The Christmas Invasion

After a good preemptive moan in November a couple of emails have already started coming in asking me if I enjoyed yesterday's festive Doctor Who episode - the first one for new Time Lord David Tennant and one that seems to have been widely enjoyed. At least it sent John into a quivering mess. Humbug. Letting the new Doc lie around in a coma for most of the episode was always going to be a big mistake, but worse it also lets the halfwit supporting cast take centre stage. Not good. Watching the wooden Mickey take on a badly rendered killer Christmas tree... not a highlight. The annoying thing is that when the new chap actually woke up he was a lot of fun - it's just a pity he woke up in a RTD penned episode complete with silly Santa assassins and a hidden UNIT base that I can see from my window. Watching it was a little like letting your 12 year old Niece play GTA for the first time - having to sit on your hands and bite your lip as she repeatedly guides the character into the same wall before stumbling into some exceptional cut scenes that only betray how good the whole thing could have been. All those "Big Damn Moments and Speeches" were nothing more than a dying episode's white light for you to follow - the dying brain firing off a feel happy lightshow as it shuts down, the cancer patient having a day of remission before the body gives up. The odd thing is that RTD can write some excellent dialogue for those HERO moments that would look great on a trailer and would make your mouth water as long as you believed that there was something tangible holding the thing together. As it stood it was a lot of very quotable lines stuck up on cheap post-it notes. It'd be much easier to ignore if it was all bad, but there's just enough great moments in there to keep you watching. Which means I'll watch the whole next season and complain about that too. And Torchwood. What I thought was clever wasn't the British PM giving the US Pres a slap across the chops (that was too similar to the 45 second thing in the last season), but rather the fact that Harriet Jones once in power felt obliged to do what she knew was wrong for what she thought was the right reason - that's Blair in a nutshell right there. That's why I was annoyed when seconds later the Doctor crippled her with a single sentence. It would have been interesting to see her downward spiral played out over the season (if indeed they continue to keep visiting the same planet and timezone every other fucking episode) but maybe we'll see more of that in Torchwood. I do hope that Anthony Head is The Master though... he's my second choice after Christopher Eccleston. [Music: off]