"42"

Would anyone be at all surprised if I described this episode as stock and boring? Everything from the 'limited time to save the ship' to the 'possessed mask-wearing crewmember stalking the corridors' to the 'spacewalk to press a button which is ludicrously situated on the outside of the ship' to the 'living star' is stolen shamelessly from other science fiction franchises. What I can't believe, but is apparently true, is that they were planning to bring back the Ood as possession victims in this episode as well, just to make it all seem tiresomely similar to "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit". Fortunately they avoid that and so "42" doesn't seem too close but it is very evocative of it and you can't help but feel like this one was thought up when they'd more or less run out of ideas and decided to mash a few existing ones together. Even the title/time-limit feels as if it was meant to make us think of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as American TV series 24 which reinforces how derivative the whole thing is.

I don't mind the idea of a living star but the notion of it possessing people makes me think too much of Jason X or possibly (although I'm sure the show makers were not aware of it, and you should play it) Yahtzee Croshaw's 7 Days a Skeptic. What I'm trying to say is that it's trope-tastic. The characters on the ship are pretty lifeless and the idea that trivia questions are passwords for the doors is ridiculous. What happens when they get into a crisis like this one and can't remember all the answers? I do enjoy it when the Doctor is possessed but his whole shouting-in-pain bit would have been infinitely more effective if this Tenth Incarnation didn't shout so much anyway. Then there's the fact that he gets all angry at the humans for scooping fuel from the sun. Does this Doctor love humans or does he hate them? The Tenth Doctor certainly doesn't seem to be able to make up his mind.

The notion that everything is happening in the space of 42 minutes is completely implausible considering how much running around happens, as well as how much time is allocated to the 'standing around like a bunch of lemons' quota of the episode, and too much simply happens with too many big scene changes for it to seem like things are happening in real time. The freeze unit thing is obviously just a repainting of the MRI device from "Sniff and Jones" and I will never believe that futuristic spaceships are full of pipe-riddled service corridors. The simplistic designs which were an inevitable consequence of the budgetary and technological limitations of the Classic Series almost always look more plausible for spaceship design.

Almost everything happens for the sake of drama instead of scientific realism and as much as I love the series I am about to compare this to the notion of releasing the 'sun particles' to appease the malignant living star sounds just like something from one of those really bad episodes of Star Trek where Geordi and Data would probably concoct a plan to spontaneously save the day involving 'redirecting a charged graviton beam through the main deflector dish' or something, and it apparently does ape rather closely a plot point in an episode of Voyager. It's not that it's bad per se and there are some good concepts here but it's incredibly unoriginal and it drags terribly. As I mentioned regarding the Devil episodes it's nice to see a bit of space suit and vacuum action happening but as usual with this era all the good stuff ends up being just as inconsequential as everything else due to issues of plotting and character.

"The Lazarus Experiment"

Poor Mark Gatiss again. This time instead of being saddled with having to write a rubbish story he actually gets to show off his acting chops in a rubbish story. I can honestly think of few things more uncreative than calling a man who de-ages himself, effectively cheating death, as "Lazarus". It beats us over the head with the subtext, exactly as when both T.S. Eliot quotes from The Hollow Men which are uttered by Lazarus and the Doctor are pointed out as being T.S. Eliot quotes, presumably for the benefit of the thickies in the audience. It's like we're reading annotations rather than watching a television programme.

Don't get me started on the idea that highly concentrated sound waves can have any effect on someone's genetics; it's just as bad as the 'gamma ray splicing' an episode before but possibly even more ignorant of physics and biology. No, what's even worse than this, and infinitely stupider, is that this causes Mark Gatiss to transform into a giant scorpion capable of sucking out people's "life energy". There's some interesting rumination by the Doctor on how a long life is overrated and that your time is exactly what you make of it, and from Lazarus about the need for progress and the value of change, but I think this message would have been infinitely more effective if they'd done something more subtle than having Mark Gatiss occasionally transform into the Scorpion King. Regardless, how could any such creature be a throwback in the genetic makeup of humans? The last I checked the amount of common ancestry between primates and arachnids was exceedingly small, and I think if humanity had ever been capable of developing into giant unstoppable scorpion creatures then those traits wouldn't have been "rejected by evolution".

So the science, and the plot in general is, as usual, complete bunk. What about the characters? Well it's nice to see the Doctor quoting a bit of Eliot instead of the usual pop references. It's incredibly charitable of RTD's team to occasionally remind us that the Tenth Doctor is still an intellectual, not just a manic-depressive hipster with a time machine. There is, of course, far too much of the usual "monster chases the Doctor around some corridors" and while I think it's not without merit to have Lazarus as unconcerned about the fate of the individual in the wake of progress, the idea of him 'feeding' on people is a deeply tired one. Besides, haven't we already seen a de-ageing device in "The Leisure Hive"? Ever seen that one, folks? Personally I think Lazarus needed some redeeming characteristics: he's ruthless, self-obsessed, and a seedy old man to boot. It's good to see Martha remain strong and steadfast and even Tish get a moment or two of courage but the usual 'horrible old mother' routine from Francine Jones which we had already with Jackie and even saw with Donna's mum in "The Runaway Bride" reeks appallingly of the suggestion that maybe RTD needs to take his neuroses outside before he develops his storylines and characters. Then she gets dropped some suspicious hints by a man who looks like a young Gryff Rhys-Jones and we hear even more about this 'Mister Saxon' character. At least this series RTD is weaving it into the stories to an extent and not simply shoving the phrase in wherever. It's not really clear why Martha's mum immediately turns against the Doctor but it's good to see Ten-Inch get slapped regardless, even though he's pretty restrained in this one and it's nice to see the Doctor play the organ.

Overall it's very unoriginal and there's too much pointless running around, but Gatiss is good, the Doctor's a good deal more in character and if there was ever an episode to suggest that not every story needs a monster, and can even suffer for having one, this is it.

"Evolution of the Daleks"

Yeah, I guess this one is pretty bad. I mean it's kind of refreshing to see Octopus Head Sec having a conversation with the Doctor even though it's obvious that the lack of a nose was making it very difficult for Eric Loren to breathe properly but the plot is hokey nonsense and as usual it has nothing to say. The idea that gamma radiation from a solar flare would splice DNA is absurd - it might give you terrible radiation burns or cancer but it's not going to make a hybrid creature; besides, even if lightning can be conducted down a lightning rod, gamma radiation doesn't flow like electricity. That's pretty basic physics but neither basic physics nor basic biology seem to have been on the menu here. How does the Doctor clinging onto the lightning rod put Time Lord DNA into the Hybrids? There's some utter brainlessness, like the fact that when they're comparing human and Dalek DNA on the computer screen the human DNA is a pretty conventional balls-on-sticks-in-a-double-helix but the Dalek DNA is all evil and spiky-looking even though DNA by its nature is composed of the same four chemicals in different arrangements regardless of the life form in question,  presumably because they felt the dribbling morons in the audience needed a strong visual reminder that the Daleks are the bad guys. Then there's the fact that these weird Human/Dalek/Time Lord abominations obey the Daleks for a while but when they're ordered to kill the Doctor is the moment they change their minds. I think it's all summed up by the bit where the Doctor agrees to help Dalek Sec and the two of them run around shouting meaningless technobabble at each other and pouring different flavours of cordial into different flasks.

There's a lot more running around in tunnels too, like when the Doctor uses the same old 'sonic screwdriver plus sound emitting device causes high pitched noise which completely incapacitates advanced aliens but leaves humans more or less unaffected' and they escape, and then there are some 'wobbly camera' moments when we're looking up at the Daleks as they chase the Doctor and friends through the sewers that are so dodgy I'm surprised the Daleks weren't humming "Devil's Gallop" as accompaniment like in a Sir Digby Chicken-Caesar sketch. There is also the bit where the Hybrids march around like twats with Tommy gun Dalek laser thingies which just looks absurd.

And how come the Doctor can keep Laszlo alive but not turn him back from being a pig? I don't know, this just felt like a bit of a weird ending to me. I mean yes, all the dispossessed were meant to be able to find a home in New York or whatever but the total destruction of the hybrids, the murder of Solomon and the death of Dalek Sec kind of contradicted that message a bit. I mean, if they'd wanted to do the whole 'poverty as the great equalizer' thing they probably shouldn't have included the Daleks. It's good that the other Daleks end up contravening Dalek Sec's orders due to his changing personality but the fact that in the end the only result is that Caan is the only surviving member of the Cult of Skaro kind of makes me wonder what the point of the story was.

Martha doesn't get to do very much and the Doctor spends most of his time standing around gasbagging with Dalek Sec, running around shouting or standing with his arms outstretched taunting the Daleks to kill him like he's some kind of Eager Jesus and all in all it's just a bit of a waste. The whole 'Martha likes the Doctor but the Doctor's hung up on Rose' thing already grates and you wish that the show could just move on, and that Martha could be given a more original character trait, but as I've already stated we're going to have to wait a while longer before we reach that glorious stage. What has happened to this show's main character, and his main enemies? The one improvement of this series over the last is the loss of the Rose smuggery but there are still a lot of problems. Overall this two-parter simply isn't very interesting and it goes further in crippling the image of the Daleks. The Tenth Doctor has already encountered them as many times as the Fourth Doctor did in a seven-year tenure and they feel tired. But will we get a rest from them? Don't count on it.

"Daleks in Manhattan"

I don't know why they thought it was necessary to bring the Daleks back again so soon yet here we have the second appearance of the Cult of Skaro in all their dubious glory. This two-parter gets a lot of stick for being the alleged worst Dalek story of the new series quite often but upon rewatch this first episode at least doesn't seem that bad. It's far from perfect but the appearance of the Daleks here is not quite as needless as that of the Daleks in "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday". Nonetheless the 1930s setting, which is always atmospheric, feels a bit wasted when it is so colossally overshadowed by the presence of the Daleks and the idea of Dalek/human interbreeding seems very reminiscent of the situation in "Bad Wolf"/"The Parting of the Ways", and that in itself evoked stories like "Revelation of the Daleks" and "The Evil of the Daleks".

I find it curious when Dalek Caan stands around on the deck of the Empire State Building having a chin-wag (or in his case an eyestalk-waggle) with Mr Diagoras about how humans always survive yet the Daleks have failed. Dalek Sec reinforces this point later when he claims that the Dalek Imperative has driven them to extinction. Aren't they losing a bit of perspective, here? Humans may be proliferate but they've always operated on a smaller scale, and within Doctor Who lore the biggest enemy they've ever had is probably the Cybermen. The Daleks, on the other hand, have made enemies of extremely powerful and advanced civilisations like the Movellans and the Time Lords - so is it that surprising that humans have survived where they haven't? It seems absurd of them to even compare human and Dalek survival. Then we discover that Dalek Sec intends to merge with a human. The problem with the Daleks is that they're a bit one-note: basically they want to rule the universe and kill anyone who stands in their way. Making them want to merge with humans, though, diminishes their character somewhat. Nonetheless Dalek Thay and Dalek Jast question the plan, which at least puts it into perspective that the character of the Daleks hasn't changed completely (unlike that of the Doctor oh snap) and that perhaps having imaginations isn't the best thing for these psychotic killing machines.

The pig slaves are another instance of humans with animal heads. Why couldn't the Daleks just brainwash people or something? What was the point of making them into pigs? Obviously someone (presumably RTD) just thought it would be cool because it's totally arbitrary and pointless. I mean pigs? It doesn't make any sense. Since when were pigs any more pliable than humans anyway?

All the Hooverville stuff and the workers being Shanghai'd into performing dangerous tasks by Mr Diagoras is interesting but as I say the Daleks serve as a massive distraction and I think it would have been more clever to have 'The Doctor in Manhattan' and just an exploration of the times, presumably with some other forced alien thrown in but not one that overshadowed things like the Daleks. That being said, Solomon fits the 'wise old black guy' trope a little too closely although Tallulah isn't too bad for establishing a sense of the people clinging onto hope and the idea of the after-image of the Roaring Twenties and so on.

I still don't know how the Doctor sets up a 'DNA scanner' using primitive equipment lying around in the back of an off-Broadway theatre and I wish he'd stop being so deliberately elusive but it's good to see something being identified as 'from Skaro' and when Dalek Caan talks about his home planet being lost it's a curious contrast to the Doctor mentioning the same thing in the previous episode. One thing I find amusing is that the Daleks have this incredibly generic old-timey lab equipment replete with bubbling test tubes and steaming flasks set up in the basement. Daleks don't have hands and the pig men seem pretty clumsy, so who the hell is operating all this stuff? Human Dalek Sec looks completely ridiculous but honestly this whole episode doesn't make me care enough to complain.

"Gridlock"

There's a good episode lying somewhere behind the RTD smuggery and Tennant shoutiness of this story. Very far behind. It tries to say something about blind faith but it fails spectacularly and the rest of it is just dross. So little of the story makes sense. How does a virus wipe out a planet in seven minutes? Since when were 'forget' and 'honesty' moods? How is the Face of Boe powering anything and how come no one ever had an issue with the tediousness of the motorway before? None of it really makes sense and you can tell that RTD initially just thought "Ooh I have an idea, let's revisit New Earth again for some reason and have a traffic jam which lasts for decades! That would be clever, wouldn't it! Now let's ram a plot in there somewhere!"

Of course the principle is interesting, of these people simply believing that they're going to reach their destination, but as much as it is a nice allegory how are we supposed to be expected to believe that these enlightened year five billion and something people would just sit around in their cars like lemons letting the world pass by? Speaking of which, if they had all those flying cars in "New Earth" the episode zooming all above the city, how come they're nowhere to be seen? And if the Upper City has been wiped out by a virus, how come there are still Mood Vendors working in the Lower City? If the virus could kill the entire Senate while it was in session and completely depopulate New Manhattan why didn't it kill the people in the slums? And why, oh why, oh why did RTD think it was relevant or necessary to resurrect the Macra, who haven't been seen onscreen since the now-lost "The Macra Terror" of 1967, and worse still bring them back as mindless simpletons so that there could be some nice CGI of them snapping at cars in the Fast Lane? It all reeks of needlessness and plot convenience, sort of like how Hame only has enough teleport energy for one trip or how the last act of the Senate was to place New Earth under one-hundred-year quarantine even though the virus itself was dying out and there were still people alive.

A lot of the smuggery includes some tedious references, like the pre-titles sequence where the two passengers look like the people in the famous painting American Gothic for absolutely no reason apart from the fact that RTD clearly thought it would be clever and funny. I've also often thought that the chap in the pinstripe suit and bowler hat was some kind of reference to Magritte's The Son of Man (or possibly the Pet Shop Boys) but either way there is ridiculous nonsense aplenty, like the brick buildings in the Lower City, the fact that people are still wearing t-shirts, the notion of cars still producing smoke, the concept of a human woman giving birth to a litter of kittens or an old woman being a 'car spotter' even though they can barely see out their own windows and are only aware of people on a 'friends list'. And if the Face of Boe is able to give the Doctor enough power to open the Motorway, how come he didn't do it ages ago? Was it really that important that he wait for the Doctor's return just so that he could say "You are not alone"? That in itself is so deliberately obscure and enigmatic that it seems virtually worthless to say.

Then there's the Doctor, who is a jerk to Martha and then realises what a jerk he's been but then has a big shout at people and so on and is generally extremely unlikeable. At least Martha forces him to sit down and talk but when she brings up the idea that she's his "rebound" after Rose you can't help but agree with her and you feel astonished at what kind of man the Doctor has become. Since when was the Doctor the kind of guy who would use someone as a "rebound"? But now he is. Why did they have to change his character so much? One day it will recover, you'll see. As I say, there's something here about faith, but it really makes very little difference; it's lost behind so much manic Tenth Doctor anger and RTD self-congratulatory pretension that any meaning is lost, which is a shame because it would probably be one of the closest steps he ever makes towards writing genuine science fiction if it weren't for its gaping inadequacies.

"The Shakespeare Code"

It's a shame, really, that I was pleasantly surprised by "Smith and Jones", because the very next episode is absolutely terrible. It's dull, the plot is incredibly forced and once again it relies far too heavily on the 'horror aliens in the past' (in this case witches) and 'celebrity historical' tropes. The latter issue is worse than ever. If you thought a bit of Eccly waffling at Dickens was bad in "The Unquiet Dead", this episode is far worse, with endless Shakespeare references and academic humour of the worst kind. Now I am an English Academic and I happen to have studied and even performed my fair share of Shakespeare in my time, but as people in the know may mention I sometimes purport to be "anti-Stratfordian", which is to say that at least for the purposes of context I believe we have to be very doubtful about whether Shakespeare actually wrote the plays he is credited for, or if taken to the extreme, if he ever even existed at all. This episode, however, takes all his alleged genius completely for granted, and while this in itself is an intriguing concept, having the Doctor constantly throwing his own lines at him and having them standing around gabbing in the slightly-too-modern looking rebuilt Globe Theatre comes across as smug and pretentious.

Then there are the Witches. Apart from arbitrary hotty du jour Lillith they look like puppets from a Terry Gilliam film and the 'true form' seen during the aborted incantation in the Love's Labours Won rehearsal looks stupid enough to put Ergon the giant chicken which fought the Fifth Doctor for the lightweight championship in Arc of Infinity to shame.

It's also useful because I've gone on and on about how much 'magical thinking' there is in this era of Doctor Who and this episode is notable for trying to do the 'magic as science' thing but the explanation makes no sense. The Doctor says the Carrionites use words instead of numbers. But language, unlike mathematics, has no relation to physics or the interaction of fundamental forces in a universal sense. It's something organic and life-based, and it's never explained how they're meant to have power over the real world. Apparently it's 'science', but with this era's usual courage it's never explained quite how science plays any role. Essentially it trips over its cleverness and falls flat on its face, which is an astonishing feat considering how it was already doing that with the moronic Shakespeare jokes.

How come there are always about three baddies that manage to get through and the rest of the race has to wait in the wings? I know there are real-world budgetary reasons but it's completely overdone and these stories use it all the time: "We could get here but others can't so we have to hold the door open for them through incredibly elaborate means." It's all very repetitive.

Then there's some awful stuff from the Tenth Doctor, and while it's quite funny when he mutters "Nighty night, Shakespeare," it's pretty atrocious when he pointlessly shouts "Good old JK!" after Martha quotes Harry Potter and the scenes where he goes on about how Rose would know what to say and stuff are incredibly forced and jarring and I daresay RTD crowbarred them in during the edit, much like the bit where he shouts "That name keeps me fighting!" It's time for the Doctor, and the show, to move on, but RTD can't let go and sadly we will be stuck with these elements until that oh-so-special but oh-so-distant moment when... well, we'll get to that.

Martha and Shakespeare are both okay but there's not much more to be said about it. Martha asks some interesting questions about black people in Elizabethan England and has some decent knowledge which continues to be refreshing but as usual the episode has nothing to say, the story is so bad and the villains, especially the non-hotty ones, are so hammy and cringe-inducing that it's not worth mentioning any further.

"Smith and Jones"

As much as I am tempted to refer to this episode as "Sniff and Jones" to homage the youtube video of the same name and to criticise the stinkier elements of the plot, I think I'll be unusual and put what's bad about this episode first. There's the "H2O Scoop", which is meaningless technobabble, there's the silliness of a blood-sucking alien drinking blood through a straw, there's the fact that the Judoon are yet another RTD animal-headed anthropomorph race, this time essentially law-enforcing Sontarans with rhino heads, and there's the bit where the Doctor does the diarrhoea dance to expel radiation from his foot. Other than that, and I can't believe I'm saying this but other than that it's not actually too bad.

Of course there's a little bit of Tennant shoutiness but the bit where he pretends to be just an ordinary person to confuse the Plasmavore is very well performed and is a case of 'playing the fool' which reminded me of "City of Death". It's good that the Judoon learn the language when they arrive rather than just coincidentally knowing it and their rockets are kind of cool. The Slabs are okay but they're very cheap and cheerful villains, as is the Plasmavore itself - no weird costumes or special effects. I do, however, enjoy it when there's someone acting against a villain parallel to the Doctor's own investigations, in this case the Judoon, but I think their justice values could have been explored in a lot more detail, as could the motivations of the Plasmavore in regards to the crime for which it was being hunted. I suppose its decent pacing and characters disguise this a bit but unfortunately it's still a problem.

I suppose an important question is what do I think of Martha? I know Martha gets a lot of stick for some reason, probably from scary Rose fangirls who are legitimately besotted with the character of the Tenth Doctor and need to live vicariously through the Doctor/Rose romance. Nonetheless change is an important element of Doctor Who and companions come and go. Martha isn't too bad; I think her most redeeming feature is that she's such a welcome change from Rose, so I imagine I will probably be less happy with her as this rewatch continues but at least it's nice to have someone with a bit of scientific background who asks good questions. Speaking of good questions, we know the air was being kept in by the force field, but what about the gravity and the electricity which was keeping the lights on and such? I suppose the Judoon took care of that too but it would be nice if it was explained. The idea of an overloading MRI frying everyone's brains is a load of crap and to suggest that it could have a range covering the moon and half the Earth is ridiculous, though. The Plasmavore's plan seems to be overly complicated. Was it expecting the Judoon to show up, or not? A lot of explanation falls by the wayside as we introduce the new companion.

It's unfortunate that the Doctor is still seemingly so hung up on Rose, and more and more you want him to recover from this post-Time War loneliness malarkey. It's this kind of emotional difficulty, along with the pop-culture-referencing and the manic shoutiness, which often makes the Tenth Doctor seem too human. Sometimes you don't feel like you're seeing the Doctor; you feel like you're just watching some guy in an overcoat with a magic wand running around picking up chicks, as seems to be the case when he stalks Martha just a little bit at the end. And speaking of magic wands it's a phenomenal relief to see RTD's favourite god-machine, the sonic screwdriver, be destroyed, just as it is especially frustrating that it is rebuilt so soon. Sometimes it's a little too obvious when merchandising plays a role in the composition of certain show elements.

Nonetheless it's a pretty good start to the series and the new companion in the shape of Martha is a welcome relief after Series 2. If RTD had been capable of being this restrained all the time he could have made his era seem a lot less wearisome, and the same can be said about Tennant's performance as the Doctor.