What A Waste

Doctor Who: Journey’s End

It could all have been so different. We could have had a gurning David Morrissey/James Nesbitt/Robert Carlyle (delete as to your preference) say something stupid before the titles and at the end it could have been revealed that Donna was Susan/Romana/The Rani/Rodan (again delete as to your preference) after using a chameleon arch during the Time War. Then once she had discovered who she really was, she proceeded to help the Doctor to destroy Davros and the Daleks.

After the way the previous episode ended I just knew that I was going to be disappointed because as I said in my last review nothing short of a proper regeneration would have been good enough for me and loe and behold there was some stupid technobabble and he didn’t regenerate at all. Now this really annoyed me when I first saw the episode because it was the biggest cop out ever, but once I watched the episode all of the way through it wouldn’t have worked in the same way if he had of regenerated.

I still felt cheated that we had been goaded in such a way as to believe that he might regenerate because it would have been such a shock if that had happened. I didn’t know what to think at the end of The Stolen Earth when he started to regenerate but they would never have been able to resolve that cliffhanger satisfactorily for me without regenerating him properly and they were never going to have the balls to do that there and then, more’s the pity.

Although that moment at the start of the episode did cast a shadow over the whole episode for me I did manage to enjoy the episode on a second viewing once I knew that the Doctor wasn’t going to regenerate, and there was plenty to enjoy in the episode, most notable the fantastic unhinged performance as Davros by Julian Bleach who is easily the best Davros since Michael Wisher after his turns in these two episodes.

Bernard Cribbins was excellent once again and his lines at the end to the Doctor were heartbreaking and, I am not ashamed to admit it, I cried. Not for the Doctor, but for Wilf and for Donna. If Bernard Cribbins does not win the best guest start in the DWM season poll then there is no justice in the world.

The biggest crime of all though in this episode was the treatment of Donna by the Doctor at the end of episode. That was beyond cruel, and in some ways is worse than her dying would have been. Catherine Tate has been by far and above the best thing about this series of Doctor Who and to see her character go through such a journey only to have her mind wiped right at the end, just doesn’t seem at all fair to me and since when did Time Lords have the ability to wipe people’s minds anyway?

I had no sympathy for the Doctor at the end of the episode when he looked all sad and miserable. Good, I thought. He deserves everything he gets after the way he treated Donna. He basically bought it all on himself and he can have no one else to blame. I have never liked the character of the tenth Doctor, and I like him even less now. She has been the best companion in decades and the treatment of her at the end by the Doctor was just unforgivable in my opinion.

Another excellent bit was the recognition of Sarah Jane by Davros, a nice little aside for the long-term fans of the show, and one that doesn’t affect the scene even if you had never seen Genesis of the Daleks, as it was explained in that little dialogue exchange exactly when and where they met.

Now not only was the episode bad enough because the Doctor didn’t regenerate but instead we got two tenth Doctor’s for the price of one due to the whole thing with the hand. I mean since when did Time Lords have the ability to re-grow lopped off body parts just after regeneration? I must have missed the episode where that happened, unless it was in the one of the Virgin novelisations! Personally I think that it was a pity that the hand didn’t spawn another ninth Doctor (well this Doctor did wear one of the ninth Doctor style jumpers, and like the Doctor said at the end, he was more like the ninth incarnation) because that would have been much more interesting that two tenth Doctors, both for me and for my wife!

Although it was nice to see Mickey and Jackie again they really did nothing else after they rescued Sarah from extermination from the Daleks. It could just as easily been the Brigadier, Sgt Benton and Captain Yates in a souped up version of Bessie coming to her rescue. After they had rescued Sarah Mickey and Jackie’s part in the story was pretty much over, and all that happened in the end was the intimation that Mickey might join the Torchwood team (that is if Captain Jack will have him) it was a shame really that they didn’t have much else to do, but it was nice to see them again as a viewer of the new series since 2005.

Christ knows what people thought of this episode who had never seen any of the previous 3 series though as this final episode bought to a close a couple of plot threads that were not yet satisfactorily resolved, most notably the whole Doctor/Rose story which had been going on since the start of the revamped series.

Quite how Rose is now better off being stuck in the parallel world she spent ages trying to escape to find the Doctor, with a clone of the Doctor created from his hand, albeit one who will tell her he loves her and would probably shag her, I don’t know. It is one way to end the story of Rose, but was it a good way to end it, when she clearly didn’t have what she wanted? What she wanted was the Doctor and what she is left with isn’t really the Doctor, it is basically an animated sex doll with genocidal tendencies who happens to look a lot like the bloke she fancies. Sure it’s closure but not necessarily in a good way.

I did enjoy Journey’s End, but I won’t be watching it again anytime soon, least of all because I don’t want to be reminded of Donna’s fate. I know that you could argue that, after the events in Turn Left, that Donna does have the potential to become the person we know and love from series 4 without the Doctor, but I want to remember Donna as she was, up till the bit when the Doctor did his mind wipe on her, the best companion for decades.

The Beginning of the End

Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth

So, was that a mad episode or what?

By the end of it I just didn’t know what to think. Was my wish going to come true and the tenth Doctor was finally going to regenerate. Judging by the last scene in the episode you would have thought so but I don’t really think that it is going to happen. I would love for it to be a proper full regeneration as that would be a fantastic way to resolve the cliffhanger of the previous episode and we would have the excitement of a new Doctor, but would they really be able to pull the wool over all our eyes (ming-mongs included) and actually regenerate the Doctor in front of our eyes?

I mean it would be the biggest shock of the series so far if that actually happened and would be the most exciting thing to happen in the show probably since it came back in 2005 but what really are the chances of it happening especially when there have been pictures of David Tennant in costume filming the Christmas special.

Of course it could be a total bluff, and they deliberately had Tennant on set just to fool all of the sad fans who go and watch the show being filmed, and all of the press into believing that Tennant will be in the Xmas special, and then pull this stunt as the cliffhanger into the finale episode. If they have managed that then I would have to take my hat of to them (if I were wearing a hat).

Who else thought that it would have been Rose who was shot by a Dalek, rather than the Doctor, in that scene when they ran towards each other? It was never going to end well was it really, but I was shocked when it was the Doctor that got shot, I would have put money on it being Rose, I really would have done. What I want to know is why it has taken the Daleks 45 years to finally exterminate the Doctor. I am sure they could have done it before now if only they had tried harder.

The Donna story is getting more and more interesting now what with the line from the woman in the shadow proclamation about her ‘loss that was yet to come’ and the strange double heart beat that was heard. Either that is a major double bluff or Donna is actually a Time Lord. Some people have said that she could be the Rani but I reckon she could be someone much closer to home say Romana or perhaps even Susan. Imagine the Doctor Who message boards if Donna does turn out to be Susan!

Julian Bleach was fantastic as Davros. As soon as I heard the rumour and once I had seen him in Torchwood I just knew that he would be right for the role of the creator of the Daleks. It is uncanny how much he sounds like Michael Wisher did in Genesis and even some of his mannerisms have come from Wishers portrayal which can not be considered a bad thing since Wisher was by far the best of the Davros’. I liked the little twist about how Davros was saved from the time war and about how now all of the Daleks are pure Kaled and are probably more evil than a lot of the Daleks we have met before, probably since the ones from Genesis themselves!

It was nice to see Harriet Jones once more and it was quite sad to think that she may now be dead after being exterminated by the Daleks. It does seem odd though that they sent more than one Dalek to Harriet Jones when they only really needed one to exterminate her.

I liked the scenes between Harriet Jones and the others and really felt for Rose that she was being left out. That was rather sad I thought. Rose seemed to be a bit more bothered by the sight of Martha than she did by Donna didn’t she? I can only hazard a guess that she sees Martha of more than a threat then she does Donna. Whatever it is she certainly wasn’t happy when she saw her!

The Daleks were on top form as usual and I loved their retort “We know who you are” to Harriet Jones. What is it with that woman that everyone in the whole known universe is aware of her? Then there was also the “My vision is not impaired” when Wilf shot the Daleks eye with a paintball gun.

Good old Wilf. He ain’t scared of no aliens, especially not if they are after his family. Wilf had some of the best lines in this episode including “want to swap” when he saw Rose with her very big gun and when he admitted that he wanted a webcam but his daughter wouldn’t let him have one.

Ianto was also on form in his small appearance in this episode being very much the Ianto from the second season of Torchwood rather than the withdrawn Ianto of the first series of Torchwood.

I am pretty sure that some fans would have fainted with excitement at the legend “with Elisabeth Sladen” in the title sequence and the Sarah we met in this episode wasn’t the rather sad Sarah from School Reunion but the stronger Sarah who we have seen in The Sarah Jane Adventures.

These little scenes of the minor characters are great if you have seen both Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventure but it doesn’t matter if you had never seen either of them because the majority of the audience would be aware of Captain Jack and know that he worked for Torchwood and also would know Sarah Jane from her appearance in the second series.

They aren’t really that significant to the story so it doesn’t matter if you don’t know who they are because Sarah tells everyone that Luke is her son, and Gwen and Ianto were mentioned in the previous episode as being employees of Torchwood.

Personally I loved the little shout outs to Tosh and Owen from Torchwood and to Maria and Clyde from SJA. They were nice little references that either makes you smile, or just go completely over your head if you have never seen either of the spin-off shows.

Either way it will not affect your enjoyment of the story unless you are that much of a pedant that you have to know who every one is in the story even down to the ones who are only referred to in passing that is.

God know what is going to happen in the second episode of this story. It is even going to be fantastic or the biggest load of rubbish ever. I reckon you will know which it is going to be before the title sequence when we find out, once and for all, whether we have a new Doctor or not.

I hope we do, but I am not expecting miracles and wouldn’t be at all surprised if just suddenly stops regenerating and they have some stupid explanation why, which I won’t buy. If he is regenerating at the end of this episode then in the next episode he should regenerate into a new body. That is how regeneration has always worked and how it always should work. We will have to wait and see if they have the balls to do that or not!

Parallel Lines

Doctor Who Turn Left

It would be true to say that if I had decided not to go to watch Man City play Nottingham Forest in 2001, then I would never have ended up in Manchester, and ultimately would never have met Elaine, fell in love and got married. Now this is probably not as cataclysmic as the events that happened because Donna never met the Doctor, as seen in Turn Left, but I would say that it is pretty bloody cataclysmic as far as I am concerned, and my life is so much better for making that decision!

Turn Left was another great episode of Doctor Who from the pen of Russell T Davies. It is always interesting, and an old science fiction standby, to think about what might have happened if the Doctor had not been there to stop something and in this episode for the first time we see what could happen in a world without the Doctor and it turned out to be a rather desperate place where Martha, Sarah Jane, Ianto, Gwen, Sarah Jane, Clyde, Maria and Luke all perished off screen simply because the Doctor wasn’t there. I thought it was quite nice for them all to get a mention even if was saying that their characters were dead. In fact this episode must have the highest death count of any episode of Doctor Who ever, even if the majority of it was off screen.

Of course being as that universe was a parallel one created because Donna chose to turn right and not go to the job at HC Clements. It is amazing how one small decision can have such a catastrophic effect on the entire universe isn’t it? Especially for Donna who doesn’t even realise that this is all happening because she never met the Doctor and he got himself killed when drowning the Rachnoss with the Thames. The events of the episode happened as they happened in our universe except for the fact that Donna was able to talk the Doctor out of destroying himself.

It is likely that in that universe some other poor unsuspecting woman ended up in the TARDIS at the end of Doomsday and had that whole adventure with the Doctor but may not have made it. Next came the events at the hospital where the Judoon took it too the moon where Sarah Jane Smith who must have found out about the Doctor’s death was somehow there and perished along with Martha when the Judoon returned the hospital back to its original spot with only one survivor.

If you wanted to be picky then you could say that who was able to defeat the Carrionites in Elizabethan England or the Daleks in Manhattan? The whole Saxon thing would never have happened as the Doctor would never have traveled to utopia allowing the Master to return to the Earth to put the whole Saxon thing in motion so you could totally write off The Sound of Drums and Last of the Timelords as well as The Lazarus Experiment; Blink could have happened but perhaps with a totally different incarnation of the Doctor (perhaps the ninth like in the original story) and neither would have Human Nature/The Family of Blood.

In fact pretty much the entirety of the third and fourth series of Doctor Who wouldn’t have happened either. Voyage of the Damned would have happened but there would have no survivors and the whole of London would have been wiped off the face of the Earth; the adipose would still have come to Earth and probably would have escaped with the matron intact and the Sontaran’s would have tried to subjugate the Earth but luckily Torchwood came to the rescue. I wonder if, in that universe Tosh or Owen never died, and that Tosh remained in the hub, which being in Cardiff, would have not been affected by the Titanic crashing into Buckingham Palace. Personally I would like to think so.

The episode was a tour-de-force for Catherine Tate as Donna and if people continue to criticize her acting ability after this episode then people really do not know what they are talking about as in this episode she gave her best performance in the role ever. For a lot of the episode she was playing the Donna from The Runaway Bride, but she gradually morphed into the Donna we know and love by the end of the episode and I thought it was really sad when she sacrificed herself at the end of the episode to allow for time to rectify itself and for events to happen as they should have done.

I really hope that she doesn’t die at the end of the series because that was really affecting seeing Donna dying like that and if that does happen then I will not be best pleased. I bawled my eyes out when Tosh died in Torchwood and I reckon that it might happen again if Donna dies as well. I am hoping that Donna has a better exit and that. She certainly deserves it, but part of me does think that something will happen to her, I just hope it doesn’t mean that she has to die!

I am glad that the return of la Piper didn’t overshadow what was essentially Donna’s episode. It would have been very easy for that to be the case, but thankfully it didn’t. Billie was quite good in her return to the role and it was really nice to see her back in the titles and in the episode. You can tell her character has changed quite a bit from when we last saw her on the parallel world in Doomsday, for a start she looks a bit more weary than she used to, but I guess that living in a different universe takes its toll on you. I also reckon that she won’t be all over the Doctor when she meets him again, at least I hope she won’t be, as I am sure she has had plenty of time to get over him and, much like Martha did, move on.

The last couple of minutes were certainly exciting. I actually didn’t even consider that the two words that Rose said to Donna would be Bad Wolf. I would have put money on Rose telling Donna who she was, knowing that the Doctor would discover that she was actually back, but Bad Wolf was a much better choice of words. It would have been a little boring if the words had just been Rose Tyler or Burnt Toast.

It certainly makes for an interesting finale which judging by the next week trailer will have a cast of thousands and about a five minute opening title sequence so they can fit all of the names of the returning actors in it! It is going to be more interesting working out who might not be in the finale rather than who will be in it judging from some of the things I have heard about the final two episodes.

Basically, this Saturday can’t come soon enough for me.

Thriller

Doctor Who: Midnight

I thought that this episode was pretty good. It was intense and claustrophobic like all good drama should be, it had a fine ensemble cast and it was well directed. True not a great deal happened, but I can’t say that it made any difference to me, as I felt like the episode flew by.

It was more like a theatre play, than an episode of Doctor Who and, as an experiment it worked. You couldn’t have 13 episodes all like this one or people would turn off in their droves but occasionally it is refereshing to have an episode like this one, or like Boomtown, or Love & Monsters which just don’t follow the usual rule book of a Doctor Who episode, and, in my opinion, are all the better for it.

It was a shame that Donna wasn’t in this episode more but then again we have the next episode which looks to feature Donna heavily so I can live with that and also it wouldn’t have worked the same way if she had of been there. If she had she would have slapped him about a bit and told him when he was being annoying smug or overbearing, which nobody did in this episode.

Was it just me or were there times when, if you closed your eyes and just listened to the
dialogue, that you could have sworn that Patrick Troughton was in this episode? How much does David Troughton sound like his father in parts of this episdoe. It is quite frightening how much he sounds like him, and if they ever did do an audio featuring the second Doctor then you could do no worse than to hire David Troughton to play the part made famous by his father. Not that they would ever do that, or that David Troughton would ever want to do that but boy do they sound similar at times! They even look a lot alike, more so now David is older, and if you looked at David Troughton discarding his bald head then he really is the spitting image of his dad, the same goes for David’s son Sam. He is basically a taller, thinner, balder version of his father.

I would have to say that the episodes threat was even scarier because we never saw it, we heard it but it was far far more scarier than it would have been had we seen some cgi creature or a prosthetic creation. Sometimes less is more and in this episode that is certainly the case.

A few Who friends of mine really didn’t like the episode, because in their words, hardly anything happened and it was a bit to talkie for their liking. What about two episodes ago where very little happened and a lot of the action took place in one room. They didn’t seem so perturbed by that but that was probably because as the first episode in a two part story that can be overlooked whereas this was just a single episdoe and they thought it lacked action. These are the same people who hated Boom Town, for pretty much the same reason.

This sort of episode is never going to be popular with a lot of people because it so far removed from what they percieve Doctor Who to be about, but I don’t see that at all. Having said that I do like that sort of dialogue driven drama which not everybody is, but as they say each to their own, and I thought that it worked very well indeed.

This episode did put you in mind of the two parters from the original run of the series with half of the episode just having the Doctor chatting to people and generaly having a good time, and then after twenty minutes or so we have something happen and it starts to get interesting.

Not that the first twenty minutes or so were boring, far from it. We got to know the characters of all of the other people travelling on the space bus, well apart from the hostess whom we never found out anything about, not even her name.

Kudos has to go to Lesley Sharp for her potrayal of Sky Sylvestry and when in DWM RTD made a comment that you couldn’t have cast simply anyone as Sky because she does carry a lot of the episode and she matches everyones performance remarkably well despite the fact that for a large portion of the episdoe she doesn’t even move! Rakie Ayola was great as the hostess who sacrificed herself in the end as she was the only person on that bus who believed that it was Sky who was possessed and the not the Doctor.

I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Midnight mainly because it was different and it was brave.

Here’s to diversity.

Save As

Doctor Who The Forest of the Dead

After watching the first episode a couple of times it did seem important that when it said that there were 4022 people saved, but no survivors, and also the fact that the planet was basically one giant computer than it did sort of make sense when in the second episode of the story we discovered that the world where the little girl lived was, in fact, a giant hard drive where all of those people had been saved to because that is all that a computer can do.

So in this episode there wasn’t any major revelations as once you had watched the first episode a couple of times you could have seen it coming. What I didn’t see coming was the fact that Dr Moon was a kind of anti-virus program protecting the hard drive from outside influences which is odd when if it was all a giant computer program then there were very little other things that he could be, but I still wasn’t entirely sure until the moment when Dr Moon faded out to be replaced by the Doctor for a split second and then when it said that was what he was it all made sense.

It also did seem obvious that Cal would have been the name of the little girl in the other sequences. I kind of worked out that she was in fact something to do with the computer but I didn’t think that she would actually be a little girl inside the computer, well kind off. I loved the idea that it was the books in the library itself that had caused the vashta nerada to be in the library in the first place and that wasn’t something that I actually thought of, well, till the Doctor said it when, like the Doctor you cannot believe that you hadn’t though of that yourself either.

That showcases the brilliance of the Moff’s writing that you don’t always notice the obvious until much later than you probably should have thought hang on a moment doesn’t that mean. He does it all the time, in all of his shows even in Coupling. I think Steven Moffat would get a bit bored if he had to write linear plots all of the time, so expect a couple of episodes a year at least not told in linear time, because that is always a hallmark of anything by the Moff and we shouldn’t expect any less of the next series of Doctor Who.

After this episode I am still convinced that River Song knows a different Doctor to the tenth. There is no reason to suggest that it is this incarnation that she met even though there was the whole bit with the Doctor opening the TARDIS door with a click of his fingers, which she said the Doctor that she knew could do and I still maintain that she knew a different Doctor than the one we currently know despite what everybody else seems to tell me otherwise.

As for who she actually is, well there is one reason for believing that she may be his wife as the whole there would only be one time when he would tell someone his real name, which as most people know is when you get married. That is where a lot of people find out that their other half has some really embarrassing middle name that they never knew about. They never actually came out and said that she was his wife in the future, it was only implied so it there if you want to believe it, and if you hate the idea you can just discard that theory. I am in the former camp and I do believe that she is his wife from the future, but there is room for maneouver if you don’t want to believe that.

A friend, and fellow Who fan, said that was the one thing that spoiled the episode for him was the intimation that the Doctor and River were husband and wife and he also said that apart from that particular line he also said that there was more concrete evidence of their marriage when she was seen in the other word at the end where she was wearing her wedding dress.

Now personally I will give him the fact that she is wearing a white dress but there is no proof that it is a wedding dress on show, it is simply a white dress. All of the other astronauts were wearing white after all. You could argue that that they were all wearing white because they were all dead, rather than the fact that it was something to with a wedding.

If only River were wearing white then you could argue that because the only person at a wedding allowed to wear white is the bride but there were other people wearing white as well, so I just don’t buy that explanation.

It does seem strange that in this two parter that everybody who had died in the episode appeared to be alive and well by the end of the episode but as they were only copies of themselves are they really alive? You could argue either way, but if it is taken to be some version of heaven then they are dead.

It does have to be said that in these pair of episodes we do have Steven Moffat presenting us with all the best bits of his previous stories: we have the riff on the fact that everybody lives and the repetition of phrases from The Emtpy Child/The Doctor Dances; we have the intimation of the Doctor having a physical relationship with a woman who dies at the end as in The Girl in the Fireplace and we have the twisty turny timey-whimey narrative that we had in Blink.

There was really nothing new in these episodes but Moffat does is so well that we don’t really notice that we have seen it all before and the sign of a good writer is being able to recycle the same ideas over and over again whilst still making them feel fresh.

Bookworm

Doctor Who: Silence in the Library

Silence in the Library was the episode that we were all waiting for the Steven Moffat episode, where we are normally treated to something very good and often the best episode of that particular series. Of course with the news that Moffat is to take over as the showrunner after the 2009 specials this episode has become even more anticipated that any episode of Doctor Who since Rose. People are going to be viewing this episode as a template of how Doctor Who will be when Moffat takes over, but how on Earth can you do that because each and every episode that Moffat has written of the modern version of Doctor Who has been totally different to every other episode he has written, so that is what we can expect from series 5 of Doctor Who not a series where every episode is like The Empty Child or Silence in the Library, which is what most Doctor Who fans think is what they want, but I am not sure if they do, or even if that would be popular with the mainstream audience who have got used to this new version of the show.

What struck me at the close of the episode was that really bugger all had happened. It didn’t matter really as it was well written and well acted bugger all but the pace in this episode was like that of an asthmatic snail compared to the usual pace of episode of new Who, and even most of the two parters that we have seen to date, with the possible exception of The Impossible Planet. Not that this is a bad thing either, because we do get to know all of the main players in the drama but Moffat is as cryptic as ever, and at the close episode I feel that I knew no more than I did when the episode began. I loved all of the reference to spoilers and of not know more than you need to know. Boy, does Moffat know how to play us?

What we do actually know (or quite possibly think that we know – this is a Steven Moffat script after all and often nothing is what it seems in a Moffat script, at least not till the very, very end) is that reality is the vents happening in the library, and events happening with the little girl are a dream, rather than the other way round which was suggested at the start of the episode.

This did seem to be more likely as what are the chances of the TARDIS landing inside somebody elses sub consciouness. Of course being Steven Moffat this should not be taken literally and there is definitely more to it than that just the library being real and the life of the little girl being the dream.

There are lots of questions here begging to be answered such as who is the little girl? What has she got to do with library? Who is Doctor Moon and why did he tell the little girl that her dreams are reality and the library was real? I think there is a lot more to his character than meets the eye also.

The single most interesting character in this story has to be River Song and there is so much to learn about her in the next episode. She is obviously a time traveller and obviously knows the Doctor and judging by the way she was with him, and the way she spoke to him and, more obviously, stroked his face she knew the Doctor in a far more than platonic way.

Rumour has it that she may be his wife from the future, and juding by her actions in this episode I could well believe it, she is definitely in love with the Doctor and seems quite hurt that he doesn’t even recognise her, but is also canny enough to know that it was in his future that she met him so there is no reason why he should recognise her at the moment. In many ways River is a female version of Captain Jack. She is from the 51st century but is also a time traveller and is not shocked by anything, and has been round the block several times as well!

My pet theory is that the tenth Doctor will regenerate at the end of this series and I refuse to accept anything different until the last moments of episode 13 when I have no choice but to accept it. A friend of mine said that my theory has been shot out of the water with some of the things that River Song said but I don’t buy it. I still believe it is possible that she met a different regeneration of the Doctor, who is older than Tennant, but River, like Captain Jack before her, is able to know the Doctor no matter what body he is in. Her main comment was that his eyes look much younger, and as they say that your eyes are the windows to your soul, perhaps a Time Lords can always be recognised when you look into their eyes, after all Timelords themselves have no problem recognising each other when meeting different incarnations, so why not people from the 51st century? After all there are much more sophisticated than us and would probably not blink an eyelid at the possibility of a person having more than one face.

The cliffhanger was a bit of a shock. I certainly wasn’t expecting that to happen. I mean we know that Donna can’t bet dead because we have seen her in the trailer and we know that she meets Rose in a couple of episode so it will be interesting to see how in the hell they get out of this one. Knowing Steven Moffat it will certainly be an interesting explanation and will probably either be very clever, or very obvious. I am personally hoping that it will be very, very clever.

There is the fact that the library computer said that there were more than 4000 people saved in the library, but that there were no survivors. What the hell can that mean. I don’t know how they are going to get out of this cliffhanger, but it is sure going to be fun finding out how they do it.

Roll on Saturday!

The Mysterious Affair at Eddison Hall

Doctor Who The Unicorn and the Wasp

The moment that the name of Agatha Christie was mentioned in the last few moments of The Last of the Timelords there was no doubt in people mind’s that next celebrity historical episode would feature Agatha Christie herself.

The fact that the episode was also to be written by Gareth Robert means that we pretty much knew what we were going to get from this episode. The episode was not dissimilar to last years pseudo celebrity historical The Shakespeare Code, just replace the theatre with a country house and swap famous authors then you pretty much have the same story give or take.

There were plenty of references to the titles of Agatha Christie’s stories and short stories, some more obvious than others such as mentions of Murder on the Orient Express and one of the characters actually reading The Murder of Roger Aykroyd. If you aren’t aware of any of these titles it doesn’t really matter as quite a lot of them are incorporated as lines of dialogue which work on their own as well as a reference to Christie’s work.

The Unicorn and the Wasp is Agatha Christie by numbers and I do believe that it lives or dies on your appreciation of the works of Agatha Christie herself and on the whole detective fiction and murder mystery genre itself. If you have little interest in either than it is likely that this episode will leave you cold. If, however, like myself, you like or have more than a passing interest or knowledge in either, then you will find plenty to enjoy in this episode.

The worst aspect of the whole episode, in my opinion, is the wasp. I mean that looked really shit, it just didn’t work when you saw the whole thing. It worked when you just heard the buzzing sounds it was making, and in shots from the wasps point of view, but it just looked really, really bad and was quite disappointing considering the sterling work we normally get from the Mill. It looked less realistic than the giant fly did in The Green Death and that was a giant rubber fly!

The story from the original series that was most like this episode would have to be the Peter Davison two-part story from his first season, Black Orchid, which was also set in the nineteen twenties but didn’t really have that much of a plot. I mean it looked lovely and all but the plot was nonexistent.

At least this episode did have a plot, and the sort of plot that they would spend two-hours telling in the usual Agatha Christie adaptations out there. Of course Christe did also write short stories so there were episodes of Poirot and the oft remembered nineteen eighties series Partners in Crime (starring Scott out of Earthshock and Franscesca Annis), which also gave the opening episode of this series of Doctor Who its name.

Catherine Tate was very good in this episode as the Doctor’s plucky assistant Donna Nobel especially considering that this was the very first episode that she had filmed. Her character had obviously grown since her first chronological appearance this series and it was obvious that she had experienced a great deal since that then and was not the same Donna Nobel that we had met in Partners in Crime.

I loved the look on her face when after she had kissed the Doctor to give him a shock that he said he would have to do that again, meaning the detox, and not the kissing Donna bit. Her look was priceless and was a bit like in the first episode when she mistook his comment about wanting a mate. In fact that whole sequence, with the sparring between the Doctor and Donna as he was trying to mime to her what he wanted, was just laugh out loud funny showcasing both Tate’s and Tennant’s comic timing perfectly.

The giving Agatha Christie ideas for titles, and even one of her most famous characters, is straight out of The Shakespeare Code but in this case it is more Donna than the Doctor, although the Doctor does slip up later when he calls her Dame Agatha.

One thing that you cannot accuse the episode of is not looking anything less than superb because if anybody knows how to do a costume drama then it is the BBC and they once again excelled themselves in this episode with the costumes and the general look of the piece which was so different to the previous episode and will be nothing like the following episode either which is what makes Doctor Who such a fascinating show.

Fenella Woolgar was very good in the role of Agatha Christie and gives a good rendition of what people might imagine Agatha Christie to have actually been like. It was nice that they had a younger Christie as it would have been not as interesting if it had of been an elderly Christie even though the whole episode could then have been played like an episode of Miss Marple! I am sure that most people think of Agatha Christie as being an old lady (like Miss Marple) so it was nice to have her as a younger, more vital woman which worked better with the younger, more vital Doctor that we have nowadays.

Christopher Benjamin made a nice little cameo appearance in this, his third appearance in Doctor Who, as the blustering Colonel who was a bit of a naughty boy and kept girlie mags, or military magazines as he liked to call them, in his study. I bet it did remind him of being in the army, the old goat!

Felicity Kendall was good too in this episode and that now leaves Penelope Keith as the only living member of the cast of the Good Life to appear in Doctor Who.

These celebrity historical characters are getting more and more recent aren’t they? Who’s next for series 5 I wonder. JK Rowling?

Aside from the wasp, I would say that this episode was a triumph. Well done to all concerned!

Who’s the Daddy

Doctor Who: The Doctor’s Daughter

I have to say that The Doctor’s Daughter was not the episode that I was expecting it to be. I expected it to be a hell of a lot more controversial than it turned out to be and for and episode with such an audacious title it really should have been.

I know the fact that he already had a granddaughter means that he must have had a son, or a daughter, who then produced Susan but what with all of the nonsense about Looms in the Virgin New Adventures and fans insistence that the Doctor would never do anything sexual with a woman (despite Girl in the Fireplace where he definitely nailed Reinette, and don’t try to say that he didn’t, because he just did).

I was expecting news of countless pot noodle related electrical fires, as lots of fans spat out their pot noodles in disgust during the episode, but nothing like that happened because in the pre-title sequence they answered all ming-mongs worries by making her a clone of the Doctor, extrapolated from his DNA, making him both mother and father as it were, rather than a child born in more tradition method, which pretty much waylaid all the fears and sleepless nights they have had since the line ‘hello Dad’ was uttered in the next time trailer last week. I was hoping that they might make them sweat for a while, but no it was bought out into the open right from the word go. So that has to be one nil to the ming mongs there.

To say that I was disappointed about the lack of outrage caused by the episode would be nothing short of a massive understatement. Still there were some good elements of the episode despite it being a massive cop-out.

Georgia Moffett was very good in the role of the Doctor’s daughter and I was shocked by how much like her father she looks. I have heard people say that she looks a bit like the lovechild of the fourth Doctor and Romana and boy would that have been a right royal twist if that had been the case rather than her being a clone. The Doctor Who Forum would have exploded if that had happened, I can tell you!

I suppose that the fact that she looks like one of the Doctor previous incarnations then it does make sense that the machine created her, rather than just a clone of the Doctor himself. God two tenth Doctor’s running around, it doesn’t bare thinking about, it really doesn’t!

I loved the twist as the end when we found out that the war had been raging for a whole week rather than the hundreds and thousands of years that the humans had believed it had lasted for. It made sense as they were talking about countless generations fighting in the war but if they are clones and their average lifespan lasts about two hours or so then there would have been time for generation after generation to be created in seven days.

I am assuming that they are created as young adults, if Jenny was a typical example of a clone but how do they age? Do they age at all, or is it a quicker process. I mean look at the difference in age between Cobb and most of the other soldiers. Either he is one of the earliest generations of clones, or he was created to appear much older than the other clones. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.

Sadly, once again, Martha was underused and was only there to get kidnapped and then meet up with the Doctor again at the end of the story. I thought that the Hath weren’t a bad alien race. They certainly looked interesting, being a combination of fish and human, and are ripe to be turned into a figure for character options. I mean they didn’t really do a great a deal and were almost just there to give Martha something to do in the episode, but they made a figure of the Hoix and that only briefly appeared in Love & Monsters.

It was quite sad though when the Hath that Martha helped ending up being pulled in the quicksand to save Martha, although how he managed to avoid being pulled under the quicksand until after he had rescued Martha was not explained, so it will just go down as one of those things that tends to happen in Doctor Who that cannot be adequately explained.

Catherine Tate continues to impress as Donna with her expert knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System coming in handy in working out the major twist of the plot. The Doctor didn’t have a clue but good old Donna was there to give him a helping hand. I would never have thought that would be much use outside of library, but its nice to now that it is still being used, in some form, in the far future.

I am not surprised that the character of Jenny didn’t die in the end, despite being shot and all, and I half expected her to regenerate at the end of the episode. Now the Doctor is no longer the Last of the Timelords, and the big question is will this be significant? As this is the sixth episode of the series, it is more than likely to become significant in the latter part of the series, but quite what the significance of it is nothing more than conjecture at the moment. I know what I think it might be, but I am not going to say anything in case I am proven wrong by the end of the series. We will have to wait and see. Time will tell, as they always say.

Hot Potato

Doctor Who: The Poison Sky

Well that wasn’t a half bad conclusion to the cliffhanger, if I do say so myself. To be honest it was about the only one that would have worked given the situation. I am not sure how Sylvia was able to smash the window when neither Donna nor the Doctor could, which they did appear to be trying to do in the close of the first episode. It did seem to be a bit of a cop out with them be able to save Wilf so easily but you couldn’t kill Bernard Cribbins off, could you? Bernard Cribbins is a legend and he is the kind of man that everybody would want as a grandfather.

I also wasn’t expecting the twist at the end with Rattigan sacrificing himself for the sake of humanity, which was quite surprising considering his contempt for the human race for the majority of the story, well at least till the Sontarans told him that they were never going to give him what he wanted and that he was just a pawn in their stratagem. In the end he did prove his worth but you can tell by the Doctor’s face that that wasn’t what he meant when he told him to do ‘something clever’.

What I was expecting was for Donna and Martha to pilot the TARDIS to the Sontaran ship to save the Doctor in the nick of time after all the story did start with the Doctor showing Donna how to pilot the TARDIS and telling her not to try and dent the nineteen eighties. Now did the Doctor show Martha how to pilot the TARDIS, or even Rose for that matter?

On the subject of Rose who saw her on the scanner screen in the TARDIS when Donna was stranded on the Sontaran ship? I am sure that nobody would have missed that by now but it could quite easily have been missed if you blinked or something on first viewing. Now of course Donna still doesn’t know what Rose looks like or anything, even though she has met her once.

I am not sure that Donna even noticed Rose on the screen, or else she might have wondered why the woman she asked to tell her mother where her keys had been left had appeared on the TARDIS screen.

Donna isn’t stupid and this surely would have piqued her interest if she had seen her, which I don’t think she did. Rose was certainly shouting the word ‘Doctor’ on the screen so one can only assume that she is trapped somewhere that is not the parallel world that she was left on after the events in Doomsday, because she is certainly looking for the Doctor, but that is for later on in the series and not now.

I have to admit that I did think that Martha was rather underused in this episode much like in the second episode of her Torchwood stint. Freema was quite good in the role of her clone working for the Sontarans but she was rather underwritten when compared to the way that she was portrayed in the previous season. That is probably because she is no longer the main companion, but if that is the case then why bother having her in the episode at all.

Her presence is not exactly vital to the plot, as there could have had somebody else being cloned by the Sontarans. It didn’t need to be Martha. It was the same with Captain Jack in the last three episodes of series 3, he was there but he didn’t really need to be there and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference if he weren’t.

It made me smile the way that Donna kept on calling the Sontarans ‘sonteruns’ instead of Sontarans. I mean it not a commonly used word is it so she can be forgiven for not be able to say their name properly for the first few times. I suppose that it never really struck me as odd that all of the Doctor’s companions were able to pronounce strange sounding alien names and races and planets without so much as a by or leave when the rest of us might have had the same difficulty as Donna did, and tried pronouncing it phonetically.

Colonel Mace stepped up the plate more in the episode that he did in The Sontaran Stratagem and was a perfectly capable UNIT Commander than he was in the previous episode. The look on his face when that UNIT female officer snogged his face off after the gas had dispersed was priceless! I think that Colonel Mace will probably end up being one of those one-off UNIT leaders much like Colonel Faraday. He was better here and there was a nice use of the valiant in this episode, a lot better use than it had in Last of the Timelords.

There was even a nice reference to the whereabouts of the Brigadier (who has become a knight of the realm since his appearance in Battlefield), which was just right for that moment, and showed that they hadn’t just forgotten about him. It worked bringing Sarah Jane back, but I am convinced that bringing the Brigadier back would work in the same way, perhaps in The Sarah Jane Adventures but not here. I can’t quite work out what he would be doing in Peru. He must be knocking on 80 and he was retired by the time of Battlefield which was about 19 years ago (both in reality and in the context of the stories as well)! Still at least he isn’t in a nursing home wiling away his final years, or dead.

The Poison Sky wasn’t as exciting as The Sontaran Stratagem, but it was a nice ending to the first two parter of the fourth series and was not the disaster that Evolution of the Daleks was last series. It was nice to see the Sontarans return and Helen Raynor should be proud of the way that she wrote them, but I don’t think I would like a return performance by them for a long time yet. They work best in small doses and now this is five appearances in 35 years by them, which is quite a lot by anyone standards. Christopher Ryan was the best Sontaran since Linx and his performance is one that will stand the test of time unlike Derek Deadman’s in The Invasion of Time.

One Potato, Two Potato

Doctor Who : The Sontaran Strategem

The Sontaran Stratagem was a rollicking good episode in classic old-school fashion. It had U.N.I.T (last seen properly on television in 1989, and when I say properly I mean actually being a part of the episode and having more than one line or two before people say that they have appeared in the new series before), Sontarans (last seen on television in 1985) a cliffhanger, and the return of a previous companion. It could well have been a Pertwee story but luckily only lasts the length of an old four parter rather than an old six parter.

It is about time that we have seen the return of the Sontarans, as they are one of the best of the original series alien races, despite the fact that they have only appeared in four television stories and were well due a reimagining by Neill Gorton and his team, and I would say that they did a good job and the Sontaran masks themselves are pretty impressive, as are the cgi effects for the Sontaran ships and spheres.

In fact this story is the best we have seen of the Sontarans since 1975’s The Sontaran Experiment. Here they are seen in classic warmongering form complete with their own war chant. This is how the Sontarans should be seen, and I am very impressed with the way that Helen Raynor has characterised them, as I am sure Robert Holmes would be if he were still with us.

The idea of them having a war chant is such an obvious one that it is quite surprising that this had never been seen before. However I am not sure we have seen as many Sontarans, as we did in this episode, ever before in the show. I could be wrong and I am sure that someone will correct me one of these days.

Raynor had certainly watched The Time Warrior and The Sontaran Experiment to get an idea of how they should be portrayed because even the late, great Robert Holmes dropped the ball on The Two Doctors.

Christopher Ryan was excellent as General Staal the undefeated, he even managed to sound more like Kevin Lindsay’s Sontarans than any of the other actors to portray Sontaran commanders since, and was a very typical Sontaran, obsessed with war and with the superiority of the Sontaran race.

It was mentioned that the Sontaran’s are a cloned race and one of the characters questioned how they could tell each other apart, but you can tell the two main Sontaran’s apart. They look similar but not exactly the same. That has always been the case in Sontaran stories when they have more that one Sontaran minus helmet, in the same scene.

You could argue that as a cloned race they should all look exactly the same, but the only way to achieve that would have been to have Christopher Ryan playing every speaking Sontaran, like Deep Roy in the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film did when he played every Oompa Loompa, but I guess that the budget didn’t stretch to that for these episodes, so they did what they always did and had two actors of a similar build and height to play the main Sontarans.

It sounds like a nitpick, but that is something I have heard other people talk about so I thought it worth a mention, but it doesn’t make any difference to me at all. They even managed to get the joke, about Sontaran’s looking like baked potatoes, in the episode itself, which was nice, as I am sure that the kids of today will be running around shouting that after these episodes have aired.

We also had the return of Martha, fresh from her adventures with Torchwood and now engaged to Tom Milligan from Last of the Timelords. There was a lovely non-bitchy scene between Donna and Martha when they met and it was nice that two female companions met up and were not cat-fighting over who liked the Doctor more. It was Donna who first noticed that Martha was engaged, because the Doctor is obviously above such mundane trivialities as that, and the Doctor seemed a bit put out by that.

Was that a little jealousy from the Doctor after a companion had left him and moved on, which it took Sarah Jane more than thirty years to do? I think that it might have been, and my wife agrees with me.

So now we know what that scene in the trailer was all about when we saw Martha dripping wet and covered in goo (it wasn’t the spurtings of fan boys, at the return of Martha, as I first suggested on this very blog!) Freema Agyeman looks like she is having a lot of fun playing an evil version of Martha and it’s going to be interesting how this clone interacts with the Doctor and Donna!

The scene when Donna said to the Doctor that she was going home and the Doctor (and probably ten’s of fans) assumed that she was leaving him, when she only meant that she was popping back for a visit. Tens of fans hearts stopped beating when they realised that she wasn’t leaving after all, and that they would have to put up with her more for another nine episodes at least, even though they knew full well that she was going to be in every episode of this series.

U.N.I.T. are portrayed more of a military might than they were in the nineteen seventies and they even get a jibe about U.N.I.T dating in there with ‘was it in the seventies, or the eighties’ or something like that when they were much more homespun as the Doctor commented. Their portrayal here was more akin to the U.N.I.T that featured in the Torchwood episode Fragments.

The new U.N.I.T. commander Colonel Mace (played by Rupert Holliday-Evans best know to a lot of people as one of the doubletake brother’s from Harry Enfields TV Programme - he even has the same hairstyle he had in that show as well) was not a particularly memorable head of U.N.I.T. when compared to the Brigadier’s first appearance. However I am not sure that we will see much more of him after these episodes, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he doesn’t make it out the story alive. That might explain why he doesn’t really have much of a character, the same which can be said for the other U.N.I.T. soldiers in this episode.

I can only hope that next week’s episode, The Poison Sky, can live up to the hype that this first episode has created. The next week trailer after the closing credits certainly looks exciting but you can never judge an episode by the trailer, as we have learned so many times watching Doctor Who over the years.

The two important questions as far as I am concerned are this:
Will Wilf survive?
Will it be the Doctor or Donna who works out that Martha is a Sontaran clone first?