Alden Bates' Weblog

This season was pretty good, all in all. The only clangers being the Dalek two-parter and, to a lesser extent, The Lazarus Experiment. As always, spoilers are liberally given below.

Blink: In a derelict house, Sally Sparrow finds a message which sends her hurtling into a world of time travel and danger.

This episode affected me profoundly. If it doesn't win at least a dozen awards, Steven Moffatt has been robbed. The Weeping Angels are the scariest thing I've seen in Doctor Who, and time travel has never been used in such an inventive manner before. Athought the Doctor and Martha aren't in it much (they're paying him over a million pounds, you'd think he could be in the whole season) the new characters make up for it. Is this the first time a televised Doctor Who story has had a female main protagonist? Or does Rose (the first episode of series 1, that is) hold that title?
10/10

Utopia: In the far far far far far distant future, humanity struggles to survive in a dying universe.

Back in the old days, the New Adventures line of books tended to include a lot of what was known as "fanwank", or continuity references back to the past of the series. The final three-parter of the series also has a lot of what you'd term fanwank, much of it admittedly caused as a side effect of bringing two characters back. Captain Jack is returned from Torchwood here, as the Doctor and Martha end up in the distant future with him. The A plot of humanity trying to launch a rocket so they can head for Utopia (and their pointy-toothed foes seem a bit much like the Reavers from Firefly to me) feels like a massive red herring, and the really important part of the episode is centering on Professor Yana, but perhaps that was the writer's plan all along.
7/10

The Sound of Drums: The Master returns to present-day and gets himself elected Prime Minister.

It was pretty much obvious that the Doctor was going to fix Jack's wrist time machine in order to get them back, so I wasn't much surprised when it happened as the first shot of the episode. This episode has enough plot for about half an hour, and the rest is John Simm being evil, basically. Like Utopia, pretty much everything important happens in the last ten minutes, though as soon as the Paradox Machine was mentioned, it was pretty much obvious that it was going to be used in the next episode as a reset button.

We've already had the cabinet killing the PM (Aliens of London) and now we have the PM killing the cabinet...
6/10

The Last of the Time Lords: With the Doctor and Jack prisoners of the Master, Martha searches for a weapon to use against the evil Time Lord.

Putting aside for a moment CGI Dobby Doctor (when's the action figure out?), this is the best of the season finales so far (the previous finales being basically plotless fight scenes). There's fanwank, revelations aplenty, the tying up of plot arcs, Martha pwning everyone, and plenty of fanfiction fodder, I'm sure. More importantly, NO DALEKS!

OTOH, the whole Doctor gaining godlike powers from the combined psychic energies of others might at a stretch be compared with a similar scene in the season finale of Buffy season 4. And the rewinding time was naff when the TV Movie did it (but at least UNIT get to keep their nifty flying aircraft carrier; Does this mean UNIT will eventually be renamed SPECTRUM?).
8/10

So, ranking the episodes in order of awesomeness:

1. Blink (10/10)
2. Human Nature (10/10)
3. The Family of Blood (10/10)
4. Gridlock (9/10)
5. 42 (9/10)
6. The Last of the Time Lords (8/10)
7. The Shakespeare Code (8/10)
8. Utopia (7/10)
9. Smith and Jones (7/10)
10. The Sound of Drums (6/10)
11. Daleks in Manhattan (6/10)
12. The Lazarus Experiment (5/10)
13. Evolution of the Daleks (4/10*)

*On reflection the rating I originally gave for Evolution of the Daleks was much too high.

Previously: Episodes 1 - 5, Episodes 6 - 9.