В‘Tooth and ClawВ’ is an exceptional piece of drama. The direction is virtually perfect, the atmosphere is oozing and the acting is top notch. You canВ’t fault the flawless production and the story has a confident depth which shows Russell T Davies doing what some fans suspected he couldnВ’t; good old fashioned suspense and terror.

Overall, this Scotland based Victorian tale has close associations with Series 1В’s В‘The Unquiet DeadВ’; itВ’s style, historical context and pacing are slightly similar. В‘Tooth and ClawВ’ is a little more dynamic than GatissВ’ tale. This doesnВ’t mean the dynamic is to the detriment of the stories historical depth. In fact, this story has even more confidence in itВ’s depiction of the Realm of Queen Victoria than perhaps the Dickensian scene of В‘The Unquiet DeadВ’.

The opening however, certain betrays the the episodes general ambience; a very slick brawl akin to В‘Crouching Tiger Hidden DragonВ’. Some may find this a little jarring with the rest of the story, I personally had no problem with such. Doctor Who is, in itВ’s essence, a very eclectic show which borrows, twists and parodies from a variety of styles. The fight scene makes for a confident and aggressive opening which certainly peaks the adrenaline and curiousity. The following sceneВ’s monster tease makes for a good introduction cliff-hanger as the show moves into the theme sequence.

The monster is - as the title suggests - a Wolf, or more specifically, a Werewolf. Doctor Who has stepped into the classic monster genre on several occasions. This is nothing new in that respect, however the focus of the plot remains closer to the monsterВ’s myth than any science fiction twist. The science fiction is there, just not too prominent.

The Werewolf is well realised, both as a wolf and as the human host. In fact, the scenes leading up to itВ’s transformation are as spellbinding as the revelation of the beast itself. The use of sound is also very powerful. Indeed the most atmospheric moment is the sound of the beast hunting for a way into the room in which the DoctorВ’s trapped in. I can almost guarantee a room of silent, spellbound viewers as that particular scene plays out.

The other В‘monsterВ’ or В‘heroineВ’ (take your pick) is Queen Victoria. SheВ’s played by Pauline Collins, a lady who the elderly fan may remember from the Troughton adventure В‘The Faceless OnesВ’. Collins is a versatile actress and barely recognizable in the role. As well as being well acted, the character is indeed well written. IВ’m not particularly versed in the character of Queen Victoria, so I canВ’t attest to the writerВ’s skill at capturing her historically, but she comes across as a deep and unpredictable character within the story.

IВ’m afraid some of the episodes weakest elements come from the two leads. IВ’m sorry to say after a previously strong episode for Miss Piper and Rose, В‘Tooth and ClawВ’ proves to be her most annoying outing ever. This is by no means an attack on BillieВ’s acting; sheВ’s as solid as ever, nor is it an attack on the writing of Rose who remains equally believable. But thatВ’s the problem; she is too real, and real people are often annoying. Few would argue that as a person, Rose is perfect. She is both cocky, rude and occasionally manipulative. In this story, some of these negative characteristics are used for story humour that results in Rose becoming distractingly annoying.

If there is a blame finger to point, it invariably has to be at writer Russell T Davies. Davies seems to overuse her in the initial set up to this story. Her constant attempts to get Queen Victoria to declare В“We are not amusedВ” (for a bet with the Doctor) is not only tiring, but intrusive. Comedy is indeed subjective so IВ’m sure some viewers found it funny, but I just found the gag did not warm me to Rose at all. Queen Victoria is a great historical character and to have the companion constantly mock her seems to belittle the QueenВ’s dignity irrelevantly. We donВ’t see too many versions of Victoria played on the small screen, so I was curious to see how she was portrayed. VictoriaВ’s introduction and continuing scenes felt as if they were being constantly interrupted by what I can only call В‘companion heckleВ’. It wouldnВ’t be so annoying if it was once, but itВ’s almost continual for the entire first act. So while I can picture the character of Rose behaving just like this, within the narrative it feels way too intrusive. Humour is subjective, and in В‘Tooth and ClarВ’ itВ’s laid on a little too thick as it sours the story for those who were not so easily amused by RoseВ’s hilarious antics.

Furthermore, as viewers are still keen to quantify this new Doctor, this continual gag keeps pushing Rose into the spotlight and the Doctor into the background. At this early stage of the tenth DoctorВ’s career, I think viewers are more keen to watch him than Rose, who dominated much of the last series - and rightly so as that was her introduction season. We now have a new Doctor and for the second episode in a row, Rose is very much at the forefront.

Thankfully, this balance alters as the pace kicks up a notch. The Doctor moves to center stage and we get to see Tennant in action. Well, sort of. As with В“New EarthВ”, TennantВ’s Doctor seems surprisingly inactive, in a way similar to Davison. There is no doubt you feel his presence, but you donВ’t feel the control that Eccleston had. In the context of this story, this works to В‘itВ’s advantageВ’; you donВ’t want the Doctor in too much control as you risk diminishing the hack and slash power of the werewolf. I am, however, looking forward to an episode in which the Doctor is a little more in the spotlight and a little more proactive, as he was in В‘The Christmas InvasionВ’.

Nevertheless, TennantВ’s acting and dialogue are spot on. ItВ’s this reviewerВ’s hope he gets a little more proactive screen time in future episodes. He does a great deal of running away in В‘Tooth and ClawВ’, which again, is good for the suspense, but one feels an urge to see the Doctor get a story in which he has a more central dynamic. ThatВ’s not to underplay some great moments in this story, from his first encounter with the Werewolf to the scene in which he runs for the books, Tennant IS the Doctor.

The ending is particularly worth a mention. We have a strong scene for Queen Victoria that almost makes up for all the hassle she and the audience suffered from Rose earlier. It is also an audience reminder that in victory, not all necessarily ends well. The Doctor and RoseВ’s banishment from the realm was a surprise and a superb character turn for Victoria. Furthermore, the walk back to the TARDIS has a great nostalgic feel to it, very reminiscent of the end of one of my other favourite (Scottish) Who tales, Terror Of The Zygons.

So overall, aside from some slightly in-your-face Rose Tyler moments and a rather inactive Doctor, this is another solid and enjoyable romp for Series 2. A good script, some well implemented genre bites (watch out for the tiny but fun homage to Alien 3) and a story brimming with tension, В‘Tooth and ClawВ’ is the perfect journey into Who horror.

One question:

Just where did those monks pop off to?

This episode oozed sheer quality. The opening teaser was perhaps one of the best since the show has returned to our screens; anyone who turned over after seeing it needs their pulse checked. From then on, Tooth and Claw demonstrated what a superb writer Russell T Davies really is. The script crackled with wit and energy, and the all of the performances were up to the task.

Pauline Collins was brilliant as Queen Victoria, and her exile of the Doctor was a neat twist at the end of the show, as opposed to a somewhat cheesy back slapping sequence which could easily have taken place. I never fail to be surprised at the twists RTD's scripts take; what can seem a light and fluffy piece - such as New Earth - can suddenly take a serious and moving turn. Victoria's influence in regards to Torchwood was well done and I'm quite intrigued by the possible "anti-Doctor" stance the organisation may well take.

Billie Piper as Rose didn't really have much to do here, though the mention of "the wolf in her" is interesting; is the Bad Wolf storyline truly over? Despite this, as usual she displays

Of course, then there is the Doctor himself. David Tennant really seems to have found his feet by this story, even though the Doctor himself is still feeling out the elements of his new personality ("am I rude?"). His mercurial performance as our favourite Time Lord builds on what was shown in last week's New Earth, and surely must cement him as one of the best actors to take on the role (and yes, I love them all!). There seems to be general complaint that the Tenth Doctor is too flawless and perfect. The theory seems to be that this is deliberate on the part of the writers, and that he Doctor is being set up for a fall. Whether it's true or not, David Tennant's interpretation of the character seems far less vulnerable and more "Doctorish" than his immediate predecessor. I'll be eager to see how his version of the Doctor develops as the series goes on.

The werewolf itself was an incredible piece of work by The Mill; it easily rivals anything seen in similar genre films or television shows. Not once did I recall thinking "that's a good piece of CGI", but rather "look at the werewolf!". The saying that if a special effect is good, you won't even realise it's a special effect, really came into effect here; I thought of the werewolf as a character, not as a collection of pixels - the suspension of disbelief was quite easy to accomplish in this episode.

Speaking of which, Tooth and Claw really pushed the boundary in what has been seen so far in terms of actual horror in the series; the transformation sequence in particular seemed quite disturbing (but in a good way!), and scenes with Rose and the other prisoners trapped with the "host" also had an unsettling quality. I found it interesting that we had the sound effects of victims being ripped apart by the wolf, yet last year a similar such sound effect in The Empty Child (when Richard Wilson's character succumbed to the nanogenes, and his face deformed into a gas mask) was cut from the transmitted show.

Frightening, thrilling, funny, stylish and moving; only in our dreams did we believe that Doctor Who could have returned in such an amazing way. Any minor plot holes really aren't worth thinking about; the Doctor is back! Tooth and Claw demonstrated everything that's right about the new series and I have a feeling the best is yet to come.

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.

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.

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?)

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.