In the Court of the Cyber-King

Tsk tsk, three months since my last blogging. And now we're in 2009, the year when - if all goes according to plan - we'll be emigrating to New Zealand, which isn't likely to make the blogging any more frequent.

No review of the year this time, since I haven't been keeping track of books, films etc as much as I could have, but there is time to look back at some of the last fortnight's television.


Doctor Who - The Next Doctor
Rising from the depths, thirty stories high, Mechzilla! (Da-dum!) Mechzilla! (Da-dum!) ...and Mechzooooookyyyyy, la la la la la la laaa... Having a giant steam-powered robot stomping all over Victorian London ought to make this the best bit of Christmas TV ever - AND YET.

The story itself was quite solid, and there was relatively little corn, which is a mercy. No sparkly Kylie dust this year. David Morrissey was hardly natural enough to be a convincing Doctor, but he was right for his character, and his story hung together neatly and unfolded well. Dervla Kirwan's character, Miss Hartigan, was a lot more vague - a fun villain, but there wasn't really much sense of where she'd come from, barring a few oblique references to sexual abuse. She seemed to have been born fully formed as a sidekick for the Cybermen. Velile Tschabalala's sidekick character was a bit half-drawn as well - I couldn't remember a thing she'd done in the episode even minutes after watching it. Nothing much to say about David Tennant, who turned in another sound performance.

Nice to see the Cybermen again, but what was the point of the Cybershades? Apparently they're the Cybermats for the new generation, but back in the day there was always a reason for having the Cybermats in a story. The Cybershades seemed to exist only to give the viewers (and the Doctors) something new to goggle at. The novelty wore off pretty quickly. You could say the same about the Cyber-King, of course (what exactly were the Cybermen planning to do with it?), but it had the advantage that it actually looked good. Besides, I always have time to spare for city-stomping giant mecha.

The resolution was where it went a bit wrong. Not the Doctor using the second-hand Dalek McGuffin to zap the Cyber-King back into the void - that was set up and used entirely fairly. But before that... It seems there is but one approved way of dealing with Cybermen in the new series, and that's to give them back their empathy. This worked fine in the Age of Steel two-parter, with a bit of head-clutching and Cyber-jiving, a lovely shot of a Cyberman pawing at his reflection, and only one Cyberman's head gratuitously and hilariously exploding. But as soon as Miss Hartigan got the treatment, she and all her Cyber-minions magically evaporated into coloured puffs of mist. What the Mighty Troughton was that all about? And in any case, hadn't she retained control of her own mind? All the Doctor did was "break the Cyber connection" - in which case, how/why did the Cybermen evaporate? I feel like clutching my head and doing the Cyber-boogie just thinking about it. And then, at last, the corn.

You know, if the Morrissey un-Doctor had, for example, clambered up the Cyber-King's foot and jammed in his un-sonic screwdriver, we could have had both Doctors involved in the plot resolution and a reason for the Cyber-King to trip over that didn't involve the mysterious sublimating properties of guilt. Yes, I've committed the cardinal sin of trying to outwrite the episode as shown. There were ways RTD could have written that ending without recourse to sucking, that's all I'm saying.

A couple of minor questions about the Cybermen, arising from the fact that these were once again the parallel universe Cybus versions. How did they get hold of footage of all the previous Doctors? (Did they perhaps pinch that from the Daleks too?) And regarding the Cyber-King - the Doctor recognises it as a "Dreadnought-class" battleship, but the only spacefaring Cybermen he's seen have been the home-grown versions, so:

How did the Cybus Cybermen get hold of it?

Since when, and why, do the Cybermen build their ships in the form of giant Cybermen?

Why do they build them out of primitive clockwork?

It seemed as though these were fragments of previous drafts bobbing to the surface of the story, overlooked by the editing coastguards.

On the whole, not a bad effort - entertaining and, barring the dodgy ending, pretty robust. Worth a 7-ish, certainly on a par with last year's Christmas special. Rewatchable, but not immediately - I might happily watch a repeat in a year or so. But hopefully I'll be in another country by then.
Yikes, I might not see Matt Smith's Doctor in action for years! Well, that's what second-hand Internet scuttlebutt is for.


Demons
AKA "Lukey the Vampire Slayer", in which an athletic teenager struggling at school is told by a shadowy man called Rupert from the other side of the Atlantic that he's been chosen to defend humanity against an endless parade of demons. Hmm, interesting premise - how on earth did the writing team workshop it?

You've got to let pass the first episode of a new series, of course, but the early signs are mixed. Neither the love interest nor "Mina Harker" are up to the sparky bickering the script requires of them. (I've only just realised that Mina was the chief witch in the Shakespeare episode of Doctor Who - I'll have to try not to hold that against her.) (EDIT: As I've since discovered, oh no she wasn't. Bit of a resemblance, but my memory was at fault. She was, however, the nurse character in Survivors.) Philip Glenister's American accent is already the stuff of legend, to the extent that they could make it the monster in a later episode of the series. Surely we've taken enough revenge for Dick Van Dyke now? Too early to say how the waxed-chested hero will pan out.

Calling the demons "freaks" is a bit insensitive to us freaks, as is the hard line the first episode takes against them, but this is in line with the Buffy model, and we may confidently expect Luke to fall for a sympathetic female demon called Angela before the series is out. The handling of the Dracula references is actually one of the episode's two strong points, even if Luke is apparently descended from the Hugh Jackman superhero version of Van Helsing rather than Bram Stoker's version. The other strong point is Mackenzie Crook's quirky ivory-nosed villain, so it's a shame - and a surprise, given his prominence in the pre-show publicity - that they've already killed him off. Presumably they'll find some way to bring him back for the series finale, if not sooner. Perhaps it'll be like the end of Flash Gordon, with some sinister cackling and a gloved hand picking Crook's nose. Sorry, picking up Crook's nose. Couldn't resist.

Plenty of ominous hints about Daddy Van Helsing's "accident", which are bound to pop up again in later episodes. Of course, we all know where they're going with this - a final episode confrontation with an evil demon version of Daddy VH. They've already broken out the Star Wars quotes, so it's not too much of a leap to expect "I am your father, Luke". Maybe they'll even bypass the Angela storyline and go straight for the family connection.

Next week, Richard Wilson turns up. 5 points if he says "Are you my mummy?", minus 5 for "I don't believe it!"


Also next week, another series of Dancing On Ice! Yikes! The routines get more complicated and more dangerous every year, as evidenced by the injuries sustained - this year there's already been a news item about one contestant splitting open his face in a fall, and the series hasn't even started yet. It's only a matter of time before we arrive at "The Ice-Dancing Man", in which criminals (and an action hero convicted of a crime he didn't commit, etc) have to run a gauntlet of in-house skating assassins to survive and win. I'm thinking Torvill and Dean armed with all the accessories from the inevitable "props" week, with all their edges sharpened. Yes, even the table.

Mad world

Well, that turned out a bit limp. The least of the DW finales to my mind, and not even especially good by the standards of this series. I'm leaning towards giving The Stolen Earth and Journey's End 5 out of 10 - the only thing that might persuade me to rate it higher than the Sontaran two-parter is that this one had more redeeming scenes and lines of dialogue. 5.5 would put it on a par with Partners in Crime, which is probably about right... but which story would I sooner rewatch?

(2010 edit: Partners in Crime, no question. I retrospectively demote this two-parter to a 3 out of 10. Bah, humbug.)

Now, I don't honestly mind all that much if a story doesn't make absolute scientific sense, provided it makes some kind of sense. See, for example, Tim McInnerny's transformation at the end of Planet of the Ood - seems a bit implausible, but it makes a kind of aesthetic sense. And I could possibly have let pass the crimes of last year's Evolution of the Daleks if they'd been in any way consistent within the story. That's the least I ask of a DW story, coherence. Here are some of the major areas in which I felt Journey's End failed to provide even that.

1. Dalek Caan's secret plan. Why did he bother to rescue Davros at all if he wanted to see the Daleks wiped out? No Davros, no new Daleks, it's very simple. Ah, say some, but he is barking mad. Now there, I reply, you have it - an adventure story's failed outright if you point out holes in its plot and the best cover it can muster is that the chief plotter is mad. And how the hell is he supposed to have manipulated events across space and time throughout the rest of this series, orchestrating this final showdown, if he's mad and incapacitated? And if he can do that, then - being generous for a moment and assuming that he didn't undergo his revelation until some considerable time after he'd freed Davros - why didn't he just use his magic manipulatory powers to crush Davros like a bug?

2. Davros' much less secret plan. Speaking of mad. So Davros doesn't want to destroy absolutely everything, he wants to leave the Daleks' time-shifted 27-planet empire intact - that's fine. And he plans to destroy everything else with a weapon that cancels out the electrical bonds of matter itself, however one might achieve that - that's fine too. For some reason he thinks this will also break open the barriers between parallel dimensions and destroy all of those too, which makes less sense, except that Rose claims she's seen the process start in her own dimension ("the darkness", if you remember). Which makes bugger all sense when you consider that a) this would require that Davros' matter-dissolving weapon somehow works backwards in time, and b) it wasn't actually fired in the end.
So the obvious conclusion is that there are parallel universe Davroses and Daleks doing the same thing at nearly the same time. But this just opens up a raft of new problems. For a start, the wave of destruction is supposed to be unstoppable once started, so Rose and her personal pet Doctor are going to be pretty screwed before long. So's everything else, if the weapon does work across universes. And surely it must be so, because Rose is able to take advantage of the big holes it's already left (although those magically heal themselves up when the story requires it). All that hard work for nothing, eh? Let's face it, the whole issue was only raised as a flimsy pretext to get Rose into the story, and forgotten as soon as its work was done, but I think we all knew that anyway.
The other big problem is that this idea allows us to compare notes between parallel Davroses, and the first thing we notice is that the Davros in Donna's little pocket universe in Turn Left, and apparently the Davros in Rose's universe, didn't need to steal the Earth to use as part of the death ray's engine. So presumably any other planet of the same proportions could be used interchangeably, which seems a fair conclusion, and you'd expect to be able to find a few dozen alternative planets lying around the cosmos without looking too hard. So why did Davros draw attention to himself by stealing 27 planets everyone would miss (or if the choice of planets was part of Dalek Caan's supposed manipulations, why didn't Davros notice and intervene) when he could have stolen 27 insignificant balls of rock no one would have cared about? The really stupid thing is that he stole three planets from other time periods, thus drawing even more attention to himself, when he must have been able to find any number of alternatives on his chronological doorstep. It's all right though, he's mad, and that apparently explains everything. Yeah, clinically insane like a fox. A very, very stupid fox.

Isn't it funny how insane villains always want to behave just like sane villains, only on a larger scale and with less planning? You never see a villain with an insane plan to make everyone wear purple hats when there's a Y in the month, or an insane plan to make potato salad out of mashed-up cuckoo clocks, or an insane plan to sit in a corner dribbling, muttering to himself and furiously pumping his fist. Not that I'm suggesting that sort of thing should appear on DW, but it's just funny how insanity never seems to mean actual insanity, just a lack of forethought.

3. The Haagen-Dasz key, or whatever it was called. Someone's given the Earth a self-destruct mechanism? That's a f***ing stupid idea even before the Doctor points out how stupid it is. It's marginally convenient for this particular story, although it's brushed aside almost immediately, but under what realistic circumstances could that possibly be of any use? "In order to save the planet it was necessary to destroy it"?! The real clincher, or whatever the equivalent of "clincher" is when you're talking about something that makes the complete opposite of sense, is that this system was apparently intended for use "if the suffering of the human race ever got too much" - what?! "What shall we do about Darfur?" "Well, our hands are tied, we can't send in the peacekeepers." "Tell you what, we could blow up the whole planet..." "Yeah, that'll solve it!" Stupiddy, stupiddy, stupid. I suppose we should just be grateful it turned out not to be a plot reset after all.

4. Towing the Earth home. Come on. Come the hell on. So we'll take a rift through space and time that happens to run through Cardiff - and apparently still does even after the planet's been moved across the universe - and we'll literally use it as a literal towrope to, if you will, literally tow the Earth back across space. Literally. I'm not even going to discuss this.

Other disappointing things:

• Last week we had talk of the Time War being "time locked", which sounded mysterious and impressive, and not at all the sort of thing a twenty-first century human scientist with issues ought to be able to knock up on the fly, posthumously I might add.
• After a brief set-up appearance last week, the Shadow Proclamation and their Judoon footsoldiers play no part in this episode whatsoever, even as an aside. I thought I'd heard the leisure centre's lead Goth declare universal war in a way that spoke of further developments to come, but I expect that was just my ears playing tricks.
• "A Dalek empire at the height of its power" is defeated in about ten seconds with a few flicks of a keyboard. A keyboard, moreover, that finds itself in the Daleks' dungeon, yet is bizarrely connected to the entire Dalek fleet. Cue embarrassing scenes of companions flinging Daleks about like they used to in the days when the Daleks were even more rubbish than they are now.
• Echoes of the first series as an entire Dalek fleet vanishes into dust at a protagonist's mere gesture.
• In fact, far too much plot convenience altogether. I don't think I could really describe any one thing as a deus ex machina this time round, but there was plenty of pulling stuff out of thin air. I've seen someone describe this sort of thing as "rabbitus ex hatta", which is a phrase I quite like and intend to steal for future use.
• And finally, and predictably, the story just couldn't sustain the sheer volume of returning characters RTD felt compelled to throw in. The evidence is plain: the Torchwood cast had nothing to do all episode, Jackie and Mickey were brought in especially to do nothing, even K-9 magically appeared for all of five seconds to provide one more rabbitus ex hatta. There wasn't all that much point in having Rose in the story, except that RTD clearly wanted to trash - sorry, sorry, revisit the (already perfectly good) second series finale and was prepared to bend this story over backwards in order to do it.
  

I've seen The Stolen Earth/Journey's End described as the most expensive bit of fan fiction ever made, and I find it hard to disagree with that sentiment.

You gotta say yes to another excess

Did the Earth move for you?

I'm still undecided about The Stolen Earth. On the one hand, RTD's just piled on as many returning characters as he can, together with the Daleks and Davros, and a handful of thrown-away references from earlier in the series, in the belief that this will magically resolve itself into a story. Perhaps next week it will. On the other hand, after four years' practice it'd be almost impossible for the Who team to get any of this wrong, mechanically speaking - the look is good, the directing is good, the Daleks are of course Daleky. But even after three viewings - one at a friend's birthday party, one late at night, and one to finally hear what was going on - I still haven't found enough of a story to really get my reviewing teeth into. So instead I present a series of impressions of bits of the episode - a string of loosely connected set pieces, if you will. Which is almost a comment on the episode in itself.

Dalek Caan - the best thing about the whole episode. How did we ever get by in the days when Dalek stories didn't include a raving, giggling lunatic Dalek? All this stuff about "the threefold man" and "the dark lord" seems quite promising, and even if it doesn't have any bearing on later developments, at least it makes for good solid gibbering. Still 'n' all, it's a bit of a shame when you bring back every companion, spin-off star and barely-cared-about character you can think of and they're all upstaged by a static, helpless prop.

Harriet Jones, one-note joke - speaking of barely-cared-about characters. Here she is again, now doing her Margaret Thatcher impersonation - at least, that's what I took it for, because I choose not to believe that Penelope Wilton could ever speak that flatly and woodenly without trying. "I've asked my conscience whether I was right to sink the Belgrano, and funnily enough my conscience said not to worry about it." All this business about following her name with her profession was fine back in 2005, because you could accept that an aspiring MP might do that in the hope that the Prime Minister would remember her later. As soon as she became Prime Minister it became ridiculous, but the "Yes, we know who you are" response gave it a new comic twist - the first time, anyway. Now it's all just plain tiresome. When even the Daleks yes, know who she is, you know it's gone too far. And what's that ID she keeps flashing? Is there a Former PMs Club that she's joined that she wants everyone to know about?

The Shadow Proclamation - sounded pretty impressive at first, didn't it? Mysterious and that. Who could've guessed it'd turn out to be two albino goths in a leisure centre? And the Judoon, of course, because this is transparently RTD's Greatest Hits and there wasn't any easy way of using any of his other animal-aliens. I expect they'll show up again next week, but here it seems their sole purpose is to remind us of the gag that they only speak in monosyllables ending in "o", so that the Doctor can amusingly respond in kind. Ho, ho.

Davros - kudos to RTD for resisting bringing him back until now. The old schtick, wheeled out again in this week's DW Confidential, is that the Daleks need a spokesman because they can't hold a conversation themselves. Which just shows how little attention people pay to the '60s Dalek stories - or to their four previous appearances in New Who, for that matter. Ironic too, considering how he usually just ends up ranting. Still, here he is again, yer old mate Dave Ross. He's looking good, the mask looks less rubbery on a second viewing. He's a strange mixture of continuity and fresh start, though - they've given him a robot hand in deference to the fact that the real one got shot off in 1985, but they've ignored the loss of most of the rest of him in 1988, and by going back to the original look of 1975 they've thrown out all subsequent development of the mask. Bonus points to actor Julian Bleach for not saying "Doc-tor", to my surprise and delight.
One thought - why has he picked his own chest clean to clone a new Dalek army when he's got Dalek Caan? The wriggly little feller's obviously too dangerously mad to be trusted with a working Dalek casing, and even if Davros likes listening to his conversation (and we sure do), well... he's got a few tentacles to spare. It'd even save time mutating the new Daleks once they've started growing.
I could digress into a couple of paragraphs on what's wrong about Davros at this point, but the mighty Ben Jeapes has already done that.

Rose - she's still back. Seems to have got those teeth a bit more under control. Nice touch that she isn't invited into the Old Companions Club - she is supposed to be locked away in a parallel universe after all (or officially, dead). Heigh-ho, she's got a big gun - I wonder if the Doctor will comment this time on how all his ex-companions seem to end up carrying guns. Also a slightly dubious message in that looting scene that the best way to deal with troublemakers is to flash your gun at them. (Still, there's the American sales to think of.) It is kind of nice to see her back, although I'm still waiting for a proper explanation of how she's able to come back at all - next week, presumably.

Playing pool with planets - come on, who else is thinking Red Dwarf? But here's the thing - the Shadow Proclamation's computer is primed to holographically rearrange the 27 planets of your choice into "the optimum arrangement" without prompting. I'd say that's a useful function to have on your computer, but it's hard to see what use it would actually be, beyond explaining the plot this one time. It's just a bit of hand-waving, an absurd convenience to move the episode along. But not as bad as...

The Archangel network - oops, sorry, the subwave network. I did say this was RTD's Greatest Hits, and oh look, there's a scene of people fervently praying to the Doctor through a global mobile phone network. Luckily no fairy dust or magic flying Doctors were involved this time. And if it's silly that the Shadow Proclamation's futuristic computer should spontaneously guess Davros' plan, it's a magnitude sillier that this "sentient software" should fall into the hands of Harriet Jones, Former Prime Minister. Retirement gift from UNIT? Apparently it's been developed using a trust fund set up by kindly old Mr Copper, the most robbed Companion Who Never Was since Will Chandler (The Awakening, 1984). What the hell's she doing with it? How the hell does she know how to use it? How can you wave away so much plot convenience with the mere claim that it's "sentient"? (The same, but less, applies to the allegation that Martha's transmat backpack "read her mind".)

The Time War - apparently the whole thing is time-locked. So who the hell did that? Did the Doctor do it after he'd finished burning the Daleks and the Time Lords? Did someone else come along and do it? What's the story there? Because if someone else has the means to do it - which seems the likelier explanation - then there's something more powerful and more interesting than the Daleks that we haven't seen yet. This mention of "the Nightmare Child" is pretty intriguing too. The Lovely Jo reckons the Daleks and Time Lords were fighting together against a third party, which seems plausible.

The darkness - is it still coming? I'm leaning now towards the belief that it wasn't some bit of foreshadowing in Turn Left for the finale, but just a way of representing all the off-Earth havoc that would have resulted if the Doctor hadn't been around to sort it out. But could it still be coming? It doesn't seem to be anything to do with Davros - his plan involves moving the Earth across space, quite specifically the Earth and 26 other planets, and since that didn't happen in Turn Left, the darkness can't be his doing. (I'll feel cheated if it is.) If we hear nothing about it next week, assume it was an episode-specific metaphor.

The reset button - you know it's coming. I'd like to give RTD the benefit of the doubt again, but he's set up his options already. (And besides, it's his Greatest Hits, so there'd have to be a deus ex machina or a reset - maybe both? We had both last year.) Will it be the Haagen-Dasz key that Martha's been entrusted with? Will it be another invisible time beetle? I'd've said this time last week that Dalek Caan might have one on his back, but it looks like they've discounted that and gone for a Double Beetle on Donna. Or maybe the Haagen-Dasz key opens a safe that contains UNIT's very own time beetle, for use in emergencies?

My overall thoughts on The Stolen Earth aren't too positive, looking back at what I've written. It's a watchable episode, with a couple of interesting moments and some nice performances - Dalek Caan's the stand-out - but none too solid if you start poking at it. It's all about the spectacle and not much about the story, which is at least something the three previous finales got right. It'll stand or fall on what happens next week.

One-way ticket to hell and back

Well, the Darkness are coming. Billie Piper said so.

When word got out that this episode would show what would have happened if the Doctor had died before meeting Donna, there were a number of things that I could see it doing, and I hoped it would do at least some of them. It met and exceeded my hopes.

They say (and the trailer confirms) that the season finale will be stuffed to bursting with familiar faces, in a way that seems to suggest a desperate attempt to outdo all previous finales - as if there were a need for outdoing, and as if the way to go about it were simply to throw more and more "surprise" revenants into the mix. Here at least there's a genuine need, a compelling reason to bring back all manner of characters and monsters, yet for the most part they're restricted to throwaway lines and cut-in effects shots, so the whole business of revisiting the last two years of "present day" stories is nicely underplayed. Bonus points for that whole side of the story, especially for the subdued effect and music when London is atomised.

The one comeback they couldn't underplay was Rose, and... yes, she did have trouble finding that accent again, didn't she? Billie Piper's good here, but she's completely out-acted by Catherine Tate, which is probably just as well considering who's the focus of this episode. But blow me, now we've seen Tate out-act Piper and Agyeman! Will the delightful revelation of Catherine Tate's acting never end?

There's just one problem I can see here, and that's the fortune teller. Who is she, and why is she so particularly keen to lure Donna in and stick a beetle on her back? How does she know about the Doctor? Perhaps she's been put up to it and we'll find out more next week, or perhaps she's just good at spotting juicy meals for the beetle. Then again, perhaps there is no explanation.

But she's such an incidental part of the story that it's easy to let this go. Overall, this episode is stunning. So many well-played moments, such good music, such good acting from all concerned. Such good writing, of course - if we consider these last four episodes of the season as RTD's swansong (and I think we may, with next year's specials being more of a lap of honour), then he's certainly rising to the occasion.

Next week, it's the New Who apocalypse. Death to the spin-offs! (Except, uh, they've all been recommissioned, so presumably none of them are actually in any danger. Or at least, danger that can't be undone with a last minute reset.) But for now, before the inevitable Daleks fly in and the screen is swamped with returning characters, let's give this episode the full 10.

You took the words right out of my mouth

Must have been while you were stealing my voice, you freaky alien parasite, you.

Better late than never - my thoughts on Midnight. Review of Turn Left to follow later.

It's easy to complain (as more than enough people already do) that modern telly, and notably modern Who, is too reliant on expensive computer effects. As if you could pull off a series of modern Who without recourse to any kind of CGI. But here's an episode that comes probably as close as it can - naturally there is still CGI, there's still a flying harness shot, there's still an explosion, but the showpiece special effect is the acting. It's like some kind of experiment in restaging classic SF TV in a modern environment, except that where The Quatermass Experiment failed miserably, Midnight succeeds, and the reason is undoubtedly the work that's been put in by the actors and by the crew pushing the actors.

You could easily imagine this as a radio play, what with the central gimmick being purely vocal. Go on, imagine it now. It's the 1950s, and now on the BBC Home Service - not for those of a nervous disposition - is Charles Chilton's new science fiction drama... Except that Charles Chilton would have spent a good long while examining the voice-stealing creature's motives before wrapping up with some sort of moral message.

And that's where Midnight falls short - no explanation. Where did the creature come from? What does it plan to do, beyond take over Sky Silvestry's body and escape? How did it survive in a supposedly uninhabitable environment? There are no answers. (Admittedly there is a moral, which can probably best be summed up as "Daily Mail readers are evil".) Now, a bit of mystery's fine, but with no explanation at all - no story to speak of - all you're left with is a set piece showing off the skills of the actors and the sound editing crew. This is entirely the problem I had with Lost (first series, at least) - that with no answers at all, the whole thing looked like hour after hour of actors showboating with a gratuitously enigmatic script. Thankfully Midnight only lasts fifty minutes, which is short enough that it can get away with this more easily. Wouldn't want Who to do it every week, though.

8 out of 10. I'm very tempted to give it 9, because I'm feeling a powerful need to give something in this series a 9 besides the Moffat story, but with such huge gaps in the plot - not even plot holes, just utter absences - I don't think I really can. But the acting and the writing in this one is so good that I can't give it less than 8. And it is a remarkable script, and a tour de force from David Tennant and Lesley Sharp. A definite high point in the season, but I'm still looking for something more substantial. Cue Turn Left...

Up the library steps, up the library steps

Now there's a two-parter thoroughly rescued by its second part - at last, the first high 9/borderline 10 of the season. Those plot details were a little easy to work out after all (mmm, smuggy-smug-smug) but the execution was first rate. Particularly good was the sub-story around Donna's virtual world, which could have carried an episode on its own.

Amusingly, this side of the episode seemed to be all about television - amusingly, because of it being set in a library. The open acknowledgement of the cuts from scene to scene, of course, and the computer girl being pressed into a secondary role as a parody of the younger viewers, not to mention the direct address to the viewer from inside the virtual world at the end. This does slightly emphasise, if not actually raise, the question of why none of the episode was about books. Or at least, about reading. A library would seem to be the obvious setting in which to explore that theme.

Even this, the last mysterious thing about the two-parter, is kind of addressed by the explanation of why the Vashta Nerada have turned predatory. It's their vengeance for the destruction of their habitat - the pulping of enough trees to layer an entire planet with books. So this part of the episode is about books, only here they're not "the best weapons you can have" (qv Tooth and Claw) - not books as a means of transmitting knowledge - but rather books as objects, as things made out of wood pulp. And to rub it in, they're completely surplus to requirements because the Library computer has the whole lot stored electronically, with the added advantage that anyone who doesn't mind being reduced to digital information can experience them all directly. (And you'd assume there'd be some way in the 51st century of achieving the same effect with a headset and a comfy chair. Make the mainframe a bit bigger, replace the planetwide reading rooms with a modest-sized building filled with comfy chairs and you'd be able to have the tourist attraction and the forest.)

So there's actually a crafty eco-message hiding underneath the surface of this story, although it's not dwelt on at all and one assumes the junior members of the audience will have been too preoccupied with the zombie spacemen and Miss Evangelista's freaky distorted face to have spotted it anyway. Possibly just as well - thought-provoking it may be, but is "books = bad" (or even "books = irrelevant when you've got films") really a message you want to send to the nation's kids when literacy is such a hot issue in the tabloids?

(There is a whole other level of philosophical debate lurking behind this, whereby we see characters being uploaded into the Library mainframe's virtual environment and equate them with the books the mainframe was designed to deal with - i.e. "flesh = irrelevant when you've got mind" - but that'd probably be even less palatable to the general audience.)

Other considerations. Colin Salmon was just fantastic as Dr Moon ("...and then you forgot!") - it'd be nice to think he might pop up again in Who in another role. (Come to think of it, he'd make a great Eleventh Doctor, but then again I assume that, based on RTD's casting of Dr Eccles and David Tennant, the smart money would be on the Grand Moff casting someone he's worked with before - Jack Davenport or James Nesbitt would seem the obvious front-runners. But I massively digress.)

Quite surprising that Lux's blatantly symbolic surname didn't play any part in the story at all, not even as a side joke.

I know what I said last week about it being too early to spot patterns in the way Moffat writes, but oh look - our heroes escape the monsters by blasting a neat square hole in a side wall, and at the end "just this once" (again) everybody lives. Even if they died (so Moffat can do the obvious thing of killing off River Song and bring her back).

Which brings us onto the plot hole (I think there was only the one) - how did Miss Evangelista (and the other victims, at the end) get inside the mainframe? I don't recall any suggestion that the Library was scanning her the whole time, or reading the neural relay in her collar, or that anyone loaded her into the mainframe (as if anyone would have had the chance).

And I can't not mention the whole issue of the Doctor's relationship with River Song, which was delightful and has the potential for a lot of very interesting development further down the line. Always assuming Alex Kingston is up for a few repeat appearances, of course. (And so continues Steven Moffat's "Get Over Rose" agenda! First Madame de Pompadour...)

Next week seems to be another take on disaster movies. I just want to tell you both: Good luck, we're all counting on you.

Also this week: life continues to punish us for owning a car, with the new Toyota fresh from one expensive servicing and straight back in for a week and a half to have its head gasket replaced (there's probably a crafty eco-message hidden in there somewhere too); and congratulations to The Lovely Jo who won two bronze medals at a taekwon-do competition on Saturday, and who's just celebrated her birthday.

When you were young and your heart was an open book

I'm saving "Carried away by a moonlight shadow" for next week, chiz chiz.

So, the annual Moffat story comes around, and sure enough it's better than the rest of this year's offerings so far, but still... only a high 8 from me. As ever, subject to re-evaluation after the second part next week. It's not that it did anything badly, it's that it didn't do enough of it.

Consider the Empty Child two parter from waaaay, way back in New Who's first season. By the time the cliffhanger came round, things were just getting going, and I for one couldn't have said for sure what was going on. It maintained a level of mystery and intrigue through to the end.

This week's cliffhanger could have similarly raised the mystery and piqued our interest as to what was going on (and was presumably meant to), but in fact having Donna's face appear on one of the Library Nodes just confirmed what Mrs Toon and I had both guessed about twenty minutes earlier, the first time someone mentioned the 4,000-odd Library victims being "saved". Yes, "saved" in the same way all the other Node faces were "saved", i.e. to memory.

(Cue argument about how exactly teleportation (fictionally) works, but non-SF-fan readers may take out a subscription to the New Scientist if they really care and SF-fan readers will already have heard it before. The idea that people's bodies can be "recorded" as digital information is at least as old as Star Trek, and though practically it may seem unlikely, aesthetically it's just one step on from the old SF idea that people's minds are just organic computer programs.)

The mystery of how the young girl in (apparently) the present day relates to the Library, initially very intriguing, seems pretty obvious by the end even without the visual clues - the Library logo on the floor, the computer name "CAL" on the psychiatrist's briefcase - and the carnivorous shadows themselves aren't mysterious, they're just something for the Doctor to defeat at the end of the story. (Hopefully without a cheesy closing montage of shadows shot in Cardiff centre for the benefit of the slower viewers, coughcoughBlinkcough.)

Bearing in mind this is only the Grand Moff's second two-parter, and it might therefore be too early to look for patterns, it is perhaps worth noting the familiar elements of the cliffhanger - our heroes penned in by a dehumanised figure that repeats the same phrase over and over and over again. This time there's the added twist of a second dehumanised figure - the Donna Node - repeating its own phrase over and over and over again. It lends a peculiar rhythm to the cliffhanger, but I can't say that it does much for the tension, just having someone lurching towards you endlessly repeating themselves. You might as well be watching an existentialist farce. Admittedly it's the stuff of my nightmares, but I like to tell myself that's down to a deep-rooted horror of banality (insert your own ironic observation here) rather than just some freaky bit of my own id.

Other Who fans may feel that it's the winning formula for the end of a Who episode, but I'm finding it a bit old and a bit tired. The obvious precedent is the Daleks shouting "Exterminate" five times without actually doing anything, and I've long since had enough of them. Still, it'll give kids something to do in the playground, which is presumably the intention.

Where this episode scores highly is in ideas. The Nodes of course, piranha-like dust motes hiding in the shadows, the data ghost scenes. Even the love interest the time-travelling hero hasn't met before, while itself an idea old enough that it's made it into the literary mainstream (qv The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger), is new to Who and played very well. (Would Mr Moffat do the obvious thing and kill her off next week? Surely not?)

And there are at least still a couple of questions we can't yet guess the answers to. Why should the Vashta Nerada have become so aggressive in this one particular place? Why a young girl in the present day? And why does Mr Lux have such a blatantly symbolic name?

Caught by the fuzz while I was still on a buzz

Ah, I knew I'd be able to come up with a song lyric title eventually.

So, The Wasp and the Unicorn. I'd place this one below Planet of the Ood but slightly above The Doctor's Daughter, somewhere around a 7. (In view of which I'm going to fix Daughter at a 7, but I'm also going to re-evaluate The Fires of Pompeii from an 8 to a 7, because I think it's more or less on a par with both these episodes.)

I went through a phase of reading Agatha Christie novels in my teens. (It was around the same time as my phase of reading PG Wodehouse and my phase of reading Jeffrey Archer. Dear god, why Archer, you ask? Because it was what the school bookshop stocked. It was that or David Eddings, and I had to draw the line somewhere.) What I learned from that experience was that Christie wrote in a formulaic way, but that you still couldn't necessarily predict the murderer's identity because some vital but absurd bit of information would be withheld until the last minute.

Some years later my erstwhile housemate, the estimable Dr Pittard, explained to me the real value of Christie's oeuvre ("or egg") - she may have had her shortcomings in some areas, but she had a real talent for engineering new ways for the crime genre to work. The murderer had to be the least likely candidate, not simply in narrative terms, but in terms of their mechanical function within the story. One of the victims did it. Everybody did it. The narrator did it. The policeman did it. The detective did it. Maybe you did it. Where were you on the night of Chapter Two?

So this might be seen as a kind of reversal of Gareth Roberts' previous New Who, The Shakespeare Code. The greatest asset of aspiring actor and jobbing hack writer Shakespeare was his understanding of human nature, yet the witches in The Shakespeare Code are after him for his technical ability. Only he can write the pseudo-magic incantation that will release the rest of their kind (or rather, as it turns out, only he can act as a flopping puppet through which they can channel the incantation, so really they might just as well write it themselves... oh, anyway, it's bulwarks). Here, on the other hand, the Doctor needs the help of genre technician Agatha Christie to unravel a murder mystery because only she supposedly understands human nature well enough. Hmmmm.

If Christie really were brought in to work on this story, she'd just wait around until the third murder, throw in a red-herring jewel thief (so far, so good), then contrive some way for the least likely possible candidate to have dunnit. By that token, it really would have been more appropriate if the culprit had been "You, Donna Noble!" or "You, Agatha Christie!" It's not all that Christiesque that the vicar should have dunnit; perversely, it's more fitting that the murderer turns out to be a giant alien wasp. Naturally there's an unlikely family connection disclosed at the last minute ("I loved him, even though at night he transformed into a giant wasp" - what?!). It's ridiculous, but not much more so than Hercule Poirot's Christmas.

What is ridiculous is the vicar's bzzzzzing just before he metamorphoses. I know, I know - it's the vibration of the wings that makes the buzzing sound, not the wasp saying "bzzzzz". That's not why it's ridiculous. He's an alien giant wasp, after all, and in any case a wasp that size ought to sound like a Chinook helicopter close up, so it's not as if they weren't already taking liberties. No no, it's just figging ridiculous.

But it's a comedy episode and therefore can be forgiven much. The shoehorned Christie title references are often quite laboured, but the story overall is a pleasant bit of fluff. Still though, halfway through the season and still no episodes I'd particularly want to get on DVD. Sigh. Next week, the Doctor faces a Dirty Two Dozen of bad pop acts. Oh no, wait, it's Eurovision.

Bring your daughter to the slaughter

Not bad. I might give that one a 7 or an 8.

The big thing for me about The Doctor's Daughter is that, whereas the Sontaran two-parter was the sort of thing a fan might think a Who story ought to look like, this actually was an old-style Who story. It felt a lot like mid-to-late Tom Baker. A mysterious set-up, a few clues and the big revelation in a tower that's pretty obviously a spaceship. Proper SF, in fact, albeit a small helping of proper SF concealed within forty five minutes of slam-bang action. Of its genre, as opposed to merely generic. And, like a very few other New Who stories, it felt like it had the material of an Old Who story condensed into the three quarters of an hour. It felt like it could have been expanded into a solid four-parter. You could almost see the natural cliffhanger points.

Also nice to get a bit more consideration of the Doctor's role in the Time War. Last week would have been an obvious place for this sort of thing, what with the militaristic aliens and UNIT butting heads, but strangely the issue of a normally pacifist Doctor taking up arms and fighting wasn't addressed. There were a couple of brief, subtle moments in which you could almost see the script starting to turn that way, plus the slight end-of-first-series overtones towards the end, but ultimately it didn't really happen. This week, on the other hand, it was brought right out into the open. Perhaps it went too far in the opposite direction, perhaps it was too unsubtle? But then again, if a Who story is going to examine an issue, it has to at least spend some time on it.

Negative points now. There didn't seem to be any good reason for Martha to be in it. Apparently someone needs to get separated from the Doctor so that we can see the conflict from the Hath point of view, and yet... do they really? It's not as if Martha's journey serves any real purpose in the end, except to get the sympathetic Hath killed (although, with that breathing apparatus on his face, couldn't he survive under that marshy stuff?). The only obvious reason for it is so that Donna can hang around being the Doctor's conscience while he tries to come to terms with the new family member, but with a bit of rejigging (or more screen time, of course) she could have done that and been the viewer's ambassador to the Hath. But anyway, next point.

It's an old, old bugbear for SF fans that cloning machines and the like always seem to generate perfectly fitting clothes for the new people they create, but that's not my point. It's pre-watershed TV, for goodness's sake, and in any case I think we all know what the average fanboy is really thinking when he complains about clothed clones. I say it's the 60th century or thereabouts, and we didn't actually see inside the magic box, so for all we know there's some whizzy bit of technology in there or a small but very, very fast tailor that produces clothing for the new soldiers. However, my next point does concern dodgy science. It's that Source thingy. So a small globe full of airborne microbes is going to terraform an entire planet? All right, it's the whichever century, maybe there's some nanotech in there too. But the entire planet, in about two minutes? One minute a cloud of magic pixie dust, the next ten feet of earth is excavating itself from the other side of the windows? Bugger off.

Then there's the slight cheese of the ending. I think we all knew it was going to happen, but still. Who's going to be turning up again in the series finale, then? And probably dying tragically (barring further cheese)? And just why does she love running so much? She's not one of those... ugh... joggers, is she?

So I'd place this episode just behind the Ood episode. Still waiting for a sock-knocker-offer. Looks like next week is going to be filled with all the standard Agatha Christie cliches that Agatha Christie isn't actually to blame for. Comedy lightning a-go-go.

Smoke on the water, fire in the sky

Well, The Poison Sky certainly fulfilled the promise of last week's episode: a Who story that ambled its way out through the saloon bar doors of the 5 Out Of 10.

Readers who were here last year or who've checked out my blog since may think I'm just being mean to Helen Raynor. Then again, it's possible those readers watched this episode as well.

I mean... yes, it's nice to see an actual Sontaran army. Yes, I'm sure a lot of fans out there believe that simply having UNIT in an episode is in itself some sort of automatic boon. Yes, it was a very pretty explosion. But beneath the engaging visuals and yet more surprising work from Catherine Tate, there lurked a very, very perfunctory story. Not so much "Who by numbers", nor even "Who by join-the-dots", but more of a stick figure standing next to a blue box with an arrow and the word "docter" drawn above it. Everything teenage DW forum members think an episode should look like, with in-jokey references to better stories thrown in in the hope that they'll drag this one up by association.

And then the planet blows up. Well, the Doctor sets light to the atmosphere, at any rate. Now see, when this half-cocked idea was included in the script of Destiny of the Daleks, itself not a well-regarded Who story, the programme makers at least had the decency not to actually have it happen. Sooo... you burn all the poisonous clone food out of the atmosphere, in a fireball that encloses the entire Earth in seconds, but which is apparently extinguished by an inrush of lovely, clean... oxygen-bearing air. Good thing air doesn't support combustion, isn't it? PS - good news, today everyone gets a free meal of roast pigeon! Bad news, tomorrow the ecosystem falls over.

So you somehow remove the noxious stuff from the air but completely fail to do anything about the millions of machines that are generating that noxious stuff in the first place. Then you flip a switch on your Macguffin that turns it from "human air" to "Sontaran air", notwithstanding the fact that we've already seen humans breathing that Sontaran air, and vice versa, and there's been absolutely no indication that there's any difference between them. Except that there must be, because the explosion that left the entire surface of the Earth unravaged blows apart a spaceship that can allegedly withstand nuclear attack. Let's face it, this was just one of those scripts that needed the Doctor to dramatically flip a switch, the Mill to produce a really showy explosion, and the plot to magically resolve itself.

The pinnacle - well, the pothole - of this episode's weakness must surely have been the Doctor's farewell. "Donna - thanks for everything, take care. Martha - you too. Luke - give me two minutes and then sacrifice yourself, OK?" Or were we the only ones who heard that line? This truly was a sleepwalking episode.

But there were some nice moments - the fact that the UNIT colonel didn't piss about when faced with the Sontaran commander was quite pleasing. The prosthetics were good. Visually, as I've said, it was engaging. And needless to say it's still better than a lot of other TV, so it still gets its "average episode" 5 out of 10.

Next week: the Doctor turns out to be Buffy's dad. Who knew? (Shouldn't Torchwood be making that episode?)


Also this weekend - we survived the Fforde Ffiesta! More about that anon. For now, let this suffice:

A huge, ever-growing, pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the Ultraworld

Work and spare-time pressures continue, and will do until after next weekend. Here, while the opportunity presents itself, is a round-up of the first four episodes of the new series of Doctor Who; weekly reviewing should resume in May.

Partners in Crime
6 out of 10. A low 6, maybe 5.5. It's become standard for a season opener, particularly one that introduces (or rather, in this case, reintroduces) a companion, to slack off somewhat on the story. Whether it should or not is open to question.
But even so, hold this episode up against the first season's Rose and you can see a definite improvement. So why doesn't it score more highly?
Perhaps it's familiarity. If New Who had launched in 2005 with this, it would have been astonishing. But there's an aliens-invade-office-block furrow that New Who has ploughed, and continues to plough, and it's starting to hit bedrock. Bringing the companion's home life to the fore is one thing, and within reasonable limits it's a good thing in my view, but using a present-day office as the front for an alien invasion wears a bit thin after the first half-dozen iterations.
Here's an experiment: try watching the 1971 season (Jon Pertwee's second) in order, at a rate of one complete story a week. Oh look, it's the Master hiding behind a present-day institution. Oh look, it's the Master again, hiding behind a different present-day institution. Oh look, etc. Try, if you can, to be surprised when you get to The Daemons and spot Roger Delgado posing as a vicar. (Well, obviously you can't now that I've said that, but the point stands.) Try to imagine how you'd receive this story as a viewer in 1971. And it's a good story - fans everywhere love it and acclaim it even today, for it is Rock Solid. But you watch it after a whole season of Master stories and tell me what you think of it.
Of course, this episode isn't following four very similar stories in a row, but I'm certainly starting to feel a touch of office fatigue setting in. But there's more to it than that - it just doesn't feel satisfying somehow. It lacks something. A friend probably described this episode best by saying it was the best episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures he'd seen. Yes, that's probably it - it feels just a bit too lightweight, a bit too kiddy. The culmination of this must be Supernanny's Wile E Coyote moment just before she plummets to her doom. The "season opener syndrome" won't be helping either.
And the Adipose aren't wrong in themselves - they're fine for a fun episode, they are indeed different from the usual run of Who aliens, and they have the selling point that you can easily make your own with a bag of flour and a marker pen. Apparently. But roll it all together and you've got a slightly lacklustre, albeit jolly episode of Who.
High point is not the window-cleaning machinery sequence, despite what the production team might think, but the mimed conversation between the Doctor and Donna. The scene of Donna looking bored in her kitchen while her mother rattles on in the background speaks for much of the rest of the episode.

The Fires of Pompeii
8 out of 10. Good, if not dazzling.
On the one hand you've got unnecessary Balrogs cluttering up the place, some slightly off acting from Phil Cornwell, and a couple of terrible "Noooooooo!!" ("My beautiful machiiiiine!/Not that button!") moments. On the other you've got the fantastically cheeky reveal of the marble circuit board, the suggestion that speaking Latin to an ancient Roman through the TARDIS' translation filter makes you sound Welsh, and a reasonably good effort at showing modern kids a Roman family in action (watershed constraints permitting, of course).
But this isn't about faithfully reconstructing Roman life for the viewers, is it? No, that's what documentaries are for. This, on the other hand, is about spoofing other TV shows/films. So just as 1965 story The Romans, while giving the kids a jolly historical runaround, sent up 1963 film Cleopatra for the benefit of the adults (or if you prefer, gave them a low-budget, slightly cleaner version of 1964's Carry On Cleo), so The Fires of Pompeii sends up big-budget TV series Rome, the show that gave the world Mockney Romans ("Brutus, me ol' cock!" - in this context, Phil Cornwell's performance almost makes sense). Again, watershed constraints permitting. And as if to prove it, they even filmed it in the same place.
In the old days, you know, they'd have done this episode without aliens ("Would they, granddad? Tell me more..."). They'd have made the focus of the episode a straight ethical dilemma for the Doctor between saving the citizens of Pompeii and letting history run its course. And indeed, there was some interesting material along those lines in this episode. But New Who couldn't forgo its aliens for a week. Tying them in with Pompeii's destruction the way writer James Moran does kind of gives the Doctor a moral cop-out, but it's done in a very interesting way and I suppose it does make it all a bit more immediate. If only we hadn't had to have (hadn't had to have?!) the big fiery end-of-level computer monsters.

Planet of the Ood
8 out of 10. A higher 8 than last week's, veering towards 9 but not quite attaining it for reasons that will shortly be explained.
Shady businessmen, an exploitative corporation on an alien world, Graeme Harper directing - you know, it's too easy to draw comparisons between this episode and Harper classics The Caves of Androzani and Revelation of the Daleks. And by and large, Planet of the Ood stands up to that comparison very well.
But what really made Androzani and Revelation, what earns them top spot in fan polls, is that Harper cast quirky character actors - real characters - in parts both major and minor, thus livening the whole thing up. Tim "Captain Darling" McInnerny puts in a solid performance, but he's not really quirky enough. The PR character is first bland, then bland and loathsome, and gets zapped in a rightly perfunctory manner. The mad scientist and the security guard do what they can, but they can't carry the whole episode on their own. Basically there aren't enough identifiable characters here - it's Tim McI, the doctor and the security guard, the PR, and a host of faceless Ood and unnamed extras.
The focus is thus thrown on the Doctor and Donna, to Catherine Tate's benefit - it's this week that I find my opinion of her performance has gone from "acceptable" to "really rather good".
But the big problem I have with this episode is that it claims to make some sort of sense out of the Ood as a species. And fair enough, they were given rather short shrift in the pretentious wankfest that was The Satan Pit. So now we learn that, as you might have guessed, they didn't actually evolve as a servant race, with glowing translator balls already attached and a genetic urge to serve the strongest available personality. Instead we're told that they evolved with external brains that they have to carry around in their hands. Bit of a liability, that, you'd have thought. And as if that weren't enough, one really big bonus brain. One Brain to Rule Them All. One really big, disembodied, pulsating brain that chews people. Hmm. Still, it's an allegory, let it go.
(Surprisingly, they did seem to evolve wearing Nehru suits. I still haven't quite figured that one out.)
And not only is the handheld brain thing at least a passable allegory, it makes very poetic sense of the translator balls. Those nasty colonial humans have cut off the means by which Ood talk to each other - their telepathic mini-brains - and stitched on the means by which they can be made to talk the human way. And given that you'd expect the mini-brain to be attached by something equivalent to the spinal cord, i.e. a pretty big nerve arrangement of some sort, you can also kind of accept how those balls might be made to discharge electricity. Well, anyway.
Even the shady businessman's come-uppance, while scientifically doubtful, makes at least poetic sense. As David Tennant later remarked, it's gothic, in the Frankensteinesque literary sense of the word: a man who tries to defy nature with science is brought low by apparently supernatural means. By that token, it'd have to make bugger all apparent sense to qualify as properly gothic. And besides, I'm prepared to excuse this episode much of its weird science just because it's so much more colourful than, for example, Partners in Crime.
I'd rate this episode the best of the season so far. Admittedly it's early days yet, and we haven't yet reached the giddy heights of a 9 or a 10, but it's a good 'un.

The Sontaran Stratagem
As usual, I'm reserving final judgement until I've seen the second part, but so far I think this might be a 5 or a 6.
Competent (well... more on this in a minute) but once again ploughing that same old furrow. There's something suspicious about a new company. Could aliens be behind it? Yes, they could. Office mayhem once again ensues.
First important thing to note: Catherine Tate is wiping the floor with Freema Agyeman. She's acting her right off the screen. At this point, even Jo likes Donna. Second important thing to note: UNIT aren't very nice any more. Well, for a covert military organisation. More realistic, perhaps, but not very sympathetic. This may prove to be a good thing, but that largely depends on where the series is going with them. But when it comes to rating this episode, the really important thing to note is just how many times it provokes us into shouting at the screen.
Yes, about that. There a number of stupid character mistakes on display here, and although a charitable viewer might attribute any one of them to the character himself, together they suggest that the writer just hasn't thought things through properly:
Things we can learn from The Sontaran Stratagem

• If you run a military outfit with four decades' experience in countering alien threats, you might want to consider sending your troops into a suspected situation in detachments of more than two.
• You might also want to train your troops to notice when someone's been hypnotised. (Come on, the Master alone should have made this an essential part of UNIT training!)
• You're in a detachment of two UNIT troops and you've found a suspicious-looking basement guarded by two obviously conditioned minions. Do not go in without backup.
• When you find the strange alien machinery, do not interfere with it. Leave immediately and get backup.
• When you notice your radios have stopped working, leave immediately and get some ****ing backup, you fools!
• If you're reasonably sure that a piece of machinery wired into all your military outfit's vehicles is a) linked to dozens of suspicious deaths, and b) potentially alien in origin, then remove that piece of machinery immediately. If you can't, don't drive any of those vehicles. The dodgy tech may be fitted as standard in government vehicles, but it isn't in civilian vehicles - for god's sake, commandeer some cars!
• If you've just seen with your own eyes that your family car's been booby-trapped, do not get into it, you old fool!
• And perhaps most damning of all, because the cliffhanger into next week's episode hinges on it - if beloved British film and telly icon Bernard Cribbins is trapped in a car that's filling up with gas, break the window! If you've got a sonic device, better still - find the frequency for car window glass and shatter all of them! I believe an entire nation shouted "Break the glass!" at that point. Not the series' best ever cliffhanger.

All things considered it's a fair run-of-the-mill episode, but that's precisely the problem: it's run-of-the-mill. This episode is treading water.