The first episode blows my mind! All three shows of Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures come together with all the characters meeting up, albeit mainly over a different monitors but its still pretty exciting. It seems particularly strange seeing members of Torchwood interacting with the characters of The Sarah Jane Adventures as the tone of each show is so monumentally different.
So the Daleks are back..again. Out of the last four season finales they have been in three of them so I'm getting a little tired of them now. But its not just the Daleks who are back. Davros is too! The creator of the Daleks is back in the series! I was so excited when I found out Davros was to make a return but I'm afraid this leads me to one of my first criticisms. He just feels underused, even his entrance into the story doesn't feel as dramatic as it should have been. Saying that, Julien Bleach gives a fantastic performance as Davros and it would be awesome if the brought him back to the series but gave him a half decent story.
So overall part one is very good but things start to fall apart in part two. The cliffhanger into part two is that the Doctor is regenerating. We had to wait a whole week to find out what was going to happen. Was David Tennant leaving? Well...no at the last minute the Doctor siphons off the regeneration energy into his spare hand that he has had lying around the TARDIS ever since the end of season 3. It felt like a bit of a cheat and things only get worse when halfway through the episode we get a clone Doctor growing from the hand who is part human having absorbed some of Donna's DNA. It just all seems a bit naff and a plot convenience so that by the end of the story the Doctor can bundle Rose off back to the parallel world and leave the clone Doctor with her.
With Donna having a Time Lord mind in her head she can save the day by flipping some buttons and prevent the Daleks from destroying reality itself (yes that was really their crazy plan!) but at a cost as her mind soon starts to burn with the pressure of it all. The only way the Doctor can save her is to remove all memories of him from her mind which is a tragedy! The character of Donna has grown so much since the loud mouth we saw in The Runaway Bride and this is all thanks to her experiences with the Doctor. With this taken from her the Donna that we have come to know is now dead and she is back to the way she was. Only her mother and grandfather will ever know the truth. The memory erasure idea makes me think back to the departure of Jamie and Zoe at the end of the second Doctor's era. The Time Lords also wiped their memories of their adventures with the Doctor but they at least allowed them to remember their first meeting with him. Poor Donna doesn't even get that.
Special mention must be made again to Bernard Cribbins who plays Donna's grandfather, Wilf. I don't know how he does it but when he gets upset then I'm right align with him. As he bids goodbye to the Doctor he knows that the Doctor now has no one and promises him that "when it gets dark and the stars come out, I'll look up, on her behalf. I'll look up at the stars..and think of you" Get's me every time!
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