The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon

The Invasion - Episode 5 (20/11/08) Very cool this week. The Cybermen have been arriving over several months so there's hundreds of them in London and Vaughn's been reactivating them and sending them off into the sewers ready for the invasion which has now been brought forward to dawn! He seems to be getting his own way with the Cybercontroller in his offices, though I expect all its promises will be void once the invasion has taken place. The Brigadier has gone to Geneva to gain authority to attack Vaughn's factories as Vaughn has his boss brainwashed, and Isobel came up with the idea of photographing a Cyberman in order to provide Geneva with evidence. However, the Brigadier refused to let her do it herself so she went behind his back and took Jamie and Zoe with her. Meanwhile, Vaughn tested his emotion machine on a Cyberman which went off screaming into the sewers. Very cool! And Isobel et al. were followed into the sewers by a local bobby who encountered two Cyber...

The Invasion - Episode One (02/11/08) What a fantastic episode! So much more sophisticated than anything we've had before! It was like The Avengers! The music was very John Barry, the Direction was brilliant and the acting and general atmosphere was incredible! Having been attacked orbiting the moon, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe have left the TARDIS invisible in a cow field while they go off to find Professor Travers to help them fix a faulty circuit. However, Travers and Anne are away and their house is being looked after by a photographer/model called Isobel and her scientist uncle who works for a company called International Electromatics. This company we already know as sinister as they have a community outside London where the TARDIS landed. Hitching a lift with a truck driver, the Doctor et al. got out of the area, but after they left security guards stopped the truck and shot the driver. Going to the main offices of IE, the Doctor and Jamie were watched by two strangers (...

The Mind Robber - Episode 1 (14/09/08) What a bizarre episode! The fluid links started playing up again (and I'm guessing prevented the TARDIS from dematerialising) so the Doctor (or rather Jamie as the Doctor was dithering) pressed a switch that took the TARDIS out of the Space/Time Continuum (something completely different to what normally happens, apparently). Zoe got changed out of her awful Dulcian garb into a rather fetching  lamé catsuit and discussed going outside with the Doctor. He forbade it as wherever the TARDIS is is nowhere and nowhen. Nevertheless, back in the console room Jamie saw an image of Scotland on the scanner, then Zoe saw her home city ( Brasília ?) and eventually both were enticed outside into a white void. The Doctor, however, came under some form of psychic attack and it took some time before he stepped out of the TARDIS to try and save them, by which point they;d encountered some strange white robots - sort of a Tonka Toy version of the Cybermen, j...

The Dominators - Part One (10/08/08) Hmmm. Not the most auspicious of starts to a series, but not bad. We're on an alien planet again (hooray!) for the first time since, well, this time last year. A couple of odd alien types have landed on an atom test island and drained the radiation off to fuel their spaceship. Now they intend to enslave the locals (well, at least the leader, Rago, does) and get them to drill through the planet's crust. Meanwhile, a group of middle-aged sightseers in silly togas have turned up looking for adventure and all but one has been killed with a cheap but quite good special effect... I mean, the alien Dominators' robot Quarks (who, unlike the special effect of the effects of their guns on the locals, are a bit silly looking). The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe turned up (eventually), found the remains of a war museum and were met by the local survey team who later found Cully (the middle-aged sightseeing survivor) who then explained the episode to th...

The Wheel In Space - Part One (27/04/08) Much better this week. Oddly, the Doctor and Jamie (and a non-speaking little robot) were the only cast for the first 20 minutes! I don't think we've had anything like that since the first episode of the story in the Space Museum (and even then there were four main cast and a host of silent extras!). It was quite refreshing! The TARDIS has arrived on a 'Space Rocket' - the Silver Carrier - and the fluid link's buggered (again- is this a Hartnell story?) rendering the interior Police Box-sized and trapping the Doctor and Jamie.They explored the ship, slowly ascertaining where they were and dealing with the robot when it attacked them, but the Doctor banged his head and is now unconscious, leaving Jamie with the weapon-like Dimensional Stabiliser (it seems to be fitted with a laser).  Meanwhile, some weird little spheres have left the ship and penetrated the hull of a nearby space station - the titular Wheel in space...

Fury From The Deep - Part One (16/03/08) The TARDIS has landed on Earth. Again. At the coast. Again. In England. Again. I'm not the only one to notice that a lot of stories (all but the first) have taken place on Earth this season; Jamie commented on it, too. Anyhow, listening to some sort of pulsating sound in a gas pipe on the beach, the travellers were shot and imprisoned by the people at the local refinery (who owned the pipe and have been having problems with a saboteur). The refinery is run by an obnoxious and rather stupid Australian who doesn't seem to know how to do his job properly. The saboteur seems to have a liking for gloves and masks and, for some reason, poisoning family members of the refinery staff with seaweed. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria engaged in a bit of 'comedy' escaping from prison and spied on a few people before splitting up. The Doctor and Jamie looked at some pipes while Victoria wandered off, found the saboteur, got locked in ...