The Best Random Doctor Who Podcast Has a New Home on the Web
The Best Random Doctor Who Podcast Has a New Home on the Web
Pull To Open, a podcast that randomly bounces through the entire TV canon of Doctor Who, has regenerated into pulltoopen.net on Substack.
Hey! If you’re new here, we’re Pull To Open. As we say at the beginning of almost every one of our podcasts, we’re Pete Pachal and Chris Taylor: a couple of guys, a couple of journalists, a couple of Doctor Who enthusiasts who have been watching, thinking about, and covering the show for a long time. One day we decided to record our thoughts in audio form, and boom — we had a podcast.
But Doctor Who podcasts are more common than goatees on evil Time Lords. To stand out from the crowd, we needed a thing. Our thing. What’s our thing? Well, there it was, staring us in the face like some kind of discarded TARDIS component on the streets of Argolis: the Randomizer.
Yes, there are plenty of (well, a few) podcasts out there that aim to review the entire run of Doctor Who, but only one that dares to do so in entirely random order. That’s us, and — if you count our first few non-random outings — we’ve been doing it since early 2020.
Every week we go deep into a new story, picked at random from the entire Doctor Who canon — both Classic and Modern. That is, when we’re not taking one of our several “short trips,” podcasts where we zero in on something weird or eyebrow-raising about the show, like who counts as a true companion, or what the best cold opens are.
We have lots of fun along the way, guessing Doctor Who story titles in the form of emoji, summarizing the at-times-convoluted plots of every episode in record time, and answering questions that have been nagging fans forever such as: where’s the Clara splinter in every story? We hope you join us on our random journey at one of the many places you can interact with us, like our YouTube channel, TikTok, and now this site, powered by Substack.
With our new home on the web, we’re going to take things to the next level by sending our notes on the stories we talk about — exclusively for newsletter subscribers. In the future, we plan to offer even more, including contests, merch and even meetups. Want to help support all that? Please head over to our Patreon and consider becoming a Patron.
Of course, we’re still a podcast, and we would really appreciate it if you’d review the show — especially on Apple Podcasts. It really does help.
You can also follow us all over the place, including YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and Bluesky. You name it, we’re probably on it.
But most of all, we plan to keep bringing you great commentary on this incredible 60-year-strong show called Doctor Who. And looking great doing it.
Hey, at least we’re halfway there.