Finding a new place to live takes a lot out of you. Between the lease, the hassle of moving, and the endless viewings, you hardly have any time left to comb the flat for glowing bugs from space that might want to absorb you into the walls. Luckily for Bill, she’s got a… uh, “granddad” to do that, and Knock Knock nicely sets up its tale by starting with the pleasant banality of college life before sucking us into a Doctor Who mystery about a creepy landlord, even creepier insects, and something t...
Jul 08, 2023•1 hr 33 min•Season 4Ep. 27
There are struggling planets, there are troubled planets, and then there’s Solos: a world so uniquely unlucky in the cosmos as to inherit a ruler like the Marshal, one of the most uniformly evil dictators to ever appear in Doctor Who. Set in a bleak future where Earth has seen better days, The Mutants is in no way subtle in its criticism of colonization and the racist policies that often result. But it wouldn’t be a Doctor Who story if there wasn’t a bug-eyed monster, a mystery involving ancient...
Jul 01, 2023•1 hr 38 min•Season 4Ep. 26
If you have two enormous, powerful entities, sure as hell someone will think it’s a great idea to have them fight. If they’re galactic space empires, so much the better for raising the stakes — at least on paper. But what Frontier in Space is really about is fear: fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the notion you might be wrong, and how that fear can lead people (and Draconians) to do terrible things. Oh, it’s also about getting captured repeatedly, and the varying ways one can escape from pri...
Jun 24, 2023•1 hr 56 min•Season 4Ep. 25
We’ve all been there: After waking up from a long sleep, you open your eyes only to witness a buzzing insect that’s invaded your bedroom. So we can all relate to the human refugees on Nerva Station, although when the pest is a man-sized space parasite that wants to consume you and absorb your memories PLUS you and your friends are the last of the human race — well, the stakes get a bit raised. There’s no question The Ark in Space sets up a suspenseful tale for the ages, and even functions as a p...
Jun 17, 2023•1 hr 46 min•Season 4Ep. 24
The hottest sci-fi writer on the planet in 1978 was Douglas Adams. Not only was he about to bestow upon the world the original radio plays of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he also wrote his first Doctor Who adventure, The Pirate Planet . There are so many similarities — in tone, plotting, and effortlessly clever dialogue — that it’s easy to tell this story came out of the same creative spigot as Hitch Hiker’s, but the recycling doesn’t detract from this incredibly ambitious story about ...
Jun 10, 2023•2 hr 6 min•Season 4Ep. 23
How does a family show like Doctor Who do a zombie horror story? You start by subtracting (most of) the gore, then add a sci-fi twist. That’s good, but what would really make it stand out is if you take a real person from history and cast the best possible actor to play the role. The Unquiet Dead ticks all those eerie boxes, deftly telling a tale of walking corpses, teasing the show’s (then) new mythology of the Time War, and showcasing the show’s central premise of time travel by involving Char...
Jun 03, 2023•1 hr 51 min•Season 4Ep. 22
Often when Doctor Who visits Earth’s past, a lot is made of whether the characters can “change” history or not. Outcomes vary, but it’s oddly refreshing to look back on the series’ first historical, Marco Polo , where the question never comes up. Instead, the story creates stakes by thrusting the TARDIS team smack in the middle of the rivalries, duplicity and politics of quasi-real events in history, and letting the drama naturally unfold. At seven episodes, it’s a gradual unfolding — and some a...
May 27, 2023•2 hr
The Doctor tends to find himself thrust in the middle of many battles throughout history, but what if he landed in the middle of all of them? That may well have been the inspiration for The War Games , the epic-length finale of the Patrick Troughton era of Doctor Who. By taking the idea of multiple wars — each a live-action board game played for the amusement of powerful aliens — with the soldiers eventually realizing the deception and resisting, the story puts forward one of the most powerful a...
May 20, 2023•2 hr 23 min•Season 4Ep. 20
The original revelation of the Doctor’s origins was a slow burn: It took Doctor Who six seasons to finally give concrete answers to who he was and where he came from. But after the landmark reveal at the end of The War Games, going back to Gallifrey seemed to be an exercise in diminishing returns for the show. True, The Deadly Assassin gave a compelling new perspective on Time Lord society, though if you look at what came after — Arc of Infinity, The Trial of a Time Lord, and even Hell Bent — th...
May 13, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 4Ep. 19
Whether you’re a fan of a TV show, movie series or comic book, it’s almost guaranteed your fandom will be tested at some point. As creative teams come and go, as changes in direction stack up, as the medium evolves, the flavor of something can change radically. And if you don’t like the taste, it can be a rapid progression from disappointment to hate-watching to quitting in disgust. Doctor Who is no exception to this, and it probably goes double given its built-in reboot device of regeneration. ...
May 06, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 4Ep. 18
If you’re going to attempt a tense thriller in Doctor Who, sometimes the horror can get really intense, such as in The Waters of Mars. And sometimes it can go 100% in the other direction and serve up an unexpected monster in the form of a baby-faced cartoon character, such as here, in The Tsuranga Conundrum . Is one approach superior to the other? We’re here to say, definitively, yes. Yep, the Pting’s bad — there’s no way around it — but as long as we have Brett Goldstein’s eyebrows to lose ours...
Apr 29, 2023•1 hr 46 min•Season 4Ep. 17
When is a TARDIS not a TARDIS? When it’s a bitey mad lady, of course. Yes, The Doctor's Wife shows a side of the show’s signature blue box that we’ve never seen before, personifying the Doctor’s “ship” in a way that’s unexpected, insanely quirky and… well, sexy. That’s thanks in large part to Suranne Jones’ pitch-perfect performance as Idris, a woman possessed with the essence of the TARDIS, the Doctor’s longest-running companion. Neil Gamian’s clever script wisely gives her a lot of time opposi...
Apr 22, 2023•1 hr 47 min•Season 4Ep. 16
You’ve got to hand it to the Doctor — he’s single-handedly saved Gallifrey almost as many times as the Earth, and The Invasion of Time even lets him double dip! Rescuing the Time Lords from the Vardans was just a warm-up, with the Sontarans laying in wait to have their crack at the planet once the production runs out of tinfoil. The story is a bizarro Russian doll of invasions, seemingly orchestrated by a borderline-megalomaniacal Doctor, set against the backdrop of Robert Holmes’ delightfully d...
Apr 15, 2023•2 hr 4 min•Season 4Ep. 15
It’s a long-debated subject among Doctor Who fans: Who counts as a companion? It used to be that traveling in the TARDS, typically across different stories, meant you made the list — and might even end up in a support group years later with Kate Stewart et al. But a mere TARDIS ride is too low a bar: Does that mean the policemen in Black Orchid are companions? You could say you need to be in more than one story, but then Astrid and Sara Kingdom are out. And what about “bad” TARDIS passengers lik...
Apr 08, 2023•46 min•Season 4Ep. 14
In the new series, it’s customary to offer freshly onboarded TARDIS crewmembers a choice: Would you like to go to the future or the past? Back in the ’60s, there was no choice involved — the Doctor didn’t have the first clue how to steer his time machine, something he states explicitly in The Smugglers to accidental companions Ben and Polly. But if he had the goal of showing them just how brutally violent traveling through time can be, he couldn’t do much better than this mostly forgotten “pure ...
Apr 01, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Season 4Ep. 13
“Fearlessly bonkers” is how director Paul Wilmshurst described Kill the Moon , a — shall we say ambitious? — episode of Doctor Who that presumes the moon we see shining in the sky every night is actually an enormous egg. Yes. Hold on… how did we not notice it’s made of eggshell? How does the moon “put on weight” so quickly that it has the same gravity of Earth? Why would the “bacteria” protecting it look and behave exactly like giant spiders? Best not to ask such questions and simply run down th...
Mar 25, 2023•1 hr 54 min•Season 4Ep. 12
The question of what constitutes a complete story in Doctor Who isn't a straightforward as it may seem. The issue actually first reared its rubber-masked head fairly early on, when, in the third season, the show decided to "tease" its most epic adventure yet, The Daleks' Masterplan, with a single one-off episode called Mission to the Unknown. It even gave Mission a unique production code that tied it to that 12-part(!) adventure. So... is it its own story, or what? Years later, The Trial of a Ti...
Mar 18, 2023•33 min•Season 4Ep. 11
Orphan 55 stands apart from the rest of Doctor Who canon in two key ways: First, its idea of an indeterminate always-in-flux future is at odds with virtually every other adventure set in the future. And second, probably no other episode has ever dared to spell out its message so explicitly, ending with an ominous speech from Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor about the terrible consequences of neglecting our planet. To be fair, the story is much more fun than that sounds, with jokes about speedos and bats...
Mar 11, 2023•1 hr 38 min•Season 4Ep. 10
Is there a story that gets the Daleks wrong more than Destiny of the Daleks ? While Douglas Adams’ run on Doctor Who as script editor is revered for many reasons (mostly the story immediately following this one), his first outing is arguably a misstep. Bringing back the Daleks after a five-year absence isn’t a bad idea, but shoehorning the show’s most crowd-pleasing monsters into a story about two rival races of “robots” in a galactic military stalemate robs them of the essence of their terror. ...
Mar 04, 2023•2 hr 8 min•Season 4Ep. 9
If you tuned into Doctor Who in the early ’70s, chances are you saw Jon Pertwee in a colorful tuxedo arguing with the Brigadier and UNIT on the best way to take down some inhuman menace whose strings are being pulled by Roger Delgado’s Master. You get that in spades in The Mind of Evil , which makes it a 100% proof 1970s Who adventure, though at times the bloated story feels like they decided to coast almost entirely on the formula, without much attention given to whether any of the multiplying ...
Feb 25, 2023•1 hr 37 min•Season 4Ep. 8
Time travel and dinosaurs — they go together like teeth and curls. Strange, then, that Doctor Who has only ventured on a rousing adventure with these colossal prehistoric monsters twice, in stories about 40 years apart. At least in the latter outing, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship , the special effects are leveled-up from stop motion to CGI. The TARDIS crew also gets enhanced, recruiting a pair of fish-out-of-water historical figures to help the Doctor solve the immediate problem: a Canada-size space ...
Feb 18, 2023•1 hr 39 min•Season 4Ep. 7
When the Doctor travels to the past he obviously has a great deal of foreknowledge about what’s taken place and, moreover, what must take place in order for history as we know it to be preserved. It’s refreshing, then, to see that same idea applied to future history in The Waters of Mars , a thrilling story that uses that device to amplify its impact by an order of magnitude above your typical base-under-siege adventure. When you add a healthy helping of zombie horror and a dark twist at the end...
Feb 11, 2023•2 hr 6 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Matt Smith’s Doctor is known for being a few notches higher on the Bonkers Scale than his predecessors, a measure that arguably reaches its peak in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe . His captivating antics early in this story — where he takes a London family on a tour of a country manor that he’s upgraded with with playrooms, hammocks and taps that spout lemonade — underscore the 11th Doctor’s “mad man in a box” appeal, and set the stage for a emotional story with surprising weight. The sc...
Feb 04, 2023•1 hr 59 min•Season 4Ep. 5
As Doctor Who’s ultimate monsters, the Daleks have been rebooted more times than a MacBook doing a janky system update. The most recent revamp came via Revolution of the Daleks , where the children of Davros got a new look inspired by the previous holiday special, Resolution, complete with sleek black casing and his and hers colored LEDs. But Dalek design isn’t the only thing up for revision here: we also get new takes on a pair of Jacks — Harkness and Robertson — who both try on something diffe...
Jan 28, 2023•2 hr 26 min•Season 4Ep. 4
The Fifth Doctor’s cricket outfit seemed a bit random at first, but Black Orchid is the story that shows it’s more than just a signature look. In an unusual twist, the Doctor isn’t the mysterious stranger seemingly come to save the day — he’s completely expected, and the thing he’s expected to do is play cricket. Of course, he does so like a boss who’s had centuries to hone his bowling skills, and then serves up an encore by solving a double murder at the estate of an aristocratic English family...
Jan 21, 2023•1 hr 57 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Entering the pocket reality of a powerful entity that loves to play games isn’t something that happens every day, but if you’re a character on Doctor Who, it’s an occupational hazard. The Celestial Toymaker is the first realization of that idea onscreen, made more interesting by the revelation that it’s not the first time the Doctor has met this potentially problematic villain. In Who canon, the story is well-remembered if not revered — for the implied history between the two characters, for the...
Jan 14, 2023•1 hr 44 min•Season 4Ep. 2
When Pull To Open debuted three years ago, we didn’t even have a rating system — just a sound of drums in our heads, convincing us to bring thoughtful commentary about Doctor Who stories from the perspective of longtime fans who are also journalists. As we went deeper into the show and installed the key component in our journey — the Pull To Open Randomizer — we developed a shorthand for signaling if we considered an episode good (a Dalek) or not so good (an Ogron). Eventually we created ratings...
Jan 07, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 4Ep. 1
If you’re a time-traveling alien with a toothache, obviously your first stop is going to be the Old West. It’s not just because of the oddly easy-to-find dentistry services, but the chance of getting mixed up in a farcical case of mistaken identity with lots of gunplay is quite high. Doctor Who’s first (and for a long time, only) attempt at a western is arguably a bold experiment and unquestionably a high-quality production, but like the gunslinging Clantons themselves, The Gunfighters has becom...
Dec 31, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Season 3Ep. 42
By Series 3 of NuWho, showrunner Russell T. Davies was two-for-two at successfully re-introducing classic bad guys in the Daleks and the Cybermen. To complete the trifecta, Davies naturally turned to the Doctor’s ideological opposite, the Master, and he raised the stakes with the new series’ first three-parter in Utopia , The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords — a story that sees the Earth not just threatened, but conquered and subjugated. That’s a lot to work with when your job is to cra...
Dec 24, 2022•2 hr 30 min•Season 3Ep. 41
As alien baddies go, the Zygons are one of the more nuanced races that have tried to take over the Earth. Turns out they want to just live in peace and chill, man — just like the rest of us. That’s some nice background for The Zygon Invasion / Inversion , a story that focuses on the extremists among us who are determined to stir up animosity to further their own idealized vision of how society should be. Kinda sounds relevant, but it’s going to take a speech for the ages, delivered by a leading ...
Dec 17, 2022•1 hr 42 min•Season 3Ep. 40
