The End of Time

Well. Yes. Thank goodness that’s over really. I mean there’s stuff to like in there, don’t get me wrong, and it’s very very VERY epic, looks amazing in HD and all that. AND it has Timothy freaking Dalton as Rassilon, which is bloody brilliant, and Bernard Cribbins also being bloody brilliant, but at the end of the day, it’s hard to say that was ‘good’.

It's flippin' Timothy Dalton!

The Master is back, brought to life by some sort of witchcraft it seems which beggars belief honestly what a load of rot. John Simms however gives a great performance over the two parts, that I can’t fault, but the things RTD writes for the Master are not particularly well thought out or interesting. In particular his need to eat, the speed at which he devours food and humans, and more so the entire plotline of turning everyone on Earth into himself. That to me was just a gimmick. Ok, probably not a cheap one, but a gimmick none the less. Then we have Barack Obama’s plan to bring about economic prosperity which is written in as if it was aimed at 6 year olds.

John Simm (the Master) is up to some odd stuff..

We have RTD’s treatment of Donna, who ends up getting married in the end as if that’s the most satisfying way to resolve her character arc. After the brilliant use of Donna over series four, finale excepted, this was really unsatisfying. Then we have the last fifteen minutes where the Doctor, knowing the end is nigh, still has time to go and see everyone he’s met during his tenth incarnation when you just want him to DIE. Well, I did, it went on forever.

Sorry to all those into Doctor Who solely because of David Tennant’s hair.

Then we have the Time Lords. And personally, despite the awesomeness of Timothy FREAKING Dalton, I think they should have stayed locked in the time war. I guess there wasn’t anything bigger to bring back and RTD wanted a big finish for himself and David Tennant. And it is epic. I’ll give him that. But sadly this episode, these episodes, are a reflection of the parts of the era that I didn’t like – the overblown finale solved by touching a button, or in this case, shooting a gun at a machine.

He doesn't want to go. Which is why, I guess, he takes so long to do it!

The Master is just weird in this. Bouncing about in the air like a jack-rabbit, eating a turkey in a few seconds, Rassilon has a bizarre metal glove which zaps people a lot, we have the Naismith guy and his daughter who are barely used and stupid typical RTD characters who merely serve a purpose in the script. BUT it is in HD, and has an awesome sequence where the Doctor pilots the space ship back to Earth and Star Wars memories are invoked as Wilfred Mott shoots a laser cannon at incoming missiles.

And David Tennant. Look, my impression actually improved of the tenth Doctor as he went along, only the first David Tennant series really annoyed me, he was just too smug and a lot of that was to do with Rose. Oh by the way, Bille Piper has clearly had work done on her lips, evident also in series 4. Those lips just looking plain creepy now. I find it very hard to reconcile that the love of the Doctor’s life is a 19 year old girl. I’m sorry, I do and that’s RTD’s fault.

So long Bernard Cribbins, it's been an honour.

Tennant works best with Donna, a wonderful balance between the two lit up the show for a year, and he’s not bad with Bernard Cribbins either, that was a wonderful piece of casting and who thought the ‘companion’ for the last Tennant adventure would be someone approaching 80 years old, and male?

The RTD era is now over. If you take the series finales out and this one, which is effectively the Daddy of all series finales, then I think generally the episodes have been excellent. His casting has been good too, David Tennant being the most popular Doctor ever, and Christopher Eccleston, in my opinion, as perfect a casting job as could be dreamt of. I really loved Eccleston as the Doctor, it was an inspired choice. Billie Piper was a risk that turned out to be genius, and Catherine Tate was even better. Freema Ageyman was less successful, she starts off well but the writing for Martha unfortunately waned, and I think to be honest, some of the things they asked her to do at the end of series 3 and when she returned in series four were a bit beyond her range.

As a writer, opinion is divided on RTD. The man who wrote the each series finale also contributed – ‘Rose’, ‘Midnight’, ‘Turn Left’, and ‘Utopia’ amongst other episodes. All brilliant in my books. He shaped the seasons well, and he got better at it each year. Series arcs, character development, all that stuff he was great at. Was there too strong an emphasis on emotions? Probably. Was the Tennant-Piper pairing grating. Definitely. But the guy brought the show back. He made it a hit. I forgive him his foibles. All of them.

As for ‘The End of Time’, I wish I could give it a great score. But it really is awful!

2/10

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

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

Partners in Crime, The Fires of Pompeii & Planet of the Ood

Partners in Crime

So, when I heard that Donna would be the companion for the fourth series (2008) I was somewhat aggrieved because to be frank she was pretty hard to stomach in ‘The Runaway Bride’, but all in all you have to give it a go, right? So I am prepared to see how it all pans out over series four. ‘Partners In Crime’, by Russel T Davies, is the series opener, reuniting Donna (Catherine Tate) with the Doctor as they try to solve the mystery of Adipose Industries, a company that specialises in weight loss.

So, when I heard that Donna would be the companion for the fourth series (2008) I was somewhat aggrieved because to be frank she was pretty hard to stomach in ‘The Runaway Bride’, but all in all you have to give it a go, right? So I am prepared to see how it all pans out over series four. ‘Partners In Crime’, by Russel T Davies, is the series opener, reuniting Donna (Catherine Tate) with the Doctor as they try to solve the mystery of Adipose Industries, a company that specialises in weight loss.

The plot is somewhat lightweight, but there’s some good comedic moments as Donna and the Doctor keep investigating but not quite bumping into each other. Donna is not the normal companion, I’ll give you that, and perhaps it will work. Eventually they find each other, solve it all and Donna declares she is going with the Doctor who doesn’t seem so convinced. David Tennant is rather good in this one, and there are some great scenes, especially on the window-cleaner’s lift. The Adipose themselves don’t look very convincing, again it is a clear case of CGI, and I think again because we know how it’s done, it makes it harder to believe.

It’s not one of the stronger opening episodes, and like ‘New Earth’, it aims to be comedic before anything else. Nevertheless it is pretty enjoyable, and Donna comes across as less angry and more excitable which I think was a good decision for the character. We will see how it all progresses. Oh and yes, spoiler alert, we have the mysterious appearance of Rose (Billie Piper) for a brief second at the end of the episode, presumably that’s something to do with the season arc…

6.5/10

Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred Mott.

The Fires of Pompeii

Peter Capaldi.

The Doctor takes Donna to ancient Rome for her first proper trip in the TARDIS, except it isn’t Rome, it’s Pompeii the day before Vesuvius erupts. A great idea for a story. However, it’s a bit hit and miss. It does have some great moments, in particular where Donna points out things to the Doctor about himself (specifically saving the family in the end).

Hello there!

I’m not sure all the elements work well together. We have people turning to stone for example, a sisterhood, and the creatures from Pirovillia, a planet which disappeared. The Doctor is then responsible for the eruption, which destroys the fire monsters. It’s an exploration of cause and effect, of being part of history rather than changing history. It’s interesting that the Doctor needs Donna to spend the whole story badgering him before he will considering saving one family from the ravages of the volcano.

The monsters are under-utilised and under-explained, as is the sisterhood. Perhaps that’s a pitfall of a 45-minute episode, you can’t fully explore or exploit elements of the plot. I loved the idea of a marble circuit. I despised the use of accents in this story, although the idea that Donna sounded Welsh is quite funny.

Some good guest performances here, including Peter Capaldi who is going to be the 12^th Doctor, and Karen Gillan in a small role as one of the sisterhood, who apparently is the next companion come series 5… The story is ok, a bit mad which is fine, but also a bit of a hodge-podge of elements.

6/10

Planet of the Ood

Tim McInnery

I liked ‘Planet of the Ood’ quite a lot. Not just because it refers to the Ood being related to the Sensorites, of the appearance of Percy from Black Adder (the brilliant Tim McInnery). This is quite beautiful at times, and horrid at others. The sad song that the Ood sing is very moving, and great work from Murray Gold. Catherine Tate cries when she hears it as Donna, she is really growing on me. This story pulls no punches, it is quite clearly anti-slavery, and you could even say anti-human.

An Ood shows the Doctor his 'hind-brain'.

It doesn’t all work. When McInnery’s character turns into an Ood in the end, that just doesn’t right true or even as a fitting resolution for the character. But the idea of three parts of the brain is quite original (as far as I know), the poor having to carry their hind-brain in their hands, their connection to the collective brain, it’s all great plotting.

When the Ood turn rabid, when they start killing, that’s really scary stuff as well. Kudos to the writer, Keith Temple, for turning out such a great tale. The Oodsphere looks beautiful too.

8.5/10

The Runaway Bride, Smith and Jones & The Shakespeare Code

The Runaway Bride

Catherine Tate and the Doctor

So, Rose is gone and before the Doctor can say ‘I heart you’, there’s a new woman in the TARDIS, dressed up for a wedding. HER wedding. Yes, it’s star of the Catherine Tate show, Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, the runaway bride (incidentally the title of the 2006 Christmas special). Actually, she hasn’t run away at all, she’s full of Huon particles which draw her suddenly to the TARDIS in one of the many plot issues this story faces.

We have a giant spider-thing with a lisp and a comic turn, a seriously moronic to the point of being unbelievable bride-groom Lance (played by Don Gilet), the return of pilot fish and killer Christmas trees just because it’s Christmas, and the highlight of the episode (aside from Tennant being separated from Piper) is this amazing chase down an expressway by the Doctor in the TARDIS. Now that’s the sort of thing that they could never have afforded to do back in the classic series, and it’s pretty impressive.

The Doctor’s all mopey about Rose, which is to be expected but golly I hope it doesn’t continue for too long, cause it’s gonna get old mighty quick. Donna Noble is a bolshy, opinionated and written to be stupid ginger who is pretty hard to take at times and not exactly endearing to the audience. Thank goodness this is only a one-off and she won’t be returning!

The Doctor flushes the spiders down a big plug-hole, fitting I guess although he doesn’t call himself on it which I was expecting. It’s light-hearted and a bit of fun really, not great and perhaps a little long, but enjoyable none-the-less.

7/10

Smith and Jones

Martha Jones (Freema Ageyman) centre.

The weekly blood-sucking villain

The third series begins with an introduction episode for Martha Jones, played by Freema Ageyman. Interestingly she played a small role in ‘Army of Ghosts’ before being deaded, no doubt that’s what caught the eye of Russel T Davies. She makes a good start here and kudos for Davies for going with an African-British companion for the first time EVER, not only that she’s studying to become a doctor and has wealthy parents. A whole bunch of stereotypes zapped in one episode!

A Judoon gets to work.

It’s a very solid, fun episode with strange alien creatures that look like rhinos and a hospital taking a ride to the moon with rain that falls up. We get a little look into Martha’s life via her sister, brother, mother and father, although we don’t go as deep as with Rose. Martha seems pretty enamoured with the doctor which could be an issue…

It goes to show you don’t have to have a universe-ending scenario for a successful episode of Doctor Who.

Martha's sister, Tish (Gugu Mbatha-Raw)

This has a woman assimilating human blood in her system, hiding from the Judoon (rhino creatures) in a hospital. Martha makes a good start by restarting the Doctor’s hearts and saving his life, apparently his lack of blood wasn’t that much of an issue after he had been drained.

I’m not sure there’s much else to say on this one, it’s rather very good.

9/10

The Shakespeare Code

The Globe Theatre.

This little gem was again highly enjoyable. Martha is a breath of fresh air from Rose, and of course we have William Shakespeare in this one making it already a memorable little tale. Now, it’s far from perfect and a little hard to understand. We seem to have an idea for an alien race mixed up strangely with witchcraft, which is all a little odd.

The head witch, Lilith (Christina Cole)

The idea that these creatures, Carrionites, find a certain power in the word is a great little idea, but then they were also made witches which muddies the waters. We even see one flying on a broomstick. It’s a bit like the vampires in ‘Curse of Fenric’, not sure of just how essential they were to the story.

Shakspeare (Dean Lennox Kelly)

Anyhoo, there’s a lot to like for the Shakespeare fans and Doctor Who fans, such as myself. There are a number of little Shakspeare ‘in-jokes’ if you will which are quite endearing, even if perhaps they do number just a few too many. To basically end with Martha rejecting Shakespeare because of his breath is very funny though. It’s interesting and probably a good thing that Martha’s skin-colour was mentioned but the reactions of that time period was not concentrated on (to people of African descent), as they could have made a whole episode around that issue.

This is purely a fun episode, not one to be taken all too seriously, and one that can be enjoyed on a number of levels. So is it a bit silly to have three witches as the main protagonists? Maybe. Maybe not. Doctor Who is allowed to be silly at times if it tells a good story, and this one does.

8/10