A Big Hand for The Doctor

The First Doctor is not my favourite at all (granted, I haven't watched all his episodes yet but still, I don't like him) and this story didn't change that.The plot was OK, I didn't care for the references to other doctors or the characters. Well, I did care for one, Aldridge. He seemed really interesting and I actually liked his interactions with the First Doctor.I thought the Epilogue was a nice touch, though.

Usually, in any story collection I read, there are: a few duds, one or two excellent stories, and a lot of mediocre filler. Not so here. I liked every single one of these stories. I even loved a couple of them. I thought I would not enjoy the stories featuring Doctors who I am not familiar with, but in every case the story opened up a world of the Doctor I just wanted to return to. My favorite stories were the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 10th Doctors' stories, if anyone is looking for a sampling without reading the whole omnibus. And yes, I am aware that it seems sad that one of my favorite stories JUST HAPPENS to feature my FAVORITE Doctor of all time, but the truth is Landry completely captured the dialog so perfectly that I felt Tennant jump off the page and ramble on (in a stage whisper) the need to confiscate a boat from a bunch of fictional characters. Genius!! And quite possibly, the other writers have captured the other Doctors as perfectly- I have not seen enough to judge. In fact, I found myself pulling out my companion guide to look some characters up. Ace sounds pretty kick ass.
I am glad I waited for this complete collection instead of plunking down 2 bucks for each “ebook” when they were released. I did read the stories back to back, but over a large spread of days.
So yay to fresh stories about the Doctor that were told well.