Well, the Thirteenth Doctor’s run of really strong historically set stories has now come to an end. While The Witchfinders wasn’t terrible, it was let down by some poor acting and some extremely over-the-top scenery-chewing, which while funny, hurt the tone to the point of making it a comedy, despite all the killing and stuff… Let’s have a look!
The last half of the first volume of the New Adventures contains what I feel is the best story of the bunch, and possibly the worst. Well, worst is harsh because it’s still perfectly good, just more generic and predictable than the other three… Want to know what I’m going on about? Read on!
The first volume of the “New Adventures” has arrived! What are they? Well, they’re new stories for the Seventh Doctor and his companions Chris and Roz from the New Adventures books and their relevant audio adaptations. So… new New Adventures, I guess. Either way, I did enjoy Roz and Chris in the aforementioned book adaptations, and if the first two stories are anything to go by, I’ll enjoy these small slices of that era too…
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…
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…
Hogan Reviews 