Category: Doctor Who
The Sarah Jane Adventures episode 12: The Last Sontaran – Part One (29/9/2008)
‘I met your people a long time ago. And some time off yet.’ What a great idea: pitting Sarah Jane against her first enemy and connecting it to the year’s big Doctor Who UNIT epic, ticking boxes for both old and new series fans. The call backs to The Time Warrior (including the crashed Sontaran sphere that needs to be repaired, and Sarah Jane revealing Kaagh like the third Doctor using his rhondium sensor) are very pleasing. But equally, this makes good use of repurposed footage from The Sontaran Stratagem.
Doctor Who: Music of the Spheres (27/7/2008)
‘Oi, get out of my TARDIS!’ A sweet scene written for the 2008 Proms, with the Doctor interacting with an audience of fans and families. The plot – a Graske invades the TARDIS to discover the Doctor composing a symphony based on the movement of planets, as a pretext for escaping to cause havoc on Earth – is essentially a pretext for Tennant to communicate directly with the audience.
Doctor Who episode 766: Journey’s End (5/7/2008)
‘This is my final victory, Doctor. I have shown you yourself.’ The cliffhanger resolution sets the tone for the episode. The Doctor regenerating into himself is a neat trick that cleverly avoids having to deliver on the implication of the previous episode. And all the way through, RTD pulls off similar feints: ‘Everlasting death for the most faithful companion’ becomes “Donna gets a mind wipe”; Rose is reunited with the Doctor forever – except it’s a meta-crisis duplicate. The Children of Time come together at the end, only to stand around and watch while the Doctor/Donna saves the day. There’s something vaguely unsatisfactory about this – not exactly the audience being cheated, but being given less than expected.
Doctor Who episode 765: The Stolen Earth (28/6/2008)
‘Someone tried to move the Earth once before, a long time ago…’ The closest Doctor Who has come to one of the Marvel Avengers movies, as the ‘Children of Time’ assemble. At the time, this was true event television – possibly the last time my whole family watched TV together. Even my mum, permanently sniffy about the series, was drawn in. Years later, it’s easy to pick flaws with this. The TARDIS zipping about gives an illusion of movement that’s not really present in the script, which unfolds as a series of scenes on the guest stars’ stock sets: Sarah Jane in her attic, Torchwood in the Hub. Martha at least gets to teleport from New York to her mother’s front room, but this is a way from the vertical chases of Army of Ghosts, or the thriller elements of The Sound of Drums.
Doctor Who episode 764: Turn Left (21/6/2008)
‘You’re the most important woman in the whole of creation.’ Another Doctor-lite episode that becomes a series stand-out. The benefit of Turn Left against Love & Monsters or Blink is that the companion is present throughout, and so this becomes Donna’s own Father’s Day or Human Nature, as she has to hold the line without the Doctor’s help in her own version of The City at the Edge of Forever plot.
Doctor Who episode 763: Midnight (14/6/2008)
‘That’s how he does it. He makes you fight. Creeps into your head. And whispers.’ I’ve seen it suggested that this is RTD out-Moffatting Moffat. It’s certainly as creepy as any of Moffat’s episodes with exactly the same kind of easily-imitated baddie, but it’s clearly inspired by RTD’s own particular fears. Moffat’s monsters are often technology gone wrong (nanogenes, clockwork men, sentient Libraries executing their functions in their own peculiar way); RTD’s is humans surrendering to their worst instincts. Here, in the Crusader 50, with nowhere to run, the Doctor is trapped with a terrified group of people and there’s no clever last-minute twist to save them.
Doctor Who episode 762: Forest of the Dead (7/6/2008)
‘I’m the Doctor, and you’re in the biggest library in the universe. Look me up.’ There are more portents of the coming Moffat years, particularly the idea that the Doctor can make ‘whole armies turn and run away. And he’d just swagger off back to his TARDIS and open the doors with a snap of his fingers’ which is essentially the ending of The Eleventh Hour (‘Basically… run’) and a chunk of The Pandorica Opens. Miss Evangelista’s veil-clad avatar looks like a prototype of Madame Vastra, and River’s ultimate fate – dying, but then living forever – is the one Moffat reserves for most of his female favourites including Clara, Bill and Ashildr. The Vashta Nerada speaking through their victims is essentially the new method of the Weeping Angels in The Time of Angels.
Doctor Who episode 761: Silence in the Library (31/5/2008)
‘Hello sweetie.’ The Steven Moffat years begin, fittingly, with a story that’s out of time, arriving a dozen episodes before his formal debut. But by this point he knew he was going to be the next showrunner, and with that in mind it’s difficult to see this as anything other than a prologue. It has all the hallmarks of his earlier Doctor Whos – an impossible girl, something hunting the main characters, a Bob Baker and Dave Martin style phrase – combined with the arrival of River Song.
Doctor Who episode 760: The Unicorn and the Wasp (17/5/2008)
‘Never mind Planet Zog. A party in the 1920s, that’s more like it.’ I bet a lot of viewers were expecting a whole series like this when Catherine Tate was announced as a regular. It’s easily the funniest new series episode to date, gleefully pastiching the conventions of countless Christie TV adaptations (the classic cars), name-dropping her novels, poking fun at British stereotypes and using Tate in the most Catherine Tate Show way possible. The end result is a glorious, summery and charming, literary comedy, The Androids of Tara of the 21st Century.
Doctor Who episode 759: The Doctor’s Daughter (10/5/2008)
‘You’re an echo, that’s all. A Time Lord is so much more. A sum of knowledge, a code, a shared history, a shared suffering.’ This is a very oddly structured episode. The teaser at the end of The Poison Sky promised intrigue which just doesn’t exist in this episode. We see Jenny’s creation as a sort of clone of the Doctor all in the two-minute pre-title sequence, and the rest of this plays out as a mix of Donna smugly mocking the Doctor about ‘dad-shock’ while Martha gets weepy about a drowned fish.
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