Recent posts in the Doctor Who category

Reviewing any episode of Doctor Who is a tricky task at the best of times. I find it increasingly difficult to detach my fan brain and approach each episode without the baggage of forty-odd years of history and emotional attachment to the series’s overall canon.

And then comes Journey’s End, the pulsing finale to this fourth, more popular than ever, series of Doctor Who.

The fan side of my brain cheered, cried, laughed and stared with open-mouthed amazement. The more detached, professional side of my brain, the side that pretends it doesn’t know Cyril Shaps played the Archimandrite in the 1978 story The Androids of Tara, was staring open mouthed for entirely different reasons. There may even have been some eye-rolling in there too.

Well thank you very much Russell T Davies! How on earth do you review that, eh? Perhaps the most bonkers, delicious, audacious, brilliant, silly, exciting and scary piece of Doctor Who seen in the 45-year history of this crazy, unstoppable TV series. The Stolen Earth had a bombastic confidence about it that was thankfully a million miles away from the beginning of last year’s two-part run around finale with The Master.

From the off, it’s obvious Davies has approached this with the intention of going out with a copper bottom pop. You can imagine him cracking his knuckles as he sat down to work on the script for The Stolen Earth, thinking: “I’m never going to be able to do this again in my life, so let’s just go for it!” And go for it he has.

Last week, I described the psychologically terrifying Midnight as Russell T Davies’s

“finest script from four years of Doctor Who”.

I also pondered whether

“he’ll better it in the next three weeks.”

With Turn Left, he gave that challenge a spirited go and delivered a confident, witty and thoughtful piece that possibly just nudges ahead of Midnight. Turn Left provides a sideways glance at the Doctor Who universe by revisiting events we’ve seen in the last few years and puts Catherine Tate front and centre while David Tennant was off filming Midnight. It also brings Billie Piper back to the Doctor Who fold, and while I’m not usually fussed over that event, I can see why some may have been a gibbering wreck over their fish fingers and chips on Saturday night.

The premise of Turn Left is simple - what if Donna had never met the Doctor? What if on the morning she was due to turn up at HC Clements to start her new job, leading to the events of The Runaway Bride, Donna turned right instead of left and landed a different job? She never met the Doctor, she never ended up beneath the Thames on Christmas Day, wasn’t there to help the Time Lord defeat the Racnoss. Basically, what if the Doctor died there and then?

Doctor Who has one of the toughest remits on British television. For over four decades (on and off) it has remained the children’s show that grown ups love. That’s a broad church to spread the word to and each episode must be finely balanced to have enough run around with scary monsters and wacky Doctor stuff to keep the kids transfixed, while having the knowing winks and drama to keep the adults watching. And week in, week out, Doctor Who manages to walk that precarious knife-edge with aplomb.

And then we get to Midnight and the return of Russell T Davies to scribing duties for the final four episodes of his last full season as Doctor Who’s showrunner. Perhaps quite rightly, just this once, he has thought “Bugger the kids, I’m writing something for the adults.”

Much of my thoughts on the second part of Steven Moffat’s most recent Doctor Who tale are mirrored with my scribbblings on part one, Silence in the Library. It’s rich and sumptuous, full of exquisite detail, big ideas and scares aplenty. In fact, it’s a step up from the previous week’s adventure with my misgivings - chiefly over the writing of Donna and some surprisingly flabby direction - all being taken care of. However that just opens up space for me to be a bit flummoxed by a dubious ending that left me a little empty…

This is a big story both for the Doctor and Donna, each facing massive emotional trials throughout. For the Doctor, he’s confronted by his future in the form of River Song and the reality that she will, at some point, become someone very special to him. Quite what the basis of their relationship is isn’t clearly stated, but taking the Time Traveller’s Wife riff and River knowing the Doctor’s real name brings confetti and rings to mind. Well, he’s had a daughter, why not a wife?

If there was a Doctor Who story that was going to garner a bit more attention than usual, it was Silence in the Library, the first of a two-part adventure from executive producer elect Steven Moffat. This spooky tale sees the Doctor and Donna land in a library in the very far future. The library is so vast it needs an entire planet to house it, containing as it does every book ever published, and at the core of the planet is the universe’s largest hard drive… but where is everybody?

The walkways and stacks of this beautiful structure are empty, save for the Doctor and Donna. But there are spooky messages left in the library beseeching the time travellers to run and keep out of the shadows… and what about the message left on the Doctor’s psychic paper for him to come to the library…?

And then the lights start to go out… Before you know it, there’s an archaeological expedition in the library, led by the flirty River Song - who clearly knows the Doctor but he is utterly clueless - and then the running starts as whatever is lurking in the darkness strikes…

I can’t recall a time when the changeover of executive producer/showrunner on a top-rated UK TV drama made the news in such a way as the announcement that Russell T Davies is to leave Doctor Who, handing over to writer Steven Moffatt for the 2010 series. It’s frankly unheard of, but this is a sign of just how much impact Doctor Who has had on the landscape of British Television in the last few years.

Is that overstating the case? Perhaps - maybe as a bona fide, signed up, card carrying fanboy, I pay much more attention to the fortunes of Doctor Who, but it doesn’t take away the fact that the news of Davies’s departure next year and Moffatt’s taking over made one of the teatime news bulletins on Radio 2 yesterday. I thought it was a bit mad back in the day when Billie Piper’s casting as Rose made the news, but four years on, I don’t think anything about this show surprises me any more.

So what we know is that Davies will be overseeing the specials that are in the works for 2009, while Moffatt will be Doctor Who’s new executive producer and head writer for the full series of 13 episodes on the slate for 2010. What we don’t know is how Steven Moffatt’s Doctor Who will differ to Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who, and most importantly for my 6-year-old nephew, is whether or not David Tennant will still be playing the Doctor by the time we get there.

There is a mystery to be solved. Who is responsible is not immediately clear, but a crime has been perpetrated, of that there can be no doubt.

The felony has been uncovered by a curious gentleman who leaves us in no doubt that he has a surfeit of little grey cells. His name is Gareth Roberts, writer of The Unicorn and the Wasp, 45 minutes of the finest Agatha Christie style murder mystery. The crime? That ITV manages, in two hours, to brutally murder its recent series of Marple mysteries, when he is able to produce such a faithful homage to Mrs Christie’s work in less than half the time, even though it includes a giant alien shape-changing insect, something that never troubled Poirot.

The Unicorn and the Wasp is unlike any Doctor Who story in the programme’s history. Right now, after my third hungry devouring of its glorious combination of melodrama, comedy and high tension, I’d venture that I’ve just watched the best edition of the show since its 1963 beginnings.

With a title as contentious as The Doctor’s Daughter, one can’t help but feel cheated within the first three minutes of this episode of Doctor Who when the cute pouty girl we’ve seen trailed endlessly this week isn’t actually the Doctor’s daughter, but a knock off bit of DNA created at the top of the episode.

Still, at least the meat of this episode isn’t undersold from that point onwards, because the next 45 minutes are actually pretty good as the Doctor, Donna and guest-companion Martha land on a colony planet in the far future. The colony was supposed to be a place where humans and the alien Hath could forge a new culture together. Sadly, things went Pete Tong fairly quickly and soon the humans and Hath were at war, a war that has been raging for generations in the underground corridors and chambers of this nightmare world. Soldiers are genetically created on both sides from whoever is near to hand, in this case the Doctor, and the gang are soon involved in the search for the Source, the mystical relic that the gun-toting General Cobb (Nigel Terry) thinks will help the humans win the war.

After last week’s run-around with the Sontarans, we still get plenty of running around, but there’s a different feel to this episode than we’ve had in previous weeks. The tone is darker, and there’s also a sense that things have settled down a bit - Donna is no longer the new girl, and we’ve hit that mid-season running speed that makes everything that bit more satisfying.

As various Doctor Who forums go into a paranoid meltdown as the ratings for this weekend’s episode fell to 5.9 million, the rest of us get on with enjoying what was another fast and fun episode. So what if the ratings have slipped a little - it was still the second most watched TV programme of the day with an audience share of well over 30 per cent. Most dramas would kill for figures like that, and let’s face it, Doctor Who is not going to pull 14 million viewers every week - and it was a Bank Holiday, so let’s not count the Doctor out just yet, shall we?

Last week, we left the Doctor in a painfully atmospheric wide shot as the Sontarans got down to business with their plan to gas the planet - for reasons that we don’t yet know. Granddad Wilf was trapped in his car, choking to death, with the Doctor unable to free him because it was “deadlocked”, the cure all solution to the sonic screwdriver. As one, the audience screamed “Smash the window!”, and obligingly, Donna’s mum did. I can’t tell if this was genius or just silly. It was the obvious thing to do, but Doctor Who rarely stoops to the obvious.

Ah, this is more like it! After last week’s pretty, yet confused tale of Ood kind, the Doctor and Donna return to Earth in a tale steeped in the legacy of Doctor Who. Lots of slick action, classic monsters (not that the general audience will remember the Sontarans), the return of military taskforce UNIT and a welcome appearance from Freema Agyeman as the wonderful Martha Jones.

Helen Raynor, who penned last year’s (unfairly) maligned Dalek two-parter, rises to the challenge here, delivering a script with a deftly simple premise that makes you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself. Of course there’s a nicely sinister sci-fi yarn to be told about the prevalence of sat nav and those not-quite-human-voices that inhabit our cars these days. UNIT thinks there’s something up with ATMOS, a system bolted on to many of the world’s cars that eliminates emissions and comes with built-in sat nav. So what does a top-secret military organisation do when they can’t fathom something out? Simple, get newly-minted UNIT operative Martha Jones to summon their former scientific advisor to have a look-see.

Every year since it returned to our screens, the first three episodes of Doctor Who have treated us to life in the past, present and future. And so, after cutesy blobs of fat in the present and lava leviathans in ancient Pompeii, the Doctor takes Donna to the future — and not only that, but her first alien world to boot.

Unfortunately, that world is the Ood-Sphere, the homeworld of the subservient creatures first seen two series ago in the two-part story The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. A world of trouble, then — and one in which we discover the rather shocking truth that Slavery Is Bad, Kids, via a lot of unnecessary running around and shouting.

It’s a moral dilemma that has haunted Doctor Who since its earliest days. While the Doctor has always meddled in the affairs of other planets and present day Earth, our planet’s history has always been treated differently. Ever since strong-headed schoolteacher Barbara Wright failed to stop the Aztecs from performing human sacrifices, the message has been clear: you cannot change the past.

Trust Donna — brash, loud, intelligent Donna — to ask the question, “Why not?” and refuse to give up until she got a satisfactory answer. It was that process that formed the emotional backbone of this episode, producing some truly heartbreaking performances from both David Tennant and Catherine Tate.

Unfortunately, the episode also had its fair share of hammy, underwritten characters — but thankfully, the positives in this week’s episode far outweighed the negatives.

I’m glad to say that I was not one of those who were wary when it was announced Catherine Tate would rejoin the TARDIS for a full series as the new companion. While her character, Donna, had many shrewish moments in the 2006 Christmas Special, come the end of the episode Tate demonstrated insight and depth that I wanted to see more of.

Now, after a year with Freema Agyeman’s Martha at David Tennant’s side, we get to see what life could entail with Donna in her stead. If the first episode of this new series is any indication, the words ‘roller coaster’ spring to mind.

Oh dear, where to start reviewing the finale of what has undoubtedly been the best series of Doctor Who… The Last of the Time Lords left me feeling a bit empty. It’s like plunging your fork into a great looking pie that turns out to be all flaky pastry and no meat.

Or something.

After last week’s tremendous opener, it seems that The Last of the Time Lords just ran a little bit too fast for the director to keep up with. The first 20 minutes or so had me grimacing at some of the excess on display, and I’m getting tired of waiting for the final reel to get to the real heart of an episode. I’m starting to feel a bit cheated by what’s on offer.

So what’s the Master up to? I’m not quite sure. While for once its nice to see him actually ruling a planet and being triumphant, and it doesn’t amount to a great deal and he seems to spend his days dancing around his bedroom. The Earth is now a downtrodden planet full of slums and slaves, it would have been nice to see the Master stepping out onto a balcony to play the tyrant once in a while and connect him to the world he’s enslaved. But no, we spend a lot of the episode pratting around on the not particularly grand looking bridge of a flying aircraft carrier. It’s a little bit constraining.