Since this series was announced I have been very excited. I looked forward to New Earth with great anticipation, only to be dissapointed. Perhaps this was just a weak opening episode? Perhaps. so would Tooth and Claw be any better? it certainly looked good on the trailers, and the tardisode gave a nice little taster. So would it live up to expectations?

Unfortunately not.

It was definitely an improvement on New Earth, but compared to Series one and the Christmas Invasion, it just lacked that magic sparkle. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there is something missing from these new episodes; They fail to enthrall. There were a few good set pieces, but overall Tooth and Claw was flat and uninteresting.

I think one of the problems, as with New Earth, is that the story was too fast paced. It just rushed past, many details, such as the "monky monk monks" being forgotten about by the end (another was the Viscum Album imbued doors, which the werewolf broke through 5 minutes after we were told it couldn't).

Tennant, although a supremely talented actor, failed to impress me as the Doctor, and Billie Piper, as Rose, was all too familiar with the new Doctor all too soon. A complete contrast from her uncertainty over the entire first series and the Christmas Invasion (for instance what was the point of the whole "i tell you what... WEREWOLF!" bit?).

I will continue to watch the new series, as i am awaiting some fantastic episodes. i only hope that the other writers will produce the sort of quality stories that i came to expect while watching the Christopher Eccleston series, as RTD's first two offerings have left me cold.

Well done RTD! I thought he’d be on safer ground with a pseudo-historical and indeed he was: the overriding impression is of a very traditional Who tale, scary, suspenseful, atmospheric, and thoroughly enjoyable. The blistering pace is par for the course these days but despite that it all flowed rather well from the superb opening scenes as a more(traditionally) vulnerable Tardis gets it wrong and lands 100 years earlier than intended, with the Doctor and Rose stepping out onto the windswept highlands for a meeting with Queen Victoria herself!

My wife was very annoyed by the flippancy of the running gag of Rose betting the Queen will say she was not amused but to my mind Victoria was treated rather well by RTD, particularly when expressing her grief and longing to be re-united with her late husband Prince Albert. I thought that might be the cue for RTD to take his usual pop at religion but this time he restrained himself somewhat.

There is a great rapport building between the Tenth Doctor and Rose. Though Sarah travelled with the Third Doctor in his final season the real rapport was between herself and Tom Baker’s incarnation, peaking with stories like Pyramids of Mars and here the same thing is happening with David Tennant and Billie Piper. The little exchanges between the two at the start and at the end (when discussing whether the Royal Family were werewolves)again felt very traditionally Doctor/companion. The Royals are certainly getting the RTD treatment of late- one moment they’re “on the roof” with the PM having to step in to do the Christmas broadcast and now there’s the prospect of them changing into werewolves during the next full moon.

The setting was suitably atmospheric, the supporting cast excellent and the CGI werewolf fine. Particularly effective was the scene with the Doctor and the werewolf listening on opposite sides of the wall.

David Tennant is superb as the Doctor in this story, several notches up from New Earth and again he takes the lead in resolving the crisis rather than relying on others with Rose “reduced” to the more traditional helper/companion role, further emphasising the restoration of the Doctor as the central figure in the season.

An excellent story which gets better with each viewing.

Tooth and Claw' was an episode of two halves. The first half was, on the whole, a chilling, beautifully filmed & nicely paced horror story. The colours, in particular, were absolutely gorgeous! I loved the two carriages at the beginning each carrying boxes with secrets, and the build up to the monster reveal was masterfully handled & extremely scary. The scene where chained Rose talked to the being in the cage was a lovely partial inverse of the scene from 'Dalek'.

Victoria (Pauline Collins) was reasonably well characterised throughout the first half. Her speech about the dead was both moving & apposite, and I loved her robust response to Rose's state of dress, though I can't see why she didn't have her shut up in a cupboard for impertinence *long* before the end.

The second half, on the other hand, was at best a mildly entertaining run-about-corridors-screaming romp. I was very amused (if one can use that word) that the 'Confidential' episode quoted someone saying that monsters are scarier in the imagination -- when will they learn that cgi creations lolloping around corridors just don't cut it? All that "bullets won't stop it" dashing up & down stairs felt far too close to 'Dalek' & 'The Parting of the Ways', while the Monster Repellant^TM mistletoe was reminiscent of the Vinegar Is Your Ally trick they pulled on the Slovene (though I did appreciate that Isobel got to do a bit more than scream). And surely they could have cut just one of the "we are not amused" jokes [pretty please?] to shoe-horn in a bit of "Our Werewolf From Outer Space is unique because..." at some point.

And then the final minutes -- simply naff in so many ways. The big & clunky engineering solution was great fun, but, like Rose, I'm a little at a loss as to quite why it worked (let alone how Sir Robert's father & Albert figured it all out). The Christian imagery of the dying alien left me a bit bewildered. And let's not even mention the knighthoods, Victoria's sudden mindswitch, the tasteless royal family jokes & that And We Shall Advertise Our Forthcoming Series scene.

I've not yet adjusted to Tennant's Doctor. He feels much more old school than Eccleston's potrayal, which should be reassuring but actually feels retrograde. Meanwhile, Rose was reduced to traditional Companion fare: info dump catalyst, character in jeopardy & atrocious comic relief.

Putting both halves together, one of the better RTD episodes (not saying much) but a bit too much of a 'Batman Begins'/'Hound of the Baskervilles'/last year's Dalek episodes/'Buffy' mishmash for my taste. (And just *where* did the Scottish monks learn those moves?)

Let me begin by saying all the Russell T Davies detractors are missing the point. I am 41 years old I can vividly recall the Pertwee and Baker eras. I even remember Patrick Troughton episodes as a child. If I was a 10 year old now I would be wetting my pants in anticipation of Saturday. This is the Dr who I have been waiting all my life for the BBC to make. Having said that though the first two episodes of the "new season" have been a little disappointing.

My gripe with "Tooth and Claw" is it just didn't make sense. If you viewed the Tardisode for this story you would know a comet crashed on a Scottish moor 100 years ago although this is mentioned in the story it would have made a good pre credits sequence rather than the one we were presented with. Although monks doing martial arts in slow motion looks good in the context of this story it was somewhat silly. A little exposition would have been useful. Where did these monks come from?. Why were they in thrall to a werewolf?. This was just not explained. So the household staff are rounded up and placed in a room with a mysterious cage which it is revealed contains a man. In the middle of the day he would have just been a scrawny looking man in a cage not a werewolf so why did the staff scream? Man in a cage not scary, especially if locked up.

So the Doctor and Rose arrive in 1879. Loved the adoption of a Scottish accent. Would it really be so wrong if the doctor had a permanent Scottish accent?. He had a Manc accent and that was acceptable so why not Scottish?. Pauline Collins fantastic as Queen Victoria as well. Hope the doctor and Rose didn't have a long walk to the house. The Queen could have let him ride in the carriage rather then make him walk.

My second gripe with this episode concerns the Werewolf plot line. So the Werewolf is supposed to be alien rather then a traditional werewolf. Is Russell doing a Joss Whedon here and playing fast and loose with Werewolf mythology to suit his story. An explanation of this would have been useful. So are all werewolves alien or just this one?. The Doctor has encountered them before but he didn't explain where or why. It may have explained their aversion to mistletoe and the power of moonlight.

Loved the Werewolf transformation and the werewolf itself. In fact will go as far as to state that was the best werewolf I have ever seen. The designers got it right there. They obviously took notes from "Dog soldiers" and came up with a truly scary werewolf. The producers of "Buffy the vampire slayer" could take notes a guy in a monkey suit is not a scary werewolf. That one most definitely was. A huge man-like wolf fulfils the criteria.

The chase around the house ending with them holed up in one room with the big bad wolf outside was fantastic. If I had been my 10 year old self I would have been hiding behind the cliched sofa. It ticked all the boxes on that score.

So why did I feel a sense of disappointment at the end?. Mostly because I Felt this was a story that deserved a whole hour. 45 minutes was not enough for Russell to flesh out the story so left massive unexplained holes. The same thing could be said of episode 1 as well. Make Dr Who an hour and a half long and have done with STRICTLY COME DANCING FEVER. It deserves it. Can't wait for next week.

"Who let the wolf out?" RTD cetainly did with "Tooth and Claw": a gripping and entertaining ode to the werewolf legend with an expected whovian alien twist. This episode was a vast improvement from "New Earth" - The fear factor was raised up a notch or two and the plot was well paced with the rising body count.

The "We are not amused" bet between the Doctor and Rose was annoying and totally unneccessary - lets just say I was not amused. The wolf CGI was acceptable, but could have been better, more menacing. I loved the opening sequence, despite the Scottish Monks trying desparately to be Shaolin monks and not quite pulling it off.

Tennant is starting to win me around and came into his own in the in the library scene. Looks like his glasses have been introduced as one of his querks - he'd make a convincing Harry Palmer. Maybe Michael Caine should pop us as the Doctor's father. Imagine Michael Caine as a long lost Timelord.

Pauline Collins portrayal of Queen Victoria was fantastic, and She certainly put the Doctor and Rose in their place by first awarding them with Honours - " Sir Doctor of Tardis" and "Dame Rose of Tyler" for saving the day, and then banishing them for the their unworldly knowledge, only to set up and introduce the "Torchwood Institute" to combat unnatural threats to the Empire. This sets up a nice precedent for the Torchwood spin off series, which by the way is an anagram of Doctor Who - as if you didn't know.

RTD delivers a second episode superior to the first, just like he did with series one, so things should only get better.

When I reviewed New Earth on these pages last week, I had made the comment that Russell T Davies seemed to concoct his scripts from a shopping list of ingredients and then create a semblance of a plot by simply joining the dots together. One of my initial fears about Tooth and Claw had been that same worry, that it was a case of throwing in Queen Victoria, a Werewolf and some Monks and hoping that that was enough to divert an audience for 45 minutes, distracting attention away from the scantily dressed plot built up around it. Well for once I am glad to have been proved wrong, for virtually everything that New Earth did wrong last week, Tooth & claw did right this week.

Tooth and Claw on paper is of course probably the most traditionally old fashioned Doctor Who story since the Unquiet Dead, and while I wouldn’t for one minute suggest that this should be the template for all new Doctor Who, it certainly proved that the old Doctor Who formula can still hack it in a twenty first century context, without being drowned under a deluge of camp humour and pop culture references.

The humour for the most part was very witty and well handled, although what the Royal family (allegedly viewers of the new series if you believe the tabloids), would make of the various jokes at their expense is anybodys guess, is Russell T Davies a republican by any chance?

It is amazing that the series has took quite so long to do a werewolf, and after one false start, Mags in Greatest Show barely counts, we finally got a bonefide Doctor Who werewolf, and very well executed it was too. While I am sure someone somewhere will make the critiscism that it looked too CGI’d, I would remind them that this is television and the fact that Doctor Who is getting this standard of effects work at the moment is an achievement in itself. Despite shots of the creature being used sparingly, one was in no doubt that the creature was a feral force of nature. The effective two shot of the doctor and the Wolf separated only by a wall, was an image that certainly stuck in the memory, and I am sure for younger viewers this story provided many a behind the sofa moment.

The fact that the wolf was given a credible science fiction background also worked in the story’s favour without ever becoming bogged down in technobabble. Particularly well handled as well was the way the separate elements of the Queen, the Monks and the Wolf were tied together in the story, it could so easily have been written as coincidence that all three happened to end up in the same place, but each element had a pivotal role in advancing the story.

Queen Victoria once again proved a worthy addition to the new series rollcall of famous historical figures, and just as Simon Callow so ably did last year, Pauline Collins managed to tread the line remarkably well between portraying the theatrical aspect of the character most audiences would identify with, while adding just enough depth to make the character a living breathing person. That Doctor who is reintroducing these historical figures, which have often been poorly handled in the old series, can only be a good thing if they can maintain this calibre of actor. If only one child in a hundred gets the urge to look through a history book after watching, then the series is still fulfilling that educational remit it started with over forty odd years ago.

So to David Tennant’s second full appearance as the Doctor, last week he breezed through the whole story with an air of confidence that firmly cemented him as a Doctor, whether he will become a definitive Doctor remains to be seen. Tennant didn’t set a single foot wrong in Tooth and Claw, but has still not had a defining moment which has firmly established him in the part. Tennant has a tough call, he has the unenviable task of stamping his mark, on what for the last fifteen years has been a guest rather than a star part (McGann, Richard E Grant, Eccleston not to mention the Undound and comic relief Doctors) and which has fundamentally destroyed the identification most people built up with the character during its first twenty years. While Tennant has all the attributes to make a great Doctor, he still needs that defining moment, that will to us older viewers at least allow us to sit up and say this is the Doctor and not just a Doctor.

While Tennant’s Doctor may have been slightly underwritten in this story, I have also felt a subtle shift in the character of Rose. I was a huge fan of Rose during season 1 and the Christmas Invasion, but certainly in the last two stories, the character has had very few defining standout scenes, not that any of her stuff in this story was bad, but all of a sudden Rose seems to be less vital and more just a standard Doctor Who assistant and I am puzzled as to why this change has suddenly come about.

The revelation that Queen Victoria laid the seeds for Torchwood was an unexpected but welcome surprise. It will be interesting to see where the Torchwood theme is going this season and whether it will lead to a bone fide role for the organisation in the story arc, or whether it is all just an extended set up for the spin off series.

So all in all, a welcome return to form for the series after a rather uneven opener, a traditional Doctor Who story which while not really breaking any new ground, touched all the bases it needed to keep both the fans and the casual viewer happy. With some truly cinematic production values, and a Russell T Davies script that for once didn’t compromise the integrity of the show, Tooth and Claw I am sure will be fondly remembered by fans and viewers alike for many years to come.