Throwback Reviews – Two-minute Time Lord: Recent Episodes
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"Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Chloe Webber?" After a couple of months away to recharge the batteries, there's no more jarring compare-and-contrast to Doctor Who of 2020 than Doctor Who of 2006's "Fear Her."
There's not a lot of distance between covering ELO songs with a band of Tenth Doctor investigators, and enjoying Doctor Who fandom culture. You just have to watch out for the Abzorbaloffs in both places.
Check out Reality Bomb Live in New York for 2019, occasionally invaded by me.
We're back, and we're picking up where we left off…
…sort of! Join us next week for a glimpse at the new 2MTL!
One last Throwback Review before 2MTL falls into a black hole: "The Impossible Planet" is great for exactly the reason I missed.
(NOTE: The ending of the podcast is an intentional nod…)
It's been a while since we did a Throwback Review, so let's look back at Mark Gatiss's second episode of New Who, which feel surprisingly like a mashup of the classic series and 1966's Batman TV show.
The Doctor and companions were threatened with maximum deletion last time, which I suppose is worse than simple deletion. I bet the Doctor had a clever way out of this one that had absolutely no deus ex machina involved, right?
Well, at least "The Age of Steel" is a cool name.
If you were a classic fan who was on Team Cyberman rather than Team Dalek, this episode was long overdue. But was "Rise of the Cybermen" a proper re-introduction of the classic villains? Or were there too many stompy missteps out of the gate?
"The Girl in the Fireplace" is a glimpse into the future: Steven Moffat's second Doctor Who story pretty much establishes the format that the show will follow when he takes over as showrunner and casts Smith, Gillan and Darvill. Plus, we revisit a 2MTL topic from 2009 and marvel at [...]
It's been a LONG time since we've done a Throwback Review. So let's pick up where we left off: with an insufferable TARDIS couple realizing that things are just a little bit complicated, and a heaping helping of nostalgia from the Archetypal Companion and the Shooty Dog Thing.
Eight years ago we saw a new side to the Doctor and his companion, who reached stratospheric levels of self-satisfaction. Was Queen Victoria right about what awful people they were? Are a smug Doctor and Rose worse than, say, a Doctor trying to brain a caveman or strangle a companion?
The single clearest indication you can get of what a new Doctor's going to be like won't come around until the second full episode. (This I vow to be self-evident! Unless you disagree with me, at which point it becomes an argument for a future 2MTL!) "New Earth" is the first distraction-free look at David [...]
So this is Christmas, or it will be in a couple of weeks, and while we have visions of killer Snowmen dancing in our heads for this year's Christmas special, why don't we look back on modern Doctor Who's first? Yep, it's time to resume our "Throwback" reviews with "The Christmas Invasion."
"You have the guts to do what's right when everyone else just runs away!" That's what the Doctor's taught Rose, she tells Mickey and Jackie during the most important scene in "The Parting of the Ways." But is this story about the triumph of the human spirit, or something much more bleak? And, oh yeah, [...]
Well, they can't all be winners. They certainly can't all be huge and epic, either, but "Boom Town" particularly suffers by being bracketed by Steven Moffat's debut and the first in a long line of budget-busting series finales. This cheap-feeling episode has a couple of things to recommend it, however, and it's actually better in [...]
Let's just quickly zip past the fact that "The Doctor Dances" is one of the most excellent episodes ever, and talk about its REAL name and its true subversive impact on Doctor Who from 2005 on.
Warning: While there isn't any actual "bad language" in this episode, there's a fair bit of bleeping which itself [...]
Wow, it's been a long time since I've done a Throwback Review. Let's remedy that with the debut of one Steven Moffat in an episode that evokes classic Who, the tropes of vintage 2005 RTD-era, and hints of the future Moffat era.
(OK, this runs five minutes. But, in my defense, there's audio clips and [...]
Resuming our Throwback Reviews, we go back to the eighth episode of the 2005 revival of Doctor Who, "Father's Day" by Paul Cornell. (It's an interesting time to watch one of Christopher Eccleston's stories, after his recent remarks about his time on the show were repeated by Martyn from the Bad Wilf podcast.)
Think of "The Long Game" as the mirror-universe version of "Torchwood: Children of Earth." Many of the same attitudes and philosophies Russell T. Davies portrayed in that later, much better work are present in "The Long Game." But in a cheap-sets far-future playground, it's much harder to muster finesse…
Shannon Patrick Sullivan's excellent A Brief [...]
The return of the Daleks. At the hands of Rob Shearman.
Yes, it's just as good as you remember.
Yes, "World War Three" is better than "Aliens of London." Which is somewhat like saying a stab wound is better than amputation. All the same, there's some important and valuable stuff in RTD's otherwise least-successful Doctor Who story.
PLUS an announcement: there's a trivia throwdown coming at Gallifrey One between The Doctor Who Podcast [...]
Michael of the excellent Tin Dog Podcast frequently observes, when he reviews an old and not-much-missed story, that "it's actually not that bad!" Would that I could say the same of an episode that brought to 2005 some of the stereotypical criticisms leveled at the classic series: bad effects, bad monsters and bad pacing.
Resuming our trek through the revived series from the beginning, we take a look at the Victorian pseudo-historical featuring Charles Dickens, whose stories provided skeleton and muscle for the 2010 Christmas special.
Resolved: "The End of the World" was the most important Series One episode to Doctor Who's breakout success in 2005. When you have a strong opening, the follow-up had better be a killer, and it was.
Beginning an occasional subset of 2MTL podcasts, in which I give a two-minute (more or less, time's a relative dimension and all that) review of Doctor Who episodes since 2005. We begin with "Rose," perhaps the only episode in which we got a fair look at the Ninth Doctor.