Doctor Who Is CLASSIC: Arc of Infinity

Welcome to a new edition of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC, a semi recurring feature here on the blog thing where I look back at episodes of Doctor Who from the classic era of 1963 to 1989.

Given events in the recently concluded season of Doctor Who, I recently re-watched this story from 1983.

Starring Peter Davison as the Doctor and Sarah Sutton as companion Nyssa, this story sends the Doctor back to Gallifrey and pits him against a menace last seen in 1973.

It's "Arc of Infinity" featuring the return of Omega. 

"Arc of Infinity" is unique in Peter Davison's run as the Doctor in that he has only one companion, Nyssa.

My major complaint of this era of Doctor Who was the TARDIS was too damn crowded with the Doctor having to share time with 2 or 3 companions as well as any number of guest stars. 

Nyssa gets some solid companion moments that may have otherwise been lost if she had to share those moments with other people. And the Doctor's rapport with Nyssa is solid instead of fending off a whining gaggle of companions.   

The crew from season 19 thinned out a bit when Adric was killed (spoilers?) and the Doctor finally got the perpetually whining and complaining Tegan Jovanka to Heathrow Airport to resume her career as an airline attendant.  

At the end of season 19, Tegan has the gall to look hurt when the Doctor takes off without her. 

Tegan is not yet gone and will return in episode 2 as part of a confusing Chibnallesque subplot involving her cousin Colin in Amsterdam. Tegan has time on her hands as she got fired from her job as a stewardess.  

(During this era, a young teenage Doctor Who fan named Chris Chibnall was interviewed on TV to express his disappointment with how bad the writing was on Doctor Who.)

What pray tell is going on in this story?

The Doctor gets whammied by an energy thingy extending from a space/time event thingy called the Arc of Infinity. (Hey, that's the title of the story!)

The Doctor's TARDIS get yanked back to Gallifrey and the Doctor gets shot by a security guard named Maxil played by Colin Baker. (Yes, Maxil is a pompous smug prick. Why do you ask?)  

Before becoming the 6th Doctor, Colin Baker got to shoot the 5th Doctor. 

The Time Lords have detected an threat made of anti-matter than is trying to invade our universe (which is bad) and it's using the Doctor as a conduit so....

THE DOCTOR MUST DIE!!!!

THE DOCTOR MUST DIE!!!!

THE DOCTOR MUST DIE!!!!

THE DOCTOR MUST DIE!!!!

THE DOCTOR MUST DIE!!!!

Duh! Duh! Duuuuh!!!!!

Meanwhile...

A couple of young travellers (Colin and Robin) have arrived in Amsterdam and forced to seek lodging in an old underground pump station near a crypt. Can't say much for the atmosphere of the place but the price (Free!) is right. 

Except Colin gets zapped by a glowing alien being and is turned into a zombie! 

Robin's in a tizzy of a snit over this but no one will believe him.  Except one person.

Tegan Jovanka has arrived in Amsterdam to visit her favorite cousin Colin.  She's inclined to believe Robin because, well,  she's seen some shit.

Meanwhile...

The glowing alien is conferring with a mysterious Time Lord.

NO!! A traitor amongst the Time Lords?!! Why...

• that never happens!
• almost never happens!!
• happens all the goddam time!!!
• will happen again this very same season!!!!

By the way it takes forever for anyone to work out the threat is Omega even though Omega is the very definition of an anti-matter threat from another universe looking to invade our universe.

See "The Three Doctors" from 1973.

The Doctor finally susses out it's Omega. 

Time Lords: "It can't be Omega! He was destroyed!"

The Time Lords may be masters of time and space but they are not genre savvy. 

REMINDER: While reading this, you may hear the word "Omega" in your head as "Oh-MAY-gah". It is not pronounced this way. It's pronounced "Oh-meh-guh".   

Anyway, Omega captures Tegan and Robin in his Earth based underground lair which is in Amsterdam for...  reasons.  

Spoiler: Colin's status as a zombie is not lethal and he will survive this story. Otherwise Tegan will have lost two relatives to one of the Doctor's enemies. (The Master killed her Aunt Vanessa in season 18's "Logopolis".)  

The Doctor and Nyssa travel from Gallifrey to Earth and the Doctor is suitably amazed the TARDIS landed when and where he wanted it to for a change.  The Doctor and Nyssa run all over Amsterdam looking for Omega's secret lair.

(Much like the trip to Paris in season 17's "City of Death", the BBC was all "we paid good money to send Doctor Who to Amsterdam to we're bloody well going to see Amsterdam on screen!")  

But Omega is ready to make his move and return to life in the positive matter universe. He takes off his helmet and hey, Omega looks like Peter Davison!

So Peter Davison has to run around Amsterdam twice!

• As Omega, enjoying his sweet taste of freedom and enjoying Amsterdam's copious amounts of weed and sex workers. 
• As the Doctor chasing Omega because whatever he did to leave the anti-matter universe is breaking down and soon, the universe (and that includes Amsterdam's copious amounts of weed and sex workers) will all go KA-BOOM!

The Doctor is forced to destroy Omega before his shields can collapse and cause everything to explode. 

The Doctor is sad that he was forced to destroy the first of the Time Lords.  

And the only thing sadder for the Doctor is this:

DOCTOR (to Tegan): "It's been marvellous to see you again."

NYSSA: "Indeed. I've missed you. I wish you didn't have to go back to your job."

TEGAN: "What job? Didn't I tell you? I got the sack. So you're stuck with me, aren't you."

<Pause>

DOCTOR: "So it seems."

Oh the expression on the Doctor's face in that moment. 

"Why didn't I let Omega kill us all?"  

Over the course of the storyline, whenever she would hear Tegan's name, Nyssa would get this sly smile.  

Which is NOT proof that Nyssa and Tegan had been in a sexual relationship but that hasn't stopped the fan fiction writers from speculating that yes they did.  

Like most shows from the classic era, "Arc of Infinity" is stretched a bit thin to excess padding to fit this story into 4 half-hour episodes and by God show us that expensive field trip to Amsterdam. 

But it is a fairly strong outing for Peter Davison as the Doctor, unencumbered by an oversized cast.   

Producer John Nathan Turner would fix that. We've got Tegan back and Turlough waiting in the wings to get us a 3 person companion crew again. 

And that is that for this edition of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC.

Coming up in no particular order:

•  A classic 4th Doctor and Leela adventure!
• The Doctor vs. the Rani!
• And a pair of 3rd Doctor stories with two different companions.

Until next time, remember to be good to one another. 

Doctor Who Is NEW!: Wish World

So here's how I imagine things went for Russell T Davies after last week's "Interstellar Song Contest".  

RTD:  The big thing on everyone's mind is going to be that mind blowing cameo from....

Dugga do! Dugga do! Dugga dugga dugga do!

RTD:  The unexpected cameo by the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan.  Yes, it's...

Dugga do! Dugga do! Dugga dugga dugga do!

RTD:  (That is so annoying!) Yes, it's the great Carol Ann Ford herself back as the original Doctor Who companion! Fans have been...

La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! 

RTD:  (SHUT THAT DAMN THING OFF!) Ahem! Fans have been begging for Susan to return for years. And the other big reveal....

La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! 

RTD:  (This cannot be happening!) The big reveal that Mrs. Flood is... the Rani! 

Dugga do! Dugga do! Dugga dugga dugga do!

RTD:  THAT and her bi-generation into the great Archie Punjabi is ALL that Whovians....

Dugga do! Dugga do! Dugga dugga dugga do!

RTD:  ...will be....

La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! 

RTD:  ...obsessed with.

La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! La! 

RTD:  I give up!  

Dugga do! Dugga do! Dugga dugga dugga do!

Welcome to Doctor Who Is NEW! where I post about the latest new episode of Doctor Who.

This week the Doctor finally gets Belinda back to Earth on May 24, 2025.

Sort of...

The world has changed.

Completely, fundamentally and not in a good way. 

It's as if someone made a wish, a really bad wish.

Welcome to...

Wish World

by Russell T Davies 

ALERT: There will be spoilers, honey! 

Pre-credits sequence is set in Bavaria in 1865 where the Rani arrives at a farm house and demonstrates she is quite the evil person of evilly evil evilness by stealing a newborn baby, turning the mother into flowers, the baby's six brothers into ducks and the father into an owl.

The baby is the 7th son of a 7th son which means the infant is a source of incredible power which the Rani intends to use for evilly evil evilness.

It's the Rani. It's what she does.

Run the credits and...

The Doctor John Smith awakens in bed on a bright sunny morning next to his wife Belinda. The two love birds give each other a quick kiss as their daughter bounds into to the room. 

(Hey, it's Poppy from "Space Babies".)   

Look, there's Conrad (yes, than son of a bitch from "Lucky Day") on the telly advising that the weather is perfect and beautiful in London and everywhere in the world, really! 

It's gonna be a great day as John Smith dresses in a dapper suit to go to work while Belinda stays home to fulfill her destiny of daughter, wife and mother by cooking and cleaning!!

We're in JD Vance's wet dream. Ewww! 

Happy happy joy joy! 

Happy happy joy joy! 

Happy happy happy happy....

...joy, joy, joy.....

Well, you get the idea. 

All is perfect in a perfect world. 

But there is a knock at the door.

It's Ruby Sunday. 

Who seems to see that John Smith is the Doctor.

Belinda gets on the phone to report there's a doubter at their door. 

What kind of dystopian Mad Men crossed with Handmaid's Tale  hellscape are we in? 

In her bone palace in the sky, the Rani will explain.

I mean, she will literally explain her plot to us. 

If I have an issue with "Wish World", it is the massive info dump that Archie Punjabi's Rani has to give while dancing in high heels.  

OK, the dancing thing is kind of cool but the Doctor has no agency in breaking the spell of this world.  The Rani has to spell it out for him.  

As the world cracks apart from under the Rani's bone palace, the first of the Time Lords Omega is returning! 

Russell's gone back down deep in the well of the classic series to bring back another formiable threat.  Omega appeared in The Three Doctors (1st, 2nd and 3rd Doctors) and again in Arc of Infinity  (against the 5th Doctor).  

We get a blink and you'll miss it cameo from Susan again.

And an unexpected return from a guest star from last season!

RED ALERT SPOILER WARNING!!!

Rogue is back!

Just for a little bit and it really makes no sense but who cares?  Rogue has a mere moment to break through the fog in John Smith's brain to get him to see the truth about the world around him. (And to tell the Doctor he loves him! Awwww.) 

(They did not get Jonathan Groff back to shoot this one thing. It seems when he was on set the year before to shoot "Rogue", RTD had Groff stand in front of a green screen to record this bit of dialogue for use a whole year later!)  

"Wish World" is a bit of a muddled mess with whatever the hell the Rani is up to and her plans involving Omega but props to the show for it's alternate world building.  Converting UNIT HQ from a state of the art sci-fi set to a 1950's themed insurance company is an incredible feat of set design.

There's a big mess for RTD and company to wrap up.

Next week: "The Reality War"

Here is a clip from 1973's "The Three Doctors" where we first meet Omega.

And because I must hate you all....

And this...

Doctor Who Is CLASSIC!: Paradise Towers

 You know it! You love it! You can’t live without it!

 

It’s another post of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC!

 

For this edition, we advance to the 1980's and an adventure with the 7th Doctor, Sylvester McCoy.

 

From the recent slate of new episodes on Disney+, you may wonder, “Who the heck is Mel?”

Mel Bush was a companion of the 6th and 7th Doctors played by Bonnie Langford and today’s post looks back to one of her exploits with the Doctor back in the day.

 

From 1987,  it’s Paradise Towers. 

 

Mel wants to take a vacay at the luxurious Paradise Towers, an architectural marvel. 

 

It’s really tall and there’s a pool on the roof.

 

Whee?

 

The TARDIS arrives and….

 

Yeah, Paradise Towers has seen better days.

 

Dark, dank and defaced with graffiti, it is home to roving gangs called Kangs who are belligerent, untrusting and ruled by arcane rituals.   

The Rezzies are residents who huddle in their apartments.

And may be cannibals.  

 

The facility is overseen by Caretakers, preening officious bureaucrats.

They never abbreviate anything.  

"Caretaker number three four five stroke twelve subsection three, make your report."  

"Caretaker number three four five stroke twelve subsection three reporting."

 

And robot cleaners that eat people. 

 

Mel thinks if they can just get to the pool on the roof, everything will be fine.

 

The pool on the roof is not all that.  Your average motor lodge motel has a better pool.

The Doctor runs afoul of the Caretakers who naturally assume the Doctor is the enemy and sentence him to death.

Or more precisely to the "three two seven appendix three subsection nine death."  

Kroagnon, an incorporeal entity who is the insane architect of Paradise Towers is up the evulz.  

End goal: kill everybody.  

Yeah, let's keep it simple.  

Besides the chance to introduce Andrea to Mel when she was a young companion, Paradise Towers offers up some comparisons and contrasts to this year's episode Dot & Bubble.

In both you have a self contained environment with young people outside the control and oversight of adult authority. As opposed to the sanitized for your protection world of Dot & Bubble, Paradise Towers sees a world in decline.  The Caretakers aren't actually taking care of anyone, just dutifully following their rule books.  The Residents are insular and unwilling to help.  The Kangs are in an pointless existence, caught in a spiral of distrust and ritual.  

It's the Doctor's task is to stop Kroagnon from killing everyone and he can only accomplish that when he convinces these disparate groups to trust him and to work together.

Which is not the outcome the 15th Doctor got in Dot & Bubble.

When the Doctor and Mel leave Paradise Towers, they leave it with the potential to be a better place, an actual good place to live. If everyone will work together. 

One of my criticism of this era is that I recall Mel being so annoying. God, that voice! Yikes! But I will admit I found Mel to be a more effective companion than I remembered.  

The seams of the show's strained and shrinking budget are on display here. Sadly, the budget would take more hits through this and the series' next two years.  

After playing the buffoon in his first episode, Sylvester McCoy's Doctor begins to take himself a bit more seriously, setting the stage for the darker edged take on the Doctor that McCoy will explore in the next two seasons. 

And that is that for this edition of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC!

Look for another installment in about a month.  

Doctor Who Is Classic: The Three Doctors

Today's post is another installment of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC where I post about episodes of Doctor Who from the classic era.

Today we go back to 1973 and the 10th anniversary celebration of Doctor Who, "The Three Doctors".   

"The Three Doctors" is an accurate title on a technicality.

William Hartnell, the 1st Doctor, was too much in poor health to actively participate.  His sequences were filmed at Hartnell's home against a black background where he read his lines off of cue cards.  The story has the 1st Doctor caught in the time stream and unable to join his other selves physically, limited to communicating through a TARDIS monitor.  

The 2nd Doctor (Patrick Troughton) is able to be present in the TARDIS with the 3rd Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and it's not an amiable team up. 

Yep, the Doctor is not getting along with himself.  A concept that would be revisited in subsequent multi-Doctor stories including the 50th anniversary special.   

Also introduced is the concept of a previous Doctor disagreeing with the current look of the TARDIS.

2nd Doctor: "I see you've been doing the place up a bit. I don't like it."  

There are two dangers present in "The Three Doctors".

1) Sporting an incredibly short powder blue mini dress, Jo Grant will flash her knickers.

She does! Climbing into the Doctor's vintage roadster, Bessie. Look, I'm not trying to be perv looking up Jo's skirt for her underwear. It's really hard to NOT see. 

2) An attack from the anti-matter universe. 

Globs of poorly animated energy (It's the 1970's! It's television! It's the BBC! What do you expect?) are going around zapping people and things (including Bessie and the entirety of UNIT HQ) to an anti-matter universe which is the base of attack of an entity known as... Omega.

PAUSE: While reading this, you may hear the word "Omega" in your head as "Oh-MAY-gah". It is not pronounced this way. It's pronounced "Oh-meh-guh".   

Anyway, Omega is identified as a legendary Time Lord who developed the energy source the Time Lords use to travel through space and time. Unfortunately, the efforts to free the Time Lords to explore a universe of time and space killed Omega.

Well, not quite. 

Omega got exploded into an anti-matter universe where by sheer force of will, he's kept himself alive

Omega's pissed off at the Time Lords for leaving him there all this time even though they had no idea he had been exploded into an anti-matter universe where by sheer force of will, he's kept himself alive. 

The Time Lords thought he was dead, regarded him as a hero and put his face on all their money. Or whatever. 

Long story made short: Omega is bug nuts and will destroy all who do not bow to his will blah blah blah. 

The Doctors trick Omega into destroying himself and they feel bad about it because they had regarded him as a hero but he was bug nuts and gonna destroy everything. 

"The Three Doctors" is a fun episode with the first time meeting of the Doctor's different personas and a major threat that adds to the show's mythology. 

The Time Lords repay the 3rd Doctor by freeing him from his exile.  

Even the limited role of William Hartnell as the 1st Doctor has it's moments, dismissing his subsequent regenerations as "a dandy and a clown" and his admonishing them to not dilly dally.

"The Three Doctors" is an effective template for a multi-doctor episode which is why elements of it are replicated in 1983's "The Five Doctors" and the 2013 special, "The Day of the Doctor".  

The next installment of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC will feature an unusual entry with the 5th Doctor from 1982.  That post will come around in a few weeks.

And NEW Doctor Who is coming May 10th!  

Doctor Who Is Classic: Robot and Terror of the Zygons

 

Today's post is another installment of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC where I post about episodes of Doctor Who from the classic era.

The first episode for today's post is Robot. 

No, not The Robot of Doom.

Or Mystery of the Robot. 

Or even The Robot. 

Just...  Robot.  

So here's how I have some fun when I watch the episode, I provide commentary that leaves off "the". 

If someone says something like, "The robot smashed through the wall", I will change it to "ROBOT smash through WALL!" 

"The Brigadier needs the Doctor to stop the robot" becomes "BRIGADIER needs DOCTOR to stop ROBOT!". 

Hilarity just ensues. Well, it does for me.

Andrea was tired of it by episode 2.  (Well, what does she know?) 

Anyway, Robot is about a robot (well, duh!) who is being used by a group of evil scientists to assemble a world destroying weapon in a bid for the evil scientists think they're better at running the world than stupid people.

The robot... excuse me, ROBOT becomes enamored with Sarah Jane Smith which introduces a King Kong element of pathos to the proceedings.  

Robot is unique for Doctor Who that other than the Doctor himself, there is nothing of alien origin in this story. The menace is all home grown right here on Earth.  

The story is the first adventure with Tom Baker as the 4th Doctor. It's a standard issue 3rd Doctor/UNIT type story but a good transition to the new guy with his bohemian fashion sense and a quirky approach to problem solving.  

The story also introduces Ian Marter as Dr. Harry Sullivan who will join the Doctor and Sarah Jane as a companion. 

Before Tom Baker was cast as the Doctor, the producers were looking at a possible return to the grandfather type we got with William Hartnell. Marter was cast for the function of being able punch people as needed. With Tom Baker being a relatively young man quite capable of punching people if he needed to, Sullivan's role became extraneous.

Which may account for his departure with the next story for this post, Terror of the Zygons which aired at the start of Tom Baker' 2nd season as the Doctor.   

But Ian Marter wasn't done with Doctor Who. He wrote several novelizations of Doctor Who episodes.    

Terror of the Zygons is also the last appearance (at least for a long while) of Nicholas Courtney as Bridgadier Letheridge-Stewart. Since the story takes place mostly in Scotland, the Brigadier sports a kilt for a few scenes. 

This is the story that introduces the Zygons who would be brought into modern Doctor Who in the 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor. The Zygons have a pretty frightening appearance despite the limitations of 1970's TV and the notoriously cheap BBC budget.    

Remember in the episode School Reunion when Sarah Jane tells Rose Tyler she met the Loch Ness Monster? Yep, Terror of the Zygons is where that happened.    

Both stories suffer from the usual problem of classic Doctor Who stories with a lot of padding and running about to justify taking 2 hours to tell 1 hour's worth of story.  But both are significant milestones in the history of Doctor Who, introducing perhaps the most iconic of Doctors in the form of Tom Baker and one of the scarier alien threats ever to plague the Doctor.  

My next installment of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC takes us back to the 3rd Doctor (as well as the 1st and the 2nd) with The Three Doctors. That will be posting early in April.

Doctor Who Revisited: the 60th Specials

 

So NO Doctor Who Is NEW post this week.

After waiting for OVER two years to see what Russell T Davies was going to do with his return to Doctor Who (the announcement of his return was made in September 2021), we've blown threw the three 60th anniversary specials with David Tennant and Catherine Tate,  

We stand on the threshold of a new era with new Doctor Ncuti Gatwa with a new special dropping on Christmas Day. (My Doctor Who Is NEW post on that will appear on Wednesday, December 27th.)  

But let's take a moment and reflect on what we've experienced so far from the three 60th anniversary specials. 

Whovians have developed certain expectations around anniversary specials. The template was established in 1973 for the 10th anniversary when Jon Pertwee's Doctor met his previous incarnations played by William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton.   

There was a lot of expectations that at least somewhere over the course of 3 specials, Russell would find somewhere to do some version of a multi-Doctor story. 

Well, he did but it wasn't what you're expecting. Instead of Tennant's 14th Doctor interacting with a previous incarnation, he teamed up with the next one, Gatwa's 15th Doctor. 

The phrase "it wasn't what you're expecting" can be applied to everything Russell did with these three specials. The specials were a celebration of Doctor Who's 60 year history if you were paying attention.    

The first special is a basic "alien threat to Earth" story that draws in regular people who are instrumental to helping the Doctor save the day.  It's an archetype of a classic recurring motif in Doctor Who throughout both the classic series and the modern era.  "The Star Beast" is a celebration of a basic truth of Doctor Who: the Doctor may be the star of the show but the heroes are the people who help them save the day.  

Russell kept a tight lid on what the hell "Wild Blue Yonder" was about and all of fandom just KNEW there were big surprises in store. That would be where we would get the multiple Doctors showing up. Nope! What we got was a tribute to that classic staple of Doctor Who story telling, the "base under siege". From the 1st Doctor's "The Tenth Planet" to the 13th Doctor's "Eve of the Daleks", the story of the Doctor stuck somewhere and unable to leave until the threat is resolved  is a long time element in the Doctor Who mythos. 

And "Wild Blue Yonder" also acknowledges the undercurrent horror that lurks underneath the shiny veneer of a "children's science fiction program". Shows like the 4th Doctor's gothic mystery "The Horror of Fang Rock" or the 7th Doctor's "The Curse of Fenric" or Russell's own 10th Doctor adventure "Midnight" reminds us that the Doctor's journeys take him into the light as well as into darkness.  

"The Giggle" gives us a classic recurring trope of the Doctor vs. an adversary with power, real power to shatter worlds and render life into dust. Any given Dalek story applies here as well as the original appearance of the Toymaker against William Hartnell's Doctor in 1966. Or any time the Master shows up and thinks the solution to what will make him happy is power! The Doctor beats power with wit, intelligence, wisdom and cunning. 

Basically, the 3 specials revisit the tropes of Doctor Who both classic and modern but with enough twists to challenge our expectations.

Next week for the Christmas special, the Doctor and new companion Ruby Sunday go up against space goblins with the life of a baby at stake.

And how best to convey that threat than through a musical number.

Yeah, that'll get the kids and a lot of adults hiding behind the sofa.

Doctor Who Is NEW!: The Giggle

After what seemed like an interminable wait of over a year, it's now all over too soon, the 3 specials celebrating the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who.

This past Saturday was "The Giggle" which gave us the return of a classic villain not seen since the 1960's and a regeneration like none other in the history of Doctor Who.

It's time for this week's installment of Doctor Who Is NEW! as  we explore the wonders, the mysteries and the utter total madness that is "The Giggle".   

What exactly is...the Giggle?

It's a signal that invades the mind that makes everyone in the world think they are right about everything all the time.

Yep, the WHOLE world is filled with pundits on Fox News.  

It's a nefarious scheme that goes back to the invention of television in 1925 and the purchase of a puppet from a strange toy shop and it's sinister proprietor with a really bad German accent. 

From his first appearance, Neil Patrick Harris just owns the role of the Toymaker, an amalgamation of all that is strange, weird, morbidly funny and deadly.  

The Toymaker says he defeated the Master in a game of chance and how the Master is embedded in a gold tooth.  

But as much fun as it is to watch Harris as the Toymaker, the big draw continues to be the chemistry between David Tennant and Catherine Tate as the Doctor and Donna Noble.  Donna has a unique gift of seeing past the Doctor's bluster and bravado as he rushes from one crises to the next. She knows when he's hurting even if he won't take one damn second to deal with it. 

The Toymaker puts on a puppet show to demonstrate to Donna what happened to the Doctor in the intervening years since she last saw him (as the 10th Doctor) and his return (as the 14th). The fates of Amy Pond, Clara Oswald and Bill Potts are recapped (damn, Moffat was hard on his companions) and half of the universe (yep, the Flux is name checked again).  

The Doctor and the Toymaker are set up for a big final confrontation, one last game to decide the fate of everything. Which means some garish costumes and epic dance choreography set to the music of the Spice Girls.  

By the way, Donna is not the only former companion on hand. Working for UNIT is Mel Bush (Bonnie Langford) who travelled with the 6th and 7th Doctors back in the classic series. Of all the companions from the original series one might want to see, Mel was NOT one of them; she was SO annoying. But Mel has matured a bit and no longer has that squeaky inflection in her voice. 

The fan boy in me was ecstatic when she brought the Doctor up to speed on what happened to Sabalom Glitz, a notorious con man and space adventurer Mel joined up with when she left the TARDIS. Glitz is dead now (bummer) but he got a Viking funeral which Glitz would've loved (cool!).  

In the showdown between the Toymaker and the Doctor, our villain decides he wants to play with the next Doctor.  So he shoots the Doctor through the chest with a laser beam.

Well, we knew our time with David Tennant was limited and sooner rather than later it would be time for Ncuti Gatwa to step up as the Doctor. 

With Donna and Mel on either side of him, the Doctor begins to glow and then...

And then....

We get Ncuti Gatwa... AND David Tennant?!?!?

WHAT?!?!?  

What is an anniversary special without a multi-Doctor angle?

Ncuti's Doctor splits off from David's and... they share the clothes.

David gets the trousers, white under shirt and vest.  Ncuti is wearing the dress shirt, tie, shoes and socks and white boxer briefs.  (Despite what the 12th Doctor told Osgood, his underpants do not have question marks on them.) 

The two Doctors defeat the Toymaker in a game of catch and he vanishes. Except for his gold tooth which is retrieved a mystery woman's hand. (The same way the mystery woman retrieved the Master's ring at the end of "The Last of the Time Lords".)

In his brief moments on screen, Ncuti Gatwa is immediately charming. I've got a good feeling about this guy's turn as the Doctor. 

But what about the Doctor he regenerated from? That guy's still hanging around.  Ncuti's Doctor creates a 2nd TARDIS and hands his predecessor the keys. THE Doctor (Ncuti) still has work to do and a universe to look after. His previous self (David) has been through a lot and deserves a rest. 

The special ends with David's Doctor sitting with the Noble family at a backyard picnic with Donna, Shaun, Rose and Sylvia and Mel joins them too. His TARDIS is parked beside Rose's shed. Except for a couple of hops in the TARDIS to New York City and to Mars, this Doctor is content to just... be here with his family.  

Awww!   

Which opens up a whole bunch of questions but you know, I will let those questions be for a bit.  

Next week's Doctor Who post will look at the three 60th anniversary specials in total. What did Russell T Davies set out to do and what did he accomplish?  

Until next time, remember to never be cruel, never be cowardly, and that hate is always foolish, and love is always wise. 

Songs For Saturday 1990's: Spin Doctors, Nirvana and Garth Brooks

 

It's November Nineties here on the ol' blog thing and every weekend this month, Songs For Saturday has a a play list from the 1990's.

We're kicking off this week with the Spin Doctors and "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong". 

We can't look at the music of the 1990's and not consider the whole grunge music thing that decade gave us.  So let's here from Nirvana with "Come As You Are".

From grunge rock to country music...

It wasn't just rock 'n' roll giving us music in the 1990's.  The decade brought us the wonder that is Garth Brooks and his signature hit, "Friends In Low Places". 

Well, that is that for today's Songs For Saturday. 

Next week we time warp back to the 1990's for three more songs. 

Until next time, remember to be good to one another and to always keep the music alive.