Category: Doctor Who
Doctor Who episode 708: Shada – Episode Four (23/5/2003)
‘What is the one thing that stands against entropy, against random decay? Life.’ Everyone seems to have been obsessed by entropy and the decline of Western Civilisation in the late 1970s – hence, I suppose, the White Guardian, the Logopolitans and now Skagra. It says a lot about the defining mood of the decade.
Doctor Who episode 707: Shada – Episode Three (16/5/2003)
‘Have to be a complete re-write.’ After two episodes of amusing inaction (bike chase aside) we get… another episode of mostly amusing inaction. Rather than being stuck in Chronotis’ study chatting about a book, now the Doctor and Romana are stuck in Skagra’s spaceship chatting about a book. By this point in City of Death, they’d run round Paris, visited the Louvre and uncovered a plot to steal it, been captured and escaped, nipped back to the 16th Century to discover a time-travelling alien, and then back to 1979 in time for a showdown. This is moving at an entirely different speed.
Doctor Who episode 706: Shada – Episode Two (9/5/2003)
‘Rassilon had powers and secrets even we don’t understand.’ It’s amusing so much time is spent mucking about looking for a book. This largely lends itself well to BBCi’s primitive animation because the script is full of little verbal jokes and digressions, rather than relying on action sequences. It’s a story where the villain is accompanied by a ‘babble of inhuman voices’, where Chronotis beats out messages in Gallifreyan Morse Code, and even Skagra’s computer is well-spoken.
Doctor Who episode 705: Shada – Episode One (2/5/2003)
‘Come on Romana, come on K9, we’ve got to go back – back to Cambridge, 1979.’ After 24 years and several attempts to resurrect the unfinished 1980 Douglas Adams serial, it finally enters the canon as a Paul McGann story; the other Liverpudlian Doctor stepping in for Tom Baker like Lennon covering I Saw Her Standing There.
Doctor Who: Real Time (2/8/2002-6/9/2002)
Episode One (2/8/2002)
‘Cybermen have fascinated me and my family for years.’ The second BBCi serial is, technically at least, a step up from Death Comes to Time, with increased animation and more detailed Lee Sullivan artwork which captures good likenesses of most of the characters (Colin Baker looks a bit of a bruiser). It also introduces the sixth Doctor’s blue costume, which has given Character Options the chance to do two further action figures, so that’s all good.
Doctor Who: Death Comes to Time (3/7/2001-3/5/2002)
Episode One: At the Temple of the Fourth (3/7/2001)
‘Shoot me, get on with it, I don’t mind. I’ve been dead before.’ The first BBCi webcast episode heads in a direction the revived TV series avoided (at least initially), taking its cues from 1990s sci-fi blockbusters (the space blockade, planetary invasions, defiant senators and mystic alien teachers are all very Star Wars), rather than Yetis on the loo. After an airy fairy voiceover, it opens noisily, in the middle of a battle between two alien fleets: the baddies led by the smug and evil general Tannis (a smarmy John Sessions) and the goodies commanded by Admiral Mettna (Jacqueline Pearce). It’s noisy and fairly butch, culminating in a trooper telling the conquered senate, ‘No help is coming’ just as the TARDIS materialises and the Doctor pops out.
Doctor Who episode 704: Doctor Who (27/5/1996)
‘Somehow, I don’t think the second coming happens here.’ 25 years on, when it’s no longer a false dawn, it’s much easier to appreciate the TV Movie as a prologue to the 2005 revival instead of the epilogue to the 1963 series. It’s much more like one of the New Testament’s festive specials, especially The Runaway Bride (another sassy redhead in a gown who thinks the Doctor’s nuts and turns down the chance to join him), than anything in the Old Testament.
The Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Adventures
The Paradise of Death
Episode One (27/9/1993)
‘Since when have I ever painted my toe-nails pink?’ The BBC’s first attempt at Doctor Who for the radio since Slipback, and, again, it’s meant to plug the gap left on TV. The difference is that the show is no longer a going concern so it makes sense to do a nostalgia piece for the 30th anniversary, bringing back the senior living Doctor and reuniting him with the most popular companion.
Doctor Who episode 703: Dimensions in Time – Part Two (27/11/1993)
‘Who was that terrible woman?’ The Rani’s plan is perfectly consistent with her previous attempts to control the course of evolution, although it takes a hastily over-dubbed ‘it’ll overload’ to clarify why having ‘two time brains’ is a Bad Thing. This does mean the Doctor’s plan relies on making the best of a lucky break, but what do you expect in an episode that runs for five minutes?
Doctor Who episode 702: Dimensions in Time – Part One (26/11/1993)
‘I can hear the heartbeat of a killer.’ Possibly the keystone episode of the series: it deconstructs 30 years of backstory, positing the Doctor and companion as eternal strangers, never in one place and time for more than a heartbeat, intersecting with real time and then gone in a flash. The constant changes of actor, the roving camera, the melange of elements suggest the inherent mutability of the show, brilliantly conveyed in Pertwee’s profoundly insightful, even moving interjection, ‘Change. You, me, everything.’
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