Who?

[Purves Grundy]

Who?

Just watched it and I'm with King Mob. I thought it was excellent. Truly excellent.

[Disco Child Ballads]

Who?

I can't agree that it was the best story ever although it was certainly an improvement on RTD's more recent efforts. I still think the best RTD story was 'The Christmas Invasion'. I may be alone in this.

[Purves Grundy]

Who?

I love the fact that it was left up in teh air. It's really bold to have it end up with the Doctor having no idea what had actually happened. I hope they don't spoil it by tying it up over the next three weeks.

RTD is at his best when he's writing about suburban people, like in Love & Monsters. The scenes where the scared people were working themselves up into such a state where they were ready to kill the Doctor was great.

I want to watch it again, and soon, but with Euro 2008 proving so utterly demented and absorbing I'm not sure when I'll have time.

[ian.64]

Who?

A very, very good episode. It was also well directed - tight as a drum, and with good scripting. What would have been a mildly acceptable 45 minutes was, instead, a fine, compelling little tale.

Does anyone watch the 'Confidential' stuff on Three afterwards? Promotional puff pieces they may be, but they're interesting to watch.

[Wyatt Earp]

Who?

Yeah, that was superb. My expectations of RTD had got really low, so I was watching rather resignedly, if anything; and then he comes up with that. Bonus.

I think PG may be right about RTD: that he's excellent at the small scale and the tight focus, but has a fatal fascination for the Grand Themes, which he handles rather badly.

[Ray de Galles]

Who?

I am very far behind in the series and just saw 'The Doctor's Daughter' Along the lines of;

Ginger Yellow wrote:

the idea that there would be nobody who survived for seven days;

Why, if both armies are populated with clones designed to be peak fitness fighting machines, is one of them (The General) 50+ years old?

[Mumpo]

Who?

Duh. Don't you know anything, you ninny? As a general, he was obviously cloned for his tactical and leadership abilities, and his physical prowess was a secondary concern. That was like so obvious.

[Ray de Galles]

Who?

I did consider that but given all of the young, fit clones were inbred with the required fighting talents, why didn't they put his "tactical and leadership abilities" in to a younger model?

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Who?

Well, I have to say, if the all-time ultimate evil that's going to affect every single dimension in the mutiverse is "The Darkness", well I'm not a great fan of Suffolk based retro-prog rock either, but I think that's a little bit harsh.

[Guest]

Who?

Just catching up . . . I agree Midnight was one of RTD's best, but it still felt like a good idea mishandled, partly because it could have done with being longer and partly because of Rusty's innate heavy-handedness. This:

In some ways the ending was a little lacklustre and brief, but the episode wasn't really about that - it was more the morality tale about how when there's fear people turn to an easier target.

. . . was surely rammed home so unsubtly that even the seven-year-olds in the audience were slightly too aware of it. It's common for horror/disaster flicks to be spoilt by Flapping Woman Who Is Too Hysterical Even For This Situation, and Lindsey Coulson got that thankless role here. "Make her stop! Make her stop! Make her stop! Make her stop! ... Get him out! Get him out! Get him out!" She was wildly OTT to the point where I ended up thinking, oh shut up, it's only someone copying what you're saying. When Coulson accused the Doctor of being "an immigrant!" I laughed out loud, half-expecting RTD himself to briefly appear, tap his temple and then point at the camera saying, "A-haaa, do you see?"

I did like the parts where the Doctor was faced with having to justify his authority, which he usually acquires easily, leading him to the tempting but unwise "Because I'm clever!" But - perhaps because the running time wasn't quite long enough to do the story justice - the other characters' journey from tourists to murderers was absurdly fast, which banjaxed the whole story for me.

Turn Left, meanwhile, was just gibberish.

[Guest]

Who?

Suppose it depends who you were watching it with Horse, Young BL was screaming at the tele for Donna to turn left and was trying to get his head round the notion of what the story was trying to say - i.e for every choice you make there is always a "What if" angle - he tried it out at bed time with "What if I don't go to sleep" !

Are we going to have some god awful twist by the way that willsee Donna become the new Doctor or something??

[Yoss]

Who?

Maybe I'm just too easily pleased, I enjoyed that one too.

[Purves Grundy]

Who?

I thought that was very slight. It rolled along innocuously enough but was transparently a case of just keeping the seat warm until things pick up again for RTD's latest effort at turning the Doctor into Jesus as a season finale.

It's a relief to know that this should be the last time we've been left twiddling our thumbs because RTD's been spreading himself too thinly.

Oh, and the main problem with constructing an entire episode around Catherine Tate is that you're constructing an entire episode around Catherine Tate. Not even (or perhaps especially not) the presence of Billie Piper could paper over that particular crack. And if anything, la Piper's mouth has started to look even wierder in the last couple of years.

[Taylor]

Who?

Her mouth is now so weird, it's affecting her voice. What's going on?

Anyway, you can tell we're drawing to the end of the series - the usual portentous atmosphere and overblown silliness, as well as a few genuinely good ideas, executed appallingly. Some of the dialogue in "Turn Left" was so poor it wouldn't have made it into an episode of "Doctors", while some of that acting would have been rejected by "The Bill"; meanwhile, RTD made his own show look bloody ridiculous with all those campy suggestions of what would have happened without the presence of The Doctor, undermining the credibility of what supposedly did happen. Reminded me of a cynical wag saying "so hang on, you're telling me that if he hadn't happened to run into Catherine Tate, then..." and reeling off a deliberately ridiculous sequence of events complete with silly-ass mock news reports, until Who fans have to shrug and say "it's only a TV show, right?" Not sure what this was supposed to achieve.

The last thirty seconds was fantastic, though.

[Yoss]

Who?

You fussy bastards.

Agree about Piper's mouth, she looked a bit weird. Looked much hotter in the Confidential interview afterwards though.

I'm looking forward to the final two-parter, I didn't go a bundle on teh John Simm thing last year, I reckon this'll be better. You can't really go far wrong with Rose and Sarah Jane.

[David Agnew]

Who?

Fuck me, that was the laziest drivel ever to have the Doctor Who name attached to it. I don't think there was an original idea in there. Not to mention full of holes, because since The Doctor is dead, he wouldn't have been able to stop the Carrionites (The Shakespeare Code), the Daleks (Daleks in Manhattan), the Family Of Blood or the Pyroviles (The Fires of Pompeii) destroy the human race in the past anyway.

But that doesn't matter, because RTD loves highlighting his own creations over anyone elses - the example I always use is that Rose would always ask if a new threat was Slitheen (created by RTD), rather than all the other alien presences she faced. And she'd only ask this question in RTD episodes.

In other words, this is a clips show. And with one exception (The Sontaran Stratagem), all the clips are RTD stories, because despite it being the thing he's worst at, RTD loves showing the world in peril. And how. And without the Doctor, we don't just turn into self-surviving bastards. We send all forriners to concentration camps. And they don't fight it, even thought they know what's coming, they even seem happy at the prospect, until they get on the truck to take them away. RTD clearly has a low view of the human race. Still, it have Bernard Cribbins a chance to act everyone else off the screen, so it wasn't all bad. Catherine Tate proved her limitations by showing that her acting range consists of how loud she needs to shout, and how much she needs to gurn. And just to prove that while he doesn't like referring to other writer's stories, he doesn't mind borrowing, the ending is the same as "Father's Day".

But then it had the Boom Town/Fear Her/Utopia 11th episode slot, so why did we expect any different.

In the alternative universe that is Planet Gallifrey, it's the greatest episode ever, and Catherine Tate should get an award, because she's proved all her doubters wrong.

Still, the trailer for next week looks good. Although how they are going to link up the Doctor and Donna, Martha, Rose, Mickey, Jackie, the Torchwood Team, Sarah Jane and her child appomplices and Harriet Jones together and bring in the Daleks and the Judoon, and the celebrity cameos of Richard Dawkins and and build a plot and draw a cliffhanger in 45 minutes without it looking an utter fucking mess will take some writing. Oh.

[Taylor]

Who?

Yeah, next week's episode looks like an RTD version of that old fan fiction you used to get, where the first, second and seventh Doctors team up with Jamie, Dodo, Leela and Ian Chesterton to fight the Daleks, Yeti, Cybermen, Silurians, and The Meddling Monk.

And you're absolutely right about Bernard Cribbins acting everyone else off the screen. Hilarious, for anyone who remembers his previous appearance in a Doctor Who-themed product.

[ian.64]

Who?

Catherine Tate proved her limitations by showing that her acting range consists of how loud she needs to shout, and how much she needs to gurn.

I found myself gritting my teeth during the lights/mirrors scene and muttering 'fucking hell' under my breath. She was at her excruciating worst.

[KimCasey]

Who?

Well, we all loved it in the KC household. KC Jnr was asking me to forward the Sky+ to next week at the end, which is the sign of good Who.

One more problem to add, though - how come the TARDIS didn't translate the 'Chinese' symbols into English for Donna, though, like it did the Latin in Pompeii? That's how sad I am.

[Ginger Yellow]

Who?

"It rolled along innocuously enough but was transparently a case of just keeping the seat warm until things pick up again for RTD's latest effort at turning the Doctor into Jesus as a season finale."

It all ties together, though. You see, Baltar used to think he was a Cylon, but now he's Jesus. And if you believe the internet, you could see an inscribed cross when the Colonials reached destroyed Earth. All of which means... the Doctor is the final Cylon.

[Mumpo]

Who?

Perhaps Steven Moffat could write an episode (perhaps for Comic Relief) in which he takes us to an alternative past where Russell Davies had written some better stories.

Plus, what everyone else said.

[Yoss]

Who?

On the technical points

Not to mention full of holes, because since The Doctor is dead, he wouldn't have been able to stop the Carrionites (The Shakespeare Code), the Daleks (Daleks in Manhattan), the Family Of Blood or the Pyroviles (The Fires of Pompeii) destroy the human race in the past anyway.

It's a parallel world, it doesn't mean that everything that would otherwise have happened in our world would still happen - clearly some of it did, but there may have been other causal reasons why other things didn't.

One more problem to add, though - how come the TARDIS didn't translate the 'Chinese' symbols into English for Donna, though, like it did the Latin in Pompeii?

The Tardis doesn't change reality, it can only change Donna's perception of it. Any time she looks at something to want to read it she mysteriously finds she can, but that doesn't mean that the structure of the universe is already altered for her on the off-chance of her wanting to do so.

[Mumpo]

Who?

Actually, no, I'm being too harsh. I'm more in accord with Purves' view that it was slight but innocuous, than I am with the view of anyone dismissing it as drivel. A few cosmetic changes (such as a creature that looked less like a novelty backpack) and a less plagiaristic denouement would have helped it no end, and at least it didn't descend into the kind of gratuitous, over-wrought climax that was the downfall of Boom Town.

My Key To Time odyssey has finally brought me to The Armageddon Factor, one of the least well regarded season finales of the classic series (although the first four episodes have been surprisingly entertaining). I wonder how this season's conclusion will fare, and if, with so many companions hogging the limelight, Dave will get any more screen time than the Black Guardian.

[David Agnew]

Who?

Yoss wrote:

On the technical points

Not to mention full of holes, because since The Doctor is dead, he wouldn't have been able to stop the Carrionites (The Shakespeare Code), the Daleks (Daleks in Manhattan), the Family Of Blood or the Pyroviles (The Fires of Pompeii) destroy the human race in the past anyway.

It's a parallel world, it doesn't mean that everything that would otherwise have happened in our world would still happen - clearly some of it did, but there may have been other causal reasons why other things didn't.

It wasn't a parallel world - it was *this* world without the Doctor. And it just so happenned that the only things that did happen were the present day RTD-written (with one exception) ones.

[Mumpo]

Who?

I have mired myself in the morass of geekitude that is the Outpost Gallifrey forum and aparrently, as mentioned in the episode, the plastic beetle was part of the 'Trickster Brigade', the Trickster being an adversary in the Sarah Jane Adventures with extended time manipulation powers.

Consider yourself told.

What is perhaps more perplexing is that the Rattigan Academy and the ATMOS factory were presumably destroyed by the replica Titanic, thus making it impossible for the Sontarans to carry through their invasion plans.