No More Mr Nine Guy

Doctor Who
Bad Wolf and The Parting Of The Ways
Series One, Episodes Twelve and Thirteen


Talk about a game of two halves.  The Series One finale starts out as a sequel to The Long Game, and to be honest it's not much of an improvement.  By the end, though, things have escalated to epic proportions.  The second episode juggles emotional highs as if they were satsumas, and ends the Ninth Doctor's brief era in triumph.  Blimey.  Where did that come from?

Surprise! It's not as crap as it looks!

First, this sequel business.  Finding out The Long Game was only there to set up this situation might explain why it contained barely enough incident to fill a Previously montage, but does knowing the grand plan suddenly make it a good episode?  Nope.  It just turns a seemingly unfortunate failure into a deliberate one, which is actually worse.

Onto the plot.  The Doctor, Rose and Jack find themselves teleported into Big Brother, The Weakest Link and What Not To Wear, but not as we know them.  100 years on from The Long Game, the shows are running en masse, and the losers are executed.  You'd have to be a newly-arrived alien toddler to think this was a brand new idea, and the sheer imagination fail goes all the way down.  Okay, gameshows that kill you.  Dumb idea, and we don't need to see it three times in the same episode, but it could work.  But... literally Big Brother, with the same theme music and everything?  Hundreds of thousands of years in the future, and we're still watching the same TV shows, albeit with different outcomes, with the same presenters, albeit as robots?  We're even wearing the same clothes.  Much of that isn't the case now, seven years later, let alone in the distant future.

The worst thing isn't just the total absence of imagination on the part of the writer: it's the suggestion that our feeble brains just couldn't handle anything else.  Going to the future?  Better make it all exactly the same, or our heads might explode with confusion!  Give us some credit.  (I know they do this to avoid dressing people up in tin foil and making random guesses at how technology will work, but there has to be a middle ground between that and just not doing anything at all.)

It might work if it made any kind of satirical point, but none of it adds up.  There are some shows where you don't even die, like Stars In Their Eyes (hey kids, who remembers Stars In Their Eyes?  Don't all jump at once...), where you get blinded.  Then there's the contestants: The Weakest Link bunch are terrified, apart from one who's coldly bent on self-preservation, whereas the Big Brother morons seem to have almost no problem with any of it, acting exactly like contestants from the present day.  Meanwhile on Earth, people watch this stuff for fun, even though contestants are picked at random and anyone could be next.  Huh?  As for the Doctor opening their eyes to how this is A Bad Thing, well thanks for that, Captain Obvious.

It's not all bad.  It's fun to hit the ground running for once, and the Doctor's immediate dark suspicions that something deeper is going on nearly renders all that buffoonish Anne-droid stuff quite exciting.  (Though seriously, Anne-droid?  Y'know, some jokes take all of five seconds to come up with because they're no damn good.)  The Doctor's scenes with Lynda are a nice repeat of the Doctor-meets-companion process, and a timely reminder that there's more to the companioniverse than just Rose.  (Not that she's especially glad to hear it, and not that we can keep her while we've still got Blondie.  Still, it's perfectly valid seeing that sometimes it doesn't work out.)  Also, it's great seeing what happens when the Doctor affects history in a bad way, all of this being arguably his fault.  Shame we can't really examine what that means, but hey, the consequences are dire, so he certainly pays for it.

Can we keep he...oh, forget it.

Even so, you might as well spend the first thirty minutes doing the dishes.  Until Rose gets discintegrated – which let's face it, was always going to be a highlight – Bad Wolf is largely dross.  But then the Doctor gets mad, and things heat up very, very quickly.  With a big gun in hand and Jack as his loyal bulldog, he barges upstairs to get some answers.  (He's not going to use the gun, of course; it's a nice moment when he scares the staff to death, then wins them over on the spot.)  The tension is palpable, and hearing the Contoller talk of her "masters", who speak of the Doctor and fear him, is a bag of chills even if you saw the Next Time trailer the week before and already know it's the Daleks.

Eeeeeee!  Daleks!  You can forget about the friendly one we met earlier this series; these guys are the real deal.  If anything, they're crazier and more dangerous than the ones us fustery old fans are used to.  They've got religion, thanks to their power-mad Emporer, and it's bliss watching them rant, wobble and exterminate everything in sight.  That's more like it, boys.

We end on a cliffhanger that forgoes scary for awesome.  The Doctor's going to get Rose out of their clutches and then kill 'em all over again.  It's been building to this.  All that Time War angst, that guilt, comes volcanically to the surface.  Oh yes.

But the next episode isn't all Doctor Who Goes To War.  The Parting Of The Ways does the big stuff you've been waiting for, and it does all that really well, but it's the smaller character moments that make it a real knock-out.  Little bits like "I never doubted you." "I did", and the way the Doctor snaps between showboating for the Daleks, and resting his head against the TARDIS doors in probable defeat.  Never mind the camp satire, the bad jokes and the stupid plot handwaving.  It's little conversations and moments Russell T Davies does best, and this one's full of them.

There's gobs of stuff about Rose and the Doctor, and their relationship.  Just before he sends her (unwillingly) to safety, the Doctor beams at her refusal to suggest simply legging it in the TARDIS.  Rose certainly ain't perfect, but at last we've laid bare what the Doctor actually likes about her: the courage to help people, no matter what, something she's learned from him.  Ignoring all her less flattering aspects (and he does), she's living proof that he's doing good.  Of course there's other stuff, like how terribly nice it is for him to feel needed, but that has to end some time.  He sends her away, knowing he's probably not going to make it and that if she survives, he'll have done something right.  This whole sequence, from the Doctor's knowing looks to the emergency hologram telling Rose to lead a good life, works brilliantly.

"Oh, TARDIS, I'll miss you.  That and what's-her-face."

Back home, she's forced to re-evaluate her commitment to the Doctor.  It's wonderfully wrong being stuck in a cafe eating chips while the Doctor faces certain death in the future.  Of course, most people wouldn't see it that way – "That's years off", according to Jackie – but Rose has learned to see time differently, and this conversation puts that marvellously into perspective.  It shows how she's grown apart from everything she knows, and does it with far more grace than the general smugness she radiates in other episodes.

Also great?  Rose using her experiences, specifically getting to meet her dad, to convince Jackie that the Doctor's worth saving.  It's a satisfying dollop of continuity, and it's great to see Jackie consider things from more than one point of view.  Mickey's got a lot to work with too, silently raging at Rose's lofty ambitions but ultimately helping her anyway, because it'll make her happy.  It's just a shame these two had to start out completely one-dimensional to underscore how far they've come.  (Similar applies to Captain Jack, although he hasn't grown so much as picked one of his random attributes, and stuck to it.)

Not so great, though, all that stuff about ripping the TARDIS open.  Yes, it vaguely ties in with the end of Boom Town, and I know I just said I like a bit of continuity, but heartening as it is seeing Mickey and Jackie working together to help the Doctor, what difference is a tow truck going to make to an ancient spaceship?  What's holding it together, Cellotape?  Surely Rose can't hope to gain much from transforming into a foetus, and that's all she's seen the heart of the TARDIS actually do.  Then, after a lot of time spent vaguely wondering what Bad Wolf means, it turns out it means Really Silly Thing That Makes No Sense.

What is the Bad Wolf?  The time vortex, apparently.  Or is it the TARDIS?  God knows.  Is it God?  Apparently it's in the Doctor's head all the time, although that doesn't seem likely since having the Bad Wolf in his head immediately kills him.  Sending the words through time seems like a neat idea, but they don't have anything specific to do with Rose's rescue plan, so you've got to wonder how much they really help.  "Of course!  I can try to save the Doctor!  Now all I need to do is come up with a way to actually do that!"

It gives Rose God-powers to make the Daleks go away, simple as that.  How much this works or annoys you depends on you.  Is it a cheat?  Probably, since what little we know of the TARDIS doesn't suggest it's possible.  But it's intended more as an emotional climax than a plot-point and... okay, I'm not even convincing myself here.  It's stupid, I agree.  And to top it off, after all that splendid work fleshing out their relationship, Eccleston has to say "I think you need a Doctor"?  Ugh.  It's even worse than "Anne-droid".

This makes Colin Baker falling off his
exercise bike look like complete pants!

There's an old adage: wow them in the end, and you've got a hit.  This one does.  Never mind all that dumb stuff – could there be a more amazing ending than this regeneration?  What with his Time War Trauma, the Doctor's never been more in need of a clean slate, and the old gimmick of changing the lead actor allows for a brilliant conclusion to his story.  The whole sequence is unforgettable: the Doctor's reaction is beautifully varied, the script handles it with sensitivity and wonder, and the special effect is none too shabby either.  It's quite possibly the Best Regeneration Ever.

The Doctor's on top form throughout, facing the Daleks en masse, making that tough decision about Rose, and finally realising he can't go through it all again.  He'd rather be defeated than sacrifice another species.  (This is still a bit muddled, as Earth has by this point been bombed to pieces by Daleks, so it wouldn't make much difference if he did wipe out humans and Daleks alike.  But, hey, the point stands: he's had enough.)  We've only known him for thirteen episodes, but Doctor No. 9 goes out with a bang.  Doctor #10, in all of ten seconds, arrives with one.

Out of the ashes of a mostly-rubbish first episode, and despite some total idiocy in the execution, The Parting Of The Ways somehow leaves me satisfied every time I see it.  It's grand in the action stakes, sublime in its character beats, and well, two out of three isn't anything to sniff at.  Not everything gets tied up – Earth is left a depopulated bombsite, and for all his noble do-goodiness, Jack is unceremoniously stuck there – but it ends on a spectacular note, and that's what I'd hoped for.  Goodbye, Big-Ears.  I'll miss you.

Morally Challenged

Doctor Who
Boom Town
Series One, Episode Eleven


I remember seeing this one advertised shortly before it aired.  It promised the return of "an old enemy".  Call me naive; I expected someone from further back than, say, six episodes ago.  The Slitheen again?  Really?

When the TARDIS parks to refuel in Cardiff Bay, leaving Rose free to pal about with Mickey, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was the kind of stuff that should go between episodes, and not be the subject of them.  Rose even describes some impressive-sounding adventures that happened off-screen.  Wait, so you get worlds made of glass and we get Cardiff Bay, or at a push, London?  Look, by all means set the show's horizons by what the budget can do, that's the way it has to be after all, but don't pretend there's other less crap-looking stuff going on as well.  It just means we wish we could see that stuff instead.

"She's going to blow up Cardiff, and kill millions."
Oh no, she isn't!

Oh well, better set your expectations to frothy, as the gang joke, flirt, go for lunch and generally behave as annoyingly as possible.  It's all in the name of character development, of a sort: Mickey is feeling increasingly alienated by Rose and the Doctor, and now Captain Jack has joined the fold, they've gone from a weird twosome to a nauseating threesome.  I'm just not sure about this.  How can you not side with Mickey?  Setting aside how repellantly smug they all are, viewing them from the outside in the first place seems like a silly idea, since they're meant to be the guys we tune in to watch.  Even when it turns out there's a Slitheen in their midst, they go to work like the cast of a Christmas panto.  Couldn't they take things just a little bit seriously?

It all tries a bit too hard to make us laugh, especially when there's quite grim stuff under the surface.  For all his outsider blues, Mickey's back on the comedy pratfalls, tripping over a trolley and getting his foot stuck in a bucket.  When they finally catch Margaret, who murdered someone at the start of the episode and plans to nuke Cardiff (and then the world, mua-ha-ha) later on, we go straight to the Doctor eye-rolling when Rose can't pronounce Raxacoricofallapatorius.  This isn't black comedy, it's pure farce with ill-fitting black bits.

With the Mickey stuff having run out of steam for now, we settle down to the plot.  Margaret Blaine aka Blon Slitheen is still at large, having murdered her way to being Mayor of Cardiff.  (Without Harriet Jones or anyone else noticing, apparently.)  The Doctor's not having any of that, so he effortlessly scoops her up using the sonic screwdriver to disrupt her teleporter.  (He did something similar in The End Of The World, only there was an explanation for it then.  Also, he discovers Margaret's secret weapon hidden in a model of Cardiff for no reason at all.  Just a cursory "Oh, but she's clever!" doesn't explain how he knows it's there.  Urgh – you can do the handwavy bit to make sense of a complicated explanationey bit, but you do need both or it's just cheating.)  Well, that was easy.  All that's left now is taking her home to face the music.

All of a sudden, it's moral dilemma time.  Take her home and she'll get the death penalty.  But let her go and she'll start all over again.  What to do?  (We'll have to forgo the possibility of taking her somewhere that won't execute her, because they sure do.)  The whole cut-price-episode approach might work if we're focussed on a puzzle at the heart of it.  It has to work, though.  Moral dilemmas aren't just about asking tough questions, you also have to stick the landing and answer them in a way that says something.  This "dilemma" just isn't a tough one, whichever way you cut it.


"It's not my fault, that I'm, so eee-vil.
It's society.  Society."

I might be missing something here, but taking her home seems like a pretty good idea.  Yes, it's a shame she'll die as a result.  It's also a shame she killed all those people, and had loads of fun doing it.  She says she can change, but she can't even go the length of that conversation without trying to kill the Doctor three times.  Pull the other one, Margie.

But wait, there's more: the Doctor's got to physically take her to her doom, which in her book is the same as pulling the trigger.  Well, it isn't.  She made this happen, there are going to be consequences, and here they are.  "Which makes you better than me how, exactly?" asks Margaret.  How about the obvious: he's not murdering people for profit or for fun, and nor is he the one setting the death sentence.  Next stupid question?

Can he look her in the eye and still do it?  Er, probably, yeah.  This is the guy who covered the Nestenes in anti-plastic, and brought about Cassandra's, the Jagraffess's and oh yeah, the Slitheen's explodey deaths.  Chucking one murderous bastard to her peers won't make him bat an eyelid, let alone lose his nerve.  Want to tickle the Doctor's sympathy bone?  Simple: don't get your kicks from killing people.

Eventually the "dilemma" runs out of steam, so it turns out Margaret was just biding her time (and wasting ours) so she could surf out of there, leaving devastation behind her.  Like the Gelth going all world-conquery in The Unquiet Dead, this makes any deathly reaction from the Doctor totally justifiable.  But wait, there's still more: in an act of random magic that's backed up by nothing, the TARDIS turns Margaret into an egg so she can start her life all over again.  Setting aside the fact that by this point there's no longer a moral dilemma to resolve (as Margaret's made it clear she's going to kill everyone anyway, because evil), how massively, massively rubbish is that?  Has there been any hint of this magic power before?  Is it ever likely to happen again?  Nope.  There's a phrase for this kind of thing, and it rhymes with beus ex nachina.  Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Next Time: Let's De-Age Hitler!

Does any of it work?  Well, Annette Badland is fantastic, and Margaret gets in a few good points during those juicy (albeit pointless) dinner scenes.  She's right that the Doctor isn't used to waiting around like this, even if she is way off about his apparent blood lust.  She's also partly right to draw parallels about occasionally letting her potential victims go.  Well, the Doctor does kill people, albeit for different reasons, and it's nice to acknowledge that.  It's all good exercise for Christopher Eccleston, showcasing the Doctor's sympathy (with a last meal) and darkness (steadfastly refusing to let her go, even if the execution's really going to hurt), quite a potent Doctorly mix.  Once all that ghastly Team TARDIS stuff is out of the way, it's another strong one for Eccles.

And ditto for Noel Clarke.  Aside from "hilariously" tripping over things, Mickey's story is brilliant, even poignant.  Shame it reflect so badly on Rose.  It turns out he's desperately miserable waiting for her all the time, and has another semi-girlfriend to make up for it.  Rose mocks him for this, despite her own wandering libido.  So you've got Mickey begging Rose to stay, and Rose stopping by Cardiff for a roll in the hay before going right back to the smug single life.  Approximately one person emerges from this with our sympathies, and it isn't the one we're stuck with on a weekly basis.  This was a good idea why, exactly?

As for Jack, John Barrowman seems to be on cloud nine, and that's nice for him, but he doesn't impact on the story at all.  Can we send him back?  (Perhaps we can trade the pair of them in for Nancy and Harriet.)

With its recycled baddie, set-adjascent locations and Abra Cadabra solution, Boom Town feels like something they knocked together to fill space.  Points for trying something new there, but it'd be a lot nicer if it worked.

Ballroom Blitz

Doctor Who
The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances
Series One, Episodes Nine and Ten


Doctor Who is one of those shows that could, in theory, be anything.  It can be funny, serious, futuristic, medieval... you name it.  But one thing has been consistent through the years: Doctor Who is scary.


"Act terrifying. For God's sake, swim or something."

Fans still talk in hushed tones about The One With The Yeti In The Underground, or The One With The Giant Maggots.  The One With The Sea Devils left me terrified of going to the beach for quite some time.  And now we have The One With The Gas Mask Zombies.  How good are they?  Run, hide, and stay hidden.  They are terrifying.

What's so scary about them?  Well, gas masks are scary just to look at.  But then there's the utter mindlessness of them, and the fear of losing your own mind.  And fear of disease: one touch and you're like them.  Their leader, the Empty Child himself, is creepy as hell.  As innumerable horror movies have shown, it's surprisingly easy to scare people with children acting just a little bit left of normal, and all that "Muuuuummy" stuff is easily spinechilling.  The best bit, though?  The change.  Nothing can stop it.  The victim's marbles slowly disappear, they start to talk like a six-year-old until they choke, something forces its way up their throat, flesh stretches and bones begin to crunch...  Ohgodohgodohgod.  Sleep well, kiddiewinks!

As a backdrop, we have the London Blitz, where a midnight stroll could get you killed even without the monsters.  It's one of the most fascinating periods in British history, as terrifying as it is weirdly halcyon, and Steven Moffat captures both without getting too wrapped up in either.  There's still a hint of saccharine, particularly in the Doctor's history-fudging "lion vs. mouse" speech, that boils the Second World War down to a cutesy David and Goliath grudge match between Britain and Germany.  (It's not quite that simple, Doc.)  But the plight of Nancy, a scrawny girl looking after a rabble of evacuees, is a poignant and very real one.  Florence Hoath is fantastic, bouncing off Christopher Eccleston with the effortless spark of a travel-weary Doctor Who companion.  It's a shame we won't see her again; the character's steely determination feels hard won and, again, very genuine.

Can we keep her? And Harriet Jones, while you're at it.

Then there's Dr Constantine, pottering around an empty hospital so he can look after the gas mask creatures, despite an obvious danger to himself.  A knockout guest performance from Richard Wilson, he packs so much dignified emotion into his brief scenes that when the inevitable occurs, and brutally, it carries enormous weight.

Good thing Christopher Eccleston's on fine form, or you'd fail to notice him next to these two.  His reaction to Constantine's fate is a moment of silent brilliance, and his empathy with his and Nancy's family losses speaks volumes about the character's history.  Then there's his behaviour with the Child, hopping from genuine sympathy (because it's just a kid) to no-nonsense cynicism (because it's harming people).  Not for the first time, it's a Doctorfest, and Eccleston does it brilliantly.  Definite kudos to Steven Moffat, a lifelong Who fan (and the guy behind the brilliant Comic Relief spoof, The Curse Of Fatal Death), who clearly has a great handle on the character.  By this point, so has Eccleston.

Of course, Rose needs something to do as well, so we have Captain Jack Harkness (ahem), a flashy futuristic con-man who sweeps her off her feet all over again.  It's a little bit rich having her tire of the Doctor's not-especially-sci-fi kookiness already, leaving Jack free to dazzle her with magic nanobots and an invisible spaceship.  Still, it's for a good cause.  Jack, the impossibly perfect anti-hero, is a lot of the things you might expect from a time-travelling adventurer, but don't get in the Doctor.  However, he's noticeably lacking (depending on the scene you're watching) the Doctor's conscience, forethought and common sense.  It's like what Russell T Davies tried to do for companions in Adam: someone getting the business of time travel utterly wrong.  This time, it (mostly) works.

Mind you, Jack's got a long way to go before he resembles a rounded character.  With his effortless tech skills, brilliant lying skills, pansexuality, memory loss, criminal ambition and noble quest for self-discovery and personal justice, he's more a shopping list than a person.  John Barrowman's charming and fun enough to make it work, certainly once he falls in line as part of the Doctor's entourage, but for now it's tough seeing past the forced corniness and finding anything at all underneath.  (I can't get too worked up about it knowing we'll get the same thing later, only much worse, in River Song.  By comparison, Jack is humble and downright likeable.  But that's future-episode-knowledge.  Spoilers!)

So how does this stack up against the previous two-parter?  The action seems more evenly paced than in Aliens Of London / World War III, and these two episodes have a marked difference in tone.  The Empty Child is dark, intriguing and terrifying.  The Doctor Dances is... well, take a look at that title.  Despite some brilliantly chilling Empty Childy goodness, and more of Nancy just being brilliant, things get decidedly fluffier as they go on.  Still really good, but going noticeably downhill, a bit.

The rivalry between the Doctor and Jack reaches a slightly crude nadir, as Moffat brandishes that cumbersome euphemism, "dancing" to distinguish and define them.  Eccleston seethes hilariously at this – a simple dismissive head shake and the way he says "He's not really a Captain, Rose" go a long way to repairing this Doctor's sense of humour – but the script can't quite let it go, flogging said euphemism until it whimpers.

"Are you my daddy?"

The effect this has on Rose, and come to think of it Rose's behaviour in general, is not exactly flattering.  Her affections dilly-dally rather too easily between the two men; it doesn't do wonders for her as a character.  What's with the alien-tech obsession, and the need for the Doctor to prove himself all of a sudden?  (You could see this as a consequence of finally meeting her dad in the previous episode.  Now the father-figure complex has worked itself out, she's open to a better offer.  But as there's no reference to this, it could just be inference on my part.  And if it is the case, it doesn't exactly tip the sympathy scales in her favour.  Perhaps Rose isn't the one who should be on the lookout for better offers...)

Soon enough Jack realises his place, and the penny finally drops.  His bargaining chip, an empty Chula warship he's put in the path of a Luftwaffe bomb, is really an ambulance full of nanogenes.  They're happily repairing people in the image of Nancy's little brother Jamie, only they're too stupid to tell the difference between gas masks and flesh.  Still, they're clever enough to install an intercom that lets him talk through anything with a speaker grille, so radios, typewriters and toy monkeys.  (I don't know either.)  They also let him command all the other empty people (gas-maskies?) in preparation for battle, because it's a battle ambulance, yet they defer to his childlike need for his mummy instead of doing any actual battling.  So, which is he: a tiny Chula warrior or a super-powered human child?  There's quite a bit of handwaving here, and it's a bit of a letdown finding out there is a rationale behind these creatures, but that it's just as mindless as they are.

All this talk of handwaving brings us neatly to the finale, when the other penny drops: Nancy is Jamie's mummy, not his sister.  The two embrace and, as the Doctor looks on rather gleefully, the nanogenes figure it out and repair everybody.  Probably intended as a calming answer to all that terror in the first episode, not to mention the cynicism that has come to define this Doctor, things end on the stickiest, literally cuddliest note possible.  It's so toothless, particularly as you realise the gask-maskies have at no point actually hurt anyone, it threatens to undermine how scary it all was in the first place.  Not the most satisfying way it could have gone, quite frankly.

Meanwhile, Jack teleports the bomb to his ship, where it can explode with just one casualty.  All very heroic, offsetting the guilt he must have been feeling for, oh, ten minutes or so, but given how little we know about Jack (besides the shopping list), it doesn't mean much emotionally.  No matter: before he can make his noble sacrifice – effectively one-upping the Doctor, who needs Nancy to make the heroic choice that'll save everybody while he acts as middle-man – the Doctor rescues him, presumably winning that little contest once and for all, and dancing to celebrate.  The dancing's a tad cringeable, but it's a seriously lovely tracking shot from Jack's ship into the TARDIS, and it's cute seeing the TARDIS's answer to mood lighting.

The first episode's practically perfect: scary, clever, dazzling to look at and a riproaring good story.  It's stood up to a dozen rewatches over the years, and I still get chills from the best bits.  Part Two gets a little stuck in the Glenn Miller side of things, and before you know it you're using words like "cute" to describe something that started out as "terrifying".  This seems to imply that Doctor Who, a mad old show that can be anything, can be both.  We may have to agree to disagree on that one.

My Father, The Del-Boy

Doctor Who
Father's Day
Series One, Episode Eight


If you had a time machine, what would you do with it?  Doctor Who takes us to exotic times and places, but cool as it is seeing the past and the future, it's all pretty much just decoration.  The scenery changes, and we meet the occasional famous person, but the actual time travel bit rarely really matters.

Although at a push, it will make the Doctor change his jumper.

All of which leaves an elephant in the room.  We're only human, and there are things we'd want to change given half a chance.  In Father's Day, Rose finally plucks up the courage to visit her dad so she can be there for him when he dies.  She bottles it on her first go, and when she tries again, instinct takes over.  The consequences are disastrous, but it's hard to imagine yourself doing anything different in her position.  She's never met the man, this is her only chance, and she could save his life.  Wouldn't you?

There's just gobs of stuff going on here.  To start with, has Rose been planning it all along?  The Doctor thinks so, as it was his pointing out that "it also travels in time" that got her on board the TARDIS.  But Rose says otherwise, and I agree: as much as she'd love to meet her dad, she isn't quick to think up schemes that'll benefit her, or she'd have pulled an Adam (so to speak) before now.  Anyway, she does what she's supposed to the first time, which is more than most people would.  The rational bit of her brain just went (quite understandably) bye-bye when too much was asked of it.

The Doctor's furious, probably in no small part because it's his fault.  He's only too happy to act like a genie if it'll make Rose happy, and he knows a trip to see the fabled Pete Tyler will win him brownie points well into his next lifetime.  But the desire to keep her sweet overrides his common sense, which must surely be screaming No, don't do it!, especially when Rose asks for a double-dip.  And then she goes and disappoints him.  Just last week he shot Adam down in flames for abusing time, and used Rose as the shining example.  Now he's all with the eggy-face, and he doesn't like it one bit.

"All right, FINE, I'll go and fix Adam's head.
Point taken."

So you've got Rose disregarding the most important man in her life, laying bare the dad-shaped hole he was occupying all along; and the Doctor's tendency to show off leading to death and destruction all round, but his absolute need for Rose letting it run amok.  Eventually the Doctor's fury subsides (after he makes Rose apologise, then gives her a fatherly stroke, setting things back to the way he needs them to be), and he does what he can to keep Pete alive.  But it's a doomed effort.  Pete knows what needs to be done, and so do we: the car that kills him circles like a vulture.  It's not a question of what needs to happen, but whether the characters can go through with it.  With the Doctor gone, Pete's all Rose has, and he doesn't disappoint.  It's complex and satisfying as hell.

And all that before we even get onto how utterly, heartbreakingly good it is as a story.  Rose finally meets "the most fantastic man in the world" (Jackie's words, and oh, the coincidence that it should be fantastic), and quickly discovers the truth's been heavily Rose-tinted.  But even with the love goggles slipping, she's still drunk on daughterly affection; the moment where he takes his hand away from her cheek, and she can't not put it right back, is an absolute emotional knock-out.  Billie Piper shines here, and Sean Dingwall makes a believable go of her dimwit dad, who's got enough imagination to figure out who she is and what's really going on.

It's a stunning episode for Rose, whose flaws and faults finally seem endearing, rather than irritating.  And it's a dark, complex one for the Doctor, who can no longer avoid just how much he needs Rose, and needs her to think highly of him.  He's even willing to die to stay in her good books, once she's made things right and said sorry first.

It even makes time for smaller dollops of colour.  1987 makes a refreshing change from ancient history, and the moment the Doctor enters the completely hollow TARDIS prop is something you'd never expect to see.  Love it.  But... ye-eah, there are also things wrong with it.  Not dealbreakers, but annoying enough to spoil the mood a bit.

Take the plot.  Rose saves Pete, so giant time-bats appear to "sterilise the wound", i.e. eat everyone.  It's monsteriffic, a bit like Stephen King's Langoliers if they actually looked scary and not like Pac-Men.  But you've got to wonder why this has never happened before, why they're just eating the people, and also, what the hell, time-bats?


"Would that I could change time, my dear,
but alas... time-bats."

And speaking of elephants in the room, it's taken Doctor Who all of five episodes to change its entire stance on time travel from "Your cosy little world could be rewritten like that" to "There's a man alive in the world who wasn't alive before, the whole world's different because he's alive."  Is there such a thing as a Script Editor?  No one thought it was a bit silly having two episodes the same year that say the complete opposite?  This situation's got to be nothing compared to the historical clusterbomb of The Unquiet Dead.

On top of that, I'm not even certain what's going on here.  As well as Rose saving Pete's life, there's a time paradox: the previous Doctor and Rose vanish, presumably meaning she didn't then return to rescue Pete.  But aside from them vanishing and an offhand reference to it being "a vulnerable point", nothing is made of this.  Which is it?  A paradox or a change in history?

Then there's all the incidental flotsam, like bits of different times poking through.  Bell's first ever phonecall, a Streets song... what the hell's all that about?  And for all the hoo-hah about not changing time, they actually do.  Pete's killer is no longer a hit-and-run, he now stays with him until the ambulance comes, and probably even meets Jackie.  His whole life's different for having made that effort.  Are we seriously going to put that down to semantics, when saving one man's life can destroy the world?

Deep breath.  It doesn't matter.  Yes, it's a shame that the continuity's horrendous and the plot's got holes you could fit your head through.  But it's about the emotions, not the details.  This isn't a free pass for the future, mind you, but this time the heart's in the right place, and that's enough.  In spite of everything, it's a classic.

Who Hum

Doctor Who
The Long Game
Series One, Episode Seven


For a show with a twenty-six year back catalogue, Doctor Who spends little time wallowing in nostalgia.  That's a good thing.  Nonetheless, sometimes you get a whiff of the old days.  The Long Game feels like something from the late '80s: it's satirical, talky, a bit obvious.  No doubt about it, this is the weak link so far.  (A bit like late '80s Who in general.)

Above: nobody's favourite era.

Some of that's due to the setting.  Another futuristic space station, already?  And this is much less interesting than the last one.  It's at least a plot point that there are no aliens on board, but still, hands up who's excited to see a bunch of normal-looking people milling about the set of CBeebies' Blade Runner?  Not exactly the trip of a lifetime, this.

Not much seems to be at stake, either.  The Jagrafess, crooked controller of Satellite Five, is distorting information and holding back the human race.  This possibly explains their unimaginative dress sense, but what does it mean?  Almost no one on board is aware of it, let alone the billions of people on Earth below.  The Doctor says they should have advanced beyond this point already, but setting aside the curious impossibility of history having changed when he wasn't looking, so what?  They're not exactly in the dark ages, and as they don't know they're doing it wrong, they're not terribly unhappy either.  I'm not saying that living like this is a good thing, and the Doctor's right that a slave is a slave even if he doesn't know about it.  But ignorance seems blissful enough for the time being.  There's no ticking clock, no sense that it needs to be sorted out now.

The decidedly "meh" feeling all this inspires is easily explained: it's satire.  The news corporation with its own agenda.  The mindless zombie journalists.  Aliens kept out by immigration.  The populace living in the dark.  Yawn – I see what you did there, but what else have you got?  Satire is all very clever (when it is clever), but it's hard to make a snarky point about society and ground it in a good story.  Here, the stuff propping up the satire is even worse.  A brilliant place nobody ever returns from, its walls supposedly paved with gold?  An all-seeing centuries-old monster who's a couple of re-routed pipes away from overheating to death?  Do me a favour.  There's enough plot here to cover a crisp packet, and still leave room for the ingredients.

And what goes in the crisp packet?  Why, padding of course!  (And quite possibly, crisps.)  When the Doctor and Rose nip upstairs to investigate, they're detained by the sinister Editor, who asks them questions for ages.  Well, question.  "Who are you?"  And again, and again and again.  The 45-minute format is often an excuse for moving things along at a frenzied gallop, but it doesn't explain the action grinding to a halt so our heroes can stand there and look on.

In the episode's defence, there is other stuff going on.  Adam, the genius Rose picked up in Dalek, is skipping around Satellite Five gobbling up information and sending it back home.  He's got the tools, thanks to the Doctor giving him unlimited (stolen) funds, plus Rose lending him her super-phone, plus both of them forgetting about him.  So begins How Not To Be A Companion, starring Bruno Langley.  Is it enlightening, seeing someone get it totally wrong?  Not really.  Probably the only reason Rose hasn't tried the same thing is she didn't think of it first.  Besides, Adam didn't ask to sign up, and nor was he invited – Rose just brought him along for the ride.  On her head, as the Doctor said.

Meanwhile on Floor 500, Charades has failed
and Rock, Paper, Scissors reaches a grim stalemate.

And what exactly were they expecting, letting a self-aggrandising genius on board a space station in the future, and giving him a full wallet to play with?  He's got no experience of time travel or its pitfalls.  This is on the Doctor's head, too: there's no getting away from the money enabling Adam to screw it all up, and that coming from the Doctor.  How thoughtless is he?  Of course, you can subscribe to the idea that he just wanted to ditch the gooseberry, and intentionally set Adam up to fail.  And you're welcome to: it ties in with the apparent closeness of the Doctor and Rose.  But if that's the case, the Doctor's got no right to be all righteously furious about it.  And if not, well, Marty wasn't a bad person for wanting to try this in Back To The Future Part II.  He just wasn't a pillar of common sense.  Neither is Adam, despite his A-Levels.

On top of all this, it's dead, dead, dead boring cutting away from the talky peril on Floor 500 to Adam spending his pocket money.  Tamsin Grieg is delightful as his surgeon, but come on.  It's obviously a struggle just to fill the minutes.

With the Doctor and Rose getting a bit comfy in handcuffs, and Adam browsing, chatting and having time for brain surgery, it's up to recent acquaintance Cathica to sort things out.  This might be a tribute to the wonderful effect the Doctor can have on a person, but if so it's wasted on this tediously promotion-obsessed nonentity.  Frankly, any adult stupid enough to believe all that bollocks about walls paved with gold is going to have to work to earn our respect, and "You should've promoted me years ago!" isn't much of a learning curve.  (Really, love?  They should have promoted you to the place where you get killed?)

Simon Pegg relishes the somewhat thankless part of The Editor, although some of the dialogue's horrible.  Russell already wrote a "literally" gag in Aliens Of London, and it was ghastly then, but guess what?  "He's overseeing everything.  Literally everything.  If you don't mind, I'm going to have to refer this upwards!"  Ugh.  Most of the really naff Bond villains would turn down this dialogue.

Well he sure looks like someone with influence
and a long, difficult-to-spell name.  He looks verbose.

Pegg's still as creepy as can be, but he can't rescue scenes spent repetitiously asking the Doctor who he is, and he's obviously only there because the Jagrafess doesn't speak English.  The monster, incidentally, is a giant zit: not a bad bit of CGI, but nor is he a baddie you'll love to hate.  He's got a long name, though, because those are funny.

Okay, it's not all bad.  Christopher Eccleston is on another stratosphere for most of it: apart from all that stupid Adam stuff (and there's more to come), he's Doctoring fabulously, dropping his happy-go-lucky smile when Rose isn't looking, and communicating gravity and menace with ease. "This technology's wrong."  "Trouble?"  "Oh yeah."  Sometimes his performance can seem a little at odds with what we know of the Doctor, but he is utterly, utterly the Doctor in this.  (And not just because of the cheesy nostalgia cloud.)

But ah, the Adam stuff.  Finding out Boy Blunder has broken the cardinal rule (which he wasn't forewarned about or prepared for), the Doctor drops him back home with his click-activated brain-hatch thingie, makes a crass joke about dissection, compliments Rose and continues on his way.  Any worries about changing history are swept away as Adam's responsibility, and Rose is fine with that.  (This is after considering Adam a potential new boyfriend, or at least not disputing the Doctor when he suggests it.  What, does she figure the future counts as a different area code to the one with Mickey in?  What a piece of work!)  Not for the first time, the TARDIS dematerialises and I haven't got a solid reason to like anyone in it.  Charming.

There's a lot wrong with The Long Game, but the really important bit is, it's boring.  Dissecting it is more fun than watching it.  Want a long game?  I recommend Scrabble.

I, Pepperpot

Doctor Who
Dalek
Series One, Episode Six


Doctor Who and the Daleks.  They're synonymous.  Show someone with no idea about Doctor Who a picture of a Dalek, there's a good chance they'll know it's not a novelty spice-grinder.  So it was a safe bet that when the show came back, the angry pepperpots would turn up as well, ready to terrify and fascinate a new generation of kiddywinks.  (Though this nearly didn't happen due to copyright issues.  You've got to wonder what else the Daleks had planned besides coming back to Doctor Who.  Village fetes?)  It falls to Robert Shearman, adapting his dark Daleky audiodrama Jubilee, to do the honours.

Some Daleks still work as after-dinner speakers,
usually with limited success.

We waste no time getting to the introductions.  The TARDIS is summoned by a distress call to the last Dalek in existence, loitering in a billionaire's dungeon and refusing to talk.  The Doctor strolls in hoping to help a distressed alien, but all he has to do is say his name.  Familiar lights flash.  "Doc-tor?  THE... DOC-TOR?"  Uh.  Oh.

I can only imagine what this must be like for someone who didn't grow up afraid of these things, but this scene is one big chill down my spine.  The direction – nothing but a blue light visible, until those first words – makes it an instant classic.  And Christopher Eccleston knocks it up a notch: the Doctor's sheer terror, followed by venomous hatred, tells us all we need to know about Daleks in seconds.  We also find out who the Time War was against, what the Doctor's involvement was, and why he's been so sullen and guilty since he came back.  "I watched it happen.  I made it happen!"  It's all there.  What a scene.

But squint, listen, and you'll notice something odd going on here.  Nicholas Briggs (undisputed king of Dalek voices) has more to do here than just shout the E word:  "I... AM... ALONE."  Down goes the eyestalk, the music going sad along with it.  Wait, wait, no, stop, stop I say!  The Daleks have been back thirty seconds and they're already acting sympathetic?  A sympathetic Dalek?  Couldn't it just sit there and be scary as hell for a little while?  I know the episodes are only 45 minutes nowadays, but are we really in that much of a hurry to de-fang the show's most famous, most popular, most scary creation?

It's not enough to ruin the scene completely, and I'll poke anyone in the nose who says that it is.  But it highlights something annoying that festers at the heart of this episode: is the Dalek scary, or isn't it?  You can have scary Daleks (and you should), and you can have not-scary Daleks (you probably shouldn't), but it seems crazy to attempt both in their first episode back.

Still, at least it is both.  When Rose meets Tim Nice-But-Dalek and offers her sympathies (because she's never met one so how should she know?), Briggs plucks at our heartstrings like a drunk puppeteer, but once she gives him a sympathetic pat full of useful DNA, it turns out he's fibbing!  I love this.  Depressing as it is to hear all that "I'M GLAD I MET A HUMAN WHO WASN'T AFRAID OF ME" stuff, and oh boy is it depressing, it's totally in character for a Dalek to lie, cheat and manipulate to get what it wants.  That'll teach Rose for not listening when someone says "Whatever you do, don't touch the Dalek."  It doesn't quite redeem the sad-Dalek stuff, because they've barely even started on that yet, but at least it's a second great Dalek moment.  Hoorah for that.

ONCE SEEN, CANNOT BE UNSEEN.

Pretty soon the inevitable occurs, and the Dalek starts doing what it does best.  (What it does best rhymes with "Frecksterminate.")  Downloading the entire internet might not be its biggest asset; it now "knows everything", so presumably all about kittens, movie trivia and adult entertainment.  But it's soon back to its former glory, and yeah, the new bronze design looks terrifyingly gorgeous.  The Doctor's "release me if you want to live" is a nice nod to The Terminator, and a good way to keep the Dalek scary (though perhaps not as scary as Topless Eccleston).  The Dalek's effortless and eye-popping extermination of everyone it sees puts paid to any images of little men sat inside shaking sink plungers and egg-whisks.  This thing means business, and no, getting up those stairs will not be a problem.

Then the episode's subtext drops by to say "Coo-ee!", and the Dalek tells the Doctor "YOU WOULD MAKE A GOOD DALEK."  Now, hold your horses there, Mr Metaltron: the Doctor might identify with it, because they're both the last survivors and both feel somewhat superfluous in the universe.  But that's about as far as the comparison goes.  This stuff's great acting-fodder, mind you: the Doctor's empathy and even, on some level, respect for the Dalek makes a complicated brew of emotions whenever they face off against each other, and Eccleston sells the long history between them every time he's on screen.  But the Doctor needn't lose any sleep over this.  Did he blow up the Daleks?  Yes.  Does he order this Dalek to die, in effect trying to exterminate it?  Yes.  Because as far as he knows, it's going to get out and kill everybody.  Because that's what Daleks do, it's all they do.  The Doctor himself says that a Dalek is motivated by hate and wanting to destroy everything that's different, and the Doctor isn't like that, so that's that, really.

But they won't let it lie.  Pretty soon Rose's DNA gives it a bad case of emotional turmoil, and while the Doctor's itching to reset the Dalek population to zero (the bastard, with his comprehensive knowledge and experience of Daleks!), all the Dalek wants is to feel the sunlight.  Ugh.  Look, it's just too soon to start re-assessing what Daleks are really like.  Having this one pathetically wiggling its tentacles and mewling about feelings would be horrible anyway, but it's their first episode.  It's like The Terminator, if Ahnuld played a friendly robot before playing a scary one, or Darth Vader telling Luke he wants to look on him with his own eyes, except in the first Star Wars movie.  The whole point is that the character has grown and changed, but that takes time.  You can't run before you can walk.

"DO NOT BE ALARMED.
THIS IS MY FRIENDSHIP PLUNGER."

The Doctor Learns and Grows as a result of Rose's telling off – "He's not the one pointing the gun at me!  What the hell are you changing into?" – but that's wrong, too.  Rose doesn't know Daleks.  This particular pepperpot is having an identity crisis, sure, and it won't kill her, but it's still an absolute danger to everyone else.  Or did she fail to notice stepping over a bunch of corpses?  This is typical Rose, assuming she's A) the most important person involved and B) knows more than anyone else, except possibly the Doctor.  Her obvious glee at knowing more about aliens than Adam, The Boy Genius, is tinged with superiority.  At least the Doctor recognises that the humanity she's passed onto the Dalek is poisonous to it – Rose, the Best Person In The Universe, naturally assumes it's "better". 

It's an important watershed moment for the Doctor – "I'm the only one left.  I win.  How about that" – and Eccleston's on fire, when he's not made to say dreadful Learn And Grow dialogue like "Oh Rose, they're all dead!"  Rose applies what she's learned so far, but she's not in full possession of the facts, and compassionate as she is, 200 people are still dead.  It's supposed to be a strong episode for both of them, but nope, not quite.  And as for their relationship, the Doctor in fact never said he'd protect her (there was a whole thing about him not saying it last week), and the Dalek's got no reason at all to call Rose "the woman you love".  I smell a Russell T Davies rewrite.

The cast, not to mention all those juicy American accents, add a nice action movie flavour to it.  Henry Van Statten makes a delectable intermediate baddie.  But Bruno Langley's not the most nuanced actor, so I'm not exactly thrilled to have Adam come aboard at the end.  Yet more typical Rose self-importance: she invites him without first clearing it with the pilot.  Hey, I'm sure that'll work out and won't be a total disaster...

The premise doesn't work, as after all those exterminated corpses it's a bit rich to ask us to sympathise.  But the important bit is the corpses.  Ignore the violin soundtrack.  On some level, those scariest of monsters are back, they look better than ever, and don't pretend you're not glad to see them.

Night Of The Noticeably Fed

Doctor Who
Aliens Of London and World War Three

Series One, Episodes Four and Five

In his first two episodes, Russell T Davies gave us two distinct types of Doctor Who.  There's the bawdy, silly, just-a-bit-of-fluff monster mash, and the emotional character-developer using sci-fi as a backdrop.  Which do we get in Aliens Of London?  Um...

Above: character development.

To be fair, it's often both.  There are some great ideas, and some moments that really say something about the characters.  There's genuine creativity here as well, handling an alien invasion story with wit.  But make no mistake, we're in flufftown.  Triple-digit IQs need not apply.

If we absolutely have to return to the Powell Estate a few short episodes after leaving it, and I'm not sure we do, at least it's an excuse for some meaty character stuff.  The Doctor means to drop Rose off twelve hours after she left (not something he'd ordinarily bother to do, but apparently she's worth it), but there's been a slight hiccup and it's actually been twelve months.  Whoops!  Rose is listed as missing.  Her mum's been worried sick.  Mickey's been accused of murder.  It is one hell of an opening, both horrifying and (thanks to the bashful way the Doctor breaks the news), shockingly funny.

In a couple of seconds Rose goes from having an exciting TARDIS-themed hobby to dealing with the consequences.  It's not something Doctor Who used to think twice about, so it's absolutely ripe for a going-over.  Come to mention it, yeah, it's a big deal when someone drops their entire life to travel with the Doctor; most of his past companions didn't end up back where they started either, meaning they pretty much vanished without explanation.  Episode Four seems a bit soon to worry about all this, but it's a pleasant surprise to be thinking about it at all.

Having said that, it is a bit of an overreaction, if not on Jackie's part then on Davies'.  Rose left the flat a couple of days ago to have an adventure, and thanks to a quirk of the TARDIS she's paying the price – but she hasn't actually done anything wrong.  (Well okay, the way she did it, hanging up on Jackie and disdainfully ditching Mickey, left a lot to be desired.  But that's just her natural, er, charm.)  It's a curious double standard, that we should expand our horizons and see the universe, but not if it means actually leaving the house.  Does Russell have issues about leaving home?  What's so wrong with getting out there and doing stuff?  So Rose went and got a life.  The horror, the horror.

He was acquitted of murder, but he'll always be guilty...
of hilarity!

It's not exactly consistent.  Jackie's initial outrage lasts a couple of scenes, but then she's sat with the neighbours chatting about boyfriends as if everything's fine.  And Mickey, who's had a pretty rough year, is reintroduced by doing a comedy pratfall into a fence.  Slapstick didn't suit him last time, and it's still an awkward fit, especially given what he's been through.  I know life doesn't stop being funny when awful things happen, but couldn't this stuff be taken just a little bit seriously?

Anyway, on with the plot, which arrives so suddenly you wonder if Russell had the first five minutes finished before he even came up with it.  A spaceship crashes in central London, and before you know it everyone, not just Jackie, is worried about aliens.  This helps make a natty point about Jackie et al having no reason to trust the Doctor, but also gives us a lovely insight into why he does what he does: Eccleston's irrepressible thrill at seeing history in the making is a big part of who the Doctor is.

Once the alien invasion hits full swing, things get decidedly fluffy.  Rather than investigate, the Doctor plonks down in front of the TV, giving us some curiously emotive news reporters and that American channel Jackie's TV apparently defaults to every few minutes.  Meanwhile, in Downing Street, the real villains are gathering, and they are farting.

Ah yes, the Slitheen.  There's a lot to like about them: the fact that they're a family, not a species, because not every member of every race acts the same thankyouverymuch Star Trek; the way their plan plays on what you (and the Doctor) expect of an alien invasion, which wittily rewards any sci-fi fans in the audience; and the general creepiness of a bunch of aliens wearing human skins like lycra.  I'm not so keen on their motive for blowing up the Earth, which just like Cassandra's is a boring bunch of dollar-signs.  But it's probably supposed to be a reversal of the usual Today London Tomorrow The World schtick.

They work best when they go against convention.  They even call the Doctor on his own flim-flam when he threatens to sonic some alcohol at them.  "Your device will do what?  You're making it up!"  It's a bit risky making fun of the sonic screwdriver and its limitations, given the rubbish it's capable of doing, but hey, they're right.

Less good, though, all that farting.  I said in my review for Rose that New Who feels awkwardly obligated to poke fun at itself (and that there were "worse bodily functions" – ah well), and that all goes a bit far in this one.  From giggling at their own naughtiness to stopping and talking about the fact that they're farting, they seem determined not to be taken seriously, because who could take a bunch of green blobby aliens (or worse, fat people) seriously?  Um... people who watch Doctor Who, perhaps?  Their general disgustingness is played for laughs, but so is their murderous nature.  Even their death is coupled with a comedy swearword.  As for the unzipping effect, so unsettling at first, it's way overdone and eventually, yes, played for laughs.  How many times do they need to get their kits off?  And seriously – "literally hair-raising"?

"Yes, Prime Minister, I see what you did there.
Please stop explaining."

Oh well.  They are funny a lot of the time, especially David Verrey as the greasy acting-Prime Minister, and their plan's pretty cool.  If they seem overly stereotypical in spite of all the smart touches, that's probably because Aliens Of London is trying to celebrate the general monsterness of Doctor Who.  It's got the first New Who cliff-hanger, which goes laboriously all out juggling three perilous situations and ending, of course, on a malevolent chuckle.  Just like the old days!  There's also a rather familiar morgue scene with something knocking on the freezer door (shades of the TV Movie, perhaps?), and that time-honoured solution to an alien menace, blowing them the hell up.  Make no mistake, this episode's got its nostalgia on, complete with references to the Doctor's career with UNIT (and more pressingly, the Doctor's name and the TARDIS being red-flagged by the government – no wonder he didn't want them to find the TARDIS, he doesn't want to get drafted!).  It's a lot of fun in that regard.

The second episode is more about hurriedly putting the plot to bed than carrying on the character development, but there's some there.  We have a nice thread about Mickey and Jackie working together because, presumably, they're all they've got; the Doctor gradually overcoming his (random) dislike of Mickey, and eventually offering him a place on the TARDIS; and Jackie wanting to know if Rose can ever be safe if she travels with the Doctor.  It's an understandable thing for a parent to worry about, but her request that Rose "always be safe" couldn't be granted even if Rose lived in a one-horse village and slept in a house made of pillows.  It's probably meant to be hard-hitting that the Doctor leads a dangerous life, but isn't any life potentially dangerous?  I know the Doctor's meant to be murkier than just some wonderful guy who's fun to be with, but Rose hasn't made any Faustian deals here – she's just seeing the world and helping people.  The constant guilt-tripping doesn't compute for a show that's also trying to encourage a life of adventure.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of running through corridors (because apparently No. 10 Downing Street is massive), including some unwise Benny Hill-esque chase sequences, because apparently some of us didn't get the memo about this being comedy.  And how could I forget some of the most hilariously terrible computer hacking ever put on screen?  Mickey can, from his home computer and using one password (which is one word with no numbers, symbols or different cases, none of which asterisk out when he types them), launch a missile at Downing Street.  It's easier than eBay.  There's even a big red button marked FIRE!  In a self-deprecating story about blobby green aliens that fart, it takes some doing to cross the line into unbelievability, and this bit does it with a pole-vault.  (Rose's "ingenious" solution of surviving by hiding in a cupboard isn't much better.  Oh, so the three-inch steel walls won't help, but wait until you see the cloakroom?)

Junior School Under 7s Missile Survival Team.
She got the Bronze.

It ends on a sour note.  Despite the Doctor being warm enough to let Mickey come aboard if he wants (he doesn't), he still forces Rose to choose right now between one life and the other, with no question of co-existing in both.  He becomes in that scene exactly the sinister git Jackie thinks he is, and between him putting the screws on Rose and Rose leaving Jackie miserable once more, I'm left wondering who the hell we're supposed to actually like.  (Oh, and another random thing: why do characters keep saying "Who the hell" and "What the hell"?  Is it supposed to sound gritty?)  It's not exactly out of character for him to get possessive, so fair enough to an extent, but really... this over Rose?  I'm just not seeing it.

Cast-wise, it's a strong one for the Doctor, although his possessiveness doesn't make much sense right next to his offering Mickey an olive branch.  Mickey grows, despite some lingering slapstick tendencies.  The Slitheen are all having tons of fun; it's not their fault the comedy's so broad.  And Penelope Wilton is a constant highlight as bright spark Harriet Jones.  Maybe it's her vague resemblance to Elisabeth Sladen, but she strikes me as a better and more useful Doctor Who companion than Rose could ever be.  Shame we can't keep her.

It's unwieldy, and on a constant humour offensive that cannot help but miss half the time.  But when it's funny, it's very funny; when it's thoughtful, it's refreshing.  The good stuff's trapped inside a wacky, often annoying pantomime, but squint and you'll see it.