Holy Smokes! Who Back When is 2 years old! It must be time for some celebratory bloopers.
Two wildly different milestone stories, neither canonical, one rather pants, the other quite amazing. All right, here we go!
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We sit down to discuss two bits of Whovian lore that coincided with milestone anniversaries. Dimensions in Time, about which truthfully there isn’t much to say, and Scream of the Shalka which Stars Withnail and Claudius and is pretty terrific.
Dimensions in Time (30th Anniversary)
The Rani has kidnapped one specimen of every species in the universe, except for the Time Lords, of whom she has two disembodied Doctor heads, and plans to clone those specimens and fashion a time tunnel along the Greenwich meridian, and thereby trap The Doctor in a so-called “20 year loop” that doesn’t quite loop so much as have every living Doctor and companion play swapsies on the set of EastEnders while all the aliens in the BBC wardrobe department make an appearance as the Rani’s army of ineffectual baddies that threaten but never attack The Doctors because why would they, The Rani has a laser cannon, and do we ever find out what happens to the disembodied heads or Leela’s clone, no, ok then, never mind.
Scream of the Shalka (40th Anniversary)
Shaggy and Logan-5-in-a-suit stumble upon a fresh meteorite, out of which springs a Shalka, a bio-plasmic, lava-based creature intent on subjugating enough of mankind in order to use them to crank up climate change to the max, end the World, and thereby make it comfortably habitable for itself. But a brand new one-of-a-kind Ninth Doctor (no, not that one) has just been summoned to Earth by the Time Lords to deal with the situation. He’s grumpy and sardonic, sarcastic, witty and debonair. He’s ostensibly a sober, twin-hearted, regenerating Withnail, although he’s working on remedying that pesky sobriety, and you’ll not want to miss him, Podcastland!
I saw Dimensions in Time for the first time about a month ago. It was good to see everyone again. That’s kind of all I have to say about that. It’s very much a no-budget charity production. Not gonna rate that.
I’ve tried to watch Scream.. a few times now (again, like a month ago most recenly) and never made it past the first episode. I’m glad it gets better. I’ll make an effort to watch the rest now. Thank you.
It’s a shame that the BBC seems to have all but abandoned it. It would take one person about half an hour to convert it to a modern video format and re-post. It’s probably on a DVD or Bluray somewhere but on the official Dr Who website, there’s just no hope of playing it.