Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

The Mystery of Edwin Ood

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Proper Who that was. A lonely base, a rag tag collection of people messing with things that they don’t understand and should therefore leave well alone, some odd aliens, some odder happenings and sinister voices in peoples heads.

And a proper cliff-hanger! Last time he was surrounded by Cybermen all wanting to delete him, but you knew that it would be a "with one bound Jack was free" moment. This time I have no idea how he’s going to resolve the ascent of the devil, the attack of the squid faced people and the fact the planet with no name (except "Bitter Pill" Of course) is being sucked into a black hole – all before the opening credits. See that’s what a cliff-hanger should look like. People in peril and no obvious way of getting out with a happy ending. Oh yes, that was much better.

In keeping with the Doctor himself and borrowing from the Hitchhiker’s Guide all I can say is that was "Action, adventure and really wild things."

A good ensemble cast, too. Made up of sort of famous faces from Spotlight although I could only place Woody the dancing paramedic in anything else.  All of the others were of the "I know them from somewhere" school of character acting.  Can I just say that I was impressed with Will Thorpe’s acting range as he went from stressed pendant via shell-shocked victim to human vessel of the ultimate evil. Having seen his turns in Casualty and heel spins in Strictly Come Dancing I had previously written him off as a pretty boy with a limited repertoire. So well done him.

Each of the character stereotypes was nicely represented. The strong, world weary "Just call me Ripley" female, the untried captain struggling against an unknown threat, the grizzled and slightly mysterious security bod and the young, slightly naïve girl who’s just screaming out victim.

The one oddity in the bunch was the representative from the ethics board (or whatever he called it). An ethecist (If such a word exists) in a deep, deep, deep space mission to land on a deserted planet and drill a big hole to the core to examine a really big power source. Whose ethics exactly was he there to observe/report upon/govern? Perhaps he was just there to make sure everybody was just generally nice to one another. This is a major step on (backwards) from merely having a councillor on the bridge of a spaceship with thousands of people and families. This chap is there to make sure that half a dozen experienced and professional workers are polite and well behaved, whilst millions of miles from any other Politically Correct influence. He certainly didn’t seem to care too much about the poor Oods.

I still don’t know what to make of this new Doctor ‘though. Most of the time I really like him and can enjoy his portrayal, but just occasionally he can come over as being a bit of a prat. I think it’s the slight whine in his voice sometimes if he’s mildly put out about something. Just doesn’t do it for me. Of course, the alternative is shouting lots if he’s really upset, so I suppose a slight whine is all that bad. Although I did like the "Best Christmas in Walford line" especially if this is the only fabled connection with Eastenders this season.

There were some good lines again. I did like the opening gag about if you think it trouble we could just go again. Although that did rather suggest that these two just wander the cosmos looking for scrapes to get into. The intergalactic equivalent of a gang of 20 something Chavs in town after a Saturday night on Alco-Pops and whatever brain melting thumpety thump noise that passes for music these days. Perhaps he should change his introduction from "Hello, I’m the Doctor" to "What you looking at?"

And then there was the chat about settling down on a planet somewhere and having to get a mortgage. The Doctor said something along the lines of "I’d rather die" and yet in "The Girl in the Fireplace" without a moment’s thought, he sacrificed his future to spend the rest of days in France. He was mildly concerned about where one gets money, but beyond that he seemed happy enough to settle down. Perhaps he just doesn’t fancy Rose. Whilst she was really put out about both Sarah Jane Smith and Madam Du Pompadour, he didn’t worry at all when she brought Mickey on board.

Speaking of Mickey, I see that Rose has replaced the mobile ‘phone that she left with him. I always felt it was a little contrived that he had to have that ‘phone in order to cart around a five-digit number. Especially when all of the technology in the other universe was so conveniently compatible. It does of course leave Mickey with a ‘phone that has a direct line to the TARDIS, should the need ever arise.

Assuming, of course, that the Doctor will ever get the TARDIS back. He does seem a little careless with it considering that it’s the last of its kind. Perhaps he could tie a piece of string around his wrist or something with the other end attached to the TARDIS - Maybe it could grow another tendril for him to keep hold of. Which reminds me, I think that I must have missed the shots of the TARDIS gardens whenever he was on Galifrey. How do you grow something like that, anyway? I can picture the Time Lord equivalent of Alan Titchmarsh presenting Gardeners Galaxy with some smashing new varieties of greenhouse TARDIS that take a little more care but smell so lovely.

I must admit to being a little stumped on how the TARDIS can translate writing. I seem to remember the language translation being explained as a telepathic link being shared between the Doctor, the TARDIS and his companions. How exactly can you read by telepathy? Words aren’t sentient, except perhaps in Terry Pratchett books. Little ink blots on a page just don’t exude that kind of mental power to be translated into a different language. Very odd. Very Ood, if it comes to it.

In order to develop some kind of coherent theme here, I’m still keeping an eye on the multiple uses of the previously humble Sonic Screwdriver. This week the Doctor brandished it as a weapon against the poor Oods who were only trying to feed him. This does lend credence to my Sonic Swiss Army Knife theory.

Still, I’m all excited about next week. I deliberately turned off when the nice continuity man warned me about the upcoming trailer. I know that the Doctor, Rose and at least some of the others survive, but I don’t want to have any hints or clues as to who or how.

See, this is why there should be more cliff-hangers. They make the whole experience that much more engaging. I just hope that the conclusion lives up to the set up episode.

Which leave one final question. Is this the story that Dickens would have written after his adventure during "The Unquiet Dead" if he’d had the chance? All this continuity is pretty darn cool!

The Oodyssey

Of all the episodes in both series so far, The Impossible Planet, is probably the closest to the original series. It is a mixture of a Hartnell, Tom Baker and McCoy story mixed with Blakes’ 7, Firefly, Event Horizon and Alien and also has elements of the Virgin New Adventures (well it reminded me a little of Jim Mortimore and Andy Lane’s Lucifer Rising) and BBC Books (TARDIS’s being grown) and, in terms of atmosphere is probably the best episode of this series so far, despite the fact that the Doctor and Rose are at their slappable best in the first few minutes of the story, leading me to have absolutely no sympathy for them when they discover the TARDIS has gone.

I am not sure if that is a good thing or not but I still just cannot like this incarnation of the Doctor, no matter how hard I try. Perhaps, when they do have a massive fall (which, let’s face it, is a long time in coming) that he will come out the other end less annoying. I can but hope.

Getting rid of the TARDIS so early on in the story was a very good idea but it is so obvious that they will get it back in the next episode (probably quite early on as well) that it doesn’t really make you think that maybe the TARDIS really has gone and that they are stuck on a planet in orbit around a black hole.

From the first moments of the episode I thought of Blakes’ 7 and came to the conclusion that if they ever did bring it back then doing it like this would not be a bad thing at all. It also smacked a little of Firefly with its more dark and gritty version of the future compared to the clean and clinical futures of Star Trek (no counting Enterprise which was more dark and dirty than the previous Star Trek series). Now I have never seen an episode of Firefly but from what I know about it this episode does have a feeling of the series. Anyone who has seen the series please feel free to tell me if I am barking up the wrong tree with this.

Of course, only being the first part of a two-part story the episodes really doesn’t stand up on its own very well and will not make sense as a whole until you have seen the second episode next week. Now I really hope that the resolution to the cliffhanger next week is better than it was in The Age of Steel. If anything the cliffhanger for this weeks episode is far more disturbing that it was in The Rise of the Cybermen and will take a lot more than it did The Age of Steel. After stripping away most of the usual stuff that they would use to get out of tight situations the Doctor will this time really have to rely on his wits to get him out this one.

Now I had heard that Gabriel Woolf was doing a voice over part in this story but I assumed that it would have been in The Satan Pit episode and I was a little surprised to hear his mellifluous tones in this episode. In fact there was a clip on Totally Doctor Who last week with his voice on it but I didn’t realise until I was watching the episode itself and I cannot imagine how I couldn’t recognise that voice. I mean everything about it is the same as the voice he used in Pyramids of Mars down to the intonation and certainly was quite creepy.

Whether or not that is the voice of Sutekh or not is open to debate but, as the next episode is called The Satan Pit, and the references to the number 6 and the image of a devil like creature that was seen on the bridge of the ship, it seems more likely that it is the devil he is playing rather than Sutekh, but as they are pretty much one and the same thing then it wouldn’t matter either way. We will know more next week.

The Ood were a pretty interesting alien race, despite looking a little bit like a cross between Sensorites and Monoids, and did look quite menacing during the pre titles sequence before it was revealed that they were, in fact, placid and just wanted to look after them. 

The guest cast for this episode were pretty good with Shaun Parkes, Claire Rushbrook and Danny Webb giving good accounts of themselves as the rag-tag crew of the ship with Wil Thorpe being particularly good, and genuinely creepy at times, as Toby. It was a shame they killed of Scooti so early but I suppose she wasn’t that important a character and was readily expendable.

The direction was excellent in this episode was really good and gave an epic feel to the story, and coupled with Murray Gold’s excellent and quite subdued (for once) incidental score (on that note it is nice to know that classical music is still being listened to far, far in the future) the episode looked and sounded fantastic.

Let’s hope that The Satan Pit lives up to the expectations heaped upon it by this episode.

Ood Awakening

Forget The Robots of Death. Brush aside any similarities to Event Horizon, Alien or Inseminoid. No, The Impossible Planet reminded me of Love, Actually, actually.

Yeah, that's right: smug, patronising tossers larking about, spouting fatuous, witless nonsense to each other. Tossers who you can't possibly identify with. Punchable, nauseating tossers who make my teeth itch. Well, I've finally stepped over the line. I don't like the 10th Doctor anymore. He's a twat.

There, I've said it.

Rose is really doing my head in, too. I'm not entirely sure who's to blame for all this. Is it all part of the smug-agenda RTD masterplan? One minute he's denying it in DWM, the next he's insinuating that it's all heading somewhere in DWC - it's hard to keep up. If it is part of a plan, then I'm afraid that only the gory, needless death of Rose in mid-guffaw will sate me now.

Or maybe it's Billie herself, far too relaxed for her own good now that she's been showered with all those plaudits? A couple of Billie moments really wound me up this week: the whole "Oooooddd" thing and the casual delivery of the line "A little bit worse than a storm, then?" took slapability to new and dizzying heights. Most people go mad when they see the ceiling. Rose just takes the piss. "We're all in danger. La-de-da-de-da!"

Perhaps the script is at fault? Well, the initial "ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!" moment is certainly shit-on-toast but it could have been realised in a far less annoying manner. So, maybe the director is the one to blame? Unlikely, as the rest of this episode is such a delight, and the Doctor and Rose have been behaving like prima-dona pricks since the opening moments of New Earth, so it's hardly his fault, is it?

Whatever the reason - please, please, please STOP IT NOW!

OK, so the Doctor loses his TARDIS (yeah, right) and we finally glimpse a teensy weensy smidgen of comeuppance, but even that turns into a schmaltzy love fest with the Doctor and Rose banging on about settling down with a (DOMESTIC ALERT! DOMESTIC ALERT!) mortgage. Oh, just get a room, will ya? And then, just as the Doctor starts doing Doctory things in a big, scary cave he has to spoil it all with a reference to East 'bleedin' Enders! And how sad is it that you are actually pleased that things are going tits up for the central characters? Surely that has to be a first?

Come back, Chris. All is forgiven.

A quarry. A f***ing quarry! Somebody pinch me.

Now that I've got that off my chest I'm happy to report that The Impossible Planet is actually a pretty damn good episode of Doctor Who. Nobody said we had to love the Doctor, I suppose - just look at Hartnell and Colin; although I'd take dark and abrasive personalities over fey, mockney back-slapping any day of the week.

I enjoyed TIP because it screams "classic Who" to me. Base under siege. Strange rubber monsters. Evil since the Dawn of Time. More pop culture riffing than you can shake a stick at. Characters who would make much better companions suddenly dying. A thoroughly predictable (in a good way) cliffhanger. And a quarry. A f***ing quarry! Somebody pinch me.

It's great to see Danny (dark secret, bit shifty, will sacrifice himself in order to redeem himself next week or my name's not Der Tachyon Ubermeister) Webb, and Will Thorp was a revelation as Toby; the moment where he's standing outside the base with that insane grin on his face made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. In fact, the whole crew of the Sanctuary Base are really nice and identifiable. Thank God, eh?

However, Ravel still needs to turn his bloody bassoons down!

The Ood are a wonderful creation. Genuinely creepy and perversely unsettling. What's really clever is they are scary, then harmless, then pitiful, then scary again. I'm guessing pitiful will be our final stop. But if we have to feel sorry for "you know who" next week then I might stop watching this show.

Gabriel Woolf as I Can't Believe It's Not Sutekh made my blood run cold. Pure, malevolent evil. It's a shame he isn't Sutekh - I simply don't buy the "general audience will feel alienated by the continuity" excuse. They've never heard of the Ood either, have they? And if you can get away with K9 you could probably get away with the Quarks. A throwaway line would have been enough for me (I thought the Ood would say his name when they listed the Devil's aliases) but I've resigned myself to the fact that we're going up against Old Nick himself next week. They must have bought Tim Curry's horns from Ebay. Still, I shouldn't rush to judgement. I could be wrong. This show might surprise me. Just this once. Please?

So, in summary: nice direction, nice script, nice design. Shit heroes.

8/10 - I feel Murray Gold.

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this say about The Impossible Planet: Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Sorry, what was the question again?

Creature from the Pit

What an appropriate date, don’t you think? (written before everyone mentioned it) Leaving behind all the sixths of the sixths of the o-sixths, there are the firsts. It’s the first time we’ve ever set foot on a strange planet, despite having an appropriate budget to create one. It’s also the first time writer Matt Jones and director James Strong have worked on DW. Yet only 6(ish) million people saw it. To be appreciated TIP has to be watched at night, when everything automatically becomes 10X scarier. Be warned however, I’m sitting firmly on the fence here. If you can’t cope with a lot of mixed opinions then look away.

Visually, it carries on this year’s tradition of dancing a jig on season 1’s box-set. The direction is solid and confident. It isn’t out there but it’s effective and straightforward without being pedestrian. Where the visuals really come into their own, however, is the CGI. Just wow. I noted back in December that with the sets it seemed to have matured. The volume of FX shots is astounding considering the quality and budget. How it’s done I can’t imagine but from the cavernous chamber to the fiery black-hole they’ve proven once again the investment of love and money the BBC have made. It’s only a pity we can’t see more exteriors – it’s always been one of my criticisms of the old series, the lack of outdoors on alien planets. I suppose they could spread the money more thinly and produce inferior results or play to their strengths and focus on a couple of truly amazing shots.

When was the last time they made the Doctor deliberately bad... oh yes – Trial of a Timelord. It’s the smugness, the insufferable arrogance of both Tennant and Piper.

The only problem is... who hasn’t already seen this? If bases are built like flat-packs, then so are Doctor Who stories. The crew are straight from the back of a Frosties’ packet and the situation is, as has been pointed out already, comparable to any number of sci-fi films. Even the sets look like clones: how Lara Croft is that cavern? With any luck, or maybe divine intervention, next week will pull the rug from beneath us and there’ll be a wonderful twist. It just looks all too likely that events will follow an easily recognizable path and everything will end with a couple of crew members alive, and the beast firmly beaten by some pseudo-science.

That over, can I say how wonderful it was? Despite the incredible predictability of it all, it was very fun to watch. The suspense was slowly built up and there were so many moments of terror it would be sickening were it not for the judicious breathers such as Rose’s realization of what the TARDIS’s loss implies. She’s fine as a travelling companion but when it comes to settling down together, that’s too far.

But there’s another problem: the twisted logic behind making the two main characters really annoying, week after week. When was the last time they made the Doctor deliberately bad... oh yes – Trial of a Timelord. It’s the smugness, the insufferable arrogance of both Tennant and Piper. I’m sure it’s the way they’re written – we know both actors can do better, we’ve seen it. If this is an exec. producer’s decision, and it probably is, it’s a mistake. Perhaps if it hadn’t been going on for so long, it would be acceptable but on and off for 9 weeks now is too much.

As for the resolution here’s a suggestion a friend of mine made: is the TARDIS key could summon it in Father’s Day then why not now? All it took was a mobile battery & as Rose has already bought a new one, (coming to a Short Trip near you!) then what’s stopping them? Those of you with more knowledge of temporal physics will probably be able to say, but I can’t see it.

TTTVBBMUDWF has this to say about the Impossible Planet: Gabriel Woolf drank 4 gallons of WD40 to get that lovely smooth voice.

Don't Save Us From The Flames

Last week Neil made some very good comments about Rusty Davies' imposition of his obviously liberal ideologies regarding the viewer being pushed and pulled towards feeling sorry for some pretty heinous enemies of the Doctor.  This week Rusty invites us to have some sympathy for the Devil.

An episode which for the first fifteen-twenty minutes or so looked like living up to its title, which was the best and most promising of the series yet, began to lose its way a bit after that and became a pretty standard Doctor Who fare where the long-in-the-tooth viewer could see the pattern of events before they materialised.

This wasn't bad telly at all, and the cliff-hanger was certainly above the usual Doctor Who standard, judging by the looks on the faces of the Doctor and his cohorts.  Sadly, it's a fair to middling guess to say that the Doctor will have won the day and that all will be done and dusted come 19.45 on Saturday.  I say sadly because I just feel that the programme has somewhat pushed the boat out too far this time.

The Devil is the antithesis of God and serves as the consequential reminder to all would-be transgressors.  It was uneasy enough to see the Doctor come face-to-face with the likes of Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria, but the Devil himself just seems so wrong.  A win for the Timelord this coming Saturday would render the Doctor above and beyond any force in the universe and would reduce Satan to the ranks of all the other notches on his winning chart.  Dammit...TDW viewers might even descend to terrorise their streets in the knowledge that they won't have to meet Old Nick as the Doctor has well and truly kicked his arse.  Let's face it, despite having the strength to withstand being sucked into a black hole, the Doctor is bound to find some implement from somewhere beknown only to Sylvester Stallone's titular character in the ridiculous Rambo, where he summoned on demand more and bigger bazookas than he ever bought his former wife.  And where next for the Doctor?  Perhaps a trip back to the year dot BC to sonically unscrew the nails from the hands and palms of Jesus from the cross before recruiting Him to the TARDIS' party a couple of days later?  Like I say, I'm no religious fanatic, but against the greater scheme of things this just feels so wrong.

So here's hoping for a draw come this Saturday's concluding episode.  Here's also hoping for some terrible cold, wet and windy weather to kill off the very un-Doctor Who-like warm weather that just takes something away from a two-parter like the present one.  The bright early evenings and heat are also just so wrong - even if the heat outside will doubtless add something to the temperature down in the pit.

The Bumper Book Of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about The Impossible Planet:  The mysterious illegible writings on the skin of the possessed crew member were in fact Sanskrit Welsh lettings which made up the words "We are proud to announce that Doctor Who has been made by BBC Wales here in Wales".

Also, this episode was set especially to be shown around Satan's birthday, which is today (06/06/06).

Ood at C&A

I am sick and tired... Sick of tired old sci-fi cliches being trotted out week after week for Joe Brainwash and his human cow family's general entertainment. I mean, how many sci-fi shows now have done the old "cookery and polyester" story line? Hmmm? Just how many? So... What, precisely, would an Ood taste like? And which cuts of Ood would fetch a premium price on the open market? Are their any recipes out there? Would it be terribly ostentatious to serve, for example, a terrine of Ood with some grated Slitheen on top as an appetizer. The perfect accompaniment to a char-broiled Ice Warrior with suteed legs of Sontaran and a suckling Nimon. Washed down with a nice glass of chilled Alpha Centauri juice. Would it be politic to describe someone who eats only Doctor Who monsters as a Whonivore? And just what about the Ood's dress sense? Was C&A the best that they could do? Perhaps they feel some sort of affinity to polyester...

The Impossible Planet

First off, and the TARDIS's satnav gets completely shit-faced on half a can of WD40 and decides to plop our intrepid adventures down in a cupboard. Could this be the first sight of a TARDIS materialization this series? Is it any wonder the old girl's a little queasy, she's just read the intro to this blog post and pictured Krotons roasting on an open fire and freshly skinned oak-smoked Heamavore hanging up above it.

And out pop our favourite adventurers. And it's got to be said that Rose Tyler's starting to get on my man boobs in a fairly major way. If her ridiculous attitude to all and sundry wasn't sufficient to make me want to twat her squarely about the head with several copies of Anne Frank's Diary, then her overbite is. Yes. I've become obsessed with Rose's comedy, Simpsons-esque, overbite. See! Once mentioned you can't get past anything else. It's only her oversized ego that's stopping her petulant ranting from turning her into Chloe O'Brien. Even her lips appear to have changed positions quite radically (we're talking Leslie Ash here people) lending themselves even more to an O'Brien-a-like status with her perfect petulant pout. Christ all-bleedin'-mighty, I can't wait for her world to come crashing down. You'll be able to hear me laughing from Uranus.

Having materialized in a kit base of some kind, moonbase, seabase, spacebase (the fold out instructions and sets of Allan keys must have been a nightmare on that construction job) the Doctor incorrectly identifies the structure as a Sanctuary Base. Whereas, in point of fact, they've actually materialized in 90's Europop beat combo Ace of Base. If only the oncoming hordes of Ood, or should that be Oords of Ood, had fancied a snack of some kind it would have taken them months to get through Rose's ego alone. And again with The Simpsons references as they get to finish their sentence, just like Kang and Kodos culinary run in with the Simpons one Tree House of Horrors special.

Fans of running and shouting are in for a treat this week as there's plenty of action to satiate their carnal cravings as the inhabitants of the base plough through the corridors like a team of quantity surveyors on The Crystal Maze. All it needed was for little bald Ricky to pop up and start bleating about his poor old Mum who's trapped in medieval zone.

At this point the show was actually spliced with any one of a number of episodes of Stargate when they start talking about strange written symbols that the crew found at the drilling site. Realizing that this was plain stupid and would more than likely result in a court case the production team, instead, just started doodling on one of the cast members and decided not to involve Dr Daniel Jackson at all. It has to be said that whatever Gabriel Woolf's using to keep his voice in that sort of condition should be made available on the NHS forthwith. Such a gloriously malevolent voice. And so low in places that he'd even give Edward James Olmos a run for his money in the sub-audible glottal rumblings stakes.

These poor sods appear to have something from a traveling fairground as a central control unit in the base. Their gravametric generator probably doubles up as a candy floss machine whilst base defences occasionally hits their targets and chucks out an oversized stuffed toy onto the planet's surface.

And then we have Scooti Manister. Her sole purpose on the base is to look pretty and have a fabulous chest when floating around in space. It's a great pity Scooti McBoob bought the biscuit farm, she would have been much better to have around the TARDIS than that over confident Rose. But she might have had to change her name. Something like Knockers O'Plenty. Or Chesty LaRue. Or Busty St.Clair (yes, I know, I too am now ripping off The Simpsons).

And, in a surprise move, SG1 are in this after all as the Doctor and some random soap actress stumble across a Stargate buried in the depths of the planet. All that drilling and not a drop of oil to be had. Let's hope the expedition wasn't funded by Congress or there'll be some stiff questions'll need answering when they get back to Earth and face George W. Bush the XXXVIII. Don't joke people, it could well happen.

So this all brings us back to the Ood. Not since the Torville and Dean performance in skimpy outfits, when both Torville and Dean forwent their customary Brazilian wax, have we seen so many hanging short and curlies on display to the tune of Ravel's Bolero. If the Ood are little pissed now, with the rising of their beast-master, just wait till they workout that the last C&A in existence has just crossed the event horizon of the black hole...

The Bumper Book of Doctor Who Facts has this to say about The Impossible Planet: the DVD release of this story will be joined by an extra featuring Gabriel Woolf reprising his role as the voice of the beast in a spoof 70's comedy series called "Ood, you are awful."

Prophecy 8: Classic.

I loved it.

Traditional Who. For those of you who forgot what this meant:
Decent pace
No using the TARDIS for cheap escapes
Completely Unhuman aliens
Delving into legends
Tacky effects
= The Impossible Planet

Okay, the effects were fine (except the crystal-ball-on-a-leash TM), but that was it. It was even (partly) filmed in a quarry!!! Finally, one of those traditional Who Quarries (TM). The SensorOods are superb as the soulless workers, doing what they were born to do, until their signals are intercepted, when the laughable bunch of worms-and-eggs (TM) becomes dark, fearful. The TARDIS is taken straight out of the picture, and we're told there's no way to get it back. So they can get on with the problems at hand rather than worrying about what happens afterwards. The main villain (no prizes for guessing who) is well built towards, with the subtle references ("The Beast shall rise from the pit" - Dante's Divine Comedy: The Inferno) to the not so subtle (Welcome to Hell). Even the 666 reference is passed over, leaving a vague suspicion but no confirmation.

Will Thorp plays a superb Toby, both as normal and as S***n. That smile - evil, powerful... sinister - when standing outside, is just chilling. It is pure unadulterated evil, and is terrifying. The more superfluous characters also give a decent performance: whereas Lynda-with-a-Y, The Sisters of Placcidity, and Eddie Honestly-I'm-Hard! all look like Big Brother rejects given the script the day before shooting, Jefferson, Ida, Zack, Danny and Scooti all give above-par performances, maintaining the standard of the leads even when the scenes don't involve them.

Billie Piper should be shot. Soon.

Gabriel Woolf makes his return as A Different Kind of Satan (Coincidentally the name of a song recently released by Ozzy Osbourne and the Sugababes), and is absolutely perfect. The tone, the accent, the strength: definitely the best Made For Radio voice we've had in a long while.

Now, what did I think of the directing? FANTASTIC. What else is there to say. Of course, I have the customary What-I'd-Do-Different, but that is so inimportant that I probably shouldn't even mention it. But I will. Here it is, my only negative comment, I'm getting it out of the way. The cameras were a *tad* static. That's all! Especially in the final few images, eg. the Ood, I would have used one or two sweeping cameras along the Army of the Beast to highlight that this can be an army.

Aside from that, the Direction was perfect. Absolutely perfect. Kudos to James Strong. The script was also perfect. Kudos to Matt Jones. Let's see more of these two.

Will get back to you on the results of the prophecy. So far, I look to have been wrong. I thought it would take a time for the concept of Non-Earthbound stories to find their feet, but this has hit the ground running (Hey, if Shakespeare can use a mixed metaphor, then so can I).

Can't fault it (Well, not really. Billie Piper aside) 10/10. More please.

The Impossible Timeslot

First, the bad news: 5.9million viewers.

And the good news: 39.8% share.

Still, what do the BBC expect? A distinct lack of any prime-time trailers is bad enough but (and I'll keep banging on about this) showing this series during the summer months is insane.

I don't care if we won the timeslot, or that we got the biggest audience share. The fact remains that *millions* of people won't watch this show if a BBQ is on the go.

Even with all my curtains closed, the scariest episode of Doctor Who so far was utterly ruined for me by squinting at the TV screen. So much so that I won't be watching the show at its transmission time anymore - I'll wait till 10pm when the sun goes down...

Full figures:

             BBC1           BBC2             ITV1             C4               C5

19:00    5.4 (37.2%)   2.4 (16.5%)   1.9 (13.3%)   1.0 ( 6.8%)   0.6 ( 3.9%)
19:15    5.9 (39.6%)   2.7 (17.8%)   1.8 (12.0%)   0.7 ( 4.5%)   0.4 ( 3.0%)
19:30    6.5 (42.4%)   2.8 (18.1%)   1.1 ( 7.2%)    0.8 ( 5.5%)   0.6 ( 3.7%)

Bad Woolf

Considering the strides that this new version of Doctor Who has taken in terms of drama, emotional depth and character development, it still comes as something of a jolt to realise that ‘The Impossible Planet’ represents out first significant trip off-Earth in over one-and-a-half years of TARDIS-travelling. I mean, back in the legendary bacofoil and sticky-back-plastic days of the 60s, 70s and 80s the show was more off Earth than it ever was on. And it remains one of the biggest ironies that now the show has finally been afforded the budget it could once only envy of other productions, the willingness of the production team to show us strange, new worlds has been less than forthcoming; with them constantly hiding behind the excuse that modern audiences simply cannot ‘relate’ to anything without a kitchen sink or a council estate behind it. I mean, purleease!

So the first question to ask of this inaugural, feet-first leap into the unknown is was it worth the wait?

Well, take a large chunk of Alien, add a soupcon of any space-explorers-as-oil-riggers setting you care to mention from the past three decades, simmer with a liberal amount of filmic homages - The Exorcist, Armageddon, Deep Blue Sea, to name but three - and bring to the boil with a couple of the show’s own thematic motifs, and you’ve pretty much got ‘The Impossible Planet’ in a nutshell. As the late, great Robert Holmes once said, Who works best when it’s showing its roots. And on the evidence here, this opening salvo in newcomer Matt Jones’ two-parter is due some serious folical therapy down the local hairdressers.

In fact what with the disagreeable crew that the TARDIS-deprived Doctor and Rose find themselves in - riding storms while subservient slaves pander to their every need in slightly sinister and mannered tones - I could have sworn for a moment that I was watching a rerun of ‘The Robots of Death’. And as Russell T Davies says himself in the following Confidential, there’s something very Sensorites-like to the Ood; from their odd little devices to the plain, fifties-style smocks that they dress in. Who’d have thought that - more than forty years on - Doctor Who would be recycling what was arguably one of its dullest ever creations; as the saying goes, what goes around comes around.

Speaking of dull, I’m afraid we’re firmly in generic spaceship-crew-stereotype world here; from the slightly stand-offish Captain (though credit, for once, for making the guy in charge black) to the no-nonsense second-in-command Jefferson (a sadly wasted Danny Webb). More interesting is Will Thorp’s Toby, who provides the episode’s most memorable moments as he slowly becomes seduced by whatever force lies at the heart of the planetoid. And whether it is sharing a scene with Gabriel Woolf’s unmistakably mellifluous tones, or standing possessed on the airless surface, Thorp’s performance provides many of this episode’s most memorable moments.

And in the episode’s favour, we’re again shown how much more beneficial these two-parters are in allowing a narrative to build slowly without the need to wrap everything neatly in a bow in forty-five minutes. There’s an awful lot that we don’t know by the end of ‘The Impossible Planet’ and it’s to be hoped that such ignorance will be to its resolution’s benefit. Certainly there’s plenty to discover about the force that is awakening both the Ood and itself; with again the ‘evil since the dawn of time’ shtick having just a whiff of the similarly epic scope of McCoy era dalliances with both Fenric and Ragnarok. Of course, given who’s actually voicing him, it’s tempting to suggest that the ‘last of the Osirans’ is preparing to make an unexpected bow, but I just don’t see it personally. Yes, this episode allegedly treats the concept of the Devil as more than just a conceptual belief; but for the show to resurrect one of its most iconic baddies simply because he himself was an ‘aspect’ of Satan would ring more than a little hollow, Here’s hoping that the production team were similarly restrained, eh?

By the way, it took a good fifteen minutes on first viewing for me to even start to get into this episode. And the reason why? Well, as one or two fellow posters have already pointed out more than once, the Doctor and Rose are getting insufferably smug about their travels, aren’t they? Now I’m all for a bit of nonchalance, but the levels of sheer slappability that both Tennant and Piper bring to their performances during the early part here have to be seen to be believed. And as Neil said in his review of ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’, it can’t be a good thing when you want your heroes to fail, can it?

Fortunately once the TARDIS is put, albeit temporarily I feel, out of commission, neither put a foot wrong; and the episode - in just one of many references to Alien - plays to its strengths as a haunted house story in space. The scenes of the Doctor and the crewmember (whose name escapes me) descending to the planet’s subterranean caverns and discovering its buried civilization are indeed so Alien as to dangerously push the boundaries of copyright infringement. But in its favour it’s all solidly directed by another newcomer for this episode, James Strong and Murray Gold rises to the occasion once more this season with a score which complements rather than suffocates the visuals; even riffing Firefly’s guitar-led soundtrack to good effect.

And the moments that stick in the mind? Well, the concept of a power source that prevents a planet from being sucked into a black hole whilst whole solar systems succumb does suggest some pretty mean and malevolent entity for the Doctor to go all smack-down with next week. And once again we’ve got a fairly gratuitous shoe-horning of a piece of popular music into a scene for no apparent reason (is the budget set aside for royalty payments at risk of under-funding next year?) And despite their early smuggy-smug-smug-smug camaraderie, Tennant and Piper do get to play one rather lovely and tender scene where the Doctor and Rose seem to seriously contemplate the prospect of settling down together like any other couple.

So unlike the ancient hieroglyphics, the writing’s not quite on the wall for this one yet. And I’ll see you down’t Pit next time…

(‘The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts’ has this to say about ‘The Impossible Planet’: following this episode’s revelation that TARDISes are ‘grown’, the next issue of ‘Doctor Who Adventures’ will come with a free packet of Artron seeds for young readers to convert their parents’ sheds with)

They sense you're right.

I saw the new X-Men film last night.  I didn't enjoy it in the end, partly because the screen was tiny and filled with teenagers who didn't seem to actually want to watch the film but mostly because it felt like the work of someone who was trying to make what they thought an X-Men film should be like rather than trying to make something which entertains because it's the X-Men.  I've had much the same criticism of a couple of episodes of Doctor Who this season, and despite my positive review last week, but in this case I was afraid it was my problem -- that I was becoming slightly jaded with the whole thing.  Call it a crisis of faith if you like but I almost didn't watch tonight's episode while it was on, just in case.

Thank God I did.

I've seen fans playing games trying to work out which of the old eras each episode is most like.  For the first half I actually thought I was watching a spruced up First Doctor story (which was wierd) then as the climax decended I knew this was pure Eighth Doctor territory, right down to the news that TARDISes are grown (which ties it in with Alien Bodies doesn't it?).  In my sporadic reviews of that era, I suggested that the the Eighth Doctor books were all about a small humanoid fighting against giant planetary or galactic forces, and that's exactly the territory this story has dropped into (although with a bit of Robots of Death tossed in for good measure).

Generic discussions aside, I can't believe that something like that is going out on Saturday teatime.  I don't remember the last time the show did demonic possessions so well, with all the tattoos and screaming and random death.  But classically it managed to meld the epic proportions of potentially a Lord of the Rings size foe with moments of human terror and body horror.  Having just recently rewatched Pyramids of Mars I was amazed to hear the voice of Sutekh demonstrating how a horrific voice in a tiny cabin can be just as chilling as a computer generated wolf, if not more so because you simply don't know what it wants or what it's capable of.  Well alright, at the end, with the Ooooood we're back in marching killing alien territory, but when has that not been something that happens?  Well alright the design of the back of their heads was ... interesting ... but I like the idea of the globe translators giving the wrong signal -- especially as the cause of the basically false teaser cliffhanger -- I don't think that's ever been done before.

Also, unlike the rebels in the Cyberman story, the crew were clearly defined from the opening scene.  The writing of Matt Jones (who I think I once met at a script conference) proved that in a two-part you simply do have the time to establish characters, even a little bit, so that when wiggy things happen to them, possibly resulting in death, you care.  Scooti Manista (MyAnna Buring) was likeable companion material so you actually felt something as she floated away in the almost void (really she was great -- anyone else feel a twinge of regret that she left so soon?)  Finally, for the first time in what seems like ages, we had the Doctor and Rose sitting down and having a chat about something, even if it was the loss of the TARDIS (another Eighth Doctor novel paradigm).  Given that we already have some idea what happens in at least a couple of the episodes after this we know that it'll be turning up again (I'm guessing the psychic link) but part of me wishes that we could see the Doctor and Rose trolling around the universe conventionally for a few episodes and dealing with that.  Is Doctor Who just about time travel?

And in a wierd move, Tennant seemed to have toned down his performance slightly whilst Piper's gone in a whole other direction.  Anyone else wonder if in places the spirit of Cassandra was still around or if Rose was doing an impression of Ken Branagh's drunk act from Peter's Friends?  Surely the loss of the TARDIS leading to no way home would have led to a bigger reaction.  A coping mechanism?  Are we seeing the effects of all that travelling, that she's become desensitised to the happenings?  Is it that belief that everything will turn out alright in the end so why worry?  They're heading for a fall.  They are.  But it has an amazing cast of largely film actors who've previously worked with British directors like Mike's Leigh and Winterbottom and it really shows.  And none of them gave the kind of BIG LARGER THAN LIFE performance that actors stuck in sci-fi dramas too often end up doing.  It's a treat to have someone like Secret and Lies' Claire Rushbrook (who I once saw shopping Manchester with Bev from Brookside) in (still) my favourite programme (have at you the less good final season of The West Wing).

I think you could actually see the directoral difference here.  Were Euros Lynn is all about interesting angle and visceral action, James Strong's more of a wide angle lense, ledgible action kind of a guy.  In moments when I'd expect a handheld we had smooth movement, but there were still those beautiful sweeping crane shots.  The editing was a bit wierd towards the end though, the repetition of what looked like the Doctor dancing in the cave.  Despite some excellent Firefly-style violin chords during the demonic-aaaah scenes, the full orchestral score, whilst suitably epic was still TOO BLOODY LOUD, with some bits of dialogue being lost in the mix.  Whose problem is this?  The sound mixer?  The Dolby downmixer?  Murray Gold himself.  I mean it's not just us who are noticing this -- I hear even Dead Ringers have done a sketch.  Will someone do something please?

Look -- if the only bad thing you can say about an episode is that the music is too loud then something very right must have happened.  From the production design that looked like a movie to a script which sounded like one too, the week's Doctor Who raised the bar yet again and confirmed my theory that you take the good with the bad.  This time The Age Of Steel allowed to us to bathe in the awe and mystery of The Impossible Planet and I can't wait to see into The Satan Pit.

Thank you, and good night.