So, why did nobody tell me that Doctor Who got good again pretty much the moment I stopped watching it?
I bailed about halfway through Season 3, after the shambolic, eye-popping awfulness of the Daleks In Manhattan two-parter. It wasn’t a conscious decision, more a meandering away – if they couldn’t be arsed to make up a better monster than this, I couldn’t be arsed to find the time to watch it.
This weekend I was feeling a teensy bit fragile following a prolonged encounter with Wollabang Australian Chardonnay (“this is not a wine for drinking. This is a wine for laying down and avoiding”) at our works Christmas do on Friday night. With my FunSquare currently on holiday in Frankfurt my only option was some undemanding telly. My shabbiness regarding Doctor Who had been nagging away at my Nerd Conscience for some time, so it got the nod.
Eight episodes. Not a duff one amongst them. Why was I not informed of this miracle?
My run started with The Lazarus Experiment and Cindy-from-Eastenders-falling-into-the-Sun-fest, 42. They probably represented the weakest episodes of the bunch but were perfectly fun and watchable, and following Mister Squidhead and the ridiculous Daleks story they felt like stumbling onto two undiscovered episodes of Firefly. Then on to a cracking two-parter set in a British boarding school in 1913, which largely revolved around a belting performance from the always-excellent Jessica Hynes (née Stephenson), best nerd-known as Daisy from Spaced. The story wasn’t completely watertight and lost its way a bit in the third quarter, but generally it used the time that the extra episode gave it really well and allowed tension to slowly build in classic Who fashion.
(One of the biggest problems with New Who, particularly in its first couple of seasons, is that too many of its single-episode stories seem to be uncomfortable with its running-length – plotlines amble along pleasingly enough, then suddenly seem to realise it only have fifteen minutes to resolve everything and turn either into a confused mess or an unsatisfying deus ex machina.)
Everyone who’d seen it recommended Blink in “if you watch nothing else of the third season, watch that” terms, so I was absolutely delighted that it completely lived up to its billing. Funny, inventive, unnerving (see: the Doctor’s videotaped monologue – “Don’t even blink. Blink and you’re dead. They are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don’t turn your back. Don’t look away. And don’t blink. Good luck!”) and featuring a classic Doctor Who brain-trumps-brawn resolution, it’s everything that Who seemed to me when I was ten years old. Steven Moffat has conclusively proved that he understands what makes Doctor Who tick, that he understands what makes the character and the series special, that he can produce one gem of a story per series (see: The Empty Child, The Girl In The Fireplace). I don’t know if that means that he’ll be able to handle the head writer/executive producer role he’s inheriting from Russell T. Davies in Season 5, but I certainly can’t think of anyone whose name doesn’t rhyme with “Boss Sweden” that I’d rather see have a crack at it.
Season 3 finishes with a traditional RTD mega-enemy world-threatening three-parter. And, unlike pretty much every other RTD mega-enemy world-threatening three-parter, it’s not terrible. John Simm left me slightly cold as The Master, it’s a faintly uncomfortable reminder of how vastly superior the Steven Moffat-scripted Captain Jack is to anyone else’s take on the character and the resolution was a teeny bit cringe-inducing but on the whole it was a perfectly good story told perfectly well.
This may sound like faint praise. It IS faint praise. But it’s enough to have me looking forward to watching Season 4 with a renewed sense of optimism even though Caroline Tate is prominently involved. I mean, she was really good in the act-y bits of Big Train before she became someone who bellowed catchphrases for coins, right? She might be perfectly acceptable in this, right? Right? Right?
More news as it comes in.
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