January 10: "The Parting of the Ways"

The opening moments of this episode are really impressive, with the TARDIS charging toward the Dalek mothership to rescue Rose.  (And it's still spinning as it travels, I'm pleased to say.)  There are so many Daleks streaming out of their saucers that the end result is worthy of a feature film, never mind a television show.

But while there are some impressive visuals in this (not just that shot, but the one of the Emperor in all his glory surrounded by Daleks, or Jack destroying the Dalek in the TARDIS), the best moments in "The Parting of the Ways" are the character interactions.  The Doctor's confrontation with the Emperor, where he's being unnaturally cheerful, is impressive (and the times when that mask slips are also really good) -- and the moment where he reenters the TARDIS, leaning against the door with his head bowed, listening to the Daleks outside, is astonishing.  Captain Jack also shines in his efforts to rally his troops in what he knows will be a futile gesture, an effort to buy the Doctor more time, showing off his leadership qualities, and his farewell kisses to both Rose and the Doctor -- each delivered in exactly the same way -- are quite lovely.  "Wish I'd never met you, Doctor," he says.  "I was much better off as a coward."  He also gets a great death scene: "Exterminate!" a Dalek grates.  "I kind of figured that," Jack replies defiantly, arms open wide as the Daleks kill them.  The Daleks themselves are an impressive force; their fanatical worship of the Emperor (whose story of how he survived is close enough to that of the Dalek's in, er, "Dalek" for them to plausibly be the same individual -- again, it would explain all the early 21st-century reality shows we see here) is scary enough, but their decision to invade the Gamestation (another great shot, by the way) and head to the lower levels for no other reason than to exterminate everyone is genuinely chilling.  "Dalek" reintroduced the Daleks; "The Parting of the Ways" reestablishes them as a galaxy-conquering force.

Rose-as-the-Bad-Wolf can stop Dalek blasts. ("The Parting of the
Ways") ©BBC

And then there's Rose, who's willing to go to the end with the Doctor but is tricked into heading back to her own time, so that the Doctor can fulfill his promise to Jackie to keep Rose safe.  She's frustrated and angry, and she tries really hard to explain how she feels to Jackie and Mickey: "The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. ... That you don't just give up.  You don't just let things happen.  You make a stand.  You say no.  You have the guts to do what's right when everyone else just runs away..."  That speech sums up the ethos of the show right there.  It's the realization that the "Bad Wolf"s have been following her, not the Doctor, that seems to ultimately convince her to break open the TARDIS console so she can go back and provide our first convenient deus ex machina ending to a BBC Wales series.  (Although the way the sequence with the chain and the truck is shot suggests there's no way that should get the TARDIS console to open, and definitely not based on the way we see it open.)

Christopher Eccleston regenerates into David Tennant. ("The
Parting of the Ways") ©BBC

But while Rose might become the Bad Wolf, the heart of this story is ultimately the Doctor himself.  It's a tour de force performance from Christopher Eccleston as he frantically tries to save humanity from the Daleks, full of intensity and a huge breadth of emotions -- but the best moment isn't while he's wiring up the delta wave transmitter or confronting the Daleks: it's during his prerecorded message to Rose in the TARDIS, when he turns to look at her and gives that gentle, easy smile.  It's a beautiful moment in an episode filled with intensity.

But what's most interesting is that we can see the completion of the ninth Doctor's character arc here, from someone cold and aloof and faking cheerfulness to someone who's learned how to feel again and is ready to move on -- and his decision not to activate the delta wave and doom all of humanity (in what we now know, in light of subsequent revelations, is a very similar setup to what he (believes he) did on the last day of the Time War) shows how far he's come.  "What are you, coward or killer?" the Emperor asks.  "Coward.  Any day," the Doctor says, unwilling to make the same choice again and stronger for it.

And then Rose saves him and wipes out all the Daleks (and brings Captain Jack back to life too, even if the Doctor doesn't seem to know this -- or else why would he leave Jack behind?) but is dying from the Time Vortex flowing through her, which leads to the Doctor kissing Rose to pull the Vortex out of her.  It's what the series has been building to, but it's written in such a way as to give the audience the kiss many of them have been waiting the whole series for without upsetting the old fans (who were irate at McGann kissing Grace in the TV Movie).  But the Doctor ends up sacrificing himself to save her (becoming the second out of three Doctors to date to give his life for a friend), getting a fabulous departure in the process:

DOCTOR: I absorbed all the energy of the Time Vortex, and no one's meant to do that.  Every cell in my body's dying.
ROSE: Can't you do something?
DOCTOR: Yeah, I'm doing it now.  Time Lords have this little trick, it's sort of a way of cheating death.  Except it means I'm going to change, and I'm not going to see you again.  Not like this.  Not with this daft old face.  And before I go—
ROSE: Don't say that.
DOCTOR: Rose, before I go, I just want to tell you, you were fantastic.  Absolutely fantastic. And do you know what?  So was I.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - The Parting of the Ways)

And with that we get our first regeneration standing up instead of lying down --supposedly because David Tennant hadn't been cast when Eccelston finished his scenes and it was easier to match standing shots rather than lying-down ones, but it's also a much more heroic-looking pose.

And so we say farewell to Christopher Eccleston, who leaves after just one series.  The reasons why he left are still unclear (Eccleston's still unwilling to more than hint at them, and no one else is saying anything), but nevertheless he was (and is still) proud of the year he did on the show.  He should be; not only did he help relaunch the show and make it a huge success, but he took the character of the Doctor and turned it into a genuine person rather than just a sort of archetype.  It's a fantastic performance from an amazingly talented actor, and the show was lucky to have him.

But what a way to go out, eh?  "Bad Wolf" / "The Parting of the Ways" is, like Eccleston's performance, a tour de force -- an unabashed "season finale" full of action and drama.  Everyone excels in this, turning a tale about reality television into one of the biggest threats the Doctor has ever faced on screen.  It's still BBC Wales' best season-ender to date.  In a word, fantastic.

Kudos, therefore, to Russell T Davies and everyone who worked on this series.  It was definitely a gamble to bring Doctor Who back, and in such a way as to capture as large an audience as possible, but they succeeded handily -- and with the strongest run of stories since, well, season 26 -- but season 18 before that.  And what's more, they did so in a way as to retain the spirit of the original show, not by rebooting it or changing it but by simply updating it for the modern viewers -- just like the programme has always done.  Definitively, emphatically, Doctor Who is back.

Now the question is, can they keep it up?

January 9: "Bad Wolf"

And right after our first sequel we get our second, as this two-parter deals with the consequences of the Doctor's actions in "The Long Game".  Well, sort of.  This episode says that the problems Earth faces in 200,100 are the result of what happened on Satellite Five a hundred years earlier, but given the reveal at the end that the Daleks have been working behind the scenes for quite some time, it looks like they're more likely to blame.

But here we are, at the beginning of Christopher Eccleston's final story as the Doctor, dealing with those consequences mixed with a healthy dose of reality television.  It's rather tragic that this is the end of the ninth Doctor, because Eccleston's performance here is so good.  He was never really "off" in his performance, but those early episodes have some moments of what feels like forced jollity -- perfectly in keeping with the characterization, but there nevertheless.  But here there's none of that.  We get all the range Eccleston's been showing the whole season, but there's never a sense that it's forced, even when he's asked to turn on a dime (such as in the Big Brother house, when he learns that the losing contestants are killed and he goes from annoyed to confused to determined in the space of a few seconds).  He's also incredibly charming with Lynda and seems genuinely pleased at the thought of her traveling with him once this reality television situation is sorted.  But then there are his more serious moments -- he's very intense when he's silent, after he thinks Rose is dead -- and it's really wonderful how he doesn't say a word until "Let's do it" to Jack, who immediately springs into action.  But his intensity here and in the speech to the Daleks at the end are marvelous to behold.

"Do I look like an 'out of bounds' sort of guy?" ("Bad Wolf") ©BBC

Captain Jack also comes off really well in this too.  He's highly entertaining in his reality TV moments ("Ladies, your viewing figures just went up," he tells the two droids after they remove his clothes on live TV, and then there's the moment where he pulls a concealed blaster from somewhere while naked -- "You really don't want to know," he tells them when they ask where he was hiding it), but what's more striking is how he seems to instinctively follow the Doctor's orders and settles in comfortably as a subordinate.  He even calls the Doctor "sir", and not facetiously either.  Really, the only one who doesn't shine in this episode is Rose, and that's because she spends a lot of this episode either forced to play The Weakest Link Deadly Edition or thought to be dead.  (And don't worry, she'll get a chance to stand out next episode.)

The reality TV stuff (the main plot of this first part) isn't as biting a satire as it could have been -- partly because the production companies that own the rights to these shows have given permission to use their logos and music and such (and thus wouldn't be terribly thrilled with too barbed an approach) and partly because Russell T Davies is an admitted fan of the genre.  As such, the parodying focuses more on a "what if?" scenario regarding deadly game shows -- not exactly the most original subject (and one Doctor Who itself had already sort of tackled in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy), but one that they get a surprising amount of mileage out of.

But ultimately this is about bringing all the "Bad Wolf" clues to a head (complete with a recap of some of their appearances during the course of the series), as the Doctor realizes that "someone's manipulated my entire life," and giving us the big reveal at the end of the episode that the Daleks are back, somehow -- and in the grand Terry Nation tradition of waiting till the end of the episode (and referring to them as something other than "Daleks" -- "my masters", in this case) before making the big reveal, even though the previous trailer spoiled the surprise (and now that the episodes are 45 minutes, you have to wait twice as long as when Nation did it).  But now they've shown themselves; the end of the ninth Doctor is almost here.

Fantastic cliffhanger, though:

DALEK: We have your associate.  You will obey or she will be exterminated.
DOCTOR: No.
DALEK: Explain yourself.
DOCTOR: I said no.
DALEK: What is the meaning of this negative?
DOCTOR: It means no.
DALEK: But she will be destroyed.
DOCTOR: No!  Because this is what I'm going to do.  I'm going to rescue her.  I'm going to save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dalek fleet, and then I'm going to save the Earth, and then, just to finish off, I'm going to wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky!
DALEK: But you have no weapons, no defences, no plan.
DOCTOR: Yeah.  And doesn't that scare you to death?  Rose?
ROSE: Yes, Doctor?
DOCTOR: I'm coming to get you.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - Bad Wolf)

January 8: "Boom Town"

Oh look, it's our first sequel of the BBC Wales run -- we even get a brief recap of the events of "Aliens of London" / "World War Three" at the beginning in case you've forgotten who "Margaret Blaine" is.

Jack, Rose, the Doctor, and Mickey stop Margaret Blaine from
escaping. ("Boom Town") ©BBC

It's kind of a weird episode though, is "Boom Town".  We get some really lovely scenes with the TARDIS crew, joined by Mickey and clearly having a great time in 2006 Cardiff.  It's especially nice to see how effortlessly Jack fits in, creating a really fun dynamic with the regulars.  I also really like the way he's incredibly enthusiastic about Margaret's tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator.  ("It's a surfboard," Mickey says, after Jack explains what it does.  "A pan-dimensional surfboard, yeah," Jack replies.)  Captain Jack will rarely be better than he is in these first series episodes, and we won't really get another "chummy" moment like we do at the beginning for a long time.

But then Russell T Davies decides to give us a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, with a returning villain who may not actually be as bad as we thought -- it's certainly hard not to draw parallels with TNG's fifth season episode "I, Borg" (in which the Enterprise finds a lone Borg and decides after talking to him that maybe they're not so bad after all).  To Davies' credit, though, he never goes full bore with the "she's just misunderstood" aspect, and in fact the moments where Margaret claims just that sound more like a desperate plea to avoid being executed than genuine remorse.  Nevertheless, it's hard to shake the idea that Davies really wants this to be an examination of both Margaret and the Doctor.  In this light, it looks like it wants to be the counterpart of stories like "Dalek", taking a hard look at the character of the Doctor.  Unfortunately, it runs into two problems: first, unlike "Dalek", this character examination is the main plot of the episode, rather than a sidelight, and so it does feel a bit lightweight; and second, the Doctor's analysis of Margaret feels a lot more compelling than her probing questions to him (even if he doesn't seem to have ready answers for all of them).  "You've been in that skin suit too long," the Doctor tells Margaret.  "You've forgotten.  There used to be a real Margaret Blaine.  You killed her and stripped her and used the skin.  You're pleading for mercy out of a dead woman's lips."  We're supposed to be thoughtful about the Doctor's lifestyle and motives, but Margaret's questions don't hold as much weight as that moment from the Doctor.  It also doesn't help that she turns out to be selfish anyway, willing to destroy the whole planet in order to surf her way out of there -- which makes it even harder for us to take her points seriously.

The other, more minor quibble is regarding Rose and Mickey's scenes.  The exploration of their relationship is actually rather good, and Mickey's decision at the end to ignore Rose is a striking one (even if it'll be completely ignored in the next story).  There is, however, something rather frustrating about listening to Rose describe to Mickey all the cool planets she's been to without having experienced any of them ourselves.¹⁶⁸  After all, so far we've been to Earth, two space stations orbiting Earth, and, er, that's it.  This is in part because of a calculated move on Russell T Davies' part, to ensure that the younger, more mainstream viewers aren't scared away by anything that looks too much like a "cult" show that they therefore wouldn't be interested in -- remember, for a large part of the audience, this show isn't about "an adventure in space and time" (as the Radio Times once put it) but instead is about Rose's relationship with the Doctor.  But it's still a bit perverse to hear about these places without seeing them ourselves.

So "Boom Town" is ultimately a really uneven episode -- the good moments are really good, but the weak moments almost cause the whole episode to collapse under the weight of the surrounding scenes.  This is worth watching for the performances and the interaction between some of the characters, but not much else.

Oh, and one additional note: we finally see the Doctor notice how the words "Bad Wolf" have been following him around for the past few episodes (the clue meant to keep longer-term viewers interested and guessing), even if he ultimately dismisses it as coincidence.  Except that the next episode is called "Bad Wolf"...  (And the trailer at the end of this episode appears to spoil the big cliffhanger at the end of that one.)







¹⁶⁸ Well, unless you're the sort of person who reads the tie-in books -- Justicia, the setting of the second Ninth Doctor Adventure The Monsters Within, gets a name-check here.  In that book Justicia's explicitly Rose's first alien planet -- a moment you'd think we might have been allowed to see, rather than just read about.

January 7: "The Doctor Dances"

Great cliffhanger resolution here, as the Doctor sternly tells the advancing patients to go to their room -- reasoning correctly that the people here have a connection with the main child who is acting as the leader.  "I'm really glad that worked," the Doctor says.  "Those would have been terrible last words."

If the first episode concentrated on a sense of suspense and creepiness, this episode is more of an action-based one, with more chases and a couple death-defying feats near the end.  That's not to say that there's no suspense or creepiness on display here -- indeed, there are just as many worrying moments, with the bit with the typewriter (an added scene when the episode was running under length) and Algy's transformation into a gas mask victim being two particular highlights.  It's also really wonderful how the Doctor's solution to the cliffhanger comes back to bite them.  "I sent it to its room," the Doctor realizes, as he, Rose, and Jack look around the room in the hospital that the child was kept.  "This is its room."  It's moments like that, presented with supreme confidence and panache, that help sell this story.

But perhaps even more impressively, they've also got time for some character moments.  Steven Moffat seems to delight in puncturing some of the show's more sacred cows -- the sonic screwdriver is scrutinized and comes up somewhat lacking ("Who looks at a screwdriver and thinks, 'Ooh, this could be a little more sonic?'" Jack says disparagingly), but most pertinently the question about whether the Doctor can be involved in anything beyond a platonic relationship is brought up playfully, most often using the euphemism "dance".  "The world doesn't end because the Doctor dances," Rose says, and while she's actually talking about dancing here the subtext is clear.  (And, in case you missed it, they make it about as explicit as they can later, when Jack proves to be interested in both women and men: "Relax, he's a fifty-first century guy.  He's just a bit more flexible when it comes to... dancing.")

Jack watches as the Doctor and Rose dance in the TARDIS. ("The
Doctor Dances") ©BBC

But there's a third meaning at work as well, one that's often overlooked even though it's referred to in the title.  (After all, the first meaning makes for a really strange name and the second doesn't happen, unless we really missed something off-screen.)  Even though he may not be the smoothest suitor (or even be interested in being a suitor at this point), when it comes to saving people and doing the right thing there's no one more adept.  "You want moves, Rose?  I'll give you moves," the Doctor declares, as he sends the upgraded nanogene software to the rest of the nanogenes.  And thus we get an absolutely joyous resolution, as everyone affected by the gas mask plague (thanks to the nanogenes) is restored to perfect health: "Everybody lives, Rose!  Just this once, everybody lives!"  The Doctor dances with joy as he's able to save everyone.  It's a beautiful moment, and everyone affected does live -- even Captain Jack, who was ready to sacrifice his life to stop a German bomb from killing everyone in the railyard, is saved by the Doctor and brought onto the TARDIS before the bomb explodes.  Looks like they have a new traveller aboard.

"The Empty Child" / "The Doctor Dances" is a supremely confident story, one that moves at a good clip with a swagger, as if it knows just how good it is.  It helps that they've made this a two-parter; a single episode version wouldn't have been nearly as good.  We get some fabulous performances from everyone and a new companion in Captain Jack Harkness, who'll go on to have lots of adventures without the Doctor (although none of them will ever explore or even refer to the missing two years of his life as a Time Agent that he mentions as a motivation here).  It's scary, it's funny, it's brave, and it's unabashedly happy.  "The Empty Child" / "The Doctor Dances" isn't just a standout story of Eccleston's tenure, or of the BBC Wales run, but of the entire programme.

January 6: "The Empty Child"

And so, sixteen years after the show first dipped its toe into the waters of World War II with The Curse of Fenric (a story, you might recall, about vampires attacking a British army base in the northeast part of England while a small Soviet force tried to steal a computer), Doctor Who dives headfirst into the subject in "The Empty Child", set in London during the Blitz.

The child in the gas mask is looking for his mummy. ("The Empty
Child") ©BBC

Except...it doesn't.  This is set during the Blitz, certainly, and we get some details here and there to support that, but Steven Moffat (who you might remember from Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death -- he's gone and done Coupling since then and thus at this point is also quite a big name in British television) is more interested in the Blitz as a backdrop rather than an event.  Instead, we get a suspense-filled episode as a child wearing a gas mask goes around following people in London -- and those who've encountered him are terrified of him.  That's really the main thrust of this first part: the Doctor does some investigating, which leads to the discovery that anyone who's come into contact with the boy develops the same symptoms -- physical trauma and a gas mask (why the gas mask gets fused to the body and not any of the other clothes is left unanswered).  It's a really creepy idea that they do a good job of selling -- director James Hawes makes good use of angles and lighting to enhance his shots.  But perhaps the most impressive part of this main storyline is the scene around the dinner table, where Christopher Eccleston shows just how good he is with children.  We've never really seen this Doctor interact with kids before, but there's something magical about this moment, as he jokes with them but also gets information from them -- it gives you a look into why Eccleston took the job in the first place.

And while that's going on, Rose clings to an unmoored barrage balloon while a German air raid is happening, only to be rescued by a charming man named Captain Jack Harkness, who is emphatically not from 1941 (seeing how he has a spaceship and all). John Barrowman makes a strong debut as Jack, oozing charm and rakishness, and even though he reveals himself to be a con man and may have inadvertently caused the gas mask plague, you still can't help but root for him.  Rose certainly seems taken with him -- and she seems more pleased with his actions (doing things like finding the Doctor by searching for alien technology) than with the Doctor's (asking around about things falling from the sky).  (And her comments about "Spock" are the first overt references to Star Trek in televised Doctor Who.)  Jack in fact seems here to be written as almost the opposite of the Doctor -- both "freelancers" but behaving in different ways.  We'll have to see if they carry this through to the second part.

It's a very good set-up episode -- the empty child is incredibly effective in its eeriness, and his plaintive cries of "are you my mummy?" are deservedly memorable, a juxtaposition of the helpless with the deadly.  The moment where Dr. Constantine succumbs to the plague is really quite horrific, and the final scenes in the hospital, where Jack finally meets the Doctor and describes the con, are also good -- and the cliffhanger is really effective as well.  And look, they've moved the "next time" trailer to after the credits (supposedly at Moffat's insistence), to avoid spoilers for anyone who wants to remain ignorant of the next episode's events.  (Although this trailer isn't nearly as "spoiler"-y as the one after "Aliens of London" was.)

January 5: "Father's Day"

This is something of a curious episode.  On the one hand it wants to be a hardcore tearjerker, designed to pull long and hard on the audience's heartstrings and throw in a bit of SF to make it plausible.  On the other hand it bends over backwards to achieve this goal -- often flying in the face of the rules it's just established.

Rose saves her dad's life. ("Father's Day") ©BBC

There's certainly nothing wrong with using SF as a means to tell a story like this (in fact, it's a fine old tradition), and Paul Cornell makes a number of clever decisions in his script.  It's not the most surprising thing to make Pete Tyler rather less than the upright citizen his wife told Rose he was, but pushing this as far as Cornell does (he makes dodgy deals, he apparently fools around) is a good move -- and throwing a personality as explosive as Jackie's into the mix gives us even more opportunities to see just how rocky this marriage is.  (On the other hand, Jackie's clearly a bridesmaid and thus presumably under a bit of stress, so maybe that's just getting to her.)  Caught in the middle is Rose, trying (and largely failing) to not let on that she's Pete's daughter from the future, while the Doctor is furious at her for saving Pete's life and starting this all in the first place.  That might actually be the best part of the whole episode, the Doctor's angry and disappointed conversation with Rose.  "When we met, I said travel with me in space.  You said no.  Then I said 'time machine'," he says, and while Rose denies that it was premeditated part of you wonders how true that is.  Nevertheless Cornell packs in the interpersonal relationships -- the Doctor telling the ready-to-be-married couple, "I've never had a life like that," his efforts to try and save the day without killing Pete Tyler, the way Pete and Rose interact -- with Pete realizing from Rose's descriptions of him as a father that he was actually meant to die earlier that day...  In terms of interpersonal dynamics "Father's Day" comes out a winner.

The SF side of things is more problematic, as "Father's Day" sets up some basic rules for the Reapers and then largely ignores them.  "The older something is, the stronger it is," we're told, but the Reapers seem to take out an adult pushing the young Mickey on a swing and not Mickey himself.  Stuart's dad is one of the first people we see grabbed, but Stuart, Sarah, and their friends are left untouched.  Baby Rose makes it through the whole thing.  The Reaper that gets into the church has no problem devouring the Doctor, even though he's likely older than the church itself.  (And, compounding the issue, the Doctor announces right before he's eaten that "I'm the oldest thing in here", but it doesn't seem to do him much good.  Then there's also the related problem of why we never see the Reapers ever again -- you'd think they would have shown up in something like "The Wedding of River Song" or even "The Fires of Pompeii" -- but we can't really blame Paul Cornell for other writers ignoring what happens here.)  And then there's the car that keeps circling the block, appearing and vanishing.  It's not at all clear why that's happening in the first place (other than to provide a solution to the problem) -- no explanation is given as to how the universe is intelligent enough (for lack of a better word) to keep trying to kill Pete with that car, or why that would even fix everything, given it's happening at a different time and place.  It seems the universe is more concerned with who lives and who dies, rather than the actual events and how they play out.

If you're willing to play along with the episode and get immersed in all the character moments, and if you're willing to accept the story's basic message of "everyone is important, no matter how insignificant they may seem", then "Father's Day" is full of great scenes and lots of good drama.  It certainly knows how to play up those moments, and the basic idea of the paradox really helps sell the episode.  It's only when you start to think about the details and how this is all actually meant to work that things start to fall apart.  How much you like "Father's Day", therefore, is directly proportional to how much you agree with the message and can ignore those nagging problems, and it's not hard to see how viewers might come down on either side of that fence.  I personally rather like it, but it's definitely not without its problems.

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...