The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon

The Macros: Part One (22 /03/26) That was a really interesting episode with some clever ideas and plenty of atmosphere and tension. Most interesting, though, is that it's written by actress Ingrid Pitt and her partner, Tony Rudkin! It's based around the legendary Philadelphia Experiment with the Doctor and Peri arriving on the USS Eldridge. These early scenes of the Doctor and Peri walking around the decaying remains of the naval vessel were the most atmospheric and very reminiscent of both The Space Museum  where, as here, they were invisible to the people they encountered, and the SS Bernice sequences of Carnival Of Monsters . The ship is being eaten away by a green rust and they soon encounter Professor Tessler and the ship's Bosun who were shielded from the effects of the experiment (apparently) because of where they were inside the ship. The Doctor commits to helping them and, after analysing the green rust, figures out the Eldridge is trapped in a time loop it can...

The Hollows Of Time: Part One   (08 /03/26) So, we're back with the stories which were actually  commissioned for Season 23 and this one, by former Script Editor Christopher Hamilton Bidmead, is a doozy! This follows his previous form as a script writer on TV where each script improves on the last, from the dire Logopolis  to the vastly superior Castrovalva  to the brilliant Frontios , and gives us an engaging mystery in a quaint English village which turns out to be a sequel to his last story and sees the return of the Tractators. Sort of. Because we've not actually seen any yet - well, not full ones, and not especially alive  ones, either. Arriving in the coastal village of Hollowdean on the premise of visiting the Doctor's friend the Reverend Foxwell (who used to work alongside Alan Turing as a code breaker), the Doctor and Peri encounter a cult who follow the mysterious Professor Stream (Stream? Why, that's an anagram of...!). The Professor, it seems, also w...

Leviathan: Part One   (15 /02/26) Wow! Now that was good! It shouldn't really be a surprise that, with the success of Robin Of Sherwood  on ITV, a story like this was proposed. Right now, in some other universe, Robert Holmes would have got as far as scripting Yellow Fever And How To Cure It  and Big Finish no doubt would have adapted that to great acclaim (I'm sure) and I'm listening to the Sixth Doctor and Peri battling the Autons in Singapore with possibly the Master or the Rani or both involved, too, but I honestly don't think it would have been a patch on this story - or the first episode, at least.  The influence of ITV's Robin Hood drama is very clear from the start. The TARDIS arrives in what appears to be a Medieval English woodland to witness Gurth (I wonder how he got that name!), a young local, being hunted by Herne the Hunter and a pack of dogs. Peri, at this point, looks up the history of Herne for context, leaving out the part that the figure of Brit...

Mission To Magnus: Part One   (01 /02/26) Wow. That was... something. Philip Martin is back with a sequel to last year's Vengeance On Varos ; sort of. It has Sil in it, anyway. Things got off to a start, however, with the TARDIS being called into the future to aid another TARDIS which was being held in a forcefield by a spaceship orbiting the planet Magnus. Unfortunately (for everyone, including the viewers), it was being piloted by Anzor, a Time Lord who used to bully the Doctor at school, and we subsequently had to endure some very cringy scenes where the two interacted. Witnessing the Sixth Doctor cower and be dominated by a rather camp and pompous Time Lord apparently dressed like an undertaker resurrected the ghost of The Twin Dilemma again . It really does seem that the worst elements of that story are set to haunt this incarnation and I really wish such scenes were struck from the scripts before recording occurred. Anyway, Anzor was on his way to Magnus to liaise with Sil. B...

The Ultimate Evil: Part One   (18 /01/26) Shades of Vengeance On Varos  this week. An alien called Mordant from a  race who engineer addictions or problems on planets in order to sell the inhabitants the drug or solution is using a 'Hate Ray' on the people of Tranquela (is this a Terry Nation script?), a country on the planet Amaltron, who have a tentative peace treaty with their neighbouring nation of Ameliora. He intends to start a war after 150 years of peace (and no contact between the two nations), in cahoots with the rather obvious Tranquelan, Escoval (who, as a high ranking member of the Second Family, has designs on becoming ruler) so that he can sell them weapons. Yes, it's another commentary on the evils of Capitalism and, subsequently, very much of its time. Much of the episode was spent world-building and we have a few more interesting characters here than we did on Varos or Karfel. T he Tranquelans have the ability to teleport to anywhere they think of, an ab...