Doctor Who - The Sontaran Stratagem

My overwhelming feeling after watching this episode was one of familiarity. I had seen it all before. This is not good for a television series as soon people will stop watching and turn over as the drama didn't deliver what was expected.

New Doctor Who seems to have fallen into a very predictable pattern ... and this is after only four series. It makes you appreciate even more the first 26 years of episodes where, good, bad or indifferent, it always felt different.

For Series Four we have a light hearted opening episode, a historical, something set on an alien planet which is a little off the wall, a two parter re-introducing an old monster ... and later on we apparently have something scary from Stephen Moffat, a Doctor-lite episode ... and a conclusion which brings lots of old faces back onto the screen. This pattern has been repeated for the last three years, so little wonder that it's not feeling new any more.

But back to 'The Sontaran Stratagem'. The modern technology being used by evil aliens is ATMOS, a device connected to cars which gives them zero carbon emissions. Oh, and it also runs the sat nav as well. It cannot be disabled, and can also literally take control of the vehicle! Did no-one notice the extensive modifications which would be needed to all vehicles to make this able to happen? No-one questioned it? This is just too hard to believe and so totally fails as a dramatic device on this occasion. There is a principle of technology that the user must always feel that they are in control, so it can always be turned off. To have something which quite blatantly tells you it cannot be disabled is something I'm sure that most people would not buy into.

But a nosy reporter, Jo Nakashima, is killed in the pre-credit sequence and we know that something is up at the Rattigan Acadamy and that young Luke Rattigan is in league with the returning baddies (who we already know all about thanks to the Radio Times).

Meanwhile the Doctor is giving Donna driving lessons in the TARDIS and the music is stupid and annoying. Cue the Doctor's mobile phone - it's Martha and she wants him to come back to Earth. As soon as we see Martha, her dreary theme music kicks in ... it's really rubbish that they feel the need to underpin every character with a theme and then to ram this down our throats every time they appear. It's really not necessary and some subtlty is needed once in a while. I dread to think - really dread - what the final episodes will be like if we end up with all the rumoured characters appearing. Snatches of their themes here and there, a veritable collision of sound and character. We shall see.

So the Doctor and Donna arrive and Martha orders Operation Blue Sky to start, this being the invasion of the ATMOS factory by UNIT troops. I smiled when they announced 'This is a UNIT Operation' to the workers as though they'd know what it meant. But then I realised that UNIT must be a well known organisation as even the journalist's sat nav at the start knew where to take her when she asked it for UNIT HQ.

The Doctor meets Colonel Mace and learns that ATMOS is believed to be behind the deaths of 52 people worldwide, all at exactly the same time. While the Doctor is looking into this, a couple of UNIT troops exploring the basement (on their own?) stumble across a secret lab and find a casket-like object inside containing a partially-formed humanoid creature before being disabled and 'processed' by General Staal the Sontaran. This sequence was very nicely handled. Lots of tension and wonder, and the half-formed clone was excellent. A really spooky design and I loved the partially closed mouth on it as well.

Now we get to see the Sontarans, and I loved how small they were. That was a great concept and was pulled off well by all concerned. They did look rather like toys and this gave totally the wrong impression to those they faced. The costume design worked well, and the helmet of course retained the 'classic' look - a nice piece of reinventing and updating by the design team. My only complaint was that, good though Chris Ryan was, he sounded as though he was speaking lines of dialogue rather than it being natural. He also sounded too human wheras Kevin Lindsay (who played the Sontaran in their first two appearances) managed to make the creature sound alien. Makes you appreciate Lindsay's performance all the more that no-one since him has matched the power and effectiveness of his performance.

Back to the plot, and the Doctor heads off with a UNIT soldier called Ross Jenkins to see Rattigan at his Academy while Donna goes to see her mum and grandfather. Martha meanwhile carries out medical checks on the staff at ATMOS, apparently not noticing that they don't blink, and speak in a hypnotised monotone. Some doctor she is! But she's soon marched off by the processed UNIT men to the underground lab. The scenes here are very well directed, and her scream echoing as all the lights go off was very effective.

The Doctor soon realises that Rattigan has access to some hi-tech kit, including a teleporter, and he pops up to the Sontaran ship only to come racing back again with General Staal in hot pursuit. Now we see the face of the Sontaran (well, assuming you'd not got the Radio Times) and it's well done indeed. Very alien and effective. I liked the Doctor using the ball and racquet to hit the ball to bounce off the creature's probic vent - very imaginative ... and of course nothing like using a satsuma to disarm a Sycorax.

So Rattigan and Staal head for the Sontaran ship where we discover that Rattigan thinks Sontarans all look the same when it's obvious that they don't - Commander Skorr (why, oh why wasn't he a General!) has a Madonna-like gap in his teeth for a start. Meanwhile poor Martha is strapped to a table and her memories used to finalise a clone of her to be used to create havok amongst UNIT. When Skorr arrives and oversees the last part of this, his line about the female having a weak thorax ... oh please! Apart from the fact that the dialogue makes no sense in context, this joke of writer Terrance Dicks, whereby every Sontaran is contractually bound to make a reference to females of the human species having different larynx structures from the males, was old ten years ago!

So we're into the endgame now ... and the Doctor and Ross arrive back with Donna as Staal puts his plan into action, sending Sontarans down to Earth in space pods (Why? They have teleports!) and activating the true function of ATMOS - to emit a gas from the car exhausts. But first the Doctor has to endure some RTD baggage in the form of Wilf and then Donna's mum, Sylvia, recognising him. So Wilf ends up locked in a car as the gas floods out and the Doctor can't open the door - what about breaking a window then?

As if this wasn't all exciting enough, the Sontarans, for no discernable reason other than to provide something to put on T-shirts, launch into a Maori-like Haka of 'Sontar-Ha!' while smacking their fists into their hands. I shook my head in disbelief here ... it's obviously rubbish, but they take it all so seriously.

So the Doctor looks into the distance as the air is filled with gas, and Wilf collapses in the car ... and we crash into the end credits.

As I said at the start, it all seemed so familiar and rumbled by without really registering on the excitementometer at all. The shock of the Sontaran appearance was diminished by good old Radio Times in shades of the CyberController and the Dalek Sec Hybrid, and the themes of modern technology gone bad was done before in 'The Age of Steel'/'The Rise of the Cybermen' as well as 'The Idiot's Lantern' and 'The Lazarus Experiment'.

UNIT seemed to have turned into a generic army unit - even their name has been changed from the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce to the UNified Intelligence Taskforce. But why? Sounds like a dollop too much of political correctness to me. I notice that Robert Holmes was credited for the Sontarans at least.

So will Wilf live? Will the chanting, dancing midget Sontarans take over the world? Will evil clone Martha turn out to have a goatee beard? Tune in next week for the answers ...

Doctor Who - Planet of the Ood

One of the nice things about Doctor Who has been that it's not afraid to plunder its past when this seems appropriate. Ever since the very beginning, certain characters and monsters have reappeared, starting with the Daleks, and although it really took four years or so for the trend to really kick in, it's one of the elements which had made the show such a survivor. The only repeating elements in the William Hartnell days (aside from the Doctor and his companions of course) were the Daleks, and a rogue member of the Doctor's own race - then unnamed - called the Monk. It wasn't until Patrick Troughton took over that we had repeat appearances from the Cybermen, Daleks, Ice Warriors and Great Intelligence/Yeti. In the Jon Pertwee era there were the Nestenes/Autons, more Daleks, and more Ice Warriors, with the Silurians/Sea Devils adding a nice twist to the concept, and of course the one-eyed hermaphrodite hexapod Alpha Centauri (and Aggedor too). Not forgetting another renegade Time Lord called The Master ...

During Tom Baker's long tenure we saw the Sontarans as a new 'returner', with the Cybermen and Daleks (with new and improved added Davros) keeping the flag flying. The Master also came back a few times to torment the Doctor, changing his face along the way. In Peter Davison's era we enjoyed the now traditional Daleks, Cybermen, and Master with new baddies the Mara coming back for more. Omega (from Pertwee) reappeared, and the Guardians (from Tom Baker), and the Silurians and Sea Devils (from Pertwee) also returned. Colin Baker enjoyed two appearances from the slug-like Mentor Sil (as well as Daleks and Cybermen), and Sylvester McCoy battled Daleks and Cybermen, as well as a return from the Master and the Rani (another renegade Time Lord) with no returning baddies from his own era to contend with.

I may have missed a couple in that quick resume (and I didn't include 'The Five Doctors' at all!) but you can see that returning foes is certainly one of the building blocks of the show.

New Who has done the same, with returns (so far) from the usual suspects (Daleks, Cybermen, Master) as well as the less likely (Macra, Nestenes/Autons) and the new (Slitheen, Novice Hame, Face of Boe).

All of which brings me to 'Planet of the Ood' and perhaps the most blatant return of a new series creature. My overall feeling here is that if you are going to bring someone/thing back, then you need to have something new to say about it, some reason for doing that - whether a sequel to the original story, or some other original ideas to bring to the table. What 'Planet of the Ood' managed to do was to combine both, and to have a returning creature which seemed to do exactly the same as in their first appearance (eyes glow red, killing people with the translation balls) while also adding in some fairly unlikely backstory as to what was happening with the creatures and what their history was.

It's unfortunate therefore that the story as a whole comes over as fairly generic and bland, with the main cast, the Doctor and Donna, given very little to do. It was pointed out to me that the events would have unfolded in exactly the same way if the Doctor and Donna had never arrived - all the main threads had nothing to do with them, and were in progress long before (Ood Sigma turning Halpen into an Ood, Ryden being a member of 'Friends of the Ood' and so on). This renders our heroes ineffectual, and their involvement becomes more of an inconvenience than helping to drive the plot. I'm sure there are other Doctor Who stories where the Doctor changes nothing whatsoever by his involvement but I can't think of any just now.

The TARDIS randomly arrives on the Ood Sphere, a cold and wintry planet which unfortunately manages to still look like a quarry covered with snow. I liked the reference to the Sense Sphere though, a touch to the show's history (look up 'The Sensorites' on page 46 of The Television Companion if you're still puzzled).

We rapidly meet the prime movers: Halpen, director or boss or something of the Ood supply chain, Solana the head of Marketing, and Ryden, a doctor tending to them (we know this as he wears a white coat). Halpen has his own Ood slave, called Sigma Ood for no apparent reason, and there's a group of buyers there looking to invest in Ood, as well as a group of bloodthirsty, triggerhappy soldiers led by Commander Kess.

The Doctor hears singing but Donna cannot. It is the song of the Ood, and I'm not sure that viewers heard it as well - surely that dreadful opera stuff wasn't the song? No wonder Donna couldn't bear to hear it when the Doctor opened her mind to it. Our heroes explore and join the party of Ood buyers. Meanwhile Ood are going rabid, slavering and red-eyed, and rampaging about the compound.

There's a lot of cross-scene editing in the episode, showing parallel events as Doctor and Donna are faced with different threats, like the utterly pointless CGI attack on the Doctor by Kess operating a grab-crane. Probably winner of the 'most pointless use of CGI' award. There's also something nasty lurking in hangar 15 ...

The Doctor and Donna find some unprocessed Ood in basement cells, and we discover that they carry a second brain in their hands. Said brain being cut off and replaced with a translator ball when they are processed. The processed Ood all go mad and red-eyed and start attacking everyone. For some reason soldiers armed with machine guns are killed as the Ood rampage (very, very slowly) through the base.

Solana is killed (well she was cute, but very misguided and thus doomed), then Kess is killed by his own gas. The Doctor and Donna manage to miraculously escape from handcuffs when the red-eyed Ood don't kill them (saved by the unprocessed Ood down below stopping the red-eye or something like that anyway) ... and so it's on to hangar 15 for the endgame.

Therein is a massive brain, held within an electrical field. What? Suddenly this is like 'Time and the Rani' all over again. How can a giant brain survive under the planet's surface anyway? Why does it seem to absorb Ryden when he is thrown to his death by Halpen? How can the Ood who have been processed (and have had their hind brain removed) communicate effectively together? It all makes little sense.

Then, to top it all, it is revealed that Ood Sigma, although mentally castrated, has maintained enough nouse to feed Halpen Ood grafts suspended in organic solution ... which conveniently turns him into an Ood at exactly the right dramatic moment. So ingesting genetic material from another species turns you into that other species does it? Some day humans are going to start to turn into cows, sheep and chickens then, or even carrots and broccoli. This is of course patent rubbish, and stretches believability to the limit.

But never mind. The electricity is turned off and all the Ood can be happy again now they can communicate and sing with each other once more.

There's a note of 'arc' at the end when Ood Sigma comments to the Doctor that his song must end soon - we hear notes from the Rose 'Doomsday' theme on the soundtrack - but then the Doctor and Donna are off again in the TARDIS.

Overall I didn't really find this episode terribly satisfying. There's an awful lot of death with no consequence, and a great many unanswered questions. I guess that the whole Ood production line now stops. The story is set in 4126, so I presume that the Ood's last appearance on the Sanctuary Base (in 'The Impossible Planet'/'The Satan Pit') was therefore set before this.

The characters were all very one-dimensional, 'evil boss', 'good doctor', 'misguided marketing manager', and the Ood themselves did little more than stand around, or, when they exhibited red-eye, either quote in unison or kill people. Pretty much as they did in their earlier appearance. Something of a disappointment I felt.

I was also disconcerted by the need to have a 'catchphrase' for the monster. After 'Exterminate', 'Delete', 'Are you my Mummy?', 'You will be catalogued' and 'The Beast will arise' we can add 'The circle must be broken'. I hope that these things aren't added in just to provide T-shirt opportunities ... but I start to wonder.

Next week we have Martha back ... UNIT, Sontarans, Earth Invasion ... why does it all seem so familiar?

Doctor Who - Fires of Pompeii

This is more like it ... a 'proper' Doctor Who romp in time with some neat, original monsters, some great ideas, and a backdrop about as big as you can make it!

It's surprising in a way that Doctor Who hasn't 'done' Pompeii and Vesuvius before. It would seem to be a fairly obvious period in history to visit. (And before you all start adding comments pointing out the audio play ... I'm talking about Doctor Who on telly). Perhaps it is because the whole concept is just so big that a meagre television budget has not up to now been able to cope.

The Doctor and Donna arrive in what they think is Rome, but what they soon realise is actually Pompeii. I'm not sure how the Doctor knows what the date is though, and therefore how he knows that the following day will be 'Volcano day'.

I like how the threads follow through in this episode. A member of the spooky sisterhood of Sybilline is following them as she has seen the TARDIS and knows that their legends speak of its arrival. Realising that they have to get out of there, the Doctor is purturbed to find the TARDIS missing, sold by a cheeky cockney market trader. I liked this character, and liked the use of Phil Cornwall to play him - the sort of small guest star role which really works in the series. So the Doctor and Donna head off to the house of Caecilius and his family as they have bought it as 'modern art', perhaps reflecting an in-joke on John Cleese and Eleanor Bron's similar summation in City of Death.

Of course I never studied anything as exotic as Latin at school so the whole 'joke' about Caecilius and his wife Metella, their son Quintus and their daughter Evelina and them being in the Latin text books passed me by. My son picked it though ... and pointed out that there was actually no daughter, and actually he was a Banker of some sort and not a marble merchant.

But none of this matters because they are actually great characters and work well in the narrative to ground it and provide a base of sorts for the Doctor. That is, assuming he stays as he just wants to get out of there. But there is something creepy living under the house in the heating system ... and then Lucius arrives. Lucius is official prophet for the rulers and has commissioned Caecilius to make him a marble slab with what looks for all the world like a printed circuit on it. Of course the Doctor is intrigued and so decides to hang around a little longer.

But now Lucius and Evelina (who is a seer-in-training) seem to know who the Doctor is and from where he comes. There is a prediction for the Doctor: She is returning ... and for Donna: something is on your back ... but what does all this mean? Is 'she' Rose? Is there a giant Metebelis spider on Donna's back? We shall have to wait to find out. This is a great sequence, brilliantly acted and with complementary music ... very effective indeed.

The plot thickens as we discover that Evelina's arm is turning to stone and the Doctor realises that they are breathing in rock from the volcano through the heating systems ... so he and Quintus break into Lucius' house that night and find more of the circuit stones - seems to be an energy convertor ... and Lucius' arm is made of stone!! Wow. This is getting better and better as the Doctor and Quintus are chased by something under the ground which then bursts out in Caecilius's house revealing itself as some sort of lava powered rock monster straight out of Transformers or Bionicles.

What a great creature! Roary and frightening, it is defeated with a couple of buckets of water which cool it and make it shatter to pieces. Brilliantly done.

Meantime though Donna has been kidnapped by the Sybilline for daring to have an alternate prophecy, strapped to a slab and is about to be executed before the Doctor wanders in. I wondered how he knew where she was or how to get there ... but soon he is facing off against the High Priestess who is almost completely made of stone, and who reveals that the creatures inhabiting her body are Pyrovile ...

I loved the Sybilline here. Although reminiscent of the Sisterhood of Karn in The Brain of Morbius, they were handled differently. I thought the make up and costumes were startling, and the idea of the eye on the backs of their hands was inspired, giving an eerie insect-like appearance to them as they summoned their powers.

So the Doctor and Donna hold them off with a water pistol (nice touch) and head down into the mountain to confront the aliens in their underground lair. It's now that the Doctor explains to Donna that to him, some history is fixed, while some is in flux, and only he can tell the difference. Convenient I thought, but at least we had an explanation as I was getting a little tired with the 'cannot change history' line when all it ever seemed to apply to was past Earth history ... what about the history of everywhere he ever goes - whether it's in the past or not is relative to where you observe it from ... the present will always be someone's past ...

The Doctor and Donna dodge lumbering Pyroviles and make for a pod thing in the middle of a cavern. Once inside, the Doctor realises that the volcano won't erupt as the Pyroviles are using the power to take over the world! He can stop them, but then Pompeii will be destroyed. But does he have the right ... Ok, he didn't say that ... but I can't have been the only person to have thought that he would ... It's all timey wimey stuff with rifts in time and goodness knows what else.

So the Doctor and Donna together push the lever which will signal the eruption of Vesuvius. And so it does, and the escape pod is thrown out of the mountain and crashes outside. Some questions around this ... given that the Pyroviles were about 20 feet tall if not more, why did they have a human-sized escape pod in the first place? And why only one? And so convenient that the controls to stop them were all inside ...

The Doctor and Donna hurry back through Pompeii to try and get back to the TARDIS as all hell erupts around them. These sequences are all the more impressive for knowing that the crew only had 2 days to record them all! They really are effective at showing the chaos and panic in the ancient city ...

But then the Doctor won't save Caecilius's family ... and heads straight off, leaving Donna to plead with him to save at least one person ... This all really didn't ring true. I think it's the show trying to emphasise that the Doctor is still scarred from the unseen Time War, and the implication is that if he shows 'weakness' and saves people, then it behooves him to answer as to why he didn't save people before when his own planet was destroyed. Unfortunately this disregard for life just makes him look callous ... and this isn't good. Especially when, after saving the family, there are no recriminations as a result.

And so we leave the family looking down on Pompeii as it is slowly buried in ash. I could have done without the epilogue ending. The Doctor and Donna become Household Gods? I don't think so. This could probably have been cut and a couple more elements of explanation about the Pyroviles added in earlier ...

Overall I loved this episode. It's grand and epic in many ways, and the whole team pulled out all the stops to make it work. It's a shame that the Pyrovile don't have a 'voice' or a lead character to develop them though. We hear them talking through the hapless stone High Priestess, and that's pretty eerie, but the creatures we see are lumbering, roaring, mindless monsters ... alien races always work best when they are characterised and are not just insane maurauding creatures. It would have been nice for the beings to have spoken and to have been intelligent, just maybe looking for a home. But this was skipped over.

The costumes and sets, the acting, even the music worked well. It was a wonderful rollercoaster ride from start to end, which mostly made sense.

Next week ... we're back in Ood-ville for more tentacled treats.

Doctor Who - Partners in Crime

There's always a palpable buzz of excitement these days when a new series of Doctor Who gets underway. That's lovely ... it takes me back to the days of yore when I knew next to nothing about the show ... I remember the voice-over after The Ark In Space telling us that the Sontarans were back next week and me having no idea what they were ... also I remember the voice over at the end of Genesis of the Daleks saying that the next story was called Revenge of the Cybermen ... oooh ... Cybermen.

How times change.

But I digress. This year, for the first time in many, many years, I was not at home for the debut episode. I usually make a point of being in to the extent of not attending the now-traditional first night party. But this year I had already committed to a Doctor Who event up in Darwen that day and so I was going to be watching it for the first time in the company of a load of other fans. The last time I remember doing this was for episode one of Remembrance of the Daleks (I had some Who friends over), and before that is was the first episode of The Trial of a Time Lord (which was at a big convention).

So I watched the episode for the first time with a large group ... and it was great. The show hit the ground running ... but then watching it back, and thinking about it a little and it somehow seems less great.

Of all of the season openers so far, I think Smith and Jones is perhaps the best. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but in that case the humour didn't overstay its welcome, which is a little more than Partners in Crime managed.

We open with Adipose Industries, one of the Bad Companies which seem to grow up on Earth overnight. Both the Doctor and Donna are independently investigating it, and I found the opening to be very reminiscent of Rose and Smith and Jones, introducing the new companion first and then filling in the gaps later on. It was fairly amusing how the Doctor and Donna kept just missing each other, but after a while the joke wore a little thin.

Of course in charge of Adipose is the Evil Miss Foster - well she has to be evil doesn't she. But she seemed to be the only person in charge ... and why on earth did she have two gun-happy thugs to order about? Didn't they think what was going on was in the least bit strange? Anyway, Donna and the Doctor both get hold of a list of all the clients - apparently 1 million customers in the Greater London area alone! And all this fitted on something like 3 or 4 sheets of A4 paper ... wow.

So our partners in crime visit some of the people taking the Adipose pills ... and we start to see what's going on - they're changing into cute little fat-creatures who mew and wave a lot. Strangely Stacey Campbell (as Donna calls her) is credited as Stacey Harris in the end credits. But now that the questions have started ... what was all that about the pendant? Something to do with the humans touching it and it being linked to them and then if they opened it then it started them converting completely into Adipose? No idea what all that was about ...

But then Miss Foster sends operatives to collect the Adipose - in a van with a siren blaring on the top! Very secretive. But now we meet the rest of Donna's family, a nagging mum and a grandpa who used to narrate the Wombles on telly. Brilliant! In fact Bernard Cribbins as old Wilfred Mott was brilliant. Far better than the mum who seemed a little one dimensional here.

But now we get a pile of 'how Donna has changed' guff, and the music soars and the whole thing starts to become a soap opera all over again. I'm sorry, but Donna hasn't really changed. She's still annoying for all the damping down and major surgery they have done on her character to make her even remotely likable. She's watchable in this story, less so in others ... maybe I need to give her more time.

Back to the plot, the Doctor and Donna head back to Adipose and finally get to meet each other again. I was taken by the silent theatrics here ... but the whole plot and expository information which Miss Foster was imparting to the journalist girl is faded out ... and we can see what is most important here is the Doctor and Donna. Yes it made me smile at the time, but it is a bit annoying none the less. Miss Foster's reaction is great though ...

But now we're into the episode's 'big chase' and this time it's up and down a building in a window washer's lift and the stairs ... all very nice to look at and to give those nice people at The Mill something to get their CGI teeth into, but it added nothing to the plot. Miss Foster is given a sonic pen so that Character Options have something new to sell as a toy later on in the year, and the whole thing ends predictably with a face off wherein we learn that Miss Foster is actually Matron Kafelia of the five straight and classen bindi nursery fleet - intergalactic class (I have invented the spelling there as I have no idea!), and she's nanny to all these little fat-created Adiposian children.

So we're into endgame now, and the Doctor uses his own sonic device, plus the gold lockets (maybe this is what they were for ...) to stop the Matron from activating parthenogenesis and killing a million Londoners dead. Instead only about 10 thousand Adipose are 'born' and take to the streets ...

Interestingly, the Adiposian message the Doctor picks up is not in English ... obviously the TARDIS' translation circuits are temporarily on the blink ... and then we're into ET territory with a very impressive spaceship appearing in the skies and the little Adipose being transported up to it, all waving cutely. They really are insufferably cute!

So Matron thinks she is going to but instead falls to her death ... wave bye bye to Supernanny everyone.

So it's all over bar the Doctor getting Donna to hop aboard the TARDIS as his new companion - the earlier scene of him talking to himself and then stopping as he realised that there was no-one there to listen was very nice indeed. So Donna gets all Catherine Tate on him when he says, quite clearly, that he needs 'a mate' and thinks he said 'to mate' ... sheesh ... I thought this sort of humour went out with Russ Abbot (look it up). So she dashes off to leave her car keys for her mum in a bin, and asks a random blonde woman to tell her mum which bin to look in before she skips off to the Doctor. The blonde woman turns round

and

she's

Rose!!!!

Bloomin heck. The room went silent but for an audible gasp from the audience. That haunting closure music from Doomsday played ... and Rose turned and walked away, vanishing into the ether with a ripple.

Wow. Singularly the best moment I can remember from Who in a long, long time ... and so totally unexpected. It is just such a shame, that four years on, the show is still running under the spectre of Billie Piper's Rose ...

So Donna joins the Doctor and they wave goodbye to old Wilf on his hilltop ... a lovely scene and very reminiscent of the scene in the original Dalek film where Cribbins played a policeman called Tom, and at the end the TARDIS crew wave farewell to him while standing in the TARDIS doorway ... it would be nice to think that this was a deliberate homage, except that Cribbins was a late replacement for the original actor playing Donna's father (Howard Attfield) ... so maybe this scene was always meant to be there and just added an unintentional layer once Cribbins was cast, or maybe it was added in after Cribbins was cast ...

Overall ... a bit too light hearted. A bit too silly in the opening. The monsters were just daft and engineered to be merchandised ... the characters all a little too over the top ... and the whole thing felt like a remake of Invasion of the Bane from The Sarah Jane Adventures ... same sort of set up, same sort of evil mastermind in charge. It all felt so familiar and I think it drew too much on common archetypes and tropes, not doing enough that was new.

Catherine Tate did well as Donna, but she didn't really grow on me, and David Tennant's Doctor seems to be swinging between manic and intense at an alarming rate ... I hope it all calms down a little as we progress.

Next week ... volcanos, strange Sisterhood-like women, monsters made of fire and rock and the destruction of Pompeii. Never let it be said that Doctor Who doesn't set itself with a challenge ...

Torcheval and Primewood

Before I launch into the regular Doctor Who reviews, I wanted to post a few thoughts on the recent series of Primeval and Torchwood. I have to say that they do seem pretty interchangable to me ... both featuring a small team of people who deal with the results of rifts in time through which things can come ... on this basis though, Primeval has the edge, as in that show you can also go through their 'anomalies' to other places, wheras Torchwood has not explored that element as yet.

But the two series had other things in common as well. Both, it seemed to me, had not learned from their first series.

In Primeval, the first series was good, but the best bit was the last 10 minutes when the possibilities of all this time/space travel became apparant. But then the second series ended up doing pretty much the same thing - with multiple cloned (?) heavies at the end.

But then again in Primeval, all the dinosaurs are a little boring ... shame the anomalies never open up in more modern times so that we got people or other anachonistic elements coming through (I suppose Dodos are fairly modern). But then again, Torchwood has the possibility for more esoteric monsters ... and so we get a briefly glimpsed blowfish man ... but then just Weevils again. There was the big fat monster thing, and the rather neat shapeshifter creature, and a giant mayfly ... but nothing really impinged on the conciousness. The best part for me was the Victorian Torchwood operation run by a couple of women ... brilliant idea!

Torchwood seemed to have the bolder edge in the way it treated the regulars, with two of the main characters killed off ... or are they? ... never can tell really. But Primeval dropped the main point of interest (Abby's pants) and managed to make the on-off romance of the junior leads something of an event ... fairly trite I thought even if Hannah Spearritt does look hot dressed in combats and soaking wet!

Overall both series were pretty good though. Certainly entertaining and fun, with the darker streak of Torchwood playing well. I could have done without the constant 'gay' references in Torchwood though. Barrowman was playing Jack as some sort of characature of himself sometimes, complete with knowing winks and nudges. In an adventure series this is really just a distraction from the main matter at hand ... though I suspect that the makers feel that the show is really all about characters and relationships and not about guns and monsters and time travel ...

At the moment we've been pretty spoiled in the UK. With Primeval and Torchwood showing, and other fare such as the superb Supernatural, the impressive Reaper, as well as Ashes to Ashes for those who hanker for 80s nostaligia, and even more generic fare such as The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Blade The Series and The Bionic Woman, episodes of which are, as far as I can see, interchangable. We even managed to watch an episode of Blade to see what it was like, only to find that Blade didn't actually appear in it in any significant way ...

But now the godfather is back on telly ... and I have to go and pen some words about that ....

Doctor Who at Earl's Court

After too many years, London is again host to a Doctor Who Exhibition ... this time at the Museum Hall at Earl's Court. I was lucky enough to be invited along for the press showing, and the exhibition itself is open from 20th March for six months.

The venue is perhaps perfect for a Who exhibit, taking up most of a basement area in the Museum Hall. This means that the items on show have room to breathe and some of the larger pieces are very nice to see indeed. I never got to see the exhibition in Manchester but the PR suggests that this one is three times the size ... it certainly is bigger than the one in Brighton a couple of years back, and as we now have three series of new Who to display items from, it's good to see them assembled in one place.

You enter the exhibition down a flight of stairs, and then along a long and wide corridor lined with photographs of past Doctors, giving a nice nod to the history of the show. From there, it's into the exhibits themselves, and they follow the new series almost in order, starting with Series One.



First up then, are the Autons from Rose, and these are displayed in an area made to look similar to the under-store area in which Rose Tyler first encounters them. In a nice touch, some of the manniquins move, and one at the end has a drop-down hand. It's all suitably spooky and well done.

Next up is an area with a TARDIS prop and a blank-faced Doctor onto which a moving image of David Tennant's face is projected to give the impression that he is speaking to you. If you can stand in the right place, this is quite effective, but from the wrong angle it just looks weird!

The End of the World is next, and here we have just two of the characters from that story: one of the diminutive blue-faced helpers, and two of the guests at the party. Rose's costume is also here, and just around the corner is one of the robots from Bad Wolf - Zu-Zanna. Next is the big 'ol Face of Boe in all his impressive glory, and in the same area, a menacing Slitheen and the destroyed St Stephen's Clock Tower model from Aliens of London/World War Three and the model of Cardiff from Boom Town.

Finally in this area for Series One, there is a Clockwork Santa Claus and the Sycorax Leader from The Christmas Invasion. Hmmm ... so nothing from The Unquiet Dead, Dalek, The Long Game, Father's Day, The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances or The Parting of the Ways. Well ... not quite true as there are smaller displays with some items from some of these stories dotted around, as well as some costumes later on (there's Captain Jack's costume at least) - I spotted a gas mask from The Empty Child for example, and some pieces of equipment from The Long Game. With the space available though, it's a shame that there couldn't have been some scenarios from these stories. I guess the budget only stretches so far, and my imagination conjuring up images of a spooky WWII London Street with air-raid sounds and silent gasmasked zombies dotted around, or a corridor, from the ceiling of which a Jagrafess suddenly lunges, are not achievable ...



Moving onto the Series Two area, and first off are Cat Nuns from New Earth along with a costume for one of the infected humans. Cassandra is also here in bouncy trampoline form, along with the Abzorbaloff (a really nice piece of sculpture here) from Love and Monsters.

The next area is devoted to the FX development of an Ood, and is a nice sequence of sculptures and development of the mask, with a short video of designer Neill Gorton talking about it. There's a couple of 'heads' of the Doctor's ageing prosthetics on display, all finished off with, strangely, one of the Forest of Cheem from The End of the World from Series One.

It's then onto The Runaway Bride and the very impressive Empress of the Racnoss model. This giant spider is a brilliant prop and dominates the area in which it is displayed. Also here is another robot Santa and one of the unmasked roboforms from the story. Donna's wedding dress is likewise on display.

Around the corner is the large telescope from Tooth and Claw - another massive prop - the small Koh-i-noor Diamond and the costumes for the Host and Queen Victoria. More Ood are next, nicely displayed in a section of Sanctuary Base from The Satan Pit. K9 is here from School Reunion, looking as perky as ever, and also a small display of some of the art from Fear Her. We have Rose's costume from The Idiot's Lantern, and a nice display of the transmitter mask. Across from this there is a beautiful black Clockwork Man and the dissecting table from The Girl in the Fireplace.



That brings to an end the Series Two area ... so nothing as yet from the Cybermen story, Age of Steel/Rise of the Cybermen or the series finale Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. But then the Cybermen and Daleks have been held back for the moment ...

Just before entering the Cyber-Area, there's a Scarecrow from Human Nature, and then it's into the realm of the Cybermen.

I have to say that this was a little disappointing. There is the Cyber Controller from Rise of the Cybermen in his chair displayed nicely (and a large button which seems to do nothing at this stage), but then there's just two other Cybermen on display. Where are the machines to make more Cybermen? You walk into the area through some clear plastic strips ... but why not make a Cybermaze out of opaque plastic sheeting and have more Cybermen, converted humans and so on displayed in a more spooky setting?

There's a single statue of an Angel from Blink in a darkened corridor area ... nicely lit with flashing lights, but another slightly disappointing scenario as this could have been handled with more statues (maybe four of them) and perhaps even a clever bit of mirror-work where one could appear serene, but switch to attacking at the blink of an eye ...

There's a couple of costumes from the Futurekind from Utopia next, and a little scenario from The Shakespeare Code - again disappointing. A solitary rather frazzled looking witch with a cauldron and the pub sign ...

From Human Nature there are costumes for Martha and the Doctor, and also the Master's costume from Utopia. There's a strange hanging-in-mid-air spacesuited Doctor from 42, and then the Emperor Dalek from The Parting of the Ways ... leading to the Dalek section.

This is very nicely done. A scenario of black Dalek Sec in the middle with two moving gold Daleks either side which acts out a little playlet in a smokey destroyed room ... quite engrossing and a lovely idea. Beyond this area are displays of more Daleks, a Pig Slave, one of the dancer costumes from Daleks in Manhattan, and one of the parallel earth fighters from Doomsday.

Then, in the final area can be found items from Voyage of the Damned. Two Host and Max Capricorn's machine, plus Kylie's waitress costume and a model of Bannakaffalata in costume. After this comes the ubiquitous shop ...



So from Series Three, nothing from Smith and Jones (where were the Judoon?), Gridlock, The Lazarus Experiment, The Sound of Drums and Last of the Timelords. I didn't see a Toclafane anywhere!

As I mentioned, there are 'BBC Props' boxes dotted throughout the exhibition which contained all manner of small props and items from stories, and the whole area is liberally 'illustrated' with graphics, photographs and information, so that, even if there seems to be nothing obvious from a given story, there probably is something somewhere from it. There is certainly lots to look at and absorb as you move through the rooms and areas.

The obvious ommission however were the Judoon - it would have been lovely to have seen some of them there, and also more on the Cybermen. Some of the areas had a lovely feel to them, emulating the television story, but others seemed somewhat soulless, with no effort to create an atmosphere around them. There are supposed to be some Series Four items added in as the Season is transmitted on television, so I guess that some items will be moved around to make space for them as that happens.

The whole exhibition is well lit with strobes, coloured and moving lights. In some cases this makes photography near impossible - the Screaming Angel statue for example is very hard to get a good picture of! However it all adds to the atmosphere. There are some nice touches for younger visitors - there's an area where you put your hand into a series of holes to feel something inside, and then try and guess what it is before lifting the lid to check. And at the end there's a place to make rubbings of TARDIS shapes which could perhaps be developed further.

I do wonder though whether some opportunities to make the exhibits more interactive have been missed. There are some buttons around which make the displays do things - one operates K9 for example, another makes a Dalek talk - but maybe there could have been quieter, more scary areas, like the aforementioned Cyberman area which could have been a maze of hanging plastic with lights and silhouettes before you come face to face with the Cybermen themselves. The Dalek area is great though and could have been extended with a similar theme running through it. I can, however, see this being a bottleneck with people moving through, as you just have to stop and watch and admire.

I suppose for me, the 'ultimate' Doctor Who exhibition has yet to be mounted ... a mixture of costumes, information and props, mixed in with interactive areas (perhaps even with actors to help keep the people moving through and interest high) and with each 'area' having the appropriate 'feel' and setting of the story in question. I went to The London Dungeon a year or so back, and this has some elements I feel would translate well to a Doctor Who exhbition. However it does need staff to help guide the visitors through, and this obviously costs more to stage and keep running. Maybe at some point we will see something along these lines.

Overall then, this is a great set of displays of items from the last three (and soon to be four) years. There is an awful lot to see here, and a lot of thought has gone into the layout and presentation of everything, with video screens, lighting and information boards making it a very attractive and enticing place to visit. Full marks to everyone involved, and I hope that many people come and visit over the summer, refreshing their memories of Doctor Who, and increasing anticipation and enthusiasm for the show as it transmits.

Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned

Another Christmas, another Doctor Who Special ... after one year it was a tradition, after two years it was expected, and as far as the ratings go, over 12 million people tuned in to watch the Doctor and Kylie go through their paces this year.

But what of the production ... any good? A television classic? Or something best forgotten? The word that came to mind for me was 'anodyne' ... fairly bland and unmemorable. Not horrendous or awful, but not spectacular or classic either. To be honest all of the Christmas specials have fallen into this bracket for me ... something nice and light for Christmas day, but which fail to really have any meat or bite to them.

I think part of the reason for this is the way that the production team approaches them - as a special, rather than as a great piece of drama. The first one was David Tennant's first full outing as the Doctor and so had a lot to prove. All the messing about with Sycorax in giant spacecraft was incidental in that regard. Last year and we had the dire Catherine Tate to contend with - screaming out that she was Catherine Tate (ie unfunny and unable to act) in every scene and really distracting from the lightweight but chokka with meaningless technobabble plot about giant spiders, plug holes and secret bases under the Thames. And this year we get Kylie Minogue overshadowing everything else.

First and foremost though, we have to deal with the cliffhanger ending from last season ... the Titanic crashing through the inner wall of the TARDIS. The Doctor just presses some buttons and it's all sorted. A little anti-climactic really and nothing to do with the plot as a whole. Just a mcguffin to get the Doctor onto the ship, which turns out to be a space cruiser rather than the real mccoy, visiting the Earth as a sort of holiday jaunt for a bunch of aliens (shades of 'Delta and the Bannermen' there). Unlike the aliens in 'Delta' though, these all look totally human. All, that is, with the exception of a red spiky conker-like creature called Bannakaffalatta. There's no explanation for this, nor that, despite having researched Earth history to the extent of having authentic period details in the outfits, music, food, culture, Christmas, as well as the Titanic herself, they don't actually seem to know a thing about the actual Earth, having a strange (and faintly amusing) hybrid mish mash of facts, fiction and myth all rolled together and accepted as fact by the tour guide (Clive Swift in a winning role as Mr Copper).

The plot unfolds. For obscure reasons the Captain (a nice cameo from Geoffrey Palmer) attracts some flaming meteoroids to the ship, smashing into it and making it 'sink'. At the same time, the android 'Hosts' - speaking information points - turn bad and start killing all the humans. Now we're into 'The Robots of Death' territory, though not handled nearly as well. And how did they know that the meteoroids would be there anyway?

The Doctor and his merry band of friends (waitress Astrid Peth, Foon and Morvin Van Hoff, Bannakaffalatta, Copper, and the boorish Rickston Slade (is that another veiled Christmas reference ... Slade?)) have to make their way to the ship's Bridge to try and save the day while being attacked by Host, having to cross a chasm on a rickety bridge, and with people dying all around them.

Some of the deaths were very underplayed, and I felt it was perhaps a little too dark for Christmas. Foon and Morvin were established as a very likable couple with some great character writing by Russell T Davies, and believable performances from Debbie Chazen and Clive Rowe. But then they both die. Quite suddenly and nastily, and without even any build up to the event. I found it a little shocking. Then little Bannakaffalatta dies as well ... but he was a cyborg and apparently the planet Stole, from where the Titanic came, is intolerant of cyborgs. So why have human-looking androids as information points then? What sort of society develops a technology to be able to create the Host and then fails to use any part of it to improve the lot of their members? Strange.

So the Doctor gets himself captured and heads down to Deck 31 to confront whatever is behind all this. I did wonder if the ship should have had more decks, and then this could have been on D84 rather than D31 (making another nice in-joke to 'The Robots of Death' - one of the Host's hands being sliced off by the door was another such reference). The Doctor discovers that Max Capricorn, the owner of the Titanic, is behind it all - and he's nothing but a head being kept alive by cybernetics. His plan is to get back at his board by making his company go bust through bad publicity while he retires to an island somewhere. He has an impact chamber to hide in and men to rescue him from the ruins of the Earth after the crash. But why bother? Why be on the ship at all? But then Kylie to the rescue and she drives a fork lift truck into Max and eventually pushes him over into the chasm, following him down herself.

All very sad and all that ... but why didn't she jump free at the last moment? Why did the Host then obey the Doctor (and I winced at the angels escorting the Doctor up to the Bridge, complete with Superman-like clenched fists punching the air) ... since when was the Doctor the second in command to Max ... and since when was Max second in command to the ship's captain? What sort of command structure do these androids follow? Thinking further about it, why didn't the Doctor send a Host down to try and rescue Astrid? And why did he give up so easily on using the teleport system to re-create her?

The Doctor saves the day and manages to pilot the damaged ship down through the Earth's atmosphere (no explanation as to how it stayed intact through the heat of re-entry), narrowly missing Buckingham Palace, and then up into space again (and for a craft to exit the Earth's atmosphere you need an incredible amount of power ... that ship must have some thrust in its engines!)

And that's about it really. Kylie was pretty good as Astrid. She had some nice lines, and flirted with the Doctor well. I was almost sad that she didn't survive the story - but her being turned into stardust was cute beyond reason. I almost wish they had gone with the rumours. That Astrid being an anagram of TARDIS and Peth meaning 'thing' in Welsh, suggesting that she would become a TARDIS, or part of it at least, in something reminiscent of Lawrence Miles' groundbreaking work in the 1990s range of BBC paperback books. Maybe this is what is yet to happen - her TARDIS-blue pixie dust could merge with the TARDIS as it leaves the Titanic.

The other actors were okay with perhaps the worst being Russell Tovey as Midshipman Frame, who reminded me all the time of Lee Evans who played a similar role in The Fifth Element. Jimmy Vee was great as the conker-headed Bannakaffalatta, even if he refers to himself in the third person when he speaks ... no race does that!

There's a cameo from Bernard Cribbins as a newspaper seller in Camden ... what was that all about? If London has been evacuated then why man a stall selling newspapers ... and what newspapers is he selling anyway? London is evacuated so there's no-one to write, print or distribute them. Maybe he hopes the Queen will stop by and buy one. Speaking of which, that whole sequence was just embarrasing ... the Queen, corgis ... 'thank you Doctor' (voiced by Jessica Martin who played a werewolf called Mags in the story 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy') ... no ... not clever, just cringeworthy.

So overall, while the 71 minutes passed by fairly painlessly - I even quite enjoyed the revamped theme music which sounds like the old theme played by a heavy rock ensemble - it was all a bit bland and non-eventful. The touches to the original series stories were nice (I spotted bits of 'Planet of Evil' and 'Earthshock' in the mix as the kitchen staff were massacred, and there's probably lots more as well), but when 'The Robots of Death' is superior in just about every way to this modern version then you know that something is not quite right. I also found myself playing spot the merchandise opportunity, with characters leaping off the screen and into the toyshops. Astrid with tray accessory, Astrid in fork life truck, Max in his box, Doctor in tuxedo, Bannkaffalatta with removable shirt and EMP device, a host of Host with removable halos, Host Halo Frisbys ... With this in mind, though, it is very strange that there weren't more background aliens present on the ship - a wasted opportunity to bring in a pile more creatures for turning into action figures perhaps, or a deliberate attempt to try and rein the temptation back?

To try and summarise it is a little like trying to hold a snowflake in your hand ... it was nice to look at, rolled by quite well, but if you try and look closer at just about any aspect, it all comes apart at the seams.

Chicago

I made my first trip to Chicago a couple of weeks back, to the Doctor Who convention held there each year, Chicago TARDIS. It was a fun trip all told. Getting to the airport was a complete pain though. The trip should take about 30 mins, or around 1 hour maximum, but on this particular morning it took 1 hour 45 mins to get there! The traffic was insane!!! When I eventually arrived, which was still an hour and a half or so before the plane left, the first thing I discovered was that the Virgin flight was not a Virgin flight any longer and was actually going to be on American Airlines as Virgin had 'mislaid' their plane and it was in Bombay or somewhere like that. How can you mislay a plane? And it was leaving an hour later. So I headed off to the AA booking desks and managed to get a window seat (luckily, as initially there wasn't one, but then in the departure lounge they managed to move people about a bit and I got the seat I wanted). I like to sit there as I can lean against the wall slightly and it's a little less claustrophobic than the other seats. Then, on the plane, to add insult to injury, I discovered that AA don't serve alcohol free with meals, you have to pay for it ... it's all free on Virgin and apparently they were supposed to give us vouchers. So I stuck with orange juice and water when I could have really done with a nice glass of red wine with my meal ... But the flight was OK and arrived the expected hour late - I had managed to ring Rosemary from the airport and asked her to email the people meeting me to warn them that I was on a different flight and arriving an hour later on - and all was well. I was picked up and driven to the hotel where I checked in fine and dumped my stuff in the room. On Thursday evening I went out with a couple of friends to a restaurant called Harry Caray's where we had an extensive Thanksgiving meal. Harry Caray was a Baseball commentator and this place is quite famous in Chicago apparently. The food was lovely but as usual in the US, there was way too much of it to eat - the turkey portion was 4 massive slices, each a cm thick and about 15cm diameter ... but the sides were lovely - stuffings and cranberry and bread sauce and all manner of things - a meal in themselves! One of my friends decided that we should have some champagne for the meal as well which was most welcome, and when we had finished it all came to about £15 equivalent each!!! The exchange rate is very friendly to us Brits in the US at the moment. Then it was back to the hotel and sleep ... Friday was spent shopping. I met up with friends in the morning and we headed off by taxi to a local mall where we spent most of the morning and early afternoon shopping. I got a pile of DVDs, and various other Christmas presents for people as well. We stopped by a Borders for a coffee as well ... then back to the hotel for the start of the convention, some panels and the opening ceremony. I hooked up with more friends for the evening and enjoyed drinks and the most massive take-away Chicago pizza pies for dinner, and then we headed off to several room parties where I chatted to people and made new friends :) About midnight I think I crashed and headed off to bed. Saturday was Convention day and so I spent the day chatting with friends, did a couple of panels, and generally relaxing. It was a nice convention, friendly and with a good mix of panels and people. Apparently numbers were down on usual as there wasn't a Doctor-actor as a guest, but it was still very friendly and enjoyable. The main guest was Eric Roberts but it transpired that he was stuck in Bulgaria on a film shoot and the weather had snowed off the planes. He eventually managed to arrive Saturday afternoon and gamely met people and did a panel and signed things for everyone without a murmer of complaint. What a star! He must have been so tired and jet lagged ... not to mention all the waiting around at the airport to get the plane in the first place. In the evening I went out to the Theatre to the Steppenwolf theatre to see a brilliant play called Wedding Play (you can see a review here: www.chicagotribune.com) Very interesting and well acted and with some excellent use of sound and lighting ... I was very impressed as were the people I saw it with. From there it was back to the hotel for more drinks and parties and chatting ... this time until about 3am when I finally went to bed! Sunday and generally a quiet day at the convention ... more wandering and chatting to people, some panels and then goodbyes to all your friends which is always sad. I bid farewell to my new friends and then hit the bar for an evening with those staying over. Went to bed about midnight again when the bar closed ... Monday morning and I'd arranged to spend most of the day with another friend called Michael. He picked me up about 9.30 and we drove to his apartment in the middle of Chicago. His place had stunning views over the city - really nice to see. We were also looking after his baby daughter Vera and we went out for a long walk taking in the museum, the park, a vast sculpture called the Bean and took in a nice coffee and brunch along the way as well. We even stopped for a drink at the legendary House of Blues :) though it was nice and quiet when we were there - and Vera was asleep in her stroller. After my whirlwind tour of the city, Michael delivered me to the airport to catch the flight back to England which again all went smoothly - except for a potential panic where I realised I had been seated in a window seat but next to the fattest man alive! Luckily the plane was less than half full and so I managed to get a different window seat to myself. It was also a night flight, but only took 6 hours because of the gulf stream running in the right direction - it took around 8 hours to get there. Overall I had a great time, managed to relax and get some shopping done. Met friends old and new and hopefully will be returning next year when there is a Doctor in attendance ... For more details on Chicago TARDIS head to: http://www.chicagotardis.com/

Happenings

A quick update on some forthcoming happenings ... First of all, next Saturday (27th October), I'm heading down to Portsmouth to see the very wonderful stage production of The Daleks' Master Plan. I was at their presentations of Fury from the Deep, The Web of Fear and Evil of the Daleks and I know it will be a wonderful show. Before the presentation, I'm MCing a mini-con for them, and interviewing folks like Terry Molloy, Nick Briggs and Rob Shearman ... should be fun. I think tickets are all sold out, but you might be lucky on one of the shows if they have any returns. Then, Saturday after that (3rd November), I'm holding a launch for The Target Book, a new illustrated tome by mygoodself about the amazing Target Book range. Everyone's welcome to come along to meet myself and co-author Tim Neal, along with top Target scribe Terrance Dicks, plus as many Target cover artists, editors and writers as we can cram into the venue including Andrew Skilleter, Nigel Robinson, Tony Clark, Colin Howard, Jeff Cummins and hopefully many more. The venue is Mr Pickwick's, 70 Leman Street, London E1 8EU. Nearest Tube stations are Tower Hill and Aldgate East. The event starts at 3pm on Saturday 3rd November. Then I'm signing copies of the book, alongside fourth Doctor Tom Baker, and actress Nichola McAuliffe ('Vivien Rook' in the Doctor Who episode 'The Sound of Drums') on Monday 5th November at The Stamp Centre, 79 Strand, London WC2R 0DE. The signing event starts at around 10:00am. Finally, end of November and I'm heading out to Chicago for the annual Chicago TARDIS convention. Never been to that before so I'm looking forward to seeing some of the city, and meeting as many people as I can at the event.

Audio Who

I a massive fan of Doctor Who on Audio, and also, of course, a fan of the old Target books ... so I was especially pleased to see that those lovely people at BBC Audio have a Myspace Page now all about the titles. There's even an excerpt from the forthcoming reading of Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon on there :) http://www.myspace.com/bbcaudio_classicdoctorwho

Silent Hill

Regular readers will know that I have a penchant for horror, and try and keep up with as much as I can.

I'm not a great fan of the current batch of 'torture porn' as I've seen it imaginatively described - where pretty young boys and girls end up trapped and being tortured for no apparent reason. I've not yet seen Saw, which is where this all seemed to start, but I'm told that Saw at least has a decent plot and premise behind it. And follow that with Hostel, sequels to both Saw and Hostel, and several other riffs on the same theme, and it all seems a little stale. I know, not having seen the films, I'm not qualified to comment, and yet there's nothing in what I have seen about them which makes me want to see them in the first place.

However, what I really wanted to talk about was a film I picked up on DVD lately called Silent Hill. I'd seen some pics and features about it when it came out, and it intrigued me, but to be honest there wasn't much of a buzz about it, and I don't recall anyone reviewing it who was blown away.

Well, I loved it! It's the same with several films that really get to me - I love them but I can't put my finger on why, apart from that they are imaginative, well shot, have some great monsters, and just draw you in.

Silent Hill managed all these for me. It's based on a computer game apparently, but I've not played that, and follows the adventures of a woman called Rose who is trying to find her lost daughter in a ghost town called Silent Hill. The mist-shrouded town seems cut off from the outside world, and ash falls constantly from the sky. Every so often, a siren sounds and darkness falls, and then, in the darkness, monsters emerge to hunt, and the whole place rots and putrifies before your eyes.

There are some great CGI effects in here, the town literally rotting away before your eyes. Then there's the monsters. Mind boggling visions of red hot baby-like creatures mewling and shuffling in chase, an armless man-like creature which spews red hot acid-like material from a hole in it's chest, and a huge, hulking muscular man in a giant triangular steel mask who can literally rip your skin from your body! Some of these are enhanced by CGI, but by and large the creatures are real, created by actors, prosthetics and make-up and this is in itsself very refreshing.

I don't want to say too much as the film is expert at drawing you in and along, and the explanations come right at the end. It is a little clunky that they are all told/explained in more or less a single sequence, but I found myself nodding and smiling as I figured out how it all fitted together. The denoument is well crafted and freakily original, and the film even has a thought provoking ending.

One of the best parts for me came when Rose has to pass down a corridor full of nightmare 'dark nurses' - faceless bandage-swathed woman in ripped and torn grey nurses outfits who home in on light and sound, and who are intent on stopping Rose. Their jerky, twitchy movements are awesome and reminded me of the horrific ballet dancers in the video for Christina Aguilera's 'Fighter' - the ones who approach moth-Christina with giant pins ...

I enjoyed the imagery and the originality of the designs - far better than something generic and way above using pure blood and guts to get an audience reaction. Overall one of the better films I've enjoyed lately

There's an official site: http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/silenthill/index.html so go and have a look at some of the visuals. However the site does give a lot away about the film, and I feel it's something perhaps best experienced with little advance information as to what happens.

Doctor Who - Last of the Time Lords

And so we come to the final episode ... the one that it's all been leading to. I'll add some final thoughts at the end of this piece, but for the moment, we pick up where we left things last week ... well almost.

It's one year later and the show opens with a graphic and a voice telling us that Sol 3 is 'closed' ... I wondered where this was coming from and why? From the last episode, it's obvious that first contact has yet to be established as the business with the Toclafane spheres was big news ... so who has decided that Earth has reached terminal extinction?

Cue Martha, who arrives in England in a boat. It's the first time she's been back for 365 days ... and I wonder how she got away from England so quickly anyway. It would take a few days to reach the coast from London, and who in their right mind would be sailing ships/flying planes while the Toclafane wiped out a tenth of the population! Maybe she is very resourceful indeed. We are told she walked across America ... is that even possible with limited supplies ... and how long would it take? And as if that wasn't enough she's been in Japan and all over ... this is stretching my credibility somewhat.

But she has returned to seek out Professor Docherty ... not sure why just yet ...

Meanwhile the Master hasn't really been busy at all. He's still on his skybase. His wife looks even more drugged up (and has a rather nice red dress on) and looks as though she has been beaten - she has a bruise on her cheek. The aged Doctor lives in a tent with some grass under it and a dog bowl and Martha's family all work on the skybase while Jack is chained up. The Master also enjoys music by The Scissor Sisters ...

It's 24 hours to launch date and the Doctor and Martha's family plot a coup at 3pm ... we learn about the rockets being built to fire into space ... to destroy what? Martha mentions it's to create an intergalactic war ... but they would take days, years even to reach anything worth destroying ... so what is the point of it? These was something about opening rifts to go through but it's all very confused. The Master is plainly insane so maybe it doesn't have to make any sense. Would be nice though.

The Doctor's coup predictably fails as the Master's laser screwdriver is isomorphic (and the fanboys sigh with pleasure). To rub this in we get the Axons and Sea Devils namechecked as well. The Master transmits a message for Martha ... and by an amazing coincidence she and Tom have just arrived at Docherty's, and Docherty has just managed to get a TV working ... to the second! While Martha watches the Master blasts the Doctor again with his laser and the Doctor is bizarrely changed into a Gollum or Dobby-like character with tiny shrunken body, big head and large puppydog eyes. By this point I was watching with mouth agape, having no idea what was going on and why Doctor Who seemed to have turned into some sort of collision between The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. The CGI on the Dobby-Doc was amazing though. But why!!!!

Martha, Tom and Professor Docherty capture a Toclafane sphere using some information Martha has on a CD and discover that inside it is a face. It transpires that these creatures are actually the future of Mankind - they are the remains of the humans sent off to Utopia by the Doctor. This was a nice touch and neatly tied up that loose end - but why did they evolve into faces and change so much! How long did all this take? Especially as the Master could not travel in time - as stated a couple of times, all he could do was to go from the year 100 trillion to 2007 ... so how could he possibly have influenced humanity to become hi-tech flying balls so quickly? Incidentally, the BBC site points out that 'Toclafane' roughly translates to 'Fool the Fan' in French ... I wonder who was trying to fool who here?

Now we discover that the Master is trying to create a new Gallifrey. I'm not sure how or why, or why firing lots of missiles into space helps that, nor how releasing millions of Toclafane spheres onto the Earth helps as well ...

Martha tells Docherty about her secret gun to defeat the Master which needs a fourth chemical from North London ... while she and Tom head off to get it, Docherty reports them to the Master as he is holding her son hostage.

So the Master arrives as Martha is telling some humans in North London about the Doctor, and she gives herself up. Tom is predictably killed which is a shame as he was quite a nice character, as was Docherty. I like how the series has presented several great older characters - Doctor Constantine and Mrs Moore spring to mind as well as Docherty here.

So back on the Skybase and we're nearing endgame. As the Master's countdown to launch approaches zero, Martha explains that she told everyone about the Doctor and asked them to think his name when the countdown reached zero ... aside from the fact that the Master seems to be making his plan up as he goes along, there was no mention of a countdown and so how would the Doctor or Martha know there would be one, and how does everyone worldwide know when it will reach zero anyway? The idea is that the Archangel network of satellites will boost this thought power and allow the Doctor to restore himself as he has hooked himself into the Archangel network.

And lo it came to pass. The people of Earth prayed for their saviour to the Archangel and he rose again. Floating arms outstretched to forgive the Master ... In the chaos the Toclafane go to protect the paradox and Jack heads off to destroy the thing ... the Doctor and the Master transport to a clifftop for no reason where the Master wants to use more technobabble and black holes to wipe the world out, but the Doctor knows he won't succeed as he can't kill himself.

Jack manages to get past the whole three Toclafane defending the TARDIS (where were the rest?) and starts blasting away with a machine gun inside the TARDIS - didn't the Doctor say they couldn't do this in the last episode? He destroys the paradox machine and the Doctor and the Master are brought back on the skybase as a wind blows and time rolls back.

Cop.

Out.

You do not write good science fiction by rolling time back at the end. What a total waste of time. It makes a mockery of everything Doctor Who has always stood for. Total and utter rubbish.

So the Doctor wants to keep the Master in his TARDIS but, after Francine cannot shoot him, Lucy Saxon does. The Master dies in the Doctor's arms as he refuses to regenerate. We get more mentions of Axons and Daleks (that's three mentions of the Axons in two episodes ... a clue there perhaps?).

As if we cared any more, the Doctor burns the Master's body on a pyre ... why? This seems to be the question of the episode. Why? Nothing is really explained and we don't really care anymore anyway. Martha also gives Docherty a bunch of flowers for something she never did and never will do ... why?

Finally (almost) Jack returns to Torchwood and the Doctor disables his teleport. The final shot across the bows is the intimation that Jack is, in fact, the Face of Boe. Shaking my head in disbelief and cries of 'What!' from my family ... this was the final nail in the coffin of silliness which was this final episode. And then Martha decides not to travel on with the Doctor proving the newspapers correct and the BBC barefaced liars.

As if all the preceeding nonsense wasn't bad enough, we then cut to the embers of the Master's pyre and a female hand (well I assume it's female ... could be Eddie Izzard for all I know, which would actually be far more likely given the way the series is going) picks up the Master's ring - an artifact previously unmentioned in the episodes. Evil cackling sounds and we all intone 'The world will hear from me again' in good old Fu Manchu as this cliched and useless Flash Gordon moment plays out.

But then ... the bow of a ship crashes through the TARDIS internal wall. The Doctor is quite right to cry, 'What!' as this should be impossible. Moreover the ship appears to be the Titanic ... and the 'Next Episode' caption announces that the Christmas Episode will be called Voyage of the Damned ... I may be going mad, but I remember a panel in Doctor Who Magazine of the prow of a ship crashing through the inner wall of the TARDIS ... any ideas?

And so ends one of the most confused, unexplained and basically dreadful episodes of recent Who. I have no idea whether anyone had a clue as to what was happening, and Russell T Davies seemed to be indulging himself in anything which came to mind in order to provide a climax to a series which had been rather good up to this point.

Overall I felt that the third season was stronger than the two previous ones by quite a long way. There were a few really dud stories: I disliked Gridlock (though others loved it) and 24, the second part of the Dalek adventure was a wasted opportunity, and this final episode was very disappointing indeed. But the duds were far made up for by the genius of Smith and Jones, Blink, Human Nature, The Family of Blood and the first part of the Dalek story. David Tennant was brilliant throughout and always watchable, and Freema Ageyeman was mostly very effective as well. It's such a shame that she's not continuing though, and I feel that this decision is, like most of the final episode, poorly thought out. The series needs a 'normal' person to act as an anchor, and the news that the dreadful Catherine Tate is returning as Donna for the whole of next season fills me with dread. Tate is not an actress, she's a comedienne with a one-trick piece of shtick which won't wash for the season. She was only bearable in The Runaway Bride as she was guesting and there was lots of other things to see ... but to be stuck with her for a whole 13 weeks!

It's not just me as well ... friends who are not fans think this is an awful idea as well ... it's the equivalent of Bonnie Langford all over again! For thoughts on that, head over to Lawrence Miles' Doctor Who blog at http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/2007/07/which-is-worse-langford-or-tate.html where he eloquently sums up my thoughts on the whole situation far better than I could.

So overall ... a great season but with a cop out and ill prescribed ending. Allowing the effects and ideas to get in the way of the plot ... fatal for what is after all a drama series, and which needs to make sense.

Doctor Who - The Sound of Drums

First of all, apologies for the delay in posting up my thoughts of the last couple of episodes of this year's Doctor Who. The real world intruded in that my sister decided to get married on the same day as Last of the Time Lords meaning that the family had to take a trip up to Glasgow for the event - this being the same weekend as the airport there was hit by failed bombers, and the same weekend as Britain was drenched and flooded for the first time ... so I was quite pleased we travelled by train all told.

We managed to see the final episode in the hotel room, though, but then back to drinking and festivities all night. Then the following weekend, there was more things to do and sort out ... and you know how it goes.

Anyway, I've finally managed to make the time to sit down and re-watch the final two episodes again, and so here's the first of the reviews.

The Sound of Drums starts with something I thought we'd seen the back of ... a fake cliffhanger resolution. We had left the Doctor, Martha and Jack facing off against a group of cannibalistic humans in the year 100 trillion as the Master nicked the TARDIS. Yet here we start with our trio arriving on Earth. They used Jack's transporter device and what a useful McGuffin this is. Able to transport them 100 trillion years when even the Doctor was alarmed about the TARDIS going so far forward in the last episode.

One of the things about the final episodes is that they move at such a pace that you can't really take it all in. I found that I enjoyed them more a second time as I could pick up on more of the nuances, but it makes trying to write the plot down near impossible! Anyway, I'll do my best. On Earth, Harold Saxon is now Prime Minister and he is also the Master as Martha now realises. And her sister Tish is working for him (poor girl doesn't have a lot of luck does she). The Master gasses all the cabinet members and we start to get the impression that he is not in full possession of all his marbles.

His wife, Lucy, is the female equivalent of Tim Nice-But-Dim and comes over as very cowed but totally devoted to the Master. I wish he had hypnotised her at some point - like when the Jean Rook-alike journalist is slaughtered by the Toclafane sphere - as then we might have had a reason for her trance-like behaviour. I guess we just have to imagine what he might have done to her mind.

So the Master is using these Toclafane spheres (a name that is made up, apparently some sort of Gallifreyan boogieman) to pretend he has been contacted by aliens. He's also somehow able to plant a massive bomb in Martha's apartment which blows up at a convenient moment as the Doctor, Jack and Martha flee for their lives. Nice effects, but it's all a little convenient.

Martha is more than a little pissed at this, but her family is taken into custody by Saxon's men in short shrift and she's on her own. The Doctor uses her phone to talk to the Master and we get bags of backstory ... Time War, Daleks, Torchwood team gone to the Himalayas ... and then we see the Master watching TellyTubbies in a nice reflection of the scene in The Sea Devils where he watches Clangers ... a Toclafane sphere says the Darkness is coming ... what Darkness? Is this the end of all things in the far future? Or the same thing they were going on about in Torchwood? Or are they looking forward to seeing Justin Hawkins and his band on tour?

More continuity - I feel the spirit of JNT looming! - the Master is not the Doctor's brother. Excuse me ... you seem to have confused me with someone who cared! I'm afraid that this sort of fannish referencing is a little lame ... why bother to even mention it? It's as though someone has a checklist of Mastery things and they just have to tick them all off. Next we'll have references to previous adventures with Axons and ... oh ... we do have those. Check. What about the Master as a boy on Gallifrey ... check. We have to have those nifty Time Lord collars in ... check. What about a time portal ... have to have a time portal ... check. Sighs

So the child Master looked into the total perspective vortex and saw the whole of creation ... and it drove him mad and he now hears drumming all the time (and the drumming is never explained). But they also said that all young Gallifreyans look into the vortex as part of their initiation ... so why is only the Master driven bad and mad?

Now the Doctor gets all A-Team and builds some TARDIS keys with somebody-else's-problem fields in them so their wearers are not seen, and the team head off to watch what's happening.

The Master meanwhile assembles everyone on Valiant - a skybase nicked from Colonel White and Spectrum - and the President of the US is killed by a Toclafane. The Doctor, Jack and Martha use the transporter to get there - a very useful device indeed - and find that the Master has converted the TARDIS into a paradox machine (a what?). All hell breaks loose after the President is killed and the Doctor, Martha and Jack are uncovered. The Master uses the power of referencing another story (The Lazarus Experiment) to age the Doctor into someone we saw in The Family of Blood.

Are you still with me. The problem with all this is that it feels so ... so unoriginal. We saw an aged Doctor in The Family of Blood, and there it was a shock and felt right. Here it feels like they loved the make up so much they just had to use it again. And the first incarnation of the Doctor was something like 450 years old when he regenerated, so why would adding 100 years to the Doctor now make him age so dramatically? I guess we just have to go with the flow.

So the Master keys his favourite pop record to play, 'Voodoo Child' by Rogue Traders, and as they sing out about the Sound of Drums, so Mrs Saxon bops cutely, and the Toclafane spheres descend from a rip in the sky. Again, we've seen this before. There were the Daleks descending on the Earth to wipe it out, then the Cybermen, then the Daleks and the Cybermen ... it all feels old when it should feel new and exciting.

Martha listens as the Doctor whispers something to her, and then escapes with that handy transporter as the Toclafane start to decimate the Earth, killing one in ten of the populace. Standing on a hill, overlooking a devastated London, she vows to return.

Meanwhile the Master is getting all biblical (foreshadowing how this all ends) and mis-quotes from Genesis as he and his wife and the Doctor look down on the Earth ... cue the credits.

So ... an exciting episode yes, but one which increasingly felt as though the show had started to go off the rails. There was little that we hadn't seen before, and scenes reminded me of similar set ups in any number of earlier stories. The whole thing was suffused with backstory and menky bits of information about Gallifrey, Time Lords, the Master, techno-stuff about mobile phone networks (didn't Lumic use that trick?) and Paradox Machines (unexplained), Jack's super-transporter which seems better than a TARDIS, and keys which make you invisible ...

However it sets up some nice mysteries - who or what the Toclafane are for example, that could have potential. How the Doctor and Martha get out of the mess they are in, and whether the Master actually has some sort of plan or whether he is just completely barking mad.

Only one episode to go ...