BETTER THAN DOCTOR WHO: SCRUBS & SPORTSNIGHT

Prefect SlogLast time it was all about drama. This time, comedy.
Comedy is something Doctor Who can do perfectly well of course, but it'’s also something it can do very badly. It tends to work best when it arises naturally out of the characters and situations (Leela at Litefoot'’s dinner table in Talons Of Weng Chiang, "“Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!"” in Revenge Of The Cybermen, Sarah Jane'’s run-in with Rose in School Reunion, or any number of situations featuring Leela or Harry). And, contrary to popular belief, it tends to be at its poorest when consciously sending itself up (the *cliff* *hanger* in Dragonfire, the Master'’s ludicrous disguises, anything with the Slitheen). But essentially I'’m oversimplifying there for the sake of brevity. The main point is that Doctor Who -– Classic or New -– has had a variable comedy career, ranging from satire to panto, stand-up to sit-down to fall-on-its-face. Season 17 was even something of a sitcom, albeit a poor one with more than the usual number of set locations. And the New Series, to be fair, has had its share of laugh out loud moments, the vast majority of them intentional -– because, unlike its Classic predecessor, there are no hubcap spaceships, CSO caverns or Action Man tanks on the chuckle menu.
Its flaws and failings, where they aren'’t easily forgiven in the good tradition of Doctor Who viewing, are more likely to elicit groans. That'’s the nature of both the business -– i.e. there'’s really no excuse these days for poor visuals and amateur fx etc -– and the flaws/failings in evidence -– i.e. they'’re generally script-related.
But in case anyone imagines my disappointment in the New Series is the result of a senseofhumourectomy, I thought it might be worth taking a look at some of the comedies that have tickled me lately and earned their inclusion under this Better Than Doctor Who banner.
Between seasons of New Who, my wife and I got ourselves Freeview -– as an integral feature of our Hard Drive recorder -– which gave us access to everything abc1 has to offer. Hmm. With its endless rotations of Home Improvement (ugh), Hope & Faith (!) and Rodney (?) this might have been like a season pass to all major traffic accidents -– but luckily it led to our chance to sample Scrubs right from the beginning and to our discovery of SportsNight. Double whammy!
Scrubs would seem like a certain winner for me, what with my love of ER, but like a lot of other potentially good TV, it had simply managed to slip me by until this year. (As I'’ve said before, there's just not enough time to watch everything!) John Wells has said of his ER staff: "“If you have been in an automobile accident and you are in the back of an ambulance, when the doors of that ambulance open and you'’re coming out on the gurney, these are the people whose faces you want to see."” Not so the staff of Sacred Heart -– they'’re all neurotic, for starters. Still, within its half-hour slot (clumsily chopped up with ad breaks on abc1) Scrubs manages to pull off quite a balancing act, slipping seamlessly into passable medical drama between all the craziness, and as much as a friend of mine drew attention to the weekly helpings of schmalz, I haven'’t found that at all off-putting so far. '‘So far'’ being two seasons at this stage. Whatever sentimentality or moral message it chooses to pitch, I'’ve found more than enough bedpan humour, tickled ribs and belly laughs to mitigate all that. In fact, it all seems to combine successfully as part of the series'’ charm. It'’s never been so mawkish as to have me reaching for the sick bag.
And just as the show can veer off into surreal humour (mostly courtesy of its central character'’s daydreams) and still pull off a human story or two, the characters are wonderfully exaggerated while still remaining honest-to-goodness, well-drawn characters. JD and Turk who, if it weren'’t for their respective medical careers, would surely be revelling in some lowly Men Behaving Badly existence and even then they do okay as far as that goes, aided and abetted by their stuffed dog, Rowdy. Elliot, whose face you might want to see when wheeled out on a gurney, but all the same you really wouldn'’t want her taking care of your physical well-being. At least not in any medical sense. Carla, as the more sensible of the four, you might trust with some light nursing duties, but you'’d want to be aware of whatever boyfriend troubles she'’s currently having -– she'’s with Turk, poor girl. Then there's the uber-sarcastic, hyper-neurotic Dr Cox, who makes ER's Benton look the most laid-back of taskmasters, scary Dr Kelso who is, I suppose, the Kerry Weaver of this outfit and his whipping boy, the long-suffering lawyer who's part of an a cappella quartet in his spare time. Perhaps the icing on the cake is the predatory Janitor, who lurks on every hospital corner and stalks JD like some mop-wielding Freddie Kruger with a heart of gold -– or so he'’d claim. Whatever, it'’s all played to perfection and there'’s a great energy and chemistry to the whole thing.
And, at the end of the day, any show that features Men At Work's Colin Hay strumming away, performing an acoustic version of "Overkill" all the way from admittance to the morgue merits full attention. And, since that'’s in a Series 2 episode, Scrubs had won mine well before that.
Then there'’s SportsNight. I hate sports, I do, but I'’d heard good things about the show and it has Felicity Huffman in it so I thought I'’d give it a whirl and, what do you know, it turns out that the fact that I hate sports doesn'’t even enter into it. I mean, okay, some of the sports-related banter goes -– whoosh! -– straight over my head, but a) so did a lot of the medical jargon in ER until I made an effort to gen up on it a bit, b) I just know I'm never going to make that kind of effort where sports are concerned and c) I zone out when some of my mates talk about football but they'’re still friends.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given its credentials, SportsNight is an ensemble piece absolutely loaded with the same sharp-witted, fast-paced office patter that characterizes The West Wing. Unlike its Whitehouse-based cousin, I warmed to most of SportsNight'’s characters fairly immediately, but that'’s to be expected -– or at any rate, hoped for! -– from a comedy: these people are making you laugh on a more frequent basis. As with Scrubs, it walks the line somewhat between comedy and drama, but -– how shall I say -– the tightrope is closer to the ground. The tone is more that of a drama and the characters more grounded, and it has enough of a soapy element to hook you into the ongoing story, but it's all done with *class*. Not only is there Felicity Huffman (did I mention?), but hubby, William H Macy shows up at one point. This is almost certainly not the way this show came about, but it'’s like when a friend is relating all the insane, frenetic things that go on at their workplace and says "“someone should write a sitcom about this place"” -– where sometimes you nod but know it's just never going to happen and if it did there'’d possibly be enough material for a pilot but never six whole episodes, or somebody goes ahead and writes it and it becomes The Office (meh) or The Brittas Empire (oh dear god), or you get a SportsNight.
It clicks. I love it. And -– fairly naturally, given that -– it only ran for two seasons before it got canned. Added to which, owing to abc1'’s erratic system that some TV channels would refer to as a schedule, I'’m still not sure I've seen all the available episodes or, for that matter, in the right order. There are gaps to be plugged, I'’m sure, and I intend to plug them, because when there are only two seasons'’ worth of such a quality show you really have to see them all.
And while we'’re on the subject of comedy, I should also mention My Name Is Earl (which I mentioned before I had been enjoying) which, with its great collection of Coen Brothers characters, completed a consistent, successful first season and did manage to leave me wanting more. Now, whether it can deliver and whether the good central concept has the legs to run for very long (and here, sorry, but I can'’t prevent the picture of Earl'’s one-legged shotgun-toting ex springing into my mind) remains to be seen and like many a good thing, given the choice, I'’d rather have it end before it took a fall. I'’ve thought the same about Doctor Who (yes, even the Classic series!) before now. Suffice to say, as it stands Earl had a great sit and plenty of com, which is what you want.
Anyway, the less said the better in a sense. For one thing, I'’d rather enjoy comedy than subject it to an in-depth analysis and for another I'’d best not jinx anything by saying things like "“I hope Earl'’s just as good next year"” or "“I hope Season 3 Scrubs is as good as what I'’ve seen so far."” That would just be tempting fate, eh. Also and perhaps more to the point, given the subject header, we'’re very nearly at the point these little articles have been leading to all this time. Yes, Next Week On... Better Than Doctor Who, our New Who Season 2 overview and some sort of conclusion to all this nonsense. Even if, in writing it, I have no fresh insights to offer there should at least be a few laughs, intentional or otherwise.

BETTER THAN DOCTOR WHO: ER & DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES

Prefect Slog
As imaginative a child as I was, one of the many things I never imagined was that I’d get more enjoyment out of mundane drama than Doctor Who. Of course some people might look on that as a sign of growing up, but through a combination of books, audios and, principally, more of that imagination of mine, Doctor Who grew up with me and I never saw myself growing out of it. I’m not sure that’s what’s happened in the wake of the New Series, but the fact is there are dramas that I enjoy a good deal more.
Of course, the likes of ER and Desperate Housewives are only ‘mundane’ in the sense of being free of sf frills. Each has its own brand of magic and, well, age before beauty they say, so we’ll take a look at ER first.
ER is one of those very rare shows that managed to work its way into my adulthood affections to a degree comparable to the way Doctor Who won me over in childhood. In terms of fondness, it’s my closest adult non-sf equivalent and, having recently started rewatching the series from the beginning on DVD, I’m reminded that it’s even old enough now for nostalgia to be a factor. (And on a personal note, it carries some special significance in that I only embarked on the series in the first place while keeping my Mum company while my Dad was away on business trips.) It represents something of a medical miracle, since I never cared for and don’t like medical dramas in general. It was like one of my rules.
A rule always supported by the fact that I’m a bit squeamish when it comes to blood and bones and, well, squishy internal things, but that just lent ER something else in common with Doctor Who, in that I’d watch some bits through faintly parted fingers. Not, it must be said, from behind the sofa – my parents always had their sofa up against the wall, leaving a space accessible to cats but not to small children.
These days, I suppose, ER may not stand out so much, but that’s because it played a major part in setting the drama standard, and back then it was really doing something different. As with DW, there’s not one specific quality I can put my finger on as the thing that drew me in and held my fascination for so long. It’s the mix, just one of those 'Master Chef' moments where all the ingredients come together.
It’s a cocktail of tragedy, warmth, humanity, humour; it can go from laugh to cry in the blink of an eye; it’s brisk and busy and it crams a dozen or more stories into the space of an episode, coming and going with the patients, and there’s a sense of urgency you just don’t get from the staff of Holby City. Throughout the connecting threads are the stories of the staff – the main cast and a small army of supporting regulars – and they, chief of all, were probably what won me over.
They’re not only attractive, they’re charismatic (and, in Season One, astonishingly young), and it’s one of those ensemble casts that really click from very early on. And yes, I fell in love with Susan Lewis, but it was one of those higher, Sarah Jane sorts of love. Nothing sordid.
Anyway, although she departed midway through Season 3 (sniff – see, I’m tearing up already, because I remember it at least as clearly as Sarah Jane being so cruelly dumped at the end of The Hand Of Fear), for the purposes of my DVD collection I’ve limited myself to the first six seasons. Not because I think it drops in quality at all after that but because, economically, I have to have some cut-off point and enough of my favourite cast members had departed by the end of that series to make a difference. That said, I have continued to watch since – and pretty avidly. As far as I can see, the only significant dip in quality came in Season 10, where I believe there was some inexcusable mishandling of Elisabeth Corday’s character, as though the writers really didn’t know what to do with her once Mark Greene was gone and she was ready to move on. But a dip in quality in ER, as I’m sure I must have said before, still leaves it in a respectable position above the competition. I miss Mark Greene, and I miss Elisabeth Corday, but – and I say this with unashamed bias – it came back strong in Season 11. And I fully expect to continue watching new ER until they finally draw the curtain. I’m an addict, what can I say, and plenty of them turn up at the ER every week looking to get their fix – why should I be any different.
Meanwhile, arriving the same year as New Who, Desperate Housewives offered the promise of a new addiction, and a very welcome one at that. Of course, all fresh and new, it doesn’t have nostalgia going for it, but it’s at least comparable to New Who in that it has thus far run for two seasons and has currently left us in a similar between-series break, where we can look forward to a third season with breathless anticipation, expectation and excitement.
Well, for one of them at least.
Actually, that’s not quite as true as it should be even for Desperate Housewives. Both shows dropped the ball somewhat in their second seasons, showing trends towards the ordinary. For me, New Who dipped below the line into just-another-TV-show, while Desperate Housewives was saved by virtue of starting out at such a higher level and slipped only a notch or two, trading in its glass slippers, as it were, for a less fanciful pair of three-inch heels.
Life in Wisteria Lane was always going to be difficult after the exceptional first series. At the end of that, they had resolved their central mystery, laid the groundwork for a new one and left us on a cliffhanger – hitting all the right buttons. And all they did wrong, really, in following up, was fail to integrate their second big mystery into the community, so we were left following separate multiple threads as per a soap opera. The thing is, the mystery surrounding the Applewhites was not one tailored for integration and it was perfectly in character for Betty (the brilliant Alfre Woodard) to maintain her distance from the other Housewives, but it falls down in comparison to the fate of Mary Alice who committed suicide leaving so many questions at the heart of the community, while staying around to narrate. And of course, with the mystery of her life solved, we do have to wonder why she’s still lingering on to offer further commentary, other than being one of the signatures of the show.
So, as with ER at one point, a measurable dip in quality, but that disappointment has to be measured on the Desperate Housewives scale and against anything else, it still retains its essential sparkle and is as vibrant and entertaining as ever and, crucially, more engaging than many another show. It may have become more like a soap, but it was still Daz, with all the brightness that implies.
And not just brightness either. Despite aforementioned (comparative) deficiencies in story, the writing still sparkles well enough and the tone is always delightfully evoked by Danny Elfman’s score, but the whole is laced with some pretty dark material, more than enough to qualify it as drama, and of course it’s that which holds the attention far more than all its polish. If the writing is good, then the performances are superb: the hapless Susan (Teri Hatcher) who, for all the comedic value in her life, had me crying with her when she was standing in the middle of the road in her wedding dress; Gabrielle (Eva Longoria), who manages to combine selfish and manipulative with likeable and commanded similar sympathies when she had her hard-won adopted (well, all right, stolen) child taken from her; obsessive compulsive Bree (Marcia Cross), whose storyline was probably the most tragic of all and commanded at least as much sympathy again, despite her being a bigot and a paid-up member of the NRA; and Lynette (Felicity Huffman), whose storyline was (until the question of her hubby's fidelity was raised) perhaps the weakest – somewhat ironically given that she became empowered and liberated etc as the principal breadwinner of the household, but who, by virtue of her virtuoso performance remains my favourite Desperate Housewife.
So, all in all, Desperate Housewives remains a must-see for me and I’m very much looking forward to the third season – not least because I understand the writers have promised to address the faults cited in the second series. Would that the New Who people were as accommodating and attentive to their own product.
Even if Desperate Housewives doesn’t manage to pick up that dropped ball and match (dear oh dear, far too many football references for my liking) the quality and appeal of its opening season – a fairly tall order, after all - there are always, of course, other ‘mundane’ dramas that despite not being covered in any detail here, would lodge very comfortably under the same Better Than Doctor Who banner.
The West Wing is one obvious and, for me, current example, given that More 4 have been nice enough to start showing them all from the beginning – purely for my benefit, I might imagine. It was just one of those shows that slipped past me simply because of that age old problem of not having enough time to watch everything as well as having a life. I confess I’ve not found it as immediately engaging as ER was, but it’s all very slick and smart and witty and so clearly outclasses New Who that it scarcely matters that it’s taken me a handful of episodes to develop anything like an attachment to more than a couple of the characters. It bears the stamp of quality all over it, like a great big eagle-centric emblem on the floor of the Oval Office and so I’ve felt it deserves my continued attention, so here I am, sticking with it and letting the characters grow on me in their own good time.
Then there’s Homicide: Life On The Street – which kind of goes without saying – but I haven’t watched any of that very recently and my DVD collection is still in its relative infancy as far as that series goes. Still, that is a situation that may well have changed after my next trip to the US – since distributors haven’t seen fit to make it very available in this country. That was a show that C4 always used to shunt around the schedules something rotten – and I gather they accorded The West Wing similar treatment, although probably not to the same extent.
One show C4 are generally kinder to is Lost, and I would be tempted to include that one here, but for the fact that, having stayed with it for two whole seasons now, I am highly cynical about it. Rather too much of its measure of success will depend on its ultimate resolution and a) whether it delivers and b) whether I’m still hanging around to see it deliver. However, in terms of its ability to hook and tease continued interest out of even deeply cynical viewers – always just one episode away from giving up on it – like me, still puts it above New Who which really begins to look very ordinary the more I reflect on it and all these other shows.
And I haven’t even mentioned Deadwood. Until then. But the list is, if not endless, really quite long and I suspect there would be more dramas on it if I had the time to accommodate them in my viewing schedules.
It’s perhaps understandable that anyone might prefer to spend time with Teri Hatcher or Felicity Huffman rather than David Tennant, but when you feel you’d rather be in hospital – even if it is County General - than in the TARDIS, you know something’s not right. And I’ve checked my vital signs, and it’s definitely not me. Maybe I should get a second opinion. From Susan Lewis.

BETTER THAN DOCTOR WHO: CARNIVALE

Prefect Slog
Here’s one I watched earlier. It’s been canned now, of course, TV execs always keen to prove that old adage that ‘all good things come to an end’, so its another of those shows with a disappointingly short lifespan – and one of those where, once you know it’s been curtailed before its time, you wonder if it’s actually worth following through to what now suffices as the end. But hey, I gave others – Firefly, Dark Angel, Tru Calling – a whirl, so I can certainly accord this one the same courtesy. Some while ago I was lucky enough to have a friend send me Series Two on disc (thanks mate - you know who you are) but haven’t yet seen any of that second and concluding (sniff) season – other things like, oh, getting married and such obliged TV to take a back seat – but I was also lucky enough to have another friend give me Series One on DVD for a birthday present (thanks, mate – you know who you are). So I figured, given the lengthy interval, I’d best take advantage of my good luck and rewatch the first series before continuing into the second and – we hope – finding out what it’s all about.
So, what is it all about? If you’re anticipating any clear and definitive answers, I don’t have the foggiest. For all I know, I may not even have them when I get to the premature finale. But for the purposes of this blog, I should be all right if I just limit myself to what I do know…
It’s a traditional tale of Good vs. Evil. Okay, it’s set in 1930s America, in the heart of the Great Depression, a land additionally blasted by dust storms of Biblical proportions. This kid escapes a chain gang, and he’s come home to an Oklahoma dirt farm just in time to see his mother die and his shack about to be torn down, but he’s ‘fortunate’ enough to be taken in by a passing carnival. Dark and if not actively sinister then definitely very moody forces are at work behind the Carnivale’s curtains, where a deep mystery lurks that holds the secret to the kid’s past and will have a profound impact on his future, and - what do you know! - all the best freaks are here!
It’s slow. There is no rollercoaster at this carney and it is never going to conjure the same excitement of a Doctor Who opening as we hurtle through the vortex to that theme tune. Then again, it’s never going to produce the same level of disappointment either. It’s slow – that bears repeating – but it’s my belief it rewards patience. Subtlety takes time. Care and attention has been paid to every frame, every detail, and it deserves the same attention from its audience – it commanded mine. In place of the rollercoaster, what it offers is a meandering (and dusty) truck ride through a bleak and unnerving (not to say disturbing) Twilight Zone – there’s the sign post up ahead! – that takes its tone from its setting and is presented with such a complete and absolute sense of its period that you might be forgiven for thinking the production design crew had to have mastered time travel.
For the duration of the episode, you are there – whether you want to be or not. And you just know they went to phenomenal expense creating something this desolate.
Sadly, probably one of the key reasons it got canned and now that I’m on the brink of embarking on Series Two there is that inevitable nervousness as to whether or not things will be sufficiently wrapped up to satisfy. But against that there’s an instinctive feeling that, no matter what, the journey will have been worthwhile.
In essence, it’s a fairly simple story. The idea is that with every generation there’s born one agent for Good and one for Evil – and through the course of Series One those two agents are each waking up to their birthright, their lives only (so far) brushing in nightmares – although they are of course fated to do battle. Fair enough. I expect there’s a bit more to it than that, but even if – come the ‘end’ – the revelations turn out to be as impoverished as my cynical side suspects Lost will ultimately, eventually prove, the richness of the Carnivale story is in the telling. It’s got Bradbury’s love of detail as well as his fascination with spooky fairgrounds. It’s Something Really Wicked This Way Comes.
Aside from the landscape through which we travel, the show invites us to take this journey in the company of characters who are at least as compelling as the underlying mystery of it all, every single one of them played with a conviction befitting the production.
I can’t say I like many of them. But I like that I don’t like them – it’s that kind of show. Ben Hawkins is the, um, ‘hero’, rejecting powers that come with a heavy price and he’s one of the more sympathetic characters as a result. But I can’t say I especially like the fellow. Justin, the priest and Ben’s opposite number, is a truly horrific creation, and Clancy Brown delivers such a powerful performance I genuinely fear him and what he might do next. And his sister, Iris, is this deceptively meek and mild Lady Macbeth who scares me just as much in her own quiet way. While the Carnivale itself is populated by a motley crew of freaks and failures, a collection of characters all vividly drawn in different shades of black. Samson is a shyster and a half, brilliantly played by Michael J Anderson, and last seen - by me - in Humbug, the similarly ‘freaky’ but tongue in cheek X Files episode from Season 3. Jonesy is a knee-capped ex-baseball player, and something of an emotional cripple to boot. Sophie’s the young old maid, desperate and trapped in her trailer and her life with her telepathic relationship with her mute, motionless mum who manages to give me the creeps while lying perfectly still. Lodz is the exquisitely creepy blind man who sees far more than can be good for anyone, who’s dangerously manipulative when it comes to the matter of Ben Hawkins and uses and abuses his bearded girlfriend, Lila. Felix, aka Stumpy, is the sleazy entertainer who fronts the strip show and pimps for his wife and daughters. Add to that Adrienne Barbeau as the snake charmer, a gay lizard man and the playful Siamese twins and you begin to get the idea. And that’s without going into some of the sordid ways of some of the irregular characters we have the displeasure of meeting along the way. Most episodes I don’t know whether to watch from the edge of my seat or behind the sofa and against the apparent ‘play-it-safe’ policy of New Who, there could probably be no starker contrast. But don’t mistake me – this doesn’t belong in Doctor Who, although it’s the sort of thing that might have worked in a DW novel, albeit a controversial one, back when they used to cater for grown-ups.
To say it’s brave TV is an understatement – it’s a huge risk, and on standard network TV it would have failed probably somewhere in the development or pitching stage. But as one studio exec said on one of my ER DVD extras, it’s often the things that seem risky that are the biggest successes. Commercially, that’s not going to be the case for Carnivale – and realistically, it was never going to be. The fact that it got prematurely dropped from the HBO schedules though is no reflection of its quality. Some canned goods have class.

BETTER THAN DOCTOR WHO: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

Prefect Slog(Warning: There's a definite danger of SPOILERS up to the end of Season 2 – I’ll try to keep them to a minimum, but you know how it is.)
Imagine what it must be like for fans of the original series. Somebody resurrects their favourite show – and they’ve gone and ruined it. It’s just not the same any more.
Well, thank the gods, I say, but then, I am in the happy position of never having been a fan – and I don’t know anyone who’d admit to being a fan of the original. I mean, I quite enjoyed the movie, but I was like 10 or something, it was shortly after Star Wars and my Dad took me to the cinema. But, unlike Brideshead, it’s best not revisited. If anything the title acted as a deterrent and the new Battlestar Galactica was a series I approached with a great deal of caution and a cynical eye.
Luckily, the producers realized that the thing to do with a show like Battlestar, apparently, was to resurrect it umpteen years later and give it a massive makeover. Render it largely unrecognisable. Of course, it is still marginally recognisable (the Vipers are merely a MkII), but it’s like one of those bizarre casting decisions where they pick an actor to play the same character at a different point in his life – and there’s just no way they are the same person. Battlestar is a whole new character and in this case the change works very much in its favour. this new incarnation has such a brooding intensity, it soon became a compulsion.
It owes some of its weight to the exceptional production design. Clearly when they knew they were tackling military sf, they took words like ‘military’ and ‘hardware’ seriously. The space battles are all very CNN and the ground actions all very Blackhawk Down. And they went retro – this is a Russian-built Battlestar – and even built in a convincing plot basis for that aesthetic, with the older hardware securely incompatible with the latest Cylon viruses. So it’s all Bakelite phones, no smooth surfaces, thank you very much, and no holodeck. The crew of this starship take their duties seriously and off-duty they play hard. Actually, a lot of them get drunk and play cards, but a good brawl is also good for relieving the tension.
They’re soldiers. Worse, many of them are pilots and are cocky with it. The problem, as always with military types, is crafting some individual character into the person-in-uniform (and the uniforms, by the way, look the business). This they manage, successfully engaging me with the majority of the regulars and throwing in some interesting semi-regulars along the way. The dialogue is not snappy or excessively lively (in the least), but that would seem like an affectation and thoroughly out of place here. This is not The West Wing in space (although in some respects it clearly is!) The humour arises naturally, unforced, if it arises at all – chiefly but not exclusively from Gaius Baltar’s neuroses, psychoses and generally unbalanced attempts to walk a very fine tightrope - and real character surfaces in the performances as much as the writing.
The result is added weight for the series, and all credit to the actors for filling out their uniforms so admirably (special mention to Grace Park as Boomer, heheh). The combination of Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell is a particularly potent one and with such commanding screen presence between them, it seems as though the rest of the cast (relative unknowns, although if you care to IMDB them you’ll find they all share similar CVs – supporting roles in Stargate SG-1, Dark Angel and other Canadian-based series) raise their game to act at their level, Commander Adama is a Caesar – an old-school general who has had to play the political game – and he, like his ship, is a relic rescued from retirement and handed a purpose – and a desperate one at that. He’s fair, compassionate and ruthless, charismatic and contemplative. Alongside him – or even pitted against him – is Laura Roslin, the schoolteacher obliged to become president. Greatness is thrust upon her and her journey from education minister to fully-fledged President of the last of the human race is, in Mary McDonnell’s expert care, fascinating to watch. Both she and Adama bend and break the rules – even when we’d like to think they wouldn’t. Desperate times, desperate measures – which is what you would expect, This is not Captain Janeway (blech!) holding on to her prime directive despite being light years from Starfleet Command, out in the back-ass-of-beyond quadrant with precious little hope of getting home (yeah, right) to file a report.
In a similar bucking of the too-good-to-be-true-or-remotely-exciting Trek trend, there are episodes like Water, which explores the question of limited resources – and the most basic resource at that – which is just the kind of concern you would expect to confront a starfaring fleet out on its own, not to mention on the run. The best of its drama arises, like the humour, naturally out of the central premise and the responses to the developing situation are, in much the same way, ‘what you might expect’ – and yet, along the way, the series still manages to surprise. Episodes like 33 demonstrate an outstanding grasp of drama and the tense intervals of suspense are expertly judged. SF elements are sprinkled throughout like seasoning, but they are not the principal driving force. It’s one of those humano-centric SF universes – no aliens with distracting crinkle-cut chips on their noses – and the story is very much centred on the humans – as well as, of course, their Cylon enemies.
There are, as with all series, poorer episodes and, shall we say, less effective aspects as a whole. Richard Hatch as Tom Zarek is unconvincing, in part because I find him a wooden actor, but mostly I think because he’s like the occasional bursts of the original Battlestar Galactica theme music (although for the record, I have nothing against the music itself) – an intrusive and unnecessary tribute. Reminders of the original series that simply don’t belong, because this is a much better series than that. There are contrivances too – particularly when it comes to maintaining Baltar’s precarious position – and his eventual progression – in the fleet hierarchy. A smarter person than I observed that he obtained a nuclear warhead far too easily and I recognize that it certainly raises doubts and questions in retrospect. But the point for me is that I was hoodwinked – the drama was sufficiently involving that I didn’t question it at the time. My reasoning plugged the gaps – I sort of assumed additional security measures were implicit – and I’m tempted to add (at the risk of repeating myself) that I could wish New Who might be as proficient at suspending my disbelief. But let’s leave Doctor Who out of this, shall we – we were talking about the less effective aspects of Battlestar.
The least of them, to my mind, to varying degrees, have been as follows:
1) The robotic Cylons, where I think the CGI is fine but they suffer, I think, from a curious psychological effect which I should call the Tumness Syndrome, in that, while watching The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, I had a similar problem with Mr Tumness. As a fawn, walking along on digital digitigrade legs, I couldn’t quite overcome the sense that he should be constantly falling over. Likewise, the robotic Cylons look none too stable, but in the first place this is such a small quibble and only included out of my fair-minded effort to be picky and in the second place they are effective war machines in any shot where you can’t see them full-length.
2) The background mythology, lifted from the original series, and the idea that we Earthbound humans are in fact descended from the BSG colonies. There’s archaeological evidence to the contrary and it’s all a bit like fundamentalists who claim humanity’s only been around for a few thousand years. But in the end, it’s no greater a conceit than Doctor Who’s (damn, there it is again) theory that Adric wiped out the dinosaurs (much as we celebrate it – although we mourn the dinosaurs) and I can certainly get on board with it for the purposes of enjoying the series.
3) Laura Roslin’s miracle recovery from cancer – about which I am strangely ambivalent. On the one hand, it strikes me as a bit of a cop out and dramatically speaking the preferred option would have been to have her die. There was a bigger, bolder turn of story to be had from he death. (And in fairness to the series, it is a show that at least strays outside of its comfort zone frequently enough that I did believe they might kill her off.) But on the other hand, I love the character and Mary McDonnell’s portrayal and I would have been sorry to lose her from the series. Hmm.
4) The One-Year-Later jump in the Season 2 finale, where the leap is a shade too sudden and we are forced to adjust to seeing our favourite characters in civvies – and it's a big adjustment. Starbuck with long hair! No! I was a while bridging that gap, when I should have been focusing on the events unfolding. Worst of all these though was Commander Adama’s moustache. What were you thinking, Bill? Hopefully his first act in the wake of the Cylon attack will be an emergency shave. Defcon Wilkinson Sword.
So far in all of this, I have ignored the impossible-to-ignore post-9/11 theme. It’s a massive issue, of course, and it was always bound to be contentious. It is worth noting, I think, that I know it can be disregarded – I know someone who does just that and enjoys the series on its own merits, free of all that War On Terror subtext. (Where, by ‘sub’, I mean ‘in plain sight’.) Without going into the huge depth it ideally deserves, I’ll just say that I’ve managed to embrace the series with and/or without all that. For me, it’s integral and unobtrusive: I’m aware of the analogy, but it doesn’t get in the way in the slightest. It’s worth bearing in mind that the ‘analogy’ is an exaggeration: BSG’s premise is far removed from our worldly woes in that it deals with the very near extinction of the human race and, frankly, if anyone expects humanity to go ‘gentle into that good night’ then they could do worse than consider a career in Starfleet. You can expect people to rage against the dying of that light, and boy will they rage. Maybe – quite probably – we won’t like what many of us might become in the face of such a threat. Maybe – if we can’t, or choose not to – ignore the ‘9/11 stuff’ we don’t like what we’re becoming. But I can only speak from experience as a viewer, and BSG has, to its credit, explored numerous sides of its own arguments – probably with more sides still to explore - even-handedly and without the enforced artificiality of black and white. I don’t like some of the characters’ actions, but I like that I don’t like them. The characters are presented in pseudo-Anna Karenina-fashion: i.e., not only do they inhabit a doom-and-gloom epic, but this is how they are and it's not for the narrative to judge them. I’ve found it thought-provoking, entertaining, gripping, compelling and somewhere along humanity’s flight from certain destruction (I also like the way the population count varies at the head of each episode) it became must-see TV. Which is quite an achievement for a remake of some old series I never cared for.
Of course, every show has its detractors and I gather that some folks see BSG as rather one-note. Someone else smarter than me (there are a lot of them) gave the opinion that it was one-note but played skillfully on a range of instruments. Or words to that effect – it was a while ago and I don’t have the original quote to hand – which is a damn shame, because it sums it up pretty darn well. I also gather that the show has garnered critical acclaim and even hailed as ‘genius’. Genius, I don’t know about – it’s one of those words that tend to be bandied about a little too casually – heck, it’s even thrown at New Doctor Who in the hope that it might stick. Ha. Genius, to my mind, is where everything works brilliantly and, that being the assumption, Battlestar Galactica might be said to demonstrate that from time to time, and New Who too with less frequency. It’s not remotely important. What’s important, by my reckoning, is that Battlestar Galactica produced a three-parter midway through the second season that had me absolutely compelled to watch all three episodes in succession in one evening. The experience was, to be honest, exhausting, but only in a way that the best edge-of-your seat TV can be. And because of the format, I had to watch it on a computer screen, which I generally hate having to do. That’s a true measure of quality right there.

BETTER THAN DOCTOR WHO: FARSCAPE

Prefect Slog
Beginning a series of odes to TV shows that, for one reason and several others, afford me greater viewing pleasure than Doctor Who. By which, of course, I mean New Who. Doctor Who in toto (and now I have images of the TARDIS materialising in Dorothy's faithful little dog) will always command a special affection by virtue of my having grown up on a weekly diet of its peculiar brand of Saturday night sf adventure and horror. But there are many areas in which New Who, like several eras of the Classic Series, fails to come up to scratch, areas which are only highlighted when it comes to appreciating some of the other treats on offer. Comparisons of chalk and cheese are something of a fruitless exercise, but make no mistake, New Who is invariably the chalk and I know which I'd rather be consuming. More to the point, the shows under discussion are ones I've been enjoying or have enjoyed relatively recently and it's fun to sit back and reflect on what it is about them that appeals. So, I come not to bash New Who, but not to praise it either. This is about said other shows.
And we'll kick off with Farscape, both because that's the show my wife and I are currently watching through from the beginning and because it's the show more than any other that I think is everything new Doctor Who should be. Okay, it lacks the Doctor and a TARDIS, but it has pretty much everything else. This is not something that's just occurred to me either; this is an impression that struck back when I first followed the series avidly, back when New Who wasn't even a glimmer on the TV horizon. Farscape filled the hole and, like a sci-fi Snickers, really satisfied.
In rewatching, the impression hasn't gone away and the thing that most surprises - and mystifies - me is that it took me as long as it did to get hooked on the series first time round. I can't recall exactly how long, but safe to say it was 'several' episodes before I had warmed to it. Now, I discover that everything was there right from the beginning, but my wife - who is seeing it all for the first time - offered a helpfully fresh perspective and came up with an answer: it was a while before she properly engaged with the characters. And that's fair enough - they're a strange and diverse bunch, and only two of them are sufficiently human to immediately identify with - and perhaps that's true of my own experience on the first watch.
Small wonder, I was about to say, except that's a phrase that just doesn't apply to Farscape. It's absolutely bubbling over with wonder. It's colourful, vibrant, fearlessly inventive and, especially considering just how colourful it is, remarkably dark. It's occasionally wacky and sometimes completely bonkers. It does start out by playing entirely familiar sci-fi riffs, but you can tell right away it's playing them with such flair and creativity that it's like seeing a tribute band that has managed to outclass its role models.
The role models in this case are fairly clear and the show's detractors will be heard deriding it as Buck Rogers or Blake's Seven with Muppets. In fact, that's about all they apparently have to say. The truth is, it's easy of course to encapsulate any series in like manner, and yes, it has a very similar opening premise to Buck Rogers, but it steers a wildly different and frequently courageous course through incredible new territory. Yes, it boasts a surprising number of elements in common with Blake's - criminals on the run in an advanced alien ship, villains in bondage and even its very own Servalan a bit later on - but it carries it off with a vitality that leaves Blake and his RADA-trained chums looking all stilted and stage-struck. Yes, it has (gasp) Muppets - or rather, creatures from the Jim Henson Creature Workshop - but (gasp) so does Star Wars and they enable this show to field a wonderful array of aliens and critters as standard that series like New Who can only long for. Their ability to invest latex with character is astounding and I have no trouble accepting - even embracing (figuratively!) - them as real characters. They put the creat in creature.
The whole production is on a creativity high, in fact, and the 'Muppets' are just one of the resources to hand to bring this universe to life. The design is consistently rich and innovative - that's like a minimum requirement here - and there is a similar energy in the writing, with the scripts lively and dynamic as a rule and the actors so immersed and enthusiastic in their roles that some life is always breathed into even the most average stories. There are duff episodes - every show has them (I'm looking at you, Taking The Stone) - but they're kept afloat by the cast and crew and sheer creative drive, and they're thankfully rare, pretty sure to soon be followed by an outstanding piece of sf adventure TV (The Way We Weren't. Wow.). A lot seems to happen in each 45-minute instalment, the pacing frequently spot-on for any given story and it doesn't lapse into any weekly formula. There's generally a fair share of action for each of the characters, and because this is a show that understands character conflict - and is never afraid to use it! - it's invariably invested with real emotion and drama, with a canny ability to surprise.
A surprising number of episodes are shipbound, but when your ship is Moya, you have a ready alien landscape before you've even landed anywhere. She's a living ship and yes, she's the Liberator, if you're still intent on those Blake's Seven parallels, but she's a character - they actually make sure this living ship is alive - and this is a crew - a Seven, if you will - who would cut off one of Zen's limbs if the need arose - and if he had any. The relationship between the crew and 'their' ship is fascinating, as is the relationship between Moya and Pilot (Farscape's Zen, but oh so much more, and quite possibly the best screen alien creation ever). The special relationship between Pilot and Aeryn Sun is nothing short of beautiful.
Amid the focus on the sf adventure story, plenty of attention is paid to character growth and, interestingly, the show explores all the separation from home and loved ones that New Who sought to do in its more pedestrian, Eastenders sort of way, but steers us very definitely in a different direction: outward. It's tough for Crichton, all this 'strange shit' to come to terms with, but he rises to the challenge, but even as long as he is out there and as much as he adapts to this new life, he never loses that sense that the universe arond him is weird. And it still has more weird to offer. He greets it with wisecracks, certainly, but as laid back as he becomes, he can rarely afford to relax enough to quit respecting it - and it never ceases to be dangerous.
There's strong and convincing growth in evidence for all the characters, as it happens, but I'll be good and confine myself to little thumbnail sketches: Aeryn, with all her authority and command, coming to terms with losing everything she knew and having to become something other than a soldier; Dargo the warrior (every sf show should have one - but this guy is a real Aslan, for any of you who ever played the Traveller RPG) and his quest for freedom, peace and his son; the beautiful and, ulp, really quite dangerous Zhaan (who did that makeup!) with her spiritual journey (and yes, the photogasms); Chiana - aka Pip - with her exquisite puppet-like stances and gestures and her frankly brilliant ability to put something more alien than contact lenses into her gaze, and her growth from little-girl-lost, thief and, to put it bluntly, prostitute to heroine in her own right in her search for security; Rygel - aka Sparky - with his lordly airs, disgusting habits, utter selfishness and rampant kleptomania, and his voyage - well, ours really - to discover whether he has any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Not to mention their collective journey in reaching a closer understanding of Crichton and their growth as a family.
The only characters I really don't much care for are Stark, who as a regular lacks the interest he had as a one-off (as River demonstrated in Firefly, it's very tricky to incorporate a mad character without them becoming annoying), and Jules, who is essentially a parody of all those screaming companions we were used to in Doctor Who, and I would happily space them before I ejected dear old wouldn't-trust-him-as-far-as-anyone-could-throw-him Sparky.
And a discussion of Farscape's characters wouldn't be complete without mentioning the villains and the series is unusual in that it successively supplants its choicest baddies with someone/something bigger and badder, while allowing us to follow their journey, threaded - often closely intertwined - with that of the heroes. The lines are nicely fluid, and the enemy of Crichton's enemies is not his friend, but there's room for some of those uncomfortable and temporary alliances we used to get in Doctor Who between the Doctor and the Master, say. Crais, the vengeful Peacekeeper, is a nasty piece of work, but seems tame by comparison to Scorpius, and in fact improves as a character - if not altogether morally! - once forced to jump ship. Scorpius is a nastier piece of work and you can tell right away he's one of those villains of rare quality, Wayne Pygram steps wholeheartedly into the role and you just know he's relishing every minute; and he perhaps relishes it even more when his character (in a thread surely half-inched by Battlestar Galactica) is split off as a kind of Scorpius emulator, embedded as a chip in Crichton's brain - and allowed to become a distinct and separate personality in his own right, known as Harvey. Then we're subsequently introduced to the formidable Scaren, and you don't need to be told they're a force to be reckoned with - we're shown; and later on, as previously mentioned, Farscape's very own Servalan.
But at this point I'm somewhere in Season 2, and I really shouldn't start getting ahead of myself. Although I have already seen the concluding Peacekeeper Wars mini series, I have not seen any of Season 4 (yet!) and I have heard some people remark that the show's creativity spirals a little out of control, away into the realms of pretentiousness, perhaps managing to distance itself from its audience. I'll have to wait and see for myself on that. But if a series must spiral, I guess I'd rather have it spiral upwards out of control than swirling down a plug hole. So for now I'll carry on enjoying the ride and look forward to looking back on the whole journey - even though I'm already familiar with the ultimate destination.

Writer's Block

Prefect SlogAllow me to get personal for a bit. It doesn't happen often here and the fact that I've generally frittered away blogspace on trivialities like TV shows - and especially trivial ones such as Doctor Who - will no doubt make 'personal stuff' feel like something of an intrusion. For which, I apologise for any discomfort in advance and would just like to reassure my regular readers that they're perfectly free to look away now and I won't take offence. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible - in a sense, that's the point of this exercise.
There is no such thing as writer's block, I've heard it said. But that would seem to run counter to my own experience and it's possibly telling that most of the writers who make that argument frankly aren't especially good. To an extent they are right - there is no barrier whatsoever to *writing*. We can all sit down to do it, once we've mastered the art of stringing a word or two together. The problems only appear to arise when we care - perhaps too much - about the results. When there are blocks to writing *well*. Then it comes down to whether you'd rather write anything at all - and can stand to look at your work on the page (which can be like having to meet your reflection on the worst mornings in the most crystal clear Hi-Definition mirror ever). Or whether you'd rather avoid the disappointment of seeing what has - temporarily - become of your God-given gift.
Against these dry spells, I am fortunate in that I do have these bursts of incredible creative energy and entire books pour out of me in such a constant stream that I occasionally have to remind myself to take breaks, sleep, do all that sort of purely functional stuff that goes to make up real life in between. It's a better feeling than I've possibly made it sound and it amazes me to think that works like Emotional Chemistry came about as a result of just that kind of intense, on-a-roll drive. Unfortunately, the roll is a rollercoaster and there are dips and troughs and other words to generally suggest lower ebbs.
Like insomnia, they're an affliction I'm familiar with and, like a sleep-deprived, nervous Van Helsing, I'm well versed in the techniques for combatting such evils. Writer's block - we may as well call it that, since that's what we know it as - is a similar breed of demon to insomnia in that they are both about the lack of a basic need - one being sleep, the other being words - and the desire to fight it works against you and exacerbates the situation. Indeed, I find that as often as not one comes hand in hand with the other: nights spent lying awake with unwritten ideas and anxieties competing for attention, chronic tiredness undermining your ability to work, which further troubles your sleep pattern and so on.
But, as I say, as much trouble as they are, I've defeated both these demons plenty of times before. It's just these past two months that I've really been struggling.
To tell the truth, I've struggled to write anything here. I merely applied myself and forced myself to stick with the weekly habit of posting my thoughts on each episode of Who after it was broadcast. But the full truth is, that was prinicipally an exercise in maintaining some sense of normality and even, dare I say, banality during exceptionally difficult times.
The fact - the inescapable fact - is that on 24th May this year, my Mum died. In the first week or so following, I dove into my writing and honestly relished it, producing some of my best material in a while. Even if I was far from happy, I was at least happy with what was emerging on the page. It was a distraction, a diversion and, as it turns out, just delaying the inevitable. The effort floundered and here I am, two months on, taking the time to consider why that single event should have so much power to so effectively send my creative drive skidding into the nearest ditch.
You would think - well, I would - that I would welcome any chance of escapism, running away from reality to create fantastic worlds, spend some quality time with my favourite characters etc.
There are, as it happens, some fairly obvious, glaring reasons. Quite apart from the shock and the grief which I have to assume are no different to anyone else's under similar circumstances, there is the entirely selfish realisation that my Mum died while my publishing history was still limited to works of Doctor Who or related fiction. She was incredibly proud of my achievements, but they're far from being the limits of my ambitions and it rankles - no, it *depresses* me that when I make the break into mainstream original fiction, she will not be there to see it happen. Or read it. And she would have loved some of the books I'm going to publish when I eventually break out of this current slump. (Although not all of them, obviously, but she would have been that much prouder to see me a real success.) And when I cast my mind back, I know there is a history to this - which I needn't go into here - that makes that more important to me than is helpful. Because, of course, there is nothing anyone can do about it other than live the cliche - that 'life goes on' - and file away the regrets somewhere they won't get in the way.
Still, it also occurs to me that another possible factor that has stood between me and my writing is that I am, quite simply, tired of pretending. By attempting to press on regardless and assure myself that I'm doing okay, I have been inhabiting a fictional world that wasn't - at least not entirely - of my own making. It's a coping mechanism, but that's all it allows you to do: cope. Anything else will apparently require something more.
So, bringing this around - at last - to some sort of positive conclusion, it's my hope that by airing and sharing here, no matter how inappropriate it may seem next to all the stuff about TV - I'll have availed myself of some much-needed therapy. Perhaps by allowing these words out, the rest will follow.
Next time, some more stuff about telly.

La Vie Sans Rose

Prefect SlogShe's gone. She's history. She's in another universe. Yay! But no, this isn't the time for a "wicked witch is dead!" style celebratory dance, because Billie Piper's Rose was a good Doctor Who companion and her departure was an undeniably sad one. A potent counterpoint to the entertaining proceedings of Doomsday, the big season finale for this year's Doctor Who. And the episode itself was a lot of fun. Expectations of a cop-out ending ultimately served in its favour, as did the atmosphere in which I watched it, surrounded by Who fans, all seated in front of a big screen in a London pub, as an integral ingredient of a birthday party.
And it didn't disappoint. First of all, let's not mince words, the invasion resolution was a big cop-out, and any writer - or non-writer - could easily stack the odds so massively against the world and the Doctor when your alien invasion has an 'off' switch. It's laughably poor and it's a trait that Rose only draws attention to when she boasts of having disintegrated the Dalek Emperor. Well, sure, girl, as could anyone if they'd chugged down a sufficient helping of Deus Ex Machina. And it's something of a challenge to see the Doctor as much of a hero when all he has to do is pull a lever and rely on his legions of fans to plug up all the plot holes.
But - knowing it was coming (and sipping happily at a pint of Guinness) - allowed me to relax and enjoy the ride, despite the inevitability of the destination. Rose's 'death' was predictably metaphorical too, but genuinely moving all the same - and was only a 'disappointment' in the sense that I'd heard a few far more intriguing speculative fan theories in the week leading up to it. Which is something you can scarcely hold against the story. As it was, the key factor was that it felt right. Not only in the right and proper, fan-approved sense of the word, but also in the cynical, bit-bored-with-Doctor-Who-lately scheme of things, in that here was a companion who couldn't travel in the TARDIS without regularly touching base with her family and friends back on Earth (for all that she declares that "I made my choice a long time ago"). So it's fitting that she ends up back with them - or, more accurately, with something of a regenerated family, in the form of Parallel Pete, Jackie with a new baby on the way, and - life just wouldn't be the same without him, would it - Mickey. At the time, I did find the coda in Bad Wolf Bay (mini-groan) a tad over-laboured, and the preceding scene where the Doctor and Rose were either side of the wall (in separate universes) - compared to Pyramus and Thisbe, by one of my more intellectual DW friends - spoke such volumes and left such a powerful impression, that I felt the added goodbye was over-egging the sentimental pudding somewhat. But it's hard to imagine what we might have had in its place and it was a nice touch that the Doctor's final words were cut off - running out of coins to put in the supernova - although that did raise a groan and a giggle or two around the room. It does at least illustrate that the Doctor has learned from his experience with Sarah Jane (and Reinette) and has determined not to make the same mistake again. He has been encouraged to think about the people he leaves behind.
On which note, I have to hope that the series feels it has covered that topic adequately and can now do a bit less of that and shift the focus back onto the people who are actually doing the travelling in the TARDIS. Because, of course - and here is the reason for my celebrating her departure - without Rose, there is no need for revisiting her family and friends, and the Doctor has a future with a new companion, someone a bit more independent, we hope, who can enjoy all her exciting adventures without the need for phoning home or popping back for cups of tea and doing her laundry. Yay!
But that's not to knock that element of the story, because that is where the substance of the episode lies. The rest is a pissing contest - although there's no contest at all, really. The Cybermen are like an army of Tim Henmans, facing just four Roger Federers - and it's clear from the get-go who comes out on top. The Daleks are spectacular, while the Cybes are clunky and pedestrian for the most part, only managing to impress to any degree in their battle with the soldiers on the bridge and while marching the Torchwood staff off for emergency conversion. Yes, they threaten to stick Yvonne's brain in a metal shell and fit her with an emotional inhibitor chip - imagine that, an Yvonne incapable of expressing emotion. Of course the heavy irony here is that she crops up as a Cyberman and displays more emotion than the actress could manage beforehand - and graces us with the painfully bad scene of a crying Cyberman. Thanks, Yvonne. Fortunately, this is easily forgotten, and we're still laughing away at the exchanges between the Cybes and Daleks when they first met - some cracking dialogue and, along with Mickey and the Doctor's traded looks when Jackie tells Parallel Pete "There's never been anyone else", it's a real comedy. Other than the Rose story, there's little drama on display here and even Mickey's error in activating the Genesis Ark is immediately dismissed with a "They'd have opened it by force anyway" comment from the Doctor. Yes, he's come a long way from calling Mickey "Stupid!" all the time.
The Genesis Ark is a cool device and it's impressive to witness in action. It is, of course, at least as full of questions as it is of Daleks - why in the name of Rassilon's Rod would the Time Lords construct a prison ship and fill it full of Daleks? Before the truth of it was revealed, I was thinking it might have been a device to re-seed the Time Lord race, which the Daleks had happened to take over, and - after the revelation - I couldn't help thinking that would have made more sense.
But this one was not about making sense, it's just there to entertain and get the job of concluding Rose's storyline done. And on that level, it succeeds. Taken in the context of a string of disappointing episodes, it is something of a case of too little too late, and somewhere in the sequence from Rise Of The Cybermen to Army Of Ghosts, Doctor Who, for me, fell from something special to 'just a TV programme'. Too many of the plots are paper-thin and full of holes that don't need to be there, and if they applied as much polish in the stories as they did to the FX and the Dalek armour, well, I'd find more in them worthy of many re-watches. As it is, I shall doubtless have a go at re-watching them later in the year and seeing what, if anything, might have changed in my - now traditional! - season overview, but I'll probably exercise my right to skip one or two of them along the way. In much the same way, I suppose, that I'd like to be able to ignore the fact that Catherine Tate cropped up at the end of this episode. Maybe that was the 'Doom' part of the title. The odd thing is that the scene gave us one of the genuine surprises of the show, but against that, I'm sorry, but Catherine Tate is one of those 'talents' who is 'highly rated' (although not by anyone I know) but who - rather like Peter Kay - generally has me - like the Doctor in the face of an overwhelming alien invasion force - reaching for the 'off' switch. Another fan theory speculated that the big surprise the BBC had in store for the Christmas special might be Gillian Anderson, a theory which, unfairly or not, only served to emphasise the disappointment felt when Catherine Tate loomed in shot.
Fortunately, between the Rose departure and my pint of Guinness, there was enough substance to counteract the resulting groan and hold Doomsday by and large together, while leaving me with no persuasive reason to believe that Season Three will be any better than this one, but with a degree of hopeful optimism nonetheless.

Phantom Menace

Prefect Slog"All phantom and no menace", I heard it said about a certain prequel in a certain famous sci-fi movie series. And that's something that applies to this week's Doctor Who, another mediocre little number called Army Of Ghosts. Given the title, there's no shortage of phantoms - apparently they've been available on tap for the past couple of months by the time the Doctor and Rose turn up on the scene. And in that time, they've been so embraced by the world's population as to become integrated into numerous facets of popular culture and the media - appearing on Eastenders, cheesy daytime talk shows (Trisha) and incorporated into the weather report. A little far-fetched - especially in cynical Britain - but all good clean fun. Only trouble is, they're so accepted by the general fictional populace that they have a hard time being scary. As does this Doctor Who story as a whole.
The ghosts are there, but they're just a springboard into the rest of the story and, I suppose, a fitting one in an episode in which Rose is supposedly telling us the tale of how she died. (Of course, unless it's Desperate Housewives, it's very unlikely that the narrator is actually dead, so expect something metaphorical come the end of this ostensibly climactic two-part finale to this second series.) I don't know if any of it was intended to be scary, but I suspect it was intended to be exciting. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite succeed in either respect and the end result is something like a high street lined with lampposts - rather pedestrian with a few bright spots.
Now, in fairness to the episode, it had a few things working against it. Not least among them, the preceding episodes - from about the clunky Cybermen two-parter onwards - all of which have served to steadily erode my interest in Doctor Who. (Another item on the dislike pile is Tennant's inane babbling which is becoming a tad annoying and at one point in the episode became unintelligible - something about "Alonso", what? - and that's an especial shame, because I had begun the season liking his Doctor more than Eccleston's.) Mainly I continue watching more for the series' potential than anything that actually transpires on screen. That and force of habit, I guess.
Then there are the Cybermen themselves. On top of all the bad work done by their previous alternative Earth outing (wasted opportunity knocks - more than ever now, I believe they should have been seen to *win*), we knew they were coming. In that context, the mind boggles at just how ridiculously long the Doctor holds his cards close to his chest, apparently reluctant to identify these foes out loud, even though we've already had their presence confirmed with the sight of one of them emerging from all the hanging plastic. There, at least, you have the one scene with true atmosphere and it offers an additonal highlight in the shape of the Cybermen slicing through said plastic in homage to past Cyber tales. As usual though there are questions about the plot, and I don't get quite why the Cybermen are fleeing, in their millions, from the alternative world into this one.
Switching more to the positives for a moment, other highlights would have to include the 'ghostbusters' rig the Doctor kits himself out with - a pure Doctor Who contraption if ever there was one. Um. Some of the dialogue (it all started when "Peggy heard a noise down in the cellar"). Um. The pre-credits sequence, to a certain extent - although the flash of an alien landscape is like rubbing our faces in the fact that we haven't seen anything of that sort and reminds us just how much we've been cheated of more exotic locales than the one on offer - again! - here. Um. The earpieces pulled out with gooey bits of brain attached. Um. The Daleks look nice and shiny.
The Daleks. Yes. And funnily enough, they might have had more of an impact had I not known they were coming too. Unfortunately, it's just too difficult to isolate yourself from online spoilers and the rumour mill, or so it seems. But, even if that hadn't been spoiled, I feel sure I would have guessed it anyway. The clues are there and, in essence, we've seen this all before.
Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways. A menace mixed in with popular culture, a major Doctor Who enemy revealed to be behind the scenes, unleashing millions of the buggers on an unsuspecting Earth. Not to mention, Torchwood's ethos is an echo of Van Statten's in Dalek, except here, instead of a museum, you have an agency who search for applications for the alien devices they acquire, and instead of the impenetrable Metaltron, you have the impenetrable Sphere, baffling and frustrating all the attempts to probe it until the Doctor and Rose show up.
Just in case you're not already thinking there are Daleks in the Sphere, there are Daleks in the Sphere, the episode turns into what feels like a fifteen minute drawn-out cliffhanger, piling up the odds with the big Cyberman invasion and giving you plenty of time to realise that there's some other Kinder surprise waiting for us at the end. I should add that the whole Daleks vs. Cybermen scenario - that we would seem to be headed for here - was one that I stopped being excited about back when I grew out of coming up with such things myself. Definitely a load of what's generally termed fanwank. And if you're not a fan, you're in danger of being left with something that's just a load of the second syllable.
Another of the minor 'surprises' along the way is the return of Mickey, of course, but that's about as surprising as all the other surprises (but at least may answer the question of what the Cybermen are running away from) and is another of the factors that conspire against all this episode's efforts to succeed. And it is making efforts, you can feel that. Despite the rather mundane and no-frills approach to shooting the Torchwood office interior, it's trying so hard to impress with many of its scenes, but it's an uphill struggle. It's not helped by the inclusion of Eastenders actors - the woman who plays Yvonne is unconvincing and a bit annoying - or by plain dumb scenes like the soldiers applauding the Doctor like a bunch of idiot fanboys. But I think what counts against it most is the fact that no matter how many surprises it endeavours to throw our way, they all fall a bit flat - because we know what's coming.
Army Of Ghosts is this year's Bad Wolf and as such we're primed to expect this year's The Parting Of The Ways to follow. There's even to be a parting of the ways, with Rose's departure already scheduled, flagged, signposted and heavily publicised in advance. But more than that, there is a pattern of disappointment attached to New Who two-parters (Empty Child/Doctor Dances excepted) that, along with all the other factors, gives rise to troubling omens that hark back to that big first season finale.
If I recall, I quite enjoyed Bad Wolf at the time, but The Parting Of The Ways was a big letdown with some truly awesome moments. At the close of Army Of Ghosts, the odds are similarly stacked against the Earth and the omens portend of a similarly horrible deus ex machina DW TV Movie rewind-style resolution that will have yours truly groaning and shaking his head in dismay. I hope - really hope - to be proven wrong and that next week Doctor Who will deliver the granddaddy of all episodes, but it's going to be difficult to overcome my doubts on that score because of past experience. It's tough to counter that standard of programming.

Sketchy At Best

Prefect SlogBetter. From last week's Blue Peter competition winner, Doctor Who has improved its game to bring it in line with the standard of entry for Tony Hart's Vision On gallery, apparently choosing to draw (ha!)inspiration from Paperhouse(1988) - a movie I've only seen bits of, but one I now want to watch in order to see if it's any more creepy and effective than Fear Her.
It's not that Fear Her was bad. It's just that it was such a huge improvement on last week's Love & Monsters that it achieved the distinction of being remarkably average. Not just ordinary, but extra ordinary. And the trouble with anything that average is that it doesn't penetrate nearly as deeply as anything excellent (The Empty Child, say) or dreadful (take your pick) and leaves you with not much you can say about it.
So there we have it. Fear Her.
Oh, all right then, I'll make an effort.
Somewhere in there was a good story. A kid has the power to capture people and things in her drawings (cool) and to bring her drawings to life (also cool, but not a flip side that's explored to any satisfactory degree in the episode). It's because the girl's been possessed by an alien (so-so) that's out to secure as many friends for itself as possible because it's lonely (awww - actually a nice and fairly novel bit of motivation for an alien 'menace'.) (And I use the word 'menace' loosely, because there's actually very little of it in evidence here.)
With that to play with, the episode does manage a steady build-up, with a mystery that's allowed to develop at a well-judged pace - not something we get to see a lot of in Doctor Who these days - and even delivers some sense of menace from the drawing in the cupboard, the fact that it's a portrait of the girl's father leading the imagination along genuinely and uncomfortably creepy lines.
Working against it, all the time, is the pedestrian setting and, not just that, the pedestrian approach to shooting that setting. There's a complete absence of atmosphere. And the menace fails to materialise, in part because the only real monster on offer stays in the cupboard.
Okay, it does break out towards the end, but by then it's all a bit too late and we've been lulled into the belief we've been watching an especially sleepy episode of some X-Files/Eastenders crossover. An impression reinforced by the inclusion of Frank Butcher's Mum from the UK's number one soap. I wonder, if the producers more time working on Doctor Who stories instead of struggling so hard for all this relevance to contemporary audiences, might we begin to see something better and something more like, well, Doctor Who. And making it a bit more Eastenders doesn't ground it in reality, it just grounds it in Wolford.
For some reason, there's also this whole Olympic Games thread running (ha) throughout and we're left to wonder why, until the end, when the Doctor takes up the torch (torch - Torchwood?) and yours truly starts hunting around for a sick bag. Far too lame for track and field.
There were nice comic moments - the TARDIS materialising the wrong way around, with the Doctor unable to get out - and there were nice character moments - "I was a dad once", the Doctor says. But there's nothing, least of all the Olympic torch, that can possibly make this episode shine. Even the nicely judged (relative to what we've seen in this series) story development falls down like a - like a paper house (haha) when we fall once more into explanation territory, somewhere in the middle. There's nowhere near enough story here for two parts, but the Doctor has to know all about the aliens in order for this to meet its 45 minute deadline, and sitting in a bedroom talking about aliens might be what Doctor Who fans do when their show isn't on, but it doesn't make for great viewing or storytelling.
At which point, I'm sorry, I get tired and I'm sure there's more I could say, but I just don't have the energy or inclination. Fear Her is an instruction and obviously that's what we're meant to do, but it's about what you'd expect from the tell-don't-show approach. Which is especially ironic in an episode that, to begin with, at least made efforts in the other direction.
In the end it all boils down to one word: 'meh'. Or, as we say these days, it's all a bit Idiots' Lantern.
As something of an epilogue, the trailer for next week's would have excited some interest but for the fact that I'm a little tired of Doctor Who being used as a promotional vehicle for its own spinoff series (they're making this thing called Torchwood, by the way, did you know?) and the return of the Cybermen just manages to rub salt in the two-part wound that was Rise Of The Cybermen and Age Of Steel. They set that bloody thing on an *alternative Earth*. They could have had the Cybermen *win*, for crying out loud. Then, when they return, they're actually a bona fide, all-conquering menace, and we've a real reason to fear them. As it is, I'll just have to hope someone manages to override my emotional inhibitor chip so that I can be induced to care.

Stuff & Nonsense

Prefect SlogOh dear. I'd been so looking forward to sitting down and watching Doctor Who this week, but for some reason it wasn't on. Instead, they showed this episode called Love & Monsters from some other series I'd not seen before and hoped we would all keep watching anyway. I did, as it happens, but only under duress and it was a very close run thing. I was, for the first time in forever, on the point of giving up and going in the other room to do something - anything - more interesting when, in about the 15th minute, Peter Kay made his entrance. Peter Kay is not normally an inducement to continue watching anything, if you ask me - quite the opposite - but it was coincidentally the same moment when it looked like something of note might actually happen.
It didn't. But I rode out the wave of disappointment all the way to the end anyway. I can't say it was downhill from there exactly - it's hard to discern any kind of gradient when you start out so close to rock bottom - but it wasn't an experience I'll be repeating any time soon.
But I'm being unfair. The opening was at least a novel one and there was the hint of a story to follow. It's just that none materialised, and in its place we were subjected to what was esssentially a parody of fandom and part 'clip show', which was all very well and perhaps in another series might have made for a reasonable sitcom. And by 'reasonable sitcom', I'd put it in the Two Pints Of Lager bracket - i.e. the sort of thing that seems acceptable to BBC3 these days - if I was being charitable. To distinguish from such sitcoms, this did have its fair share of witty moments - although the early recourse to Scooby Doo antics was an ominous sign that did the whole thing no favours - but in the context of this latest series of Doctor Who - because, it's no use, I can't really kid myself otherwise, it was officially an episode of Doctor Who - it was nothing remotely like what I was looking or hoping for. What this series needed that Saturday was a decent, well-written, gripping Doctor Who adventure. As it was, in light of this farcical bit of fluff, we might easily kid ourselves that, despite the gaping plot holes and sloppy writing in the previous two-parter, we'd already seen such a thing in The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit. But the truth is we haven't - and we are long overdue. This is a flagship series for the BBC, with huge resources thrown at it and, allegedly, written by the best in the business - and yet I've seen entirely average - or lesser - American TV shows that have been consistently put together better.
People will no doubt applaud this outing for being brave and experimental, and of course I'd have to agree. But the thing about bravery is that it's easily confused with foolhardiness, and the thing about experiments is that they are often apt to fail. Experimental episodes, really, are for the shows that have achieved a comfortable and consistent high standard, not series which even in their best episodes (this year, Tooth & Claw, School Reunion) are riddled with flaws that we're sufficiently engaged to overlook.
This one, you know the outlook is poor when they're resorting to a montage so close to the beginning. No matter how much you like ELO - and I do - it's a telltale sign that there's a lack of story here.
(The montage, of course, is an increasingly frequent staple of Doctor Who: Confidential these days, used to flimsily disguise the fact that they're running out of material to fill a 30 minute instalment each week. And by a curious coincidence it was only when watching Confidential, after the show, that this week's episode made sense. This was the first I discovered that the Absorbaloff (sp?) was in fact a monster designed by a Blue Peter competition winner - a 9-year old kid. Yes, suddenly it all became clear. Although I then wondered when we were going to be introduced to the 7-year old who'd written the script. Which was, I confess, very uncharitable of me, but hey, I had just been cheated out of my weekly helping of Doctor Who and, perhaps more to the point, in amongst some of the sharper wit, I have detected too much in this latest brand of Doctor Who that is puerile and infantile, as though the show is often playing down to its younger audience, something that I don't believe the 'classic series' did, at least until its later pantomime years. Aka the Winter Years, because winter is the season of pantomime, after all.)
Just as things aren't helped by the presence of Peter Kay as the most ludicrous monster since the Slitheen (passing similarities to which I noticed with a groan, before the episode acknowledged said similarities itself), they aren't helped either by the inclusion of the guy from Hustle - for one thing he looks too much like Gordon Ramsay for my liking, and for another he was in Hustle, another of the BBC's proud series which suffers a bad case of style over substance; the only successful scam it ever depicted being the one where it ripped off every con-artist movie in history and passed it off to an unwitting public as original and entertaining. Things were moderately helped by Shirley Henderson, who was such a scream in the BBC's recent modern re-telling of Taming Of The Shrew. But against that, the same things weren't at all helped by Jackie who, despite contributing a sometimes humorous and emotional performance, just serves as a reminder that this is all about 'the people left behind'. Both in her case and - in more of a Girl In The Fireplace Doctor-just-occasionally-passing-through sort of way - in the case of Elton, the 'hero' of this 'brave experiment'. I mean, fine, go ahead and explore this aspect of the companions' travels with the Doctor - but explore it once, thanks, and be done with it. Then get on with telling us some cracking Doctor Who stories. Please. I am BORED with 'the people left behind'. Doctor Who is NOT about them. That's for another show that, let's be honest, really doesn't deserve to be made anyway.
Rather like Love & Monsters, in fact.
It's all a bit like one of those experimental short stories you encounter from time to time in a Doctor Who anthology, and in that kind of context it might have amused and entertained, while registering as a fun bit of speculative Who-related fiction. But, at the risk of repeating myself, in the context of a series that has been sadly wanting when it comes to good, solidly told Doctor Who stories, it just comes across as a wasted episode and a huge disappointment - and given that there are only thirteen of these per year and that they're all hideously expensive (apparently), that sense of waste is magnified.
Next week, I notice, we are back on Earth. Woo bloody hoo. This, in a series that allegedly promised to take us further than before and visit more alien worlds - a promise that has, as far as I can see, only managed to set us up for further disappointment. Surely there's enough space in the TARDIS interior to accommodate a kitchen sink, so we don't have to keep returning to Earth for that? I don't really see a great deal of evidence to suggest that the series has come any great distance from its flawed beginnings or learnt from any of its key mistakes. It seems content to hover in what it perceives as safe territory and troll out the same substandard goods, when it has already shown itself to be capable of so much better.
This was the week I officially grew tired of Doctor Who - as I said, some 15 minutes into the episode (I was even SMSed and have been 'accosted' since by friends and family who wondered what it was all about, who thought it had to be 'the worst storyline EVER', and who thought it should have been called Doctor Where? - like I had something to do with it! I disagreed with the latter, arguing that they might have called it Doctor WTF?.) Three worthwhile episodes so far out of thirteen, with the rest ranging from meh to blech, is a poor showing in my book.
Doctor Who is a wide-ranging and flexible show and one which can accommodate experimental episodes with ease, but I think this series needs to focus on getting the 'standard' ones right before it has another go at one of these. Come back in, say, seven years maybe, and while we're about it can we make sure that 'the people left behind' are left behind?
Thanks to the way things have played out, I'm now actively looking forward to Rose's departure at the end of this series. Not through any fault of her own - she's been great. But getting rid of her should in theory see the series shedding all the baggage that came with her and, maybe - just maybe - with the TARDIS thus unburdened, we might get to travel a little further.

Pitfall

Prefect SlogWhat a ride. I mean, only last week Doctor Who left us gasping with a three-way cliffhanger, which - after a shabby piece of expositionary storytelling - showed a real knack for drama and heightened tension.
So what went wrong?
If you're so good at blowing up all those dramatic balloons, surely the thing to do is let them loose and see where they fly. Not pop them all in quick succession and spend the rest of the time desperately trying to keep them up in the air. At the end of The Impossible Planet the possessed Ood are on the march, the planet's hurtling into the black hole and something's rising out of the pit. At the beginning of The Satan Pit, Jefferson decides to open fire on the Ood, begging the question why he didn't get around to doing that last week, the planet decides to stop heading for the black hole, and all that rose out of the pit, it turns out, was the camera. And unfortunately, from there on in, too much of this episode was just like that - throwing away good dramatic potential like it was going out of fashion.
Thankfully, while this shameless waste was going on, there were saving graces. It was hugely spectacular, for one. I'm not usually one to be easily impressed by spectacle alone, but credit where it's due, this one was dazzling and cinematic for most of its screentime. So much so, that the big-budget fx made the cast look too much like low-budget actors. Yes, I'm afraid to say it, but there was little sign of that elusive charisma from the previous week, but again I'm disposed to be charitable and put that down to the failings of the script. There are, after all, moments when the script is working - and the actors work with it. Too much of the time though, they are toiling against script inadequacies: each of the crew has backstory, it emerges, but it's only something that we're made aware of as Satan dishes out token character sketches like helpings of Protein 3, or whatever slop they were serving in the Sanctuary Base kicthens last week. It's a perfunctory, shorthand form of storytelling that's best reserved for a synopsis, and doesn't belong in a completed and, we would hope, finely polished TV episode. Of them all, only Toby really comes alive to any significant degree, and that's largely because he becomes the Devil and is voiced by the mighty Gabriel Woolf, the man who gave us Sutekh and the man who, if the truth be known, inspired us to do our best Sutekh impersonations in the playground all those years ago.
Setting the crew aside, there are further problems with the storytelling that grate a little more and jumped me out of the action just a little too frequently. Immediately after the multiple-deflation of the cliffhangers, things revert to exposition and explanation territory, as the Doctor engages the Ood legions in a little conversation and gets the Beast to oblige us all with a little information about itself. There's no attempt to learn or uncover the truth in the proper manner of an epic tale of archaeological discovery, which, come on people, this should have been. And even the Doctor at one point postpones the action by backing away. It's a fair attempt at a twist, but dramatically speaking it does the story no favours. It's another deflated balloon and also feels very un-Doctorish. Or, to put it another way, very Ninth Doctor.
The tension and drama are given a welcome shot in the arm with a chase through the ducts, but this feels a bit like it's been shoehorned in simply because chases through ducts are requisite scenes in stories of this nature. It's undermined too by the fact that the action follows an entirely predictable path: we knew Jefferson was going to sacrifice himself, and we knew there would be Ood waiting for them behind Door 9.2. It wasn't helped either by an oddly placed lull in the middle, where we are even given a fart gag to relieve the tension, when being relieved was the last thing the tension needed.
There are all manner of other niggles along the way, most of which are sprinkled in for convenience: how did the Doctor hear the rocket taking off when he was, what, ten miles or more down? how did the TARDIS end up all the way down there (which we knew it was going to) when the Pit was closed at the time it fell? when did the TARDIS acquire a tractor beam device? The answer to that last one, of course, is 'When the writer realised the story required it to have one.' (Grounds for a rejected book proposal, right there, if you'd ever care to try your luck.) But there were alternatives that were not only more expedient but potentially more satisfying, dramatically speaking. The TARDIS could have materialised in the rocket and the Doctor rescued everybody while the air was still being sucked out into space and the rocket being dragged into the black hole. But no, Rose shatters the windscreen and - ooh, look, the Emergency Shield slides up. That's handy.
Unfortunately, that scene in itself illustrates perhaps the biggest pitfall of the lot. And this is a key lesson that all would-be supreme forces of evil really ought to take on board: don't go manifesting yourself in human form or possessing a human body. Most especially if you're an inexorable elemental force or, say, a fifty-foot tall Horned Beast. Word to the wise: in human form, you are surprisingly vulnerable to quite mundane and predictable forms of attack and generally a good deal easier to kill. The Beast himself was, frankly, a supremely impressive piece of CGI - a veritable Balrog of a creation - but when you know it's just a dumb brute helplessly chained to a cavern wall, it kind of loses something. Especially when you happen to have worked out a while back that Satanic Toby was going to be finished off by Miss Tyler, in the rocketship, with the bolt gun. At that point, and an unfortunate number of points throughout, it's a competition between me and the black hole to see who can yawn the widest.
Against that, you do have some solid conflict in the Doctor's dilemma, and his struggle against his own belief system offers some good material, particularly when he's hanging suspended and alone in the darkness of the Pit, but really, it's not given a sufficient foundation earlier on to ensure that we all know that this is what this story is about and it lacks a certain potency. If we'd seen a story that was more apparently built around that core from the beginning, we might have been onto something better. And in the end, smashing a few vases to bring about the Beast's destruction, is not all it's (haha) cracked up to be.
In the end, what we're left with is a two-parter that had a great scenario, given the full cinematic treatment - and that's a rarity and something of note for Saturday night telly. There's energy and pace to a lot of it and a good deal between the two episodes that's worthy of applause. It's a rollercoaster ride, with some good ups, a few too many downs and a lot of minor bumps along the way. What it needed was a good script doctor and, sadly, come the concluding part, instead of having all that dramatic potential come spilling out of the Pit, it just unearthed a convenient hole in which to dispose of it all.

Have TARDIS Will Travel (Eventually)

Prefect SlogWhat do you know, we finally broke away from Earth's orbit. So where, in last Saturday's episode, The Impossible Planet, did we end up? On a remote frontier base on a, well, an impossible planet, in orbit around a black hole - one of those impressive, swirling cinematic jobs too, that's sucking everything into its dark heart: light, entire star systems, time and apparently the charisma of the Sanctuary Base crew.
But let's be clear on this: it's not their fault. In the early stages of this otherwise really pretty good sf/horror outing, they're all handed such dull explanatory dialogue that even the cast of Alien would have trouble standing out from the scenery. Of course, I say Alien, but really this was all more reminiscent of Event Horizon, and a fairly decent homage too, with the added advantage that this one has a second part and could actually amount to something in the end. Unfortunately, it's fair to say that in the case of The Impossible Planet, it's the early stages that let it down. Not the beginning, that was a good little opener, with some effectively scary critters (reminded me a lot of some B5 aliens) and a nice twist with their translation devices where they turn out not to be scary at all (except, see later). No, what kept me from really getting involved in the action very early on was, well, the fact that there was no action. Presumably feeling constrained - yet again - by the 45-minute episode format, the writer adopts an almost painful tell-don't-show approach. Lifeless exposition is bad enough, worse when it's repeated, as though we the audience need the details drummed into us. And instead of introducing us to the station crew as part of a developing story, they just go ahead and make a round of introductions. Jeez, I think I'd have preferred the Reservoir Dogs approach: slo-mo stroll, freeze frame and add a tag to identify each of the station personnel in turn. For this slow, early explanatory third, I really was thinking of Event Horizon, not so much for the horror or suspense elements, more for the fact that we always felt on the brink of events, rather than actually have something happening.
But, when all that's said, somewhere along the way, this episode actually comes alive and becomes a bit of a doozy. I'm not really sure when it happens, I'd have to watch it again to pin the moment down, if that's at all possible. But the main thing is, it does happen and thankfully we're treated to a superbly handled gallop towards a three-way cliffhanger, wherein the Ood return to being scary (although they are still somewhat hampered by a bloody silly name), the eponymous planet is being sucked into the black hole (where we can hope that the crew might be reuinited with their charisma) and the Doctor and, er, that woman (see, despite the functional introductions, I can't remember her name) are confronted with Satan emerging from the pit. Ooer.
It's also worth noting that the woman's face, when seen through her lighted spacesuit visor during the descent in the elevator, looks incredibly like a skull which, whether by design or accident - surely the former - is a great and wonderfully creepy bit of foreshadowing. Ironic, isn't it, that for the first episode of New Series Doctor Who away from Earth or (allowing for New Earth) an Earthalike, that they filmed the subterranean sequences in a quarry. And those sequences were amazing - a real sense of scale and something epic, and a momentous, forbidding archaeological discovery.
Given how successful the later stages were, I could have wished for an opening fifteeen-to-twenty minutes with much better crafted story development, but in the end, the impressive elements were impressive enough to save it - although of course a lot now hangs on the ability of the second episode to deliver a worthy payoff. So overall, I'm erring on the side of positive on this one, but as with all two-parters, holding off until the closing stretch. The TARDIS has finally travelled, now it just needs to go the extra mile.