nuWho Reviews - From Start to Hurt!

02x09 - The Satan Pit

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Because it’s Satan and he’s living in a Pit.

So yeah. Some “Beast” claiming to be the Lord of Darkness himself has escaped from its eternal prison on a planetoid on the doorstep of a black hole. He’s possessed one human, killed another, and then possessed all the Ood, while the status of the TARDIS is “at the bottom of a crevasse somewhere”. Oh, and the planetoid is now falling into the black hole, while Something is rising out of the Pit.

So Jefferson opens fire on the three Ood threatening him and, in this case, bullets will stop them. Danny bursts into the room and warns him to keep the door closed now, as Danny’s being chased by Ood packing heat. Jefferson, who was competent in Part One, is dumb enough to open the door for no good reason, and the Ood zap someone else before the door is shut again. Absolutely none of your fault, Danny.

We check on Zack, who immediately announces that the planetoid has stabilized into a new orbit, which feels really cheap. Anyway, he finds Ood headed his way too. So he seals himself in and calls Jefferson for an update. Jeffy says he’s low on ammo, so it’s only natural he was so eager to open the door and spray bullets a moment ago.

From deep in the planetoid, the Doctor gets in touch and tells us, yes, there was in fact nothing visible coming up the pit at the end of last episode. Fair enough on its own, the unseen can be scarier than the seen, but not even a burst of dry ice smoke? Triple-copout, all told, and the only thing saving it, compared with the Cybermen two-parter, is that they are still trapped with the scary thing, in the scary place.

Rose calls the scary thing Satan. The Doctor tells her not to be silly, but won’t tell her there’s no such thing as Abaddons. Zack orders Ida and the Doctor back up to the base so they can enact Strategy 9, but Ida wants to explore the cave instead. So she cuts her comlink with Zack before Ed Wood or Bela Lugosi can get involved.

Ida and the Doctor suspect that the Beast is still in the pit: the prison is open but the cell is still locked. Ida wants to go see, but the Doctor wonders if the Beast is relying on that curiosity, if that’s the temptation it alluded to last episode. Reluctantly, he advises they leave the pit be, saying that now he knows he’s old. On the way back to the elevator, Ida explains Strategy 9: no zombies, just open the airlocks and swoosh out the Ood go. The Doctor, without heat, calls it a slaughter.

Meanwhile Jefferson continues to slide the cheese off his cracker, preparing to shoot Toby for being “infected” even though he looks back to normal. This time Toby remembers a little from his possession: the sense of an entity full of rage and death, surely the Devil himself.

The elevator starts back up to the base with Ida and a Doctor onboard, but Rose is looking way too happy for this to end well. Sure enough, the elevator stops as most of the power cuts out. The possessed Ood appear onscreen to rave at all these little people who live in the light of dying stars. Zack reveals he works for Torchwood and asks what the Beast wants. Death, here and now. Okay then.

The Doctor tries to talk at the Beast, asking which specific religion’s evil it purports to be. All of them, the answer comes back, and you know me well, O killer of your own people. With barely a pause the Doctor continues interrogation, with the Beast saying it was imprisoned by good guys before the universe even began. The Doctor protests that that’s impossible. “Is that your religion?” the Beast inquires. “It’s a belief”, the Doctor finally offers. The Beast mocks each character in turn, through blue-tinted screens full of Ood visages, picking at their insecurities, before ending by addressing “the valiant child who will die so very soon.” That stresses Rose out, because it’s either her or the Doctor, but the Doctor tells her to ignore it. With another flash of the ram-horned being from last episode, the pictures cut out.

Everyone chatters over each other until the Doctor restores order with radio feedback. As he urges them to work together, the elevator cable snaps, and the suspended elevator plunges. Of course it wasn’t very high up, but contact has been lost. Zack knows the Doctor and Ida are still alive, that’s about it.

The Ood start cutting through the door hinges. With ten minutes until they get into the respective rooms the crew are in, Rose takes command, pulling everyone together to brainstorm. This starts with Zack, who’s been feeling useless since Booti was found dead last episode. He pulls power from the rocket that got them there, enough that the station is working again. Except that Strategy 9 requires their energy bar to be full.

Danny, the Ood Dude, laments the lack of anti-Ood viruses onboard (I guess the Space Geneva Convention allows biowarfare if you’re fighting The Dark One), but says he could telepathy-EMP the Ood. Except he’d have to go back to the Ood storage facility to do that. Jefferson says they can follow the maintenance shafts, but there’s no oxygen in those. Zack says he can manipulate the “oxygen field” to create a bit of atmosphere that he could push through the shafts with them. With Ood banging on his door, too, you can see how this is scary all around. Rose and company exit through the shafts, making rude comments about each other’s hinders.

Ida is savvy enough to recognize that, if she and the Doctor are to survive, the Plot Gods will leave their means of salvation down in the Pit. So she wants to climb down there using the cable from the elevator. The Doctor agrees, except he’ll go instead of her. Over the edge and into blackness he goes. Or the camera retreats from him, one or the other.

Meanwhile, the Ood have gotten into the shafts too. Moving the air around takes time, time that Rose & co. may not have. Zack isn’t sure where the Ood are, as the computer can’t pick them up because they aren’t “proper lifeforms”. Rose is understandably piqued at this plothole. With the Ood catching up, Jefferson finally has to stay behind to shoot as many Ood as he can. He ends up on the wrong side of a bulkhead, and at his request, Zack suffocates him rather than let him suffer an Ooding.

The last bulkhead goes up to reveal Ood on the other side. Panicked, Rose leads them up the nearest access cover. Toby is the last to go up, but he flashes red eyes at the Ood before he gets hauled to “safety”. Rose & co. run for safety ahead of Ood, Danny gets his EMP slapped in and transmitting, and all the Ood clutch their heads and slump to the ground just in time to save Zack. So that’s dealt with for now.

What is this next thing. This is seriously surreal. I feel like I’m watching a little action figure being lowered on a thread (I probably am) while a documentary narrator talks about comparative religion.

It’s supposed to be the Doctor ruminating on the mythology of ultimate evil while he’s being lowered into the Pit, but wow. Just when you think you know a show, it goes and does something like this.​

Anyway, maybe this “beast” thing is a genuine Devil, or maybe it’s a non-Devil experience that everyone translated into all those different Devils, or maybe it’s just some influence that caused similar imageries to run through all the religions in the universe. Maybe the Devil is just an idea, the Doctor wonders . . . and then the winch reaches the end of the cable, but the Doctor continues to dangle. Is the bottom of the pit five feet down or five miles? If only there were a rock in this cave for Ida to toss down. Faced with the choice of being pulled back up to suffocate or taking the plunge, the Doctor chooses the leap of faith.

Ida protests she doesn’t want to die alone, but the Doctor continues to unhook himself. While Zack tries to patch through to them, Ida and the Doctor search for consolation in each other’s faiths. Ida was brought up New Revised Congregation Version but none of it really stuck. The Doctor, again hesitant to categorically deny anything, says he doesn’t know everything yet, so will not categorically deny it all. He’s been confronted with a “funny” bit of his belief system: he’d have believed the Beast coming from outside his universe, but balked at the idea of it existing before. “Still, that’s why I keep traveling”, he says. “To be proved wrong.” The sad oo-ey music from last season starts up as he searches for the right words for a final message for Rose. Finally, he says, “Oh, she knows” and slips free.

Wouldn’t you know it, Rose is on the comms half a second later. All Ida can tell her is that the Doctor insisted on taking the fall. While Rose gets really sad in the face, Zack tells Ida they can’t get to her. Ida, the brave human explorer, tells Zack how it’s so beautiful down there. She’d doubtless give details, but that’s the trouble with CGI instead of matte, you don’t know what the artists will whip up. Through tears she tells Zack it’s okay, just get out of there.

Rose wants to stay behind, to wait for the Doctor, even if he’s dead. As the Ood start to wake up, Zack makes the executive decision to have her manhandled toward the waiting rocket, and they blast off. Rose threatens violence but Zack coolly reminds her the Doctor wouldn’t like that.

The Doctor wakes up lying on the ground with his helmet smashed open. He says the atmosphere at the bottom was made thick enough to slow his fall. He removes his helmet, then watches in his mind’s eye, all forlorn, as the rocket takes Rose away.

The Doctor goes exploring, chatting at Ida whether or not she can still hear him. He finds a cave painting of humanoids fighting a big red horned humanoid and locking it away. Those yellow urns on pedestals seem to be important too. Suddenly the horror film has turned into a point-and-click puzzle game, or maybe an RPG. He touches an urn and both urns start glowing. This is either very good or very very bad. Finally he looks up and, uh, well. This Beast is definitely not a copout.

If this is an idea, I’d like to stop having it now.​

The Doctor tells the Beast that he will admit its existence and no more. He tries to work with the Beast on what he’s expected to do next, maybe a ritual or a spell, “all these things I don’t believe in, are they real?” The CGI is doing its best, but the shots from the back of the Doctor betray their rear projection nature as the Beast just kind of sways to and fro. Still pretty good. Anyway, the Doctor makes a series of Tennant faces as he figures out how to get the Beast to talk. He decides that the Beast can’t talk because he’s only looking at its physical form, which means the intelligence is elsewhere. Since Toby is still smirking a Master-level smirk as the rocket speeds away from the black hole, guess where that part is. The Doctor decides that the Devil really is just an idea, and that idea is currently on the rocket. We’re deep in metaphysics here.

And sure enough, what I’ve been dreading will happen is about to happen. The Doctor takes up a rock to destroy an urn, reasoning that by destroying the prison, failsafes will destroy the Beast with it. (Why Didn’t They Just Destroy The Bad Guy To Begin With?) But he reconsiders: the gravity funnel will also be destroyed, dooming the rocket and killing Rose.

Rose conveeeeniently immediately starts wondering how they got away so easily. Toby tells her to shut up. The Doctor then puts on bravado, announcing that after all the would-be gods and devils he’s seen, he most believes in Rose. And he smashes an urn. Toby panics and gets all Zalgo-faced. He rants and blows fire to no effect except to freak everyone out. “Nothing shall destroy me! Nothing!” And then Rose shoots the windshield out and unbuckles him and he flies to his doom. Luckily the rocket has a spare windshield, although it’s too tinted to be legal in most states. Zack is a little crabby but otherwise everyone’s taking their imminent deaths well.

So the planet keeps falling and the rocket keeps falling and the Doctor just stands around trying to avoid the stagehands throwing rocks at him, but finally he gets knocked over to the side, and winds up against his TARDIS. Even the Doctor has to get railroaded by the plot occasionally for his own good. He nabs Ida and tractors the rocket away from the black hole. He’s a bit bummed about not saving the Ood but otherwise happy to play the cock-sure hero.

With everyone back with their crew, the Doctor sets aside Rose’s fear that she’ll die in battle, and describes the two of them as “the stuff of legend.” The TARDIS leaves, and the episode ends with Zack according some dignity to the Ood by reporting each of them, plus Toby, deceased with honors.

In keeping with the “humans are awesome this week” theme from Part One, everyone is stoic and resourceful in the face of scary death (once the Doctor and Rose get a chance to provide leadership). Ida in particular buries her fear in exploration. The Doctor goes to wrap up their adventure with advice for the future, but decides humanity will just “blunder in” the next time regardless. He also declines to explain what was at the bottom of the pit, saying he doesn’t fully know, and that’s good, because when he knows everything he’ll stop exploring. I like a two-parter that keeps its themes going strong. Even if the horror isn’t as intense as in the first episode, and there honestly isn’t much plot in the last twenty-odd minutes, there’s enough action and tension to hold up to the first part.

The Doctor asserts his utmost trust in Rose. He also refers to the two of them as “the stuff of legend”, as equal partners. These details highlight just how important the Companions are in the Doctor Who relaunch. As opposed to the old series, where they might provide a bit of muscle, or blunder into plot and get captured, the modern companions take much more important, prominent roles in making decisions, being clever, and saving the day.

Rating: 3 urns that glow yellow

Favorite dialogue: Ida: I want to go [down the Pit]. Don’t you?
The Doctor: (beaming) Oh, in a second, but then again . . . . That is so human. Where angels fear to tread. Even now, standing on the edge, it’s that feeling you get, yeah?

Will bullets stop it: One yea, three nay

oh wow has it been this long, silly babies getting in the way of srs Doctor Who discussion

2x11 - Love and Monsters

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Love and monsters
Love and monsters
Go together like a horse and consters

So some bloke is running as if pursued through an empty field. With sad Season 1 music and British tumbleweeds blowing in the air, he comes to a blue police box. He examines it, but is distracted by Rose yelling in a nearby abandoned warehouse that has lots of TARDIS-blue doors. He investigates but can't find anyone anywhere inside. Finally he reaches the other end and opens it, coming face to face with a walnut-headed alien iguanodon, wearing Serious Technology, that snarls in his face.

Cut to the bloke safe at home, evidently narrating the whole adventure into his camcorder or webcam. "Oh boy!" Oh boy, indeed.

Back to the iguanadon. The Doctor pops in and distracts the alien with raw meat, as if it were a pet dog. Tennant puts on a show again, casually leaning against the doorframe as he alternates cooing at the alien and yelling at the bloke to run. Rose comes charging in with a battle cry and throws a bucket on the alien. But it's the wrong bucket and the alien just gets mad. And then the three actually Scooby-Doo their way back and forth across the hall, right in front of Bloke. But the Doctor notices that Bloke looks familiar and pauses. Bloke evidently decides he doesn't want to be recognized and runs outside.

Back to the safe-at-home narration. Bloke teases us with hints of his story to come and introduces us to his camera girl, Ursula. We finally find out his name is Elton. I guess the producers are dumping their entire stock of ecch names in this episode. Three-year-old Elton Bloke went downstairs one night to find David Tennant glaring at him like Santa Claus with an unsatisfactory progress report. That's all that grown-up Elton remembers.

The next time Elton had an alien encounter was during the first reboot episode, with the Autons. Then he recalls oh no. No please. Don't do this. Uuuugh. The "Aliens of London" two-parter. Elton Webcam, you are officially my least favorite Elton. Elton teases the names of a few upcoming characters and mopes for dramatic effect. This particular narrator may suck suspense out of who's going to live or die, but he's milking the foreshadowing and the writers are having fun with it. They're also using Elton to good effect with the pacing, as Elton breaks up the seriousness with ten seconds of dancing to ELO.

Anyway, Elton shrewdly guesses there's more to a giant spaceship hanging over London than a mere giant spaceship hanging over London, and turns to the Internet for answers. He finds a picture of the man who invaded his house when he was three. This leads him to Ursula, who's part of a group that has been putting together clues about the Doctor. The idea is similar to Rose meeting with Clive, but expanded. I like this, because it reinforces the idea that ordinary people have started to notice the Doctor showing up and saving the Earth again and again. This is the Information Age, after all. It's interesting world-building.

So we montage our way through the group having their meetings. Mr. Skinner has a literary theory about the Doctor, while Bridget is more into the blue box. Bliss expresses herself through abstract sculpture. I'm genuinely concerned a new person will come in and inflict erotic fanfiction on us. That's clearly what this is about, Doctor Who fandom translated into the show. Elton, with his investigative acronym he's wanted to use for years, seems like the type who wants to dig into the lore to find a deeper meaning in it all. Anyway, the meetings turn into social events as time goes by, fun and friendship taking center stage away from the Doctor.

"King"? I guess the Doctor is lord of his castle . . .​

Then one day a dramatic man enters dramatically with his dramatic walking cane. His name is Victor Kennedy, and he promises help in their quest. His shiny laptop contains a shiny video recording of the Doctor and Rose entering the TARDIS. It's back to business, with Victor having Torchwood files that he hands out as homework. And then they set up a classroom with actual school desks. Victor evidently represents a bossy, self-absorbed fan who commits hostile takeovers of communities. He isn't satisfied to talk about the Doctor, he wants to "catch" him. He gets Bliss alone, does something scream-y to her and, when asked later, dismissively says she went off to get married.

Anyway, one day a blue box is reported and off they go. Thus, Alien Iguanadon. Elton was running toward something, not away, at the start of the episode. But he runs away from the Doctor now, and Victor is about to whale on him for failing in his mission when Ursula shows some steel and puts Victor in his place. Victor, true to type, notes her for a troublemaker.

Victor decides that tracking down Rose will be a better idea. Armed with some glamour shots and Elton's recollection of a London accent, they take to the streets for a search against impossible odds, only for Elton to immediately find someone who recognizes Rose.

Elton sees Jackie and trails her into a laundromat. He prepares to use Victor's spy training to ease Jackie into his confidence, only for the garrulous Jackie to do all the work for him. She hits on him for his number, and they even talk about Rose, but Jackie lets no incriminating details slip. Still, this is clearly the right Rose, and Victor congratulates Elton before dismissing everyone with homework so he can screamify Bridget.

Jackie keeps calling Elton over to fix her home up and finally puts a move on him. Elton accepts the challenge, only to walk in on her upset, close to tears worrying about Rose's safety. Moved, he drops Rose and gets pizza to share as friends. But Jackie has found the picture of Rose in his coat, deduced he's after the Doctor, and blows him off. She feels hardened by being the one left behind while others have adventures, and she doesn't like it, but she'll protect her daughter with her life. So that's that.

A guilty Elton storms back and shouts Victor down, then hits Ursula up for a date. The two lovebirds storm out, but Victor keeps Mr. Skinner behind with the promise of Bridget's phone number so he can screamify him. Ursula and Elton return for Ursula's phone, only to find Victor stubbornly holding a newspaper between them and himself, with Mr. Skinner's muffled voice begging for help. Those inhuman fingers holding the paper are worrisome too. Victor reveals his true form, a yellow-greenish humanoid with Mr. Skinner's face sticking out of his abdomen. Bridget and Bliss are, ah, elsewhere on his body too. Victor declares that absorbing Jackie is a price he's willing to pay to get to the Doctor. Apparently he gets the knowledge of people he absorbs. Victor dramatically absorbs Ursula and declares she tastes like chicken. Ursula's face, which has mysteriously retained her glasses, tells Elton to run. Victor chases after, having rather too much fun doing so, and corners him.

But the TARDIS materializes, and Rose steps out to berate Elton for getting Jackie upset. Victor is pleased to see the Doctor. Rose wonders if he's Slitheen but Victor says he spits on those losers. Point in his favour. He also says he's from their twin planet, with the grandiose name of Clom. Har har. Victor puts the Doctor over a barrel by threatening to absorb Elton unless the Doctor surrenders. The Doctor calls his bluff, and the people already absorbed strain and pull until Victor drops his cane. Elton breaks it, and Victor and his absorbants dissolve. Rose sees that Elton is upset over Ursula and hugs him.

Finally, the Doctor explains what he was doing in Victor's house so long ago: stopping a "living shadow" that had already killed Elton's mother. Afterward, Elton sits at his computer and broods over salvation and damnation, and what price Rose and Jackie might eventually pay for being touched by the Doctor. And we find out that the Doctor was able to bring Ursula back as a face on a pavement tile, which is . . . nice? She and Elton seem to be happy together? Just didn't need to broach their sex life, thank you, let the dirty minds think about that without sharing with the rest of us.

My impression is that "Love and Monsters" has a mixed reputation, at best, among fans. It's understandable why. The alien is gross. The episode starts out light and silly, but then tries to get all philosophical at the end, and three of the characters don't make it and a fourth winds up as just a helpless tile with a face. Some people don't like mood whiplash, and it's a difficult thing to pull off well in any case. Also that oral sex allusion is out of line. There's the lack of suspense with the narrator. The fan stand-ins could have hit too close to home for some, especially Victor. A lot of this could have spectacularly fizzled.

But it works for me, aside from a couple of moments that got too silly, and yes, the sex life allusion. I think the silliness and seriousness are balanced well, and I was entertained all the way through. The fandom allegory thing isn't pursued too far, and nobody's actually mocked who doesn't deserve it. Victor's problem isn't that he takes the Doctor seriously. It's that he ruins others' fun by demanding they all do things his way, without any concern for their well-being, and ultimately he's just using them for his own malevolent ends. The Doctor only stopping the big bad because Rose wanted to yell at one of the victims is an amusing twist.

I found a couple of comprehensive Doctor Who rankings lists that both cite the 'last five minutes' as a reason to rank this episode way down in the 200s, and I guess that's fair enough. However, they both list the Slitheen two-parter in the upper 100s despite all the bad logic and in-your-face flatulence humor in there, so obviously they can be disregarded.

Note that there are a couple of bits that are not part of the plot proper, but they have to be included as being necessary to the plot, if that makes sense. The first is what the Doctor is doing when Elton finds him in the opening. The second is the question of what the Doctor was doing in Elton's childhood home. For these bits to succeed, they have to be worth their screentime without the viewer wishing the episode had been about them instead. So the warehouse is a goofy, self-contained action sequence. The second is answered by a very simple, very generic reason that would have felt like a letdown if not for Elton's mother being killed. That gives the answer emotional weight, and gives Elton a sense of having gotten a satisfying closure to his adventure: an answer to why his mother is dead.

Rating: 3 gross absorbaloffs

Favorite dialogue: Elton: So it began. The impossible task. To scour the mean streets, to search a major capital city for an unknown girl. To hunt down that face in a seething metropolis of lost souls. To find that one girl in ten million.
Old lady: Oh, that's Rose Tyler. She lives just down there. Bucknell House, number 48. Her mother's Jackie Tyler. Nice family. [pause] Bit odd.

Whyyyy: Whyyyyy must this show keep bringing up the Slitheen two-parter whyyyyyyy

Where do all these flat people keep their brains:

Jackie Tyler was seriously MILF-y in that ep.

It works for me as a meta-comment on Dr. Who fandom. You get the nerds all coming together for different reasons and all with differing views on the Doctor, then forming friendships and other interests within the group, only for the VERY SERIOUS fan to march in and suck all the life out of it (Victor is thought to be a caricature of uber-fan Ian Levine (the chap who keeps teasing that he's found missing footage from the early years) who is a self-absorbed tosspot who insists Who can only be enjoyed his way).

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02x11: Fear Her

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This is another episode that seems to have a shaky reputation among fans. We’ll see how much it’s deserved.

It’s a lovely day in a London suburb as the city prepares to host the 2012 Olympics. An old lady is out for a walk with her blue baggage. She looks around, her old lady spidey senses tingling, and starts shouting for some nearby children to get inside. As she argues with their father, a girl in a nearby house watches, singing to herself. She crosses her darkened room and draws one of the boys, Dale, and he disappears while the adults’ backs are turned. Downstairs, her mother crosses her arms and gazes up the stairs. The girl finishes her drawing, and it snaps into life, raising hands and evidently shouting as it runs “toward” her. Cue opening theme!

That’s a creepy teaser that lays out all the relationships. But how much room is left for any mystery? It’s often unfun to watch the leads blunder around for half an hour when the audience already has all the answers. We’ll see.

The Doctor squeezes his blue box between two large, very blue dumpsters, only to find he’s got the doorway facing one of them. One ninety-degree rotation later, he’s out and about with Rose, chattering about the genius that is edible ball bearings. Rose calls his attention to the numerous posters of missing children surrounding them. The Doctor senses an uncannily low temperature, and zeroes in on the spot where Dale vanished. Rose does her bit by finding that all the cars on this street are having mysterious engine trouble. She gets exposition from a road worker and the old lady before being interrupted by Dale’s father menacing the Doctor for being a weirdo in his yard.

A row ensues, with a woman accusing the road workers of kidnappery, until the Doctor calms them down. Through it all, the girl’s mother hovers silently nearby, seemingly aware that her daughter is involved. This is the danger of revealing the plot at the start, it can be a little frustrating that the protagonists don’t see “obvious” clues.

The artist girl, Chloe, sees a cat outside and starts drawing it next to Dale. Her mum walks in and asks why she drew Dale so sad. Chloe says she didn’t, Dale made himself sad, so she’ll draw him a cat for company. She’s a little too old to be that deep into her make-believe, mum. But her mum tries to distract her with the Olympic procession streaming on her laptop in flawless high-definition bandwidth that seems unlikely for a single parent with a flat in the mid-2000s. Maybe warm beer makes for cheap Internet.

Chloe ignores all this in favor of her art. Mum pesters her about nightmares, until Chloe passive-aggressively threatens to draw her if she won’t leave. Instead of taking this chance to positively interact with her child, Mum leaves. Chloe tells all her pictures to stop snivelling, they get to have friends and don’t know how terrible it is to be lonely. Hon, have you ever tried just, I don’t know, going outside?

“And if you’re *really* annoying, Mother, I’ll draw you with your hairdo from your freshman yearbook picture.”​

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Rose happen upon the cat just as Chloe finishes her drawing. The cat walks into a small box and doesn’t come out. The Doctor is more impressed than ever.

Chloe snaps her pencil while ranting at her subjects and draws a scribble to vent her anger. The scribble takes on physical form and attacks Rose when she investigates it clanking around in someone’s garage. The Doctor sonics it into a harmless ball of twine and takes it to the TARDIS for autopsy. He determines it’s graphite, even erasing it with a pencil, and he and Rose share a Moment as she deduces. We’re about fifteen minutes into the episode and here they are, ringing the bell at the correct flat already. How much more can there be?

The mother, Trish, turns them away from her door defensively, but a passive-aggressive goodbye from the Doctor gets them inside. Rose senses the episode is going too smoothly and wanders off to explore and hopefully get herself captured (a necessary instinct for any Companion) while Trish explains that Chloe isn’t herself lately. Rose goes into Chloe’s room to see all her drawings on the wall. She notices a particular drawing of a scared Dale and his new cat, then is distracted by a door rattling, then turns back to find that Dale is now grimacing aggressively. Whoa!

It’s not Chloe at the door, she’s downstairs being creepy at the Doctor, so Rose probably shouldn’t open the door to whatever’s rattling it. But she does, and it’s a closet, and now the winds of Hell are beckoning her in and whoa! On the back wall is a black-on-red drawing with glowy eyes glaring at her violently. The other drawings have been childish, but this one is good art to give the jump scare a chance to work. It growls about coming to hurt Rose.

The Doctor comes running and, much like with the werewolf in “Tooth and Claw”, doesn’t even want to deal with it, slamming the door shut. Chloe explains it’s a drawing of her dad, whom Trish told us is dead and we’re all better off with him that way. Anyway Trish gets upset with Chloe and Chloe effectively says “WE need to stay together and YOU are not in my ‘we’ group Mum.” A frightened Trish tries to kick the strangers out to protect Chloe, but Rose charges Chloe with all the disappearances and the Doctor firmly but compassionately breaks down Trish’s defenses and offers help.

The Doctor says that Chloe is harnessing “ionic power” to capture the things she draws. Personally, I harness ionic power to make balloons stick to cats. He also deduces that Chloe’s nightmare dad is about to burst out of her closet drawing. So he puts Chloe in a mind meld trance and talks to whatever’s possessing her to give her this ability. He tells it he knows it’s lonely, but who is it and what does it want? It’s an Isolus, which is a spore that rides in a swarm through space for millennia, feeding off the love of billions of siblings. Obviously it’s only natural such a thing would be named something like “isolation”. But this one crashed to Earth alone and it’s miserable, so it possessed Chloe, who also felt alone, and you know the rest.

Dad tries to get out of the closet now, but Trish sings to Chloe until she stops vibrating like an old comedian touching a live wire, and the dad-thing goes away.

While Rose guilt-trips Trish about not talking to Chloe about her father’s death, Chloe watches the crowds at the Olympics. She also watches the Doctor return to the TARDIS, then gets out some pencils that Trish didn’t confiscate and gets to drawing. The Doctor wants to scan for the pod that the Isolus crashed to Earth in. Rose comes along to, ah, discuss his sympathy for the alien who keeps banishing children to the Crayola dimension. He’s matter-of-fact about his point of view: the Isolus is just a child, and he knows what it’s like to travel alone. Rose is a little shocked to hear that he “was a dad, once.”

Chloe draws the Doctor and TARDIS and they both disappear. Rose tries being stern with the Isolus, but it just repeats that it loves Chloe and wants to stay with her. So Rose goes to look for the pod and finds that it’s been paved over. She digs it up (it’s tiny) and rushes back to find that now there are also tens of thousands of people missing from the Olympic stadium on the telly. The Isolus is still not content, so with Rose breaking down one door and Nightmare!Dad breaking down the other, Chloe begins to draw the planet Earth on her wall. Isolus tells Rose it’ll turn Dad loose if she interferes, but the drawing of the Doctor is pointing to an Olympic torch now and the Olympic announcer is rambling about the torch being a beacon of love and so on. So Rose takes the pod out to the street that just happens to be where the torch is passing by and tosses it in the flame from 3-point range.

Since the invention of the plot contrivance, there have been five contrivances that were rated the most natural, the most forgiveable. This one is at the other end of the scale.

Isolus stops just as Chloe has one square inch of sea left to fill in, announces it can go home, and says goodbye. Happy Rose time as she sees all the children return. Angsty Rose time as the old lady thanks Rose and tells her to say hi to that man, but the Doctor isn’t here yet didn’t he come back it’s not like he could be somewhere out of her line of vision. And then scary time as Dad comes to life too and magically locks the front door to trap Trish and Chloe inside the house. They sing him away. Outside, the road worker consoles Rose on the Doctor’s absence while gazing straight ahead, facing where her face would be if the director hadn’t decided she should be huddled in angst on the doorstep in the reverse angle shots.

On the telly, everyone has returned to existence in the stadium. That was odd but no biggie. But what’s this? The torchbearer collapsed and let the torch hit the ground! COULD THIS BE THE END FOR THE OLYMPICS? No. The Doctor comes up and jogs the torch the rest of the way in. The big flame plus everybody cheering gives the pod enough good vibes that it can return to space and rejoin its swarm.

All that’s left is for Rose to give the Doctor a cupcake with edible ball bearings on it and the Doctor to foreshadow an oncoming storm beneath the joy of a fireworks display.

I suspect fans’ problems with this episode largely stem from two main causes: (1) we know in the teaser what’s going on and (2) people can’t take a girl’s scribbles seriously as a threat. Also, it turns out to be (3) very alien aliens from the deep depths of space, which is honestly jarring when it crashes in on the little domestic story that we had been watching. And then (4) the Olympics are just thrown in to beef up the threat’s magnitude. Which, fair, I guess you do need an intermediate step to suggest that Chloe could capture the whole planet. But (5) Chloe’s behavior didn’t make a lot of sense, in the little non-obviously-plot ways, until the reveal that she was possessed by a childish being. And after that you don’t necessarily revisit your assumptions, you just remember “there was some bad writing or acting earlier.” And, uh, (6, 7, 8) everything with the torch. Okay, it’s kind of a fine episode, but there are definitely some issues. At least it didn’t turn out to be one of those “mentally different gives you SOOPER POWERS” stories like I was expecting partway through.

Rose is feeling very American this week, wearing a blue denim jacket with a bald eagle patch on the back. Maybe they went and saw Elvis just before this.

Chloe’s actress does a fairly good job when she isn’t trying to track a CGI flower floating in the air. It’s not her fault the episode is middling.

Rating: 2 old lady instincts

Favorite dialogue: Rose: Ohh, aren’t you a beautiful boy!
Doctor: Thanks, I’m experimenting with back-combing. (sees the cat) Oh.

Tuesday at 6:15 PM: The Philosophical Society will provide a potluck dinner followed by debate over whether the IOC or FIFA is more corrupt, and whether the Olympic torch can be said to still represent anything other than massive greed and exploitation of young athletes. Feel free to bring a salad or dessert to share.

This ep wasn't as bad as all that and did, in fact, correctly predict the (sadly brief) national mood around the 2012 Olympics. I can forgive it as much of S2 was RTD seeing what storylines would work for Torchwood and which for The Sarah Jane Adventures.

​

2x12: Army of Ghosts

Rose’s voiceover tells us Earth is where she was born and died, where she met the Doctor and saw her adventures end with the titular army, Torchwood, and a war. Foreboding enough. Today’s story of Rose’s death begins in a blue-and-yellow playground (do the showrunners look for blue places or do they hand out free paint jobs as they go?) as she returns to visit her mum. Rose brought Jackie a golden bazoolium weatherometer, but Jackie has big news: Grandpa is coming to visit. Uh, Grandad Prentice died a decade ago. But right on time, some kind of Hollow Man CGI comes striding through the kitchen wall.

The Doctor and Rose find that similar hollow men are all over the neighborhood. Nobody seems to take notice (easiest CGI interaction ever). None of the hollow men pay attention to the living people either, which is understandable because the British version of foursquare looks pretty dull. Over at Torchwood, some nerd pulls a Big Lever and the CGI dissipates. The lady in charge, Yvonne, announces that the ghost power reached over nine thousand or whatever.

The Doctor turns on the telly, but that clears nothing up. One unconcerned news anchor reports a military-esque formation of ghosts on a bridge. Another predicts where the ghosts are expected to show up this evening like they’re thunderstorms. The best bit is the advertisement for a spray can that makes your ghost look spiffy. I hope it’s a spray can and not a rub-on polish, because that would get weird. There’s even some sort of TV drama with a Hollow Man “actor”? Did it get an agent somehow? Can anybody even communicate with these things at all?

Jackie says this has been going on for two months now. She’s sure her Hollow Man is Grandad because the more she wants it to be him, the more it smells like Grandad’s cigarettes. The Doctor suspects a psychic link and quells Jackie’s wishful thinking that these are actual ghosts. Jackie and the Rose protest that at least the ghosts must be human, after all they look human . . . as they stare right at a human-looking alien who is definitely not human. The Doctor suggests that the Hollow Men are like a bootprint: they leave the impression of a boot, but they are not boots.

Back at Torchwood, Yvonne talks to one Rajesh about a giant mysterious Sphere they’ve got. They can see the thing is there, but none of their instruments detect it. It gives Rajesh the creeps. Other than that, he’s bored, and so are a couple of office types upstairs who start flirt-texting each other. They “sneak” away and enter a tarped-off section. The man slips behind the tarps, and when he doesn’t respond, the woman (Addy) goes after him, her nervousness escalating with the music as she slips past one layer of plastic after another. Finally she sees a figure through the last tarp, which she twitches aside to see a Cyberman! The man and woman both come back to their desks acting reasonably normal, but we know better. Their earpods (Torchwood has earpods now) are blinking like mad.

Rose insists that society has gone too far in electing a ghost as MP and wants to know what the Doctor will do about it. So he leads her in a Ghostbusters lyric that is too short to get them sued by Ray Parker Jr. and they set up some busting equipment.

Alone in the TARDIS with her daughter, Jackie says Rose looks like the Doctor now and she isn’t sure she likes it. Rose protests that her current life is so much better than retail. But Jackie is worried for Rose, that after Jackie is dead Rose will never return home to recharge her humanity and remember who she is, that Rose will just keep running around with the Doctor and changing until she has nothing in common with the woman Jackie knows as her daughter. Maybe she won’t even be human anymore. Jackie has clearly had this on her mind for awhile, and it’s actually relatable.

The world is scary and full of things and people that might lead one’s child astray. As much as my sons are good boys now, there’s always that fear of what choices they might make in the future without my guidance. Always the knowledge that there are evil influences out there that might even seem friendly, but will steer them astray. But at least I have some idea of what to warn them against, based on my experience living on planet Earth. Jackie foresees a whole universe of influences and dangers for her daughter that she can’t even fathom. And supposing an aged Rose time-traveled back to see her mother one last time, would Jackie know her? Would she see a complete alien staring out of her daughter’s eyes? Could they even hold a basic conversation?

The Doctor’s equipment captures a Hollow Man and, not for the last time in this two-parter, he puts on a pair of red-blue 3D glasses to look at it better. Torchwood notices his meddling and shuts down the ghosts at their end. They tap into the local CCTV network and recognize the TARDIS. Meanwhile the Doctor has located the ghost source and launches to meet them. But Rose calls his attention to Jackie still in the TARDIS, her body language that of an outsider, tentatively trusting him to take her somewhere that isn’t not Earth. Meanwhile Yvonne gets excited that the Doctor is coming to see them. Hmm. Not the usual reaction.

Torchwood greets the TARDIS with a lot of guns to point at the Doctor. Yvonne comes in and, melodrama achieved, lowers guns and leads everyone in several rounds of applause for the Doctor. She jumps to the expectation that the Doctor has a she-companion and, with guns now lowered, the Doctor is willing to bring Rose out. He pulls Jackie out by mistake and, pretending she's Rose, patters about her not being the best companion he’s ever had while Rose stink-eyes through the closed TARDIS door. The Doctor and Jackie leave with their Torchwood attendants while Rose tries to find a way to be useful inside the TARDIS.

The Doctor is led to a Torchwood hangar/storeroom where they keep the good stuff from various alien visits to Earth that all ended in one-sided violence. Yvonne cheerfully claims several kills of aggression against alien spacecraft Torchwood felt threatened by, with the Doctor giving her looks of quiet horror. “If it’s alien, it’s ours” is, uh, let’s say it’s a pretty guileless motto. Maybe the guy living below Utah in the last season would like it with a slightly different possessive pronoun.

“Ah, and that hyper-slinky’s a personal favorite. We salvaged it off of a Znoobian preschool ship that was on a field trip to Saturn. It was nowhere near British airspace, true, but it was definitely looking at Earth funny and we got to try out our megarange tractor beam, so all’s well that ends well right?”​

Yvonne says she’s working for the glory of a future British Empire. She keeps up with modern times by being a people person, but not by using metric. And she does it all with a self-satisfied smile and only half a shirt. I guess Torchwood has been kept pretty insular through the decades.

Jackie protests at seeing the TARDIS being hauled away on a pickup. She must have forgotten Torchwood’s motto already.

Yvonne cheerfully tells the Doctor that he’s the enemy of Torchwood. In fact, he was specifically mentioned in their 1879 charter that charged them to fight aliens and (her words) keep Britain great. Am I a prisoner? the Doctor asks. Of course! Yvonne answers. But we’ll treat you well and keep you busy. Your first job is to explain this giant mysterious Sphere.

The Doctor pronounces the Sphere to be a Void ship, impossibly designed to travel in the Void (also known as the Howling or Hell) between universes. Yvonne wants to get inside, the Doctor just wants it out of his universe. Yvonne believes that the Hollow Men are a side-effect of the Sphere. It came to Earth via a hole in spacetime that Torchwood had already built a 600-foot skyscraper to look at.

The Doctor looks at the hole and scolds Yvonne for all the poking Torchwood has done since finding it. Yvonne says it will make Britain energy-independent. The Doctor warns her to stop, but Yvonne brushes it off as typical Doctor behavior. You’re always trying to boss humans around. Well, we know our rights. So the Doctor sonics a hole in her safety glass office window to illustrate that the ghosts will keep coming through the worsening cracks until everything shatters. Yvonne says they’ll just be more careful. (She also says she was warned that the Doctor likes to make a mess.) She has all the antagonistic single-minded stubbornness I expected of the lady assistant in “Dalek” . . . but on the other hand, she is a people person. Finding that an intense Tennant stare can’t get through to her, the Doctor switches gears and flippantly lets her do as she wishes, asking for a cup of tea to watch the show with. Yvonne is unnerved enough to stop the next ghost shift. Jackie allows herself to be ever so slightly impressed.

Meanwhile it turns out that only Addy got cybered, because she lures her boyfriend away to meet her fun new tarp friend. He screams as someone takes a sander to him offscreen. Now they’re back at their desks and their co-worker is a little uncomfortable being left alone with the two of them.

Also meanwhile, Rose grabs the psychic paper and a lab coat and starts snooping around Torchwood. She uses the paper to open a passkey-locked door and finds the Sphere. She tries the paper on Rajesh, but Torchwoodians are all trained against psychic influence. Rajesh puts her under citizen’s arrest and tells his buddy to inspect the lock. The buddy, who looks awfully familiar, gives Rose a shh and a thumbs-up before leaving. If poor Mickey got cybered and led the last Cyberman back here I shall be very displeased.

Anyway, the Doctor denies real!Rose, but Yvonne calls his bluff and the Doctor admits that’s the real Rose. He asks that Jackie be left out of his biography for his dignity’s sake and Yvonne laughs.

At this point the ghost shift starts up again, with the lovebirds tapping away at their keyboards with their co-worker, whom they presumably jumped when the camera’s back was turned. The Doctor catches on that Addy is the proximate cause, and finds she’s overriding the system via computer. Which is rude. That Big Lever wasn’t just for show, it was a lot of fun it raised employee morale considerably for everyone to take turns on it. This is a people-oriented workplace! Anyway the Doctor cottons on to the cyberfied earpieces they’re wearing and apologizes to the victims before sonicing them to death. Jackie is aghast. Yvonne pulls an earpiece off and is disgusted by the mass of fiber optics that wasn’t in her employees’ ear canals last time she checked.

While the Doctor chases down the override transmission source (Yvonne grabbing a couple of redshirts along the way), Rajesh is freaking out over the Sphere. Naturally it’s chosen this time to decide it exists. And now the room is sealed shut. Mickey tries to calm Rose down but won’t say the C-word because that’s the Doctor’s big reveal to make.

The Doctor and Yvonne are quickly surrounded by Cybermen who tear through the obscuring tarps like metal hands tearing through tarps that are plastic. The Cybermen snap into formation and the redshirts obligingly demonstrate that Bullets Won’t Stop Them.

Meanwhile the Doctor has now said the C-word, so Mickey can give us his full exposition: The Cybermen escaped to this universe and his group followed. Mickey is so self-assured now that when Rose insists the Doctor said Void travel was impossible, he can say “it’s not the first time he’s been wrong” without a trace of smugness. Rose says good to see you and Mickey responds in kind, but immediately looks back to the Sphere. No lingering glances here.

The Cybermen take the Doctor, Jackie, and Yvonne up to the Big Lever, shoot all the non-speaking roles, and crank that baby up to 100%. Ghost sightings shoot up (into the millions — are you sure you were winning the war, Mickey?), they start turning into all-too-solid Cybermen and rounding up civilians, and down in the Sphere room, Mickey retrieves the giant gun he cunningly stashed in near-plain sight to deal with whatever comes out of the Sphere. But to everyone’s surprise, several Daleks come out and announce their intention to, well, you know. Full cliffhanger achieved!

I’ve been wrong about someone being written out of the show before and I’m wrong again. Whether Mickey will show up after this season remains to be seen.

The Doctor is very Tennanty this episode, with horrified stares and other Tennant facial expressions, geekiness, slightly off-kilter weirdness, and a level keel and lack of high-handed preaching despite his obvious intensity. He gets in some good lines against Jackie and she gets some good retorts back.

Jackie’s Torchwood interactions are otherwise largely passive. This is not her world, she doesn’t want it, she makes no pretensions about belonging. But I think she goes along with everything for Rose’s sake, to understand the world Rose lives in now. Her most insightful comment on all the alienness is that an antigrav would be useful on a shopping spree.

Rating: 3 emerging Daleks

Favorite dialogue: Jackie: You’re always doing this. Reducing it to science. Why can’t it be real? But just think of it though. All the people we’ve lost. Our families coming back home. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?
The Doctor: I think it’s horrific.

Allons-y!: yes
Allons-y, Alonso!: no

02x13: Doomsday

After a brief recap, Rose makes herself too interesting for the Daleks to kill by namedropping their race and the Time War. The Daleks accept her argument for the moment and turn their attention to checking on their “Genesis Ark” (more human religious terminology from the self-worshipping Daleks). Gosh I wonder what’s in there!

Jackie, who throughout this two-parter is focused on Rose, wants to know what’s happening to her daughter. The Doctor says he doesn’t know, but promises to get them both out alive.

A Cyberman broadcasts to all the world, saying they’ve got the whole planet wrapped up and will make everything better by cybering everyone into identical cyberhood. A human soldier demonstrates that maybe Bullets Won’t Stop Them, but a good explosive will. That’s clearly too small a win to bring hope to the planet, as we see swarms of Cybermen all over. The Doctor gets angry when the lead Cyberman expresses surprise at finding resistance to their conquest. I’m not sure the last time we saw the Doctor get angry like this?

Meanwhile a Dalek quite ingenuously asks Rose’s group which one of them is most disposable. Rajesh volunteers his services and gets his knowledge sucked out of his brain, frying his head. From this, the Daleks find out about the Cybermen at the same time that the Cybermen notice something weird about the sphere and come to investigate. One Dalek goes to meet two Cybermen, and both sides obligingly project the scene for everyone to see. And so the titanic struggle we were all expecting grinds to a halt as a couple of genocidal races refuse to do anything until the other one tells them its name first.

While the scariest races in the universe each wait for the other to blink, the Doctor borrows Jackie’s cell and calls Rose. He overhears a reference to the Ark. Meanwhile a Cyberman offers to ally with the Daleks, which is rejected out of hand.

Join us, and together we will rule the universe as Cyberman and pepper shaker!​

The Cybermen attack first, but the Dalek shield absorbs their shots and the Dalek takes them both out. In response, the lead Cyberman hacks into the Daleks’ feed and they trash-talk each other. The five million Cybermen see this conflict as war, but the four Daleks, true to form, are just exterminating pests. But the Daleks notice the Doctor in the background, know he’s an enemy (from Rajesh’s brain? Then they should know his name), and expect Rose knows who he is. Rose defiantly tells them and they all back away from her.

The Cybermen decide they’d better start upgrading some people into cannon fodder. Yvonne loses her cool and Jackie screams at the Doctor. The Doctor offers Dalek knowledge to the Cybermen in exchange for Jackie, to no avail. Yvonne tries to do the Victorian stiff upper lip, face death with dignity old chap thing, but dies screaming.

The lead Cyberman taunts the Doctor with being destroyed by emotions. Then Jake and friends beam in from the other universe and start killing Cybermen. Jackie slips away during the distraction. The Doctor protests that this inter-universe travel is impossible but Jake shows him one of the shiny big yellow buttons they used to do it. Jake then takes him back to the other universe before the Doctor can protest. Jake says they found out what their Torchwood was doing and “the People’s Republic” took it over. Whether their first order of business was to tell their Yvonne to put on a T-shirt is left unsaid. Their Pete Tyler comes in, all slick and in control, and tells the Doctor he isn’t going anywhere. He explains that they bottled the Cybermen up in their cyberfactories, but the Cybermen infiltrated Torchwood and crossed universes while everyone argued about what to do with them.

Pete says his world is in a Golden Age now, with a President Harriet Jones in charge. But global warming is off the rails. The Doctor says the heat is because all the impossible cross-universe travel that people insist on doing pokes holes all over the place. Can you seal it? Pete asks. That would leave 5 million Cybermen on “my Earth” the Doctor responds. Not my problem, Pete says, untempted by the offer of a living Jackie or a Rose. He’s cold and in control like Yvonne was. But he believes in the Doctor more than Yvonne was willing to, and the Doctor says maybe that’s all he needs and grins.

Mickey shows Rose his yellow button, but says it can only take one person and he’s not leaving her surrounded by Daleks. Rose calls him the bravest man she’s ever met, then unblushingly corrects it to “bravest human” when Mickey reminds her of the Doctor. Rose says that back in “Dalek” when she revived the Dalek with her touch, it absorbed (harmless) radiation that she’d accumulated by travelling in the time vortex. She thinks these Daleks might need the two of them to revive what’s in the Ark. An eavesdropping Dalek informs them that the Ark wasn’t made by Daleks but by Time Lords, and then all the Daleks do a little promenade around a Dalek-shaped Ark thing.

The Doctor and Pete teleport back. The Doctor immediately checks in with Jackie (her exact location: near a fire extinguisher) before going to talk to a batch of Cybermen about “a very good idea”. Meanwhile the Daleks insist Rose touch the Ark. She sees her end near and decides to go out spitefully, telling them you wanna know what happened to your Emperor? I happened to your Emperor. The Daleks want to kill her for that, but the Doctor arrives. He gives Mickey a fist-bump. The Daleks want to know how he’s still alive. The Doctor says (far more casually than the Ninth would) that he was there for the fall of Arcadia and he’s still got some trauma to work through. These Daleks fled the battle to keep the Dalek race alive. Rather than taunt them for turning coward like the Ninth would, the Doctor wonders what’s so special about these “last four Daleks in existence”. Sure, these are definitely the last ones for sure this time.

Anyway, Rose wants the Doctor to know these Daleks have names and so they introduce themselves. The Doctor gets a kick out of this, as it means he’s in the presence of the legendary Cult of Skaro (Skaro being the Dalek home planet) that was supposed to do all the imagining so other Daleks didn’t have to. The Doctor does taunt these Daleks a little about needing someone else to touch the Ark because they themselves can’t touch anything because of the horrible teapot existence they inflict on themselves. When the Daleks demand the Doctor touch the Ark, he makes a big show of his sonic screwdriver before using it to explode the doors to the room. Mickey’s resistance comes in, firing side by side with Cybermen. Pete helps Rose get out while Mickey gets to do a cool slide to grab his gun. The Daleks are damaged but adapt and turn the tables.

Well, Mickey is still Mickey, so while trying to get to his feet in the chaos he accidentally rested his hand on the Ark. So now that’s going to activate. The Doctor tells him not to worry, that big of a Chekov’s gun was never going to go unfired the Daleks would have blown up the Sun to crack it open anyway so good work.

Jackie gets caught between Cybermen but Pete blows them up. Feel that, Pete? That’s the winds of narrative inevitability chilling you to the bone. It’ll be fun, promise. So the two have a shocked meeting, Jackie complains about getting Pete back of all people, and the Doctor tries to lay many-worlds theory on her but she tells him to shut up. Pete is getting a little emotional and I think Jackie means it when she says she never found anyone to replace him. They bond over Jackie’s latent avarice while Rose knits her fingers nervously. Pete finally cracks enough to need a hug.

The Daleks charge into a cyber-infested hangar to get the Ark past the Cybermen and the resistance fighters. Yes, even Daleks have to suffer through escort missions. The Doctor slips in to grab a couple of those anti-gravs Jackie liked in the last episode. The Daleks get the Ark outside, where it opens to reveal a Dalek in Washington Redskins Commanders colors. The Doctor says it’s a prison ship with millions of Daleks inside. One can only hope Dan Snyder is trapped in there too. The Daleks pour out and soon London is the stage for Cybermen vs. Flying Daleks and Daleks vs. Everybody Else.

Pete says that about wraps it up for this Earth and tells “Jacks” to come back with him so the Doctor can trap all the bad guys in this universe. The Doctor whirls around a little maniacally and says great idea. He insists someone ask him about the 3D glasses he keeps whipping out, then gives them to Rose. She can see Void stuff coming off everyone who’s travelled between universes. The Doctor will open Torchwood’s hole to the Void such that everything Void-contaminated gets sucked in. Rose and the resistance fighters from “Pete’s world” will have to go to the other universe to avoid the Void Vacuum. And the Doctor will be left behind to operate the computer. He’ll hold on to the antigravs to avoid getting sucked in until the hole seals itself.

Rose protests at being stuck in a Doctorless universe. Jackie refuses to leave Rose, Rose refuses to leave the Doctor to be alone after all he’s done for everyone. But the Doctor sneaks a yellow button over Rose’s neck and Pete takes them all back. Rose promptly yellows her way back to the Doctor and Pete starts ripping off everyone’s buttons so they can’t follow her back and cause more damage to the spacetime continuum. Jackie, who only cares about spacetimes if they threaten her daughter, is outraged and heartbroken.

The Doctor sees how serious Rose is and accepts her choice. Cybermen march up the stair well, intending to retreat through the Voidhole. But Cyberyvonne guns them down, her dedication to Queen and Country apparently surviving the cyberification process. Then she cries motor oil or something. She and the other Earth Prime Cybermen are never addressed after this.

The Daleks come to stop whatever the Doctor is up to, but the hole is open and they get banged around the room amusingly before being sucked in. All over the world, Cybermen get pulled straight up into the air before being sucked toward the hole so they don’t just get yanked along the ground, plowing through everyone’s houses, businesses, and spleens as they go. Turns out the Void is very considerate.

But in Torchwood, a Big Lever slides out of position somehow? I don’t think anything hit it? and the hole will close before all the bad guys are expelled. Rose works her way over to it and forces it back in place, but now she’s losing her grip on the universe. Looks like she dies here! She gets sucked in, but Somehow! Pete yellows in at the exact spot and time to catch her neatly, then yellows back out. And then the hole closes like a paper airbag crumpling up and okay, that’s a fun visual, sure. Meanwhile a single Dalek time-shifted (they can do that now) to escape.

Rose is super heartbroken about being stuck over there. Pete says the yellow buttons have stopped working. And the Doctor is a little sad himself to have seen his connection with Rose vanish. They both lean their heads against their respective wall-where-a-hole-used-to-be while sad clinky music plays, and then the Doctor walks away first.

One night Rose dreams about the Doctor calling to her. So she tells her parents and Mickey, and they follow the directions in the dream, while the clinky heartbeat music picks back up and the landscapes change to indicate that this is a grand epic journey in a very rich man’s old beat-up Jeep. (Pete is still Pete underneath it all.) They reach a spot on a beach and the Doctor’s image appears.

He’s found one last pinhole between universes and blown up a star to enable this conversation. Rose says this pinhole came out in Bad Wolf Bay in Norway. (The showrunners evidently invented this location with the purpose of angering Norwegian fans on the Doctor Who wiki.)

They smile, they cry, Jackie’s pregnant and Rose is with Pete’s Torchwood now. The Doctor tells her she’s dead in her home universe, but here she has a life to live, and although it may seem humdrum to her, it’s a kind of life he’ll never be able to experience. Rose is distraught at the idea of him going back to his old lonely ways, and finally tells him she loves him. The Doctor considers his options and finally admits that he — is gone as the pinhole closes. Music swells, the Doctor is left standing alone again in his TARDIS with tears on his face, and Jackie rushes to console Rose as Pete and Mickey stand at a distance. And then the music stops as the Doctor notices a strange woman in a wedding dress standing a few feet away, in his personal TARDIS, without his personal invitation. She turns around and starts yelling at him in confusion, while all he can say is “What?” And that’s it for Season 2.

--

Another season, another huge finale. This one doesn’t strain to tie every single episode together, but it works as a direct sequel to the Cybermen two-parter and isn’t afraid to call back to the previous season. It’s big, it’s well-paced, the special effects are good, the action is good, the featured characters all get their time to shine, and everyone should feel like they got their money’s worth even with the sad ending.

Many moons ago, I came across a fan art/meme that I incomprehensibly failed to save the link for. It featured a long, snaking line of the Doctor’s female companions, in order of appearance, each calling out “Doctor!” in her own way, until at the end is found Rose, teary-eyed, wailing “I thought I was the only one!” The Doctor can only look sheepish.

Fans at the time this episode aired were no doubt split into similar camps. There were the old fans who knew some (or a lot) of the show’s history, and the new fans, for many of whom the Ninth was the first Doctor and Rose was the only Companion. The farewell for Rose, which lasts for seven minutes and involves the Doctor blowing up a star just to talk to her for a couple minutes, is largely for the latter group. But it’s also in line with how the relaunch is being run regardless, with companions being more rounded characters with their own arcs and less sidekicks who mainly ask plot questions, then run off and get attacked or captured. Rose gets a big emotional spotlight for her send-off where I guess pretty much none of the previous companions did, even Sarah Jane, because she really is that special to many fans, not even just the ‘shippers, and because that’s how it’ll be going forward.

There is a quick shot, as the Void is sucking all the baddies out of the universe, of Londoners in the streets looking up and seeing these massive streams of evil pouring into the 600-foot high skyscraper in the middle of town. Once the dust is settled, I think there might be some very pointed questions as to what’s in that building.

Rating: 4 big yellow buttons
Favorite dialogue: Cyberman: Our species are similar, though your design is inelegant.
Dalek: DALEKS HAVE NO CONCEPT OF ELEGANCE.
Cyberman: This is obvious.

More details borrowed for Moffat’s time in charge?: Yep
What’s the name of that fourth Dalek, again?: Dalek KHAAAAAAAAN
Are Daleks really that inelegant?: They have a looking-stick and a shooting-stick and armor and locomotion and a means of vocalization and that’s really all they need, plus they have much less surface area (well, aside from the knobs) and profile than the Cybermen do and the Cybermen can’t even turn their heads all the way around can they? Ever go Dalek-tipping, because it’s nearly impossible I can tell you, but you can knock a Cyberman right over with a little muscle. Anyway on to the season summary we go, wheee

Oh, if only they hadn't been...

https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberwoman_(TV_story)

More than one.

I'm glad they never let the writer of that disaster anywhere near the franchise again.

Is it really as bad as letting the guy who put alien sex gas in the first ep back?

Torchwood S1 was basically just an excuse to let out all the stuff that seemed adult, sexy and edgy in the Wilderness Years New Adventures novels.

If The Dying Days was any indication, Sarah-Jane Smith's reaction to meeting a younger, hotter incarnation of the Doctor would have been to jump him at the end of the episode.

*skims*

> partially cybered woman
> multiple Torchwood locations
> leisure crawler
> barbecue sauce
> early Star Trek self-insert
> invisible lift
> blood and kissing need their own wiki entries
> pizza delivery girls walking right into Torchwood

Wild stuff.

​

David Tennant had the risky task of following Christopher Eccleston’s triumphant arrival and swift departure. The Christmas special got him off on the right foot, with Tennant showing that he could entertain with a forceful, energetic personality (when conscious). Once S2 started, however, that performance was toned down a bit. I haven’t seen much classic Who, but the comparisons with Tom Baker are there for the taking. Both Doctors have a knack of dropping odd, off-beat comments into the conversation (and Tennant will also do odd, off-beat things like stick his fingers in someone’s jam jar or look at alien tech through cheap 3D glasses), they’re both kind of the same energy level, they both will open their eyes wide for that dramatic whites-of-the-eyes gaze. Just a similar vibe.

Eccleston’s Doctor is alien by way of his knowledge and experience, his physical capabilities, and being above human ideas of morality. Tennant is alien in his personality, the little choices he makes that would be social awkwardness or eccentricity in a human but are clearly logical and internally consistent for who he is.

Jackie has undergone some development for Season 2. She’s still fundamentally Jackie, preoccupied with men and gossip and shopping and other such concerns. But building on her decision to help Rose return to the Doctor in S1’s finale, she now treats Rose as an adult living her own independent life. She still worries about Rose’s safety, still can’t fully trust a strange alien to keep her daughter safe in a universe far too strange for her comprehension, but Jackie has accepted that Rose won’t come home to stay and that all she can do is support her daughter when called upon.

Mickey comes to accept that he’s lost Rose and it’s time to move on with his life. So he does, in a different universe. He comes back with more self-confidence but still recognizably the same guy. Rose doesn’t really change her opinion of him, but the Doctor comes to treat him with respect.

One thing the show kept for continuity with Season 1 was the relationship between the Doctor and Rose. They’re now fast friends. The Doctor appreciates Rose’s companionship on perhaps a deeper level than he realizes and treats her as an equal. Rose has matured into a capable, confident young woman. Billie Piper turns in a strong performance of a strong character worthy of setting the baseline for future Companions.

Overall, a very good season with only two poor episodes. One of them, “Fear Her”, was aired at the end of the season just before the finale two-parter, so I suspect the showrunners knew it wasn’t very good and put it off as long as they could. “Love and Monsters” aired just before that, and judging from the mixed reception they were right to put that one off as well. As for “The Idiot’s Lantern”, the only thing really wrong with it was how overbearingly, unrelentingly awful the father was written to be.

Final scores:
4: (1) Doomsday
3.5: (1) The Girl in the Fireplace
3: (9) New Earth, Tooth and Claw, School Reunion, Rise of the Cybermen, The Age of Steel, The Impossible Planet, The Satan Pit, Love and Monsters, Army of Ghosts
2: (2) The Idiot’s Lantern, Fear Her

Average rating: 2.96 out of 4
Number of “watch it again” (3-plus) episodes: 11/13
Number of “never again” (sub-2) episodes: 0/13
Number of episodes set in the British Isles (one version or another of them): 9/13

Least favorite episode: “The Idiot’s Lantern” had some good cheese and creepy tension, but the father’s awfulness was too much for me.
Favorite episode: Memorable and fun, “The Girl in the Fireplace” gets the nod even if I rated “Doomsday” higher.
Worst episode: On one hand, “The Idiot’s Lantern” has higher highs but far lower lows. On the other hand, “Fear Her” kinda jumped the emotional tracks when the Doctor held his first seance with Chloe’s possessor. Before that, it was domestic drama; afterward, it was about the alien. The two halves of the story were tied together by the string of Chloe and the alien both feeling lonely, but it was too frail a connection to be effective. “Idiot’s Lantern”, curiously, also starts with a domestic drama, features televisual communications as a key point, takes place during a huge event, and escalates into a possessive alien taking advantage of that event to regain what it’s lost. Anyway, I think “Fear Her” is the “winner” here.
Best episode: “Doomsday” gets the nod with action and a balance between high personal stakes and high universal stakes. The hype of seeing the Cybermen vs. the Daleks paid off well without sacrificing the more human stories. “The Girl in the Fireplace” is a worthy runner-up. Trying to pick a third place among the other eps just underscores (1) how solid this season is, and (2) “Love and Monsters” maybe doesn’t belong in the same tier as most of the other candidates. I went back and forth about moving L & M down half a point, but it’s fun and fresh enough to stay at 3.
Disappointing episode: I guess “Idiot’s Lantern”, which I went into with null expectations and was mostly enjoying until the father started taking things too far. (No blame to the actor, who is just playing the part he’s given.) I already knew “Fear Her” wasn’t well-liked.
Surprise episode: I knew “Love and Monsters” had a dodgy reputation, but it was pretty enjoyable.

Things Doctor Who has made scary forever:

• Mannequins
• Children wearing gas masks
• Wireless earpieces
• Tarped-off sections of buildings

The Cybermen and Daleks trashtalking each other was hilarious

​

The Runaway Bride

We once again begin with a zoom from space down into London. Specifically into a church where Donna Noble is about to walk up the aisle. A black groom, Lance, waits at the altar. I have to question whether this show is single-handedly making “white lead with a black boyfriend” into a cliche, between Donna, Rose, and Clara. Boyfriend is really just a special case of sidekick.

It’s a lovely wedding until the bride disappears screaming in a cloud of golden light (the show’s preferred manifestation of technobabble). The light arcs up through the roof and into the TARDIS. And so we reach the end of last episode.

The Doctor gives Donna half-answers to her questions and, rather than taking the cue to say “Golly, what’s a tardiss? Perhaps you’d like to explain the conceit of this show to me?” she just keeps demanding a proper response. Making the viewers go from Rose to this person trying to steamroll our favorite Time Lord is pretty funny.

So yes, Donna is unsettled, but she chooses being a terror over feeling terror and decides that the Doctor’s best friend Nerys put him up to this for revenge and of course the Doctor has no frame of reference for any of this. He finally notices the wedding dress and asks what’s up with that, and Donna says “I’m going ten-pin bowling. Why do you think, dumbo?” It’s totally understandable that people didn’t like Donna back in the day.

Donna promises to have the Doctor arrested and sued, then storms to the obvious exit and finds herself staring a nebula in the face. Fun factoid, Time Lords use nebulae for Rorschach tests. Her shock gives the Doctor the chance to explain that Dorothy isn’t in Kansas anymore. Donna copes by complaining that the heat is getting out.

The Doctor gets in Donna’s face with an optometrist thingy and some impressive technobabble until Donna finally slaps him and yells to put her back in the church. Fine, I don’t want you around, says the Doctor. This statement is an essential part of a proper romantic comedy, following a meet-cute and the woman establishing she can stand up to the man. Hmmm. Donna gives him the church’s full galactic address. She isn’t Jackie levels of scientific ignorance, she’s just focused on her wedding.

Donna spots one of Rose’s discarded vests (?) and declares that the Doctor is going around kidnapping women. The Doctor gets stone-faced as Donna keeps angrily pushing the conversation where he doesn’t want it to go. The clothing was his friend’s . . . she’s not here . . . he lost her. Donna demands he lose her next. But then she realizes she poked the bear and looks frightened. The Doctor is now fed up and determined to get rid of her, which in any romcom means they’re soulmates. Doctor/Rose ‘shippers go to DEFCON 2.

Well, the TARDIS lands in the wrong part of London. Something’s wrong. The Doctor rushes back in and starts talking to the central column. Is ‘um’s tummy hurting? Meanwhile Donna is discovering that this spaceship is smaller on the outside. It’s too much for her and she leaves. The Doctor tells her to call ahead on her “mobile”, at which she lays into him for expecting a wedding dress to have pockets. So he tries to help her hail a taxi and I’m going to call a timeout here.

The cabs have lights to show whether they’re available for passengers. The lights look like the Doctor Who catseye logo. Is that where the showrunners got the idea for that ugly thing? Just took a taxi light and slapped some Abrams glare on top? Do they think the TARDIS is a glorified hack for hire? Ugh.

Okay, time in, back to the episode. Cabbies drive by, accusing Donna of being drunk or in drag. The Doctor looks her over in response, expresses no opinion, but whistles a cab over with Matt Smith’s power to make someone do what he wants exactly once. They get in but realize they have no money at all.

But let’s review this sequence. Donna expected a Martian to have Earth money, but got mad that he expected her to have pockets. She cussed the cabbie out for kicking them to the curb, then complained about his lack of Christmas spirit (and she hates Christmas anyway). She then insulted an alien for not knowing it’s Earth Christmas Eve. But that means she dragged her family and in-laws to church to see her get married Christmas Eve rather than let them celebrate at home.

Donna really is a piece of work. Catherine Tate plays her as a human being and not a flat stereotype, and the rest of the creative choices also allow her to be amusing rather than totally comical or horrifying (except to D/R fans). The Tenth Doctor mostly takes her in stride, only letting his true feelings slip out a few times. We all know the Ninth would not be so kind.

Anyway, the Doctor sonics a public phone for Donna’s use. But the church is chaos, with everyone’s phone dying except the vicar’s, and he’s calling the police to get the current wedding party out of there. (So this isn’t Donna’s home church, so she picked an elaborate one to go with her pricy dress before she left on a Moroccan honeymoon . . . with her family and groom probably paying for all of it.) Donna then realizes she doesn’t even know where in London she is. A total disaster.

The Doctor sonics an ATM and turns to find masked Santas playing brass in his direction. Uh-oh. Meanwhile Donna borrows someone’s money and gets into a cab driven by another masked Santa, yelling abuse at the Doctor as she leaves.

Doctor Christmas V: The Claus Strike Back
“Santa came here to play tuba and kick butt, and he just forgot the rest of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’!”
“We’re gonna shove a lump of coal right up your Time Vortex!”​

The Doctor makes the ATM spit out lots of money, which materializes a large crowd of excited extras, who block the Clausodes. He runs back to the TARDIS and tracks Donna down as she argues with her driver. She pulls its hood off to reveal a Las Vegas Knights mask underneath, truly the epitome of evil. Then the TARDIS arrives and bounces off the traffic behind her, and Donna can only sit there in shock and realize her Martian kidnapper is the hero of this romance. Rose truthers begin burning their Donna effigies as they discuss storming BBC headquarters.

The Doctor steers the TARDIS alongside the cab, but Donna refuses to jump in. Finally the Doctor just tells Donna to trust him. Did you tell the last one to trust you too? Donna yells. Yes, and she is still alive, the Doctor says, impervious to angst. So Donna jumps and lands on the Doctor in the required *nudge-nudge wink-wink* position.

Unfortunately this cooked the TARDIS and the Doctor has to land on a rooftop for damage control. Donna looks out over the city and accepts defeat. She wishes the TARDIS were a time machine and the Doctor agrees that would be helpful if he hadn’t already lived through “Father’s Day”. Then he drapes his suit over Donna’s shoulders to protect her from the wind. Oh my. And then HE PUTS A GOLD RING ON HER FINGER. Oh MY. He says it’s to keep the Santanese from tracking her, but we know where all this is going, don’t we? All the poor ‘shippers who were teased along for the past two seasons are dying inside at the idea that the Doctor might have come around on this awful Donna person in less than 20 minutes.

The Doctor explains to Donna that he met the robot Santas last Christmas. Donna apparently spent the day too hungover to notice the whole Sycorax invasion thing. We’ll find out she was also too busy scuba-diving to notice the Cyberman conquest in the last episode. Donna softens and tries to chat about the Doctor’s lost friend, but he wants to focus on solving her part of the plot.

We flash back to Donna meeting her groom, Lance, at her new job a mere six months ago. Bit quick, the Doctor says. Well, he insisted, Donna says. Smash cuts to Donna asking Lance to marry her, chasing him down stairways, begging him on public streets.

Donna expects all her guests will be heartbroken to miss out on her reception. Smash cut to everyone partying it up. Donna walks in looking like she sees someone spraying skunk all over the place. Donna’s mum gently chides her for pulling a stunt, and everyone crowds around rhubarbing questions at Donna until she goes to tears for sympathy. It works, and she winks at the Doctor.

While Donna dances happily with Lance, the Doctor borrows a flip phone to do Internet research. I had a tiny clamshell for many years and I never dreamed of web surfing on it. But he sonics it to skip to the big plot point: Donna’s security systems employer is owned by Torchwood.

The Doctor gets the wedding photographer to replay Donna’s golden exit. The Doctor calls her glow Huon particles. But (1) Huon energy only existed billions of years ago and (2) the ring he gave Donna won’t hide its presence. Sure enough, the reception is now surrounded by Fathers Christmas. One raises a remote control at a huge Christmas tree in the party. Red ornaments float into the air and start exploding. An actor does blatantly pretend to get blasted into the wedding cake, but the scene is brief and poorly lighted, so 5/10. We can do better.

“It’s fun to stay at the S-C-Y-M-C-A!”
“We six droids of outer space are
Wearing masks, we trap you in cars”​

The Doctor pipes the sonic screwdriver’s shrill whirr through the amplifiers. The robots fall apart. He finds their remote control is also being used by someone else to control them. Donna wants him to start doctoring people, but the Doctor heads outside to follow the signal. He finds that it’s coming from up in the sky. Out in space, something with spider legs and a red face resting in a snowflake ship watches. Flakespider makes evil cheesy noises and declares evil cheesy intent, saying Donna is its key.

Investigating Donna and Lance’s workplace leads to an elevator. There, the Doctor finds two basement buttons where there should only be one. If you’re worse at hiding a secret basement than Team Rocket, you might actually be dumb enough to make “buffalo” your password for everything. He wants to go down alone, but Donna insists on sticking close to her personal life saver, then insists Lance come too, then shuts them both up commiserating about her bossiness.

There’s not much down in the secret basement except walls, lights, and Segways, one of which the Doctor grimly steers down the hall, with the couple-to-be flanking him. But Donna cracks up at the absurdity and he laughs too. They reach a Torchwood door and the Doctor scales the ladder behind it, coming out by a Thames flood barrier. Another Torchwood door reveals fun bubbling tubes being used to manufacture liquid Huon. The Doctor realizes that the particles were put in Donna so her body would go bonkers over the wedding and catalyze them. What actually happened was they pulled her to the only other remaining Huon particles, found in the Heart of the TARDIS. Donna slaps him again for enjoying himself too much. He deserves this one too.

Donna wants to know if she’s safe with these Huons inside her, and the Doctor says yes. She wants to know why everyone stopped using Huons, and the Doctor admits they’re deadly. A very Doctor moment.

It’s time for the villain to make itself known, and a wall rises as Flakespider monologues about waiting and secret hearts and here’s some more robots with guns. Lance, who has been mostly a non-entity, breaks and runs away to climb a ladder.

The Doctor notices a big hole in the ground that Flakespider says goes all the way to the center of the Earth. Donna, trying to be helpful, says maybe Torchwood wanted to find dinosaurs down there, like in that one movie. Okay, she’s not that scientific. The Doctor coaxes Flakespider into showing itself and it beams down. It is in fact a spider-person. Thanks so much. Oh wow, they even put extra eyes in its Triceratops crest and one of them just blinked. It’s the empress of the Racnoss (spot-on name), the last of a planet-devouring race that existed eons ago.

At this point Lance sneaks up behind the empress with an axe in hand. So Donna demands the empress focus on her. He gets within striking distance, then the empress looks over at him and they both laugh. They’ve been in Huon cahoots all along!

He complains about listening to Donna’s shallow idiocy for months, just so he can put Huons in her coffee all the while. Donna quietly tries to take it in. “But I loved you,” she says. “That’s what made it easy,” Lance replies. He serves the empress for the chance to see the universe. It’s a little late to build on the doubling of the last of the Time Lords with the last of the Racnoss but I guess we’re doing it. Lance is an evil Donna while we’re at it.

The Doctor tries to steer discussion toward the hole in the ground, but Lance is as single-minded as Donna. Donna yells and shields the Doctor as the robots take aim. But the Doctor gives a vial of Huons a twist to bring the TARDIS to Donna, and it materializes around them just in time. The disappointed empress decides to turn Lance into her new key. A robot starts literally dumping a jug of water over Lance’s face.

The Doctor pilots the TARDIS back in time to the coalescence of the Earth’s core as Donna turns away to cry over her life. The Doctor tries to distract her with the view out the door. Donna feels tiny, but the Doctor talks about how humanity observes chaos and brings order to it. A Racnoss ship comes into view and starts pulling bits of future Earth towards it. So there’s a ship full of ravenous alien spiders at the Earth’s core! I preferred the dinosaurs.

The empress uses Huon-ed Lance to pull the TARDIS back toward her. But the Doctor pulls out an extrapolator and uses it to bump the TARDIS to a slightly different destination in the basement. He finds another Torchwood door and uses a stethoscope to listen to it while he explains to Donna that the empress will use her to open the dormant ship full of dormant Racnoss. He then turns around at the uncharacteristic silence to find Donna is captured and gone. And on the other side of the door is an armed robot. That stethoscope didn’t help at all.

Donna and Lance are now both stuck in the webbing in the rafters. The empress sends their Huons down to the core, then strikes a blow for feminism by dropping Lance in the hole first. He plummets to the bottom, where he will splatter to microns and be of no use to feed any Racnoss. Outside, the flakeship arrives in the sky like a shiny Star of Bethlehem. Starstruck Londoners decide to interpret it as such rather than, oh, I don’t know, more Sycorax or Cybermen. The flake starts sending out ELECTRICAL SUPERBOLTS to fry people, but this is a Christmas episode so nobody much gets killed.

The empress spots the Doctor climbing toward her in a robot disguise. He de-costumes and sonics the web so Donna will swing over to him. But her webstring is too long and she swings underneath his platform, crashing with Looney Tunes sound effects.

The Doctor offers to find the Racnoss a planet to live on, but the empress orders the robots to execute him. But the Doctor has something that Donna doesn’t have: pockets. The remote control is in one of them. Having established last Christmas that he doesn’t do second chances, the Doctor then uses the red ornament bombs to burst walls to let the Thames in. The waters pour down the core hole and presumably drown the other Racnoss while the empress wails. Donna tells the Doctor to stop, but he can only watch stoically.

The empress beams back to her flakeship. Tanks roll up and start shelling it, and with all its Huon used up, bullets can stop it. It explodes and rains tatters down like confetti.

Dropped off at home, Donna tells the Doctor not to feel bad about Lance, he deserved what he got . . . okay maybe he didn’t. To make her feel better about having to face Christmas, the Doctor fires a bolt of TARDIS energy into the air that triggers a snowfall, then leans against the TARDIS with that old Ninth “I’m hot stuff” swagger.

Donna now intends to travel the world and experience life. The Doctor hesitantly offers her a ride and she turns it down. His power, ruthlessness, and lifestyle all scare her. She does try to coax him into staying for dinner. When he starts to move the TARDIS under pretense of a better parking spot, though, she yells loud enough for him to hear her through the closed door. She wants to know if they’ll meet again, and he can say that would be good luck for him. She also tells him he needs someone around to stop him. He accepts that opinion and tells her to live magnificently. And he can finally tell her that his friend’s name was Rose.

Honestly, about the time the Doctor was in line for the ATM, I became sure that Donna was doing something subconsciously to make everything go wrong because she didn’t want to go through with the wedding.

Donna evidently has a deep need for marriage, given her behavior with Lance. This is going to make the “Silence in the Library” two-parter all the more heart-breaking. She manipulates and yells her way through life, but I think she’s more of a cunning, bossy child and less of an exploitative adult. She’s not ruthless like Lance, she does have some empathy, she just spends her life focused on knowing what she wants and getting it. And she’s not an idiot, but she probably doesn’t pay attention to anything that doesn’t seem to concern her.

Rating: 3 snowflakes in orbit

Favorite dialogue: Doctor: Weird. I mean, you’re not special, you’re not powerful, you’re not connected, you’re not clever, you’re not powerful, you’re not important.
Donna: This friend of yours, just before she left, did she punch you in the face?

Unfavorite favorite dialogue: Doctor: Is there anything that might have caused this? Anything you might’ve done? Any sort of alien contacts? ‘Cause I can’t let you go wandering off. What if you’re dangerous? I mean, have you, have you seen lights in the sky, or did you touch something like something, something different? Something strange or, something made out of a piece of metal or . . . who’re you getting married to? Sure he’s human? He’s not a bit overweight with a zip around his forehead, is he?
[Donna goes wandering off.]
Doctor: Donnaaaa!

Donnas are from St. Mary’s but Doctors are from: Mars six times over

Big wedding cakes, fruit carts, and carried panes of glass: they all must die

Christmas rankings:
1. The Christmas Invasion
2. The Runaway Bride

​

03x01: Smith and Jones

Is this the first episode without a teaser? After the title we open with Martha Jones walking down the street while she cheerfully wrangles family drama over her mobile phone. Her dad wants to bring his girlfriend to Martha's brother's 21st birthday party, and everyone expects Martha to deal with it. She closes the last connection in disgust at the sound of said girlfriend's mooching, only to have a man step in front of her. He makes a point of taking off his tie and showing it to her, then says "See?" and heads off.

Well, that happened, and Martha continues to her workplace, Generic British Name Hospital, where the skies are stormy and there's a sad oo-ey in the background. A futuristic motorbike rider bumps into her as she's about to enter.

Next we meet an old lady patient and honestly, it feels wrong in 2023 to see physicians and students stand around her with nary a facemask in sight. The students, Martha included, propose various tests, but the attending physician/mentor determines that the lady merely has a sodium-deficient diet. He chides his students grandiosely as they all walk past a pair of future bikers.

Their next patient is a Mr. John Smith. Martha recognizes him as the weirdo tie guy from earlier, but Smith doesn't know what she's talking about. Couldn't have been his brother, he doesn't have one anymore. Martha finds his heartbeat sounds strange and he winks at her. Her mentor gets zapped by the patient's chart. Apparently that's happening to everyone today. Smith reminisces about getting himself electrocuted with good old Ben Franklin. The physician leads everyone out of attack range of the crazy person, but Martha is charmed by his eccentricity.

Later Martha is plotting with her sister against the girlfriend over mobile when they realize the weather is odd: Martha is in a storm while her sister nearby is sunny. In fact, there's a swirling thundercloud specifically over Martha's hospital. And the rain is falling upwards.

A lightning bolt hits nearby and the camera rocks harder than any Enterprise bridge ever did. When Martha and a co-worker recover, it's dark as night outside, largely because the hospital is now located on the Moon. (Someone must have put the Moon back in place after the events of "School Reunion".) Throughout the hospital, shock turns to terror and panic. Back on Earth, Martha's sister tries to raise her on mobile as we see the TARDIS in the background.

Martha keeps her head as everyone around her screams and rushes about. The old lady patient asks her a question with curiously unruffled body language, but Martha is too busy looking through different windows to help her. Her co-worker stops her from opening a window (for Science! I guess), but Martha reasons if the air were going to escape it would have done so by now. John Smith sweeps a curtain aside and agrees with Martha. He asks if there's a balcony on this floor and invites her outside to take a look. He matter-of-factly shuns her co-worker, who can now sob in peace.

Outside, Martha tries to process everything: the mysterious presence of air, the Earth hanging over the lunar landscape, and the likelihood that she'll miss that birthday party. The Doctor asks if she needs to go back indoors, but she's happily caught up in the moment.

Martha blames this event on "extraterrestrial", which is farther than anyone besides Donna in that last episode ever got. Martha lost a cousin during the Cybermen two-parter. Smith quietly says he was there too. So Martha turns on her bedside manner and promises her patient that they'll get out alive. Smith feels this might be a good time to mention his name isn't actually Smith. He's "the doctor", just "the doctor". Doctor-to-be Martha tells this guy that he'll have to earn that title, then worries how long the oxygen will last.

At this point three spaceships rumble by overhead and land out on the lunar plain. Fine CGI. The occupants march out in long lines. Martha excitedly declares them proper aliens. The Doctor calls them Judoon. This sequence is a little slow and deliberate as we experience the tension with the hospital occupants. That includes the cranky old physician, Mr. Stoker, who is watching the Judoon with binoculars, only to be interrupted by the old lady, Ms. Finnegan. He gets lofty with her, but she's unimpressed. She calls in the two futuristic bikers and talks loftily herself, about the future and about Stoker's blood (Bram Stoker?) that she'll need to survive it. She pulls out a plastic straw and advances while the bikers hold him down.

"Allow me to properly introduce myself. I'm the little old lady from Pasadena you may have heard of. These are my understudies."​

The Judoon enter the hospital, sending the inhabitants scattering in terror. The alien leader takes off its helmet to reveal a wrinkly rhinoceros head. It snaps orders, and the other aliens train weapons on the humans. A young doctor, who has been less panicky than most, tries a first contact speech and gets shoved up against a wall for his trouble. The leader uses his speech to prime a universal translator on its chest and starts talking English. It scans the doctor, pronounces him human, and marks an X on his hand. It then loses interest in him, telling its followers to catalog all the "suspects". All the humans cower and wibble as their heads are scanned and hands are marked.

"This isn't an alien mating ritual, this isn't an alien mating ritual, please tell me this isn't an alien mating ritual . . ."​

The Doctor arrives on the scene of chaos to admire the hospital's charming little gift shop. He explains the Judoon are thugs-slash-police for hire, and they brought the hospital to the Moon because they have no jurisdiction over Earth. The fact they're looking for non-humans concerns the Doctor. It dawns on Martha he thinks he's non-human.

The young doctor follows the troops to calm people down. But a man smashes a big urn over a Judoon's head. The leader calls it a crime, enters a guilty plea for the defendant, and enacts judgment with a lava laser gun all by himself.

The Doctor is upstairs, sonicing the hospital's files. Martha doesn't believe he's alien and she sure doesn't believe that's a "sonic screwdriver" either. It doesn't help her unbelief that the Doctor claims a 20th-century suffragist stole his "laser spanner". He hits the computer monitor in frustration -- the Judoon have evidently wiped out the patient records -- and unloads his feelings at Martha. He wasn't looking for any trouble this time, he just noticed plasma coils around her hospital and infiltrated to see what was up. He explains to Martha that if the Judoon find their target before he does, they'll declare the hospital guilty of harboring a fugitive and kill everyone inside. Martha goes to ask Stoker about any recently admitted patients that seemed odd.

She catches "Finnegan" flagrantly sucking Stoker's delectable blood. A biker chases her and the Doctor around the hospital, into an X-ray suite. The Doctor sets up a trap, telling Martha to press "the" button when ready. She has only a few seconds to consult the manual on which button does what while the biker smashes down the door, but chooses wisely when the moment arrives. The Doctor had cranked up the radiation to kill the biker. Martha is concerned about his exposure, but he used to play with "roentgen bricks" as a tot, no sweat. He does go into a little hopping dance as he expels all the radiation he absorbed into a shoe and tosses it. He also gets rid of his other shoe to look symmetrical.

The biker is a Slab (evocative), a generic robot that happens to be made entirely of leather. Martha tries to tell the Doctor what she saw Finnegan doing to Stoker, but the Doctor has a more immediate concern: the X-ray machine burned out his screwdriver. He tosses it aside, shows pleasure at Martha calling him Doctor, and cogitates on why Finnegan would be not-hiding right now. She must be absorbing blood to help her mimic humans. Sure enough, a Judoon scans Finnegan and gives her the X of humanity.

The Doctor mentions that Slabs always work in pairs, which gives Martha an opening to ask if he's got any backup he can call. The Doctor sets this question aside. He steps out the door, right into a Judoon scan, and Martha finally takes their word for his alienness. Fleeing, Martha leads the Doctor to Stoker's office. Finnegan is gone, but Martha closes Stoker's eyes out of respect. The Doctor tries to guess Finnegan's next move. An MRI sign tells him the answer.

But the Judoon are closing in. The Doctor needs a distraction. So he asks Martha to forgive him and gives her a deep kiss that she enjoys. Wow. Really trying to stir up some 'shipping wars, aren't we.

The Doctor walks in on Finnegan and plays the dumb panicky human and quickly gets captured. Meanwhile Martha tries to talk sense to the Judoon, but they find a trace of the Doctor on her and get up in her grill.

The Doctor then plays slightly less dumb in order to get Finnegan to explain what she's doing: supercharging the MRI to fry every nervous system from the Moon to halfway across Earth. Mmmm, no, not buying that one. Your local hospital does not contain a machine that can destroy all sapient life on the planet if the technician twists the dial too far.

The Doctor then alarms her by claiming the Judoon are intensifying their scans. So Finnegan decides it's time to suck his blood. The Judoon in fact find her sucking his blood through her straw. The Doctor flops to the floor and the Judoon scan him as dead. They don't let Martha examine him, but she realizes Finnegan must scan as non-human after drinking the Doctor. So she grabs a scanner and scans Finnegan herself, with a positive result. Finnegan admits she killed some little space princess and then uses her last Slab to delay the Judoon so she can turn on the MRI O'Death. She cackles about mutual annihilation as the Judoon vaporize her.

Martha wants to know what that bit about annihilation meant, so the Judoon find the MRI is now a Death-R-Us. But their job is done, so the Judoon leave, ignoring all pleas for help, as the hospital's O2 content slides to zero. Martha gives the Doctor CPR, remembering to pump both his hearts, and he comes back to life. With Martha exhausted, the oxygen almost gone, and electrical bolts all over the hospital, it's up to the Doctor to pull apart the red wire and turn off the MRI. Then he has to hope loudly that the Judoon will put the hospital back where they found it, which they do.

While Martha reunites with her sister, she notices the Doctor heading toward a police box. When she looks back again, Doctor and box are both gone! Later she listens to probably the young doctor on the radio talk about his unique experience with extraterrestrial life and smiles. Her night later gets "better" as her father's girlfriend storms off in a huff and breaks the party up. The Doctor shows himself, and Martha follows him to the TARDIS.

She turns down the offer of a trip, having several personal messes that need cleaning up stat, but the Doctor proves his time travel with the tie thing from the start of the episode. She then points out his police box appears to be built for only one, so he lets her take a look inside. Once she gets over having a giant room crammed into a wooden box, Martha asks about other crew. The Doctor can now talk about his occasional "guests", and even name Rose as his latest "friend", but he gets his back up when he stalls at explaining why she isn't around now. She's with her family now, happy being with her family, and Martha is not a replacement for her!

He tells Martha she'll get just one trip as thanks for saving his life: "I'd rather be on my own." Martha teases him about travelling across the universe just to kiss her, but he firmly tells her this isn't a date. Well, I'm not interested anyway, Martha says, which . . . honestly, anything she might do here is playing into one romantic cliche or another, she's just doomed. The Doctor twiddles the handbrake, and he and Martha shake hands as the TARDIS grinds and tumbles through the Time Vortex.

Martha is intelligent. She offers several sensible ideas to the Doctor during the episode. (She does also ask why he didn't go back in time to warn her not to go to work. Uh, if he had, he'd be dead and the whole hospital with him?) She has a sense of adventure that overrides fear. She's adaptable and slow to panic (possibly honed by years of family drama). She follows the Doctor around even when she thinks he's just an eccentric human being. She can also run for her life on a moment's notice. So she's an ideal candidate for Companionship. She also strikes me as practical and fond of demanding extraordinary evidence for extraordinary assertions. Or at least looking out lots of windows to choose between extraordinary assertions. We'll see.

Rating: 3 out of 4 blood-sucking shifters

Favorite dialogue: MARTHA: What else have you got, a laser spanner?
DOCTOR: I did, but it was stolen by Emily Pankhurst, cheeky woman. Oh, this computer! The Judoon must have locked it down. Judoon platoon upon the moon.

"It's bigger on the inside": check

3x02 - The Shakespeare Code

​

Second episode of the season, so it’s time for a historical episode with a cheesy teaser. So we visit 1599 London.

A young man sings an ode to his love, Lilith, from the street. She’s turned on enough to invite him in for a goode tyme in really jank Ye Olde Englyshe. Suspiciously, her bedroom is kinda witchy and torture chambery. She kisses him, turns into a crone, and introduces him to two more crones, Mothers Deathfinger and Bloodtide. They tear him apart. I’m guessing he won’t be back for a second date.

One gnarled crone, her teeth specially sharpened to points, rises to tell the camera that at “the hour of woven words” they will again rise and the planet will die. This is the Shakespeare episode, so no points for guessing this riddle. Maybe I should be tallying the “alien lurking on Earth wants to regain former power/freedom” plots. This would be, what, the tenth so far?

In the TARDIS, the Doctor tells Martha that explaining the time travel would kill the magic, and admits he failed his TARDIS driving test. He then presents Martha with the brave new world of Shakespeare London dumping a bucket of human waste on her. Doctor-in-training Martha is unfazed. But she is worried about changing history or being sold as a slave. The Doctor tells her to just act like she owns the place.

Martha is being established as more methodical, more cautious, and more educated than Rose. She’s asking questions to diagnose the situation, if you will, even as she reacts with amazement to the reality of time travel. The Doctor, while being polite and otherwise retaining his Tenth personality, lacks the rapport with her that he came to have with Rose.

He guides Martha along the road toward the Globe Theatre, its monumental blue and white edifice soaring majestic beyond the surrounding candlelight and brown buildings and people. I want to say this warm-and-brown palette also featured in previous episodes such as the Dickens episode, the Madame Pompadour episode, and . . . sigh . . . “World War Three”.

Browns, browns everywhere: Doctor Who or Skyrim?​

Martha has a blast at the play and leads a curtain call for Shakespeare. He’s lively and not dressed in five shades of dirt or the usual Shakespeare wardrobe. He will get a poofy collar at the end of the episode, but for now the collar would only get in the way of the audience relating to him as an individual.

Up in the balconies, Lilith takes out a voodoo-looking doll and toys with it while murmuring rhyme. But the Doctor is focused on William Shakespeare, calling him the most human human ever. He’s hyped for the Man to deliver an exquisite monologue, but instead Will plays down to the crowd with base language.

This play was Love’s Labours Lost and even I know there was supposed to be a sequel that we don’t have today. Shakespeare teases the crowd with the promise of a Part Two eventually. This displeases Lilith, who kisses her doll, causing Shakespeare to declare the sequel will be acted tomorrow night.

Martha and the Doctor discuss the mystery of Love’s Labours Won outside. Martha somewhat seriously suggests making a recording of the play and selling it in modern times, but accepts being shot down with grace. The Doctor decides that they might as well stick around and see what happens.

At the Elephant Inn, the proprietress hits on Shakespeare, then leaves so his company can harangue him for promising a brand new play in 24 hours. The Doctor bursts into the room. Will is about to kick his latest superfan out when he notices the radiance of the accompanying pretty face and changes his tune. He is however unfooled by the psychic paper. Martha gabbles random Ye Olde words at him and is rewarded by being called everything short of a Nubian slave.

At this point the sanctimonious Master of Revels storms in, demanding that Shakespeare register his script for tomorrow’s new play with him. Gotta make sure it doesn’t say anything obscene about God or Country. No script being forthcoming, he promises to get the play banned and leaves. The maid, who is also Lilith, bumps into the Master and also hits on him, so he won’t notice she clipped a bit of his hair. She then uses her newly haired doll to alert her elders to the situation.

Incoming message from the Wee Little Doll!​

The witches all do an astral rhyme together and the Master chokes. The Doctor and Martha run into the road at the sound of his cries to find him spewing out water. Lilith stabs her doll and the Master’s heart stops. The Doctor tells the locals that it was a humour imbalance, but tells Martha that this assassination was witchcraft.

Back upstairs in Shakespeare’s accommodation, Will is analyzing the woman doctor and the young doctor with old eyes who is constantly putting on a performance. The Doctor escapes the examination and joins Martha in their bedroom. There, he lends her a toothbrush and tells her Harry Potter 7 made him cry. But he’s mostly off in his own world, puzzling over what could be going on. Actual witchcraft would be absurd.

Martha awkwardly gets in bed next to him, unsure of the propriety, but she finds the opportunity auspicious enough to lean over and gaze deeply into the Doctor’s eyes as he tells her “there’s something I’m missing. Something really close. Staring me in the face.” Then he adds “Rose would know” and excuses Martha for being just a newbie. This spoils her mood and lets any M/D shippers know exactly how they’ll be jerked around for the rest of Martha’s run.

Lilith has good witch hair even when in non-hag form, by the way. She blows green smoke into Shakespeare’s room through his window. He inhales it and almost goes cross-eyed. She then uses a marionette to get him to finish writing the new play on the spot. Then the proprietress walks in on them, so Lilith turns into a hag and scares her to death because I don’t know. The Doctor and Martha arrive on the scene only to see Lilith ride off into the moonrise on a broom, cackling.

Perchance the wench was born with it
Mayhaps ’tis Maybelline​

Our three main characters put their heads together over the inexplicable events. The Globe’s architect mentioned witches once, and that hint is good enough for the Doctor. They head into the Globe, a very nice set, where the Doctor obsesses over the theatre having 14 sides. Martha is helpful and the Doctor appreciates it. The Doctor tells Shakespeare this isn’t “just” a theatre, theatres are magic places where mere words change people’s minds. He wants to talk to the architect, Peter, but Shakespeare says the man was put in Bethlehem/Bedlam Hospital shortly after finishing the Globe, babbling about voices in his head. On the way out, Bill makes a pass at Martha, then flirts with the Doctor as fanservice for *that* kind of academic.

Meanwhile the actors are studying the new script. One makes the daring comment that sequels are never as good as the original. Very helpful for both Tennant and Agyeman’s egos. But they’re confused by the final speech, that Bill wrote under Lilith’s influence. It sounds like a spell written by a GPS, and reciting it kicks up a wind and a vision of some sort of ugly man-bird in a cloak. Huh.

In the asylum, which is your standard dungeon prison plus a nice view of the sunrise, the keeper generously offers to whip some of the inmates if that’ll amuse the Doctor. Martha tries to scold enlightenment into Shakespeare, but he says the place serves its purpose by scaring people sane. You haven’t truly experienced Shakespeare until you’ve read him in the original Cardassian.

The Doctor touches Peter’s mind to get him lucid enough to talk, and the actor does a fine job being coherent but mad with fear. But the witches sense something’s up. Mother Doomfinger teleports into the cell. She waves her fingers around and kills Peter with a touch, then cheeses up the scene until the Doctor deduces that she’s a Carrionite from Rexel. This is enough to dislocate her back whence she came. As the Doctor says, the power of knowing a name is old magic. Well, science, really, just a different science.

The Doctor explains the Carrionites are another of those ancient races that vanished long ago (maybe I should tally those too). Obviously they’re interested in using those last weird lines of the play, plus the fourteenosity of the theatre, to bring a bloody future to the planet.

Shakespeare hurries to the theatre to stop the play, which would be dangerous enough in real life. He gets there in time, but a witch knocks him out with a bump to her doll’s head. The show must go on!

The Doctor meanwhile takes Martha to look for the witches’ lair. He uses Back to the Future to explain to her that yes, history could change. Lilith witchily invites them inside to break the ice. Martha tries naming her, but it doesn’t work, and Lilith knocks her out in retaliation. Lilith then calls the Doctor “sir Doctor” but it doesn’t work: he has no true name for her to exploit. But she finds the source of his deep despair and names it: Rose. That just makes the Doctor mad enough to demand exposition.

The “Eternals” banished the Carrionites to the Phantom Zone, but these three used Shakespeare’s deep grief over his dead son to come back. The play will bring the rest back, and then they’ll destroy humanity and conquer the universe! Lilith grabs a bit of the Doctor’s hair, attaches it to her doll, and dexterously doll-stabs him in the trunk before making her aerial escape. Martha is now awake and applies percussive maintenance to get the Doctor’s second heart going again.

The actors say the magic words and activate the witches’ crystal ball. Black shapes start pouring out as the protagonists arrive onstage. It’s very fine for TV CGI. The Doctor tells Shakespeare to regain control: he needs to use his words to make the invasion stop. Bill comes up with a few couplets, aided in rhyming by Martha’s suggestion of “expelliarmus”, and the Carrionite destruction begins. The wind sucks in all the copies of Love’s Labours Won and they all disappear with the aliens into the tempest of death. The audience applauds and our heroes bow. The Doctor finds the witches three are caught in their own crystal ball.

Afterwards Will puts the moves on Martha again, but she’s just not ready for a relationship that predates Aquafresh. The Doctor walks in with a strange skull, implying he’s left the crystal ball in the prop room, but he’s got the ball with him and will tuck it away in the TARDIS. Shakespeare is ready to move on to fresh ideas, possibly write a father-son thing in memory of his son Hamnet. He also has deduced Martha is from the future and the Doctor is from another world.

Shakespeare starts to recite his “summer’s day” sonnet over Martha’s hand, but his courtship is interrupted by word that the Queen is here and wants to see this new play everyone is gossiping about. Elizabeth walks in and recognizes the Doctor at once, demanding his head. Martha hauls him off to safety, with the Doctor looking forward to finding out what he did to upset her.

Early in the episode the Doctor calls out some “similarities” between 1599 and the modern day. That idea pops up again when Shakespeare initially treats the Doctor like a modern celebrity might treat an annoying fan. The Doctor mentions political correctness when Shakespeare is confused as to why his guesses at Martha’s ancestry don’t charm her. The Doctor also quotes a later poem. Altogether, the present day was more present in this episode than in the Dickens or werewolf episodes. I wonder if there was a bit in an early draft where the Doctor or Martha talked about Shakespeare being timeless or something, to cap this theme off.

Inevitably, the Doctor drops a few phrases that Shakespeare will use as his own in later plays. There is no scriptwriter in existence who can pass that opportunity up.

The witches are nicely witchy but never get so cheesy as to be laughable. The actress playing Lilith seems to be particularly enjoying herself.

I don’t think there would have been so many copies of the play to go flying through the air. This video about the First Folio and such actually says (at about the 4:15 mark) that actors would only have gotten their own lines to study. The climax does look nicely dramatic with countless pages flying through the air though.

Rating: 3 old hags from Rexel

Favorite dialogue: The Doctor: Tell you what then, don’t step on any butterflies. What have butterflies ever done to you?

Pirate ship or metal band?: 1. Lilith 2. Deathfinger 3. Bloodtide

Speaking of pirate ships: I guess there was a cartoon that aired before this episode, it has a space pirate and oil rigs or something? It’s not in my DVD set so I’m ignoring it.

How many words and phrases did I use that Shakespeare has been credited with inventing?: Hard to say for sure, but you might be surprised

The Infinite Quest!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Quest

It was... okay. Anthony Head came back for it, playing a different character. I mostly remember it for Martha excitedly describing something as "Fantastic!" and Ten making a weird little mumbled response.

3x03 - Gridlock

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The American Gothic couple is watching a traffic report in a futuristic automobile interior set. Trouble begins when the car shakes from something trying to get in. The husband calls for police but is put on hold. The wife is distraught, blaming her husband for lying about them having a third person aboard. I guess future carpool lanes are mercilessly enforced. The camera shakes and sparks fly as the traffic reporter reports calm skies.

On the TARDIS, the Doctor is talking himself into maybe just one more trip for Martha. But Martha is eager to visit his home planet. He deflects without angst, finally letting her pry a vivid description out of him. But he insists it wouldn’t be fun for him to go home, he wants to go to New York City XV, on New Earth, in the year five million and a bit. They land in a rainy, narrow alley between two old-timey brick buildings.

They find a screen that shows them the traffic report, complete with that fantastic futuristic vista from “New Earth”. Martha is a bit miffed at being taken to the slums, but the Doctor says slums are so much better than high society. Martha smiles and says he’d enjoy anything.

The Face of Boe, still on New Earth, has sensed the Doctor’s arrival. He tells his personal cat nun, kneeling before him, to find the Doctor before it’s too late. She nods and pumps her raygun meaningfully, but does not actually promise that young Skywalker will join them or die.

What is thy bidding, my ma–*hack* Sorry, hairball.​

Martha wants to know if the Doctor is taking her everywhere he took Rose, and wonders if maybe she’s being used as therapy. But with the rain ceasing, storefronts around them open up, offering mood drugs. These storefronts are all age-battered wood painted a happy green, a breath of culture flowering amid the lifeless brick. Good set work.

A woman buys a capsule of “Forget”, saying her parents have driven to the motorway and she’ll never see them again. She tells the Doctor that “everyone goes to the motorway in the end. I’ve lost them.”

Martha doesn’t think much of this drugged-up future and definitely doesn’t like being seized by two locals. The Doctor tries threatening and bargaining but the kidnappers drag Martha away, with apologies, through a green door and into a flying vehicle. Now they qualify for the carpool lane!

The Doctor returns to the marketplace and demands answers. The shopkeepers fill him in on what we know and casually tell him he’ll never see Martha again. Angry Time Lord draws himself up magnificently and vows to get her back and then shut down this drug market tonight.

Martha wakes up and grabs a serious gun. But the gun is fake and nobody present knows how to use a real gun anyway. Her captors are Sheen and Milo. Sheen is wearing an Honesty[TM] patch so I guess she’s trustworthy. She’s pregnant, so they’re headed for New^15 Brooklyn, where there are jobs and the air is clean and there’s grass and wood and the towels are oh so fluffy! Martha gets mad and rips the drug patch off the pregnant woman. But Martha had better settle down and settle in, because this trip is going to take six years to go ten miles.

The Doctor gets up high enough to see the motorway for himself: It’s smoggy, bumper-to-bumper, door-to-door, and undercarriage-to-hood traffic from here to the ends of the world. A catman, Bran, opens a car door and yells at him to get in. The Doctor takes his chance. He gets to know Bran and his human wife, Valerie. They have kittens in the back. Well then. The Doctor gets the same drift as Martha has so far: once you start driving you don’t stop, and you don’t go anywhere much either. Bran and Val are also headed toward the promise of jobs.

On finding that it will take him years to get anywhere, the Doctor decides to leave for the TARDIS. But the exit platform is long gone. Next rest stop: six months. He tries calling the police but is put on hold. The police badge has a bird of prey on it, which I would expect to be unpopular with catpeople.

Bran says he can call other cars if they’re on his IM friends list, and proceeds to have a charming chat with two old ladies. Presumably they got in their car years ago, drawn to the chance of being WalMart greeters in Hoboken just twenty years from now. One of them, who watches cars, gives the Doctor the number of Martha’s car, but they say only the police can do anything about it.

Martha and her captors start hearing noises as they near the bottom of the traffic. Milo says it’s just air vents, but Sheen gleefully relates an urban legend that it’s something that eats lost vehicles. Martha points out the air vents don’t look functional. Down they go anyway. The Doctor meanwhile can’t get his new friends to go down to look for Martha. So he asks the grannies if they’ve ever seen any police or emergency vehicles since the traffic jam started. No. Well, what if the people on the surface have just abandoned the traffic jam to go on forever? Bran and Val don’t want to hear this. Then the traffic lady comes back on, with a soothing weather report and deepest apologies, followed by a soothing hymn. And everyone in the traffic jam sings along, and as Bran says, they’re not abandoned as long as they’re all in it together.

The Doctor decides to go it alone. He gives Val his coat to hold (Janis Joplin gave it to him), regrets how he’s treated Martha so far, and jumps down onto another car. He starts dropping through one car after another, the costuming and stage dressing crews having the time of their lives with each new passenger and interior.

Martha’s car, finally down in the carpool lane, has found that all the Brooklyn exits are closed. Milo wants to go around in circles until they open again, as if he were waiting for a Buick to pull out of a prime parking space. The rumbling noises start up again and they get a call from another carpooler who tells them to escape before being destroyed by whatever-it-is. Then Martha’s car is attacked by pirates cutting in from above! But it’s only the cat nun looking for the Doctor.

The Doctor himself is in a car in the bottom regular traffic layer. Opening the car’s bottom hatch reveals a lot of smoke obscuring something writhing below. He hotwires the venting system to reveal a floor full of giant crabs with giant claws and red beady eyes. The Macra!

Meteor would like to note his support of these magnificent creatures and their crustacean agenda against the humans.​

Martha’s car gets banged around as it tries to surf through the sea of clutching claws. Martha finally insists they turn off the car: with all the obscuring pollution, the crabs must be homing in on the engine. Like in submarine war films. The car goes dark and the crabbing quiets down. Now they have to figure out what to do next, before the breathable air runs out, just like in those submarine films!

The Doctor recaps the Macra’s previous appearance (see below for context) and says they ruled the galaxy billions of years ago. Now they’ve devolved into just feeding off of gas in the depths of this subway.

Then someone else drops in through the car’s roof. The Doctor declares he’s invented a sport. It’s the cat nun, who brought the gun for pirates. This is Hame, who has repented of her mad scientist ways and desperately wants the Doctor to come right now as the final piece of her penance. She teleports the Doctor away.

He’s angry but demands to speak to the Senate. Hame says this is the Senate, and she turns up the lights to reveal a lot of skeletons in bleacher seats. Everyone aboveground got addicted to “Bliss” and then there was an airborne virus that somehow wiped out the entire planet over the course of seven minutes. Hame closed off the exits to the surface to protect those belowground, which is surprising thematically to me. I expected the exits to be shut down due to government apathy or choice. Anyway the virus is definitely dead now too, so that’s one tidy, self-sealing doomsday to order.

The Doctor now meets the Face of Boe again. Hame explains that the Face is wired into the city and uses his life energy to keep things running enough that the undercity doesn’t plunge into the ocean. And the Senate activated a planetary quarantine to keep everyone away for a century. A neatly packaged scenario for the Doctor to fix alone.

With a few minutes of air left, Martha hopes the Doctor will show up. But Milo’s illusions are gone. “No one’s coming”, he says. We get Martha’s view of the Doctor: sometimes she thinks he likes her, sometimes she thinks he just wants company. Her face framed in dark emptiness, Martha deals with dying a long way from home, without her parents ever knowing. Then everyone takes courage, and the air is out, and it’s time to fly again. Why Milo won’t break his conditioning further and just fly above the claws is unclear. They’re clearly a hundred feet below the other traffic.

The Doctor spots their beacon on his screen and gets to work with computers. He messes around with cabling, which calls back to “The Parting of the Ways” between that and the use of “brilliant”, and pulls a switch, but the power goes off. Meanwhile a claw catches Martha’s car and starts crushing it. And swinging it around, too, but it must have inertial damping and artificial gravity. Why not. The Doctor messes around more, and the Face of Boe gives an extra effort, and something happens. The ceiling of the motorway opens to let air and exciting sunlight in. The Doctor hijacks the weather program to urge everyone to drive up and out. Including Martha’s car, which has escaped its crabby doom.

Meteor wishes to disavow any connection to these pathetic arthropods.​

The Face of Boe’s vat is starting to crack now. By the time Martha arrives, she finds the Doctor next to a giant head with tentacles for sideburns lying on the floor. The Doctor tries to encourage him, but the Face reveals his final secret to the Doctor — you are not alone — and dies. The Doctor is stunned with the weight of this revelation. Could it really be true? He and Martha embrace while Hame sobs.

The Doctor retrieves his coat from Val, checks that the drug shops are closed forever, and heads out with Martha. Martha wonders if the Face of Boe were referring to her, but the Doctor gives her a slow, kind but condescending smile. No. Martha Jones is not big enough to fill the emptiness.

He wants to leave, but Martha sits down and demands answers to some of the questions she faced during those harrowing moments where her world grew thick with crabs and thin with air. Martha’s red jacket against a bright green background on one side, the brown Doctor against a brown background on the other. The Doctor confesses that he was pretending Gallifrey was still alive. The Face was wrong: there is no one else. He takes a seat and explains to Martha, simply but with respect, as his own little penance for a big lie. He tells her of his love for his dead planet as a sun rises on a newly reborn world. It goes without saying that Tennant delivers this beautifully. Agyeman keeps up her end well. And the Doctor gets a little therapy.

This is more than an emotional core to the episode, of course. It establishes the Doctor’s loneliness and loss for new audiences, and stresses the extinction of the Time Lords. Now we’ll be properly primed for when the Master shows up down the road.

There are some class struggle ideas in this episode that go beyond merely “what if the future but X-TREME traffic jams”. The people who live underneath surface society don’t want to believe they’ve been abandoned by their betters, even as they passively accept that hope only lies on the other end of years of living tiny, enclosed, fruitless lives. Their underground life leaves them out of the sight and perhaps minds of Important People. Maybe this system worked well enough at first. But the exits are now shut down, forever. The Macra and drugs will feed on the underclass forever. The people who could have helped, do nothing (because dead). And the lower class keeps hoping, unaware that they’re trapped.

The Macra themselves come from an old Who story set on another planet. That story was about a slightly different class struggle, that of the common people being trained by those in power to live in a happy, self-contained society and never wonder if there were dangers they weren’t being told about. Like humongous crabs outside the compound that were secretly controlling their government.

The “what happens to humanity if we get too good at making raw happiness” premise has been explored a lot of ways in a lot of sci-fi. Here it’s kind of grafted alongside the main themes.

Martha continues to be observant and practical.

This episode is mostly of typical quality for the relaunch, but the descriptions of Gallifrey, delivered by Tennant, elevate it a bit beyond “a giant traffic jam and then there’s crabs”.

Rating: 3 CGI crab claws

Favorite dialogue: The Doctor: I lied to you. ‘Cause I liked it. I could pretend. Just for a bit. I could imagine they were still alive. Underneath a burnt orange sky. I’m not just a Time Lord. I’m the last of the Time Lords. The Face of Boe was wrong, there’s no one else.
Martha: What happened?
The Doctor: There was a war. A Time War. The last Great Time War. My people fought a race called the Daleks, for the sake of all Creation, and they lost. They lost. Everyone lost. They’re all gone now. My family. My friends, even that sky.
The Doctor: Oh, you should have seen it, that old planet. The second sun would rise in the south, and the mountains would shine. The leaves on the trees were silver. And when they caught the light every morning, it looked like a forest on fire. When the autumn came, the breeze would blow through the branches. It sounded like a song.

Meteor could defeat the TARDIS quite easily if he felt like it. He just prefers to attack wizard castles.​

​

3 x 04 - Daleks in Manhattan

1930 New York City. A showgirl, Tallulah, is backstage with her boyfriend, Laszlo. Just after she leaves, something zips by in the hallway. Laszlo investigates, he wanders around alone in the props room, he gets spooked . . . just leave. Just head back out the door, none of this is yours to protect, nothing is actually spooky except the music. But then a bipedal pig in a suit charges him and that’s the teaser.

Now, there is no actual law that Daleks have to be in the title in a Dalek episode. They could have left Daleks out of the title here, surprised us when the ol’ pepperpots showed up, but then everyone would have tuned out at the sight of a pig person because we’d all expect it to be another Slitheen story.

The Doctor has taken Martha back in time to see his old friend Lady Liberty. Martha is all stirred up to think she’s living in a world she could formerly only see in old newsreels. But the Doctor notices a headline about a series of disappearances in the local “Hooverville”. The term allows our heroes to set the socioeconomic scene for us. Martha finds it hard to imagine people living in Central Park. But here Hooverville is, a cluster of shacks for people at the very bottom of society, people nobody wants to help.

A fight breaks out over a loaf of bread. A man literally named Solomon steps over, breaks up the fight, takes the loaf from the alleged thief, gives a speech about unity and justice, and splits the bread between them. Solomon’s a Great War veteran, and what he learned from that terrible experience was to stick together and stay civilized. Okay, but babies and bread are not the same thing. The right way to do this scene would be to have the two each agree to split the loaf, persuading brotherhood instead of enforcing it. The Doctor wants to chat with him, and he says look at the Empire State Building going up while so many of us starve. Just look at the ESB’s pinnacle.

Reminds me of something. Can’t put my plunger on it.​

A foreman of the crew building the ESB is complaining to his boss, Diagoras, about being told to work even faster. Diagoras says suck it up, it’s what the “new masters” want. In fact, the pinnacle needs to be finished tonight. The foreman demands to speak to these new masters. A Dalek flanked by pig men comes to see him. Foreman gets hauled away for a “final experiment”. The Dalek then tells Diagoras to get more bodies, because the gamma strike is increasing. (Diagoras makes sure to assure the Dalek that “labor is cheap” and the foreman can be easily replaced, just to make it clear this is more class struggle.)

The brown Doctor talks to brown Solomon inside a very brown tent about the disappearances. Solomon says they hear people being taken in the night. The Doctor wonders who’s taking them and why. On cue, Diagoras shows up, offering work in the sewers for a dollar a day. Everyone has nice-looking clothes on, I imagine getting them cleaned afterward will eat much of that dollar up. The Doctor perks his ears at the mention of accidents and enlists. Martha joins after promising to kill the Doctor for dragging her into it. Solomon and another man, Frank the Red Shirt, also come along.

In the sewer, Frank comments that the sewers are big and convoluted and could hide an army. Martha chats with Frank, and on mentioning he’s from Tennessee, the actor remembers to put a backwoods twang in his tone.

Then the Doctor finds a stinky, glowy, green brain jellyfish lying on the ground. He gets out his nerd glasses for examination and incidentally points out they should have found the job site by now. That’s the cue to . . . uh, utterly fail to be attacked or trapped. Or have anything happen.

Meanwhile Diagoras is telling the remaining foremen they need to attach a bunch of Dalek hemispheres to the spire that night. Even for 1930, this is too unsafe to attempt, but Diagoras threatens their jobs and the foremen quiet down. They leave and the Dalek comes out to engage Diagoras in what passes for deep Dalek philosophy.

Humans are weak, yet they build great cities. And their New York City persists across planets and centuries while the Dalek planet is long gone. Really makes you think. The Dalek even compliments Diagoras for his “rare ambition” to survive and become the boss of Manhattan. Unfortunately, other Daleks are listening, and they decide Diagoras is the least inferior experimental subject available.

“I AM EXPERIENCING POSITIVE EVALUATIONS TOWARD YOU, VERMIN.”
“That means you’ll kill me last, right?”
“GUESS AGAIN.”​

Diagoras is taken to the top floor. He steps out of the elevator into a strange world, with strange equipment all around, pig men slowly advancing on all sides, and a Dalek in the shadows at the other end of the room. It’s properly creepy like the teaser wasn’t. The shadowy Dalek is Dalek Sec, leader of that cult of Skaro thing that escaped back in “Doomsday”. Sec has been projecting images of power and grandiose plans into Diagoras’s head to get him to work for the Daleks. Sec now has Diagoras taken away.

The Doctor’s party is still exploring the sewers when they hear a squeal. Martha spots a figure huddled against a wall. In the bad light, it isn’t until the Doctor heads over to take a look that they realize it has the face of a pig. He soothes and empathizes, but angrier pig men come along and Running Through Corridors commences. Frank plays the hero and is captured while the others escape into the theater. Solomon refuses to let the Doctor go back for him: “I’m not losing anybody else!” The decision of a soldier.

Then Tallulah comes into the room with a gun, dulcet tones gone in favor of her natural nasal Brooklynese, to demand Laszlo be returned to her. He disappeared two weeks ago, and lotsa men would run off sure, but Laszlo’s no pig! The gun is a prop, by the way, same as the gun Martha was taken hostage with last week.

The Doctor jury-rigs a DNA scanner for his jellyfish-brain. He tries to brush off Solomon’s prying, but then apologizes for treating him like a fool. Solomon heads back to Hooverville to rouse a defence in the rainy night.

Meanwhile Martha is chatting with Tallulah, who is living through the Depression, paycheck to paycheck, in the hopes that Laszlo (and the economy) is coming back. Every day there’s another rose on her table. Might be from Laszlo somehow, but why is he being so secret like he doesn’t want her to . . . see . . . him? “Tallulah”, for those who don’t know, is derived from the Choctaw or Creek for “blatant dramatic irony”. Tallulah also pokes at Martha/Doctor shipping by assuming that pairing is reality. Martha frankly wants it to be real at this point.

Meanwhile Diagoras has caught on he’s going to be experimented on, but no fears, you’ll be something much better than a pig man. Still, being told “WE NEED YOUR FLESH” by a Dalek is a pretty horrific thing to face. Even worse than a Dalek philosophy debate.

The other two cultists now complain that the Big Plan is needless and Daleks should be pure. Sec retorts that since they haven’t destroyed humanity yet, they need to imagine a different plan to win. Mind you, we haven’t seen them try to destroy humanity. This is not the same Dalek mindset that a single Dalek can vanquish any enemy. These Daleks are apparently damaged, presumably by that emergency warp-out. Anyway, Leader Sec wins the debate and opens its casing so it can, uh, suck Diagoras into itself headfirst. Gross.

Tallulah invites Martha to watch her perform her “angel among devils” show. While she sings, Martha notices a pig man in the opposite wings, watching, a little less piggy-looking so we can tell it’s Laszlo. She slips across the stage, trying to hide behind the dancers, but pulls one down and causes mayhem. Tallulah screams at Laszlo, scaring him off. Martha runs after Laszlo but he escapes. But another pig man grabs her and takes her into the sewers. The Doctor, who has found that the jellyfish-brain has Dalek-homeworld DNA, hears her scream and follows, with Tallulah enrobing herself in a robe and following him despite his protests, determined to find Laszlo herself.

Martha meets a line of prisoners, including Frank, whom she hugs before joining the line, very scared. Meanwhile Tallulah’s blabbermouth almost gives the Doctor away to a Dalek. He watches it pass in disbelief. “They always survive, while I lose everything.” Sorry, Doctor, it’s our fault. We’d be very unhappy if they never came back. He explains Daleks to Tallulah, whose actress has been very good at using the whites of her eyes to advantage.

Meanwhile Sec has blown a gasket while processing Diagoras and the other Daleks want to abort the procedure. But Sec wants to keep going. He wants to evolve. A Dalek reaches out with a syringe of green stuff and I’ll leave it to you whether to make a Captain America or Pokemon comment here.

With Daleks in the picture, the Doctor insists on returning Tallulah to the theater, but then they blunder into Laszlo, who hides his face against the sewer wall. And at this angle . . . he’s goofier than the full pig men. He looks like a third-rate vampire who didn’t know whether he wanted to be an orc or an elf for Halloween. Tallulah gets a good long close-up look and finally recognizes him. It upsets her but she’s not repelled.

Laszlo takes them to watch the Daleks look over the prisoners. Martha naturally recognizes the word “Dalek”. Everything is prepared for the experiment, the Daleks just need to choose the smartest victims. Like Martha. The Doctor sends Laszlo and Tellulah away (and then Laszlo stays with the Doctor and sends Tellulah away) (and then Tellulah gets lost) and slips into the High Intelligence line with Martha (and Laszlo) to see what happens. They find Sec steaming and shaking. The Doctor tells Martha to ask what this whole evolution thing is about. She’s scared but steps up to it. The answer staggers out of Sec’s chassis: a humanoid with Dalek head and weird hands. That’s another yikes.

Pinstripes are not your look. Maybe you don’t have a look, but if you do, this isn’t it.​

That’s the cliffhanger! What could come next?

Every fictional world has some sort of fundamental rules, perhaps even a formula, that help to define it. That help make it special (or not so special). And every creator, however happy they may be working within their chosen world’s constraints, will sooner or later look at one of those rules and ask What if . . . ?

If a rule is violated or changed or abolished, the more fundamental and important it is, the bigger a shock it can be. For good and bad. A great twist can keep the material fresh or open new avenues for storytelling. What if baby Superman lands in the USSR instead of Kansas? What if the Time Lords disable the Doctor’s TARDIS? A bad twist, however, can just confuse the audience, or weaken the world’s identity, or come across as misunderstanding or disrespecting the world you’re working with (possibly because you are). What if we write the Borg so badly that a second-tier ship crewed by idiots can beat them every week? What if we just shower teams with unearned baserunners because the commissioner of baseball actually hates baseball and assumes everyone else does too?

The Daleks have always been a simple concept. They’ve always had that iconic shape. They hate everyone else (other than their usually-creator Davros, sometimes) and want to kill everyone else, with a conviction that Daleks are supreme over all things in this or any universe by virtue of their own pure Dalekness.

We saw this in “Dalek” and “Doomsday”, where a Dalek was quite convinced it could slaughter a whole planet on its own. The “Dalek” Dalek was horrified to be contaminated by Rose, because there was now an impurity in it that made it less than fully Dalek. Now these Daleks, instead of going boldly and exterminating, hide and plot to turn themselves into something very un-Dalek.

It’s a bold “What if?” that violates one of the fundamental rules of the show’s most iconic villains. And I respect the nerve. But it matters that Daleks are so self-confident. They cannot co-exist with anyone, we cannot find common ground with them, because they fundamentally see all other beings as vermin to be either exterminated or used and discarded. It matters that they are so self-assured in their purity, because we know they have grounds to believe in their superiority, and it makes them that much more menacing and hateable, to know they can back up their attitude.

So: does the story so far justify violating this rule? If you got a big kick out of the genetic manipulation and that pinstriped thing at the end, maybe it does. On the other hand, “Daleks that assimilate people” are kinda just the horror of Cybermen in a different key.

And why would these Daleks do this? What advantage is there to grafting humanity onto themselves? The only thing humans can claim over a Dalek, from the Dalek POV, is imagination — which three of these Daleks were explicitly designed to have anyway. I think the Daleks may not quite know what they’re looking to gain themselves. But they see a weak species that keeps coming back from the brink, with big shiny New York Cities all over the galaxy, while Dalekkind stands on the brink without a home, and they think: we gotta get what they have.

Unfortunately I feel some disgust at the last cliffhanger, but no real horror or danger. They’re doing awful things to people, and presumably soon to all humanity, but they’re weakening themselves. And they’re doing it to their leader. Why not try it on the generic Dalek first?

And what was the point of Diagoras sending people into the sewers? There were no pig men waiting to jump them. No alarms tripped to let the Daleks know another delivery was made. Just a vague idea of letting them get lost and eventually the pig men will pick them up probably? Bad henchman work.

I’ll score this in conjunction with the second part in case I’m just missing something, but right now I’m thinking a 1.5 – 2 out of 4.

Rating: 1.5 Hooverville dwellers

Favorite dialogue: Tallulah: Ever been on stage before?
Martha: Oh, little bit, you know, Shakespeare.
Tallulah: How dull is that?! Come and see a real show!

Humanity’s Guide to Perpetual Survival, for Daleks:
1. Be the pet species of a Time Lord
2. Don’t make a Time Lord your archenemy
3.

You know the difference between you and me?

I make this look good.​

Fun fact: Frank is played by Andrew Garfield, before he got the Spider-Man role.

​

3 x 05 - Evolution of the Daleks

The new Dalek-human (Dalekman) demands that the captives be processed, but the Doctor slips off and starts playing a happy little tune on a radio. Dalekman recognizes him immediately. The pure Daleks want to shoot the Doctor, but Dalekman says wait, gotta let him speechify first.

The Doctor says their emergency temporal shift at the end of “Doomsday” must have cooked their batteries. Okay then. He asks Dalekman how it feels to be, well, Dalekman. The actor can’t do facial expressions under all that prosthetic, but he tries body language as he reveals he’s very much feeling all the good parts of humanity. You know, ambition, hatred, war.

That’s what they wanted to get out of this hybridization, so the experiment is a success I guess. (Note: Daleks already had these things down to perfection. What they should want is some metal ore and a power plant.) The Doctor and Dalekman argue over whether such traits define humanity. The Doctor might have a stronger position if Solomon had talked those guys into sharing the bread last episode, hmm? He points to the radio to prove his position: music and dancing mean nothing to a Dalek.

Then he makes the radio emit obnoxious noise, causing Dalekman to flinch, causing the Daleks to move to protect him while the Doctor and captives (except Laszlo) escape, picking up Tallulah along the way. Dalekman remains to caress the broken radio and presumably ponder aural pain and pleasure. In a better episode this might lead somewhere. Spoiler: this is not a better episode.

The cultist Daleks take a moment alone to discuss Dalekman Sec. One Dalek asks if the other is doubting its duty to follow Sec, and the other actually looks over its “shoulder” for eavesdroppers before turning back and saying yes.

Back in Hooverville, the Doctor tells Solomon what they’ve figured out and everyone in Hooverville is stock for Dalek splicing. (Because we didn’t have a scene at the end of last episode where the Daleks only pick the best and brightest for splicing, and there aren’t just three more Daleks anyway.) While Solomon insists that diplomacy might work and everyone else tells him it won’t, a sentry spots a pig man advancing. Solomon tries to rally a defense, but the pig men have a free hand in dragging off people and randomly jumping up in front of the camera. Finally the defenders are hemmed in and start fighting back, and for once bullets will stop the monsters.

But two Daleks fly in and commence blowin’ stuff up. Gee, their batteries seem just fine to me. Solomon tries to talk them down, like the reverend in the classic War of the Worlds, except preaching his particular message of brotherhood among outcasts. His universe has expanded immeasurably today, but he chooses hope over fear. But appealing to the Daleks for brotherhood is never a good move, and a Dalek zaps him. The Doctor screams for the Daleks to kill him too (because obviously they’re only here to kill him specifically, not capture more bodies or start the extermination of humanity), but Dalekman says no. Dalekman wants the Doctor brought to him alive, to pick his brain. Martha is left behind to tend the wounded. The Doctor thanks her, winks, and hands her the psychic paper.

The Doctor storms in, furious about the attack (because the Daleks totally care), but Dalekman agrees with him that the deaths were “wrong”. He also didn’t like Solomon being killed after showing “excellent” courage.

Dalekman says they tried growing new Daleks but that didn’t work. That explains the existence of that green brain-squid in last episode, but not why it was randomly lying around in the sewers. Dalekman turns up the lights to reveal hundreds of slabs hanging from the rafters, each one holding a mind-wiped human ready to be indoctrinated with Dalek ideas. The Doctor wants to know where all the power for this operation will come from, and Dalekman shows him a diagram of the Empire State Building as an energy conductor. Then a diagram of human and Dalek DNA splicing together under a blast of gamma radiation. Then a diagram of a solar flare hitting the Earth and haha they used the super-speed “swoosh” SFX again. There’s also an open flame in the background that bursts upward at dramatic moments.

Dalek DNA is spiky because they’re evil, get it.​

Dalekman tells the Doctor he needs the Doctor’s genius. He even says Davros was wrong to leave emotions out of the Daleks’ makeup. The Doctor never expected to hear a Dalek use the “wr” word about Davros, and as the other two cult Daleks look at each other, Dalekman insists that they must return to flesh to avoid being inferior to their enemies. (Because being invulnerable to small-arms fire is inferior?) The Doctor says, then you wouldn’t be superior. And Dalekman calls that good.

This is finally too much for the other Daleks. But Dalekman says that seeking supremacy has been disastrous for them. (This is just about the only part of the whole scheme that makes any sense.) He sets the Doctor an appealing task: help me un-Dalek everything that makes a Dalek a Dalek.

The Doctor is interested, but says there’s no room for “another race of people” on Earth. (The Ninth and Eleventh Doctors disagree.) Dalekman says okay, take us to a new planet then. With eleven minutes before the big solar flare hits, the Doctor is convinced.

Martha has been trying to figure out what the Doctor wants her to do with the psychic paper. Frank points her to the Empire State Building as Diagoras’s main project. Off they go, and up the ESB they go.

They walk into a dump of a room. Tallulah admiringly declares it the top of the world. Martha then warns Tallulah not to fall out a window. Maybe Tallulah was an airhead in an earlier draft. Incidentally, her character is one of the brighter spots in this mess.

The Doctor lets it pass that the pig men only live a few weeks. But he tries to comfort Laszlo that it won’t happen to anyone else. Laszlo asks if he trusts Dalekman, and the Doctor can only trust to hope.

Tallulah and Martha girl-chat about the Doctor while studying ESB blueprints. Martha seizes the chance to unload about the Doctor being too preoccupied with Rose to notice her. Tallulah invites herself to the pity party by saying there’s no future for her and Laszlo. Martha finds the key alteration to the latest blueprint and they both decide it must be the mysterious Dalekanium that was installed overnight.

The Doctor has altered the Dalek hybridization process for a better chance of success and soon systems are go. But alarms blare and the Doctor finds that the pure Daleks have overridden part of it, to use pure Dalek genes. It’s a mutiny! The Doctor and Dalekman are merely restrained (because the Daleks would never exterminate their declared enemies). Laszlo and the Doctor escape into an elevator and head for the spire. They find Tallulah and Martha, hugs ensue, but the Daleks hijack the elevator to send pig men up. The Doctor will have to climb the rest of the way to the spire. Martha’s ready to dig her heels in and come along too, but the Doctor needs her to stay behind and fight.

He gets up there and the “Dalekanium” is actually pretty unimpressive-looking. Meanwhile pig men are on their way and Laszlo is suffering from impending mortality. But Martha has an idea: if lightning is going to strike anyway (uh, no, gamma radiation is), then run metal from the outside of the building to the elevator to blast whatever comes out.

But the Doctor has dropped his screwdriver before he can remove all the Dalekanium. With no better idea, he clings to the spire and gets gammacuted as the lightning radiation strikes. The pig men walk out of the elevator just in time to get a faceful of gammaning. Martha feels bad about killing people, but Laszlo says they were dead long ago. Obviously meaning himself too.

The Daleks perform quality control on their test subjects by asking one hybrid if he’s a Dalek. He says yes. I guess everything went exactly as planned, then! Off you all go, to convert the rest of the city into Daleks, solar-level gamma radiation being easy to come by on 1930 Earth after all. And, uh . . . all these men are dressed the same. Do the Daleks care about aesthetic enough that they found twenty of the same outfit and dressed everyone up? Did they send pig men to plunder Macy’s?

Martha finds the sonic screwdriver and brings it up to find the Doctor unconscious. She’s shamelessly emotional about him seeming dead and then waking up. The Doctor heads to Tallulah’s theater to make himself known via screwdriver signal. The Daleks actually refer to it as a “sonic device”. Either they borrow his terminology because they don’t know how it works, or Time Lords really can do magic with sound waves. Or this is more sloppy writing.

Martha finally gets to dig her heels in and stay with the Doctor to face danger. The human Daleks surround them and the Daleks appear on the stage, Dalekman crawling on a chain. I can only suggest they haven’t killed him because he’s still part Dalek. The Doctor and Dalekman try to talk them down from global conquest, but Dalekman gets shot when one Dalek tries to exterminate the Doctor. The Doctor appeals to the human Daleks: see who you work for? Destroying their own brilliant leader like that. He dares the Daleks to let the hybrid Daleks kill him, and the hybrids refuse. One asks why they should kill and says they aren’t really Daleks. The Doctor says they never will be Daleks. They have too much Time Lord DNA in them because that’s totally how lightning/gamma radiation works. A little Gallifreyan freedom was passed along into their beings. (Because Time Lords are so famous for their independent thinking that the one Time Lord who openly left their planet was sentenced to timeout on Earth.)

A Dalek shoots the impudent hybrid, and then the other hybrids start defending themselves with the Dalek guns they carry. (Where did those come from? How is anybody making all this advanced technology from scratch but the Daleks can’t simply repair themselves and remain pure?) The two Daleks’ heads asplode. The Dalek back at base then remotely kills all the Dalek humans. A horrified Doctor calls it the killing of an entire species. Okay? I guess killing Tuvix was genocide too. Voyager should have kept him alive at all costs until they could extract enough DNA to repopulate the species.

The Doctor heads over for a showdown with definitely the last Dalek in the entire universe we mean it for real this time. Tennant gives it his best, telling the Dalek I’ve seen enough genocide for the day and I’m the only person in existence who might show you mercy. Let me help you. The Dalek instead chooses to NINJA VANISH temporal-shift again, leaving the Doctor to deal with a dying Laszlo. Laszlo starts a nice little death scene in Tallulah’s arms and that’ll be one last thread tied off. But the Doctor uses the Dalek DNA lab to save him.

Laszlo is accepted into Hooverville as a permanent outcast. Tallulah seems attached to him still. Better than he deserved after wandering around alone in a Doctor Who teaser. The Doctor says NYC is the only place in the universe where Laszlo might fit in. Martha says the couple proves there’s someone for everyone. The Doctor says “Maybe” and walks off. Then Jeff Foxworthy stops by to observe, “If you ship Martha and the Doctor . . . you might be a masochist!” And that’s it.

The Doctor has had chances to destroy the Daleks before. He thought he wiped them out in the Time War, with the cost being his own people, and it deeply scarred him. Before that, the Fourth Doctor had a chance to disrupt their creation in cold blood, but recoiled at what he considered genocide even as he knew what they would become. Now he has a chance to end the threat of the Daleks, but allow them to live, even help them prosper. There’s even a Dalek begging him for aid. That is quite the high concept, aimed square at the heart of the Doctor’s morality. But did we convincingly get there? Was the payoff worthwhile?

As I mentioned at the end of last episode, the disgust is there for what might happen to the human race, but I never feel like this will make the Daleks scarier. Or very scary at all. It’s obvious from the get-go that the Daleks are being diluted to their disadvantage. Maybe this would have worked better with Eccleston, if the writing could have pulled off the idea that there was something dark in humanity that was worse than anything the Daleks could do. Or if the sect was played up as insane or deluded, tearing apart human society in a mad quest to survive at any cost.

One of the ways I can tell whether I’m giving a work too much patience is how I feel about plot elements that don’t immediately make sense. When I’m actually enjoying myself, I tend to trust there to be a good explanation or revelation in the future. When it’s bad writing, I just see it as a mistake. There were a lot of things here that I took to be mistakes, some of which were actually “explained” later. I never felt like these were signals that there were hidden depths to the Daleks’ diabolical plan, or that the writer might be cleverer than me. I just thought it was bad writing. Good plotting that doesn’t feel good isn’t good. And this wasn’t good, because the Daleks have to be given so much technology to carry out their plan that they shouldn’t have needed the plan.

Overall, this two-parter just doesn’t have much going for it. One highlight was the hybrids not shooting the Doctor in the theater, but he’d already not been shot so many times that it was to be expected. And we knew he’d messed with the hybrids’ creation somehow. The Tenth Doctor’s persistent compassion for his worst enemies is also nice. Would the Ninth Doctor have willingly helped?

Sec, on the other hand, is the central figure in this plot. So much more could have been done with him. Let us watch his slide into the unexpected sides of humanity, for crying out loud. Does he fight or embrace it? It’s obvious and probably cliché, but write it well and nobody will care. At least make him devious. He’s too nice to be a half-Dalek anything. He should have been plotting to kill or hybridize the Doctor after he got all the help he wanted.

Rating: 1 angelic showgirl

Favorite dialogue: Dalekman Sec: You betrayed me.
Dalek: You told us to imagine. And we imagined your irrelevance.

Dead named redshirts: Zero

​

3 x 06 - The Lazarus Experiment

The Doctor lands the TARDIS and announces the end of the line. Martha steps out excited, but doesn't find herself in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. We're saving that for next episode. No, this is Martha's home, twelve hours after she first stepped into the TARDIS. He hands her an underthing to show that even her laundry is the same as ever, a bit of Tennant awkwardness. They begin to say goodbyes, but Martha's mum leaves a message on the landline. At word that Martha's sister Tish is on the news, Martha turns on the TV. Tish is giving an old white-haired man the side-eye as he announces to reporters that he will push a button and change the meaning of being human.

Boring! Back to goodbyes. The Doctor acknowledges that he expected just one trip with her. Yes, Martha says, but things . . . escalated. The Doctor says that happens to him a lot. Martha simply says thank you, the Doctor says "my pleasure", and he enters the TARDIS while bittersweet strings play. This does seem like a farewell scene, doesn't it? Martha sadly watches the TARDIS disappear and leave behind a bright, blowy day. But then the TARDIS returns. The Doctor can't let go of what he saw on the telly.

The old man, Richard Lazarus, is conversing with his wife (?) at Lazarus Laboratories. She's worried about some demonstration for investors. Richard is feeling frisky enough to creep on Tish.

The Doctor meanwhile is worried that his current outfit, a tux, is bad luck. Martha says he makes his own bad luck. They've come to the Lab to see this redefinition of humanity. But first, a fancy dress party, where the Doctor happily gobbles the appetizers. Honestly, I think Tennant might already be having more fun than he had all of last episode. Tish and Martha tease each other happily. The Doctor starts asking about the technobabble science he sees on display, but Tish is PR and has no clue about anything. She teases Martha about catching a science nerd. Mum and brother show up, and mum is surprised how happy Martha is to see her so soon. She starts quizzing Martha's "boyfriend" and of course the Doctor is totally oblivious to the idea that there might ever be anything romantic between him and Martha.

Anyway, Professor Lazarus calls everyone to attention. He walks into a big capsule (white and blue, the '00s colors of Technology). It spins and lights up alarmingly, then overloads. The Doctor stops it as safely as he can. Out steps Lazarus looking like he's maybe thirty years old.

The Doctor is wide-eyed and disappreciative while everyone crowds around Lazarus. The old lady enthuses over the money they can charge for this treatment first, and what it'll do for her second. But Lazarus is starting to feel side effects. He starts gobbling the appetizers himself. The Doctor tells him it's a standard energy deficit. He also identifies it as a sonic process and warns that Lazarus can't have figured it all out. Martha worries about societal chaos. Richard and the old lady both pooh-pooh their concerns. The Doctor refuses to equate longer life with improvement of the species. Richard kisses Martha's hand before leaving. He and the old lady reminisce about the war before making out, but of course he finds her old and disgusting now. She gets all huffy and wants all the credit for the breakthrough, but he's just tired of her.

Meanwhile Martha and the Doctor are looking at a schematic of Lazarus's DNA on a laptop. They see it change before their eyes, and Martha says that's impossible. Yeah, it is impossible, it's not going to be constantly updating the image because it's not going to be constantly scanning the strand. You get your one good scan and it gets processed and diagrammed and you like it. Martha and the Doctor exchange some technononsense to the effect that Lazarus soniced his genes into rejuvenating and a surprise bit got activated.

Lazarus and wife are sniping at each other when Lazarus feels his aftershocks again. He flails around and a scorpiontail thing comes out and attacks his wife.

While Martha's mum worries that the Doctor will be a bad influence on Martha, Lazarus makes another move on Tish, taking her away for some alone time. Martha finds Wife's skeletized corpse. The Doctor thinks something drained her life-energy. ("Life-energy" and dictokinesis and mind control via blood rituals, but we can't have ghosts or witches or vampires or . . . .) Martha senses that her sister would be a logical target for another such attack and rushes off to find her. Warned by Martha's brother, she and the Doctor rush up to the roof, ignoring Mum. Some random guy warns Mum that Martha should stay away from the Doctor.

Tish, of course, doesn't see any reason to step away from Lazarus. The Doctor tells Lazarus that time doesn't just add up linearly. One person's 80 years may be worth another's 20. He would know. He would also know that many lifetimes can add up to a curse.

While Tish scolds Martha for trying to ruin another nice guy for her, Lazarus spazzes out and the full monster bursts out of his body. I, uh, was not prepared for it having Richard's face. Other than that, it's a giant goopy skeleton with a scorpion tail. Tish gets introduced to the favorite Who pastime of running for your life. They get inside, but the monster bangs on the access door so hard that alarms are triggered, doors seal, and lights flicker. Tish explains that the power cut is a deliberate part of the lockdown. Look, I'm not in the mood for this after all the little plotholes in the last story, can we just be sensible for 45 minutes? You can lock down the computers without trapping your people inside in the dark with whatever paramilitary attack you're expecting to come after your precious fountain of youth. And you can wait until something worse happens than "idiot banging on a door" to go full red alert.

Back down in the reception, the Doctor gives Martha his screwdriver, setting 54, to unlock an exit. The monster shows up to convince everyone to leave. They all run, except the designated idiot who just stands there to be made an example victim of. The monster turns its attention to Mum and Brother Leo. The Doctor distracts the monster, calling it Lazarus, telling it to give up, the experiment's a failure, and runs off. The monster follows on the ceiling, and the camera obligingly rotates to show its point of view. They play cat and mouse in the boiler room, the Doctor accusing Lazarus of arrogance and Lazarus replying "no u".

HERE'S LAZZY!​

Martha and the partygoers have come up against an outer glass door. Martha finds the override switch on the wall and sonics it successfully. Everyone gets out and Martha laughs exultantly. She's gettin' pretty good at this! Over her family's protests, she runs back to help the Doctor. Martha's mum feels betrayed. Not sure how much it says about Mum's character versus how much it says about her feelings toward her husband betraying her for that blonde hussy. So far, Martha's time on the show is speedrunning not only her character development but her family's. That strange man comes over again to warn Mum against the Doctor.

The Doctor has found a chemistry-looking lab. He starts accumulating relevant equipment and honestly the writers for this and the "Daleks in Manhattan" story were copying off each other's work the whole time, weren't they. Very Significant Names, the Doctor making use of the antagonists' lab under time pressure, DNA-altered human beings, both antagonists wanting to evolve.

Anyway, he sets up a trap, and when the monster gets well into the room, he exits and sets off a fiery explosion. He flees, collecting Martha as he goes, the monster still coming. The two hide in the de-aging capsule, hoping that Lazarus won't destroy it to get at them. The Doctor says the capsule must have activated dormant genes in Lazarus. Now, usual DNA magic aside, my understanding is that we carry a lot of old "junk" DNA that doesn't seem to do much of anything, but I don't think humanity has scorpions and Kabutops in our ancestry. Well, at least Reginald Barclay isn't turning into a spider in this one.

But Lazarus activates the capsule. The Doctor tries reversing the capsule's energy flow, like in Superman II. The burst blasts Lazarus-monster away, knocks him out, and reverts him to a young Homo sapiens.

Outside, Tish hugs Martha and Mum slaps the Doctor. Mum tells Martha to stay away from the Doctor, she's been told things about him, things the lamestream media doesn't want you to know. There's a crash, and when Martha follows the Doctor to investigate, her mum simply says "Leave him." Martha looks in her eyes, shakes her head, and goes. Tish follows her sister, also against her mum's wishes.

They find the paramedics dead of nth-degree burns and Lazarus gone. He's escaped into the cathedral from his childhood reminisces from earlier. They find human Lazarus kneeling behind the altar, in bad shape. He remembers how he fled there during the Blitz, and how that experience led him to focus on defeating death. In a building dedicated to a man who defeated death already. It's like paying when you've already had the free ride.

The Doctor calls back to "Father's Day" and "The End of the World", about any life being enough to change history, and death being part of human life. Lazarus refuses to regret any deaths he's caused, refuses to consider his present condition as anything less than progress, even as he writhes in pain. The Doctor whispers to Martha that he wants to get Lazarus to the top of the bell tower. He then reiterates that a longer life isn't necessarily better: eventually you get worn down by struggle and loss. He looks into Lazarus's eyes, and Lazarus soberly insists that unending life is worth it, even if it means eternal loneliness.

Lazarus warns the Doctor that he'll have to eat soon. Martha entices him after her, and leads him up toward the bell tower, with the Doctor left on the ground. They wind up on a balcony above the organ, which the Doctor is sonicing to produce hyperwhatever sound like the capsule made. Martha ends up dangling over empty space while the Doctor cranks up the volume. Lazarus-monster falls to the ground below and reverts to old dead human. The Doctor is not pleased in victory. Tish pulls Martha to safety and they both laugh so they don't cry.

Back in Martha's room, she and the Doctor agree that this is another situation that escalated, and that it's been fun. The Doctor is ready for just one more trip with her, but Martha has to say no. She wants to be more than a mere temporary passenger. The Doctor says okay then, and has to clarify that he means it's okay for Martha to consider herself a more permanent TARDIS occupant. Martha is excited, the Doctor is pleased, and off they go. Just in time to miss a call from Mum, who begs Martha not to get herself killed by hanging out with the Doctor. Turns out, that guy warning her earlier is named Harold Saxon. I wonder how he knows anything about the Doctor.

This episode kind of comes and goes. The Lazarus thing is a wonderful bit of horror, balancing an alienly unbalanced look with making sense at a glance. The quiet scene behind the altar is also good, a shift from the action/technobabble/family drama mixture that took up the rest of the episode. The introduction of Saxon and putting Martha's status on firmer footing are both important in the season's story arc. We also see Martha again blindly trust the Doctor while in a position of mortal peril, while the mysterious warnings highlight that the Doctor is a dangerous person to be around. And we get a look into the deeper, darker parts of the Tenth Doctor's soul. But it feels like we've seen a lot of this before, done to fuller effect.

Rating: 2 big lab explosions

Favorite dialogue: The Doctor: It really shouldn't take that long just to reverse the polarity. I must be a bit out of practice.

Bowties are: bad luck

​

3x07 - 42

Ohhhh it's this one. Whether this episode breaks us out of our low-ratings slump or not, we're gonna have some memorable moments. Grab your towel and come BURN WITH ME.

The Doctor celebrates Martha's upgrade to full-time Companion by sonicing her cellphone like he did Rose's. Before she can give it a test, the TARDIS is rocked by a distress signal. The Doctor operates the console with two hands and a foot (he's not missing Rose's help at all) to go see. They land in a hot, steaming metal sort of interior set. Wandering out the nearest door causes the locals to come running and slam the door behind them. They've landed on a cargo ship where the engine's died and nobody knows why the computer is locking down sections. Oh, and they're going to hit a star in 42 minutes. Is Arthur Dent on board?

The Doctor opens the door to get everyone to the TARDIS, only to be blasted back by the surging 3,000-degree heat in the room he just left.

Off to Engineering, then. The Doctor is surprised that the ship still uses a now-illegal form of propulsion. The captain says they'll totally take care of it next port call. But the engine is toast and the auxiliary engine controls are on the other side of dozens of deadlocked doors -- which, as the Doctor points out, are immune to sonicing. Crewmember Riley gets started on them with Martha's help. Meanwhile, Crewmember Ashton calls in to tell the captain to get to sickbay now. The Doctor follows.

Crewmember Korwin is convulsing on a sickbay bed, shouting that something's burning him. While the Doctor scans him, we find that Korwin is the captain's husband and that Ashton found him going mad and sabotaging the ship. Korwin is heating up with strange energies. The Doctor recommends a stasis chamber and detailed scans, then runs everyone else back to the engine room, leaving the ship doctor alone with a sedated patient whose hands are beginning to twitch.

Riley explains the lockdown release system to Martha. It's a cheap implementation of those website security questions about what car you first drove, or what highschool you went to. The crew put it together when they were drunk. If he gets one wrong, the whole system locks up. Better hope nobody made any drunken typos. Or that you didn't have a math nerd on the crew at the time -- the Doctor has to give them the answer when one door wants a sequence of special primes. But he doesn't know whether Elvis or the Beatles had more #1s. So Martha has to phone her mum, who of course is recalcitrant and slow to address the question, a scene well done.

Meanwhile the crew is trying to use the generator to jump-start the ship, and Korwin has started to walk around sickbay with his eyes shut. And telling the doctor to BURN WITH ME in a deep voice. And opening his eyes to reveal blinding white light. The doctor screams in pain over the intercom and cuts off Martha's little chat. The deed done, Korbin finds some kind of multi-purpose mask-helmet and puts it on, lowering the visor so he can flip it up dramatically when he wants to kill someone (and so he doesn't have to walk around with eyes shut).

Time Lord, Captain, and Crewman Scannell find Korwin gone and ship's doctor vaporized. The Doctor is intimidated by the force of the attack. The captain has been competent and focused until now, but cracks a little, refusing to believe her husband could be responsible. She also refuses to believe the readings that he's full of hydrogen and boiling temperatures. She also doesn't enjoy the Doctor's attempts at figuring out the source of the infection. But she bucks up and warns the crew against Korwin's infection.

Which is good. The usual pointless death of an unsuspecting redshirt will be avoided. Except Crewmember Erina has an attitude about being ordered around. She's sick of it and wishes she were dead, and of course when she swings a closet door shut Korwin's standing on the other side. BURN WITH ME and she's dead.

Shoutout to the actress playing the captain. She's a no-nonsense commander, but she loves her husband deeply, and the portrayal is good. Now she wants to face the truth, and the Doctor tells her her husband's gone.

Meanwhile, Crewmember Ashton is doing engineering under some equipment when someone walks in. He talks to Erina but it's Korwin that pulls him out. Korwin says "they are getting too far" and then "shares the light" with him, which involves burning Ashton's head with his hot hands.

People are dropping like flies, the heat shields are failing, and Martha and Riley are only about halfway to the aux controls with about 20 minutes to go. And then newly-possessed Ashton walks in on them, his BURN WITH ME sounding goofy in his red helmet thing. Riley is about to die the death of the dumb, but Martha panic-rushes him into an airlock and he ducks them both into an escape pod. So Ashton obliges with the obvious response. Now Riley and Ashton are dueling via jettison and abort sequences.

While the Doctor tries to deal with that, the captain finds Erina's charcoal mark and realizes they're all being hunted down. The generator's properly wrecked now, too. She demands answers from Korwin, who hesitates at being called her husband, then declares "IT'S YOUR FAULT." He's about to BURN her when Crewmember Scannell turns on the ice vents. Korwin howls in pain, and Captain Kath, now given some hope that her husband still existed, is upset at his apparent death.

The Doctor faces Ashton down and demands his own answers. Ashton reacts by smashing his control panel, irrevocably starting the jettison sequence. Ashton and Time Lord stare each other down, but Korwin's death reaches Ashton and he recoils, then leaves.

The computer announces jettison. Free of the ship's fading heat shields, there's no question that the pod and occupants will be fried. All the Doctor can do is stare through the windows at Martha, pounding on her window and screaming for help. He keeps mouthing "I'll save you" as encouragement. No sound, just silence, proper silence, and alternating views of the Doctor and Martha as the pod slides toward the star. And then a rising rush of noise to represent the star's ferocity. And then Martha simply says "Sorry."

Whoops.​

This has been a fast-paced, hectic episode thus far, with people running all over and plot points and deaths clipping along every few seconds. But now we breathe. Martha and Riley are off to doom, the Doctor is watching them go, Ashton is in transit for the moment, and the captain laments her husband as Scannell wants to know what this "fault" business is. She lashes out at him for killing her husband. The Doctor calls them to demand a spacesuit stat.

Riley is enjoying the view, resigned to death. Martha wants to believe in the Doctor. Riley doesn't have anyone in his life to believe in. He burned bridges with his mother, who wanted him to stay home safe. At least this time Martha can call her mum one last time. But Mum is a little too insistent on questioning what her daughter is up to to give Martha a satisfactory conversation. Also there's a woman in the room, trying to track the signal on a laptop.

Captain decoys Ashton into finding out that his human form is susceptible to a good punch in the gut. She forces his head into a cryo-CAT scanner or something and, not enjoying it, cranks the temperature way down. The crew is down to Captain Kath, Riley, and Scannell now.

Scannell is arguing with the Doctor and he's right. The Doctor wants to go out and magnetize the ship enough to re-magnetize the pod. The pod's too far away, magnetism isn't that powerful, and you are in the vicinity of some very chaotic magnetic fields right now dude. But the Doctor is determined to not lose Martha. So he suits up, without an umbilical cord, and leans waaay out onto the ship's exterior, into the full blast of a summer Arizona tornado, and manages to trip the control lever. The pod comes back, and Martha finds the Doctor collapsed in the hall. He has stared into the star and realized it's alive, at the cost of getting BURN WITH ME eyes himself. Ten minutes to doom, by the way.

The alien speaks through the Doctor: the cargo ship was siphoning fuel from the star without checking to see if it was alive. Captain doesn't get all this but defends herself that her fusion scoop is illegal and they have to be quick and sly about fuelling it.

While Martha and Captain drag the Doctor off to ultra-freeze him, Korwin begins to revive. Captain doesn't want to kill the Doctor, but is willing to help. Martha doesn't want her help: "You've done enough damage." Uh. Sure. Break the Doctor because you're mad at someone for not knowing stars can be alive. The Doctor can barely control his alien and admits to being scared. He tries to warn Martha about regeneration, but her bedside manner won't let her listen. Korwin senses what's going on and kills the cryo-power. Captain goes off to see about that. Riley is just a few doors away from the aux controls. Four minutes to go. But it's down to Martha being willing to leave the Doctor to go vent the sunstuff from the fuel storage. Captain runs into Korwin, admits her mistake, then runs away into an airlock where she vents herself and Korwin into the star.

Riley and Scannell get to the aux controls, but it's not working. With a minute left, Martha shows up and tells them to dump the fuel. The iron in her voice convinces them, and as the fuel spews out, the light leaves the Doctor's eyes. The engines fire just in time.

At goodbyes, Riley hopes Martha will stay, but settles for a kiss. Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor gives Martha a TARDIS key with his thanks and suggests doing something less hot next, like ice skating. Martha calls her mum back, who wants to make up with a nice dinner tonight. It's Election Day back home, by the way. I'm sure that won't be relevant any time soon.

This was some classic Who: sci-fi setting, Doctor separated from his TARDIS, a monster running around an enclosed space attacking people, Companion gets herself in a tight spot and needs rescuing. It was also very not classic, as the old stories could be pretty slow-moving to fill out four episodes. A lot of people die quickly in this one, a lot of plot happens fast, and that countdown keeps the pressure on.

Good set design, too. The ship doesn't look great, it looks fairly utilitarian, with an old-school shape (crew quarters way up in the front, large cargo area shielding them from whatever the engines are doing) and utilitarian interiors and devices. But it doesn't look broken-down either. It's left to the dialogue and machine designs and controls to tell us just how rundown and cheap the ship really is. I'm not sure that engine ever looked like "this is an engine" even before it was broken. But hey, every ship comes with a superfreeze stasis unit in the future.

If Riley and Scannell don't get thrown in jail for an illegal fusion scoop, maybe they can sell their story to a periodical and upgrade the ship. Get a modern engine, user-friendly security system, maybe one of those new-fangled Real People Personalities for the computer.

Rating: 3 crewmembers blasted

Favorite dialogue: Picard: Someone once told me that time is a predator that stalks us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a fire in which you BURN WITH ME.
Picard eye-blasts the Enterprise-D to cinders.
Picard: Ah, a job well finished. So long to that mis-proportioned caricature of a ship. Surely the dumbest-looking ship that will ever bear the name Enterprise.
Riker passes Picard several snapshots.
Picard: What is this atrocity? "Enterprise-J"? Sacre bleu, Rick Berman, I shall have vengeance if it takes thirty years and all I do is turn a hot Borg chick into a lesbian.

BURN: WITH ME
BURN WITH: ME
BURN WITH ME: yep

The answer was: Elvis

​

3x08 - Human Nature

We're getting deeper into episodes I've seen before. This is another two-part high-concept story. We just did "What if the Daleks tried to stop being the Daleks?" Now it's "What if the Doctor stopped being the Doctor?" This one turns out much better.

So the episode starts with the TARDIS being chased by violent somebodies. The Doctor decides there's only one course of action. He asks Martha if she trusts him -- it's implicit that he trusts her now -- and gives her a pocketwatch to hang onto at all costs, because --

-- And Tennant wakes up. In stripy pajamas and stubble, in yet another brown-and-yellow room. Martha comes in in full maid's outfit with a breakfast tray, coolly calling him Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith deigns to tell her about his strange dream. Martha professionally dismisses such ideas and shows him it's November 1913.

I understand not wanting to confuse new or casual viewers, but I think this episode would have been more artistic if it started with Tennant waking up. Let the audience feel disoriented and work harder to piece things together as the episode proceeds.

Smith works at a boys' school in Britain. He's a perfectly unremarkable schoolteacher. Not the slightest hint of any sideways thinking from him. Well, Martha's fellow maid Jenny thinks he's a space case. Martha defends him as being kind. Some people aren't kind to her, because she's, well -- and she points to her black face. "A Londoner!" Jenny finishes. Sure, that's it. But then a Snotty Lad stops by, toady in tow, to make fun of her skin tone anyway. A little double-cross on the viewers.

We meet Mr. Smith's admirer, Nurse "please call me Joan" Redfern. She . . . exists. There's nothing "extra" there. She's likeable, and she has presence in this episode, but no special interests to give her personality, no intellect or curiosity to mark her as What Could Have Been for Mr. Smith, let alone for the Doctor. She takes a genuine interest in Smith's wild dreams and the drawings he's made from them, but it's purely because she's interested in him. Mr. Smith seems no more sexual than the Doctor: he misses all Redfern's cues, and when she invites him to a dance, he vaporlocks and falls down stairs.

Martha bursts in on the "woman tending the man's wounds" scene, worried. Of course she's gotten used to going where she pleases when danger calls. But she doesn't have the endorsement of a helpful Time Lord now, and Smith and Redfern both think she's being forward.

Anyway, Smith's "Journal of Impossible Things" is full of drawings of hexagons and sonics and past antagonists. Clearly something is slipping through. "You have quite an eye for the pretty girls," Redfern says about an uninspired sketch, thinking there might be hope for her yet. Oh, that's just an invention, I call her Rose, she seems to disappear later on. And there's the TARDIS, a magic carpet in the form of a box. "I sometimes think," Smith admits, "how magical life would be, if stories like this were true." Redfern is charmed that the target of her affections might have a smidgen more depth than herself. Her idea of adventure probably involves telling her grocer "surprise me" when he asks if she wants pears or apples this week.

Meanwhile, Snotty Lad is having his toady, Latimer, do his homework while he sits back and brags about his father's money. Snotty deduces from Latimer's talk that Latimer has been reading Snotty's mail. Latimer protests that he's just spooky good at guessing, he can't help it.

Jenny takes her turn to chide Martha for being uppity. Martha's free spirit is chafing under the disrespect -- she doubtless got enough of this from the doctors back home. She tells Jenny one more month and she'll leave, into the sky and beyond. So much for OpSec.

But now Redfern gets hit with a green searchlight from the sky. She runs and finds Martha. They all see an unnaturally green comet flare across the sky. Smith dismisses it as a "meteorite", but of course Martha is worried.

​

Martha investigates. A boy, Baines, gets there first while looking for a beer stash, and watches an "aeroplane" land and turn invisible. Well, surely no danger getting in a stranger's UFO. Martha arrives, sees nothing, and not having watched The Voyage Home, goes home. Baines interviews the occupants, who are called the Family and are about to do the old body-snatch to him. Baines's friends let "him" back into the dormitory, beerless and affectless, as he looks around with a wide-set, appraising gaze. He zeroes in on Latimer looking at him funny and sniffs.

Exposition flashback time. The watch contains the Doctor's self, he used a Chameleon Arch to change himself very painfully into a human, and if he just hides long enough the somebodies hunting him (who can smell Time Lords) will die off. So he set the TARDIS to give him a new life somewhere on Earth, warned Martha she'll have to make do, and left her a few rules to follow. Twenty-three of them, protecting her and the humans around them, ending with "in case of fire, and only fire, open watch." Martha feels the strain of being without his guidance now that things are happening.

Latimer drops by Mr. Smith's office to get a book. Smith chides him for tanking his grades to avoid bullies' attention. "No man should hide himself, don't you think." While Smith is looking for the book, Latimer hears the watch whispering to him. So he opens it up, and as golden light streams out, "Baines" senses it. Latimer goes back to his dorm to study his find. "Baines" telepaths a message back to HQ to "activate the soldiers."

Awww yeah, bring on the creepy scarecrows!

Some Teddy Roosevelt wannabe sees a scarecrow wave at him. He decides it's a prank, but while he disembowels the scarecrow, more scarecrows come shambling over the ridge in the best cheesy old-school Doctor Who manner and dogpile him. These are regular humans trying to be scary in awkward, creepy costumes and nobody is going to pretend very hard otherwise. I love it. Then a little girl strolls along a lane, wearing soft colors and fabrics and holding a red balloon in her hand to maximize childish innocence. A scarecrow hauls her away. Awww yeah.

Back at school, the young teenage students are practicing with machine guns. Snotty accuses Latimer of deliberately bringing the class average down. Latimer doesn't want to shoot imaginary poorly-armed racist caricatures. Then he gets distracted by a vision of a battlefield where he realizes he and Snotty are about to die. With Mr. Smith's permission, the boys haul Latimer off to beat him. Redfern has been watching this with displeasure. She unloads to Mr. Smith about how angry she was at the army for getting her husband killed at something called Spion Cop. Mr. Smith is neutral about warfare, but hopes it will go away soon. Further moralizing is derailed by Smith noticing a piano about to fall on a passerby. He throws a all and sets off a Rube Goldberg chain reaction that stops the passerby short of being killed.

This is all in line with who the Doctor is. It may seem horrifying that he let Latimer get beaten up, and if he had his memories he probably would have stopped it. But the Doctor started as a tourist and he's still a tourist. He will help a planet against overpowering external threats, and he will help individuals in need, but his purpose in life is not to go around changing cultures to fit his ideas. And bullies are a part of this culture, and he's brainwashed himself to be a part of the culture, so Mr. Smith sees nothing terrible in bullying or warfare.

Anyway, his little heroic act gets Mr. Smith so chuffed he invites Redfern to the dance himself. They walk back, and as Redfern dissects Smith's ideal "Doctor" self he notices a scarecrow askew. In the scarecrow's hearing he mentions Gallifrey as his home, though he's not sure where it is. The stage is set for Martha to blunder in on the lovebirds kissing. She runs away to figure out what she's supposed to do about this doomed romance, and be upset that she isn't the one he fell in love with.

Meanwhile Jenny gets captured and taken to the spaceship. "Baines" puts his mother's consciousness into Jenny.

Martha continues to sink ships with her loose lips by spilling to "Jenny" that Smith will leave in a few weeks as she tries to figure out how to deal with the romance. "Jenny" is just weird enough about it that Martha twigs the jig is up and makes a break for it, nearly getting space-gunned down. Martha tries talking to Smith as if he's the Doctor, but he and Redfern are having none of it. And the watch is gone. Smith throws her out, and she runs for the TARDIS, blundering into Latimer. Latimer I think has a flash of her face from the watch and wants to talk to her, but Martha misses her chance.

The dance hall is surprisingly in red and yellow, not brown and yellow, to make it fancier I guess. Martha barges in to ruin Redfern's evening. She tries to brace her before pulling out the sonic screwdriver for Mr. John Smith to look at. Overhearing this, the little girl tips off the other Family who have barged in with their shambling scarecrows.

So the Doctor's attempt to hide, despite his and Martha's best efforts, has failed. He's cornered by the killers who want him dead, he's surrounded by innocent bystanders, no TARDIS, no screwdriver, no Time Lord experience or knowledge, he doesn't even know who he is or why they want him dead. And "Baines" demands that he "change back" immediately so they can bag a proper Time Lord, or they'll kill his choice of Martha or Redfern. This is, perhaps, the hangingest of personal cliffhangers that Doctor Who has produced (we will disqualify that time the universe started winking out while the Doctor was in stasis prison).

I mentioned the "Daleks in Manhattan" two-parter at the start. That had a very shaky premise, that Daleks would want to stop being Dalek. It also had a lot of shaky logic to answer how they'd go about that. This bled out into the story proper, because Daleks were going against their fundamental nature, and because they kept doing illogical things to suit the premise.

This has a very, well, precise premise as well. The hunters got close enough to fire at Martha and the Doctor, but not close enough to get a good look at them. They can smell (or "smell") across time and space. They have to have time travel capabilities to follow the Doctor, or there won't be a plot. But they can't follow closely enough to be right there when he and Martha walk out of the TARDIS. And to allow this to be a temporary situation, they have to have a short lifespan so the Doctor can wait them out in his timey-wimey way. And they have to need a Time Lord, or they can just shoot John Smith at the end of the episode.

The question is, as with the Manhattan story: is the result worth it? Is our suspension of disbelief safe? The answer here is yes. It's a great story, full of creepiness and an idea of "the Doctor as an ordinary human" that may be more meaningful than it seems at first glance. The premise doesn't trip itself up, doesn't get in the way of the story, doesn't require characters to inexplicably act against who they are, avoids a few plot holes with the mental engineering so that John Smith notices Martha but not the watch. Well paced, well structured. We'll see in the second part why the Doctor did all this, and, even if what follows is rather shocking, it just underscores who we have seen the Tenth to be.

The Chameleon Arch (which is from the old series) camouflages the Doctor to fit into the target society, and does it well. He's quite unremarkable aside from his dreams. But how much did it have to invent?

The First Doctor was no brave, clever, experienced time traveller. He was a grandfatherly, learned figure who led the show's young audience on exciting adventures in history and science fiction. No exceptional personality from the few serials I've seen. But we learn later that he started his tourism by stealing a TARDIS and taking off to see the universe. Who was he before that? Perhaps a professor with a doctorate, quietly teaching in a Gallifreyan university. Quite an unremarkable nobody. But perhaps he had a belief that small heroic acts count just like the big ones. And a yearning deep down to see the universe. He sometimes thought: how magical it would be, if stories about magic carpets and distant adventures were true. And one day he decided to go and see for himself.

This may be who the First Doctor was, in his younger days, with details chameleoned to fit 1913 Britain. An unremarkable, conforming professor who had that hidden streak of wanderlust that grew and ached until one day he took a TARDIS and left.

Toady (Latimer) is a suitably developed side character. Enough time is spent on him to understand who he is and that he has some psychic gift that will probably pop up in the second part. Through him, we see the brutality of boarding school culture, and through him and his classmates, we portend the tragedy that will soon break upon unsuspecting young men in Great Britain and the world. Martha's pity for her young tormentors, knowing what's coming, and for Redfern, parallels Redfern's pity for her boys, Latimer's pity for African natives, and the Doctor's initial pity revealed in the second episode. Latimer will take pity on his tormentor in the flashforward at the end of the second episode as well. In each case pity overlooks its target's desire or willingness to do the person harm. Kind individuals caught up in a pitiless culture.

And how about Martha? Would any other companion, under such pressure, have picked up on the wrongness of Jenny's curiosity, acted decisively, and thought on their feet so smoothly to get out of there? I doubt it. Well, technically Martha was sitting down, but, you know.

Rating: 3.5 shambling scarecrows
Favorite dialogue: Jenny: Head in the clouds, that one. I don't know why you're so sweet on him.
Martha: He's just kind to me, that's all. Not everyone's that considerate, what with me being --
Jenny: A Londoner?
Martha: Exactly. Good old London town!

It's not a meteorite: until it hits the ground

Good review. Couple of points.

1) Chameleon Arch isn't from the old series. You're thinking of the Chameleon Circuit, which should let the TARDIS change shape. This is new. It's also something to remember is possible in future episodes.

2) This is an adaptation of a New Adventures novel - originally featuring the Seventh Doctor and his companion Benny (a hard-drinking archaeologist from the future who sleeps around a fair bit... kind of a prototype for a character we'll be introduced in Tennant's fourth series). You can check out the (pretty major) differences at https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Human_Nature_(novel). I'm miffed the Doctor didn't get pussy out of this (literally - Redfern gives him a pet cat so he won't ever be alone).

3) Spion Kop was a battle in the Second Boer War, fought between the British and two Boer (Dutch colonials in Africa) Republics. The war lasted 3 years and, prior to WWI, would have been the major conflict of the era in the memory of British citizens. Latimer's vision of death on a battlefield is alluding to the fact that these kids are less than a decade from WWI and are likely to end up fighting in it.

The finale for the two-parter ("The Family of Blood") is jaw-dropping.

A lot of NuWho hasn't aged well, but Family of Blood is still wonderful, but then I really enjoyed the novel it's based on too.

I was also aware of a reference to a race of Chameleons from a Second Doctor story, so I was very muddled.

Thanks! Personally I would rather die for a place called something more dignified than Spion Cop.

The vision of death is played out in the next episode.

Back on the Chameleon Arch, I'm still very salty how it wasn't used on Donna.

If there was ever a series that you'd expect to introduce a bit of social mobility it's Dr Who, but no, let's clatter the mouthy working class woman with a glass ceiling, and tell her to shove off with a husband, a baby and a lottery ticket. Because that's all the British working class need, want and aspire too.

I mean, it wasn't fridging her at least, but it was still one of the more terrible decisions made.

Hopefully the specials will remedy that, and I can quit giving RTD the stinkiest of stink eyes.

​

3x09 – The Family of Blood

There's really no way out of this cliffhanger without someone dying. Except for Toady/Latimer to open the watch. Its Gallifreyan scent distracts the Family enough for Martha to grab the gun at her head and point it at "Jenny". Martha tells John Smith to get everyone out, but his hesitancy leaves Nurse Redfern to take charge. Outside, Smith tells one man to clear the village, and Latimer to -- but Latimer pushes him away. "You're as bad as them", he says, and runs off.

Martha tries to back out, but "Jenny" taunts her about Jenny's death so that a scarecrow can grab her from behind. The Family are content to take the gun, leave the girl to escape.

Creepier than the Addams family, but not as ooky.​

The Family relish the coming hunt. "Jenny" glows green, accesses Jenny's memories, and finds that Martha kept running off to the west. Fake Teddy Roosevelt goes to see what was so interesting in that direction. The little girl will sneak into the school.

Back at the school, Smith rouses the boys to fight. Martha protests. Is the not-Doctor blundering by thinking violence works? The headmaster storms in threatening punishments, is slow to believe anyone even with the extraterrestrial details excised, then storms out with an aide to see what's going on, deaf to Martha's warning. Martha is in the Doctor's classic position, with nobody willing to believe a terrible thing could be happening on home soil, everyone naively believing their defense can do the job, and a stubborn master in charge insisting on doing things his way. And like the Doctor so many times, Martha is left to wonder how many will die needlessly. She hurries off to find the watch, Redfern with her.

Next is a great little scene between the headmaster and "Baines". "Baines" takes control, ripping off a scarecrow's arm just for show, taunting the headmaster with foreknowledge of WWI, and asking if his pupils will be grateful he taught them to die bravely. When the headmaster recites his war experience and says he'd do it again, "Baines" guns down the aide and sends the headmaster running scared. All "Baines" wants is the Time Lord. Will the headmaster give him Smith?

He will not. The boys are rallied in the name of the King. While the little girl spies on them, "Baines" calls forth the scarecrows so we can watch them shamble again. It's still fun. Their head designs are very creepy.

Martha tries to give Redfern the basics of the Doctor's backstory, but Redfern seizes on "this black female servant is training to become a doctor" as the thing she can make sense of enough to dismiss as absurd. Ooooooh. Martha recites the bones of the hand. Redfern goes to test Mr. Smith and finds he can't recall any of his childhood. She's also worried about the boys. Martha was right, they're children. It's wrong to make them fight. You know that, John Smith.

And Smith does know it. He watched the aide die, he knows the Family will leave the school alone if he gives himself up. He remains silent for now.

Latimer tells Snotty Lad his future vision, where they die in battle. So relax, we die violently later. He then runs off to see if the watch can help. It warns him against the little girl. He blasts her with the watch's Time Lord energy and she runs off. But now the Family know about the watch. They have the crook, the loot, and the TARDIS can serve as the warrant, now they just need to put it all together to earn the chance to catch Carmen Sandiego. So the scarecrows attack. The boys defend, flinching and crying. John Smith himself brandishes a gun but does not fire. Bullets stop the scarecrows, and the headmaster determines they were only straw. "Then no one is dead, sir. We killed no one", one of the boys asks.

The little girl comes in and, despite the headmaster staunchly seeing her as an innocent, vaporizes him. There's one irritant gone, anyway.

Violet Beauregarde sure is more violent in the Johnny Depp version.​

"Baines" reactivates the fallen scarecrows, and we get to watch them chase the students around the school. Smith tells the ladies to follow the boys to the village, then goes back inside to look for stragglers only to get a faceful of straw people. Running with the ladies it is.

Teddy Roosevelt is now standing out front of the school with the TARDIS as bait. The Doctor had told Martha to stay away from the TARDIS. She didn't, and it's been found as a result. Of course John Smith won't recognize it. He doesn't want to hear it's in his diary. He only wants to be John Smith, none of this wild Doctor stuff. His reserve breaks. "Why can't I be John Smith? Isn't he a good man? Why can't I stay?" The storyteller is becoming less real to others than the story his dreams told.

Redfern takes Martha and Smith to hide in a house. She says nobody lives here, but it's clean and a fancy tea set still sits on the dining table. What gives? Well, it's the little girl's home. Redfern surmised the girl would have vapourised her parents after being bodysnatched, and it seems she was right. Smith says he must surrender, then lashes out at Martha for being useless. What good is she to the Doctor? "He's lonely", Martha says. Everything Smith hears about the Doctor makes him hate the guy even more, but now there's a gentle knock at the door. Latimer has come to return the watch. He held on to it at first, he explains, because it was waiting, and then because the Doctor scared him.

Latimer gets poetic in listing attributes of the Doctor he's seen: ice and rage, the storm and the heart of the Sun, ancient, watching the universe turn. He's really making the Doctor out to be an unapproachable force of nature. All this emphasizes how immense the gap is between the Doctor and humanity, despite his friendliness. It's why the Doctor can't really have a fulfilling romance with any human, even Rose or Martha. There can never be true equality. But against all this, Latimer adds: "And he's wonderful."

Imagine being in Smith's place. Your entire life, everything important to you, is being treated as a lie, something to be discarded. You'll be replaced by a strange, heartless person with powers beyond your imagination. It's genuinely terrifying. This story is immensely strengthened because it is very clear, in every scene, that Smith and the Doctor are separate people. It's not a question of Smith becoming someone else or regaining something he's lost, but of him ceasing to exist so that this Doctor person can live again. Would you care to make that sacrifice?

The Family, meanwhile, have gone back to their invisible spaceship and are having fun tossing bolts of fire at the village to draw the Doctor out. Well, that makes Smith's duties clear. He picks up the watch and we prepare to watch him struggle with himself to open it and bring the golden light SFX out. But he immediately tells Latimer the boy has a bit of telepathy, that's why he heard the watch, and Martha slowly smiles. The Doctor is back, just a little. Martha apologizes for not stopping the romance, saying that wasn't on the list of instructions. Smith retorts, "Falling in love? That didn't even occur to him? Then what sort of man is that?"

Martha explains that the Family can avoid death by consuming a Time Lord. That's why they need the Doctor in Original flavor, Extra Crispy Human won't do. All Smith hears is that "your job was to execute me." Martha pleads with him: people are dying, and the Doctor means everything to her.

Doctor-Smith puts two and two together: if the Family just wants eternal life, he can give them the watch and remain John Smith. Redfern has to quell that idea, citing Smith's own diary: if the Family lives forever, they'll multiply and conquer forever. "A war across the stars, for every child." Smith starts sobbing. Latimer and Martha sit outside quietly, watching the village get shelled, as Redfern and Smith face the decision together. Through all this drama, the music has been muted, letting the other elements carry the emotional weight.

Smith and Redfern chin up as best they can, reaffirm that their love is real, even share a vision of the two of them blissfully happy together. Redfern has had to be the strong one this episode, showing or creating depths she did not show in the first part. Like Rose, she was a nobody who has been changed by the Doctor's influence.

"Baines" is exulting in destruction when Smith walks into the spaceship. Presumably they left the door open for him to find. Smith protests that he had nothing to do with this, that Doctor person created the whole situation. The Family smirks at what an idiot the Doctor turned himself into. Smith offers them the watch if they'll just leave, and "Baines" accepts. But he throws Smith into the wall, Smith's hand flying out and slapping a column of controls as he falls. "Baines" finds the watch is empty now. "Smith" puts on his nerd glasses and Doctor voice and points out what an awful feedback in your doodad system I've caused. He evacuates.

They evacuate too, but the explosion knocks them over, and they find themselves on their knees before an angry Time Lord. He hid himself in the first place so that he wouldn't have to kill them. But now? "Baines" narrates the gruesome fates the Doctor invented for them: his father dangling in a well in unbreakable chains, his mother sucked into a collapsing galaxy, his sister somehow trapped in every mirror everywhere all at once (Every time you see a fleeting movement in a mirror, that's her! OOOooOOOOooooh), and "Baines" himself made a scarecrow. They will live forever, but not as they wanted to. Yikes.

The Doctor goes back to wrap things up with Redfern. She doesn't want to look at him, but is surprised he looks the same. She says Smith was braver than the Doctor, because he chose to die, not merely change. The Doctor offers her a ride. He contains John Smith still. He wants to start their relationship over, give it a shot. But Redfern can't live looking in the face of the dead man she loved. And she won't forgive the Doctor for bringing death to her school. The Doctor exits, leaving behind an abandoned table with two tea settings, never to be used.

Martha is anxious to comfort Redfern if she's needed. She's also anxious that the Doctor doesn't think she really loves him or anything. The Doctor brushes it all off. He thanks her for her assistance, smiles, and hugs her. Then Latimer stops by to thank them. He will fight in the coming war, because it must be done. The Doctor gives him the watch and flies off. And then we see Latimer in battle at his fateful moment, helping Snotty Lad dodge the incoming shell, and chivvying him to safety. And then he's at an old soldiers service at the school, and sees Martha and the Doctor are there to pay their respects.

Well. There's still a lot to talk about. The Family are a very unpleasant antagonist. They kill Jenny, they kill an Innocent Little Girl, they revel in cruelty and killing and destruction. They mock and belittle and seek to take for themselves. They're very much the Doctor's opposite. There are doubtless intended parallels between them and the British Empire.

War is presented as a fact of life in this time. The culture naively sees war as something to be engaged in for adventure, for honor, for King and Country. But people like Redfern and Latimer don't like it. Still, Latimer can find his own reasons for enlisting, and live with it afterwards. This is not an episode for explicit, unadulterated messages. The audience is trusted to draw their own conclusions about war, bullying, and classism.

As I mentioned last time, one of the themes running through this two-parter is mercy and pity in the face of a pitiless world. The Doctor, while still in his watch, shows mercy to Latimer by warning him of his death so he could avoid it. He shows mercy to the Family by going through the pain of the Chameleon Arch and rendering himself helpless for several months, just so he won't have to kill them to stop them. Which makes the imaginative punishments he visits on them all the more shocking. Latimer's recitation of how scary the Doctor is deep down prepares us somewhat, but still, yikes. At the same time, that he punished them at all is in character for the Tenth Doctor, all the way back to his introduction, when he decided he didn't offer second chances.

Timothy "Toady" Latimer was integrated very well. He was part plot device, as his job was to keep the watch out of Martha's hands until the writers were ready for her to have it, while opening the watch when the Family was about to kill someone the writers didn't want dead yet. But plotwise, his telepathy only mattered so that he could hear the watch whispering. He was fairly well-rounded for the part he had to play.

Redfern would not have lasted long in the TARDIS. She might have developed affection for the Doctor, but all the running and violence would have been too much for her.

Scarecrows and villainous aliens aside, what really elevates this two-parter is, fittingly, the humanity. Smith's desperate desire to live, to be a simple man with Redfern and not be replaced by a monster. Redfern's discovery of one more man she can love, only to have to be strong and urge him to cease to exist for the good of the children. Martha's selfless love for the Doctor, different from Rose's jealous desire, and everything she has to decide and carry out on her own authority. (Full marks, Martha, except less spilling the beans next time.) And Latimer's view from the bottom of the heap. To do all this, the acting had to be spot on, and the writing had to fully commit to the premise. I think everyone delivered.

Rating: 4 whispering watches
Favorite dialogue: Martha: He's just everything to me, and he doesn't even look at me, but I don't care. 'Cause I love him to bits. And I hope to God he won't remember me saying this.

We'll blast them into dust, then fuse the dust into glass, then shatter them all over again!: And then we'll turn them into fleas, and put them in a box, and put that box inside of another box, and then mail that box to ourselves, and when the box arrives, we'll smash it with a hammer!