Doomsday

Just to get it out of the way first, despite my instinctive dislike of the interminable Doctor-Rose love arc, I have to say that Billie Piper's performance in the rather bleak denouement of Doomsday was very touching and believable and drew out my sense of sympathy for a character I have otherwise found increasingly irritating. It also, ironically, inspired Tennant's best moments yet as the Doctor: brooding, slightly detached, paternal and visibly moved. But my irritation with Rose has not been so much to do with Piper's acting, which has mostly been of a high standard compared to many former companions (just compare her with Victoria, Jo, Adric, Peri and Mel and it's clear Rose, despite her annoyingly 'chavvish' aspects, is generally played pretty strongly by Piper), but with her characterisation and the intrusiveness of her growing infatuation with the Doctor. Well, it had to come to an end sooner or later, and I'm glad it has. Having said that, Piper's emotive performance on saying goodbye to her Timelord in shining armour - her convincing stuttering out of 'I love you', cringeworthy and absurd though this implication is, especially considering the Doctor's an alien - was impeccable. Having said this though, for me still this was all out of place in this programme; not so much her infatuation with Him, but the further implication that the Doctor requited it in some sense. And this was implied here though thankfully the Doctor didn't get to finish his verbal recipocration of Rose's sentiment. Thank God. But his tears afterwards say it all anyway. Maybe ultimately this was a direction the show had to go in eventually, in order to 'grow up' in a sense, but then, Doctor Who isn't and was never meant to be Star Trek or - much as I love it - Blake's 7: that is, the pivot of Who is the seemingly asexual, alien nature of its main protagonist, and RTD's humanisation of the character has been mostly lazy and feckless, arrogant and ill-conceived, and only really on this occasion has proved to work dramatically, with the Doctor's palpable sense of loss and lonliness on the final farewell to the most emotionally demonstrative companion he's ever had. I know RTD can't be entirely to blame for sexualising the Doctor as this was tragically first manifested in the appalling 1996 movie - which also heretically implied the Doctor was half-human - but that's still little excuse. The fact remains, in a far more sexually literate culture than when the series was last on our screens in 89, RTD, his finger ever on the pulse of zeitgeist, felt it was necessary to bring romance into the TARDIS. But the inevitable effect of this move is the dilution of the central character's enigma and alienness. This, in my view, has generally been damaging to the drama of the series. I wouldn't have been quite so prudish had the Doctor requited an infatuation with a Time Lady (as, let's face it, the implication was often there, though infinitely more subtly, between the Fourth Doctor and the second Romana - cue City of Death and the Doctor's mournfulness in Full Circle, after her departure the previous story). Hartnell's flirtation with Camica in The Aztecs aside, there's never really been any other hint of the Doctor's amorousness; even the Fifth Doctor's bond with Tegan seemed pretty one-sided on her part (cue Enlightenment), though, again, he was visibly emotionally drained at her sudden departure in Resurrection of the Daleks.

So what now then? Rose has apparently gone, though the likelihood of her returning one day is left open by her existence in that oh-so-difficult-to-return-to parallel Earth. Time will tell if RTD and the boys will decide to move on from this rather infantile preoccupation with the Doctor's capacity for human romance, with the dawning of the new companion next season: if the same sort of relationship is developed again with a new companion, I will really give up all hope on the new series ever fully rising above the level of sci-fi soap opera. This said, the appearance of Catherine Tate as an Essex-style bride in the TARDIS at the end of the episode was not only totally misplaced after the torrid farewell to Rose, but also I predict indicative of a fast-approaching abomination of a Christmas episode. With a title like The Runaway Bride, I feel Christmas day may be spoilt somewhat by a possible pantomime episode. I reserve judgment till Doomsday.

Talking of which, this episode itself. Well, my love of Who has always been much more down to the scripts, characters and concepts rather than the monsters. The essential theatricality and verbosity of the classic series is what drew me in in the first place; the detail of plots and scripts; the effortless imagination of scenarios; the absorbing, often intellectually-tinged escapism of it all; the suggestiveness of concepts and plot elements rather than always trying to visualise them, often mainly to do with lack of budget. New Who, for the first time, has the cash to show us practically everything suggested, but in a perverse sense this, for me, detracts from the power of the drama dormant in the show, and ironically cheapens it all in a way, to the level of Hollywood or US sci-fi. I think it also makes the writers much lazier, being able to rely more than ever on special effects etc. Doomsday is a good example of this techological complacency in the new series - the only consolation is some well-pitched battle sequences between the Daleks and Cybermen, the kind of scenes I would have loved as an eight year old but that now as an adult I find rather tedious and comic-strip. Doomsday's impeccable visuals (though the flying Daleks I thought didn't look that great) and fast action pace in no way distracted me from a fundamentally facile plot and conceptual laziness. In short, this episode, despite a truly emotional ending, was a big let down after the build-up of Army of Ghosts.

What we get really is one big winding up of the Tyler family saga/parallel Earth Tyler saga in an implausible implosion of scriptural laziness and plot conveniences: now, apparently, it's possible for the parallel Earthlings to simply hop back and forth by pressing big yellow medallions. Just like that. Yes, the Doctor points out how impossible such technology is. To which we get a hackneyed, non-falsifiable explanation from Jake that the parallel Earth has its own Torchwood but that the people's Republic found out what they were doing and seized on it. Mmmm. Ludicrous. As is the fact that their new President is called Harriet Jones. Come on. The Whoniverse has contracted massively under RTD: we now have an almost continually Earth/London/Cardiff-bound TARDIS, a future in which the Earth is controlled by the National Trust (why not International, for crying out loud?), a previous Doctor who has a consciously Salford accent ('All planets have a North'), a series of alien menaces that prowl around the same South London estate, and now even an impossibly parochially related parallel Earth where there's an identical Tyler family and Micky etc. Talk about suspension of disbelief. But I won't go on.

Other criticisms: the cop-out of the Genesis Ark arc, very disappointing - it would have been nice to have had Davros back finally - obviously not going to happen - but instead we get a vague thing about it being of Timelord technology (which even the Doctor finds vague for goodness' sake), and the Ark is basically a sort of TARDIS prison from which inevitably ejaculate millions of CGI Daleks swarming around Canary Warf (my, MI5 have been busy - or should that be MFI). Meanwhile the Cybermen are getting rather clumsy, falling over all and sundry to the Daleks' exterminators like so many empty suits of armour. I've decided I don't like these new models much: they seem to cumbersome and too robotic, the essential menace of the old ones being their obvious organic element. Basically these new ones are robots with human brains. The production team (and possibly Harper) have overdone their stomping noises to the extent that they're actually a bit embarrassing. Their voices are good and quite Troughtonesque, but there's something essentially lacking from them and I can't put my finger on it. At least, not as easily as on a parallel Earth transmat medallion. The focus on the moral and dehumanising aspect to the Cybermen is a brave and fruitful development in the new series, which I applaud; however, the shot of the Cybernised Yvonne shedding a tear of patriotic pride was implausible and clumsy, a perhaps irresistable play on the tear-duct design of the Cybermen's eyes. I hate to say it, but Harper has delivered the kind of direction in this episode and debatably the previous three that seriously poses the question: did your stunning talents die out with the old series? Rise of the Cybermen and Ghosts/Doomsday are not a patch on Harper's classic efforts (two of the best directed stories of all time); only Dalek from last season showed similar flair to Harper's old series' classics, but that was by a different director.

On the good side, there were a couple of scenes which shone in Doomsday both scripturally and directorially: first was the scene of the Cybermen rising again to the chanting of 'We will irradicate all class, sex, race' etc. 'and make everyone the same, like us' - a possible chilling comment on the misguided idealism of Communism?; and the shot of the Doctor gloating through the Dalek's vision, saying 'No wonder you're always screaming'. Doomsday needed many more scenes like these, but sadly, it didn't.

Doomsday was a disappointing climax to the second series overall, though with an affectingly emotive farewell scene. But it was full of cliches, plot-conveniences and cop-outs, and seemed to try and mimick the superior (though over-rated) Parting of the Ways finale to the previous season, but failing ultimately due to lack of believability and originality. Doomsday was the climax to the Tyler soap opera and the Doctor-Rose arc, and so was inevitable, but I do feel it could have been pulled off much better than it was, without so many continuity intrusions from the previous two series and frankly, without the Daleks, who seemed generally superfluous to the plot and weren't done full justice. Is it just me, or are the Daleks rather boring without Davros?

5/10 - on a good day.