Thal-plant hybrid tries to incite a communist revolution amongst the Daleks through use of psychedelics. Yeah, this is an odd one.

Frankly, I can't make heads or tails of the message of this one, and I kept losing track of who was a Dalek duplicate, but the dynamic between Six and Charley is excellent; they have a strong emotional arc throughout the story and both Baker and Fisher clearly acted their hearts out.

Overall, confusing but entertaining, with a hard to parse political angle. In other words, solid Who. 7/10.

A hauntingly terrifying and hauntingly beautiful haunted house mystery – one that, as all the best ghost stories do, focuses on the personal rather than the big picture.

It's absolutely excellent.

There certainly feels like there's a bit of lost potential here. The concept of characters meeting their shadow selves is interesting, and could be an excellent way for characters to confront their own flaws and self doubt.

However, this just... doesn't happen. Shadow Ace and Shadow Hex are largely apathetic and uninvolved in the story, not serving any meaningful narrative purpose.

On top of that, the whole plot thread about the native Umbrians being displaced and the rage of the planet itself seems tacked on, and isn't explored in enough depth for it to really pay off. It has potential, but it falls a bit flat.

The highlight of the episode for me was the Doctor doing a little dance with his shadow self to save the day. Was it tacky? Yes. Was it at odds with the tone of the rest of the story? Sure! But McCoy does silly like an expert, and it was a delightfully clownish sequence that made me laugh. Sometimes, that's enough!

Well, this was bloody chilling.

Protect and Survive starts out with an absolutely gripping first part, and frankly, if the entire story had just been Hex and Ace stranded and struggling to survive nuclear fallout, I would have been absolutely on board.

But it didn't stop there. Raising the stakes and changing the game with each part, Protect and Survive remains absolutely gripping.

The introduction of the time loop. The realization that the loop is a prison. Learning just who those prisoners are – and who the jailer is. Every beat raises the atmosphere of  terror, helplessness, and distrust.

The sound design is top notch. The pacing is impeccable – the chilling transition from Peggy getting sick to the radio droning on about burial to both her and Albert being dead in the ground is particularly notable, but the whole episode keeps that standard.

My only quibble is, right at the end, when Hex realizes their escape plan has failed and begins to panic (thus triggering their escape), that moment feels a little cut short. To really drive home the helplessness at the core of this story, it would've helped to have a more drawn out sequence of helpless terror.

But that's a nitpick, and does nothing to prevent me giving Protect and Survive an easy five stars.

I don't know how to feel about this one.

On one hand, it's a solid episode. Nothing crazy, but compelling enough to keep me engaged in the story throughout. Its character work is strong, and it serves, on paper, as a satisfying end to both Hex and Sally's stories.

On the other hand... well, I'm not actually satisfied am I? That's why I'm writing this.

Hex died. It was abrupt and tragic, but also perfectly built up to and executed. What followed was, for me, a profound exploration of grief, giving us both insight into how the Doctor compartmentalizes loss (until he can't) and how Ace can hold onto denial long past the point of it being healthy.

I loved the character of Hector Thomas (even if I wish his emotional state had been delved into with greater complexity). He was a ghost made flesh, a manifestation of Ace's inability to let go.

The culmination of this arc, to my mind, should have made good on all of that emotional buildup. Hector Thomas should have left, or died, and Ace should have had to finally confront the loss that she'd been denying for so long.

Instead, we get a sort of wish fulfilment. Ace learns nothing. Hex gets his happy ending, and his sacrifice means a little less. An arc about a very real exploration of loss and grief ends with a hand wave of elder god magic (who are nice now, actually). Punches were pulled, and it disappoints the lover of beautiful tragedies in me.

All that said, it was a fine episode. I enjoyed listening to it, and it was well written. I just wish it hadn't done what it did.

I found this one rather tedious.

The pieces were all there: an eclectic cast of characters all trapped together in an old house with a dark history, each with their own secrets to be uncovered, and a murderer stalking the house, punishing them for their past crimes. It's a cliché, certainly, but one that tends to make for a gripping story nonetheless.

Night Thoughts drops the ball largely in terms of pacing. The tension is racheted up at the wrong moments, and is low during big reveals. Most of the revelations are had through rather bland exposition, and even the villain of the piece seems content to flatly explain his own deeds, feeling almost like he's summarizing the plot, rather than living it.

By the third part, the tension had all gone out, and I began to wonder why the story hadn't ended already. The subtle tension and dropped hints built up in the first part were replaced with monologues and predictable plot beats. And while I love suspending my belief for madcap Doctor Who plots, a time travel zombie embalmed and stuffed inside a taxidermied bear seemed... comical to a degree that was at odds with the rest of the story.

I don't mind the whole concept behind the story. I just feel like it could have done with a lot more polishing, and, well... some better writing, frankly.

I'm not happy to be giving Flip-Flop such a low rating, because frankly, episodes that get clever with non-linearity and time shenanigans are one of my chiefest delights in Doctor Who. While I can commend Flip-Flop for its clever construction and originality, I simply cannot say that this was an episode I enjoyed.

I shall get the most obvious issue out of the way first: the Slithergee. They seem like obvious bigoted caricatures, striking out at refugees and people with disabilities at once. One could certainly argue that they're meant to be a criticism of people who use their positions as minorities to excuse themselves of the blame for the harm they cause to others, but for that argument to hold, the episode would have had to delve deeper into the characters of individual Slithergee, which it does not. Plus, if you want to see that angle done well, look at Miriam in Jubilee. In comparison, the Slithergee struggle to come off as anything but a blatantly bigoted inclusion to this story.

The Slithergee are not alone in coming off as caricatures in this story. Every single character in Flip-Flop, aside from the Doctor and Mel, seem like cardboard cutouts of characters. President Bailey in particular strikes me as a totally motiveless character, and the dialogue in the scene where she sleeps with her secretary is almost comically unrealistic. The rest of the characters similarly seem to be easily categorized by one word personality traits – dumb, violent, greedy – that leads the entire plot to feel frustratingly farcical.

There are certainly some strong elements in this story; in particular, it's quite fun to realize how the pieces of the story fit together, and realize how earlier details given about the events of the day came to pass. I am, after all, enchanted by story structures like this.

However, the long and short of it is that stories need substance, not just structure, and what little substance there is to be found in this story is lackluster at best, and offensive at worst.

But hey, at least there was a Mind Peeler! When the Eighth Doctor mentioned it in Caerdroia, I thought it was a joke. Shows me, eh?

I'm always a fan of Paul Magrs, though he has a rather particular format. A mad, over-the-top (and sometimes hard to follow) plot; bonkers ideas pulled together into some sort of sense with Iris Wildthyme swanning through the plot like a chaotic juggernaut.

The Wormery follows this format, but it's not quite as successful as Magrs' other work. There's an oddly grim tone to the whole thing, rather than his usual tone of surrealist comedy. The framing device an elderly Mickey telling the horrid tale to a mysterious investigator (who later turns out to be the Seventh Doctor) adds a layer of abstraction to an already overblown plot, and the layers of inter-worm (and shadow) politics leads the plot to be rather all over the place, and not in the fun way.

Iris having her own Valeyard-esque figure in Bianca isn't necessarily a bad choice; I just wish it were better executed. That said, I wish that the Valeyard himself were better executed as a dark reflection of the Doctor, too. Neither the Valeyard nor Bianca feel like a reflection (however twisted) of the character they purport to be – they just feel like rather two-dimensional baddies. Perhaps this is just personal preference, though. I can see how a dark reflection of Iris would be obsessed with order and stability, but I am fonder of a dark version of the character having their existing flaws twisted and exaggerated into wickedness, rather than being a simple opposite.

All that said, The Wormery is still a decent episode. I was never bored throughout it; it always had something fun to throw at me. Was it all one elaborate way to make an episode about wormholes having actual worms? Perhaps. But I find that sort of thing hilarious, so I won't complain.

It's lighthearted, camp, and a good bit of fun! Certainly nothing life-changing, but sometimes you're in the mood for a silly little romp with over-the-top characters and a tropey murder mystery!

I came into Divided Loyalties with a fair amount of foreknowledge – specifically about its controversial introduction of the Deca to the tangled web of Doctor Who canon (the implications of which are neither here nor there to me; I take the Unnatural History approach to Doctor Who canon). And yes, it certainly does that. What I didn't expect, however, is the novel's caring attention to the characterization Fifth Doctor and his companions – particularly Tegan Jovanka.

Gary Russell has written Tegan in a way that shows a deep, and profoundly compassionate, insight into her character, which I found profoundly refreshing. Tegan comes to life in Divided Loyalties, with all her strengths highlighted and her flaws sympathetically understood.

The novel itself is also some proper good fun. The Toymaker is sufficiently celestial and terrifying, and all of his game pieces are humanized just enough for it to be deeply unsettling as they are promptly dehumanized. The crew of the Little Boy II is a bit too large and too expendable for their fates to have much of an impact, but that is the fate of Doctor Who side characters; one must always have meat for the grinder, after all.

My one major issue with the novel lies in the character of Millennia. Aside from a few moments where she shows off some cursory mathematics brilliance, she is not a character with any agency. She feels largely inanimate long before she becomes a puppet, present to be in love with Rallon and to briefly provide the Toymaker leverage over the Doctor. Even her gruesome fate is more of an afterthought, overshadowed by Rallon. The Doctor does not spare a thought towards saving her, and she is given no last words. As one of only two women amongst the Deca, this feels like a rather callous position for her to be in. Though the epilogue paints her and Rallon as a pair, I feel that the greatest tragedy is all Millennia's.

Aside from that, what a topping read! Good show, eh?

73 Yards is one of those episodes, I feel, that is not suited to everyone's tastes. Luckily for me, it was suited perfectly to mine!

I've always been a fan of episodes that don't condescend you by explaining themselves fully, but instead leave room for the viewer to speculate and form their own relationship to the text, and 73 Yards does this excellently. The tension is kept high throughout the episode as the mystery of The Woman remains unresolved, and as Ruby continues to be abandoned by everyone around her. Even when Ruby herself grows accustomed to the spectre, I found myself tensing whenever I spotted her. The ending, to my mind, was perfect - a broken loop and an unbroken circle, with all of the big questions still hanging in the air.

There were a few burrs in the overall experience: the rather ham-fisted allegory of the 'Mad Jack' presidency, some wonky pacing, and the fact that we are meant to believe that Ruby has aged twenty years just by putting on a pair of glasses... but overall, those are minor details. The focus of the episode was that of a rather personal horror and isolation, and the agony of unanswered questions, and that landed perfectly. Bravo!