The Empty Child

I didn’t get to watch this until the wee small hours as we had been out for the evening but my trusty old VCR came up trumps!

I thought it started off a bit frenzied with the Doctor and Rose chasing the Mauve object through space pre Title sequence, but it soon settled down to be my favourite episode so far.

The initial scenario with Rose wandering off is Doctor Who law and on this occasion seemed perfectly natural as the young child looked lost and in a dangerous position on such a high wall!

The Doctor’s turn as a stage comic was well done with the realisation of the time scale only dawning on him as the sirens were going off with Eccleston played this down rather well and not resort to his usual face splitting grin!

It was also good to see the Doctor be very Doctorish in his investigation into what has been going on and again Eccleston was brilliant in this. The scenes with Billy Piper this week however were rather overshadowed by the exceptional CGI and the presence of Captain Jack who was played to the hilt by John Barrowman. His charm and wit having an instant effect on Rose but always played with a great deal of menace too! I loved the whole “Spock” thing too which at long last is something Rose had been looking for from the Doctor, some good old TV Sci-Fi technology.

The atmosphere that followed the Doctor was always dark and brooding and his speech to Nancy about Great Britain standing up to Hitler, alone and almost defenceless made me feel proud and very patriotic.

Little Albert Valentine was superb as the haunting Empty Child and given such a young actor was behind a mask throughout was amazing. The pleading on the doorstep and the hand through the letterbox would have had me hiding behind my parents in the 60’s no doubting that!

However for me the show stealer was Richard Wilson in a rare serious role as Doctor Constantine. He was measured and assured and his characters impending demise made his efforts to help the doctor truly heroic. I loved Ecclestons admiration for Wilson’s acting ability in the following BBC3 Doctor Who Confidential, he didn’t say a lot but his face said everything. If there was such a thing as “The Doctor Who Oscars” Richard Wilson would have my vote for best supporting Character.

The climax was again a frightening scenario setting up a great cliff-hanger for next week.

Having given this review I can tell you why this was my favourite story so far. The scenes with Chris Eccleston were all acted out without CGI (with the exception of the few seconds morphing of Doctor Constantine) and played in an atmosphere of growing tension. All the characters he played against were believable and well acted. This is also the reason Roses scenes paled beside them. Because of the use of (very well done) CGI your attention to the characterisation of Captain Jack was lost on first viewing.

A very interesting and disturbing story, with some very well fleshed out characters and a cliff-hanger. What more could a Doctor Who fan ask for?