My bad on the Satan Pit review, I was in head cold country and didnt get round to it later in the week, I might get a belated one up later today.

Really what could be said about last nights episode other than WTF??? That was easily the weirdest episode of Who and scifi in general I think Ive seen (and I remember Time and the Rani).

What made the episode was the cast. Marc Warren was note perfect as Elton, as was Shirley (Moaning Myrtle) Henderson. The big name for the episode was of course Peter Kay who put in a good turn as the villain (lots of planets really DO have a north, then). Those who saw some of the other competition entries must agree we dodged a few bullets there!

The episode had a subtext of course, about a subtle as the villain! Clearly a commentary on obsessed Doctor Who fans, the episode sent a message that being too obsessed with anything can lead us to being blinded to the simple joys of life that are going on around us (ironically its specifically this episode thats got the Who hardcore crawling out the woodwork signalling their obsessively negative or positive reactions)

It didnt all work for me, the 2 'Benny Hill' runaround sequences were far too broad for me, the 'paving stone' ending stretched credultiy for even this show, and I didnt buy that Elton would really be enthusiastic about getting it on with Jackie (apparently the actors ages are quite close but I thought Elton was late 20s and Jackie mid 40s).

It looks like we can expect an experimental episode each year, with last years being the 'Dinner with Slitheen' episode. FYI for those wondering why it was a Doctor-lite episode, this years production had to squeeze one more episode (the Christmas Special) into the the same production schedule, the only way to pull this off was to film two episodes simultaneously, so there could only be Rose and Doctor cameos.

Next year there should be another one of these, bets are already on as to what they will try next time! Not sure wether to be excited or worried!

The ratings are up on last week apparently, so I guess the general public werent switching off in droves, which is the most important thing. This definitely needs a second watch...

(Edited by Wobag 18/06/2006 11:09)

Wasn't too sure about this one to be honest, although I'm pretty sure it'll be one that grows on me . I loved the casting of Marc Warren as Elton - spot on. I think he's great in 'Hustle' and it was good to see he can pull off great performances in other shows too.

I liked the fact that the episode dealt with the effect of the Doctor on others - the guy doesn't go unnoticed and had a profound effect on individuals which is never really thought about. We've had a few instances of 'what about those that are left behind' in the 2005-2006 seasons, notably with Mickey, Sarah Jane and Jackie this week, but it was good to see it from the angle of the 'average joe'. Placing Elton into scenes from previous epsodes was also quite clever, although maybe a bit too neat...still liked it though.

All in all, there wasn't enough David Tennant , but Peter Kay and Marc Warren were awesome, and it was good to see them doing something a bit different with 'Who'.

In general I liked this episode. I found myself smiling and laughing at the silliness, mainly due to the wonderful and excellent performance from Marc Warren.

Thought they pushed it a little too far with the paving stone though ....

I rate anything that gets Peter Kay playing Fungus the Bogieman.

Subtle it wasn't, but the off-kilter plot worked thanks to the good casting and writing. Marc Warren (Elton) avoided the usual geek mannerisms and Shirley Henderson (Ursula) is talented enough to make them work. The comedy was broad but not nearly as bad as Russel T Davis's efforts last year.

Making the Doctor responsible for Ursula's fate was the one missfire. Points for a ****ing creepy idea, but you call that preferable to death?!

A joy, even though the one thing that stretched credibility for me, and put it firmly in jokey territory was the way the surviving members of LI'n'DA would fail to notice the dying screams of their less fortunate comrades.

One of my favourite pastimes while watching the Box is to note where I've seen an actor before, so this was a special ep for me, once I'd nailed Mr Skinner as the Geordie from 'I'm Alan Partridge'. If you include Shirley Henderson (as well as 'The Taming Of The Shrew' a few months back, she was in 'Bridget Jones', wasn't she?), they were all comic actors, even Moya Brady, who's worked with Harry Hill, so it was always going to be about fun.

That whole 'immortal' thing is going to crop up again, I fancy. Can't see Ursula being a slab for ever...

(Edited by The_Host 19/06/2006 11:08)

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by The_Host
One of my favourite pastimes while watching the Box is to note where I've seen an actor before, so this was a special ep for me

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it took me a couple of minutes, but eventually i figured out that the woman who told elton who the girl in the photo was, was bella emberg - those of us who are old enough will remember her as blunderwoman in various russ abbott tv shows back in the 80's.
**edit**
and ive just found out she has 2 previous who credits - dr who and the silurians, and the time warrior.

(Edited by mad 19/06/2006 12:46)

I apologise in advance for the length of this. As far as this week's review goes, Love and Monsters inspired me for almost all of the wrong reasons (thoughts on The Satan Pit're delayed, but also on the way):

And so, after the breathless high human drama of the last two weeks, we got this. And I wanted to like this episode more than I did - I really did.

There was the germ of a decent story in there and some genuine flashes of it.

But the execution?

Ugh...

It was obvious from the slapstick cliché corridor chase that something different was on the cards, but I think that RTD himself described it best in Confidential with the analogy of the episode having a "shopping list" of many elements from different places - not all of which sat together very happily.

If this is his idea of not wanting an episode “to get daft”, I really don’t want to see this series actually making a real effort in the opposite direction.

Maybe it's because - as I've said a few times over the last few weeks - the personalities of the Doctor and Rose've been so unsympathetic that apathy's kicked in, but I have to say that the almost complete lack of the Doctor and Rose didn't bother me as much as it probably should've.

It rather made a change to see the wider picture, and ordinary life and ordinary people reacting to the circumstances the Doctor creates rather than constantly having "ordinary" defined by the caricature that is Rose's mother. It was a good opportunity wrecked by bad handling.

Since there's an awful lot to get through, I might as well start where the episode started: with the character of Elton.

The way in which we were introduced to him – in fact, the whole piece-to-camera narrative structure – was a novel device that really did grab my attention initially.

The immediate flashbacks to previous events put him into context well enough, but quite frankly, the whole "Elton" running gag would've had me convinced that this was a RTD episode through and through if I hadn’t been set straight afterwards. It got in the way.

And then there was the music.

As much as it was supposed to be part of his personality, I felt that it fell foul of what I’d say was the problem with almost the entire soundtrack for this episode (with one quite notable exception that I’ll get around to later): it was too intrusive, and it seemed to pervade absolutely everything. Elton could go hardly anywhere without uncomfortably loud ELO following him (lyrically appropriate or otherwise), Victor Kennedy’s X-Files rip-off signature music sounded as though it was being played on a Stylophone and again seemed too loud, and when there wasn’t something playing music was being talked about… The whole episode just never seemed to give the audience time to let anything sink in – but since there wasn’t actually a lot to concentrate on, maybe it was camouflage.

I was fascinated by the actor's comment that he didn't want the character of Elton to come across as geeky, when the script painted him as the biggest cliché you could've gotten without a Dungeons and Dragons manual and an “I Want to Believe!” poster (I winced when he came out with the remark about Ursula that “it turned out we read all of the same sites and she only lived half a mile away".

He came across initially as bland but not irredeemable until we were introduced to the rest of LINDA, who came across straight away as a convenient way to parody every type of Doctor Who fan that the writer could think of, and get away with it (to a rather insulting level, I thought).

I’ll single out Ursula immediately, as the classic lazily-written, woolly-hatted, bespectacled, squeaky-voiced she-geek that arouses the ire of half the she-geeks I know on pure principle.

But you had the people sitting around theorising, the people picking over the symbolism of “what the Doctor should represent” and suchlike, the people who wrote their own fiction and other creative endeavours…

I really do hope that RTD hasn’t over-estimated the fanbase’s sense of humour before he decided to play stereotype games with the people paying his wages (let alone parody games with the entire narrative) – because for all they were played as sympathetic, those caricatures weren’t exactly polite to people you allege to respect.

Granted, it was a fair portrait of how relationships evolve out of a single common interest, and there were glimpses of character and some genuine dark moments of the stories lurking behind every activity: the undercurrent of the scene where Bridget was describing LINDA as fulfilling a void as she was looking for the daughter she lost to drugs actually came across as genuinely moving - even though again the music cut in, and the immediate parody of The Twelfth of Never seemed to ruin a moment when giving the audience a moment of silence to use their imaginations would probably've served better.

But I’ll be the first to admit that removing the recently rather dislikeable protagonists did something that I was hoping that someone might be able to manage to do, but never actually held out much hope of happening: gave a thoroughly decent character development scene to Jackie Tyler.

For the first time, we got to see her when she's not having to react to either the Doctor or Rose - and it really did work for me.

It was telegraphed from a mile off that Elton was going to wind up doing what he did as soon as Victor mentioned that he was going to have to "do anything" to get the information that he needed - but the turn the scene took was totally unexpected when considering the tone of everything else up to that point, with the menace largely covert and very well buried.

Yes, she was still Jackie; but even she was acknowledging that she could be a little grating and OTT at times, and that - in depth and frankness that I honestly hadn't seen coming - she understood why.

(It made me wonder what Jackie was like when she was actually with Pete in "our" universe, and how different - having seen an alternate vision in Rise of the Cybermen with something missing - all three Tylers would've been as a unit over the last twenty years, together and maybe even without the Doctor's whirlwind influence to cock things up. There's always something tragic in looking at that family too closely.)

She even mentioned Mickey, and managed to actually look as though someone remembered that he was gone and was genuinely sorry about it.

To be honest, between that and her behaviour towards Elton, I thought that I was going to see a bit of support for my theory that if Jackie liked Mickey as much as she seemed to, she might as well be going out with him herself. But it seems that what his leaving actually did was remove a form of constant support, companionship, a final link to Rose's past life and the only other person on the Powell Estate who could talk with her about the Doctor (I'm actually feeling rather embarrassed that I didn't see that staring me in the face before now).

That scene where she was explaining where Rose was and how she felt about it - with the lyrics to Unbreak My Heart (although it was actually this version) running in the background was a genuine high point. We even got continuation of that theme of independence and leaving things behind that's been hanging around since School Reunion (and even got brought up again last week), with that comment about "at that age, who can be bothered 'phoning home?".

And then we got the confrontation between Jackie and Elton - right down to the echoes of Mickey himself with the "It's never me!" dialogue. The quiet courage of "those left behind" to keep the world running as normal - and do it without all of the gadgets and intergalactic advantages - and just having to learn to cope on the slow path whilst the Doctor and Rose get to cheat...

That seemed to be an underpinning idea of the whole story, right down to shifting the POV to an otherwise random bystander. But for once, it was Jackie who got to handle the delivery - and since Elton's parodic nature made even Jackie at her most stereotypical look well-rounded, I think it was possibly the only thing in this episode that even halfway worked.

And then there was the villain.

I'll make no secret of the fact that Peter Kay doesn't do anything for me (maybe in the same sense of northern embarrassment that puts me off Coronation Street), but Victor Kennedy just didn't work as far as I was concerned. At all.

Frankly, I could've flat out screamed when RTD was describing how "you've got to keep a certain amount of Peter Kay" when casting Peter Kay as a villain, after Peter Kay was apparently keen enough to be in the show to go to RTD with cap in hand, but not quite so desperate that he didn’t quibble over the role he was initially offered.

No, you don't!

The show is called Doctor Who - not The Fantastical Romantic Misadventures of Rose Tyler and Some Bloke or Other with a 'Phone Box and DEFINITELY not Peter Kay!

I've seen enough opinions on this series which object to it being seemingly structured as Doctor Who and the Guest Star of the Week, and this seemed to thoroughly confirm it.

If you want to bring in an actor to play a particular role, then fair enough. But they’re actors - they aren’t supposed to be paid to wander around on set just being themselves or calling their own shots all the time, the narrative isn’t their own vehicle to grandstand on and the story doesn’t revolve around how many guests, in-jokes, industry friends or people you fanboy over you can crowbar in per series!

It was lazy writing as far as I was concerned, pure and simple – apparently due to the fact that RTD selfishly thought that everyone was as big a fan of Peter Kay as he was. I wonder how many other performances that accounts for…

There seemed to be no discernible character other than that strung together by a number of poor one-liners, borderline bodily function gags (right down – and I do mean down - to the gratuitous crotch shots during the desk scene) and an "eczema" running (alleged) gag that should've been buried with a stake through its heart. The only flash of anything other than low humour or exposition was the retort to Bridget that there was no time for "bleeding hearts" - and that was never followed up.

And can this series ever get away from its obsession with deus ex machina and quick fixes? I appreciate that we were supposed to be riding with the whole episode from Elton's point of view, so we weren't going to get as much of the Doctor's techno-jargon as usual - but the quick fix with the cane was just cheap and nasty.

Physically, he didn't look right, even as a human. Although there're a few prematurely grey people in the world, that white hair just didn't seem to even look a convincing shade for that.

But if Peter Kay was trying to play a character older than his actual age, then the make-up department need their heads banging together for the fact that his skin tone and complexion were as out of place as that Hammer Horror cast-off costume was with the rest of the cast. And nobody even attempted to let anything make sense - right down to an alleged exposition scene between Victor and Elton that, again, went straight into parody levels as far as length was concerned.

Upon seeing the trailers, my first thought was that he looked like some sort of stage magician (and a title like Love and Monsters even sounded like a corny autograph). Upon seeing him burst in on LINDA's musical efforts with an accent that could be used as an offensive weapon and his cape flapping like a bat, my immediate thought was that he was going to be passing himself off as some sort of eccentric impresario.

Basically, for an alien creature who was trying to conduct a load of covert investigations into his own private X-File, you'd think would be trying to keep a lower profile and look a bit less conspicuous.

Especially since he was in possession of a pile of files from Torchwood. Again, I find myself wondering exactly how top secret this top secret organisation really is. Or wishing that Victor got enough characterisation for it to make any kind of sense.

We even got two meta-plots for the price of one, with yet another passing Bad Wolf comment. This one, however, was a complete paradox, bearing in mind that Rose didn't go back to the Victorian era and partially inspire Torchwood until after she'd been the Bad Wolf.

And we don't even know how or when she could've done something like scramble her own trail in the first place (working on the comment from The Parting of the Ways that she was personally responsible for any mention of Bad Wolf, even if she didn't put it there with her own physical hands).

But trying to untangle that one could give me a headache, and definitely isn't worth the bother. It just stank of yet more ret-con, loose continuity and a rookie writer who seemed to've been inspired to work in a few stock phrases that'd associate with the series, but have no idea what he was doing with them.

When the Doctor finally showed up, we did get to see him keep that cold detachment that's been there for the rest of the series; just standing and watching as Rose is hugging Elton (although at least we saw some sign immediately beforehand from Rose that Jackie’s still important – “Nobody upsets my Mum!” was wonderfully ironic coming from her after what we’d seen).

My first thought was that this was a sharp contrast to something like Father's Day, where Nine really did seem to try to either understand or be almost openly jealous of the fact that he never could. This stuck in my head a little harder when we found out that the Doctor hadn't been able to save Elton's mother, either.

But the Doctor said it himself in a flash of what's been running through the whole series so far (and what I admittedly thought was a nice touch in having the Absorbaloff caught out by the change): he's not that nice.

Yet the same Doctor who killed Cybermen en masse rather than let them suffer - and was quite prepared to see Elton die in a case of pure utilitarianism - saved Ursula in a manner which would've probably appealed more to his sense of mercy in letting her die, and (as would've fitted with the themes of the rest of the episode) giving Elton a lesson in the fact that bad things happen and you just have to keep moving on.

This new series has - from the first episode - been all about new beginnings, growing up and learning to let go. As far as consistency goes - even down to within the episode itself - this was an utter travesty.

We'd had Jackie talking about how Rose had grown up and effectively moved on, and how it'd affected her. We'd had Bridget asking outright "How do you move on?", as she contemplated turning her emotions full-time from her own lost daughter to pursuing a relationship with Skinner.

If I was really going to stretch things, I suppose I could cobble up some theory or other about how guilt at failure to save Elton's mother might make him want to give Elton something back at all costs. But I'm not going to do that because when it comes to theorising, even I'll draw a line somewhere; on the grounds that it was just too silly and OOC to bother justifying.

And not in a good way, either – although again we got that nasty undercurrent of something being left unfixed, the bathos of the whole thing seemed to've been solely created for the delivery of that cringe-inducing "love life" ending, which just cheapened Elton's tragic and more fundamental dialogue on the Doctor as a harbinger of death and the strangeness, darkness and madness of the world.

RTD was right about the “genuine danger” and lives being ruined; but even right at the end, when that speech without Ursula there could still’ve brought everything back down with a bump, we just weren’t allowed to take the comedy glasses and spinning bow tie off and to feel any of it.

It was an episode that just couldn't decide what it wanted to be - or rather, which wanted to be two things at once, and didn't succeed particularly well as either a comedy or something darker and further-reaching. Just like LINDA itself, it came across as a sub-par parody of something - namely a Who episode - rather than a sincere effort.

It felt like the more classical kind of rent-a-celebrity, no-brainer telethon sketch that Children in Need broke away from last year – and it terrifies me that this is actually going to have to be treated as canon for future reference.

I have to say that I didn't realise that this was going to be the episode that featured the winner of the Blue Peter "Design a Monster" competition until early last week, but it answered a lot. I've seen quite a few people around grumbling about how bringing in writers from outside the Who universe seems to be stretching continuity because they're not quite sure what they're doing - and that got taken to the next level entirely when you apparently have an episode being written completely around an outside creation (complete with the creation's name being rammed home at every opportunity, just for the kudos value to the creator afterwards), rather than creations being made for episodes.

(The same can also be said, of course, of writers who write a character around a particular actor rather than just tell the flippin’ story, let alone the two elements crowbarred together.)

Apologies in advance if I sound like a total and utter po-faced killjoy who's peeing on a nine year old's imagination from a great height, but it just did not work. I didn't realise that Blue Peter had ran the same competition back in 1967, but with no promise of broadcasting the winner; but that would've made more sense than this. I know that new talent has to come from somewhere, but the whole reason why you employ professionals is because they (okay, allegedly) actually know what they're doing and how to do it.

I'm sorry, but when Billie Piper started gushing about how "so smart", "really, really clever" and "really quite terrifying" the whole Absorbaloff concept was - which I'll admit may’ve been true if it'd been handled differently - my first thought that she was hardly going to say anything else whilst the cameras were rolling.

It would've been less difficult to stomach in this respect if it wasn't only playing the card of fanservice in its purest form, but the card of screamingly blatant marketing.

I haven't seen Blue Peter recently, so I don't know whether it gave the episode any free advertising in the last couple of shows; but I just got a very strong sense that this episode was geared towards all of the little 'uns who might not've watched the show before or otherwise had a reason to give it a try.

Looking at the whole thing, the flashback at the start of the episode became a context aid in more ways than one: not just showing where newcomer Elton fitted in, but bringing new viewers up to speed in much the same way as using Rose as a viewer cypher has done (they even got greeted by the same first line from the Doctor: “Run!”).

And right down to the fact that once we'd dragged the kiddies in, the double bill of Confidential that we got was a repeat of the K-9 episode: the other episode from this series that the kiddies apparently lapped up, according to feedback.

Again, I find myself returning to a comment from Confidential - specifically, the point where it was mentioned that the record numbers of people entering the Blue Peter competition showed "how the show's connected with 8-12 year olds".

The rating for the DVD release of the last series was 12 and over. Granted, a lot of that was probably thanks purely to the antics of Captain Jack, but the younger audience identified with it and stuck with it anyway.

I haven't particularly commented on it since it only really struck me as I was thinking about the comment, but whilst the Tennant series has had its darker moments - as we've mentioned before - its dramas've been largely more emotional than physical this time around, which will probably keep the rating a little lower.

I'm not outright saying that it's been dumbed down on every level, but until the last two-parter, it's felt as though there has been a reluctance to hit some of the notes that the Eccleston series was hitting on camera.

Again, given the covert darkness of some moments even here, I'd like to hope that we're maybe going to see a raising of the stakes for the last few episodes (I'm still surprised that the series seems to've gone by so fast). Particularly with the amount of foreshadowing and the announcement that Billie Piper is leaving the series, there're possibilities of interesting things out there.

But at this rate, I hope that the series is never going to be faced with the choice of whether or not it's going to let its audience be attracted to it, or letting pursuit of ratings start bending it further towards this new, younger audience that the BBC's chasing for it.

Prescriptive versus descriptive writing isn't something that I'd like to see the series come down to.

In spite of the dark undercurrents and the fact that even its comedy was trying to straddle multiple age groups by making Peter Kay basically play Peter Kay, this was still primarily the "for the kiddies" episode - designed for an age group that the BBFC thought should watch the last series at their own risk.

The BBC's own web site tests episodes on children as young as five and seven, and they manage with it well enough.

Since we know from RTD's previous work for the ages of 8-12 (Dark Season and Century Falls) that he’s more than capable of writing drama for that age group, this was more like his days on Why Don't You: definitely for the lowest common denominator of that demographic (if they get a nasty shock the moment that they realise that it's not that fluffy every week and turn off, it wouldn't shock me).

I only wish that RTD'd remembered that the kiddies didn't need such blatant efforts to keep them watching until this point in the first place.

(Edited by Samanfur 19/06/2006 15:45)

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by SamanfurI really do hope that RTD hasn’t over-estimated the fanbase’s sense of humour before he decided to play stereotype games with the people paying his wages (let alone parody games with the entire narrative) – because for all they were played as sympathetic, those caricatures weren’t exactly polite to people you allege to respect.

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Hey! You can't say that about Russell T. Davies!

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by The_Host
Hey! You can't say that about Russell T. Davies!

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Too late - she can and she has!

It would help if I'd seen the episode in question yet so I could say whether I reckon said comments were justified, mind... there is another repeat, right?

Personally I can't say the objections raised bother me. I view Doctor Who as enjoyable Saturday-evening fluff with the potential to be something more on occasion. Thanking Blue Peter for years of loyal support/free advertising (choose as cynic-metre deems appropriate) is fine with me, and doing so by theming an episode around a competition-winner is a cool idea.

It might play the bejesus with continuity, but it's just one episode. I'm sure it'll never be mentioned again, so if you want to forget it, go right ahead!

As for the Doctor being unlikable: he's got a dark side, but I don't find him unlikabke. Eccleston's "Stupid ape!" version was far more acerbic. Doc10 seems governed by compassion (he's making "I'm sorry" into a bloody catchphrase) but with a willingness to be ruthless when it's required. He's gained control over the explosive temper of Doc9 (shell-shock doc) and incorporated it into his personality.

Interesting progression rather spoiled by Tennant's woeful SHOUT, SHOUT and SHOUT AGAIN attempt at acting pissed off.