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the day of the doctor gallifrey falls no more
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Day of the Doctor: Gallifrey Falls No More

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I look at The Day of the Doctor, the 50th anniversary special where the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors meet the War Doctor and the Time War finally gets shown. I go through John Hurt’s tired old soldier, the Moment wearing Rose’s face, the Zygon plot, and the three-men-one-button decision at the end.

I loved it. It’s warm and funny and far braver than an anniversary special needed to be, and I give it 5/5.

Anniversary specials are usually a parade. You wheel out the old faces, you have them insult each other’s coats, you gesture at the past, and everyone goes home pleased. “The Day of the Doctor” does some of that, and there’s a scene where three Doctors compare screwdriver sizes that is very funny, but underneath the celebration it’s doing something far more serious. It goes back to the single decision the revived show was built on, the one it has spent eight years treating as immovable, and it takes it apart. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely does, and I was grinning for most of it.

The man who wasn’t called the Doctor

The tease at the end of The Name of the Doctor, a face he refuses to count and a promise he says was broken, is cashed in here, and the answer is better than the setup. The War Doctor isn’t an evil incarnation, or a secret villain, or any of the things a lesser show would have made him. He’s the one who fought the Time War. That’s all. He’s an exhausted old soldier who did what the others were too squeamish to do, and the reason his successors won’t include him in the count isn’t that he’s monstrous but that he’s inconvenient, the living record of a day they’d rather file under someone else’s name. John Hurt is magnificent, and he plays it without any self-pity. His War Doctor is dry, tired, and openly contemptuous of the two men he meets: a pair of overgrown children with sonic screwdrivers and catchphrases who point things at problems and shout. When he asks whether they’re capable of being serious for four seconds together it’s the funniest line in the special, and also the sharpest thing the programme has ever said about itself. It’s a rare thing for a show to let a guest incarnation stand in the middle of its own anniversary and call the whole gang a bit silly, and the fact that it lands as affection rather than sneering is a big part of why it works.

It’s also, finally, a look at the war itself. Eight years of this show have described the Time War in reverent, deliberately vague terms, the Nightmare Child and the Could-Have-Been King and horrors too large to put on screen, and there was always a risk that showing it would shrink it. What we get instead is narrower and smarter: the fall of Arcadia, a street, Daleks in the sky, and a soldier writing NO MORE on a wall with a gun because he’s run out of other things to say. The special declines to show the cosmic end of it and shows us a city being lost instead, which is the only scale at which it could ever have worked. The grit of those Arcadia scenes is a big part of why the whole thing holds together, and I’d have happily sat through twenty more minutes of them. Seeing the war as a place people actually lived, rather than a phrase we’d heard Daleks and Time Lords whisper for years, makes everything the Doctor has carried feel a lot heavier.

The weapon with a conscience

The Moment is the best idea in the script. It’s the Time Lords’ final weapon, powerful enough to end the war, and it has developed a conscience, so it refuses to be used without first making its user understand what they’re doing. It shows up as Rose Tyler, or rather as Bad Wolf, since the interface picks a face from the Doctor’s future and wears it. Billie Piper gets to play something that is emphatically not the character she’s associated with, an ancient, amused, slightly cruel thing that has decided this man needs supervision. It’s a smart way to bring her back without dragging the whole Bad Wolf Bay apparatus along with her, and she’s properly eerie in it. The Moment’s punishment is elegant, because it doesn’t stop him. It shows him what he’ll become, opening a window into his own future so he can watch the two men he turns into and see exactly how they carry it.

The Day of the Doctor

Zygons, and a very good trick

The present-day plot is the weakest strand and it’s still perfectly decent: Zygons, hidden in Elizabethan paintings, thawing out in the twenty-first century to take England. Kate Stewart and UNIT return, Osgood arrives fully formed as the fan-in-a-scarf who turns out to be genuinely brave, and the Black Archive is a nice bit of world-building, a room UNIT has made TARDIS-proof, staffed by people whose memories are wiped at the end of every shift. The resolution is the bit that matters, because it’s the special’s argument in miniature. The Doctors scramble everyone’s memory of who is human and who is Zygon, so the two sides have to negotiate a settlement without knowing which side they’ll be on when it lifts. That’s the Zygon shape-shifting being used to keep you guessing who’s who, and it’s the same move the whole special is building towards: you can’t make a fair decision about a war until you can’t tell which side you’re on.

Tennant slides back into the part effortlessly, incidentally, and the Elizabeth I material, a Zygon duplicate and a marriage and the Tenth Doctor’s flustered horror at his own wedding, is broad but well played. The one absence worth noting is Christopher Eccleston, who declined to return, and the special handles it gracefully by simply not pretending otherwise. The Ninth Doctor appears only in archive form, and the gap is filled by inventing the War Doctor instead. Given that the invented incarnation turns out to be the best thing in the episode, it’s hard to file as a loss. I missed him a little, I’ll admit, but I never felt the special was worse for it. Paul McGann, meanwhile, got his own send-off in a seven-minute minisode released alongside this, which is where the War Doctor actually comes from. Worth seeking out, since it does more for the Eighth Doctor in seven minutes than the 1996 film managed in ninety.

The decision

And then the three of them stand in a barn with their hands on a big red button, and the special does the thing. The Doctor has spent eight years defined by this, the man who burned his own people, children included, to end a war. It’s the wound under The End of Time, the reason for the guilt, the engine of the whole revival, and the same choice he walked away from in The Parting of the Ways when he asked whether he was a coward or a killer. Undoing it should be a betrayal. It isn’t, because the special doesn’t cheat. The War Doctor still makes the choice. He puts his hand on the button having decided, and the other two join him, not to talk him out of it but so that he doesn’t have to do it alone, which is the most affecting beat in the whole thing, and it’s the point where I stopped watching as a fan and just watched. What changes the outcome is Clara. She looks at three men about to commit genocide and simply asks what happened to the promise, and it’s the Moment’s whole argument arriving from a human being who has no stake in Time Lord politics.

So they find a third option: freeze Gallifrey in a single instant and shift it out of the universe into a pocket dimension, leaving the Daleks to destroy themselves in the crossfire. All thirteen Doctors turn up to do it, and yes, the thirteenth is a pair of eyes and an unfamiliar eyebrow, and yes, it’s a thrill. The line that lands is the quiet one. He isn’t sure it worked. He’ll never be sure, because the two older Doctors will forget, their timelines won’t hold it, and so the man who has carried this for centuries goes on carrying it. Nothing about his past changes, only his future does. And that last moment with the Curator, a face I won’t spoil for anyone who somehow hasn’t seen it, is the warmest ending an anniversary could have asked for. Gallifrey falls no more.

Rating: 5/5. Warm, funny and brave, and I loved every minute of it.

Which of the three Doctors do you think carried the decision, and would you have let the War Doctor go through with it? Tell me in the comments.

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Journey's End: The Most Important Woman in Creation - Doctor Who episode still
Doctor WhoTelevision

Journey’s End: The Most Important Woman in Creation

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

“Journey’s End” is the second half of the Series 4 finale of Doctor Who. It picks up from the Doctor’s near-regeneration, resolves it with the severed hand from The Christmas Invasion, and follows the Daleks’ reality bomb plan, Davros’s confrontation with the Doctor and the creation of a half-human second Doctor.

The post argues the episode is crowded but powerful, praising Catherine Tate’s DoctorDonna and the Davros scenes while calling Donna’s memory erasure the cruellest ending the show has written. It rates the episode 4/5.

Three years of storytelling arrive here. “Journey’s End” picks up from the golden light pouring out of the Doctor’s hands at the close of The Stolen Earth, and it’s exactly the finale all that build-up suggests: enormous, overstuffed, occasionally ridiculous, and absolutely devastating when it matters. It resolves a cliffhanger with a conjuring trick, it gives the Doctor the worst thing anyone has ever said to him, and it does something to Donna Noble so cruel that I’m still angry about it. Not a flawless episode by any measure. An unforgettable one.

Start with the regeneration, because it isn’t one. The Doctor siphons the excess energy into the severed hand he’s been carrying around in a jar since a Sycorax took it off him in The Christmas Invasion, healing himself without altering a single cell. It is, unquestionably, a cheat. It’s also been sitting on the console in plain sight for two and a half years, so it’s a cheat with a receipt, and I’d far rather have that than a reset button. The show immediately makes the hand matter rather than leaving it as a get-out, because Donna touches it and something extraordinary happens: a two-way biological meta-crisis. A second Doctor grows out of the hand, part human, one heart, wearing a blue suit and rather more impulsive than the original. Donna, in exchange, receives a Time Lord mind on top of her own.

The DoctorDonna is magnificent

Catherine Tate playing Donna Noble with the Doctor’s intellect running underneath is the most fun this season has had. She rattles through calculations at double speed, finishes his sentences, and insults him fluently in two disciplines at once. She’s the one who disables the entire Dalek fleet, spins the reality bomb into reverse, and saves every universe there is, a temp from Chiswick doing it with a keyboard and a great deal of shouting. For a character who has spent her whole life being told she’s nothing special, by her mother and worse by herself, having Donna be the one who saves all of creation is a superb payoff. The season has been signposting it since a soothsayer looked at her back in The Fires of Pompeii, and it lands exactly as it should.

Journey's End: The Most Important Woman in Creation - Doctor Who episode still

The moral centre of the episode, though, is Davros, and he’s superb precisely because he never fights. Strapped into his chair below the Crucible, he simply talks, and what he does is read the Doctor a roll call. Everyone in this building is prepared to die. Sarah Jane has a warp star. Jack has a bomb. Martha has a key that will crack the Earth open. Every one of them arrived at the same place, willing to commit atrocity and willing to be destroyed, because of him. You take ordinary people and you fashion them into weapons. It is the single most devastating thing anybody has ever said to this Doctor and the show pointedly declines to give him an answer. Tennant plays it as a man watching a bill be itemised. It lands harder because we’ve watched him earn it: the eternal punishments he handed out in The Family of Blood weren’t the act of a gentle man, and Davros has simply noticed. The sting in the tail is that the meta-crisis Doctor then wipes out the entire Dalek fleet in one stroke and the real Doctor is horrified by him, which is of course Davros’s point arriving from a second direction. A version of himself, born in battle, doing precisely what he’d never allow.

And then the cruellest ending this show has written

A human mind cannot hold a Time Lord consciousness. Donna is burning up, and there’s exactly one way to save her: the Doctor has to erase every memory of him, all of it, every trip, Pompeii, the Ood, the Library, and take her home. She begs him not to. She knows exactly what she’s losing while she’s losing it. And she goes back to being who she was in Partners in Crime, loud and brash and a bit lost, entirely unaware she was ever anything else, while her mother and grandfather are told she can never remember or the burning will start again and kill her.

That’s a horrible ending and the show knows it. Donna Noble saved every universe there is and doesn’t get to keep it. The one companion who genuinely grew, from the shouting bride who turned him down to the woman who put her hands on that lever in Pompeii, is the one who has all of it taken away, and she doesn’t even get to be sad about it. I wasn’t the only one left bitter, as Cathode Ray Tube’s write-up shows. Wilf gets the last word, promising to look up at the sky for her every night, and it finished me off completely. The Doctor walks back into the TARDIS alone, in the rain, and closes the door.

Rating: 4/5. Too crowded, and the reality bomb is an awful lot of plot for a resolution that turns on one very fast keyboard. But the character work is exceptional, the Davros scenes are the best writing of the season, and the last twenty minutes are as good and as sad as this programme gets. Everyone he ever saved in one room, laughing, flying a police box, and then a beach and a doorstep and a man walking off alone in the rain. Worth noting too: two separate people have now told him his song is ending, and nobody has explained what that means.

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the stolen earth davros returns
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Stolen Earth: Twenty-Seven Planets and a Familiar Voice

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Doctor Who’s “The Stolen Earth” is the first half of the Series 4 finale. The Doctor and Donna find Earth missing from its place in space, one of twenty-seven planets stolen and hidden by the Daleks, and the episode gathers the Doctor’s former companions and allies, including Martha, Sarah Jane, Captain Jack, Rose and Harriet Jones, to help find him.

The post covers the full-scale Dalek invasion, Davros’s return, Dalek Caan’s madness and the growing hints about Donna, before landing on the Doctor being shot just as he reunites with Rose. It rates the episode 4.5/5 as breathless and overstuffed but confident, and ends on the open cliffhanger.

This show has spent three years building a cast of people the Doctor left behind, and “The Stolen Earth” is the episode that collects every single one of them, drops the planet into a hole in space, and lets the Daleks walk down the middle of a British street. It is enormous, gleefully overstuffed, and it ends on the most upsetting cliffhanger this show has ever attempted. As event television goes, this is about as good as it gets.

Twenty-seven planets

The Earth is gone. That’s the opening: the Doctor and Donna step out of the TARDIS into an empty patch of space where the planet ought to be, and the show plays it completely straight. No monster yet, no explanation, just an absence. It turns out Earth is one of twenty-seven worlds that have been stolen and hidden in the Medusa Cascade, arranged in a precise configuration for reasons nobody will explain until next week. The stars going out in Turn Left weren’t a metaphor after all, and something has been quietly removing pieces of the universe for weeks. The Doctor’s search takes him to the Shadow Proclamation, the galactic authority whose name he’s been bluffing his way past since his first series, and it’s a nice bit of pay-off to finally see the thing behind the phrase, complete with an imperious Architect and a barracks full of Judoon. It’s also where the sheer scale of the theft gets spelled out, and where the Doctor starts to look genuinely frightened. Donna’s contribution there, an apparently daft aside about the bees disappearing, turns out to be the thread that actually unpicks it, which is a lovely piece of misdirection at the expense of everyone in the room with a doctorate.

The Stolen Earth: Twenty-Seven Planets and a Familiar Voice - Doctor Who episode still

Everyone he ever knew

Back on the stolen Earth, the Daleks arrive in force, and the show does something it has never had the nerve to do before: full invasion. Saucers over cities, Daleks gliding down suburban roads exterminating people in their front gardens, news broadcasts collapsing mid-sentence. It’s the apocalypse the series has been circling for years, finally delivered at full scale. The domestic scale of it is what really stings. This isn’t a war fought over skylines in wide shot, it’s a Dalek hovering outside a suburban front door while a family cowers in the hallway, and Wilf Mott coming out to meet it swinging a paintball gun because it’s the only weapon in the house. Bernard Cribbins squaring up to a Dalek armed with nothing but outrage and completely the wrong equipment is simultaneously very funny and genuinely brave, and it’s precisely the note this show hits better than anything else on television.

And then it starts assembling the family. Martha Jones with UNIT in New York. Sarah Jane Smith and her son. Captain Jack with what’s left of Torchwood. Wilf with that paintball gun. And Rose Tyler, arrived from a sealed universe with an enormous gun and an expression that suggests she has run out of patience entirely. Watching them all realise, separately, that the only person who can help is unreachable, and then work out how to shout loudly enough, is enormously satisfying. Each of them has been on their own since the Doctor moved on: Sarah Jane since he left her behind decades before School Reunion, Jack since he was abandoned on a space station, Rose since a beach in Norway at the end of Doomsday. The episode’s real argument is that he doesn’t just leave wreckage behind him, he leaves people who learned how to do it themselves.

The best of it belongs to Harriet Jones. Deposed, disgraced, living quietly with the ruins of the career the Doctor demolished with six words in The Christmas Invasion, she turns out to have kept a secret subwave network precisely for a day like this, and she uses it to link everyone together and boost a signal loud enough to reach him. When she meets the Daleks she holds up her ID and says “Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister,” and gets the old reply, “Yes, we know who you are”, and it’s genuinely moving rather than a gag. She dies doing the right thing, having spent three years being told by the Doctor that she was wrong. The show lets her be right.

Davros, and the street

And then the voice behind the invasion, which is a proper fanfare moment: Davros. Creator of the Daleks, believed lost in the Time War, hauled out of the jaws of something unspeakable by Dalek Caan (a fan review at Slice of Sci-Fi lays out the same rescue) and now sitting in the dark below his own creations, having grown a new Dalek race out of the cells of his own body. Julian Bleach is superb, quiet and courteous and faintly amused, far more unnerving than shouting would be. His relationship with the new Daleks is the interesting part: they don’t obey him, they keep him. He built them and they’ve put him in a basement. Dalek Caan, meanwhile, the last survivor of the Cult of Skaro, who fled the wreckage of Canary Wharf into an emergency temporal shift and then flew unprotected into the Time War itself, has come back completely insane, hanging in a broken casing and giggling prophecies. It’s a properly strange, unsettling image, and his rhymes about the coming darkness and the Doctor’s “most faithful companion” dying are the sort of thing you rewind and squint at.

Donna is having a strange time of it, too. Caan’s prophecies keep circling her without ever quite naming her, the Shadow Architect notices something distinctly odd about her timeline, and she spends the hour quietly unsettled by things nobody will explain to her. It’s a slow, deliberate drumbeat. The season has been pointing at Donna Noble since a dying soothsayer in Pompeii clocked something on her back, and here it starts pointing considerably harder. Whatever’s coming, it increasingly looks like it belongs to her.

The last five minutes are extraordinary. The Doctor finds the Earth. He steps out into a London street, and at the far end of it is Rose Tyler, and they see each other, and they run. It’s the reunion two seasons have been building toward and the show gives it the full slow-motion treatment, absolutely earned. And a Dalek shoots him mid-stride. Jack and Rose drag him inside the TARDIS, and the golden light starts pouring out of his hands, and he begins to regenerate on the console room floor while the people who love him stand there and watch. That’s where it stops. No resolution, no reassurance, nothing. Just an ending, and he’s shot running toward the one person he lost.

Rating: 4.5/5. Breathless, sprawling and occasionally so busy it can barely breathe, but the sheer confidence carries it. If it fumbles anything it’ll be next week’s problem; as a first half it’s close to perfect. I don’t know how they get out of this. I’m not sure they do.

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turn left world without the doctor
Doctor WhoTelevision

Turn Left: The World Where He Died

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Turn Left is the Doctor-lite episode in which a fortune teller sends Donna back to a junction where she turned right, and a Time Beetle makes her turn left instead. The piece covers the world where the Doctor never met her, the disasters nobody stopped, and the turn against refugees.

It lands on Donna’s sacrifice, Rose’s warning of Bad Wolf, and the stars going out. The argument is that the Doctor matters most for the times he happened to be in the right place. Rating: 5/5.

Doctor Who does a Doctor-lite episode most years to ease the production schedule, and they’re usually a bit of a curiosity. “Turn Left” is not a curiosity. It’s the bleakest, angriest hour this show has ever made, it uses the Doctor’s absence as its entire argument, and it is comfortably the best thing in Series 4. It’s also, unexpectedly, a nastier piece of political writing than anything the series has attempted before.

One small decision

On a market world, a fortune teller talks Donna into examining an old choice: a day, years ago, when she sat at a junction in her car and her mother nagged her toward a temp job at a security firm called H.C. Clements. She turned right. That job is where she met the Doctor for the first time, in The Runaway Bride. And while the fortune teller keeps her talking, something climbs onto her back, a Time Beetle feeding on altered possibility, and makes her turn left instead. It’s a superb premise, and it also quietly cashes a cheque the season wrote months ago. A dying soothsayer in The Fires of Pompeii took one look at Donna and said there was something on her back. Everyone, including me, filed it under atmospheric nonsense. It wasn’t. Den of Geek thought it was really, really good as well, and I can’t argue.

Turn Left: The World Where He Died - Doctor Who episode still

What follows is the episode’s masterstroke. Donna doesn’t die, and the Doctor isn’t erased from history. He just isn’t there for any of it, and the show walks us through every catastrophe of the last two years playing out with nobody to stop it. The Doctor dies under the Thames dealing with the Racnoss, because Donna wasn’t standing there to shout at him. Then the dominoes fall. A hospital is transported to the Moon, the Judoon incursion he defused so easily in Smith and Jones, and everybody inside suffocates. Sarah Jane Smith and Martha Jones both die saving the people they can, and Martha’s death by radiation is delivered as a line on a news bulletin. The starship Titanic, which he hauled off its collision course at the last second in Voyage of the Damned, comes down on London instead and takes most of southern England with it, a nuclear-scale hole where the capital used to be. The Adipose breed unchecked in North America and sixty million people die. Torchwood stop the Sontaran gas from The Poison Sky but every one of them is killed doing it. Watching the season’s own back catalogue turn into an obituary list is a genuinely chilling trick, and it’s the strongest possible argument for what the Doctor actually does. Not the speeches, not the cleverness, just the number of times he happened to be standing in the right place.

Britain closes its doors

But the disasters aren’t the point. What the episode really cares about is what comes after. With England broken and refugees flooding north, the country turns. The Nobles are billeted into a shared house in Leeds, rationing bites, and the rhetoric hardens by degrees, England for the English, we can’t take any more, they’re taking our housing. Then one evening soldiers arrive and take the Italian family they’ve been living with away to a labour camp, and Wilf, who fought in a war, stands in the street and says quietly that that’s what they called it last time, and then he breaks. It’s the bravest thing this show has ever put on screen at teatime, and it’s played entirely straight, with no aliens involved and no monster to blame. Bernard Cribbins is devastating, and the episode makes its point with total clarity: catastrophe doesn’t turn people into fascists, it just gives the ones who were ready an excuse.

Meanwhile Donna, Sylvia and Wilf grind each other down in a cramped house, and Sylvia, stripped of everything, stops even pretending to like her daughter. It’s a brutal watch, and it makes Donna’s ordinary life back in the real world look like an enormous kindness. What’s most striking is how little of this involves anything alien at all. The middle third of the episode is a straight domestic drama about a family losing everything and slowly turning on one another across a shared kitchen table, and it would play almost unchanged with every science-fiction element stripped out of it. The show has done grim before, but never this sustained and never this recognisable: the queueing, the shortages, the billeting, the neighbours quietly informing on neighbours. It is the most convincing apocalypse the series has ever staged, precisely because there is no spectacle anywhere in it.

The woman who wasn’t there

Threaded through all of it is Rose Tyler, appearing at intervals to steer Donna, refusing to give her name, and visibly straining to hold herself in a universe she shouldn’t be able to reach. The blonde woman who walked round a corner and vanished in Partners in Crime is now doing the whole job herself, organising UNIT, running the operation, dragging Donna toward the fix. Billie Piper plays her harder and older, and the episode is careful never to explain how she’s here. It just keeps her slightly out of focus, doing the impossible, while the sky empties. She’s also, pointedly, doing every bit of it without him: giving the orders, improvising a rescue for a universe that is visibly coming apart at the seams. Whatever Rose Tyler has been doing since that beach in Norway, she has very clearly not spent any of it waiting around to be collected. Because that’s the other thread: the stars are going out. Not metaphorically. Constellation by constellation, the night sky is being deleted, and nobody can say why.

The fix requires Donna to go back and make her past self turn right, and the only way to stop that car at that junction is to put something in the road. So she does. She steps in front of a lorry, and dies, so that a version of herself she’ll never meet takes a different turning. It’s an extraordinary thing for a companion to do, and the show gives it the weight it deserves, because this is Donna, who has spent four series being told by her own mother that she’s nothing special, choosing to die for a world she won’t be in. As she goes, Rose leans down and whispers two words for her to carry back: Bad Wolf. Donna wakes up in the real timeline, and the words are everywhere, on posters, on shop fronts, on hoardings, and finally burned into the sign on the TARDIS door. The Doctor sees them and the colour drains out of him. Those were Rose’s words, scattered across all of time in The Parting of the Ways, and their return means something is very badly wrong.

Donna stepping in front of that lorry to hand a stranger a better life, when the stranger is herself, is the best thing she’s ever done, and no speech about why the Doctor matters could have landed as hard as watching two years of disasters play out without him. Then the stars go out, because whatever’s coming is bigger than a monster.

Rating: 5/5. Bleak, furious, superbly constructed and anchored by two career-best performances from Catherine Tate and Bernard Cribbins. That it manages all this while barely featuring its own lead is astonishing. Whatever’s coming next, I don’t think anyone’s ready for it.

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partners in crime
Doctor WhoTelevision

Partners in Crime: Donna Noble Comes Looking

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

A review of Partners in Crime, the opening episode of Doctor Who’s 2008 series, in which Donna Noble and the Doctor separately investigate Adipose Industries and its diet pill that turns body fat into small alien creatures. The post covers the parallel investigation and the mimed reunion through a window, the Adipose and Miss Foster, the terms Donna and the Doctor set for travelling together, her family, and the unexplained appearance of Rose Tyler at the end.

It calls the episode warm, very funny and confident, light on plot and a little weightless after Voyage of the Damned, but a superb return for a character it had written off, with Wilf a highlight and the closing Rose cameo lifting it further. Rating: 4/5.

When Donna Noble turned down all of time and space at the end of The Runaway Bride, I thought that was the last we’d see of her. I was wrong, and I’m delighted to be. Partners in Crime brings her back, and not as a lucky bystander this time either, but as a woman who has spent the time since actively hunting the Doctor down. It resets the whole feel of the show in a way that’s genuinely fresh. It’s also very funny, which helps.

Two Investigations, One Building

The structure is the best joke in the episode. The Doctor is investigating Adipose Industries, Donna is investigating Adipose Industries, and neither knows the other one is there. So the first half runs them on parallel tracks, the pair of them knocking on the doors of customers with the same clipboard patter, sneaking round the same building, missing each other by seconds. Roger has lost a kilo a night, exactly a kilo, and his burglar alarm keeps going off at ten past one in the morning for no reason. Stacy’s delighted with the pills until Donna asks to use the loo. And I spent twenty minutes shouting at the telly for them to just turn round.

The payoff is the scene everyone will be talking about. The Doctor’s hanging outside Miss Foster’s office in a window cleaner’s cradle, listening in with a stethoscope, Donna’s creeping up to the same office from the inside, and they both look through the glass at the same moment. What follows is an entire silent, frantic conversation mimed across the office, him mouthing “What? What?” and her mouthing that she was looking for him, that she read it on the internet, that she crept along and heard them talking and hid. Tennant and Tate are superb, and the timing’s immaculate, and then Miss Foster turns round and asks if she’s interrupting. Other Doctor Who fans loved that mime too, and I think it’s the funniest thing this show has done in years. It tells you exactly what this pairing is going to be.

The Doctor and Donna spotting each other through the office window in Partners in Crime

Because Donna has been looking. That’s the change that matters. She went home and couldn’t settle, and she worked out that the way to find the Doctor was to look for trouble and wait for him to turn up. So she chased all of it, UFOs, sightings, crop circles, sea monsters, a bit on the internet about the bees disappearing. She believes all of it now, she says, apart from that replica of the Titanic flying over Buckingham Palace on Christmas Day, which has obviously got to be a hoax. She’d packed ages ago, just in case, and the boot of her mum’s car is full of suitcases and a hatbox. She didn’t wait to be chosen, she went and found him, and when they finally meet on the stairs the first thing she says is that he’s even got the same suit on.

And she arrives at exactly the right moment. The Doctor we rejoin here has been rattling about on his own since Martha walked away, and the last time we saw him he was letting a dead woman’s atoms go into space at the end of Voyage of the Damned. He’s lonely and he’s brittle, and when he works out who’s standing on the other side of that window the relief on his face does more than any amount of dialogue could.

The Fat Just Walks Away

The plot is pure high-concept silliness, and it works because it’s played so straight. Adipose Industries sells a diet pill with an irresistible slogan, the fat just walks away, and it does. Literally. Overnight a kilo of body fat pulls itself together into a small white creature with stubby arms and a big grin and toddles out through the cat flap. The Adipose are shameless. They’re marshmallows with faces, they wave, and they’re obviously going to be on every lunchbox in the country by summer.

But there’s a proper horror underneath it. Earth is a nursery, and when the schedule gets pushed forward the process stops politely taking the spare fat and starts taking the whole person. Stacy locks herself in her bathroom as the lumps move about under her clothes, and then there’s just a pile of clothes on the floor and a crowd of cheerful little blobs, one of them waving at Donna from the window sill before it jumps. It’s a nasty idea dressed up in something adorable, and that mix is very much what this show does best.

Sarah Lancashire is excellent as Miss Foster, brisk and contemptuous and completely unbothered, telling a tied-up journalist she’s travelled a long way to find obesity on this scale. Foster as in foster mother, she points out, since nobody asked. She’s a nanny from the stars running a baby farm on an unsuspecting planet, with the manner of a woman managing a regional office. Her end is a good one too. The parents turn up to collect their young, the Doctor points out they don’t need the nanny any more, and the beam she’s floating in simply switches off. No villainous speech, just a very long drop.

A Mate, Not a Girlfriend

The most important thing here isn’t the plot at all, it’s the terms they set by the car. The Doctor’s hesitant, and when Donna asks if he’d rather be on his own he admits that last time, with Martha, it got complicated, and that was his fault. All he wants is a mate. Donna hears “mate” the other way, tells him he’s not mating with her, sunshine, and makes it very clear she isn’t having any of that nonsense with a long streak of alien nothing. It’s a great bit of comedy and it’s doing a real job. Martha fell for him the moment they met back in Smith and Jones, Rose before her, and both of them got hurt by it, so having the possibility taken off the table in the first episode is enormously refreshing. It frees both actors up completely, and Tate and Tennant play them as squabbling equals with the chemistry there straight away.

Donna’s family are a fine addition too. Her mum Sylvia is a hard watch in a very recognisable way, dismissive and disappointed, always making it clear her daughter has amounted to nothing and mostly wanting the car back. Her grandad Wilfred Mott is an absolute joy, a warm old man with a telescope up at his allotment who shows her Venus and tells her that one day we’ll be striding out among the stars. She makes him promise to shout for her if he ever sees a little blue box in the sky. And his delight at the end, when one goes past with her waving from the door, “Go on, gal!”, is the loveliest moment in the episode.

The contrast between those two is doing deliberate work as well. Sylvia tells Donna she’s a failure, Wilf tells her she’s meant for something better, and Donna has spent her whole life listening to both. You can hear both of them in the way she talks about herself, the loud brassy bravado sitting right on top of a flat certainty that she’s nobody special. That’s more texture than a comedy episode strictly needed to bother with, and I’m glad it did.

The Woman Who Wasn’t There

And then, right at the end, the bit that stopped me dead. Donna’s still got her mum’s car keys, so she drops them in a bin on Brook Street, rings Sylvia to tell her, and asks a blonde woman standing by the police barriers to point out the bin when a tall woman called Sylvia comes looking. Donna goes. The blonde woman turns round, walks away up the street, and fades out of existence.

It’s Rose Tyler. Unmistakably. The same Rose who was sealed on the far side of a closed-off universe in Doomsday, for good, with the way between the worlds shut and the Doctor left crying in the TARDIS. She’s standing on a London street, and then she isn’t. No explanation, no music sting telling me what to think, and nobody in the episode even notices. I have absolutely no idea what it means or how it’s possible, and it’s completely hijacked my attention for the rest of the series. What’s she doing there, and does she know Donna, and why is it Donna she’s standing next to?

Rating: 4/5. Light on plot and a bit weightless after what the Doctor’s just been through, but hilarious, beautifully played, and a superb return for a character I’d written off. The last thirty seconds lift it a good deal, and I can’t wait to see where the two of them go first.

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doomsday
Doctor WhoTelevision

Doomsday: Daleks, Cybermen and the Genesis Ark

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This is a fan review of Doomsday, the Series 2 finale of Doctor Who. It covers the long-awaited clash between the Daleks and the Cybermen over London, the Genesis Ark, Torchwood’s downfall and the plan that seals the breach between worlds.

The post argues that the finale works both as blockbuster spectacle and as a heartbreaking goodbye, built around Rose’s choice to stand beside the Doctor and the farewell on Bad Wolf Bay. The unresolved Cult of Skaro thread and the wedding-dress cliffhanger round it out, and it rates the episode 5/5.

I’ve watched a lot of Doctor Who, and I’ve never been wrecked by an episode the way “Doomsday” wrecked me. Fair warning: spoilers all the way down, because I don’t see how you talk about that ending without them. It’s the payoff to the enormous double cliffhanger of Army of Ghosts, and for forty minutes it’s the biggest, loudest, most gleefully fan-servicing thing the revived show has ever attempted, and then it puts everything down, walks you onto a cold grey beach in Norway and quietly breaks your heart. As a finale it’s close to perfect. As a goodbye it’s devastating.

A line of Cybermen standing in formation in Doomsday

Daleks Versus Cybermen

First, the bit every fan has wanted since roughly 1966. Four Daleks and an army of Cybermen in the same building, and the show’s smart enough to know exactly what we came for: it lets them talk first. The stand-off between the Cult of Skaro and the Cyber-Leader is a joy from start to finish, the Cybermen coolly proposing a logical alliance to conquer the universe together and the Daleks answering with the purest contempt in science fiction. “You are superior in only one respect: you are better at dying.” It’s funny, it’s chilling, and it sums up the difference between them. The Cybermen want order. The Daleks want everything else to stop existing.

Then the war starts and it’s spectacular. The Daleks have brought the Genesis Ark, a Time Lord prison ship that’s bigger on the inside, holds millions of Daleks and needs only the touch of a time traveller to unlock, and when it opens above Canary Wharf and pours its cargo into the London sky the scale is properly breathtaking. Daleks and Cybermen shooting each other out of the air over a real, recognisable city while ordinary people run for cover. I don’t think the show has ever spent a budget this well, and the fan review over at Doctor Who Reviews is every bit as gushing about that battle as I am.

What keeps it from being empty spectacle is Torchwood. Yvonne Hartman was certain she could handle whatever came through, that certainty has doomed her people, and the Institute that Queen Victoria founded to protect Britain from the Doctor ends up handing the Earth to its two worst enemies. It’s the grim, logical end of the arc the season has been quietly building since that first ominous name-drop.

Into the Void

The Doctor’s solution is beautiful in its simplicity. Everything that crossed through the Void, every Dalek and every Cyberman, came back carrying traces of it, invisible contamination clinging to them like dust. Open the breach again and reverse the flow, and every single thing that has touched that nothingness gets dragged back into it, which is a lovely bit of thinking because it turns the trip that got them here into the thing that removes them. The catch is that the Doctor and Rose have to be there holding the clamps open, standing in the pull of a void that wants to take everything with it.

And here’s the thing that makes the ending land: Rose chooses this. She’d already been sent to safety in the parallel world we first saw in Rise of the Cybermen, with Jackie, Pete and Mickey, the family she’d been offered, alive and whole and waiting, and she came straight back. She’d rather stand in the path of the apocalypse beside the Doctor than live a safe life without him. Everything Rose Tyler has become since she took a stranger’s hand in a basement in Rose is in that decision. The shop girl who ran is now the woman who refuses to.

The sequence itself is superbly staged, the howling white of the breach and the two of them clinging on while the armies of two universes stream past them into oblivion. And then Rose’s lever slips out of alignment, and she has to let go to push it back.

Bad Wolf Bay

She holds, and then she doesn’t. Watching Rose lose her grip and start to slide toward the Void is one of the most sickening things this show has ever done, and the rescue that follows is somehow crueller than the death would have been. Pete Tyler blinks in out of nowhere, catches her and carries her back into the parallel world a heartbeat before the breach seals itself for ever. She’s saved by her father, or a version of him, which is a knife-twist all of its own after everything she went through to save the real one in Father’s Day, and the universe gives Rose her dad back and takes the Doctor away in the same second.

Rose and the Doctor pressed against opposite sides of the white wall between their worlds in Doomsday

And that’s it. No clever reversal, no last-minute technobabble, the walls between worlds are closed for good and Rose Tyler is on the wrong side of them. The image of her hammering on a blank white wall, with the Doctor on the other side of it and his forehead pressed to the concrete, is the single most painful shot of the series.

The coda is what makes it more than a good finale. Rose follows the Doctor’s voice in a dream to Dårlig Ulv Stranden, Bad Wolf Bay, a bleak wind-scoured Norwegian beach where he can appear to her one last time as a flickering projection, burning up a star just to say goodbye. And yes, that name is doing deliberate work. “Bad Wolf” was the message scattered across all of time and space in Series 1, the two words Rose herself sent back through eternity to lead her home to the Doctor when she stared into the heart of the TARDIS in The Parting of the Ways. Back then it was a promise that brought them together. Here it’s the name on the signpost of the place where they’re torn apart for good, which is just cruel, and magnificent.

They’ve got two minutes. She asks if he’s alone, he says yes, she tells him she loves him. And the Doctor, this brilliant, brittle, endlessly talkative man, says “Rose Tyler, I—” and he’s gone, the transmission dying mid-sentence.

It’s an astonishingly brave piece of writing. Every lingering look and unspoken thing since the apple grass meadow in New Earth runs straight into a sentence he never gets to finish, and Tennant plays the aftermath alone in an empty TARDIS with a single tear and absolutely no dialogue at all. Sarah Jane warned him back in School Reunion that everything has its time and everything ends, and here it is, arriving exactly as promised and hurting exactly as much as she said it would.

What the Void Leaves Behind

Not everything goes into the Void, mind you. The Cult of Skaro blink out at the last second with an emergency temporal shift, four Daleks gone to who knows where and not a single answer offered about it, which is the one loose thread the finale leaves hanging while it gets on with breaking your heart.

What the Doctor’s left with is exactly what he’s been warned about all season. He’s lost the person he loves most, and his loneliness stops being a theme and turns into a fact. There’s no last kiss, no confession completed, no comfort, just a show trusting the silence, and it’s all the more shattering for it. Rose didn’t go out as a victim of the plot either, she picked the Doctor over safety and over family and over her own survival, and the tragedy is that she was right to and it still cost her everything.

And then, because this is Doctor Who, the Doctor turns around in the wreckage of his own heart and finds a woman in a full wedding dress standing in the TARDIS, glaring at him and demanding to know where she is. No explanation, no warning, roll credits. I laughed out loud through the tears and I have absolutely no idea what to make of it. What a season. What an ending. I need a lie down.

Rating: 5/5. Enormous, exhilarating, and finally heartbreaking. The best finale the revived series has produced, and the moment this era stopped being a fun adventure show and proved it could break you. I haven’t stopped thinking about that beach.

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Yvonne Hartman standing in the middle of the Torchwood Institute office in Army of Ghosts
Doctor WhoTelevision

Army of Ghosts: Torchwood Finally Steps Into the Light

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This review covers “Army of Ghosts,” the penultimate episode of Doctor Who’s second series, in which the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler come home to a London where grey ghosts appear all over the world and people welcome them as their returning dead. The trail leads to the Torchwood Institute at Canary Wharf, where Yvonne Hartman’s team has been tearing at the fabric of reality to harvest energy and has pulled a mysterious sphere through from the Void.

The piece loves the idea of a planet choosing comfort over the truth, the way Torchwood is finally brought on screen, and a double cliffhanger in which millions of Cybermen arrive and four Daleks roll out of the sphere. It gives the episode 4.5 out of 5, holding back half a point because so much of it is setup for the finale.

“This is the story of how I died.” That’s how Rose opens Army of Ghosts, in voiceover, and it’s a hell of a way to start a season finale. I’ll be honest, it had me from that first line. Everything after it pulls together threads the show has been quietly laying since the Tenth Doctor showed up at Christmas, the ghosts, the name Torchwood, the people in charge who are far too sure of themselves, and then the last ten minutes set fire to the lot and I was physically off the sofa. Really loved this one, it’s Doctor Who firing on every cylinder it’s got, and the first half of a two-parter already feels enormous. I’m going to keep this to the first half only, because I’m nowhere near ready to talk about what comes after that ending.

A World Full of Ghosts

The Doctor and Rose come home to present-day London for a cup of tea with Jackie and find the whole planet has quietly gone a bit mad. Ghosts have been turning up all over the world for two months now, grey humanoid figures that fade in and out of streets and living rooms, and humanity, being human, has decided to love them. Everybody’s convinced these are the dead coming back, somebody’s husband, somebody’s gran, and nobody seems especially keen to ask what they actually are. There’s something properly chilling in that, a whole species picking comfort over the truth because the truth would mean losing them all over again. The Doctor isn’t buying it for a second, and his first guess is something psychic feeding on all that belief.

Jackie’s the human face of it. She can’t wait to see her own dad, and there’s a hushed, hopeful excitement to her that’s hard to watch when you can see exactly where it’s going, and sure enough one of the ghosts does turn up in her kitchen. What I love is how straight it’s all played, ordinary people on an ordinary estate just getting on with it, because the ghosts have been around long enough to become part of everyday life. It’s a wickedly clever bit of world-building, an alien invasion dressed up as the one thing everyone most wants to be true.

But the Doctor knows what he’s looking at, and it isn’t the beloved dead. These things are a symptom, the visible sign of something forcing its way through from a place it shouldn’t be able to reach, and the source of it, it turns out, has a name we’ve been hearing all year. Army of Ghosts spends its first act just letting that sit, the wrongness building on the streets while the Doctor and Rose work out where to go looking, and I think it’s better for not rushing to explain. It’s patient, the show trusting you to sit in the unease instead of dumping the answer on you in the first five minutes.

Torchwood, At Last

There it is. The name’s been hanging around the edges of the frame all season, first when Harriet Jones has Torchwood shoot the Sycorax ship out of the sky in The Christmas Invasion, then when Queen Victoria founds an institute to keep the Doctor out of Britain in Tooth and Claw, and here we finally walk in through the front door. Torchwood Tower sits at Canary Wharf, all glass and polish, hoarding alien technology and answering to nobody, and it’s run by Yvonne Hartman, who’s a superb creation. Corporate smile, steel underneath, completely convinced that everything she does is for the good of the country. Their philosophy might as well be “if it’s alien, it’s ours”, and they scavenge the wreckage of every incursion and reverse-engineer whatever they can’t hope to understand.

Rose Tyler in a lab coat peering round a corner inside Torchwood Tower

Yvonne even greets the Doctor like a prize catch, the best piece of alien technology they’ve ever got their hands on, and before he knows it he’s effectively their prisoner and the TARDIS has been confiscated. It’s the logical end of what Victoria started all those years ago, Britain arming itself against the entire universe and no longer entirely sure which side of the line it’s standing on. And it’s Torchwood that’s been making the ghosts, deliberately tearing a hole in reality to harvest the energy of what they call a ghost shift, treating a catastrophic rip between worlds as a handy source of free power. Worse, they’ve dragged something through it, a smooth, silent sphere sitting in their lab, a Void Ship, a vessel built to travel through the empty space between universes.

The Doctor is properly frightened of it and says so, warning that its arrival has put cracks in the world that could end the whole planet, and Yvonne treats all of that as an eccentric’s inconvenience. We can see the catastrophe coming from a mile off and the people in charge are too pleased with themselves to look up. It’s what makes the tower such a good place to spend the episode, that mix of gleaming confidence and a sphere that just sits there being wrong. I was properly on edge by the time anyone paid it any attention, which is exactly where the episode wants you.

Two Armies for the Price of One

Jackie’s along for the ride and completely out of her depth, and then Mickey turns up. He’s come across from the parallel Earth chasing Cybermen, having stayed behind at the end of The Age of Steel to finish the job, and he’s exactly where he’s needed. This whole season’s been so good at seeding people that their convergence on Torchwood Tower feels earned rather than convenient. 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 front room on Earth, the steel horror of the Cybus world pouring through the breach into ours. It’s a staggering reveal, an invasion on a scale the show has never tried, and it would be a finale-worthy cliffhanger all by itself. 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 come four Daleks, battle-scarred survivors calling themselves the Cult of Skaro, meant to have been lost in the Time War the Doctor still carries around like a wound.

They’re the same enemy whose fleet was undone back in The Parting of the Ways, and now here they are in the same building on the same afternoon as an army of Cybermen, the two monsters every fan has always wanted to see collide, with the Doctor caught in the middle and the people he loves standing right beside him. Plenty of people saw the Daleks coming and it’s still a fun cliffhanger. I didn’t see it coming, for what it’s worth, and I don’t think the revived show has landed one this big. And then it just cuts out on the lot of it.

Yvonne Hartman Thinks She’s the Hero

The best villains are the ones who never think they’re villains, and Yvonne’s a perfect example. She isn’t cruel, she isn’t twirling anything, she’s just certain, and it’s that certainty that opens the door. Every warning the Doctor gives her bounces off, because she’s spent her whole career being the person in the room who knows better, and the moment she gets to prove it is the moment the planet pays for it. Torchwood’s the same as the rest of the world in that respect, refusing to look at what it’s doing because it likes what it’s getting out of it, the ghosts as comfort for everyone else and power for the Institute.

If I’ve got a gripe, and it’s a small one, it’s that a fair chunk of the episode is setup and I noticed myself waiting for the payoff. The pieces take the time they take to move into place, and the sphere in particular sits there for a good while being ominous before anything happens with it. I don’t mind that much. It’s just the reason this doesn’t quite hit a five for me, and it’s a very small reason next to everything the episode gets right.

Rating: 4.5/5. Tense, clever and properly emotional, with a cliffhanger so cheeky it almost dares the second half to top it, and I’m not sure I’m ready to find out.

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doctor who fear her
Doctor Who

Fear Her: The Girl Who Drew People Away

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This review covers “Fear Her,” the eleventh episode of Doctor Who’s second series, in which the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler investigate a wave of child disappearances on a London housing estate on the eve of the 2012 Olympics. It traces the episode’s premise, a grieving, isolated alien reaching out through a lonely girl’s drawings, and the darker thread underneath it: a dead, abusive father reimagined as a literal monster in the girl’s wardrobe.

The piece argues the episode is at its best when it stays small and human, and loses its footing in a stadium-sized climax built around an Olympic torch and a surge of collective love. It rates “Fear Her” 2.5 out of 5, calling it the weakest entry of the season despite a strong central idea and the easy chemistry between its two leads.

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. Reviews written that same week made the same comparison between the two episodes, and several ranked this one as the stronger of the pair.

When the episode stays small, frightened and human, 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, because some fears you have to face rather than solve, the same bet the Doctor staked everything on a few weeks back in The Satan Pit, when faith did what reason couldn’t.

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.

The Tenth Doctor confronts Chloe in her bedroom as Rose and Trish look on, Fear Her
The Doctor faces down what’s really in Chloe’s wardrobe

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 looks 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.

The Moment That Actually Lands

What actually stays with me isn’t the torch or the stadium. It’s the small scene right after, where Trish finally gets to tell her daughter she’s sorry without a scribble-monster in the room to interrupt her. Child actors carrying material this heavy is always a gamble, and Abisola Agbaje doesn’t land every beat the script hands her, but that one scene works because for once it’s small enough for a young performer to actually hold. It’s a small mercy the episode almost doesn’t earn, tucked in after all the noise of the torch and the crowd, and it’s the one moment where Trish stops being the worried mother the plot needs her to be and just gets to be her daughter’s mum again.

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 Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

“Love & Monsters” is the “Doctor-lite” episode of Doctor Who’s second series, narrated by fan-turned-investigator Elton Pope, whose search for the Doctor turns into the story of LINDA, a found-family fan club, and of Jackie Tyler’s loneliness once her daughter leaves Earth behind for good.

The review finds real warmth in LINDA and in the Jackie Tyler material, and considerably less in the Abzorbaloff, the shape-shifting monster whose cheap design undercuts the episode’s tonal balance. It lands the episode at 3 out of 5: a fascinating, uneven experiment that connects about half the time.

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. Only a show this confident in its own format would risk something so far outside it, right in the middle of a season. 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.

The Abzorbaloff, a lumbering green creature with absorbed faces embedded in its body, in Victor Kennedy's study
The Abzorbaloff mid-gloat in Victor Kennedy’s study, faces and all.

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 people get off the ride. I don’t entirely blame anyone who does. It’s not just that the suit looks cheap, it’s that Kennedy needs to carry real dread for the back half to land, and a green blob in a novelty fat suit can’t do that heavy lifting. Every time the story cuts from Jackie’s quiet grief to a wheezing rubber monster, the gears grind audibly.

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 fits right into 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. Ursula deserved a better final beat than a joke about paving-slab sex, especially after the episode spent so much goodwill making her a person worth caring about.

What Love & Monsters Leaves Us With

An experiment that swings wildly and connects maybe six times out of ten, which for a show this ambitious is still a decent hit rate. 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 proof of how badly two moods can clash in the same 45 minutes.
  • “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.

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doctor who the satan pit + the impossible planet
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Satan Pit: The Doctor’s Leap of Faith

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

“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, destroying the Beast’s body would doom everyone on the planet, but the Doctor acts on faith in Rose and the crew rather than certainty anyway. 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. The episode earns a rating of 4.5 out of 5.

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, since reveals rarely match the dread of the unknown, but this one mostly rises to it, because it understands 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, because 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, because a caged god, roaring but bound, is far more frightening than a rampaging one.

The prison itself is beautifully conceived too. 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 it, and that has to be enough.

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, the same growth that’s been building since she took the Doctor’s hand back in Rose. Other Doctor Who write-ups single out that same beat, Rose taking the shot herself, as the best moment in the whole two-parter.

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, and the episode is confident enough to leave the biggest question hanging in the dark where it belongs.

What’s Left Hanging

There’s one line from the Beast I keep turning over: the bit about Rose being “the valiant child who will die in battle so very soon.” The Doctor waves it off as a lie meant to rattle her, but he doesn’t sound entirely sure of it himself, and neither am I. Whether that’s a real threat with teeth or just the show needling me the same way the Beast needled everyone else in this story, I genuinely don’t know yet. Either way it’s sitting there now, and I can’t unhear it.

It’s not the first time this season’s asked someone to leap without a net, either. Mickey did the same a few weeks back in The Age of Steel, choosing to stay in a world he’d never see again because it mattered more than being sure of the outcome. The Doctor’s version of that gamble just happens to come with a black hole underneath it.

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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doctor who the satan pit + the impossible planet
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Impossible Planet: Something Ancient Stirs

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

“The Impossible Planet” places the Doctor and Rose on Sanctuary Base 6, a research station orbiting a planet impossibly stable beside a black hole. An ancient presence begins possessing crew members and the servant species the Ood, claiming to predate the universe itself, while the Doctor finds himself without answers or an escape route.

The episode is praised for its sustained, patient horror, strong ensemble crew, and a quieter emotional thread in which the loss of the TARDIS forces the Doctor and Rose to contemplate an ordinary life together. It ends on an unresolved cliffhanger as a sealed pit opens at the planet’s core.

Sometimes Doctor Who wants to make you laugh, and sometimes it wants to scare the living daylights out of you. “The Impossible Planet” is firmly in the second camp: a slow, dread-soaked descent into the best kind of sci-fi horror, all clanging metal corridors and whispering shadows and a fear that gets right under the skin. After the retro fun of The Idiot’s Lantern, this is the show reaching for Alien and Event Horizon, and reaching them. It’s the first half of a two-parter, and by the time the cliffhanger hit I was genuinely rattled.

The Impossible Planet

The TARDIS materialises on Sanctuary Base 6, a cramped, functional research station bolted onto the surface of a planet that has no business existing. The world of Krop Tor sits in perfect, stable orbit around a black hole, a thing that should be physically impossible, since anything that close ought to have been ripped apart and swallowed long ago. Yet here it hangs, held in place by some vast unknown power source buried at its core, and a human expedition has come all this way to drill down and find out what’s generating it. The Doctor, reading the situation, is almost giddy with terror and wonder in equal measure: this shouldn’t be here, and he loves it, and it frightens him.

The visual of it is stunning. When the base’s great shutters roll back to reveal the black hole filling the entire sky (a churning maw of doomed, in-falling light), the show simply lets the crew, and us, stand and gape at it. It’s one of the most genuinely awe-inspiring images the series has managed on a BBC budget, and it doubles as a ticking clock: everything about this station is precarious, held together by bolts and back-up systems and luck, and you sense from the very first minute that it is not going to hold.

The base crew are one of the show’s better ensembles: Captain Zachary Cross Flane, the steady science officer Ida Scott, the jittery archaeologist Toby, ethics officer Danny, gruff security man Jefferson, and young Scooti. They’re ordinary working people a very long way from home, and the episode takes real care to make them feel lived-in before it starts putting them in danger. Serving them are the Ood, a new alien species: softly spoken, tentacle-faced telepaths who carry glowing translator orbs and exist, a little uncomfortably, to serve. “We must serve, we have nothing else in life,” one says, and the Doctor’s flicker of unease at that is well judged.

He Is Awake

Then the whispering starts. The Ood begin relaying messages that aren’t theirs: “He is awake.” “The Beast and his Legions shall rise from the Pit.” Something buried in the heart of this impossible world is stirring, and it’s old, older, it claims, than the universe itself. It reaches into the mind of poor Toby first, scrawling ancient symbols across his skin and burning his eyes a hellish red, and it turns the placid Ood into a telepathic weapon, their translator readings climbing toward “the point of death.”

An Ood stands in a dimly lit corridor aboard Sanctuary Base 6, its tentacled face illuminated as its translator orb glows, relaying an ominous telepathic message to the crew.

The tension never really lets up. The Beast’s messages arrive in fragments, half-heard over crackling comms, so you’re always leaning in and always a beat behind. It doesn’t announce itself with a big monster reveal; it seeps into the base through the people, one mind at a time, so any face on the station might already belong to it, and that creeping uncertainty about who’s still themselves and who isn’t gets under my skin more than anything with teeth would.

What makes it work is how completely the episode commits to the horror. This isn’t a monster you can technobabble your way around; it’s a presence, an intelligence claiming to be the Devil himself, the thing every culture’s demon myth is a memory of. The Doctor, a man who prides himself on having an explanation for everything, is visibly wrong-footed. When the possessed Toby’s power lashes out and young Scooti is lured to her death, sucked out through a cracked viewport into the void, the show makes it clear the stakes here are total. Nobody is safe, and the Doctor doesn’t have his usual head start.

No Way Home

And then it does the cruellest thing of all: it takes the TARDIS. A quake tears open the base, and the Ship tumbles down into a collapsed shaft, lost somewhere in the depths of a dying planet on the edge of a black hole. For once, there’s no easy way out, no dematerialise-and-flee. The Doctor has to sit with the possibility that he and Rose are simply stuck here, for good.

The scene that follows is my favourite in the episode, and it has nothing to do with monsters. The Doctor and Rose, marooned and scared, quietly talk about what a life without the TARDIS would even look like: getting a house, a mortgage, “the domestic approach,” the two of them just… living, somewhere, together. It’s tender and awkward and enormously revealing about where these two have ended up with each other, a world away from the giddy tourists who lay in the apple grass back in New Earth. The show never spells out what they are to each other, not in so many words, and by this point it doesn’t need to.

There’s a nice thread of continuity for eagle-eyed fans, too: this deep-future expedition is operating under the banner of the Torchwood Archive, the name Queen Victoria coined back in Tooth and Claw, turning up thousands of years later at the far end of space. Doctor Who is clearly building something with that word, and it’s fun to watch it surface where you least expect it.

With the drilling complete, the Doctor and Ida descend in a capsule to the planet’s core, to the source of the impossible power. The drop down the shaft is pure horror-movie grammar: the rattling little pod, the fathomless dark, their torch beams swallowed whole by a cavern far too vast to light. At the bottom they find an enormous sealed trapdoor, an ancient disc-shaped lid over a pit with no mechanism and no way in, and then, against every instinct screaming at them to leave it well alone, it grinds open of its own accord, revealing a shaft that plunges down toward the literal heart of the world, and every instinct says some doors were never meant to open. Other Doctor Who fans agree it’s some of the best horror the show has done.

What The Impossible Planet Leaves Us With

What it leaves me with is genuine, grown-up horror: an isolated base, a dwindling crew, an ancient evil in the dark, and a show that hasn’t been this frightening in a long time and never blinks. It’s a Doctor out of his depth, too. Faced with something that claims to predate creation, the man who always has an answer has none, and his fear is the scariest thing in the episode.

Then there’s the Ood, a new servant species whose forced servility the episode quietly refuses to let me feel comfortable about, and who make deeply unnerving villains once the Beast gets hold of them. Stripped of the TARDIS, the Doctor and Rose contemplate an ordinary life together, and it’s the most honest their relationship has ever looked. And that name, Torchwood Archive, keeps a season-long thread quietly ticking along at the edge of the frame.

Rating: 4.5/5 — Atmospheric, intelligent, and properly scary, with a stranded-Doctor angle that raises the stakes higher than any monster could. One of the best-directed hours the revived show has produced, and a superb first half.

The pit is open, the Ood have turned, Toby’s eyes are burning, and something enormous is rising up out of the dark toward the Doctor. That’s where they leave us. I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted next week to arrive faster.

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doctor who the idiots lantern
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Idiot’s Lantern: The Monster in the Television

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Set during the 1953 Coronation, the Doctor and Rose arrive in a Britain gripped by television fever, only to find a predatory alien called the Wire feeding on viewers through their new TV sets. Portrayed by Maureen Lipman as a BBC announcer, the Wire strips faces from its victims while authorities quietly suppress the evidence.

Writer Mark Gatiss layers a second threat into the story through Eddie Connolly, a domestic bully whose intimidation mirrors the alien menace. When Rose is de-faced, the Doctor’s cold fury drives the episode’s resolution: trapping the Wire onto magnetic tape before she can feast on the Coronation’s mass audience.

The Doctor’s aiming for 1950s New York and a night out with Elvis. He lands, as he always does, somewhere else entirely: London, June 1953, days before the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. I love this kind of trip, the one where the destination’s wrong but somehow better anyway. “The Idiot’s Lantern,” written by Mark Gatiss, drops the Doctor and Rose into a Britain gripped by Coronation fever and finds something genuinely unpleasant crackling behind the screen of every new telly on the street. It’s a bright, brisk, slightly slight period romp, but there’s a real streak of nastiness running through the middle of it, and after the metal and misery of the Cybermen two-parter I was more than ready for the change of pace.

Coronation Fever

Gatiss and director Euros Lyn nail the period. The whole street’s buying television sets, most of them for the first time, all so they can crowd round and watch the young Queen crowned, and the show gets the bunting and the Brylcreem and the aspirational shine of a shiny new box in the corner of the front room exactly right. With Mickey gone now, having chosen his own road in the parallel world back in The Age of Steel, it’s just the Doctor and Rose again, and I liked watching the two of them roar into 1953 on a borrowed scooter, all quiffs and headscarves, having an absolute ball before anything goes wrong.

But there’s a reason those tellies are so cheap. Lurking in the signal is the Wire, a creature of pure energy, a criminal fugitive from some far-off world who was executed by her own kind but is clinging on as electrical life inside the broadcast. She turns up as a genteel, plummy BBC announcer, played by Maureen Lipman, and I don’t think I’ve seen her have this much fun in a role, purring at her victims through the glass before she strikes. When she feeds, she takes their faces. Literally drains the life and the features clean off them and leaves behind blank, smooth, screaming-less horrors that the authorities are quietly bundling into the backs of police vans and hiding away.

What gets me is how briskly it all gets hushed up. Faceless men and women carted off in the dead of night and locked in a cellar, and the neighbours just look away, because in 1953 you kept your head down, you didn’t ask questions, and you certainly didn’t make a fuss. The Wire picked the perfect hunting ground: a buttoned-up, curtains-twitching Britain that would rather pretend nothing’s wrong than admit the shiny new telly’s gone bad. It’s the kind of detail that sticks with me longer than the alien does.

A boy watches the Wire, a glowing electrical face, appear on a 1953 television set in "The Idiot's Lantern"

The Monster in the Living Room

The clever thing Gatiss does here is put a second monster in the story, and this one has a face. The Connolly household is ruled by Eddie Connolly, a puffed-up domestic tyrant who wraps his bullying in flags and patriotism and barks orders at his wife Rita and his son Tommy, turning his home into a small kingdom of fear. When Gran gets de-faced by the Wire, it’s Eddie who informs on his own mother-in-law just to keep the shame off his doorstep. He’s a coward and a bully, and the episode doesn’t pretend otherwise: the alien eating faces on the telly is frightening, sure, but the man ruling his family by intimidation in the front room is the real rot, and I found myself angrier at him than at the Wire for most of the episode.

The Doctor sees it instantly and can’t stand it, and the confrontation that follows, the Doctor and Tommy pushing back against Eddie’s bluster, gives the episode a spine I wasn’t expecting from something billed as a runaround. Tommy finding the nerve to stand up to his father, and Rita finally throwing the tyrant out, felt like a bigger win to me than anything involving the transmitter. It’s a proper Gatiss touch, the same eye for the ugliness lurking under respectable Britain that he brought to the Victorian chill of The Unquiet Dead last year.

And then the episode plays its nastiest card: it takes Rose. She pokes too close to the truth, comes face to face with the Wire, and ends up blank and faceless on a police stretcher, and the shot of the Doctor finding her like that got to me. Tennant flips in an instant from larking about to cold, controlled fury, the temper we’ve been warned about since the Sycorax, and from that moment he is not messing about. Hurt Rose and you’ve made this personal. Up to that point the Doctor’s been a tourist on a lark. The instant Rose is taken, the story finds its urgency, and his quiet, clipped rage is far more frightening to me than any amount of shouting would have been.

Trapping the Wire

The trail leads to Mr Magpie, the browbeaten telly-shop owner the Wire’s enslaved into flogging her cut-price sets across London, and then up to the top of the Alexandra Palace transmitter mast, where she means to pull off her masterstroke. The Coronation is going to draw the biggest television audience in history, millions of faces all pointed at their screens at once, and she plans to feast on the lot of them in one go and finally gorge herself back into a physical body. “I will become flesh!”

The climax is a bit of a scramble up a radio mast, I won’t pretend otherwise, but it’s a fun one, and I liked how period-appropriate the Doctor’s solution is. He’s cobbled together a portable recording device, and rather than destroying the Wire he traps her, recording her onto magnetic tape at the moment of her triumph, sealing the screaming announcer into a spool of tape like a genie into a bottle. It’s a wonderfully analogue solution to an analogue-age menace: you beat the creature living in the broadcast by simply recording it, the way you’d tape a programme to watch back later. Gatiss clearly adores this stuff, and the episode’s at its most charming when it’s playing with the technology of the age rather than sending the Doctor scrambling up an aerial for the sake of it.

With the Wire contained, every stolen face comes back. Gran, Rose, all the blank victims suddenly whole again, just in time to catch the Coronation after all. Warm, tidy ending to a story that flirted with real darkness along the way, and I’ll admit I didn’t expect it to pull off both halves as well as it does.

What The Idiot’s Lantern Leaves Us With

So what does a zippy period piece like this actually leave behind, once the runaround plot’s done with you? Quite a bit, honestly. There’s a sly bit of satire humming under the fun: a whole nation gathering to stare, slack-jawed, into a glowing box that’s quietly feeding on them, and whether that lands as 1953 commentary or something closer to home, I’ll let you decide. Eddie Connolly is the episode’s real villain, not the alien, and the show’s clear-eyed that domestic tyranny does more lasting damage than any energy creature ever could. Watching Tommy and Rita break free of him is the true happy ending here, more than the Wire getting trapped on tape.

De-facing Rose is a genuine shock too, and the Doctor’s ice-cold response reminds us just how dangerous this cheerful man gets when someone he loves is threatened. And with Mickey gone, the Doctor and Rose are back to a two-hander, and I think the easy joy they’ve shared since New Earth is what carries the episode through its thinner stretches. Gatiss brings the same knack for horror under the net curtains that made The Unquiet Dead tick, just transplanted here to Formica and Festival-of-Britain optimism instead of Victorian Cardiff. Doctor Who News reviewed the episode at the time and landed in a similar place: hugely entertaining even where it’s borrowing familiar shapes.

Rating: 3.5/5 — stylish, sharply acted, with more going on underneath it than the plot gives it credit for, even if the actual story’s thin and the finale amounts to a man climbing a big aerial. Lipman and the Connolly household drama do most of the heavy lifting here, and they lift it well. Faceless victims, a domineering dad, and a monster that feeds through the telly: “The Idiot’s Lantern” is minor Doctor Who, maybe, but it’s minor Doctor Who done with real wit and real style. Now then, about that trip to see Elvis the Doctor still owes us…

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age of steel - doctor who
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Age of Steel: Mickey Smith Becomes a Hero

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The Age of Steel closes out the two-part Cybermen story that began the previous week, following the Doctor, Rose, and the Preachers as they storm John Lumic’s Battersea factory to stop a city-wide forced upgrade. The episode turns on the discovery that the Cybermen are converted humans kept docile by an “emotional inhibitor,” and that switching it off would let them feel, and be destroyed by, what has been done to them.

The review credits the episode’s horror to that single idea and singles out Mickey Smith’s arc as its emotional core, tracking his shift from comic relief to the person who saves London and then chooses to stay behind in the parallel world. It closes with a rating of 4 out of 5, calling the episode a strong, emotionally intelligent resolution to the two-parter.

Picking up right where “Rise of the Cybermen” left off feels almost unfair. The Doctor’s cornered, the whole party’s surrounded, and that flat steel voice is promising to delete everyone in the room. After the quieter, romantic detour of The Girl in the Fireplace, this two-parter throws me straight back into it, and “The Age of Steel” has a lot to deliver after a first half that spent most of its runtime setting pieces on the board rather than knocking them over. I’m happy to say it delivers. This is the half where everything that spent last week clicking into place finally goes off, and while there’s plenty of running, shooting, and factory-storming, what actually sticks with me is a genuinely upsetting idea at its centre, plus the payoff of an arc I’ve been watching build for half a season. This is the episode where Mickey Smith stops being the tin dog for good.

Escaping the Trap

The escape itself is a nice bit of business. The Doctor pulls out the TARDIS’s last power cell and blasts the Cybermen with raw energy, and the survivors scatter into the night. From there it’s a race to Lumic’s Battersea factory, with the Doctor, Rose, Pete, Mickey, and the Preachers converging on the place where the “upgrades” are happening from every angle. Lumic himself gets a nasty comeuppance dressed up as a promotion. His failing body finally gives out, and his own Cybermen forcibly convert him into the Cyber-Controller, the exact fate he designed for everyone else. The man who wanted to escape death by becoming steel gets exactly what he asked for, and he hates it.

the age of steel cyber factory

Then Lumic springs his masterstroke. Every EarPod in the city switches on at once, and all across London ordinary people go blank-eyed and start walking: a silent, orderly procession of the controlled, filing toward the conversion factories by the thousand. It’s a genuinely chilling image, and it pays off every ominous thing the first episode planted about a population that handed over its attention without a fight. Rose’s mother is out there in that crowd. So is everyone else’s.

What follows is a proper assault, and the episode splits its heroes up smartly so everyone has something to do. The Doctor and Mrs Moore go in low through the freezing access tunnels beneath the plant. Rose and Pete bluff their way in from above wearing deactivated EarPods. Mickey and Jake take to the air in a stolen zeppelin. It gives “The Age of Steel” real forward momentum after the deliberate slow build of part one, and because the team’s scattered, when things start going wrong (and they go wrong for very nearly everyone), the losses land on people I’ve spent two episodes coming to care about.

The Horror in the Steel

Here’s where “The Age of Steel” earns its keep. For all the metal-monster spectacle, the episode’s real weapon is one simple, awful idea: the Cybermen are people. Every one of those steel shells has a human brain trapped inside it, and the only thing stopping each of them from screaming is an “emotional inhibitor,” a chip that switches off the horror of what’s been done to them. Sit with that for a second. They aren’t robots. They’re victims, anaesthetised against their own existence.

A dormant Cyberman reactivates as its emotional inhibitor is switched off, revealing the human consciousness trapped within the steel shell.

The show drives it home in the episode’s best and bleakest scene. The Doctor and the brilliant, brave Mrs Moore corner a dormant Cyberman and switch off its inhibitor, and it turns out to be a woman named Sally, converted the night before her wedding, still asking about her fiance, still cold because she’s “getting married in the morning.” She realises, in real time, what’s been done to her, and the grief of it kills her. It’s horrifying in a way the show rarely attempts, and it hands the Doctor his solution at a terrible price: Mrs Moore is murdered by a Cyberman moments later, one more good person lost to Lumic’s machine.

The Doctor works out that the inhibitor is the whole game. Shut it off everywhere at once, and every Cyberman in the city wakes to the full horror of its own body and is destroyed by it. It’s a solution that doubles as a mass mercy killing, and the episode doesn’t pretend otherwise. The Doctor frees these people the only way he’s got left, and it’s the saddest kind of victory. Tennant plays it with no trace of triumph, just a man doing the necessary, terrible thing because no one else will, knowing exactly what it costs. It’s the same cold resolve I saw beneath the charm when he faced down the Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion, turned here toward an act of grim mercy.

Mickey Smith, Hero

And the person who makes it happen is Mickey. The arc that’s been simmering since he named himself the tin dog in School Reunion pays off completely here. He watches his own parallel double, Ricky, die at the hands of the Cybermen. It’s a gut-punch that could have broken him, and instead of folding, he steps into the gap. He takes the wheel, hacks into Lumic’s systems, pilots a zeppelin, and cracks the code that broadcasts the cancel signal to every inhibitor in London. The spare part saves the world. The man who was always told to wait in the car turns out to be, when it counts, the cleverest and bravest person in the building.

What lands even harder is what he does next. With the Cybermen beaten and Lumic fallen from his burning factory, Mickey chooses to stay. There’s a version of his beloved gran alive on this world, a fight still to finish alongside Jake, and, crucially, a place where he’s needed and seen rather than trailing after the Doctor and Rose as an afterthought. His goodbye is understated and quietly heartbreaking. He isn’t being left behind this time. He’s choosing to stay, on his own terms, as his own man. The friendship he strikes up with Jake, spiky at first and then real once shared grief over Ricky welds them together, gives Mickey something the Doctor and Rose never quite managed: a partner who genuinely needs him. By the time he waves the TARDIS off, I completely believe he’s found where he’s meant to be. After a season of watching him ache to matter, it’s an enormously satisfying send-off.

Rose’s farewell is rougher. Pete Tyler, this world’s Pete, who never had a daughter, can’t cope with what she represents and simply walks away from her, and there’s nothing she can do but let him. It’s a cold little echo of everything Father’s Day put her through: a second version of her dad slipping through her fingers.

Where The Age of Steel Leaves Me

I came out of this two-parter thinking about how much it manages to reframe. The Cybermen aren’t killer robots to me anymore. They’re converted people, screaming behind steel until a chip silences them, and that one idea does more work than any amount of factory-storming could. The Doctor’s win is to let thousands of trapped minds finally feel what happened to them: a rescue that’s also a mass death. I respect that the episode has the nerve to sit in that discomfort instead of glossing past it. Lumic gets exactly what he wanted, too. The prophet of the upgrade is upgraded against his will, which is about as tidy and grim a piece of poetic justice as this show has ever managed.

But the thing I’ll remember most is Mickey. The tin dog becomes the hero and then walks his own road, choosing to stay behind out of purpose rather than defeat, and I think it’s one of the best companion arcs the show has told, something other Doctor Who fans have picked up on too. Rose loses her father all over again in the same hour, and this time there’s no saving him. Just the quiet cruelty of being unrecognised by someone who should have been family. That’s a lot for one episode to carry, and it mostly carries it.

Rating: 4/5. A strong, emotionally intelligent resolution that mostly justifies the slow build of part one, anchored by the horror of the inhibitor scene and a career-best turn for Mickey. A little of the factory-storming plays as standard-issue, but the heart of it is anything but.

The Doctor and Rose step back into their own world one companion lighter, with a hard conversation waiting for them at home. Mickey Smith stayed behind, a hero. I honestly didn’t see that coming back when he was just the bloke minding the phone.

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Doctor WhoTelevision

Rise of the Cybermen: A Parallel World Turns Cold

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This review covers “Rise of the Cybermen,” the first half of a two-part Doctor Who story from Series 2. A TARDIS malfunction strands the Tenth Doctor, Rose, and Mickey on a parallel Earth where Cybus Industries and its dying founder, John Lumic, are secretly converting the population into Cybermen, and Rose is confronted with a living, wealthy version of her dead father, Pete Tyler.

The review rates the episode 3.5 out of 5, praising the parallel-world setup and the Cybermen’s reveal as genuinely unsettling while noting the story drags while it arranges its pieces, and singles out Mickey Smith’s confrontation with his more confident parallel double as the episode’s strongest thread.

After the swooning romance of The Girl in the Fireplace, Series 2 slams the tone into reverse and gives us cold steel, corporate dread, and one of the most famous monsters in the show’s history clanking back into view. “Rise of the Cybermen” is a slow-burn setup episode, and it uses that time well, building a whole parallel world, twisting the knife in Rose, and giving Mickey the spotlight he’s been quietly craving. It ends on a cliffhanger that had me shouting at the screen, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

A world that’s almost right

The TARDIS tumbles out of reality itself, falling through the Void between universes, and dies. Properly dies, with a dark console and no power and the Doctor genuinely frightened for a moment before he coaxes a single surviving power cell back to a faint glow. One fan writing the day after transmission called that pre-credits crash “sublime,” and it’s hard to argue with him. They’ve landed on Earth, but not their Earth. Zeppelins hang in the London sky. Everyone wears EarPods, sleek little ear devices that feed information straight into their heads, all manufactured by the omnipresent Cybus Industries. It’s a fantastic bit of world-building, familiar enough to unsettle and wrong in all the small ways that matter. The Doctor and Rose spend a while just gawping at it, and the show is happy to let them: a fleet of zeppelins crossing the evening sky, strangers stopping dead in the street to receive a daily download through their EarPods, jokes and headlines and lottery numbers piped straight into a nation’s skulls twice a day. It’s meant to look convenient. It looks like a leash. And when Pete Tyler’s beaming face turns up on a giant advertising screen, the trap the episode is quietly building around Rose clicks into place.

Father's Day
Father’s Day

And then the knife. On this world, Pete Tyler is alive. Rose’s father, the man she watched die and risked everything to save back in Father’s Day, is here, breathing, thriving, a self-made millionaire flogging a health drink with the slogan “Trust me on this.” He doesn’t know Rose. In this world he and Jackie never had a daughter, they have a little dog named Rose instead, which is the kind of detail that’s funny until it isn’t. The Doctor warns her, gently and firmly, that this is not your father. But of course she can’t leave it alone, and Billie Piper plays Rose’s helpless pull toward this stranger with Pete’s face beautifully. Everything the show built in Father’s Day comes flooding back.

The ultimate upgrade

The architect of all this is John Lumic, head of Cybus Industries, a brilliant dying man kept alive by a wheelchair full of life support and utterly consumed by his terror of death. Roger Lloyd-Pack plays him as a proper mad-scientist grotesque, and his solution to mortality is the stuff of nightmares: if the body fails, replace it. Cut out the human brain, drop it into an indestructible steel shell, wire in an emotional inhibitor so the poor thing doesn’t go mad from what’s been done to it, and call the result an upgrade. It’s not the first time this series has treated a sick body as raw material, New Earth spent its whole premiere on a plague farm growing infected patients so the healthy could be cured, but Lumic turns that same idea from medical horror into an industrial pitch. Human point two. The next stage of evolution, whether humanity consents or not. The EarPods are the tell. They aren’t just a gadget, they’re a leash Lumic already holds, and the episode’s most chilling beat is a demonstration of exactly that, when he freezes an entire street of pedestrians mid-step, hundreds of people locked rigid while the city carries on around them, purely to prove he can. When he takes his ultimate upgrade to the President of Great Britain and is flatly refused, told to his face that it’s an abomination, Lumic doesn’t bother to argue. He simply decides that consent was never really on the table.

The show is smart about how it doles out the horror. We see the homeless herded off the streets, because they won’t be missed, into converter factories, and we hear the machinery, and we’re spared just enough that our imagination does the rest. When the Cybermen finally march out in formation, gleaming and identical and utterly without pity, they land as genuinely disturbing rather than campy. This is the version of the Cybermen the revived show needed, and it’s the body horror dressed up as progress that does it, a company turning people into product. Everyone plugged into the same corporate feed, nodding along in unison, and Lumic didn’t have to force the EarPods on anyone, they queued up for them.

Mickey, Ricky, and the spare part

If Rose’s story here is about a father, Mickey’s is about himself, and it’s the most rewarding thread in the episode. Stranded in this world, he runs into his own parallel double: Ricky, a resistance fighter with the Preachers, a scrappy cell trying to bring Cybus down. Ricky is everything Mickey has always suspected he isn’t, decisive and respected and the leader, and it forces a reckoning Mickey’s been circling since he clocked himself as the tin dog back in School Reunion. He’s spent so long as the one who waits by the phone, the spare part, the third wheel to the Doctor and Rose, that meeting a version of himself who matters lands like a challenge. There’s a real ache to it. In the space of a single conversation he realises that the parallel version of him is out here grieving people and leading a resistance, while the real Mickey has spent two years being told to wait in the car. Noel Clarke plays the wound without ever wallowing in it, and you can watch him deciding, more or less on the spot, that he’s finished being anyone’s punchline.

It helps that the Preachers give the parallel world some texture and stakes beyond Lumic’s boardroom. Ricky, the loyal Jake, and the wonderfully down-to-earth Mrs Moore are people already living under the boot of a company that owns their government and their heads, and they know exactly how bad things are about to get. The Doctor, meanwhile, is unusually powerless, and the episode is smart to keep him that way. No working TARDIS, no reputation on this world, no backup and no easy technobabble hatch to escape through, just a man improvising on hostile ground while the net draws tighter. It makes Lumic’s slow, patient advance feel genuinely dangerous, because for once you’re not certain the Doctor has an answer already up his sleeve.

Rating: 3.5/5. A deliberate, atmospheric setup that occasionally drags while it arranges its pieces, but the world-building is superb and the Cybermen reveal genuinely lands. Very much the wind-up before the punch. And what a place to leave us: the Cybermen crashing Jackie’s birthday party, steel closing in from every side, the Doctor out of options and out of power, and that flat metal voice promising to delete everyone in the room. Part one done, and I have no idea how anybody’s getting out of this. Roll on next week.

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thegirlinthefireplace
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Girl in the Fireplace: The Doctor’s Lonely Angel

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

“The Girl in the Fireplace,” written by Steven Moffat, follows the Tenth Doctor as he discovers time windows aboard a derelict spaceship that open onto 18th-century France, connecting him to Reinette, the future Madame de Pompadour. Clockwork repair droids stalk her through Versailles, waiting to harvest her brain as a replacement ship component.

The episode’s emotional weight comes from a doomed romance built on mismatched time. The Doctor lives minutes while Reinette lives years, and she dies still waiting for him to return. A final reveal, that the ship bears her name, reframes the droids’ actions entirely, in a detail the Doctor never learns.

Every so often Doctor Who produces an episode so complete, so confident, and so quietly devastating that you just sit there when it’s over. “The Girl in the Fireplace” is one of those. Written by Steven Moffat, the man who gave us the chills of The Empty Child last year, it takes a premise that sounds like nonsense on paper, a spaceship full of fireplaces that open onto the court of Louis XV, and spins it into the best hour Series 2 has managed yet, ahead of the alien queen and werewolf chase of Tooth and Claw. It’s funny, it’s frightening, and by the end it left me genuinely a bit wrecked.

Windows Into Versailles

The TARDIS drifts onto a derelict spaceship 3,000 years in the future, Rose and Mickey in tow, this being Mickey’s first proper trip in the box since he talked his way aboard in School Reunion. The ship is dead, its crew long gone, and yet its power is running full tilt and it’s riddled with “time windows”: doorways that open, impossibly, onto 18th-century France. Light an ornate fireplace on the ship and step through, and you’re in the bedroom of a little girl in Paris. Her name is Reinette, and she’ll grow up to be Madame de Pompadour, mistress of the King and one of the most remarkable women of her age.

The Doctor keeps stepping through, but time runs at different speeds on either side of the glass. He crosses in minutes; she lives whole years between his visits. So he meets her as a frightened child checking for monsters under the bed, then, a heartbeat later for him, as a dazzling grown woman who has been waiting for her “fireplace man” her entire life. It’s a gorgeous, dreamlike structure, and Sophia Myles plays Reinette as clever, fearless, and utterly a match for the Doctor.

The monsters under her bed are real, and they’re the episode’s masterstroke: clockwork repair droids in beautiful, blank-faced 18th-century carnival masks, ticking softly as they stalk her through the palace. The reveal of why they want her is pure nightmare logic. When the ship broke down, its robots had no spare parts, so they used the crew, every scrap of them, to patch the vessel back together. There’s an eyeball in a scanner, a heart wired into the engine. And now they’ve fixated on Reinette, waiting with terrible patience for her to reach a specific age, because they’ve decided her brain is the one component the ship still needs. The ship, you see, and the woman share a name. The droids are simply trying to finish their repairs.

the girl in the fireplace clockwork

The Lonely Angel

What elevates all this from clever to unforgettable is the romance. When the Doctor first scans the child’s mind, Reinette scans him right back, and what she finds there is the loneliness he carries everywhere, the same open wound we’ve watched him nurse ever since the Time War took everything from him in The Parting of the Ways. “You are the loneliest of them all,” she tells him, and it lands like a diagnosis. Reinette sees the Doctor whole, the way almost no one does, and she isn’t frightened by what she finds. She calls him her lonely angel, and she chooses him anyway.

Tennant is wonderful here: giddy, flirtatious, and then suddenly, nakedly moved. There’s a scene where he emerges from reading her mind having accidentally let her into his, and the vulnerability on his face tells you everything. This isn’t a companion crush or a bit of banter. For once the Doctor has met someone who runs at his speed, and the show lets him fall, hard.

Which is what makes the climax so magnificent. The droids open a window to snatch Reinette at a grand ball, and the only way through is a sealed mirror with no return. So the Doctor does the maddest, most romantic thing imaginable: he takes a run-up on horseback and smashes straight through the mirror into 18th-century Versailles to save her, knowing, as he does it, that shattering that last window strands him there forever, cut off from the TARDIS and everything he is. He gives it all up without hesitation. “One may tolerate a world of demons,” he says, “for the sake of an angel.”

And credit where it’s due: Reinette is nobody’s swooning damsel. She walks toward the ticking monsters when she has to, stares down a clockwork man twice her size with nothing but nerve and a fireplace poker, and when the crisis comes it’s her giving the orders. Moffat writes her as the Doctor’s equal rather than his prize, which is precisely why losing her cuts so deep. The script even finds room for comedy in the middle of the heartbreak: the Doctor strolls back through a time window having somehow acquired a horse, utterly deadpan about it, and christens the thing Arthur. Little grace notes like that keep an achingly romantic hour from ever curdling into the po-faced.

Too Late

And then the episode does the cruellest, most beautiful thing. Having sacrificed his way home, the Doctor discovers the original fireplace still works, still linked to the ship: a way back after all. Overjoyed, he promises to whisk Reinette off to see the stars, tells her to pack a bag, and pops back through to fetch the TARDIS. But time runs differently, remember. For him it’s a moment. For her, it’s years. When the Doctor returns, grinning, ready to make good on his promise, he’s met with silence, and a funeral carriage passing in the rain. Madame de Pompadour has just died, aged forty-three, still waiting for the angel who said he’d come back.

The King hands him her final letter, and the Doctor reads it alone, and Tennant plays the whole thing with a stillness that’s worse than any breakdown. She kept her window, her fireplace, her whole life. She never stopped believing he’d return. He was minutes too late by his own clock and a lifetime too late by hers. It is one of the most quietly heartbreaking endings the show has ever done.

The final gut-punch is saved for the very last shot. As the TARDIS leaves, the camera drifts across the derelict ship’s hull to reveal its name: the SS Madame de Pompadour. The droids were never mad. They were repairing a ship named for a woman, and in their broken logic they simply went looking for her. The Doctor never finds out. It’s the sort of detail that reframes everything the second you catch it, and it’s the mark of a script operating on a completely different level. Other Doctor Who fans single out that same closing shot as the moment the episode earns its ending rather than just delivering one.

What The Girl in the Fireplace Leaves Us With

A near-flawless standalone that doubles as the definitive statement of who this Doctor is. Here’s what it plants:

  • The Doctor can fall in love. Not a companion’s adoration, but a real, adult, doomed romance, and the show treats it with total seriousness.
  • Loneliness is the engine. Reinette reads it in an instant, and it’s the truest thing anyone’s said about the Tenth Doctor yet: for all the joy, he is the loneliest man alive.
  • The slow path and the fast path. Moffat turns time itself into the tragedy: the Doctor lives fast and arrives late, and someone who loved him grows old and dies in the gap.
  • Rose and Mickey, sidelined on purpose. Rose watching the Doctor lose himself in another woman quietly deepens the ache she’s been carrying since School Reunion, and that’s exactly the point.
  • A monster you’ll remember. Ticking clockwork men in porcelain masks are an instant classic: elegant, patient, and horrible.

Rating: 5/5 — Funny, terrifying, romantic, and tragic in a single tight hour, with an ending that recontextualises everything that came before. The best episode of Series 2 so far, and one of the best the revived show has produced full stop.

A horse through a mirror, monsters under the bed, and a love letter read too late — “The Girl in the Fireplace” is Doctor Who at the absolute top of its game. Give me a minute. I need to go stare at a wall.

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school reunion sarah jane returns
Doctor WhoTelevision

School Reunion: Sarah Jane Smith Walks Back In

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

School Reunion (Series 2, Episode 3) brings Sarah Jane Smith and K9 back into Doctor Who for the first time since the classic series, as the Tenth Doctor investigates a school where the pupils have been turned into a living supercomputer by the shapeshifting Krillitane. The post covers the episode’s alien plot, the Skasis Paradigm bargain Anthony Head’s headmaster offers the Doctor, and the emotional weight of Sarah Jane and Rose meeting as two companions the Doctor left behind.

The review rates the episode 4.5 out of 5, calling it a near-perfect blend of nostalgia and emotional heft anchored by Elisabeth Sladen and Anthony Head, and highlights K9’s sacrifice and Mickey Smith’s decision to finally join the TARDIS crew as the episode’s most memorable beats.

Some episodes are about a monster. This one’s about a goodbye that never happened. School Reunion has a perfectly good alien menace ticking along in the background, bat-winged body-snatchers running a comprehensive school, but that’s not what I’ll remember about it. What I’ll remember is a woman walking into a darkened classroom, recognizing an old blue box, and the floor dropping out from under the whole series. This is the most emotional hour Series 2 has given me so far, and it earns every bit of that.

Something’s Wrong at Deffry Vale

Sarah Jane Smith discovers the TARDIS in an empty classroom in Doctor Who's School Reunion

We open on the Doctor doing something I found genuinely funny: teaching. He’s gone undercover as physics master “John Smith” at Deffry Vale High School, where the pupils have turned alarmingly, unnaturally brilliant, and Rose is skulking around in a hairnet as a dinner lady, hating every second of it. It’s Mickey, back home and doing his own digging, who flagged the school in the first place, and I loved getting to watch the Doctor clearly relish being the cleverest person in a room full of teenagers. The culprits are the Krillitane, a nasty composite species that conquers other races and physically absorbs the bits it likes, so this generation sports leathery wings and a taste for children. Disguised as the teaching staff and led by the wonderfully oily new headmaster Mr Finch, played by Anthony Head at his most silkily sinister, they’ve been lacing the school chips with Krillitane oil to supercharge the kids’ brains. The children aren’t students, they’re a living supercomputer, being run flat out to crack something the Krillitane very badly want. It’s a strong, creepy premise, and Head is a superb foil: all charm and menace, practically the anti-Doctor in a headmaster’s suit.

And then she walks in. Sarah Jane Smith, investigative journalist, sniffing around the same story, steps into an empty classroom, finds the TARDIS parked in the corner, and Elisabeth Sladen plays that moment of recognition so beautifully I didn’t need to have seen a single frame of her original run to feel the weight of it. Here’s someone who travelled with the Doctor long ago, who he left behind and never went back for, standing face to face with a man wearing a stranger’s body but unmistakably him. This is the episode where the revived show finally admitted its companions have lives after the TARDIS.

Two Companions Collide

The episode turns that reunion into its real subject. Sarah Jane’s hurt is raw and specific, because she waited, she says, she looked up at the sky, and she never quite managed to move on. Watching all this land on Rose is the masterstroke for me. Rose has spent these last few adventures glowing with the sheer joy of it all, from the apple grass of New Earth to the werewolf hunt through Tooth and Claw, secure in the idea that what she has with the Doctor is singular. Sarah Jane is living proof that it isn’t. The two of them circle each other with a jealousy that curdles into something like solidarity, trading barbs and then, gloriously, trading stories at the Doctor’s expense. It’s funny and it’s devastating in the same breath. The real gut-punch for me is Sarah Jane’s quiet certainty that she must have done something wrong, that she wasn’t enough for him to come back for, when the truth is simply that he couldn’t bear to stay and watch her grow old. The Doctor doesn’t have a good answer, because there isn’t one, and Tennant lets you watch him flinch from the question. There’s an old friend in the boot of her car too: K9, the robot dog, rusted and defunct and instantly, ridiculously lovable. The show knows exactly how much affection it’s trading on here, and it doesn’t overplay its hand.

The God-Maker’s Bargain

That question comes to a head when Finch reveals what all those child-powered calculations are actually for. The Skasis Paradigm, the “God-maker”, is the fundamental equation of the universe, and crack it and you can bend time, space, matter and life to your will. Here’s the cruel part: the Krillitane don’t want to fight the Doctor, they want to recruit him. Finch offers him a share of that godlike power, and dresses it up as the one temptation I don’t think this Doctor can easily resist: the chance to stop losing people. To reverse the pain, undo the deaths, maybe even bring back everything the Time War took from him. For a moment he wavers, and it’s genuinely terrifying, because I’ve felt the size of that loss ever since the regeneration in The Parting of the Ways. It’s Sarah Jane who talks him down, and she does it with the hardest wisdom the show has offered yet: everything has its time, and everything ends. Pain and loss aren’t a flaw in a life well lived, they’re the price of it, and a universe frozen into permanence just to spare the Doctor his grief wouldn’t be worth having. He lets the power go.

A Tin Dog’s Last Stand

The Krillitane are undone by their own oil, and it’s K9 who does it, trundling the battered old dog into the danger zone to detonate the barrels and take the monsters with him, sacrificing himself to save a hall full of kids. It’s a hero’s death for a tin dog, and it stung more than I expected. But the Doctor, being the Doctor, has a parting gift: he quietly builds Sarah Jane a brand new K9 to take home so she doesn’t have to be alone. It’s the going-back he never managed the first time, offered at last. Mickey’s arc quietly grows up here too. He’s the one who called the Doctor in, and yet he spends the episode on the sidelines once more, until he clocks the rusted robot dog in the boot and has a rueful little epiphany: to this crew, he’s the tin dog. The spare part. The one who stays home and does the legwork while everyone else runs toward the danger. Ever since his bruising, sidelined turn back in Boom Town he’s been chafing at exactly that role, and this time he finally does something about it. He asks to come along, and when the Doctor says yes, it plays less like a reward than like Mickey quietly refusing to be the one who gets left behind.

What it leaves me with is Rose learning the truth, that she isn’t the first and one day she won’t be the last, and the episode is honest that the knowledge hurts. It leaves the curse of the Time Lord said out loud, because he can give a companion the rest of their life and never give them the rest of his. It leaves “everything has its time, and everything ends”, which is the show’s whole philosophy handed over by a former companion, the thing that ends up saving him from the God-maker’s bargain. It leaves Mickey in the box, tired of minding the home front and finally asking for more than that. And it leaves a goodbye done properly this time, since Sarah Jane chooses not to travel again but goes at peace with a new K9 beside her, which is the show quietly promising me that the Doctor’s departures don’t have to stay wounds forever. Doctor Who News’ review at the time called it one of the strongest scripts the show had done, and having watched it, I don’t disagree.

Rating: 4.5/5 – a near-perfect blend of nostalgia, character and genuine emotional heft, anchored by Elisabeth Sladen and a razor-sharp Anthony Head. The Krillitane plot is the least of it, and it barely matters. An undercover Doctor, a legend of a companion, a robot dog’s last stand, and a lesson in letting go. Mickey’s in the box now too. I can’t wait to see how that goes.

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The Tenth Doctor and Rose in the observatory in the Doctor Who episode Tooth and Claw
Doctor WhoTelevision

Tooth and Claw: A Werewolf, a Queen, and a Secret Weapon

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The Tenth Doctor and Rose land in 1879 Scotland instead of their intended destination, quickly becoming entangled with Queen Victoria, a group of militant monks, and a werewolf stalking a Highland estate. The episode blends gothic horror with historical adventure, using the Koh-i-Noor diamond and a hidden observatory to deliver a resolution built on Victorian-era preparation.

The episode’s final scenes shift tone sharply, as Victoria condemns the Doctor and Rose for treating deadly danger as entertainment, banishes them from the Empire, and founds the Torchwood Institute in direct response to the alien threat they represent. This establishes the origin of an organisation previously glimpsed in the series, framing the Doctor’s own recklessness as something with lasting institutional consequences.

Whovians, this is what I want from a Saturday night: a moonlit Scottish estate, kung-fu monks, a full-blooded werewolf, and Queen Victoria caught in the middle of it. “Tooth and Claw” is a gothic monster romp with its tongue only slightly in its cheek. Then it turns around in its final five minutes and drops a twist that recontextualises the whole season so far. After the sunny sci-fi of New Earth, this is the show flexing a completely different muscle, horror-tinged and historical, and it’s a cracking hour of television.

A Wolf, a Queen, and a House Full of Secrets

The Doctor is aiming the TARDIS at a 1979 punk concert and, being the Doctor, misses by a full century and a few hundred miles: 1879, the Scottish Highlands. Almost immediately they fall in with a very stern travelling party. Queen Victoria herself, diverted from Balmoral by a conveniently fallen tree and heading for the night to the Torchwood Estate. The Doctor, delighted, flashes the psychic paper and bluffs his way into the royal entourage as “Sir Doctor of TARDIS,” complete with a truly terrible Scottish accent. Rose, meanwhile, makes a private bet to get the famously severe monarch to say “we are not amused.” That giddy, larking-about energy, the same joy that made New Earth such a treat, is out in full force here, and it’s worth watching how the episode slowly turns it into a problem.

Because the house is a trap, and everyone in it is in danger. The local monks, the bald, black-robed, unexpectedly acrobatic Brethren of Saint Catherine’s Glen, have taken over the estate, imprisoned the household, and brought with them a caged prisoner: a wiry, feral man who is, in fact, the host of something far older and hungrier. When the full moon rises, he transforms, and the transformation is genuinely nasty for a family show. A towering, sinewy wolf-creature stalks the candlelit corridors while the guests barricade the doors. Davies and director Euros Lyn lean hard into the haunted-house horror, and it works. This is the kind of monster you’d have watched from behind the sofa as a kid.

The lore behind the beast is a lovely bit of world-building, too. This isn’t folklore made real so much as an alien cell that fell to Earth centuries ago and has been passing host to host ever since, and the Brethren have a plan for it: infect the Queen, put the wolf on the throne, and found an “Empire of the Wolf” that would swallow the British Empire whole. It’s daft in the best Doctor Who way, and it gives the werewolf a purpose beyond simple slaughter.

Moonlight and the Koh-i-Noor

Here’s where “Tooth and Claw” quietly becomes clever. The house, it turns out, is itself the weapon. Sir Robert’s late father, an amateur astronomer, built an enormous observatory in the attic, and he built it in collaboration with none other than Prince Albert. The two of them had been preparing for exactly this night for years, and the key to the whole thing is the Koh-i-Noor: the legendary diamond that Albert kept having re-cut, over and over, never satisfied, always insisting it wasn’t quite right.

The werewolf creature looming in the moonlit corridors of Torchwood House in the Doctor Who episode Tooth and Claw

There’s a real poignancy underneath the sci-fi here, too. Victoria is a widow deep in mourning, still carrying Albert with her everywhere she goes, and this is the night she learns her late husband spent his final years secretly building a weapon to guard her against a threat he somehow knew was coming. Pauline Collins plays her with a marvellous flinty grief, all iron composure over a bottomless well of loss, and it lends the whole werewolf romp an unexpected emotional weight. A review of the episode I found online makes the same point: that pairing of pulpy monster runaround with real character weight is exactly what makes “Tooth and Claw” one of Davies’ best scripts.

The Doctor puts it together in a rush of that trademark Tennant brilliance. The observatory isn’t a telescope, it’s a light chamber, and the endlessly re-cut diamond is the lens. Focus the moonlight through the Koh-i-Noor and you can turn the wolf’s own strength against it, trapping and burning it in a concentrated beam of the very thing that gives it power. It’s a properly satisfying “everything was set up centuries ago” resolution, the sort of long-fused trap that rewards you for paying attention, and the Doctor gets to be both the clever one and the awestruck one. He’s thrilled that Victoria’s dead husband was three steps ahead of everybody.

The wolf dies in the light, almost peacefully, and there’s a flicker of sympathy for the creature that the episode is smart enough not to oversell. But the sting is in the tail. Somewhere in the chaos, the Queen takes a small cut to the wrist. She waves it off. The episode does not, quite, let us wave it off with her, a neat little ambiguity left hanging in the Highland air.

“We Are Not Amused”: the Birth of Torchwood

And then the reckoning. Victoria does, eventually, say it: a grim, joyless “we are not amused,” but by then the joke has curdled, and that’s the whole point. She has watched the Doctor and Rose treat mortal danger as a great fun day out, giggling their way through a night that got good men killed, and she is appalled by them. In a scene with real bite, she knights them both, Sir Doctor of TARDIS, Dame Rose of the Powell Estate, a long way indeed from the shop girl who first took the Doctor’s hand back in Rose, and then, in the same breath, banishes them from the British Empire forever. She wants nothing more to do with these strange, careless creatures from beyond the stars.

Queen Victoria (Pauline Collins) faces the Doctor and Rose with a cold, regal stare in the candlelit hall of Torchwood House.

More than that, she resolves to be ready for them. She announces the founding of a new institute, based here at Torchwood House and named for it, dedicated to defending Britain against the supernatural, the alien, and against the Doctor himself, should he ever dare return.

If your ears pricked up at that name, they should have. Cast your mind back to The Christmas Invasion, and the shadowy, unheard-of organisation that reached up and blew a retreating Sycorax ship out of the sky over London. That Torchwood. This is its origin story: a Victorian queen, wounded and unnerved by an alien who wouldn’t take death seriously, quietly building a weapon against the very man who saved her life. It’s a superb piece of connective tissue, and it retroactively sharpens the Doctor’s own recklessness into something with consequences. He breezes in, has a whale of a time, saves the day, and leaves behind an empire that now considers him a threat to be neutralised. What that institute grows into is a question the episode is content to leave dangling, and I’m dying to find out.

What Tooth and Claw Leaves Us With

A gothic werewolf yarn that turns out to be an origin story in disguise. It plants a few things that matter: the Doctor’s joy has a shadow, the same giddy delight that’s so infectious can look, to the wrong person, like callousness, and Victoria makes him pay for it. Torchwood gets explained. The name that vaporised the Sycorax now has a founder, a date, and a mission: watch the skies, and watch the Doctor. There’s a queen who won’t be dazzled, too. Victoria sees straight through the psychic paper and the charm, and stands as one of the few historical figures to send the Doctor packing on principle. And there’s a wound that won’t quite heal. That little cut on the royal wrist is left deliberately unresolved, a splinter of doubt the episode slips under your skin. On top of all that, the show proves it can do horror. After cat-nuns and body-swaps, a straight-up haunted-house monster shows how much range this era has.

Rating: 4/5. A tight, atmospheric, genuinely creepy adventure with one of the best final-act twists of the run so far. I’m only docking a point because the wolf effects show their 2006 seams once or twice in full light.

A werewolf, a diamond, a not-amused monarch, and the birth of an institute with the Doctor’s name on its most-wanted list: this one earns its place. Now, where’s that big blue box off to next?

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Doctor WhoTelevision

New Earth: Ten and Rose Take Their First Trip

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

“New Earth” opens Series 2 of Doctor Who, sending the newly regenerated Tenth Doctor and Rose to a hospital run by cat-faced nuns on humanity’s adopted homeworld billions of years in the future. Behind the Sisters of Plenitude’s miracle cures lies a secret farm of diseased human test subjects, while a body-swapping Cassandra turns the middle act into farce before the Doctor solves everything with a flood of medicine.

The review calls it a messy but big-hearted season opener, 3.5 out of 5, stronger as a mission statement for the Ten-and-Rose partnership than as a tightly plotted episode.

Right then, Whovians. This is the one I’d been waiting for. Not the regeneration, not the pyjama-clad swordfight over London in The Christmas Invasion, but the first proper trip. Doors open, new Doctor, old companion, somewhere impossibly far away, just the two of them and that grin. “New Earth” is where David Tennant and Billie Piper finally get to show us what this partnership is actually going to feel like, and the answer is: sunlit, giddy, and just a little bit dark around the edges. It’s a flawed episode (I’ll get to that), but as a mission statement for the Ten-and-Rose era, it’s an absolute delight.

Sunshine, Apple Grass, and a Familiar Face

The TARDIS lands billions of years in the future on New Earth, humanity’s adopted home after the old one burned. And if that sounds familiar, it should. We watched the original Earth go up in flames back in The End of the World, so there’s a real thrill in seeing where the human race washed up afterwards. The Doctor and Rose lie back in the “apple grass” under a warm sun, staring across the bay at the towers of New New York, and Tennant sells the sheer joy of the thing. “I love it. I love this. I love New New York!” He’s not brooding, he’s not haunted. He’s a big kid showing his best friend the universe, and it’s infectious. Cast your mind back to the guarded, war-scarred man who first grabbed Rose’s hand and told her to run in Rose; this is the same soul with the weather turned to summer. Rose feels it too. She’s looser here than we’ve ever seen her, teasing him, needling him, the pair of them bickering like they’ve got all of time to waste, which, of course, they do.

But they haven’t landed here by accident. The Doctor’s had a message on the psychic paper summoning him to a hospital run by the Sisters of Plenitude, an order of cat-faced nuns whose miracle cures are the talk of the galaxy. And waiting in the wards is another face from that far-future day we’ve seen before: the Face of Boe, the ancient, enormous head-in-a-tank who’s apparently dying of old age. Legend says he’ll speak a great secret with his final breath, to a lonely wanderer, at the end of his life. When the Doctor comes to see him, though, Boe changes his mind: the secret can wait for another day, another meeting. Cheeky. Davies dangles the hook and then pulls it away, and I am completely on the line.

new earth sisters of plenitude

The Sisters of Plenitude and Their Terrible Secret

The Sisters can cure anything: Petrifold Regression, the lot. And that’s exactly the problem. Nobody’s medicine is that good. Rose, doing a bit of investigating, goes down into the basement and finds the ugly truth behind all those miracles: an “intensive care” unit that’s really a farm. The Sisters have grown thousands of humans in isolation pods, deliberately infected with every disease in existence, and they harvest the cures from these living, suffering test subjects. A whole species bred to be sick so the paying customers upstairs can walk out healthy. What makes it land is the Sisters themselves: soft-spoken, purring, endlessly gentle, utterly convinced they’re doing good work. There’s no cackling villainy here, just the serene bureaucracy of people who’ve decided some lives are raw material. That’s a far more unsettling kind of monster than anything with a blaster.

It’s a genuinely nasty bit of sci-fi ethics, and the show doesn’t flinch from it. The Doctor’s fury when he understands what he’s looking at is the first real flash of the Tenth Doctor’s righteous anger since he stared down the Sycorax – this is a man who cannot abide cruelty dressed up as care. The Sisters justify it the way people always justify these things: the ends, the greater good, all those lives saved. The Doctor isn’t having a word of it. “These people are alive.”

Cassandra, Body-Swaps, and a Rain of Cures

And then the episode’s other returning guest crawls out of the woodwork, literally, from a hidden chamber in the basement. Cassandra, the “last human,” the bitchy trampoline of stretched skin who we watched apparently die back on Platform One. Turns out her brain survived, and she’s been lurking down here with Chip, a devoted little force-grown clone who worships her. Furious at being called ugly, she uses a “psychograft” to leap out of her own frame and into Rose’s body. And here’s where “New Earth” pivots hard into farce.

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I’ll be honest, this is the part fans argue about, and I get why. Billie Piper spends a big chunk of the episode playing Cassandra playing Rose: all pursed lips, va-va-voom strut, and a scandalous snog she plants on the Doctor before he’s worked out what’s going on. Then Cassandra hops into the Doctor, so Tennant gets a turn being camp and vain too. It’s broad, it’s silly, and it sits at a very strange angle to the horror farm humming away in the next room. When it works, it’s a hoot and a showcase for both leads; when it doesn’t, it feels like two different episodes wrestling for the wheel. For more on how that split landed with other fans, this Doctor Who News review digs into the same tonal whiplash from a different angle.

What pulls it all back together is the ending, and it’s a beauty. The infected Flesh humans break out of their pods, and one touch from them spreads every plague at once, so the Doctor does the most Doctor thing imaginable. He empties every cure the Sisters ever brewed into the disinfectant drip, rides a lift down into the quarantine ward, and showers the poor diseased masses in a rain of medicine. He doesn’t fight them; he heals them, all at once, and turns a farm of manufactured suffering into a brand-new people: humans with no parents, no past, born fully grown into a cured world. It’s exactly the kind of solution this show does better than anyone: mercy as the answer, life as the win.

Cassandra’s send-off lands the emotional gut-punch, too. Body-hopped one final time into the dying Chip, she finally runs out of road, and instead of clinging on she asks the Doctor for one last kindness. He takes her back to the last night anyone ever told her she was beautiful, and she dies in her own younger arms, whispering the compliment she never got to hear. For a character introduced as a snob and a punchline, it’s a startlingly tender exit.

What New Earth Leaves Us With

A messy, bright, big-hearted season opener that’s more interested in vibes than tidiness, and honestly, that’s fine by me. Here’s what it plants:

  • Ten and Rose are going to be joy. After a debut where the Doctor was unconscious for most of it, this is the first real taste of the partnership, and the chemistry is off the charts. This is a Doctor who travels for the sheer love of it.
  • The Tenth Doctor’s line on cruelty. Same anger we saw with the Sycorax, aimed at a quieter evil: he will not accept suffering justified by results, no matter how many lives it “saves.”
  • RTD’s signature cure. The rain-of-medicine finale is a thesis statement: this Doctor solves problems by healing, not smiting.
  • A secret held back. The Face of Boe has something enormous to tell the Doctor and won’t say it yet. Whatever it is, it’s now hanging over everything, and I want to know.
  • Cassandra gets a soul. Killing off the show’s shallowest villain with genuine pathos is a neat trick, and a sign of how confident this era already is.

Rating: 3.5/5 – Overstuffed and tonally all over the map, but so warm and so watchable that I can’t hold the mess against it. The apple grass alone nearly gets it another half-point.

New New York, cat-nuns, a body-swapping trampoline, and a Doctor who cures a plague with kindness. If this is what an ordinary trip looks like now, sign me up for the whole season. Pass the psychic paper; I’m ready for wherever we land next.

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Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion — BBC promotional poster featuring two characters standing before the TARDIS in a snowy Christmas setting
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Christmas Invasion: A New Doctor Crashes Into Christmas

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The Christmas Invasion is the first full outing for David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, spending most of the 2005 Christmas special unconscious while the Sycorax threaten Earth with a mind-controlled hostage crisis and Prime Minister Harriet Jones tries to hold the country together in his absence.

The review argues the gamble of sidelining the new lead pays off completely once he wakes, delivering one of the show’s most efficient character introductions, and rates the episode 4.5 out of 5.

Well, Whovians, he’s back, and he spends most of his own debut fast asleep in a pair of borrowed pyjamas. After the tears and time-vortex fireworks of The Parting of the Ways closed out a barnstorming first season, I sat down to “The Christmas Invasion” absolutely desperate to meet this new Doctor properly. And Russell T Davies, the cheeky so-and-so, made me wait almost the entire hour for the privilege. It’s a bold, borderline reckless way to launch a brand-new leading man: bench your hero for two-thirds of his first outing, and by the time the credits rolled I was completely, hopelessly sold on David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor. Let me tell you why.

A Doctor Fast Asleep

The TARDIS comes screaming down out of the sky and clatters into the Powell Estate, and out spills a stranger. That’s the whole gamble of this episode right there. We know he’s the Doctor, we watched him regenerate, but Rose doesn’t feel it. This isn’t the man who took her hand and told her to run all the way back in Rose. The leather jacket, the northern vowels, the haunted eyes are all gone, replaced by a gangly, grinning face she’s never seen, who promptly babbles a few cheerful nonsense words and collapses. Billie Piper is quietly heartbreaking here. Rose spent an entire season learning to trust one face, and now she’s sitting at a bedside willing a stranger to wake up, terrified that she’s lost her Doctor for good.

While the hero snores, Davies does what Davies does best: he turns Christmas itself into a horror show. A brass band of robotic Santas (pilot fish, scavengers drawn to the crackling regeneration energy still leaking out of the Doctor) open fire in a crowded shopping street. Then the Tylers’ festive spirit turns homicidal when the Christmas tree whirrs to life, spinning like a buzzsaw and chewing its way across the living room. It’s daft and delightful in equal measure, and it’s a very deliberate stall: the Doctor briefly stirs to zap the tree with the sonic screwdriver, mutters an ominous question about who’s controlling all this, and drops straight back into his coma. Other Doctor Who fans reckon keeping him under for so long is a canny choice rather than a cop-out, and I agree: you don’t miss him being awake, you miss him, and that’s the cleverer trick. The message is clear. Earth is in real trouble, and this time the man who usually saves it is unavailable.

Blood, Snow, and the Sycorax

The wider threat is genuinely nasty. The British space probe Guinevere One, meant for Mars, gets swallowed instead by a jagged asteroid ship crewed by the Sycorax, bone-masked, blood-drinking warriors with a real Old Testament swagger. Using a sample of human blood pulled from the probe, they trigger “blood control,” and suddenly a third of the planet, everyone with A-positive blood, sleepwalks to the nearest rooftop, ledge, and multi-storey car park, standing motionless at the edge, ready to step off on command. It is one of the eeriest images the revived show has produced: whole crowds swaying on the skyline of London, a mass execution held in reserve as a bargaining chip.

And who’s left to answer for the human race? Prime Minister Harriet Jones. Yes, that Harriet Jones, the plucky backbench MP from Flydale North who survived the Slitheen’s Downing Street takeover in World War Three, the one the Ninth Doctor cheerfully tipped for greatness and three glorious terms in office. Now she’s in Number Ten, and Penelope Wilton plays her as the beating human heart of the whole episode: decent, frightened, and doing her level best to hold a terrified country together with the Doctor nowhere to be found. The running gag survives her promotion, too: she still flashes her ID and announces “Harriet Jones, Prime Minister,” and she still gets the weary “Yes, I know who you are” from everyone she meets, up to and including an alien warlord. It lands every single time.

When the Sycorax teleport Harriet, project scientist Daniel Llewellyn, and UNIT’s Major Blake up to the ship, Rose, Mickey, and Jackie do the only sensible thing and drag the unconscious Doctor into the TARDIS for safety, only for the ship’s tractor beam to haul the whole blue box aboard the asteroid anyway. What follows is one of Rose’s bravest, most quietly devastating moments. She steps out, squares her shoulders, and tries to face down the Sycorax with the Doctor’s own borrowed authority, invoking every bit of alien law and swagger she’s watched him use all year. And the Sycorax simply laugh at her. It doesn’t work, because she isn’t him, and you can see the exact moment she realises it. The bluff collapses. Earth is out of options.

The Tenth Doctor in a dressing gown facing the Sycorax leader aboard their asteroid ship, with Rose and Mickey watching in the background

The Tea, the Sword, and the New Doctor

And then, a cup of tea. A little spilled tea, seeping into the TARDIS console and feeding a last jolt of energy back into her sleeping pilot. The doors open, the Doctor strolls out in his dressing gown, and with a grin he asks the only question that matters: “Did you miss me?” Reader, I cheered.

What follows is the most efficient character introduction Doctor Who has ever done. In about five minutes flat, Tennant’s Doctor establishes exactly who this new man is. He exposes the blood control for the empty threat it always was, a psychic con job that could never really make anyone jump, and releases the sleepwalkers with a flick. He rifles through his own personality out loud, delighted and alarmed to be discovering it in real time. And when the Sycorax leader refuses to leave, the Doctor invokes the ancient rules of combat and challenges him to a sword fight for the fate of the planet, winner takes all, still in his pyjamas.

The duel out on the hull is glorious. He gets his hand lopped clean off. Then, because he’s barely fifteen hours into his regeneration cycle with energy to burn, he simply grows a new one, calling it his “fighting hand” as he comes back swinging. It’s cheeky, it’s a little bit terrifying, and it tells you everything: this Doctor is a showman who will absolutely weaponise the wonder. He wins, spares his opponent’s life, and turns his back, at which point the beaten Sycorax leader hurls himself forward for a treacherous killing blow. The Doctor doesn’t even look. He flicks a satsuma, hits a release, and drops the man to his death, delivering the line that becomes his whole moral thesis: “No second chances. I’m that sort of a man.” Mercy, offered once and exactly once. That’s the Tenth Doctor, fully formed.

Six Words and a Snow of Ash

The Sycorax are beaten and warned to spread the word that Earth is defended. Victory. Except Harriet Jones, safely back on the ground, gives an order, to a secretive organisation called Torchwood that nobody’s ever heard of, and a great green bolt of energy stabs up and blows the fleeing ship out of the sky. It’s a chilling turn, and the Doctor is incandescent. The enemy was leaving. To him this isn’t defence, it’s murder, and the argument that follows crackles with a temper we haven’t seen on this scale before. Harriet insists she has to protect her people from the things that come in the night when the Doctor isn’t there to help. He doesn’t shout her down. He leans in and murmurs six words to her aide — “Don’t you think she looks tired?” — and just like that, plants the rumour that begins to unravel her before the episode is even over. It’s the most unnerving beat in the episode. This warm, funny, pyjama-clad new hero can topple a sitting Prime Minister with a whisper, and the show lets us sit with the question of whether he had the right. (Who Torchwood actually are, and why Britain is quietly building alien-killing weapons behind everyone’s back, is left dangling like a loose thread nobody’s meant to notice yet.)

Then the ash comes down. The debris of the Sycorax ship drifts over London like snow on Christmas morning, and the Doctor tells Rose the loveliest, saddest little truth of the night: “It’s not snow, it’s ash.” The coda is pure warmth: Christmas dinner round the Tylers’ table, paper crowns and crackers, the Doctor finally picking out his brown pinstripe suit and long coat, choosing his new face’s new look. Rose gets her Doctor back. Not the same man, a different one entirely, but hers, and she chooses to keep travelling with him. After an hour of dread, the show hands us hope with both hands.

What The Christmas Invasion Leaves Us With

For an episode that keeps its lead unconscious for two-thirds of its runtime, this one does a staggering amount of heavy lifting. Here’s what it plants:

  • A wholly different Doctor. Where the Ninth was coiled and war-haunted, the Tenth arrives manic, romantic, and quick to anger: same man, brand-new weather.
  • “No second chances.” The satsuma and the sword lay down this Doctor’s moral line in a single, unforgettable stroke: he’ll show you mercy, but only once.
  • Rose’s leap of faith. She learns the hardest companion lesson there is: to love the man and not the face. That’s a bond that just got deeper.
  • The cost of the Doctor’s judgement. Bringing down Harriet Jones with a whisper shows a Doctor willing to play god with human affairs, and the episode is honest enough not to tell us he was right.
  • Torchwood. A ruthless, secretive British power is out there, arming itself against the stars. File that name away.
  • A Christmas Day Doctor Who actually works. Davies bets the nation will make room for an alien invasion between the turkey and the presents, and the gamble pays off completely.

Rating: 4.5/5 — A debut with the nerve to sideline its own hero and still stick the landing. Docked half a point for keeping me waiting, though I’d argue the wait is the whole point.

Whatever this new Doctor is, and he’s clearly still working that out himself, I am completely on board. Pass me a paper crown and pour the tea; I’m ready for wherever that big blue box lands next.

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Doctor Who

Doctor Who Blasts Back to Our Screens: A Season 1 Celebration of Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Doctor Who returned to television in 2005 after a 16-year absence, with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor and Billie Piper as companion Rose Tyler. The season introduced new audiences to the show while reestablishing core elements including the TARDIS, sonic screwdriver, and iconic villains such as the Daleks, Autons, and Slitheen.

The season explored the Doctor’s trauma from the Time War and balanced tones ranging from horror to comedy across its episodes. It concluded with Rose becoming the Bad Wolf entity and the Doctor’s regeneration into the Tenth Doctor, setting the stage for the show’s continued revival.

I’ve been putting off writing this one for a few months, mostly because I didn’t want to just retell every episode back to you one at a time. What I want instead is a proper Season 1 celebration, a look at the whole run now that it’s actually finished and I’ve had time to sit with it.

Doctor Who came back in March after a sixteen-year gap, and I’ll admit I went in braced for disappointment. That dismal 1996 TV movie is still the last time anyone tried this, and it didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Christopher Eccleston changed my mind inside the first ten minutes of “Rose.” He plays the Doctor like someone who’s been through something and isn’t over it yet, a leather jacket and a northern accent standing in for a whole personality, and Billie Piper’s Rose gave the show a way in for anyone who’d never seen a single frame of the classic series. I hadn’t expected to like a companion this much this fast.

What’s stuck with me most, now that I’ve had all summer to think it over, is how confident the whole thing feels for a show that had every reason to play it safe. It could have leaned entirely on nostalgia and coasted on the name. Instead it went for something rougher and more emotional, a Doctor who’s clearly running from something rather than the eccentric grandfather figure I half-remembered from repeats. Thirteen episodes isn’t a lot of runtime to introduce a Time Lord, a new companion, and an entire alien war, but it uses every one of them well.

New Faces, New Places

“Rose” throws you straight into it: living mannequins in a shop basement, a sewer chase, and the Doctor grabbing Rose’s hand and just saying “Run.” That’s the whole pitch for the next thirteen weeks, and it works. Before this episode I’d have told you an alien invasion of a London department store sounds like a hard sell for 2005 television. It isn’t. It’s fast, it’s a little scrappy around the edges, and it never explains itself more than it has to.

“The End of the World” is the one that sold me on this being a genuinely different show. Five billion years in the future, watching the actual Earth burn up while a room full of alien dignitaries sip drinks and gossip, and somewhere in the middle of that spectacle is the first real crack in the Doctor’s composure. He doesn’t say what happened to his people yet. He barely says anything. But you can see it sitting on him, and that’s the moment I realized this season was going to be about grief as much as it was about monsters.

Then “The Unquiet Dead” moves the whole thing sideways into 1869 Cardiff, and I liked that the show wasn’t shy about going backward as well as forward. Having Charles Dickens turn up as a genuine character rather than a joke was a nice touch, and it’s the first sign that this version of the Doctor is going to drag Rose through history as often as the future. Three episodes in and I already had a decent sense of the show’s range: space opera, gothic horror, and everything in between, all filtered through the same two leads.

Battling the Baddies

This season runs through a stranger set of villains than I expected from a show trying to prove it could still work on television. The Gelth were probably the least of it, gaseous spirits pretending to be the reanimated dead in Victorian Cardiff, with Charles Dickens along for the ride in “The Unquiet Dead.” It’s a solid spooky hour, mostly there to hand the season its first properly creepy setpiece.

The Slitheen, on the other hand, I did not see coming. Farting aliens wearing human skin as a disguise, trying to trigger a nuclear war for profit across “Aliens of London” and “World War Three.” On paper that sounds like a kids’ show being a kids’ show, and somehow it still manages a real cliffhanger and a genuinely tense back half. They came back one more time in “Boom Town,” which turned out to be my favourite use of them, a whole episode built around the Doctor just talking to Margaret Blaine over dinner instead of fighting her, and it’s a much quieter, stranger hour than I expected from a Slitheen episode.

Rose Tyler facing a chained Dalek in a bunker, Doctor Who Series 1
Rose comes face to face with the last Dalek in the universe.

Then there’s “Dalek,” which is the episode I’d point to if someone asked me why this reboot works at all. One Dalek, chained up in a bunker, and it’s more frightening than an entire fleet would have been. Eccleston spends the whole hour barely holding himself together, and by the end you understand exactly what the Time War cost him. It’s the best forty-five minutes of the season.

And “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances” gave me actual nightmares, a gas-mask kid wandering the Blitz asking “Are you my mummy?” in that flat little voice. Throw in Captain Jack Harkness turning up out of nowhere, and it’s easily one of the strongest two-parters of the run. It’s also the only story all season with a genuinely happy ending, no one dies, which after everything else the Doctor’s been carrying feels like it matters as much as the scares do.

Peeking Behind the Curtain

The season doesn’t explain the Time War outright, and I think that’s the right call. You get fragments, a look on the Doctor’s face, a line dropped and never finished, Rose asking a question he won’t answer. By the time “Dalek” rolls around you’ve pieced together enough to know his entire species is gone and he had something to do with it, without the show ever sitting you down for the full story.

That restraint is part of why “Father’s Day” landed as hard as it did for me. Rose gets one chance to see her dad, who died before she was born, and instead of fixing his death she nearly unravels time trying to stop it. It’s not really about the Reapers or the paradox mechanics. It’s about Rose realizing you don’t get to rewrite grief just because you finally have the tools to try, and about the Doctor watching her learn that the hard way.

I also noticed how often the show trusts you to sit with silence instead of explaining a feeling out loud. There’s a moment near the end of “Boom Town” where the Doctor and Margaret just look at each other and neither of them says what they’re both thinking, and it does more work than a page of dialogue would have. For a series that’s also doing farting aliens and living plastic, that kind of patience caught me off guard more than once.

Memorable Moments

A handful of things from this season are staying with me long after the credits rolled. “Run,” the Doctor’s first word to Rose, somehow the whole show in one syllable. Eccleston’s face in “Dalek” when the creature starts absorbing Rose’s DNA and briefly becomes something almost sympathetic, I’ve genuinely not seen an actor swing between rage and grief that fast.

“Everybody lives!” the Doctor practically shouting it at the end of “The Doctor Dances,” the first time all season he sounds like someone who still believes in something good. Rose standing in front of her dad in “Father’s Day,” not able to tell him who she really is. I won’t lie, that one got me.

And then the finale. “Bad Wolf” and “The Parting of the Ways” throw Rose into the Game Station, turn her into the Bad Wolf entity, and burn out the Doctor saving her, which means we get a whole new Doctor before we’ve even had time to properly say goodbye to this one. I wasn’t ready for that. I’d gotten used to Eccleston’s version in thirteen weeks flat, and watching him tell Rose “you were fantastic, and you know what, so was I” before his face changes is the closest this season comes to an actual goodbye speech, and it still caught me off guard.

Conclusion: A New Era Begins

Thirteen episodes in, and Doctor Who has done something I genuinely didn’t think a revival could pull off: it feels like the same show my dad used to talk about, and it feels completely new at the same time. Eccleston is only getting one season, which still stings a bit, but he used every minute of it, the accent, the leather jacket, the grief he’s clearly carrying and won’t put down. Piper matched him the whole way, giving Rose enough backbone that she never comes across as just someone along for the ride.

What sold me on the season overall wasn’t the effects or the returning monsters. It’s how much of it is really about the Doctor learning to let people back in after whatever the Time War took from him. The Slitheen give you the laughs, the Daleks give you the dread, and Rose gives the whole thing a heart. Even the episodes I liked least still had at least one idea worth keeping, and across thirteen weeks that’s a much better hit rate than I expected going in.

If you want another take on how the whole run holds together, other Doctor Who fans online have put together their own rundowns worth comparing notes with. For now, I’m just glad the show is back, and I’m already curious what a new Doctor is going to look like.

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The Parting of the Ways
Doctor Who

The Parting of the Ways: The Doctor Faces the Dalek Emperor’s Fleet

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This review covers “The Parting of the Ways,” the thirteenth and final episode of Doctor Who’s 2005 series, in which the Ninth Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack are trapped on the Game Station facing a Dalek fleet led by the Dalek Emperor, and the Doctor builds a delta wave device capable of destroying the Daleks at the cost of every human life on Earth.

The piece focuses on the Doctor’s refusal to fire the delta wave, Rose’s transformation into the Bad Wolf after staring into the heart of the TARDIS, and the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration into the Tenth. No numeric rating is given, but the take is strongly positive, calling it the best possible send-off for Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor.

“The Parting of the Ways” is the last time we get Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, and having sat with it for a few days now, I still don’t want it to be over. This is the finale, the Doctor, Rose and Jack trapped on the Game Station with a Dalek fleet bearing down on them, and it earns every bit of the buildup this season’s been quietly running since “Rose” first aired back in March. I went in expecting a big fight. I didn’t expect to end up in tears by the closing scene.

After the breather of Boom Town, where the biggest threat was one lonely Slitheen at a dinner table, this episode throws all of that calm out the window in the first five minutes. The Emperor’s fleet is bigger than anything the show has put on screen before, and I like that it doesn’t waste time easing you into that. One scene you’re catching your breath from last week, the next the Doctor’s staring down an army that outnumbers his side by a number too big to actually process. It’s also the first time all season the Doctor looks genuinely rattled by the size of what he’s up against, rather than just annoyed at having his evening interrupted, and that shift in him is what tells you this one’s different before a single Dalek even fires.

Trapped on the Game Station With a Dalek Army

The Doctor sends Rose home before the fighting starts, locking the TARDIS controls so she can’t follow him back to the Game Station, still built on the bones of Satellite Five. I was annoyed at him for that the first time I watched it, and I’m still a little annoyed at him now, even though I get why he does it. He’d rather she’s safe and furious with him than dead alongside him, and that’s very much who this Doctor is by episode thirteen. Meanwhile he and Jack are stuck actually holding the line, and Jack in particular gets to be the leader here in a way we haven’t really seen from him before. He arms a ragtag crew of Game Station staff with whatever weapons he can improvise and holds a corridor against Daleks with nothing but nerve and a big gun, and I loved every second of it.

What gets me about this stretch of the episode is how outmatched everyone genuinely is. This isn’t a fight the Doctor’s cleverness can win outright, and the show doesn’t pretend otherwise. Jack’s stand buys time, not victory. The Daleks keep coming no matter what gets thrown at them, and for once I actually believed the Doctor might lose. Other reviews written right after this aired made the same point I kept coming back to: the show had spent all season building toward this, and it wasn’t going to cheat its way out with an easy fix.

The Dalek Emperor is the other reason this hits as hard as it does. He’s not just another Dalek barking orders, he’s set himself up as a god, built out of the shattered remains of the Time War, and the way he talks about himself is genuinely unsettling in a way the Daleks haven’t managed since they first turned up this season. It reframes the whole invasion as something closer to a crusade than a conquest, which makes the Doctor’s usual trick of reasoning with the enemy completely useless. There’s nothing to negotiate with here. That’s what makes the corridor fighting feel so desperate instead of just loud.

Rose DW Parting Ways

Rose Becomes the Bad Wolf

Back in London, Rose isn’t willing to just sit there and wait, and I’m glad the episode doesn’t make her. She gets Jackie and Mickey to help her drag the TARDIS console back open with a length of chain and a tow truck, which is a ridiculous image and I mean that as a compliment. She stares into the heart of the TARDIS, into the raw time vortex itself, and it changes her completely. Every “Bad Wolf” scattered through this whole season, the graffiti, the throwaway line, the company name, turns out to be a message Rose sent herself, backwards through time, so she’d know exactly where to look when this moment came.

What she does with that power is the moment the whole episode’s been building to. She turns every Dalek in the fleet to dust with barely a gesture, and she brings Jack back after the Daleks kill him mid-fight, and he just gets up again like it never happened, which nobody on screen has time to properly react to in the middle of everything else going on. I’ve seen people call this an easy way out, the companion suddenly turning into a god and fixing everything, and I get the complaint, but it didn’t feel like a cheat to me watching it. The whole season’s been telling us Rose matters more than she knows. This is just the season finally showing its hand.

I also like that it’s Rose who ends up solving this, not the Doctor. Every episode this year has been building her up as more capable and more stubborn than the Doctor gives her credit for, and here it actually pays off instead of just being a nice character beat. Jackie and Mickey get real credit too. They’re not sidelined so Rose can have her moment; they’re the reason she has a moment at all, hauling that console open with a truck and a chain because Rose refused to just wait at home and be safe.

The Delta Wave, and a Choice I Didn’t Want Him to Make

Before Rose gets back, the Doctor’s already built his own way out, and it’s a much darker one. The delta wave would wipe out the Daleks, but it would also burn out every living thing on Earth in the process, because the wave can’t tell the difference between a Dalek and a human being. He sets it up. He’s ready to use it. And then, right at the point where he’d actually have to pull the switch, he can’t do it. “Coward, any day,” he says about himself, choosing that over becoming a killer, and I don’t buy that reading of him for a second. Refusing to commit a genocide to stop a genocide isn’t cowardice. It’s the one thing that’s kept him the Doctor and not just another weapon in this war.

This is the scene that made me sit up straighter than anything else in the episode. Christopher Eccleston plays it completely wrung out, a man who’s run every version of the maths and hates every answer he’s found, and when he finally puts his hand down instead of firing, it doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like he’s just accepted he’s about to die for that choice. I think that’s the whole point of who this Doctor is by the end of his run: he’d rather lose than become the thing he’s spent the whole season fighting.

It also lines up with everything else this season’s put him through. He’s had versions of this same choice before, whether to compromise who he is to survive, and every time he’s found some other way out that didn’t cost him his own conscience. This is the biggest stakes he’s faced yet, an entire planet against one species that’s tried to wipe him out before, and he still won’t make that trade. I don’t think a lesser finale gives him that option and lets him refuse it. Most shows would have him fire the wave and live with it. This one needed Rose to arrive in time so he never has to find out if he actually could have.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jaI9XTt7KRM%3Ffeature%3Doembed

Goodbye, Nine

Rose comes back before the delta wave ever fires, and once the Daleks are gone, she’s still burning with all that power and it’s killing her. The Doctor knows it, and he doesn’t hesitate. He kisses her, pulls the entire time vortex out of her and into himself, and it’s the kind of scene where I forgot to breathe for a second. Saving her costs him everything. A human body can survive touching that kind of power for a moment. A Time Lord’s can’t hold onto it at all, and he knows that the second he starts pulling it into himself.

And then he regenerates, right there in the TARDIS with Rose watching, and just like that Christopher Eccleston’s gone and David Tennant’s standing in his place, fixing his tie and asking about the coral on the console like nothing happened. I wasn’t ready for how much that hit me. I only got twelve episodes with this Doctor plus this finale, and somehow that was enough time to make his last line, “You were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And you know what? So was I,” land like a gut punch. This is a genuinely great finale: it pays off “Bad Wolf” properly instead of treating it as a gimmick, it lets the Doctor lose the fight and win anyway by refusing to become a monster, and it hands the show off to a new Doctor without ever making Eccleston’s run feel like a placeholder. I’m sad to see him go. I’m also, somehow, already looking forward to whoever David Tennant turns out to be.

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