Doctor Who: Terror of the Zygons
by Robert Banks Stewart; dir. Douglas Camfield (BBC, 1975)
The Zygons engineer a creature that can withstand nuclear weaponry, but themselves are one of the few aliens not impervious to UNIT bullets. Dynamically directed with plenty of location filming and lush, organic sets, Terror sadly peters out to become Sock Puppet.
Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction
by David Whitaker, dir. Richard Martin (BBC, 1964)
Jacqueline Hill out-acts her fellow regulars in this, the third ever Doctor Who serial, a remarkable two-parter set entirely within the TARDIS. The tense, eerie and unsettling, claustrophobic drama of disorientation and distrust prefigures by forty-four years the David Tennant story Midnight.
Doctor Who: Shroud of Sorrow
by Tommy Donbavand (BBC, 2013); audiobook read by Frances Barber
Although Donbavand captures the Eleventh Doctor’s quick-fire whimsy very well, he rather lingers upon it, which in book (and especially audiobook) form robs the story of tension. Barber’s narration is fine but her JFK Dallas accents sound gratingly like the wild west.
Doctor Who: The Spectre of Lanyon Moor
by Nicholas Pegg (Big Finish, 2000)
Writer director Nicholas Pegg takes the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn out onto the moors and somewhat loses his way. The story proceeds at a ramble, the subplots more or less resolve themselves, and the Doctor, though empathetic, lacks both urgency and agency.
Doctor Who: The Crawling Terror
by Mike Tucker (BBC, 2014); audiobook read by Neve McIntosh
Although featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Clara, this novel labours along like the most interminable of Third Doctor stories; neither original in content nor polished in execution (think ‘Planet of the Spiders’ meets ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’). Neve McIntosh cannot save it.
Doctor Who: The Dark Husband
by David Quantick (Big Finish, 2008)
Whereas humour in Doctor Who has always worked best in moderation, Quantick can’t seem to help himself: the jokes never relent, meaning that the Doctor, Ace and Hex are constantly, frivolously undercutting the drama. Thus a potentially intriguing SF tale is stillborn.
Warehouse 13, Season 3
(Syfy, 2011)
Re-watching season three of Warehouse 13, one could easily imagine this perfect blend of action, humour and pseudo-science running for a decade or more. With its wide family appeal and endless capacity for wonder, it could have been the next Doctor Who.
Doctor Who: The Sandman
by Simon A. Forward (Big Finish, 2002)
A nice SF concept, which affords plenty of scope for the Sixth Doctor’s almost bipolar swings between compassion and firewalled ‘otherness’. Colin Baker once again shows that he could have been great if given something to work with by JNT and company.
Doctor Who, Series 5
(BBC, 2010)
A whimsical, wizardly Doctor; coupled companions; a contrived plot-arc whose conjured finale proves that bigger and bombastic are not better: Steven Moffat overhauled the programme for both good and bad, with the best coming from one-off writers Simon Nye and Richard Curtis.
Adventures with the Wife in Space
by Neil Perryman (Faber & Faber, 2013)
Several Everyman’s autobiographies have been structured around Doctor Who, each perfectly readable if of limited appeal. The titular allusion of this one doesn’t actually work (as the author himself would have noted) but Sue Perryman’s affably caustic interruptions make the trip worthwhile.