The Doctor Who New Year’s Eve special featured Daleks, Manchester and Irish comedian Aisling Bea. Despite a few missteps, it’s an entertaining time with genuine humour and some touching moments. More after the fold.

Season 13 of nu-Who is over and it is time to sum up Chris Chibnall’s experiment with the format based on covid-curtailed episodes. There’s a big mix of good and mediocre here and I could damn it with faint praise by saying I expected the finale to be worse or I could be more upbeat…

The New Year’s special provides a hit of Doctor Who but that is about all. The episode is inoffensive, it plays around with one interesting idea about the theatre of policing and the aesthetics of fascism but doesn’t know what to do with that. Above all, it exemplifies the frustrating aspects of the Chibnall era.…

The two part finale is over and can be summed up in a single word: divisive. There are positive reactions to the story, particularly focusing on the scale and dramatic stakes it provided. There are substantial negative reactions. When both veteran Doctor Who critic Elizabeth Sandifer and theocratic blowhard John C Wright hate something (for…

Part 1 of this two part finale to the season is very, very much a ‘part one’ sort of story. As a single episode it is barely coherent and difficult to evaluate. The most pertinent observation is that there is a lot going on, including a fascinating side story set in 1950s Ireland about a…