The Impossible Countdown - The Lodger

Look, I've been ill.  Very ill.  And busy, something about working... anyway, ummmm, season 6 ends in a few hours so it's about time I try to finish season five.  I've got three lousy episodes ahead but first "The Lodger"

The Lodger.  A great comic strip but, unexpectedly, an even better episode!  I really wasn’t looking forward to this one when it was broadcast.  Swapping Tennant for Smith???  (Well, it’s not like they hadn’t done that already in a load of the early season five episodes)?  Swapping Mickey for James Corden?  Give me a break.

I forgot that Gareth Roberts really should be trusted more.

It’s one of Smith’s best performances of the season and, more importantly, it’s a very solid Doctor Who story.  It would work with pretty much any Doctor, the 7^th Doctor being mysterious but friendly, the 4^th Doctor coming in and just dominating things. “The Lodger” is a return to the proper days of Doctor Who with modern elements thrown in without them seeming too obvious.  Well, maybe a couple of scenes.  The headbutting, as glorious as it is with the flashback clips, is too over the top.  Far, far too over the top.  Ah well, at least it wasn’t kissing J

The design of the ship is stunning, someone’s given a serious amount of thought to how a TARDISthatisn’taTARDIS might look. There are roundels and a console like thing in the middle with the supports from the McGann movie.  There’s a creepy old man/young girl in homage to a Sapphire and Steel type atmosphere, there’s a Doctorsneakingoff moment that doesn’t work for the Doctor and a surprisingly low key use of time travel that seems to suit the low key nature of the episode (shame that a certain person will end up blowing it in a few episode’s time).  And there’s an ending to the plot that doesn’t quite work.  Why would there seemingly be a random one storey house in the middle of a long line of terraced houses?  The whole look of those final shots doesn’t do it for me.  It looks too obviously photoshopped as a bungalow.  Oh well…

“The Lodger” is one of the redeeming features of season 5. I’m very happy to have seen it… Shame it’s about to not just fall back down to the level of the previous episodes but plummet to new depths of incompetent writing…

Season 6 - The Impossible Astronaut/The Day of the Moon

Okay, so I haven't quite finished my season 5 re-watching but, as it happened, I don't think I've really forgotten much that was needed to "understand" the opening two parter.  It might have helped if I'd forgotten basic physics and left my brain at home but sadly I didn't and whilst episode one really was pretty decent, episode two bombed rather spectacularly.

Okay, racing through episode one as I've not got so much to say about it...  didn't like the opening silliness.  I'm guessing it was there to demonstrate the passing of two hundred years of the Doctor's life but it went just that little bit too far for my liking.  Plus whoever painted that portrait of Smith, they must have taken one hell of a bung to make his body look that good.  My money was actually on River getting killed so the Doctor trying to regenerate was something of a surprise (though I'm sorry to say I think I cheered for the wrong reasons when it started).  However, I guessed the "younger" Doctor turning up before he appeared on screen but, again, cheered when he got deservedly slapped.

Something to keep in mind is that, as we've seen it so far, River and the Doctor *aren't* meeting themselves in strict reversing order.  The 1100 year old Doctor meets River before the 900 year old one does so things are a little mixed up at least from time to time.

Another important snippet from episode one is that putting the TARDIS in invisible mode is a huge drain on its resources.  Just as well it only has to stay hidden for a few minutes eh?

The Silent in the loo knows all about Amy, so I'm guessing we can assume that telepathy goes along with their hide-and-seek skills and, whereas I think the mask on its face is superb, the hands look really dumb.  I can't quite work out what it is, I think it's the fingers look too wobbly being so long, maybe if they'd had more support in them to make it look like they actually had bones in there...  I'm not entirely sure what attacks Canton in the cellar either, the astronaut seems to be far too far away (though it also seems to have the ability to vanish into thin air at the start so we'll see what other powers it seems to have as we go through the season) and the Silents surely wouldn't have knocked him out?  So if someone could tell me for sure what whacks him?  So yes, a good episode one.

Then there's episode two.

I'm not entirely sure how Amy and Rory manage to stay on the run for three months.  Sorry but they just don't seem the sort who'd have had all that much practise at it.  River, yes... but Amy and Rory not a hope.  But anyway, episode two opens three months later and the Doctor has a beard (and not in the Time Crash sense either!).  Really don't know why this doesn't work for me, I'm guessing because it indicates that between adventures the Doctor is off shaving somewhere in the TARDIS.  Yes, I know we know there was seemingly a shaving mirror back in the days of the secondary console room, yes I know he grew one when aged in The Leisure Hive and yes I know the Master had one on his face as well but the beard (apart from looking a little fake) just doesn't seem "right" for just three months' worth of imprisonment.  What's worse is that the Doctor seems to think his prison is being built out of the densest material in the world.  A material so dense that quite large blocks of it can be shifted around by two people with ease!  And the blocks can seemingly be supported as a roof with no extra supports.  Er, no!  If this magic material is the densest thing in the world then two people shouldn't in any way, shape or form be able to move it like that and they certainly shouldn't have been able to build a box out of it (with a magic sliding door but that's just a minor niggle).

Once the prison is complete we find that the TARDIS is inside it in invisible mode which really does make you wonder how long it's been there given that episode one went out of its way to point out that invisibility mode was a huge drain on the power!  The Doctor then takes the ship back in time to save River who's thrown herself out of a window.  Ummmmm, so the Doctor will now quite happily nip back in time to save someone from certain death?  Probably just as well he didn't know how to do this for Adric or Katarina or the classic series might have turned out very differently.  This isn't just Moffat bashing by the way, ever since the Doctor nipped back into Martha's timeline in "Smith and Jones" to prove a point to her I've been growing very tired of the casual way the Doctor plays about with the time lines and the rescuing of River Song just happens to be the latest in a long line of sequences that really pissed me off.  Just you wait till I review A Christmas Carol, I'll REALLY let rip on that one!  So yes, the Doctor now sees nothing wrong with popping back a few days/weeks/months to save the falling River Song (who very fortunately guesses that the Doctor will drop her in the pool rather than onto, say, some mattresses).  Oh, and with the new look console room with the police box doors, I'm not sure what must have happened to the Doctor, Amy, Rory and Canton when they flipped the TARDIS onto its side to get River through the doors.

When Mulder and Scu...sorry, Canton and Pond investigate the orphanage we get introduced to the creepy janitor (I get the feeling we might see him again at the end of the year) and we're told that too much exposure to the mind wipe from the Silents drives you round the bend.  Now think back to how many markings Amy and co collected on their bodies whilst they were on the run and also think about how many times each random human probably (allegedly) sees a Silent.  Why isn't the whole population completely bonkers by now?  Still, the sequence with Amy in the locked room is a sign that Doctor Who can still do creepy when it wants to! And then we get the hatch in the door that disappears once Amy goes in the room and a mysterious woman's voice as she looks in.  That'll definitely be picked up, could the room have been a TARDIS in disguise?

We eventually find out that the Silents have been manipulating us pretty much since the dawn of time and that then raises some more questions.  Are we so dumb that we couldn't have evolved ourselves and secondly, why did it take the Silents thousands of years to get us to build a space suit?  Is the story seriously trying to say that the Silents couldn't push us any faster?  After all, the Doctor was terrified of Ace leaving her gheto blaster in the 60s in case it sped things up too much? I guess the Silents aren't as intelligent as they're trying to make out.  I also wonder if they change their look depending on human fashion, or if they've always worn a suit and tie.  Personally I can't wait to see one in a ruff....

Then we get to the big scene.  The bloody awful scene that pretty much shatters my faith in Doctor Who.  It's NOT the fact that the Doctor gets humanity to begin mass murdering the Silents (though it's pretty clear he didn't have any sort of backup plan and it looks like it was always going to be this or nothing), we've seen the Doctor desperate before (Vervoids, Warriors of the Deep, Genesis of the Daleks and so on).  What I really, deeply and thoroughly object to is the fact that Matt Smith's "Doctor" looks as though he's actually enjoying what he's doing.  He came across as completely lacking in remorse or any kind of guilt.  He was smiling, he was bounching up and down at the thought.  There was no sorrow, no "There should have been another way" moment, this was the Doctor ordering the deaths of thousands of living beings and not giving a damn about what he was doing.  To me, thats not Doctor Who, that's not the Doctor, that's some character I'm not sure I want to follow.  I certainly now no longer believe that whatever the Doctor does it's done with life as the most important thing.

Follow this up with something of a weird and major plot hole... the Doctor says that half a billion people will see the footage and will continue to see it for thousands of years but the other implication is that neither Amy nor Rory have ever seen it as they show no "pre-programmed" tendancy to kill Silents on sight.  Right from the very start of episode one Amy should and Rory should have been desperate to kill the Silent that we saw in the sunlight but no, not a single twitch in the trigger finger is evident.  Bit of a cock up there eh.

After the shoot out, River says something along the lines of "I hope my old man didn't see that".  Now, given the Doctor was in the room with her, does this (thankfully) mean that River ISN'T the Doctor's wife and that she's married to someone else?  I really hope so...

The Impossible Astronaut set things up superbly well.  Then along comes The Day of the Moon and really seems to do nothing other that spectacularly mess things up in a desperate attempt to try and look mysterious and set things up for the rest of the year.  I'm guessing that we'll be visiting the 60s again at some point and Amy will be responsible for the Silents being underground in their TARDIS-like room, I'm guessing the little girl that River thinks is human will turn out to be a human/TimeLord hybrid that the Silents have made with all their gadgetry and I'm guessing that it'll never be explained how humanity can go about massacring thousands of Silents and no one ever noticing what happens to the bodies.  Do they just pile up and no one notices them?  Do people trip over them constantly but not know why?  It's a badly thought out, completely non-Doctor Who solution that didn't have any place in the episode.

Bring back the Fifth Doctor.  He knew there should have been another way, this Eleventh one is just a git.

The Impossible Countdown - The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood

It's sad when a two part story can be summed up with the single word "yawn"

I'm not sure what it is that makes me so apathetic towards this story.  It's not actually "bad" as such, I think it's more that it's a half-arsed effort on pretty much every possible level.  The script, re-introducing the Silurians, is a rehash of... well... The Silurians (which is not good as it had already been rehashed as The Sea Devils) with a few bits of Inferno thrown in and a touch of The Daemons. The effects aren't the cheapest but the CGI explosion at the end looks rather lacklustre and whilst the large scale shots of the city try their best to look impressive, the running around the tunnels sections look as though the tunnels are made from polystyrene.  The regulars aren't particularly sparkling, Smith's not quite at his flattest here but he's completely lacking eloquence and the scenes where he's supposedly being all authoritative leave me thinking "well, I wouldn't be doing what you asked me".  Thankfully Amy's absent for a lot of the story leaving us left with a very underwhelming guest cast of two scientists, a kid and his tedious parents.  And given that they're allegedly heading for Rio at the start of the story, Amy and Rory look very VERY overdressed.

The first part also presents us with yet another impossibly short time scale.  They've got twelve minutes before the silurians arrive in the village and somehow, before the clock's even counted down to three minutes they've managed to wire up pretty much everywhere with cameras.  Nope, sorry, don't buy that for a second.  Nothing in that sequence feels remotely plausible and yet it could so easily have been more realistic (and weirdly probably even tenser) by making the time longer.  Alas, they went with twelve minutes and the scene seems more a spoof of Mission Impossible style set pieces than anything Doctor Who related. And when the silurians/homo reptilia do turn up they're missing their third eye and in possession of a very long (and cheap looking) CGI tongue.  They don't sound like silurians and yes, the Doctor "explains" this by saying they're a different branch of the family so to speak but, quite frankly, they completely bore me in a way that even the original seven parter would have been impressed by.  They've got their magic "we can hack into anything" technology though which seems to be able to turn a computer monitor into a two way camera.

The main problem with the story is the whole ending where Rory dies or, more importantly, the crack and the comments made about time.  The Doctor states that there are some points which are fixed and some points which are fluid. To me though, the presence of ANY fluid points completely eradicates the idea of a fixed point.  How could you have, say, a fixed point in the year 2040 when here, in 2020, the Doctor's saying that the future can be completely re-written anyway? So problem number one is that we've got internally inconsistent statements about the nature of time.  Problem number two concerns the fact that Amy forgets Rory.  She's a time traveller, so in the angels story we were told this meant she would remember things that other people didn't.  Yet here the Doctor says that as it's her own personal time that's being re-written she could forget?  So let me get this right, she's capable of remembering being taken into the middle of a forest (and I would still love to know how she got there unaided if she couldn't open her eyes) and the soldiers who assisted her (but who were then swallowed by the crack) but she almost instantly forgets the person she's madly in love with?  Which version of history does the Doctor remember?  The version of this story with or without Rory?  And with Rory gone, just how did the story actually unfold in the first place?  Does this mean that Vampires of Venice never happened (in which case why aren't we over run by fish people) and how have the other adventures changed as surely, without Rory, even The Eleventh Hour would be totally different? And we've now got a combination crack, one which the Doctor can reach into and pull TARDIS fragments from and one which also swallows people up. 

Finally, along with prisoner zero and River Song knowing the problems the Doctor will face, we've now even got the Silurians narrating it to us, just how does everyone in the universe except the Doctor know about all this???

So, in short (but not quite as short as a simple yawn), it's a cobbled together left over plot that smacks of lack of effort and starts to show just how badly thought out the crackpot crack plot is coming across.  And I demand a third eye!

The Impossible Countdown - Amy's Choice

Okay, so I didn't quite make it through season 5 before The Impossible Astronaut hit our screens but last week wasn't a good week for Who fans and things distracted me.  So only slightly later than planned... probably the best episode of the series.

Everything about this episode cries out "good old fashioned entertaining Who". There's a superb pre-credits teaser (yes, the Doctor's line into the theme is terribly cheesy and fourth wally but who cares, I love it) and I can't think we'd ever see the Doctor having to drop back in on a happily pregnant Amy with husband Rory after having dropped them back on earth.... I mean thank goodness it's all a dream :) We even get a "Space Museum" reference, how cool is that! Oh, okay, don't answer that one.

Just a shame that the superb cold opener is still followed by that theme music/title sequence.

Anyway, one of the greatest characters from season 5 (and, actually, quite a few of the recent seasons) is the Dream Lord.  Twisted, bitchy and played to absolute perfection, the Dream Lord really was one of the highlights of the year's episodes.  Part of me would like a re-match but I'm not sure how they'd go about doing it now that we know all about him.  Well, I say "him", we know nothing really about the Doctor and this is one of the few times that any attempt to look inside the Doctor's mind has thrilled me but this story mostly hangs on us not knowing his true identity till the very end and now we know his way of working as well... oh well, as a one off he was great.  Other things that are stunning about this episode include the ice covered console room (oh how I love the look of it, I wonder if when they do another console room we could have an ice themed one?), the CGI TARDIS freezing over and the fact the script doesn't feel like an old Tennant knock off, it actually starts to show the Smith Doctor as actually having his own traits.  Completely inappropriate ones admittedly but the self harm line still raises a smile whenever I hear it (the town I live in isn't quite as dull as the dream scenario but oh boy does it come close).  I love Rory's practical nature, I think the Doctor building a generator out of a whisk is inspired and death by dissolving into sand is also pretty grim.

As with pretty much everything in season 5 though, it's a story about perception and what's real/what's not. I am starting to get just a little tired of this and Amy is REALLY starting to irritate me now. When this was shown and Amy and Rory finally realised that they were made for each other I really and truly hoped that this would push Amy back to the background and let us concentrate more on the Doctor... we'll see how that panned out when I face the next two parter.

"Amy's Choice", absolutely superb.  I know quite a few people didn't like it but this, to me, is how a Doctor Who love story should be done.  Creepy, surreal and with possessed OAPs being hit with bits of wood.  I just wish it could all have been like this.

The Impossible Countdown - The Vampires of Venice

And now for the return of Rory.  I'm not normally a fan of cringe worthy humour but the bachelor party opening is great.  Admittedly I thought that those sorts of events rarely took place the night before the actual wedding but I'm guessing as this is supposed to be small town community then they still do it the old fashioned way.  Anyway, Rory's in the TARDIS and the Doctor promises a wedding present trip in the TARDIS (either that or tokens, nice line).

There are two stars of this episode and Rory is definitely one.  He's grown up since the Prisoner Zero event and although it takes him a while he copes with TARDIS stuff much better than other people have in the past. Throughout the episode his dumbstruck charm really kept me amused (much needed as the plot's wafer thin) and it's possibly the only time I've ever found a "your mum" joke funny.  Mind you, I probably found it funny because I found all the others rather dumb and the dumbness of the... okay, analysing the joke too much.  Anyway, Rory's definitely the star character in this one.  Amy's being bossy (which does nothing for me) and I'd have probably kicked her out of the TARDIS rather than become one of her "boys".  The Doctor's also a bit too goofy in places in this one, the mirror scene in particular is probably supposed to be charming or something but I think Smith over plays it a lot and there's a surprising lack of venom in him given he thinks he's facing vampires, the ancient enemy of his people...

The other star of the show is the whole look of it, it looks fantastic.  Often I've really wondered if it's actually been necessary to travel abroad to film things when really the story would have worked anywhere but this tale just looks sooooo brilliant and so sumptuous that you can't help but be impressed by the way it looks.  A good thing really as the plot, as I mentioned, isn't up to much.  Fish people lost their world, want ours.  They make it rain, the Doctor stops the rain, fish people die (one dies at the hands of possibly the world's most powerful makeup mirror).  Once more it's a perception story (how many now??) with the fish people wearing perception filters.  However, it doesn't quite work consistently.  Up until the end bits, whenever the perception filters have flickered off, the human form has been fully clothed but the fish version has been "naked".  At the end though, queen fish ceremonially removes her garments before throwing herself in the canal which would suggest the clothes are real?  If they are, how on earth do they contain the fish body?

The most important thing about this episode really is that it's setting up aspects of "The Silence" for season 6 (including the world falling silent at the end of the episode).  It also deals with cracks so let's see what we're told.

The cracks were everywhere in the universe (so presumably not just where Amy and the Doctor have been recently).
You can travel through the cracks from one part of the universe to another
The cracks close up behind you once you've travelled through them (of their own accord?)
Through some of the cracks they could "see (the?) silence"

Now these, to me, seem to be very different cracks to the ones presented in the previous two parter which seemed to be ones that ate you out of existence if you even went close to them as opposed to ones you could travel through!

Oh and the fish people, like everyone else in the universe, seem to know about Gallifrey and its fate.

It's a weird story, light on plot and hammers home the crack bits rather heavily.  It looks great (and I do love the clockwork bits at the end) but it's just not really got enough meat of its own to make it a good story. And one last thing... the Doctor makes it very clear at the end that time can't be changed.  So just something of a major change in opinion since last week then.  Ho hum.

The Impossible Countdown - The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone

Right then, let's start with a massively positive opening to the comments... classiest cold opener ever.  Seriously, in the whole of Who this two parter starts with possibly the best opening action of any story, ever.  And I have to admit that it stays pretty good for most of the first episode and probably quite a bit of the second one as well. It also sets up a few "key statements" about the ongoing plot which will turn out to be very important over the next few episodes...  which is where things then start to go a little wrong.

So anyway, after the superb cold opener (and after the less than superb titles which still leave me cold) we get a feisty TARDIS scene with the Doctor, River and Amy.  First gripe about the episode, River suggests that the only reason the TARDIS makes the noise that it does is because the Doctor leaves the brakes on.  Which would then suggest that EVERY OTHER TIME LORD DOES IT.  Sorry, I know it's supposed to be a charming joke about River and the Doctor's abilities but it still really rubs me up the wrong way. On the beach we get a diary scene and when Octavian turns up we find out that River has secrets that the Doctor doesn't yet know about which aren't going to endear her to him. We then get the start of some major "changes" to the angels nature.  Now, if you look one in the eye you become one (after a while).  Does that mean that Sally Sparrow (from Blink) is slowly turning into an angel?  A simple picture of an angel becomes an angel as well and we also find out that they also kill in nasty ways because they enjoy it. It's all wrapped up in some very well directed sequences though with Amy and the monitor screen so it just about moves you on before you have too much time to think about it.  The trek through the statues is exceptionally well done with full use made of caves as location footage and it's another mention of perception filters which again means we've got a story about how things are perceived and seen and disguised.  The cliffhanger is then... just a little strange.  It's one of those ones where you know what's going to happen next but aren't quite sure how it will happen.  Then it happens with a bit of technobabble and the story moves on.

So episode one was running through caves, episode two is running through corridors and running through woodland.  It doesn't quite look as stylish as the first episode did as the corridors look, well I suppose they just look like rather standard corridors and the woodland bits have a weird look to them that I can't quite put my finger on.  It's also a very crack heavy episode...

Things we learn:-
The cracks can be closed by throwing complicated space time events into them
The crack can move and looks as though it's following Amy around
The crack was caused by a very big bang and the Doctor can work out the date of the explosion
Fall into the crack/get too close to it and you're erased from time and everyone forgets about you.  However the universe carries on exactly as it was which means that, as the Doctor puts it, "Time can be rewritten".  Once the soldiers are in the crack presumably 99.9999% of the universe remembers some weird way that Amy managed to get into the middle of the woodland area on her own (that's got to be some majorly weird re-writing going on!).
If you're a time traveller then you don't forget the people who fell into the crack.  And that's probably quite an important one as it might be cropping up again in a few episodes' time
Even though it looks like the crack is following Amy, the Doctor suggests that it might have been there when the cyber king stomped over London and rewrote that as well somehow.

It's quite neat the way the Doctor solves things in this one but there seem to be an awful lot of times in the second episode where it looks as though the angels are clearly looking at each other when they're moving (it's certainly the impression I got anyway).  More mysteriousness on the beach (River remembers being there when the Pandorica opened) and then the final scene which is the start of the bullying Amy appearing.  To be honest, I really wish it hadn't happened.  From this point on Amy becomes very dominant in pretty much every episode and it feels once more as though it's a show about her rather than the Doctor.

Overall, episode one is much better than episode two, the angels are very different this time around and it does look pretty.  It is also clearly setting up future episodes so...

Things we learn about River:-
She knows old high gallifreyan
She's travelled in time and views herself as a complicated space time event
She remembers the pandorica (even though the Doctor seems to now think it's just a fairy tale?)
She killed a good man.

It's ALMOST back to the levels of the Tennant years but it seems too ongoing plot fixated in the second part to really thrill me and the constant repetition of the "time can be rewritten" didn't half get on my nerves...  Still, an improvement on Victory of the Daleks :)  Mind you, pretty much anything would have been...

The Impossible Countdown - Victory of the Daleks

Apparently, in his DWM interview, the writer seems convinced that the only reason people don't like this episode is the new look daleks.  Personally I don't like it because the plot's a steaming pile of badly thought out crud which has clearly started with the words "spitfires in space" and not really gone much past the thinking about things in any detail stage.

Starts well, the very short cold opener is a corker with the daleks established straight away (thankfully no surprise reveals here as in Destiny, Planet, Genesis etc).  The Doctor's late for an appointment once more (more of which next episode) and Amy did at least take the time to get dressed (as did Churchill).  When the "ironsides" show up they're superb.  And then the plot kicks in and things start to fall apart.  Apparently it was only "a few months ago" that Bracewell came up with the idea of the daleks.  Presumably he worked on them 100% on his own otherwise why would no one else start to question the speed at which completely perfect, working devices were created with technology way beyond anything we ever had.  And presumably no one else had access to the plans or to any of the "technology" used to create them otherwise someone else might have conceivably tried to make them.  The fact there's a dalek gun laying around in Bracewell's lab and no one's even suggested giving the foot soldiers these to assist in the war?  Also, wouldn't Torchwood be just a little interested?

Winston Churchill, the "brilliant" Winnie, continues the long running UNIT style tradition of not paying a blind bit of notice to the Doctor who has, presumably, had a great track record with them in the past but presumably he's too hot on Bracewell (who the daleks have presumably somehow created an absolutely perfect cover/background story for in order for the government to take him on?) to care.  After all, Bracewell has "musings" on anti gravity devices and hyper sonic thingies.

So the daleks then reveal themselves as being bad (I'm guessing the Doctor's bored of saying "I told you so" by now?) and shoot Bracewell's hand off to show how evil they are.  And somehow, once the hand's been blow away, Bracewell's arm gets suspiciously longer. I'm guessing that no-one notices as they're all wondering just why a loon in a bow tie going "you're the daleks" suddenly made them go bad.  Apparently it's because the daleks' progenitor won't recognise the daleks as daleks but will recognise someone saying "you're the daleks". Which does raise the question of where are these daleks from?  Are they the ones that were grown from Davros' cells (which would make them pretty pure)?  Presumably they've got to be from the pre-Davros time in which case where did they come from as they were all sucked back into the void? But whatever, apparently the progenitor is going to make new "pure" daleks, though I'm guessing they're not too worried about being pure in the casing front as the new daleks are unlike any we've seen before.  I just want to go up to them and see if they make a buzzer sound when you press their head down.  Nothing I can really say about the new daleks that hasn't been said a thousand times before on other websites.  Then the new daleks decide to turn Bracewell into a giant bomb, just before they do a runner.  Thankfully though there's a very convenient "emotion over-ride" cut off that I'm sure the daleks put in just in case they somehow needed to deactivate the bomb that they wanted to be de-activate-able? A bomb, by the way, that must be of Slitheen design as once it's revealed suddenly makes his body look twice as big.

I've saved the "spitfires in space" bit till last.  Earlier in the episode Bracewell suggests that he has "musings" about anti gravity devices.  When the daleks somehow light up the whole of London, we're told that the Nazis are ten minutes away.  So somehow the brits take musings, get them fitted to spitfires, launched and up to the dalek ship in well under ten minutes.  The pilots are familiar enough with the devices to be able to fly the planes perfectly and do fancy manoeuvres. Right. Okay. And none of the other scientists question this, remember how to make things?  The Doctor manages to completely clear everything away that's dalek tech (other than the gun still clearly visible in the lab along with other things) and presumably wipes everyones' memory as well? 

I don't hate Victory of the Daleks because of the new look daleks.  Completely implausible, impractical and over the top daleks fit in with the massively unrealistic plot and the grossly overblown nature of the story (how long does the ending drag on for???).  Even the small things bug the hell out of me, when the TARDIS dematerialises infront of Amy and Winston, Amy's hair is blown around artistically but Winston's cigar smoke floats on unhindered.

Oh, the crack appears about three quarters of the way through as it's not there when the TARDIS takes off for the first time but it's there when it goes for the second.  And we find out that Amy doesn't remember the daleks at all.  Sadly, the rest of us will suffer the memories of "Victory of the Daleks" for a long time to come...

The Impossible Countdown - The Beast Below

Alrighty, story two of season five and the short version is - SOOOOOOOOO much better than "The Eleventh Hour".  Not perfect (though brilliantly charming in its own way) with only one real criticism and a performance from Mr Smith that could almost have been the Doctor...

Firstly we get a cold opener that's actually relevant to the whole story.  As you may have gathered from the previous episode, there was a certain amount of showing off (some of which gets repeated in this one) but this is a classy opener which has relevance later on.  It also has, sadly, a continuity error in that in the upwards looking shot just before the floor opens you can clearly see the smiler with its teeth showing and THEN the head rotates to show the teeth.  Sadly, on the DVD release, this is then followed by the more traditional rendition of the theme music complete with crappy sounding lightning effects.  Oh so tempting to lift one of the versions off YouTube where someone with talent and/or too much time on their hands has put better music to the visuals.  Or indeed, put better music to better visuals.  Anything other than the candy floss tunnel of fear.

Matt Smith plays the Doctor in an almost Sylvester McCoy like professorial manner with Amy very much as his protege.  The relationship between them is quite watchable in this one (because Amy spends most of it in a state of shock and doesn't get irritatingly bossy at any point) and the opening where she's floating around outside the TARDIS really is quite sweet.  It's just as well that Starship UK is very much based on the twentieth century model of England otherwise who knows how badly shocked she would have been.  The starship idea is a brilliant one, utterly Doctor Who in its ridiculousness but played brilliantly straight by everyone concerned and it's realised superbly on the screen.  The smilers are a well realised menace (even if the third face appearing out of nowhere doesn't work in my mind but ho hum, that's just my mind for you) but you do have to wonder just how crap the next few hundred years of living are if the 1950s are seen as the golden age.  Amy gets attacked by a tendril (again) and we get closeups of eyes as people have flashbacks (again).  At least it's not the Doctor this time but it's weird how we've now had two stories with very similar themes in a row (things being masked by perception).  One big question that gets raised though (and I don't recall ever being answered) is about Amy's marital status.  Is this supposed to foreshadow Rory's disappearance from time later in the season because surely, if Rory goes, then she either marries someone else or just remains a kissogram for the rest of her life?

It's not the most subtle of stories (with the Doctor's line about voting every five years and forgetting everything you've learned) but that's not my main problem.  My main issue is with the ending.  The Doctor comes VERY close to making a monumental cockup and Amy is the one who saves the day.  Now, if I'm being charitable then I could put this down to the Doctor only having regenerated a day or so previously and thus not being fully functional but it still seems very odd for the Doctor to get it so categorically wrong.  If someone wants to tell me other times he's been quite so incorrect I'd love to know because I can't think of many times he's been this close to catastrophe. 

So, if I'm being charitable (and I'm having a good day today so I will be) then I'll put the Doctor's error down to post regenerative stress syndrome and say that this is a story that's almost infinitely better than Eleventh Hour.  It still has a gross out scene involving food but this time it's relevant to the plot.  It's well acted by everyone, it doesn't have quite such cheap looking CGI and it has a cliffhanger ending that makes the next story look really good.  See, it's amazing how much crap you can disguise if you really want as, of course, it's Victory of the Daleks next... still, The Beast Below was good whilst it lasted :)

The Impossible Countdown - The Eleventh Hour

I survived the cybermen so I thought I'd put myself through the wringer once more and try and get through season five (Matt Smith version) before the start of season six part one (or whatever it's being called).  People who know me will know that I wasn't the biggest fan of the season when it aired.  People who know me will also know that's something of an understatement.  I really didn't like it with a capital REALLY.  However, so that I give season six a fairer chance it's probably a wise idea if I revisit season 5 and see if my opinion of it has changed (I've changed myself quite a bit since then so it could potentially be interesting). It also might help me get my brain around what allegedly happened at the end of it.  So, starting with the Eleventh Hour...

Short version... make it "The Eleventh Forty Five Minutes" and I might like it. The middle of it is an alright episode but there's so much extraneous crud in there that it detracts from anything worthy.  Starting with the pre-credits sequence which seems to have little (if anything) to do with the main episode.  Basically it's the team wanting to show off at the start and, to me, well it just doesn't quite work.  Especially as there's enough time jumping around in the episode itself without an extra time period at the start (we're clearly post 2000 in the pre-credits thanks to the buildings shown).  The spike to the balls joke also suggests we're once more aiming at kids rather than adults... First trim I'd make, get rid of the fly over and start with the young Amelia praying (a superb performance through the episode) and end it with the Doctor's appearance out of the TARDIS.  "Can I have an apple" being a very unexpected line to start the theme on.

Oh dear goddess, the theme.  Thankfully I watched this one from the DVD which doesn't have the lightning effects all over it, thus making it marginally less painful to listen to.  I remember sitting in horror at this disco fanfared version and it's still not really grown on me.  It's just a damn good job the effects aren't on top of it on the DVD. And the visuals... let's just say that I'm sure I've seen it before on a colonoscopy.  Anyway, back to the plot and one of the most abhorrent scenes I can remember in a long time.  The "spitting out the food sequence".  I hated it.  I still hate it.  I think it's an abominable scene that I wouldn't just take a cutting blade to, I'd take blades, flame throwers and acid to it just to get rid of it.  First impressions are important and this set the eleventh Doctor up as a rude, vulgar and unpleasant person to panders to racial stereotypes. An abomination that I deeply wish had never made the final show.

The crack then appears properly.  Here it's presented as a join between two bits of the universe that shouldn't ever be pushed together.  Yes, it then also appears on the TARDIS scanner (more of which later), but it seems to be closed up when the Doctor does his usual wafting of the sonic screwdriver. A very Tennanty wafting. Which is the main problem with a lot of this episode.  Smith is playing a second rate Tennant.  The dialogue mostly sounds Tennant, there's Tennant in the mannerisms and, although I'm sure it's not the case, there's the air of "we wrote it for Tennant and changed it at the last minute" about things. Except the production values, they're sub Tennant.  When the snake Prisoner Zero observes Amy the green screen work looks exceptionally cheap and I just sat there thinking "What is this, the rough cut?".

Sad geek that I am, I made a mental note of when the Doctor first said twenty minutes to death.  Give the production team their credit, when the Doctor saves things and says there were two minutes to spare, there really were two minutes to spare.  However, the preceding shots don't feel as though they flow uninterrupted.  It feels very much like a condensed set of shots and my brain just can't see them as having taken eighteen minutes to complete in real time. Some of the shots also feel as though they're trying to build up to something that we never see.  A big thing is made of the duck-less duck pond.  Jeff feels as though he's going to become important.  Annette Crosby feels as though she should come back in a future episode... but none of this ever gets brought back.  Thankfully something else that doesn't come back is the "Doctor's Point of View" sequence.  That's another huge no no when it comes to Who.  The Doctor's the mysterious one, I don't want to see things from his side, I want to be amazed by him.  The almost stop motion sequence did nothing for me and I'm glad that it never came back.

Next issue is the whole virus thing.  Yes, it's a neat way of doing it BUT it's one of those things where you've got to think "What were the consequences?"  You've re-set all the counters in the world to zero (except for the ones needed to artistically animate big 0s on every handy display screen) which must have done some damage somewhere in the world.  Plus there's no indication that the Doctor gives out the cure to it as well.

In the monster clip show, we get a whole load of aliens who have invaded the Earth along with the Ood and it looked like the fishy people thingies from "The Doctor's Daughter".  Setting the scene for something ahead?

Two more things that I still don't like about this episode.  Firstly, Prisoner Zero clearly has knowledge of both the Pandorica and the Silence.  Now, I know at this stage we're not supposed to know what they are (though when it was first shown I really didn't like the sledgehammer subtlety with which the season's arc was introduced!) and when I finally make it to Pandorica/Big Bang then I'll be revisiting this to work out just how Prisoner Zero could have known, if it should have known at all.  And finally... the TARDIS console room.  Bleugh.  Just bleugh.  When the TARDIS was supposed to have been the Doctor's home and rebuilt using whatever came to hand I could accept all the weirdness and cobbled nature of the console but here we're supposed to be seeing a console that the TARDIS itself rebuilt.  The hot and cold taps, I think, were more than a step too far.  My overall feeling of it was that they changed it because they knew they were going to be in HD but wanted to make it bigger than the previous one just because they could and with no real need to.

Overall, it wasn't as bad as I remembered it being. There are some good bits to it.  But it feels as though it's a script that was originally going somewhere but got diverted without the original drafts being neatened up. And it needs a serious editing to get rid of some of the pointless and vulgar bits.  An hour might be offered but if you've not got enough to fill it then you should decline for the sake of the programme and keep it much tighter.  Still, it's going to get worse before it gets better.  Then it'll get worse again and again and again...