I haven’t regretted my decision not to review series 12 at length, but not because I didn’t like it. It’s nice to relax and enjoy the show as a fan and not as a critic, ignoring the stuff I didn’t like and focusing on the…
Things I learned from Doctor Who: it takes eight minutes to build a surveillance network from spare parts around a subterranean drilling site, per “The Hungry Earth.” It helps if you’re a Time Lord, or maybe just have a sonic screwdriver. If you don’t have…
“It’s better the second time, if only because all hope that it’ll be vibrant and exciting is safely dead.”
During the Moffat era, I posted my season rankings pre-finale, because finales are so often either uncommonly great or massive train wrecks. This time I decided just to triage the series, since it divided so evenly, and since I found it difficult to order my…
“‘It Takes You Away’ appears to change genre throughout the episode — from cabin-in-the-woods-style horror to dark fantasy to Solaris-esque SF, but really there’s only one overarching genre at work: the fairy tale.”
They really backloaded this season with the good stuff, didn’t they? I spoke way too soon about favorite episodes last week. This is riveting Doctor Who, put way over the top in more ways than one by Alan Cumming’s delicious “I know everything about Satan!”…
“It’s likely that future Doctor Who episode guides will recall this episode as ‘never letting us look at bubble wrap the same way again.’ But there’s a chance — just a chance, but a good one — that I’ll recall it as ‘my favorite story of the Whittaker era.’”
I’m at a loss to understand why Chibnall felt this story was worth telling. The setting, while featuring lovely set design of almost Tron-level sterility, was just a ship; the individual stories (a decorated pilot with a career-limiting ailment, a pregnant man from a race…
Since I’m no longer writing these for publication to a general audience, the torch having been passed to a new runner, we can let our hair down a little and just talk. I’ve been listening to the Trial of a Time Lord Podcast a lot…
It’s the beginning, and the moment has been prepared for. We’ve seen so much of Jodie Whittaker over the past six months especially, not just in trailers but promoting the show at conventions and on the talk show circuit, that to see her finally appear…