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FishyFish

By FishyFish
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Turn Left

(Blog has pictures)

Turn Left is this season's "Doctor-Lite" episode (filmed alongside the previous "Companion-Lite" episode for convenience, presumably), in which Donna relives an alternative life, a life that would have played out if she'd taken a different path and never met the Doctor, depicted in this case by a literal cross-roads situation. Turn left or turn right? How big a difference can one tiny decision really make?

[Picture: Left or right? The right leads to a fascist dystopia. Subtle.]

[Picture: The Doctor's death happens too quickly for him to regenerate.]

As it happens, quite a big difference. Without Donna to save the Doctor's life during the encounter with the Racnoss, he is no longer alive to protect Earth from all the other invading aliens. The episode is like a big recap of events, just with a different perspective on things. Without the Doctor, we learn that Martha, Sarah Jane Smith and her group of kids are killed protecting the hospital from the Judoon attack, the Torchwood Cardiff team is killed stopping the Sontarans from choking the Earth, and all of London is obliterated when the Titanic crashes into it.

[Picture: Donna and her family witness the destruction of London from afar.]

We see all of this from Donna's perspective, as her and her family are swept up in events and end up as refugees as Britain descends into fascism. There are some touching moments as they spend time with their temporary housemates, and sadness as said housemates are carted off to a "labour camp" with other immigrants, their resilient spirits finally crushed. It shows how messed up the world has become that we could descend to such a level, but it's scarily believable, and it drives home just how important the Doctor is to the world, and by extension, how important Donna is to saving the entire universe.

[Picture: Mr. Colasanto and his family are whisked off in a truck.]

The reappearance of Rose is disappointing because it takes the focus away from Donna's character, and this is supposed to be Donna's story, not Rose's. Moreover, Rose has had her chance, she's reached the end of her character's arc, and that should be it. The wall between dimensions should be locked shut, rather than have Rose repeatedly cross over like it's no bother at all. I don't entirely understand how she's able to exist in Donna's altered timeline, or how she knows what's going to happen to her in the future. I know more will be explained in the final two parts, and there needed to be some external influence to guide Donna's actions, which is fair enough, but I feel it dilutes this episode with unnecessary mystery. And why "bad wolf" again? It was a meaningless phrase then and it's a meaningless phrase now.

[Picture: Rose and Donna stare at the night sky.]

There have been hints about Donna's ultimate fate sprinkled throughout this season, and in the Pompeii episode, the psychic was able to sense the alien beetle on her back (even though it wasn't there in that timeline). I thought the presence of the beetle was fantastic; there's something very creepy about not being able to see something attached to your back, particularly combined with the clickety-clack of insect noises. It reminded me of the giant spiders from Jon Pertwee's final serial, 'Planet of the Spiders', and the Star Trek TNG episode, 'Phantasms', which featured small invisible insects feeding off the crew, invisible except under certain light. But, generally, big insects on your back are just creepy, man.

[Picture: UNIT's special equipment reveals the Time Beetle on Donna's back. What happens when she takes off her coat?]

With the stars going out, Rose returning and universes colliding, Turn Left is a prelude to the finale of Russell T Davies' last season as showrunner, but it stands on its own as a thematically and emotionally strong episode that would have been even stronger without such baggage. It's a little bit self-indulgent in revisiting episodes through stock footage, but it's a clever idea, well-written and the episode is better than I remember it being the first time around. In fact, season 4 on the whole has been better than I remember; I can only assume the finale tainted it!

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The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

(Blog has pictures)

'Journey's End' is everything that is wrong with modern Doctor Who all rolled into one. I was torn over whether this is worse than 'Voyage of the Damned', but I think it has to pip it. It... is... terrible! It's a melting pot of ideas thrown together and stirred until it's nothing but fanboy pulp; it's Russell T Davies writing from the point of view of a ten-year-old playing with his Doctor Who action figures and going "and then Jack turns up and then the Daleks fight them and then Torchwood and Sarah Jane help them and then Mickey comes back and then Martha and she teleports and then they explode and then there's two Doctors and then-...". There is no restraint shown, it's just trash. It's hard to believe this is the same writer coming from 'Turn Left' and 'Midnight'.

[Picture: It's telling that Davies wanted the Shadow Proclamation scene to be much bigger and include hordes of aliens from the past four years but they ran out of money so it had to be some Judoon and a woman with red contact lenses instead.]

It's simultaneously overblown and boring. It's full of rambling exposition and ridiculous technobabble. It even makes fun of its own technobabble, but continues to use it to solve the plot anyway; meanwhile, interesting setups (like the Osterhagen key) go literally nowhere. A bluff amongst other bluffs with no consequence. Devices work and break and work again, people teleport in and out. Despite the two parts and extended length, the cast of characters is still too huge to get enough screen time. Even previously satisfying conclusions, such as Rose's farewell in season 2, are undone, like prodding at a corpse to make it twitch. Rose now comes back then returns to the parallel world for really poor reasons, with a half-human double of the Doctor to spend her life with, just to thoroughly undermine one of the few good things about 'Doomsday'.

[Picture: She's back, and she's got a great big gun.]

As for the Daleks, I think they've given up any pretence that they're an endangered species now. Time War? Void ships? Pah! Despite Rose eliminating "all Daleks" from existence with her godly powers, there's somehow another army of them, grown from the cells of Davros himself, with enough power to move entire planets and destroy the Universe. No, not just the Universe, that's not big enough anymore. We have to go bigger. All Universes! All parallel worlds, alternative timelines, past, present and future. All of reality and unreality and everything in between. The Daleks will destroy all of it. Don't worry, though, the duplicate Doctor presses some buttons and all the Daleks are destroyed.

[Picture: The 27 missing planets, pulled out of time and space, are used as a power source for the Daleks' Reality Bomb, within the Medusa Cascade. Also something about bees.]

I hated pretty much everything about this. Every little cliché that all the "big event" episodes have. All those TV news reports from around the world, celebrity cameos, disastrous events having no apparent consequences on everyday life, big fleets of CGI things swarming over the Earth while overbearingly bombastic music plays, the Doctor running about shouting plot things at people, and so on. There's even a ratings-grabbing tease of a cliffhanger as it seems like the Doctor is going to regenerate (ooh, they kept that a secret!) but actually he comes back as David Tennant again because... yeah. The planet Earth being carried through space by the Tardis is the giant cherry on top of a very cheesy cake, and not in a good way.

[Picture: The Doctor, the other Doctor, Captain Jack, Sarah Jane Smith, Martha, Rose and Rose's mum, take the controls of the Tardis.]

It's not all bad, but it almost is. Admittedly, amongst all the running around, there's some nice moments between the reunited characters. Wilf is good, as he always is. Doing a crossover with The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood is an interesting idea, and I've been keeping up with both shows in parallel, so the events line up properly, but I can't imagine the average viewer doing the same, given the target demographic for them. The return of Davros is a big moment and he is as bonkers as ever and looks disgusting, as he should. Oh, and German Daleks. It's almost worth it for German Daleks. "Exterminieren!" Aaaaand... that's it. That's basically the extent of anything good in this finale.

[Picture: Davros' new hand is shocking! Sorry.]

Even Donna has to leave, and to make sure she can never come back, there has to be some memory-enabled killswitch in her head, because in modern Doctor Who, you can't just part ways like ordinary people. Donna has, frankly, been fantastic, and she deserves a better end than this. She has been the moral compass for the Doctor on more than one occasion, and the best decision they made was in removing any possibility of romance right from the start so that she could have balanced motives and behave in a more human fashion. She will be missed.

[Picture: Unable to retain the Time Lord knowledge, Donna's memory is wiped. Because the Doctor can do that, apparently.]

Season 4 has been really good, so it's a shame that it had to end on such a duff note. This is the ultimate lesson in why "less is more".

----

Now then, I've got season 2 of SJA and season 3 of Torchwood to get through before I move onto the "specials". I may be some time...

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Hexx

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Yeah Journey's End was a pile of pish, and that bad taste tainted the series for me. It certainly made me despise RTD :D

S3 of Torchwood will be interesting? Have you seen it before/are you planning to recap?

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Mogster

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Season 3 of Torchwood is somehow brilliant, thanks in no small part to Peter Capaldi. It's not perfect by any means, and being an RTD thing the ending was a bit contrived, but bloody hell it's a great journey.

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Children of Earth was rather good! Not without its faults, of course - I am sick to death of RTD scripts having "everyone in the world" type events with zoomed-in-on-the-pixels-of-news-reader footage and that same bloody American news reader who's in every single episode that features American news footage... BUT, I forgive it. Because it actually takes the time (all five episodes, in fact) to tackle the realities of a situation like that and what it would mean to us if we had to make that sort of choice. The Doctor isn't here to swoop in and save our arses with his magic screwdriver. This is a big deal. Frightening!

Repeat viewings would probably be a tad slow and drawn out, but it's all about the journey and the discovery. I was gripped. It felt like a five hour Torchwood movie, in a good way. And

exploding Jack - fuck! :o

Peter Capaldi was also excellent in it. Annoyingly good, 'cos now I'm gonna keep comparing him to the twelfth Doctor later this year.

Sadly, the death of

Ianto

came as no surprise to me, as I'd already inadvertently seen his bloody shrine when I was in Cardiff a couple of months ago. Thanks for the spoiler, Cardiff!

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The Next Doctor

(Blog has pictures)

With rumours of David Tennant's departure from Doctor Who back in 2008/'09, Russell T Davies seemed to enjoy teasing the audience with things like fake regenerations and misleading episode titles... at least, that's how I remember it. The Next Doctor ostensibly depicts a future incarnation of the travelling Time Lord, who is trying to solve a series of murders and kidnappings in Victorian London. It plays up to this ruse for the first half of the episode before finally admitting that, actually, he's not the Doctor at all, he's just a man named Jackson Lake (played by David Morrissey), who's been infused with the Doctor's memories in an accident that took his family.

[Picture: The next Doctor shows off his "sonic" screwdriver by banging it against the wall.]

On the basis of this performance, he would have made a pretty good Doctor had they decided to go that way - somewhat like Peter Davison's fifth, grounded and human but brilliant and inventive. The scenes where the "two Doctors" team up and work together are fun, and the reveal of the new Doctor's "TARDIS" raised a smile as well. The rest of the episode is, well... the usual routine.

[Picture: Miss Hartigan is shown no "Mercy" as the Cybermen predictably betray her.]

Cybermen in a Dickensian setting at Christmas should be far better than this, but they're just not very interesting villains anymore. They're deadly and threatening when they need to be (zapping people with a touch) but useless when they're fighting the Doctor (with a sword - why not zap him through it?), and their leader, Miss Hartigan, has only vague motives to support her pantomime villain routine. The "Cybershades" are supposed to look retro or something, but they're just too fluffy and adorable and make little sense. The Cyberking looks amazing and has a great steampunk vibe to it, but it's similarly implausible. How did something that big hide under the Thames? It's just another "big threat" for the sake of, with a poor resolution - more magic weapons and silly save-the-day devices.

[Picture: The Cyberking flattens London. Nobody ever mentions it again.]

Still, it's not too bad. Before it gets boring, the mystery of the Jackson Lake character gives the episode an intriguing focus (he should have had more to do in the final act - put him in the balloon instead, for instance!). It was nice to see the old footage of all ten Doctors projected from the infostamp (that's the first time that's happened, isn't it?). It's Christmassy, but the Christmassiness isn't overdone - there's no embarrassing scene like the Queen waving in last year's special. But, it is still just a big budget special and these rarely rise above "okay". Unfortunately, without a regular season and a regular companion, 2009 was all about one-off specials, and the Doctor getting increasingly whiny to the point where I was glad to see him go.

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zxcvbnm

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That was one of the worst things ever for me - they completely wasted David Morrisey - they should have held him back to be the actual doctor, he was superb and we all know how fantastic he is in pretty much everything he does. I'm undecided if this or the Titanic is the ultimate low point for the Xmas specials.

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All of the specials are low points, bar none.

Especially that one where they end up in the desert on a bus.

Tenant's first one was good and got me into the new Who. But yes the rest disappoint me and my family every christmas, it's like a tradition now though so we keep doing it.

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Planet of the Dead

(Blog has pictures)

The Doctor, now a lonely wanderer, winds up back in London on the trail of a wormhole, hops on a number 200 bus (this is the 200th serial, sort of) with an assortment of characters, including a cat burglar on the run, and accidentally gets transported to an alien planet. I guess they just wanted a reason to show a London bus in the middle of a desert, and to be fair, it is a strikingly memorable image.

[Picture: Last stop, San Helios. Or is it Tatooine?]

What I find partially refreshing about this episode is the simplicity of the characters' predicament. There's no contrived reason for being trapped on the alien planet - they simply can't pass back through the wormhole alive unless they're protected by a metal container, and the bus is stuck in the sand, mere metres away from it. It takes a bit of good old-fashioned ingenuity to get them back rather than a wave of the magic screwdriver or a neutron polarity reversal or whatever. I like that.

[Picture: #Stingraaaaay... stingray! Da-da-daa-daa-daa-daa!#]

There's also no "bad guys" in this episode. The threat they face is a biological force of nature, a swarm of metal-coated stingray aliens, flying from planet to planet, consuming it as part of their natural life cycle. There's no menace, just survival instinct. The marooned fly-like aliens, the Tritovores, are friendly as well, despite their appearances (animals as aliens again, really?). With no villain, then, this becomes a simple story of survival, but one with a more jovial tone than perhaps it ought to. The music is more whimsical than usual and the presence of Lee Evans as the scientist bloke is for comic relief, but I quite like his character (more than his stand-up routines, anyway).

[Picture: UNIT's latest scientific advisor, Malcolm Taylor, speaks to his hero.]

Michelle Ryan plays the Lady Christina, a rich thrill-seeker who just robbed a museum of a very valuable gold chalice, just for fun. Goodness knows, Doctor Who needs better female characters, but is this the answer? Christina is, much like the Doctor, overly-confident, authoritative and clever, but she's barely passable as a human being and seems to be having far too much fun in every scene. She's easy on the eyes, for sure, but what is her drive, her motivation? Who is she, other than "sassy, smart-talking, sexy thief"? The other bus passengers aren't exactly three-dimensional either, which is unusual for a Russell T Davies story, and the Doctor doesn't seem to care very much when the bus driver gets himself fried. The prophetic old woman is pulled from the Big Book of Clichés, teasingly informing the Doctor that his time is coming to an end. Apparently, psychic power in humans is nothing to worry about.

[Picture: Formal request: Could everybody please stop kissing the Doctor? Thanks.]

On the whole, I found enough to enjoy here. The big concept science fiction premise is appealingly simple and the imagery is excellent. There are, however, a few too many silly moments that take me right out of it. The incompetent security guards who stand with their backs to the chalice that they're supposedly guarding, with no protection on top, is one thing, but then the police later are similarly dumb, keeping their police car door unlocked on the inside! It's farcical!

[Picture: With no Tardis to translate, the Doctor talks to the Tritovores with clicks and squeaks, until they use their own device.]

Planet of the Dead is the first ever episode of Doctor Who to be made and shown in high definition. The location shooting in Dubai looks great. Some of the special effects do look a bit iffy, particularly the stingrays and some shots of the flying bus, but on the whole it's a good looking production.

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they simply can't pass back through the wormhole alive unless they're protected by a metal container

I've only just realised they've nicked that from the Angel season 2 finale!

(Can't stand this episode, otherwise - this and the Kylie Christmas one are the only episodes I don't think I can ever rewatch).

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