The Big Bang - Gaz

Wow... what a season finale! I've gotta say that I have been a big fan of this season, despite some weak episodes it's been brilliant, does it eclipse the return of Doctor Who when it relaunched in 2005... no, but it comes very close, very close indeed.

Now that's off my chest, how about the episode, well it was a fast paced story, of time, love, trust and friendship, in which everybody got to die and be reborn... take that everyone who accuses The Doctor of being a mock-Jesus... we are all mock-Jesus! Firstly Rory dies, then Amy, then River, then the universe and finally The Doctor... oh by the way, love the stone Dalek, brilliant and way more scary than iDalek, can we have more of them? So with all that death comes rebirth and how spectacular was that, to re-boot the universe with the TARDIS and The Pandorica? I was also a fan of watching The Doctor skip back along his time-line and interact with Amy, whist it would have been great to see him go back further, I'm sure that would have blown the budget for the series, let alone the episode.

It's also very clear now that Steven Moffat is playing the long game with his stories, because we have no clear resolution on when silence will fall and timey-whimy-crack'n'space is clearly not going to go away. Also despite Wayne's likely protest River Song will be back for a few more visits, and clearly there will be darkness for her to come. I like the idea of a potential future for The Doctor, clearly not this Doctor, but it's certainly out there.

Also it's nice to see that Amy and Rory will be staying in the TARDIS for a while, it'll be a nice change in dynamics and I think it'll be a first, a actual committed couple as companions, should give the future writers some new dimensions to stories, as Amy and Rory will have divided loyalties. Maybe this is the lead for The Doctor and River Song?

Now take a bow Rory, from annoying side character in The Eleventh Hour to a full blown hero in the last two episodes, brilliant! His character, aside from The Doctor has developed the most this season.

I liked:

The constant throttle down of this episode... it did not let up at all!

Dark River

The constant development of The Doctor and Rory

The stone Dalek

The Doctor dancing

I disliked:

Hmmm, actually I liked it all this week

I need to be convinced:

What is going to happen with River Song and The Doctor, whilst I love the concept, I wonder if this story could all go wrong

The TARDIS will still explode on 26/06/2010

Now it's a big wait until the Christmas special... I understand it starts shooting late July in the UK.

The Pandorica Opens - Gaz

Does it ever bother you, Amy, that your life doesn't make any sense? - and so this episode begins a countdown to the end of the universe and the destruction of the TARDIS.

What a manic ride it has been, first a quick recap through people we have met in this series, a secret painting from Vincent Van Gogh, then we chase it across time with River Song as she receives a re-routed call and that's before the titles roll and now we are counting down.

Gotta say I loved this episode, when normally I've been dreading the end of season two parters, as they tend to spin a bit out of control. I'm hoping this will not be a disappointment like Cold Blood was a couple of weeks back. Meanwhile we have Romans and Stonehenge, a lovely nod to the origins of the show when it was a much a history lesson as entertaining science-fiction.

The dialogue was brilliant, from The Doctor's half-distracted comments (love Under Henge!) to his challenge of the mass of aliens hanging in the sky. Also it was nice to see River Song being reclaimed, though I'm starting to wonder about her time-travelling abilities and she seems very comfortable and competent in the TARDIS. In fact her role may be the key to the next episode.

It was also fantastic to see Rory back, even if he turned out to just be a recycled plastic copy with a lot of conflict to deal with. Oddly he seemed to be a better fit as a Roman Centurion than as a nurse living in Leadworth.

Now to the story of Amy, she has been through so much, including being attacked by a demented Cyberman head... finally they have been made terrifying again. Then she finally realises who Rory is only to have him shoot her... damn, that was harsh.

Best part of the episode, the bad guys getting it all wrong, The Doctor is in the box... so non-one can fly the TARDIS.... that'll come back to haunt em' next week! I can hardly wait.

I liked:

The dialogue, the special effects, the story

Scary Cyberman head... that'll certainly wake me up tonight

The triumphant return of Rory and River

I disliked:

The villains roll-call; for a start the Judoon are the inter-galactic cops, not an enemy of The Doctor and the Silurians from the other week, when did they get spaceships? If they'd had space ships they'd never have buried themselves underground. The coloured Daleks are still a bit too silly.

I need to be convinced:

Errr, so who was talking in the TARDIS?

Next week will not be a return to shitesville

The Lodger - Gaz

I was right last week, The Lodger was Doctor Who meets Spaced... via Cold Feet, Couplings, Gavin and Stacey and that crappy show with the bloke from Doc Martin and the awful one who now voices Bob The Builder! It was also brilliant, very funny, tense, wacky and kinda scary.

One of the strengths of Doctor Who, not just since the show was relaunched, but also in it's many year run was to allow actors and into guest spot roles that were usually outside of their norm, so we have seen soapy actors as comics, wimps as heroes, villains in a sympathetic light and some people just become plain scary. The guests who stepped up to the plate this week were James Corden and Daisy Haggard (who coincidently I'd swear I saw doing stand-up in a pub in London back in the late 1990's, and from my hazy memory, she was quite good), as the pair of timid, not quite there yet lovers, Craig and Sophie.

Then into their well-in-the-groove-life arrives The Doctor, possibly the oddest flatmate in the world.

The plot was great this week, The Doctor is dumped from the TARDIS investigating a localised disruption in time and to find out what's going on, he has to abandon his usual approach along with his reliance on technology. Unlike Being Human, he does not have to re-arrange his DNA and become a human being, he's just got to pass himself off and being like the rest of us... more or less.

It worked really well, and had some nice touches to previous episodes, such as when he looked for food from the fridge, flashed his psychic paper and assembled a scanning device made of kerbside rubbish. I also liked the paper bag full of money, conversations with the cat and when he filled in for Craig at his job, how often have you wanted to put someone on hold just to eat your biscuit? I know it's something I'd love to do.

Meanwhile just to show he's not entirely out of touch, he very quickly realises the key to resolving to localised time problem lies with Sophie and Craig and the fact that there is a time-machine upstairs, not really another flat.

The episode worked really well, it was about sharing your heart, even if you happen to have two.

I liked:

Crazy wacky flatmate Doctor

Craig and Sophie, they are kinda sweet

I disliked:

There was a shiny new time-machine above Craig's flat and The Doctor was not curious at all about who it belonged to and how it got there? C'mon normally in the show this is BIG STUFF

I need to be convinced:

Amy has learnt a lot about running the TARDIS... way more than anyone else has ever!

Next week, River Song returns and the Pandorica opens, also it looks like they have brought a big bunch of villains from the past, is this what the timey-whimy-crack'n'space'n'timey is, a intergalactic-pan-dimensional rubbish bin of The Doctors past... where all vanquished monsters go to hang out?

Vincent And The Doctor - Gaz

Whew!

After last week's shite-fest it's great to see an episode back on the form I've come to expect from this series, it was a great caper. It could have all gone a bit Pete Tong with guest writer Richard Curtis, remember he may have brought the world Blackadder, he also brought us The Boat That Rocked! He's a comic genius when he's on form, exhibit a) Blackadder II, but can also be fantastically sentimental and over the top, exhibit b) Love Actually.

Of course a lot of what works and does not work for Richard Curtis can be tied to who he works with, such as Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Grant, so it's great to see something where he's without any of his familiar players... errr hold on, there's Bill Nighy there only slightly hamming it up as Dr Black, the art historian, but he did no wrong and clearly was not out to set to steal anyone else's thunder.

I thought it was a wonderful episode that played to the strengths of Richard Curtis, such as witty dialogue,  romantic notions and some wonderful nostalgia for an age that never existed then and does not even exist now, but we all would like to think it could. That means it was light on the science-fiction, and many ways better for it, for the first time in years it was nice to see the sonic screwdriver removed as a solution and a plot device... it's a fuckin' tool for fuck's sake, not a character, nor something to resolve every episode.

Now to the heart of the episode, loss, for that's what it was about. For Amy it's about her unknown, but still felt loss of Rory, for The Doctor it's the loss of control. He knows something is going amiss with the universe, but he's really at a point where he cannot grasp as to why and for Vincent, well he's just losing his battle with his mental capabilities (I'd have said his loss of marbles, but that seems cruel, insensitive and really I'm not sure if he liked to play with them, knuckle bones or dominoes). Bravo to Tony Curran for his portrayal of Vincent though, bravo!

It was an emotional episode, there is no denying that, what I was impressed with was it's range of joy (Amy and The Doctor at the gallery and then meeting Vincent), sorrow (the sunflowers and the return to the gallery), the hope (Vincent) and the despair (Vincent and Amy). Great work from the guest writer, Neil Gaiman next year has some big shoes to fill an will the Stephen Fry episode ever get written and then brought to screen? 

I liked:

The caper aspect of this weeks episode

Not a timey-whimy-crack-n'-space-n'-timey in sight

Tony Curran as Vincent.... bravo again sir, bravo

The design of the episode

I disliked:

The killed a blind space rhino with an easel... ewww, that was just cruel

I'm need to be convinced:

Next weeks episode is looking like a weird, potentially lame version of Spaced

Next week on Spaced... errrr Doctor Who

Cold Blood - The Jones Review

Cold Blood.

More like a cup of cold sick.

I did not like this episode.

Specifically how murderous the humans became. How murderous the Silurians were. How the Doctor kept on about typical humans and being better than that and putting up with some severe violence, racism and downright provocative behavior from the other side. The Doctor does not do double standards.

Did not like the dispatching of Rory. Did not like the mind-wipe of Amy. Did not like the crack.

Maybe too much time is being spent on the idea of bringing back a classic rather than finding the RIGHT story and then bringing them back.

Annoyed. Even more than the rubbish WW2 Dalek one with the rubbish Winston Churchill annoyed me. Felt ripped off.

And I can be forgiving of mistakes and missteps. But no forgiveness here.

Just a cold shoulder.

Cold Blood - Gaz

Well that was a load of shite from shitesville delivered by the shitesville delivery service top shite delivery van... and quite frankly I thought it was shite!

I know Jones has had a couple of episodes he's disliked this series, and for me this was the stinker and I was really disappointed after last weeks sterling effort. Cold Blood felt like a completely different episode from The Hungry Earth, so much so I wondered if I was watching parallel universe Doctor Who. For instance where did the voice over come from... what the fuck! Also, that one sentence gave away the outcome of the whole episode and demolished the Silurian story before you could say cuddle-me-lizard-man!

Let me count the other ways I was disappointed, we only get to meet four individual Silurians and I'm not even sure if that counts as two of them were "sisters" and played by the same actress. The evil Silurian doctor was not evil, just misunderstood, the annoying family became even more annoying... I know who I'd have taken to with a tazer... in fact if I was The Doctor I'd have left the idiots and gone visiting the Cliffs of Andromeda Nine or some such. Hell it felt like an episode from the previous Doctor, with only the manic shouting missing. Oh and it was all wrapped up rather promptly for the appalling ending.

In the end the story became just an interlink to the giant timey-whimy-smiley-cracky-whacky and it was really sad to see it become that. Poor Rory, he really deserved more than this.

I liked:

Very little this week

I disliked:

Pretty much most of it... what happened?

I need to be convinced:

The timey-whimy-space'n'timey-cracky-wacky is going to be a good story

Next week has Bill Nighy and sunflowers

The Hungry Earth - Gaz

It's the compulsory Welsh episode this week, so it's timely as the newly elected Tory Government make themselves comfy there is a former mine involved, even if it's now scientific and drilling a bloody deep hole, based on the sole reason that the grass in the graveyard is blue. I thought coal would have been a better reason, but hey, I dropped out of my geology degree at University, so what do I know!

Meanwhile, people in the village are going missing... but oddly it's the dead ones that seem to be of concern, as "the wife" expects the Police to deal with this and the fact "the husband" has not returned from home is not even on her radar. Meanwhile "the kid" is just a bit creepy, first with Rory and then The Doctor and oddly... well I'll get back to oddly in a moment.

So the mighty drill has awoken a "lost" tribe of Eocene homo-reptillians, or Silurians in Doctor Who lore, after 300,000,000 years of peaceful village life 20 odd miles beneath the surface, and like all villages cut off from eveyone else, their first reaction is to kidnap a couple of people and cut them open... whilst they are alive and awake... ewww. But I did notice that oddly "the kid" is not with "the husband" and Amy, so maybe the Silurians find him more than a bit creepy too?

I liked the episode, it was a nice to visit the spirit of John Pertwee and Tom Baker episodes I first watched, there are echoes of many classic episodes, not only those featuring the Silurians and The Sea Devils, but also the classic alternate reality episode The Inferno. The episode even felt paced to the traditional 30 minute per week format. I also liked the Silurians, the new look is sleek and attitude is nice and menacing, I expect The Doctors offer to act as a mediator is not going to go well, these Silurians seem more fierce in attitude and dogma than before.

I liked:

The new look Silurians

Rory finding his feet when Amy is not around

The pacing of the episode

I disliked:

The resident family, "the kid" is creepy, "the wife" is annoying, and "the grandfather, who is a geologist" is clearly too stupid to live.... I've been tongue lashed by a lizard women and now I'm turning green, but I'll not let on

The Silurian city... c'mon if they'd recovered that much in the 300,000,000 years since they had fled underground they have surfaced by now and kicked our naked ape asses

I need to be convinced:

That Amy will be dissected by Dr Frankenlizard.... I'm not sure why??

So next week, who will kill the Silurian prisoner, or will she be wrong? Will Amy be dissected? Will The Doctor sacrifice another species to save some humans and their dodgy morals?