The Doctor Dances

This review is for both the Doctor Dances and The Empty Child.

All I can say is wow!!!

These episodes really took me back to the old days. It was spine tingling, dark, action packed, and ontop of that a fantastic story!

When I first heard that Steve Moffat was writing this episode I had mixed emotions, mainly because I had only known him to have written the Curse of Fatal Death, the Doctor Who spin off staring Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor, which was very funny and just took the mickey out of the series, so I wasn't to sure whether these episodes were going to be any good. But I am so glad I was wrong.

What I love about these episodes is that the Empty Child gives us all these questions, what is the child? what kind of disease does this? etc and then the second part answers them beautifully. And for the first time this series we have a brilliant cliff hanger where for the first time we have no idea how the Doctor is going to get out of this one, whereas the other cliff hangers in the new series are very predictable, and very typical like in the Aliens of London where the Slitheen is walking up very slowly towards Mrs Tyler when it could've just run up and killed her. The direction for this episode was marvellous as well, so well done, as was the acting minus Captain Jack.

The idea for the Captain Jack character was a very good one, a character who tries to use his charm and good looks to win over Rose in an attempt to complete his mission. I just feel that John Barrowman played the character quite badly, there wasn't alot of dimension to the character, he seemed to be very 'plastic' in appearance and movement. I thought there could've been some better casting.

I do love the transformation scene though, when the gas mask appears on the actors faces, done beautifully, and really is quite incomfortable to watch. Just love it!

At the end however I would've liked to have seen Captain Jacks spaceship blow up, thought that would've been a good conclusion.

Now I have got nothing against homosexuals, however I think in this episode we have a few to many references to homosexuals in this episode. Firstly we had the officer who was always flirting with Jack, which I thought was probably not necessary, and quite annoying. And also the Doctor uncovered that the reason why a family received such generous proportions of meat from the butcher was because the father was in fact giving the butcher some extra meat if you know what I mean. I thought this was not necessary also, and may make the younger viewers confused.

Apart from this it was a really fantastic episode, great cliff hanger, great acting (minus John B), great directing, certainly one of the best episodes of the series so far (new series, not old) but still doesn't beat Dalek for me. I am glad however to see that the series has finally begun to establish itself, we have had some really fantastic stories recently and I do hope that we are not going to go back to stupidity with the next episode which happens to be an RTD episode.