Pull To Open: A Random Doctor Who Podcast

The Doctor tends to find himself thrust in the middle of many battles throughout history, but what if he landed in the middle of all of them? That may well have been the inspiration for The War Games , the epic-length finale of the Patrick Troughton era of Doctor Who. By taking the idea of multiple wars — each a live-action board game played for the amusement of powerful aliens — with the soldiers...

The original revelation of the Doctor’s origins was a slow burn: It took Doctor Who six seasons to finally give concrete answers to who he was and where he came from. But after the landmark reveal at the end of The War Games, going back to Gallifrey seemed to be an exercise in diminishing returns for the show. True, The Deadly Assassin gave a compelling new perspective on Time Lord society, though...

Whether you’re a fan of a TV show, movie series or comic book, it’s almost guaranteed your fandom will be tested at some point. As creative teams come and go, as changes in direction stack up, as the medium evolves, the flavor of something can change radically. And if you don’t like the taste, it can be a rapid progression from disappointment to hate-watching to quitting in disgust. Doctor Who is...

If you’re going to attempt a tense thriller  in Doctor Who, sometimes the horror can get really intense, such as in The Waters of Mars. And sometimes it can go 100% in the other direction and serve up an unexpected monster in the form of a baby-faced cartoon character, such as here, in The Tsuranga Conundrum . Is one approach superior to the other? We’re here to say, definitively, yes. Yep, the Pt...

When is a TARDIS not a TARDIS? When it’s a bitey mad lady, of course. Yes, The Doctor's Wife shows a side of the show’s signature blue box that we’ve never seen before, personifying the Doctor’s “ship” in a way that’s unexpected, insanely quirky and… well, sexy. That’s thanks in large part to Suranne Jones’ pitch-perfect performance as Idris, a woman possessed with the essence of the TARDIS, t...

You’ve got to hand it to the Doctor — he’s single-handedly saved Gallifrey almost as many times as the Earth, and The Invasion of Time even lets him double dip! Rescuing the Time Lords from the Vardans was just a warm-up, with the Sontarans laying in wait to have their crack at the planet once the production runs out of tinfoil. The story is a bizarro Russian doll of invasions, seemingly orchestra...

It’s a long-debated subject among Doctor Who fans: Who counts as a companion? It used to be that traveling in the TARDS, typically across different stories, meant you made the list — and might even end up in a support group years later with Kate Stewart et al. But a mere TARDIS ride is too low a bar: Does that mean the policemen in Black Orchid are companions? You could say you need to be in more...

In the new series, it’s customary to offer freshly onboarded TARDIS crewmembers a choice: Would you like to go to the future or the past? Back in the ’60s, there was no choice involved — the Doctor didn’t have the first clue how to steer his time machine, something he states explicitly in The Smugglers to accidental companions Ben and Polly. But if he had the goal of showing them just how brutally...

“Fearlessly bonkers” is how director Paul Wilmshurst described Kill the Moon , a — shall we say ambitious? — episode of Doctor Who that presumes the moon we see shining in the sky every night is actually an enormous egg. Yes. Hold on… how did we not notice it’s made of eggshell? How does the moon “put on weight” so quickly that it has the same gravity of Earth? Why would the “bacteria” protecting...

The question of what constitutes a complete story in Doctor Who isn't a straightforward as it may seem. The issue actually first reared its rubber-masked head fairly early on, when, in the third season, the show decided to "tease" its most epic adventure yet, The Daleks' Masterplan, with a single one-off episode called Mission to the Unknown. It even gave Mission a unique production code that tied...

Orphan 55 stands apart from the rest of Doctor Who canon in two key ways: First, its idea of an indeterminate always-in-flux future is at odds with virtually every other adventure set in the future. And second, probably no other episode has ever dared to spell out its message so explicitly, ending with an ominous speech from Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor about the terrible consequences of neglecting ou...

Is there a story that gets the Daleks wrong more than Destiny of the Daleks ? While Douglas Adams’ run on Doctor Who as script editor is revered for many reasons (mostly the story immediately following this one), his first outing is arguably a misstep. Bringing back the Daleks after a five-year absence isn’t a bad idea, but shoehorning the show’s most crowd-pleasing monsters into a story about two...

If you tuned into Doctor Who in the early ’70s, chances are you saw Jon Pertwee in a colorful tuxedo arguing with the Brigadier and UNIT on the best way to take down some inhuman menace whose strings are being pulled by Roger Delgado’s Master. You get that in spades in The Mind of Evil , which makes it a 100% proof 1970s Who adventure, though at times the bloated story feels like they decided to c...

Time travel and dinosaurs — they go together like teeth and curls. Strange, then, that Doctor Who has only ventured on a rousing adventure with these colossal prehistoric monsters twice, in stories about 40 years apart. At least in the latter outing, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship , the special effects are leveled-up from stop motion to CGI. The TARDIS crew also gets enhanced, recruiting a pair of...

When the Doctor travels to the past he obviously has a great deal of foreknowledge about what’s taken place and, moreover, what must take place in order for history as we know it to be preserved. It’s refreshing, then, to see that same idea applied to future history in The Waters of Mars , a thrilling story that uses that device to amplify its impact by an order of magnitude above your typical bas...

Matt Smith’s Doctor is known for being a few notches higher on the Bonkers Scale than his predecessors, a measure that arguably reaches its peak in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe . His captivating antics early in this story — where he takes a London family on a tour of a country manor that he’s upgraded with with playrooms, hammocks and taps that spout lemonade — underscore the 11th Doctor...

As Doctor Who’s ultimate monsters, the Daleks have been rebooted more times than a MacBook doing a janky system update. The most recent revamp came via Revolution of the Daleks , where the children of Davros got a new look inspired by the previous holiday special, Resolution, complete with sleek black casing and his and hers colored LEDs. But Dalek design isn’t the only thing up for revision here:...

The Fifth Doctor’s cricket outfit seemed a bit random at first, but Black Orchid is the story that shows it’s more than just a signature look. In an unusual twist, the Doctor isn’t the mysterious stranger seemingly come to save the day — he’s completely expected, and the thing he’s expected to do is play cricket. Of course, he does so like a boss who’s had centuries to hone his bowling skills...

Entering the pocket reality of a powerful entity that loves to play games isn’t something that happens every day, but if you’re a character on Doctor Who, it’s an occupational hazard. The Celestial Toymaker is the first realization of that idea onscreen, made more interesting by the revelation that it’s not the first time the Doctor has met this potentially problematic villain. In Who canon, the s...

When Pull To Open debuted three years ago, we didn’t even have a rating system — just a sound of drums in our heads, convincing us to bring thoughtful commentary about Doctor Who stories from the perspective of longtime fans who are also journalists. As we went deeper into the show and installed the key component in our journey — the Pull To Open Randomizer — we developed a shorthand for signaling...

If you’re a time-traveling alien with a toothache, obviously your first stop is going to be the Old West. It’s not just because of the oddly easy-to-find dentistry services, but the chance of getting mixed up in a farcical case of mistaken identity with lots of gunplay is quite high. Doctor Who’s first (and for a long time, only) attempt at a western is arguably a bold experiment and unquestionabl...

By Series 3 of NuWho, showrunner Russell T. Davies was two-for-two at successfully re-introducing classic bad guys in the Daleks and the Cybermen. To complete the trifecta, Davies naturally turned to the Doctor’s ideological opposite, the Master, and he raised the stakes with the new series’ first three-parter in Utopia , The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords — a story that sees the Earth...

As alien baddies go, the Zygons are one of the more nuanced races that have tried to take over the Earth. Turns out they want to just live in peace and chill, man — just like the rest of us. That’s some nice background for The Zygon Invasion / Inversion , a story that focuses on the extremists among us who are determined to stir up animosity to further their own idealized vision of how society sho...

Is there a better episode to introduce new viewers to Doctor Who than Blink ? Sure, it’s a little unrepresentative of the show considering the Doctor is barely in it, but the essential elements are there: a fantastical world, a normal person pulled slowly into it, and a monster for the ages. Blink had both hardcore Whovians and casual fans buzzing when it debuted in 2007, but has it been long enou...

What is so fascinating about the micro world that almost every sci-fi franchise has been inspired to include an episode where the characters shrink to the size of insects? The Doctor’s first foray into diminished circumstances came pretty early: William Hartnell’s second-season opener, Planet of Giants , sees the original TARDIS crew taking on giant bugs, deadly water faucets, and a ruthless kille...