"The Eleventh Hour"

You might notice at this point that the tone of these reviews somewhat changes. From here Steven Moffat, writer of some of the better episodes of the previous era, such as "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink", had taken over the head writership of Doctor Who and the entire show was getting a revamp. The biggest change is of course the new Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor, played by Matt Smith, also known among the wise as "The Smith". He is basically pretty awesome. I was hesitant at first, thinking he would just be another young-and-trendy like the Tenth Doctor, and when he jumps out of the TARDIS talking about cravings it initially made me worry, but then he eats fish custard and is rather self-deprecating, and as the elements of the Tenth Doctor's personality visibly slip away we know we've got a whole new man on our hands. His eccentricity and alien nature are obvious and at the same time this regeneration has clearly moved him on from all the anxiety and neurosis of the previous incarnation. Matt Smith grasps the role very intuitively and plays him as someone who is clearly both old and weary as well as childlike and adventurous, someone who is familiar with humans but not one of them. It's wise of Moffat to avoid the normal 'post-regeneration' thing, using no more than a few aches and pains, some cravings and the ragged remains of the Tenth Doctor's costume which is disposed of to my considerable relief at the end of the episode. The Eleventh Doctor's outfit is also something important because it's not trendy or fashionable like the Tenth Doctor's. He says it's 'cool' even though no one agrees - he's clearly his own man with his own ideas. It's a welcome relief and the professorly outfit is nicely evocative of Classic Doctors with a modern touch. Basically, the Eleventh Doctor's awesome.

We're also introduced to new companion Amy Pond, who we first meet as a child. Caitlin Blackwood is incredibly good as the curious but slightly grumpy Amelia and is the best child actor in the New Series by a considerable margin. It also helps that as Karen Gillan's cousin she looks a great deal like her adult self. Speaking of Karen Gillan, she is of course good as the full-grown version of Amy Pond. It's amusing on rewatch to listen as she slips from the English accent she is using to fool the Doctor initially to her natural Scottish and the issues which have clearly plagued her life since the Doctor's accidental visit to her child self are expressed very clearly through her perfomance; the brashness disguising insecurity, her sense of doubt and so on. Some fans don't like Amy Pond but she's good stuff and if you don't like her you must be stupid. Nonetheless she's also funny and has a great rappor with the Eleventh Doctor and they clearly form a good team. So it's check check on Doctor and Companion and things are looking good.

Obviously the plot takes a bit of a hit with so much focus on introducing new stuff but it still manages to be decent. The huge Atraxi fleet flying over the Earth is a bit repetitive but at least we're not in London anymore and I applaud Moffat and his team for deliberately extricating the show entirely from London which had become way too familiar in the previous era. The cracks are interesting but I still wish we could ditch the sonic screwdriver and the psychic paper because they feel like cheats for lazy writing. I also think Prisoner Zero could have been something a bit more inventive than a fish thing which hung from the ceiling but at least it took multiple forms even if Olivia Colman is a bit hammy in the role. The big conference call to send out the 'zero' virus also seems a bit unnecessary but at least the plot elements are weaved together better - even the fact that Rory's been photographing the coma-patient-forms of Zero help to reach the resolution. I might also point out for the sake of someone else that it could have been funnier if the vehicle the Doctor had "commandeered" was the ice cream van.

Did I mention Rory? You're going to be hearing about Rory a lot in these reviews because I like him and worry that I associate with him a little bit but he's also a good character. He's fairly secondary in this one but we'll get to see him develop later. The humour in this episode is actually funny as opposed to the cringe-worthy referencing of earlier days and there's something satisfying about seeing Matt Smith step through the image of David Tennant and disperse it. The Atraxi are kind of cool but I wish their eyes looked less human. It's also good that they tie the plot into the Doctor and Amy's characterisation and how much a person can be effected by these kinds of unusual encounters in their youths and the follow-on effect this can have for other people, in this instance Rory. There's no purple prose about how great the Doctor is and he's definitely not a cool guy - the "Who da man?" scene is perfect for reinforcing this and making us like this Doctor more. He may be an alien, but he's fallible while simultaneously intelligent and crafty, and he's someone to respect and befriend rather than worship. He's pretty much just the right mix of everything and it comes across extremely well. This is by far the best introduction for a Doctor and it is probably one of the best episodes of the entire New Series. Even the new TARDIS interior gets points for being bigger, more geometric and angular and more mechanical-looking. The episode feels like the return of something which has been missing for a long time and it's immensely satisfying. Good to see the finger-click door-opening as well. The Eleventh Doctor's theme is also extremely catchy and a vast improvement over the melodramatic warblings of days gone by. The whole episode is a phenomenal improvement and it seems to better reconcile the concepts of Doctor Who with modern television. I could go on praising this episode but suffice to say it never gets old and it's special every time.

"The End of Time" Part Two

Is it too harsh of me to say that the best part of this episode is the bit where the Tenth Doctor dies? I'd never think anything could be more self-congratulatory, ridiculous, overblown and needless than "Journey's End" but this somehow manages it. I think the sheer pomposity of it and the fact that it was the final Tennant story can probably render it the worst Doctor Who episode of all time legitimately in contrast to previous mentions because of how pathetic the narrative is and how smug its conclusion.

Last episode we had the Master turn all the humans into copies of himself and now he's captured Wilf and the Doctor. The Master has a whinge about Gallifrey and then he gets knocked out by the male Vinvocci who actually has no reason to help the Doctor. The Doctor has one of those nauseating pieces of dialogue where he tells the Master how brilliant and amazing he is even though all the Master's done so far is horrible stuff. It's more of the 'tell don't show' attitude and we're supposed to accept it in direct opposition to the immediate evidence of our senses. The Master says his body "was born from death, all it can do is die" in a case of utter nonsense apparently being used to explain how the skeleton thing is happening and why he can shoot lightning and crap. A bunch of Master clones also go and hunt down Donna, who for some reason has a 'defence mechanism' built into her by the Doctor which causes her to shoot gold light out of her head and knock all the Masters out. It's just another in a series of cop-outs in these episodes where characters essentially perform magic to stop anything bad happening.

This for some reason jumps into a comedy escape sequence which stupid people seem to find funny and which is totally jarring and the Doctor, Wilf and the two Vinvocci go to the Vinvocci spaceship in orbit to hide from the Master, who really wants to find them for... some reason. Meanwhile the Time Lords are sitting around in some black emptiness because they clearly blew all the money on needless CGI of Timothy Dalton walking through a big metal door so they can't afford sets and he has a discussion with the High Council of the Time Lords; it turns out he's the Lord President - neat enough reference to Classic Series Time Lord Lore. A woman objects and gets evaporated. Then they realise there is a prophecy, and "The Visionary" is introduced, a purple prose-spouting madwoman who epitomises the worst excesses of RTD's oldey-worldy pseudopoetic pastiche fixation and who I absolutely despise. She sits there ranting all this nonsense which is meant to sound impressive but just sounds ridiculous and you have to wonder why Timothy Dalton is buying all this crap. They figure out some plan to do with the Master by putting the drum beat in his head, so I guess maybe that explains why Delgado, Ainley and Roberts never complained about it. For some reason they can make a two-way link by throwing a diamond to Earth and getting the Master to plug it into some bollocksy machine. It's totally meaningless unscientific rubbish which makes no sense whatsoever.

Meanwhile the Doctor and Wilf are sitting around on the ship and they have another good old chat which is by miles the best scene in the episode. Bernard Cribbins is again very good apart from when he starts telling the Doctor he's such a wonderful man and having a bit of a cry which comes across as a little soppy, and it's good to see the Tenth Doctor constantly refusing the gun until he learns that the Time Lords are coming back, at which point he grabs it straight away. As opposed to having people going "Oh no oh no" about the Daleks or whatever this very effectively represents the sense of threat.

Wilf's still seeing this mysterious white-garbed woman, but it's never revealed who she is, and again it turns into another piece of deliberate hype-drumming mystery with no meaning. RTD weaves in all this ambiguity, but not in regards to theme or character, in terms of facts and figures so that you really have no idea what's going on. Who's this woman? Why is she helping the Doctor, and how is she able to mysteriously show up if she's a Time Lord and she's locked in the war? RTD said it was meant to be the Doctor's mother but this seems pretty meaningless. Isn't his whole family meant to be dead? His mother's never even been signficant in the show before so I don't see how seeing her would teach him what to do.

Anyway there's a terrible Star Wars homage as they fly the Vinvocci ship, which is basically ripped off from Starbug in Red Dwarf, down to Earth and the Master fires some nukes at them. Earth has tens of thousands of missiles but he fires about fifty and none of them hit even though they only have two laser batteries. Then the Doctor jumps out of the ship back into the mansion and must fall about a hundred feet or more and still survives. That killed the Fourth Doctor in "Logopolis" but apparently it's okay now! Then he stands there like a, yes, like a lemon, pointing his gun back and forth between the Master and Timothy Dalton. In the meantime Timothy Dalton has used his magic gauntlet, blessed with the power of cop-out, to inexplicably transform all the Master clones back into humans for no reason. I guess a whole bunch of disoriented humans are easier to deal with than six billion Masters. Although is the Master's consciousness in all of them or are they individuals? They all seem to obey the main Master, and you'd think he'd end up in conflict with himself, but they also talk to each other. Maybe he just enjoys the sound of his own voice.

Anyway the Doctor is pointing this ancient pistol from the Forties at Timothy Dalton and the Master as if it matters. It's not threatening at all. The Master can shoot fricking lightning from his hands and Timothy Dalton has a magic gauntlet which can apparently do anything. Why doesn't he just evaporate the gun? What does it matter what choice the Doctor makes, who to kill? Timothy Dalton could easily remove the choice. I'm not sure what stops him. Then Gallifrey appears in the sky and for the thousandth time we get the typical scenes of mass panic in the face of alien happenings as everyone runs around in the street and the total consequence of a significantly more massive planetary body so close to Earth means a little bit of shaking. The Doctor says he trapped the Time Lords because they became all mean during the Time War, and that if Gallifrey comes back so will all this other horrible stuff from the war with the purplest names imaginable like the 'Nightmare Child' and the 'Could've-been King' which are all totally meaningless and are clearly meant to sound cool but just sound ridiculous. It's all so overblown and melodramatic, and the Doctor ends up shooting the Master's bollocks machine which for some reason stops everything, because Timothy Dalton had a plan to destroy 'all creation' and 'ascend to beings of pure consciousness'. Isn't that like just a cross between what Davros was planning in "Journey's End" and what the Ancients or whatever they're called in Stargate want to do? Anyway the Doctor has a big shout and reveals that Timothy Dalton is Rassilon.

Hang on a minute, he's Rassilon? What the hell, Rassilon's dead! Has RTD even seen "The Five Doctors"? I guess if they were going to get anyone to play Rassilon at least it was someone good, and at least he was a bastard like he was in the darker Time Lord myths. Regardless the Master starts attacking them and they all conveniently disappear for essentially no reason. Isn't that nice? They show up for no reason, say a lot of rubbish about destroying the universe, and then piss off and take the Master with them. It's all so incredibly convenient that I can't believe RTD came up with such a cheap solution. Even growing a spare Doctor out of a hand was less ridiculous than this. I think "Eye of the Storm" is less ridiculous. Why would you bring the Time Lords back, and then just have them stand around having a chin wag with the Doctor for a few minutes only to get rid of them again straight away? Clearly RTD's imagination had completely run dry by this point and he didn't actually know what to do with them because it's stupid that they'd be defeated in such a way and that their appearance was so arbitrary. It's also incredibly frustrating that RTD writes them and the Master back out in such a way that it will be incredibly difficult for future writers to come up with plausible explanations for having the Master or the Time Lords return. I suppose that never stopped them in the Eighties where the Master seemed to die horribly every time he appeared and still returned unscathed a season or two later. I'd say people expect more explanation these days but if the absurdly sycophantic praise this dirge of a finale received is anything to go by then clearly they don't, they'll swallow any rubbish if David Tennant shouts it fast enough and then has a bit of a cry afterwards.

Speaking of which, it's back to the crying game again as the Tenth Doctor has a bit of a tanty about having to sacrifice his life to save Wilf. I did think it was clever to make Wilf's four knocks the signal for the Tenth Doctor's death but even this seems ridiculous. Why is the nuclear bolt overloading? How come it's so sensitive? Why can't he just let Wilf out? It's not very clear. And the containment chamber may be constructed from 'Vinvocci glass' but the doors don't even seal, you can tell just by looking at them! It seems incredibly arbitrary. And then, having absorbed all the radiation the Doctor doesn't regenerate on the floor of the chamber, he goes on a little trip.

And this is where it gets ridiculous. After he suffered radiation poisoning on Metebelis III it took the Third Doctor three weeks in Earth time to pilot the TARDIS back to Earth and he was possibly lost in the Time Vortex for years in his personal time. The Tenth Doctor, however, goes and visits every single major companion he's had in the entire run of the show. It's absolutely absurd, unbelievably self-congratulatory and when you get right down to it, just plain dull. The Ninth Doctor had a good death, reassuring Rose and facing it with dignity, and now the Tenth Doctor goes off for the RTD Memory Lane. Martha and Mickey are married with no prior character development even though Martha was engaged to someone else a year ago. The Tenth Doctor sets Jack up with Alonso from the Titanic in what is essentially the Cantina from Star Wars because he is some kind of interstellar matchmaker now. He gives Donna's family a winning lottery ticket as a wedding present, which probably should have been the only companion visit if any. He saves Luke Smith from a car which is apparently some kind of Sarah Jane Adventures in-joke and so they can cram Sarah Jane in. For some reason he goes and gets his published journals from "Human Nature" signed by Joan Redfern's granddaughter. This one is especially arbitrary. How come he didn't also go visit Adam from Series 1, or all the two-bit barely-companions from the Specials, or the Fifth Doctor or something? Because it'd be ridiculous, and so is this. And then of course, dreck of drecks, he has to go and visit Rose before she knew him. How on earth has he survived this long? It's ridiculous and it's all done in the name of narrative-killing fan service. How long ago did Rassilon and the Master disappear? It's been ages since this episode had anything even approaching a plot and the entire threat of 'The End of Time' is revealed to be melodramatic and meaningless. Finally Ood Sigma appears and says they're going to sing him "to his rest". He's just going to regenerate, for heaven's sake. How does Ood Sigma travel around, anyway? How come Ood Sigma was never a companion? That would have been interesting.

Anyway he stumbles into the TARDIS, flicks some buttons and regenerates. He regenerates so violently that the TARDIS begins to explode, and it's like RTD's saying that without Tennant the show can't really go on and that everything's falling apart; like it's not really Doctor Who anymore and that everything's gone to hell without his guidance. I don't mind that he says "I don't want to go" per se, because the Second Doctor had much the same attitude when the Time Lords forced him to regenerate, but I suppose I resent the notion that the Doctor has become especially fond of this incarnation. Nonetheless it's thankfully time for him to go and suddenly the Eleventh Doctor is before us, being played by Matt Smith, also know as The Smith. He makes some funny remarks so that you know we've completely moved on from Doctor Angst Mode, gobs all over the TARDIS console in what I like to think of as a final response to the RTD era, and off we go.

It probably is the best part of the episode. All the rest of it is just hype and melodrama, and it's like the whole of the Tennant era and probably RTD's entire tenure. As a whole the scripts were rarely anything particularly good with only a few exceptions and were generally sentimental and unscientific. While the Tenth Doctor has moments of quality and there's nothing wrong with David Tennant's actual talent as an actor, the character he performed as the Doctor is cringe-inducingly manic and hyper at times and is far too trendy and human. He feels like just some guy in a suit with a magic wand. The episodes also rarely had any statement to make or message to deliver, and artistically seemed limited. The visions of the future were dull, Classic Series characters and concepts were often misrepresented and it relied far too much on mystery and hype rather than compelling narratives. Unfortunately it's quite obvious that a lot of Tennant's popularity relied on him being conventionally handsome and the fangirl 'cult of Tennant' which developed surrounding his portrayal is not healthy to public appreciation of the show. I don't begrudge RTD for bringing it back per se but I think some of his attempts to modernise it were unnecessary and that he dumbed it down too much for a modern audience. The fact that this era receives so much acclaim and worship quite honestly makes me despair about the cultural intelligence of the public. There was too much romance, too much pop culture, too much melodrama, not enough science, not enough originality and not enough art. But you know what? It's over now, and it's never coming back. Doctor Who is about change, and the show must move on...

"The End of Time" Part One

The beginning of the end for the RTD era is actually not too bad and it's watchable but as usual with these specials it is needlessly long and has a lot of junk that just comes across as ridiculous. It all starts with the incredibly hammy narration by Timothy Dalton. Would this mysterious narrator really be using the term "bad dream" instead of "nightmare"? What kind of children is he narrating to? Anyway we're reintroduced to Wilf who we haven't seen since "Journey's End" but is as reliable as ever, played with aplomb by Bernard Cribbins. Then we cut to the Doctor, who has finally answered the summons he was given by Ood Sigma back in the previous episode. He cracks a lot of corny jokes which aren't very funny and then goes to have a pow-wow with the Ood.

There's something about the Ood Elder which I find deeply disturbing. I just can't avert my eyes from his disgusting 'brain cleavage' in those exposed cerebral lobes. How does his skull even work if his brain sticks out of the top of his head? The Ood have still not developed pouches for carrying their hindbrains and just plop them in their laps and then they show the Doctor a vision of the Master having a chuckle. As much as I generally dislike his portrayal of the Master, I will say that John Simm does a very good evil chuckle in this episode and it's quite a strong image. One thing that annoys me about this scene is how much the Doctor sits around taking the piss out of the Ood. Why does he have to treat them as if they're weird, like he's human? He's meant to be a "citizen of the universe" so why can't he just sit down enlightened-alien to enlightened-alien and have a good old chat? Anyway he figures out that the Master is coming and apparently so is the End of Time so he runs pell-mell back to the TARDIS. It's not a bad start, as they go. It's kind of mysterious and we get to see the Ood Sphere so it's not entirely Earth-centric.

Sadly it all goes downhill from here. Remember Mrs. The Master from "Last of the Time Lords"? She's still alive and that ring the Master dropped during his Darth Vader funeral has been recovered by some iron lady. They then put the ring in a bowl and start pouring in some magic potions from the "Secret Books of Saxon". Ignoring the fact that it completely wrecks the whole thing from "Last of the Time Lords" about the Master never wanting to die but in a good way, I can appreciate that the Master would probably set up some kind of organisation to bring him back to life in the event of his death. He thinks of these contingency plans. What I don't appreciate is totally unexplained 'potions of life' with no scientific rationale provided whatsoever. It's worse than technobabble and comes across as ridiculous, especially with John Simm sitting there in a big flash of light like evil Buddha hamming it up being resurrected like he's Voldemort or something. It gets worse when Lucy delivers some clunky speech about having a reverse magic potion and throws it at him, which causes a huge explosion yet nonetheless doesn't stop the Master's resurrection and allows him to escape. This whole bit makes absolutely no sense and as a set piece is just weird. It's definitely one of the serious clunkers of this episode, which is a shame because it's more or less followed by another one.

Wilf knows he has to find the Doctor because unlike everyone else he can remember his nightmares. This also goes unexplained and is just another piece of magical thinking over the course of the episode. Anyway he and his bunch of old people go on the search. Meanwhile the Doctor chases the Master for a really long time through a construction site for absolutely no reason. The Master's hungry for some reason, and he's eaten some people. There's a whole thing in an attempt to force relevancy which only makes the episode feel incredibly dated now where characters go on about how "President Obama is going to make a speech which will save the economy" in this incredibly meaningless and condescending way; presumably, as usual, it's characterised in such broad and childlike terms for the benefits of kids and idiots. Meanwhile the Master is snacking. This episode in general makes me hungry because the Master won't shut up about food and that burger he has looks pretty tasty. The other noteworthy thing is that for absolutely no reason whatsoever the Master has developed superpowers. The Doctor utters some guff about how "your resurrection's gone wrong" and that's about it. The Master can force jump and throw lightning from his hands like he's a Sith Lord clearly just because RTD thought it would be cool. It makes absolutely no sense and looks ridiculous, almost evocative of the 'Doctor Jesus' from "Last of the Time Lords". Another part of it is that occasionally his skeleton flashes into view for equally no reason like he's been shot by a New Series Dalek and the one benefit of this is that it's rather reminiscent of his appearance in "The Deadly Assassin" and "The Keeper of Traken". Presumably because he's not in control the Master is a lot more palatable here because most of the zaniness and lame humour from Series 3 is gone. It's nice that elements of his friend/enemy relationship with the Doctor are re-established; he attacks him like he's doing a lightning hadouken and then helps him as he falls, the Doctor asks for his help and the Master lets him hear the sounds in his head. It's unfortunate that they bring in the drums again because we know the Master hasn't heard drums his whole life but they want to stick with it. The Doctor and Wilf have a nice old chat and the Doctor has a bit of a cry. It's a very well-played scene by Bernard Cribbins and David Tennant but you can't help feel that the Doctor's comments about how a "new man goes sauntering away" sounds like RTD wants us to resent the Doctor which comes after his tenure. And he says it feels like dying, but how does he know what dying feels like? The Eighth Doctor told Grace and Chang Lee that they'd experienced something he never had. Sometimes I think the Tenth Doctor is being a touch melodramatic to elicit some sympathy. Wilf has also been seeing a mysterious woman in white but we'll get to that in the next episode. Also, if he's radiation shielded in the nuclear bolt room, how does he get the phone call from Donna?

Then there's an arbitrary technobabble plot with a couple of green aliens and a rich guy who wants to make his daughter immortal and a machine for healing planets but the only purpose it serves is to allow the Master to convert everyone into copies of himself. This is meant to again be a big shock but we know it won't last. RTD just keeps having to up the stakes and it never works because the effect has worn off. And now with the whole of the human race turned into the Master, there's another stake-raising because someone else returns. By this point we'd seen the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master and Davros reappear in the New Series and there was only one major missing element for RTD to exploit, unused until this time so that the Tenth Doctor's departure could be really over-the-top and overinflated. Yes, it's the Time Lords. I really think they shouldn't have repeated 'For the End of Time itself!' but you can't help but be impressed that the Time Lords are coming back. Nonetheless while it has some good bits there's a lot of stupidity and the constant series of threats to the Earth remind us that cop-out solutions will definitely be on the way. RTD played all the cards he had back in Series 1 and he's been constantly trying to reshuffle them and lay them down in different formations but ultimately it's the same thing every time and it's a shame he couldn't do something a bit different than a huge everything-going-to-hell ending to signal the departure of the Tenth Doctor. I guess he has to die how he lived. As far as they go it's a decent set up and in spite of padding feels like a better first part than most, but the true horrors are still waiting.

"The Waters of Mars"

Where were the Ice Warriors? Why would you set an episode of Doctor Who on Mars and not feature the Ice Warriors? I mean sure, they're referenced in one throwaway line, but in Doctor Who lore if you go to Mars you're gonna encounter the Ice Warriors. And the Doctor says the glacier has been buried in the past by the "ancient and proud" race of Ice Warriors. Has he forgotten Peladon? That was the future and the Ice Warriors were hale and hearty as part of the alliance. What the hell RTD?

Anyway in all seriousness this episode isn't too bad but like all of these specials it feels like a 45 minute episode with padding. The plot drags a bit and there's a good deal of time spent on long shots and wearisomely plodding conversations. An amusing thing to do while watching this episode is to treat the Doctor's hubris as an allegory for RTD's own descent into madness and the Doctor's belief that he can do anything as RTD saying he can get any script made into an episode no matter how dull, stupid or artistically bankrupt it is. That being said you can tell a lot of effort was put into this episode. The sets are nice, they've managed to assemble a multigender and multiethnic cast of all nations as the colony crew of the future, and the threat is certainly presented in a novel way even if it is another reiteration of the classic zombie trope so it's not really one of RTD's abominations. That's still yet to come.

I wish it to be known however that contrary to the Doctor's rather pointless claim upon arrival Mars isn't actually red; that's a common misconception and it's actually more of a dull beige colour. Unfortunately in real life space isn't quite as uniformly bright and weird as it's depicted occasionally in this show. Speaking of bright, the base seems awfully large, bright, spacious and gravitically normal for an installation only fifty years in the future housing a mere nine people and a robot. The Doctor's right, that robot is annoying, but it's kind of unimaginative to have the American as the weird creepy dude with the thousand yard stare. I also don't understand how a twiddle with the sonic screwdriver spontaneously gives Gadget the robot a pair of rocket boosters like it's the Batmobile or something.

I know the Doctor gets to make some not very funny jokes about bicycles due to this but do the corridors need to be so long? In some of the shots of them running these connecting tunnels between the main parts of the base seem to be absurdly long, stretching off into oblivion at either end. Wouldn't that be a colossal waste of resources, air and the energy of the people onboard? Unfortunately the whole possession aspect and rocket escape and so on make it all feel a little too reminiscent of "The Impossible Planet" and to a lesser extent "42" in many important respects, and the greenhouse happens to seems to evoke "The Doctor's Daughter" so some parts feel a bit copy-pasted from other episodes.

There's also the bit where the Doctor stands around telling Adelaide her future. Now we know they're all meant to die but would he really stand there and gasbag about the future, in itself generally an inadvisable proposition, while there are water zombies on the loose? The whole segment with her being inspired by the Dalek and it knew she was a fixed point in time and stuff suggests that the Daleks back in "Journey's End" knew the Reality bomb was going to fail, too. All this 'knowing the future' stuff raises questions and it's not especially well dealt with, as is the notion of fixed points in time. Why does Adelaide trust the Doctor anyway? Implausibly she lets him run around with her from the get go and when he starts telling the future she just sits there and listens to him waffling on about all this stuff which would sound like madness to a twenty-first century person.

But I suppose all of this, and indeed the entire plot, is made secondary lead-up to the big finale. The Tenth Doctor's gone wrong in his mind tank and he fulfils the suggestions I made way back at "New Earth" by trying to be a fully-fledged Nietzschean Übermensch, considering himself the ultimate authority and the arbitrator of what's right and what's wrong even insofar as these concepts apply to himself. I don't mind the Doctor taking this 'dark' route because it seems like the ultimate manifestation of all the annoying and dickish parts of the Tenth Doctor which I have been noting and it's good to see him go too far and then feel like a bit of a silly twat. Of course if you had that kind of power you'd be at risk of being tempted to use it, and you'd probably regret it almost instantly. It's nicely performed by David Tennant except when he's a bit too shouty, and there  are some annoying bits in the escape from the base where all the dialogue is drowned out by Murray Gold's overpowering score. All the shots of the headlines changing is a bit too "Back to the Future" as well, although they were overdone at the beginning anyway when he was meeting the crew in another very obvious piece of padding where every time he meets another one of them it juts with a big noise to a shot of their obituary. Nonetheless it's a powerful touch that Adelaide kills herself in an effort to repair the timeline. You have to think, though, would it have the same effect back on Earth? Wouldn't there be a huge investigation about how they got back there and what happened?

Adelaide is pretty well performed but kind of boring and most of the other crew members aren't really developed enough. It's a decent episode and satisfying to see the Tenth Doctor take a fall but it's not exactly the most gripping television.

"Planet of the Dead"

Nothing sums up the needless pointlessness of the whole 'Specials' gimmick than Planet of the Dead, a dull and characterless runaround with no purpose and virtually no plot. The Doctor's in a bus which gets stranded on an alien planet, he fixes the bus and they go home. Throw in some arbitrary animal-based villains and allies in the form of flying metal stingrays and anthropomorphic fly-men in coveralls, some padding in the form of a UNIT appearance and a companion who seems to only exist for the purposes of eye candy and that's it.

You can tell that RTD basically wanted the BBC to pay for him to take a holiday to Dubai because the whole thing is such a phenomenal waste of time. Apparently the metal stingrays fly around the planet really quickly like they're re-enacting the time travel sequence from Superman which causes a wormhole to open. I hope I don't need to explain that this has absolutely zero grounding in any form of real-world physics whatsoever and that the bus acting like a Faraday cage seems to be an extremely convenient explanation for why they can't just turn around and walk back. It's typical hand-wavey nonsense and it reveals how totally insubstantial and pointless this story is.

Anyway the Doctor wants to fix the bus so he puts the other passengers to work. It's nice to watch the scene where the Doctor bigs them all up but it's a bit disappointing to see how disinterested he is in this alien planet. I suppose you would be disinterested if it was all just sand but it's incredibly frustrating how in this series whenever the Doctor goes away from Earth he's still in the company of nothing but humans and no effort is really made to construct fresh alien civilisations. It's desperately unimaginative and comes across as patronizing the audience.

Just to rub it in we keep cutting back to Earth where UNIT show up and essentially do nothing besides sit there and we're introduced to an annoying, camp Welsh scientist called Malcolm who has a phone call with the Doctor for basically no reason. Yes, Malcolm can close the wormhole. That's essentially everything UNIT does. Couldn't the Doctor have done it when he got back? Probably, but I suppose having some dudes with guns running around keeps kids and Tories watching. The UNIT Captain is the one from "Turn Left" in case any die-hard UNIT fans were worried she wasn't real.

Anyway the Doctor's busy getting to know the jewel thief of today, sprightly young woman Lady Christina de Souza, who flounces along having a good old flirt with the Doctor while they wander around inside a ship run by fly people. I mean come on, fly people? This one is seriously weak. We need to drop the whole 'humanoid bodies with animal heads' thing but clearly RTD can't think up anything better. They have some bollocks device in the bottom of their ship which the Doctor needs so Christina does her Mission Impossible thing and grabs it after we've discovered the planet used to have a civilisation but it was turned to sand by the evil flying stingrays. Basically it could have been interesting, but instead we have flying metal fish. Anyway the two fly-men are conveniently killed off so that the Doctor doesn't have to worry about taking them home or showing them to UNIT or in case the morons in the audience would get bored because there aren't just conventionally attractive humans on the screen, the Doctor and his new squeeze run off with more and more heavy-handed flirting and the Doctor makes the bus fly.

This has got to be one of the stupidest scenes ever in a Doctor who story, where he somehow uses magical unscientific anti-gravity things from the fly-men ship to fly a bus and he of course uses Christina's stolen treasure to make it work due to some pointless gabble about 'welding the systems'. Then they fly back to Earth, UNIT shoots down some stingrays, Professor Welsh stops the Wormhole and that's that. Christina's been bigged up as a perfect match for the Doctor because she's adventurous and intellectual and so on and she has the abritrary snog with Tennant which seems to be mandatory in this era for every woman who enters the show for more than five minutes but Tennant flat-out refuses to let her come inside the TARDIS for some more fun. Why? Not because she's a thief and the fact that she steals out of boredom suggests she has some rather curious psychological issues, but actually because he's apparently decided to "never again" travel with a companion. Come off it, RTD, we knew by this point that the next Doctor was going to have a companion, so why slather all this melodramatic angsty crap on the Tenth Doctor about how people leave him and get hurt and how the floors are as dirty as hell and he isn't going to take it anymore? It's just a needless change to the character of the Doctor once again which we know will be proved untrue once he regenerates.

At the risk of sounding paranoid at times it almost feels like RTD is trying to perform some kind of character assassination on the Doctor to turn crazed fangirls and casual viewers against the future series because it will contradict all this crazy and fundamental-aspect-of-the-show-breaking character development which is somehow the 'true' Doctor. Regardless it becomes even more wearisome than ever to watch the Tenth Doctor revelling in depression. He lets Christina escape for some reason however and recommends a couple of the cyphers from the bus for a job, so clearly he's a nice man for getting kids jobs with a military organisation and letting a criminal escape. Christina performs one of the slowest getaways imaginable in the flying bus and the cops just stand there like lemons cursing and stamping their feet instead of, you know, shooting her down or anything in a ridiculously forced happy ending which takes the piss out of the authorities for doing their jobs because apparently law enforcement is just professional killjoying and UNIT stand around with big grins on their faces rather than being upset that the public is being exposed to a flying bus and valuable alien technology is escaping. It just sums up how stupid this whole episode is.

Then of course there's the prophecy. One of the bus passengers is a textbook 'mystic old black person', in this case Carmen, and she prophesies that "He will knock for times" in a case of stereotyping which when you get right down to it is essentially just racist. It's more hype-drumming and you know some ridiculous, awful finale is on its way. This is a complete waste of time of an episode and it's disappointing to see that instead of using these specials as an opportunity for something artistic, meaningful and creative that RTD dribbled out more of this sort of junk.

"The Next Doctor"

Need I say more than that the best aspect of this episode is that it fully canonized without a doubt Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor? Regardless about half of this episode is good and the other half is just meaningless runaround action with a giant robot designed to please children and stupid people. I was in the UK during the lead-up to this episode and I remembered the vast swathes of hype surrounding the plot and whether David Morrissey would actually turn out to be playing the next Doctor. Frankly I think this would have been a pretty clever plot device and a successful reversal of the normal multi-Doctor angle but unfortunately it's just another in a long string of cop-outs by RTD designed to rake in audience figures and it turns out that this new man is actually just a human who thinks he's the Doctor through a combination of backfiring technology and psychological trauma. It's unfortunate that they couldn't have done something more crafty and actually introduced the new Doctor prior to regeneration but that probably would have been too 'out there' for normal audiences to handle.

This episode is also notable in that it's the first of what are dubbed the "specials", a handful of longer episodes produced to pad out a year while David Tennant was too busy to film a full series and RTD wanted a vacation at full pay, designed to conclusively end the story of the Tenth Doctor, something I believe could easily have been done at the conclusion of "Journey's End". Nonetheless this permitted RTD to mischaracterise the Tenth Doctor as somehow more important than other Doctors and aggrandise his own era in a drawn-out death rattle before handing over the reins to Steven Moffat, and the self-indulgence begins to show, although it's not so bad in this episode.

The return of the Parallel Universe Cybermen is extremely unwelcome and it's rather uninspiring to have us return to the nineteenth century again, especially since the Doctor arrives in the middle of an extremely sanitized and stereotypical Victorian Christmas. The Cybermen's plot involves building a giant robot to stomp around and generally act menacing and that's about it. They've also developed the Cybershades, a bunch of incredibly naff-looking Cyber-dog-things which really serve no purpose whatsoever. It's all very arbitrary and you can tell that RTD only brought the Cybermen back because he was fresh out of ideas. The real villain is slightly older hotty du jour Dervla Kirwan playing Miss Mercy Hartigan who is basically just a ham who gets plugged into the giant Cyberman and says a lot of guff about gaining knowledge and so on. The Cybermen develop this elaborate plot involving mind-control and so on just to get four orphanage owners to bring their child workers to the Thames sluice who end up working for about five minutes before the giant robot is ready. Why did they bother? Why not just get the spare Cybermen to do it? There are plenty of them just standing around doing nothing looking, as they tend to do in this incarnation, as if they're constipated. They're certainly stronger and more efficient than child labour, so why didn't they do it themselves? I think RTD wanted to make some kind of point but then forgot and it just gets used as a big cry moment for Jackson Lake aka David Morrissey to be reunited with his son.

Speaking of Jackson Lake he's a bit of a ham as well, using "sir" in just about every sentence like he's Howard Moon or something and speaking in some fairly purple tones about how "great swathes of my life have been stolen away" and so on but he's very watchable and his stuffy old-timeyness almost makes him feel like a Doctor of old compared to the rather excessively human and trendy Tenth Doctor. There's some stupid stuff about how he says the sonic screwdriver is sonic by tapping it on some wood and how the TARDIS is a hot air balloon but it's kind of endearing more than anything. One thing I will say is that by this time I am becoming desperately tired of watching the Tenth Doctor. While his performance is very restrained in this one and there aren't really any significant cringe-inducing moments it certainly feels like he's run his course and there's not much left to wring from his character. He complains about his companions leaving him, and you can appreciate that it would be difficult to never have any permanent friends, but if it's such a problem why doesn't he travel with one of the longer-lived species of alien or something? It just seems like a bit much that suddenly he's feeling all lonely when he seems to have managed changing companions before. He speaks with all this finality like he's achieved all this character development that never happened to the Doctor in the classic series but it comes across as self-involved and melodramatic. Why does he complain about companions breaking his heart? He's the one who's always telling them they're short-lived humans and can't stay with him forever and so on. He even goes so far as to imply that he has nothing to live for, which just makes it sound like he has depression and is being irrational. At least he goes to Christmas dinner so he doesn't have to spend all his time being moody. He's just stopped Megatron coming out of the Thames and killing everyone anyway.

The defeat of Megatron aka the Cyber-King is unsatisfying because he flies up in the balloon, has some stern words with Dervla Kirwan about aspects of her character we never really get to see on screen, then shoots some magic beams at her and spontaneously causes her and her Cyber-buddies to blow up for absolutely no reason. How does breaking the Cyber-link make everything explode? I do like it that the Cybermen are carrying their gear around in bandoliers, though, which makes sense, and the Cyber-Leader looks kind of cool even if he has 'action figure' written all over him. The Parallel Universe Cybermen are nonetheless still lame and the fact that they nicked all their cool stuff from the Daleks and get taken over by Miss Hartigan who is apparently a stronger mind than anyone they've previously encountered without much explanation why seems to reduce their menace by a significant extent.

It's a serviceable episode, and probably the best of the Christmas Specials to this point but it really feels like they could have omitted the Cybermen since they're pretty needless and just focused on an exploration of the nature of the Doctor but as usual opportunities are missed for the sake of hype and cheap thrills. At least there are only four episodes of RTD to go.

"Journey's End"

I believe Shakespeare wrote "Journey's end in lovers' meeting" so you know what to expect from this episode. Wet sentimentality, a totally meaningless and arbitrary unscientific resolution, narrative-killing fan service and self-congratulatory pretension abound in RTD's last hurrah for a full series finale. It's tiresome to see how he has to up the stakes every time. First the future was imperilled by the Dalek Emperor, then it was the present day under attack from both Daleks and Cybermen, then it was the Master actually succeeding and taking over the world, and now it's Davros striving to destroy all of reality with some physics-ignoring device called the 'Reality bomb' which cancels electric fields. We've seen it all before, we know it won't succeed because the stakes are way too high - if the bad guys won in this episode we'd never have Doctor Who again. It cheapens any effect and while it seems impressive at a superficial level it becomes rather insubstantial under examination. What exactly do the Daleks intend to do once they've destroyed everything in existence, anyway? Settle down to a life of peace? This would be a question the Doctor could have asked but he mostly just stands there like a lemon letting Davros pontificate endlessly about this and that in a string of purple phrases about his final victory, which seems to be several different things over the course of the episode, and the greatness of the Daleks, and the weakness of the Doctor and his companions.  Why do they keep playing up the whole thing about the Doctor not using weapons? Clearly Davros hasn't re-watched "The Invasion of Time" or "Attack of the Cybermen" recently because I recall a few stories where the Doctor was more than happy to grab a gun and blow away some bad dudes when the situation demanded it. This is only really exceeded by Dalek Caan's prophetic rantings which have even more RTD pseudopoetical pastiche than usual and are abominable to listen to. I'm not surprised the Supreme Dalek was so dismissive of him.

Anyway, how did we get here? Oh yes, it all begins with a cop-out. The Doctor was regenerating at the end of this episode, but fortunately he has that spare hand of his just sitting around and after he's healed he shoots all the 'regeneration energy' into that. What a cheat! You can tell that this aspect was just done to drum up loads of hype because people would definitely want to see the next episode to find out what the deal was, and this is probably one of the most unsatisfying resolutions imaginable. Regenerations are meant to be a big deal, and they throw an abortive one into this episode for the sake of ratings. It's cheap and meaningless - since when did regeneration heal the current body before transforming? If that happened there'd be no need for the change of appearance. Somehow when First Doctor said "This old body's wearing a bit thin," back in "The Tenth Planet" I don't think the regeneration was somehow curing his 'being-an-old-man-ness' and then transforming him into the Second Doctor. It's the transformation from a damaged body into a new fresh body itself which causes the healing process.

Of course everyone gets captured but Donna's stuck in the TARDIS while the Daleks are trying to destroy it. But she touches this hand which has been hanging around since "The Christmas Invasion", and the hand inexplicably grows into a duplicate Tenth Doctor due to some nonsensical event described as a "meta-crisis" because RTD's written himself into a corner and needs another Doctor to save the day while the Doctor we actually care about is busy. Now I want to point this out at this stage because it will become important later: in the meta-crisis sequence the clone Doctor appears to be a 'Ken Doll', which is to say he has no genitalia. Bit weird. Anyway this is just ridiculousness incarnate. It's made even more absurd by the fact that it turns out Donna's been affected too and a shock from Davros' lightning hand (replacing the one shot off in "Revelation of the Daleks") causes her to manifest as a human-Time Lord with all the knowledge of the Doctor but somehow more resourceful and intelligent due to 'human intuition' or some rubbish like that. She and the clone Doctor hit a bunch of buttons which cause the Daleks to all get taken out for absolutely no reason and returns all the planets, and then they blow all the Daleks up which makes the normal Doctor angry. That's it. That's the plot of "Journey's End", yet somehow RTD manages to drag it out for an hour and ten minutes.

Davros seems to be looking a lot healthier than when he was a head in an augmented Dalek machine back in "Remembrance of the Daleks" and while Julian Bleach does a good job with the character all his cackling and his 'look at what you've done Doctor' stuff seems kind of insignificant compared to how he himself, y'know, created the Daleks, the most horrible beings in the universe and all that. Dalek Caan turns out to be a traitor who was helping the Doctor all along, thus fulfilling the true prophecy that the 'Cult of Skaro' was doomed to make the Daleks seem totally un-Dalek-like and weak. Martha threatens to blow up the Earth to stop the Dalek plan but doesn't because she makes the stupid decision of threatening the Daleks, Rose does nothing, Captain Jack and Sarah Jane make some more vague threats which also only lets them get captured, and Jackie and Mickey turn up for absolutely no reason. It's all completely pointless, and could have been accomplished in one episode with the Doctor and Donna.

Regardless, in spite of the fact that they have built the Death Star the Doctors are able to whack a few buttons which kills all the Daleks and makes everything explode with one of those expanding rings that they have these days during big explosions and using more nonsense the Doctor rustles up even more unnecessary guest cameos in the form of Mr. Smith the computer and K-9 to 'tow' Earth back to the Solar System using the TARDIS. RTD claimed that people who didn't like the ridiculousness of this scene were 'spod boys' who didn't know science as well as a Time Lord. You know what? I think even the Doctor knew how absurd this was because that's why he distracts everyone with the little info bite about TARDISes neededing six pilots because he hopes if they don't notice then it'll work like something from a Douglas Adams novel. Anyway the tectonic-ripping, gravity disrupting, atmosphere disturbing motion of the Earth means a few shaky rooms in Torchwood and the Nobles' house and then we're back. The Moon is even still in place. The Doctor exchanges platitudes with Sarah Jane, Jack, Martha, and Mickey whose resolution is the most satisfying in that he's matured so much, and then it's off to Pete's World for the crying game.

It's notable that Pete didn't actually end up appearing in this one. Well, it's not really notable but I'm surprised they didn't bring him back. I bet RTD wanted to and Shaun Dingwall was just busy. Good for him. Anyway Billie Piper is standing there trying to remember how to speak with a cockney accent and crying through makeup which has been absolutely caked on with a trowel and David Tennant does his concerned look which doesn't seem difficult because in close ups he looks kind of old and tired. I guess the production schedule, along with having to play the Doctor twice in several scenes, has taken its toll. Rose still wants the Doctor, but the Doctor says she'll have to make do with his clone.

This is just weird. For a start, he doesn't give Doctor Clone any choice. He doesn't even ask. I guess if the Doctor is meant to be all in love with Rose and all this crap it's unsurprising that he isn't too worried about staying but it's still incredibly weird that this facsimile is used as the perfect replacement for the Tenth Doctor, one who will age and die. You can tell that the whole meta-crisis thing wasn't actually written to save the day but actually because RTD needed an excuse for Rose to get her man without the show having to become "Doctor Who: The Domestic Years" or something. To avoid crippling the Doctor's character any further they decline to have the Doctor say he loves Rose but Doctor Clone whispers something in her ear and apparently it's all right. He's quite simply not the same guy, but Rose is perfectly prepared to shack up with him because he looks the same and will grow old. It's kind of disgusting, diminishes Rose's romance to a certain extent and makes the Tenth Doctor look rather heartless. Nonetheless as we've already discovered earlier in this episode Doctor Clone has no willy so Rose is going to be disappointed later on but I suppose that's a good thing. I do find it weird though that Rose is prepared to have make-outs and stuff with this Doctor but it never happened with the proper Doctor. What the hell is the nature of this relationship? Is it only romantic when it's convenient or what? You can tell the proper Doctor at least is too alien to acknowledge it but it's too ambiguous, contradictory and inverse to the Doctor's established character to make much sense.

But there's yet more to deal with! Rose is happy, so it's time to end with a death. But heaven forbid RTD ever kill one of his characters, so it turns out that Donna can't actually handle being a human-Time Lord meta-crisis thing and the Doctor wipes her memories. Much like the events of "Doomsday" apparently this constitutes death and is another cheap hype-drumming cop-out. I don't understand what this was meant to achieve. Yes, Donna changed a lot with the Doctor and I suppose it's disappointing that she couldn't go on but that's the nature of things. I simply don't feel sufficiently invested in the character to care.

Anyway, that's it. It's a huge episode, one of the longest of the New Series, and for all intents and purposes nothing happens. There are some Daleks, they're stopped, Rose gets to hook up with a Doctor-substitute and Donna's memory is wiped. Yet it's so overblown, takes itself so seriously, is so self-congratulatory and stands as so important in spite of the insignificance of it all that it's all just a waste of time. Why can't Doctor Who be exciting and meaningful? Why can't the narratives achieve something without hand-waving cop-outs and meaningless technobabble? Why is the character development so inconsistent and the thematic content so secondary and unfulfilled? It's just a piece of hype, pop-culture incarnate, valueless, artistically devoid and totally pointless.