Mindless Ones

Yes, I’m a week late with writing this one, but that’s because it’s quite difficult to find much to say about it.

It’s Trad, Dad!

The levels of taste and good judgement in the Doctor Who production office in the mid-1980s can be summed up in three words:

Doctor In Distress.

It’s taken me nearly a week to get up the energy to write about this episode, because it was… it was just sort of there.

Seriously, if Steven Moffat isn’t going to bother, why should I?

The Caves Of Androzani is, notably, the only actually good Doctor Who story from 1984

The twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who was obviously a special event, and who better to write it than the man most associated with Doctor Who, Terrance Dicks?

Earthshock is almost universally considered one of the very best Doctor Who stories of Peter Davison’s tenure in the role, with only The Caves Of Androzani offering it much competition. In Doctor Who Magazine‘s 2009 reader’s poll ranking the first two hundred televised stories, it was rated number 19, and was one of only three stories from the 1980s to feature in the top twenty (in contrast, a full ten of the bottom twenty were from that decade).

It’s therefore a good case study to look at exactly what went wrong with the show

It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for…

L is for Logopolis

Shada is a television story from 1979 starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, Lalla Ward as Romana and David Brierley as K-9, the incomplete parts of which got a video release in 1992.