From MadCap's Couch - "Doctor Who: The Long Game"

Simon Pegg has a good turn as the Editor, as a pro to this episode.

This episode exists for a grand total of two reasons: 1) for Adam to depart and 2) for us to get a sneak preview of the location where the finale is going to be set. That's it. Why? Because Russell T. Davies had not yet crystalized the "every single episode has to lead into the finale in some way" thing that Steven Moffat would later pick up and roll with (aside from the Bad Wolf meme, but we'll get to that in Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways) but he was working very, very hard on it. Or, perhaps, he'd had enough meds to think that we'd hate Adam and that would keep people like me from hating on Rose.

What he didn't count on is that I am perfectly capable of doing both things, just for different reasons. And with that, let's get into it.
The TARDIS lands on a space station in the year 200,000. There's a bit where the Doctor and Rose screw with Adam for...reasons I'm not exactly clear on. In what I imagine is supposed to be a hilarious scene, Adam faints from the shock of hearing of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. The Doctor taunts Rose about her "boyfriend" to which she replies "not anymore".

...implying she was just going to ditch Mickey. Again.

Astounding.

Rose Tyler is Awful Count: 22

After the title sequence, however, it seems that things are not all well. Instead of the glorious utopia that Earth is supposed to be, they find that it's...populated by food trucks. The Doctor thinks something is very wrong and distracts Rose and Adam with hacking a cash point before going to investigate things. Interrogating two redshirts, the Doctor learns that the trio have landed on Satellite Five and that everybody wants to get to Floor Five Hundred.

"I AM INTERFAAAAAAAAAACED!"

Apparently, the Satellite is all about the news. The news, which is run by an enigmatic being known as the Editor (Simon Pegg), who is sure that something is very very wrong as he watches the Doctor and the two journalists on a security camera.

After Adam phones home on the superphone, getting a dastardly look after as he pockets said superphone. Meanwhile, the Editor attempts to determine what is wrong, and the journalists take the Doctor and company into a room where several people sit around another person while another person sits in the middle and opens a device in their head with a snap...

...yeah, the effect of the infospike isn't great. While bad special effects are a thing in Doctor Who, this is just...ugh...

The Doctor says that this technology is wrong, and I happen to agree...just not for the reasons he thinks it is. Unfortunately, the Editor kicks in and disrupts the Info transfer, calling up one of the two journalists after having a conversation with an unseen "sir". She heads up, much to the dismay of the other journalist. Adam mentions that the device in the head freaks him out...which seems to be a bizarre ploy for what happens later.

Rose also gives him her TARDIS key and he walks off smirking evilly like some sort of Saturday morning cartoon villain.

As the distressed journalist mentions that nobody who goes to Floor Five Hundred ever comes back, the other heads up the lift and into what looks like Narnia before the Pevensie children came around crossed with a construction site. Digging around, she finds corpses! Yay! It is admittedly a rather creepy scene where we see the twisted version of the uplink room with the corpses, I'll admit. Drawn to a door, however, she meets with the Editor...and is eaten by the same off-screen "sir" from before after she's revealed as a freedom fighter in disguise.

Elsewhere, Adam tries to access a terminal and discovers that he can, in fact, learn everything. Learning the history from his time in 2012 to 200,000 of the microprocessor. Elsewhere elsewhere, the Doctor and Rose get found out by the journalist, who gives a bit of background for the Doctor to poke out with a stick - the ultimate conclusion being that someone's been screwing with the proper flow of the human race.

Adam uses the superphone to record knowledge from the terminal, but is locked out and gestured to Floor Sixteen. There, Adam gets an infospike put into his head after the saleswoman puts on a good sales pitch that conveniently pushes him down the exact path he needs to go for this to work. The Doctor, Rose, and Journalist break into some wiring and get the attention of the Editor, who scans them...and finds that the Doctor is...no one. No identification, no nothing. And neither is Rose.

Luckily, though...the pair have a promotion in their future!

Hacking the computer, the Doctor finds that heat is being channeled from the top throughout the station - explaining why it's so hot. The Doctor and rose head up, Adam plays with his new headpiece...and vomits an ice cube. The Doctor and Rose head into Junkyard Narnia and find the Editor. The corpses keep the Doctor and Rose from leaving, the Editor demanding to know who they are...and we get the reveal of...

...can you hear me sighing? I'm sighing.

Who approved this and what drugs were they taking? And can I have some?

...the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe. A gigantic, predatory blob creature that lives in the ceiling, and has been controlling the development of humanity for the past ninety years. I really do want to know what it was that Russell was smoking when he created this, particularly how it relates to what we find out in the finale...but we'll get to that. The other journalist, who had left the Doctor and Rose previously, decides to head up to Floor Five Hundred after them after they are taken into custody.

The Editor lays out the major set up of Satellite Five: namely that the Jagrafess can control everything through the use of the media. Insert political control of the media joke here. Not bad commentary, Russell, but your commentary on the Iraq War didn't save Aliens of London and World War Three, and it won't save this one.

Adam prepares to use an infospike, sending a message back home. The other journalist overhears the Editor talk about how humanity are but slaves to the Jagrafess, monologuing and revealing the plot. The Doctor and Rose get tortured and Adam's brain gets hijacked to give the Editor all the information he needs. With the threat of the Jagrafess being able to rewrite history, the Doctor convinces the journalist to go use her infospike to breaking Adam's link and turn off the cold. The whole place goes completely off the rails, the Doctor and Rose escape, and the Editor attempts to escape...and gets grabbed by the journalist zombies to keep him around for the Jagrafess to explode.

We get the round up. The Doctor tells journalist that everything should now be back to normal following the death of the Jagrafess. Humanity should accelerate. All back to normal. Those of you who have seen Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways are laughing right now. With that done...the Doctor deals with Adam, returning him home and destroying his family's answering machine with the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor then elects to leave Adam behind. He protests, but both the Doctor and Rose are adamant.

...leaving Adam behind in the present with a piece of technology from the year 200,100 in his head.

Typical reaction to reading Doctor Who fanfiction.

Again, this isn't uncommon. The Doctor is known for screwing with history like this on a regular basis. The problem comes when what he does literally just contradicts him destroying the answering machine.

The episode ends with Adam's mother comes in and is amazed by how much time has passed, saying that times goes by like that - emphasizing that last word with a snap...and is horrified by what she sees.

The Long Game is not as bad as some. It's a "meh" episode, like most of Series 1. It's only real problems are Adam's wasted potential and the Doctor being a gigantic hypocrite at the end. Simon Pegg does very well as the enigmatic Editor, though I wish there had been more meat given to his character. That being said, he plays the sleazy newsman-type very well indeed and carries himself with the attitude of a mercenary with a sadistically humorous edge, really only caring about the job he's been paid to do. If he'd survived this episode, he might have made an interesting recurring villain.

Now a lot of the set up here doesn't really make sense in the context to the finale, but in the context of itself as a self-contained entity, the episode works fine. It's nothing special, and it would be decent if it weren't for the ending. Adam was never meant to be a long-term companion, from inception, and I really think that it's a missed opportunity. A companion who is devious, backstabs, and has ulterior motives had happened before. Turlough from the Classic Series, a companion who didn't trust any of the others with him and had literally been hired to kill the Doctor. Of course, Turlough was given time to develop beyond that as a complete character. Adam was not.

This could have been an interesting arc, the Doctor perhaps showing Adam the folly of his way of thinking, helping him develop as a person by giving him a better perspective of the universe as he's done so many humans. Instead, we have him chucked off of the TARDIS after one episode. Why? To make Rose look good. To make Rose, who is going to have her character completely destroyed by the following episode, Father's Day, look good.

Essentially, the entire lifespan of Adam Mitchell on this show was, say it with me now, completely pointless. And yes, I am well aware that Adam later returned in the comics and was vindicated, but that hardly counts. There is so much more that could have been done with the character...and he only existed so that Russell T. Davies could have someone to deflect the hatred from Rose. Sorry, Russell...you managed to shoot yourself in the foot with this one.

The Doctor's punishment for this - Adam being the first companion ever ejected from the TARDIS for bad behavior - seems a little ridiculous, too, when you consider that by leaving Adam in the present of 2012, he risks altering history. He even says that Adam will likely be dissected if his secret gets revealed...but he leaves him anyway with the tech intact. But hey, it's not the first or the last time the Doctor will be a hilariously overblown hypocrite.

For me, The Long Game is a "meh" episode, as I said before. It's not great, but nothing other than the ending is really objectionably bad. I wish I could say the same for the next episode, Father's Day. We'll get a cool alien concept, get to see an excellent performance by Shaun Dingwall sandwiched into forty-five minutes of terrible, terrible drama, and Rose doing something that is far, far worse than what Adam did in this episode. But she gets away with it because she's crying and she's really, really sorry.

Only she's not.

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