Doctor Who Feeds

The Carrot Juice Queen is back! Mel returns for more adventures with the Doctor in Series 14!

 

Star of stage and screen Bonnie Langford will once again reprise her legendary role as Melanie Bush as she returns to Doctor Who! This time she’ll be starring alongside Ncuti Gatwa who plays the Fifteenth Doctor in the new series.

Langford first entered the world of Doctor Who in 1986 as the companion of the Sixth and Seventh Doctors. Most recently she was part of the former companion support group in The Power of the Doctor. Intriguingly, Jodie Whittaker’s final episode as the Thirteenth Doctor saw UNIT’s Kate Stewart, who also returns next series, suggesting she was going to recruit Mel and others to work for her…

Langford made her West End debut at seven years old in Gone with the Wind at Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Since then, Bonnie has since gone on to lead an outstanding career. Having become a household name in shows like Just William, she seamlessly managed the transition from child actor. She’s starred in countless roles on both Broadway and West End, such as Chicago, 9 to 5 and Cats. Meanwhile, she’s reached a whole new 21st century audience with her award-winning role as Carmel Kazemi on EastEnders.

 

Back in the 80s Mel (right) helped the Doctor through his regeneration, but has to contend with an imposter! (left) (c) BBC Studios “Right back in the thick of the action, battling monsters and chaos and cliffhangers!”

Now Bonnie is back, as Melanie returns for another epic adventure!

Bonnie Langford said: “I am absolutely thrilled to be bringing Melanie Bush back. To be part of the exceptional cast, crew and production team led by the force of nature that is Russell T Davies is a career highlight. I’m so privileged and proud to have been a member of the Doctor Who family since the classic era and to be included in the new generation is phenomenal.”

Showrunner, Russell T Davies said: “Open those TARDIS doors wide, because Bonnie’s back! What an honour, delight and hoot to welcome back the character of Melanie, after too long away. And this isn’t just a cameo, Bonnie is right in the thick of the action, battling monsters and chaos and cliffhangers, right at the Doctor’s side, just like the old days.”

Details of exactly how Mel falls back into the Doctor’s life are still under wraps.

 

Doctor Who 60th Anniversary poster (c) BBC Studios Doctor Who returns in November with three 60th Anniversary specials on BBC One in the UK and Ireland, and Disney+ worldwide

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The long awaited collaboration between Doctor Who and iconic card strategy game Magic: The Gathering is almost here!

Fans of both Doctor Who and Magic: The Gathering have been exciting awaiting the crossover between the two ever sine it was first announced. And now the cards themselves are finally here. The Doctor Who decks form part of the Worlds Beyond strand of the fantasy card game. Worlds Beyond allows other science fiction and fantasy universes get to play in the Magic sandbox. But cards are compatible with the main game system so can be folded into other games. The Doctor Who cards form four ‘commander decks’ with everything you need to begin, though you can also buy individual packs containing smaller selections of random Doctor Who cards.

As you’d expect from Magic: The Gathering each card features gorgeous original art exclusive to the set.

 

The five land cards in the Doctor Who game, as represented by Vulcan (Plain), Marinus (Island), Zeta Minor (Jungle), Peladon (Mountain), and Tigella (Forest) (c) Wizards of the Coast Each deck contains:

• 100 Magic cards (2 Rainbow Foil Legendary Creature cards, 98 nonfoil cards)
• 10 Planechase cards
• 1 six-sided planar die
• 2-card Collector Booster Sample Pack (contains 2 Rainbow Foil or nonfoil special treatment cards, with 1 Common or Uncommon and 1 card of rarity Rare or higher)
• 1 foil-etched Display Commander (a thick cardstock copy of the commander card with foil etched into the card’s border and art)
• 10 double-sided tokens
• 1 deck box (can hold 100 sleeved cards)
• 1 Life Wheel
• 1 strategy insert
• 1 reference card

 

The four Doctor Who Commander Decks are: The art by FaJareka Setiwan for the Sarah Jane Smith card in the Blast fro the Past deck Blast from the Past

A Green-White-Blue deck containing Doctors, companions, allies, villains and monsters from 1963-1996, with the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith serving as the Commander Cards

 

The Doctor Who decks also feature planetary cards, including The Library. Art by Wei Guan (c) Wizards of the Coast Timey Wimey

A Blue-Red-White deck with a similar mix of characters from 2005-2013, with the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler as the Commanders.

 

The art by Lenka Šimečková for the Thirteenth Doctor’s ‘TARDIS Showcase’ card (c) Wizards of the Coast Paradox Power

A Green-Blue-Red deck of heroes and monsters from 2014-2022, with Commander Cards featuring the Thirteenth Doctor and Yasmin Khan. Wizards of the Coast have also said they “haven’t forgotten” the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors, but that details on those will

 

Martin Dominic’s art for the Davros card (c) Wizards of the Coast Masters of Evil

A Blue-Black-Red deck focusing on the bad guys. This is where you’ll find all the most well known villains and monsters from all across all six decades of Doctor Who, with Davros serving as the Commander Card.

 

The Eleventh Doctor in Magic the Gathering. Art by Justyna Dura (c) Wizards of the Coast Booster Packs

When you crack into one of these Doctor-approved Collector Boosters, you’ll find cards from classic and modern Doctor Who. They serve fans the most fantastic moments, characters, and places from throughout the beloved BBC series’ history.

Every pack contains cards with special treatments that celebrate what makes the show so iconic, including 2 Showcase TARDIS cards (featuring alternate-art and TARDIS-inspired frames), 6–7 Extended-Art cards (frameless cards that show off a card’s artwork in its full glory), tons of Rare cards, and more shiny foil cards than you can shake a sonic screwdriver at, including at least 3 of a special foil type—Surge Foil cards.

Each Doctor Who Collector Booster contains 15 Magic: The Gathering cards, with a total of 12 foil cards (3–10 Surge Foils and 2–9 Rainbow Foils) and 1 Surge Foil or Traditional Foil double-sided token. Every pack includes a combination of 7–14 cards of rarity Rare or higher and up to 7 Uncommon, up to 5 Common, and 1 Land cards.

You can also buy the Doctor Who Collector Booster packs by the box, each box containing 12 packs.

The decks and booster packs are available to pre-order now from Amazon, ahead of their release on the 16th of October. You can also pre-order the booster packs from Forbidden Planet.

You can see a special video preview of what to expect from the decks from one of the designers below:

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The Annual that never was arrives 27 years after the fact, in a lovingly observed recreation of the Eighth Doctor stocking filler that might have been

The Doctor Who annuals have always had a special place in the binary cardiovascular systems of fans. Or at least in the hearts of those who came to the show as children, with a hardback book of delights waiting next to the sock on a Christmas morning. The quality of the content they contained could be variable, and the connection to the show itself even more so. They were often the product of people who’d never seen the show alongside artists not allowed to use the likenesses of all the cast. But we wouldn’t have been without them.

Except, of course, we were. The last of the original run of annuals came out in 1985, and it was a full 20 years before the Doctor Who Annual made a triumphant return with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper on the cover. But that two decade gap in between remains an old wound. And one which Terraqueous Distributors are attempting to heal with unofficial annuals. As if they’ve drifted to us from the vortex from a parallel reality these attempt to reflect what such annuals would really have looked like if they’d appeared during the wilderness years. This time, it’s the turn of the Dr. Who Annual 1997 to vworp vworp its way to our reality.

 

The title illustration of The Edge of Oblivion, another of the text stories in the Unofficial Dr Who Annual 1997 (c) Terraqueous Distributors The unofficial hardback’s premise is that a 1997 annual would have followed on from the Radio Times comic strips

The main premise here is that an annual arriving in late 1996 would have, of course, featured the freshly minted Eighth Doctor, but also continued on from the Radio Times comic strips that year. Those teamed Paul McGann’s incarnation with two new companions – future space freighter crew woman Stacy and the Ice Warrior Ssard. Ssard in particular is a neat use of a medium to introduce a regular character that could never have worked on TV.

The use of Stacy and Ssard makes perfect sense in context, though it does make the project feel a little like a niche within a niche within a niche. Similarly, while the official annuals tried to be open and accessible as possible, a story here is enmeshed in the characters and continuity of Candy Jar Books’ Analysis Bureau books and the 1968 television serial The Invasion. Combined with the assumption of a working knowledge of the mid-90s Radio Times strips, it feels like the Annual is drawing the venn diagram of Doctor Who fandom remarkably tightly. It also slightly spoils that 1997 Annual illusion by using character not yet even created.

However, Stacy and Ssard are vividly enough sketched for the most part, and with enough of an interior life, that anyone with a less encyclopedic knowledge of the show, its spin-offs, and its spin-offs’ spin-offs, will still be happy enough to spend these 170 odd pages with them.

 

One of the seemingly impossible images of the TVM console made possible for the Unofficial Dr Who Annual (c) Terraqueous Distributors A tour of the Doctor’s TARDIS (or rather an exquisite replica) is a highlight of the non-fiction features

The book accurately recreates the familiar mix of illustrated short stories, comics, features and puzzles. Among the short stories, Infestation is a particular strand out. It deftly does the heavy lifting of trying to give new readers some background on Stacy and Ssard without seeming too exposition heavy. It’s also among the best at providing a window into that road untaken, mining the original series bible for the TVM or ideas like the Cybs, an incredibly vain Cyberman variant.

A highlight among the features is My TARDIS, My Home. It’s another entry that gives genuine mid-90s vibes, built on the kind of incredibly detailed photographs of ever inch of the TARDIS console that we might have gotten if the TVM had sparked a series. In this case the frankly gorgeous photos which illustrate the piece come courtesy of Allen Machielson’s simply astonishing fan built recreation of the set for his Whoseum. So beautiful is his work, in fact, that you might wish for slightly less of the accompanying text so you can soak up even more detail.

 

A selection of pages from the Unofficial Dr Who Annual 1997 (c) Terraqueous Distributors You can order the 177 page hardback now

As an exercise in generating nostalgia for something that never existed, the Unofficial Dr Who Annual 1997 is a fitting bit of time travel. With so much love for the era packed into so many pages, there’s inevitably the odd story which swings and misses. But if you’ve ever looked sadly at that twenty year gap on your bookshelf, wished we’d got more time with the cast of the Eighth Doctor comic strip, or just like some good, old fashioned, Doctor Who, then you’ll find plenty to enjoy here.

You’ll also be helping support a good cause, with none of the contributors to the annual receiving any of the money raised. Instead it’s all going to Refuge, the charity for supporting those affected by domestic violence.

The annual is available via a print on demand service an can be ordered here. There are also two variant covers available, details for how to order those are available on Terraqueous Distributors‘ Facebook group.

 

 

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Doom’s Day gets four short stories on both CD and Vinyl this August as the assassin meets Ian, Barbara, the Ice Warrior, the Ood and… the Twelfth Doctor!

Hired assassin Doom is on a mission to save her own life before Death catches up with her. If she can find the Doctor they might be able to help her – but where in Time and Space are they?

These four missions, The Steel Cascade, The Martian Dilemma, An Ood Halloween and Dark Space, take Doom to a Mediterranean cruise ship in 1966, the planet Mars in the distant past, San Francisco in 1999, and finally a desolate planet in a dying solar system.

Along the way she meets former TARDIS travellers Ian and Barbara, the mighty Ice Warriors, and Brian the Ood. But when a mysterious stranger with silver hair and sunglasses turns up, will he be Doom’s salvation? (Considering the Twelfth Doctor is pictured on the inner sleeve art, Blogtor Who can take a guess!)

Written by Darren Jones and read by Sooz Kempner, Jaye Griffiths and Silas Carson, these four original stories form part of the multi-platform Doom’s Day adventure to celebrate Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary.

The four stories in this collection take place between 4pm and 8pm on the worst, and possibly last, day of Doom’s life. Check out Blogtor Who’s complete hour-by-hour guide to discover exactly where they fit in.

 

The vinyl edition of Doctor Who: Doom’s Day – Four from Doom’s Day (c) Demon Records Demon Records also bringing the audiobook out on vinyl

Four from Doom’s Day will also be available on vinyl record from Demon Records. For that edition the four stories are split across 2 x 140g Translucent purple & blue vinyl LPs, in fully illustrated inner bags, are presented in an attractive
‘Doom-laden’ wide-spine outer sleeve.

• Side A – The Steel Cascade
• Side B – The Martian Dilemma
• Side C – An Ood Halloween
• Side D – Dark Space

The CD and download editions arrives in all good retailers on the 24th of August, while the vinyl record follows one day later on the 25th. Both are available for pre-order now.

 

Doctor Who; Doom’s Day (c) BBC Studios Doctor Who: Doom’s Day begins on the 5th of June on the official Doctor Who social media channels

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