Doctor Who - Boom

Sunday Mundy

Doctor Who - Boom
Airdate: 18th May 2024
BBC 1

Warning: Some spoilers here sweeties.

Yay! Finally... the new series of Doctor Who has a pretty good episode... Boom... with a hidden surprise to it too, it has to be said. And, blimey! It’s written by Steven Moffat. He was a great Doctor Who writer during the Russel T. Davies era of Doctor Who but when he took over as show runner on Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi’s tenures, well it would be safe to say his writing went rapidly downhill. Now though, he provides a pretty good story  for the new show and, well, I guess Russel T must be the best editor for this writer, is what I’m thinking.

Okay so, The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his new companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) land slap bang in the middle of a war. I think the army, who are once again a religious army, with serving ministers and bishops etc instead of modern ranking, must mean it’s the same lot as in Moffat’s second Weeping Angels story for Matt Smith’s first season. Here there is no real twist as the fact that the army is fighting no enemy and are being kept fighting and dying because of capitalism of the war machinery merchants (and the soldiers’ own gullibility) is something that is telegraphed from very early on, I thought... or at least just very obvious.

So we have mechanical ambulances killing their own soldiers in the field because it’s not financially viable to give them a few weeks to recover from their injuries and, right from the get go, The Doctor steps on a ‘smart’ landmine and stays there for most of the episode while Ruby, who is pretty much shot dead under accidental circumstances about half way through the episode, tries to figure out, with the help of a few religiously impaired military types, a way to stop The Doctor from both blowing up and, because of his timelord anatomy, taking out pretty much half the planet if he shifts his weight or blood pressure one notch more.

But there’s lot’s of things going on here for what must have been a relatively cheap episode to shoot (it’s mostly set in that one location, which I suspect is one of the new backdrop screen thingies which Disney used on The Mandalorian and which seems to be rolling out through the entertainment industry). Including two surprise actors in this one.

Well, okay, actually the first one is no real surprise... I’ve been expecting Susan Twist to appear in every episode this year, as a different character per episode and, in this one she’s the personality of the ambulances. If the final twist of this year’s show isn’t to do with The Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, I’ll be surprised (although I was fully expecting her to make an appearance about six years ago and she didn’t show then).

As for the second guest appearance... well I would have been more worried about whether Ruby Sunday was going to come back from certain death or not had I realised that Mundy Flynn was being played by Varada Sethu. Who is back as Mundy next year, I believe (or maybe this Christmas?), as a new regular companion for The Doctor (alongside Ruby, I think... I suspect the marketing machine is being pretty deceptive with the facts at the moment). I’m somewhat relieved, though, because I really liked the character here and so I’m glad she’s back at some point.

Okay, so to be fair, the supposed ‘twists’ were all forseeable... although, did anyone catch Ruby’s age when the ambulance analysed her (is she really many thousands of years old or is that just because she’s maybe that far in the future?)... but it was all done with a certain panache and I even found myself warming to Ncuti in this one (thank goodness) so, I guess the darker ones fit him better, perhaps? Or maybe just me.

Once again we have the return of the ‘Ruby snow’ through one sequence. Which is another part of the ongoing mystery of Ruby Sunday and I’m all for that underlying arc (again, something to do with either Susan Foreman or Susan Twist, perhaps?). Time will tell and, not long to wait I guess, since it’s a ridiculously short season this year... well, unless they make us wait until Christmas or beyond, I suppose.

And I’ve not much more to say about Boom, to be honest except, next week’s ‘mostly Doctorless’ (if the publicity is to believed) episode is one I’ve been looking forward to for a bit and it looks to be giving us more intriguing flashbacks to the mysteries of Ruby’s past, for sure (the ambulance in this episode was completely unable to find her next of kin when it analysed her, of course). I just hope all the other episodes of this season carry on with this kind of quality going forward (if not even better). Liked this one a lot.

Doctor Who - The Church On Ruby Road

 

The Paradox Children

Doctor Who -
The Church On Ruby Road
Airdate: 25th December 2023
BBC plus some evil purse strings

Well, this wasn’t bad and, it certainly wasn’t, as someone in my house said, “Bloody awful... put me off watching Doctor Who!” By the same token it wasn’t great either and, yeah, possibly not quite good. The new split off version of The Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa teams up with his new companion Ruby Sunday, played by Millie Gibson, for an adventure which all circles around her origins as an orphan and begins a thread which will, if I’m not mistaken, run through the whole of this next season, which begins properly in May.

Okay, so the story of The Church On Ruby Road, such as it was, involved The Doctor and Ruby trying to prevent her foster mother’s new baby, the 33rd she’s adopted (which maybe a reference to LP playing speeds, given that one of the upcoming episodes features Abbey Road and The Beatles) from being eaten by goblins, itself a ploy by the goblins to, I would assume, get their hands on Ruby. Which they do after being defeated by The Doctor, by using the goblin ‘physics of coincidence’, if I’ve got that right, to fracture time and kidnap Ruby from the steps of the church she was left at as a newborn baby. The Doctor goes back and saves her and picks up his mysterious new companion once the timeline is set back, stupidly not following the mother himself because, hey, it makes dramatic sense to dangle that mystery over the audience for the rest of the year (I’m guessing). I wonder if Ruby has a pocket watch. Probably not, two hearts would definitely show up when they’re doing checks on foster kids, for sure.

Okay... so Gibson seems fine. Gatwa looks absolutely perfect as a new Doctor but, there’s still something about the way he’s playing the character which I’m not liking and, I can’t quite put my finger on what that is. Something about the voice and attitude seems a bit off, to be honest. Still willing to give him time though... unlike other members of my household, it has to be said.

And there’s the other trap that either I’ve fallen into or Russel T. Davies has accidentally sprung on himself. Doctor Who was always, as far as I remember, supposed to be a family show, rather than just a kids show. And this episode is nothing but childish malarkey from start to finish it seems to me. Now, I think one of two things could be happening here... and the thing I hope that’s happening is that he just wanted to do a  very light hearted, drama free, kid pleasing tale for Christmas. The whole episode felt like a poorly CGId version of The Dark Crystal or even The Muppets, to be fair. But, it could be just a concession to Christmas with more serious drama and peril on the way later (I mean, seriously, just eat the kid already and move on, there are no high stakes or real threats in this episode).

Or... and I suspect some newspaper reviews may well take this tack in the next morning’s papers but... is this new, child-like tone a sign of the Disneyfication of Doctor Who? Remembering that it’s Disney who are injecting finance into this thing now (although not enough to make the goblins look ‘all that’... apparently). Now, this was my first thought but, being as the preview trailer for the new series starting in May looks like that won’t necessarily be the case... I’m not going to rush to any conclusions and keep my fingers crossed that the whole Disney element and the child-like atmosphere in this episode was just a big, Christmas fuelled coincidence. I hope. Keeping my fingers and toes crossed for this... I’m just not sure.

Also, I didn’t see any Daleks or Cybermen in the trailer and, as much as I hate that they keep returning with alarming frequency over the last ten years or so... if you want to establish the new guy as The Doctor, then you should get him sharing screen time with those established villains as soon as possible, would be my take on that.

Still, it was nice hearing Murray Gold return to the show with some pretty good music and I can only hope that Silva Screen will be releasing a proper CD of that soon... along with the Murray Gold season which they never got around to releasing all those years ago, preferably (or even instead of this new one because, they should be releasing these things in order anyhow).

And that’s me almost done on Doctor Who - The Church On Ruby Road other than... did someone mention Mavity. Yep, again, instead of gravity. That’s been turning up since the episode Wild Blue Yonder (reviewed here) and I can only assume that it’s going to turn around and bite the audience in the backside at some point over the next two years because, obviously, those timelines aren’t quite rightly settled yet, are they?

Anyway, I don’t think this episode was a total disaster and I’ll withhold judgement for a while. I'm ot looking forward to the new series all that much but I'm still hopeful. Time, as always, will tell.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Sky

Sky-Fi

The Sarah Jane Adventures Season 5 Episodes 1 & 2: Sky

Airdate: October 3rd and 4th 2011. UK. CBBC

Warning: A skyful of spoilers

Back in November of last year I finished off my review of the last two episodes of Series Four of The Sarah Jane Adventures with the following paragraph...

“Looking forward to Series Five next year and hopefully by then we will have seen the new series of the other two shows in this particular family, Doctor Who and the US continuation of Torchwood.”

As the number one rated UK children’s TV programme, I thought this great show was just going to run and run until the lead actress decided it was finally time to retire and quit in a blaze of glory. Sadly, this was not to be the case.

Looking at that last paragraph now I realise how much I was in for some bad knocks when it comes to Doctor Who related product in 2011. The main flagship show is still a bit hit and miss in the quality/entertainment stakes since Russell T. Davies quit producing the show and the show Davis did produce this year, the Americanised Torchwood, was really not the success story we were all hoping for (yeah, alright it was dire and a chore to find new things to say about when it came around to writing the reviews of the individual episodes).

Plus we had the death of two major members of U.N.I.T to take in. Nicholas Courtney who played The Brigadier in Doctor Who starting from when he was a Colonel in the Patrick Troughton days (the actor also starred opposite Hartnell but not as “The Brig”) and who had the last proper appearance of the character in The Sarah Jane Adventures, tangling with the Sontarans again, died and left a void in his wake.

More shocking, though, was the news that actress Elizabeth Sladen, who played the popular Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane opposite Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison (in The Five Doctors) and in her own shows K9 and Company (only the pilot was made) and The Sarah Jane Adventures, passed away unexpectedly of cancer. People were shocked, devastated and the Doctor Who community on-line collectively mourned her passing.

Then came the news that the first half of the fifth series, six episodes comprising three stories, were already in the can and would be shown later in the year. That time has now come and I find it hard as a reviewer to be really critical of something which I know makes up the last performances of a wonderful actresses body of work... especially since I had a lot of time for this series... but found these opening two episodes to be a little less than what I’ve come to expect from the show.

Sky is an introductory show for a new character, called... um... Sky, who starts off as a baby left at Sarah Jane’s front door but grows up to a twelve year old suddenly at the end of the first episode and the whole feel of this character is that she’s very much a repeat of the Luke character in that they needed a non-human character to give the show the missing element now that the Luke character has gone to College (He's in this first episode a little, seen on-screen talking to the extended Sarah-Jane family. This doesn’t give me much hope for seeing K9 again this series as I bet they were holding him back until episodes 11 and 12, which were never filmed). Instead of being super-smart like her predecessor, however, Sky is a living bomb who is defused by Sarah Jane and company but who obviously retains some of her alien powers of “electrickery”.

We have a new supervillainess in the form of Sky’s test-tube “mum” and a metal based alien race who look a bit like stainless-steel versions of Batman. However... nothing feels really new here. In addition to the Sky character who, I’m sure given time, would have been a strong cast member on the show, her “alien mum” just feels like a repeat of every other super-villainess they’ve had on the show and the metal aliens are mostly just there to check all the boxes it seems to me... although the pre-credits sequence with them in the first episode is almost a classic Jon Pertwee opening and certainly helps lend the series the tone of the old Doctor Who which it does have quite a lot of the time throughout the show's entire run.

Don’t get me wrong... there are some really good things going on in this opener... the return of both the mysterious and magical shop-keeper (plus his parrot) and Floella Benjamins character from previous series’ demonstrate that the writers really are trying to push the show into having a very coherent universe of its own with recurring regular characters... which makes the death of the lead actress doubly poignant when you can see how they are trying to progress things.

However, the comedy element of the show, which was always very broad but which worked pretty well, is way over the top and really dumbed down on this one (so broad it falls off the humour scale into something a lot less than funny) and I can’t help but think the comedy element is also being heavily pushed when, really, it was perfect the way it was. Clyde Langer is such a strong character in the show... he doesn’t need to be made any less subtle, thanks very much.

Ultimately, this is a fairly weak couple of episodes but they certainly more than hold their own against some of the weaker episodes of Doctor Who this year... which means this show is still wiping the floor with this year’s Torchwood as far as I’m concerned (and, to be fair, that’s not really hard). Looking forward to the remaining four episodes in this series and keeping my fingers crossed that the show will somehow, cut off mid season, go out with a bang rather than a whimper.

Torchwood 4.10 The Blood Line

Bloody Rubbish

Torchwood - Miracle Day Series 4

Episode 10: The Blood Line

Airdate: 15th September 2011. UK. BBC1

Warning: Bloody spoilers.

To loyal readers of my weekly Series Four reviews who have suffered and despaired and shared in my disappointment at the current incarnation of what was once one of my favourite TV shows, I can say only this... I come to bury Torchwood, not to praise it.

I mean... wow! Any hopes that the last episode would go out with a bang while simultaneously tying up any dangly loose plot ends were slowly shot down as the episode wore on until we were left with a tagged on ending scene which managed to not only insult the viewers intelligence and then do it all over again... but also, it has to be said by the look on Gwen Coopers face in the last shot... seemed to have turned in Carry On Torchwood. Seriously, you just needed Kenneth Williams standing behind John Barrowman and Eva Miles in that last little bit and it would have been just too perfect!

So, to be fair, the episode did pick up the pace a little but everything was so overplayed that it was just unbelievably insulting... the writing was just plain weak. For example, there's a very important cargo on a truck full of soldiers and, just after one of our two lead characters in that section gets on the truck, the other one starts grasping at his injuries and lead character number two gets back off the truck to help him. Woah. Way to telegraph that the truck is just about to go up in an explosion people! I mean, seriously, find a not too discrete way to get the leads to safety and then blow something up. What rot!

And then you have Rex, who has been carrying Jack’s blood in his veins (bit of a give away really about what’s going to happen to him, is it not?) and when he and Jack spray their blood into the earth’s diameter-long vaginal canal that is The Blessing, you pretty much know (since Jack can’t die until the future events witnessed by The Doctor and Martha Jones in an episode of Doctor Who) it’s pretty obvious that they’ll both be returning from the dead soon. Which they do, although Rex then seems to collapse on the floor again in a desperate bid by the writers to attempt to engage the audience one last time.

Not content with not at least giving us the courtesy to assume we know a little about the obvious resurrection abilities of these two characters, the makers of Torchwood: Miracle Day then do a slow reveal in which I think they wanted the viewer to act surprised about when it came to Rex being in the shot. Seriously? And then they go and do it all over again by having Rex gunned down and pronounced dead (even though it’s quite clear that the terrible wounds he’s been carrying around with him all series have healed themselves) and then expect us to accept things as a good ending to have everyone reacting like someone’s just stuck a finger up their collective bottoms when Rex comes back to life again. Seriously Torchwood people? You are really that dumb about this stuff?

Things pretty much went, in this episode, as I expected them to go... as opposed to going as I’d hoped they’d go. In a review for Episode 4 of this series, for example, I said this...

“... does anyone else think Oswald Danes is going to be thoroughly despicable right up until the last five minutes of the final episode... when he suddenly realises what’s at stake and saves the day in some self-sacrificing way? Is that character’s set up really going to be that obvious?”

Well I’m afraid the answer to that one turned out to be yes... yes it is.

And just to completely, “play the game” they also added a scene which can be used to set up a sequel story arc. Seriously people! If, and I sincerely hope it will happen but really don’t think it will after this poor showing but... if... anyone ever decides to put some money up for a fifth series of Torchwood, they surely wouldn’t be so stupid as to write a storyline that’s in any way, shape or form connected with this storyline which, it has to be said, has seemed to have left a bitter taste in the mouths of the older fan base of the show. This is never going to happen people and we’ll never, I strongly suspect, ever hear from “The Families” again.

You know, I’ve been thinking about this dumbed down for the kiddies incarnation of Torchwood for a while now and I’ve come to the conclusion that Russel T. Davies really can’t be held too responsible for this mess. I bet there was a lot of pressure on him to do things a certain way on this and maybe that’s why he’s gone on record that he doesn’t think he’ll do anymore Torchwood after the first episode of this series aired. I bet, after seeing the finished result and seeing just how oafish it’s turned out... he may have found it quite a painful birthing for the fourth child of his Torchwood family. It must be hard to see the projects you are emotionally invested in turn out with less than stellar results. I hope he gets on to something really good again soon because, and I know some folks will disagree with me here, he can be a pretty talented writer and a great producer. So I hope he’s smart enough to just take this stuff in his stride.

And that’s about it. I won’t waste anymore column space on reviewing this terribly disappointing series of Torchwood. I do hope that somehow this lifeless corpse of a TV show will somehow snatch itself back from the jaws of death like one of it’s regular characters but I just can’t see that happening. However, give me a year or two and I will start revisiting and reviewing the first three series for my blog. Hopefully I’ll have something positive to say again about the exploits of Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper and the rest of them.

Until then, though, I will use the tag line of another sci-fi genre show to sum up my feelings about the promising collaboration between the BBC, Starz Network and Russel T. Davies and say just this... Trust No One!

Torchwood - Miracle Day 4.1

Passing the Torch

Torchwood - Miracle Day Series 4 Episode 1

Airdate: July 14th 2011. UK. BBC1

Hmm... since I’ve only been blogging a year and a half and have not had a chance to review the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood before in a public space, I think maybe I should give you a little history of my own experiences with the last three series’ of Torchwood before kicking off into a review of episode one of the fourth series.

When the first series came out 5 years ago, we were all excited about it over here in the UK because this was the first time that we’d had a spin-off show from a popular TV show, Doctor Who and the name Torchwood or The Torchwood Institute had started to get referred to a little bit in the good Doctor’s show to get us all primed and ferocious for the series premier... and all in all I have to say that I was very disappointed with the first series back then. Since then I’ve re-watched them all on DVD and am not quite so disappointed now with them, I think my expectations of what the series was going to be possibly got in the way of me being able to accept that series on it’s own terms a little bit... although I still say that the first year of Torchwood was hands down the worst series of the show we got (so far).

I think we were all expecting more Doctor Who references on the programme (after all, even the shows title is an anagram of Doctor Who) but apart from a few cynical references to The Doctor and an episode featuring a cyber-babe, we had to wait until the last minute of the last episode of the first series to hear the familiar sounds of the TARDIS... and that was all we got, the last episode dovetailing into a new Doctor Who adventure in the main series which guest starred Captain Jack (and an important three episodes they were, dealing with the return of The Doctor’s famous arch-nemesis The Master, this time around played by both Derek Jacobi and John Simm in two incarnations).

Aside from that though, I think that first season had some bad writing in it. It was trying to be adult without wanting to really ruffle anyones feathers was my opinion of it... and as such was a huge let-down. The pacing seemed a bit out and the dialogue just sounded too... well too English school-marmy for my taste. Everything was so prim and proper and you got the feeling half the time that the shows writers (and Russell T. Davis is an excellent writer and producer to have on anything, by the way) were just doing things to impress the audience which just weren’t that impressive.

However, good fortune inadvertently smiled on me because I persevered where, frankly, every other friend I had who was watching this show dropped out of it by the middle of that first series (and none of them have returned to watching it by the sound of it, which is a pity because Torchwood suddenly got to be compulsive viewing a short time after).

My secret weapon, at the time, was that I had a girlfriend who liked it and insisted on watching it (otherwise they would have lost me too). I groaned when I heard she wanted to watch the second series when it came on but dutifully sat with her to watch... and I’m really glad I did. Torchwood Series 2 was like a fresh breath of air to jaded British TV... it’s like the producers and writers really listened to viewers perceptions, analysed what was right and wrong about that first series, and managed to completely fix everything. The second series, right from the opening hook in the first five minutes where the crew chase down an escaped fish alien, was absolutely brilliant. The pacing was great, the dialogue was clever and extremely witty, it was a TV show that had got itself more than just a fresh lick of paint... this was suddenly a great show. Even if they did kill off the best two characters at the end of the series.

And then the BBC decided they didn't have enough money to carry on so the third series was a 5 part serial which aired in one week over consecutive nights... everybody was disappointed with this decision but it has to be said that the result of this, Torchwood: Children of Earth, was also quite brilliant and dramatic. And both critically and in the ratings was an absolute sensation.... so of course the plodding BBC let it wallow for more than a year without commissioning a new series, presumably because of budgetary restraints again?

Luckily (perhaps) a US cable chanel has jumped in to fund a fourth go at it and the right, honourable “Russ T” and his brilliant producer Julie Gardner have brought us a show which I’m still confused about in regard to it’s title. I believe that over here it’s called Torchwood: Miracle Day and in the US it’s called Torchwood: The New World. Ether way... we get to win on this side of the pond because I believe our episodes are 5 or 6 minutes longer over here. My guess is they’ve cut out a lot of the uniquely British bits in the US to make way for advertisements?

And I also have to say that, quite surprisingly, after my viewing of episode one of this 13 part serial (man, that’s one long story arc) then I’m almost, but not quite, as disappointed as I was with that first season... but this is, after all, only the first episode so I’m figuring (hoping) this is gonna get real good, real quick).

There’s two real problems I’ve got with it at the moment. One is... it looks and feels like any generic, US made TV series... it seems to have lost a lot of that edgy Britishness that it had and looks maybe a little too slick for something like Torchwood. That’s okay though... I’ll get used to that, I’m sure, as soon as it gets a bit more edgy (fingers crossed).

Because my other problem is that it really does feel very formulaic at the moment. It’s exactly what I was expecting it to be... and that’s really not a good thing. Even the action sequences were things we’d seen before... rockets entering a dwelling through one window and exiting via another window, helicopters flipping out of control and just flying over the heads of “our heroes” etc. We even had a major character skewered through the chest in exactly the same way as the husband and child got killed off at the start of Neil Marshall’s The Descent... we’ve seen it all before.

Same thing with the Ret-con and standard Torchwood procedures (and emergency drills)... I guess this is a big jumping on point for US audiences though, so it’s understandable for now.

But, there were also some nice sequences in it, like the man who is blown apart and later decapitated but who is still conscious and alive throughout this process (the show deals with a world unable to die). Also the fact that Captain Jack has suddenly become mortal since his run in with the Daleks at the end of Christopher Eccleston’s first season of Doctor Who. Interesting twist that. After all, we know the ultimate fate of Captain Jack Harkness and we’ve even seen his ultimate death in an episode of the companion show, hundreds of years in the future, so we know there’s no actual threat to Captain Jack in this series... although I do put it to you that he could wind up decapitated by the end of the show... that would tie in with things, wouldn’t it? Although I doubt if they’d want to do that to John Barrowman’s career in the two shows just yet.

The real problem with the events occurring on Miracle Day though, of course, is that if it really is related to what normally “afflicts” Captain Jack then they’re going to have to get into the whole Rose Tyler powered up by the heart of the TARDIS where she inadvertently gave Captain Jack his passport to immortality (I like to call it the Rose T-virus)... that could be an awkward one to dovetail into a “jumping on” series. We’ll have to see what happens on that.

So, yeah, some nice things about the show, certainly... like Captain Jack's use of the name of a former Torchwood team member Owen Harper as an alias or the little flourishing musical references by Murray Gold to the old main theme of the show whenever Captain Jack does something particularly Captain Jack-ish... although I was surprised to see they’d dumped the old “chase/action” theme in favour of something less striking... never mind.

Also, though, there’s been no real references or explanations as to Captan Jack’s sudden return to earth after the death of his lover and the guilt over deliberately and painfully sacrificing the life of his grandchild at the end of Torchwood: Children of Earth. But again, this is only the first episode and I’m sure they’ll get to it. I’m willing to forgive them a lot for a few more episodes due to the fact that Series 2 and 3 were so brilliant... I trust Russell T. Davies a lot so lets just be patient and see what he’s got for us this time.

The jury is out on Torchwood 4 for the time being.