RogerBW's Blog

Andrew Rilstone recounts his reactions to the 2005 revival of Doctor Who.

Rilstone, like me, has been a fan of Doctor Who since it was on television the first time round. This is a collection of his blog posts about the revived series, along with some earlier writing (reviews of some of the original series stories) and with some gaps filled (he didn't write about season 6 at the time it was broadcast).

This isn't a per-episode recounting; rather, Rilstone wrote when he felt he had something to say, and often combined reactions to multiple episodes into a single post. There are definite gaps, but overall one can chart his gradually falling opinion of the show through the Davies era, his sudden re-appreciation when Moffat turned it explicitly into a fantasy programme rather than a science fiction one, and his disappointment as narrative coherence gradually collapsed into a morass of nifty individual scenes. But it's all vastly more detailed than that.

Rilstone pleasingly manages to avoid fannish orthodoxies, of both the "yesterday's episode was the best thing ever" and the "nothing can ever come close to the original series that I saw in the 1960s" schools. His opinions are well-argued, and his writing in general is a pleasure to read.

We do not always agree. This is good; if I only read people with whom I agreed, I'd be vastly more boring. But I can at least work out why he thinks what he does, and where our points of disagreement are.

The book is not readily available (I backed the Kickstarter campaign, and it should still be on Lulu) but I strongly recommend reading some of the posts at andrewrilstone.com.