Saying that this one literally pales in comparison to its predecessor is too easy a joke for me to pass up. Aside from the drab color palette, it lacks the humor of the first one (due in part to Ian's absence). Bernard Cribbins and especially Jill Curzon are good - and arguably much closer in spirit to the original Ian and Barbara than the first movie's characters of those names - but Louise and Tom simply aren't as enjoyable to watch. Moreover, there are several instances where Daleks seem to just stand still and let themselves be defeated, and generally too much seems not to have been thought through. For instance, as Dr. Who himself notes, how are these Daleks able to move on any turf if they're older than those in the first movie? Louise's "female Sherlock Holmes" outfit looks great, but what's the reason for it?

On the other hand, it (like the original serial) is ahead of its time in its inclusion and depiction of Dortmun as a wheelchair user.

I'm dying to know why nobody made the obvious argument that Andrea was going to die either way - by drowning or by the meteor - so she may as well save everybody else.

this is so much fun you guys are just curmudgeons

I really enjoyed this one. A fun, genuinely creepy Halloween romp. Lisa McMullin doesn't miss.

I really wanted to like this one, because I like haunted houses and I like the Romantics, and it just felt like a letdown. It doesn't help that it revolves around my least favorite Who monsters, but the whole thing just doesn't make a whole lot of sense and feels stapled together. And its appearance isn't nearly as stylish as it should be.

The supposed twist (and consequently, the last third or so of the story) is unutterably clichéd, but this is still a really fun story. It's not as Underground-heavy as, say, The Web of Fear, but it does manage to get in some jibes at Crossrail. I always like DW incorporating mythology and folklore, so I liked the use of elves, and the details like the king feeding birds from his 51st-floor penthouse. Great dialogue too.

I have mixed feelings about the Fugitive Doctor's characterization, but mostly I have to say: Man, it was hypocritical of Thirteen to criticize her for letting Gat use the sabotaged gun when she herself killed the Reconaissance Dalek four episodes ago, after similarly giving it a warning.

A really unsatisfying, muddled plot, but several earnest emotional moments in the last few minutes. I teared up twice!

Alan Cumming: (sees a bit of unchewed scenery) I'll take care of that.

It's a fun, stupid romp, and sometimes that's all you need.

The spiders going after a Trump wannabe played by actual sex pest Chris Noth... the spiders are woke...

I was leery going in to this episode as I'd heard bad things about it, and I've just recently read Rosa Parks' memoir, as well as Our Auntie Rosa, a joint memoir by several of her nieces and nephews. Happily, Chibnall and Blackman did their homework. While some elements of the episode aren't quite accurate (e.g., Mrs. Parks being locked out of the bus in the 40s, rather than choosing to wait for another), they were clearly done to simplify events while remaining basically true to history. And, as in reality, she reacts to the threat of arrest with a calm "You may do that," which literally made me want to stand up and cheer.

The ending tries a bit too hard to wrap things up nicely, and the episode does have a bit of a "gosh golly can't we all get along" attitude, but I can forgive it that.

Hey, at least it's not the Touched by an Angel episode guest-starring the real Mrs. Parks, which does an amazing job of illustrating how racism works with a nuance and level of understanding well ahead of its time, then puts Monica in blackface for ten minutes.

A significant improvement on The Daleks in Colour. The story is mostly intelligible, albeit with the occasional bit left hanging (e.g., how did Lt. Carstairs come into it?). The colourization itself is also much improved; whereas The Daleks had the look of '60s colour TV like Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, with the colours rather pastel, The War Games is still somewhat muted but looks more realistic, similar to the 3rd Doctor era.

On the downside, the continued attempts to modernize the look of the story with CGI inserts and fast edits, particularly cutting away from dialogue to make a voiceover, end up detracting from the experience by making it obvious that it's a re-edit. The flashbacks to The Highlanders and The Wheel in Space are particularly gratuitous. (But at least they didn't do any dizzyingly fast, flashy edits like in The Daleks.)

As for the story itself, I enjoyed it and look forward to watching the original.

Nitpick: Using exclusively Nu Doctors as the Doctor's possible regenerations undermined the attempt to connect Classic and Nu. Should have been the War Doctor (too old), Ten (too thin), Five (too young), and Four (won't do at all).

EDIT: I've now watched the original, and the unexplained things I assumed were cut in the colourization... aren't there either. In fact, I preferred the colour version. So I'm bumping my rating up a half-star.

I'm generally only reviewing/rating the original story or the animation, whichever I saw more of, but I have to make an exception here. The story is a 3.5 (apparently I'm in the minority here!), but my god, the animation is demonic. I appreciate that they were trying to do "something different"... but did it have to be this?

The same general idea as Galaxy 4 and even The Daleks, along with later stories I can't call to mind right now, which meant it felt a bit like a retread. I still enjoyed it though, and the background animation was really nice, though some of the character animation was subpar.

The premise of this sounded dopey, but it actually works well. The ending is incredibly bittersweet and actually made me cry, which I was by no means expecting. It shows, however briefly, a real soft side to the First Doctor that I appreciated.

The Eighth Doctor story is a cool little "you're trapped in here with me/I'm trapped in here with you" type story, with a really enjoyable robot character and Dame Kathryn Drysdale to boot. The Tenth Doctor story is a bland space opera that might have made half of a good TV episode.

It's literally just The Power of the Daleks (Remix), with an interpolation of The Ark in Space. Tom's fantastic though.

This did not need to be as long as it is. Cut ten minutes and make the coda part of the story proper and we'd have been in business. Instead, the exposition is painfully slow.

What an absolute, unadulterated delight!

It has an evil Ood, a lesbian couple fighting for their love (but not against homophobia!), a nicely foreshadowed B-plot, absolutely sparkling dialogue, and of course over-the-top pseudo-Western accents and settings. It's the campest Western I've ever met, and I love that journey for me.

This is a really, really interesting look at the Master being a good guy, if only temporarily. It's worth it for that, and for one line that absolutely stunned me, but my god does it drag on.

This has a really interesting structure, both in that it constantly shifts between the Doctor's and the Brig's (and later Sarah's) perspectives and in its combination of multiple genres and elements: post-medieval and Regency historical, Gothic, hard sci-fi, Christian/European mythology, probably more I'm forgetting already. I didn't enjoy it as much as its predecessor, The Paradise of Death, as its dialogue isn't as snappy and it's denser (hard sci-fi is always hard for me to follow, though). But Christian mythology specifically is something I've always felt is underused in Doctor Who – probably to avoid offense – so it's very cool to see it get some use here. The Brig's uncle is a good comic relief character, and Jeremy is still a solid quasi-companion. On the other hand, by this time Jon wasn't always audibly recognizable as the Doctor, and Sarah is a bit weak and imo even out of character in this.

If I'd been a Whovian as a kid, I would have been obsessed with this story. The Rani's back! And she dresses up as Mel! And she helps the Doctor choose his new outfit! And the Tetraps are the most adorable monsters since the Daleks! (Sorry, The Meep.) And Wanda Ventham's back in yet another fabulous role!

But then... there are three more episodes. The story simply can't sustain that long a script. They should have cut this to 3 episodes and given Delta a fourth. The Rani also isn't as entertaining when she's not fighting with the Master for dominance nor pulling the wool over the Doctor's eyes, and she ends up being a waste of a great actor on a pretty pedestrian villain.

I get that this was an educational piece, but it's handled so badly. The plot, such as it is, is useless, and Sarah comes off as a whiny, screaming idiot. The enemy is even more inexplicable and unbelievable than the Pescatons. This would have been better if it had abandoned the Doctor vs. monster format of the show and just been the Doctor taking Sarah on a tour through time.

If I'm being generous, I can say that this was probably hampered by its format and the practicalities of fitting a story onto two sides of a record. I can imagine that the novel is better.

Right, I've been generous enough. This is a supremely unsatisfying story that moves in leaps and bounds, a bit like getting the first and last five minutes of every episode in a serial and nothing in between. I can't take the Pescatons seriously, and the Doctor and Sarah both seem unusually hapless. Worse still, it has some truly ear-splitting sound effects. The only good thing I can say about it is it has a few funny lines of dialogue.

At literally no point in this story did I understand what was going on.