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…

Or: Curse of the Third Episode. Okay, maybe two seasons isn’t enough to set up a curse, but this has a lot in common with “Victory of the Daleks.” Both are weaker stories following two strong season openers. Both are too rushed to build up…

(Big old spoilers ahead, sweetie.) A partial list of the questions I still have after watching this episode twice: Did Amy and Rory know just to fall down when they were shot? If so, why didn’t River get the same briefing? If not, what were…

Proper Who is still dead, and now it thinks it’s The X-Files. I’ve never liked Greys, and with Paul and Roger from American Dad as their more recent portrayals in popular culture, their presence alone could have sunk this for me, but it didn’t. Here’s…

Proper Who is dead. Which is rather like saying “the Third Doctor is dead” or “the Eighth Doctor is dead.” That is: both true and false. The man regenerates. He’s the same man; he’s eleven men. The show regenerates too, roughly once a decade. I…

It might be facile to say that Russell T. Davies wrote Doctor Who like a soap opera and Steven Moffat writes it like a sitcom. I’ve actually never seen any episodes of Queer as Folk or Coupling. Also, RTD was funny even when he was…

Liked it. There really isn’t a whole lot else I can say yet. For about 34 minutes it seems pretty silly — not “The End of Time” silly, fortunately, but still “New Who Season Finale” silly: big, fast, loose, very kitchen-sink with the monsters and…