Happy New Year, Whittaker era! And how better to celebrate than with beefy beans and countless countdowns?

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It’s New Year’s Eve 2021, and for the third year running Jeff’s done a bunk, leaving Sarah to pick up the pieces as the family always expects her to because she still hasn’t found a nice man to settle down with, and the odds of him being the guy standing across the counter from her holding a 1930s Monopoly board bequeathed to him by his latest, possibly latest ex-girlfriend seem limited to non-existent.

Into this madcap Mancunian melodrama plop Team TARDIS 2.0, thinking they’re seven seconds and a brush with death away from a sentient beach holiday, but who instead of playing chess with crabs are forced into a four-dimensional chess version with Daleks, corridors, and somehow finding a way to survive a mega-meta-countdown before midnight finally comes and the clock strikes Thirteen.

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This is the second time we're discussing Eve of the Daleks on Who Back When. When you've listened to this one, check out our instant(ish) reaction review here (and below) as well.

The Master channels Salem to recruit a Rex Kwon Do class as human catnip. Dear God, Ace, get some actual friends!

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In the very last serial of Classic Doctor Who, The Seventh Doctor and Ace finally return to Perivale only to find the town in a dismal state: stray cats maraud the back gardens; the local youth centre has been turned into a fight club; and most of Ace’s old friends have vanished without a trace. The locals don’t appear particularly concerned, but Doc immediately gets on with his usual investigations and tracks down the most fake looking cat prop in Greater London.

The so-called Kitling is indeed behind the disappearances, but isn’t acting on its own accord. In fact, it is merely a pawn of The Master’s, who is controlling it from far away on the planet of the Cheetah People. Himself trapped there, The Master is sending Kitlings and Cheetahs to kidnap the youths of Perivale, use them as food and playthings for his new feline compatriots, and maybe as bait for Doc and Ace to come help him leave, possibly, not sure, perhaps we’ll get to the bottom of it in our review.

Doc and Ace are obviously kidnapped as well and taken to a quarry on the far side of the universe. There, they join forces with the surviving Perivale kidnappees and must somehow navigate the ultimate of Catch-22s: if they don’t fight, they can’t leave; if they do fight, they’ll turn into cheetahs; if they remain, they turn into cheetahs; if they turn into cheetahs, they can leave. We’re not doing it justice, Podcastland. It’s all really rather profoundly poignant stuff from the writer of Eaters of Light.

Sweet Buttery Kablammos, we've been DocPasting for a decade!!!

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Sweet Buttery Kablammos, we've been DocPasting for a decade!!!

Thank you for lending us your ears, dearest Podcastland. We never would have made it this far without your friendship and support.

Our journey down this temporal road is very nearly over, and we'll no doubt release a proper celebratory banter session to deliberate our decade of docpasting when we're all caught up. In the meantime, please accept these traditional Anniversary Bloopers.

Ciao-Ciao,

WBW

PS: Omg, TEN years!!!

Three Doctors, Time personified, and the undoing of pretty much every single character arc this season

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Doc ducks where Tecteun stuck and tries her luck in triplicate, torn between being tormented by Smarm and Assured, reuniting with the TARDIS under Kate Stewart’s protection in Williamson’s tunnels, and with no possible justification also part-materialising on Karvanista’s ship, which she promptly rams into the Sontaran forcefield to infiltrate their new headquarters.

Yup, this final Flux event has to wrap up in an hour, so expect ever-increasing levels of tension, excitement, inattentive guards, accessible shortcuts, cosmic coinkydinks, hasty exits, cursory comeuppances, speed dates with destiny, heartstring stunts, bullet-point scripting, keyword banter, physical impossibilities, general fobbing-off of watchers, and genocides.

Zompires, Nicholas Parsons, and the most awkward seduction in Classic Doctor Who

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Alan Turing really should have made a mad dash for the patent office, because World War 2 is coming to an end and some dude named Judson has ripped off the Enigma with his Ultima machine and is using it to not only decode enemy cyphers, but translate ancient norse inscriptions. The chap in charge, Commander Millington, has an obsession with the local norse legend of Fenric which he believes will ultimately win them the war, and happily endorses Judson’s experiments. 

In a plotline that hasn’t aged badly at all, meanwhile, some Russian army chaps led by a heroic and hunky Soviet charmer with perfect faith in his country’s ideology, have arrived to steal the Ultima machine and are evidently going to be our best hope for peace in act 3. Millington and Judson are about to Necronomicon the sh*t out of Fenric, however, and soon this ancient evil will be free to unleash an army of haemovores and transform a pair of local women into vampire sirens. Also, Doc and Ace arrive just in time for Ace to meet her mum, seduce a couple of GIs, and learn she’s been a pawn in Fenric’s game since the start.

The Mummy Returns, The Serpent is the Plain Foe, and Indiyaza Jones and the Candle of Tomb

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Three years have passed since Yaz, Dan and Jericho were Angeled back to the past, and she’s been Indiana Jonesing around the world with her new fam, trying desperately to hamfist a dotted red line composited onto a map into this episode’s b-plot. Bla bla bla something about the end of the world and tunnels through space and time.

Meanwhile, five seconds have passed since the Doc was Angeled, and it turns out she’s not an Angel anymore, they just petrified her for the pigeon shits and giggles, and to transport her to the one place Tecteun told her she should never come, courtesy of… well… that’d be Tecteun again. Yada yada yada Grand Serpent UNIT Kagels Sontarans.

An evolution-crazed diorama fan with a Neanderthal butler plots to take over the British Empire from his haunted mansion. And, wait, Ace was an arsonist?!

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Perivale, Greater London, houses some dark secrets, many of them in one particular house that Ace had the misfortune of encountering in 1983. But that’s all in the past, well the future, as Doc’s current focus is most definitely on said house’s Victorian period, and its occupants who only come out at night. No, they’re not vampires – that would make far too much sense – they’re just under the control of a rapidly-evolving alien called Smith, who has a Neanderthal for a butler. You know, that ol’ shtick.

Smith has plans, of a sort, and has also ensnared explorer/game hunter Redvers Fenn-Cooper to help him achieve them. Something to do with having lunch with the Queen and then taking over the Empire, yada yada yada. Somehow there’s also a supreme being, imaginatively called Light, kept in suspended animation as well. Light is a fan of the status quo, and much indeed has changed, nay evolved, since he last put a foot outside of his cozy bed. Will Doc manage to overcome both of these Grumpy Gooses or just fudge it all until the final credits roll? Only time I will never get back, can tell.

Inter-dimensional Arthurian warfare, helicopter ear sanitation and a demon's wet mouth

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Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (Bagels to his friends) has been many things: a soldier; a hero; a skeptic; a teacher; and, as seen in this very serial, the world’s champion. But his greatest accomplishment is perhaps being the cutest (but dimmest) husband in the galaxy. He might have the sweet banter down but there’s still plenty he can learn about putting his wife, Doris, before thoughts of glory. And he’s about to be truly tested because UNIT is calling him out of retirement to team up with the Doctor once again.

UNIT, in all of its misguided heroism, is wandering around the countryside with a nuclear weapon. So when a load of inter-dimensional knights pop out of Arthurian legend, it’s a good thing that Doc and Ace are on Earth to tame the situation (or blow things up). Throw some sorcery into the mix in the form of Morgaine, Battle Queen of the S'Rax, and they’ll have to work hard to stop the world being destroyed by the evil forces waging their own little war or the sheer stupidity of the human military forces.

Not wholly sensical, but probably the best use of Weeping Angels since Blink!

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In the, it must be said, fate-tempting second iteration of the village of Medderton, November 1967 sees Professor Eustacius Jericho planning on helping out his percipient object of study Claire Brown just as soon as he’s gathered enough data to explain some fascinating psychic anomalies. Outside, young Peggy has gone missing and nobody bats an eyelid at the vicar and the suspicious old lady not lifting a finger to join the search.

But batting eyelids is the last thing you should do on a cloudy night in rural Devon when the Weeping Angels are messing with your 9 Volts. Doc, Yaz and Dan get stuck in while the TARDIS reboots - Dan and Yaz get stuck in 1901 and Doc gets stuck in the basement with hordes of angels overrunning the upstairs, one reassembling like the T-1000 from a grate sketch, and as Claire rubs her eyes it turns out another may be already in the rheum.

Doc and Ace appear on Ragnarok’s Got Talent and allegedly it's an allegory of Doctor Who itself

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I’m reading this intro and I’d like to say… nope, the rapping stops right now! Ahem. The circus is in town and anyone who’s anyone is paying it a visit. Well, if you think a Vandal with a Batwing helmet or the World’s Most Annoying Fan are anyone that is. Of course Doc and Ace will be popping by as well, so it’s a good thing that Doc’s been practicing his juggling but not such a good thing that Ace hates circuses, especially the clowns.

Clowns are about all this circus has to offer, unfortunately. Unless you count the sinister talent competition, the previous acts that have tried to leave and died or gone mad in the process, the visiting explorer Captain Cook and his girl Friday (aka Mags), and the audience that just consists of Mother, Father and Creepy Girl. Something is afoot with those last three, if the naming didn’t clue you in but, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t the foggiest about that!