New Earth

Bring to mind everything that upset you about Russell T Davies' writing in last year's Doctor Who. The dreadful humour, the look-at-me-aren't-I-clever references, the way sexuality barged its way in where it was completely unnecessary. Now imagine that the BBC distilled it, and made a programme out of it.

Imagine 45 minutes of pure, unfiltered Russell T Davies.

I think I'm in Hell.

The premise is simple. The new Doctor takes Rose to see Earth's future - its even further future, because the half dozen glimpses we've already had weren't enough. It's a new planet entirely, but the human race lives on with it. But how? Who are the strange cat-woman nurses who offer their mysterious cure to all ailments, and what is the cure? Interesting questions anyway. It would have made a great episode for Sylvester McCoy.

Unfortunately Davies hasn't got a clue how to approach the issue. By the end of the episode it seems to mean something or other about the human race's will to survive, and our sympathies are geared towards marauding, disease-ridden zombies. But it all happens so fast that it doesn't work, particularly because about half a dozen things are confusing the issue.

For instance, Cassandra is back. Oh, Russell's very happy with that creation; isn't it just masturbatory that she's given such coverage, the same way Rose happened to mention the Slitheen every other episode last season? Zoe Wanamaker is largely wasted as her character body-swaps between characters. In the case of Rose, she uses the excuse to tart Billie Piper up to the nines, breasts heaving and hair tossed. It's frequently embarrassing to look at the screen, as passers by may assume that Doctor Who abandoned all subtlety and went with a scantily clad bimbo companion. Well, they'd be half right.

And then she possesses the Doctor, who is a pretty major issue I'm having at the moment. David Tennant is actually rather annoying. His dramatic rants come out of nowhere, and I kept trying to get a handle on him as the Doctor (it seemed so easy in "The Parting of the Ways", perhaps because it was just one short scene), but I can't. He's clearly enthusiastic, but he hasn't quite got it yet. He and Rose - who is gushing and falling over herself far too much, in a way that suggests Billie simply fancies Tennant - are in awe of everything around them, so they're not acting normally, so I can't tell what they're really like.

Yeah. That's the excuse I'll go with.

Let's try not to talk about the scene where Cassandra steals the Doctor's body, and the loathsome gag about "not using" several "parts" of himself rears its ugly Russell-T-Davies-shaped head. For God's sake man, we appreciate that you enjoy your job. Would it kill you to have just a little respect for the series you're proclaiming as your own?

And he does. All the humour is turned up to eleven, from vaguely funny but nonsensical gags ("I'm a chav!") to dire, lazy zingers ("Go and play with a ball of string"). This is Doctor Who in a punny, one-liner mood. You can just feel that series we know and love dying under the ridiculous talons of Davies. He's suffocating it in his idea of a good time.

There are good moments, of course. As the Doctor fiddles with the TARDIS in the opening moments, he smiles as the column rises and falls; it's beautiful, and it's completely the Doctor. Then the production falls on its arse, as the windy location of Wales forces the first five minutes of dialogue to be totally (and obviously) dubbed. It's horrendous. Then along comes Murray Gold's "sweet" theme from "The Parting of the Ways", suddenly dumped in a satirical context and ruining any emotive memories I have of that last episode. It's like they're laughing at everything that worked.

I think I'm in shock. Just about every good idea is missed. The cat-women, for example, could just as easily be fish, robots or normal women; it's completely irrelevent (their make-up is uniquely good-looking, improving ten-fold on the similar species in "Survival", but the quality of the story is such slurry that this counts for nothing). The Face of Boe's involvement is ultimately a cop-out, so he's useless, and the final moments suggest that we sympathise with Cassandra. She was hardly a deep character to begin with, merely a repository for sassy comebacks and cruelty. If Davies is so taken with her, let him write his own adventures. Why smother the series with this stuff?

Sigh. I want to say "perhaps it'll look up", or "perhaps another writer will tone down the humour and make it all okay", but I said that at the end of last season, and at the end of "The Christmas Invasion". There's no getting rid of this bloody man, as he has no intention of leaving Doctor Who alone. Woe is very certainly me.