“It all started out as a mild curiosity in the junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure…”
And so, on the 23rd of November, the TV show that has been such a huge part of my life – and of so many of my friends – turned 60. Now, I’ll grant you, ‘60’ seems somewhat less momentous than ‘50’ (despite being a bigger number), but the celebration of what’s now one of the BBC’s tentpole brands was far from diminished.
Continue reading “Happy 60th birthday Doctor Who!”“I was never here!”
The smorgasbord of Doctor Who laid on for its 60th birthday continued last night with a 5 minute skit on the BBC’s annual charity telethon, Children in Need. Monsieur BBC, with these Who specials you are really spoiling us!
Continue reading “Doctor Who: Destination Skaro (Children in Need)”“Will someone tell me what the hell is going on here?”
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When we Doctor Who fans were kids, we liked to write stories about our hero. Because we were ten year olds with no real grasp of how storytelling worked, we’d just chuck in everything we liked about the show. So, however many Doctors there were at that point would team up with UNIT to fight the Master, the Daleks, the Cybermen and whichever other monster we happened to like. What were the villains trying to achieve? Didn’t matter, just as long as they were there. The results were great fun – if you’re ten.
Continue reading “Doctor Who – The Power of the Doctor”“We’ve gone back in time. Dalek incoming. Two people in this building about to die unless we stop it.”
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Star Trek has done it. The X Files has done it. Person of Interest has done it. Heck, even Doctor Who has done it before (Heaven Sent). But for the non-nerds in the hungover New Year’s Day audience, Dan Lewis spelled it out in a way that pretty much everyone should know – “It’s Groundhog Day”.
Continue reading “Doctor Who: Series 14, Episode 00 – Eve of the Daleks”“There’s a balance to the universe. It exists that way for a reason.”
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Well. Let me get this out of the way right at the beginning, because I’m struggling to contain myself from saying it. That was the biggest load of overcomplicated, incoherent, unmitigated garbage I’ve ever seen masquerading as the resolution for a story. Frenetic running around in place of explanations, with so many deus ex machinas cropping up out of the blue that I’m actually looking forward to the return of RTD who usually sticks to just one a season.
Continue reading “Doctor Who: Series 13, Episode 6 – Flux: Chapter Six: The Vanquishers”“Time is playing games with us all.”
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OK, let’s see if I’ve got this straight. There’s a planet, called Time. And all the time in the universe comes from there. And upsetting the Mouri, the priests who run it, can destroy time itself, and that’s what’s happening. Have I got this right? Uhh… ok.
Continue reading “Doctor Who: Series 13, Episode 3 – Flux: Chapter Three: Once, Upon Time”“I was in prison for being me – right at the point I wasn’t sure what that meant.”
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The Timeless Children was a bit of a game changer (and I realise that, for various reasons, I haven’t written about it yet – I will get to it). Controversially rewriting the whole of Who continuity (again), it had a lot of fans up in arms, and left many, many unanswered questions. Continue reading “Doctor Who: Series 13, Episode 0 – Revolution of the Daleks”
“Imagine. To hold in your hand, the heartbeat of every Dalek on Skaro. They send me life. Is it beyond the wit of a Time Lord to send them death?”
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I’ll admit, last week I was a trifle surprised to find that Steven Moffat had the chutzpah to open the new series of Doctor Who by writing, effectively, a sequel to Genesis of the Daleks – a story regularly voted the best the show ever did. Yet for me, he pulled it off surprisingly well, building cleverly on the themes, characterisation and philosophy espoused by both the Doctor and Davros in that first meeting. Continue reading “Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 2 – The Witch’s Familiar”
“Davros made the Daleks. But who made Davros?”
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After a divisive first season for Peter Capaldi’s abrasive, sometimes hard to like Twelfth Doctor, Doctor Who was back this week with a busy episode that was an obvious fan pleaser. Continuity references abounded, even outside a main plot that featured Davros, the Daleks, Missy and UNIT. Being a fan, I enjoyed it hugely. Trouble is, will the casual viewer even understand what all this is about? Continue reading “Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 1 – The Magician’s Apprentice”
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be – be one.” – Marcus Aurelius
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Tricky things, anniversary shows. Although this was celebrating 50 years, technically there’s only been two previous attempts – The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors (no, I’m not counting Dimensions in Time). They have to be crowd-pleasers, they have to encompass the show’s ever-growing mythology, and yet they also have to be accessible to viewers who don’t necessarily have the extensive knowledge of the show’s past that us fanboys have. The Three Doctors works rather well in that regard, while The Five Doctors doesn’t. But what about Day of the Doctor?
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