A week after the Season 18 Blu-ray release and we get an even more anticipated HD release for Doctor Who: another fully animated missing story, in this case The Macra Terror! Yes, I never thought I’d see the day… would be an understatement, even after the release of Power. So how does the animated version stack up, and how is the story overall? Well…
Season 18 made its way to blu-ray this week, so as per usual I thought I’d review a story from the season to “celebrate”, so to speak. The big draw of the set is the new Special Edition of Logopolis, but given I’ve reviewed that already, I decided to go with the story I haven’t seen in the longest, which in this case was Meglos. Nearly 10 years since I last watched it and mentally wrote it off as “boring”, I actually enjoyed it more than that memory would‘ve had me believe. By how much? Well, let’s find out!
2019’s first, and only, televised Doctor Who story was at the very least a good one. Despite being the weakest of the writers in his own show-ran season, Chris Chibnall managed to tell a good story and put a unique spin on a Dalek tale, something very hard to do after 50+ years of the evil pepper pots. So let’s take a deeper look at Resolution, and then I’ll update the Thirteenth Doctor page for the last time this year… already. (not bitter or anything…)
So I thought with the blu-ray season sets being released now I’d watch and review at least one story from each season as they come out, rather than do the whole season in one go and ruin potential marathons for down the line. For Season 19 I chose Four to Doomsday, as I had already covered Castrovalva for the “Debut Story Marathon”, and it was the one I hadn’t seen in the longest… that wasn’t called Time-Flight… Let’s take a look then, at the story that is actually Davison’s debut in the role, recording-wise.
Series 11 / Season 37 comes to an end with the unnecessarily annoying to say “Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos”. Sadly, once again, the limits of Chris Chibnall’s script writing rears its ugly head, as while the story wasn’t bad by any means, it was once again lacking in tension or interesting new characters. So, let’s take a look then, as the Thirteenth Doctor’s final outing until New Year’s… in a couple of weeks?!
It Takes You Away is right up there with the best this series. It was cleverly written, used the companions well and had a really interesting, unique sci-fi plot at its centre. It’s getting rather worrying that the only stories I’m particularly thrilled with come from writers who aren’t showrunner Chris Chibnall, but hey-ho! Let’s take a look at “It Takes You Away”.
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!
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…
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…
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…
