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
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 […]
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 […]
Doctor Who A-Z #50: The War Games (1969)
Patrick Troughton’s final season sounds like a nightmare to make. The War Games‘s ten-episode length is a product of the turmoil: other stories had their episode counts rejigged during filming and editing, back-up stories were hastily put into production and several storylines were rejected outright. One of that latter unlucky […]
Doctor Who A-Z #49: The Space Pirates (1969)
Reviewing The Space Pirates demands you accept two things about 1960s Doctor Who. The first is that they absolutely churned the show out. There was an ambition, early on, to run it like a soap opera and have it on fifty-two weeks a year; this was wisely rethought before the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #48: The Seeds of Death (1969)
The Seeds of Death is the Patrick Troughton era’s last business-as-usual story, the final one that fits into the “base-under-siege” mould that series guides often reduce it to. It’s not a wholly unfair summary; Troughton’s first ever story fits this mould, and by Season Five it’s become something close to […]
Doctor Who A-Z #47: The Krotons (1968-9)
The Krotons is something like the base material of Doctor Who. The Doctor and his friends roll up on a nameless planet where a group of people in an isolated community are being ruled by stubby robot monsters. Some of the oppressed community want to rebel, others want to submit, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #46: The Invasion (1968)
One of the little-remarked-upon peculiarities of Doctor Who is that, for a science fiction series, it doesn’t do many future Earth stories. It addresses the future of humanity, certainly – as early as the first season, The Sensorites was sketching out a mythology of mankind exploring and colonising space. But anyone looking for news […]