Doomsday

And so we reach the end of series two. I have felt a mixture of emotions about the whole thing I have to admit.

Army Of Ghosts promised a huge amount and set us up for an epic battle between the two greatest and most fearsome alien races that the Doctor has ever encountered. I was expecting a very grand affair, knowing that so much budget had surely been reserved for this final episode, given that Love & Monsters and Fear Her had saved so much thanks to their limited scale. I thought world armies would be brought into the mix, whole cities would fall and the human race would seriously be threatened as the battle of the giants continued about them. Perhaps I was being overly optimistic. On a few occasions over the past fifteen months I have found myself expecting a little too much. A great deal of fanfare was bandied about when news that Doctor Who was returning to Saturday nights with a lavish no holds barred budget. I remember being hugely disappointed by the terrible photoshop-ing of Chris Eccleston's face onto the Kennedy photo in Rose, and the slightly cartoonish Nestene consciousness, but was placated by the reassuringly expensive shots of the Slitheen craft crashing into the Thames, via Big Ben. The Christmas Invasion certainly didn't disappoint, so why did this gargantuan confrontation between the Daleks and Cybermen feel a bit like a drunken bitch fight on a late night episode of Big Brother..?

Okay, we had some nice scenes. The gun battle in the Torchwood hangar was nicely noisy and colourful, as was the Cyber encounter with the army on the bridge, but the majority felt just a bit underwhelming. It seemed that the daleks were only threatening one streetful of people before they got sucked back into the void, and just why were the Cybermen STILL standing outside the Taj Mahal having appeared there several hours earlier? Were they just wondering where to go first? Maybe I'm being unfair but I just thought these two menaces were decidedly un-menacing. Perhaps given a little more time than 45 minutes there might have been opportunity to understand what sort of battle plan both sides had in mind, but long before we got a chance to hear what that might be the Doctor had quickly decided to ditch his companion of two years and send her to a parallel universe forever more, thus neatly despatching both enemies from all across the globe through a hole in the wall at the top of a towerblock in London (via one window)

I feel I'm being wholly critical about this episode and I shouldn't be. There was much to enjoy. The lighter moments with Jackie running up and down the staircase constantly on the run from Cyber conversion were pacy and exciting, with just the right amount of humour. Her reunion was Pete was also delightfully handled "how rich?"/"how very?"! It was also nice to see that Yvonne Hartman's wonderfully full character from Army Of Ghosts wasn't completely wasted as she defended the Torchwood office from the onslaught of more Cybermen, her belief in her cause so strong that she had partially resisted full conversion.

And so to the departure of our wonderful Rose Tyler. Much had been made of the news that Billie Piper would be leaving the TARDIS at the end of the series, and so much had been written suggesting that she would be killed off that I felt almost certain that this wouldn't be the case. I absolutely loved the final scene in the Torchwood Tower - such a brilliant age old dilemma of having to risk your life to save the lives of many and how fitting that such a brave and gutsy character as Rose should have had no hesitation in risking hers. As she did her duty and thus massively increased the force of the pull into the void I was reminded of that heart stopping opening scene in the film Cliffhanger as the female character gradually loses her grip on safety and falls to her death. So we were here with Rose being pulled into oblivion. I suddenly felt that maybe the papers had been right and we were going to have the first companion self sacrifice since poor old Adric. As the Doctor and we, the audience, realise she had lost her grip on that lever I felt genuinely shocked and saddened, and then such huge relief as Pete zapped himself across universes one more time to take back his (sort of) daughter. To know that she would at least be happily ensconced with her old family and Mickey was some consolation, albeit she would never set foot again in her own world and was, in those terms at least, dead.

The epilogue on the beach in Norway was a nice touch and, although it laid on the emotions in spades, I was glad that Rose and the Doctor were given a chance to say goodbye. To this day I still find myself suffering moments of sadness when I think of Peri suffering life as a warrior queen to King Ycarnos, just wishing the Doctor would come and finally take her home! Let's resolve that situation in a future series PLEASE!!

And finally a nod of appreciation to the closing moments in the TARDIS. How fantastic that not so much as a smidgeon of a leak of this information ever got out into the public domain (as far as I am aware at least). This was the most genuinely surprised I have been to see someone appearing in Doctor Who since the Brigadier turned up in Mawdryn Undead. Catherine Tate played her indignant lines just perfectly and I already cannot wait til Christmas Day to see how these two get on.

So all in all, Doomsday was far from the episode I had been expecting when the Daleks emerged from the void ship at the end of Army Of Ghosts, but it was still a thoroughly enjoyable 45 minutes of television and, as has been said in the press recently, proved once again that this is far and away the best home grown drama on television at the moment.