Happy 60th Whoniversary, everyone! On this date in 1963, our favorite show premiered, and it returns this very Saturday with the first of four specials we'll get in 2023. I'll get back to reviewing regular Who next week (but come back this Saturday for the Children in Need minisode!), but let's ramp things up THIS week with a review of the 6 recent Tales of the TARDIS minisodes. Normally, I would have gone back and edited the stories they are attached to and listed them under versions, but this is a special occasion, so I think we deserve a bit of a celebration...
"Time is memory and memory is time."
IN THESE... Companions and Doctors are reunited to reflect on some of their adventures.
REVIEW: As Doctor Who is about the start again, with a major marketing push - Tennant and Russell T Davies reunite, Who on Disney+, the 60th Anniversary - it's not a bad idea to ease potential new viewers into past Doctor adventures using surviving actors to present their eras. Omnibus episodes (which is how a lot of us first experienced Doctor Who on PBS) with introductions, but doing them in character makes them special. RTD wrote the first one (with Doc5 and Tegan) and introduces the neat idea of the TARDIS dreaming, and in those dreams, reaching out to its former occupants across time (including versions of the Doctor) and allowing them to share conversations, memories, and in some cases, even new adventures. The dream TARDIS is a bric-a-brac collection of various versions of the ship interior (have fun with the Easter Eggs), with the 13th Doctor's crystal console columns in miniature as a camp fire. The exterior looks transparent - it really is a dream.
Since Tegan, Ace and Docs 5, 6 and 7 all appeared in The Power of the Doctor, they provide natural access for younger audiences. Jo Grant and Clyde Langer, bookending a 3rd Doctor story, both appeared on Sarah Jane Adventures. But the Tales get to introduce a lot of other companions to the new era, including Peri, Steven, Vicki, Jamie and Zoe. They're also not shy about telling us what these characters have been doing since their original runs, sometimes even alluding to Big Finish audio adventures! I love it when Doctor Who embraces its extra-canon. And indeed, the 7th Doctor even comments on multiple timelines, where he might regenerate or might not, and that's how the Doctors can appear much older here. In other words, don't worry about it. It's all a dream anyway.
And a sentimental one. RTD wrote the first one and set the tone. Whatever the relationships really were in the original series, here there's a sense of a warm reunion and of companions saying how much they loved the Doctor. Some stories are recontextualized with fan lore - Vicki describing herself a the Doctor's surrogate granddaughter was obvious to us, but never said onscreen, for example, and Peri and Doc6 have conversations about Varos' prescience and on how it set up Ms. Brown to become a "warrior queen" (which is a stretch). But it's a sentimentality that managed to reach me. Like the best emotional moments of the RTD era, most of the shorts brought me to the brink of tears. Whether that's Vicki invoking the First Doctor, Jo's special guest, Clyde talking about Rani, or any of the companions discussing their feelings in ways they never could between 1963 and 1989. If you've taken the entire trip and have invested in each of these eras and characters, it really gets to you. If you haven't yet, hopefully these conversations and episode selections will open the door to discovering the stories that will soon become available to a new market.
Oddly no 4th Doctor, but if they're planning to eventually do more of these, one could imagine a short run of 4th Doctor omnibi, since his era is the best remembered and has many great classic stories.
VERSIONS: As intended, all the scenes bookend omnibus editions of classic serials and are meant to be watched in conjunction with Earthshock, The Mind Robber, Vengeance on Varos, The Three Doctors, The Time Meddler and The Curse of Fenric.
REWATCHABILITY: Medium-High - They load in a lot of new continuity for Whovians, but mostly, these are poignant reunions of your favorite characters - with the promise of more!
Comments