Who Back When | A Doctor Who Podcast WhoBackWhen.com

The military industrial complex doesn't stand a chance against the power of dad in this bottle episode



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“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 your daughter to work week and what kind of father would forget his duties while he’s dying out on a battlefield?



Of course, death isn’t certain for all warriors blinded by the atrocities of war, so why do things seem so bleak for John and the other soldier guiding him? Because this war is all about the “bang for your buck” rather than “bang, bang you’re dead” and the capitalist forces at work don’t take kindly to soldiers that are slacking in the killing machine department. And there are Ambulances on the prowl.



Ambulances, you say, surely they’ll patch ol’ Johnny boy up and he’ll be fine and dandy from now on? Well, no, they’ll run the numbers and decide he’s not worth the resources and turn him into a death canister. War’s a bitch, am I right? Also Doc is there and he’s just stepped on a mine, so that’s the rest of this nail biting, tear squirting bottle episode. Unless you count all the anti-religious sentiment, the repetitive dialog, the repetitive dialog and the repetitive dialog.





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Toodle-Pip!

A musical-ish episode with an actually sonic screwdriver, but no real twist at the end



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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 EMI Studios.



Something’s clearly amiss with the timeline, though, as Back in the USSR, there’s been an anachronistic attack on Finland, The Beatles are rubbish, and music overall appears to have left human hearts. And what is humanity or indeed history without a hum and a whistle, or indeed an entire song-and-dance number? 



Turns out, back in 1925 no-name never-existed piano teacher and one-of-a-kind musical genius Timothy Drake has discovered the so-called lost chord that summons Maestro, son of The Toymaker (the one with the German accent), and sets off the chain reaction culminating in the destruction of London, mankind and mayhap some of the 60s science fiction fandoms in-between.



Anyone so much as hum or tap their finger against the Bakelite and Maestro will show up and straight-up pop a capo in their bass cleft, yet oddly the music industry is still a thing. Presumably only The Beatles will be able to save the day, though, right? This is a Beatles episode after all, right? Or should we be dreading a twist at the end?



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Check out WHOBACKWHEN.COM for more information, Doctor Who TV Serial and Audiobook reviews, ratings and ramblings, and loads more podcast episodes.




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WhoBackWhen.com




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Toodle-Pip!

Babies, boogers and fart jokes remain an unexpected way to inaugurate a new era of Doctor Who



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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 Pacifico del Rio. And she likes the jukebox.



However, turn this baby around and Doc is showing his new-found friend a stinking corridor and a bunch of inexplicably stunted infants who are kind of CGI but not nearly enough. They’re piloting the ship with a little help from Nan-E, and—Soiler alert!—all that, a howler of a Bogeyman and a steaming pile combine to kick off this new year with a literal gas leak.



* * *



Check out WHOBACKWHEN.COM for more information, Doctor Who TV Serial and Audiobook reviews, ratings and ramblings, and loads more podcast episodes.




WEB:

WhoBackWhen.com




FACEBOOK:

Facebook.com/WhoBackWhen




Instagram:

Instagram.com/whobackwhen




YOUTUBE:

WhoBackWhen.com/YouTube




TWITTER:

@whobackwhen




Toodle-Pip!

With the new season steadily approaching, we discuss our predictions, hopes and fears

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.

Tennant is back, inexplicably yet fabulously, prompting a customary, cocktail-fuelled retrospective