Just A Note...

...to say that I'll be away over the Bank Holiday weekend (no idea where -- according to B. our destination is "a surprise"), and hence will very likely not be watching The Doctor Dances at all until Monday night. I therefore won't be reviewing it until mid-week, or possibly even later. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Curse of the Mummy

Well, the first half of the Doctor Who story The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances was very fine, I must say: funny, moody and at certain points downright bloody terrifying.

Once again the relaxation of the need to get everything sorted out in the space of 45 minutes led to much improved scope for parallel plotlines, quieter character moments and the piling-on of atmosphere (and what atmosphere it was). Stephen Moffat's dialogue was crisp and clever, and his pacing exemplary. All the performances were great (especially the consummate Richard Wilson), and even the child actors didn't spoil things too much.

By my reckoning (and I'm aware I rate The Long Game more highly than many) this makes four top-of-the-range episodes of Doctor Who in a row. This is not simply a record for the series -- it may even constitute one of the two verifiable miracles required to elevate Russell T. Davies to sainthood.

As anyone who's watched The Sixth Sense, The Ring or even Addams Family Values will be aware, small children can be very scary indeed. The same is true of gas masks. Most of the parents of my generation have stories about how their family had spare ones lying around after the War, or photos of them in books or magazines, which scared the living daylights out of them when they were small. The rest of us had to make do with The Deadly Assassin, but even so.

In combining the two images, Stephen Moffat risked a degree of overkill, but he wields the image with such deftness it creates a whole new nightmare. Certainly the Empty Child, with its plaintive piping of "Please let me in, Mummy, I'm scared of the bombs," would have terrified the pants off me as a kid.

The fact that Moffatt coupled this horrific image with the idea of contagion -- one of my personal pet phobias -- meant I wasn't too sanguine about it as an adult either. The thing I found most unsettling in the trailer was Wilson's sepulchral "physical injuries... as plague", and all the scenes in the hospital creeped me out excessively. In the episode as a whole, the two points where I was most seriously disturbed were in the house when the toy monkey started its slow-handclap, and around halfway through Dr Constantine's transformation when his eyes bulged out into goggles. (The fact that the obvious C.G.I. animation in the latter scene hadn't caused my disbelief to become instantly unsuspended shows just how drawn in I'd become by that stage.)

Of the two plot strands it was of course the one with the Doctor, Nancy, Constantine and the Child itself which was the most compelling. This worked excessively well, with events following one another with the tightness and inevitability which one would expect from the creator of the almost algebraic sitcom Coupling. Only the rather Dickensian meal-table scene threatened for a moment to tip things over into sentimentality, but fortunately the Doctor himself drew the necessary parallel with West End musicals, and all was well.

Rose's subplot was less successful, although not so much so as to spoil things -- its worst crime was to move rather slowly, and it's rare in this series for the luxury of that possibility to be available. I loved the image of her dangling helplessly in front of the Luftwaffe whilst wearing a Union Jack T-shirt -- a whole new order of companion peril -- but the fact that the scene went on so long without her being shot to pieces, together with the video-game feel of the C.G.I. air raid, made the whole thing seem a little farcical.

I had no problem with Captain Jack as a character, and I'll be interested to see how he develops. So far he's one-dimensional, a flash conman (and mooring your invisible spaceship to Big Ben is a pretty stylish trick, I'll admit [1]). The scenes of him and Rose flirting did go on rather long before reaching their conclusion, and, while I enjoyed Rose's dialogue as much as I do that in Coupling, it was a good deal more characteristic of Moffat's sitcom characters than of Rose herself.

Still, things came together nicely for the cliffhanger, and there are lots of lovely loose ends for next episode to take and tie back together again (something I have every confidence Moffat will do). If I have a complaint about the cliffhanger, it's just that, as with Aliens of London, the two simultaneous cliffhanging events (this time facing the Doctor and pals on the one hand, and Nancy on the other) were iterations of the same threat. Perhaps 45 minutes still isn't long enough to set up two credible independent perils.

I said last week that none of the stories during this series had been flawless. That's still true, but none has come closer than The Empty Child.

Being the untrusting cynic I am, and remembering how the sparkling Aliens of London was followed by the fairly dismal World War Three, I do find myself hoping rather fervently that the second episode doesn't balls it up. (The fact that the trailer showed us no locations other than the hospital and the bombsite does concern me rather. Confining the Doctor to a single room for more or less the entire episode was one of the bigger mistakes WW3 made.)

Still... for four weeks running now, Doctor Who has been outstandingly excellent. In the space of two weeks it's moved me as never before, and scared the life out of me. I really don't have a lot to complain about at present.

Bring on the dancing Doctor.


[1] Having been partially destroyed in Aliens of London, Big Ben is emerging as an icon of the series. It certainly figures prominently in The Clockwise Man, the first of the new series tie-in novels, which in only tangentially related news, I've nearly finished reading. It's not too bad, or at least less so than I feared. The "young adult" approach doesn't appear to have harmed Justin Richards' style notably, but then his prose has never been among the most complex in the range. The same's true of Jac Rayner, whose Winner Takes All is the third in the range: I'll be more interested to see how Steve Cole's more sophisticated style has changed for The Monsters Inside. A review may well follow once I've read all three.

Father Time

From my admittedly subjective point of view, the best episodes of New Doctor Who are not those which are flawless -- because there haven't been any of those -- but those which charm me enough while watching them that, deliberately or otherwise, I overlook their flaws.

Rose, The End of the World, Dalek and The Long Game achieved this. The Unquiet Dead and Aliens of London / World War Three signally failed to. Of all the stories so far, the least flawed is probably Dalek, but even there there were dodgy special effects, nonsensical plot points and some notable examples of stupidity by supposedly intelligent characters.

Father's Day, the first televisual Doctor Who story from the long-term Who novelist, playwright and minor saint Paul Cornell, has some huge flaws in it. (Why is the Doctor so stupid, for instance? When he takes Rose back to see her father's death he's taking a calculated risk that she might screw things up by interfering, but when he does it for the second time he doubles the risk whilst simultaneously making the potential consequences of interference catastrophically worse. How does Pete's dying at a completely different time and place from where he did originally restore the original timeline, and how does this banish the Reapers, let alone resurrect all their victims? If the TARDIS key can summon the TARDIS, why has this rather useful ability never been used before? Is Jackie really meant to be so annoying? Why do the Reapers look remarkably like rubber action figures?)

And yet, the episode charmed me so profoundly that I'm quite prepared to state for the record that this is the best episode of the new series to date, that only extreme and irrational nostalgia for some of the old stories prevents me from declaring it the best television Who ever, and that it is in fact up there with Cornell's novels as a beautiful, affecting, characterful and above all adult Doctor Who story. It is, in fact, the kind of story (in tone and approach, if not in detail) that I'd been kind of hoping that all of this season would be.

I suggested last week that Paul Cornell's recent work in Doctor Who showed signs of a loss of interest, or of his touch. (But you don't have to listen to me. Watch the now comprehensively outcanonised adventure of Richard E. Grant's ninth Doctor, Scream of the Shalka, and decide for yourself whether the writing's any good or not.) I may also have suggested that Billie Piper didn't have quite the acting range to handle the series' more emotional moments. I'm absolutely delighted to report that I was entirely wrong on both counts, and that the combination of Cornell's dialogue and Piper's acting took my breath away more than once during this story.

The one thing I really wasn't sure about, even while I was watching, was the necessity to include the Reapers in the story at all. Perhaps my perception of them as obviously fake (which oddly enough most people don't seem to share) has biased me there. Of course the theme of the episode, as explicitly stated by the Doctor, is "Be careful what you wish for", and so Pete's survival has to be shown to have been a bad idea; but there are ways in which the consequences of Rose's actions could have been shown as following more directly from the actions themselves. To have actual literal monsters turn up and start eating everybody in the world seems like an overreaction, on the part of both the Reapers and the writer. (If they'd just started picking off the people who had actually met Pete since his anomalous survival, then that would at least have seemed more in proportion, although I still don't see the need for them to be a corporeal force at all.)

Most of the other flaws mentioned above are logical ones, and so, to a great extent, don't matter. The story is working on dream-logic, myth-logic like that of Sapphire and Steel, which Cornell has acknowledged as an influence. In those terms it makes perfect sense that the driver who was destined to run Pete over is now fated to follow him, reliving the moment of their accident over and over, until eventually Pete complies with his destiny -- and it makes sense that, having received this glimpse of his personal hell, this man who would otherwise have perpetrated a hit-and-run killing stays guilt-stricken with his victim. (Paul Cornell is, among various other things, a Christian, and has an interview in this week's Baptist Times -- so don't think I won't be using that in my Greenbelt talk.)

It makes sense, too, that Rose's part in events still stands in the revised timeline, and that the story does not become a self-cancelling paradox like so very many bad media-S.F. stories. Whereas before Rose's motivation to be with her father as he died was that she knew he died alone, she's presumably now impelled to become the mysterious girl who Jackie told her sat with Pete until the ambulance came.

The deft use of non-linear narrative, with the flashback / flashforward scenes of Jackie and little Rose; the elision of unnecessary information (such as Rose running away from the scene of Pete's death the first time round); and, above all, the characterisation of Pete -- a 'born failure', nothing like the paragon Rose's childish imagination painted him, who nevertheless convinces us during the course of the episode that he has both the intelligence and the heroism to act as he does at its end -- are masterful, showing that Cornell is as gifted a T.V. writer as he has been a novelist.

The cinematography, too, is excellent, with particularly good use made of the church backdrop. Despite my reservations about the Reapers, the scenes of them scratching at the outside of the church, and of their shadows passing over the windows, are remarkably creepy. And there's one astonishingly beautiful shot, shortly after the Doctor's death, where Rose's grieving face appears in profile at the extreme left, while the rest of the screen is taken up with a deep view of the rest of the church. She's lit so that her skin appears the same colour as the stonework, and for a moment she looks like a carved angel. It's breathtaking.

Eccleston's Doctor didn't get a great deal to do this week -- but then again, as the posters to various internet fora are beginning to point out, this Doctor generally doesn't. He's an observer, a facilitator or a catalyst, inspiring others to act (Rose, Jabe, Dickens, Mickey, Cathica -- even the Dalek, in some senses), rather than acting directly. His best moments were the stern pre-emptive talking-to he gave baby Rose, and his panic on discovering that the inside of the TARDIS was gone. His self-sacrifice was rather underplayed, I thought, and he didn't carry much conviction when talking to Stuart and Sarah about his never having had a normal life. But this was emphatically Rose's story, and Pete's, and to a lesser extent Jackie's (her scenes with the four-year-old Rose were the best she's appeared in).

And what a fantastic story it was. One thing I hadn't been expecting, after the first few episodes at least, was that this new series of Doctor Who would ever make me cry. Laugh, yes, grin, yes, cringe, sometimes -- but cry, no. Even the most poignant bits of Dalek didn't manage that. I've certainly been in floods of tears over some of the Who novels, and even the audio CDs on occasion, but Father's Day is only the second T.V. story to have done that for, or to, me. (The first was Battlefield. Yes, yes, I know, but Morgaine's speech about Arthur at the end gets me every time.)

So, go Paul Cornell. I am slightly concerned that he and Rob Shearman, the writers of the two best episodes so far, aren't returning to write for Season 2 next year... but still, their being commissioned in the first place shows that Russell Davies knows his stuff as an editor.

Next week's trailer has its good and bad points. Much of it is creepy and atmospheric, especially Richard Wilson's eerie voice. The C.G.I.ed blitzkrieg sky looks overly fake, almost like a computer game, and Captain Jack... well, let's just say that so far he reminds me a little too much of someone else of that name.

Stephen Moffat's another excellent writer though, so as ever, we'll just have to wait and see.

Kronkburger with Pajatas

So... a multi-ethnic cyberpunk future, replete with satire on the media and the way it manipulates public perceptions. A companion who betrays the Doctor and becomes an information-downloading cyborg. A character with one life that's been overwritten by another. Angst and jealousy and romance... I hope the Doctor Who fans who said the new series would be nothing like the past sixteen years of original novels are feeling at least slightly foolish now.

While Dalek was certainly the best episode of the new series so far, The Long Game is surely the best one not to rely on a monster from the old show, and the best to have been written by Russell T. Davies. Prior to this week, none of the episodes had really lived up to the potential of the 45-minute episode format. The ones which come closest are Aliens of London -- which was complex and twisty enough but can't really qualify due to being the first half of a two-part story -- and Dalek -- which uses the time available to great effect in creating a relentless, claustrophobic juggernaut of a story, but lacks anything that could really be called a plot, beyond your standard Dalek-meets-girl. There were, at least, remarkably few scenes between the introduction of the tortured Dalek protagonist and its demise which didn't revolve around it.

Most modern science fiction T.V. shows, like Babylon 5 or Firefly, use this same 45-minute format to combine the kinds of effective and touching character moments which Davies and new Who excel at, with complicated, clever and surprising plots of the kind that new Who so far really has rarely managed. There's a good reason for this: most other S.F. series, even the Star Trek Collective, have extensive standing sets and large regular casts with which the regular viewer is assumed to be familiar. Even if part of the story takes place on a previously-unseen planet or features previously-unknown characters, they are introduced through the filter of the familiar.

Doctor Who, on the other hand, has always been taken up completely with exploring new environments, whether temporal, spatial or conceptual. Apart from the aberration of the Pertwee era, the largest regular cast has been four, two being far more usual, and very rarely do more than a couple of scenes in each story take place on the TARDIS. (The Long Game is not atypical in having a "regular" cast of three, and no TARDIS scenes at all.) There's therefore a great deal of setting-up of premises which needs to be done at the beginning of each story, as the regulars meet new people and find out about the world they live in (generally getting split up early on, in order to save time), before the plot proper can even begin.

The three-to-six half-hour episodes of the traditional Doctor Who adventure may indeed have been too long to devote to this... but the new series has had severe trouble fitting both this necessary background and a plot into the available three-quarters of an hour, as witnessed by the paper-thin plotettes of The End of the World and The Unquiet Dead -- and, I might add, World War Three. (Rose is a special case, because the plot we see is the iceberg-crest of the more complex story the Doctor is embroiled in.)

The Long Game, on the other hand, manages this balance really rather deftly. Its future is an off-the-peg cyberpunk one, both in the broad brushstrokes (dominant corporations, cybernetic brain augmentation) and in the tiny design details (the non-Roman script, the neon)... although gloriously its multi-cultural inhabitants all still speak perfect B.B.C. English. This is, by my reckoning, the first true cyberpunk setting that Doctor Who on T.V. has given us (although see the novels passim), but it's become a familiar vision of the future through the literary and media S.F. of very nearly the past twenty years.

This familiarity doubtless helps to establish of the setting (although the same should have been far more true of The Unquiet Dead's Victorian cityscape), but the adoption of cyberpunk's multi-channel information-overload is the writer's most powerful tool here. The setting may, in traditional fashion, be only a handful of rooms on board a space station, but Satellite 5's news-gathering function allows for a far wider environment to be presented to us through the infobites on the media screens.

(Historical note: I mentioned after The End of the World that the far future depicted in that episode failed to convince me that the writer had a clear sense of historical scale -- and it's certainly true that cyberpunk settings are more typically employed to portray the world a generation or two hence, rather than hundreds of thousands of years into the future as this one was. Strangely, though, I found The Long Game's setting easier to swallow, chiefly because the era -- specifically "the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire" -- is far enough ahead to imply that entire civilisations have risen and fallen on Earth and across the galaxy, so that this looks like just one historical phase all human cultures have to go through. Of course, one then has to explain away the fact that these people are called things like "MacRae", know the tune to "Danny Boy" and appear to have a detailed record of third-millennium industrial history... but that's nothing compared with people in the 50,000,021st century being called "O'Brien" and listening to Britney.)

This vivid and evocative setting is, for the first time this season, combined with a reasonably solid plot, in which two entirely separate storylines run in parallel before coming together pleasingly at the end. Sympathetic characters surprise us with their hidden agendas, the evil plan when revealed makes sense without being anticlimactic and there's a fair amount of non-linear shuttling back and forth between different individuals' points of view. Rose even manages to go an episode without getting locked inside anything.

What impressed me most, though, was the five-minute sequence where the story diverts totally from the experiences of the Doctor and chums, to show us Suki's discovery of what really lurks on Floor 500. A miniature S.F. story in its own right (or it could be, if the Editor's explanation of "Max"'s scheme came here rather than to the Doctor at the end), this sequence manages something of the slowly climbing tension and building atmosphere of the old series at its best.

Adam's character arc in this episode -- which formed the "B" plot to the Doctor and Rose's "A", clicking back together with it at the end in a pleasing jigsaw-puzzle moment which this series needs more of -- worked fantastically well, I thought. It's great to see a companion character who turns out to be utterly untrustworthy and manipulative and who (in a reasonably subtle parallel with the alien villain) has no scruples about altering the course of human development for his own gain. In the old series, untrustworthy companions were always won over by the Doctor's essential goodness -- see under Adric, Turlough, Chang Lee. This Doctor doesn't give Adam the chance, and it's doubtful, given the way we've seen him behave, that he'd have this effect on anyone anyway.

Indeed, the Doctor's reactions to Adam showcase his jealous protectiveness over Rose -- a welcome depth to the character, who at first seemed ready to combine all of Tom Baker's bumptious self-satisfaction with none of the irresistible charisma, but who has accumulated facets almost with each episode. After Rose I was seriously concerned about Eccleston's ability to play the part, but with each week that passes I become more convinced that he is, in fact, the Doctor.

The only major disappointment in this episode is that the Doctor's own plotline is both linear (he turns up, gets told about Satellite 5, goes to Floor 500, gets chained up, has the plot explained to him and then escapes while things go boom), and also, again, reliant on the sonic screwdriver as a quick technological fix (it would have been more interesting, I feel, if he had actually had to overcome an obstacle or two to get the access codes to the lift). Still, this is a story where a supporting character saves the day, and Cathica's change of heart, while fairly obvious, is well-motivated and believable.

Simon Pegg was great fun as the Editor, managing the difficult trick of projecting huge enjoyment on the character's part whilst keeping a lid on his own. This means that the villain seems like a proper character, unlike some of the classic Doctor Who villains, without coming across as a camp pantomime caricature as some of the others do. (O.K., so the Editor may have been a little camp, but given the record of campness among Who villains he was positively macho.) Tamsin Grieg was great as well, although her part didn't allow her very much to sink her teeth into.

The Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe (which, incidentally, I would parse along the lines of "The mighty potentate of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick", hence the abbreviation "Max") was, admittedly a bit of a disappointment. It had the Editor as its mouthpiece, but I still find monsters who can't speak English but communicate through emphatic roaring rather dull. (Besides, it's contradictory. How could the creature possibly pronounce "Jagrafess" or "Hadrojassic"? But where do the words come from, if not its language?) And must we blow up the bad guy every week? I realise the violence is part of the current Doctor's characterisation, but the programme's occasional aspiration to pacifism is one of the things I've always admired most about it, and that I miss.

The media satire is... none too subtle, really, especially in the later scenes where we get to see how this T.V. station literally turns people into zombies. As evil plans go, though, manipulating people through the media is a pretty effective way to go, and it's subtler than the "massive weapons of destruction" in World War Three.

There are a great many little touches to the episode that I really enjoyed, but the standout image has to be of Cathica, and later Adam, with their foreheads opening up like flowers to let the information in. It's a brilliantly creative way of envisaging the technology, resulting from the same blend of literal and lateral thinking that gave us plastic surgery's logical conclusion in the person of Lady Cassandra.

Oh, and why does Adam fall from grace? It's because he succumbs to temptation by a woman and partakes of forbidden knowledge. Just thought I'd mention that.

The trailer for Father's Day looks interesting enough -- nothing spectacular, and the monsters look a bit pants, but then I wasn't too impressed by the trailer for The Long Game either. Paul Cornell was a very good novelist once upon a time, but I consider that he's been off his game recently when it comes to his Doctor Who work. Still, he has a lot of T.V. experience, so maybe Father's Day will be fabulous. Time will tell.

[Edit: To correct spelling in title. Lucky escape there.]

Colour Coding

I said when I began this blog that I would try to supplement my reviews of the new episodes with the Doctor Who criticism I post to other fora, and so I intend to. I'll be backdating the reprinted material as appropriate, so that some of the older stuff from the archive will end up coming right at the beginning of the blog.

Anyway. I've just put up the first such piece, a review which first appeared at Outpost Gallifrey only a week or so ago. It's insanely obscurantist, relating to the early-1990s Titan scriptbook of the unmade 1963 Doctor Who T.V. script Masters of Luxor -- which brings me to my second point.

I'll be distinguishing between posts relating to the new Doctor Who series and those relating to other stuff (the original T.V. series, the books and audios), so that fans of the new series can skip the more esoteric stuff. I'll do this by rendering the titles of all the new-series posts in burgundy, and all others in purple. Isn't that pretty?

Remembrance of the Dalek

Well, given the presence of the excellent Rob Shearman as scriptwriter, and Joe Ahearne of Ultraviolet directing, Dalek was always going to be fantastic. It turned out to be the best episode of the new series so far, and only the nostalgia factor attached to Genesis of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks prevents it from being the best Dalek story ever.

The treatment of the title character (and the use of characters as titles in this series is interesting in itself: Doctor Who, Rose, Dalek... Bad Wolf?) was as thorough and inspired a reinvention of a British icon as the new series itself.

Arguably it would have worked best for those who were already familiar with the Dalek-as-icon, but not too familiar -- the "My God, but it can climb stairs!" moment would have fallen a little flat for a viewer who had no reason to suppose that a race of evil cyborg supersoldiers wouldn't be able to negotiate a standard architectural feature, just as it did for those of us who are obsessive enough to remember the previous occasions when they did. Still, the visual aspects of the creature -- from its first appearance in the dark, to the extreme close-ups on its eyestalk during conversations, to the faithful replication of the horrifying electrocution-death-ray effect -- were handled deftly and chillingly.

I particularly enjoyed the fact that the radical redesign affected the functionality of the Dalek -- the killing sucker, the rotating midsection, the more effective antigravity, the force-field -- whilst retaining the appearance pretty much unchanged. (The one design idea which didn't work so well was the sudden separation of all the hemispheres in the final self-desctruct scene -- what the Bad Wolf was that supposed to be about?)

I loved the way that the Dalek was allowed to be properly threatening before it became pathetic. So often in classic Who the Daleks acted as cannon-fodder, disposable tools of a mouthpiece character like the Emperor Dalek or Davros, who were as inept at shooting and as fragile as Star Wars Stormtroopers or Star Trek redshirts. This Dalek -- although it was explicitly just a footsoldier, and already unhinged from solitude and torture even before its intimate moment with Rose -- was shown to be manipulative, resourceful, ingenious, efficient, merciless and very, very deadly. The scene where it dispatches Van Statten's entire security force with three shots may have owed a little to Hollywood cliché, but it makes the Doctor's dire warnings ("Population?" "One million." "All dead.") seem horrifyingly plausible. This Dalek would not explode from having a hat put over its eyestalk and being pushed out of a window, nor would it say things like "The prisoners have escaped! I have failed! Self-destruct!"

The other side of the Dalek's character -- its pitiful need for orders, its friendship with the Doctor's companion, the emergence of its long-suppressed humanity and its eventual suicide -- was handled with great skill. This is partly because it's a story Shearman has already told, in his audio drama Jubilee -- although Dalek is a tighter and more effective treatment of the theme. The intrinsic absurdity of empathising with an armoured dustbin never threatened to topple the emotional drama, and although the sunbathing Kaled slithered a narrow line, the pathos in its cry of "Obey! Obey! Obey!" when begging Rose to kill it redeemed the scene admirably. (If only the subsequent self-destruct effect had been more convincing, and, as previously mentioned, less daftly designed. But if the episode had been perfect we would have had nothing to look forward to in the rest of the series.)

As for the other characters... the Doctor was as good as Eccleston has ever been, with his hatred and contempt for the Dalek visibly overwhelming his pity and humanity. Although he insists in their first confrontation that he killed the Dalek's entire species because "I had no choice", he can't look the creature in the eyestalk as he says it, and by the end, as the threat to Rose and Earth pushes him to his limits, we see his own ruthlessness in action. On this occasion Rose prevents him from pulling the trigger -- but she wasn't there when he destroyed the rest of the Daleks or, it now seems, the Time Lords. The line "You would make a good Dalek", predictable though it was, chilled me to the bone. All this, along with the "Bad Wolf" foreshadowing (which this week appeared to bear no possible relation to the earlier mentions) is pretty clearly working up to some nasty revelations about this Doctor's past actions. (One theory doing the rounds, which I'm finding oddly convincing, is that the character Christopher Eccleston is playing is not the Doctor, but an enemy who's taken on the rôle, whether for his own sinister purposes or out of remorse at killing the real Doctor.)

Rose was a general-purpose companion, acting as the Doctor's conscience (though that in itself is a fairly recent development, and previously almost invisible on television) and showing a pity which, although misplaced at first, eventually proved self-justifying. I'm consistently amazed by how much Piper's acting doesn't suck compared with how much I expected it to... not that she's a particularly good actor, just that she really, really doesn't suck at all. The new companion, Adam, was permitted more dimensions -- particularly his non-heroic (but hardly cowardly) saving of himself when Rose appeared beyond saving. His joining-the-TARDIS scene, with the Doctor and Rose squabbling over whether to let him on board amid his evident incomprehension, was possibly the best ever, introductions of regular characters being notoriously awkward.

The other characters were two-dimensional at best, but in the face of the Doctor / Dalek conflict, that was all they were required to be. Admittedly I could have done without Van Statten's Hollywoodish I'm-the-mayor-of-this-town-and-we're-not-evacuating-until-I-say-so-meteorite-impact-or-no-meteorite-impact stupidity, but his initial face-off with the Doctor was very nice. The human characters in Shearman's Who work, like Mark Gatiss', have always tended towards the grotesque.

...And that's about it, except to say that I also liked the setting -- a museum of the alien on Earth is a clever conceit, and a very apt place for the TARDIS to end up. The very simplicity of the episode, though -- the fact that Dalek tells a story which, while linear, makes clear sense and lacks obvious plot holes or other solecisms -- shows how far above most of the rest of this season it comes.

I was less enthralled by the trailer for The Long Game, but perhaps that was just by contrast with what I'd just been watching. Simon Pegg is always great, at least, as is Tamsin Grieg. Given that every episode so far has featured either an extremely famous guest star (Zoe Wanamaker, Simon Callow, Penelope Wilton) or an old enemy (Autons, Daleks), I can confidently predict that the Editor will not turn out to be the Master.

As for the Bad Wolf, though... well, who knows.

Dalek

...Bugger me, that was good.

More later, or possibly tomorrow. After I've watched it again, anyway.