January 4: "The Long Game"

Typical.  You wait your whole life for someone with the same name as you to travel with the Doctor, and then when one does he's held up as the epitome of a bad companion.

Supposedly the main plot of this story (the bit with the media and such) started out as an idea Davies submitted to the Doctor Who production office back when Andrew Cartmel was the script editor.  Davies dusted the idea off and combined it with a storyline designed to show that not everyone could do what Rose did (this element had the working title "The Companion Who Couldn't").  And you can sort of see how this might have worked in the late '80s/early '90s (if Doctor Who hadn't gone on hiatus), with the rise of Rupert Murdoch and his efforts to get as much of the media as he could get his hands on under his control -- something that happened in both the UK and the US.  But this particular satire is one that's, if anything, improved with age, as the media becomes increasingly polarized thanks to the efforts of Murdoch and those like him.  It's not a terribly subtle satire (so you can see how it would have fit right in on Cartmel's Who), but it still works.

The Editor refers the problem of Rose and the Doctor to his boss,
the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe.
("The Long Game") ©BBC

Casting Simon Pegg in the role of the main villain thus has a slight feel of inevitability about it -- after all, if you're going to get someone with a line on slightly smug characters, who better than Pegg?  But he really does a nice job with the material he's given, making him highly entertaining to watch.  His is probably the standout performance; the rest of the cast are good, but none of them really make you take notice.  Well, except for Bruno Langley as Adam Mitchell, who does a good job of being somewhat duplicitous and selfish as the failed companion, and the regular cast, who do their usual fine job.  I particularly love the moment where, after Adam wonders where all the aliens are, if this is the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire in the year 200,000, the Doctor distracts him and Rose by telling them to go have fun: "You can't just read the guide book, you've got to throw yourself in.  Eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers.  Or is that just me?"  But then after they leave, his happy grin quickly changes to a more serious look -- something's wrong and he's going to find out what.

It's not a significant story and it's unlikely to be at the top of anyone's list -- it's a bit too understated and quiet for that -- but nonetheless I quite like "The Long Game".  It's got its own charms, and it's nice to see a small story doing its own thing -- which makes it something of a shame that the final story of this series is going to retroactively make "The Long Game" more important than it otherwise would have been.  I prefer to think of it as that charming little story between bigger events: the return of the Daleks last week, and Rose's dad next week...