It's a real testament to Davies that despite having seen these episodes a good half dozen or so times, I still get chills from the Dalek reveal and a huge grin on my face when the lab tech turns around to reveal that he's Mickey.

The four-part interview with Fuller here mentioned that there was a character the writers thought about killing off last season, before deciding that it wouldn't be impactful enough because they hadn't had a whole lot of development so far. But he wouldn't say who it was, because there was still a chance they'd decide…

The original plan was three original stories for seasons 1-3, then one season each for the three Thomas Harris books, finished up by a final original story for season 7 to close out the show. No idea whether that's changed or not, but the challenge would definitely be adapting the books to keep Hannibal and Will as…

You never know — Susan was dropped off on 22nd century earth, and it seems like a lot of the timeline before that point has been altered in the episodes since. It might prove difficult to find her again.

Martha also hasn't been on the show in four years and hasn't been a main cast member in seven. The main cast has been lily-white for quite some time now.

I'm holding out hope that there's some kind of Turlough situation going on here, and he's a humanoid alien inexplicably stuck on contemporary earth before joining the TARDIS crew.

In defense of how Fear Her (and to an extent the rest of this season) treats Rose and the Doctor, it works if you view it as intended to show how bad they are for each other and how unsustainable their love is. That's an arc that leads to its natural conclusion in next week's episodes. So even though I agree that the…

Like the review points out, it's an episode that largely aims to be about what happens on the fringes of the Doctor's attention, so to some extent it really does depend on his being absent for much of the proceedings. That absence doesn't really feed the episode's conflict, though.

Without fail, whenever someone tries to get me hooked on a program by showing me its "best" episodes, I'm bored to tears. Yet some of those same shows I've loved once I started at the pilot and worked my way through in order.

I'm pretty sure Davies has openly acknowledged that The Zeppo was the inspiration for this episode… I think it was in his book, The Writer's Tale. (Anyone have a copy handy to check on that?)

I agree that it's great to have the perspective of new people in these reviews, since so many of us have seen the episodes under discussion multiple times (in addition to ones from years later) and can lose track of how they stand fresh on their own merits. Maybe you'll be able to track down season 3 from a local…

That's what I always circle back to, too. I don't want to criticize the child who designed the creature, but how on earth did the contest judges think that was the best submission to implement for a Doctor Who episode? I'm quite curious to see what some of the rejected ideas were, if this was truly the best of the lot…

If we're allowed to lump Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures into the same category as New Who, the new and old might be closer. Both spinoffs have their great episodes, but my god, they sure do have a lot of clunkers as well.

See, I thought that was one of the worst lines of the season. Saying that the South was fighting for slavery is okay for a high school history test, but no real-life politician — especially one from South Carolina — would ever have such a simplistic view of the war. That line struck me as something that Frank would…

I really don't understand the argument that 2 seasons is too quick of a timeline for Frank to take the Presidency. Gerald Ford was appointed Vice President in December 1973 and then took over as President the following August. For a TV character to have a similarly meteoric rise doesn't seem implausible to me at all,…

Yeah, Martha is so far the only new companion to bow out without any sort of tragedy, unless you count Jack's subsequent appearances when he's only hopping over from Torchwood for a bit. Clara is already different from the others (except for Amy and Rory near the end) in that she regularly goes back home in between…

I think Love and Monsters has its good points, and I've even said as much elsewhere on this page. That doesn't change my opinion that it and Fear Her are the worst New Who episodes out there.

She could easily have been wrong — she even says it's just a rumor in the line in question — and I don't think the show is in any way bound by a single line in a spinoff anyway. But on the other hand, Sarah Jane herself wasn't killed off in canon after her actress passed, so there's at least a precedent for "let's…

Too soon. (Forever too soon.)

Tennant's goodbye was almost certainly lengthened by it being Davies's goodbye as well. You had the writer / showrunner wanting to linger on everything he'd done before the end, which of necessity became the main character doing that too. It's hard to imagine The End of Time dragging on for so long between the Doctor…