So the dumbing down of Dr. Who continues...

After being part of the campaign to bring back Dr.Who for many years and thoroughly enjoying the novels during the intervening years, especially the ones published by Virgin (when the BBC were no longer interested in having anything to do with Dr.Who), I am sad to say I haven't even saved a recording of the last seven episodes of the new series, as I know I won't want to watch these episodes again.

Series two. Overall, despite the werewolf - just not enough bite. Perhaps they are missing the Daleks, who will surely return for some much needed sense of genuine menace in series three.

As for the most recent offering Fear Her… Ooooh! The scary badly drawn scribbles of a little girl sitting in her bedroom are coming to get me - I'd better hide behind the sofa with terrifying monsters like that! Or maybe just reach for a rubber…

Turn the page Russell T Davies! Time to move on from all this smug silliness and generally being too concerned with being a comedian, and get back to some proper classic Dr.Who and some interesting, absorbing, dramatic, and intelligent writing.

Fear Her is by no means a classic episode of Dr.Who, and like The Idiot’s Lantern and Love & Monsters, it’s certainly not going to be remembered for the right reasons. Despite the title, there was little to fear in this uninteresting story set in a suburban London street of the near future.

And oh… Not London again!! London, London, London, London… What is this obsession with London? Why does our favourite Timelord choose to visit London over and again? And not even the most interesting bits of London! Suburbs. Council estates. Shopping centres. And so on… In the end, I have begun to understand the Tardis can travel anywhere - so long as it is in London!

If it has to be a story set in England on Earth, couldn’t it be Sheffield or Birmingham or Bristol or Plymouth just for once? If it’s just an ordinary street, then why not let it be a city other than London for crying out loud!

And if they really do have to visit London, lets have really scary slimy monsters in the dark recesses of the Underground, or lots of classic nasty Daleks coming up out of the Thames!

Was I the only one to cringe when Fear Her turned out to be yet another story featuring London with the forthcoming Olympics? I imagine not. The hype and propaganda surrounding the Olympics will be bad enough in five or six years time - we hardly need it to start now - so this felt a bit like telly ads promoting Christmas shopping in August. Too early for this. Plus, the story was just not good enough. Kids are disappearing. An alien has taken over a little girl in a suburban street. Not much happens really. Altogether, very much done on the cheap.

The groan of it being London again, and there being nothing much to ‘fear’ apart from an alien petal in a little girl, and that daft ending with the Doctor carrying the Olympic torch were very much off kilter and I’m guessing totally missed the mark with most fans.

I’m even starting to go off Billie Piper - instead of being so impressed with her in the last series, I’m finding the new ‘clever dick’ Rose increasingly irritating.

But it’s this dumbing down of the new series and aiming so much of it at an audience of young children that has really took the polish off the show’s return to our screens. As it turned out, The Christmas Invasion was an omen of what was to come, but strangely enough New Earth, Tooth and Claw, School Reunion, and The Girl in the Fireplace were all excellent and thoroughly enjoyable...

New Earth had it’s moments, a clever premise, and some excellent action shots in the lift shafts, and for it once it wasn’t set in London or even on this planet, which was a relief.

Tooth and Claw was clever, with the Matrix style fighting monks and the combination of Queen Victoria and the beast, and being set in Scotland in a remote country house did give it something extra.

School Reunion was superb. I thought the reappearance of Sarah Jane and K9 worked really well, and the whole thing was handled sensitively - and it enhanced the Dr.Who-ness of the series. My personal favourite episode, and I’d love to see more coming across the best of the old characters in future stories - after all, there are lots and lots to choose from! We might even find out what happened to Ace and some of the others…

The Girl in the Fireplace was also a classic, which I really enjoyed. Really well done, with history and space elements combined as it should be, and a real charm and elegance to the writing. Magical. Very well thought out and handled with delicacy and care. Perfect Dr.Who. And I loved the horse crashing through the mirror - which was shamelessly stolen from the cover of the 1987 Stephen Donaldson paperback, The Mirror of Her Dreams.

So after a dodgy start with a killer Christmas Tree, Series Two of the new adventures of the Doctor was surging ahead and at this stage compulsive viewing…

Of course, it all went wrong with the appallingly dreadful new version of the Cybermen with all those endlessly long lingering shots of marching steel boots - as if we couldn’t guess what they were going to look like after all the previews and press releases. The entire history of the Cybermen, with Mondas and the weakness of gold was completely forgotten about. While the poor casting of a lacklustre ‘Trigger’ from Fools & Horses was just not believable. And why mess with the classic story of the Cybermen - somehow, this just didn’t feel right or appropriate. Especially as a proper Cyber head from the old classic series was featured in the Chris Eccleston episode Dalek in Van Statten’s museum.

I don’t think the incredibly disappointing new design for the characters helped at all - the new Cybermen look more like something off a children’s TV show than credible villains. Bitterly disappointing to dumb down one of the best Dr.Who baddies to this. From start to finish, Russell T Davies just got the Cybermen altogether wrong, and his credibility as the saviour of Dr.Who ended at that point.

Unfortunately, the mistakes in series two did not end there.

To my mind, The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances were by far the best episodes of series one, and fantastic Dr.Who, taking the whole show to a new level. Just what Dr.Who on TV should be. Startling special effects, good acting, an interesting look into an aspect of history that was hitherto not really explored, the excellent addition of Captain Jack, and the only truly frightening behind the sofa script since Dr.Who returned.

So I can understand the writers looking at following this up with more of a similar vein. Yet The Idiot’s Lantern seemed more like an attempt to secure future funding from the BBC establishment, and just too self-indulgent and dull for it’s own good - and oh dear, yes, London, yet again.

While Rose and the Doctor are getting more and more flirty and silly all the time. Now don’t get me wrong, Billie Piper is a very attractive young woman, but how much of the meagre 45 minutes screen time was wasted in showing off her 1950’s rock& roll outfit from the BBC wardrobe department?

The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit were better and almost rescued the decline, in a story much more like the best of classic Dr.Who, off world with a colony in danger from an unknown foe. After all, there is nothing wrong with doing more of what has worked before, keeping it simple and delivering what the public want.

Then Love & Monsters, and now Fear Her… Oh, dear!

Can someone please point out to the powers that Beeb, that Dr. Who is not and never was a children's programme!

The key audience is not under 10 years old!

I fear if things are allowed to deteriorate any further, then the next series will no doubt see an episode about a Dr.Who fan club vs. a Mr. Blobby alien, written by a 10 year old Blue Peter viewer as part of a CBBC competition to see who can write something more frightening than an episode of Tellytubbies. In fact, you can find more charm and more interesting stories on Postman Pat than in recent Dr.Who!

Please… Dr. Who should be based on the classic episodes of drama - aimed at intelligent adults - not based on episodes that made viewers cringe featuring giant Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts monsters and South Wales Hi Di Hi holiday camps featuring Bonnie Langford having a tantrum. Isn't this what lost viewers and got the old series cancelled in the first place?

If every episode in the Sylvestor McCoy era had been like the gripping Wolves of Fenric or the classic scene with Daleks shooting at a baseball bat wielding Ace as she smashes through the glass window, then I don't think Dr. Who would ever had been cancelled in the first place.

And now we have Peter Kay in a green rubber suit in Love & Monsters commenting that "It tastes like chicken"? Ridiculous! Almost as bad as the ludicrous ‘Keystone Cops’ running left and right through doorways in the opening sequence! How could they do this to our show? You have to suspect that David Tennant and Billie Piper were too ashamed to be in this episode any more than absolutely necessary!

If Blue Peter want to produce a TV show, let them have a competition to influence an episode of Eastenders! Maybe one about the London Olympics coming up soon!

I’m pretty sure that Jon Pertwee would not be at all happy with the way things are going. And while I like David Tennant as an actor, I feel sorry for him being made to portray the character in such a childishly silly and falsely forced gung-ho manner. We can only hope that a more serious Doctor will emerge after Rose is killed off… So fingers crossed!

So now we have two more weeks of long lingering cyber boots stomping around, while they say, “We are going to get you!” without actually getting anyone, and more long-lingering shots of Billie Piper’s exit from the show… But maybe then, next year, if they haven’t completely lost the audience, we can get back to some proper serious Dr.Who.

If the BBC seriously want to do silly childish dumbed-down Dr. Who for kids, why not simply put together a spin off series for the under tens? They could call it ‘Teachwood’ and set it in a school (in London of course) where the teachers have been taken over by aliens, or feature a story about a young child making people she draws disappear and almost spoiling a sporting event… “By Eck!” as the Doctor from a planet with a north would have said, now that would make a fine series of Dr.Who.

That's more like it! After the disappointing filler episode we are back on track. I enjoyed "Fear Her" a lot, and if it felt at times more Sapphire & Steel than Doctor Who there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that once in a while.

The Doctor and Rose travel to London for the 2012 Olympics, he quipping that the last time the Games were in London the opening ceremony was so good he had to go back and watch it twice. But strange things are happening on a residential street close to route the Olympic torch will take. Children and animals are disappearing, and it all seems to have something to do with a little girl who stays in her bedroom drawing pictures.

The Doctor and Rose both investigate, clearly having fun and playing Inspector Morse and Lewis games. The Doctor senses some sort of energy on the street, whereas nobody apart from an elderly lady seems to have noticed anything - apart from the obviously missing kids.

It is Rose who notices something odd about the girl peering out of her bedroom window, and we are treated to a frightening scene with Rose alone in the girl's bedroom realising there is something unusual inside the closet...

Cutting a fairly long story short, the girl herself isn't evil, nor is the alien that has in effect posessed her. It simply misses its billions of siblings and has been taking the children and pets in an attempt to feel their love. The Doctor, himself captured in a drawing and unable to directly help Rose realises this and manages to communicate via the drawing that Rose needs to find the entity's space ship and introduce it into the Olympic torch so it feels the love of the thousands upon thousands of fans.

Here is my only quibble with this story, the climax was over too quickly. Otherwise Euros Lyn's direction was more impressive than his last outing (The Idiot's Lantern, complete with strange angles) and paced well. Visually the effects were superb, especially the scribble monster created when the girl gets angry and simply scribbles on paper in frustration.

Not on a par with 'The Girl In the Fireplace' or 'Tooth & Claw' but a thoroughly worthy story, and the climax gave Rose perhaps her last triumphant moment before the final two-parter. The teaser clearly hints at trouble ahead for her which contrasts with the up-beat tone of this story.

7.5/10

I think this episode represents part of the problem of the second series to date. While I enjoyed it all the way through, I felt it lacked the gravity of last season and some of it was a bit tired. Another dreary housing estate, another mystery alien in a run of the mill household, and instead of Rose disappearing this week, why don't we make the Doctor disappear. It just seemed to be a bit like The Idiot's Lantern all over again - except set in 2012 with a more modern approach.

I thought the premise of the girl and cartoons coming to life was a bit dull and not really all that scary. We have had some utterly brilliant episodes in the series so far but this just could not excite me, and while the ending was marvellous with the Doctor running with the Olympic torch, the general idea behind the story seemed somewhat flimsy.

The story just seemed to lack a sparkle. There have been some cracking episodes so far but I think we could have seen the return of a few more of the Doctor's old foes. While Russel T Davies rightly wants to introduce some new terrifying monsters, he should remember that the Cyberman and Daleks have been very successful, and I am sure bringing back the dastardly Ice Warriors or even the Yeti and the Great Intelligence would be fascinating, and capture the appeal of a new generation. These monsters were great for a reason - they were well created and suitably scary!

Fear Her just never seemed to get going and lacked general purpose and direction. Even the Doctor's Tardis arriving the wrong way round was a bit odd? What was the point in that? The reason probably is that it has never happened before but even so, pointless.

On the plus side, the end of season finale looks fantastic.

The Doctor Who team have a second stab at The Idiot Lantern В– on the eve of a huge public spectacle, people are disappearing from a suburban London street while a shady family member covers up the truth; meanwhile a disembodied alien visitor plans to use the television broadcast of the spectacle for their nefarious ends, and the Doctor and Rose enjoy a tea party and lay down the law in other peoplesВ’ homes В– and pull it off a little more memorably and with more confidence.

And like the Impossible Planet two-parter, this is a mish mash of imported ideas: Twilight Zone episodes В‘The Monsters Are Due On Maple StreetВ’ and В‘ItВ’s A Good LifeВ’, The Shining (В“DannyВ’s not here, Mrs. TorranceВ”), and, probably most blatantly, Bernard RoseВ’s underrated 1988 chiller Paperhouse, in which a bedridden 10-year-old girlВ’s drawings come to life in her dreams, providing her with a real-life playmate and a demonic absent father figure who stalks her through her surreal nightmares.

As with The Idiot Lantern, the running time meant that the end was rushed and somewhat trite. There was an appalling howler in the shape of the BBC News 24 commentary, which was stammering over the disappearance of 80,000 spectators one moment, then narrating the progress of the Olympic torch the next. I really think that the Olympic torch might be a little irrelevant at that point. Some of the humour was a bit silly, and IВ’m really not sure about Doctor 10В’s enthusiasm for the Olympics in general (try picturing Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker orВ… anyone else running with the torch with such gusto).

Having said all that, the programme did actually work for me. The themes were scary and well-handled, David Tennant was very confident and had some great presence, and two of the early gags were genuinely laugh-out-loud funny (the TARDIS door joke, and the line about the Earth being the only place in the galaxy that bothered to invent edible ball bearings) By and large, even though The Idiot Lantern was terrifying in parts, I would have preferred to have seen this show take precedence over the earlier adventure with something a little more original in TILВ’s place.

There's really not much to say about this one, I'm afraid.

As much as everyone complained that "Love and Monsters" was filler, I really think this one qualifies. Despite the neato-keeno background of the London 2012 Olympiad, this one was pretty inconsequential I thought. (And did we HAVE to have another episode of Daddy Issues? Huh? Did we, really?) Neat concept about the drawings, but, meh. I had an overall feeling that I'd experienced this episode before, and not just because of the seemingly shoehorned foreshadowing of the 2-part finale. Which makes it, preciesly, like this season's version of "Boom Town." Same placement in the season and everything. Replace Eccleston's revelation about seeing the words "bad wolf" everywhere with the "there's a storm coming" and there you have it, "Boom Town."

No, seriously. Back in 1996 I'd written a multi-part fanfic about a colony where a lonely child was stealing people out of thin air and into another dimension. I'd even riffed on the Doctor being able to smell something in the vicinity of where the people had disappeared (although I'd mentioned brimstone instead of graphite). Now, while it's strange that this should later turn up in an episode, it just goes to prove that there really are only so many thoughts you can have in Doctor Who.

But WAIT A SECOND. HANG ABOUT. A tiny species in a tiny spacecraft, crashlanding on Earth, possessing a human host and able to move people out of thin air into another dimension?

Frak me, this is frickin' "Evening's Empire!"

You remember "Evening's Empire," right? 7th Doctor/Ace comic strip in DWM circa 1991, written by Andrew Cartmel (McCoy-era script editor) and drawn by Richard Piers Rayner, who would go on to draw the comic that the Tom Hanks movie The Road to Perdition was based on? Infamous because it was never completed in DWM and had to come out as a comic special a couple of years later to see the completion of it?

No?

Well, trust me, this is it. Close to it, anyway.

So, yeah, maybe there really are only so many story ideas one can have for Doctor Who anyway.

Moving on -- next episode. Yes, for all the foreboding and all that happy crap about Rose...

It seems that Ann Coulter is in charge of Torchwood.

Oh, and the other thing.

It ain't just Cybermen there. Rewatch the trailer. Distinctive laser-blast sound effects, and very distinctive way of dying seen within that trailer.

It ain't just Cybermen. I may just have to squee next episode.

*whistles*

Matthew В‘Life on MarsВ’ Graham has В– while surely attaining the accolade of most unimaginative and flat title in the seriesВ’ 28 year history В– delivered a refreshingly subtle episode, empowered considerably by the directorial restraint of Euros Lyn. Fear Her benefits considerably from following the appallingly silly Love and Monsters, and comes off better all round than the overly crammed and ill-developed IdiotВ’s Lantern, the episode with which conceptually it shares most in common.

Both GrahamВ’s and GatissВ’s episodes heavily borrow from the creepy oddities of PJ HammondВ’s Sapphire and Steel, and significantly from one particular story of said series, the fourth assignment canonized as В‘The Man Without a FaceВ’ in S&S fan circles, in which a faceless entity traps people inside photographs: Lantern used televisions for this purpose and Fear Her uses a childВ’s drawings. Simply due to the fact that Graham gives a satisfactory explanation as to the ontology of its extra-terrestrial picture perpetrators В– an intriguingly В‘sensitiveВ’ and В‘empathicВ’ fairy-like race, nicely realized as tiny celestial jellyfish with equally miniature space-pod to match В– and their unusually innocent motives, and that Lyn directs unpretentiously (a world away from his slanted-angle pretensions in Lantern В– a style only ever successfully managed in the noir-ish Happiness Patrol В– and with an element of suspense, Fear Her is the more successful of the two S&S-inspired episodes. Graham also borrows from the first S&S adventure and its themes of nursery rhymes as incantatory catalysts for supernatural/alien manifestations; a theme also prominent in the fourth S&S storyline. The creepy suggestion of a phantom father appearing В– in this case also a dead one В– via his shadow hovering on a wall is also strongly reminiscent of the В– more sinisterly shot В– apparition in said S&S story one, but it again works well here in Fear Her, tapping into the worst of childrenВ’s fears: the impostor parent. As in S&S story four, the main protagonist(s), The Doctor, is eventually trapped in a picture, manipulating his own entrapment to suggest a solution to his human companion (as do Sapphire and Steel when trapped in a photo). But Fear Her still succeeds by the skin of its teeth as being something worthwhile and interesting in its own right via its inspired play on the sometimes sinister innocence of childrenВ’s pictures, and the opening animation is a striking image which sadly wasnВ’t used enough throughout the episode В– in fact, the only similar moment was when Rose noticed the face on a drawing had changed into an angry expression on a second glance. I felt these strikingly distorted pictures werenВ’t featured enough which was disappointing, but the bizarre attack of the giant scribble was a nice diversion halfway through and the Doctor seemingly rubbing out a tangible object was a clever touch.

But Fear Her also borrows heavily from the ingenious plot of The Tomorrow PeopleВ’s early classic, The Blue and the Green, in which an alien disguised as a schoolboy paints bizarre pictures of his home world whose colours change periodically, manipulating the emotional behaviour of the onlookers from passivity to aggression. Roger Price, creator of said series, possessed a prolific and highly original imagination which was sadly frequently let down by poor acting and production standards (in some cases, В‘poorВ’ being an understatement: superb and inspired though most of the Tomorrow People plots were, their realisations were mostly home-made production-wise and sometimes the show, with its predominantly juvenile cast, resembled a ludicrous medley of Doctor Who and Why DonВ’t You?). But The Blue and the Green is widely regarded as his best storyline and its potent influence is tangibly echoed in GrahamВ’s episode. The weird ontology of the entities in Fear Her is also uncannily reminiscent of the Denjali in TB&TG: while the former channel their gestalt-like empathetic synergy through human innocents and their drawings, the latter travel and migrate on human brainwaves, culminating in their swarming away from Earth on the power supplied by the human race falling asleep and dreaming. Yes, quite bizarre indeed, but thoroughly original. GrahamВ’s В– unconscious? В– plagiarism manages to justify itself through the highly affecting use of childrenВ’s distorted drawings, as opposed to PriceВ’s use of garish planetary abstracts. If Who stories are going to be derivative then they may as well be derivative of inspired sources, and so far this season the choices have been well made, producing in Tooth and Claw, The Girl in the Fireplace, (to some extent) IdiotВ’s Lantern and Fear Her, some of the most imaginative concepts to come out of the series in a long time. Season 28 reminds me, with its jarring but oddly complementary mixture of conceptual innovation and peripheral nostalgia (Sarah Jane, K-9, Cybermen) of the massively under-rated and misinterpreted Season 20 (wherein reunions with Omega, the Brigadier, the Timelords, the Guardians and legion companions and enemies В– i.e. Five Doctors В– intermingled with highly imaginative concepts such as Manussan archaeology, sailing ships in space, and the uniquely dissected character of Visla Turlough).

With its blatantly contemporary suburban setting and vanishing children/youths, Fear Her most closely resembles Survival, last story of the original series; but these similarities are only ostensive, its plot and concepts being very different to Rona MonroВ’s script. ItВ’s also really refreshing to have an episode focused on a different family to the Tylers for a change. The young girlВ’s performance is well-balanced and to be honest in some scenes she comes across as less of a kid than the Doctor himself. The DoctorВ’s effortlessly childish and fun-loving persona is still rather irritating in places, however, Tenant gets enough В‘seriousВ’ moments to carry the story along to its fairly satisfying conclusion. Even his torch-carrying at the Olympics is ultimately justified by his using the flame to catapult the aliensВ’ pod back out into space.

Criticisms aside В– and there are a fair few more that I donВ’t think itВ’s really worth going into, as they are quite minor ones on the whole В– Fear Her is a pretty strong episode, nothing spectacular, but certainly more enjoyable and satisfactory than its conceptual cousin, Lantern. One does tend to feel often with the new series that some episodes only just miss the mark due to lack of subtlety in direction and atmosphere, and Fear Her eschews its full potential mainly due to speeding through its strengths (i.e. the animations, the shadows on walls etc.) rather than exploiting them fully; but then itВ’s difficult to create and sustain a truly chilling atmosphere when up against the clock (so far only Empty Child and Impossible Planet have managed this, both significantly two-parters В– Unquiet Dead (screaming lady) and Tooth and Claw (pre-transformation scenes of the black-pupiled lycanthrope) were forced by similar time restraints to go more for the shock tactic, though both expertly done). Fear Her gives it a good try and succeeds on its own levels, delivering a plot which fits its 45 minutes pretty well and doesnВ’t promise what it canВ’t deliver. Having said that, while I watched fairly engaged throughout, I kept thinking to myself В‘yes, that bitВ’s straight out of Sapphire and Steel, but atmospherically itВ’s still not a patch on itВ’. But it was a good effort.

7/10.