After the mixed 'Love and Monsters' comes an episode which is far more successful at giving us a good one-off story on a reduced budget.

'Fear Her' cracked on at a good pace, with the Doctor and Rose posing at detectives on a street where children are vanishing mysteriously and a local girl spends all her time penned up in her bedroom, surrounded by drawings of the missing.

Matthew Graham, writer and co-creator of 'Life on Mars', includes some nice allusions to his own series, with David Tennant and Billie Piper playing up the copper stereotype wherever possible. Graham also manages to slip several genuinely funny gags into the proceedings - the best probably being the Doctor having to repark the TARDIS when he can't open the door.

Despite the season-long issue of the episode being just a bit too well-lit (wasn't everything a little darker and moodier last year?), 'Fear Her' manages to create a genuinely unsettling sense of something nasty under the surface in everyday suburbia, with nods to 'Poltergeist' and 'The Exorcist' in the manner in which Chloe is possessed. The explanation for what is going on is quite nice, too. This is not a malevolent being looking to conquer or kill, it is a child who has lost its family and is acting out in anger against its loneliness. The London Olympics setting is used to good effect, also.

In the end, Rose manages to save the day without the Doctor, putting her nicely back in focus for the upcoming finale. If I have one criticism, it's that the foreshadowing dialogue which closes 'Fear Her' feels just a little shoehorned in, not to mention cliched ('There's a storm coming ...'). Still, the sight of the Doctor and Rose sharing a precious moment in the midst of celebrations is a nice way to set up the darkness to come.

And then we come to THAT trailer.

Clearly a lot of work has gone into the finale of season 2. This was not a standard 'next week' preview, but a proper build-up to something big. Even the music was ominous. So many questions ... was that a Dalek ray we saw a brief snippet of? It certainly seemed to share the same SFX and sound effect. Is Earth mergeing with the parallel world of 'Rise of the Cybermen'? Does this mean Mickey will make an appearance? And will Rose actually die?

I've genuinely no idea, for all The Sun's attempt at spoilage. It could be that Jackie and Mickey will be the ones to die, prompting Rose to abandon the Doctor in a Tegan-style, 'It's just not fun any more' moment.

Of course, the biggest surprise would be if it was Tennant who took the final fall, but I can't see that happening. Besides, I really want the Tenth Doctor to be given some darker material to work with next year, so I hope he's sticking around.

Either way, we've come to the last adventure of a pretty strong season. There have been some issues along the way and I don't feel the end has been built up quite as successfully as it was in season one, but I get the feeling we're in for something really special. Russell T Davies has promised payoffs not only for this year's setup, but for eveything which has happened since the show came back.

Count me excited.

Last year we had “Boom Town.” This year’s filler episode is Matthew Graham’s “Fear Her,” an episode written quite literally to fill the gap left by Stephen Fry’s unfinished episode. I don’t think I’m being unduly harsh by saying that this is the worst episode of the season yet, especially bearing in mind the competition. In fairness, for a really cheap little episode, there is a hell of a lot to love about this episode. For me, it’s greatest strength is its humour. Last week I thought “Love & Monsters” was funny, but at times “Fear Her” had me rolling in the aisles. Scenes like the Doctor coming face to face with the burly Dad, all the “Fingers on lips!” stuff and the immortal line from Kel – “You just took a council axe from a council van and now you’re digging up a council road! I’m reporting you to the council!” – really dragged the episode up from being a (relatively) average episode to a quite decent one.

“Five, six, seven, eight. There’s a Doctor at the gate.”

Ironically, one of this episode’s greatest strengths is the cheapness of it all. What could be creepier than kids going missing on a normal, suburban street in the not-too-distant future? Moreover, although it’s been done before the ‘spooky little girl’ angle really works. What makes Chloe so frightening here is her intensity rather than her power. Abisola Agbaje brings so much to the part for someone so young, and that voice is just disturbing! Her strange power itself is fascinating, only in Doctor Who could you have one of your main characters being attacked by a scribble! The special effects in this episode may be few and far between, but when they are used they look superb – the cartoon boy coming to life in the pre-title sequence is quite horrific; he looked like something off the artwork of a Radiohead album!

Although it is the Doctor who works everything out about the Isouls creature that has taken over young Chloe, when he becomes one of her drawings it is up to Rose to save the day single-handedly. It’s strange to think that this is Rose’s last chance to really do something on her own – in a fortnight’s time she’ll be gone (one way or another!) and so “Fear Her” is really her last chance to show what she can do. Billie doesn’t disappoint – she kicks ass! Digging up council roads with council axes… Smashing through doors with axes… Rose rocks! Even when the Doctor is still around, in Chloe’s bedroom it is Rose who does most of the explaining, not the Doctor, and it is Rose who really stands up to Chloe’s Mum Trish (Nina Sosanya of Teachers fame) and blames her for making Chloe feel so isolated. It’s also only fair to mention that Billie looks absolutely stunning in this episode – we’re talking nearly “New Earth” standard!

The story’s conclusion is very uplifting and reminded me very much of the “Everybody lives!” finale to “The Doctor Dances.” Even the music is the same. This Isouls creature has taken Chloe over because she feels lonely, and the Isouls see that as suffering beyond imagination. The Isouls feed off each other’s love you see – not your typical Doctor Who baddie, I’ll admit. The Isouls’ pod needs some love and so Rose throws it into the Olympic Torch that the Doctor carries all the way into the Olympic Stadium! It’s a wonderful Doctor Who moment, a definite calm before the storm.

“Never say never ever.”

“We’ll always be okay you and me, don’t you reckon Doctor?”

“Something’s in the air. Something coming. A storm’s approaching.”

And so next week it’s the big one. We all know she’s leaving, and the question everybody is asking is “is Rose gonna die?” Personally, I hope not, but I really can’t see any other way of getting her to leave the Doctor. She’d rather die. Moreover, if they kill Rose millions of kids are gonna be scarred for life! No one even liked Adric and look what his death did to people!

On one final note, I’ve noticed that the writers have been much braver this year about slipping in more and more references to the show’s past, and “Fear Her” marks the biggest one yet. Blink and you’ll miss it, but in the TARDIS Rose says to the Doctor, “…easy for you to say, you don’t have kids,” to which he replies “I was a dad once.” It won’t matter to a lot of people, but I for one am glad that the new series is a definite continuation of the show that began back in 1963 with the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan. Whether she actually is his granddaughter or not is another matter, it depends where you stand on the whole ‘Other’ issue… but regardless, it’s the latest in the long line of nice little touches that certainly sit well with this fan.

“Fear Her” was a super episode of Doctor Who, well written and directed, and decently acted; though some have found it forgettable, my own opinion is that it achieves excellence more than once.

I enjoyed this episode practically the whole way through, from the comedy of the Doctor’s awkward materialisation at the start to the splendidly uplifting finale as the Doctor lights the Olympic flame – though Huw Edwards’ voiceover is perhaps weak, and the whole thing is admittedly contrived (but not more contrived than “The Girl in the Fireplace”, and who complained about that?!). Though having a sports reporter, upon witnessing the disappearance of an Olympic crowd, babbling not once but twice about the flame representing love, courage and all that, is a bit odd, at least those fine virtues took centre stage, and the Doctor – literally – became their torchbearer. Even apart from the justification in plot terms of that finale (the alien ship needed the power boost and a helping hand from him), that symbolism made the indulgence more than okay for this viewer.

Yes, I was extremely impressed by that; and despite being sidelined in exactly the same way that Rose was deleted from the plot of “The Idiot’s Lantern”, the Doctor still managed to hold the episode together, with a fantastic performance from DT – and, while we’re on the subject, David Tennant earnestly telling a frightened woman “I’m help” is far preferable to David Tennant screaming “No power on this earth can stop me now!”, or somesuch rubbish. In my humble opinion, only one of those lines could really be spoken by the Doctor!

And while the Dr Who fan in me was thrilled by the Doctor’s offhanded comment about being a father (well of course he is – and yet in forty years, he has never actually come out and said so!), and the Sci-Fi enthusiast by the good conception and realisation of the alien around whom it all revolves, the television viewer was hugely impressed by the episode’s construction. The Doctor and Rose appear in a utterly normal street, discover some fairly normal people, and spend most of their time inside a very normal house – this was an episode of a major TV drama which could, with a bit of ingenuity, have been done fairly easily on stage** – more so even than “Dalek” or “Father’s Day”. “Fear Her” benefited hugely from the low-key settings, scenarios and effects.

The resolution of the plot was another brilliant high – with the Doctor gone, Rose must prove once again just how far she has come under his tutelage. Billie (aided by perfectly-judged direction) gives a stellar performance as she conveys Rose’s struggles to bring everything to a happy end; and just as she manages it, she has to contend with the monstrous drawing of Chloe’s father, coming to life in the cupboard upstairs! But Chloe and her mother manage to sort that one out fairly well themselves, showing, in turn, how far they have come – thanks to the Doctor. Good old Doctor!

Following Alan W. E. Dann’s rant about “po-faced, sexless, conservative” Who fans in the “Love and Monsters” reviews last week (and I am proud to be a conservative, in all walks of life as well as Who fandom), I would say this – “Fear Her” is a shining example of the kind of programme Dr Who can still be, even in 2006. It gives lie to the simplistic “radical versus conservative” argument – as Steven Moffat said on the “City of Death” DVD, previously Dr Who stories have been about maintaining a status quo (for those not in the know, City of Death ends with a fake Mona Lisa, underwritten with the words “this is a fake” in felt-tip, hanging in the Louvre), and “Fear Her”, with its mass-disappearances, doesn’t bother with anything like that; none of the new series episodes have. And yet! “Conservative” to its core – in that it retains Dr Who’s historic values and techniques, and starts with the TARDIS materialising and features the Doctor in most scenes (more or less) – “Fear Her” lives up to the promise of the new series, which things like “Love and Monsters” (despite all that episode’s initial promise) just don’t. It doesn’t have farting aliens, stupid jokes taking the mickey of the Royals, or barely-veiled references to oral sex, because it is stronger without those things. And, to be blunt, it is far, far better than most of the episodes we have seen hitherto.

**Actually no, maybe the drawings on A4 paper ‘coming to life’ would present a bit of a problem. But I’ve never made a production for the stage, so I don’t know!

Yet another disappointing entry in this hit and miss 'New Who' season. Russel T.Davies commented that this season was to be lighter - by that I now gather he meant crap incognito.

After last weeks emabarrasment, the less mentioned on that the better, we have a story that notches up the dramatic intensity to nothing more hotter than a tepid cup of milky tea.

As in my opinion last years 'Boom Town' , its one of those stories that really didn't matter if it had been aired or not, a definate 'skip' forward on the forthcoming DVD releases.

The syrupy reason for the children disappearing was not particularly scarey (to see how its done properly see last years 'Father Day'-kid on a swing). Another major let down was the monster in the closet , a crude etching with red glowing eyes that puffs smoke.

Obvious to us all that the money for effects has run particularly dry by now but there was at least one redeeming instance 'the graphite attack' which moementarily built up ones' hope that this would be a good story, from then on it went completely the opposite and plodded along lamely with a few bits of 'fizz' scantily dotted here and there. The rest of the effects on display were feeble attempts at keeping us awake or not go and do something else.

I am sorry but the 'Flower Jelly Fish' - a sort of poor mans 'Matrix' worm did nothing for me either, it was awful, its' main purpose it seemed was to provide the story an ending to a wholely lacklustre affair.

With the cringe worthy vanishing spectator scenario and the Doctor lighting the flame of peace so the aliens could be released to go home this made me want to reach for the sick bag.

Nina Soonaya did a a good job as the fretful mother but her acting ability seemed seriously underused just like the main cast. Most of the time the script called for her to be worried and weirded and....very little else.

The child actress who played Chloe achieved admirable acting capability in and out of her 'possessed' scenes. These scenes were crudely executed however and on the whole were cheaply carried out by getting the child to hoarsely whisper when the alien speaks through her - this was bargain basement effects that caused potential vigour and robust thrills in these scenes to go completely out of the window. So all we had was a child sounding like she needed a good gargle with salt water and that folks was the 'menace'.

Tennant seemed hyperactive as usual squeaking and spitting out his lines throughout the irksome narrative, he seemed more happier and 'bouncy' than normal - probably a lot more than the viewing audiences.

'Fear Her' could have had potential if more care and effort had been applied to it, it wasn't creepy, menacing or scarey just wishy-washy sci-fi soap that seems to epitomise the style that T.Davies wants and is seeminglycontent with - how selfish.

I have drawn to the conclusion that this seasons scripts with the exception of a few rare beauties are to blame for the sheer lack of quality and enthusiasm this time around. Tennant and Piper can and have achieved vignettes of super drama in previous stories but this is constantly let down by unnecessary 'over-the-top' stupidity and far too many 'IN YER FACE!' moralist preachings. This instalment was a prime example of such shoddy fayre.

Jacob Clifton, who writes the Doctor Who recaps over at the Television Without Pity website – and very good they are too – has a theory about the series. Well, actually he has many and varied theories about the show, which are often expounded upon at length in his pieces – never one to shy away from analysis and subtext, is Jacob – but perhaps chief amongst them is the idea of Doctor Who as an unconscious depiction of the United Kingdom’s low sense of self-esteem. “The Healing of Albion,” the idea than Britain and the British should be put through the wringer and subjected to all manner of evils before they come out clean on the other side.

He’ll certainly have a field day with Fear Her, if and when the US Sci-Fi Channel ever gets around to showing it. For one of the chief ideas the episode carries – and probably one of its most accurate – is the boost to national self-esteem and sense of worth that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 will provide. We have seen before in just about every other country that’s held the Games that the pride and patriotism which comes from being chosen to be the custodian of the grand tradition of sportsmanship and something great and good about the human condition can be a boost to even those who are not directly connected with anything going on at the Games. Merely being there, in the country and seeing the verve and joy it brings to the nation, is enough.

Occasionally such pride and patriotism can go too far – I know that the Atlanta Games of 1996 made some people feel almost physically ill, and it’s perhaps very appropriate that this episode first aired in the UK the day before England played their second round match at the 2006 World Cup in Germany. An episode based against one of the two greatest and most-watched sporting events on the planet, being shown while the other one is taking place – no accident on the part of the production team, you’d think.

But the World Cup, like the Olympics – although the Olympics suffers this to a lesser degree, being mainly about individuals rather than groups – is often criticised for the flag-waving patriotism being only a stone’s throw away from nationalism, which leads us down the ugly path of superiority complexes and racism. In Fear Her we see the streets bedecked with Union Flags, although the number of them around and about is pretty tame compared to the swathes of St George’s Crosses currently covering English front room windows, car aerials and pub beer gardens.

There’s nothing wrong with getting behind your country and its representatives in a sporting event, and flying a flag to show your allegiance – indeed, the pride and passion and love and emotions of all kinds that such sporting events bring out in us all, the sense of togetherness and unity as we bind together to celebrate our nation is one of the few times when such a thing as Englishness ever exists – Britishness too, perhaps, as the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish seem strong enough in their own identities as individual nations even without the aid of sports teams.

Often a minority of morons will spoil it for the many thousands who do no wrong; they take it too far, sing the racist songs, get drunk and start violence. Less so now, but still idiotically. It’s happened the weekend this episode aired, with a tiny, tiny minority in Germany ruining the good reputation English fans have been building up there, so it was good to see Fear Her taking a stand and showing that sports events en masse can be a good thing.

That said, however, it did almost feel on occasions as if the episode could have just as easily been sent in the present day, with the 2012 setting used merely to provide that Olympic backdrop and the chance to throw in a few audience amusing novelties such as the idea of Take That, complete with Robbie, performing at the opening ceremony, or Shayne Ward bringing out a Greatest Hits CD. And whoever’s idea it was to get Huw Edwards doing the commentary ought to hang their heads in shame – getting real people in to play themselves sometimes works, as Andrew Marr showed back in series one, but Edwards is pretty awful here.

I do have to admit that Fear Her was not an episode I was especially looking forward to, mainly because of its writer. While I did very much enjoy Matthew Graham’s work on Life on Mars earlier this year, the previous effort of his I’ve seen – ITV’s 1999 post-apocalyptic serial The Last Train – was a clunker, and in every interview I’ve seen with Graham I’ve got the distinct impression that he doesn’t really ‘get’ Doctor Who. I know that’s a terrible arrogant and fannish thing to say, and many of you will doubtless think it’s simply because he’s not an out-and-out fan like most of the other writers on the current incarnation of the show. Not so – I never got the same sense of unease with Toby Whithouse or Tom MacRae when I read interviews with them before their episodes aired. Graham, however, just seemed too… Well, ‘ordinary’, I suppose. I’m not saying all Doctor Who scriptwriters ought to be hand-crafted by Telefantasy Angels, touched by Grace and handed down to us from high on a mountain top with their CVs carved on tablets of marble, but… Well, it’s hard to explain.

Anyway, the important point is that on the whole I was pleasantly surprised. The central concept of the episode is pretty damn good – the idea of a little girl who can snatch people into her drawings. Very Sapphire & Steel. The nightmare vision of her dead father, trapped in the wardrobe, was also superb, and probably conceptually the high point of the episode. I would not be at all surprised if the father was not featuring in a few real nightmares after this episode went out. There is also some very good interaction between the Doctor and Rose – when he thinks that she’s holding her hand out to him made me smile, and just before that when he reveals that he was, indeed, once a father. We’ve always known he must have had children at some point, in fact it’s practically the first thing we ever do learn about him, but it’s nice to have it referred to again for the first time in a very long time.

Mind you, not all of the Rose and Doctor scenes are spectacularly good. The very end of the episode, for example, where the Doctor broods on an approaching storm could not have been less subtle had it been painted luminous yellow and leapt up and down on the spot, singing Three Lions by Baddiel, Skinner and The Lightning Seeds in a screeching falsetto while holding up a large sign saying ‘This is foreshadowing events in the season ending two-parter!’ We do get the idea, you know – there’s no need to sledgehammer it home.

Aside from that, there was little to complain about – only the Doctor lighting the Olympic flame, which was ridiculously over the top and made even less bearable by Edwards’ continuing awful voiceover, really irritated me. The guest cast were all good – the girl playing Chloe especially, and it was good to see yet another Casanova co-star of Tennant’s in the form of Nina Sosanya, who I’m a fan of.

So, certainly not a stellar episode, and probably not one that will live long in the memory of the general audience or rate highly in the fan rankings. But a solid enough stop gap, marking time in the schedules before we come to what looks like a truly epic adventure to follow.

I'm sorry, boys and girls, but for me that was quite possibly the dullest episode we have had since the series returned.

It's a real shame too. The story actually had some really great ideas in it, not all original, but good, strong ideas that were simply frittered away. The idea of a child's drawings coming to life was brilliantly built up in the pre-credits sequence and then very badly sidelined throughout the rest of the story. And this was symptomatic of the whole feel of it - cost cutting and down sizing to the degree that strong ideas are very sketchily developed.

And Euros Lyn seemed, for me, to be struggling to present the material in a dynamic way without blowing the budget. His direction had some very interesting touches - big close-ups moving into frame for example - but I just felt that the 'Brookside Close' feel of it all undermined any attempts to be visually interesting. There was a real struggle to generate tension too. Rose being attacked by the 'scribble' was great but it was a momentary flicker of a tangible threat within the story. And I'm sorry, but for a series that actually prides itself on being televisual, to reduce what should be the overwheming threat and fear of an abusive father to a lacklustre bit of red lighting and a shadow looming on the landing seemed to be really dismissive of the sheer visual power that the series has harnessed since its return. All that good work was undone with that cliched 'less is more' directing, lighting and editing in an ill -judged denoument.

I didn't feel that the 2012 Olympics setting was quite working either. It seemed very tacked on and a rather weak vehicle to move the story on. It was also highly predictable that the Doctor would swan off with the Olympic torch too. And Huw Edwards did this scene setting no fsvoours with his ham-fisted role as commentator.

I loved the sprinklings of humour, from the parking of the TARDIS, the mock Inspector Morse exchanges and to running gag of the cakes with the ball bearings on. Great little riffs that helped to lift it but not really enough to save it from wearing far too much of its message on its sleeve. The nods to the Doctor being a dad and the Shadow Proclamation were welcome too. The performances were, on average, very good, especially Tennant and Piper, and from Edna Dore and Nina Sosanya.

It's influences and inspirations were perhaps a little too obvious; much was lifted from 'Marianne Dreams' by Catherine Storr ( later televised as 'Escape Into Night' and the inspiration for the film 'Paperhouse' ) but also Wyndham's 'Chocky' kept nagging away at the back of my mind. There were also touches of 'The Excorcist' and 'The Omen'. However, I felt that there was too light a touch in both directing and scripting to really be able to generate any genuine scares on the back of these influences. It all felt very pale in comparison. The Doctor Who story it most resembled for me was 'Survival' and that story, as an example of the utterly fantastic erupting into mundane surburbia, wipes the floor with this. For me the fantastical elements really didn't have enough impact within the story to make it truly startling and convincingly menacing and exciting. The excitement seemed to rapidly drain out of the episode through a combination of small budget, muddled direction and variable acting.

Thematically, the episode is on stronger footing. There was an attempt to try and discuss child abuse and its affects on wives and children and the 'blame culture' that currently exists in society. I particularly thought the scene in the street where the residents seem happy to make the council worker the scapegoat for the events was strong and there was an undercurrent of racial intolerance mixed in too that made this a little more truthful.

The subsequent 'fingers on lips' scene was also for me a really good indication of how Tennant can be authoritative without resorting to a gimmicky performance.

I very much enjoyed the ideas about creativity and the mother/father complex. The child's drawings could be seen as projections that occur as the child/alien gets 'inside' other people, gets to know them and to 'create' them as characters around it/her. It's something we all do throughout our own lives. We invest life in the people around us from material in our own inner selves and this process allows us to discriminate between what is observed and what is invented to the degree that we can assemble sketches of our own personal complexes. Our own inferiority complexes can be assembled from people we end up despising. The living drawing of the father is a huge inferiority complex made tangible. And it lives in the wardrobe - the dark of the unconscious mind. A wonderfully rich notion tapping into both imaginary childhood fears and real family traumas.

The alien is symbolic of a creative impulse that must be utilised in order for it to remain healthy. Failure to use your inner potential can lead to impotence and a damaged personality. The alien uses the human girl to activate this potential in order to find 'love', to be replenished and to survive. Likewise, the creative act of singing, of using music, by mother and daughter to express positive feelings and reassert reality.

These are very strong ideas but they are rather under-developed in the story. I would love to have seen the drawings all come to life, which I believe was the intention, as I feel this would have been the powerful visual statement that, sadly, the episode excused itself from doing.

Low budget should not equal poor episode. Here, the script, full of good ideas, progresses in a very linear structure and the location is too confined. Ironically, this seems to have hemmed in the 'creativity' of the production team and despite some brief flashes of life, the way the story is delivered lacks pace and seems oddly joyless in counterpoint to the rather joyful resolution of its themes.

Good concept, good script and good performances but it ultimately fell flat.You sometimes find you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and no amount of back-pedalling can save you! It's a neat summation of what is wrong with this episode, I'm afraid.