Book 4 in a set of compilations of a Dr. Who blog which deconstructs, reviews and critiques all the Dr. Who episode from 1963. This book covers 1975-1978 my doctor Tom Baker. I have no plans to read the first three but I did buy volume 5. Dense and detailed giving more significance to the television show than perhaps it deserves but a fascinating take nonetheless. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2223888.html

This is of course my favourite era of Old Who, the run from Robot to Talons of Weng-Chiang, and so I read the book with more than the usual degree of interest (also looking to see if my brother is quoted again - he is, in the essay on Brain of Morbius but talking about Terror of the Zygons).

As usual I found myself nodding in satisfied agreement 90% of the time and blinking in surprise 10% of the time. Sandifer's deconstruction of The Android Invasion, for example, is brutal; his defence of Planet of Evil a little surprising. Almost fifty pages out of 320 total are devoted to a single story - but The Deadly Assassin was my favourite Old Who story anyweay, and Sandfer convinces that there is far more going on within those 100 minutes than I had realised (and also makes it seem pretty obvious in retrospect). I also very much liked the "Time Can Be Rewritten" entries on spinoff books (Managra, System Shock, Asylum, Corpse Marker and Eye of Heaven), all of which I had read and most of which I enjoyed. And the penultimate piece on The Valley of Death, a Big Finish "lost adventure" by Hinchcliffe, points out some general problems with the era as a whole. Basically this series - in the definitive ebook / print version - joins About Time as key material for the inquiring Whovian. ( )