(My record is six years for Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which is pretty versatile as well, and players taking producer roles and running a couple of sessions factored in too.)
Doctor Who, and the Doctor Who: Adventures In Time And Space roleplaying game. By Craig Oxbrow.
Monday, 16 June 2025
40 years, 5000 sessions!
A GM talks about running Doctor Who for forty years! Starting with the FASA game and incorporating a variety of systems, outside adventures, players guest GMing sessions. In case you didn’t know how versatile a story engine Doctor Who is.
Friday, 13 June 2025
Saturday, 31 May 2025
The War Between The Land And The Sea
The War Between The Land And The Sea trailer. Having a whole other series goes some way to make up for only getting eight episodes this year including a Doctor-light one.
Saturday, 24 May 2025
Wish World
15.2.7 Wish World
After a What The beginning, the classic reality is not as it seems to torment someone. And Conrad was already a prick, but even for a fascist that really leaned on retrograde thinking for a guy in his twenties these days. Bowler hats?
Although of course his Doctor Who book looks like that.
Saturday, 17 May 2025
The Interstellar Song Contest
15.2.6 The Interstellar Song Contest
As multicultural things with lots of weird costumes and effects and eccentric side bits that goes out here on BBC One, Eurovision and Doctor Who have always been a bit connected, so here we are.
But as an actual episode it’s as RTD says Eurovision meets Die Hard, and that’s fun, and it’s also a lot of surprise guests.
Belinda rightly gets the big crying moment.
I was just thinking we haven’t had any animal people this year.
Iona Anderson (Wynn) looks so much like Eve Myles I was expecting that to come up somehow.
Sunday, 11 May 2025
The Story And The Engine
15.2.5 The Story And The Engine
Largely a bottle episode - I wasn’t surprised when I learned writer Inua Ellams is a playwright. (Thanks to Emmet Asher-Perrin at Reactor for linking his prologue to the episode.)
Having downplayed Ncuti Gatwa’s Blackness, an episode stemming from where the Doctor feels more accepted. Various Doctors have had places to go and feel at home, but the ones we’ve seen are usually with recurring supporting cast in the U.K.
The delayed reveal of the Barber had me expecting him to be someone familiar. I hope he will be, or this gets us more of Ariyon Bakare as wise and possibly sinister mysterious characters.
Big slow artistic spider probably not going to set off too many arachnophobes, which is nice.
Saturday, 3 May 2025
Lucky Day
15.2.4 Lucky Day
Going into the back half of the season unspoiled - I’d seen clips showing Ruby organising the defence of the pub and the bit with her telling the story (which in isolation made me wonder if this was really her?) but that was it.
So I didn’t know what was coming at all.
Wednesday, 30 April 2025
Dalek at 20
Having brought back Doctor Who could they bring back the Daleks and make them work?
Yes.
James Whitbook for io9 on Dalek twenty years on.
Saturday, 26 April 2025
The Well
15.2.3 The Well
Happy to have one Aliens episode every year or two, and I appreciate the yes-obviously-Aliens-ness of it. And the Planet Of The Vampires look of the suits. (See also the second Aquaman film.)
And a heart-tugging central guest performance by Rose Ayling-Ellis as Aliss.
And then...
... Okay, you can get away with bringing back a scary one-time-only monster if you wait seventeen years.
And another bonus for watching the credits.
Next week, Ruby! And after that, I have no idea...
Saturday, 19 April 2025
Lux
15.2.2 Lux
I had this pegged as a Pantheon episode right away.
A Scottish actor recorded in New York as the voice of a Hollywood cartoon playing in Miami which is actually Wales.
Belinda continuing to be reasonably annoyed but running with it partially because she has to and partially because she’s a good person.
A light touch for the issues of the time.
A quick sketch of fans rather than a full portrait like Love And Monsters, but still showing them love. And a lovely little grace note - look at the credits.
(Does this mean the Doctor and Belinda just made our universe real? Er...)
Next week, Planet Of The Vampires?
Saturday, 12 April 2025
The Robot Revolution
And here we go.
Funny stompy robots are a bit less funny when they kill a cat and then a bunch of sympathetic characters.
Wondering if the bitten guy was gong to be plot, or might be later, or just a passing emergency-rooms-are-horrible reference.
Who gave the Doctor Belinda’s name?
People who saw Superman III at an impressionable age just flinched up and down the country, and I don’t believe for a second that wasn’t intentional.
Proper horrible looking cyborg for Saturday teatime.
Wednesday, 26 March 2025
Rose
Doctor Who celebrating its twentieth anniversary a year and a half after its sixtieth anniversary. Well, yes.
Thursday, 20 March 2025
Mr. Benn
BBC sort-of-animated classic Mr. Benn, as mentioned in Joy To The World, continues to sneak into reality.
Pulled up at a traffic light in some small Swiss town and...
..wait... what?
For those wondering, it was about a man visiting a costume shop with two doors in the changing room, the second leading to the world the costume was for...
Thursday, 6 March 2025
Monday, 3 March 2025
1970s BBC Poe
Via horror writer and media critic Kim Newman, something I had never heard of:
In the mid-1970s, BBC2 tried to get a tradition going in parallel with BBC1's MR James-heavy Ghost Story for Christmas by doing Edgar Allan Poe stories as special editions of their Centre Play slot. Only two were made, both directed by James Ormerod.
Here's Andrew Davies' adaptation of 'The Imp of the Perverse', with Michael Kitchen, Philip Stone, Lalla Ward and Milton Johns.
And here's Hugh Whitemore's 'William Wilson' with Norman Eshley, Stephen Murray, C-3PO and Robert Tayman.
Sunday, 2 March 2025
15.2 trailer
Good to note the reluctant companion warming to the adventures upfront, showing that won’t be a drag for long.
Ruby being sinister? Oh noes.
Alan Cumming cartoon on the loose is presumably a spooky god thing?
Wednesday, 26 February 2025
Saturday, 15 February 2025
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Telefantasy Time Jump
Telefantasy Time Jump begins with Paul Cornell and Lizbeth Myles discussing British genre telly (and other genre telly for subscribers) starting with The Quatermass Experiment.
(With a historical note about series before that, beginning with Algernon Blackwood reading a ghost story at the end of the first BBC TV broadcast!)
Wednesday, 8 January 2025
Thirteen plots from David Bowie's Black Tie White Noise
For David Bowie’s birthday, adventure hooks based on his studio albums’ song titles.
Black Tie White Noise has enough for a regular BBC season...
The Wedding
The Stranger is asked to officiate at a wedding that will unite two galactic civilisations. Or to be the groom. Or the bride. Or something. The invitation’s rather vague.
You’ve Been Around
The travellers arrive on a new world to find people waving and saying “good morning” and addressing them by name and chatting amiably like they’re neighbours. Have they been here before?
(Or: The travellers arrive to find the TARDIS surrounded by police and news crews within minutes of arriving. It seems they saved the planet last week.)
I Feel Free
The travellers are sent to a 77th Century prison planet for a crime they absolutely did commit but which was legal when they did it four thousand years earlier. How do they escape, who was responsible for this miscarriage of justice, and how many of their old enemies are here too?
Black Tie White Noise
The travellers attend a jazz show in Weimar Berlin and have to save the trumpeter from an alien art thief trying to collect him which would rewrite 20th Century Western music.
Jump They Say
Something sinister living under the streets, best not to walk across the road too slowly.
Nite Flights
A plane sets off with two hundred and thirty-three people on board and lands with two hundred and thirty-four. And then another like it, and another. Always on night flights taking off and landing after dark.
Pallas Athena
An ancient city’s patron god reappears, over a thousand years and a move to a new religion after she was last seen.
Miracle Goodnight
A children’s hospital sees a dramatic rise in recoveries from serious conditions. What could be behind this, and why?
Don’t Let Me Down & Down
The travellers have to spelunk into an ancient cave complex to look for a missing group of explorers. Comments from a modern companion about dungeons and/or dragons will become slightly awkward once they spot something watching from the dark...
Looking For Lester
One day, everyone with a certain fairly-common name in London disappears for forty minutes.
I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday
One of the travellers meets the love of their life. Who really shouldn’t be on this planet or in this century.
The Wedding Song
The travellers are invited to one of River Song’s weddings, and not one of the ones the Stranger remembers happening.
Special: Lucy Can’t Dance
The travellers find themselves backstage at Strictly Come Dancing, and have to make sure one of the contestants makes it through to round two.
Wednesday, 1 January 2025
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