Doctor Who Reviews: 'The History of the Doctor'

After being a little disenchanted with last week’s dawd-ling, introductory instalment, I’m pleased to report that Cold Blood is an altogether different animal. Where The Hungry Earth was sluggish, Cold Blood is fast as lightening. Where The Hungry Earth was conventional and conservative, Cold Blood is pioneering and provocative...

The Doctor Who Project is the multiple award winning Doctor Who fan fiction series that follows the adventures of an alternate Doctor and his companions. Stories are published as part of an overall season that sees the Doctor face new and original situations in time and space. The penultimate story of Season 37 has been penned by our long-standing contributor Daniel Tessier, and can be downloaded from The Doctor Who Project website by clicking the link below.

The Doctor, Rory and Amy materialise in a Welsh mining village where they are drilling into the centre of Earth and the inhabitants are being dragged under the earth, Frontios-style. There they uncover a clan of Silurians wherein one of the...

After the twisting, temporal majesty of Unnatural Hist-ory, David A McIntee brings us right back down to Earth with Autumn Mist – a novel that couldn’t have been any more different to its predecessor. A pseudo-historical jaunt set during the Battle of the Bulge, Autumn Mist is sodden with the author’s customary level of historic detail, but lacking...

What troubled me going into Paradise 5 was the fact th- at it had been dropped in favour of Terror of the Vervoids - one of my least favourite Doctor Who stories in any medium. Some-one, somewhere must have made the call that Pip and Jane Baker could produce something better than PJ Hammond’s story, and this “something better” ultimately proved to be one of the series’ lowest points. This being the case, how could Para-dise 5 possibly be worth its salt?

'Help us be whole,' its voice writhed. 'Make us unending.'

January 2037.

A new miracle drug, donepezil endochloride, is made available to practitioners specialising in dementia care.

The drug is the first medicine ever to effectively halt the progression of the disease.

February 2037.

In care homes across the country, a number of people with dementia begin to die in extraordinary circumstances.

Post-mortem investigations suggest that in each case, something has burrowed its way out of the victims' brains.

March 2037.

Isaac Foreman is brought the Shoreditch Respite Centre by his "grandchildren", Steven and Dodo.

April 2037.

Isaac Foreman disappears…

Featuring the first Doctor, this short story takes place between the TV stories The Ark and The Celestial Toymaker.

What I really love about Series 5 is that Steven Moffat is really trying to make each episode very different. It reminds me of is the series’ first three seasons, where the producers deliberately plotted their years with stories that went backwards, forwards and sideways. Amy’s Choice is a really good...

The latest series of Doctor Who gets more old-fashi-oned with each episode, with The Hungry Earth providing a very sedate beginning to this story, filled with elements reminiscent of the original series. As well as the return of classic foes the Silurians, we’ve got the heat barrier from The Dæmons, the mighty drilling project from Inferno...

Earth Reptiles, Eocenes, Homo Reptilia or just plain old ‘Silurians’ are amongst Doctor Who’s most recognisable anta-gonists, despite having only appeared in three classic television serials and a handful of stories in the spin-off media. Accord-ingly, their return here has been keenly anticipated...

21ST MAY 2010

On paper, The Magician’s Oath couldn’t possibly have looked any better. A UNIT-era escapade featuring arguably the most remarkable character from that setup, penned by the writer of one of the better BBC Audio tenth Doctor talking books? I’m sure that I wasn’t the only listener with my appetite well and truly whetted. And on most fronts, this Companion Chronicles lives up to its great promise. Writer Scott Handcock has done a great job of running with range producer David Richardson’s...

The Companion Chronicles have enabled Big Finish to te-ll aural adventures set during bygone eras previously consigned to prose. The series’ inspirational format has seen the likes of William Russell, Frazer Hines and even Katy Manning breathe new life into their celebrated characters, in brand new adven-tures grounded in modern sensibilities. Yet the most memorable Companion Chronicles have...

Summer 1976.

A series of inexplicable world-wide earthquakes and volcanic eruptions has put the planet on high alert.

Nowhere is safe. UNIT is desperate for answers.

Recalled to Earth, the Doctor and are Sarah Jane reunited with the Brigadier and UNIT who find themselves

working with the unlikeliest of allies in a quest to discover the cause of the ecological upheaval.

But when the Master returns and the Doctor disappears, Sarah Jane,

the Brigadier, and their friends find themselves stranded and helpless.

But how has the moribund Master gained such new and great power?

What is the ancient secret he seeks to uncover?

While the world bleeds and reality itself burns, this time the Master may at last

succeed in unleashing total chaos and destruction upon the cosmos…

Featuring the fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, UNIT, and the Master, this novella takes place between the TV

stories The Seeds of Doom and The Masque of Mandragora, and after the story The Duke of Dominoes.

And it was all just a strange dream… There’s a fine episode hidden somewhere in Amy’s Choice, but sadly it seems that the choice by the writer and the director was to fluff it. This could have been a great surreal comedy episode, or a chilling slice on unreality, but as it is it falls between those two stools. Simon Nye’s script has some great lines, to be sure - it’s the Doctor’s mumbled comment about self-harm that...

I can see why Unnatural History is one of Kate Orman’s least popular works. A dense and convoluted tapestry of temp-oral technobabble, devoid of her generally deft and lyrical prose, it isn’t difficult to understand why some readers gave up on it, and a number of those that finished it condemned it. But as a sucker for the wibbly-wobbly and especially the timey-wimey, I loved it; and today I probably love it even more...

Right at the start I’m going to tell the truth and before we get to The Time of Angels I’m going to get my worry right out of the way. So here it is: River Song doesn’t quite fit for me at the moment, but not because I dislike the character – far from it. When I watched Steven Moffat’s 2008 episodes Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, I couldn’t help but be...

BBC7’s short run of fourth Doctor audios comes to a close with David Fisher’s novelisation of his own television script, The Creature from the Pit. I doubt that the original serial makes it to many fans’ lists of favourites; it’s one of those jobbing, perfectly average stories that isn’t at all bad, but isn’t anything to get excited over either. It’s also one that is...

I really enjoy watching Doctor Who with my husband because we very often have conflicting opinions about the episode. He is on the cusp of being a fan – he wouldn’t go out of his way to watch a story, but will happily join me if I am, and he wouldn’t dream of missing a new episode...

When the pool of writers for this season was announc-ed, one name stuck out like a sore thumb: Simon Nye. Writer of the raucous 1990s sitcom Men Behaving Badly and, more recently, a frighteningly well-observed modernisation of...

The Hollows of Time is a delightful title that’s been st-uck in my head for more than a decade now. I first came across it (prefixed with an extra word: “In”) in the mid-1990s when reading about the aborted Colin Baker season, and more recently I was reminded of it when watching the Lost Season documentary on The Trial of a Time Lord DVD. However, on neither occasion was I able to glean anything about the story other than that it had been written by Christopher H Bidmead...

Here’s a secret for you: I’m the type of fan who plays “I spy the…” with the “…”, usually representing a familiar fixture in Doctor Who that often gets a mention or a cameo in visual or verbal cues - whether it be the Time Lords and their Seal of Rassilon, the Brigadier (or General Sir Alistair...

Vampires and Doctor Who share a long and torturous history that spans three decades and just as many mediums, and which has seen the fabled creatures rise to a position of some prominence within the series’ mythology. The race of Great Vampires introduced in Terrance Dicks’ 1980 serial State of Decay were portrayed as the ancient enemies of the Time Lords – a notion that would be embraced and...

This month we’ve been fortunate enough to get a mention in Big Finish Production’s podcast, and as a result the number of visitors to the site has already increased considerably, with many discovering it for the first time. As such I thought now might be a good to time to recap what we do for the benefit of our new readers.

The History of the Doctor gathers together reviews of almost every full-length Doctor Who story and presents them from the Doctor’s unique chronological perspective. Where the Doctor’s adventures intersect with one of the spin-off series that we cover, if you’re scrolling through them in order you can branch out into that spin-off at the point where they converge.

The site can be navigated by selecting a ‘timeline’ (right), and from there clicking on a story’s image. We have elected to use images as opposed to listing story titles as not everybody knows the name of the story that they’re looking for, and - more importantly - we just think that it looks cool. Story titles can still be seen, however, simply by hovering your mouse over a story’s image.

In deciding what fits where, we try to look at the Doctor’s life in the sort of way that a historian or a biographer might. A surprisingly large amount of the source material fits together effort-lessly, but (and it’s a big ‘but’) some of it is conflicting. With very few exceptions (such as The Curse of Fatal Death and Death Comes to Time, which were never intended to form part of mainstream continuity) we have made no judgement calls whatsoever as to what is ‘canon’ and what is apocryphal. Most full-length Doctor Who stories are included here in some shape or form, and it’s up to you whether you think that they ‘count’ or not. Short stories generally aren’t covered simply because it would be a logistical nightmare for us to include them, and besides, there’s enough full-length Who out there to keep us all busy enough!

Naturally, we did have to wield a fair bit of discretion in deciding which story fits where, and not everybody is going to agree with our thinking. Over 2010 we’re making it our mission to include what we call ‘Continuity Corners’ to show our working, as it were, but thus far work has only been completed on the eighth, ninth and tenth Doctors’ sections (we took the view that working backwards would be more beneficial, as most headaches are thrown up later in the Doctor’s life). We’re hoping to tackle one Doctor each month for the remainder of the year, starting with Sylvester McCoy’s this month. This does mean that you may encounter one or two technical difficulties in the coming months, but we are doing our level best to keep these to a minimum.

The reviews themselves aren’t high-brow critiques, nor are they the detached and sensat-ionalist summaries that you’ll read in the papers – they’re written by fans and for fans; from an enthusiastic, passionate, and more often than not shamelessly-biased point of view, hence our cheesy tagline…

I sincerely hope that those of you new to the site will enjoy it, and those wishing to keep up with our regular updates can do so either by joining our Facebook group or adding the site as a friend on My Space by following the links at the bottom of the page.

For readers that haven’t heard the May Big Finish podcast, they can download the relevant excerpt by clicking

The Pyralis Effect is steampunk novelist George Mann’s first endowment to the auditory world of Doctor Who, and for an opening effort it certainly doesn’t pull any punches. A bold, sweeping affair that tells of ancient Time Lord wars, creatures of light, and temporal prisons, this production is nothing if not amb-itious. It even sells itself as a sequel to a first Doctor adventure that we know nothing of, allowing Mann to gently critique the ramifications of the Doctor’s meddling as he drives his plot forward....

For a book that begins with an action replay of Ter-minus’ opening scene, Dominion isn’t bad at all. In fact, Nick Walters’ debut novel is practically bursting with potential. Walt-ers’ premise is really quite remarkable. The Swedish woodland setting sets it apart from the glut of outer space and home counties romps that the series inevitably gravitatess...

BBC7 continues its series of fourth Doctor novelis-ation readings with Terrance Dicks’ adaptation of The Brain of Morbius. Dicks adapts a serial that was heavily altered from his own script by Robert Holmes, and it’s no secret that he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the result. Nonetheless, the novelisation...

Death in Blackpool isn’t a title that one instantly ass-ociates with the jingling of sleigh bells, nonetheless it is the name given to Big Finish’s first out-and-out Christmas Special, and it’s as a clear and as representative a label as ever I’ve come across. Rather than compete with the colour and the spectacle of the television series’ previous yuletide romps, Alan Barnes’ script instead pays homage to another festive...

As The End of Time saw the series return to the more conventional method of multi-part stories sharing a title, I was gratified to find that Steven Moffat has continued to indulge the new series’ proclivity for individual episode titles. I much prefer each episode being given its own billing, particularly when it is clearly a very different animal to its counterpart, as I feel is the case here. Whilst Flesh and Stone is every bit the...

It’s not as good as Blink. Yes, I know that’s not fair. You don’t start a review by comparing something unfavourably to something else; it’s shoddy. But I wanted to get that out of the way. I had over-hyped this two part story for myself, built it up in my head and was expecting something amazing. It is, after all, the sequel to Blink, one the undeniable classics of modern Who. In the end, it wasn’t a classic. It’s very good, but...

What a beast of a two-parter. This is one of those very rare occasions where Doctor Who gets every single thing right and the story can be enjoyed over and over. It is easily Steven Moffat’s most accomplished piece of writing to date and, considering the general standard of his episodes, that is quite an endorsement. The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone is a Doctor Who masterpiece...

On 2nd May 2010 I completed the Yorkshire “Three Peaks Challenge” (a 26-mile fell walk encompassing Pen-y-Ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough) in eight hours and twenty minutes, beating my previous best time by well over an hour.

Including Gift Aid, I’ve been able to raise £57.69 for the Hull Memory Clinic, where my wife practises, and £76.92 for the Sheffield Cats’ Shelter. Donations are still welcome, however, and those wishing to sponsor me online after the event can do so by visiting my JustGiving page:

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure that Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer.

So please dig deep and donate now.

To start off this week, may I say I wish I could start my day floating in space with the stars spread out all around me. Lucky TARDIS companions! The second episode in the 2010 series (there are so many alternate numbering systems this year, the year itself seems the simplest standard) of Doctor Who is The Beast Below, once again penned by showrunner Steven Moffat...

BBC Audio seem to be making a habit of releasing their ‘audio exclusives’ at the drop of a hat. Hot on the heels of two impromptu tenth Doctor releases comes Matt Smith’s first venture into the world of talking tie-ins...

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