Doctor Who Reviews: 'The History of the Doctor'

Barnaby Edwards’ Wreck of the Titan is quite easily my favourite release of 2010 thus far. A sweeping, filmic affair abounding with polar bears and sea monsters, this thrilling progression of City of Spires and Night’s Black Agents has a little something for everyone. At a first glance, The Wreck of the Titan appears to be Edwards’ Whoniverse rendition of the sink-ing of the Titanic. Indeed, a cursory...

Night’s Black Agents is Big Finish’s second cross-range Companion Chronicle venture, the first being last year’s suc-cessful Key 2 Time tie-in, The Prisoner’s Dilemma. However, unlike its predecessor, which was capable of standing alone, this adventure quite deliberately forms an important part of the sixth Doctor and Jamie’s ongoing arc in the main range, to the extent that it picks up directly where City of Spires left off...

Frontier Worlds just goes to show how a novel’s rele-ase date can make or break it. Had Peter Anghelides’ follow up to Kursaal come on the back of books like Beltempest and The Face-Eater, it probably wouldn’t have been received half as well as it was dragging the range out of the post-Interference...

Certain episodes of Doctor Who cause my phone to buzz. They’re generally the ones containing momentous events, si-gnificant changes of direction, great expectation or particularly devastating cliffhangers. My phone buzzed a lot on Saturday night. So, after leaving work amidst an urgent flurry of texts, and an even more urgent flurry telling them to stop, for...

Old Sixy has something of a knack for acquiring compan-ions from the Doctor’s past and future selves. Nicola Bryant’s Peri, of course, was inherited from his predecessor, and India Fisher’s Charlotte came straight from the side of Paul McGa-nn’s eighth Doctor. Even Bonnie Langford’s Mel was borrowed from the sixth Doctor’s own future in The Trial of a Time Lord. Yet never do these adoptions feel wrong…

What a triumphant piece of drama! Easily the most acc-omplished piece of writing so far in Series 5, and a complete diversion from the usual alien takeover shenanigans that the series usually dabbles in. I was whooping with joy as the credits rolled at the thought that Doctor Who could still be as entrancing and surprising as this. I have to be perfectly honest with you: I haven’t found Series 5 to be as gripping as previous...

After a parade of thrilling stories, Season 7 comes to a cliffhanger-like end with the Eddie Robson penned Empire State. The adventure begins with the mysterious...

Amelia Pond has been waiting her whole life for the Pandorica to open, and it feels like she’s not the only one. Matt Smith’s first season as the Doctor has been energetic and emotional, but it’s also been excruciating. For months now, Steven Moffat has teased us with unexplained cracks in time ...

The latest Companion Chronicle is, at a first glance, the antithesis of the first. The range was conceived as a medium through which Big Finish could tell stories featuring the first four Doctors, and so the first release was essentially just a first Doctor talking book, narrated by one of his companions and punctuated with occasional injections from a second voice. Soli-taire, conversely, is a fully-fledged eighth Doctor audio...

When I first read Simon Boucher-Jones’ novel for Virgin publishing, The Death of Art, I didn’t expect that one day I’d be trawling though a tome brimful with prose even more dense and impenetrable than that it housed. At the time, I put my alienation down to the abstruse complexity of the New Adventures’ ‘psi-powers’ arc, of which The Death of Art formed a part...

As a fan of the ongoing comic series in Doctor Who Magazine, I was looking forward to seeing the first television episode to be adapted from a Who strip. We’ve so far had adaptations of a novel, an audio play and an annual short story - with varying levels of divergence from the original source - and so I was intrigued to find out just how the episode...

With each season comes a new trio of Doctor Who nove-ls, and this spring brought the first batch to feature Matt Smith’s eleventh Doctor. In accordance with the series rebranding, the novels have undergone a redesign, now sporting the new logo and insignia, images of the new Doctor and Amy Pond, and even a little tagline (“Houston - we have a problem…” reads...

Part of the first batch of eleventh Doctor novel adven-tures, Night of the Humans immediately impresses with an intriguing opening and improves from there on. Certainly the strongest of these three novels, it takes the Doctor and Amy way into the future, circa the year 250,000, onto a hazardous...

Third in this first batch of eleventh Doctor novels is Brian Minchin’s The Forgotten Army, which comes sporting a very fetching cover featuring a rampaging mammoth. I’m always a sucker for a prehistoric beastie, so the fact that a mammoth - albeit a highly atypical one - features heavily in this story...

Vampires. Although a staple of literary horror (and it seems every recent teen fantasy) and fairly often seen in the books, comics, and audios of Doctor Who, the concept has appeared quite infrequently throughout the television run of the good Doctor’s life. In fact, aside from some vampire traits seen in the Haemavores, the monsters featured in 1989’s...

“There aren’t thirteen episodes of Doctor Who this year, there are seventeen - four of which are interactive,” stated Piers Wenger, series producer, earlier this year. It sounded like hyperbole, but he was right - City of the Daleks really...

The season’s unreserved comic belter, The Lodger is one of Doctor Who’s most endearing offerings since it returned to our screens in 2005. Loosely based on his popular Doctor Who Magazine comic strip of the same name, Gareth Roberts’ script is warm and dry, fuelled by a convincing combination of gentle character drama and ironic mirth. Just as the comic strip version of The Lodger saw David Tennant’s Doctor...

For fans of the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who, the character of Mike Yates, played by Richard Franklin, is some-thing of an enigma. After making his first on-screen appearance in Terror of the Autons at the start of Pertwee’s second season (although dialogue from that story makes it clear Yates was known to the Doctor as a UNIT officer...

The concluding part of Nigel Fairs’ trilogy of Leela / Z’nai Companion Chronicles, The Time Vampire, is a sco-rching and oblique affair; a real departure from the relatively straightforward and traditional brace of adventures that pre-ceded it. Over the course of its seventy-three minutes, this two-parter confounded me, aggravated me...

The Blue Angel by Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad is an ineluctably lyrical, tendentious and high-brow piece of work which literally raises more questions than it answers. A tapestry of conflicting realities that threatens to transcend the boundaries of fiction, yet still has time to take the piss out of Star Trek, I think it’s fair to say that there’s not another Doctor Who novel out there like this one...

The Suffering is something of a cornerstone for the Companion Chronicles. For the first time, Big Finish have put together two companions whose Doctor is no longer with us, providing us with a sound that is as close to the relevant television serials as we’re ever likely to get. But, as if this weren’t an enticing enough gimmick in itself, the release is made up of four episodes spread across two discs instead of...

The Companion Chronicles’ remit seems to get wider by the month, with the range now boasting a sundry mix of later-Doctor companion pieces and loose-fitting acquaintance adve-ntures. But for me, its primary hook of being able to offer new stories with the first four Doctors still holds the greatest appeal, and there’s no period that I like to see revisited more...

Following the successful return of the Silurians in the latest two-part story, The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood, I decided that it was time to look back at where the reptile people’s story began. Not the Pertwee-starring serial, Doctor Who and the Silurians, but the true vision of their creator, the great Malcolm...

Richard Curtis and Doctor Who might not be the most obvious marriage, but it’s one that I’ve been quietly looking forward to ever since I first got wind of it, and one that I think will both surprise and impress a great many viewers. After the high-octane action of last week, here the Blackadder and Love Actually scribe supplies us with a script that is calm...

At last: an episode where the Doctor isn't trying to save an entire planet, or fighting to save the whole of humanity / time / the universe, which instead focuses on the life of one person, and is all the better for it. Without having to worry about the suitably grave depiction of responsibility, acting on behalf of billions of people, the Doctor’s direct focus on Vincent van Gogh and his demons is touching, tender and entirely convincing...

After forcing him to make do with just one performer in The Stealers from Saiph, this production sees Big Finish more than make things up to Nigel Robinson by gifting him not merely two actors, but two companions to play with. Though The Em-peror of Eternity is demonstrably Victoria Waterfield’s tale, Deborah Watling’s narration is buoyed throughout..

Although I found that individual scenes in Cold Blood worked very well, on the whole I found the episode quite a disappointment; visually, emotionally and structurally. What I wanted was a story as powerful as the original Silurian seven-parter; one that would make me think about humanity’s weak-nesses and capatilise on the awesome moral dilemma of the Silurians wanting to claim back a planet that could be...

2010’s inaugural Companion Chronicle, Bernice Summer-field and the Criminal Code, is the first to feature a companion from the spin-off media: the eponymous Bernice Summerfield. Prior to this release, all of the range’s featured “companions” had at least appeared in the television series, even if it was merely as a one-off supporting character. Yet for me, the...

Interference is definitely a tale of two halves, but not in the way that you might think. Shock Tactic and The Hour of the Geek each contain two distinct stories, chopped-up, skilfully intertwined, and then framed by a gentle conversation between the Doctor and an old acquaintance with a suspiciously similar name. One of these tales tells of a trio of alien...

We return to the fray with a disoriented Amy, who picks herself up from the ground (now smooth and light grey). She wonders how the Doctor’s gunfire saved the day and a quick camera zoom-out and spin reveals the answer: the detonation of the gravity globe caught everyone in the Byzantium’s artificial gravity field, and when the Doctor ordered...

Cold Blood has to be the most predictable, clichéd, and unoriginal episode of Doctor Who that I have ever enjoyed so much. There’s barely a scene in this is story that feels remotely new in the series. The plot is a direct, if very successful, update of the original Silurians serial...

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