Tooth And Claw
Well, that was better, wasn’t it? They scored an ealy own goal with the comedy. The Balamory joke was a poor reverse anachronism. It could only be understood by an audience at home and not the audience in the narrative. Tennant could have turned to the camera, winked and given a big thumbs up and it wouldn’t have been any less jarring. Also it was a rubbish gag. Rose’s attempts to get Queen Victoria to say “We are not amused” were indeed not amusing. Once those shenanigans were over, it got better. Good hammy nonsense, and dare I say it, a romp. Like last weeks it might have been better as a two parter. A few more shots of a werewolf skulking around and eating the occasional hapless servant could have worked wonders, and a bit more on the supposed alien origin wouldn’t have gone amiss. It seemed a bit pointless to make the monster an alien when all they were going to do is say “oh, it probably landed with that meteor a few hundred years ago”. Why not just make it a good honest werewolf and be done with it? Maybe because the whole Death By Moonlight thing would have made even less sense…The effects were OK though. I was braced for a really ropy werewolf, but it was actually pretty good in the end. After last weeks Romero lite, this was like Doctor Who does Dog Soldiers. When you’re up against The Best Film In Cinema History, you’re always going to come off worse but this was probably an away draw, and a big improvement on last week’s effort.
New Earth
….hmmm. Not brilliant, was it? There was almost too much stuff jammed in, and I thought it could have been better served as an old school four parter. Nothing was really fleshed out enough, what with strange cat ladies (were there any cat men? where do little cat boys and girls come from?), Cassandra, the Face of Boe, a plague of really ill people (well enough to walk though, weren’t they?) and so on. The whole mindswap thing was frankly bobbins. How come Cassandra needed a machine to jump into Rose the first time, but was able to hop about at will later on? The whole thing was a poorly contrived excuse for some bad comedy acting from the leads. If I wanted that I’d be watching Are You Being Served?. And that kiss was rubbish too. Of all the things I watch Doctor Who for, some artificially generated “smouldering” sexual tension is not near the top of the list. Or even on the list at all. The whole sickness plot only echoed old movies. I’ve seen The Matrix and Dawn of The Dead, and they were better (do you think the sequence in on the ladder was a deliberate nod to Day Of The Dead’s escape through a missile silo?). As for the “cure”, well I’m not sure that throwing medicine at someone can make them instantly better, and I am downright certain that medicine is not contagious, even though everyone’s cough seemed to clear up as soon as the Doctor chucked some Listerine about. I did like the payoff with the Face of Boe at the end, could be a nice set up for some later events. Maybe a Cyberman invasion, although I’m a bit worried about this one off episode and two part season climax structure – smacks a bit too much of what happened with the Daleks last year. Next week’s looks good though. Warrior monks, Queen Vic and a werewolf? Can’t go wrong, can they?
Doomsday
Oh, admit it, you had a tear in your eye, didn’t you?
A fine season conclusion, and much better than last years. I just like to pretend that whole Weakest Link / Trinny and Susannah thing never happened – and wasn’t it a relief that Derek Acorah and co only got a few seconds of screentime this time round? I even enjoyed the Eastenders gag in AoG, although it was a bit weird referencing Den Watts in an episode where the actress who killed him in her last job was playing someone else. Jarring or postmodern? You decide…
Daleks and Cybermen fighting each other, eh? All my eight year old fantasies come true. Mind you, when I was eight, I didn’t think it would be quite such a queeny bitchfight…after the Dalek’s “you are better at dying” line, I was half expecting / hoping the Cyberleader would be all “oooh, get you” and flounce off. It did give us the brilliant Dad’s Army Dalek though – “Don’t tell them your name Pike!” versus “Daleks do not self identify”, anyone? I liked the reinforcement of the Daleks as (to quote Aliens) ultimate badasses who could easily massacre a planet of Cybermen without breaking a sweat, which also indirectly helps to big up the Doctor. If things this hard are scared of him, he must be bad news indeed. That is one thing that I have missed a bit, especially with DT – the essential alienness of the Doctor. Sometimes in this series he’s not been much more than a clever bloke with some nice toys, and we haven’t seen exactly why he is the Oncoming Storm.
So, I was pretty much right about what happened to Rose. I didn’t expect her to go so unwillingly though, or for it to be so emotional. And just for one second, before Pete appeared out of the void, I thought they were actually going to do it, and leave a nation of children traumatised. I suspect there were a few tears before bedtime anyway though. On my first viewing, I was thinking “there! Stop it there!” as they were leaning their heads against opposite sides of the same wall in different universes, kind of like how Blade Runner would have been much better if it had finished when the elevator doors shut, but in the end the finale in Bad Wolf Bay was worth stringing it out a bit longer for. I must say that young Ms Piper was acting her socks off there. And despite what we may have been led to believe earlier, I can’t believe they didn’t know Billie was leaving when this series entered preproduction. Just look at School Reunion – one long piece of foreshadowing those last ten minutes. To my relief, we didn’t get to hear the Doctor say “I love you” either. That would have been wrong on so many levels, and I think RTD copped out nicely, leaving both factions happy. Probably the best send off for a companion I can recall, even if she didn’t get to kill off the dinosaurs.
Other random thoughts: Yvonne as Cyberman defending the Empire was just about acceptable until that tear. Cybermen will remove emotions? Apparently not. Cybermen 1065 & 1066 are sent to investigate the sphere – a reference to the last time Britain was invaded? In reality, obviously. In the Doctor Who timeline, Britain was probably last invaded about five past three. I felt slightly let down by the Dalek / Cybermen/ hapless bystander street scenes. Not that they were bad, quite the opposite, but I would have liked a little bit more, or at least not to have shown pretty much all of them in the trailers. Mickey’s grin when Jackie claimed there had never been anyone else? Priceless. Catherine Tate – great slingshot out of a heavy downer ending to make sure people are still watching come Christmas, but a little dubious about what seems to be Donna’s shrewish nature. Open minds till Xmas, but let’s hope she’s not just playing one of her sketch show characters. I know it wouldn’t have had the desired attention if she hadn’t been revealed, but wouldn’t it have been great if we’d just seen the Bride’s back, and DT’s confusion?
So Series 2 overall, then. A little bumpier then the previous one I think. The highs (TGITF, TIP/TSP and the climax) bettered the last series easily, but I also think the worse episodes were worse than anything in the first series, and yes, New Earth and Love & Monsters, I’m looking at you. Even Boom Town, dull as it was, had an important part to play in the overall arc. On arcs, randomly inserting the word “Torchwood” into each episode wasn’t anything like as effective as slowly building the Bad Wolf mystery. The writing of Rose’s character was a bit frustrating at times as well. Round about episodes 3 and 4, I really wanted to see the back of her (probaby a hangover from her sheer cocky obnoxiousness in Tooth & Claw). She didn’t regain any sympathy from me until The Impossible Planet, when we saw her take charge and demonstrate her resourcefulness, along with whatever the Doctor saw in her to take her with him. As far as characters go, the jury is still out here on DT, I’m afraid. Sometimes very good but just as often a gibbering goon who seems incapable of saying anything other than “Brilliant!” or “I love humans, me!”. Like I said, I’d like to see a bit more implacable alienness as well, which is my main wish for season 3. Other wishes – Sontarans, a delayed introduction for Martha Jones – I’d like to see DT on his own for at least a couple of episodes, so as not to cheapen the emotion of Rose’s departure – and, for the same reason, absolutely positively no quick fixes to pop between universes and see how she’s doing. A bit less early 21st Earth wouldn’t go amiss either.
Fear Her
Rose isn’t going to die, is she? It is being telegraphed way too obviously for that to happen. For what it’s worth, Adric and the end of Blakes 7 notwithstanding, my theory goes something like this. The trailer for Army Of Ghosts seems to indicate that the parallel world from Age Of Steel is merging with ours, maybe thanks to Torchwood and that meddling bint from Eastenders. As well as loads of Cybermen coming through, so does alterna-Pete, who already knows Rose is (kind of) his daughter. This Pete and real world Jackie meet up and, hey presto, happy families, Rose decides to stay with them – I don’t think anything else would keep her away from the Doctor, unless it goes the other way and the Doctor sacrifices Jackie and Pete for the greater good and irrevocably upsets her- and DT legs it, maybe with the new action Mickey, (which would allow scope for Rose guest appearances) and promises to send a Christmas card. Of course, it’d be better if alterna-cyber-Jackie comes over, cyberises Pete and Rose, and the whole happy families thing looks more like a late 70s Smash ad. But I doubt it.
Therein lies a problem. The first part of my commentary on last week’s episode is all about next week’s. That trailer had plenty of gosh wow action and overshadowed the preceding 45 minutes. After watching the whole package, my first thoughts weren’t “hmm, that was a nicely observed story with some clever touches, an interestingly different villain and some welcome underplayed comic relief”, which, despite moans to come. it was. No, I was all “Fighting! Torchwood! Cybermen! Daleks!”, and as I hinted, that’s a shame because there was some good stuff in this story. The monster was a good original concept, and all the better for not being a raging evil baddy out to destroy the world, but more sort of an intergalactic dandelion seed. Also interesting that its name was “Asolus” (if I’m spelling it right), which if it was a Latin word would roughly translate as “not alone” – very fitting. The whole child’s drawings affecting the real world idea was not terrifically original (Paperhouse, a segment of The Twilight Zone movie) but more worryingly didn’t really hold up to close examination. Unless I misunderstood, the Asolus was inside Chloe, but the children she drew away (good pun that, innit?) went somewhere else altogether – so what was the benefit to the Asolus? If it’s in Chloe and the children are ….elsewhere, its loneliness isn’t going to be alleviated, is it? And if it’s after friends, why create (and the explanation for the creation of living drawings went past me – I heard some mutterings about ions and that was about it) a representation of a horrible father? And the less said about the Doctor carrying the Olympic flame the better. This might have been better placed earlier in the season. If it had occupied, say, “The Idiot’s Lantern” slot, the nasty in the closet would have been a nice tiny foreshadowing of the real big red angry chap we’d meet in a couple of episodes, and we wouldn’t have had two consecutive episodes set in Britain in the here and now (three, maybe four, if you look ahead). And just once, wouldn’t it be nice if some of these stories were set outside London? (Boomtown doesn’t count on the grounds that it was dreadful, easily the worst of the new series. If I hadn’t been busy spotting things on the telly I could see from my old flat it would have been even worse) Maybe with Rose gone the Doctor will spread his wings a bit. Even Jon Pertwee went outside the M25 every so often, or would have if it had been built then. To hell with it, bring back Bessie and let’s go on a road trip! And finally, the gratuitous reference to That Other British SF Television Series. In the 70′s ITV version, a large group of people gather in a stadium and are – yes! – disappeared by an alien nasty!
Love And Monsters
I guess you can't have an "Impossible Planet" evey week, can you? This one was always going to struggle to live up to the last two episodes, and I get the feeling they tried to duck the issue by going for a quirky light piece, after all the Satan, Hell and big red fellas of the two parter and before the (hopefully) boneshattering climax of the season. So, ten out of ten for pacing, but minus several zillion for quality of story, as our friend Zaphod might have said. Despite the toe curlingly cringey oral sex gag* at the end, this was the most overtly child orientated episode yet. Perhaps I'm prejudiced because I knew beforehand the monster was from Blue Peter, but it often had the feel of children's drama. When it wasn't being Eastenders, that is. I mean, there was even a launderette scene – admittedly one of the better written scenes of the episode, but still a launderette. I enjoyed Peter Kay as Victor Kennedy. A bit like an extraordinarily camp Roger Delgado, but maybe that's just me. The Azorbaloff, I'm afraid, was just pants. Bad idea, badly designed, and yes, I know I'm picking on some poor little kid's work, but I think we'd all have been better off if his mum had just pinned it to the fridge and shown Granddad instead. And I bet said kid wasn't responsible for it's "comedy" northern accent either. No, grown ups have to take the rap for that one. I liked the conceit of a story that was about the Doctor, but didn't feature him very much, and looked instead at the ripples he leaves behind. It was better handled on Mickey's website during the first season though, I felt. I also appreciated that the group of people (I can't bring myself to type out the acronym they came up with) were treated gently, when it would have been easy to have a laugh at the losers. It just didn't gel for me though. The humour was too broad, the resolution was too pat (aw, look! It's his mummy!) , and the less said about the whole Scooby Doo vibe the better. Overall, an interesting failure, but a failure nonetheless. And I really, really hate ELO. * "gag". geddit???!!!!????? (c) Glenda Slagg
The Satan Pit
I don't think I had the tiniest hint of letdown. Apart from maybe the horrendous science of the whole story, but that's hardly unique to these episodes, the rest of Doctor Who or TV SF as a whole now, is it? Another film reference I missed last time – aren't the Doctor and Ida's suits very reminiscent of 2001? They also worked brilliantly in the descent into the pit – a tiny speck of orange getting smaller and smaller against the darkness. Good idea to have "satan" so far down as well – picks up the idea of psychic space used so well in movies like Psycho, (and that's before we consider the acting captain. Presumably lifted from the ranks of the crew upon the old captain's demise, he spends most of this epsiode seperated from them physically as well as by the pressures of command). The Doctor is literally descending into the subconscious to fight this archetypal beast from the past. Hark at me getting all Jungian… (Hmm, the devil as race memory – wasn't that in, oh hang on, I'll remember in a bit, ooohh, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT?). The ventilation shaft sequence was another old cliche from Dark Star, Alien and all the way back to Doom again, but it was handled very well. Having to move the air about, while it may have been a prime example of the terrible science above, made it genuinely dramatic and exciting, and set up a good end for Mr Jefferson, who I couldn't help but think looked like Bruce Dickinson with a few more years on him. Realising that Toby was still possessed gave me a nasty frisson as well, and set up the ending in the rocket well (Danny, on seeing Rose wake up and begin to struggle): "I think we're going to have a problem passenger". Dan, at home :"hoho, you don't know the half of it, matey"). The real horror in this episode wasn't the big red thing down in the pit (but what a hell of a big red thing it was), but for me came in two sequences. Ida alone, believing the Doctor dead, shortly to run out of air on a collapsing planet, knowing she is truly alone as she hears the rocket her companions are escaping on- now that is nasty. The second is a bit more metatextual and not really explicit in the script but struck me on second viewing. If the Devil was locked away, mind and body, almost from the beginning of the universe, then that means there are no excuses. Auschwitz, Passchendaele, 9/11 – they are down to humans and humans alone. It's the flipside of the Doctor's pep talk about the brave explorers in a tiny little rocket and the spark of human endeavour. It's all down to us – our capacity for good and evil is ours alone. This was a story that had a lot to do with reason and faith. Interesting that the scientific plans for escaping the Ood based on computers and technology are all taking place above ground, while down in the pit / subconscious it's all significantly less rational, from the religious discussions to the Doctor's literal leap of faith into the dark, not to mention the Tardis ex machina at the end. I liked the weighty mentions of "history" and "legend" at the end as well – two concepts that underpinned the entire story being given their due. Quite apart from all this po faced analysis, it's worth stressing that this was all exciting as hell, and a high water mark for any Doctor Who stories, old or new. I don't think I've ever seen a television SF show that has come so close to Hollywood production values, only with a script full of the intelligence and wit that Hollywood seems to have abandoned. Roll on Peter Kay…
The Impossible Planet
I suppose I have to give the same caveat I did after Rise Of The Cybermen. You know, it's only part one, not fair to judge yet, have to see next week's to get the whole story, etc, etc, BUT BLOODY HELL WHAT A CRACKER THAT WAS. This may have been my favourite episode of the entire relaunch so far, at least in terms of sheer enjoyment. Okay, The Girl In The Fireplace was better if you're looking at things like characterization, structure (that last shot!), heart and intelligence, but this was good honest pulp fun. It's like Tremors versus Three Colours Blue. TCB is unquestionably a finer work of art, but what one are you going to watch again and again on rainy Sunday afternoons? I thought this was the closest yet New Who has got to the feel of Classic Who, only with far better production values. The Doctor and his companion find themselves stranded on a distant planetary base with a handful of other humans and something nasty in the woodshed? Brilliant!, as our friend DT would say. Loved the precredit cliffhanger, just like the end of episode one of an old story might have been, and enjoyed the joke of its resolution. The episode also wore its other genre influences proudly on its sleeve, including the obvious Alien and Event Horizon feel. Weren't the scenes of the Doctor and Ida entering the temple/cavern/thing just like John Hurt and co entering the boneship in the first Alien? Also, I picked up on The Descent, The Black Hole, Fallen, and perhaps most of all, the game Doom. The set design, especially the corridors and doors, the references to Hell, and the flash of the demon while the captain's back was turned, could all have come straight out of Doom 3. Let's hope The Rock doesn't show up in part two. I think it's also important that we see something fresh with the second part, preferably a really good and original monster – I'd like this story to transcend its influences instead of ending up just a mishmash of other genre work. There was loads of good stuff in this episode. The possessed(?) Toby standing outside in hard vacuum, the ancient writing transferring to his skin, the escalating references to Hell, Satan and 666, the unveiling of the black hole, the gradual possession of the base's computer systems, the lighting that made Ida's face look like a skull inside her helmet – a nasty piece of foreshadowing? And I haven't mentioned the Ood yet. Assuming that by the end of the episode they were showing their true colours and weren't basically good kids who had fallen in with a bad crowd, I see them as the latest in a not so honourable line of bad guys. Daleks, Cybermen, Autons, Zarbi, and now the Ood – there's something about villains in Who that is verging on the fascist. The hive mentality of these creatures is a recurring theme. They'll unswervingly follow a single aim, and probably couldn't even understand the concept of dissension. There's no individuality, all is subjugated to the will of the State, or the Emperor Dalek, or Satan or whatever. Can you imagine a world ruled by any of them being anything other than Orwell's "jackboot stamping on a human face. Forever"? It always comes down to the Doctor to stop them, and he is as individual as can be. Jelly babies, cricketing outfits, pet robot dogs – there's no place for any of these in the Cybermen's bleak conformity. While I'd stop short of suggesting a radical anarcho libertarian agenda for the show, I do think you can ascribe some of its enduring appeal in Britain to this dramatization of the struggle between the individual and the State. We're a nation that has a long history of cocking a snook at authority and standing up to those who would take our liberties. It's not that hard to draw a line from Robin Hood through Wat Tyler and the Chartists, the Luddites (had to get them in somehow) and the suffragettes, the Spanish Civil War volunteers and the poll tax protestors, Animal Farm and V For Vendetta and have it come out at the Doctor. Ahem. So, there's this bloody great monster coming out of the hole, right? And it is supposed to be the DEVIL? In a PIT? It's bleeding Quatermass again! I cannot wait for part two. I just hope it isn't a) all running down corridors and screaming or b) Sutekh. Way to make 95% of the audience look at each other and go "huh?".
The Idiot’s Lantern, or Doctor Who Meets Shine On Harvey Moon
Bit of a strange one this. I was left curiously unmoved by the whole experience. I didn't especially dislike it, but I certainly didn't love it either. It was just…there. The scooter and Elvis stuff in the beginning was fairly awful, but at least it petered out pretty quickly. I think there's been a bit of tendency this series to do things like this which are more fun for the actors than the audience (I'm thinking DT and Billie vamping it up as Cassandra back in New Earth and so on). That aside, the 1950s milieu was well realized (most of Portsmouth still looks like that, you know). I liked the faceless villains – a sly comment on TV's power to turn people into idiots? Also nicely in keeping with the Luddite subtext running through this series, after last week's "your mobile phone will turn you into a Cyberman" public service announcement (and why did they meet the Cybermen in the first place? Because the most advanced technology for traveling through time and space ever broke down!). I enjoyed DT getting angry again as well. Part of my lack of reaction is down to finding the Wire really underwritten. I wonder how non–British fans that don't get that whole Watch With Mother thing will react. Without that cultural safety blanket, it's a very poor villain indeed. I know there was a brief mention of some sort of trial, but I'd have liked a bit more exposition than that. How did it end up on Earth? What was its hold over Mr. Magpie? What was it doing with the personalities/souls it was stealing? Not much obviously, as they all recovered quickly enough. How did it hope to incorporate by stealing these souls? Have you ever seen it and Evil Edna from Will O'The Wisp in the same room? Thought not. Without any of this background, it's just a baddy because Mark Gatiss says so. Again, maybe a problem arising from the 45 minute time slot (mind you, when they gave two episodes to Trigger and the Cybermen, I was moaning that there were too many longeurs. Never satisfied, me). I know I keep bringing this name up, but this was the most overt homage to Nigel Kneale's scientist chappy yet. Wasn't Gatiss involved in the recreation of The Quatermass Experiment with DT last year? Maybe it was another Leaguer, but look at the similarities – space creature terrorizes London? Check! 1950s setting? Check! Final confrontation high up on a London landmark? Check! Bit hazy now on the very end of TQE, but didn't they kill the monster with electricity then as well? This was a lot weedier than Quatermass though. Maybe it's this season's Long Game – another so so story at a similar stage of the series. These slight stories are okay if there's enough going on in the foreground with the characters to keep your interest, as was the case with School Reunion, but we didn't really get that here. Rose's encouraging the young lad to make up with his dad made sense in the light of her recent history, but it wasn't enough. Plus, it was a really stupid decision given that said father had given no evidence of being anything other than a total arse throughout the episode. Like I said at the beginning, it wasn't especially bad, but equally far from being a high water mark. And I didn't even mention that stupid Betamax joke at the end. Next week's looks interesting, but I have to question why we are wasting our time with these Ood characters, when what I'd really like to see with the new improved sfx budget is a massive Sontaran invasion fleet. Oooh, imagine that…
The Age Of Steel
okay maybe I was a little harsh on part one. I still maintain it wasn't as intelligent as …Fireplace, but I don't think it was ever intended to be. Part two definitely improved on the first, being a lot pacier and punchier, with no time wasted on that pointless exposition telling us things we already knew. From the cliffhanger resolution onwards it was pretty much all go (that resolution was maybe the least satisfactory thing about the episode – way too pat and easy. It would have been better if a giant anvil had fallen out of the sky and crushed the Cybermen, especially if it had ACME written on the side). I loved the Cybermen having memories of their past lives, especially the sequence with the bride to be. It also set up a great ending, classic Who based on intelligence and empathy rather than brute force. I'm not sure exactly why the Cybermen started exploding after they went mad, but it was dramatic, I suppose. Lumic's character was much better, mainly for not being as present as he was in part one. I was bothered by his cybercontroller incarnation's cyberchair, though. If he was all about beating disease and the frailities of the flesh, why did he end up in a big metal chair after being cyberised? I'd have thought he would have liked to stretch his legs a bit. He certainly seemed nippy enough when he got out of it. Great death scene – a mixture of McKellan's Richard III (which I think was also at Battersea), Dr Strangelove, and Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. And have we seen the last of Mickey? There's definitely spinoff potential in this destroying cyber lairs mission of his. A shame to see him go just when he was geting interesting…. Wasn't this story supposed to feature Project Guinevere and the British Rocket Group? Maybe they are being saved for the real world Cybermen…I am still holding out for a guest appearance by Prof Quatermass!
Rise Of The Cybermen
After two strong episodes (and an alltime great in The Girl In The Fireplace) we were bought back down to (a parallel) Earth with a bump with this one. The precredit sequence was howlingly awful, like something out of an Austin Powers movie, and it's hammy cliched nature set the tone for what followed. What was that cobblers about the Tardis dying? Whatever happened, everyone seemed to get over it very quickly, Almost as if it was nothing more than a hasty plot device to strand our heroes in the parallel universe… I could just about buy Trigger as the inventor of the Cybermen, but Trigger in a wheelchair smacked far too much of Davros, especially now that the Cybermen have developed their own catchphrase. There are probably loads of kids running around their playgrounds now, grabbing each other round the neck and shouting "Delete!", and more power to them, but it was just too close to "exterminate!" for my liking. And why so coy about revealing the Cybermen? All of those blurred shots and closeups of metallic feet would have been understandable if their appearance was a big Earthshock style surprise, but trying to generate that kind of suspense in an episode which been mercilessly plugged as containing Cybermen and even had the word "Cybermen" in THE GODDAMN TITLE was a tad pointless. And what were said Cybermen doing when they finally showed up? I thought they were supposed to be rounding people up to be upgraded (I still think "cyber-ised" is a better word), not going on a killing spree. Perhaps they found Mrs Tyler as annoying as the rest of us. There were good things. The Mickey's gran sequence was quite nice and helped develop his backstory a bit, which can only be a good thing given that Rose is becoming less sympathetic and more whiny with every passing episode. The cyberising machine looked suitably nasty, and I'm always going to be a sucker for CGI Zeppelins. The last couple of minutes and especially the cliffhanger were the closest this relaunch has got to the spirit of classic Who, and gave me a little nostalgic buzz (although that was a bit questionable in a story that pretty much threw out anything we thought we knew about the Cybermen – no Mondas, Telos, gold dust or cybercontroller!). It wasn't as bad as New Earth, and it certainly wasn't as bad as the new Battlestar Galactica (you should see the blog entry I am cooking up on that one), and it's probably unfair to judge it without seeing part 2, but overall it was a disappointment, maybe because I'd let the fanboy in me (never very far from the surface) get over excited. Part of the appeal of Doctor Who is it's variety, and this couldn't have been more different from last week's well constructed, thoughtful, imaginative and moving episode.
