New Earth

I'm a Chav!

The true kick-off story for the Tenth Doctor and Rose as the Doctor was out for so much of The Christmas Invasion. I recall this one not sitting well with me and I think it was more than just my general distaste for Rose in her early adventures with the Tenth Doctor. But when I went back and rewatched Tooth and Claw, it wasn't quite as bad as I remembered so maybe this one won't be as bad either.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Rose land on New Earth, a colony planet established after Earth is destroyed. The Doctor has received a note via his psychic paper requesting his presence at a nearby hospital. As they walk there, they are spotted by a probe operated by Cassandra, the woman who was seemingly killed after the destruction of the original Earth. She orders her cloned servant Chip to bring Rose to her.

When they arrive at the hospital, Rose and the Doctor are split into separate elevators. The Doctor is taken up to the ward where he finds the Face of Bo who is dying. Rose on the other hand is taken under the hospital where she is lured into Cassandra's hideout by Chip. Rose is trapped and Cassandra transfers her mind into Rose's body, destroying her own body in the process. Summoned by the Doctor, she heads up to the ward.

As Cassandra arrives, the Doctor is confused by the fact that the sisterhood who runs the hospital has been able to supply cures to diseases that shouldn't be cured for centuries. Cassandra had observed the same thing and works with the Doctor to uncover a secret storage facility where thousands of cloned humans are infected with all known diseases to work out cures. The Doctor is outraged and confronts Novice Hame who had followed them while looking after the Face of Bo. Hame runs off to alert her superiors and Cassandra knocks the Doctor out when he notes that he knows that she is not Rose.

Cassandra places the Doctor in a spare cell, intending him to be infected by the various diseases pumped in to the cells. She is interrupted by Matron Casp and Sister Jatt. Cassandra attempts to blackmail them to keep their secret but when they refuse, she opens the cell doors on that block, allowing the people out. This inadvertently lets the Doctor out as well. One of the freed humans short circuits a control mechanism, killing himself but opening all the doors, freeing everyone. The Doctor, Cassandra and Chip all flee as the horde, begging for help, overrun and infect Sister Jatt, killing her.

The trio runs and hides in Cassandra's lair, although Chip is separated and forced to barricade himself in one of the cells. Most of the horde burst into the hospital, infecting visitors and patients alike. Matron Casp does manage to initiate quarantine, sealing the hospital. In the lair, the Doctor orders Cassandra out of Rose, which she does by taking over his mind.

They find a ladder leading up the elevator shaft and begin to climb it. They are pursued both by the horde and by Matron Casp. Casp catches up to them but she is caught by the horde and infected. She loses her grip on the ladder and plunges to her death. Cassandra and Rose reach the top of the shaft and Rose orders Cassandra to leave the Doctor so he can get them out using the sonic screwdriver. Cassandra jumps into Rose but the Doctor refuses to open the door as long as Cassandra is in Rose. She jumps back to the Doctor but is in the same predicament. With no other choice, Cassandra jumps into the lead infected person. The Doctor then opens the door and he and Rose hop through it. He closes it behind them but not before Cassandra jumps back into Rose.

Cassandra is momentarily overwhelmed by the loneliness she experienced in the infected woman's body, but the Doctor drags her into the main ward, which is where the high priority patients are. The Doctor has everyone grab the IV cocktails used to cure them while he rigs a repelling device. Gathering all the cocktails on his body, the Doctor reopens the elevator shaft. Convincing Cassandra to help him, they slide down to the stalled elevator on the ground floor.

The Doctor pours all the IVs into the decontamination bath tank on the roof of the elevator and orders Cassandra to hold elevator lever to keep it in place. He then jumps into the elevator and invites the infected horde in with him. As they enter, he activates the decontamination system and the horde in bathed in the curing cocktail. They begin to heal from their diseases and walk out of the elevator. The Doctor orders them to touch the others, passing the cure on to others. Deprived of human contact in their cells, the cured people eagerly hug and touch the others, spreading the cure throughout the hospital.

The quarantine is lifted and the authorities come and arrest most of the staff. The cured are gathered up to be integrated into society while the Doctor heads back up to see the Face of Bo. The Face of Bo tells the Doctor that he has a message for him but will wait until their third and final meeting to impart it. He then teleports elsewhere.

The Doctor then orders Cassandra to exit Rose's body for either trial by the authorities or death. Cassandra balks but goes into Chip's body when he is revealed to have survived. However, Chip, as a half clone is already dying. But Cassandra decides to accept death in exchange for one favor. The Doctor and Rose take her into the TARDIS and transport her back to a party she mentioned earlier. Cassandra comes up to herself, cloaked to hide the clone markers, and tells herself how beautiful she is. The past Cassandra is touched and calls for help as the future Cassandra collapses and dies. The Doctor and Rose quietly slip away in the TARDIS.

Analysis

I can see why I didn't care for this one the first time around, yet my memory was cheating on me a bit as again, it was not as bad as I remembered. There are a number of flaws in this story and if you are not quite into zombie stories, the action will not excite you. But to say that it is actively bad would be an exaggeration.

First, let's hit some of the positives. Most of the acting was pretty good in this. It is rather funny to watch this story with the whole rest of his run to see how many of the Tenth Doctor tropes formulated in this story. His "I'm so, so sorry" line, the exuberance at the mundane, the fundamental pleasure of seeing people delivered from certain death scenarios and the almost instantaneous rage at enforced suffering. If you want the Tenth Doctor in a nearly pure form, you will get it here. Of course, that includes some of his more annoying traits as well but we'll get to those.

Probably more than any other story in her regular run, this was the story that Billie Piper got to show herself as a decent actress. The distance between Rose and Cassandra was probably not that big but there was a change in how the characters carried themselves and I could appreciate the effort there. It probably speaks more to my opinion of Rose that I preferred the Cassandra personification more than the Rose. Of course, I'm a sucker for a good sarcastic wit as well as a bit of rogue demeanor so I thought she simply sparked more when she was Cassandra rather than Rose.

You wouldn't have thought that Cassandra would be a repeat villain but she is and she makes for a rather decent one. In The End of the World, she is just the annoying socialite who happens to be the dinner guest that ends up being the murderer (very Agatha Christie). Here she has a bit more depth and personality. She also gets to add nuances that come from being in different bodies and given a different spin by the actors. Though her motivation is still just money and youth, there is a brief moment where you get caught up in her helping the Doctor with his investigations and rather enjoying her extra take on things.

The sets and direction were also nice. You could tell that the budget was a concern due both to the tightness of a number of shots as well as the fact that only three of the cat nurses showed their faces. All others wore full veils, eliminating the need for the expensive and time consuming makeup. But for what it was, I thought it was a decent job in trying to convey a sense of largeness while also trying to get that sense of intimacy.

Now on to the less than stellar bits. I mentioned the good things and the tropes of the Tenth Doctor that cropped up. But that also includes some over-the-top moments. His celebration at having cured the people was a bit much. I can understand joy at the situation but there was an excessiveness that seemed unbecoming of the Doctor. I thought his instantaneous anger at the cat nurses was also a bit much. There should have been a slightly slower build to his rage. It wasn't bad but I thought it was too quick a turn into making the nurses the villains of the story.

Staying with the solution, I thought the fix for this was a bit too pat. Yes the cat nurses had developed cures to various diseases using these people as lab rats but if a cure had been developed, why keep the rat that still has that disease? Were they keeping them for synthesis purposes? Also, didn't some of these people have diseases for which a cure had not yet been developed? Those would have been unaffected by the cocktail and they still would have infectious. Also, if the cures were delivered intravenously, why does mixing them in a steam bath produce a cure and how is that cure able to be transmitted simply by surface contact? It is a very slap dash solution and it seems hokey even while watching.

Another small problem with this story is that the special effects look a bit cheap. Of course we're not expecting absolute magic, but usually there's a bit better work done rather than just a straight CGI effect that cannot possibly compete with Hollywood effects. But in this case, there were several shots where the camera just trained on the person and CGI was expected to tell the tale. It just had the unfortunate effect of making the story look cheap.

So overall, there is a bit to like in this story but it does fail on a number of levels as well. Yet the parts that don't work aren't so bad to cause the story to completely fall apart and they never detract from the fun ride. It feels more like what it is: an early story where kinks are being worked out. It can be fun and if you don't think about it too hard, it is serviceable enough. Decidedly middling seems about right.

Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5

The Stolen Earth/Journey's End

The man who abhors violence, never carrying a gun. But this is the truth Doctor, you take ordinary people and fashion them into weapons.

As has been stated by many others besides me, The Stolen Earth and Journey's End were the real goodbye stories for Russell T. Davies. Yes he stuck around for another year but he tried to replicate these in a way with The End of Time and it didn't really work. These were much more of a natural end with the old sitcom style of bringing back cast that had left the show and having a big send off at the end. But even in that, it is not without it's flaws.

Plot Summary

Having been warned of trouble at the end of Turn Left, the Doctor and Donna arrive back on Earth but find everything seemingly normal. However, upon going back in the TARDIS, the Earth is instantaneously transported away and the TARDIS is left in space. Around the world, reactions are observed by Martha with UNIT in Manhattan, Jack Harkness and his fellow Torchwood team Ianto Jones and Gwen Cooper in Cardiff, Sarah Jane with her son Luke and supercomputer, Mr. Smith, in London and Wilfred and Sylvia also in London. As people notice the change in sky, Rose teleports in, just outside Wilfred and Sylvia's home.

Unable to figure out what happened, the Doctor and Donna travel to the Shadow Proclamation where they learn of twenty four other planets disappearing. While going over the list, Donna recalls that the hatchery planet of the Adipose and the planet of the Pyroviles was also missing. The Doctor adds those to the list along with the lost moon of Poosh and they are projected outward and reform themselves into a perfect engine alignment.

Above Earth, the Daleks prepare an invasion force and move towards Earth, attacking the various armed installations and rounding up humans for transport back to the Dalek command ship, the Crucible. Martha' command post is Manhattan is overrun and the commanding general fits her with a experimental teleport based off Sontaran technology. He also gives her a command disk called the Osterhagen Key. She then teleports to her mother's place in London. With the defenses down, Earth surrenders.

The Doctor and Donna try to figure out how to trace the missing planets and Donna mentions the stories of the missing bees. This triggers an idea as a certain alien insect interbreeds with Earth bees and may have warned them. They scan for signals and trace the alien signature to just outside the Medusa Cascade. The Shadow Proclamation tries to requisition the Doctor but he and Donna leave in the TARDIS before they can take control. They reappear outside the Medusa Cascade but find nothing and the end of the signal trail.

Wilfred and Sylvia step out to fight the Daleks but are rescued by Rose, looking for the Doctor. They head back to their home where Rose detects a signal from Wilfred's computer. It doesn't have a webcamera so she can only receive and not transmit. She observes as Harriet Jones, former PM, sends a signal over the subwave network and contacts Torchwood, Sarah Jane and Martha. She networks with Mr. Smith and the Cardiff rift power source to boost the phone signal to call the Doctor, which succeeds but also alerts the Daleks to Harriet Jones' location. She transfers control to Captain Jack at Torchwood just before the Daleks break into her home and kill her.

The Doctor receives the signal and contacts with Jack, Martha and Sara Jane. Wilfred and Sylvia are relieved to see Donna just behind the Doctor. As they talk, the signal is overridden by The Crucible and the Doctor sees Davros, who was rescued from death in the Time War by Dalek Caan, after escaping the events of Evolution of the Daleks. The Doctor deactivates and lands on Earth in London. The Daleks also send an attack force to the new subwave control center at Torchwood.

After landing, the Doctor and Donna exit and spot Rose who left Wilfred and Sylvia's house. The Doctor runs towards her but is shot down by a passing Dalek. The Dalek is destroyed by Jack who teleports in to help. He and Rose drag the Doctor into the TARDIS where he begins to regenerate. However, after healing the wound, the Doctor transfers the regeneration energy into the severed hand cut off by the Sycorax and recovered from the Master following Last of the Time Lords. The Daleks meanwhile move and surround the TARDIS.

Sarah Jane leaves her house to go help the Doctor but runs into a Dalek patrol. They mean to kill her but are destroyed by Mickey and Jackie Tyler who teleport in from the parallel dimension. They approach the TARDIS and see it placed in a temporal lock which drains it's power. It is then taken up to The Crucible. Knowing it's the only way to get on to the ship, Sarah Jane, Mickey and Jackie surrender to the Daleks and are put with a group of human prisoners for transport.

On The Crucible, the Daleks deactivate the defenses of the TARDIS and order the people out. The Doctor, Rose and Jack all come but Donna is distracted by a heartbeat and the TARDIS door shuts before she can follow. Suspecting treachery, the Supreme Dalek drops the TARDIS into the core of The Crucible where the TARDIS will be destroyed. As the TARDIS begins to burn, Donna touches the hand filled with regeneration energy. It explodes out of it's case and a clone of the Doctor materializes. The clone brings up the TARDIS' power and dematerializes, making it look like the TARDIS was destroyed.

Jack attacks the Supreme Dalek but is gunned down. The Doctor observes him quietly coming back to life but plays along, though Rose is unaware of Jack's ability and thinks him really dead. The Doctor and Rose are taken to Davros' lair while Jack's body is dumped in the incinerator. He escapes and crawls through the ducts while the Doctor and Rose are placed in isolation cells.

As the humans arrive on The Crucible, a woman falls over, distracting the Daleks. Sarah Jane and Mickey make a dash and hide behind a door but Jackie is left in the crowd. The Supreme Dalek orders a test and Davros informs the Doctor of the new weapon, the reality bomb, which destroys the electrical connection between atoms, reducing all matter in it's field to subatomic particles. As it prepares to fire on the crowd, the thirty minute recharge on Jackie's teleport ends and she is able to teleport to Mickey and Sarah Jane while the rest of the humans are disintegrated. Jack pops out of a duct and Sarah Jane gives him a warp star that had been presented to her in the past and Jack hooks it up, preparing to destroy the ship.

On Earth, Martha teleports to Germany where she enters and activates one of the Osterhagen key stations. She radios out to the other stations and two other stations respond: one in China and the other in Africa. They ready their stations, which will trigger twenty-five nuclear warheads buried in the crust, cracking it and destroying the Earth.

At nearly the same time, Martha and Jack radio The Crucible and threaten to activate their weapons if the Daleks do not release the Doctor and return their planets. The Daleks however lock on to the signaling locations and teleport Martha, Jack, Sarah Jane and Mickey to Davros' lair. All four are placed in isolation cells similar to the Doctor and Rose. The Supreme Dalek then orders the powering of the reality bomb to full power to destroy the universe while the Daleks fall back to the protection of The Crucible.

With the failure of other options, the clone Doctor builds a small weapon and rematerializes the TARDIS in Davros' lair. He bursts out but Davros stuns him with a burst of electricity. Donna runs out to grab the weapon and Davros electrocutes her as well. Unbeknownst to him though, the electrical burst energizes the regeneration energy she absorbed from the Doctor's hand, giving her and infusion of the Doctor's mind.

Donna, with the Doctor's mind, access the control panel and deactivates the reality bomb. She then neutralizes Davros' and the Dalek's weaponry. She frees the prisoners who push the Daleks out of the way and she, the Doctor and the clone Doctor return the planets to their proper locations. Davros manages to destroy part of the control panel before they can return the Earth but he is neutralized once again. The Supreme Dalek comes down to attack but it is destroyed by a shot from Mickey.

The Doctor runs back into the TARDIS and contacts Torchwood, who had been caught in a time bubble to protect them from the Dalek attack, and Luke and Mr. Smith. Together they plan to create a reinforced energy line between the Earth and the TARDIS, allowing the TARDIS to pull the Earth across space. To access the TARDIS mainframe, Sarah Jane activates K-9, who feeds the TARDIS information to Mr. Smith. As the Doctor does this, Donna and the clone Doctor realize that the Daleks will still come after them and are highly dangerous. The clone Doctor activates a feedback loop which destroys the Dalek fleet and sets The Crucible on fire.

The Doctor hurries everyone into the TARDIS and appeals to Davros to come with them. Davros curses him and refuses. Dalek Caan, who had arranged everything to ensure the destruction of his own race, shouts a warning that one of his companions still must die. The TARDIS leaves The Crucible as it explodes and pulls the Earth across space and places it back in it's proper orbit.

The Doctor lands on Earth and drops of Martha, Jack, and Sarah Jane. Mickey also comes with them as his grandmother has passed away in the parallel dimension and he feels he has no place there. The Doctor then lands the TARDIS in the parallel dimension in Bad Wolf Bay to return Rose and Jackie, informing them that access between the dimensions will be sealed once more. He also sends the clone Doctor, who, being half human, will age and not regenerate. Rose accepts him as a substitute for the Doctor and the three are left as the TARDIS takes off again.

On the TARDIS, Donna's mind begins to become overwhelmed as the Doctor's mind is too great for her human brain. Knowing that she will die if he doesn't, though she begs him not to, he purges her mind of her knowledge of him, leaving her as she was before being transported to the TARDIS at the beginning of The Runaway Bride. He returns her to Wilfred and Sylvia's and tells them that they must never reveal what happened to her.

Donna wakes and assumes that she missed things once again. She dismisses the Doctor with a bare glance and he leaves the house. Wilfred however sees him off, saluting him as he goes. The Doctor then dematerializes in the TARDIS, alone once more.

Analysis

It's a bit cliché to talk again about how RTD starts off a story like a house on fire but always peters out. But the cliché does apply to this story as it has in previous ones. However, I would note that I don't think the fall off here was as bad as some fans make it. It is still a good story and still fundamentally entertaining even if there are some sour notes in the second half.

I'll just go ahead and cut to the chase, the problem in Journey's End is the tone shift. The Stolen Earth and the first 30 minutes or so of Journey's End played like a solid sci-fi adventure story. There was a small cheese factor but the overall tone was mostly dark and serious with some real weight behind the various moments such as the Doctor getting shot by a stray Dalek, the Daleks destroying a house with a family inside it and the death of Harriet Jones.

That tone continued until the arrival of Doctor-Donna. While I love Donna, the flippancy that suddenly took over regarding the situation and her own cavalier attitude towards the situation was just so jarring. Millions of people had died and they are laughing and pushing the Daleks and Davros around like the props they actually are. I don't even mind the usual complaint people have about the shut down being a single button on a panel in Davros' lair. For me, it is all about the flippancy of the moment.

The silliness gets compounded with the TARDIS towing the Earth across space. That just seems a bridge too far and how do you reconcile that silly, cartoony tone with the idea of Daleks mowing people down or even what happens to Donna later? The story was dark and brooding, then it got silly, then pukingly saccharine, then dark and depressing again. It's just so inconsistent in what it thinks the audience should feel about it that it becomes aggravating.

So let's jump to the saccharine moment: leaving Rose on Bad Wolf bay a second time. I'm fairly open about not liking Rose very much but I appreciated the emotion of that scene in Doomsday. There was raw feeling and even if you didn't like Rose, you could appreciate the loss she was feeling with regard to the Doctor. Fast forward two years later and while Rose is dropped off again, she now gets the clone Doctor to grow old with while keeping her parents and little brother. Not only did this throw all the emotion of the first scene into the garbage, it wasn't done particularly well because it was noticeable dubbed with studio recordings (presumably due to the wind issues). It was just the show bending over backwards once more to give the spoiled brat that is Rose whatever she wants.

I say spoiled brat because while Rose was improved in most of her appearances in Series Four, the scene where she is listening to the discussion between Harriet Jones and the others, she can't help but talk about how she was important as well. Her resentment about the status of Martha as a companion of the Doctor who has gone on to better things shows that petulant side of Rose that I couldn't stand when she was a regular companion.

A third point where Rose bothered me was when the Doctor was preparing to regenerate. Of the three of them, Rose should have been the least bothered by his regeneration. She was close to the Ninth Doctor, who selected her in the first place. Her mourning over the potential loss of the Tenth Doctor spoke to her shallowness regarding the Tenth Doctor. She knew that the Doctor would still be the Doctor, but it was the physical appearance and nuances of the Tenth Doctor's personality that she really liked. She mourned over the potential death of the Tenth Doctor because it was that form and not the Doctor himself that she desired. Again, it was just a reinforcement of the shallowness of Rose.

As for the Doctor himself, I quite liked him in this. He got dark and brooding and I always appreciate him in those situations. I also liked that, unlike Rose, he balanced out praise for everyone. He lavishes praise twice on Donna for her contributions when the try to figure things out at the Shadow Proclamation. He praises Martha and all the other contributors in their fight against the Daleks, showing no favoritism and working together. I would have liked to see him offer a bit more of a contribution in the final equation but it all works fairly well in the end.

All of the rest of the companions do well. I remember watching this story for the first time and actually thinking about watching Torchwood because I enjoyed Ianto and Gwen in this story. Other information I heard about Torchwood dissuaded me but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy it. I liked Jack a bit more than Martha but both were still good. Jackie and Mickey didn't do much except for rescue Sarah Jane at the beginning of Journey's End so they were a bit wasted but that's not the actor's fault. Donna also was pushed into the background a bit after leaving the Shadow Proclamation but with so many others pulling focus, that a bit understandable. I did enjoy the scene between her and the clone Doctor as he mimics her outrage and speech patterns. That was an amusing little scene.

The clone Doctor was fine. I don't really understand why people get bent out of shape about him. Obviously they had to avoid the proper regeneration of the Tenth Doctor and funneling the regeneration energy into a clone seemed perfectly fine. I also appreciated that he did what the regular Doctor could not and that was to destroy the Daleks properly. The Doctor is outraged at what the clone has done, but he raises a good point in that there are millions of Daleks, just as dangerous as before and now no Time Lords to oppose them. Genocide may be a sin in the eyes of the damaged Tenth Doctor, but how many lives would have been lost if the Daleks been permitted to continue? I side with the clone in this case. That he gets stuck with Rose is not his fault.

This story also saw the return of Davros and he had both excellent and silly moments. In a way, he was a microcosm of the whole story. Some of my favorite moments are Davros quietly taunting the Doctor, exposing him to his true nature. But then he goes and dials it up to eleven and goes way over-the-top. I compare it to not being able to fully decide whether to channel the Davros from Genesis of the Daleks or to give over to the ranting Davros of Revelation of the Daleks. I'm also not sure why he suddenly got Emperor Palpatine power in the form of projected lightening. That seemed a bit odd. Overall good, but not without flawed moments.

The overall story as I said worked well aside from the tone shifts. I felt bad for Donna but understood why they had to write her out the way she was. Whether you liked the Doctor Donna or not, Donna was fully prepared to keep travelling with the Doctor in either capacity. Only her outright death or other great tragedy would have stopped her. I suspect that her outright death was debated but that would have vindicated Sylvia and crushed Wilfred so I can understand keeping her alive. Those final moments between the Doctor and Wilf were very good and the clear impetus in making Wilf a proper companion in The End of Time. That everyone agrees that those moments between him and the Doctor were the best parts of The End of Time justifies that decision.

So overall, I'd say that the story is fun but the first part outpaces the second. As much as I dislike Rose and as much as I dislike the hokey tone the story takes for those few minutes, the majority of both parts work very well. I would also say that Journey's End does well in that it ends on a true and somber note and that does quite a bit to mitigate the overt silliness of the previous fifteen minutes.

This is the proper RTD farewell and he does a good job with that send off. Obviously there are better Tenth Doctor stories but it handles the epic scope fairly well and will give you a pretty good ride, even if there are a few bumps in the road here and there.

Overall personal score: The Stolen Earth - 4.5 out of 5; Journey's End - 3 out of 5

Tooth and Claw

We are not amused!

Tooth and Claw was the second episode of the Second Series and the second celebrity historical with Queen Victoria. Victoria is actually played by the same actress who nearly became a companion to the Second Doctor (Samantha in The Faceless Ones) except that she turned it down when offered, presumably due to other commitments, paving the way for Victoria Waterfield in The Evil of the Daleks. I remembered being not overly impressed by this story the first time around, in contrast to most fan reaction, so we'll see if it plays better a second time.

Plot Summary

A group of monks arrive at a country estate called Torchwood House in 1879 and take the household prisoner, locking them in the basement with a creature in a cage. Nearby, the Doctor and Rose land, undershooting their intended target of a 1979 concert. They run into the caravan of Queen Victoria who was forced to abandon the train due to a tree on the tracks. She is now making for Torchwood House to spend the night. The Doctor uses the psychic paper to convince the queen that he has been appointed as Lord Protector over her person and he is invited along.

The group arrives at the house where the monks are posing as staff and the master of the house, Sir Robert, is being forced to assist in their plan. The group is invited in and Sir Robert shows the Queen, the Doctor and Rose the house. The Doctor becomes fascinated by a telescope built by Sir Robert's father who was a close friend of Prince Albert prior to his death and would come up for visits. Sir Robert begins to tell the legend of the wolf but is interrupted by Father Angelo suggesting that everyone freshen up before dinner.

Each person heads to a different room to prepare. The Queen also has a special package locked away for safekeeping. The monks pass out mugs of drugged tea and knock out all the guards, leaving the Queen, Sir Robert, the Doctor, Rose and Captain Reynolds (commander of the Queen's guard) awake. While Rose is dressing for dinner, she discovers a maid named Flora who tells her of what happened. They go to warn the Doctor but are captured by the monks and chained with everyone else in the basement.

At dinner, Sir Robert continues with the story of the wolf, which parallel's the typical werewolf legend. He also notes that his father and Prince Albert indulged in the tales a great deal during his visits and Sir Robert suspects that his father actually believed the legend to be true. He notes that while most of the slaughter was against livestock, once a generation a child would disappear, usually a boy, as well. As they talk, Father Angelo, posing as the butler, moves to the window and begins chanting.

In the basement, a young man is enclosed in the cage but with dilated eyes. Rose recognizes a sign of alien life and communicates with it. It admits to being alien, infecting new bodies as the old ones deteriorate, but does not admit it's origin. The moon begins to break through the clouds and the man begins to change into a wolf. Rose urges everyone to ignore the change and pull on the chain binding them together. In the dining room, the Doctor becomes alarmed at the monk's change and he and Sir Robert leave the room, following the sound of the howls. They open the door just as Rose and the staff pull the chain loose and the werewolf breaks free from it's cage.

Father Angelo disarms Captain Reynolds but Queen Victoria pulls a gun from her purse and shoots him. The gamekeeping staff pull weapons from the cabinet and fire at the werewolf, driving it back. It regroups and kills the gamekeepers and the butler while the rest retreat. Sir Robert's wife and the maids head for the kitchen to escape but find the doors boarded shut and guarded by armed monks. Sir Robert also discovers this in another room and he is shot at while trying to open the windows for Victoria to escape.

The group retreats further in, the Queen retrieving her valuables from the safe and meet Captain Reynolds in the hall. He holds off the werewolf while Sir Robert, the Queen, the Doctor and Rose barricade themselves in the library. The wolf kills Reynolds but does not burst in to the room, instead looking for another way in. The Doctor discovers that the walls are varnished with the oil of mistletoe, something the women notice the monk guards wearing outside. He deduces that the wolf is allergic to mistletoe and that buys them time to look through the books for answers.

The Doctor pulls one book and discovers that the ship from which the wolf landed, crashed over three hundred years ago near the abbey of the monks. He theorizes that only a small sample of the cells survived the crash and took hundred of years to grow into the form it is now. Rose tells how the man, before transforming, spoke of wanting the Queen and to create the empire of the wolf. The Queen produces her hidden treasure, a great diamond that Prince Albert always brought with him to be cut down, suggesting that the wolf might want it. The Doctor realizes Sir Robert's father and Prince Albert had actually been collaborating, planning a trap in case the wolf ever attacked the house.

The werewolf bursts into the room through the skylight and the group runs to the observatory. Sir Robert's wife emerges and throws a bucket of mistletoe tea on the werewolf which causes the creature to retreat. The women return to the kitchen while Sir Robert stands guard outside the observatory room. The Doctor and Rose begin to align the telescope with the moon, the Doctor telling Rose that it is actually a light focusing machine, using the large diamond as the final focus for the moonlight.

The wolf recovers and kills Sir Robert before bursting into the room. It scratches the Queen as the Doctor finishes aligning the machine. A beam of moonlight comes out and hits the wolf, paralyzing it. He tightens the beam through the diamond and the wolf evaporates through overexposure to the light.

The Queen knights the Doctor and Rose for their services and then banishes them from the realm due to their cavalier and un-Godly attitude towards things of the planets and stars. She also takes the Torchwood House from Sir Robert's widow who doesn't want it anymore to establish the Torchwood Institute to defend against alien menaces, including the Doctor. The Doctor and Rose return to the TARDIS, speculating that the Queen has become infected with the werewolf DNA and that it is reaffirming itself in the Royal family.

Analysis

This story is a bit of a mixed bag for me. On one hand, it is a fast paced adventure story with an interesting and more energetic take on Queen Victoria. On the other hand, it breaks it's own tension in the wrong places, is rather poorly directed and retains too much flab on the end that could have been better served elsewhere.

The Doctor is pretty good in this one, although he is rather light-hearted through the whole adventure. It's an odd shift with the next story being School Reunion and the darker Doctor persona comes through. I also wish there had been a little more time and volume devoted to the Doctor explaining the werewolf. He passes it off very quickly, mostly mumbling and I couldn't even begin to tell you what he said other than light transference. But still, he was enjoyable especially in the direct adventure parts. I did also like the nod to Jamie, allowing David Tennant to use his natural Scottish accent for a time.

I did not like Rose in this one. In fact, this story may be one of the strongest examples of my dislike for Rose. She is cavalier in this story to the point of being just a brat. One of the best scenes is Queen Victoria telling off Rose for cracking a joke when their lives are at risk and a man has just died to save them. It shows a real detachment from Rose. She is confident that the Doctor will save her and the situation in general so minor deaths and the overall tension of the situation are flippancies to her.

She also instigates a moment I didn't like in the Doctor where he also breaks the mood by having a moment with Rose about how cool it is to be encountering a werewolf. Even Doctor's who had flippant attitudes, such as the Fourth Doctor, would have respect over people who were killed, especially in his defense. It's an unfortunate attitude to be seen in the Tenth Doctor and Rose only feeds into that.

I liked Queen Victoria, especially when she acted against type. She is often depicted in history as a stogy sourpuss and it was nice to see her portrayed as a robust and relatively independent woman, though still tenderhearted, especially where Prince Albert is concerned. I enjoyed that she went so far as to kill Father Angelo, although had hesitation and remorse about it. It's only at the end of the story where she reverts back into type that she gets boring. I especially disliked the heavy-handed bit of exposition regarding the establishment of Torchwood. I thought that section poorly written and not very well acted either.

Most of the rest of the cast was decent, although not memorable. That's not unusual, but I thought it a bit of a waste with Father Angelo. After showing such fortitude in the first half of the story, to simply stand there while Victoria shoots him seemed highly anti-climatic. It also would have solved the problem of adding a little color to the villain. The werewolf worked fine as the monster, and I thought the CGI pretty good for the time, but the werewolf also has no personality, meaning no depth from a villain standpoint. I think Doctor Who works better when the villain has more color and thought, which Father Angelo could have provided. Having a unkillable beastie makes for a one-note villain that gets a bit tired after a while. To be fair, this is a somewhat common complaint anytime a werewolf is used as a villain in any medium.

I did not like the camera work in this story. In the beginning, the monks enter and go very kung-fu on the people of the house, but the cutting is so disjointed that it is just a horrible mishmash of faces and people falling over. There is a similar overuse of close ups throughout the story and when a longshot is actually used, you feel almost a sense of relief, even if that longshot shows the wolf advancing up a hallway. Outside of these, there wasn't much else to note, as most of the shots were fairly static and didn't provide much else to draw you in, relying on the overall story to do that instead.

The story itself was fine with the fast pace of a running from a monster providing the bulk of the it. It indulged in the most common clichés of monster stories including having a strongman believing that he has killed the monster be instead killed by it and having it be vulnerable to a common thing, allowing the heroes the time they need to figure out how to defeat it. If you are in the mood for a simple run around, that works fine. If you want more depth (a la Midnight), this will disappoint you.

The ending also disappointed me. Victoria's reversion of personality I think was supposed to be funny, but it didn't really work for me, especially after having been through the adventure. I also didn't care for the casual dismissal of the Royal family being werewolves. Not that I care about them, but they just spent the whole story defeating an evil monster who reveled in death and destruction. To pass off that the entity survived and reestablish itself a hundred years later in a joke fashion undercut the whole theme of the story.

I also thought it rather silly about turning hemophilia into a joke about werewolves, both in its attitude and logic. Seven of Victoria's nine children were married by the time this would have happened so to suggest that a blood disease would have passed to them at the time when she already had a number of grandchildren makes no sense whatsoever. Given the tragic deaths of several of her descendants due to hemophilia and the implications of the disease, it's also in somewhat poor taste to pass it off as a lycanthropic affliction. It's a lame joke at the current royal's expense that does offer a genuine detraction to the overall story.

In the end, I'd have to say my reservation in going back to this was somewhat justified. It wasn't terrible and I generally enjoyed the chase part, but the rest of the story just didn't do it for me. That one of the main characters made herself somewhat painful to watch in the story didn't help in it's passing. This is a quick adventure story to put on the background if you're in a certain mood. Not horrible, but I'd say the bad outweighs the good in this case.

Overall personal score: 1.5 out of 5

Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways

If I am God, what does that make you Doctor?

The final adventure of the Ninth Doctor, the culmination of the "Bad Wolf" subplot and the full return of the Daleks. RTD has a reputation for putting together excellent set ups in the penultimate episode and then letting things go out with a whimper in the finale. Does that hold true in his first finale and the end of the Ninth Doctor?

Plot Summary

One hundred years after the events of The Long Game, the Doctor, Rose and Jack wake to find themselves on futuristic versions of 21st century game shows being broadcast from the Game Station (formally Satellite 5). The Doctor is in Big Brother, Rose The Weakest Link and Jack What Not to Wear. The Doctor and Rose are confused and rather nonchalant in each of their shows until they witness other contestants incinerated after failing a level.

The Doctor breaks a camera in the house, causing his immediate eviction. However, his life is spared as the program is overwritten. He leaves the house to the station proper with another contestant, Lynda. Meanwhile, Jack pulls out a gun when the two droids attempt to kill him and he destroys them. Fashioning himself a larger gun, he meets up with the Doctor on the lower floors. The Doctor discovers that when he destroyed the Jagrafess, he left the Earth without any information, causing the society to break down, leading to the dystopia that now exists.

Jack manages to locate Rose's signal and they burst into the game just as she has lost the final round of her game. She runs to the Doctor but the Anne Droid incinerates her. The Doctor, Jack and Lynda are arrested by station security and placed in a holding cell, but the trio overpowers the guards and heads up to the top floor. There they discover the station run by a few workers and a controller.

The station briefly shuts down as a solar flare passes by and the controller comes to herself. She reveals that she brought the Doctor there to thwart the powers controlling her. She is unable to reveal that as the flare passes and the station comes back on-line. Jack discovers the TARDIS in a storage room nearby and using it, he discovers that Rose was not killed. All failed contestants are merely transmatted to a location just outside the solar system.

They discover that the location houses a cloaked Dalek fleet. Aware of their discovery, the Daleks transmat the controller and kill her. They then threaten to kill Rose unless the Doctor surrenders. He refuses and instead vows to rescue Rose and destroy the Daleks.

The Doctor and Jack take the TARDIS across the solar system and materialize it around Rose and her Dalek guard. Jack destroys the Dalek with his gun while the Doctor heads out of the TARDIS. Protected by a force field, the Daleks are unable to gun him down. The Emperor Dalek reveals himself to the Doctor, having survived the Time War. He has rebuilt the Daleks using cellular material from slaughtered humans. The Doctor also discovers that the Emperor Dalek has developed a god complex, infusing all other Daleks with both a religious devotion to him and a self-hatred at their impure state.

The Doctor takes the TARDIS back to the station where he begins to build a Delta-wave weapon that will fry the Daleks. Jack and the others head down to the first floor to recruit any former contestants to fight and buy the Doctor more time. Only a few do with Jack ordering the rest to stay quiet on the first floor.

Checking his readings, the Doctor discovers that he doesn't have enough time to create a weapon that will only kill Daleks. Instead it will kill both Daleks and humans. He tricks Rose into going into the TARDIS and then sending her back to her family where she is found by Mickey and her mother.

The Daleks arrive at the station and land five floors below the control room. One group of Daleks proceed upwards where they kill the defenders and blast through the defenses Jack had set up. Another group heads down to the first floor and kills all those who refused to fight and stayed below. The Daleks then reconnect and head to the last of the defenses.

Despite attempts to console and convince her, Rose refuses to accept being sent away. She sees more Bad Wolf signs and recognizes them as a symbol for her to help the Doctor. She decides to pry open the TARDIS console and look into the heart of the TARDIS as that would allow her to communicate with it telepathically. Mickey tries but his car doesn't have enough power.

Jackie tries to dissuade her but Rose refuses also forcing Jackie to realize that it was Rose who bent over Pete when he died. Jackie, realizing that it is the right thing to do, borrows a tow truck from a friend. She and Mickey help Rose pry open the TARDIS panel. Rose looks into the heart of the TARDIS and absorbs time energy directly from the vortex. The TARDIS then disappears as Jackie and Mickey look on.

The Daleks overrun the last of the defenses, killing both Lynda and Jack in route to the control room. As the Daleks enter, the Doctor finishes the delta wave weapon. The Dalek Emperor goads the Doctor to use it but faced with repeating the genocide he committed against his own people to stop the Daleks, the Doctor refuses to discharge the weapon.

As the Daleks move in for the kill, the TARDIS reappears and Rose emerges, full of the time vortex. She admits that she planted the Bad Wolf sign throughout time as a signal to herself. She then atomizes all of the Daleks and even brings Jack back to life. The time energy is killing her though and the Doctor takes her and sucks it out of her through a kiss, releasing most of the energy back into the TARDIS. He then carries an unconscious Rose into the TARDIS and takes off as Jack enters the room to see them go.

Rose wakes with almost no memory of what happened. The Doctor only reminds her of it a little, admitting that he had to absorb most of the time energy, which is now killing him. He comforts her that things will continue but that he must change. He then regenerates into the Tenth Doctor and offers to take her to the planet Barcelona.

Analysis

Taken as a whole, this story is pretty good. However, it does suffer from the typical RTD problem of having a really good set up and then petering out at the end. Some fans blame the literal "god out of the machine" ending but that didn't bother me that much. There were several issues that affected the end but I think the primary problem was that Bad Wolf was clearly focused on the Doctor while The Parting of the Ways focused on the companions, specifically Rose.

Throughout both stories, the Doctor was excellent. He was his caviler self at the beginning and then got serious as the scale of the problem reared its head. He was serious and focused, to a point that you could see how dangerous he could be. But at the end, the damaged Doctor who couldn't cope with inflicting large scale violence emerged. Even in Bad Wolf that is apparent as he casually hands off his gun to the people he's supposed to be threatening. It is funny and also a significantly Doctor-ish moment.

In fact, there is almost nothing not to like in Bad Wolf. The characters are engaging, there is humor but also a strong sense of danger. We also get a wonderful fake out with Rose apparently being killed. This is doubly effective because Lynda has asked to come with the Doctor and he is very open to it. It has the exact feel of an old companion being removed and being replaced by a new companion. You buy it, even to the point where Rose is revealed to still be alive as it is easy to imagine the Doctor's rescue of her failing and Lynda still moving on to be the new companion.

The reveal of the Daleks is also excellent. The preview at end of Boomtown spoiled the review for most people. But if you had been ignorant of that, the reveal was very well done. As Rose wakes up and classic fans instantly key on to the Dalek control room sound as it is the only noise. Even as the Daleks enter their reveal is slow. Rose pins herself against a wall as we view through a Dalek eyestalk, just like Barbara did in The Daleks. As others enter, they are shown in reflection and other oblique ways. It is not until they focus on talking to the Doctor that the full scope of the Daleks is made clear. The build is slow and very well done, giving a proper sense of fear that the Daleks deserve.

That fear pervades through the entire invasion. In the whole battle, the Daleks wipe the defenses with relative ease. Only four Daleks are shown to be destroyed or damaged in the entire attack and with multiple Daleks filling the room each time, the overrun is quick and efficient.

Of all the deaths, I found Lynda's to be the best and the most sad. She is trapped in a room waiting for the Daleks to burn their way in when three Daleks rise in front of the window. There is no sound but you see the lights of the Dalek flash and it's like reading lips to know that he is yelling "Exterminate". The window shatters and you don't hear Lynda scream as she is exposed to space. For having such little time, you got to know the character and enjoyed her company. That you started getting into the mindset of thinking of her as a companion also makes her death seem that much more tragic. Jack at least fought up to the end and even had a moment of defiance before being gunned down. It was a death worthy of the character and felt less tragic even though you know Jack a lot more.

So why does it fall apart at the end? Rose. It's no secret that I don't care for Rose that much but I always felt that she meshed fairly well with the Ninth Doctor. Her rough edges matched well with his more caustic personality. But in both episodes, Rose shows almost no redeeming characteristics. She is over the top in her amusement on The Weakest Link until the reality of the situation dawns on her. She also is the only one who does nothing to help herself. Both Jack and the Doctor are able to get themselves out of their situations so she feels bit a useless in Bad Wolf.

It is The Parting of the Ways that exacerbates things though. The focus of the story leaves the Doctor once he sends Rose away, in what is an excellent bit of acting by the Doctor. Once she is back though, while I appreciate her passion to get back to the Doctor, her methods are annoying to me. She is openly insulting to Mickey, noting that her exposure to the Doctor has left her unable to live a normal life the way they do. It is the most condescending attitude for going back to rescue a person one could imagine. It becomes all about her, which is precisely why I don't like Rose.

Even her scene with Jackie should have been more touching. But instead it becomes this angry event, with Rose forcing Jackie to accept the reality as she and the Doctor changed it. I still fail to see how the acceptance that Rose was at her father's side when he died equates with helping to get back to the Doctor. Yes, helping is the right thing to do and Pete would have advocated for that, but almost nothing Rose has done has emphasized that point. It is still all about what she wants.

As far as the climax with her becoming god-like to destroy the Daleks and then the kiss, I don't have a problem with the idea, but the execution fell short. In this, I have to place most of the blame on Billie Piper. Her acting was not up to the challenge of what that scene required. When you see her do a flash of Bad Wolf as the Moment in The Day of the Doctor, you can see how much she has grown as an actress and the fear and power of that comes across much better. In this scene though, it just feels silly.

It doesn't help that Christopher Eccleston also falls short here. His reactions seem overplayed as well. Only the Dalek Emperor seems to be where he needs to be in terms of the reaction. I also thought the kiss was over the top but they were playing the romance angle (something I never saw) between the Ninth Doctor and Rose so that is expected, if also unwelcome.

I thought the regeneration scene was done fairly well, although I wish the Doctor hadn't been quite so jokey before it. I don't mean that I think he should have been tragic and mopey the way the Tenth Doctor was, but his almost maniacal grin right near the end seemed more creepy than anything else. It's almost a relief to get to the Tenth Doctor at the end.

In the end, it was a high that fell to an average. Not as bad as the drop off from other finales but no where near what could have been achieved. I think if Rose had shown even some humility and selflessness in her quest to rejoin the Doctor and if the director had been able to coax the actors to a bit more gravity in the Deus ex Machina scene, the second episode would have had a lot less fall off. I think this story is still quite enjoyable and a must when revisiting the Ninth Doctor, but it's less than what it could have been due to the way things wrapped up.

Overall personal score: Bad Wolf - 4.5 out of 5; The Parting of the Ways - 2.5 out of 5

The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances

Are you my mummy?

Enter Steven Moffat. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is the Moff's first entry to writing for Doctor Who and it also is probably a pretty good summation of his overall view of the show and how he conducted thing as show runner: scary, funny and just a little too fearful to go overly dark. In the end, everyone lives and that is both the blessing and curse of the Moffat era.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Rose respond to a distress signal by an alien ship. The ship is caught in the time vortex and crashes in London in 1941 during the Blitz. The Doctor and Rose land the TARDIS about a month after the crash. The Doctor slips into a nightclub to see if anyone knows about the ship crash while Rose waits outside. There he learns of the time period to which they have landed.

While waiting for the Doctor, Rose spots a young boy in a gas mask calling for his mother on the roof of a building. She climbs up to try and help him but when climbing on the anchor line of a barrage balloon the balloon frees and she is carried away across London as the German planes approach. She manages to hold on for a bit but eventually slips off. Her fall is arrested by a tractor beam from the ship of a 51st century time agent named Captain Jack Harkness.

Captain Jack pulls Rose aboard his ship and believing her to be a time agent, proceeds to make an offer of sale for a crashed Chulan warship. Rose plays along, intrigued by Jack but tells him that only her partner is authorized to make payment. They then scan about looking for the Doctor.

The Doctor emerges from the club to find Rose gone. He is distracted by the phone in the TARDIS door ringing. He is warned not to answer it by a passing girl named Nancy but does so anyway, hearing the voice of a child asking for his mother. He follows Nancy into a home where the family is hiding in the air raid shelter and Nancy is leading a group of homeless children in partaking of the large set dinner table.

The Doctor asks about them but they are interrupted by the boy in the gas mask knocking on the door and calling for mummy. The children flee but the Doctor looks to help. Nancy again warns him before running and the Doctor is further alarmed as the child's voice comes over the phone and the speaker of the radio. He opens the door only to find the child gone.

The Doctor follows Nancy to her hideaway and asks further about the fallen spacecraft. She tells him where it is but tells him to see the doctor in the hospital near the crash site first. She also confesses that she does what she does as she feels guilty over the death of her little brother Jamie who was killed in an air raid when he followed her out.

The Doctor heads to the hospital, observing the crashed ship under guard of the British Army. In the hospital he finds hundreds of people in bed, all with the same injuries and all with gas masks fused to their faces. Doctor Constantine tells him of an original patient, a small boy and that everyone else was infected after touching him or one of the subsequent patients. Doctor Constantine also reveals that they are not dead but respond occasionally as he himself begins to transform with a gas mask face and the same injuries.

Rose and Jack find the Doctor shortly afterwards in the hospital. At the same time Nancy reenters the house to find more food and is confronted by the child in the gas mask, whom she recognizes as Jamie. Jamie calls out to her asking her if she is his mommy. This triggers the people in the hospital who begin advancing on the Doctor, Rose and Jack. The Doctor tells them off by telling them that he is cross and they need to go to their room. Both Jamie and the people accept this. The people go back to bed while Jamie heads out of the house.

At this point, Jack realizes that the Doctor and Rose are not time agents and he comes clean about the ship. It was an ambulance that he poached and was going to con them into buying just before it was destroyed by a German bomb. Annoyed by Jack and his carelessness (as he suspects the ship is the source of the plague) the Doctor heads upstairs to the patient zero room. They find toys and drawings of the child's mom. They also listen to a tape recording of the child asking for his mom.

Jamie, ordered by the Doctor to go to his room, enters the room and summons all the other infected people. The three flee through the hospital until they are finally able to barricade themselves into a storage room. Out of escape options, Jack teleports himself back to his ship and sends a signal via the radio that he will transport them once he's changed the ship's settings. The Doctor and Rose banter a bit until Jack pulls them out of the hospital and they head back to the scene of the crash.

Nancy is caught trying to escape the house but blackmails the husband into letting her go when she threatens to expose him for sleeping with the butcher. She stops by the group of kids and tells them that she is going to stop the attacks by the masked child. She then cuts her way through the military perimeter but is caught. She is handcuffed to a table under guard, but the guard is showing signs of transformation.

The Doctor and his party approach the compound and when Jack greets the captain in charge, the captain also begins to transform. They rush past him and find Nancy singing to the transformed guard, who has been lulled to sleep. The Doctor frees her and begins to examine the ambulance. Attempting to open it triggers an alarm and all the masked people begin to advance on them. The assemble but hold until Jamie arrives.

The Doctor confronts Jack, informing him that the ship was full of nanogenes, tiny medical robots. Upon crashing, the nanogenes found Jamie's dead body but didn't have a human pattern to work from so only brought him back to life in his state. His touch spread the nanogenes who rewrote the human DNA in favor of their repairs. Jack transports back to the ship to stop the German bomb from destroying the ship and spreading the nanogenes.

The Doctor looks at Nancy as Jamie and his hordes approach and realizes that Jamie is not her brother but in fact her son. Knowing this, he encourages her to go to him. She confesses to him that she is his mother and hugs him. The nanogenes read the parent DNA and correct their earlier mistake. Jamie returns to himself and the Doctor takes his mask off to reveal a normal boy underneath. He then sends out the nanogenes who repair all those affected by the earlier mistake, some to a point of improvement beyond their original condition.

The German bomb is released by Jack catches it in his tractor beam and puts it in stasis. The Doctor and Rose head back to the TARDIS to celebrate. They then rendezvous with Jack's ship which is about to be destroyed as the bomb is losing it's stasis field. They take Jack with them and all three have a dance in the TARDIS.

Analysis

This story is Steven Moffat in miniature. About the only thing missing from it is anything that is "timey-whimy." But the simple horror elements are there, along with drama and emotional manipulation. You also have the saccharine and a few pacing problems as well.

The best part of this story is the child himself and the Doctor's reaction to him. The child is both creepy and also very sympathetic. When he calls out to the Doctor through the door of the house in The Empty Child, you both hear and feel a lost, scared child who you should bend over backwards to help. That you are also afraid of this child creates an odd dichotomy in your brain that you wrestle with. I personally felt even worse when the Doctor told him to go to his room. He is looking at Nancy and as it registers, you see his head droop and you can almost feel the sadness welling up inside him as he doesn't know why he is being punished.

Nancy and the rest of the kids were also fine but I felt Nancy was a bit stiff at times. Some of that might have been trying to pull the stiff upper lip and all, but her confession regarding Jamie seemed like it should have been a bit more emotional for her than it was. The other children didn't have much time to be more than children, which is exactly how it should be. Too much time with children and their lack of acting experience starts to show and that can hurt a story.

I quite enjoyed Jack. He skirts the line with his cockiness and it is very close to descending into cliché at times, but he is still a very enjoyable character. I actually like him even better when he is less sure of himself and begins to cow to the Doctor a bit, although that's a good payoff solely because of the dick measuring going on between them. The Doctor's embarrassment over the sonic screwdriver relative to Jack's squarness gun is quite funny and one of the few times the Doctor is put on his heels with regard to it.

Rose on the other hand, is not that enjoyable. She never seems to come across as particularly serious in this episode. You would think that flying over London in the Blitz would temper her a bit but she goes along with it and is all pally and flirty with Jack. I do like that she gets called out with regard to Mickey and how she is more or less using him to make herself feel better but is always looking to drop him. Her one decent moment is her quiet talk with Nancy and the reassurance she offers that the Allies win the war. It is a nice moment and reflects how low the spirits of the British people must have been given that Nancy takes it as a given that the Germans will eventually win and that Rose is lying, not because she has reservations about time travel, but because Rose isn't German.

The overall look of the story is pretty good. The only real point where they didn't quite pull things off was in the scenes from the Blitz where Rose is hanging from the balloon. The CGI is pretty thick there and it gets a bit of a cartoon-y look the longer Rose is up there. I understand the idea, but they don't quite pull it off. You can definitely see how far the show is come by pulling that scene next to a similar sequence in Victory of the Daleks. But other than that, the production looks pretty good. The transformation of Doctor Constantine being an excellent example of a well done CG effect that helped a great deal with the horror element of the story.

Aside from the niggles noted above, there are three points of the story that didn't really work for me. The first was the pacing, especially in The Empty Child. The cutaways to Rose and Jack didn't do much for me and they felt like distraction and filler. The tension was with the Doctor and his interactions with Nancy and Jamie. That built the scariness and any cut away from that felt not like relief but instead like a distraction. I didn't care about champagne on the roof of a cloaked ship. I cared about the Doctor's unease.

The second was the Doctor's over enthused reaction to everybody living after the nanogenes correct their mistake. He is saying this in the middle of a German air raid where potentially thousands of people are dying. Doctor Constantine also pointed out that none of the people infected were dead anyway. They were alive but transformed. So it wasn't like they were brought back or that they were in danger of dying. Yet many people are dying around him. It is an out of place moment that just clangs. It feels like an extra load of syrup on what should be a normal happy ending and it just gags.

The third thing that bugged me was the dance discussions between the Doctor and Rose. Unlike a lot of fans, I don't have a problem with a sexual Doctor. He obviously had a relationship with Susan's grandmother and several other females in the past to say nothing of what he would do in the future as the Tenth Doctor. But what starts as a little bit of coy innuendo just gets beaten to death as the episode goes on. I don't care much for Rose bringing it up in the first place as it adds to her very cavalier attitude towards the situation they are in. But to take something that should have stayed in that room and dragged it out across the whole rest of the story just got tiring. I think Moffat thought he was being clever but it just seems overly silly.

As an aside, I noticed while watching this one that Moffat was able to slip his traditional "Doctor Who" joke in. Nice to know that some things always stay the same.

Overall, I think the goodness of the episode is spread well and it covers the more negative aspect of this story. I was a little surprised at how balanced both stories were. I generally expect one episode to be stronger than the other, but this one was fairly well balanced. I knew I was going to have a favorable opinion of the first episode as I enjoy the scene between the Doctor and Doctor Constantine so much, but I had forgotten that the second part didn't go downhill as I misremembered it doing so. This is another reason why I'm making a point to go back and rewatch these early stories and not relying on my own faulty memory. In the end, I'd say it's definitely worth watching multiple times. It may not be the apex of the First Series that other fans are inclined to think of it as, but it is one of the higher points.

Overall personal score: The Empty Child - 4 out of 5; The Doctor Dances - 4 out of 5

Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel

So, which one are you?

In the Tenth Doctor era, it became something of a trope to have a middle of the season two-parter with a classic villain. Rise of the Cyberman and The Age of Steel was the first of these and it reintroduced the Cybermen. Eschewing both Mondas and Telos, the story recreated the Cybermen in an alternate universe with complete freedom to create as desired.

Plot Summary

The Doctor, Mickey and Rose are travelling in the TARDIS when it falls through a crack to a parallel universe. The transfer kills the power of the TARDIS and it materializes in a London where the rich travel in zeppelins and Rose's father is alive and a successful business man. The Doctor mopes about the TARDIS being dead until he discovers a small spark of energy. Using a little of his own regeneration energy, he recharges it which will allow them to leave in 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Rose has connected to the internet and learned that Pete Tyler's company was recently purchased by the Cybus corporation, headed by John Lumic. Lumic, unknown to them, has developed a metal body in which a brain can be installed, creating an alternate reality version of the Cybermen. He is trying to get permission to proceed with creating more but is being denied by the President of Great Britain. Despite the denial, he is proceeding anyway, taking homeless off the street and converting them.

Rose and Mickey rebel against the Doctor's warnings and head off to explore. The Doctor follows Rose, leaving Mickey to wander on his own. While they are walking, the people suddenly freeze and get a news download from their earpods. Concerned over this, the Doctor elects to sneak in to Jackie's 40th birthday party, at which the President will be attending, and investigate.

Mickey goes to his grandmother's house. In his universe, his grandmother died tripping over a loose patch of carpet on the stairs he failed to fix. She is still alive here although his counterpart is named Ricky. She invites him in for tea, having not seen him in a few days, but he is grabbed by a man in a van and sped off. They take him to a safehouse where Ricky is waiting. They are a group called the Preachers who work against Cybus and Lumic's plans. After searching Mickey, they are unsure of what he is but elect to take him along on a planned raid of Jackie's birthday party.

The Doctor and Rose sneak in to the party as staff. The Doctor slips away to pull information from Pete's computer while Rose chats with her parents. Pete let's slip that he and Jackie are separating. She also learns that she was never born in this universe, although they do have a dog named Rose. Meanwhile the Doctor learns of Lumic's Cybermen plans. Before he can leave though, a group of Cybermen assault the house, killing the President. The Cybermen kill or round up the rest of the guests for conversion.

Ricky and his gang try to gun down the Cybermen but their bullets are useless. The gang, the Doctor, Rose and Pete are cornered. The Doctor attempts to surrender but the Cybermen deny this chance due to the resistance. The Doctor discharges the TARDIS power cell he has with him, killing most of the Cybermen and they flee into London. They are pursued by other Cybermen and Ricky is killed in the attack.

With the raid successful, Lumic begins the conversion of London. He activates all earpods, putting people in a trance and having them walk to his factory for cyber-conversion. Seeing this, the Doctor realizes they need to stop it. Pete admits to being a mole inside Cybus, feeding the Prophets information. They divide into three groups: the Doctor and Mrs. Moore (the techie) will use tunnels to enter the complex; Rose and Pete don fake earpods and enter the front door with hypnotized people; Mickey and Jake head to the roof to try and knock out the broadcast signal to the earpods.

The Doctor and Mrs. Moore enter the facility but are spotted at one point and pursued. They disable one Cyberman and the Doctor figures a way to stop them. However, Mrs. Moore is killed and the Doctor taken to see Lumic who has been converted into the Cybercontroller following an attack by his second, Dr. Kendrick.

Pete and Rose successfully enter the facility but Pete is recognized by a Cyberman who used to be Jackie Tyler. Due to Pete's knowledge, he and Rose are also directed to be interrogated by Cybercontrol.

Mickey and Jake successfully infiltrate the airship where the broadcast signal is coming from. Attempting to stop it, they wake a prototype Cyberman. The Cyberman tries to kill them but Mickey is able to use it to knock out the signal to the pods. Awakened to what has happened, the people flee the facility. Mickey also hacks into the security system and observes the Doctor, Pete and Rose with the Cybercontroller.

Aware of Mickey's success, the Doctor instructs him what to do in a mouthy speech to the Cybercontroller. Mickey sends the code for the emotional inhibitor to Rose's phone and the Doctor sends it to the Cybermen. Suddenly aware of what they've become, the Cybermen collapse as their brains are overloaded. The sudden shut down also triggers equipment failure in the factory and it begins to explode.

Mickey contacts the Doctor, instructing them to head to the roof where he and Jake will get them on the Zeppelin. Mickey lowers a ladder and the three climb aboard. But the Cybercontroller pursues them and begins to climb the ladder as well. The Doctor tosses Pete his sonic screwdriver and Pete uses it to cut the lower part of the ladder. The Cybercontroller falls back to the factory as it explodes.

Afterwards, Rose admits to Pete that he is her father in the alternate universe. Unnerved, Pete leaves vowing to destroy Cybus' other Cyberman factories. Mickey also elects to stay behind as his grandmother is here and he has a new purpose. He is also tired of being a third wheel between Rose and the Doctor. Rose and the Doctor leave, closing the crack behind them. They return to Jackie's apartment where Rose reassures herself with a good hug with her mom.

Analysis

I enjoyed this story, although I've heard others give it more of a middling grade. I don't quite understand this as I thought the Cybermen were scarier and more competent than in most stories of the classic era. There were flaws in the story, but not so bad that I didn't enjoy what I did see.

The story does start a little slow and the Doctor's mopiness at the prospect of being stranded gets annoying after a while. But it doesn't last long and the Doctor is excellent in the rest of the story. The slow periods where the TARDIS team isn't doing much are cut with scenes of Pete and Jackie Tyler as well as John Lumic, so it takes advantage of the dearth of action to at least flesh out character and other set up points for the plot. That at least is nice in that we are treated to needed information in a non-expositional way rather than given a killing time runaround.

The second part is pretty much action from the word go. It is fairly obvious that Ricky and at least one of the redshirts is going to get killed but the interaction between the various teams is nice. It was also good to see them give a bit of a gut punch by converting Jackie and not have the story bog down with the idea of a rescue. The punch is tempered with the fact that this Jackie is a bit more bitchy and as the Doctor is constantly reminding Rose, that is not her actual mother.

One of the best things of the Tenth Doctor era, in my opinion, was the fact that the Doctor was often faced with unpleasant choices. We are treated to reminders in Jackie and the woman who was converted before her wedding day that the Cybermen have real people who are not evil in them. But they have been changed to an evil form and that the only way to stop them is to kill them. It's a good reminder of the tragedy of the situation and that sometimes dark measures do have to be taken for the greater good (the greater good). Of course, the Tenth Doctor has a habit of also overapologizing to emphasize the point in case you miss it and that does get old after a while.

There were some flaws in this story though. As mentioned before, it does start slow and much of Rise of the Cybermen can feel like set up before the full story commences in The Age of Steel. It's not bad, but no one fully enjoys a story that is primarily a set up for the next stage.

Another slightly surprising shortcoming is John Lumic. The actor, Roger Lloyd-Pack, is pretty good and outside of this I know him best as Barty Crouch Sr. from Goblet of Fire (with David Tennant amusingly). His performance here though is rather hammy. He is trying to show the obsessed and slightly mad genius, but it comes across as over-the-top and a bit too mustache twirly.

There are also a couple of moments where drama gives way to reality. After Mrs. Moore and the Doctor examine the Cyberman they felled, a Cyberman is shown standing right behind them to kill Mrs. Moore. Both her and the Doctor should have heard the Cyberman coming from a mile away but it's more dramatic if it sneaks up on them. Similarly, it is never overly clear as to why the factory starts to blow up after the emotional inhibitor is deactivated. We see the Cybermen falling over and in some cases blowing up, but then the factory starts to go for no apparent reason.

In the grand scheme of things, these are rather minor problems that don't overly detract from the overall story. I will warn you that bitchy Rose does make an appearance at times and it's very easy to sympathize with Mickey who is clearly getting the K-9 treatment. In fact, it's worse than it was in School Reunion which doesn't do anything to endear you especially to Rose in this story. A little bit with the Doctor too but he redeems himself easier, especially at the end. I don't think either of these detracts though, since I find Rose bitchy in most of Series Two.

Overall if you're in the mood for a two-parter, this isn't a bad one to sit down with. It's not overly deep; just a good action story with a hint of scariness. Having enjoyable secondary characters like Pete and Mrs. Moore helps get you invested as well. Even Ricky is entertaining with Noel Clarke putting on more of a hard edged effort that still smacks of goofiness. It's fun and worth a repeat watch.
Overall personal score: Rise of the Cybermen - 4 out of 5; The Age of Steel - 4.5 out of 5

Turn Left

There is something on your back.

Doctor-lite stories have evolved nicely since the misfire that was Love and Monsters. It is not often that Doctor Who plays with the "what if" card but when it does it usually does it well. Turn Left is an interesting exploration of how things would have evolved had Donna never met the Doctor and he died in the aftermath of the sans Donna The Runaway Bride.

Plot Summary

Donna and the Doctor are visiting a planet and they split up to do some sampling. Donna enters a fortune teller's house who prompts her to recall the point in her life where she made a decision that resulted in her meeting the Doctor. She focuses on the moment when she ignored her mother and turned left at an intersection, leading her to get the job in which she eventually met the Doctor. The fortune teller tells her to focus on turning right as something sneaks behind her and latches on to her back.

Six months after turning right, Donna is celebrating Christmas with some coworkers, having just gotten a promotion in her job. One of the women is fixated as she keeps thinking that she sees something on Donna's back. Suddenly, London is attacked by the webbed star ship of the Racnoss. The army manages to destroy it and Donna rushes towards the action while everyone else runs away. There she sees the army taking away the body of the Doctor, although she doesn't know who the Doctor is at this point. He was drowned in the flooding and failed to regenerate.

As Donna turns away, she sees a blonde woman run up and asking about the Doctor. Donna tells her that the Doctor is dead. Rose turns away but notes Donna's name. Donna asks hers but she disappears before saying anything.

Several months later, Donna is being laid off. Everyone is distracted as a hospital has disappeared. It reappears several hours later with only a sole survivor. That survivor notes how a colleague named Martha saved his life and how a woman named Sarah Jane Smith had stopped another woman from using an MRI to destroy the hospital. He also reports of the search by "space rhinos," triggering Wilfred's interest. Rose also reappears to Donna, telling her to use the raffle ticket she still has and use her winnings to take the family out of London for Christmas.

At Christmas, Donna, her mother and grandfather head to an inn north of London. A maid enters and is immediately unnerved by something on Donna's back. They are distracted though as the television reports a replica of the Titanic is crashing into London. The feed is suddenly lost, but the whole family sees a mushroom cloud appear where London once was.

With most of southern England irradiated, the family is relocated to Leeds where they share a house with several other families, including a large Italian one headed by the jovial Rocco Colasanto. Wilfred is buoyed by the thought that the Americans have promised aid to help Britain. However, this is dashed a few days later when over sixty million Americans are killed in the birth and collection of the Adipose children.

A couple of months later, Rose appears again as army soldiers are seen trying to disable toxic gas coming from the cars. Rose leads Donna away and informs her of the Torchwood team's demise as they destroy the ATMOS system and the Sontaran ship. Rose also tells Donna that she is the special key and in three weeks will agree to come with her to stop all this, although Donna must die.

Three weeks later, the Colasanto family is relocated to an internment camp with Wilfred noting that this was how the Nazis started. He and Donna try to find solace in looking through his telescope but they observe the stars disappearing. Donna then acquiesces and goes with Rose when she reappears.

Rose and UNIT take Donna to a facility with the dark TARDIS. They have used technology scoured from it to create a time machine. They first show Donna the time beetle on her back. Freaked out, she begs them to turn the machine off. Rose then tells her that the only way to get rid of it is to fix the universe by having her go back in time and forcing herself to turn left at that intersection. Donna agrees although Rose again alludes that she will have to die.

The time machine sends Donna back to four minutes before she makes the turn but also deposits her half a mile away from the intersection. She runs as hard as she can but realizes that she won't make it to stop herself. Remembering what Rose said, she steps in front of an oncoming truck. The truck crashes into her and cars begin to back up towards the intersection. Seeing the traffic, the intersection Donna turns left. As the original Donna dies, Rose reappears and whispers two words into her ear. Donna reawakens in the fortune teller's shop, the failure to change having killed the beetle and the teller flees in terror.

The Doctor enters and Donna tells him what happened. He notes the beetle is part of the Trickster's Brigade (a Sarah Jane Adventures villain) and how is usually just creates a blip in time that that universe compensates for to feed. Donna however generated a parallel universe. Talking about that triggers Donna's memory and she recalls Rose. As Donna talks of her the Doctor becomes concerned, demanding to know her name. Donna recalls she said "Bad Wolf." As she does so, the Doctor runs back to the TARDIS with warning signs flashing everywhere. Confused, Donna asks what is wrong and the Doctor states that it's the end of the universe.

Analysis

Turn Left has it's ups and downs but it's the type of story that every companion should have: a character study that allows them to breathe and develop, especially in a way that is independent of the Doctor. Not that being with the Doctor is bad, but it is nice to see a companion act in a way that is not influenced by the Doctor now and again. This story is probably also the most Doctor-lite of all the Doctor-lites as he is only in the first thirty seconds at the beginning and the last two minutes at the end. Any shots of the Doctor during the rest of the episode are taken from previous episodes (mostly The Runaway Bride).

It was also a nice way to bring Rose back without offering disrespect to the drama of the goodbye moment in Doomsday (as would be done at the end of the season in Journey's End). It makes sense that in a parallel universe created around Donna, it would offer a thinner veil that Rose could break through and act as the Doctor surrogate. In the end, she gets left out again as the veil is returned to it's original strength (at least until Stolen Earth).

Donna has another one of her nice moments in this episode as well. She starts more like her stroppier self as she is unchanged by the Doctor, but there is emotional growth as the world comes crashing down. This culminates when she is shown the time beetle on her back and her reaction of fear and horror mixed with the refusal to believe that she is special is quite good. Yet it is also still mixed with Donna's humor which gives much needed levity.

On that note, this is a bleak episode to watch. It more or less has to be since it needs to highlight how important the Doctor is but there are moments that are just down right horrifying. The nuclear blast in London is pretty bad, but I think the moment that just hits you hardest is when the Colasanto family is taken away. Nearly everyone in the story had been pretty dour but Rocco expressed happiness in the face of dark times. Then he is taken away and he still stays happy for Donna. It is not until he salutes Wilf that that moment even breaks him. The tragedy of that scene just oozes out without being melodramatic. In a way, it reminded me of the scene near the end of Life is Beautiful where Guido maintains the illusion to his son that he is just playing a game with the soldiers as he is being led off to be shot. The episode doesn't get in to whether the Italians are actively being disposed of or just being held, but it is not hard to imagine that it might come to that point in that timeline.

There are only two points in this story that bother me. The first is the unconvincing way that Donna changes her mind to turn right. That might be down to direction but Donna starts the conversation so feisty and Sylvia isn't any worse than she normally is but Donna just rolls over and concedes. Now obviously in the real timeline, she blew her mother off so it shouldn't be too different, but it just feels wrong to have Donna concede so easily.

My second is one that others have mentioned and that is the Doctor's death. I don't recall the situation in The Runaway Bride being so dire as to that the Doctor would have died without Donna. I can think of more obvious situations where the Doctor would have died when he was with Martha but this was supposed to be about Donna so I can leave that point. It is also hard to imagine that things would have been so bad as to prevent him from regenerating. The half-hearted aside of it happening too fast seems like garbage to me as well. The only point that makes sense to me would be that if the chamber flooded, drowning the Doctor, his regeneration wouldn't have mattered as there still wouldn't have been air to breathe. We've seen enough instances where the Doctor is vulnerable during regeneration (with The Impossible Astronaut providing a direct example of total death in the midst of regeneration) so drowning in a sealed chamber could be seen as a way to kill the Doctor properly. But it still seemed a bit off to me. At the very least, it could have been explained better by the UNIT soldiers. Any story where I have to fill in a better explanation than the one provided is falling a bit short.

Despite the shortcomings and other small bits, this is a pretty good episode. It makes for a good intro into the finale, even if the finale didn't quite live up to all the expectations. It is not an episode to watch for a first timer as there is too much dependence on knowing the Tenth Doctor era to understand the story. But once you've been through, it is a perfectly good story to pull down and enjoy from time to time.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5

The End of the World

Everything has it's time.

Rose introduced the Doctor and companion while The End of the World propelled them on their first time adventure together. Except not really. Yes, they travelled through time five billion years, but Rose spends most of the episode in a state of shock (probably the first realistic reaction by a companion) or locked in a room. So this more of a Doctor with pseudo-companion in the form of Jabe the tree.

Plot Summary

Showing off for Rose, the TARDIS materializes on Platform 1, a space station overlooking Earth on the day it is to be destroyed. Artificial gravity satellites had kept the expansion of the sun in place but funding had run out and the abandoned Earth is to die in a show for the rich and famous.

The Doctor and Rose pose as guests and exchange gifts and pleasantries with the other invitees, most notably Cassandra, the last genetically pure human, although hundreds of surgeries have reduced her to a sheet of skin and extended her life for several thousand years. Among the gifts exchanged are a silver spheres from the Adherents of the Repeat Meme. While the guests are busy, spider droids emerge from the spheres and sneak into the crawlspaces and begin to sabotage the station.

Feeling overwhelmed, Rose leaves the observation deck. She calms herself a bit talking with a maintenance worker, who is killed by the spider droids after she leaves, and then sits alone in a side room. The Doctor finds her but becomes angry when she presses him for specifics about who he is and where he is from. Rose backs down and the Doctor reciprocates by tinkering with her phone to allow her to call her mother. While observing, the station rocks a bit and the Doctor recognizes a problem.

The Steward also recognizes an issue but before he can dispatch a repair team, a spider droid enters his office and brings down the sun shade, roasting him in his office. Back on the observation deck, the Doctor notices sabotage. Jabe, a sentient tree, offers to show him an access shaft near their quarters. Rose, offended by Jabe's assumption of a sexual relationship between her and the Doctor, stays on the observation deck, where she promptly gets into an argument with Cassandra.

The Doctor and Jabe find an access panel that allows the Doctor to scan the station and access the main control box. While talking, Jabe confesses that she scanned the Doctor earlier and learned he is a Time Lord. She offers sympathy for the loss of his world. The Doctor thanks her and upon entering the discharge room they discover and capture one of the spider droids.

Following her argument with Cassandra, Rose stalks off and is knocked out by one of the Adherents. She is dragged to the room earlier and the sun shield begins to lower. She screams and the Doctor, returning to the observation deck hears her. He manages to raise the shield but the rays fused the door shut leaving her trapped in the room. He promises to come back for her.

Returning to the obervation deck the Doctor repairs the droid and sends it back to it's makers. It first goes to the Adherents of the Repeated Meme but they are exposed as robots as well. The droid then goes to Cassandra. She confesses as she stands to make a large amount of money with the deaths of the guests due to business holdings. She detonates the spiders, lowering the station shields and then transports off.

The Doctor and Jabe run back to the discharge room where the computer override station is located. But the way is blocked by rotating fans. With the controls damaged, the only way the fans can be slowed enough is for the control bar to be held down. Jabe grabs the bar even though the temperature is rising. The Doctor then begins to dodge the blades.

As the pressure wave approaches, the shieldless station begins to crack and unfiltered sun rays begin to get through, killing several guests. Meanwhile, the Doctor makes his way to the last blade. Jabe catches fire and the bar rolls back up, increasing the speed of the blade. Concentrating, the Doctor opens himself to time and passes through the gap. He then reactivates the shield just before the pressure wave hits, destroying the Earth.

The Doctor returns to the observation deck, as does Rose as the door was destroyed while the shield was down. He finds the transporter signaling device and recalls Cassandra without her medical support team. The heat increase in the station causes her to begin to dry out. Rose asks him for mercy but the Doctor just stands there. Cassandra dries to the point of contraction and then bursts apart, killing her.

The Doctor and Rose return to the present, where Rose is still feeling a bit shell shocked. The Doctor tells her of his race and that his planet was destroyed in a war that his people lost. He offers to let her go home but she instead suggests they go have some chips and relax.

Analysis

This story was pretty decent, but there was something missing from it for me. I'm not one hundred percent sure what it was but it just felt like something was lacking in terms of drawing me in.

One thing it is not is the acting. All the central characters played their parts well. The Doctor was on point with the prickly PTSD manifesting itself well in the scene with Rose and then later with Jabe. Rose did very well as well as we finally saw a companion legitimately overwhelmed by being in the midst of a group of aliens. Other companions had moments of disbelief but this is the first time one seems genuinely overwhelmed by the situation and Rose does it very well.

Jabe also works well as the step-in companion. She seems genuinely fond of the Doctor and noble in the acceptance of her death to help the Doctor save the rest. I also enjoyed Cassandra. She's a bit of a one-note stereotype, but she plays the part well and there is a subtle level of humor there, to say nothing of a fairly well executed plan. At the same time, it is very easy to stand with the Doctor and just let her die, especially after her mocking of him that she will tie up the courts for years.

Cassandra's death is a marked point in the new series as it defines that the Doctor will be vicious and cruel at times. In the classic series, the Doctor would kill but in most cases it was in self defense or the defense of others. Usually if there is something he could do to bring the villain to justice, he would do. This is an instance where he makes the active decision that the justice system will not be enough. He wants vengeance and the fact that he has to do nothing makes it so much easier. But as I am a fan of the dark and vengeful Doctor (see The Christmas Invasion), I found Cassandra's death and the Doctor's attitude towards her most satisfying.

So why is there this niggling lack of connection for me and this story? I think this story has an element of trying to hard and as a result, falling into cliché. The worst moment was actually the scene with the fans. The fans were meant to be a scary obstacle but with Jabe holding down the lever, they slowed down to the point that the Doctor should have been able to go through them faster than he did. It felt very much like a set up to ensure that he would have to do the last one without her help and use special Time Lord power. It also ensured that he would be raising the shields back up at the very last second. That just smacked of Galaxy Quest level cliché and it was obvious about it.

I think the other thing that bugged me was that the story had very little mystery or subtlety to it. Cassandra's reveal as the mastermind was the only reveal but we saw the spiders from the get go and there was a strong element of waiting until we saw what the ultimate goal of their sabotage was. I think that because the episode was running short, bit of a padding were put in which helped with character development but also slowed down the payoff of the story and I got tired of waiting after a while.

For me, the story was decent but I don't think I can rate it higher than average. Whether it was the waiting for stuff to happen or the obviousness of what was going on, the story just didn't grab me and say that this is one to watch again. I think I could even sense that going in for the rewatch as I remember looking at the Ninth Doctor catalogue in the past and always passing over this one as I never felt overly compelled by it. It's not bad and I wouldn't say no to watching it, but I feel no sense of desire to watch it again in the near future.

Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5