Tag Archives: Nyssa

Nyssa the Stoic

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Roger Pocock

Companion Tropes 17 Imagine for a moment what your reaction would be to the following… An evil monster kills your step mother, which is a shame because you rather liked her.  Then he kills your father, and starts walking around … Continue reading →

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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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Cliffhangers: Fifth Doctor

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Roger Pocock

When I wrote about the Fourth Doctor cliffhanger endings, I mentioned how the variety and inventiveness of the cliffhangers had been a diminishing process since the 1960s.  That doesn’t just continue for the Fifth Doctor era, it falls off a … Continue reading →

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Arc of Infinity

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Roger Pocock

Arc of Infinity was the beginning of the 20th season of Doctor Who, and it was decided that every story should include some element of the past of the series to make up a celebratory year.  Earthshock had gone down … 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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Terminus

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Roger Pocock

When I first watched Terminus I hated it.  Subsequently I have re-watched it a few times, with a kind of nagging feeling that there is a good story in there somewhere and I must be missing something, but I still … Continue reading →

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Mawdryn Undead

Posted on April 17, 2018 by Roger Pocock

Sometimes things just don’t go according to plan.  There are some Doctor Who stories that are so overshadowed by what might have been that it becomes difficult not to watch them without a sense of disappointment.  In the 20th anniversary … 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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Snakedance

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Roger Pocock

Every once in a while there is a “Before They Were Famous” type of programme on TV, and who should appear but a lipstick-wearing Martin Clunes. Well, fancy that. Of course, the audience finds it all hilarious, quite the funniest … 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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