tek's rating: ½

Doctor Who: Dreamland, on BBC Red Button
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This CGI serial aired in November 2009, consisting of one 12-minute episode and five 6-minute episodes. It's set between the second and third of Doctor Who's 2009 specials. (I'm not sure if it's canonical or not, though David Tennant does voice the Doctor.) I didn't see it until August 2019, on a DVD set of several animated Doctor Who adventures. (On the DVD, the episodes of "Dreamland" are edited together into a single seamless story.) The animation itself, in this serial, isn't all that great; despite not being Flash-animated, I'd say it rather looks like the sort of Flash-animated webseries you'd expect to have been made in the late 90s or early Aughts, not the late Aughts. But that's not important. I'm not even saying it's bad animation, but what's important is the story itself. Which... is kind of fun, I guess. And there's some real drama.

It begins with an alien spaceship being shot down outside Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The story then flashes forward eleven years. The Doctor arrives in the small town of Dry Springs, Nevada, and enters a diner, where he meets a waitress named Cassie Rice (voiced by Georgia Moffett, whom Doctor Who fans will surely remember from The Doctor's Daughter). He also meets Cassie's friend, Jimmy Stalkingwolf. Cassie has an artifact from the crash that happened in the opening scene, though she doesn't really believe it's from an alien ship. However, it activates when the Doctor examines it, and... some Men in Black soon show up to claim it. But the Doctor, Cassie, and Jimmy manage to escape with the artifact. After that... oh, so many things happen. They get attacked by a giant bug-like alien called a Viperox. They get taken to Area 51 (aka "Dreamland"), which is run by U.S. Army Colonel Stark (Stuart Milligan, who has done other Doctor Who work, including playing Richard Nixon in a couple of episodes). Stark wants to erase their memories, but they escape again, and find an imprisoned alien (of the type we'd call a "Grey"). Later, they meet another Grey. And um, Colonel Stark is working with the leader of an army of Viperox, Lord Azlok (David Warner), who has his own plans. And... yeah, that's pretty much all I want to say. Believe it or not, I've only scratched the surface of the plot. But of course, despite facing powerful enemies on more sides than I've even mentioned, the Doctor and his new friends win in the end.


micro-series index
CGI index

Whoniverse specials
Doctor Who: The Five Doctors * The Curse of the Fatal Death
K-9 & Company: A Girl's Best Friend
Doctor Who Mk II: Christmas specials * minisodes * The Infinite Quest * 2009 specials * Dreamland * The Day of the Doctor * 2022 specials
Doctor Who Mk III: 2023 specials
Sarah Jane Adventures: Invasion of the Bane * From Raxacoricofallapatorius with Love
docudrama: An Adventure in Space and Time