Below are posts associated with the “Doctor Who Short Trips” series.
🎙️ radioblog: Quantum Heresy (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: The Shadow Trader (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: To Cut a Blade of Grass (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: The Lions of Trafalgar (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: The Old Rogue (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: Lost in the Wakefield Triangle (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: Penny Wise, Pound Foolish (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: A Star is Born (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: Seven to One (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
It took me a while to cotton on to some of the premise of this story—again, not being a Classic Who fan means mixing up characters means missing important details—and I’m still not sure I get all of it, but it was fun enough to give it some benefit of the doubt.
🎙️ radioblog: All the Fun of the Fair (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
Silly and fun, this story wasn’t life changing (and I have a lot of questions about the fictional logic of things), but I enjoyed listening to it.
🎙️ radioblog: The Riparian Ripper (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
At first, I thought this was going to be gruesome and dumb, but it ended up turning into that special Doctor Who genre of the wildly misunderstood monster, and I really enjoyed listening to it while shoveling ice out of our cul-de-sac.
🎙️ radioblog: Murmurs of Earth (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
The Voyager record as inspiration for a Doctor Who story really ought to work for me, but it didn’t land. Maybe I’m tired of this series, or maybe I should have paid more attention instead of listening while cleaning.
🎙️ radioblog: Wet Walls (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
I can’t say this one worked for me. I can kind of see the vibe that the author was going for, but I wasn’t a fan.
🎙️ radioblog: The Wondrous Box (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
TARDIS dematerializing is responsible for famous elephant death (which I didn’t know about before listening) is not the fun Doctor Who story the author thinks it is. This felt like it was an extended excuse to riff on a historical anecdote, and it didn’t land at all for me.
🎙️ radioblog: Pop Up (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
The idea behind this one is fun—not least a BASIC interface on the TARDIS—but it doesn’t really deliver.
🎙️ radioblog: The Five Dimensional Man (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
Fun homage to 50s sci-fi and old-timey radio shows. The performance and the conceit got me more than any of the plot did.
🎙️ radioblog: Letting Go (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
It can be surprising how dark and melancholy Doctor Who is sometimes, but this story does an excellent job of capturing that vibe in audio. Really enjoyed this one.
🎙️ radioblog: Critical Mass (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
Yet another story that doesn’t really land with me because I don’t know Classic Who that well.
🎙️ radioblog: The Doctor's Coat (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
Good mix of a clever idea that holds the story together, alien world-building (including an alien comics shop, which earns full marks on its own), and some semi-meta reflection on the importance of wardrobe in this franchise.
🎙️ radioblog: Sock Pig (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
I like parts of this, but there’s also some nonchalantness about grief that doesn’t work for me—and maybe a vibrator joke?
🎙️ radioblog: Chain Reaction (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
Even by Doctor Who’s famously wibbly wobbly standards, the rules of time travel make zero sense in this story, but it’s so fun that I don’t care.
🎙️ radioblog: Walls of Confinement (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
Some fun gags, but this is another case where I think not knowing the classic series prevents me from appreciating this. Or maybe it’s just not that interesting?
🎙️ radioblog: The Way Forward (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
Sometimes silly is good, and this story features a gorilla quoting Monty Python within a goofy but interesting premise, so I’m here for it.
🎙️ radioblog: 1963 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
This didn’t wind up being as meta as I’d hoped when I first realized where it was going, but it was fun and interesting.
🎙️ radioblog: Running Out of Time (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
Wondering if I should be reviewing these a volume at a time instead of a story at a time, but it’s too late now. This one felt like a Doctor Who story—if a bit darker than what we might see on TV—but that’s not entirely complimentary. Not bad, but nothing impressive in my book.