Season Thirteen is the first of two consecutive seasons where Louis Marks will turn in a very good script that nevertheless gets ignored because of all the consensus classics around it. Perhaps this is why he’ll leave the show next year, twelve years after his first story was broadcast. That […]
Doctor Who
Doctor Who A-Z #80: Terror of the Zygons (1975)
Terror of the Zygons is a rarity among classic Who stories, in that its masterpiece status is most often defended by pointing to its visuals. Classic-era Doctor Who fans, who normally find themselves in the position of declaring a haughty disinterest in special effects, have been known to go into […]
Outside the Blue Box (1970) The Vampire Lovers
WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the Doctor Who Series 15 two-part finale ‘Wish World / The Reality War’. Picture this: the year is 1970, and Hammer Films – at one point, the most iconic and beloved horror film studio in the world – are in a state of turmoil. Anthony Hinds, the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #79: Revenge of the Cybermen (1975)
Revenge of the Cybermen is a real oddity. It’s not an oddity because it’s the only Tom Baker Cyberman story, or even because it’s the only 1970s Cyberman story, though these are the clearest symptoms of its true underlying strangeness. And it’s not odd simply because it’s a Patrick Troughton […]
Doctor Who A-Z #78: Genesis of the Daleks (1975)
Part of the fascination I have with things that run as long as Doctor Who has is that it repeats; to you, it might be mere repetition, to me it’s an endlessly fascinating series of variations that shapes the story. There may be, for instance, a parallel universe where only the nerdiest […]
Doctor Who A-Z #77: The Sontaran Experiment (1975)
In retrospect, it’s hard to believe anyone was ever nervous about Tom Baker taking over as the Doctor. At the time, though, Jon Pertwee was both the longest-running and most popular Doctor, so producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes came up with a number of strategies to ease […]
Outside the Blue Box: Claws (1987)
Looking back on the history of Doctor Who means looking back over the last sixty-plus years of British television. Along with a few other titans like Coronation Street and Blue Peter, it’s one of the few shows whose contemporaries can include anything from Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? to Adolescence. The fact […]
Doctor Who A-Z #76: The Ark in Space (1975)
With Tom Baker’s debut story, Robot, handled by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, this is the first story to be produced and script edited by the iconic team of Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes. The break feels sudden and immediate. Even the Troughton era was never this single-mindedly concerned with being […]
Doctor Who A-Z #75: Robot (1974-5)
Interviewed ahead of Peter Capaldi’s debut in Deep Breath, Steven Moffat said he’d already written his Spearhead from Space in The Eleventh Hour, so why not do Robot for the next Doctor? The comparison has to do with familiarity: Pertwee’s debut, like Smith’s, was a sudden, startling break with the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #74: Planet of the Spiders (1974)
I don’t know what I expected when I started this project – I don’t know if I was doing anything as vulgar as expecting something – but probably the last thing I was expecting was having my childhood love for the Third Doctor comprehensively reignited. And yet, despite a rocky final season, […]