With the new season steadily approaching, we sit down for predictions and bants * * * We’ve now been treated to no less than TWO teasers for the upcoming Series 14 of Doctor Who, and so we sat down for a boozy (well, for one of us) evening of predictions and general pondering. * How excited are we about the new series, and why? * How many Bridgerton references do we think there will be in the Bridgerton episode? * Is Agent Smith a colleague of Captain Jack’s? * Whom is Jinx...

Inter-temporal infanticide and a divisive song-and-dance number. We spend more than twice its runtime dissecting The Fifteenth Doctor's first big adventure. * * * A mysterious cloaked figure enigmatically leaves a newborn baby behind on the collection doorstep of St. Building Atmosphere’s Church one snowy Christmas Eve, departing without so much as a “Goodbye, Ruby Sunday”. Who could hang that name on her? Flash forward 18 years and the foundling has grown up to become another...

Tennant is back, inexplicably yet fabulously, prompting a customary, cocktail-fuelled retrospective * * * David Tennant returns to Doctor Who for a brief trilogy stint (at least to start with), this time as the Fourteenth Doctor. How curious, you might think. Why did this face return, they ask at the start, and you'd think they'd have answered this question by the end. Therapy, say some. Calculated corporate commercialism, say others. In any event, it's hard to refute that the trilogy...

The Toymaker temporarily relinquishes his confounding mock-German accent while lip-syncing to Spice Girls in Stark Tower for the conclusion of the 60th Anniversary Specials * * * It’s 1925 and John Logie Baird would have invented television already if only it weren’t for the tragic lack of a televisual crash test dummy. Fortunately, just across the road, the affable Mr Emporium’s Toy Shop stands ready and waiting. A few cuts later, a chap we’ve known was the Toymaker for at least a year...

D’n’D return for Midnight 2.0 in perhaps the most corridory episode of Doctor Who * * * Fresh from some leisurely bants asking Isaac Newton how does he like them apples, Doc and Donna hurtle to a fiery stop aboard a mysterious spaceship, where the first thing the TARDIS regenerates is its Hostile Action Displacement System so it can finally put itself back together in peace. It turns out their landing pad was off a corridor so long that it punctures the very bounds of the universe...

Another glimpse at some of the bits that didn’t quite go as planned * * * What-Ho, Podcastland! Hope you’re enjoying a sensational holiday season and looking forward to the most decadent of New Year’s celebrations! It’s been an eventful and momentous year! We FINALLY caught up with famous-TV-show-we-all-really-really-like Doctor Who, after over 10 years of podcasting about it. Yep, we haven’t uploaded reviews of the latest three Specials yet, but fret not, Who Back When Phase 2...

Mad Paddington interrupts a tuna madras and Doc is rubbish at keeping a secret * * * The freshly re-generated 14th Doctor travels to London’s Camden Market and instantly bumps into Donna Noble, the one former companion who under no circumstances may be bumped-into. She introduces her daughter, Rose, handily volunteers information about Rose’s career to the stranger before her, and then fails to observe a spaceship crashing into a nearby disused power station. The timings frankly are so...

We're joined by legendary Whovian, jD, as we continue our trip down that temporal road

Join us for perhaps the most introspective of our retrospectives as we reflect on a trip down that temporal road * * * We set out, a little over a decade ago, to review all of TV Doctor Who, and now that we've finally accomplished that mission, we figured it was time for a slightly different and more introspective kind of Bonus Retrospective.  This is Part 1 of a 2-part Retro, in which Marie, Jim, Drew and Leon sit down to commemorate this momentous occasion. We sit down over a...

A deep-dive into the successes (and failures) of a Doctor, a show runner and an era of Doctor Who. * * * If you haven't already, then go through our back catalogue and listen to our reviews of the 31 13th Doctor episodes! Jodie Whittaker's and Chris Chibnall's Thirteenth Doctor Era came to an end on TV just a year before we wrapped it up on Who Back When. We've reviewed every single Thirteenth Doctor episode — some of them twice! — and as we are wont to do, we are taking a step back...

It's the end of an era as Doc is joined by old friends and selves to save the world one last time before she regenerates * * * Kablammo! We’re aboard a spacetime express train and Doc and what remains of the Fam fail to rescue yet another unique, near-mythical, never-seen-before creature we’ll never revisit, substantiate or learn more about. Boom! Rasputin is The Master. Why? Never you mind. Explosion! Famous paintings are being vandalised and seismologists disappearing. Shut up,...

Two wildly different milestone stories, neither canonical, one rather pants, the other quite amazing. All right, here we go! * * * Dimensions in Time (30th Anniversary) The Rani has kidnapped one specimen of every species in the universe, except for the time lords, of whom she has two disembodied Doctor heads, and plans to clone those specimens and fashion a time tunnel along the Greenwich meridian, and thereby trap The Doctor in a so-called "20 year loop" that doesn't quite loop so...

We’re thrilled to learn that Doc herself listens to Doctor Who podcasts! * * * Abby McPhail, Cleo Proctor, and Shawna Thompson with excellent discernment have embarked upon that most noble of endeavours: a Doctor Who podcast, or increasingly Docpast, as Abby’s carefully curated collection of files on the Doctor begins first to corrupt and then to disappear. These aren’t the only lacunae opening in the Whoniverse, however; Graham and Ryan also go missing, somehow even more missing...

Join us for an evening of discussing, debating and flat-out fawning over the utterly sensational Eighth Doctor * * * The Eighth Doctor may only have had one movie, but he has undeniably carved out a niche in the time vortex all his own with myriad audio adventures, the odd appearance in NewWho (The Night of The Doctor, The Power of The Doctor), even popping up in The Five(ish) Doctor Reboot, and of course in every Whovian's heart. Tune in, as Leon is joined by extra-special guest,...

Doctor Who graduates to a one-off on the little big screen and heads across the pond in our very last Classic Doctor Who review * * * Seven has dispensed with his companions to catch up on some light time travel-themed reading at Home Alone, but little does he know that a Phantom Menace is lurking in his old frenemy The Master’s funeral casket holding a Secret of the Ooze. Forced to make an emergency landing in San Francisco in 1999, with consummate English naiveté Doc steps through...

A poor story, countless plot holes, and two wasted historicals land this not-so-Special somewhere in the bottom-two of the Whittaker era * * * It was a dark and stormy night in the middle of the day on the road to Mandalay, when Shih Yang rocked up beachside with a writ for mayhem and unleashed an ancient ocean demon, all because keeper of the secret order’s secret secret Ying Wai had a chip off the old blockhead son who didn’t want to fight until he got his dad killed, and then wanted...

We’re joined by a guest expert for a look back on the tragically brief Seventh Doctor Era. * * * Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor only appeared in 12 Classic Doctor Who serials, but boy oh boy did he leave an indelible mark on the show. Having now reviewed this fabulous dozen, we are joined by perhaps the foremost expert in this particular flavour of Timelord, Michael Ridgway (@bad_movie_club), to debate, rate and/or berate the stories, companions, aliens and baddies. Which...

Happy New Year, Whittaker era! And how better to celebrate than with beefy bean has-beens and countless countdowns? * * * It’s New Year’s Eve 2021, and for the third year running Jeff’s done a bunk, leaving Sarah to pick up the pieces as the family always expects her to because she still hasn’t found a nice man to settle down with, and the odds of him being the guy standing across the counter from her holding a 1930s Monopoly board bequeathed to him by his latest, possibly latest...

The Master channels Salem to recruit a Rex Kwon Do class as human catnip. Dear God, Ace, get some actual friends! * * * In the very last serial of Classic Doctor Who, The Seventh Doctor and Ace finally return to Perivale only to find the town in a dismal state: stray cats maraud the back gardens; the local youth centre has been turned into a fight club; and most of Ace’s old friends have vanished without a trace. The locals don’t appear particularly concerned, but Doc immediately gets...

Sweet Buttery Kablammos, we've been DocPasting for a decade!!!

Three Doctors, Time personified, and the undoing of pretty much every single character arc this season * * * Doc ducks where Tecteun stuck and tries her luck in triplicate, torn between being tormented by Smarm and Assured, reuniting with the TARDIS under Kate Stewart’s protection in Williamson’s tunnels, and with no possible justification also part-materialising on Karvanista’s ship, which she promptly rams into the Sontaran forcefield to infiltrate their new headquarters. Yup, this...

It’s got Zompires, Nicholas Parsons, and the most awkward seduction in Classic Doctor Who * * * Alan Turing really should have made a mad dash for the patent office, because World War 2 is coming to an end and some dude named Judson has ripped off the Enigma with his Ultima machine and is using it to not only decode enemy cyphers, but translate ancient norse inscriptions. The chap in charge, Commander Millington, has an obsession with the local norse legend of Fenric which he believes...

The Mummy Returns, The Serpent is the Plain Foe, and Indiyaza Jones and the Candle of Tomb. * * * Three years have passed since Yaz, Dan and Jericho were Angeled back to the past, and she’s been Indiana Jonesing around the world with her new fam, trying desperately to hamfist a dotted red line composited onto a map into this episode’s b-plot. Bla bla bla something about the end of the world and tunnels through space and time. Meanwhile, five seconds have passed since the Doc was...

An evolution-crazed diorama fan with a Neanderthal butler plots to take over the British Empire from his haunted mansion. And, wait, Ace was an arsonist?! * * * Perivale, Greater London, houses some dark secrets, many of them in one particular house that Ace had the misfortune of encountering in 1983. But that’s all in the past, well the future, as Doc’s current focus is most definitely on said house’s Victorian period, and its occupants who only come out at night. No, they’re not...