Doctor Who

An archive of blog entries about British science-fiction programme Doctor Who.

Question of the week: what was your favourite Doctor Who story this series?

30 June 2010 Rob Buckley 20 Comments

So – except for viewers in the US who have their own programmes – series 5/season 31/series 1/there’s no such thing as seasons* of Doctor Who has just finished. Time for a very obvious question of the week:

What was your favourite episode this series and why?

You can also, if you wish, suggest your least favourite and you can even say what you thought of the show this series, how it compared to the previous series, what you thought of Amy, the Doctor, Karen Gillan, Matt Smith, that spud Rory, the new-look Silurians or anything else that grabs you. It’s a basic Who-ey free-for-all.

If you need to remind yourself of the episodes, what I said and even what you said, here are links to the reviews on the blog:

  1. The Eleventh Hour
  2. The Beast Below
  3. Victory of the Daleks
  4. The Time of Angels
  5. Flesh and Stone
  6. The Vampires of Venice
  7. Amy’s Choice
  8. The Hungry Earth
  9. Cold Blood
  10. Vincent and the Doctor
  11. The Lodger
  12. The Pandorica Opens
  13. The Big Bang

PS Rest assured, readers of the blog who don’t really give a monkey’s about Doctor Who, it’s all going to be a bit less Who-ey round here for a while.

As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog

* Delete according to your degree of mental illness

Wednesday’s “scripts better than plans” news

30 June 2010 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Doctor Who

  • Stevie Moffat’s plans for series 6 [minor spoilers]

Film

  • Jude Law, Ray Winstone and Christopher Lee among those joining Martin Scorsese’s Hugo Cabaret
  • Andy Serkis joins Rise of the Apes
  • Facebook app “Mafia Wars” to be turned into movie
  • Trailer for Paranormal Activity 2

Theatre

  • Peter Egan and Robert Daws to star in The Secret of Sherlock Holmes

British TV

US TV

UK TV

The Caves of Androzani – still the best ever Doctor Who story

28 June 2010 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Peter Davison in The Caves of Androzani

Well, I mentioned it on Friday as part of new series “Liz Shaw’s Best Bits” and the lure ever since has been irresistible. So today, the best bit from the best Doctor Who story ever – the final fifth Doctor story The Caves of Androzani.

Written by Robert Holmes, directed by Graeme Harper, Caves is without a doubt one of the bleakest of all the Who stories, with the Doctor and new companion Peri finding themselves stuck in the middle of a war on a moon that holds the key to near eternal youth: a chemical called Spectrox. Unfortunately, in its unrefined state, Spectrox is poisonous to anyone who touches it – guess who touches it. Go on – and so the Doctor and Peri have to spend most of their time looking for a cure.

The joy of The Caves of Androzani is that it’s pretty much exactly what would happen if the Doctor did end up in the middle war: he gets captured, tossed around as a pawn, and stuck in front of a firing squad, while more or less everyone around him dies. In fact, of all the many, many characters in Caves of Androzani, by the end, there are only two survivors, and neither of them is the Doctor…

As well as Graeme Harper’s incredible direction, Maurice Roëves’ mercenary, Stotz, and the sheer brutality of the story, Caves is notable for a couple of things: the use of machine guns, rather than outer-space lasers to make everything just that little bit more real; and the breaking of the fourth wall, with chief villain Morgus turning to camera at a couple of points to explain his thought processes.

Nevertheless, it’s ironic that the best bit is the end with Peter Davison’s regeneration into Colin Baker – still the best regeneration scene of them all (unless you count the lead up to David Tennant’s exit, and guess what that was modelled on). Unfortunately, within about three seconds, you can see everything falling apart as possibly the worst Doctor Who story in existence, The Twin Dilemma, is cued up.

If you want, you can watch the whole ruddy thing on YouTube thanks to BBC Worldwide (which has, unfortunately, made the whole thing unembeddable otherwise I’d stick it on here for you!)