Rats

Prefect Slog"Boomtown" may not be quite bad enough to have everyone singing 'I don't like Saturdays', but really, what a pile of rubbish, I wouldn't be surprised to find a few rats foraging around in there - in search of something, anything they can get there teeth into. Give it up, rodents, there's nothing. Now, fair enough, the episode was onto waste ground from my point of view anyway, in endeavouring to bring back the Slitheen. Doctor Who has been perennially knocked for its wobbly sets and men-in-rubber-suits monsters, so resurrecting a man-in-wobbly-rubber-suit monster seems like retrograde motion, especially given that the new series was allegedly setting out to distance itself from the poorer aspects of the old show's reputation. Still, even given a patch of waste ground, you ought to be able to build something on it, rather than just rearrange the mess into a bigger heap. It has all the silliness of the earlier two-part Slitheen outing, a modest fraction of the farting and, given the confines of a single 45-minute episode, a heavier concentration of stupidity. Stupidity which begins with the basic premise: an alien with the ability to disguise itself as any human being by slipping into a new skin escapes to become the mayor of Cardiff, but neglects to switch disguises and prefers instead to protect her identity merely by being a bit camera shy. And goes on from there. There must be something in the Cardiff air that dulls the Doctor's wits too, as the last time he was here, he was easily duped by the angelic appearance and pitiful appeals of the Gelth - he even mentions them and the rift here, some little while before delivering a surprised "I should have known" when the Slitheen Mayoress turns nasty in the TARDIS. This, after the Doctor has been goaded into taking her out to dinner. Although I suppose, relatively speaking, this is only comparable to Tom Baker's Doctor sharing a philosophical discussion with Davros as intellectual equals in "Genesis of the Daleks". Yeah, right. I suppose it doesn't help that I rarely go a bundle on the kind of bleeding heart sympathy vote that they were aiming for here, as this poor lonely Slitheen that had been prepared to reduce the entire Earth to radioactive slag - and who had murdered the woman whose skin she was wearing - did her best to appeal to the Doctor's soft side. I'd have hoped that at least one of the TARDIS crew had the backbone to look her in the eye - particularly a Doctor who could watch Cassandra shrivel up and explode at the end of "The End of the World". The other thought that occurred during that scene was that the TARDIS was a mite overcrowded, and it may (what do I mean, may!) have been a mistake to bring Mickey in, when we had only just recruited Cap'n Jack (who has precious little to do here, but he needn't feel left out as the others are only involved in the plot equivalent of make-work) and only had a single episode to play with. On the other hand, the plot is so flimsy, Mickey is much-needed padding, but unfortunately padding something out with Mickey is like padding it with vacuum. Ordinarily, I've been giving each story a second watch before writing any sort of review, but I honestly can't bring myself to waste a second 45 minutes on this one. There's not even enough story to merit the one watch, let alone a second. Okay, there's some stuff about the rift, cracks (appropriately enough) opening up in the scenery, and there's a danger of the Slitheen surfing away to freedom, leaving the entire planet to blow up in her wake. But luckily, she looks into the heart of the TARDIS and turns into an egg. Huh?! Bring back the reset switch of the McGann TV Movie, all is forgiven. Or better yet, roll on the Daleks, and if they get to exterminate Anne Robinson then maybe "Boomtown" will be a distant memory by next Saturday.