At the beginning of this episode, the Doctor turns off some key TARDIS defense systems so that Clara can more easily fly the ship. That would also be a good time for you to turn off your brain so you can more easily enjoy the…

I’m scared to watch “Hide.” I’ve watched it twice now, and I’m scared that if I watch it one more time, I’ll start to notice things I don’t like about it. I’m scared that it’ll lose its sheen and become just another Doctor Who episode….

Mark Gatiss has failed to make the Ice Warriors scary again. That’s because they weren’t scary in the first place, so it wouldn’t be possible to make them scary “again.” Well, okay, I wasn’t even alive in the 60s, let alone watching Doctor Who from…

The Doctor and his brand new companion, a pretty white woman in her early twenties, take their first real trip in the TARDIS. They travel both in space and time, arriving in an unfamiliar society with strange rules. Right away the companion wanders off and…

“The Bells of St. John,” indeed. That Steven Moffat is one clever bastard, isn’t he? Well. When I heard the elevator pitch for this one—”there’s something in the wifi”—I rolled my eyes, because come on. We’ve had sinister cell phone networks, Bluetooth headsets, GPS devices,…

There’s a very old man who cannot die, and his business has always been saving the world…until now. Now he has withdrawn from that world, having sacrificed one of his dearest protegées in saving it. Now he lives in a gleaming white palace on top…

Spoiler warning: watch the episode first. One of the more interesting answers to the question “Doctor Who?” that I’ve read goes all the way back to the 1968 story “The Mind Robber.” The theory (which I first read on TARDIS Eruditorum, and you should read…

If there are two things Gareth Roberts does better than anyone else in his scripts for the Eleventh Doctor, they’re domestic life on Earth and warm-hearted humor. They’re not traditionally the foremost qualities of Doctor Who, which makes them all the more welcome for bringing…

The last time the TARDIS visited the Old West was in 1966’s “The Gunfighters.” I’ve never gotten around to watching that story, partly because it’s historically been regarded as one of the worst of the series. I can confidently say it’s a better Doctor Who…

I was gearing up to compare this episode to “Invasion of the Dinosaurs,” the 1974 Doctor Who story where a cultlike organization scooped dinosaurs from the distant past to present-day London in order to incite an evacuation. I had expected that the older story’s combination…