Category: Doctor Who Reviews

And after that long, rambling assessment, here’s the epic season finale to my reviews of Russell’s tenure in charge of Doctor Who.

Every producer has had a recognisable style. Witty dialogue laced with philosophy and pratfalls? You’re watching Graham Williams/Douglas Adams. Moody Tom lurching through a dry ice recreation of a classic horror story? You’re watching Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes. Militaristic action laced with homespun Buddhism and environmentalism? You’re watching Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks. Similarly, there are several ways to tell you’re watching a story from ‘the RTD years’. Well, apart from the vastly improved budget, acting and sets. Here are some of them:

1. Sex. The classic series only ever vaguely alluded to shagging – logically the Doctor must have done some to get a granddaughter, and companions kept leaving him because they fancied a bit – even if they’d barely met, like Leela and Andred. New Who lets it all hang out – literally, in the case of Captain Jack. But the Doctor ‘dances’ too; thanks for the euphemism, Mr Moffat. He just doesn’t do it much, so presumably those parts don’t regenerate as effectively. Though, according to The End of Time, the Doctor can disprove Queen Elizabeth I’s nickname of ‘The Virgin Queen’! Elsewhere, we’ve got Jackie Tyler lusting after anything in trousers, the Doctor snogging every companion – even Donna, who isn’t interested – and even Mickey teaming up with his parallel universe counterpart’s boyfriend! Which brings us neatly to:

2. The gay agenda. Presumably these were the script pages colour coded in pink. Actually, the much-vaunted ‘gay agenda’ mostly took the form of showing that homosexuality actually exists – thankfully we never saw Captain Jack rimming a Slitheen. In keeping with the Virgin New Adventures style of showing that, in the future, sex will be pretty much equal opportunity, Captain Jack was a perfect poster boy for omni-sexuality. Elsewhere, we got references to Shakespeare fancying the Doctor, 1920s aristocrats fancying the footmen (Unicorn and the Wasp), smutty innuendo aplenty about happy bald men (Tooth and Claw), long married lesbian couples (Gridlock). Even Steve Moffat (the straight one, remember) got in on the act with that naughty man shagging the butcher in The Doctor Dances. Come on, there isn’t really a ‘gay agenda’, fan people. RTD just acknowledged that sexuality might be as diverse as the peoples of the universe.

3. The ‘Davies ex Machina’. Yeah, cheap shot, I know. But you know it’s RTD when he’s presented the Doctor with such a formidable threat that no amount of technobabble, ingenuity or plain old nous can save the day. Only some hitherto unsuspected miraculous event, indistinguishable from magic, can help us now! What’s that you say, the TARDIS can do it if only you can open that big panel? (The Parting of the Ways) Oh, we all have to pray to the Doctor at the same time, like children clapping to resurrect Tinkerbell? (Last of the Time Lords) Wait, mixing all that crap together and spraying it around will cure everyone, even though it’s referred to as ‘intravenous’? (New Earth) Ooh, I can avoid regenerating thanks to this handy hand which will incidentally give my companion the necessary superpowers to defuse the entire situation by pressing a few conveniently placed buttons and provide my other companion with a more compatible duplicate of me she can settle down with? (Journey’s End) Well, you get the idea.

4. Gratuitous set pieces that have no logical place in the story but look really cool. Viz: the liftshaft slide in New Earth (They still have cable lifts in the year 5 billion?), the window cleaning lift peril in Partners in Crime (originally in a different story but so irresistible it had to be shoehorned in elsewhere), the inexplicable spacewalk to retrieve the escape capsule in 42 (the button to do this is on the outside of the ship?), the reset button inconveniently placed on the other side of lethal, whirling fans in The End of the World (“Whoever wrote this episode should die!” – Galaxy Quest), the TARDIS/taxi chase in The Runaway Bride… I could go on, but shouldn’t.

5. Pop culture references.  Until now, the quotiest Doctor ever was Colin Baker, with a literary aphorism on hand for every occasion. Plainly, it was his misfortune he didn’t nip into the future and read Heat magazine for some handy quips. As early as the first season, we had such instantly dating references as the Big Brother house (cancelled now, so unlikely to be around in the year 100,000), while later the Tenth Doctor had a handy sideline in quoting from EastEnders, The Lion King and Kylie Minogue. Oh, and Shane Warde’s Greatest Hits on a billboard in Fear Her (Set in 2012, remember). Methinks the team overestimated the staying power of crap talent show winners. Obviously, Buffy’s constant pop culture references were an inspiration here, but Joss Whedon had the sense to use references that had already guaranteed their staying power, rather than leaping on the bandwagon of whatever was trendy at the time. Thankfully, before things went too far, Shakespeare rushed in to save the day.

6. The sentimental bit that will make you cry. Actually, sometimes this was good. Mainly in stories written by Paul Cornell, who has the art of subtle emotional manipulation honed to a fine skill. But elsewhere it just jarred: like the bit in New Earth where Cassandra inexplicably decides she’s just going to die after all, and the Doctor gives her a ‘second chance’ to get the viewers’ tearducts flowing. The ‘sad bit’ became such a staple by The End of Time that my tearducts had become nearly immune to it – but not quite. Thanks for that, Bernard Cribbins.

7. The companion’s large, irritating circle of family and acquaintances that the Doctor just can’t get away from. Until now, companions’ friends and relatives were either unseen plot devices (Jo Grant’s string-pulling uncle, Sarah Jane Smith’s conveniently absent aunt) or there to be horribly murdered (Tegan’s Aunt Vanessa, Nyssa’s father, Victoria’s father etc). New Who gave us the opportunity to be consistently menaced by soap opera subplots about who Jackie was shagging, whether Martha’s Dad was having a midlife crisis, if Donna’s mum would ever approve of her, and so on. With hilarious consequences.

8. The Doctor is God. Actually, it’s not really fair to have a pop at RTD about this one, as the Virgin New Adventures had already established this to be the case. But his messianic resurrection in Last of the Time Lords left little doubt, after the Face of Boe had already referred to him as ‘the Lonely God’. And that bit in The Family of Blood where we didn’t even see how he trapped the family but just took it for granted kind of clinched it too. At least we get to see him shamed after abusing his godlike powers in The Waters of Mars.

9. Really, really loud music. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Murray Gold’s sweeping, almost cinematic style. Once he’d got over the urge to score it like Queer As Folk, as seen in Rose. The trouble isn’t in the music, it’s in the mix. When you can’t actually hear the dialogue over the swelling emotion of the string section, someone needs to fiddle with the sound settings. And no, it shouldn’t be the viewer.

10. The Doctor is sexy! Yes, even Christopher Eccleston. Hartnell would never stand a chance now, with the posterboy likes of David Tennant and Matt Smith. As if that wasn’t enough to freak out the old school fanboy, the Master’s quite fit now too! Especially with all the homoerotic overtones between him and the Doctor… oh no, it’s the gay agenda!

 

I’ll just finish by saying that all of the above is meant in fun. Like the Roman satirists of old, I’d like to conclude by begging for a free pardon from Steven Moffat:)

“Hooray!”

I honestly never thought I’d be in the position to assess an ‘era’ of Doctor Who again. And that, more than anything else, is reason to give Russell T Davies an enormous amount of credit.

Doctor Who has never had a ‘showrunner’ as such before; actually, such an exalted position is still relatively rare on British TV. If you want to credit anyone with starting the trend, it has to be the Americans – notably J Michael Straczynski, whose single minded determination to do Babylon 5 the way he wanted set a trend that would be followed by the likes of Joss Whedon with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Still, Doctor Who has had kinds of showrunners before. They used to be called ‘producers’. Each producer, usually working in tandem with a script editor, produced his/her own distinct vision of the show. When John Nathan-Turner took over for his unchallenged nine year reign of terror, things became a bit more complicated, and the show’s style changed several times according to who was script editing. Thus, we had incomprehensible hard science under Christopher Bidmead, masses of unbelievably gratuitous violence under Eric Saward, and a sub-Tolkien ‘story arc’ from Andrew Cartmel (years before J M Straczynski had one!).

Russell T Davies was neither producer nor script editor. His rather ill-defined job title was ‘executive producer’. But in practice, he was the one man behind getting the show back on our screens and making it the astonishing success it has become. To put it another way, he’s the one responsible for the people who used to call me a sad geek asking me respectfully what I thought of each episode as it went out. He’s the man who made the Doctor trendy again.

One of the factors so vital in his success was the fact that, as we discovered, the BBC and the country as a whole are stuffed full of fans, previously terrified to come out of the closet (or police box). So the new regime at the BBC gave RTD a budget the likes of which the series had never seen, and the creative freedom to more or less do what he liked. They wanted six episodes, he said thirteen. So they went with thirteen. He even masterminded the extremely clever marketing that trailed the show, and planned out that first season in exhaustive detail before even hiring writers. While the writers filled out the dialogue and plot complications, he even went in and ‘fine tuned’ scripts (isn’t that usually the script editor’s job?). In short, he undertook and enormous amount of work for what was, basically, a labour of love.

And the fans who were now working as writers and producers helped him do it. Phil Collinson (allegedly the basis for the character of Stuart in Queer As Folk) took on a producing job the likes of which he could never have been prepared for. Longtime fan writers such as Robert Shearman, Paul Cornell and, most significantly, Steven Moffat were brought aboard. RTD couldn’t have picked a better crew.

He made a lot of very good decisions in planning the first season, too. Ditching the old four-part 25 minute episode stories was probably the most significant, possibly vying with his determination to see the show back in its traditional Saturday early evening slot, watched – and tailored for – a family audience rather than for the hardcore fans. Not that the hardcore fans were ignored. From the start – the one with the Autons, remember – it was clear that this wasn’t a ‘reboot’, but a continuation of the old show. Just with more money. And better acting. And bigger effects.

Like most fans, I was pleased to hear that a serious actor had been cast as the Doctor. Christopher Eccleston turned out to be a far better choice than I’d imagined; though I respected him as an actor, I expected a very serious, dour, Northern performance. Northern it certainly was, but he displayed a gift for comedy and eccentricity I’d never seen before, that was perfect for the part. Here was a Doctor with all the necessary gravitas, who could still gurn like Sylvester McCoy and leap manically about like Tom Baker. Fantastic!

Like most fans, I was horrified to hear that a low-rent pop star had been cast as the Doctor’s companion. And like most fans, I was proved very, very wrong. Billie Piper turned out to be a fine actress as Rose Tyler, and a surprisingly hard act to follow.

Not that mistakes weren’t made. While Russell made a great showrunner, I had serious issues with his skill as a screenwriter – at least for this kind of thing. His Virgin New Adventure novel Damaged Goods was a clue – interesting setting, great characters, terrific, witty dialogue – and a plot that bordered on the incomprehensible and seemed to go nowhere. It’s worth remembering that even Queer As Folk. the show he was justly lauded for writing never had a proper ‘ending’ to either one of its series.

While Rose was a steady enough season opener, it’s notable that in that first season, the real standouts were the scripts by anyone but Russell – in fact, his The Long Game was probably the weakest story of the season. And while the slam bang season finale was jaw droppingly spectacular, it showcased Russell’s problem with writing himself into a corner and using a magical deus ex machina to get out of it.

He was also still learning about the publicity/fan gossip process. It would have been superb if the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration after only one season had come as a total surprise, but a combination of flubs by the production office, the BBC, and Eccleston himself ensured this was not to be. Still, it was a learning experience, and later ‘surprises’ were handled better; though the Daleks v Cybermen match up at the end of season two wasn’t entirely a surprise.

We also saw the introduction of ‘soap opera’ style relatives and friends to ‘ground the series in the real world’. In fact, for the first couple of years it rarely got away from the real world, due to Russell’s worry about unconvincing alien planets – like the ones we were all used to already. Thankfully, after a couple of years he stopped worrying about that, and started to tax the Mill’s CGI effects often beyond their ability to convince.

But, undoubtedly the most important factor was the casting of the Tenth Doctor. David Tennant’s fanboy enthusiasm and undoubted good looks took a show that was already successful and propelled it into the stratosphere. I’m not saying that a good actor can’t play the Doctor without being a fan, but Tennant’s instinct for how the character worked was incredibly useful. A combination more of Tom Baker and Peter Davison than anything else, he was initially a bit hard to take after Christopher Eccleston’s intensity – he often seemed to be revelling in his delight at playing the part he’d gone into acting to get. Thankfully, he ditched the smugness and dialled down the manicness after his first season, maturing tremendously to give nuanced performances like those witnessed in School Reunion and Human Nature. At this point, I didn’t think we could ever have a better Doctor.

After the end of his increasingly irritating ‘relationship’ with Rose, companions came and went, some good, some not so good. Noel Clarke improved immensely after his first, cartoonish stab at playing Mickey, and was pretty easy on the eye for those of us that fancy blokes. John Barrowman was so over the top he was in orbit as Captain Jack, but fair’s fair – that’s exactly what the character demanded. Freema Agyeman tried hard but made little impression as Martha, but then Catherine Tate – whose comedy show I can’t stand, incidentally – knocked our socks off as Donna Noble. With all the self-righteousness of Sarah, the mouthiness of Tegan, and none of the simpering looks at the Doctor of Rose or Martha, I’d venture to say she made the most perfect companion since the show returned.

As a showrunner, Russell was already good, but as a writer, he seemed to improve a lot. The absolute nadir of his writing was the execrable and plot hole filled New Earth, but this was immediately followed by Tooth and Claw, an excellent little episode that showed his writing to be at its best when not trying to overdo the spectacle. The nicely wacky Gridlock and taut claustrophobic Midnight went on to prove this.

One noticeable lack was Russell’s failure at creating any really memorable new aliens. It’s significant that in each series, the overarching baddies were derived from the classic show – the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Daleks, the Master, Davros and the Daleks, and finally, the Master and the Time Lords. While some of Russell’s creations were fairly memorable, none really seemed to be crying out for a return visit. No matter how much he tried to convince us that the Slitheen were great, I don’t think anyone really bought into that.

The final thing Russell got perfectly, absolutely right was the manner of his departure. As head of one of the BBC’s most successful drama series, he orchestrated the reports of his own and David Tennant’s departure with great aplomb, giving us more of a surprise than some of the show’s plotlines had! And his decision to, effectively, take the show off the air for a year, was what Sir Humphrey Appleby would have disdainfully referred to as ‘courageous’, yet has made the specials, and the show’s return, more hotly anticipated than ever.

In future, fan books will probably be written about ‘The RTD Years’ – much as they have been for every producer of the show since 1963. He’s hotly divided the fans like no producer since John Nathan-Turner. And I’ve been the first one to bang on, sometimes unfairly, about the weaknesses of his plotting. But the bottom line is this – he is almost single handedly responsible for getting Doctor Who back on the air, he got it a decent budget, a proper time slot, real actors and dragged it into relevancy in the 21st century. Sure, he wasn’t perfect, but come on – I think doing all that probably makes him the most important ‘showrunner’ since Verity Lambert. Steve Moffat has some very big, Welsh shoes to fill.

“I don’t want to go…”

And so, at last, the RTD era is over. My thoughts on his tenure as show runner will follow soon, but what of The End of Time – fitting end of an era?

One of Russell’s problems as the man in charge has been this compulsion to consistently outdo himself in every series. The overstuffed silliness of Journey’s End, which tried to include every character and situation from Russell’s run, was however going to be hard to top. After the serious, intelligent writing of Waters of Mars, though, I had high hopes that the Tenth Doctor’s swansong might be a little more sophisticated than Russell’s usual season finale tales of sound and fury. Sadly, this wasn’t to be, but while unbalanced dramatically and suffering from a somewhat incomprehensible plot, The End of Time was a fairly enjoyable romp.

On the positive side, I was utterly relieved that we didn’t have to have the Daleks again. Don’t get me wrong, I like them every bit as much as any fan, but their near-constant presence since the series returned has become something of an irritant. A Dalek story used to be a special occasion; now it’s just something that crops up at least two episodes a season, predictable as clockwork.

So the villain was to be the Master. If you were reading this blog back in the season three days, you’ll know that I love John Simm’s Master for his sheer, barking insanity – the only thing that makes the character’s motivations and overly complex scheming make sense. Simm didn’t disappoint here, taking the character to new levels of nuttiness. When he was Harold Saxon, he had to at least maintain a veneer of sanity to get to the position of Prime Minister. Shorn of high office and hanging around with the homeless, he could let it all hang out. Even the other tramps thought he was scarily mental, especially when they found that he’d eaten the cooks in that burger van inexplicably parked in the middle of a wasteland.

And as in the past, the Master must have laid the groundwork for his incredibly elaborate resurrection plan while still working on his previous global domination scheme. It’s always occurred to me that having so many complicated back up plans going on at once means that he always expects to be thwarted. Either that or he just likes to keep busy.

As Timothy Dalton’s portentous voiceover informed us of ‘the final days of Earth’, it was hard to see how the scruffily mad Master was going to achieve this, but Russell was actually quite clever at putting the pieces in place. The odd coincidences surrounding Wilf, the presence of yet another sinister businessman in Joshua Naismith (who can’t stand still without posing with his arms crossed), and finally the mysterious Immortality Gate all seemed to be good ingredients for a nice, apocalyptic finale. Only that peculiar failsafe power system that required one person to remain locked in a room smacked of ‘that’ll be useful as a contrived plot device later on’. You know, like that bit in Event Horizon where Sam Neill points out the explosives that can separate the ship in two, then just forgets about it till it’s needed for the plot.

Part one took a bit of time to nicely establish characters and set up situations. Wilf’s quest to find the Doctor was entertaining – I chuckled at ‘the silver cloak’ – and it was lovely to see June Whitfield acting up a storm. I actually hoped we’d see bit more of her, but her part amounted to little more than a showy cameo, which made it seem rather like unnecessary padding. It was nice to see Catherine Tate back as Donna, and even nicer that Russell didn’t succumb to the temptation of undoing her previous tragic fate. But, oh, Bernard Cribbins! Given a more substantial role as the Doctor’s companion this time, he managed to make every scene he was in little short of magical. That first scene with Wilf and the Doctor chatting in the cafe was one of the highlights not just of this story but of the new series as a whole, up there with Sylvester McCoy’s similar cafe scene in Remembrance of the Daleks.

Which brings us neatly to Mr Tennant himself. Whatever you may think of the story as a whole, this undoubtedly one of the finest performances from an actor who’s really grown into the part. His first series found him so smug and manic I wanted to thump him half the time, but this story showed just how much his performance as the Doctor has matured. That cafe scene, with him just holding back tears as he talked about his oncoming death with another old man was just one of many moments that, calculatedly or not, brought a lump to my throat. And his interplay with the Master was far better than their previous encounter, where they hardly had any scenes together. The scene in part two where they were talking very softly to each other about their childhoods, faces mere millimetres apart, had one of us in my house crying out, ‘oh, just kiss, for God’s sake!’.

OK, the Master’s plan was, ultimately, very very silly. But still in keeping with John Simm’s interpretation of him being nuttier than squirrel shit. Everyone on the planet being played by John Simm must have been hell to shoot, but was well done; however, it was never clear whether every version of him was aware of what every other version of him was seeing. Presumably not, as he kept having to give orders to other versions of himself. And it was fun to see ‘Barack Obama’ changing into the Master – confirming every Republican’s worst fears – though perhaps the show ought to steer clear of political comments like ‘he’s found a solution to the recession’! And just why did he continue standing at that podium throughout the crisis?

But the end of part one had the not entirely unexpected reveal that the Master wasn’t the main bad guy after all – it was (gasp!) the Time Lords! At this point I began to think that perhaps Russell should perhaps have kept the threat a bit more low key. As Timothy Dalton impressively proclaimed through a mouthful of spit that he was going to ‘bring about the end of time itself’, I wondered how exactly such a danger could be visualised. I wasn’t to wonder for long, as apparently it’s best demonstrated by showing Gallifrey pop into existence next to Earth. Impressive though that looked, I couldn’t help noticing that Gallifrey was at least four times the size of Earth, which made me wonder why visiting humans such as Leela were never crushed by its presumably heavy gravity.

The trouble with piling threat upon threat like this was that once the Time Lords actually appeared, they actually had very little time to do, in effect, not much. Oh sure, they changed the human race back to themselves, and kept muttering doomy pronouncements like HP Lovecraft’s Elder Gods, but what did they actually do? Timothy Dalton’s President (who seemed to be referred to as Rassilon at one point) played with a silly gauntlet that looked suspiciously like that one out of Torchwood for a couple of minutes, then the Master charged in and saved the day! It was a nice bit of circular logic for the Time Lords to have, effectively, created the Master by driving him nuts just to save themselves, but that smacked rather too much of fanwank – answering a question that never really needed to be asked. And ultimately, left the Doctor without much of a role in saving the day.

So what did the Doctor save? Well, that was, for me, the most interesting aspect of an all over the place story. With so many apocalyptic events looming, the Tenth Doctor finally died to save just one man. While this was nicely unexpected, it could have been telegraphed slightly less by Wilf’s selfless but silly decision to climb into the convenient Booth of Doom.

Still, as the Doctor writhed in the grasp of alien radiation, his face hidden, I very much expected that when he finally turned to camera, it would be Matt Smith we’d be looking at. But it wasn’t, and that’s where the narrative seemed to really go to pieces. I can appreciate that his extended tour of all of his friends’ fates (yet again) had the poignant feel of a terminally ill man putting all his affairs in order. But we just saw all that lot gathered together at the end of the last season, and it really undercut the pace of the narrative for the Doctor to spend the better part of fifteen minutes popping by to say hello. So Martha and Mickey got married? Whuh? And while mostly going around conveniently saving his old friends’ lives, apparently the most he could contribute to Captain Jack was to give him the opportunity of a shag, something he probably wouldn’t have had much trouble with anyway. Still, it was nice to see Russell Tovey popping up again as Midshipman Alonso Frame from Voyage of the Damned, especially in light of all those comments RTD made about wanting Tovey as the next Doctor.

All of this made us wonder whether the Doctor might actually get away without regenerating at all, as it was beginning to seem like it would never happen. But happen it finally did, albeit with less drama than if it had occurred when the Doctor appeared to be seriously injured. It’s unusual for a regeneration to happen with no one to witness it – Troughton to Pertwee, I suppose, and McCoy to McGann. Oh, and McGann to Eccleston. All right, not that unusual then. But a first in the new series. And yes, Tennant’s final line was heartbreaking, and for that moment I didn’t want him to go either. But change finally happened, in the most unnecessarily pyrotechnic regeneration ever. While I like the ‘shooting out energy’ effect of recent regenerations, surely the near total destruction of the TARDIS interior was a bit excessive? Lucky that never happened on other occasions; Ben and Polly might have been burnt to death, or the Pharos Project telescope might have fallen over.

And so, here was the new boy! I like Matt Smith, having seen him act his socks off in a number of other productions, but when I heard of his casting as the Doctor, my main misgiving was ‘he’s actually not too different from David Tennant, is he?’ And so it proved, at least initially. It’s impossible to judge a new Doctor after a couple of minutes – after all, Colin Baker looked like he might be good – but Matt’s post regenerative confusion seemed rather too similar to Tennant’s back in 2006. He even commented that he was ‘still not ginger’! But I liked the energy of his performance, and his self-mockingly aghast ‘I’m a girl?’ And I trust Steve Moffat, so I think he’ll be good.

Ultimately, The End of Time was more of a reasonably serviceable story than the celebration of an era Russell T Davies clearly wanted it to be. The trouble with his approach of making every season finale top the last meant that it really had nowhere to go, and on occasion it seemed to be trying very much too hard. And the story structure was all over the place, making it hard to maintain the level of emotional involvement that might have been nicer to wind up the Tenth Doctor’s tenure. That said, Tennant was undeniably great, as were John Simm and Bernard Cribbins, and from the online trailer, the new era looks rather good. Roll on Series 5/1/32, or whatever you want to call it. And whatever we thought of this particular story, a definite salute to Russell T Davies for bringing back the show we loved, and doing it so well that it’s now one of the most popular shows on British television. Well done, sir.

“The Laws of Time are mine. And they will obey me!”

Now that was good. I was rather disappointed with the previous two specials; The Next Doctor, once one got past the striking images of Cybermen in Victorian London, had a flimsy and predictable plot, and Planet of the Dead seemed an empty, overambitious romp with some gaping plot holes.

Waters of Mars, conversely, may be one of Russell T Davies’ best scripts ever. Shorn of his desire to play to the crowds by having Cybermen fight Daleks, or having a reunion of every companion since 2005, he turned out an economical, chilling script that worked on several different levels.

First, and most obviously, it was an effective little horror story, playing on some of Who’s staple strengths. A relentless, thoroughly alien adversary that takes over and changes your very body is straight out of Philip Hinchcliffe’s darker stories – The Ark in Space being the prime example. And the ‘base under siege’ scenario is a formula that’s worked in any number of Who stories – not to mention classic horror films like Night of the Living Dead and most of the work of John Carpenter. Indeed, there were scenes reminiscent of a number of horror films. The basic premise is not dissimilar to Carpenter’s far inferior Ghosts of Mars, and the bit when Roman was infected by a single drop of water recalled nothing so much as Brendan Gleeson’s infection with a single drop of blood in 28 Days Later. Ratcheting up the tension with his customary expertise was the reliably superb Graeme Harper, who could show John Carpenter a thing or two about direction these days.

The possessing aliens were genuinely imaginative and unnerving. The possibility of running water on the surface of Mars has a plausible scientific background, and the possessed humans, bodies shedding a horrifying amount of water, were just scary enough for a show on at 7 in the evening. Like Russell’s other horror classic Midnight, their nature and motivations were left deliberately unclear, and were more disturbing for it. All we got were disquietingly ominous hints, with the viewer’s imagination left to fill in the rest.

At the other end of the scale from ‘scary’, I was a little dubious about the inclusion of an intentionally ‘cute’ robot. Not that I have anything against cute robots per se – as a Star Wars fan that would make me something of a hypocrite. But it did seem that Russell was trying to have his cake and eat it by both including a cute robot and having the Doctor make contemptuous remarks about cute robots. Still, younger kids will probably love it, as will the merchandise manufacturers. For me, I found the robot’s operator, young Roman, far more cute.

So, on one level, Waters of Mars was very much a thrilling, family friendly slice of horror in the style of old school Who. If it had had a decent budget and more convincing effects. But what definitely wasn’t old school – and will, I suspect, be the part that excites and divides the fans – was the parallel thread exploring how the Doctor squares his increasingly omnipotent power with a sense of morality.

This is what made the episode truly dark, and made it one of the most audacious scripts Russell has written. The Doctor’s a difficult character to deconstruct, as ultimately he’s the hero of the show and necessarily its moral compass. To show him as both fallible morally and arrogant to boot is nearly unprecedented.

I say ‘nearly’, because the show has touched on the idea before. In the very first story, William Hartnell seemed prepared to bash in a caveman’s head  to help himself escape. Patrick Troughton’s deliberate misdirection of the archaeological team in Tomb of the Cybermen always struck me as a bit suspect, too. He plainly knew what was down there; if he wanted to avoid bloodshed why not just tell people? Then we saw Jon Pertwee confronting his own ingrained prejudice towards the Ice Warriors in The Curse of Peladon. And most famously, Tom Baker agonised over the decision of whether or not to commit genocide against his deadliest enemies in Genesis of the Daleks – a moral debate slightly undercut in light of the knowledge that Sylvester McCoy will later blithely blow up the Daleks’ entire planet.

But this is undoubtedly the most overt use of the idea as a central plot thread. We’ve known about ‘fixed points in history’ almost since the beginning, of course – witness the First Doctor telling Barbara “you can’t rewrite history; not one line!” in 1964’s The Aztecs. And last year we had the point underlined in The Fires of Pompeii, which also clarified that,as a Time Lord, the Doctor did have the power to do so. It’s an interesting, and consistent approach to show that there are points in our subjective future that are just as fixed.

Simply by having the ability to travel in time and alter such fixed points, the Doctor has power not far removed from that of a god. And the only check on that power – his own people – is long since gone.

It is, of course, with the best of intentions that the Doctor chooses to exercise that power – you know what they say about the road to hell and its construction methods. That point is neatly underlined as we see him grimly walking away from the base listening to its crew members die one by one. When he finally snaps and decides to act from the heart rather than the head, it’s a neat reversal of the ruthless morality often displayed by the Seventh Doctor – this is a man who wants to save individuals even at the expense of the bigger picture.

And, of course, he’s wrong. More wrong than he’s ever been before, in a dark turn that could only really be pulled off with a character so strongly established. As he piles transgression on transgression, at best he seems arrogant and hubristic; at worst he seems simply mad.

David Tennant perhaps chose to overplay the ‘close to madness’ feel of the dialogue in the scenes set at the base, but the later scene outside the TARDIS on Earth was played to perfection. The Doctor is all haughty arrogance, convinced of his moral superiority in his actions.

And as in The Runaway Bride, it takes a mere human to show him he’s wrong. Lindsay Duncan’s quiet, dignified performance in that scene with the Doctor was masterful, and the way Tennant just crumpled when he realised she had shouldered the responsibility that should have been his by ending her own life was heartbreaking.

This moral complexity and fallibility makes Waters of Mars the most interesting look at the Doctor yet, and undoubtedly one of Russell T Davies’ finest scripts. There were many other excellent aspects in an all-round excellent production, but this was the core of it for me.

“The Time Lord victorious… is wrong.”

“This is your final destination.”

OK, as usual of late a rather drunken weekend prevented me reviewing this on Sunday! Now I sit here with a stinking cold, and the muse is on me yet again.

“Is that how you spell ‘stratagem’?” asked my boyfriend as the title appeared. Yes it is, but I’m not sure it’s how you define one. The return of the Sontarans in a story Russell had defined as “military” got off to a low key start as apparently an episode of Torchwood with a lethal satnav system that can apparently take over your car and kill you. It seems churlish to quibble in a show that features a time travelling alien and a race of cloned militarists, but how exactly did it control purely mechanical bits like the gearstick and the handbrake? And the name “Atmospheric Omission System” seemed to be a misspelling of “emission”, though I suppose it did cause the “omission” of certain gasses from the exhaust. My guess is that they just wanted a snappy acronym, though.

In keeping with the story’s military flavour, it generally felt like it had strayed from an early Jon Pertwee season, with all the shallow action and gunplay that entails. It was nice to see UNIT back again properly, though the insistence that it now stands for “Unified Intelligence Taskforce” was immediately undermined by references to it having a remit from the UN. In light of recent history though, it’s just as well the connection with the UN was played down; else we might have seen a years long story in which weapons inspectors were sent to disarm the Sontarans while Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart composed strongly worded letters to them.

In light of his rather advanced age, it’s understandable that Nick Courtney wasn’t back as the Brig, though it’s a shame some advisory role couldn’t have been found for him. Rupert Holliday-Evans’ Colonel Mace seems a rather hollow replacement, just like all those interchangeable COs we saw whenever Courtney wasn’t available in the Tom Baker era. Still, he seems to be developing a good rapport with David Tennant’s Doctor, who seems unusually antagonistic towards an organisation he used to work for. Pertwee’s occasional spat with the Brig was nothing on Tennant’s cold contempt of anyone who carries a gun to keep the peace – a viewpoint that seems idealistic but rather naive for a man who happily manipulated the Daleks into blowing up their entire solar system.

The fanboys were kept happy with some nice continuity references that, as usual, were kept discreetly away from alienating the casual viewer. Best of these by far was the Doctor’s assertion that he used to work for UNIT “back in the 70s… or was it the 80s?”, nicely ripping the piss out of those fans with a pedantic obsession for noting the contradictions in dating UNIT stories.

Also in keeping with the classic Pertwee stories was the “stratagem” of keeping the bad guys hidden for the most part. Initially (if we hadn’t seen the somewhat spoilery title) we might have been looking at the creepy public school of Luke Rattigan as the villains. Reminiscent of 70s kids’ drama Codename Icarus, a public school seems a great place for a villain to hide in plain sight. Rattigan himself was a great character, a spoiled teenage genius whose decision to become a quisling seemed perfectly understandable given his attitude to the rest of humanity. It also helped that actor Ryan Sampson is rather easy on the eye! The scene with the Doctor correcting his grammar and his peevish attempt to do the same back was brilliantly played by Sampson and Tennant, with the even prettier Christian Cooke standing pointlessly around in the background as Private Jenkins. I hope he gets more to do in the next part, though the apparent requirement that most episodes should have at least one really pretty young man in them can be very distracting!

Eventually though, the true villains had to be revealed, and rather less than amazingly, it was the Sontarans. Now I have to be honest here and say I’ve never really understood why they were so popular. As militarist allegories go, both the Daleks and the Cybermen do it better, not to mention the Klingons. The Sontarans aren’t especially interesting to look at, and with the exception of their debut story The Time Warrior they’ve never really been involved in any of the show’s most interesting plots.

So it’s probably no fault of writer Helen Raynor that I was still unimpressed with them here. The rather cartoony design of their armoured spacesuits didn’t help; why are they suddenly bright blue? And while the make up was undeniably impressive, Christopher Ryan’s performance as General Staal seemed somewhat less so. Ramming the miltary allegory home with a sledgehammer, he delivered lines that put a soldierly connotation onto everything. Obvious though that was, it wouldn’t have been so bad if his voice hadn’t instantly called to mind Mike from The Young Ones. Still, in his favour, at least he isn’t a cockney Sontaran like Derek Deadman in The Invasion of Time.

The one thing the script did best concerning the Sontarans was to include their skill at cloning as part of the plot. We’ve always known that they reproduced this way, and it seems odd that this aspect of their technical skill was never really exploited in the classic series. Mind you, if all they’re doing is creating emotionless replicas of senior government and military figures I shall be very disappointed. At least, though, they’ve given us evil Martha.

Ah, Martha. Having spent most of last year failing to convince as a doctor, she now gets the chance to fail to convince as a soldier. The scenes of her barking orders at a troop of UNIT soldiers seemed rather forced, though to be fair, she played it brilliantly when she met Donna. In a nicely written scene overturning expectations formed by School Reunion, present and former companions didn’t fight. Instead they teamed up to laugh at the Doctor’s expense. Nicely done, Miss Raynor!

With first Martha then evil Martha taking up a lot of screen time, Donna seemed to have less to do this week than usual. It was, however, perfectly in keeping with her character that her office knowhow solved more mysteries than UNIT’s military might. And after her one to one with Martha, she got that cracking scene when she seemed to be leaving the Doctor, ony for him to open his hear to her before realising his mistake. Given my dislike of Catherine Tate as a comedienne, it’s telling that I’ve really warmed to her in Doctor Who; she’s a breath of fresh air in this era of companions who have to be consumed with sexual tension for the ascetic Time Lord.

And her family are less irritating than the last couple too. Granted, her mum is a paragon of the kind of middle class snobbery incarnated by Hyacinth Bucket, but her Grandad is Bernard Cribbins! It was great to see him back, and the scene where everyone realises they’ve already met was a corker, played to perfection by all concerned. Fitting then that the cliffhanger is nicely personalised by Grandad being stuck in a car filling with poisonous gas.

Less terrifying was the Sontarans prebattle stomping ritual, which gave you more the impression that they were about to embark on a game of rugby. But overall, a cliffhanger that works reasonably well, as the Earth’s atmosphere is choked with concentrated exhaust emissions. A message here, do you think? Shame UNIT didn’t bring Bessie back with them to undermine that.

The Sontaran Stratagem was generally, a fun but shallow romp. Its roots lie very much in the early Pertwee UNIT era, and it’s perfectly in keeping with the tone of the early 70s. But we’re not in the early 70s any more. Let’s hope The Poison Sky has a bit more substance to it. Somehow, I rather doubt it though.

“The circle must be broken!”

It’s a planet. It’s where the Ood come from. Yessir, this episode certainly does what it says on the tin. But under the expert direction of Graeme Harper, it did so much more. The script, by newcomer Keith Temple, was actually rather a mixed bag, with moments of profundity balanced out by somewhat clumsy messages about slavery and greed, but the sci-fi concepts explored were truly imaginative.

Last time we saw the Ood, they weren’t much more than a cipher, an impressive looking bunch of aliens without much in the way of background. But they plainly made an impression, especially to those of us dedicated to the worship of Dr John Zoidberg. An episode with the spag bol faced creations was an inevitability, but who would have expected it to be so deep? It seemed uncharacteristic the last time we saw them for the Doctor to be so uncaring about what was obviously a race of slaves, but then he had other things on his mind, what with the Devil coming back and all. Clearly there was unfinished business, and as befits an alien so … alien-looking as the Ood, we had a glimpse into a truly weird life form.

The concept of the Ood having multiple brains, one of which was some sort of centralised hive-mind, was intriguing, although perhaps a little above the heads of some of the show’s younger viewers. But it gave the script the right kind of moral outrage when we realised that one of those brains was ripped away to be replaced with the translator that was a symbol of servitude. Shame, then, that the giant “central” brain was about as convincing as something from a 1959 Ed Wood movie. In fact, visually it looked like nothing so much as the even more giant brain in naff Blake’s 7 episode Ultraworld, proof if proof be need be that hi-tech CG can look just as ropey as good old miniatures.

Donna got to display some fine moral chops again in this episode, albeit with the irritating “Why do you call me miss, do I look single?” line to remind us that we’re watching Catherine Tate. Only three episodes in, and she’s displaying the kind of self-righteous rectitude that Tegan always had. And I’m rather enjoying that. Her compassion towards the Ood was somehow more convincing than I would have expected from Martha or Rose, but then maybe it’s the shock of the new. Or the refreshing change of a companion who doesn’t spend every couple of minutes gazing wistfully at the Doctor.

With the moral focus squarely on Donna, the Doctor’s function this week was mainly to explain the plot. Which occasionally got a little lost in the melee of concepts and subtexts. Still, David Tennant had a whale of a time running around being chased by a giant claw, all the while managing to keep his improbably styled hair immaculate. And he got that marvellous continuity nod to The Sensorites, neatly explaining the Ood’s slight resemblance to that noble race who can’t tell each other apart. So Ood Sphere is twin to Sense Sphere? That makes… sense.

Nice, too, to see Tim McInnerny, who’s developed a neat line in barking bad guys since his turn as Oliver Mace in Spooks. But even he couldn’t make much more than a cipher out of the character of Mr Halpen, who wasn’t well-drawn enough to be truly believable. Doctor Who is swarming with unscrupulous businessmen out to make a profit from the suffering of others, and Halpen was less compelling than the likes of Stevens in The Green Death or Morgus in The Caves of Androzani. His vanity about his hair loss was the only real humanising aspect to him, and McInnerney played that well, but like many a fine actor he descended into ham when confronted with the blunt edges of the script. And it has to be said, his final transformation into an Ood, while it made perfect sense dramatically, seemed a little too much like magic given what had gone before.

The sledgehammer message that slavery isn’t very nice would have seemed too obvious, but the writer counterbalanced it nicely with his comparison of the Ood to contemporary sweatshop workers. And the most sinister thing about the Ood since their first appearance was the way they seemed to like being slaves. The marketing exhibition was a nice touch, with the PR woman the most easily identifiable-with character in it. Would we stand up to injustice at the price of our cushy, high-paying jobs?

The real star, though, apart from Graeme Harper’s masterly direction, was Murray Gold’s music. Perilously skirting the border with schmaltz in the same way as Danny Elfman’s score for Edward Scissorhands, Murray gave us some moments of genuine beauty, fitting for a story in which the aliens were bound up with song. The scene in which the Doctor grants Donna the ability to hear the Ood’s song was a little masterpiece, played to perfection by Tennant and Tate and made haunting by Murray’s music. The score for this should be the highlight of the series four CD when it comes out.

Overall, Planet of the Ood was more reminiscent of old Who than we’ve seen recently. It had a sledgehammer political message delivered by ciphers and a denouement hinging on a giant, unconvincing brain. And yet it also had moments of astounding beauty and profundity, and some nice foreshadowing of events. Why must the Doctor’s song end? Oh, and what has happened to the bees? Hmmm…

“Thank you, household gods.”

OK, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. Parties, baby naming ceremonies, mates getting made redundant… Is it any wonder I haven’t had time to write on here? Still, I’m back now. And the Doctor’s been busy too, not least revisiting the end of Pompeii, thereby confusing those of us that remember the last time he did that in the similarly titled Big Finish audio The Fires of Vulcan. So was The Fires of Pompeii preferable? Is Catherine Tate more or less annoying than Bonnie Langford?

Actually, to be fair, both companions were pretty well served in those scripts. And a fairly good script it was too, from witty writer James Moran, whose slyly funny screenplay for Danny Dyer horrorfest Severance I absolutely adored. True, there were one or two, welll, whopping contrivances, and the name Pyrovars was less than imaginative, but by and large this was a pretty darned good debut script for a Who writer. It took in plenty of clever references to the show’s past without alienating the casual viewer; I loved the Doctor’s oblique reference to the burning of Rome in The Romans, and finally Mr Moran addressed a question that’s burned in the mind of many a pedantic fan. Namely, with the TARDIS telepathic circuits translating for you, what happens if you actually try and speak the language in question? Yes, at last we know – you sound Welsh (Or is it Celtic?).

OK, so that gag might have been a little done to death, but it’s hard to complain when it’s being delivered by the likes of Phil Cornwell and Peter Capaldi. This episode had an astonishingly good cast, delivering lines that… well, may have seemed a little odd for a trained actor playing a classical Roman. Phil Cornwell’s Pompeiian Del-Boy was a bit of an instant shock to the system, and by the time teenage wastrel Quintus was grumbling “give me a break, Dad”, I was somewhat confused. But actually the modern colloquialisms tied in rather well with the TARDIS translation idea, the only real problem being that it made you think surely it would always translate language like this. Still, I suppose it might have shattered the image somewhat if the Time Lords had started saying things like “It’s the Master? No shit, Sherlock.”

But the quality of that cast shone through, uncomfortable dialogue or not. I’ve always thought Peter Capaldi was great, from his turn in The Crow Road through the angel Islington in Neverwhere to his monstrous Alastair Campbell-alike in The Thick of It. Here, he gave us a nicely balanced turn, from the light touch of John Cleese tribute lines about modern art to the despair of a man watching his city consumed by fire. Opposing him nicely was old hand Phil Davis, giving a darkly sinister performance as Pompeii’s resident augur, Wilfrid Brambell… sorry, Lucius. And I was rather taken with young Francois Pandolfo as the pretty young Quintus, though in truth my attempts to see up his indecently short toga somewhat distracted me from the action.

The CG, as usual, varied from the ropey (the early shot of Vesuvius) to the stunning (the final destruction of Pompeii, the Pyrovar creatures). But the real visual strength of the episode was obviously those exterior shots, filmed at Cinecittà’s sumptuous recreation of ancient Rome for the BBC/HBO series of the same name. Historical Who has rarely looked so lavish, with only the occasional story like The Masque of Mandragora, with its Portmeirion locations, looking like anything other than a BBC set. It seemed churlish to complain that I actually recognised some of the streets from having seen Lucius Vorenus walking down them in Rome.

Catherine Tate gave us her usual spirited performance as Donna; her bolshie personality nicely contrasted with her moral outrage at the Doctor’s refusal to warn the inhabitants of Pompeii of their impending doom. OK, so her reaction to being tied up by the Sisterhood of Scylla was rather too reminiscent of her comedy show, but at least she wasn’t screaming. And the climactic scene as she begged the Doctor to at least go back and save the Pompeiians they had met was staggeringly well-played, by both her and David Tennant.

Indeed, the final moral dilemma faced by the Doctor is at the heart of this episode. We’ve always wondered why he felt so free to mess about with the timeline of contemporary Earth, but couldn’t change moments of schoolboy history. Here at last, we got an explanation, as the Doctor explained about fixed points in the web of time. That seemed a little pat until we realised that Pompeii would only become a fixed point if he personally caused the deaths of 20,000 people. Tennant played the scene brilliantly, with Tate matching him as she took the decision with him. It was a scene reminiscent of Sylvester McCoy’s sometimes coldhearted calculation that some have to be sacrificed to save many.

And what of the bad guys? Phil Davis’ Lucius was an effective mouthpiece for a race of suitably apposite monsters, but the Pyrovars were in truth not that interesting an alien. We’ve seen races that thrive on heat before, and their actual plans seemed rather muddled and confusingly explained. It’s also hard to be that scared of a monster that goes to pieces when you throw cold water on it. That said, they were realised with some striking CG, and the offscreen thudding footsteps as they pursued the Doctor and Quintus were if anything even more effective.

While it was a good debut for James Moran, it has to be said that the climactic scene of Pompeii’s destruction was rather undermined by Peter Capaldi being forced to deliver some incredibly clumsy lines in which he invented the word “volcano”. And that tacked on epilogue was not only irritatingly obvious, but also made you wonder why a professional marble worker couldn’t have come up with a better bas relief of the Doctor and Donna than something that looked, quite honestly, like it had been knocked up as a third form art project.

Overall, The Fires of Pompeii was an interesting but flawed script made to seem better than it really was by a superb production. Not that I’m doing James Moran down; on the strength of Severance and this, I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next. Let’s just hope he doesn’t let his enthusiasm for Doctor Who carry him away too much, as it seemed to here.

NEXT TIME…

“Planet of the Ood” was intriguing…

McInnerny’s potential for ham…

Graeme Harper, just, wow!

“The fat just walks away!”

So we’re back, Doctor Who and me. The show was having its usual break between seasons, and I was caught in a soap opera plot involving my boyfriend having major surgery whilst I got all confused about where my affections lay, thus stymying my original intention to review all the episodes of Torchwood.

Still! It’s all dealt with now, and we can move on to the reappearance of Donna Noble, last seen as a typically gobby Catherine Tate comedy character in The Runaway Bride. Thankfully by the end of that rather lacklustre Christmas special her character had developed into something more nuanced, and able to convincingly tell the Doctor off when he effectively committed genocide. The Donna we see in Partners in Crime is a nicely evolved version of that, but the first hurdle for Russell T Davies is explaining her sudden change of mind about wanting to travel with the Doctor. Actually, this never really gets explained, but I guess people do change their minds, and Donna seems to have grown since we last saw her, having tried to travel the world and found it rather disappointing.

So she’s been trying to find the Doctor by the eminently sensible method of investigating anything weird in the assumption that he’ll eventually show up to check it out. Even so, you have to assume she was lucky here. She could just as easily have ended up bumping into Sarah Jane Smith, Captain Jack, or even Fox Mulder.

The opening half of the episode, Donna and the Doctor “comedically” just missing each other in their parallel investigations of Adipose Industries, quickly became a little forced, and reminded me of the really irritating episode of Survivors in which Greg and Jenny keep just missing each other and never actually meet again before he dies. Yes, it’s vaguely amusing, but also annoying. Plus, the script and the direction never really made clear that their investigations were actually separate, and I found myself wondering whether I’d dozed off and missed the scene where they actually met before embarking on a joint poke around the shady company.

Still, it did build up the anticipation for the scene in which they finally meet, which I have to admit was rather well done. Their little dumb show across the office of the bad guys was actually very funny, and presumably put in by Russell to exploit Catherine Tate’s gift for physical comedy. David Tennant rose rather well to the occasion too, and the whole thing was topped off nicely by Miss Foster’s frosty punchline “Are we interrupting you?”.

In keeping with the style of new Who, we also got to know Donna’s family rather better than previously. Her nagging mum was a good character, giving us the lovely “why don’t you look for a job?” kitchen montage, which reminded me rather too closely of various conversations between my boyfriend and me during my brief period of unemployment last year.

But surely the crowning glory of this new bunch of soap opera rejects (sorry, “characters”) was the casting of Bernard Cribbins as Donna’s Grandpa. Stepping neatly into the shoes vacated by the late Howard Attfield, who was to have reprised his role as Donna’s Dad, Cribbins was simply marvellous, his very voice conjuring up memories of The Wombles and The Railway Children. He was helped by being given the standard “Magically Contemplative Scene #227” automatically generated by Russell’s Sentimentatron computer. Actually, I’m being rather harsh, it was a well-written scene very well-played by Cribbins and Catherine Tate. It’s just that it’s so predictable that any Russell T Davies script will include at least one scene of this ilk.

Much like School Reunion, another episode with the job of reintroducing an old companion, the actual plot of Partners in Crime was slight to non-existent. We’ve seen shady companies with alien agendas plenty of times before, and the schemes of Adipose Industries didn’t actually seem that nefarious. It could be that I’m missing one of Russell’s subtle nuances (!), but it seemed to me that the original plan was simply to cream off some of Britain’s extra fat to generate the Adipose children, without actually killing anyone. Seems to me like everyone benefits from that one. Although Miss Foster’s assertion that Britain was “a wonderfully obese country” that she’d had to look rather hard for does make one wonder how her planetary survey somehow missed the United States of America.

With the real bad guys, the Adiposian First Family, never actually appearing, Miss Foster/Matron Kafilia (if that’s how it’s spelled) was a rather splendid main baddie. Russell has asserted that in some way she was inspired by Supernanny, a cultural reference that I have no knowledge of. But Sarah Lancashire’s marvellously unflappable, smiling cut-glass accented performance made it clear to me where her inspiration lay. Yes, the Matron was an evil, extra-terrestrial Mary Poppins! I mean let’s face it, she even flew up into the sky at the end, albeit without an umbrella and a song. The fact that she then fell gruesomely to her death was the icing on the cake for those of us who find Disney’s classic one spoonful of sugar too many, though for my money The Simpsons did it better having her sucked into a passing plane’s engines.

And what of the Adipose themselves? I still can’t make up my mind about them. On the one hand, they were infuriatingly cute, with their gap toothed smiles and little waves to the characters. I immediately found myself thinking of Ewoks, and merchandising opportunities to appeal to the kiddies. But! On the other hand, these cute little fellas were formed out of discarded human fat, which is actually rather gross when you think about it. In case we missed that point, Donna acknowledged it at the end with her shell-shocked remark, “I’m waving to fat…”

In keeping with the somewhat low key plot, Russell managed to keep the action set pieces down to a minimum, and at least they made sense within the plot. The main one, of course, was the whole “hanging on a cradle outside the building” business, which was rather well-done, and almost entirely convincing. Still, Donna’s slightly unbelievable dangle above the ground managed to be more convincing than Alan Rickman’s death plunge in Die Hard, though that was some 23 years before…

Other than that, we had the Adipose forming all over London, and then the actually rather good spaceship that came to pick them up. OK, it looked more than a little reminiscent of the Mothership from Close Encounters, but it was done very nicely. And that blaring noise it made periodically was a lovely sound effect.

But with all the concentration on Donna, it seemed like the Doctor didn’t get too much of a look in. David Tennant was his usual self, but the script hardly stretched him, confining itself to re-establishing the chemistry between him and Donna. In this, at least, it succeeded, with that marvellous final scene where she she acidly commented that she wasn’t about to “mate” with him. Thank the gods for that, I thought. Finally, an old-fashioned companion who doesn’t want to shag the Doctor. Let’s hope he doesn’t get any ideas himself.

Still, just while I was feeling happy about that, who should pop up but bloody Rose Tyler? It was rather a surprise ending to a somewhat slight season opener, but I’m guessing we haven’t seen the last of her…

“Excuse me, have you seen a blowfish driving a sports car?”

When one slayer dies, another is called. And so, with the disappearance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from our screens several years ago, television producers cast desperately about, looking for a replacement for the hip, cultish Scooby gang. Nowhere more so than in Britain, where we had a go with the fun but inconsequential Hex, until Buffy fan Russell T Davies had the bright idea of combining a lot of Joss Whedon’s style with his own obsession – and thus was born the new Doctor Who.

What, then, to make of Who spinoff Torchwood? In its first series, it was admittedly an attempt to ape the style of Buffy‘s sister (or should it be brother?) show Angel and set it in Cardiff. Hence the dark, brooding hero in a long coat who stood on top of tall buildings for no very good reason and investigated sexy mysteries. The trouble with season one of Torchwood was its determined efforts to be “adult”, which amounted to little more than how an adolescent boy might define the term – everyone was bisexual and copping off with everyone else, and the word “fuck” was shoehorned uncomfortably into dialogue where it didn’t belong as if to scream “look how grown up I am!”

Thankfully, between seasons new show runner Chris Chibnall (the man responsible for the show’s worst excesses in its first season) must have taken a long hard look at some of Joss Whedon’s work and decided that explicit sex, gore and swearing do not necessarily make a show adult. And obviously having taken note of many of the criticisms of that first season, he’s actually retooled the show into something that works far, far better, principally by giving it something that was a key ingredient in Buffy – a sense of humour.

From the very beginning of season opener Kiss Kiss Bang Bang it was obvious that we were seeing a very different show, as a curmudgeonly old woman shook her head at the asinine Torchwood-mobile and muttered “Bloody Torchwood”, thereby acknowledging everyone’s realisation that they must be the least secret secret outfit in the world. Indeed, the episode’s very title (nicked from the Japanese translation of a James Bond title) self-mockingly summed up the popular opinion of Torchwood as a whole.

But there was more to be learned from Buffy than just a sense of humour. In an amusing reverse of the scheme BBC2 introduced to show Buffy uncut by repeating it later at night, Torchwood will now have a “junior edition”, repeated at 6 o’clock to grab the younger viewers who like Doctor Who but can’t watch an “adult” show. With the episodes from season one, this would mostly have meant cutting the episodes down to ten minutes long just to get rid of the gratuitous shagging, but again, Mr Chibnall seems to have learned something. Even in its full-on adult incarnation, the new season had not a single swearword that I could spot, and the sex was confined to nothing more than flirting. Oh, and a full-on snog between John Barrowman and James Marsters.

Yes, the final ingredient nicked from Buffy was Spike himself, James Marsters, as new recurring baddie Captain John Hart. And he’s not half bad. The role is basically just Spike all over again, a sort of irresistibly charming bad boy with a roving eye, and Marsters even plays it with the same English accent he adopted way back when he hung around the canteen with Tony Head. But his cocky, dodgy charmer brings a real new life not just to the show but also to Captain Jack Harkness, who has thankfully got back to the ebullient character we knew from Doctor Who before he got stuck in Cardiff last year. In point of fact, the relationship between old flames Jack and John is reminiscent of nothing so much as the flirtatious byplay between Avon and Servalan in the glory days of Blake’s 7!

With those two hogging the limelight, the rest of the gang didn’t get much of a look in, but it was obvious even from their brief appearances that they’d been retooled a bit too. Especially Owen, who by no fault of actor Burn Gorman had in season one become a close contender for most irritating man on television (yes, worse than Justin Lee Collins). They’ve only gone and given him a sense of humour, so thankfully there are no lines about coming so hard you forget where you are. Indeed, the inter team sexual tension seems to have been stepped down a notch too, with Jack asking office boy Ianto on a date seeming oddly touching, unlike the incomprehensible attempt at innuendo involving a stopwatch shoehorned in last year.

Comfortingly, despite its post modern shine, the plot was still tosh. So Captain John’s hunting for a huge diamond that his ex let on about before he killed her. Except there was no diamond, just a revenge scheme by her to kill John. Except, if she’d never let on about this diamond in the first place, he wouldn’t have killed her, so there’d be no need for revenge and…. I can’t stand the confusion in my mind! Still, it was pulled off with so much panache that I was barely able to believe the credit I’d seen on the screen at the beginning – “By Chris Chibnall”. Wonders will never cease.

Of course, over on ITV they’ve got their own Buffy/Doctor Who contender, and since it returned in the same week as Torchwood, the TV guides wasted no time in pitting them at each other’s throats. “Torchwood vs Primeval!” screamed the Radio Times as though it were Clinton vs Obama. “Who will win?”

Hmm. Well, Primeval too has wasted no time in retooling itself since last year. When we last saw Professor Nick Cutter, he was left reeling after his butterfly-stomping activities in the Cretaceous had changed time so that his girlfriend had never existed. But Cutter’s time-fiddling, it soon transpired in the new series, had had far more results than just removing one of the show’s main characters. It gave the showrunners a chance to make the crack team look loads more professional by giving them a shiny new research centre to investigate the mysterious temporal anomalies, called, imaginatively enough, the Anomaly Research Centre. Oddly, the government as personified by Ben Miller’s marvellously slimy James Lester, still seem to have overlooked the logical idea of putting any kind of physicists on the case, instead relying on Cutter and his crack team of palaeontologists to clean up the anomalies’ messes rather than sorting out the problem itself. Of course, if they did sort out the problem there’d be no reason for a show, so I can’t see it happening any time soon.

Jurassic Park rather more astutely observed that while palaeontologists might know about prehistoric life, they would hardly be skilled enough to deal with it in the flesh. So Cutter’s gang have a token zoologist in the person of S Club 7’s Hannah Spearitt, who seems to particularly specialise in not wearing very many clothes. This season there seems to be some sort of arc involving her and the oddly pretty token nerd, played rather well by the endearing Andrew Lee Potts. Unlike Torchwood, though, this doesn’t have a late night edition, so I can’t imagine they’ll be coming so hard they forget where they are in the near future.

While they are at last examining a few of the messier aspects of time travel, the show is still at heart just about letting prehistoric monsters terrorise the Home Counties. So in episode one, our heroes leapt into action to deal with a gang of velociraptors roaming a gleaming new shopping mall. Comparisons with Dawn of the Dead were inevitable, but this show doesn’t have that kind of gravitas. What it has instead is a motorbike chase through a shopping centre to the tune of Republica’s “Ready to Go”. Reassuringly it’s just the same kind of dumb fun it was last year, and I don’t have a problem with that at all. It’s not trying to be anything more significant. It’s when a show like Doctor Who gets dumb that I get annoyed, often thanks to Chris Chibnall.

So, Torchwood vs Primeval. Who will win? Well, given that Torchwood runs for thirteen episodes and Primeval gets six, I think Jack and his gang will be the last Buffy clones standing. And on the evidence of the trailer at the end of their first episode, it looks like it could be quite a ride.

“Let the Christmas inferno commence!”

There are some very gay things in the world. The Pet Shop Boys cover of Village People’s Go West. Rufus Wainwright recreating Judy Garland’s classic Carnegie Hall concert. Anything at all involving John Barrowman. And then there’s Doctor Who. A show whose most rabid fanbase seems to consist primarily of gay men (I should know, I’m one of them) currently being run by the bloke who wrote Queer as Folk and featuring numerous appearances by the aforementioned John Barrowman. Straight fans often bemoan the show’s supposed “gay agenda” (which seems to consist of occasional lines suggesting that being gay might, actually, be OK).

The challenge, then, facing Russell T Davies and his team must have been – how do we make this show even more gay? One can imagine much brainstorming at BBC Wales until someone came up with the obvious answer – put Kylie Minogue in it! After all, short of getting David Tennant to dress in drag and fellating a Dalek, she’s about as gay-friendly as it gets.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached this year’s Christmas special. Was this just a gimmicky piece of stunt casting? Kylie’s guest appearance has been trumpeted so much for so long, you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t a drama after all. Perhaps she was going to spend the whole thing performing her greatest hits. She was so ubiquitous that even the normally objective (and very pretty) Ben Cook of Doctor Who Magazine had a photo of her standing next to him as his Facebook avatar.

But I needn’t have worried. Lest we forget, before she became a loveable diva, Kylie Minogue was actually an actress. Well, insofar as being in Neighbours constitutes acting. Voyage of the Damned gave her a chance to demonstrate this with more aplomb than the Erinsbrough suburbs ever did, in another surprisingly good script from Russell T himself.

Russell seems to be on a genuine learning curve as a Who writer. Already a skilled dramatist, his previous efforts for the programme have shown an occasional lack of logic obviously borne of him being such a fan of the show. I’ve had genuine, and I believe justified criticisms of his scripts in varous ways since the series returned. But lo and behold, every time he turns out another script, it’s as if he’s been listening to me! (Be still, my giant ego). It’s just that he seems to avoid every pitfall I’ve previously had a go about and produce a script that’s a real improvement.

Take Voyage of the Damned. I was distinctly unimpressed by last year’s Christmas effort The Runaway Bride for various reasons – the plot lacked logic, the robot Santas were in it for no good reason, and most importantly, the story lacked a sense of jeopardy as no-one appeared to be in real danger and no-one died. This year, Russell redressed the balance with a script that had a higher body count than Rambo. And it was more than just a retread of last year’s show, being almost entirely not set on contemporary Earth.

Not that its roots weren’t showing. The most obvious source of inspiration was 1970’s disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure, about a luxury liner which comes to grief – at Christmas. The ensemble cast of survivors were true disaster movie archetypes as well, right down to the snivelling Richard Chamberlain-style weasel Rickston Slade and Shelley Winters-alike Foon Van Hoff. I was only surprised that there wasn’t a small child and a dog. Yet even here, Russell confounded expectations. In a classic disaster movie, it would be a given that Slade would die, and yet he was one of the few survivors at the end.

Russell’s other occasional weakness – a fondness for action/emotion set pieces jammed in with little regard for logic – was also not in evidence. There were some great set pieces, to be sure – the sequence of our heroes trying to make it over that rickety bridge while being besieged by the Host was a humdinger. But each of them arose naturally from the plot, rather than seeming shoehorned in because they looked good but had no place in the drama.

Of course, the other obvious “homage” here was classic Who story The Robots of Death. From the moment the Doctor first encountered the placidly polite Host and it started to twitch, it was obvious that they’d be wandering around the ship slaughtering everyone soon enough. And so it was, their “Information: you are all going to die” catchphrase not too dissimilar to SV7’s calm declaration “You have to die. All of you. That is the order.” The moment when Midshipman Frame slammed the door on them only to trap and detach one of their hands was also a straight nick from the scene where Pamela Salem is menaced in her Sandminer cabin by one of the robots.

But Doctor Who has always nicked from other sources, often with excellent results. After all, The Brain of Morbius is simply Frankenstein, while Pyramids of Mars is nothing more than an old Peter Cushing Mummy film. And the Host were very effective, their angelic design an excellent counterpart to their murderous intentions. It’s got to be the first time a halo’s been used as a murder weapon.

David Tennant was on fine form, expressing the Doctor’s loneliness with none of the irritating smugness he displayed in his debut season. The relationship he built up with Astrid was genuinely touching, and paid off nicely with his desperation to save her after her noble sacrifice (though, to be fair, she could easily have jumped off that slow-moving forklift before it plunged into the abyss).

And it was scenes like that which allowed Kylie to really show off her acting chops. From her first appearance, she was charming and likeable as a girl who still saw the wonder in the universe. The scene of her expressing delight at the “alien” shops and streets of Cardiff… er, London was enchanting, and her final scene as a half-there teleport phantom was heartbreaking. It’s a testament to Russell’s skill as a dramatist that he didn’t go for the easy happy ending of letting the Doctor save her, but at least she didn’t, technically, “die”. As well as being a touching scene, it served as a welcome reminder that the Doctor’s just as fallible as everyone else, and sometimes he can’t save everyone.

With these two at the centre of attention, it would have been easy for Russell to reduce the rest of the characters to two-dimensional disaster movie cyphers. But all the characters were nicely rounded, and played to perfection by a splendid guest cast. It’s always a delight to see old hand Geoffrey Palmer popping up, and here as Captain Hardaker he used his jowly, hangdog face to real advantage. He really made you feel for the guy even though he was about to be responsible for a mass murder and you then saw him shoot that nice young Midshipman. It actually seemed rather a shame that he died so early on, as I’d like to have seen more of his character’s haunted, guilty personality.

There were plenty of characters blessed with that earthy humour Russell likes too. The most obvious were the Van Hoffs, a likeable pair of proles who’d rather unfortunately won passage on the ship in a competition. The scene of the Doctor immediately siding with them over the snobs who were the rest of the passengers was great, and the characters went on to display real depth. It was more believable than in your averager disaster movie that Foon really went to pieces after her husband was killed, but she still pulled it together enough to make the heroic self-sacrifice demanded of likeable characters in disaster movies. The shot of her plunging to her death in slo-mo was genuinely moving, though it has to be said that the almost identical shot of Astrid plunging into the abyss might have had more impact if we hadn’t already seen this one.

Clive Swift, another old hand, was on fine form as Mr Copper, the loveable old codger of the piece. He got some of Russell’s best lines as the “academic” who didn’t quite get what 21st century Earth was really like. The coda, with him happily running off to spend all his money, was sweetly joyful, though I had to wonder why the Doctor didn’t warn him off marrying that awful Hyacinth woman…

And then there was Bannakafalatta. At first glance just an action figure opportunity made flesh, Jimmy Vee made him a loveable but believable figure. It was nice to see him getting a real character to play for once, after the last few years of incarnating any alien that happens to be a bit on the short side. And it was his secret cyborg status that cleverly held the key to the whole mystery, neatly setting up the concept that here was a society that treated cyborgs as underdogs who couldn’t even get married. The gay agenda? Possibly. I’m sure certain fans will take it that way…

Cyborgs brings us neatly to the villlain of the piece, Max Capricorn. the revelation of him as the force behind events didn’t entirely come as a surprise, since I was doubtful they’d hire an actor of the stature of George Costigan and confine him to a few shipboard commercials. Costigan was as good as ever in a role, which, let’s face it, was the standard villainous businessman. His scheme to ruin his betrayers on the board was a little reminiscent of Morgus’ business manipulations in The Caves of Androzani, but was nonetheless a clever motivation. I had to wonder whether some of the younger viewers would grasp the idea of share price manipulations, mind.

So what else was there? Well, it was a joy to see Bernard Cribbins, who by the looks of the trailer will be back next year. It was also a nice touch to have London deserted after the repeated alien incursions of the last two Christmasses. The set piece of the Titanic plunging down towards Buckingham Palace was genuinely heart in mouth – you wondered whether Mike Tucker and his crew were going to blow up another London landmark. Though I’m not so sure about the from-behind appearance of Her Majesty, in a pink dressing gown and curlers! And her cry of “Thank you, Doctor!” was pretty toe-curling, too. I guess she just knows that whenever anything like that happens, the Doctor’s bound to be involved somewhere.

On a final note, I’m likely to be in the minority of saying that I rather liked Murray Gold’s beefed up new arrangement of the theme tune. But I definitely didn’t like the new, hyper fast end credits, which sped by so quickly I could barely read any of them. Apparently this is due to a new BBC rule that credits can only be thirty seconds long, lest the viewer’s tiny mind and attention span be distracted by thoughts of turning to the other channel. Whatever, it made the end of the show seem unpleasantly American.

So another Christmas gone, and a huge improvement from Russell and crew this year. Kudos to the bloke for apparently learning from previous pitfalls and producing a fun and thrilling piece of family entertainment. And how gay was it, really? Actually not much. John Barrowman was nowhere to be seen….