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A man in an orange spacesuit stands stoically in a sci-fi interior as flames burn in the foreground
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Waters of Mars: The Time Lord Victorious

by hutchm
written by hutchm

This is the one. After a year of specials that mostly filled time pleasantly, “The Waters of Mars” arrives and does something the show has been circling for four years: it lets the Doctor lose. Not lose a fight — lose himself. It is a horror story with a genuinely frightening monster, and then it becomes something much worse than a horror story, and its last fifteen minutes are among the most disturbing this programme has ever broadcast.

Bowie Base One

Mars, 21 November 2059. The Doctor steps out of the TARDIS in a spacesuit, delighted, and then reads a plaque and stops dead — because he knows exactly where he is and, more importantly, when.

This is Bowie Base One, humanity’s first colony on another world. Today is the day it is destroyed in a nuclear explosion with all hands. Captain Adelaide Brooke and her crew die here, and the manner of their deaths becomes the story that sends Adelaide’s granddaughter to the stars and launches the whole human expansion outward. It is one of the fixed points — the events that cannot be altered without unravelling everything downstream.

The Doctor knows the names. He recites them, one by one, to a crew of living people standing in front of him, and the show does not let him off the hook for a second. This is the same rule he explained to Donna in the doomed streets of The Fires of Pompeii — and back then he had somebody standing beside him arguing, someone who forced him to at least save a single family. Here, nobody argues. That absence is the entire engine of the episode.

Lindsay Duncan is superb as Adelaide: hard, decent, exhausted, utterly unsentimental. She has a childhood memory that explains her — during the theft of the Earth she watched a Dalek look straight at her through a window and choose not to kill her, and she has spent her whole life understanding that as an obligation. It’s a lovely, unexpected use of The Stolen Earth, and it makes her more than a doomed name on a plaque.

The Flood

The monster is one of the best the show has produced. Something ancient is frozen in the Martian ice cap, and the base’s water filtration system has just brought it inside.

The Flood is a viral intelligence that lives in water, and infection takes a single drop. The infected split and crack across the face, their eyes go white, and water pours endlessly from their mouths and hands — not spraying, just flowing, constantly, silently. They move slowly. They don’t need to hurry. They are patient and they are absolutely relentless, and the design is so effective that the first proper look at one is genuinely alarming.

What makes it work as horror is the logic. This is a base full of humans surrounded by the one substance they cannot live without and cannot avoid, in an environment where a single leak is fatal. The show wrings real dread out of drips, condensation, and the sound of running taps. The crew go one at a time, and each loss is made to count — a woman sealed in a room with a leak she can hear starting, a man watching the skin of his own hand begin to crack. Nobody here gets a heroic death or a last stand. They just get wet, and then they aren’t themselves any more.

A Flood victim advances through the base corridors, water streaming from their face and mouth, eyes blank and white.

The Man Who Walked Away

And for a long stretch, the Doctor tries to leave.

That’s the most uncomfortable thing in the episode. He knows what’s coming, he knows he mustn’t interfere, and so he starts walking back to the TARDIS while people he’s just met are dying behind him. Tennant plays it as physical pain — a man forcing himself down a corridor, flinching at every scream, telling himself the rules exist for a reason.

He gets as far as the door. And then he stops, and turns around, and goes back — and it plays not as heroism but as something snapping.

The Time Lord Victorious

What follows is the most frightening thing Tennant has ever played.

The Doctor decides that the laws of time were made by the Time Lords, and the Time Lords are gone, and therefore the laws belong to him now. He tears through the base saving people he has just finished explaining must die. He drags Adelaide, Yuri and Mia off Mars, lands the TARDIS in a snowy suburban street on Earth, and throws the doors open like a conjuror.

And then he says it out loud. Not the last of the Time Lords — the winner. The Time Lord Victorious. He announces that he has broken a fixed point because he could, that he decides what’s fixed now, that there is nobody left in the universe with the standing to tell him no.

It is exhilarating for about ten seconds and then it is deeply, genuinely horrifying, because we’ve watched this coming. Davros told him he turns ordinary people into weapons at the end of Journey’s End and he had no answer. He’s been alone ever since, refusing companions, with no one to argue him down. This is what four specials of nobody saying “stop it” produces.

And the genuinely unsettling part is that he isn’t wrong about the facts. There really is nobody left to stop him. The Time Lords are ash, the rule he’s breaking has no enforcement behind it any more, and he has worked that out — which is precisely the problem. The only thing that was ever holding him to it was himself.

Adelaide

And then Adelaide Brooke, who has spent the episode being the only person in it with a steady moral compass, looks at him and is appalled.

She doesn’t thank him. She tells him that no one should have that much power, that he has gone somewhere no one should go, and that saving her has broken something more important than her life. And then she walks into her house and shoots herself, restoring the fixed point with her own hand, making sure her granddaughter still looks up.

It is a shocking, brutal piece of writing, and it lands like a slap. The Doctor stands in the snow having been comprehensively judged by a better person, and the arrogance drains out of him in real time.

Then the Ood appear at the end of the street — Ood Sigma, who told him on a snowy hillside in Planet of the Ood that his song was ending, standing silently in a suburban road. The Cloister Bell tolls. The Doctor says no, and runs for the TARDIS like a frightened man.

What The Waters of Mars Leaves Us With

The best thing the show has done in years, and the most upsetting. Here’s what it plants:

  • A monster of pure dread. Water that thinks, in a place where water is life. Slow, patient, and unstoppable — a superb piece of horror design.
  • Fixed points, weaponised. The rule the show established in Pompeii returns as a trap, and this time there’s no companion to make him save one family.
  • After four specials of travelling alone, refusing anyone who asks — and this is the result. The show has been building this deliberately.
  • The Time Lord Victorious. The Doctor as tyrant, briefly, sincerely, and terrifyingly. Tennant has never been better.
  • Adelaide’s answer. She takes her own life to fix what he broke. The most damning verdict anyone has passed on him, and he can’t argue with it.

Rating: 5/5 — Frightening, morally serious and genuinely shocking, with a central performance that turns the hero into the villain without ever losing the thread. Easily the best of the specials and one of the finest hours the revived series has produced.

He saved three people who were meant to die, called himself the winner, and one of them went inside and made sure he was wrong. The Ood are waiting in the street. Three people have told him his song is ending. I don’t think he’s got long.

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doctor who utopia
Doctor WhoTelevision

Utopia: The End of the Universe and the Watch on the Desk

by hutchm
written by hutchm

Every so often a season quietly loads a gun in episode three and fires it in episode eleven. “Utopia” is that shot. It starts as a fairly straightforward last-outpost-of-humanity story, spends forty minutes being perfectly good, and then executes a reveal so well-prepared and so beautifully performed that I actually said something out loud at the television. This is where Series 3 stops being a run of adventures and becomes one story.

Refuelling in Cardiff, Landing at the End

It opens with a lovely piece of housekeeping: the TARDIS putting down on the Cardiff rift to refuel, the same crack in the world the Doctor was tinkering with back in Boom Town. And sprinting across the plaza toward it comes Captain Jack Harkness, who grabs the outside of the ship as it dematerialises and hangs on.

Jack’s return is handled beautifully. He’s been waiting a very long time — abandoned on the Game Station at the end of The Parting of the Ways, brought back to life by Rose when she held the time vortex, and left behind. He is now unable to die. Not hard to kill: unable. And the Doctor, it turns out, ran from him — the TARDIS bolted to the end of the universe trying to shake him off — because a man who cannot die is a fixed point, and every Time Lord instinct the Doctor has finds him wrong.

That conversation is the best character material in the episode. Jack is owed an apology and doesn’t get much of one; the Doctor is honest about his revulsion in a way that isn’t flattering to him at all. And the affection underneath survives it. John Barrowman slots straight back in, and the three-hander of Doctor, Martha and Jack has an easy energy the season hasn’t had before.

Utopia

They land on Malcassairo in the year one hundred trillion, and the setting is magnificently bleak. The stars have gone out. The universe is running down. What’s left of humanity huddles in a concrete silo, hunted across the wastes by the Futurekind — feral, filed-toothed people who used to be human and have given up on it.

The imagery is genuinely striking. This isn’t the heat death of a physics lecture; it’s a black sky with nothing whatsoever in it, a rust-coloured wasteland, and the last few thousand people alive queuing in a concrete bunker to board a rocket aimed at a rumour. The show has done far-future stories before, but never this far out and never this hopeless. There’s something close to unbearable in a civilisation reduced to hoping that a signal nobody can decode is coming from somewhere better than here.

In the middle of this ruin is Professor Yana, working with salvaged junk and string to launch a rocket toward a signal called Utopia, the last rumoured refuge at the end of everything. Derek Jacobi plays him as gentle, apologetic, a little defeated — a brilliant man who has spent decades doing impossible work with inadequate tools and no thanks, kept company only by Chantho, an insectoid assistant who begins every sentence with “Chan” and ends it with “tho,” and who is quietly, hopelessly in love with him. Chantho is a small gem, and the episode affords her far more dignity than a comic speech tic has any right to carry. Her scenes with Martha — two women comparing notes on the business of being devoted to a brilliant man who hasn’t noticed — are gently funny in the moment and, in hindsight, quite brutal. Martha recognising her own predicament in somebody else’s is one of the better quiet beats of the season.

It’s a genuinely warm portrait, and the episode takes its time with it. Yana is delighted by the Doctor. He’s overwhelmed to finally have someone who understands his equations. He’s the most sympathetic guest character of the season, and Jacobi plays him with such decency that you spend the whole hour rooting for him.

utopia

Which is, of course, the trap.

The Watch on the Desk

The clues have been sitting in plain sight. Yana has been troubled all his life by a sound in his head: a relentless four-beat drumming, since childhood. He was found as a boy at the edge of the Silver Devastation with nothing but a battered fob watch, which he keeps on his desk and has never opened, because he’s certain it’s broken and it makes him uneasy.

And Martha — who spent three months in 1913 guarding an identical object in Human Nature — sees it, recognises the circular Gallifreyan engraving, and makes the connection out loud. That’s a wonderful piece of construction: the audience gets there roughly half a second before she says it, and the horror arrives with the understanding.

Then the season’s other loose thread snaps taut. The Face of Boe spent his dying breath in Gridlock telling the Doctor four words with no context: you are not alone. Not a prophecy. An acronym. Y-A-N-A. It has been sitting in the season since April, and I never once saw it.

Yana opens the watch, and Jacobi’s face changes, and the kindly old professor is gone. What’s left introduces itself with three words and a smile: “I… am… the Master.” It’s a masterclass in performance — the same actor, the same room, an entirely different person — and Jacobi is so good in his brief window as the villain that it’s almost a shame he doesn’t stay.

He shoots Chantho, who shoots him back as she dies, which forces a regeneration into a younger, wilder man who takes one look at the situation, laughs, and steals the TARDIS. The Doctor, Martha and Jack are left locked out at the end of the universe, hammering on the door while the ship dematerialises without them.

What really sells the ending is Tennant. The Doctor has spent three series defining himself by a single fact — last of the Time Lords, sole survivor, the one who was left behind. Watching that fact come apart in front of him is not, it turns out, any kind of relief. He goes white. He starts pleading through a locked door, using the old man’s name over and over, trying to reach whatever might be left of the professor in there. It doesn’t work, and the expression on his face as the ship fades out is the first time all season he has looked genuinely, helplessly frightened.

What Utopia Leaves Us With

A superb piece of long-game plotting and one of the great reveals. Here’s what it plants:

  • The acronym. “You are not alone” has been a mystery since Gridlock and turns out to be a signpost. Seeding a reveal eight episodes ahead and having it land this cleanly is genuinely impressive.
  • Jack, and the cost of immortality. A man who cannot die, abandoned by the person who made him that way, and told to his face that his existence is repellent. He deserves better and mostly takes it with grace.
  • Jacobi’s Master. On screen as the villain for a matter of minutes and completely unforgettable. The switch from kindly to malevolent is done with almost no makeup and pure performance.
  • The drumming. Four beats, constant, since childhood. Nobody explains it. It’s clearly the key to something.
  • The Doctor, stranded. No ship, no way home, at the literal end of time, while his oldest enemy walks off with the only means of escape. That’s a cliffhanger.

Rating: 4.5/5 — A slow, sad, beautifully acted build that detonates in its final fifteen minutes. It loses half a mark only because so much of it is setup for what’s coming; as a piece of season architecture it’s close to flawless.

The universe is dying, the Doctor is locked out at the end of it, and something very old has just woken up and remembered its name. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted the next episode this badly.

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doctor who army of ghosts
Doctor WhoTelevision

Army of Ghosts: Torchwood Finally Steps Into the Light

by hutchm
written by hutchm

“This is the story of how I died.” That’s how Rose Tyler opens “Army of Ghosts,” in voiceover, and it’s a hell of a way to start a season finale. From that first ominous line, the first half of this two-parter grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go — pulling together threads the show has been quietly laying since the very start of the Tenth Doctor’s run and detonating them in a final ten minutes that had me physically off the sofa. This is Doctor Who firing on every cylinder it has.

A World Full of Ghosts

The Doctor and Rose come home to present-day London for a laugh and a cup of tea with Jackie, and find a planet that has quietly gone mad. Every day, at set times, “ghosts” appear all over the world — grey, humanoid, silent figures that fade in and out of streets and living rooms. And humanity, being human, has decided to love them. People have convinced themselves these shapes are their returned dead — a lost husband, a departed gran — and they wait fondly for each “ghost shift,” greeting the figures like family. Nobody wants to ask what the ghosts actually are. Grief has made the whole species wilfully blind, and there’s something quietly chilling in that: an entire world choosing comfort over the truth.

The show has real fun with the texture of it, too. There are spoof adverts, a “ghostwatch” craze on the telly, soap operas writing the spectres into their storylines, whole families cheerfully setting a place at the table for their fading grey visitor. Jackie is certain one of them is her late father, and her hopeful, hushed grief becomes the human face of a planet-wide delusion. It’s a wickedly clever bit of world-building — an alien incursion disguised as the one thing everyone most desperately wants to be true.

The Doctor, of course, is horrified. These things aren’t the beloved dead; they’re pressure points, the visible symptom of something forcing its way through from somewhere it shouldn’t be able to reach. And the source, it turns out, has a name we’ve been hearing all year.

army of ghosts torchwood
army of ghosts torchwood

Torchwood, At Last

There it is. Torchwood — the word first dropped when a mysterious force blew a Sycorax ship out of the sky over London in The Christmas Invasion, then given an origin when a wounded, unamused Queen Victoria founded an institute to defend Britain against the Doctor in Tooth and Claw. All season it’s been surfacing at the edges of the frame, and here, finally, we walk through the front door. The Torchwood Institute operates out of a tower at Canary Wharf, hoarding alien technology and answering to no one, run with brisk, patriotic self-assurance by Yvonne Hartman — a superb creation, all corporate smile and steel underneath, utterly convinced that everything she does is for the good of the Empire. Torchwood’s guiding principle might as well be “if it’s alien, it’s ours” — they scavenge the wreckage of every incursion, reverse-engineer what they can’t hope to understand, and answer to a Crown rather than to reason. Yvonne even greets the Doctor himself as a prize catch, the ultimate piece of alien technology to be catalogued and put to use. It’s the logical, chilling endpoint of the institute Victoria founded all those years ago: Britain arming itself against the whole universe, and no longer entirely certain which side of the line it stands on.

And it’s Torchwood that’s been causing the ghosts. They’ve been deliberately punching a hole in reality, harvesting the energy of the breach, treating a catastrophic tear between worlds as a handy renewable resource. Worse, they’ve pulled something through it: a perfectly smooth, impossible sphere sitting silent in their lab, a “Void Ship” — a vessel built to travel through the nothingness between universes, a place so absolute the Doctor calls it Hell. He is genuinely, deeply frightened of it, and Yvonne treats his terror as an eccentric inconvenience. The dramatic irony is delicious: we can see the catastrophe coming, and the people in charge are too pleased with themselves to look.

The reunions land beautifully in the middle of all this, too — Jackie smuggled along and out of her depth, and a certain someone from a parallel world turning up exactly where he’s needed, having found his own way back into the fight. The season’s been so good at seeding these people that their convergence on Torchwood Tower feels earned rather than convenient.

Ghosts, Cybermen, and What’s in the Sphere

Then the trap springs, and it springs twice. Yvonne, drunk on her own cleverness, pushes the ghost shift past the point of no return — and across the entire planet, the ghosts finally solidify into what they always were. Cybermen. Millions of them, marching out of every street and shopping centre and living room on Earth, the steel horror of the Cybus world from The Age of Steel come pouring through the breach into ours. It’s a staggering reveal, an invasion on a scale the show has never attempted, and it would be a finale-worthy cliffhanger all on its own.

Except it isn’t the cliffhanger. Because the Cybermen didn’t come in the sphere — they only followed it through. So what’s inside the Void Ship? The thing rolls open, and out glide four Daleks. The Daleks — battle-scarred survivors calling themselves the Cult of Skaro, an elite meant to have been lost in the Time War the Doctor still carries like a wound, the same ancient enemy whose fleet was undone back in The Parting of the Ways. And now, impossibly, they are here, in the same building, on the same day, as a Cyberman army.

Cybermen and Daleks. The two deadliest forces in the Doctor’s universe, the two monsters every fan has always wanted to see collide, both loose on Earth at the same moment — and the Doctor caught in the middle with the people he loves. For him it’s a nightmare with a personal edge: the Daleks are the ghosts of the war that made him what he is, and the Cybermen are the horror he thought he’d sealed away in another universe entirely. Both of his worst chapters, arriving on the same afternoon. “EXTERMINATE,” and cut to black. I don’t think the revived show has ever landed a cliffhanger this big.

What Army of Ghosts Leaves Us With

A masterclass in the slow burn and the sudden bang. Here’s what it plants:

  • The Torchwood payoff. A word whispered since the Doctor’s first Christmas becomes the engine of the apocalypse. It’s superb long-game plotting, and it rewards everyone who’s been paying attention all season.
  • Grief as a blind spot. The world embracing the ghosts because it wants its dead back is a genuinely unsettling idea — humanity opening the door to its own destruction out of love and denial.
  • Yvonne Hartman. A brilliant new antagonist, dangerous precisely because she’s certain she’s the hero of the story.
  • The invasion to end them all. A planet-wide Cyberman army was already the biggest thing the show’s ever done — and then it gets topped in the very next shot.
  • The two great enemies, together. Daleks and Cybermen in one room is the fan-service dream, and the episode makes you wait an entire season to earn it.

Rating: 4.5/5 — A near-perfect first half: tense, clever, emotionally grounded, and built on a cliffhanger so audacious it almost dares the second part to live up to it. Only the slight sense that it’s all setup keeps it from a full five.

Two armies, one planet, an Institute in ruins, and Rose’s voice still echoing in my head telling me this is the story of how she died. I have genuinely never wanted to skip a week of my life more than I do right now. Whatever’s coming, I don’t think I’m ready for it — bring on the finale.

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doctor who fear her
Doctor Who

Fear Her: The Girl Who Drew People Away

by hutchm
written by hutchm

After the grand experiment of Love & Monsters, Doctor Who scales right back down for “Fear Her” — a small, domestic, child’s-eye story set on a single suburban street. It’s the most modest episode of the season by a distance, and if I’m honest, the weakest. But there’s a gentle, well-meaning heart beating under its wobblier moments, and even minor Doctor Who has something going for it. Let’s talk about the one that doesn’t quite come together.

The Girl Who Draws

The TARDIS lands in London in the near future of 2012, on the very day the city is due to host the Olympic Games. On an ordinary little residential close, though, something is badly wrong: children are vanishing into thin air, snatched from the street in broad daylight with no trace, and the neighbourhood is gripped by a quiet panic. It’s a nicely observed bit of ordinary dread — net curtains twitching, parents keeping their kids indoors, a council worker convinced there’s a predator stalking the close. Doctor Who is often at its best when it drops the fantastical into the utterly mundane, and a sunny suburban cul-de-sac where children simply evaporate off the tarmac is a promising place to start. Rose handles much of the early legwork, knocking on doors and piecing the pattern together while the Doctor frets over his readings, and their easy division of labour is a pleasure to watch. The Doctor and Rose arrive to investigate, and the trail leads them to a house, and to a twelve-year-old girl named Chloe Webber.

Chloe, it turns out, is the cause — though not by choice. She’s become the host to an Isolus, a member of an alien species that travels the cosmos in vast family groups of billions, drifting together on waves of shared love and warmth. This particular Isolus was separated from its siblings and crash-landed on Earth, marooned and utterly, achingly alone — and it has latched onto a lonely little girl who understands exactly how that feels. Together, through Chloe’s drawings, they’ve been reaching out for company in the worst possible way. Whatever Chloe draws becomes trapped in the picture: the missing children are all there, alive but frozen in two dimensions, pinned to the paper like specimens. It’s an eerie, genuinely creepy central idea, and the best thing the episode has going for it.

Fear in the Wardrobe

The stronger, darker thread is what Chloe fears. Her father is dead — but he was a violent, frightening man, and her terror of him is so raw that the Isolus’s power has given it form. Something scribbled and monstrous lives in her wardrobe, a childhood nightmare of an abusive parent made real, growling her name in the dark. It’s an unmistakable echo of the domestic dread Mark Gatiss mined so well with Eddie Connolly back in The Idiot’s Lantern, and it gives “Fear Her” its most affecting material: a child haunted, quite literally, by the shadow of a bad father, and a mother, Trish, quietly carrying the guilt of not having protected her sooner.

When the episode stays in this register — small, frightened, human — it works. There’s real feeling in the idea of a lonely alien and a lonely child recognising each other, and in the notion that the monster in the wardrobe is the one horror the Doctor can’t just reverse-engineer his way past. Some fears you have to face, not solve.

There’s a real tenderness in how the episode treats the Isolus, too. It isn’t truly a villain; it’s a frightened child that lost its enormous family and simply wants to stop feeling so alone, lashing out only because it doesn’t know any gentler way to reach for love. That ache — a lonely thing desperate for connection — rhymes quietly with the loneliest man in the universe standing right there in the room, the very solitude the show laid so bare in The Girl in the Fireplace. The Doctor, of all people, ought to understand exactly what this creature is going through.

The Torch and the Trouble

Where it wobbles is the plot machinery, and the climax in particular. Growing desperate, the Isolus has Chloe draw the entire Olympic stadium — eighty thousand spectators gone in an instant, vanished mid-cheer into a child’s sketchpad. The Doctor works out that the Isolus needs two things to launch its pod and go home: intense heat, and an overwhelming surge of love and togetherness. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s an Olympic torch and a stadium full of hope passing right by. The Doctor ends up scooping the dropped torch off the ground and carrying the flame himself, beaming, as the pod reignites and every trapped soul comes flooding back.

fear her the drawings
fear her

It is… a lot. The torch business is earnest to the point of being hokey, the resolution leans hard on a warm-fuzzy convenience, and the child performances, while sweet, aren’t quite strong enough to carry the emotional weight the script piles onto them. It’s the sort of ending that wants to move you and mostly just makes you smile and wince at the same time. The threat evaporates a little too neatly, and for all the creepiness of the setup, the payoff never quite delivers on it. It doesn’t help that there are a few frankly baffling small beats scattered through — a possessed cat, a scribble-monster that reads as more silly than scary once it’s in full light, an eighty-thousand-strong crowd that pops back into existence without anyone appearing to notice they were ever gone. These are the visible seams of a script that ran short on both time and budget, and unlike the best hours of the season, “Fear Her” can’t quite hide the join.

Still, there’s something to the final beats — Chloe and Trish banishing the last of the scribble-father not with technology but by holding onto each other and refusing to be afraid. Love as the thing that beats the monster is peak Russell T Davies-era Who, even in an episode he didn’t write, and it lands more gently than the torch nonsense that precedes it.

What Fear Her Leaves Us With

A slight, kind-hearted misfire with a couple of ideas better than the episode around them. Here’s what it plants:

  • A genuinely unsettling premise. People trapped alive inside drawings is prime nightmare fuel, and the episode never quite lives up to how creepy its own hook is.
  • The monster you can’t out-think. The scribble-father makes fear itself the villain, and roots it in something painfully real — a child’s terror of an abusive parent.
  • Loneliness, mirrored. The lost Isolus and the isolated Chloe are two versions of the same ache, which quietly rhymes with a lot of what this Doctor carries around himself.
  • A hokey heart. The torch-and-togetherness climax is the season at its most saccharine, and a reminder that “love saves the day” needs a defter touch than this to really work.
  • Back to a two-hander. The Doctor and Rose are easy and warm together throughout, and their chemistry papers over a fair few of the cracks.

Rating: 2.5/5 — The weakest of Series 2 for me: a promising, creepy idea let down by a soft plot, uneven young performances, and a climax that tips over into cheese. The domestic-fear thread and the leads’ chemistry keep it watchable, but only just.

And yet it ends on the oddest note. Right at the close, out of nowhere, the Doctor goes quiet and uneasy, murmuring about a storm approaching — a chill that comes from nowhere and settles over the last shot. I’ve no idea what he means by it, and the episode offers not a single clue. But it gave me goosebumps in a way the preceding forty-odd minutes never quite managed, and now I can’t stop turning it over. Whatever’s out there, the Doctor plainly feels it coming — and for the first time all episode, so did I.

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Five people standing in a rehearsal space, one woman holding an electric guitar, all looking ahead with concerned expressions
Doctor WhoTelevision

Love & Monsters: The One Without the Doctor

by hutchm
written by hutchm

Well. This is the strange one. After the hellfire and dread of the Satan Pit two-parter, Russell T Davies hands us “Love & Monsters” — an episode where the Doctor barely appears, the whole thing is narrated to camera by an ordinary bloke with a webcam, and the monster is a big green blob with people’s faces in its belly. It is, by a distance, the oddest hour Doctor Who has attempted, and depending on who you ask it’s either a misfire or a small stroke of genius. For me it’s genuinely both at once, sometimes in the same scene.

The Doctor’s Fan Club

Our narrator is Elton Pope, a warm, slightly awkward everyman who’s spent his life on the fringes of the Doctor’s world — he glimpsed him once, as a boy, on the worst night of his childhood. That memory is the episode’s quiet engine — a small boy, a strange man moving through his house, and a grief Elton has spent his whole life only half understanding. It gives his cheerful webcam narration a melancholy undertow, the sense of a man still circling the night everything changed. So when he stumbles into LINDA, you understand at once why he holds on so tightly: here, finally, are other people who felt the same brush of the impossible and never quite got over it. As an adult, Elton falls in with a little band of like-minded souls who’ve also brushed up against this mysterious traveller, and they form LINDA: the London Investigation ‘N’ Detective Agency, a club dedicated to tracking the Doctor down.

Except the loveliest thing about the episode is that they mostly stop bothering. LINDA drifts, gently and beautifully, away from its stated mission and into something better — friendship. They cook together, they talk, they start a band and cheerfully murder some Electric Light Orchestra covers, and the pursuit of the Doctor becomes an excuse for a handful of lonely people to find each other. Davies clearly adores these characters, and the episode’s first half is a genuinely charming ode to fandom and community, to the way a shared obsession can quietly become a family. There’s a sweet, halting romance brewing between Elton and the funny, forthright Ursula, too, and you find yourself rooting for the whole daft lot of them. The group is a lovely little gallery of British eccentrics — the would-be novelist Mr Skinner, gentle Bridget, sparky Bliss — and the episode gives each of them just enough life that what happens to them later genuinely stings. For a good twenty minutes “Love & Monsters” is less a Doctor Who episode than a warm, shaggy comedy about a support group that quietly forgot what it was supporting, and it’s a real charmer.

Enter the Abzorbaloff

Then the rot arrives, in the form of Victor Kennedy — a supercilious, glove-wearing stranger who muscles into LINDA, kills the warmth stone dead, and drives the group back to hunting the Doctor with a nasty new urgency. Kennedy is, of course, a monster: the Abzorbaloff, a lumbering green creature that consumes people by touch and keeps them alive, half-digested, as tormented faces stretched across its bulk. One by one, the members of LINDA start to vanish — absorbed, screaming silently from inside the thing’s flesh — and the cosy club becomes a picking-off ground.

Here’s the honest problem: the Abzorbaloff is naff. Famously designed by a child through a Blue Peter competition — a lovely idea in principle — it lands on screen as a rubbery, farting, pantomime lump that the story keeps insisting is menacing while it visibly is not. The absorbed faces trapped in its body are a legitimately disturbing concept, but the creature carrying them is too silly to earn the horror, and the tonal whiplash between the tender first half and the goofy monster movie of the second is where a lot of viewers get off the ride. I don’t entirely blame them.

The Trouble (and the Heart) of Love & Monsters

And yet. When “Love & Monsters” reaches for something real, it grabs hold. The best material isn’t the monster at all — it’s the subplot with Jackie Tyler. Elton befriends Jackie to get closer to the Doctor, and the episode turns that into an unexpectedly aching portrait of a lonely woman left permanently on the outside of her own daughter’s extraordinary life. Ever since we met her back in Rose, Jackie’s been the one who stays home and worries; here she gets a spotlight, and Camille Coduri is quietly heartbreaking in it. There’s a scene where Jackie, lonely and a little tipsy, makes a clumsy pass at Elton and then, catching him out as a liar, turns fierce in defence of her daughter — and it has more truth in it than the entire monster plot combined. This is a woman who handed her child to the stars and got left behind with an empty flat and a phone that only rings when something’s gone wrong. It’s of a piece with the show’s ongoing interest in the people the Doctor leaves in his wake — the Sarah Janes and the Mickeys, the ones touched by wonder and then left to get on with ordinary life, which the show explored so movingly back in School Reunion.

The Doctor and Rose do finally turn up to sort the monster out, and the resolution is a scramble — Elton smashing the creature’s cane, the absorbed victims turning on their captor — that ends with the Abzorbaloff dissolving into the pavement. But the real ending is Elton’s closing monologue, and it’s a beauty: a rueful, glowing little speech about how the world is stranger and darker and madder and so much better than the grow-up-get-a-job-get-a-house script we’re handed as kids. Coming right after that stranded, wistful “domestic approach” conversation in The Impossible Planet, it plays like the show’s mission statement delivered from the cheap seats.

It’s a shame, then, that the very last note is the notorious business with Ursula — saved from total death but reduced to a living face in a paving slab, complete with a cheeky innuendo about their love life that most of us could have done without. It’s the episode in miniature: a genuinely touching idea undercut by a gag that doesn’t know when to stop.

What Love & Monsters Leaves Us With

An experiment that swings wildly and connects maybe six times out of ten. Here’s what it plants:

  • A love letter to fandom. LINDA at its best is a gorgeous tribute to the way shared enthusiasm builds community — and a sly, affectionate wink at the show’s own devoted following.
  • The view from the edges. By putting an ordinary man at the centre, the episode asks what it’s actually like to live at the border of the Doctor’s world, thrilled and marked and mostly left behind.
  • Jackie, seen at last. The season’s most human scenes belong not to a monster but to a lonely mum, and the show is all the better for noticing her.
  • Tone is a tightrope. The lurch from tender character study to rubber-monster farce is the episode’s great weakness, and a cautionary tale about mixing your registers.
  • “So much better.” Elton’s closing speech is the warmest articulation yet of why anyone would want this mad, dangerous life at all.

Rating: 3/5 — Your mileage will vary more wildly on this one than anything else all season. The ideas are lovely and the Jackie material is superb; the Abzorbaloff and that final gag are not. A fascinating, frustrating, oddly moving misfire that I can’t quite bring myself to dislike.

A fan with a webcam, a band that loves ELO, and a monster that (quite literally) only a child could love — “Love & Monsters” is Doctor Who taking its biggest, weirdest swing of the season and connecting with maybe half of it. Ambitious, uneven, and unlike anything else on television. Here’s hoping normal service resumes next week.

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doctor who the satan pit + the impossible planet
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Satan Pit: The Doctor’s Leap of Faith

by hutchm
written by hutchm

“The Satan Pit” resolves the cliffhanger of “The Impossible Planet” by shifting focus from horror to character, centering on the Doctor’s confrontation with a colossal chained creature claiming to predate creation. The episode frames its central conflict as a philosophical challenge to the Doctor’s rationalist worldview rather than a physical one.

Faced with an impossible choice — destroy the Beast’s body and doom everyone on the planet — the Doctor acts on faith in Rose and the crew rather than certainty. Rose simultaneously identifies and eliminates the Beast’s mind, which had escaped into the body of an Ood aboard the escape rocket, with both characters independently making high-stakes decisions without guarantees.

We left the Doctor on the edge of a bottomless pit with something monstrous rising toward him, and “The Satan Pit” has the unenviable job of paying that off. Resolving the terror of The Impossible Planet was always going to be tricky — reveals rarely match the dread of the unknown — but this one mostly rises to it, because it understands that the real question isn’t what is in the pit. It’s what the Doctor believes when he stares into it. This is the half of the story where the horror becomes a character piece, and it gives Tennant his best material of the season.

Into the Pit

The Doctor descends into the abyss on a cable that runs out long before the bottom — and, in a lovely beat, he lets go and drops anyway, trusting that a planet holding an ancient prison wouldn’t be built to kill the one visitor who came to look. What he finds down there is genuinely enormous: a colossal, horned, chained creature, a devil straight off a medieval fresco, roaring in the dark at the heart of the world. The twist is a clever one. This vast brute is only the Beast’s body. Its mind — the intelligence, the malice, the voice — has already slipped its cage, leaping from Toby to the Ood and back, waiting for a way off this rock.

The design of the creature is a proper swing-for-the-fences moment — cloven, horned, mountainous, chained to the rock in a cavern lit like a cathedral of hell. It’s an image the classic series could only ever have dreamed of attempting, and the show is wise to keep it mostly still and looming rather than lunging about. A caged god, roaring but bound, is far more frightening than a rampaging one.

The prison itself is beautifully conceived. The whole impossible arrangement — the planet in defiance of physics, the black hole, the gravity field pinning everything in place — is the lock. The ancient Disciples of the Light chained the Beast here at the dawn of time and made the planet its jailer: kill the body and the entire system collapses into the black hole, taking the prisoner with it. It’s an elegant, awful trap, and it hands the Doctor an impossible choice. To end the Beast he has to shatter the prison, and shattering the prison means dropping the planet — and anyone still on it — into oblivion.

the satan pit the beast

The Doctor’s Leap of Faith

Here’s where the episode earns its title. Faced with a thing claiming to be Satan himself, older than creation, the keeper of every devil-myth humanity ever whispered, the Doctor is forced to confront the limits of his own certainty. He’s a man of science and reason, and this creature is daring him to admit that some things sit outside both. All through the story the Beast has been getting inside people’s heads — whispering their private fears and failings back at them, needling every crew member with the worst thing they secretly believe about themselves. When it turns that weapon on the Doctor, it goes for the one foundation he stands on: the conviction that the universe runs on rules he can, in principle, understand. That’s the real battleground of the episode — not claws and fire, but whether the Doctor’s entire way of seeing the world can survive contact with something that claims to predate it. His response is one of the finest speeches the revived show has given us. He doesn’t claim to have it all figured out — he freely admits he doesn’t know what the Beast really is, or whether it’s telling the truth about the time before time. But he knows what he believes in. He believes in the people around him. He believes, above all, in Rose. It’s the culmination of everything that quiet, marooned conversation about a life together was circling in part one, and of a bond that’s deepened all season long, ever since the pair of them lay grinning in the apple grass back in New Earth. And that faith — not certainty, faith — is enough to make him take the gamble.

It’s a genuinely thoughtful bit of writing, and Tennant sells every word of it. The Doctor works out the trap’s cruel logic and chooses to spring it: he smashes the ancient urns that keep the body imprisoned, freeing the Beast’s mindless shell to die as the planet begins its long fall into the black hole. He’s betting everything on the belief that Rose and the crew can get clear in time — and that the mind of the Beast, wherever it’s hiding, will die with them if he times it right. He can’t prove any of it. He just believes.

Rose Takes Charge

While the Doctor is having his reckoning below, the episode remembers that Rose Tyler is a hero in her own right, and gives her the other half of the win. Up on the base, the Ood are butchering the crew on the Beast’s command, and it’s Rose who holds the survivors together, who refuses to be left behind when Zach tries to bundle her onto the escape rocket without the Doctor, and who works out the piece the Doctor can’t see from the bottom of a pit: the Beast’s mind is riding along with them, hidden inside Toby.

The payoff is fantastic. As the rocket claws its way up out of the dying system, Rose clocks the ancient markings crawling back across Toby’s face and hears the Beast sneering through his mouth — and she doesn’t hesitate. She grabs a bolt gun, blows the safety belt and the windscreen, and lets the vacuum rip Toby and the thing inside him out into space, straight down into the black hole. It’s the mirror of the Doctor’s own gamble: no certainty, no clever gadget, just a companion making a terrible call under pressure and being right. Everything Rose has grown into since she took the Doctor’s hand back in Rose is in that moment.

The Doctor, meanwhile, finds the TARDIS fallen to the bottom of the pit, scoops up Ida, and hauls the rocket free of the black hole’s pull at the last second. They get out. Not everyone does — Jefferson and Scooti are gone, and the Doctor is quietly haunted that he couldn’t save the Ood, dragged to their deaths serving a master they never chose. And he never does get a straight answer about what the Beast truly was. The episode is confident enough to leave the biggest question hanging in the dark where it belongs.

What The Satan Pit Leaves Us With

A muscular, thoughtful finale that turns a monster into a mirror. Here’s what it plants:

  • Faith over certainty. The Doctor can’t solve the puzzle — so he chooses to believe in Rose anyway. The clearest statement yet of who this Doctor is.
  • The unknowable stays unknown. Refusing to explain the Beast is a bold call, and it’s the right one. Some horrors are bigger when you never get the footnote.
  • Rose, fully a hero. Her half of the rescue matches the Doctor’s beat for beat — the same leap of faith, made without him, and dead right.
  • A cost that lingers. The dead crew and the doomed Ood aren’t waved away; the victory is real but it isn’t clean, and the Doctor carries it.
  • A two-parter that delivers. Dread in part one, meaning in part two — together, one of the strongest stories the revived show has told.

Rating: 4.5/5 — A reveal that can’t quite out-scare the brilliant build of part one, but more than makes up for it with a story about belief that gives both the Doctor and Rose their finest hour. The speech alone is worth the price of admission.

Faith, a bottomless pit, and a companion who saves the day herself — “The Satan Pit” is Doctor Who thinking big and feeling deep at the same time. After all that darkness, I could do with something a bit lighter next. Wonder what the show’s got in store.

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