Who Back When | A Doctor Who Podcast

This episode should have been called “6 o’clock” * * * Doc and Belinda are still struggling to get back to Earth in 2025 because, maybe, there’s no Earth to go back to! Cue immediate action to solve that really rather large problem? Nope, let’s  jump forward 500,000 years and dress up as soldiers instead. Yes, Doc needs to drop the Vindicator somewhere to get a new reading but that’s not before he...

The "God of Light" turns itself into a cartoon character that, umm, captures people in celluloid?! On rewatch, we offer RTD a lot of admittedly late rewrite options. * * * The TARDIS is still having problems landing back on earth in 2025 so Doc and Belinda are forced to land a tad off course – specifically, by a seemingly deserted Miami cinema in 1952, where unsurprisingly a mystery awai...

We get a brand new companion, and meet a chap named Manny who wears his character arcs on his sleeves * * * 17 years ago, new companion Belinda was on a date with a chap called Alan and he bought her a star. Well, he bought her a bit of paper that says the star is hers. Young Belinda unfortunately doesn’t have world experience yet and thinks it’s kind of sweet. In fact, Alan is obviously a negging...

Doc takes a break from saving the world to read some lady's private correspondence * * * When Doc happens upon the delightful Time Hotel in Earth’s future, he’s in for a real treat. Every room offers a different historical period and plenty of plot potential. ere he can embark on a yuletide adventure, he embroils himself in a devious plan by the military industrial complex to blow up Earth and...

Myriad single tears later, an old man takes credit for the women doing all the work in this season finale * * * Let’s pick up where we left off, shall we? Susan Triad has turned into Sutekh’s puppet, along with Harriet Arbinger, and they’re threatening everyone with some death dust. Before you know it Sue is blowing kisses to the TV crew and they fall to the floor like grains of sand. Doc and Mel...

Sutekh's back and Kate just had a flapjack, as RTD lines up a plethora of mysteries that surely all will be explained in the next and final episode of the series, surely * * * It’s mid-June and that can only mean one thing: it’s time for a Doctor Who Christmas Special! Thus, the Fifteenth Doctor brings legendarily mysterious companion Ruby Sunday to UNIT HQ and there poses three challenges to...

Doc cranks the flirting up to Fifteen while some posh birds hatch a plan for homicidal Bridgerton cosplay * * * Oh, my Bridgerton, doesn’t 1813 Bath seem a wee bit familiar? With the dances, scandals and old-timey modern music, you might be mistaken for thinking you’ve fired up the wrong subscription service. But that’s our Doc on the dancefloor, about to cut a rug with that handsome chap from Min...

Holy Bananas and Cheesecakes, how can we still be blooping after eleven years?! * * * Happy Polling Day, UK-based Podcastlanders! Happy Independence Day, Peeps in the US! And Happy Birthday to us!! Thank you for eleven years of travelling down that temporal road with us, dearest Podcastland. Fret not, regular programming will resume very soon. In the meantime, please enjoy our customary anniversar...

White-power walkers are too busy influencing to notice the epic slugfest around them * * * In the immaculate city of Finetime, Lindy hops out of bed for another day of two hours’ work on substack processing, before spending the rest of the time hanging out with her Close Friends in her head-orbiting bubble, an arrangement she might call piss-easy if she ever had to urinate. But the peppy Ms Pepper...

The Doctor accidentally breaks a fairy circle prompting an unexpectedly divisive episode of The Ruby Show * * * Yes! Wow! Finally! Wales! And, honey, Wales in 2024 has a lot going for it: fresh air, cliffs, hiking trails, fairy circles that can make people disappear and interfere with causality if you break their string boundary and/or read out messages folded up inside them. Wait, what? Yep, Doct...

The military industrial complex doesn't stand a chance against the power of dad in this bottle episode * * * “Have you done your teeth?” asks literally named father John Fancis Vater as he blindly walks through a war-torn planet. No, he’s not just paying little attention, he’s a casualty of war and has been blinded in combat. So why would he be asking about dental hygiene? Because it’s bring y...

A musical-ish episode with an actually sonic screwdriver, but no real twist at the end * * * We co-launch into the soft reboot of Doctor Who with this second half of a re-premiere and the prospect of the long-awaited, Beatles-centric, musical extrava-gonzo. When Ruby asks to see The Beatles record their first ever album, Doc steers the TARDIS to London in 1963 —  Ring any bells? — for a visit to E...

Babies, boogers and fart jokes remain an unexpected way to inaugurate a new era of Doctor Who * * * Ruby Sunday is in for a fun day, a she-gon’-have-to-run-day, as the marvellous Fifteenth Doctor with his pearly whites full-beaming gives her a whistle-stop TARDIS orientation, a quick chaos effecting and un-effecting tour of the past, then whisks her into Babystationary orbit above the planet Pacif...

With the new season steadily approaching, we discuss our predictions, hopes and fears * * * We’ve now been treated to no less than TWO trailers for the upcoming Series 14 of Doctor Who, and so we sat down for a boozy (well, for one of us) evening of predictions and general pondering.  How excited are we about the new series, and why? How many Bridgerton references do we think there will be in the...

Inter-temporal infanticide and a divisive song-and-dance number? We spend more than twice its runtime dissecting The Fifteenth Doctor's first big adventure. * * * A mysterious cloaked figure enigmatically leaves a newborn baby behind on the collection doorstep of St. Building Atmosphere’s Church one snowy Christmas Eve, departing without so much as a “Goodbye, Ruby Sunday”. Who could hang that...

Tennant is back, inexplicably yet fabulously, prompting a customary, cocktail-fuelled retrospective * * * David Tennant returns to Doctor Who for a brief trilogy stint (at least to start with), this time as the Fourteenth Doctor. How curious, you might think. Why did this face return, they ask at the start, and you'd think they'd have answered this question by the end. Therapy, say some. C...

The Toymaker temporarily relinquishes his confounding mock-German accent while lip-syncing to Spice Girls in Stark Tower for the conclusion of the 60th Anniversary Specials * * * It’s 1925 and John Logie Baird would have invented television already if only it weren’t for the tragic lack of a televisual crash test dummy. Fortunately, just across the road, the affable Mr Emporium’s Toy Shop stands r...

DnD return for Midnight 2.0 in perhaps the most corridory episode of Doctor Who * * * Fresh from some leisurely bants asking Isaac Newton how does he like them apples, Doc and Donna hurtle to a fiery stop aboard a mysterious spaceship, where the first thing the TARDIS regenerates is its Hostile Action Displacement System so it can finally put itself back together in peace. It turns out their landi...

Happy New Year! Here's a glimpse at some of the bits that didn’t go quite as planned * * * What-Ho, Podcastland!  Hope you’re enjoying a sensational holiday season and looking forward to the most decadent of New Year’s celebrations!  It’s been an eventful and momentous year. We FINALLY caught up with famous-TV-show-we-all-really-really-like Doctor Who , after over 10 years of podcasting about...

Mad Paddington interrupts a tuna madras and Doc is rubbish at keeping a secret * * * The freshly re- generated 14th Doctor travels to London’s Camden Market and instantly bumps into Donna Noble, the one former companion who under no circumstances may be bumped-into. She introduces her daughter, Rose, handily volunteers information about Rose’s career to the stranger before her, and then fails to o...

We're joined by legendary Whovian, jD, as we continue our trip down that temporal road * * * We continue our trip down the temporal road that is memory lane in Part 2 of our Who Back When Retrospective . (If you haven't listened to Part 1 yet, what are you waiting for?!) This time, Drew and Leon were joined by former co-host and perpetual legend, jD, to talk some of the best and worst of 6...

Join us as we reflect on a ten-year trip down that temporal road * * * We set out, a little over a decade ago, to review all of TV Doctor Who, and now that we've finally accomplished that mission, we figured it was time for a slightly different and more introspective kind of Bonus Retrospective. This is Part 1, in which Marie, Jim, Drew and Leon sit down to commemorate this momentous occasion...

A deep-dive into the successes (and failures) of a Doctor, a show runner and an era of Doctor Who. * * * If you haven't already, then listen to our reviews of the 31 13th Doctor episodes ! Jodie Whittaker's and Chris Chibnall's Thirteenth Doctor Era came to an end on TV just a year before we wrapped it up on Who Back When. We've reviewed every single Thirteenth Doctor episode — som...

It's the end of an era as Doc is joined by old friends and selves to save the world one last time before she regenerates * * * Kablammo! We’re aboard a spacetime express train and Doc and what remains of the Fam fail to rescue yet another unique, near-mythical, never-seen-before creature we’ll never revisit, substantiate or learn more about. Boom! Rasputin is The Master. Why? Never you mind. E...

Two wildly different milestone stories, neither canonical, one rather pants, the other quite amazing. All right, here we go! * * * We sit down to discuss two bits of Whovian lore that coincided with milestone anniversaries. Dimensions in Time , about which truthfully there isn't much to say, and  Scream of the Shalka which Stars Withnail and Claudius and is pretty terrific. Dimensions in Time...