7.13: Dimensions in Time

In which this is gonna be the best timeloop Walford’s ever ‘ad.

Broadcast: November 1993

Watched: March 2020

“What’s going on, Doctor?”

Good lord I almost enjoyed that. It’s weirdly like a distillation of Doctor Who for the charity telethon audience – no story, no plot, no attempt to explain why the cast keep switching, just a load of gibberish in which the various Doctors and their various companions are menaced by various monsters. It’s like the folk memory of shitty Doctor Who, for an audience of people who don’t actually like Doctor Who: the closest we can never come to seeing the fan through normal people’s eyes.

Why on earth is it a 20 year time loop not a 30 year one? On the 30th anniversary? FFS, JNT. Weirdly enough the Eastenders crossover stuff doesn’t seem half so annoying as it did at the time because it’s just random characters now, not an attempt to pollute the purity of proper Who.

Logically those must be the real Brigadier and Mike as they seem separate from and better equipped than the other fake companions.

Oh, Sam West as the Rani’s companion, what a waste.

Why is Tom only half in it? [He does a sort of announcement thing, rather than interacting with anyone else: apparently he agreed to be in it, so long as he didn’t have to interact with anyone] Pertwee is actually really good in this. Davison pretty good. Of the companions, oddly I think Lalla is quite good in this. For once her inability to show human emotion actually feels like a nice contrast with everyone else’s OTTness.

Hilariously they forget to include Colin in the parade of Doctors at the end.

Anyway: like almost every fan and frankly I imagine everyone else who saw it on broadcast in 1993, have always hated this one. Never got over the disappointment of the fact that *this*, an extended sketch without jokes rather than an actual story, is what they did for the 30th anniversary. Now, though, where the slightly metatextual nature of Who is almost text, it’s almost sweet. And the 6th Doctor gets to meet the Brigadier! 

Anyway: next up, the real but slightly delayed 30th anniversary story, Paul Cornell’s No Future.