Kopic's Doctor Who & Torchwood News |
| Brief Encounter With … Derren Brown - WhatsOnStage.com Posted: 04 May 2008 09:40 AM CDT
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| Doctor Who 2008, Week Five: "Surpriii-iiise" Posted: 04 May 2008 09:04 AM CDT In which Helen Raynor fails the Gadarene Test. Look, I was only eight: however half-baked and unconvincingly-monstered it may seem now, the fact is that episode one of "The Leisure Hive" just freaked me out. It wasn't that the "wooooo!" title sequence I'd known all my life was suddenly replaced by a "phreeeeeow!" one, or that the sets suddenly involved actual colours (rather than late-'70s regulation spaceship grey) and the incidental music sounded like Brian Eno (rather than Tenko). It was the cliffhanger. The Doctor got his arms and legs ripped off, for God's sake. True, it wasn't The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but we still found ourselves staring down his screaming throat while an alien death-telly pulled his body into five easy pieces. The idea that he could scream was startling enough. Remember, for the previous three years we'd had a "comedy" version of the Doctor who was largely a vehicle for Tom Baker's endless showing-off, a version who never looked remotely threatened by the villains, who seemed to adopt new superpowers every week, and who probably wasn't even capable of feeling pain. We hadn't seen him break a sweat since Sutekh, and to an eight-year-old, 1976 might as well have been the late Renaissance. Now the Doctor was actually being tortured, or so it appeared. Surpriii-iiise! And then, a week later, he got turned into a wrinkly old man. We didn't know the universe could do that to him, either. If it seems unlikely now that a little thing like "the lead character grows old" could actually surprise us, then that's partly because we've been so over-exposed to the idea in the ten months since "The Family of Blood" did it properly (we consider its recent use in Torchwood, which wasn't just surplus to the plot but outside the realms of all discernible logic), but mostly because 28 years of advances in prosthetic makeup have made us think of it as exactly the kind of thing sci-fi does these days. Which sums up the problem in a nutshell: Doctor Who has always surprised us, yet fandom has the kind of hindsight which stops us remembering how bizarre it all was at the time. In the case of "The Leisure Hive", the important thing isn't what actually happened (or why), but the fact that this double-violation of the Doctor changed the tone of the whole programme. But just try to imagine the surprise of the original, first-generation audience. In 1963, there was nothing else on Earth like this programme. After the obvious "what the Hell is this?" value of "An Unearthly Child" and the "where the Hell are we?" impact of "The Daleks", early Doctor Who was seen by the viewers as uncharted territory, not just because they had no idea where they were going next - they didn't keep getting dragged back to present-day Earth, the jammy bastards - but because the programme itself was so often an unexplored landscape of alien shapes and radiophonic noises. This series surprised people by giving them things they'd never seen or heard on television, not by the nature of its plots. This was true even in the 1980s. The only surprising things in the script of "Earthshock" are the two Big Twist moments, yet the real shock wasn't the return of the Cybermen or the eventual sacrifice of the firstborn boy-child, but the fact that a TV programme was giving us this physically dark, quasi-gothic version of the future. In the age of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century, nobody else was attempting anything like it on the small screen. In fact, an argument could be made that the real reason Doctor Who went to pieces in the mid-1980s (and bear in mind that even in this column, we've heard numerous reasons more complex than "John Nathan-Turner went mental") was that it stopped even trying to surprise the audience, and instead settled into a pattern of pandering to the fans while delivering The Kind Of Things Doctor Who Does. Which might be taken as a warning from history, but we'll come back to that later. Flip forward to the 1990s, and a small war is raging in fandom, at least amongst those who regularly pick up the Doctor Who novels (and, yes, it already seems strange that there was a time when we needed this life-support system). By the end of the decade, there were supposedly two camps, "trad" and "rad". We'll skip over the question of whether the "rad" authors were genuinely "radical" or just trying to be interesting, and concentrate on the "trad" side of the argument. The theory holds that there are "traditional" types of Doctor Who story, and yet… if you examine the episodes from the original series, then it's hard to find more than a handful of them. Certainly, those stories which are most beloved of "trad" fans - or, at least, those which seem most iconic - weren't even remotely "trad" when they were broadcast. "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" was an oddity, not a template; "The Silurians" was unlike any Doctor Who story that had gone before it; "The Web of Fear" would have been unthinkable in William Hartnell's day. Occasionally, we find stories which seem to be made up of mass-produced parts from other stories of the same era ("Fury from the Deep" is easily the worst offender in this category), or stories which seem familiar because they remind Cult TV fans of other Cult TV programmes ("Terror of the Zygons" is an Avengers episode with monsters), but this isn't what "trad" really means. Actually, "trad" didn't exist in the TV series until quite late in the day. It's been argued that "The Visitation" was the first genuinely "trad" story, the first to mimic a specific style of Doctor Who without even trying to add anything new to the mix. Which points up something rather important: those old-school Doctor Who stories that come closest to being "trad" aren't actually very good, and probably wouldn't even keep "trad" fans happy these days. No, what the "trad" camp of the 1990s wanted were books that were just like the Doctor Who stories they happened to like, however freakish those stories may have been on first broadcast. I've mentioned this before, but when an acquaintance lent me a copy of The Last of the Gadarene in 199xx, he made me tell him what it was about before I'd actually read it. He did this by asking me questions about the plot, and encouraging me to give the most predictable answers I could think of. 'It's a Third Doctor story, so where do you think it's set?' 'Erm… England in the 1970s?' 'And who do you think the villains are?' 'Well, I suppose… aliens who want to invade Earth.' 'Yes, but how?' 'By infiltrating an institution of some sort?' 'And?' 'Um, disguising themselves as something normal and then smothering people.' And so on, right up to the "twist" where it turns out that one of the characters is the Master in disguise. At the time, one of the review magazines gave The Last of the Gadarene full marks for being a "perfect Pertwee", yet the irony here is that Barry Letts would never have commissioned a story this banal in the actual, bona fide 1970s. However formulaic the UNIT stories may seem now, there was always something new to see during his producership. Even "The Claws of Axos" - probably the drabbest of them all, and a story well worth contemplating this week, since we can think of it as a direct ancestor of "The Poison Sky" - showed us things that seemed slightly weird by the standards of the day. Letts' own 1990s attempt to recapture the Pertwee years, The Ghosts of N-Space, demonstrates that Yet Another Alien Invasion was the last thing he wanted: Ghosts may be hideously malformed in almost every detail, but as a story in which the Doctor visits a Hieronymus-Bosch-style spirit-realm while attempting to defeat a four-hundred-year-old Mafia boss who's also a necromancer, you can't call it staid. The truth is that like so many other '90s fan-phenomena, the "trad" novel didn't come from a genuine tradition of Doctor Who at all. It existed partly to give a career opportunity to writers with very little imagination, but mostly as a kind of security-blanket for people whose video of "The Three Doctors" was getting a bit worn out. (Incidentally…since I've mentioned The Last of the Gadarene, I might as well head back to Gatissville. I've always argued that "The Unquiet Dead" isn't a "trad" Doctor Who story at all, but an episode of a generic '90s sci-fi show: try watching it back-to-back with Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Xx", and see what strikes you. But a few years on, even those who liked "The Unquiet Dead" have begun to admit that there isn't really much to the script at all, and that it works because everyone involved in the production is so good at doing random Victoriana. The sets are perfect, the performances are just like those you'd find in one of the BBC's Christmas adaptations of Dickens' novels, and the gas-monsters are visually beautiful even if they're conceptually ugly. Strip away these nineteenth-century crowd-pleasers, though, and you're left with… well, with something like "The Idiot's Lantern", which is also made of Cult TV standards but doesn't have the right visual "props" to keep the punters interested. Here we should bear in mind that Mark Gatiss is so confused about what the traditions of Doctor Who actually are that he thinks it's indistinguishable from Quatermass, even though the two programmes are philosophical opposites. See the article Sci-Fi Iconoclasty 101, about halfway down this page, if you really care about this sort of thing.) Jump-cut to the present day, and "The Sontaran Stratagem" / "The Poison Sky". Last week I spent 3,000 words explaining exactly why this sort of Yeti-in-the-loo business is bound to wear thin after a while, with occasional diversions in the direction of the Earth's core, but it wasn't until the repeat of "Stratagem" that I realised I'd missed the most important point. It isn't just that the series is intent on flogging a formula we're already sick of, or that Doctor Who's capacity now appears to be more limited than at any point in its prior history, including the UNIT era. It isn't just the embarrassment factor of watching yet another TV newsreader announce the apocalypse while urgent-sounding music pumps away in the background, or the crushing banality of the "relationship" dialogue, or the way Helen Raynor keeps saying how nice it is that Doctor Who can combine "real world" with "alien" without noticing that the "real world" half of the programme is a spent force and that the "alien" half is rapidly becoming too routine to seem worthwhile. No, the real point is this: The programme is now being made by people who don't even realise that "surprise" is meant to be part of the package. There are no surprises in the Sontaran storyline, but it isn't just a problem with the plot. Remember what I said: it's in the mandate of Doctor Who to give us a kind of television we've never seen before, to use the medium in unique ways, to show us things that have never previously existed. What we have now is a version of the programme for people with no imagination, who want it to be as cosy and as familiar as Casualty (which would, at least, explain why Alison Graham actually prefers it this way). Surprise is no longer part of the agenda. In "The Sontaran Stratagem", we're given numerous questions to which we already know the answers, like The Last of the Gadarene for under-twelves. "Why are these cars killing people?" "Because of aliens." "What do these aliens want?" "To take over the world." In "The Poison Sky", we're faced with questions that are tougher, but no more interesting. "Why do the Sontarans want to change the atmosphere?" "For some reason to do with their war, but it doesn't really matter, to be honest." "How are they going to be defeated?" "The Doctor's going to rig up a spurious piece of technology, just like always." We're being shown something known, something safe. This is television specifically for an audience which doesn't feel the need to get involved, an audience which supposedly gets scared if you jump out at it and go "boo!". And this is a problem, because that's always been Doctor Who's job. This surprise-free version of the series should come as no surprise. Looking back on it, the clue was there two whole years ago, in the Confidential that accompanied "The Girl in the Fireplace". You may recall an interview with Julie Gardner, in which she expressed her surprise that a script which begins with monsters on eighteenth-century Earth should then cut to a space-station in the fifty-first century, and said that this clearly wasn't business as usual. Now, this puzzled me at the time. Since Doctor Who is capable of going anywhere, anywhen and anyhow, and has the ability to change its methods with every episode, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I consider a time-shift between the 1700s and the 5000s to be pretty much par for the course. At the very least, it's no big deal. Yet as far as the programme-makers are concerned, standard practice is to (A) find a historical setting or a modern-day "topical" issue, (B) attach a monster to it, and (C) arrange the set-pieces around the result. To me, a script that stretches our attention between Mme de Pompadour and clockwork droids in the far future is surprising, but it's only a background-radiation level of surprise. To a producer who doesn't even realise that surprise is a minimum expectation, on the other hand… yes, it must seem spectacular. This point became even more obvious when Russell T. Davies announced that he considers Steven Moffat to be a genius, and to have neural pathways made of gold (or something like that… I forget the exact quote). Well, Moffat is certainly competent, which is a novelty these days. Yet his work should, ideally, be the baseline for all modern Doctor Who rather than its pinnacle: "The Empty Child" and "The Girl in the Fireplace" should be the norm rather than the crème de la crème. If our standards hadn't been set so low by the (A), (B), (C) approach, then we'd see this rather more clearly, and realise that the programme's inability to do the unexpected has become truly crippling. A big part of the problem here is that television in general, and (sad to say) Doctor Who in particular, is almost going out of its way to discourage any actual talent amongst new writers. As we saw in Week Three, a modern script is expected to be more like a storyboard than a teleplay. It's notable that Davies considers Moffat to be the best of the bunch, because Moffat is significantly older than most. He started working in television in the 1980s, and can therefore remember a time when writers were actually supposed to write, rather than being encouraged to churn out second-rate Hollywood action-movies for TV. I say "notable", because he's succeeded by actively defying what the producers have forced Doctor Who to become. Moffat has - if you will - the element of surprise, but that shouldn't be a sign of genius, it should just be a sign of adequacy. A quick glance at this year's Radio Times round-up of the 2008 season shows us that while Davies is patting his writers on the head for giving us by-the-book scripts like "Planet of the Ood" and "The Sontaran Stratagem", Moffat will be giving us a story involving…. Christ, I don't even know what it involves. There's something about a library, something about shadows, something about data-ghosts. This could go anywhere. I'm more interested in "Silence in the Library" than any other story on the menu, not because I believe Moffat to be the high-water-mark of all Doctor Who authorship, but purely because I have no idea what it's going to be like. As I said, this should be a normal part of the Doctor Who experience, not something exceptional. Perhaps, just perhaps, all writers could be this unpredictable if the producers actually gave them some incentive for doing it. Instead, we get a two-parter that starts with a killer sat-nav device driving a car into a river (see, I told you that modern-day Doctor Who is just like Bugs) and then gives us an alien invasion that makes Independence Day look creative. It's not as if the modern series can't surprise us, just that… it can't be bothered. After all, the 2005 season was a long list of shocks to the system. "Rose" surprised us all - and horrified the Cult TV fans, pleasingly - by taking Doctor Who out of the realm of sci-fi and into the daylight, giving us a universe that was upbeat and bright pink instead of morbid and badly-lit like The X-Files. This was only the beginning. "The End of the World" showed us a future that was completely berserk instead of cyberpunk; "Aliens of London" reinvented the contemporary Doctor Who story as a wilfully grotesque parody; even "Father's Day", which really is far less interesting than the thirty-second trailer that gives away most of the plot, is a long way from routine. (Ironically, at times it's a lot like an episode of Casualty, with the key difference that the supporting characters are being threatened by Reapers rather than a crashed bus or a gas leak. However, Casualty with Reapers is far more surprising than "The Poison Sky", and therefore - on the grand scale - less Casualty-like. If you see what I'm getting at.) But that was 2005, when the programme had to redefine what Doctor Who actually did. Now it can afford to be complacent, and so… it is. In less than three years, the series has reached the same point that fandom had reached in the 1990s: for the first time in the Doctor Who's thirty-year history (I'm not counting the big gap), there's now a surfeit of genuinely "trad" stories on television. And just as before, "trad" means "stories which try to be like other stories that weren't trad at the time", usually padded out with clichés that could have come from any Cult TV series in history. In the Sontaran two-parter, you can turn "Spotting the Sci-Fi Standards" into a drinking game, although for now I'll simply mention the amusement value of the Evil Martha episode being shown on the same day that Channel 5 broadcast S Club: Seeing Double. This isn't "traditional", this is just banal. If there's any form of surprise here at all, then it's our sheer amazement when the script sinks to the lowest level of Cliché Hell by having the Cartoon Teenage Braniac heroically sacrifice himself in order to blow up the alien spaceship, at which point the drinking game became irrelevant and there's no option but to drain the rest of the bottle. Of course, thanks to the US, our very idea of what "surprise" means has been altered. Babylon 5 led us to become obsessed with the Cult of the Story Arc, and this changes our expectations of what a fantasy programme is supposed to do. In a Story-Arc world, "surprise" means the big twist in episode fourteen that changes the nature of what happens in episodes seventeen and nineteen as a means of setting up the season finale in episodes twenty-one and twenty-two. Shows like Battlestar Galactica and Heroes are entirely driven by this sort of numbers game, and it rather distracts the viewer from the fact that the form of these programmes isn't surprising in the least. Back in the 1990s, I knew someone who mocked Babylon 5 for having "terrible scripts". This shocked and appalled the rest of us, since we were under the impression that it was the only thing on TV which did sci-fi "properly", and yet… watching the programme again now, as a fully-grown-up grown-up, I can't help noticing that he was right. The scripts are awful, but what kept us watching was the scale of the Story-Arc. Take away big questions like "what do Vorlons look like?" and "if he goes to Zha'ha'dum, will he really die?", and any individual episode just looks like po-faced, Voyager-level space opera. Nobody outside geekdom would be able to hear lines like 'I hear they still call you the star-killer' without needing Settlers. Again, it has to be remembered that Doctor Who used to surprise us with the nature of the territory it covered, not with "revelations". As I've pointed out elsewhere, "Gridlock" may not be to everyone's liking (that's okay, this programme's always been an experiment), but it is one of the most surprising episodes made in the modern age: it has a narrative approach unlike anything else on modern TV, and finds a new way of integrating old-fashioned "small-scale" television drama into the twenty-first-century CGI epic, for which it should be applauded. Yet as I've also pointed out elsewhere, Mark Braxton - the Radio Times' geek-in-residence, and a man who has all the critical faculties of kelp - dismissed it as being "slow", then claimed that it was excused by the Face of Boe's "revelation". Of course, this "revelation" was so bleeding obvious that we could easily have taken it for granted (in fact, many of us already had), but let's focus on the larger point here. Even if the producers of this show weren't encouraging writers to be as bland as possible, should Doctor Who really be pandering to this sort of idiocy? Increasingly, the series is under the impression that it's okay to keep doing the same trick over and over again, as long as there are clues to the end-of-season two-parter buried in the mix. The big surprise of "Partners in Crime" was the second coming of Rose Tyler, yet many people would much rather have been surprised by an episode that wasn't set on modern-day Earth (again) and didn't involve alien consumer products (again). Likewise, I'm guessing that most of the internet-talk about "The Poison Sky" will revolve around the one-second-long glimpse of Rose on the TARDIS scanner rather than the actual story. Irony Number One is that this new, Americanised form of "surprise" was developed specifically because so many US shows couldn't go anywhere in space and time: if you're stuck on a single space-station week after week, with a finite number of sets, then you need ongoing plots and subplots just to keep the audience watching. The same goes for "small-town" fantasy, Buffy included. But Doctor Who is, demonstrably, meant to be above all of this. Irony Number Two is that the Cult of the Story-Arc demands constant clues about what's going to come next, and the entire essence of Doctor Who - at least when it's any good - is that we're not supposed to have the slightest idea what comes next. But if it's physically impossible for the series to get any blander than "The Poison Sky", then the worst part is knowing that even now, the programme-makers seriously believe the laser-gun battles and the colossal CGI explosions to be exciting in some way. Whereas in fact, we've forgotten them by the time the episode's over. A child in a gasmask saying 'are you my mummy?' is vastly more interesting than a standard-issue spaceship explosion, even for younger viewers: this week's episode has the Doctor make an in-joke about "The Empty Child" just as the Valiant arrives, but the script doesn't seem to realise that it's just underlining its own failure. We're here for the strangeness, not the big bangs. And Doctor Who Confidential, in which the cast and crew analyse every detail of the scripts as if they're somehow more  | ||
| "Sontaran" Director Douglas MacKinnon Interview Posted: 04 May 2008 07:34 AM CDT Today's Sunday Mail carries an interview with Douglas MacKinnon, director of just-broadcast episodes "The Sontaran Stratagem" and "The Poison Sky". Having grown up watching Doctor Who as a young man, and remembering the Sontarans debut appearance in 1972's "The Time Warrior" starring Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen, directing these episodes was a dream come true for him. "To get a two-parter with Catherine Tate and Freema Agyeman and the Sontarans...  | ||
| Posted: 04 May 2008 07:02 AM CDT As reported in the Telegraph today, leaders at a church conference were encouraged to study Doctor Who and to draw upon the themes that run parallel to Christian doctrine in their sermons as a means of reaching more young people. Andrew Wooding, a spokesman for the Church Army, which organised the conference, said that its intention was to give vicars new ideas for conveying their message. "There are countless examples of Christian symbolism in...  | ||
| Review: 'Doctor Who' - The Poison Sky - SyFyPortal Posted: 04 May 2008 06:13 AM CDT
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| Flood; Peep Show; The South Bank Show - Times Online Posted: 04 May 2008 06:06 AM CDT
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| Bruce Anderson: Boris Johnson is a libertarian, but he is not a ... - Independent Posted: 04 May 2008 06:03 AM CDT
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| S4: Episode #5 - Overnight Ratings Posted: 04 May 2008 04:14 AM CDT S4: Episode #5 - Overnight Ratings The Overnight Ratings are in for 4.5: The Poison Sky. Overnight Ratings show that the episode achieved 5.9m viewers with a 32.5% audience share. Doctor Who was the second most-watched programme on Saturday, being beaten by Britain's Got Talent, which achieved 8.5m viewers. Discuss this story in the DWO Forums: [Source: Andy Parish]  | ||
| Hunky Lee beats Ashes star Gene - The Sun Posted: 04 May 2008 03:30 AM CDT
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| Doctor Who - Planet of the Ood Posted: 04 May 2008 03:30 AM CDT  One of the nice things about Doctor Who has been that it's not afraid to plunder its past when this seems appropriate. Ever since the very beginning, certain characters and monsters have reappeared, starting with the Daleks, and although it really took four years or so for the trend to really kick in, it's one of the elements which had made the show such a survivor. The only repeating elements in the William Hartnell days (aside from the Doctor and his companions of course) were the Daleks, and a rogue member of the Doctor's own race - then unnamed - called the Monk. It wasn't until Patrick Troughton took over that we had repeat appearances from the Cybermen, Daleks, Ice Warriors and Great Intelligence/Yeti. In the Jon Pertwee era there were the Nestenes/Autons, more Daleks, and more Ice Warriors, with the Silurians/Sea Devils adding a nice twist to the concept, and of course the one-eyed hermaphrodite hexapod Alpha Centauri (and Aggedor too). Not forgetting another renegade Time Lord called The Master ...During Tom Baker's long tenure we saw the Sontarans as a new 'returner', with the Cybermen and Daleks (with new and improved added Davros) keeping the flag flying. The Master also came back a few times to torment the Doctor, changing his face along the way. In Peter Davison's era we enjoyed the now traditional Daleks, Cybermen, and Master with new baddies the Mara coming back for more. Omega (from Pertwee) reappeared, and the Guardians (from Tom Baker), and the Silurians and Sea Devils (from Pertwee) also returned. Colin Baker enjoyed two appearances from the slug-like Mentor Sil (as well as Daleks and Cybermen), and Sylvester McCoy battled Daleks and Cybermen, as well as a return from the Master and the Rani (another renegade Time Lord) with no returning baddies from his own era to contend with. I may have missed a couple in that quick resume (and I didn't include 'The Five Doctors' at all!) but you can see that returning foes is certainly one of the building blocks of the show. New Who has done the same, with returns (so far) from the usual suspects (Daleks, Cybermen, Master) as well as the less likely (Macra, Nestenes/Autons) and the new (Slitheen, Novice Hame, Face of Boe). All of which brings me to 'Planet of the Ood' and perhaps the most blatant return of a new series creature. My overall feeling here is that if you are going to bring someone/thing back, then you need to have something new to say about it, some reason for doing that - whether a sequel to the original story, or some other original ideas to bring to the table. What 'Planet of the Ood' managed to do was to combine both, and to have a returning creature which seemed to do exactly the same as in their first appearance (eyes glow red, killing people with the translation balls) while also adding in some fairly unlikely backstory as to what was happening with the creatures and what their history was. It's unfortunate therefore that the story as a whole comes over as fairly generic and bland, with the main cast, the Doctor and Donna, given very little to do. It was pointed out to me that the events would have unfolded in exactly the same way if the Doctor and Donna had never arrived - all the main threads had nothing to do with them, and were in progress long before (Ood Sigma turning Halpen into an Ood, Ryden being a member of 'Friends of the Ood' and so on). This renders our heroes ineffectual, and their involvement becomes more of an inconvenience than helping to drive the plot. I'm sure there are other Doctor Who stories where the Doctor changes nothing whatsoever by his involvement but I can't think of any just now. The TARDIS randomly arrives on the Ood Sphere, a cold and wintry planet which unfortunately manages to still look like a quarry covered with snow. I liked the reference to the Sense Sphere though, a touch to the show's history (look up 'The Sensorites' on page 46 of The Television Companion if you're still puzzled). We rapidly meet the prime movers: Halpen, director or boss or something of the Ood supply chain, Solana the head of Marketing, and Ryden, a doctor tending to them (we know this as he wears a white coat). Halpen has his own Ood slave, called Sigma Ood for no apparent reason, and there's a group of buyers there looking to invest in Ood, as well as a group of bloodthirsty, triggerhappy soldiers led by Commander Kess. The Doctor hears singing but Donna cannot. It is the song of the Ood, and I'm not sure that viewers heard it as well - surely that dreadful opera stuff wasn't the song? No wonder Donna couldn't bear to hear it when the Doctor opened her mind to it. Our heroes explore and join the party of Ood buyers. Meanwhile Ood are going rabid, slavering and red-eyed, and rampaging about the compound. There's a lot of cross-scene editing in the episode, showing parallel events as Doctor and Donna are faced with different threats, like the utterly pointless CGI attack on the Doctor by Kess operating a grab-crane. Probably winner of the 'most pointless use of CGI' award. There's also something nasty lurking in hangar 15 ... The Doctor and Donna find some unprocessed Ood in basement cells, and we discover that they carry a second brain in their hands. Said brain being cut off and replaced with a translator ball when they are processed. The processed Ood all go mad and red-eyed and start attacking everyone. For some reason soldiers armed with machine guns are killed as the Ood rampage (very, very slowly) through the base. Solana is killed (well she was cute, but very misguided and thus doomed), then Kess is killed by his own gas. The Doctor and Donna manage to miraculously escape from handcuffs when the red-eyed Ood don't kill them (saved by the unprocessed Ood down below stopping the red-eye or something like that anyway) ... and so it's on to hangar 15 for the endgame. Therein is a massive brain, held within an electrical field. What? Suddenly this is like 'Time and the Rani' all over again. How can a giant brain survive under the planet's surface anyway? Why does it seem to absorb Ryden when he is thrown to his death by Halpen? How can the Ood who have been processed (and have had their hind brain removed) communicate effectively together? It all makes little sense. Then, to top it all, it is revealed that Ood Sigma, although mentally castrated, has maintained enough nouse to feed Halpen Ood grafts suspended in organic solution ... which conveniently turns him into an Ood at exactly the right dramatic moment. So ingesting genetic material from another species turns you into that other species does it? Some day humans are going to start to turn into cows, sheep and chickens then, or even carrots and broccoli. This is of course patent rubbish, and stretches believability to the limit. But never mind. The electricity is turned off and all the Ood can be happy again now they can communicate and sing with each other once more. There's a note of 'arc' at the end when Ood Sigma comments to the Doctor that his song must end soon - we hear notes from the Rose 'Doomsday' theme on the soundtrack - but then the Doctor and Donna are off again in the TARDIS. Overall I didn't really find this episode terribly satisfying. There's an awful lot of death with no consequence, and a great many unanswered questions. I guess that the whole Ood production line now stops. The story is set in 4126, so I presume that the Ood's last appearance on the Sanctuary Base (in 'The Impossible Planet'/'The Satan Pit') was therefore set before this. The characters were all very one-dimensional, 'evil boss', 'good doctor', 'misguided marketing manager', and the Ood themselves did little more than stand around, or, when they exhibited red-eye, either quote in unison or kill people. Pretty much as they did in their earlier appearance. Something of a disappointment I felt. I was also disconcerted by the need to have a 'catchphrase' for the monster. After 'Exterminate', 'Delete', 'Are you my Mummy?', 'You will be catalogued' and 'The Beast will arise' we can add 'The circle must be broken'. I hope that these things aren't added in just to provide T-shirt opportunities ... but I start to wonder. Next week we have Martha back ... UNIT, Sontarans, Earth Invasion ... why does it all seem so familiar?  | ||
| The Poison Sky - Overnight Ratings Posted: 03 May 2008 11:25 PM CDT Unofficial figures show that episode five of Series Four, The Poison Sky, was watched by 5.9 million viewers, giving it a 32.5% share of the total television audience. Although dipping below the 6 million mark, the programme was still the second most watched of the day, being beaten by ITV1's Britain's Got Talent, which got 8.5 million viewers. It was the highest rated programme on BBC1 for the day. The programme is currently the 17th most watched...  | ||
| UNIT: A Brief History of the 'Dr Who' allies Posted: 03 May 2008 08:00 PM CDT Learn more about the role of UNIT within the history of Doctor Who, dating back to 1968.  | ||
| Posted: 03 May 2008 08:00 PM CDT What feisty young lad or lass doesn't go through a ninja phase, eh? If you've ever fancied yourself as a magic-wielding shuriken-throwing Japanese warrior and are now grown up enough to stomach a bit of bloody violence, now's the time to indulge those...  | ||
| Doctor's Daugher to Play the Doctor's Daughter on Doctor Who - Wired News Posted: 03 May 2008 02:30 PM CDT
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| UNIT: A Brief History of the 'Dr Who' allies - Digital Spy Posted: 03 May 2008 02:20 PM CDT
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| Doctor Who's Tardis wrecked by Scots director - Glasgow Sunday Mail Posted: 03 May 2008 02:17 PM CDT
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| Honey, I Wrecked The Tardis - Glasgow Sunday Mail Posted: 03 May 2008 12:14 PM CDT
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| IOAN’SA REAL SUPERHERO! - ic Wales Posted: 03 May 2008 11:21 AM CDT
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| BBC AMERICA EPISODES ONLINE. Fans - Newsday Posted: 02 May 2008 03:28 PM CDT
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| Dr Who fanatic builds dalek - This is Wiltshire.co.uk Posted: 02 May 2008 12:27 AM CDT
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