Doctor Who Reviews: 'The History of the Doctor'

give credence to the BBC Books and the War in Heaven that they allude to. The ancestral seat of the Time Lords has been portrayed as a darkened, haunting place occupied by god-like beings with terrifying mind-powers; a rotting cesspit of almost human corruption and ambivalence; an elaborate network of cavernous family houses and progenerative looms; a majestic world with continents of “Wild Endeavour,” mountains of “Solace and Solitude,” and a “burnt orange sky”; even as a burning mass of rock desperate to escape its immolation...

To say that it has such a dire reputation, I’ve never found The Space Museum to be all that offensive. Built upon an intr-iguing predestination paradox, Glyn Jones’ story was the first Doctor Who adventure to explore the fourth dimension with any real ambition. The peculiar first episode stands out as being truly exceptional for its time, as the Doctor and his companions come face to face with their near-future selves...

Of all Paul Cornell’s Doctor Who novels, The Shadows of Avalon is probably the one that held the most allure. Charged with bringing one chapter of the eighth Doctor’s long and tort-urous life to an end and beginning another, Cornell was able to justify wheeling out some of the most exciting toys without wor-rying about which range he was plucking them from...

The Guardian of the Solar System may be Big Finish’s most keenly-anticipated Companion Chronicle to date. Given the enormous popularity of Home Truths and The Drowned World, the promise of a third and final chapter in Simon Gue-rrier’s Sara Kingdom trilogy would have been enough to have most listeners chomping at the bit in any event, but with a title as bold and as suggestive as The...

City of the Daleks provided an enjoyable, if flawed, st-art to BBCi’s new series of Doctor Who Adventure Games. Bl-ood of the Cybermen was therefore under greater pressure; it had to prove that the games could work as a series, by being more than just a rehash of City...

What’s fascinating about Planet of Giants is how mode-rn it all feels, especially in its opening episode. The serial throws instant mysteries at the audience, with the scanner exploding suddenly screen and the TARDIS doors terrifyingly opening during materialisation. William Hartnell’s urgent performance suggests that both of these events are potentially cataclysmic. However, the big surprise of the story – i.e. that our heroes are only one inch tall – isn’t given away as the TARDIS materialises between crazy paving slabs...

Doctor Who’s fourteenth season isn’t just one of my personal favourites, but one of almost everybody’s. Every serial that it contains is exceptional, save for this curious opening instalment (technically making it ‘exceptional’ too, just not in a positive way), which has now been lovingly restored by the Restoration Team and released on DVD. Though I don’t think that it stands up to the bar set by the rest of the season...

Prior to their release, I was already familiar with the first five Lost Stories. The Nightmare Fair and Mission to Mag-nus have been widely-known for many years thanks to Target’s novelisations of their aborted scripts, and much has been written about the likes of Leviathan, The Hollows of Time and Paradise 5 despite the extant scripts laying dormant until...

Obverse Books’ third volume of transtemporal shen-anigans takes a slightly different format to the previous two, dispensing with the short stories in favour of four linked novellas. Each story stands comfortably alone, but together they make up a single, over-arching narrative. The linking MacGuffin...

Written by newcomer Natalie Dallaire and then-editor of the range Stephen Cole, Parallel 59 is quite a curiosity. The lines of blood that drip down Black Sheep’s evocative cover illustration might suggest two parallel narrative threads, but in truth they’re about as parallel as chalk and cheese. This book is a quiet and introspective thriller that gracefully probes Fitz’s...

Legend of the Cybermen is a story about war. On one side, we have the ruthlessly aggressive Cybermen, and on the other a diverse throng of largely human characters. What sets it apart from most Whovian hostilities is that its human characters aren’t real, nor is the Land of Fiction that they inhabit. As well as being something of an immodest sequel to the acclaimed sec-ond Doctor serial The Mind Robber...

How do you describe an impossible thing? Because that’s exactly what The Big Bang is. Steeped in more paradox than a Lawrence Miles paperback, Steven Moffat’s inspirational sea-son finale is an absurdity of the most profound kind. It’s a story of unparalleled scope, reduced to just five characters running about in a museum (two of whom are the same person). It’s a story free from antagonists, save for the delicious stroke of irony that is a petrified Dalek. It’s a story stuffed to bursting with in-genious retcons that provoke applause rather than scorn...

Season finales have a big job to do, and The Big Bang in particular had a lot to live up to. Could it possibly match the standards set by The Pandorica Opens? Well, of course it did, but in a very different way. Rather than build on the huge monst-er-fest of the first episode, Stephen Moffat instead created a rather magical story that manages to be both extremely pers-onal and on a universal scale - big and small at the same time, rather like the TARDIS. Last week’s episode ended with huge questions hanging in the air. How will the Doctor escape the Pandorica? Is Amy really dead? What’s going to happen...

A dazzling and triumphant finale – and I haven’t said that in a while! Steven Moffat really was saving up all of his bangs and flashes for the last two episodes. What a clever way to bring the season to a close. As I’m sure I’ve said over and over again, Russell T Davies is very strong on build up but rarely gives his stories the satisfying conclusions they deserve. The Sound of Drums and The Stolen Earth rank amongst my favourite Doctor Who episodes ever, but neither of them was especially well-served by the bloated and overcomplicated conclusions that followed. With The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang, how-ever, Moffat has provided us with a stonkingly memorable build up and a concluding episode that manages to be even better, taking the title as the best episode of the season against...

I went into this episode with no preconceptions at all, which is a rare relationship between an episode of Doctor Who and me. This year I’ve been giddily awaiting Churchill and the Daleks, River Song and the Weeping Angels, Chibnall and the Silurians, and Curtis and Van Gogh. It might be sacrilegious to...

He’s gone and done it again. Just when I was starting to lose faith in Steven Moffat’s vision for Doctor Who, he’s gone and delivered two astonishingly good episodes that are comp-letely different to each other yet still make a great pair, tying up the season satisfactorily and in doing so turning it into some-thing far more effective than it would have otherwise been. It’s not because the episodes this year have been bad, but I feel that the last five or six have lacked the ‘wow factor.’ The mom-entum of a Russell T Davies season is like a steam train...

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