By 1979, Doctor Who had gone about as far into outer space as it ever would. Season Seventeen, which this is a part of, has only one story set on Earth; the season before it has half as much as that. In its opening scenes, Nightmare of Eden seems to […]
Doctor Who
Doctor Who A-Z #106: The Creature from the Pit (1979)
The Creature from the Pit is the kind of story title that points so clearly towards a particular tone, a series as iconoclastic as Doctor Who is duty-bound to undermine it. Much as the revival series’ Mummy on the Orient Express turned out rather more grave than its tongue-in-cheek moniker, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #105: City of Death (1979)
Early in the first episode of City of Death, Romana asks the Doctor where they’re going. “Do you mean philosophically or geographically?”, he replies. It’s one of an overwhelming number of great lines in the script by “David Agnew” (essentially, Douglas Adams doing a page-one rewrite on a David Fisher […]
Doctor Who A-Z #104: Destiny of the Daleks (1979)
Mark Gatiss once said that when Doctor Who works for eight-year-olds, it works for everyone. Looking at Season Seventeen, it’s easy to see why Tom Baker’s clowning hit the mark with that age group, but there’s also plenty of humour targeted at other age groups. Students would have enjoyed the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #103: The Armageddon Factor (1979)
Classic Doctor Who comes from an age when the word “arc” did not fall confidently from television producers’ lips, and the Key to Time is mostly the kind of loose overarching plot that works in a show like this. It’s a MacGuffin, one that can affect as much or as little of […]
Doctor Who A-Z #102: The Power of Kroll (1978-9)
When faced with a Doctor Who story that is, to put it mildly, not very well-thought-of, there are three approaches you can take. The first is simply to say, yes, this is crap, which is often tempting but doesn’t make for good reading. The second, more analytical approach is to […]
Doctor Who A-Z #101: The Androids of Tara (1978)
It can be hard to evaluate the years Graham Williams spent as Doctor Who‘s producer. Part of the problem is having to follow up Philip Hinchcliffe, under whom the show’s median production values and script quality skyrocketed; the fact that Williams could not maintain this led some fans to write […]
Doctor Who A-Z #100: The Stones of Blood (1978)
It’s been clear for a while that script editor Anthony Read and producer Graham Williams are under strict instructions from the BBC not to delve too much into the horror territory that got their predecessors Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe into trouble. Williams did so a couple of times in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #99: The Pirate Planet (1978)
The history of Doctor Who is remarkably well-documented, and these reviews would be nowhere without the generations of scholarship that taught us all how our favourite show was made. Yet sometimes the history of a story can get in the way of appreciating what it actually is. We are told […]
Doctor Who A-Z #98: The Ribos Operation (1978)
Before I started this rewatch project, I always found it funny that Robert Holmes, Doctor Who‘s most beloved writer, wrote two Patrick Troughton stories nobody likes before suddenly becoming a genius as soon as the calendar flipped over to 1970. But actually sitting down and watching The Krotons and The […]