Even though “Hell Bent” is as unrepentantly sci-fi and literal as “Heaven Sent” is allegorical and rich with subtext, even though it’s as chaotic and messy and all over the place as its part 1 is focused and precise, I loved it. I don’t know…
One way to gauge the sturdiness of a work of fiction might be: if you know the big spoiler, can you still enjoy it? The longevity of Hamlet, Citizen Kane, and The Empire Strikes Back (to name just three) suggest that it’s certainly possible to…
Imagine, if you can, a monster that uses your time asleep to attack you…yes, a bit like Freddy Krueger. Imagine that this monster is so insidious that just watching a video featuring that monster will allow it to get into your eye…yes, a bit like…
Imagine you’ve been forced to move to another country, one where you don’t speak the language and the customs aren’t your own. You probably still dream about home, where everything is as you understand it, but then you wake up in your new apartment and…
And just like that we’re back in a classic mode, in this case the Earth invasion stories that introduced UNIT in 1970 and continued through the mid-70s. Some would say this mode peaked in 1975 with “Terror of the Zygons,” the only story of the…
For a moment in this season’s opening two-parter I got the ghastly fear that by the end of this year we’d have a definitive, boring answer to the question of “why did the Doctor run away from Gallifrey?” Something like “he felt ashamed of his…
Series 9 continues our tour of the classic series in general and the Tom Baker era in specific with a season 16/17 smorgasbord. Those two seasons were the “comedy” era, in which Douglas Adams first wrote for and then script-edited the show. It produced such…
It’s all about paradoxes this season so far. In the opening two-parter, we got the Grandfather Paradox: if you go back in time and kill your own grandfather, how can you have been born and then gone back in time to kill your own grandfather?…
If you hear a classic series fan talking about the “base under siege” story, they’re talking about a story like “Under the Lake”. It’s a scenario where the Doctor and his companions are trapped in a more or less confined space with a small group…
I said last week that there was only one time travel story to be told about Hitler: do you go back and kill him before he attempts genocide? Well, that clever Moffat has proven me wrong again. Apparently there is also the time travel story…