From MadCap's Couch - "Doctor Who: Bad Wolf"

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...oh boy was I not looking forward to this one.

Don't get me wrong, I do actually like this episode...to an extent. It's really in its second part - The Parting of the Ways - where problems start popping up. And pop up they do, very hard popping up indeed.
The episode kicks off with a recap of The Long Game with the last appearance and acknowledgement of Adam Mitchell on the show to date. What it also, unfortunately does the work of completely ruining what I am almost certain was supposed to be the big twist at the beginning of the episode - it's set on Satellite Five. Why am I almost certain? Because the scene where this is revealed to the Doctor is long and dragged out as though it is supposed to be big and dramatic and important...which is completely undercut by the fact the cold open spills the beans.

A caption tells us "100 Years Later" before the Doctor wakes up with amnesia to suffer a fate worse than death...being on Big Brother. Brought in by transmat, he gets grilled by his housemates - in particular a woman named Lynda (with a "y" as she is sure to emphasize) - and begins to piece together just what exactly has happened to him.

"Why the bloody hell did I say 'yes' to this script?"

Rose, meanwhile, wakes up in a darkened room and quickly learns she's the latest contestant on The Weakest Link...hosted by the Anne-Droid (voiced by actual Weakest Link host Anne Robinson), while Jack finds himself on a version of What Not To Wear. All three of the TARDIS travelers have no idea how they have gotten where they are.

Now you might think this is something straight out of fanfiction by that one weird guy who writes fanfiction about game shows (you know who you are)...but it's not. This is Russell T. Davies' commentary on reality television...which is actually pretty well done, so I have to give him a rare credit for that. Why does it work? Because losing the shows apparently gets you killed...I say apparently because of something we'll find out near the end of the episode.

That being said, again, this was actually pretty well done. The least believable thing about it was that it took until the year 200,100 for reality television to get lethal.

The Doctor works out that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and gets himself put up for eviction...and isn't killed by the disintegration ray, proving his theory that someone or something brought him to the place. Escaping with Lynda, he gets the reveal that I complained about a few paragraphs before - namely that Satellite Five has become the GameStation, and is the main setting of this two-parter.

Jack gets out using a compact laser deluxe he was carrying in a place "you really don't want to know", destroying the robotic hosts of his game and getting out. He meets up with the Doctor and Lynda, resolving to find Rose...who has learned the gravity of her situation as several of her fellow contestants have been disintegrated by the Anne-Droid.

"...as if a million voices suddenly squeed out in glee, and were suddenly...silenced..."

And...now we come to Bad Wolf, which one of Rose's fellow contestants mentions in the "Bad Wolf" Corporation. And we get a montage of spoken and written variations of Bad Wolf that had been used in the episodes of Series 1. Again, this is built up to be big and grand and important...and it really, really isn't. To jump ahead a bit, it's supposedly a message to tell Rose in the next episode that she can get back to the Doctor and rescue him...but both it's implementation and it's existence are completely independent of one another. It's like Russell started reading about predestination paradoxes, got about halfway through the first sentence on the Wikipedia article, and then just kind of gave up and wrote out the Series 1 Arc.

Also, after a short bit where Lynda coaxes the Doctor into letting her join the TARDIS crew, she reveals to him the Bad Wolf Corporation...and he's visibly shocked! For reasons I've already stated and will elaborate on in The Parting of the Ways, this is really really dumb.

The Doctor, Jack, and Lynda eventually find the Big Brother game, trying to hack their way in just as Rose goes into the final round of The Weakest Link...and loses. Just before the Doctor can get to her, she gets disintegrated by the Anne-Droid...finally putting her out of my misery!

PARTY!!!!!

...yeah, I wish. As I already spoiled, she's not dead. The Doctor, Jack, and Lynda get arrested before breaking out and making an assault on Floor 500, taking control of the control room. I've been leaving out bits of two workers who have been monitoring events and the mysterious "Controller" who is hooked up into the GameStation's systems, monitoring every game. They mention rumors of something hidden behind the transmissions and are confused when the Controller will not allow them into Archive Six to check the transmat logs.

But when they're in control of the GameStation, a solar flare allows the Controller to speak to the Doctor. Along with that, the Doctor has determined that the GameStation is far more advanced than a normal broadcast station, and learns that there is another hand behind everything...but the Controller can't name them, whoever they are. As he discusses that with her, Jack finds the TARDIS in Archive Six and works out the truth of the "disentegrator"...somehow. He says the TARDIS worked it out, but how this is...I have no idea. I thought, perhaps, the scanners...but we never see it.

Anyway, Rose is indeed still alive (as the Doctor and Jack celebrate, ignoring the fact that literally a century's worth of people are mysteriously unaccounted for and I'm not sure they'd give a shit if they did acknowledge that fact - since Rose is alive, everything's okay) and she gets the reveal of the villains of the episode...the Daleks.

In an episode called Bad Wolf.

"WE MUST RE-NE-GO-TI-ATE OUR CON-TRACTS!"
"RE-NE-GO-TI-ATE! RE-NE-GO-TI-ATE! RE-NE-GO-TI-ATE!"

Now, I didn't get into the classic series hardcore until after I started watching the Revived Series. A lot of the episodes of the classic series are absolutely great and are some of my favorites of the show entirely. When I was in my freshmen year of high school, I saw the Daleks and thought this episode was absolutely astounding...then I watched the Classic episode "The Curse of Fenric" and later found out the fan theory that Fenric was behind the events of Series 1, much like he'd been behind the events of much of the Seventh Doctor's era from the time he met his companion Ace.

But no...instead, we get Daleks puppetmastering Earth. A concept that was done far earlier in the show's history and far better to boot. Fenric coming back would have been a neat connection of Old and New Who, and would have given us a chance to see Eccleston's Doctor go toe to toe with a seriously high-level threat. Instead...Daleks. A race that can be defeated by throwing a coat over their eye is a poor substitute for an Elder God is all I'm saying.

But solar flare ends and the Controller returns to her comatose state...just before jumping up again to help the Doctor find the Dalek ships, getting transmatted to their ship and exterminated for her trouble. But the damage is done and the Daleks are revealed. They message the Doctor and they have a bit of back and forth where the Daleks hold Rose hostage to keep the Doctor out of things...and the Doctor has a badass bit where he makes clear his intention to save Rose, the Earth, and then wipe every last Dalek out of the sky. When the Dalek declares that he has no weapons, no defenses, and no plan, the Doctor gives the best reply ever.

"Yeah...and doesn't that scare you to death?"

...why exactly the Daleks don't shoot Rose and put her out of my misery is a mystery for the ages, but we have our set up for Part 2. The Daleks are preparing to assault Earth and the Doctor is coming to save Rose.

I'm not lying when I say this is an awesome moment for Nine.

I've made several complaints throughout this review, but Bad Wolf is fairly solid. Fairly. It's only real problems are the problems with the Bad Wolf meme in general and trying to figure out how the Daleks in any way were able to puppetmaster Earth given the events of the Time War and how even the Earth seems to know who they are despite them having "vanished out of time and space" according to Jack. But we'll probably get the default Doctor Who answer of "humans are stupid and blind" that sadly isn't limited to just the Russell T. Davies era.

Next time, we get a body count that sadly doesn't feel so great, some more terrible behavior from Rose, we say goodbye to Christopher Eccleston in the role of the Doctor (possibly forever, sad to say), the Bad Wolf meme comes to a head, and we get our first very poorly explained deus ex machima ending to a Series in the New Show.

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