With The Long Game ready to be dismissed as a re-hash of Vengeance on Varos I was simply struck dumb by yet another mind blowing episode, both literally and figuratively.

The TARDIS arrives on the seemingly cosmopolitan Satellite 5 with new companion, the slightly shifty Adam. It all seems like a bustling cornucopia of human achievement, however both Rose and the Doctor feel something is amiss. Why does the technology feel wrong, where are the aliens and why is floor 139 so uncomfortably hot.

The sets first off were (to coin a phrase) fantastic and had a real feel of solidity and age about them. The acting was superb, everyone from the coldly sinister Editor to the Kronk Burger Van Man played the action as so without knowing winks or playing down to their audience.

Everything seemed to slot into place with events happening for a reason and every character acting within believable parameters. The most innocuous of plot details bore on all aspects of the denouement which the better of these one-off 45 minute episodes do so well.

Revealing many elements alongside characters who are seeing them for the first time worked even better than in 'Rose' not least because the entire audience were experiencing for the first time as well that character. The most effective of these being both Suki and Kaffika's separate arrivals on floor 500. Despite having seen it on several occasions the character's response, actions and in particular the incidental music relayed the feelings of fear and suspicion which grew in their minds. You could almost feel their apprehension as each character felt their way around the sinister surroundings.

Simon Pegg, cameoing in a similar fashion to many comics in eighties Who, excelled as the sinister editor believing to have control but really being a puppet for the true master of the station.

The Doctor seems to have settled down after his harrowing confrontation last week and his grin/gurn quotient appears to have dropped considerally, and this is a good thing. Billie Piper unfortunately is still not convincing me, particularly as her character is imprisioned in a mockney accent more at home in the mouth of Eliza Doolittle or Dick Van Dyke.

Bruno Langley also shone as the dodgy Adam seeking to better himself financially through foreknowledge, but with a role model like James Statton you can hardly expect him to act any different. His slightly comical fate brings the program back to earth (so to speak) and allows the audience to come back to reality after an engaging and exciting adventure in the far flung future.

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 &%$#.

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!

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.

This could well be the best of the series so far. At no point during the episode did you feel like you had to make allowances for moments designed y'know for kids. No farting or burping here. This was a story sleekly designed to frighten the bejesus out of everyone and was all the better for it. Arguably, for the first time, the series held its back story on its sleeve throwing references for long term viewers and fans all over the place, to Davros and Cybermen, without needing to name any names. But new mythology was created for new fans, with the adversaries in the Time War spelt out for the first time and The Doctor's part in it.

Ironically the scariest moment for me were the scenes in which this story was told as The Doctor confronted the Dalek. He just ranted at it, face red with anger, veins popping out all over. We've seen Eccleston do comedy in the series, but this was the first time we saw his out and out anger and I just sat clutching the armrests of my chair. I jumped as we saw The Doctor's face bending around the Dalek's line of sight. Hartnell smirked, McCoy underplayed, Eccleston boiled over. Billie Piper was at it again too bringing even more dimensions to her work. The moment when we were led to believe the Dalek had killed Rose, even though having seen spoilery clips of later episodes we know she'll still be around, was heart breaking because the histrionics and screams which could have greeted her end are replaced with a quiet seeya to The Doctor.

But it wouldn't have worked if Nick Briggs, in his voice work as the Dalek, hadn't been there giving as good as he got. I've been following Briggs' Daleks for years in the Big Finish audio dramas but I haven't witnessed anything like the performance he gave tonight. In the diary in this month's Doctor Who magazine, he talked about how he was asked to loosen his intonation slightly and he comments that he'd been wanting to do that for years (perhaps constrained before by expectation). It really showed. This Dalek had an emotional range which made it even creepier -- as it tricked Rose into caring for it to the extent that she would touch and reinvigorate -- with that quiet whisper. Terrifying.

Much like The Unquiet Dead the episode benefited from having a small number of humans. It's tricky for the main guest cast to make an impression in circumstances such as this, but Corey Johnson's Henry van Statten had just the right level of smarm, Anna-Louise Plowman (who was previously in the Stargate tv series) oozed charisma and Bruno Langley had to just the right amount of charm without you wanting to throttle him. I like that he'll be travelling to another adventure -- he's a good counterpoint to the now slightly darker Doctor. Also want to mention Jana Carpenter who I think was the guard on the stairs who stood her ground against the Dalek -- along with Beccy Armory who played Raffalo the plumber in the second episode its an example of someone really making you care in only a few moments of screen time.

But again, to demonstrate what an intricate jigsaw this episode was, none of their work might have been as good had Rob Shearman not produced another gem. I'd thought it would be a more traditional work than Big Finish's Chimes At Midnight and particularly Scherzo. So it was with all the action and chase sequences. But there was still something else going on. You have an episode with a Dalek. What to do with it. I mean you could just drop it in a city and letting it go on a killing spree, and that might be exciting and scary (and expensive) but what would be the point we'd need to do something new. And as has been the case with this new series and Shearman's past work it was bound to subvert expectations.

They've invaded Earth, the universe and time on countless occasions. We've seen their beginning and now and then their ultimate end. What next? Make us care for them. Actually make them the wounded and The Doctor the aggressor, wanting their ultimate destruction. No crouching on the floor with two wires debating whether they should be destroyed. They just needed to die at all costs, the hero standing almost over one with a giant gun hoping to finish the job of wiping out their race for the final time. And we didn't want him to. Actually the Daleks have been given feelings before, way back in the Troughton era in The Evil of the Daleks when they were infected with the human factor leading to them inploding in on themselves in a civil war. Then it was a cool way of ending the adventure in some excitement. We never heard of that faction again (give or take a comic strip).

The programme makers knew that if you gave them feelings it took away the one thing which made them different. That they just wanted to kill everything else. Watching tonight I was reminded of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode I, Borg in which that series' version of the unstoppable killing machine was drawn away from its kind, spent time with humans and started to question its purpose. In that series it had the ultimate effect of weakening the foe for years afterward, because we knew that under their organo-metal exterior they still had the capacity to care. And even when it returned to its own kind there was that little wink at the end that it had taken the experience with it. They became too human.

Doctor Who didn't make that mistake. The Dalek might have absorbed some of Rose's DNA and was beginning to have new ideas, thoughts and feelings but it didn't know what to do with them. It could have gone either way and made it even better at its job. Instead it just wanted to die. And there it went, imploding in on itself. But we know its just that Dalek and no matter what The Doctor says it was the last of them, in our heart of hearts we know they'll back, and judging by all the flying, plungering and electricuting, deadlier and scarier than they've ever been.

Some will question whether its right that our hero would go on the offensive in that way -- all of the jellybabies and telling Leela to put away her knife out the window. But we've seen this kind of thing already this series from this incarnation with anti-plastic, withholding moisturizer, gas explosions and hunking great missiles. What people probably won't like is how direct it is, in a moment when the enemy is already effectively defeated. Which is an idea entirely inkeeping with Shearman's canon -- the deconstruction of what we know -- in previous cases through the restructuring of story, this time the audiences reaction to a Doctor who becomes an anti-hero bent on revenge.

The jigsaw continues with Joe Aherne's direction. His vampire series Ultraviolet was one of the best looking and written genre series of the past twenty years so I was delighted to hear he was directing some Who. In television series like this, it's less easy to see the individual contributions of the director, editor, photographer and producer. But for me this show seemed to flow much better than the rest. It had a fairly linear story, certainly, but the pacing seemed perfect, and it didn't throw in a camera angle to be flashy. Everything seemed in service of the story. I'd include in this Murray Gold's score which demonstrated what he is capable of, pulling back when he needed to in a very Howard Shore way.

But, finally what of the realisation of the Dalek? Considering the horror stories in the past of Spider-Daleks and humanoids I was amazed and overjoyed at actually how respectful this design is. There is something of the Battle-Dalek from their last tv appearance about it, all gleaming metal. The rationalising of the sink plunger as part of its killing armoury worked very well, as did it's new approach to the electronic keypad. The CG effects really demonstrated how far tv has come, especially as the exterminated not only went negative but also transparant, shocks flying through skeleton.

After the disappointment of the film version of The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy, I feel blessed that my actual favourite franchise is being rendered so perfecting in the next century. It took that familiar jigsaw, all of the icons of the series, and cut its own pieces out to fit. Our perception of The Doctor and those Daleks will never be the same again, and that's an extraordinary thing.