The Patrick Troughton era had no right to start off as well as it did. It’s not just that regenerating the Doctor was an insane gamble to begin with, though it was. It’s that Troughton tumbles into what seemed to be another season of William Hartnell just two stories in […]
Doctor Who
Doctor Who A-Z #34: The Macra Terror (1967)
I’ve complained, perhaps a little too much, about the difficulties of experiencing missing stories, so let’s raise our glass to BBC Video’s range of animated reconstructions by looking at perhaps the greatest of their works. By all accounts, the titular monsters in The Macra Terror didn’t look good. They don’t […]
Doctor Who A-Z #33: The Moonbase (1967)
The Second Doctor’s natural habitat is the edge of the frame. In stories like Fury from the Deep he scurries around in the background, cheerfully letting this week’s guest cast underestimate him until the time comes to deliver the coup de grace. There’s a bit of that in The Moonbase, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #32: The Underwater Menace (1967)
The Underwater Menace is, by most estimations, rubbish. Patrick Troughton knew it when they were filming, and nobody has contradicted him since. In most of Doctor Who Magazine‘s occasional polls it ranks in the bottom ten stories of all time, which is almost impressive. The script, credited to Geoffrey Orme, is so […]
Doctor Who A-Z #31: The Highlanders (1966-7)
If, like me, you’re fascinated by the question of why Doctor Who abandoned ‘pure’ historical stories, The Highlanders offers something like the perfect test conditions to run an experiment. This is the last time pure historicals were a regular part of the series’ repertoire, rather than a decades-later experiment in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #30: The Power of the Daleks (1966)
So, here we are. The first Patrick Troughton story, an attempt to sell a “post-regeneration story” to an audience who, two weeks ago, weren’t even aware they were watching a pre-regeneration story. Persuading an audience that this completely different man is, in fact, the same man they were watching last […]
Doctor Who A-Z #29: The Tenth Planet (1966)
The hardest Doctor Who reviews to write, for me, are the ones where I have priors. Stories that I haven’t watched before are very easy to write for; stories which I have watched before but produce no strong memories or opinions are also straightforward. It’s the ones that scared me […]
Doctor Who A-Z #28: The Smugglers (1966)
The ‘pure historicals’ – stories whose only science-fictional aspect is the TARDIS and the Doctor – haven’t been subjected to much scholarship compared to the rest of Doctor Who. This is probably because they’re superficially harder to relate to the modern version of the show than anything else from the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #27: The War Machines (1966)
Remarkably, Doctor Who had never done a story set on a recognisable contemporary Earth before The War Machines. There had been one – Planet of Giants – set on an unrecognisable contemporary Earth, and it had stopped off briefly in modern-day England to either pick up or drop off companions. […]
Doctor Who A-Z #26: The Savages (1966)
This is the first Doctor Who script by Ian Stuart Black. For all he won’t be one of the series’ most prolific or acclaimed writers, he’ll always be a step or two ahead of where the show is headed. His next story, The War Machines, maps out the core subject […]