Things Of Interest

I've been writing enough about the new series (season 27) of Doctor Who that I reckoned it was worth creating a separate page for my comments. Newer episodes appear at the top. Episode numbers are listed in the SSxEE format - 27x06 means season 27, episode 6.

Contents

• 27x13 - The Parting Of The Ways
• 27x12 - Bad Wolf
• 27x11 - Boom Town
• 27x10 - The Doctor Dances
• 27x09 - The Empty Child
• 27x08 - Father's Day
• 27x07 - The Long Game
• 27x06 - Dalek
• 27x05 - World War Three
• 27x04 - Aliens Of London
• 27x03 - The Unquiet Dead
• 27x02 - The End Of The World
• 27x01 - Rose

27x13 - The Parting Of The Ways

Oh.

Is that it?

I was wrong about the Face of Boe - it was just the Emperor of the Daleks. Fair play, I was fooled. But that was because I was expecting something less, you know, obvious. Something worth sticking in the trailer and creating discussion about. How did the Daleks survive the Time War? Because one ship escaped. BRILLIANT. A four-year-old could have thought of that. The Doctor: coward or killer? "Coward. Any day." Except, you know, at the end of the Time War? Remember that? Opening the front console of the TARDIS: a matter of pulling hard enough? That's STUPID and you know it! It should have been a code word or a psychic wossname or something intelligent! Why doesn't Captain Jack run when he knows he isn't cornered? Why does Rose bring back Captain Jack but nobody else? How come we only get to see bits of some map warp slightly, instead of basking in what should have been the spectacular annihilation in flame and fire of the entire human race? How come, after the human race has been basically wiped out anyway, the Doctor is STILL reluctant to trigger the delta wave? Seriously though, WHY can't the Doctor go back in time and sort things out in advance? And as for the solution to the Bad Wolf mystery: That's it? Why send messages to yourself throughout space and time when just sending one - the chalk on the playground - would do the trick, most likely with much more efficiency?

Based on the high points of the season, such as "Dalek" and "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", I was expecting something thrilling and spectacular, witty and yet moving and yet terrifying. I was expecting all those ongoing story arcs to be wrapped up neatly with some sort of shocking or at least cunning twist, without using the TARDIS as some omnipotent deus ex machina.

I was expecting something a LOT more awesome. Frankly, this was a poor episode. A great, great shame.

And at the end of it all the Daleks could still have survived. I thought it was supposed to be OVER, I thought that was RTD's intention to end the Dalek story with as much finality as he could muster. They'll be back, because it'll turn out Rose missed a ship or something, AGAIN. Useless!

There will be a Christmas special - "The Christmas Invasion". At this point all I can conjecture is that it may involve going back to Rose's twelfth birthday and giving her a red bicycle.

2005|06|19 1:55pm

27x12 - Bad Wolf

More questions than answers.

The Doctor, Jack and Rose are all plucked from the TARDIS by a transmat beam - which, according to the Doctor would have to have been fifteen million times more powerful than a regular one to actually DO that to someone inside the TARDIS. They wake up in a selection of homicidal variations on the theme of twenty-first century game shows - a Big Brother where the evicted housemates are disintegrated, a Weakest Link where weak links are disintegrated, and a makeover show - it probably corresponds with some show which I've never even seen so I don't know the name - where the makeovers involve knives and saws.

It turns out they're back on Satellite Five, a hundred years after the events of "The Long Game" - and far from causing the planet to revert back to the Fourth Great And Bountiful Human Empire, the instantaneous cessation of news caused by the explosion of the Jagrafess in that episode plunged the Earth into chaos. Now, in the Doctor's words, "half of you are fat, half of you are thin, the rest of you sit and watch television". Deadly game shows go on continuously, and anybody can be plucked at random from anywhere in the world to compete - and people just sit at home and watch. And it was all the Doctor's fault.

It turns out the whole show is still being run from floor 500, and is controlled by the Bad Wolf Corporation.

Eep.

I'm gonna keep going with the plot here so I can discuss the implications. The Doctor and Jack both break out of their sealed gameshow rooms, but fail to rescue Rose from being disintegrated. The Doctor is struck dumb, and seems to be running on automatic, never saying a word as he, Jack, and a girl the Doctor rescued from the Big Brother house (Lynda) are arrested, manhandled through interrogation, and stripped of all their equipment.

Then, a single word from the Doctor, and they've all escaped. Instantly. What a legend.

Lastly on floor 500 they discover the TARDIS, sealed safely inside a restricted archive, the news controllers and a single girl, wired into every channel since the age of five, who does nothing but watch ALL the television, and whisper numbers. Jack checks some readings inside the TARDIS and discovers that the disintegration beams are actually secondary transmat beams, sending people offplanet. Rose is still alive!

On a Dalek ship!

Surrounded by Daleks!

And then there's that amazing exchange, the Doctor - without weapons, resources, bargaining chips, or a plan - declaring outright his intentions to engage the Dalek fleet that Rose is now a captive of, rescue Rose, save the Earth, and wipe the Daleks from history for ever... Cue credits!

When I say more questions than answers, here's what I mean. Where are all the humans being transported to, and why? Obviously it's not to their deaths - otherwise the disintegration beams would be real. And why use the medium of game shows? Even with so many going at once, your throughput rate isn't going to be very high. It's an extremely inefficient way to exterminate or exile the human race. So where are they going? I'm stabbing in the dark when I guess that they're being used to feed something...

Perhaps the single most important question is: Why keep the Doctor alive? If the Daleks were truly running the show, they would most assuredly have killed the Doctor when they had the chance. The most obvious conclusion, then, especially given the EXTREMELY suggestive "They survived... through me!" line in the trailer for next week's (final) show, is that the Daleks are NOT truly running the show. They are being used by X where X is whatever deep voice delivered that line. I think X wants the TARDIS. That's why the Doctor was left alive, that's why Rose is still alive (so she can be used to manipulate the Doctor).

Candidates for X are pretty numerous. Let me go through the most popular suggestions.

1. Davros - creator of the Daleks, the evil mastermind behind them. The Daleks had him as their leader in many episodes but occasionally not in others. Not entirely sure where and when he was last seen. Some people suggested that Henry van Statten from "Dalek" would become Davros, which to my mind sounds ridiculously far-fetched. A plausible idea, but I'm not behind it for the same reason I'm not behind the next one...
2. The Master - I believe RTD has gone on record saying that the Doctor's arch-nemesis, the Master, will not appear in this series. That makes sense since this series is drawing a LOT of new viewers whom he didn't want to alienate. He isn't relying on people's existing knowledge of the Whoniverse to ANY extent, apart from the fact that the Daleks exist, and during a few quiet references/homages to previous enemies which only the knowledgeable need appreciate. That for me rules out both the Master and Davros and indeed anybody else who appeared in previous seasons but has yet to pop up in this one.
3. Adam Mitchell - last seen dumped in his home in 2006 with a high-capacity data transfer hole in his brain which opens when he snaps his fingers. Adam seems like a good candidate - with all that knowledge in his head he could have done anything. He also had prior contact with the Dalek. I'm ruling him out because most of the knowledge he managed to get was on the subject of microprocessors - not interstellar spaceship technology. Also, we can be pretty sure his entire existence is post-Time War meaning he couldn't have had a hand in helping the Daleks survive it. Plus, the Bad Wolf references extend back far before he was even born.
4. Somebody we've never met before in this season OR previous seasons - I find this HIGHLY unlikely, because what's the point of the teaser line if it's not going to be someone significant?
5. The Face of Boe.

It's the Face of Boe. I'm absolutely certain about this, absolutely positive. Of course I'll probably turn out to be incorrect. Think about the evidence. Firstly he is an AMAZINGLY long-lived creature - if indeed the FOB we see in "The End Of The World" and the one in "The Long Game" are the same, he is nearly five billion years old. That would make it easily possible that he could start the Long Game he's been playing WAY back before 1869 and Gwyneth, and continue it through to AD 200000 and further. Secondly he's huge, so he'd have a deep voice, but he's never been heard to speak yet, which is rather convenient. Thirdly, Gwyneth mentions in "The Unquiet Dead" that Rose has seen something she describes as "the darkness". The Dalek in "Dalek" mentions this too. That means it's got to be something Rose has seen. I'm pretty sure the Bad Wolf is the Doctor/TARDIS combo so it has to be something else, and at this stage in the proceedings, all she's seen apart from her mundane life in England (which Gwyneth has already described) are the aliens on Platform One. The Moxx of Balhoon is burnt to death in that episode, Jabe is killed too, as is Cassandra, and the Adherents Of The Repeated Meme are just Cassandra's slaves like the spiders. There are a few other folks who don't get named, as well, of course, but they haven't reappeared...

The last great question I want to know is precisely how all this Bad Wolf manipulation happened, and why. It supposedly follows the Doctor around, but how? And why? What's the mechanism behind it, and what does it seek to achieve?

I can barely wait for next Saturday. Finally we see the TARDIS actually MOVING rather than teleporting - literally flying through space.

2004|06|11 10:04pm

27x11 - Boom Town

The last surviving Slitheen, now stuck on Earth, has become mayor of Cardiff and is building a nuclear power station directly on top of the Cardiff Rift, last seen being sealed during "The Unquiet Dead". Our new trio - Doctor, Jack, Rose - land there to refuel the TARDIS from the harmless energy being given off by the Rift, and discover the mayor's plan: the power station is designed to melt down, and when it does, it'll break the rift open, imploding the whole planet, enabling her to ride the shockwave offplanet on a high-tech surfboard.

Yes, the premise is pretty stupid, and in fact I have major issues with this episode. The most major is that there's a scene where the Doctor catches sight of a headline on a newspaper somebody's reading, and proceeds to walk over and snatch the newspaper out of the guy's hands for a better look. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's just MEAN! And extremely uncharacteristic of the Doctor! He'd ask politely! This isn't America, you can't get away with stuff like that here, and the Doctor isn't mean. Moreover I feel the plot in this episode is very poorly structured indeed. We never even see the power station for real, and it turns out it's totally unnecessary anyway. So why bring it up? People running around with mobile phones, tripping over trolleys full of cleaning equipment - has Doctor Who come to this? Does anybody actually trip over trolleys anymore? The Doctor catching a poison dart in mid-air - he can't DO that! He's basically human, surely it would make more sense for him to just block it with a tablemat? And if all he knows of the Slitheen is "only what I've seen", how does he KNOW she can fire poison darts and breathe poison gas? He isn't familiar with this species. And the whole Mickey thing just never gets tied up in any sense. It just doesn't make sense. And the Rift opening? Most uninspiring special effect ever.

Notable Time War/Bad Wolf development ahoy: the Doctor finally picks up on the recurring Bad Wolf phenomenon. He describes it as "everywhere we go, two words, following us". But much more significant is the Slitheen's line: "Chose it at random, that's all, I don't know. Just sounded good."

The Slitheen are NOT in on this! So how all-pervasive does a force have to be for an alien who's only been on the planet Earth for a few months to PICK the name "Bad Wolf" AT RANDOM?

Also worth noting: the TARDIS is DEFINITELY alive. But how alive is it? Is it intelligent? Does it have an AGENDA?

2005|06|11 8:34pm

27x10 - The Doctor Dances

A CLASSIC episode! Really, really good. For two reasons - firstly, impeccable writing: succinct, witty, fast-moving, and secondly, impeccable scripting. If I'd had the time after "The Empty Child" (I was busy with exams) I could have sat down and figured out PRECISELY what was going on. The thing which shows like Alias do is make it impossible for people to accurately predict what's going to happen next by not giving them all of the pieces of the jigsaw - all you need to do is introduce Sydney's long-lost half-sister and the problem becomes unimaginably complicated and all your existing theories are right out of the window. But all the pieces were there. Nanogenes, the dead child - you could have guessed it given time. I admire that.

Captain Jack Harkness is a good character, brings something to the table which isn't in the traditional Doctor/companion duo: some gung-ho attitude and some heavy weaponry.

And as for the ending, such classic lines: "And everybody lives, Rose! Just this once! Everybody lives!" and my personal favourite:

"Look at you, beaming away like you're Father Christmas."
"Who says I'm not, red-bicycle-when-you-were-twelve?"
"What?"

Loved it. Stephen Moffat, you're a genius.

2005|06|11 8:17pm

27x09 - The Empty Child

Encountering a rogue spaceship plummeting crazily through spacetime - and coloured mauve, the universally recognised colour of danger (red is camp apparently) - the Doctor slaves the TARDIS to its simple flight computer and follows it. They land in approximately the same region of spacetime - a mile or so away, and a few weeks later. It turns out it's 1941 London, and there's a strange child in a gas mask stalking the streets, looking for his mummy, and somehow calling telephones which aren't even connected...

This is the first episode of a two-parter. The cliffhanger at the end is uninspiring, and sticking Rose on a barrage balloon in a German air raid is far-fetched at best, but as dialogue and writing goes this is right up there with "Dalek". Some genuinely hilarious lines, some very decent acting. Highly enjoyable, and I look forward to the follow-up.

Not much in the way of Bad Wolf references in this episode, though Nancy does allude to the story referring to the Doctor's big ears...

One note. A lot of people noticed that in the opening titles the TARDIS travels down a blue wormhole, then emerges from the end, pauses briefly and plummets down another wormhole, this one red. I say to you: watch more carefully! After the TARDIS leaves the blue wormhole, watch the SCENERY, not the TARDIS which is rotating on the spot. It TURNS AROUND and goes BACK UP THE BLUE ONE! Which turns red as it travels in the opposite direction up it! This makes sense in terms of red and blue shift, but not really.

2005|06|11 8:08pm

27x08 - Father's Day

Recall the end of the first episode. When the Doctor said he could travel through space, Rose wasn't sold, but when he mentioned he could travel through time too, then she decided to come with him. In this episode, her ulterior motive of sorts is revealed. She travels back in time to find her father, who was hit and killed by a car when she was a year old, and find out what kind of person he really was.

After witnessing him being run over, the Doctor allows her to loop back around and watch it one more time, at which point Rose makes the entirely understandable but ultimately bad decision of saving his life, thus changing history. In Back To The Future that resulted in fading limbs: in Doctor Who, nasty black beasties called reapers, which feed on chronological upsets like this, begin springing into existence around the place and swiping people off the streets.

Exactly what happens next is kind of difficult to follow unless you fully understand the model of time travel being employed here, which I'm not entirely sure I do. There are some entertaining moments - the Doctor opening the TARDIS to find, of all things, the interior of a 1950s-style police box being the most hilarious - but the emphasis of this story is on emotion, something I reckon was handled pretty well. The episode is quite unusual in that it is a period piece set in the late 1980s, something I suspect may have never been done before!

This episode added a little to the ongoing Time War story arc. The Doctor explains that his entire family is gone (now, correct me if I'm wrong, but he doesn't have a family, does he? Or is he speaking figuratively about his whole race?) and also that the option, which I'm sure has occurred to all of us, of going back in time and preventing Gallifrey being destroyed is not one which is available to him. He also mentions that in the "old days" (whatever THAT could be held to mean) the business with the reapers would never have gone on - the Time Lords wouldn't have let it. If we put two and two together it seems logical to conclude that if he went back and tried to resurrect Gallifrey, reapers would pull the place down, or something. That makes it reasonably simple to understand the reapers' place in the whole business. The Time Lords have always had a policy of non-interference, a policy the Doctor frequently and willingly violates. This is presumably because it encourages the reapers to do their thing, though while the Time Lords existed they were held in check. Now the Time Lords are (almost) all gone, major temporal "wounds" get very much "infected", unless the event is approximately put right.

But history has been changed subtly or not-so-subtly several times over the course of the season so far. Why would the reapers appear now? If it's because they only appear for major changes (they certainly don't turn up for some of the subtle ones), who was Pete Tyler going to turn out to be?

And another thing: how come the Doctor knew the bride was pregnant?

2005|05|14 9:22pm

27x07 - The Long Game

The Doctor, Rose and newcomer Adam arrive in the year 200,000, the time of a great human empire, hoping to witness humanity at its peak. But something's wrong - the technology is backward, and the hundreds of alien species which should be swarming over the space station they arrive on are missing - it's all humans, everywhere you look. Not to mention that everyone who gets "promoted" to floor 500 never comes back, and the air conditioning isn't working properly...

Our heroes soon discover that humanity is being controlled, enslaved, and held back by the omniscient Editor and his gurgling, alien boss the Jagrafess, through the medium of the media itself. By having access to every single piece of information on the planet Earth, they manipulate the news in order to manipulate humanity itself for the benefit of a consortium of banks, who are treating Earth as a long-term investment.

It's a cunning concept for a story but I feel the execution was poorer than it could have been. The script could have used more work, the ending needed tightening up, and the monster just wasn't scary or indeed anything more than cliched. And if the Doctor is paranoid about changing history, why does he wipe Adam's phone message, but leave the hole-in-his-head thing? Won't THAT change history? Not as bad as "The End Of The World", but below par in my opinion. I still like Simon Pegg though, pity he didn't get more screen time.

As for the ongoing Time War story arc, a major new theme seems to be revealing itself, that being Things Not Being How They Should Be. In this episode the Doctor discovers that for some reason, humanity is around ninety years behind where it should be, technologically and culturally, due to the installation of the Jagrafess ninety-one years ago. By the end of the episode everything is on course to return to "normal", but this isn't the first time something has happened when the Doctor - who claims in this episode that his history is perfect - wasn't expecting it to. Perhaps most confusing is when he calls Mickey "Ricky" in the Aliens Of London two-parter.

The other theme that seems to be becoming common is the TARDIS's apparent mind of its own. Whenever the Doctor tries to go somewhere, the TARDIS will drag him slightly off-course to a slightly different time and/or place where something weird is happening that the Doctor can get involved in. It happens in "The Unquiet Dead" and again in "Aliens Of London" and in "Dalek" (though there he is following a distress signal).

Obviously, Something is Up.

2005|05|09 9:15am

27x06 - Dalek

"Dalek" is the sixth new Doctor Who episode and finally, some light is shed on the Time War alluded to in almost all of the preceding episodes. It was the final great war between the Time Lords and the Daleks and - apparently directly due to the Doctor's actions - the result was almost total extinction on both sides. The Daleks were all completely wiped out - not wiped from history, beaten face-to-face in some sort of battle, but one Dalek survived and eventually fell to Earth in roughly 1962 (50 years prior to the events of this episode, which is set in 2012). (Doctor Who began airing in 1963. Coincidence? I think not!) It seems reasonably clear that the Daleks and the Time Lords were the two sides in this war but obviously it could be a lot more complicated - a huge amount of innocents were certainly killed in the war, something the Doctor is clearly very upset about. The Nestene Consciousness from the first episode apparently laments the death of its people, whom the Doctor failed to save, and the Gelth in "The Unquiet Dead" appear to have also suffered from the backlash of this conflict, being driven into some spiritual plane to survive. But on the other hand humanity seems to have been relatively unaffected.

It might be nice to see what actually happened during the Time War, but since it was probably the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) who participated, we're unlikely to get more than hints and allusions from Ecclestone's incarnation. Maybe he'll explain the whole thing at some point, though.

One could conjecture that the Eighth Doctor regenerated into the Ninth as a result of the Time War, but there's no real evidence of this fact.

An interesting consequence of the Time War is that in theory the entirety of established DW continuity could be out the window. Any event that happened in the Doctor's past history could have been retroactively undone, while still remaining canon. This is a useful bit of retconning - literal retconning, actually! - which means the writers can bring in any old characters/themes/enemies they like if they want (witness the Cyberman head in this episode, and the Doctor's reference to Davros, the Daleks' creator) without having to explain their absence. It also means that past enemies can be essentially upgraded for the new series - now that the original Daleks have been wiped from history, we could in theory have a whole new Dalek race, built from scratch in the new, post-Time War universe.

Moving on. As an episode I thought this one was pretty excellent. There were a whole bundle of good moments. The Doctor's reaction on seeing the Dalek. Turning all the perceived weaknesses of the Daleks (can't climb stairs, useless sink plunger attachment) into strengths. Taking out an entire basement full of armed gunmen with just two plasma bolts. "You would make a good Dalek." "Space dustbin." "Giant pepperpot." The Doctor rummaging through a basket full of old alien weapons and remarking "Broken... broken... hairdryer..." is probably the funniest moment in the whole series so far.

The next episode features Simon Pegg, which should be good. I'm adding a new document on the strange Bad Wolf running theme which you may have picked up on.

2005|05|01 5:12pm

27x05 - World War Three

"World War Three" is the fifth new Doctor Who episode. Following on from the previous episode's cliffhanger, our heroes are tasked with figuring out what the alien Slitheen want with Earth, and how to stop it. It is an exciting episode, my favourite so far, despite a few somewhat worrying plot holes ("Buffalo"? Something of a weak password, guys!). It does also sort out the third plot hole I mentioned last week; the reason why the Doctor didn't know this was the date of first contact? Because it wasn't, in the end everybody thinks it was a hoax.

So far the new series has proved to be an extremely enjoyable piece of television. Highly recommended. I'm particularly looking forward to the next episode, where the Daleks - or one of them - finally reappears...

2005|04|24 7:34pm

27x04 - Aliens Of London

"Aliens Of London" is the fourth new Doctor Who episode. This sees Rose and the Doctor return to present-day England to answer an open question which remained after Rose left in the first episode - what would your family do if you randomly disappeared off time-travelling with the Doctor? I was wondering if they were going to address this point or simply gloss over it, seems like they did the honourable thing and wrote it in, good show.

As an episode it's a pretty exciting piece of work, I'd say the best so far. Having a spaceship carve a chunk out of Big Ben? Seems somewhat over-dramatic, right? You're right, and as the Doctor picks up on it too, and it turns out the crash was staged. That's a refreshing change from the asteroid movies where the asteroids are always shown improbably hitting heavily populated capital cities instead of empty ocean etc... It's also a two-parter, to be concluded next week.

Several problems have already been thrown up with the whole DW universe though, and this is just working from this series, not even considering the preceding 26 years of episodes. First off is an issue I should have picked up on in the very first episode. The Doctor catches sight of himself in a mirror and remarks, "Ah, could've been worse," implying strongly that his regeneration from Paul McGann's Eight Doctor was recent, VERY recent. But that Clive guy has images of the Doctor from various points in history, from the sinking of the Titanic and JFK's assassination. Images of the NINTH Doctor. How is that possible? It seems unlikely that the Ninth Doctor would visit those two time periods and still not know what he personally actually looked like, especially given that he actually knows that these photos are being taken. That means that instead these visits must lie in the future along the Doctor's personal time scale, which means sooner or later he will have to actually visit those time periods, presumably later in this season and presumably with Rose in tow. But I don't see anything like that happening in the very brief episode synopses of the rest of the season already available.

Secondly is that the Doctor seems to have this almost supernatural attraction to weird goings-on. Wherever he goes, whenever he goes, shortly after his arrival there is ALWAYS something weird going on. In the first episode, "Rose", the Ninth Doctor's presence wasn't an accident, but even ignoring that, he's currently three for three! Of course, given that the TARDIS malfunctioned on two of those occasions and brought him to the wrong time it might seem plausible that the TARDIS brings him to those times and places on purpose, perhaps with a will of its own, which I'm told isn't totally unheard of in DW canon. Still pretty weird though.

Thirdly, how come the Doctor knows the year Charles Dickens dies but not the date humanity makes first contact with aliens? He claims the events of this episode take him completely by surprise. Which of these is the more important event in history? How could he NOT see this coming?

And how come he can't take Rose back to the RIGHT time he intended to take her?

Foolishness!

2005|04|17 3:11am

27x03 - The Unquiet Dead

"The Unquiet Dead" was the third new Doctor Who episode. The action takes place in Cardiff in 1869 this time around, and involves Charles Dickens and some gaseous blue aliens. (Utterly unexplained is why the Doctor picked that exact point out of all of spacetime to land the TARDIS. Is he in a habit of always accidentally landing near trouble? I mean, what are the odds?)

This one ranks between episodes one and two. Decent writing, some funny moments, a slightly tenuous plot. The best parts to my mind were the tiny hints towards the greater overall picture of the DW universe - about time being in flux and malleable, and a reference to some gigantic time war which the Doctor clearly knows about. This larger story arc, which was mentioned fleetingly in the previous episode, is something I am looking forward to seeing developed further.

Enjoyable watching. The next episode looks better: Rose is back on present-day Earth, and Big Ben is getting destroyed. Looks good.

2005|04|10 2:46am

27x02 - The End Of The World

The second episode of Doctor Who, "The End Of The World", aired yesterday.

It was okay... ish. But it was, I dunno, a bit of a mess, frankly. It could have done with a lot more plot exposition - as it is, it made sense, sort of, but was really badly explained. The writing was a little off, the acting was a little off, the action sequences were a little off... it was all just a bit disjointed. It could have used more work on the script, or maybe more work on the editing. Serviceable, but the pilot was far better.

2005|04|02 9:56am

27x01 - Rose

So somebody leaked the first episode of the BBC's new series of Doctor Who onto Bittorrent. I have downloaded and watched it (which seems perfectly fair to me, it's not like the BBC loses any money for it; in fact, I'd probably have missed it otherwise). I'll say right here that I am not a major Whovian. I'm familiar with scarf and the eccentricity and the IMDb quotes page, but apart from that this is all somewhat new to me. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect.

It was BRILLIANT. Once again the theory that British science fiction is the best of all science fiction is confirmed. The newest Doctor (Christopher Ecclestone) may seem a little young, but he's knowledgeable, insightful, witty and alien. Rose, played by Billie "sunk without trace five years ago" Piper is entertaining. The plot was ridiculous, pulpy and engaging, in the best possible way. The special effects were below average - in other words, true to the original series. And the writing was great, and I always think that the writing is always far more important than anything else.

I will be sure to watch the rest of the series.

2005|03|17 1:22pm

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