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…
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…
It’s a little surprising that after just two stories, 1964’s Doctor Who had already turned inward for the two-parter “The Edge of Destruction”/”The Brink of Disaster”. But after going to prehistoric Earth and then the planet of the Daleks in Earth’s far future, maybe it…
Doctor Who Season 6.2 trailer This looks fantastic. Boo to the Weeping Angels and Cybermen (enough already with both of them) but yay to the minotaur, the robots (presumably related to the ones chasing Mme. de Pompadour), and River in an eyepatch (surely it’s a…
You can tell when you’re talking to a real Doctor Who nerd if he* rolls his eyes when you mention the second-ever Doctor Who adventure, The Daleks. It’s not the content, but the title: back in the Sixties, as with the modern two-parters, every episode…
In the space between the halves of season “6” of Doctor Who, I’m planning to watch Doctor Who, the classic series. I’m not watching in order or anything crazy like that; my collection’s nowhere near that complete. But I’m starting with the first three stories,…
Note: This episode reveals the identity of River Song and deals heavily with Amy’s apparent pregnancy. If you haven’t seen it or been spoiled about these things already, you might not want to read this yet. I’m feeling overwhelmed about how to approach this one,…
Once again I think I’ll be alone in preferring the action-packed second half of the “morality play” two-parter (i.e., this episode and “Cold Blood”) to the clumsy, uneventful, implausible setup of the first half (i.e., “The Rebel Flesh” and “The Hungry Earth”). I think it’s…
Yes, it’s the “classic” two-parter, the counterpart to last season’s Silurian story. Here are the elements that feel “classic” to me and the classic stories where we’ve seen vaguely similar things before. There’s a preexisting world here that the Doctor (apparently) stumbles into, as opposed…
I don’t love everything Neil Gaiman’s done. Some of his post-Sandman stuff I’ve found just okay, or struck me as almost self-parodic (Coraline and Neverwhere), and some of it’s really rubbed me the wrong way or just been shockingly off-putting (Stardust and almost all of…