in without too much trouble.

What about missing episodes?

If you’re reading this you are probably already a Doctor Who fan who knows that 97 episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s are “missing.” And you probably also already know that there are various ways to enjoy those stories, including fan-made reconstructions, audio versions, animations, and novelizations. The official position of this pilgrimage plan is: tackle those stories in whatever way you prefer, including skipping them if you want. It’s your pilgrimage!

Where can I stream Doctor Who?

This varies from country to country and tends to change a lot. As of right now, if you are in the US, most of the classic series is on BritBox, but the 1996 TV Movie is not. The 2005-2022 series is on Max, and future episodes will be on Disney+. In the UK, as of November 2023 it should all be available on iPlayer. But as for other countries, I'm sorry, I don't know! And even the things I just said will probably change in the future.

Why those dates?

Doctor Who premiered on 23 November 1963. The start date is the sixtieth anniversary and the end date is the seventieth anniversary.

What’s with all the ???? in years Nine and Ten?

This plan is written in 2023, and we don’t yet know how much Doctor Who will be produced and released between now and 2033. For that reason, the exact shape of the schedule in the last few years is a bit vague. We have plenty of time to figure it out.

Why are the week by week schedules for years Five through Ten "TBD"?

I want to leave these years vague for now. For reasons explained in the answer to the previous question, we don't know exactly how much content we'll be watching, so we might need to speed up or slow down.

How did you decide on the schedule?

A combination of guesswork, data analysis, and manual manipulation.

Firstly, I figured it would make sense to leave about a year and a half to two years for the decade of content from 2023-2033, i.e. the Gatwa era and subsequent unknown eras. That meant fitting the first 60 years of Doctor Who into 8.5-9 years.

Next, I wanted to have a mostly consistent amount of material from year to year, and given the various episode lengths I thought minutes of content was a more important thing to worry about than episode count. So I put all the episodes and their running times into a big spreadsheet and did some spreadsheet stuff to determine that the yearly minute count would need to be in the neighborhood of 3,000 minutes per year.

And then I kind of fudged it to make the schedule “cleaner”. For instance, breaking most years at a regeneration, at the expense of minute count consistency. Obviously I couldn’t get it perfect. And I also had to awkwardly lump Eccleston into year 6 with the tail end of the classic series, which still left that the lightest year in terms of total viewing minutes. But I think this is pretty solid.

This schedule doesn’t make sense, it should be some other way.

Shrug. Pobody’s nerfect.

What if there's way more Doctor Who than you are expecting in the next few years? Or way less? Won’t that throw off the schedule for years nine and ten?

Yes. We’ll figure something out.

How do I know if I'm on schedule?

I've created a bot that posts every monday reminding you about which episodes you should watch in the coming week, if you want to stay on schedule. If you are on mastodon/fediverse, you can follow it at @tenyearpilgrimage@botsin.space.

If you're not on mastodon/fediverse, and you'd still like to follow it, it has an RSS feed (all mastodon accounts do). Just copy this url and paste it into your feed reader of choice:

https://botsin.space/@tenyearpilgrimage.rss

If you'd like to get email reminders instead, there are services out there that will let you subscribe to RSS feeds via email. I don't know very much about these services but I'm aware of one called feedrabbit.

What kind of content is going to be on this website?

Almost nothing. I’m not blogging or podcasting about it or whatever. Here’s what you can expect to find here in the future:

1. The year by year schedule above, which may change.
2. A link to the spreadsheet containing the week by week schedule, which may also change.
3. I'll answer FAQs here if people ask me questions and I have things to say.
4. That’s it.

Who made this?

Tom did.