Smith and Jones

After the hit and mostly miss of season two, I surprisingly found myself excited about the approach of season three. Perhaps with Torchwood and Primeval in the background, suddenly there seemed to be more fantasy TV on the box than for a long time.

Fortunately Smith and Jones, the season opener, was solid enjoyable fare that did a good job of fleshing out what a 21st century vision of Doctor Who could be like for a family audience. With an ambitious premise the views of a hospital block on the moon, yes on the bloody moon, were well done and overall this clever production looked great. The landing of the Judoon spacecraft was wonderful, although I couldn't help thinking the lunar landscape looked more 2001 Space Odyssey rather than the real vistas of the Apollo missions. One nice touch was the reaction of the hospital inhabitants to their new locale ? a slow realisation followed by sheer terror. So many other productions depict people bravely soldiering on in these situations when of course if this sort of thing actually happened, most people would go rather mad. It did a good job of notching up the tension.

The Judoon, intergalactic coppers, were well done although fairly simplistic. Along with setting it in an actual hospital, with a lot of already built corridors to run down, the showing of only one trooper's actual face was clear cost cutting. Just one more rhino face would have helped dispell this rather obvious budgeting. But they looked great, although this fanboy longed for Sontarans instead, who would have been far more frightening and evil.

The snappy little plot with a not quite sinister enough villian worked well enough. The one major problem I had was that there were worries to begin with that once the Judoon found the alien they wanted, they would destroy the hospital and everyone in it for harbouring their quarry. But this never resurfaces and the Judoon handily transport the hospital back to Earth and everything is well again.

The performances are consistent and the new companion is rather good as well as rather gorgeous. David Tennant's performance is restrained compared to some of his previous, perhaps rather irritating, outings as the Doctor with only the scene with the radiation escaping from his foot giving cause for concern. This scene just doesn't work. In another scene he mentions that he once had a brother and whilst with Christopher Eccleston's Doctor (think of that tear in Episode 2 of Season 1) these moments were always a breathtaking revelation, with David it never quite has the same power.

And at the end we have the Doctor seduce his new companion into travelling with him after she undergoes an unsatisfying episode in her own domestic situation. An exact parallel with the same scene in Rose, it suggests a Doctor who travels the cosmos in his high powered time machine to pick up chicks. "Did I mention, it also travels in time", the Doctor almost says in what was presumably an exercise in cutting and pasting for the writer.

But overall, great fun and easily the most satisfying start to a new season for the new Who.