Doctor Who: Destination Skaro

 “I like it!”

Yes, this is only five odd minutes. Yes, the tone is very much Children in Need, geared towards a very different audience to those who would actually watch the programme. The metatextual jokes and times-wimey fun at the end, then, much though I enjoyed it, doesn’t tell us anything about the tone of the actual specials from one week today. This is what it is. And I enjoyed it enormously.

Julian Bleach, without make-up, is superb as Davros. No chair, no make-up, but the voice and mannerisms are utterly Davros. I’d assumed the decision to present Davros like this to be an interesting creative one, but it seems RTD is now on record as saying he’s rather bothered that the character tends to encapsulate the trope of Disabled=Evil. If he’s decided to just present Davros like this from now on regardless then, well, the fan in me does whisper “but continuity!” but these things can be handwaved with a bit of creativity. Let’s face it, RTD has a point.

David Tennant is also superb… and this is something that may well come to point towards what we may shortly expect. Tennant has aged, but this gives him a nicely Doctorish gravitas. And is it me, but is a post-Good Omens Tennant even better, certainly at comedy in particular, than previously, despite being bloody good before?

This is what it is. But I love it.

Doctor Who: The Witch's Familiar

"So... anyone for dodgems?"

Wow. That was unbelievably good, and indisputably the first truly epic Dalek story of the twenty-first century. I suppose I still have concerns about how the general viewer is going to react to a direct sequel to a story from 1975 but, dammit, this is one exquisitely written, made and acted work of art. The Moff has done it again, and as for Julian Bleach's extraordinary performance... there are no words.

We begin with a delightfully metatextual sequence. We all know (er, in spite of what I said last week) that Missy and Clara are not really dead, so we begin with them, after a nifty bit of upside down camerawork from Clara's POV. Missy has control of the tied-up Clara, which symbolises the fact (see the title) that she has control of the narrative, particularly here but also throughout: Missy is a character not limited by the rules of the text, and delights in finding holes in Moffat's plot. She is also, of course, a delightful unreliable narrator. Oh, and Michelle Gomez? Best. Master. Ever.

The Doctor, by contrast, doesn't have control of the narrative, as Missy does: the scene at the end where Missy almost tricks him into killing Clara is mostly there to emphasise that. He doesn't know, as we, the audience, know, that Clara is alive, and duly pulls a gun on the Daleks in a clear shout-out to Resurrection of the Daleks. He still gets to be cool, though. That's what all the fun with Davros' chair is there for. Personally, I love the cup of tea.

Oh, and I love the questioning of whether or not the Doctor ever uses weapons. I know I always bang on about it, but this whole thing with his never using them as a matter of principle is quite recent. Pertwee used to shoot Ogrons all the time. Go back and look. It's simply that he refuses to carry one himself. All the cool people do.

It's a delight to see the peerless imagination of Steven Moffat let loose on the planet Skaro, so much described in all those weird '70s Dalek books and annuals. His contribution- elderly Daleks that can't die of old age but that simply ooze angrily in the sewers- is über cool. It is also, of course, a nicely placed plot point, like Raymond Chandler's revolver.

That's not the coolest thing he does with Skaro, though. That would be Davros' line about the effort he went to in order to get the Doctor "the only other chair on Skaro". Metatextual, again. I'm loving this.

The best thing about the episode, though, and where it is an exact thematic sequel to Genesis of the Daleks, is the whole extraordinary conversation between Davros and the Doctor, in which each word is loaded with weight and significance. It begins with Davros explaining that the cables are in fact a conduit for the Daleks, motivated by a filial respect which Davros calls a "defect", to nourish Davros with part of their life force. This process could be reversed to drain energy from the Daleks: once again the Doctor is handed the option of genocide: this couldn't be a more blatant reference. Once again, of course, he doesn't directly take it while, quietly, also masterminding their being hoist into extinction by their own metaphorical petard. The ethical distinction is important to him.

(And yes, I know the Daleks will be back, but my point still stands.)

Meanwhile, Missy and Clara are escaping by means of Clara homaging Ian in The Daleks, except here we have 50 years of Dalek behaviour thematically distilled through the device of having the Dalek change the words Clara says. Firstly, having Clara inside a Dalek in this way can only be a deliberate bit of body horror in harking back to Asylum of the Daleks and poor Oswin. Secondly, as explained by Missy (mistress of the narrative, remember?): while Cybermen repress their emotions utterly, the Daleks don't. They are very emotional indeed. And they channel that emotion into hate. And their guns.

But the more interesting stuff is still on that cosy chat between Davros and the Doctor. I'm not sure that stuff about why the Doctor really left Gallifrey really works, especially as there is never any real risk of this Dalek-Gallifreyan hybrid actually amounting to anything, but we can explain that as Davros' hubris. That wasn't why he left Gallifrey at all. Still, Davros is right to say that just being "bored" doesn't cut it. Future story arc once Gallifrey is found, perhaps?

More interesting is that Davros is genuinely pleased for the Doctor that Gallifrey survives: for this old racist, no man should be without his ethnic fellows. It's both perversely touching and a significant yet appropriate deepening of Davros' and the Doctor's relationship. Also, Julian Bleach is amaaaaazing.

Oh, and then Moffat goes and deepens the thematic depth (or "semiotic thickness" as we old fans like to say) by having Davros parallel the current Doctor's own "Am I a good man?". I don't care that this is more artful structure than actual thematic depth. It's awfully clever.

Speaking of clever, Davros cleverly uses the Doctor's compassion against him but, of course, the Doctor is cleverer, by means of Raymond Chandler's pistol, which we discussed earlier. But none of this lessens the pathos of the Doctor's concern that the ostensibly dying Davros should live just long enough to see another sunrise. And, if that's not enough, we learn the true context of last episode's cliffhanger: the Doctor goes back to save the young Davros.

Look; I'm prejudiced against "epic" Doctor Who stories. They promise much, and tend to deliver lots of bangs and very little real content. None of my favourite stories are epics.

Until today.

Doctor Who: The Magician's Apprentice

"Pardon my sci-fi..."

Well, there's me floored. At last Steven Moffat, in what is possibly his last full season as showrunner, writes a proper, epic Dalek story. Awesomely. And... I really wouldn't be surprised if Clara turns out to be actually, irreversibly dead. We know she leaves at some point during the season, and it would be just like Moffat to unexpectedly have her not leave after all in Last Christmas and then just kill her off in the next episode.

Anyway.. we begin on ancient Skaro, in the trenches outside the Kaled citadel, only we have CGI now, unlike in 1975 when they did Genesis of the Daleks, so we can now have biplanes firing laser beams and hand mines with actual hands, with eyes in them. Bit scary for the little ones, that, and part of me worries if all this continuity may perhaps alienate the casual viewer, but let's go with it. How long, I wonder, until someone does a version of Episode One of Genesis where Harry stands on a hand mine?

I knew the boy was Davros before we were told- what other dramatic purpose to the appearance of a little boy in No Man's Land could there have been? And, of course, I knew that the Doctor wouldn't save him, and would be ashamed. It's awfully clever of Moffat, later in the episode, to have Davros play a clip of the Fourth Doctor's musings to Davros in the ethics of killing a child who would grow up to be a murderer. Nice foreshadowing of the cliffhanger, too.

Colony Sarff is an awfully cool idea: a colony of CGI snakes in, as the Doctor later says, a dress. Sarff is essentially used to drive forward the plot by telling us that a dying Davros is looking for the Doctor, who is missing. We also get nice, nostalgic cameos from the Shadow Proclamation and assorted moderately old monsters. But by the time we get to the Sisterhood of Karn I again wonder how the casual viewer would take all this continuity. Yes, it's done well- this is good writing, not Attack of the Cybermen- but I somehow suspect that the next showrunner may react against all this dense reliance on the show's own mythology.

Anyway, Clara and Missy are on the trail, but not without some fascinating little character moments for them. Clara not only pretty much behaves like the Doctor in her approach to the mystery of the suspended planes, but is actually treated in the same way as the Doctor by UNIT. Here is a companion with nowhere further to grow.

Missy is her delightfully witty, evil old self, of course, casually refusing to explain how she somehow isn't dead, an old Anthony Ainley tradition done in a delightfully metatextual way by Steven Moffat. Fascinatingly, it is her, not Clara, to whom the Doctor has sent his "confession dial", traditionally sent by Time Lords to their closest friends on the eve of their death. Never more has hers and the Doctor's fascinatingly ambiguous relationship been proved and explored in some fascinating dialogue.

The Doctor's eventual entrance is, of course, awesome, but it isn't long until the trio are teleported by the Colony to the hospital on a space station where Davros is spending his final hours. The conversation between the Doctor and his archenemy Davros (Missy's reaction to the Doctor's use of the word is priceless) is electrifying. This story is, in several different ways, a kind of sequel to Genesis of the Daleks.

Moffat, having explored the characterisations of most of the recurring characters in Doctor Who, finally turns to Davros' own psyche. (Although, I fear, the canonicity of the I, Davros audios may be in danger.)

The big reveal, of course, is that they're not on space at all but on a hidden, reconstituted Skaro, with a landscape that recalls Destiny of the Daleks and an awesome modern riff of the Dalek city. I notice, also, that we get Daleks from all eras, which is well cool. It looks as though the cliffhanger is going to be Missy offering to show them how to use the TARDIS but no- they quickly and shockingly just kill her, and then destroy the Ship. I just hope the Doctor remembered to set the HADS.

What happens next is slower, agonisingly so, as Davros verbally teases the Doctor with the inevitability of Clara's death. But, inexorably, killed she most certainly is. And that still isn't even the cliffhanger.

No- the cliffhanger is the Doctor crossing his own time stream (naughty) and seemingly about to kill Davros as a boy...

I can't pass final judgement yet, really: this was an episode of set-up, albeit awesome set-up. But I'm buzzing. Oh yes, I'm buzzing.

Finally... this is my first live episode of Doctor Who since becoming a father. So what did Little Miss Llamastrangler (seven months) think of it? Er, she didn't really notice it was on.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Nightmare Man

Part One

“It’s all my fault!”

So, we still have the spiel at the start, narrated by Clyde. It’s different, though, with different footage. A whole new series. The Marathon may be over, but the post-Marathon starts here!

This is the first episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures I’ve seen since… you know. This was only on telly last autumn, and Lis is fantastic as always. I think it’s going to feel quite unreal for some time. I haven’t seen any of this series before; it’s all going to be a genuine surprise.

The beginning, with its “keep watching” and Luke speaking into a camera, is very metatextual. Surprising to see something like this in the Whoniverse’s show aimed particularly at kids, but Joseph Lidster’s script is fantastic, and very, very adult in the best possible way. It’s all a bit scary, even a bit Ghostwatch, for kids, I would have thought. But this is superb.

We start a year earlier than the main narrative- has a year passed, or did this happen a year ago? Whatever, Luke is taking his A levels a year early, and he got four A*’s. Lucky git. We never had A*’s in my day. Still, I only got four B’s and a D, and one of the B’s was General Studies, so I suppose I’m just not clever like what he is.

This all feels very real- University (Oxford, no less!) approaches, and the pace of change is all too much for Luke’s seventeen year old mind. This is quite close to home for me; I had the only depressive episode in my life aged seventeen and eighteen at the sheer conveyor-belt inevitability of A Levels, University, and so on. I ended up dropping out of uni until I was twenty-three and all grown-up. Luke’s a lot more sensible than I was, though, and I’m sure he smokes rather less weed than I did back then. Still, there’s sensible and there’s sensible. I think going to bed at 10.37pm is a bit much, frankly.

Luke’s nightmare sequences are brilliant, and tell us so much about his fears and insecurities- will his friends forget him? Will his mother abandon him? This is so very well-written and performed, and highly appropriate fare for teenagers, although I would have thought the target audience to be younger.

There’s a very tangible sense of melancholy at Luke’s current life ending, and what will feel at first like an end for his friendships. I love the party. Intriguing to see Luke apparently setting up Rani and Clyde- should I be watching this space?

The moment we finally get a glimpse of the Nightmare Man is eerie and effective. Yes, I know it’s only clown make-up(ish), and we’ve had clowns before. But it works. And the concept of Luke’s next nightmare giving life to the Nightmare Man and dooming the world is well scary. This is quite a cliffhanger…


Part Two

“I need a USB lead, Sarah Jane.”

Interesting to see the nightmares of Rani and Clyde. Rani’s has Doon Mackichan in it (yay!) but plays on her fears and ambitions surrounding journalism as she’s forced to co-present a programme exposing Sarah Jane. Interesting that the comments of the Evil Newsreader, that Sarah Jane is putting children in danger, are quite accurate! Clyde, meanwhile, is stuck in a dead end job, mocked by an elderly Sarah Jane. Both dreams say a lot about the characters.

Elisabeth Sladen is utterly superb as an elderly version of herself. Roles like this really give her a chance to show her range. It’s… weird to see her playing a role like this at the moment, of course.

There was a laugh out loud moment for me at the bit where Clyde exclaims “This isn’t a real burger bar. There aren’t real burgers. And you- you’re not the real Sarah Jane.” The Android Invasion, anyone? I love little bits like this.

The ending is satisfying and makes sense, and also wraps up the B-plot of Luke’s nerves at going to uni. But off to uni he is. And he’s taking K-9 with him...

This is superb. Possibly the best thing on SJA so far.

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.

Torchwood: From Out of the Rain

“Make her cry. I want to drink her tears.”

Objectively this should be a great episode; effective and fascinating concept, real atmosphere, great direction, Julian Bleach. But I find myself being, not underwhelmed, but… whelmed by it. There’s nothing wrong with this; it just feels a bit by the numbers.

Partly this is because we have a standalone monster-of-the-week story here, one which doesn’t develop any characters or plot threads at all. That makes it an oddity in this season. So too does the more or less exclusive focus on the baddies to drive the plot, rather than allow it to be partly driven by character stuff. It’s a perfectly fine piece of sci-fi drama, but this just doesn’t feel like Torchwood. In fact, not that I’ll push this too far as I’ve only seem the first one-and-a-half “assignments” of said programme, this feels a lot more like Sapphire and Steel than P.J. Hammond’s previous Small Worlds did, and with the much faster pace it feels like a rushed version- the character of Pearl, for example, was left frustratingly undefined. And perhaps there’s also a little too much of Steven Moffat in the use of recorded images as a threat, even by this point.

And I’m getting a bit tired of all these meaningless random nuggets from Jack’s past which show no sign of fitting into any larger pattern.

Still, for what it was, I liked it. I imagine the combination of Julian Bleach’s performance and the eeriness of the footage would have scared the wits out of any little ‘uns watching. I love the strangeness of it all; it was absolutely the right thing to not explain who the Night Travellers were or how they were able to do what they did. The concept of saving someone’s breath in a flask is inspired, as is the mostly downbeat ending, with the team only managing to save a single child. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what they failed to do in Hammond’s last script.

Not that I necessarily want to read too much subtext into this, but I like the idea of the travelling entertainers using film, which would eventually mean their downfall, as a means of survival. More eyebrow-raising, to someone who was watching reconstructed versions of missing Doctor Who episodes a year and a bit ago, is the implication that we should burn any old film cans we have in our attic!

So, great concept and great execution, but by this point monster-of-the-week stuff like this is no longer what this show is about. 3/5.