Who are the impossible people behind the Impossible Podcasts? Meet the team as we discuss our favourite eras of Doctor Who, our geek interests and specialties, and our claims to geek fame!
What about you – what are your geek interests, and what else would you like to see us cover? Do you have any cool “claim to fame” stories? And what do you think of our first foray into video? Let us know below!
Are you a fan of Doctor Who‘s new format? Podcast commentator Swithun Dobson (a.k.a. “The Great Intelligence”, a.k.a. “The Beast”) certainly isn’t and turns his critical eye on the past to suggest how the show might evolve in future.
Deafening Silence, River Melodies and “shenanigans”. Are story-arcs the future of Doctor Who? Since Steven Moffat acceded to the showrunner’s throne, the series has tended toward more heavily-arced narratives. Last year it was the Crack, this year it’s the not-so-silent Silence.
For the purpose of this article a story-arc will be defined as a continuing narrative which is directly related to each individual episode over a significant period of time, normally a single series. This definition should be treated as the gold standard against which other series can be compared, to determine their arcedness. (Bad Wolf, for instance, wasn’t an arc – it was an afterthought).
James Willetts reviews the mid-series finale, with a somewhat less positive take than that of this week’s commentary team. Who do you agree with? Let us know in the comments!
If the first half of the episode was all about building the Doctor to be an all-destroying Action Hero, crushing everything in his path, the second was all about drawing him back from that path.
I’ve written a couple of times this season about my unease at the way the Doctor seems to solve problems with battles, and I’m glad that it was addressed here. I recognise that there is an intrinsic problem in television in showing conflict-resolution which doesn’t involve stuff blowing up. The problem many people have with much of Star Trek is the endless diplomacy. No one wants to see the Doctor changing people through dialogue and mediation with no running around and shouting. That’s boring, even if it is a better, more realistic route.
River Song’s identity is finally revealed as ‘A Good Man Goes To War’! The Doctor and the Last Centurion, otherwise known as Rory Williams, husband to a kidnapped wife, father to an abducted daughter, go chasing after Amy and Melody Pond.
Find out what we thought of the latest developments in the Moffat Master Plan in our commentary!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:18 — 33.5MB)
Join us as we discuss ‘The Almost People’s’ many twists and turns, as the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory attempt to escape the island and bring peace between humans and flesh, and face some startling discoveries of their own. We discuss everything from Roman Rory through to Moffat’s alleged sexism, and of course, that cliffhanger!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:23 — 53.8MB)
James Willetts reviews the twists and turns of ‘The Almost People’. Let us know what you think in the comments below. Don’t forget to download our commentary!
Cliffhangers seems to be the Doctor Who stock in trade these days, being dropped into episodes whether they make sense or not. Gone are the days when a cliffhanger ending meant an impending disaster to be resolved though, because these are more about setting up the next episode.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this week’s episode. On the one hand, I wasn’t at all a fan. It felt more like a slight miss than a big one and it never felt like a total disaster along the lines of ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’. It’s a big drop off from the greatness of the last few episodes. Yet at the same time this episode lives on unfairly thanks to another game-changing coda, presumably written by Moffat, that undoes much of what we thought we knew about the series so far and completely rewrites the Doctor’s motivation for this two-parter. Continue reading