Mindless Ones

While widely reviled as one of the worst things Doctor Who ever broadcast, Timelash is in fact a masterpiece of postmodern avant-garde art…

OK…OK…clearly given that it’s now a week since I said these essays would be going up one a day for a week, and this is only the fifth essay, I may have overestimated my own ability. If only I could go back and talk to my past self and warn him of this…

Before we start, a quick apology – I didn’t get to write a piece yesterday as I had planned. I tried to go to sleep on Thursday night, but just couldn’t – I ended up finally sleeping from about 9:30AM on Friday, and that for only three or four hours. Almost as if someone had extracted the chemical that promotes sleep from my brain…

This is a difficult one to write about, in two different ways.

Doctor Who season twenty-two is not, as we saw in the previous essay, a particularly loved season, and its opener is no exception. It’s one of the most reviled Doctor Who stories ever, and in my opinion unfairly so.

It’s Doctor Who week here on mindlessones.com. Specifically, it’s Doctor Who Season 22 week.

Continuity can be a useful tool.

Sometimes all you need is a good story.

2003 was possibly the peak year for Big Finish.

Meanwhile, the people at Big Finish had been busy. They’d got the license to create new Doctor Who audio adventures, initially featuring the fifth, sixth and seventh Doctors, and had started with a range that was more-or-less straightforward pastiche of the TV show, although generally with a standard of writing that was much higher than it had been during the time those Doctors were on the TV.

Colin Baker, in particular, had been very well served by his first few stories.