Of Ood and Men ...

It will be pretty obvious to everyone by now that I’m the weak link in the chain. The faulty circuit, the twisted wire in a RTD-scripted deus ex machina finale where it turns out there’s a setting on the sonic screwdriver that can fix everything. My v. professional and v. insightful friends are two episodes ahead of me, seem to recall detail with startling clarity and have the intellectual kapow to back up those recollections with solid critique. All this while rooting the new series squarely in the context of the show’s mythology and (quite possibly) making stacks of fluffy pancakes with maple syrup and crispy bacon just the way I like them.

I’m not going to attempt the trick of catching up, of trying to shoehorn in an alternative perspective for each episode when they’ve been thoroughly interrogated already. That’s a lot of words and my fingers are like thick frankfurters tripping greasily across the keys, I don’t have the wpms in me. It’s a fool’s errand exacerbated by the following points:

a) I love Dr Who. Love it. Consequently any attempt on my part to go all Siskel and Egbert on its ass is doomed to failure. My utter unfeasible love for the programme renders me a dribbling moron with the analytical prowess of toast. I try to be insightful and unbiased but I’m not and it’s stupid to pretend otherwise.

b) As soon as I try to write a review, I think to myself “I’m writing a review now” and suddenly I revert to school mode and it stops being fun. I find myself clicking the word count every sentence and mewling to myself in irritation. Have you ever heard a grown man mewl? It sounds exactly like a cat. It’s uncanny, I don’t know how I do it. Make it stop. Make it stop.

c) I can’t remember the first two anymore, the third one’s getting fuzzy now too. They’ve all kind of blended together into a Rutan-alike amorphous blob entitled something like Dr Who and the Planet of Fiery Crime or Ood in Pompeii.

Anyway, here’s my review of Ood in Pompeii …

Isn’t the Doctor good? He just sets the screen on fire, doesn’t he? I mean even when everything on screen is literally on fire he still lights up the place like a magnesium flare. Any plot hole, any slight wobble with the dialogue can be relied upon to be ironed out by the sheer titanic steamrollering presence of the Tenth doctor. God, it’s brilliant to have him on the show- all crackerjack energy, wisdom, wit and rage. DT, in my humble opinion, is the broadcast equivalent of MSG in Chinese food - only good for you.

And this series has raised its game to keep pace with its star. The scope, the ideas, the FX execution is really quite brilliant. From those cute little teddy bear blobs of fat through choking volcanic ash to an ICE PLANET we’ve been spoiled in a way comparable to having the ambassador unload a dump truck’s worth of Ferrero Rocher on our front porch. I love the confident referencing of the show’s history, I admire the temerity of the writers to tackle complex and morally dubious issues, I applaud the skill and joie de vivre of a crew working at the very top of its game. This is a TV show don’t forget, and a British one at that, it has a tight schedule and a budget that Hollywood would laugh at and called ‘titch’ or ‘small fry’ while making derisive snorting noises through their cocaine-decimated blow holes. Well screw you Tinsel Tossers because this little Welsh televisual engine that can has delivered ancient cities, lava-veined granite homunculi, skin-rending, tentacle -spewing species switching and an orange rocket ship with go faster stripes. All within a budget that wouldn’t even cover Teri Hatcher’s mid-morning smoothie. Hooray for you BBC.

Oh dear, now that I’ve started there’s so much I want to talk about. The theory of Whoniverse time travel that I’ve cobbled together from years of trying to make it all make sense. The difference between a show like Lost that has been worked out 4 series in advance and a show like DW that has a spaceship that looks like a Police Box because they had a spare one lying around when they started filming. A show where layer upon layer of lore has been added by different artists with no rhyme or reason other than expediency and practicality at any given moment in its history and that now stands proudly unbent beneath the accumulated mass of more than six decades of creativity.

But perhaps I’ll be contented with unburdening myself of these furious narrative flights of fancy in short bursts throughout the week. What say you chaps? Are you up for some full on geek-flavoured navel gazing to break the humdrum passage of quotidian reality? Shall we free ourselves from this rigorous prison of academic discursion and plot our own course through the vortex?

Or shall we fall back on well-worn terrain because I tell you what … I’m still not sure about Catherine Tate.

Moving the mountain (off the face of the earth)

And Partners In Crime is completely forgotten. My word this was good.

Soothsayers, volcanoes, underground monsters, stone people, ancient circuitry, moral depth for Donna (who saw that coming?! – I don’t believe you if you say you did…), fabulous actors...

Any shortcomings from the week before, forgotten and gone. This was lovely. Even the water pistol moment was good. In fact, it was far better than that – it was classic Who – it sits alongside offering Jelly Babies and cups of tea, and bamboozling enemies with insults so intelligent that they are still standing scratching their head while their plan is unraveled around them.

This is what I call Doctor Who… at least, what I did when I was little. It was one of those moments that you look for with every new Doctor, the moment where they challenge the previous incumbent’s reputation… Where they mark their path. Introduce their own little quirk to the role. The first moment that Pertwee’s furrowed brow morphed into that cheeky glint in the eye, when Tom Baker’s teeth filled the screen like an Attenborough Shark Special. When Davison adjusted the leek on his lapel and straightened his hair. When McCoy doffed his hat and swung his question-mark-handled brolly. When Colin Baker’s doctor had a break…

The Doctor of agonising choice was back, and boy it was fantastic to watch!

The thing is, this is more of a traditional Doctor Who story than any of the others I’ve seen so far in the “new series”. Until now, there’s been nothing that has created such a chasm and such a choice. Sure, in the last three series we’ve seen a succession of historical characters and settings, from Shakespeare, Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens to the Blitz, but none of them have been based on something obviously historical (albeit with the historical element given that regular, everyday alien conquest twist). And given the success of the last three years, maybe this constituted a risk. But by thunder, just see how that worked!

May be it sounds a little odd to say that its only now that DT’s doctor has made his mark – but I’m saying that from the point of view that everything else that has gone before has been markedly different from the kind of style that occupied the first 25 years of Who… DT made a mark immediately, but it was a complete change – its just not fair to compare some of the sweeping epics of the 1960s-70s to the swift, modern drama we get nowadays. But that doesn’t stop them being the same character, or having the same ethos. But I can’t think where this scale of sacrifice has been challenged. I’ve found something I like about Donna, if she’s going to stay like this – she’s stronger when it comes to challenging thought. But maybe that’s because she’s not distracted by the thought of what is in the Doctor’s pants.

All in all, this was a triumph!

There’s just one thing though: Donna's "TK Maximus" gag... Oh lord.

There are countless millions of suns*

Ahhh, that rare thing: really good telly.

Oh. My. Goodness. That was good. The Doctor holds off a monster with a water pistol. Donna gets mouthy with the sisterhood. There’s jokes about Latin being translated into Welsh (why? Who cares. It’s sublime). There’s history – we learn about Ancient Rome and their household gods, hypercourses and Pompeii. We glimpse monsters in the hypercourse, the sort of thing that took me back to the days when I stayed close to my parents in case I got too scared (Rutan, Stones of Blood, Kroll, Scaroth). There’s a cast including some of my favourite actors. There’s wit and genuine proper drama.

It’s wonderful isn’t it? It’s still a matter of suspending belief, just supposing for 45 minutes each week that there are aliens out there made of fire and rock, or … oh, how does that speech from the McCoy years go: ‘There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep and the rivers dream, people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice and somewhere else the tea is getting cold’. It’s still about being spun a good yarn; learning something; and being scared – just enough to go on about it on Monday morning with your mates. Even if you left school in the last century. You’re never too old for this, and it’s priceless.

This week the point was to ask what would you do if could go back and warn Pompeii. As Chris said below, the Doctor operates on a completely different level from us, and there's some superb stuff going on as he deals with Donna's protestations. He knows what can’t be changed. But suddenly, in a great twist that makes this even better it’s more than that – it’s the awful dilemma of is it ever right to kill for the greater good? Although the answer in this case is made more palatable by dint of it being human history v alien empire. The act itself is still something the Doctor almost can't bring himself to do, even though he knows it is a fixed point in time and therefore has to happen. As Chris said, 21st century effects can properly take this show further than Saturday tea time suspension of belief and into real full bodied drama – and how; the long shot of the ash cloud rushing towards the town is an image that is not easily forgotten. This is the quality we all remember thinking we saw when we were aged four to ten. Goodness knows what the kids make of it these days. Marvellous.

We don’t really know why at first the Doctor doesn’t save the family that Latin students have loved for years. And that’s fine, because it makes you think. Is it because if he saves them it’s not fair on the rest of the Pompeiians? Or does it hark back to the time he had to destroy his own world? Survivor’s guilt. Or perhaps he “shouldn’t” have saved them. That might explain the strange bright light emanating from the TARDIS as being more than just dramatic effect. Maybe it was fighting the fact that it had returned. I love temporal theory!

So now we know: Catherine Tate can really really blooming act. Goodness! There’s a chemistry between her and Tennant that is a delightful surprise, and if all goes well (and I think it will) will provide even more memorable moments in the months to come as their characters develop. Orrrr yes!! There’s months more of this!!

Congrats Who team. You are all brilliant. Just the best. And next week looks SUPERB too!!

PS: I have read in the Guardian of all places that Rose was in the cave scenes somewhere. Anyone spot her?

*Thanks to Edward Bond. If you missed his play The Sea at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, then you missed out…