Like most episodes of this era, it's a mixed bag.

I wish it delivered on the themes it establishes in the first act. Here we have the first female Doctor running headfirst into what is perhaps the ultimate sexism. She is actively discriminated against and is facing a (female) villain who is specifically weaponizing misogyny to hurt other women. There's a lot of meat in that premise and I just don't see what we get out of it other than Jodie remarking that she'd be taken more seriously if she was "still a bloke."

I'm not saying the episode has to be a YouTube essay on historical sexism, but this really could have been an all-time classic if it WENT THERE. We get tantalizingly close, too. Comments like "oh, you won't get pockets for a few hundred years" are genuinely funny, but they'd be excellent little asides keeping our focus on the episode's central theme without hitting us over the head if the episode was going to GO THERE.

Instead the resolution is like any other. They figure out the sci-fi bullshit and save the day by touching a tree or something.

I can't help but feel there's a more powerful resolution we're missing, a more powerful resolution that dares to explore what it means for the Doctor to have this face. Basically Jodie never got her Dot and Bubble and it's a bummer. (I'm leaving this review in February 2025 so here's hoping the audios starting this summer GO THERE.)

Cinematography and music are excellent, as they often are in this era.

This story has it all. Eccleston hating on the monarchy. A relentlessly funny companion. A giant last-of-its-species creature as a metaphor for the Doctor's loneliness post-Time War. A character I can only describe as "the smell pervert." Truly a classic.

I don't know how closely novelizers have to hew to the story they're retelling, so maybe having lousy source material is part of the problem here but I really didn't enjoy this story or the way it was written. It's difficult to describe exactly what I didn't like; the writing simply didn't feel very interesting. There's a flow and a consistent humor to many of the other Doctor Who books I've read that is simply lacking here.

I actually picked up this novel because I had just finished Alien Bodies and wanted to get into the 8th Doctor more. I figured I'd start with the novelization of the tv movie because it had been such a long time since I'd seen it. I figured this would be a sort of refresher before starting in on the Eighth Doctor Adventures. As soon as I finished this book, I picked up Vampire Science, and the difference was night and day. I am much more gripped by the opening pages of VS than I was by anything in the novelization.

I think the tone is weird in the novelization. It doesn't really succeed at giving us the absurd, humorous but dark, vibe of the best Doctor Who. Sometimes it feels childish, sometimes it veers into the grim, seemingly on accident. When the goo that is the Master slithers down a human's throat to possess the body, we see it from the goo's perspective, and it describes the man "gagging and dying." That's really grim, but it's just cut into a story that otherwise feel childish. The characters don't feel very deep and therefore they feel a little stupid. Am I supposed to root for Chang Lee? For Grace Holloway? There's a way of telling this story where I do, I'm sure, but this wasn't it.

Toward the end, the action picks up a little and it gets a little better but that was really only worth half a star in my estimation.

Wow. Following Auld Lang Syne, yet another fantastic Ninth Doctor audio. I'm sure I won't be the first to comment how wonderful it is to land on a world of reimagined peace-loving Sontaran utopians. Or maybe I will be the first. I understand it was controversial, in NuWho, to make Strax, and by extension the rest of the Sontarans, comic relief rather than terrifying threat. But as someone who grew up solely with the revived series, I had no affinity for earlier, scarier incarnations and felt they always worked well as a slightly absurd threat — dangerous enough but not series finale material you know?

Dan Starkey was spot on as always, giving a performance I always love, whether it's Strax (who is cheerfully violent) or these Sontarans (who are cheerfully ignorant of war). He gives us comic relief characters that are somehow more, that are somehow characters we root for and care about despite or because of their ridiculous qualities.

A wonderful story, smartly written, "Salvation Nine" recommits us to those ideals that make Doctor Who great: the pursuit of peace, the possibility of redemption, the promise of new beginnings. Thank you, Timothy X Atack, Starkey, Eccleston and the rest of the cast and crew who put out yet another great adventure.

Auld Lang Syne, the third and final episode of the Ninth Doctor's "Back to Earth" boxset, dug into an element of time that Doctor Who, despite being all about time, hardly ever explores. Specifically: the way families build meaning across time with traditions kept.

Leah Brotherhead's Mandy Litherland meets up with the Doctor once a year for, IIRC, basically four years running, which seems like a short time to get to know someone and a short time to form such a friendly bond. But as her sister points out toward the end of the episode, that can be enough when the people are right. It strikes me that this is also how well a lot of us know our families, especially extended family. We meet up for the holidays, having grown or suffered an entire year in the interim. It creates a rift to be sure. Your family doesn't know you the way your day-to-day friends and acquaintances might. But there's also something deeper about seeing someone once a year through a large chunk (or all) of their life. So structuring a story around these time windows that have the Doctor popping into our hero's life year after year is a neat way to explore that.

Mandy is a great one-off companion, too. Interested (maybe in love) without being starstruck. Really enjoyed the way Brotherhead played off of Eccleston. And her reason for not traveling with the Doctor at the end of the episode makes sense: it would preclude her from visiting this family we have seen she loves. Sometimes, companion exits feel cheap (Really? You're not going to travel in SPACE and TIME so that you can go do [insert mundane thing you could also do in 10,000 BCE or on Mars just as easily]. Looking at you Dan.) so it was nice that her exit didn't.

Enjoyed this. Would recommend. Going to keep listening to the Ninth Doctor audios.