Really lovely start to this series, a nice mainly comedic one, albeit with a hideous shapeshifting truth vampire lurking around a country manor during a hen do, picking the participants off one by one. It’s a very good script from Tim Foley that really captures 13 and Yaz down to a tee (“Hang on. Is (Sherlock Holmes) real as well?” “Yes he is! And he’s such a lazy- FOOTBATH!!”), love Ian and Barbara (RIP), love Gina’s mum and Daryl best of the guest cast.

There is even a New Who style arc gently seeded, with the vampire mentioning it had traveled through time on the slipstream of The Tourist (who is a Faction Paradox-y figure, yes? I don’t really know. Could be a new character too). I sort of inherently trust BF to pull off an arc to a season more than any of the three TV showrunners to be honest (who all have at least one great one!), so let’s go!

Love to hear that theme tune arrangement, it’s so good. I have one or two very slight nitpicks to the sound design, but overall it was very good and the music was pretty great (love the opening fake pop song)! Wish there had been a little more conversation in the maze, I don’t need them to get into The Timeless Etc, but perhaps just a little more from The Doctor about how she’s been feeling about everything and about Yaz might’ve been nice. We do of course love Yaz carrying The Doctor.

Weird that I listened last night to the 8th Doc adventure The Love Vampires, where 8 says the exact same thing as 13 does here, that every strain of vampire has their own rules. I enjoyed both of those stories about the same, solid 4s for fun and character and a nice twist and a bit of threat. “(The TARDIS is) at the center of the maze.” “What?! Why did you park it there?!” “Because I’m a silly billy!!”

The novel version of 73 Yards is very interesting! If you liked the creepy, supernatural, unexplained time twist nature of the TV episode, then this is that plus much more of the inside of Ruby’s head as she lives through an entire life on what the book emphasizes is a version of the earth “suspended along” Ruby’s event. There is more here about how the world is cut off from reality in some way, no more extraterrestrial visitors or supernatural threats, the TARDIS is just a shell, some link to itself in the “real world.”

There is a little bit more but still not enough about Roger ap Gwilliam, who we are told is very very bad but who doesn’t do anything and is despatched very easily. One wonders why, with The Doctor’s words about Roger ringing in her ears “the most dangerous Prime Minister in history,” she decides to work really hard to elect him and then undermine him, a strange course of events.

One wonders why people react so differently (as the narrative requires) to the same thing being said by Old Ruby. Some cut her out of their lives, some run away in fear, some resign as Prime Minister. The book here does postulate what Old Ruby must be saying to them, more or less, since her gestures and message never change, but also covers itself by describing Actual Ruby finally hearing it as being like syllables tumbling together to describe secrets that should never be shared, which is lovely, so we can treat it as if those syllables meant something different to each of them who heard it, but each of them definitely knew it was a different older Ruby saying it, and whatever was happening was WRONG. It’s mysterious!

It’s also complicated by the people in the Welsh pub (a great scene in the show and the book, perhaps the whole story should have stayed there with those characters), they are messing with Ruby, so we can’t really use anything they’re saying about Mad Jack or the Fairy Circles to help us understand what’s happening. The Doctor at least confirms it IS a Fairy Circle when he reappears, and knows not to read the messages, so maybe some of what they said was real?

Why Mad Jack there and then Roger saying he was once called Mad Jack later? Are we meant to interpret that they are the same? Linked? Breaking the circle released him or some spirit inhabiting him? Or is it just another mysterious implication? One thing is clear, the old Ruby is not there until they break the Circle, really until The Doctor has vanished, but she’s there already the second time and is able to help Ruby break the cycle instead of the circle; whatever happens here, by whoever’s hand, we can only infer that this was all some kind of punishment for breaking the Fairy Circle.

But we know from Empire Of Death that Roger is still elected anyway, and does become Prime Minister, and does make everybody log their DNA, but he has yet to be mentioned again, so…much as I adore the vibe, the creepy tone, the writing in this book as well as the way it was shot for TV, one does wonder what it was all for. Ruby does gain, from this experience, the ability to later tell when reality has been altered, even more than The Doctor can, which is cool. But the Roger character is sort of just jammed into these events and does confuse me slightly.

The main thing we do gain here is time with Ruby Sunday, and I really do like her on her own. Not every companion gets a Doctor-lite episode focused on them, and Ruby gets two! And they are both pretty good! This one confuses me at its core, it feels like a clumsier Turn Left, or even RTD attempting to write his own Listen, which I would say is not his natural metier, but it does have strange ideas, it is vibey, and it’s an hour of TV and thus a novel that just wouldn’t exist in almost any other franchise.

4/5, I’ll take mysterious and unexplained vibes over lots of other DW modes!

It took me almost a full week to listen to The House That Hoxx Built from Classic Doctors New Monsters 3, but never let it be said that I’m a quitter lol. This was utterly, utterly boring. They’re going for a haunted house vibe but it is so painfully obvious that that isn’t what’s happening, and the sole joke here (Hoxx mixing up his Earth metaphors) becomes stale quite quickly. The pacing is what really made this a slog though, very short scenes where not much happens followed by a mysterious music sting, repeat that 150 times. I did think Dan Starkey did a good job, he usually does, I enjoy this version of 3 and Sarah Jane, and I like the sentient sheep lady (the timeline of the destroyed earth and sentient sheep made me go “hey, is somebody trying to tie in the sheep war mentioned in It Takes You Away with the possible destroyed earth in Orphan 55? Appreciate that, Tim Foley!”). Tim Foley is pretty dependable, even the scripts of his that I haven’t liked as much have some cool ideas. I think this one is going for an amusing romp but unfortunately I was bored to tears. 2/5

I didn’t just like Like, I loved Like! This is a pretty excellent 6/Peri adventure that’s part mission of diplomacy, part overthrow the regime, part social media satire, a very funny and lively script by Jacqueline Rayner, a ton of giggles courtesy of all the fake ads that play, some interesting ideas about using this system to your advantage, things to say about race and immigration and closed border mentalities and all sorts of things, and of course excellent performances from Colin & Nicola. Sound design is really good in this box, there’s a couple of extreme transitions that are very cool, and all the ads too. An easy 4/5, maybe even higher after a think!

An unfortunate low point of the 9DAs so far, but to be positive, it does retrospectively clarify that Ravagers *was* much better than it seemed, I’ll go back and correct those ratings up. No episode of that was as poorly acted, unengagingly sound designed, or as frankly boring as I found this one. I see that it’s a low rated entry from this series everywhere, The Curse Of Lady Macbeth doesn’t seem very well-regarded either but I liked it a lot, here I must agree with the consensus, I’m not a fan of this dialogue or the plot and I didn’t really warm to any guest character in particular. Eccleston sounds disengaged from the story too, but still delivering his lines well. Kind of a dud, 2/5

The second two parts of **Rage Of The Time Lords** reveal the nature of The Master’s plan, as he heads a facility full of scientists near a thin thread of anti-matter,studying and extracting abilities from the creatures gathered in the previous stories (and lots of other unseen ones, many of which sound more interesting and relevant to proceedings than The Coney Island Chameleon). One of the most entertaining bits here is The Master being presented as the manager of a company, he is told early on about the Employee Of The Month, and how somebody wants a raise and this kind of thing, and then all of that plays out in completely evil, disturbing ways over the episode haha. The Doctor arrives in response to a psychic distress callfrom Alice, the girl from story one, and then as they try to escape together, his mind begins to go awry (wait, the Eighth Doctor with mind/memory problems? There’s a first time for everything!). The Master has been assembling all these unique abilities to birth a new creature, The Rage, ostensibly as a weapon for The Time War, but mostly for his own nefarious purposes first, and The Doctor’s presence is no accident. Lots of fun stuff between Jacobi and McGann, I personally always love a Doctor/Master storywhere Mr Evil’s plan spins wildly out of his control and he needs The Doctor to rescue him; this is almost that, but this being The War Master’s series, he’s always on top in the end.This two-parter was good but it unfortunately makes the overall plan a little uninspiring,like Phase 10 is kind of cool in their potential abilities, but so is Alice (who gets unceremoniously capped, and so wasn’t actually central to The Master’s plans, beyond I guess her ability to call him psychically, and the temporal possibilities power we see The Rage display in the final part, and I guess the mental poisoning which she displayed against the chickens is what they hone to poison The Doctor, her abilities come into play but she was a really strong character and I wish she’d been more central to the resolution). Instead we swap that character over to Pryor, the last of the race who used to live on this planet before The Master massacred them all, and I dunno, rather than mess about with Coney Island accents and the strongman who never returns and doesn’t really matter to the ending, maybe we should have done hour two about *that* story, to give a sense of the devastation that we later just have to be told about, and to give the box set an Alice/Pryor/Alice/Pryor structure which I think would really have tightened it all up.Good 8/War Master stuff, I love both of them to bits, but I actually don’t need The Doc to pop up in my War Master stories, we can do all that business over in the main franchise. Over here, my little creepy tweed trickster gets to do his elaborate, clever, abominable schemes on a massive scale and get away with it. Less good than the first two box sets, but then the first two are notably great BF stories in any range. The Survivor - 3.75, Coney Island - 3.25, **The Missing Link** - 3.5, **Darkness And Light** - 4, overall 3.75

Orphan 55 is a very strange episode, for sure, written by It Takes You Away’s Ed Hime, which is also very strange but more confidently & aggressively weird, so I like it way more. Orphan 55 has such the tone of a S24 McCoy for me, like the plot of this (a companion wins a holiday to a galactic spa which turns out to be in a climate controlled dome on an otherwise inhospitable world populated by aggressive mutants) could slot right in there with Paradise Towers or my beloved Delta. Plenty of things are well done about the production, from location shooting in Tenerife to the monster design and the way they are shot and teased for so long before we see them clearly (and man, these Dregs are freakin’ JACKED lol, they all have a full eight-pack). Several things are done in an aggressively silly way, like Hyph3n’s whole look and of course poor James Buckley’s wig. There is the lady endlessly yelling “Benni,” which is not the same as a character lol. And the saboteur’s plan seems quite a bit too intense and insane for the understandable human reason she’s doing it. Unclear why absolutely all characters have to go to so many of the plot points together, it’s weird to trundle like 10 people out into the dangerous wasteland to look for one person.

And then there is the twist, and ending. I don’t mind it particularly, I don’t even know that it does necessarily contradict The Ark In Space (could feasibly be long after or way before) or The Mysterious Planet (this is way before that) etc etc. It seems to me that what The Doctor says at the end is relatively reasonable, that on this show we’ve seen myriad future and alternate Earths and they may contradict each other because their future is still being written. Now, the actual message is certainly delivered with the opposite of subtlety, and I feel personally that the message of the story, which I’m of course fully on board for, could’ve been better explored if this was a completely fictional alien planet and the drama helped us understand what a rich and vibrant planet had been lost and turned into a cheap holiday facsimile. I also might have preferred if the saboteur’s plan was less familial and more about some kind of activism related to the planet or the mutants, essentially to make this more like S24 we’d want this to be some kind of corporate satire, the parent company is exploitative or even causes the disasters that create orphan worlds for their galactic hotel chain. All kinds of elements are here to play with, and I like lots of them, but the story or the edit doesn’t present them too favorably. Can’t manage much more than a 2.5/5, unfortunately.

Oh, this is EXCELLENT. The 9DAs have a first season that felt rockier to go through than it ultimately was, almost entirely down to them sticking Ravagers first. If Ravagers were the third box set, after Respond To All Calls and Lost Warriors, I think I would’ve had a much smoother time (and rated Ravagers much more highly). In the end, there are several big highlights from these first 12 eps, and this season finale 2-parter is way up there.

After attending the funeral in the previous story, The Doctor decides to look up The Brig and say hello, tell him what their friendship has meant to him. But of course there’s no such thing as a casual drop-in with The Doctor, and they’re soon dealing with ghosts baked into the Forth bridge as psychic impressions, an experimental submarine being developed by UNIT, and the lost partner of a creature The Doctor met on the set of Metropolis.

Culshaw was the main thing for me to adjust to here. It’s a very, very good impression, and I have heard several of the 3DAs he’s in. He maybe works better as young blustery Alistair than he does as older Battlefield/Lanyon Moor Alistair, but the writing nails the friendship between the two, and Eccleston really sells it. I am gleaning that it’s an Eccleston directive not to get into the traumatized ex-warrior side of 9’s psyche, which does seem like a particular shame here when confronted with one of his best friends, who is a lifelong soldier. But 9 also believably doesn’t want to get into it.

The quality of the writing is really spectacular here, especially all the atmosphere and history and love of Scotland that forms the most lovely lines in Part 1. Fiona is such a great character, she is set up to have Big Companion Energy, like a Lynda with a Y, and while she does not meet quite the same fate, it is still heartbreaking and painful. Sam Bishop I do not know as well, I’ve only listened to one or two UNIT boxes, but I like the trajectory they set up for him here, I’ll get back into UNIT at some point.

Sound design fantastic, like exceptionally good. The steel Cybermen stalking across the sea bed is so perfect. And the descriptions of this new generation of Cybermen and their appearance and how they were built, excellent.

A lovely, thoughtful but increasingly action-packed script with a great use of a classic monster that follows on from their previous great use and finally sells the feel that this was a Season of episodes. I’ll absolutely listen to this one again, I loved it. 4.5/5

A very strong start to the fourth 9DA box, this is a story about a future funeral parlor that provides a unique service to its rich patrons in offering a simulacrum of their departed loved ones for a limited time on the day; essentially, the dead can attend their own wake. The Doctor comes to visit at the behest of the deceased, a noted galactic animal conservationist who knew he was dying from a fatal disease and had many corporate enemies. Only, his simulacrum doesn’t remember The Doctor, or his former assistant Sasha Yan, and then the robotic Attendants start electrocuting people. It’s a pretty great standalone low-stakes adventure very much in the style of S1, and it succeeds at it! Good sound design and pretty decent music. Some minor nitpicks, it probably doesn’t need to be a full hour, a bit of trimming might have helped the pace, and Juliet Stevenson is perhaps chewing just a little bit too much of the audio scenery, but I thought this was a fun and engaging bit of Ninth Doctor audio drama, nicely written by David K Barnes. 4/5

The second standalone adventure for 8/Liv/Helen is a pseudo/celeb-historical about famous psychic debunker Harry Price and a real-life case from the 1930s involving a lonely young girl and her talking mongoose, Gef. The atmosphere is great in this one, and actually I should say the sound design is notably fabulous in this and Paradox Of The Daleks, and there are some great character moments for Helen in particular, but this isn’t a full success. The Doctor’s characterization is very strange, he’s spent way too long with Helen and Liv to not listen to them to this extent, it’s as if the writers need him to not believe them so that the ending they have in mind works, rather than that being the way these characters as depicted at some length across their previous adventures would behave. And the talking mongoose voice is really extremely difficult to understand most of the time, even though I ultimately really enjoyed that character. And the reveal of what’s actually been going on is very good, there is a thematic core to the story which absolutely does work, the last section is great. So not at all a failure, the atmosphere and setting and Helen’s characterization make this plenty enjoyable, just not a total success either. 3.5/5

A fun, twisty first adventure in the post-box set standalone adventure era for 8 & friends; because of the very twisty time-based nature of this story, andalso driving around in a Dalek, this is essentially an ultra-Space Museum. It’s very cool how John Dorney has planned out the layers of reveals, and it all does click into place, but I think you could shave a full ten minutes off the running time if you just cut out every line where someone apologizes for how complicated time travel is or says they don’t understand what’s happening (one character essentially only says variations of this). The problem with that is that it makes the whole thing feel a bit apologetic for being complicated, which is sort of the opposite of what you want to do. Coupled with several absolutely diabolical lines (“he who smelt it dealt it” is criminal, Dorney), this is not one of my favorite of his scripts, but then he’s very prolific and almost all of them are great. This one is very good, but slightly padded. 3.75/5

This box finishes one of BF’s best four hour epics in fiendish style, beginning straight away with The Master laughing his way through torture by electrocution. At no point when he is in captivity does he not have the upper hand, and when he chooses his moment, he springs his trap. Sir Derek is so good, the plot is so satisfying in its nightmarish resolution, and the sound design is so great, this whole box is perilously close to a 5/5, an evil favorite.

One of the most surreal, terrifying, heartbreaking hours of Big Finish, only made worse by the context of its sting at the end of the subsequent part.I love being trapped inside the vending machine trying not to be eaten. The sound design on this set is so good!

The net tightens slowly but surely in part two, as we fast forward a year after Cassie answered the call. Now Mr Orman has ingratiated himself as a jovial elderly benefactor, hosting children’s parties where he dons clown makeup (horrifying), and eventually, after masterminding a breaking point in relations between Cassie and the governor, convinces the colony to help him steal all the pure Sueno from the mines and pulls off the heist. Once it is stowed, with Cassie’s wife Martine, he is captured by the governor, who threatens to torture him until he gives up the location, which we sense is going to be a violently losing battle in the next installment.

An extremely creepy, nightmarish opening chapter, so many hateful characters, and several you really like, plenty of arresting imagery like the lynched Oods, and every phone call from himself is a sinister highlight.

I was so curious about this one, as an 8/Charley fan, and a fan of Alex Macqueen’s all-systems go version of The Master, but the studio version of this absolutely serviceable but by no means overly inspiring story is a strange experience. This could not be more clearly written to be performed live, with moments where you’re supposed to cheer or boo or gasp or applaud all very signposted, but without the actual response. I suppose I should’ve gone with the live version, had I known that was so much the reason for it existing at all, but even as a music fan I’m not really into live albums, I got my degree in audio production because I like everything you can do with a studio, live albums don’t always translate the actual experience of a song as well as a crafted studio version, for me.

The positives here are that McGann and India are do-it-in-their-sleep good in this pairing, still, they haven’t lost their charming double act and they really don’t sound much different than they did in Time Of The Daleks. Added to that, hearing the original 8 theme arrangement with that churning synth bass really put a smile on my face, that’s one of my all time favorite versions. And Alex Macqueen is deliciousness itself as The Master, he’s playing it for the back row even in this studio version, but then that’s just how he plays it even in Dark Eyes (and this story is intriguing in being maybe the earliest time 8 meets this Master, this is definitely Charley’s first meeting with any Master, or at least the first she will remember, referencing The Light At The End).

The one-off extra companion Emily Barnfather could’ve been a little stronger, the thing of having her narrate from the future with a very different voice made the character feel disjointed, and I’m not sure the folklore and legends element was actually used all that much. The Daleks were my real problem here. A pretty lazy inclusion of them to just juice up the anniversary vibe, and they sound terrible. Dunno what Nick was going for with this particular set of voices, he’s enough of a nerd about it that he’s probably trying to make them the specific squad of Daleks from Destiny or something, but they just sounded silly.

Seemed like there were several plot elements that just went nowhere, but I now see this would be much more fun with some cheering and hooting and hollering from an engaged crowd. Studio version is a bit strange! 3.25/5

isn’t that an exciting cover? Shame the story it is attached to is not overly compelling! This is a nice setting in theory for the 9th Doctor, an Upstairs/Downstairs situation in the 1930s where he will of course side with the staff over the snooty gentry, and there is a nightly visit from a pack of alien creatures on horseback shouting about “flesh.” The things that happen in the story are quite predictable, and not played with enough fun or wit for that not to matter; also the class stuff, which is very promising 9 material, doesn’t really marry to the sci-fi stuff in a way that illuminates either. There are opportunities to get into 9’s post-Time War psychology, but they are firmly not taken, plus some really awful characters get away with no real comeuppance. Annette Badland is in this, and her voice is so great, her scenes with Eccleston are why I still rate Boom Town very highly as an RTD script, but she is not given much of a character here, nobody is really, even the villain reveal is too late to really get into what they are about. Some good Doctory bits though, of course, he’s very sarcastic. Disappointing one. 3/5

I really enjoyed the second story in the third 9DA box, Lost Warriors. It has so much going for it in the characterization department with the difference between the dramatic myth and the historical reality of Lady Macbeth and husband (Neve McIntosh is simply fabulous here, Anthony Howell is great, David Rintoul is great, all given so much juicy stuff to do, every character goes through changes across the story), and Chris Eccleston is meta-textually the right actor for the story with his general Shakespeare credentials and very famous theatre run as Mr Macbeth, plus his Doctor strikes up exactly the right kind of friendship founded on respect with Ru (the nickname he develops for Mrs M). She is a great one-off companion, and the turn of the story around her inability to destroy the changelings for compelling character reasons is just very satisfying. The nature of the creature was a bit vague to me, the resolution was a little abstract in a way I wasn’t sure about, but I still appreciated the outcome, 9 fans all love a Doctor Dances ending. The 9/Ru chemistry is so strong and the characters so well-drawn by Lizzie Hopley that I really liked it even with some fuzzy plot bits. Strong 3.75/5

Well, there’s your first out-and-out classic 9DA! Absolutely lovely marriage of ideas, a great script from John Dorney, fantastic sound design, Eccleston in full effect, one of Nick Briggs’ best performances…basically everything works. Not to rewrite history too much, but when I share these with my dad I am going to point him to Girl, Deconstructed, Planet Of The End, The Curse Of Lady Macbeth, and this as if they were the first box set. It’s a very clever riff on the TV story Dalek, reducing this monster race down to just one of them and really digging in on its particular psychology and situation, and it’s ultimately pretty moving, nicely tragic. It also finds its true villain’s motivation and a really lovely last scene in tying the Cybermen’s ideology to the slow motion slide into an authoritarian regime. Great supporting cast, well-directed. Loved this very much, a top end BF production! 4.75/5

This is my favorite S11 story, even if I think Demons Of The Punjab is the best piece of TV drama they made that year, and Witchfinders and Rosa are absolutely top notch, there is something so purely, perfectly Doctor Who about this mad blend of styles and emotions and big ideas. We are dealing with a sentient pocket universe made of energy fundamentally incompatible with ours to a destructive degree, it is lonely and seeks to gain either access to our universe or some company for its own solitary existence, and it tries to tempt people through offering them a convincing simulacrum of their lost loves (Graham and Grace break my heart here). Between our world and that one, an Anti-Zone grows as a natural barrier between incompatible energies, with flesh moths and The Actor Kevin Eldon scavenging for some kind of existence in that nothing place. And we start in Norway so we can get a little Scandy noir vibe going. There are two things that ping me here, one is why Ryan is quite so harsh about Hanna’s dad leaving (I understand character-wise what they are going for, but it feels better suited to a Ryan earlier in the series, he feels like he’s grown more by this point and wouldn’t be quite so blunt), and the other is how Erik initially found the portal, or why the Solitract picked specifically him, specifically that mirror. But not everything has to be answered, some things are better left vibey. I couldn’t love the concept of a toxic universe that wants to be friends more, and I can’t think of much that is more totally Doctor Who than that universe choosing to appear as a frog on a chair.I love this one. 4.25/5

A story I like a whole lot, not least for being one of a string of Jodie-era eps that have a specifically Sylvester McCoy vibe to their setting (Orphan 55 I have always liked because it feels like it could be from S24, in a good way!), but this is another one that is divisive, at least thematically.

I think everyone could agree that this episode *looks* fantastic, the design of the warehouse, little break zone park, the production design of all the signage in the background, and of course The Teammates themselves, that’s all pretty ideal. Jennifer Perrott, who also directed The Tsuranga Conundrum, keeps the pace nice and high when required, the editing when Yaz is pursued through the Triple 9s is really good.

I suppose where we get into questions is the resolution to the story, and here’s how I read it: the Kerblam! business is of course exploitative and largely awful, Lee Mack can only see his child once a week for example. The Kerblam! computer system, on the other hand, has more empathy than the people that manage it, and senses, tries to stop on its own, then eventually has to directly ask The Doctor for help to avert a truly senseless massacre. You could reasonably ask if the system is trying to save lives out of what The Doctor perceives as empathy or merely making a sound business calculation about needing to keep customers alive in order to have people to buy things lol.

So, The Doctor must clearly avert the deaths of 100,000 people, she begs and tries to convince Charlie not to do it in every way she can think of, but he starts it anyway, then smashes the device so she can’t quickly stop him. Despite the girl he loved dying in front of him (the computer system’s murder of this almost comically nice girl as a ploy for his empathy is pretty intense as a plot element), he commits to killing a ton of innocent people because he believes it will erode trust in Kerblam and automation in general. He can’t be allowed to kill people on that scale no matter how exploitative an employer Kerblam is.

Her only option in the time given is to keep the deadly bubble wrap (so good as an idea on multiple levels) there where it is, set it off now where it can only destroy The Teammates and the Kerblam dispatch area, and escape with everybody using one of their robot heads as a short-range teleport. Charlie is the one who runs away from them and will not come back no matter how much she pleads. I don’t know what else she was supposed to do for him, he made a choice. I guess this is divisive in a similar way to the scenes with Kid in Interstellar Song Contest, it’s uncomfortable to see The Doctor seemingly side with a big corporate entity, but the way I see this one, it is more that an intelligent computer system begged for help in averting a massacre, and Charlie refused to be swayed and refused to be saved.

In the end, Judy believes she now has leverage to hire more actual people (a majority she says anyway) and treat them a little better, I don’t know that I could reasonably expect The Doctor and friends to bring down this entire galaxy’s economy on their way passing through? The company is ubiquitous because the galaxy is making the choice to use it, those people definitely do need a wake-up call, but the death of 100,000 people can’t be it. I will agree that The Doctor certainly doesn’t need to be *quite* so gung ho about the company from the very beginning, although her excitedly saying “Kerblam man” is a highlight anyway. I guess we must also picture the 11th Doctor up late, a few wines in, ordering a new Fez on the Kerblam! app and giving it a door code pin to access the TARDIS when it arrives lol.

I think the plot logic all works for me, and it is consistent with The Doctor’s character that you exhaust every method you can to convince, cajole, compel the antagonist to change their ways and failing that you just have to stop them, and even then you try to save them but if they’re committed killers then honestly not all that hard (Dinosaurs On A Spaceship). Good that this one makes you think that through, though! Is it right or is it wrong? Was Charlie right to some degree, sure he was! There are some clunky bits of writing earlier on that I think are way more worthy of criticism, like Ryan just saying the thing about his coordination issues twice out loud largely unwarranted. But I really want to read the novel, I like what this story is up to a lot and I love how it looks. 3.75/5

The fourth episode of S11 has several great things in it, like the final sequence where the fam make the conscious choice to keep traveling with The Doc for their own individual reasons, and Yaz’ family are fun to meet (love The Doctor’s reaction to “are you two seeing each other?”). I also like the DW trope of monsters who are not really monsters at all, but victims of the human villains, invariably morally bankrupt capitalists, as here.

My criticism with this episode (apart from the title being, I guess, some sort of weird pun on “Anarchy In The UK”) is the character of Jack Robertson, who I just find a little bit perplexing. He’s explicitly not Trump, as stated in dialogue, but he is nonetheless clearly a kind of Trump analog for the purposes of the episode’s satirical points. I find that weird, muddy. Why have him be both Trump and not Trump? He’s also not particularly consequential here, again I do like the running theme of this series that the villains are often small men with delusions of importance, but without him being a little bit more threatening this episode falls a little flat in that element.

But again, the effects are pretty great here, the spiders are very well-rendered, the sound is great too. The things I like are all the fam dynamics, the Graham thread really touches me as somebody on their own grief journey, Yaz is really good, Jodie especially good in the fam moments. Not a favorite story but better than I remembered, even though I’m not sure they really solved the wider Sheffield spider problem before scooting off?? 3.25/5

Time has not changed my opinion that this is one of the best episodes of Doctor Who, certainly since the revival, but also one of its very best pieces of historical sci-fi (& so much like a throwback to Hartnell-era educational historicals). The conflict over small nudges to the web of time is extremely clever, and making the central conflict about preserving a moment in history, even if the role The Doctor and her friends have to play in it is ultimately uncomfortable, it’s just all a bit brilliant. I had always hoped we would see Krasko again (“Oi, Brando!!”) if only to learn if he had other space racist associates and deal with him/them properly.

The really wonderful thing about this script and the way it’s played is that they fully approach and interrogate the racism of 1955 Alabama, relate it to the present, allow us to feel both ways about how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go, and yet this is still a Doctor Who episode with plenty of funny moments (Graham pretending to be The Doctor’s husband, touching her shoulder and her disgusted face, Graham and Ryan annoying the bus driver) and also a space racist from the future with a time displacement weapon. It doesn’t make light of the subject but still makes it fit into a DW framework.

I love both of Jodie’s scenes facing off with Krasko, but especially the second one where she’s already figured him out but still pushes him to the point of throttling her to prove it. She’s The Doctor, when she says she’s gonna stop you, you get stopped, son. A delightful running theme this series is that the villains are often little petty dweeb men with tech or connections but no backbone.

Shooting this and Ghost Monument in South Africa was really smart, it pays dividends in feel because although this isn’t exactly giving the south of America, it certainly doesn’t feel like Cardiff either, so it does sell the setting. Three great opening episodes, and this is my favorite of the three. US accents can be rough on DW (Daleks In Manhattan, woof) but it’s all pretty solid here. 4.75/5

I really like this second episode, we finally get that title sequence, and let me just get some hot takes out of the way: best theme arrangement, most atmospheric title sequence, best logo of the revival era! The bit near the top from Yaz waking up through The Doctor crash landing that’s done as a single six minute take is so exciting! I enjoy the framework of the race, and I always like when the TARDIS gets abandoned somewhere and the local population form a whole myth around this weird object.

The Remnants are cool but maybe not explored enough for me, and the explanation of what happened on the planet always feels rushed, but I remember we do come back to Stenza business. And I love The Doctor demonstrating to Ryan why brains are better than bullets, that’s absolutely classic stuff. Jodie is fantastic throughout, love how genuinely unsettled she is by “the timeless child.”

This episode looks absolutely stunning, the outdoor sequences are really pretty next level gorgeous, and the fam dynamic is very strong already. 3.75/5

13 rewatch begins! The Woman Who Fell To Earth! Girlfriend and I watched all these when they first aired, it was her first live Doctor Who since early Matt Smith, feels really nice to come back to them. We loved this again tonight!

Jodie is an absolute treasure from the second she opens her mouth, I am sold on her as my protagonist, as The Doctor specifically, and as an absolute sparkly ball of charisma on screen, she is so much fun constantly (“A half hour ago I was a white-haired Scotsman!”). The building the Sonic scene is iconic stuff, and I love that this Doctor is so hands on, such a fixer, a doer, an engineer. I cried again about Grace, who is such a great character in the short time we get with her, and her plan at the end actually does work! She would’ve been such a great member of the fam.

I really like Graham and Ryan, but I feel so warmly towards Yaz in particular, right from her first scene, she’s such a clever and capable person who’s just immediately charmed by The Doc. She must be the only companion who is in every episode of their Doctor’s tenure, even Jamie showed up in the second Troughton story, and Donna/14 don’t really count (Rose/9 kind of don’t either, because 9 clearly has adventures pre-Rose, and Rose carries on with 10; Yaz meets The Doctor a half hour after she regenerates and leaves a half hour before she regenerates). I love the idea of the Stenza trophy hunt, and that Tim Shaw is a cheating little loser.

But the main thing to say, and I remember feeling this at the time, this is possibly the best the show has ever looked. Girlfriend made a point of saying, and we’ve watched all of the 15th Doctor pretty recently, “this one doesn’t look like a TV show at all, it looks like a movie!” The cinematography, lighting, special effects in Jodie’s era are outstanding. And this has one of the great surprise cliffhangers of the reboot! Also, of course, I adore “Eat my salad, Halloween.”

One of the best first episodes for any new Doctor, not as good as The Eleventh Hour which is pretty hard to beat, but certainly miles better than The Christmas Invasion (I’ve never ever liked that one), or Church On Ruby Road. Rose is iconic for sure but I do find I have to apologize for it a bit when I show it to people. Don’t have to apologize for anything about this one. 4.25/5