Doctor Who - The Stolen Earth / Journey's End
The Doctor lands on Earth, which promptly vanishes. The TARDIS is in the right location, but the planet isn’t. It’s been taken, nowhere to be found in the universe, and nobody knows what’s going on. UNIT, including Martha Jones, will be working overtime, as will Torchwood, headed by Jack Harkness. More informally, the journalist Sarah Jane Smith is
( Read more... )
Excellent stuff, as ever - any disagreements I may have are certainly nothing to do with your own analysis...
The Doctor lands on Earth, which promptly vanishes. The TARDIS is in the right location, but the planet isn’t.
And a good thing too, since much of the rest of the episode is about him getting back to the Earth! :-)
It’s the Daleks, which is such bad news that I think curling up into a foetal position and drinking oneself into a coma would be a pretty good idea at this point.
Indeed. I’m sure there are perfectly good commercial reasons for it, but I liked it better in the Davison to McCoy eras when the Daleks appeared once per Doctor, not once per series...
The Stolen Earth is a great episode.
Argh, I still need to be convinced...
There’s the pleasure of seeing old faces, one of which is truly surprising. Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister, makes a return.
This would have been truly surprising, if only the Big British Castle hadn’t put in an “also starring Penelope Wilton” credit within seconds of the opening music, thus totally ruining any such surprise, even for those of us that had successfully avoided spoilers...
Jack searches personally for the Doctor
After leaving Gwen and Ianto to the mercy of the Daleks! When he knows (from The Sound of Drums) that the teleport can transport three people!!
There's so much going on around them that there’s no time to stop and really have Rose’s return make the emotional impact that it should. Indeed, even in the scene where they meet the Doctor is shot by a Dalek.
Exactly. If you’re going to undo Doomsday, the emotional impact you mention needs to be there. This is a personal thing, but, if there’s one thing I hated more than the business with the “second” Doctor grown out of the hand, it was Rose’s ending, where, with vomit-inducing ickiness, the Doctor, essentially, says: “It’s okay, I’m leaving you this sex doll of me.” I’ve not been this disillusioned with the show since the “rewinding time” debacle at the end of Last of the Time Lords. (I should make clear, perhaps, after this, that I’m a great fan of RTD - not withstanding that Doctor Who wouldn’t be back without him, I’m inclined to think that Eccleston was the best Doctor ever, and that Series 1 of the new run, was, mostly, a masterpiece...)
But I’m not one to end on a sour note.
Me neither. After the ickiness of what’s gone before, Donna’s ending in Journey’s End (assuming that it’s not unpicked in Tennant’s finale, of course!) and, in particular, Bernard Cribbens’s performance (he was unquestionably man of the match in Series 4) pretty much makes me forget all the bother I may have felt about what had gone before. (And they left off all the “what, what what”’s before the Christmas trailer, too!)
As RTD would say: "Hooray!"
Mark_W
Reply
Yeah, they're a bit overused. But try teling that to William Hartnell.
Reply
Leave a comment