Bad Wolf & The Parting of the Ways (Joint review)

And so it's over. Not just this current series - a whole era, the Christopher Eccleston era, is over. And boy, what a way to go!!

This final story had everything that makes good Dr Who, and had it in bucketloads. Fantastic effects, huge ambition, raw emotion, great acting, fabulous directing. In short, it was a microcosm of the 9th Doctor's era.

OK, let's get a few things over with. Yes, all you very clever reveiwers / critics that have picked at the "holes" in RTD's latest script. You're right - it's stretching things to imagine that Big Brother, Weakest Link etc will be around in thousands of years time. Very well spotted. But that's really not the point. We could have been shown some imaginary futuristic game shows - but that would have missed the irony, the sarcasm, it just wouldn't have worked so well, as showing us perverse versions of shows we already know. That's what satire is all about, and it requires a little thing called suspended disbelief. We know it's not real - we all turn over to Confidential afterwards and see how it's all done - but for 45 mins that doesn't matter. This whole premise could have gone horribly wrong - I shuddered when I first heard about this idea - but they took it, treated it absolutely straight (except for What Not to Wear - this was there for comedy value, and p - lease, I ask you, don't start picking holes in the logic behind this. It was a J-O-K-E and worked darn well!) The other shows were handled dead straight - pardon the pun - and as such were scary, suspenseful and unmissable TV.

Another point has been raised in these reviews - why didn't the Daleks just destroy the Doctor in the first place? Well, think about it. The Doctor discovered the Daleks presence partly because of the Controller - something the Daleks hadn't bargained on. The Emperor was loopy, and presumably had some mad scheme to humiliate the Doctor - the last of their great enemy the Time Lords - before killing him. But once the Doctor discovered them and revealed them to the rest of the humans, their strategy had to change, and they now needed him dead asap. So perhaps - yet again - RTD wasn't so guilty of "lazy" scriptwriting...

You get the point. There are loads of things which have been picked apart in this script, most of which can be rationalised, alot of which we just don't need to pore over. It would have been nice to know exactly how the Controller became the Controller. It would have been nice to know why Rose chose "Bad Wolf" as her message, instead of something a little more obvious.Etc etc. But it doesn't matter. RTD knows his business like few others out there and that's why he's managed to pull in a huge audience every saturday with something other than Celebrity Funeral Directors on Holiday. I'm sick to death of certain "reviewers" - you know who you are - slagging his scripts off and trying to be clever. In truth, most of my favourite scripts have been written by other writers, but this is purely because of the incredibly high standard of writing, and not because RTD's are bad.

OK. Rant over. But please, criticism is all well and good, but some of you guys just don't deserve this series.

Anyway - back to the show. So, Bad Wolf paved the way beautifully for the final episode. It was a shame the BBC totally ruined the surprise of the Dalek return - I'd known this was a rumour, but had actually got to the point where I wasn't expecting it, then all surprise was shattered with the previous week's preview. Stupid, idiotic mistake by the Beeb - one of the few feet they put wrong in their otherwise excellent publicity for this series.

Anyway, the Daleks' return sent shivers down my spine - and left me feeling like I did as a child, in being almost unable to wait for the final episode. The scenes inside the Dalek spaceship were absolutely gorgeous, and the space scenes of troops of daleks flying out - well, it just doesn't get better than that.

There was so much expectation on the final episode, it almost had to disappoint in some areas, and I must admit most of the "Bad Wolf" theories I'd heard proved to be far more exciting than the real one. I myself had plumped for either the Black Guardian's return, or Adam, enhanced by the knowledge he gleaned in the Long Game. (So what the hell was the point of taking Adam on board for one story...?!) The Emperor Dalek looked fantastic, but I just expected something else - it's always a problem to build something up as something absolutely mind blowing, had they not then I would have immediately realised that the voice in the trailer was the Emperor and not started with fanciful theories which then felt slightly disappointing not to be realised!

The whole Bad Wolf scenario too just didn't make that much sense - as I said previously, why leave herself such a cryptic clue?

But hey, did any of this matter? What we got was absolutely stonking Dr Who, with some of the best action sequences ever seen in the programme and some wonderful acting by the regulars. John Barrowman, so fantastic in the absolutely sublime Empty Child two - parter (surely the best episodes of the series), was just slightly annoying and smug in Boom Town, but here he was back to his best, and the touching scene where he said goodbye to the Doctor and Rose - and the infamous kiss - was as good as any scene in the rest of the season. There was another reason for this - I'll come to that in a second.

The peripheral characters were all ok, Lynda with a y was annoying and one of the worst performances of the series, which has to be said, has been as consistent as anything seen on TV. (The episode which convinced me of this was the aforementioned Empty Child, with the waif children - surely no one has managed to get such good performances out of a group of children other than Steven Spielberg who does it regularly - James Hawes, I salute you.) The inclusion of Anne Robinson was great, even if the name Ann Droid was a bit of a predictable pun and not the genius that RTD seemed to think! Her destruction of, and then by, the Daleks in the last episode made me laugh out loud. Again, sheer brilliant writing.

And despite huge space battles, incredible enemies and mass destruction - all realised quite magnificently by the best set of special effects people in the country - it all came down to Rose and the Doctor.

I mentioned the emotion of Jack's farewell to these two, and the reason it was so poignant was that this whole episode had a kind of dark foreboding to me which I haven't really felt since Logopolis. In that story, Tom Baker, my favourite Doctor and a man who had made the character his own over 7 years in a way that none of his predecessors had, finally bowed out, and the production team deliberately went for a very funereal atmosphere which grew through the whole story. That was 24 years ago. Since then, we lost Peter Davison - Caves of Androzani was a great story, a classic, but I really didn't care that much that Davison was going. Except that we had Colin Baker to replace him! He, of course, had no regeneration story and to be honest was no great loss (sorry Colin). Sylvester McCoy, well he had some great stories and some terrible ones, but by 1989 I almost didn't care that the show went, it all seemed a shallow mockery of what it had been with good old Tom.

And now, here I am, 40 years old, and after just 13 episodes, I felt that same blanket of dread again at the thought of Chris' imminent departure. Mr Eccleston I salute you. The era of the 9th Doctor, though painfully short, has been blissfully quality, owing in no small way to the lead actor. I had so many doubts before the show started - principally the costume, the fact that at first viewing he seemed to be more of a normal "bloke", all this has been blown away over the weeks as Eccleston's performances have soared. He had so many great scenes in these 2 episodes - when he felt Rose was dead, when he vowed to save her and destroy the Daleks, his scenes with the Emperor, his sadness when he sent Rose back. He has been simply awesome, and while nostalgia will probably always keep Tom as my fave Doctor, the 9th remains an almost perfect portrayal of our favourite hero.

And, of course, Billie Piper. It's an obvious thing to say that this series has been about her more than the Doctor, but I fear many just haven't got that. They've complained about the "soapiness" of Rose's home life, not realising that without this background we just wouldn't care about her as much as we do. Did we really care this much about Jo Grant or Sarah Jane Smith? Father's Day was the pinnacle of Rose's story, the singular most emotion-laden Dr Who story there has ever been. It was gratifying that Rose spoke to Jackie about this in this episode - I feared it would all be conveniently forgotten (and would have been in the original series). But no, as usual RTD has written these characters as real people, and therefore it was imperative they discussed this. Similarly with Mickey in Boom Town - Noel Clarke's best scenes by a long way (oh and my - written by that crap old bloke Russel T Davies...!)

And so, with soaring music - and I think Murray Gold, also much-maligned, has been pretty faultless in the last half of the series - the Dr and Rose kiss, a special kiss, a kiss that saves Rose's life, and ends the Doctor's. A shame that the regeneration had been given away too, I hadn't expected this. I'm still not entirely sure of this was just tacked on the end - it almost seems impossible now the way the season was structured, that it might not have ended with a regeneration. I suspect Chris was only ever going to do one season. And in a way, sad as this is, it's quite fitting way to end possibly the greatest TV series there has ever been - too OTT? - perhaps. But I can't think of another where just about every aspect has been perfect.

And ultimately, that's what worries me. I felt a genuine loss when the end credits came. David Tennant was fantastic as casanova, and I'm sure Billie Piper will be as good as ever. But I do feel an era has passed and that we'll always look back and say, Dr Who's good now, but what about the Eccleston era...? It's one of those times when you just know that things will never be the same again. Sometimes you don't realise it til a long time after, and that's when things are viewed with the rose-tinted lenses of nostaligia. But when you know straight away - and I do - you realise that you've just witnessed something quite, quite, special. Russel, Chris, Billie, Phil, writers, directors, effects wizards, actors, set designers, composers....you get the message...you were, in the words of our hero, "fantastic". Shove the detractors. Thank you for giving me a little part of my childhood back again. Roll on Christmas...