Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

So often with Doctor Who these days, when we have a two-parter, the second part seems to not live up to the expectation of the opening instalment. This seems to especially afflict the 'big monster' stories which is a great shame as Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans deserve better. The season-enders especially seem to have suffered, with the final episode in each case having to do a lot of work to try and wrap everything up neatly and failing somewhere in the attempt.

Luckily, the more low-key two-parters on the whole have succeeded admirably. 'The Empty Child'/'The Doctor Dances' is a great example, as is 'Human Nature'/'The Family of Blood'. 'The Impossible Planet'/'The Satan Pit' however dropped the ball.

Now we have another to add to the roster of successes, with 'Silence in the Library'/'Forest of the Dead' managing to feel like a wholly rounded story, something that Doctor Who used to do time and time again, and yet which seems to be missing from this new, fast-paced, CGI crammed, 45 minute episode format. We either get something whimsical and knockabout (eg 'Partners in Crime', 'New Earth') or something which is a glorified runaround (eg 'The Doctor's Daughter', 'The Lazarus Experiment', '42'). It's rare to come across an episode which feels like and works as a complete adventure in 45 minutes, though thankfully it has happened ('Dalek', 'Father's Day', 'The Girl in the Fireplace', 'The Idiot's Lantern', 'Blink'). What's interesting to note is that every one of these episodes which feel like 'proper' stories has not been written by Russell T Davies ...

But back to 'Forest of the Dead', an episode concluding an adventure begun with 'Silence in the Library', in itself one of the best, most exciting and chilling episodes of Doctor Who we have seen to date. It had a lot to live up to.

If you remember, last week we left our heroes trapped in the darkened Library, with a shambling, reanimated corpse heading towards them, Donna apparently dead, and no way out ...

Of course there's a way out! River Song has her squareness gun, and so the team escape by making their own way through the bookcases. This is a little bit of a cop out I suppose, but in keeping with the nature of cliffhangers.

More important were some of the revelations in the episode. Last week we had no idea who the strange little girl with her father was, who the mysterious Doctor Moon was, and what River Song's relationship with the Doctor was. Personally I wanted answers to all but the last one. I really found I could care less about River Song and this whole future relationship guff. It was interesting, and well played by the actors, but as some sort of big arc-like revalation? No, just not interested. So I was very pleased indeed that we discovered who the little girl and Doctor Moon were, but were left with no real clue as to the Doctor and River's relationship.

The episode managed to fill in the blanks, with a nice televisual conceit of showing Donna apparently arriving at a hospital/home, getting better, meeting a nice man, getting married, having two kids and living happily ever after ... but all in the space of about two minutes. The idea of the cutting between scenes and locations happening in the way we see on television and on film all the time, but having Donna experience it in 'real time' so to speak was inspired, and made for fascinating watching. I did wonder what younger children watching might make of this, or how their parents might explain what was happening to them if asked.

So as Donna starts to realise that all is not as well as it seems in her idyllic world via a visitation from a strange cowled figure, so the Doctor and the team of archaeologists back at the Library try and find out what's happening. Most of these scenes are enlivened by the performances of David Tennant and Alex Kingston, as the Doctor and River try to come to terms with each other. River whispering an unheard word to the Doctor to force him to realise that he can trust her was a nice touch - I hoped we would not find out what that word was ... and we didn't (it was the Doctor's real name which is a little cliched I suppose, but miles better than: 'Doctor ... I am your mother').

There's lots more running around. First Other Dave is eaten by the shadows, and the Doctor falls through a super-convenient trapdoor and ends up monkey-swinging under one of the Library building spurs. This was rather naff and I didn't really get the point aside from a chance to use some more CGI. Finally Anita gets shadowed as the Doctor races to try and get everything sorted out.

The idea that the little girl was the computer core (CAL being her initials: Charlotte Abigail Lux) and Dr Moon was a virus checker, protecting and supporting the core, was well handled if a little predictable, and the performances from Eve Newton (CAL) and Colin Salmon (Moon) were exemplary. What was less believable was that the girl would throw a hissy fit and activate the destruction of the Library in 20 minutes! But then I suppose the episode needed some artificially engineered tension to give it all something to work towards.

Donna meets with the cowled figure, and it's Miss Evangelista from the first part - assumed dead, but now a hyper-intelligent computer recreation, with a twisted face as a result of some data corruption as she was 'saved' by the computer from her Data Ghost. The resultant breakdown of Donna's world was nicely handled, and her reaction when her two children vanished was superb. This is the very best we have seen Catherine Tate so far - not playing some caricature of her comedy persona or overegging the pudding.

I liked very much the idea that the Vashta Nerada came to the Library in the books, as the books were made from the forests in which they lived. It explains why all the books in the Library had to be newly-made reprints at least (I did wonder about this last week - surely a library would generally have actual editions of the books rather than going to the expense of printing new ones, and if you were going to print new ones, then why not just keep them all digitally and only print a copy when requested by one of the library users?)

It's only right at the end that the questions start to come. When rescuing all the people who had been saved (as in literally saved, to the computer hard drive), why didn't the core have enough storage meaning that the Doctor had to try and use his brainspace as well? And they said that River's brainspace was not big enough and would kill her (which it did) so how did all the people get retrieved then? And in retrieving the people, where did their flesh and blood bodies come from? What material was used to make them? I can accept that their personalities and minds were stored on the computer, but I can't see how their bodies could be physically stored as well? Maybe I missed something.

The final scenes between the Doctor and River were awesome. Pitch perfect performances from both actors, well balanced and giving nothing away. I found myself wondering how much better '42' could have been with someone decent in the lead role rather than the woefully mis-cast Michelle Collins. Alex Kingston was totally believable as River Song, taking charge, enjoying the challenges ... a true Doctor-like figure which was, I suspect, the whole point, as in her the Doctor had found himself. Of course Lux's line that they were arguing away like an old married couple was a deliberate plant to make the fans think she therefore was his wife ... personally I suspect not. That would be too obvious.

So the story concludes, and there are some wonderful, soul achingly beautiful lines of dialogue. I adored Donna asking the Doctor whether 'all right' was a special Time Lord code for 'not all right at all', before admitting that she too was 'all right'. I loved the 'some days nobody dies at all' line, which is of course what happens here - everyone is saved, either literally, or on the computer hard drive. I even liked the concept that the Doctor that we see now, today, is not a patch on the Doctor from the future, the one from whom whole armies will run, and the one who can open his TARDIS doors by clicking his fingers. In the accompanying Confidential episode, this was explained as a take on a trait of fandom where fans always look back to the golden days and moan that '... it's not as good as it was in my day.' Here we have the show saying that it's only going to get better, which is no bad thing. However they have a lot to live up to.

With the author of this story, Steven Moffat, now announced as the new showrunner for Doctor Who, taking over from Russell T Davies for the 2010 series, I feel that the show is in safe hands. Moffat seems to have an instinctive grasp of what makes Doctor Who good, and certainly his writing for the show has given us the best episodes of its run to date. Personally I hope he can keep up the quality, and the darkness. Remembering that Doctor Who is, at its heart, NOT a science fiction show, but a horror show, plundering the depths to bring us thrills and scares in equal measure. If he can manage that, then I'll even forgive him 'The Curse of Fatal Death'!

Next week: goodness knows! Something on a space tour across a diamond planet called Midnight ... death ... horror ... screaming ...

Doctor Who: Silence in the Library

That's more like it! Steven Moffat to the rescue with another of his complex tales of horror and relationships. It's interesting is that almost every commentator is saying the same thing: that Moffat's stories are the best, and it's not hard to see why. With 'The Empty Child'/'The Doctor Dances' (WW2 horrors, gasmasked children and zombies, and, of course, 'Are you my mummy?'), 'The Girl in the Fireplace' (creepy clockwork men from a spaceship in the future stalking 18th Century France, and white horses jumping out of mirrors) and 'Blink' (statues that will come and get you if you look away or so much as blink) Moffat has made the art of great television his own, drawing on various primal fears and delivering scripts which make you think as well as adding a laugh or two alongside some well judged shocks and scares. What is strange is that although almost everyone who offers an opinion would claim that Doctor Who is at its best when it's being scary, Russell T Davies seems to believe the opposite and likes to present more lighthearted runarounds.

I suppose on the plus side, this lighter, fluffier fare shows just how brilliant the darker tales are - consider whether 'The Girl in the Fireplace' would have stood out quite so much had it been bracketed between 'Human Nature'/'The Family of Blood' and 'Blink' rather than between 'School Reunion' and 'Rise of the Cybermen', but it does seem that this preference towards comedic runarounds is at odds with what everyone, critics and viewers alike, actually want. And when your entire audience is waiting for Steven Moffat's story, and that everything before it is just some sort of prelude, well the balance can't be right can it?

Just as with his earlier tales, there was little really known in advance about 'Silence in the Library', except maybe that it featured a library ... so when we open with a little girl seeing said library in her imagination, floating about within it like Christopher Walken in a hotel lobby, we are immediately on guard ... what has this to do with anything? In fact, this feeling persisis throughout the episode as the little girl, her father and the mysterious Dr Moon discuss the girl's imaginary library, though this is where the Doctor and Donna arrive, and where the girl seems to communicate through a security camera. There are no answers forthcoming, except that Moon seems to be more deeply involved in whatever it is than initially suspected.

The structure of the opening is interesting as well ... starting pre-credits with everything from the Girl's point of view and then, post-credits, backtracking a little in time to show the Doctor and Donna's arrival. I wasn't sure this worked at first, but on re-watching, it seems to be a good shorthand to get everyone in place.

The Library, it seems, is the biggest in the universe ... it occupies an entire planet. The core hollowed out to house the index computer, and newly printed copies of every book ever in shelves and buildings on the surface. My first niggle came when the Doctor and Donna wondered why the place was deserted. According to the computer, there were just two humanoids on the planet (being the Doctor and Donna) but when the Doctor looking for any lifeforms, there were over 1,000,000,000,000 reported. This seemed to puzzle the Doctor but, I wondered, why? If you take microbes and bacteria as being life forms (and they are) then you would get the same reading on Earth - and you can't hear or see microbes and bacteria. I found this so obvious myself, that I didn't understand why the Doctor made a big thing of it.

We're introduced to the Nodes (which become important later). These are information points dotted around the Library with human faces. Shades of the Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean film Mirrormask I thought. The first one had an annoying nasal voice but I like the straight reporting of the log entry, complete with 'Argh!' This leavening with humour is important as it helps to maintain some sense of light when things get dark. They are also given a warning: stay out of the shadows ...

There is some lovely lighting in this story. Sometimes on television, all the director seems to want to do is to light their sets blanket-style. Blasting every nook and cranny with light ... but here the lighting is important as the play of light and shadow is integral to the plot, so great care has been taken and it shows. I loved the interiors, dark and light and musty and filled with menace. Very nicely done indeed.

The plot kicks up a gear when the Library is invaded by a group of space suited archaeologists. There is River Song (the leader), Strackman Lux (the financier), Proper Dave (the pilot), Other Dave and Anita (roles uncertain) and Miss Evangelista (Lux's PA). These people have come to investigate the Library and to find out why it closed 100 years earlier and where all the people there at the time had gone. Lux is set on keeping the secrets there intact (like, for example, who or what CAL is - referenced on the computer systems), his PA is nice but dim, and the others are all nicely characterised with what little screen time they each get.

It all gets a little confused now as there's so many people all of a sudden, but the Doctor has realised that they are under attack from something called Vashta Nerada, literally, 'the shadows that melt the flesh'. These are minute voracious flesh eaters which swarm and attack and target other creatures, and which can strip them to the bone in a microsecond.

Moffat has really latched onto it this time ... fear of the dark and shadows, and why we should really be afraid of these things ... and it's brilliant stuff. As the teleplay unfolds, Miss Evangelista is the first to be killed, and the aftermath of her death is poignant indeed. The idea of her data ghost persisting in the neural communicator is brilliant and horrific and very, very well handled by all involved. Her final, looping, words of 'Ice Cream' being horrifically memorable.

Next to go is Proper Dave who inherits a second shadow before he too is consumed in a microsecond, leaving behind a space-suit inhabited by his grinning skeleton, and then motivated by the Vashta Nerada to chase after everyone else.

Meanwhile the Doctor has determined that the only defence against the creatures is to run and so he whizzes Donna off to the TARDIS via a handy teleport, but the process seems to fail. 'Donna has been saved' intones the little girl ominously. Lo and behold Donna's face turns up on one of the information nodes when the Doctor tries to find her location having realised that she did not make it to the TARDIS. But this surely means she is dead?

River Song (what a daft name) is something of an enigma. She knows the Doctor well (very well) in the future but he hasn't met her yet. So who is she? Is she his wife? A future companion? Professor Bernice Summerfield - also an archaeologist - masquerading under a different name? Hopefully some answers will be forthcoming next week. The implication is that she is something like this anyway.

So we leave the episode with everyone in the Library. The lights are going out, Donna is apparently dead, and there's an ambulatory skeleton made of flesh-eating microbes in a space suit asking who turned the lights out ... what a brilliant climax!

I loved this episode. It all felt right. It was well paced, not too much running about and light on flippant humour (though Donna got on my nerves a little as she is want to do most episodes). The horror was well handled, and the ideas simply burst from the script in great waves of brilliance.

I cannot wait until next week to see how it all, hopefully, resolves. According to the 'Next Time' trailer, we have the planet cracking open like an egg, trying to save CAL (whatever that might be) and spoilers!

Doctor Who - The Unicorn and the Wasp

After last week's promising episode which turned out to be somewhat light on plot, this week we get something that is so full of plot it's positively groaning at the seams.

Much to my surprise, I really enjoyed 'The Unicorn and the Wasp'. Yes, it's lighthearted, yes it has too many characters, yes it reads more like a story from a Doctor Who Annual, yes it should probably have had two parts ... but the breadth and scope work well, and the plot unfolds neatly, with pretty much all the loose ends tied up, albeit at a tearing pace.

The TARDIS arrives at a country house in the year 1926. Professor Peach arrives and heads for the library where he discovers something in some papers and is promptly killed by a giant wasp with a lead pipe ...

This sets the scene for the tale which unfolds. Full of allusions to Agatha Christie's own writing, the titles of which litter the dialogue. This opening is from the game Cluedo (called Clue in the USA) of course, but the sheer fun of having a professor killed in a library with lead piping by a giant wasp (how *did* it hold the piping anyway?) just seems right in context.

Our suspects arrive: There's Lady Eddison, a woman with a hidden secret; Colonel Hugh Curbishly, her husband; Roger Curbishly, her son; society beauty Robina Redmond; and the Reverend Arnold Golightly. Then there's the staff: Miss Chandrakala is Lady Eddison's constant companion and maid; Davenport is a servant boy who is enjoying a secret relationship with Roger; there's Greeves the butler ... even Mrs Hart the cook might be a suspect ... and of course Agatha Christie herself, on the very day of her disappearance for 10 days in 1926. This would place the date as being 10 December 1926, however the weather is anything but! According to internet sources, the maximum temperature in Oxford in December 1926 was 6.9 degrees C - hardly the weather we saw.

I'm not going to go through the plot here for once, as it is so complex and convoluted that I would end up just retelling it with little space for comment. All of the characters have secrets, and as the story unfolds they are each revealed. I liked the way that the flashbacks were handled, with the on-screen image showing the 'truth' as the person narrated their version of events. For once, the music was excellently handled. Not intrusive or wrong, but subtle and perfectly in tune with the period and the action.

I was very puzzled as to why 'The Unicorn' was called that ... there seemed to be nothing about the thief that suggested this moniker. But this is about the only thing that didn't make sense. All the secrets meshed together and the revelations were spoilt only by Catherine Tate's Donna being just obnoxious with interjections and statements which were meant to be funny (I assume) but which just came over as crass. There was a repeat of the Doctor telling Donna not to talk in the posh voice (as the Doctor told Rose not to try speaking in a Scots accent in 'Tooth & Claw') more of the Doctor and Donna denying being partners, more Doctor and companion snogging action - and there is no way that Donna would kiss him, even to shock him ... this whole poisoning scene was just a step too far into silly, with Donna clowning and talking rubbish while the Doctor was to all intents and purposes dying in front of her. There was a level of gravitas missing here I felt, and I was reminded more of an Abrahams/Zucker film (aka Airplane or The Naked Gun) than of something which was meant to be a little scary.

The villain of the piece is revealed as ... well maybe I should leave some secrets. But it's an alien vespiform from hives in the silfrax galaxy and looks like a giant wasp. The CGI is quite impressive and the creature looks real and effective on screen, even if it's not possible to just shine sunlight through a magnifying glass to burn something - you have to focus it, and it needs to be fairly close to the lens to work.

Even the revelation that a human/vespiform relationship can result in a baby which turns into a wasp when it gets angry sort of works ... I think you really have to leave your disbelief at the door with this one. Strange and daft though it all sounds, the show rattles through at such a rate that you tend not to notice the somewhat ludicrous elements.

Amongst all the fun and games, there are a surprising number of Christie's own book titles scattered throughout. It's a shame in a way that Doctor Who Confidential gave a large number of them away, but I managed to find three which they didn't list. If I remember, when the season is ended, I'll pop them all in another post so as not to spoil the fun for anyone trying to spot them. There's a handy checklist list of titles online at http://www.davros.org/misc/agatha.html, a URL which amused me as well!

Next week we're at the biggest library ever (hopefully with no lead piping) with a spooky kid, spacemen, infected darkness and a warning to stay out of the shadows ... Steven Moffat's back ... and it's hopefully going to be terrifying.

Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter

This was an episode that I really don't know what to make of. Doctor Who can sometimes fall between two stools, and it can run the danger of being caught between a rock and a hard place as far as what it is trying to achieve and how people want or expect it to play out.

On the one hand, the episode was enjoyable and rattled along nicely. I liked what Georgia Moffett did with the part, and she was perky and prancy and fun. The monsters were cool and I even liked how they gurgled instead of speaking.

On the other hand, it had no discernable plot, Martha was wasted in it, the characters were all from central casting, and it had more than a few elements which niggled and grated.

We open with the TARDIS out of control. Now this was a great cliffhanger from last week, and I am a massive fan of this sort of lead in from one story to the next, but it has to be carried through ... and this wasn't. We do eventually learn why the TARDIS was out of control, but the explanation makes no sense ... more of this later.

So the Doctor, Donna and Martha arrive in a tunnel and Donna utters something about swallowing a hamster! I had to stop the recording and watch this a few times. Did I hear it right? She's swallowing a hamster ... and yes indeed that is what she says. So maybe Donna has been replaced by one of those reptile aliens from V, and has been snacking just before she leaves the ship ... not sure ...

Before we can worry about this too much though, the Doctor's party is set upon by some soldier types, and the Doctor's hand is shoved into a tissue sampling mcguffin machine and before you can shout 'Clone!', there's a mega-cute blonde babe emerging from a smokey doorway, dressed in leather trousers and a tight fitting vest. She smiles perkily (and 'perky' is about the only description which fits this character) and says 'Hello Dad!' to the Doctor.

Okay. So this is a story predicated on a title. It's a great title. 'The Doctor's Daughter'. Gets the imagination firing and anticipation high. So what do they do? Fumble it in the first minute and reveal that this girl is not the Doctor's daughter at all but a clone grown from his cells ... conveniently dressed and with hair and make-up all perfect. What a let down. Rather than a story about the possibilities of the Doctor having a daughter, we now know from the outset that he doesn't. Except of course that all the characters, including the Doctor himself who should know better, think that she is actually his daughter ... crazy.

The other problem, which I will discuss at this point, is that the Doctor is the last Time Lord ... well, maybe not the last, as the Master was around as well ... and perhaps others as well ... but he has spent some time telling this to everyone he meets, agonising over being alone. Now here is a machine which can make Time Lords, and the Doctor even has a spare hand in the TARDIS. He could single handedly (excuse the pun) recreate his own race! But this possibility is not even mentioned.

One of the tenets of an ongoing series is that it should have some sort of internal consistency, and when a story like this comes along, which contains elements which actively impinge upon that internal consistency, then the writers and producers cannot just ignore any potential that might exist. The Time War and its effect and impact have informed the Doctor since the series returned, and yet here he ignores a technology which could make such a difference.

Back to the plot. On this planet there are two races, humans and the dolphin-like Hath. They have been at war for generations, and are looking for 'the source' which the believe will give them supremacy in the battle. In charge of the humans is General Cobb, who speaks like he's from the Westcountry, and is an embittered man, seeking to win the war with whatever means he can.

Martha ends up trapped with the Hath, and strangely she seems to understand their gurgling although we the audience are not privvy to the translation. This is not commented on, even though in 'Fires of Pompeii' we got the TARDIS' translation function rammed down our throats. Kids have good memories and I'm sure several were questioning why we didn't have the Hath's speech translated for us.

Fixing a wounded Hath's shoulder - lucky they have a bone structure which is similar to humans - Martha befriends them and, when the Doctor uses his handy all-purpose Sonic Screwdriver to reveal the location of the Source on an electronic map, she and the Hath see it too. So they all trot off to find it.

In a puzzling and confusing series of events, everyone seems to leave at different times and yet all arrive at the same time at the end. The Doctor, Donna and Jenny (as Donna names the perky clone) are locked in a cell but escape when Jenny snogs the guard. The Hath set off immediately, while Martha and another Hath (they all look the same and are not named on screen so I have no idea which one this is - the credits reveal Hath Peck and Hath Gable as two of them - named after Hollywood stars then!) make their way over the blasted surface of the planet as it's apparently quicker ... while General Cobb decides to wait until the next day before he and his troops leave - strange sense of urgency there.

Along the way, Donna gets intrigued by numbers stamped onto the walls. Given that she's not been too interested in anything like this before, this is more of a plot convenience than anything else. Jenny meanwhile skips along like a puppy, smiling and grinning and perkily loving the running down corridors. We learn that Jenny has two hearts, and is a soldier adept at killing and doing backflips through lasers.

The Hath with Martha drowns in a pool while rescuing her (how can a dolphin drown? No idea. But we don't see this Hath again ... or maybe we do ... they all look alike!) and eventually, after much running up and down corridors, everyone seems to arrive at 'the temple' at pretty much the same time. Except it's not a temple, it's a spaceship, and it's all still working and powered up.

Now comes the infodump - robot drones from the ship built the city (so where are they now?) but the commander died and the crew split and turned on each other. Quite why this happened is not clear, but there are definite shades of the earlier Doctor Who story 'The Face of Evil' here, as well as bits of 'The Ark' with the humans and Monoids turning on each other. But ... the shocker is that the city was built over the last 7 days. The war is only 7 days old. Apparently the humans and Hath create 20 generations a day and as each has been wiped out, the truth has passed into legend.

What? This makes no sense whatsoever. 20 generations a day? That's about one an hour? So how do Cobb and co manage to make it to the end of the day? Why aren't they all wiped out and the army which arrives at the end of the story be a totally different one to that which set off? Why do they power down the machines overnight? Surely they'd be churning out clones 24 x 7? Why does Cobb wait overnight before setting off? That's something like 7 generations he's waited?

All this is inexcusable really. It doesn't make sense however you try and read it, and is sloppy writing and plotting. It's a nice idea, but if the idea doesn't work in the final teleplay, then maybe it's not the right idea.

So we get to the end and we know that Jenny is not going to make it as the Doctor told her that she could come with them (cue bright-eyed perkiness). Cobb decides to shoot the Doctor after he explains the plot - probably in exasperation as he can't make any sense of it either - but Jenny takes the bullet and dies. Why Cobb has a old fashioned revolver when everyone else has gas machine guns is anyone's guess. Cue tears and the Doctor pontificating.

Meanwhile the 'Source' is revealed as a planetary terraforming device which the Doctor activates by smashing it on the floor. Now I'm sure that's the best way to make it work properly. The planet is then converted into somewhere that is habitable (whether by humans or Hath or both is also unclear).

The soldiers all lay down their arms, moved by the Doctor's appeal to make theirs a society based on someone who never would, or perhaps they wanted to put their fingers in their ears ... and the Doctor, Donna and Martha return to the TARDIS to be on their way again ... seems that they arrived because the Doctor's spare hand was drawn to Jenny, except that the TARDIS arrived before she was created, thus bringing her into being in the first place ... a classic paradox. But actually just more rubbish plotting. An excuse to try and explain something which was poorly conceived in the first place. We actually didn't need this at all, the TARDIS could have arrived, as usual, by accident, the Doctor then setting off the chain of events.

So why doesn't the Doctor stay for Jenny's funeral? He has done for several other characters over the series' history, but not for his own daughter (even though she wasn't, but we covered that above). Of course the real reason is more plotting of convenience as perky Jenny isn't dead at all! She returns to life, full of vim, nicks a spacecraft and heads off for her own series of adventures on CBBC (or novels, magazines, audio, DVD ... take your pick).

I've watched the episode a couple of times now, and aside from generally strong performances from the cast, it has little to get your teeth into. Georgia Moffett is good as Jenny, but it's a very generic part and her tight leather trousers could equally have been filled by any rent-a-babe actress from Hollyoaks or Emmerdale. Moffett, I am convinced, got the part because she is fifth Doctor actor Peter Davison's daughter ... and that this appealed to the sense of fun of the production team and also provided far more publicity and PR than any other actress would perhaps have been able to bring. That she is also a pretty decent actress was a distinct benefit, but I would love to see the list of who else was actually auditioned for the part.

Overall then, disappointment on several levels. If only the script had been better, and the plot more cohesive then this could have been the episode which defined Tennant's Doctor, which provided dramatic interplay between characters who may or may not be related ... the end result to have been a thought provoking commentary on genetic research and cloning, providing insights into the pros and cons and ethical arguments which surround it. Instead we got a dog's dinner of a plot, lots of running around, actors struggling gainfully with two dimensional characters, and Georgia Moffett shining as Jenny, not necessarily because she was that good, but that she was the best thing on offer this week.

Next week ... Agatha Christie? A giant wasp? demons? Thunder and lightning ... and some sort of murder mystery.

Doctor Who - The Poison Sky

According to the ratings, the Sontaran two-parter has really not done as well as other episodes. The first part came in with 6.4 million viewers and was beaten by ITV's Britain's Got Talent which had 9.4 million, and the second part fared even worse with 5.9 million and was again beaten by ITV which had 8.5 million. One way of reading this sort of trend is that people aren't that excited by Doctor Who any more and would rather watch brainless people be insulted by so-called 'celebrities' ... and also that the first part of the story was not gripping enough for people to want to watch the second part ...

This broadly matches my own feelings about it. I talked last time about the sense of having seen it all before, the familiarity and the ennui which set in on watching the episode ... well the second part really failed to do much to change my mind. What it did do was to jettison the elements which were interesting in the first part (the clone plot mainly), and replace them with lots of soldiers running around, shooting guns and getting killed ... which doesn't really cut it these days.

So we're back in the fray and Wilf has collapsed in a car. I think we are really struggling when the cliff hanger revolves around someone we have met only a couple of times in the series being trapped in a car! Luckily Donna's mum has the brains and also a handy axe (something that every home in leafy Croydon owns) and she smashes the front window to get Wilf out.

Meanwhile clone Martha (C-Martha from now on) downloads UNIT's security protocols to a PDA and is able to control the launching of a nuclear strike from there ... just nod and smile and ignore the ludicrousness of this as a concept and go with it, okay?

Oh no ... now we have the almost obligatory fake news broadcasts with 'real' newsreader Kirsty Wark in a head to head battle with 'fake' US correspondent Lachele Carl as to who can sound the most ominous in close up.

The news out of the way and in Helen Raynor's Big Book of Scriptwriting it says that we now need to split everyone up, so Donna goes back to the TARDIS for no reason and is promptly transported to the Sontaran ship in space. The Doctor meanwhile is suspicous of C-Martha and wants to talk to the Sontarans, so he opens a channel to them. Donna can also see this exchange on the TARDIS screen (but misses Rose shouting the Doctor's name for a second before the Sontarans appear - a nice moment and for once fairly subtle).

Questions here ... how did the Doctor know that C-Martha would get the TARDIS transported, that Donna would watch the screen or that the TARDIS would even be able to pick up the signal? Never mind.

So the Doctor tells Donna to use the phone ... but she's mystified, not knowing who to call. So she calls her mum and has a cry at her down the line. Doesn't ask Sylvia or Wilf to contact UNIT, doesn't try ringing anyone else who might be able to help ... fairly useless really.

But we're losing track of all our characters ... and the Big Book says we need to keep flicking between them now. So back to Luke Rattigan and his followers. I was wondering why they were following him? He's an annoying brat-like clever dick. Why would anyone follow him? Rattigan unveils his real plan, to go to another planet and start the human race anew with his faithful few. Yup, he's barking. So they all leave him. This is also shades of 'Operation Golden Age' from 'The Invasion of the Dinosaurs' back in 1973, only it was better realised and integrated into the plot back then.

UNIT prepare to blast the Sontarans out of the skies using missiles fired from all around the world at the same moment. But they wouldn't all arrive at the same time, and some are on the other side of the Earth from the Sontaran ship. There's some very dodgy planning going on here.

Suddenly there are hundreds of Sontarans in the ATMOS building - I assume they did teleport there after all, so why were their little space balls flying around in the previous episode? What need would they have to do that?

Of course, when the Sontarans attack, the troops' guns don't work ... so the troops get slaughtered. Why would a warlike race with an ethos built on honour think it was good form to disarm your opponent and then to kill them - now that is cowardly.

Hang on ... we've missed something! Ah, where is the Brigadier in all this? Don't worry, the Big Book says that all references to Doctor Who's long history can be dropped in as throwaway lines, and so we learn that the Brig is 'stranded' in Peru. Well that's okay then.

Luke realises that the Sontarans have betrayed him, but, actually, we don't really care as the subplot about going to another planet was so badly nailed to the rest that even the people involved hadn't been told about it until too late. So what does Luke do? Return to his Acadamy and cry. Poor baby.

The Doctor phones Donna on a phone borrowed from one of the UNIT folk, and yet she answers it knowing it is him. How? That's some impressive caller display. The Doctor gets her to leave the safety of the TARDIS and reactivate the teleports (having assumed in another leap of deduction that the Sontarans had disabled it). Along the way, Catherine Tate forgets she is supposed to be acting and lapses into pseudo Lauren-mode with a pithy 'Shut up' to the Doctor. I wince when these lapses happen. We had a 'Why did you call me miss? Do I look like a miss?' in the Ood episode, and various other pronouncements which are just so bad. I find it hard to believe we've not had an 'Am I bovvered?' yet, but I just feel in my bones that we will get it one week.

What else is happening? Ah yes, UNIT don gasmasks and the Doctor quips 'Are you my mummy?' to hilarious applause from the continuity brigade, and then the Valiant (more applause) descends from the skies and in true Thunderbirds style, uses its engines to blow the poison gas away from the area. Then the Valiant fires on the factory.

Hang on. While we're doing continuity, in 'The Christmas Invasion' didn't UNIT use a powerful ray weapon to blow the retreating Sycorax ship to smithereens. Why not use that now against the Sontaran ship?

With new guns that work, the troops renew their assault on the Sontarans and gain ground. Interesting that the Sontaran's body armour is not bulletproof. Something of an oversight methinks.

The Doctor and C-Martha (still using her PDA to stop UNIT from launching the missiles) head to the still-deserted basement, and find the clone tank. The Doctor knew C-Martha wasn't real all along as her iris response was wrong, she had thinning hair on her left temple, and she smelt of clone! So he frees the real Martha from the machine and C-Martha collapses.

While the Doctor rewires the Teleport while on the phone to Donna like some sort of mad Teleport help line, Martha talks with C-Martha who takes an age to die. And the music is rubbish here as well - I really don't like the music in this story, it's all wrong, being intrusive and just naff for most of the time.

C-Martha reveals that the gas is clone feed and the Doctor realises that this has been the Sontarans' plan all along, to convert Earth into a clone world. But he knows how to stop it.

The Doctor rescues Donna, gets the TARDIS sent back to Earth and teleports to the Rattigan Acadamy where he uses the lab to build an atmosphere converter which Rattigan had the parts for as he was planning to do the same to the new world once he and his acolytes arrived there.

As Staal orders the ATMOS systems in the cars to full power (why weren't they on full power anyway?) the Doctor, to music which sounds like very light hearted Tim Burton, launches a flare into the sky from the atmosphere converter and sets the atmosphere on fire! The flames engulf the Earth ... but strangely not a single person is apparently harmed as the gas and atmosphere burns explosively. Then it's all over and the flames clear to reveal a perfect human atmosphere again. So who turned the ATMOS system off in all the cars? Why didn't they just continue belching out the clone feed? Finally, we get stupid 'triumphant' music as the Earth rejoices that it is saved.

So now the Doctor teleports back to the Sontaran ship with the atmosphere converter to burn it away unless the General leaves. So the air on the Sontaran ship is different from on Earth? How did Donna and Luke breath when on board?

Staal prepares to blast the Earth and kill everyone on the planet. Why he didn't do that first and avoid all the problems with Rattigan and complex plots involving ATMOS and factories and whatnot is beyond me. With a deserted planet they could have converted the atmosphere in their own time with no resistance.

Unfortunately for the Doctor, rather than offering any defence, the Sontarans launch into another victory Haka until Luke manages to swap places with the Doctor and detonate the converter himself, blowing the Sontarans and their ship to smithereens.

So peace is returned to the Earth and people apparently can now deactivate and remove the ATMOS devices from their cars - if it was that simple ...?

The Doctor, Martha and Donna return to the TARDIS, with Donna being told to go off by Wilf, who is, I think, head and shoulders the best new character this season. Cribbins manages not to play him for laughs, and has built a believable character who you can really empathise with. I wish we could ditch the annoying Sylvia and just have Wilf as Donna's link with Earth.

At the very end ... possibly the best part of the episode. Another cliffhanger. Boy I missed these and I loved this one. Very much shades of the first Doctor and how his stories ran one into the next. Martha is all set to leave but the doors to the ship slam closed and the TARDIS is off again, but apparently of its own volition. What a great ending.

And next week? Seems to be monsters, a cute blonde, backflips, snogging and ... what? She's the Doctor's daughter!

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.