Talk To Rex - Comments

Sorry to hear that

James Lark — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:46:05 +0000

...but thanks for letting us know. I assume you ARE the famous H from Steps, and not some random H we haven't heard of? If so I'm glad to see you're now in the TV extra work market - all that stuff about becoming an actor was a bit unrealistic, really, wasn't it? Good luck, and sorry again to hear of your confusion. I trust our blog was not the cause (it seems pretty clear to me).

Thanks, but...

James Lark — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:00:58 +0000

Everyone who has stuck up for Glee (discounting those who resort to the "I heart Glee" with a million exclamation marks hysteria that seems to inexplicably reduce the critical faculties of people who I otherwise quite like) has given these rather apologetic reasons to watch it, often including the proviso that it's great after a glass or two of wine. I've no doubt that's true, but when there's other, genuinely good drama to watch, a finite number of hours in the day and the programme in question offers less satisfaction than I get from pairing up my socks, I think I'll give it a miss. I was one of the not-IT kids and I got a lot more encouragement from the likes of Doctor Who (though of course, that was in the 80s when the Doctor was also one of the not-IT kids...)

H

tv extra work — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:27:36 +0000

Hmmm I'm abit confused :S

Give it chance

Wednesday — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:27:04 +0000

Yes, Glee is predictable in the story lines, does a lot of going back and forth (how many times can they each quit and storm out?!) and is highly unbelievable in many ways - BUT if you take yourself way back to when you were a teenager (and yes, James - I know you were one once!), you can appreciate how Glee might appeal to the younger generation. It acknowledges the repetative stupidity of "highschool" behaviour, the bullying, lack of confidence and general banality of being an outcast teenager... or, in fact, any teenager. Something to which they can relate. Yes, the show features gross over-exaggeration of the points: everyone feels different and awkward; has hidden talents that in reality will rarely be overwhelmingly brilliant; and gets frustrated by the unfairness of the way they're treated by peers and overseers alike... but if you just sit back and enjoy the over-the-top point-making, and suspend your disbelief, and pretend you're one of the "not-IT" kids, it's actually all rather cute. So I like it. That and the Mash-ups they do (has it reached that far yet on UK TV?) - which are adorably inspiring at times and worth watching the rest of the series so that you can build up the context. I'm not offering any spoilers by telling you to look out for the Police/Gary Puckett & the Union Gap mash-up in episode ten. Give it a chance - if nothing else, just for Jayma Mays unbelievably sweet-yet-hypnotic eyes...

That's... charitable

James Lark — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:31:29 +0000

Plentiful jokes? Really? Where? Which ones? I think you might have self-edited them in. If you really still think "New Directions" was a joke, I think you are simply lending your own (plentiful) sense of irony to the show. I saw no evidence of it being remotely knowing, though I did find plenty to laugh at...

Hmm. I agree with some of

Jon Taylor — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:26:13 +0000

Hmm. I agree with some of this- the autotune is annoying, certainly. But it seems a little disingenuous to review a comedy and ignore the jokes, which are plentiful (and New Directions is one, of course, imho all the better for not being spelled out). And I think that the use of the standard stock characters is fun and knowing and exhibits precisely the kind of irony you say is lacking. It made me laugh, anyway, and that's usually enough to keep me watching a thing.

Save us, Steven Moffat

David Stamm — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:36:03 +0000

I agree with the above commenters who claimed that Steven Moffat deserves more credit for the Doctor Who renaissance. When I think back on the high points of the RTD years, what comes to mind are episodes like The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, and Blink -- all written by Steven Moffat. His 2-parter in season 4 (Silence of the Library and Forest of the Dead) briefly reversed the trend of crapification that had been rapidly accelerating during Donna Noble's tenure as the Doctor's companion. I can't wait to see what Moffat will bring to the series, especially now that he is working with the clean slate of a newly regenerated Doctor.

Children's television should be the best television

James Aylett — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:01:28 +0000

If we feed them crap, they'll never want anything better. And, as James points out, some (many, even) can tell the difference. And even within Doctor Who, let's dial back right to the beginning. I watched An Unearthly Child again last night, and it's by turns unsettling, poignant, exciting and, in one place, actually chilling. Even if modern Doctor Who were only for children, with no adult fan base to speak of, it would still have to be compared to a half hour of children's television from nearly fifty years ago. I hope Moffat gets it together in time for 2013.

No but...

James Lark — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:48:05 +0000

The "it's a kids' programme" argument doesn't wash, for three reasons: 1. Some kids ARE very discerning and appreciate good writing even if they can't explain why it's good. 2. Even if they can't, it's up to us to teach them. 3. The amount of money the BBC are chucking at Doctor Who, it damn well ought to be better. The best children's writing - and I include Doctor Who when it IS at its best - is not condescending, patronising or lazy, but treats its audience with respect, and as a result it rises above the narrow confines of "children's material" to find a much wider audience. Now let's hear no more of this nonsense. You make a good point about Cribbins.

Yes, but...

Owen Gregory — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:51:00 +0000

I like Doctor Who as much as anyone, and I've been just as frustrated with RTD's vision of it and I'm just as hopeful that Moffat's will be much better. But what I think is often lost sight of in this kind of discussion is that, first and foremost, Doctor Who is a programme aimed at children, with just enough material and appearances by established UK actors to keep their parents involved and happy to watch it with them. Yes, I agree that a lot of this finale was overblown nonsense, poorly written and not thought out, with RTD indulging himself (again), but the kids saw their hero running about and saving the planet, before making his farewells to both a lot of the characters the kids recognize and the audience as well. I'm sure most of them loved it and were as reluctant for the Tenth Doctor to go as he was (Tennant delivered his last line beautifully). And whatever you thought of the episode, Cribbins was fantastic.

I think RTD has an amazing Doctor Who universe… in his head.

Ben Ward — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:14:17 +0000

Tom makes some fair counterpoints, but the good plot details picked out cover a tiny minority of actual episode screen time. Yes, conceptually, there's a lot to like about The End Of Time, but the execution of the episode was ruining. So, the Master comes back. John Simm is an outstanding actor, of course, and in his last outing he and David Tennant made great scenes together just by showing up and being awesome. He's back… but at no point in this story is he a Time Lord. Now, he's a super-hero. Jumping in the air? Shooting electricity from his hands? Using the electricity in his hands as a propulsion mechanism so that he can fly?! Fuck off. Fuck off. Absolute shit like that is what took up the time on the television. That and running around the docks. And that's after we'd dealt with him being resurrected using magic potions. By a cult! That I just made up! But then it goes wrong using anti-magic potions! From a resistance movement! That I just made up! What on earth was going on there? What was going on was an inordinate amount of screen time and distraction being inserted into the programme so that RTD could give one of his precious tertiary characters (Mrs Saxon) screen time in the final episode. Entirely unnecessary. Even though she was in the series too briefly for the viewer to ever become emotionally invested in her, apparently she was actually really important and she still gets to be a little redeemed hero. Of course. All of this after accepting the rubbish way in which RTD ‘killed’ The Master in the first place in season 3. Why didn't RTD just let him get away? He's a recurring character, after all, and he'd only just reintroduced him. Heck, he could have done a fun pastiche of Darth Vader's escape at the end of A New Hope; that could have been pretty good. (Aside: The ‘refusing to regenerate’ detail was a good one and played very well, but occurred far too soon in the series; the Master had been back in the show for two episodes and one story before being ‘permanently’ killed out of it again.) A problem I've had with RTD's writing all along is that he incessantly rejects building story around the canonical, pseudo-scientific base of Doctor Who in favour of just making shit up. RTD wasn't writing The Master as a Time Lord, he was ‘Generic Nemesis’, and this time he had silly powers. So much of the plot was unnecessary. Things were introduced, barely explained, changed and barely re-explained. The incredible-gene-splicing Gate of Doom? One minute it's a device to make one girl immortal, now it's a device to reprogram all human DNA. There was no story telling to being it into the plot, it was just there in its own unjustified story thread. Why? That plot segment could be so much simpler if the people who had found the gate had no idea what it did. The Master would show up, take the lead and trick the naïve humans into activating it. Heck, the trick could be ‘it will make your daughter immortal!’. Then he double crosses them, obviously. But instead, the who-the-fuck-are-they owners of The Gate have to be put in control of the plot for too-long a while, hunting down and capturing The Master, all at great expense of screen time. No background justification for the things they know and possess is provided. I think that Russell T Davies has all of these plot points filled out in his head. I think he imagines this universe of moving parts and characters that he's invented and cares about. He made them up and made them live. They're as important to him as the ‘real’ Doctor Who characters are to me. But then he forgets that he's making an TV special. Rather than cutting those ideas that are shallow, don't make sense, or distract from the Time Lords (all of them), he cramped it together. End Of Time Part 1 felt like I was watching a clip show at points. Disjointed, scrappy scenes showing snippets of the story. There was no story telling, it was a summary, a recap of a storyline that hadn't actually been told. I don't appreciate a writer assuming that I'll fill in the narrative, characterisation and backstory with my own fan-fiction afterwards, especially a story already failing to explore the rich science-fiction universe it's been set in. Moving on. I've covered The Master's new super-powers, and James' point about his energy hunger/consumption/expulsion is so spot on in highlighting RTD's weakness for stupid visual effects over even light-weight science. But the other plot devices are even more annoying. Timothy Dalton has a Magic Time Glove! It can undo The Master's actions in 20 seconds; actions that required half an episode to set up. Also, it's a gun to shoot The Doctor with! Of course! Does it make toast? I'd really like some TIme Toast. I bet if you ate that all kinds of crazy things could happen (and then be immediately undone when you drink a glass of milk, or by touching a cow, or a pregnant woman.) The return of Gallifrey at any point in the Doctor Who story should have been a big deal. Instead it was briefly tedious and then got written out faster than it emerged. The ‘they said something, not someone!’ line was utterly shit. It was so close to the Earth it would have caused any number of natural disasters that children learn about in Primary School, and a great number that they don't. Then it disappears again with no adverse affects than the flustering of middle-class housewives that populate 90% of Russell T Davies vision of England. Gillifrey doesn't mean anything in RTD's Doctor Who. It's a historical footnote, to a history that you're only told exists (but barely told about). It's reduced to a cheap name-drop. Even now when the planet finally makes a physical appearance in a story, nothing comes of it. Nothing happens on it, it offers no resources, it doesn't contain a macguffin. It was a tedious waste. Oh, and the Time Lords ascending? Really? Been watching a little too much Stargate SG1, have we? And then the end itself. How limp. Homages are fine, stealing from Stargate is dubious, but you'd expect The Doctor's actual fatal-blow to be original. Instead, it was radiation poisoning lifted right out of Star Trek II. Even the source of the radiation had nothing to do with averting the preceding disaster scenario. Then the regeneration starts, apparently, but unlike Nine, or the last time Ten regenerated (but ‘didn't feel like’ properly regenerating… for fucks sake…) the healing starts right away so he can be pretty again, but he still seems to have a period of about three weeks for a final curtain call. And that final period, that's what nailed it. This wasn't a finale for the Doctor Who character, it was for Russell T Davies' show. His show that we have the privilege to glimpse inside of once a week. He wasn't writing it to give The Doctor a decent ending, it was written to grant a cameo to every single character he'd ever dreamed up, no matter how absurd. It was trite and shit. And of course Rose is back to say goodbye. Again. This overall plot could have worked, but the script was an ego-satisfying, first-draft, mastabatary, brain fart. Regarding James' alternative. I'm intrigued but slightly undecided. Tom's counter-point that enslaving humanity for an entire series would be too drastic and would change the viewer connection to the universe could make sense… but for all the apocalyptic bullshit the human race has already been put through by RTD. They were enslaved by Daleks last year, The Sontarans choked everyone and then the sky was set on fire. The human effect of these is just completely ignored. (I don't accept that as a commentary on the human race surviving disaster by emotional disengagement; it's just bad writing.) An extended period of human suffering and oppression would still get resolved in the series finale, and it would be a much bigger deal, far more affecting, than fixing 15 minutes of mild peril and special effects. I think that in such a scenario you can still tell stories about the human condition, fight and spirit. It doesn't have to be the kind of slavery scenario where everyone is being herded around with whips; humans could still exercise some individual ‘freedom’ within the bounds of their Time Lord dictatorship. That leaves room for human stories that don't have to end with Absolute Victory, they can show small success in rebellion, they can be much more personal and human than any Earth-set apocalypse story of the past four seasons. However, the specifics of James' story are actually less important than the required development of the writing style. What James' describes is an episodic plot, with actual consequences. A bigger story, an arc with a clear but not imminent end, the Big Bad defined and in action before the trailer for the finale episode. An end to retarded ‘press this button and everything's back to normal’ cliffhangers. I would like Doctor Who to mature and take on a bigger story. The problem with big arcs and consequences carrying over multiple episodes is that it can be harder to pick up if you miss an episode. Is that still a suitable structure for tea-time entertainment? Maybe? But, a more ambitious plot doesn't stop you making Monster of The Week episodes (that was never a problem for Buffy), so I don't see a problem, especially given an already dedicated fan-base. Plus, the benefits to the writing and character development seem a very worthwhile counter-benefit. Was it the lack of consequence in RTD's writing that made his run so frustrating for me? Is it just his failure to embrace interesting canon in place of making his own shit up? Is it the abysmal dialogue? The incessant melodrama? The ‘because I say so’ approach to character development? Is it just that every year the music in the Christmas special is too loud? It's all of these things and more. I regard RTD with scorn; a burden. It's infuriating to consider so many wasted opportunities to do greater things with Doctor Who. So Russell T Davies revived Doctor Who and made it a commercial success. Great. I will still offer begrudging thanks for that. But I will not issue a free pass for churning out half baked dross like this finale over and over and over again. For me, David Tennant's Ten will be remembered with affection in spite of RTD's writing, not because of it. I hope that Stephan Moffet has the confidence and talent to do better.

Efficient writing is good writing

James Lark — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:01:10 +0000

You've both over-analysed it. It was shit. The End.

No, no — I partly agree with you :-)

James Aylett — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 13:35:50 +0000

I think I wasn't as clear as I could have been what my problems were with it: a large part of it was weak dialogue, insufficient characterisation, and altogether too much running around instead of coming up with Cunning Plans, which is endemic to RTD's work on Doctor Who (with a couple of notable exceptions), and so is a little boring to talk about at this stage. The other main problem was the lack of courage to follow through with a big awesome idea; pressing the "no Time Lords" button so shortly after they appear left me feeling cheated. A lot of the things we actually disagree on are more minor (except my proposed alternative, which I'll come to in a minute)! To your points: (2) The rich black people comment was a cheap shot, although I do think that it was stereotyping (but not racist) to have the black woman in Planet of the Dead be the one with psychic abilities. Like that line in Community: "I was raised on TV. I was conditioned to believe that every black woman over 50 is a mentor of some kind". Wouldn't it have been more interesting for the premonition to come from a young Polish immigrant, or a Scouse builder, or frankly anyone else? Similarly, the megalomaniac rich guy is a stereotype, as you point out, and it really doesn't matter what colour his skin is. (Yay! Our stereotypes can now be minorities!) (3) The particular Law of Time I was thinking of that the Time Lords had to violate in order to make a psychic link with the Master from when he was a baby was that he was a baby on Gallifrey, and some of the Counsellors would have known him back then. So that's changing your own past; although I guess it's not that different to Rose saving her Dad. I'm certainly not bothered about the Time Lords suddenly getting all interventionist as a result of the Time War; that seems perfectly natural to me. (And I may have changed my mind and decided he actually is Rassilon, since resurrecting their "greatest President" to lead them at the darkest part of the war would also make sense. Of course, he was bonkers to begin with, and deciding that the best way of winning is to destroy the material universe so he can transcend feels entirely in keeping with what was know about him.) (4) Yes, it was a little glib of me to suggest that a conduit created by sending the diamond to Earth would only allow through diamond-sized things. But I'm still unclear as to why, from a Time Lock, they could send a physical thing just by having a psychic link. I'd have believed the other way round, that the sound of drums in the Master's head acted as some sort of hypnosis, and caused him to open the Time Lock from the outside and bring the Time Lords through. (That would have been awesome, particularly if he didn't know what was inside and then hurriedly tried to claim credit in front of the High Council.) But hey, lots of things seem to escape Time Locks: both the Dalek and Cyber fleets have (Daleks twice now, at least), so clearly they aren't all that robust against cleverness. It does seem that the Doctor increasingly uses them as his weapon of choice against big complex things, which seems entirely fair, but maybe he should have the TARDIS remind him every few years to go round and check that they're not leaking ;-) (5) It's not so much that all the characters RTD created are shit, because they're not. It's more that it was completely unnecessary for the Doctor to go back and visit every single one (someone pointed out that Rose has now had four tear-jerking farewell scenes). He's the Doctor, he knows full well that he's regenerating, and that largely his memories and love for them will be intact into his next regeneration; this feels entirely as RTD saying goodbye to the series, which he could have done with a special bumper edition of Confidential instead. (I haven't watched the Sarah Jane Adventures, but I admit that I like Sarah Jane a lot more now than I did when first watching her with either Pertwee or Baker, so I'll accept and even revel in RTD's positive influence there. And I really should get round to watching her series.) My point wasn't intended to be taken literally, it was hyperbole intended to emphasise how self-indulgent the last half-hour was. And onto the problems with my alternative story. There are three things I'd want to pull out specifically. First, in the modern Whoniverse, humanity is aware of the stars. They look up at the sky whenever weird stuff happens; but then they go back to their lives, because living gives more than enough to worry about. Maybe they forget, maybe they ignore, maybe they just get on with struggling to make enough money to pay rent, but there's no doubt that the humans in the series have an important difference to the humans in the real world. So there's precedent for having the worlds different. Of course, having them entirely under the thumb of a mad, conquering alien race is a significant step further. (Although it's happened, several times, it always gets undone swiftly.) But there's actually no need to deal with this (second point), for two main reasons: firstly, the focus is on the Doctor, and if he wanders the universe for a year, we don't see back home during that time. Secondly, we've already seen tensions within the High Council of Time Lords, and so it would be entirely believable for the less crazy ones to gain the upper hand during the Doctor's absence. Imagine him raising an army, Caesar-like (or maybe Crassus, with the Master as Caesar), to find his way back despite all the blocks and difficulties flung in his way by the Time Lords when he is exiled—only to walk into the Panopticon on the day of Rassilon's trial, with a miffed Chancellor Flavia looking sharply at him and saying "you're late". (It doesn't have to be an actual army with weapons, although RTD's Doctors have been much more fond of explosives, guns, machinery of death and generally the large and quick solution to problems rather than the clever, pacifist approaches that the 4th and 5th favoured. It makes me wonder if the Doctor, moving towards the end of his spans, is turning back more into the curiously detatched and slightly amoral character of the 1st Doctor. From the previews, apparently the 11th will follow this trend, or at least hit people and grin about it.) Third point: I didn't want a series reboot now at all. I'd have been much happier with the Master versus the Doctor, struggling for the control of time, the prize: for the Master, creating a new race of Time Lords, entirely under his control; and for the Doctor the quandary of whether to take on the burden of protecting causality himself, or trying to find a way of defeating the Master and preserving the current status quo (which he has decided to like, after Waters of Mars). So that's what I wanted, but given the desire to bring back the Time Lords, and make them a menace (which I like, and the subtlety of really the menace being driven by one mad, but very powerful, person, with a lot of more timid folk scuttling around trying not to speak too loudly lest he destroy them, and a few very cunning people working hard to undo the evil they've unleashed by making him President), you have to do one of two things: either bring them back much earlier in the story, so the Doctor has to actually struggle with them for a while, rather than the somewhat brief and hence unsatisfying confrontation we saw; or have them win, leaving an enormous and threatening cliff-hanger. Of course, the latter wouldn't have been fair to do given that the production team is changing. The former would have been a totally different story (with more Time Lord screen time), so I guess I was just trying to do a "last third" rewrite, and those never work out well. But as to making the Time Lords an epic, recurring force? As soon as they get out of the Time Lock, it's game over and the universe ends—so we're left with the Doctor fighting against avatars of the Time Lords, which is a lot less fun. (Although it still will be fun.) It's starting to smell a little like the struggle with the Nameless God in Raymond E. Feist's books, a force so terrifying and powerful that even half-dead, asleep, at the bottom of a mountain in another universe, it can incite minions to scurry around here trying to free it. Not that this doesn't lend itself to some interesting storytelling, but I want actual Time Lords, dammit! They're fun, and I've missed them. Finally, yes, I'm thankful that RTD brought back Doctor Who, and its huge commercial success under his banner means it'll be around for quite some time. There have been some amazing episodes so far; my favourites have been mostly but not exclusively written by Steven Moffat, and certainly the series is set for an exciting future. But I still feel cheated.

Bizarrely I completely disagree with you!

Tom Coates — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 02:11:06 +0000

To your five points: (1) I mostly agree. That could have been played a little more simply - Master is weak, desperate, hungry, more dangerous as a result, is captured by humans who want to use him for some purpose. Despite being weak, he uses his superior Doctor-like amazingness to get whatever gizmo is around to enslave the planet. The leaping and the energy, not really necessary, and the docks thing was a bit weird, but I guess the Doctor has to figure out where he is somehow... (2) I think you're comments on black people are actually really off the mark here. RTD has brought in a lot of characters from different backgrounds and ethnicities and treats alien species similarly - I find it difficult to think that a series that has Martha and her family, Donna's husband and Mickey in it could really be considered to be racist in the way you're implying here. That just doesn't seem like a fair accusation at all. If anything it's "rich people are evil, and hey - for a change, let's say that black people can be rich too". I'd actually argue it's almost a progressive moment in a weird way. (3) I think it's difficult to argue that the Time Lords shouldn't be breaking the laws of time when the Doctor did an episode and a half ago and was then mortified by the whole thing. The Time Lords, presumably, do not care! They're okay with violating everything, they think the structure of space and time is broken and want the whole thing to burn so they can transcend it. It seems reasonable to me that they'd be doing stuff along the lines of the Doctor here. I think that's a bit unfair too. (4) Don't have too much trouble with any of that stuff, bizarrely. All seems okay to me. I don't think when people say in TV shows that there's a connection between two objects, that they mean there's an actual pipe between them the size of the smaller of the objects. (5) I'm sort of puzzled by the all these characters are shit thing too. Martha wasn't shit. She was awesome! Donna started off really annoying, but that was the whole point - that she starts off with a small world and gets to see the universe and it changes her and reveals her to be as awesome as she was in Turn Left - one of the best episodes of the run, in my opinion. I was never a huge Billie fan, I'll admit, and Mickey was always a bit meh. Captain Jack mugs to camera a bit too much. But I think I'd have trouble saying they were all shit. And I quite like the Sarah Jane Adventures. She remains awesome as a character after RTD's treatment - in fact I think she's got better, if anything. Been a long time since anyone gave a crap about the adventures of a sixty-one year old woman through time and space, or what it would be like for her to be single, alone and childless after seeing the universe. I think that's sort of amazing that they did that. So yeah, I guess, I'd agree with you that it wasn't brilliantly plotted, that it was uneven and some of the dialogue was a bit strange, and that RTD's Christmas episodes have been a bit too broadly family entertainment, and that some of them are really just not very good at all. I'd go along with all of that. But on the whole, it's been a pretty decent run, with some really brilliant bits in it, and that last episode seemed to me to be terribly good! Let's get to your proposed plot! So you're suggesting that - what - we have a set up situation whereby Gallifrey turns up, the Time Lords remain on the other side of the solar system, enslave humanity and then the doctor wanders off for a year or something, only to try and resolve it in the end of the next season!? Are. You. Mad?! That kind of plot would write them into a terrible situation with no escape! Eventually they'd have to do a proper huge retcon to stop the next twenty years of Doctor Who being about post-traumatic stress disorder on Earth! And the world that they live in would never again feel even vaguely like our world. It would make a series that lurched off into a completely new reality that was so dramatically different from our planet that mainstream viewers would have to know years of continuity to know what was going on, and probably would not be able to identify with any of the characters or situations at all. It's not only not practical, it would have been a disaster! I can't believe you think it would make any sense at all to do something like that! Instead, I think, RTD has done a very clever thing indeed. Just at the point where pretty much everyone has been saying that there aren't enough iconic Doctor Who villains left - there's just the Daleks, the Master and the Cybermen - and that we have to deal with seeing them every single year in the finales - he's made an actually really brilliant move. He's taken the whole Time Lord race, and turned them into an enemy! An epic, timelocked, desperate for escape group of people keen to destroy and destabliise the whole structure of time and space so that they can transcend it! That's a recurring enemy that can last for the ages! He took a bit of continuity that was generally positive - a moribund, bureaucratic, clumsy race of people who had become useless and lazily corrupt, and turned them into a huge idea. Frankly, you should be thanking him. We go into a new period in Doctor Who where the series has been brought back from complete desolation, low budget, smirked-at hell, into one of the top TV series in the UK. It's one where the Daleks are back and are genuinely powerful, where the Cybermen are back and are creepy as hell, where The Master has come back and seems like a proper anti-doctor, and where the line-up of good villains has been extended to include the Time Lords. Plus a fairly rich new environment to work in, some really stunning episodes (not of RTD's writing on the whole, but there you go) and it's all wrapped up in a political liberal, non-violent, positive, wonder-of-the-universe, gay and racially positive bundle. You might not have liked all the stuff that RTD has done, but surely you can see that the series is now in a brilliant position to move forward! Surely?! I also can't believe you liked the cactus aliens. You talk about excesses of RTD - that's one right there - comedy aliens slapped in for no reason just for some comic relief and so the nine year olds can get a giggle. They'll probably be action figures before you know it too.

I'm still in therapy...

James Lark — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:33:32 +0000

...for the Christmas day hokey cokey. Can Russell Park Baptist manage anything as impressive, I wonder...?