This is a cute but very simple and somewhat pointless comic.  It's written by Paul Cornell, which is a fun bit of trivia, but the real attraction here is the art by Lee Sullivan.  As this story features both the Second and Seventh Doctor, Sullivan does a great job at bringing both characters and some associated companions to life in his work.  It's very impressive.

As for the story, the Doctor's old signet ring falls into the TARDIS and some wonky stuff happens.  It is quite insubstantial, but hardly an inoffensive read, either.

Blink is one of the all-time great Doctor Who horror stories. It used to be my go-to as an introductory story for the franchise for newcomers, but I've since shied away from that a little bit. Blink is almost too scary and too good to the extent it feels as though it might leave new viewers with the wrong impression for the larger franchise. It's better for something fans discover on their own time, and let its work its magic more naturally without the weight of being somebody's first episode.

I love the framing of this story and it does a really good job of featuring the Doctor in a very limited role. Sally Sparrow is extremely entertaining and well done as a protagonist. I can totally see why she was considered for a more full-time companion part.  That would have been very cool.

The Angels are every bit as terrifying as when I first saw this episode. Blink is extremely re-watchable and holds up really well against the test of time. Even the DVD extras don't feel culturally irrelevant all these years and innovations later. It's easy to forget how ingenious these monsters were right out of the box, too. Moffat had a really good idea here and it is explored excellently across the episode, with so much care and attention given to building suspense and tension as we learn more and more about the Weeping Angels. It's a really strong build-up to a scary ending I really didn't know how our characters were going to survive, and the little trick with the TARDIS at the end works well for a quick resolution. Fine content overall, especially because you can figure out how everything fits together right at the ending in a way that is immensely satisfying for any story.

I guess the ratings and reputation of Phobos should have warned me, but some people really like this one and I was hoping I might have been one of them.  I was left deeply disappointed by this audio, however.  Something about the adrenaline junkie characters just rubbed me the wrong way - I found them very loud, tropey, and annoying. They're bad characters in a horror movie in a story that kind of had the sophistication of Scooby Doo.

I never bought this setting.  I feel like the idea of a story taking place in a theme park centred around adrenaline would be a lot more interesting but I didn't really feel like the audio brought me into it.  We have so few characters and none of them feel real to me, and the whole idea of the theme park seemed at odds with the snowy mountain setting and fear-based content.  The story just really doesn't seem to come together in a coherent way I could grapple with.

There's an interesting idea buried here all about a fear god feeding on these people but I found the execution of it all just terrible.  Sure, it winds up having the Doctor pull a Rings of Akhatan years before that episode was made, but the show does that moment so much better.  It's a cool moment here but it feels underplayed and everything else going on here leaves me feeling hollow.  It just takes us so long to get to anything I found interesting and not just this shallow mess.  I think that's why the Doctor's big moments in this story felt really underwhelming to me - they don't feel earned in a story that simply wasn't engaging with me.  I had trouble simply caring about this fear god when all the other characters feel entirely unnecessary for the story, nor do they get any real pay-off in the form of any sort of narrative arc.  Considering that the fear-god thing feels entirely abstract and in-personable as a main threat, I'm left feeling like this was kind of a waste of my time. From my experience, Phobos has serious narrative issues and deserves its relatively low grade.

This wasn't terrible and reminds me a bit of Revelation of the Daleks, in that both seem to stand out a bit better as content compared to the rest of the season.  I found this story a lot harder to get through than Revelation, though.  In comparison, this one spends a lot of time with really lousy dialogue that feels totally forced and unnatural, while, even though this story isn't really that long, it feels like it drags on a bit.  The whole historical background of this story was interesting but most of the scenes that come out of it wound up being pretty boring.  I've really come to dislike Anthony Ainley's acting for the Master, too.  He's just not fun like Roger Delgado or even the Decaying Masters were.

I'm giving it a decent bit of a pass though, because at the end of the day, it has a goofy comic book feel to it I could quite appreciate.  The Rani and the Master teaming up is simple, but a lot of fun, and I did enjoy how they introduce her character here.  We basically don't have any other female recurring villains like this and won't again until Missy, I guess, so it is nice to see her here and this might just be the only halfway good television Rani story, so that's something.

This is a very weird story, but I sure enjoyed it more than I didn't.  Compared to the rest of Season 22, it does feel a bit like a masterpiece, but I'm not so sure it is totally immune to the larger, troubling trends of this season, it just mitigates that with a lot of creative content around the Daleks.  Look, even by this point in the show's history, the Daleks can get a little repetitive, but this feels anything but the usual Dalek affair.  I really like the body horror elements around the Glass Dalek, but tragically, that stuff does feel minimal compared to the larger nature of the story and its scope.  Yet that other stuff is pretty good, too.  Peri and the Doctor don't quite feel like the nightmares they've been all season, while the stuff with Davros was pretty well done overall.  Still, it feels like a nice culmination of what has come so far in the 80s Dalek stories, and I have to say I am largely on board with these takes on the Daleks.  I was definitely entertained overall and that compares well to a lot of the other lesser Dalek stories that come before and after Revelation of the Daleks.  That's really all one can ask for.

Well, here it is.  My very last review of Torchwood TV.  It's been both fun and a bit of a nightmare revisiting this series, so I'm glad I'm able to close out on one of the best (if not the best) standalone episodes.  Fragments is really cool, featuring a number of flashbacks of each of the Torchwood team joining up with Jack's crew.  It's a particularly devastating thing to do in the midst of what feels like they are killing off the entire main cast and essentially ending the series as we know it.  This episode would be an easy 10/10 and a haunting memory - and in many ways it still is - but I do hit the same problem I always struggle with regarding Torchwood.  These characters have been presented as liars, cheaters, and date rapists.  It is really hard to fully sympathize with someone like Owen (or really anyone on the team) when they have been so thoroughly depicted as despicable people all in the name of having a show seem adult and mature.  Still, most of that can't be blamed on Fragments, which is solid TV and a great chapter in Torchwood history.  In a better show, this would be an episode of legends on the level of something like the Red Wedding.  As it stands, it is an interesting bit of trivia for the slightly more hardcore Doctor Who fans out there.

I checked out Quinnis as I started getting into more of Susan's arc with the Eighth Doctor. The importance of this to that story is very minimal at best, as Quinnis almost completely stands on its own, although listeners will note a very direct reference in the introduction to An Earthly Child. This story fills in the details of a random line Susan has in The Edge of Destruction from the classic TV series, and Quinnis sets up the events that would lead to the pilot episode of Doctor Who, An Unearthly Child. The TARDIS' chameleon circuit even works here, which I found very fun as a detail.

All that is pretty cool. Even more interesting is the idea of the setting, the world of Quinnis in the Fourth Universe. This is a pretty cool setting that should lead to imaginative content. Unfortunately, the Fourth Universe doesn't really feel all that different from an alien world in our universe. I really wish the actual plot was more creative, because the production itself is rock solid. The special effects and music do a great job at establishing mood. Quinnis is a jungle world and I feel like production did a good job with that. Susan is great, Carole Ann Ford bringing a retroactive life to her character that gets to be more dynamic and active than she ever was in the show. Carole also does a pretty good impression of the First Doctor. It's also neat because Ford's daughter is performing with her here, and they work well together, even if Tara-Louise Kaye's character left a lot to be desired.

It's an interesting audio in that the weakest element is by far the writing but everything else is good enough it is at least worth listening to once. I was most entertained by the bonus interview where Ford and her daughter just got to talk about this stuff and their perspective on the story and Doctor Who as a whole, more than the actual story of Quinnis, which is an unfortunate sign if there ever was one.

A pretty strong finale overall.  I like how ballsy Exit Wounds is and how tough this conflict really feels on our main characters.  It really feels like they practically killed off the main cast with this one and it's not something you typically see on television, so it definitely stands out in a positive way and this finale, coupled with Fragments, really puts forward Torchwood as something of value where it often had struggled with this consistent level of mature tone up until this point.  It feels like we finally reach a point where Torchwood is working for me, and the status quo is basically permanently thrown out the window in the process, with the show never returning to its more standard, episodic approach from here on out.

So it's bittersweet as hell, very much feeling like the end of an era that only now really found its footing.  Though I do have to admit even here, the sense of misery porn the show too often revelled in prevent this episode from really being something I can whole-heartedly say I enjoyed or consider truly great.  I get worn down by how depressing of an experience this is for the Torchwood team after a while.  At a certain point, it's hard to feel for Jack when his experience is this distressing.  It's upsetting to watch and not something I'd be eager to revisit any time soon, but boy, what an experience it was overall.  I'm glad I watched and can appreciate the craftsmanship behind the story, but it is a tiring viewing experience in a lot of ways.  It doesn't necessarily fall on the degree of dark storytelling - look no further than Torchwood's own Children of Earth for a darker story - but one I found less exhausting.  And that has a lot to do with the pacing and structure of the story, which I think Exit Wounds really struggles with.

I think this episode is a little underrated.  It's an episode that appears to just be the usual old fogey shallow complaints about youth culture - the type of content that has been created for all of human history - yet I think it hides a much smarter satire more on the level of something like Black Mirror.  Maybe I'm just a big dumb-dumb and I really can only speak from my privileged perspective, but I really resonated with that twist at the end.  Not only was it a surprise to me, but it's one that reflects everything we had seen in the episode up until that point and re-frames just about everything about the racist main character and her racist friends.  I really loved the Doctor's reaction to being rejected because of its race.  That felt powerful and is a nice moment in what turns out to be a rare thing with this Doctor, where I actually connected with his character.  It's funny, I think, from a character perspective, the Fifteenth Doctor's personality struggles to break through out of a lot of his stories, but here, in an episode he's barely in, he really gets to shine in that memorable moment at the end.

Anyways, it's a really cool episode overall, that I've only come to appreciate more over time.  Ricky September is just such a fun name for a character, and the absolute dreamboat we stan in my household.  Dot and Bubble overall was a nice surprise and a great treat that stands out in what is already a pretty strong season of television overall.  The whole Season might not be the best overall, but it does have amazing episodes like this one that really help make it stand out from the average season of Doctor Who.

The final story and what could have been the last ever episode of the revived series, Power of the Doctor delivers a lot of great moments, a plot that achieves the bare minimum of coherence and thought too many other Chibnall episodes lacked, and even a handful of memorable moments I think will stand out in franchise history. For once.

Look, some of this review might seem backhanded and maybe even a little bitter, but the reality is Chibnall's era had a lot of problems to it from the ground up, and they are hard to ignore in a story that both celebrates and ignores it. So many plotlines, like the Timeless Child and even stuff like the Time Lord Cybermen, are effectively abandoned (sure, the Cyber Lords are here but their ability to regenerate might as well just be trivia at this point), yet it largely all feels for the best. Instead of trying to tie up any of that nonsense, we instead get a story with some potential where the Master takes over the Doctor's body.

This alone could have been so fun. You could have had Sacha Dhawan acting like the Doctor while Jodie Whittaker gets to be the Master. But no, it's barely explored or used at all. The fact that Jodie takes a backseat in this episode a bit just so Sacha can dress up like the Doctor and still act like the Master is pretty... empty, the more distant I get from watching the finale. What was the point? It does not help that both Dhawan and Whittaker have been weak as the Master and the Doctor in my eyes. The Master feels way over the top while Jodie feels practically disengaged at all times. Is it not telling that this episode feels like a decent farewell to Jodie even though she's not in it for huge chunks of the story? I don't think that would sit right with any other Doctor, but because 13 is such a non-character it doesn't even feel like that (or the full abandonment of Chibnall lore) matters in the slightest.

And for those to whom it does matter, that Jodie is not around for much of this story, and nothing up until this point in her story really matters for this arc, this feels like a bit insulting to those who actually enjoyed the metanarrative of Chibnall's era, because that Timeless Child arc, the Division - all of that is completely ignored and likely to not be brought up again for a long, long time. So I have to imagine Chibnall fans must find this episode... frustrating, on some level.

So even something like this, with, I admit, many, many moments and cameos I enjoyed, I still think it was just okay. I loved the stuff with the other Doctor cameos, including the Fugitive Doctor. Jo Martin consistently shows off how much better she would have been in 13's shoes. In spite of my issues with Dhawan as the Master, I like him as a performer and got a good laugh out of his dance scene, and Ace was pretty amazing any time she was around. Even Graham was a welcome sight.

Everything else... it just felt like good riddance to what I am increasingly convinced is the worst ever era of Doctor Who. I really hope we get past the editing, music, casting, writing, and so much more that was endemic to the Whittiker era. Just about everything in it outside of a handful of episodes just drained me of so much enthusiasm for this franchise. Even something as cool as this, bringing back Classic Companions and Doctors, the Eighth Doctor in all his glory, and even the wild fun of the ending moments with Tennant, the best Chibnall could do with all of that was a story that was just okay.