TARDIS Eruditorum Vol 6: The Peter Davison and Colin Baker Years, by Philip Sandifer

[nwhyte]

The latest of Sandifer's collected essays from his blog, published only last month so it's hot off the presses. There is a lot less to say about this less popular era of Doctor Who - his previous two books covered the seven Tom Baker years, this one book covers five years and two Doctors. There's not a lot of people who pick this as their favourite

Comments

[bookzombie]

I'll pick this up at some point - though most of the essays I'll have read online.

I am finding in his more recent episode reviews that obviously he and I have very different ideas of what makes 'good' Doctor Who: he adored Kill the Moon last year (which I cannot even bear to re-watch) and he hated the last episode (which I really rather enjoyed.)

[nwhyte]

I'm completely with you on Kill the Moon. I'm just pretending it wasn't ever shown.

NB that plenty of people disagree with us, including also Paul Cornell.

[bookzombie]

My tolerance for 'stupid' in Doctor Who is fairly high (difficult to be a fan otherwise!), but 'Kill the Moon' just broke me.

Thinking about it, some of that is entirely on the context of the overall episode. For example, the 'firing the gold arrow at the spaceship' resolution to 'Robot of Sherwood' was completely idiotic, but because the rest of the episode is a comedy romp it didn't spoil the episode too much. But because 'KtM' is so very serious, the stupidness of it destroyed the whole episode.

It's also, incidentally, a terrible waste of Hermione Norris who really deserves a better episode to guest star in...

[ravenskyewalker]

My unpopular opinion: I'm just going to say that I didn't hate KtM, despite it being completely bonkers, and I'm very glad that DW gave me Hermione Norris as an astronaut, even though of course she needed more to work with.