nuWho Reviews - From Start to Hurt!

Netflix right now, will continue on Hulu Plus until I get to the ones KJ has bought. But thanks for the warning.

KJ's mom is visiting, so it'll probably be quite a while until the next episode.

Meanwhile, @ PulpLibrarian posted some (mostly old-school) Who media the other day, including this article previewing the series.

01x08 - Father's Day

We open with a flashback to Rose's childhood. Jackie is telling her about how wonderful Rose's father, Pete, was, and how he would have liked to have seen her. Little Rose is listening seriously, as children will do . . . for maybe forty seconds . . . before they start fixating on some minor detail or return to playing Pokemon. Seriously, though, this adds a bit to the history of the bond between Jackie and Rose.

Back in the present day, Rose convinces the Doctor to take her to see her father. The Doctor asks if she's up to it emotionally, then cheerfully starts the TARDIS off with the warning to be careful what she wishes for.

They end up at Rose's parents' wedding, where Pete steps in it by forgetting his bride's middle name. Jackie and Rose both give him the kind of look you don't want a woman giving you. The Doctor thinks it's funny, while Rose protests that "I thought he'd be taller." Fitting, because throughout the episode, Peter Allan Tyler is going to repeatedly come up short in Rose's estimation.

We return to the flashback to find Jackie is now reminiscing about Pete's death. Someone ran him over and left him to die alone. Guess where we're headed next.

They step out into 1987, home to Margaret Thatcher, Sylvester McCoy, and Wesley Crusher. One out of three isn't bad in baseball. Rose again comments that everything seems so normal for the day her father dies. She narrates events as Pete gets out of his car with a vahhz, only to get rammed by the Murder Car. The Doctor squeezes her hand and tells her to run to Pete, but caught in the shock of the moment, Rose can't do it. So, now behind a building out of sight, she asks the Doctor if she can try again.

The Doctor cautions Rose against attracting their previous selves' attention -- wait until our old selves leave before you run out there -- and it's notable that he takes it for granted that she understands. Much as when he asked earlier if she'd be all right seeing her father die, the Doctor is treating Rose as very nearly a peer, someone he doesn't need to get all camera-zoom and emphatic with. In short, the Doctor now trusts Rose.

The deadly car turns the corner, and Rose breaks. She rushes out of hiding -- crossing in front of their old selves, no less -- and saves the vase, and also incidentally her father. The old D&R look at each other in bewilderment and vanish into nothingness.

Rose tells her father her name, clearly expecting him to recognize it, but naturally he doesn't recognize her as the baby he has at home. Rose invites herself along to the wedding Pete's attending, while the Doctor glares and the camera switches to a red, distorted overhead shot of London with discordant noises.

Pete takes them back home and prattles about milk. The Doctor nods and smiles politely while Rose enjoys every word out of Pete's mouth. Left alone, the Doctor crosses his arms and glares at Rose, who puts her best reality-ignoring shields up and chatters satisfiedly about Pete's trophies being out on display instead of tucked in the attic.

It's noteworthy that Pete juuust missed out on advancing to the next tier of the bowling tournament. Pete does not look good for most of this episode. He hits on Rose while being married, he blusters, his inventions are dubious, he argues with his wife. The obvious view to come away with is that Pete may have had his quirks, but overall he was nobody special, maybe even a loser who struggled through life doing odd jobs. Jackie was simply cherry-picking her memories and not telling little Rose about all his faults, whether because she didn't want Rose to think her father was a loser or because she didn't want to face them herself. But between this, Pete's intuition, and his decision at the end, maybe the intention was that Pete simply had hard luck and a weak character. Maybe there was something there, past the weaknesses, something substantial and good, that never found its place in the world.

Anyway, Rose finally pays attention to the Doctor's glare and he spits out that she's "just another stupid ape", like Adam and (previously) Mickey. Rose protests that saving her dad was safe, that one person couldn't make all that much difference. The Doctor replies that one single living person makes all the difference in the world. He changes history, yes, but he has the experience and knowledge to know what is safe to change and what is not. Rose, inexplicably, thinks the Doctor is jealous of Pete getting Rose's attention, and the Doctor takes his TARDIS key back and leaves in a mutual huff. He finds that the TARDIS greenscreen has been deactivated and now it's just the empty prop.

Meanwhile, whatever is viewing London in Red Insectoid Vision starts descending on people and making them drop whatever they're holding. This could have come across as unintentionally hilarious, I'm just saying.

As they're driving to the wedding, Rose tells Pete that Jackie calls him "the most fantastic man in the world". Pete brushes that off with "Must be a different Jackie then." Rose's FutureFone beeps, and she pulls it out to hear the first message ever sent by telephone. Presumably, history has changed backwards so that no other message is allowed to be transmitted telephonically. As they turn a corner, the Murder Car following them keeps going and vanishes. Then it tries to ram them head-on as they pull up in front of the church. Then Jackie tells Pete off and accuses Rose of being "another" of Pete's too-friendly friends, but the biggest shock for Rose is that Jackie's hair is in curls. Jackie rails against all the "rubbish" that Pete brings home and denounces him as a failure. Poor Rose finally yells at them to behave.

A little boy who suddenly finds himself alone in a playground runs past them into the church, yelling about aliens. Then an alien runs up to Rose, yelling at her to get in the church herself. Rose smiles fondly when she sees it's the Doctor, but then a monster bat with a mouth for a stomach appears out of thin air, and it and its buddies start squishy-crunching everybody in sight. You know it's serious when the monsters are confident enough to stop sneaking around. Everyone bundles into the sanctuary of the church, where there is a large stained-glass window of Jesus on the cross that totally isn't foreshadowing anything.

The Doctor covers the question of "why don't they just teleport inside?" by saying that the church is old and therefore strong. I guess they time-travel to get around obstacles by going to a point in time when the obstacle didn't exist? Maybe? What happens if that window was just installed last month? He relishes shouting Jackie down, then says that the scary bat things are sterilizing a wound in time, and nothing in the universe can hurt them. The Murder Car goes by, and when Pete asks about it, the Doctor tells him to pay it no mind. I have to think the Doctor knows that Pete getting himself properly killed might set things straight, but, even in this situation and as dark as this incarnation can get, he isn't going to tell Pete to give himself up.

Pete has pieced enough together to make the leap to confront Rose as his daughter, and they get to know each other more frankly. Meanwhile, the Doctor reassures the bride and groom that they are important, that he'll do his best to save their lives, and comments that he's never lived a life quite like theirs. This could have been just filler, but wound up reinforcing the idea of "common" lives being valuable. Maybe in another episode, the Doctor could have told Pete to buck up and get himself killed, but not this one. Well, he probably wouldn't say that to the father of any of his companions in any episode, but you know what I'm getting at.

The Doctor moves on to telling baby Rose that she mustn't destroy the world. Whether he can speak Baby yet is uncertain, but Baby Rose just looks at him frightened. He warns grown-up Rose not to touch Baby Rose because that would be a "paradox". Presumably that's the Human concept that gets nearest whatever the Time Lord understanding is, because I can touch myself right now and that doesn't create a paradox. The Doctor didn't warn Rose not to breathe on her second try earlier, because that would change the air currents around her earlier self and create a paradox. I'd rather he just said something about an energy discharge if a person overlaps herself in time and space, if this has to be a plot point. I'm pretty sure this rule isn't adhered to in the future anyway.

The Doctor and Rose start arguing again, but the Doctor apologizes (and Rose soon follows suit). He has no idea what to do: aside from a few buildings here and there, all of humanity has been wiped out by now. It's a grim moment, made grimmer by the reminder that the Time Lords are wiped out too. Fortunately the TARDIS key is discovered to be glowing, so the Doctor takes the pulpit (inevitably) and tells everyone that he can use the shiny thing to regain access to his time machine and everyone will be saved from the huge bat monsters. The groom's father's portable phone comes in now as a power source, having served a previous purpose by letting the Doctor listen in on A.G. Bell's first phone call. I approve of plot devices that don't look like plot devices.

Rose tries to invent a future life for Pete's pleasure. If I had to guess, she's drawing on what she wanted as a child to have from her father. Saturday picnics are a bit specific, and she stresses the "being there to be relied upon" thing. Pete simply says that he isn't who Rose describes. He catches on that he should be dead, but that Rose saved his life and wrecked reality and has been trying to hide it from him. "I'm so useless I can't even die properly", he says bitterly. Rose insists she's to blame, but he responds, "I'm your dad. It's my job for it to be my fault." That's leadership quality right there. Unfortunately, Jackie overhears, events eventuate, and baby Rose ends up in Rose's arms (why did Pete put her there? baby Rose's hair and eyes haven't even changed yet) just long enough to allow a monster to make its entrance. The Doctor gets himself eaten up, and the monster promptly collides with the materializing TARDIS. Both disappear, leaving the key behind. Despite the Doctor having warned everyone not to touch it, Rose picks the key up and finds it cold.

The Doctor had said his fix would keep Pete alive. With that hope gone, Pete now sees there's nothing left but for him to get run over. He has a last touching word with Rose and Jackie, this time agreeing with Rose's belief that he would have been there for her. Pete then grabs the innocent vase and heads out, to be Rose's dad, to be one ordinary man who makes all the difference in the world, to have a death that isn't useless. The monsters disappear, humanity reappears, and Rose gets to be with her father at the end after all. There's a flashback with Jackie narrating the revised events, to give the viewers a chance to get all those bits of dust out of their eyes before the next episode's preview.

One is reminded of the bit in "Vincent and the Doctor" about a life being a heap of good things and a heap of bad things. Rose adds to her father's heap of good things, even if the opportunity here came about through a moment of foolishness.

Rating: 3 out of 4 time-fixing monster bat freaks

Favorite dialogue: Rose: But it's not like I've changed history. Not much. [...]
The Doctor: Rose, there's a man alive in the world who wasn't alive before. An ordinary man. That's the most important thing in Creation.

Useless Fact: It turns out that the "paradox" is, in fact, supposed to be a release of energy. Okay then.

Fun Fact: This was KJ's first modern Who episode, she was hooked, and so I started watching because she was, and now here we are.

1x09 - The Empty Child

Great title, huh? The teaser isn’t much on plot, though, as we find the TARDIS chasing a mysterious distress signal–emitting cylinder that is headed for London by way of a mess of time tracks (the space equivalent of the Underground). Rose is wearing a Union Jack shirt for no apparent reason other than this being a very British episode.

Having landed in nighttime London, the Doctor re-introduces the psychic paper, again as a device to let him go around asking people about the weird thing of the week. Structurally, this introduces the idea for when Jack pulls his own paper out later on. But between that and Rose’s dramatic outfit and a few other details, I wonder if TPTB sensed this two-parter would be something special, and made certain it would do the job as a First Episode. As the Doctor breaks into a building to see who’s playing music in it, Rose is distracted by an eerie, childish voice calling for its mother. She then sees an eerie, childish figure in the distance and decides that’s more interesting than asking somebody about big metal cylinders by way of Stravinsky. This is all good dialogue, by the way.

The Doctor finds himself in a nightclub, with a lady in big furs singing “It Had To Be You, Wonderful You”. He waits out the song appreciatively before commandeering the microphone to ask “Has anything fallen from the sky recently?” The audience finally decides this is a funny question, not a stupid one, then shuffles out of the room as sirens sound. It becomes clear that the TARDIS has taken them to WWII London, during the Nazi air raids.

Meanwhile, Rose has tracked the figure down. It’s a child in a suit who's decided to accessorize with a gas mask. It’s currently looking about from atop a scary-tall building. Rose catches hold of a rope that a stagehand is enthusiastically waving about and begins to climb up to him. Unfortunately, the rope is attached to a blimp of some variety, which lifts Rose off into the thick of an air battle before she’s pulled herself more than a few feet off the ground. The compositing in these wide shots is . . . not impressive. The rest of the effects -- and there are many -- are good, especially for the time and on a TV budget, but you'd think they could spare a few last dollars for a merely passable composite shot of Rose drifting across the screen.

The Doctor mentions to a cat that after nine hundred years in the TARDIS, the one thing that could still surprise him would be a travelling companion who doesn’t wander off. Then the fake phone on his fake phone booth rings, which understandably confounds him. A girl with a hard expression appears out of nowhere just long enough to warn him not to answer his TARDIS phone, that the call is not for him. Very spooky! Nancy looks . . . fifteen at the oldest, let’s say, but the actress playing her was about twenty-one at the time the episode aired.

The girl having vanished, the Doctor looks the most indecisive we’ve yet seen him, but finally picks up the phone gingerly. The eerie child’s voice, asking for its mummy, turns the Doctor immediately serious. (As comes up later in the series, the Doctor is friend to all children.) He can’t get anything more out of it, however, and the phone goes dead. He follows a clatter to find a family headed into their bomb shelter, the father less scared than he is frustrated that he can’t finish a proper supper these days. The Doctor catches sight of the mysterious girl slipping into the freshly abandoned house. He finds her inside, feeding homeless boys on the family’s dinner.

Meanwhile, a British officer named Jack uses Luke Skywalker binoculars to investigate an object dangling from a blimp. It’s Rose, still trying to avoid the spectacular battle CGIing around her. He compliments her rump, then when another officer suggests he make himself useful, compliments his rump too. When Rose finally loses her grip on the rope, Jack catches her in a tractor beam and pulls her to safety.

The Doctor ingratiates himself with the home crashers and asks why they haven’t been all evacuated from London. Some were, but landed in abusive situations (a sad historical fact) and headed back to the city they knew. He then gets serious with Nancy, who is defensive. He asks about the phone, Rose, and the cylinder from the teaser, with no results.

Hearing a tapping and the voice asking after its mummy, he finds the eerie child on the other side of a window, looking in, its hand pressed against the pane. It saw several of the boys and followed them here. Nancy hurries around and bolts the door before it can get inside. A wounded hand comes through the mail slot. Under stress, Nancy tells the Doctor that “it isn’t exactly a child.” As she evacuates the house from a child who is evidently worse than a bombing run, Nancy warns the Doctor not to let it touch him, or he will become like it: “empty”.

And then the phone by the Doctor rings. When Nancy takes it from him and puts it back on the cradle, other things start being triggered. The radio starts playing, and a wind-up monkey clashes its cymbals in time with the child’s “Mummy, mummy” chant. It’s basically a twisted inversion of the "toys" plot thread in Close Encounters, with the child still the focal point, but now being the source of the wrongness. (In fact, there's an ape-with-cymbals toy here, too.)

The Doctor talks to the Child (it's capitalized now), telling it its mummy isn’t around, but can get no further information except that it’s afraid of the bombs. He tells it he’ll let it in, but when the door is opened, the Child has vanished.

Meanwhile Rose is overtly attracted to her rescuer (and vice versa), who introduces himself as Captain Jack Harkness. He’s got a fancy spaceship with a tractor beam and a cloaking device and psychic paper and healing nanobots and probably even a stash of Oreos somewhere. As we learn later, he also has an infinite lives cheat, and he’s omnisexual and so are his pheromones. Much like Mickey before I started this rewatch, I've seen little of him, and like Mickey before this rewatch I can take or leave him. We'll see if Jack can similarly elevate himself. So far his dialogue delivery has chafed, although it improves once he decides Rose is a Time Agent.

They go out on top of the spaceship and have a drink, right in front of Big Ben, in the middle of an air raid. As they dance, Jack offers her a Chula warship for sale -- if she's authorized. Rose isn't sure she likes pretending to be an Agent, but she likes the whole flirting thing. Deciding that he won't get any money from her, Jack searches for her companion, by doing "a scan for alien tech" -- which is what Rose wanted to see the Doctor do earlier. "Finally, a professional," she declares, beaming.

The Doctor catches up with Nancy, and amid the commentary on his protuberant facial features finally gets the location of the cylinder out of her. The armed forces have it quarantined. Nancy, ever reluctant to give any direct information herself, urges the Doctor to talk to a doctor in a nearby hospital first. The Doctor reflects on the bravery of Great Britain in stopping the Nazis, then sends Nancy on her way to "save the world".

Inside the hospital, the Doctor finds rooms lined with patients in their beds. All of them wear a gas mask. The doctor, Constantine, is not in the best of health. Constantine tells him there are hundreds of such patients. At his invitation, the Doctor examines a patient and finds head trauma, a collapsed chest cavity, and a hand wound. (Remember, the Child had a prominent gash in its hand as well.) Also the gas mask has inexplicably become fused to the face. The Doctor checks other patients, and all of them have those same features.

Over the Doctor's protests that this is all impossible, Constantine relates that the cylinder killed only one person initially, but his injuries spread rapidly throughout the hospital like a plague. Stranger still, despite the absence of life signs, none of these patients are dead. To demonstrate, he raps a refuse can, and the patients all sit to attention. This is all slowly paced, with dialogue leading the viewer along, to draw out the suspense and horror. Constantine says he expects that the hospital will be exploded to eliminate the plague, but adds that it has spread around London.

As his coughing worsens, Constantine tells the Doctor where to find Patient Zero, then says it's Nancy's brother and that Nancy knows more than she lets on. (The latter is obvious to anyone, especially given that Nancy let on that her brother died from a more normal bomb.) As the Doctor watches in horror, Constantine strains to say "Mummy . . ." and a gas mask grows out of his mouth to cover his face. Gross. Imagine something that size forcing itself out between your jaws.

At this point Jack and Rose arrive to join in the fun. The Doctor takes the news that he's a Time Agent without the slightest twitch, but being called Mr. Spock, after Rose got on his case for not "Spocking it up" earlier, annoys him. The Doctor demands to know what kind of Chula warship Jack has, at which point Jack drops the rakish air and admits that there's no such thing, the cylinder is just a space ambulance with nothing useful in it, and he was hoping to sell it to the Agency and then destroy it before they could find out they'd been had. Also, the fabled Oreo stash is just store-brand oatmeal raisin. Also, he threw the cylinder in their way in the first place, in order to get their attention, and you people aren't actually Time Agents are you?

The Doctor explains the mechanism behind the plague: the victims' DNA are being rewritten. But the results seem pointless. It isn't killing them, it isn't healing them, it isn't enhancing them, it isn't mind-controlling them to any useful purpose. Why would anyone invent such a virus?

Meanwhile, Nancy has gone back to the banquet house for more food, but is trapped in the dining room by the Child. She makes a break for the door, but the Child uses its Force powers to slam the door shut. As it advances on her, ignoring her attempts to identify herself as its sister, the patients around our other heroes come to life and entrap them with the same haunting question.

"Mummy?"

The dark, often creepy atmosphere lifts this episode immensely. Cramped alleyways, the small nightclub, muted colors, and the bewildering turns of events combine for a story that encloses our heroes tightly even though the action, in principle, ranges across London. Even when Rose is first lifted into the sky, her view is blocked by walls of balloons and aeroplanes. It goes without saying that the use of gas masks to remove the main humanizing feature, the face, while making the enemy/victim instantly recognizable as such was a smart move. And the soundtrack has been on-point as well. The odd thumping when the Doctor is deciding to let the Child in, after Nancy and the children have fled, or the "finally reaching the source" music when the Doctor unlocks the hospital gates and heads inside, for example.

This episode shows the inhabitants of London finding ways to maintain a sense of order in their lives. People visit nightclubs; the father's irritation reflects the loss of horror at being bombed; Nancy insists on good manners from her boys. Jack feels out of place in this regard, at least until it turns out he started the whole plot. He's an intrusion, like the Doctor and Rose, but in mood as well as time. All this stuff about time agencies and used warship salesmen and ropey spaceship innards works well enough, but it feels thematically at odds with the Doctor's half of the story, and I think that is what ultimately rubs me wrong about Jack's part of the episode. It's not nearly enough of a blemish to lower the rating, though.

Rating: 4 creepy children in gas masks

Favorite dialogue: Doctor: So that's what you do is it Nancy? Soon as the sirens go, you find a big fat family meal still warm on the table, with everyone down in the air raid shelter, and bingo! Feeding frenzy for the homeless kids of London Town. Puddings for all, as long as the bombs don't get you.
Nancy: Something wrong with that?
Doctor: Wrong with that? It’s brilliant. I’m not sure if it’s Marxism in action or a West End musical.

I'm not heading straight on to "The Doctor Dances" because: I got Close Encounters for Christmas and I'm gonna watch it.

01x10 - The Doctor Dances

Okay, so we left our heroes cornered by hive-mind zombies intent on infecting them with gas masks. Just your standard cliffhanger. The Doctor tries telling the hospital bunch that he's angry with them and they should go to their rooms. All of them, plus the Child, adopt identical dejected body language and shuffle away. The Doctor is happy the threat is over: "Those would have been terrible last words."

While Nancy sobs for her lost brother, Jack and the Doctor expand upon a few plot points from Part 1. Jack protests that his con game is fun for all ages and he's not to blame for any of this virus stuff. As you can guess, the 9th Doctor is angry with him, possibly for trying to deflect blame (it's become a theme this season) as much as for what his actions have led to.

Nancy suffers a jump scare as she's leaving the house, as the Child steps out from around a corner! But it's just the resident boy wearing a normal gas mask. His parents capture Nancy and bundle her back into the house, presumably so the mother can administer boiling-hot justice via her coffeepot.

The Doctor leads the way up the hospital's stairs to look at Patient Zero. He lets Jack neutralize the lock on the door so he can get a good look at Jack's sonic blaster (not a euphemism). Continuing this Doctor's theme of being a walking disaster magnet, Jack mentions that the facility that made his gun was destroyed. The Doctor agrees: "Like I said, [I was there] once." The fact that bananas are now grown there now is also implied to be his doing. One might further infer that he's messing with Jack deliberately. The gun's shooty visual effect is kind of cheesy but fun. Rose likes it too.

The room beyond is half lab, half bedroom, and all a mess. Jack surmises that something strong and angry escaped, but the walls are covered with childish drawings of stickmen. Playing back an interrogation recording yields what the viewer expects: One question after another is met with a childish voice repeating variations on "Are you my mummy? I want my mummy!" Grim, the Doctor sees that the stick figures all represent a woman. One thought permeating this child's mind: to find his mother. As a new father, I'm reminded that a young child's need for his or her parents is a primal desire, an instinct that can override all other emotions when the urge strikes. Not even proximity is enough sometimes.

As the recording provides an eerie backdrop, the Doctor demands to know why the monkeys around him can't feel "it" emanating from the walls. "When he's stressed he likes to insult species", Rose tells Jack, which is as good an explanation as any. The Doctor reasons through what must have happened: children all over London, looking for food; the spaceship crashes; someone gets altered; then -- what? "It's afraid," the Doctor says as the recording changes to "I'm he-ere!" "The power of a god, and I just sent it to its room", he grins. But then it sets in that the tape ended and the voice is still talking. "And this is its room", he concludes, and spins around -- and the background music, respectfully absent for a while, now jumps in to punctuate the sight of the Child on the other side of the table, blocking their escape.

Jack pulls his gun to shoot the Child, but finds he's holding a banana. The Doctor grins and uses Jack's gun to remove part of the wall. They jump through, Jack reverse-guns the wall back into existence, the Child starts punching through the wall, and they flee, only to run into the other patients. Trapped, Jack starts enumerating the uses of his blaster. "What've you got?" he asks the Doctor. The Doctor proudly pulls out his screwdriver and announces, "I've got --" then realizes how lame it would sound and finishes with "-- never mind. It's sonic, okay, let's leave it at that." Finally, pressured further, he admits it's a screwdriver. This is the best contender yet for Favorite Dialogue. We all know what will win, yes, but honorary mentions all around.

Anyway, Rose finally shoots the floor with Jack's gun and they fall through to the next floor. (Spock raises an approving eyebrow at her three-dimensional thinking and Han mutters about maybe beginning to like her.) Jack asks, "Who looks at a screwdriver and thinks, ooh, this could be a little more sonic?" and the Doctor says defensively, "What, you've never been bored? Never had a long night, never had a lot of cabinets to put up?" They find they're in another room of the Living Gas Masks and, upon finding Jack's gun is spent (not a euphemism), the Doctor just opens the door himself and sonics it locked behind them. Jack complains about the Doctor blowing up the gun factory, to which Rose responds, "The first day we met, he blew up my job. It's practically how he communicates."

The Doctor calls for a list of assets, to which Jack snarks about the lack of same, to which the Doctor asks Rose where she found this romantic interest. A bit of banter more, and Jack disappears with a teleporty sound.

Nancy has blackmailed her way out of her citizen's arrest and picked up wirecutters, a torch, and food into the bargain. She finds her boys and scolds them for reusing a hideout. One of them, blissfully ignoring logic, is illiterately typing a letter to his father, whereabouts currently unknown. Nancy tells them they have to think for themselves in case she never comes back. She's headed to the "bomb site" to try to solve the mystery herself. One of the boys protests that she keeps them safe, to which she responds that the Child keeps homing in on her, and as long as they are with her they will never be safe. As evidence, she points out that the typing SFX have continued even with nobody near the typewriter. Spooky!

Jack phones back to the Doctor and Rose by activating the hospital's broken radio, using his fancy spaceship's capabilities. The Doctor notes that the Child can do the same thing, to which the Child singsongs, "And I can hear you. Coming to find you", which just makes it creepier.

The Doctor sets about the time-honored task of loosening the bars in the window of their effective prison cell. You know, just in case the self-centered con man from the future doesn't come back for them. Rose says she trusts Jack because he's like the Doctor except he also knows how to get a girl's heart racing. The Doctor, rather than take umbrage at the implication that he too would run a con and then shrug off the collateral damage, protests he can totally dance. (The Doctor Who wiki says there is one instance of the Doctor dancing in the old show.) Rose calls his bluff, and he steps toward her with a very unfamiliar look of trepidation on his face, one of being at a loss as to what to do next. Were I a Doctor/Rose 'shipper, I'd say he's only now realizing the depths of Rose's feelings for him *siiiigh*. Anyway, he catches sight of Rose's healthy hands, and wants to know where the burns from that barrage balloon rope are. Rose explains about Captain Jack Harkness's Patent Cure-All Nanobots[TM]. This works to get an important plot point reintroduced for this episode while seeming to just be a way to progress the, uh, interest triangle centered on Rose. As they start to dance, not impressing Rose in the least, Jack pipes in to inform them that he teleported them aboard unawares.

The Doctor recognizes this as a Chula ship too, only more functional than the derelict. Accordingly he snaps his fingers, causing a glowing swarm of nanobots/"nanogenes" to appear around his hand and fix a burn. He patters about them some more, but if you're really super-detective you probably picked up on the "genes" part of their name, connected it with the re-writing DNA comment from the end of last episode, and went hmmm. He then, not at all euphemistically, tells Jack he needs to see Jack's "space junk". There's also a bit of backstory for Jack, as he used to be a Time Agent, only to discover they'd removed two years' worth of his memories.

Nancy has gotten herself captured at the crash site. She's chained to a desk with a soldier sporting the hottest new injury everyone's wearing this season. Nancy begs the commanding officer to detain her somewhere else, but being Nancy, she never tries to explain why. Even when the CO catches the soldier calling him "Mummy". She then tries to tell the soldier to let her go, with no results.

Outside, Jack distracts "Algy", the CO, while the Doctor cheerfully tells Rose about humanity going out into the galaxy and dancing with all the aliens they can find (this is a euphemism). Rose isn't sure what to make of this. Jack isn't sure what to make of Algy -- his posh demeanor has degenerated into childish body language and a preoccupation with the word "mummy". After the inevitable transformation, the Doctor announces that the whatever-it-is is airborne now (how would he know?), and there are only hours left to save the human race. An air raid siren sounds the alarm, and Rose remembers that a bomb is supposed to hit here soon.

Our heroes stop by to rescue Nancy, who sang her soldier to sleep, then look over the derelict ambulance. It looks like it could hold two, maybe four humans if they held their breaths. Jack tries to open it, but trips emergency crash protocols that involve a siren and a blinking red light. Probably not a good thing then? All the Gas Mask people wake up and head for the crash site. Not a good thing. The Doctor tosses Rose his screwdriver and tells her which setting will close up Nancy's hole in the fence. It's setting #2000-odd, which suggests an awful lot of long, bored nights.

Rose and Nancy talk about the future as they repair the fence. (Rose makes it easier for the VFX people by making the screwdriver glow extra-bright as the wire repairs.) Nancy finds it hard to believe that any future exists beyond this war that doesn't involve Germans goose-stepping all over Britain.

Jack has gotten the ambulance open and declares it empty. The Doctor counters that it contains enough nanogenes to "rebuild a species." The nanogenes found a dead child wearing a gas mask, healed and brought it back to life as best they could guess, then used the result as a template to "fix" all the rest of the humans they found. Which will be everyone in the world. Since the derelict is designed for the battlefield, it added on standard Chula warrior features, which covers all the supernatural things we've seen the victims do. Such as them now converging on the ambulance to defend it.

As the bombs get closer, Jack kinda-sorta-doesn't really apologize for having to leave them in the lurch, actually apologizes with his eyes, and then teleports out. Meanwhile the Doctor has looked up Nancy on IMDB and realizes that she's old enough to in fact be the Child's mother. As the Child marches forward with his army, the Doctor urges Nancy to tell him the truth. Tragically, there isn't enough Jamie left to understand Nancy's answer, so she finally tells him she's sorry and gives him the physical contact she's been afraid of the whole story, embracing him as the son she's been afraid to admit to his whole life. And then the nanogenes kick in and create a cloud of glowy love around them. It's touches like these that win Hugos.

As the Doctor looks on in hope, the nanogenes recognize Nancy's DNA as similar to Jamie's, then reconstruct him properly based on the new information.

Jack flies by and tractors the bomb before it drops on the happy reunion. The, uh, "special" effects strike again here. I'm guessing the FX people were at a loss as to how to stage this bit, so they had someone's five-year-old come in and show them how to do it with toys. And . . . uh . . . Jack is riding the bomb now. Huh. The Doctor tells him the bomb isn't necessary -- he must have told Jack to let the bomb drop and wipe out the infection, back while the barbed wire was being repaired -- and Jack says goodbye before teleporting himself and the stasis'ed bomb into the ship and flying away.

That, uh, that happened.

Then the Doctor calls down the nanogenes onto his hands, apparently reprograms them with a twiddling of his fingers, and, beaming, flings them at the Gas Mask Army. "Everybody lives!" he shouts, and sure enough, everyone gets up with their proper faces on. He compliments Dr. Constantine, who may not remember the whole freaky zombie thing, and leaves him to deal with a lady whose leg has grown back. "There is a war on, is it possible you miscounted?" Dr. C. asks her.

The ambulance is set to self-destruct once nobody is nearby, the nanogenes are set to deactivate once everyone is cured, and the Doctor is ecstatic. "Ask me anything!" he declares, so Rose wants to know why Jack said goodbye. Well, that's a downer.

We find Jack in deep space, trying to figure out how to get rid of a bomb before it eats through stasis. Finding no way out, he sips booze to remain upbeat and reflects on previous times he was doomed to die. It seems we're about to witness a brave man meeting his end . . . but then the TARDIS appears in the back of the ship, with Rose urging him into the control room as she instructs the Doctor in dancing. Rose invites Jack to cut in, but the Doctor suddenly remembers his dance moves and the episode ends with Jack watching with approval as the Doctor and Rose strut their stuff.

Honestly, I could have done a "top ten dialogues" list for this story and have had plenty of material left over.


Rating: 4 square-shaped sonic blaster bolts

Favorite dialogue: The Doctor: Come on. Give me a day like this. Give me this one.
[He removes the mask from Jamie, then laughs.]
The Doctor: Twenty years to pop music, you're gonna love it.
[...]
The Doctor: Everybody lives, Rose. Just this once! Everybody lives!

Things from this episode also appearing in the Matt Smith run: I dunno, four at least?
Things even more pointless than a sonic screwdriver: sonic carpenter's level, sonic lockpick, sonic eyebrows

1x11 - Boom Town

Maybe it's just me, but this is an unassuming little title. It feels like it should rouse interest, but it doesn't. Anyway, on with the actual episode.

The episode opens with, oh dear, a recap of the Slitheen two-parter. At least they avoided showing the really stupid bits.

It is now six months later, Earth Time. Gentle Scientist McFussy is gently telling Alien Lady ("Margaret") that there's a problem. His "readings" indicate that "the project" is just so dangerous that it's as if someone must be trying to annihilate "the city". Margaret's stomach gurgles as she gently tells McFussy that of course she'll shut the project down, she's not a maniac, and, er, she won't have to kill anyone else to hush this up will she? She unzips, the inevitable is about to happen, and we go to title sequence.

This gives us time to wonder about that stomach gurgle, because doggone it, someone's still got some 'splaining to do about all the flatulence "humor" that drove the initial two-parter into the ground nose-first. Did they reshoot after negative feedback from the first two episodes? They couldn't have just changed the sound effect, because Margaret blames the gurgle on being hungry. So either someone went to the expense of a dinky little reshoot, or someone realized ahead of time how stupid the toilet humor would be, and altered it for this episode but not the first two. What gives?

Okay, enough of this. Let's try to approach this episode with a fresh palate. McFussy looked to a model depicting several nuclear reactors and a lot of buildings, so we see where the title is likely to come in. IT IS A PUN HA HA. I for one am disappointed we aren't in the American Old West, but I guess it just highlights how Britain-centric this first season is.

We join Mickey as he homes in on a blue police box randomly sitting in a plaza somewhere in scenic downtown Wales. But the man who answers his knock is not the Doctor! How embarrassing! But don't worry, it's Captain Jack Harkness. The Doctor greets Mickey cordially. Mickey has come to give Rose her passport, and also to see if she's gotten tired of having all of space and time at her beck and call yet. But now there's this new handsome guy in the room, giving off decidedly non-asexual vibes, and Mickey wants to know what's up with that too. Instead we find out why the TARDIS is in Cardiff: that rift that was sealed to stop the ghost invasion force back in the third episode left behind a spacetime scar, and spacetime scars leak energy pus, and energy pus is what the TARDIS needs to get refueled.

I don't remember the TARDIS ever needing refueling as if it were an ordinary Earth vehicle. KJ doesn't either. Being drained of its power by some force, sure, that happens, but this? I wouldn't care so much, but an episode that goes back to the Slitheen is already on close watch.

Mickey introduces the question of why the TARDIS always looks like a police box. (Mickey didn't realize that police boxes were ever a real thing, which is likely a wink to younger viewers in the same position.) The Doctor says he doesn't fix the chameleon circuit because he likes the TARDIS as it is. (We'll later see that he leaves the parking brake on because he likes the wheezing sound.) "I love it," agrees Rose, hugging the TARDIS probably a little too warmly for Mickey's comfort. The Doctor leads them off to explore Cardiff, the safest place in the universe.

Cut to Margaret saying that the nuclear plant will be built in the middle of Cardiff. I figured this would be revenge against London for previous events, but no, the project's in Cardiff. Anyway, she's Mayor and she's going to knock down a castle and build perfectly safe nuclear reactors, and absolutely nothing bad will happen, honest. She doesn't want to be photographed, she doesn't want to be interviewed, and she doesn't want Cathy Salt, intrepid reporter for the Gazette, to tell her of whispers that the project is cursed with more than an indecipherable Welsh name.

Cathy says it's "a bit odd" that so many have died during the construction of the project, which in this day and age probably means three or four tops. And then she starts her list with "the entire team of the European Safety Inspectors", and it's like, whoa, how is this project still going forward? The odd local engineer is one thing, but wipe out an entire unit of people devoted to rooting out dangers that others might try to hide, presumably sent by the European Union, and there are going to be Inquiries.

How long has she been Mayor, anyway? Can you even advance a nuclear reactor project within six months to where an international safety team wants to look things over?

Anyway, the reporter lists all the people who have died, and Margaret brushes them off one by one, going from probably illegal safety issues to "ice is slippery okay geeze". You'd think someone must have noticed a pattern and called for a formal investigation, but apparently this is just one of those things that can only be pieced together by an attractive reporter chick, who then brings it to the attention of the attractive male lead, and then they try to tell the authorities but get the brush-off and have to have adventures to uncover the truth. Cathy says she's found that the man killed in the teaser was concerned that the plant was deliberately designed to lead to a gigantic meltdown.

Margaret hustles Cathy off to kill her out of the public eye. Cathy goes along because, hey, all those other suspicious deaths happened to other people, and it's not as if her little bitty newspaper could ever happen across anything, you know, actually serious. If Cathy came across Tony Blair sneaking out of the Treasury at midnight, guilty expression on his face, strange bulges in his British garments, all she would say would be, "Hello Mister Blair! Put on some weight, have you? Oh, while I'm here, do you have anything to say about reports that someone is embezzling large sums of money from the Government?"

Anyway, just as Alien Lady is about to kill Cathy to stop the information being released, Cathy mentions her fiance thinks she's nuts. Alien Lady considers this angle, relaxes, probes this new line of thinking. The fact that Cathy is pregnant hits home with Alien Lady, and she softens. It's rather a strange scene, deliberately so, with Alien Lady sitting in a public restroom stall, fully unmasked, chatting in a very human way about family with this oblivious girl. Alien Lady reminisces about her deceased family as much as she can do in public, concluding that maybe she is cursed. Cathy disagrees, adding that Alien Lady is "quite nice." Alien Lady thanks her and sends her on her way, saying that she needs to be alone and perhaps I'll kill you some other time?

Now we find the TARDIS Gang relaxing in a seaside restaurant, listening to a delightful anecdote Jack is telling. It's a great little bit, and oh wow already? Here we are, immediately plunging into the exact plot device Alien Lady (and everyone else) saw coming: the Doctor recognizing her in a photograph in a newspaper . . . right under a big headline reading New Mayor, new Cardiff. Looks like she's been mayor considerably less than six months, then.

Alien Lady isn't cursed, the whole Slitheen storyline is.

Rrrgh.

The Gang heads straight for City Hall. Jack coolly outlines a basic, sensible plan to confront and bottle up Alien Lady. How can these episodes be so sane and yet so stupid? The Doctor corrects him as to who's in charge, then after a moment's thought accepts his scheme. Everyone flips out their cell phones, and in they charge.

The Doctor tells the Receptionist to tell the Mayor that the Doctor told the Receptionist that "the Doctor" would like to see her. "Doctor who?" asks the receptionist. (Ding!) There is a prompt clink as Margaret's teacup hits the floor. The receptionist comes back out and tries to stammer apologies, to which the Doctor smiles knowingly and says, "She's climbing out of the window, isn't she?" The Doctor begins coordinating with the rest of his strike team, with Mickey continuing to look a little out of his depth (especially as he collides with a janitor and runs off with his foot in a bucket of toilet paper). At this point, the receptionist decides to defend the Lord Mayor from the Doctor. Fortunately, Rose and Jack drive Margaret back past the Doctor. She gets past Mickey's exit before he can cut her off and she teleports away, but the Doctor teleports her back, now pointed in their direction, and smiles genially at her. Every time she teleports away, the Doctor simply returns her closer to them.

Back in her chambers, Margaret tries to pass off the nuclear plant as philanthropy, but the Doctor says that it's designed to explode the moment it achieves full capacity. Jack adds that, being on top of that scar (he calls it a "rift", but he himself helped establish it was sealed, so good job again episode), it would blow up the entire planet. Rose asks whether anyone noticed -- noticed the design flaw, I mean, not the impossibility of the Doctor discovering such a design flaw from examining a public relations model the size of a coffee table.

It's like the Slitheen sweat plot holes, or something.

"I further deduce that this model was constructed by a left-handed man of average height whose wife has ceased to love him."​

Margaret bitterly says that London doesn't care what happens in Wales, then declares in shock that she's gone native -- sounding like a Welshman, ugh. Okay, that's funny, but it doesn't count as patching that particular plot hole. You can do better than that, Russell T. Davies.

Or maybe you can't. Because I just, what is this. It's Mickey's turn to get a line, so he asks why she would blow herself up (uh, remember she's got a teleporter?) and gets alien-racist, and in response the Doctor pulls the central portion out of the model and flips it over, revealing what looks kinda like a color-coded circuit board. Looks like she put her evil plans into a model where anyone could find them. I bet she puts her secret lair's self-destruct code under the doormat when she goes out for the evening, too. Jack is practically drooling over whatever this impressive hardware is supposed to do, but he also points out that it should be beyond her capabilities. I suspect a "Bad Wolf" moment is coming by way of explanation.

Essentially, the technobabble doohickey would surround her in a protective bubble, then use the energy from the planetary explosion to surf her back to a properly civilized planet. And the circuit board is the doohickey itself, not a representation of what's to be buried under the plant. I actually respect that more. She's keeping her doohickey close to her, in a natural place for her to be at the crucial moment, in an elegantly relevant place that, honestly, nobody's likely to look. It's much more sane than "I will tell the model builder to include all that weird underground stuff I should be keeping secret." I will award this style points.

Margaret is tight-lipped about how she came by the doohickey, then tells the Doctor that she chose "Blaidd Drwg" for the project name for no particular reason. The music gets eerie-sad ooo-oo-y as the Doctor announces that it's Welsh for "Bad Wolf". Okay, well, half-credit for me, I guess. Rose and the Doctor are both weirded out, having caught on that the phrase is "following" them around, but the Doctor snaps out of it and announces plans to take Margaret home. Margaret stonily informs them that the planetary government would execute her if she returned. The Doctor simply replies, "Not my problem." That's cold, and comes out of nowhere. He seriously won't drop her off on another planet that she could have travelled to anyway after he took her home?

Maybe the whole Roxycolecofallopian thing breaks writers' minds. The word overflows a neuron somewhere in their brains, and they just can't take the episode they're writing seriously. Maybe if the Slitheens' planet were called "Sturm" or "Dirk" these would be among the best early episodes of the series.

Anyway, Margaret gushes over the TARDIS, calling it technology of the gods. The Doctor responds that he'd make a bad god. The fact that he wouldn't allow his followers days of rest could hint at his suppressed ego (my preference), or just that he doesn't believe in taking a break from doing whatever it is he would have his followers do. Jack is trying to siphon some energy from the doohickey into the TARDIS. Margaret tries to make them feel guilt over taking her back to die. Mickey tries not to have any of it, but nobody can meet her gaze.

Eventually, Mickey steps outside to get away from the tension in the TARDIS. Rose follows to make eyes at him, and Mickey takes the chance to get her to himself for the night.

In the TARDIS, Margaret goes to work on the Doctor. It just slides off of him. So Margaret asks for a last meal, at a nearby restaurant she claims to have come to appreciate. Jack warns that she will try to escape, to which Margaret lashes out bitterly that she can't escape the Doctor. She challenges the Doctor to eat with someone he's about to kill. The Doctor says he could totally do it but brushes her request aside, to which Jack now volunteers his futuristic handcuffs that should keep her from escaping. The Doctor grins and accepts her challenge. He is really mood-swingy this episode.

Eating with other people tends to be a community thing for humans, a thing done among friends and those who are about to become more friendly toward each other as a result of eating together. It's probably something in our brain chemistry. That there would be similar connotations among aliens is a leap in logic, but a plausible one.

In the restaurant, Margaret works on the Doctor, trying to force him to see her as a person rather than a problem to be disposed of. She also dumps iocaine powder in his wine while his back is turned, but he turns back and trades their glasses with a smile. Then she manifests a goofy-sounding poison dart from her finger, but he catches it. Then she breathes poison at him, but he blocks it with breath freshener spray.

I want to take this man vs. woman struggle seriously, I genuinely do, but you cannot just dump this goofy stuff RIGHT IN THE THICK OF IT and expect not to break the mood. Rrrgh. Let's see what Rose and Mickey are up to.

Rose is telling Mickey about visiting a planet that was much colder than the brisk Welsh summer night they're experiencing. The planet is called Woman Wept, when they could have just called it Maine. She's gushing about her amazing experiences with the Doctor when it should just be her-and-Mickey time. It's understandable but rude, and it shows in Mickey's face. He finally says that he's seeing someone else. Mickey confronts her with what he's gone through. "You left me! You make me feel like nothing!" he shouts. "Am I just supposed to sit here for the rest of my life waiting for you, because I will."

Margaret describes the slow torture that she'll be put through upon return home, which finally gets the Doctor to break his oblivious facade and get down to brass tacks. He won't take her to another planet because she'll just start killing people again. (And she couldn't have left Rampartcalaminefurious after you dropped her off because . . . ?) He points out, "You're pleading for mercy out of a dead woman's lips." As evidence that she can lead a quiet life, Margaret tells the Doctor about not killing Cathy. The Doctor dismisses it as a whim. Margaret turns on him again, accusing him of playing God with other people's lives and leaving the wreckage behind forever. (This, obviously, is more of that darker look at the Doctor's career we've been getting this season.) And the Doctor falters just a bit.

Margaret is trying the "bad home life" defense on for size when the rumbling starts. The Doctor deactivates the handcuffs for convenience, or something, and Margaret assures him that she has no desire to wander off. Meanwhile, Mickey is asking Rose to give him some sort of commitment. But electrical things explode, people scream, and Rose takes off without an answer. Mickey gets mad and shouts after her that she'll always choose the Doctor over him.

The Doctor finds the TARDIS is the focal point of a discharge of basic VFX: the rift is opening again, and it'll tear apart the planet! It looks like Jack got the doohickey plugged in a little too well. Rose rushes in, demands an update, and gets collared by a gloating Margaret. Margaret explains that this was all according to backup plan: anyone capable of stopping her would have technology that her doohickey could feed off of.

Margaret is ready to surf her way to freedom, but then a bright light comes from beneath the TARDIS console. The Doctor informs her that it's the Heart of the TARDIS, pouring out from the ship's soul. She gazes at the light and begins to smile at how shiny it is. She finally tells the Doctor "Thank you" and is gone.

After the TARDIS blows a few more circuits and everything gets settled down, they investigate and find a tentacled egg inside the Margaret skin. The Doctor tries to rationalize how the TARDIS could make her physically regress to her childhood, but I don't think even the writer bought what he's trying to sell us. Rose remembers she has a boyfriend and rushes off to see if he's safe. Mickey sees her return, clearly looking for him . . . and walks off into the night.

Rose returns Mickey-less. When the Doctor inquires, she simply says he's fine and he's gone. The Doctor says Alien Lady can look forward to her second chance at life, to which Rose says, "That'd be nice." On that note of wistful regret, we're finally done.

This was less painful than either of the first two Slitheen episodes, but no way it gets the same score as "The Unquiet Dead" or the news spacestation one.

Rating: 1.5 nuclear plants astride a rift

Favorite dialogue: The Doctor: You let one of them go. But that's nothing new. Every now and then a little victim's spared. Because she smiled. Because he's got freckles. Because he begged. And that's how you live with yourself. That's how you slaughter millions. Because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind's in the right direction . . . you happen to be kind.
Margaret: Only a killer would know that. Is that right? From what I've seen, your funny little happy-go-lucky life leaves devastation in its wake. Always moving on because you dare not go back. Playing with so many people's lives, you might as well be a god. And you're right, Doctor. You're absolutely right. Sometimes . . . you let one go.

Credit where credit is due: The rift that brought the TARDIS there to "refuel" was the same plot point that attracted Alien Lady to the location. Efficiency in plotting. Even if it's stupid plotting.

01x12 - Bad Wolf

We quickly recap "The Long Game", which I never expected to hear about again. But the Doctor's comment that humanity's progress should resume is used as a plot hook to propel us another hundred years into the future, where the Doctor wakes up disoriented in a changing room. It's disorienting for the viewer, too, helped along by the aggressive techno dance soundtrack. A young blonde woman, Pigtailed Rose, rushes over to help him up.

We gather (aided by the subtitles) that the Doctor has been dumped into a garish version of the Big Brother TV show that I thankfully haven't heard of in years. Also in the room are a black woman wearing loud pink and a man in a bootleg Rolling Stones shirt. He complains that eviction (which we all know is code for "someone's gonna die") is just five minutes away, what's with dropping someone new on them now? Black Rose agrees that if "the rules" keep changing like this, she might just repaint the walls as an act of defiance.

Given that her color scheme is just as loud as the house's, I'm not sure what kind of threat that is.

"You see that bit of white wall over there? I'll paint it day-glo green. DAY-GLO! And if you really make me mad, I'll paint it a blinding yellow, and then deep purple, and then beige on top of that just to really tick everyone off."​

The Doctor is promptly led off to a private room to tell the audience how his day is going. Meanwhile, Real Rose comes to looking into the face of a man who tells her that the android is the Law. I hope it flies around eating frogs, because that sounds more appealing than what I expect from the House O' Roses. The Weakest Link is as sordid as I care to get in the reality show genre.

Oddly enough, Rose is led onto a Weakest Link set. I honestly did not know that was coming. The android is an Anne-droid with red hair and red eyes and actually says this is The Weakest Link. Either the BBC owns the British version, or the parody laws are very strong across the Atlantic.

Meanwhile Captain Jack Harkness finds himself on Robot Eye for the Omnisexual Guy. The robots in question remove his clothing for the edification of millions of viewers. Jack confidently responds that "your viewing figures just went up." Not sure how this scenario is supposed to lead to deadly peril, but at least we're getting a variety of shows.

The Doctor is back in the House, sonicing his surroundings to find a way out. Pigtailed Rose (who claims her true name is Lynda) pesters him to tell her what the viewers think of her. The Doctor pleases her by telling her everyone thinks she's sweet. Then he remembers how he was captured: a white light emanated from the wall of the TARDIS and sucked everyone in. The inside wall of the TARDIS, while they were in 1300s Japan saving the locals from Cyberkaiju or something. That's quite a feat, too much of a feat for their abduction to be anything other than deliberate. He looks into a camera screen and delivers the typical Doctor warning.

A man listening in lowers his headset and moves closer to a bank of computers. Like in "The Long Game", but the operators aren't zombies. He tries to get a woman's attention, but she's busy segueing us back to Rose, who decides she'll win a trivia game based on popular culture several hundred years into her future. Fortunately, there are enough simple questions that she doesn't lay a total egg. We learn that Torchwood (who?) became famous and is now destroyed. This cracks Rose up. Headset Man and Segue Woman are concerned by this: "I think she knows." Headset Man says the Doctor just appeared without explanation: "It's like the game is running itself."

The fashion robots have replaced Jack's white shirt with a different white shirt, and well, that's about the extent of their ambition thus far. One robot tells Jack he should "do something about that face", to which Jack agrees that he's considered cosmetic surgery and cups its crude plastic boobs. Okay then. But just when it seems Jack's storyline is going smoothly, the other robot reveals that it's equipped with a chainsaw and a Death Star torture kit.

Speaking of pain, Annedroid is making small talk with Rose. Annedroid burns her by asking how she has money to dye her hair, then asks why she voted for Fitch. Rose says Fitch (who looked distraught when she got a biology question wrong, to let us know who would lose the round) got a few questions wrong, to which Annedroid replies with a bit of venom, "And you'd know about that." Meanwhile Fitch is starting to blubber, because naturally getting voted out means death here too. Instead of a trapdoor, or even eye lasers, however, Annedroid sticks out her tongue and disintegrates Fitch.

Rose declares that everyone is sick in the head and she won't play anymore. So the actual weakest player, Broff, breaks down and declares he won't play anymore, so that Annedroid can shoot him down to railroad Rose back into the plot.

The Doctor is very bored with playing along and impatient to get back to clicking on objects so he can solve the puzzle and escape the room. When Black Rose is evicted, the other two embrace her tearfully while the Doctor flops down on the couch in irritation. "We're going to get you!" the announcer voice announces gleefully, and soon Black Rose walks into a clean white box and is zapped into powder.

Meanwhile, Headset and Segue mention a rumor that something is concealed "under the transmissions", possibly something that the Controller can't see, even though she should see everything. Well, this took a hard U-turn straight back into "The Long Game". We meet the Controller: a woman with lots of tubes and fiber optic cables coming out of her, her eyes staring at something and nothing, her mouth gibbering uncontrollably. The visual and music combine to be horrific.

The Doctor learns that Big Brother contestants are chosen at random, the winner is happy to escape alive, and nobody (in an admittedly small pool of respondents) seems inclined to question this status quo. But hey, there are only sixty Houses right now because of cutbacks. He sonics a camera to death so that he can be evicted, escape death, and then find Rose.

While the others stare their mortality in the face, Jack has decided that this white tennis outfit just isn't him. The robots zap that off and announce that they will proceed with the "face-off". "I think you'd look good with a dog's head!" one of the robots declares, and they proceed to get more inventive, again with a little venom. Jack shoots both their heads off.

A fairly obvious inference by now is that someone or something blames the Doctor & associates for not sticking around to set things right in "The Long Game". The temporal teleportation powers remain unexplained.

Rodrick tells Rose he's keeping her alive so he can beat her in the finals, then says the Bad Wolf Corporation is behind all this Television To Die For. Cue the sad oo-ooo-y music as Rose remembers all the times we've seen Bad Wolf crop up, with an overlay of the Time Vortex for spice. We've seen all this, we remember enough of it, especially given it was pointed out just last episode. Show us something different, like Pretty Samurai Moon using her Sparkling Bad Wolf Justice Strike against Cyber-Mothra.

The Doctor pumps his fists excitedly on hearing he's been evicted. The disintegrator powers down, no worries: whatever brought him here wanted him alive. Because nobody ever wants to see an enemy die ironically, or humiliatingly in front of millions . . . but this is standard Doctor Who logic, so we'll let it go. He breaks out of the Death Room, then tries to break through his fellow occupants' conditioning so they'll follow him to safety. Pigtailed Rose obliges.

He recognizes his new environment as Station 5, and humble-brags to Pigtailed Rose that he helped solve a little problem here a century ago. She rattles off all the death-oriented TV shows that Bad Wolf produces and says well, naturally everyone watches them. She finally has enough of the Doctor being strange and wants to know who he is. The Doctor brushes her off with possibly the biggest fib he's ever told: "All I'm after is a quiet life." She asks if she can tag along on his travels, he likes the idea, gentle music is playing, and she's just doomed herself to a gruesome end. The Doctor can afford one chick at a time, Lynda, the production budget isn't infinite.

The Controller tells Headset to ignore the "no one" contestants wandering around the Satellite's innards, then tells Segue that she's not allowed to look inside Archive 6 to figure out what's going on. Clearly the Controller is in on it.

The Doctor now finds that Earth is super-polluted to death and everyone just passively watches each other die on game shows. Pigtailed Rose tells him that when he shut down the news, society plain fell apart. The Doctor is just a little horrified.

Jack has made a laser rifle and tracked down the Doctor, who is stressing out over a balky computer. He finds evidence of the extra transmission thing, but more importantly they find Rose is facing death from Annedroid. Off they go, while Rose tries desperately to win the final round. She puts up a respectable fight but loses by one point, then starts to lose all her composure. The Doctor comes rushing in, but too late: Rose gets turned to ash as she runs toward him. Well, good thing he's got a spare after all! Jack starts waving his gun around (not a euphemism), and Security comes in and arrests everyone. The Doctor hardly notices.

He remains blankly silent through the frisking, grilling, and sentencing. But when the last guard turns his back, he signals Jack and the guards are dispatched. Up to Floor 500 they go! Headset tries, but can't evacuate anybody before an angry time traveler shows up with an angry man with a phaser rifle.

The Doctor points a gun at the Controller and demands answers. The Controller continues to drone on about a solar flare. The Doctor aims at Headset as thanks for offering advice, then scoffs at his fear before tossing him the gun. An amusing bit follows with Headset being very uncertain of what's expected of him now. Then Jack barges into Archive 6 and finds the TARDIS waiting for him.

Segue tries to get the Doctor to let the staff go free, but the Doctor has no sympathy for the feelings of people who murder hundreds every day, even if they are "just doing their jobs."

A solar flare causes the room to go eerie blue, and the Controller drops her distant facade to talk to the Doctor. She's been using the flares to hide her messages to the Doctor so that her "masters" won't detect them, finally bringing him to her station to speak to him in person. She can't bring herself to name these masters, who have been ruling Earth from the shadows for centuries. Jack comes in with a demonstration he put together with the TARDIS's help. He disintegrates Rose 2.0, then reforms her, to demonstrate it's actually just a transmat beam. Presumably the one that whisks random people away to be the next contestant on The Price Is Death looks different.

The Controller gets zapped away for telling the Doctor Original Rose's coordinates. The Controller herself finds herself blissfully free of body horror, but surrounded by Daleks. She happily accepts her death, certain that the Doctor will end her tormentors.

The Doctor explains to Headset and Segue that "someone's been playing a long game," someone behind the Jagrafess and Annedroid, someone waiting patiently until the end of the series to air this sequel. Continuing the layers upon layers theme, he finds that the main extra signal cloaks something hovering over Earth. Disabling it, he finds an entire fleet of half a million Illuminati! Er, Daleks. They call him up and demand he stay out, because look at our hostage. The Doctor simply says no. It quickly becomes an angry no as the Doctor's hackles raise at the reappearance of his hated enemy.

The Doctor signs off, and the Daleks announce that this means war. The episode ends with random Daleks floating off of the floor as dozens more crowd into the shot.

I expected this to be a message episode, a harsh send-up of reality shows. In fact, I put this episode off partly because I half-expected to be beaten about the head with it. But no -- the Doctor even shares a warm memory with Lynda about an ursine reality show. There are a few ideas touched upon -- unintended consequences, news is important, maybe people are the sheepiest sheep ever after all -- but none dominate.

This is a good enough episode, it just doesn't stand out for me, and the subject matter isn't something I find fun. I'll round down, but I may regret it.

Special mention to the occasionally startling camera work, and to the actress playing Lynda (Pigtails). She manages to convey, just here and there, that there is an undercurrent of, well, sweetness within while still being just another conditioned member of this dystopia. And perhaps that is the best takeaway for this episode. Sometimes dystopias don't contain total wrecks of people, and rarely do they contain heroic people who valiantly fight just the way we think heroes should fight, their flame unquenched beneath a layer of grimness and dirt. The true tragedy of a dystopia is the untapped potential for good, and for better, in its downtrodden citizens.

Rating: 2 nonexistent gardeners

Favorite dialogue: Doctor: I said no.
Dalek: What is the meaning of this negative?
Doctor: It means no.
Dalek: But she will be destroyed!
Doctor: No, 'cause this is what I'm going to do. I'm gonna rescue her. I'm gonna save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dalek fleet. And then I'm gonna save the Earth. And then, just to finish off, I'm going to wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky!
Dalek: But you have no weapons. No defences. No plan.
Doctor: Yeah. And doesn't that scare you to death.

Supplementary favorite dialogue: The Doctor: Death, destruction, disease, horror. That's what reality television is all about, Anan. That's what makes it a thing to be avoided. You've made it neat and painless. So neat and painless, you've had no reason to stop it. And you've had it for five hundred years. Since it seems to be the only way I can save my crew and my ship, I'm going to end it for you, one way or another.

Silliest future name: Broff. He died as he was named: pitifully. Nope, it's Strood. There must have been a fad in the next few hundred years where people started naming their babies after food.

One wonders: whether The Weakest Link is the new standardized test to which schools feel obligated to teach?

My electronica '70s cover band is named: Crosbie Lynda and Strood, except we're never going to cover "Judy Blue Eyes" because the goal of a band should not be to put audiences to sleep. Actually, nobody would want to be Strood, so scrap the whole idea.

Wait a second. Seeing it typed out like that -- is that a Kirk parody?

Parody? It's a direct lift from "A Taste of Armageddon": http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/23.htm

I noticed the people obediently walking into disintegration cubicles, but none of the TOS dialogue directly addressing that was any fun, so I went for the more memorable dialogue and turned it into a burn on reality shows.

(That was going to be passed off as the actual favorite dialogue for most of the episode, in fact, until things got interesting close to the end. Lack of striking dialogue probably hurt the episode in my decision to round down.)

Parody, as reality television has replaced war. I fell for it and thought it was RTD's joke. :duh:

Still waiting on the second half of this season to come into our hands, we visit

01x13 - The Parting of the Ways

Bad Wolf II: Delta Wave Boogaloo!

A Dalek demands that Rose tell them what the Doctor is up to. Naturally, Rose declines, but listening to the Daleks obey the Rule of Three is always fun. "Predict! Pre-Dict! PREDIICT!" Anyway, the TARDIS comes spinning toward the fleet, missiles come hurtling out to greet it, it's all tense as Rose informs us that the TARDIS has no defenses against this, and then there's a spectacular explosion. But then we cut to Jack in the TARDIS talking about using the transmat laser gun to generate defenses. And then the Doctor sloooowly materializes the TARDIS around Rose and her jailkeeper Dalek, Jack shoots the jailer before it can do more than singe the interior, and the first item on the Doctor's list is crossed off.

Jack still doesn't understand how the Daleks can exist, when they already vanished from all of Creation. The Doctor puts on his angsty face and tells him that the Daleks left their war with the rest of the universe to fight a different war, the Time War. In that war, the Time Lords died but took all the Daleks with them . . . or so he thought. He adds, "I almost thought it was worth it. And now it turns out they died for nothing."

The Doctor swaggers out to meet the Daleks and engage in his favorite tactic of getting his opponent to tell him everything he needs to know. For once, the Daleks shoot on sight, but the TARDIS's forcefield stops their shots cold. He tells the Daleks that they fear him, the Oncoming Storm. The deep Dalek voice from last episode offers to tell him everything he needs to know.

Lights go up and it's the Emperor Dalek, in a big mechanical thing that has logic in its construction but definitely does not conform to Earth sensibilities, so points to the prop department. The Emperor Dalek's ship got hit by a stray bolt of red protomatter or whatever and fell through the cracks of time, falling, falling, falling, falling . . . . The Doctor tells him to get on with it, and when the Daleks take offense, snaps at them so fiercely that several actually back away from him.

The Daleks have been abducting humanity's unwanted outsiders for centuries, coldly pulping their bodies and sifting through the result for the one stray cell in a billion that they deem worthy of developing into a Dalek. But suggesting the result is half-human, as Rose blurts out, is blasphemous, as the Emperor insists he purged everything human from the organic material. The Emperor calls himself a god for creating life from lifelessness, and the Daleks agree. This strikes the Doctor as insanity (because their worldview was oh so wholesome before). The Doctor decides that they all hate themselves for being grown from humanity, and that that hatred makes them even more dangerous. Despite all the Dalek protests, he walks back into the TARDIS, then leans his head against the door as he listens to the hated cries of "EXTERMINATE" outside, evidently mourning the failure and loss of the Time Lords anew.

Back on the Game Station, the Doctor is surprised to find Lynda (Pigtails) still aboard. She says there weren't enough shuttles to evacuate everyone, and there are still about a hundred people on the station. This includes Rodrick, the Weakest Link winner last episode, who is currently watching people helplessly mill around as he yells for someone to give him his prize money. This is so people who missed last episode won't mind when he gets his comeuppance for being a Jerk. Earth has responded to the station's warnings by revoking their broadcast license.

The Emperor-God Dalek sends the fleet to the station, announcing his desire in Earth-religious terms that the Earth be wiped clean for Dalek use. Meanwhile, the Doctor is pulling large showy bundles of wire out of the station's walls. He plans to send a delta wave at the Dalek fleet to fry their brains. The problem is that it will take him three days, and the fleet will arrive in less than half an hour. No matter: he pulls the last foot of the wire out and grins.

Jack lays out the defense scheme: the station has shielding now, so the Daleks will have to invade in person. He's super-shielded the top six floors, so the Daleks will have to invade lower and work their way up. He and several others (the Doctor promptly calls dibs on Rose's assistance) will have to use security's guns to defend floor 500 as best they can. And yes, it's dumb of the Daleks to provide humanity with weapons that work against them, but as long as humans are content to kill each other, who cares how they do it?

Lynda gives the Doctor a little farewell speech and handshake. Rose skunk-eyes the whole thing. She's mollified when Jack gives her a goodbye kiss. Then he gives the Doctor a goodbye kiss and says he's become braver as a result of meeting the Doctor. Uh, I guess he has? Maybe sorta? He didn't seem particularly cowardly in "The Empty Child", just a conman on the make. He doesn't seem to be Jack the Undying yet, that's for sure.

Rodrick gets upset when Jack calls for volunteers to fight off the Daleks, insisting that he get to be as big a jerk as possible so that the audience will actively cheer for his death when it comes. Jack gets snippy when only one more person steps forward, telling the rest to head below the Daleks' likely invasion point and stay quiet. So we know how Rodrick will get himself killed now. It's all coming together!

Alone with the Doctor, Rose prods the idea of travelling back in time to warn about the Daleks, without much hope. The Doctor confirms that it wouldn't work, then prods her for any interest in escaping. Rose simply says that, well, he wouldn't want to escape, then brushes aside the point that she hasn't asked to escape by saying she's too good a person to think of leaving. This scene shows how life with the Doctor has changed Rose, as her admiration for the Doctor has led her to become more like him.

The Doctor checks how long it would take the delta wave to reach full functionality and looks despondent. Rose starts to commiserate, but the Doctor jumps up and excitedly kisses her on the forehead ('shippers cheer), declaring her a genius. He can cross his own timestream and make things go faster. He hustles Rose inside the TARDIS and tells her to hold a switch to disable "the buffers" while he goes back out and checks on things there. He rushes out of the TARDIS and comes to a stop, all his excitement gone, apprehension in its place. He then turns and triggers the TARDIS with his sonic screwdriver. As the TARDIS leaves, "sad-heroic things are happening" music plays and Rose catches fright and tries to get out.

Instead she gets a holographic Christopher Eccleston, who tells her that the real him must see no chance of personal escape and has sent her away to live a good life, with the TARDIS to be allowed to quietly gather dust wherever it lands. Rose starts working the controls, getting frantic once she's found it's landed her in her neighborhood, but the levers and switches all clack limply as if they were simple props with nary a foley artist to be found.

Meanwhile, Mickey comes racing around a corner, having heard the TARDIS from several blocks away. His attitude is neither that of a boyfriend, nor of an enemy, but just an associate. Rose hugs him before she can do something un-British like crying in public.

Jack calls up to Floor 500, wanting Rose to read him some data. Probably also simply wanting to talk to her one last time. He catches on that the Doctor sent her out of trouble, then changes the subject to the delta wave. At this point the Dalek Emperor reveals that he took a "spy on the heroes" feat, breaking in to gloat that there is no time to alter the delta wave so that it only kills Daleks. "All things will die . . . by your hand." And the Doctor, staring at the Emperor on the screen, stares that truth in the face, even as Jack tells us what we could have guessed, that the wave will hit all of Earth.

(If this were a Slitheen episode, the solution would be that all the reality TV has degraded humanity's nervous systems too much to be affected by the wave.)

The Doctor intends to proceed: there are human colonies elsewhere, and wiping out the Daleks properly is more important to the universe. His grim face cracks for a moment as he tells Jack that this is his decision, he owns it, and he would rather people die human than live Dalek. With Rose out of danger, Jack gives the Doctor his blessing.

The Dalek Emperor declares, on his honor as a genocidal megalomaniac, that he had nothing to do with the "Bad Wolf" motif that's followed the Doctor around. I thought that was supposed to be the Controller's work? Maybe it will turn out Rose did it . . . somehow. For reasons.

Speaking of Rose, she's sitting in a restaurant, while her mum and Mickey try to distract her with banal gossip.

"I said to my girlfriend just the other day, 'Gee, I'll bet pizza parlors are innnteresting,' I said, 'I bet you meet a lot of innnteresting people there,' and she said, 'Well, I happen to know a pizza parlor,' and I said, 'My stars, does it carry pizza?' and she said, 'Yes,' she said, 'Yes, it does,' and I said, 'But does it deliver?' and she said . . ."​

Rose gets more and more upset, thinking of the Doctor getting killed five seconds ago, now, millennia in the future, while a sterile 'rat race' future stretches before her. Jackie and Mickey try to convince her that it's okay to live an ordinary, unambitious life, but Rose gets more upset. The Doctor has taught her that she can make a difference, she says, that she should fight for what's right, and it drives her mad that she cannot. In a final burst of anguish, she runs out the door. Rather than stretch this review out even further, I'll just note the religious ideas in this scene and leave it at that.

A Rose-less Jack is making do with Lynda (not a euphemism) when the Dalek fleet arrives. I can tell it's CGI, but it's pretty okay, especially for a TV budget and a TV screen. These shots are "big finale" stuff right here. Daleks come marching, well floating, out of their ships in dozens of sixteens.

Mickey is telling Rose to forget the Doctor and lead "a proper life" when she spots BAD WOLF chalked on the blacktop, right in front of their bench. There's also a brick wall that has "BAD WOLF" repeatedly graffitied along its length. Rose reasons thus: the words are a sort of connection between the present and where the Doctor's future is, therefore the message is that she can find a connection to get her back to the Doctor. She heads back to the TARDIS, telling Mickey that the ship is telepathic, which means it's alive and she can talk to it.

This is actually something I just realized a minute ago: the utter lack of personification of the TARDIS. As far as I know, that trend really only started with Matt Smith's run. During this season, the TARDIS is just a machine, a machine with a mind of its own to be sure, but a vehicle to get the Doctor places.

Anyway, Rose decides that if she can access the Heart of the TARDIS, she can convince it to override the Doctor's command. Mickey is afraid she'll die. Rose accepts that possibility sadly, telling Mickey, "There's nothing left for me here." Mickey isn't happy to hear that, naturally, but accepts her choice.

Meanwhile, the Daleks have landed and Lynda is tracking their movements all by her lonesome. The defenders try to spring a trap, but find the Daleks have disabled everything of that nature. Also, the defenders' bullets are vaporized by the same sort of shield we saw back in Utah. And then the Daleks start killing them. Their day just keeps getting worse.

But then the Daleks' day gets worse when they run into Anne Droid, who disintegrates three of them before the next knocks her block off. I'm, uh, not used to seeing the good guys in charge of the minibosses. Anyway, the Daleks then head downwards to achieve the sidequest of EXTERMINATING Rodrick and his dismal band. We don't actually watch him die after all, just a few seconds of terror and then we cut to poor, sweet Lynda announcing that the deed is done. Oh, and the EXTERMINATION of Earth is proceeding too.

Mickey tries to haul the top off the Heart with a chain attached to his little British car, which looks really weird to any passersby, but the chain finally snaps. Jackie tells Rose to give up, but Rose insists she'll continue to fight, it's what Dad would do, and Jackie says no it isn't, Rose says yes it is and I know because I met him. She tells Jackie about how she was the one who, in the revised timeline, held Pete's hand as he died. Jackie doesn't want to hear about it and flees the TARDIS.

Mickey is now trying to keep Rose's spirits up, wishing for a bigger tow vehicle, when an actual British tow truck-ish thing pulls up with Jackie at the wheel. Jackie tells Rose that she's right, Pete was nuts enough to keep trying, so go nuts yourself.

Back with the last defenders, Jack says that now would be a good time to aim for the Daleks' eyestalks, and if the scriptwriters like you they might let you survive getting shot because the shields totally extend inside the station too. The Daleks appear, and it's hard shooting but eventually one's eyestalk goes dim. Segue Girl cheers and gets zapped, to which Headphone Guy goes all "NOOOOOOO" and mercifully stands up and gets himself zapped. Meanwhile, Lynda gets to watch one Dalek blowtorch its way through her bulkhead, then turns around to see a Dalek float up and destroy the window separating her from space. Soon Jack is retreating alone, and the Doctor redoubles his efforts.

The TARDIS puts up a fight, but the tow truck is strong enough to pull off the hatch guarding the Heart. Rose gets in position and, with her hair blowing in the Dramatic Wind, the Heart starts beaming glowy light straight into her eyes. The TARDIS takes off. As Rose races to the rescue, Jack announces a 20-second doomsday timer for the Doctor to get his work done. This is another episode where the music stands out, and here it rises tensely to the climax, as everyone converges toward the Doctor. Jack runs out of ammo and gives himself up, and all three Daleks oblige him. The Doctor is surrounded by Daleks just as he finishes his preparations.

He tries to use the threat of the delta wave to ward death off, but the Dalek Emperor tells him, "I want to see you become like me. Hail the Doctor, the Great Exterminator!" Little does he know, eh? But the Fourth Doctor was no genocide, and ultimately, despite the darker tone of this incarnation, the Ninth isn't either, choosing the title of "coward" over that of "killer".

The Dalek Emperor declares the Doctor too "heathen" to become a Dalek, so the Doctor gives himself up to extermination. But then the TARDIS materializes behind him, and a glowy Rose steps out from a bright glowy interior. She stops a Dalek's EXTERMINATE beam Vader-style, and declares herself the Bad Wolf: "I create myself."

Well, in accordance with conservation of plot, Rose did do the Bad Wolf thing herself, and the reasons are that she was sending a message to herself to not give up. The somehow is that, by looking into the Heart of the TARDIS, she looked into the time vortex that the TARDIS travels through, and anyone knows that once you have time powers you can do anything. Then she starts disintegrating the Daleks with Heart-fire Heart-burn. When the Dalek Emperor declares himself immune, she calls him "tiny" and burns his whole ship into nothing.

This could have been a cheap deus ex machina, since the time powers come out of nowhere and neatly wrap up a huge, unsolvable problem just like that, but it isn't really. The episode has been building up to Rose's return, with the magnitude of her new powers validated by her selfless attitude, determination, and love for the Doctor. The TARDIS certainly contains great temporal powers, and we saw a hint of weirdness in "Boom Town" when Margaret was given her life to live over again. Overall, it feels like an appropriate, organic extension of the preceding drama, and indeed season. If it is a D.E.M., it's an earned one.

It also doesn't actually wrap things up neatly. Rose has chosen to play God, and that power comes with a price: the vortex is burning her up, and the temptation to hold on to the power is too much. The Doctor tells her to stop, that the Daleks are gone, but Rose returns Jack to life and is awestruck at the sight the vortex grants her: everything that was, is, or might be. The Doctor says that's what he sees too, and offers his help. The tableau changes from Frodo claiming the Ring for himself, to Decker and Ilya at the end of TMP, as the two embrace and kiss. (And the 'shippers go wild!) The Doctor receives the vortex glowy from Rose, then sets her down and exhales it back into the TARDIS.

Poor Jack gets left behind as the Doctor sets course for points unknown. Rose is foggy about what just happened, and meanwhile the Doctor notices himself glowing in unusual places. He gets a little manic as he breaks it to Rose (and to the 'shippers as they clean their drinks off their couches): the time vortex dealt a mortal wound to every single cell in his body, so he needs to regenerate (the word is not actually used), and whatever form he takes afterward, life with him will not be the same. Rose is understandably scared about this, especially with phrases like "I'm never gonna see you again" thrown about, but bears up womanfully. The Doctor gets in one last good line and turns into a volcano, and a moment later, he's David Tennant!

The first thing the Doctor does in his new body is check his teeth, and the second thing is to reassure everyone he's the same person by saying "Where were we?" and referencing Barcelona from the conversation a few minutes before. In those few seconds, he's already recognizably the Tenth Doctor.

Christopher Eccleston rides triumphantly off into the sunset, assured of not being forever typecast as the Doctor, and we head off toward our first Christmas episode!

This is largely Eccleston's episode to shine in, and he does so. His aggressive visit to the Daleks is probably the high point of the Ninth Doctor's glory (to continue using theological language), and throughout the episode things revolve around his emotions and the very simple, but ultimately fatal, task he must carry out.

Billie Piper also has a lot of acting to do to carry her branch of the plot, and she also delivers. She has to sum up a season-long character arc and do a lot of emoting, often muted expressions of deep feeling. So props to her as well. Everyone else also turns in great performances.

It's curious to me that (I'm pretty sure) the only hint this season that the Doctor ended the Time War himself comes from the Emperor Dalek here. I had figured that was established from the get-go. It makes for a very different viewpoint on this Doctor.

Further comments on the resolution of the Bad Wolf arc go in the season round-up. As for this episode by itself, it's fast-paced with big ideas, big action scenes, big stakes, big consequences, big character growth, big emotions, and still has time for quiet moments when they're needed.

Rating: 4 delta waves of deadly doom

Favorite dialogue: The Doctor: If I'm very clever, and I'm more than clever, I'm brilliant, I might just save the world. Or rip it apart.
Rose: I'd go for the first one.
The Doctor: Me too.

PO-LICE AND TRAFFIC CON-TROL SYSTEMS ARRE UN-NECESSARY: LIVING IN A DAHHH-LEK PARA-DISE

Sorry (not sorry): for the Heart-burn thing

RIP: Lynda the Pig-tailed. You were too sweet for this world.

​

As the first part of a relaunch of a beloved series that had lain fallow for nearly a decade, this season had its work cut out for it. It succeeded by knowing its universe, using the canon and its rules to good advantage, showing a genuine appreciation for the material, and above all by just being really good television. Hopefully the Star Trek: Discovery people have taken notes.

Christopher Eccleston plays a very mercurial Doctor, and I think that's appropriate. It gives him unpredictability without having to mystify the plot or technology or anything else central to understanding the show. And there should be a level of unpredictability here, to keep new viewers tuned in long enough to fall in love with the show. He's also a menacing Doctor, physically intimidating, one who is not afraid to throw his full presence or intelligence around when there is need. He gives a strong performance in every single episode, and any worries he might have had about hurting his career never seem to cause him to hold back. I'm glad we got John Hurt for the anniversary special, but I can understand that fans would be anxious for Eccleston to have another turn in the role.

Before this rewatch started, I didn't get the love for Rose. I figured she was just the first companion, forever to be missed, who apparently had some romantic subtext to get the 'shipping types excited. After watching the whole season, Billie Piper has won me over. I'm looking forward to her dealing with this new strange person the Doctor has become.

Mickey, as I mentioned in an earlier review, was also just sort of a bit character who popped up in a few episodes I'd seen. Noel Clarke plays him well: not the brightest or most ambitious, so a suitable character to stay behind. But he's a sound chap (as the British totally still say), and devoted to Rose, so that her rejection of him is painful to watch for his sake. And yet, as we see by the last episode, one can't entirely blame Rose for leaving him, as she's far outgrown him.

Jackie started as a bit of an annoyance (intentionally so) and likewise rounded out into a proper character by the end of the season, when her daughter's life and happiness are on the line and there are no annoying facades to be raised. Full points to Camille Coduri for taking a relatively small role and putting so much life into it.

Jack Harkness . . . I'm still not sold on. He's likable enough, he just doesn't feel like he fits as fully in this universe. John Barrowman plays him a little more broadly than the other main and secondary characters, and that might be part of the issue. The other part is that I am simply not the intended audience for The Romantic Antics of Omnisexual Han Solo. And that's okay. I don't want him to go away, and he works well enough in his plot threads, I just don't perk up and lean forward when I see him onscreen.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this season, for me, aside from the characters, is how detailed every episode feels compared to some of the much later series. There are a lot of what I call "wrinkles": bits of set dressing, throwaway facial expressions, background activity, minor plot curveballs, et cetera that either aren't necessary to the plot or contort the plot in little ways to make it feel more of a real story, a real world, to draw one in. The music, likewise, shows a lot more effort than in the Matt Smith years. I think Matt Smith's first season is great (spoilers!), but I can understand people, shall we say, not feeling satisfied with how the program was progressing by that point without regard to whether they liked Smith's take or not.

What about the "Bad Wolf" story arc? Well, it wasn't really a story arc at all. The structure itself is pretty weak. However, Bad Wolf is a fairly unsettling phrase to have following one around through space and time, and it wasn't pushed as more than some bit of weird trivia until the last few episodes, so it was executed about as well as could be hoped . . . aside from Rose's silly sweeping gesture in "The Parting of the Ways".

It falls to the last episode to properly wrap the season up by itself, then, and it does so in two ways. One is by completing Rose's character arc, as she takes it upon herself to save the Doctor regardless of cost to sanity and life. The other is by drawing in details from many of the earlier episodes without regard to the "Bad Wolf" meme -- "The Empty Child", "Father's Day", "Boom Town", and naturally "Bad Wolf" off the top of my head. These are alluded to in minor but significant ways, and it's enough to feel like the season is all coming together properly. Enough to feel like it was worthwhile having the story arc in the first place.

Overall the season was consistently good, except when the Slitheen got involved. As I said in the "World War Three" review, that's frustrating, because the Slitheen are mostly competent opponents and their visual design is, well, fantastic. And these episodes have good ideas and good bits in them, too. They just have too much stupid bogging them down.

Final scores:
4: (3) The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances, The Parting of the Ways
3.5: (1) Father's Day (adjusted up)
3: (3) Rose, The End of the World, Dalek
2.5: (1) The Unquiet Dead
2: (2) The Long Game, Bad Wolf
1.5: (2) World War Three (adjusted down), Boom Town
1: (1) Aliens of London

Average rating: 2.69 out of 4
Number of "watch it again" (3-plus) episodes: 8/13
Number of "never again" (sub-2) episodes: 3/13
Number of episodes set in the UK: 8/13

Least favorite episode: Yeah, still "Aliens of London".
Favorite episode: I will give "The Empty Child" the edge over "The Doctor Dances" if I must choose a single episode. The first one feels like it has a lot more going on and is super-spooky, whereas the second has the beautiful ending.
Worst episode: After rereading my summaries, I will stick with "Aliens of London" being worse than "World War Three". I could make a list of points about each episode and see which sticks out the worse, but they're such a bewildering mix of good and idiotic that I will spare myself the headache. If you need a reason: "World War Three" develops Jackie a little and has less obnoxious foley. There, I even used a fancy word, now it's over and I never have to talk about the Slitheen mess again.
Best episode: Basically the same list as for favorite episode. The Child Dances two-parter stands above everything else. "Parting" is up there, and gets difficulty points for tying the season together, but doesn't have the plot to match.
Disappointing episode: "The Unquiet Dead" just didn't deliver all the fun I wanted. It's partly on me, because sometimes I want ghosts to be ghosts and monsters to be monsters. Let me soak in the supernatural creepiness a while longer before you whip off the mask to show that it was Old Man Alienface the whole time. This show simply is not interested in following that route (see "Vampires of Venice" preview and Capaldi's haunted house episode). But this episode could also have been a little stronger in the plot.
Surprise episode: "The End of the World". I don't like blowing significant bits of the planet up (one reason of many I've never liked ID4), but this episode worked hard to win me over. It might get a 3.5 score if I were less chary with half-points.

Things Doctor Who has made scary forever:

• Mannequins
• Children wearing gas masks

The Christmas Invasion

Not unlike "Rose", we pan from the Moon down into Jackie Tyler decorating her Christmas Crimbo tree. It's white and gold with pastel lighbulbs, the better to blend in with the room. Then she picks up her present for Rose and looks at it with concern. Some naughty prop artist has underlined her name on the tag with a Jesus fish. Religion in a Christmas episode? What do you think this is, EWTN?

Anyway, she and Mickey both hear the TARDIS materializing, impressive since Mickey's immersed in Automotive Repair Foley and bad British Christmas covers. They reach the usual landing spot, and the TARDIS appears overhead and they scrunch waaay down a good few seconds before it actually heads at them. It bounces off a few buildings but manages a two-point landing, and a strange man pops his head out. He has loud body language and accosts Rose and Mickey physically as he tries to recall what he needs to tell them. He announces "Merry Christmas!" and falls over unconscious.

Rose pops out next, and announces that this isn't a spacetime hobo, it's the Doctor. "Doctor who?" a befuddled Jackie insists, and with that ding! we're off to the intro. The green and red have been toned down, just in time for Christmas, to pink and lime. That reads sarcastic, but it's much appreciated.

The Doctor is now in a comfy bed in the Tyler residence. Jackie has "borrowed" a stethoscope from another flat, but she thinks what the Doctor really needs is a hospital, with a proper doctor in attendance. Maybe next companion, Jackie, as Rose has visions of alien dissections dancing in her head. Upon hearing the Doctor has two hearts, Jackie immediately wants to know if he also has two . . . anything else. One imagines she wondered the same thing about Spock back in the day. The Doctor exhales a drop of golden regeneration energy, and we get to watch it whisper its way into space.

Rose is teary-eyed about having to get to know a new Doctor. But she quickly decides her mother's sex life is more interesting. You're all alone on that score, Rose.

Then Harriet Jones, now Prime Minister, talks to the press on the telly. Remember when the Doctor said Harriet Jones would preside over Britain's Golden Age, which was at least a different flavor of dumb in a generally dumb episode? Well, for whatever reason, PM Harriet is getting written out this episode, and it's not like last season repeatedly told us "history can change", so we've got to prove the Doctor right. So Jackie declares that her wages have gone up and that everyone is already calling Jones's reign Britain's Golden Age. That's asinine, even in this day when everything must be labeled right away. Generation Y, indeed.

Rose is also all alone in recalling the Slitheen episodes fondly, but she did good there so it's understandable. Meanwhile Harriet Jones is defending her space program on grounds of national pride, but it's a probe to Mars. I expected a cheap satellite broadcasting "HELLO WORLD" or aiming a Fisher-Price telescope at the stars, but no, this sucker's preparing for descent, destination Mars as they speak. It's Mars -- don't you wait until the probe disappears before you start bemoaning the cost? I sense subtext. I think the "waste of money" must refer to bloated budgets and maybe a no-bid contract or two, and Jones just avoided the issue with a "YAY BRITANNIA." Will it actually do any science, Prime Minister? Whose palms are being greased here?

Anyway, Guinevere One promptly smacks facefirst into a moon, which turns out to be an artificial construct that sucks it in. Wow. Mars expeditions peaked under Queen Victoria and it's been downhill ever since.

Rose is out with Mickey, who joshes at her for talking about nothing but her TARDIS adventures. Their romance is still on the rocks, but they can laugh and accept each other better now. Rose tries to just enjoy herself, but notices the street music is being played by people covered by identical Santa Claus masks and robes. This is creepy when you're in Doctor Who. And then they all lower their instruments and stare at Rose. This is creepy wherever you are. And then one strokes his trombone and it blazes forth Yulefire at her, which is a universal red flag. The other Santa Clauses (Santa Clausi?) also open fire, and everyone screams and runs away.

Rose and Mickey flee using fruit stands for cover without knocking any over, which I needn't tell you violates basic rules of storytelling. Then a Claus launches a TUBA missile at them, knocking a tree over onto himself. No witty one-liners, no tomatoes flying everywhere. This episode is sinking fast.

^
"Santa got SLEIGHN!"
"Jolly old Saint DEADolas!"
"Looks like he's PINING for the fjords now!"
"O Christmas Tree, O NOT THE FACE!"
"Hey, Santa's really SPRUCED himself up for the holidays!"
"O come, all ye FATALITIES!"
"Deck the Claus with boughs of FOLLY!"
"Are you sure it isn't Halloween, cuz you just got TRICK-OR-TREE-TED!"
This isn't hard. I
even made a tree.​

Rose and Mickey race home to Jackie. Rose is practical, wanting to go to ground far away, but is distracted by a standard green Christmas tree in the corner of the room. The tree waits politely for them to figure out it shouldn't be there, then lights up and whirls at dangerous speeds and advances upon them. If you know exactly where a Time Lord is, just send a spinning tree to kill his buddies, and then send some Santas to comb the city for them because apparently you don't know exactly where they are.

I know, it's a silly Christmas episode, doesn't mean I can't poke fun at it.

Anyway, Mickey (per usual) tries to fend the tree off to cover their escape, but Rose won't leave the Doctor, so they wind up barricaded in with him. Desperate, Rose puts the sonic screwdriver in the Doctor's hand (remember this is when you had to have some clue about how to operate it), then leans over and whispers that she needs help. The Doctor pops up as if he'd been faking all along and explodes the tree. He then leads them outside to find several Clausia holding the tree's remote control. They back off and teleport away, because you don't mess with a Time Lord before his new regeneration has woken up properly.

The Doctor says the Santae were attracted to the tremendous regeneration energy he's radiating. The Doctor mentions a "neural implosion" resulting from being awakened early and says he needs something, at which Jackie rattles off painkillers and food until he tells her to shut up. The Doctor warns them that there will be something bigger coming, then collapses into a pained sleep.

The Doctor gets tucked back in, looking worse for wear, and the humans all shaky-cam watch a press conference about the Mars probe, starring a stammering nerd that someone cruelly promoted out of his natural habitat. This being a Christmas episode, Mickey spells out the "sharks following pilot fish" thing the Doctor mentioned again, then we get probe footage of a bony, red-eyed, wolfish, snarling visage.

I'm guessing this is our bad guy.

Anyway, the world is flipping out, and Over-Promoted Nerd confers with UNIT and Harriet Jones. Penelope Wilton puts a strong personality into Jones starting right now, forceful and practical without any coldness. You'd hate to let her down on a professional or personal level. They all watch a scary red blip leave Mars for Earth. Rose and Mickey watch along on a laptop, because I guess "buffalo" is still the password for everything everywhere. And then the aliens cut in and rhapsodize in Huttese.

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality?​

Rose is upset that the TARDIS isn't translating the Huttese for her, because the only explanation is that the Doctor is "broken". Rose's descent into despair never takes over the episode, but is a vital part of its emotional core, and she pulls the viewer down with her to be properly receptive when the Doctor makes his grand entrance at the end.

Meanwhile the U.S. President wants to take over from UNIT, and we all know the only thing Americans do with things that scare them is pew pew. So Harriet Jones tells the President off, then confers with a UNIT officer. No report of the Doctor. No thought of tracking down Rose. Torchwood comes up for the second time. Harriet allows nobody is supposed to know about Torchwood, but she does know, and she's willing to activate them on her authority -- clearly A Drastic Step.

The translation arrives: the Sycorax own Earth and its inhabitants, so surrender or watch 'them' die. Jones sends back a message of peace or begone.

The Sycorax response is to activate a blue light around the heads of billions of people around Earth. These people just blankly walk around, until they find a high spot where they're one step away from plummeting to their death. It's a frightening process, with people seeing their loved ones stripped of their selves and put into a clear hostage situation. Rose, who has moved on to the "frustrated inadequacy" phase of the grieving process, tells Mickey that "there's no one to save us. Not anymore."

But O.P. Nerd has figured something out: the K-Mart people must all have A+ blood. The Sycorax have done something with the blood sample from Guinevere One. Uh, I don't see the point of having stuff meant for aliens onboard a Mars probe. Mars is dead as far as Nerd knows. Frankly, it's an unacceptable contamination hazard.

So P.M. Jones goes on the telly and asks the world for calm, then begs the Doctor for help because she has no idea what to do next. Rose breaks down, taking the Doctor's condition personally, telling Jackie that "he left me, Mum."

But there's no time for that, as the Sycorax (great alien race name, btw) enter the Earth's atmosphere, producing a glass-shattering sonic wave that murders whatever that glass pineapple thing is. O.P. Nerd has a very GIFable take, rising into the shot, delivering his line with his eyes focused desperately at the cameraman's thumb, then sliiiding his eyeballs to the side to look at . . . who knows?

Outside, the spaceship glides into view like an asteroidal leaf on the wind for all the extras to stare at, and stare at, and stare at some more. This episode certainly likes to set its own pace. It works, but one notices it. Rose looks long and hard at the ship, and comes to a decision. They're going to take the Doctor into the TARDIS and just hide there.

Meanwhile the Sycorax beam Harriet & co. up. Remember the Santas beaming up? Feels like an entire episode ago. Anyway, the humans materialize in the Klingon court from ST: VI, which isn't very reassuring. A Sycorax removes the wolfish helmet to reveal what looks like bone and muscle underneath. I'm with Nerd: put the helmet back on, please. Nerd tries to sort of inverse-Picard speech some mercy out of the Sycorax, but the alien flays the meat off him with an energy whip. The UNIT chief protests that that was a bad show, old fellow, and gets skellified in turn. Harriet Jones identifies herself, to which the Sycorax becomes the third person to tell her that, yes, he already knows who she is. He also tells her that she has a choice between letting half of Earth be enslaved or letting the third that has A+ blood die. Nasty choices indeed. Incidentally, what are the A+ infants doing?

In the TARDIS, Mickey and Rose fiddle with the central console's screen dealy to see if they can pick up a broadcast. Somehow their fiddling is heard in the alien ship, and the Sycorax get paranoid and beam the TARDIS onboard to see what the Earthlings are hiding from them. Rose wanders out to see what Jackie is up to and gets nabbed immediately. Her scream brings Mickey out and he gets nabbed too. All that's left safe in the TARDIS are the Doctor and Mickey's Thermos, which drips tea onto a blue mushroomy bit of machinery.

Harriet recognizes Rose. Rose tells her that they're on their own, then they all get lined up in front of the TARDIS for a photo I guess. The lead Sycorax decides that since Rose has the shiny box, she's the one in charge. Despite having felt useless, Rose accepts the responsibility: "Someone's got to be the Doctor." Split between fear and bravery, she invokes Article 15 of the Shadow Proclamation blah blah blah, but the Sycorax just laugh it off. The lead Sycorax calls her a child, but his words turn to English as he nears the end of his monologue. Everyone turns dramatically as the camera zooms in on the TARDIS, and 41 minutes into the episode, the doors open and the Doctor appears at full tea-empowered strength. He smirks just a bit and asks, "Did you miss me?"

The Doctor yanks the energy whip from the lead Sycorax's hand, breaks his other weapon over his knee, and immediately begins to assert his full personality in classic style, telling the lead Sycorax to just stay put for the moment. It may be significant that the first thing he does is give Mickey a delighted greeting. No residual disdain here, thank goodness.

Anyway, he intensely asks Rose how he looks, and after being disappointed at not being ginger he tells her off for giving up on him -- but then acts a little surprised at how "rude" he's being. Then he reassures Harriet that he is the one and only Doctor and begins to catch up with her. All of this, of course, without regard for their circumstances. The lead Sycorax demands to know who this person is, which is of course the very hook the Doctor needs to go off on a ramble about all the things he might be, but doesn't know about yet . . . and then the Doctor catches sight of the pink jewely orb that the lead Sycorax has been standing by most of the time.

He investigates, tastes the blood in the dish underneath, identifies it as human A+. That's one Time Lord ability I could have done without knowing about, but it puts him on the right trail. "I haven't seen blood control in <i>years</i>!" he exclaims delightedly. Then, talking about how he just doesn't know how he will react to a "great big threatening button that should never ever be pressed," he grins maniacally and pushes down on it.

That frees the A+ people. With the lead Sycorax trying to save face, the Doctor explains that blood control can't actually force anyone to kill themselves. It was all a bluff. The Doctor tries to persuade the Sycorax to leave humanity alone to realize its potential, and accidentally starts quoting "Circle of Life" from The Lion King. When that doesn't seem to have any effect, he challenges the lead Sycorax to a duel. "You stand as this world's champion?" the alien roars. "Thank you. I have no idea who I am, but you've just summed me up," the Doctor replies.

They fight with longswords. Just basic longswords. Or broadswords maybe. Not an expert, but the Sycorax's form doesn't impress me. I know, Christmas episode. Anyway, the Doctor is getting the worse of it, so he heads outside for a change of venue. That doesn't work so hot either, as the Sycorax quickly cuts the Doctor's sword hand off, then turns away to roar his victory to the onlookers. But the Doctor grows a new hand into existence, then when Rose throws him another sword, declares it to be a "fightin' hand" and goes on the attack.

The Doctor wins and the lead Sycorax swears to leave Earth alone forever. He hugs Rose and walks away chattering about the fruit he found in his borrowed houserobe. Upon hearing the Sycorax come up behind him to kill him, however, he throws the fruit at a button that causes the "ground" to retract from under the alien (why?), leaving the dirty cheater to plummet to his doom. "No second chances. I'm that sort of a man," the Doctor grimly says.

He goes back inside to deliver a warning to the Sycorax assembly: stay away and warn others to stay away. They're all teleported tellyported back down to Earth and get to watch the Sycorax ship fly away to the sound of triumphant music.

On being asked, the Doctor tells Harriet Jones that, sure, there are thousands of alien species out there, and they're noticing Earth more and more! He clearly means it as a "chin up and have a blast" sort of message, but Harriet takes it the other way. On hearing that Torchwood is ready, she sadly, reluctantly gives an attack order. Death Star beams lance out from London and destroy the Sycorax ship.

The Doctor is of course angry, calling it murder. Dead UNIT Guy would agree. Harriet insists that it was necessary, to prevent word about Earth spreading to others who might plunder the planet while the Doctor was not around. He refers to the human race as monsters, and she wonders whether she will have to protect the Earth from him. He threatens to end her ministry with six words, and when she doubts him, whispers in the ear of her sidekick, "Don't you think she looks tired?" . . . and simply walks away with his Tyler retinue, freaking Harriet out.

The rest of the episode is Christmas and wardrobe festivities, Harriet sliding down the slope of public opinion, and festive meteors and snow-ash falling from the sky.

The main takeaway about Tennant's Doctor from this episode is his dominance. When awake, he dominates every frame he's in. He dominates the screen when he's loud or soft, when he claims to be at a loss or when he knows every letter of what he's doing. He strides regally onto the balcony to confront the Santa Claus aliens. When he catches himself drifting into Disney song, he never loses any intensity. He dominates the lead Sycorax from beginning to end . . . well, we'll call the swordfight a tie. Harriet is built up to be forceful and charismatic, but her PMship is sacrificed so that his personality can steamroll hers the moment she moves against his wishes. I think this was done so that "Is the show still worth watching?" was answered not by his looks or personality, but by his sheer force of presence. You may not actively like this Eccleston replacement, but he demands your attention . . . and meanwhile the other characters you love are still around. And that grants Tennant the time to grow into a Doctor you do like.


Rating: 3 Sycorax wolf masks

Favorite dialogue: Mickey: That's fascinating, because I love hearing stories about the TARDIS. Ooh, go on Rose, tell us another one, 'cause I swear I could listen to it all day, TARDIS this, TARDIS that.
Rose: (grinning) Shut up.
Mickey: "Oh, and one time the TARDIS landed in a biiig yellow garden full of balloons!"

Me and my big mouth: thinking I'd never have to talk about the Slitheen mess again

Featuring bits from: ST III, ST VI, SW V

Shoutout to: The late Adams Douglas Adams, when the Doctor mentions meeting Arthur Dent

Christmas rankings:
1. The Christmas Invasion

02x01 - New Earth

It's a new season and a new incarnation, so we ease in with the Doctor powering up the TARDIS while Rose says her goodbyes. She gives Mickey an extra-long kiss on the lips but he doesn't seem comforted in the slightest. He knows full well where he ranks.

The Doctor takes Rose to AD 5 billion and a bit, to what he claims is a planet called New Earth in another galaxy. But what they step out into is clearly a "futuristic city" level in a racing car game.

Player 1 presses Spacebar for nitro boost.​

Rose bounces with excitement and tells the Doctor how much she loves running around spacetime with him. The Doctor smiles (no Eccleston smirk here) and says he loves it too.

But what's this? A scaly-tattooed crazy-eyed dude has spied the duo in his crystal ball! He gasps at Rose's perfect, er, blood, and sends a flying monkey a little tentacled droid to spy on her. The Doctor is shaking out his new chatter routine. He tells Rose about how the Earth blowing up finally got humans to care about it long enough to find and settle on this planet, which is as near a carbon copy of the original Earth as you can find without serving under James T. Kirk. Rose wants to tour New^15 York City, but the Doctor has business at a nearby hospital, having been sent an invitation via his psychic paper.

The chemistry between Tennant and Piper is already, dare I say, in full bloom. The Tenth Doctor just wants to pal around the cosmos with Rose, rather than show off to her.

A female voice near Crazy Cardassian gets all het up over Rose. It's Cassandra!? She decides that Rose's visit must be a fated chance for revenge. The Ironic Foreshadowing Of Next Companion continues, with the Doctor telling Rose that he doesn't like hospitals. He does like hospital shops, and while he comes to terms with this place not having one of those, Rose adjusts to the nurses being catpeople in silly big hats.

There's an amusing bit as the two take separate elevators and Rose finds out the hard way that "disinfectant" is a three-course meal of full-body shower, powder, and hair dryer. But Crazy Cardassian has rerouted her to his grungy little floor, and beckons her with a creepy inflection and body language. Rose, ever improving at self-preservation, picks up a shank before following.

Meanwhile the Doctor has had a run-in with the Duke of Manhattan, or rather his personal assistant. Apparently viruses have been playing D&D to get new ideas for keeping up with humans, because the Duke is turning to stone. The Doctor's escort nurse presses him to forget Dukes and hospital shops and find whoever he's supposed to be visiting. The Doctor has already zeroed in on his correspondent: the Face of Boe. Boe came up in two episodes last season, "The End of the World" and "Bad Wolf", so points for worldbuilding via a recurring background character.

The Doctor's new escort nurse, Hame, has a very human voice. I don't know how else to put it. The catface CGI/makeup is just fine, but that voice clearly does not go with that face. Anyway, the Face is dying of old age, mercifully free of the ravages of arthritic limbs.

Rose finds an old-school film projector. It's showing faded film of a tuxedo party. Rose recognizes Cassandra's voice and shallowness in one of the people onscreen, and wheels around to find herself flesh-to-face with the villainess!

Cassandra introduces Crazy Cardassian as Chip, a clone who is devotedly faithful and faithfully devoted to her. I'd wonder if this was a setup for a betrayal but I just don't see Chip doing it. Cassandra's brain and eyes somehow survived her death, and she had some backup skin from her back, so, well, here she is again! That's a big brain way over in the nearby vat. How does she control her mouth and eyes?

Anyway, Cassandra tries a woe-is-me, last of my race line of talk, but Rose isn't having any. Cassandra then tells Rose that the nurses are hiding something, come close and I'll whisper in your ear. Rose wants none of that either, but blunders into the wrong spot and Cassandra transfers her own mind into Rose's body using the mind-transference device she had tucked away in that corner. Just in case a sufficiently pure human ever came along, I guess. Rosy!Cassandra is initially excited, but gets a good look in a mirror and realizes that she's a "chav". She also demands that Chip moisturize her, but to the disappointment of the male audience there is no white T-shirt to be had. She does unbutton her top and admire her upper and lower curves, so we're getting served a full helping of fanservice this week, boys.

Meanwhile Hame shows her fascination with FoB. The two plot bits she reveals are that Boe-face is the last of Boe-kind and that just before dying he will tell someone like him (guess who) a great Boe-secret.

Cassandra says in so many words that Rose is still in her body too, then gleans from her memories that she's still travelling with the Doctor. Cassandra is not pleased that the Doctor survived his own death. And then the thing in her pocket rings. The Doctor ignores her attempts at Cockney rhyming slang, then finds that the Duke is healed and credits the Doctor's presence for it. The Doctor is alarmed that the hospital could cure stoneitis, but Matron Cusp assures him that it was merely the "tender application of science" that did the trick. The fact that she needs to acknowledge that "primitive" people would consider it magic, in a place where we're all hyper-advanced friends here, is rather a heavy bit of foreshadowing. Then a nurse whisks her away to deal with a problem: someone woke up during a "perfectly normal blood-wash" and got upset. It becomes clear the nurses are meddling in cat-God's domain, and the malfunctioning patient is incinerated.

The Doctor shows Rosy!Cassandra a few more patients who ought to be dead instead of cured. It's marvelous, but why are the cats being so secretive? He also gets concerned about Rose's new voice. (I'm surprised that he can hear the change too, and it's not just a meta thing like Star Trek aliens' lips forming the English their speech is translated into.) Cassandra tries to convince him everything's normal before pulling him down for a liplock. The Doctor lets it happen, then, a little flustered but uninterested in pursuing the matter, concludes that he's "still got it."

Cassandra, who is genuinely curious about what the cats are up to, helps the Doctor break into the computer system with technical advice beyond a 21st century department store clerk's capacity. They discover the secret ICU and enter. The ICU is your standard industrial stairs leading to your standard pit with thousands of glowy-green stasis pods lining the walls. The Doctor opens a pod randomly, finding a man who's turning into the Thing from the Fantastic Four. The Doctor whispers his empathy for the man's suffering before gently closing the pod back up. He tells Cassandra that the pod people have been infected with every disease in the galaxy, so try not to touch them. His anger quietly builds up as he reflects on the horror of creating people to serve as "plague carriers", then vents it at Hame when she appears to defend the setup. She can't see the pod people as actual beings, just as things created for a purpose.

As Hame recounts how the cats were driven to this scheme out of desperation, the Doctor freely shows his horror at what he's hearing. Which is a good move to get the audience to like him, as the Ninth Doctor's empathy was a bit lacking at times. Eccleston would tell Hame why she's wrong with a few sharp appeals to principles. Tennant simply tells her she's wrong with his face. (Meanwhile, Cassandra is reminding us that she's not Rose with very un-Rose-like, detached, look-at-me body language.)

"But this is horrific."

"Yes, yes. Hmm. Do you think I should luncheon at the country club, or skip it and fill up at the Marquis's cocktail party tonight? I do have a figure to maintain for my adoring public, you know." ​

The Doctor sweeps aside Hame's argument that happy people justify these means and declares that he is the highest authority, and one more thing: put Rose's compassion back in her head or I shall get angry.

Cassandra reveals herself to the Doctor, then knocks him out with her perfume, sends Hame away, and triggers an alarm. The Doctor wakes up in a pod, with Cassandra gloating over finding such a superb way of killing him. She promises to discard Rose's body once she finds someone more worthy of herself. Three minutes to live and no friends nearby -- how will he survive this time?

Well, Cassandra tries to blackmail the Matron and when Cusp reminds her that they can claw a mere human to pieces, Cassandra has Chip open all the nearby pods with a single lever. Not a very safe system. The Doctor and all the "lab rats" get out, and the lab rats all shamble around in zombie mode. One zombie tells the Matron very lucidly that they're going to put a stop to things, and he shorts out a conduit that opens all the pods. One of the cats (I really don't know how to tell them apart) can't escape the fatal touch, and gets nastyfied in seconds. The other enacts a quarantine. Some zombies have already entered the public spaces and started desperately grabbing people.

The Doctor tries to herd a wailing Cassandra and Chip to safety, but Chip gets cut off. The Doctor apologizes to him before chasing after Cassandra. The Doctor tells her to get out of Rose, right now, and Cassandra obligingly breathes herself into his body. Tennant proceeds to do a very happy drunk impression, getting in Rose's face about her attraction to Ten, but then the zombies figure out how to open the door and Doctor!Cassandra panics.

The two head up a ladder in an elevator shaft, joined soon by I guess the Matron, who rants at them for destroying everything. And then the Matron seems to grab Rose's heel with a veiny hand, but apparently it was a zombie grabbing the Matron, and she screams and twirls and hurtles miles and miles to her death, terminal velocity all the way. Rose takes Cassandra back into herself so that the Doctor can sonic their way to safety. But the Doctor won't do anything until Cassandra leaves Rose, so Cassandra bounces back into the Doctor and thence into a zombie. Don't worry, she hops back into Rose as the door closes behind the Doctor and Rose. But she's a little reflective now, saying that the zombies are desperate just to be touched so they can feel less alone. The Doctor reaches down and helps her to her feet in response.

They find themselves back in the room with Boe. The Duke's assistant charges to attack them with a roar. She's focused on escape without regard for the quarantine. The Doctor accepts this; what's one more opponent at this point? He gets all the curative IV fluids roped to his body, then uses a pulley thing to lower himself down the elevator shaft . . . after Cassandra is persuaded to join him. At the bottom, he pours all the curatives into the disinfectant spray container, then coaxes all the zombies in the lobby to join him and get cured. Cassandra thinks he's killing them, but instead it's hands held and hugs all around as they apparently pass the cures to each other by touch. Which doesn't make any biological sense to me, but at least it ties in with their loneliness.

The cats are arrested and taken away, including a sad Hame. I expected her to help the Doctor in the last pinch, but appreciate the plot twist that was a lack of that particular plot twist. Sometimes nice people just do not-nice things, and can't be made to understand an outsider's point of view that they should really stop doing those things. If you need her to "redeem" herself to justify her presentation as a nice person, maybe you don't understand human history. Or cats.

Anyway, the Doctor remembers that the Face of Boe is probably on his way out, now that the miracle cures have been cured. So he goes to see him again, but the Face Boe-forms him that the Doctor's influence has given him a fresh interest in life. FoB refuses to tell the Doctor anything more except that they will meet again, and teleports out, as the Doctor observes, enigmatically.

Cassandra is the last plot thread to be tucked back into place for the day. She's driven to (crocodile?) tears at the idea of finally letting go of life, but Chip comes up, having survived in a pod, and volunteers himself as a host. Alas, his clone body has been through too much, and Cassandra finds herself in a dying body. But now, suddenly, she's reconciled to her fate, despite the Doctor suddenly wanting to give her a new body. Her last request is to be taken back to the tuxedo party, where she tells her younger self that her younger self looks beautiful. Then Chip!Cassandra collapses, and the younger Cassandra -- a made-up snob who had been prattling pretentiously about something only a minute before -- is the only one who cares, clasping Chip's body to her as others ignore her pleas for help. Cassandra does not die alone, finding final humanity in her younger self of all people . . . and one wonders how long it had been since her younger self had received any genuine warmth of feeling, and whether it would ever happen again, given the circles she moved in.

This is a good episode without being anything amazing. Cassandra isn't the greatest villain, but her personality is taken full advantage of here to give some color to an episode that takes place in a sterile hospital. Everyone does a fine job of playing her. This is also the first "regular" Tennant episode, and as I said, it's made clear that the Doctor has a new personality now, one less preoccupied with his superiority over others.

The loneliness motif feels . . . not fully executed. No problem there, but I do wonder if Boe was originally intended to give his Big Reveal in this episode, and that was only pushed back to a later story at the last minute.


Rating: 3 zombies and catgirls

Favorite dialogue: Hame: He's thousands of years old, some people say millions, although that's impossible.
The Doctor: Oh, I don't know. I like impossible.

Pooky's rating: purrrrrrr purrrr purrrrrrr purrrr purrrrrrr purrrr

Cutesy almost-cusses: 2

Form over function: Hospitals of the distant future use pointy glass ice cream cones as water cups. Just in case there's any sensitive equipment that needs spilling on.

02x02 - Tooth and Claw

A small band of monks arrives at an isolated estate. The head monk tells a servant there that they want his house. When the man refuses, the monks whip off their cloaks to reveal they're airbenders who traded their blue tattoos for Matrix-fu. The servants are quickly subdued and locked in the cellar, along with the lady of the house, then presented with a cage. On being asked about the cage's contents, the head monk says "May God forgive me" and shows them what's inside. End-of-teaser screaming commences.

The Doctor meanwhile is aiming the TARDIS for a 1979 concert. He and Rose are partying, enjoying some of the era's noise music to get into the mood. He puts down Rose's denim suspenders. It's not so much the suspenders as their combination with the dark hose, Rose. Rose accuses him of being punk with a little rockabilly, which sounds amusing, but I was never very good at musical genres. They step outside, the Doctor chattering about how he almost lost his thumb getting Skylab down, straight into a pack of 1879 mounted soldiers escorting a carriage.

The Doctor dons the local Scottish accent and says he's a distinguished doctor who had been chasing the "naked child" around the countryside. (Rose tries her own Scottish accent, but the Doctor shoots it down.) The occupant of the carriage is none other than Queen Victoria, who ignores Rose's exposed limbs in favor of the Doctor's psychic paper, which appoints him as her protector. She could use a little protection, as the train track has evidently been cut to force her to travel by carriage through this empty country, with only a TV budget's worth of soldiers for escort. Also, wolves are said to live in the area. This might be just for color, but then Victoria dismisses them as old wives' tales, so you know we're gonna get a faceful of undomesticated canine before the story is over.

The Doctor and Rose join the procession, both excited over meeting the Queen Victoria. Rose decides her new goal in life is to get a "We are not amused" out of Vicky.

Upon their arrival, Sir Robert tries to urge Victoria to ride on, but Victoria has had enough of her carriage for the day (and who can blame her). She'd rather stay the night here, at the monk-infested . . . Torchwood estate. With her mysterious sparkly-music box.

We see the servants (and Lady Isobel) are still alive, but are currently being terrorized by a robed man in a cage who, uh, shushes them. Victorians: scared of wolves, ghosts, and librarians.

Queen Victoria is taken to a planetarium room, with an orrery and a telescope. Did they CGI the sky? Something about this scene looks off and I think the sky is part of it. No, maybe just sketchy compositing. The Doctor approves of Sir Robert's father, who poured money into a telescope rather than spend it on creature comforts. The Doctor inspects it and begins to complain about the functional design, but catches himself and admires its aesthetics. Victoria helps to cover up his gaffe.

There's a nice detail here, as Sir Robert himself knows nothing about the telescope, but adds that he wishes he'd spent more time listening to his father about whatever his father wanted to talk about. I feel like often, when the descendant is "sorry, can't help you", it's written off as either "he was an obsessed old eccentric, spent his time locked away doing heaven knows what" or "if only I'd listened when he was talking about that plot point!" Sir Robert's desire is a simpler, more generic thought, but is not tied to the specifics of the plot, and so feels more relatable.

Queen Victoria leads away from the stars and into our plot by mentioning her late husband's fascination with folklore. Against the wishes of his current handlers, Sir Robert is almost prevailed upon to speak of the local "wolf". Notice there's been no talk of werewolves. Evidently that part of culture isn't that codified yet.

While Rose gets acquainted with Lady Isobel's wardrobe (and with the random maid hiding therein), the monks drug the soldiers with a friendly round of drinks. The perils of being redshirts. Rose and the maid are quickly captured.

Dinner conversation takes a serious turn as the Queen admits she misses her husband terribly. Her desire for "ghost stories" has increased, because they hold the promise of contact with the dead, and she feels the loss of contact with her husband painfully. She perhaps even struggles to understand how Providence could allow this state of affairs.

This is not the sunshiny-est episode Doctor Who has ever produced.

Sir Robert tells the centuries-old tale of the local wolf: each full moon is greeted by howling and fields of annihilated livestock. And once a generation, a boy disappears. The officer sitting to Victoria's right establishes himself as the boor of the episode. Vicky's note to self: if the wolves don't get him, never invite him to dinner again.

In the cellar, Rose decides to play Doctor and poke the sleeping bear. This is a very dark set, just blacks and blues and a few small whites besides Rose. Even the servants all have dark hair (or are balding). Despite being a fairly large room, it feels enclosed and prisonlike. The chains probably help there. Full points for set design. Anyway, the person in the cage tells Rose that it's possessed the kidnapped boys each in turn: "I carved out his soul and sat in his heart." Spooky! It says it's being "cultivated" by the monks.

Since joining the Queen's retinue, the Doctor has critiqued a telescope and otherwise watched the plot progress without him. Now he spurs Sir Robert on to tell that the wolf is actually a "man who changes into an animal". It's left to the Doctor to finally drop the big "W" word, more than eighteen minutes into the episode.

Except, thanks to Rose, we already know it's not an actual, traditional-style werewolf. Again, this show is not interested in telling ghost stories for very long. In this case, so far, that's okay with me, because the fear and unknown factors are still very much present. The alien still has room to behave like a werewolf, and the sense of being ensnared in some fiendish plot continues. What terrible thing(s) are the monks up to? What do they want with the Queen? What exactly is in the "werewolf", how does it change shape, what does it want or need, how violent is it, how does it feel about the monks, what abilities does it have?

Whereas, when the ghosts became not-ghosts in "The Unquiet Dead", my reaction was a and: "That’s the ghosts over and done with, then. It's aliens now."

Rose endeavours to shed light on these questions. In so doing, instead of releasing tension, the stakes are upped. The werewolf says that it will possess the Queen with a bite, and then rule the British Empire, which it finds much to its liking. Then it gets annoyed at all the questions and snarls at Rose. She's further scared when it says it sees wolflike qualities in her.

Sir Arthur, increasingly distressed, stakes all his hopes on this pinstriped doctor. Under the eye of the head monk, he tips the Doctor off that the wolf is real, and the house is full of monks that have turned to its worship. The monk quietly chants Latin in response. Big Dumb Soldier holds a pistol on him, while Sir Robert apologizes to the Queen and chases after the Doctor. In the cellar, the full moon's light falls upon the werewolf, and it sheds its cloak and gets down to business with pretty good special effects. And claws long enough for human shish kebab. Rose gets the servants to pull their chain out of the wall, just in time for the Doctor to rush in. He looks amazed at the wolf and, lost in the moment, exclaims to himself how "beautiful" it is. Eccleston would have announced it to the room or, more likely, to the wolf itself. Everyone scrams, leaving the wolf to pose against the moon. The men take up guns, and Lady Isobel kisses her husband and leads the women to safety.

The Doctor, visibly unsure of the next step, heads back to face the wolf down a long hallway . . . and runs. The guns seem to inflict no serious injury, but do drive the wolf back. One of the elderly servants puts away his gun and heads after it, convinced that it's as good as dead, and gets hauled up to the ceiling to meet his fate. On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, twenty years before, so take note: this guy's a strong candidate for 1879's Darwin Award champion. This time bullets don't stop it, and the wolf has free run of the house, squeezing into the room where the women are hiding to check if they have any Holy Monarchs it could borrow.

The Holy Monarch, after shooting the head monk with her secret purse-gun (he slapped the Big Dumb Soldier down for being irksome), has retrieved her shiny-music box. She tells Sir Robert and Rose (the only apparent survivors of the second assault) that Big Dumb Soldier shot the man, because the best weapons are the ones that the enemy doesn't know about. The Doctor arrives and suggests they defenestrate themselves, but the monks have surrounded the house. Running up a big spiral staircase it is, then. Big Dumb Soldier shoots the wolf in the chest as it's about to leap upon the rearguard, then slows it down so the others can regroup in a library behind a barricaded door. (The Doctor actually says "Bullets can't stop it!") The Doctor leans his head against the door from one side and the wolf against the other, and the wolf retreats. Then there's a frenzied rush to barricade the room's other door, and after that silence, listening to the wolf growl and prowl around outside. The wolf leaves, and Rose and the Doctor take a moment to break the tension and celebrate meeting a werewolf.

Sir Robert apologizes for the whole mess, but also wonders why nobody noticed anything wrong with his household. The Doctor implies he figured Sir Robert had taken advantage of his wife's absence to surround himself with hawt dudes, and follows it up with that full-eyed Tennant gaze (subtype: social awkwardness). Queen Victoria declares she's had enough of werewolves and mysterious gentlemen who lose their accents and chase impertinent, naked girls around the countryside: "This is not my world." Dramatic irony!

Lady Isobel notices mistletoe on the monks outside and collects it for defense from the wolf. Simultaneously, the Doctor notices mistletoe carved onto the library doors. Licking the doors reveals that they've been varnished with mistletoe oil. He puts on his Serious Glasses and everyone starts to investigate the books. They turn up evidence of the werealien falling to Earth near the monastery. The Doctor tries to imagine what an alien could do with Victorian England: basically, steampunk straight into space.

I wrote "steampunk" as a noun, but I think it works better as a verb there. The insane flexibility of English.

The Queen calls Sir Robert over to transfer the shiny-music box's contents to his safekeeping. It's the Koh-i-Noor diamond! She explains that she was taking it to a jeweller for another re-cutting (sacrilege!), because her husband never thought it looked quite right. While the Doctor and Rose admire it, Sir Robert wanders off to listen for the wolf. But the Doctor is inspired by Victoria's musings. He goes into a classic brainstorm frenzy now, putting all the pieces together: the house would be an obvious place to trap the Queen when she goes to the jewellers, therefore Sir Robert's father might have worked with Prince Albert (who took an interest, remember) to leave a counter-trap for the wolf.

At which point the wolf crashes through the skylight (he's Wolfman now, nananana nananana Wolfman, get it) and it's time to evacuate. Rose apparently tires of life and gives herself up, but Lady Isobel splashes mistletoe water in the wolf's face and it runs off. Her contribution to the plot over, she takes the women back to the kitchen, and everyone else piles into the observatory. Except Sir Robert, who gets himself killed to redeem his honour. (He confirms the Doctor's estimate of his brains by slashing at the wolf with a thin, stabby-looking sword. Bullets didn't even draw blood, dude, so put some muscle into it.) Predictably, the trap involves using the telescope to focus the moonlight on the wolf (PSA: don't look at the moon through a regular telescope without a filter, any more than you'd look at a solar eclipse), but it does involve using the diamond as a focus. The wolf is unnecessarily levitated into the air, and after some ethereal CGI, is burnt away to nothing.

But then Victoria is examining a cut on her wrist. The Doctor is concerned that she might have been bitten by the wolf (who got nowhere near her), but she dismisses it as the result of a flying splinter.

The Doctor is knighted as Sir Pinstripes, and Rose becomes Dame Will You Please Get Dressed Already. The Doctor consoles Victoria that her husband has continued to protect her from beyond the grave, through the Koh-i-Noor. Then Victoria declares that she is, in fact, not amused, and as Rose celebrates, she banishes them both from the British Empire for being steeped in terror and blasphemy and general I-can't-even-ness. "You will leave these shores, and you will reflect, I hope, on how you came to stray so far from all that is good," she scolds them. Historical figure layin' down the law on the time travellers!

Afterwards, Queen Victoria assures Lady Isobel that, in honor of her husband, she will form a group to defend Britain against freaky enemies like werewolves and Doctors. And it shall be called . . . Torchwood.

This episode is much more in the mold of the old series's "historical" episodes than "The Unquiet Dead" was. Little facts and cultural impressions are dropped here and there. Saxe-Coburg had me fooled -- I always assumed it was part of England, not Bavaria. One last tidbit is dropped as the Doctor and Rose return to the TARDIS, with the Doctor telling Rose that Queen Victoria was a hemophiliac, like so much of recent British royalty, but nobody knows where it came from. Perhaps "hemophiliac" was genteel speak for . . . WEREWOLF? And perhaps that werewolfishness will mature in her descendants . . . right after this episode airs? Rose thinks this is a riot, and they share a howl as the TARDIS dematerializes.

I prefer ghosts to werewolves, and Dickens to Victoria, but this is quite an improvement upon "The Unquiet Dead". The tension is maintained much more effectively and the plot is more thorough.

I do see circular logic here. Queen Victoria would not have been in the wolf's way if not for those trips to the jewellers. But the trips to the jewellers were presumably to make sure the diamond was cut properly to serve as part of the trap. The trap that Prince Albert was using to protect his wife from the wolf she would never have encountered if not for the trips to the jewellers to perfect the diamond for use in the trap. Is your dead husband protecting or using you, Victoria?

The wolf CGI is up to series standards. Which is to say, it's not flawless but it looks good enough. The TARDIS Wikia says that a specialist was brought in to help get the wolf's hair right. And thus the disbelief is suspended.

The Doctor doesn't really contribute much for the first half-ish of the episode, not until the mistletoe thing. He has a few moments in the spotlight, but mostly the focus is on the scenario and guest characters. Not ideal when audiences are trying to get familiar with a new face. I like to think that scheduling this as the second episode shows how much faith they had in the episode's quality, but maybe they were just following last season's pattern of putting a historical supernatural episode in the second slot.

Rating: 3 big mistletoe wreaths

Favorite dialogue: Rose: I want her to say "We are not amused." I bet you five quid I can make her say it.
The Doctor: Well, if I gambled on that, it would be an abuse of my privilege as a traveler in time.
Rose: Ten quid?
The Doctor: Done.

We are not not amused: 4 times over
If you liked that, you might also like: "The Stalker of Norfolk".
I spelled werewolf correctly every time, and my reward is: bringing in Mike and the Bots for the outro:

^ Posted during a full moon, but the next episode would have been appropriate for Eastertime too!

Also, this is the first time SF Debris covers an episode I've already done, and -- not even having started watching it, just seeing it on the schedule -- it feels pretty weird

^ He gave it quite a different rating.


2x03 - School Reunion

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The headmaster of a primary school finds a girl waiting outside his office. The nurse sent her over because she is weak enough to be culled has a bad headache, but she's an orphan so there's no one to notice she's missing take her home. The headmaster verbally winks at the audience, then takes her inside his office to do something horrible to her.

The rest of the teaser establishes that this is one of those boring schools with student uniforms and that the Doctor teaches a class there, pinstripes and all. Doubtless some of the frailer faculty faint as he walks by.

The Doctor opens his lecture by writing "Physics." on the board, then repeating the word over and over, as the students watch him with generic Dull TV Student Faces. Remember, folks, only weirdos have the slightest interest in getting an education.

He starts class off with a basic question, and Milo establishes himself as the school's Hermione (except his admirer is blonde). The Doctor heads deeper into science, the class taking on a wider spectrum of lost or worried looks, until Milo pops out a method of FTL travel.

In the British-word-for-school-cafeteria, today's menu is yellow chips with yellow sandwich and a side of yellow glop. Rose gives the Doctor a "This had better be worth it" stinkeye as dessert.

The Doctor tells her "your boyfriend" was right: something's odd here. Everyone's too orderly, the fries are off, and there's a ten-year-old who's smarter than the entire crew of Voyager.

Before Rose can tell him that last point isn't unusual, the head British-word-for-lunch-lady comes over to chide Rose for leaving her station. Rose explains the new teacher doesn't like the chips, and Food Bossess says too bad, the headmaster designed the menu himself. Guess who the special ingredient is.

Rose goes away, irked, and the Doctor eavesdrops on a nearby black teacher: Melissa is promoted because Milo "failed" the teacher somehow, and why isn't another boy eating the chips, hm? (There were 'Yay chips!' posters by the lunch line, which I took for faintly amusing set decor, but I guess that was a plot point. Well done.)

After lunch, some people wheel a canister into the kitchen. It's a sturdy, chemical-storing metal barrel, with danger symbols glued on, encased in a heavy wooden frame. Also the people are wearing lab gowns, gloves, and breathing masks. This must be next week's Chicken Surprise.

Mickey now calls Rose to report plot while she's on the clock: secret military records of a recent rash of UFOs. Further info is behind Torchwood (ding!) security, and they're far too smart to rely on "buffalo" as their master password like everyone else in the Western Hemisphere. So, until it occurs to Mickey to try "doowhcrot", he's stuck.

Well, the school completely replaced its kitchen staff recently too. Mickey is pleased that he was actually on to something. Rose says she thought maybe he'd, you know, invented an emergency as an excuse to be with her? Mickey says that actual emergencies happen when they get together, no inventing required . . . at which point the barrel spills yellow goop on someone, who's ushered into quarantine. Rose goes to call emergency services, but a straight-faced lunch lady assures her that everything is fine, even as the victim continues to scream.

Meanwhile, the black teacher has the school's presumed best and brightest headphoned up and seated at computers that display glowy-green freaky Smart People things like alien hieroglyphics and square roots. The evil scheme unfolds before our eyes: it isn't long before these innocent children are typing in excess of 30 wpm!

We're seven minutes into the episode. Seven minutes of horror, of physics classes and school lunches and toxic yellow goop and math symbols. If you've survived this long, congrats, you win the prize! Sarah Jane Smith arrives, listening to Headmaster Finch's enthusiasm for his reforms. She flatters him, but tips the audience the wink that she isn't fooled.

The Doctor is learning from another teacher that the faculty recently suffered a drastic turnover as well. One day Finch arrives, the next day half the teachers get the flu, the next day 'this new lot" take their places. Not subtle, but humans aren't the canniest lot. Look at their movies: as long as an intrepid reporter isn't around, you can get away with anything.

The teacher the Doctor replaced, meanwhile, had a winning lottery ticket shoved through her door. Similarly brute-force. In fact, the straight-faced lunch lady from earlier reminded me of the Doctor quelling a background character at a moment of crisis: you don't matter, so I'll tell you whatever it takes to keep you out of the way for the next five minutes.

Anyway, Finch introduces Sarah Jane to the teachers, and the Doctor has to hold back his pleasure at seeing her again until she introduces herself. Then it's smiles all around. The Doctor says he's John Smith, and she recognizes his standard alias, but naturally doesn't make the connection. She has happy memories of the Doctor, though.

Sarah's a journalist now, but don't worry Mister Finch, she might not be intrepid. Well, she finds out it's only John's second day on the job, and immediately starts asking pointed questions. Uh-oh! The Doctor gives her inquisitiveness his warm blessing as she heads over to another group of faculty; she's evidently made his week.

Elsewhere, a student hears an odd noise and heads off alone through the school. He finds a slimy humanoid prowling under a desk. He and the humanoid both stand up, and it resolves into the black teacher, who tells him to leave.

The day is over, the school drains of students. Bring on night and skewed camera angles! Rose heads to the kitchen, Mickey to the maths section (all the new teachers work there). Ooh, Mickey Smith, right? Three Smiths in this episode, and none are related to each other.

The Doctor heads toward the headmaster's headroom. Sarah Jane (who broke in through a window) is already there, but just as she's about to open the door, freaky noises and an increasingly alarmed soundtrack spook her. Meanwhile, Rose gets a sample of the yellow goo, but a shadow and a screech pass over her. She looks upward to see . . . a cutaway back to Sarah Jane, who slips through a door to hide. She turns around to find herself caught in an enclosed space with the climaxing soundtrack and . . . a lit-up police box, looming ominously. Stunned, she backs through the door and keeps going, almost straight into . . . the Doctor.

Sarah has turbulent emotions, but is glad to see the Doctor again. Finally she lets her anguish through: she expected the Doctor to return for her, and when he didn't, she thought he'd died. "I lived. Everyone else died", the Doctor replies simply and sadly. "I can't believe it's you!" Sarah says. A haunting scream from afar convinces her, and off they run, just like the old days.

They almost run over Rose, who didn't see anything in the ceiling (or forgot to mark her arm) but had the sense to scram. The Doctor makes introductions. Sarah Jane comments that his "assistants" are getting younger. Rose protests the title, to which Sarah Jane assumes she's the Doctor's girlfriend. Rose is already giving Sarah Jane a bit of the stinkeye.

They race off to investigate another noise, to find that Mickey has opened the "packaged yellowfied rats" closet. The Doctor teases Mickey for screaming. Rose wants to know why a school would collect rats; Sarah Jane isn't sure she's old enough for high school dissection yet; Rose retaliates with a dig at Sarah Jane's age. The Doctor calls a halt to this, and the two literally huff at each other while he tries to get things back on track.

Unfortunately for him, the two women begin comparing notes, with Rose insisting that no, the Doctor never even mentioned you.

In the Headmaster's office, they find that child Rose was right: these teachers, at least, do sleep in the school. In the rafters. They're giant CGI bats, a little faker-looking than the wolf last week. Everyone leaves the room, but shutting the door causes one of the bats to go from zero to jump-scare.

Outside the school, Mickey is done with bat country, and Rose looks shaken up too. Sarah Jane leads them all over to the boot of her car, where she's stashed K-9. The Doctor is tickled, but Rose thinks the dog is a little too "disco". One of the bats has been watching all this, and responds by sweeping back and forth against the moon.

The group retreats to a restaurant, where the Doctor is catching up with Sarah Jane as he tinkers with K-9. Mickey is highly amused, telling Rose that he has a special "I was right" dance exhibition planned for her later. Rose insists the Doctor isn't a womanizer, but Mickey thinks she had better watch her figure.

Finch has perched, oh so inconspicuously, atop a nearby building, framed against the full moon. He calls a bat over. Aaand we have bad compositing. That was bad compositing last episode, poor compositing in "The Empty Child", and here it is again.

Anyway, Sarah Jane recalls the "Christmas Invasion" and says she'd imagined the Doctor being on that spaceship. The Doctor says yeah, I was up there. Rose was too. Sarah Jane looks stricken again, clearly thinking That could have been me. And she asks: Did I do something wrong? I waited and you never came back. The Doctor says he was called back to Gallifrey and there was a No Humans Allowed rule, and anyhow she didn't need him. "You were my life", Sarah tells him. It was hard to return to a mundane existence. The Doctor tries to pep her up, tell her she's been doing great, but it's not working. Finally, he quietly tells her he couldn't come back. Sarah Jane is not satisfied, but that's all she'll get for now, so she has another gripe: he dropped her off in the wrong place, and that's just rude. But she smiles at his lack of British geography.

K-9 comes alive, hooray! Unconcerned about screaming lunch ladies (dinner ladies, it seems), the Doctor smears some of the yellow goo on K-9's antenna. K-9 starts talking, which tickles Mickey. (Sarah Jane refers to K-9 as "my dog.") K-9 says the stuff isn't human extract, but Krillitane oil. The Doctor doesn't like this: "Think how bad things could possibly be and add another suitcase full of bad." Oh really. Bats who devour a few children and educate the rest within a single school rank pretty low on this show's threat scale. But the Krillitanes are an empire that pilfers the best bits of their conquerees . . . including their physical shapes.

Rose takes the Doctor aside and wants to know if she's just another travelling companion. "As opposed to what?" the Doctor asks. As opposed to something more permanent, Rose thinks but doesn't say. She now sees her future in Sarah Jane: a friend for a while, then forgotten.

The Doctor insists that Rose can stay with him indefinitely. But understand, Rose: I can't stand watching my friends "wither and die" as the years pass by. I can't cope with how short your lives are. For a moment he comes close to sobbing -- again, this Doctor is more approachable than Eccleston's, who would have kept a hard front up the whole time. But he's no less intense.

Finch whispers "Time Lord", and that of all things catches the Doctor's attention. The bat buzzes our heroes. Rose wonders why it didn't physically attack them, but we see the answer as it insistently flies away toward the Moon:

Look, Doctor! This planet's moon is in the atmosphere! It's below the clouds!​

Next day, the Doctor and his team head back to school for more action. Mickey stays back with the auto, and the Doctor actually tells him, completely seriously, to crack the window so he won't suffocate. Wow. It's a hard life being Mickey.

The Doctor goes inside for a glaredown-staredown with Finch. Finch ("Brother Lassar") likes being humanoid, so he's the figurehead while the others stick with their batforms. That's a nice bit of characterization. Finch has an educated, debonair thing going on. He refers to the Time Lords as old, reactionary "senators" and invites the Doctor to figure the plot out himself. "If I don't like it, it will stop," the Doctor replies simply. Finch affects interest in this interventionist Time Lord. Just how far will you go, Doctor? "I'm old now. I used to have so much mercy. You get one warning. That was it." The "Fun times with my BFF Rose" Doctor has vanished. But Finch is confident that the Doctor will join his cause soon.

Meanwhile, Mickey sulks with the tin dog. And Sarah Jane (to whom the Doctor gave the sonic screwdriver) and Rose are trying to get into the lab computers. Seems like you could use an experienced hacker for that, but it would have to be Mickey. Anyway, Sarah is having trouble with the screwdriver, to which Rose comments things were sure simpler waaay back in your day, eh? Sarah tries to make peace, but Rose does feel threatened by her and a catfight ensues. They try to one-up each other's experiences before calling it off and bonding over the Doctor's eccentricities. The Doctor enters to find the two women laughing over who knows what human foolishness.

But Finch has alerted his friends to wrap it up quickly. Step one: trap the children inside the school. (The students, except Master Eat-No-Chips, are all eager to get back to class. Considering they're just hanging out in a concrete courtyard, I don't blame them.) Step two: Eat the human staff. Step three: 60 wpm or bust!

The Doctor has no luck with the screwdriver either -- the hard drives must have deadlock seals. Fortunately for his curiosity, all the computers display the current lesson for him to view. It takes him a while to decipher, but he finally gets it: the children are being used to solve the Skasas Paradigm, which would give the Krillitane the equations necessary to control the universe. The yellow goop greases the brains, and the childish imaginations provide . . . leaps of logic or something.

Meanwhile, No-Chips is freaking out. He gets Mickey's attention. Mickey wakes up K-9 for help, only to be told "We are in a car." Finally he gets the hint and rams it through the doors.

Finch offers the Doctor partnership in this venture. With the Doctor's wisdom, they can make the universe genuinely better, saving all the races destroyed by the Time War (not explicitly said). And he'd never have to say goodbye to another friend again. The Doctor is seriously considering this. But Sarah Jane pops in with a Kirk speech, saying that everything comes to an end, and that pain and loss are as inmportant as the happy stuff. Never thought I'd mention "The End of the World" and The Final Frontier in the same sentence, but here we are. Much as I agree with her, her words seem lightweight against all the emotions the Doctor is feeling. But the Doctor throws a chair into the main LCD widescreen.

The Krillitane smoke-shift into bats and chase our heroes (plus Mickey) (sorry, Mickey) into the cafeteria for second lunch. But K-9 arrives and aggros the bats with lasers. Having escaped, the Doctor decides that the Krillitane have changed their physiology to the point that the goop is toxic to them. How to get past the bats to the goop? No-Chips hits the fire alarm, which immobilizes the bats with pain. Mickey evacuates the children, but unfortunately K-9 must remain behind to explode the goop. It's, uh, a very delayed explosion. The children all cheer wildly (?!) as exam papers rain down, and Kenny "No-Chips" gets appreciation from a cute schoolmate, so no trauma to worry about there. The Doctor consoles Sarah Jane, who is trying to keep the old stiff upper lip.

Back in the TARDIS, Sarah Jane admires the new interior, and she and Rose exchange warm fuzzies. The Doctor is willing to let her come along now, but Sarah says she can't do this any longer. She's got her own life to live now. Everything is set to end on smiles, when Mickey announces that he wants to come with: he's sick of being the tin dog. Surprisingly, this harshes Rose's mellow something fierce. I guess she wants the Doctor to herself. Or perhaps she doesn't like her "mundane life" intruding into her "adventure life".

Sarah Jane gives Rose one last word of advice: stay with the Doctor. "Some things are worth getting your heart broken for." Then Sarah Jane and the Doctor head outside to get their private warm fuzzies on. The TARDIS leaves, and Sarah is about to sob, but she finds the Doctor left behind a fancy new K-9 for her. And off the two walk into new Adventures.

This episode presents us with a stronger, faster, better Mickey, in the same way that the Wright Brothers' biplane was better than pedaling a bike really fast off a cliff and hoping for the best. He's more confident, more aware of how to attract Rose's interest (appear competent and a little aloof). But he still gets easily scared, like a normal human being. Even when he makes good, he's presented as slow on the uptake. At least this Doctor has no venom in his voice when he rags on Mickey. Mickey gets some schaudenfreude this episode, entertained both by Rose having a rival and by the Doctor's "missus" and "ex" getting together.

That last aspect is made full use of here, with plenty of interaction between Sarah Jane and Rose. Sarah Jane comes off as a well-rounded, independent adult who benefited from her TARDIS time. She misses the adventuring but has carried on with life. Rose starts in on Sarah Jane a little too early for it all to be due to insecurity over the Doctor's attention.

Several apparent plot threads were false leads (the fries aren't soylent green or soylent rat, Milo does nothing in the second half). Sometimes that's jarring, but here the unpredictability is fine. What's actually going on is satisfying enough that I don't miss any of the false leads.

No one ever thinks to return the Moon to orbit.

Rating: 3 swooping briefcase bats

Favorite dialogue: Mickey: So what's the deal with the tin dog?
Sarah Jane: The Doctor likes travelling with an entourage. Sometimes they're humans, sometimes they're aliens, and sometimes they're tin dogs. What about you? Where do you fit in the picture?
Mickey: Me? I'm their man in Havana, I'm their technical support, I'm . . . Oh my God. I'm the tin dog.
(He sits down and Sarah Jane pats him on the back.)

Number of TARDIS-blue doors and chairs: So, so many.

List of terminology the Doctor will never use again: 1. Correctamundo
2. Team

How many times must a man be reminded that the "Aliens of London" two-parter exists: the answer is blowin' in the wind

02x04 - The Girl in the FIreplace

​

There was no way I was going to pick another header image for this one, right? What an iconic moment, and what a great episode title.

So we join a fancy costume ball at Versailles, with everyone fleeing from some unknown menace. A man tells a woman (you can tell she's important because her gown is so big it needs a whole room for itself) that there are unstoppable creatures afoot. (We will see later a lack of anyone trying to stop them.) The woman replies that the clock is broken and that the only other man she's ever loved is coming to defend her, as he has done her whole life. She takes her pneumatic bosom over to the fireplace and calls into the flames for the Doctor. That's a lot of questions for a teaser to raise.

The TARDIS lands on a CGI toothbrush for spaceships. The Doctor prattles out his decreasing comfort with the situation, then pokes around while Rose enjoys Mickey's enjoyment of the view out the window. The Doctor finds there's nobody else on board, and that the warp engines are at full throttle but the station isn't moving. In response, a wall slides open. On the other side, in another otherwise aggressively unremarkable room, they find an ornate fireplace with a fire going. Through the fireplace another room can be seen, and in that room is a little girl.

The girl identifies herself as Reinette. She lives in Paris in 1727. The Doctor warns her to stay inside during August and sends her off to bed. While Rose explains to Mickey that yes, the TARDIS even translates French, the Doctor deliberately triggers a Scooby-Doo mechanism to rotate the fireplace and take him into Reinette's bedroom. The girl wakes up and tells him it's been weeks since they talked.

The Doctor notices the clock by the bed is broken, but there's still a loud ticking to be heard. He deduces that someone ticky broke the clock so they could hide in the bedroom with the girl. Naturally, he looks under Reinette's bed, and there's a jump scare as Ticky Person lashes out at his sonic screwdriver. And now it's standing on the other side of the bed! The Doctor gets up to see it's a humanoid with a white mask and fancy period hair and clothes. The Doctor takes a proper Time Lord look at Reinette, realizes her brain has been scanned, and indignantly wants to know how that was worth putting a hole in a perfectly good universe. Ticky Person declares the girl incomplete and cuts conversation short with a Ticky-Swiss Army knife. The Doctor draws it over to the fireplace and gets it back to the space station with him.

The Doctor disables Ticky with fire suppressant, then removes its head cover to discover clockwork. The Doctor puts on his glasses and gets super-nerdy with appreciation, but before he can take Ticky apart, the android teleports away.

The Doctor warns Mickey and Rose to stay put while he goes back to see the girl again. Rose likes it when Mickey takes the lead in exploring, tempted by an "ice gun" to call his own.

The Doctor returns to Reinette's room to find she is now perhaps in her older teens, well into pneumatic womanhood. She gets up in his grill with gentle banter, believing that having met him a few times means they're on familiar terms. Back-echoes of Amy here, in a different key. She sweeps the Doctor nearly off his feet with a kiss. It's a wanting kiss, a this-is-mine-to-claim kiss. And the Doctor gets into it. A man urgently calls to her, alas, and Mademoiselle Poisson distributes herself out the door, a golden girl flowing through a gold-and-red room.

The Doctor can hardly believe it. He regales the man who appears in the doorway with Reinette's future accomplishments as Madame de Pompadour, gleefully declares that he just "snogged" her, and sweeps back around the fireplace.

Frustrated that his companions have inevitably wandered off, the Doctor strides off to look for them or the "anything" that's on the station . . . and finds a horse. That would count as "anything" indeed. He also finds a set of doors that lead to where he can spy on Reinette making plans to make a move on King Louis.

Mickey meanwhile seems to think a big gun makes him an action hero, aaand yes there he goes into a crouch-and-roll with an ending swivel-the-head-looking-for-trouble! Full marks on that one, Mickey. He tough-talks an eyeball wall camera, which is surprisingly good CGI for this show, but then they find a laughable heart in the wiring so it averages out.

The three friends meet at another portal, one that looks into a room where the King and Reinette first meet. The King leaves, and Reinette notices a ticking, then a broken clock, then finds the Ticky lurking in the room. The time travellers barge in to protect her. She orders it to answer the Doctor's questions, and it is learned that Ticky is a repair robot that uses whatever it needs to repair the space station. It used all the crew, then scanned time and space to find the last part it needed in Reinette. It can't use her just yet, but eventually she'll mature and it can pluck her ripe brain from her skull.

Reinette orders Ticky to leave, so it teleports out. So the Doctor takes his crew back to the station, plus the horse. Rose is alarmed that he's named the horse, saying he can't keep it. "I let you keep Mickey!" the Doctor responds. Nice. He stays to mindmeld with Reinette, to figure out what the droid is after. Reinette keeps her chin up, there's some mild humor, then Reinette starts looking at his mind and sees that he's always been a lonely person. She talks him into a spin on the dance floor.

Meanwhile, Mickey is ragging Rose about the Doctor scoring yet another girl when the two of them get ambushed by repair droids. They wake up strapped to Standard Vivisection Platforms with a droid waving a clockwork vivisection probe in Rose's face.

Mickey, gunless, wails about the Doctor being nowhere in sight. Rose tries to threaten the droids with the Doctor, only to have him waltz in singing showtunes. Not very helpful. Tennant, now wearing shades and a tie-hat, is just brilliant in this scene. He sweeps aside Rose's disgust, blathers about bananas and French parties, then finally notices the droids and cheers up further, insulting the nearest one with just a hint of inebriation. He declares that the droids are waiting to strike until Reinette is 37, as old as their ship, then empties his goblet over the droid menacing Rose. The "anti-oil" in the goblet freezes the droid up.

The Doctor disables the other droids and tries to close the time windows, but one of the droids must still be in France because he can't override. A ding! sounds, and all the droids present power back up and teleport away. It's brain extraction time.

Rose visits Reinette at 32 and timesplains things as best she can. (I'm not sure what the costume department was going for here, but Reinette looks like she's wearing a waterproof tarp.)

"Pray excuse me. I am needed in Pittsburgh. The Pirates are having a rain delay."​

Reinette is disappointed the Doctor isn't here yet, but perceives that the Doctor only exists where there are monsters. Mickey comes for Rose, and Reinette bursts through the time window he used to find a dark hall of machinery, but no Doctor. She hears screaming, then her own voice pleading desperately: her fated future. Reinette finally begins to lose it, but bucks up and returns to her time.

The screaming segues us back to the episode start, where several droids herd the partygoers together while three others escort Reinette and her king.

"Hello viewers, look at my mask. Just wanted to remind you that this is a lavish costume party in 18th century France. Ta-ta, see you in the next scene!"​

Reinette calms everyone down while the Doctor tries to figure out how to get to her. The TARDIS is timey-wimey counterindicated, and the time windows are sealed with nothing to smash through them with, and if we did that we'd be stranded in France . . .

Reinette tries to die with defiance, and then we hear an approaching horse . . . and the Doctor rides through a large mirror on the wall on Arthur. Reinette swoons and the Doctor winks at her. He one-ups Louis XIV dismissively and talks the droids into giving up: they can't make a way back to their ship now. The droids actually accept and quietly power down, symbolically bowing to the Doctor in defeat. "They've stopped. They have no purpose now," the Doctor says, clearly thinking of himself as well.

Back on the station, Mickey is at a loss while Rose silently stares at the lack of window and cries.

Reinette finds the Doctor staring at the night sky. He gently downplays his heroism and begins to face his new life, starting with the problem of what exactly "money" is. Reinette expresses regret that she won't be living "the slow path" with him, before sadly leading him away from the conspicuously TARDIS-blue window (the only blue thing in all of France) into her new bedroom, which contains the original fireplace. The Doctor flimflams the fireplace portal into working again, then offers Reinette a chance to come along. Sadly he didn't take her through, and by the time he returns to the fireplace she's died. The King, a gentleman to the end, hands him an envelope. Back in the TARDIS, Mickey leaves the Doctor alone to read it: a missive of hope amid failing health.

One last detail as a grim Doctor flies away: the station is named the S. S. Madame du Pompadour.


I think it's this kind of episode that makes Tennant such a popular Doctor, such a definitive Doctor. His unpredictability, whimsy, and gusto are on full display here.

This could have been a bad episode. The logic behind a future space station needing a famous French courtesan for repairs is fragile. If we had found that out quickly, and then focused on the fight to save her, the whole story would probably have felt stupid. But the fun surrounding the premise is the draw here, using the mystery of freaky robots spying on a girl centuries in the past to nudge the problem part of the plot forward until we get to the finish. Watching Reinette's life progress adds to the sense of plot. It's suspension of disbelief: I can accept a weak link if the results justify it.

Reinette is played well as a woman who knows what she wants and knows how to get it, without being made of steel. Such as you might expect of someone who ascended into a title and became lover to the King and friend to his Queen. Her occasional references to reason probably signal her living during the Enlightenment.

Rose is enjoying having Mickey along on her adventures. We'll see how long this lasts.

Rating: 3.5 party bananas

Favorite dialogue: The Doctor: Must be a spatio-temporal hyperlink.
Mickey: What's that?
The Doctor: No idea, just made it up. Didn't want to say "magic door".

How much red and gold is in this episode?: all of it

Fridge logic time: Did an ailing Reinette paint her bedroom blue in hope of a ride in the TARDIS?

All in all, I thought this episode was a good mix of playing both with the future and the historical past at the same time.

It worked for me, since the robots were so powerful but had such obviously shitty logic circuits or whatever. If they're unable to realize that the crew of the S. S. Madame du Pompadour isn't an acceptable source for parts, it follows that they'd try to scavenge anything else attached to the name Madame du Pompadour.

In four years this thread has only gotten to The Girl In The Fireplace?

That's got to be the longest "binge" in the history of TV....

I am under siege by a baby

02x05 - Rise of the Cybermen

I’ve said that I like the Daleks. I’m not such a positive fan of the Cybermen. They’re fine, but they’re kinda just cheesy old robots that the Borg one-upped, you know? They can be scary or effective in good episodes, but they rarely bring that extra oomph of enjoyment just on their own. Maybe that will change as I watch the new series in order.

Anyway. This is a two-parter that I think occurs on an alternate dystopic Earth, so going in I’m a little dubious about how I’ll like this.

We open aboard a ship, with a mysterious wheelchair occupant conversing in vague terms with a mysterious technician about a mysterious humanoid shape with blinding backlighting. No points for guessing what that shape will be. Wheelchair Man, one John Lumic, runs the humanoid through a “Hello World” and is delighted that he has funded a “child” that will not be subject to blah blah we all know the transhuman drill. The techie dutifully follows the formula by insisting he must tell the Geneva Bio-Convention (not sarcasm, that’s what it’s called) about this latest tampering in God’s domain. And he is utterly surprised at what happens next. Lumic then sets sail for . . . Great Britain. Dun dun dun, the teaser is done.

Both actors were hired because they made these exact faces in the audition.​

The Doctor and Rose are laughing over some incident with a “mushroom lady”, with Mickey on the other side of the console wanting to know the full story. Instead the Doctor tells him he can let go of the control the Doctor told him to hold down half an hour ago. In case you don’t get the point, Mickey accuses the Doctor of forgetting about him. The Doctor tries to cover for his gaffe but the TARDIS trips a breaker and sparks fly everywhere.

They exit the time vortex and crash. The Doctor takes one look at the smoking central column and, voice hushed, pronounces it dead. (This might be the first time in the modern series the TARDIS is referred to as a she?) They’ve crashed out of the time vortex into nothingness, and nothing can save them. The Doctor starts to invent mythic names for the nowhere they’re doomed to inhabit for the rest of their lives, while Mickey simply looks out the door and sees modern-day London, bright and sunny.

It falls to the Doctor to notice the zeppelins flying overhead. As in comic books, when you’ve gotten your heroes into a scrape you can’t get them out of, just say it’s an elseworlds story! Zeppelins are a brave choice, considering how bad the CGI blimps were in the “Empty Child” two-parter, but these look pretty good. Mickey is all over this parallel universe idea, but Rose is distracted by a poster of her dad hawking a health drink. Actually, the poster looks worse than the blimps.

This Pete arrives at his country estate to find his Jackie looking very upset in her I-never-do-a-lick-of-work houserobe. See, his “Happy 40th BD” banner conflicts with her official story that she’s an entire year younger. He offers her a bouquet but she wants nothing to do with anything that isn’t at least gilt or a drab old family painting.

Jackie now calls attention to her new diamond ear radios, gifts from Mr. Lumic himself. Everyone wears two of ’em in this world. The audience doesn’t care, we’ve been teased with the impending appearance of this world’s Rose and where is she?? Finally Rose appears and . . . she’s a Yorkie. Well played.

Mr. Lumic calls Pete on the ear radio, which is called an Ear Pod and I’m sure that’s supposed to be real subtle. We see Mr. Lumic making giant eyes at nothing in particular as he delivers his evil foreshadowing, then activates Jackie’s pods to access her security arrangements. The pods form a Cyberman head handle on Jackie and I like this approach.

The Cybermen have had multiple origin stories over the course of Doctor Who. In this one, they start out as radiophones that everyone uses as the next fancy electronic gadget. It just happens that a maniac is using them for mind control and eventually world domination.

Anyway, Lumic contacts a Mr. Crane to go on a “recruitment drive” for “extra staff”. The evil Crane fiendishly backs a menacing truck away from a garage.

He then entices some homeless people into the truck and the screaming begins right then. One homeless person, who has a leather jacket and a digital camera, is smart enough to hide and record the whole thing. Did I mention the truck is very distinctly marked?

Rose has wandered off. The Doctor freaks out a bit, but calms down and just laments the passing of the Time Lords with Mickey like friends. Mickey even says something stupid and the Doctor passes over it. Then the Doctor notices one little light is on. Some part of the TARDIS is still working! He finds a little battery and pours ten years’ worth of his life force into it.

Rose is sightseeing when her cellphone gets a “news broadcast” from Cybus Industries painting Lumic as a visionary and humanitarian. She moves on to an Internet search for her father. She’s shaken that he and Jackie never had children. Despite the Doctor’s repeated warnings, she heads off to see them.

Mickey rebels, feeling fifth or sixth wheel, and goes off in the opposite direction to just do whatever while the battery recharges. He tells the indecisive Doctor to go protect Rose, as it’ll always be about Rose won’t it? When the Doctor warns him to be back in 24 hours, Mickey coldly says, “Yeah. If I haven’t found something better.” He seems serious about that.

On an airstrip, Pete and the “President” of Great Britain chat as they wait for the great Lumic to grant them his presence. Pete’s health drink is actually pop, and he’s less willing than the president to refer to Lumic as nuts out loud. This does sound like a successful version of Pete.

Rose tells the Doctor about Mickey’s rough home life, laughing at him because it’s Mickey, and admits that she takes him for granted. Then everyone around them beeps and does their best mannequin impression. They’re downloading the news of the day into their brains, followed by a joke that everyone gives a 7 out of 10.

The Doctor finds that Cybus owns nearly everything that makes money, including Pete’s company. When everyone’s well-connected, nobody is. The Doctor caves and agrees to go see him.

Mickey picks his way past a roadblock, finding out that ground dwellers have a curfew, to find his grandmother is alive in this world. She’s the one who gave him a rough childhood, and she’s a blind, rough old lady who insists his name is Ricky, but he loves her and she wraps him in a warm hug. Then she smacks him for leaving for so long, when she’s worried he’s been disappeared. Mickey sees the frayed carpet on the stairs that broke her neck in his world, realizes this world’s Mickey never bothered to fix it either, and declares he’s useless, overcome with shame.

A blue van pulls up and Mickey is hustled in by a couple of punk rebels who fill him in on the abducted homeless part of the plot. Also his counterpart is the most wanted person in Great Britain. This is out of Mickey’s depth, all the more so when they return to base, meet the actual Ricky, and turn their guns on our guy.

Lumic gives Pete and the President a presentation on his research, complete with “cyber” and “upgrade”, but the Prez shuts him down partway through. Lumic begs, but the President tells him flatly to stop playing God. After they leave, Lumic calls up Crane, who demonstrates his new remote-controlled homeless toys before walking them into a scary room to begin their upgrades. Crane plays a cover of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” to cover the screaming, a choice that doesn’t quite work on any level.

Speaking of pop music backgrounds, Lumic justifies his actions by asserting his right to survive. I think we all remember how the Ninth Doctor felt about that defence in "The End of the World".

The Doctor and Rose slip into Jackie’s BD party as servers. Rose is annoyed at their status and annoyed that the Doctor already knows one of the female servers’ names. Rose drinks in the sight of Jackie and Pete, a contentedly childless couple. She assures the Doctor she wouldn’t think of leaving her own Jackie to be alone. Then she discovers this universe has a four-legged Rose, and the Doctor has to laugh at her expression.

We see Crane and his accomplice chatting in the midst of robotic stomping people, all of whom are background-defocused so they don’t ruin the grand reveal. “Stop staring,” Crane tells the audience anxious to see the new Cyberdesign.

Mickey is tied up in a chair as he’s scanned. Ricky grimaces and scowls the whole time so we know he’s no gentleman. The rebels decide that Mickey might be Ricky’s brother? A clone? Ricky informs Mickey that they are the Preachers, free from Cybus influence, and they’ll take Lumic out. The punk chick tersely announces incoming intelligence and for a flash, I have a vision of Harriet Jones in her part.

They head out, obvious rebel van following obvious Lumic van on secret missions, and Mickey’s eyes are still big as he watches them put Very Serious Guns together. Between him and Rose and Lumic, we’ve got enough bug eyes in this episode for an anime convention.

While the Doctor helps himself to an unattended Cybus laptop, Rose chats with Pete, who finds himself spilling about his separation from Jackie because Rose ‘just feels so right.’ With Jackie thinking her figure was more important than getting a baby Rose, this isn’t looking any happier for Rose than “Father’s Day”. Our Jackie’s self-absorption is tempered by low status and her love for Rose. This Jackie has nothing to hold her back. Pete asks someone how Torchwood is torching along, which is interesting that a fraudulent health drink baron knows about what I think is a top-secret thing in our universe.

Punk Chick tells Mickey they’ve followed Lumic’s van to the house of Pete Tyler, henchman and traitor, and Mickey knows Rose is probably in there.

Rose steps out to chat with Jackie, who’s melancholy. Rose tries to gently talk Pete up a bit, but Jackie gets mad. And all three prongs of the plot find out about the Cybermen at the same time, with the army marching past Ricky into Rose’s face as the Doctor examines Lumic’s presentation.

The Cybermen burst through the windows and doors and surround the partygoers. The President, angry, loses all his likability by telling Lumic he “forbad” any more of this. I bet the ponce drops the h in “historic” too. Lumic cheeses it up once more, defending the Cybermen as his children.

The Cybermen announce a free compulsory upgrade for everyone present. Against the Doctor’s wishes, the President resists, and the Cybermen go on a deleting spree. Jackie flees to the cellar. The Doctor, Rose, and Pete escape the building, running into Ricky. Ricky’s bullets won’t stop the Cybermen (the Doctor actually says “Bullets won’t stop ’em”), but they do pause long enough for Rose to hug the wrong guy and the Doctor to make a disparaging comment about having two Mickeys around.

Surrounded, the Doctor tries to surrender the little band for upgrading, but a Cyberman announces they will be deleted with extreme prejudice before being upgraded. The episode ends with Cybermen standing still with death grips outstretched, chanting “Delete.”

Lumic brings enjoyable cheese in his scenes. Mickey is still Mickey, but he gets a few good scenes, Rose admits his mistreatment, and he even scores a point over the Doctor. I think he stays behind next episode, so I guess his grand send-off involves being treated with a little respect. One wonders if this was a Romana or Tasha Yar situation where the actor got tired of being dumped on.

This Doctor, thus far, is not super empathetic. He’s also not cold, as witness his treatment of Mickey in this episode. He doesn’t go out of his way to impress or be judgmental like the Ninth, or be the cool kid in the room like the Eleventh. He’s kind of just hanging out with friends, a tourist who’s not looking for anything in particular, who will help with trouble he gets caught up in: getting down to the bare bones of the Doctor. But even when he screws up, he’s still on top of the situation. And it’s often clear that his patterns of thought are very much not what is going through the nearby humans’ minds. That particular flavor of Time Lordliness is, I think, part of Tennant’s great appeal as the Tenth Doctor.

It also occurs to me that Rose’s run is thus far very heavy on just spending time on the companions, getting into their heads and their backstories. Moffat’s time at the helm is very focused on the adventure first with the character arc in the background. I don’t think that either approach suffers when done well.

Rating: 3 Pete Tyler thumbs-ups

Favorite dialogue: Ricky: But target number one is Lumic and we are going to bring him down.
Mickey: From your kitchen?
Ricky: You got a problem with that?
Mickey: No. ‘s a good kitchen.

About fifty: the number of people worldwide who would have gotten a mannequin reference to Today’s Special

Better pop music choices to pair with a screaming hobo being roboticized: The *original* “Lion Sleeps Tonight” . . . “Mr. Roboto” . . . “It’s A Beautiful Morning” . . . the list goes on.

This was like two paragraphs away from completion for weeks, I've just been so busy. Anyway.


2x06: The Age of Steel

We left the Doctor and rebel Preachers surrounded by Cybermen ready to delete them good and hard. The teaser just takes us up to that point again. The only noteworthy point is watching the Doctor's increasing desperation to get the Cybermen to accept their surrender. He's frantically clicking on the X but the program refuses to close.

I didn't mention the new Cyberdesign last time, as the post was long enough already. So: It's good. It looks much less cheap than some of the old designs (surprise, surprise). That's about it.

So the Doctor has palmed his crystal battery, and he immediately swings it around and fires an energy beam straight out of a video game that locks onto the Cyberman in front of him, spreads to the other Cybermen hemming them in, and vaporizes the lot of them in seconds. Uh. Wow.

"Sweet little weapon you've got there! What's the DPS? I've been struggling against group mobs, my T5 plasma blaster just doesn't cut it."​

The group escapes into the rebels' van, the Doctor telling a loyal Pete and heart-torn Rose to give Jackie up for dead. The TARDIS battery is back to recharging. The Doctor expects it to be done in four hours, which should be early dawn at the latest, rather less than the twenty-four hour estimate from broad daylight hours, which is impressive considering he just discharged some of its energy. With no apparent drawbacks to having magically "fired" the crystal at the Cybermen, and no reason to hesitate about destroying them, I'm calling this cliffhanger a cheat.

The rebels vent at Pete, promising to put him to death. They have dirt on Pete being a tool of Lumic in the latter's machinations against the British government. Rose is shaken. But Pete claims to be Gemini, the source of the dirt, and is irked that he was feeding info to "Scooby Doo and his gang" instead of actual government professionals. Now that's funny. And looking back at last episode, wouldn't you know it, our Mickey is positioned to become their Scrappy Doo.

It turns out that the fearsome Ricky is actually wanted for parking tickets. He tries to put on a mean face (the lack of grimacing this ep is an improvement BTW) and claim he's fighting the system by parking anywhere he likes. The Doctor agrees that that's his policy too, and with the ice broken, introduces himself. He takes charge and off they go to find the authorities.

Off come the Preachers' earPods, and just in time, because Lumic pauses his scenery chewing long enough to activate the virus across the whole . . . city of London. Well, we wouldn't want to conquer the people with actual armies and bombs just yet, everything in its time. News anchors are a low priority, too, as one transmits warnings to remove the pods while Londoners zombie their way toward the nearest processing center. Toward Battersea, Pete fills in, as the Doctor fumes over humanity's willingness to submit to others' power.

Rose calls back to the Cyberman head in "Dalek" to remind us that Cybermen are parallel evolution made mechanical, then Ricky takes charge and uh he and Mickey are dressed awfully alike right now. Could we not do that, please.

The Doctor sonics some oncoming Cybermen into believing these aren't the bins they're looking for, while Rose clutches her ersatz father's hand protectively. Meanwhile Mickey and Ricky have no garbage to hide behind, so they split up, coming at a fence in an alleyway from opposite directions. Ricky almost gets over before a Cyberman grabs and zaps him. Mickey is angry but has nothing better to do than run off.

Crane is brought before Lumic on charges of having got his earPod off before getting his brain properly stormed. I'd wondered if Crane might team up with Mickey, that would have been quite the duo. Crane gives a speech about volunteering for an upgrade, concluding with the stinger "I know exactly what to do." Then he demonstrates by ripping apart Lumic's life-support chair before the Cybermen can intervene. The Cybermen want to treat Lumic's suffering Cybermen-style, and when Lumic says he wants to stay human until his last breath, well, that breath can be arranged!

Mickey reunites with the main team. Rose quivers her lip until she knows it's him for sure, then throws herself on him. Ricky's buddy, Jake, lashes out at Mickey, but the Doctor puts on a super-stern face and focuses everyone on the task.

Arriving at the conversion factory, a plan is developed. Rose (her hair fluttering bravely against the night sky) will go with Pete through the front door wearing fake Pods. Jake goes after the zombie signal. The Doctor and the lady, Mrs. Moore, will go in through the cooling tunnels because A/C vents are just so overdone. Then Mickey calls attention to his own existence and the Doctor struggles to find a role for him. Mickey defiantly attaches himself to Jake.

In the cooling tunnels, the Doctor wishes for a hot dog, but instead finds columns of Cybermen "put on ice" for future needs. The Doctor gets Mrs. M's backstory so we feel sorry when she bites it -- she's an ex-Cybus employee on the run. One Cyberman is alert enough to notify the system of an intruder. The other Cybermen wake up, and the two barely get out of the tunnel alive.

In Rose and Pete's prong of the plot, a Cyberman almost reaches Dalek levels of excitement as he reports that 6,500 have been upgraded. In a conversion chamber, a CGI torturebot waves around in mid-air, and poof comes the helmet down on another satisfied customer. A Cyberman recognizes Pete and comes over to tell him, hi, I used to be Jackie. Pete and Rose betray themselves, and are marched off to Cyber Control so Pete can be rewarded for helping create the Cyberrace. Maybe he'll receive the Order of Planetary Self-Ownage.

Mickey has convinced Jake to not kill the zeppelin guards, who are conveniently still human and therefore druggable. Inside the zeppelin, Mickey commits the classic mistake of stepping backwards without looking first and blunders into a Cyber jump-scare. An empty Cybersuit, in an alcove with mid-20th century fans.

Mrs. M disables a Cyberman with an EMP bomb. Behind its chest emblem, the Doctor finds a goopy central nervous system and the emotional inhibitor that is the only thing keeping it sane. But the inhibitor broke, and the Cyberman's brain starts feeling cold and wondering where her husband-to-be is. The Doctor deeply apologizes for breaking her and turns her off. He wonders if turning off the system of inhibitors is the right thing to do, if he has any more right to do it than when he had a chance to annihilate the Daleks as the Fourth Doctor. Mrs. M tells him to go for it, then stands up and backs herself into a Cyberman's arms. Zap! The Doctor wails in anger, but the Cybermen are more impressed by his second heart than by his protests.

Reunited with Pete and Rose, the Doctor tries to bait Lumic out into the open, only to learn that he's already been upgraded. Jackie, then Lumic: these Cybermen do not mess around. Lumic is Cyber Controller now, and the position comes with its own chair and special voice just like being in charge of the Daleks does.

Jake and Mickey have decided to crash the zeppelin. Mickey works on hacking the steering, and Jake actually pays him a faint compliment. The "empty" Cyberman suit comes alive in response to Mickey's meddling. But Mickey decoys it over into punching the signal controller and that frees everyone who's still human. The Cybermen are as effective against the resulting mob as a bunch of mall security guards.

CyberLumic boasts of eliminating differences and sickness, but the Doctor points out that he's eliminated imagination as well. And with mortality defeated, any further advance will have to be in the realm of things that require imagination. Humanity will stagnate.

CyberLumic points out the pain of emotions. The Doctor embraces it without flinching and continues to drive his own viewpoint home: the world needs people, both ordinary and brilliant, and it needs those people to be human. Echoing his previous incarnation in “Father’s Day”, he asserts that all it takes is one ordinary person to change the world. Mickey, who has hacked into a feed, nods in agreement, but takes exception to the inclusion of idiots. The Doctor goes on, clearly describing Mickey's computer hacking abilities under the category of useful idiot, seemingly unaware Mickey's listening in. But then the Doctor mentions a code Pete found, so Mickey gets on that. The Doctor laughs when CyberLumic dismisses his babble as "irrelevant" and continues to feed Mickey directions for disabling the emotional inhibitor. Rose then tosses the Doctor her Mickeyfied phone, he plugs it in, and the Cybermen go haywire.

All the humans cheer, but the Doctor apologizes to a Cyberman who's seen itself in glass. Then everything explodes, Cybermen are clogging the exits, everything's on fire. The only escape will be the zeppelin, which Jake implies is full of hydrogen. I guess the Hindenburg taught nobody anything in this history. He and Mickey fight over whether to wait for the others. More explosions, more running, as CyberLumic tears himself free so he can stand up to deliver one last big NOOOOOO!

Mickey is having a blast piloting the zeppelin out of danger with his friends clinging to the zeppelin's rope ladder. But SOMEHOW CyberLumic has gotten up there fast enough to grab on to the ladder too! Pete cuts the rope below himself and CyberLumic slo-mo plummets to his death. Ho-hum. And then the effects crew throws in the classic "superspeed suhwoosh" sound effect for no reason. The Goofy wa-ha-ha-hooo would be more relevant and no less bizarre a choice.

As the Doctor mends the TARDIS, Rose tries to entice Pete inside with heavy hints about her paternity and the promise of a living Jackie. Pete can't handle it all being spelled out and politely leaves to save the world from the other side of the ocean from this girl. The Doctor tells Jake to tell Mrs. M's family how she died. And yes, Mickey is staying, to defeat the Cybermen factories (first stop, Paris!) and be there for his blind old gran. Rose is upset, Mickey's distressed, and the Doctor deeply hopes Mickey understands the finality of his choice.

Rose and Mickey have a teary goodbye, with Rose genuinely broken up, and then Rose heads home to cry on the shoulder of her living mother.

This story is the good, fun kind of cheese. Aside from the cliffhanger cheat, the second episode holds up to the first very well. Maybe better. Good work fitting all that into three-quarters of an hour. They must have saved enough by amortizing all those zeppelins and Cybersuits over two episodes that they could afford the explosions and fires to wrap things up.

I feel like Tennant got more emotional this story, with his cliffhanger desperation, his rage over Mrs. M, and his big showy Kirk Speech telling Mickey what to do. His ego popped up twice as well, in sort-of-incidental remarks. At the end, Mickey ushers in the next era of Who by bringing the Doctor the pinstripe brown suit.

Mickey himself finally gets his first unqualified hurrah since "Rose". Despite having "butt of the joke" all but stamped on his forehead in big red letters, he was a rounded, sympathetic character throughout his run, and I wish he'd had more moments to shine, or just to draw a breath without the universe dropping a banana peel at his feet. It's important that he leaves to be with his gran. He leaves for a positive, internal reason, not just to escape his failed relationship with Rose or out of a sense of obligation to fill Ricky's shoes.

Rating: 3 tunnels of Cybers

Favorite dialogue: The Doctor: I've been captured, but don't worry, Pete and Rose are still out there, they can rescue me. {He finishes walking up to them} Oh well, never mind. You okay?

People who have never seen a horror movie in their lives: 2

02x07 – The Idiot’s Lantern

​

I did not know an episode by this title existed.

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a Dutch angle rang out! A man's balance sheet screamed! An evil lightning bolt appeared on the horizon!

In his electronics store, Mr. Magpie hopes for a miracle to pull him out of debt while BBC plays in the background on one of his many unsold B&W TV sets. Instead, he receives an evil red lightning bolt on his lightning rod. The lady from the previous telly program reappears on the telly, calling to him personally! Then she sends evil red lightning out of the telly to grab him by the head and just smear his face across spacetime!

Ho ho ho, when Grandma Connolly said television would melt your brain out, over in the other part of the teaser, she knew what she was talking about!

But then it gets better. Evil Lightning Lady starts laughing and we jump-zoom in on her face. A classic trick, and they could have adhered to the Rule of Three and been done. But by jumping toward her grainy face a fourth time, the showrunners fully commit to their chosen device, and thereby signal it as cheese to be relished along with the time-worn plots of "television is evil" and "some Thing zaps people and uses them for its Evil Plan of Domination".

Will the rest of the episode measure up to this intensity of cheese, or will this be a bit disappointing like the Dickens episode was? Let's see.

Rose steps out of the TARDIS all saucy in pink and blue, ready to go see Elvis. The Doctor argues Elvis eras with her as he putt-putts a blue scooter out of the TARDIS. They head off to find Ed Sullivan's studio but find they landed on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Again we see the Doctor and Rose completely comfortable together, two pals bantering without anyone's ego at stake.

In the Connolly residence, the family is watching what the subtitles inform me is "Muffin the Mule". Mr. C had promised his son, Tommy, during the teaser that they might get a telly. Mr. C enthuses over the children's programming, then tries to get his wife, Rita, to cheer up. Rita says Grandma isn't the same anymore, that Rita can't get "that awful face" out of her head. Mr. C gets upset with her in the approved strict master-of-my-castle fashion. We hear Grandma moving around upstairs, presumably trying to navigate all these Dutch angles on arthritic legs.

Rose and the Doctor find that it's 1953 and they're just in time for Elizabeth's coronation. Rose is confused by the sight of so many television aerials. Oh, that's no surprise, their informant says, Magpie is selling tellies for dirt-cheap.

But then there's a scuffle, as a woman begs for help. The police(?) have a sack over her husband and are taking him away. Tommy is nearby and comments that everyone is turning into monsters. The Doctor and Rose chase the "police", but the driver has arranged for a fruit cart and movable wall to block any pursuit. The Doctor, bamboozled, finds a quiet dead end waiting for him.

Mr. Magpie tells Evil Lightning Lady he did what she asked and will she please leave and stop burning his brain up? She tells him that things can never go back as they were, because civilization moves forward, and that's the real tragedy.

Tommy carefully creeps up the Dutch stairs to unlock his gran's door. Between the lovely key and his mum's lovely sewing machine and the scooter, there are a lot of old-timey visuals in this episode to appreciate. Anyway, his father catches him at it, and asserts himself over the situation because that's basically his only reason for existence. With suppressed rage he steams at his son for being uncontrolled. Tommy wants help for his gran while his father wants to keep her locked away and forgotten about.

Right behind Tommy, on the wall, hangs a presumed photograph of Infant Tommy with a slight frown. Yes, his dad's been this way all his life.

"Now you sit right there and let the man take your picture, young man. And then you will eat your mashed peas, chew each bite exactly ten times, and you will like them."​

Father shuts down Tommy's protests, cancels his college so he can come work in the dirt like a REAL man, and yells at his wife, who is nearly in tears about Gran and what her husband is doing to her son. Lady, at some point you trade the control freak for the monster and just hope for the best.

The Doctor and Rose come calling. The Doctor sizes Father up and decides representing Queen and Country[TM] will get him in the door. It works like a charm, Mr. Connolly falling over himself to present himself well and keep his family from ruining everything. The Doctor takes his sexism down a peg and gives him busywork (Rose adding a verbal kick as he goes), having immediately sensed that the Missus and son will be more helpful.

Caught between a helpful doctor on one hand and a looming husband in the corner, Rita breaks down. Mr. Connolly visibly makes his saving throw against enchantment and works himself up to order the Doctor out of his castle. But the Doctor exerts his own personality and Mr. Connolly tucks his tail.

Tommy says people are turning strange, and somehow the police find out, turn up, and take the people away.

Into Gran's room they go. Now, when Tommy was at the door earlier, there was light so that we could see the shadows of something moving around in her room. It was then bright outside when the Doctor rang the doorbell. But now the light from the window is just enough to illuminate the corner of the room in blue and cast Gran in silhouette.

The manipulation is working because I'm actually not sure if I'm ready for this jump scare.

The Doctor flips on the light and a chord sounds as we see . . . somebody's fuzzed out Gran's face in Photoshop. That was disappointing.

The Doctor gets up close and corrects me: there is coherent skin there, with wrinkles but no features. "It's like her brain's been wiped clean", he says. Gran was right about TV again! If only she'd heard a rumor that watching telly makes you younger.

But the "police" break down the door downstairs. The Doctor begins a filibuster but gets punched out, and off Gran goes with a blanket over her head.

Rose notices Evil Red Lightning flickering around the telly and looks that over, finding the Magpie label. Mr. Connolly orders her out, and she gets in one last dig before vamoosing.

The Doctor couldn't wait for Rose before scooting after the "police". This time the fruit cart fails to outfox a Time Lord, and the Doctor sonics his way into a building. He finds all the "monsters" in a cage exactly big enough to hold them. He gets in among them to get a better look, at which point they all start clenching their hands noisily and turning toward him, and then the "police" capture him.

Rose has gone off to find Magpie's shop, where Evil Lightning Lady appears on a screen and whines about being hungry in a performance that would have been cheesy back when the Doctors could be counted on one hand. The actress has been fine so far so this has to be deliberate. It's good cheese so that's fine.

Magpie tries his best to get Rose to leave, but she puts her foot down and he admits something's up. Evil Lightning Lady introduces herself to Rose as "The Wire". Terrible superhero name, so she's gotta be a supervillain. She zaps Rose's face. Rose calls to Magpie for help, but Magpie just tells Wire Lady to think of feasting off of 20 million Brits tomorrow.

The Doctor's captors make the mistake of demanding he tell them "everything you know". The Doctor has seen The Strongest Man in the World too, so he knows to start in with the trivia. His captors, who are in fact police, have just been hiding the monster people away, to be dealt with after the Coronation. Am I going to find out this was a reference to sweeping homeless people out of sight in reality? I am, aren't I.

And then Rose gets brought in, faceless and brain-drained. And one phrase pierces through the Doctor's haze: Rose was de-faced and then just left out in the street. This utter contempt for her empowers him into focused action.

The Connollys have company over. Mr. C gets Rita alone and makes it clear he resents her talking to the Doctor and she'd better behave from now on. Mirroring the governmental desire to have a spotless national image on the Big Day, he doesn't want her distress spoiling the family proceedings. It's basically the same desire, but the parallel doesn't really work for me somehow.

And then Mr. C livens the party up by making fun of his wife for looking pretty, and I increasingly don't understand how they're going to come up with a death nasty enough to necessitate making him this nasty in the first place.

Auntie asks after Gran, and Rita answers with her eyes on Mr. C, who's just heaving his stomach at her shameless act of existing. Tommy defies him by "innocently" suggesting they go up and see Gran later, a good idea, don't you think, Dad? Auntie says you should beat the mommy out of a mommy's boy and Mr. C makes it clear that that will happen, and . . . like . . . what even is this anymore.

Will Mr. C get sucked into his own personal black hole that tears him apart for all eternity while red lightning devils pitchfork him and "My Heart Will Go On" plays on loop? Is somebody taking their issues with 1950s British government out on this guy? Is this just how they decided to pad out the episode, just come up with more ways for this guy to be terrible?

Mr. Connolly is more unpleasant than all the baddies from this and the last season put together, and they just keep piling it on.

Anyway, Tommy answers the door and it's the Doctor, who needs Tommy to spill all the beans now. Mr. C comes up and unleashes final salvos on the Doctor and Tommy, telling Tommy it's all about respect and a baby like him couldn't understand. Tommy is at least 11 or 12 by the way. Tommy calls him a coward for telling the police about Gran, so Mr. C finally blows his last fuse, saying he didn't fight in The War so a "little scum" like Tommy could ruin his respectability. Tommy calls him fascist in a big speech aimed at Somebody who probably rhymes with "Maybe Groomers". Rita asks if her husband actually is "informing" on everyone (subtle). Mr. C actually jumps up and down in a tantrum while calling Gran a "filthy disgusting thing".

And that is where the episode loses me. The shark has been jumped. The strawman has lit himself on fire and we're all supposed to dance around the bonfire now. The whole episode since the teaser has been hammering in that Mr. C is a terrible human being. Now it takes the terribleness way too far, to no purpose.

Who is this aimed at? I don't know. Mr. C is WWII veterans, or possibly the British government since he's been doubled with a police inspector. Tommy is a younger generation. I get that much.

Is Tommy supposed to be younger activists trying to keep the elderly from being forgotten and left to die? That's the straightest line I can draw. Whatever the exact message is, it's been lost at this point. Nobody is going to learn from this. Anyone who saw themselves reflected in how Mr. C treats his family will see this turn of events and think, "No, I'm nowhere near as bad as this guy" and the anti-domestic violence lesson will fail to stick, because that's how humans work. Anyone who otherwise identifies with Mr. C's desire for respectability and disdain for youth will dismiss this and think "Wow, the writer has issues" and not feel reproached, because that's how humans work. What is left? That being authoritarian is bad? That being respectable is not worth it if your family dies? Such messages have been done before, without coming near having to write the opposing side as a one-dimensional family abuser who chews up the scenery and spits out hatred at every turn.

And meanwhile, the Doctor, the star of the show, who came here so full of fire to save his friend and twenty million innocents, stands quietly to the side and lets the writer's whole pet scene play out.

Anyway, it now falls to Rita to deliver the Shocking Message that Gran Is My Mother And Those Other People Are Friends Too, and Mr. C just stands there, taken aback at remembering that familial relations exist apparently. He stammers that he did the right thing, bewildered by the Light of Truth that the writer is shining in his bescaled eyes, and Rita asks if it was the right thing for his family or just for himself. That's a question from Cars, which tells you how childishly this is being written at this point. And so the mother figure, freed from her shackles, turns to her son and blesses his courage, sending him forth. It's a scene that's been done thousands of times. She calls Mr. C a monster and locks him out, leaving him Rejected By Everything He Wanted as Tommy goes on to Bigger and Better Things. And then she implies she's going to divorce him so yay I guess?

This is not very good cheese at all. All because one character got way out of hand.

A scene from the darker, grittier Mary Poppins reboot.​

So that's all settled and . . . oh, yeah. I guess millions of people need saving. This was never a complicated plot, and a few words from Tommy are all that's needed to send the Doctor and Detective Bishop straight to Magpie's shop.

The Doctor finds an anachronistic power source that Magpie put together for Wire Lady, and then all the TV screens light up with faces of people talking. It's moderately creepy and of course it's the faces that Wire Lady took away from the victims. The Doctor finds Rose's face mouthing "Doctor" and that winds him up to unload on Magpie. Wire Lady makes her grand entrance. Her plan, she says as she dramatically turns full-color, is to gain enough power to regain her physical body. If you needed three tries to guess that, you were not paying attention to that teaser.

The Doctor taunts her with the power source, she cheeses at him, all three guys get their faces zapped. Wire Lady is chewing the scenery so exultantly that she actually uses the word "lashings". It's beautiful. But she notices the Doctor slipping out his sonic and knocks them all silly, then transfers into the power source for Magpie to take her somewhere else.

The Doctor gets up and finds the detective de-faced and noisily clamping his hands too. The clamping thing is never explained. He quotes Kylie Minogue (that's gonna date this episode something fierce) and deduces Magpie is headed for the transmitter station at Alexandra Palace.

The Doctor takes some Generic Electronic Stuff to the station. He leaves Tommy inside to keep the Stuff turned on, then takes to the roof after Magpie, who's climbed up the transmitter and plugged in the power source while Wire Lady does her "FEEEED MEEE SEYMOUR" impression. Maniacal laughter, evil red lightning spreads outward across the sky, twenty million people are getting their faces sucked away, and Magpie gets his Ironic Reward as Wire Lady zaps him to dust.

The Doctor climbs up to the power source. He connects it to the Generic Electronic Stuff, but something blows and Stuff doesn't work. But Tommy fixes Stuff (he was reading about radios in the teaser) and Wire Lady does a Big No and Big Scream as she gets sucked into a fate worse than death: a Betamax cassette. The Doctor plans to tape over it, probably with something really demeaning like the "World War Three" episodes.

Twenty million Brits are too pleased at the sight of newly crowned Elizabeth to suffer any major trauma, everyone gets their faces back, and the Doctor and Rose twirl-hug. Mr. C gets kicked out by Rita and probably gets run over by a lorry and bursts and all that evil Greatest Generation Gunk spews out onto the pavement. Actually he trudges down the street while the Doctor declares it's a new world with "no room for a man like Eddie Connolly." I know we hammered Mr. C into paste already, but doggone it, we set that line up and we are going to use it.

Then Rose sends Tommy after Mr. C, and that surprised me. But Rose knows what it's like to not have a dad, so it makes perfect sense. And so the episode ends on a bit of healing.

The Doctor is aggressive this episode, repeatedly shouting down people and then intending to casually erase Wire Lady in cold blood. Which makes his passivity during the My First Daddy Issues One-Act all the more noticeable. The episode's camera work adds to the fun, but that one scene knocked this down a full star.

The wiki has no idea about any specific allegory in this episode, but it does say this was originally written for Eccleston. I believe it.

Rating: 2 Question-ing faces

Favorite dialogue: Rose: Monsters, that boy said. Maybe we should go and ask the neighbors.
The Doctor: That's what I like about you. The domestic approach.
Rose: Thank you! Hold on, was that an insult?

Worst dialogue: Rita: We had a ruddy monster under our roof all right, but it weren't my mother!

You can just see the writer at his keyboard, thinking, "Yes, yes, I will mar the grammar right there at the end to make this awesome crowning speech all the more memorable!" And then he goes and prints out copies for all his friends to practice over lunch tomorrow because this is for a school play and he's, like, fifteen.

3:1: guesstimated ratio of Dutch angles to straight-up-and-down shots

Telly telly telly: telly telly telly telly telly

BBCA at 8 Central is running the cartoonification of "The Macra Terror". Join Patrick Troughton and friends as they take on terrifying [spoilers] on a distant planet, with the original soundtrack plus tastefully animated action based on what video survives of the story! PS Macra auto-corrected to Mazda

Oh, looks like they're only showing two parts, dunno how many the original is. But after that is "Shada", that Douglas Adams wrote, and that wasn't aired.

02x08 -- The Impossible Planet

Now that’s an old-school title.

The Doctor lands the TARDIS in an industrial setting, concerned that “she” (personification again) was fighting him landing there. Rose suggests they fly away to avoid any trouble and they have a good laugh at the very thought. They go looking through the base, the Doctor pattering about humans’ like of pre-fab. Some of this set design feels old-school too, stark and direct.

The base computer announces whenever a door opens or closes. The doors are individually numbered. Plot relevance incoming.

Rose reads “Welcome to Hell” off of a wall, spraypainted with Zalgo text underneath. From the “to the point” school of ominous warnings. The Doctor is unsettled because the Zalgo text isn’t being translated by the TARDIS. Which means that they’ve gone somewhere or sometime the TARDIS doesn’t know about, which unnerves the Doctor. He goes looking for people and finds three Ood behind the next door.

The Doctor said the writing must be “impossibly old”, and the first sight of the Ood fit the bill. The Ood evoke thoughts of Cthulhu and his gang. The one in front wears a uniform with Earth-standard collar and buttons, though, so that’s a bit comforting.

The Ood each carry a ball attached to their head by a cord. The balls announce “We must feed” insistently as the Ood stride toward our heroes, more Ood come through another door, and this is looking like a standard Doctor Who trap.

Back from the titles, the lead Ood jiggles his ball to get it to finish their thought: “We must feed you, if you are hungry.” Very polite, but then humans aggressively barge in. One is shocked that actual real people have been found. But the conversation is interrupted by an incoming quake, and our heroes are transferred via shaky-cam to the control center. Everyone is dumbfounded at the visitors, but then the quake hits hard and they have to deal with busted steam pipes and such.

After damage report is sorted, we finally get the news on all the impossibilities on this here planet. (There are enough guest stars that everyone gets introduced again.) The opaque roof is retracted, with a promise that the view is literally maddening. The view is that of a black hole with plenty of suction power. They’re in “geostationary” orbit of the black hole, so close to it that it appears larger than the Sun or Moon do from Earth’s surface, but a stable orbit nonetheless. The view is impressive, but not maddening. Future humans need to chill out.

The gas clouds rushing past into the black hole are from other star systems. That black hole has to have effective reach across many light years to still be pulling in stars. So yeah, this planetoid should be ripped apart by now.

We see that the design of the space base is a bunch of criss-crossing corridors on the planet’s surface, and would you have it any other way in Doctor Who?

Someone tells a myth about this planetoid: it’s named the “Bitter Pill” because someone made the demon black hole eat it, but the black hole spat it out as poison. Zack, the guy in charge, says the planet shoots a gravity funnel out into space, which keeps it in place. They got in by the funnel, they’d be toast if it turns off.

An Ood comes back with a drink for Rose. She asks for a name, but it considers itself a nameless part of a unity with the other Ood. The other humans explain that the Ood are a slave race, everyone’s got one of these things, and don’t go getting all offended, because the Ood would die without someone ordering them around.

The Doctor has meanwhile figured out some technobabble that took the humans two years to calculate. There’s an impossibly big power source somewhere in the core of the planetoid, and the Ood are being used to drill down to find it. They also serve refreshments, because employing robots in that capacity is a bad idea, just ask Winston Churchill or Jabba the Hutt. One man, Jefferson, wants to use the power to “fuel the empire“. (The Zalgo text was copied from some artifact found during drilling.)

Toby (who is charge of translating the text) explains: That funnel called out to us. And we came. Ida adds: How could we not? The Doctor, already amazed at these humans for being here, is so overwhelmed with pride about his favorite species being explorers that he ceremonially hugs Zack. Then he adds: You’re all nuts and you should run for your lives.

Which begs the question of how he and Rose arrived. And it comes out that the TARDIS is exactly in the area that was collapsed by that last quake. Happy fuzzy feelings all gone. The Doctor rushes off with Rose to find that part of the base is now in the core of the planet somewhere.

The human crew refuse to go looking for the Doctor’s ship. They came here to dig for one thing only. So the Doctor gets assigned laundry duty and life goes on. Rose is scared enough to need a hug.

Well, it’s time for plot complications on the crew’s side, and Bolero is the crew’s selected soundtrack. Because that’s not going to get on anybody’s nerves as the musical tension builds. Also the scene shown is in a huge echo-y space, but the music is just a basic recording without any effects added. Anyway, the power goes wonky in Toby’s quarters as a creepy voice whispers at him.

Meanwhile Rose tries to chat with an Ood about the Ood’s civil rights, but gets an apocalyptic prophecy for her pains. And a hologram set up to visualize the drill’s progress changes to a red image of a beast with ram’s horns. Even the computer takes a break from door-announcing to note that “he is awake.”

And then the creepy whisper starts talking to Toby again, answering all his questions with “don’t turn around” and “I’m right behind you” and “if you look you will die” and “I’m gonna touch you now.” Predictably, Toby can’t take this and turns around. Nothing there. But he notices the pottery he was studying has broken, and the Zalgo text has left it and passed through his gloves to stain his hands. A mirror reveals the text is all over his face. He keels over as if strangled.

A lady opens the viewport in the cafeteria so they can watch the last dust from a billion-year civilization get sucked into the black hole. Rose watches empathetically; the Doctor watches with quiet intensity and asks that the port be left open. (That isn’t Zalgo text on their table, by the way, just physics differential equations. Sorry.) Rose brings up the idea that black holes lead to other places, but the Doctor says this one “just eats.” Which matches the black hole CGI, which is not unlike a mouth now that he mentions it.

The Doctor and Rose try to face their future. The Doctor is terrified by the thought of settling down in a house and doing things that people who own houses do. Rose gingerly touches on the idea of cohabitation, maybe? please? but the Doctor broods on his promise to Jackie to bring Rose back safe.

Then Rose’s mobile impossibly rings, and tells her “He is awake.” Confronted with the plot, Rose flings the phone away as if it had turned into a cockroach.

Off to learn about the Ood’s telepathy, to see if any wires are getting crossed. Danny, the Ood dude, insists that the Ood are dumb herd animals, and only have minimal telepathy . . . at which point the telepathy monitor indicates higher and higher levels of telepathy. The nearby Ood stir and insist that everyone will worship “him” but refuse to be more specific.

Meanwhile Toby has woken up with red eyes and gone off elsewhere. Another crewmember, Scooti, finds his cubicle empty, then is alarmed by the use of Door 41. That’s only one away from a Hitchhiker’s crossover. It’s also an airlock, which nobody would use without a spacesuit. She looks outside to see Toby bathing in the black sun. He telekinetically breaks the window to let her come out too, to help him decide if he should be more of a Master or a Gary Mitchell kind of omnipotent loony.

The station rocks under the hull breach, and people scramble to safety. Including Toby, who tumbles in at the last moment, without red eyes or Zalgo text. He doesn’t remember what happened.

Scooti’s biochip indicates she’s indoors, but her body’s actually outside, floating away. Jefferson recites a somber verse, then everyone realizes the drill has stopped. At last, the next phase can begin. A team heads down to see what’s down there, with the Doctor wheedling his way onto the team in the captain’s place. Rose gives his visor a goodbye kiss.

Most of the Ood are left behind, with Danny telling the audience that no command can override their being told to stay put.

At the bottom of the shaft is a cavern. Ida tosses out a gravity globe, like in the Weeping Angels two-parter, to light the darkness. There are massive columns and animals carved into the rock. Bad news: no pictures are being sent back because of interference. This is enough for Ida to say “well, no turning back now,” which the Doctor immediately calls out for the bad-luck charm it is.

Meanwhile the Ood are all staring at Danny, despite his order that they sit back down. The telepathy level is so high it should have fried the Oods’ brains. Zack is unimpressed, having the end of his mission to focus on. Jefferson orders that guns be loaded with flesh-seeking bullets, just in case the nearby Ood go nuts.

The away team finds a giant manhole/seal in the ground, with Zalgo text around the edges. Toby, who has been curled up on the floor, is appealed to for translation. He stands, revealing red eyes and Zalgo face, and tells them in a weird voice about the Beast. Upon being threatened with a gun, the Zalgo text all evaporates and goes into the Ood, leaving a clean Toby behind again. As the Doctor decides he needs to go back up and see what’s going on, all the Ood start chanting, identifying the Beast as every world’s Satan, now freed to conquer the universe anew. One Ood’s speech ball flies to a man’s forehead and electrocutes him.

As the Ood advance on the humans, the seal opens and something is implied to be rising out of it. Also, the gravity funnel is vanishing, leaving the planet to plummet toward the black hole. Cliffhanger!

This is a tense, claustrophobic episode. Penned in by a black hole on one side and the loss of the TARDIS on the other, our heroes feel very trapped indeed. Then a universe-scale evil arises and outnumbers them by taking over all the Ood. What will happen? Surely not a cheap copout like in the Cybermen two-parter.

Rating: 3 Ood and a voice ball

Favorite dialogue: Jefferson: You telling me you don’t know where you are?
The Doctor: No idea. More fun that way.

Number of impossibles: 5 with one “impossibly”