The Timeless Children – Commentary & Thoughts Previously on Doctor Who… The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) has tracked the Cyberfleet to a planet sheltering the last survivors of mankind (and some electricity pylons). Separated from the ‘fam’, the Doctor steals a Cyber-cruiser and heads off to meet Ko Sharmus (Ian McElhinney), the semi-mythical leader of the […]
Ascension of the Cybermen – Review & Thoughts “Love, pride, hate, fear… have you no emotions, sir?” enquired the First Doctor (William Hartnell) to the Cybermen, way back in his 1966 swan song, The Tenth Planet. In last week’s episode, The Haunting of Aston Villa (I still can’t remember its actual title), we met the lone […]
The Haunting of Villa Diodati – Review and Thoughts Before we begin, let’s get something clear right from the outset. Doctor Who isn’t science fiction – it’s horror, albeit horror dressed in the clothes of science fiction, in much the same way as Alien is a haunted house in space. For all its neutron flow […]
Can You Hear Me? – Review & Thoughts “If you’ve been affected by Graham’s story…”, said the sombre voiceover at the end of this week’s instalment of Doctor Who, the seventh episode of the current run – Can You Hear Me? It’s fair to say that this episode did affect me, ironically filling me with a […]
Praxeus – Review & Thoughts In popular fiction, birds have always taken on a spiritual, even supernatural aspect. From the raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem of the same name to the Albatross in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, our winged friends have often been portrayed as harbingers of doom, bringing death and destruction […]
Fugitive of the Judoon – Review & Thoughts On the planet Logopolis, setting for Tom Baker’s 1980 swansong, there lived a race of beings who cared so much for numbers that they could convert them into solid matter. Mathematics so pure that objects, even living creatures capable of independent thought, could be summoned into being. The […]
Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror – Review From its earliest beginnings, Doctor Who has always featured historical celebrity figures. From Wyatt Earp (in 1966’s The Gunfighters) to Charles Dickens (in 2005’s The Unquiet Dead), the Doctor likes to name drop, or drop in on names, from time to time. Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror (a story […]
Orphan 55 – Review In the early days of Broadcasting House the three-word mantra of “Inform, Educate and Entertain” constituted the mission statement for all BBC programming. Ringing the school bell for this syllabus was the founder Director General, Lord Reith, whose autocratic approach to programming demanded that all content had to satisfy these criteria. […]
Spyfall: Part Two – Review “Previously on Doctor Who” … the TARDIS team, Ryan (Tosin Cole), Yaz (Mandip Gill) and Graham (Bradley Walsh) were last seen hurtling towards certain death on board Daniel Barton’s (Lenny Henry) crashing jet. Meanwhile the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) finds herself trapped in the Upside Down mysterious home world of the story’s antagonists […]
Spyfall: Part One – Review James Bond and Doctor Who have always shared a close association over the years. Both are the products of the swinging sixties (Dr. No releasing in 1962, Dr. Who the following year) and both have reinvented themselves numerous times through recasting their leads. And just as you can gauge a […]
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