42

This, my friends, was a sad day for Doctor Who, the first truly dud episode of Series 3, only the second in the whole of the new series (the other being the mind-numbingly dull 'Fear Her' towards the end of Series 2, best not to get me started on that one).

Firstly, in defence of the episode, expectations were unfairly high, having followed by far the two weakest Dalek episodes in the new series and the rather one-dimensional Lazarus Experiment, and then a two-week break for Eurovision.

The episode certainly had its up sides, I for one think the premise was very interesting, a ship hurtling towards a sun in the far future, even if it has been done before, Doctor Who has a habit of improving on ideas, even when they are recycled from elsewhere. I also very much liked the idea that they could change their fate if only they could get to the cockpit, blocked not by the usual culprits like falling rubble, lack of atmosphere, or super-high temperatures, but by the simple fact that the doors would take too long to open, I thought this was a nice touch.

Also, visually the episode is breathtaking, being up there with The End Of The World and The Satan Pit. It did bear a striking similarity to the latter, both in terms of feel and story. The title was very neat, as was the idea of a real-time episode.

However, while comparing the episode to the aforementioned Satan Pit, let us consider the differences between the two. I should mention that, possibly excluding certain stories involving Daleks, The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit are my favourite episodes of the new series, and so 42 should have been right up my street, another one set in the future, with all in mortal peril and a mysterious force possessing members of the crew.

I found that 42 was rather like The Satan Pit with all the really good bits taken out. There was none of the Devil mythology stuff, which I thought really made the episode stand out. Instead there was some preposterous theory that 'the star is alive.' Ok, I'm sure Doctor Who could make that idea work, but there was never any time to explain it in the slightest, which I found very frustrating.

There was nothing like the fear factor of The Impossible Planet, and while there was a certain element of steadily growing tension, it couldn't touch the "He is awake" moments of the former, or the colossal crescendo of power as Lucifer broke free.

As for demonic possession of the crew, the bad guys in this were totally unoriginal, both in appearance and power (come on, I remember a certain member of the X-Men doing that in a cartoon when I was 5 years old). I will admit that "Burn with me!" was a rather cool catch phrase, but I doubt many would accuse it of originality. I urge you to contrast this with the immortal image of Toby, red-eyed and tattooed in ancient heiroglyphs, standing on the atmosphereless surface of a barren asteroid, a black hole behind him, his hand outstretched and slowly beckoning, a look of pure, ancient evil in his eyes (I think that moment is the best acting the series has seen to date, I would even go so far as to say best acting I've ever seen). Not only that, but they had the Ood as well, probably the most menacing-looking alien species of the new series. Alongside this, two men in Breen-like gas masks with visors can't quite compete.

As for the good guys, the crew of the spaceship in 42 were instantly forgettable, and had little or no backstories whatsoever. Quite why Martha liked one of them is utterly beyond me. Yes, female spaceship captain, gotta be the first time we've ever seen that... except Star Trek Voyager did that in 1995, and I didn't think it was a very big deal even back then. After all, this is sci-fi, we've had female leads since Alien first came out in 1979. Again, contrast this to Satan Pit, where the odd line here and there suggested a great wealth of backstories for the crew, many of which we heard about in detail, providing a much more believable human element for the story, and creating characters that were actually cared about when put in danger.

As for the structure of the story, at first it all seemed to be going well, they have to go through all the bulkhead doors, reach the cockpit, and turn on the engines, while there's someone trying to kill them off from within. Except all that went out the window when they decided to start launching escape pods, suddenly the previous plot appeared completely forgotten, leaving the Doctor to scream "I'll save you!" again and again, because clearly he had nothing better to do. That alone I could overlook, but since I'm being critical it seems a shame to leave basic storytelling out.

All that would have made a poor episode, but it is the gaping holes in science and logic that really tore the episode apart. Yes, I know that in the Satan Pit they're orbiting a black hole, a scientific impossibility, that's one of the things that made it so good though, a deep-seated feeling of being uncomfortable, if you know what I mean. This was solved by the presence of Satan, I don't think science can argue with that too much. However, 42 was just getting silly. The idea that you could get that close to the sun without melting, for one thing, is ridiculous. I don't even remember if they tried to explain this with 'shields,' but it seems unlikely that shields would be online when the engines weren't, no? The TARDIS being trapped in a really hot room, ok, I'll go along with that, that bit was possibly better handled than Satan Pit, where it miraculously turned up at the end. But the real problem was the escape pod scene. That escape pod had been falling towards the sun for quite a while, and then with a press of one button, it comes flying back to the mothership, courtesy of electromagnets. Que? Has it not occurred to them that it's falling towards a star, the biggest source of gravity in the whole solar system? So large, in fact, that the mothership is being pulled towards it at high speed? Yet, press the magic button, the escape pod comes flying back from nearly touching the surface of the star, without even a scratch. A friend of mine then pointed out that not only is a star a huge gravity signature, it's also a giant electromagnet in itself. I really feel the writers would have benefited from a half-decent grasp of at least GCSE physics, and common sense would have helped considerably as well. As for the escape pod recall button being on the outside of the ship, it's probably best to ignore that entirely.

And so, to recap:
Story premise - Not half bad, but not overly original.
Real-time storytelling - A nice idea, but didn't leave nearly enough time for explanations
Characters - Universally terrible
Bad guys - Also completely dire
Deeper 'drama' messages/thoughts - Unless a star really is alive, none whatsoever
Realism/Physics - Shockingly poor

I found the discovery that the episode was written by the main writer of Torchwood explained quite a lot, all of the episodes that the writer has been credited with have been terrible (not to keep going on about it, but how does 'End Of Days' in any way appeal to a Satan Pit fan? And this is supposed to be the 'more mature' series, Pingu would have been better at revisiting the Devil-from-the-dawn-of-time idea than Torchwood). As for 'Cyberwoman,' the makers of Conan The Barbarian could have managed a more subtle costume for the title character, and probably a better story too.

However, I leave you on a good note - this evening was the airing of Human Nature, a welcome return to form. And, on an even better note, it's not long now until we can quote the tagline of a certain pirate film that's rather big at the moment - Captain Jack's back!