With the Fires of Pompeii hurling us back into the drama expected from modern day Who, the team have established that last week’s quandaries regarding the confusing nature of time, space and how our Doctor fits into the mix certainly wasn’t a random blip.
Rather pleasantly we were finally given a much needed respite from the confines of Earth with the long awaited trip elsewhere, in this case to the Oodsphere. Granted this wasn’t a huge change to the norm, humans were still present in abundance and considering we were a couple of thousand years in the future there doesn’t appear to have been a whole lot of change in fashion or language in that time.
So, without further ado…time for the spoilers. You know the drill folks.
This week’s morality tale hit quite a bit closer to home than last week’s and it’s interesting to see that for once the Doctor isn’t really involved. The theme of slavery is a fairly hot topic right now with some parts of the media waking up a little more to the idea that the clothes we wear might not all have been made by emotionless machines in a harmless factory. This episode was barely even a thinly veiled swipe at this fact with the Doctor himself passing judgement and I couldn’t help but think that while they were hammering this point home it was either clever or badly written. Put aside the huge theme of how evil the human race can be in the future and you begin to wonder where this fits in with the time line? Was it after the events of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit or prior to them. If it followed on then why was there no record of the red eye beyond the few cases mentioned, however if it occurred before the series 2 episodes we have to ask ourselves how are they still enslaved in the future?
They also managed to side step the trickier aspect of just why the Doctor was keen to pass judgement on humans and our history with slavery yet seemed fully supportive of the Ood enslaving Mr. Halpern.
After her masterful performance last episode, Catherine Tate spent this one on firmer companion territory. That isn’t to say she didn’t have her fair share of drama and she handled it as well as she did last episode, lending Donna’s strong opinions to the topic of slavery in the future, however alongside the drama she got to do a lot more of the classic Companion Cower. While I was wondering if there’s still a place for the classic approach of hurling a companion into seemingly inescapable moments and having them pray for mercy in a bid to build the drama to a suitable climax, it was still fun to have a few familiar nostalgic moments which in the past would have led into the end credits.
There’s still something about Donna that has me a bit on edge. No, not Catherine Tate’s acting, play nice now people. I’m talking about the character and how I can’t help but shake the feeling that something just isn’t quite right about her, a feeling that keeps flitting past my consciousness every now and then like I’m missing something that I can’t quite put my finger on. I described it recently as the feeling that she’s somehow like that person your best friend has been spending a lot of time with that you just think is a bad influence on them, yet you don’t know why. The Doctor has always been something of a powerful and occasionally vengeful will but this time around Donna appears to be right there with him, guiding him to make those changes you think are just going to spell trouble or simply leading him in some way to where the problems are. Of course, come the end of the series I could be proven completely wrong and I wonder if it’s going to come back and bite me, yet for now I can’t help but think I’m right.
What would an episode be now without the big omen, though? We had a good idea of how capable the Doctor Who team are of slotting hints to the final showdown right from Ecclestone’s era with the hugely telegraphed Bad Wolf references, or the second season’s mentions of Torchwood right through to the very subtle asides in series three to Prime Minister Saxon. So this season I’ve been fully ready to spot them when they come along, perking up every time I think it’s about to appear, getting lost in the plot then suddenly getting hit out of left field (excuse the Baseball metaphor) with commentary which can only be classed as subtle if you’ve got the IQ of a brick. It could get old however so far I’m loving it. Who is returning? Is it Rose and if so, what was she doing there? What’s on Donna’s back? Where are all these planets going? What is the Doctor’s real name?
So again I begin, there’s a hint, no there’s a hint, none of those were hints so this must be a hint. Again I stopped looking without quite realising until there it was again!
Tags: bad wolf, christopher ecclestone, doctor who, donna, ood, rose, the masterYour song soon must end.
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