Who Back When | A Doctor Who Podcast

Adric's maths badge finally pays off and Team TARDIS commits Dinocide * * * Earth; the future; soldiers; caves: normally you’d only get to pick two of these to make a Doctor Who serial, but we’re being treated with all four of them right from the start! The hullabaloo this time is that a group of palaeontologists and geologists have been murder-killed while poking about underground. The one surviv...

Doc and Bill liberate the rocket-fuel-crapping tape worm mapping the intestinal tract of the British Isles * * * That bad girl the TARDIS has enforced on Doc and Bill a detour on the way back to Nardole’s tea party, namely to London’s famous and much-frequented final Frost Fair of 1814, where the elephants in the room are real elephants on the ice, and also the continuation of slavery. But betwixt...

A ripping performance and a whodunnit in which we know whodunnit * * * The TARDIS seems to have developed a compulsion for Earth, more specifically, England, so we find ourselves there again, this time in 1925. Shortly after materialising at a train station, Doc is mistaken for another Doc and the whole crew get chauffeured off to a rather fancy estate, old boy, for a bit of cricket and light cosp...

A happy-go-lucky episode full of corridon’ts, and what exactly does a self-aware AI demand in rent?

A chav extraordinaire makes a bombastic exit in the blockbuster double-feature finale of The Eighth Doctor Adventures! * * * Lucie and Alex are enjoying their gap year in Thailand when a deadly pandemic engulfs the Earth and Susan pulls some strings to whisk them back to the UK. Susan reports that in England it’s bad and getting worse, the hospitals are swamped, and she doesn’t think it’ll be long...

Doc heads to Diagon Alley to investigate a pain-in-the-neck countdown and loses yet another companion in the process * * * Clara has been amazing, saved the Doctor from having to marry a giant plant thing, and made a mysterious decision, basically perfected the whole companion role, she’s royally bossing it, when she gets a call from a concerned Rigsy, who’s been lumbered with an unwanted countdow...

Statler and Waldorf provide running commentary on Paw Patrol's continued enslavement in a serial that sees the departure of TWO companions * * * The Fourth Doctor, Romana and K-9 — and some brat named Adric — are still making their way through E-Space, when a wobble of some sort pulls them into a micro universe between E and N, probably somewhere around I. It turns out humanity learned nothing fro...

Eye-booger monsters, an FPS perspective and heavy Pet'ing didn't quite detract from the gargantuan plot holes in this one * * * Boom! First-person perspective cold open aboard a spaceship where the crew’s gone missing, Doc and Clara have turned up for no real reason, and so has a team of soldiers, of whom exactly one was genetically bred for soldiering — because that’s what we do in the future, ex...

Doc and Romana team up with the single-greatest comb-over in E-Space to battle a Big Daddy Vampire * * * Still stuck in E-Space, The Fourth Doctor, Romana and K-9 are on the lookout for a way back home. Stumbling upon a planet with a population of maybe thirty people at most, who have barely even discovered astrology, they decide to land and see if anyone can point them in the direction of the nea...

Duelling Claras, a sucker punch and Basil’s legendary soliloquy * * * Clara Oswald is being Old Boy’d inside her own mind when she realises that she’s not quite out for the count yet, and instead perfectly capable of subconsciously strategising against her doppelganger. She even managed her own mini retro rewrite of last week’s ending. Doc, meanwhile, may have bailed out of his poncing purposes ai...

Cavemen and spiders attack in droves, but all the Lost Boys can think about is giant melons * * * Doc and Romana have dropped off last week’s succulent-spooked accountant back on 1980’s Earth and are looking forward to a return trip to Gallifrey. Well, Doc is surprisingly chipper about the trip given what’s happened on previous visits, but Romana is worried that she’ll have to stop her TARDIS trav...

Electric hairballs make the laziest tumbleweeds * * * UNIT’s zany comedy double act, Osgood and Osgood, have recorded one final short just in case, on the off chance, either a human or an undercover Zygon ever commits a murder and activates the one tiny loophole in the otherwise most perfect peace treaty of all time. Left clutching her twin’s box after Missy’s murderous flight of fancy, the surviv...

Mercurial mercenaries manage Doc's grocery shopping * * * The Doctor has spent six years residing at The Consensus’s pleasure at the heart of a botched stellar weapon, tackling solar eruptions as they’re Bubblin’ up before they get Too Close to the monitoring station, so they don’t All Rise, Fly By, and wipe out the 2 billion people living on the star system’s planets, leaving him Guilty. Into thi...

A sentient cactus possesses an accountant delivered by space pirates to impersonate The Doctor * * * On the planet Tigella, a mysterious dodecahedron has divided the population into the religious Deons and the scientifically inclined Savants, both of whose future is under threat and both of whom rely on the object’s power to stay alive. Something’s going wrong, though, and thus the Savants summon...

The Doctor joins a Viking Highlander on a heist plotted by The Lion King * * * The Twelfth Doctor has been led by his aptly named curioscanner on a solo mission to England in 1651, to track down an exoplanetary artefact of deadliest purple. But there’s a brigand lurking in this particular forest of the night – a former Viking! Ashildr, now hundreds of years old, amnesiac and disillusioned, has tea...

Doc does a lot of maturing while Romana shares the gift of immortality with a bunch of cornetto hairdos * * * After inter-stellar, nuclear war with the reptilian Foamasi ravaged the planet Argolis, forced the few remaining survivors below ground, and made them sterile in the process, the Argolins did the only sane thing, and turned their home into a low-rent Center Parcs. As luck would have it, K-...

The Twelfth Doctor, Clara and a Viking girl he reverse-remembers meeting at a later date set up Home Alone traps for a Monty Python God * * * Fresh from buying a planet one extra day of terror, Doc crushes a Love Sprite that had a crush on Clara, then makes an emergency landing on the nearest patch of grass to wipe it from his boot. But there are silent warriors lurking in this particular forest o...

Doc's plans for a family Christmas dinner are hampered by a fishy paradox * * * The Doctor’s promised Lucie Miller a perfect, cosy, alien-free Christmas to make up for the last one where she left him sitting on Blackpool beach, but he can’t resist showing off his newly reconnected bloodline in the form of Susan and great-grandson Alex. The Doctor’s dozy descendant can’t quite muster up an interest...

Creative disarray, an abundance of tea, and a ball bag are but some of the treats on offer in this legendary unfinished serial * * * A handful of reasonably young chaps are asleep aboard the Think Tank research space station, when a particularly nefarious one among them — Skagra — awakens and uses a silver orb to absorb all of their brain power in a first step of an equally nefarious plot to find...

Doc breaks Beethoven’s fourth wall to explain how a tall chap who turns people’s souls into ham radios can plot to invade the Earth from beyond the grave * * * Doc, New Oswin, and Bennett have rock-rock-rock-rooocked up in Krasnodar, the MoD’s fake Russian town built to practise icing Commies at the height of the Cold War, in 1980, before the flood that caused the lake that caused the underwater b...

Romana and The Doc join Space Theseus in a Space Labyrinth to help prevent an invasions of Space Minotaurs * * * A pilot, a co-pilot, and a bunch of people in yellow jumpsuits are jetting across space in a decrepit craft from the Skonnan Empire. Said jumpsuit aficionados are in fact being brought from their home planet of Aneth to be used as tributes to a local deity called the Nimon. The overzeal...

Doc leaves Clara hanging in a haunted underwater research facility or military base or oil rig * * * The TARDIS is unhappy to have brought the 12th Doctor and Clara to an underwater research base in 2119, fully equipped with nuclear reactor, Star Trek references, quippy characters and a small but growing complement of ghosts bent on murdering anyone who enters the recovered alien spaceship in the...

When two spaceships are dimensionally fused, Team TARDIS must battle monsters that turn into cocaine when electrocuted * * * The Fourth Doctor, Romana II and K-9 plop onto allegedly luxurious space cruiser, Empress, just as it has coincidentally materialised in the same space as the more diminutive spaceship belonging to Dymond, a spaceman of questionable morals and origin. Equally adventitious is...

Doctor Dodgems, a Davros Zinger and Reverse-Shawshanking through Dalek Scatacombs * * * The parlours and salons of Skaro are abuzz with talk of the handsome new visitor, The Doctor, and his private audience with Davros in the infirmary. His companions have run into significant difficulties, and he himself appears to be hampered by a lack of transport options. Doc and Davros dispense with the usual...

On a planet with a dysfunctional economy, Doc and Romana encounter Hagrids, a back-stabbing Golden Girl and a giant, vegetarian space phallus * * * When Romana II attaches a transceiver to the TARDIS console, it picks up a distress call and immediately takes her and The Fourth Doctor to the planet Chloris. There, Lady Adrasta rules with an iron fist, ironically, as she also holds a monopoly over t...