Day 728 - Fear Her

Do you all remember the opening of the 2012 Olympics? That glorious moment when David Tennant came running into the stadium with the torch to light the flame and start the games? No? Well neither to I! And thank God for that!

This episode was broadcast in 2006 but was set in 2012 and the year of the London Olympics. I guess the advantage of having stories set in the near future is that you don't have to worry too much about predicting the change if technology etc and so can present a world which is pretty much the same as our own. That being said I'm guessing this must have been made before the official logo of the Olympics was revealed as it is no where to be seen which is a shame. Although it was a ridiculous logo and since someone pointed out to me that it looks like Lisa Simpson given someone a blowjob then I've never been able to see it as anything else. Seriously! Look it up and you will see what I mean. And once you see it you will never be able to unsee it. I'm also aware that this is the second blog entry in a row where I've wondered on to the subject of oral sex. Says a lot for my mind set at the moment. Anyway...

I'd say this was the weakest episode of this series and could easily be skipped but that is not the nature of my quest. I have to take the rough with the smooth. An alien has taken possession of a lonely little girl and has given the girl the power to trap other children inside drawings. It's implied she is doing this to find more and more friends and eventually leads to a pretty cringeworthy moment when she manages to make everyone inside the Olympic stadium vanish leaving a perplexed newsreader, Huw Edwards to wonder his colleague has gone "not you to Bob???" Oh dear lord!

The alien can leave in its tiny little ship but only if it is powered by heat and love. The Olympic torch! After the guy carrying the torch falls, the Doctor appears from nowhere and runs into the stadium with the torch to light the flame and send the alien home. Some people were actually beginning to think that this scene may have been re enacted during the real opening ceremony. Thankfully we were spared it. 

The highlight of the episode comes at the very end (and no I'm not talking about the blessed relief of the episode being over) when Rose says that no one will ever be able to split her up from the Doctor to which the Doctor looks up ominously at the sky and says he feels something coming...a storms approaching.  Ohhhh its the two part season finale next!!!

Day 727 - Love And Monsters

Now I can't be sure, but I believe this is the first episode of Doctor Who to contain a joke about fellatio. I'm pretty sure it's the first...More on this later.

Now that I have your attention (or not, who knows), lets turn our attention to the rest of the episode before I delve into the blow job gag. Interesting to note there that by iPad was unsure whether to hyphenate blow job and now I'm not to sure either.

In order to fit the required number of episodes into the production schedule it was necessary to double bank meaning that this episode was actually filmed at the same time as The Impossible Planet. This meant that there could be very little of the Doctor and Rose in it as they were busy being chased and tormented by the red eyed, possessed Ood. It does sort of make for an interesting story.

I went through a phase of hating this one but its not all that bad. Might as well get the negatives out of the way first. 

Peter Kay appears as the villain of the story, Victor Kennedy aka the Abzorbaloff. Now I'm a fan of Peter's comedy for the most part but it really feels like stunt casting here. He's a fantastic comedian but there are many actors who could have played the part better I'm afraid.

The Abzorbaloff as a creature is pretty rubbish too. Basically a fat green alien (with a mohawk!) who absorbs people into himself and the feeds on them. It was actually designed by a Blue Peter competition winner. Now as a child's creation it's fantastic and really imaginative, it's just let down in the realisation. I think the kid himself imagined the monster as as giant as a double decker bus and they just completely ignore that fact. That would have been much cooler.

So to some of the good stuff. The plot centres on a man called Elton whose life has been touched by the Doctor and now he is trying to find out as much as he can about this mysterious stranger. Through his searches he ends up teaming with a group of people who are also on the hunt for the Doctor and LINDA is born (the London Investigation 'N' Detective Agency...yeah I hate that too). They are a fun little group until Victor Kennedy joins and takes over, making the search for the Doctor much more of a serious affair than it had been before.

Elton tracks down Jackie Tyler and infiltrates her life, hoping to find information. Soon they become good friends but things turn sour when Jackie discovers the real reason he spoke to her in the first place. This is where the story shows some of its true strengths. It's a proper examination of what happens to all those people who are left behind. Poor Jackie is always wondering where Rose is and what she is up to, whether she is safe.

Deciding to confront Victor about the terrible way he has made the group treat Jackie, Elton is terrified to discover him in his true form, the Abzorbaloff! Elton escapes but not before the love of his life, Ursula, is absorbed into the creature.

To cut a long story short, the Doctor arrives to safe the day and the creature melts away into the concrete. As Ursula was the last victim, the Doctor manages to bring her back (kind of). It's revealed at the end of the episode that Ursula is now living happily with Elton, as a face sticking out of a paving stone! Who the hell would want to live like that??? She doesn't appear to have any ears but can still hear somehow. And Elton cheekily explains that they still have a bit of a love life! Not only is that very very rude (shaking my head in disgust) but what an horrific thought, having sex with a face sticking out of a slab of concrete. And they say love is dead!
 

Days 725 to 726 - The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

People sometimes ask me whether I'm tempted to watch more than one episode a day and i never usually am, but I was very close to doing it with this one! of course I would then have had to rewatch that second episode the next day so in the end I just thought I'd wait. But it was tough! 

The basic premise of this story is, the Doctor meets the devil himself!! Well sort of. The creature he meets is the one that gave birth to the idea of the devil so that raises the question, does that make this the real devil?

A great two part story which also introduced the Ood as a recurring alien in the new series. They are described as being a slave race, they live to serve others. This is an idea that will be explored in a later episode and it seem strange that the Doctor doen't question it here as it seems morally dubious. The Ood are a great looking creature with their squid mouths which David Tennant informs us (in a DVD extra) feel fantastic that he just wanted to go up to them and chew them. Bit weird that David...a little bit weird.

I have to admit that as much as I like this one, Rose is starting to get on my nerves a little. As a companion she is becoming far too cocky. Also at times she seems to be imitating the Doctor so much that Billie Piper takes on some of the characteristics of David Tennant when she is talking. I like to think that this was all intentional, to show the growth of her character before her eventual "demise" at the end of the series.

Aside from that little quibble (is quibble a word?), this is a fantastically atmospheric story with some great scenes such as the ones where the Doctor is being slowly lowered into the pit with no idea how deep the pit goes. As his cable runs out, with no sign of the bottom of the pit, he has to make the decision of whether he dares let himself drop, knowing that it could be as little as 30 feet or could be miles! It's at this point that the Doctor starts to possibly explain his true feelings for Rose. They have been cut off from one another since the communications went down so the Doctor tells Ida that is she manages to contact Rose "if you speak to Rose tell her....tell her I....oh she knows" at which point he lets himself drop. That's awesome!

Day 724 - The Idiot's Lantern

It's 1953 and people are being sucked off by their television sets!! At least their faces are.

This was an unusual day on my journey through every episode of Doctor Who as I ended up watching this in a busy restaurant. It was a Friday and several of us had gone out for a meal after work for Lucy's leaving do. I had steak, obviously. My initial plan was to get up early to give myself time to watch it before work. Unfortunately that didn't happen, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to get out of bed it seems. So I had to revert to my back up plan which was to download the episode onto my iPhone just in case I didn't make it home before midnight. Now why I didn't just watch it at lunch time is anyone's guess!

So we were at the meal and everyone had finished eating but people stayed there for several more drinks before moving on. I wasn't drinking unfortunately as I was driving but I stayed out with the others for the time we were in the restaurant. It was a really fun evening but as time wore on the anxiety grew and grew. It's so bloody stupid but I'm way too far down the rabbit hole now to complain about the mad things I'm putting myself through. Luckily the others were understanding enough (and possibly getting frustrated with me nipping to the loo every so often to catch a few minutes of the episode) that they didn't mind me watching it at the table. To all the other people in there who didn't know what I was doing I  must have looked like the most antisocial bastard in the world!

In hindsight I think I would have got home in just enough time to watch it but I just couldn't take that chance. So if any if you who were at the meal are reading this (highly doubtful! No one reads this!) then I apologise and thank you for your patience.

Look at that, a blog entry where I've hardly talked about the episode at all! Except to make a smutty joke. There's always room for a smutty joke!

Days 722 to 723 - Rise Of The Cybermen / The Age Of Steel

The Cybermen are back! And what's more they have been "upgraded" for the 21st century series. See what I did there?

These aren't the Cybermen from the old series however, which to be honest is a bit annoying. The TARDIS crashes through a hole in the universe and the Doctor, Rose and Micky find themselves in a parallel world. In this world Rose's father Pete Tyler is still alive and is a successful businessman.

Unfortunately the more than slightly insane John Lumic has designed a way to prolong human life (motivated by the fact that he himself is dying) by placing the brain in a metal shell. The new Cybermen are born. To build up his own private army of Cybermen he sends trucks round to gather up homeless "volunteers" by tempting them in with the promise of a free meal. Brilliantly these lorries are all labelled with the name of a dummy company called International Electromatics, which just happens to the the company run by Tobias Vaughn in the second Doctor Cyberman story, Invasion.

Some stand out moments include the scene when a Cyberman is knocked down by one of the freedom fighters the Doctor has teamed up with, the Cyberman's emotional inhibitor is broken and it begins to speak like a normal, albeit confused, human. The twist that this particular Cyberman was a woman really hammers home the point of the horrific nature Lumic is making everyone all uniform and the same. This is used again when Jackie Tyler is revealed to have been converted into a Cyberman. 

This story also signals a goodbye, at least for now, of Micky. With this world having lost its version of him to the Cybermen her feels it is his place to stay and help in the fight. When the Doctor explains that travel between parallel worlds is practically impossible, Rose realises that she will never see him again. Micky and Rose have had a bit of an odd relationship. Poor Micky hasn't really known where he stands with her but it seems here he is finally making his decision. He knows he has lost her to the Doctor and in this world his gran is still alive so he decides to stay behind after an emotional goodbye.

I've always thought the Cybermen were more frightening than the Daleks. They have that creepy thing of looking kind if human but with that blank expression. These new Cybermen are certainly a more impressive threat than some of their predecessors, but they don't half make a racket when they walk! They couldn't exactly sneak up on you!

Day 721 - The Girl In The Fireplace

       

I absolutely love this episode! This is just the sort of story that could never be told in any other television show. Fact!

After arriving on a space ship in the 51st century, the Doctor, Rose and Micky are confused when they find an 18th century French fireplace. Even more shocking is that say in the other side of the fire is a young girl. So begins this bizarre love story between the Doctor and Madame de Pompadour.

Scattered throughout the ship are time windows into different parts of Madame de Pompadour's (I'm going to use her real name Reinette from now on, can't be bothered to type that everytime!) life. Having met the Doctor as a little girl (Reinette was a little girl I mean, not the Doctor, although the way regeneration is going you can't rule that out one day) he has had a profound impact on her life. Especially after he saves her from one of the sinister clockwork droids. These droids originate from the space ship and have created the time windows in order to extract the head of Reinette when she reaches a certain age. There is reason behind this madness believe me. The ship is in a bad way and the droids have been doing everything they can to repair it with the limited replacement parts. Unfortunately the parts were so limited that they decided to canalise the the crew. This leads us to some horrific moments of Rose and a Micky finding human body parts wired into bits of machinery.

Whilst telepathically reading Reinettes mind, she manages to access the Doctor's memories also and from here their bond becomes closer. Considering this story was written by Steven Moffat who also wrote the excellent Empty Child of the previous year I wonder if the dancing equals sex rule still applies. If it does then we can maybe read more into the scene when Reinette is begging the Doctor to dance with her. Even more when he declines because tonight is the night she "dances" with the king. 

There are just so many good lines in this story. These include Reinette's quite profound thoughts of "it's the way its always been, the monster and the Doctor. It seems you cannot have one without the other"

Other great lines come near the end of the episode. With the droids defeated, now cut off from their ship the Doctor speaks quietly to their leader: "How many more ticks left in that clockwork heart? A day? A week? It's over! Accept that! I'm not winding you up..." Brilliant!

I could write an entire blog just about this one story! But this blog entry is way overdue so I must press on I'm afraid. But to summarise this is highly recommended!

Day 720 - School Reunion

The return of Sarah Jane Smith and K9 to the world of Doctor Who! Finally this new series is developing the courage to acknowledge it's past and what better way to do it that to bring back one of the Doctor's old companions.

When I first watched this when it was first broadcast in 2006 I had no real knowledge of who Sarah Jane was beyond that I knew she had been in the series before. It's a shame that that sense of delight at seeing her again that old time fans must have had was robbed from me somewhat. I've more than made up for this since but it would have been nice to have that nostalgic feeling that I'm afraid to say was missing for me.

Lets get the plot out of the way because its a pretty crap one. Aliens are using children's imagination and accelerating their learning in order that they can crack some sort of paradigm which will allow them to become God like creatures, shaping the universe around them. Seeing the children all sat at computers in a hypnotic state is all a bit too "Demon Headmaster" to me. Despite my reservations regarding the story, Anthony Head puts in a brilliantly creepy performance as the headmaster of the school, especially in the scenes he shares with the Doctor has they confront each other around the school swimming pool.

The really heart of this episode though is down to the return if Sarah Jane. Not only is this a brilliant nod to the past but it explores areas of the Doctor's life which had been untouched until now. Just what does happen to all those people he travels with and then just dumps back home? Poor Sarah Jane seems to have spent her life waiting for the Doctor to return and as such is a little angry at him. Also it's a bit of a shock for Rose when she discovers that she is no pt the first of the Doctor's companions. Micky is along for the ride in this story, taking great delight in Rose's plight when she realises there have been other women before her!

The inclusion of K9 makes the attempted spin off "K9 and Company" officially canon. It's in this spin off that Sarah Jane and K9 meet and as they are together now then this must have really happened. This is why K9 and Company had to feature in my quest at the end of the fourth Doctor era. You see there is a plan for all of this! 

I've never been a big fan of K9 as I just think the idea of a robot dog is a little too daft, even for Doctor Who! But nevertheless it's still great to see things from the Doctor's older adventures cropping up in the new series.

This episode has quite the emotional ending when Sarah Jane finally gets to say her proper goodbye to the Doctor. I'm sure I'll be seeing her very soon anyway!

Day 719 - Tooth & Claw

I'd like to say that my lack of blog entires over the last couple of days was to give people a break from the constant Facebook posts but the truth is I've just been too lazy and/or busy to keep up with it. As such I'm falling further behind but I still think there is a good chance that I can catch up with myself I'm only 6 days behind. Those helpful two part stories let me catch up.

Season 2 of the new Doctor Who (or season 28 as it should be technically called!) has another celebrity historical for us. This would seem to be the pattern over the next few years. Having met Charles Dickens in the prior season story The Unquiet Dead, it's now time to meet Queen Victoria in this episode. And a frightening adventure with a werewolf!

Having the story set in Scotland gives David Tennant a nice excuse to use his native Scottish accent for the first part of the episode and he attempts to convince the Queen's guards that he is Doctor Jamie McCrimmon. The first time I watched this I just assumed that this was a random fake name but knowing the series like I do now I can pick up on these cool extra bits that are put in, Jamie McCrimmon being a former companion to the Doctor (who was Scottish obviously, the companion I mean not the Doctor) during the era of the second Doctor.

Queen Victoria is played fantastically be Pauline Collins. The Queen has recently been widowed and the impact that this has had on her life is very much at the centre of the story. At times she seems playful, longing to hear the stories of the fabled werewolf but beneath this is a real sadness. She wanted to belief in such supernatural events in order that she can also belief one day she will have contact with her beloved Albert once again. 

However after her encounter with Rose and The Doctor (the former trying to get the Queen to say "we are not amused" throughout the duration of the episode) she realised that the supernatural creatures (or more correctly, aliens) that exist can threaten the Earth. She therefore banishes the Doctor from her empire and resolves to set up an institute to investigate such occurrences and to fight back. She names the institute after the estate from which the story was set, Torchwood!!

Day 718 - New Earth

The first proper outing for the tenth Doctor and Rose sees them FINALLY leaving the planet Earth! After an entire series of Earth based stories this was quite refreshing. And to which planet do they travel? New Earth! God damn it! What's this obsession with Earth!?

The Doctor has received a message telling him to come and meet someone in the hospital of New New York. Yes that's not a typo, the city is called New New York. (Although technically it's the fifteenth New York since the original so really it should be New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York. But Doctor Who fans don't get tied up in the details..ahem..)

The patient in question, sending out the message, is the The Face Of Boe, an alien creature who had a minor role in the previous season's story The End Of The World. So minor in fact that it's only in this story that we hear him talk for the first time! He appears to be dying, having been rumoured to have lived for millions of years, and legend has it that upon his death he will speak his great secret to the "wanderer without a home".

The nurses in this hospital are cats....not sure what else I can say about that really, except that they are marginally better realised than the Cheetah people from Survival! Also being a dog lover myself (in a strictly platonic sense you understand) I have a little mistrust for cats which is proved to be correct here when we discover that they have grown thousands of humans and kept them hidden beneath the hospital in order that they can act as specimens for them to test all their treatments on. These poor people have been infected with every disease in the universe and as such don't look all that pretty.

The Face Of Boe is not the only returning character from The End Of The World however as Lady Cassandra is also investigating the hospital, purely for her own ends as she hopes to find the terrible secrets of the cat nurses and then blackmail them in order that they can pay for her extensive beauty treatments. I mean at this point Cassandra is just a piece of stretched skin, what else can she possibly have done to her??

Using some sort of techno gizmo she transports her mind inside that of Rose. Billie Piper is a really good actress. I don't think I've really mentioned that before but it shows here when she is essentially having to play two characters, both Rose and Cassandra.

At the episode's end, The Face Of Boe decides he's not dying (like it's that easy!) but promises the Doctor that they will meet a final time and his secret will be spoken. "That is enigmatic, that is text book enigmatic!"

By the end of the story the character of Cassandra has developed (I like a bit of character development) to the point where she is willing to accept her own mortality which leads us into the most touching scene of the episode where the Doctor takes her back in time (she is now inhabiting the body of her clone servant, Chip, whose body is failing her) so that she can see herself as she was when she was still pure human, prior to all the treatments that turned her into a bitchy trampoline.

I didn't love this episode but the ending is pretty damn marvellous!

Day 717 - The Christmas Invasion

Christopher Eccleston revived the character of the Doctor brilliantly but it was probably David Tennant who became most well known and beloved for his portrayal of the Time Lord and so it's a bit weird watching his very first story again whilst trying to recapture that anxious feeling of wondering if the new Doctor was going to be any good. We are certainly made to wait a pretty long time as the Doctor spends a good portion of the story unconscious in bed!

I think I'm right in thinking that this was Doctor Who's first Christmas special since episode 7 of The Daleks' Master Plan way back in 1965 (so actually 40 years to the day that this special was broadcast). The changing perception of people's television viewing is certainly evident. Episode 7 of The Daleks' Master Plan was written so that it didn't contain anything vital to the plot of that serial and was therefore a bit of fluffy nonsense really. This was done as it was believed that no one would be watching television on Christmas day and therefore they didn't want the viewers to miss vital information which would prevent them from understanding the later episodes. Fast forward 40 years and the Christmas specials are some of the most watched things on television all year!

While the Doctor lies unconscious in bed, the Prime Minister is facing the imminent threat of a huge spaceship approaching the Earth. In a stroke of brilliance the Prime Minister is none other than Harriet Jones from the last series who has clearly moved up in the world of politics, although she still insists on flashing her ID badge and identifying herself, "Harriet Jones - Prime Minister" to which everyone responds "yes....we know who you are". When the Sycorax (the aliens of the story) respond with the same phrase, it's pretty funny.

Meanwhile poor Rose is really shaken up by what has happened to the Doctor and even seems angry with him, claiming that the old Doctor would have been there to save them whilst this impostor is just lying asleep in bed!

When the Doctor finally does come round (stirred to wakefulness by a cup of tea no less!) he springs straight into action with wise retorts to the Sycorax and challenging the leader to a sword fight. The amazing thing about David Tennant is that he was already a big Doctor Who fan in real life and therefore his enthusiasm comes across ten fold on screen. It's also nice that he seems to have softened a bit to Rose's family and even gives Jackie a hug at the end of the episode. I don't think they could have kept up the slightly moody Doctor for much longer so this was a bit of a relief.

Another key part of this story are the references to a mysterious institute known as Torchwood. Harriet Jones eventually uses Torchwood to blow up the Sycorax ship despite the fact that they were retreating much to the Doctor's horror.

The Doctor's new outfit is very nice. When the series was first brought back they were frightened of going too eccentric and as such Eccleston wore a pretty bland (but still cool) costume. Now the series has some confidence some of the Doctor's more outlandish taste in clothing is rearing it's head again. Luckily he has slightly more taste that his sixth incarnation! No clown costumes in sight!

A new Doctor and yet more adventures to come!

Days 715 to 716 - Bad Wolf / The Parting Of The Ways

It seems to be a fairly common event recently that I'm bidding farewell to another Doctor and as such it's time to say goodbye to yet another one with this being the swan song of Christopher Eccleston,

It's actually a really good two part story but the way it starts makes you think that you could be in for a right crap one. I may as well go into the rubbish bits first.

The gameshows of the future...oh God this is awful. The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack find themselves transported inside a "game station" where there is a separate gameshow behind each door. This would be a cheesy enough story in of itself but what makes it worse is the fact that this is set in the year 200100 but the gameshows are all based on ones from the early 21st century i.e Big Brother, The Weakest Link, even Ground Force gets a mention! I don't think The Weakest Link is still on air even now so what are the chances that these shows would last another 198,000 years!

Seeing Christopher Eccleston in the Big Brother house is pretty funny though. I think I can safely say that you will never really see Eccleston in any celebrity reality television shows. If he won't come back for the 50th anniversary then I doubt he's going to turn up on Strictly Come Dancing!

These gameshows have a sadistic twist however as the people that lose them are apparantly vapurised and unfortunately for Rose she is not a very good contestant in The Weakest Link. Although saying that she does make it all the way through to the final. That seems a little unbelievalbe as her knowledge has a 198,000 year gap in it!

The Doctor escapes from the Big Brother house to discover this is all taking place on Satelite 5 (the setting of one of the previous episodes, The Long Game). The Doctor's meddling 100 years ago has created this terrible future. Even worse the corportation running the station is known as the Bad Wolf Corporation!

Jack soon discovers some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Rose has not really been vapourised but transported through space. The bad news is that she has been transported right into the middle of a massive Dalek fleet who have secretly been converting human beings into Daleks for hundreds of years and now they are ready to invade the Earth!

As Jack goes off to defend the station he bids goodbye to his friends who he realised he may never see again. It's a short scene but it has to be noted due to the fact Jack kisses the Doctor! He kisses Rose too of course but even so. I mean I think it's great because it shows how in the future these sort of issues won't be a problem which is fantastic but it does make me laugh how fans were up in arms at the Doctor kissing his companion Grace back in 1996 and now he's kissing guys too!

The Doctor can stop them by sending a huge delta wave their way to fry their brains. Unfortunately he does not have time to refine the wave meaning that it will kill all humans on Earth along with the Daleks! This is where the emotional twist comes into play. Knowing that they are all about to die, the Doctor tricks Rose into going inside the TARDIS and then sends her home. As Rose stands inside the TARDIS a holographic image of the Doctor appears to her to say goodbye. I got a little choked up I must admit.

Back on Earth, Rose continues to see the words Bad Wolf everywhere and she realises that this is some kind of link to the Doctor telling her that she can get back. I don't think the whole Bad Wolf thing is explained very well which is a shame considering that this has been the running theme throughout the whole series.

As she desparatly tries to open up the TARDIS console so that she can telepathically tell the machine where to take her, we get another fantastically emotional scene with her mum. In order to get her mum understand how good the Doctor is she tells her all about how he took her back in time to meet her Dad and Jackie realises that the blonde girl she saw from a distance as Pete dies was Rose herself! It's true to say that Jackie and the Doctor have had a pretty poor relationship throughout this series and so this scene was needed to show Jackie just how good the Doctor can actually be.

Soon she manages to open the console with the help of Micky and a fairly hefty chain attached to a lorry and after abosrbing a load of energy from the time vortex itself she is soon racing back to the future in time to save the Doctor by using her new God-like powers to divide all the atoms in the Daleks and bring Captain Jack back from the dead. Realising that the power will soon consume her, the Doctor draws the energy out of her. By kissing her of course. Good grief! The Doctor is snogging everyone in this story!

So this leads us on to the regeneration into the tenth Doctor. Having absorbed the lethal energy out of Rose it proves to much for him and he begins to regenerate. What's cool about the regeneration here that sets its apart from all previous ones is the way the Doctor regenerates standing up. Previously all
Doctors had been lying down. Standing up with the regeneration energy flaring out of the arms is just so much cooler!

And so here I am, another chapter complete and the birth of the tenth Doctor, stumbling into the world, shocked at the weird sensation of having new teeth! 

Day 714 - Boom Town

This would seem to be a bit of a dull picture to attach to an episode of a television show about adventures through time and space but it really sums up the crux of this story, the details of which I'll go into shortly.

The Doctor has discovered that one member of the Slitheen family has survived from the events of Aliens Of London and sets about tracking her down to prevent her causing any more mayhem. She has become mayor of Cardiff and is overseeing the construction of a new nuclear power station in the city. Unfortunately for Cardiff, as well as for the rest of planet, the power station is being built on top of the rift in space as discovered in The Unquiet Dead. Lots of links to previous episodes in this one. Speaking of which, the name given to the project of building the nuclear power station is "Blaidd Drwg" which just happens to be welsh for "Bad Wolf". This is a phrase that seems to have been following the Doctor throughout this series and its in this episode that the Doctor acknowledges this for the first time.

After capturing Margaret (the Slitheen) and telling her she is going t be taken home she reveals that her entire family have been sentenced to the death penalty and therefore if she is taken home then she is being taken to hear death. Unfortunately she cannot be taken directly there as the TARDIS needs several hours to refuel by absorbing energy from the rift. And this is where we come back to the picture shown above. As a last request Margaret asks for a final meal.

Margaret: "I wonder if you could do it. To sit with a creature you're about to kill...and take supper. How strong is your stomach Doctor? I've seen you fight your enemies, now dine with them"

This is where the story gets really good. The Doctor's morality is put to the test when Margaret starts giving him all the horrific details of the way her race put people to death by boiling them into a soup. Does the Doctor have the right to deliver her to such terrible punishment? 

It's not the strongest episode of the series but its so different that I quite like it. There is not a great deal of action in it but the scenes in the restaurant more than make up for this.

Christopher Eccleston's time as the Doctor is coming to an end now with only one more blog entry on his time in the show. Hopefully I'll get that one up soon as I've started to fall behind a little again. It's pretty hard work keeping up with a new story every day! 

Days 712 to 713 - The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances

"Are you my mummy?" How can such an innocent question sound so damn creepy??

This is by far the highlight of this series of Doctor Who. This two part story is quite simply perfect in every way.

The Doctor tracks a mysterious ship to where it has crash landed in the middle of London during World War II. After being split up from one another "one day I'll meet someone who gets the whole "don't wander off" thing" Rose meets another mysterious time traveller who calls himself Captain Jack Harkness. Jack would become a big part of the future of the show and since I have decided to watch the spin offs I'll be seeing a lot more of him when it comes time to watch Torchwood.

Meanwhile the Doctor meets a young girl called Nancy who warns him about the young child following them. The child wears a gas mask and is constantly asking "Are you my mummy?" Nancy is living on the streets and has the pretty clever idea of using the air raids as opportunities to sneak into people's houses to get her hands on some food for herself and the rest of the young children she is caring for. We later discover that her young brother was killed during an air raid and it is this "empty child" who is now stalking the streets asking for his mother.

The creepiness reaches a climax at the end if part one when the Doctor finds himself in a hospital surrounded by patients lying silently on their beds, all wearing gas masks and, after scanning them, he discovers they all have the exact same injuries right down to the scar on the back of their hand. Doctor Constantine who has been treating them then succumbs to the "disease" himself and there is a really horrific moment when we see a gas mask sprout out of the front of his skull! Constantine is played fantastically by Richard Wilson. He's only really in one short scene with the Doctor but he's amazing.

Captain Jack is revealed to be a time agent who is trying to con the Doctor and Rose into believing that the ship that has crashed is valuable so that he can sell it to them, knowing that soon a German bomb will fall on it, destroying it forever. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't aware that this ship was actually an old ambulance carrying nano genes designed to patch people up and get them ready for battle. Crashing in London it came upon the dead child and this being the first human that they had seen they got the "repairs" to the child a little wrong believing that the gas mask was actually part of the human body. Now they are out to fix the rest of humanity.

As well as being incredibly eerie, this story is also highly emotional. Some of my particular favourites include the moment when Rose reveals to Nancy that she has travelled here in a time machine from the future to which Nancy glances up at the German bombers flying overhead and asks "what future?"

Of course the most touching part of the whole story comes at the very end with the reveal of the true identity of the boy's mother. Nancy it seems is not the boy's sister after all. She has lied to him all his life to cover up her shame of being a young mother out of wedlock. And now he will never stop asking "are you my mummy?"

There are just so many things to talk about that I really don't feel that I can do it justice. I haven't even touched on the whole "dancing" theme. Pretty much dancing becomes another way of describing sex and if you replace the two words the scenes still make perfect sense. The best scene being when Rose doubts whether the Doctor has ever danced to which he relies "I'm 900 years old, I think it's save to assume that at some point I've danced" Yes we know you have Doctor, after all you're granddaughter Susan didn't just spring from nowhere...or maybe she did..who knows how Time Lord reproduction works. I'm not even joking when I say I think there was even a novel that went into details about that very subject. 

This story has a bit of everything that a Doctor Who story should have. Genuine chills, moments of comedy and overall a really strong story throughout. This was written by Steven Moffat who would go on to become the show runner from the eleventh Doctor onwards and whilst I am a fan of his eleventh Doctor stories too I have always felt that the stories he wrote when he wasn't running the whole show were just that little bit better. 

And I'll finish with asking one more time:

"Are you my mummy??"

Day 711 - Father's Day

Now this is a story unlike anything they ever tried in the old series. Whilst this new series may be a little frightened to touch on over the top alien vistas or too many links to the shows past, one thing it definitely isn't afraid of is ramping up the emotional implications of travelling through time and space.

In this episode Rose asks the Doctor to take her back in time so that she can see her Dad who died when she was just a baby in a hit and run incident. After seeing him marry her mum she decides that she can't let her Dad die alone and therefore she wants to be with him to hold his hand after the accident. Unfortunately temptation is too much and Rose runs out into the street to push her father out of the way. The Doctor is pretty annoyed by this and starts to wonder whether Rose only started travelling with him so that she change history. I guess having had Adam just let him down he's feeling a little sensitive and ends up referring to Rose as "another stupid ape" which is a little harsh.

They establish in the new series that certain things in history should not be changed and unfortunately the death of Rose's father, Pete, is one of them. As such we soon have some alien creatures coming through the wound in time and killing people off. Rose and the Doctor find themselves taking refuge in an old church with Pete and Jackie and a number of other people.

There are some really emotional moments in this episode. Pete eventually discovers that Rose is his daughter from the future and starts quizzing her on how he turns out. She lies to him, telling him how he was always there for her, taking them for picnic and reading her a bedtime story every night. He listens to all this and then sadly says "that's not me" and so he pretty much knows she is lying to him.

Meanwhile the car that should have killed him is looping round the church in some kind of time loop. Peter realises what he has to do to put things right and he runs out in front of the car, setting history back on track. Rose gets the chance she wanted from the very beginning, to hold her dads hand whilst he slips away. A very sad episode..very emotional indeed.

Day 710 - The Long Game

I'm a little drunk. Yes here's some inside information as to how this blog gets written sometimes. Whenever I find myself alone (which is all to often sadly) I pull out my phone (I said phone!) and start making a few notes...such as these. Whilst making these particular notes I'm sat in the White Horse whilst waiting for Matt to return from the toilet. Anyway I'm avoiding talking about the episode and there's a good reason for that...

I don't really like this one. It's by far the worst of this first series. It's not terrible but its just a bit dull really. The Doctor takes Rose and, newly acquired companion, Adam to the year 200,000 and to Satellite 5 orbiting the Earth. Again the nervousness of the production team is shown by the fact that for this entire first season we never have a story that is not either set on Earth or in a space station orbiting the Earth. What happened to all the alien planets??

My God! Matt takes ages on the toilet!!.

The Doctor discovers that human development has been stunted and that something is going on in Satellite 5 to cause this. This leads us to a villain of the week played by Simon Pegg with the brilliant name of "The Editor". Basically Satellite 5 is a huge news gathering station but the facts are being manipulated in order to control the human race. In overall charge of the station is the Mighty Jagrofess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe (okay I'll admit, I had to look that name up. It doesn't quite roll of the tongue in the same way that Raxacoricofalapatorius does).

I wonder if Matt has died....

Adam (a character I completely forgot to mention when writing my blog for Dalek) demonstrates how not everyone is cut out to be a companion for the Doctor and be is soon up to no good by trying to find out as much about future technology as possible and phoning home (using his new timey wimey phone) leaving all the details on his mums answering machine. The Doctor doesn't take to kindly it this and end up kicking him out of the TARDIS by the episodes end.

I think Matt has left...

Day 709 - Dalek

So exciting! A Dalek makes its first appeance in the revamped series and its a fantastic episode!

Having landed in a secret underground space museum, the Doctor discovers that one of his greatest foes is being kept prisoner. It's in this episode that we find out a whole lot more about the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks. In fact it's only in this episode that it is finally confirmed that It was the Daleks that the Time Lords were fighting.

Between the cancellation of the old series and this new series starting, the Daleks had never really gone away but were treated as comedy props pretty much. Therefore when we see the Doctor's sheer horror and anger at coming face to face with one it feels all the more powerful. Christopher Eccleston gives a brilliant performance as he angrily explains to the Dalek that he destroyed the entire Dalek race.

It doesn't taken long for the Dalek to get loose and then we see how dangerous they really are. Just one pretty much kills everyone in the base. The Dalek manages to escape from its confinement when Rose touches it and allows it to extrapolate the DNA of a time traveller to rejuvenate itself...or some bullshit like that anyway. The characterisation of the Dalek is pretty good. It's not just a ranting pepper pot but is actually quite sneaky. This is evident in the scene as mentioned when it acts in a way to make Rose pity it by telling her how he is the last of his kind and he shall die alone. It's really great stuff and its so unusual to hear a Dalek talk in such a way.

Throughout the episode the Dalek starts acting more and more peculiar due to absorbing Rose's DNA, it is becoming more human. Meanwhile the Doctor is changing too. Being around a Dalek has turned him psycho and by the end of the episode he is pointing a massive gun at both the Dalek and Rose. The effects of the Time War are still ver much being felt by both the Doctor and the Dalek and they share a quite touching scene at the end.

It was this episode that really turned me into a Doctor Who fan. I saw it for the first time in 2005 when I was at university. I'd had a pretty shitty few months and all of a sudden there was the Doctor. I clung to him then (not in a gay way!) and I've not let go since..

Days 707 to 708 - Aliens Of London / World War Three

Farting aliens! Bloody farting aliens!! This new series of Doctor Who is still trying to find its feet and is so doing is still trying to establish the right tone. And they mess up a little here.

The aliens in this story, the Raxacoricofalapatorians or as I shall be referring to them from now on, the Slitheen (Slitheen being their family name) aren't exactly a fantastic creation. Massive green creatures who kill people, skin them and then climb inside the skin as a disguise. However due to their giant stature it is first necessary to shrink themselves down a little causing a gas exchange, hence the constant farting.

Now the idea of aliens skinning people and wearing their bodies is horrific! But instead of it being played that way we get comedy farting and hidden zips on foreheads for when they need to disrobe from their disguise.

The Doctor has taken Rose back home to see her mum, believing he has dropped her off just 12 hours after she originally departed with him. Unfortunately, proving that the TARDIS is still as unreliable as ever, Rose has actually been returned 12 months after she first left! Therefore this has caused a great deal of worry for her mother who has believed she has gone missing and possibly been murdered! I like how the new series shows the wider repercussions of companions leaving home behind to travel with the Doctor and just what kind of impact that can have on their friends and family.

The Doctor is pretty unsympathetic towards the plight of Jackie ( Rose's mother). He seems to find families just a pain and something that gets in the way of him having fun. There are several occasions when he gets frustrated with both Jackie and Micky (Rose's poor boyfriend who she left behind for a year and who has been questioned several times by the police about her mysterious disappearance).

This is the first of the two part stories that would be fairly common in the new series and that means we get the first proper cliffhanger of the new show! Cliffhangers were one of the main features if the classic series with each story being played out over several episodes. The problem here though is that a feature of the new series is to show a "next time" trailer at the end of every episode so that kind of defeats the purpose of the cliffhanger!

The story itself is pretty good. The Slitheen have faked a potential alien invasion in order to put a earth on red alert and to spread terror and suspicion. Meanwhile they have assumed the identity of various me members of the British government and are working on convincing the United Nations to release the access codes that will allow them to launch a nuclear strike on the mythical mothership in orbit which they claim has "massive weapons of destruction, capable of being deployed in 45 seconds". A bit of satire there for you. Once they have access to the nukes they intend to nuke the planet instead, turning the Earth into a massive radioactive lump of rock that they can sell chunks of to other aliens to power their ships. Clear?? Well it wouldn't be Doctor Who without a convoluted alien plot.

Meanwhile the Doctor and Rose are trapped inside 10 Downing Street with a woman called Harriet Jones, a lowly back bencher who hilariously insists on constant flashing her ID badge and identifying herself "Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North."

Jackie finds out the truth about the Doctor in this two parter and by the end of it she is begging Rose not to leave. Unfortunately the lure of more adventures is to much and Rose leaves her Mum and Micky behind once again. You really find yourself feeling sorry for the people like them who are left behind to worry about where Rose could possibly be. Maybe Rose is being selfish but given the opportunity to travel anywhere in space and time then is that something that you could really turn down?

Day 706 - The Unquiet Dead

After taking her first trip into the future, Rose now takes her first steps into the past into the year 1869 in the city of Cardiff (with the show being filmed in Cardiff the TARDIS would end up visiting there quite a lot). This would aptly demonstrate to the new audience joining the show with the revamped series just how versatile the show could be.

This is very much a highlight of season 27 (I refuse to call it series 1!) The writing is sharp, witting and occasionally delightfully dark. Creatures made of gas are inhabiting dead bodies being stored at an undertakers.

Added to this we also have the Doctor meeting Charles Dickens, brilliantly played by Simon Callow. I didn't know this but apparently Dickens but a lot of effort into exposing the fraudulent nature of mediums and spiritualists and so when faced with the events of this story he has a sort of crisis of faith for want of a better word. He begins to despair that he has wasted his life by trying to expose these people when maybe what they are doing is real in some cases. Of course it turns out they are not ghosts but aliens made of gas. By the end of the story Dickens is full of joy in the world once more having witnessed theses spectacular goings on.

It's in this story that we find out there is a rift in space and time running through Cardiff and it is through this that the Gelth are passing. This rift would go on to play an important role in the future of the show and be one of the key factors in the spin off series Torchwood, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself now.

The servant to the house, Gwyneth, has lived over the rift pretty much her whole life and this has given her some kind of psychic powers. This becomes evident when she lets slip things that she couldn't possibly know and is used in one of the best scenes in the episode where she has visions of present day London when looking at Rose. She also refers to "the big bad wolf". If I'm counting correctly then this is actually the second reference to "bad wolf" so far in this season and is something that will pay off further down the line.