Worship Him! Worship Him! Worship Him!

The final story of Season One of new Doctor Who, Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways, was pretty much everything I hoped for: spectacular, surprising, clever, witty, gorgeously emotional, with a depth of character and theme that only the very best of Doctor Who on television has ever attained[1].

The absolute standout moments of the episode for me were... hell, more than I can sensibly list, but these were the ones that really got to me: Jack's farewell to the Doctor; the Doctor hologram turning to face Rose; the utterly-inspired-televisual-genius of the Dalek pulsing "Exterminate" in the vacuum; and Rose's (or was it the TARDIS's?) tender "my Doctor..."

(You can tell that that's a selective list from the fact that the Doctor's farewell isn't on it, and nor are the new Doctor's new teeth. Nor is the Doctor deceiving Rose in order to save her; nor the anonymous volunteer's dying accusation of Jack; nor Rose's revelation of the events of Father's Day and Jackie's reaction; nor the Doctor's decision not to activate the Delta Wave; nor anything the God-Emperor says; nor the Daleks' chanted liturgy.)

What's more, this wonderfully clever, textured dialogue and action is integrated with a working plot, whose only serious hole is the out-of-nowhere resolution of the "Bad Wolf" motif. The fighting-off-the Daleks plot is straightforward (although at times very clever), but in its relentlessness creates a deeply effective sense of oncoming doom, reminiscent of what we saw in Dalek itself[2]. This half of the story succeeds in bringing the ninth Doctor's character arc, as introduced in Rose to a perfectly satisfying conclusion, one which Eccleston plays almost to perfection.

The ninth Doctor is a killer. His idiot grin and manic enthusiasm in the early episodes are a front put up by a deeply scarred individual who has watched his world and people die at his own hand.

(This is never explicitly spelt out, but it's clear all the same. In Dalek it's established that it was he who killed all the Daleks -- excepting Van Statten's specimen and that pesky Emperor -- and that the Time Lords "burned with them". It doesn't take much reading between the lines -- especially for those of us who've encountered the parallel concept in the BBC Eighth Doctor novels -- to realise that the Doctor was only able to save the universe from the ravages of the Daleks by sacrificing the Time Lords also. Needless to say, this becomes important.)

When we first meet him, despite his cheery façade, the ninth Doctor is inured to death. He's sanguine about blowing up the Slitheen and the Gelth, the Nestene and the Jagrafess, and even the last human, Cassandra (or at least destroying what remains of her body... she does seem to keep her brain in a jar[3]). He's particularly cruel towards the lone Dalek, being perfectly willing to torture it to death while it's defenceless, and later to blow it away with a huge gun while it sunbathes.

By the end of the season, he's become the man who was willing to sacrifice himself to let Pete Tyler live, who rejoiced when, just once, nobody died, who even considered carefully whether Margaret the Slitheen deserved a judicial execution. Even as Eccleston's performance has become more sombre, the Doctor's actual behaviour has become less vindictive, until in Bad Wolf he dismisses the idea that he would ever have shot someone as self-evidently absurd. It's tempting to see Dalek as a turning-point for him, but the Jagrafess buggers that up slightly... still, maybe his self-sacrifice in Father's Day is just as apt.

In The Parting of the Ways, this man is faced with the same dilemma as before: to kill the Daleks, he must also destroy his (adopted) homeworld. This time, he refuses -- a decision which (while the Gamestation's heroic defenders would surely have had something to say about it, had they not already died) is nevertheless presented as the right choice. He chooses "coward" (ie, moral hero) rather than "killer"[4]. The Doctor ends this incarnation finally at peace with himself, and dies saving a life -- the life, as the lone Dalek pointed out to him when he was prepared to sacrifice her once before, of "the woman you love".

Rose's character is equally well served by her subplot, which also provides the episode's story with most of its twisty detail: deceived by the Doctor, encouraged by her family to give up, impelled instead to put the Doctor's principles before her comfort and their happiness, and eventually -- by appealing to the most Doctorish traits in both Mickey and Jackie -- persuading them to help her reach what turns out to be her apotheosis.

Of course, she does then turn out to have been the Bad Wolf all along. The relative paucity of explanation for this isn't a flaw as such -- one thing this series has been extremely good at, certainly in comparison with the original series, is eschewing unnecessary exposition in favour of letting the audience work things out for themselves[5]. However, after all the build-up, the fact that this specific resolution hasn't been foreshadowed at all, and that the words themselves are literally meaningless, does mean that the solution pulled by Russell Davies out of (charitably) his hat, seems like a bit of a cop-out.

However, this is -- and I say this after some careful consideration -- about the only major flaw in the episode. (There are one or two minor ones, which we may come to later.)

There has been some (not unrelated) criticism of the very literal deus ex machina which Rose's apotheosis represents, with some viewers opining that the whole thing falls apart from the moment she returns to the year 200,100. For me, this wasn't a problem, largely because (as I think the readers of Of the City of the Saved... may have gathered) I'm a sucker for warring-Gods stories.

I'm delighted that Davies gave us a religion-themed final episode, turning the Daleks from essentially atheistic Nazis into theocratic fundamentalists (or "Islamists", as some U.S. viewers would have it), and I'm particularly delighted that the awesome God-Emperor of the Daleks was referred to by the Goddess-in-Rose as "the false God", suggesting that she -- the TARDIS, or the Time Vortex, or Time herself -- is a true God, and that "her Doctor" is her representative.

Of course, as in his The Second Coming, Davies takes this further. Divinity -- at least as experienced by humans like Rose -- is ultimately dangerous, and must be rejected. Steve (the Son of God played by Christopher Eccleston in Davies' earlier drama)had to be murdered by his friend Jude for the salvation of humanity, whereas the Doctor saves Rose with a Judas kiss, sacrificing himself in the process.

Hurrah, that's my Greenbelt talks sorted.

No, I really loved the deus ex machina -- and what's more, thought it was perfectly well foreshadowed (and therefore not a d.e.m. in the classical sense) by Boom Town and by the God-Emperor's delusions. More, please.

I may well write something else at some point, going into greater detail about the symmetry of the season. For now, suffice it to say that both Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways and Rose / The End of the World divide their action between contemporary Earth and a space station in the far future; that they both feature facsimiles of twenty-first-century people; that both show apocalyptic fates being inflicted upon the Earth; that both present Rose with a choice between her mundane life (the council estate, Jackie, Mickey) and the life of a time-traveller; that both show the Doctor dealing with consequences of the Time War; and that both sets of villains are reinvented species from the original series who consist mostly of identical units with one unique leader. As if that weren't enough, the final story also picks up on other running themes, such as protective motherhood, romance and sexuality, which run throughout the series; and follows up specifically upon the cluster of central episodes, with character- and plot-related consequences of Dalek, The Long Game and Father's Day being addressed.

So... let's go back and look at the boxes I felt The Parting of the Ways needed to tick.

explore what the Doctor did during the Time War that has left him so changed:
Well, it certainly seems to cover this, albeit mostly via subtext. I wouldn't expect the new Doctor to be similarly haunted -- and whether that's a good thing for the future or not, it serves as a perfect culmination to this season.

explain how the Daleks have escaped their destruction and whose the booming voice of their saviour is:
Yes indeed, and all without the need for extensive exposition.

address Rose's developing dissatisfaction with the Doctor's life and regret over what she has left behind:
Again, this is resolved now. I hardly dared hope that the story would give the Mickey and Jackie arcs a degree of closure as well, but it does.

explain who or what "Bad Wolf" really is, and why the name has been following the Doctor through history:
Well... not exactly "explain", but certainly "address".

indicate why Rose hasn't been exterminated, and just what the Daleks have been doing with their reality-show rejects:
Not, as I thought, the same explanation in both cases, but still adequately covered. ("Predict! Predict!")

reveal what their "long game" really entails, and just how long it has been going on:
This turns out to be the same answer as b) above. A precise figure isn't given, but it's not really needed, so that's O.K.

resolve one way or another the Doctor's evident grooming of Lynda-with-a-Y as an additional or replacement companion:
Not really, although the expression on Rose's face when the Doctor and Lynda said goodbye was quite remarkable. And Lynda does get the coolest Dalek-related death ever screened.

give Captain Jack something to do:
Ooh boy, yes.

show the Daleks being defeated properly this time and the Big Brother future overthrown:
It looks like being their most permanent and irrevocable defeat yet, doesn't it? And the Game Station is out of action, although what's happened to the Earth does get glossed over rather. (Does Rose restore it, as she did Jack? Are Lynda and Roderick and Programmer A and Programmer B and Upset Volunteer alive now as well? What about all the people who became Daleks?)

act as a farewell between Eccleston's Doctor and Rose and, of course, morph him into David Tennant:
Ah, yes. I haven't really said anything about that. I did think the reasons for the Doctor's regeneration were a little too arbitrary -- his taking on the death which Rose is now "due" works well dramatically, but isn't really sufficiently set up in story terms. He also got a convenient amount of time to say goodbye, which made things less dramatic. Tennant hasn't had time to make an impact yet -- so far I haven't found myself taking to him, but then it took three episodes for Eccleston to click with me, so...

and probably sundry other things that I forget for the moment:
Well, I didn't expect the Dalek Inquisition, but if I'd been making a shopping list of what I wanted from the episode, "Provide more material for my Greenbelt talks" would certainly have been up there.

These two episodes may not have been as definitively the best Doctor Who story ever as I would have liked. Opinion is divided on whether they were even the best this season.

But they were a glorious, triumphant climax and vindication of Russell Davies' vision for the series, and that of his creative team and actors. They did everything I could have wanted, and more.

Bring on The Christmas Invasion.


[1] I'm thinking of Ghost Light, I'm thinking of Remembrance of the Daleks and The Curse of Fenric, I'm thinking of Kinda and of Snakedance and, just possibly, of the Traken / Logopolis / Castrovalva triptych... probably some of the Hartnell historicals as well, if we accept that "serious drama" and "horrendously slow-moving and dated" aren't mutually exclusive categories. Anyway.

[2] By my reckoning, at the point when Rose the Goddess shows up on the Game Station, the score to the good guys is: 1 Dalek blown up (Captain Jack, in the TARDIS with the enormous weapon); 1 Dalek blinded (Jack and the two programmers, with the machine-guns), 3 Daleks transmatted back to the mothership (the Anne Droid). Score to the Daleks: everybody on the Gamestation dead except the Doctor.

[3] "Lady Cassandra, wearing the brain that she keeps in a jar by the floor..." I'm sorry, I'm tired.

[4] I wonder, though... does he still have a plan, even now? He asks the God-Emperor, "Will I become one of your angels?". Is it really possible that he's hoping to become a Dalek, as the unfortunate human rejects have, and destroy their empire from within?

It would have made for a deeply bizarre regeneration scene, if nothing else.

[5] For what it's worth, I think the explanation goes as follows.

The TV station was originally called Bad Wolf, and was presumably the same organisation mentioned in The Long Game. While there may be a deliberate parallel with Twentieth-Century Fox, the actual words used are (within the fiction) arbitrary ones: Rose scatters them through time and space purely in order to remind herself of the Gamestation and her responsibilities there. (She does this specifically by using the telepathic TARDIS to plant them in the minds of certain individuals: the Moxx of Balhoon, Gwyneth, Van Statten, the graffitists in 1987 and 2006, and Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen aka Mayor Margaret. The only deviation is the stencilling on the German bomb in The Doctor Dances, where "Schlechter-Wolf" appears to be a brand name and therefore implies a somewhat deeper degree of cultural infiltration.)

All the thematic connections with the Three Little Pigs / Red Riding Hood stories are still there, casting the Doctor as the Big Bad Wolf and Rose as young Ms Hood. However, they've been been put there by the writers and, despite their thematic relevance, have no bearing on the meaning of the words within the story.

Clear? Good.

The Parting of the Ways

Holy flaming heck, that was good.

Daleks... Eccleston... God of all Daleks... Jack's kiss... Eccleston again... Rose and Mickey and Jackie... gnosticism... symmetry... Bad Wolf... Jack again... the Doctor's kiss... oh, my absolute God.

Tennant... Hmm.

OK. More coherent reaction to follow.

Crying Wolf

Incidentally, I'm far from convinced that the Big Bad Wolf and the God of All Daleks are the same entity.

Unless the trailers themselves contain non-canonical misinformation (and what an intellectual coup that would be), we know from the voice that the latter is the Dalek Emperor -- or at least a Dalek Emperor, since there've been as many as three separate ones in various sources. I wouldn't actually expect much by way of further identity-revelations there, except possibly (given the otherwise unnecessary mention of the Daleks having a creator in Dalek) a confirmation that it's still Davros inside the casing.

The Bad Wolf, on the other hand, pretty much has to be the Doctor, swanning around the universe blowing other people's houses down and having no idea what to build in their place. Quite why, and how, someone has been trying to inform him of this opinion -- well, that, I'm guessing, will be the revelation.

(Unless anyone's buying my theory that they're both archetypes from the Nestene Unconsciousness...?

No, I thought as much.)

2000th Century Wolf

Throughout its history, the ability to cross genres has been Doctor Who's primary strength. It has never been purely (even if it has arguably been primarily) a science fiction programme. The earliest stories flit between historical drama and more or less B-movieish attempts at S.F., awhile this most recent season has brought us everything from pulp sci-fi (The End of the World) to character drama (Father's Day), taking in comedy (Aliens of London) and horror (The Empty Child) along the way. Even the theme of vicious reality television in Doctor Who isn't a novel one -- Vengeance on Varos borrowed it from Stephen King's The Running Man in 1985. Deadly games have been part of the Doctor Who experience since as long ago as The Celestial Toymaker.

Even knowing all of this, I couldn't see how combining Doctor Who with Big Brother was going to end up as anything other than a train wreck. My best hope last week was that Bad Wolf could be great if it only managed to get the reality TV jokes out of the way in the first 15 minutes, and then got on with the good stuff.

And yet the episode was stunning. Admittedly they did get most of the reality TV jokes out of the way in the first 15 minutes, after which The Weakest Link and the Anne Droid were being used for genuine menace. (It's true that that particular format did feel as if it had outstayed its welcome, and I could personally have done with less of the actual gameplay being shown onscreen, even if it did allow a namecheck for the Face of Boe. And I hadn't even been watching the Weakest Link Celebrity Hairdressers' Special beforehand.)

But still -- while it lasted, the deployment of the Big Brother images and motifs was elegant and stylish, drawing perfectly on the iconic status which the gameshow has succeeded (God knows how) in attaining. I do see Charlie Brooker's point that a rather more vicious and parodic approach is probably called for by the utter vacuousness of the programme itself; but inevitably that would have resulted in Endemol's refusing permission to use the theme tune, logo and branding, without which the scenes in question would have simply fallen flat.

This episode took to new heights the televisual metatextuality which has always characterised Doctor Who (Andrew Marr was no big departure -- TV news reports concerning alien invasions have always been delivered by genuine BBC reporters), by drawing the entire audience's attention to the fact that a drama format -- a four-decade-old drama format, as imaginatively non-realist as a drama format can possibly be -- has for the past twelve weeks consistently, both artistically and by more objective measures like viewing figures, been trouncing the pants off every one of those reheated pulp-reality docusoaps which comprise the turgid, stodgy bulk of modern TV scheduling. Doctor Who itself may be, quite literally, in the process of saving us from a dystopian future of the very kind that Bad Wolf depicts, and I feel that it's entitled to be smug about the matter. To co-opt Davina McColl, Anne Robinson et al into helping it display that smugness just shows how thoroughly the programme has made reality TV its bitch.

Ahem. I may have been turning into Lawrence Miles a bit there.

(It's also be worth pointing out that the pastiches -- not so much Big Brother, but the other two for sure -- were by far the closest the new series has yet come to the camp pantomime excesses which were sometimes characteristic of the original.)

But onto the important stuff: the story utterly rocks. Forget the pastiches, which from this point of view only fulfil the tried-and-tested function of separating the companions in order to put them through their individual ordeals. The four-stranded plot during the early stages is strongly reminiscent of The Long Game, and it's hardly a surprise (notwithstanding the "100 Years Later" caption) when we discover that the Doctor is back on Satellite Five. The way these independent subplots nearly converge and then veer apart again would be impressive even without the shocking twist of having the Doctor and Jack turn up apparently too late to save Rose. The suspense-building material with the Controller worked very well, as did the Doctor's and Jack's storming of Floor 500 and the subsequent revelations.

A hell of a lot happens in this episode, and it hangs together very well. To be sure (and to say the least), a good many points are still requiring explanation, but to move from "Hmm, the Doctor appears to be taking part in Big Brother," to "My God, the invisible Dalek fleet is invading the space station!" in 45 minutes takes some extremely deft plotting.

The return of the Daleks was exceptionally well-handled, with subtle visual clues dropped in from the Doctor's first arrival in the House, and increasingly unsubtle hints (up to and including a distorted reflection) preparing us for their eventual, unambiguous appearance. (Admittedly, this aspect of the story would have worked an awful lot better if the gaff hadn't been blown in last week's trailer.)

Christopher Eccleston's performance seems to be building up to a peak. Even the fact that those of us over eight can guess that Rose is not, in fact, dead can hardly detract from the shock and grief on his face during that scene, and his blank unresponsiveness in the cell afterwards is equally believable. All of his earlier behaviour has shown that this Doctor is, at best, quick to anger and none too stable, and for a while we can really believe that he is going to hold the satellite's staff hostage. By contrast, his reactions to finding himself within the Big Brother format, and later his delivery of the line "Oh, don't be so thick, like I was ever going to shoot," were hilarious.

Only his promise to defeat the Daleks fell somewhat flat, and that hardly matters when you have hundreds of Daleks chanting "Exterminate the Doctor!" and levitating.

The Long Game was rather a favourite of mine, even in a season replete with mindblowingly excellent episodes, and it's pleasing to see that my guess as to its centrality is paying off. The actual revelation (apparently not the final revelation, but still) that "Bad Wolf" is a rapacious globe-dominating TV company may ring certain twentieth-century bells, but is more obviously a continuation of the media-dominated dystopia which the ealier episode sets up. It seems, as I've suspected for a while, that it's going to be necessary to examine the Russell T Davies episodes in the context of the season arc as a whole in order properly to assess them.

Indeed, my only real reservation about Bad Wolf is actually a lingering worry about The Parting of the Ways. Can it really tie up so many strands of plot, character and theme in a manner that will satisfy and make sense to those of us who have been following the story from the beginning? Can it -- whilst showing us a full-scale Dalek invasion which looks like being spectacular beyond even our own wildest dreams as eight-year-olds -- manage to explore what the Doctor did during the Time War that has left him so changed; explain how the Daleks have escaped their destruction and whose the booming voice of their saviour is; address Rose's developing dissatisfaction with the Doctor's life and regret over what she has left behind; explain who or what "Bad Wolf" really is, and why the name has been following the Doctor through history; indicate why Rose hasn't been exterminated, and just what the Daleks have been doing with their reality-show rejects; reveal what their "long game" really entails, and just how long it has been going on; resolve one way or another the Doctor's evident grooming of Lynda-with-a-Y as an additional or replacement companion; give Captain Jack something to do; show the Daleks being defeated properly this time and the Big Brother future overthrown; act as a farewell between Eccleston's Doctor and Rose and, of course, morph him into David Tennant; and probably sundry other things that I forget for the moment -- all in the space of 45 minutes?

Well, if anyone can do it, I'm fairly sure Davies can. Let's wait and see. After all, there are only three days to go...

Fearful Symmetry

The structure of this season of Doctor Who, it seems to me (and of course we don't have all the information yet) has been designed to be rather pleasingly symmetrical. Consider the following:

1. Rose
2. The End of the World
3. The Unquiet Dead
4. Aliens of London
5. World War Three
6. Dalek
7. The Long Game
8. Father's Day
9. The Empty Child
10. The Doctor Dances
11. Boom Town
12. Bad Wolf
13. The Parting of the Ways

It's been suggested that Rose and The End of the World were originally a two-part story introducing Rose to the Doctor's universe, and the return to contemporary England in the latter story's coda tends to reinforce this continuity.

As yet we don't know the details of Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways (although for those of us who've seen the trailers, there might be superficial similarities between the robotic reality-show hosts and the Autons, and perhaps between the idea of using elements of other people's lives as entertainment, and the spectators on Platform One). It does seem likely that the final two-part story is to act as another crisis point in Rose's life, where leaving the Doctor and returning to her old life becomes a possibility. If nothing else the story will mark the end of the Eccleston Doctor's character arc, and presumably tie up the "Time War" threads which first appeared in Rose.

At the next point in from these notional bookends, we have the third and antepenultimate episodes, The Unquiet Dead and Boom Town. The most obvious element these episodes share (and what tipped me off to all of this) is their Cardiff setting, but there is also the motif of the gassy aliens who inhabit dead people, and the plot element of the interdimensional rift.

Both stories nod towards the transcendental, in Gwyneth's Christianity (and the fact that the Gelth appear to be angelic but turn out to be demons) and in the mystical ending of Boom Town. Gwyneth's life is, mysteriously, prolonged beyond her death, while Margaret the Slitheen is regressed to her birth: indeed, more broadly, TUD is about death while BT deals with rebirth (although in the former Dickens experiences a spiritual rebirth of his own). Most prominently, in both of them the Doctor faces a moral dilemma in which he believes the consequences of his past actions (the Time War, in the case of TUD) are coming back to haunt him, but which turn out to be deceptions on the part of mendacious aliens.

As two-parters set in London in, supposedly, two subsequent World Wars, Aliens of London / World War Three and The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances share some very obvious connections. Alien spaceships are vital to the plot, and are spectacularly juxtaposed with the icon of Big Ben. Soldiers play prominent roles as well, as does the setting of Albion Hospital. Characters are encased in clothing / tissue which is alien to them.

Each story climaxes with a bomb falling: in Aliens ... Three the Doctor has to persuade one of Rose's boyfriends to launch it, while in The Empty ... Dances he persuades another to prevent it from hitting its target. Families take centre stage: in Aliens ... Three an evil family holds the world to ransom, and a mother must risk sacrificing her daughter to save it; while in The Empty ... Dances a boy's search for the mother who denies him threatens to destroy humanity.

Then, nestling either side of the central episode, The Long Game, we have Dalek and Father's Day. These stories take two of the series' perennial elements, monsters and time-travel, challenge the idea that either is as unproblematic as it has generally been painted, and subject them to dramatic analysis through the medium of Rose's emotional reactions.

In each of them, Rose's merciful nature causes her to make a substantial error of judgement, and provokes a killing rampage on the part of one or more monsters. As a result, a character with whom we have come to sympathise must sacrifice himself / itself to put things right again. In the former story, the Doctor is relentless and merciless in hunting down the Dalek: in the latter, he does all he can to save Pete's life, even down to sacrificing his own.

Furthermore, these two episodes are deliberate attempts to incorporate the styles of the non-T.V. media in which Doctor Who has persisted for the past sixteen years; Dalek being a loose adaptation of Rob Shearman's script for his Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama Jubilee, while Paul Cornell was allegedly asked to write Father's Day in the tone of his New Adventures novels.

And so we come to The Long Game, the episode at the heart of the series, which by rights should prove to be its lynchpin. To see how true that is in practice, I suspect we're going to have to watch Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways.

Boom!

Well, that was odd.

I have of course been wrong before. But I was wrong about Boom Town on almost every level.

When I first heard the rumoured plot summary ("The last of the Slitheen from World War Three has become Mayor of Cardiff, where she's trying to blow up a nuclear power station to reopen the rift the Gelth were trying to come through in The Unquiet Dead"), my thoughts were twofold.

One: That's the worst idea I've ever heard. Two: Thank God they'll never actually do it.

When last week's trailer made it clear that my point Two was wronger than David Icke, my thoughts were as follows.

Three: Bollocks. Four: That's still the worst idea I've ever heard.

And now... Well, Boom Town may not have been a very strong episode, and it certainly broke that run of excellence which I was talking about below -- but it most certainly wasn't, in execution, the worst thing new Doctor Who has done.

I wasn't timing it, but I reckon a good half of the episode was composed purely of conversation -- conversation about how Rose's life has changed and how she and Mickey have grown apart, conversation about whether redemption is possible for a villain, about the Doctor's feelings about the deaths he's responsible for and about how he relates, or refuses to relate, to his own "victims".

Those bits were -- and I realise I may be going out on a limb in saying this -- bloody good. Annette Badwolf Badland is a better actor than I would ever have credited after Aliens of London / World War Three (which, to be fair, people told me at the time); and while the scene of "her" becoming emotional as a C.G.I. Slitheen was fairly silly, her exchanges with the Doctor when in "costume" as Margaret were really compelling. Eccleston's Doctor continues to deepen now with almost every line he utters. Mickey was as good as he's ever been, and his and Rose's failure to connect was convincing and sad.

This part of the episode was brave, and clever, and moving, and (unless I'm wrong again, and I do hope I'm not) is going to piss off the fanboys who considered Father's Day to be "soap opera" because it had people displaying emotion in it, no end.

Of course, that leaves the rest of the episode and its flimsy facsimile of a traditional Doctor Who plot, which was predictably a great deal less good... and that astonishing, bizarre, awesome, ludicrous, teetering-on-a-knife-edge-between-redemptively-moving-and-irredeemably-shite deus ex tardis ending.

That, I think it's fair to say, didn't work so well.

But: what a remarkable story. An experiment that didn't work so well, to be sure, but a valid one nevertheless.

It almost gives me hope that next week's reality-T.V. pastiche with Daleks can be better than it sounds as well. If, taking a lead from this week's episode, they get the Weakest Link jokes out of the way in the first fifteen minutes and then move on to something else entirely (preferably involving that Dalek fleet and exactly what the Doctor did when he thought he'd destroyed them)... well, it could be stunning.

Of course, it could also be the worst idea I've ever heard, which is what I thought when I first heard a rumour of the plot summary.


[Edit 5/6/6: To replace David Irving with David Icke. However wrong I may have been, I couldn't possibly be wronger than Mr Irving.]

The Mummy Returns

(You knew I was going to do that, didn't you?)

Well, I promised to review The Doctor Dances before Boom Town aired, and so I shall. Unfortunately this week has been quite hectic, as weeks following holidays often are, and it shows no particular sign of letting up. So I'm going to try to keep this brief.

Overall verdict, then: The Doctor Dances was less good than The Empty Child, but nowhere near as much less good as World War Three was than Aliens of London. Er, if that makes sense.

What's more, overall The Empty ... Dances is a massively better two-parter than Aliens ... Three, with all the characters given a chance to be both heroic and interesting, and a resolution which was the precise opposite of just blowing up the bad guys. "Just this once," as the Doctor points out wistfully, "everybody lives." This time the limited setting was hardly noticeable (although admittedly there was a lot more moving around than there was in WW3), and the plot kept up its impetus effectively, resolving itself neatly with only a few, minimal loose ends.

Overall the second half was as tightly constructed, entertaining, textured and witty as the first. If only Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways are this good, and hang together this well, I will be a very pleased Doctor Who fan indeed.

Even so, the second half of this two-parter was very different from the first in aims and effect. Where much of TEC was about establishing atmosphere and character, TDD was primarily concerned with conflict and resolution. Character is still important, of course -- as much of the conflict occurs between the Doctor, Rose and Jack as between anybody and the Child -- but the atmosphere is, by now, taken as read.

There were unsettling scenes, but only the Child's voice continuing after the tape had ended came anywhere near the creepiest moments in TEC. Even the transformations of the infected were never going to be as effective the second time around -- although at least this time we get a victim's perspective in the rather pathetic Johnson -- and this time the camera (or its C.G.I. equivalent) wisely doesn't dwell on them.

On the other hand, the witty lines kept coming, and helped to keep up the pace. Only Rose's "He saved my life -- as far as blokes go, that's up there with flossing," sounded overly Couplingesque, and only Dr Constantine's reaction to the woman with two legs went beyond the bounds of the plausible and into sitcom territory. My favourite line was "Rose, I'm trying to resonate concrete!", but that's entirely because of context, and Eccleston's exasperated delivery. The sight gag with the banana worked nicely as well.

Captain Jack is growing on me: it was good to see him reacting to situations which couldn't be resolved through the use of flashy technology, and it's clear that unlike Adam he has both courage and a conscience, albeit neither of them operating in the same way as the Doctor's. His bisexuality is a nice gimmick (he's sharing the TARDIS with the most obvious Doctor / companion couple since Romana's day, and he could swing in the direction of either of them), but the writers are obviously limited in how far they can take that. The character could be acted more interestingly, but he's written well.

(As for his amnesia, that's too obvious a setup for them to actually use in the final episodes, isn't it? I mean, surely? I'd keep it back for next season, personally...)

The episode still didn't achieve flawlessness, of course. The ending was too long (one quiet, reflective scene after the complex and cathartic climax would have been perfect: two of them was stretching it rather), and the resolution, inspiring though it was, didn't entirely make sense. One minute the Doctor asserts that "nothing in the world can stop" the nanogenes, the next he's reprogramming them telepathically. It also seems somewhat odd that the devices know how to resurrect a human but not, for instance, heal his scar... and from what I could gather, Jamie and the other "gasmask people" will have to be careful for the rest of their lives that they don't accidentally broadcast their inmost thoughts whenever they wander near a piece of communications equipment.

But all of these are minor quibbles. On the whole I loved the episode, and given limited time I'd rather dwell on its many admirable aspects: every single scene of the Doctor and Rose either dancing or failing to, for instance; Jack's gadgets; the conversation about the sonic screwdriver ("Never been bored?"). The quite amazing non-violent resolution to the cliffhanger, with the Doctor pulling out of thin air a solution which satisfies on every level and relies on his ingenuity alone. Nancy's performance throughout, the revelation of her relationship with Jamie, and their tearful reunion. Richard Wilson. The Doctor dealing with the bomb using "psychology". Algy: "Jack? Are you my mummy?".

Fantastic stuff.

Each week for the past month I've been astonished at the continuation of the run of shockingly good episodes: from Dalek to The Long Game to Father's Day to The Empty ... Dances we have, I think, the most perfect month of televisual Doctor Who, and certainly by far the best run of four successive T.V. stories, that there's ever been.

Sadly, Boom Town doesn't look like the best way of prolonging that run of quality. Although I'm willing, as ever, to be proven wrong, I'm not sure that even Joe Ahearne's direction (as seen in Dalek and Father's Day) can redeem the Return of the Slitheen. Of all the aliens from this season, I can't think of a single one I wouldn't have preferred to see more of than the fat flatulent skin-stealing chalk-monsters. Not even the ambassadors from the City of Binding Light. Ah, well.

(That wasn't brief, was it? Bugger.)

Well,

I've now seen The Doctor Dances, and it's jolly excellent. I'll try to post a review in the next few days, and certainly before Boom Town airs. (Oh dear, Boom Town doesn't look very good, though, does it?)

The holiday was in Portmeirion, incidentally, and very nice it was too.