Doctor Who Reviews: 'The History of the Doctor'

The Minister of Chance Review

The Gunfighters has long-since held a position of not-oriety amongst Doctor Who serials. Whilst its viewing figures weren’t all that poor, its audience appreciation score was. In fact, so pitiable was its approval rating – 30% – that to this day there isn’t another Doctor Who story that has gone down as badly with the viewing public. However, The...

The Awakening always feels like a bit of an afterth-ought. When the series was released on VHS, it was bundled together with Frontios in a double-tape pack for no other reason than that one followed the other on transmission. Now, besides the dubious distinction of being the final fifth Doctor serial to be released on DVD, The Awakening must...

The name Tony Lee will already be familiar to readers of Doctor Who Magazine’s comic strip, who will have seen it ado-rning many a multi-coloured panel just next to the word story, but I’d wager that few of those readers ever expected to see it on a Big Finish by-line. Indeed, even with two scripts falling through for this slot, some might think it a little odd that...

Filler filler filler filler. Hunter’s Moon is a good, solid adventure tale. It introduces a new alien species, the Torodons - generally well-built, silver-skinned humanoids who have a patria-rchal interstellar civilisation. Refreshingly, these aliens are nei-ther one-note goodies nor faceless baddies; rather, they have a range of characters and moral codes...

James Goss, better known for his Torchwood novels, in Dead of Winter provides the eleventh Doctor with one of his strongest novels to date. Goss takes an atypical approach, con-structing his adventure as an epistolary novel, told in letters, diary extracts, memories and asides. This allows him..

The Way Through the Woods begins with an effectively creepy opening sequence, as a teenage girl misses the last bus home, and is forced to take a walk through the dark woods as the edge of her town. Such a simple thing is made to feel a good deal more sinister than you’d expect...

Back in 2007, Peter Anghelides’ Ferril’s Folly was one of the first few Companion Chronicles to be commissioned by incoming producer David Richardson. It was worked into the Big Finish recording schedules, and its impending release was even reported by Doctor Who Magazine before it vanished into the ether without any explanation as to why. Rumours...

The second, and hopefully not final, episode of the new Minister of Chance audio series builds on the promising set-up of the first. This time around, the greater political situation takes a less prominent position, the story focusing more on the travails of the individual characters. As before, the performances are excellent and the soundscape immersive, although on occasion it can be difficult to hear some characters’ voices clearly...

Crime of Century is different to most of the Lost Stories that have preceded it. There was never a script to adapt, a title to tinker with or even a writer to get back on board – just a sin-gle, enduring image. A female cat burglar slinks into a swanky party, slips off her silk gloves and cracks the safe. As it creaks open, the smile is wiped from her face as she finds that her jewels have been replaced by a diminutive figure in a...

Few 1980s Doctor Who serials upset me as much as Fro-ntios does. I can forgive an outright clanger - even enjoy one, in rather a perverse sort of way – but what aggravates me is an adventure that should have been a world-beater, but turned out to be nothing but a barrel-scraper. Of such stories, Christopher H Bidmead’s third and final...

This proves once and for all that Stephen Moffat can do big, barnstorming finales with all the panache of his predeces-sor, Russell T Davies. If this is to be viewed as a finale, that is - it’s more of the conclusion to volume one of this series, with volume two to follow later this year. One thing’s certain...

The Sentinels of the New Dawn may be a more flamboy-ant title than Leviathan, the Lost Story that begat it, but the Companion Chronicle that it identifies packs the same sort of punch. Paul Finch’s prequel may switch spacecraft for helic-opters and a mechanical Pagan spirit for a more ornithological terror, but it’s every bit the visual feast that his father’s...

Last May I spent a gloomy Saturday evening looking back and forth between my telly and my watch, frowning intolerantly as I waited for monsters to burst from the hearts of humans and the bowels of Mother Earth. The same time a week later, I spent almost an hour perched perilously on the edge of my sofa, my jaw risking carpet burn as I witnessed a dawdling plot take a sudden plunge over the catastrophe curve...

Doctor Who’s sixth series (or thirty-second, if you mu-st), seems to be polarising fan opinion, and this latest story is no exception. Fans have never been shy or particularly tactful about voicing their opinions, and this time they seems to be split...

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