Doctor Who rarely does big character arcs. By its very nature it’s a transitory program: every week a new adventure, every few years a new Doctor and new companions. That means that a character, especially the Doctor, is established quickly and stays like that till they leave. But this weekend’s season ten finale put…
When asked about the scariest Doctor Who villains, fan have all sorts of responses. The Daleks are the go-to, but there’s new-era villains like the Weeping Angels, or everything from Autons to Zygons. But this week’s Doctor Who was a chilling reminder that there’s actually only one true answer, though: The Cybermen.
This week’s Doctor Who delivered a classic, but very familiar tale of two hostile sides coming together to face a greater threat than each other. But while most of it was a story we’ve seen many times before, it stood out as a huge, satisfying step on Bill Pott’s ongoing journey as the Doctor’s student.
After the middling Monk trilogy, Doctor Who fell back on a well-trodden house style this weekend for “The Empress of Mars,” a Mark Gatiss-penned romp. But even though this is a classic storytelling style for Who, and even though it had some interesting ideas tucked inside it, it never really strived to be anything…
This week’s Doctor Who saw the Monk trilogy come to its end, as team TARDIS found themselves battling through a dystopian Britain literally being brainwashed by fake news. It’s a timely take on our modern world, but “The Lie of the Land” disappointingly threw out its most interesting premise by committing the exact…
There’s a lot of comparisons to be drawn between this weekend’s “The Pyramid at the End of the World” and its preceding episode, “Extremis”—mainly in that they’re both setup for a story that’s really yet to shift into high gear. But, they’re also both examples of how Doctor Who can transform a humdrum episode into…
“Extremis” was the most unique episode of Doctor Who we’ve seen so far in season 10—but only because, unlike the rest of the season, it felt like an episode we’ve seen many times before from head writer Steven Moffat. For better or worse, it was a reminder of the style that will be forever linked with his time running …
By its very nature, Doctor Who is a formulaic show. You’ve got the Doctor, you’ve got a companion, they go on an adventure, there’s a scary monster, they overcome it , and are back in the TARDIS in time to do it all over again. But its latest episode did something to twist that: it gave some major consequences to the…
Doctor Who’s tenth season is only four episodes in, but I can’t remember the last time the show hit the ground running as well it has this season. We’ve had great chemistry between Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie, great fun, and now in this weekend’s episode, “Knock Knock”, we got the rest of the perfect Who formula: a…
The general arc of a companion’s introduction on Doctor Who is pretty much the same each time. They have their “bigger on the inside” moment, they do a bit of space-time travel, and then they learn that running around in a Police Box spaceship can be quite grim. With newcomer Bill, Doctor Who is back in that swing—but…
Peter Capaldi’s sublime portrayal of The Doctor has carried the show through some dodgy stories ever since he took over the role. But season 10 has given him a companion that’s just as capable in the form of Pearl Mackie’s Bill—to the point that it’s a joy to watch them, even if not much actually happen in the episode…
Doctor Who made its welcome (and long overdue) return this past weekend, and it was all decidedly new: a new companion, new tone, and in some ways, a new sensibility from showrunner Steven Moffat, as compared to his past few seasons on the series. Still, for all its freshness, season 10's opening episode couldn’t help…
I had some mixed feelings about tonight’s episode of Doctor Who. The plot of the episode (and the season) felt severely half-baked, to say the least, and great moments intermingled freely with a certain amount of WTF. But that ending? Was the greatest. That ending retroactively made the whole thing great.
Warning: If you haven’t seen tonight’s new episode of Doctor Who, it’s pretty heartbreaking. And kind of grueling. Remember “Midnight,” the scary-weird David Tennant bottle episode? This is sort of Peter Capaldi’s version of that. Goosebumps!
For years now, Doctor Who has been exploring the dark side of the Doctor, that quasi-immortal time traveler from another planet. He turns people into weapons, he inspires his friends to be reckless, he makes his enemies worse, etc. But with this latest episode, we see the absolute worst indictment of the Doctor.
I have a feeling “Sleep No More” will be another polarizing episode of Doctor Who. It’s sort of a clever experiment, though I’m not sure it entirely gels, and it’s probably saved by a fairly creepy twist ending.
This was another odd episode of Doctor Who, a show which seems to be trying to reinvent itself not through radical change but through stylistic drift. Last year, Doctor Who had some insane experiments, but this year it’s just doing a slew of two-parters about the Doctor stumbling through messes of his own creation.
There are basically two major types of Doctor Who stories: 1) The Doctor protects the status quo from some outside disruption. 2) The Doctor finds a terrible status quo, and overturns it. But then there are outliers, where the “status quo” is in itself a lot more complicated.
In the run-up to Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams guest-starring on Doctor Who, there were all sorts of rumors about which character she was playing. And a lot of people believed she was playing Jenny, the “Doctor’s Daughter” from the episode of that name. Instead, she’s playing something much more interesting.
