Doctor Who: Redacted (series 1)

Chapter the 331st, features the adventures of three people who podcast about the Doctor.

Plot:

Three friends, Cleo, Abby and Shawna, host a podcast about a mysterious blue box, and all the various conspiracies that surround it (diet pills that create alien fat babies, hospitals disappearing and ending up on the moon, statues of angels that move when you're not looking at them, etc.). Abby is the Mulder-style believer, who puts this all down to alien activity. Shawna is the cynic who would rather assume they are man-made conspiracies. Cleo is the joker, just there to bring the sass (but underneath is fiercely loyal and brave). Some of their fellow bloggers and podcasters are disappearing, and files are being corrupted. The trio interview some key figures in the history of the blue box like Rani Chandra, as well as [Redacted] and [Redacted]. After talking to the trio, though, these people go missing, and then Abby and Shawna forget they ever existed. Some people they talk to mention a woman associated with the box called the Doctor, but again after a while only Cleo is able to retain knowledge of a person of that name. The three are arrested by UNIT, interrogated and meet [Redacted] and [Redacted]. Abby decides to help UNIT, much to the other two's chagrin. They leave her and come into contact with [Redacted]. More and more people are disappearing and being replaced by ghosts, redacted from existence. UNIT manage to rig up a device to keep the ghosts at bay, and Abby is reunited with her two friends at the Powell Estate (where Cleo grew up). When Cleo is the only one left not to have been turned into a ghost, she sees the blue box arrive, and meets the Doctor. An intergalactic thought virus has been spreading throughout humankind. Cleo was immune as her psyche had blocked out a traumatic childhood memory of the Doctor after a previous encounter, which inoculated her. Together, she and the Doctor reverse the virus and return everyone to normal.

Context:

I recently had a conversation with a Doctor Who fan of my acquaintance (and he's no slouch, he's had books published and does a Doctor Who podcast, and that sort of thing) and he surprised me by telling me that there are still Doctor Who stories he has not seen. He's holding them back, saving them for a rainy day. I long ago used up all the classic stories, and have kept up to date with the new series stories. So, everything Who-related that I view for the blog is a rewatch, days, months or years after first having seen the story in question. After the conversation, I took the challenge of finding my own 'rainy day Who', and remembered this BBC Sounds spin-off series. I would watch the first of the two series, leaving the second for that future rainy day's listening. But would it pass muster with my usual rigorous canon-checker questionnaire? Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With a full house of correct answers, I started my listening. The first series of Redacted is fairly long, 10 episodes of between 20 and 30 minutes duration, and took me a good couple of weeks of June 2025 to finish, listening to an episode every day or two.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. When not going off piste with spin-offs like Redacted, I have completed 11 Doctors' televisual eras, Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14, which entailed completing 37 out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

As mentioned above, this is my first time listening to Redacted. I do remember it being advertised online when it first became available, though. The first episode landed on the Sunday of the Easter weekend 2022, the same day that Legend of the Sea Devils was shown (and the same day I was writing it up frantically for the blog). I don't know why I didn't listen to it straight away, but probably I had too much in the 'to watch / listen' pile already at the time to commit to another long-running series. I always planned to get around to it sooner or later so I'm glad I've finally done so now.

Reaction:

As you'll see in the Deeper Thoughts section, I have not kept to my personal pledge to stay away from online news about Doctor Who. As such, I have further polluted my psyche with headlines like "Doctor Who Collapse: Woke Fans Join the Backlash", "Woke Doctor Who loses millions of viewers" and "Doctor Who’s ‘woke, boring rubbish’ storylines have caused staggering number of fans to turn off". I was momentarily amused by one site that had asked a surprisingly even-handed Mel Gibson to weigh in on the issue (reader, when I adjusted my glasses it turned out they were Millie Gibson's comments). Presumably the articles do represent some people's honestly held views. In all my many conversations IRL about Doctor Who, though, nobody's ever complained about it being too woke (however that's defined). It's usually positive (I was wearing my Van Gogh exploding TARDIS T-shirt on the tube the other day and a few young fans got talking to me about how much they enjoyed The Well); if there's any negatives it's usually about plot points or continuity. Nobody likes being preached at, of course, but I don't think Doctor Who does that too often. To pick a random example (but one that did create some annoyed articles at the time), 2025 season opener The Robot Revolution depicted a male character that was excessively controlling of his female partner. It gave that as a reason why the partner character stopped going out with him. Part of the story is some sci-fi shenanigans associated with this broken relationship being played out on a cosmic scale. The story never so much as hinted that all men are like the character, and didn't even paint him as a wholly bad person. Where is the room for anyone to feel targeted? If anything, it's too far the other way: he is presented in such a cartoonish way that nobody watching could possibly associate themselves with him, letting many off the hook.

The Burger King Kids' Club - selling burgers

It's not for me to dictate when people can take offence, of course. If people want to take offence about a negative representation, then they are of course free to do so. But what about taking offence at a positive representation? This gets a bit more tricky. As a BBC Sounds offering, Redacted was probably a little too niche to draw much attention. The Star Beast, though, the first 60th special in the year following Redacted series 1's broadcast, garnered 144 complaints from members of the public just because it, like Redacted, featured a trans character. That's not that many people, but it boggles my mind that even 144 people went to the effort to call in or use an online form to register their disgust that trans people exist and are being represented. What motivates anyone to do something like that? Stories are about people, and to be interesting they must be about a diverse range of people. Cleo Proctor, the protagonist of Redacted, is a great character, full stop - funny, dynamic and brave. That she's representative of a previously underrepresented group of people, some of whom would very likely be listening to the drama, is just a bonus. A cynic could see this as tokenistic. The band of heroes from UNIT and the TARDIS seen in Wish World and The Reality War thrillingly contains men and women, the young and the old, people of colour, cis and trans, queer and straight, and a wheelchair user. Someone tuning in that's not massively invested in the story might see this as the shallow box-ticking inclusivity of something like the Burger King Kids Club. But these characters don't exist to sell burgers, they exist to represent humanity versus the baddies. Besides, they're all great characters, as are the heroes of Redacted. Unlike the perhaps over-staffed UNIT of 2025, the three characters at the heart of the audio drama (who do form something of a cross section of LGBTQ+ women, one lesbian, one bisexual and one trans woman) all have a lot to do in the story.

The Doctor and friends - saving the world.

Head writer Juno Dawson and the other writers create a series that's a celebration of new Who. It was an obvious joke in the synopsis above to redact the names of some of the characters cameoing from Who's history, but I also did it for anyone who might be reading this and hasn't listened to Redacted yet: it would be much better to not know and be surprised by who shows up. Another cameo throughout the first nine episodes is Jodie Whittaker, occasionally leaving a voice message that gets scrubbed out by the burst of white noise that represents redaction. She is fully present for the final episode, with Cleo in the companion role. The revelation that Cleo has blocked out a traumatic memory from her childhood involving the death of a parent during a visitation of the David Tennant Doctor is exactly the same as a reveal in 2000s story Love & Monsters; it's so close a match that I'm chalking it up to homage rather than rip off. That the event in question is the "Red hatching" with Redacted building a backstory from a throwaway line from another 2000s Tennant story Blink backs that up. The use of our heroes' podcast recordings at the end as part of the plot resolution is a nice touch too. The only flaw - and it isn't that minor - is that 10 episodes is too long. After the first couple of episodes, the idea that people who have had any contact with the Doctor are gradually being erased is well understood by the audience, but it keeps happening for several more episodes, hammering the point home in a quite repetitive fashion. The beat where the trio are at their lowest ebb and split up acrimoniously seems to happen at least three times too. At the end, there's a step over the line into the overly preachy, comparing the impact of the redacting virus to online misinformation; mind you, a warning about steering clear of dodgy online content was one I could have done with, I suppose (see Deeper Thoughts for even more details).

Connectivity:

Both Redacted and Death of the Doctor feature a long section at the start where the Doctor is missing presumed dead, an appearance by Rani Chandra, and dubious behaviour by UNIT personnel.

Deeper Thoughts:

Out of the mouths of Beebies. Doctor Who has gone on hiatus three times before 2025. In 1985, it came back in 18 months; in 1989, it was back in seven years; in 1996, it took nine years. But it always came back. June 2025 is the first time since the return of 2005 that the programme is off the air without any commission in place for new episodes. This is similar to the situation of the latter two 21st century scenarios and so, just as it did in 1990 and 1997, speculation reigns. Unlike in the 1990s, though, this speculation is supercharged by website proliferation and social media. In the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post I stated that this pause would be my opportunity to stop regularly googling 'Doctor Who' and looking at news articles. This turned out to be another prediction I made about Who that was wide of the mark. At the start of the year I speculated here that there would be a Christmas special aired in 2025, and that seems unlikely based on everything currently known. There is almost nothing that is currently known, though, so anything is possible. In this spirit, every news and entertainment site, both the big names and the smaller players, has indulged in flights of fancy based on almost nothing, and I haven't been able to resist reading them all. It is very like scouring fanzines in 1990 and messageboards in 1997, only more so. Doctor Who has no defined future, so it has any and every possible future. For example, recent rumours stated that the BBC were in discussions with Amazon, and that J. Michael Straczynski was involved (he apparently then posted in a reddit chat calling bullshit on all of this). Even the recent Doctor Who Magazine had no actual news about what was happening, and said as much (such were the restrictions of access to the finale, the magazine team were unaware of what happened at the end of The Reality War until it went out).

This didn't stop people reading meaning into the slightest mention or hint in the magazine's pages, though. Russell T Davies finished off his regular production notes column with a goodbye, his rationale being that a column about production of Doctor Who shouldn't be continuing when the production of Doctor Who was on hold. Many people immediately took this as a sign that he was no longer going to be running the show henceforth, and that there would be a long gap before the next series. It didn't really indicate either. The exact words he used were "Hopefully, we'll have news soon, and certainly, The War Between the Land and the Sea is about to break out, so there are great things ahead. Until then...". This suggests that the wait for that spin-off will not be too lengthy; indeed, elsewhere in the magazine it's confirmed it will be "broadcast on BBC One, BBC iPlayer and Disney+ later this year". Everybody else is doing it, so I too am going to speculate and risk seeing patterns in things that aren't there: the scheduling of TWBTLATS (using this initialism makes me wonder whether the show was ever titled The War Against the Sea at any point in development before someone realised that made a rude acronym) suggests to me that the Disney+ deal is dead, and they won't be contributing to any future episodes after the spin-off. If there were any chance that would happen, the spin-off would be held back to better bridge the gap between seasons. Showing it this year fits with getting the last Disney+ co-commissioned material out of the way to create a clean slate for a new production partner. It would also explain why no official announcement has been made yet: Disney will want to give the series they've paid for the best possible chance to bring in viewers / subscribers, so won't risk it being labelled a last hurrah (or lame duck) before it's been shown.

The one honest-to-goodness fact that has been reported about Doctor Who since the broadcast of The Reality War is a very positive sign, but certainly not one anyone predicted. Not even the most imaginative speculator nor the most informed 'insider' ever reported before the official announcement that Doctor Who was going to be made into an animated series for pre-schoolers on CBeebies. Whether or not you'll be planning to watch it should it get made (I am a completist, so will have to give it a viewing, even though my kids are far too old for it now), this has to be good news. Broadcasters don't tend to make pre-school spin-off versions of an intellectual property if they're not planning on continuing the main show. The Beeb, if not Disney, must have been happy enough with the last two years' performance. It doesn't mean that either the animation or further seasons of the main show will happen, of course - anyone watching the Who news closely from 1990 or 1997 saw many an article about projects in development that never got to a screen - but it indicates a strong motivation for the Whoniverse to endure. Some reporting on the press release and call for pitches mentioned that this series would have nothing to do with Disney+, though I haven't found an official source for that anywhere. If it's true, then it 100% would mean that the Disney+ deal was over: the House of Mouse's lawyers would almost certainly have drafted contracts such that the BBC couldn't make any spin-off of new Who without their go-ahead. If the BBC are proceeding with the Cbeebies show without Disney+ involvement, it suggests that any new Who of any kind will be made without Disney+ involvement. That would indicate that the popular general belief that the BBC is already shopping Who around other streamers is correct; we'll find out when we find out. I'm going to try to resist peeking at the internet until then...

In Summary:

It's another very enjoyable story that works as a celebration of all things Who, though it could do with being two episodes shorter. 

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Death of the Doctor

Chapter the 330th, in which Doctor Who appears to be dead, but returns before you know it (let's hope life imitates art).

Plot:

Sarah Jane, Clyde and Rani are invited to the funeral of the Doctor, held in a UNIT base within Mount Snowdon. Sarah Jane does not believe the Doctor is dead, which the others put down to denial. Another old friend of the Doctor, Jo Jones, attends with her grandson Santiago. She also doesn't believe the Doctor is dead. The funeral is arranged by the Shansheeth, an alien race that look a bit like vultures who act as undertakers across the galaxy. Clyde's body keeps crackling with energy that he absorbed from the TARDIS when he last met the Doctor: suddenly, he changes into Matt Smith. The Doctor has been stranded without the TARDIS on a planet, but has constructed a gizmo to let him switch places with Clyde temporarily. He takes Sarah Jane and Jo with him when he goes back to the planet, and they help him to cross back permanently. The Shansheeth and UNIT Colonel Karim conspired to strand the Doctor and steal his TARDIS, but they don't have the key. They capture Sarah Jane and Jo and wire them up to a device that will create a new key from their memories. The Doctor, the kids and a Groske that works for UNIT are trapped outside of the room when this is happening. Through the door, the Doctor encourages his two ex-companions to remember everything of their adventures. This overloads the machine. It explodes, killing the villains.

Context:

I gave this spin-off a pre-screening screening by asking the usual set of questions. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes (it did end up being an extra on the Blu-ray collection season 10 box set disc, from where I viewed it this time, but it wasn't created to be so). Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. A full house of correct answers means that the story adheres to the - somewhat arbitrary, I grant you - rules of suitability for inclusion in this blog. I watched the episodes one a day on the last two days of May 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. When not going off piste with stories like Death of the Doctor, I have completed 11 Doctor's televisual eras, Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14, which entailed completing 37 out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

I can't remember the details, but I remember the feels. I watched this when it was first shown in October 2010, probably from a recording on the PVR later on each of the days of transmission. I was probably accompanied by the Better Half, but not by either of our only two children at the time as they were still a little too young. I enjoyed it immensely, as I did again on this recent watch, and for the same reasons: it's fun, well paced and celebratory. Whisper it, but it was probably the most enjoyable Matt Smith story of 2010 for me (I'm not as keen on Matt Smith's first season as many are).

Reaction:

What a difference a year makes. Death of the Doctor is a loose 2010 sequel to the last Sarah Jane Adventures story that featured a guest appearance from the Doctor in 2009. In that instance, as I mentioned when I blogged it in January 2025, the story scaffolding surrounding the guest casting was pretty flimsy. Just having David Tennant appear seemed enough, without having to construct a strong story in which he could feature. The writer of Death of the Doctor Russell T Davies puts a lot more into this and it's therefore much more rewarding to watch. The masterstroke is to have another guest star appear as well as Matt Smith. This is Katy Manning as Jo Jones née Grant, another companion from the same era as Sarah Jane. Manning gives every scene she's in a lift; Lis Sladen is very good within a narrow range, and can do the dynamic moments, but she's not so good at emotion. Manning can handle the emotional moments perfectly: witness the scene where she asks the Doctor why he never came back to see her again. This then leads into a wonderful revelation that Tennant's pre-regeneration victory lap towards the end of his last episode, where he visited lots of new series companions - which would have been relatively fresh in the audience's memory after its original broadcast on the 1st January of 2010 - extended to his catching up with every one of his companions. Obviously, on one level it's fanwank, but it's also lovely. The little moments talking about other companions (Liz Shaw working on a moonbase, Ian and Barbara having got married, Ace setting up her own charity, etc.) are also great. The story then climaxes with loads and loads of archive clips. What more could one ask for? Davies might never have written for the Doctor again after this story, and he clearly wants it to be a celebration of Doctor Who and the Doctor's positive impact on people.

Matt Smith gets some great gags, but also some more melancholy material like the line about regeneration "It always hurts" that he almost throws away, making it all the more powerful by doing so. The younger regulars are their usual good value. You could lift the Santiago Jones character out of proceedings and not impact the plot one jot, but it's great to have Rani and Clyde with their own sort-of companion, comparing their adventures with his life supporting family members in environmental protesting. Rani and Clyde have the benefit of always going back home after their escapades to normality and safety (a metaphor perhaps for the enjoyable but safe escapism of Doctor Who and associated Whoniverse shows). There's even time for the script to say a few simple but nonetheless true things about grief and loss. There's fun villains and monsters to provide some salt and avoid things becoming too saccharine. The Groske, friendly aliens who look like nastier cousins that the Bannerman Road gang have encountered before, are also pretty superfluous to proceedings; they do, though, provide a few nice moments of comic relief that it would be a shame to lose. For example, there's the sequence where a Groske encourages Rani, Clyde and Santiago to hurry along to its hidden sanctuary, only to reveal that it has no plan beyond hiding, and just wanted to hurry so its pizza wouldn't go cold. Laila Rouass has a lot of fun playing a UNIT officer gone rogue, tempted with the chance to leave Earth behind. The sneering delivery of her put-downs directed at Sarah Jane ("Frankly, I've never met anyone so staggeringly pious in all my life") are worth the price of admission on their own.

The Shansheeth are also a fun enemy race, if a little bit too Jim Henson in their look to be truly scary. Their motivation, though, is nicely original; tired of the ravages of mortality witnessed in their work as space undertakers, they want to prevent death in the universe. Davies mentioned in the commentary for the story that the Shansheeth's nefarious plan to nab the TARDIS broke his rule that the Doctor's time machine should never be the antagonists' prize (drawing attention to the power of the TARDIS too much would invite audiences to wonder why the villain every week didn't abandon whatever plan they had on hearing about it, as it would be more valuable than anything they'd previously had in their sights). It does help to up the ante at the end, though. The effects work to visualise a base in Mount Snowdon and a rocket ready for blast off are pretty good for the minimal budget of a CBBC show. There's great voice work from Jon Glover and David Bradley as the Shansheeth (the latter would be invited back a few times to appear in person in the main show). There's lots of fun continuity references for those that like that sort of thing (Jo mentions Karfel, tying up a loose end of continuity from the Sixth Doctor story Timelash, which sees the Doctor return to a planet that he'd previously visited with Jo in an unseen Jon Pertwee adventure). Beyond all of that, this is the story that depicts the first ever meeting of Sarah Jane and Jo Grant, and for that it gains special status and should always have a place in fans' hearts.

Connectivity:

Both Death of the Doctor and The Story and the Engine feature the Doctor as played by Matt Smith (he's in a blink and you'd miss it clip in the Ncuti Gatwa tale). Both stories involve the antagonists trapping the Doctor in another time- and space-zone away from other characters, but in both his companion(s) eventually join him to help him escape the trap. In a reasonably sizeable coincidence - Doctor Who doesn't do such a thing that often -  both stories climax with a sequence featuring lots of clips of Doctor Who representing the memories of characters being used to overload a machine.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Story is the Engine: Anniversaries and Endings - 2. [Spoilers follow for the end of Ncuti Gatwa's second season - don't read unless you've watched The Reality War.] In the first part of this musing in the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post, I talked about blogging all remaining classic and new series stories before the end of year; but, of course, anything could happen between now and the end of the year. The world could end. There might suddenly and unexpectedly be so many new Doctor Who stories created and broadcast on TV in late 2025 that I couldn't possibly write them all up before the 31st December (sadly, the world ending seems more likely as things stand). As mentioned above, when Russell T Davies wrote Death of the Doctor it probably seemed to him that he was writing for the Doctor for the very last time. In the end, that didn't turn out to be the case. As I write this in early June 2025, in the twentieth anniversary year of the new series launch, the time has come again when Davies may have reached the end of his time writing for the Doctor. All is uncertainty as we wait for news. Stories are a tool that humans have created to help them deal with the uncertainties of the world. It therefore feels a little unfair that Doctor Who fans' favourite coping mechanism has been taken away, just as the world for us has got just a little bit less good. We've been lucky up to now, though: through those twenty years, there's never before been a period when a Doctor Who season ended before the next one had been commissioned (and usually had started production). We now have that situation, and don't know exactly how long it will endure. Things could change before these words are even read. After I publish, Disney+ could confirm funding for another season the next day, the next week, the next month. The smart money (with the caveat that there is no smart way to make such a prediction) is on it taking longer than that, though: to my mind, this explains decisions taken with The Reality War's ending.

There are two facts that are certain. First, Ncuti Gatwa decided to move on from the role of the Doctor. Second, Disney+ had not made a decision about continuing to fund the series - and therefore it was not known exactly how the series would continue - before Gatwa's last episode was due to be broadcast. We don't know exactly when the decision about Gatwa's departure took place. A large amount of material towards the end of The Reality War looks to be constructed around his self-sacrifice. Too much to have been created with hasty pick-up shots? Maybe. My feeling is that he probably would have done a third year if Disney+ had not prevaricated, but we'll probably never know for sure. However it came about, the situation created a challenge for Davies in the writing of the final seconds of The Reality War. Ncuti has to be seen to regenerate, or else he'll still be associated with the role while trying to make a name for himself with other work. This would probably be true even if the regeneration was seen to start but not finish: it would leave open the possibility that he could continue (as David Tennant did after seeming to regenerate at the end of The Stolen Earth, for example). Someone brand new couldn't appear at the end without the guarantee of future work, for the same reason of unfair association with and responsibility for the show. So, it had to be someone already associated with the show in a big enough capacity that further association would not hurt the brand, and successful enough in their own right that the association wouldn't hurt their career. Any of the actors who'd played the Doctor before could have been candidates, but unfortunately Davies had already pulled that trick when David Tennant took over from Jodie Whittaker in 2023. It therefore would have to be a companion actor.

Of the small number of candidates that fit the bill, the ones with a previous working relationship with Davies probably boiled down to two, Catherine Tate and Billie Piper. As Tate had already returned in 2023 too, there was only really one choice. This doesn't mean it's not genius, though: Piper's presence harks back to the relaunch, when she was arguably the most crucial cast member of the first two years of the new series. The credits of The Reality War and the BBC's press release are careful never to refer to Piper as playing the Doctor. This leaves Davies's (or someone else's?) options open for when (if?) things resume. A quick decision on the future of Doctor Who could just about make a Christmas special for December 25th 2025 a possibility; what's more likely is a special or specials in 2026, with Piper handing over to someone else to do a series in 2027. Or it could be the end of Doctor Who altogether. It would be a shame as there are lots of ends left deliberately loose still to be tied up (who exactly is "the Boss"?) and scripts have been written for the next season and beyond. Also, the last ever image of Doctor Who being Ncuti Gatwa turning into Billie Piper is not as fitting as the Doctor and Ace walking off into the sunset (which served as the final image from 1989 to 1996). It certainly feels like there's confidence that the wait won't be too long (but then, one might have thought that about a newly regenerated Paul McGann flying his TARDIS off to adventures new, which served as the final image from 1996 to 2005). We'll have to wait and see (just as we did, for quite lengthy periods after 1989 and 1996). If news does come, I might miss it, at least for a while. I went into my viewing of The Reality War knowing the rumours about Ncuti leaving and regenerating into Piper, and it would have been much better not to have known.

As I've mentioned on the blog before, I don't engage with any social media any more, and I get all my news (except Doctor Who news) offline. I'm much happier for doing this, and I would recommend the approach to anyone. The fear of missing out, though, tempts me to regularly google 'Doctor Who' and look at news articles. I'm going to stop that too now. With no stories being made I'm not likely to see any spoilers, but there are other dangers. Stories are ways to help us manage the uncertainty of life, but there's a different and uglier type of storytelling too. Whether just for clicks (negative stories attracting more attention), or as a stick with which certain other media outlets can beat the BBC, or because of a more general anti-woke agenda, whatever that means exactly, a narrative is already being pushed that Ncuti Gatwa's time as the Doctor was a "flop" with "plummeting" ratings. I'd just like to use a few words here to show how that's complete bollocks. The average consolidated 7-day ratings figure for the first six episodes of the second Gatwa season is 3.18 million viewers. This is a slight drop on the average for last year's season of 3.71 million, but it's a very small drop (not a plummet or a "nosedive"). It's likely that when the final two stories' figures are included, the drop will be even smaller, possibly non-existent. The figure of 3.71 is down on the average figure for Jodie Whittaker's last season too, but then almost every year since 2005 has seen Doctor Who's average ratings go down compared to the previous year. The only exceptions were David Tennant's final season and Jodie Whittaker's first, the averages for both of which were buoyed up by a single outlier rating, because an aspect of that episode snagged on to the public's curiosity (what's the first female Doctor going to be like, and is Tennant going to regenerate earlier than we thought?).

This year-on-year decline is no surprise as it's happened across the board to all other programmes too. As such, Doctor Who is holding its own, particularly when one considers that each episode is usually available to stream before it is broadcast on TV, meaning that overnight and even 7-day figures will never give the whole picture. As was seen with the bump in viewing figures for the 2025 Eurovision-themed episode - which formed part of a live viewing experience with the contest itself for those at home making a night of it - people will tune in live when there's a hook (this is also borne out for special episodes, which tend to perform better than episodes that form part of seasons, and always have). If people aren't motivated to watch live, they will still catch up with the story at some point, Doctor Who episodes on the iplayer have a 'long tail'. Isn't the point of the streaming age that people can watch whenever they want? I'm sure there will be many people who held off from watching any of the season until it was complete, so they could binge it as a box set. I will not be sorry to miss tabloid newspapers misreporting such statistics, and then assigning spurious explanations tied to their own agenda. None of this means that Doctor Who will necessarily come back to TV anytime soon, of course. If I'm disciplined and stick to avoiding any online Who news, the next I know about the future of Doctor Who will be in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. For example, it will be interesting to see whether Billie Piper starts to appear in the magazine's comic strip, or whether they stick with Ncuti, or indeed do something different altogether. There will still be Big Finish audios too, of course, and probably some more original novels as well. What did I foolishly say earlier about losing our coping mechanism? You don't get rid of Doctor Who stories so easily: they'll likely run and run - and be a force of positivity, unlike some other stories out there - forever.

In Summary:

A very enjoyable story that works as a celebration of the Whoniverse.

The Story and the Engine

Chapter the 329th, in which the Doctor goes to see a man and it turns out to be about a god.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] The Doctor and Belinda are still landing in random places using the vindicator device to triangulate and thereby help them return to Earth on the 24th May 2025. The Doctor decides to take a reading in Lagos, Nigeria in 2019, so he can visit a friend Omo at his barbershop. When he enters, though, he is trapped inside with Omo and three of the regular patrons. The mysterious Barber has taken them hostage, and they have to have haircuts in the chair while telling stories to fuel and propel the Barber's extra-dimensional engine (shaped like a giant mechanical spider) towards the centre of the nexus (a web-like structure in some tract of hyperspace or other). The only person that can travel back and forth between the barbershop dimension and the real world of Lagos is the Barber's assistant Abena, who brings the others food. The Barber claims to be a story-telling god (indeed all the storytelling gods) of Earth mythologies, but in reality he is a human who built the nexus that gives those other gods power. Abena is the daughter of the West African trickster god Anansi. A long time before, the Doctor - when in her fugitive persona - failed to take Abena away from her miserable life with Anansi, and she harbours a grudge. Abena thinks that the Barber plans to depose the gods and rule fairly in their stead, but he reveals that he plans to destroy them. The Doctor realises that this would be calamitous for humans. Abena helps show the Doctor the way to the centre of the engine's power. He tells his own never-ending story to overload the engine, and persuades the Barber to leave before it explodes. Omo grants the Barber ownership of his shop, now it has returned to normal; the patrons go back to their lives, Abena is free to start a new life, and the Doctor and Belinda resume their travels.

Context:

Random selection picked a very recent story for me to blog next. I watched it from the BBC iplayer accompanied by both my sons (boy of 15, and young man of 18 home from university) towards the end of May 2025, not much longer than a week after having first seen it. Both of them expressed positive opinions about the story and the series as a whole to that point, so it's clearly working with some of the key demographic to whom it is aimed.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the second story blogged from the 2025 season (season 2 or 15 or 41, or indeed however you want to number it, and whatever you want to call it), leaving five stories of the run remaining. Beyond that, I have completed 11 Doctors' televisual eras, Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14, which entailed completing 37 out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

For the only time in Ncuti Gatwa's tenure thus far, I watched this story the day after it landed on the BBC iplayer. The others I've all watched on the Saturday, not usually at 8am (when Ncuti's second run stories first become available) but sometime during the day before they were shown on BBC1 in the evening. On the 10th May, though, my daughter had a birthday celebration with a number of her friends invited round to the house, as she'd recently turned 13 years of age. The rest of the family were encouraged to steer clear of this group of teenage girls to avoid embarrassing her (we tend to do this just by existing at the moment, she's at that stage!). Anyway, she had a nice time, we didn't embarrass her (any more than usual, anyway) and I caught up with the story from the BBC iplayer on Sunday 11th May 2025. I was accompanied by middle child (boy of 15), who really liked the story and thought the Barber was an epic GOAT-ed bad guy, or words to that effect.

Reaction:

In the previous blog post for The Invasion, I mentioned that Doctor Who is famously the show with the flexible format that can tell any kind of story. It's nonetheless more conservative than it could be; a story like The Story and the Engine comes along once in a while that wakes one up to this: there's never been a Doctor Who TV story with anywhere in Africa as its setting before, let alone one like this that dwells on African, and specifically Nigerian, culture and characters. Other relatively recent stories by and of people of colour (Rosa, Demons of the Punjab) looked at historical conflict. It's refreshing that The Story and the Engine instead just tells a science-fantasy story in this setting. It allows the key characters - including the two regular cast members - to represent humanity while not being boringly white. This is a change from the usual, both for Doctor Who and UK television more generally. This rich and different texture, with the story taking the aspects of black barbershop culture and twisting them to become the tools of a malign force, is the key asset this story has. It helps to get an audience past some of the areas of the story that don't work quite so well, of which more in a moment. Every aspect of production in creating Lagos and its inhabitants is exemplary. There was some drone camerawork used of the real place to create establishing shots, but everything else seen on screen was created in Cardiff, not that you would know it. I've never been to Lagos, but based on everything I've read the depiction is accurate, and - this I can confirm - engaging. Once we get into the barbershop, it is down to the characters and the stories they tell (plus some nice effects and animation work depicting those stories on the window of the shop) to hold our attention. Again, they achieve this with aplomb, with lots of wonderful details that I won't spoil here.

The characters are all nicely drawn in minimal story time, particularly the Barber as played by Ariyon Bakare: the scenes where he snips off his own hair while monologuing are mesmeric. There is something deeply affecting about Ncuti Gatwa's performance as the Doctor when he talks about the haven that Omo's barbershop has become for him, now that he has a "black body" and he's "treated differently" elsewhere. His feeling of betrayal by Omo for luring him in to the trap, and his subsequently forgiving him, feel a tiny bit rushed. This might be a by-product of having eight characters crammed into one relatively small set by the end. The six word story (the script doesn't spell it out, treating its audience as intelligent enough to know it or look it up, but it's "For sale: baby shoes - never worn" ) wasn't written by Hemingway; that's a common misconception. I'll forgive this, though, as it doesn't mean that Hemingway might not have suggested it when challenged by the Doctor in the past; the mythology of it being Hemingway's invention also fits well with the general theme about the power of tall tales. The characterisation of story as a rapacious devourer, and the characterisation of those that construct the stories as unsung heroes compared to those that perform them, both scream out to me as preoccupations unique to screenwriters or playwrights (though none the worse for that). The unexpected cameo by Jo Martin as the fugitive Doctor was a nice bit of fan service, and importantly celebrated the first ever black actor to be cast as the Doctor. So, The Story and the Engine was rich, colourful, different from the norm, well made, but... I still didn't feel as much as I should about the action and the ending. I should have felt emotion about the risk, the more to feel the exhilaration when the Doctor's own story (as represented by lots of archive clips) is used to save the day.

The difficulty, I think, was understanding what was at stake. Before 2023, Doctor Who was rigorous in terms of scientific explanations. It did ghost stories and god stories often, but always had to put in some exposition to reconcile these stories to the rules of our physical universe. The Toymaker, for example, when he appeared first in the 1960s, was presented as an extra-dimensional being of supreme power within his own domain. Showrunner of all the Doctor Who shown since 2023, and exec producer of The Story and the Engine, Russell T Davies, made a deliberate and significant change change to those previously established rules. He had David Tennant's fourteenth Doctor inadvertently open up our universe to a pantheon of beings that had powers that went beyond the rules of the physical universe. No longer was it necessary to explain acts that were indistinguishable from magic by getting bogged down in the details of futuristic technology. This opened up the types of stories that could be told while making some of the mechanics of their storytelling a bit simpler, which - agree with the decision, or disagree - was clearly something that the people making it felt was required for the new Disney+ era of Doctor Who. The Toymaker wasn't an existing god of planet Earth in the way that Anansi or the others mentioned were, though. He therefore had no symbiotic relationship with the people witnessing his godlike magic. He derived no power from them, and they derived none from him. The Doctor, though, says that "Humans are tied to the gods", and that destroying the story gods whom the Barber wants revenge upon will "wreck" the "seven billion lives" on planet Earth, who will have to live without stories. This is reminiscent of story The Devil's Chord from Ncuti's first season - take away music, or take away stories, and it will have a disastrous impact on human beings. In that instance, though, what was needed was exactly the opposite to what is done in The Story and the Engine: Maestro needed to be banished to save music; here, the story gods must be protected instead.

If these story gods were supposed to be part of the Pantheon, they behave very differently from them, and seemed to exist on Earth, at least as an idea, before the Pantheon were freed to enter our dimension. They are, in fact, much more like the gods in Neil Gaiman's work (most notably the novel American Gods) than what had been established in Doctor Who in recent years. This isn't necessarily a problem, but given that the nature of the story nexus and the spider engine traversing it are already quite nebulous, it doesn't help sell what's happening in the narrative, particularly at the denouement. There's a lot packed in to the 47 minutes of run time too, and it could do with a little longer to make things clearer. I would not complain about spending some more time in this setting. Anyway, if one doesn't think too much about it, one can just take away the simple, and no doubt intended, message: stories are important, and Doctor Who is the most important of all of them. Amen to that!

Connectivity:

Both The Story and the Engine and The Invasion feature the second Doctor (a clip is used in the sequence where the Doctor tells his never-ending story and it overloads the engine); earlier on, when the Doctor is talking about stories he could tell, he mentions Cybermen.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Story is the Engine: Anniversaries and Endings - 1. [Speculation follows that some might consider to be mildly spoilerific.] If I've timed things right, this blog post has been published on the 26th May 2025, exactly a decade on to the day from when this blogging endeavour first started. Back then, Peter Capaldi had been the Doctor for a year, with his second series a few months away from transmission. Neither fully animated missing Doctor Who stories nor season box sets on Blu-ray were anywhere near being a reality. Nobody back then would have believed you if you'd told them that the series would one day be a lavish coproduction with Disney+ (the main difficulty in their grasping of this likely being that Disney+ didn't exist at that point). Brexit, Trump, Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, Trussonomics - all were yet to come, as were nicer things like non-white and non-male actors finally being cast as that wonderful folk hero Doctor Who. By May 2015, I'd ceased being an aspiring and perspiring screenwriter, not having put virtual ink to Final Draft software for about five years. I was looking for something to do for a while to keep my writing muscles in shape before I started creating stories again. I did not expect that while to extend to a decade. The decision to include both classic and new series stories in my scope meant that I potentially would never be finished. Until the last few weeks of those ten years, there wasn't so much as the slightest hint that Doctor Who as an ongoing 21st century concern would stop. From the off, I averaged 30+ stories blogged a year. The most the series - classic or new era - ever managed in one twelve-month was something like eleven stories, so I was always going to catch up. It didn't feel like that would be an end, though, as long as the BBC - and whichever coproduction partners they managed to hook up with - kept making the show.

In the last couple of years of that decade of blogging, I foresaw a time that I would have to abandon the approach of covering stories from different eras in a random order. Casting the net a bit wider in that time to include spin-offs and oddities put the point off a bit, but couldn't put it off for ever. That wouldn't mean I'd stop, though. I'd just have to settle for writing up each story as it was broadcast in a dull, pedestrian way. Or would I? The one key reason that wouldn't happen, of course, was if new Doctor Who ceased broadcasting new stories. At the time of writing (as anyone following the Milestone Watch updates, such as the one in the Context section above, would know), I have eight more Doctor Who stories to blog: two are from the classic series, one from the new series before 2025; plus, following on after this blog post for The Story and the Engine, five more from the latest Ncuti Gatwa season. I also have found about the same number of spin-offs and oddities to be interspersed with those posts. If I pace myself, I should be able to keep going until year end. By that time, 41 seasons and every special episode of Doctor Who will have been completed, constituting at least fourteen Doctors' eras. It could be fifteen. At the time of writing, the last one of those eight remaining Doctor Who stories, the finale of Ncuti's second season, is only halfway through. Speculation is rife that the story will either see Doctor Who end, or see Ncuti leave the title role, or both. I mentioned the flurry of such stories in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Slipback post in mid-March, and again in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Lux post in late April. Things didn't die down in between, and haven't died down since. Nothing about the rumours is consistent, except the relentless nature of the 'news' stories being published online.

The latest of these stories says Ncuti has been "axed" from Doctor Who; it's from the same newspaper site that earlier in the year said that he was leaving because the quality of the stories was hurting his career. The word 'woke' is used in the body of both articles, as seems to be inevitable. There are articles saying that the axe is falling because of the recent bad ratings, but the same places reported that the axe was going to fall months ago, before a second of the new season had been broadcast. There's another rumour that someone surprising (they are named online but I won't share their name here) has been cast as the Doctor and will be revealed at the end of The Reality War. Yet another says that the regeneration will start on screen but not complete, to leave things open. One story, which was then picked up and regurgitated by many other sites online, quoted an anonymous source saying that Doctor Who would definitely continue no matter what decision was made by Disney+ as to whether they will still be funding coproduction of future stories. Are any of these accurate in any way? Just because there are lots of rumours, doesn't mean any are true; but, it does feel like something significant is going to happen. As such, I need to think about endings with regard to the blog. I'm a bit torn. If I'm going to move from random to sequential ordering, then it would be neat and tidy for the blog to start that with a new Doctor and all previous eras nicely tied up. On the other hand, I love Ncuti in the role and want him to continue. If it's the end, or at least a lengthy pause, then the blog having covered everything in a nice round ten years (give or take a few months) would feel right. I could then get on with doing other writing. But I'd be without new Who stories coming along every year, and I'm a Doctor Who fan old fashioned enough to enjoy Doctor Who being on television. I can't predict what's going to happen. Like life, like hope, Doctor Who might end soon, it might end later, it might never end at all...

In Summary:

The engine of this story is well put together, the scenery it propels itself through is rich and engaging, but it reaches its conclusion without evoking the necessary emotion.

The Invasion

Chapter the 328th, re: UNIT, and it feels so good.

Plot:

After narrowly avoiding a missile attack on the dark side of the Moon, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on Earth sometime in the late 20th century (we could argue forever about exactly when). The TARDIS is on the blink and becomes invisible. To fix it, the Doctor needs to work on some circuits, and trying to get help with this embroils him in the machinations of a global electronics corporation, International Electromatics. The head of this company is Tobias Vaughn, and he's in league with the Cybermen planning an invasion of the Earth. The TARDIS team meet Isobel Watkins, an aspiring photographer in swinging 60s (or 70s or possibly even 80s) London; her uncle went to work for IE and hasn't been seen since. Investigating this, the Doctor and Jamie are picked up by UNIT, a military taskforce run by the Colonel Lethbridge Stewart that they previously met fighting against the Yeti in the London Underground, who has now been promoted to Brigadier. UNIT has been keeping tabs on IE and Vaughn: people who have gone in to IE headquarters have come out changed, under Cyber control. There are also mysterious extra circuits in IE devices, and the Doctor can't immediately discern their purpose.

Vaughn is planning to double-cross the Cybermen, and is using Professor Watkins for this purpose. The Professor has invented a prototype teaching machine that provokes emotions in the user; Vaughn kidnaps Isobel and Zoe to coerce Watkins into turning his device into an anti-Cyberman weapon. The Doctor, Jamie and UNIT rescue the two women, but Vaughn bluffs the Professor and he finishes the job. UNIT then rescue the Professor before Vaughn can mass produce the machine. The Cyber army are hidden in the sewer system of London, and Isobel, Jamie and Zoe almost get killed trying to get photographic evidence of their presence. The invasion begins when a hypnotic signal, boosted by the hidden circuits in IE equipment, takes over the populace (the Doctor, UNIT and Co have a method of resisting the signal). The Cybermen emerge from the sewers and attack. The Doctor goes to the IE headquarters and persuades Vaughn that he can't control the Cybermen. They use the Professor's device to fight their way to the IE transmitter, with UNIT battling the Cybermen around them. Vaughn is killed, but transmission of the hypnotic signal is switched off. There are a tense few minutes while everyone waits to see if a missile will destroy the Cyber ship on the dark side of the moon before it can launch an attack on Earth. It does. Later, after the Doctor has mended the TARDIS circuits, the TARDIS team leave for new adventures.

Context:

The random number generator that dictates the order in which I blog Doctor Who stories indicated that it was time to cover my final black-and-white 1960s story, my final story with episodes missing from the archives, and - potentially - my final Cyberman story. I watched the version from the DVD, which has animated first and fourth episodes paired with the surviving soundtracks. I viewed the story spaced out over about two weeks of early May, accompanied by the Better Half for the early episodes. As this is one of her favourite eras of the show, and she was intrigued by the animation, I was able to persuade her to watch at first. Once the animated episodes were over, she lost interest and left me to watch the rest alone. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, with the second Doctor joining the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Doctors, to make it 11 on the 'done' pile so far. It also marks the completion of another season with 37 completed out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

I first saw The Invasion when it was released on VHS in 1993. It was the first tape released - in a range that had started a good few years before in the mid-1980s - that was presented as a self-contained story but had episodes missing because they were no longer in the BBC's archive. Starting a couple of years earlier, there had been tapes that collected together orphaned Who episodes within a documentary framing; these, though, had made no effort to contextualise the surviving material within the overall narrative. The Invasion plugged the gaps in the same way as the 1991 VHS release of Shada, which had sections that were unfinished rather than lost: an actor from the story (in the case of The Invasion, this was Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney) gave a brief to-camera precis of what the viewer had missed. It's fair to say that Courtney's links were not detailed (his material lasted three minutes, and that included credits and a preamble where Courtney introduces himself and the character of the Brig). My first opportunity to experience the two missing episodes fully (or as fully as then possible) was in November 2004 when their audio, alongside that for the other extant episodes, was released on CD as part of a Cyberman box set. Finally, I got to see the two episodes with moving pictures when the aforementioned DVD, with animation plugging the gaps, was released in November 2006.

Reaction:

Doctor Who is famously the show with the flexible format that can go anywhere and anywhen, telling any kind of story. Equally famously though, it is a show that exists to serve a broad audience (it was brought into being in 1963 to keep all ages amused between sport and pop programming on a Saturday night, and was still performing this role in mid-May 2025 when one Ncuti Gatwa episode nestled in the BBC1 schedules between the year's FA Cup Final and Eurovision Song Contest). Throughout its history, the programme has thus swung between the experimental and the crowd-pleasingly formulaic. The Invasion comes during such a swing. Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin, who were effectively co-producers by this point, had taken over gradually from the previous producer / script editor team of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. With input from a scientific advisor Kit Pedlar, Lloyd and Davis had hit upon a successful formula for Doctor Who that had been used increasingly throughout Patrick Troughton's time as the Doctor: a base under siege by a monster of the week. By the season before The Invasion, this template was used for all but one story, with Yeti, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and sentient seaweed all getting a chance or two to kill or take over members of isolated, locked-in communities one by one before the Doctor defeated them. The formula had served its purpose and then some, and it was definitely time for a change. The first two stories of Troughton's third and final season preceding The Invasion were wildly different, both from what went before and from each other. But with experiment comes risk. Sherwin and Bryant wanted to create the certainty of a new winning formula, and The Invasion was a trial for an approach that they wanted to apply to every story from the next season onwards.

Though the storyline for The Invasion came from Kit Pedlar, and there are a few links to the most recent previous Cyberman adventure The Wheel In Space (the metal meanies use of a signal to control humans, and our heroes use of depolarisers worn at the back of the neck to combat this, are callbacks to that story), it is much more focussed on the future shape of Doctor Who than the past. The action doesn't take place on alien planets or in space, it's set on Earth, with the monsters coming to us; the characters aren't stuck in one base represented by a big set in Television Centre, but able to roam to many different places, many of them outdoors and filmed on location. The Doctor has a team to support him in banishing large-scale invasions too big to be handled just by him and the couple of friends with whom he tended to travel: UNIT was born. Leading this team was the Lethbridge-Stewart character, promoted to Brigadier, reused from a popular story of the previous season The Web of Fear. The Web of Fear - directed, like The Invasion, by Douglas Camfield - was very much a base under siege story, but had one key action sequence (the attack by Yeti in Covent Garden) that inspired many similar set pieces in The Invasion. Like in Web, there is a significant military presence in terms of both soldiers and hardware. The story world is expanded beyond the parochial, though: rather than the troops being from the British army as they were in Web, these are a United Nations taskforce (the story even involves an offscreen Russian missile team) with an investigative remit that allows for some espionage as well as shooting and blowing things up. The set-up has lots of potential, and would serve as the model for a lot of the Jon Pertwee era stories. It's not without drawbacks, though.

The importance of the Doctor and his companions is diluted by being part of a bigger team. Jamie is missing throughout the latter part of the story; part of this is because the actor was on holiday for an episode, but even when Fraser Hines is present in the studio, his character spends the best part of a whole episode asleep. His usual role of being the Doctor's minder isn't needed when the Doctor has the assistance of his own army. Early on, though, when the protagonists are more in investigative mode, there's some fun to be had in the sequences where Jamie and henchman Packer (played mostly for comedy by Peter Halliday) indulge in one-upmanship, squabbling like a pair of children. The Troughton Doctor too seems a bit diminished by becoming part of a professional investigation outfit; his usual schtick is to lure his enemies into a false sense of security by appearing to be bumbling and absent minded, but he can't really do this when he's in a role of expert advisor. There's the odd nice moment smuggled in - the Doctor undercutting tense sequences by stopping to play cards with Jamie, or posing for photographs - but in general, he just has to be serious and professional, which doesn't fit well. The series would struggle for quite a while in the Jon Pertwee era to square the circle of finding the fallible, human element in a serious establishment organisation: if its creator Sydney Newman was right, and Doctor Who needs a kid to make mistakes and get into trouble, why would UNIT hire such a person? Nepotism was the answer they finally decided upon, with Jo Grant having secured a job at UNIT because of a powerful relative.

In The Invasion, it is left to the character of Isobel Watkins to trip up herself and others into jeopardy, but she isn't sympathetic enough to provide the necessary heart. Her romance with a UNIT captain isn't given much air time, and doesn't convince when it is. The script also tends to patronise her and the other younger characters. The Brig casually disregards Isobel's evident knowledge of photography, and later refers to her, Zoe and Jamie as "crazy kids" when they venture into the sewers to secure evidence of the Cybermen. The Brig has only been involved in one and a half alien invasions, whereas Jamie and Zoe see off monsters every week; he should show them more respect. A lot of the early part of the story focusses on the fate of Isobel's uncle Professor Watkins, taken captive by Tobias Vaughn; once he's rescued, though, he disappears from the narrative - he's last seen early in the penultimate episode after having been shot in the leg, and - unless I blinked and missed it - he's never mentioned again. It's an odd paradox; The Invasion has too much going on to fully complete all characters' subplots, yet there is only six episodes worth of story here stretched to fill eight. On VHS, as mentioned above, it was reduced to a six episode story; annoyingly, the missing two episodes are from early on when the plot's put together fine. It's in the latter half that it falls apart. The ending is structured oddly, with the climax of the fight against Cybermen in the IE factory, including main villain Tobias Vaughn's death, happening too early. There's then a lengthy sequence of characters standing around waiting to hear about whether a missile has destroyed the Cybermen's ship in orbit. The sequences should have been swapped around, or - better - the missile could have been dispensed with altogether. The Doctor and Vaughn have a device that emits a Cyberman-destroying signal, plus a big transmitter to beam that signal into space; it would make more sense for that to be the mechanism that saves the day.

There's a lot of good stuff in here too, even later on: for example, the famous sequence of the hypnotic signal taking people over across London, and the Cybermen then emerging from manholes and strutting about near St. Paul's Cathedral. The special sound created for that signal and for other sequences like the revivification of dormant Cybermen is perfect, as is Don Harper's score. Little touches too, such as the repetition of Packer being summoned and appearing on a monitor, only for this to be twisted: the final time Vaughn calls for Packer, the scary blank face of a Cyberman appears on the monitor instead. This design of the Cybermen is probably the best of the 1960s, and the decision to hold them back for the first half of the story is a good one. The character of Vaughn is a joy to watch. Kevin Stoney creates a silky smooth psychopath, with occasional flashes of hysteria and anger. The way he says Packer's name is so fun, and so easy to imitate. Many a villainous character in Doctor Who's history has tried to ally themselves with the Cybermen, thinking they can turn the tables on them; Vaughn comes closest to pulling it off, with only Professor Watkins dragging his heels meaning Vaughn runs out of time to mass produce a machine to kill Cybermen (I was almost rooting for him to succeed). Though not a part of the original presentation, of course, it's worth noting that the two animated episodes are gorgeous, the art in character designs and backgrounds is probably the best ever created for a Doctor Who missing episode animation project. I had a slight twinge of disappointment both times the story returned to live action.

Connectivity:

The Invasion and Lux both feature the antagonists using entertainment technology to assist them in invading Earth: Lux uses movie projection equipment to corporealise, the Cybermen and their ally Tobias Vaughn use circuits in products like Jamie's transistor radio to send a hypnotising signal, quelling any resistance from the population. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Animated Meanderings. The Invasion started something by creating UNIT in 1968, and then started something again in 2007 - it was the inaugural story using animation to represent episodes that were missing from the story (because they were missing from the archives). As mentioned in the First Time Round section above, Doctor Who initially made do with brief linking synopses delivered by actors from the original story, specially filmed many years later. Sometimes these were in character, sometimes not. Occasionally, things got a bit more sophisticated with surviving audio recordings and off-screen photographs put together to form reconstructions of missing episodes (as happened for The Ice Warriors and The Tenth Planet) but often they fell back on that original approach of brief linking material (The Crusade, The Reign of Terror) even to the very end of the VHS range. These approaches were also only felt to be viable to replace two episodes of a story maximum, and usually only if the surviving episodes outnumbered the reconstructed / summarised ones. The Crusade VHS release in 1999, with the story split 50/50 between two surviving and two missing episodes was the only exception - this was because an episode of the story had been recently discovered, so half the story was felt to be enough of a draw (even then, though, it was released in a box set with the adjacent complete story The Space Museum). After the UK animation company Cosgrove Hall Studios (who had produced Doctor Who webcast Scream of the Shalka) created animated episodes one and four of The Invasion for its DVD release, the sky was the limit. Animated visuals of missing episodes matched to those surviving soundtracks were much more watchable than a reconstruction, and much more faithful than an actor's brief summary.

Though more possibilities had been opened up, with even the potential for a wholly missing story being released in 100% animated form one day, what happened next for the DVD range and animations was... nothing, for a good long while. There were still plenty of intact adventures to release, and it was six more years before another story had episodes animated, by which time Cosgrove Hall had alas closed down. There were other companies, though. In 2013, either because the range was running out of other classic series stories to release, or because the costs of animating episodes had become more affordable, or both, three stories came out: The Reign of Terror (two episodes animated) in January, The Ice Warriors (two episodes animated) in August, and The Tenth Planet (one episode animated) in October. With its recovered episode old news by 2013, The Crusade did not get similar treatment (it has loads of different characters and locales too, which would make the animation a challenge), but a different 50/50 story was done instead. In early 2014, The Moonbase was released on its own shiny disc. Parts one and three were animated, parts two and four live action. It was the first story that animation allowed to have a release on DVD that had not been a title on VHS. To date, thirteen stories have had their own moment on DVD or Blu-Ray that never got to be centre stage in the video tape days; for only one of these - The Enemy of the World - was this wholly down to the live action episodes being recovered. The remainder have had some or all of their episodes animated for release on disc. Nearly three years on from The Moonbase, The Power of the Daleks was the first wholly missing animated story; a couple of years later, it was followed by The Macra Terror.

By the 2020s, two different teams (one led creatively by Gary Russell, the other by AnneMarie Walsh) were working away, with The Faceless Ones, Fury from the Deep, Galaxy 4, The Evil of the Daleks and The Abominable Snowmen being released between 2020 and 2022. Many of these included episodes that had been animated even though they existed in the archives, to allow the cartoon version to be watched as one consistent piece. Animating episodes you didn't 'need' to would have seemed the height of extravagance even a short few years earlier. Beyond the five new stories released in that period, there was also an improved version of Power of the Daleks, and a new version of The Web of Fear with its single missing episode (part 3) animated; the initial vanilla DVD edition had used a reconstruction. By the end of 2022, a source of funding from BBC America had dried up and there was a worry that the animations would go on hiatus. This situation didn't last long, though. Towards the end of 2023, The Underwater Menace was released; in 2024, there was The Celestial Toymaker, and in 2025, The Savages. Those of us who've been collecting home video Doctor Who since the VHS days can only boggle at the things that have been achieved that we wouldn't have thought of as feasible back then. To pick just a couple of examples, there are now only three - three! - Patrick Troughton stories left to be released (his era amounted to a pitiful handful of video tapes); and - bar a five-minute introduction at the end of an adventure where she was otherwise not present, every moment of companion Dodo's time with the Doctor (from The Ark to The War Machines) is available to buy on individual shiny discs.

There now remain only nine stories that haven't had a dedicated disc release. One of these is the longest story (The Daleks' Master Plan at 12 episodes) but one is the shortest (single episode prologue to Master Plan, Mission to the Unknown), so it evens out. Of the remaining stories, most are historical stories (Marco Polo, The Myth Makers, The Massacre, The Smugglers, The Highlanders), which might be more challenging to animate, and might be a harder sell. The other two (The Wheel in Space, The Space Pirates) are science fiction tales with metallic monsters and / or spaceships, so might be an easier proposition. Additionally, The Crusade  - which had 50% of its running time represented by reconstructions for its Blu-ray release alongside the rest of the second classic season - may be animated before the end. If two teams continue working at the established rate, and with technological advances still gathering pace in parallel that could be brought to bear, all these stories could be out in as little as five years. Exciting. 

In Summary:

Massively successful as a reusable formula, slightly less successful as a story in its own right (mostly because it's a couple of episodes too long).