Day 111: The Celestial Toyroom

A new serial brings with it a new nemesis, this time The Celestial Toymaker. He's introduced as something that we've never really seen before, a character with godlike powers who has captured the TARDIS crew. And not only that, but he's captured them presumably in order to meet the Doctor again, and to beat him in his twisted games. This whole fantasy like concept, with godlike creatures and deadly parlour games is a realm that Doctor Who has never travelled to, although it possibly should have. When the series was first proposed, it was deemed that there would by three possibilities for story ideas: trips to the past, trips to the future/alien worlds and 'side trips' where odd things would happen to the TARDIS crew, such as being shrunk down, or driven insane by the TARDIS going faulty. Here, we get what is arguably the third of these 'side trips', with a weird fantasy world and an all-powerful game player behind it all and it becomes apparent to see why these concepts haven't really occurred in Doctor Who before. It has previously been a show that, despite the science fiction elements, has had a degree of possibility and rational explanation behind it. Here, we've broken the rules and can do whatever we like because we're in fantasy land now, and we don't need things like rationality for us. It's an interesting experiment, and we'll see how it plays out over the course of the next couple of episodes.