It is a 7th Doctor stories and picks up on some of the hints of a more mysterious and unique origin for the Doctor as well as expanding on…[Read more]

I’ve been through this thread and near as I can see no one has…[Read more]

Jack was well-used and the quips landed.

Doc: “Have you had work done?”

Harkness: “YOU can talk…”

Robertson if anything was more of a Trump parody here. That…[Read more]

A Canadian, Sydney Newman, was the driving force behind the creation of Doctor Who.

I hadn’t noticed this. Can you name one of the episodes where this is seen, so I can look at it?

The Next Doctor (continued).

Other things:

Although we saw sketches of some of the early Doctors in “Human Nature”/”The Family of Blood”, this was the first time…[Read more]

So now we are in to the five specials shown from Christmas 2008 to New Years Day 2010.

The Next Doctor.
A typical whimsical Christmas special, lots of fun but don’t inhale. David Morissey throws himself right into the role of a Victorian-era…[Read more]

ROSE: Three Doctors?
JACK: I can’t tell you what I’m thinking right now.

(Rewatching all of post-gap Who with my 11 year old son and now my 6 year old nephew, continued: 4×12 and 4×13)

The Stolen Earth/Journeys…[Read more]

Turn Left

A very pleasing Donna-focused episode. What-ifs are always fun.

Of course the “fun” in this ep is everything going to hell quickly. Real world events in the past few years have been so weird and perversely terrible that some…[Read more]

Midnight

A little episode, wedged between the grand Vashta Nerada story and the explosive Keep Left.

On the board, in comments sections, I often see this referred to as a poor episode, but that’s not how I see it. There are no onscreen…[Read more]

(Rewatching all of post-gap Who with my 11 year old son and now my 6 year old nephew, continued: 4×8 and 4×9)

Silence In the Library/Forest of the Dead

This is well and truly one of my favourite DW stories. Great sci-fi…[Read more]

The Unicorn and the Wasp

A fun and somewhat silly story with plenty of humour. A bit of a breather before we head to the Library I suppose.
It does read a bit like a Christie novel: the characters are a little thinly drawn and somewhat s…[Read more]

The Doctor’s Daughter

The previews at the end of The Poison Sky made sure to show The Doctor saying “She’s my daughter”. Come on, we knew it wouldn’t be that simple…

This is one of those episodes where The Doctor’s Wife takes The Doctor…[Read more]

There was a non-broadcast version of An Unearthly Child., sometimes called the Pilot episode but that’s a bit of a misnomer: it was just a first recording that was not sent out because the producers felt there were too many problems with the recording and performances.

One notable thing about it is that the interior of the Tardis is shown from…[Read more]

(Rewatching all of post-gap Who with my 11 year old son and now my 6 year old nephew, continued: 4×3 to 4×5)
————–
Planet of the Ood

This is one of my favourite episodes. The moral problems of Ood slavery introduced in The Impossible Planet are addressed. Donna develops, gets to see more of the tough calls the Doctor has to m…[Read more]

Partners in Crime

Donna’s back! And don’t we just love her. My favourite companion.

Even by DW standards, blobs of fat peeling off a person and brought to life is a pretty wacky concept, and the body horror is only ameliorated by the…[Read more]

Voyage of the Damned

It’s a pleasant Christmas episode. The stakes are high but spirits are light. As is often the case, the tension is raised by the fact that the Doctor is separated from the Tardis early in the piece. He saves the day, uppance…[Read more]

The Master offers Lucy a jellybaby.

MASTER: “The Eve of War. Lovely woman.”

(Rewatching all of post-gap Who with my 11 year old son and now my 6 year old nephew, continued: 3×13)

In parallel we see two the story develop in two places. Aboard the Valiant, Jack and the Joneses scheme, and The Master…[Read more]

The Sound of Drums

We start with the big payoff to the Saxon breadcrumbs. Master as Prime Minister is a suitably nightmarish scenario. Old Who Master was a hypnotist so we may suppose he got his start by hypnotising a small number of people…[Read more]

The start of the de facto three-part story that ends season 3.

Utopia.

Has there been a better revival of a pre-gap entity than the reveal of the Master here? They did clues that the Master was someone known to the Doctor, and I suppose “The…[Read more]

Blink.

What’s not to like? It’s a nice time travel story, it’s terrifying for the kids (and spooky enough for the adults, if I’m honest). The Angels are the first new evil critters of the Post-Gap era to make an enduring and valuable…[Read more]

The last six episodes of season 3 are, to my mind, one of the greatest runs of eps in the history of the Doctor Who: this two-parter lays the basis of the final three parts, with the iconic “Blink” in between as a breather.

Human…[Read more]

Daleks in Manhatten/ Evolution of the Daleks. This two-parter is a lot better than I’d remembered. It does a lot to further the grand lore of the Daleks, and provides a nice link between the events of Doomsday and those of Stolen E…[Read more]

Smith and Jones. This is an enjoyable character introduction. Little Old Lady villains are the best, even better than Child villains. There’s something very unnerving about Grandma gone wrong. We also see a poster for Harold Saxon.

This…[Read more]

He said, “I didn’t really understand the concept of regeneration when I saw the 9th Doctor’s regeneration,  ’cause I was only five years old…”

Get the hell off my lawn.

Still surprises me that there are full grown adults for whom the start of New Who…[Read more]

“The Runaway Bride”

Donna’s spectacular intro. I kind of had the feeling we would see more of her.

The Doctor says Donna is not important: he has said this about other people too. Kind of contradicts his comments for instance in “Christmas…[Read more]

Yeah I never really understood the lack of enthusiasm for Clara or Martha. My favourite companion is still Donna, though.

(Rewatching all of post-gap Who with my 11 year old son and now his 6 year old nephew, continued: 2×12 to 2×13)

“Army of Ghosts”/”Doomsday”

Why oh why does the BBC give away the farm in the end-of-episode p…[Read more]

Although I’d remembered the Cyberman-related eps of Series 2 fondly, somehow in my memory the rest of the second half of the Series was a bit bland. Although they certainly have their weaknesses, they are much better than I’d remembered. They all contain Torchwood r…[Read more]

(Forgot to mention that in School Reunion, a conversation between SJS and 10 makes another Time War ref: “I lived. Everyone else died.” The slow drip drip drip of information is always something I liked about Who, even in the Before Times.)

“The Girl in the F…[Read more]

“Tooth and Claw”
Opening with Western monks doing Eastern martial arts: whacky, exciting start.
This is a historical episode but, unlike some others, it’s unlikely to teach youngsters anything important, though it is true that Albert had the Koh i Noor whittled d…[Read more]

And I don’t mean like this…

“Christmas Invasion” is the first Christmas special, and not a bad one. It’s a fine introduction, and sets up a number of things that are important or called back to in later episodes: The Doctor’s lost hand, his inability to resist big red buttons, the fall and…[Read more]

@badwolfalice

“I haven’t seen much of pre-2005 Doctor Who yet so there’s a lot of those that I don’t recognise, but I know #11 is a Dreg from Orphan 55, #12 is clearly Gallifrey but I’m not sure what the shapes in the foreground are, and #19 is the Pting from The Tsuranga Conundrum. I recognise #15 but can’t think who she is. I’ve seen…[Read more]

So here are the images that are shown before The Doctor blows up the Matrix. I counted 89 images, it runs for about 10 seconds, so it’s about 3 frames per image, average. It’s a…[Read more]

In “The Deadly Assassin”
SPANDRELL: Just the kind of hooliganism we’re always running the Shobogans in for.

In “Hell Bent”:
DOCTOR: The last I heard, he stole the moon and the President’s wife.
CLARA: Was she, er, Was she nice, the President’s wife?
DOCTOR: Ah, well, that was a lie put about by…[Read more]

I don’t see how that’s possible. They look completely different.

BTW do you know the name of the actor who plays old Brendan? Often when DW doesn’t include someone in the credits, it is significant.