Pull To Open: A Random Doctor Who Podcast

In Doctor Who’s early years, there were many episodes where the Doctor was noticeably absent, usually because William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton needed a holiday from the grueling shooting schedule. But Human Nature is the only episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor doesn’t appear at all outside of flashbacks. Of course, David Tennant is front and center, giving a performance for the ages, lite...

Perhaps no classic episode has benefited more from a “special edition” than Day of the Daleks . Although it tells a solid timey-wimey paradox story, the original version didn’t do justice to Doctor Who’s No. 1 monsters. They only made three rather diminutive props for the story, and the voices made Lumbergh from Office Space sound good. But when you add some convincing disintegration effects and d...

OK, you've got us — not all 100 stories were randomly picked. That's because when we were but a wee newborn Doctor Who podcast, we weren't random. Series 12 was underway and, after reviewing every single Christmas episode, we zeroed in on the current season. But that was predictable, common, perhaps even a little basic. Pull To Open needed something more. So in 2021, we wired in the Ra...

Instantaneous teleportation between any two points on Earth? Sounds pretty convenient — so convenient that it might lead to a stagnant society ripe for conquest by the next passing alien force. Yes, The Seeds of Death tees up the planet quite nicely for the Ice Warriors, but it’s hard to close the deal when your troops faint when they get close to a radiator, your diabolical bioweapon fizzles the...

Plenty of casual viewers of Doctor Who have been hooked into becoming fans because of the cold opens. Well, we don’t have stats or anything, but that feels true — because there are just so damn many great ones in the show that have gotten viewers to cancel plans, skip trips to the bathroom, or leave something burning on the stove because you just have to watch. A good cold open doesn’t necessarily...

What exactly is the Doctor’s attitude towards changing history? With all the pure historicals of the era, William Hartnell’s Doctor actually has a lot to say about this. While The Aztecs makes clear his reluctance to interfere in history, The Myth Makers shows his bemusement at becoming a part of it — and his regret at seeing the consequences of that participation. It’s a surprisingly mature takea...

If you want hard evidence that the UNIT era — when Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was exiled to Earth after being put on trial by the Time Lords — was set in the “near future,” look no further than The Ambassadors of Death . With routine missions to Mars, nuclear fuel available in factories on the British countryside, and space capsules that can land on solid ground no less, this is a version of the future...

An intelligent cactus? A society that worships a giant 12-sided shape? Barbara, but not Barbara? You don’t have to get very far into Meglos to begin to feel this story is the result of a drunken session of Doctor Who mad libs, complete with its own game show segment: How Do Time Lords Get Out of a Time Loop? One thing you can’t take away from Megos — it thoroughly and completely goes for it, and T...

Doctor Who has its share of metaphors, but perhaps none so naked as the eponymous company featured in Kerblam! (the only TV story so excited to feature an exclamation point in the title). With its motivational corporatespeak, closely monitored warehouse workers, and super-efficient delivery robots (that may or may not be homicidal), Kerblam is an obvious stand-in for Amazon — just projected out se...

It’s not a good idea to bet against the Doctor. There are lots of lessons learned in Doctor Who’s second “pure” historical, The Aztecs , but the folly going against the instructions of the curmudgeon with the time ship is probably the biggest. Of course, Barbara’s attempts to rewrite history by softening the more barbaric instincts of the eponymous civilization are what gives this particular story...

Two full seasons in, Doctor Who finally gave viewers a hint of where its mysterious main character came from in The Time Meddler , a story that introduced the Doctor’s first time-traveling rival, the Monk. If the War Chief was a Master prototype, the Monk is the concept phase — the Doctor’s ideological opposite at a time long before the character became a righter of wrongs on a cosmological scale....

When your show goes on hiatus for 15 years, the result is a literal generation gap of fandom. If you happen to be one of the many fans who have grown up on the series “Doctor Who” that began in 2005, you’re certainly aware of the Classic series but you may also be intimidated by just how much of it there is. Twenty-six seasons comprises a whole hell of a lot of television, so it’s difficult to kno...

Doctor Who rarely did season-long arcs in the Classic series, but sprinkled here and there are mini storylines like the E-Space trilogy. After all, what better way to raise the stakes a bit AND introduce a new companion than to maroon your regulars in a pocket universe for a few episodes? Well, if you’re going to use cliche marsh creatures and sad plastic spiders as your chief antagonists, that mi...

Doctors come and go, and each leaves their mark on the role — one as iconic as Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. But outside of their undeniable impact on Doctor Who, some of the actors who have played the Doctor go on to impress and find audiences in other roles. Even if those parts may not match the level of notoriety a franchise like Doctor Who bestows, those performances sometimes demonstrate a r...

Returning to Gallifrey to fight an old enemy sounds like a surefire formula for a Doctor Who epic. So why then is Arc of Infinity so bland? Kicking off the show’s 20th anniversary season, this story seems determined to undermine the memories of classics like The Deadly Assassin and The Three Doctors, turning the formidable Omega into a cowering refugee and completing the Time Lords’ reduction from...

We don't always live up to our own ideals. Doctor Who's main character is no exception: The Doctor's mantra is "never be cruel or cowardly" — created by writer Terrance Dicks as an off-screen guideline during the classic series until it became official in the new series, with Peter Capaldi's Doctor going so far as to remind Jodie Whittaker's of the catchphrase in his...

Being the Doctor is a tough job, but when he’s unavailable, few are better qualified to fill in for him than Clara Oswald. Flatline ’s clever script thrusts her into the position after the Doctor is trapped in the TARDIS by one of the most ingenious monsters of the series, a group of silent two-dimensional invaders the Doctor names the Boneless. Building on its intriguing role reversal, Flatline i...

Is it possible for Doctor Who to have too much time and money? Judging by Legend of the Sea Devils — one of just three stories made since 2021 — the answer is, “Aye!” Boasting some of the biggest sets Doctor Who has ever had and the return of a mostly well-remembered classic        monster, this pirate adventure seemed destined to be a treasure. But nobody’s heart seems in this outing — not the in...

Finding a new place to live takes a lot out of you. Between the lease, the hassle of moving, and the endless viewings, you hardly have any time left to comb the flat for glowing bugs from space that might want to absorb you into the walls. Luckily for Bill, she’s got a… uh, “granddad” to do that, and Knock Knock nicely sets up its tale by starting with the pleasant banality of college life before...

There are struggling planets, there are troubled planets, and then there’s Solos: a world so uniquely unlucky in the cosmos as to inherit a ruler like the Marshal, one of the most uniformly evil dictators to ever appear in Doctor Who. Set in a bleak future where Earth has seen better days, The Mutants is in no way subtle in its criticism of colonization and the racist policies that often result. B...

If you have two enormous, powerful entities, sure as hell someone will think it’s a great idea to have them fight. If they’re galactic space empires, so much the better for raising the stakes — at least on paper. But what Frontier in Space is really about is fear: fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the notion you might be wrong, and how that fear can lead people (and Draconians) to do terrible t...

We’ve all been there: After waking up from a long sleep, you open your eyes only to witness a buzzing insect that’s invaded your bedroom. So we can all relate to the human refugees on Nerva Station, although when the pest is a man-sized space parasite that wants to consume you and absorb your memories PLUS you and your friends are the last of the human race — well, the stakes get a bit raised. The...

The hottest sci-fi writer on the planet in 1978 was Douglas Adams. Not only was he about to bestow upon the world the original radio plays of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he also wrote his first Doctor Who adventure, The Pirate Planet . There are so many similarities — in tone, plotting, and effortlessly clever dialogue — that it’s easy to tell this story came out of the same creative sp...

How does a family show like Doctor Who do a zombie horror story? You start by subtracting (most of) the gore, then add a sci-fi twist. That’s good, but what would really make it stand out is if you take a real person from history and cast the best possible actor to play the role. The Unquiet Dead ticks all those eerie boxes, deftly telling a tale of walking corpses, teasing the show’s (then) new m...

Often when Doctor Who visits Earth’s past, a lot is made of whether the characters can “change” history or not. Outcomes vary, but it’s oddly refreshing to look back on the series’ first historical, Marco Polo , where the question never comes up. Instead, the story creates stakes by thrusting the TARDIS team smack in the middle of the rivalries, duplicity and politics of quasi-real events in histo...