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

Planet of the Dead & Waters of Mars

Planet of the Dead

So they had an Easter Special in 2010. Well, I guess they had to. This story is a mixture of good and bad again. I think it look pretty fantastic, at least the stuff shot in the UAE in the desert certainly does, and for the most part being HD makes it all worthwhile. However, the CGI version of the red double decker bus looks pretty poor.

Lee Evans

RTD seems to have started with the idea of a London bus lost in the desert on a far-off planet. Ok. but then he needed more and besides vision, I’m not really sure what this story offers. Ok, it offers Michelle Ryan as Lady Christina de Souza, who is friggin awesome and I so wish had stayed as a companion. She is a cat burglar who starts the episode off by floating down on a wire and stealing a valuable gold cup from a museum. Doesn’t get much cooler than that?

But the plot is up to pretty much

nothing at all sadly. A massive swarm of metal creatures go from planet to planet through wormholes eating planets dry and leaving them deserts. Ok. But they really stretched it out to a full hour I felt, it could have been more effectively told in 45 minutes. I guess they had a lot of footage from the UAE and they didn’t want to waste it. We have a bunch of characters trapped on the bus which are quite under-utilised too, some of them were really interesting, especially the elderly couple. They basically just wait on the bus whilst the Doctor and Christina try to solve everything.

Then we have Lee Evans giving a wonderful performance as Malcolm which added a lot to the story, but for 60 minutes it did seem a little lacking to be fair.

6.5/10

The Waters of Mars

After watching this story through to the end, I have to say that it contains probably the most disturbing image of any Doctor Who story I have seen. Captain Adelaide Brooke (Lindsay Duncan) takes her own life, she shoots herself. Although we don’t see the moment she shoots herself, we do see her pull out the gun, and we do see a flash as the gun is fired. I’m going to say that considering the intended audience is families, and particularly children, I don’t believe this was appropriate for the show and I am left feeling very uneasy about it.

The episode itself is somewhat disturbing and extremely dark in nature. The idea of water that kills, or transforms, the ideas behind the tale I think are very strong and we have an almost ‘Gerry Davis-esque’ crew on the Mars base who are from all countries of the world with lots of accents. Ok, it’s mostly limited to Europe to be fair.

It’s also the old ‘tried and true’ base under siege storyline, and it’s tried and true because it works. There’s

The Doctor and Adelaide Brooke

wonderful elements emphasising the inevitability of what is going to happen, juxtaposed against the Doctor’s determination that sod it all, he’s basically God and if he wants to change established history then he will! Despite the dangers, as Adelaide’s daughter is inspired by her to become a pioneer of space travel herself.

So this is where it all gets a bit screwy, and the Doctor comes across as so angry. I’m not sure I bought it, and that’s not because of the performances but because of who the Doctor is and has been. He certainly was more chipper in the previous two specials. And we are left wondering how the two characters who survive, Mia and Yuri, could possibly integrate back into life on Earth, let alone explain how they got back home from Mars.

It is great to see Australia actor Peter O’Brien in the cast, a veteran of many Australian shows. I think the story was very solid, the effects and the direction (directed by Graeme Harper) were outstanding. A bit of a hard episode to judge. It’s a bit preachy in places and I wasn’t convinced with the way RTD wrote the Doctor in places.

7/10

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

42, Human Nature, The Family of Blood & Blink

42

Whilst this is not a great episode, it’s somewhat of an improvement from the previous three at least. Chris Chibnall wrote this one, and the concept is good I think – 42 minutes to live, the episode to play out in real-time, inspired by the show ‘24’. The sets are very good, the casting is solid, there’s a throwback in concept to ‘Planet of Evil’, Martha has some nice moments, and it looks good.

It’s got issues too, the idea of having to answer trivia to get through a whole bunch of doors grated with me and seemed to be a gimmick. There was some stuff I just couldn’t believe – the Doctor going outside in a space ship so close to the sun to save Martha for example. I liked the idea of the sun being alive, which is why they couldn’t leave with part of the sun on board the ship, but I was annoyed that the sun was then portrayed as evil and given a nasty catchphrase – ‘burn with me!’. As creepy as the phrase was, it just didn’t seem right to me.

Freema Ageyman hasn’t had the sort of character development that Billie Piper got. Her family has thus far been just used as tools to tell the plotlines, rather than developed characters like (as much as I disliked her) Jackie Tyler. Martha’s Mum is being used somehow by Mr Saxon to find out information on Martha and presumably the Doctor. Martha speaks on the phone to her mum a number of times in this episode, revealing it’s election day in Britain and presumably Mr Saxon is up for office. We’ve seen the ‘vote Saxon’ signs here and there too.

What it’s all about is perhaps more interesting than the stories we’re being told. ‘42’ feels like the Impossible Planet in many ways, the sets look similar, but I think the idea is better and far less… stupid. I wish the writer had chosen to make the sun more concerned about losing part of itself and less about being evil and creepy though.

6.5/10

Human Nature/The Family of Blood

Paul Cornell’s two-parter came from the book he wrote for the Seventh Doctor in the New Adventures series back in the 1990s. It’s set in 1913 at a boy’s school and on the whole is very good. It is certainly down on things that pissed me off or made me squirm. The only thing is, I’m not sure about the ending, and I’m not sure it fully fills the two episodes.

Paul Cornell is an excellent writer. He sets things up well, his character writing is top-notch, his ideas are wonderful. The idea that ‘what if the Doctor wasn’t the Doctor, what if he was human’ is a great place to start from. David Tennant gives his best performance here. Martha, sadly, is a bit generic. We have scarecrows as monsters, lovely! What more could you want?

The setting is perfect, and it’s shot wonderfully. They must have had a lot of late nights making this one! Some very good casting – especially Thomas Sangster as Tim Latimer. When you have young characters, it’s very important to find the right kid to play them! As Joan Redfern, John Smith’s ‘love-interest’, Jessica Hines does very well indeed. All Martha can do is regret that he’s not falling in love with her, which I must admit isn’t the strongest of concepts for a companion.

Thomas Sangster

The second part starts well, and the first part (Human Nature) is excellent TV, but after the battle at the school, it seems very stretched out for the last 25 minutes or so. It’s fine action and drama, as John Smith battles with the choice to open the watch. The Doctor is contained inside this fob watch and when opened John Smith will become the Doctor again, and John Smith is terrified. It’s wonderfully played by both Tennant and Jessica Hines, however it probably didn’t need to go for quite so long.

Then the ending. The Doctor was hiding from the Family of Blood as John Smith to spare them. Because in the end he imprisons all four members of the family in different places. One in a mirror – no, every mirror, one as a scarecrow forever, one in the heart of a star… I didn’t feel satisfied by that ending and I don’t like the idea, suddenly, that the Doctor is THAT powerful, or indeed it would seem magical too. Then what’s the point? He doesn’t beat them by doing something clever, or fighting them, in fact we don’t even see how it’s done. It’s just done, like magic. Well if it’s that easy, I’m surprised anyone goes up against him!

Despite those two issues, and especially on the strength of ‘Human Nature’, I still think this is a great story. It goes to show resolutions are hard to write well.

7.5/10

Blink

Steven Moffat’s contribution to series three is this story, the ‘Doctor-lite’ episode for the season. And we don’t see a lot of the Doctor or Martha at all, in a lot of ways it doesn’t feel like you’re watching an episode of Doctor Who to be honest.

The main character for this story is Sally Sparrow, played by Carey Mulligan (who would have made a great companion) who sneaks into an old abandoned house to take photographs, only to find there’s more going on there. Strange messages are left under the wall-paper from 1969 addressed to her. When she returns with her friend, her friend disappears just as a man arrives with a letter for Sally from her friend. This is the story where the phrase ‘timey-wimey’ is first heard, which does kind of describe this tale pretty well. Thankfully though, the concept isn’t that convoluted, it’s a reasonably logical story to follow with a host of wonderful elements to it.

Carey Mulligan as Sally Sparrow.

The Weeping Angels are the ‘monsters’ of the tale – creatures that turn to stone whenever someone can see them. It’s when you’re not looking that they move. What they do is send people back in time, rather than kill them, and feed off the displacement energy. I think that’s what they said! The Doctor is in 1969 with Martha without the TARDIS, and hides messages for Sally Sparrow on DVD easter eggs. Sally has a conversation with the Doctor on the DVD, whilst someone else writes everything down. It’s very clever, because later (for Sally Sparrow) yet earlier (for the Doctor) they bump into each other and Sally gives the Doctor the transcript so he can read it. So it all sort of works which is part of the beauty of ‘Blink’.

Also, it looks amazing. Not a high-budget story at a guess, but one very very well realised. The angels themselves look incredibly creepy, and I think this was voted the best new series episode of all in a poll somewhere? Not that I read the polls.

That seems perhaps a bit of stretch, but it’s certainly a great episode.

8.5/10

Gridlock, Daleks in Manhattan, Evolution of the Daleks and The Lazarus Experiment

Gridlock

The Face of Boe.

Into the past, into the future, the far future, a hundred years or something after the events of ‘New Earth’, but we are back on New Earth the planet for this tale about cars stuck on a motorway. It doesn’t make perfect sense – the city of New New York has been in lockdown after a mood (Davies decides to tackle drugs as one of his themes) went feral and became an infection. So everyone is stuck going very slowly around and around the motorway whilst the city is in quarantine. So how can rain get through? Because when the Doctor and Martha arrive it is raining.

Thomas Kincade Brannigan - Ardal O'Hanlan.

The majority of the episode is spent going from car to car with some lovely little characters, the most memorable played by Ardal O’Hanlan who is just a wonderful actor. He could play the Doctor one day I reckon, but in this story he’s a cat, called Thomas Kincade Brannigan. He’s a wife who’s human, and in their car they have a bunch of kittens!

Down at the bottom of the motor way are… the Macra. An interesting and perhaps somewhat out of the

The Macra lurk at the bottom of the expressway. CGI Macra

blue as a returning monsters, not that they play much of a role in the story, as in the second Doctor tale they live off the fumes, but apart from snatching the odd car they are pretty quiet. The Face of Boe reveals to the Doctor ‘You are not alone’, before dying. Who is the Face of Boe? Maybe it’s not important, or maybe we will find out in a later episode. A nice creation. The final piece of the story is this beautiful hymn that the motorists sing from time to time. It’s quite moving although strangely there appears to be a bit of a backing track at times.

Heading towards the light.

The story has its limitations. One – the CGI is very very clearly CGI. The time and money required to make it look more real I guess just wasn’t available so that’s a little disappointing. And the fact that for 12 years or more people have been stuck on the motorway without doing anything is a little hard to swallow. But it’s a pretty good one all up.

7.5/10

Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks

Miranda Raison as Tallulah - three ls and an h.

I know this story is not well liked, and after viewing it, it’s not hard to see why. It’s clunky, it features bad accents and bad acting, the concept is all a bit weak, and it’s more concerned with where the story is set that anything else.

I don’t know how this story came about or evolved, but I can only presume Russel T Davies came to the writer Jacqueline Raynor asking for a story set in New York City, or perhaps the brief was even more exact – NYC during the depression with Daleks. I don’t know exactly. Some writers work well to a brief, others don’t. Maybe that’s an issue here, maybe it was too constrained for Raynor I just don’t know.

Quite a view.

The Daleks find themselves underneath New York City in the depression, and are anxious to get the Empire State Building finished early so that a lightning strike mixed with solar flare activity will give them the energy they need to bring a whole bunch of new ‘human’ Daleks to life. The Doctor’s DNA mixes it all up though and the human Daleks destroy two of the real Daleks, who have already killed Dalek Sek, leaving one Daleks to scream ‘Emergency Temporal Shift’ and disappear – exactly how these four Daleks (the Cult of Skaro) escaped their previous misadventure.

Dalek Sek combines with Mr Diagorous to make... this.

They have pig slaves. They have turned people into part-pigs to serve them. WHY? WHY OH WHY? It’s pointless and certainly adds nothing to the plot. Two of the main characters are hard to deal with as an audience. Miranda Raison is Tallulah, with three ls and an h as she tells everyone she introduces herself too. She’s the star of a revue at a theatre not too far from the Daleks’ base of operations. Just because the character’s a stage star though shouldn’t mean that all her lines are written like they are part of a musical. It’s terribly clichéd stuff ‘Hands in the air and no funny business!’. Oh dear dear dear. And the accent is very much a ‘stage’ New York accent. The sort of thing you hear if you go to London’s West End and watch a British production of an American musical.

And pig slaves. Every story needs em, right?

But she’s not a patch on Mr Diagorus, as if that’s even a real name. Actually, before he mingles with Dalek Sek he’s fine, but after they become one, apart from looking ridiculous, it becomes one of the worst acted parts in Doctor Who history. Ok, he was given a seriously tough job, but it’s honestly dreadful. I am sorry. But it’s pure pain watching that character.

Actually, much of the two parts are seriously painful.

3.5/10

The Lazarus Experiment

Professor Lazarus (Gatiss) Before the process.

And after, talking to the Doctor and Martha.

Unfortunately it doesn’t get better. ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ shows that just because you’ve only got 45 minutes doesn’t mean you need one idea and see if you can stretch it to make a successful episode. The name is misleading, although Lazarus does appear to come back from the dead at one point, but I would have thought bringing the dead back to life was the point of the episode, yet it is all about turning back time to make the young look old.

And the guy’s name is Lazarus?

And then he changes a bit more again.

Please. There is some nice stuff with Martha’s family – we are back in a modern day setting so that’s nice. And her mother is warned about the Doctor, and this has come from Mr Saxon, a name we might have heard a couple of times so far, but now it seems Mr Saxon could be a significant character leading up to the finale. We will wait and see I guess.

It’s all very icky this episode – Mark Gatiss plays Lazarus, who is rejuvenated back to a young man (he

Most of the Jones' family.

starts off as an old man). The aged make-up sadly is rather obviously. Not bad per se, but obvious. He turns into a feral monster which really is not the best work the production team have done thus far, the face doesn’t look like Gatiss (although it might actually be him) and it’s all clearly CGI. Very quickly the story is about hunting down the monster and killing it and little else. And like ‘Timelash’ it appears to be resolved too quickly so they brought the thing back to life for another fifteen minutes of fun.

Worse still is the fact that Lazarus is a creepy old pervert. Really it’s dreadful.

2/10