Mindless Ones

Before the last of these essays, a little bit of other stuff…

This post is going to go live at precisely midnight — at which point it will be the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, and so this is the last of the fifty stories essays.

Enough people said they would want a book of this that I’ve put one together, and that is also available from midnight tonight. You can buy it as a paperback, hardback, Kindle ebook (US) (UK), or non-Kindle ebook (with no DRM on the ebooks). And for those of you who visit us at Thought Bubble, you can buy a paperback copy off me personally.

But don’t worry if you’re too poor to buy one, or you just don’t like me and don’t want me to have money — the essays are essentially the same as they were when published here, but without the dodgy screencaps, and with quite a bit of copy-editing and fact-checking. You can still read the original versions here for free.
But anyway, here’s the last essay

Doctor Who has had several radical reinventions over the years — when it stopped being about Ian and Barbara, when the Doctor first regenerated, when it became an Earth-bound show during Pertwee’s time, when it stopped being on TV altogether and became a series of books…

Most of the time, the programme has a tendency to revert back to something like the mean, but each time it retains some of the new with the old. Steven Moffat’s reinvention of the programme is, one suspects, another time when this will be the case.

Blink is, in many ways, the most Steven Moffat script imaginable.

Yes, it’s an extra-special double review!

In which I look at the last two episodes of the most recent mini-series of Doctor Who

Does Steven Moffat not want to be writing for the Daleks?

It would make sense that he doesn’t — the Daleks are fundamentally uninteresting antagonists from a story point of view. They’re an incredible visual and aural design, of course, but as far as stories go, there aren’t really very many that you can do with them.

When I started doing these posts a few weeks ago, I titled the series ‘Season 6B’ as sort of a joke for Doctor Who fans. I say sort of a joke, because it’s a geek joke, which is to say something that isn’t actually funny but references something else.

In this case, I was referencing the idea in fan circles that there was an unseen-but-‘canonical’ ‘season 6B’ of Doctor Who, which came between series six (Patrick Troughton’s last) and seven (Jon Pertwee’s first), in which the Troughton Doctor had various adventures, including his parts of the multi-Doctor stories The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors.

So it was sort of a joke, in a way, because the current series of Doctor Who has been split into two halves, and it’s the sixth series of the revived show, and so I’m reviewing season 6B for real. Do you see?

But I’m increasingly of the opinion that Moffat made the joke himself…