Good by Doctor, thanks for the ride! Barbara and Ian were part of the original TARDIS crew, and after two years the actors decided they wanted to move on. This video shows their debate with The Doctor outside a Dalek time traveling ship, and their arrival back in London in 1965. At first The Doctor refuses claiming he doesn't want to aid/abet suicide. It was a Dalek ship and who knew whether it would actually work properly. But the end of their contract said the two must go, and so they did.

The Day of the Doctor was the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who. This special goes behind the scenes of filming the episode.

For the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, Mark Gatis was able to put together a documentary about how it all started.

Two seasons in a row we saw a BLACK companion get converted into a Cyberman and given a strange send-off. The first, Danny Pink, was supposed to be Clara Oswin's love interest -- we even saw them rescue an apparent descendent of that match-up, until Moffatt needed someone to be converted into a Cyberman. Then in Season 10, we had Bill Potts, an excellent companion, get converted into a Cyberman because Moffatt needed someone to be converted into a Cyberman. The history of Doctor Who has not seen a successful conversion of a Companion into a Cyberman until Danny Pink. With Bill Potts we have a second successful Companion-Cyberman-conversion. What's the commonality? Both the actors are BLACK?

I was going to let this pass -- until todays news included Moffatt bragging about the story twist in The Doctor Falls of having Bill Potts saved by her love interest, Heather. Ugh. Really? It's all okay because you gave yourself a magic way out of the corner you wrote yourself into?

No matter how brilliant Moffatt is in coming up with clever stories -- this shows a weakness in that he writes himself into corners, and rather than face the consequences of the story he's penned, Moffatt comes up with a magic way out.

Science fiction shows are full of stories about parallel universes. Maybe it lets the show writers reimagine a premise in the show, to ask "what if" and see what the characters do. In any case, a show centered on a travel capsule which can traverse all of time and space, don't you think it's fair to ask if any kind of parallel universe showed up?

What an auspicious beginning to a TV show which would become iconic. Did they know the show would last as long as it has?

An Unearthly Child is constructed as a very good starting point, introducing the people to The Doctor and his ways. The episode introduces us to the Cold Hill School and the junkyard in which the Doctor and Susan live. Schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright are concerned about Susan Foreman, who seems to have a very alien outlook on England. She is precocious but seems to have strange gaps in her understanding of the world. They have come to her listed address to investigate. Her listed address is this junkyard, which they simply cannot grasp. Then they meet this strange gruff old man who tries to get them to leave, but instead makes it look like some kind of pedophilia or homelessness situation.

Honey! I shrank the Doctor!

Due to a glitch the Doctor and Companions end up small. Very small. As in, smaller than the typical insect. But they don't realize this at first, as they are wandering through a landscape of strangely large but familiar looking objects. Such as a box of matches the size of a car. After awhile they realize they aren't trapped in an oddball amusement park, but instead they have been shrunk and the problem for them is how to return to "normal" size.

To make matters interesting the place they land was the home laboratory of a chemist working on a very potent insecticide. One which is especially dangerous to the humans in their extremely tiny size, as Barbara learns when she touches some of the insecticide.

Oooooo! This is why Doctor Who stories should be spread over multiple episodes. So many of the Doctor Who episodes since the revival have been one-episode wonders where the story was rushed .. and a rushed story is often one not told as well. Even some of the two-parters since the revival have been too rushed. In any case these two stories are very well paced, extremely interesting, and excellent feats of story telling. That they were written by Stephen Moffett, the next lead writer, portends good things for the future of Doctor Who.

The story is about a library, not any old library but one that is the size of a whole planet and contains every book ever written. But, strangely, there is nobody there in this library. Why? The strange goings-on start almost immediately with an ominous message saying to watch out for the shadows. And shortly afterward a group of researchers burst upon the scene, one of whom, Dr. River Song, amazingly already knows the Doctor. Many creepy and odd events occur until there is another of the endings where someone sacrifices their life in order that the Doctor will live.

The Toymaker is an immortal jokester and game master. He inhabits a world of his own making, in which he traps people, makes them play games where the losers become his prisoners. Into this snare fall the Doctor and Companions. They play a series of stupid games. They win but the toymaker has a final move which is set to destroy them if they make the move. But they manage to trick him and escape without being destroyed.

Blah.

It's fitting given the season finale which is upon us, to have watched the earliest of the Dalek appearances. This story was the second episode cluster of the first Doctor Who season way back in 1964, that's how long the Doctor and the Daleks have been fighting each other. In The Daleks the Doctor and companions accidentally land on this strange desert-like planet where the trees and flowers are made of stone and the lizards are made of metal. As their explorations lead them to meet the Thals and the Dals. These races had been fighting a long running war over centuries which left their planet a radioactive wasteland. The two groups chose different paths to survival, the Thals having forsaken war to take up gentler livelihood and the Dals encasing themselves in machines and taking on the word EXTERMINATE as their major vocabulary.

Another tour de force of time travel stories on Doctor Who. This episode asks the question -- How would your life be different if your decisions were different?

Clearly where we end up in life is directly determined by the decisions we make along the way. It's also determined by what goes on around us, the decisions everybody else makes, and for that matter the context we all live in on this planet in this star system in this galaxy etc. But, really, what path would life take if there were a different set of decisions?

In the episode they suggest that for most people it wouldn't make much difference. Choose one job versus another job, what difference does it make? But in the case of Donna Noble, the Doctors companion, that choice ends up being between accompanying the Doctor and not doing so. Then because the Doctor truly dies because Donna is not with him, without the presence of the Doctor the whole universe dies, step by step.

Time Lords famously are hard to kill, and those who die can cheat death by regenerating themselves. But, what happens if a Time Lord, like The Doctor, dies in an extremely dramatic fashion - like being blown to little tiny bits by a bomb - or vaporized in a nuclear explosion - would that Time Lord actually die even if s/he had several remaining regenerations? The evidence is mixed on this question, so let's take a look.

Clara Oswin Oswald, a.k.a. The Impossible Girl, has a convoluted history in Doctor Who. The character was first seen in Asylum of the Daleks but over her story arc she became entwined in the whole of the Doctor's life. How can we say for certainty when the Doctor first met Clara?

Want to know more about Nardole and Matt Lucas? This video has Nardole answering questions for a Youtuber named Crispy Pro.

Earlier we asked "Why is Nardole still around?" Because, well, it's kinda strange that a person presented as River Song's side-kick, and then disassembled and inserted into King Hydraflax's body, would be able to reappear as a functioning person helping the Doctor. But then this is Doctor Who.

Unfortunately our curiosity isn't answered by Matt's answers. He's very good at saying things and being funny without really answering questions or saying anything of substance.

The first Female Doctor ever has been minted, now that Jodi Whittaker has taken over the role, but the big question is how many regenerations are left. By any rational regeneration counting, we ran out of regenerations -- supposedly Time Lords can only regenerate 12 times -- but the show has continued on. The in-show explanation is that the Matt Smith Doctor was given a new regneration cycle, letting us enjoy Peter Capaldi as The Doctor. But, how many regeneration cycles are remaining for The Doctor?

In The War Machines, The Doctor encounters scientists developing an artificial intelligence computer which is planning to take over the world. The computer has been hypnotizing folks and ordering them to build robots (the war machines) that are meant to rampage around London and take over the city. These videos show different points in this episode.

I watch every Doctor Who episode, at least once, sometimes a couple dozen times, but I almost did not watch this one. The preview information on this episode sounded like it was much too close to the reality we're living today. That's doubly so considering today's violence on London Bridge in which a 'Lorry Driver' drove his truck into a crowd of people, and in a possibly separate attack someone with a long knife attacked people in South London.

I apologize to anyone put off by my bringing reality into the enjoyment of Doctor Who, but that's what is in front of us in the real world. Once I did watch the episode, I found it to be excellent, and maybe after I write this I'll write a regular review. At the moment I cannot separate this from the concerns I have over what's actually happening in the world around us.

The timing of this episode -- June is six months into the year, and approximately 6 months ago the Trump Administration was being sworn into office. That's more than a curious coincidence especially given the assault on truth going on with the Trump Administration in power.

This week's Doctor Who, The Lie of the Land, deserves a real review because it's such an excellent story. As I noted yesterday, this story strikes very close to reality given the problem we have with Fake News currently. This story goes way beyond Fake News to Fake History, and a telepathic broadcast of fake information to delude the population.

What happens when we're told an idea enough times? So long as the idea is plausible humans will eventually accept that idea and get on with their lives. This happens all the time in the real world with certain news channels routinely reporting falsehoods as if they're real, and fake ideas affect enough people to influence major elections. Witness last Fall in the USA, and several elections since then in France, and Moldova, and Bulgaria, and the Netherlands, where fake news propagandists had enough success to sway a few of those elections.

The TARDIS is The Doctor's home and spaceship. TARDIS's were invented by the Time Lords, and contain a range of technology gizmos to manipulate time and space and energy systems and who knows what else. The TARDIS is therefore a central plot device in Doctor Who, and you could argue the TARDIS is also a character in the story since it has been demonstrated to have its own consciousness and will.

The word, TARDIS, has been treated as an "acronym" as if the letters have a meaning, just like the word RADAR is actually an acronym meaning either "RAdio Detection And Ranging" or "RAdio Direction And Ranging". The problem with thinking TARDIS is an acronym is language differences. Gallifreyans do not speak English, and therefore would not use an English-centric acronym as the meaning of the word TARDIS.

But, within the context of Doctor Who, several acronym/meanings have been given for TARDIS. Let's just go with that and hum a chant about timey-wimeyness.

Think "The TARDIS" and you think an old-style Police Telephone Box. TARDIS's are supposed to adjust their shape to fit their surroundings, but The Doctor's TARDIS refuses to do so. Supposedly it's a broken chameleon circuit, or maybe this TARDIS has a mind of its own. In any case there is a real history to the Police Telephone Box's in Great Britain. They served a public safety function, giving police officers a place to rest/work and keep in touch with their precinct, and it gave the public a quick way to contact the police for assistance.