January 17: "The Age of Steel"

This week's TARDISode:
     All around the woooorrrrld
     Gotta spread the woooorrrrd
     Tell 'em what you've hearrrd
     You're gonna be a Cyberman
 
The main problem with "The Age of Steel" (for me, at least) is that it's really hard to get worked up about the fate of people in a parallel universe.  I'm really not sure why; it's not like Doctor Who is normally a documentary or something, but nevertheless the fact that what we're witnessing doesn't affect "our" universe makes it hard to get really invested in events.  (And unlike, say, Inferno, we're not witnessing a cataclysmic disaster that leads to a breakdown in everything or directly comparing it to "our" world (which is what made that story worthwhile), but rather are simply seeing the sort of event that happens roughly once a year nowadays in the regular Doctor Who universe anyway.)  So even though we see Ricky killed by the Cybermen, it's hard to feel genuinely upset about it because Mickey is standing right there -- and as he was the only one present alongside his double, it felt more like bookkeeping than anything else.  Meanwhile, Jackie's conversion into a Cyberman is presented in a way that looks like we're supposed to be horrifically upset by this, but as it's not "our" Jackie it's hard to muster up the energy to care as much as it seems we're supposed to.

But where this episode (and really, this story) succeeds is in Graeme Harper's direction, which he makes impressively dynamic.  The scene of the Doctor and Mrs. Moore walking through the Cybermen-infested cooling tunnels is really well done, and manages to be tense and suspenseful without seeming too much like the crew of the Enterprise walking through a Borg ship on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  And Mrs. Moore's death actually is genuinely upsetting; she's been one of the best things about this episode, and to see her killed in such a shocking moment has a major impact on the viewer.  (Although how did that Cyberman come up behind her without anyone hearing it stomping?)  And the part right before, where the emotion inhibitor in the Cyberman is deactivated and we get a sense of who the Cyberman used to be, is really good -- it explores the idea of the dehumanization of the Cyber-conversion process in a way we haven't seen before, and the thought that the Cybermen have removed all their emotions not because emotions are "weak" (even though Lumic seems to be suggesting that later) but because it's the only way to stop them from going insane is a fascinating one, and it's a scene enhanced by Harper's direction, with a close-up on the Cyberman's face as "she" wonders what's going on.

Mickey says goodbye to the Doctor as Jake and Rose look on.
("The Age of Steel") ©BBC

But it's still hard to shake the idea, after everything is over, that we're meant to care a lot more than we actually do.  The moments that involve the regulars work way better than most of the ones that don't; we're cheering when Mickey saves the day by tricking the robot Cyberman into smashing the transmitter controls, and when he works out what the Doctor is telling him to put the Cybermen out of action for good.  As such it's genuinely sad to see him go at the end of the episode; Mickey has become the audience identification figure, and he's had a larger and more complete character journey than Rose has -- compare his first appearance in "Rose" to how he is here, and it's clear how much he's grown.  It's genuinely sad to see him go, even when you know he'll be back later.

However, ultimately "Rise of the Cybermen" / "The Age of Steel" is a story that doesn't quite work.  As a straightforward action tale it does a good job; there's enough action here to keep you happy, enhanced (once again) by Harper's direction, and it's probably a good move to have a simplified Cyberman history.  (Although subsequent tales are going to make things even more complicated than they ever were before.)  But you get the feeling that this two-parter wants to be more than that; it wants to examine some familiar characters in a new light and see what comes out.  But no one's different enough for this to work: Ricky is probably the furthest away from his counterpart, but that just makes him angry all the time.  Pete Tyler is still a good man and Jackie is a bit more snobbish, but it's hardly a reach for her character.  What it comes down to is that they don't give us enough of a reason to care about the fate of Pete's World, and so we're distanced from the events we see on screen; it's not affecting "our" Earth, so why should we care?  It's a question that "Rise of the Cybermen" / "The Age of Steel" struggles, and ultimately fails, to answer.

January 16: "Rise of the Cybermen"

The TARDISode shows a report about some strange goings-on related to a man named John Lumic, which Noel Clarke (as Ricky) is watching in a blue van...

Our first two-parter of this series takes the TARDIS to a London with zeppelins in the skies and Pete Tyler alive and well and a millionaire, thanks to hawking a drink called Vitex.  (Which you might remember as one of the products in his flat in "Father's Day".)  Yep, nineteen episodes into the revived series and they've decided to do a parallel universe story.  Fortunately we don't see too many duplicates between Pete's World (as it'll be called in "Doomsday") and our regular world, so the actors aren't using this as an opportunity to do something different from normal -- and in fact the two who do show up in both universes (Noel Clarke as Mickey/Ricky and Camille Coduri as Jackie) don't play significantly different versions of themselves: Ricky is more intense than Mickey, and this Jackie seems a lot more stuck-up than "our" Jackie, but that's about it.  (Incidentally, we get confirmation of the "+1" dating, with Mickey commenting that it's right when they left their universe, on 1st February, and that Jackie is claiming that she shares a birthday with Cuba Gooding, Jr., even though she's a year older and is actually turning 40.¹⁷²)  Rose really wants to find Pete, and when the Doctor is forced to choose between her and Mickey, he chooses Rose.  Even though Mickey has by this point replaced her as the audience identification figure, being a lot more likeable and sympathetic -- check out the scene between the Doctor and Mickey in the darkened TARDIS console room, where they both seem really comfortable with each other, if you need proof.

So then why is this set in a parallel universe?  It's not to destroy it, as in Inferno, and while it's nice to see Shaun Dingwall back as Pete Tyler, it's unlikely that's the main impetus either.  No, it looks like this is designed to jettison all the backhistory of the Cybermen and start afresh.  (And in fact, this story started out as another Big Finish remake, like last year's "Dalek" (which was a remake of Rob Shearman's own Jubilee): this time of Marc Platt's "genesis of the Cybermen" story Spare Parts -- although you can be forgiven for not realizing that, as there's very little overlap between the two.  (Nevertheless, Marc Platt gets a "thanks to" credit during the end titles.))   No one apparently wanted to untangle all the Mondas/Telos stuff, so we get a brand-new beginning here.  Instead of being created on Mondas as a desperate response to deteriorating conditions there (if Spare Parts is to be believed), the Cybermen of Pete's World were created on Earth by a wheelchair-bound genius named John Lumic.  It seems no one mentioned Davros to writer Tom MacRae (and MacRae is on record as having to be brought up to speed on Doctor Who when he wrote this, so he wouldn't have known about Davros on his own).

But that's fine; other than the "it's been done" factor, there's no real reason the Cybermen couldn't have been created by a Davros-like character.  The problem with the episode as broadcast, though, is that Roger Lloyd-Pack is woefully miscast as Lumic.  Lloyd-Pack seems to be taking the opportunity to play Lumic as one-note as possible, with wide staring eyes and a melodramatic tone to every one of his lines (one online commentator -- I don't remember now who -- described the performance as if Lumic is spending the entire time touching cloth, which is as good as a description as you're likely to find).  It's thus incredibly hard to take Lumic seriously, and even when his Cybermen are stomping around he's still essentially a buffoon of a villain.

Lumic's Cybermen stomp around the grounds of Pete Tyler's
mansion. ("Rise of the Cybermen") ©BBC

The redesigned Cybermen, however, fare rather better.  They look pretty good, with some classic bits (the jug handles, the teardrop eyeholes, the external cables running along the arms) mixed up with some brand-new design elements -- most notably the metal plating over semi-exposed bunches of cables.  It also helps that they're all moving as a well-trained single unit, stomping along in unison.  In fact, that's probably my only real complaint: these Cybermen sure are loud, aren't they?  They could hardly sneak up on someone while clomping along like that...

But they still look pretty good (even if I still prefer the Earthshock design), and thanks to some good direction their big reveal is held back until the end, when they burst into Jackie Tyler's birthday party and kill the President of Great Britain (as played by Don Warrington, who Big Finish fans will recognize as Rassilon from various Doctor Who audios).  And look!  It's the return of Graeme Harper, last seen directing Revelation of the Daleks in 1985; there's nothing quite as visually striking as anything in either of Harper's '80s stories (partly because stylistically, the rest of television had caught up with him by 2006), but there are still a lot of nice touches, with a number of blurred shots and out-of-focus elements in the extreme foreground while we concentrate on something further back in the shot.

It's not a perfect first half, but it's got enough to keep us engaged and wondering what will happen next time.  (And there's no "next time" trailer to tease us for this episode either -- apparently because the episode was running long as it was, but it's still a good move to keep us in the dark.)







¹⁷² Well, sort of.  Cuba Gooding, Jr. was indeed 39 in 2007, but his birthday is actually January 2nd.  But in American dating, where the month comes first, that's written as 1-2-1968 -- which, if you think it's British dating with the day first, looks like 1st February.  So the question is, is this a mistake made by Jackie/her biographer and included as a (very) subtle character detail, or a genuine one by Doctor Who's production team?

January 15: "The Girl in the Fireplace"

This episode's TARDISode shows the ship being damaged by an ion storm, which leads to the repair droids killing the crew so that they can use their bodies as parts to fix the ship...

The episode proper begins after this, with Mickey's first trip in the TARDIS: "It's a spaceship.  Brilliant!  I got a spaceship on my first go!"  And no one seems to have told writer Steven Moffat about Rose's reluctance to have Mickey around (as we saw at the end of "School Reunion"), so consequently she's a lot more likable here -- she and Mickey seem to be having a good time, at least until they're captured by the repair droids.  In fact, this is easily the closest we've gotten to the first series's characterization since "The Christmas Invasion", and it's a welcome return.

A clockwork robot confronts the Doctor in pre-Revolutionary
France. ("The Girl in the Fireplace") ©BBC

But "The Girl in the Fireplace" isn't really about Rose and Mickey; it's about the Doctor and how he keeps popping up into a young girl's life -- a girl who turns out to be Jean Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour.  It's a relationship made possible thanks to some powerful 51st-century technology that's punching holes in time, stalking Madame de Pompadour for a reason left unknown until the closing shot of the episode.  But that reason (the ship is the SS Madame de Pompadour), while useful to know, isn't really germane to the issue -- it's just a way to cap off the events.  The real issue is the Doctor's effect on Reinette, and her effect on him.  Owing to the clever use of "time windows", the Doctor periodically shows up for a bit during moments of Reinette's life, providing an interesting relationship between the two, as Reinette is forced to take "the slow path" while the Doctor flits between moments.  It wants to be a romance, albeit one with clockwork robots, as well as a man who's 900 years old.  But they do manage to pull this aspect off -- Reinette is clearly infatuated with her "fireplace man", and while the Doctor's interest is pitched more as intellectual fascination, there still seems to be a spark there (and he definitely kisses her back during that first kiss).  Plus there's the whole "drunk Doctor" scene, where he swoops in all cheer and goofiness, singing "I Could Have Danced All Night".  He may indeed be playacting (as suggested by his sudden change in demeanor, as he pours "anti-oil" (er...) over the lead clockwork robot), but the choice to play drunk didn't come out of nowhere.¹⁷¹  And there's the heart-breaking finale, as the Doctor learns, after offering to take Reinette along with him to travel in the TARDIS (hey, it could happen; Mary Shelley traveled with the eighth Doctor for a time, if Big Finish is to be believed), that he's come back too late, arriving just after her death.  "I'm always all right," the Doctor tells Rose at the end -- although it's Mickey who's sharp enough to notice that the Doctor needs some time alone.  Really, the only problem is the Doctor's mindlink with Reinette, which looks so much like a Vulcan mind meld that's hard to take it seriously (particularly since it's not an ability he's ever exhibited before; it'll come up again down the line, although the method of thought transference will be different).

It's a story well-suited to Doctor Who, and an idea that hadn't really been explored before this point.  The clockwork robots are a great design, and they give a nice bit of impetus to the story -- and there's something appealing about no one considering the possibility that their repair droids might use people to effect repairs and thus not programming them to not do that.  But this is ultimately about getting a number of different looks into someone's life, and everything else is secondary to that.

The last three episodes of this series, we've had to make allowances for a number of questionable choices, and while the finished products might have ultimately come out ahead, it's been with a lot of qualifiers.  There are no such reservations here.  "The Girl in the Fireplace" is a gorgeous tale about history and romance, with some clever SF ideas underpinning them.  Like Moffat's last story, it won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.  It's an honor well-deserved.







¹⁷¹ Given the extra meanings of "dance" floating around Moffat's last script for the show, it might be worth pondering just how far things went between the Doctor and Reinette.  (Though for what it's worth, Moffat has said they didn't get to that stage.)

January 14: "School Reunion"

The TARDISode: Mickey does some investigations online into UFO sightings and comes across a large flashing sign saying, "TORCHWOOD ACCESS DENIED", which lets him know he's on the right track.  Nice job keeping secret the top-secret organization that not even the Prime Minister is supposed to know about, guys.

This is an episode where the script seems to be working at cross-purposes with the actual filming and direction.  On paper "School Reunion" is meant to be an examination of how the Doctor enters people's lives and leaves them behind, and why Rose is different from the others -- and if you're coming to this episode as someone who started watching in 2005, you might get that feeling.  But you'd probably notice that something about that feels off, because the story they're actually telling on screen has a different emphasis.  The version we actually see is about the Doctor meeting back up with a friend from long ago -- one Sarah Jane Smith -- and working through some things so that everything is patched up by the end, while it becomes less and less obvious why we should be rooting for his current companion.

The Doctor, Rose, Mickey, and Sarah Jane wait for K-9's analysis.
("School Reunion") ©BBC

It's certainly clear which side David Tennant falls on.  A lifelong Who fan himself (Doctor Who was what made Tennant want to be an actor in the first place), you can see how thrilled he is to be working with Elisabeth Sladen, and the chemistry they have is quite impressive -- Tennant is incredibly enthusiastic, and that translates to the Doctor himself, who seems genuinely pleased as punch to see Sarah again.  Sladen herself is fabulous as Sarah Jane, still full of the same energy and presence that she had in the '70s.  The only real problem is that the script requires her to play her relationship with the Doctor as like that between Rose and the Doctor, with Sarah having been hopelessly in love with the Doctor -- when a quick look at any of her stories would show that that's just about the least likely interpretation of their friendship.  It's frankly a bit insulting to Sarah to reinterpret her relationship that way, but to her credit Elisabeth Sladen pulls it off.  This is a Sarah who's slightly bitter about the Doctor leaving her at the end of The Hand of Fear and has just been spinning her wheels since the Doctor left (another insult, as Sarah seemed just about the most independent companion the Doctor had, with her own life outside the TARDIS and everything, and thus the least likely to be pining after him -- and besides, what about The Five Doctors?¹⁷⁰).

As I said, Sladen manages to make this work, presenting one of the Doctor's former companions in a new light -- but Billie Piper isn't as lucky, as she's been saddled with some frankly petulant and bitchy material.  It's hard to see what they were going for -- clearly they want Rose to be different, to be the one that the Doctor wouldn't leave behind (it even comes up in the dialogue), so why do they try to make her as unlikeable as possible?  She fights with Sarah, she's jealous, she really doesn't seem to want Mickey on board the TARDIS for some reason... and, perhaps most problematically, she doesn't have much to do in this episode; her purpose in this story seems to be to act as a counterpoint to Sarah Jane, but she's the one that ends up looking the worse for the comparison.

And it's really only Rose who fares poorly in this story: Mickey comes across as a dependable and rather fun member of the team, and his realization that he's "the tin dog" makes him step up in a way that causes you to cheer.  And it's a welcome pleasure to see K-9 again after all this time, even if he is the worse for wear here -- and they even got John Leeson back to do the voice.  Meanwhile, Anthony Head is fantastic as the evil leader of the Krillitanes, Mr. Finch -- he underplays everything, which makes him even more menacing, and his confrontation with the Doctor in the school pool is a fabulous dance between the two, beautifully shot by director James Hawes.

In fact, if this story works at all it's largely down to Hawes's direction, with some great visuals and clever shots as the cast interact with each other.  Beyond the reintroduction of Sarah Jane and K-9, the script isn't the most terribly original thing ever (maths will change the universe -- Doctor Who already did that in Logopolis, albeit not with high school kids on computers displaying various permutations of the PC game Quake's logo), and the interesting idea of the Krillitanes is rather squandered.  But Hawes makes these concepts work visually and gives a coherence to everything on screen, giving the impression that this story is better than it probably actually is.

So like "New Earth" and "Tooth and Claw" before it, "School Reunion" is a qualified success.  There are some wasted opportunities here (like the Krillitanes, which to date haven't made a return appearance on screen) and some extremely problematic issues with one of our main identification figures -- as well as a need to grit your teeth and accept the revisionist interpretation of Sarah Jane -- but the confidence of the direction and the happy interplay among the Doctor, Mickey, Sarah Jane, and Rose (at times) makes up for this.  In particular, Tennant and Sladen make this story stand out; their interplay alone makes "School Reunion" worth watching.







¹⁷⁰ So not only does Toby Whithouse get the relationship between the Doctor and Sarah Jane wrong, but the basic premise of the story needs Sarah to have never seen the Doctor since she was dropped off -- even though he sent her K-9 in K-9 and Company and saw her again in The Five Doctors.  K-9 and Company clearly happened, but for a while it looked like maybe The Five Doctors had been removed from the continuity (the suggestions that The Hand of Fear was their last encounter and that the Doctor has regenerated "half a dozen times" since he last saw her, which, if Tennant is the tenth Doctor, would make Tom Baker the last Doctor to have seen her).  Subsequent events have both addressed the "half a dozen" comment (the inclusion of the War Doctor) and definitively shown that The Five Doctors happened (in "The Time of the Doctor", the Doctor still has the seal of the High Council that he took from the Master in the Death Zone -- an event that Sarah was present for) -- so why doesn't Sarah remember that here?  Well, it's remotely possible that, as she was taken out of time by the Time Scoop, those events were erased from her memory once they were over.  Or maybe Sarah didn't realize that Peter Davison was a later Doctor; after all, Tom Baker wasn't around, and she knew Jon Pertwee was the Doctor from her past, so if she never learned that Peter Davison was the fifth Doctor then she might think he's actually a pre-Pertwee incarnation, and that the events in the Death Zone happened in his personal past and thus didn't really count as him seeing her again.  This would require her to have not really talked to any of the other companions while in Rassilon's tomb and for her to not be paying attention when Troughton calls Davison "the latest model" -- a bit of a stretch, but just about plausible enough to be workable.  Either way, this is more thought than Whithouse appears to have put into things.

January 13: "Tooth and Claw"

This episode's TARDISode: a meteor crashes to Earth, and then 300 years later someone's attacked by a giant wolf in Scotland...

The actual episode proper opens with an incredibly stylistic, heavily choreographed fight scene, as orange-clad Scottish monks perform kung fu (er...) as they flip and fly around a courtyard.  It's an extremely frenetic sequence that promises an action-packed story.

Unfortunately, the rest of "Tooth and Claw" doesn't quite deliver on that particular promise.  There's a lot of action to be sure, as characters run up and down corridors in fine Doctor Who tradition, but none of it seems quite as energetic as that opening sequence.  There's also the problem that, after their balletic moves, the Brethren don't do much beyond shoot at anyone trying to open a window of the house -- they're there to keep people in, not to kick ass in excitingly visual ways.  It's therefore to the story's benefit that the primary threat of the werewolf is realized convincingly enough to help carry the day.  ("Finally, a werewolf story!" they proclaimed at the time, ignoring things like Mindwarp and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.)  It often feels like Russell T Davies is attempting to recapture the feel of a Hinchcliffe-era story, with a small group of people under threat from a single creature.  (Actually, it's most like Horror of Fang Rock, which is technically the first Graham Williams story.)  And to his credit and that of the people making this, they just about pull it off.

The Doctor and the werewolf, separated by a mistletoe-infused
door. ("Tooth and Claw") ©BBC

One drawback to this approach, though, is that owing to the comparatively short running time, "Tooth and Claw" can't spend much time slowly building up the werewolf as a threat or giving our heroes much time to come up with a defense against it.  Instead we get a story that, once it gets going, moves at full pelt the whole time.  So you sort of wonder why, given the time constraints, Davies wastes it with the "We are not amused" bit, which is incredibly unfunny and makes Rose seem extremely callous.  (In fact, "Tooth and Claw" marks the clear start of the degradation of Rose's character -- sadly, she'll become increasingly shallow and unlikeable as the series progresses.)  I understand that he needs a reason for Queen Victoria to banish the Doctor and Rose from the Empire (yeah, that worked) and set up Torchwood, but making Rose (and the Doctor, to some extent) seem like unfeeling gits feels like the wrong way to go about it.  And while we're at it, the resolution of this story is awfully bizarre -- it hinges on some major implausible coincidences (the Brethren just happened to choose Torchwood House, the place where Prince Albert and Sir Robert's father spent their last few years creating an elaborate trap to destroy a werewolf, and Victoria just happened to have the Koh-i-noor on her when she was there, allowing Albert's trap to be sprung), as if Davies is in such a rush to get to the conclusion and the subsequent denouement and founding of Torchwood as an anti-Doctor agency that he stops worrying about plausibility.  (Oh, and the color grading they've applied to make that first windswept meeting with Queen Victoria look like a bright sunny day, despite the clouds looming overhead, has the side-effect of making David Tennant's skin look incredibly blotchy.)

Fortunately, there are enough positives going on to outweigh the plotting concerns.  It's really lovely to hear David Tennant use his natural Scottish accent (and the little in-joke of calling himself "Doctor James McCrimmon" is a nice touch), and most everyone in front of the camera is doing a great job --  Pauline Collins (who you might remember as Samantha Briggs from The Faceless Ones) is incredibly good as Queen Victoria, giving the sense of a somewhat overwhelmed but extremely resolute woman, and Derek Riddell is great as Sir Robert, conflicted between loyalty to the queen and love for his wife.  And while we're here, can we just note that Michelle Duncan (playing Sir Robert's wife Lady Isobel) has incredibly beautiful blue eyes?

It has some odd moments and some questionable script decisions, but "Tooth and Claw" ultimately succeeds, thanks to the cast's performances and some assured directions from Euros Lyn, as an entertaining return to the style of some of the more claustrophobic stories of Doctor Who's past.  It's really not trying to do much more than provide some tense and exciting moments for 45 minutes, and so while there are those missteps, they ultimately don't significantly sully the final product.

January 12: "New Earth"

Series 2 gets to its real start here with "New Earth", our first trip beyond the solar system this century -- but before we get there, there's a quick teaser.  Each episode this series has a quick scene called a TARDISode, designed for mobile phones -- the one for "New Earth" is an infomercial for the hospital we see in the episode.  (And for some reason these short scenes weren't released on the DVD...)

But yes, it's our first extra-Solar trip, with a "new new Doctor".  They don't want to go too far afield and scare off the casual viewers though, so we get another sequel story -- this time it's a sequel to "The End of the World", set about twenty years in the future (I think?  Comparing the dates given in the two stories is slightly hazy...), with the Face of Boe and Cassandra both returning, even though Cassandra appeared to be dead at the end of it.  And really, the only alien-looking creature on display, other than the Face of Boe, is the cat nurses running the hospital -- everyone else is either human or humanoid with a different color of skin.  It's even explicitly a planet called New Earth, rather than anything more exotic.  They're making this first alien planet as safe and accessible as possible.

It's not a terrible story, though -- don't misunderstand me.  It's got a lot of great moments, and David Tennant is clearly having a grand time in his first regular story as the Doctor (as opposed to being sidelined and then rediscovering himself in "The Christmas Invasion").  The joy in which he experiences the disinfecting process in the elevator is gorgeous (and Rose's initial shock at the same thing makes it even better), and the life and energy he puts into his scenes makes him incredibly watchable.  It's also interesting how much of a contrast he makes from the ninth Doctor; there was a core of steel in Eccleston's performance, as if he was afraid of letting people in too much, but Tennant's Doctor seems to be putting it all out there.  Really, the only misstep is when he's possessed by Cassandra, which strays a little too far to the camp side of things.

Billie Piper, on the other hand, is clearly having a great time playing Cassandra-in-Rose, with a posher accent and a more overtly sexualized performance.  She's almost note-perfect, and scenes like her kiss of the Doctor (which half looks like an effort to distract the Doctor and half like she just really wants to kiss him) are handled really well.  (And the Doctor's reaction is priceless: initial bemusement giving way to a sort of pride -- "Yep, still got it," he says in a pleased tone.)  The farcical body swap moments are handled very well.

The infected new humans crave physical contact. ("New Earth")
©BBC

Unfortunately, they're unwilling to make an all-out comedy, and the ostensible main "serious" plot is just a little too generic to really shine.  The basic idea is intriguing (breeding human tissue and infecting it to study it and thus create a cure), but this essentially turns into a cut-rate zombie film -- but there's little of the sheer terror and intensity needed to make this aspect truly effective.   We get a handful of shots that suggest what they could have done if they'd really gone for it, but they're really few and far between.  The gas-mask plague victims in "The Empty Child" / "The Doctor Dances" were more effective than this -- heck, the Lazars in Terminus felt more worrying than this.

And if we're going to bring up last series's standout story, it's hard to escape the feeling that the resolution here is awfully similar to the one there.  Here it's a cocktail of different disease cures (um, how would that work exactly?) instead of reprogrammed nanogenes, but the Doctor passing the cure to the new humans feels awfully derivative of that earlier tale.  It's not exactly "Everybody lives!", but it clearly wants to be (note how triumphant the Doctor is -- although "I'm the Doctor, and I cured them!" doesn't have quite the same ring).

It has a lot of problems, but "New Earth" just about manages to pull it off.  The "zombie" plot threatens to make this story collapse, but the Cassandra interplay elevates this enough to make it worth watching -- and the final scene, where the dying Cassandra goes back to see herself when she was younger and still beautiful, works far better than it has any right to: Zoë Wanamaker and Sean Gallagher (as Cassandra-in-Chip) really sell it.  It's got some fabulous make-up (the cat masks here are light years ahead of the last time they tried this, in Survival) and some impressive setpieces (like the bit where they zoom down the elevator cable) -- if the rest of the episode had been up to the caliber of these moments, this would have been a knockout.  But as it is, our first trip to an alien planet is decidedly average.

January 11: Children in Need Special / "The Christmas Invasion" / "Attack of the Graske"

A brand-new Doctor for a brand-new series...well, sort of.  Strictly speaking, the series doesn't begin until "New Earth" -- but the Christmas special is included with the series 2 boxset, so I'll count it as part of the series.  And before we even get there, there's a quick little scene to view -- officially known as the Children in Need Special, although it also goes by other names.¹⁶⁹  Other than giving us our first mini-look at new tenth Doctor David Tennant, there's not much of note here -- Rose wants the Doctor to change back, and the regeneration is causing the Doctor to become increasingly erratic and dangerous as he causes the TARDIS to go out of control.  Oh, and, oddly, he seems to know that Captain Jack is alive back in 200,100.  But that's about it.

No, the main event is "The Christmas Invasion" -- Doctor Who's first Christmas special.  (Not its first Christmas episode, as you may recall -- but "The Feast of Steven" wasn't a standalone special.)  We get our first real look at David Tennant as the Doctor, still dealing with the effects of the regeneration.  And, in a canny move, Davies sidelines the Doctor for much of this story, leaving Rose feeling helpless and Jackie and Mickey trying to help pick up the pieces.  The result is a planet on the brink of disaster, ready to be enslaved by an alien race.

The Martian probe is a nice idea (although why would you put an extrasolar friendship package on something heading to Mars?), even if it seems to suggest that mankind hasn't actually been to Mars yet -- true for the real world, but not for the Doctor Who universe, if The Ambassadors of Death is to be believed.  (Then again, we've sent people to the moon and still get interested when probes are sent there, so maybe we can let this slide -- but the Ambassadors of Death problem will rear its head again later.)  The way the crisis evolves is really well done -- having a third of the population under control and heading to the roof is a neat trick that helps provide a genuine sense of worry and tension.  (Incidentally, Wikipedia suggests it's roughly 28% of the world's population with A+ blood -- closer to a fourth than a third, but still within the ballpark.)  Plus we get to see UNIT back in action and the return of Harriet Jones, now the Prime Minister of the UK.  She gets a running joke of introducing herself to everyone, which is either amusing or tiresome, depending on your mood.  And another mention of something called Torchwood (after a fleeting mention in "Bad Wolf").

"Did you miss me?" ("The Christmas Invasion") ©BBC

But this episode is ultimately about providing a huge threat to the world that only the Doctor can fix and then leaving him out of the action.  The others try to cope in his absence (with some nice set pieces, like the robot Santa "pilot fish" and the surprisingly impressive spinning killer Christmas tree), and while the new Doctor regains consciousness from time to time to remind us he's still around, essentially the humans are left on their own -- despite Harriet Jones's on-air pleas for the Doctor to help deal with the Sycorax.  (Which leads to Rose breaking down and sobbing, "He's left me, mum."  Nice of her to have a sense of perspective.)  This seems to be demonstrating one thing: that Rose, despite traveling with the Doctor and having her horizons expanded as a result, cannot do what the Doctor does -- no better illustrated than in the scene where the Sycorax laugh at her after her attempt to posture the way the Doctor would.  And so it's up to the Doctor to step in, with that great reveal of the TARDIS translation circuit beginning to work again, as he swoops in and easily saves the day -- breaking the blood control over the A+ people ("That's all blood control is, a cheap bit of voodoo," the Doctor says afterwards.  "Scares the pants off you, but that's as far as it goes.  It's like hypnosis.  You can hypnotise someone to walk like a chicken or sing like Elvis.  You can't hypnotise them to death; survival instinct's too strong") and standing as the Earth's champion against the Sycorax.  This sequence is overflowing with great lines from the Doctor, from being disappointed in not being ginger to accidentally quoting The Lion King to fighting the Sycorax leader in a swordfight -- one where he gets his hand chopped off and grows another one back.  Tennant is really wonderful in this sequence -- I don't even mind "This new hand?  It's a fightin' hand!" -- and it's easy to believe that he really is the Doctor, just the way Davies presumably intended.

Great ending, too; it's nice to have a bit of a "down" ending, with the destruction of the Sycorax ship by Torchwood more than a little reminiscent of the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano by a British submarine during the Falklands War.  We get a great speech from the Doctor ("I gave them the wrong warning.  I should've told them to run as fast as they can, run and hide because the monsters are coming.  The human race") and the bit about six words to bring down Harriet Jones is really good too.  And I love how the snowfall on Christmas turns out to be ash from the Sycorax ship burning up in the atmosphere -- a wonderful subversion of the cliché.

It's got a compelling story, a great new Doctor, and some really clever writing.  It looks good and is suitably Christmas-y without being overly saccharine or sentimental.  It's even got a nice weighty storyline, instead of a throwaway plot.  "The Christmas Invasion" is one of the best Christmas specials they've done yet -- it's just a bit of a shame it came first, because you know it's not going to be quite as good as this at Christmas again.

And one last little treat: an interactive adventure (originally on BBC Red Button but also available online if you're interested) called "Attack of the Graske".  It's essentially a simple "choose your own adventure" game with specially filmed footage of the Doctor guiding you through the events.  It's rather cute (although I think they missed a trick by not having the word YOU showing up in the credits after David Tennant's name), but the thing that's most striking about it is how comfortable David Tennant is addressing the camera directly; he seems very committed, and it's easy to become a part of the Doctor's adventure.  The only main quibble is that the very last scene with the Doctor is the same no matter how you did -- although some of the earlier "bad" outcomes, where the Doctor is increasingly exasperated at you, are awfully amusing (and the "bad" ending with the family is way more entertaining than the good one -- I love the way the girl causes the Christmas tree to fall over).  Frankly, even though it's ultimately a bit of fluff, "Attack of the Graske" is far better than it really has any right to be.

(Oh, and my friend Charlie finds the line "Got as many doors as Jim Morrison" (so, three) incredibly funny for some reason.)







¹⁶⁹ A genuine title controversy!  There's no title given on screen; the DVD release just calls it Children in Need Special, which is usually what it's referred to, but some reference works call it "Born Again" for no clear reason whatsoever.  Russell T Davies referred to it facetiously as "Pudsey Cutaway" (after both the Children in Need's mascot Pudsey, and "Dalek Cutaway" -- which you'll recall is the "technically correct" title (somehow) for "Mission to the Unknown"), which really should be what we're calling it.