Category: Reviews

“I am your sol-dier!”

There used to be a running gag in Family Guy in which Peter’s latest antics would destroy the front of his neighbour Cleveland’s house. Cleveland would be revealed, lying in his bath as it slowly slid down the now tilting floor to deposit him naked on his lawn. As this happened, Cleveland would always say, “No. No, no, no, no NO!”

I mention this because this was more or less the reaction I had during the last half of this unfortunately insubstantial episode. Don’t get me wrong, it started well. I thought the basic premise – Daleks in World War 2 pretending to be our allies – had so much potential, and for the first ten minutes it seemed to be realising that. Then they revealed themselves, teleported back to their ship, and we were watching something altogether different, and far less interesting.

That first ten minutes was very obviously indebted to the classic 1966 story Power of the Daleks, in which a group of damaged Daleks pretend to befriend the inhabitants of a human colony world in order to rebuild their resources. It even cleverly revisited the well-remembered line from that story, “I am your ser-vant.” There was a lot to like in taking this basic premise and transposing it to the Second World War – since Daleks are obviously Nazis, an interesting variety of themes could be developed. I liked the images of them painted military drab with blackout covers on their lights, trundling around the War Rooms carrying box files and offering people tea. It did seem curiously apposite – the Daleks are as much a British icon as the Blitz, and they fitted together curiously well.

The setting was well-realised, with a convincing vista of the wartorn London skyline and all the little details in Churchill’s HQ like bakelite phones and old-fashioned light switches. I loved the faux-period propaganda poster showing the Dalek as Britain’s new secret weapon.

I could have lived with the transformation into a different story entirely rather better if a little more time had been devoted to this intriguing scenario. A longer running time might have helped. The trouble was, once the Doctor arrived and started hitting them with a spanner, they blew their cover almost immediately, when it felt like the suspense of the idea was barely beginning to be established. And when they teleported back to their ship, not only was the suspense blown but we were into a different style of story. The trouble seemed to be that Mark Gatiss was trying to do two different things: a war movie and a Dalek relaunch. And he didn’t seem to know how to fit the two together properly.

I’ve honestly liked all of Mark’s previous work on the show, even his performance in the otherwise lacklustre Lazarus Experiment, but this was far from his best. The story structure was all over the place, with climaxes seeming to pop up at random just when they didn’t belong there, like the Daleks’ big reveal so early or the Earth’s salvation being followed by lots of lengthy discussion and sentiment. True to form, he shoehorned in some amusing references for people: 633 Squadron was mentioned, and I genuinely chuckled at the line “Broadsword calling Danny Boy”, best remembered as Richard Burton’s gruff catchphrase in Where Eagles Dare. The usual Quatermass reference was dutifully present as one of the WAFs was called Breen, presumably named after Quatermass and the Pit’s Colonel Breen.

But Breen was a good example of where the story fell down. She had a couple of lines early in the episode about her boyfriend being in the RAF, but we barely got to know her as a character, much less care about her. And then we were expected to be moved when she tearfully discovered that he’d been killed over the Channel. In fact, there were pretty much no developed characters on the Earth side of the action, with the exception of Bracewell and Churchill.

Winston Spencer Churchill was nicely incarnated by Ian McNeice, an actor I very much like who’s played him before on stage. The archive footage shown on Confidential demonstrated that the real man was considerably slimmer than McNeice’s barrage balloon figure, but that’s a minor quibble.  The real problem was that Gatiss seemed so much in awe of this larger than life historical figure that he had trouble writing him any distinctive dialogue. “Keep buggering on” was nice, but other than that it was a curiously flatly written role. And considering that the man famously spent most of the war drunk, it was odd not to at least see him with a glass of whisky at some point.

Bracewell, by contrast, was almost overwritten. Bill Paterson, a great actor who should have been on Who before now, did his best with the part, but it was a kind of overwrought combination of the Tin Man, Pinocchio, and most obviously Lieutenant Commander Data. When Churchill asked him, “I don’t care if you’re a machine – are you a man?”, I half expected him to respond with, “I am fully functional… programmed in multiple techniques…”

Matt Smith’s performance as the Doctor was a little over mannered here; his delivery of the lines in the laboratory confrontation with the Daleks came across as forced and rather peculiar. I like the approach he’s taking to the character, but he seems at this point to have not quite settled down in quite how stylised he wants his acting to be. Mind you, I did love the bit with the Jammie Dodger – a perfect ruse for this new Doctor, and comedically played to perfection as he confronted the new Daleks.

Ah, the new Daleks. That’s going to cause ructions in online fandom. Not even John Nathan-Turner dared to mess with the design of the series biggest icon. In one way, I salute Steven Moffat for doing something so incredibly brave; he obviously really wants to stamp his mark on the series and what better way than with such a radical change? (Though the cynic in me did envision Character Options’ Managing Director rubbing his hands with glee at the opportunity to sell a whole new range of toys).

A lot of parallels have been drawn with the new, gaudily coloured Daleks. The colours are very obviously drawn from the two Peter Cushing films, but I’ve already heard them compared to iPods, Smarties and the Power Rangers. For me, though, the inescapable similarity was with the revolting range of colours offered by British Leyland in the late 70s. As the new Daleks impressively lined up in front of the ‘Progenitor’ I kept picturing them as Austin Allegros.

 

They’re as chubby as Allegros too. While there have been minor tweaks to the Dalek design over the years, nobody’s ever felt the need to change the basic proportions of Ray Cusick’s iconic original design. I seem to recall even Russell T Davies saying that the original was so perfect there was no need to change it. I don’t mind their elevated base sections – though in another 70s parallel they uncannily remind me of platform shoes. But I frowned at their bulging mid sections, which looked very much like the middle aged spread of a habitual beer drinker, and wasn’t too sure what to make of them apparently now being hunchbacks. And what was that peculiar thing in their backs that looked like a giant scart socket?

But my reaction is that of the hardened fanboy, and we don’t make up the vast majority of the show’s audience. Another fanboy friend of mine has already told me that his children love the new Daleks. I think they’ll ultimately be accepted by the fans, but it’s going to be a hard job getting used to them. Plus, the obvious expense of the new props does lead me to the conclusion that they’re yet again going to be at the centre of the season finale, a gambit which is already tired.

Still, they were always going to be a divisive point in the episode, but it had many other flaws too. The Daleks’ plot doesn’t actually make a lot of sense – they needed the Doctor, so pretended to be Churchill’s friends because they somehow knew that Churchill had a magic phone line to the TARDIS? And the Progenitor doesn’t recognise them as ‘pure’ Daleks? If these are the last survivors of the fleet from Journey’s End, they’re cloned from Davros himself – how much purer can you get? Why does the progenitor redesign their casings? For that matter, since it’s explicitly stated that it contains DNA, why does it give them casings at all? Surely there should have just been some helpless Kaled mutants wriggling around on the floor.

The ‘Spitfires in space’ was a fun set piece, but that was the trouble with it. It was, as Mark Gatiss explicitly stated, something Steve Moffat thought was cool and then had to be shoehorned into the story somehow, which was the very mentality I used to criticise Russell for. Plus. it’s been done before by Who’s greatest rival, albeit in a slightly inverted form. The opening story to season four of Enterprise contained the memorable sequence of the titular starship being chased through the skyline of 1940s New York chased by laser-equipped Messerschmitts. And, Dalek technology or not, it seemed massively implausible that the British could equip and launch the planes in the stated ten minutes they had before the Luftwaffe entered London airspace. For that matter, how were their propellors driving them through space? There might have been air inside the ‘gravity bubbles’ but all that would do would crash the plane into the side of it. And if the propellors weren’t driving them, why have them turned on?

That’s quibbling, I know, but there’s a bit of real criticism there. Increasingly, the new series is using the ‘advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ argument to get away with, effectively, using magic to get out of tight corners. That strikes me as lazy scriptwriting, in much the same way as the 70s over reliance on K9 and the sonic screwdriver as an instant solution to any problem.

And as for talking Bracewell out of blowing himself up, what on Earth was all that about? It might have helped if the Doctor had said something about the android being able to override the detonation if it just had the motivation, but that was left very unclear. On the plus side, I liked the cutaway to Amy’s reaction when he talked about the death of his parents – very nicely played by Karen Gillan. On the negative side, it seems to be increasingly becoming a pattern that Amy has to leap in and save the day just when the Doctor fails. I hope we’re not going to see a revival of the Eccleston episodes, where the solution almost always came from Rose.

Ultimately, this was a forgettable comic romp in the style of a war movie, though the plot would have worked equally well (or badly) in a contemporary setting. The main reason I found it such a disappointment is that the premise had so much potential to be both deeper and more exciting, and it almost seemed to be ditched in favour of a big relaunch for the series most iconic villains. Against that, there was probably no real point at trying for depth. In the end, I didn’t enjoy it because I saw it a wasted opportunity, though my young boyfriend has made the point that I probably shouldn’t have expected Power of the Daleks Mark2.

Still, the story arc is looking more and more intriguing. So Amy doesn’t remember the multiple Dalek invasions of recent history? Have the mysterious cracks erased the last four series (and specials)? Torchwood and Sarah Jane are in trouble if they have…

"We all depend on the beast below.”

So after spending most of the first episode introducing the new Doctor, Steven Moffat this week gave us an episode which had more of a plot. It felt like a fairly slim plot, though, and as some have noticed was basically the same plot as Encounter at Farpoint, the dreary intro to Star Trek: TNG.

It’s a measure of quite how good last week’s episode was that I found this one somehow disappointing, but it’s not really fair to say there was anything particularly wrong with it; if anything, to consider The Beast Below as not that great is a reflection on the high expectations we’ve been given by five years of mostly very good stuff. As with the first season of the new revival, the episodes seem to be put in the order they are to firstly show the new Doctor dealing with a threat on contemporary Earth, then in space in the far future, then in Earth’s past. Consequently, this had the feel of a retread of The End of the World, but in keeping with Steve Moffat’s writing, it was much, much darker.

It’s the little details of this story that really make it. The observation of Britain reflected in Starship UK was intentionally idealised; it’s fun to imagine a 30th century where British identity boils down to a hackneyed, rundown version of the 1950s. Nice to see a sign for Magpie Electrical, and noticeable that the Starship UK logo displayed on screens was obviously based on the old BBC one. The ‘Vator’ with its London Underground logo, was very much the same kind of lift that takes you down to Covent Garden tube station, and the ‘London market’ was so obviously out of Eastenders that it even had a Queen Victoria pub!

As the Doctor very precisely pointed out early on, this was obviously a police state with a dark secret, and the real driving force of the plot was to find out what that secret was. The Smilers, clockwork enforcers for the State, were a typically memorable Moffat creation. Even in ‘smiling’ mode, confined in their fairground booths, they looked very sinister – it might actually have been even better if they hadn’t had an ‘angry’ face, and had shown their displeasure in some more literal way while still wearing that blank smile. The ability to somehow have three faces despite only appearing to have two was never remarked on, but their scariness was somehow undercut by never having any idea of what they might actually do; the shock moment when we see them get out of their booths certainly makes you go ‘Whoa!’, but then a moment’s thought reveals that they don’t appear to be armed in any way. All they do is menacingly walk forward until someone shoots them. Nice to have them apparently run by clockwork though, in a presumed nod to Moffat’s previous clockwork droids in The Girl in the Fireplace.

Appositely enough for an episode that went out in the week a general election was announced, there were some amusingly blatant political jokes contained therein. The voting booths, where every five years the citizens are told the truth then choose to forget, was obviously a sly dig at the political system, and Liz10 was a brilliantly conceived character – “I’m the bloody Queen, mate”. Hard to know what would shock the Daily Mail more – the idea that the Queen was black, or that she speaks like Captain Jack Sparrow. Sophie Okonedo, clearly knowing she had a terrific role, overplayed it to perfection. Less well used was Terrence Hardiman, who doesn’t seem to have aged since The Demon Headmaster – maybe he really is a demon. His Chief Cleric was clearly the real power in Starship UK, but didn’t really get much to say or do, which is a shame as his few brief appearances were very bit as charismatic as his evil teacher of some years ago.

This was also our first real chance to see the new Doctor and the new companion properly in action. Matt Smith’s performance seemed oddly different than last week – presumably a consequence of shooting the episodes out of order. He was no less engaging though; his fussily precise, slightly stuffy diction were very reminiscent of Patrick Troughton, and his almost mannered physicality is a clear evolution of the previous week’s. And he does righteous anger every bit as well as David Tennant. I don’t know whether this was one of the eariler episodes shot, but it very much showed his stated intent of playing the Doctor as an older man in a young body. Not that I’m complaining, it worked very well – and it’s a rather nice younger body too! And he’s still slyly evasive with Amy, as his avoidance of answering her question about him being a parent showed.

Amy was not so easy to get, though. Karen Gillan is certainly very attractive – for those who fancy girls anyway – and it was a brave decision to have her spend the entire episode in a baggy nightdress rather than the microscopic skirt she wore last week. But I’m still unsure if she matches up to Catherine Tate in the companion stakes. It’s entirely fitting that she’s the one who sees the real solution to the thorny moral problem the Doctor’s ultimately faced with, as it shows that he still needs a human perspective, and the continuing mystery about her upcoming wedding is obviously going to be a major plot point. Steve Moffat has pre-empted jokesters by saying that he doesn’t have a ‘Scottish Agenda’, but with the quips about Scotland wanting their own ship following last week’s exploration of Scottish frying, one has to wonder…

But what about the children? (As the Daily Mail might say). Children were the major plot point in this episode, from the little boy disappearing down below in the pre-credits sequence to the little girl who ultimately helped the Doctor and Amy solve the mystery. It smacked somewhat of a sentimentality that I’ve not previously seen Mr Moffat display for the space whale to have wanted to save Earth because it couldn’t bear to see children crying. Though frankly, it must have been a bloody good-natured space whale to still want to help after hundreds of years of torture. I’m pretty sure my reaction under the circumstances would have been to say “bloody sod you then” and leave the UK to rot. Amy’s faith in its good nature was, with this in mind, one heck of a gamble.

It also disappointingly relieved the Doctor of having to make a decision on the moral dilemma he was presented with. It was a good one, too; either leave millions of people to die in space or destroy the mind of a beautiful and unique creature. It’s been a trademark of the series for years , the idea that a new Doctor gets presented with a moral dilemma to solve, and it seems like cheating a little to cut the Gordian knot with a sword. Still, I note from the trailer that at some point we’re going to see him actually using a gun, so maybe he’ll start doing the dirty deeds himself this year.

The ending, with Churchill randomly able to call the Doctor on the new TARDIS phone, felt a little tacked on to give us a teaser of next weeks Dalek appearance, but was well handled for that. Ian McNeice is clearly great casting as Churchill, and having the Dalek appear as just a shadow in his office was nicely foreboding. Mind you, I’m not sure what to make of the idea that great historical leaders can simply call the Doctor for help whenever they need to. Perhaps Gordon Brown will be on the blower to him soon, to ask for help dealing with the menace of David Cameron.

So after a storming season opener, this one seemed rather low key, but there was still plenty to enjoy. Some clever design, great dialogue and performances, and some lovely CG of Starship UK in space. I notice it’s got another one of those cracks in the universe in it though; I know it’s a little early to speculate, but I wonder if it was there before the Doctor showed up?

“Hello, I’m the Doctor. And basically… Run.”

So, after months of unrevealing trails, the new era is on us. The Moffat years! The first change of showrunner since Russell T Davies brought back the show we love and turned it into a juggernaut of ratings success. With so much riding on it, it was probably the most important episode since Rose opened the new series in 2005. A new Doctor. A new companion. Even a new TARDIS. Would the viewers be able to cope with so much change? What will we do without David Tennant?!

Reactions to The Eleventh Hour seem to be universally favourable, and with good reason. As the best writer of ‘The RTD years’ and a lifelong fan, Steven Moffat has an instinctive understanding of how to make the show work, and almost all his decisions here were spot on. The episode had superb pacing, a suitably spooky monster, and excellent dialogue to introduce a very well-cast new Doctor.

Matt Smith logically carried the lion’s share of the episode, since the plot had to somewhat come second to the idea of introducing the new Doctor. And he grabbed the opportunity of a lifetime with both hands, clearly relishing the part. The first quarter or so of the episode does little more than introduce him, but with his verve and enthusiasm eating up the screen, it’s never dull. And speaking of eating, the ‘my favourite food’ sequence was genius – showing the newly regenerated Time Lord at his most engaging and childlike. With an actual child to sound off against, he exhibited a rather Tom Baker-like combination of childishness and grown up cynicism – “You’re Scottish, fry something", being an unlikely thing for a child to say.

The dialogue, as I’ve come to expect from Steven Moffat since Press Gang, sparkled on the screen (well, it wasn’t actually visible, but you know the metaphor).

“You know when grown ups tell you everything’s going to be fine, and you think they’re lying?”

“Yeah?”

(smiles) “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Matt Smith’s Doctor, as the episode progresses, is clearly reset from David Tennant’s latter ‘weight of the universe on my shoulders’ persona, as he should be. He crackles with the joie de vivre of someone simultaneously grown up and newly born, and puts a physicality into the part that seems very new; he clearly thinks hard about how his movements affect the performance. Thus, he progresses from flailing uncoordinatedly about at the outset to purposefully striding and pirouetting around as he grows more comfortable with his new form. By the end of the story, he’s plainly settled down into his new persona completely, and something about it seems, despite his outward zaniness, a little bit darker than we’re used to. There’s a hint, just a hint, that he’s not telling Amy the whole truth as to why he wants her to travel with him – that enthusiasm seems for a moment a bit darker, shifty, almost evasive. I like that. Despite his bounce, this Doctor has a core of steel.

And what of Amy Pond, new travelling companion? Moffat’s given her an instant depth that previous companions have never had, by cleverly writing the Doctor into her life in sporadic instances from her childhood. I don’t know whether she’s going to carry on the previous trend of having a near-romantic relationship with the Doctor, but she’s already obsessed with him as the ‘imaginary friend’ of her childhood. So obsessed, in fact, that she’s willing to duck out of her wedding at a moment’s notice to travel with him – she can’t have believed, given her previous experience of the Doctor, that he actually would be able to get her back in time for it.

In fact, the whole idea of her having the Doctor as a childhood imaginary friend is typically clever in a number of ways. How many old-school fans – I’m betting including Steve Moffat – spent their childhoods dreaming of the TARDIS, ready to leap off into time and space as soon as the opportunity presented? And how many children of today feel the same way?

Of course, this being a Moffat script, there were moments of humour that were aimed more squarely at adults than kids (though kids often understand a lot more of that sort of thing than we give them credit for). Amy’s occupation as a ‘kissogram’ (surely ‘strippogram’ in earlier drafts of the script) gave rise to some saucy gags along the way, notably with the ever excellent Annette Crosbie – “I thought you were a nun?” “I dabble.” Not to mention tacit acknowledgment of what all young men with laptops in their bedrooms are inevitably looking at; although I’d have sworn that, given the look of Jeff, the Doctor would have been more likely to admonish him to “get a boyfriend” rather than a girlfriend. Even Patrick Moore got in on the flirting – “Doctor, who was your lady friend?”

Prisoner Zero was a typically scary Moffat creation, its mouthful of pointy teeth looking particularly scary in the face of Peep Show’s Olivia Colman. As with previous Moffat episodes, the ordinary and mundane was given a twist to give kids the same sort of nightmares that I had during the Philip Hinchcliffe era. How many kids now look with dread at the cracks in their walls? And after his terrifying depictions of statues and shadows, too! Moffat has a gift at pitching the scary factor at just the right level, which I think bodes very well for the forthcoming series.

But it wasn’t just a new Doctor and a new companion. We also got a new TARDIS, and even a new sonic screwdriver! Steve Moffat has publicly said that anyone who pitches him an idea solely for merchandising purposes would be thrown out of his office; nonetheless, I think there’s going to be a lot of those new screwdrivers sold this year. I’ve got mine already.

As for the new TARDIS, it’s a thing of beauty. The script has openly acknowledged now that it has more rooms than just the Console Room, and what we’ve seen so far shows that very well. The console’s in a nice separate area with a glass floor, and has itself been redesigned to reflect the new Doctor’s rather wackier persona. The controls now include a pair of bath taps and an old Olympia typewriter, and the whole thing has an overall cleaner look which no longer reflects its past as a relic of the Time War. The exterior regenerated too, with a new door sign, new window frames and even a new key – a standard Yale item this time, but seemingly unnecessary as the Doctor can now open the doors with a click of his fingers. Best of all, just audible in the Console Room is what I think of as the ‘proper’ TARDIS sound effect, the one I grew up hearing in the 70s and 80s.

Unlike Rose, the series is now so established that it can more openly acknowledge having some forty seven years of history behind it, too. So we got a marvellous moment of seeing all ten previous Doctors from the point of view of giant eyeball the Atraxi, culminating in that superb moment when Matt Smith stepped through their final projection of David Tennant to declare , “Hello, I’m The Doctor. And basically… Run.” Undoubtedly the crowd pleasing moment of the script, met with rounds of applause in the pub where I was watching it.

So, an almost perfect start to a new era and a new Doctor. The ‘almost’ part, for me and a few others, is the anaemic and lacklustre new interpretation of the theme music. Murray Gold, having got it pretty much right from the outset, has never been able to resist tinkering with the arrangement, and for me has now taken that rather too far. There’s so little of the original tune overtly left in it, particularly in the end credits, that it’s very disappointing. Even accepting that, it really lacks punch compared to the previous versions of the last five years, seeming almost too light and fluffy. That’s a shame, because it’s coupled with a lovely new opening sequence which is very reminiscent of the classic 70s  ‘time tunnel’ effect, and has a great moment where the centre of the new logo turns into the TARDIS and spins off into the distance. The only thing which could make it better would be the inclusion of Matt Smith’s face, but that might be too retro for some. Still we’re obviously stuck with this version of the theme tune for this year, though for once I actually really hope Murray will rearrange it for next year.

As for the rest of the series, it looks every bit as good if not better. There’s obviously a story ‘arc’ (I still prefer the term ‘storyline’ myself, but I know that’s rather old-hat). Prisoner Zero dropped some very heavy hints about ‘the cracks in the universe’ and the Doctor’s apparently surprising ignorance of their cause; also something about how ‘silence will fall’ when ‘the Pandoracle is opened’. Oooh, interesting. And it’s all to come, in a series that promises us vampires in Venice, Daleks in World War 2, injured Cybermen and much, much more. I’m so breathless with anticipation, it’s like being a kid again, waiting for that final part of the exciting adventure you’ve been watching for weeks. I can hardly wait! David who?

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…