This is the first time since “The Five Doctors” back in 1983 that my first viewing of a Doctor Who episode took place in a movie theater, surrounded by other fans. I watched “Day of the Doctor” and “Deep Breath” that way, but both were…
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…
By tradition, before the finale, I rank the year’s episodes and discuss how my opinions of them have changed with hindsight. I’ll list them from my least to most favorite this time. 11. Sleep No More Mark Gatiss seems like a fun guy I’d probably…
The Doctor has lost his best friend. His best friend has forbidden him to take out his anger and grief on anyone else. But he can still take it out on himself. There’s no mystery as to the subtext here. It’s a labyrinthine prison, containing…
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…