It’s real neat that the Eighth Doctor has had such a presence in Big Finish and other ancillary media, but this is another story that entirely dissuades me from trying to get into any of that, because I cannot follow what’s going on. Hard to say whether it’s continuity lockout, poor writing, or both.

This story is the hardest to follow radio drama I’ve ever experienced. It did turn out that I’d accidentally skipped over the first few tracks, but even going back to listen to them didn’t help much. I couldn’t tell characters apart, I wasn’t sure what was a flashback and what was the main story, there was some serious continuity lockout, and I found the whole thing confusing. There were some fun ideas in there, but they were buried under a persistent feeling of being lost.

Je me souvenais de ne pas aimer cette saison aussi bien que la première. Si ça reste vrai (je n’aime pas trop ce qu’on fait avec André, ce qui me semble trop compliqué), il y a des moments marrants qui ont lieu dans cette saison, et je suis triste de savoir que même la plus compliquée des histoires ne trouveront pas de résolution dans une troisième saison.

There was some passing around of the idiot ball in this story, and it felt surprisingly dark for a Doctor Who story, but I appreciated the layers of disaster piling up, and the villain was compelling in a pathetic way (in multiple senses of the word). I don’t know the Eighth Doctor well, so it’s interesting to get to know him here.

Battle of Britain Doctor Who would really have appealed to me at some point, but it’s the sort of thing now where I find myself wondering if the story is uncritically pedestalizing an important moment of history that is actually much more complicated.

Enjoying this series less and less the more that it goes on. I think I’d still watch a Season 4, but what began as a smart series with interesting drama has felt with each season that it’s leaning more into the drama and willing to set aside the smarts. Some fun moments in this series but also some headscratchers.

Worms: The Board Game is exactly what I was hoping for. No, it isn’t an elegant work of high strategy, but it captures the feel of the source material even in abstracting it to board game format. Really enjoyed my first play and looking forward to more.

Some silly stuff in here, but enough of a compelling story (and enough John Hurt and core Doctor Who vibes) that I’m willing to forgive it.

WAIT. Read the letter more carefully, and my “health plan” gave this third party printing/mailing service my SSN and address. This is even dumber.

Just got word from a “third-party printing/mailroom services” provider whose name I don’t recognize that they had a data breach involving my SSN and address. Literally no idea how they got those data. Did I sign up with them? Does my employer work with them? What a stupid world we live in.

More “fun but not life changing” exploration of the War Doctor.

Expanded universe material can get very dumb very quickly, but sometimes, it’s a great way to explore stuff that the main canon didn’t have time for. Just like it was a delight to have Christopher Eccleston back as the Ninth Doctor, getting more from John Hurt as the War Doctor is a treat. The story is interesting enough, but it’s really just fun to play with these action figures for a bit,

When one is at a gaming café, one pays one’s dues to help keep the place open, but the chai latte was a bad choice. It tasted like warm milk with some cinnamon mixed in, and maybe that works for some people, but it’s not what I’m looking for. I might just go for some “regular” tea the next time I’m there—or support the café in some other way.

Clever genre blending is one of my favorite things, so setting a Doctor Who story in what I presume is the style of a P. G. Wodehouse story is delightful (even if I clearly don’t know the genre it’s being blended into!).

Doctor Who is not often high art, and neither are radio plays, but this was good enough. Besides, I didn’t realize how damn much I missed Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor, and I would have struggled through a much worse story just to hear his “lots of planets have a north” voice.

Torn between enjoying Kagi’s machine translation tool and grumpiness about using something LLM-based. Still can’t get over digital labor, but I might(?) be less hostile to generative AI if it were more often deployed in these targeted, careful ways instead of as get-rich-quick chatbots.

Leveling up from Doctor Who Short Trips to full-length Doctor Who radio plays, and they’re only affirming my belief that a well-done radio play might as well be television.

Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to this while trying to find parking on campus at a very inconvenient time, but even though there’s an interesting time travel bit at the center of the story, it just didn’t pay off for me.

This was a fun example of a lot of worldbuilding crammed into the background of a short Doctor Who story, and it gets a lot of points for that.

This story is maybe the most heartwarming and beautiful that I’ve heard in the entire collection! The Sixth Doctor visits a stroke patient in the hospital and takes him into his own future to see a few important events that he’ll miss because he never recovers from the stroke. It really emphasizes that you don’t have to be important to matter and encourages the listener to be kind in small ways. I really liked it.

This particular story is just so very British that it didn’t really connect with me. I normally appreciate Doctor Who’s very Britishness, but this one just didn’t work for this American.

Loved this one. It tells the story of The Fourth Doctor and Romana visiting a café owner who is actually a galactic tyrant who got body swapped with a café owner forty years ago and now lives out a much more meager existence on earth. The Doctor checks in on him every decade or so, and even though he resents the whole thing, it’s kind of working for the villain’s rehabilitation. It was clever, funny, and made me want to watch Tom Baker-era Doctor Who, so full marks.

There have been a couple of these audio stories that felt like someone read a Wikipedia article about something they found interesting and decided to build a Doctor Who story around it. I… have not really enjoyed them.

There’s an interesting, even Ellulian, moral to this story about falling in love with the means and not thinking about the ends, but I think the story surrounding that moral could have been better done.

It took me three times to start and follow through on this one. The science was too wibbly wobbly, and I’m not invested enough in the First Doctor to care about it on those terms.