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Showing posts from June, 2006

Who Review: Fear Her

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"Fingers on lips!" Easily the funniest moment in the episode (if not the series so far). 'Fear Her' is a low-key Who episode in all respects. A small budget affair, based in a single suburban street, and with minimal effects. The result is a solid adventure in its own right but ultimately an episode which comes across as being a bit of a 'filler' before the epic two-part finale. In fact, it seems as though the finale has taken the budget of both this episode and last week's 'Love and Monsters'! Whilst I enjoyed 'Fear Her' I was actually more excited by the sixty-second preview of next week's 'Army of Ghosts' - and I wasn't disappointed. That single shot of Rose standing on some colourless beach, looking so sad, so lonely, added with the voice-over "This is the story of war on earth...This is the last story I will tell..." Ooh, I got goosebumps I did. Like most fans of this series, this is what I've been waiting

Who Review: Love and Monsters

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Something of a curio this week for Doctor Who : an episode which is heavy on the comic side and in which the Doctor and Rose barely appear. On initial viewing I found it amusing and it definitely kept my interest, but did I really enjoy it? Not sure. I enjoyed Peter Kay's performance as the Abzorbaloff and I thought Mark Warren as nice guy Elton did a good job of playing, well, a nice guy , which, for an actor who is used to playing edgy, psychopathic characters, was actually quite a stretch. Considered seriously as an episode of Doctor Who , however, I thought it was very hit and miss. But taken on its own merits, I don't think it did any harm to have a bit of fun (the viewing figures actually went back up with this episode). Although I found it entertaining in its own way, I wouldn't want to see another episode in this mould. I look at it like an intermission, a pause for light relief before we get into the really dark stuff that will lead us into Billie Piper's rece

In this haze of green and gold...

What a gorgeous June. The sun is shining. England are still in the World Cup. I have a fantastic new job. Doctor Who is still running. And I have a handful of my favourite stories scheduled for publication in the next few months: 'Groghol's Staff' will appear in Scifantastic issue five (Aug) 'The Midnight Men' will appear in Dark Recesses issue four (July) 'Death's Head' will appear in Twisted Tongue issue three (August) 'The Man Who Ate Planets' will appear in Revelation 4:1 (Sept) 'Guardian' and 'The View From the Bridge' will appear in future issues of From the Asylum. 'Pleasure Units' is set to appear in anthology Tabloid Purposes III in August.

Who Review: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

I deliberately waited until I’d seen both episodes of this two-parter before making any comments here, mainly because the first part was so good, so promising, that I was a little scared the second part would be a colossal let-down. I needn’t have worried. In fact, this two-parter has been so enjoyable it has actually made me look back at the earlier episodes with a somewhat critical eye. Looking back at my Who Reviews, I’ve been exceedingly positive about the series (apart from New Earth which still rankles), but compared to this adventure, even the better episodes look like pale, sickly cousins to the real thing. In short: this adventure is everything I imagined Doctor Who to be. Quick story synopsis for the uninitiated: The Tardis arrives on a Sanctuary base on a remote planet which - impossibly - is suspended beneath a black hole which is sucking in everything around it but the planet. “How could this be?” the Doctor wonders. “That’s impossible!” Quite. But there it is, being all i