Kidulthood (2006)

"You can put it in my arse as well. It hurts, but I don't mind."

This is an extraordinary debut from Noel Clarke as a writer and, which is sort of the point, a bloody good film. Doesn't half make me feel old, though, and I'm only 38.

Are teenagers really like this in London, with the bullying, the drugs, the incomprehensible slang, the relentlessly hard gang mentality, and the horrifying level of bullying? I'm 38, and I feel old. I don't live in London, fortunately, but I'm still terrified about the bullying my daughter could experience when she starts school.

It's a brilliantly directed film, with some wonderful touches, and a superb script is brought to life by a largely unknown cast, although Cornell John and Alison Newman are both familiar faces from Eastenders. It deals with bullying, gang culture, teen suicide, teen pregnancy, and, in a subtle way, racism, although this seems to be one issue which is actually shown to be less of a problem than one might expect. Most depressing, perhaps, is the universally subservient attitude the girls have towards the boys: it's as if feminism never happened.

All this builds towards a tragic and dramatic ending which leaves us wanting more. This isn't necessarily the sort of film is usually watch, and I only watched it because it was written by Noel Clarke of off of that Doctor Who, but I enjoyed it immensely.

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: Combat

“I didn’t want saving.”

The first rule is: you do not talk about Combat. The second rule is: YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT COMBAT. But nobody tells me what to do. I’m a rebel, me. I live life right out there on the edge.

This is our first and so far only script by Noel Clarke, which reminds me I must get around to watching Kidulthood sometime. It’s much better than I remembered; bloody brilliant in fact. And once again there’s a lot of story arc stuff, some of which passed me by the first time round. Not the Gwen / Rhys stuff, of course. Their relationship hits a real low here; “What’s happening to us, Gwen?” asks a despairing Rhys, just before things start to get worse. Even Jack is warning Gwen, not exactly without hypocrisy, that she should take a bit more care of her personal life, but she doesn’t get it: “Rhys will get over it. He always does.”

Things don’t get better; Gwen has to give the bad news to a bereaved wife and immediately gets snapped at by a particularly depressed and nasty Owen (of whom much later, obviously). He surpasses even his own history of nasty putdowns with “I was getting tired of your fuck-tricks anyway”. It’s clearly over between them.

And then, the climax: Gwen confesses her infidelity to Rhys. His reaction is to say “But you wouldn’t do that,” bless him. But Gwen makes her confession meaningless by revealing that she’s drugged Rhys with retcon, desperate for forgiveness. Ever since Gwen joined Torchwood it’s been changing her for the worse; this is rock bottom. And this is where she discovers Torchwood is no replacement for her life with Rhys. Symbolically, she turns up at the Hub with a pizza in a parallel scene to the one in Everything Changes. But this time the team aren’t there for her and she sits alone, crying.

Anyway, Owen. On the one hand the character is so unlikeable and shallow I have no sympathy for him, even after what’s just happened with Diane. But on the other hand I suspect I’m not expected to. And on the, er, other hand (assume a hypothetical three-armed alien creature, or something), Burn Gorman has been putting in brilliant performances right through the series and is truly outstanding here. It’s a staggering achievement to make such a git of a character so compelling. Especially as we start off with him just being a bit of a mardy git and having a bit of a foreshadow-y fight in a bar with Hot Chip’s “Over and Over” playing in the background. How very 2006.

Also very 2006, and this time not in a good way, is the Crazy Frog ringtone found on the phone of the corpse found by Tosh and Jack. I’d managed to repress my memory of that particular trauma, and now it’s all coming back. Damn you, Torchwood. Fortunately the plot is gripping enough for me to almost forgive this. And once Owen deigns to actually joining in with it by going undercover, things start getting really good.

Owen meets Mark Lynch, who seems to like him in the false belief that he’s found a fellow Nietzchean wanker to be all nihilistic and laddish with. Mark is a fascinating and well-written character, though; for someone with a basically shallow personality whose life revolves around arrogance, crap beer, fighting and cod philosophy he’s made to seem quite compelling. Oh, and we get another line about something coming, “out there, in the darkness”. Gosh, do you reckon this might be a subtle piece of foreshadowing?

Interesting to hear the speech from Mark about the world having no meaning without, among other things, “faith”. On the one hand this fits in with the pessimistic pseudo-atheism of the series, but on the other it hints at a possible religious meaning intended by the author. Either way, it’s a superficially shallow philosophy at the surface level intended by Mark but asks interesting questions about the series themes deeper down.

The stuff with the Weevils and the cage may not be particularly original (Angel did this a year previously), but it’s just a McGuffin; this is another story where theme and character are the main focus. And Owen’s apparent death wish is a very interesting development.

Another interesting point; Jack allows Janet the Weevil to run loose as bait, at the risk of killing innocent bystanders, although Tosh and Ianto both object. And Tosh later calls Jack on his treatment of the Weevil. Once again, we’re shown that Torchwood may be our protagonists but they’re certainly not heroes.

Excellent stuff, the best Torchwood yet. 5/5.

Doctor Who: Army of Ghosts / Doomsday

Army of Ghosts



“They can shoot me down, but the moral high ground is mine.”



It’s a most arresting beginning- “This is where I died”- which immediately grabs you, reminding you of a certain line from The Satan Pit. Throw in a few short “nothing can possibly go wrong” scenes, and we’ve been well and truly told that this is going to be epic.

The Doctor and Rose arrive back in the Powell Estate, and naturally Rose has got loads of washing for Jackie. Apparently the TARDIS has no washing machine, which gives rise to all sorts of questions about how the Doctor used to get his washing done way back when. Perhaps he originally landed in Totters Lane to use the local laundry.

Anyway, there are strange apparitions which everyone on the planet seems to assume are a) ghosts and b) not scary, as would be traditional. And actually, seeing David Tennant wait for a ghost to arrive at the appointed time is quite spookily reminiscent of his recently televised Hamlet.

Elsewhere, the actual plot is happening. We’re finally introduced to Torchwood, and its leader Yvonne Hartman, played quite brilliantly by Tracy-Ann Obermann, who is at the same time quite the imperialist and a devotee of the latest management crap. There’s a mysterious sphere, and some lurking Cybermen. Oh, and there’s a one-off actress called Freema Agyeman but we’ll probably never see her again.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is now sporting 3D glasses and has announced the debut of a new catchphrase, “allons-y”. I never noticed the line “Allons-y, Alonso” before! He and Rose head into the TARDIS and trace the “ghosts” to their source in the Torchwood building, momentarily forgetting that Jackie’s still on board. Oops.

There are a lot of great individual scenes in these couple of episodes, the first of which is the Torchwood heavies applauding the Doctor. In fact, the whole sequence which follows between Yvonne and the Doctor is a delight, especially when she casually tells him he’s a prisoner. She’s a great character.

The Doctor explains that the sphere is for travelling through the void which separates universes from one another, and name-drops the Eternals while he’s doing it. Yay! He then proceeds to play mind games with Yvonne, getting her to suspend the “ghost shift”, in another brilliant scene. Billie Piper also adds greatness to her own strand with her hilariously brilliant lying body language, and… it’s Mickey!

The ghosts are Cybermen! They’ve just conquered the entire planet! And… there are Daleks inside the sphere! Yep, that was all a bit good.



Doomsday



“I’m burning up a sun just to say goodbye.”



It’s been a while since we last saw the Daleks so naturally they need to remind us how nasty they are. Killing Rajesh (this week’s red-shirt) with their suckers for no particular reason will do nicely. But Rose is a match for them- as is Mickey, who is suddenly yet naturally a bit of a hero with no idiot tendencies whatsoever. That’s good character development.

The Cybermen / Dalek macho stuff is amusing, especially the Daleks boasting about being able to defeat five million Cybermen with one Dalek, let alone four, but this is as much about the environmental damage caused by the hole between universes as it is about them. They still get to be cool, though: the Daleks reminisce about the old days of Terry Nation Dalek annuals by talking about “Rels” while the Cybermen threaten to cybernise Yvonne (Tracy-Ann Obermann plays the fear quite superbly) and Jackie, who is rather fortunate to escape.

Jake and his commando mates suddenly turn up from the other universe to resolve the immediate crisis, and take the Doctor back to their universe to have a chat with Pete. Apparently Harriet Jones is president!

Meanwhile, the chat between Rose and Mickey is halted by a curt “Social interaction will cease!” from Dalek Thay. Naturally the Doctor chooses this very moment to pop in for a chat. We learn that these Daleks are all from the Cult of Skaro, a kind of Dalek freemasonry, and are sufficiently special to have names: Thay, Sec, Jast and Caan. They have a mysterious bit of Time Lord tech called the Genesis Ark, which Mickey helpfully activates for them.

We get another fantastic scene as Jackie and Pete finally meet. The highlight, of course, is Jackie telling the Doctor to shut up, although this is closely followed by the look between Mickey and the Doctor as Jackie tells Pete that “There was never anyone else.”

Things are still pear-shaped though; the Genesis Ark is bigger on the inside and it contains millions of Daleks. The CGI is slightly dodgy at this point, but that only really highlights how great it has otherwise been.

The Doctor comes up with the solution very quickly; he can force everything that’s been through the void to fall through a hole to be trapped there forever. But that means everyone from Pete’s world, plus Rose, has to go back there to be safe, while the Doctor just holds on tight and hopes for the best. Rose isn’t having this, and makes sure she ends up staying behind. This is feeling very much like Adric’s final moments from Earthshock- we know it’s all going to end in tears. Rose’s fall into the vortex is beautifully realised, and Pete’s sudden reappearance to save her comes out of the blue.

We now get shots of both Rose and the Doctor standing next to walls to emphasise the permanency of their separation. Time passes, and we come to the point from which Rose has been narrating everything all this time. Their final meeting at Bad Wolf Bay is perfect and wonderful, and the Doctor’s final failure to say to Rose that he loves her is an inspired moment. It’s just a shame that Catherine Tate’s sudden appearance has lost rather a lot of its shock value in recent years!



Amazing. 5/5, easily, and at last a story to take the top spot from The Caves of Androzani. The season as a whole, though… after last season’s rather successful scoring this is a bit of a letdown and actually a bit below the average with 3.7/5. When it was good it was very, very good but the clunkers really let it down.

Doctor Who: The Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel

Rise of the Cybermen



“And how will you do that… from beyond the grave?”

It’s an odd beginning- Roger Lloyd Pack, in a wheelchair, unveiling a new creature which is part machine. The echoes of Davros from Genesis of the Daleks are difficult to ignore. Still, this megalomaniac has a much better sense of humour. And I think this scene is funny even if a lot of people didn’t at the time.

This is the first time since the RTD era started that I’ve found myself knowing very little about the writer. I have no idea who Tom MacRae is or what he’s done. In fact, I could almost claim to be coming to this story with no preconceptions if it weren’t for the small detail that I’ve already seen it several times.

The story’s notable for the return of the you-know-whats, of course, but also to the foreground is Mickey, his character arc, and his relationship with the Doctor and Rose. The first TARDIS scene has Mickey still being the outsider of the gang, the butt of the jokes. And while the Doctor later worries about Rose going to find her father, it hasn’t occurred to him that there might be a parallel situation for Mickey, or indeed that he might have a hinterland at all.

It’s a good story for him, fittingly enough. It’s the sci-fi savvy Mickey who’s the first to realise that they’re on an alternate Earth, and he deals with the situation a lot better than Rose does in something of a role reversal. He also tells us that Tony Blair exists in “our” timeline, sadly. Or did, presumably, before the Slitheen got him.

Rose’s dad is alive here, in another fascinating plot thread which reaches backwards and forwards and, like the Mickey arc, is far more significant and fascinating in the context of the Marathon than it was at the time. To digress, though… both Jackie and Pete exist in this reality, and given that the chances of the same sperm fertilising the same egg as in our reality are vanishingly small I have to assume that events must have diverged from our reality less than forty years previously, after they were both conceived. That seems quite a tall order, given the zeppelins, the fact that Britain is a republic, and so on.

It’s fun exploring this world, where Jackie is rich, a bit nasty, and has a dog called Rose, Don Warrington is the President, and everybody’s wearing silver ear things that bring up Cybermen-style jug handles when Lumic wants to take control.

The Doctor states quite clearly that, with no more Time Lords around, “the walls of reality are closed,” and that travel between different realities is impossible, except for just this once. I wonder why he’s emphasising this so much? It’s almost as if something’s being foreshadowed.

The moment where Rose and the Doctor see everyone just stop and receive their “downloads” is just as horrible, once you think about it, as the forced Cybernisation to the sounds of Tight Fit that happens shortly afterwards. An entire society is just allowing one private monopoly to get inside their heads and “download” its own stance on politics, culture and everything, and hardly anybody seems to question it. Could this be the second dig at Rupert Murdoch from the “New Series”, I wonder?

Mickey finds that his Gran is still alive, and then things start happening rather quickly as he’s bundled into a van by people talking about “International Electromatics” (Now where have I heard that before?). But at least he manages to, ahem, find himself. Heh. Sorry.

There’s a nice bit of dialogue from Lumic which I only noticed this time round, as he says to Crane that he’s governed by greater laws than those represented by the President- “The right of a man to survive.” What a very Cyberman mentality.

The Doctor and Rose infiltrate the party, where Rose, interestingly, has a conversation with Pete that closely parallels their conversations in Father’s Day; Pete instinctively trusts her. Jackie’s reaction to her is quite a shock, though. This is not the Jackie that we know and love, and we know that be the narrative laws of the programme she’s going to die.

It’s a fantastic ending, showing us that Graeme Harper’s still got it; not only do the Cybermen look fantastic, but they’re brilliantly shot and, best of all, brilliantly choreographed. Again we get an outstanding cliffhanger.




The Age of Steel



“I’d call you a genius, but I’m in the room.”

Actually the cliffhanger resolution is quite good, I thought. A bit convenient in hindsight, perhaps, but I didn’t see it coming at the time. And from this point on it’s pretty much all epic movie action stuff.

There’s a bit of exposition in the van first, though, in which Pete makes two earth-shattering revelations. Firstly, he’s been spying on Lumic for the preachers, and secondly, they have Scooby Doo in this world.

It’s fascinating to see that here, as so often, the Doctor just takes charge of these people he’s just met and is questioned by no one, and yet the script manages to make this entirely plausible. It’s also interesting to see how Mickey and Ricky are shown to be more similar than the might have first seemed, with Ricky not being quite the freedom fighter we imagined and Mickey constantly showing himself to be more brave and resourceful than even he realises.

Of course, we can’t have two of them, and it’s only polite of Ricky to be the one to bite the dust, what with him not being a regular character and all. And Jake not only has to deal with the loss of his boyfriend (interesting angle on Mickey here, and also our first glimpse of a proto-Torchwood take on sexuality) but has his doppelganger hanging around apologising. But Mickey comes up trumps with his magnificent speech about how he’s going to help, dammit.

The Doctor and Mrs Moore re-enact the hatch scene from Tomb of the Cybermen and then, in a scene which brilliantly shows us the horror of Cybernisation, they examine an immobilised and dying Cyberman and the Doctor accidentally damages its emotional inhibitor. We find out that she was called Sally and tomorrow was going to be her wedding day. Meanwhile, Pete and Rose are spotted by a Cyberman who turns out to have been Jackie but then, even more effectively, she disappears into the crowd and they have no idea which one she was. This is brilliant; never before has the nature of Cybernisation and the existential dilemmas it raised been dramatised so well.

Lumic, of course, is forcibly Cybernised by his underlings and becomes the Cyber Controller. I suppose there’s grounds for criticism in that we’re not told how or why he seems to retain a bit of emotion while other Cybermen don’t (rather hypocritically, given his boasts to the Doctor), but I don’t really mind as the character fulfils a dramatic need for a chief villain who can cut it in a verbal showdown scene.

And it’s a pretty damn good showdown scene, too. The Doctor echoes Peter Davison’s speech from Earthshock but also emphasises the New Series’ themes of change versus stasis and human potential. And, of course, it’s Mickey who saves the day. I love the way he apparently learned to fly a zeppelin via Playstation.

There’s an interesting role reversal at the end, though- when finally tells Pete who she is things don’t work out as they did in Father’s Day; this time he can’t deal with it. And Mickey’s leaving scene is brilliant as he finally unloads his dependence on Rose. And his last line is perfect.

Doctor Who: The Girl in the Fireplace

“What’s a horse doing on a spaceship?”

“Mickey, what’s pre-revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspective!”

Steven Moffat’s back, and it’s timey-wimeyness right from the start. It’s Versailles, it’s the eighteenth century, then the credits roll and it’s Moffat’s very own 51st century. But we’ll be coming back to this scene in a rather clever way. Let’s not beat about the bush; I might as well say from the start that this is a blatant 5/5, and it’s going right into my chart at number three. It manages to be simultaneously a genuinely affecting romance, an ingenious treatment of time travel and an awesomely plotted tale that not only works like clockwork but is probably doing a metatextual nod to the story’s monster by doing so. Simply awesome.

The TARDISeers walk out on to the spaceship, to Mickey’s obvious delight. But something is odd; the engine’s running, and is clearly powering something, yet the ship is still, with not a crew member to be seen. But even stranger is the genuine eighteenth century French fireplace in the wall, behind which is a little girl called Reinette who thinks it’s 1727.

The Doctor spins round, and he is indeed in Reinette’s room, albeit a few months later. We then get the only flaw I can see in the story; the clock’s broken, so what’s doing the ticking? This is fine, even brilliant in itself, but it’s too similar to the scene with the tape recorder in The Doctor Dances. Seeing Moffat repeat himself like this is worrying. Still, aside from this the episode, and indeed the scene, is pretty much faultless. The fact that the monster is underneath Reinette’s bed is brilliant, as is what it is- an eighteenth century style automaton! This is exciting stuff. I love the no nonsense way the Moff sets out to scare the kids here.

The Doctor returns through the fireplace a few minutes later, and my, hasn’t Reinette grown! She indicates she’s rather pleased to see him but has to leave. The Doctor is then made aware that he’s just snogged Madame de Pompadour.

Back on the ship, there’s a certain amount of weirdness- a horse, a camera containing a human eye, and a human heart attached to machinery, for starters. There are windows to various events in Reinette’s life scattered throughout the ship; it appears to be stalking her. Once again, an awesomely brilliant concept.

The Doctor partially explains things, slightly yuckily; the ship is damaged and is in need of parts. It’s used parts of the bodies of the now ex-crew, but for some reason it now wants to use Reinette’s brain as its central computer. Blimey.

In a development of last week’s themes, Mickey gives Rose a bit of a ribbing now that the Doctor again seems to have a new lady friend. And there’s also been talk of Cleopatra (“He called her Cleo”). Interestingly, though, when I first watched this I had the impression that, brilliant though both this story and its predecessor undoubtedly are, the character arcs were poorly done as the Doctor’s relationship with Reinette seemed to indicate a betrayal of Rose. Interestingly, I no longer feel that’s the case. The Doctor loves Rose, but essentially in a platonic way, whereas the reverse isn’t necessarily true, although it’s not necessarily false either.

Reinette shows how fab she is by reading the Doctor’s mind as he read hers, and says some very interesting things about his loneliness. And we get the return of our favourite semi-euphemism as she asks the Doctor to “dance” with her. The camera then cuts away. Some time has passed.

The Doctor, feigning rat-arsedness, rather easily rescues Rose and Mickey from certain death at the hands of the clockwork robots, pausing only to note that “bananas are good”. I love this script.

It’s now clear than when Reinette is 37, the same age as the ship, she will be “ready” for the honour of being beheaded. Rose has the task of explaining this to Reinette. Reinette proves to be just a bit more eloquent. It’s a wonderful scene, turning the tables on our expectations of the “primitive” person from the past.

The Doctor rescues Reinette- naturally in the most show-offy way possible- but is trapped, and is now destined to take the slow path with her. Except that Reinette is rather clever and has kept the fireplace.

The ending is truly heartbreaking. Even I cried a bit, dammit. And the final shot explains everything. Having watched this I’m getting really quite excited about the future of Doctor Who under Steven Moffat. 5/5, like I said.

Doctor Who: School Reunion

“Oh, mate! The missus and the ex… welcome to every man’s worst nightmare!”

Nice pre-credits teaser, with Tony Head being suitably dastardly and the surprise of seeing the Doctor taking a class. And then the credits remind me of Toby Whithouse, who has of course since become famous for Being Human. Must get round to watching them when I start watching television fully again after the Marathon!

There are odd goings-on, and the Doctor and Rose have gone undercover as a teacher and dinner lady respectively. For the first time we join the story in the middle of the action, giving the whole thing a sense of pace and cutting out unnecessary and tiresome exposition. Of course, the plot is little more than a perfunctory Demon Headmaster type thing, but in this story more than other the plot is just something chugging away in the background while we concentrate on the character stuff, so I have no problem with that. We’ve only got 42 minutes, after all.

In the context of the Marathon it’s such a big, big thing so see Sarah again (I refuse to call her Sarah Jane) and Tennant’s face when she walks into the room is extraordinary. But the scene where the two of them come face to face besides the TARDIS is electric. The whole thing’s perfect, and Lis Sladen is great. I love the cattiness between Sarah and Rose, too. In fact, the next few minutes are pure joy, as we get to see K9 again (yay!) and the boot’s finally on the other foot as Mickey takes great delight at Rose’s discomfort with the Doctor and Sarah (“If I were you, I’d go easy on those chips”).

We get the sort of conversation between the Doctor and Sarah which we never would have got back in the old days, and it throws a whole new dimension on to their relationship, in a good way. Sarah says that the Doctor “dumped” her, and demands to know why he doesn’t return. Interestingly, his reply, that he has such a long life compared to those he travels with, is simultaneously genuinely deep and tragic yet completely dodging the question. It’s all summed up in one exchange as the Doctor protests “You didn’t need me! You were getting on with your life,” to which Sarah simply replies “You were my life”.

And we get the brilliant revelation that the Doctor left her in Aberdeen, not South Croydon! But even this is topped mere seconds later by Mickey’s realisation that he’s the tin dog.

Next we get a conversation between Rose and the Doctor which parallels the earlier one between him and Sarah; Rose now realises she’s only the latest of many to travel with him and wonders if one day she’ll get the push too. The Doctor’s reply is more insistent and more heartfelt but really no more honest. And it’s Sarah who he instinctively gives the sonic screwdriver to.

We switch to the conversation between the Doctor and Finch, a scene relating to the actual plot which, almost uniquely, is probably worth mentioning. There are echoes of the “No second chances” line from The Christmas Invasion as the Doctor gives him just one warning; there’s a hard edge to this new Doctor.

The monster competition between Sarah and Rose is fanwank heaven, and it’s the fact that the Loch Ness Monster just can’t be trumped that breaks the ice and allows them to bond. This scene is a significant one in post-2005 Who; ever since Rose the programme has been cagey about explicit references to specific past events for fear of alienating new fans, with even the creation of the Daleks being alluded to only in vague terms. This episode marks a sudden shift, with continuity references everywhere. At last the programme can embrace its past.

It turns out that the Krillitane want to solve some ultimate equation type thingy to somehow gain power over reality. It’s only on this viewing that I realised the significance in their all being maths teachers! Interestingly, we never see whether the Doctor is ultimately tempted or not by Finch’s offer of power as it’s Sarah who decides for him, assuming the Doctorish role at that point.

Finch says “forget the shooty dog thing”- so that’s where the phrase comes from! And then the plot comes to an end with K9’s sacrifice and Mickey, er, pulling the plug. The coda’s great; Sarah declines the offer to come aboard the TARDIS again, finally getting a proper goodbye from the Doctor, and advises Rose that “Some things are worth getting your heart broken for.” We end with the revelation that the Doctor’s made her a new K9.

And Mickey finally joins the TARDIS crew (yay), to Rose’s apparent annoyance…



Utterly wonderful. The plot was by-the-numbers, of course, but rightly so; we wouldn’t want it to overshadow the important stuff, in the same way no one ever criticised the works of Jimi Hendrix for the so-so vocals. Easily a 5/5.

Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion

“Harriet Jones, Prime Minister.”

“Yes, I know who you are.”

It’s Christmas Eve, and both Jackie and Mickey (who, we now learn, is a mechanic) hear the sound of the TARDIS materialising. “She’s alive!” cries Jackie, once again showing us how traumatic the last few months of not knowing must have been, and how thoughtless it was for the Doctor to arrive now rather than shortly after the events of The Parting of the Ways.

The Doctor collapses and ends up in Jackie’s flat. The fact that he has two hearts is quickly brought out, the first of several nods to Spearhead From Space. Rose is shaken by the regeneration, coming to realise that the Doctor really isn’t human.

Meanwhile, Harriet Jones has become Prime Minister, and the British space programme has sent a probe to Mars, apparently single-handed. I mean, come on- I know this is science fiction, but that’s just too far-fetched.

It’s interesting how the change in their relationship is revealed in the conversation between Rose and Mickey- he’s come to accept the situation to the extent that he’s able to give Rose a ribbing for constantly going on about the TARDIS. Of course, as soon as he gets her to promise they’ll just have a normal Christmas with no aliens or anything a bunch of robots dressed as Santa try to kill them with a flamethrower. And then there’s the attack of the killer Christmas tree, which I just love. In a way it’s a shame that these ideas have been used up, as no Christmas special will ever be able to be quite so Christmassy again.

The Doctor briefly wakes up and sorts it out, and then the focus shifts to the PM and UNIT in the Tower of London. The probe has come across some aliens on live TV (cue another appearance by Trinity Wells) and there’s some debate as to who they are. They can’t be Martians; as the UNIT major point out they look completely different. They make contact with the aliens; Mickey, of course, is hacking into this, as that’s how the Internet works in TV dramas. There’s another mention of the mysterious Torchwood, which the PM is not supposed to know about and the UN doesn’t know about, although the UNIT major apparently does.

Harriet refuses to surrender, and the Sycorax, controlling peoples’ blood, makes a third of the world’s population, including the Royal Family, go and stand right at the edge on the tops of buildings. Oops. It’s all looking a bit grim. And then, when things seemingly can’t get any worse, the Sycorax ship manoeuvres itself over London blotting out the Sun, Independence Day style. This is a triumph both of effects and design, the ship being essentially a massive rock with the technological components built into it.

While Rose manoeuvres Jackie and Mickey into the TARDIS, for no reason other than safety, Harriet and underlings are teleported up to the Sycorax ship, where Harriet assumes the role of leader of the world! The Sycorax leader demonstrates how nasty he is by killing both scientist Daniel Llewellyn and the UNIT major, and then proceeds to throw a major wobbly because Harriet hasn’t told him about some secret alien tech she’s hidden. This turns out to be the TARDIS, and the Sycorax leader duly teleports it on to the ship. In retrospect, this probably wasn’t a good idea.

Rose and Mickey emerge, leaving behind an unconscious Doctor and a dripping flask of tea. But as the Sycorax leader’s words start to be translated, it’s clear that tea is indeed the solution to everything as the Doctor emerges. His first scene is a killer and leaves us in no doubt that this is indeed the Doctor. Disappointed he’s not ginger (how very topical!), he babbles on for a bit before he eventually deigns to allow the Sycorax leader to speak. And then, brilliantly, he presses the big red button and calls the Sycorax bluff, simultaneously resolving a major plot point and showing us something of this new Doctor’s character. He instantly feels a lot more confident and, well, Tom Baker-ish than his traumatised predecessor.

The final challenge between the Doctor and the Sycorax leader gives us a couple more great moments; as he’s less than fifteen hours into his new body, he can regrow his hand after it’s been cut off. And we get the “No second chances” moment, which in hindsight looks as though it’s foreshadowing rather a lot.

There’s another nod to Spearhead as the Doctor explains to Harriet that Earth is drawing attention to itself with probes and such like, but the cosiness of the coda is shattered as Harriet orders the mysterious Torchwood to vaporise the Sycorax ship as it’s retreating. This causes the Doctor to end Harriet’s career with six short words in a scene which may not be entirely believable but is more than cool enough to get away with this. Still, it looks as though the Doctor has changed the future from what was supposed to happen back in World War Three…

With the adventure over, the new Doctor gets the traditional clothes choosing scene. I think it was said somewhere that there was supposed to be something on screen from every previous Doctor, but all I spotted was the two scarves. Still, it’s a nice ending. The Doctor stays for Christmas dinner; this incarnation clearly does do domestic.

And just when things seemingly can’t get any better, the middle eight is back. Yes! 5/5.

Doctor Who: Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways

Bad Wolf



“Ladies, your viewing figures just went up!”



Arse. I might as well admit from the start that I’ve ended up awarding a 5/5 to every story of the season. This in no way affects my credibility, I’m sure.

Anyway, we start with a few clips from The Long Game, and a caption tells us it’s a hundred years later. Except that we seem to be in the Big Brother house. And the Doctor’s a contestant. Now there’s an extremely weird pre-titles sequence.

We then switch to Rose in a scene which directly parallels the Doctor’s, right down to parts of her dialogue. She’s about to play The Weakest Link. With an, ahem, “Anne-Droid”. And Captain Jack Back is with a robot Trinny and Susannah. Naturally.

In 2005 I was distinctly uneasy about these references to contemporary game shows, especially as this is supposed to be 198,100 years in the future and technically a bit implausible that people in the distant future would be watching these shows, although at the same time I admired how it was done. This time round it doesn’t bother me at all- that’s just the style of Doctor Who these days. And I can accept the implausibility because it doesn’t really matter- this is allegory, like a large chunk of science fiction generally is, and therefore really about the concerns of the present. Besides, we couldn’t possibly depict the distant future at all without doing this sort of thing on some level. Everything we see is necessarily an extrapolation of the present, so we might as well be blatant about it.

Anyway, it soon becomes clear that not only are the Big Brother contestants disintegrated once evicted, with the only prize being survival, but being the Weakest Link also means disintegration. Oh, and Trinny and Susannah extend their makeover tendencies to rearranging peoples’ faces. It’s all quite mysterious, too; the transmit beam which transported our heroes into these game shows did so inside the TARDIS, indicating considerable power. And no one in charge seems to be picking the TARDISeers- they seem to have just arrived.

Oh, and the Anne Droid asks a question about something called the “Torchwood Institute”. Just thought I’d mention it. No particular reason.

The Doctor escaped, with his new friend Lynda with a “y”, and learns that this is in fact Satellite Five. It seems this is all his fault, as the collapse of TV news is what caused all this to happen. Gosh. And there was me thinking that 24 hour rolling news was a complete load of crap. Oh, and the Doctor agrees to let Lynda travel with him in the most fate tempting way possible. She’s so going to die.

Rose is still playing The Weakest Link alongside the rather gittish Rodric, played rather well by Patterson Joseph (who, incidentally, I was expecting to be cast as the Eleventh Doctor- shows how much I know). The questions are rather amusing: Jackie Collins is now apparently classed as “literature”. Oh, and the Face of Boe is apparently from the Isop Galaxy. As is Vortis, I seem to recall. But just as the Doctor and Jack rush in to disintegrate her, apparently she’s disintegrated. And both Eccleston and Barrowman convincingly portray their characters’ utter dejection as they’re arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced, Frontier in Space style, to the lunar penal colony. Without trial, naturally.

Of course, they escape, and head up to Floor 500 with a whopping great gun. They soon discover that things are rather odd, and that people are just as unquestioning as in The Long Game. There’s a great moment of moral force for the Doctor when, upon being told that the people running the games were “just doing our jobs,” he replies “And with that sentence you just lost the right to even talk to me.”

There’s a brief power cut, courtesy of a solar flare, and the Controller is able to explain that the has brought the TARDISeers here in the hope that they can stop her mysterious “masters”. These “masters” were the power behind the Jagrafess and have been guiding humanity’s destiny for centuries- this means simultaneously that all this is, crucially, not actually the Doctor’s fault, but at the same time he should have thought to dig a bit deeper into what lay behind the Jagrafess.

Jack, though, has found the TARDIS, and it turns out that the “disintegrated” humans are not killed, merely transmatted- Rose is still alive! Then we cut to her- and a certain familiar throbbing sound…

At last we see loads of Daleks, and they look fantastic. The odds against the Doctor are huge, but brilliantly the cliffhanger emphasises not that but his resolve to defeat them.



The Parting of the Ways



“New teeth. That’s weird.”

The Doctor rescues Rose with admirable speed, materialising the TARDIS around Rose and a Dalek, while Jack shoots the Dalek with that whopping great gun. And now the Doctor naturally has to have a chinwag with the Daleks. He discovers they’re half-human. Ah, that old favourite…

It seemed they survived the Time Lord because of a single survivor, who is now their Emperor, with delusions of Godhood. Having established the Emperor’s a bit of a nutter, they all head back to Satellite Five. Once there things start to go a bit UNIT, with the Doctor taking charge of the boffin stuff while Jack takes charge of the military side of things. Jack kisses both the Doctor and Rose full on the lips, indicating he doesn’t expect he’ll live to see them again. Things are getting very dangerous. So the Doctor sends Rose home in the TARDIS.

Rose is not too pleased about this, especially as the conversation with Jackie and Mickey as they eat their chips is as mundane as a conversation can be. Rose is insistent that she can’t live like that, to which Mickey very reasonably retorts “Why, because you’re better than us?” But Rose insists it’s not the travelling she can’t live without, but the better way of living, the refusal to give up. I’m not sure she’s written as being entirely honest here, but it does the trick with Mickey. The fact that “Bad Wolf” suddenly appears as graffiti everywhere clinches it. Rose is determined to get at the heart of the TARDIS…

Meanwhile, the Doctor is nonplussed as the Dalek Emperor denies all knowledge of the Bad Wolf thing. And the cowards on the bottom floor, including Rodric, get what’s been coming to them. The situation seems hopeless, in spite of a bit of fight being shown by the Anne Droid, and Lynda is killed in a brilliantly executed scene. Meanwhile, on Earth, Jackie finds a truck for Rose and Mickey to use. It works, and Rose looks into the heart of the TARDIS. The TARDIS materialises…

It’s too late for Jack, though, who dies heroically. Everything seems hopeless; the Doctor is unable to carry out his plan in the end as the collateral damage would just be too great. But then Rose arrives, full of power from the TARDIS- again, the TARDIS has some worryingly powerful abilities, and this is a potentially bad precedent. But for now it provides a satisfactory ending. In something of a time paradox, Rose herself is the Bad Wolf, scattering the words throughout eternity. Jack is resurrected, the Daleks are all killed- and Rose starts to collapse. She won’t be able to survive all this power.

Of course, the Doctor saves her (with a kiss!) and they leave in the TARDIS. Without Jack, for reasons which remain unexplained. But the Doctor can’t survive himself, and regenerates, to the sounds of the “Chancellor Flavia” theme. Standing up.



Actually, this is one of the weaker episodes of the season. But it’s still good enough for a 5/5. And the season as a whole- wow. A perfect score. Surely this level of quality can’t be sustained?

Doctor Who: Boom Town

“Dinner in bondage. Works for me.”

I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly here, but a short while before this Marathon started- and what a scarily long time ago that was- there was a thread in the old forum about what we were expecting to happen. I can’t remember what I put, but I rather suspect I’d have been expecting most of all to slag off The Keys of Marinus and to mount an impassioned defence of Boom Town, the most underappreciated gem in all of Doctor Who. And once I’ve finished writing this I’ll have done them both. How time flies.

This blew me away in 2005 and it blew me away again earlier this evening. Which might seem a little odd given its reputation as a cheap and silly bit of lightweight fluff. Certainly I remember not being impressed with the trailer at the end of The Doctor Dances. Actually, I’m very curious about how other Marathoneers have rated it (I don’t read the threads until just after I post my own review)- I’m guessing rather higher than its general reputation if not necessarily that highly overall. It’ll be interesting to see if I’m right.

I may not have realised before I reached this stage of the Marathon that I was going to rate every single story so far 5/5, but it’s safe to say I’m not particularly surprised that this season is looking really quite likely to be my favourite. And Boom Town is absolutely vital to this best of all seasons, in fact the heart of it. Set just before the non-stop action of the season’s climax, this is where the season stops to examine its themes in ways which look both backwards and forwards.

The early scenes are very silly, of course. And yes, technically there are problems with the plot logic. How can Margaret Blaine become Mayor of Cardiff without ever having been photographed? How on Earth can a proposal to demolish Cardiff Castle and replace it with a nuclear power station stand any chance of being reality? How can so many absurd and suspicious deaths not cause someone in authority to raise an eyebrow, however much London may not care if all of South Wales falls into the sea?

But all these things are supposed not to make sense. It’s part of the joke. I can understand how a lot of people would object this type of comedy device being used, of course. (I don’t- I have a weakness for self-referential humour, and I accept this sort of thing as part of the wonderful diversity of styles in Doctor Who) But it’s funny; when Margaret replies to journalist Cathy Salt’s question about the fate of the European safety inspectors with “But they were French!” and regrets that the signs saying Danger: High Explosives were only written in Welsh, the dialogue is signalling that this part of the episode is following the narrative rules of sitcom rather than drama; it’s allowed to have dodgy plot logic as long as it knows that and makes a joke of it.

There’s one very important serious scene in this part of the episode, mind; Margaret decides not to kill Cathy, which will be referred to later on. But essentially the entire section with Margaret and the nuclear station is just a bit of light-hearted preamble, albeit well-crafted, and it’s the serious stuff later on that’s the real meat of the episode. This is paralleled with the regular characters, too; their lighter scenes are put at the beginning before things get serious later, so we get a bit of fun, a bit of banter, a bit of exposition about the rift being a good refuelling spot, and, bizarrely, a brief allusion to the events of An Unearthly Child. But there’s stuff bubbling under, of course; Mickey’s relationship to the three time travellers is fascinatingly ambiguous. On the one hand he’s now being welcomed socially into the group and even takes part in the plan to capture Margaret. But he’s still something of an outsider amongst his maybe-girlfriend and two alpha male types. Jack, meanwhile, gets to be the action hero before taking a back seat for the rest of the episode.

It’s not long before Margaret is captured and the episode proper can begin. After one last great comedy line (“Oh, I sound like a Welshman,” says Margaret, in a line which was of course scripted by a Welshman. “God help me, I’ve gone native.”), the TARDISeers decide to take Margaret back to Raxacoricopalafatorius(?). And with a single line- “They have the death penalty”- the episode suddenly turns on a sixpence. As Margaret explicitly states, the Doctor now has to face the consequences of his actions, and this of course foreshadows coming events in which the aftermath of The Long Game will play a central part. But it also looks back to the consequences of the Doctor causing Rose to be missing for a year (the consequences of which are still being played out in this episode)- in fact, the consequences of the Doctor’s wanderings are a central theme of the season, and this is the episode where we stop to explore it. Throughout the season RTD has been deconstructing the tropes of the programme, and this is the ultimate example of that.

Of course, it’s great for other reasons, too. The dialogue between Margaret and the Doctor before and during their “date” is great not just for the gripping discussion of ethics but for her obvious manipulation of him, for Margaret’s comedy assassination attempts, and for the Doctor’s triumphant reoccupation of the moral high ground as he points out that occasionally sparing the odd someone is how a murderer like Margaret can live with herself.

This is paralleled by the conversation between Mickey and Rose, where Rose finally has o confront the way she’s been treating him- she leaves him behind to go travelling but gets jealous when he starts seeing another woman. And yet she only has to call and he comes all the way to Cardiff for her. She’s forced to conclude that “He deserves better.”

The resolution may be a little overly neat, and perhaps over-reliant on the ever-increasing powers of the TARDIS, but it’s very satisfying as far as the themes and characters are concerned. And now that all that’s been dealt with we can finally get to the climax…



5/5. You guessed it.

Doctor Who: Aliens of London / World War Three

Aliens of London



“I’m shaking my booty!”

We begin with another reprise, this time of Rose, and the TARDIS arrives back in the Powell Estate. And… Rose has been gone a whole year. Oops. That’s quite a pre-titles sequence.

Hang on, what’s that the little kid is writing on the side of the TARDIS with is spray can? Never mind. This whole set-up is great: once more RTD finally does something that’s never been done before but must have been speculated about by the viewers. In exploring the consequences of travelling with the Doctor on those left behind RTD once more deconstructs the Doctor / companion relationship, to brilliant effect. There are some funny moments- Jackie slapping the Doctor; the Doctor and Rose replying “NO!” in unison as the policeman asks if they’re in a sexual relationship- but these moments are needed to prevent things getting too dark. Because for Jackie things really have been horrible, and Rose really is very uncaring to her mother. Both these things are wisely kept subtle but they’re there.

Things then slow down a bit as Rose and the Doctor go outside for a chat. They start getting all philosophical, and the Doctor casually mentions he’s 900 years old (he’s lost at least 53 years since Time and the Rani, then). But just as Rose is musing on how no one else around her knows that spaceships exist, a bloody great big one proceeds to crash land above them, in the most dramatic way possible. So what should the Doctor and Rose do but watch it on telly, just as we‘re doing? I love it when things get all postmodern.

The montage we get of different TV programmes (including Blue Peter!) and their reaction to the events is another superb touch, and yet another example of both RTD’s effortless grasp of things you can do with the narrative in television and the much greater degree of TV literacy viewers are credited with compared to earlier eras. Plus, we get Andrew Marr as himself, and he’s great.

On a less positive note, RTD clearly has a rubbish grasp of how British politics works, something I’ll be whinging about quite a bit as I’m a bit of a politics junkie, but this time round it doesn’t loom as large as it did at the time, and I think I may have overreacted originally. But there’s no denying it’s absurd for a parliamentary committee chief on sugar standards or whatever- and thus a backbencher- to suddenly become Acting Prime Minister just because the Cabinet are all conveniently outside London.

The Doctor goes for a wander, but to reassure Rose he gives Rose a TARDIS key of her own; big moment, that. He sneaks off to the TARDIS, where Mickey (who no one’s bothered to tell) spots him…

We meet the tenacious, decent and dull (in a good way) member for Flydale North, with her commendable continued interest in the kind of boring details that proper politics is all about in the face of a ruddy great spaceship that’s just landed in London. And it’s through her eyes that we see something is very strange in Downing Street.

The Doctor, meanwhile, lands near the place where the alien has been taken to, and discusses things with one “Dr Sato”. They don’t tell us what her first name is. I’m guessing something like Toshiko.

Bizarrely, the alien turns out to be a cute little piggy- something which just seemed tonally wrong at the time but no longer does. Perhaps I’m more used to RTD’s style. Even more bizarrely, the whole thing turns out to be a joke, an alien hoax concocted by aliens. And if that’s not enough to tell us that the baddies in this story are very silly aliens, we see our three obvious baddies behaving in a most silly fashion.

Mickey’s shocked to see Rose; no one bothered to tell him that she’s back. Worse, he’s spent the last year being thought of as Rose’s murderer; the character was a buffoon in Rose but now he’s suddenly a very sympathetic figure, a casual victim of the Doctor’s and Rose’s lifestyle who’s genuinely suffered in their wake.

The Doctor returns in the TARDIS- and Jackie sees. Oops. Jackie can’t take this, or the shock of the TARDIS interior, and just runs away, her whole world falling apart. Once back inside she reports the Doctor as an alien- and all sorts of alarms go off. The Doctor is a known figure.

We’ve not had much in the way of explicit continuity from previous series thus far, but here we get a mention of UNIT! And Mickey’s been looking up the Doctor online; there are an awful lot of myths and legends that have built up about him. For the first time in the “new” series, we get explicit acknowledgement of previous incarnations.

Troops surround the Doctor and Rose and they’re put into the back of a police car. But they’re not being arrested but rather conscripted; the Doctor is able to smugly inform Rose that he’s well known in government circles as an expert on alien invasions. And that “Lloyd George used to drink me under the table.”

Unfortunately, it’s a trap, set by the aliens, and we get an excellent triple cliffhanger, with aliens- Slitheen- also advancing on both Rose and Jackie…






World War Three



“I need to be naked!”

“Rejoice in it. Your body is magnificent!”

The Doctor saves the day- but unfortunately one of the Slitheen is disguised as someone who seems to be accepted as Prime Minister for some reason; all the forces at the state’s disposal are now out to get the Doctor. Still, he’s brilliant, and manages to manoeuvre himself into the Cabinet Room with Rose and Harriet Jones.

Apparently “Slitheen” is the aliens’ surname, not their species- nice bit of wrong-footing there. And it’s not an invasion, just a family business who somehow wants to make money.

Nice conversation between Jackie and Mickey. It’s hard to argue with Mickey when he says that “This is what he does, that Doctor. Everywhere he goes- death and destruction.” It’s also nice that he bonds with Jackie, sort of (You saved my life. God, that’s embarrassing.”

The bit with the nuclear codes being held by the UN drove me mad with its implausibility when this was originally shown. I’ve now seen Robot, so I understand it’s a nod to continuity (and by far the biggest so far), but in isolation it’s quite absurd that a nuclear power should give up its arsenal so easily, and here it’s far more than the throwaway line than it was in Robot, and no longer supposedly in a “near future” to boot. Even so, it didn’t annoy me so much this time.

It’s great to see that, after his portrayal in Rose, we now see a different side of Mickey, with the trapped Doctor and Rose suddenly reliant on his computer hacking skills. He could get into trouble for that if he’s not careful. And it’s a great moment when Jackie asks the Doctor “Is my daughter safe?” and he can’t answer.

Probably the heart of the episode is the Slitheen attacking Mickey and Jackie while the Doctor “narrows it down”. It seems the Slitheen are from the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius and vulnerable to vinegar.

The line from the “Prime Minister” about “massive weapons of destruction, capable of being deployed within 45 seconds” is even funnier now than it was then, and shows how you can get away with a lot more satirically in a drama if you include elements of the fantastic.

Mickey, of course, saves the world at the climax, guiding the missile which destroys the Slitheen (“Oh, boll…”). And the episode concludes with the Doctor actually inviting him aboard the TARDIS. The offer is turned down, of course, but it’s a nice bit of character development.

Jackie is finally forced to accept the Doctor, if only because she fears losing contact with her daughter if she doesn’t. But the Doctor refuses to stay and have a meal, as though he’s somehow afraid of domesticity. This is an interesting part of the Doctor’s character; this Doctor wouldn’t have cooked supper at the end of Battlefield.



I’m rather surprised to be rating this two-parter a 5/5 after not liking it way back when, but perhaps I’m lightening up a bit in my old(er) age. Once again RTD has a good play with the fundamental building blocks of the series, and it’s great.

Doctor Who: Rose

“Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!”

Now that’s what I call a set of opening titles, especially after what we were subjected to by the TV Movie! The theme tune is fantastic as well, very much based on the classic template, as it should be. And not only the titles but the programme itself seems to have an overriding sense of redness, which in a bizarre outbreak of synaesthesia I tend to associate with the visual style of the middle of this decade. I know, I’m weird.

It feels very strange watching this again a few years later, and seeing the name of Russell T. Davies for what I’ll try and pretend is the first time. But it’s just as great now as it was then, starting in space above the Earth, zooming down to Rose’s alarm clock and whizzing us through her working day. The pace is incredibly fast compared to anything we’ve previously assumed in the Marathon, and trusts the audience to understand narrative short cuts which the programme hasn’t used before. It’s also a jolt to see an unmistakably contemporary London. And we’re introduced, of course, not only to Rose but her mother, Jackie, and her boyfriend, Mickey, who’s portrayed as quite the prat here.

Rose ends the working day in a claustrophobic basement, surrounded by shop window dummies which we all instinctively know to be Autons cos we’ve seen Spearhead From Space. And incidentally, that’s two stories in a row that borrow heavily from said Pertwee tale.

The dummies come to life and surround Rose, but suddenly a mysterious, leather jacketed man grabs her hands and simply says “Run!” He appears fleetingly, blows up the building, and then disappears from Rose’s life, apparently forever.

We then move to scenes from Rose’s domestic life, establishing the characters of Rose, Jackie and Mickey, all of whom we’ll be getting to know quite well over the next few weeks. Mickey, in particular, seems to be behaving exactly like the bloke who gets killed first in a slasher flick.

It’s a new day, signalled by a very nice repeating of the shot of the alarm clock, and suddenly the Doctor turns up at Rose’s door, drawn there by the plastic arm that Rose has kept. We get some amusing moments, as Jackie flirts with the Doctor, and the Doctor seems to appraise what is apparently a new regeneration by looking at his face in the mirror. But then we get to the important bit, as Rose follows the Doctor out of the flat and they have a very interesting conversation, the subtext of which is that they’re both sizing each other up. Suddenly the Doctor comes out with a fantastic speech about the planet revolving, but then he disappears, again seemingly forever, as he tells Rose to forget him. The camera moves away as he walks towards the police box, and then, alongside our first instance of what would become known as the “Chancellor Flavia” theme, we hear that old familiar sound…

In a nice modern touch, Rose looks up the Doctor on the Internet; inevitably, in the Whoniverse, he’s generated conspiracy theories, the theorist here being Clive, played rather interestingly, by the same actor who played the Devil in Davies’s own excellent The Second Coming, opposite Christopher Eccleston. In what is presumably a nod to Who Killed Kennedy, also concerning conspiracy theories in the Whoniverse, the Doctor is shown to have been at the assassination of JFK.

Meanwhile, Mickey has some trouble with CGI while investigating a wheelie bin, and there is burping. Mickey is replaced by a plastic version, and Rose fails utterly to notice the extreme oddness of his behaviour in spite of the time that must elapse before they end up in the restaurant. Here, the Doctor turns up again, and plastic Mickey is strangely scary as his arms suddenly turn into meat cleavers and he lashes out at anything in front of him. The Doctor defeats him, but Rose is no less impressive, having the presence of mind to sound the alarm and evacuate everyone.

They flee to the TARDIS, which gets exactly the sort of introduction here that it should have been given in the TV Movie. Everything is introduced to us through Rose’s eyes, and the fact that it’s bigger on the inside is played for maximum effect by having Rose walk right round it. The new TARDIS interior is brilliant, too. And the conversation between the Doctor and Rose is brilliant, too- I love the way the Doctor replies “Yep. That all right?” as Rose suggests he might be an alien. He’s also shown to be alien, in a rather Tom Baker-ish way, in his apparent lack of concern for Mickey, or Rose’s need for reassurance as to his fate, focussing instead on the bigger picture.

We get some admirably concise exposition; the Nestene have lost their “protein planets” in some unspecified recent catastrophe, and the Doctor has a MacGuffin called “anti-plastic”. Although this is technically a cheat, something like this is needed if we’re to fit everything necessary into an introductory episode with so many different jobs to do. The bare bones of the actual plot, quite rightly, are perfunctory.

After the highly amusing scene in front of the London Eye, the Doctor confronts the Shadow Proclamation. Refusing to just use the Anti-plastic, he insists on giving the Nestenes a chance. We get some information here; there’s some authority called the Shadow Proclamation, and the Doctor has recently fought in a war, during which he failed to save the Nestene homeworld “or any of them.”

As all this is happening, the Autons smash through windows in scenes we never actually got to see during Spearhead From Space. Clive is killed, thus proving him right about the Doctor bringing death in his wake, with his last words suggesting he’s heard about the events of the earlier story. I’m pleased that the sound effect for the Auton guns is exactly the same as the original.

Back to the Nestene Consciousness, and I’m surprised to hear (well, read in the subtitles) that it cries “Time Lord!” Rose saves the day, with the Doctor taking her and Mickey away from danger in the TARDIS. Mickey’s terrified reaction to its dimensions here underlines even further the contrast between him and Rose. Rose initially refuses the offer to travel in the TARDIS, rather unconvincingly citing her responsibilities to her mother and boyfriend, but when the Doctor gives her a second chance she doesn’t take much convincing.



Wow. Now that’s what I call an introduction. This story got so much done in the course of its 45 minutes, and did it with wit, style and incredible characterisation. Our two leads are both fab too. 5/5.