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Saturday, June 04, 2005

Doctor Who - The Doctor Dances

I'm really not sure to make of The Doctor Dances. As a piece of television I enjoyed it a lot, and it tied up all the elements from The Empty Child satisfactorily, but it still seemed to be a little rushed in trying to achieve so much in a short time. From the offset, where the Doctor realises that he can send all the gas-masked zombies 'to their room' by talking to them as though they were a child, we realise that he knows more than perhaps he is saying as to what is happening here. But then he also seems to not know what is going on and needs Jack to explain more about the spacecraft he has acquired before the link with the nanobots becomes apparent. The visuals were superb as always, and the idea of Jack's 'squareness gun' was nice - even if it ran out of power after about three uses ... not a lot of use in a battle then - but there was a fair amount of running about and the eventual solution, to allow the nanobots access to the 'parent' DNA, ie Nancy, in order to remake all the people in the appropriate image was somewhat simplistic. What if the child's real mummy had been dead, or someone else? Why did the nanobots just assume that the gasmask was a part of the boy's body? Why not his clothes as well? Why didn't they make everyone infected look the same as the boy, if it was his DNA which was being mapped onto everyone else? Perhaps questions like these need to be glossed over for the greater good of the episode, but then this gets into arguments of style over substance and Doctor Who has always favoured substance. At least the Doctor finally got to do something here, providing the eventual solution and pushing the nanobots to put right the problem they had caused. This makes a change from the earlier episodes where the Doctor and Rose's involvement has been tangential to say the least. So a shorter review this time ... The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances was a great tale, well told and with some cracking dialogue. Jack looks to be an interesting addition to the TARDIS crew and the relationship between him and Rose and him and the Doctor could develop in any number of ways. Next week we have Cardiff blowing up and the return of the Slitheen ...

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