Turn Left

A little later than planned, here’s the Doctor Who review! So on Saturday night, it was the now-annual Doctor-light episode, this time spotlighting Donna (hoo-ray…) along a parallel universe. Well, mostly Donna, anyway.

While I appreciate the intention, the last thing I wanted to see was Donna Noble circa The Runaway Bride. Yes, it showed us how far she’s come (and she is a lot better than she was then), but if I never hear that shout again it will be too soon. Luckily, Tate did a pretty damn good job with the rest of the episode, despite Bernard Cribbins nearly stealing the show as cuddly old Wilf.

Of course, there was only one woman I was looking out for – Billie Piper! Woohoo. Can’t help wondering why she was talking a bit funny, though – I hope that’s some weird universe-hopping side effect and will go away next week – but she radiated awesomeness as Rose throughout, despite us learning absolutely nothing about what the heck’s happening to her (“all the universes are being pulled together” isn’t as expositionary a piece of dialogue as it thinks it is). Looking forward to seeing more of her next week.

I do have to wonder if they couldn’t have done the back-bug (as it will surely become known) in a slightly more convincing fashion. I’ve been impressed with a lot of the monster work in this series but the obviously plastic creature was one of the worst I’ve seen and really undermined the danger of the situation. Budget-saving for the finale? Probably.

I loved all the little nods to other episodes and the spin-offs, of which more in the finale – brilliant news. According to those evil media types who got to see the episode already, the entire of episode 12 (titled “The Stolen Earth”) is a massive ’squee’ moment. I cannot wait. I cannot wait at all.

Spuds Up

So. The Poison Sky. I said I wasn’t prepared to completely judge last week’s Sontaran Stratagem until I’d seen this week, and you know what? I’m still not completely sure. While there were some very good moments during the two-parter, there were also some disappointments and inconsistencies, and I can’t decide if either outweighs the other.

Let’s start with the good – Ross’ death. No, I don’t mean it like that – I was sorry to see him go, he made a good impression in the first episode – I say this because the manner it was played was brilliant. As the Sontarans basically kicked UNIT’s ass, his demise was a reminder of what a terrible price to pay every single human life is. I’ll miss him, and that’s a credit to Christian Cooke, who played him, for the energy he injected into someone who in truth we saw very little of.

While we’re on the subject of the Sontarans owning UNIT, though, I must say that the sudden turnaround after the Valiant turned up and Colonel Mace gave his mildly inspiring speech was stretching believability. For a race that had been established as pretty much invincible apart from the probic vent on the back of their necks, I found it hard to suspend my disbelief as suddenly the Sontarans were slaughtered left, right and centre by being shot in the front.  I don’t care how good that speech was, if the enemy has supercool armour that’s built up to help make fighting Sontarans complete idiocy, then you can’t kill them that easily. Frustrating, but I guess I can live with it, I thought at the time.

However, that wasn’t the only glaring mistake. The big Earth-save method, cleansing the atmosphere of the poison gas by igniting the atmosphere and therefore burning it off, should have not only incinerated the gas, but also used up essentially the world’s entire oxygen supply, razed buildings and destroyed planes, including the Valiant, and probably instantly killed billions of people. Now, that’s a pretty big thing to overlook. I often give Doctor Who some leeway when it comes to stretching the bounds of plausibility but that was just ridiculous.

Anyway, I seem to have abandoned covering the good, but there certainly was plenty, so I should pick up on it again. Again, I have to give Catherine Tate some credit for Donna in this episode. The SFX magazine review of the episode that went up immediately after the episode aired made an excellent point that though we’d seen previous companions do similar things, when Donna knocked out that Sontaran it was the first time that we really felt it was a hugely courageous thing to do. I wholeheartedly agree, in fact that was probably my favourite scene of the episode, so credit where it’s due.

That said, despite the good work of the companion this episode, the one thing that excited me most about the Poison Sky was that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment when the transmission from the Doctor to the Sontaran vessel was intercepted on the TARDIS monitor – for less than a second, an image of Rose screaming interrupted the communication. Woo! I’m less patient than ever waiting for her return.

In all, I guess I liked it – it was dramatic, thoughtful and exciting in spades – but I can’t love it. There were too many silly things that made no sense (I haven’t even covered them all), but I can just about put up with it and look ahead to next week, which looks…intriguing. I have confidence that the writing team will do it well, but I can’t escape the worry that the idea of the Doctor having a daughter smells faintly of shark-jumping. There, I said it. Now I know karma will ensure that episode 6 will be the best of the season…

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In other news, apologies for not getting a midweek blog up as I’d hoped. I’ll be posting again tomorrow with discussion on Pushing Daisies, and probably the London mayoral election too as a way to get away from television for a bit. Next week will be my last five days of school (ever, quite worryingly) so I’ll have time after then for a lot more of the CDB Desk.

I do want to say a quick thank you to those of you who’ve followed links on Facebook or the SFX forums, or even if you found this blog on Google (by the way, hands up – who the hell is searching for “is Catherine Tate alive”? For Pete’s sake!). I hugely appreciate the readership, and special thanks to those who take the time to comment and feedback as well.

A Saturday night in

Okay, so by one day I meant over a week. These things happen. Now, I was planning to do a blog reviewing the first episode of the fourth season of Doctor Who a week ago, but circumstances conspired against me – however, I don’t think that’s been such a big problem. I feel a lot better being able to write about the first two episodes than the one on its own, and that’s because, like last season, the season opened with a slightly more comedic first episode before getting down to a serious drama in the second.

I came into the first episode, Partners in Crime, trying to shed my mind as much as I could of the preconceptions I had of Catherine Bloody Tate (as you can see, I was not entirely successful). I was really disappointed upon learning that she was returning after her less-than-stellar Christmas special in 2006, and Partners in Crime didn’t really do anything to change my perception. She’s still shouty and annoying, especially as there is a constant fear while watching her that she may say “am I bovvered?” as a little writers’ joke, although she was good for the minute or so where she didn’t have to speak – her through-a-window conversation with the Doctor was great. Other than that, I wasn’t so keen on the episode as a whole, mainly because as Who is primarily a kids’ show, the humour is a little underdeveloped for my tastes, so I much prefer the hard drama and action episodes that make up the bulk of the 21st-century series. The whole thing was made worth watching, mind you, purely on the basis of that 5-second surprise cameo for Rose Tyler. Hooray! Billie’s back! I realised in those five seconds just how much I’ve missed her.

The second episode, The Fires of Pompeii, which aired yesterday, started an evening of TV which I am on the whole pleased to have watched, although the jury is still out on some of it (more on that later). I certainly preferred this episode to Partners in Crime – even Donna was slightly more watchable this week, Tate did a decent job with her reaction to the Doctor’s refusal to warn the people of Pompeii. I’m pretty sure neither Rose nor Martha would have made such a fuss about it (I shudder to think what Captain Jack would have tried if he’d told everyone they only had 24 hours to live) so that was a nice change. Some points of interest; that’s two for two so far in terms of episodes in which they’ve mentioned the Shadow Proclamation – to do with this season’s story arc maybe?; the excellent CGI throughout the episode, really impressive work on the fiery alien rock monsters in particular; and the warning that Donna “has something on her back”. I know there are rumours of her character’s story arc taking a turn for the sinister this season (it’s a comfort to think that Catherine Tate is the villain of the piece), and I’m looking forward to seeing how it’ll pan out.

Now, on to the rest of my Saturday night in. Unfortunately, my family, particularly the women in the house, are prone to falling into watching all of the inane talent shows like the X-Factor and (god help us) I’d Do Anything, or whatever Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest PR scam is, but occasionally this works in my favour. Having been around while they watched the week-long festival that was last year’s Britain’s Got Talent, I have to say that it was a good laugh, if only because it deviated from the singers-only format that weighs down the entire genre. Obviously, it was won by a singer, but Paul Potts was at least not singing in English, and he was awesome. So this year I decided I’d put my dignity to the side and indulge myself again, starting yesterday with the first bunch of auditions. And while so far I’ve yet so see anything both really different and really good (such as my favourites from last year, the drink-juggling Bar Wizards), it was worth the time I put into watching it, and the 13-year-old at the end of the programme is surely Paul Potts’ test-tube baby. It’s totally uncanny their resemblence, and I’m quite sure he’ll be there in the final live show. As usual, there was a lot of cringe-worthy rubbish on the show, but that’s quite enough talk about Piers Morgan.

My evening concluded with the show that followed Britain’s Got Talent on ITV, the award-winning American import Pushing Daisies. My interest in the show was only slight, and I only really thought about watching it when I realised that it was about to come on next. I’d heard of it in various SF and TV magazines and knew it was winning awards for being slightly quirky, but I really was unprepared for quite how quirky it is.

If you’re unfamiliar with the show, and I wouldn’t blame you, the premise is as follows: pie-maker Ned (Lee Pace) has the ability to bring dead things back to life with a touch, as he discovers at the age of 9 when his mother bursts a blood vessel in her brain and he resurrects her. Unfortunately, as evidenced when she kisses him goodnight that evening, if he touches those things again they die for good. What’s more, if he keeps that thing alive for more than a minute, something else will die instead to keep the balance – in this case, his neighbour, whose daughter “Chuck” (Anna Friel) he is in love with, drops dead instead. In the present day, a private investigator called Emerson (the excellent Chi McBride, last seen being excellent on House) finds out about Ned’s power when a man he’s chasing falls from a roof to his death only to touch Ned on the bounce and return to life. They start a business claiming rewards from murder cases by talking to the deceased and solving the crime. Eventually they cover the case of a woman who was murdered on a cruise ship – it turns out to be long-time-no-see soulmate Chuck who’s kicked it this time, and as he speaks to her in her coffin, Ned can’t bring himself to kill her for good, so some fat funeral director takes the bullet instead (metaphorically). Much romantic awkwardness ensues as the pair can not touch each other lest she keel over like the cadaver she really should be.

The thing about Pushing Daisies is that it’s the brightest thing on television. Immediately you are assaulted by full-power yellows and blues in corn fields that I’m pretty sure can not physically be that colourful, and from then on the tone stays exactly the same. Everything is sweet and sugary and happy, including a faintly nauseating narration by former Carry On regular Jim Dale, who if he keeps referring to Ned as “the pie-maker” may cause me to break my TV in frustration by episode three. It may well be that as the season goes on the continuous sweetness may eventually stop me watching but I was intrigued enough to decide to watch the next episode in a week’s time. Much of this is down to the overwhelmingly-cute Anna Friel (yes, that Anna Friel, who will, to her great frustration, probably always be known as the 16-year-old on Brookside who participated in the first-ever-in-Britain screen lesbian kiss), who is just totally compelling as the born-again village girl who muscles her way into Ned and Emerson’s enterprise. It’s great to see another English import do well overseas.

The big worry for me with Pushing Daisies is whether it can continue being interesting over more than one season (Friel is contracted for six-and-a-half years!) as the central premise loses its novelty. But I think I’m looking forward to finding out.