written by Russell T. Davies; produced by Phil Collinson; directed by Graeme Harper
The opening sequence, following on from the heavy-handed ending to Fear Her, is nether good nor bad � it's just plain odd. So Rose is supposed to have died, right, and yet there she is on a beach explaining this to us. So is this supposed to be Heaven, then? It doesn't make it clear yet whether she's actually going to die (in the conventional sense, as it were) at this stage, but something weird is definitely going to go down. However, it does allude to the major problem with Rose: there she is on a bus, eating chips (which has always been Russell T. Davies's favourite metaphor for how us ordinary mortals behave) and complaining that nothing has happened to her ever. And then the Doctor comes along and changes her...and immediately she ceases to be the girl-next-door type that actually had value as a character and as an audience identification figure. For an entire series now she's been aloof an alienating in a way that the series itself has portrayed as a positive development, and now she's entitled to sympathy? More on this later.
I do like the opening scene after the opening titles though: warm-hearted, offbeat and genuinely intriguing, the kind of tone that made Love & Monsters so enjoyable before Peter Kay donned his fat-suit at the end. It's also nice to come into a story where the lead characters � and the audience � know less than the other characters since the story has already got going by the time the episode actually starts. It's a very Hartnell-esque opening, as the Doctor begins by exploring an environment only unfamiliar to himself, his companion, and us. The 'ghosts' look great, and it's always nice to see the insufferable tenth Doctor wrong-footed.
We do have to put up with the infuriating pop culture jabs and celebrity cameos as the Doctor flicks through the TV channels � so annoying because, like with Bad Wolf, there's little real difference between what's being sent up and what the show actually is. I'm all in favour of EastEnders being sent up, but not by a programme that's going to commit worse offences later and expect us to take them seriously. For example, when we're told that the ghosts are all over the world, what do we actually see? We see one of the oldest clich�s that exists in science-fiction, where 'the world' is represented by shots of the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal. It's not the biggest corner the episode is going to cut by any means, but its a start.
Thankfully the void sphere is introduced at this stage, an interesting and original spin on the locked cabinet mystery. A little touch of mystery can add a lot to an episode like this and I'm glad they introduce it early, thereby allowing its mystique almost the entire episode length to bask before the big reveal at the end. It's also nice to see Freema Agyeman in a one-shot role that obviously went completely unnoticed at the time � but WHY do they have to reveal the Cybermen so early? Particularly when they're not going to be seen in the episode again until the end? I know that they're not the real surprise of the episode (that honour goes to a certain other famous Doctor Who monster) but even so, two surprises are surely better than one. I also feel that it would have made the sudden appearance of the Daleks even more effective, since the audience would be reeling from one revelation and therefore less prepared for another one to follow immediately afterwards. In theory, anyway.
The Ghostbusters riff is another awful moment, an extreme example of the smug pratting around that drained all credibility from the series up to this point. At least it's followed swiftly by an engaging scene where the Doctor tries to investigate what the ghosts actually are: these little moments are fewer and farther between than I remembered though. For the record, no I'm not particularly enjoying criticising the show in this way and I'd much rather be watching (and writing about) a good episode, but I'll have to wait until Smith And Jones before I actually get to do that. I did laugh at the Doctor's line that the ghosts are appearing all over the world though, since in the new series's increasingly insular outlook this essentially means that they appear on daytime TV. Same thing, eh?
Jackie confronts Rose in the TARDIS, lamenting about the change in her daughter. Now, this really is an interesting moment, since it's the first time that the very obvious change in Rose has been so explicitly acknowledged in the programme itself. But what prevents this from being one of the episode's best moments is that the entire series has, up to now, portrayed this change in an entirely positive light. At no point, not even here, is the suffocating arrogance and selfishness of the character ever really dealt with properly. Rose's eventual separation from the Doctor isn't due to her own hubris (like the third Doctor's regeneration in Planet Of The Spiders) but blind chance. Was she ever called on her point-and-chortle attitude towards the desperate, stranded explorers in The Impossible Planet? Don't be daft. Tennant meanwhile is still going through the same few mannerisms (correcting himself with repeated exclamations of �well...� this time around). He did improve in the third series, but I really don't understand the appeal of such a charmless, insincere performance.
The Doctor finally arrives at Torchwood Tower, bringing the world's most pointless plot arc to a close: pointless in the sense that we knew exactly what Torchwood was from the very beginning, made worse by the way the name of the place was clunkily inserted into every previous episode whether it fitted or not. Here's one arc that could have benefited from not having an arc word: we would have known what Torchwood was, but maybe not that it was going to come along in the finale. Tracy-Ann Oberman is excellent as Yvonne Hartman (smug, like the Doctor, but not a phony). The repeated clapping at the Doctor's arrival is childish though, and it's interesting that the nationalist, right-wing subtext is totally forgotten about when the Daleks arrive. What a crushing waste of an opportunity that is � although this is Russell T. Davies's episode, so we can't expect much in the way of intelligent, challenging programming.
The episode is saved by really starting to tell a story at around the halfway point, with the Doctor finally getting to see the sphere and Mickey Smith (Noel Clarke) making a welcome return; the last ten minutes is just one joyous, brilliantly directed set piece in which both Cybermen and Daleks are revealed (although surely Torchwood should know what Cybermen are, right? The Mondas attack was only twenty years previously in the Doctor Who timeline). If the entire episode was like this it'd be brilliant � shallow, but brilliant � and not something I'd need to say that much about. it'd just be enjoyable on its own terms, and that's what Army Of Ghosts almost becomes at the end.
Unfortunately, Doomsday is where things really start to go to pot, as it turns out that the point of the second episode wasn't to introduce the story but to get it out the way and s make room for lots of explosions and a few contrived character pieces. The Genesis Ark is introduced as a simple (but inoffensive) sequel to the void sphere and Daleks hit all the right buttons in their early scenes. It isn't the demand that Rose designate the �least important human� that makes Dalek Sec so effective here, but the fact that it doesn't understand why the question is unanswerable. Having said that, given that Daleks are by and large identical, it surprises me that Sec has a notion of �least important�; surely if a Dalek needed to be sacrificed for any reason, one would just be picked at random and be done with it.
I know some people found it funny, but the exchange between the Cybermen and Daleks is just horrendous and really shows a profound misunderstanding of what the monsters really stand for. Here are two supposedly unfeeling and dispassionate races trading playground insults, and the result is that both end up looking ridiculous while the episode turns into one man's fantasy playset. The Daleks need to do more than wipe the floor with the Cybermen to make up for that. Yvonne's brutal conversion scene is a sudden, shocking and welcome injection of genuine drama though, thanks largely to Oberman's fantastic performance.
The eventual meeting of Pete and Jackie sums up everything that's wrong with the second series. I've made a lot of the way emotional moments require the story to halt in its tracks like a car waiting for ducklings to cross a country road: here it's taken to an absurd extent. For one thing the scene is as unsubtle and over-explicit as usual (why can't there be just something that's left unsaid, just once?), but for another there's supposed to be a battle going on in this building. What sense is there of a wider narrative in this scene? None at all, with no sound of fighting anywhere at all, only Murray Gold's �commence crying now� warbling. I can picture in my head Cybermen and Daleks frozen in position while they wait for the scene to end, ready for the order to resume fighting. When they do start again, it's with a small scale set piece that reflects badly on Rose's earlier description of events as a �war�. I do like the effects of the Dalek army (or should that be fleet, in the circumstances?) in the sky, though.
I'm really surprised to be ripping into the story to this extent � in my head it was average, but having just rewatched it it falls well short of that.
The resolution, for one thing, is one-star nonsense. Yvonne's failed conversion is utter rubbish for one thing � what, they left her tear ducts in, just so she could cry? Or is it just leaky fluid? In which case, why does it act just like a tear? Why bother using a pre-existing monster if you're just going to undermine the entire concept behind it? Why not just start with a blank canvas? And as for the massive void hoover...so let's get this straight. The Daleks and Cybermen are all sucked into the void from miles away, and yet all the Doctor and Rose have to do is hold on tightly. That's a lame reset switch, but worse is to come. Rose lets go, and tumbles towards the portal. Then Pete materialises, despite not knowing where to appear or even than he's needed at all � and if that wasn't bad enough, he's completely unaffected by the portal, despite having come through the void himself. In fact, he's unaffected to the extent that he is able to catch Rose without being knocked over, and hold her long enough for her to look back at the Doctor before she disappears. Deus ex machina is there to act as a narrative get-out-of-jail-free card, but this one can't even follow its own flimsy rules. It reminds me of the gravestone scene from Revelation Of The Daleks: it's a contrivance that furthers the story in the clumsiest way possible. The difference is that you can criticise the cliffhanger to Revelation without having to worry about people telling you you're not a real fan.
Resolving the plot simply and quickly does give the episode more time to flog a dead horse though, by giving us the beach scene. We're apparently supposed to care about Rose now, despite the series having worked so hard to lose my sympathy. As such we get two cardboard characters that it's impossible to care about spelling out their every feeling and demanding that we feel it too. It's very telling that the only way the show can leave anything unsaid at this stage is to have the Doctor physically yanked out of the conversation mid-sentence. Back in the TARDIS, he meets Catherine Tate, who bellows her lines in the least natural way possible and so sets the scene for one of the very worst episodes the show ever made. I'm knackered now.
I'm so glad that I'm able to write this having seen series three, and knowing that it's such a vast improvement over series two. That allows me to look at this episode much more confidently and give it the kicking it deserves. This is a crude and shallow story with pretensions of being heart-tugging prime drama, and a very poor reflection on the state of British television in this decade.
Overall: **
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