The Nimon Be Praised! - Seasons of Fear

Finally back with Eight, where Big Finish prove that there's no such thing as a bad character, just a bad writer.

As I said last week 'The Horns of Nimon' is quite possibly the worst Doctor Who I've ever seen. It was a train wreck, and I was only watching it because of this audio, 'Seasons of Fear'. It was worth it. Big Finish take the Nimon, a race of minotaur locusts and make them a decent bad guy. They even make the Minotaur reference make sense.

I Gave You My Heart - Last Christmas

There were two big questions going into 2014's Christmas special. Was it going to be the farewell for Clara, and is Santa real? It also keeps both of them going for awhile. Tellingly it's the Santa one that's answered first, and we're left guessing about the other right up until just before the credits roll.

“Last Christmas” also happens to be one of the better Christmas specials.

The Thing I Do for Big Finish - Horns of Nimon

"Horns of Nimon" is the exact serial I made the jump to the Fourth Doctor instead of heading back to the First. I have hit the point in the Eighth Doctor audios where the next one in the sequence is a sequel to "The Horns of Nimon", a serial most people don't talk kindly of, and from all the sources I've pulled recommendations from, "The Horns of Nimon" has never appeared. But since the Eighth Doctor heads back there, I thought it best to go in fore-armed.

I'm not sure it was enough.

Destiny of the Daleks part 2 - the actual episodes

I said before, we're back with Tom Baker. Despite Baker generally being regarded as the best of the old Doctors, I can't quite get behind it. But more immediately, it's bloody weird jumping from mid Pertwee to late Baker, a very big difference in style. Not just in that the TARDIS is working again, but the Doctor and Romana are very different to the Doctor and Jo, in fact the roles are almost reversed.

We already covered the Regeneration and how she stands in Doctor Who. It's that last part I mentioned, the 'she's his equal' that really comes into play for the rest of the episode.

Oh, the episode. It's alright, I guess. Pretty sub-standard Dalek affair.

Talking 'bout Regeneration - Destiny of the Daleks part 1

Once again we're back with Tom Baker. The Doctor who had the longest stint in the role, and the one I've probably watched the least of up to know. Maybe second after Sylvester McCoy. There's no real reason to it, just how my choices have fallen.

However, before we look at 'Destiny of the Daleks' as a whole, I'm going to look at the first five minutes of the first episode. Romana's regeneration. Which is just bizarre. It seems to go against everything we've ever known about the process. Clearly Douglas Adams was playing it for laughs, as so much of this era is about (something I click with as I watched the following serial). However, some fans can't just leave it like that. These things need explaining. So I'm going to live up to that part about wanting to be a writer and try to provide one.

Back to Earth,One Last Time - Mind of Evil

Finally, after Big Finish eventually managed to get my spirits back up about Doctor Who I dived into what would be me final Pertwee for a while. When I left Hartnell along with Susan I said I would venture up to the previously watched The Daemons before heading back. Now we're there, and I'm not. I'm going to keep jumping forward.

Unlike the previous skip, this one is more out of necessity then choice, and far larger. This time I'm jumping all the way towards the end of Tom Baker's time as the Doctor, to where Romana II debuted. This is because of the other side of Who I'm writing about, the Big Finish audio adventures. Romana's regeneration is slightly earlier than I need to go, but like I used the previous jump to connect disparate viewings of War Games and The Daemons, I'm doing the same here, tying in the brilliant City of Death. I'm also going to watch the Four/Five Regeneration, because they were the main reason I started my second jaunt through Time and Space.

But anyway, The Mind of Evil. Thank God we get to finish on a high.

Who Thoughts

Welcome to the Friday blog. Like everything else at the minute this was written long before Capaldi's first season. But because of the backlog (and therefore lead time) I'm bringing back the Friday blog. Right now they're going to be random, but come the Hartnell restart Friday's will be audio day.

As I've written these posts on Doctor Who, I've never been quite sure what I was doing. Am I writing reviews of them? The people most likely to read them are way more up on Who then I'll ever be. But that's what I did, because that's what I thought I should do. I did try and go a bit deeper, with my own take on it, coming from a person who jumped onto Classic Who because of New Who (as I guess most new fans that look further back than Christopher Eccleston) but the niggling sensation of 'am I doing this right?' stayed there.

It's All About the Audio - Whispers of Terror

Emboldened by my success with I.D. I decided to press my luck further, and dive into Six and Peri territory. I mean “Whispers of Terror” is the third ever Big Finish serial, how much trouble could I get into? Besides, I'm now at ten hours of just treading audio water, I think I might have just been better diving into the Fifth Doctor and Peri. This seems like a good compromise, and if there's any BF continuity to worry about, getting the third entry out of the way seems like a clever move.

The first thing I noticed was an obvious difference between this and “I.D.” I didn't say anything above because I thought I just had realised relatively late on and was just being simple. But “I.D.” uses the theme song from Colin Baker's time as the Doctor, making it feel that little bit more of the series it's meant to fit. Yet being Big Finish's third episode, “Whispers of Terror” doesn't do that. It has the very original theme that everyone knows. That later change is a clever move by Big Finish.