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Sunday, 28 May 2006 - Reviewed by Adam Leslie

This was a well-made – if unoriginal – Doctor Who adventure: a casserole of bits from last week’s cyberman two-parter (a newfangled gizmo turns people into monsters), The Empty Child (a similar period setting) and the author’s own The Unquiet Dead (a being without corporeal form manifesting itself in one of the utility services... I fully expect water monsters emerging from the faucets of the 1920s next year, Mark).

The build-up was all very well done, though. Maureen Lipman is always a welcome presence and hammed it up less drastically than Roger Lloyd-Pack last week, Rose has come back to life again now that Mickey has disappeared, and the whole 1950s period setting was all much more tastefully and authentically portrayed than in the obnoxious Delta And The Bannermen (possibly the most screen-kickingly bad Doctor Who story of all time, in my less-than-humble opinion).

For all its unoriginality, this was one of the scariest Whos for years. After the sanitised off-screen Auton invasion in Rose, it’s wonderful to see some real horror back on TV of a Saturday teatime. The scenes in which grandma was alluded to having become a monster scared even me, and the cage full of faceless people – and later the faceless Rose – would have had Mary Whitehouse foaming at the mouth in apoplectic rage. Always a good thing. That was terrifying Doctor Who at its best.

The rushed ending was a let-down though. The day was saved by a boy changing a fuse; the whole mast-climbing silliness deflated an otherwise thoughtful and very creepy episode; and the 45-minute constraint meant that the family issues were solved in a pat and convenient way, Rose’s ‘fatherly’ advice being the least convincing heartstring-tugging so far.

So all in all, a brilliant made and very creepy episode that was let down by a botched ending and – like the X-Files and some of the other New Doctor Who stories – disappointingly demystified by the need for a sci-fi alien invasion explanation.





FILTER: - Television - Series 2/28 - Tenth Doctor

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Sunday, 28 May 2006 - Reviewed by Richard Walter

Well the Doctor has already met Lady Penelope this season so it was inevitable that he should meet Parker in the guise of actor Ron Cook playing the misguided TV salesman Mr Magpie. 1953 - Coronation year - and a quaffed Doctor brings Rose to New York to see an interview with Elvis although of course the Tardis ends up in London. Equipped with a scooter (the latest version of Bessie perhaps??) the two time travellers soon get caught up in the evil doings of the Wire magnificently performed by Maureen Lipman - quite obviously revelling at the chance to play a Doctor Who baddie. Being a Mark Gatiss script, there was an inevitable black theme to this story - indeed even the squint camera angles gave the story a weird atmosphere whilst steeped in 50s reality.

As the Wire consumes and feeds on her captive TV audience, Rose quite literally loses face and again we see that dark and troubled side of David Tennant's Doctor. This regeneration has a charming and mischievous side but rile him and . . . beware! As Mark Gatiss has pointed out, the climax of the Doctor and Magpie scaling the TV transmitter mast at Alexandra Palace had memories of Tom Baker's fatal fall in Logopolis and indeed a line was cut from the scene which would have been a nice little part of continuity with the past. Oh well - it wasn't crucial to the plot!!

Some nice vintage touches thrown in - footage of the Queen's Coronation, Muffin the Mule and the betamax tape - which was the Wire's downfall! This was a good sound story to tell in 45 minutes although the sub-plot of the manipulative, bullying and traitorous Dad was a little baffling - a political message being thrown in perhaps?

For me the favourite scene has to be the Doctor emerging from the Tardis on his scooter - maybe not quite as dramatic as when he crashed the ball during The Girl in the Fireplace on a horse but nevertheless a nice touch.

Season Two goes from strength to strength - I have enjoyed every story so far and find it hard to believe that we are past the half way mark!!





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Sunday, 28 May 2006 - Reviewed by Nathanael Nerode

Spectacular.

We've got a clever, creepy concept -- the Wire, living in the TV sets, stealing people's faces. We've got a solid subplot about a dysfunctional family; and some relatively subtle commentary on current political affairs in there too. (Such as the policemen just locking people up and hiding them away, rather than actually trying to figure out what's going on, because "the nation has an image to maintain".)

Rose excels: she figures out what's going on very quickly, way ahead of the Doctor -- and then gets her face stolen, so the Doctor still has to save the day. A very insightful way to allow the companion to actually be competent and do something on her own, without sidelining the Doctor.

It's nice to see the Doctor's unreliablity pointed up again. Aiming for 1958 New York, he gets 1953 London. But he doesn't want to admit it. The psychic paper is used -- and it sort of works, but you can see why he doesn't always use it, when he's mistaken for the King of Belgium.

Mark Gatiss manages to move smoothly between comedy and horror without ever letting one undercut the other. This is quintessentially appropriate for Doctor Who. On the whole, this is a very traditional, classic Doctor Who episode, right down to the Doctorless opening scene where the monster arrives on Earth. The "surface plot" is simple; but there's actually a lot of issues brought up (and not resolved) under the surface. It really is exactly what I hope for from Doctor Who.

And all the actors do an excellent job. Even the smallest parts feel *right*. I find it hard not to gush about this episode.





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Sunday, 28 May 2006 - Reviewed by Bruce Sharp

I thought it was good.

Is that a criticism ?...only in as much as it wasn't GREAT, and with Unquiet Dead being one of my favourites from last season I was really really hoping for GREAT.

So why didn't it achieve greatness?

I suspect because the script was tinkered with just a little too much by outside hands. I think R.T.D. is doing a brilliant job of holding it all together and making it fit the big picture, but from what was said on confidential, it sounds like some very nice and 'important' monologues were cut and I'm struggling to understand why, because that was exactly what I felt was missing from this episode. It needed just a little more intellectual and emotional depth from the doctor, which the monologues would undoubtedly have delivered.

There was also too much running to and from the house. The answers the doctor sought seemed to be split between two sides of the city and he had to keep running back and forth in order to piece them together. I found my self asking 'why hadn't he just stuck around long enough in the SAME place to find out all he needed in one go?'.

And the line "No power on this planet is going to stop me" as well as being very 'Parting of the Ways...I'm coming to get you', also sounded suspiciously like an R.T.D. intervention and one I could have done without. I know it's meant to show the ever deepening bond developing between the Doctor and Rose ( let's face it, he's already died for her once ) but a line like that is never going to be subtle and it felt a little forced dramatically.

This brings me to the Doctor himself. There seems to have been a real inconsistency in TennantÂ’s performance over the season so far. I caught myself looking back today, thinking about this time last year and the excitement of 'New Who' and I began comparing Tennant with Chris Eccleston.

I was always uneasy about Chris as the doctor. Don't get me wrong, he's a 'fantastic' actor and it worked brilliantly, but I always had trouble seeing past the Eccleston persona. He's not really a character actor, he is the strengths of his own personality focussed on a particular part.

The thing I was looking forward to with Tennant was the genuine realisation of a 'CHARACTER. I was hoping he would be the Sylvester McCoy that Sylvester should have been...with a big chunk of Baker thrown in for good measure.

In many ways however, Eccleston was actually more like Baker than Tennant. They were best when they were themselves, but charged up the by the character and the situation. It gave them a real edge and strength. I'm kind of missing that in Tennant at the moment, that level of unearthly intensity. He touched on it during the stand off with Finch in Reunion ( the first time I got a real sense of his age and universal authority ) and I want more please.

Over all however I really liked this episode. It certainly delivered scare wise, with the face melting energy sucking television sets. And it got Rose to shut up for a while, which has got to be good!

I loved the concept and the period setting. Returning to the source of television ( the tower) as the delivery system of evil was a brilliant idea.

The acting was excellent throughout this week with the possible exception of the father, who kind of peaked character wise in the first few lines and didn't leave himself anywhere else to go dramatically after that other than 'nasty shouty man'...but he certainly achieved loathsome, so he did serve the character well.

Maurine Lipman was superb and achieved a perfect balance of creepy British aloofness and seething malevolent evil. I was a little disappointed we didn't get to see a transformation into her true self at the very end ( the evil energy of the Wire made flesh just before it's destruction ) ...and I know it would have been a bit of a cliché, but it's the sort of cliché that can work really well in Who.

I liked the 'worm that turned' aspect of Magpie in the end too.

The direction was smooth, coherent and the dark elements of the script brilliantly handled.

As always, the 45 minute time slot deprives us of some potentially worthwhile character development and contemplation time but the upshot is a faster paced energetic delivery of the story. If they'd only give in to the full 60 minutes we could have the best of both worlds. I do wonder if it's so they can sell it to commercial stations allowing advert time to be slotted in. If that is the case, then why can't they just shoot the extra 15 minutes and release it on a special edition extended DVD?

So, a thoroughly enjoyable episode that will be remembered as having impact and depth. Sadly, it didn't have the richness of Unquiet Dead.

As I said, I would love to see a copy of Gattis' script prior to edits. I would dearly like to know what extra elements he included as I suspect they would have tipped the balance of this episode from good to GREAT.





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Sunday, 28 May 2006 - Reviewed by Michael Hickerson

Last season, Mark Gatiss's The Unquiet Dead showed that you could incorporate elements of an old-fashioned Dr Who story into the context and sensiblity of the new series. Of all the series one episodes, The Unquiet Dead felt like it would be the one story most easily transplanted into a season of classic Dr Who and not feel radically out of place.

This year, Gatiss returns to that sensibility with The Idiot's Lantern.

And while all the elements of an old-fashioned Dr Who adventure were there--historical setting, monster in everyday things, aliens bent on world domination--I still felt as if The Idiot's Lantern were missing something. It's nothing I can put my finger on directly and say--yes, this is definitively what's wrong with the episode. Instead, it's just an overall feeling of the episode trying very hard but just not quite connecting in the way it could or should.

Part of that may be that it seems like a greatest hits of a lot of various Dr Who elements.

TARDIS lands in the right time but wrong place--check.

Alien is using a big historical event to cover its own agena--check.

The Doctor is the only one who recognizes the threat and can stop it--check.

Shoot, this one even borrowed elements from Terror of the Autons and Logopolis with images of the Doctor climbing up a broadcast tower. Yes, I'll give you that in both of those stories it was a radio tower and here's a TV transmission tower, but it still felt simliar enough to me.

The thing is, on paper, The Idiot's Lantern seemed to have a ton of potential. Here you have an almost Robert Holmes like twist with televisions turning nasty. The idea of an alien creature using the TVs during the queen's coronation to feed upon the unsuspecting masses is a great idea. But despite some really intersting effects and some memorable moments of victims with no faces, we're not quirte sure exactly what the overall purpose and agenda of the Wire is--I mean other to make speeches and cackle with laughter (seriously, she could be the Rani for all we know). And there were isolated scenes that worked well, such as the Doctor becoming angry once Rose falls victim to the Wire and the Doctor's charging into a situation and setting himself up immediately as an authority figure.

I think the biggest thing that didn't work was the family dynamic. The family where the grandmother has been taken over by the Wire and is hidden in the upstairs bedroom. I think part of that is that if the father is turning in his neighbors, why'd he take so long to turn in the grandmother? Other than setting it up so the Doctor and Rose see what's happened to the victims of the Wire, it makes little sense. Oh sure, it does set up the family conflict, but even that felt a bit stitled and forced. As we kept cutting back to the scenes of the faher blustering and being a blow-hard, I kept wondering if time wouldn't be better spent with the Doctor and trying to figure out just why the Wire needed to feed off the unsuspecting television viewers.

In many ways, The Idiots' Lantern is the first major mis-step of series two. It's not Boomtown bad, but it still left me with an empty feeling at the end of 45 minutes. I'd just watched an epiosde of Doctor Who and while I was mildly entertained, it just wasn't on par with the depths of School Reunion or Girl in the Fireplace. And maybe that's my fault since when I heard Mark Gatiss was writing it and that it'd be a historical story with a monster twist, I had high expectations for it. Maybe when I've watched it a few dozen more times, something more about it will sink in and I will find more to it.

Until then, I have to chalk it up as a lot of good idea that don't add up to a great whole.





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Sunday, 28 May 2006 - Reviewed by Angus Gulliver

Some years ago my dad, incidentally a Doctor Who fan since november 1963, told me how everyone crowded around the only telly in the street to watch the coronation in 1953. When I read that Mark Gatiss thought this an excellent idea for a Doctor Who story, with the 'monster' transmitted through the airwaves I instantly agreed with him.

I had very high hopes, not least because Gatiss' "Unquiet Dead" was one of the highlights of last year. While this installment was satisfying and a nice slice of Doctor Who, it wasn't great. The only thing I can pinpoint as being missing is an explanation of where The Wire came from, what its nature is...why has its people denied it a body? Having watched the story twice I don't recall any explanations...again the downfall of the 45 minute format.

On the other hand we have David and Billie on great form enjoying 50's London, a lovely set in the family home and some cracking performances once again from the guest cast - especially Maureen Lipman as The Wire and Magpie, the TV/Radio dealer down on his luck who has no option but to go ahead with The Wire's plans. 1953 is depicted wonderfully, almost in Kodachrome colours, there is colour everywhere as if to emphasise the nation throwing off the shackles of postwar austerity and entering a new age of hope.

I also enjoyed the chance to see vintage TV equipment, and the wonderfully macabre faceless victims. Oh and the thrilling climax at the top of the Alexandra Palace transmitter, almost reminded me of Logopolis.

I did find Euros Lyn’s direction somewhat strange. There were some un-necessarily odd camera angles, and instead of adding to the atmosphere they were merely distracting. I believe it helps to change directors to give different "feel" to some of the episodes, but it wasn't quite right here. Hence 7.5/10





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