Bog-standard. I felt this was below the standard set so far I'm afarid. I'm glad RTD finally got his old uncommissioned story from the 1980s realised as I hope in vain to get some of mine produced, but it really was a clever idea but badly executed.

Depicting the media as enslaving the population is an excellent idea but the story was a generic runaround without even a gripping runaround! Eccleston was his excellent self and so was Billie Piper who just shines in every episode, no matter the quality of the story. Bruno Langley was quite under-used I felt. It was a surprise [for me anyways!] that he got abroad the TARDIS in the first place but to only use him for one episode seemed pointless. I tend to concur with reviewer Joe Ford on most things, and I agree that Dalek should have come after Father's Day. Much more could have been made of the character, but I was one of the sad minority who thought the joke at the end was quite good.

Simon Pegg, while motiveless, was excellent in this. He gave a terrific performance in every scene he was in and I loved the way he tried to flee the scene at the climax but was trapped by one of his zombies. Christine Adams was absolutely gorgeous - better looking than Billie Piper in fact! I have to really fight the urge to not make this whole review about her! Let's hope we see her in more things!

So there you have it. Ordinary. Traditional Doctor Who, but one of those, like Terminus, which you'd never watch again. Although Christine Adams is a good enough reason to still make me get it on DVD!

Nice to know that the new series can make some really naff Doctor Who…

Following on from Dalek was always going to be a chore and to be honest they probably should have avoided having Adam around for another episode and headed straight into Fathers Day which thanks to a gripping trailer looks set to be one of the best of the year. The Long Game just doesn’t have the oomph to be placed where it is, at the halfway point in the series and the signpost of quality for the rest of the year now that the audience has been won over.

There have been some mightily unfair statements made about Russell T Davies’ scripts in comparison with Gatiss and Shearman, which to me seems a tad ungrateful since we wouldn’t be enjoying a new series of Doctor Who if it wasn’t for him. What’s more he shaped the first season, which has so far proven to be delightful with some of the most consistent and evolving characterisation Doctor Who has ever boasted. What’s more the first three scripts he has written (Rose, Aliens of London and World War Three) have all been winners in one way, the first a confident re-introduction of the series, the second a healthy dose of domestic drama and the third a humorous and dramatic slice of action adventure. The Long Game is the only stumble he has made in my eyes, simply because there was so much potential in this idea and much of it is largely wasted.

I have heard many people complaining about the 45-minute episode format, saying that it just isn’t enough time to tell a satisfying story with any great depth. I have dismissed their comments up to this point because RTD and company seem to have produced a winning formula, one that leaves no time for flabby padding or needless digressions from the plot (a common problem with the old six part Doctor Who stories). But with The Long Game the formula has failed totally, as this was a story that begged to be told at length and on a much grander scale than it is. The central idea of the episode (a media controlled culture with the news used as a weapon to enslave the human race) is fantastic and it is obvious why RTD was so keen to use it but it is abused on a script that has to move so fast that we never get to see the culture that is being manipulated or even glimpse at the Earth besides an establishing planet wide shot and consigns the story to three rooms. Establish the setting and the problem, deal with the problem, that’s about all the length allows this episode to do. Even worse is the Doctor’s casual “I’m leaving and you can sort out all the consequences…oh and the Earth should develop at its usual rate now I’ve interfered…okay byeee!” (okay he doesn’t say it quite like that but it is equally blaze and thoughtless) because the episode doesn’t have any time to deal with the cost of his actions. I understand the limitations 45 minutes places on a writer but compared to RTDs last script World War Three, which managed to give its plot amazing depth without affecting the high action content this is lazy work.

Vengeance on Varos managed to exploit its media theme by cutting the action with scenes set in the average workers home and showing the reactions of regular person receiving the transmissions. And it managed to be traditional Doctor Who run-around with it. The Long Game only wants to be a traditional Doctor Who story with none of the cleverness of Varos, and it wants to be traditional in the sense of the old series AND the new series. You’ve got the smooth talking villain who answers to a horrid creature (old series). And you’ve also got Adam’s first glimpse space being that of Earth from a space station and a quick call home to his parents (both scenes pasted here directly from The End of World). It merely enhances the feeling of lethargy to the script that we’ve seen it all before in both series and that there is little to distinguish itself as anything special. A great shame as I fear this would have made a fantastic two parter with two plotlines taking place, one on the station and one on Earth so we can witness cause and effect of this fake media sham.

Adam, What is the point? To show a teenager on the road to villainy, his ambitions cut short by the Doctor? To show how well Rose has adapted to the time travelling business? To put a bit of male totty on the screen to keep my boyfriend Simon happy? Just because…? Whatever the reason this has got to be the biggest misstep the series has made yet. Not only does it split the episode in half and thus leave us with even less time to explore the BIG IDEA OF THE WEEK but by writing out the character after just one week it exposes as a monumental waste of time and the viewers attention. I don’t want to insult Bruno Langley who gives everything the script requires of him but he is lumbered with a totally thankless character, one I didn’t warm to OR dislike (which I fear was supposed to be my reaction…lets be honest I think we would all have a stab at what Adam tries in this episode). He was just sort of there, going through the motions, not giving enough of a personality or motive or screen time to make his character anything but worthless. It isn’t RTD’s fault; I didn’t think much of Adam in Dalek either (and he was practically ignored in favour of the much more interesting plot anyway). The best thing I can say about this gaping hole of illogic is that Langley is mouth wateringly gorgeous and even that wasn’t enough to keep me interested. Guess I’m not as shallow as I thought.

I want to say something nice about The Long Game so here I go! Simon Pegg! Wonderful, marvellous, witty, engaging, lickably perfect Simon Pegg! What an actor! RTD how right you are when you suggest how mind numbingly dull this episode would be without Simon Pegg. This character is the only one who was scripted with any real style and Pegg brings the Editor to life with charismatic relish. Every line that came out of his mouth was a delight and I was cheering every time the episode returned to floor 500 and this quirky character. He is basically the same as every other quick witted stooge who appears to be running the show in Doctor Who with that marvellous mix of humour and horror (there was a spine tingling shot of the Editor when he says “GOT YOU!”) and gets the same fate as is the usual ( a horrible death). Who cares? This is the best ‘villain’ we have had yet, funnier than Van Stratten, better acted than Mr Slitheen and creepier than Cassandra. Pegg was inspired casting and actually makes this traditional role (which in other hands would be as clichйd and dull as the rest of the episode) something special and the episode well worth watching in spots.

Even the Doctor and Rose are wasted, left to do all the boring investigating whilst Adam gets up to the mischief. The usually dynamic pair are joined by some particularly unmemorable guests characters (I forget their names, such was their impact) and the tedium is infectious. Eccelston seems as bored as I was; at least until he is paired up with Simon Pegg and then at least there is some electricity. But that only comes at the end of the episode; we all know where the Doctor is going to end up but it seems to take age for him to end up there. Instead of enjoying himself spitting insults with the Editor he rambles on about plumbing for Christ sakes!

Add to all this an uninspiring production (the lighting is pretty good, especially on floor 500 but the sets look particularly plastic this week and it is the first week I have actively disliked the music) and truly lousy final joke and you have the first stinker of the new series.

After his previous magic I expected much more than rehashed old stories from RTD. There are many similarities to The End of the World. Except one, this was &%$#.

It seems to me that several people have not yet woken up to the reality that Dr Who, to survive, has to go after a mass audience, and that mass audience wants human interest stories and neat packages that the Doctor has not delivered in the past, but is delivering in spades this series. I suspect Dr Who has never been so mainstream since the William Hartnell era. Yes we get the odd plot inconsistency, rehashing of old plots and not always brilliant acting by subsidiary characters, but hey, look back at some of the classic Who episodes and judge them against the same criteria most of us are using to evaluate this series and they just wouldn't shape up. Reading other reviews of this episode it is clear that you can't please all the people all of the time, since the things one set of reviewers have liked have annoyed another set.Perhaps that is no bad thing?

This was another episode that proved the value of the 45 minute timeslot. How on earth did they manage to spread plots over four or five episodes in the past? The action here seemed sensibly paced. Accusations that some scenes were reminiscent of "End of the World" seem to have missed how much there might have been a deliberate 'compare and contrast' approach. To give just one example, Rose in TEoTW was faced with a totally alien culture, here the aliens were conspicuous by their absence.My criticism would be that the whole setting was very Bladerunnerish, but perhaps that was more a case of homage than plagiarism? Generally special effects were good, and 'Max' was very well realised, except that I'm not quite sure what it is he did to kill promotees to floor 500 that left their bodies so in tact, you can't help feeling their should have been signs of poorly executed needle work on the re-animated corpses. the idea that people who get promoted have to leave their real lives behind would strike a chord with anyone who has experience of seeing colleagues climb the corporate career ladder.

I'm surprised Anna Maxwell-Martin's performance hasn't attracted more attention. No one seems to have picked up her role in 'His Dark Materials' with it's echoes of alternative realities, and complaints that her initial persona didn't fit with her freedom fighter background obviously miss the point that she was working deep undercover. I thought she was much more convincing, and likeable, than Christine Adams, who for me lacked any moral anchor.

I do feel that Adam's character was squandered too quickly, it would have been nice to have an episode where he appeared ambiguous before allowing us to make our minds up whether he was good or bad. Plotwise it also seems rather silly, because with his brain enhancement, and his time at Geocomtex he must surely already know enough about alien technologies to make a tidy sum.I wonder how many Who fans would have behaved just like Adam, and whether that was a point being made - the average fan would make a lousy companion.

Simon Pegg was fine as the editor, but it would have been nice to see a bit more motivation behind the character, and a degree of self-delusion. As a character he should believe he is doing a public service by propagating lies.

Nobody seems to have commented yet that the editor calls the alien Max, as in Max Clifford or Robert Maxwell. I thought the alien was really well realised in CGI terms, and vaguely reminded me of Robert Maxwell...

Nagging at the back of my mind is a feeling that time still isn't as it ought to be. Considering the trailer for next week's episode where strange entities try to correct Rose's meddling in time it seems the Dr is very accepting at the end of the day about events that have distorted human history. Shouldn't he be trying to stop Max's influence happening in the first place?

Bog-standard. Uninspired. Treading water before the next big 'special episode'. I can't tell you how much I was dreading having to write a luke-warm review for this story.

Happy chance, then, that it turns out to be fantastic.

Lacking what advertisers call the 'unique selling factor' of all previous episodes ('the one with the Dalek', 'the one where the world ends', 'the one with the ghosts', 'the one where a spaceship hits Big Ben', even just 'the first one'), The Long Game is harder to pin down, and arguably all the better for it. A satire of Fox News? An adventure story? A nostalgic reworking of classic Dr Who? No, better: it's all these things. Adapted in part from one of Russell T Davies's rejected submissions from the 1980s (now THAT's how to get even with an editor), it's gloriously traditional while keeping all the trademark features of the New Who, and best of all absolutely stamps on the opinion festering around fandom that Russell T's scripts are the weakest of the series.

While overdoses of comedy in his previous efforts left room for only lightweight, superficial plots, here the whole script is full of dense, multifunctional scenes, and there's not a wasted beat among them. The result is an undeniably classy, well-paced piece that - even more than The Unquiet Dead - definitely proves the 45 minute format can support a complete story. Perhaps this is due in part to an often overlooked limitation of the new series, where the one-companion setup, and Rose's defiantly equal status with the Doctor, tends towards a more linear narrative. With the addition of Dalek's Adam to the crew, an opportunity at last arises to split up the regulars, and as a result not only he but two guest characters are provided with suitably fleshy subplots and character arcs, in addition to the exciting story happening around them.

Arguably this happens somewhat at the expense of the Doctor and Rose, but happily Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston do an excellent job of handling their relatively thin part in the action. The duo squeeze every drop out of their limited screen time, milking an excellent script for all its worth to inform their fun, charming and still sometimes unexpected relationship. Chris in particular copes magnificently with an unprecedented quantity of exposition, although as if to compensate he has some absolutely cracking dialogue, including in the pre-credits sequence one of the funniest lines in the series. The guest stars are similarly impressive, with star turns from Christine Adams and Anna Maxwell Martin, and Bruno Langley returning to bring the character arc begun in Dalek to a satisfying conclusion. Simon Pegg - comedy genius behind (and in front of) Spaced and Shaun of the Dead - is less impressive as the Editor, although this is more a problem of casting than performance. The part was written to play against expectations, the villain chatty and affable rather than moustache-twirling and "I have you now!", but with Pegg in the role this was already what the audience was expecting, so that the intended reversal goes unnoticed.

Still, viewers have by now come to expect a high standard of special effects from the series, and in this regard the episode really delivers. While the design feels a little off in places - the decor and inhabitants of AD 200000 aren't very different from those of 2000; the Spike Room is rather uninteresting for such a significant location, and the observation deck a bit too similar to that of The End of the World's Platform One - the realisation is solid throughout, and occasionally tremendous. This is enhanced through impressive use of CGI, subtly adding matte effects to increase the impact of the studio sets as well as combining seamlessly with live action to create important plot-elements. Only the set-piece villain is a little simplistic, its lack of gripping limbs or tentacles making it more of a hemorrhoid with teeth than the lurking horror earlier shots promise, but with corpses and head-holes aplenty there's already more than enough gore to go round.

Overall, The Long Game is one of those stories that will have people complaining that it's complex enough to have been a two-parter, but its joy is precisely that it feels like one already. Pacey without being rushed; funny without being silly; complex without being confusing - and perfect Dr Who without being 'special'. If only all bog standard episodes could be this good... Then the series really WOULD be in it for the long game.

No-one could accuse Russell T Davies of lacking commercial sense. An old monster in Episode One to reassure the fans. Half the budget thrown at Episode Two to convince the CGI generation this stuff is worth watching. A gloriously historical Episode Three to flex the BBC's period drama muscles. Then relax with a money-saving two parter, coasting on the show's newly established success... And then, just as the rating starts to sag with the traditional mid-season slump - WHAM! Hit 'em with a Dalek.

Now THAT'S Doctor Who.

Previews suggested Dalek would be the pick of the season, and expectations were consequently enormously high for this episode - although perhaps not much higher than they would have been anyway, with the iconic nature of this, the Doctor's oldest foe. The BBC's pan-media publicity outlet ground into action once more after a lull for Aliens of London / World War III: a new-look Dalek graced the cover of the Radio Times; trailers popped up at all hours of the day; Blue Peter worked its usual behind-the-scenes-feature magic; Newsround Showbiz carried a feature on the story, although not until after the show aired... Even BBCi managed to make a story out of it, focusing on the monster's new abilities.

Ultimately, the episode probably ended up commanding almost the same level of public attention as Rose, the new season's opener - and much like that story, it succeeds absolutely in recreating an icon for a new generation, mixing the traditional with the innovative to invent a whole new, even more satisfying creation. The tight cast, high production values, impressive direction and top-notch visual effects are everything people had been demanded of the new Dalek, and indeed everything they should now be coming to expect from the series, but it's the writing that's the real start of this episode. It was always going to take more than a bigger laser to evolve the Dalek from a prop that crops up in Kit-Kat adverts into a really scary alien, and Rob Shearman absolutely cracks it, creating instead something that goes beyond all that and becomes, at times, genuinely moving.

The self-consciously traditional prop/costume design belies a new direction for what is a supposedly a 'monster' story, with a tense, claustrophobic storyline that makes the most of its 45 minutes by filling it with moral greys and difficult decisions rather than great big explosions. Gone are the massed armies of yester-who, the 10,000 Daleks waiting just off camera to annihiliate the universe - here we have a single lone Dalek, against a single, lone Doctor; both of them intelligent, and both of them dangerous. The result is an exquisite pair of performances, each one bouncing off the continuing wonder that is Billie Piper, and each character (and yes, it is a character) bringing out the best and the worst in the other. Between the three of them - amongst all the mayhem, and despite the occasionally overbearing incidental music and now-traditional wobbly editing - they create what are undoubtedly some of the strongest moments ever seen in the series.

Genuinely, it's hard to say much about this episode other than how good it is. It's scary, it's funny, it's tense, it's almost impossibly involving, and it's got lines that will send a thump of energy right through your tragic geeky heart. And it's got the best cliffhanger ever written, right there in the middle of the episode. And not only has it got all this, and profound emotional arcs, and powerful, moving moments of drama, AND great big explosions, it's also got the cute gay bloke off of Corrie.

Never mind aiming at the eyepiece, this one hits you right between the eyes - and stays there.

I bet some of the dedicated fan base are spitting feathers tonight. "Dalek" was all about icons - the show itself, the characters themselves, the enemy itself - enough icons in one show to keep media students happy for months. But rather than keep each element in thier own place, this series continues to chop up convention and slap heritage in the face with a kipper; the Doctor turns evil, the Dalek turns soft, and the companion gets herself into trouble an... Oh, okay, not [i] all [/i] the conventions are altered...

"Dalek" will certainly divide opinion. Maybe some fans are beyond convincing now - for some, this series is beyond a joke and as far as they are concerned, Doctor Who finished with Sylvester McCoy and has never, ever returned. This episode pushed the show further away from the assumed conventions of Doctor Who, and maintains the very high standard of the series so far. Make no mistake - this is classy, classic television, with the confidence of the show oozing from the screen. By making the Doctor far more complex, twisted even, the new series opens up the usual character traits and stuffs them full of new, unexpected details. Viewers are being asked to feel sorry for a Dalek, and for a moment actually does. The viewer - this one, at any rate - must have held their breath when they realised what was implied by the line "You'd make a good Dalek..."

For this episode to work, Christopher Eccleston would need all his ability turned all the way up. He did and gave one of the best performances of any of his predecessors. The shock seeing the trapped shirtless Doctor, urging his captor to listen to reason, was made all the more real by the constant sense of fear running through the entire episode. In 45 minutes, real terror existed in an episode destined to be remembered as a modern classic. Genuine concern at the safety of Rose, genuine shock at the electrocution of the guards, and as for the Dalek's levitation...

By making the Dalek and Doctor so closely tied, the danger always existed that the episode would be too sentimental, perhaps too domestic to use a common phrase round these parts. But how clever, how perfectly written, was the twist which saw the last surviving Time Lord turn into a gun-toting mad-man, and consequently the Dalek into the moral voice of reason. How brilliant to see the depth of intellegence which allowed humour to appear like raindrops on a windshield, giving the Doctor a real gritty drama to act through but with a background of light relief perfectly realised. Christopher Eccleston will surely be ranked fairly high on the list of 'best' or 'most convincing' Doctors. Not because he's the most recent or the better looking, but because this Time Lord has layers so thick one series wouldn't be enough to scratch the surface, and that is the kind of character the series has always needed. Of course, one series is all we have, all we get given after all these years. "Dalek" was a very different, very modern Doctor Who, played by one of the best Doctors, with one of the best narratives. Onwards, ever, ever onwards.