Doctor Who: The Giggle

 "I gambled with God and made him a Jack-in-the-box..."

Yes, I know: I, of all peopole, am a day l with his ate for Doctor Who. But, much as my Who fix is an imperative, a necessity,  a matter of life and death... yeah, my child comes first. Anyway, this is going to be a long one. But let's just start by saying that it's a tour de force of writing, characterisation, direction and production, like both of its predecessors this 60th. We even get Mel, getting to be a genius working for UNIT, Bonnie Langford being brilliant, and even a potted history of life from Sabalom Glitz onwards... and is it hinted that they were an actual couple? Bizarrely, though it shouldn't, I think that sort of works. Anyway...

Love the pre-titles with the Toymaker in 1925 with his creepy shop, the John Logie Baird stuff, and the captivatingly evil charisma from Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker. I like the way the Toymaker is called out for a casually racist comment that exactly echoes one made to Waris Hussein in An Adventure in Time and Space, surely a deliberate nod. It's also perhaps a nod to the hints of archaic racist tropes that hover around the character; if you're not sure what I mean, Google the words "Celestial" and "Chinese". I'll wait. Incidentally, I love the brief colourised clips of William Hartnell and Michael Gough. 

Of course, The Celestial Toymaker is, I have to say, total pants, just game after game with no real sense of drama or purpose. The games here are so much different, and creepy. That poor man made into a marionnette (not saved, I note, from this existential body horror), and Donna's being attacked by the family of ventriloquist dummies. Brr. The Toymaker may not have been a great villain in 1966 (he really wasn't!), but he is now. The concept was always potentially great. Now, at last, it's been done properly. And I love how RTD refuses to do anything so mundane as explain what the Toymaker is. The whole point is that he's beyond all logic and explanation, and therefore terrifying.

Even better, this episode is about something. People acting so belligerently in 2023 is simply the Toymaker having people behave in real life as they behave online, a nice touch. And the anti-Zeedex conspiracy theories, with the obvious subtext... yeah, chef's kiss. The Toymaker even declares during the climax how he loves the capacity of humanity to lose themselves in their gaming headphones (not much of a gamer myself in that sense. Pokemon Go, on the other hand...), plus "the mind games- the dating, the ghosting". This is the perfect way of using fantasy to get away with social commentary. Oh RTD, how we've missed you.

Anyway, we get UNIT again. Still led by Kate. Shirley is still there. Are we, perhaps, looking at a recurring UNIT gang, 70s style? Potentially including Donna (I love how she casually gets the job!) and even Mel? It's an exciting prospect, one of many arising from this episode.

The conclusion, with the bi-regeneration and two Doctors, really shouldn't work. Describe it out of context and it's terrible. Except, with RTD writing... it isn't. It's brilliant. Ncuti Gatwa is superb, of course, but more on him at Christmas. The Fourteenth Doctor is tired, full of the weight of history, and facing burnout. The Toymaker's puppet show illustrates it nicely... the guilt of Amy and Rory, of Clara, of Bill, of the Flux, of that thing last episode with the salt. As Donna hasn't stopped telling him, from the very start, he needs to stop. And now he has a family, on Earth, which is lovely, much as he keeps taking people on naughty little TARDIS trips. It's a nice touch that Mel, being an orphan, gets included too. And, being that this is a second Earth exile of sorts, it's a nice little Easter egg that the Doctor tells a little anecdote about the planet Delphon, where they communicate with their eyebrows. That joke is fifty-four years old next month...!

Much as I'd say the chance of the Fourteenth Doctor and the Nobles (sadly Wilf had just a cameo, understandably...) reappearing in some way is pretty much 100%. Good. Because the characterisation has been exquisite, not least with the Doctor accepting his regeneration without self-indulgence this time. 

This is pretty much perfection. The bar has been set high... but I've every confidence that Ncuti Gatwa's debut is totally going to smash it.

Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder

 “Oddsbodkins!”

There were all sorts of predictions for this episode, weren’t there? Returning Doctors and all sorts. But that was never going to happen. Multi-Doctor stories are a logistical nightmare for the writer, and become all the more so with the onward march of time as new Doctors are cast and old ones age.

Plus, this is the start of an RTD renaissance. What better way to celebrate the 60th than by looking forward instead of back? By all accounts the ratings for last episode looked good overnight on the BBC but within a week, as iPlayer was factored in, they began to look stratospheric. And it seems the show has been a massive international hit on Disney Plus too. Why alienate all these new viewers with excessive continuity and fanwank? It’s enough of a nod to us oldies to just mention the HADS, something newbies won’t even realise is a reference. Anyway, Doctor Who is back, and popular. Happy 60th.

Anyway, I loved this episode. After last week’s fairly trad alien invasion story with lots of characters and characterisation, this time we get something very weird and different, showcasing the variety of what the show can do. It’s all delightfully creepy, not only in the sense of jump scares but in concepts that make you go “brr”. The edge of the universe stuff is superficially a bit Planet of Evil but the details, and the plot, are very, very different.

The first half of the episode felt like an old-fashioned Part One in the best possible sense, until the scary weirdness started happening, built up perfectly. Making the antagonists shapeless copies of the Doctor and Donna was brilliant. This episode had mood, scares… and drama, with lots of great character scenes between the Doctor and Donna. After all, why not take advantage of the fact you have a two-gander of an episode with such great leads?

Literally the only other characters are Isaac Newton- did you recognise the actor from RTD’s It’s a Sin?- and Wilf. Yes, Wilf. About whom more next week.

This was almost a bottle episode… but, excessive CGI aside, it didn’t exactly look cheap. This is a reminder that RTD can write characters to perfection, yes, but he can also scare the pants of us. May he continue to do so for a long, long time.

Doctor Who: The Star Beast

 "You can wear a suit that tight up to the age of thirty-five... and no further!"

SPOILERS, obvs.

Oh, RTD, how I've missed you. It's so many years since I've watched an episode of Doctor Who with characters who act and talk about real people, and whom we care about. Yes, we know Donna, Sylvia and Shaun, and that's a nice shortcut, but RTD really can write people, and family dynamics, and those little bits of character subtlety.

That, more than anything, is why this episode is so bloody good. The actual alien threat plot is not the point, cool though it is to see Miriam Margolyes voice Beep the Meep- it's literally an off-the-shelf plot from a very early issue of Doctor Who Weekly for which Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons get credited. No; what matters is Donna, and fixing the cruelty done to her in wiping her memory of all the cool adventures she had. Coming right on the heels of Tales of the TARDIS, which returned the memories stolen from Jamie and Zoe by the Time Lords, Donna now gets similar treatment.

Even better, the way Donna's memories are returned is not a cop out. The moment is earned, and comes from real, human drama centring on Donna's Daughter Rose (nice name). I'm a cis middle-aged man, and it's not my place to comment on what it must be like to be a trans person in the UK in 2023, a nation blighted by culture wars and whose prime minister has made a speech saying people should not be "bullied" for denying trans peoole exist. But the characterisation here feels real- Donna is a wonderful, loving mother and, while Sylvia sometimes gets things wrong, she loves her grandaughter and tries hard. But making all this the resolution is so bloody clever. 

It's so wonderfully nostalgic seeing David Tennant and the whole gang again, both in front of the camera and behind it- this was the first time this year I'd actually watched telly live, as broadcast, albeit on iPlayer- but Doctor Who (aside from General Elections) is literally the only prpgramme for which I treat iPlayer as anything other than a streaming service. Yet it's not just nostalgia. This is bloody good, contemporary telly, calculated to appeal to a general audience. The script is witty and human, the budget looks enormous, and Rachel Talalay's creative direction looks literally cinematic. Plus, the climactic scenes with the Doctor and Donna feature what is literally the best and most fun technobabble ever.

We get to see UNIT, and new character Shirley, UNIT's newest scientific adviser who fires missiles from her wheelchair, is very cool, and is played by the awesome Ruth Madeley from Years and Years. We get teased about both Kate Lethbridge Stewart... but we don't get to see them, not yet. Likewise, Beep the Meep hints cryptically at a "boss", but so far there's no big, Bad Wolf-like continuing thread. Oh, and the new TARDIS interior is at once cool, enormous, oozing high production values and... blatantly based on the DWM comic strip from the early '90s, which is certainly no bad thing.

Doctor Who is back. Properly. Oh yes.

Doctor Who: The End of Time

Part One

“Some new man goes sauntering away. And I’m dead.”

Oh my God. I took five pages of notes. This is going to take aaages to write. Best get started.

Crikey, it’s the end. You can tell this story’s important because it’s the only two-parter of the RTD era not to have individual episode titles. It’s also notable that a large proportion of the dialogue is in rather more heightened and literary language than usual, with large chunks of it having a metrical rhythm. This is partly due to the presence of a narrator (and, with the Elder Ood, a narrator within the narration!), but only partly. The language, and the fast-paced, highly structured narrative which takes place in more different regions of time and space than usual, gives this whole story a very rich, epic feel.

We’re bombarded from the start with a lot of evocative figures and themes- Wilf, the Master, bad dreams, the Master, a cathedral at Christmas Eve with the TARDIS as part of a stained-glass window. And the first of many appearances of a mysterious woman whose identity is never quite revealed. The presence of so many meaningful signs and portents in the pre-credits teaser leads us to expect something big. And this intensifies once the Doctor lands on the Ood-Sphere. Although there’s been a gap between stories, his behaviour follows on directly from The Waters of Mars. He’s been procrastinating, unable to accept what he knows to be his fate. He’s married and shagged Queen Elizabeth I purely to avoid being here. He knows he’s been naughty for dragging his heels, and he’s sheepish. You can tell from the gabbling. And Ood Sigma gives him a right telling off: “You should not have delayed!”

Called to the headmaster’s office, the Doctor is punished by being forced to share in a very, very bad dream: the Master is not completely dead and, in another appearance from the ultimate RTD meme, “Something vast is stirring in the dark.”

It’s glossed over a little, but the extrajudicial jailing of Lucy Saxon suggests something extremely sinister about the UK of the Whoniverse, even by comparison with the real contemporary UK, with its 42 day detention and threatened identity cards. Along with the sinister nature of UNIT, this is something which will probably come to date the RTD era. Under the Moff and the Coalition, this sort of thing seems to have gone out of fashion.

I know I’m always going on about RTD’s brilliant economy of storytelling, but the way he manages to give us so much exposition so quickly yet clearly is brilliant. The whole story behind the Master’s resurrection is explained very quickly, and the story doesn’t slow down one bit.

The Doctor runs, but events are already underway. He’s too late. Interesting (particularly as I’m currently halfway through Timelink) that his timeline and the timeline of the narrated events proceed at the same rate, and the Doctor can’t arrive at a point before the prison has exploded.

John Simm is fantastic from his very first scene, as bonkers as ever but so, so dangerous. Lucy sabotages his rebirth, but then we switch to some other chess pieces: Joshua Naismith and his daughter are themselves admirable examples of RTD’s storytelling economy. Their role in the story (the Tobias Vaughn role, as it were) is simple and functional, but they’re allowed enough personality to feel as though they’re more than that. We also have Wilf and the “Silver Cloak”, including the fantastic June Whitfield. Oh, and President Obama is about to broadcast to the world his plan for magically ending the recession. Er, how would one do that, then? Possibly the most far-fetched element in the entire story, this.

Meanwhile, the Master is homeless, in a hoodie, dying, stuck looking like the ex-prime minister, very, very hungry, mad as a biscuit, and very, very scary. And he bangs a drum. Four times. Just as inside his head. Interestingly, though, he’s not the one in control of events at this point. Neither is the Doctor, who is distracted at this point by Wilf and his mates.

The Doctor’s chat with Wilf, fantastically acted by both Tennant and Bernard Cribbins, is a big moment. There’s something about Wilf; he attracts coincidences. The Doctor confides his feelings to Wilf, and admits for the first time that regeneration “still feels like dying”. We see Donna, too, and her heartbreakingly humble life: “She’s making do.” And he even admits the things he’s been driven to do of late, with no Donna to stop him. “I thought it would be better alone. But I did some things that went wrong. I need…”

The ensuing chat between the Doctor and the much-diminished Master is most interesting, too. “I had estates,” says the Master, shortly before he’s kidnapped. “Do you remember my father’s land back home? Pastures of red grass stretching far across the slopes of Mount Perdition.” RTD is so good at this sort of poetic, throwaway texture. The drums are getting louder… and the Doctor can hear them. The drums are real. We know this will be significant.

Wilf sees the mysterious woman again, on the television, where only he can see her. “Only you stand at the heart of coincidence”, he’s told. He’s also told to take a gun, a highly charged item as discussed in relation to this programme! Inevitably, the Doctor is soon along to collect him, officially the oldest ever companion at 80. I love his reaction to the TARDIS.

It seems Naismith acquired the “Immortality Gate” from Torchwood after its recent fall. It seems to be some kind of medical device. He wants to use it to make his daughter immortal, never a good idea in Doctor Who. But along his underlings are a couple of Vinvocci spies, who are particularly fun characters. I love Addams and her constant exasperation.

The cliffhanger is great, as everything is reversed. From a position of powerlessness, suddenly the Master is everyone on the planet. And our narrator is revealed. It’s Timothy Dalton! He’s the Lord President of the High Council! The Time Lords are back!


Part Two

“There’s an old Earth saying, Captain. A phrase of great power and wisdom, and consolation to the soul in times of need.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Allons-y!”

We begin with a flashback to Gallifrey, and a nice CGI shot of the Citadel, the orange skies, and the mountains. Fanwank heaven! These are recognisably Time Lords, although updated, with CGI and everything. The shot of the High Council from the end of last episode reminds me very much of the Imperial Senate from the Star Wars prequels, which I must apologise for mentioning. They are, I’m sure we all agree, abominations, and I shall not mention them again.

Gallifrey is a lot more bad-ass than it used to be. Timothy Dalton’s Lord President is prone to zapping people for disagreeing with him, and there’s a rather cool prophetess, possibly inspired by the Pythia from the New Adventures, although of course she looks very much like one of the Sisterhood of Karn.

After a bit of a worry over Donna, we get another flashback of the Master as a child, technically a flashback to another flashback from The Sound of Drums. It’s recursive occlusion from Castrovalva all over again.

The Master realises; with six billion of him, he can finally triangulate the source of the drums. And we return to Gallifrey, where we get some highly satisfying answers. Oh, and in our last chance for some slapstick we get the “worst rescue ever”. I like these Vinvocci. The Doctor and Wilf are aboard their ship, and Wilf gets to gaze out of its window upon the Earth, something he’s always wanted. That’s the thing about RTD; he can do exciting, fast-paced, big stories such as this one, and yet still have time for genuinely affecting character moments. The conversation between the Doctor and Wilf is deep and insightful, with the brilliance lying in what remains unsaid. The Doctor opens himself more with Wilf than we’ve ever seen him do before. He sees the absurdity of his rejection of Wilf’s proffered gun, accepting that he’s taken lives and, which weighs heavily on his conscience at the moment, manipulated others into taking their own. And yet the symbolism of not carrying a gun has become important to him. Much as I would argue that this has only been the case since the 1980s, this knowingly hypocritical semi-pacifism has become an interesting and ambiguous side of his character.

But… the Master reveals that the source of the drums is a White Point Star. The Doctor knows this means the Time Lords are back. All the above goes out of the window and the Doctor just takes the gun. Things are clearly very, very serious. But before the seriousness starts we get a rather cool scene in which Wilf gets to fire lasers from a spaceship.

There’s another cool RTD moment; only two Time Lords vote against their plan, and they “will now stand as witness to their shame, like the Weeping Angels of old.” Like so much of the dialogue in this story, this is wonderfully poetic. Unfortunately, there’s another moment which is considerably less cool; the Doctor jumps several hundred feet, lands hard, and is only slightly hurt. WHAT? I just had my head in my hands at this point. We know the Doctor is vulnerable to gravity; that was the whole point of his regeneration in Logopolis! This is just silly. How can such a good writer as RTD, in such an otherwise excellent script, possibly commit such a howler? Perhaps he needs someone to stop him. This is a crying shame. It wouldn’t be so bad if everything else (except perhaps the end, which we’ll come to) wasn’t so perfect.

But the pieces are in place; the Doctor, the Master, and a Lord President who only now, oddly, is revealed to be Rassilon himself. And with a wave of his staff he casually undoes the Master’s takeover of the people of the Earth. The Doctor makes clear the scale of the horrors to come; Gallifrey is fading back intro existence, a fiery orange world which dwarfs the Earth. And we face horrors such as “the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Tragedies, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been-King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres”. Again, so wonderfully poetic. And deadly; the Time Lords intend to destroy time, and exist on a higher plane as beings of pure thought. This is how they planned to end the Time War, and why the Doctor had to destroy them.

The Doctor is unsure, pointing the gun first at the Master, then at Rassilon. The Master’s “You never would, you coward!” seems to be a deliberate echo of the last regeneration- a very nice touch. Then the Doctor sees the mysterious woman, reacts, reflects, and simply shoots the machine which links this room to Gallifrey. And the Master, angry at what Rassilon has done to his life, seems to sacrifice himself to gain his revenge. It’s a dramatic ending. And suddenly the Doctor is alive, and fine, and can’t believe it.

And then there are four knocks. And silence. And another four knocks. Wilf is still inside the booth, waiting to be flooded with radiation. His only hope of survival means the Doctor’s death. It’s the perfect storm, and very cruel. The Doctor immediately realises the bitter irony, and reacts with rage. I’m reminded of what Lady Shelley said in her review of The Waters of Mars about the Doctor going through the seven stages of grief; is this where he finds acceptance? It’s certainly a brave speech. The Doctor is allowed to be very self-centred here, and even unlikeable. We even get a “Well, it’s not fair.”

The Doctor is dying, and we get an extended series of visits to his mates. Yes, this is self-indulgent, and yes, it was an idea that should have been nipped in the bud but, as so often with RTD, the execution is so brilliant that it sort of works. So we get to see Mickey and Martha, now married (what?!!) looking at the Doctor at a distance, as though he were the Watcher. There’s a brief moment with Sarah Jane. And even Captain Jack, with Alonso, in a Mos Eisley-style cantina filled with monsters of the RTD era. We even, oddly, get Jessica Hynes as “Verity Newman”. And Donna’s fate actually kind of works; the winning lottery ticket, bought with a pound “borrowed” from the late Geoffrey Noble. Appropriately, given Tennant's recent role as Hamlet, Ood Sigma sings him to his sleep: “This song is ending, but the story never ends.” One last poetic flourish from RTD. And it’s over. I think the Doctor’s last line is misjudged, and it’s a shame that the regeneration is the same as last time, but what a send-off. Although why the TARDIS should be set on fire I have no idea.

This is, for the most part, sublime. It’s only the falling scene and the self-indulgence of the final scenes, something almost redeemed in the execution, that disappoints. But this still manages a 5/5, if not a particularly high one. “Event” stories often disappoint, but if we take out the negatives, everything else is truly magnificent here.

Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

The Stolen Earth


“Rose is coming back. Isn’t that good?”

The sight of a milkman shows us things are about to happen, Survival-style…and then immediately we’re straight into the Big Things Happening. Earth has disappeared! Martha’s back, with UNIT, in the USA! Torchwood! Sarah Jane and Luke. My, even RTD himself is getting a bit irritated with that fanfare of Mr Smith’s.

Things pretty much go on like this, really. More than any other episode this one is constantly “up”. This is what happens when an episode of Doctor Who gets a sugar rush. We get Wilf and Sylvia. Rose! The Shadow Proclamation. Ooh. Thing is, it’s nice to see the Judoon again but the whole Proclamation is a bit disappointing, little more than a “posh name for police”. Still, we learn the truth behind all this season’s missing planets, sort of. “Someone tried to move the Earth once before. Long time ago.” So the Daleks are trying to attract the Doctor’s attention by means of continuity references to The Dalek Invasion of Earth? Well, why not…

The excitement keeps on coming. Davros! Dalek Caan! And he’s utterly doo-lally, courtesy of a particularly great performance by Nick Briggs! Not all bees are aliens, apparently. Good to know. And I love Wilf’s paint gun. “My vision is not impaired!”- this is RTD’s last chance to play with the Daleks and he’s bloody well going to have fun with them. Quite right too. And the Doctor was taken to see the Medusa Cascade when he was “a kid, about 90 years old”.

Things now get serious. Donna has to reassure the Doctor that things are going to be ok. Harriet Jones (yes, we know who she is) heroically sacrifices her life to bring the Doctor to Earth. Rose can’t manage to become anyone’s friend on Space Facebook.

We’re told Davros died in the Time War. The Doctor is devastated to see him again. He’s now played by Julian Bleach, who is fantastic, instantly better than anyone since Michael Wisher. The mask in particular is far superior to anything we’ve seen before, with facial muscles and everything. It seems Dalek Caan managed to get into the Time War, time locked though it was, but at the cost of his mind. And Davros created a whole new race of Daleks from his own cells, Kaled cells, so they’re pure-blooded Aryan Daleks. Urgh. Of course, Dalek Caan predicted all this. In no way will these predictions rebound on the Daleks in an ironic way. Oh no.

We end with the Doctor and Rose running towards each other’s arms, but the Doctor is shot by a passing Dalek. And we end with the ultimate cliffhanger. So who’s he going to regenerate into next week? My money’s on that Simon Cowell fellow.






Journey’s End



“This is a fully-fledged Dalek empire at the height of its powers. They can do anything.”

…Well, well, well. That cliffhanger resolution was simultaneously an inspired work of genius and an utter cheat. Plus the Doctor starts acting vain again. Grr. Still, Mickey and Jackie are back. Yay! And, er, there are no Daleks on Francine’s street, apparently. How convenient.

But… Donna touches the Doctor’s magic hand in a jar and creates some kind of half human “Doc 2”. Er… sorry, but this is silly. Still, at least this presumably gets rid of the hand forever. It was starting to outstay its welcome. After a bit of exposition the two of them take a break from the story for a bit so they can tread water until their next appearance on stage in the final act. Meanwhile, Jack escapes from captivity by cunningly getting himself killed.

Surprisingly, the talk about Donna’s “destiny” sort of works; a human / Time Lord meta-crisis is a big space / time event which sends ripples backwards as well as forwards. It’s also an interesting twist that Davros, confined to the vault, is not in charge and is merely kept around for amusement by his somewhat ungrateful offspring! Also intriguing is Dalek Caan’s insistence that “One of them will die!” This will be followed through, right?

There follows an extremely interesting scene in which Julian Bleach is outstanding. Davros draws together a lot of the thematic threads of this season as the Doctor’s companions start threatening the Daleks with weapons of mass destruction. Who exactly was it that made them like this? Why exactly is it that Martha is working for an ethically dubious military outfit in the first place, for that matter? “The man who abhors violence, never carrying a gun. But this is the truth, Doctor. You take ordinary people and you fashion them into weapons.” Thing is… genuinely brilliant this exploration of the Doctor’s character though this is, I tend to think it’s based on a misunderstanding of the Doctor’s character that has been growing for a long while, perhaps even since McCoy. In the ‘60s and ‘70s the Doctor would occasionally use guns when he had to, without any qualms. He’s never been a pacifist. He didn’t used to think that weapons were unethical if used in the right cause, merely that they cramped his style. Far cooler to walk around unarmed and defeat the baddies through cleverness and wit. And blow them up at the end, of course.

The Doctor’s perceived ethical faults are thrown into sharp relief by the Daleks’ plans, of course. With the Reality Bomb they intend to destroy the entire universe outside their own little bubble in which they are somehow apparently going to survive, thereby ethnically cleansing the entire universe. Nasty.

Still, Sarah Jane and Davros get a touching little reunion. How nice.

Anyway, Doc 2 and Donna emerge, and Donna saves the universe. I love this bit. Unfortunately the TARDIS towing the Earth back to its rightful position is exactly as silly as people keep saying it is, and these overcrowded TARDIS scenes feel uncomfortably like fanwank. There are some insights here, though- Sarah Jane so misses the point in telling the Doctor that he’s “got the biggest family on Earth” immediately before they all bugger off and leave him alone. Mickey, by now a real action hero, returns to “our” Earth, following Jack and Martha, while Jack and Martha say goodbye with a salute, interestingly in the light of what Davros said earlier. It’s particularly interesting that Jack is trying to persuade Martha to leave UNIT.

And then we have Bad Wolf Bay. I can see the cleverness in how this is done, but I really don’t like it. It’s such a cop out for Rose (who’s been somewhat neglected, inevitably) to settle with a half human ersatz Doctor she knows deep down isn’t the real deal. Yes, it’s clever of RTD to try and tell us that this Doctor is vengeful, as he was when he and Rose first met, and needs Rose to make him into a better person as she did with the real Doctor, but emotionally this feels very wrong to me.

As for Donna, I’m not sure about this either. Yes, it’s sad, but frustratingly so rather than tear-jerkingly so. The character deserved better. She was magnificent.

Still, aside from some unsatisfying character departures and a little too much of a fanwank feel towards the end this is epic Doctor Who at its best. 4/5.

As for the season- better than remembered. It joins four other seasons in joint eighth with exactly 4/5.

Doctor Who: Turn Left

“You’re not gonna make the world any better by shouting at it.”

Right. This is me back. The final push starts now. Still, it looks as though Series Three of The Sarah Jane Adventures won’t be out on DVD till November 1st, so there would have had to have been a hiatus, and it’s all worked out quite well.

Er, that’s the best excuse I can think of, anyway. Back to Turn Left…

It’s the pre-titles sequence, and the Doctor and Donna are nosing about on the Planet Of The Ever So Slightly Dodgy Ethnic Stereotypes. Donna sees a fortune teller (ever so slightly dodgy ethnic stereotyping within slightly dodgy ethnic stereotyping?), who seems uncannily similar to our late friend Chantho. Said fortune teller proceeds to use her alien reality-warping powers to force Donna to re-enact scenes from Planet of the Spiders. So that’s what all the “something on your back” foreshadowing was about.

Billie Piper’s name is in the credits. Ooh! And then it’s straight into that old TV sci-fi stand-by; the alternate universe. This is a trope which never fails, although sadly nothing can ever trump the example of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had Evil Willow in it. Mmm… Evil Willow…

The episode is of course all about Donna, and thus reliant on Catherine Tate to put in a good performance. She really comes up trumps; this is probably the finest individual performance of any member of the regular cast in Doctor Who ever, even after Tennant’s stellar performance last episode. It’s also the Doctor-lite story, of course, and by far the most successful, being about the Doctor’s absence in a way no previous example has been.

We get to see a parade of recent episodes, starting with the appearance of the Racnoss star, except that this time Donna has been promoted, and so is both materially more successful- for now- and shallower than she would have been. She isn’t there to stop the Doctor, and so he dies. This is what we alternate history geeks (*cough* Alternatehistory.com *cough*) call the “point of departure” or “POD”, and it’s interesting to consider this story as an example of this sub-genre. Because, on the one hand, the world changes entirely because of one apparently minor decision by an apparently ordinary person, yet there is also an awful lot of convergence as regards the alien invasions. It looks as though the butterfly effect hasn’t spread as far as the Adipose or the planet Sto. It’s a nice touch how the Doctors could-have-been companions (especially Martha) all get noble deaths. Of course, the Master never gives his pocket watch a second thought in this reality! It isn’t Harold Saxon who order’s the destruction of the Racnoss ship, I notice.

Oh, and how come the satellite pictures of the falling Titanic seem to be looking from the ground up? Ahem.

This is a very different Donna, at least on the surface: her reaction to being laid off does not present her in a good light, and she shows no interest in Wilf’s alien obsession. But this is the last point in the story in which she’s relatively untested by adversity. And Sylvia’s casually delivered “To be honest, I’ve given up on you” hits like a punch.

Donna is visited a number of times by a very Doctorish Rose, and her reaction is a little more accepting each time, showing how the hardships she suffers bring out her resourcefulness. Things start to get very dark, giving us a glimpse into the bleak world view that lurks behind RTD’s light touch, as also seen last episode (interesting comment by Nuallain on Midnight about RTD using his last chance to write the sort of crowd-pleasing episode which Moffat has so far had the luxury of writing- we seem to have another example of this here). The inhabitants of radiation-soaked southern England become refugees, France has closed its borders, people are billeted, dozens to a property, in the residential streets of northern cities while the army patrols outside; there’s some kind of “emergency government”; and finally the obvious foreigners, including a rather likeable example of the ever so slightly dodgy ethnic stereotypes, are sent off to “labour camps”. It’s not spelled out for the kids, but Wilf knows exactly what’s going on.

Sylvia, by this point, is quite horribly, cripplingly depressed; Jacqueline King portrays this brilliantly. Her final scene with Donna (“I suppose I’ve always been a disappointment.” “…Yeah…”) is understated and utterly heartbreaking.

It’s clear something is coming; not only is Rose warning of “The Darkness” that’s coming. We seem to have heard this before; a very similar phrasing was used in They Keep Killing Suzie. But far more effective is Wilf’s realisation that the stars are going out. So on we zoom towards the final scenes, with a Rose so Doctorish she might as well start calling herself Romana, a dying TARDIS, and a nice little re-enactment of the mirrors scene from Kinda. Catherine Tate really is sublime here in her delivery of every line- I love her desperate denial of her own certain death. Well, sort of certain. It’s a bit timey-wimey.

Everything returns to normal with Donna’s sacrifice, the Doctor notes all the odd coincidences surrounding Donna’s life, and the phrase “Bad Wolf” suddenly appears everywhere for no obvious reason. That’ll be a season finale coming up, then.

Brilliant. Something that could only be attempted once, so it’s great that it was done well. The amount of fanwank was nicely judged, nice but not excessive, and there was just the right amount of dystopian pessimism. And then there’s Catherine Tate. Wow. Best actress in Doctor Who ever. 5/5.

Doctor Who: Midnight

“Sorry, I’m a Doctor. I’m very clever.”

Ahem. Been a while, hasn’t it? Well, I’m back.

Some nice CGI, to start with. And that’s all that we’ll be getting of this sort of thing, as I believe this is what those Trekkie people call a “bottle episode”. And if this is what “bottle” episodes are like then let’s have more of them. This may be a filmed stage play with very little of the visual, but it’s a bloody good one, and the best thing RTD has written since The Second Coming.

We briefly see Donna at the start, which reminds us how bloody useful she would have been to the Doctor in what is to follow. It’s a very nice touch that the “Donna-lite” story is one in which her absence is really felt; for once the Doctor needs her to stop others, not himself. This story features the most terrifying foe the Doctor has yet faced: the slavering, vicious, unreasoning mob; the sort of mindless conformity which at its worst extreme… sorry, came very close to invoking Godwin’s Law just then. And we learn more of RTD’s views of society here than in anything we’ve so far seen.

The early scenes in the shuttle show us once again what a master at the nuts and bolts of economical storytelling is our showrunner. In a few brief scenes he nicely sketches out the characters whilst amusingly taking the proverbial out of the petty irritations of air travel which are so familiar to us all. But the early humorous touches (I liked “I must warn you that some products may contain nuts” a lot) very quickly turn into misdirection; when the Doctor states jokingly that “We’ll have to talk to each other instead”, he’s already started to misjudge the situation, the people he’s with, and his own status. These early scenes are full of subtle touches that, oblivious though he may be, for once he isn’t the alpha male.

There’s quite a cast here: Lesley Sharp is of course superb, so is David Troughton. And I’d forgotten that Merlin was in this. But these aren’t the quirky, loveable types we’re used to seeing in RTD Who scripts; in their own ways they’re all self-absorbed, narrow-minded and entirely lacking in the qualities we’re used to seeing in a programme based partly on the Doctor’s making others into better people. There are no suitable candidates here. And yet, arguably only Biff is truly nasty. Well, with a name like that.

The initial scenes of suspense as the craft stops and the banging starts are very well done. I was reminded of The Edge of Destruction, in a good way. And even at this early stage the sight of everyone panicking is almost as scary as the external threat. Mobs and groupthink are far scarier than alien possession.

Oh, and it seems the mysterious alien force knocks three times. How interesting. Don’t know why I mention it. We get Rose on the screen again, too…

Then the two pilots are the first to die, Sky starts repeating people’s words, and RTD cranks up the tension quite majestically. Credit also has to go to the performances, the claustrophobic setting, and the more than usually noticeable soundtrack for modern Who; almost musique concrete at times, a bit Tristram Cary. Almost modern enough to have appeared in this very programme back in ’63…

The mood of the mob shifts decisively once the subject of throwing Sky comes up, and even the apparently nice Dee Dee is implicated. From this point onward things are very, very dark, much darker than anything previously seen in the marathon so far. They all start to turn against the Doctor (Disturbingly, he’s described as being “Like an immigrant!” It’s a mob of Daily Mail readers. The horror.). He’s accused of “loving” the danger of the situation- there’s a germ of truth there, as has often been pointed out- and he finally alienates everyone with his fantastically misjudged “Because I’m clever!” In the land of the mob, no one likes a smartarse. Smartarses don’t conform. They’re too intellectual. They read things into things. They’re weird. Let’s just throw them out. Chilling stuff.

Things then proceed to get better than this, as Sky speaks first, the Doctor is apparently possessed, and the Doctor is left repeating everyone’s words as they set about throwing him out. The expressions on Tennant’s face here are incredible.

There’s one potential seed of redemption for humanity, though; the stewardess, who’s hardly been saintly so far, finally realised what’s happened and sacrifices her life to save everyone. No one even remembers her name. And the Doctor then has to spend twenty long minutes in the company of the mob which had attempted to kill him although, of course, everything goes unsaid. How very English. Unusually, it’s made clear at the end that the Doctor is deeply upset by what has happened.

Superlative: a stage play with a camera plonked in front of it, perhaps, but a triumphant example, and one that makes me want to go to the theatre more often. By which I mean, these days, at all. 5/5 and straight into my top ten at number six.

Doctor Who: Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead

Silence in the Library



“I try to keep you away from major plot developments…”

This one’s by Steven Moffat, so let there be no attempt at suspense here. This is heading for a 5/5. You knew that. What surprised me, though, was that it’s better than that. I came back to this expecting it to be merely superb, the sort of casual excellence exuded even by the Moff’s lesser scripts. But it’s much deeper than I remembered, and it goes straight into the top ten.

Even the pre-titles sequence is a little work of art on its own. The scenes with the little girl add so much, not just mystery but a nice bit of Sapphire and Steel style philosophical musing on the nature of reality.

Then it’s off to Moffat’s beloved 51st century, and some nice fourth wall-damaging banter between the Doctor and Donna. This isn’t really an “arc” episode (well, not as far as this season’s concerned) but they’re both continuing to enjoy both the travelling and each other’s company and really getting on; I love their simultaneous tearing up of Lux’s proffered contracts! Clearly, nothing bad’s going to happen.

The sudden reveal that this apparently deserted world is hiding great danger, and that the danger lies in the shadows, is inspired, and the way it’s built up is masterly. And very scary. Also, very funny in the way it builds up (“It doesn’t do wood?!!!”). The Doctor’s exposition bit about the Vashta Nerada even manages to be scary in itself; you should be afraid of the dark because there really are monsters out to get you. Great stuff. I’m sure the young kids loved it!

And yes, River Song. I try to watch in the spirit of the Marathon without any extra-curricular viewing, but new episodes are impossible to resist. And it’s particularly interesting to see River’s “first” appearance. We get our first “Hello sweetie”. We get a squareness gun, of course. And it’s interesting seeing the Doctor working out just who the hell she is. Then again, only Steven Moffat knows that.

The rest of the “others” are cleverly given the illusion of depth through a few nice lines (love the “Proper Dave” and “Other Dave” stuff). Steve Pemberton is a surprising yet good choice for Lux, apparently an arrogant corporate sod at this stage. The later reveal of his true motives is nicely foreshadowed by River, nicely undercutting the Doctor’s typically declamatory “I don’t want everyone in this room to die because some idiot thinks his pride is more important,” with a simple “Then why didn’t you sign his contract?” But she then undercuts that by admitting she’s as bad as he is. I love her already. The new Romana?

Probably the centrepiece of the episode is Miss Evangelista’s death and “ghosting”. This is so brilliant I’ll even forgive the fact that the threat from the Vashta Nerada seems to be on pause for the duration. And then things get even better with Doctor Moon’s private chat to the little girl, telling her that “The real world is a lie, and your nightmares are real!” This story delivers on scares, wit, and conceptual brilliance. And there’s another episode to go.




Forest of the Dead



“And then you remembered…”

Well, resolution by squareness gun is a bit disappointing, but since everything else about this episode is great I’m not quibbling too much. Especially as we get some great fourth wall-injuring stuff here with Donna noticing that her Family of Blood-style “life”, wherever she is, seems to follow the conventions of television camerawork, cutting straight from one scene to another. I really am a total sucker for this kind of thing, but it’s particularly well done here. It also shows us that this is going to be a very different episode from its predecessor.

All of the “others” are killed off, one by one here; everybody lives, but first, everybody dies. This is very well handled, both maintaining the sense of threat and giving us a bit of pathos. I liked Anita too.

The gradual reveals are great: the “doctor moon”, the spores of the Vashta Nerada arriving with the books by accident (again, no real sense of evil or even agency for the threat in a Moffat script), CAL, Lux not in fact being an arse at all. (One problem, though; if it’s the 51st century, and Charlotte Lux lived only a couple of generations ago, why does her “world” seem to be the early twenty-first century?) And of course the revelation that everyone who died was “saved”. Of course, they all did in fact die; they just got copied. But I suppose that applies to all teleportation as much as this one. In The Seeds of Death, everybody dies, including the regulars. Several times.

Donna suffers real heartbreak here, and it’s a shame there are no real long-term consequences; Moffat scripts are never quite plugged in to the series arcs. Yet. She loses what are, emotionally, a real husband and two real children. The moment where the children recognise that they only exist when Donna can see them is fantastically awful.

Of course, River dies. Sort of. And knows the Doctor’s name. And they squabble like an “old married couple”. Hmm.


As I said, superlative. 5/5 and top ten.

Doctor Who: The Unicorn and the Wasp

“I say! What are you doing with that lead piping?”

For the second story in a row I’m very pleasantly surprised. From my vague recollections I was expecting this story to be a fun but inconsequential bit of fluff. In fact, it’s brilliant, one of the very best comedy episodes the series has ever produced. It helps that Catherine Tate, who has a lot to do here, is such a brilliant comic actress, but the script is superb.

There’s little in the way of overt season arc stuff here (although Donna and the Doctor continue to relate to each other as they have been doing and Donna gets a quick line about the bees), so we have a standalone episode which reminds me very much of Gareth Roberts’ Missing Adventures novels, particularly The English Way of Death; a superbly realised historical pastiche, this time of course based on the Agatha Christie-style Whodunit. Actually, the whole thing feels very Season Seventeen in the best possible way, and Catherine Tate has never seemed more like Lalla Ward. Yes, I know how weird that reads.

The pre-titles teaser gives us a pretty clear example of both the tone we can expect and the kind of tropes we’ll be playing with. We’re immersed in the genre through overdosing on the trappings of the genre and period- flapper gear, gramophones, a very Twenties soundtrack, a vicar, a colonel, a professor. I love the blatantly excessive number of Cluedo in-jokes!

This feels nothing like Black Orchid, though. Aside from the nicely handled personal stuff regarding Agatha- her prickliness about her philandering husband, the chat with Donna, her very Victoria-esque admonition of the Doctor for enjoying himself as people die- the tone is quite rightly kept firmly tongue in cheek. There are a lot of postmodern in-jokes, of course (“I mean, that’s like meeting Charles Dickens. And he’s surrounded by Ghosts. At Christmas.”), and I’m a sucker for that sort of thing. And the story is able to use our familiarity with the trappings of the genre to have a bit of fun; I love the wibbly-wobbly flashback scenes which contrast with what everyone is claiming to have been doing.

The whole think climaxes in the Poirot moment as Agatha and the Doctor take turns in revealing everyone’s secrets. Colonel Curbishley’s is the best, of course, as is Agatha’s surprised reaction. Of course, claiming that Agatha Christie is the greatest novelist of all time is a bit much. I devoured dozens upon dozens of her novels when I was about twelve but these days I find the prose and casual class stereotyping makes it hard not to hurl said novel across the room and reach instead for the nearest Margery Allingham. Still, her plots are rather clever and so is this. 5/5.

Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter

“Hello, Dad!”

Wow. I was expecting this to be average-to-good going by my memories, which are fairly recent, after all. Stephen Greenhorn’s last effort was a bit meh, too. And yet this has just blown me away. It’s superb.

Martha’s back, which means some great character stuff for all the regulars (back to that in a bit), but also a larger TARDIS crew, which allows for what feels like an uber-traditional episode of Doctor Who. In fact the first five minutes see our heroes split up and separated from the TARDIS, and Martha’s experiences and those of the Doctor and Donna mirror each other for the early part of the episode. The Hartnell vibes couldn’t be much more blatant. And the whole thing feels very “trad Who”.

The pre-titles teaser is fab, of course, and so’s Georgia Moffat. And the Doctor’s reaction to the fact that he has a daughter leads to some superbly played scenes with Tennant and Tate. Donna as a character is fantastic here, able to take the proverbial out of the Doctor as no one else can. I still love her. Oh, and she’s the one who works out the mystery at the end. She’s great, but by now it’s becoming clear that her arc is building up to something. She can’t carry on having this much fun and being this fab without being brought down to Earth with a bump- her final comment to Martha about wanting to travel in the TARDIS forever makes it clear that something’s coming. Such is how the RTD universe works. That’s what happened with Rose back in Season 28- again, RTD repeating his own tropes, and again, not a problem at this point but it’s clear that RTD’s song will end soon.

Martha gets an interesting character arc here; initially reluctant to travel in the TARDIS because she’s aware there’s always a cost, she’s soon enjoying herself anyway (“I love this bit!”). And she proves to be brilliant, even more so than before, as symbolised by her insistence on using her medical skills to help with the dislocated shoulder of one of the Hath who’s captured her. Shades of The Smugglers there. She’s also brilliant in the way she takes the alternative route over ground to the mysterious “Source”. Shades of The Five Doctors there. And yet… only one non-redshirt dies in the whole story, and it happens on Martha’s watch as the Hath dies saving her. Martha is heartbroken; symbolically, she suffers this but Donna doesn’t, having fun down below. This is innocence versus experience; the dark side of time travel will catch up with Donna one day. It’s a good proper farewell for Martha, though. Fittingly, both of them finally address each other as “Doctor” as they part.

Jenny is an extremely cool character. Her personality is a bit superficial, perhaps, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s underwritten. She’s cool; a kind of Doctor-in-training who can dance through laser beams and gets a great ending. Plus, she’s a proper Time Lady. She’s got two hearts and, er, she was loomed. Sorry.

There’s some good stuff for the Doctor, too- Tennant is particularly good here- with some interesting revelations about his having fathered children, plural. And yet… there’s something not quite right about the extreme pacifism he displays here, especially at the end. I know I keep banging on about this, but this Marathon has shown that the Doctor may feel guns cramp his style, but he’s happy to use them when absolutely necessary, or even if not, if he’s in Frontier in Space. Plus there’s the blowing stuff up, and the Venusian Aikido. All this stuff about the Doctor being an uber-pacifist only came along very late, if at all.

And yet… could that be what we’re supposed to think? The exchanges with Jenny about war, which he doesn’t entirely win, suggest it might be. Could it be that this Doctor retains some of the war-weariness from the Time War, and that this is causing him to exaggerate his pacifistic streak?

Lots of food for thought here with the development of the characters. Plus, the plot is great, proper hard sci-fi, with a good twist at the end as it’s revealed how long the war’s been going on for. There’s not a lot wrong with this one. 5/5.

Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky

The Sontaran Stratagem



“Is that what you did to her? Turned her into a soldier?”

I like the pre-credit sequence a lot; there’s something brilliant, effective and very very zeitgeisty about the concept of killer satnav. Almost an updated version of the chair and the doll from Terror of the Autons, in fact. And it’s nice, if a little Sarah Jane Adventures-y, to have a young genius as villain; Doctor Who has another trope to add to its collection.

Oh, and we get a proper UNIT story, in spite of odd glimpses for the first time since Battlefield. And Martha’s back. Yay! Except that the context of both Martha and UNIT has changed. This is handled brilliantly. I love the initial meeting between her and Donna, nicely subverting both our and the Doctor’s expectation of School Reunion-style fireworks. Martha’s doing very well (“She’s engaged, you prawn!”), but clearly still damaged by her experiences. But UNIT is not what it used to be (“back in the ‘70s. Or was it the ‘80s? But it was all a lot more homespun back then”). In Fragments it was seen to be doing reprehensible things, and it’s good that this is acknowledged in the Doctor’s frosty attitude to Colonel Mace, and his initial semi-doubts about Martha. But it’s also good that the Doctor and Martha later resolve this with their little chat; just as the Doctor tries to make people better, Martha means to do this with UNIT. This works, more or less, allowing the character to keep her integrity.

Notwithstanding UNIT’s moral dodginess, though, I don’t like the implication here that the Doctor has some kind of moral objection to guns and blowing things up per se. He doesn’t. At all. Oh, he may think they cramp his style a bit, granted, but he had no qualms about using guns when necessary in Day of the Daleks or Frontier in Space for example.

Incidentally, on the theme of (yawn) UNIT dating, the Doctor’s dialogue rather tends to support my view that all UNIT stories exist in some sort of shifting time zone of quantum uncertainty. Or something. And it’s good to hear greyhounds talking to traps again.

Oh, and it’s great to see the Sontarans again, of course. Christopher Ryan is fab, as is the design, although I could do without all the “Sontar-HA!” stuff. I imagine this means we’ve been well and truly told that Sontar is the name of their planet then. It’s a particularly nice touch that they’re actually jealous that they weren’t allowed in the Time War.

Their re-introduction is well done and integrated well into the also impressive plot; the necessary exposition about the probic vent is done as a cool little action scene with a tennis racket, making the Doctor look rather cool. And once again, I notice, he presses the big red button. Plus we get a bit of body horror with the proto-Martha clone. Impressive stuff from Helen Raynor. Oh, and we also get more nostalgia as one of the soldiers shot by Staal cries “My legs! I can’t feel my legs” just as Ian did in The Daleks. Please tell me I’m not the only person who noticed that. Because it would be rather tragic if I were.

This being contemporary Earth, we also get some good stuff for Donna, as Martha urges her to not repeat her own mistakes in not telling her family where she was. But as before she’s only able to connect with Wilf and is unable to tell Sylvia. There’s something genuinely troubling in this mother / daughter relationship, and the subtle way this is handled is quite impressive; it’s clear that there are character arc things going on here. Of course, the Doctor’s abortive farewell speech to Donna, and her reaction (“Dumbo!”) is the best thing in Doctor Who ever. It’s official; from now on I not only like Donna. I bloody love her.




The Poison Sky



“Good work. For a female.”

Things are bad, so it’s out with the news reports. This time it’s Kirsty Wark who joins Trinity Wells in a nice little bit of exposition telling us what peril we’re all in. This is pretty much an all-action episode, and doesn’t have anything like the depth of the first part, although there are some nice bits. I like Donna’s understated reaction to being given a TARDIS key. Again, though, we’re reminded that RTD is starting to mine the same ground. It’s not a problem at this point, but it has the potential to become one eventually. Again we’re reminded that his song should probably end soon.

Luke, the Tobias Vaughn of this story, gets some nice moments in this episode which gives his character arc a pleasing trajectory. First there’s his speech to the students (“I’ve designed a mating programme! I’ve planned the whole thing!”) which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t go down well. Then there’s his shocked realisation that Staal was planning on betraying him all along; as Donna would say, well duuuh! And then, of course, there’s his final sacrifice.

We also get a big and rather impressive gun battle, in which Skorr has a wonderfully Sontaran reaction to being killed. No less impressively, we get a reference to “Sir Alastair”. Yay! UNIT are redeemed a little from last episode; Mace’s weapons are effective, plus we get to see Valiant again, which is cool. They and the Doctor are not quite reconciled (and shouldn’t be, considering what they did to Tosh, and no doubt others), but it’s also acknowledged, rightly I think, that the Doctor has also been guilty of rudeness and tactlessness. Still, I loved the “Are you my mummy?” I like a bit of metatextual fun, even when it’s totally gratuitous, like this.

The Doctor’s willingness to sacrifice his own life because he has to offer the Sontarans a chance he knows they’ll never take- this Doctor’s guiding ethical principle, it seems, the flip side of “No second chances”, is wonderful. And so’s the aftermath, as Martha takes his arm and Donna slaps him. But soon they’re off again, this time with an unwilling passenger.


Well, that was the epitome of what we used to call trad Who, albeit with some good character work, mostly in the first part. A good 3/5.

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

“The circle must be broken.”

Bit hard to know what to say about this one, really. It’s sort of… average. Not that it doesn’t have lots of things going for it, of course; there’s Ood, Tim McInnerny, and the still great chemistry between Tate and Tennant. And I love the scene with the claw. It’s just that it’s all a bit… “meh”, as I’m told the young folks say. Even the dialogue hardly sparkles at all, unusually for the RTD years, hence the desperate choice of quotation above.

There’s a bit of political subtext (What? You noticed?), but it doesn’t really go anywhere beyond “Slavery is bad, mmmkay?” and a bit of superficial dialogue about culling cows during outbreaks of foot and mouth. Even the whole “Who do you think makes your clothes?” thing rather comes across as fence-sitting in the execution. Otherwise there’s little that particularly stands out about the plot, good or bad. I had to raise a smile when the lovely Solana betrayed our heroes, though; by the laws of the programme she’s signed her own death warrant.

There’s lots of good Doctor / Donna stuff though. Again we get the “We’re not married”, again we get Donna experiencing both the wonder and the horror of the universe. And Donna’s turnaround from despair at the Ood’s singing and wanting to go home to euphoria and enthusiasm again echoes last week very well. Their mutual character development is being very well handled.

There’s another mention of the bees disappearing, I notice, confirming its significance, and another pleasing reference to the show’s early days as the Sense-Sphere gets a name check. This story pretty much confirms the likely exploitation of the planet by humans after our original TARDISeers left, incidentally, but then it was clear at the time that this was bound to happen. Oh, and this is 4126, so RTD is sticking to his habit of often setting the future stories in defined periods, including the year Five Billion and the 42nd century.

The ending’s a bit odd- the Doctor and Donna have been rather passive throughout the episode, so what’s Ood Sigma thanking them for? We finish on an ominous note, though, as the Doctor is told “I think your song must end soon.” 3/5.

Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii

“You must excuse my friend. She’s from Barcelona.”

It’s ancient Rome again. Gosh, how nostalgic. Particularly as we get an oblique reference to a certain incident with a magnifying glass. But then again, token aliens apart this is very much in the tradition of those early historicals from days gone by. You could almost say it’s a remake of The Aztecs. It’s a stretch, yes, but not that much of one. Our heroes even get briefly separated from the Ship- er, TARDIS, just like old times. Although I’ll grant you that Donna and Barbara do have slightly different personalities.

Oh, look at that young actress playing the sneaky priestess in the teaser. I understand she’s called Karen Gillan. There’s no particular reason I mention that, of course.

Anyway, this is brilliant, even if it doesn’t quite manage to explore the ethics and issues of interference in historical events as it seems to promise. For a start it looks great; from the sets to the Pyroviles, surely the finest CGI creations yet seen with their superb design, right down to the Roman helmets. And the script, from James Moran, is brilliant. We get some lovely subverting of tropes here- I love Donna’s “You have got to be kidding me!” when about to be sacrificed; this sort of thing never happened in The Stones of Blood. Catherine Tate is particularly brilliant here, and already has nigh-perfect chemistry with David Tennant. I love the Spartacus stuff, and their mutual insistence that they’re definitely not married.

On the subject of the Pyroviles, incidentally; I notice that’s the second implied missing planet in as many weeks. They’re getting their season arcs started early these days.

It’s nice to finally see some traditional style Sibylline priestesses in Doctor Who (well, I suppose there’s The Brain of Morbius, even down to the clothing). They’re one of the great archetypes of the classical world, familiar to me from the likes of I Clavdivs and various historical novels by the likes of Gore Vidal, Marguerite Yourcenar etc etc and rather pleasingly the history of the Sibylline prophecies is so vague that writers can do as they like with them. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of men in the Classical world acting as augurs (entrails excepted), great character though this Lucius is. I’d assumed Apollo preferred inhabiting the larynxes of women. No doubt some bizarre fetish. These gods, eh?

The fact we have augury allows our characters from earth’s past to know things about our heroes, of course. The word “Gallifrey” is suitably shocking to hear. And most interesting of all of course is “Daughter of London, there is something on your back.”

Oh, and the entire family at the centre of the episode are brilliant. It’s rather admirable how these characters are made to anchor everything together so it all fits inside forty-five minutes, something which feels quite astounding considering all the stuff that’s packed into this episode. The entire family pretty much had me at “Positions!” but Peter Capaldi in particular is great. But then, he is Peter Capaldi, so it’s only to be expected.

Still, there’s a problem with this episode. Sort of. Because even this is great in terms of character and drama in the way it’s used- which is, after all, the main thing. But the whole “explanation” of why some historic events doesn’t really work. We may now know for the first time about “fixed points in time” but this doesn’t actually tell us anything we didn’t already know back in Season One, as this is just another form of words for telling us that the Doctor can alter some historical events and not others. We knew that.

It says a lot for the excellence of the writing and characterisation here because the scenes between the Doctor and Donna arguing over whether to save people or not work superbly, even though they don’t really work. I particularly love the way this further develops the “lonely god” theme of the Doctor’s occasional aloof arrogance and (as the Doctor admits at the end) that he needs Donna to stop him. That’s why the final scene is so brilliant; the Doctor ends up not being a lonely god as he has Donna there with him. I hope that libation is ginger beer.

But… is it actually impossible for the Doctor to interfere or does he not want to? If the former, why doesn’t he just say so? If the latter, it’s hard to conclude that he isn’t just being an utter shit. And surely, this being a fixed point in time, the Pyroviles should be no more able to alter history than the Doctor. None of it works. And yet it’s great drama. It’s so brilliant that the two of them press the button together.

So, even though there’s a massive and fundamental flaw here the story still gets a 5/5 anyway for being so damned great. One other quibble, though; shouldn’t this be placed a bit later in the season? This is Donna’s first proper full trip in the TARDIS. It should really have been something a bit less heavy and more fun for her.

Doctor Who: Partners in Crime

“You’re not mating with me, sunshine!”

Ooh, new theme music! And no pre-titles sequence; it seems we’re relaunching the show again, and once again we’re doing so by focusing on the new(ish) companion. It’s a tried and tested formula, and it works well here, but all the same its noticeable that RTD is repeating his tricks and tropes. This isn’t in any way a problem at this stage, and it’s an unavoidable consequence for any writer, even a great one such as RTD, who writes so many episodes of a series. For the first time we’re made to realise that this production team have been around a while and probably shouldn’t stick around for that much longer. None of which means that this episode, or indeed the series at this point, are anything other than great.

This is a textbook example of a “fluffy” RTD episode, I suppose- again, repetition of tricks and tropes- but such a perfectly crafted one. Compared to, say, New Earth, this is perfection. The parallel opening narratives, with both the Doctor and Donna investigating this week’s threat, are perfectly written and staged for comic effect. And the scene at the windows is the funniest thing in Doctor Who ever.

The baddies, Miss Foster and the Adipose, are quite rightly relegated to the background a little so that the episode can focus on Donna, but personally I love the little things. Susan Hampshire is quite deliciously villainous, too.

But this all about Donna. Happily, we’ve already been introduced to the character, so we need waste no time on establishing the character and we can get straight into some quite nuanced character stuff; I love the way the scene is shot where Sylvia is nagging Donna in the background (“No one’s gonna come along with a magic wand and make your life better”), and the way this is immediately followed by a contrasting scene with Wilf. Both Catherine Tate and Bernard Cribbins are superb, something which no doubt I’ll soon be taking for granted.

Donna’s character has had to change, of course. It’s subtle, but this is no longer the, er, abrasive Donna of The Runaway Bride. Instead we get a good look at a character who has been changed by her experiences with the Doctor- an ongoing theme of the series, of course- after several months have passed. It’s great to see her investigating Adipose Industries on her own initiative, and doing such a fine job of it too. I love the tense scene in the ladies’ loo. Dammit, there’s no way of putting that last sentence which doesn’t sound wrong.

The chat at the end between the Doctor and Donna is extremely revealing; the Doctor is full of guilt at how he mistreated Martha, refusing to acknowledge her feelings for him and doing a lot of damage to her family. But it’s made clear that his relationship with Donna is going to be different. And I’m looking forward to it. This is Donna Mark 2, retooled for permanent TARDISeer status. And she’s great.

Oh yes, and that scene at the end packs quite a punch. It’s a great statement of intent for the coming season. And what was that about the bees disappearing?

Yes, this is all pretty much done to a template which is very familiar by now. But it’s done superbly. There's one thing that dates it a bit, though, even though this was only two years ago. "It's not like the 1980s," says Sylvia. "No on's unemployed these days, except you!5/5.