The Stolen Earth, Journey's End & The Next Doctor

The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End

By now I know what to expect with the series finales. They are big, very very big. A little reminiscent, and generally plotwise a massive disappointment. So, keeping that in mind you can’t be disappointed with The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End, because they merely ran true to form. In fact, they were the pinnacle of overblown, over the top stories laced with awful plotting and a very drawn out ending.

Although there are a few specials to go, you could be forgiven for seeing this one as Russel T Davies’ and David Tennant’s swansong. We even got a regeneration of sorts! What really got me was how unsatisfying the resolution was. Which is RTD’s forte it seems, building up on a huge scale and then not really having anywhere to go except a big reset button or exploring the realms of incredulity.

So. We have planets throughout the universe disappearing, and at the start of the story the Earth becomes one of them. Why the TARDIS would not be taken with the Earth is anyone’s guess, it had landed there and so being left in the empty space when the Earth is stolen made no rightly sense to me.

Not only do we have a Dalek army, a Dalek supreme, but Dalek Sek and Davros are back too. Julian Bleach’s Davros is wonderful, perfect casting as the mad creator of the Daleks, and he looks fantastic, true to the original, so a big thumbs up for that. All the important characters are back for the finale – the characters that have made the first four years of the new series. Rose, Mickey, Rose’s Mum (grooooooan), Martha, Captain Jack, Sarah Jane (always wonderful to see her) and Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister. They all come up with ingenious ways to destroy the Earth so the Daleks can’t have it, but it all comes to naught in the end.

Because this series is about Donna. And she’s been saying she’s no-one, so it must be her who saves the day. So here’s the thing that killed the story for me. Donna-Doctor. Doctor-Donna. Whichever it was. As the TARDIS is seconds away from destruction, Donna touches the Doctor’s hand in a jar (this is the hand he lost in ‘The Christmas Invasion’ by the way) and creates a new Doctor, combined with Donna. So yes, we have two David Tennants! Then Donna herself inherits the Doctor’s mind, combined with hers, and presses a few buttons and stops everything.

Let’s look past the fact that pressing buttons is a very weak way to resolve the situation, and consider then that it is NOT Donna that saves the day, but the Doctor-Donna. It’s nothing inherit in Donna perse, but the combination of minds which allows her to be the heroine. For me, that defeated the purpose of having her being the key to it all. BIG TIME.

That for me was the single biggest issue with this epic story which looks great although it’s full of many other crappy elements like the Oster-Haagen key, and the end of the first part where the Doctor starts to regenerate and then doesn’t cause he didn’t want to. Then we have the ending with Rose. Rose is sent back to the alternate Earth and given the new version of the Doctor, who is incidentally human. I’m sorry, but AS IF. Let’s also look past the age difference and oh so much that’s wrong with the idea of a relationship between the two, he’s a friggin’ facsimile. It’s dreadful, awful, shite.

The ending doth drag too, and all we really needed to see was what happened to Donna, who has her memory of the Doctor wiped because otherwise it will kill her. And this is really sad. And again unsatisfying for this viewer. In fact, I may have preferred her to actually die. Dalek Caan is continually saying one of the companions is going to die, and then no-one does.

So, in short, grand on scale, vision and design, short on plot and satisfaction. In short, the antithesis of every series finale RTD has given us.

3/10

The Next Doctor

And we’re back with another Christmas special, starring David Morrissey as Jackson Lake, who thinks he’s the Doctor with his faithful companion Rosita (played by the brilliant Velile Tshabalala) facing off against Miss Hartigan (Dervla Kirwan) who is equally brilliant. In fact, the these actors make the show wonderful, seriously wonderful.

The first three quarters of the episode is just a great romp, with some clever twists. I love the idea of the Doctor thinking that Jackson must simply be a future incarnation, and then he has a sonic screwdriver which is just… a screwdriver! Brilliant! And the TARDIS is a hot air balloon! Wonderful stuff! Then we have the Cybermen, and their ‘Cybershades’ very strange creatures with cyber-faces but a sort of shaggy black carpet as the costume. Ok, they look pretty crappy.

The show is full of wonderful moments and reveals, it’s truly magical in places, sad in others. Highly entertaining. It was the best Christmas special of all.

Until… the Cyberking. Oh gawd. What were they thinking? A huge Cyberman walking around London destroying everything with like a control deck and Miss Hartigan at the controls. She appears to be an early feminist too, but the script doesn’t treat her well which I didn’t like and seems almost anti-feminist in the way it portrays her. It looks a bit rubbish this CyberKing, but in concept it’s even worse. It’s a kind of lame concept which may have been used because RTD couldn’t think of anything else when faced with the question – ‘What are the Cybermen up to?’.

The story is the first to be shot in HD, and it looks magnificent. The improvement in picture quality is massive. I enjoyed that aspect and the performances of the guest cast. And the first three quarters is pretty awesome. Hard to get past the CyberKing though…

6/10

Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, Midnight & Turn Left

Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead

Steven Moffat wrote this two-part story for series 4, and again he provides us with a fantastic tale full of terror, thought, and great characters. Enter Professor River Song (Alex Kingston), a character from the Doctor’s future who has travelled with the Doctor and it seems is much more than just a travelling companion, greeting the Doctor with ‘Hello Sweetie’.

The sets and CGI of the library planet are excellent in this one, it’s just very strong all round. We have as our monsters the Vasta Narada, who hide in the shadows and eat a person’s flesh in a split second. We have the central computer which is connected to the mind of a small girl, who saved everyone in the library before they died to the hard drive. We have elements, such as life inside the girl’s mind, which seems completely separate to the action in the library until things slowly come together in the second part.

It’s wonderfully crafted, emotional, clever, as good as Steven’s previous episodes which all bear the hallmarks of someone who loves to create and paint with his scripts. Donna Noble is sidelined a bit in this one. She ends up saved to the hard drive living a life out with children and a family before she is restored, and whilst it’s a nice story-arc for her, I don’t feel her character progresses throughout the story – which has been a hallmark of every story she’s been

in so far. But that’s ok, suddenly we have River Song who proves to be a very interesting character. Will River Song come back? Although she professes to be a big part of the Doctor’s future, I don’t think she needs to. Especially as we’ll have a new Doctor in the not so distant future (I am told this is David Tennant’s last full series as the Doctor).

And we also have the twist that the library was built on the home planet of the Vastra Narada. They lived in the forests there, but the forests were destroyed by the humans to make books and the library. So again life is not all black and white, they are bad and humans are good.

Alex Kingston

The humans have this strange device attached to their collars which allows them to speak very briefly after they die. It makes for a couple of very sad and moving scenes, but I have to question whether there would be any logical reason to invent such a thing. All in all though, the story has a wonderfully scary atmosphere. It’s written in such a way that you slowly understand what has been going on, where much of the first episode, whilst creepy, is rather strange and difficult to process.

Wonderful piece of writing, direction, everything really. So much time and care went into this one.

9/10

Midnight

‘Midnight’, I think, is Russel T Davies’ best work for Doctor Who, writing-wise that is. It’s a great twist on the character of our hero, the Doctor, that he basically loses the plot when people don’t stand in awe of him and do whatever he tells them to do. ‘Midnight’ is a claustrophobic masterpiece, incredibly creepy and scary, brilliantly played by the cast, including David Tennant, and it is one of the simplest Doctor Who stories there has ever been.

Lesley Sharp.

The Doctor and a group of people on a tour are trapped by a creature that lives outside on the planet Midnight where deadly exitonic sunlight shines and supposedly nothing can live in direct contact with the sun’s rays. The creature gets inside the tour vehicle and possesses Mrs Silvestri (Lesley Sharp) who starts to mimic what everyone says. Then she catches up and we have an eerie few minutes where everything the characters say Mrs Sivestri says at exactly the same time. She then

Lesley Sharp and David Troughton

starts mimicking only the Doctor, but before e speaks!

People become convinced that the Doctor is behind it all and are about to throw him out of the capsule, but the stewardess realises the Doctor is not to blame and pull Mrs. Silvestri out. It’s wonderfully played out by all, including David Troughton (formally of ‘The War Games’ and ‘The Curse of Peladon’, not to mention son of Patrick), Ayesha Antoine and Rakie Ayola. Excellent, scary stuff, presumably a cheapish episode to film too mostly stuck in the capsule.

9/10

Turn Left

Rose is back. Had a little work done I thinks!

For Series Four Russel T Davies took a different approach to the ‘Doctor-lite’ story compared to the previous two. Usually one story featured the Doctor and companion very little. However, for series four we have one story which doesn’t feature Donna a lot (‘Midnight’) and then ‘Turn Left’, all about Donna with only the Doctor featuring at the start and end. And both of these episodes worked very well.

‘Turn Left’ is perhaps a style of story the concept of time travel immediately lends itself too, yet I don’t think we’ve ever had a story that went down this exact route until ‘Turn Left’. What would have happened if you’d made a different choice earlier in your life? How would your life have been different? How would the world have been different?

Refugee life.

If Donna hadn’t taken the job at HC Clements where she was working when she met the Doctor in ‘The Runaway Bride’, then the events of this episode would have happened. The Doctor is killed in the encounter with the Racnos, and the world is open to the threat of invasion. This episode basically shows us an apocalypse on Earth, Donna and her family living as refugees, and then the return of Rose who is working with UNIT (in this Universe). She has to return to the decision and change it back to the way it was meant to go.

Chipo Chung returns as a sort of soothsayer who is working on behalf of a big bug which sits on Donna’s back (occasionally mentioned through this series in fact, now we know why) and feeds off alternative timelines or something like that. It’s a great episode, it’s thoughtful, confronting too when immigrant refugees are sent away to labour camps, moving and gets everything except the unconvincing bug just about right.

Bernard Cribbins is as always wonderful as Wilfred Mott, and Catherine Tate has shown so much depth and range during the series that I can’t believe I ever doubted her. This episode is sheer brilliance.

9/10

The Sontaran Stratagem, The Poison Sky, The Doctor's Daughter & The Unicorn and the Wasp

The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky

Sontar HA!

Helen Raynor gets asked back to write another two-part adventure, this time with the responsibility of bringing back both UNIT and the Sontarans. Throw Martha into the mix too, a teenage brainiac, oh and a second Martha, and you have… a bit of a mess really.

I’m not sure what this story is.  Is it trying to pay homage to the classic series? At points it feels like it is. It’s certainly better than Raynor’s first Doctor Who tale, but it still fails to hit the mark in my opinion. It begins at the end of ‘Planet of the Ood’ when the Doctor gets a call from Martha, who says ‘I’m bringing you back to Earth’. It’s a dreadful DREADFUL line. Martha is written differently, rather like she was in ‘Last of the Time Lords’, in this one. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to be in Martha’s character, she’s just not believable.

The Sontarans are rather good. We have Christopher Ryan who appeared as Kiv in ‘Mindwarp’ as their leader Starl, and he is fantastic, the makeup and mask work is also superb. Dan Starkey takes the role of Commander Skorr and makes a great Sontaran, but all the other Sontarans (and we see more than we have every seen before) are helmeted. So we just see two potato heads.

There is some nice moments with Donna’s mother and her grandfather, Wilfred Mott (Bernard Cribbens) when Donna goes back to see them. In contrast to Martha’s and Rose’s first absences, Donna’s mother has hardly noticed she’s been away.

It’s the plot and the resolution the principally lets the story down, along with Martha and her double, which I mostly put down to the writing, although I think we see that Freema Ageymann is not as versatile as she needs to be too. The Sontarans are using a device connected to half the world’s cars to convert the atmosphere so they can turn Earth into a cloning planet. They have a device which stops guns, which is good for them I guess as they appear to go down pretty easily when shot.

Then the Doctor finds a device which sets the gassy clouds alight without burning anything else thus destroying the Sontarans plans. Then Luke Rattigen (played by Ryan Samson, an American boy genius and a VERY annoying character) manages to rig the transmat so that he switches places with the Doctor in the Sontaran space ship and presses the destruct button. Meh, sorry but meh. That’s all I can say to those plot points. Add the doppelganger of Martha, it seems like a plot written for a different alien race and then adapted to try and fit in for Sontarans. Poorly.

4.5/10

The Doctor’s Daughter

Georgia Moffat

Woah. Wham bam that’s the quickest moving start to a story ever. The Doctor, Donna and Martha are whisked away to a far off planet. The TARDIS has detected the Doctor’s DNA there or something, the explanation is retconned into the end of the episode and makes no sense at all. Anyways the TARDIS speeds to this planet, where the Doctor and co. bump into some humans, a sample is taken from the Doctor and a sort of clone warrior is grown in 2.1 seconds flat, and the Doctor’s daughter is born.

The Hath.

The humans are fighting the Hath, a sort of fish race with a bottle of liquid attached to their mouths. They looked pretty good I thought. We have a runaround 45-minute episode where the humans and Hath all try to get to the ‘source’ first which they think is a weapon. They have apparently forgotten why they came to the planet in the first place, and appear to have been locked in war for years. Turns out it was only seven days. The source is in fact a terra forming device.

Anyways. There is a focus on killing and the fact that the Doctor never would. Which is quite nice I guess. Catherine Tate is great as Donna, who is proving an excellent foil for Tennant, and as the Doctor’s daughter Jenny, Georgia Moffat (daughter of Peter Davison) couldn’t have been more perfectly cast. And they brought her back to life at the end too just for the hell of it.

and... RUN!

Martha, on the other hand, is surplus to requirements and as she leaves at the end of the tale I have no idea why they put her in this one. She does have her own storyline but it all could have easily been covered with a bit of plot-restructuring.  The sets are underground tunnels, so sort of stock-standard I guess, but they are pretty good. The plot makes no rightly sense at all, despite the war and how quickly they can grow new generations of humans. So it’s another mixed bag. Donna works well with Doctor as I said, and with Jenny. That’s the highlight and here we can really see that the decision to bring Catherine Tate back as the companion was in fact an inspired choice.

6.5/10

The Unicorn and the Wasp

Fenella Woolgar as Agatha Christie.

The Doctor and Donna go back in time and find themselves at a party with Agatha Christie, and very quickly embroiled in a murder mystery! That was probably not that of a twist, right? This story is enormous fun and one I completely enjoyed. It sees some great guest appearances from Christopher Benjamin in his third Doctor Who tale, his last being ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’. Felicity Kendall also guest stars meaning the principle two characters from ‘The Good Life’ have now appeared in Doctor Who. It would be fair to say this was the more successful of the two appearances (Richard Briers appeared in ‘Paradise Towers’).

There’s not a lot to say. It was an awful lot of fun from start to finish, and includes a very funny and brilliant played scene by David Tennant and Catherine Tate when the Doctor has been poisoned and he’s trying to flush the poison out. The confrontation scene when the truth is revealed has a lovely lot of twists to it and is superbly played by all this was a wonderful ensemble piece. Especially well played was Agatha Christie herself, Fenella Woolgar.

The Doctor fights the poison - best scene of the episode!

Well done to Gareth Roberts who wrote this one, the idea of a wasp morphing into a human may seem a bit silly, but quite frankly the odd dose of silly does no-one any harm at all.

8.5/10