While “Kerblam!” might not be the best title in Who history by any means, it’s still better than Arachnids in the UK… and a better episode too! We dive head first into some political commentary again, but this time against major corporations (*cough* Amazon *cough*) and their treatment of workers, but also against radicals taking things too far. So let’s have a look and see if this works at all in the world of Doctor Who…
The trilogy originally billed as a “UNIT Trilogy”, but in reality is more a trilogy surrounding tragic UNIT soldier Daniel Hopkins, comes to a close with Warlock’s Cross, a story that also features the return of Big Finish sort-of-companion Elizabeth Klein. So how does the three-part story close itself out? The tone of the story may surprise you…
While part of me thinks it was a bit too soon after Rosa for Doctor Who to do another historical that focused on racial prejudice and related issues, Demons of the Punjab managed to outdo Rosa in the storytelling stakes and delivered a really interesting drama, with a bit of Who alien-related stuff around it (so we’re still not in pure historical land just yet…) So let’s take a look at the story and see just why it took me by surprise…
It’s the last of the trio of companion introduction stories that weren’t actually intended to be companion introduction stories, as much like Flip and Klein before her, Liv Chenka wasn’t conceived as anything other than a one off character for this story. This is an odd one though as Liv would go on to be a companion to the Eighth Doctor, rather than the Seventh, yet this is still her debut story! ANYWAY, as for Robophobia itself, it’s a sequel to Fourth Doctor TV classic “The Robots of Death”, but it manages to avoid the classic sequel pitfall by not just recycling the original but instead building a new story with the materials provided. Let’s take a closer look!
As I mentioned in my Gallifrey: Time War Vol. 1 review, I brought the two spin-off range boxsets that included Derek Jacobi’s version of The Master in a recent sale, but unlike Gallifrey, which surprised me with two excellent stories, this anthology is not up to the same standard, and if anything Jacobi’s Master is one of the few highlights… Let’s take a look!
The Tsuranga Conundrum was a step up after last week’s effort, not that it was particularly hard to do that, but it does seem to highlight a quirk of the Thirteenth Doctor’s run so far: a focus on the companions and their relationships at the expense of the villain of the story. Let’s take a look at this most recent example and see how that affected the story this time round…
A couple of months ago Big Finish did a “best of the year so far” sale, where everything returned to its pre-order price, so after thinking about it for a while, my enjoyment of the War Master set last year lead me to buy the two spin-off releases he appeared in, starting with this! Gallifrey, as a series, never appealed to me. Gallifrey politics was always a negative rather than a positive, and Lalla Ward hasn’t exactly won me over with her performances in the Fourth Doctor audios, but I can say this: There are two stories here that were fantastic! So let’s take a look at the set as a whole, and see what worked and what didn’t, in my opinion, of course!
Remember in my Rosa review when I said “while I wouldn’t want all of my Doctor Who this blatantly educational” ? Well, I meant it, so I was kind of annoyed when “Arachnids in the UK” not only had one of the worst titles in Who history, but was also all about the effects of not properly disposing of waste… plus we got another heavy-handed, unsubtle Trump-a-like, which if you’ve read my review of Who audio story “The Silurian Candidate” you’d know how I feel about those! … So… yeah. Let’s take a look…
Rosa is a hard episode to review. As a Doctor Who episode it was alright, the lead villain was bit pants but on the upside Jodie Whittaker felt much more funny and interesting this time round. As an episode made to highlight both how horrible racism is and as a history lesson to show how one lady refusing to give up her seat on a bus lead to such a big change, it was good. I guess it all comes down to what you want out of the episode, but let’s have a look one way or another…
While this TARDIS team has had more misses than hits, The Quantum Possibility Engine is at least a fun story, more comic book silliness (with some actually well-written political satire) than standard Who, and given it has Dogbolter from from comics, that’s a fitting decision. Let’s take a closer look then, at the end of this most recent Doctor-Ace-Mel trilogy…
Hogan Reviews 