Saturday, 16 January 2077

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Friday, 28 November 2025

Doctor Who Review Index (2025)

My quest to review every episode of Doctor Who is one of the bigger projects I've undertaken on the blog, especially in recent years, and now (fortunately for those interested in other topics), the end is in sight. Only the six black-and-white seasons from the 1960s remain to be covered, and those seasons can be problematic to watch due to their volume of missing episodes, unwisely destroyed by the BBC in the 1970s for storage reasons.


That's a problem for another day, as I have now watched and reviewed most of the rest of the series on television. A full list follows, and will be updated once I've cracked those early seasons and the spin-off shows.

And yes, barring the anticipated announcement of a recovered missing episode, this should be the last Doctor Who article in a while.


Classic Doctor Who

Modern Doctor Who
List of Doctor Who Companions from this Index
(not counting recurring characters and allies, or one-off characters from the specials; I would also categorise the Doctor as River Song's companion rather than vice versa)
  • Season 7: Elizabeth Shaw
  • Seasons 8-10: Jo Grant
  • Seasons 11-14: Sarah Jane Smith
  • Seasons 14-15: Leela
  • Season 15: K9 Mk. 1
  • Seasons 16-18: Romana
  • Seasons 16-18: K9 Mk. 2
  • Seasons 18-19: Adric
  • Seasons 18-20: Nyssa
  • Seasons 18-21: Tegan Jovanka
  • Seasons 20-21: Vislor Turlough
  • Seasons 21-23: Peri Brown
  • Seasons 23-24: Mel Bush
  • Seasons 24-26: Ace
  • Series 1-2: Rose Tyler
  • Series 1: Captain Jack Harkness
  • Series 2: Mickey Smith
  • Series 3: Martha Jones
  • Series 4, 14: Donna Noble
  • Series 5-7: Amy Pond
  • Series 5-7: Rory Williams
  • Series 7-9: Clara Oswald
  • Series 10: Bill Potts
  • Series 10: Nardole
  • Series 11-12: Graham O'Brien
  • Series 11-12: Ryan Sinclair
  • Series 11-13: Yasmin Khan
  • Series 13: Dan Lewis
  • Series 14: Ruby Sunday
  • Series 15: Belinda Chandra
List of Doctor Who Showrunners from this Index
(note: in the Classic show, the role of showrunner was effectively held by an executive producer in charge of physical production, whilst the script editor handled all writing decisions)
  • Seasons 7-12: Barry Letts (producer) & Terrance Dicks (script editor)
  • Seasons 12-14: Philip Hinchcliffe (producer) & Robert Holmes (script editor)
  • Season 15: Graham Williams (producer) & Robert Holmes (script editor)
  • Seasons 15-16: Graham Williams (producer) & Anthony Read (script editor)
  • Season 17: Graham Williams (producer) & Douglas Adams (script editor; yes, that one)
  • Season 18: John Nathan-Turner (producer) & Christopher H. Bidmead (script editor)
  • Seasons 19-23: John Nathan-Turner (producer) & Eric Saward (script editor)
  • Seasons 24-26: John Nathan-Turner (producer) & Andrew Cartmel (script editor)
  • Series 1-4, 14 - present: Russell T. Davies
  • Series 5-10: Steven Moffat
  • Series 11-13: Chris Chibnall
Bonus List: List of Seasons with Daleks in Them from this Index
  • Seasons 9-12
  • Season 17
  • Season 21-22
  • Season 26
  • Series 1-13 inclusive
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Doctor Who: Season 26 and the TV Movie

The Doctor's travels with his companion Ace have returned him to Earth in the near future, where an interdimensional incursion sees him reunite with UNIT and his old friend Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart. But the Doctor is also playing a longer game, intrigued by Ace's troubled history in Perivale, a suburb of London where nothing ever happens...until it does.


With the quality and ratings of Doctor Who backsliding through the mid-1980s, it was a welcome surprise - though an unwelcome one to the BBC executives eager to cancel the show - that the 25th silver anniversary season in 1988 had seen something of a return to form for the show. The season had restored some mystery to the Doctor's character, made the Daleks a force to be reckoned with once again and seen successful experiments with surrealism (in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy), though the season had also wasted the Cybermen. Still, the show seemed to be on the upswing under increasingly confident script editor Andrew Cartmel, and was even holding its own in the ratings war with soap opera Coronation Street.

For the 26th season, Cartmel brought in a promising team. Ben Aaronovitch returned from the previous season's Remembrance of the Daleks to do for UNIT what he'd done for the Daleks, alongside Ian Briggs, the creator of the character of Ace, for one of Ace's most important stories. Newcomers Marc Platt and Rona Munroe also joined the team. The decision had been taken to continue the path taken in Season 25, of making the Doctor darker and more manipulative, whilst querying the mystery of his background. Ace also became the most-fleshed-out companion in the show's history, driving much of the action in three of the four stories in the season and her background and motivations being explored in a way never before seen for the companion role.

Battlefield is a very promising story that never quite takes off. It's a collection of great, sometimes classic, vignettes and individual scenes which don't cohere into a solid whole, built around a very solid premise. The idea here is that, on a parallel Earth in a neighbouring dimension, the legends of King Arthur were real, undertaken by warriors who mixed feudal fighting styles and notions of chivalry with energy weapons and spaceships. The Doctor got involved in their feud, becoming known as the sorcerer Merlin. However, that was also a future Doctor. When the battle between Arthur and Morgaine's forces spills over onto our Earth, the Seventh Doctor doesn't really have a clue what's going on and has to work with clues and messages left by his future self, whilst also just purely winging it.

This creates a nice contrast between this story and Aaronovitch's last one, Remembrance of the Daleks, which had the Doctor as a master manipulator, moving the Daleks and Davros and humans around like chess pieces with no worthwhile opponent. It's also fun seeing UNIT back in the mix, with Nicholas Courtney on excellent form as the Brigadier and Angela Bruce making a fine Brigadier Bambera. It's also great to see UNIT as a genuinely multi-national organisation, with French, Polish and Czech troopers amongst others.

The rest of the cast is exemplary, with Jean Marsh knowing how to make Morgaine sing, chewing the scenery in one scene, being scary in another and being even compassionate in another. One of Aaronovitch's best ideas here is that Morgaine's forces are not "evil" as such, but merely misguided and still following the codes of honourable combat: Morgaine's fury when she learns her son has accidentally desecrated a memorial to fallen soldiers in a churchyard is palpable. Christopher Bowen's Mordred is also solid, and Marcus Gilbert's Ancelyn is great fun, with 200,000 volt charisma (Gilbert went on to play Arthur himself in Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness just three years later). Even the individual UNIT troops are well cast, with Dorota Rae stealing her every scene with a small role as the Brigadier's helicopter pilot. The great worldbuilding and plotting, and excellent casting, is backed up by some nice battle sequences and a great bit of prosthetics work with the Destroyer, easily the best monster of the season (and, in technical terms at least, maybe all of Doctor Who), played with gravity-laden menace by Marek Anton.

Unfortunately, the story just doesn't really come together. There's a bit of panto in the feeling of characters running around, and there's some plotting shortcuts that feel like script placeholders that were never fleshed out (Ancelyn being thrown several hundred feet by a single grenade to fly through the roof of a building to meet the Doctor is unintentionally comical). The ending also feels like it could do with some work, and I go back and forth on whether Aaronovitch's decision to spare a character who was going to be killed off was a good idea or not. Battlefield can be a lot of fun but feels a bit shambolic.

Ghost Light, on the other hand, is Doctor Who at its quietest and most horrifying. A Gothic horror story unfolding in a haunted house that (as usual) is more than it seems, this serial also has a phenomenal cast, great dialogue and a solid premise, with a very well-thought-out theme of evolution and how that factors back into the story, with Ace's character evolution, the evolution of humanity itself, the character of Nimrod (the last surviving Neanderthal) and the atrophying static of the villainous Light all being great ideas.

Unfortunately these ideas are delivered in a very dense script, which should have been a four-parter than than a three-parter, with some ideas under-explored. There's also a lack of clarity in some ideas - realising that "Control" refers to a scientific control group rather than something in charge complete changes the viewer's perception of a character - and precisely how much the Doctor knows about what is going on is left fuzzy.

The absolute standout of the serial is Sophie Aldred as Ace. Her performance in her debut story lacked subtlety, but she improved immensely over Season 25 and this season is knocking it out of the park. Sylvester McCoy is also on top form; both actors played into the cheesy fun of Battlefield but here respond to the Gothic horror and deep-rooted character clashes and excel. It also helps that Platt gives the Seventh Doctor one of his two all-timer pieces of dialogue:
Ace: "Don't you have things you hate?"
The Doctor: "I can't stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations - terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls. And then there's unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty."
Ace: "Too right."
The Doctor: "We all have a world of our own terrors to face."
Ace: "I face mine on my own terms!"
Ghost Light - which I remember once calling the In Utero or The Holy Bible of Doctor Who, brilliant but you're not going to be putting it on at parties - is hard work but ultimately rewarding in being a fine piece of horror and a parable about childhood terrors.

The Curse of Fenric is the season highlight and a strong challenger to Remembrance of the Daleks' position as the McCoy story. The story takes the Doctor and Ace to a remote British military base in Northumbria in 1943. A codebreaker is using an advanced machine to break the encryption on the German U-boats, but the Soviet Union has discovered that their erstwhile allies may be on the brink of other, less positive developments and send in a strike team to intervene. There's a strange disagreement between the chief codebreaker and the naval commander going on, and the local vicar is facing a confidence of faith, something that becomes more important than expected.

This is a great story packed with fine performances and nice ideas. Nicholas Parsons was a typical John Nathan-Turner bit of stunt casting, but Parsons was a professional, serious actor long before he was a gameshow host and relishes the chance to show his acting chops here, and his performance is heartbreaking. Dinsdale Landen is suitably gruff as Dr. Judson and Alfred Lynch is memorably haunted as the Viking-obsessed Commander Millington. Tomek Bork is also great as Captain Sorin. The Soviet strike team is also painted with excellent depth, such as them coming from different parts of the USSR, so the Armenian gets mocked by the Russians, and the Cossack is suitably proud of his heritage.

Even better is the way the store coheres together, succeeding where the (very) superficially similar Battlefield fails. The ideas of faith and hope drive the narrative onwards as the Doctor confronts of his most formidable foes, a deadly enemy who can be trapped by the inescapable logic of his own beliefs. The action sequences are solid (even if the timeslot means some punches are pulled), and the makeup for the Haemovores is quite exceptional.

If McCoy and Aldred were outstanding in Ghost Light, they manage to go a step further here. The Seventh Doctor's confidence turning to desperation is brilliantly played by McCoy, and the sequence where he is surrounded by Haemovores and he fends them off by a demonstration of faith - intoning the names of all his companions one by one, knowing he could rely on every single one of them - is superb. But the story really belongs to Aldred as she confronts the trauma of her past in a way she wasn't expecting, falls in love, has her faith tested by possibly her bloodiest story, and emerges stronger for it all.

The story only has a couple of weaknesses: the writing and performances of the two evacuees who fall prey to the Haemovores can be a bit questionable, and the editing is a bit choppy, a result of the story going 15 minutes over time and having to be cut down. The Blu-Ray release incorporates two alternate cuts of the story, both incorporating the extra footage, one in episodic format and a more recent, movie-length version with a totally recut score by original composer Mark Ayres and subtly updated effects. Both cuts are better, clearing up some spotty plotting and adding some more scenes that make the characters resonate better.

Survival is an odd Doctor Who story. After the events of the two preceding stories, Ace decides to lance the boil of her childhood trauma by getting the Doctor to take her home to Perivale so she can check in with her mates. The town turns out to be boring beyond belief, and a much smaller place than Ace remembers. There's a classic Doctor Who mystery - most of Ace's old gang has gone missing and there are cats doing weird things in the neighbourhood - and some interesting guest characters, with the most random being the shopkeepers played by famous-at-the-time comedy double act Hale and Pace. Eventually a link is discerned between Perivale and a dying alien planet, whose inhabitants don't care about their impending demise, only the thrill of the hunt, and the Doctor encounters the Master, now consumed by an alien force.

This isn't as strong a story as the previous two, but that's a high bar. It's instead a lyrical and offbeat tale from Rona Munro, who would make minor history by becoming the only writer to work on Classic Who and Modern Who when she returned ten seasons and twenty-six years (ha!) later to writer The Eaters of Light. The story is simple: the Doctor, Ace and Ace's friends have to escape from the alien planet before it is destroyed, and deal with the planet's ability to "infect" people and make them into hunters. Even the Master isn't hatching some Machiavellian scheme. The result is a very contemporary-feeling story unfolding in youth centres, on housing estates and on suburban back streets, as well as the alien planet. In many respects, the story feels like it aired sixteen months before Rose, not sixteen years. There's a lot of "you can't go home again," ideas floating around here as well as the continuing evolution of Ace's character.

There's a great performance from Anthony Ainley, here appearing as the Master for the very last time, eight years after his first appearance, giving a more measured and subdued performance that is far more menacing than his normal scenery-chewing. Lisa Bowerman is also outstanding as Karra, the main alien character. Bowerman would go on to play companion Bernice Summerfield (the first major, popular companion to debut in non-TV media) in various Doctor Who audio projects up to this very day.

The weaknesses in the story are the Cheetah People, who actually have great prosthetics and makeup, but just look a bit too cuddly, and the Doctor feels a bit inert in the story and too reactive. The finale gag, which has the Doctor escaping from an exploding motorbike, also feels a bit random and shoehorned in for the sake of a big effects piece.

Survival, of course, also holds another special place: it is the final episode of the Classic run of Doctor Who, bringing the show to an end after 26 seasons, 695 episodes (701 including the untransmitted story Shada from Season 17, which has since been finished with animation), 155 serials (156 including Shada), 7 Doctors and (approximately) 26 companions. When the show was written this was not the intent, with planning for a twenty-seventh season, which would have seen the departure of Ace midway through the season before the Doctor's regeneration at the end, in the early stages. It was only during production that rumours of the axe began to swirl, and Andrew Cartmel hurriedly wrote a monologue for Sylvester McCoy to record as a way to bring the entire saga to an end.
"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do."
The twenty-sixth and regrettably final season of Classic Doctor Who (****½) sees the show go out on an impressive high. Battlefield is the weakest link but at least that's fun, and the other three scripts are interesting, thought-provoking, well-made (for the time) and smart.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas.

Whatever happened to this guy?

The Doctor Who flame was kept alive in the 1990s through novels, a stage play, comics, audio dramas and an increasingly popular series of VHS video releases of the original show. An attempted 30th anniversary special in 1993 fell apart during pre-production, and was hurriedly replaced by an awful, zero-budget charity episode recorded on the set of soap opera EastEnders. The novels and associated comics and short stories were arguably the key to keeping the light burning, especially as new writers came on board, including a certain Russell T. Davies, an unknown Steven Moffat, and people like Mark Gatiss and Paul Cornell (creator of the aforementioned Bernice Summerfield). But it would take until 2005 for the show to return full-time.

There was one serious attempt to relaunch the show, however, in 1996. The BBC joined forces with Fox to trial a TV movie which could act as a backdoor pilot for a new run. Fox had enjoyed huge success with The X-Files and were eagerly exploring more science fiction and supernatural ideas. They'd just cancelled a space opera called Space: Above and Beyond, and roughly as their Doctor Who special aired, they'd just started shooting a pilot called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, based on a cult movie from a few years earlier (and would provide a template for the eventual return of Doctor Who).


The TV Movie, as it is rather unfortunately called by default, is a fascinating look at the universe where Doctor Who is just another American midlist science fiction show, and not a hugely edifying one. The plot, where the Master tries to use the TARDIS to destroy Earth on the eve of the millennium, is odd, but at least it fits into the established canon, featuring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor before he regenerates into the Eighth, played with winning eccentric energy by Paul McGann. The movie is actually a huge workout for McGann, who has to carry the whole damn thing on his shoulders.

Eric Roberts is divisive as the Master, but I think he does a pretty good job given the mustache-twirling limitations of the character as written. Daphne Ashbrook is also fine as quasi-companion Grace, even if the script seems uncertain about her acceptance of what's going on. She sometimes flips from Scully-ish scepticism to Mulder-style total acceptance in the space of a single scene.

The movie also seems odd in its treatment of the canon: it uses the Seventh Doctor as the lead-in instead of the Fourth, as the BBC themselves had nonsensically suggested (Tom Baker being the best-known Doctor in the USA), and the Master even retains his yellow eyes from Survival, but the Doctor is also suggested to be half-human, something out of keeping with the mythos (and firmly rejected in the 2005 iteration).

The main problem with the TV movie is that it's very ordinary with flat lighting and unremarkable direction. This is Doctor Who if it was the most generic, dull American mid-season replacement show you can imagine. It's not offensively bad, and you can point to McGann and Robert's performances, and a superb TARDIS set, as maybe solid foundations that a regular series could have built on, but ultimately this is the most unforgivable thing Doctor Who can be: boring.

The TV movie got indifferent ratings in the USA, so Fox passed on the chance to do a follow-up, but a startling nine million viewers tuned in for the BBC transmission. Plans by the BBC to commission their own series fell foul of internal politics, and in the event it would be a frankly ludicrous nine years before the show would return full-time, and when it did, it would certainly not be boring.

26.1 - 26.4: Battlefield (***½)
26.5 - 26.7: Ghost Light (****½)
26.8 - 26.11: The Curse of Fenric (****½ or ***** for the extended cut)
26.12 - 26.14: Survival (****)
TVM: The TV Movie (**½)

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Wednesday, 19 November 2025

The Outer Worlds 2

2362. The outer colony systems have mysteriously been cut off from Earth. An Earth Directorate investigation team is dispatched to the Arcadia system to investigate possible causes for the disruption to communications, only to face unexpected resistance and betrayal. A single agent is recovered from cryosleep ten years later and learns that the system is threatened by huge dimensional rifts of unknown origin. The agent must help save Arcadia from the rifts and navigate the complex political machinations between three factions and various local concerns.

Released back in 2019, The Outer Worlds was a totally fine roleplaying game. It saw the player explore the Halcyon star system, navigating local factional squabbles and ultimately help rescue (or destroy) the helpless frozen crew of a colony vessel. Though enjoyable, it was somewhat shorter than players have come to expect in the modern era, and perhaps fell short of the more complex writing and characterisation people expect from Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind knotty RPGs like Alpha Protocol, Pillars of Eternity, Neverwinter Nights II: Mask of the Betrayer, Tyranny and Fallout: New Vegas.

The Outer Worlds was developed relatively quickly and on a low budget, before Obsidian's acquisition by Microsoft. The Outer Worlds 2 has a much larger budget and took twice as long to develop, with a larger scale and scope. There were also creative team changes, with RPG legend Tim Cain (creator of the Fallout franchise and the various classic games at Troika) who co-led the first game retiring but staying on to advise.

The question is here is if they could make something more impressive. Both The Outer Worlds and its effective fantasy successor, Avowed (released earlier this year), were fine RPGs which were enjoyable to play with some solid characters and storylines, but with a limited scope and risked being a bit too forgettable. The answer is, fortunately, yes. The Outer Worlds 2 is a significant improvement over both games and is easily Obsidian's best recent AA-level RPG so far. People hoping that they'd rediscover their writing mojo from New Vegas or Pillars of Eternity may be somewhat disappointed as they don't get back to that level, but definitely of their recent 3D RPGs, this is the strongest.

The game can be played from either first or second person (or flipping between them), with the player creating their character from scratch. They can decide how to approach combat (direct engagement, stealth, engineering to hack robots and turrets etc), puzzle-solving (through engineering skills, hacking or science) and dialogue (through speech, a threatening demeanour etc). It's important in Outer Worlds 2 to pick a lane and stick to it as, unlike its forebear, there's no way to respec once you're in the game itself. However, you can respec once at the end of the prologue mission, which gives you a taste of the game and how you're likely to play it.

The prologue is a nice taster for the game itself, giving you options on how to infiltrate a facility and two different routes; you can't take both, so immediately you have an alternate choice for a replay. The prologue has some obstacles that can be solved by talking to people (talking a nervous bureaucrat into helping you out in return for eliminating some problems from his service record) or just killing everyone in sight.

Once the prologue is resolved, the game sets you down on the planet Eden and you have to get to work investigating the mystery of the rifts. You'll soon find the Arcadia system is divided between three factions: the authoritarian Protectorate, the science-minded Order of the Ascendant and the hyper-capitalistic megacorporation Auntie's Choice. The Protectorate is mostly presented as antagonists and will usually fire on you on sight, but representatives from the other two factions can be more nuanced, and you can deal with them through negotiation or combat. You also gain NPC companions from these factions who will join you on your ship, and navigating the personal relationships between these companions can give you clues on how to handle the wider political relationships between the factions. You can side with one faction over the others or try to negotiate peace between them, which is more difficult but also generates a ton more missions, so that feels like the optimal choice.

The game is set over four planets: Eden, Dorado, Cloister and Praetor, along with several space stations, an asteroid settlement and several spacecraft. The four planets are each surprisingly large, with a sprawling map. You are guided around the map by quests, but you can also just break off to explore (there are various locations on each planet that no quest will take you to, and will generate quests or rewards by striking out on your own). This is the first notable difference from original game, where the maps were smaller and there was less to do outside the scope of the quests, not to mention that the first two planets were reasonable in size but the latter ones were tiny with only a few quests apiece. There is immediately more to do here, spread over a larger area, with more choice in where to go. Exploration is more of an option here than it was in the prior title.

The writing and pacing are also stronger, and the game's intro immediately grabs your attention in a way the first game didn't. There's bigger and more epic set pieces, and more changes to the story based on your choices. Combat is improved, with more variations in approaches to battles. I chose to switch between a high-powered sniper rifle for ranged engagements and an explosive-shell-firing shotgun for close-up encounters, and these got me through most of the game with moderate skill improvements. Combat is chunkier and more satisfying than the first game, with body parts flying and a wider array of loot.

The game also tries something new for an RPG: there are no weight limits or encumbrance, the designers finally giving up since people now expect a "send to camp" or "send to spaceship" button, so why even worry about encumbrance in the first place? Similarly there is no stamina bar, allowing you to run around effectively forever. Removing that limitation has zero negative impact on gameplay, and allows you to focus on having fun.

But the game does imposer limitations elsewhere. Like its forebear, the skill points are dished out somewhat miserly (2 per level, with a 30-level cap) and the game does not reward jacks-of-all-trades. You really need to focus in on 5-6 skills, spreading things out further will just leave you underskilled to really do anything. I ran a Speech, Lockpick and combat-heavy build and that allowed me to get through the game one way, but a Hacking, Engineering and Science-heavy build would give you a different-feeling result. With no respec possible after the prologue, the game does force you to think carefully about your character build, unlike other recent RPGs that basically allow you to respec at will to overcome every problem in the game. Outer Worlds 2 requires more careful thought there.

Your companion characters are fine, being a likeable lot with their own, fairly involved quest chains. Even psychotic killer Aza ends up being a valuable team member, despite her unrelenting preference to just murder everything in sight. None of the companions are going rank amongst Obsidian's best, but they're mostly a step-up from The Outer Worlds'. 

If the game has a key weakness it's probably that, after the impressive prologue, the game suddenly feels a bit underwhelming. The first planet is a bit RPG-by-the-numbers and very similar to the first game. Choices are mostly limited in scale and consequence (one Fallout 3 Megaton-ish exception aside) and shooting all the bad guys will get you through the game. Those expecting a better experience than the first Outer Worlds may feel distinctly let down by the opening to this game. But around 10 hours in (about a quarter of the way through the game), the game suddenly bursts into life: the story kicks up a gear and becomes more interesting, the scale of events becomes much larger and the level of your freedom to make choices and the variation in the consequences of those decisions both improve immensely. The game catches fire and doesn't let up to the finale, taking in some impressive level design, combat encounters, exploration and even semi-immersive sim moments along the way.

The Outer Worlds 2 (****) has a slow start but then bursts into life. It's a stronger game than its forebear, with more interesting locations, a better story, more convincing characters and more in-depth worldbuilding. It plays some interesting trade-offs, getting rid of tedious things like encumbrance and fatigue and instead forcing you make harder choices about your character build. It's a longer game than its predecessor, but not so much as to become tedious. It's still not Obsidian at their best, but it's a solid, enjoyable RPG experience even if it's not going to be troubling any best game of the year lists.

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Tuesday, 18 November 2025

Doctor Who: Season 25

London, November 1963. A strange white-haired man said to be living in a junkyard with his granddaughter has disappeared, along with two of her schoolteachers. But he disappeared with the mission that brought him to this place unfulfilled. A few weeks later, but much longer for him, he returns to complete his task, and prevent the streets of London being turned into a battleground between two factions of the most dangerous species in the galaxy.

It would probably be fair to say that, after the underwhelming twenty-third and twenty-fourth seasons, expectations ahead of Doctor Who's silver anniversary year were low. The show had the feeling it was running on fumes: the budget had been slashed, the quality of the scripts was apparently deteriorating and the episode count almost halved over Doctor Who's traditional format. Ratings were on the slide and angry fan calls for the showrunner (as he'd now be called), John Nathan-Turner, to be sacked were being roundly ignored, leading to furious diatribes in the fanzine community.

Of course, it wouldn't be Doctor Who if it was predictable. For the twenty-fifth season, the creative crew riposted by delivering its finest set of episodes in years, and for its opener, its best story since Season 21's The Caves of Androzani.

Remembrance of the Daleks is, by any measure, a triumph. The debut script by Ben Aaronovitch - best known today for his Rivers of London urban fantasy series - is phenomenally good. The characters banter with one another believably, there are exceptional monologues on the mutability of time, and the script interjects mystery back into the Doctor's character. In fact, for almost the first time in the entire series, the Doctor is revealed to have set the events of the story in motion himself, laying an elaborate trap for the Daleks only to realise that things are complicated because the Daleks have divided into two factions with different motivations, something he was not expecting.

The white Imperial Daleks and grey Renegade Daleks (led by a black Dalek Supreme) despise one another due to their differing notions of racial purity. The Imperial Daleks have accepted cybernetic enhancements and deliberate mutations to make themselves more powerful (one such mutation resulting in a "Special Weapons Dalek" that can blow away entire streets). The Renegade Daleks believe these mutants are freaks, only fit to be destroyed. The metaphor for human racial superiority is expanded more directly as well: a black cafe worker muses with the Doctor on how if people had never decided they liked sugar, the sugar cane industry wouldn't have happened and he'd be an African. A key moment in the story is when Ace, vibing on the coolness of being in Swinging Sixties London (though 1963 is actually a bit before the swinging fully kicks in), is confronted with the less-cool spectre of racial bigotry.

In fact, Remembrance of the Daleks has a good claim for being the first "modern" Doctor Who story, rather than 2005's Rose. The story works on multiple levels of theme and metaphor, the Doctor is far more intelligent and cunning than we've traditionally seen, often acting rather than reacting, and the VFX work is beyond any other story produced in the Classic run to date. Daleks blasting one another on the streets of London, rocket-propelled grenades flying, spaceships landing in school playgrounds, the Doctor jury-rigging powerful weapons on the fly...this is Who at its most action-packed, even beyond Earthshock. The show is helped by its new stunt coordinator Tip Tipping, fresh off the set of James Cameron's Aliens, resulting in some pretty decent stunts and action sequences. The story also uses continuity in a neat way, tying in with the events of the first-ever Doctor Who story from 1963, An Unearthly Child, but lightly enough not to confuse people who hadn't seen that story recently (which, in 1988, was the majority of viewers).

As well as the excellent script, memorable dialogue, cool plot twists, impressive (for the time) action and several of the most "badass" moments in all of Doctor Who history (Ace single-handedly taking on a Dalek assault squad armed with a baseball bat being a highlight), it has an exceptional cast. Old reliables like George Sewell and Michael Sheard give great performances, but it's Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred who take centre stage. McCoy makes the Doctor convincingly dark and manipulative in a way we've not seen before, cementing his position as the best Doctor since Tom Baker, whilst Sophie Aldred dials down the enthusiasm of her debut to deliver a more compelling performance (and cementing her position as the best companion since Tegan, if not Sarah Jane Smith). Pamela Salem also gives a great guest performance, having previously been on the show over a decade earlier in The Robots of Death. Dursley McLinden also gives a solid guest performance as Mike, though this is tinged by tragedy: he later died of complications related to AIDS, and his character and story inspired Russell T. Davies' mini-series It's a Sin.

Remembrance of the Daleks is something of an embarrassment of riches, with so much packed into the story it could have easily been a six-parter and still felt crammed. As it is, it holds a claim to being the last truly great serial of Classic Doctor Who, though a couple of the stories after this have a go at breaking that claim.

The Happiness Patrol feels like a thematic sequel to the preceding season's Paradise Towers, in that it also feels like a JG Ballard novel come to life. The Doctor and Ace arrive on a planet where citizens are mandated to be happy on pain of death (resulting in the TARDIS getting a pink makeover). Does this make much literal sense? No. But as a nightmarish dreamscape it almost works, with Ace working to corrupt the titular "Happiness Patrol" not to be so happy, and the Doctor working with blues player Earl Sharp to help bring down the society. The guest cast is also in overdrive, with Sheila Hancock (as a Margaret Thatcher analogue), Lesley Dunlop, Ronald Fraser and Richard D. Sharp delivering great performances.

Production value-wise, the story is a mixed bag with some great costumes and excellent animatronic creature effects, but poor sets (the sets look dowdy and distinctly misery-inducing, which is odd given the vibe). The Kandy Man also feels a bit random: he gets the best lines and his happy and cheerful performance belaying his murderous intentions is a nice juxtaposition, but he looks ridiculous. He's also not really important to the story and could be removed with no issue, which would have improved the story no end. As it stands it's a solid story, and much better when viewed as an adult than as a kid (especially after coming off the action high of Remembrance of the Daleks).

Silver Nemesis aired on the actual 25th anniversary of Doctor Who itself, but is a bit of a mixed bag. The idea here is that the Doctor has unleashed a powerful superweapon in a prior, off-screen adventure and here has to ensure it is neutralised whilst fending off multiple forces on its trail. This is pretty much the exact same plot as Remembrance of the Daleks, even down to the fascist metaphor, although that's less subtle here as literal Neo-Nazis show up in pursuit of the weapon. We also have a returning classic monster with the Cybermen, but they have almost nothing to do in the story. The Cyberleader is incompetent (to the point where his lieutenant keeps pointing out that he's an idiot) and the Cybermen themselves are wiped out too easily by gold weapons. Ace fighting off a whole Cyber-platoon with a catapult and gold coins is a cool visual but a very dumb idea.

This is a shame because other elements of the story work better. The Doctor having a hidden, darker past is again hinted at, and Fiona Walker as Lady Peinforte and Gerard Murphy as Richard are a great double-act. The location filming at Arundel (standing in for Windsor Castle) is also very impressive and, for the second story in a row, we have a lot of riffing on music, this time jazz, with Courtney Pine guesting as himself (only the third time this ever happened in Who history, and both prior times it was newsreaders who only appeared on TV). Some of the action sequences are effective, and the Nemesis itself, which can speak and seems urgently concerned that people find it beautiful (given its ability to lay waste to vast amounts of the galaxy, most respond in the affirmative, with alacrity). The first episode is also quite strong. But it's a bit of a letdown overall, wastes the Cybermen, and is overshadowed in every way by Remembrance of the Daleks.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy rounds off the season and is a very bizarre story. This is Doctor Who returning to the "Surreal Who" school of story, previously seen in Warriors' Gate, Kinda and Snakedance. The Doctor and Ace arrive at a galactic carnival where people have to keep the audience entertained or die a horrible death. They find both allies and enemies amongst the carnival entertainers and other guests, with a constantly shifting web of allegiances to keep on top of.

It's deeply weird, not helped by the story expanding from three to four episodes, meaning a first episode where the Doctor and Ace take the whole length to even reach the circus.

What helps elevate the story is the guest cast, with Jessica Martin as Mags, the random werewolf; T.P. McKenna as Captain Cook (getting the assignment); Ricco Ross as the Ringmaster; Ian Reddington as the Chief Clown; and Peggy Mount as the Stallslady all turning in sterling performances. It helps that Ian Reddington doesn't do a cliched "evil clown" performance but something more interesting, with McKenna's what-ho-fellow-well-met fellowship giving way to more vicious selfishness as he tries to survive the travails of the carnival.

Most intriguing is the ending, where the Doctor starts off doing slapstick comedy to entertain the audience but then slowly becomes more manipulative and cunning as he builds up to defeating the enemy. The arc here is the Doctor going from one of the exhibits at the carnival to the grand ringmaster, manipulating everyone else without them realising it.

The twenty-fifth and - alas! - penultimate season of Classic Doctor Who (****) is a winner. The scripts are better, the dialogue is becoming more modern and naturalistic, the effects are improving, and the Doctor-Ace team is becoming one of the most definitive in the show's history, but the season is definitely too short, with great ideas having to be rushed.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas. It's currently only available on limited edition Blu-Ray, but the standard edition is expected to be released in 2026.

  • 25.1 - 25.4: Remembrance of the Daleks (*****)
  • 25.5 - 25.7: The Happiness Patrol (****)
  • 25.8 - 25.10: Silver Nemesis (***)
  • 25.11 - 25.14: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (****)

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Sunday, 16 November 2025

RUMOUR: Something may be up with HALF-LIFE 3

Here we go again.

Almost quasi-credible rumours are swirling from previously-reliable Valve insiders (including those that broke the news of the existence of their previous games) that Valve Software may be on the verge of formally announcing Half-Life 3, for release in early 2026. The mega-delayed video game was at one time slated for release as early as 2009, and its continuous non-appearance has made it one of the Internet's most famous, long-running gags. Fans had given up hope of ever seeing it before Valve released the VR-based spin-off game Half-Life Alyx in 2020, which ended with a strong tease that Half-Life 3 was indeed on the way.

Series protagonist Gordon Freeman and key ally Alyx Vance in publicity art for Half-Life 2.

A Short History of Half-Life

The original Half-Life was released in 1998 and was a revolutionary game in the development of the first-person shooter genre. With its commitment to total immersion - your character never spoke and there were no cut scenes that took you out of the action - the game broke new ground in telling story and depicting action in a first-person environment. Almost every major FPS series that followed after it owes it a debt of gratitude, including BioShock, Far Cry, Call of Duty and Halo. Three expansions followed, namely Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay, that expanded the story and background lore. The game was also a huge step forwards for modding, with some mods becoming official releases, including the single-player action game Gunman Chronicles and multiplayer games Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. In 2020, after five years of partial releases and betas, Half-Life received a Valve-sanctioned remake release as Black Mesa.

Half-Life 2 was released in late 2004 and was again a giant jump forwards for FPS gaming, mostly down to its stunning graphics (which still hold up well today), lighting and physics puzzles. Half-Life 2 also massively popularised the game distribution platform Steam, which has now become the single most popular game distribution platform on PC, and is credited with saving the PC as a gaming platform. The game was followed by two direct expansions, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two, the latter released in late 2007 as part of The Orange Box alongside Team Fortress 2 and physics puzzler Portal.

Valve indicated that Half-Life 2: Episode Three should follow within about eighteen months, but the game never appeared. Instead, it developed Portal 2 (2011) and the multi-player Left 4 Dead series. Constant rumours about the status of Episode Three swirled but nothing definitive was announced, aside from a nod that if a new game should appear, it would probably be a full Half-Life 3 rather than another expansion. Finally, in late 2019, Valve confirmed that Half-Life: Alyx was on its way, an interquel set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Released in March 2020 to blanket critical acclaim, Alyx became (and remains) the definitive VR game, as well as a strong game in its own right. With the ending of the game apparently recontextualising the end of Half-Life 2: Episode Two, fans began theorising that a new, mainline (non-VR) entry in the series was in development.

The Combine Citadel in City 17 under construction (from Half-Life: Alyx).

The Rumours

Rumours of Half-Life 3 began circulating after Half-Life: Alyx's release, specifically its ending which revisited the massive cliffhanger ending of Episode Two and provided a stronger jumping-off point for a new game. It was also noted that the making of Alyx required the creation of 4K assets for City 17 locations and Half-Life weapons and items, that could be reused either in Half-Life 3 or a comprehensive remaster/remake of Half-Life 2 (or both). The creation of Alyx also meant huge adjustments to the Source 2 Engine that cold only be fully justified through the release of additional games (Counter-Strike 2 was subsequently released in 2023, and multiplayer game Deadlock has since been announced, both also using Source 2).

Rumours began gathering pace last year, with rumours stating that a project known as "HLX" or "Half-Life X" had been in development since Alyx wrapped, alongside new hardware projects. These rumours gathered pace in late 2024 and early 2025, with noted industry insiders with excellent track records confirming that Half-Life 3, or at least a new Half-Life game, was an active project. Hardware rumours also continued to proliferate.

This week, Valve formally confirmed the existence of a new generation of Steam Machine home consoles, a new range of VR equipment, and a second generation of Steam Controllers. Insiders became more confident that Half-Life 3 was a thing, stating that Valve had not announced it at the same time as the hardware so one news would not drown out the other.

The date for Half-Life 3's official confirmation is unclear, though some have suggested 16 November (today), as the 21st anniversary of Half-Life 2's release. However, that hasn't happened so far and it'd be odd to make a major announcement on a Sunday (though it's Valve, who delight in not being bound by commercial conventions, so who knows?). Wednesday 19 November may be more likely, as the 27th anniversary of the Half-Life franchise as a whole. Otherwise the next likely date is Thursday 11 December, at the 2025 Game Awards, though it's likely Valve would not want to share the stage with other games.

As for a release date, a shadow-drop like that done by Bethesda for Oblivion Remastered earlier this year seems less likely, with a Q1 2026 release more plausible. The rumours also suggest that the game will only be released on PC via Steam, Linux and SteamOS, and may be a launch title for the new Steam Machine hardware, estimated in early 2026. Console versions of the game would only follow at a later date. The game is rumoured to not be a VR-exclusive, Valve acknowledging that too many gamers are not fans of the VR experience (or even can't enjoy it due to medical reasons). There may be an optional VR mode.

If Half-Life 3 did launch in 2026, it would likely only be eclipsed in sales and profile by Grand Theft Auto VI (currently scheduled for a November 2026 release).

Of course, that's assuming the news is real and Valve don't actually announce Alyx 2, Portal 3 or some other title.

The Aperture Science vessel Borealis from Half-Life 2: Episode Three concept art. The Borealis is believed to be a key location in the next Half-Life title.

NOTE: Spoilers for the Half-Life series follow

The Half-Life series tells the story of an alien invasion of Earth that begins when scientists at the Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico inadvertently breach the dimensional barrier between Earth and another world called Xen. Aliens flood the complex, but are ultimately stopped and their master, the Nihilanth, is defeated by Black Mesa research scientist Gordon Freeman. Freeman is the only survivor of the crisis equipped with a Hazardous Environment Suit, allowing him to reach Xen and destroy the threat once and for all. Having achieved his mission, Freeman is "recruited" by the enigmatic "G-Man" to serve as his agent. Other expansions explore the fate of other characters during the original Black Mesa Incident, including US Marine Adrian Shepherd and Black Mesa security officer Barney Calhoun.

Half-Life 2 is set twenty years later and reveals that, although the Black Mesa Incident was successfully resolved, the events attracted the attention of the Nihilanth's masters, the mysterious Combine, an ultra-powerful, trans-dimensional, post-Singularity alien force. The Combine invaded Earth in the Seven-Hour War, defeating its armies and occupying the planet with trivial ease. Draining the oceans, suppressing human reproduction and reducing the population to "manageable" levels, the Combine are interested only in draining Earth's resources and leaving the planet for dead. Gordon Freeman is returned to the frey by G-Man. Rapidly joining forces with a resistance movement led by veterans of Black Mesa (including Barney, Dr. Kleiner and Eli Vance), Gordon leads a successful uprising that destroys the Combine Citadel in City 17 and frees humanity. Gordon leads a further military assault that ensures the survival of the resistance and the destruction of the Combine "superportal" that is summoning reinforcements from one of the Combine homeworlds. During this latter battle, one of Gordon's key allies is killed and Combine Advisors are revealed to be at large on Earth, whilst a resistance group has located the Borealis, a ship created by Aperture Science capable of travelling through portals. The Borealis may hold the key to permanently sealing the portals to Earth and preventing future Combine invasions.

Half-Life: Alyx is set a couple of years before Half-Life 2 and focuses on Alyx Vance, the daughter of Dr. Eli Vance from Black Mesa. Alyx plays a major role in Half-Life 2 and its expansions as effectively a co-protagonist. Alyx sets out on a routine reconnaissance mission which escalates when the resistance discovers evidence of a major Combine "superweapon." Her investigations eventually defeat this Combine plot but attract the attention of the powerful G-Man. G-Man agrees to intervene to help her during her moment of highest need, which results in him changing time to alter the end of Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Unfortunately, this is only possible if she agrees to replace Gordon as his most trusted agent. Gordon finds himself discarded, but with a new, incredibly daunting mission: to defeat G-Man and rescue Alyx, and ensure the Combine threat is ended for good.

The spin-off Portal series focuses on Aperture Science, a rival to Black Mesa. Aperture focuses on portal technology, short-range teleportation using interdimensional portals. A research subject named Chell discovers that the Aperture Science computer, GLaDOS, has gone loopy and is trying to kill her. She defeats GLaDOS but is unable to escape from the facility, and is put into suspended animation. She wakes up to find the world in ruins (possibly a result of the Combine invasion) and tries to escape again, but inadvertently reawakens GLaDOS. GLaDOS is in a battle of wills with a rival AI, Wheatley, with Chell caught in the middle, having to cut deals and work with both as she tries to navigate the Aperture Labs and escape. There are various connections to the Half-Life series, including the discovery of the empty Borealis dry dock, but these are limited.

The Black Mesa Incident, or Resonance Cascade, that triggers the events of the Half-Life universe. Depicted here in remake game Black Mesa.

A Wertzone History of the Wait for Half-Life 3

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Forge of the High Mage by Ian Cameron Esslemont

The Malazan Empire has completed its conquest of the Quon Tali continent and is mopping up a few rebellions and uprisings. However, Emperor Kellanved is in no mood to consolidate. Greymane's armies are engaged on the continent of Korelri to the south, but Kellanved is of a mind to take the rest of the imperial forces and strike for Falar, the peninsula and large island chain off the remote northern coast of the continent, separated from the rest of Quon Tali by the icy wasteland beyond the Fenn Range. In Falar, religious strife and political intrigue are building to a climax, but it is in the icy wastelands that the fate of the land will be decided, for an ancient Jaghut has discovered a K'Chain Che'Malle artefact of tremendous power, and is of a mind to unleash it upon the world.


The first two novels in the Path to Ascendancy series, Dancer's Lament and Deadhouse Landing, were Ian Cameron Esslemont's best Malazan novels to date. Set long before the events in either his own Malazan Empire sequence or Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, the two books established the origin story of Emperor Kellanved (aka Shadowthrone aka Ammanas aka Wu) and Dancer, the Rope (aka Cotillion), founders of the Malazan Empire. The books were focused, tight and highly enjoyable.

Unfortunately, the third book, Kellanved's Reach, was less-accomplished. The book was incredibly rushed given the story it had to cover - the conquest of mainland Quon Tali by Kellanved and his ragtag bunch of disparate allies - with massive battles, campaigns and character motivations machine-gunned out by the writer at a rate of knots. It had every appearance of a book written to a tight page count (just over 300 pages) and meant to wrap up its series.

With the Path to Ascendancy series selling much better than expected, it was decided to expand the series to six volumes, with the next three focusing on the Malazan conquest of Falar, Seven Cities and northern Genabackis in turn. It also appears that any page limit has been relaxed, with Forge of the High Mage coming in at a much more generous 450 pages, with a tighter focus that mean we're back to the quality levels of the first two volumes here. Indeed, if not better.

The book is structured around the Malazan decision to invade Falar from both land and sea. Kellanved contracts a pirate flotilla to invade Falar and cause chaos and destruction, scattering the Falaran fleet piecemeal whilst the Malazan land armies under Dujek One-Arm advance across the icy wastes to invade the archipelago from the south, via its mainland holdings. This plan, naturally, barely survives contact with the enemy: the Falarans are revealed to have a magical superweapon called the Jhistal, the capabilities of which are unknown and the threat of which stymies Kellanved's plans. Meanwhile, the Malazans have to deal with the natives of the wastelands, namely the Jheck and various other factions who do not take kindly to the Malazan incursion. Events are complicated further by some treasure-seekers who find a solitary volcano in the heart of the wastes, and get rather more than they bargained for when they get inside.

Forge of the High Mage works because it settles on doing three things and doing them well: a Malazan military campaign focusing on the old favourites, with Kellanved, Dancer, Hairlock, Nightchill, Dujek and the Crust brothers playing a major role in events; a coming-into-his-power story for perennial Malazan favourite Tayschrenn; and an exploration of the Falaran culture and religion through the eyes of its highly reluctant High Priestess (with a healthy bonus of exploring more of the character of perennially loathed antagonist Mallick Rel). It's also tapping into something the Malazan series has flirted with before but not quite committed to, and in fantasy as a whole is under-explored: an epic fantasy disaster novel. The second half of the book turns into the fantasy equivalent of Towering Inferno as various characters try to stop the disaster that has been unleashed and is now out of anybody's control.

The book's pacing is much-improved over its forebear, and we get a lot more character-building and exploration. Tayschrenn's growth from arrogant but skilled mage to a more considered, mature statesman starting to understand the vast powers he has access to is extremely well-handled, whilst our limited-but-effective observations of Mallick Rel's multi-layered, Littlefinger+ Xanatos Gambits that see him emerge on top when he should really have been killed ten times over are quite impressive. Indeed, Esslemont makes Rel's ability to get on top of even the most ludicrous odds and emerge victorious seem quite plausible, which in turn benefits Erikson's Malazan novels where Rel's rise to supreme power decades after these events felt a lot more random. Kellanved and Dancer fans may be disappointed that they get a lot less screentime this time around, but those who feel they were verging on overuse in the prior books may appreciate the fact we spend a lot more time with the rest of the Old Guard.

Another theme of the novel is the idea of "moving into a new world." The Malazans started as a gang operating out of an inn and somehow conquered an island, then a continent, and are now going for the world, but in doing so they are starting to attract the attention of some very big hitters. When one legendary figure who has so far dismissed the Malazans as non-entities finally turns his attention to them after their madcap antics in this book and decides to "keep an eye on them," it feels like the sort of momentous backstory moment we really should be seeing in these books (and often are not).

On the negative side, it does feel like Esslemont includes some favourite characters really only to touch base with them rather than because they have a key role to play in this book. He's sensible enough not to bring in Surly or Greymane (who have other fish to fry), but some of his favourite Crimson Guard do feel shoehorned in, do very little, and then leave the narrative. Some might also ponder the bonkers scale of events in this book and the fact that nobody in chronologically later books mentions them, but to be honest that's par for the course for Malazan: the events that completely change the lives of millions of people in Falar forever are just a wet Tuesday afternoon to the likes of Kellanved and Tayschrenn. There's also quite a bit of blatant scene-setting for the next volume in the series that fulfils relatively little function in this novel, but that might read better once the next volume is available.

Forge of the High Mage (****½) is a splendid return to form for Esslemont, something that will hopefully continue. The fifth book in the Path to Ascendancy series, The Last Guardian, is forthcoming.

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Thursday, 13 November 2025

Doctor Who: Season 24

The TARDIS has been drawn off course with such force that the Doctor has been injured and forced to regenerate. The Rani takes advantage of the Doctor's post-regenerative confusion to trick him into helping her with her amoral plans of scientific experimentation, whilst his companion Mel sets out to rescue him.

Season 23 of Doctor Who had seen the show both metaphorically and literally in a fight for its life. Cancelled by BBC1 controller Michael Grade on the questionable grounds that he didn't like it (despite it pulling in almost nine millions viewers at the time), the show had been granted a reprieve after a national press campaign and massive fan blowback. The resulting trial season saw ratings drop, but with the episode count halved, the cost of the show had also been significantly reduced. The show was also started to generate additional revenue streams, via a series of releases on home video. The show was given a lifeline: it would continue with the 14 episodes a year format pioneered by Season 23, but Colin Baker would have to be let go as the Doctor.

Baker, understandably annoyed by the decision, declined to return to film a regeneration story. With script editor Eric Saward having quit the show under highly acrimonious circumstances at the end of Season 23 as well, this left producer John Nathan-Turner - himself continuing only extremely reluctantly - opening the next season with no script editor, no script and no Doctor. With little choice, he tapped the last writers from Season 23, Pip and Jane Baker, to pen a new story. With negotiations continuing to try to get Baker back to return for at least one more story, it was also unclear when the regeneration would take place, meaning the script had to be kept open-ended. Nathan-Turner finally succeeded in hiring a new script editor, the young Andrew Cartmel, who promptly found Pip and Jane Baker refusing to listen to any of his story edits. Baker finally confirmed he was not coming back at all, so the new Doctor would have to start the story in Bakers costume and wearing a wig during the regeneration scene, which was suboptimal to say the least.

To say it was a trial by fire was an understatement, and the resulting script, Time and the Rani, is a mess. The story does do well by bringing back the magisterial Kate O'Mara as the Rani, who reportedly begged Nathan-Turner to be allowed to return to rainy England after spending too long filming the drama series Dynasty in California, and the story is kept borderline watchable really by O'Mara's gusto (including selling the Rani's totally deranged decision to impersonate Mel to win over the Doctor), Bonnie Langford's enthusiasm and a sharp upturn in the quality of visual effects. The story is surprisingly accomplished in deploying sharp video effects such as the killer "soap bubble" trap that the Rani employs, and even some primitive CGI with the brand new title sequence (the totally computer-generated TARDIS is really quite impressive for 1987).

The guest cast also does well, with risible material. Wanda Ventham gives a very good guest turn, and it's amusing to note that during filming she brought her 11-year-old son, a certain Benedict Cumberbatch, to watch the shooting. The rest of the cast is solid, O'Mara is outstanding and Bonnie Langford has to rise to the occasion as a driver of the story given the Doctor's instability. But of course the most notable performance has to go to newly-anointed Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy. A comedian and light entertainer, best-known for making kids laugh, McCoy was keen to bring a more dramatic and darker touch to his performance as the Doctor. Whilst he's limited by the script, McCoy does give the most charmingly off-kilter performance as the Doctor since early Tom Baker, and immediately makes the character work.

Great effects (not even mentioning the very solid prosthetics work for the alien Tetraps), good performances and a good Doctor can't make up for the fact that the script is very weak and contrived, and almost all the location filming takes place in the exact same Doctor Who stock quarry we've seen a thousand times before.

Paradise Towers, on the other hand, sets out its claim for greatness by asking a very simple question: what if J.G. Ballard wrote a Doctor Who? The resulting story is a mostly-legally-distinct rewrite of Ballard's seminal novel High-Rise as a Who story, and it has to be said it's pretty solid. The Doctor and Mel visit Paradise Towers, a famed luxury apartment complex, only to find it's descended into being a totally dystopian post-apocalyptic hellhole. The tower is divided between the robot Cleaners, officious Caretakers, eccentric old Rezzies and the Kangs, all-girl gangs divided by colour who engage in mock conflicts, though not to the death (or "unalive," as the story prophetically calls it).

The story is deliciously dark (two Rezzies try to eat Bonnie Langford alive!) and quite funny, with a solid guest cast. The weakest link, infamously, is Richard Briers, a comedic actor who decided to go "big" for his dramatic villain role. His performance in the first three episodes is okay, but his playing of a "zombified" version of the character in the final episode is horrendous and makes getting through to the end tougher than it should be, which is a shame as so much of the rest of the story works well. Paradise Towers also nearly made a claim for being the first Doctor Who story to feature canonically gay characters (though a whiff of subtext remains with Tilda and "room-mate" Tabby) before the production team decided not to go in that direction (Who's first gay characters being cannibalistic lesbians trying to feast on Bonnie Langford would have given every tabloid writer in the northern hemisphere convulsions for weeks, though the publicity would have been impressive).

Delta and the Bannermen is one of those stories that's not great, but everyone involved is clearly enjoying the hell out of it, so you almost don't care. The Doctor and Mel win a trip to 1959 Disneyland but, due to a collision between the transport spacecraft and an American test satellite (and also a collision between the writers' ideas and the reality of the budget), have to divert to a sub-Butlins holiday camp in Wales instead. The story then goes completely berserk, with the Doctor and Mel having to contend with a love triangle between two locals and an alien space princess; a newly-hatched big green alien baby; two American intelligence agents; an enigmatic bee-keeper; motorbikes; rock and roll; and a squad of unhinged mercenaries led by Don Henderson at his most gloriously scene-consuming.

It's all unhinged, but kind of holds together and works, though the production values are desperately strained here. Sylvester McCoy continues to give an exceptional performance, but Mel is put on the back burner in favour of Sara Griffiths as Ray, who stands in as the Doctor's companion for this story. Griffiths' performance is 100% pure charm and she only misses out on being promoted to full companion because of the decision to film this story first and Dragonfire second, otherwise we'd have had Sara Griffiths as Ray rather than Sophie Aldred as Ace. Fortunately, thanks to the power of Big Finish Audio, Griffiths would get her stint as the Seventh Doctor's companion in a later audio series. 

The rest of the cast is mostly solid, but the script is a bit janky in places, and the new three-part format (each of Seasons 24 through 26 would feature two four-parters and two three-parters, all 25 minutes) is not really successful. The three-parters in this era would generally feel like two-parters stretched out too long or four-parters badly rushed, and this is definitely the latter. The script is also not helped by a bit of a tonal mismatch, with a fun, madcap feel that's rather undercut by some fleeting moments of Eric Saward-meets-Robert Holmes level of cynical ultraviolence. Still, entertaining, and the level of Welsh location filming and accents make this feel like the Russell T. Davies era arrived early.

Dragonfire rounds off the season by taking the Doctor and Mel to Iceworld, a shopping resort on the planet Svartos. Here they meet old friend Sabalom Glitz and a new ally, Ace, a teenager from Earth transported to Earth by a "time storm." The four decide to team up and track down a legendary treasure, said to be guarded by a dragon. However, they also run afoul of the enigmatic Kane, who wants to escape from the planet and return to his homeworld, no matter the cost.

Dragonfire is a bit Doctor Who-by-the-numbers, with lots of running around corridors and one of the cheapest monster costumes you'll ever see in your entire life. The script is also a bit of a mess, with main villain Kane (Edward Peel) spending a lot of his time getting in and out of the freezer, which is...odd. Tony Selby imbues Glitz with his traditional insouciant charm, and secondary villain Belazs (Patricia Quinn) gets way more character development and motivation than Kane. The story also relies a bit too much on the revelation (spoilers!) that the alien dragon is actually friendly, beyond which there isn't too much to the story.

However, the story is most notable for introducing the character of Ace. Almost uniquely for a Doctor Who companion, Ace is given a ton of characterisation and backstory here, with her status as an orphan, feeling out of time and place back on Earth and her love of chemistry and explosives being well-established. She is also depicted as a person of action, taking offensive and defensive action (usually involving nitro-9 explosives) whilst all Mel can do is stand and scream. The script was rushed towards the end, leaving writer Ian Briggs and script-editor Cartmel with several major plot holes, including the way that Ace got to Iceworld not making any sense. However, various Doctor Who fanzines (and the actual Doctor Who Magazine) saw fans furiously theorising that a larger plan was at work and there was a bigger story to Ace's arrival, something Cartmel was happy to run with in later seasons. Yes! This is the first long-running Doctor Who mystery box storyline, a novel idea for the Classic series but something the modern one would run with (perhaps a bit too much).

Season 24 of Doctor Who (***) is quite possibly the most underwhelming of the entire 26-season run of the Classic series. It's quite short and one story, Time and the Rani, is arguably one of the dozen or so worst Doctor Who stories of all time. Even its strongest moments, Paradise Towers and Delta and the Bannermen, would barely pass muster in a typical Third or Fourth Doctor season. But Sylvester McCoy gives a genuinely intriguing performance as the Doctor, and there's a lot of goodwill generated by the show bouncing back from the messy way the Colin Baker era ended. There's a notable improvement in the quality of video effects, and the new title sequence and music are both very solid.

But the decision to air opposite Britain's biggest series at the time, soap opera Coronation Street, was to damage the show's ratings permanently. And the show was about to find itself up against some formidable science fiction opposition working with a much higher budget that would leave Doctor Who looking very dated indeed: on the exact same day the fourth episode of Time and the Rani aired in the UK, the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation aired in the United States.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas.

  • 24.1 - 24.4: Time and the Rani (*½)
  • 24.5 - 24.8: Paradise Towers (***½)
  • 24.9 - 24.11: Delta and the Bannermen (***)
  • 24.12 - 24.14: Dragonfire (***)

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