Doctor Who

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Doctor Who related DVDs: The Deadly Assassin (is there any other kind?), Image of the Fendahl and Delta and the Bannermen. Accomplishments" New Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG cards: 8, just the start of The Romans, with more to come through the week.

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Taking a step back and looking at Trek today, people will find that 700 hours of viewing is too much, so they look for the essentials. Those essentials are the episodes that have built up continuity, often by being good enough other episodes will want to reference them, bring back memorable...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Books: Tragedy Day is a Doctor Who New Adventure by Gareth Roberts, and it's one of his thoroughly entertaining kitchen sink novels. By that I mean it's over-stuffed with crazy ideas, characters and details. You have a secret cult trying to turn a planet into a sitcom, super-powerful monk g...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) James Nesbitt My favored casting for the 11th Doctor, Jimmy Nesbitt makes a great "working class" Time Lord. Admittedly, my familiarity with his career is limited to Millions and Jekyll. Relevant experience: Jekyll was the brainchild of the new Doctor Who head writer Steven Moffat.

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Audios: I've gotten way behind on my Doctor Who Big Finish audios, so it's about time I start getting back into the radio play groove. Picked up where I left off, just after C'rizz joined the 8th Doctor and Charley in the Divergent Universe. The Natural History of Fear is Doctor Who does Dark Ci...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Books: Since the last few Doctor Who New Adventures I read were all part of the same arc, and No Future was its finale AND written by my personal man crush Paul Cornell, how could I not fly through it this week? Granted, it has the worst cover of any Doctor Who book ever, but the insides are prett...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) New Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG cards: Only 5 (from Fires of Pompeii) as a teaser for the new expansion. Oh, and its booster pack art: Someone Else's Post of the Week Bully's Pantone Strips of the Marvel Superheroes is a brilliant, zen-like experience. Standing ovation.

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Getting relatively low on my unread Doctor Who New Adventures, I picked up a few more from eBay. I had up until Conundrum, then First Frontier, so I procured myself the seven books in between. That would be: No Future, Tragedy Day, Legacy, Theatre of War, All-Consuming Fire, Blood Harvest an...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Though Unisystem manages to balance "Heroes" and "White Hats" (in this case "Time Lords" and "Companions") reasonably well, it's still likely players will want to play a Time Lord first, and a Companion second. Regeneration offers a way to give everyone a turn at the TARDIS controls.

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) 3. It must cater to Classic Who. A true Doctor Who game can't just have the Eccleston/Tennant material, it should give fans of the Classic series the chance to use the old monsters, the more relaxed UNIT, Gallifrey itself, etc. Supplements could later allow you to run Torchwood, UNIT or Sarah...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Books: Finished a couple of Doctor Who books, the first of which is Wishing Well, a New Series novel by Trevor Baxendale and featuring a monster living down in a well. If each New Series 3-book release features a horror tale, a romp and a sci-fi story, this one is definitely in the first catego...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) I've really decided to "collect" the new Doctor Who action figures, and the quickest way to do that is getting large collector sets. Even when I have a hunch they're all missing their accessories in that packaging. Still, can't resist that TARDIS-shaped box!It's all Series 1 stuff: 9th Doc...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) The Doctor (Doctor Who) Obviously, there was going to be a character from the Whoniverse in here. I looked at a lot of classic companions, Sarah Jane and Leela most especially. I looked at New Who characters like Rose, Martha, Captain Jack and Donna. For a while, I thought it was gonna be Gwen Co...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Also this week, more Classic Who action figures, including Daleks from The Daleks, Planet of the Daleks and Genesis of Daleks, and some beautiful 60s Cybermen of all stripes, along with a couple of tiny Cybermats. There was a Cyber Leader from the most recent Christmas special in the set, m...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Coming upon the end of my Doctor Who New Series books like I am, I bought the next four: Forever Autumn (Mark Morris), Sick Building (Paul Magrs!!! YEAH!!!), Wetworld (Mark Michalowski) and Wishing Well (Trevor Baxendale). Big Doctor Who haul considering I also got DVDs for Battlefield a...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Altered history: Since Donna takes a job at a photocopy place instead, she never boards the TARDIS, so another person - perhaps Lance himself - is impregnated with the particles. The Doctor catches wind of the plot and, like in the original history, floods the Racnoss chamber. But without D...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Spoilers for the most recent Doctor Who Easter Special, Planet of the Dead, below. You have been warned.)Last weekend, just in time for Easter, the BBC aired Planet of the Dead, the first of 4 Doctor Who specials going out in 2009 in lieu of a proper series. And it's a piece of fluff, frankly. Not t...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) I've always been opposed to the old Whovian complaint that "it's not Doctor Who" leveled at any story that doesn't meet their IDEA of Doctor Who. Doctor Who has done historical drama, SF, horror, mystery, espionage, satire, and yes, comedy. It's always been a hodgepodge, so there's really...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Everybody Likes Doctor Who Why do people inately trust the Doctor wherever he goes? Blink and You'll Miss It A review of Blink. You Were My Doctor Every Doctor is SOMEone's Doctor. Why this is and a review of Time Crash. Top 10 Most Terrifying Doctor Who Monsters To file under Behind the Sofa.

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) DVDs: I also flipped the 1st Doctor adventure, The War Machines, which features some dreadfully silly robots, but may otherwise prove important as the first of the Doctor Who formula that survives to this day. The only story spent entirely on present day Earth for William Hartnell, it fea...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Season 6B: The never really acknowledged notion that the 2nd Doctor kept traveling for a time after the Time Lord's sentence of exile/Pwerteeness but before it was enacted. Proposed evidence includes that Doctor knowing the fates of his companions in The Five Doctors and his and Jaime's...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Hanky Panky in the TARDIS: What everyone old enough to think such things thought was happening once the Doctor became young Peter Davison. Shudder to think what those same people think of Tennant. JNT: Short for John Nathan-Turner, producer of Doctor Who throughout the 80s. Right up there w...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Alongside the main Doctor Who series, Big Finish also produced many mini-series, some starring the Doctor's evil foes (Dalek Empire, Cybermen), some featuring companions (Bernice Summerfield, Sarah Jane Smith), and others still (UNIT, Gallifrey, Iris Wildthyme). There's a spiffy...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) This was an important theme for the 9th Doctor who spent his entire series allowing others to save the day. He was merely the catalyst for their becoming heroes. The Doctor has an important line in "Father's Day" about an ordinary man being the most important thing in the universe, a key to the...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) One reason for such a small week is that one of my roommates spent his Christmas bonus on both Guitar Hero III and Rock Band II. So you can well imagine. My band in the first game is called TARDIS Blues, and OUR band in the second is Torchwood. Our lead singer is a very good likeness of Gwen Cooper. I pl...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Continuing from last week, another important theme in Doctor Who - perhaps the most important theme of all - is Individuality vs. Conformity. Though the first Doctor has his authoritarian side (comes with the territory when you employ William Hartnell), he's still a Time Lord who rebelle...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Yeti in the loo" is an expression commonly used to describe Doctor Who's approach to story-telling, second only to "behind the sofa" (see Part II), but what does it MEAN!? (I'm taking for granted that you know what a "loo" is, if not well, check out the puerile picture on the right.)

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Children in Need bit with Tennant followed by The Christmas Invasion (Series 2 boxed set) Torchwood Series 1 Sarah Jane Adventures Series 1 Torchwood Series 2 Sarah Jane Adventures Series 2 (not yet on DVD) The Next Doctor (and other specials this year, not yet on DVD)

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) It's not that Christopher Eccleston stayed too briefly to have his own era, but rather that New Who up til now has been Russell T Davies' story above all. Starting with "Rose", it's a story that only finds its conclusion in Journey's End, 4 years and 2 Doctors later. RTD reinvents the program f...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Are all the Classic Who episodes I watched this week kind of crap? I guess they are, because our next story is Destiny of the Daleks, with the 4th Doctor and the first appearance of the 2nd Romana, and featuring the return of Davros (in a terrible mask). The story of the Daleks' war with the Move...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Spoilers for The Next Doctor ahead.)And by that, I mean this year's Christmas special, not the actual next Doctor to succeed Tennant by the end of next year. And for those who really thought it could be David Morrissey (above, right), all I can say is sorry! When a "future" version of the Docto...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Doctor Who Series 4 took quite a deal longer to flip, what with a commentary track on each episode (the best is on Silence in the Library - listen to Moffat and Tennant flip out when Julie Gardner dares say the Doctor has a wife!), the full run of Doctor Who Confidential, deleted scenes presen...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Some would have me try my hand at other cult series. The problem I foresee is that no series really has Trek's sheer bulk of material. Time Tunnel is over in 30 episodes, and then I have to start scratching my head all over again. For a while I though Babylon 5 would be an interesting substitute - si...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) This week, I finally got Doctor Who: The Infinite Quest, the Doctor Who cartoon that appeared in 3-minute installments on the BBC's Totally Doctor Who. I've already flipped it, so see below, but I wonder if its success will encourage BBC World to put out some kind of omnibus DVD with Doctor W...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Before they were turned into space hoodlums, the Cybermen actually had a good turn as fearmongers. They were huge, faceless, had a hard-to-understand distorted voice, and were always accompanied by creepy music. "You will serve... uzzzzzz." And to make things even creepier, they died in an e...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) REVIEW: After zombies, how about a haunted house episode? Or as it turns out, a gothic romance complete with a lonely monster in a candle-filled castle looking for a lovely companion. This chunk of Enterprise reminds me of the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era of Doctor Who, appropriating gothic h...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) REVIEW: Of any of Enterprise's four seasons, the second can most readily be accused of Same Old Trek syndrome. And in a way, those bog standard stories make the Temporal Cold War stuff seem less out of place. Good for those 2 or 3 episodes, I guess. In Future Tense, a ship from Daniels' time, the 3...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) 4. Reed as the Doctor This is one the most perfect Reed Richards panel ever. On paper, Reed IS quite a bit Doctorish, isn't he? So I don't mind the characterization at all. Not if he thinks nothing of creating new fields of human endeavor like it ain't no thing.

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) New Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG cards: 13, completing the small Premium set that featured one card from every story in Doctor Who Series 4, and even getting to start on the next full expansion: Lords of Time. Here's the booster pack art:

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) Tons, most of it on sale, so I'm really spending money to save money, and that's how I justify it. Here's a list of DVDs that'll have to stand on its own: The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus, Bubble, Gangs of New York, Juno, Hot Fuzz, The Wire Season 1, Matchstick Men, All the President's...

By noreply@blogger.com (Siskoid) I couldn't resist the Scarecrow from Human Nature! But this is probably the last wave of Doctor Who action figures I get until the Series 4 set gets off the back order list at the store I deal with here in Canada. (Promises, promises.) This Series 3 set includes Martha, a bespectacled Doctor, a...

By Siskoid Extra Doctor Who Links of the Damned Blackmarket Pies has a couple of points to make with Boosterin' the TARDIS and Messiah Complex. Steve at Gad, Sir! Comics! tells us "I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a TARDIS", and discusses a few Christmasy Doctor Who comics.