The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon

Warriors' Gate: Part One (03/01/21) Back after New Year and the Doctor, Romana, K9 and Adric are still stuck in E-Space. It was quite nice after the short break to have the Doctor and Romana briefly recap the story so far - Romana called back to Gallifrey, and Adric from E-Space and now travelling with them. First, though, we got a terribly atmospheric opening sequence on board a freighter transporting Leonid aliens which seem to be used by the Human crew as navigators. Their ship seems to have been trapped in a void for months, unable to escape. Their Captain, Rorvik, seems a bit of a hard case, choosing to risk killing the navigator, Biroc, in order to push through to N-Space. They failed and Biroc survived and escaped when he was taken to recover by two of the crew.  Leaving the freighter, he entered the TARDIS (because he was out of phase with the time line) and took it into the void. The freighter crew picked it up on their scanner and went to investigate. There's been a l...

Over the last few days I have watched every episode of Doctor Who from the last two years (except 'Orphan 55' which was utter shite). The modern series has always had its supporters and detractors, but I think that the series of stories which I just watched are some of the strongest episodes for several years (if you don't agree with me, you should probably stop reading now). It all got off to a relatively underwhelming start on NYD 2019 with 'Resolution', the story which sort-of acted as the finale to Series 11 and also brought back the Daleks. I've never been a fan of the Daleks, but this dealt with them rather well, following the resurrection of a lone scout and featuring a fancy new design which purposefully eschewed a Tonka Toy look for Junkyard chic. Unlike Moffat, Chibnall seemed to understand that in most cases less is more. Unfortunately, this doesn't really work when sending the army after the scout in a lone tank which felt more like an homage to ...

State Of Decay: Part One (22/11/20) This week's episode felt more like Doctor Who than the series has in a while! I'd hazard a guess this is partly because it was written by Terrance Dicks, but it also had a very Gothic feel akin to some of the Hinchcliffe era (but better). It opened with scenes which seemed to be set in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages with the Three Who Rule in their rather gorgeous castle and peasants in the adjoining village being taken away at a selection (including the Head Man's son). I'm guessing that the Doctor and Romana arrived some time later due to the way Ivo and the Head Guard were talking about the fate of Ivo's son. It turns out that the castle and village are the only civilisation on the planet, and the advanced technology K9 detected was because they're all descendants of a ship from Earth which passed through the CVE that brought the TARDIS to E-Space a thousand years ago. The peasants seem to live in fear of the Three Who R...

Full Circle: Part One (25/10/20) That was very good. Certainly a lot glossier than any previous story filmed on location and continuing the feel of the last two stories but already feeling a lot more considered and interesting. Returning to Gallifrey, the TARDIS encountered something K9 couldn't identify while the Doctor was consoling Romana in her bedroom (not like that!). The scanner, on arrival, showed the outer wastes of Gallifrey but, upon leaving the TARDIS, they found themselves in a rather gorgeous, Summery forest by a river. They've not got involved in the plot much yet, but the Doctor thinks they've travelled out of 'Real Space' altogether and are somewhere with negative co-ordinates. The majority of the episode was spent building up the local society, better drawn than the Tigellans but more Human looking than the Argolin. They have three leaders - Deciders - the chief of which was dragged into the river (seemingly) by humanoids which resemble the Creatur...

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...