Obamaphobia

If there's one thing that did set my alarm bells ringing in EoT1, it was the inclusion of the esteemed President of the United States of America, Barack Obama. While RTD's penchant for celebrity cameos means we've already seen real-world politicians in the Whoniverse (hello Ann Widdecombe), having Obama as POTUS felt wrong somehow.

Does it make any sense? Until very recently, the politicians of the RTD era were fictionalized. In Aliens of London the Slitheen bump off the incumbent Prime Minister and replace him with "Joseph Green". This doesn't last long, obviously, and Harriet Jones takes charge. Thanks possibly to the Doctor's whisper campaign against her, she's out in May 2008 to "Harold Saxon", who quickly goes insane and kills himself, his entire cabinet and the US President. He may or may not be succeeded by one Aubrey Fairchild, depending on whether you count original Who novels published by the BBC to be canon; if so, Fairchild dies sometime circa the 2009 Dalek invasion. In 2009 Brian Green is definitely, canonically PM, but probably not for long given how Torchwood: Children of Earth finishes up.

Obviously we have less information about American politicians in the Whoniverse, but we do know that in 2008 Arthur Coleman Winters was President, or at least President-Elect, however that's possible, of the USA. It seems strange that a world that may not have had George W Bush or even 9/11 should still be electing Obama in late '08. Given that the Earth is constantly under highly visible attack from aliens these days, wouldn't a candidate with a better track record on military and national security issues have made more sense? Or is Barack one of those "fixed points" in history we've been hearing a lot about lately. (I like him, but that might be overestimating his importance just a little.)

I think I see what RTD was trying to do. After introducing one rubbish, fictional Prez to be killed off by the Master just a couple of years back, it would have had little impact to do it again. They could have not named the President, but let's face it, if the back of his head belongs to a black man he's obviously Barack, and if it doesn't, that's not the implicit political statement that RTD wants to be distracting attention from his swansong.

So we're stuck with President Obama and his speech about a recession that doesn't really make sense in the Whoniverse (I think if we'd been invaded by Daleks and our entire planet towed across the universe one year ago, the economy would be a bit of a secondary issue). Unless, and here's a theory I do quite like, the inclusion of the "real" President is symptomatic of The End of Time also being The End of the RTD Timeline. The Whoniverse Earth has had a pretty crazy ride over the past five years, but maybe this is where it ends. No more Presidents and Prime Ministers being assassinated or discredited by aliens on an annual basis. A return to the even keel of stable, "normal" history, at least until Steven Moffat decides if and how he wants to much that up beyond recognition again.

I wouldn't put it past Russell T Davies to employ a big reset switch in EoT2 tomorrow: it's a device he doesn't seem to see much point in sparing any need to use sparingly. Bring back the Time Lords, wipe out the whole post-Time War Earth continuity, which frankly went completely bananas without their stewardship. (Even inside of the RTD era, episodes like 2005's 2012-set Dalek make no sense at all in the light of the events of the subsequent few seasons.)

In many ways it'd be a great relief to get back to normal, have a Doctor on the run from his own people in a rackety old TARDIS, and an Earth where alien invasions are unthinkable again, instead of an annual occurrence. In other respects it'd be a massive, lazy cheat on Russell's part - encouraging future writers not to care about tight plotting or logical consequences because, hey, we can always reinstall a clean timeline at the end of our tenure. I suppose there's no point in speculating about it until we see what EoT2 has to say, in about 24 hours from now. Until then!

Anagramania

Oh dear, I can't believe I hadn't noticed this before.

Wilfred Mott's name is an anagram of Time Lord with a few letters left over.

Only on Friday will be know if his true identity is TIME LORD WTF?! or TIME LORD FTW!!!

The End of Time Part One, Part One

Well, I'm sure I will be able to get blog-writing material out of The End of Time for a good couple of weeks... but let's just say that my reaction to Part One was very positive. I watched it before Christmas dinner with Tessa, her Who-positive brother, and her Who-clueless sister, and a good time seemed to be had by all.

And then of course I logged onto the internet, and was inundated with the usual bile. Worst episode since Timelash! A plotless, pointless mess! Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Russell T Davies!

It seems to me that, at this stage, RTD Who is not unlike US politics. Russell T Davies has always, unrepentantly, made the sort of Doctor Who he likes. (Crucially, the general public seems to like it too - EoT1's AI figures of 87, while not record-breaking for modern Doctor Who, are comfortably awesome.) There is however a significant faction in Who fandom for whom the sort of thing that Russell T Davies likes are exactly what they hate. And these people no longer even bother to weigh up the merits of RTD's style of show. If he's not making their definition of "real Who", no point in weighing up the many good points of the show he is making: let's just shout unconstructively over the top of any other opinion till he's gone.

Meanwhile those of us who found EoT1 hugely entertaining - so much more interesting, ambitious and witty than almost anything else that's on modern television, so God bless you Sir Russell! - just have to shut out the noise and wait for what will without a doubt be an even more memorable Part Two. And yes, this is a story in two parts! So for the many people who are asserting that the new superpowered Master, or whatever other plot point, makes no sense whatsoever, can we just wait one week to find out if that's actually true?

The End of Time Part One is an episode that - gasp! - raises more questions than it answers. For me that's a huge positive. Where on earth have the Time Lords been hiding all this time? What the hell is going on with the Master? Are the Silver Cloak way more than they appear? Who's that white-haired woman then? Can Donna possibly survive this one? Can the human race possibly survive this one?

I for one can't wait to find out. This could be the best cliffhanger of the whole RTD era, given the disappointingly cheaty resolution of the one at the end of The Stolen Earth...

Captain Quirk

We are halfway through Planet of Evil in our occasional Tom Baker chronological rewatch and... well, we're certainly enjoying it, but is this the most Star Trek-like episode ever? An isolated planet quite literally on the final frontier, a scientist there who's behaving a little oddly, a Federation, sorry Morestran, starship turning up to investigate, a jungle created in the studio and an alien menace made of pure energy to save money.

The Hinchcliffe era is often lauded as a high point - if not THE high point - of Doctor Who, but approximately halfway in I'm not sure if it really deserves that sort of immunity from criticism. What it has, in spades, is a sort of grim and gritty hyper-seriousness. The situations are deadly, the bodies keep piling up, and while the Fourth Doctor has a clownish streak there's never the slightest hint of him not being in desperate earnest about the predicaments he finds himself in. (How that would all change under Hinchcliffe's successor...)

The charming, bumbling Harry Sullivan has now been removed from the TARDIS lineup, and it's interesting how much harder-edged that immediately makes the show. That this era's Doctor is a big fan of humanity as a species is a matter of record - see the famous eulogy from Ark in Space - but in Season 13 it's starting to become obvious he no longer cares much about humans as individuals. I criticized the most recent episode of Sarah Jane Adventures, The Gift, for Sarah's xenophobia and throwaway callousness towards the Blathereen, but watching Planet of Evil it's easy to see where she got it from. The Doctor professes to be actively tempted to hop into the TARDIS and leave the entire Morestran crew to die, if it wasn't for the small matter of the entire universe being endangered.

We'll see more evidence that this most alien of Doctors feels little empathy for individual humans as the season goes on. He does seem to be fiercely protective of Sarah, of course, where he mostly just verbally abused Harry for being an idiot. I wonder how much of the early dynamic of the new series arose from RTD's love for this era (apparently the man's favorite ever story is Ark in Space). The Ninth Doctor's unswerving devotion to Rose ("I could save the world but lose you!") while constantly belittling "Mickey the idiot" is very Season 12. Of course, Sarah's exit at the end of The Hand of Fear is the proof of the pudding when it comes to the Fourth Doctor's alienness. Of course she matters to him, but he's not of her world, don't try to understand or second-guess his feelings, one day out of the blue he's just going to show her the door.

Anyway, back to grimness and grit: a lot of old school fans want and need that out of their Who. That and plenty of spaceships, aliens and scientific pseudobabble. "Real sci-fi" has a checklist of such approved elements, and takes them all VERY SERIOUSLY INDEED. (I imagine that devotees of the Hinchcliffe era were big fans of the recent Battlestar Galactica reboot too.) The enemies of "real sci-fi" are magical realism, metaphor, satire and silliness - hello the Sylvester McCoy era!

I've always felt that I disliked Eric Saward's mid-80s vision of Who above all others, but I suddenly find it easier to sympathize with him now that I realize that, in many ways, he was just trying to recreate Hinchcliffe Who. Lots of violence and death, heavy reliance on popular old foes to kick the era off, a clownish Doctor (in a literal clownsuit this time), and a certain humorlessness to the approach. You can imagine him being absolutely baffled about how, ten years later, this tack would lead the show not to critical adulation this time, but cancellation.

Myself, I like my Who as quirky and metaphorical as possible, and I'm glad that Russell T Davies kept those factors high in the new mix. Planet of Evil is all very well, but if I wanted a bunch of aggressive, unlikeable characters (the Doctor included) posturing for dominance, spouting clunky, po-faced dialogue and then being killed by a sentient outline, I might as well go watch 60s Trek. Hinchcliffe Who is so straight-down-the-line and serious, but is it actually that much fun? My personal jury's still out on that one, but I guess we have many of the recognized classics to come. Let's see if they can win me over...

Why Let Zygons Be Bygones?

Terror of the Zygons strikes me as a pretty average yarn, enlivened by some above-average moody direction by Douglas Camfield and... probably the best-designed aliens never to have made a return appearance in Doctor Who.

It's easy to forget how hard it is to create a truly iconic race of monsters for a show like Who. The Daleks and Cybermen came out of opposite ends of the Hartnell era. Troughton's tenure added only the Ice Warriors, not that they've been seen since the early 70s themselves. With Pertwee came nearly-classic foes the Silurians and the Sea Devils, and then the Sontarans... who are possibly the last great recurring baddie in 36 years.

When a monster is any kind of a hit with the general public, the tendency is to bring it back as quickly as possible. The Slitheen and Judoon are Russell T Davies' big attempts at "icon" rubber-suited aliens, and both have been modest successes, although their main comebacks have been in the Sarah Jane Adventures. The Ood were an even bigger success, and seem to be writing themselves firmly into the mythology of the modern show, even if they have a big drawback in the form of not being remotely villainous unless possessed by Satan himself. I've already hinted that I'd like to see more of the Flood, and Steven Moffat would be missing a trick if he didn't bring back his own scariest creations, the Weeping Angels, before too long.

So why has the Doctor never had a rematch with the Zygons? In terms of design, the whispering, bodysnatching octopoids were hit straight out of the park. The organic technology inside their spacecraft, all slimy nodules and veined, eyeball-like viewscreens, is a high watermark for the series. James Acheson, the costume designer, would go on to win three Oscars. Perhaps we have to blame the Skarasen, that deeply unconvincing refugee from Invasion of the Dinosaurs, for letting the side down - the Zygons do subsist on Skarasen milk, after all, so maybe it was contractual that one could not return without the other.

Or perhaps Who is already at saturation point for eternally returning villains with the Daleks, the Cybermen, and at a pinch the Sontarans. Once you get any more obscure than The Big Three, you run a big risk of alienating the non-fan audience and losing viewers; in the mid-80s, it was Eric Saward's obsession with arcane continuity (see Attack of the Cybermen et al) that almost scuttled the show for all time.

Which is very sad for the Zygons, the Ice Warriors, the Yeti and other great monster concepts that never quite made it into the Dalek and Cybermen's league. But I guess there's always Big Finish. And sometimes, just sometimes, against all the odds, they do get one more hour in the primetime sun - just ask the Macra.

Prosthetic Vogan Gents

With their bumpy prosthetic foreheads, their flowing white locks and their aggressive, militaristic attitude towards restoring the honor of their people (well, if Vorus is anything to go by), the Vogans resemble a certain warlike Star Trek race more than anything else we've ever seen in Who, before or since.

The one big difference? The Vogans live on a planet of gold, and adorn themselves and their dwelling-places with the stuff.

I hereby move that we should rechristen them... as the BLINGons.

Hey, there wasn't ever a showdown between the Klingons and the Borg in ST:TNG, was there? If there had been, I think there'd be a strong argument that the whole Star Trek relaunch might have been cribbed from a long-forgotten viewing of Revenge of the Cybermen, on some subconscious level...

Sigh-bermen

It is intensely frustrating to rewatch Season 12 and to find yourself enjoying Revenge of the Cybermen more than officially rubber-stamped classics like The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks; because for all that is good about it, you can't help but admit that those who think of it as the season's embarrassing clunker do have a case. And that case is the Cybermen themselves.

There is so much that is good about Revenge. The excellent reuse of the Nerva Beacon sets, the chilly and paranoid space-plague scenario, a pretty fair stab at an alien race in the Vogans. The supporting cast is great, even if Kevin Stoney's incredible face and presence is wasted under a ton of prosthetics. Kellman and Vorus make for interesting and contrasting villains, there are great setpieces like the Doctor escaping from Kellman's electrified room, and the grand finale of the story arc, with Nerva Beacon plunging down on a collision course with Voga, the Doctor and Sarah bound and helpless on the bridge, is the most ambitious and pulse-pounding moment of the Hinchcliffe era yet (certainly on paper). The underground sequences shot at Wookey Hole are awesomely atmospheric and the direction is generally top-notch. What's not to like?

Well, in many ways Revenge is the anti-Genesis. Genesis is a boring, derivative Terry Nation script that succeeds because it single-handedly revitalizes the Daleks by introducing the electrifying figure of Davros, their creator. Revenge is a tense, interesting (try to tell me that Vogans aren't infinitely more interesting than Thals!) Gerry Davis script that fails because, well, it ruins the Cybermen, so thoroughly and devastatingly that they still haven't recovered from it.

The Cybermen are my favorite Doctor Who monster. This despite the fact that many of their sixties episodes are lost; Tomb, when it turned up, was less good than its hype, and I don't like Invasion that much at all; Revenge and its 80s successors - well, I'll get to them; and the new series Cybermen have been ridiculous at worst, and second fiddles to the Daleks at best. I can only conclude that the Target novelizations had a considerable effect on me in my teens.

Because the idea of the Cybermen is great. Humans who have removed every part of themselves that makes them human and "weak", and want to carry out the same upgrades on everyone else they meet. I always tell ST:NG fans that the Borg are pretty cool and all, but they've got nothing on the Cybermen. But pointing to any episodes that might prove this has never been easy.

The Cybermen of Revenge, while they do look awesome, are a disgrace. Their leader displays a full gamut of human emotions, as you might well expect from a serial in which they're bent on "Revenge". They have no interest in cybernizing anyone, preferring to utilize humans in a variety of damnfool schemes that don't make any sense, and which Cybermen would doubtless perform more efficiently. Worst of all, Revenge is the story in which the Cybermen suddenly develop the most preposterous weakness since DC's Green Lantern was powerless in the face of the color yellow. Despite the fact that there is no reason at all that Cybermen should need or want to breathe, suddenly, for no apparent reason, gold is fatal to them if inhaled. I'd harp on about how nonsensical their plan to blow up gold-rich planetoids such as Voga is, but really, worse was to come in the 80s. I still have nightmares about droves of Cybermen dying in agony from being hit by gold coins fired by a teenage girl's catapult, and not in the good way.

I don't know why it has proved so difficult for generations of Who scribes and script editors to get the Cybermen right. Thankfully the gold weakness seems to have been scrapped for the 21st century, but they still can't seem to get the cold, implacable logic and the body horror right. When the Cybermen's most recent idea of a cunning plan is to build a giant Cyberman the size of a mountain and stomp Victorian London into smithereens with it, it's no surprise that they mostly need humans like Lumic and Miss Hartigan to do their thinking for them nowadays. It's a crying shame.

All the Cybermen need is one show in which their true potential and horror is realized, and they could take their rightful place as the scariest monsters in the Whoniverse. Unfortunately they haven't had anything close to that since the 1960s, unless you're a big fan of Earthshock, which I can't say I am. That Russell T Davies' team considered them only as cut-price Dalek substitutes was evident from their new catchphrase of "Delete! Delete! Delete!" - how unimaginative was that? But if someone would present them with the love they deserve again, as heartless, soulless metal vampires making the world more efficient one upgrade at a time, man, that'd be a story to watch. Come on Moffat! You can do it!

In the meantime, I still think Revenge is underrated in Season 12 because of its dodgy place in Cyber-history. Pretend they're not Cybermen or something, that the allergic-to-gold concept didn't send us on a horrible downward spiral that would end with the sickening crunch of Silver Nemesis, and I think you'll find a lot here to love. It's more full of ideas than anything else in Season 12, and somehow more fun. And if those aren't the things we ought to love Doctor Who for being, then what are?

Boys Boys Boys

Another good indication that Season 12 wants to get back to the Troughton era is the composition of the TARDIS crew: one male and one female companion. It's funny how we're now conditioned to think of the orthodox TARDIS complement as the Doctor plus one female companion: since Season 12, only the first half of John Nathan-Turner's tenure (Seasons 18-21) has deviated noticeably from this formula.

Back in 1975, such an orthodoxy wasn't even dreamed of yet. The black and white seasons of Doctor Who always had at least one male and one female companion, and quite often a fourth crew member of either sex just for good measure. Pertwee may have had only one, female TARDIS companion at any given time, but with a squad of beefy UNIT soldiers hanging around at all times, the testosterone levels were kept high. What an innovation it was to ditch Harry Sullivan at the end of the Zygon escapade and head off into the vast universe with just one eccentric Gallifreyan and one Earth girl for him to explain the plot to on board the ship! The series would barely ever look back from here.

I do kind of mourn the loss of male TARDIS crew members - and yes, I'm aware that New Who has flirted with the idea of them, with Mickey, Adam and of course Captain Jack. When the Doctor decided to leave the well-meaning but dim Harry at home, he unwittingly gave birth to a lot of the fundamentals of the 21st century series. The Doctor is now young(ish) and athletic enough to do his own fighting and stunts. He is also, on some level, sexually rather than just paternally motivated: see how much gentler the Fourth Doctor is with Sarah than Harry, and of course the most romantic Old Who story ever, City of Death. With a slimmed-down crew the focus can go onto the stories instead of the characters - well, actually that's something they reversed for the new series, writing in friends and families for the companions to help construct some rather elaborate personal development arcs. But when the Tenth Doctor and his lady friend of the hour zoom off to another planet, there's usually only two people for whom the writers have to find something relevant to do, which I'm sure must be a great relief with only 45 minutes or so to work with.

As I say, I find it a bit saddening that the Doctor took over the parts of action man and romantic lead in his show; there's nothing wrong with it per se, it just seems like an eccentric old man taking youngsters on semi-educational, semi-terrifying trips in time and space in his magic caravan is a more original premise than the intergalactic superhero with an adoring woman on his arm.

Oh well, nothing to worry about, even if Moffat looks set to cleave firmly to the one-hot-babe-companion rule with Amy Pond: Doctor Who is always amazing. Some days I just quite miss the likes of Harry and Jamie, Steven and Ian, that's all.

Johnny Reboot

I've been enjoying watching my way through Season 12 with Tessa, starting from The Ark In Space; probably the best launching-off point to introduce someone who only knows the new series to the delights of Old Who.

I don't think Season 12 is up there with the very best of the old show - it is a sad truncated thing of only 20 episodes, 4 of which are a hangover from the Pertwee era. There are a few almost unsurpassed gems of dialogue - you probably know the ones from Ark and Genesis that I mean - but the adventures themselves aren't exactly incandescently exciting. It doesn't help that each story has at least one pretty duff monster, robot or special effect liable to cause the unconverted to snigger at the shoddy production values of Seventies Who. (But what do they know?)

The real greatness of the season lies in the fact that it's such an obvious reboot of all the values of the show. After five years of UNIT family coziness, Hinchcliffe and Holmes whisk us as far away from our comfort zone as possible, into the far future and the chilly reaches of outer space. Even the TARDIS, that trusty, impenetrable sanctuary from evil, is absent for the bulk of the season. The stories are littered with dead or frozen bodies, while the living are in constant fear of torture, irradiation, or plague. It's bleak dystopian sci-fi with a vengeance, leavened only by the Doctor's cheerful faith in the indomitable spirit of mankind. And even that would start to be whittled away in seasons to come, as the Fourth Doctor's alienness was played up more and more.

A conscious effort seems to have been made to bring the show back, if not exactly to its first roots, at least to the Troughton era. Genesis remakes the Daleks in a new image, that of Davros, just as Power and Evil had repurposed the Daleks to David Whitaker's thoughtful specifications. The return of Gerry Davis writing a Cyber-story is obviously a huge clue that the Second Doctor's era was uppermost on everyone's mind and, hell, maybe we can even claim that the intervention of the Time Lords in the Doctor's affair at the start of Genesis harks back to The War Games. Certainly Holmes and Hinchcliffe must have been interested in investigating the mystery of the Doctor's people, as The Deadly Assassin was not too far in our future...

I'm excited, then, to see how Steven Moffat reboots the show for 2010. A lot of people have been "like, whatever" about the decision to brand Matt Smith's first season "Series One" instead of "Series Five", but I'm filled with excitement by that news. It implies that they won't necessarily play it safe, with more of the Russell T Davies same, but might take us off to unsuspected new dramatic territories, might place a whole new spin on the Whoniverse. It's been done before, and some very highly regarded seasons have resulted (only the forced drastic revamp of the show that was Season 24 has really earned the hatred of the fans, but Andrew Cartmel and company started hitting the mark pretty quickly after that).

I mean, really, none of us has any idea what the newborn Smith era might have in store for us. Isn't that exciting? Please, Mr Moffat, don't let us down.

The Continuity Trainspotter Strikes Again

I wonder if Rivesh Mantilax and Saruba Velak got home okay with their spaceship's mileometer missing? After all, it was still in Henry Van Statten's possession 57 years later. (The Roswell crash was also responsible for giving the world broadband, so Dalek informs us.)

Then again, it's possible that Dalek exists in a continuity parallel universe from the Tennant era, given that it's 2012 and no one knows what the "Metaltron" is, despite the planet having been absolutely swarming with Daleks by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, according to subsequent episodes. Or maybe Van Statten and his staff were all on that Spanish scuba diving holiday with Donna Noble?

Oh No! It's The Pathetic Daleks!

In a bid to understand the Daleks better, I finally sat down to watch all seven episodes of their Season 1 debut, "The Dead Planet", "The Mutants", "The Daleks", whatever you personally choose to call it. And I must say, while it's a little unfair that I've chosen to name this post after the Viz comic strip "The Pathetic Sharks", I don't think it's absurdly off base.

Compare the Daleks of their preliminary outing to the terrifying monster we meet in "Dalek" in 2005, and... well, they do look the same, and the word "exterminate" is at the forefront of their vocabulary. But apart from that, nothing much in common at all.

The Daleks of "The Daleks" are a sorry bunch, all told. Sickly, dependent radiation and static electricity addicts, they mercilessly paralyze Ian's legs on first meeting him, and also gun down the Thal leader after his speech about peace and cooperation (boo! hiss!) but other than that they are easily bested in a fight by even the weakest humanoids throwing rocks at them, or just grabbing them and spinning them around. In fact these Daleks seem much more suited to bringing the Doctor and his companions trays of refreshments - they do this several times - than conquering the universe. By the end of the story, they have been wiped out by a tribe of pacifists, an old man and a couple of girls, thus meeting the first, and most ignoble, of their something like five "final ends" in the history of the programme so far.

So there's an obvious disconnect between Daleks as we think of them now, 46 years of mythologizing later, and how they appeared in their historic first outing. But this is Who Positive, so let's not be too quick to write off these proto-Daleks as a joke. History relates that they were an overnight sensation with the Great British Public, that Dalekmania swept the nation and that we'd get 13 episodes of Daleks a year until Evil of the Daleks declared that it was time for the poor dears to have a rest. So what was so great about them?

Well, first of all, the fact that they look pretty much identical both in 1963 and 2009 (in contrast to the Cybermen, whose appearance has been reworked for pretty much every story, never mind every era) should tell you that the design is a stone-cold, knocked-straight-out-of-the-park classic. There is a non-negligible possibility that Terry Nation owed his entire career to Ray Cusick, in much the same way that George Lucas arguably only got where he is today thanks to Ralph McQuarrie. Look at any other Nation-created Who monster and the less said the better, really: the Voord and the Kraals, anyone?

But to give the man his due, there is something about the original concept of the Daleks... even if it's very little to do with the Daleks as we know them today. The idea of a post-apocalyptic race so hideously mutated that they scoot around inside travel machines rather than expose themselves to public view: that's quirky enough that it's actually rather good. And I think what we see in the adventure - Ian getting inside a Dalek shell and wandering around impersonating one - does bear out the theory that, initially, the Daleks were just wizened little gnomes riding around in futuristic, heavily armed and armored bicycles. Did I just call that "rather good"? I'm upgrading it to full-blown genius.

The rest of the story, after the creepy tension of the first couple of episodes before we know who is out there in the city and jungle respectively, is sadly pants. The Thals turn out to be "perfect" blond-haired and blue-eyed specimens that Susan and Barbara are quickly crushing madly over. The "hideous" Daleks naturally seethe with hate for anything that is not like them. All the women are passive, and present solely to be protected by and fawn over the men; Ian is an unpleasant he-man who persuades the Thals from their pacifist ideals by manhandling one of their females.

Kudos to William Emms for subverting this silly scenario with his much sharper Galaxy Four script two years later, where the ugly aliens are benevolent, the beautiful ones are hostile, the women are shrewd and aggressive, and the male companion (Steven this time) nearly comes a cropper thanks to letting his chivalry/libido do his thinking for me. Needless to say, Galaxy Four languishes in the bottom 20% of DWM's recent "Mighty 200" poll, while The Daleks makes it into the top 20%. It's a bit lame; but of course fandom is notoriously intolerant of anything that smacks of even affectionate send-up - witness the generally low regard in which the ingenious Cartmel era is held, and modern episodes such as Love & Monsters - and besides, no one's ever seen or can remember seeing Galaxy Four.

So, once again, we have a story that seems highly rated more due to its historical importance than any intrinsic merit of its script. In it we see the first (and greatest) alien race and planet in Doctor Who, but also the first deeply unconvincing romance between a female member of the TARDIS crew and an alien; once the historicals were phased out due to lack of public interest, this would be the main blueprint for Doctor Who for the next twentysomething years. The fact that it's nowhere near as good as the criminally underrated The Tribe of Gum on one side and Marco Polo on the other is neither here nor there: thanks to the runaway success of the genocidal pepperpots themselves, their debut story, flaws and all, became a lasting template for "real Doctor Who".

And to give Nation his due, he certainly knows how to keep a six- or seven-parter packed with incident. Escapes, ambushes, expeditions, ordeals, rescues: not only did he include them all, he nabbed them for his individual episode titles, thus probably precipitating the shortage that would result in them being phased out within a couple of years. It's all faintly adorable boy's own adventure hokum from a more innocent time, and certainly a fabulous way of spending a couple of hours. It's got the first ever, hilariously useless Daleks in it, and a splendidly selfish and conniving First Doctor, and plenty of hunky Thal boys with posh British accents, perfectly coiffed hair and ridiculous trousers. In short, camp as Christmas, and I may not be entirely sure to this day why British telly-watchers took it to their hearts, I'm certainly glad they did.

RIP Terry Nation. They certainly don't write 'em like they used to.

Dream A Little Dream Of Me

I really enjoyed Dreamland, for a lot of different reasons. First, it arrived with relatively little fanfare, but it made for such a nice bonus in this droughty year for Who; stacked up together, the six parts are basically one extra full-length episode, and while thirteen or fourteen per year are much of a muchness, I'll take six "specials" over five any time.

And then, of course, is the fact that it's so different from everything else we've been getting lately. Dreamland is a romp, one last bit of fun for Doctor number Ten. This is huge in a year which has all been doom and gloom, even in Torchwood (could Children of Earth have been any more of a downer?) and Sarah Jane Adventures (well, it was a bit miz when Sarah found and lost the human love of her life, anyway). Planet of the Dead would have qualified as fun... if they hadn't tacked all that "your song is ending soon" foreboding onto the end.

But Dreamland dispensed with all of that emo stuff; the Doctor didn't see fit to warn his temporary companions that hanging around with him could only result in misery and death, and by the way did he mention that he recently lost all the people he ever liked or love? And the adventure was much better for it. A potent reminder that, despite the maudlin tendencies of the RTD era, Doctor Who doesn't have to wallow in angst to work.

I loved the fact that, even though the individual episodes were about five minutes long, the script wasn't afraid to pile on the complication, with about half a dozen different factions running around: the Viperox, the robot MIBs, the US military, the Grays, the Skorpius flies, the Indians... At first I was a bit unimpressed that Jimmy's relatives were so uniformly strong, noble and generous - it's a bit of a predictable reading of American indigenous peoples, especially when you have a boo-hiss evil US military nearby for contrast, but it actually turned out to be appropriate.

And here's why: the real triumph of Dreamland was that, despite being a "throwaway" piece of animation, it didn't skimp on the sound moral principles that are the bedrock of the very greatest Doctor Who. The Indians were straightforwardly good guys, but then, suddenly, miraculously, everyone turned out to be good guys. General Stark, despite initially appearing to be a textbook Dr Strangelove nutter, was capable of seeing reason. Even the Viperox, and this is surreptitiously a real punch-the-air great Doctor Who moment, are spared from eradication because one day they'll evolve into something wonderful. I was complaining in my last post that Genesis of the Daleks wimps out after the amazing "Have I the right?" speech. Yes, decides the Doctor fifteen minutes later, he does have that right, and back he heads to murder some Dalek babies. In Dreamland the Doctor regains the moral high ground that he never should have lost at the end of Genesis.

I can't end this review without mentioning the amazing voice work of David Warner as Lord Azlok: the man has been an acting hero of mine since I was a small child and saw his portrayal of Evil in Time Bandits. His association with audio Who is quite extensive, I believe, and I only wish they'd put him back in the main show, age permitting: wouldn't he make the ideal next Master? He's younger than Derek Jacobi at the very least...

But I'll let the last word go to the best dialogue we've heard in Doctor Who since... ooh, I don't know when. "Always count your steps, Seruba Velak. You never know when you'll need to escape in a box." If that isn't some top-of-the-line, A-grade Doctor Who dialogue then I don't know what is. I've had my doubts about him from time to time, but: good work, Phil Ford. You did a fantastic job on this.

Genesis of the Overrated?

According to the DWM "Mighty 200", Genesis of the Daleks is currently considered the third greatest Who story of all time, behind only The Caves of Androzani and new series flagship Blink. I had the pleasure of rewatching it a few days ago, and while it's certainly great Doctor Who, can it really be said to live up to its hype?

Yes, it has some incredible features. Davros is one of the greatest villains in Who history, perhaps the only one that can give the Master a run for his money. He is visually almost as much of a triumph as the Daleks were back in 1963, a genuinely repulsive living corpse in a wheelchair, immobile but for one greenish, dessicated claw. He's the original and best half-human half-Dalek, eons before modern pretenders like Dalek Sec. His dialogue too is phenomenal, the highlight being his musing over whether, given a virus that would wipe out every lifeform in the universe, he would unleash it: "Such power would set me up above the gods!"

The atmosphere is pretty strong as well, with gas-masked figures stalking a devastated warzone, or even more creepily, their dead bodies propped up in the trenches to give the illusion of armed resistance to the enemy. The bunker too is effectively grim and claustrophobic, and for once the bare minimalism of Doctor Who corridors seems appropriate to the setting, rather than a budgetary limitation.

But it seems to me that things fall off pretty quickly beyond this. The script is standard Terry Nation boilerplate, with cardboard cutout characters doing idiotic things, which don't seem to have logical repercussions. Only Davros has the remotest shred of actual character: the rest might as well be mannequins with "goodie" or "baddie" felt-tipped onto their foreheads. Even Nyder, majestically played by Peter Miles as the apotheosis of thin-lipped, bureaucratic evil, has no scripted features other than his loyalty to Davros. Even one line hinting at why he thinks it a good idea to help an obvious megalomaniac psychopath destroy all other life on the planet would have been welcome, but no. (One of the dissenting Kaled soldiers towards the end of the story has a Davros-designed pacemaker keeping his heart ticking, but even that's not enough to keep him on Team Let's Create An Amoral Killing Machine; so what's the story with Nyder?)

I won't bother getting TOO worked up about the Giant Cave Clams, which are well up there in the Monster Hall of Shame with the rat from Talons and the magma beast from Caves, since the occasionally really dodgy costume or prop is part of the fun of old Who; but the scene in which the Doctor and companions jump over these sad, completely motionless bits of polystyrene and then utter some immortal line to the effect of "lucky they're not very fast" is a bit of a low point. Likewise let's not dwell on any of the duff cliffhangers, for example Sarah free-falling from the rocket to certain death, and then being a little bit dazed on a miraculous ledge the following week. No, the problem with Genesis is that it's all classic capture-and-escape nonsense, with nothing to differentiate itself from any other Terry Nation script... until Davros blazes into view.

How much of Davros' dialogue is Terry Nation's and how much was cunningly interpolated by script editor extraordinaire Robert Holmes is, I think, open to some debate. Certainly great speeches such as "Have I the right?" have a Holmesian feel, but there's plenty of typically wooden Nation dialogue doing the rounds too, and for my money there is nowhere as near much sparkle on display here as we got in, say, The Ark In Space a few weeks earlier.

And indeed it does feel that the great moments are constantly being dragged back down to the bog-standard business. The Doctor may agonize over the morality of suffocating the Daleks in their crib at first, but five minutes later he's striding back, without a qualm in his mind, to finish the job. A great letdown in my opinion. Couldn't he have shown himself nobler than the Time Lords, the Kaleds and Thals, the audience? Instead of just temporarily (and disastrously) indecisive?

So why, if there's a lot to be ambivalent about in Genesis, is it destined to be in the top 10 Who stories of all time for ages to come? Well, not wishing to belabor the point, but Davros really is fantastic, so much so that we won't another Dalek story without him center stage for the next 30 years. And even Russell T Davies eventually caved and brought him back to New Who, despite that not really making an awful lot of sense. (But hey, "Journey's End" was one big Whovian carnival parade, sense wasn't at the top of the agenda.) If I had to vote for the best villain of all time, I think it would be the deranged Kaled scientist. Genesis is so much "Davros's story" that it's hard to separate the two things out.

By introducing Davros, Genesis really did change the course of Doctor Who history. Probably no other story has had such an influence on the 2005 show: in it, we see the first salvo fired in the Time War, and the first manifesto, I suspect, for the Daleks being the ultimate force for evil in the universe, as opposed to just another (literally) tinpot race of conquering aliens. I think Davros's fruitless plea "Have pity!" to his creations in Genesis is as unsubtle as a brick through the television, and completely out of character too; but I couldn't help shivering when it resonated down the ages in Rob Shearman's episode Dalek, as the captive Metaltron pleads to the Doctor with the very same words.

Dalek, yeah, I think that's a better Dalek story than Genesis. I think Remembrance is too, and I could well go with Master Plan, the White Album of Dalek stories, uneven though it may be. But are any of them more important than Genesis? Hell no. And that's why I think it's great that these six episodes of riveting Davros showcase (shame about the rest of the plot) can still be found amongst all authoritative lists of the ten greatest Who stories of all time. Long may it stay there.

Fandom, I'm Disappointed In You

Rewatching Genesis of the Daleks (overrated, I felt, but not massively so) a horrible yet strangely persuasive thought struck me. But a quick play with Google revealed my fears to be thankfully unfounded.

Can you believe, given the legions of shippers out there, that you don't get one single hit if you search for "Davrotica"?

The Times They Are A-Changin'

If you want evidence of the different regard that Doctor Who is held in these days, you only need to look at Radio times covers through the decades.

For the first eleven seasons, Doctor Who gets one cover per year, to remind people that it's on again and they should watch it. And then... one cover, to celebrate the 20th anniversary special, and that's it till 1993. One cover in all the final 15 years of old Who's run! The show had become a fixture, completely taken for granted.

After the cancellation, of course, everyone kind of missed it now that it was gone, and there are 4 nostalgic covers over the 16 year period that the show is off air. Then the show comes back and in its first year gets 3 generic TARDIS or Dalek covers, presumably because actually showing Chris Eccleston's ugly mug might put people off.

And then David Tennant comes on board, the show is pronounced a smash success, a phenomenon, the nation's favourite programme. By my quick calculation there have been more Radio Times covers in the Tennant era than there have been in the entire rest of the history of the show put together.

The ratings and the AI figures these days are of course astonishingly good. One wonders if the enthusiasm with which the Great British Public has taken this once-so-neglected genre television programme to its heart will endure, or if the fickle winds of fashion will change direction once again. Obviously I'm hoping that the show's current awesome popularity remains constant into the Moffat era and beyond, but hmm, can Matt Smith possibly compete with his photogenic predecessor in the monopolizing the RT cover stakes? Time will tell.

As An Era Nears Its End...

People are already murmuring about David Tennant being one of the most iconic, Doctorish Doctors ever. I suppose that's fair, the lad's done a great job. But let's bear in mind that he's the first actor since Tom Baker left in 1981 (a lifetime ago! Matt Smith wasn't even BORN then!) to have had a really substantial amount of time to win people over. Davison, Colin Baker, McCoy, McGann and Eccleston, fabulous Doctors all, but if you were an average member of the British viewing public you could easily have blinked and missed any one of them.

I loved what Russell T Davies did with the first season of his show. Not only was it a fabulously original re-envisioning of the Doctor as a post-traumatic war veteran, it attacked the cliches of the old show from all sides, brought Doctor Who into real three dimensional existence at last. Look at all the questions RTD's episodes ask and answer: wouldn't a companion and a Doctor start to develop romantic feelings for one another? Don't companions ever have families and boyfriends and things that they love and miss? How come when the Doctor whisks random youngsters off for adventures in time and space they're so invariably suitable for the job, don't any of them ever fail to come up to snuff? Does the Doctor's meddling ever create disastrous repercussions throughout the timelines? Do monsters have feelings too? (Love and Monsters, later on, feels like another item in this series: what happens to the little people whose lives the Doctor touches, once he's off on his next adventure?)

Obviously, from Series Two onwards, RTD dialed back the number of episodes he was writing each year, assigning himself the duties of introducing each new companion, creating a suitably festive romp for each Christmas special, and writing an even more ultimately apocalyptic and Earth-shattering season finale each year than the last one. So now we're on the verge of getting some kind of overarching perspective on Doctor Ten's reign, what do its questions and themes seem to be?

At this point, with Waters of Mars still fresh in everyone's minds, we're all wondering if Ten is doing some kind of reverse Six: starting off quite sweet, and then ending up a mad, ranting, angsting megalomaniac whose only remaining option is to regenerate. We'll see how that arc ends up in a month.

The other cohesive thread that seems to bind Ten's three-and-a-half seasons together is... his relationship with women. Yes indeed, Ten is the playboy Doctor. Not content to have gotten into sexy relationships with Madame de Pompadour, Joan Redfern, Queen Elizabeth the First and River Song (well, sort of), each of this Doctor's seasons has centered around his relationship with a different woman. Rose is the one he loves and trusts implicitly, who's always been there for him... and he loses her. Martha is the one who wants to be everything Rose was to him, but he's too wounded and wrapped up in himself to be able to see it, so she gives up on him... and he loses her. Donna's the one who he neither wants or is wanted by him, finally he's got a good functional relationship with a female... and he loses her. And now we have the pseudo-season of No Companion, Period: he can flirt with the likes of Lady Christina, but there's no way anyone's getting through the doors of the TARDIS now or ever again.

So basically the Tennant era, 2005-2010 has, boy-girl relationships as its keynote. And - I'm strangely reminded of the plot of recent indie video game hit Braid here - those relationships are deeply dysfunctional. Female companions, can't live with them, can't live and are forced to regenerate without them; I can't help but wonder which members of the scriptwriting team may have been deeply scarred by failed relationships in their past.

Nine was horribly traumatized by war, Ten by being unable to hold down relationships. I dunno, maybe the angst is a fundamental part of the show's new school appeal, but maybe it'd be nice if Matt Smith could be a basically carefree, optimistic, happy-go-lucky young/old Time Lord, at least for a while? It worked for (most of) the first 26 years, after all...

Doctor In Need

I suspect the intention was to show something upbeat, so as not to harsh the jolly vibe of Children in Need... but wow, that only barely qualified, and then only if you weren't paying much attention.

The Tenth Doctor puts on a brave face, but from the look of things he's positively sick with fear. The forced jollity drains right out of his voice, becomes something tight and uncomfortable, when he brings the subject matter round to what's actually on his mind: his song is ending soon.

Worst of all, and kudos to sharper eyed people than me for spotting this, is what the Doctor says upon making his unfunny "I locked it like a car" joke. "Funny? No? Little bit?" Word for word the same as the Master, just before he gasses the British cabinet in The Sound of Drums. It's not a stretch to believe that the Doctor is starting to turn into his arch-nemesis, not any more. What is a "Time Lord Victorious" but a Master? Also, Ten's leering innuendo about devirginising Good Queen Bess doesn't seem a million miles away from John Simm lurching around the Valiant groping and French kissing Lucy Saxon; New Who doesn't (at least let's hope) equate heterosexuality with evil, but the flaunting of heterosexual promiscuity was certainly one of the completely-off-the-rails Master's key traits in Last of the Time Lords.

To be honest, after these painful few minutes I'm not sure I'll miss Tennant's Doctor as much as I might have hoped. He's turned into a bit of an irritating idiot, and for what reason? Ultimately, because he fell in love with Rose and then couldn't be with her; a plotline that became increasingly unconvincing as he first rejected the infinitely more attractive and resourceful Martha, and then it turned out that Rose was going to escape from her parallel universe and come visit him at least once a year anyway.

I'm not even convinced by all this "Phosphorus Carousel of the Great Magellan Gestalt" business: frankly, every time RTD attempts to describe the infinite wonders of the Doctor's universe, it invariably sounds to me like a discounted weekend away break at Eurodisney. The pink lei and the sunhat would seem to bear this out: not content with holding a candle for Rose, the Doctor's started to holiday in a chavvy style too, booze cruises and wet T-shirt contests on the Costa del Sol. Here's hoping we get back to a Doctor with the capacity to be a bit more dignified and majestic soon.

Happy Birthday To Who

I suppose I can't let this day go by without wishing a very happy 46th birthday to the greatest show in the galaxy. Here's to 46 more!

I myself was born somewhere in between Planet of the Spiders Part 6 and Robot Part 1, which I suppose makes me almost 7 Doctors old. All being well, my daughter is going to be born somewhere between The End of Time Part 2 and Matt Smith's debut. I wonder if there'll still be Doctor Who when she's 45 going on 46? Will she, or her children, be eagerly anticipating the last few adventures of the Twentieth Doctor?

One thing's for sure, if there's any TV show that has the capacity to go on forever, Doctor Who might just be that show. Forty-six years and showing no signs at all of running out of steam. Bravo, Doctor.

Never Invite A Gift Horse Round For Dinner

The problem with Sarah Jane Adventures series 3 closer, The Gift, wasn't so much that it was terrible or anything... more that for a long time, most of the first episode, it looked as though it might be really good.

The Slitheen are a funny old monster. After vying with the Daleks for being the Ninth Doctor's signature foe in New Who Series One, it seems as though they might have been deemed a bit too kiddie-oriented for the mothership, and bequeathed to Sarah Jane instead. (Let's hope they never find their way onto Torchwood, as I just don't want to know what a notorious pansexual like Jack would find to do with a farting alien in a fatsuit.)

I didn't hate the Slitheen in Aliens of London/World War Three, despite the questions they raised about Russell T Davies' taste levels - the core concept is, after all, so crass that Hollywood has since spoofed it, in the "Fatties Fart 2" trailer in Tropic Thunder. And I actively warmed to them after Boom Town, when RTD brilliantly used Blon Fel-Fotch Slitheen to ask the question, are the monsters in Who people too?

So I was hoping for good things for most of episode one. In the first five minutes, a typically absurd Slitheen moneymaking plot is foiled... by the intervention of two new Raxacoricofallapatorians, the Blathereen, who have every appearance of being good guys. This seems canonically reasonable: we know that the Slitheen family are bad apples on their own planet, an exception rather than the rule. Leaf and Tree Blathereen come over for dinner, and despite displaying "humorously" disgusting table manners, are gracious enough to present Sarah Jane with a gift: an alien plant that will solve the problem of world hunger on Earth for once and all.

After the Blathereen depart, the regulars argue: Rani (increasingly the most impressive member of the gang) wants to trust them, Clyde is prejudiced against disgusting aliens and doesn't. Sarah Jane's head wants to trust the Blathereen, but her intuition tells her that there's something fishy going on. Mr Smith's scan detects nothing problematic about the Rackweed, so they keep it in the house - and then the following morning the plant releases a cloud of spore which make Luke very ill indeed...

And at this point this could still have been a great story. We are told that the Rackweed spores lead to coma and death for those that might stand in the way of their propagation. How interesting would it have been if they'd infected Luke for some reason related to him being a creation of the Bane? Sarah Jane would have had to choose between ending world hunger... or saving her own son. Of course there'd be no contest, and the "gift" of the title would not have been a no-effort get-out-of-jail-free card for the human race, but her child; it would have been a perfect contrast to the tragic climax of Torchwood: Children of Earth earlier this year.

But no, the spores are going to end all life on earth as we know it. The Blathereen turn out to be close relatives of, and basically indistinguishable from, the Slitheen. With all potential moral dilemmas now avoided, the story can be resolved and the villains dispatched in a completely standard and unmemorable way. Ho hum.

There were a few other little things to be annoyed about: after Clyde suddenly turned out to be a brilliant artist for the purposes of last week's Mona Lisa episode, it was gratingly noticeable that he suddenly turned out to be an excellent cook for this one. Fine, Clyde's a renaissance man, I have no problem with that, except that it's blatantly obvious that he's REALLY just a place that lazy writers turn to for cheap plot hooks. Would it be too much to ask them to find something for underused unearthly genius Luke to do for a change, instead?

Even more disappointing, for me, was the final showdown with the Blathereen. Sarah Jane gives them one chance to reform their wicked ways; "no, we love being evil!" the pantomime villains cackle; and so Sarah blows them up. This is (a) quite boring, because it's exactly the same exchange as the Tenth Doctor traditionally enacts, q.v. the Sycorax leader in The Christmas Invasion, and (b) troubling, because it undoes all the good work Boom Town did in showing us that mercy is never wasted, not even on an incorrigible Slitheen recidivist.

I hope the writers aren't buying into the idea that Ten is some kind of shining paragon in the how-to-deal-with-aliens stakes, because I'd personally class him as a dangerously unstable egotist, bordering on the psychopathic. And after Sarah Jane only "almost" having sympathy for the Mona Lisa trapped in painted solitary confinement for eternity - shades of Sister of Mine in her mirror, at the end of Family of Blood - I'm worried they're bringing her right down to his level.

It just feels like lazy writing to set up an interesting, problematic scenario, and then reduce it to something simple and one-dimensional, conveniently just in time for the denouement. Remember The Unquiet Dead, also from Eccleston's first season? Alien asylum seekers come to Victorian London... but in order to survive they need to borrow human corpses to walk around in. That's a bona fide moral dilemma - but wait, it turns out the aliens are completely evil and want to eat the entire human race, so it's fine to let them die after all, roll credits.

As such, I'd label The Gift one of the largest disappointments of what has been, overall, the best series of Sarah Jane Adventures yet, despite having the fabulous Alice Troughton in the director's chair. I'd rank the six stories, from best to worst, as follows:

1. The Mad Woman in the Attic
2. The Eternity Trap
3. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith
4. Mona Lisa's Revenge
5. The Gift
6. Prisoner of the Judoon

Here's hoping that Series 4 has no problems getting greenlit - there's plenty of life in the old girl yet...

Love and Monsters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzXotzG-6Oo

I literally cannot get enough of this song, and the video isn't half bad either.

I do feel it's based on one of those charming misconceptions about Doctor Who that has, through the power of anecdote, become accepted by the general public as fact. A prime example of this is the notion of "wobbly sets" - as Toby Hadoke points out in his great Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf routine, he's watched every extant episode of Doctor Who at least two or three times and a set actually wobbles once or maybe twice.

Likewise, the idea that the Who girls were anything but strong, independent women. I think there's one companion from the Seventies that you can remotely level that accusation towards and that's Jo Grant, who admittedly did grace the show for a good long stretch, three years. For the other two-thirds of the 70s though we had Liz Shaw, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela, and two Romanas, all of whom spoke their minds and gave the Doctor as good as they got. And yet Mitch Benn can still cash in on the urban myth that Who girls were just there to look pretty, scream and get captured. (See also "Fiona" in Victoria Wood's late 80s Doctor Who skit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tbe3W6hWyw)

Tell you what though, I bumped into someone in Seattle last year who, when the topic of Doctor Who came up somehow, launched into the following, seemingly in no way tongue-in-cheek, anecdote: he claimed that 70s Doctor Who, being prior to the age of political correctness, regularly saw Tom Baker's Doctor refer to his favorite sweets not as jelly babies but as n****r babies; allegedly this had been dubbed back for modern repeats and DVD releases. Of course this must be nonsense: there was such an un-PC licorice or chocolate sweet back in the early parts of the 20th century, but even if it was okay to bring them up on 70s TV, and it wasn't, you'd never mistake a jelly baby for one!

Now whether or not The Talons of Weng-Chiang is offensively racist, that's still up for discussion, but still... I think we can see the importance of judging Old Who based on its actual merits, not how the public seems to remember it. Because they remember it in very strange ways indeed!

Knock Knock Knock Knock

My current theory for what "he will knock four times" means?

I think the Tenth Doctor will tell that knock-knock joke twice over the course of the next two specials. You know, the one we all thought was so hilarious in the playground, aged about 8:

Knock knock!
Who's there?
Doctor.
Doctor Who?
Exactly.

Riddle Me This...

If, under extreme provocation, the Time Lords are willing to authorize the Doctor to go back in time and wipe out the Daleks at the moment of their genesis...

And if Adelaide Brooke is a fixed point in time, who must be inspired by a Dalek to go to Mars where she will die and inspire her granddaughter Susie Fontana Brooke to go the the stars, and whose timeline must not be interfered with under any circumstances...

Then how many million years of power does it take for a civilization to be really corrupt?

Presumably the Time Lords were so keen to smother the Daleks in their cradle because they had an inkling that that race might, one day, be strong enough to bring down Gallifrey itself in a devastating Time War. But really, the difference between the Doctor and his people? He interferes with the timelines because he can't bear to stand by and watch people die. They do it to protect their own skin.

Dammit, Gadget

Has there ever been a dafter climax to a pre-title-sequence in all of New Who? The Doctor turns and his eyes widen in horror... as he's confronted by an exceptionally silly robot saying "gadget gadget" at him.

Given that, about a minute after the title sequence, we get the moment when Andy turns around to reveal he's turned into a hideous water zombie, I'd have thought they could have moved things around a bit for increased dramatic impact.

Wet Wet Wet

I'm writing this on a very soggy Monday morning in Victoria indeed... and I'm definitely not going outside until it's dry.

The Waters of Mars wasn't perfect, but I do think it was damn good, and definitely worth the six month wait. Some people had been agitating for an airdate of Hallowe'en, on the grounds that this was obviously "the scary one, but in the end November 15th was fine, because it wasn't really about the chills, was it? They were just window dressing to the main plot, the one about the Laws of Time.

No disrespect to the Flood, who were a superbly horrifying monster. Can I be among the first to suggest that they should make a return appearance, sometime in the next few years? However, I agree completely with my wife, who turned to me about halfway through and pronounced, "this isn't nearly as scary as Blink". Part of the problem was that we'd seen most of the big shudder moments already, in the trailers, leaving as far as I can remember only Maggie's transformation scene to unexpectedly chill our blood. The main issue though was that, with so much time and dialogue being devoted to the Doctor's inability to alter fixed history, there wasn't too much room left for terror and suspense.

Full marks to RTD for finally clearing up a question that has been hanging over the show since 1964, when the First Doctor insisted to Barbara "you can't rewrite history! Not one line!" For a long time it seemed as though history there just meant "the subject as studied in Earth schools in the late 20th century", and that deposing dictators and toppling empires was entirely kosher as long as it took place on alien worlds or in the future. At last though we have confirmation that some events are fixed, some aren't, and Hartnell just had a predisposition for taunting his bleeding-heart liberal companions by taking them to unpleasant moments in history that have to stand.

Things I liked about this episode: the production values and acting were top-notch, and Graeme Harper did his usual solid directing job, realizing the importance of turning the lights off for the scary bits. (Witness how comparatively lame Steffi's transformation is compared to the others, because no justification can be found for doing it in the half-light.) Mars looked better than Dubai, sorry, the Planet of the Dead, at presumably a fraction of the cost. "Bowie Base" was a good joke, and there were some classic soundbites, such as the impeccably delivered "the Doctor, Doctor, fun" and "are you the Doctor or the Janitor?"

Things I didn't like. Well, the crew. There seems to be an unwritten rule that the "crew" in any given episode set in the future will always be about the same number of people (half a dozen or so), with an appropriate diversity of genders and ethnicities. The problem being that, in an hour long episode with other things on its plate, there was only room to develop about 50% of them. Adelaide was fantastic of course, Ed defined himself economically by butting heads with his captain, Roman likes robots, Yuri has a gay brother and even Andy has his carrots. Unfortunately that left Steffi, Tarak and Mia with no discernible features apart from their nationalities. Particularly outrageous was where the Doctor made a song and dance about Mia being "only 27", moments after being introduced to Yuri (also 27), and Roman, the baby of the crew at 25. We can draw one of two conclusions from this: either the Doctor in this incarnation only really cares about attractive young girls (not entirely implausible at this stage), or that, in the absence of an actual character, they felt like they had to try and give Mia some remarkable feature, to wit being too young and pretty to die.

I was also miffed by the amount of time spent on shots of people running. Seriously, what was with all those corridors? Yes, they made Bowie look awesome in longshot, but you'd think it'd be blimmin' inconvenient over many years of running a base in actual practice. There was no room in the cargo for the dead weight of bikes, but miles of corridor material was deemed essential? I found myself wondering if the corridors were there as some kind of ironic statement, that "running down corridors is what futuristic Doctor Who is all about", in which case shame on you, Russell T Davies!

As I've said though, it turned out that the Flood and Bowie Base One were just a sideshow to the main issue, of what happens when the Tenth Doctor is confronted with a piece of timeline that he really can't change. We had a taster for this in The Fires of Pompeii: then, he refused to do anything, but Donna pleaded with him to make just a tiny difference, to save just a few. This time, again, he refuses to intercede, and again, Adelaide pleads with him for the lives of her crew. You'd think if he got away with it once, he could get away with it a second time... but apparently not.

I have to say, I loved the Doctor's constant struggle with his conscience at the beginning of the episode. He knows he should leave, knows that when things start taking a turn for the apocalyptic he might not be able to stop himself from rolling up his sleeves and wading in. The funny thing is, I think he's right to stay, and I think he's right to help, though it's a crying shame for Ed and Steffi and Ramon that it takes him so long to come to that conclusion. The Doctor doesn't look like a coward and he isn't a coward. How morally repugnant would it have been for him to keep walking away at the end, while he's listening to his helpless friends dying, one by one? That's the Time Lord way, but the entire series is founded on the principle that non-intervention is not the Doctor's way. I think the tragedy of the end of this episode is that what the Doctor does is completely, unarguably right. What use are laws, of time or otherwise, if all they do is cause innocents to suffer?

And although the timelines do change, Susie Fontana Brooke still goes to the stars. Is there an implication that this only still happens because Adelaide takes her own life? Perhaps. But I have to say, I was a bit shocked by the ingratitude of the survivors back on Earth. Yes, the Doctor should have taken them somewhere far away from the Solar System and 2059, instead of saying "in your face, Laws of Time". But it seems a bit unlikely that the universal reaction to a reprieve from certain death would be shock and outrage. Adelaide may be suffering from "a captain must go down with her ship" syndrome, but she begged the Doctor to help save her crew. She's known him for all of an hour and already she knows better than him about the immutability of the timelines... something which he explained to her in the first place? Granted, she could see the megalomania burning in his eyes in the last minutes on Bowie, she can tell he's going off the rails, but coming to the conclusion that she has to end her own life... well, I think that's RTD telling us, somewhat hamfistedly, that what the Doctor has done is Bad and Wrong, instead of it being any kind of logical thing for the character to do.

I liked that even a Dalek, with its presumable overriding urge to exterminate small defenseless humans, wasn't messing with the timeline of this one. I have to wonder - if the Doctor's screwing around with immutable Earth history somehow impacts on the Time War and brings Gallifrey back, and early indications are that this is a possibility - could the Daleks have been steering clear of Adelaide Brooke's timeline as a matter of priority? Though, as Davros's plan was to snuff out the entire universe, or something equally silly, I'm not sure that's entirely likely.

But yes, in the end, The Waters of Mars is good, because it addresses the issues that have been rankling with viewers for a while now. Isn't this increasingly messianic and Christ-like Doctor getting a bit too big for his boots? Isn't it a bit irritating that he can just point the sonic screwdriver at any problem nowadays and it fixes it? I would be pleased to believe that the increasing aura of omnipotence around the Doctor is not a matter of writers being too lazy to construct proper denouements, but a "Davies Masterplan" - an arc conceived from the start to illustrate the tragic theme of "pride comes before a fall".

"I went too far!" cries the Doctor, and yes he did. But he went too far for a lot of the right reasons, as well as a few of the wrong ones. "Just for once, everybody lives!" he crowed at the end of The Doctor Dances, and we cheered him on. But it's the fact that he's now trying to save too many people, too much of the time, that's going to be the end of him. And that is heartbreaking.

Web of Fear

While I wait with trembling anticipation to watch Waters of Mars...

It feels like Doctor Who has always provoked its most favorable reactions when it's been at its most scary. The phrase "behind the sofa" has become part of everyday language: I don't think anyone ever actually hides behind furniture to watch the show, but it's a pleasant urban myth that sometimes things get so scary that you might have to. The Troughton "base under siege" era has always been regarded as all-time classic Who, despite the episodes quite often not standing up to modern scrutiny, because it was pretty much all monsters lumbering about in the shadows all the time. Holmes and Hinchcliffe ratcheted up the horror levels after the "cosy" Pertwee era, much to Mary Whitehouse's disgust: result, classic status. Graham Williams and Douglas Adams made it lighter and funnier again: result, suspicion and disdain from the fans.

In the mid-80s Eric Saward managed to get it sadly wrong - he must have thought he was onto a surefire winner with Season 22, but violence and gore are not the same thing as the sophisticated, suspenseful thrills and chills which first made the show's name. Andrew Cartmel, replacing him, was a much more imaginative and innovative script editor, but sadly fell foul of the fans by not being scary enough, until it was too late.

New Who has treated scariness as something to be wheeled out for special occasions, normally in the context of a Steven Moffat script (though The Impossible Planet was no slouch in the creepiness department). But it's no coincidence that ostentatiously scary pieces like Blink and The Empty Child regularly top the fan favorite polls, and I think eventually RTD decided he wanted to get in on some of that action: Midnight in Season 4 was easily his most disturbing, and arguably one of his most successful scripts yet. Early indications are though that he might be trying to top it with The Waters of Mars.

It'll be interesting to see how scary post-2009 Who ends up being, whether Moffat just can't help increasing the fear factor of everything he touches, or whether he'll keep the formula of doing "a scary one" once or twice per season. Generally speaking, I don't think Doctor Who can go wrong by making it as scary as possible (while staying firmly within its PG limits) as much as possible, and I hope Moffat does edge it further towards the shadowy and Gothic.

A final anecdote: in 1988 I was combining watching the last episode of Remembrance of the Daleks with babysitting my young (six or seven year old) cousin. All was going well until a Dalek shell slid open to reveal the cadaverous figure of Davros. This was just too much for little Alice, who began to scream and scream, before rushing sobbing upstairs to her bedroom, pleading for me to come upstairs and protect her. Twenty years later, I don't believe there have been any lasting scars: I believe she's a fan of the new show, or at least considers David Tennant to be rather dishy. The point is, I wonder if this is the secret of Doctor Who's enduring success: whether it's black-and-white Daleks, or Yeti in the Underground, or giant maggots, or the horrible sight of Davros, everyone ideally needs something to scare the bejeezus out of them at an impressionable age, so they can say "Doctor Who? I was terrified of that show when I was small." Here's hoping for many more traumatized infants in the months and years to come. It's how the journey of a lifetime begins.

She's A Fake, Sure But She's A Real Fake

So, yeah, in the end I rather enjoyed Mona Lisa's Revenge, but it was easy to be distracted by the famous painting's other starring role in a Whoniverse adventure, 1979's wonderful City of Death. No wonder Leonardo da Vinci needed to borrow paint from his neighbor when he had not one but six Mona Lisas to complete. But surely Mr Harding the curator couldn't have missed the Fourth Doctor's warning "this is a fake", scrawled on the canvas of his beloved masterpiece in felt tip pen? Oh well, whatever.

Suranne Jones' performance as the Mona Lisa will doubtless always be mentioned in the same breath as the words "love it or hate it". Personally I might rather have seen the painting portrayed as a serene, implacable presence than a potty-mouthed Mancunian shazza, but I guess we were overdue for a comedy interlude. Jones didn't really bear much resemblance to the actual painting in my opinion, either, but that's what suspension of disbelief is for.

Very little of the actual plot made much sense to me. I have no idea why proximity would re-empower the aliens in the paint; it's then enough of a stretch to imagine that one of the powers of this race is to be able to make things in paintings real, but as far as turning real people into two-dimensional paint is concerned, I'm not even going to bother trying to make sense of that. I do amire the chutzpah of going to such absurd lengths solely to be able to reuse the Sontaran blaster, and avoid having to spring for a new weapon prop for the Mona Lisa. The puzzle box, so let me get this straight, Di Cattivo went stark staring mad from painting The Abomination but then had the time, knowhow and presence of mind to build an elaborate containment device for the alien, and a convenient key to release it? No, you've lost me there.

I liked the return to the International Gallery (though truly, it is a very silly place) and enjoyed Mr Harding and Miss Trupp. The dowdy spinster female assistant in love with her oblivious boss is a familiar double act, and it was nice to see Phyllis reject Lionel for being an idiot at the eleventh hour, in place of the telegraphed tidy conclusion. Though didn't we already have this scene out between the Doctor and Martha, at the end of New Who Season 3?

As I say, I could have done without so much of the "Harders" and "Clydie", but there was a lot more to this painting than met the eye. The scene where the Mona Lisa longed hopelessly to explore the outside world was touching, and the idea of a sentient being being trapped in silence and immobility on a wall for hundreds of years is a horrifying one. I was very surprised that Sarah Jane could only "almost" feel sorry for consigning Lisa to such a fate; I tend to expect a bit more compassion out of her, she's not the bloody Doctor after all.

All in all, a picture paints a thousand words and there were a lot more ideas in these two episodes than the somewhat silly business of Lisa running around wisecracking might suggest. I definitely preferred it to the straightforward "here's some aliens" fare of Prisoner of the Judoon, and if it does end up being rated as a relative disappointment, it's only because this has been by far the strongest and most interesting season of Sarah Jane Adventures yet.

Extraordinary Boys

After three really dramatic and intense Sarah Jane Adventures in a row, the first part of Mona Lisa's Revenge returned us firmly into "amusing romp" territory; and nothing wrong with that. I'll review the story as a whole after I've watched the second part, but here's something that struck me about Part One:

Since the reboot in 2005, the Doctor Who franchise has spent a lot of time in praise of the ordinary. Rose was a shopgirl from a council estate, Donna was a temp; of course in the middle we had Martha, an educated and capable doctor-in-training... who might as well have been chopped liver as far as our chops-and-gravy-eulogizing Time Lord hero was concerned. Torchwood centers around the anything-but-ordinary Captain Jack, but the real audience identification figure is Gwen, constantly torn between secret agent life and her blissful, boring relationship with tubby and hapless Rhys. When we met Ianto's sister and her family in Children of Earth the jig was up: tubby, hapless, tabloid-reading "ordinary folk" without a GCSE between them are the salt of Russell T Davies' earth, the new most important people in the Whoniverse.

Sarah Jane isn't as bizarre a protagonist as the Doctor or Jack, but they do play up the idea that she's a pretty odd old lady: she's traveled in time and space, she has a robot dog and an alien supercomputer in the attic... meanwhile her son Luke is an incredible genius grown in a vat by the Bane, and new girl Rani is a precocious wannabe investigative journalist whose dad is the school headmaster, neither of them exactly commonplace. With the departure of Maria Jackson, Clyde Langer was left as the series Everyman (or Everykid): a lot less concerned with academic success than being "cool", which is pretty much kidspeak for safe and ordinary.

So, I know it's only in the episode to provide a spurious justification for the gang to be roaming around an art gallery, but it was weird to see Clyde outed as one of Britain's most promising young artistic talents. (Not quite sure what it could have been about his busty-space-babes-brandishing-guns piece that won such admiration from the serious art community, but we'll let that slide.) What this seems to imply, at least to me, is that while the "grown-up" shows are intent on hammering home to us the idea that Mr and Mrs Joe Slob eating their fish and chips in front of the telly in Cardiff are the most wonderful and enviable creatures in the universe... Sarah Jane Adventures has left behind the last pretense that its young team are anything other than three incredible child prodigies.

None of this should come as any surprise in a world where children's fiction is still in thrall to Harry Potter, with its sharp dividing line between magical folk and the crude, boring Muggles. I have to say I feel that Russell T Davies ladled on the opposite view a bit thick over the past 5 years - to the point where it almost felt like his shows had contempt for anyone who tried to be educated or exceptional, or just stand out from the crowd. On the other hand, my favorite character from Buffy ended up being Xander, just because in a show where every other character was turning out to be an immensely powerful witch or werewolf or demon or angel, he remained an ordinary schmoe to the bitter end.

I guess my ideal is for there to be a balance: no contempt for ordinary working-class folk, but equally, no suspicion of those who have education and talents, and use them to live extraordinary, heroic lives. Clyde, Rani, Luke and Sarah Jane all fall into the latter category, I think, and it's nice. Because three shows dedicated to continually showing the nobility of life on the sink estate would probably be too many.

And A Gentle Manifesto To Boot

What's the point of this blog? Well, there isn't really one yet, seeing as no one knows about it, and I assume no one is reading it. Nonetheless:-

Like many other rational people, I subscribe to the view that Doctor Who is, hands down, the best TV show in the history of the universe. I've been a moderately obsessive fan since sometime in the mid-80s, and a quarter of a century on, the passion shows no sign of abating.

So far, so run of the mill. But here's where I think I differ from other fans. I really do love the whole show. There are plenty of "elder statesman" Whovians out there, making pronouncements on their podcasts, who seem to love bits of it. Some of them profess to love Old Who but are scathing about the snogging 'n' soap opera elements of the 2005 revamp. Even within the Old Who camp, you'll find plenty who don't have a single nice thing to say about the latter half of the 80s, who write off all the joy and innovation of the McCoy era with a sneery quip about Bertie Bassett. These people invariably love the "Hinchcliffe era", Seasons 12-14, and everything else falls short to a greater or lesser degree. Some of them, mentioning no Lawrence Mileses in particular, seem to watch the new show avidly for the sole, religious purpose of ripping each new episode to shreds for how far it misses the mark of "real" Who.

And recently I've started to see a backlash against the relentless negativity of these crusty old gits, an equal and opposite reaction from newer fans who are quite invested in the "true love" of Rose and the Doctor, and want to see them live happily ever after. I've heard it said that the fixation of the 70s with spaceships and aliens at the expense of human interest is a real snoozefest, that The Caves of Androzani is nothing more than a tedious, testosterone-drenched video nasty, that Robert Holmes (Old Who's most beloved scribe and script editor) couldn't write worth a damn.

And none of these points of view are in the right. My intention is not to be a hagiographer: obviously in a show with a 46-year history there will have been high and low points. But put your ear to the ground of "fandom" and most of what you'll hear is bitching. My Who is better than your Who. The latest Who is nowhere near the quality of what I arbitrarily designate as "real" Who.

All of this is of course ridiculous. Who is a program that has survived for half a century on the strength of being all sorts of different things, and something new for every successive generation. To claim that it was at its objective best during the few years when you happened to fall in love with it is missing the point: it's at its best when it doesn't rest on its laurels, doesn't stick to tried and tested formulas, keeps moving restlessly and experimentally forward. The Doctor doesn't regenerate just because the actor decides to leave. The show stays alive because the Doctor regenerates. It's never the same program for more than about 3 years in a row. It's not hard to reel off a list of TV shows that were great for about 3 seasons but whose returns kept on steadily diminishing until the point of cancellation. For Doctor Who, that's not often a problem, as 46 years, 31 seasons and 11 leading men have proved.

Who Positive is my little love letter to Doctor Who, all of Doctor Who. I love almost all of it and I can say with my hand on my heart that there isn't a moment of it that I hate. I'm going to try and write something in here every day, be it a review or a thought or a memory. And who knows, maybe someday other people will stumble across it, by the magic of the internet, and enjoy it too.

Change, My Dear

If my calculations are correct, only once in the entire run of Old Who did they kick off a new season with both a new Doctor and a new production team: Season 7, surely the most massive sea change in the history of the program.

It seems unlikely that Moffat will tamper THAT much with RTD's award-winning formula, but still, it's hard to overestimate what a momentous year 2009-10 is for the show. I'm waiting with bated breath.

Binro Was Alright

"For years I was jeered at and derided - I began to doubt even myself. Then you came along and you told me... I was right!

"Just to know that for certain, Unstoffe... is worth a life."

RIP Timothy Bateson, 1926-2009