Doctor Who 2008: Sontarans cometh, RTD Ood 'ave 'im etc.

why are you people unhappy about the 2nd version of Tennant going off with Piper in the other dimension?

I quite liked that, I think.

'Genocide' seems a red herring, or an inapt word, as the Daleks at that point were all about to go and destroy things / the universe / etc. But I still don't know how he managed suddenly to kill them all (but I get the impression that all the rules in this programme are made up as it goes along).

There was literally no point to Davros. He's meant to represent a purpose, a humanity, behind the Daleks. In this one he's all 'wah I want to destroy everything' without a proper reason.

Ha, Alan's already said what I was going to say to this, but yeah, this is dead wrong, one of the things I really liked about this episode is how true it was to the original spirit of davros!

The Doctor : "Davros, if you had created a virus in your laboratory. Something contagious and infectious that killed on contact. A virus that would destroy all other forms of life... would you allow its use?"

Davros : "It is an interesting conjecture."

The Doctor : "Would you do it?"

Davros : "The only living thing...the microscopic organism... reigning supreme... A fascinating idea."

The Doctor : "But would you do it?"

Davros : "Yes. Yes. To hold in my hand, a capsule that contained such power. To know that life and death on such a scale was my choice. To know that the tiny pressure on my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything. Yes. I would do it. That power would set me up above the gods. And through the Daleks I shall have that power!"

Plus, you know, highlighting the stuff about the doctor making people into weapons, and running away from the fact so many of them die for him - there was plenty of "point to davros" there, for my money.

- A Face of Boe reference is dropped in somewhere

5. bzzzt

He was in there! One of the "look who's died for you doctor" flashes.

At least give us some edge-of-the-seat suspense before undoing the cliffhanger ffs.

WE HAD A WHOLE WEEK OF THAT! ffs.

Wonder how Rose is going to react when she realises that her new wuv-doctor happens to have all Catherine Tate's mannerisms.

Yeah, lotsa OI! yelling at inappropriate moments.

Fuck me, RTD really blew everything out for this one, didn't he?

At any rate, I think I enjoyed this. Watching last week's, one of the things i wondered about, and found after a bit of searching, was that the insignia pin that Cribbins wore on his red stocking cap was/were SAS wings. Last week's ep really was something where too much was happening too fast to really consider if it made sense or not in real time.

Still, I always enjoy Doctor/Davros interactions, because each Doctor gets to fuck with him in their own special way.

Kinda disappointing that there wasn't more Doctors involved, but I'm hoping one of next year's specials will have a multi-doctor story. I guess the "Tennant will be back next year" newsbits weren't a headfake after all.

Also, having only seen half of the first season of Torchwood, when did Fishface get quite so, um, "fishy"?

The best bit was getting home at 10 o'clock this evening, with the episode all recorded and ready to watch, but just beforehand sitting down to check emails and seeing the breaking news 'latest' ticker on the BBC News homepage pop up with "David Tennant remains Doctor Who after series ends without him regenerating".

Fuckwits.

Davros: 'You are the destroyer of worlds!!'

THE DOCTOR = BOB

why are you people unhappy about the 2nd version of Tennant going off with Piper in the other dimension?

Mills & Boon?

Okay I've watched the end again (the Donna stuff only, mind) and I agree that it was brilliant.

AND OMG CYBERMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!

there was so much great stuff in this episode (daleks speaking german, the doctor and donna taking on each other's personalities, the genesis callback, davros telling the doctor he turns people into weapons... burn! take the shame doctor!, the return of mickey, the rose resolution) but the impact of all of it was dulled by me waiting throughout the whole episode, right up until the end when he goes back into the TARDIS, for the regeneration to complete. you start the doctor regenerating, he'd better fucking regenerate! RTD you suck so much for doing that.

i really hope mickey ends up on torchwood though... i missed him! he and captain jack play off each other really well.

For all it's dumbassedness and canon debasing, this was idiotic good times.

Really really really wish he'd taken cribbins with him at the end though.

Seriously, I was literally sitting on the couch with my fingers crossed saying aloud to no one "please please PLEASE take him" cause that woulda been AWESOME

"Hey what's this do?"
"Don't touch that!"
"uh oh..."

And yeah, what kind of anticlimactic ending was that? Beats being smashed into by space titanic i guess, but....

I loved Captain Jack's inappropriate lewdness on the docteur e troix... "I can't tell you what I'm thinking right now"

It fell flat for me. Not least because a week of cliffhanger excitement dissipated in the first 30 seconds, making the rest seem anticlimactic, regardless of impending destruction of universe.

I like a bit of hokum, but even hokum has to have some kind of logic. This had lots of random stuff showing up (exploding jewellery?) and point after point in the resolution was just fudged over at high speed.

The two doctors thing allowed quite a bit of cake-and-eating-it too - so the doctor gets to kill all the daleks while still maintaining the moral position that killing is bad, and he gets to be with Rose, but not really. And the whole thing had the sickly sweet whiff of fan fiction.

Come to think of it, for the first time I really did want to hide behind the sofa. Sadly not out of fear but more out of a mounting sense of cringe.

Yeah, everything was crammed in there too fast, and the logic wasn't particularly sound, but as a send off for the Davies years and in terms of sheer nerdgasm entertainment value, it brought me major smiles.

The Donna thing was handled really well at the end there. Donna's whole arc of "i'm a middle-aged loser doing temp work and living with my mum" played out beautifully, what with being able to save the world(s), only to have it snatched away.

I saw a bit of an RTD interview with the BBC about the spoilers and the cliffhanger, and he said he was "surprised" by all the fuss, which made me think it wasn't going to be the HUGE deal it might have seemed. I had to chuckle at that.

The two doctors thing was pretty iffy, but all in all there wasn't much of a cop-out ending, especially with the aforementioned consequences that resulted from the solution.

On reflection, I really wonder if this would be otherwise rejected as overzealous fanservice if it wasn't for RTD playing every single ace he had and cashing it in all at once. Cribbins had some great lines: "she won't let me have one! Thinks they're naughty!"

Appropos of nothing, a goon posted this somewhere else:

Remember 'Dalek'?

That was a rather neat episode in series one. It was set in 2012. There was this strange metal monster that nobody had ever heard of or seen before, despite the fact that they noisily moved our planet halfway across the galaxy and then invaded and conquered the shit out of the planet four years ago, and then fucked off again.

Also, was this the first appearance of respek knuckles in DW?

That was a rather neat episode in series one. It was set in 2012. There was this strange metal monster that nobody had ever heard of or seen before, despite the fact that they noisily moved our planet halfway across the galaxy and then invaded and conquered the shit out of the planet four years ago, and then fucked off again.

TIME TRAVEL

Then again, I think I highly tolerant of a lot of stuff in this last story from just the angle of "fine, FINE, if this is what you need to do in order to leave the show, whatevs. Have your emo beach scene, tie up your loose ends, send Mickey off to Torchwood to get skeeved out by Jack."

Wish there had been more Davros, tho. He needs a proper ep or two.

And bring back Peter Miles, if nothing else than for one of the best representations of a fascist cog on film.

Donna still had that time beetle on her back in last week's episode. They made a point of it. So wtf happened there? An excuse to bring her back in later years?

Also, expect a big announcement in the next 48 hours. They always cap off a season with some kind of announcement, just to keep the hype going.

I reckon it'll be the next companion.

I don't think she had the spider on her back, I think the Shadow Proclamation woman said she'd had a spider on her back.

either way, too late now

But it made the noise!

I'll have to go back now, damn it.

either way, too late now

Well yeah, quite. Half the show under RTD is McGuffins. Be interesting to see how the general tone alters under Stephen Moffatt. Is he in charge from now?

Not for another 2 years. RTD has control over the off-year specials, doesn't he?

At any rate, who wants to place bets that he'll have a new Doctor when he finally gets the reins?

http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/3329/jack2ax1.gif

YES YES LOOK AT THE CAMERA

Also, Jack enjoys pumping

I thought the Christmas special trailer was edited in a way that didn't rule out the possibility of David Morrissey being the next regeneration. Which would be cool, so probably he isn't.

Wow, that was quick. The auto-suggest in my google window does "david morrissey david tennant" without even fully spelling it out, and here's the result:

from your friends at the Daily Mail

I'm torn between finding the Rose/Doctor clone matchup a bit fanfictiony and being totally charmed by it since I'm a romantic and have been dying for them to hook up. I was also waiting for David Morrissey to drop from the ceiling or something at the end of the episode so the lack of any hint of the Christmas special was a bit jarring.

xpost People have known about the Morrissey/Cybermen Christmas special for a few months now. It was a pretty big clue that Tennant wasn't going to regenerate this week, as there are lots of pictures of him and Morrissey traipsing around in costume.

Not least because a week of cliffhanger excitement dissipated in the first 30 seconds

I agree that this was kind of disappointing, but to be fair nearly every Who cliffhanger is cheaply satisfied within the first 30 seconds (I think we had this same conversation circa the Sontaran 2-parter).

I love Donna and I kind of hate her ending. We barely get a goodbye from the old Donna, just fearful gurgling and a mindzap and then oblivious chattering Donna to end with. It just felt abrupt, since she was already partially sidelined by Companionpalooza.

Same thing happened to Jamie and Zoe when the Time Lords banished the Doctor to Earth back in, uh, 1969. Back to your old life, all memory of your travels with the Doctor wiped away.

David Morrissey is the guy from Men Behaving Badly?

No, that was Neil Morrissey

The noise when the Shadow Proc lass talked to Donna was the heartbeat noise, wasn't it?

And given the Daleks can time travel, and have no fears about changing the course of history, the 'Dalek' thing bugs me not. I mean, they changed the Time War, which is presumably a bigger deal than changing events taking place in an isolated spot under Salt Lake City.

Here's hoping that moffat can do a cliffhanger without doing a reset afterwards. Although SITL and FOTD don't give me much home.

Whilst I like the idea of Mickey in Torchwood I hope that Martha swiftly gets eaten by some unspeakable horror from the rift.

What I liked is that there wasn't a reset at the end of this one: the thing with Donna was genuinely moving, and the fact that RTD managed to restrain from her giving the Doc a lingering look as he left, despite everything, impressed me.

Donna and Wilf were absolutely brilliant, and am so sad they are consigned to history whilst EmoRose and DoctorTwo get to live on.

Could they not get the rest of Martha's family back? Am saddened that they didn't get Pete back, and why has Gay Todd From Corrie with that information thingie in his head never ever been re-referenced?

did davros have two ultimate triumphs? destroying everything, and being nasty to the doxor

"Bad Wolf Bay"

Yeah this felt like a succession of RTD pulling rabbits out of hats, I got very annoyed indeed at the opening but once I noticed the hand continuing to glow in the corner of the screen for a while I knew we weren't done with it. The rest of it = marvellous, needed more of everyone being nasty to Mickey though.

This episode really tied in with what I've been saying about letting the air out of the Messianic Doctor balloon - this wasn't an OMG THE DOCTOR SAVES EVERYTHING episode at all, real ensemble cast feel to this one, everyone had a part to play. Well, except Jackie really, that was pointless. Total star turn from Donna as well. Also K-9 was a total icing on cake moment.

I get the feeling the two Tennants thing was structural rather than anything else, it allowed RTD to concentrate on Doctor-Donna and Doctor-Rose separately without having everyone tripping over one another.

Tennant I calling out Tennant II was almost as good as Davros calling out the Doctor. I liked how unbelievably unsatisfied Rose seemed by ending up with Tennant II. Almost as much as the look Tennant II gave when Donna said "I've got the best bit of the Doctor".

But really, the best bit was the Daleks speaking German.