Articles in “Doctor Who”

This live-blogging is brought to you by four things:

1. I completely forgot that this was on tonight, and was all prepared to watch the last two episodes of Slings and Arrows so I can return it to Drew this weekend when Nick reminded me that Doctor Who was starting in fifteen minutes.

2. Had I known that Doctor Who was on tonight, I wouldn’t have used my heavy-duty moisturiser, but I did—now I have palm oil on my hands.

3. Nick still can’t remember that the small Tibetan coffee table is kept in the spare room now and has been for a year—ever since I decided that twelve tables was really too many for one living room.

4. I’ve only just remembered which episode this is, and now I’m excited about live-blogging it.

Also, though this doesn’t really qualify as a fifth thing, I need coffee.

Coffee is forthcoming, but meanwhile I’m sitting through the Jack Dee comedy that I’m still not finding very funny.

Feet coming down stairs—ooh, feet belonging to Anthony Stewart Head. I lose concentration slightly, but only a for a minute.

He comes across a sickly child leaning against the wall, and determines that she’s an orphan—at which point he declares that “It’s nearly time for lunch” and shuts the door to his office before we hear high-pitched screaming.

And then the Doctor walks into a classroom and declares, “Good morning, class. Are we sitting comfortably?”

Credits.

The Doctor, wearing his glasses, is teaching physics, but it mostly involves saying, “Physics, physics, physics, physics” over and over, and occasionally interspersing “Correctamundo.”

He has one student called “Milo,” who has knowledge that he should not have, including information on how to travel faster than the speed of light.

Rose, meanwhile, is wearing a cap and apron, and working in the school canteen. They’ve infiltrated the school on Mickey’s advice. The Doctor’s intrigued: he thinks the school should be all “happy, slappy hoodies with ASBOs and ringtones.”

Meanwhile, a sinister teacher is wandering around calling students into “extra classes” and the headmaster is hovering over all, looking even more sinister.

Torchwood reference! Drink!

While Rose is chatting to Mickey on the phone, a barrel of mysteriously labelled oil being manhandled into the kitchen falls and drenches a kitchen worker, who burns horribly and is hustled off into another room. Rose tries to call an ambulance, but another worker claims the woman is fine, even when the injured worker combusts with a scream: “She does that. It’s fine.”

The students in the “special class” are typing improbably fast in a closed room.

And there’s Sarah Jane, schmoozing the headmaster—but she knows that something odd is going on.

Sarah is brought into the staffroom, and the Doctor sees her—and he smiles and blushes and burbles as he introduces himself as “John Smith.” She once knew a man who went by that name, a very unusual man.

Oh, the look on his face makes me smile just to see it. He’s so pleased to see she’s doing so well and just as nosy as ever.

Even on his way back to class, he can’t stop himself grinning.

A little fat kid (why is it always the little fat kids?) called Kenny sees—in the special classroom—a monster who transforms into the sinister teacher, but the teacher simply warns him off.

Meanwhile, Sarah Jane is breaking into the school at night, as are the Doctor, Mickey, and Rose, each of whom have their own tasks. Mickey, of course, talks himself up and is made to look a fool.

The school is filled with strange screechings and flapping of wings, audible even to Rose, testing the oil in the cafeteria. But Sarah: Sarah has walked into an unused corridor—and straight into the TARDIS, which shocks her. But when, backing away from it, she walks into “John Smith,” she knows him for who he is, straight away.

When they hear a scream, the Doctor and Sarah both rush out—and straight into Rose, who’s not happy to see Sarah. Sarah, meanwhile, is overly pleasant to Rose, telling the Doctor that “You can tell you’re getting older, because your assistants are getting younger.”

The scream was Mickey, surprised by hundreds of freeze-dried rats—which allows some further bitching between Sarah and Rose—but when they find all the teacher-monsters hanging upside down in the staffroom, they all leg it.

Sarah says she has something that could help the Doctor—and pulls away a blanket in her boot to reveal—K9!

Hey, K9! The Doctor cooes over his old dog, until Rose snaps, “Could you two just stop petting? We’ve got work to do!”

They all repair to a cafe, where the jukebox is, conveniently, playing “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

Rose is as jealous as hell, while Sarah and the Doctor sit at another table, the Doctor trying to fix K9 while Sarah tries to explain just how hard it is for a companion left alone by the Doctor.

They could only have done this episode with Sarah Jane—all the other companions died or left voluntarily, except for Teegan, and she did come back before leaving voluntarily.

Sarah explains that she was dropped in Aberdeen, not Croydon, before K9 disrupts the conversation, waking up and saying “Mas-ter?” The Doctor’s delighted: “He remembers me!” Mickey mocks K9’s voice—and later mocks him as “the tin dog”—before Sarah says, “Excuse me, that’s my dog.”

K9 identifies the bat people as Crillotanes (oh, I’ll check the spelling later) [it should be “Krillitanes,” so I’ll acknowledge that but I’m not correcting them all], which the Doctor says is bad: as bad as can be, plus another suitcase of bad.

Mickey has a moment of realisation that he, himself, is a tin dog. Now, I’m going to say this once: Rose and Mickey, you both lay off K9. Now. K9 is off-limits.

Rose and the Doctor talk about the limits of their relationship, which is rather a touching conversation, except that Rose’s indignation that other people preceded her annoys me no end.

A Crillotane sweeps down on them, but flies off without doing any damage.

ROSE: It just flew off! Why would it do that?
NICK: To make a lovely silhouette against the moon.

The next morning, the posse rides up to the school.

The Doctor, sending the others off to their designated tasks, confronts the headmaster at the poolside: the headmaster derides Time Lords as “dusty senators” and “peaceful to the point of indolence,” but says that the Doctor is something new. The Doctor agrees, saying age has worn down his peaceful intentions: “Now you get one warning. That was it.”

Mickey is talking to K9 and mocking himself for talking to a tin dog.

(Rose, I’ll say this once: lay off Sarah Jane. Just, seriously, stop bitching at her. Because Sarah way outranks you on my list of favourite companions.)

Rose and Sarah, meanwhile, are trying to access the computers in the special classroom and comparing their own adventures with the Doctor, and the odd monsters they’ve met:

SARAH: The Loch Ness monster.
ROSE: Seriously?

Next thing you know, they’re mocking the Doctor’s foibles, and when he walks in, they’re in hysterics, much to his discomfort.

DOCTOR: What? Stop it!

While this is happening, the monster-teachers eat the remaining normal members of staff and start the children on the final phase of the programme—except for fat little Kenny, who is trapped outside the classroom but can’t exit the school, because the headmaster has locked it down.

The Doctor realises what is happening.

Kenny alerts Mickey to what is happening, and Mickey wakes K9, asking him how they get into the school:

MICKEY: Do you have, like, a lock-picking attachment?
K9: We are in a car.
MICKEY: Fat lot of good you are. Wait! We’re in a car.
NICK: “Fat lot of good”—I bet that’s exactly what Tom Baker used to say.

The Doctor tells Sarah and Rose that what they are using the children for—their abilities enhanced by the oil in which the chips are cooked—is to break the “God Paradigm,” which will give them access to “the building blocks of the universe.”

The headmaster appears, again, to seduce the Doctor, telling him that with access to the God Paradigm, he could recreate the Time Lords, and keep Sarah and Rose young forever. But Sarah says no: the universe needs to change. And the Doctor heaves a computer through the main display (we don’t know whether that did anything) as Mickey drives through the front doors.

The teachers all change to their bat form—except the headmaster—and corner the posse and Kenny in the cafeteria—but K9 appears, saying to Sarah Jane, “Suggest you engage running mode, Mistress.”

K9 manages to hold them off—though the headmaster tells them to “ignore the shooty dog thing”—while the others barricade themselves in the kitchen—they escape past the monster-teachers thanks to Kenny hitting the alarm.

Mickey goes off the unplug the students, though he can’t get them to listen. The others run to the kitchen, where they find the barrels dead-bolted. The sonic screwdriver won’t open them, but K9 suggests they won’t survive a direct blast. Mickey frees the children by literally unplugging them, bless him.

K9 has to stay behind to ignite the barrels, though it means his death.

DOCTOR: You’re a good dog.
K9: Affirmative.
ME: Whimper.

The monster-teachers arrive in the kitchen, but K9 ignites the barrels, and the school blows up, a series of events that rapidly increases Kenny’s standing among his peers, since they know he had a hand in the explosion.

Sarah is devastated by the loss of K9, and Rose annoys me by pouting when the Doctor puts his arm around Sarah as she cries.

The aliens defeated, the Doctor invites Sarah into the TARDIS for a cup of tea. The Doctor invites Sarah to travel with him again, but Sarah says she can’t do it again—she needs to find a life of her own.

Mickey asks if he can come instead, and Rose once again demonstrates that she really can’t stand Mickey, can she? But the Doctor agrees that Mickey can come.

Rose asks Sarah whether she (Rose) should stay with the Doctor, and Sarah says yes: “Some things are worth getting your heart broken for.” But she says that Rose should come and see her if she ever needs to.

When Sarah forces the Doctor to actually say goodbye this time, he grabs her and lifts her right off the ground in a bear hug.

NICK: Tom Baker never used to do that.

But as the TARDIS dematerialises, behind it is K9, rebuilt by the Doctor and left behind—again—for Sarah: the two of them walk off into the (metaphorical) sunset. Well, K9 rolls.

Next week: Madame de Pompadour!

Note: This is an odd live-blogging experience. About two hours ago, the server that hosts Circulating Library went down for emergency repairs. It went down without warning, which suggests that there’s some problem in the underlying hardware. This is exceptionally annoying.

I asked Nick what the options were, and he suggested that I simply couldn’t blog it tonight. But I’m quite fond of this episode, and I don’t really want to miss one episode out of the season if I can avoid it.

So I’ve reached a compromise that suits me: I’m live-blogging this in Microsoft Word—which is a whole ‘nother story. I’m blogging it as I would if I could access my actual blog, but it’ll be posted later—as soon as the site is up and running again. So consider this a live-blogging under unusual live-blogging circumstances.

It’s also given me the opportunity to discover that Microsoft Word doesn’t recognise the word “blog.” Microsoft Word is so far behind the times.

That was fifteen minutes ago, and the blog’s still not up.

Here, though, we have a Scottish vista—most beautiful country on earth, bar none—and a carriage crossing the heath.

And monks! Vicious monks, threatening crofters. Damn! Ninja monks. They don’t believe in the hand of God: they have the fist of man—and some excellent bullet time. Was this episode directed by Yun-Woo Ping?

NICK: These chaps are a little underexplained, I have to say.

I don’t think they need explanation, since these guys have quarter staffs, and a giant scary box, which even the head ninja monk seems a little frightened of. We don’t get to see what’s in the box, though the terrified inhabitants of the stately home (or Scottish equivalent thereof) that they’ve attacked do.

The Doctor claims they’re heading for the late 1970s, for which he thinks Rose is over-dressed in her cut-off overalls and dusty pink T-shirt. Of course, it’s unlikely to end that way—they seem to be listening to Ian Durie, by the way. And the Doctor loves the Muppet movie, but hates Margaret Thatcher.

Instead, they’ve landed in Scotland in 1879—and there’s David Tennant’s real accent (and the Robbie Burns quote). Rose, on the other hand, is firmly instructed not to attempt a Scottish accent.

The Doctor trained under Doctor Bell? Ha! (That would be the model for Sherlock Holmes, for those of you who don’t read Golden Age detective fiction.) On the other hand, that’s Queen Victoria. Nick and I are secretly quite fascinated by the fact that Doctor Who keeps coming back the Victorian era. But I don’t really have time for that angle right now.

Instead, they’re heading to the house of a Sir Robert McTeesh (and I’m sure I haven’t got that right) [it’s “MacLeish,” as it turns out. I checked later. So I was close. In a manner of speaking], thanks to a tree across the train lines (which the queen is suspicious about), which has prevented them getting to Balmoral.

Sir Robert, of course, is the man whose house has just been overtaken by ninja monks.

Meanwhile, Rose bets the Doctor ten quid she can make the queen say “We are not amused.” (She tried for five quid, but the Doctor said at that price it would be against his responsibilities as a time traveller.)

Wait, Sir Robert’s estate is called Torchwood? Now, I bet that’s not a coincidence.

There’s a running joke about Rose’s relative nakedness, but I’ve not had a chance to reproduce any of that. Funny, but mostly because of the delivery.

Sir Robert’s wife is super pretty, but she’s not happy with the guy in the mysterious crate, who we see shushing the terrified group. (Apparently, David Tennant went to acting school with the chap in the crate, who was a bit weird even then.)

Meanwhile, the Doctor’s being shown a gorgeous steampunk telescope—Rose is still trying to get the queen to say, “We are not amused.” This is starting to annoy me, actually. The Doctor thinks the telescope is rubbish as a telescope, but beautiful. It is truly beautiful.

There’s a local myth about a wolf that fascinated Prince Albert, but before Sir Robert can explain the story, the head ninja monk, now masquerading as a butler, cuts him off. There’s something mysterious being done in the kitchen by numerous semi-identical monks, involving herbs, which they then feed to the queen’s soldiers.

Who promptly collapse.

Well, they’re not getting their Christmas bonuses.

Rose, meanwhile, is hearing about the problems in the house, the over-running by the ninja monks, from a terrified housemaid called Flora. She convinces Flora to tell the Doctor, but they come across the drugged soldiers in the interim, and are snatched by ninja monks.

The Doctor is told that Rose has been delayed by the complexities of nineteenth-century clothing, which the Doctor finds convincing.

Hang on, my server’s back up! I’ll cut and paste.

Ah, now this is proper live-blogging. Hurray!

(The fact that Nick didn’t tell me the server was back up is another story.)

(I’ve missed the queen talking about missing Albert.)

Rose is now with the other prisoners—and we see the terrifying eyes of the creature in the crate—while Sir Robert tells the story of the local legend of the wolf. Rose, showing the bravery we see in other episodes, approaches the crate, recognising the content as not human. Well, the boy in the crate is human, but something else has taken a local boy, a “heartsick boy,” and taken over his body.

And the Doctor mentions the word “werewolf” for the first time.

Rose offers to take the werewolf—the essential wolf—back to its home planet, but it wants to take over the queen, and begin “the Empire of the Wolf.”

The wolf, meanwhile, recognises something of a kindred spirit in Rose, presumably a hangover from the Bad Wolf events of last season.

Sir Robert is trying to warn the Doctor of the nature of the ninja monks—that they turned from God and worship the wolf.

Meanwhile, the moon has risen, and the creature in the crate is changing. Rose is trying to motivate the prisoners to pull simultaneously on the chain holding them, though they are, not surprisingly, distracted by the man turning into a werewolf in front of them.

The ninja-monk-butler openly admits to wanting the throne, and kills the queen’s last bodyguard—just as Rose and the prisoners release themselves, as the Doctor leaps into the room and, seeing the werewolf, proclaims, “That’s beautiful!”

(It is, in a way. The transition looked intensely painful: I can’t blame the prisoners for being distracted.)

The queen has her own pistol, though I doubt it would work against a werewolf. We don’t get to see how it works against a ninja-monk-butler, whom she shoots.

The werewolf, meanwhile, is roaming the house, entirely comfortable in its plan to kill everyone. The house is ringed with ninja-monks, by the way. The Doctor tries to convince the man I called the crofter earlier—who is, of course, the steward of Torchwood, though whether the house steward or the land steward is another story. I’m betting house steward—that the werewolf is not that easy to kill, but the steward goes ahead and is grotesquely eaten.

The werewolf enters the kitchen where Sir Robert’s wife is hiding with the maids, but disappears without eating them, which is odd and suggestive.

Oh, apparently ninja-monk-butlers are susceptible to bullet wounds.

Much frenetic running through the house ensues.

Hang on, there’s a soldier still alive and conscious. Where’d he come from? Anyway, he plans to hold the corridor, despite knowing that bullets can’t stop the beast, to give the queen time to get away. He’s eaten horribly, as well—after talking to the queen about the mysterious content of the chest she brought with her in the carriage.

The werewolf is stopped by the door to the library, for some reason. The Doctor is uncertain why, though they all look quite relieved not to be eaten. The Doctor, of course, is overtaken with intellectual curiosity about why the werewolf can’t enter the room.

(Oh, and there’s some indiscriminate hugging, going on. And Rose tries to make the queen say she’s not amused, but now is really not the time.)

The queen seems to have lost faith in the Doctor, partly because of his gobbledegook but mostly because he’s dropped out of the Scottish accent at some point.

The Doctor and Sir Robert’s wife both realise that the wolf won’t touch or pass mistletoe—the wife sees the monks garlanded in mistletoe, while the Doctor has to lick a door. I know which one I’d rather be.

(The Doctor suggests that the wolf only thinks it’s allergic to mistletoe, a belief instilled by the monks as a means of controlling it.)

The Doctor’s also quite rude to Sir Robert, although it seems a little unnecessary. Even if he’s not as bright as his father, that’s hardly his fault. He, Rose, and Sir Robert flip frantically through the books in the library, looking for information they can use.

The queen, meanwhile, whips the Koh-i-noor out of her pocket. The Doctor wonders why she’s carrying it with her, and the queen acknowledges that Prince Albert never liked it. The Doctor knows that Prince Albert had the stone cut down by 40%, which seems a shame.

This sets the Doctor off. He knows the wolf is trying to trap the queen in the house, but the Doctor thinks that Sir Robert’s father and Prince Albert may have planned a counter trap for the wolf, which conveniently falls through a skylight at that point, but is doused with mistletoe-infused water by Isabel (finally, we get a name for Sir Robert’s wife).

The party head towards the conservatory, followed closely by the recovered wolf.

Sir Robert stays outside, hoping to buy them some time and, perhaps, to absolve himself of his sense that he has committed treason. Luckily, he has some swords stored on the wall outside the observatory, but that doesn’t seem to have helped him last long against the wolf. He dies off-screen, but I’m not too worried about that in this context.

(Remember, he’s one of the people the Doctor flashes back to in the final episode of season four.)

Meanwhile, the Doctor has put the diamond in the telescope, magnifying the light in some way I don’t understand and using it against the wolf right as it grabs the queen. (The question of why the queen was standing right in front of the door instead of at the far end of the room, when they knew she was the target, goes unanswered.) The telescope immobilises the beast, who transforms to human shape, begs for the light to be made brighter, and disappears with a howl.

The queen has been bitten, but she won’t acknowledge it.

The queen knight the Doctor and makes Rose a dame, but simultaneously banishes the Doctor from her empire, never to return. She claims that they consort with stars and magic and think it fun, but their world is steeped in terror, and blasphemy, and death. She won’t allow it. (She’s also not amused, so Rose wins her bet.)

I’d like to see some pay-off to the Doctor being banished, myself.

The Doctor, meanwhile, indulges in some entirely scurrilous rumours about Queen Victoria’s haemophilia. I’m no expert, but my understanding is that you don’t actually have to inherit haemophilia: it can be caused by a mutation in a single individual, who then becomes a carrier of the disease, passing it on to their descendants.

But I’m not getting into a debate about Queen Victoria’s haemophilia.

The queen, finally, founds Torchwood in remembrance of Sir Robert and to guard against the Doctor’s return. I wonder if there’ll be any pay-off for that?

And next week, Sarah Jane comes back! Hurray! I hope the server doesn’t go down next week, as well.

This live-blogging extravaganza brought to you by the fact that I still don’t know how to turn my television on (and we must have owned it for nearly a year) and by the fact that I forgot to unplug my external mouse from the laptop before moving it into the living room, causing wackiness to ensue.

Oh, and by the mysterious person on my television who looks almost exactly like Marcus Grahame in a low light but who is apparently Jack Dee, British comedian.

He doesn’t seem very funny, judging from the ten minutes of the programme I’ve just seen.

In other news, I know it’s been nearly eight years, Aaron Sorkin, but I still haven’t forgiven you for killing off Mrs Landingham just to give the President a reason to run for a second term.

I’m sure the episode will begin airing soon.

. . .

Ah! Here we are! That’s a man in a pin-striped suit turning dials in the TARDIS—yes, that’s the Doctor, all right. While Rose, outside, is once again demonstrating that she really doesn’t seem to like Mickey, at all.

And yet it’s Mickey who waits and watches for the TARDIS to leave: Jackie, who knows how things are going to go, is already walking away when it dematerialises.

And, credits!

The Doctor and Rose land on a mysterious planet in the year five billion and three. Which is just silly. And there’s New Earth—complete with apple grass. And Rose is being slightly odd in this scene . . . I can’t explain why.

And she’s being watched by a strangely tattooed man, who is keeping an eye on her through a crystal ball. Well, it looks like a crystal ball.

The Doctor is explaining about the Earth-nostalgia movement and how New Earth and New New York came about: they’re very flirty in this scene, but the Doctor is easily distracted by the hospital and the message he’s received on the psychic paper. Someone in Ward 26 wants to see him.

The Doctor, on the other hand, is showing his first obsession with the little shops that you find in hospitals (and, later, libraries).

Ah, the disinfectant scene. I’m quite partial to this scene. Rose settles down into it soon enough, and she’s really having fun in this episode, Billie Piper.

Though that’s not Ward 26—and Rose isn’t stupid (though, as Nick says, she can be bloody annoying), or she wouldn’t have picked up that metal pole. Did I mention that the nurses are giant humanoid cats? Because it seems as though that would be an important thing for me to say.

The Doctor has found the patient he has come to visit: the Face of Bo, asleep in his jar, alone with the novice who is taking care of him. The Face of Bo sleeps most of his time, these days—the Doctor claims that he only met the Face of Bo once, but those of us who have seen later episodes have our own suspicions about that.

And Rose has wandered into a different place, playing endless movies of someone she rapidly identifies as Lady Cassandra—and his tattooed human, Chip, who is a “force-grown clone.”

Ew, they salvaged her eyes? That’s . . . well, that’s not quite right, is it? Or am I being human-normative?

Well, Rose isn’t human-normative, although she did seem hung up on the whole “human” thing in the last episode—just because the Doctor can regenerate, and grow new limbs, and has two hearts, you’d think that was odd in some way.

While I’ve been nattering on about that, though, the Lady Cassandra has been transferring herself into Rose’s body: she’s quite manic in this role, Billie Piper.

ROSE/CASSANDRA: Oh my god: I’m a chav!

Flipping back to the Doctor and the Face of Bo, the novice is explaining some of the legends around the Face of Bo, especially the imparting of his last message to the lonely god. (Hint: we know what that is!)

I do laugh every time Rose/Cassandra describes herself as “living inside a bouncy castle.” And her attempts at doing “old Earth cockney.” Apples and pears? Hee!

Hang on, the Duke of Manhattan got better! I thought that petrifold regression wouldn’t be curable for another thousand years? Did I mention the Duke of Manhattan before? It’s terribly difficult to keep track of all the plot points.

(Would the Doctor honestly say, “How on earth . . .?” Wouldn’t it be more likely that he’d say, “How on Gallifrey?”)

ROSE/CASSANDRA: Never trust a nun, never trust a nurse, and never trust a cat.
NICK: These are the archest cats ever!
ME: Have you ever met a cat?

I admit, though, that these cats are creepy. Or should I say these nuns are creepy? Anyway, they’re (wow! Cassandra shows much more decolletage than Rose does) performing cures well ahead of their time, and keeping people in cells in the basement, not to mention incinerating them when they show signs of sentience.

Rose, in the interim, has found the Doctor and, seeing his new face, enthusiastically snogged him, to the apparent satisfaction of both of them. Is it just me, or does David Tennant look insanely young in this episode? Maybe it’s the relatively short hair.

The Doctor, working with advice that, coming from Rose, should make him highly suspicious, has found his way to what the nurses call “intensive care,” which is full of people suffering, apparently, every single disease in the galaxy. Which seems a little improbable to me, but what do I know?

The Doctor recognises immediately that these are not patients, but lab rats.

Ah! Rose asks the same questions as I do, and the Doctor (non)answers that plague carriers are always the last to die.

Now the Doctor is shouting at a poor novice—at least, I think she’s the novice. I find it hard to tell the nun-cats apart—who probably doesn’t actually have an active role in hospital administration. Shouldn’t he be shouting at the abbess? Or matron? Or whatever she is?

Meanwhile, the Doctor decides at this point to reveal that he knows there’s something wrong with Rose—apparently not because she snogged him while Rose has been shilly-shallying around for months, but because she doesn’t care about all these sick people.

Cassandra, however, only toys with him for a very short period of time before knocking him out with her perfume. That’s not a euphemism, by the way.

Cassandra is planning on infecting the Doctor with all the diseases that the poor people in the cells in intensive care are suffering—they’re “topped up” every ten minutes, and the Doctor’s been shoved into a spare cell.

The nurses, though, aren’t susceptible to Cassandra’s attempted extortion, and she releases all the ill patients on her level—who rapidly release every single person in intensive care.

(I wish the nun-cats wouldn’t call them “the flesh.” It’s . . . it’s just creepy.)

Nick’s of the opinion that releasing “the flesh” worked better as a threat than as “Plan B,” and I have to agree with him. Especially since these zombie people can infect you with every disease under the sun with just one touch.

There’s a lot of infecting, and running, and screaming at this point, so I’m going to ask two questions (Chip looks like dying, by the way, but he jumps in a barrel of waste):

a. How do they harvest the samples from these patients, if they can’t touch them?
and
b. How can these nun-cat nurses isolate the required antibodies to treat a particular disease, if the patients are simultaneously suffering from all of these disease?

Anyway, back in the episode, Cassandra is now in the Doctor’s body, but his taunting of Rose (“So many parts! And hardly used!”) is brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of the zombie patients.

Poor Chip, meanwhile, is stuck in one of the cells formally occupied by the zombie patients. And Rose has a psychotic nun-cat hanging off her ankle—but the nun-cat is infected by one of the zombie patients, without transferring the diseases to Rose. I’m not sure how—presumably Rose is wearing socks?

After a little back and forth, Rose manages to transfer herself to a zombie patient climbing up after Rose and the Doctor, but frantically sends herself back into Rose before the patients reach the top of the ladder—Cassandra experiences something usually described as a “character moment” before she and the Doctor reach the safer, quarantined sections in the general wards.

The Doctor calls for the intravenous solutions to every single disease, and straps them around his body before ravelling down the elevator shaft. He’s a busy little bee, this Doctor. And he talks Cassandra into going with him.

(Another question: Cassandra needed complicated technology to transfer herself into Rose’s mind, but once it’s been done once, she can just flip between people’s brains without any technological intervention and with no side effects?)

The Doctor, meanwhile, is mixing up his chemicals in the lift, and inducing the zombie patients to come into the lift for the disinfectant process—where they’re cured and can then pass the cure on to others by touch.

Wait, what?

Surely intravenous drugs don’t cure when they pass through the skin, do they? If they did, why would they be called intravenous drugs?

And, then, how can intravenous drugs and cures to horrible diseases that take at least two days to cure in the wards (as the Doctor mentioned in an earlier case, though I’ve forgotten its name already. Not the petrifold regression: another one) occur immediately?

Oh, I’m sure it’s not important.

But it is another instance of the Doctor becoming complicated with the idea of a medical Doctor, which Nick finds fascinating.

Meanwhile, the Face of Bo is feeling better, and tells the Doctor that they will meet again, for the third and final time, when he will impart his message, and then teleports off.

DOCTOR: Now that is enigmatic. That is . . . that is textbook enigmatic.

Cassandra, meanwhile, transfers into Chip’s body, but it’s all too much for him. He only has a half life, apparently, and presumably the excitement of hosting his “mistress,” who he loves, is too much for him.

So the Doctor bundles him into the TARDIS and takes him back to the party for the Thracian ambassador, the video of which Cassandra was watching earlier in the episode. She said, then, that it was the last night that someone told her she looked beautiful—and Chip/Cassandra wanders up to his/her older self, and tells her that she looks beautiful, and then collapses.

It’s rather sweet—but also strangely narcissistic. Although, since the original Cassandra doesn’t know that she’s speaking to herself, does that count as narcissism?

Either way, the Doctor and Rose wander silently into the TARDIS and off to their next adventure—which is “Tooth and Claw,” starring David Tennant’s actual Scottish accent! Hurray!

The strangest thing that has happened today: wasps built a nest behind my copy of Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The strangest thing about that, for me, is that the book is a paperback.

“Go back to where it all began,” ABC? Oh, poor Christopher Eccleston. Why doesn’t he qualify for your description of the reboot of Doctor Who?

Of course, the episode hasn’t started, yet. That’s why I’m filling the space with unnecessary rambling about wasps. (Seriously, they love our study. I’m always finding nests behind odd books. Last time it was Leslie Stephens’s Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. At least that was a hardback.)

I’m really glad I don’t live in South Australia right now. Despite the humidity here, it’s better than temperatures well over forty.

Ah, here we go—after this mysterious crime writer talking.

And that looks like the Earth to me; I think we’re going to zoom into London. Yep, there we are, Jackie decorating the Christmas tree and putting out presents for Rose. Aw, she breaks my heart, sometimes, Jackie.

And Mickey—but he can hear something. Sounds oddly like the TARDIS. Jackie hears it, too. And they both go running out into the quadrangle. But they can’t see anything—until the TARDIS comes screaming in for a very poor landing indeed.

And there’s David Tennant! Not his first appearance as the Doctor, but one of his earliest. He’s still wearing Christopher Eccleston’s clothes.

“Merry Christmas!” he says and then keels over.

Nick’s so completely uninterested in this blogging that he doesn’t even have his iPhone to hand. He doesn’t even know that I just wrote that. Well, that’ll teach him.

Now the Doctor’s in bed, with Rose and Jackie [in retrospect, I should have said “with Rose and Jackie looking after him,” but you know what I meant]—Rose won’t take the Doctor to hospital because of the high risk of his being dissected. But she knows he has two hearts, and she checks they’re both beating strongly.

ROSE: He’s got two hearts.
JACKIE: Oh, don’t be stupid.
ROSE: No, he has.
JACKIE: Anything else he’s got two of?

Cheap laugh, but funny. Ouch—my coffee’s really hot.

And here’s Rose’s psychological breakdown at the idea of regeneration. She’s really hung up on the whole “human” thing, isn’t she?

I love Jackie’s soliloquy about why Howard sleeps over now—beautifully delivered. And there’s Harriet Jones, Prime Minister! Aw, bless, Harriet. I think they treated you badly—narrative wise—but you’re a sweet woman, really. And you do well for yourself in a kind of . . . really tragic and horrible way.

Have I mentioned Guinevere One, yet? Because it’s about to come face to face with some sort of mysterious floating space rocky object. I won’t say what, because of spoilers.

Rose and Mickey, wandering down the street listening to Christmas carols.

MICKEY: TARDIS this, and TARDIS that.
NICK: This one time, at TARDIS camp.

Ah, Nick’s just read something on my blog. I wonder what that was?

Ooh, creepy Santa masks—I wouldn’t trust those guys, Rose. And, sure enough, they’re an explosive brass band. Well, you should have known that that would happen, what with the creepy plastic masks. Or are the masks metal? Either way, they’re creepy masks.

I do like action scenes: they allow me to catch up on the dialogue.

More of the glowy yellow stuff comes out of the Doctor’s mouth—I forgot to mention that before.

Ooh, a mysterious new Christmas tree has turned up on Rose’s doorstep and has now become homicidal. There’s something unusually horrifying about a homicidal Christmas tree—especially when you’re trying to manhandle an unconscious Time Lord out of the apartment.

Think of something else, Rose. Ooh, sonic screwdriver! That’ll work. That always works. I bought one for my nephew last Christmas, and he spent the next week opening doors for his mother.

Ah, and now the Doctor’s conscious. Hang on, I should hit “save” at this point.

Creepy Santa robot things! Nick’s ranting now about how there’s a steely side to this Doctor that you don’t see much of later—which I think is rubbish. I think this Doctor is far too steely and determined.

This dialogue with the Doctor and Jackie where he’s trying to explain what he needs makes me laugh, but I’d not noticed before how similar it is to the detox scene in “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” which also made me laugh.

“Harvey Wallbanger?”

The Doctor’s looking a lot worse for wear, now—which is a problem, since he managed to reveal that the creepy Santas were only pilot fish, which means there’s a shark up there somewhere. And yet no-one associates this with the disappearance of Guinevere One? Except that one guy talking on the telly who, as Nick points out, is a terrible, terrible liar.

And now Rose too sees that something is wrong—which isn’t hard, what with the screaming alien face on the television screen.

Ooh, serious men in dark cars and dark suits. This is worrying, unless it’s UNIT, of course. Nothing wrong with UNIT. And there’s Mr Llewellyn, the man with the beard on television, the one who is the bad liar.

Is that the first instance of “Harriet Jones, Prime Minister”/“Yes, we know who you are”? Of course, Harriet isn’t fazed—she’s seen aliens before.

LLEWELLYN: Maybe they’re not actual Martians.
RANDOM OFFICER: Of course not. Martians look completely different.

Poor Llewellyn—is he the only one who hasn’t met aliens before? And now the aliens are speaking—it’s an odd but strangely convincing language, though I think it’s highly unlikely that translation software would be able to translate that language after only a few lines. After all, you should see what translation software does when you run a John Keats poem through it. (Oddly enough, do it with Led Zeppelin lyrics, and they become more comprehensible.)

“Our longest night”? That rings a bell, but I can’t put my finger on it. Ah, now that’s the first reference to Torchwood, after a brief reference in “The Long Game.” But this is the real spinning off, the introduction to the new programme.

And now the translation software has given a translation of the Sycoraxes’ message—and they seem mighty sure that they haven’t got their personal pronouns mixed up. I wonder how they can be so sure.

Rose is still freaking out, indicating that this Doctor is nowhere near as cool as the old Doctor, that this one is ineffective compared to the ninth regeneration.

The Sycorax don’t like being threatened, apparently—and now dozens of apparently unconnected people are wandering away from their homes and jobs, with mysterious circles of blue light flashing up around their heads and necks. Guess the translation software didn’t get that personal pronoun wrong, after all. These would be the “they” that the Sycorax threatened with harm if Earth didn’t surrender.

It’s a useful threat, though—there’s something sincerely creepy about these people just standing silent at the edge of high buildings. Two billion of them? Wow.

Rose, for goodness’s sake. Can you not pull yourself together? She’s now insisting that there’s nothing we can do, that there’s no-one to help them.

(Torchwood is missing a third of its staff? Which third? Because Captain Jack is always standing on the edge of high buildings, so there’d be nothing new about that.)

Nick wonders why they’ve put a plaque about humanity on Guinevere One (even excluding the blood sample, which seems odd) when the probe is supposed to land on Mars. As he points out, that’s usually reserved for craft that are leaving the Solar System.

Now Harriet is calling for the Doctor to come and help humanity, which will be a little difficult if he only has one heart beating. Rose has completely broken down, now. Man, I hope I’m never ill in a situation where Rose is my only hope of nursing.

Should I be sympathetic at this point? Nah. She can cry after the crisis, not during.

Glass shatters as the Sycorax ship hits the atmosphere.

NICK: I reckon at least half a million people just fell off their buildings.

I like the ship design, though. (Hey! They rebuilt Big Ben!) And I like these scenes of people just standing in the street stunned, staring up at the ship as it passes. So plausible, if depressing. We are a species of rubber-neckers.

The Sycorax are calling for the world leader to stand forward, and Harriet does so. (Seriously, Doctor Who is the only programme on Earth in which the Americans aren’t allowed to control things in the case of alien invasion. Well, and Torchwood.) She is transported aboard the spaceship, along with others—including Llewellyn, who steps forward to talk to the Sycorax leader, with an oddly sycophantic speech for mercy, but it doesn’t matter overly much, since he and then the random officer whose name I don’t think we ever hear are both killed with what I can only describe as a glowing electrical whip.

The Sycorax want Harriet to surrender on behalf of the world or they will kill the one-third of the population who are standing on the rooftops (the ones with AB+ blood).

Rose, Jackie, Mickey, and the unconscious Doctor, meanwhile, have disappeared into the TARDIS, as a safe place for them to hide. But the Sycorax can recognise the TARDIS technology, now it has been activated by Rose and Mickey’s presence (Jackie has been left outside)—and Rose, not knowing that they have been transported to the Sycorax spaceship, steps outside, screams, and is followed out by Mickey, who drops his Thermos of tea by the Doctor’s head.

Harriet is thrilled to see Rose, but less thrilled when she hears the Doctor isn’t with her. The Doctor, meanwhile, seems to be responding to the mixture of tea and the fumes that the tea is causing when it drips onto the TARDIS wires.

Rose, meanwhile, is spouting random phrases from her adventures with the Doctor—and, frankly, coming across as a little aggressive, for a spokesman to a warrior race.

Aha! The Sycoraz are speaking English! I wonder what that means? Perchance the TARDIS translation circuits are working again?

Oh, yes! It’s the Doctor, in his stripey pajamas and Howard from the market’s dressing gown. He’s not going to save the world, just yet, though, because he’s too busy going into a monologue and coming over all vain about his personal appearance—he rather wanted to be ginger. He’s also doing a little bit of explanation about how regeneration works and a little back story, but the Sycorax would really like the plot to start up again.

Now the Doctor goes into a fairly excellent monologue, but I really don’t think that I can transcribe it—and I couldn’t do justice to David Tennant’s articulation of “a great big threatening button.”

And did the Doctor really just eat that human blood? I’m not sure that’s hygienic, Doctor.

The Doctor presses the button. (NICK: But why did they move forward? They were already right on the edge!) But apparently, blood control—which the Doctor regards rather as though it were a tin monkey clapping tambourines together which he’s just found at a flea market and which he thinks would look fabulous in the living room . . . (Actually, where can I find a tin monkey?). Anyway, you can’t use it to kill people.

And now—barring a brief moment where the Doctor thinks he’s delivering a heroic monologue (he does love a monologue, this tenth regeneration) but then realises it’s a bit from The Lion King—the Doctor and the Sycorax commander are duelling, and the Doctor’s not doing so well. Plus, he’s in pajamas, which just looks silly.

And there goes his hand.

D’you know, I have a feeling that that hand might actually come in handy at some point in the future?

But the Doctor grows another one.

SYCORAX: Witchcraft!
THE DOCTOR: Time Lord!
ME: Those two items aren’t parallel!

But don’t listen to me. The Doctor wins, though he won’t fight to the death, of course. Instead, he forbids the Sycorax to ever return to Earth. (And namechecks Arthur Dent. But if he met Arthur Dent, do you not think he could have brought him back to Earth? Because we know Arthur wanted to come home—well, you know, once he realised that the dolphins had managed to save it by a process that I haven’t ever really understood.)

What? Oh, the plot? The Doctor has killed the Sycorax leader—after he cowardly attempted to stab the Doctor in the back—and warned the Sycorax off, which impresses Rose, Mickey, and Harriet Jones, Prime Minister.

Wow, this is a long episode. But now we’re coming to a climax, while Jackie hugs the Doctor, because Harriet has received a message from Torchwood—and tells them to fire at will.

And they do—a weapon that looks as though it were scavenged from the Death Star, which blows the Sycorax ship out of the sky and send its debris raining down over the Earth.

And the Doctor is not pleased—not pleased at all. Harriet has a good point, here: the Doctor may be the Earth’s champion, but he’s not there all the time. And the Doctor’s becoming truly self-righteous here. And here he does something that I’m not at all sure I approve of—when he goes wandering over to Harriet’s aide and mutters, “Don’t you think she looks tired?”

And while Rose, Jackie, and Mickey are all united in the Doctor’s support here, I’m not at all sure I am. Hasn’t the Doctor just brought down England’s Golden Age? He doesn’t seem too bothered, though—he’s in the TARDIS wardrobe room, wearing the fourth Doctor’s second scarf (the one all in shades of red, not the one with multi-coloured stripes) and Nick thinks he saw the third Doctor’s tartan cape in there, too—and he picks the outfit we know: the suit and tie, the Converse, the coat that we later learn he got from Janis Joplin.

And as they sit at Christmas dinner, we can see the effect of his words, as already they’re talking about a vote of no confidence in Harriet Jones. Well, we’ll see how that works out for you, Doctor.

Meanwhile, London is basking in and building snowmen from the remains of hundreds or thousands of dead Sycorax, while the Doctor and Rose have a really horribly believably awkward and adorable conversation about whether she’s going to continue travel in the TARDIS.

And, finally, the Doctor pulls something out from his previous regeneration, when he insists that his future travels are going to be “fantastic.” Well, we’ll see—next Tuesday, with “New Earth.” See you then!

So here with are, with an unusually early play of the Doctor Who Christmas special. I wonder if there’s anything in the title, “The Next Doctor”?

Hmm. We’ll see.

In the interim, before the episode actually starts, here’s a little rant that some of you in Queensland might recognise: What the hell is up with this humidity?! Seriously, Brisbane, I’m likely to die if you don’t tone this weather down. A weak cool change, you say? What use is a weak cool change when there’s three degrees of difference between the lowest temperature and the highest temperature? Seriously, this is unnatural!

Right. I feel slightly better now.

Oooh, hang on—the ABC is repeating season two of Doctor Who? Right, it may be necessary to live-blog those, as well.

But here we are with the Christmas special.

And there’s the Doctor, stepping out into a Christmassy scene—snow, which is presumably not the detritus of an alien spaceship, for once; people in Victorian costumes; spinning camera angles; Christmas carols; a mouthy urchin.

All very Dickensian.

But there’s someone calling for the Doctor off-screen, which is much more to his taste: it’s an attractive woman in a corset, who must be freezing (well, bits of her must be freezing).

But she keeps calling for the Doctor, and David Morrissey comes haring around the corner, pulling out his sonic screwdriver, telling Rosita to get back to the TARDIS, and telling the Doctor that this is a job for a Time Lord.

The Doctor’s bewilderment is brought to a sudden halt by a furry creature wearing a Cyberman mask.

Both Doctors: Allons-y.

The creature starts climbing a building, and the new Doctor (to make it easy) manages to lasso it, but is pulled straight up the building—as is our Doctor when he grabs the rope.

NEW DOCTOR: Perhaps if you could pull?
OUR DOCTOR: I am pulling. I couldn’t not pull in this position.

Our Doctor is a little startled that the new Doctor doesn’t seem to recognise him, but they’re mostly worried about their impending deaths, as they’re pulled through a window, across a warehouse floor, and towards another window.

Rosita saves them, but they’re simply roaring with laughter and embracing. I’ve always known that the Doctor was a narcissist, but this seems to be taking it a little far.

Our Doctor is really keen to induce recognition in the new Doctor—he doesn’t want to know how he regenerated, as long as it wasn’t something stupid, like tripping over a brick: “Although, there are worse ways to go. Depends on the brick.”

Our Doctor claims to be John Smith, presumably because he recognises—as the new Doctor admits—that this new Doctor has some form of amnesia. He can remember nothing since the Cybermen—which comes as a shock to our Doctor, though it probably shouldn’t, not with the creature with the Cyberman mask.

The new Doctor remembers nothing, just a vague sense that something odd is going on. Now he’s off to a funeral—and our Doctor is not going to let him out of his sight.

Ooh, a Cyber Controller! Thought Nick says not: he’s never called a Cyber Controller. But he has a visible brain! What else could he be?

Ooh, and Dervla Kirwen! Maybe I’ve spelt that wrong, but I’ll go back and check later.

And she’s going to the funeral, too. Ooh, I wonder if that’s a coincidence?

Of course, the new Doctor is not actually going to the funeral—he’s just breaking into the corpse’s house (that’s not a good phrase, but that’s live-blogging, for you) during its final absence.

Ah, the new Doctor’s sonic screwdriver.

OUR DOCTOR: But . . . that’s a screwdriver. How’s it sonic?
NEW DOCTOR: Well, it makes a noise. (Taps it on the doorframe) That’s sonic.

Love that line.

While he and the new Doctor wander around the house of the late Reverend Aubrey Fairchild, the new Doctor tells him about the previous death: Jackson Lake, come to London to take up a new job.

Oooh, a fob watch. Really? And whispering? Are his memories contained within?

Nope. Says the new Doctor, “It’s more for decoration.”

Nick wants me to point out that the Cybermen seems unusually excited and happy about the Cyber King—well, unusual for the Cybermen.

And now our Doctor has found an infostamp—like a floppy disk, apparently, containing a history of London from 1066 to 1851, where we are now. And it has a curious effect on the new Doctor, who says he was holding an infostamp the night he regenerated.

Our Doctor wants to head back to the new Doctor’s TARDIS, but a quick final look through the house reveals a Cyberman hiding in a cupboard—and another one who comes from somewhere else.

Our Doctor leads them upstairs, telling the new Doctor that they can’t afford to lead them out into the London streets. He’s insisting to the Cybermen that he, not David Morrissey, is the Doctor, that they should be attacking him, not the new Doctor—but it’s the new Doctor who neutralises them, by doing something with the infostamp’s core that I can’t pronounce and wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to spell.

The new Doctor is not pleased that our Doctor told the Cybermen that he was their target—he’s worried that our Doctor is trying to steal his only remaining thing, his identity, like the Cybermen did.

And now we’re at the funeral, a grave surrounded by sombre Victorian gentlemen—except for Dervla Kirwen, as Miss Hartigan, matron of a workhouse, who arrives slowly, dressed in bright scarlet with a scarlet parasol, thoroughly scandalising the mourners.

And she taunts them about the difference between their charity and the sheer hard work involved in what she does, about their suppressed desires and their hypocrisy, before she calls the Cybermen to slaughter all but four men whom she names and protects.

She needs them, she tells them, for their children—presumably they also run workhouses or orphanages.

But back at the new Doctor’s home—Rosita has been worried about their absence—our Doctor is surprised they’re not living in the TARDIS and by the presence of mounds of Jackson Lake’s luggage in the corner, which our Doctor immediately tears opens, over Rosita’s complaints.

(Nick and I have a brief conversation, in which Nick is surprised that I’m not shocked by his tentative identification of Rosita as a prostitute. Seems obvious to me.)

The new Doctor takes our Doctor out to see his TARDIS: Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style. It’s a hot-air balloon. Well, powered by gas—I don’t know whether that’s different to a hot-air balloon or not. It’s rather stunning, though. I don’t know how advanced the technology was by this point, though people had been ascending in balloons for some fifty years by this point.

But our Doctor doesn’t think much of balloons, and offers to tell the new Doctor how he became the Doctor—he thinks he’s figured it out now.

(Elsewhere, Mercy Hartigan is sending the four men from the funeral off to an unspecified task involving their children; they’re controlled now by those glowing Cybermen devices in their ears.)

Back in the stables—at least, they look like stables—where the new Doctor is living, our Doctor explains how the Cybermen could have escaped from the battle of Canary Wharf, thanks to the battle with Davros and his reality bomb at the end of last season.

And the Cybermen came across Jackson Lake . . . but he’s dead, says the new Doctor. Not quite, says our Doctor, showing the mongrammed “J.L.” on the back of the new Doctor’s fob watch.

(I stop blogging briefly to coo over the images in the Cybermen’s database on the Doctor and all his previous regenerations.)

This data stamp is the one that Jackson Lake was holding the night he went missing—and it streamed its content into his brain, causing him to believe that he was the Doctor. But Jackson knows there’s something else going on here—he knows the Cyberman took something from him.

And the Doctor is genuinely sorry to say this, as he points out gently to Jackson that the pile of luggage is very large for a single person—and Jackson’s face freezes and then breaks, as he sees all over again the death of his wife.

Man, David Morrissey is brilliant in this scene.

And the Doctor’s sympathy rather dissipates—and the music becomes rather inappropriately jaunty—as he hears the infostamps buzzing and sees them glowing: it’s a call to arms, and the Cybermen are on the move.

It’s not so much the Cybermen, though, as dozens of children under the Cyber-controlled presence of the four men from the funeral. The Doctor can’t remove the control, because the furry Cyber-creatures (does anyone remember the Cybermats? They were a bit rubbish) are keeping guard from alleyways.

They’re all converging on an unidentified building that the Cyber-controlled men call “The Court of the Cyber King.”

(Meanwhile, Jackson’s “fugue state” has dissipated, and he’s now fluctuating between despair and anger.)

Two Cybermen sneak up on the Doctor and Rosita—DOCTOR: Do you have your legs on silent?—and Miss Hartigan appears, scorning the Doctor’s offer of help.

The Doctor, planning on injuring the Cybermen with a damaged infostamp, does at least manage to convince them that he, not Jackson Lake, is actually the Doctor. That doesn’t look as though it helps, since Miss Hartigan orders them killed, but Jackson arrives and destroys them, as he did in the Reverend Fairchild’s house, with the manipulated infostamps.

Jackson Lake has found the deeds to his London house, in the cellar of which he thinks he found the Cybermen and saw his wife killed: this, then, could be a way into the Cybermen’s lair.

Meanwhile, Miss Hartigan kills the four men she had previously saved from the funeral—and puts the children to work in some sort of insane, steampunk chamber full of chains and wheels and mysterious spheres with spikes on them.

She takes the Cyberman’s arm, as he takes her off to see the Cyber King that they’re all so proud of.

Meanwhile, the Doctor, Jackson, and Rosita are in Jackson’s basement, where they find a Cyberman and Dalek technology.

Miss Hartigan, on the other hand, has just found that she is supposed to become the Cyber King, and she isn’t overly thrilled about the whole thing:

MISS HARTIGAN: But you promised me I would never be converted.
CYBER CONTROLLER: That was designated a lie.

Becoming Cyber King involves having a Cyber helmet—or at least those curious handle parts—welded onto the sides of your head. It doesn’t look like a pleasant process.

The Doctor and his companions, meanwhile, have found the room where the children are working; the Doctor recognises it as an engine, but he’s not entirely sure what’s happening, since the machine is reconfiguring itself.

The Cybermen aren’t too thrilled with Miss Hartigan, meanwhile, because the conversion hasn’t removed her emotions: her joy is too emotional a response, apparently. (NICK: And “All hail the Cyber King!” isn’t?)

So she deletes the Cyber Controller, and that scares the other Cybermen into behaving themselves. Meanwhile, the Doctor and his companions are evacuating the child workforce.

Jackson, though, is having another of his moments: he’s starting to remember what else the Cybermen may have taken from him, in the figure of an angelic blonde child, who is now standing high up on the machinery, wearing, frankly, far too much mascara. The stairs explode before Jackson can get to his son, but the Doctor is rarely fazed for long, and he’s up (improbably fast, it must be said) on a convenient rope, grabbing young Frederick, and down through red-tinted smoke.

Now, this is the point where I’m going to ask everyone to suspend their disbelief and just forget how deep the Thames is, for a moment. This is a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen—movie, that is—approach to the relative depth of urban water courses.

Yes, apparently there’s an enormous robot in the Thames, but that’s okay, because it’s stomping its way across some of the Thames-side suburbs of London as we speak.

It’s actually a pretty nice piece of steampunk design.

The Doctor, rejecting Jackson’s offer of help, grabs infostamps and sets off for the TARDIS—the hot-air balloon TARDIS.

The Cyber King, meanwhile, is using its guns to demonstrate its overwhelming might.

NICK: Oh my God, you just killed Charles Dickens!

And the Doctor is off in the TARDIS. (Wow, that’s . . . seriously, that’s a lot of mascara on that kid.) He’s showing remarkable control for someone who has never flown a hot-air balloon before.

(Nick is torn between being uncertain about Dervla Kirwen’s acting and being impressed by how attractive she is.)

NICK: I’m starting to think that Russell T. Davis doesn’t like uppity women.

The Doctor fails to convince Miss Hartigan that she should leave, to colonise another world, and instead attacks the main Cyber party with his infostamp.

(Last time we watched this, a friend exclaimed at that point, “Hey! He’s getting Zoom whitening.”)

What the Doctor has done is sever the connection between her and the Cyberman, which allows he to scream herself and all the other Cybermen to death. Actually, I’m not entirely sure what happened there. It’s not as though she was receptive to the Doctor’s rhetoric before she became the Cyber King, so why is she receptive now? It’s as though the infostamps basically worked as an extremely fast-working course of anti-psychotic drugs.

Oh, well—that’s not important right now. The Doctor also uses the Dalek technology to transport the falling body of the Cyber King into the void before it can crush half of London.

And everyone in London cheers, though I think the Doctor does actually get thanked rather a lot, doesn’t he? I remember him being thanked by the Ood last season, for example. Still, a bit of cheering is always nice.

Jackson is trying to ask the Doctor to Christmas dinner (a combination Christmas dinner and wake, it sounds like), but the Doctor is reluctant. He shows Jackson the TARDIS, at Jackson’s request—and Jackson insists that the Doctor needs a companion.

I’m pleased, I admit, by the Doctor’s stutter there when he says that sometimes his companions forget him—I’d hate to think he felt no backlash from what happened with Donna. But, no: says the Doctor, his companions break his heart.

Aw.

And so he agrees to Christmas dinner with Jackson and Rosita—and they’re off. Until the specials at Easter, anyway.

And that was “The Next Doctor”! (Wow, sorry—that was long. Won’t happen again!)

This should be interesting. We haven’t even put the disc in yet and Nick is already complaining. Mind, I agree with him there: the TARDIS-shaped box takes up an enormous amount of space, and the glue perished very quickly, so the insets keep falling out. I’m quite glad that the others didn’t come in, say, a Dalek-shaped box.

Nick’s now decided that these should be called recaps, but I don’t fancy doing that: I’m already a little uncomfortable, thinking about the fact that these have already been recapped on TWoP. But then I decided that, firstly, that didn’t mean I couldn’t do it, as well, and, secondly, I never cared for those recaps, anyway.

And all that before we get to the actual episode . . .

. . . which, of course, opens not with the Doctor, but with Rose (once we get past the opening credits, which were exciting enough in 2005, sixteen years after we’d last heard them on live telly, and with the slow panning down to London from outer space).

Rose, and her alarm clock—Rose looking terribly cute, actually, back before she started annoying me.

And the careful shots of the plastic dummies, just so we know what’s actually coming up.

Now Rose being adorable with Mickey on her lunch break, and now back to the work montage.

Ah, but now things are heating up, when Rose has to take the lottery money down to the basement to poor, dead, never-seen Wilson. (That’s not a spoiler, surely? Not four years on. Sorry, but Wilson is totally dead.) And you can tell it’s getting serious, because the very jaunty music has stopped as soon as the lift doors open.

Wow, I’m out of practice at this.

I find this whole scene in the basement very creepy, but then I’ve always found the (spoiler!) Autons terribly creepy. The horrible little dolls! And that black plastic armchair that suffocated people! The only thing that frightened me more in the original series was the Peking homunculus.

And now the dummies start moving, and they’re waaaay creepier than the stop-motion dolls from the 1970s. Even Rose is thoroughly freaked, backing away, until—the Doctor grabs her hand. “Run!”

Hurray!

Actually, the dummies look less realistic and less frightening when they’re running. For some reason, they look more like people and less like dummies/Autons when they’re running.

DOCTOR: Why would they be students?
ROSE: ‘Cause to get that many people dressed up and acting stupid, they have to be students.

I can’t argue with that.

And there goes the Doctor. Well, that was quick. Shall we assume he’ll be back at some point? Rose looks a little shell-shocked—and that’s before her place of work explodes, which it just did.

Well, you can’t argue with that: that’s what the Doctor does, just wanders in to a planet and creates massive quantities of chaos.

Jacki really is at her most annoying in this episode, with the nattering about Rose being “aged” and “skin like an old Bible” and “honestly, if you walked in now, you’d think I was her daughter.” I like her more in later episodes. And Mickey, too, though I don’t dispute his desire to go down the pub to see the match. Perfectly normal impulse—unless it’s Man. United playing. Or Chelsea. Or Arsenal.

Uh oh, strange scuttling sounds, and rattling cat flaps.

Oh, that’s okay—it’s only the Doctor poking through the cat flap. Which sounds like a euphemism, but isn’t.

I love this scene with Jacki:

JACKI: I’m in my dressing gown.
DOCTOR: Yes, you are.
JACKI: There’s a strange man in my bedroom.
DOCTOR: Yes, there is.
JACKI: Well, anything could happen.
DOCTOR: . . . No.

I also love the montage of the Doctor wandering around the living room while Rose makes coffee and natters on—checking his new face in the mirror (how long has it been since he regenerated?) and flipping the playing cards all over.

And if Mickey is being immature earlier in the episode, at least that explains Rose’s assumption that the Doctor is pretending to strangle himself with the plastic arm.

I wonder if this exchange between Rose and the Doctor

DOCTOR: Just “the Doctor”.
ROSE: Is that supposed to sound impressive?
DOCTOR: Yeah, sort of.

is a nod to the fact that this is the first new episode in sixteen years, a nod to all those new viewers out there who don’t automatically see the title sequence and think, “Well, obviously he’s the Doctor.)

I love Eccleston’s Doctor, the way he can flip between a thoroughly brittle manic mood, almost hysterical, to a sort of portentous solemnity that also has something hysterical about it. I’m writing this passage during the sequence when he’s walking back to the TARDIS (our first real glimpse of the TARDIS, though Rose runs past it in the street after the explosion—and the first time we hear it) when he’s explaining how he can feel the Earth hurtling through space, and that’s a good scene to explain what I mean about this Doctor.

I’ve lost the knack of explaining where the plot is while also rambling on about other things!

For the record, Rose has just checked out the Doctor on the Internet, and now Mickey is over-protectively driving her to see the chap who runs the Doctor website. (Well, his driving isn’t over-protective, but you get my point.)

I like Clive’s son—“Dad! It’s one of your nutters!”—but his wife’s “She? She read a website about the Doctor, and she’s a she?” just makes me a little cranky. (Yes, there are girl Doctor Who fans, and, no, you don’t need to assume that a Doctor Who convention is just going to be sad men in anoraks standing around shuffling their feet.)

Clive is showing his photographs and pictures to Rose, and Nick wonders what the Doctor was doing at Kennedy’s assassination. I wonder that, too. He wasn’t assassinating the U.S. President, presumably, so what?

Ah, the wobbly wheelie bin. No, Mickey, don’t get out of the car! You fool! Oh, you know something bad’s going to happen when it’s a wobbly wheelie bin.

This sequence with the bin isn’t entirely convincing to me—and as I type those words, Nick says, “You know, given the requirements, I don’t think ILM could have done better with that.” But the strips of plastic attached to Mickey’s hands I like—they’re kind of creepy and mundane at the same time, but the wobbling bin itself—especially in the panoramic shots—isn’t convincing.

Mickey’s post-Auton make-up is fabulous, though—the shift in the eyebrows and eyes and the shininess of the skin. I love it. Very uncanny (in a Freudian sense).

On the other hand, the scene where the cork hits Mickey in the forehead is deeply unconvincing.

(While Mickey wrecks the restaurant, I want to know more about this boy for whom Rose left school. Who was he? Why is he never mentioned again? Why would she have to leave school? I want back-story, dammit!)

And Rose is inside the TARDIS for the first time, and completely and utterly freaked out. Can’t say I blame her.

When did the assembled hordes of Ghengis Khan try to get through the TARDIS doors? I don’t remember that episode.

Oh, dear: Rose is breaking down. Poor girl.

Damn, these two are self-absorbed. We’ve already had Rose’s “I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about me” line at the dinner table, and now the Doctor’s insisting “Yeah, culture shock—oh, what? Your boyfriend? Oh, him.”

Sorry, Doctor: I love you, but Rose has a point—a Police Public Call Box is not a good disguise. It wasn’t even really a good disguise in the 1960s.

And now we have the first real running scene of the new season: the Doctor and Rose, tearing along hand-in-hand towards the London Eye. It reminds me, vaguely, of all the running through Paris that the Doctor (the Fourth) and Romana do in “City of Death.” As always, with Russell T. Davies, I wonder if it’s deliberate homage.

And they’re underneath the streets, looking down on the Nestene Consciousness.

NICK: This is a setting they keep coming back to. Spaceship interiors, cellars . . .
ME: I think it’s the new series’ quarry, myself.

Oh, and Mickey’s still alive. Which is good, I suppose, though Mickey didn’t grow on me for quite some time.

The Doctor probably shouldn’t call us “dumb apes” and “stupid little people,” when he’s always claimed to be so fond of us.

This scene is odd: this hysteria when he’s talking about the Time War in some detail for the first time is heart-breaking, but the image of the Doctor as a diplomat doesn’t really work for me here. Maybe because he’s not very good at diplomacy? Or perhaps he’s just tentative in the role here, coming out of an uncomfortable role as a soldier?

While I’m pondering that, vaguely, the Nestene Consciousness has activated its Auton warriors, and they’ve killed poor old Clive. Why? Because he’s the only person other than Jacki and Mickey that we’ve seen in any detail this episode, and the implication is that we’ll feel sorrier for someone we know? Or because they recognise that he, like Rose, has had contact with the Doctor, albeit virtually?

Of course, Jacki is at risk, too, from the hyper-creepy Auton brides.

But that’s all right, Rose knows what she needs to do. I do feel a little sorry for the Nestene Consciousness, though. It’s controlling the Autons, and the Autons have always been mindless killing machines, but it doesn’t look like a nice death—it looks intensely painful, and the poor thing is only a refugee from a destroyed planet.

Oh, well—it’s dead now, so there isn’t much point worrying about it.

Rose, when your mother is trying to tell you not to leave the house because it’s dangerous, you probably shouldn’t hang up on her. She’ll be having a panic attack right now.

Now, now, Mickey: aliens are people, too, in the broadest sense of the word.

And while I’m writing that, Rose is turning down a trip in what she thinks is a spaceship. Because she’s an idiot. Who seriously turns down a chance to travel in the TARDIS, even if their boyfriend isn’t invited? (Sorry, Nick!)

Ah, but when the Doctor turns up again and tells her it’s a time machine, as well, then she’s off—and I love that grin of sheer joy on her face. But that exchange with Mickey (“Thanks.” “For what?” “Exactly.”) doesn’t leave me with a good impression of the newest companion.

And that’s “Rose”! Sometime in the not too distant future (that is, probably next Sunday), it’ll be “The End of the World.”

I am, as vaguely promised in an earlier post, going to real-time blog (Nick has insisted I can’t call it live-blogging when the episodes aren’t actually airing on telly) the first episode of season one of Doctor Who this evening, probably around 5 p.m., when Nick’s finished killing zombies.

I don’t think it’s necessary to be watching the programme to enjoy the real-time blogging—at least, I don’t think it’s necessary for you. It’s fairly necessary for me to be watching the programme.

Still, it never hurts to give people a little heads up.

The new Doctor has been announced.

And it’s not, as we thought it might be, Paterson Joseph. I’m a little disappointed about that, actually.

Instead, it’s . . . well, you can read for yourself right here at Outpost Gallifrey.

It’s not that it’s a spoiler, not now it’s been officially announced; I just think people might like to learn the news for themselves.

For much the same reason, I’m putting my response to this in the comments thread, rather than right here.

UPDATE: Courtesy of the BBC, here is an extended interview with Matt Smith, which the Beeb kindly posted on YouTube.

Seriously, he looks about twelve.

May well be Paterson Joseph.

There’s no official notification and the blogosphere is divided on the apparent accidental reveal of Joseph as a frontrunner in this very short snippet of an interview (via IO9) with his Survivors co-star Phillip Rhys.

Me, I’m not quite certain that the interview is as revelatory as some people are thinking. It could be an accidental slip of the tongue or it could simply be a verbal shift away from a potentially damaging statement.

As to whether I’d like to see Paterson Joseph as the Doctor? Well, I think I would.

I’ve seen Joseph in a number of things, most recently as the punctuation-challenged Dr Rossi in the first episode of The Gil Mayo Mysteries: the one who had “No special relationship’s” written on his wall and to whom Gil said, “You’re really just making yourself look stupid.”

Before that, he was Lyndon, the world’s sexiest IT consultant, in Green Wing, which was a superb show and a charming role.

He was in Steven Moffat’s Jekyll, which is probably where the rumours started in the first place: anyone who has ever worked with Moffat is currently being linked to the role of the Doctor for 2010.

He’s been in Doctor Who itself, of course, as Rodrick in season one’s weepy two-parter “Bad Wolf” and “The Parting of the Ways.”

And before all of those, the role I genuinely adored and the reason why I’m not too worried about these rumours—he was the fabulous Marquis de Carabas in the BBC version of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

(And if you’ve neither read that book nor seen the television version, I can strongly recommend both of them—but if you’re thinking of catching up on what Joseph is capable of before this rumour is confirmed or denied, definitely track down the television serial.)

Gaiman has, apparently, said that he wrote the Marquis de Carabas’s character as William Hartnell’s Doctor, so the role is both unique and, simultaneously, a nice primer for perhaps playing the Doctor.

I don’t know if this rumour is true or not, but I’m not going to fret if it is.

The Marquis de Carabas knows everything. Knows everyone. Can go anywhere. Can do anything.

Just like the Doctor.

[An aside: Today might well, as Nick has just reminded me, be an auspicious day for an announcement of some kind. Today, forty-five years ago, Doctor Who premiered.]

And by two interests, I mean Doctor Who and archival research.

The BBC, it seems, is opening its Doctor Who archives and making them available on the web.

Nick, it need not be said, is neither to hold nor bind after discovering this.

The archive begins, chronologically, with an exploratory document outlining the practicality of developing a science-fiction programme for television—and the document is awesome: at one point, it suggests that “More pretentiously, far less ably, the novels of CS Lewis likewise use the apparatus of SF in the service of metaphysical ideas” (see here for that document, written in 1962).

I guess nobody in the BBC was a big fan of Lewis’s work?

That document also outlines the fact that science fiction is overwhelmingly an American genre, which I find fascinating: no-one would argue, now, that there’s a distinctly British flavour of sci-fi, but this document largely predates that time.

And the archive ends with the announcement of the new series in Radio Times.

Surely no more incentive is needed to go and rummage through this? Everyone loves archives, yes?

Well, how about this audience report on “An Unearthly Child,” the pilot episode? According to page two, “The acting throughout was considered satisfactory.”

Or this concept report from 1963, which talks about the “unsexual” nature of science fiction and emphasises the need to avoid the generic tendency against in-depth character development.

Or the image gallery, including this image of William Hartnell from the pilot episode. (What a silly hat!)

Or . . .

I’m talking to myself here, aren’t I? You all disappeared at the first link and are now happily rummaging through the archives, aren’t you?

Thought so.

I’ve been marking for a week, and am still marking frantically before my next pile of assessment comes in next week, and cruising on the blog a little (thanks to unusually strange conversations and some pretty spring flowers), and I thought, “Do I really want to delve into the fact that David Tennant is leaving Doctor Who after next season?

Then I remembered who I actually am and how much of this blog is actually devoted to Doctor Who and I thought, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

I don’t, though. Not really.

Because this is a potentially divisive issue and I don’t want to tread on any fan toes.

Now, I’m a Doctor Who fan from way back; I’ve said that before, and I’m saying it again, because I’ve seen many Doctors come and go over the years.

And I liked all of them. Yes, even Colin Baker: I didn’t entirely appreciate the way in which the show shifted in that era, I really despised Peri and Mel, and I wasn’t terribly fond of the “Trial of a Time Lord” extended storyline. But I could appreciate how difficult it must have been to play the Doctor at a time when the BBC was uncertain about the show, including an eighteen-month hiatus from production.

I eventually liked Peter Davison, though it took repeats to make me appreciate him: in 1981, I was too devastated by the regeneration of the fourth Doctor to really enjoy the fifth incarnation. But by the time the ABC started showing repeats, I was hooked: I loved, particularly, the way in which this Doctor was analogous to the cool older brother with a driver’s license and the way in which the series showed, for the first time since William Hartnell, the interior life of the TARDIS.

I even liked Paul McGann, despite the fact that I disliked, with a fierce intensity that has lessened not a jot over the years, the liberties the telemovie took with a beloved programme: Eric Roberts as the Master? The suggestion that the Doctor was half human? The seventh Doctor dying from a gunshot wound? The Doctor snogging his companion? (Sigh. It was a more innocent time, was 1996). Oh, the pain will never lessen.

(Admittedly, even some of the Doctors I loved I also disliked at times. The seventh Doctor’s appalling enunciation and tendency to gurn in moments of high stress still irritate me. But balanced against the sheer delightfulness of the “Professor” and the glory of some of those episodes, they seem small problems.)

Bear with me: I do have a point here.

I like David Tennant. I always have. True, I don’t always like the way in which this incarnation has been presented: the implacability in some cruel situations and the occasional near-hysterical joy in chaos have made me wonder where this Doctor is going, whether he’s cruising for a fall or, like Hamlet, pretending to be mad in order to hide the fact that he is, in fact, completely insane.

But I like him. And I will be sorry to see him go.

But this is Doctor Who.

The longevity of this show comes down, in the end, to the idea of regeneration: once you induce audiences to acknowledge that the same character can be played by vastly different actors, then a show can run for as long as the acting and script-writing remain engaging.

(That conclusion requires that we all forget about “Time Lash,” for the time being.)

We all accepted the idea of regeneration in the original series. Sure, some regenerations were harder to accept than others, but even then it was a matter of shouting at the television, “Stop going wavery! You can survive a forty-foot drop from a radio telescope, you wimp! Dammit, what do you mean, ‘It’s the end’? Just stop regenerating!”

It wasn’t a disbelief in the essential fact of regeneration.

But I’m not convinced that the new audiences that this version of Doctor Who has attracted are entirely happy with the idea of regeneration. As I was saying in a discussion with Wendy over at The Spiralling Shape, I’m seeing many comments online along the lines of “Well, the show’s jumped the shark. I’ll never watch it again.”

But if the Doctor doesn’t regenerate, the entire show is at risk.

Russell T. Davies made a bold decision in bringing Christopher Eccleston in as the ninth Doctor, knowing that he would only remain a year. Even then, I recall much discussion suggesting that Eccleston had misrepresented his willingness to remain with the show, because no showrunner would have hired an actor for a single series of a long-awaited return.

But it was a good decision: a fragile, manic, appealing Doctor who regenerates almost immediately? I can’t think of a better way to foreground the nature of the programme.

This, though, is the real test. Tennant is dearly beloved as the tenth Doctor, and anyone filling his shoes has a difficult task ahead of them. There’ll be no shortage of willing aspirants, but the real concern here is with the fans.

The fans have to accept regeneration.

I don’t mean to sound dogmatic on the subject, and I know a lot of the cyber-distress at this point is shock and dismay at losing a favourite Doctor. I sympathise with that; I’m shocked, too. But I’m sticking with that main point.

We have to accept regeneration.

If we ignore the Doctor’s unique lifespan and the ways in which his physiognomy works to extend his life, then we’re inevitably shortening the lifespan of the programme as a whole.

In honour of the controversial ending to season four of Doctor Who, I want to run through, in a diffuse and undirected fashion, something that’s been bothering me for a while.

I want people to stop telling me what criteria I need to meet before I can call myself a Doctor Who fan.

Sure, no one’s actually telling me this in person, but I’m seeing blanket statements more and more often, and they’re frustrating me.

I was surfing around the other day, looking for a version of Tim Bisley’s rant about The Phantom Menace from Spaced so I could quote it in a comment thread, and I came across another version of this statement on a blog I’d never visited before.

I’m not going to link to the blog, because that’s not important: the author is entitled to their opinion (which is, in a nutshell, what this post is about), and it was just one more iteration of the comment that’s been bothering me.

And that comment, paraphrased, is this: You’re not a fan of Doctor Who unless you get all gushy about the Doctor’s relationship with Rose.

Well, I don’t get particularly gushy over the relationship, but I see no reason why my fandom should be constrained or questioned as a result.

Why am I not particularly invested in that relationship? Many reasons.

Partly, it has to do with the fact that I found Rose thoroughly whiny at the end of season four, and lost much of the sympathy I’d previously had for her as a result.

But partly it has to do with the fact that Rose’s relationship with the Doctor opened up the subsequent unrequited-love angle for Martha and the argument, which I still see posted on various sites, that obviously Donna is in love with the Doctor: everyone is in love with the Doctor.

This argument, to me, has shades of another old chestnut that I despise: Men and women can’t ever really be friends, because sex keeps getting in the way.

I can’t count the number of ways in which that statement frustrates me, but here are a few:

• it’s patronising: not everyone is locked into a mode of thought where a sexual relationship is the only possible relationship.

• it’s deeply heternormative: what if one member of the pairing is gay? What if both are? And what on earth does this suggest about our friendships with people who aren’t heterosexual?

• it suggests we should live in a climate of trepidation, suspecting that everyone we meet wants something from us that they’re hiding behind a facade of friendship, and if we ever acknowledge that facade, the whole friendship will crumble.

• where do married couples or couples in other forms of long-term committed relationships fit in here?

It seems to me that Rose’s relationship with the Doctor has opened Doctor Who up to this type of reading. I can’t fathom how it is possible to read Donna as in love with the Doctor, but no text is translucent, so presumably people are pulling something out of it that I’m not seeing.

But this is only my personal problem with the programme. When I watched it as a child, there was no suggestion of this in my mind. (With the possible exception of Romana.) The Doctor has companions, and they travelled the galaxy together, and we all wished we could travel in the TARDIS one day. If anything else was going on, it was going on behind closed doors, and I, for one, never thought about it.

Looking back, I think that was one reason why I liked the show: it was one of the few shows out there that didn’t subscribe to the “men and women can’t be friends” mentality.

Well, those days are over, as far a large proportion of Doctor Who fandom is concerned.

And that’s not the issue with which I have a problem.

I’m not attempting to assert that my view of the programme is the only true and right one.

Fandom is not monolithic.

There are as many different ways of being a fan as there are different ways to read a text, and there are as many ways of reading a text as there are readers (provided the text is of sufficient complexity. I don’t know how many ways there are to read Spot books—though I did once have students demonstrate a brilliant reading of a Spot pop-up book through the conventions of Gothic literature, so maybe I shouldn’t be so restrictive.)

You experience great joy out of being a Rose-Doctor ‘shipper? Great! ‘Ship away!

But don’t dare tell me that if I don’t subscribe to your view of the text then I’m not a fan.

I’m a fan of Doctor Who.

I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who my entire life: I can’t remember a time when I didn’t watch this programme, growing up in the household of parents who started watching the programme in 1963.

I was an open fan of the programme back when Doctor Who fans were unilaterally perceived as anorak-wearing weirdos (though I ascribe no particular virtue to this on my part: I never have been cool).

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: Doctor Who is blood and bone to me, the only television programme that I’ve ever felt exists under my very skin.

So I don’t gush over the Doctor’s relationship with a recent companion.

Why should I feel compelled to abandon a life-long fandom on those grounds?

This live-blogging of the final episode brought to you by the fact that we had to chase two possums out of the kitchen this evening: the second time this week we’ve had to chase native animals out of the house.

I love Brisbane.

(Of course, the last great possum chase was slightly derailed by the fact that the possum was running hysterically in one direction and Nick was running in the opposite direction looking for his camera, while I was stopping the possum from making it into the bedroom, and wondering aloud why Nick needed to take pictures of the incident. But that’s not important right now.)

So this is the final real episode of Doctor Who until 2010: sure, there are the specials next year, but it’s not the same as a full season. We’ll see how it works out.

And he we go: the beginning of the final episode. And we have a brief recap of the events of the last episode, to begin with, including Davros. Davros!

And Gwen and Ianto.

And terrified Sarah Jane. (Nick tells me I gave away a spoiler there, last episode. Sorry about that: it’s hard to type and watch at the same time. I do try to keep things spoiler free, honestly.)

And here’s the episode, with the Doctor regenerating, but forcing that regeneration energy into his severed hand.

NICK: The Doctor Who equivalent of the Hand of God goal.

And here come Mickey and Jackie to save Sarah Jane.

And something mysterious to save Gwen and Ianto.

(I have to say, I wasn’t fooled by the regeneration sequence at the end of the last episode. I knew we’d have heard if Tennant was leaving the episode.)

Damn: Doctor and Rose angst. So over this.

Nick points out that the Doctor has technically used up a regeneration, even if he didn’t actually regenerate.

Now why won’t Captain Jack give Donna a hug?

So Torchwood is locked down: Captain Jack is outside, but Gwen and Ianto can do nothing because of Tosh’s time lock. And the TARDIS has been caught in a temporal loop and transferred to the Crucible, the Dalek control ship.

But Sarah insists on the three of them surrendering, so that they too will be taken to the Crucible, where the Doctor is. (Jackie, of course, is only interested in following Rose.)

Martha won’t explain what the Osterhagen Key is (Hee! Daleks talking in German! Funniest bit of the entire episode) but she’s going to activate it, anyway.

NICK: It’s a wonderful McGuffin.

Rose is explaining that her world is ahead of this one, and that this is how they know that the stars are going out—and that all the dimensional timelines converge on Donna. Donna, naturally, immediately puts herself down again, but we know what Donna’s capable of.

Even the Doctor’s scared, here: as he says, this is a Dalek empire at the height of its power. Not like the last time they fought the Daleks.

But something odd’s happening to Donna: she can hear a heartbeat that no-one else can hear.

Rose and Jack are pretending to be tough about the whole thing—but they’re scared. Jack’s terrified, even though he knows he should be fairly safe. And even Donna, who doesn’t really know what the Daleks are like, is concerned—but she keeps getting side-tracked by that heartbeat. The Doctor thinks she’s scared, but it’s more hypnotic than that.

But now Donna’s scared, because she’s trapped in the TARDIS, and the Daleks intend to destroy what they rightly identify as the Doctor’s greatest weapon. They’ve deposited it into the heart of the Z-neutrino energy that powers the Crucible, which will destroy it.

Now, Russell T. Davies: I warned you I’d stop watching if you destroyed the TARDIS.

The Doctor is, rightly, more concerned about Donna, but the loss of the TARDIS must hurt him, too.

Donna, meanwhile, has touched the Doctor’s hand, from which the heartbeat is emanating. And the glass breaks, and the hand glows, and a new Doctor grows from the severed hand.

A second Doctor. Completely naked, if that’s your cup of tea.

He activates the TARDIS and it dematerialises, but from the original Doctor’s perspective, it looks as though it has been destroyed.

Jack shoots the red Dalek, and is exterminated. This freaks Rose out: the Doctor, obviously, slightly less.

Rose and the Doctor are being taken to Davros; as they leave, Jack—who, remember, cannot die—winks at the Doctor.

Donna is freaked out: “Lop a bit off, grow another one? You’re like worms!” But this Doctor is much more frenetic than the original, and David Tennant does a nice Catherine Tate impression. This one only has one heart, and he owes his existence to Donna: part Time Lord, part human.

And he’s more intuitive than the original Doctor. He knows that Donna lacks self-confidence, that she really does think that she’s worthless. But he knows better. The original Doctor does, too, but he doesn’t see any reason to convince Donna of it; he doesn’t really see her fragility.

He emphasises again that the way in which he and Donna keep meeting each other over and over again is not common, that there must be something more to it than that.

Martha, meanwhile, has reached her destination, and met an old woman who has stayed while the soldiers—boys, all—have fled in terror. The woman has heard of the Osterhagen Key, and she knows what it does. She blends this with memories of a single trip to London, the central thought in all her memories—all spoken in a mixture of untranslated German and English, so we don’t understand all that she is saying—but she can’t bring herself to shoot Martha.

Jack is being incinerated, but he works his way out. What kind of incinerator has a lock on the inside? Still, it’s good for Jack that it does.

Sarah, Mickey, and Jackie are being taken for “testing.”

The Doctor and Rose are being “contained” in Davros’s vault. The Doctor suspects that Davros is no longer in charge of the Daleks—he claims Davros is the Daleks’ “pet.”

Dalek Kaan is ranting, again—Davros is committed to the idea of the prophecies that Kaan is repeating. His trip into the Time War means that he saw “time,” and that is what has driven him mad.

Once again, he emphasises that one of the companions will die, but the Doctor, of course, thinks that Donna is already dead.

Davros repeats the idea of “testing,” but this time he mentions that they are testing a “reality bomb.” Sarah easily runs away from the group, and Mickey follows her. But Jackie has stopped to help a woman who has fallen down, and now the Daleks are looking directly at her. She can’t escape.

The planetary alignment field allows them to power the reality bomb—and z-neutrino energy in a single stream. The Doctors know what this means, but everyone else is in the dark. The test subjects will soon find out, though—but not Jackie, because her teleporter has recharged; she can still escape, and does so.

Everyone else in the firing lines dissolves into their constituent atoms, leaving nothing but dust.

Donna and Rose both ask their respective Doctors what happened, but neither answer: Davros tells Rose that the reality bomb cancels the electronic field that holds the atoms in any object together. With the help of the twenty-seven planets, Davros can send the wave through the entire galaxy and through the interstices between galaxies, destroying all of reality.

(I originally wrote that as “destorying,” which is fair enough, but not quite accurate.)

Detonation is near: the Daleks are retreating.

Captain Jack meet up with Mickey, who’s both pleased to see him and not:

JACK: And that’s beefcake.
MICKEY: And that’s enough hugging.

Sarah Jane, though, has a warp star: an explosion waiting to happen.

And Martha has two other people on line, and that’s enough to activate the Osterhagen Key, but she won’t activate it yet, not until she’s tried one more thing.

And that’s contact the Daleks on behalf of UNIT.

(The clone Doctor, on the other hand, has an idea to lock the reality bomb onto Davros’s DNA, which will cause the plan to backfire.)

Martha explains that the Osterhagen Key—invented by someone called Osterhagen, the Doctor supposes—will detonate nuclear bombs below Earth’s surface, tearing the planet apart.

The Doctor objects, but Martha points out that the Dalek needs these twenty-seven planets, and have no use for twenty-six planets.

Jack also pops up on the monitor, with the warp star. It gives Sarah, too, a chance to confront Davros, whom she originally met back on Skaro as a much younger woman. I’d love the deal with that confrontation in more detail, but I don’t have time.

Because Davros is pointing out that the Doctor has killed many people over the years: his daughter, the stewardess, River, the tree woman from season one, Rattigan, the man from “Tooth and Claw” . . . many, many others whose names I can’t remember, and that’s only the people who’ve died in the past four seasons. Many more died in the Doctor’s name between 1963 and 1989—it might have been nice to see some of them.

Martha and the others are drawn into the Crucible’s vault, with Davros, the original Doctor, and Rose.

DAVROS: Detonate the reality bomb!

And then the evil cackle. For one friend of ours, that was his sole update on every social-networking site around for about three days after this episode aired. “Detonate the reality bomb! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

But now the clone Doctor and the TARDIS are here: unfortunately, the clone Doctor is a bit rubbish, and ends up getting shot and locked in a cell. Donna, trying to activate the weapon, is also shot.

But the bomb isn’t detonated? Why not?

Donna!

Donna’s not dead—and, as the Doctor points out, she can’t even change a plug. So what’s happened?

She has control of the Daleks, who are horribly confused by the fact that they can’t exterminate anyone.

The Ood saw this coming: the Doctor-Donna, they mentioned.

(Ha! The spinning Daleks make me giggle every time. And they remind me of the sad, wailing Daleks dying of lack of radiation in the original William Hartnell Dalek story. So sad, that was.)

So it was a two-way meta-biological crisis (or something like that: this is a hard episode to recap), and now Donna is part Time Lord, as the clone Doctor is part human. And Donna knows what needs to be done to send all the planets back home: without those, the reality bomb is no threat.

SARAH: So there’s three of you?
ROSE: Three Doctors?
JACK: Oh, I can’t even tell you what I’m thinking right now.

Jack, we all know what you’re thinking of right now. You’re not exactly an opaque character, in this regard.

Dalek Kaan has been manipulating the time lines: in his trip into the Time Wars, he has seen what the Daleks have done, and he objects. He is working to the end of the Daleks, but he needs the Doctor to do it.

The Doctor won’t.

But the clone Doctor will. He reverses the power feeds, blowing each and every Dalek in the Crucible, in all the ships, into dust.

Oh, and the Doctor is not happy. Because he’s seeing himself re-commit the genocide that we know he committed. And Davros is left alone on his burning battleship: the Doctor wants to save him, but Davros refuses—he forces the Doctor to accept the fact of his genocide. And Dalek Kaan insists that one will still die.

The Doctor calls Torchwood, and he calls Luke and Mr Smith—but wait! What’s this? K9!

K9! Good dog, K9! I’ve been waiting all episode for you!

With the help of Torchwood and Mr Smith (and K9!)—but not Jackie, who’s not allowed to touch anything—the Doctor can fly Earth back home, towing it behind the TARDIS with the help of the rift.

A little silly? Perhaps.

Lovely music, though. And Ianto seems to be enjoying himself. And I like to see Ianto enjoying himself.

Plus, this is a bit of a break from the recapping, because we’re still ten minutes away from the end of the episode, and I’m already thoroughly confused about whether I’ve mentioned all the main points or not.

So Donna finally gets her cuddle from Captain Jack? I don’t know how I feel about the fact that Donna’s not just the only woman, not just the only human, but the only sentient being that Jack’s been reluctant to cuddle.

Back on Earth, Sarah’s off, to see to her teenage son.

Mickey’s off; he doesn’t want to go back to the parallel world.

Jack and Martha are off: Jack’s been deprived of his teleport, but hints at another possible career for Martha, other than UNIT.

Mickey’s not stupid, he says: his Gran’s dead, and he can see which way the wind’s blowing, so he’s off after Jack and Martha.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is back to Bad Wolf Bay: Jackie’s not thrilled about being in Norway, because she’ll have to get Pete to pick her up.

Rose doesn’t want to return to the parallel universe, but the Doctor says she has to, because the clone Doctor needs her. He, she says, is himself when he first met Rose, fresh from committing genocide and scarred by his war experience. The Doctor wants her to heal him, as she originally healed the original Doctor.

Rose is reluctant, but Donna points out the great gift that the Doctor is trying to give her: this Doctor has only one heart, so he will age and die as Rose does. He can spend the rest of his life with her.

Rose is still reluctant, but when the clone Doctor completes the sentence that the original Doctor never managed to finish in “Doomsday,” Rose grabs him and kisses him.

She still runs after the TARDIS when it leaves without her noticing, though.

I feel a little sorry for the clone Doctor—I think things are going to be a little difficult for him at first, with Rose or without her.

Donna, on the other hand, is breaking down. Her brain can’t contain the effects of the human-Time Lord meta-crisis (I must go back and correct this), and the Doctor knows what’s happening.

Donna knows, too, but she doesn’t suspect the consequences.

Until right now. She knows what he’s going to do—she can see it in his face, and he apologises, but she’s crying and she’s begging him not to, and this scene breaks my heart, because he’s going to strip everything away from her, everything that makes her Donna.

He’s going to do what the humans did to the Ood.

Damn, I don’t want to watch this again.

And he does it.

And he takes the unconscious Donna back to her mother and her grandfather, stripped of every memory of the Doctor. And no one can ever mention it to her again, for the rest of her life. She can’t ever know what happened to her.

And Bernard Cribbens is weeping: he knows what this means. He knows that Donna grew and stretched while she was with the Doctor, and now that’s all gone.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is the cruelest thing that the Doctor has ever done.

And I know Sylvia is trying to be supportive of Donna here—the whole “She’s my daughter” thing—but it breaks my heart to see that braying woman on the phone, not knowing who the Doctor is or what they did, and knowing she’s been dumped back into that suffocating life, with her hen-pecked grandfather who has to escape up the hill to be able to breathe and a mother who’s constantly berating and belittling her.

Oh, Donna.

What Rose goes through—a parallel universe, sure, but with her mother, her formerly dead father, her ex-boyfriend, and a clone of her recent boyfriend—is nothing compared to this wholesale destruction of Donna.

Okay, I can see in his face that the Doctor feels the horror of what he’s done.

Good.

I say again: this is the cruelest thing you’ve ever done, Doctor. Ever.

(For those of you watching these as they air on the ABC, some of us had an enthusiastic conversation about this episode here. It was spoilerific, but no longer.)

I was a little uncertain about the practicalities of live-blogging this episode, since there seemed to be an enormous storm heading straight towards us and, Brisbane’s power-grid being what it is, I was rather alarmed about the possibility of the power going out.

But, as with last night, the storm seems to have boiled away to the north, so we should be all right.

There’s more rain coming, but not sufficient to warrant a severe storm warning. It has, at least, cooled everything down, which is an advantage. I’ve never acclimatised to Brisbane’s weather—at least, not the warm weather.

So here we are, for the second-last episode of season four.

(And I tell a lie, apparently—there is still a severe storm warning for Brisbane City. But if the power goes out in the middle of the episode, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.)

(I’m giving a lecture on—partly, anyway—cliches tomorrow morning, and that always seems to have a detrimental effect on my writing. So keep an eye out for further cliches in this posting. I’m sure there’ll be plenty. Does that qualify as a cliche? It’s certainly not inspired writing.)

But all that’s beside the point—this is the first of the two-part story line that ends season four. I wonder what can possibly happen in this episode?

And here we are on earth—the Doctor panicking about what “Bad Wolf” can mean, but finding that nothing is wrong at all. Apparently.

Donna’s a bit stunned that she’s just met Rose, but the Doctor’s more worried about what Rose’s ability to travel between universes means for the health of the universes themselves.

Of course, he leaves too early: things start going haywire as soon as he gets back in the TARDIS—and the Earth is gone. The TARDIS is fixed, but the Earth has vanished.

Oh, bless, Donna—she’s so free from jealousy, insisting to the Doctor that isn’t it a good thing that Rose is back? I’m not sure about that, myself—but we’ll see.

Martha! She’s in the U.S.

And Torchwood—still in Cardiff. Captain Jack dashing out to see what’s happened, while Ianto and Gwen boggle.

And Sarah Jane, with her adopted son and “Mr Smith,” the computer with the melodramatic fanfare.

And Donna’s family—and Martha, and Captain Jack, and Sarah Jane, all staring up at the sky.

And there’s Rose—and we pan up, following her eye line, to see a sky full of planets, hanging so close to the earth that you’d think we’d be pulled into one of them.

And, the world’s longest credit sequence!

Donna, practical as always, is worried that with the absence of the sun, everyone on earth will freeze to death. And the Doctor’s astonished by the power of the technology that could move the planet.

That’s a nice encapsulation of their differences.

Richard Dawkins! Say hello to Romana for me!

And the Doctor’s going to the Shadow Proclamation—that’s something we’ve been hearing about for several seasons, now. I’m looking forward to seeing how that pays off.

Damn—I can’t keep up with what’s happening. Now there’re two hundred spaceships heading straight for earth. Not that anyone would notice, because they’re all too busy looting the shops, getting drunk in the streets, and beating each other up.

Rose isn’t fussed, though—she’s carrying an enormous gun, so she’s perfectly secure.

Martha’s phoning Captain Jack, to see whether he’s heard from the Doctor. Martha’s on Project Indigo. It’s top secret, but Jack’s heard about it, because he met a soldier in a bar—strictly professional, he tells Ianto.

And now the Daleks are broadcasting “Exterminate!”—and Sarah’s crying, and Jack’s terrified, and Rose looks like she’s barely holding it together. They all know what two hundred Dalek spaceships mean.

And, of course, last time Jack met the Daleks, they killed him. It was a heroic last stand, but he still died.

Supreme Dalek! All red and shiny. He’s pretty funky. But I’m with Jack and Sarah; I don’t like where this is going.

The Doctor, meanwhile, tells us that the Shadow Proclamation are intergalactic policemen—I suppose rather like Interpol. Turns out the Jadoon (don’t correct my spelling!) work for the Shadow Proclamation.

The Shadow Proclamation tell the Doctor that twenty-four planets have been ripped from the skies. Oh, yes, Donna—you’re every bit as important as the Doctor; she’s the one who notices that Pyrovillia is part of this pattern, and the Adipose breeding planet. She doesn’t mention the Lost Moon of Poush, of course, because she wasn’t there for that conversation, but she’s still the catalyst for the Doctor realising what’s happening.

(And he does mention that they’re in a perfect pattern, which is why they’re not falling into each other.)

And the Doctor mentions the Daleks in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” trying to move the Earth—he doesn’t mention the Time Lords moving the planet in the distant future, in “Trial of a Time Lord.” Self-editing again, Doctor?

Jack’s freaking out almost as much at the idea of Project Indigo as he is at the two hundred Dalek ships. But Martha knows that she takes her orders from UNIT, and she activates it.

Jack tells us that it’s experimental teleport scavenged from the Sontarans—but that without stablisation, Martha’s dead, scattered into atoms.

I know that voice! Oh, damn—Davros! That’s Davros! Brilliant!

And Dalek Kaan—driven insane, somehow, burbling of the arrival of the Doctor. Oh, wow, that CGI for the Shadow Proclamation headquarters is beautiful. Prettiest thing this season, I think.

One of the workers approaches Donna, telling her that there was something on her back, and that she’s so sorry for the loss that is to come.

Oh, I do hate these hints about what’s to come. They keep me worked up for the coming week.

Doctor, don’t dismiss Donna’s advice, even when it’s the bees disappearing. Bees are aliens? I’ve never trusted bees. But they leave a trail that the Doctor can follow. The head woman for the Shadow Proclamation wants to co-opt the TARDIS, to have the Doctor lead them into battle. But she’s also terribly naive, so he just takes off.

The Daleks are rounding people up in the streets, but not every street. Nevertheless, Bernard Cribbens wants to attack them with a paint-gun—he thinks if he blinds them, they’ll be helpless. While he’s explaining this to Sylvia, Donna’s mother, the Daleks blow up a house when a family defies them and runs back inside.

Bernard Cribbens is a good shot, but the Dalek burns off the paint—and then explodes, as Rose appears behind him.

Bernard Cribbens wants to know if she wants to swap guns with him.

Sylvia is learning the truth about where Donna is, as her father tells her that they’re travelling the stars. The Doctor, meanwhile, is following the bees’ trail, but it stops in the middle of the Medusa Cascade—the centre of a rift in time and space, which the Doctor hasn’t visited since he was a boy of ninety. The Doctor’s defeated here—which the very Ennio Morriconian music (as Nick points out) reinforces. This is the point of ultimate defeat: the Doctor has no idea where to go, Sarah is devastated, Torchwood is stalled, Martha seems to be dead . . .

But then a voice comes out of nowhere on the subwave network.

Everyone thinks it’s just a desperate cry for help, until the voice says, “Captain Jack, shame on you!”

It’s Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister. And she’s calling for Jack, Sarah Jane, and Martha, who’s not dead, but in her mother’s home.

(Rose, meanwhile, wants to talk to Harriet, but the Nobles don’t have a webcam—Sylvia thinks they’re naughty. Rose started annoying me, here—she’s a little whingy.)

Jack, of course, is hitting on Sarah Jane. I don’t blame him—and it is Captain Jack.

(And Rose whinges, again.)

The subwave network was invented by the Mr Copper Foundation—and Mr Copper was the man who survived the wreck of the Titanic and left to start a new life on earth with a million pounds. He seems to have brought his alien technology to bear.

Harriet shuts down all possibility of using the mysterious Osterhagen Key. (Don’t correct my spelling.)

(And Rose whinges, again. You were there first, Rose—but there were many companions after you.)

Torchwood, Mr Smith, and Martha are combining their knowledge and technology to send a message to the Doctor, boosting the signal through the subwave network. It will be traced back to Harriet Jones, but she’s not worried about that.

And the Daleks have detected the transmission and are tracing the signal back to its origin: Harriet.

(Rose, the Doctor is in space: is holding your phone up to the ceiling going to make a difference? Oh, never mind.)

The Daleks have found Harriet Jones, who’s masking the location of Sarah, Torchwood, and Martha.

Now she’s transferring control to Torchwood. She knows what’s coming through her door.

And she stands up:

HARRIET: Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister.
DALEKS: Yes, we know who you are.
ME: (Chuckle)
HARRIET: Oh, you know nothing of any human. And that will be your downfall.
DALEKS: Exterminate.
ME: (Sniffle)

It’s a good death, for a character whose every appearance has been fascinating.

And now the Doctor’s skipped forward to the Medusa Cascade, which has been pulled a second out of time from the rest of the universe. And he can see Torchwood, Sarah Jane, and Martha—but not Rose. He hopes Rose is there, but she doesn’t have a webcam.

And then another voice comes in—and Sarah Jane knows that voice. She remembers the genesis of the Daleks.

Davros—Davros resurrected, though Sarah thinks he’s dead and the Doctor knows he’s dead, that his command ship flew straight into the jaws of the Nightmare Child at the gates of Elysium (don’t correct my spelling).

Dalek Kaan gave his mind, flying again and again into the time-locked Time War to rescue Davros. And Davros stripped the flesh from his own bones, literally—NICK: That’s grotesque and implausible—to create a new race of Daleks.

And Dalek Kaan can forsee death for the most faithful companion of all—everlasting death. I really hate these future warnings.

The Daleks have located Torchwood—and Jack is out of there, having used Project Indigo to get his teleport working again. And he also has an enormous gun.

But the Daleks are coming, and there’s only Ianto and Gwen left.

Sarah is leaving, as well—like Jack, she wants to find the Doctor, although she’s leaving her son behind in the car of Mr Smith. And where’s K9? I want K9, dammit!

Rose is off, too—another one seeking the Doctor. She, too, has some kind of teleport technology. But hers can take her straight to the Doctor, who’s landed on an empty street outside a church.

So there’s Rose and the Doctor, staring at each other—and Donna grinning to see it.

And they start running—but the Doctor’s not looking where he’s going. And there’s a Dalek: Rose sees it, the Doctor does not. And it catches him a glancing blow, before Captain Jack arrives and blows it up.

Donna and Rose drag him into the TARDIS while Jack covers them.

And back at Torchwood, Gwen and Ianto are insisting they’re going out kicking and screaming, like Tosh and Owen.

The Doctor is looking pretty bad.

And Sarah Jane is pulled over by a Dalek patrol—who is shot by mysterious benefactors.

The Daleks break into Torchwood, and Gwen and Ianto are shooting them.

The Doctor’s starting his regeneration cycle . . . and the episode is “To Be Continued.”

You bastard, Russell T. Davies! You magnificent bastard!

So, there are only two episodes left after this one. And I’m really not in the mood for this episode; I found it intensely difficult to watch the first time around. So depressing. And after a weekend of marking and being horribly ill, I’m in the mood for a more light-hearted episode.

I know!

I could live-blog the Agatha Christie episode. How about that?

No?

Okay. I’ll stick to “Turn Left.”

I mentioned this episode to my mother last week, when we talking about “Midnight” and what a good episode it was. Mam is not at all sure about an episode that is largely devoted to Donna and with very little Doctor. But I liked this one: I’ve come to increasingly like Donna over the course of the season, and she develops in a fascinating fashion here.

But it’s one of the episodes I really . . . well, “enjoyed” isn’t quite the right word, but it will do for now.

(I’ve just had a quick phone conversation with my brother that included the lines (on my part) “How do you walk into a soccer-boot emporium and come out with a new car?” and “How on earth can you not be sure whether you still have that cockatoo skeleton under the seat in your car?” He also reminded me of the time the power cables fell on top of his car while he was innocently driving along, and then told me that the same car was repeatedly kicked by a man who was apparently bleeding very heavily. It’s not every day you have a conversation like that.)

Wow, even the Doctor Who promos sound depressed at the thought of this episode.

Yet another reason to love the ABC (apart from the fact that that was the only station I was allowed to watch, growing up): is anyone else covering the Paraolympics?

Hey, we’ve wandered into Firefly!

NICK: Hey, it’s crude ethnic stereotype planet.

Apparently, this irritated a lot of people. I know the accent on this fortune teller—who played the insect woman in the Master episodes—irritated a lot of people in my living room.

Oh, Donna! You idiot! Why do you keep wandering away from the Doctor. That is never, ever, ever a good idea. And this fortune teller is creepy—and can’t keep her eyes on Donna’s face, even though she’s clearly not supposed to be looking at that chittering sound behind Donna.

Donna, you’re feeling woozy. Shouldn’t this be a hint that you should leg it out of this tent? Even before you start hearing the chittering sound?

Oh, dear: it’s Donna’s horrible mother. And why is this fortune teller so keen on pushing Donna to the point where she turns left instead of right?

Damn, that’s cold: when Donna’s mother tells her that all city men need temps for is practise. Oh, she’s an awful woman. Truly awful.

Okay, this object on Donna’s back doesn’t look that convincing, but I hate insects so much that it frightens me anyway.

Don’t turn right, Donna!

Oh, she turned right. That’s not going to end well.

That’s got to be the longest trailer we’ve ever had on this programme. And Billie Piper’s in the credits! I feel I should be more excited about that.

Christmas! I love Christmas! But which Christmas is this? Is it the Runaway Bride Christmas? I suppose we’re about to find out.

And Donna’s friend can see something on her back—that’s creepy.

A Christmas star? Then it is the Runaway Bride Christmas. Ken Livingstone spends money on Christmas decorations? Red Ken? Surely not! And now the Rachnos ship is starting to shoot everyone. But Donna’s friend can now see what’s on her back, and it’s freaking her out. It’s freaking Donna out a little, as well.

The army brings the star down, but what’s this? UNIT is there. And an ambulance—and a body? A body with a sonic screwdriver? Oh, damn! The Doctor’s dead! (I think that’s Sergeant Dead Meat! Or was that Private Cannon Fodder?)

Rose! Hang on, what’s happened to Billie Piper’s diction? She sounds as though her mouth is too full of teeth—and she seems to have lost the accent, as well. Rose can see what’s on Donna’s back—but she vanished before Donna can challenge her.

And the Doctor’s dead! Damn!

Now Donna’s been sacked—because the Thames has been closed off after the Doctor’s behaviour in the Rachnos episode.

Oops, it’s “Smith and Jones,” now—the hospital disappears while Donna is stripping her desk and insulting the staff: “Cliff, I’d leave you the mouse mat, but I’m afraid you’d cut yourself.”

The hospital is back, but with one survivor—and it’s not Martha. Damn, Martha’s dead, too? No! Yep: she sacrificed herself to save Oliver. Oh, dammit: the Doctor and Martha.

Bernard Cribbens’s right, though, Donna: it is getting worse. (And I see they’ve written Donna’s father’s death into the script.)

Sarah Jane Smith’s body was recovered from the hospital? Oh, dammit! Sarah Jane can’t be dead!

This is the point where I jumped off the sofa and sat half a metre in front of the television for the last part of the episode, hoping everyone would come back to life.

Here’s Rose again—stepping out of an alleyway in a mysterious blue light. I’m not sure why, but I have a sense there’s a mystery here. (Dramatic understatement.) Now why is Rose suggesting that Donna might want to leave the city for next Christmas? And how does she know about that raffle ticket? I don’t blame Donna for not trusting her. I wouldn’t trust her, either.

But Donna does use the ticket, and here she is with her mother and grandfather—and Bernard Cribbens has reindeer antlers on his head. I love you, Bernard Cribbens! (Donna’s father has died at some point before this episode.)

(Is Donna’s mother sharing that bed with her daughter? In that red satin nightie? I’d go for flannel under those circumstances.)

The chambermaid at the hotel can see something on Donna’s back—and she enables Donna to see it. And now the Titanic is falling out of the sky onto central London. Into Buckingham Palace. And the television goes dead just before they feel the impact of the shock.

Damn—a mushroom cloud is rising over London, from the effect of the Titanic’s engines. It’s a beautiful shot, but I’m old enough to get the shivers from the sight of a mushroom cloud.

Refugees flooding out of the south of London, to escape the radiation: Donna and her family are billeted into a house in Leeds.

And this is my favourite bit of the episode: the neighbour woman complaining that a perfectly nice family, who missed one mortgage payment, have been kicked out in favour of southern billets, and Donna descending into northern stereotypes about whippets. Not only does it bring the southern/northern dichotomy sharply to the forefront, but it’s such a complicated exchange: there’s so much going on behind that, about the impact on the south of London and the fact that this will have a devastating effect on the rest of the country.

And the Adiposians take their product into the U.S. since England is no longer available? Dear lord, the bodycount in this episode is high!

Donna’s mother almost breaks my heart in this scene, lying on her campbed, in her coat, in the kitchen of an overcrowded billet, thinking of more people that she knows who are now dead.

The fact that she insists “we’re refugees; we don’t count”—that ties in with the slap last episode from Mrs Cane about the Doctor being an “immigrant.” And perhaps also the tensions about Polish workers that Nick suggested were present in the ATMOS episodes. Man, there’s some complicated stuff coming to the surface in this episode.

And now, speaking of ATMOS, the cars are starting to go mad now, but Britain’s lack of petrol is helping. A soldier has seen the object on Donna’s back, and is threatening to shoot her.

So when Rose turns up in the middle of this, it’s to point out that Gwen and Ianto from Torchwood are dead, and Captain Jack has transported to the Sontaran homeworld. Is he dead, too?

As Nick pointed out earlier, they’ve killed off every spin-off, in this one episode.

The Doctor’s hair isn’t that great, Rose.

So Donna saved the Doctor’s life? I think that’s true—and in more ways than one. That scene with the Rachnos devastated me when I first saw it; that Doctor was implacable. Horribly so. We’ve seen that subsequently—notably in the Family of Blood two-parter—but that was the first time I saw it, and it broke my heart.

The darkness is coming? Damn.

Oh, Donna. Why do you always think that people are mocking you when they tell you how awesome you are?

Nick’s just reminded me that I’m so busy trying to cover everything in this episode that I haven’t been hitting the update button.

England for the English? Labour camps? Oh, shit! I saw what was coming here long before Donna did. And it’s giving me goosebumps, watching it again. Donna’s grandfather knows, too—but he remembers the camps the first time around, too. As he’s just said.

And now he’s weeping, and Donna finally realises what’s happening. Oh, shit—this is awful.

And it gets harder to watch, with Donna’s mother. She’s completely shut down, now. I don’t really blame her: she’s had a hell of a year, when you factor in the death of her husband. But when Donna says she supposes she’s always been a disappointment, and Donna’s mother just says, “Yeah.” Totally flat. Oh, damn—no wonder Donna has no confidence in herself.

That’s an interesting shot, that one, too: as Nick points out, they’d normally do it in deep focus, so that both actresses are in focus. But having Donna blurry behind her mother pulls up all those ideas about Donna losing her sense of self and her world, and the way in which her mother strips her of everything, even confidence, so she’s left with only a brassy aggression that covers a lack of confidence.

And now the stars are going out—so Donna is ready to go with Rose, to UNIT. And Rose has some standing here, though it’s unclear what, since they don’t even know her name.

And there’s the TARDIS! Salvaged from under the Thames—and a shade of the old Donna, laughing delightedly at the idea that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside.

The music’s dropped away here, which gives the scene a kind of dead feeling—though the music comes back when the TARDIS comes briefly to life. It’s dying, in the absence of the Doctor—and I mean “dead feeling” in a good way. It feels static, much as Donna is in this new world.

Rose strikes me as a little unsympathetic in this scene: it’s not the ruthlessness with which she pursues her plans with respect to Donna. I can understand that. But she’s from the same time and the same world as Donna: shouldn’t she be able to see how shell-shocked Donna is by the events of the past year or so? But she’s not really interacting with Donna, not soothing her or even answering her questions. She doesn’t even really seem to see how close Donna is to a breakdown, here.

So the thing on Donna’s back feeds off time? It’s like the blind angels in “Blink,” I suppose. And it’s found a good host in Donna. It makes sense to me that these kind of creatures are attracted to time travellers.

The Doctor and Donna are needed together to stop the stars going out.

GENERAL: This is to combat dehydration.

I love that line. And I love the music in this scene. I don’t know what it is about it that I love, but I love it.

So Donna’s going back in time with equipment cannibalised from the TARDIS. And she thinks this will save her, that travelling back in time will help her avoid Rose’s promise that she will die if she does this. But Rose can’t promise that. And, to give her credit, she doesn’t even try.

So Donna will travel in time, even if she never meets the Doctor.

And here she is in London in the past, before the bomb blast. But she’s half a mile away from where she needs to be in four minutes time. I couldn’t run half a mile in four minutes.

And we’re back to original Donna, arguing in the car with her mother, coming to the junction where she needs to turn left and her mother is bullying her to turn right. And past Donna is running and running, but she’s not going to make it in time.

So she stops. And she thinks. And while original Donna’s mother is haranguing her into turning right, past Donna steps out into the road in front of a garbage truck, causing the traffic to back up, blocking the right-hand turn.

And Rose turns up, and whispers two words in Donna’s ear as she dies.

And original Donna turns left—and time turns back into its original position.

Back on the planet of ethnic stereotypes, the creature falls off Donna’s back and the fortune teller is terrified by Donna’s ability to resist the creature’s abilities.

And, of course, the Doctor turns up then, not being certain that anything has happened, and looking like a puppy seeking out a new friend.

The Doctor does point out at this point that there’s a lot of coincidence around Donna—including more than one parallel world created around her, which is a good point.

Now Donna remembers the messages that Rose has told her to pass on to the Doctor. And the Doctor suspects: he suspects it’s Rose.

The two words? Bad wolf.

Now that’s not good. And now “Bad wolf” is plastered everywhere, presumably a residual effect of the time that Rose spread them through the universe.

The Cloister Bell! Damn! I’ve been waiting twenty years to hear that noise again. That’s a bad noise.

And next week, the first of the two-part finale—with everyone. And a mysteriously familiar-sounding evil chuckle.

And that’s “Turn Left.” Wow, that was tiring. I’m for a cigarette.