The Power of The Doctor saw Jodie Whittaker’s final episode as The Doctor and featured return of the Doctor’s biggest adversary – The Master (Sacha Dhawan), who last appeared in series 12’s final episode The Timeless Children.
Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor regenerated into a familiar face and it has now been officially confirmed that David Tennant will be the Fourteenth Doctor.
But what has led to the return of a much loved face? Check out the preview below.
The upcoming BBC centenary special of Doctor Who finally has a title. As previously confirmed by Doctor Who Magazine the episode title is Power Of The Doctor. Check out the teaser images (also previously released in DWM) below which show The Doctor joined by some familiar friends & foes.
The upcoming BBC centenary special of Doctor Who finally has a title.
Although it has not been officially announced by the BBC at the time of writing – subscribers of Doctor Who Magazine #581 got the news early today.
The Master, Daleks and Cybermen plus two classic companions are set to return to Doctor Who.
A first look at Doctor Who’s feature-length BBC Centenary special, and Jodie Whittaker’s final episode, has revealed the return of the Doctor’s biggest adversary – The Master (Sacha Dhawan), who last appeared in series 12’s final episode The Timeless Children.
And for the first time since the show returned to BBC One in 2005, The Master, the Daleks and the Cybermen will all feature in one single story.
Review by Jacob Licklider
This has been a review that I’ve let percolate in my mind for a few days. The first season of The Ninth Doctor Adventures has come to a close in a perfect parallel to Series 1 and building from genuinely humble beginnings. It is also quite difficult to discuss as it’s serving as a prequel to Series 1, ending with Old Friends implying a lead into Rose. This along with Lost Warriors, and to a lesser extent Respond to All Calls, have been an examination of the Ninth Doctor’s trauma along with other characters he meets on his lonely travels. Old Friends is a contemplative box set with two stories, a single hour long episode and one two episode serial, both parallels to Boom Town and Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways. This has been a long time coming and is honestly an odd box set to review, because it’s a box set that almost blind sided me with what it was doing and how things ended up the way they were. The covers of the sets have been mimicking the four individual releases of Series 1, from blue to red to green to purple for the finale. This ended up being an interesting example of priming listeners for what exactly to expect with these sets.
Review by Jacob Licklider
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic making time feel incredibly compressed, it is now 2022, and with 2022 comes Big Finish Productions’ new format for release, something that had been slowly introduced throughout 2021. Everything’s a three-disc box set and the first release of the year, like the first release of 2021, is a celebratory anniversary set, this time celebrating Peter Davison’s 40th anniversary as the Fifth Doctor with the first of two box sets under the umbrella label Forty. The premise of what is essentially the Fifth Doctor’s consciousness being catapulted across his timeline in no particular order, both forwards and backwards from his second story, Four to Doomsday, to Season 20, and as the brief for the second set implies, Season 21. Unlike last year’s Masterful, Forty isn’t a single story, but a series of interconnected stories with this volume containing the four-part Secrets of Telos and the two-part God of War with the second not currently having all of its story details announced (only one story has a title, The Auton Infinity). The story arc of the sets doesn’t actually get close to an explanation, ending with the Doctor still being catapulted around his timeline. There is a nice thematic through-line for the first set with the Doctor being taken in the first story to a time after Earthshock where he finds out Adric’s fate while going back in the second story to several stories below the young companion’s demise meaning the Doctor has to face the fact that he knows where Adric is going and actively has to move him towards that fate.
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Review by Jacob Licklider
Ravagers introduced Christopher Eccleston to the world of Big Finish as the Ninth Doctor through a miniseries. Respond to All Calls switched gears towards three thematically similar stories with the idea being the Doctor, battle scarred and hardened, is always there to help. The third set follows the format of Respond to All Calls, three stories tied around a theme, but that theme is a little subtler and is perhaps why some people haven’t gelled as much with this set as a whole. Lost Warriors is a title which sets up the set with a subconscious exploration of the remnants of the Time War, and that’s there, but only in the last story and in the way the Ninth Doctor is characterised. Each story has a warrior at its centre and each is an exploration of a different reaction to a war, one from a modern human war, one from a human war in the past, and one from an alien war, while the Doctor representing the Time War in all three of the stories. It’s interesting as the Time War isn’t really directly mentioned in any notable capacity throughout the set, it’s in the background and simmering, but not actually being the driving force of the stories. It’s a set about other warriors and other people as a reflection of the Doctor and not a direct parallel. Eccleston’s portrayal of the Doctor is incredibly subtle here with the trauma and in each of the three stories he is absolutely brilliant in the role. Some have complained he is too close to Tennant, but this is an odd set where the Doctor is actually the connection to the audience which usually is the companion’s job.
Review by Michael Goleniewski
Under the seas of an alien world, the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith have landed in a gigantic sea-base city run entirely by scientists working to clean up the planet. From cleaning up pollution to creating clean energy, these beings are working for the good of the entire population and of course, the TARDIS team is more than happy to help. While the Doctor is busy in his duties and work, Sarah Jane Smith puts herself on the case of some potentially dangerous issues such as flickering lights that hint at something going precariously wrong and staff members going missing in the deeper parts of the facility. An ominous recording captured on the security cameras portends the arrival of a force stalking and waiting in the depths of the base to make its attack, one which the Doctor is intimately familiar with and rightfully horrified of. The Cybermen have arrived and are working to gain a foothold in this world and its resources by any means necessary and this time they may have outsmarted even the Doctor in their attempts to conquer…..
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Review by Jacob Licklider
Out of Time was a release that couldn’t have come at a better time: we were reaching the fall and the COVID-19 pandemic was still getting worse and lockdowns were getting to people and Nicholas Briggs brought together Tom Baker and David Tennant in an exciting adventure with the Daleks. It was a fun release and with David Tennant’s availability due to the pandemic being more available to record from home, two further releases were announced where the Tenth Doctor meets the Fifth and Sixth Doctor set to be released in June 2021 and 2022 respectively. Well, it’s June 2021, if only by two days and Out of Time 2: The Gates of Hell sees the Fifth and Tenth Doctors in Paris, 1944 facing off against the Cybermen in the Catacombs. There’s also a Time Agent calling herself grapefruit but French. This is a script from David Llewellyn and he packs a lot into a single hour, almost too much for a single story to do. As the title is ‘Out of Time’, the idea is that Cybermen have been using the Transit of Venus, whenever the planet Venus passes directly in between the Sun and another planet (in this story Earth, obviously). It’s actually a really interesting idea with a piece of alien technology from the Cybermen being sent back in time and essentially being put into the hands of aristocrats to weasel their way to survive. This is a Cyberman story after all and it just feels right, though if there is one big and glaring issue with the story is that they don’t actually feel like a threat.
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One of Doctor Who’s most famous unmade stories will finally see the light of day courtesy of audio drama producers Big Finish.
As part of their Lost Stories range, Big Finish is adapting Return of the Cybermen – an unused script by the monsters’ co-creator Gerry Davis.
Indie Mac User 