Russell Davies admits in this week's 'Doctor Who Confidential' that 'Boom Town''s plot is just an excuse to get to the scene with the Doctor & Blon in the restaurant -- and, unfortunately, it shows. The episode lifts somewhat when it shifts gear from lame comedy to character scenes. However, subtlety doesn't seem to be Davies' strong point, and everything in 'Boom Town' is bashed home.

Much of the current series has played with rewriting the old 'Doctor Who' concepts, turning the old formula on its head, so highlighting the mayhem that follows the Doctor around doesn't really come as much of a surprise (especially when it was stressed right back in 'Rose'). Like everything else in this episode, the parallels with 'Dalek' aren't exactly subtle; on second viewing I was particularly annoyed by the shaft of light at the end. In fact, the nods to earlier episodes fell so thick & fast this time I got the impression 'Boom Town' is intended as a whistlestop tour of the season for late joiners.

Chris Eccleston is perfect in the pivotal restaurant scene, and Annette Badland, as Margaret/Blon, delivers her lines with a decent blend of humour & menace. The scenes with Rose & Mickey left a soapy taste in my mouth, and Billie Piper's sparkle just shows up Noel Clarke's rather wooden delivery. Jack, stripped of his sexy RAF uniform, has little to do but spout technobabble.

It was good to get out of London for a change, and Cardiff centre makes a beautiful backdrop; I particularly liked the Tardis dematerialising against the Millennium building at the end. Speaking of SFX, I note the producers have nicked the fanficcers' method of generating amazing ones -- which, given their budget, hardly seems to be playing fair...

Though it wasn't as bad as I'd feared from the trailers, 'Boom Town' did feel uncomfortably like filler between the stunning 'Empty Child' two-parter & the finale. Neat concept, pity about the execution.

Thank goodness the budget got tight. You see, for all the rushing around and fantastic adventures we've seen throughout the season, there's seldom been time to stop and catch our breath and just chew over some good, solid conversation and character work of the type we often hear in Big Finish. This episode, set entirely in Cardiff and bringing back a single Slitheen, was obviously done in part to save some money, but in the process, we got to have this other thing that the series has been mostly missing up until now.

The lynchpin of the episode is the scenes between the wonderful Annette Badland and the fantastic Christopher Eccleston around the dinner table as the Slitheen tries to convince the Doctor not to take her back to her own people and her certain death sentence. It's very interesting that she says all the right things to pluck at the Doctor's heartsstrings, yet he doesn't back down this time from what he thinks "must be done." He clearly doesn't like it, and we don't know if he really would have done it had it come down to it, but from what we've learned of this Doctor so far, I'm inclined to think he probably actually would have taken her to her death sentence. And again I wonder if this is his "war damage" coming through in his psyche... the time he most famously balked at an execution was back on Skaro in "Genesis of the Daleks" when he had the opportunity (so he thought) of destroying the Daleks for all time, and now that decision has come back to bite and swallow Gallifrey itself. Does he wish he could go back and "get it right" now? And would he try to not make that "mistake" (if that's how he sees it) a second time here with this Slitheen?

Getting back to her, I love how she tries to off him at the table three times and yet still has the gall to tell him how much she's changed, which she hasn't of course, although we do eventually discover that she truthfully wishes that she was different or could start over. That's the wish the TARDIS grants her at the end by regressing her back to being an egg, and it was a neat solution to the problem. I've heard some complain or point out that this is a deus ex machina, and in a sense I suppose that's exactly what the TARDIS is, but this isn't something just out of the blue. The whole sequence at the end looked almost the same as the climax of the McGann TV Movie, and I was expecting the TARDIS herself to finally put in a more pro-active appearance at some point (which she hadn't in the previous 10 episodes). I didn't quite see the egg bit coming, but even that's been done before... this ending looks a whole lot like that of "The Leisure Hive," where Pangol is regressed to being an infant so he can be brought up properly this time. (and that story also featured big aliens in tiny human body suit costumes... hmmm) New viewers might be a bit confused, I suppose, but even they should've got the hint that the old girl was going to be more involved than usual when they took the time to explain police boxes and the chameleon circuit in the early going, or later point out that they're actually using the "cell" function of a police box for real once they've captured the Slitheen, and there was also the refueling business. And that says a lot to fans too... the fact the TARDIS no longer has a limitless store of energy to draw on but must be refueled with temporal energy from time to time, which follows the fact that the Eye of Harmony would've been destroyed along with Gallifrey (or at least turned back into a normal black hole again without any energy infrastructure around it anymore).

What of our other characters? I'll start with the easy one (pun intended), and that's Captain Jack. I think John Barrowman should've taken his performance down a notch or two in this one... it was at the right level when WWII was going on all around him, but here when it's just domestic-looking present-day Cardiff, it seems too loud. It's interesting to note that he's got enough know-how to help the Doctor with the TARDIS systems and the refueling process... perhaps he'll be able to pilot it as well at some point?

And then we have Rose and Mickey and their romantic sub-plot, where Rose just can't quite cut the cord that still exists between them (as her not really needing her passport shows) even though she's clearly not coming back to him. She even gets charmingly upset with him for going out with someone else they knew, to the point that she completely forgets about the fantastic alien planets she was describing and wants to talk more about that girl. Mickey on the other hand is, by episode's end, very angry indeed with her, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this doesn't factor into the season finale somehow. Perhaps the Bad Wolf will try to turn Mickey against her and the Doctor?

This is the episode where the Doctor first really notices that the words "bad wolf" are following them wherever they go, then tries to pretend it's a coincidence, but we know it isn't, and he clearly doesn't think it is either. At the same time, some hints are dropped which may have gone unnoticed as to just how interested the Bad Wolf is in the Doctor... I'm convinced that the entire Slitheen-builds-nuclear-power-station-on-the-rift plot was the Bad Wolf's idea, and that it is the one who supplied Margaret the Slitheen with her super surf board and gave her the idea of what to name the station, though I'm guessing Margaret isn't conscious of most of this. Also, given the points the Doctor makes again in this one about how the TARDIS telepathic field gets into your head to translate things for you, I wonder if this isn't some sort of telepathic attack or surveillance of them. (though I don't think it's from a TARDIS)

The direction was as solid as I've come to expect from Joe Ahearne now. I particularly liked the chase sequence where our four heroes manage to corner Margaret and how that was staged ("she's climbing out the window, isn't she?"), and the teleporter joke that looked like Margaret was doing John Cleese as Sir Lancelot in "The Holy Grail." Also the music wasn't offensive again... it's still not terrific, but Gold's scores are at least tolerable now, which they weren't sometimes earlier in the season.

I do have one true complaint about the episode, and that's how whoever is in charge of the special sound effects is at times using some stock Hollywood sound effects that have been in use in films and cartoons since TV began. Whoever you are, cut this out. It sounds childish and like you're taking the easy way out. If you're stumped for a sound effect, ring up someone who either does or did work at Big Finish and they'll teach you how it's done. And oh, you should also not use a TARDIS in-flight hum for the interior of someone else's spaceship like you did in Captain Jack's in the previous two episodes... it only creates confusion amongst the fans.

And I want to put in a good mention for Mail Harries as Cathy Salt, who gave a very good performance, and who I think is very cute.

Overall then: 8 out of 10 for "Boom Town" Good character stuff, mostly great acting, good direction... solid all around, except some sound FX.

Having been slightly less then impressed with Rose, yet captivated by episodes 2 and 3, I had come to believe some aspects of the new series are fantastic, some of the best examples of Who ever to grace our screens, yet other aspects have been nothing short of abysmal. To me, Boomtown is a microcosm of the series, some brilliant moments mixed with the non-brilliant.

Here we have an episode in which not a great deal occurs. In surmation, the Doctor and his companions arrive in Cardiff, set about having a good time, discover one of those tiresome Slitheen people is not quite dead and is trying to blow up the aformentioned Welsh capital. Said Time Lord and companions then capture monster, threaten to take it home, discover home means execution, have a moral debate and then the TARDIS decides to make life easier and save everyone from having to make a moral choice.

Yet this is not to say that there is no excitement - we see some very funny banter between the new TARDIS crew, some extremely amusing scenes in the capture - Margaret Blaine [sic] climbing out of the window whilst still Mayor of Cardiff is for me the funniest moment of the series thus far - whilst the restuarant scenes are extremely intense. Also, while many Who fans have been unimpressed with the more domestic aspects of the series, I was genuinely impressed with RTD's exploration of the effects of Rose's travelling upon Mickey, in a superbly acted scene.

However, much of this episode left me cold. Firstly the set up itself seemed to me a little 'fanish', going back and revisiting plot devices that have already served their function. Although I can see the intention behind this, to show an already vanquished enemy pleading with the Dr. for mercy, I found it difficult to feel sorry for the Slitheen. This being has recently attempted genocide, has killed countless innocents and is once again intent upon reaping destruction of an entire planet. This being has already been given a chance by the Dr. to walk away, but instead laughed at the suggestion. In my mind, Blon was going to everything she deserved. Alternatively, the Dr. could surely have found an alternative punishment, handed the Slitheen over to other authorities, exiled it on an unihabited planet, yet here we are told there is only a black and white choice. Yet we do not even see the Dr. make this choice, the TARDIS does it for him.

What is more this episode follows another trend that has presided over Dr. Who in all its forms for a decade - the examination of death, the costs of the Dr.'s lifestyle. This is all very interesting, but yet again the Dr. is accused of wrong doing, of causing death, yet this is somewhat blind to the fact that the Dr. usually prevents death. Few of the people who die in the course of his adventures, die by his hands, there is often mercy for his enemies, the universe is made better by the Dr. I felt the restaurant scenes while intense missed the point - the Dr. is facing accusations from a murderous criminal whose sole motivation is profit. In contrast, for example, to the Big Finish Unbound adventure, 'Symapthy for the Devil', where the Master does a similar thing, there is the context that the Master believes in his own twisted head he is making the universe better; he accuses the Dr. of hypocracy, only helping the "right" people, failing to stop greater suffering, his evocative mention of Chairman Mao's admiration for the Dr. Boom Town misses all this. The Dr. is accused of being a murderer, by a murderer. The Dr. simply is not a murderer.

This along with the unsatisfactory ending, left me unsatisfied by this week's offering. I felt the plotting was simply not strong enough, the aspects of the story had not been properly thought through. I would have much rather seen the Dr. discover another Time Lord had survived (as earlier rumours suggested) and find out a little more about the Time War, than have watched this.

In my opinion, this episode is also an example of RTD taking on too much. Eight episodes is a vast number and the quality gap between some of the RTD episodes and those of the other writers has been very noticeable. This, I do not believe, is a symptom of RTD not being as good a writer as his hired help, I believe its a symptom of him not having the time to work on each episode properly. His skills as a writer are indeed awesome when it comes to writing dialouge and character, but his plots are often sloppy, his over reliance on magic gadgets worrying. It seems the sonic screwdriver can do anything, without explanation. I am coming to worry that RTD has underestimated the signifance of plot in action-adventure, which is what Who is. Dramas, such as those that have made him a televisual beomouth, don't need the tight plotting, but the sci-fi action adventure genre does - people will buy into virtually anything provided the fantasy coheres to itself, so long as it has its own laws that it obeys - Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, all these fantasy worlds make sense within themselves. If Dr. Who does not, then the slick execution that has captivated audiences can only keep them engrossed for so long. The generally negative reaction of many fans of the new series to this episode is surely the evidence that poor plotting will not go down well with the dedicated viewer. While many people are tuning in now for the novelty, if the series is to go on, it needs to keep a big core of viewers.

Although this perhaps seems like a doom and gloom monologue as to how Who is doomed, please do not take it as such. The excellence is there, I merely worry that RTD will not learn from his mistakes and may make them again with increasing regularity. The rating and audience approval were no doubt high again, but I doubt an entire season of Boom Town's would capitvate many people. I can only hope RTD will tighten up his plotting when Series 2 comes around, as expectations will be higher and it will be harder to get away with mistakes such as this episode.

Doctor Who has always been a show of variable quality, you would often get years of brilliance followed by a whole eras of mediocre quality, usually a dry spell was broken by a change of Doctor or production team, however whatever season you were watching usually gave you a pretty good idea as to what the rest of that series would be like.

This new version of Doctor Who however is another thing entirely. I honestly believe we have had the best and worst of Doctor Who all in the space of one season.

The new Who has had great characterisation, extremely poor characterisation, terrible incidental music, great incidental music, brilliant stories, mediocre stories and downright awful stories, a great companion, a boring Doctor, I could go on. The truth is for every time I have been close to despairing, along has come a story that has restored my faith, only to be found a few weeks later feeling like writing off this revival of my favourite show as a failure.

On the basis of Boom Town and its trail for the following week, I must admit I am perilously close to the latter. Once again another script by Mr Russell T Davies has pushed Doctor Who to an all time low for the second time this season, and surprise surprise both stories happened to feature a flatulent green blob.

It is customary to start reviews by listing the good points and leaving the niggles to the end, so here we go.

Some pretty Cardiff location work, some impressive effects courtesy of the Mill, a fairly decent Murray Gold score, we got to see some more of the excellent Tardis interior and of course Billie Piper was as great as ever. That I’m afraid is the closest I can come to finding anything positive to say about this unmitigated mess of a story.

It might have helped if there was a story to speak of, what started off as another Slitheen destroy the world premise, quickly split up into a series of disjointed segments that seemed to be trying to do something profound but ended up failing miserably.

The Doctor taking an alien for a last meal prior to returning them home to await potential execution is a sound premise. Unfortunately whereas a villain such as the Master, Sharaz Jek or even Sil could have made this whole scenario work, the knowledge that the alien concerned is a flatulent green teletubby played by a reject from Fit Club, rather diluted any dramatic impact this scene could have had, you might as well have stuck the Candyman in.

I honestly hoped we had seen the last of the Slitheen after the awful Aliens of London story, but unfortunately the Doctor Who production team obviously thought otherwise. While admittedly they have great marketing potential as stuffed toys, inflatable punch bags etc, they still make an abysmal Doctor Who monster. At least failed monsters of the past Nimon, Myrka etc went wrong by accident rather than design, the Slitheen seem deliberately designed as a cute comedy creation, the sort of thing a skit on Doctor Who would come up with as a joke. Sitting in on a Saturday night watching a green baby faced monster, sat on a toilet looking looking forlorn, made me wonder if anyone who had ever called being into this stuff sad, actually had a point.

It is not a secret that Russell T Davies is a Buffy fan and in this episode his attempts to turn the Tardis crew into the equivalent of the Scooby gang were painfully apparent. All that fast talking buddy buddy stuff was painful to watch. I will give it a few more episodes, but I don’t quite get the whole Captain Jack character, at the moment he seems little more than a bland American cipher and I cant really see what the point of him being there at all is.

Christopher Eccleston although trying his damnest, was still as dull to watch as he has been for most of this season. I honestly would never have thought eighteen months ago that the dream team of Davies and one of Britains most respected actors would respectively turn out this middle of the road, flat and at times embarrassing effort.

Unfortunately much of the poor material he has had to work with, has highlighted Eccleston’s weaknesses as an actor, he is a great working class actor and can even posh it up convincingly on occasion. But Doctor Who has left him hopelessly out of his depth, he simply cannot get a handle on how to play this sort of material and I’d be surprised if his reputation is left untarnished by his stint as the Doctor.

I too had high hopes for Davies scripts, of all the fan writers who were announced as working on the new series, he was the one I had most faith in. Unfortunately Davies take on the whole ethos of Doctor Who seems to be skewered, the man is obviously of the belief that the series should be written down to Childrens BBC level and have all the artistic integrity of something like the Thunderbirds movie. This is personally how I see Russell T Davies take on Doctor Who, 10 years from now it will be as disposable as Batman Forever or Robocop the series is today. When he does employ some of his skills as a dramatist the results can be extraordinary, but there is so much chaff surrounding the wheat that the message is lost.

Apart from not liking the tone, his scripts are badly constructed. Everyone had a go at the end of the Paul Mcgann movie, but this week we saw it repeated as the Tardis mysteriously reversed time once again. Too many of his scripts have relied on these convenient quick anticlimatic fixes and if that is not a mark of bad writing I don’t know what is. The man obviously has a love for Doctor Who, but something has gone badly wrong, rather than being the new Robert Holmes as I had hoped, he seems to be more of a twenty first century equivalent of Pip & Jane Baker. And for me the day he leaves the mantle of executive producer on Who to someone a bit more respectful of the series as a whole cant come too soon.

So two more episodes to go and is there really any hope left, the Doctor in the big brother house, robots looking like gigantic legoman, is this really what Doctor Who is about. Forty two years ago William Hartnell starred in a magical fantasy series, that enthralled children and adults alike. In 2005 Doctor Who returned as a low brow Saturday night light entertainment show. Come back Graham Williams, John Nathan Turner, Philip Segal, anyone, all is forgiven.

I'm a long time reader, first time writer as Paul Clarke's reviews voice my opinions admirably every week.However Boom Town has forced me to come out and reveal to you just how this episode was written:

One day Russell T Davies woke up. He got dressed, cleaned his teeth and got his early morning coffee, but something was niggling in the back of his mind. It kept telling him he had forgotten something, but what was it? Suddenly he blew the coffee out of his mouth. Of course! He had forgotten to write episode 11 of Dr Who. What was he going to do? He sat down at his computer. He had a three o'clock deadline and had to complete a forty-five minute episode.

He thought about the basics. - It would be set on Earth. That was an easy decision, as all episodes would be set on earth due to the fact the TARDIS was just a time travel machine (Wait a minute, isn't it a space travelling machine as well? -Huan) and seeing as the series was being filmed in Cardiff it would be easy to set the episode there and after all the Doctor likes Cardiff, he's a secret Welsh man.

Russell then put his imagination to work and decided to set the episode in two years time (cos that's what Doctor Whos all about isn't it kids - Huan). Now the aliens. Again for easiness he thought, let's bring back the funny (think he's forgotten the inverted commas there - Huan) Slitheen cos after all they were his favourites, a great marketing opportunity and the costumes were already made.

Now the plot - As he had already established in earlier episodes, he wasn't good at putting together a full 45 minute episode, he normally chose to think of a good 15 minutes and then just fill in the gaps. So for this episode he looked around his office and saw that the paper had a news story about nuclear power. That was good, a nuclear power plant. Yes, right, let's build one in the middle of Cardiff because like in two years time the Government of Britain won't mind a nuclear power plant being built in the middle of the city and neither will its residents. Those people of Cardiff are up for a laugh and obviously wont be concerned about the chance of having mutant children. We'll make the Slitheen the Mayor because Mayor's have all the power to make all the decisions in Wales dont they?

Right now what about the characters. The deadlines apporaching - 2.30pm already, right well, it's more important to make the episode a full 45 minutes long rather than give the characters any consistency so: let's pretend Mickey still hasn't got over Rose leaving him, even though he appeared to in the last episode when they were together. Then let's make them have a fight and at the end have him really bitter that Rose prefers travelling in time (not space remember) to boring old him. He can then go stomping off so that maybe next series I can have him come back as a baddy or something. Also may as well make Rose look upset, even though she has been through three other men since leaving Mickey. (obviously he's forgotten her brief relationship with the suicidal Dalek - Huan)

Right what about the other two minor characters Jack and the Doctor? Okay well Jack can stay in the ship most of the time fixing the TARDIS, that's him out of the way, and the Doctor can capture the Slitheen and then they can have a moralistic debate about life and death again, oh and explore some of Cardiff's finest eateries. Yeah that's good.

By now it was three o clock and he quickly finished off the script with an awful alien surf board idea, the TARDIS saving the day, added a few bad special effects and sounds and raced over to Cardiff for the shoot.

In my opinion (and some other people's based on the 'grin and bear it' remarks) Mr Davies' episodes are not up to scratch, with the other writers far out shining him. Trouble is he writes over half of them and to me that's a worry. Let's hope he's listened and learned. He has a second chance with a new Doctor. Please take it.

В‘Boom TownВ’ is an absolute gem of an episode. It quite explicitly sets out to be a character piece; principally about the DoctorВ’s lifestyle, which is an interesting enough idea in its own right - but when you add to that an exploration of the immediate and long-term consequences of this lifestyle then you have a story which becomes far more substantial, than many in the season to date.

DonВ’t get me wrong. All of the stories up to Boom Town have been highly enjoyable and notable in their own right. However Boom Town is perhaps the only story apart from FatherВ’s Day which actually has a dramaturgical В‘centreВ’. It has an absolute fixed starting point like all good stories. In this case it is about morality, or to be more specific, moral absolutes. In the case of Boom Town one characters moral absolute is anotherВ’s nightmare.

ItВ’s really interesting to see RTD script pivot between these arguments. Indeed the resolution becomes even more important with a script such as this, where will the final line in the sand be drawn? I think itВ’s wonderfully inventive for RTD to come up with the resolution he has, he chooses not to side with either the Doctor or Margaret, but by opting for a В‘thirdВ’ way. He gives Margaret another chance by effectively going back to year zero for her. This brilliant denouncement should be given the credit it deserves for being both intelligent and imaginative. Of course the consequences or В‘priceВ’ of these actions have to be explored. RTD does this extremely successfully by juxtaposing the weighty matters of morality alongside the very personal fall-out between Rose and Mickey. Indeed grounding and contextualising the action like this made the more personal or domestic material not only touching and valuable but probably made for the episodes best scenes. In particular the scene outside the TARDIS where Mickey and Rose discuss going for a pizza and even raising the possibility of hiring a hotel for the night, brilliant! (ItВ’s impossible not to genuinely feel for Mickey). Simple and fundamental relationships such as these are one of the reasons why the Doctor needs Rose so much. That is what the Doctor really longs for, some kind of В‘fundamentalВ’ normality.

On the subject of great scenes, the encounter in the toilet between Margaret and journalist Cathy Salt was also notable. Brilliant juxtaposition, the alien on the toilet quietly weeping and the reporter looking forward to her В‘new lifeВ’. Scenes such as these are really what make new Who a joyous thing indeed. This is an episode which really makes you care, it involves and challenges its audience on a level that only really good writing can, to a certain extent the episode even redeems the Slitheen as RTD challenges us too identify with there plight. Even all the scripts gags really come off for once!