Army of Ghosts

What. The. Hell. Was. That?

Doctor Who's a funny old programme, isn't it? I mean, if you take it as a whole and select the bits that you can like without having to say "Well, it was done in the 60's," or "That's cos it's a kids' show really," or any of the other things that you need to say in order to justify it to someone who didn't fall in love with the programme at the age of 6, then there's still the fact that you have to bend over backwards to make a case for Doctor Who being any good. Right? You have to say: "Ignore the Mandrels, look at Logopolis, ignore the Slitheen, look at 'The Pool Scene' (yeh, 'Paradise Towers' was brilliant, wasn't it? Na, just winding you up kids, you know which pool scene I mean. Actually maybe you think I mean Leela's pool scene. Alright: Look at the pool scene in 'School Reunion'. Happy?)" And, you know, through the dross and the overacting and the plot holes and the rubbish science and the washing-up liquid bottles and the polystyrene bricks, you can usually rely on the actor portraying the Doctor to put in a good performance. Even in the worst stories, there's usually the Doctor to rely on. But that's just a teaser for my main complaint about 'Army Of Ghosts', let's have a quick bitch about everything else that was wrong with it, eh?

Blimey Torchwood's boring. Honestly, there better be non-stop scenes of Captain Jack Kirking it around Cardiff with every available species and gender of alien, because Torchwood as an organisation is very, very dull. You remember that big reveal of the 'shop floor' and how impressive it was supposed to be? Well, it looked like a couple of rooms loaned out from Buffy's season 4 Initiative. Remember? When the story arc was so crap its finale didn't even merit being the final story of the season.

What was all that clapping about? Were they mocking the Doctor, or is G Harper such a bad director that he told everyone to clap like that? Well, G Harper is a terrible director, there's no doubt about that. I thought the Cybermen stories were rubbish earlier in the season and this one failed to surprise by disappointing too. Shall I qualify this? Nah. You know I'm right. Just feel that empty space in yrself, deep down, that you made in yr heart when you heard that G Harper was coming back; that little void waiting to be filled with love and excitement. Now see that it's still empty. Maybe you told yrself that his stories were alright, maybe you even found some good bits in 'Steel Of The Cybermen' or whatever it was called and you freeze-framed them and pointed to them. But you and I know that that space in yr heart is empty and that Trigger was rubbish. And gargled.

Operate the blue switches! Those two great big ridiculous switches in the control room were hilarious! Come on. Straining, sweating scientists turning on the ghost shift regularly for no good reason at all, and it being perfectly fine every time until the 1001st. I bet they felt like right goons when they realised that they could've saved themselves the effort of heavy switch-pulling by merely tapping, tapping, tapping, tapping pointlessly on the keyboard like their cybernised colleages did.

You know, when I was little and Colin Baker said "I'll take you to..." and Peri never found out where and Doctor Who wasn't on the telly for 18 months and I learnt the word 'hiatus', I wrote a Doctor Who story. You probably did too. Obviously it was a terrible piece of fan-fic. I was a fan, it was fic and I was 10 or something. But you know what really gave it the hallmark of dreadful fanwank? It was the fact that it was an impossible and boring wish-list. Not only did it have Colin and Nicola meeting Tom and Lala, but it featured both Cybermen and Daleks. It also had some crap Spider creatures and Davros, but that is not the point. And now Russel has got to actually make that ultimate fan-fic. He's been allowed to do what people have been arguing about since Hartnell carked it: Daleks v Cybermen. Dalek