Tag Archives: Sylvester McCoy

Cliffhangers: Seventh Doctor

It has been a fascinating exercise looking at the Doctor Who cliffhangers from the Classic Series, Doctor by Doctor.  The 1960s were inventive and brilliant, and since then it has been a tale of steady decline in terms of new … Continue reading

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Dimensions in Time

Pickled in time like gherkins in a jar. It wasn’t an auspicious start, possibly the worst opening line of anything, well… ever.  The choice of villain was also a slight disappointment for the 30th Anniversary.  The Rani always was a … Continue reading

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Silver Nemesis

Silver Nemesis is not a popular story, and I can understand why.  The problems are obvious, with three different sets of enemies who all fall short in some way, and are largely kept separate from the Doctor and Ace, who … Continue reading

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Survival

Survival is the final story of the Classic series of Doctor Who.  Remarkably it manages to bookend the series thematically and foreshadow the revival to come, and it does both of these things by accident.  We are back in contemporary … Continue reading

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The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

Once upon a time there was a Doctor Who story called The Gunfighters, which had a framing device of somebody singing the plot in the form of a ballad.  Fast forward a couple of decades, and we get The Greatest … Continue reading

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Delta and the Bannermen

There have been endless Doctor Who stories based on making some kind of an insect or small creature bigger and using that as the basis of a race of aliens.  We have had giant ants and butterflies (The Web Planet), … Continue reading

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Paradise Towers

It has been two and a half years since we last had a Doctor Who story that didn’t feed off continuity in some way, but Andrew Cartmel is our new script editor for this series and he is setting about … Continue reading

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Time and the Rani

As regeneration stories go this is obviously not ideal.  It is a million times better than The Twin Dilemma, but still arrived with some pre-packaged faults.  Andrew Cartmel took over as script editor from this story onwards, but as usual … Continue reading

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Themes in Ghost Light

Yesterday we looked at the Sylvester McCoy story Ghost Light and in particular the degree of complexity on display, so let’s take a look today at the story itself, and some of the themes it tackles.  We are obviously going … Continue reading

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Ghost Light

Ghost Light demands some effort of the viewer.  It’s not a story to just watch once.  The reason this happened is that it was originally an overly long, complex set of scripts that then got edited down by one episode, … Continue reading

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Dragonfire

Yesterday we looked at The Abominable Snowmen, which was Doctor Who’s first combination of crytobiology and robotics.  Here we have another example, with a robot dragon.  There is also the linking theme of a cold location, which we are using … Continue reading

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The Curse of Fenric

This is the second of three attempts to do a Doctor Who vampire story.  It is also the second of three stories to date that are resolved by the companion having to lose her faith in the Doctor.  Combining these … Continue reading

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The Happiness Patrol

As far as I know, this is the only story to have ever made it into an address by the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Here is what Dr Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, had to say about the story … Continue reading

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Remembrance of the Daleks

Classic Series Doctor Who is over.  New Who starts here.  That might seem an odd comment, but there are so many similarities between the Russell T Davies version of Doctor Who and the final two seasons of McCoy that in … Continue reading

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