Intended (by its producer at least) as a pilot for a potential full series, K-9 and Company brought together two of Doctor Who's most popular companions - Sarah-Jane Smith and the robot dog K-9. Team-ups such as this are always exciting and in this case, on first transmission, it was doubly thrilling as the episode bridged the gap between the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat season and our first glimpses of Peter Davison in action as the Doctor. Sadly, for fans based in the North-west of England, celebrations were delayed when the Winter Hill transmitter suffered a technical problem just a few hours before K-9 and Company was due to be broadcast. As a result, viewers in Liverpool, Manchester and Lancashire would have to wait until the following year, when the episode was rebroadcast.

The story begins with one of the single most bonkers-mad title sequences ever. The title music is excitable and not at all out of place with such thrilling action series as Magnum, Charlie's Angels and other glossy American shows. That this particular production was clearly filmed up a freezing cold hill in autumn unfortunately undermines the effect somewhat as we see fast-edited shots of K-9 on a wall while Sarah swigs Chardonnay (in a red wine glass, no less) while typing up a story outside her local pub. It's an unintentionally funny sequence that sets us up perfectly for what is to follow.

Though the episode works well in reintroducing the lead characters, 'A Girl's Best Friend' (as the episode was subtitled) had a difficult task in trying not to be too much like a rehash of Doctor Who while simultaneously having to be familiar enough to those people who were only tuning in because of the connection to that particular series. It doesn't have any monsters, aliens or spaceships, but it does have similar views on the occult, dismissing it all as superstitious nonsense. It also shares the unfortunate trait of labelling anyone with a faith as an evil nutter.

The producer, John Nathan-Turner, was always concerned with the tabloids making connections of a sexual nature between the leads in Doctor Who. His oft-quoted phrase 'no hanky-panky in the TARDIS' now comes across as a rather odd thing to be worried about in the light of the successful relationship between the Doctor and his companion in the 2005 series. But that was the edict behind 1980s Doctor Who, which led to the casting of a male juvenile companion for both the Doctor and for Sarah-Jane. There's really no danger of Brendan being mistaken for Sarah-Jane's underage lover as he's quite a sexless being. That goes for the rest of the cast too though: Mr Tracey might have a son, but there's no sign of a Mrs Tracey anywhere; Juno Baker and her hubby possibly sleep in separate rooms, such is the lack of genune connection between them; and both Sarah and her Aunt Lavinia have the independent air of feminism-as-written-by-men where they clearly must not be allowed to indulge in any sexual relationships. Hence Sarah being saddled with her aunt's ward (surely a word that, Batman aside, hasn't been uttered in any other fiction written after 1940?).

'A Girl's Best Friend' turns out to be an entertaining, if slight, piece of drama. One can't help wondering how a whole series might have paned out though, with Juno and Howard Baker continuing to act like a pair of guilty-as-sin swingers just waiting to entrap Sarah while villager after yokel villager is exposed as a devil-worshipping criminal. Just so long as they remembered the rule - 'no hanky panky in Morton Harwood'...

I always got the impression John Nathan-Turner didn't have a particularly well-developed sense of humour, and unfortunately that seems to be borne out by K-9 and Company. All the elements are there to make for a really funny series full of dramatic coincidences and misunderstandings but it all falls a bit flat in the execution. It's perhaps that missed opportunity that led to the episode failing to make it to the hoped-for full series. Still, it gave Doctor Who fans their very own 'Goat Story for Christmas' (groan) to enjoy every December since.

With ‘Snakedance,’ the done thing seems to be to say that it’s good, but not as good or smart as ‘Kinda.’ Now, whether one Doctor Who story is truly *better* than another is always going to be a matter of subjectivity, but I think it’s worth pointing out that ‘Snakedance’ stands up extremely well on its own, and is certainly smart. It’s true that writer Christopher Bailey does employ a more conventional storytelling style here than he did in the rich, strange stew that was ‘Kinda,’ but it no less intelligent, and in fact focuses on questions the earlier story ignores (or, at least, doesn’t get around to asking).

First off, one of the best things this story does is capture the Manussan culture itself. It’s always hard to suggest a realistic alien society in what amounts to a mere handful of scenes, and that’s why Doctor Who stories are historically populated by invaders from other worlds who have conveniently lost their home cultures. But the depiction of the Manussans is different – we get a clear picture of a society grown so remote from its own historical origins over half a millennium that its people have largely forgotten them. The account of a terrifying force that once dominated this world has been happily mythologized into ‘safe’ rituals like the ones at the anniversary festival (snake parade, ‘attendant demons,’ children’s Punch and Judy show, etc.). The Manussan people themselves are depicted as cheerfully cynical from the lowest social rank (the fraudulent showman and fortuneteller) up to the highest (Lon seems to question whether the Mara story even happened at all). But the viewer knows better – having seen ‘Kinda,’ *we* know that the Mara’s threat is frightening and real, and this even more than usual puts us on the side of the Doctor – who, in an amusing irony, is as squeaky and ineffective here as at probably any other time in his history (“I do not want more blankets, I want to get out of here!”). To see the Doctor scrambling to get the amiable Manussans to believe him is funny, but it also creates real suspense as we watch the Mara move towards its goal with complete ease.

But ‘Snakedance’ doesn’t simply tell a tense story set in a believable culture – it has real observations to make about reading the past, and somewhat odd ones at that, at least in the context of this series. For in ‘Snakedance’ we see that, for once, it’s the superstitious characters who are in the right, and the skeptical ones who are shown up as fools. This comes into focus in the fascinating character of Ambril, a tunnel-visioned academic with the authority of a government behind him (frightening thing). While the character’s earnestness and archaeological zeal is respectable, even admirable – he’s anything but a mad scientist – he is nevertheless so wrapped up in his own way of viewing the past that he can’t see new history being made around him. He scoffs at the Doctor (who, as I said, is quite a wonderful cracked young man in this story), but we can only suspect he’d act the same way even if the warnings about the Mara came from a more credible source. Ambril likes the past the way it is – frozen in time, preserved for posterity under museum glass. And Bailey’s script does a marvelous job of communicating the character’s smallness (the ‘sixth head’ joke is perhaps a little obvious, but it brings the point to the fore well enough).

The other caste of skeptical character here, of course, is the hereditary ruling elite, represented by bored Lon and his mother Tanha. Both characters are basic upper-class stereotypes, but they become quite full-blooded in the hands of the capable actors; more than that, they function well in the story, both in terms of their service to the plot and their symbolic resonance (as decadent skeptics so modern that they *laugh* at the Mara stories, despite being descended from the family who originally destroyed it!).

So who are the heroes of ‘Snakedance’? The obvious guess is Dojjen, Ambril’s counterpart and philosophical opposite, a scholar who takes such a hands-on approach to his subject that he becomes a true believer, and renounces his shallow culture for a mystic’s life in the wilderness. But the script’s real hero might actually be mild-mannered Chela, a kind of reverse skeptic – a student of science who is nevertheless able to imagine a reality outside his own experience, who begins to question the secular norm he has always known. He is a man with imagination, and Bailey seems to value that more highly than any devotion to science and reason; in fact, it’s implied that the search for knowledge is what created the Mara in the first place. (One senses that Barry Letts would have *loved* a script like this, and I like to think that the blue crystals were included in the plot as a conscious tribute to ‘Planet of the Spiders.’)

As for the aesthetics of the story, the absurd Manussan costumes are always good for a laugh (Lon does look like a refugee from a particularly wild Duran Duran video), and some of the snake effects are a bit sad, but by and large it has the look of classic eighties Doctor Who. Janet Fielding gives a good performance, and she is helped by the sound technicians (her ‘Exorcist’-like sudden voice change – “NO!” – is very effective); and Peter Davison is as wonderful as usual. As is so often the case, Sarah Sutton isn’t given anything to do, but as I can’t stand Nyssa anyway, I don’t mind. Director Fiona Cummings has some good ideas, and helps to make Lon and Tanha into more believable characters than they perhaps are on paper. (When Tanha stands with her back to her son - and the camera – it conveys her hurt better than words or acting ever could). The ending is a little sudden, but for once this abruptness works perfectly – I much prefer an ‘open’ ending like this to a hasty, well-let’s-sum-it-all-up-and-say-goodbye scene like the ones we so often get in this series.

A final thought: after sitting through a sometimes unpleasantly flirtatious first season of Russell T. Davies’s new Who, I found it refreshing to see the classic, sexless Doctor -one who doesn’t even recognize that his pert companion is wearing a new dress!

I'm falling to pieces! I don't even have any clothes sense...

Lots of 'bad' stories are often just mediocre, but seem worse due to being directly after brilliant stories. Revenge of the Cybermen isn't so bad, but when you've just seen Genesis of the Daleks? The Long Game after Dalek? Pretty much every Season 17 story after City of Death? Lets face it, no story could have started up after The Caves of Androzani and not suffered.

I, however, was fortunate to see this on video without having seen the masterpiece beforehand.

It ultimately dulled the pain, but it didn't help. I wish I was a funky rebel Who fan, able to hold up the most pathetic of stories and scream it's genius, but sometimes the majority are right. Not always, but when The Twin Dilemma ended up the least-liked official Doctor Who story, it was not by bad luck.The Twin Dilemma is bad. And worse, it's important. It's the first story of a new Doctor. It needs to be good, or at least, entertaining. And it fails. Anyone who has seen the new Children in Need special (which I insist on calling Afterlife), you can see the whole point of this story - the Doctor's regeneration is going wrong just when he needs to get his companion to accept him - done far better in seven minutes.

It gives me no pleasure to say it's a stinker.

In a way, the troubled background of the story (Anthony Stevens collapsed while writing it and his typewriter blew up, forcing Eric Saward to take over at the last minute) means it's got a better excuse for being crap than Resurrection of the Daleks which had plenty of time to have its wrinkled smoothed out only for the writer to simply make even bigger problems. However, the gloss to Resurrection means a first viewing leaves you bouncing with exploded Daleks and a massive death toll. It may not survive anything other than a cursory viewing, but Resurrection still beats Twin.

OK, the problems with Twin are if not obvious then at least very noticeable.

First off the scene where the Doctor strangles Peri. Now, on the one hand, it sets up one of the theme of the stories - the newly regenerated Doctor isn't so much mad, he has no self control. He sees a course of action and continually exaggerates it until it gets silly. Even his attack on Peri is justified in the plot. Here is a woman he risked total death to save and... she doesn't even thank him. She calls him old, ugly, rude and insults his fashion sense but expects him to applaud hers. Can you honestly blame the Doctor for being annoyed at Peri? But then it starts. The paranoia - Peri got the Doctor killed, Peri's not sorry, Peri's rude to him, was it all a plot? Is Peri some kind of saboteur trying to kill the Doctor? Is he going to let her get him killed again? Can he risk her killing anyone else? No, he's got to kill her now!

Of course, it's ridiculous and stupid. But that's the horror of the regeneration crisis, the Doctor can't help himself. When he realizes how dangerous he can be, he comes up with a simple and effective plan - put himself out of harm's way until he's settled down. Except he gets carried away: he's becoming a hermit, thriving on desolation, chanting in Latin and requiring eternal atonement! No wonder the production team wanted this idea for a regeneration story, it's brilliant - a Doctor going rogue, trying to stop himself screw up everything and somehow helpless...

And like so many brilliant ideas, Twin buries them under gastropod slime.

Like the gastropods themselves. This is the series that, twelve episodes previously showed the most horrific and stomach-churning insectoid grubs imaginable in the Gravis and his Tractators. I'm shocked that Doctor Who's cash-strapped ingenuity didn't step in and re-use them - not only were the monsters already made and shown to the public, there's not much difference between these slugs wanting to move planets and these grubs wanting to move planets. It would have been very interesting to see the blunt, coarse Sixth Doctor up against an enemy the Fifth Doctor defeated by never having an angry word with. Instead, we get the wittily-named Gastropods.

And they are rubbish.

We only see Mestor do anything, but apparently there are two other slugs waddling around, not even noticing that there's a huge blue box marked POLICE blocking their empty corridors. Mestor looks crap too - fat, cross-eyed and morbidly obese. Its embarassing to see him wobbling on his throne waving his paws on either side of his dumbfounded face. And why is there a frog outfit on a pole beside his throne? Why does he fancy Peri? Why is he supposed to be scarier because he is "half humanoid half slug" a phrase the Doctor trots out over and over again? Why does he have these mental powers? Why does Mestor go all the way to Azmael's room for a quick Q & A he could have done via telepathy, especially when he could have sent a vision of himself like he does to Titan 3? Why is he apparently determined to blow himself up? Just... why, full stop?

And the most painful thing is that Mestor could have been terrifying. Yes, even with that costume. His origins seem to be less oversized garden pest, more Skagra from Shada, who was determined to become a God by making his mind and personality spread like a disease, washing across civilization. We get a tantalizing glimpse of this, with Drak dropping dead and Azmael being possessed. There are a few moments when Noma implies that its not him talking, but Mestor when he euphemistically says that he does what Mestor 'would have wished' and he 'too, has duties' - but its all undone when it turns out Noma was genuinely working on his own bat. The suggestion that anyone might just turn out to be possessed by Mestor would be great thriller material, as well as explaining why the hell anyone puts up with this ranting, rude megalomaniac. It could also explain why no one realizes this last, desperate plan is so obviously doomed to failure and no one notices - because Mestor is blocking their thoughts.

A creature whose mental powers can control an entire planet would surely be calm, disarmingly polite... a bit like Noma... but Mestor shouts things like "Never argue with me again!" and goes to all the trouble of zapping workers to death instead of the cheaper bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head. It's not embarrassing when the Doctor denounces Mestor as crap, because he is. It's embarrassing because a story that is meant to establish that the Doctor is more cunning and cleverer than his opponent sets him up against an incredibly stupid slug. That looks stupid. And fancies Earth women.The Twin Dilemma also crystallizes the part of the Sixth Doctor's era I hate. Not the continuity, the companions, the costume or Colin Baker, but the no unity of action. It happens again and again. This story encompasses Earth, Titan 3 and Joconda and only the last one is in any way relevant to the plot - and we don't get there to episode three, where the plot finally starts. The first scene of the story should be (an unseen) Mestor ruthlessly executing the thief (in front of assembled masses to prevent further rebellion), not Rom and Re playing backgammon. We don't even see the regeneration sequence again, and it's far more important to the plot than it was in Robot and it was repeated then as well.

Why does the story stop at Titan 3 anyway? Why not have the Doctor simply mis-steer the TARDIS straight to Joconda and have him mistake its raped landscape mistaken for the quarry he was aiming for? Why do we abandon Earth after the worst episode - we never get to see Rom and Re meeting up with their parents, for Elanor and her boss be glad to see Hugo's alive and well. And if we're not going to see them undergo the whole 'growth over the adventure', why the hell include them in the first place?

In fact, the twins themselves baffle me. What on Earth inspired anyone to have a story where identical twin geniuses are kidnapped? It would make more sense for Azmael to be stealing some nifty computer designed for it - hell, I bet I wasn't the only one expecting the twins to be revealed in episode four to be badly-programmed androids (and would explain why we never see their mother). The twins are like Adric clones - something Saward flags up in his novelization - where you would expect something more like Chloe and Radcliffe from The League of Gentlemen. They should be creepy, speaking in unison, ideally freakier than their kidnappers. But they're not even as interesting and need to wear different colours in order to be told apart (colours also inexplicably mirrored in the pens they use, their backgammon set, their home computers and the ones the Jocondans helpfully provide).

Come to think of it, why have their memories removed? In prose, I might get that, having a novel hinge on these twins trying to remember where they are, where they came from and to be revealed at the conclusion. But we already know. And the amnesia does nothing to stop the twins asking awkward questions, causing trouble and whinging. Remove those circles and does the plot change? No! Hell, I don't even care they've been kidnapped, because their first scenes show them to be arrogant, emotionless, smug, gormless and rude. When they're kidnapped my sympathies are for Professor Sylvest when he gets home, not for dumb and dumber. Why is their "game of equations" so dangerous anyway? Looks like a dull computer game to me. And if its so dangerous, why on Earth allow the twins access to the computer to use it anyway?

Azmael doesn't grab me either. Why does he insist on calling himself Professor Edgeworth? If he had established this identity on Earth in order to infiltrate the twins' room, I could buy it, but he just teleports in and teleports out again. The character is written a bit like the Doctor in Caves of Androzani, a tired Time Lord desperate to save the day any cost. Part of me wishes it wasn't Azmael but Maxil involved, ironically regenerated into Peter Davison. You could believe him when he tells the twins either they help him or they die, and you can see him grimly setting the base on Titan 3 to explode because he honestly can't risk the Doctor interfering. Maurice Denham does a wonderfully tired old man, even though he does resemble that big-headed monster from an Original Star Trek episode (I do love his sad "I can if I have to" as he uses his mind power to freeze the twins in mid-stance).

Colin Baker's first full story. And he's far from perfect. I've met the man, he's a lovely human being and Big Finish have proved both he and the Sixth Doctor got a short rift. Here... he's intermitent. Sometime he's acutely embrassing (though not as embarassing as Peri's sobbing at the end of part two - the only time Doctor Who makes me want to hide behind the sofa), but I don't look at these moments and think 'Colin, you're crap!' I think Colin is deliberately acting badly, for the moments to show that the Doctor isn't thinking straight. Watch the bit where the Doctor makes a ludicrously overblown and passionate speech that just because there's a minor mystery to be solved the whole universe is about to fall about and only HE and PERI can POSSIBLY stop it, only for Peri to meekly ask "How?" and the Doctor blows out his cheeks, shrugs and changes the subject. That's brilliant, that is, fantastic.

However I can only really appreciate it because I know it's the latter that speaks of natural Colin Baker than the former. The Doctor is given countless stupid things to say, but knowing its awful doesn't stop it being awful. Just as good as the moments when you're not sure if he's having a fit or not: when the Doctor goes on about how old and useless he is, it's said with rising hysteria rather than self-pity; when the Doctor calmly and reasonably insists he and Peri leave the TARDIS to face, if not certain death, then a horrible, harsh life; and when he suddenly starts baiting Mestor. The moment where the Doctor's wandering mindset causes him to deride existence as boring and laughing hysterically is wince-inducing, but the moment were he goes Hannibal Lector on Peri/Piri is definitely scary.

But it happens in the first episode! That's what's wrong with it, not the act but it's timing!

Imagine it happening not just after the Doctor's finished changing, but instead happens towards episode three. The universe is in danger, the Doctor needs to get in action but we can see his thought processes have got muddled, he's moving off topic, getting enthusiastic, and now he thinks Peri is the danger to him and she can't reason with him and the Doctor attacks her - bang! Cliffhanger! And it's made all the more poignant because we know, like Maddox in Warriors of the Deep, the Doctor doesn't want this to happen...

The whole relationship between Peri and the Doctor is skewed. She starts off by treating him with open contempt and when she finally realizes the Doctor is not in the best of moods to be taunted with, she instantly becomes meek before finally snapping. Yet, this happens in the first episode! If you're going to have an emotional arc to the four episodes, it shouldn't be over in part one and then get repeated. I admit, Peri's tirades against the Doctor are brilliant (her taken-aback shout of "I'm not letting a manic-depressive paranoid personality like YOU tell me what to do!" is killingly funny), but they are not consistant. Peri has as many mood swings as the Doctor, being quiet and contemplative while tending Hugo to blubbing at the thought the Doctor's dead to giving the impression she'd want to do the deed herself. Peri was timid around the Fifth Doctor (did she have a crush on him?), and it would have been more effective if that had stayed until the end of the story where she finally snaps and earns the new Doctor's respect. The bit where he marvels she still cares about him is a case in point - he should be touched, not baffled!

The suit, also, is another thing I'd do differently. Actually, I don't hate it (my biggest issue is that it's a bugger to draw), but it is a massive problem. The Twin Dilemma might look like the cash-starved end-of-season four-parter it is, but it's doing better than The Caves of Androzani (where spy cameras are studio cameras, personal computers remote controls and laser guns replaced by machine guns with sparks added in post-production). The reason Twin looks worse is because its decked out in awful greens, purples, silvers, blues and browns. And why? Because of that coat! There's a whole chunk of The Sixth Doctor Handbook explaining that due to the way TV works, brighter colours cause others to fade out so everything in The Twin Dilemma had to look so gaudy otherwise they would litterally wash out by the coat. As Eric Saward notes in his novelzation, all the colours clash and don't add up to anything - a bit like the story itself. It would also, in my humble opinion, have been better had the Doctor not chosen the bloody outfit in the first place but rather grabbed the first thing to hand because the TARDIS was out of control and needed something to wear. Four episodes go by and the only person who thinks the Doctor looks stupid in the coat is Peri - hardly the evidence needed to show the Sixth Doctor is 'totally tasteless', is it?

The problems are shared by the plot. Anthony Stevens seems to have been making it up as he goes along and Eric Saward is constantly building up elements only to end up ignoring them. Mestor wants no link between Joconda and the twins' kidnapping... but he has the power to wipe out entire space fleets by just thinking it! Mestor tells Azmael to reveal what he knows in the belief learning the mission will be benevolent will convince the twins to cooperate - which begs the question why he didn't do this from the beginning, and maybe just write a letter to the twins asking for the answer on the back of a postcard? If Mestor is so powerful, why doesn't he slam the planets into the sun instead of going through the charade? And why is his plan's aim appear to be to increase his species but not himself when every other scene shows him to be an arrogant megalomaniac? What are the 'consequences' the twins foresee about the planet juggling, because it clearly isn't the one the Doctor twigs to? Why does Noma, clearly a smart cookie along the lines of Lytton, honestly believe Mestor is benevolent? If the Gastropods eat everything and food is running out... why don't they just eat the Jocondons? Why does Azmael have a couple of handy 'anti-Gastropod' juice hanging around and never used it? Just how and why did Mestor have the X3773 captured, and why doesn't he change the number plate if he doesn't want it traced? How come he can communicate with Azmael, but Azmael needs a pager to talk back to him? And why oh why does Hugo pull a gun on the Doctor and threaten to kill him if he becomes unstable when he's never seen the Doctor unstable? As far as Lang knows, the Doctor's just a prima donna!

The last scene doesn't work. I wish it did. The Doctor's line ("And whatever else happens, I am the Doctor - whether you like it... or not.") is delivered firmly but not angrilly, and the smile between him and Peri makes the story end on a happy note. But there's no resolution - otherwise we wouldn't have most of Season 22 where the Doctor and Peri are arguing all the bloody time. The line is given such heavy emphasis you wonder if the Doctor was originally supposed to say the same thing in episode one, only this time Peri actually believes him.

Oh, and the cliffhangers... Not good. Not good at all. I can forgive episode one as we see the Doctor's face (just in time for it to be blown off), but Peri's strange snorting sobs are off-putting. The extremely long lingering shots on Colin Baker's face for the other two are bad. Really bad. Especially the final one, where the Doctor is clearly staring straight at camera and looking gormless - and not at all like the genuine smile he was giving to Peri seconds earlier. You would have thought someone would have noticed and done something... And the music is terrible - bar the scene where Azmael detects the TARDIS following his ship and, not recognizing it, wonders what it might be as a militaristic version of the theme tune plays.The Twin Dilemma just doesn't work. And that's not just bad, it's a tragedy. Because new Doctor stories are the only stories in Doctor Who that HAVE to work. There are crap Dalek stories, Cybermen stories, companions can have bad arrivals and worse departures, and even regeneration stories have been known to below par. But a story introducing a new Doctor just can't afford to go wrong, and The Twin Dilemma hits the ground burning - there are good elements but the don't gel and we're left with a bad start to the Sixth Doctor, a terrible continuation of The Caves of Androzani and lacklustre end to Season 21. Eric Saward easily improved the whole story for his novelization, which proves that Twin was one rewrite short of greatness. JNT was not perfect, but fighting to keep the half-thought-out The Twin Dilemma in Season 21 rather than finish it in Season 22 was the only big mistake he'd made since taking the reigns.

If there's a story Big Finish are going to replace in the canon, don't let it be Shada, let it be this.

People often complain about the contrivances and plot holes in ‘Earthshock,’ and first off I’ll acknowledge that they’re there. The suggestion that the Cybermen’s computer can be ‘code-cracked’ to make another vehicle travel in time is particularly bothersome, and I’m always troubled by the implication that the Doctor’s (and Adric’s) interference caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and set Earth’s history on a radically different evolutionary track. I’m reassured by fans that this is not actually a paradox, but it still seems to me to create a circular timeline (Adric crashes freighter, which causes Earth to evolve differently, which [presumably] causes the Doctor to become fond of it, which causes the Doctor to become involved in Cyberman gambit in the first place, which causes the freighter to travel in time and crash in the first place, etc.) that, if not technically impossible or ‘rule-breaking,’ is still more annoying than clever. In my view, anyway.

But I won’t say anything more about that, and truly, it’s not the plot holes that bother me so much about this story. Generally speaking, I’m much happier with a Doctor Who plot that *seems* to make sense when it doesn’t, as opposed to one that works the other way round, and ‘Earthshock’s’ storyline is definitely the former. But even with a tolerant attitude towards sloppy plotting, ‘Earthshock’ isn’t really all that good. Eric Saward’s writing is a big part of the problem here – his unrelenting ‘badass’ dialogue wants desperately to be serious and adult, but instead comes off as just macho and dull and comic-book-ish. Saward’s story is obviously influenced by ‘Alien,’ but in its scripting it actually more anticipates James Cameron’s (much-overrated, in my view) sequel ‘Aliens’ – like that film, ‘Earthshock’ is also dominated by mock-American war-movie clichйs, and they’re not even well fleshed out or entertaining ones at that. It doesn’t help that the supporting cast is uniformly uncharismatic, with the obvious exception of Beryl Reid, who makes a surprisingly sporting attempt, despite being impossibly miscast. (It’s not really a successful attempt, but it’s appreciated for its sheer oddity, if nothing else.) And of course there’s David Banks’s booming portrayal of the Cyber Leader – how funny that this character turns out to be one of the script’s most human characters!

But even all this might not be such a problem, if Saward’s tough-as-nails style didn’t also extend to his characterization of the Doctor, both in terms of dialogue and concept. To be fair, Peter Davison, bless his heart, acts himself into a frenzy here – scowling, snickering, squeaking, and displaying all the little tics that make his Doctor unique – but it still can’t save a writing approach that seems so false to the character. For instance, when Adric asks the Doctor how much damage will be inflicted by the bomb, and he responds “Enough to make life intolerable for the few who survived,” it’s an odd moment: this is evidently Saward’s stab at Doctorish wit, but it almost makes the Doctor sound impressed, as if he’s bragging about the weapon’s capacity for destruction. Similarly, when he casually describes the victims not as dead but rather “finished,” he sounds more like a war-hardened general than an appalled humanist. And the sight of the Fifth Doctor pressing a gun into someone’s chest, even a Cyberman’s, and repeatedly firing, is extremely unpleasant, and justly criticized by some critics of this story. There really is no other way to put it, except to say that, at moments like these, one really does feel that the series is going horribly wrong.

That’s not to say that everything is bad here. Peter Grimwade’s direction is actually very good throughout, with the android scenes in Episode One being especially well handled – when those dark shapes approach from the shadows, we can’t be sure if they’re friendly troopers or something else, and it’s genuinely scary. Later on, things become more routine, but it’s all still well done enough, and there are occasional nice touches throughout (e.g. when the Cybermen’s shadows appear around the corner before they do). Matthew Waterhouse is a controversial figure, of course, but personally I don’t find his acting all that bad – I actually think a lot of fans project their dislike of Adric’s *character* onto the performer, and that’s never entirely fair. At any rate, I find him pretty convincing here, with his final moment as he breathes heavily while gripping the belt suitably underplayed. (What would people rather he did, start screaming for help, or banging wildly on the controls?) Tegan and Nyssa aren’t given much to do, but that’s appropriate enough given the story is Adric’s swan song, and at least Tegan provides the inspiration for that fine exchange between the Doctor and the Cyber Leader – it’s one of the few points in this story where the Doctor really seems like himself. 

And I suppose I must also mention that world events since this story have added a truly frightening resonance to the terrorist tactics attempted by the Cybermen here, and this fact, while accidental, undeniably contributes to the overall effect of ‘Earthshock.’ Unfortunately, it’s not enough to save the story.

Perhaps because it is be regarded by many fans as a Doctor Who classic, I was disappointed by 'The Tomb of the Cybermen'. A fine performance from Patrick Troughton, an interesting basic plot idea, and the excellent realisation of the cybermen themselves are let down by a flawed script and just a little too much (yes, even for Doctor Who!) poor acting from the supporting cast.

The basic premise of the story is sound enough and the setting of the "tomb" allowed plenty of scope for the BBC designers to create an atmospheric set. However, the script suffers from three main failings: clunky plot devices, crude characterisation and poor attention to detail. The worst of the plot devices is the use of the sabotaged spacecraft to force the characters to remain in the tomb throughout the story. The idea of sabotage is perfectly reasonable, but the fact that the archaeological team are banned from the spacecraft for the duration of repairs (despite an escalating rate of fatalities) stretches the audience's credulity too far. It is not easy to separate the poor characterisation from the poor acting, but the character of Captain Hopper is little more than a cardboard cutout (indeed, his only raison d'etre seems to be to support the above-mentioned plot device), while poor Toberman seems to have been plucked from among the ranks of Cleopatra's slaves (in the Cecil B. DeMille film). As for the problem of attention to detail, this manifests itself right at the beginning of the first episode. We are led to believe that Professor Parry heads up an archaeological expedition at some point in the future, yet his team's methods would shame even a Victorian grave robber; they use explosives to expose the entrance to the tomb and once inside the only hint that they are making any attempt to catalogue their discovery is Viner taking down a few notes.

The quality of the acting is mixed, to say the least. Aubrey Richards is credible as Parry and Shirley Cooklin is suitably villainous (despite her character being burdened by the silly name of Kaftan). However, Cyril Shaps is over-the-top as Viner while George Pastell's initially promising Klieg eventually borders on the pantomimesque. Given the lines he is saddled with, George Roubicek can perhaps be forgiven for playing a spaghetti western cowboy. I can't yet compare Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling's performances here to their other stories. They both do a reasonable enough job of portraying the standard-issue young companion, but their characters are devoid of any convincing background. At no point does Jamie seem like an 18th century highlander, while Victoria's accent is too "BBC" and she is remarkably handy with a pistol for a sheltered young woman from Victorian England. Of course, Patrick Troughton's performance carries the story and almost justifies on its own watching 'The Tomb of the Cyberman'.

The rest of that justification are the cybermen. Given the limitations of time and budget inherent in 1960's Doctor Who, the designers and the director have done a convincing job of portraying the cybermen and injecting both them and their tomb with an air of menace. The scene where they emerge from their hibernation is justifiably iconic. The only point when the representation utterly fails are the close-up shots of the cybermats, which are truly hilarious. But then, every Doctor Who story requires such a comic low-budget production moment!

"The Christmas Invasion" seems to encapsulate Russell T. Davies' vision for "Doctor Who" better than any of the other episodes done thus far. It is by turns silly, scary, dramatic, epic, witty, and tragic, and then all of those things again in another order, and then again, and so on. Most of the time this works really well and that's what's made "The Christmas Invasion" such a great show to watch, and the one or two times that it doesn't quite come off aren't enough to totally derail it (but I'll mention those bits all the same).

The story owes much to one of RTD's favorite stories, "Spearhead from Space." It's got UNIT fending off a new alien invasion, Auton-like everyChristmasDay-looking robots, and a regeneration to contend with. He wisely chooses to mimic "Spearhead"'s structure by holding off on the full reveal of the new Doctor for a very long time indeed, and as a result all of the other characters (and by this time the audience) are in such a "we need the Doctor!" state by then that his grand entrance becomes all the more grand and we have a ball following him as he easily romps through the Sycorax plan and puts paid to it.

It's just as well then that the best thing in the episode is David Tennant's debut performance itself, or else all that build-up would've been a bit anticlimactic. But he really is tremendous, isn't he? He seems to get by on his one-liners alone for a good long while, like "You just can't get the staff" or roaring "I DON'T KNOW" back at the Sycorax leader, or his ramble about the "great big threatening... Button!" Or best of all, "Sorry, that's The Lion King." He seems to be going to be one of those Doctors that loves the humor-as-a-distraction tactic, where the tactic part is foremost in his mind. Although, come to think of it, he is just having a great old time some of the time too, such as when he regenerates his hand and exclaims "It's a fightin' hand!" in an American accent.

He has also got a very hard streak in him which should be fascinating to watch. This comes up twice... first when he sends the Sycorax leader falling to his death and saying "No second chances, I'm that sort of a man," and second and more fascinatingly when he tears down Harriet Jones after she uses the secret Torchwood weapon to destroy the retreating Sycorax ship. One need only look at the level of debate that's sprung up over this decision of his to see how fascinating this was, as everyone takes a side as to whether he was right or whether Harriet was. My take on it is that there's no question that each of them acted completely in character; Harriet made the human decision and the Doctor made the Doctor decision. Which one is the truly right thing to do though? Personally, I'm with the Doctor on all counts, as I usually am. His decision gets even more fascinating when you consider that his taking down of Harriet's premiership is a change to the history he's already told us about back in "World War Three," where he indicated she'd be PM for three terms. _That's_ how angry he was with her on this one... angry enough to break what would've been the First Law of Time if the Time Lords were still around, and that says to me that the Tenth Doctor will place his morals above everything and everyone else. This holds a lot of potential for great stories in the next two seasons (at least).

Going back to Harriet Jones for a moment, I was very heartened to see a level of political sophistication in the writing here that you don't often get in today's polarized media environment. I was among many who cheered her dig at the US President early on when she sent the message to him that "he's not my boss, and he's certainly not turning this into a war." The easy way to write this would've been to just leave that there to go on saying "our politicians should be better than America's," but then we get to the end of the story and Harriet herself makes that decision to destroy the retreating ship in the name of national/planetary security, the sort of decision we'd expect to see from the US administration, and here the script seems to be saying "most world leaders put in this position would also make the wrong choice." And I cheer at this piece of writing as well. This doesn't mean I'll be voting Republican anytime soon, or in fact ever, but I do appreciate the perspective RTD brings us here. There's a lot of anti-Americanism in the world today, and while that directed against our foreign policies is completely justified in my view, I bristle at the how knee-jerk and prejudicial so much of it is, as I suspect that whatever nation was in the no. 1 spot today would be making many of the same mistakes. RTD seems to get this too, and I thank him for writing that into this story.

Changing tack entirely, we have the story of Rose, Mickey, Jackie, and Christmas at home. This material was all a lot of fun even if some of the plot starts to creak here if you stare at it really hard. There was another balancing act to be done here of putting Rose back into the standard companion's role from where she was at the end of "The Parting of the Ways" while at the same time not making her seem like a weakling, and the story seems to have done that effortlessly. Or is it Billie Piper's acting that does it so effortlessly? Probably equally both, really. Piper's got this character down inside-out by this point, and at the same time the writing has her not just being a "companion" but showing more experience as any second-season companion should. She's long past the stage of making bad decisions and though she doesn't quite know what to do some of the time (because she's not got the Doctor's knowledge), she doesn't make any mistakes and keeps things together nevertheless, i.e. realizing immediately that there's something up with the sinister Santas and why they'd be after her and Mickey, or thinking to check both the Doctor's hearts, or realizing how dangerous his blood could be to history, or putting the sonic screwdriver into his hand during the tree attack, or taking everyone into the TARDIS for safety when all other options are bad. I also loved the bit where she has to play at being the Doctor herself and basically just quotes every alien name she can think of from last season at the Sycorax leader.

And what about those Sycorax and the eponymous Christmas Invasion? This was exactly the right mix of a great big epic Independence Day-style alien invasion and "Doctor Who" alien cheesy fun. It starts with that hysterical moment when the news footage is tuning in the space probe's transmission and the whole world sees "Raarrgh!" and just builds from there. They are by turns post-modernly funny ("Sycorax rock!") and really scary what with the whole genius idea of them getting every A+ blooded person up onto a roof or height to jump from if they don't get what they want (and didn't those crowd shots just look _amazing_?). This whole mix is wonderfully encapsulated in the moment when the leader starts to take his helmet off and Mr. Llewellyn says "they might be like us!" only to reveal a nasty-looking alien face beneath. And they've got this fabulously big-looking menacing "ship" that looks like they've just hollowed out a big asteroid and put some engines in it while at the same time they've got a pseudo-Klingon culture of trial by combat and champions and tactics that aren't really as nasty as they at first appeared (the blood control). I loved them, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of them again in another setting, perhaps their home planet or vs. some other creatures. Their bark was worse than their bite, and there's always more potential with a set of characters like this.

The direction was as top-notch as James Hawes' earlier effort... I particularly like his sense of scale when it came to the big outdoor shots, from the Sycorax ship hovering over London to the crowds of people first walking and then standing on the edges of buildings, to the fight scenes set against what looks like nothing but sky. The music by Murray Gold was some of his best as well. With just one rather glaring exception, I thought he nailed every scene right on the head this time (and more especially in the "Children in Need" prelude... I really loved what he did there).

As I've heaped so much praise already that the episode's about to go into a diabetic coma, I'll turn now to my list of mostly small quibbles with the episode. I'll start with that glaring music exception. Why does Murray Gold go for brass and trumpets in the scene where Rose breaks down and cries over the loss of her old Doctor? Trumpets don't say "sadness" in my musical vocabulary. Also, the swordfight choreography between the Doctor and the Sycorax leader didn't come off looking at all well. I liked the movement around the cave and then outside onto the edge of the ship, but the actual blows looked very clumsy by today's action standards, or even by those of the Pertwee era (although it still manages to beat that anemic-looking swordfight in "The King's Demons"). I didn't care for the teleport special effect either, as it looks far too much like that used in the "Power Rangers" shows. The CGI and effects were otherwise very, very impressive.. oh, except for the Guinevere One probe, which looked too computer-generated for my taste.

I've mentioned how the story so rapidly turns from funny to tragic to something else and so on, and most of the time that really worked, but the one time that it really didn't work is the only blight on the episode big enough for me to take a point off my rating of it, and that's the too-violent tonal wrench we're whiplashed through when at the end we go from Harriet's genocide and the Doctor's "just six words" bit to suddenly happy music as he finds his new clothes in the TARDIS wardrobe and then Christmas dinner at the Tyler's flat, and then back again to the awful aftermath of the genocide as "Schindler's List"-like ash falls on the area like snow and then back to fun again as the Doctor and Rose peer upwards at where they'll go next. I can't be having much fun at a mass funeral, I have to say, and I'm a little shocked that they let this go through as it is. This really jars.

And, one other note about this ending, with the alien ship's death throes being seen by the Doctor and company at Christmas... didn't we get this exact same thing in Big Finish's "Winter for the Adept"? Except that there it was written much more sensitively... or at least it was after Peter Davison objected to the original text and got them to change it. I'll give one point to Andrew Cartmel over Russell T. Davies on this occasion. :)

And I should also say a great big "hooray!" for the restoration of the middle-8 to the closing title music, even if we couldn't hear the music properly owing to the continuity announcer talking over it. I have already said that I don't care for how orchestral the closing music now gets though as I think it's now drowning out the Derbyshire radiophonic swoops sounds, but I now wonder if that's a transition that's in fact more gradual through the piece and we just can't hear the swoops earlier on because again the announcer was talking over them. The opening music has been redone as well, and there the balance is perfect.

Overall then, 9 out of 10 for "The Christmas Invasion," with only that strangely set-against-itself ending being a blight on the story to my mind. And welcome to the TARDIS Mr. David Tennant. I agree with your character, that it is gonna be fantastic.