The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon

TERMINUS  (Part One)  15/02/2023  So, this story is written by Steve Gallagher who gave us the impeccable Warriors' Gate  from Tom's last season. So far, this doesn't look quite  as beautiful but has nonetheless looked better and displayed more interesting ideas than most of this season thus far. Turlough is still being ordered about by the Black Guardian and has this time been persuaded to sabotage the TARDIS console by fucking with the Space/Time element that was removed and replaced in Arc Of Infinity . This resulted in the TARDIS interior starting to break up (or something) which led to it latching onto a spaceship (due to a failsafe) so that Nyssa could escape being killed by the break up when it (temporarily) spread to her room. Much of the episode was spent with the Doctor and Nyssa, and Tegan and Turlough separately investigating the seemingly abandoned ship. Much like the last story, however, it isn't abandoned. It is, in fact, a ship transporting Leper...

MAWDRYN UNDEAD  (Part One)  01/02/2023  That was an episode which started off incredibly badly but improved as it went along. This story is set at an all-boys Public School and started off with one of the students, Turlough (a ginger kid who just about looks 18 if you squint), and his put-upon mate, Hippo (who is similarly age-affected and clearly meant to be fatter than the actor is... an actor who seems to think that speaking in a higher register will make him sound younger) stole an expensive old car belonging to one of the teachers, encountered a white van in a narrow country lane, and crashed into a field. Firstly, this driving sequence was accompanied by the most god-awful music I've ever heard on the show. I don't have words to describe how unbelievably terrible the score was at this point, but I hope we never hear anything like it again! We then cut to a shot of Turlough watching himself from above, unconscious by the car, against a backdrop comprising possibly th...

SNAKEDANCE  (Part One)  18/01/2023  Well, that was a massive improvement on last week, and promises to be fairly good at the very least by dint of being a sequel to last year's Kinda . Aboard the TARDIS, Tegan dreamt about a cave mouth shaped like a snake's head - a dream she's had regularly but can never remember. Turns out the Mara remained inside her head, hiding, and used her to return it to Manussa, its planet of origin over which it ruled until about 500 years ago when it was destroyed by the (Human) Federation. There's been a Federation colony there ever since, currently ruled (in the Federator's absence) by his posh wife, Tanha, and somewhat snobbish son, Lon. The background to Manussa, whose original society was replaced by the Sumaran Empire for several hundred years, was rather nicely delivered via a basic summary from Nyssa (reading from one of the TARDIS's books) and some very naturalistic conversation between Lon and Tanha, later joined by the Dire...

  ARC OF INFINITY  (Part One)  03/01/2023  So here we are! Season 20; two decades of Doctor Who (well, in November, anyway). The wait for this season seemed to take ages, and judging by the amount of dust I had to brush off my journal, it has been! They seem to have pushed the boat out for this one - location filming in Amsterdam, Time Lords, an Anti-Matter being intent on taking over the Doctor's body. That last one wasn't lost on me. Given it's exactly ten years ago (Shit - is it really that long???) since the Third Doctor encountered Time Lord legend Omega in a world of Anti-Matter for the 10th Anniversary, I suspect this adversary (filmed in negative, which I quite liked when it was revealed he was Anti-Matter) who is colluding with a so-far-anonymous traitor on the High Council of Time Lords is one and the same, despite having been destroyed in The Three Doctors . Obviously, since we have Time Lords we have Gallifrey, and it seems a rather beige place, very simi...

Revenge Of The Slitheen Sarah Jane's second adventure, and the opening instalment of the first series, also stands as a sequel to the Doctor Who Series 1 serial Aliens Of London/World War Three . Like that story, and as the title of this adventure implies, the main protagonists are members of the Raxacoricofallapatorian Slitheen family - gangster-like aliens who disguise themselves by wearing the skins of fat humans they've murdered. Much like in their first appearance, much is made in the first episode of their habit of farting - a result of the compression software they use to fit in the Human skins - which feels a lot more at home in a kids show than in the parent series (although I didn't mind it so much as the early two-parters of the rebooted Doctor Who  always felt more squarely aimed at a younger audience than the two-parters shown later in the series'). The early scenes featuring the murder of a slightly obese science teacher (who you later see a Slitheen shed...

To fill the gap between seasons of Doctor Who on my Marathon, I've decided to watch The Sarah Jane Adventures and blog about that. Anyone who reads my DWRTM blogs will be aware that I'm not Sarah Jane Smith's biggest fan. I find her pushy and rude, often quite obnoxious and in the habit of complaining a lot and getting herself into situations which she needs help to get out of - not the independent and assertive character she began as in her first two stories. Joining the show in the wake of the magnificent Jo Grant (who clearly developed as a character throughout her three seasons) Sarah wasn't too bad in Season 11 yet not remotely as likeable as her predecessor, and her negative traits were less annoying when she had Harry to bounce off in Season 12, but once Harry was gone she had very clearly devolved into a damsel-in-distress archetype without the winning personality of her predecessors. Never more so was this obvious than in the failed pilot K9 And Company  See he...

TIME-FLIGHT  (Part One)  22/03/2022  Well, I'm not sure what to make of that. Overall, it was actually pretty good. There's a concrete, central mystery - a Concorde flight has travelled back in time and nobody knows why or how - it's set at Heathrow Airport, where Tegan's been wanting to get to since last series, and it actually features Concorde, which is pretty bloody impressive! They're a beautifully designed machine - my Auntie Barbara travelled on one once - and to be actually filming on one is quite a scoop! Plus there was a mention of UNIT and the sector of Government who's in charge of them: C19 (is this a sneaky reference to this being Season 19?) as well as the Brigadier! Maybe they'll turn up later! On the downside, there was some hideously bad CSO when Concorde landed in the past in a scene which, frankly, could have been filmed on location and been no different other than it wouldn't have looked shit. Then there's the 'Conjuror' ...