Blah Blah Flowers

I hope you're all having a wonderful Christmas. In this country you can barely move for Christmas traditions, the most long-standing one of which being that Russell T Davies empties out his drawer marked 'any old shit', sticks some fake snow on it and presents it to us as his Christmas Doctor Who show.

The Next Doctor is the fourth Christmas special now and, I think it's safe to say now that the Christmas Specials will always be shit. The Christmas Invasion was dull, The Runaway Bride was fun and the exception that proves the rule and Voyage of the Damned was hell on toast. The Next Doctor is halfway between Bride and Voyage, the half of the story with Doctor David Tennant and Doctor David Morrisey was quite fun and the two of them are clearly having fun. The other half of the story with Cybermen and Dervla Kirwan is confused dribble that makes no sense. Clearly there are a number of ideas that RTD wants to cram into Doctor Who before he leaves (Cybermonkeys! Giant steampunk Cybermen!) and is seeing his last chance here. I mean, why do Cybermen need children to work in their engine room? Have the Cybermen erased all emotions from their soul except the one to doss around and not really do much? Why do they need a Cyber King when they have a Cyber Controller? Exactly why is Miss Hartigan able to override the cyber-process (though to be fair we did have that in the finale to season two)? And what exactly does the Doctor do that defeats Miss Hartigan and the Cybermen? I'll buy the 'psychic feedback from her kills all the other Cybermen (the Cyberman army mysteriously depleting down to four men and someone in the monkey suit)' argument, but he zaps her with Cybermen data pods and she 'gets back in touch with her lost humanity which we weren't even aware she'd lost'? What?!

The David Morrisey side of the story is equally daft but at least he's putting some effort into it, for most of the proceedings Dervla looks extremely bored, though to be fair she's probably paid much less to appear in this than she gets making the food porn for Marks and Spencers and she doesn't even get any good lines. The gig is up within about ten minutes but he has the right amount of bombast to amuse, but what is Rosita doing? She seems at first to think that he is The Doctor, then to be some sort of nursemaid to a mentally-ill man, then falls in with the Doctor and helps him out no questions asked. She seems to be there because someone needs to be saying things at certain times between the start and Jackson realising the truth. The rest of the time, like Miss Hartigan, she becomes surplus.

The story would have been better without Miss Hartigan. Often in Doctor Who you have humans helping aliens mainly because they can speak quicker (I'm not sure the Patrick Troughton stories in which the Ice Warriors try to take over Earth have even finished yet) and explain the plot. These new, chatty Cybermen don't need that. Removing her doesn't alter the plot at all. Have them kill Rosita, so that either both Doctors or just Doctor Morrissey can emote over her death (and then point out how callous the Doctor can sometimes be (especially considering what the Doctor says at the end about not wanting to travel with a companion for a while because it's too much heartbreak)) and then explain what the children are doing in the Cybermen's Torchwood Hubpower plant. Actually, the more I think about this, the more it annoys me. No matter how you try and work it out, they only do about half an hours work. What are they doing that Cybermen can't? It's not that RTD needs the Doctor to follow the children as the only way to find the Cyber-base, it's in the basement of Jackson's house. Again, the Cybermen kill Jackson's wife and steal his son what must be at least three or four days before the Doctor arrives, if you try and figure out the timeline. What happens between that time and when all the other children arrive. Do the lazy Cybermen make him try and run all the engines on his own? Or do they just stick him up at the top of the scaffold and wait for him to starve to death?

So yes, a complete turkey of a Christmas episode. And the prospect of four more helpings of tripe before RTD finishes off next year. It's a sad day when even enormous steampunk Cyberman towering over Victorian London isn't enough to make an episode a classic.

Labels: Doctor Who, Television

Daily Mail insist Doctor Who fans are OUTRAGED!!!1! that phone number in show doesn't connect to anything exciting.

Doctor Who finished its latest series on Saturday night watched by a huge audience of nearly 10million. But it was another set of figures that got some fans really worked up - the Time Lord's phone number. The digits had been flashed up on screen several times in the previous week's episode as the Doctor's sidekicks Sarah Jane Smith, Martha Jones and the Torchwood team contacted him.

More than 2,500 fans... dialled it before the last episode aired on Saturday.

One fan complained: "They showed that number so many times, as if they were asking for it to be called."

But their attempts to contact their hero on his personal number - 07700 900461 - came to nothing when they discovered that it would not connect-Writing on the BBC's website, one disgruntled viewer said: "Grrr - I phoned the Doctor's phone number but there was just an annoying network message.

"What's the point in showing a phone number if you're not gonna use it?!"

The Daily Mail really will try to find any excuse to bash the BBC won't they? Just imagine the headlines if they'd used a real number, 'Lorry driver Pete Belly claims that the BBC have made his life a misery after using his mobile phone number in an episode of Doctor Who'. Also, 2500 fans out of ten million, isn't that below one percent of the people who watched it supposedly tried phoning it?

Labels: BBC, Daily Mail, Doctor Who

So, what did you think was going to happen?

I figured that, as a parting gesture, RTD was going to bring back Gallifrey and the Time-Lords. I figured out that the group of planets (what is the collective term for a group of planets? Is it just ‘galaxy’?) formed a machine of some kind together but I assumed it would be used to break open the time-locked Time War and extract all the Daleks from within it, bringing back the Dalek Empire but not the one race that had any hope of stopping them, only the Doctor would flick some switches and instead of extracting the Daleks Davros would help bring back the Time Lords instead. I didn’t bet on RTD just giving us an hour of callbacks to the last four years.

Generally speaking RTD seems to enjoy setting things up more than resolving things and giving us explanations. Let’s not forget that, originally, Bad Wolf was never going to be explained, wasn’t intended to be any more than a little in-joke to himself that RTD put in each episode. So, when I said yesterday that this was a bad episode, I wasn’t kidding. This is probably one of the worst scripts that RTD has ever turned in, and yet, and yet, it is also one of his best ever, it’s all a matter of perspective.

If I had to make a list of my 5 least and most favourite points then I suspect that they would closely tally. I could, but I won’t. It was that kind of episode.

Definite non-redeemable bad points? The ‘regeneration’. Though it did spin-off in to some positive points it was a cheat, pure and simple, in the ‘finest’ tradition of Doctor Who, needing something dramatic to cliff-hanger an episode that can then be quickly dealt with at the start of the next one. I didn’t have a stopwatch but I reckon all the crisis points from last week were dealt with within about two minutes this week.
Jackie Tyler. While it’s always a delight to see Camille Coduri on our screens, this was fan service pure and simple. Rose isn’t Newt and Jackie most definitely isn’t Ripley. Admittedly she didn’t do anything after blowing up the Dalek but even if the parallel world’s population now consisted only of the Tylers and Mickey then Pete should be warping through space and time before Jackie, hell, the baby could come over and is only two!
The Daleks. Back in Patrick Troughton’s days they had to make do with three real Daleks in front of a painting of a room full of Daleks (The Power of the Daleks IIRC) By the time of Christopher Ecclestone we have an actual fleet of CGI pepperpots but the action is mostly, and wisely, concentrated on the Daleks that are invading the space station that the Doctor is on and religious fish tank Dalek as the scale of the fleet is too vast to encompass on screen. Because of the brilliant work of John Barrowman and Elisabeth Sladen we also get a really powerful sense of how terrifying these monsters are, even though we know the Doctor will arrive soon to sort it all out. Last week and at the start of this week, we see a few Daleks on Earth, murdering people and being beastly. Once everyone gets kidnapped up to Dalek HQ this gets mostly forgotten (honourable exception: German Daleks! Fantastic!) and we just have the Dalek fleet hanging aimlessly around because Davros has invented a super weapon to make them superfluous. By the time Martha is kicking Daleks into corridors the vast scale is forgotten.

But there were some great moments. As though in response to complaints that there are too many deus ex machinas in the new show RTD threw a whole slew of them at us on screen and then broke them one by one, the Osterhagan Project will destroy the Earth and so break the Dalek machine, except Martha is beamed away before she can activate it! Captain Jack makes a bomb out of a supernova stored in a necklace, except he’s beamed away before he can break it! The HumanDoctor makes a gun out of nothing in no time at all, except both he and Donna are zapped before it can be used! In the end the deus is one we never saw coming.

A word on the Daleks. For once, Doctor Who Confidential got it right, Nick Briggs deserves a fucking medal for his work. RTD made the Daleks a credible enemy once more and after the mistakes Helen Raynor made last year restored them to their right place as the Doctor’s worst enemy last week. More often than not, you can read the relationship between the Doctor and the Master as a masochistic one which can only be stopped when the Master decides to stop it, he often seems less interested in the pursuit of power than of causing the Doctor the most distress possible. The Doctor is rarely in physical danger when the Master is around, but with the Daleks it’s different. Quite why they didn’t shoot him on the spot I don’t know, presumably that’s Dalek Caan’s influence. And here we have them at their genocidal worst, not only do they want to destroy all other life in the universe but they’ve expanded their hatred to all patterns of energy too (although let’s be fair, stars are beings too, remember 42?). Julian Bleach does a brilliant Davros and, as with Blink last year, we actually have something so terrifying on screens that if the Radio Times doesn’t get letters complaining that Doctor Who is too scary for tinys then I really despair for the ‘Midnight passengers’ of this country. RTD has beefed-up and made changes to all of the returning villains from the mythology to make them more of a threat, with Davros he didn’t need to. I have a sense of cross-purposes here, the Daleks clearly turn up spoiling for a fight, Davros hates the universe so much that he wants to fight that, Bleach’s performance when Davros thinks he’s won is amazing. I don’t think the Doctor was right though, I don’t think Davros was in Dalek prison. I think it was like when middle-class people move their recently bereaved remaining parent into their house to live with them until they die. The Daleks are there to destroy the universe and Davros is their grandpa. Of course, being older than them he’s naturally more right-wing but I would suspect they would be more than happy if his scheme failed so they had to exterminate the galaxy the old-fashioned way, just as long as his failure doesn’t coincide with them exploding to bits. Oh dear.

I wonder what Billie Piper felt about the whole experience. The impulse to bring her back was one that RTD should have resisted. Her story ended perfectly on the shores of Bad Wolf Bay the first time round, we didn’t really need an encore, although her agent is presumably happy as the work hasn’t exactly been flooding in over the last few years. So we have alternate world-Torchwood building another machine to send people through reality, despite the whole Cybermen and global warming thing that happened last time they tried that gimmick, just so Rose can be reunited with her second boyfriend (no longer Mickey decides not to go back to that universe, if the prospect of the end of all creation isn’t enough of a hint that the girl really isn’t interested then he really would be Mickey the Idiot). This was my second guess by the way, that alternate-Earth becomes the New Gallifrey.

But when we end up there again there’s less of an emotional reaction, or at least not the same one as the first time round. Especially as Rose gets to take home HumanDoctor this time and she’s still not satisfied. Careful girl, a lot of killers can be set off by rejection by sexual partners. RTD manages to transform Rose into rather a selfish and heartless little girl, quite an achievement. It’s rather messy.

I also guess that while it’s not good to be half-human/half-Gallifreyan like Donna, it is fine to be half-Gallifreyan/half-human like HumanDoctor? Maybe there’s a missing scene where Rose watches the TARDIS dematerialise and then turns around the find the real reason the RealDoctor got HumanDoctor out of the ship was that he was about to turn into the Human Roman Candle.

I did assume it was going to be Martha that got killed as she’s generally been punished for not being Rose. Season Three has been my favourite series of all four but I seem to be in a minority of one on this. If Hitler and the end of this episode are right, and she and Mickey are going to join Torchwood then that might be enough to make me watch season three even though by rights she should be more efficient at everything than any of those losers. (And I can just imagine Ianto’s expression when Jack waltzes back into the Hub with Mickey: “I know you’ve just spent the last millennia underground endlessly dying and being reborn but I didn’t think you’d dump me for some rough trade.”)

And Donna. I didn’t know until a friend told me that Catherine Tate has done a hell of a lot of serious acting apart from the comedy she’s most famous for. And certainly, when she acts rather than gurns she was amazing all series as well as last night. The tragedy of Donna is that she has grown up not realising her talents, presumably having all her dreams squashed by her bitch of a mother. To be returned to that at the end and to be effectively condemned to a life of mediocrity because the knowledge of her potential would kill her is especially bleak.

And I doubt she’ll get to come back in two years time to have that sorted out.

And before we move on, Bernard Cribbins. Bernard Cribbins. Other than the unfortunate Voyage of the Damned he has been one of the biggest pleasures of this season. After his work over the last three episodes I want to adopt him as my granddad.

Which brings me on to missed emotional cues. Either RTD is losing his touch or we’re becoming inoculated to his tricks. A number of people online pointed out after last weeks episode that if we really were saying goodbye to David Tennant as the Doctor then RTD would have sledgehammered the point home, rather than killing him off in the most offhanded way since ‘Colin Baker’ bumped his head and turned into Sylvester McCoy. But while there was a point to that there was too much spectacle! and technobabble to really let a lot of passion hit home. The worst misfire was when RTD decided we needed to be reminded of the consequences of the Doctor’s existence on other people. This was perhaps a difficult sell two weeks after showing us that the Doctor’s existence was infinitely better than the Doctor’s non-existence, it was made more unlikely because it was spelled out none-too-subtly by someone who was supposed to be one of the beings in the universe most responsible for death and destruction. I assume that RTD wisely decided to cut this short of trying to claim that the Doctor was to his companions as Davros was to the Daleks but, although it’s a point worth periodically revisiting it’s been dealt with better before, such as The Doctor Dances, The Parting of the Ways, The Girl in the Fireplace or Love & Monsters. As it is, all we can manage here is that David Tennant looks vaguely constipated and that’s it. We should perhaps not be surprised that a race that want to destroy all that’s different don’t really have psychological insight into another species. Similarly, at the end, when everyone has been returned to their constituent realities and/or spin-offs Wilf comments on the Doctor being alone but it just doesn’t compare to the other times they’ve made this point, such as, oh I don’t know, Doomsday?

But Bernard Cribbins and David Tennant really sell the tragedy of Donna both in the doorstep scene and the discussion afterwards. Bernard gives an acting master-class in just a minute or so of screen time. You can see it in his eyes, for the rest of Wilf’s life he’s got look at Donna, knowing that every time she feels she’s worthless, cut down by the cruelty of her mother or her work colleagues, he can’t tell her how special she is, he can’t remind her of how she saved existence because it would kill her. That is the terror of the Doctor that makes the Vashta Nerada turn and flee, that makes the Racnoss quail. That’s worse than Davros having spent his time reading ‘Psychological Manipulation for Dummies’. I don’t know whether it’s the strain of being the lightning rod for every good or bad word for the series in the last five years and having to deal with some sometimes pathologically unhappy fanpersons but is this and Midnight RTD’s way of saying “screw you guys, I’m going home”?

And Dalek Caan, erm, what? So, I’ll accept that even though [ authority figure ] The Doctor says it’s not possible that Dalek Caan somehow entered the Time War what we are supposed to assume happened is that he absorbed time vortex energy and became the Bad Wolf, this gave him the power to extract Davros’s fleet from there scant milliseconds before they were destroyed by the Nightmare Child or the Toddler of Terror or whatever it was. He dumped them back in the regular universe and it was at this point that he realised Dalek Sek had been right all along and that the Daleks needed to be destroyed? So why didn’t he dump them back in the Time War or a black hole or something rather than allow them to come very close to wiping out everything and manipulating Donna Noble along a path that would lead her to do the job? Why didn’t he use his ill-defined powers to change Davros’ device so it destroyed only Daleks? So many people got killed last week I assumed that RTD had hired ‘Star Trek: Voyager’s reset button especially for the occasion, but as Harriet Jones would appear to be still very much dead at the end of series four I’m sure her corpse would be interested in Caan’s thought process on this one. It’s rather like Joe Quesada’s opinion that magic doesn’t need to make sense, I can’t see why, if Caan knows the Daleks are evil and must be stopped he suddenly lacks the power to do it himself. I also challenge anyone to explain to me how Donna fills the role of ‘the most faithful companion’ that Caan burbled about ‘dying’ last week.

But hey, big cheer on the TARDIS pilots thing becoming part of official recorded continuity. I got rid of my ‘Doctor Who: Magazine TARDIS Special’ over ten years ago so I have no means of checking whether that was in the minds of the designers of the first TARDIS set in the Sixties or whether the idea came along at some point later. I suspect that the whole ‘toeing the Earth back home’ thing will annoy a lot of people but while the concept itself is terrible, it’s redeemed by the chance to see almost the entire family of the last four years of the Doctor all together. It’s not up there with “Come here, I think you need a Doctor” but RTD can still pick his moments.

It just goes to show how cowed the human race is these days, in the past big events toppled Governments and caused social upheaval, the Earth has now been through at least two major invasions that it can remember and has had two heads of state assassinated yet somehow Paul O’Grady is still allowed to broadcast his show on telly. Is there nothing that can shake this planet’s people from their apathy?

So yes, not as good as last week, as I said at the start I expect RTD had more fun writing last week’s episode than tying it all up this week. I also suspect that this will be one of the most divisive episodes of RTD’s tenure, but who knows (no pun intended), I’m wrong about most things.

Labels: Doctor Who, Television

Warning: Contains Hitler.

Genius.

Labels: BBC, Doctor Who, Torchwood, YouTube

The BBC decide to stop being overzealous in their attack on a woman for creating knitting patterns for Doctor Who aliens.

Labels: BBC, Doctor Who, lawyers

BBC Lawyers are threatening legal action to Doctor Who fan who created free knitting patterns for some of it's aliens, including the Ood and the Adipose, despite having no intention to release knitting patterns or woollen Doctor Who figures themselves. Crikey, I hope they don't come after my Mother for the Superted she made me when I was four.

Labels: BBC, Doctor Who, lawyers

So one of the inadvertently funniest moments from the last series of Doctor Who was in the penultimate episode where The Master tells Captain Jack that he's got the rest of the Torchwood team out of the way by sending them to another part of the world on a wild goose chase. Considering that under the control of Chris Chibnall this team of rapists, emotional cripples and closeted lesbians had almost all managed to kill Captain Jack at least once and were treated with absolute contempt by the Welsh constabulary, why sending them out of the country was supposed to be a blow to Jack wasn't entirely clear.

Ahhh, Chris Chibnall. The Anti-Matter RTD. The RTD of Earth-2. In the 'Mirror, Mirror' alternate universe of Star Trek: DS9, where the evil Kira does nothing except wear bondage gear and suck the face off of every female that comes near her, RTD looks like Chris Chibnall. Are we clear? This man has a talent for writing. Unfortunately, he has elected to use his powers for evil. Rich Johnston has reported that Chris has got the job of showrunner for the preposterous sounding 'Law and Order: London'. We have to hope that Rich is on the money about this one, because if he isn't then Chris would be replacing RTD on 'Doctor Who' when he leaves at the end of the next series, and that is too terrifying to contemplate.

And so, Torchwood series two. I believe that series two was offered before series one aired. I never bothered to look up the viewing figures but as it was on BBC3 I don't think they'd tell us much to judge whether it was a hit with fans. I remember there was a comedy show about teachers in the mid-nineties called something like 'Chalk' where they commissioned two series straight away saying comedy needed time to develop characters for the public to like. Result= Two series of a show that was consistently derided as awful, then it disappeared, never to be seen again.

But I start watching and, blow me, it's good. It's as though Chibnall has actually read all the criticism on the net, or maybe it's just that the show is going out at 9:00 pm on BBC 2 rather than 10:00 pm on BBC 3. The team act intelligently and, in Owen's case, aren't trying to shag Gwen and kill not-Gwen all the time. They work as a team, whereas in season one they all hated each others guts and seemed locked in a vicious spiral of self-loathing and abuse. They don't fly off the handle about Jack's reticence to speak about his past (which I still don't really understand) and the scene with Ianto and Jack in the office is genuinely sweet, whereas all the same-sex snogging in the first series was as erotic as Big Daddy fighting Giant Haystacks. The script is also very funny. The much ridiculed notion of a super secret team that drives around in it's own monogrammed cars seems to have been quietly forgotten, everyone knows of Torchwood and I'm fine with that.

I remain to be convinced as to whether they can sustain this throughout the series but if tonight's episode had been banned I would have jumped out straight away. This has at least made me want to come back for more.

Labels: Doctor Who, Torchwood

Philip Pullman would write for Doctor Who if he was asked, but it appears he hasn't been. So would Anthony Horowitz. Didn't he write for Robin Dur Dum Dum Dum! The Hooded Man back in the day, or am I getting my children's authors mixed up?

Labels: Doctor Who, Philip Pullman, Television

Doctor Who's pioneering first producer has died. Telegraph obituary.

Labels: BBC, Doctor Who, Television, women

Labels: BBC, Doctor Who, Flickr, humour

Genius!

Labels: Doctor Who, Torchwood, YouTube

More later, but for now the one word on the last episode is disappointing . After a generally tight ship this season Russell T Davies chokes at the last minute. Was there anyone who, once they saw the words 'One Year Later', was truly surprised by the denouement?

Labels: Doctor Who

Fifteen minutes left until the return of the Real Captain Jack. Let's hope he's got over the grump that being stuck in early-21st century Cardiff gave him...

Labels: Doctor Who, Torchwood

Crikey but Doctor Who was scary! Good stuff! Of course, some of us recall a time when the statues could move and were equally psychopathic and bad tempered, go Bok!

Labels: Doctor Who

After the first five episodes of the third series of Doctor Who we had The Lazarus Experiment in which a scientist has created a machine that will allow him to stay forever young and cheat death. Typically it's all gone wrong and, while the Doctor has that awkward first meeting with the mother of the young lady he's been running around space and time with. She isn't too impressed with him, even less so when The Bad Wol- ahem, Torchwo- I beg your pardon, someone working on behalf of Mr Saxon whispers something in her ear. This is a real by-the-numbers episode , while Mark Gatiss does what he can to try and make his Professor Lazarus more than just a one-dimensional monster he can't stop the special effects bods from turning him into a one-dimensional monster. It's also not a very convincing one-dimensional monster , possibly due to the decision to keep Mark Gatiss's face on it's head. Sadly this makes it look like something out of Quake or Unreal. It does give airtime to some of Martha's family, including her younger sister. As she seems to work as a PA I wonder if it's her, rather than her mother, that will be standing closest to the mysterious Mr Saxon come the end of the season.

Forty Two just didn't interest me. The Doctor and Martha end up on a spaceship that is diving into a sun within three quarters of an hour. The idea is that the story runs in real-time as they struggle to repair the ship and discover what exactly went wrong, while an unhinged crew-member goes around singeing everyone with his eyebeams. Possibly because it looks similar to the much better Satan Pit two=parter from last year, possibly because the script sacrifices building the characters in favour of clever-clever moments and ACTION! this episode is a big yawn. There's a lovely moment when Martha is in an escape pod which is accidentally fired towards the sun and the Doctor watches aghast, and Martha is put in a situation where she has to save the Doctor's life again but it's eminently missable.

This is followed by another two parter, Human Nature and The Family of Blood . This is possibly not only the best story in this season but maybe the best story in new Who or on television in the last few years. Chased by time-travelling bounty-hunters who want his 'precious bodily fluids' the Doctor lands the TARDIS in a pre-First World War English boarding school, using a previously unseen device which rewrites his DNA and wipes his memory, making him think he is a normal human school teacher, John Smith. Martha works as a maid in the school, waiting for enough time to pass so that their pursuers die of accelerated old age and then getting Smith to open his old pocket-watch and restore him to Doctor-hood. Unfortunately things don't go quite to plan. Yay! The bounty-hunters arrive and, being discarnate energy beings, take control of a quartet of humans and create walking scarecrows, as you do. Meanwhile John Smith finds himself falling in love with the school nurse Joan Redfern and the pocketwatch goes missing, stolen by a strange psychic little boy. When Smith doesn't want to believe he's an alien Martha has to keep him alive and out of the hands of the Family of Blood, find the pocketwatch then persuade Smith to sacrifice his life in order to allow the Doctor to return.

The prospect of the Doctor not being the Doctor did not initially excite me, the story emphasises character over action and at first I wasn't that interested in the Doctor falling in love. But there is real effort made to show that John Smith is not the Doctor so that by the end of the first episode I was won over. Then, in the second episode, the dilemma is not how to get the Doctor back but whether John Smith is willing to give up his life to let someone who sounds like a monster (and this is one of those Dark Doctor episodes) back into the world. The cast are all superb, but David Tennant, Jessica 'Spaced' Hynes and Freema Agyeman are great, as is Harry Lloyd as the 'son' of the Family, a by-turns charming yet utterly alien killing machine. By the time the Doctor returns it's more a tragedy than a triumph, the Doctor's involvement in events has caused the deaths of so many innocent people, but they rarely have to die to allow him to arrive in the first place. Tennant's body language as the Doctor, John Smith and the-Doctor-pretending-to-be-John-Smith are all individual and distinct. And the final scene where Nurse Joan meets the Doctor is a masterclass in emotional acting from the heart, while the Doctor can do no more than offer Joan the chance to travel the universe in the TARDIS with him she never makes it clear that she struggles to tell the difference between the Family of Blood (aliens that take the place of humans and dispatch their enemies without mercy) and the Doctor (alien that... you can guess the rest). Wonderful stuff.

Tomorrow it'll be Blink, the extra episode which the regulars don't get to be in it because of scheduling (only the BBC would give a show an extra episode each year but no time to make it).

Labels: Doctor Who, science fiction

Parting of Wai? No wai! [via Miss K]

Labels: Doctor Who, humour

The Sun claim Doctor Who will finish next year. I won't break out the cyanide capsules just yet, seeing as it's News International and the BBC we're talking about here I refuse to believe that The Sun's source is as good as the one that tells them everything the Prime Minister is thinking in Number 10. I wouldn't be surprised if Russell T. Davies wants to move on, he's worked crazy busy for the last few years getting Doctor Who and Torchwood off the ground, so if he leaves soon that's to be expected. But the Beeb hold the rights to Who, and I can't believe they'd be willing to throw in the towel, even if market share being what it is the new show doesn't get the viewing figures of the mid seventies heyday...

Labels: Doctor Who, The Sun

Doctor Who- The Five Doctors Part One.
Doctor Who- The Five Doctors Part Two. [via Miss K]
Doctor Who- The 0th Doctor.
"HAM?! Moi ?"
"I didn't save the planet from the Daleks so that Gordon Brown could take over."

Labels: Doctor Who, humour, YouTube

No, but seriously, I know what you're thinking, namely "Loz, what do you think of this season of Doctor Who so far?" Well Gladys (did I ever tell you my pet name for you was Gladys? Well, consider yourself told G.), up to two Saturdays ago, it was positive. Smith and Jones did a good job of introducing Martha, I especially liked the fact that Martha was so quick to accept the aliens and all the weirdness precisely because of all the alien activity in Britain over the last few series, whereas in the Christmas Special they had to give a number of implausible reasons for how Donna missed them all. It's not a new idea, it was used in the strangely maligned Love and Monsters last year but it's a nice one, especially as in the Seventies people probably had to keep quiet or else get a visit from Sergeant Benton and Captain Yates. With all the rushing around the vampire wasn't really an impressive monster but I don't think she was expected to be. That the Doctor's plan to defeat her seemed to involve letting her kill him is certainly a new one, sure he probably would have regenerated had he actually died, but it was rather reckless. The Judoon were nice though, I'd certainly enjoy seeing them turn up every now and again, though why they felt the need to chase a vampire and not, say, the Slitheen from season one is one of those things we shouldn't consider too much.

The Shakespeare Code continued the fun. However, I'm getting a bit bored with all these 'last of their race' aliens turning up all the time, we had the Daleks, the Gelth, Satan, the Spider-thing from The Runaway Bride ... give me the good old days when Jon Pertwee just had to fight a Sontaran, from Sontaran, where there was an entire planet of Sontarans getting on with whatever Sontarans did. Martha's whole 'but what if I kill my grandfather' thing was amusing. I'm also wondering about the race issue. So far the humans and human-shaped creatures have been pretty colour-blind, Mickey's skin-colour was never a storyline and so far racism has been the domain of alien races and creatures like the Daleks. Now that we have Martha I'm in two minds about whether there is an issue here that needs to be addressed or not. Other than the threat of death the worst a companion of the Doctor's had to worry about up to now was being lightly patronised, I do wonder whether, if the makers are insisting on keeping the show more or less on Earth or recognisable equivalents whether there should be some situations they land in where Martha does stand out and is in danger just because of her skin colour. I'm not calling for Doctor Who and the Terror of the KKK but I'm wondering if ignoring the fact that Martha is different to almost all his other companions in one very visible way is actually a ham-fisted liberalism. Anyway, plenty of time for this to be addressed. The episode had any number of great lines, plus the rather unnecessary 'Doctor gives Shakespeare a number of quotes from his great plays' (a William Hartnell story had Queen Liz tell Shakepeare to write a particular play and Sir Francis Bacon give him the idea for Hamlet, rather suggesting that Shakespeare hasn't come up with that many of his own plays himself at all).

Gridlock gave me a brand new feeling, being glad to see the year five billion. New Earth had it's moments, but they didn't involve the hospital, the implausibility of the Cat Nuns cure or the Doctor's solution. But this was a nice character piece, with a great feeling of claustrophobia with everyone stuck in those little hover-cars they'd made their homes. The moment where everyone comes together to sing the hymn was either really sad or really uplifting depending on how you chose to read it, and Ardal O'Hanlan did an amazing job acting through the cat prosthetics. I must say though that I've never really cared for the Face of Boe as a character, so don't really care that he's shuffled off the coil, still, being five billion the Doctor could easily meet him in his own past. It's great that Martha isn't just a script with 'Rose' crossed out each time, and that the Doctor's relationship with her isn't at the same place as it was with Rose, though I'm not sure why Martha would be fancying the Doctor.

It had to go wrong eventually and it did so with the Daleks in Manhattan two-parter. Some of the problems were thankfully addressed in part two, the big one being the racial purity of Daleks. It was bad enough that the Emperor Dalek made his Daleks out of humans (though I suppose Davros was doing the same back in the Colin Baker days, and this was one of the big things in Remembrance of the Daleks) but all the stuff with the Cult of Skaro being there to 'think the unthinkable' was just daft, the equivelent of the Nazis saying "You know what, we could really do with some Jews to help us out round here". Then there's the Doctor suddenly way to eager to cuddle up to Dalek Sec, never mind that he's taken over an innocent human body, the Doctor doesn't seem to mind too much about all the humans the Daleks have captured to turn into human-Daleks. And the lightning streak allowing them to keep their independence? This was a mess of two episodes, with my largest cheer being when Solomon gives a cringingly awful speech that echoes that of the American President in Mars Attacks! just before he gets killed by the Daleks ("can't we all just get along?" "Exterminate!"). The first two series managed to credibly present the Daleks as a bigger physical threat and also, because of that whole Time War business, a bigger emotional threat for the Doctor to deal with, as they killed his people. This story diminished them, not least because of the three times in the second episode where the Daleks should have just shot the Doctor on the spot. At least the other stories managed to give fairly credible reasons why they didn't, mainly by use of things like forcefields and being in different places most of the time. In one of the last scenes the Doctor has a nice long talk with Dalek Khan, who decides to run away rather than shooting him. I know the Daleks are scared of the Doctor but really! I've heard a rumour that the BBC have a deal with the Terry Nation estate which means they must have a Dalek story each season or else they lose the rights to ever use them again. I hope this is incorrect as I really think the Daleks need to be left alone for a good long while as this story, reusing bits from The Parting of the Ways, Remembrance of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks as it does suggests they've seriously run out of ideas for now about interesting things to do with them.

So, that's where things are right now. Next week we're back with Martha's irritating family so I suggest we'll hear about the mysterious Mr Saxon again, the closest thing we have to this season's Bad Wolf/ Torchwood. I'm lukewarm about Martha's kin, not least because the Dad seems to be a stereotyped hapless male but, with only a few lines and hardly any screen time so far that may be a view that will be challenged. I wonder if his mid-life crisis girlfriend is around for the Doctor to see as some anti-Rose, again she's only had a few lines and little screen time but it was something I thought I saw straight away in the first episode. Ah well, only a few more episodes and then surely they'll be joining up with Captain Jack...

Labels: BBC, Doctor Who, Television

An essay about lesbian, gay and bisexual characters in Star Trek. I've always tended to think any claim by Trek fans that their show is socially progressive to be a humorous one. Of course, there was that Kirk/Uhura spit-swapping session in the sixties but while the visual was undoubtedly progressive let's not forget that in the context of the story neither party wanted to do it.

I don't agree with everything in the essay, I quite enjoyed most of the treatment of religion in Deep Space Nine, and I think the fact that the only queers in several decades of Star Trek were leatherclad degenerates in an alternative universe suggests a much more homophobic attitude than the author is willing to suggest.

Still, we don't need them, we've got Doctor Who and (well, you'll forgive me if I don't use the 'girl')Slash Goggles for all our needs now.

There's another essay on sexuality in Star Trek and Star Trek slash here.

Labels: bisexual, Doctor Who, gay, geekery, lesbian, science fiction, slash, Star Trek