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No. 35653
And that's season four behind me. Just the specials left of Tennant's run. Thoughts:
0. Voyage of the Damned. It's shit. About all there is to say.
1. Partners in Crime. I love Donna to bits, I really do. I just wish the villain here had been a bit more...threatening. Still, significantly better than Rose or New Earth, if not quite as good as Smith and Jones.
2. The Fires of Pompeii: I like this one! Nothing really exceptional, but it does a good job highlighting what role Donna plays as the Doctor's companion: she's his conscience.
3. Planet of the Ood: What's-his-name turning into an Ood at the end was beyond silly, but apart from that I think this was a damn fine episode. Any species evolving with its brain in its hand seems unlikely, but I can overlook it.
4. The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky: Another really good one. The UNIT soldiers are a bit of a disappointment - those clowns wouldn't last a single mission in an XCOM squad - but otherwise I quite enjoyed it. Martha's back, and I love Martha, and I especially like how Martha and Donna instantly get on like a house on fire.
5. The Doctor's Daughter: This is the episode which stopped me watching when the season was originally running. Or, to be more precise, the preview for it, which made it look just absolutely awful. The episode itself actually didn't turn out to be all that bad, the reveal that planetfall was only a week ago took me a bit by surprise, that was a bit clever. I have to call bullshit on the ending, though. I mean I'm glad they didn't actually kill Jenny off at the end because they couldn't think of anything else to do with her and they didn't want to deal with her running around, which is absolutely what I was expecting. But come on, if she's a Time Lord (and she is) give her a proper regeneration. Don't just do "oh she's got some of you but not enough I MEAN TOO MUCH", that's bullshit. She's cloned from the Doctor, for once Time Lord DNA really is the correct explanation. And Martha's trek across the blasted landscape was utterly pointless, the episode would have played out in exactly the same way if she'd just stayed in the Hath camp.
6. The Unicorn and the Wasp: ...eh. I liked Agatha Christie, but like so many other "the Doctor and his Companion go back and meet famous authors!" episodes I found the story around it rather lacking. For one thing, the titular Unicorn is totally pointless, isn't it?
7. Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead: Oh, oh, oh, now THIS is the good stuff. Fucking brilliant. It's got that perfect blend of mystery, suspense, and terror that makes for my ideal Who episode. And it played on the creepiness that is automatic lights in library aisles, which I've always thought was fucking scary. University of Ottawa's shelves on floors four and up do that at night, and it always spooks the hell out of me. Finally, I'm intrigued by River Song (although I've been spoiled for at least some of her story), and look forward to learning more about her under Moffatt.
8. Midnight: I was honestly surprised to learn this was a Davies episode, because it's really not Davies' usual style of script. It's good, for one thing. Or, rather, it was really good up until whatever the hell that thing was took over completely, and then it started to fall apart. People's actions didn't make sense, some people were randomly immune to the mindcontrol effect, and we never did find out what the hell sort of thing it was. A rather unsatisfying ending to a really great first 3/4 of an episode.
9. Turn Left: Well this one's pure Donna, so that's good. And you get to see what would have happened without the Doctor, which I think is really interesting. But Rose's performance here was...lackluster. And the big bad threat it promises is Journey's End, so that's disappointing. Overall good, but dragged down by its context.
10. The Stolen Earth/Journey's End: "It Stinks!"
Honestly, garbage, garbage, garbage. To be fair, it doesn't really turn bad until halfway through Journey's End proper...but when it gets bad, oh GOD does it get bad.
These episodes capture perfectly, like nothing else, how absolutely shit Davies is at technobabble. He doesn't even try to make it make sense. Science is just a plot device to him, every single time characters try babbling techno it comes out like this: GUI interface using visual bas… There's an art to technobabble, and Davies doesn't grok it.
"Oh give me that number on your teleporter! Now I can make my totally unrelated teleporter work!"
"Time Lord-Human Metacrisis"
"Yes, the TARDIS was Dalek-proof last time...but these are BETTER Daleks!"
"Every single thing Doctor-Donna says up until dragging the Earth back into place!"
Not to mention, how did the TARDIS tow the Earth out? I'm not one to fuss over physical possibility too much but wherever the crucible was, it was not part of the same physical universe as the Earth is. You can't just fly there. That's why they had to do all sorts of bad-technobabble bullshit to give the Doctor a phone call.
And then there's Martha's German doomsday device. This is just profoundly stupid. Again, I don't mean that every Who plot must adhere meticulously to established science, but come on. If you google 'how to destroy the earth' the very first result is a page telling you specifically that all the explosives in the world - literally - could not significantly alter the Earth's shape. Fuck up the ecosystem, yes. Destroy the earth itself? Please. And then there's the question of what sort of sick mind would think building something like that would make sense...this is why I honestly think Martha got just as much of the short end of the stick as Donna and Rose in this episode. She didn't get screwed over like them, but she had to say all of that like it made sense. Poor Freema Agyeman, I bet she needed a shower afterwards.
And then there's the ending. Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. I honestly can't decide whether Donna or Rose's final fate makes me angrier. Donna's is bad, horribly bad, totally unnecessarily bad, but with Rose they didn't even try to justify it in universe. "Oh just spend the rest of your life babysitting not!me on a parallel world, even though you said specifically you didn't want to!" Plus, if he really is dangerous, why are you letting him loose on some parallel world? Imprisonment in the TARDIS was good enough for the Master, but not for him? I mean, he did save the universe from the threat of a new armada of Daleks. Clearly he's the real villain here. Christ. Not to mention it makes a hell of a lot more sense to imprison him there than the Master. He'll die eventually, the Doctor would only need to watch him for 50-60 years tops. The Master'd be there forever. Imprisoned within the universe's most powerful time machine. What could possibly go wrong? Ugh.
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