From MadCap's Couch - "Doctor Who: Aliens of London"

Happy New Year! I hope you're having a much better time than I am, because I had to sit through this piece of garbage. And it is garbage, there are no two ways about it. Aliens of London was one of the first three episodes of the revived series of Doctor Who produced, the other two being it's second part World War Three and Rose. As such, there's a lot of Early Installment Weirdness as, behind the scenes, the cast and crew were still trying to find the voice that the show would eventually have.

Not to excuse the crap we're going to see, because we'll be seeing a lot of it.

From MadCap's Couch - "Doctor Who: The Unquiet Dead"

And incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home!

...that was for the Classic Who fans in the audience.

I have to admit, had I been particularly clever and started this retrospective a few weeks earlier, I could be doing The Christmas Invasion right now and be that much closer to getting through the episodes that feature Rose...and into episodes where Rose is there despite not actually being there. But I'll get to that complaint in a minute. Fortunate for us, The Unquiet Dead is a Christmas episode! ...well, an episode set during Christmas at any rate.

This is New Who's first offering from writer Mark Gatiss, who would come to prominence far, far more when Steven Moffat takes over the producer's chair and would write a total of nine episodes for the series as a whole. And while he and Moffat are off doing their Dracula reboot, I do hope he'll come back and write a few for Jodie Whittaker's Doctor. You hear that, Chibnall? I'm giving you a freebie here!

This episode forms the third part of a sort of trilogy with Rose's first adventures with the Doctor. As I've said before, Russell T. Davies wanted to show off the potential that the show had. Rose is set in the present, The End of the World in the future, and The Unquiet Dead in the past. And I do have to applaud Russell for that, it's a stroke of genius!

Don't get used to me saying that, you won't hear it a lot. Less so as we go on.

From MadCap's Couch - Doctor Who: "The End of the World"

Following on immediately from the previous episode, Rose heads off into the TARDIS to join the Doctor, who gives her a choice between going forwards or backwards in time. Rose chooses forwards and the Doctor shows off the TARDIS' capability to make a lot of noise and the capability of the camera crew to shake the camera around because they don't actually have the budget to show any of the fantastic places he talks about.

Seriously, guys. A matte painting. Something.

Speaking of the TARDIS itself, I must say, I do actually like the Corral console room. Call it nostalgia, but as it carried us through both the Eccelston and the Tennant eras of the show, it does hold a special place in my heart. The design itself is nice, a mix of organic-looking bits and technology that really gives the feeling that the TARDIS isn't so much a vehicle as a living, breathing being...more on that later this season.

But back to the plot, as Rose rightly chides him for being a bit smug in his machine making a bunch of noises with no payoff, the Doctor decides to not throw her off the TARDIS for giving him lip and save us four seasons of irritation and instead takes her to the far future of...an observation room on a space station with a stunning view of the Earth five billion years in the future. After the opening credits sequence (which, again, I like the time vortex effect and the theme song - no surprise there), the Doctor and Rose head out to meet the aliens coming to watch the Earth burn.

From MadCap's Couch - Doctor Who: "Rose"

If you've read my blog for a long time, you know that I'm a big fan of Doctor Who. I adore everything about it and, even when it's not perfect it's still pretty damn good. That doesn't mean, however, that there haven't been a few clunkers as any long-running series will often have. Sometimes, Doctor Who can be absolutely awful.

My first exposure to the show was the 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, which my mother had a DVD copy of which I now own. Through that, I had several of the show's core concepts made more apparent to me than a casual viewer would have had it starting from a traditional episode. The 2005 continuation of the show first helmed by Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner came out...which I actually didn't see in full until the DVDs came out.

I'm American and, for some reason, we had either missed or the Sci-fi Channel (back when it was called that and not "Syfy") chose not to air this episode but instead the following episode The End of the World. And, having viewed The End of the World...I'm not exactly happy with that choice for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that The End of the World is really, really not that great, but I'll get to that next time.