Oh dear, yeah. I didn't have hugely high hopes, but I'm afraid that really did feel like Doctor Who by numbers to me. Basic plot-line - a Dalek is unleashed, causes a bit of havoc before being tracked down by the Doctor, and is then defeated via a combination of Technobabble and the Power of Love. We've definitely seen that story before, and the ( Read more... )

I'd lost count a bit when I sat down to watch this, so didn't realise it was the final episode of the season until the continuity announcer said so at the end. I'd thought there was one more. Still, I did obviously notice the closure of the Tim Shaw / Stenza / stolen planets / Grace's death arc opened in the season's first episode, as well as the ( Read more... )

Tonight's episode really made me realise how much I love it when Doctor Who does surreality and alternative universes - like the Fourth Doctor's trips inside the Matrix and into N-Space. You can't do it all the time. The series has to be kept grounded in reality, otherwise the sense of any real stake in anything would be lost and people would lose ( Read more... )

This story raised the question of the Doctor's non-interference policy for Earth history early on, when Yaz asked "even if something's not right?", but it also found two ways to dodge really answering it. Graham's insistence that he has never heard of Bilehurst (sp?) Crag equates to the way Hartnell and Troughton's pure historical episodes were ( Read more... )

I'll admit my heart sank for a moment as I realised this was going to be another story about a big corporation. I expected something similar to Arachnids in the UK, which had probably been my least favourite episode so far this season, and wasn't relishing a repeat of its pretty unsubtle message about corporate greed. In fact, though, this was a ( Read more... )

Gosh, that was powerful. I mean, I would totally defer to anyone from an Indian or Pakistani background about the details of it, and whether it did justice to the time and the people depicted. But it had me absolutely gripped and entranced, and often close to tears. It was a really good example of how history in microcosm, told here through just ( Read more... )

With these two stories I feel the new series, new show-runner and new Doctor have all settled into a regular rhythm with discernable patterns. And the good news is everything seems to be running smoothly. The big hurdles of introducing the new Doctor, taking her companions on their first adventure and tackling a historical story which could very ( Read more... )

I have been around and about all over the place lately, racking up a week-long trip to Romania followed by two successive weekends in Whitby and Warwick. Weekends are when I tend to write LJ / DW posts, so I now have a huge backlog of things to write about caused by being busy doing interesting things in exactly the time I might otherwise be ( Read more... )

I think we can chalk that up as another cracker. I don't have time to write much about it, as I'm going to Romania tomorrow and need to prioritise prepping for that, but a few thoughts ( Read more... )

Ooh! That was good, wasn't it? Good enough to make me want to write about it here, anyway, which I haven't managed for the last season-and-a-half ( Read more... )