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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Well, to use the old Krusty the Clown meme: “What the hell was that?!”. There’s a lot to digest here but so much of it was visual spectacle over any actual sense of plot or well-written dialogue and the return of Omega was absolutely awful for this long-time fan. The Rani was wasted, more heavy-handed social commentary and then we get the final 10 or so minutes and suddenly it was actually well written and interesting… until the last shot. Yes, there’s no point in hiding it, this was Ncuti Gatwa’s regeneration story, and boy that was some cliffhanger… Let’s take a look and try and make sense of it all…

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Doctor Who’s latest season continues and manages to deliver a fun episode at last, though one that wasn’t without its usual issue of being subtle as a brick about an important message, so we’re not golden here or anything. Still, some big continuity things / callbacks and The Fifteenth Doctor actually showing a range of emotions other than happy and crying lifts the episode up quite a bit! So let’s take a look…

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“The Story and The Engine” is another episode of this Doctor Who series that tells a good story, is well acted and has some positive messages at its heart but once again I find myself longing for something a bit more… Doctor Who-y. I’m happy episodes like this exist but I would prefer not to have so many of them in a row is what I’m saying, throw in a few base under siege / generic alien invasion stories here and there to break things up maybe… Well, anyway, let’s take a look!

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