The Ood Cast

Now it’s my turn to be the contrarian.

Ummmm

Sorrrrrry

But

I really didn’t like it.

Gasp.

I actually nearly switched off after the resolution to the multiple cliffhanger. Sorry, I said resolution, I was aiming at cop out and accidently said resolution. No one was in any danger at all. Come ON! I lost count of the number of characters in there, shoe horned in like Old Mother Wotsit and her shoe. Davros did practically nothing, what a waste! A new Doctor was grown so Rose could have him, blergh. It was all, oooooo we are in danger!!! Oh, no we are not so that’s all right then.

Towing a planet through space? No, come ON! What would happen to the gravitational forces and therefore the atmosphere? Someone tell me if that’s possible?

You had to have some knowledge of the Christmas Invasion (the hand and Harriet Jones) and Doomsday (Rose, Bad Wolf Bay, Jackie and Mickey). You had to know who Captain Jack and Martha were. If all those companions hadn’t been involved then we might have had more plot.

What a build up to Davros’ end of series entrance only for him to do almost nothing. The comparision of the Doctor and Davros as the two destroyers of worlds was interesting and I was surprised that it wasn’t explored further.

One thing did work for me! (Hooray!). The Doctor Donna. Nice idea; the companion that becomes the Doctor but cannot ‘take’ being part Time Lord. (Loved the opportunity to show that Doctor could fix the chameleion circuit if he wants to). How sad that this wonderful hero will never know what she did with the Doctor. What a down beat ending too. I hope Donna does make something of her life now. But then, it’s only a story.

Oh well…. I love Doctor Who. And I love what Russell T Davies has done with it. It’s just this time I didn’t.

Saturday was supposed to be a momentous day for Doctor Who – it was RTD’s big finale, in effect. An episode where he pulled together as many loose strings from the last four years as he could fit into an hour and tried to tie them all together once and for all.

We finally saw the door slammed on the ridiculous Doctor-and-Rose-sitting-in-a-tree… “tension”. Mickey finally moved on (to Torchwood?). Martha finally seems to have joined Torchwood permanently. Donna is back with her family – having got better and better as the series rolled on. And we got that answer to the regeneration question.

But did it all come off?

I think so, yes – but to be honest, I’m not all that sure.

It was fantastic to watch – a real visual feast. But it was a disappointing way to close off such a massive story… There was so much to go on, so much promise, and we got a bit of a cop-out and a lot of confusion…

Personally I didn’t mind the cheesy family-stuff with the Doctor and his “children of time” as Davros put it. Actually, the way he said it made it all pretty chilling. I loved the delightfully-mad Dalek Kaan, his false prophecies and ultimate betrayal – and that the Doctor even offered to save Davros’ life at the end.

But I didn’t really understand why all the companions were needed – excepting maybe as a distraction for the Doctor. A particular highlight for me was Davros. The scenes involving him were magnificent – and particularly when he thought he was in total control. Ahough they could have and should have done a lot more with him than they did.

The two-way meta-crisis: interesting idea, although its back to RTD’s “imaginative” science… I really enjoyed the consequences – the Doctor who talked like Donna, and finally an explanation to the Ood’s mysterious Doctordonna… But for me, it was more Star Trek than Doctor Who, and I have never been a huge fan of Star Trek…

I thought what they did with Donna’s “death” was excellent – and she was finally properly likeable – proper human emotions in trying to deal with a situation so far removed from being “just a temp. From Essex.” The extra Doctor was borderline for me. I sort of saw it coming, but hoped that it would be something else. I think it was handled well until the Bad Wolf Bay bit, and then it got nauseating, but at least it got the romance element out of everything (every cloud and all that).

The ending in particular, with Wilf, was lovely. Very sad, and I am particularly sad to see Bernard Cribbins’ place in the series go with Donna. But it was a good ending to a very good year in Doctor Who.

Three things though – C, G and I.

The Daleks, for me, had their appeal in being an endless force – no matter how many were destroyed or disabled, more and more came after it. Part of the secret was that you couldn’t see or know just how many there were. Genesis, Revelation or Planet of the Daleks wouldn’t have been as tense or dramatic or good if you could seen thousands of them flitting around on their way to battle stations, coffee breaks etc…

But when the Doctor walks out into a massive space, filled with flying Daleks, I lose interest. It looks like a hoard of fruit flies bustling around a discarded apple core. Its not threatening, or scary. It’s preposterous.

The other bit that bothered me was the whole “towing the earth back home” bit. As a concept and a plot point, its fine – it’s a very Doctor thing to do. But why oh why oh why did they have to show it? It looked cheap and silly. We didn’t need to see it.

I could see it working with say, Tom Baker – but it would certainly not be shown… It would have been one of those little asides… You know, like this:

Sarah: But Doctor, what about the Earth?
Doctor: What about it?
Sarah: For goodness sake, its still stranded miles from where it should be!
Doctor: Oh that. I towed it back into position using the TARDIS. (Teeth fill the screen) Come on, let’s go and find a cup of tea…

And that scene where they’re all flying the TARDIS… it was the first time in a long, long time that I’ve wanted to go and make a cup of tea in the middle of Doctor Who (for the record, the last time was while I was watching a video at uni… and my VCR was a fancy model with a pause button and everything…)

All in all, it was brilliant – if self-referential and a bit messy- a real climax to the first four seasons, and despite its flaws, I’m glad it was so big and bold. What a fantastic way of clearing the decks for the Vast Toffee* to step in.

And then there was the trailer (or should I say “spoiler”) for the Christmas special. What was it again?

Oh yes:”Coming this Christmas… The return of the Cybermen.”

Well. Thanks.

That’s the surprise taken out of that one then. Where are your spoilers now, River Song?!

Still, I suppose that stopped The Sun leaking it later on.

*Vast Toffee MN (Master of Nightmares) – Steven Moffat – brilliant anagram courtesy of Staggering Stories…

My good friend Andrew wrote me an email this afternoon concerning ‘Turn Left’, it went something (or almost exactly) like this:

“But if the Doctor died at the end of the Runaway Bride then he wouldn’t have been able to stop the Carrionites. Or the Daleks. Or The Family of Blood. Or the Weeping Angels. Or the Pyrovilles. So Earth History would have been completely knackered from at least the eruption of Vesuvius, no? Or do RTD scripted invasions carry greater potential danger than all of the above?

It’s time for your timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly Oodcast post to sort all this out!”

It’s a conundrum and an arresting one at that. For a series based around the central conceit of time travel, Dr Who (particularly this new iteration) plays its cards surprising close to its chest where matters of temporal chronology are concerned. RTD OBE would rather tell a good story than get bogged down in the geeky nuts and bolts of it and more power to him if that’s how he feels. However, I’m a Dr Who fan, dammit, and for a lot of us the geeky nuts and bolts are not beside the point, rather they are the point. No, perhaps that’s overstating it slightly but they are an integral part of the tissue of rarified pleasures that make up the dna of the show. So, with that in mind, and with every intention of arriving at an answer to Andrew’s query at some point down the line, it is my great pleasure to present:

Chris Sigma’s Laws of Time Travel* **

First Law: Time Lords are creatures of time

Wow. Incisive stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. Let me unpack this a bit for you so you can see why it’s relevant. What I mean is this: time is a Time Lord’s natural habitat, they move through it as easily as a Silurian through water or a human through nitrous rich air. It’s natural for them, it’s the way they’re built. Witness the Doctor’s extra sensory perceptions, he can literally see time in flux, respond to its ebbs and flows, he is as aware of changes in time as keenly as we perceive changes in temperature or light. Also, long time fans of the show will recognise that the TARDIS is less a vehicle and more an extension of the Doctor’s physiognomy. He’s not just a bloke with a time machine, to all extents and purposes he is part time machine, the TARDIS in this case analogous to a set of gills or an exo-skeleton – a physical, outward manifestation of an evolutionary advantage.

Now this is all well and good but how does it help us explain time travel? Aha, read on my confounded friend and I will elucidate. You see, if we accept that it is a natural state of affairs for the Doctor to be traveling in time then we can also accept that his personal timeline was never meant to be linear. Whereas we Earth bound organism were only ever meant to travel A to B, time wise, the Doctor’s personal history is more like a cosmic plate of spaghetti, all over the place basically. Where as a human companion is being pulled out of their timeline when traveling in the TARDIS, the Doctor is merely fulfilling a function of his existence. The crucial point here though is that the Doctor can no more travel backwards through his personal timeline than we can decide to visit last Tuesday. He may treat human history like a personal toy box to rummage through at will but he’s as powerless as anyone else to go back and change his own past. That’s why he can’t go back and save Adric or tell his 4th incarnation to touch those two wires together in ‘Genesis’ and win the Time War without a shot being fired. The only time he can cross his own personal history is if he has played no active role in events*** (like Father’s Day) and even then the results can be devastating. From a distance it looks like he can go anywhere and see anything but in actual fact his travels cause time to coalesce around him, possibilities solidifying into certainties as he experiences them. Setting history in stone by his very presence.

Second Law: Gallifrean Mean Time

So why can the Doctor change Earth’s history and not his own? The most popular theory involves a concept called Gallifrean Mean Time (or GMT). This states that the universe has an event horizon, a present day in effect that advances forwards and before which one can no longer time travel. All Time Lords, wherever they are in time and space, share this awareness of what is the present, even though they are all over the place, all over time in different incarnations, shot through the universe like a stick of rock, only one of those incarnations is ever the ‘present’ Time Lord. The rest are fixed past selves or possible futures. The twist in the tale is that this ‘present day’ is actually still billions of years in the past and Earth is actually just a probable future planet (made more probable, it must be assumed, by the amount of it’s future history that has been fixed in place by the Doctor and other time travelers experiencing it). GMT also explains why there is only ever one president of Gallifrey at any given moment, why the Doctor knows what time period to visit if he gets a distress signal from his own world and why he only ever meets the Master one time after another in a linear order despite jumping between times and places. It also explains why there was only five Doctors to choose from at the time of ‘The Five Doctors’ and not thirteen. Most of all it explains why he can never see his own people again, despite them all being time travelers, the event horizon of the present has passed by the destruction of Gallifrey, committing it to the past, and he can never go back there, nor can anyone from there ever be in the same place as him at the same time. The Doctor has to obey the second law of time travel just as surely as we have to obey the law of gravity, he can bend it but he can’t break it. There are things that are lost to him forever.

Right, on to Andrew’s question. Armed with these theories the answer becomes pretty straight forward (I hope). When the creature forces Donna to turn right rather than left it creates a parallel universe where the Doctor has died and everything has gone to hell in a hand basket. But this is certainly not a fully fledged parallel universe of the kind we visited in The Age of Steel. It is a rickety, cowboy-builder-esque construction created by a creature of dubious power. We are told time and again in the episode that reality has been bent around Donna herself, the changes have been made with her as the conduit so we can reasonably assume the new universe shares her linear limitations when it comes to time. Consequently, the only changes that are made are one’s where the Doctor’s wibbly-wobbly timeline intersect with Donna’s timeline from the right-turn moment onwards. There’s no way that the creature could extrapolate every change that the Doctor’s death would have across all time and space, it’s host is an ordinary, A to B, time-bound human and so it can only affect change in one direction – forwards. In fact, it is entirely possible that this new universe doesn’t even have a history before the point of Donna’s decision – that it merely branches off from the main continuum and exists in a little paradoxical bubble by itself.

(If we also take the second law into account, we can really see the creature has bitten off more than it can chew. Because the Doctor manifestly didn’t die during The Christmas Invasion and that has now been set in stone. Time can not just shift slightly around such a colossal error. That is why the whole bodged-up, rubbish, fragile parallel universe came into existence in the first place.)

So there we have it – it was one crappy time beetle against the last gate-keeper of an intrinsic function of the universe’s temporal physics (or the champion of time to give him another name). And the stupid beetle lost. Hope that helps.

* Specifically in the Whoniverse, this doesn’t hold true for Back to the Future, Quantum Leap, the Terminator milieu or JCVD action classic ‘Time Cop’.

** I would be wrong to pass this off as all my own work. Rather it is a bastardisation of hundreds of things I’ve read over the years all cobbled together into a Frakenstein-esque whole. I’d gladly name my sources if I could but unfortunately I’ve forgotten most of them, I seem to remember several copies of DWM, an editor’s note in a Virgin New Adventures book and one of those interminable Dr Who encyclopedia of the mid-80s all played a part. So well done to you guys!

*** Or through massive Time Lord intervention, probably holding it all together with some sort of paradox machine on a planetary scale (see any episode where the Doctor meets himself)

I find straight-up horror films pretty boring these days. I almost think its fair to say that if a film states that it is a horror film, and is not made in Japan – its probably not very scary unless you’re a horror virgin or too young to see one. They generally end up in three categories, in my experience – the unheard-of, non-english-language original version, the plastic-bimbo-populated Hollywood remake, and the half-baked predictable teen-horror.

What’s impressive with Doctor Who at the moment, is how far they seem willing to push the boundaries for the timeslot they’ve been shoved in (I say shoved in: series 1-3 were all shown in a slot an hour later – and all pulled in roughly a million more viewers per week).

But this hasn’t quietened down the ambition of the production team. This series has had a feel of the inevitable about it – a kind of running dread that has wound its way around the storylines. But – no stories that have tried to freak viewers out with “scary” CGI monsters… Not that spring to mind, anyway.

And RTD’s episode, Midnight, seems to be the pinnacle – so far, anyway.

I’ve said before that I have my doubts about some of RTD’s episodes. In fact, I wasn’t overly impressed with Partners In Crime – although I enjoyed it…

I have found some of his other episodes a bit suspect – especially with Rose and the 10th Doctor. My personal view being that series 1 served Rose better as a character than series 2 with all the will-they-won’t-they rubbish that came along with it… A main culprit of that must have been RTD, being in charge of the overall “story arc”, and it seemed to be his episodes where that whole romance thing was dwelt on. I was disappointed with the start to series 2 – in particular New Earth, and I really wasn’t sure about the Peter Kay monster and pavement-love in Love and Monsters.

But, with Martha, his writing seemed to hit the mark more. And even more so with Donna. Or in the case of Midnight, without Donna…

This showed how far Doctor Who has come, I think. It wasn’t a monster-fest. It wasn’t a space war. It wasn’t an invasion. We didn’t even see the monster or get to hear what it was. And that was its strongest hand. Something that particularly Steven Moffatt has played on regularly is what people genuinely fear, and RTD has just pushed on into the psychological territory with this episode. People have an amazing talent by blowing fears up to huge proportions just by talking themselves into believing it… Just like this group of tourists.

Opinion seems divided with the newspapers, anyway. The Times were broadly critical, the Guardian were extremely enthusiastic. Out of the two, the Guardian had the better-written review, even if that’s because the reviewer seems to have approached the episode in a better frame of mind. The Times had a point, possibly, about the episode being a bit wordy, but it the reviewer was needlessly cynical, and doesn’t seem to have bothered either doing any research on this year’s series or taking a sense of humour to the sofa with him.

I agreed with this:

“Midnight felt too much of a writing exercise to be really scary”

Well, to an extent. I think its proved with the moment when Sky looks up at the Doctor for the first time after she is possessed. Her head movements and the way she looks through him really was frightening.

I don’t agree that Tennant’s Doctor is becoming irritating, though – in context of the whole series, he’s not been short on confidence (after all, why should he be?), and I personally found the arrogant comments funny.

But on the whole, Midnight was great. RTD may well have been watching the Horror of Fang Rock when writing – the claustrophobic atmosphere is every bit as good, and its well-realised without going OTT with the effects.

There is just one thing though. I don’t see why the “hostess” would do what she did. She seemed far more concerned with rules and regulations than the good of her passengers…

Strong performances from another really good cast made this even better. And at least this monster wasn’t unrealistic!

Oh so often in television, cliffhangers are abused. Cruelly used to drag viewers back against their better instincts to watch the next installment of whatever it is they’re watching. And often, this is a complete let-down. Imagine sitting back to watch the new episode of Eastenders because the end of last night’s has intrigued you – only to find out that its still a soap opera of negligable merit about depressing people and their petty little existences. Nothing is ever discussed – always dismissed as either “it’s family” or in fisticuffs. Or a bottling. It is London, after all.

Where are the Krays when you need them, eh?

Well, I’m always worried that a cliffhanger in Doctor Who was just such a hook to drag you into a mediocre fishing net, filled with slippery little bores that rumble on endlessly about continuity, mythology and characters. Incidentally, I’d like to set up a forum for people to discuss and enjoy the good doctor’s universe – but it would have a strict policy – the rules of Just A Minute would apply. Say continuity twice and you’re out of here!

But why was I worried at the end of the Silence In The Library? Why did I even entertain the idea that the next part would be anything other than magnificent? I’m not sure. But I’m glad I was worried, if only that it meant I enjoyed The Forest of the Dead even more.

I think I’m pretty clear that this was “nu-who” all the way. It was involved, and emotional to levels that really didn’t even register as an option in the 80s. I particularly liked the dream-time sequences – and Catherine Tate is starting to become impressive, even… Who’d have thought after Partners In Crime that we’d see this sort of performance from her. Stunning. And considering my views at the start of the series, I don’t use the word lightly.

There were moments that brought a lump to my throat (but no, I didn’t cry, in case you’re wondering). And I sat grinning like the sad little fool that I am for the last ten minutes. You know the feeling when you see David Tennant sprint with such purpose, vault over things to get to what he needs to do, and slowly spread his Tom-Baker-esque grin out for all to admire, that something brilliant is happening. And in this case, I don’t see how people couldn’t have enjoyed this – it was a very Doctor Who ending – he couldn’t let everyone die. No matter what happened, everyone still had to be saved.

I LOVED the double bluff in the mystery of what CAL was. Everyone I talked to and listened to in the intervening week assumed that the girl being CAL would be too obvious – after all, this was Steven Moffatt – it had to be more complicated, and more chilling than that. But it wasn’t. And that was brilliant, somehow. It does prove that the writing doesn’t have to be complex to work.

The completely bloodless confrontation with the Vashta Nerada is fabulous – a real harkening back to the old-school… Threatening an alien predator with an entry in a book could only be done by the Doctor, couldn’t it?!

But I do have questions about the end… For one thing – they said that the planet was cracking apart – and yet he “saved” them in the Library’s core. They’re not safe for very long then…?

Also, he brought the others back from the hard-drive, so why not them?

But oh, this was great. Anyone else? We seem to have gone oddly quiet…

Well. How to describe The Silence In The Library… I sat still afterwards for a few minutes, looking at the now empty screen I’d been watching it all on, and became very aware that I had a dark room behind me…

I’ve loved this series so far – so many things to like about the writing, the elusive “story-arc” (yawn). But the one thing I think we’ve been missing is suspense. Last year was not short of suspense – I think most, if not all the stories had elements of suspense – with 42 being extremely tense all the way through, and then the ultimate trio of episodes from Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat topping it all off. But this year, I think we’ve seen things coming.

The Sontaran story, as enjoyable as it was (and I mean that sincerely – it was incredibly watchable, even if I did have reservations about the plot), was not tense at any point, to me. The Doctor’s Daughter gave away the suspense within a minute of the start and from then on was light on plot and pretty predictable (but great all the same). The Fires of Pompeii had some suspense in, and was a cracking early episode, but that’s about it.

But as usual, The Moff defies us all. From start to finish, this episode pulsed like one of the classic Dalek tales or the relentless tension in the Web of Fear. There were some fantastic touches in structure – they’re sealed in a library, but there’s a little girl on earth (? Is it earth?) who can see all and communicate with them – even if she doesn’t understand. Shadows that eat you alive – “not every shadow, but any shadow” is how the Doctor described it. Weapons useless against such an enemy is something that also screams classic Who to me – and makes all this even better.

Then there’s Professor River Song. Odd name. Hope that means something good or important, because otherwise it’ll annoy me as a useless comedy name that reminds me of an Ocean Colour Scene song.

We discussed River Song briefly when we “did lunch” last week – only briefly, as none of us wanted to spoil anything and I’d only mentioned that I’d heard a couple of “facts about her”. Namely that she is meant to be the Doctor’s lover, but she’s from a future he hasn’t got to yet. So far, that’s half right.

Lovely touches, too, with the references to Donna – the way River started saying something about how the Doctor talked about her and then stopped herself. I wish they’d stop with all that now. We pretty much know that something horrible is going to happen at the end of the series – I just wish they’d let us wait for that in peace!

Fabulous cliffhanger too. That is something I miss from Classic Who – the weekly cliffhanger. Even the one in The Sontaran Stratagem wasn’t all that nervy (like Wilfred is going to die that early…). But this was great – with a horrible but brilliant touch of the real faces on the robots.

Those are creepy too, and I liked Donna’s earlier reaction to them “It chose me the face of a dead person that it thought I’d like?!”

By the time it had finished, I’d felt like I’d only just sat down to start it. It really didn’t register that I’d just seen 45 minutes of brilliant TV until I’d seen the clock. I’m not sure I’d breathed for the last half an hour of that, either. This is what it’s all about.

Bring on Saturday!

I can’t stand wasps. I have never liked Agatha Christie. I was therefore probably not going to immediately warm to this episode. Gareth Roberts was either going to be onto a total winner or complete failure….

My problems with Agatha Christie are long and deep-rooted. I was kind of brought up with her work (my mum had read every single one, and there were hundreds of them in the house). I studied her work as part of a course at university – compared and contrasted every aspect of her novels with others of both the time, earlier and later. And I was bored rigid of her. Formulaic, predictable and annoyingly elitest, her mysteries were not exactly my favourite time-killer.

But there is a sort of history with Doctor Who and crime fiction. They seem to be natural companions. You see, Doctor Who is not all about saving universes from horrible beings, sometimes what is worth saving is somewhat smaller than a planet. And the Doctor has been pretty good at being the detective – stories such as the Talons of Weng Chiang and The Horror of Fang Rock unfold like Sherlock Holmes tales, while fabulous murder mysteries in their own right, like The Robots of Death (which still stands up as a magnificent piece of drama, in my opinion) carve out this alternative and rich vein in the Doctor’s psyche. And here he was again.

I loved every second. It was like Gosford Park with… humour… and aliens. Its a very different episode to anything else in this series – something akin to a twisted version of Cluedo…

Gareth Roberts seems to get all the fabulous subjects, last season it was Shakespeare and this time it was Christie – and both times there was something integral to the work of the writer that he picked out and made central to a supernatural mystery. Last time was more straightforward – some witches use the Globe Theatre to try and unleash evil forces. This time, the trademark structure (sorry – the only structure) of an Agatha Christie mystery serves as a template for a wasp trying to exact revenge on his mother.

Oh and there were some fantastic lines and moments – the attempted poisoning of the Doctor and his “de-tox” – completed with Donna’s idea of a shock (I don’t think I’d recover from that though…well done, Doctor…!). My personal favourite was the Doctor’s “You always fool me. Well, several times, Well, once or twice. Well, once. But it was a good once…” Says a lot about the way I read her novels…

postscript: 29 May 2008

I just caught up with the Who Cast’s review of The Unicorn and the Wasp, and I need to add to what I wrote.

I tried not to analyse the episode too much, as it was meant to be straight up enjoyable telly rather than anything serious… but I don’t think I can sit back and do that now.

I think I may be able to appreciate the episode more than others because I am already a fan of the crime fiction genre. I mentioned that there were crossovers where the Doctor assumes the mantle of detective – happens more often that not, in my opinion, but not that often in such an obvious and traditional way.

That said, the criticism I’ve heard, including Trevor’s on the Who Cast, seems to completely miss the point. That’s not necessarily a criticism – if its not your bag, its not your bag and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But Gareth Roberts’ script is much more subtle and manipulative of his source material than I think its been credited. There are the in jokes – for example, Donna’s blatant attempts to get her name in print (although that pretty much echoed the in-jokes from The Shakespeare Code – except in that episode it was the Doctor influencing the future written works…). But that is the tip of the iceberg.

I loved the way the script used the one structure Christie ever really used and twisted it to make it fit with Doctor Who – the flashbacks, which Christie uses, particularly in the finale to explain the previously hidden narrative – were brilliant, with even the Doctor joining in. Trevor’s point of being able to work out who the murderer is alongside the detective, I disagree with. I think Christie’s detectives actually kept their cards close to their chest, and clues (as with a lot of crime fiction) don’t often seem to lead anywhere specific.

What I think maybe confused people and put them off the scent of any murderer was the side plot of the “Unicorn” being present (and subsequently caught) – which is the one slight issue I had with the plot… I thought the Unicorn bit was unnecessary and got in the way a little. But that in itself is a device Christie used – everyone in the mystery with something to hide will always give some sub-plots which will distract from the main story and throw the reader/viewer off the scent. Possibly.

But, there are a few very accurate parodies in the script – the catching of the murderer in particular. The way the Doctor names suspects, puts forward a theory or a possible motive and then discounts them (with Donna’s brilliant comedic reactions) is straight out of every Poirot story. One of the quietest characters in the story turns out to be the murderer – again a recurring theme in Christie’s works. That’s why its at once so hard and – with experience of the novels – so easy to work out who the murderer is – there’s not much to go on in terms of evidence, and the Doctor doesn’t reveal anything particularly in naming the killer insect, so if you don’t know Christie, you won’t know.

But after a while, you get a feel for which characters are possible suspects. And generally, the less obtrusive the character, the more probable that they’ve done something heinous. That’s why I think Trevor’s comment, about anyone who says they worked out who the killer was is either a good guesser or a complete liar, is not fair – you just had to watch a few Poirot stories and put two and two together to work that out if you wanted to.

I loved this episode – for all the marvelling I’ve done at the other episodes, this may well be my favourite so far – because it taps into my personal tastes, sure – just like the Shakespeare one did – but also because it was just fun and could have gone so horribly wrong.

Agatha Christie may well be a good old British Institution these days, but so are soldiers wearing red unfiorms during desert combat, the Royal Family, complaining about the weather, golf and horse racing. Not all institutions deserve all the reverence they receive.

There was a time – the late 80s spring to mind – that Doctor Who wasn’t really viewed as, you know, “proper acting”. The Doctor was arriving in places filled with Comedy double-acts trying to stretch their careers for a bit longer, the cast of Cats and actors that people had assumed were already dead…

If there was any doubt to the quality of this show by now, I point you in the direction of The Doctor’s Daughter. This is, seriously, the best thing I have seen in a long time. Ok, so being daddy to a small boy, TV isn’t exactly something I get to experience all that much anymore. But the point still stands. This was brilliant.

That Tennant bloke is a master of his craft. In theory, I think its perfectly possible to play the Doctor by hiding behind the huge character and equally massive back-story and still do a fairly good job of it. But he packs so much into these performances – I’m sure that this isn’t the biggest acting challenge he will ever take on – but from the way he rollocks through these episodes, it looks like the most enjoyable.

Georgia Moffatt was superb – equally as subtle and deft with looks and facial expressions that echoed the Doctor. The beginning is a prickly one, and I felt a little nervous about where this would be going… But it becomes very obvious very quickly that the connection between them is real and from that moment on it was impossible not to warm to her.

In terms of characters, Donna showed a bit of intelligence here – and managed to think about puzzles in a completely dispassionate way, bypassing the confusion that the Doctor was going through. Martha was her usual bold self with firm morals. And the Doctor…? That scene where Jenny dies is the single most affecting thing I’ve seen this series. The pain and the emotion were real, and my goodness we felt that hole reopen inside him. A huge wow-factor.

It was hardly completely unpredictable. But I didn’t – and still don’t – care in the slightest. Like I said before, way back in my post about Partners In Crime I think, being a Doctor Who fan, its more about escapism than gritty reality. I don’t (usually) care whether the plot is water-tight and the visual effects are accurate, spot on or even good. It doesn’t matter if the cast contains more wood than a 16th century Galleon being studied by a group of hormonal 15 year olds. This isn’t Eastenders – this is meant to be entertaining.

And this was magnificent. I loved the similarities with classic stories – particularly Genesis of the Daleks sprung to mind a few times – the multi-generation race war just about to come to a horrible, destructive head and the surface scenes in particular helped that image.

And you know, even though I knew the end was coming, I loved it. Even though I was sitting there, waiting for it, I still bounced off walls with joy. The Doctor isn’t the only Time Lord any more. And he’s not the only one of him around. I really hope Andrew’s right and she returns some day…

I’m really really looking forward to next week. Not least because the writer of one of the best Series 3 episodes (The Shakespeare Code) is back with a new story, but also because its allegedly written as a more straight-up comedy episode, and that its about Agatha Christie – an author that I have disliked and been bored rigid by since I was little. I now sit here impatiently fidgeting waiting for Saturday…

Ahhh! I was wrong. In my last post I said that one of us would be using the word ‘comeuppance’ to describe a scene featuring Rattigan in The Poison Sky. Doctor Who is not that simple. It’s a multi-facetted, thought provoking, cleverly constructed series that avoids the easy and predictable and opts to go the extra mile to answer the tricky question, ‘How can we solve this deadly threat without using force against a war-obsessed race who don’t fear death?’. Love that. 24 take note. Actually don’t. It wouldn’t be 24 then, which would be a shame, as I love that too but for entirely different reasons. Sometimes you need telly that is the viewing equivalent of way too much caffeine and a format that needs a plot to fit 24 hours exactly no matter how many times a character needs to be kidnapped to make it work. Yeh, Doctor Who can be implausible too; they’re both great because they both have their own logic but Doctor Who is better. …. there is no easy answer to the question above, and that’s good.

I can’t help thinking about morality this week. Forgive me if I get all deep and meaningful but this series is doing a lot of that. The Doctor is adamant about doing things in a moral and non-violent way, having that little twinkle in his eye when he faces evil, even giving a race of fearless warmongering aliens who are poised to destroy the Earth a choice to leave or die instead of just blowing them up. And he doesn’t just do it in a ‘be nice to each other, kids’ way but in a full on you might get hurt doing good but do it anyway way. (I remember being utterly stumped and really shocked at how the Doctor treated the Family of Blood last year. Those punishments were sick, and seemed wholly out character. But he had no choice, either they were free to pursue him in a never ending game of hide and seek at the expense of thousands of lives or he dealt with them once and for all. Why did he place them in their individual eternal prisons? Should he have killed them? The morality of Who is sometimes very challenging.)

Who’s insistence on having characters so central to its format and the Doctor encouraging them to respond to the extraordinary challenges around them and to grow in only positive ways is utterly laudable. I crave the chance to be in it myself. To have scripts so good and to rub shoulders with that team. To work on something that is made with such blooming skill and love that shines from the screen and seems to make your living room a better place.

So, The Poison Sky. Good solid stuff. Superb monsters, plenty of action, plenty of character. A big shout out for Donna tentatively saving the world on her mobile and for Martha’s scene with the clone. And there’s enough Bernard Cribbens to make everyone very happy. Just one thing though. If someone can confirm that the gas could be burned off like that then I will get on a campaign bus with a mega-phone to tell everyone how GOOD this story is. Well, you know what I mean. Oh, and isn’t it intriguing that the Sontarans use the same interstellar alarm providers as the Sanctuary Bases.

Do you remember that feeling when you were little, when Christmas came round, and you got exactly what you wanted in every way… and then discovered it wasn’t quite as brilliant as you thought it would be?

I don’t know whether I should be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the story – and I think the Sontarans are a wonderful baddie. I am, and always have been, a UNIT fan. DT was brilliant as usual, Donna bearable, and Martha was excellent. But I feel cheated. I went on a nostalgic trip after I saw The Poison Sky, and it only made things worse, and because I particularly like the Sontarans and I want to share my pain, I’m going to go a bit geeky on this episode’s ass.

After I saw this episode, I watched the first ever Sontaran story. A real cracker starring Jon Pertwee – The Time Warrior. Then I sat, and I thought back to classic adventures, including the first two or three Sontaran stories, and I feel like they’ve missed something big with the new one. A classic story – particularly of the 4-6 part Pertwee stories would consist of the first part being the Doctor and Liz/Jo/Sarah investigating something – just like the ATMOS device – and then calling UNIT in as they think there’s something suspicious.

We didn’t get that. The Doctor and Donna turned up halfway through the UNIT investigation.

We’d then be treated to a final part full of suspense-filled, thrilling denoument, topped off with a moment or two of humourous banter or slower reflection.

Out of two 45 minute episodes, we got about ten whole minutes of conclusion. One short, sharp UNIT assault, using amour-piercing bullets. One hastily-assembled atmosphere changer to fix the earth. One teleporter, and one more explosion. That’s it.

Ok, factor in the surprising change of heart from Luke Rattigan, who finally made something of his genius and sacrificed himself to save the Doctor and protect the earth. And because I don’t want Andrew to be wrong – maybe that was the comuppance he deserved for throwing his lot in with some squat Mr Potato Head alien types.

Despite that, I really enjoyed it. It was pacy, suspense-filled and good fun. But I do think it was badly-structured. Its the first time I’ve had the inclination to criticise the new series, and I feel awkward. But it was too-weighted on setting-up the end and had a storyline that didn’t entirely add up.

Let me explain: The Sontarans are cloned war machines, basically. They are totally focussed on war. They do anything and everything they can to fight – and ultimately to die. The term “one-track-mind” was invented for them, I’m sure. So would they really have decided to take some time out of their war to come to a planet like earth, team up with a teenage genius to gas the world’s population so they could use it as a clone-production world? Surely that’s far too crafty for Sontarans?

This is the trouble with bringing back older monsters. Its like the myth about Daleks not being able to climb stairs (they can – watch Rememberance of the Daleks if you don’t believe me – the cliffhanger to episode 1 is the Doctor being chased up a flight of stairs in the school basement by a dalek.), the Sontarans already have attributes and characters to fall back on. Their behaviour in the story was fine – and the two commanders were brilliantly written – and performed… Yet another blast from my comedy-watching past in Christopher Ryan making the small leap from Mike in the Young Ones to a Sontaran Commander… But it all worked well, and I absolutely loved it. Except for the mind-bogglingly layered “Stratagem”…

But I tell you what, if you either a) don’t have a clue about previous Sontaran stories, and/or b) are able to watch it all and keep your geeky tendancies quiet – like I had to – then this is brilliant. My reflection on it might be a bit lukewarm after I’ve had time to think about it a bit, but my reaction when I saw it was complete joy – and I’ll be happy to see this again (and again)!

Oh, and the icing on the cake… Martha’s in the next one too! Hurrah!