In terms of the first series of “Fourth Doctor Adventures” this was the story I was most looking forward to revisiting as I remembered strongly liking this story at the time. It’s a simple but effective idea: send Leela back to the time of Boudica and watch the Doctor look on in horror as she finds a kindred spirit she wishes to help, despite the fact history has other ideas. Let’s take a look!
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The Renaissance Man is an odd one, and I don’t mean it how I normally do in terms of “hard to talk about for reasons” but I mean it in that it’s intentionally an odd one! Full of surreal humour and scenes and some fun back-and-forth between The Doctor and the villain of the day it was a definite step up from Nerva if nothing else, but what’s it like now, divorced of the “shiny new Tom Baker audios” feel? Let’s take a look!
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For a lot of people “Destination: Nerva” was a big exciting release as it was the first Tom Baker Big Finish audio they listened to, but as mentioned in its review I also brought the Lost Stories set released at the same time and was delighted by “The Foe from the Future” and therefore missed out on the disappointment that many had listening to this story first. So this is less “does Destination: Nerva still hold up?” and more “is it really as boring as I remember it being?” Not super inspiring, but oh well, let’s take a look!
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The Horns of Nimon is a hard one to talk about because technically, in every way you’d normally judge a story, it’s pretty crap. The story is quite dull, the acting quite poor, the costumes, even for the time, are quite naff… yet despite all of that I do often enjoy the story, mostly because of the odd dichotomy of Tom Baker doing a few serious takes while the character of Soldeed eats so much scenery that you kind of have to applaud him for it. So let’s take a look and see where my opinion lands on this watch through…
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When it came to finally reviewing a story from Season 16 I couldn’t bring myself to choose a later serial as the season is one long connective story arc from start to finish, so for this season only (well, and probably Season 23…) I will be reviewing these in order, whenever I swing back round to it again. “The Ribos Operation” isn’t exactly a stellar start, while I do like the concept of the season and Mary Tamm impresses straight away as Romana a lot of the actual core story is, well, dull frankly. Oh well, let’s take a closer look!
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Time to tackle another personal favourite of mine with “Horror of Fang Rock”, a classic claustrophobic base under siege (or in this case, lighthouse under siege) story with an eclectic cast of characters slowly being picked off by a mysterious creature. It only features about five sets but everything is written and directed so well that you don’t notice, or if you do, you don’t care. It also introduced the Rutans visually at last in currently their only TV appearance, oddly enough! Let’s take a look.
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The next somewhat random Fourth Doctor serial to get reviewed is the “Masque of Mandragora”, another one of those stories I can’t remember the last time I watched due to an overriding feeling of it just being “okay”. It is a rare Fourth Doctor “pseudo historical” and set in Italy’s past no less, but despite sentient time energies, evil cultists and swashbuckling scenes it’s… yeah, still just “okay”. Let’s take a look anyway!
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Kicking off this run of Fourth Doctor reviews is one of my all-time favourite Doctor Who stories: “The Seeds of Doom”, which features the plant-based Krynoids and spends one third of the story in Antarctica and the other two-thirds in the British countryside, leading to a fun six parter that doesn’t lose steam like so many of its peers. Let’s take a look!
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The latest Doctor Who Blu-Ray set has arrived, and sadly they used some pretty poor AI upscaling thing that makes the picture look… weird, even to my eyes that often doesn’t catch that sort of thing, to the point where I’ve taken screenshots from the DVD release instead, which kind of goes against the point of these reviews but oh well! While it does introduce the Zygons, a great alien race that oddly never reappeared on screen until 2013, many decades after this story, my favourite thing about it is that it’s pretty much a Third Doctor era UNIT story with the Fourth Doctor… and being set in Scotland. Still! It’s a great story, so let’s take a look at it!
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“The Last Queen of the Nile” is the titular story for this final box of this year’s Fourth Doctor Adventures and really goes out on a high. A “pure historical” (in other words our time travelling heroes and their timeship are the only sci-fi elements) which is rare for any non-Hartnell Doctor but even rarer four Mr. Baker, but it really succeeds in its goal of showing the “Whoniverse’s” version of Anthony and Cleopatra with real dramatic gravitas, while also not forgetting to have a bit of fun here and there. Let’s take a look!
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Hogan Reviews 