Pull To Open: A Random Doctor Who Podcast

Jodie Whittaker’s regeneration wasn’t just unusual for — spoiler alert — marking the first “repeat” Doctor when she morphed into David Tennant at the end of “The Power of the Doctor.” It was also one of the only regenerations to also regenerate the Doctor’s clothes. The in-show reason for this will likely be revealed in next year’s 60th anniversary special, but incoming showrunner Russell T....

Why did it take Doctor Who so long to do the “star whale” concept? If the show was waiting for a particularly strong script, it probably should have sailed right on by The Beast Below , which doesn’t exactly bestow the idea with a lot of dignity: it could be the only time Doctor Who has introduced a creature by showing it barfing. Even though the show is mostly using this cosmic cetacean as a meta...

Regeneration. It's been a pivotal part of Doctor Who for almost 60 years, but let's face it: Some regenerations have been better than others. When a new Doctor takes over, it's always dramatic, but there are several more boxes to tick to make the episode a classic. The story should be epic in impact if not in stakes, the incumbent Doctor should have apt and memorable final lines, and the regenerat...

The simple, straightforward title of Dalek belies so much: This story doesn’t just re-introduce the Daleks for a new generation of Doctor Who viewers — it makes them interesting, upgraded, and scary in ways they always deserved to be but never quite achieved in the classic series. Stellar performances from the cast — including an arguably best-of-his-run showstopper from Christopher Eccleston...

When companions go, sometimes it’s sad (brave heart, Tegan), sometimes it’s bittersweet (London, 1965!), and sometimes it’s a nonevent (Dodo who?). But the heartbreaking departure of Rose in Doomsday is on another level altogether, and it simply requires repercussions. Those shockwaves are front and center in The Runaway Bride , yet somehow the story ends up being one of the most fun in the entire...

When you hear “a Doctor Who story set in the Jurassic period,” the picture you conjure in your head probably looks quite a bit different from Time-Flight . That’s not necessarily a strike against it: The finale of Season 19 is notorious for being light on budget, so it’s probably a blessing that they didn’t even try to show a single allosaurus stomping around the barren plains of prehistoric Londo...

Is there any Doctor Who format as reliable as the base under siege? You can see why: All you need is one set, an excuse to keep the TARDIS out of reach, and one illogically obstinate person in charge, and you’re about 90% there. The key ingredient, of course, is a convincing and creepy monster, and though mutant seaweed might not be your first choice to fill that role, it’s what Fury From the Deep...

Jodie Whittaker’s first season as the Doctor took the show in a new direction, but The Witchfinders is almost a return to a very old format: the pure historical. True, this outing to the witch-obsessed England of the 17th century doesn’t quite qualify — what with alien mud creatures reanimating left and right in the final act — but the most interesting thing about this story is certainly the...

Often Doctor Who travels to the past to showcase historical events, but it rarely shows what life in those eras was like for the less privileged. Rosa is a jarring exception to the rule, with its lens pointed directly at the racist past of the American South. While there is an antagonist from the future present, the real evil force here is state-sanctioned segregation. And the hero who must confro...

If you lack emotions, can you seek revenge? It’s the burden of Doctor Who fans to ponder questions like this, since Revenge of the Cybermen attributes emotion to the show’s notoriously unfeeling monsters right there in the title. More likely, we suspect some future historian did their best to characterize the Cybermen’s incursion on Nerva Beacon in the 29th century with some fanciful language to g...

When more than one Doctor is present, you know something’s gone disastrously wrong. While that usually applies to something within the show, in the case of The Two Doctors , you might be talking about the show itself. In some ways, it’s not the story’s fault — the production was famously plagued with problems behind the scenes — but a misfired location shoot can’t explain away the script’s icky ob...

Summer is peak season for action romps, we’re told, so that must be why the Randomzier plopped us in the middle of Battlefield , the opening story of Classic Doctor Who’s final year, and one that seems to continuously feature guns shooting, swords clashing, and all manner of things blowing up. I mean, you’d expect nothing less from the last official appearance of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, but...

Rebooting Doctor Who is a feature of the show, not a bug, but it was still uncertain territory when Jon Pertwee took over in 1970. Sure, Patrick Troughton had taken over from William Hartnell a few years before, but it was very much the same show, following the adventures of a mysterious traveler and his human companions throughout all of time and space. Spearhead From Space boldly tosses out that...

Doctor Who can be dramatic, captivating, and even epic, but some of the most memorable episodes are just plain fun ! Carnival of Monsters definitely qualifies as one of the fun ones, made all the more interesting with an intriguing first-episode mystery and some subversive messaging in Robert Holmes’s almost-too-clever script. Come for the fearsome drashigs, stay for the brilliant political satire...

If a regeneration story means the end of an era in Doctor Who, Logopolis is an extinction-level event. It bears the extra weight of being the final story in the epic run of Tom Baker, who, to many, was the definitive actor to play the Doctor. Christopher H. Bidmead’s script doesn’t shy away from this impossible task, with the premise, the villain, and the stakes all appropriately elevated. You’d b...

Time Lords come and Time Lords go, but what about Time Ladies? The Rani is a peculiar case among Gallifrey’s ruling class: an amoral cosmic elitist who just wants to be left alone and occasionally perform horrible experiments on various folks — and isn’t the slightest bit interested in the Doctor. That’s a refreshing change, made even more memorable by holding it right up against the status-q...

Longtime Pull To Open listeners have heard his name again and again, but exactly who is this mysterious “Jack?” It’s time for a surprise reveal: Pete’s son Jack takes a little time off from being a kid to visit the podcast and share his thoughts on Doctor Who, including what he thinks of the classic series after growing up on NuWho, how the show is sometimes too scary, and of course who his favori...

Some say Doctor Who’s The Romans is just a romp, a bit of silliness, and not that consequential. Don’t you believe it. It’s arguably the story where the Doctor has the most sweeping and destructive effect on history as we know it. We might all be living in the “bad” timeline right now — one where Rome burned and Nero’s expensive reconstruction hastened the weakening of the empire. Consider th...

Invading the Earth used to be so simple: Either land or crash your spaceship in Britain, wait for the local Time Lord to show up, then coerce them into helping you by threatening the people they care about. But it gets a little complicated when two Time Lords show up, which was oddly the norm back in the UNIT days, what with the Master constantly trying to both one-up the Doctor and do some invadi...

It’s official: Ncuti Gatwa is the Doctor. Sometime soon, Jodie Whittaker will bid farewell to the role and a handsome actor of Netflix’s Sex Education fame will take over — or so we think. All we know now is Gatwa will play the Doctor in Russell T. Davies’ renewed run as showrunner, but is he the 14th incarnation (which is incorrect numbering anyway) or something else? What is the deal with D...

When Doctor Who takes us to the far future, it’s often with a dystopian view. That’s certainly the case with Frontios , which isn’t content to simply plunge a scrappy group of refugees from a doomed Earth into a harrowing fight for survival. It also adds to the mix the twin horrors of giant insects bent on recreating the ugliest parts of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and some of the worst spiked hai...

Quick, what’s the best way to mount an insurrection in your remote Earth colony? Right, exactly — befriend the mechanical creatures you’ve just revived from hibernation within a long-dormant capsule that crashed centuries ago and enlist them to be your muscle. Really, if you’re a marooned Dalek attack force, it’s good work if you can get it, especially if the annoying humans who think they’re...

Ever been to Scotland? Doctor Who sure has, and if you’re ever looking for the ultimate proof of that look no further than The Eaters of Light , an episode that seems designed entirely to showcase bad weather, Pict history, and very cross people. Of course, it doesn’t get much more cross than the 12th Doctor, but just how effective will a pair of epic eyebrows be against a squad of Roman centurion...

Doctor Who explains the Big Bang! That’s an ambitious idea, and not one you’d expect to be shoehorned into an episode about space lepers journeying to a vast space station that promises not just a cure for their disease but also the opportunity to play with the biggest dog you’ve ever seen. Still, Terminus goes for it, soldiering on through plot holes the size of a supercluster to explain how all...

We’re worried. In the two-and-a-bit years since we started Pull To Open, we’ve done commentaries on 42(!) individual Doctor Who stories. That constitutes only 14% of the entire onscreen canon, but we appear to have exhausted a much greater portion of the series’ most revered episodes: The Girl in the Fireplace, Inferno, The Day of the Doctor, and even Genesis of the Daleks. In this special podcast...