This season had a unique format, never again repeated in the show. Doctor Who had returned to production after a near-cancellation and an eighteen-month production hiatus. For the first time, a season consisted of a single story, The Trial of a Time Lord, although this was made up of four serials from a production perspective: each serial was written by a different person (save for The Mysterious Planet and the first part of The Ultimate Foe, both of which were written by Robert Holmes) and featured a different story presented as evidence, excluding the final two episodes which concluded the ongoing story of the trial; the trial storyline itself acted as a framing device to bracket the first three serials. As a result, whether The Trial of a Time Lord should be considered one story or four has been intensely debated. This single-story format, sometimes referred to as a "miniseries", would later be utilised for the third and fourth series of Torchwood.

• Sylvester McCoy