mavic_chen

This is the second of last year's Who stories to make the Hugo shortlist (the other being Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead). I wasn't overwhelmed with it myself on first watching, but liked it a bit more this time. (I still think Midnight was the best story of the season.)

The good bits first. Catherine Tate is fantastic in this episode, which is all about the potential of Donna Noble, an ordinary person, to change the world. Donna is one of the best Who companions ever, as white_hart has explained much more eloquently than I can. This is the third Doctor-lite episode of New Who, and the first to use the format to showcase the companion's story. It is impossible to imagine Rose or Martha bearing the same weight of narrative. (Jack and Sarah Jane get their own spinoff series, but both of course are older characters.)

The second good thing about the story is the portrayal of post-apocalypse Britain. I have written before about politics in parallel universes. Here we slip much more to the Inferno model, as mass destruction leads the government to abolish civil liberties and set up concentration camps for the non-English. The great thing about this story is that it does so much to convey what this soty is like with surprisingly little material. Bernard Cribbins' silent look of tearful horror as the Italians are taken away says more than paragraphs of exposition could do.

I am neutral about the episode's use of the point of departure concept. New Who has tackled this several times: Father's Day in 2004, and not one but two Sarah Jane Adventures. So I am not wowed by the audacity of the concept; it is almost routine. Also I can't help but notice that Pete Tyler, parallel Donna and Sarah Jane's parents all choose to die in car accidents - Pete and Donna both throw themselves under the wheels of a passing vehicle as Rose watches. The best treatment of the point of departure I have seen (and that's not saying much) is in the movie Sliding Doors, which cuts between the two realities. Doctor Who has yet to do a really interesting spin on it; Time Beetles are not the answer.

Not to be too negative on this point: what we are being asked to imagine is the Doctor's world without the Doctor, where the Thames was drained, the Titanic crashed on Buckingham Palace, millions of people disintegrated into fat and the Sontarans almost poisoned the rest (though on the flip side, presumably Professor Yana will live out his life as a human and die at a ripe old age without ever realising his origin, so Harold Saxon never appeared on the political scene). Big Finish did an excellent similar story where the Brigadier has retired to Hong Kong after failing to deal with the series of alien invasions in the 1970s, and is confronted years later both by the new Doctor (played by David Warner) and by the new head of UNIT (played by one David Tennant).

My big problem with this story can be summed up in one word: Rose. It is not just Billie Piper, whose performance and particularly diction in this episode are respectively monotonic and peculiar. Did she have a cold? Was she recovering from dental treatment? I neither know not particularly care.

But the original point of Rose is that she is an ordinary girl caught up in extraordinary things, and the Rose of Turn Left has lost that. I am not one of the legion of Rose-haters among Who fans: I thought that she injected the new love-interest theme into the old companion routine very well, and made us care about her and her fate. Now she returns as a grim dimension-hopping superwoman who for some reason cannot say her own name. She never smiles (and Billie Piper has a very disarming smile). Think of the Rose / Sarah Jane and Donna / Martha encounters, and then consider the total lack of chemistry between the two leads in this episode. I don't blame Piper; she has done her best with confusing and shallow material. But I find the Rose parts of Turn Left almost unwatchable.

I'll also note, as others have done, that the opening sequence has the most offensive Chinese stereotypes in Doctor Who since Talons of Weng-Chiang.

The guts of my objection are to the use of Rose as a character; for viewers who know nothing about her, I imagine this would work rather well as a Who treatment of a familiar sfnal theme, with a strong performance from the central character and some interesting thoughts about alternative history. Your mileage may vary.

I wrote previously that I couldn't understand why this story didn't get a Hugo nomination this year; I am still baffled.

I think it's the best episode of the season, and certainly the best ever written by Russell T Davies. The sources are good sources - The Edge of Destruction, also written at the last minute by Old Who's first script editor, putting the Tardis crew in a single set for 50 minutes; also I think Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, where a group of tourists is trapped on the Moon, though without the sinister alien presence. (The eye of faith may detect inspiration also from Delta and the Bannermen, or The Leisure Hive, but personally I don't.) Davies takes this and puts his own particular interpretation onto the situation, and for once his writing remains tight up to the last moment.

He's helped by a couple of stellar performances - Lesley Sharp as Sky and the unnamed baddie, and Rakie Ayola as the hostess in particular; also from the past we have David Troughton as the Professor, and from the future Colin Morgan as Jethro. The scenes with Lesley Sharp first echoing, then synching with, then anticipating the other cast members' lines are just incredible. (The only irritating moment is Rose's brief appearance, which is difficult to reconcile with what we later find out she's been doing - the similar moment in The Poison Sky is at least set in the present day.)

Quite apart from the creepiness of the basic concept, it's a story where the Doctor's normal cockiness and air of mystery, which normally seem to get authority figures magically co-operating with him, work against him; and his fellow passengers end up baying for his blood. It's notable that they are not, particularly, authority figures; and the one who is nominally in charge, the Hostess, ends up being the one who saves them all. And the specific point where the Doctor's credibility breaks down completely is when he tries to urge compassion, which rather more often works to shame other characters into cooperating. It's a great subversion and stretching of the show's usual assumptions.

After two stories where we've had the Doctor's own intimate relations (his daughter and River Song) on screen, here we have the Doctor observing and interacting with several other family dynamics - Biff, Val and Jethro; the Professor and Dee Dee; Sky and her absent ex; perhaps also the Hostess and the crew. (Indeed, it might have been better if this had been shown between The Doctor's Daughter and Silence in the Library, as was originally planned.)

Midnight was Russell T Davies' nineteenth story for Who, which puts him ahead of the 18 stories written entirely or partly by Robert Holmes. Andy Murray suggests (in his piece in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space) that we can see the frustrated attempts of the tall, fair-haired Chancellor Goth to hunt down and destroy the Doctor as the tall, fair-haired Holmes working through his own frustration with the central character of the show. Note that in this story the Doctor loses his authority over the other passengers and even his voice, and that he is actually killed off at the beginning of the next story; am I going too far in detecting a subconscious desire to get rid of him on the part of the executive producer and chief writer? (Not that there is the same physical resemblance between RTD and the villain of either story.)

Two further pieces of trivia from the BBC via Wikipedia: it is the first story since Genesis of the Daleks where the Tardis does not appear, and the only Who story where the villain is never named.

Unlike a lot of people I wasn't overwhelmed by Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. On re-watching, I enjoyed it more, but still feel it is weaker than Moffat's previous New Who stories. Perhaps I am being unfair, and I guess that expecting another Blink is not reasonable. I must admit that as sf, its concept works very well - the intersecting levels of reality, the time-traveller who meets a lover from his own future; and as drama it is pretty effective, with Alex Kingston and Catherine Tate particularly strong, and the utterly horrible creepiness of the ghosting data chips ("Who turned out the lights?", etc).

My two problems with it are both to do with River Song's story. To get the easier one out of the way, her ending is not a particularly happy one; she is still dead, and gets to spend an ersatz afterlife in the computer's memory with her crew rather than with the man she loves. (If you work or have ever worked in a team with other people, just consider for a moment whether you would prefer to spend eternity with them or with your lover.) The script didn't quite do justice to the tragedy of River's story for me.

My other problem is that while the story works as sf and (apart from the above niggle) as drama I'm not so sure it works as Doctor Who. Back in 2006 I enjoyed The Girl in the Fireplace, but rated it below School Reunion, because one of my sources of enjoyment in Who is its dealing with its own mythology, and another is the relationship that we as viewers build up with the regular characters, and TGitF did not deliver much on the second and nothing on the first of these. Now, where at least TGitF had a decent start and closure to the Doctor's love story, with Renette's death ending their relationship, SitL/FotD cheats us because we are asked to care very deeply about the Doctor/River dynamic, without getting the payoff of it becoming a regular plot theme. (No televised return to explore River's past relationship with the Doctor seems likely now, and anyway it would hardly get satisfactory treatment in the time we have left.) So while this episode may well get strong support from Hugo voters who are not regular Who watchers, I was and am surprised by the favour it has found among fans.

 In my early teens I read Agatha Christie almost as obsessively as I watched Doctor Who, so this episode was total nostalgic crack. I was noting every book title as it came up. I have even read Death in the Clouds, the book referenced at the end, which features a murder on an early commercial flight from Paris to London, after which the inquest jury wants to indict Poirot for the murder because he is foreign.

This is so much better than Black Orchid, the only other televised story I can think of set in this era. It was really fun to watch - very silly, but played with total conviction; all the guest stars were good, so it is invidious to single any of them out. Doing a story like this is, as I was saying of some of the Eurovision song contest entries, a high risk strategy, but I think it worked.

---

I enjoyed The Unicorn and the Wasp even more the second time round, and they were entirely right to drop the framing device of Old Agatha reminiscing. I'm glad I've seen it from the DVD extras but even gladder that it wasn't there to clutter up the broadcast version.

 I suspect that this is one of those "Marmite" episodes, in that you either love it or hate it. (For the record, I hate Marmite.) Georgia Moffett, who I had previously heard helping her father battle Ice Warriors in an early Big Finish play, is very cute and also very good. I loved her "Hello, boys!" at the end. Yeah, of course bringing her back to life was a bit of a cop-out, but we got to see the Tenth Doctor's take on how the First Doctor had moved on from having his own family to other commitments, and then suddenly had the chance for it to start again, and then (as far as he knows) it didn't.

And Donna got to be brainy. I love the brainy companions. (Am also trying unsuccessfully to think of another Who story which gives the Doctor three strong female sidekicks.)

The background to the story, as I spotted at the time (and Lance Parkin also noted, in a post which seems to have since been deleted) owes quite a lot to The Ark - the humans and their conflict with their non-human travelling companions, the room with the jungle at the end; another reference to the Hartnell era, and this time one that RTD just might credibly remember from the original broadcast (he would have been nearly three). The Hath are better than the Monoids though.

Here's a funny thing: if you get appoonted as UNIT's medical officer, you may find that in your first televised story in that role you have to go undercover to infiltrate the bad guys' headquarters; and then when the Doctor returns to Earth to meet you for the first time after you stopped travelling with him, you get replaced by an evil doppelganger. Apart from that, of course, Harry Sullivan and Martha Jones are very different, but I was amused by the similarities.

The Sontarans' plan is as nonsensical as most alien invasion plans (and setting fire to the poison gas? Really?) but again I enjoyed the ride. The resolution of the UNIT dating controversy was brilliant; so was the Martha/Donna encounter going so very differently from the Sarah Jane/Rose encounter two years ago; so was the Doctor thinking that Donna was leaving him rather than popping back to her mum's for a cuppa. And there were pleasing refs to both the Brigadier and the best Ninth Doctor story - "Are you my mummy?"

Having recently re-watched The Two Doctors, I felt that the Sontarans came across much better this time - as an actual army, complete with war chants. We have not often seen big groups of Sontarans before. And good performances from Ryan Sampson in particular as Luke Rattigan, but also Christian Cooke as Ross Jenkins and Rupert Holliday Evans as Colonel Mace. 

Russell T Davies was 15 months old when the first episode of The Sensorites was broadcast in June 1964, but it obviously made a deep impression on him - we had two explicit references to Susan's description of her and the Doctor's home planet last season, and now we have it confirmed that the Ood are close neighbours to the Sense-Sphere. I think The Sensorites is positively the worst First Doctor story, so to me it is a slightly weird choice, but I'm aware that this is not a universal view.

wwhyte pointed out at the time that evolving to the stage where you have to carry part of your own brain around in your hand doesn't seem terribly viable. But that apart, I thought that the music was great, the parable about slavery and society decent enough, and Tim McInerny's performance (and also Ayesha Dharker's) really excellent.

I must have been one of the few kids of my generation who voluntarily did Latin O-level. There were two of us in the class; our teacher was from Achill Island, and had studied classics in Galway through the medium of Irish (which she also taught at our school). However we used the Ecce Romani books, not the Cambridge Latin Course, so missed out on that particular set of in-jokes.

But I loved the Doctor's shifty acknowledgement of responsibility for the Great Fire of Rome, and my Big Finish sympathies were satisfied with the fact that there was no explicit contradiction with what Seven and Mel were up to on the other side of town. I also liked the new take on the Tardis translation effect - "Look you!" - and the way in which the Doctor accepts responsibility for causing the eruption. There was that one moment reminiscent of the "You lucky bastard!" scene from Life of Brian, and I am aware that volcanoes on the whole do not contain such conveniently located corridors, but I was willing to take the ride. 

Well, I enjoyed it. There's no harm in being funny; I enjoyed the Doctor and Donna constantly missing each other and then their silent dialogue. But I was especially impressed with Donna's character's perception that the Doctor has changed - one of Tom Baker's insights into his time on the programme was that his Doctor couldn't really change or develop, and RTD has modified that a bit. I didn't see the plot (as some have) as an attack on fat people. I did like the appearance of That Blonde Girl at the end. 

Yeah, the start, comprehensively prepared for this... Kylie, check; angels, check; small red blobby alien, check. Of course the Titanic sailed in April, so the Christmas theme is already a giveaway.

But what a shock! New theme tune arrangement! Love it!

And here's Geoffrey Palmer, on Doctor Who for the third time. He is hiding something. Ah, the ship, from the planet.

Doctor talks to the alien which reminds me of that creature from the Bernice Summerfield audio.

The robots are malfunctioning. They have an interesting resemblance to my Christmas present last year, the Robots of Death.

Astrid finds that spaceflight isn't what she wanted. DT and KM work well together.

Meteor shower, not quite astronomically accurate...

Psychic paper gets the Doctor shoreside. Mr Cooper (Clive Swift returns to DW also) and his off-beat take on Earth customs. Deserted streetn but Earth is exotic for Astrid.

It's Bernard Cribbins! Christmas in London is not safe in the Whoniverse!

Ah. That might explain why the meteoroids are not standard issue. What is the captain up to? The Doctor's onto him, but the Captain has superior man- and fire-power. And the angel robot tells them they are all going to die!

Wham!

Angels queueing up... Why?

Steward sucked into space! And lots of other people have been too... And the Tardis! Landing on Earth, so we know where this is going to finish.

Oooh, nasty angel!

Aha, so the ship crashing will wipe out life on earth. Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without the end of the world!

"I am a Time Lord, I am from Gallifrey..." Great stuff!

Yes, the Doctor agrees with my statement about his Christmases.

A nice bit of character-building from the Van Hoffs. (Rather more cheerful than the Eastenders plot.)

Bk is a cyborg - how will this fit with the robots?

Kitchen staff about to get wiped out... Yep.

Killer robots... Hand stuck in door - a familiar trope - Rose, Robots of Death. (The midshipman is recovering rather well from a gut shot.)

"A Time King from Gabbadee." "You should see me in the mornings." "OK!" Oooer!

Space shuffles! A fake degree! Glorious!

"I was sort of made homeless..." Awww.

A bridge across the chasm. Poor Foon... But will the Doctor be able to come back for her?

Angels have wings!, and Banakaffalatta can kill them dead! But not much good for him. Rather moving sacrifice.

...And Foon sacrifices herself too.

"All I do is travel." "I could squeeze in it..." Makes a change for someone to beg the new Doctor to come too. (Well, Mickey did.) "Old tradition, yeah." Good music now.

Three questions. Whoops, that blows two of them.

Teleport to safety... No, to deck 31. Good girl, Astrid. (But will you survive to the end of the story?)

It's Max Capricorn. Looks in bad shape. What is he up to? Is it all just an insurance scam? No, elaborate corporate revenge. This is rather Douglas Adams-ish. Well, if he had written Davros.

Kylie and a forklift truck... Oh dear!!!! Poor Astrid, I thought things might not end well!

How's the Doctor in charge of the angels? Oh.

Rescue the ship now! Skip into the atmosphere... Oh dear, poor old Buckingham Palace! Getting the Queen out in time! And a near miss (reminiscent of the end of Revenge of the Cybermen) of the target. Looks like Elizabeth II is better disposed to the Doctor than Elizabeth I.

Can we save Astrid? Looks like maybe not. Every victory has a cost, and the good guys don't always live to see the end.

"If you could decide who lives and who dies, that would make you a monster." So true. And off they go to England.

And Mr Copper has fallen on his feet, hasn't he!

"Where are you going?" "No idea!" "Me neither."

And a tribute to Verity Lambert.

Well, an interesting shift of tone! And I loved the world-building, the Vones and the invocation of Vot.

Oooh, Torchwood trailer with James MARSTERS! 

Wasn't it great???!!!???
 
< Slipback | Castrovalva >

Back in Cardiff again...

Run, Jack, run!

End of the universe...

"Humans are coming!" Say the werewolves with piercings.

Barrowman in the opening credits!

Hmm, not sure about the music.

It's Sir Derek, talking about Utopia and bad coffee. A very cute green tentacled assistant.

The beat - Beethoven's fifth, V for Victory, diggerdydum 

It's Jack, with Torchwood music in the background. And Jack is back on form. Recognises the Doctor immediately.

"Busy life, moving on!" A bit callous. But redeemed by the hug. Martha very pissed off - Rose again.

Jack has lived through from 1869!!!

"D'you just get bored of us and disappear?" Ow. The Doctor's riposte on blogging gloriously off-target.

The hunt again. Save the victim, but cut off from the Tardis. The teeth thing is reminiscent of Survival, though much better.

A wee Scottish girrl! At the end of the world!

It's a generation starship! "It's not rocket science!"

The hand! The first ever flashback to The Christmas Invasion!

Poor Martha has been more freaked out in the first quarter of this episode than in the whole of the series so far.

Hermits! Hilarious!

Utopia Project - sounds a bit like Asimov's Foundation.

"Better to live in hope." - "Quite right too!"

The sonic screwdriver as magic wand again.

(What about the Tardis?)

Nasty snarly woman with teeth...

"Food and string and staples." Great!

They found the Tardis, and it means something to the professor...

The sound of drums...

Martha, "Tell me about it!" Awww.

Giggling girls, very cute.

Stet radiation - very technobabble.

Mutant sabotage!

Woo, disintegrated Jake!

Poor old Jack, he's going to get all the really crap jobs. "Well, I look good!"

"The sports car of time travel." Hmm.

Flashback to The Parting of the Ways.

Martha hasn't heard the end of Rose's story before, it seems.

The professor's got the watch!!!!!!

Martha tells the watch story, and the Doctor has never been so dismayed by anything she has ever said to him.

The professor is another Time Lord!!!

YANA - you are not alone! But who is he????

Shuts them out, let's the werewolves in.... Doesn't seem friendly!

The professor was the Master all along! I truly did not see that coming! Superb misdirection re Mr Saxon (or is it?)

The injured Master in the Tardis.

Regenerating... Into Mr Saxon? Oh yes it is!!!!

And he's off, leaving them with the wild men yelling through the keyhole, as Kevin O'Higgins so memorably put it.

Loved it!

< Blink | Frontier in Space >

Crumbs, that was one of the best episodes ever.

Especially for an episode that didn't really have the Doctor in it. In Hartnell's day, he would take a week or two off here and there and nobody would really notice. None of his successors managed to get away with it to the same extent though.

By truly bizarre coincidence, I banged in my ancient videocassette of Frontier In Space this afternoon, and in the first episode there is a 26th century newsreader played by Louis Mahoney. And there he is again this evening, playing the older version of Billy. (It would be a truly brilliant example of synchronicity if he had appeared in a Doctor Who episode first broadcast in 1969, but it was 1973. And, I see on further research, also 1975.)

Edited to add: major_clanger makes a good point about 1973 as a missed opportunity for further synchronicity!

Even the great Robert Holmes had an off day now and then. But Steven Moffat is now definitely the greatest Doctor Who writer of all time. Each of his stories has been outstanding.

I say it again. That was one of the best episodes ever. 

< Galaxy Four | Utopia >

What's this chirpy music?

Lucky Martha with the phone. But she's not Rose.

Hah, future gender-balanced space crew. Very Firefly.

Nice line, "42 minutes until we crash into the Sun"!

Boo, Chris Chibnall; but yay, Graeme Harper.

Hah, ship is illegally obsolete.

All 29 doors deadlocked, of course.

Captain's husband accused of sabotage. Hmm, he's obviously not out of it completely. Possessed by alien forces, or some personal grudge?

Don't like the music.

"Happy primes"? Never heard of them. "Some stupid pub quiz." Good line. Beatles vs Elvis - good question.

Hah, the patient woke up as we knew he would.

Korwin can now kill people with his eyes. I guess it wasn't just something personal with his wife then.

Here he goes again. Crew is a bit less gender-balanced now...

What is the captain holding back?

And Korwin makes a convert rather than killing.

What's that handy door? Oh, an escape pod. How sweet!

Oh Martha, don't scream! (But it's better than the music.) Fan-fic writers are going to love this scene of her stuck in the escape pod.

Korwin thinks it is his wife's fault...

Ice vents - jolly good! That'll teach 'em.

Martha disappears off - a beautiful silent scene, no stupid music this time.

Doctor wants a spacesuit. Rescue plan...

Heat shields fail, and then into free fall? Seems a bit unlikely.

Oh Martha, you should have been nicer to your mum!

Good for Kath, taking direct action against Ashton.

Doc in spacesuit. Some day someone will do a montage of Doctors wearing spacesuits.

Martha doing last phone call. Her mother has company though. Who? Someone doing a phone trace?

What buttons is the Doctor trying to push? (Fnarr!) Oh yeah, the recall plot device button.

But he has looked into the face of the sun and got infected! Brilliant!

Go and get frozen!

Who's that twitching? Korwin?

The Doctor is "so scared"! But he can of course regenerate.

Korwin cuts the power to the med centre. And chases the captain off.

Music has improved now.

The captain's self-sacrifice - very good!

But the Doctor is still infected...

Martha takes his message to the two remaining crew members. They do what he says, and the day is saved.

Hmm, it would be enough to make you want to try not being a Time Lord for a bit.

Martha has to say goodbye. Snog. Yuck. And bad music again.

"Frequent flyer's privilege."

Martha's mother - in league with Mr Saxon, or being used?

Actually that was quite good, though there were moments of naffness and implausibility, and the music was more than usually irritating. Better than any of Chibnall's Torchwood scripts.

< The Sensorites | Planet of Giants >

Poor Martha, all in lurve and the Doctor doesn't see it.

Reference to Mr Saxon already!

Big reception reminiscent of that scene in the Eighth Doctor movie.

Martha's mother has the Doctor beaten!

Lots of flashing lights and switches, even smoke rising, great stuff!

And the man in the box is... Mark Gatiss!

"What it means to be human" - echoes of last week's plot, such as it was. (Also dodgy DNA science.)

Ah, he's got the munchies and the Doctor knows why...

Smart Martha, picking up DNA samples!

Hmm, old woman not attractive to newly young man. Not sure if I approve. But he's going to die, I bet; and her too.

Martha and Doctor in the lab, very sweet.

Yep, Dr Lazarus is going to die.

Oh, I didn't expect that! Cool!!!

Now he's back again, right as rain, having had his snack. And Tish is next on the menu...

Sinister waiter! Who is he? A minion of Mr Saxon?

Yay, a monster that doesn't look crap!

And escaping down a tall building - like last week, only better.

Doctor shouting at the monster - great!

Running down the corridor - great!

Martha has the sonic screwdriver - cool!

Doctor blows up the lab.

Martha's mother and the sinister waiter again. Can't lip-read but did he say "he's not human"?

Yep switching the machine on - will we get Chris Ecclestone back? No, but we get a "reverse the polarity" phrase. Good.

Dead Mark Gatiss. But for how long?

Martha's mother unable to articulate her feelings.

Yes, with a name like Lazarus of course he is going to come back from the dead.

Much better lines in this episode. Doctor v Lazarus on death and immortality. "No such thing as an ordinary human." "If you live long enough, the only certainty is that you'll end up alone."

Martha and sister up the tower. Very hunchback. And the organ as well! Fantastic!

Killed by a discord. (And a long drop.)

Martha saved not quite by the bell, but by her sister.

Goodbye scene again? Surely not.

"One more trip?" But she puts it well. Doesn't want to be an extra. Not really "just a passenger" - so what, then?

Oooh. Shiny trailer!

Anne points out that for once it was just a mad human scientist, no aliens for a change. (Though Mr Saxon...)

I'm travelling next week, so I'm glad it's postponed to the week after.

< Storm Warning | Marco Polo >

I liked the human interactions, and the strenuous efforts to show New York realistically as it would have been in the 1930s, though not sure that the Empire State Building is visible at that angle from the Statue of Liberty - and how did the Doctor and Martha get across the water to Manhattan?

Though I did like the nod to the scene on the Empire State Building in The Chase. (Steve Lyons picks up on this also in Salvation, where Steven "remembered standing on its observation deck, in what seemed like another lifetime".)

Not convinced by the Daleks though. As paratti eloquently puts it, "Guy with a Dalek on his head does not equal DALEKS." The whole point of the Daleks is that they are not humanoid at all; they have tried to absorb bits of human-style information over the years (Evil of the Daleks, The Genocide Machine) but untilamtely failed. No doubt they will fail again, and of course this is only the cult of Skaro not the mainstream Daleks, but it goes against the basics. 

< Winter for the Adept | The Apocalypse Element >

---

I think the idea of the hybrid Dalek is crazy but the execution is good.

The rather nice moment of Sec picking up the radio.

The doubting Daleks.

Dalek attack on the camp is a bit half-hearted...

Solomon tries to talk to the Daleks. Bet they kill him.

Yep.

blue_condition  has just put a comment on an earlier post saying that this episode has already started badly. Indeed, and not just because this storyline was already done in 1967.

Martha left behind by the Doctor in Hooverville as companions always are. To show her dismayed expression the camera tracks up from her cleavage. Slowly.

But she's very clever, and while the Doctor is engaging in pointless banter with the Daleks, she is working out what is in the sewers.

My wife sniggers scornfully at the reference to gamma radiation.

Crumbs, Davros was wrong? Dalek Sec has decided to undo the mutation? (I preferred The Mutant Phase's take.)

Daleks ask the Doctor to take them to a better place, and he agrees!!!

"If aliens had to come to earth, no wonder they came here!" Of course these days it would be San Francisco.

Doctor has his glasses on again.

Tallulah and Martha on the Doctor and love, etc.

"The line feeds are ready." (Aren't line feeds old-fashioned computer printers?)

Oh, very Frankenstein! The solar flare rather than lightning of course, but still...

Now the Daleks are rebelling. This is being done much better than the Dalek conflict in Resurrection of the Daleks. Also of course my sympathies are very much with the anti-Sec faction.

"First floor, perfumery" - ah, Rocky Horror nostalgia.

(How is the solar flare going to make much difference at night time?)

Poor old Laszlo. Obviously doomed, but it solves the problem of how he and Tallulah can get together again; they won't because he will be dead.

Whoops, dropped the sonic screwdriver!

Really great shot of the lightning strike!

Martha's remorse, and Laszlo's reassurance, nicely done.

Dalek army of humans awakes... Despite getting electrocuted the Doctor failed.

The Daleks have not got out of the habit of imprisoning captives in their control room, first seen in Dalek Invasion of Earth.

The silent dalek hybrid army and Carmina Burana style music - very effective.

"If you choose death and destruction, death and destruction will choose you" - a good line, must mean he is about to die.

Yep.

Hah, the radiation passing through the Doctor's body obviously is enough to save the day.

So are these people going to be a new generation of Time Lords then?

Hah, Daleks killed by their own creation.

But they had a way of killing them off. No new Time Lords then.

"Just one." Dalek Caan is the last one left. Will he get away?

Yep.

Laszlo is doomed. Or is he? Hah, the Doctor is not completely useless. Indeed, "The Doctor is in." Well, that's a plot twist I didn't expect.

Back at the Statue of Liberty. "There's someone for everyone." "Maybe." Awww.

I see we're back in Martha's home period next week. Will be better, I expect. This wasn't as bad as last week's, but the two-parter was the weakest story so far this year.

< Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters | Planet of the Daleks >

I have to say that of all old-school Doctor Who monsters to return, I really didn't expect the Macra!

I loved this. The traffic jam was neatly claustrophobic, the use of hymn tunes tremendously evocative, and the Doctor having to tell the truth about why he lied to Martha.

Sure, not a lot was made of the Macra other than some impressive CGI imagery, but I suspect they did better this time round than last time.

I liked it. If I want to know what really happened in 1599, I'll read James Shapiro; if I want to be entertained, I'll watch Doctor Who.

There were a lot of cute one-liners. I liked the Harry Potter references (three altogether?); the "57 academics" line (and pretty much all the Shakespeare stuff); Martha's reference to Ray Bradbury (which of course is particularly good if it's a nod to this year's overarching "Mr Saxon" theme); and the scene on the bed where Tennant's Doctor is being particularly alien, and Martha is hoping in vain that he will act human.

I wasn't in fact particularly grabbed by the witches. But I was prepared to go along for the ride. 

< Smith and Jones | The Fearmonger >

It was good.

Lots of references back to the very first episode, "Rose".

Lots of references forward to "Mr Saxon".

Good to have a "brainy" companion. (check: Zoe; Liz Shaw; maybe Romana; er, that's it, unless you count Adric or Grace.)

< Land of the Dead | The Shakespeare Code >

It's almost a law of nature that any long-running television serial will face the problem of what to do about members of the regular cast who come and go. Too glib a disappearance—or indeed reappearance—can wreck a programme's reputation. Everyone remembers Dallas in 1986, when it turned out that the entire previous season of stories had been Pam Ewing's dream.

Doctor Who is no different, and its original series, which started in 1963, became more careless in this regard as time went on: while the first few companions were written out after falling in love, discovering means of return to their own home, being adopted by alien races as their ruler, or (in a couple of daring cases) killed off, it wasn't too long before regulars whose contracts had expired started popping off to the countryside for a quick break from which they never reappeared. (And that is just the first Doctor's companions.)

New Who has placed a much greater burden on the audience's rapport with just two central characters—Billie Piper's Rose Tyler and the Doctor himself. The 2005 Christmas special had the difficult task of introducing David Tennant's tenth Doctor, in succession to Christopher Eccleston's superb reintroduction of the character to teatime audiences, and was sufficiently unsure of itself that it kept him asleep in bed for a large part of the somewhat rambling story.

The 2006 Christmas special had a somewhat easier job: Tennant had firmly established himself as an audience favourite during the year, handsomely winning a viewer poll as the best of the ten actors to play the role (which caused some grinding of teeth among us older fans, but let that be). Rose's departure gave the writers a chance to portray his Doctor meeting a potential replacement, but also meant that viewers would see the Doctor from a different perspective, Rose having been effectively the viewpoint character for the first two seasons.

Judged on that basis, as a segment of the Doctor's developing character arc, I think "The Runaway Bride" succeeded. Partly this was because the extra fifteen minutes of plot were used by writer and producer Russell T. Davies to balance frenetic action with pauses for reflection (say, on top of a skyscraper). Much also depended on well-known (to others, if not to me) comedian Catherine Tate, cast as one-off sidekick Donna Noble, snatched from the aisle on her wedding day and mysteriously materializing inside the TARDIS at the start of the episode.

Donna gives us an immediately different view of the Doctor. To her, the Doctor is a possible Martian, for whom being human is optional; a kidnapper whose "er, spaceship" is smaller on the outside than the inside (alone among Doctor Who characters, Donna sees its interior first); and a guy who sometimes makes so little sense that you just have to give him a slap (she hits him twice). By the end of the story, she has resolved not to go with him on his travels. Her treacherous fiance, Lance, was tempted by the opportunity to explore the universe; Donna prefers to stay at home.

Donna is herself one of the great Doctor Who creations: she missed the last two alien invasions of Earth (in "The Christmas Invasion" and "Doomsday") because she was variously hungover or scuba-diving in Spain. Compared by the Doctor to a 4H pencil, she has nagged her boyfriend into marriage, and her disappearance during the ceremony causes her family so little dismay that they go ahead with the reception without her; she spends much of the first part of the story simply yelling. David Tennant himself notes on the commentary track for the episode that "Donna is not the Doctor's normal choice of traveling companion."

Above all, Donna is funny. More, it must be said, in the sense that we laugh at her than with her. (She is gobsmacked that there is a secret base hidden underneath a major London landmark: "I know, unheard of!" replies the Doctor.) Yet it is more than just a comedic role, and Donna's grief at her betrayal by Lance—it turns out he only wanted her for her body, or rather for its usefulness to his real mistress—is poignant.

The episode's other lead character is the alien threatening destruction of the Earth, Sarah Parish's Spider Queen (as I must think of her; the official name of the character is the Empress of the Racnoss). I don't require much of my Doctor Who villains except that they snarl convincingly, and the Spider Queen does this to the tips of all eight legs—or was it ten? I lost count. In the end, the Doctor literally washes the spiders down the plug-hole, using the River Thames, and the Spider Queen is blown up by conventional weaponry (some fans grumbled at this intervention of state coercive power being untrue to Who, but we older types mutter about the Silurians and the Krynoid from the 1970s, similarly eliminated by the armed forces rather than by the Doctor).

Although the sequence is effective enough on first viewing, I have to say that on re-watching, some limitations become apparent. The scale of the costume means that the Spider Queen is unable to move from her spot—not a patch on Shelob from The Lord of the Rings, for instance—and the spider-children concealed at the center of the Earth, whose potential awakening and feeding (on humanity) is supposedly the core of the plot, are never themselves actually seen, presumably due to budget restrictions. Apart from this, however, the effects are convincing—the dawn of creation, witnessed by the Doctor and Donna, and the TARDIS chasing a taxi down the motorway being particularly memorable. Other chase sequences involving a bus and Donna's pink Smart Car were apparently cut (probably a good thing), though a sequence involving Segways was mysteriously retained. Even the spiders' lair is rather good. I'll also put a good word in for Murray Gold's score, particularly in contrast with some of the old Doctor Who stories ("The Three Doctors" and "Battlefield" come to mind).

As Donna runs from her own wedding reception, her mother asks her, "Who is he? Who is that man?" New Who has tended to opt for exploring character rather than plot, and although Donna's mother gets no reply, we learn more about the answer to her question by the end of the story. In particular, the Doctor becomes more and more a wizardly rather than scientific figure; indeed, with his glasses on and brandishing the sonic screwdriver as a magic wand, David Tennant begins to faintly resemble an older version of Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter. The sonic screwdriver works on cash machines, sound systems, and snowstorms, and the Doctor's pockets are bigger on the inside than the outside; however, the Doctor's biodamper ring is a less successful device, its failure perhaps mirroring the failure of Donna's wedding.

However, he has a much darker side: he is grieving for the loss of Rose (whose name, spoken for the first time, is the last word of the episode) and he is unmoved by the Spider Queen as he destroys the underground lair, or by Donna's entreaties for moderation. But when Donna, overwhelmed by the dawn of creation, mutters that "it puts the wedding in perspective," the Doctor responds with one of the best lines of the show: "The human race! You make sense out of chaos, marking it out with weddings and Christmas and calendars. The process is beautiful, but only if it's being observed." It is a line that reshapes Doctor Who's essential optimism about humanity, and also the Doctor's concern with the fate of individuals, shown again in his final instruction to Donna to "Be magnificent!"

"The Runaway Bride" nods to but is not overly burdened by Doctor Who's past. The spiders' lair had been taken over by them from the London branch of the Torchwood Institute, whose Cardiff offshoot is now the subject of a separate TV series. (Since "Torchwood" is famously an anagram of "Doctor Who," I was trying to make a decent anagram out of their front company in this episode, Donna's employer H.C. Clements, but all I can get is "Clench Stem" so I'd probably better stop.) The extrapolator gadget which saves the Doctor and Donna is a souvenir from the ninth Doctor's encounter with the Slitheen in Cardiff. Hardcore fans like me were very excited by the Doctor uttering the name of his home planet, Gallifrey; New Who has thrown away much of the burdensome continuity of the Doctor's people, the Time Lords, but informed speculation is that at least one of them will make a reappearance in 2007.

Christmas is a time of high expectations—perhaps only weddings (according to the Doctor, scenes of chemical warfare) come close. "The Runaway Bride" turns the familiar into a threat—killer Santas, exploding baubles, a spaceship shaped like the star from a Christmas tree. And families will have enjoyed the episode. I note its use of children—three in the wedding reception, two watching the motorway chase, one near the end threatened with death by laser, none of them speaking parts—and suspect it will have been much more successful at making the youngest viewers feel part of the action than Old Who's habit of dragging in child actors ever was. Above all there is a happy ending; the man with the magic screwdriver sees us right, all over in time for dinner.

< The Five Doctors | Battlefield >