The Doctor lands on Earth, which promptly vanishes. The TARDIS is in the right location, but the planet isn’t. It’s been taken, nowhere to be found in the universe, and nobody knows what’s going on. UNIT, including Martha Jones, will be working overtime, as will Torchwood, headed by Jack Harkness. More informally, the journalist Sarah Jane Smith is trying to work out what happened, whilst Rose Tyler, Jackie Tyler and Mickey Smith have come to help the Doctor. If only they could find him; the Doctor has no idea where the planet is now.

Poor old Earth doesn’t even have the distinction of being unique. There are twenty-six other planets that have gone missing, and the Doctor finds out that they’ve been taken to construct some sort of engine. The first question is what this engine could possibly be for, and the second question is who’s constructing it.

The second question is the first to be answered. It’s the Daleks, which is such bad news that I think curling up into a foetal position and drinking oneself into a coma would be a pretty good idea at this point. What’s worse is that the Daleks have come back not only with a Supreme Dalek and hundreds of battleships, but with their creator! Davros is back, and he’s as ruthless and insane as ever.

( But don't get your hopes up )

One day Donna Noble had a choice. She was driving to her new temporary job at HC Clements, and stopped briefly at a junction. If she turned left, she would go to HC Clements, if right, she would go to see someone about a more permanent job. She ultimately turned left and went to HC Clements. Her job would lead her to meet the Doctor that Christmas, as the Rachnos tried to take over the world.

Enter something nasty, something that made her turn right instead. Donna never met the Doctor, meaning that although he defeated the Rachnos, he drowned whilst doing so. An Earth without its Doctor – how bad could it be?

Pretty bloody bad.

Donna doesn’t even have any memories of the Doctor, which means that when a strange blonde woman keeps turning up she doesn’t know what to make of it. But we do; we follow Donna from the Rachnos invasion to the Sontaran attack, as Britain falls under martial law, ‘labour’ camps are set up (ahem) and millions continue to die. At last the blonde woman is able to convince Donna to help, because she knows what was supposed to happen. The Doctor was not supposed to die, and the only person who can help now is Donna…



Turn Left is this season’s Doctor-lite adventure, leaving us all alone with Donna Noble. Fortunately for everyone, the complete and utter misery pervading this adventure means that any attempt at comedy would fall flat, and so Catherine Tate doesn’t have many jokes. And I really do mean complete and utter misery; the only surprise is that the human race survives for so long.

This adventure is so loaded with continuity that you will only fully appreciate how ghastly all its implications are if you’ve been following the last two seasons, preferably three seasons, regularly. If you haven’t… well, don’t start watching here, that’s all I can say. For the rest of us fans, however, it’s fascinating to see what could have happened if the Doctor died. The adventure is such an unusual one that you can’t help but admire the concept. You also feel that Davies set himself a challenge here as well, just as he did for Midnight. With the Doctor gone, who would be left to help? How can past events be arranged to ensure that, for example, the Sontaran attack still fails?

The Rachnos attack isn’t too devastating for the planet because the Doctor stops it at the cost of his life. The next incident – the ‘theft’ of Royal Hope Hospital in Smith and Jones - is more disturbing. Martha Jones dies through oxygen starvation, and whilst that episode’s villain is defeated, saving the Earth from a massacre, Sarah Jane Smith dies in the attempt.

The Titanic from Voyage of the Damned crashes into Buckingham Palace, destroying London and irradiating southern England. Refugees are taken to the north, with several extended families having to share one house (Donna’s family have to sleep in the kitchen). Sixty million Americans die as Miss Foster from Partners in Crime converts them into baby Adipose, and whilst the Torchwood team stop the Sontaran attack, they die as well. Meanwhile, all foreigners in Britain are taken to, er, ‘labour’ camps. All this adds up to such a grim picture that Donna’s final action to correct the time line seems practically inevitable. As Rupert Giles would have said, whatever a universe with the Doctor is like, it has to be better than this.

Davies’s solution to his challenge isn’t totally successful. The Titanic crash should have wiped out all life on the planet – possibly Midshipman Frame was able to do something? – and Davies only concentrates on contemporary events. However, (for example), the Doctor’s death means that the Pyroviles back in The Fires of Pompeii would have wiped out all human life years ago. On the other hand, this is rather nitpicking. I’m content to admire the results this time around, as doing justice to all the plot’s implications would be tedious and not worth the effort. What we get from Davies is a real sucker punch, and one that I’m rather grateful for.

As the episode revolves around Donna we in her company for most of it. The combination of Tate/Davies/comedy does not work well, but the adventure is such a bleak one that comedy is at a minimum. Donna does bellow at times, but becomes increasingly subdued as her situation gets steadily worse. From the sheer of volume of tragedies that fall on top of her and everyone else, it’s difficult not to feel for her.

A major plot point of the adventure is that Rose Tyler returns. I can’t help thinking that Billie Piper seems a little ill for this adventure – she’s noticeably back to normal in the season’s finale – and it’s a bit distracting. On the other hand, it’s amusing to see her finally being ‘the mysterious character’ herself, as opposed to the all-knowing but silent Doctor.

The next adventure is the season finale, in which the Doctor fights the Daleks and wins, and Russell T Davies fights the audience and fails.

Austria is passing a law for civil partnerships, effective from 1 January 2010. Congratulations Austria!

(Alright – I couldn’t resist. The Waters of Mars was first shown on television today, and so I’m reviewing it out of sequence. It takes place after the fourth season and after the adventures The Next Doctor and Planet of the Dead. I’ve not seen those adventures yet, but… well, The Waters of Mars is such an interesting episode that I’d like to get my thoughts down now.)

The Doctor, still without a companion at the moment, is sightseeing. He lands on Mars and whilst wandering around stumbles upon a colony base, headed by Captain Adelaide Brooke. At first the Doctor is glad to see them, notwithstanding their suspicions on seeing a stranger in their midst. However his pleasure turns into horror when he realises what the mission actually is. It is 23rd November 2059, and this is Earth’s first mission to Mars. They have been there for over a year, and today is the day when every member of the crew dies. Brooke will be hailed as a hero back on Earth, leading to others taking her lead and pushing Earth’s space program further than ever before.

So the Doctor can’t alter anything. He shouldn’t - it’s Pompeii all over again. But he’s still going to see the end come, and it starts very soon after his arrival. Something is possessing members of the crew, something in the water supply. Something that even creates water; water that can seep through ceilings and airlocks, contaminating whatever it touches. Something that would just love to get to Earth, a planet with a surface covered 60% with water.

There’s no choice. The Doctor has to allow events to run their course. Doesn’t he?



The TV listings magazine Radio Times played this up as ‘the scariest Doctor Who ever!’ That might be good advertising; it’s not the most honest, though. First of all, yes, this is one of the ‘horror’ adventures, and it succeeds admirably, but I’m not sure it can claim to be the scariest so easily. The real problem, however, is that it seriously undersells the adventure. If you’re only looking for a frightfest you’re missing half the content. After beating The Fires of Pompeii to death for botching its premise so much, I was amazed to see The Waters of Mars tackle precisely the same issue and pull it off.

The Fires of Pompeii asked why the Doctor couldn’t change history – why, for example, he couldn’t save people from the eruption of Versuvius, or prevent the Second World War. It then proceeded to spend the entire forty-five minutes avoiding having to answer the question. In The Waters of Mars the same situation arises. People are going to die if the Doctor doesn’t help, and because of history he can’t afford to help. (By the way, it’s good to see the problem happen with a future event – as I’ve said before, it’s very rare to see the Doctor refuse to change events in the audience’s own future) However, in Waters the question is (almost) ignored in favour of a different angle. There’s no companion to argue with. There’s just the Doctor, ever conscious that he should leave and not look back. Waters is about the crushing responsibility of knowing that people will die and doing nothing to prevent it.

The style of the episode – horror – is thus perfect for the dilemma. The more horrible the fate of the victims, the more agonising it is when you try to ignore it. In a brilliant scene towards the climax, the Doctor is walking back to the TARDIS in his space suit, which is still rigged up to the communications system. He is thus able to hear three people die, but he must keep walking…

And he can only do it at the last moment. At first he cannot leave the base, as his spacesuit has been confiscated. But by the time it is returned to him, the problems have already started. His natural curiosity won’t allow him to leave until the last possible moment, and neither will his reluctance to abandon the innocent crew. As the remaining survivors run around the central compound, collecting supplies for their ‘lifeboat’ rocket back to Earth, the Doctor stands there, watching them. Watching the monitors as the ex-human creatures try to get in. Not helping, but not leaving either.

One other person knows what’s going to happen. Captain Brooke is not the most easy-going of leaders, but she is brilliant at her job and cares about her team. The Doctor not only admires her for her professional achievements and the example she sets for the human race, but because she is at heart a good person. She also has the same drive as he does to explore the universe. She is someone he can relate to. His respect for her and his inability to keep his mouth shut leads to him dropping too many hints, and she finally gets the truth from him. In order to stop the creatures, Brooke will end up detonating a nuclear bomb under the base.

There are no hysterics, and Brooke is determined to fight, but she never questions the Doctor’s sincerity. She never tells any of the crew, and still tries to get to the rocket. But once she realises there is no other way out, she initiates the detonation procedure without a qualm, even whilst the Doctor finally tries to save the remaining crew members. Why would she prefer to walk to her own death than survive? Ironically, because of the Doctor.

To cushion the blow, the Doctor has told her what her death will lead to. Her death means that Earth will reach out even further into the cosmos, further than she could ever dream. If she does not die, history will be changed. This bit of sympathy means that Brooke knows her fate is fixed; she doesn’t want the Doctor to interfere because she doesn’t want history altered. She knows the law of unintended consequences.

And I’m on her side. Because the Doctor goes mad.

As he walks away from the base, hearing the deaths of the crew, the Doctor decides to fight back, time and history be damned. Donna Noble will get her wish, albeit too late for Pompeii. But what prompts this change of heart? The real answer is that the Doctor is psychologically incapable of letting go. He has to intervene or he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. But he rationalises this in a horrible, horrible way. He claims that he is the last of the Time Lords, so what he says goes. He is able to do anything at all, able to choose who should live and who should die.

That, my friends, is the most terrifying part of the adventure. The Doctor as God - something other Doctors would flee from as fast as they could. It is literally madness, and Brooke recognises it for what it is.

The Doctor rescues her. And then she shoots herself.

She has to. It might not matter where exactly she dies, but she has to die. As it turns out, not only for the sake of the human race, but for the sake of the Doctor. It brings him back to his senses, horrified by what he’s been saying.

One must wonder if Russell T Davies has been taking notes from critics here. I’m not the only one to complain about Davies setting the Doctor up as a god. This seems to be Davies’s response to such accusations, an answer that he would never go the full distance.

The Waters of Mars, then, is not a ‘mere’ horror story. But even if it were, it would be terrific. The monster make-up, with black mouths and cracked skin, is suitably horrible, but the genius is in making water the threat. The creatures are soaked in it, with it constantly pouring out of their cuffs and mouths, and a single drop of it is enough to turn someone. (I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few children were nervous about cleaning their teeth tonight!) Water can also get everywhere, leading to a brilliant moment as it cascades through the ceiling, trapping one of the crew members. In tears as it moves ever closer, her last sight is of a video transmission made by her children – a final remembrance before she transforms.

I’m also fond of the moment when we find out that one drop of water really is sufficient to turn someone. As the crew try to get to the rocket, the victim tells them that they have no choice; they must leave him behind…

There isn’t a single weak link in the cast, and I have to single two people out for praise. The first is Lindsay Duncan. Apparently the Doctor Who team have been trying to get Duncan to appear in the programme for some time, but something has always prevented them. I can only say that it was worth the wait. Duncan gives one of the best performances of a guest star in Doctor Who. Her role is difficult, but wholly successful. You believe in her character, you can see why the Doctor admires her, and when she argues with the Doctor just before her suicide the cold anger is almost tangible.

The second person deserving accolades is David Tennant. A few small moments aside, this is possibly the best performance he’s given yet as the Doctor.

I hope it continues, because the next two episodes are his swansong. The Master is back (hurrah! It’s John Simm, too!), as are Donna and Wilf – looks most promising!




PS – It appears that by 2059 Russia has legalised gay marriage. Congratulations, Russia. In order to fulfil the programme’s prediction, I recommend you draft the law as quickly as possible.

The website Good As You has unearthed a fascinating piece of history. In September 1917 the voters in Maine went to the polls once more, this time to grant or deny women the right to vote. Some people apparently voted no even though they didn't understand what the vote was about.

The anti-suffrage crowd was out in force, stoking up support for their archaic and unfair opinions. The pro-suffrage crowd pointed out that there was no good reason not to give women the vote. Newspapers carried adverts calling for equal rights.

And the pro-suffrage side lost, by a far greater margin than the pro-gay side lost last week.

The pro-suffrage side vowed to continue fighting. Two years later, the voters of Maine ratified the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, and women gained the right to vote.

You can see some of the material at http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2009/11/maine-september-1917.html

I should have blogged this earlier, but I have an almost neurotic compulsion about certainty. Washington's voters have approved a law allowing domestic partnerships for same-sex couples.

The vote was a postal vote, so the count took longer than Maine's did. But it's all over now - the pro-partnership vote cannot be beaten.

The ballot featured the following question -

The legislature passed Engrossed Second Substitute Senate Bill 5688 concerning rights and responsibilities of state-registered domestic partners and voters have filed a sufficient referendum petition on this bill.

This bill would expand the rights, responsibilities, and obligations accorded state-registered same-sex and senior domestic partners to be equivalent to those of married spouses, except that a domestic partnership is not a marriage.

Should this bill be approved/rejected?

There's that not a marriage thing again. Rub it in, why don't you...

But, in comparison to Maine, the vote went in the pro-gay direction early on and stayed there. The current results are -

Approved 855,457 52.56 %
Rejected 772,258 47.44 %

Congratulations Washington!

The breakdown of voting by county makes for interesting reading. Most of the counties actually rejected the bill, but those that approved it typically had the larger populations. This is like the Maine breakdown, where the anti-gay side won primarily on the strength of the rural counties.

The first thing to say is - gosh. If the anti-gay groups were chortling with glee over the Maine result - 'Democracy has spoken! The public doesn't like gays!' - this will sober them. Nobody thought that November would be the end of the fight for either side of the battlefield, but this is extremely encouraging. A public vote has swung in the pro-gay favour on such a huge issue - if it's possible here, it will be possible elsewhere.

And things get better when you consider how Washington voted in 1997. That year an anti-discrimination law was up for the vote. Though it looked absurdly weak, it would have prevented anti-gay discrimination in certain areas in the workplace.

The result of that poll was abysmal. Every single county in Washington voted against it. Twelve years later, however, gays and lesbians are getting domestic rights that would give the Pope a heart attack. And almost every single county reported an increase in pro-gay voting as well - there was only one exception.

So, despite Maine, the pro-gay contingent is alive and kicking. Clearly something is being done right. I can only hope that in future the anti-gay groups get ever more desperate...

The Doctor and Donna are on holiday. (Well, come on. They can’t be running away from Sontarans every day of the week) They are visiting a holiday colony on the otherwise inhospitable planet of Midnight. It appears to be a popular destination, and Donna decides to laze around by a swimming pool drinking cocktails. The Doctor, being the Doctor, is more interested in wandering around the place, and decides to go on a day trip to see a sapphire waterfall. It’s a four hour journey there on board a space truck with a few other passengers, and the Doctor, being the Doctor, decides to make some new friends rather than endure the obnoxious on-board entertainment.

Before long the passengers are all getting along well, until the truck breaks down. For no reason. In the middle of nowhere. It won’t be too long until the rescue team arrives, but it’s never that simple with the Doctor, is it? Something is outside and it wants to get in, to the extent of ripping out the truck’s front cabin and killing the pilots. Leaving isn’t an option. There’s no air outside and even if there were, the radiation is fatal. So the only thing to do is sit tight and wait calmly for the rescue team.

As if that’s going to happen. Something ‘infects’ one of the passengers. She does nothing except repeat – repeat everything said by everyone, no matter how stupid or convoluted. So everyone had better shut up, including the Doctor.

But come on, as if that’s going to happen. You know how the Doctor always raves about how great the human race is? He’s about to reassess that opinion.



There’s always one of them, in every season. It’s the episode without a big budget, which means there can’t be many special effects. It cannot be a visual extravaganza. In the Christopher Eccleston season we got Boomtown (aka Nothing happened here today for all the plot in it). Then we got Love and Monsters, which sharply divided fans. Half loved it. The other half loathed it; in my opinion it’s one of the worst adventures of the new run of Doctor Who. Afterwards came Blink, which I admired hugely. This season has Midnight.

Love and Monsters and Blink were both Doctor-lite. Tennant headlined the show, but he was not in the adventure for very long, and neither was his companion. Midnight goes in the other direction; the Doctor is onscreen all the time, whilst Donna only appears at the very beginning and the very end. I have a feeling that Russell T Davies set himself a challenge for this one – write an adventure that takes place in one scene and in real time. Not only that, but the scene must be very small; the passenger space on the cruiser is very compact. So there can be no running, no chases, no escapes. The Doctor cannot retreat.

Faced with this problem Davies… well, he doesn’t cheat. But he does distract. Very little really happens in Midnight to the passengers. Woman gets ‘possessed’, the entity tries to ‘possess’ the Doctor and fails, and that’s it. So, what’s left? Characterisation and fear.

Fear, precisely because the space is so limited. There is something there and it is with the passengers and they don’t know what it can do and they cannot escape from it. Whatever Ms Silvestri is now, she certainly isn’t human. What makes the passengers panic so much isn’t that she’s repeating things, it’s that she just will not stop, even when everyone’s talking at once. And then, having creeped the audience out, Davies ramps everything up to stage two – Silvestri doesn’t just repeat what you say, she repeats it as you say it. There’s no time lapse. And afterwards, stage three – Silvestri only repeats what the Doctor says. She’s singled him out.

Stage three isn’t the most disturbing of the stages, but Davies has a back-up plan. If Silvestri doesn’t creep us out enough, the human characters will. They aren’t the Doctor. They are easily panicked. They are scared of Silvestri and her repetitions, they are afraid of what she might do, so, they think, why don’t they just throw her out to die?

The Doctor is having none of this, of course, but he is one man with no authority and a great deal of hostility against him. He hasn’t given the passengers his name and he didn’t book the trip in advance, meaning that he’s just turned up from nowhere. For once we see the Doctor completely without backup and he is unable to rise to the occasion. More than that, the creature is able to use the passengers’ paranoia against him, knowing full well that he is the most threatening person on board.

That’s one of the most bizarre things about Davies. He gives us a manic Doctor, would probably stage a Doctor Who musical if he thought he could get away with it, and yet some of his scripts are amongst the most vicious of the series. It’s not that the passengers decide to throw someone out to die, it’s that they’re so eager to do it. At the end, they’re all helping out, a wonderful example of teamwork to do something dreadful. The ultimate kicker is that even if they were morally right, they’re throwing out the wrong person.

After the danger has passed, the Doctor spends another half hour or so waiting for the rescue team with these people. What do they say to him? What could they say to him? How do they live with themselves afterwards? In a way, the most interesting moments of Midnight aren’t shown.

And the best thing about the adventure? No love interest!

Next time around we get to see what would happen if the Doctor weren’t here to help us humans. Short version – we’re utterly, utterly screwed.

Occasionally the Doctor finds another person’s writing on his psychic paper, asking him to come to a particular place. This time someone anonymous has asked him to come to the Library – so big, it doesn’t need a name. It is a planet of books, containing every novel, biography, monograph, comic ever written. When the time travellers arrive, it’s very quiet; in fact according to the library computer they are the only humanoid creatures on the entire planet. On the other hand, when the computer scans for any kind of lifeform it counts over a million million. So where are these creatures? What happened to the library’s staff and users?

The Doctor soon bumps into a small expedition headed by Professor River Song and funded by Strackman Lux, whose family set up and owns the Library. It’s been a number of years since the Library was ‘abandoned’ and this is the first attempt to find out what happened. Unfortunately for all concerned they soon find out what the other lifeforms are – a swarm of darkness, the vashta nerada. The swarms look like shadows and can reduce a human to a skeleton in a couple of seconds, something that is demonstrated rather vividly before long. That’s bad enough, but it’s not the Doctor’s only problem. For one thing, Professor Song appears to know the Doctor, but he doesn’t know her. For another – what the hell has all this got to do with a little girl in the 21st century and her psychiatrist?



Alright, people. Quiz time. Name an adventure written by Steven Moffat that fits the following description –

1) It’s a two-parter
2) That’s very creepy
3) With a creepy child in the middle of it
4) With a type of zombies that mindlessly repeat a particular phrase and that are potentially ‘deadly’ to the touch
5) Where, in a sense, nobody actually dies
6) With a swarm of very tiny and very dangerous ‘bugs’ that do nasty things to their victims
7) Oh, and one character has a device that dissolves holes through walls

Right. Now, name an adventure written by Steven Moffat that fits the following description –

1) There is a woman who meets the Doctor on multiple occasions, but their meetings are ‘distorted’ by the fact they inhabit different time lines
2) The woman is clearly in love with the Doctor

Naturally, you should have answered both questions with Silence in the Library. Why, what other adventures could you possibly have named?

The Library two-parter is not exactly a replica of The Empty Child or The Girl in the Fireplace, but there’s enough here to make you wonder if Moffat doesn’t have a lottery system of plot devices – he reaches in and takes out ‘creepy child’ or ‘zombie’. Still, if there’s nothing very new here Moffat is a solid writer, and the Library adventure has enough to keep you entertained. Though it does mean that the Doctor is portrayed as a bit of moron, the central child actor has a bigger opportunity to be annoying and – oh, god, wasn’t Rose Tyler enough?

It doesn’t make for good drama when the Doctor knows everything – as he’d say, where’s the fun in that? – but it really doesn’t work when the audience are so far ahead of him. The Doctor and Professor Song have indeed met before, many times, but the Doctor is a time traveller. His timeline is very twisted, meaning that this is only the first time he’s met her for him. (Yes, it’s The Time Traveller’s Wife plotline) One would have thought the Doctor would be used to this, but it seems to take him a long time to realise what’s going on.

And even when he does we have the rather tiresome routine of the Doctor learning to trust her. That’s fine, actually, but it’s the way it’s done that’s tedious. Song has a sonic screwdriver – gasp! How could she have one? thinks the Doctor. The audience already knows, but it gets worse – when the Doctor realises that he gave her a sonic screwdriver he thinks Gasp! Why would I give anyone my screwdriver? Why would I ever tell her my real name? etc, etc.

Oh no thinks the audience. The Doctor might not have loved Professor Song, but she loved him, and I’m afraid the audience just doesn’t care very much. Professor Song just isn’t a compelling character. She’s meant to be strong willed and independent, but in the hands of the actress Alex Kingston she just comes off as a smug, over-confident know-it-all. Never mind the fact that Russell T Davies took two seasons and a Christmas special to create a believable relationship between the Doctor and Rose.

I tell you this, I hope Moffat’s first season as head scriptwriter won’t be filled with women swooning at the Doctor’s feet.

On the other hand, Moffat continues to be very good at generating tension from extremely nasty things happening to people. The victims’ fates are particularly gruesome, in almost everyway possible. First the vashta nerada latch onto their victim, giving them a second shadow. In other words, they know they have a death sentence, and they must be treated as contaminated by the survivors. Then they die, but not immediately. The members of the expedition are wearing spacesuits, with helmets and neural relays. The relays continue working for a short time after death, and they contain the victim’s brainwaves. So when the body dies the brainwaves remain for a time. We can hear the confused victim as their voice degenerates into nonsense, and it is horrible. The first time we see it happen is a highlight of the adventure, and used to full ghastly effect. And afterwards we’re left with a skeleton in a spacesuit infested with the vashta nerada; for want of a better word, a zombie.

You could make a good adventure out of this alone, but Moffat lumps in CAL, the central operating system of the Library. Well, sort of – she’s actually a small child who years ago was on the verge of dying. Since she loved books so much, her wealthy family built the Library around her, keeping her consciousness alive with all the time in the universe to read any book she wanted. It’s a good plot twist, one few viewers will guess, and for bibliophiles it’s a touching one. The trouble is that CAL is the little girl in the 21st century, except it isn’t; it’s really a mental construct built around her mind to insulate her from a breakdown. Again, the problem here isn’t with the concept. The problem is that CAL is called upon to act hysterically, and the actress does it well. Very well. Which almost drove me mad. Maybe I’m in a minority of one with this, but I can’t handle screaming children very well, especially when they become central characters.

Incidentally, and this is another one of my pet hates, Donna doesn’t really get to do much in this two-parter. Things happen to her, but in terms of the plot it doesn’t matter if she’s there or not. You would have thought that with ninety minutes she could have played a bigger part, but the chance slips through the cracks.

The Library adventure is good but not great, and it could have been. It should have been, given how fantastic The Lonely Child two-parter was. In the end, ‘good’ is a polite way of saying ‘disappointing’.

In the next episode the Doctor goes on holiday. Unfortunately for him, it will not consist lying on a beach and occasionally topping up on sun lotion. I think he’d probably prefer that.

A few months ago I wrote about Noah's Ark Zoo Farm in Bristol, warning readers that if they had any respect for science and intellectual curiosity they had better stay away. The Farm is a creationist nuthatch.

http://baron-scarpia.livejournal.com/205190.html

It's now emerged that the Farm is in hot water. Unfortunately it has nothing to do with the nonsense they try pumping into children's heads, and has rather more to do with flouting regulations. Following an investigation by the Captive Animals Protection Society, the Farm has had its membership of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums suspended. North Somerset Council, which grants licences to zoos in the area, is also investigating. It appears that the Farm has been secretly breeding animals for use in circuses and illegally disposing of animal corpses.

Apparently mutilating tigers when they die after giving birth is a bit of a no-no.

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/homepage/Noah-s-Ark-suspended-zoo-welfare-group/article-1470936-detail/article.html

You would have thought that creationists, with their veneration of God and Jesus, would be law-abiding. How absolutely shocking that this is not the case!

The vote was smaller, but you wouldn't think that if you were personally affected. The results for the Kalamazoo, Mitchigan vote have come in. The vote was for anti-discrimination measures, to add gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals to an existing Kalamazoo city ordinance banning discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations.

The pro-gay side won, by 7,671 votes to 4,731.

Congratulations!

There are two particularly interesting points to note. First, this vote covers the transgendered, and transgender rights are even more of a controversy than gay rights. Second, other Mitchigan cities will soon by voting on similar measures. Kalamazoo might end up being the best possible publicity that the pro-gay side could have.

As for Washington, the votes are slower coming in because it was a postal vote. Votes were accepted for any letter with a postmark of 3rd November. We should get a better picture of things later on today, but the most recent news I've heard is that the pro-gay side is slightly in the lead. So was Maine's, at one point, so don't break open the champagne just yet!

Damn my personality.

It appears that the majority of voting citizens in Maine don't care about their gay neighbours. currently 87% of districts have submitted their results, and -

REJECT SAME-SEX MARRIAGE LAW
Yes 266324 voters 52.75%
No 238595 voters 47.25%

I suppose the silver lining is how close it is, but at the moment I'm just looking at the cloud. America continues to confuse me.

Mere confusion, however, is as nothing compared to what LGBT Maine citizens must be feeling. Their rights have been yanked away from them after a campaign of lies and diversions. Maine voters have told them that are are second-class citizens, and that their relationships should not be legally recognised on the level of an opposite-sex relationship.

This is what the anti-gay side calls 'saving marriage'. I've never been able to intellectually decipher this piece of doublethink, but I'm sure they went to bed happy, knowing they they're just as married to their spouse today as they were yesterday.

Apparently there's only a limited amount of marriage to go around, which is why gay people shouldn't be allowed to dilute it.

Meanwhile, schools will still be able to teach children about gay issues. The anti-gay side pretended that the vote would help stop this. It won't.

During the campaign some LGBT commentators were ambivalent about the pro-gay tactics. They felt that the publicity should have attacked the anti-gay side more instead of constantly playing in defence. It's tough to feel that they don't have a point.

Best wishes to Maine LGBTers, and if you voted No, gay or straight, good on you! I know this won't be the end of it - not by a long shot.

Isn't YouTube fantastic? Here I am, in a bit of a mood, and then a thought occurs to me.

Roadrunner cartoons!





And best of luck in America tomorrow!

Lady Eddison is giving a party at her country manor. She has invited a number of local friends over, along with a truly special guest, the author of six bestselling novels Agatha Christie. She definitely has not invited the Doctor and Donna, but they invite themselves anyway. Good thing they did, too. One of the guests has already been found dead in the library, his head bashed in with a piece of lead piping. This sounds just like Christie’s territory, but the Doctor can also stick his oar in – evidence has been left to show that a shape-shifter committed the crime. The murderer is not only one of the party-goers, but is an alien in disguise. As the bodycount increases and the Doctor narrowly avoids a fatal poisoning, can he and Agatha uncover the killer?



I rather like Agatha Christie, particularly the Poirot novels. She even wrote one of the first slasher stories, And Then There Were None. The Unicorn and the Wasp pays tribute to her with a hint of parody and even manages to explain why Agatha Christie is investigating an Agatha Christie story. This is one of the best adventures of the season.

I mean, just look at the suspects! You’ve got the aristocracy, military men, socialites, even vicars. The Doctor and Agatha interview the suspects and discover that none of them have alibis. Everyone has a secret, even if that secret has no ultimate bearing on the crime. People die whilst muttering cryptic sentences and at the end we even get the traditional ‘X was the killer and this is how we worked it out’ scene. Granted, it’s a bit unlike Christie because she never wrote about giant wasps, but in every other way… The only fault with the story is that the culprit is the least likely suspect, and Christie would never have made it that obvious.

The characters are a bit of a mixture. Some act as stock characters, such as the vicar, some are comic, such as Lady Eddison’s husband, some are a little more complex, such as Lady Eddison herself, and some of them are all of these at once. The character who gets the most respect, however, is Agatha Christie herself. At the time of the story Agatha had just discovered that her first husband was cheating on her, and it’s no secret that she always doubted her writing ability. Part of her believes that she’s just fooling people into believing that her books are good, and that one day they’ll realise. But, being English, she’s going out and carrying on as normal. The script treats her decently, and I think she has one of the best ‘guest appearances’ in Doctor Who. She’s more than the Doctor’s equal in her particular field.

(The characterisation of Christie is particularly interesting in light of later events, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I expect it’s easy to do that as a time traveller.)

The Unicorn and the Wasp is not really a comic adventure – Lady Eddison becomes a rather tragic figure, Agatha Christie continually doubts her own abilities, and even one of the footmen has his own tragedy, which is made all the worse because given the time period it can never be openly acknowledged. However it is one of the funnier episodes of the season, with the guests telling us little white lies, the Doctor implying that he’s poisoned everyone, even a comic routine between Tennant and Tate that actually manages to be amusing.

Russell T Davies, please take note. The Runaway Bride was as funny as an orphanage fire. Don’t do it again.

One other delightful touch in the script is the constant references to Christie’s novel titles. If you don’t recognise them, you won’t notice them, but if you do they’re everywhere. Normally they’re fairly straightforward (‘The secret adversary remains unknown’) but some are brilliant. My favourite is ‘Why didn’t they ask – Heavens!’

In the next adventure the Doctor and Donna go to a library. A fairly big one where people get eaten. This is why I prefer bookshops.

Many generations ago an explorer ship co-manned with humans and the Hath race landed on an inhospitable planet, with the purpose of creating a new colony. However a dispute has led to a long-running war, so long-running that the descendents of the colonists even have their own creation myths. Each side dreams of victory, yet this is rather unlikely to happen for anyone. Both sides have access to replicating machines, which means that if a genetic sample is taken from anyone a new person can be made from it – not a clone, but someone based on the original genetics. This new person is already mentally equipped with military knowledge and can immediately go into battle. So whatever the casualties on either side, the injured warriors can simply create new platoons to order.

Then the Doctor, Donna and Martha come blundering into things. A genetic sample is forcibly taken from the Doctor and… well, look at the title again. She’s a daughter the Doctor is very reluctant to acknowledge.



There’s no way to say this diplomatically – the adventure’s a turkey. It might have been only disappointing, but a plot twist near the end is so utterly stupid that I almost cried out in pain. It’s all the worse when you consider that the writer is Stephen Greenhorn, whose The Lazarus Experiment was one of the best episodes of the previous season.

First, let’s consider the Doctor’s daughter, who Donna christens Jenny. She is born knowing perfect English, fully aware of military tactics and fully aware, it seems, of how horny young men can get when tempted by young women. How odd that she should be ‘born’ completely fully formed, needing no period of training or acclimatisation. I smell the desperation of a bad plot device, coming from a writer who thinks he has a really cool idea but hasn’t a clue how to build up to it. It’s possible that all the necessary information is pumped into the heads of all the replicants, but that’s more generally associated with the creation of Cybermen than human beings. Cybermen, of course, were designed to all be completely identical and without any personal needs or emotion. The replicants in The Doctor’s Daughter are very definitely not.

Jenny is played by Georgia Moffet, and the in-joke is she really is the Doctor’s daughter – more specifically, she’s the daughter of Peter Davison. Art, however, is not as kind as reality, and she doesn’t convince as someone who has been specifically bred to fight. She may work as one of the Doctor’s companions, but you never believe in her as a soldier.

The reason why the Doctor doesn’t really want her around is an interesting one, even more so because Donna pushes so hard for him to acknowledge Jenny. Donna is taken aback a little to discover that the Doctor has been a father before, and lost everything. Jenny is acting as a constant reminder of it, so no wonder he’s so cold towards her. The concept of the Doctor starting to teach Jenny about what’s out there in the universe, and how you can solve problems without guns, is genuinely fascinating, though Moffet’s inability to look like a soldier hurts it.

Martha’s role in the story is to get separated from the Doctor and then wander back to meet him. She has a long and dangerous trek. She has to watch her travelling companion drown in a slurry pit. She arrives emotionally and physically on the point of collapse. And for all her impact on the plot, she might as well not have bothered.

Oh dear. I’m getting increasingly upset for Martha. If you’re going to use a companion in a Doctor Who adventure, you should USE THEM. COMPANIONS SHOULD NOT JUST BE TIME FILLER. A companion who accomplishes nothing useful is just as risible as the companions who would start screaming at every alien menace they faced.

And unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it. The Doctor and the audience are led to believe that the war has been going on for generations. Indeed it has – generations and generations of replicants. Actually, the war has only been going on for a week…

AAAAGGGGGHHHH!

So, what, the true history of the ship has been lost in a week? A whole new mythology has sprung up in seven days? To achieve this there must at least be a new generation every couple of hours, yet they don’t use the replication machines at night and they don’t lose men at such a rapid rate to require constant replications. This is one of the most retarded and unnecessary plot devices I can remember seeing in the Tennant era, and Greenhorn doesn’t even use the revelation for anything. He’s slotted it in because he thinks it’s cool. It’s a revelation simply for the sake of shocking the audience. Well, yes, I was shocked. But not in a good way. Not at all.

What a waste of forty-five minutes!

In the next episode the Doctor meets Agatha Christie at a party, and Professor Peach’s skull meets a piece of lead pipe. Who can the killer be? Well, it’s most likely the massive wasp with the foot-long sting that’s turned up.

Dr Werner tells us that we should be able to understand her talk if we've taken chemistry classes at school.

Alas, she did not follow her own advice. What follows is some of the finest nonsense I've ever heard outside creationism. Believe me, her support for homeopathy is among the least of her problems.

Yes, it's another post about Maine. But as the vote looms ever closer it's clear that some people are losing their sanity over it.

http://mainefamilypolicycouncil.com/artman/publish/Pastor_s_Update_24/Overcoming_Opposition_-_Part_2.shtml

Meet the Rev Dallas Henry. He really hates the homos. In order to bolster the spirits of his congregation, he has written a piece using Bible verses and historical events to motivate them.

Yes, he preaches, the anti-gay protestors will encounter opposition and fall prey to fatigue. But think of the alternative!

Many recall some of the most notorious industrial accidents in recent years - Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the fatal navigational error of Korean Air Lines 007; all occurred in the middle of the night. When the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian A300 airbus killing all 290 people aboard, fatigue-stressed operators in the high-tech Combat Information Center on the carrier misinterpreted radar data and repeatedly told their captain the jet was descending as if to attack when in fact the airliner remained on a normal flight path.

In the Challenger space shuttle disaster, key NASA officials, after working twenty hours straight with only two or three hours of sleep the night before, made the ill-fated decision to go ahead with the launch. Their error in judgment cost the lives of seven astronauts and nearly killed the U.S. space program. We ignore our need for rest and renewal at the peril of others and ourselves.

Gay marriage - it's just like Chernobyl.

So what can be done? The good reverend recommends praying. Being an atheist, I heartily encourage this. In fact I'd go so far to request that the reverend and his congregation pray for twenty-fours a day until, oh, Wednesday. There's no need for them to actually go out and vote. God will assuredly do it for them.

But let's be fair. Many Christians, including those who do not compare same-sex marriage to shuttle disasters, pray when they face a time of anxiety. Rev Henry has to do something special to really make himself a laughingstock, and here it comes!

The enemy comes in and becomes "one of us" unless we are discerning. For example, the Homosexual activists have been very clever in appearing as normal families while hiding the diabolical acts they engage in on a regular basis. They have infiltrated some churches becoming leaders and even clergy. God calls it an abomination and so should we.

Rev Henry inhabits a world in which gay families are deceiving every voter in the state to sanction their wicked, wicked depravities. After all, gays can't really provide love, affection and stability for their partner and their children. They are masquerading as good and virtuous when in reality it's only about the DIRTY, DIRTY HOMOSEX!

(By the way, it occurs to me that I don't engage in diabolical acts nearly enough. It sucks being single.)

It's not a new tactic, dehumanising opponents. The more human a person appears to be, the more difficult it becomes to write them off as an aberration, as a mistake, as something worth taking seriously. But good propagandists tend to do this with a bit more subtlety. Rev Henry, on the other hand, can't help himself. It's like he's used the Conspiracy Theory Generic Template. Change a few words, and it could be David Icke talking about blood-drinking lizards.

And then it gets weirder.

The message was told ten times over "they are coming to kill you while you sleep, when you least expect it." Nehemiah and the builders received the news from the Jews living in the outlying areas near the opponents' camp. The Arabs, Ammonites, and the Philistines of Ashdod were planning to attack Jerusalem before the wall was completed. They would be able to take the city by surprise and destroy Jerusalem again before the wall was strengthened and complete. Nehemiah received the warning, "You’re surrounded!" For anyone, those are frightful words.

Homosex kills, children! Feel the paranoia love.

The article ends on a note of hope that provides the blackest humour in the piece.

"After I looked things over, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, 'Don’t be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.'" Neh.4:14

That verse should be the call of all serious church leaders to their people; "fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes." We should urge anyone under our influence to be sure to vote "yes" on One this November 3rd to protect marriage and family here in Maine. It is our last chance.

Every gay person is a son or a daughter of someone. Many are brothers and sisters. This seems not to have occurred to Rev Henry - well, why should it? Gays aren't human. They can't have mothers. They can't have sisters. They can't have families. What a frightened, tiny, segregated world Rev Henry must inhabit. Constantly vigilant against a menace that only exists in his own head.

However the rest of us inhabit the real world. Let's keep it that way.

The American LGBT crowd are currently sweating bullets over 3rd November 2009, and with good reason.

In my last post I mentioned that voters in Maine and Washington would be going to the polls soon to decide on the fate of same-sex marriage. A year ago Californian LGBTers were slapped in the face; this is a chance for the tide to turn. At the same the residents of Kalamazoo, Mitchigan, will be voting on accommodation protection for LGBT residents.

And guess what - the vote for all three will be on the same day.

So, for any Americans reading this - if you can help, here's your chance. You don't necessarily need to reside in any of the states. And if you can't help, but are eligible to vote, please help to move America foward. Don't stay at home, thinking that the defenders of equal rights will win without your aid. Don't think that the votes won't have serious repercussions for equal rights in other states. Nobody can predict how the voting will turn out; there are no certainties.

And, of course, if equal rights win out, we'll have the highly amusing spectacle of the fundamentalists melting down over it. But that's just the icing on the cake.

The Courage Campaign has put together a number of ways you can help all three causes, and they're making the HTML code available to all bloggers. I've reproduced their guide below. If you want to copy it, head over to http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/content/321CountdownForEquality/

( Here's what you can do )

Some things upset me more than others. One thing I have a personal animosity against is the US immigration system.

I’m British, and I have no desire to live in the US. I’ve never been personally affected by the US immigration system and I know very few people who have been. The only two I can name off the top of my head are two university friends who went to the US for work – presumably they were sponsored by their employer. I don’t think they had any difficulty in emigrating for work, but for a lot of people it’s quite a different story. You can tell what’s coming, can’t you?

Yep. It’s the gays.

If you’re heterosexual and have an American sweetheart, you can join them with a ‘fiancé(e)’ visa. This allows you to remain in the US for ninety days, get married, and then apply for permanent residence. The criteria for the visa is that you must have met your partner at least once in the last two years – and there are exceptions to this rule – you must have a bona fide intention to marry and you must be willing and legally able to get married.

For most heterosexual couples, these criteria are absurdly easy to meet. For a gay couple, however, it is literally impossible. Unable to get permanent visas, many are forced to rely on a string of temporary visas, hoping that one they can get a shot at permanency. Many overstay their welcome when the visa expires, and hope that nobody will ask to see it. Some are afraid to travel abroad, in case they aren’t allowed back into the country. The upshot is that because they can’t get a permanent visa nothing is permanent. No long-term plans can be built, no careers can be developed, no families can raised – at least not without the constant fear that it could be all broken up within five minutes if a state official asks the right question. And let’s not forget the financial cost. The couple may have to spend thousands of dollars on legal advice and applications simply to stand still.

Gay people have been denied permanent visas whether they have no education or they have doctorates. It doesn’t matter whether they come from Mexico or India or Canada or Britain. Many relationships do not survive the strain.

A very good report on this frankly shocking injustice is at http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2006/05/01/family-unvalued, courtesy of Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality. It was published in May 2006. Three years later, might it be a little out of date? Some states now grant same-sex marriage.* If two men get married in Massachusetts, surely the foreign partner would be allowed to stay in the United States to remain with his American citizen husband?

Well, no.

Ah, but suppose John Kerry intervenes, and asks the Obama administration for help? Would that make a difference?

Well, no.

Ah, but suppose that the foreign partner had been raped in his home country and was afraid to return? Would he be allowed to stay?

Well, no.

http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/10/26/16021

So, President Obama, here’s another thing you might want to look into. You’ve already said the immigration ban on those with HIV will be lifted. There’s nothing to stop you on this one.



Whilst I’m complaining, here’s another reminder that Britain isn’t completely a land flowing with milk and honey either - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/8327214.stm




* Incidentally, same-sex marriage is up for a vote very soon in the states of Washington and Maine. If you’re eligible to vote, do the right thing – everyone’s human and a couple in love deserve their shot at happiness. You don’t want to look back at your vote in forty years’ time and feel ashamed that you fell for the lies and hysteria of the fundamentalists at the National Organization for Marriage.

I never thought I’d say this, but Donna has proved herself to be wiser than almost every other companion – she’s learning how to pilot the TARDIS. If I were a companion, I would insist on doing this. I don’t want the Doctor to get eaten by a monster and leave me stranded on a desert planet somewhere…

Martha Jones, last seen deciding that she’d like to get back to Earth whilst she still has all her limbs, has qualified as a doctor and has joined UNIT, Unified Intelligence Taskforce. So when she phones the Doctor for help, it’s a double reunion for him – a triple reunion, as it turns out. A spate of mysterious deaths has occurred all over the world at exactly the same time, all happening in cars. It appears to have something to do with the ATMOS system used in the cars, technology designed to cut carbon emissions to zero.

The Doctor likens the ATMOS device to finding a mobile phone in the middle ages – yes, humans will become capable of developing it, but they shouldn’t have created it yet. Obviously the inventor had a little help, so the Doctor goes round for a visit. The inventor is the teenage wunderkind Luke Rattigan, someone who knows a lot about technology, very little about other people and absolutely nothing about self-awareness. He’s now a multi-millionaire, running a private school for very intelligent people, and has a lot of weird gadgetry – one piece of which the Doctor identifies as a teleporter. A teleporter to the massive Sontaran spaceship currently in orbit around the planet.

When the Sontarans discover that this weird little man is actually their fabled enemy ‘the Doctor’, they step up their plans to phase two. About four hundred million cars on the planet are fitted with ATMOS devices, all of which start spewing gas into the atmosphere – currently without causing much death, but the worldwide fatalities will start when the gas density is high enough.

The Doctor is confused by everything about this. The Sontarans could have simply blown the planet apart – but they haven’t. They are so enamoured of warfare and so concerned with battle honour that it makes no sense for them to use poison gas – it’s a cowardly way to wipe out the human race. And considering that nuclear weapons wouldn’t even scratch the Sontaran spaceship, why don’t they want any fired?

(And bloody hell, according to this adventure one of the nuclear-capable nations is North Korea!)



I think Doctor Who has started scraping the barrel a little with classic villains. Sontarans are a good enemy, but you can see why the Cybermen and the Daleks got their entrance first; casual watchers would recognise a Dalek, but not the Sontarans. Which is a bit of a shame, really. Though we don’t see much of their culture, the Sontarans are so concerned with warfare and the proper way to conduct a battle that they become enjoyably pompous. (Side note for the hardcore fans – if you didn’t like their portrayal in The Two Doctors, tough. Robert Holmes knew what he was doing. And no, I shall never tire of defending that adventure.)

The problem with the Sontarans was that they weren’t unique enough. Daleks looked like no other creature in science fiction, whilst with Cybermen you have a total lack of emotion combined with the horror of conversion. As for the Master, the other major Doctor Who villain, he was a completely conscienceless single man, a true anti-Doctor. A mere army of aliens, on the other hand… well, they could be enjoyable to watch, but they’re not inspiring in the public imagination.

And they are enjoyable to watch. Fans have whined about this one, but then I’ve found that they’ll whine about anything. This two-parter is written by Helen Raynor, who was responsible for last season’s Dalek two-parter. That adventure was good, but its plot fell to pieces towards the end (and practically caused one of my friends to have fits!); the Sontaran adventure is at least better constructed. There are a large number of plot strands to resolve, and everything ends up meshing together fairly well. It’s a solid, good old-fashioned runaround, and as long as you aren’t expecting fireworks you should be quite happy.

Except… well, since Martha Jones returns, you might have thought Raynor would do something with her. Her return starts off quite well, as she and Donna refuse to start fighting (unlike Rose when she met Sarah Jane Smith). Martha has got over her infatuation with the Doctor, has got engaged, and is working for UNIT. In other words, her apprenticeship with the Doctor has made her quite independent, thank you very much.

But then it all falls apart. Halfway through the first episode Martha is kidnapped and replaced by a clone, and she ends up contributing very little to the plot resolution. She’s about as useful as Peri. Or possibly Tegan. More seriously, Donna turns out to be of considerably more help, sneaking around a Sontaran spaceship on her own to help save the day.

The major flaw of the story lies elsewhere, though, and I’ve started getting unpleasant flashbacks to the tenth Doctor at the start of his tenure. UNIT is run by Colonel Mace, who would rather like to work with the Doctor. But the Doctor doesn’t like guns, so he doesn’t like Colonel Mace.

You know, just like the third Doctor refused to ever work with UNIT or Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart because they used guns. Oh, wait…

The Doctor goes out of his way to belittle Mace. He reprimands Mace for insulting the Sontarans and then insults them himself with far more vitriol. When Mace comes up with a way of successfully fighting Sontarans the Doctor shouts his plan will never work. In fact it does, and the Doctor even comes to depend on it. Does he ever thank Mace? Of course not. And then Mr ‘I don’t like people with guns’ ends the adventure by blowing up the Sontarans’ ship. Not a hypocrite at all, then.

As for the guest cast, one character who I think is going to divide audience opinion is Luke Rattigan. Rattigan’s a brat, and Ryan Sampson’s performance is intentionally antagonising. But so help me, I can’t bring myself to hate Rattigan. He’s just so easily provoked by any implication that anyone could be smarter than him – and yes, that would be the Doctor. It is also made clear how lonely and consequently how resentful Rattigan is towards others. He’s not a person to inspire sympathy, but we do get a villain with more complex motivations than the single-minded Sontarans.

All in all, this two-parter is an enjoyable adventure in spite of some gaping flaws. Incidentally, this is as good a place to any to point out that Donna’s granddad, Wilfred, is played by Bernard Cribbins. Fans of Cribbins may enjoy watching him choking in a car that’s filling with poison gas.

In the next adventure the Doctor confronts one of his most deadly enemies, a scriptwriter who hasn’t a clue what he’s doing. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Donna arrives on her first alien planet. It’s freezing and mostly barren, except for a large industrial complex near where the TARDIS has landed. The complex is a distribution centre for the Ood, whom we first met a couple of seasons ago. Back then, all we knew about the Ood was that they were calm, peaceful humanoid aliens who acted as servants for humans. This is their home planet, and the complex belongs to the human corporation that ships them out in great numbers to each of the three galaxies that humanity has spread to.

Unfortunately something’s going a little wrong. An Ood has been caught on CCTV murdering an employee, which is unheard of. There seems to be some kind of infection driving individual Oods mad, and Mr Halpen, the Chief Executive, has arrived to make sure 1) the problem is resolved, and 2) nobody else knows about it. Alas, it’s not quite an infection. In fact, it was all but unavoidable, and thanks to human greed and wilful blindness, there are going to be quite a few more deaths before the day has ended.



The Ood originally appeared a couple of seasons ago in The Impossible Planet. There they became dangerous when their minds were engulfed by a malevolent force, but this time the reason is quite different. Way back then, when Rose Tyler met them, she thought it odd that there should be an entire race that existed simply to serve other people. Keith Temple, the scriptwriter, has taken that and run with it – as the Doctor points out, a race like the Ood couldn’t have evolved naturally. It would have died out long ago. Something else must have happened, and it’s pretty horrible.

By the time we see a weak Ood being whipped, it’s quite clear that they’re more slaves than servants. A scene where a sales executive, Solana, demonstrates the Ood to a group of prospective buyers is at first funny, but the more you think about it the more disturbing it becomes. It’s utterly degrading to the Ood. So why don’t they rebel? Well, what do you think happens in the processing centre?

I would not be surprised if the company had connections with the Spectrox miners in The Caves of Androzani. Mr Halpen is only concerned with killing the problem in the bluntest possible way – heaven forbid that he should start thinking of others for a change. Dr Ryder might nominally turn out to be one of the good guys, but he must have been aware that his actions would lead to people dying. Solana, the PR representative, is an extremely weak woman who just turns a blind eye when confronted with any moral question. When the Doctor asks her for help she wavers – and then shouts for guards to arrest him. Even the prospective buyers are a bunch of shallow yuppies who are more interested in free drinks than anything else.

By the end, we’re firmly on the side of the Ood. They may be killers, but who wouldn’t have gone mad with the treatment doled out to them by this collection of scumbags? In the end the only human with any sort of decency turns out to be Donna.

After The Fires of Pompeii, it’s good to get back to a morally grim adventure without all the loose ends and failures of that particular misfire. Tim McInnery, as Mr Halpen, puts in the best performance of the guest cast. He believes he’s doing the right thing for his family company, something he has invested a great emotionally in – he mentions visiting the complex at the age of six. He also gets a fate that – well, given the whole adventure, I can’t call it gruesome, but it’s pretty bizarre. By this stage I should also mention Tennant and Tate. Tennant’s acting more or less found its feet in his second season, and that continues here – once more, I cannot call him a great Doctor but he’s turned into a good one.

And Catherine Tate? For a comedian, she’s spent a strangely large amount of time going through trauma. Tate deals with drama better than comedy – she only occasionally bellows – but though she’s adequate she hasn’t yet hit anything great.

Planet of the Ood is the best of the three adventures so far. It has suspense, darkness, action, drama, and unusually for such a bleak story it has a completely happy ending that doesn’t seem forced.

Next time around, the Doctor gets a phone call from Martha Jones, now a member of the military team UNIT. More nasty alien beasties are attacking the Earth – it’s time for the Sontarans to finally make their comeback to Doctor Who.