Doctor Who - The Reality War

Paying The Piper

Doctor Who
The Reality War
UK/USA 2025
Airdate: 31st May 2025

Warning: All the spoilers.

I’m not so much as angry with The Reality War, the latest and possibly last episode of Doctor Who as I am...  disappointed with it. Primarily because what Russell T. Davies cooked up for both last season and this season, regarding the season finales, smacks of the one thing a previous showrunner (Steven Moffat) was really bad at... that is to say, setting up all these threads, teasing great things and then, well, kind of dropping the ball at the last minute. 

This one ran way over the scheduled episode length according to the Radio Times so... I’m guessing people who were relying on it to run to time, since there was no pre-iplayer version... were possibly angry they were all half an hour out on their schedules. But before I talk about the things which went wrong... and the, kinda, nice things about the episode, lets do a quick story summary. 

The Rani’s bring back Omega from the underverse of the wish world version of Earth but, yeah, it’s a quick mythical version of Omega who promptly eats the latest regeneration of the Rani... although Anita Dobson’s Mrs. Flood version of the character manages to escape to somewhere else. Perhaps it was a case of having a Rani knows moment. It’s up to The Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa, Varada Sethu’s Belinda Chandra and Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday (who still seems to be a major dangling plot thread in terms of identity, if you ask me), along with several members of UNIT and Anita from the Joy To The World Christmas special (reviewed here), played by Steph de Whalley and now working at the Time Hotel... to put a stop to things and restore the world back to reality... including saving the Doctor’s daughter (who’s not his actual daughter, it turns out) and bringing on the expected regeneration at the end. Yup... and I’ll get to who he regenerates into in a little while, because it is revealed, in what I suspect is a last ditch attempt to bring back old viewers and avoid cancellation.

Okay... so the new thing about the timelords being sterile... if this is a new thing since the latest few iterations then that’s fine but if it is supposed to be going back to the original shows then, it completely contradicts The Doctor having a granddaughter at all. 

And talking about Susan Foreman... everyone was pleased to see Carole Ann Ford coming back as a cameo in the last two episodes. People were excited to see how it would unfold in this final episode to see her finally reunited with The Doctor. Well guess what folks? It didn’t happen. She’s not in the episode and doesn’t really get much reference either. That, I think, was a bit of a mistake which I’m sure fans of the show will be grumbling about. I’m glad the teased Rogue return didn’t happen though. Also, that will probably annoy some fans, I suspect.

Meanwhile... the big bad reveal of Omega turned out to be... some kind of mythical ‘wished into existence’ version who lasts about five minutes before The Doctor vanquishes him back to the same dimension. Bit quick for a villain who once had to have three incarnations of The Doctor present to defeat him. Um... a bit rubbish too. 

I didn’t really like the Back To The Future tyre tracks that UNIT lady left with her wheelchair as a joke either. Kinda felt almost a little too throw away if you ask me.

So, as far as all that goes... an optimistic but also bitter sweet finale which, honestly, just got bogged down in a lot of exposition and really felt quite a bit draggingly dull at some points. Not to mention the terrible, retrofitting ‘flashbacks’ to conversations which Belinda had which, yeah, just reminded me of the whole ‘who is Ruby’s mother fiasco?’ at the end of the last season. It was just cheap and not terribly clever. Some might say awful (yeah, okay, that’s what I said too). 

Okay, so wouldn’t put many thumbs up or recommend this episode to anyone at all, really. The teased out promises turned out to actually be much more than the finale could bear... even with the unscheduled extra half an hour. 

Now then. There were a few nice things. Firstly, Anita Dobson’s joke about The Two Rani’s followed up with “And it’s good night from me!”... well. I loved that even as I was wondering just who, apart from the 50 plus British audience in the world, would even understand that joke. For all those people wondering, look up an old British TV comedy show called The Two Ronnies, with Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker. 

Secondly, it was really nice to see Jody Whittaker back as The Doctor. I always loved her portrayal, even though I lamented she hardly ever had any good scripts to work with. It was good to see she’s willing to return to the show if needed. Although, where the Earth bound(ish), retired David Tennant incarnation was during all this with, you know, his extra much needed TARDIS, is anybody’s guess. To quote Ellen Ripley in Aliens... did IQs suddenly drop?

Thirdly... it was also really nice seeing Anita back from the Christmas special. A lot of fans wanted that to happen. She seemed really wasted here though and didn’t have anything to do in terms of the emotional impact she had when we first met her so... yeah, good and bad at the same time.

Fourthly... and this is a kind of double edged sword... I called it when I had a conversation with some friends a few weeks back when I said that, when The Doctor inevitably regenerates at the end of the last episode... they would either end the show mid-regeneration or, if they were smart, get back a really big superstar which would pull in financial backers to bring the show back and ward off cancellation. Alas, although I loved seeing The Doctor regenerate into... Billie Piper at the end of the show (who has now played three different characters in the modern era of Doctor Who, with this iteration)... I’m not sure if she’s a big enough pull to get people back on board with another show resurrection. At least not with American audiences (which is where the big money is)... which is a shame because I’m all for it. It’s almost like the writers and producers said, we’ll bring Billie Piper back... Because We Want To. And, it has to be said... just to remind you all... this is not the first time The Doctor has regenerated into a person he’s already met and accidentally changed into their face. I might mention Colin Baker and Peter Capaldi here. Not ot mention the reappearance of David Tennant a couple of years ago. And don’t get me started on Lalla Ward’s regeneration of Romana.

I guess we’ll know soon enough whether the show gets cancelled or not. Meanwhile, next year’s apparently Doctorless UNIT VS Sea Devils spin off, The War Between The Land And The Sea, was trailered after the show and all I can say is... it looks pretty awful, to be honest. I mean... yeah... I hope the trailer truly isn’t reflective of the content but... again, time will tell I guess.

And that’s me done for a while, with The Reality War and the modern era of Doctor Who at least. There are still reviews coming, soon and less sooner, for stories starring various past Doctors from the classic series so, yeah, blog posts on these will be forthcoming, at some point soon. And with that I’ll finish this review by saying... and it’s good night from me. 

PS.  One last thing... thanks so much to the anonymous individual who has been leaving comments on my recent Doctor Who posts. Firefox won't let me reply and I just haven't got enough time right now to go through the whole rigmarol with Safari each time to have to re-log in and respond. But please know, whoever you are, that your comments are very welome and, like I said, thank you.

Penny Dreadful Series 3

Lady And The Vamp

Penny Dreadful Series 3
2016 USA Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers.

And so I finally got around to watching Series 3 of Penny Dreadful and I’m happy to say that this third trip, with the surviving characters, is a lot more interesting than I thought it was going to be. At the end of the last season I expressed concerns that the continuation of the show would not be up to the high standards of the previous incarnations due to all the characters splitting up and going their separate ways. However, rather than giving us stand alone episodes of each one, as I’d expected, the majority of the series has each set of characters in scenes all crosscut in the same episodes.

So, as each character has their own adventures we can start to join the dots and see how one part of the story affects another and get a taste of how, when the inevitable reunion of characters happens (to some extent), the people are still very much caught up in one single minded cause. That cause, in this one, being the advent of the ‘end of days’ ushered in by Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) herself. And, I have to say that, beyond my expectations, this one really works well and I enjoyed this third series almost as much as I did the first.

We also have a bevvy of new characters, four of which... Dr. Jekyll, Dracula, Renfield and Dr. Seward... are ripped from the pages of British, gothic literature and a few others who... well, who are not. We have Perdita Weeks as the extremely cool ‘hunter warrioress’ character Catriona Hartdegen... although she’s introduced rather late in the story, almost like the writers are making her ready to become a regular in a fourth series although, as it turns out, a fourth season was not on the cards. We also have Dr. Seward, who has been recast as a lady and who is played by Patti LuPone. She is a problematic character in that she is played by the same actress who played Miss Ives’ witch friend/instructor in Series 2 and, to get around this, the writers have made that former character an ancestor of Dr. Seward. Which means the Vanessa Ives character is obviously a lot older than I’d thought... possibly hundreds of years. I don’t think I realised this when I watched the second season to be honest and, frankly, I'm still not sure how that timeline would work given her relationship with Sir Malcolm. And we have Jessica Barden playing a ‘waif with teeth’ who is rescued from a Victorian ‘torture/snuff’ club by both Billie Piper’s Lily (the Bride of Frankenstein character) and Reeve Carny’s Dorian Grey.

So, yeah, we start off with the various groups split. We have Sir Malcolm, as played by Timothy Dalton, who is about to be brought from his big game hunting in Africa by an Apache who claims to be the spiritual father of Ethan Chandler (aka Lawrence Talbot, the Wolfman)... in an effort to rescue him from his real father (who is played in one episode here by Brian Cox). Meanwhile, Ethan in Texas (as played by the brilliant Josh Hartnett) is rescued from his captors by the leftover witch from last series, played wonderfully by Sarah Greene. They then go on a mission to wreak bloody vengeance on Ethan’s real father but... well, I’m really trying to not get into spoiler territory here. We also have Eva Greene’s Vanessa Ive’s character left on her own in London where, after a period of heavy depression, she makes the acquaintance of the head of the Natural History Museum... but is she also being stalked by a greater menace from her past?

And then we have Victor Frankenstein hooking up with Doctor Jekyll in order to help him perfect a chemical serum which he hopes will relieve mankind of their baser, violent, out of control desires. Of course, we all know where this is going with Jekyll but, alas, it’s another thing which we don’t get to see through to culmination... almost, again, as if the writers were holding it back for a further series. One wonders if the writers knew it would be finished when they started writing this season or if they were as taken aback by the cancellation as the many core fans of the show were.

Finally we have Rory Kinnear’s brilliant reprise as the Frankenstein monster, who is now finally beginning to remember scraps of his former life. There is what is probably a retro but still effective gesture on the part of the writers here where another character from the regular pool, turns out to have memory loss of certain events and, as that character regains it, we find that Frankenstein’s monster and this particular character have a much deeper connection/history than the friendship they have slowly cultivated over the last two seasons. There’s one episode here which features the full, shared history of both characters here and it’s addictive and jaw dropping. Which is just as well, actually, because the Frankenstein monster shares no screen time with any of the other, regular characters in this one except for hiding out of sight of them towards the end of the last episode when... no, if you need to know the rest of that sentence then you need to watch it.

Now, since I knew that this was the last series and had some expectations that the writers knew that too (the last episode does, indeed, finish with the words ‘The End’), I was interested in seeing how one of the regular characters, Miss Ives, would finish up and, I have to say, it wasn’t at all what I expected. I fully expected to see her on her own, with all her friends and colleagues dead by the end of the last episode and she, herself, imprisoned within a straight jacket. This would have been the perfect ending for me here. However, instead of this, admittedly downbeat conclusion to the series, the writers have gone for something less expected and, in my opinion, maybe just a little less interesting but... well, I’m not too disappointed by the end game here. I certainly would have had trouble keeping interest in another series after the final events in this one play out as they have done and it’s an end which certainly, in my opinion, brings things to a sound conclusion... despite the possibilities of new regular characters being an interesting proposition.

And there’s not much more to say about this one, methinks.

Penny Dreadful Series 3 is another slice of moody, twisted gothic literature remade in the new image of the writers and served up with a dark and enhanced flavour, well held together by one of Abel Korzeniowski’s excellent scores. One of the few TV shows I’ve watched over the last year and, if you’re into the kinds of characters and situations explored herein, definitely worth some of your time, I think. 

Penny Dreadful Series One

Gothensian

Penny Dreadful Series One
2014 USA
Paramount Home Entertainment
Blu Ray Zone B

I’ve been wanting to see Penny Dreadful for a while now. Been patiently waiting for it to show up on some normal channel on television over here but, alas, none of the proper channels without adverts - aka BBC1 and BBC2 - or even their two advert filled rivals, ITV and Channel 4, have screened it. Forget the other channels too... they also run adverts. Luckily, a Christmas gift in the form of a Blu Ray of Series One turned up... so here we go.

I didn’t know much about this show from the start. Two things really. One was the title, which obviously recalls the one penny priced, blood and guts sensational fiction of the Victorian era, the Penny Dreadfuls being perhaps best defined by famous poster boy yarns such as Varney The Vampire and Sweeny Todd. So I knew it would be a ‘mash up’, in modern parlance, of various gothic horror tropes and tales all thrown in together and, this is indeed what it is... the first series incorporating elements of Dracula, Frankenstein and A Portrait Of Dorian Gray... among others.

The other thing I knew was that it had a bloody good cast, including the four main draws for me... Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, Billie Piper and Josh Hartnett. Their co-stars, who I am less familiar with, also, as it happens, give great performances too. So even if an episode is maybe less enthralling than another... you can always count on the quality of the acting to steer you through.

This first series suffers a little, perhaps, from being a touch uneven in places and I wonder if that’s to do with the direction in each episode. Some are full on gems of horror with blood and sex in equal measure and some are more sedate, toned down and perhaps lacking the more prominent ingredients of their Victorian namesakes, it seems to me. The lengths of the episodes tend to vary a little too... some clocking in around 45 minutes while others seem to run almost ten minutes longer. That being said, the atmosphere in each one is quite startlingly intriguing and even the more tamer episodes can be mightily entertaining... athough I thought the initial set up episode was something less than what was being achieved in certain others of the series.

Unfortunately, the shifting tone also runs to the story elements of this one, too. Some things are really obvious and telegraphed from the get go and one wonders why the writers waited until the last episode in this first series to uncover these revelations which the audience must surely have figured out from very early on in the series. For instance, Billy Piper’s lovable Irish prostitute, introduced in the second episode, hooking up with Josh Hartnett’s character after shooting pornographic photographs with Dorian Gray (played by Reeve Carney), is gradually dying of consumption as a feature of her character as soon as she is introduced. One just assumes from the start that Piper’s character is going to die and end up being fodder for another character caught up in the plot, transforming into what many might see as a key legacy character fairly soon after her death and... indeed, the ‘makings’ of this character do indeed start to play out in the last episode of this first season. So I’ve no doubt she’ll be back in a much changed form for the second series.

Similarly, all the way through since he was introduced in the first episode, Hartnett’s character seems to be a set up for something more to come and it was in the second episode where I finally nailed just who... or rather what.. he is. Again, though, his transformation into a very specific and iconic figure is kept back right until the end of the last episode... following on from the similarly ‘not so surprising’ revelations about Billie Piper. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of this character’s ‘hidden’ talent in the next series. It might even be a case, depending on whether they want to go the whole hog with the original character name, that this makes Hartnett only the third person in the history of cinema and television, to play this specific character (a crown which was held as being played by only Lon Chaney Jr until only a few years ago, in fact).

So yeah... there’s that lack of surprise in certain key elements of the script which can’t be gotten away from. I wouldn’t be surprised, also, if something resembling The Mummy comes in to the show at some point soon, either, since there are a lot of references to the Egyptian Book Of The Dead and so on dotted about the early episodes. Something held back for future seasons, alongside some other famous characters, no doubt.

All that being said, the series does still manage to surprise in certain places. The end of the second episode, Séance, for instance, is probably the bloodiest and most shocking in terms of language (when it comes to an amazing scene featuring Eva Green) but the final moments involving Victor Frankenstein (played by Harry Treadaway) and his new creation, who he has been bonding with over the course of the episode, is quite refreshing in terms of completely throwing away what the audience might have thought the purpose of that slow build was and actually caught me off guard. This is a good thing because that hardly ever happens to me and it definitely helped get me hooked from fairly early on in the run of the show.

Another introduction took me completely by surprise too. Most of the established characters from famous fictional sources are introduced in terms of their identity in a fairly sloppy manner, it has to be said, but one of them took me completely unawares. Timothy Dalton’s Sir Malcolm Murray has been promising Frankenstein a consultation with a friend who is an expert on blood and, when David Warner turns up playing this character and his name is revealed... well I didn’t put two and two together until his identity became known. What was even more surprising, given the reverance in which this character is held, is what happens to him a mere episode or two later. I don’t want to spoil the moment if you haven’t seen the show and I don’t neccessarily agree it was the right thing to do, but it certainly came as a slight shock although, in hindsight, the scenes with David Warner directly preceeding these really do kind of spell it out that this ‘incident’ is going to happen soon. I’m just getting old, methinks.

All in all though, the atmosphere and weight of the show, although uneven, is certainly enough to keep me watching. I do find the individual characters interesting and even the Frankenstein monster, played by Rory Kinnear, had my sympathies as the end of the first season drew to a close. It’ll certainly be interesting, though, to see where the main characters, brought together on a quest to find Murray’s daughter, Mina Harker (yeah... that Mina Harker), go from here... since that main plot comes to a close, somewhat, in the last episode. I’m pretty sure some supernatural being, either Egyptian or possibly Indian, may pose a new threat to Dalton’s character and his allies but I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. Since I spent some Christmas money on the second series on Blu Ray, I’m hoping to be able to get to watch these in a month or two. As far as the first season goes, however, it’s not the absolute masterpiece of gothic horror I was hoping for but, with stalwarts like Eva Green and Timothy Dalton in there to prove that you really can’t go wrong with them, I think most fans of this kind of literary entertainment should be delightedly and dreadfully surprised. Worth checking out.

Doctor Who: The Day Of The Doctor

Miss Zygon

Doctor Who: The Day Of The Doctor
UK Airdate: 23rd November 2013
BBC 2

Warning: Spoilers sweetie!

This year, two very famous fictional doctors are celebrating big anniversaries. The first of these was in March when Doctor Clark Savage Jr, aka Doc Savage: The Man Of Bronze, celebrated his 80th. To celebrate this, a new Doc Savage novel was written by Will Murray (the current incarnation of the Kenneth Robeson pen name, although this one went out under his own name) in which Doc Savage crossed paths with another fictional character who shares his 80th anniversary year with Doc in 2013. This particular Doc Savage adventure is called Skull Island and the other 80th birthday boy is, of course, King Kong. 

But the other fictional doctor, who is quite young in comparison, a mere 50 years old as the time lord flies, is of course The Doctor from the BBC TV show Doctor Who. And last night I watched the 50th anniversary episode of the series, not in 3D at the cinema (although the temptation was certainly there), but in 2D at my parents home, as a family unit... as I had mostly, off and on, watched Doctor Who for the last 43 of my 45 years of existence.

So did it live up to the hype and incredible amount of fan expectation that preceded it?

No, not really. It couldn’t possibly, could it? But, although I found myself a little underwhelmed at the time, mainly due to my own “what if...” kind of expectations, the episode certainly wasn’t terrible and it was, actually, really jolly good, mostly. Up to a point.

It wasn’t greatness but then again, the other two anniversary specials, The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors, weren’t the best stories of their respective contemporary Doctors either and, well, the less said about The Two Doctors (reviewed here) the better, I think (not even “the great Troughton” could save that one).

So it’s probably a little unfair on Moffat to expect multiple Ogron orgasms from the episode so... if anyone did really hate this one... seriously boys and girls... cut him some slack.

Now then, one of the reasons my expectations were raised so high is because, two nights prior to this, I’d just seen Mark Gatiss’ own tribute to the show, the excellent An Adventure In Space And Time (reviewed here) and, frankly, after seeing that, I was prepared to accept miracles from the regular incarnation of the show. At the end of that review I wrote “If the 50th anniversary episode shown on Saturday 23rd November 2013 is even half as good as this one, then we’re in for a good time on that one too” and I did have a good time with The Day Of The Doctor... but there are a fair few negatives with it that didn’t sit too well with me either, I’m afraid. On the other hand, there were a fair few positives too and so I’ll save those for the end of this review because, I do want to go out on a positive note on this one... I hate being a grump when it comes to this show but this is kinda what the show has turned me into over the last few years, it has to be said. It’s a much more “hit and miss” affair than it used to be before David Tennant left the show. And that’s not a pop at Matt Smith, who is briliant in the role also, whether he’s got a good or bad script.

Okay, my first negative is that, apart from not having a sorely missed Christopher Eccleston in it properly, I did think the Zygons were a little underwhelming. Now I don’t remember the Zygons too well. I think at the time of their first appearance opposite Tom Baker in Terror Of The Zygons, I was busy watching a new pretender to the Saturday night science fiction throne which, quite deliberately, aired on ITV at the same time. The show was called Space 1999 and it didn’t take me all that long, it has to be said, for me to lose interest in that and return to Doctor Who but, these were the days before commercially available (let alone affordable) video recorders, remember. So I never got to actually see the original Zygons in their first round with The Doctor but, I did like the make-up/costumes and, thankfully, the BBC haven’t really changed them all that much this time around.

However, the clue was in the title to the original story... Terror Of The Zygons. 

As in terror.

Actual terror.

As in monsters you were supposed to be terrified of... and by all reports of people I know who did tune in for it... they were kinda scary. Which brings me to my main problem with The Day Of The Doctor. The Zygons here were not terrifying and, even when they appeared to have the upper hand (in the most obvious manner where every kind of escape is entirely possible), they really weren’t all that threatening and were mostly played for laughs, really just the straight men... er... straight creatures for Matt Smith and David Tennant to bounce off, for the most part. In fact, the actual Zygon story didn’t even come to a proper conclusion that we were shown. They were just tools used to get a few incarnations of The Doctor together so those three could reminisce about an important moment in their collective past which they were about to undo and so the aliens in question were just kinda jettisoned when they were no longer needed. I really think that monsters such as these could maybe have had a stronger entrance into the modern era version of Doctor Who before Moffat played around with them in this fashion. Even the comic relief Sontarons had a few truly deadly missions in new versions of the show before they became the, admittedly quite entertaining, joke that they are now. Never mind, though. Let’s let Zygons be Zygons and forgive, shall we?

Then there was the fact that bits of it really made no sense. Queen Elizabeth the First would not be able to remain disguised, or is that undisguised, as a Zygon long enough to learn the intricate details of their plan down to the Nth degree to explain it to The Doctor(s) really, would she?

And then there was the Time War.

Great gravitas from John Hurt and I’ll get back to him in a little while but, ultimately, as much as I regretted Russel T. Davies’ decision to make The Doctor the last of the time-lords (with occasional convenient exceptions) and as much as I knew that the only way to keep running forward with this show was to bring them back at some point, I really think this episode unmade that decision very quickly and with no sense of it being a hard thing to accomplish. Bit rubbish. Nice effects, to be sure, but the time war seemed to me to be a bit of an inconsequential battle, and not the war of different aliens and collisions of history the event had been made out to be in numerous episodes. So that was kinda trashy.

The only other negatives I got were that sometimes Smith and Tennant seemed to cancel each other out, almost, in the funny man stakes (which are stakes The Doctor shouldn’t necessarily be playing about with anyway) and also the fact that Billie Piper’s return to the show was not as Rose Tyler, but as an interface based on her and who was unable to interact with any of the incarnations who would actually have known who she was. That felt a bit like a kind of missed opportunity, to be honest, but at least there was a plus side to both these last two negatives... so let’s start getting happy and brightening things up a little.

When they weren’t cancelling each other out, Tennant and Smith did have some wonderful exchanges between them such as the “reversing each other’s polarity” scene and which culminated early for me with the wonderful line that Tennant says to John Hurt’s “true ninth Doctor” character... “I dunno where he picks this stuff up from”, in response to Hurt’s enquiry about the legitimacy of Tennant’s (and Moffat’s) original “timey wimey” phrase which Smith uses. That, for me, was the highlight of the episode, in fact.

And let’s look at that performance by Billie Piper. She may not have been Rose but she was truly stunning as the conscience of the most powerful weapon in the Time Lord arsenal, “The Moment”. And put her in a room with one of the greatest English speaking actors going, aka John Hurt, give them both a script with a particular thorny issue (genocide and the mass murder of billions of children) and you get a truly great set of scenes which, alas, lead up to a conclusion which, as I said earlier, wasn’t won with too much struggle but... you know... what a lead up to it, though. John Hurt was, of course, excellent and I really didn’t expect anything less from the old war horse... now transformed into the “War Doctor” as a means of keeping out fans comments about the hasty renumbering that has to be done now.

Oh, and that reminds me. I’m not finished with the negatives after all. Here’s another couple for you...

It’s unfortunated that, during the end of the Fourth Doctor’s era, it was established that a Time Lord can only regenerate 12 times (flying in the face of continuity with prior bits of the show’s history actually, but people seem to forget that bit). However, with that bit of established lore, having a line in it from the all powerful “The Moment” which says that The Doctor’s punishment is to carry on living is really a sorry excuse for losing that rule. Really? That’s it? I do hope not but, since future Doctor Peter Capaldi (who made his debut in this episode actually, just like I tweeted I thought he would some weeks ago... otherwise why announce him so early? Gotta get him into the audience consciousness so the cameo has weight.) is actually now Doctor number thirteen, I really hope that Steven Moffat does the right thing and addresses this long standing issue properly at some point.

And then there’s Tom Baker, Who turns up playing “The Curator” but makes jibes about being The Doctor, completely breaking the barrier between verisimilitude and fiction and being completely “meta”, as the kids say... destroying all credibility of the show, once again. He was brilliant and entertaining and, maybe even seeking redemption for not returning for the 20th Anniversary special but, for me anyway, the cost was too high. Further explanation was needed but, alas, none was forthcoming.

Okay, so back to the good stuff.

Lots of Doctor Who references, both visual and audio related. I loved the new character Osgood, played by Ingrid Oliver, and would love to see more of her in the series please... and even didn’t mind the fact that she was wearing Tom Baker’s scarf. The UNIT archives, or whatever they were, had lots of references of course but, for me, the best reference came from David Tennant when he delivered the line “I see you’ve redecorated. I don’t like it.” This was, of course, a quote from Patrick Troughton’s Doctor in the 10th anniversary special The Three Doctors and it was particularly gratifying to hear my second favourite Doctor, Tennant, quoting my all time favourite Doctor, Troughton. So that was a nice bonus.

And that’s about pretty much all I’ve got to say, if I’m honest. I understand why we just saw Peter Capaldi’s face in extreme close up... they want to reveal the true personality and costume of that character in the next series and, truth be told, I reckon they probably didn’t even know what that was going to be yet when they filmed it. And all the archival footage of the various incarnations of the character on the view screen and even the overly cheesy construction of them all standing together at the end was all very entertaining. But I did feel underwhelmed and I think I’ll probably get more out of it when I give it a second watch sometime next year on Blu Ray or DVD (yeah, I know it’s out in a week or two but I’m pretty sure I won’t get around to watching it again for a good few months yet).

However, although I didn’t like the story arc on this one, I did think a lot of the dialogue... not all but a lot... was particularly good and it’s certainly not the let down, nor indeed the triumph, that I could have foreseen. Just a nice little celebration for a nice science fiction hero who deserves to have a nice slice of cake and a cup of tea on his Birthday so... Happy Birthday and Happy Times And Places to you Doctor. And may you have many more.