The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon

Meglos: Part One (27/09/10) Well, that was quite interesting. The Doctor and Romana spent the episode fixing K9. Literally. The entire episode. The TARDIS is hovering in space and they haven't arrived where they're meant to be going yet, but that's fine. The Doctor found out they were near Tigella, a planet he's been to before (50 years ago, their time) so wants to pay a visit, once K9 is fixed. Tigella is an underground society (forced to live there due to the planet's 'lush, aggressive vegetation' on the surface) and populated by two bickering groups - the Savants (Scientists with blonde, bowl-cut wigs) and the religious Deons, led by Barbara Wright. Yep. Barbara Wright... or at least Lexa, a character played by Jacqueline Hill. I have to say, as lovely as it is to see her again it's massively disappointing that it isn't actually  Barbara. I wonder if the Doctor will notice (if he arrives) - this is  a doppelganger story, after all. Because on neig...

Having recently started to watch Tom Baker's final season of Doctor Who , I've been looking back at some of the essays I did for a fan page a few years ago and stumbled across this overview from December 2017. I'd just reached the halfway point of the era and this briefly sums up my thoughts on the serials between Robot and The Sun Makers . I'll be doing an overview of Tom's entire tenure next Spring, but in the meantime here are my thoughts from almost three years (!) ago: It's been a long journey with quite a few surprises (falling in love with the Pertwee era after over a decade thinking it was a bit rubbish being one example!) and some stories have fared better than others ( The Space Museum seen one episode a week is actually quite brilliant; The Mind Robber less so) and two weeks ago I reached the halfway mark of the Tom Baker era. So I thought I'd look back over the first half of his run and share what I thought. It didn't get off to a great ...

The Leisure Hive: Part One (30/08/20) Well, that was a bit unexpectedly lush! It's a new Production team, but I wasn't quite prepared for exactly how new  it looks! Aside from the fact that the theme tune has had a reboot, all bursting electronica and Gary Numan synths, and the credits are a massive, fancy starfield using cool computer effects, the incidental music has also been overhauled. Bye bye Dudley Simpson and his predictable orchestrations; Hello Peter Howell and his lush, dramatic synths! It really does sound very modern and quite exciting, and if that wasn't enough, the Direction is superb! So, okay, the design isn't that far removed from the Disco feel of last series' opener but, damn! does it feel arty! To be honest, not a great deal happened this week but it looked fantastic. Maybe I should elaborate on the plot. The Doctor took Romana to Brighton but got the season and year wrong so she had a strop, tried to kill K9 (blaming the Doctor for getting his ...

Peter Capaldi's era was a step up from his predecessor. Whilst there were still issues with the writing and (often glaringly) the plotting of each season, Steven Moffat seemed to be pulling his act together. With commitments to Sherlock waning (only one episode would air during Capaldi's tenure), the Show Runner seemed able to finally focus on Doctor Who and ensure that it was almost coherent and vaguely watchable. Granted, the first three quarters of Series 8 were littered with malfunctioning computers and misunderstood aliens - the dreary stalwarts which had populated Matt Smith's stories - and even featured the revelation that the Moon is an egg and, Moffat's most audacious conceit in his time as show runner, a story with no plot and no monster and no explanation as to why! But then came along  Flatline It had been a while since there'd been anything that actually felt like a threat in Doctor Who (other than a diminishing number of episodes per year). Fro...

I'm not going to beat about the bush. The Matt Smith era is far from my favourite in the long history of Doctor Who, and whilst I may enjoy a number of his episodes, I find many of them marred by his performance. After watching The Eleventh Hour (with its truly awful extended opening scene with the newly regenerated Doctor eating various things brought to him by a juvenile Amelia Pond) I was hopeful that, as with his predecessors, I would grow to like him as his first few stories unfolded. By the end of his first season, however, I was a little disappointed. Not only had I failed to warm to the new Doctor, but I had taken a disliking to his unpleasant new companion and felt that even the best episodes of Series 5 had been pretty underwhelming and average. Unfortunately, the next few years did little to change my mind. But I'm not here to moan about the Eleventh Doctor; this is about my favourite of all his serials! Since I can count the truly great Matt Smith stories on...

Following an extended break while I focus on work and move house I've reached my favourite of the Tenth Doctor's adventures, and to be honest it's a pretty difficult choice. Tennant got some really good episodes in his tenure, many from his relatively flawless third series. Accompanied by the bolshy, mature (and in no way romantic interest) Donna Noble he encountered aliens made of fat, Agatha Christie, River Song and the return of the Sontarans and Davros. The series (and Tennant's run) peaked, however, just before the season finale with two fantastic episodes separately centring around the series' two leads. Whilst Turn Left focused on Donna, and is a fantastic exploration of what the world would be like without the Doctor to save it, my favourite Tenth Doctor story is the episode which preceded it because of its themes and execution. It's unsurprising that this episode won BAFTA Cymru awards for Best Writer, Best Editor and Best Sound! Midnight is a p...

Shada: Part One (19/01/20) Somewhere out there in an alternate universe, Season 17 ended with six part 'epic' 'Shada'. And that is (sort of) where I find myself today. It's been an interesting but very slow episode where very little happened. The Doctor and Romana are in Cambridge having parked the TARDIS in the corner of Cambridge lecturer/retired Time Lord Professor Chronotis' study (and seemingly left K9 inside). While they were gallivanting about on the Cam, young Parsons (a student) called round and borrowed some of Chronotis' books. One, however, was a very dangerous book from Gallifrey which Chronotis had 'borrowed' and subsequently contacted the Doctor in the hope that he'd return it for him. Meanwhile, some bloke called Skagra has travelled to Earth with one of his huge balls in a carpet bag, looking for Chronotis and hijacking a car to return to his invisible spaceship. Played by the handsome Christopher Neame, Skagra is quite an ...

The Horns Of Nimon: Part One (22/12/19) It's my birthday and I may have had one too many glasses of Bailey's to appreciate tonight's Doctor Who fully, but Michael got me the special edition of Belinda Carlisle's 'Real' and we watched the videos from that first, so I'm blaming their high production values for how shoddy some of this episode looked. It all started on an ancient Skonnon battleship that the LX department had lit like the Blue Peter studio. They were transporting the last of their Anethan sacrifices home in order to have their decidedly decrepit empire renewed by the Nimon, a tall, lanky bull-type creature who the Skonnon leader, Soldeed (a raving loony with a pasty face), kow-tows to like a whimpering bitch.  The tubby co-pilot pushed to force the engines past their capabilities and fucked the ship, killing the pilot. Luckily, the Doctor was doing some work on the TARDIS and disabled a tonne of systems so it got pulled to the Skonnon ship wh...

Nightmare Of Eden: Part One (24/11/79) Another very good episode slightly let down by one or two things. Some of the Direction was a bit lacking in drama, particularly the collision between the two spaceships and the cliffhanger. However, it's a fantastic premise - a space liner coming out of hyperspace has collided with a smaller vessel and the two are meshed together with areas of unstable interface. This all happened because the co-pilot keyed in the wrong materialisation co-ordinates because he was high on drugs. In fact, drug smuggling seems to be the main drive of the plot as someone has taken the co-pilot's stash and the co-pilot has been attacked and killed, possibly by the alien we saw at the cliffhanger. Meanwhile, there's a subplot with a scientist called Tryst and his assistant, Della, who have a machine which contains the flora and fauna of a bunch of planets converted into living crystal recordings. The CET machine is primitive and unstable, though, which ...

The Creature From The Pit: Part One (27/10/19) Well, that was all rather wonderful! We're on an alien planet and, frankly, the jungle sets are amazing! They rival the 'Planet Of Evil' and 'The Face Of Evil' sets and, I think, are superior thanks to some lovely mountainous backcloths. Brought to the planet by a distress signal, the Doctor and Romana discovered a (brilliantly realised) giant, shattered egg made of woven metal! They were caught (in 'The Place Of Death') by Madame Karela and her posse (who we'd earlier seen with Lady Adrasta chucking some poor bloke down the eponymous Pit) who took them to her boss (Lady A.). Romana was kidnapped during an ambush by bandits but managed to talk her way out of the situation with the help of K9 (yes, he's back! Sort of...). At dawn, Lady Adrasta took the Doctor to The Pit ("You have such a way with words") to witness one of her engineers, who she set the task of finding out what the egg was,...