Plum Pudding Reviews

  This War Will Never Let Us Go; An Essay on Time Wars in Heaven and Criticism Thereof " You think it’ll last forever. People and cars and concrete. But it won’t. One day it’s all gone. Even the sky. My planet’s gone. It’s dead. It burned like the Earth. It’s just rocks and dust. Before its time." "What happened?" "There was a war and we lost."  Russell T Davies, The End of The World (2005) Like it or not, the Time War is now an "era," of Doctor Who.  The same as that of The Sixth Doctor's era, or the Eleventh Doctor's era, in 2005, the Time War as a concept became an intrinsic part of Doctor Who history. Introduced as an idea in Rose, we learn what the Time War was from Christopher Eccleston in The End of The World, and it serves as a critical emotional impact in the Doctor's character arc. An offseen trauma. This angle was meant to be probed, to be explored from a critical lens, but never necessarily explored physically. Russell T D...

There's an increasing problem with the Daleks these days. It can be downright unpleasant to note that the Daleks are the largest victim of the tried and tested formulas over the years - we were already experiencing it in the Third and Fourth Doctor's eras, that early on - when Terry Nation, their own creator struggled to deliver an original story each time and proceeded to make something that usually ended up looking rather similar to the previous one. While there have been exceptions since then, stories that forged the Daleks in a new way in public consciousness - Genesis of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks, or more simply, Dalek, but in truth, even these newer entries have their imitators. As such, it can be common perception among the Doctor Who fan that the Daleks, as a species, are on a decline, and there is less and less to do with them. And indeed - even in Big Finish, that can be the case. We're now onto Fifty Eight years of Dalek-ing, with no end in sight, and...

For the 200th post on this blog, I wanted to do a special thing. I debated putting up an episode of the Last Adventure, or a Main Range story, but this blog started as a review blog, and a subject I wanted to talk about occurred to me. The Characters of Big Finish. Primarily the companions, but also the other inventions of the company over the years. Of course, not all their successes have been their own characters. I intend to do another list shortly on reinvention of characters, the way they took duds like Mel or unexplored slates like Yvonne Hartman and made them great. But for the moment, I wanted to look back and consider the few magnificent characters the company has made, and talk about a few of them. Mostly the lesser knowns. Of course, there are monolith's on Evelyn Smythe and Charley Pollard, and how they're great, (they're even better than most on this list, if not all) but for this post, let's speak for the characters that aren't always remembered, just ...

 This is a new review category that I am definitely going to do (unlike the last one I tried out) where I am going to shine a light on the most important thing in Doctor Who, not the Doctor, monsters, TARDIS, or anything, no, you don't need those to tell a Doctor Who story. You need a companion, a character that's the audience's surrogate, and occasionally even takes the lead, the true unsung heroes of Doctor Who to truly tell a story. Want my proof? You need at minimum for a story, a companion. Doctor lite specials positively require it, and if you're a spinoff and you want to hold my attention, you need it even more! The show wouldn't work without them, (unless it's the Deadly Assassin) and in this series, I will be reviewing them. Not in the usual format of course, I can't reliably put these fellows on a /10 scale. It'd be insulting to most of them, and wouldn't be enough for a few others. What I am going to do, is list how much I am familiar with...