Reviews | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
List: |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In 25 years time, all the nostalgia-obsessed 30-somethings will be discussing TV shows they watched when they were little and recalling that episode of Doctor Who in which there's a spaceship falling into the sun with a crew of strange aliens that need glowing balls to communicate, Martha gets blasted off in an escape pod, the Doctor's eyes glow, he puts on a red space-suit, goes down into a dark pit and meets Satan. And the guys in the gas-masks with hieroglyphics all over their bodies burning people up. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This, my friends, was a sad day for Doctor Who, the first truly dud episode of Series 3, only the second in the whole of the new series (the other being the mind-numbingly dull 'Fear Her' towards the end of Series 2, best not to get me started on that one). Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chris Chibnall has come in for a lot of flack since he scripted the absolute worst episode of Torchwood. The title Cyberwoman sends a shiver down many a spine even after all these months. It is difficult to defend the very nadir of what was at best a patchily successful series but it is worth remembering that much of what was wrong with Cyberwoman (the high heels; the flinching from barbecue sauce, deadly to Cyberwomen of course) were failures in the design or direction rather than faults in the script. Chibnall's other Torchwood scripts were good and his two Life on Mars episodes ranked among the best. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Since 1963, Doctor Who has been a survivor because of one elemental strength. The series, it characters, and its premise has always embraced change rather than resist it. Change has enabled the series to continually regenerate itself over the years and has been it's elemental strength and protocol since its inception. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
There is silence. Martha's fingernails are tapping frantically on the pod window. The Doctor is mouthing , 'I'll save you' through the airlock window as the distance between them elongates. The shots keep frantically intercutting between his agonising observation and Martha's face at the window of the pod as it slowly pulls away and falls into the sun. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
42 could only have ever gone one of two ways for me. After a fortnight's deprivation, this episode was either going to satisfy two weeks worth of pent-up cravings or it was going to crash and burn. Now whilst the Pentallian may have avoided that particular fate, in my opinion Chris Chibnall's episode did not. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The midway point of Series 3 sees The Doctor and Martha return to the future for a real-time (give or take a few minutes) adventure set on a spaceship in a similar futuristic era to last season's excellent The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I prefer to think of "42" as homage. The setup is rather obvious: "Alien," one of the all-time great horror films and science fiction classics, featured seven people trapped aboard a starship with a killer alien they accidentally picked up. Substitute an impending crash for the alien nasty, and what you have is a taut little thriller of the kind that "Doctor Who" has rarely done in its three-year history since the show's modern return. Which is surprising, because the one-shot episodes the show's featured have largely been there to further ongoing plotlines ("Boom Town," "The Long Game") or spirited romps that meet varying degrees of success ("Love and Monsters," "Gridlock" or "Fear Me" if you really want to get down to the "all you need is love" aspect). The homage doesn't end there, either -- forget, for a moment, the bonk-you-over-the-head dues paid to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in the title, and the play on both the name of and plotting of the series "24". Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Against all the odds, Chris Chibnall, writer of three and a half very bad Torchwood episodes, writes a blinder. There's little original about '42': a doomed spaceship plunges towards a sun whilst the crew desperately try to save themselves and a mysterious alien presence hunts them down one by one. What makes it work is the titular gimmick, as the episode unfolds in real time, and veteran Doctor Who director Graeme Harper exploits the frenetic pace to astonishing effect. The cast is superb, with former EastEnders star Michelle Collins proving the biggest surprise, and they all put in sweaty and frantic performances. The episode looks great too, from the sunlight bursting from behind the eyes of those possessed, and the rusty, dirt-streaked ship a far cry from the brightly lit gleaming white interiors of the eighties. But this isn't what really surprised me about the episode. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Last year's two-parter The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit was not one of the most successful instalments of new Doctor Who in terms of viewing figures. But it did seem to go down very well with reviewers, particularly those within fandom, and was a story with which the production team themselves appeared very pleased. Perhaps, in that context, it's no surprise that in 42 we were given an episode so similar to that story in so many ways. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One of the better gap-fillers of the past three seasons, 42 is really a paler version of last year's seasonal peak, The Impossible Planet. It lacks the latter's detail and scenario, and characterisations, hinting at a reprise of the same supernatural menace, but rather strangely taking a sidestep away and avoiding being the Snakedance to Impossible's Kinda. This is a bit confusing as not only does 42 very much look like Impossible Planet, simply re-alligning the latter episode's scenario of a space station hurtling towards a black hole with an equally sweaty spaceship hurtling towards a distant sun, but the menacing 'burn with me' catchphrase also mirrors uncannily the 'don't turn round' chiller of Impossible Planet's Sutekh-esque invisible menace. But this time, instead of a disturbingly tattooed possessed crew member with red eyes, we have various possessees donning 2001-style space helmets and opening visors sporadically to emit leathel sun-rays on the victims. We also again have subtle allusions to Sutekh of the classic Pyramids of Mars with one of the possessed killing a crew member by clutching their face while smoke steams out seemingly from his hands. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Something different for Doctor Who, a "realtime" epsiode. My dad asked what that meant when he read it in his TV guide. So we knew we were in for something of a rollercoaster ride. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The inner core of "42," Chris Chibnall's seventh episode of this year's season, is all about the current state of uncertainty in British politics as Tony Blair gets ready this summer to leave No. 10. The current worldwide mistrust of politicians and total dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, so evident on the streets of London these days, is clear in this episode's scenes where it is revealed that Mrs. Jones is cooperating with intelligence agents from a political party who is out to destroy the Doctor. They are wiretapping her mobile phone conversations with her daughter. One of these conversations involves Martha calling up her mother fearing that this will be their last phone conversation, as her space pod is being sucked into the gravitational pull of a living sun. The scene painfully reminds us of the countless mobile exchanges that occurred at the World Trade Center on September 11 when parents and children professed their love for one another for the last time. The fact that during Martha and her mum's conversations the UK is in the middle of Election Day makes the political implications of this episode crystal clear. Filters: Series 3/29 Tenth Doctor Television |