Tag Archives: Adric

Doctor Who Annual (1983)

Posted on February 8, 2019 by Roger Pocock

The 1983 Doctor Who Annual might have the blurriest photographic cover ever, but there seems to be a genuine attempt to make it more appealing to fans of Doctor Who than previous annuals.  The big change is the effort that … Continue reading →

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Doctor Who Annual (1982)

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Roger Pocock

The 1982 Doctor Who Annual (undated, published in 1981) has a split personality.  It’s a Fourth Doctor annual, and it’s a Fifth Doctor annual.  There are six stories and one comic strip, with all but the final two stories featuring … Continue reading →

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Adric the Scrappy

Posted on January 23, 2019 by Roger Pocock

Companion Tropes 3 Young viewers of Scooby Doo cartoons could be forgiven for being completely unaware of the existence of Scrappy Doo nowadays.  The character hasn’t featured for years, and is rarely mentioned in any marketing material.  He has almost … Continue reading →

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Earthshock

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Roger Pocock

During the 1980s, Doctor Who started to do a couple of things over and over again, which almost certainly contributed to the eventual cancellation of the show: very violent stories, and stories which feed off the past of the show.  … Continue reading →

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Four to Doomsday

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Roger Pocock

In 1981 the Doomsday Clock was at four minutes to midnight, so Doctor Who gave us a story called Four to Doomsday, featuring a TARDIS crew of four people encountering Monarch’s spaceship four light-days from Earth, with four ethnic groups … Continue reading →

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Castrovalva

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Roger Pocock

There are lots of Doctor Who stories that are inspired by fiction or by films, but these are not the only sources of inspiration available.  I have not exactly showered the work of Christopher H. Bidmead with praise so far, … Continue reading →

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Logopolis

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Roger Pocock

Anyone who has read my other Season 18 articles will have worked out by now that I am not a big fan of Christopher H. Bidmead’s approach to Doctor Who, which basically amounts to rooting it in science.  Up to … Continue reading →

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The Keeper of Traken

Posted on May 29, 2018 by Roger Pocock

On Traken there is no evil.  Anything evil on the planet turns to stone.  The use of that word “evil” will give regular readers of this blog a clue as to what kind of an article this is going to … Continue reading →

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The Visitation

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Roger Pocock

Eric Saward’s first Doctor Who script is a return to a format that Doctor Who had explored surprisingly rarely up until this point: the pseudo-historical.  The first time history was combined with an alien element was The Time Meddler, and … Continue reading →

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Audience Identification: Fifth Doctor

Posted on February 10, 2018 by Roger Pocock

This week, I began working on a review for The Visitation when inspiration struck for a weekend article; possibly a series looking at each Doctor’s “Audience Identification Figures”. It came from a piece of dialog between Adric and the Doctor, … Continue reading →

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Warriors’ Gate

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Roger Pocock

So here it is, the most incorrectly apostrophized story on websites of them all (yes, there is more than one warrior!).  It’s also one of the biggest missed opportunities of them all, because it chickens out on an idea that … Continue reading →

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State of Decay

Posted on January 18, 2018 by Roger Pocock

Welcome back Terrance Dicks.  Watching this in the original broadcast order it seems like an eternity since Doctor Who has done something like this, and it only happened because new script editor Christopher H Bidmead was in a pretty dire … Continue reading →

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Full Circle

Posted on January 17, 2018 by Roger Pocock

So here begins the E-Space Trilogy, a run of three stories set in a different universe.  If this were done again, it would be described in terms of the TARDIS passing through a “rift”, or a “crack in the universe”, … Continue reading →

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Kinda

Posted on September 26, 2017 by Roger Pocock

Kinda is a fascinating Doctor Who story.  There are layers upon layers of subtext to explore.  Christopher Bailey draws on Buddhist philosophy but I’m not going to get too hung up on that because it is little more than a … Continue reading →

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Black Orchid

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Roger Pocock

The first thing that often gets said about Black Orchid is that it is the first historical story since The Highlanders, which spectacularly misses the point and is… well, wrong.  Those Hartnell (and one Troughton) historical stories were all about … Continue reading →

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