For the second time in as many years, Doctor Who closes a season by closing the book on a particular version of the show. And just like the last time, there isn’t much of a change in the cast and crew to explain the tonal shift. When Season Nine of […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Doctor Who A-Z #58: Colony in Space (1971)
It’s strange that Colony in Space tends to be the forgotten soldier of Season Eight. It is, after all, the story in which the Third Doctor gets to travel to an alien planet for the first time, ending an Earth-based format which a considerable number of fans find hard to […]
Doctor Who A-Z #57: The Claws of Axos (1971)
Bob Baker and Dave Martin have a reputation in Doctor Who fandom as undisciplined writers, a reputation that comes in part from the production of this, their first script for the show. The Claws of Axos was originally intended as a Patrick Troughton seven-parter and ended up being broadcast as […]
Doctor Who A-Z #56: The Mind of Evil (1971)
A contemporary audience would not have seen The Mind of Evil as a throwback. Two stories in to Jon Pertwee’s second season, and Doctor Who is already hard to recognise as the same show Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell starred in. Don Houghton’s story also features the show’s newest ingredient, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #55: Terror of the Autons (1971)
Here he comes, folks. The Autons might be the headline monsters but there’s no question who steals the show. In introducing the Doctor’s most frequent enemy, Terror of the Autons makes good use of the show’s recurring props, with a gently modified version of the TARDIS materialisation sound effect heralding […]
Doctor Who A-Z #54: Inferno (1970)
Season Seven is one of those seasons of Doctor Who that’s cherished, in part, because it has a unique tone which the show immediately moved on from. You can think of other examples: seasons Fourteen, Seventeen, Eighteen and Twenty-Six have the same air, as do series four and ten of […]
Escape from the 21st Century (2024): everything, everywhere, even more than that (Review)
Do you think, when he went into the vocal booth for the first Kung Fu Panda film, Jack Black knew he was changing film history forever? Probably – it seems like the sort of thing he’d say to psych himself up. But even he probably couldn’t have guessed that the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #53: The Ambassadors of Death (1970)
Despite only being Jon Pertwee’s third story, The Ambassadors of Death is a story defined by endings. This is true in a narrative sense: the final moments of the serial, where the Doctor simply walks off and leaves the Brigadier to sort out the diplomatic fallout, feels like something that […]
Doctor Who A-Z #52: Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970)
The Jon Pertwee era gets some stick for showing the Doctor working alongside the military, but in a strange way it’s the series’ essential anti-militarism that makes this work. At no point does the Doctor reject the principle that invasion, colonisation and enslavement are the acts of villains, and since […]
Doctor Who A-Z #51: Spearhead from Space (1970)
Hearing that Auto Plastics is now fully automated, Major-General Scobie allows himself a chuckle of class solidarity with the factory’s owner Channing. “Don’t get the machines going on strike, do you?” he smirks. That line must have been cherished by the producers of Spearhead From Space, since it was a strike […]