I recently rewatched Steven Moffat’s first New Who story, “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances,” and it was much better than I’d remembered. My only major complaint, apart from the contrast between Captain Jack’s American accent and his UK English dialogue, is that the script comes down pretty hard on the boy’s mummy, treating her cover [...]
I just rewatched “The Horns of Nimon.” Let’s just say I think it’s fallen a bit in my esteem since I was a lad. Also, “The Stones of Blood” is my second favorite story of this era (meaning seasons 16 and 17 of classic Doctor Who). My first favorite is obviously and forever the fabulous [...]
THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG: SHORT VERSION FOR BUSY PEOPLE THE UNIVERSE is disintegrating due to the Doctor’s personal PROBLEMS again. DOCTOR: I’m going to die, for real. RIVER: Don’t die! DOCTOR: I have to. RIVER: I won’t let you! This REPEATS for almost FORTY MINUTES. DOCTOR: Let’s get married. RIVER: Okay. The DOCTOR DIES, [...]
If you’re an American, you have a pretty good chance of being able to watch Doctor Who with little or no context for the guest actors in it. Billie Piper can just be Rose (and not a teenage pop star), Catherine Tate can just be Donna (and not a standup comic), and Lynda Baron can [...]
Here’s an alternate view on “The God Complex”. I enjoyed the episode, and I think it works and makes as much sense in isolation as any episode of New Who. But I must agree with this reviewer that taken in context, Amy and Rory once again (as I noted when discussing “Let’s Kill Hitler”) do [...]
I’m a sucker for a minotaur. A guy with bull horns can make even an iffy story like “The Time Monster” just a little better, and I’m not gonna front like the hilarious “The Horns of Nimon” isn’t tied with “The Stones of Blood” as my second* favorite story of the Douglas Adams era of [...]
We rarely see the Eleventh Doctor on planets other than Earth. In the televised adventures, he’s set foot on alien soil (as opposed to ships or space stations) only three times: “The Time of Angels,” “A Christmas Carol,” and “The Doctor’s Wife.” Only one of those worlds was what you’d call populated, and that was [...]
Here’s a very interesting theory about why the Doctor changes into a tuxedo in “Let’s Kill Hitler.”
Big twisty mind-blowing arc episodes like “Let’s Kill Hitler” are fun, but this show isn’t really about its main characters. The need for a central mystery is right there in the title. This is, in fact, how the show has managed to continue for 48 years in one form or another; it’s an anthology show, [...]
Doctor Who is not a series known for good titles. The classic series is full of stories called things like “The Robots of Death,” “The Seeds of Doom,” and “Terror of the Autons,” to the point that its most successful parody (written by Steven Moffat himself) was called “The Curse of Fatal Death.” “Let’s Kill [...]