Review: Torchwood – Odyssey

Review by Cavan Gilbey


The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit are amongst my favourite episodes of Doctor Who; they bring a much needed sense of cosmic and occult horror to the Tennant era and the show in general with a return of the classic base under siege formula. Those episodes are always ones I tend to rewatch when I want to dip back into Tennant’s stint on the show, which I’ve been doing quite a bit in the run up to The Star Beast. So when Big Finish announced a trilogy of stories featuring survivors from those episodes I was naturally intrigued, and this first story certainly made me far more excited to hear the next two chapters of this Ood trilogy. Here we are reunited with Ida Scott and we finally get to see what exactly the Beast meant when he teased about her relationship with her father, which isn’t exactly the best.

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Review: Doctor Who – Once And Future – Time Lord Immemorial

Review by Cavan Gilbey


The penultimate episode of Big Finish’s 60th anniversary celebrations bring us our first true multi-Doctor story of the bunch, just not with the Doctors you may have been expecting. I’m surprised it took the miniseries this long to finally get round to properly pairing up a pair of Doctors for an hour, but the choice of Nine and the Unbound Doctor does make a good bit of sense since we can celebrate Big Finish’s main bespoke incarnation alongside the man who helped revitalise the program; the reason we can really have a Diamond anniversary in the way we do. However, the excitement I felt going in to this story did feel quite misplaced as this is not the story it could have been.

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Review: Doctor Who – Once and Future – The Union

Review by Cavan Gilbey

Spoiler Warning!!! Review contains spoilers of The Union!!!


Big Finish’s diamond anniversary has finally come to an end, except for the coda story next year but I don’t think anyone is going to count that as a true end to the narrative. It has been a bumpy ride across these seven episodes, with wildly varying quality on show with some scripts such as The Martian Invasion of Planetoid 50 or Genius For War being quite good hour long excursions and other’s (looking at you Two’s Company) being the exact opposite. The plot threads, well those that have been half built up anyway, finally come to their conclusion here in The Union and Matt Fitton has done a brilliant job. Possibly bringing us the strongest story of the run so far, although that might because it is one of the few that feels like a full story with a beginning, middle and end as opposed to just a beginning and middle.

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Review: Rose Tyler – The Dimension Cannon 3 -Trapped

Review by Cavan Gilbey


When I reviewed the previous set in this series, I’m fairly sure I called it my favourite release from Big Finish of 2022. It was a fantastic set of really well explored ethical dilemmas in increasingly creative settings, with some of the best character work the company has put out in recent years. Naturally I was very excited to hear this third, and I assume final, set from the series. There’s been a bit of a departure from the episodic formula of the previous two sets, now choosing to tell a serialised story with Rose and new companion Danni (played by Em Thane) trying to find a way to get Rose back home and escape the Anti-life that is ravaging Danni’s universe. Now was this as good as that second set? Yes, and it might even be better in quite a few regards.

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Review: Doom’s Day – Dying Hours

Review by Cavan Gilbey


 

The Doom’s Day event is a weird one. The last time we have a multimedia event like this was Time Lord Victorious, a story which didn’t do much to separate itself a lot of the Time War media which had come out around the event. But some of the stories stood out as being pretty good on their own, namely those two Master starring Short Trips and Genetics of the Daleks which worked because of how standalone they were. Dying Hours feels like it really needs the prior hours of the story to fully appreciate what was going one, especially in the final story. The problem is most people will do what I do and listen to this in isolation because these multimedia events always have a high buy in price. It’s a lot easier to just buy this one boxset than all the linking comics, DWM strips, novels and BBC Audio releases. So I want you to keep that in mind, I haven’t heard anything else from Doom’s Day. It might shock you to hear that this boxset is actually quite good.

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Doctor Who trailer, new casting announcement and episode titles

As Doctor Who gears up for its simultaneous global premiere this May, the episode titles have now been revealed for the season, as well as another guest star who has jumped aboard the TARDIS for the upcoming season. And, as another Easter treat, viewers will be given another official trailer. Check it out below

Up first, in the Julie Anne Robinson directed ‘Space Babies’, is Golda Rosheuvel (Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story) who joins Doctor Who as Jocelyn, who the Doctor and Ruby collide with in their first adventure in the TARDIS together.

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Trailer and images for Doctor Who upcoming season

It’s time to strap into the TARDIS and journey back to the sixties with The Doctor and Ruby Sunday as some groovy new images are released from the highly anticipated new season of Doctor Who, which is due to simultaneously premiere globally on 11th May 2024.

 

New glimpses at the time travelling duo donning some iconic sixties style can be seen in the far out new images which highlight an episode set in the sixties. This episode shows off the Doctor and Ruby’s distinctive style as they come face to face with the young Beatles.

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Doctor Who release date announced

Doctor Who is set to make an explosive return on 11th May as the TARDIS will make its global premiere around the Whoniverse and for those in the UK, for the first time ever, the Doctor will land with two episodes premiering on BBC iPlayer at midnight, before arriving on BBC One later that day right before the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final.


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Review: Doctor Who – In The Night

Review by Jacob Licklider


In the Night is the second of the Fifth Doctor sets with 2023 being the first year that the Fifth Doctor Adventures have decided to avoid doing a year-long story arc, meaning that this set is another standalone without prerequisites, released in the same month as the very prerequisite heavy Purity Unbound.  In the Night has an interesting premise, both stories essentially take place over the course of one night, though the first plays around with the time scale in general, and have themes of discovery of historical pasts in some very different ways.  This is balanced with the first story, the four-part Pursuit of the Nightjar being an example of “future” history concerning itself with a myth the Doctor is familiar with from their childhood, while Resistor is more concerned with the past of the Earth, though a past that would have been contemporary had it been a televised story.  It’s a set that like Conflicts of Interest before it, despite eschewing perhaps the better format, creates two incredibly complementary stories that allow some very interesting introspection and exploration.

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James Bond and Doctor Who actress dies aged 80.

British film and television actress Pamela Salem has died at the age of  80.

Her long career in stage, television, and film included multiple roles in touring plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Pinter and Ayckbourn, as well as starring alongside Sean Connery in two films, The First Great Train Robbery and Never Say Never Again.

A move to Los Angeles in the 1990s, then Miami, led to a number of guest appearances in popular US drama series, such as ER and The West Wing, and a new career as a co-writer and producer of radio and theatre productions with her husband Michael O’Hagan.


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