Tom Salinsky

I have neglected my post shamefully and will try and rewatch the episode soon to give some more cogent thoughts, but here are some quick observations…

• New title sequence and music seem to lack focus and drive, although the glimpse of Matt Smith’s face is welcome and stylish.
• Moreorless everything in the set-up is great – Jenna-Louise Coleman acquits herself splendidly, and Matt Smith is excellent as this darker, more lonely version of the Doctor.
• The nods to the Patrick Troughton Yeti stories are lovely and to have Ian McKellan and Richard E Grant is almost spoiling us
• Welcome returns too from Vastra, Jenny and especially Strax
• Don’t like the new TARDIS much. Too small, too boxy. I thought the previous version was the best since the series returned and possibly the best ever. I remember hating the Eccleston version when it debuted and I got used to that, so maybe this will grow on me too (mind you, they did adjust the lighting when Tennant took over).
• Fantastically bold to actually kill off Clara, although the storytelling was a bit wobbly there. If she’s dead, kill her off. If she’s not dead yet, then give her a line or two at least.
• Resolving the plot with “tears at Christmas” is almost unforgivably nonsensical and rather makes me wonder if the resolution to the Sherlock cliff-hanger will be that Watson closed his eyes and wished really hard that Holmes wasn’t dead.

I’m shortly turning this blog over to movies and especially The Oscars, but before I do a quick word about the New Yes Prime Minister which began on Gold tonight. As a writer myself of a satirical play about the, and called Coalition, I was duty-bound to take in the recent stage version of the venerable 80s sit-com which I found very disappointing. Trapped in a single set and playing out in real-time did the storytelling few favours, but worse was the way that the elegant wit and supple characterisations had desiccated over time, becoming hack imitations of their former selves. Naturally, the new actors couldn’t help but be compared to their progenitors, but the writing never added anything new, while simultaneously failed to resurrect glories past, and the plotting was glacially slow, and rarely managed to raise the stakes appreciably.

Putting this new incarnation back on the television seems scarcely wise, but I was stunned to realise that the first half hour installment is essentially the first thirty minutes of the play, with all attendant faults and compromises, and several jokes made appreciably less funny in the minimal rewriting. Too see such good actors as Henry Goodman and David Haig struggle with this third-rate material, while spectres of Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington loom over their shoulders is a very discomfiting sight. I shan’t be watching any more.

Oh my god, they killed Rory.

You bastards!

There’s a lot to like about The Angels Take Manhattan. It looks fantastic, with director Nick Hurran making excellent use of the opportunity to go on location in the USA. The regulars are all on sparkling form – it’s a pleasure just to watch the three of them sitting in Central Park and teasing each other. The opening hard-boiled narration is atmospheric and captures the spirit of the novels and movies it’s referencing without being smug, and the story as a whole acts as a fine finale for the era of the Ponds and Amy in particular, with enough references to key episodes from the past two-and-a-half seasons to engage the regular viewer’s sentimentality without being key to understanding the episode.

That brings up what for me is the main point though – who is this really aimed at? On the one hand, clearly the regular viewer. The character of River Song blithely referring to the Doctor as her husband and Amy as her mother would be baffling for any casual or new watcher, and the emphasis of the whole story is very clearly on the departure of Amy and Rory – even to the point of just letting an Angel keep roaming around free, the Doctor is apparently entirely unbothered by the thought that the paradox they have created may not have been entirely successful in eradicating them. So clearly, this was made for the regular viewer then.

One the other hand, only a casual viewer would fail to spot that we’ve seen all of this before. The Weeping Angels first return in The Time of Angels brilliantly added to their powers and qualities while preserving their original Grandmother’s Footsteps appeal. This simply reprises scenes from Blink, when it isn’t ignoring established Angel lore altogether (like having Rory transmitted only in space for no reason at all except that it makes the plot work). Likewise the relationship between River and the Doctor is never explored in any new way at all, it’s just minor variations on themes played again and again by Steven Moffat in previous scripts – the Ming vase is simply a lesser version of the “Hello Sweetie” message in The Pandorica Opens, and the novel is just River Song’s diary rehashed for example.

There’s also a tendency in the episode for things to be true only because someone, usually the Doctor, says they are, rather than because they flow naturally from other story elements, or because they fit with things already established. Once you read something it becomes true. Really? Okay, I guess. The Doctor has healing hands now? Uh-huh. New York is messed up with time… things… so it’s hard to land a TARDIS there. Really? Didn’t seem to be an issue in The Chase, but I suppose. If you voluntarily go back in time, I can never come and visit you again. Huh?

When I overcome the aching familiarity of it all, then it does kind-of work – at least up to the moment of old Rory’s death. Honestly, has any character in fiction other than South Park’s Kenny McCormick died more frequently and less permanently? It’s impossible to take the sight of an emaciated Arthur Darvill seriously, given that he’s already been aged to death in a previous episode (as well as shot, turned into an Auton, desiccated to death, erased from history etc), and even Rory commenting on his propensity for resurrection can’t overcome the feeling of “here we go again”. Amy and Rory chucking themselves off the ledge is nicely done and is moving for as long as you ignore how fast-and-loose the show is now playing with the rules of the Angels (they basically obediently wait for you to finish being noble now, whether you blink or not) but tarnished slightly by the fact that we then get the same damned scene again in the graveyard. Only Rory Williams could exit the series dying three times in the same episode.

And yet, and yet, and yet… there is energy and power and pace to this episode. Moffat’s use of structure is as elegant as ever – “break mine” is if not a fresh melody then at least a nimble variation and Amy’s “afterword” is both a nifty idea and a nice bit of writing. And, following-on from the Doctor’s erasing of himself from history, maybe a bit more of a clean break with the past is what’s needed. The Ponds living a quiet life as a media couple in New York makes sense, and is a fitting departure for them – clearly the Doctor was never going to leave them alone. But what on Earth is the Doctor going to say to Brian…?

So, now I suppose I have to give this episode a star rating, which I find almost impossible. If I’d never seen Blink or the various other episodes plundered for ideas, I think I would have loved it. If I judge it on the basis that every episode this year is supposed to be a completely original “mini-movie” then clearly it falls very far short. If I didn’t truly believe that the Ponds were gone for good, I would have found the abandoning of the evil-Angels plot maddening, but equally if I hadn’t mourned Rory a dozen times already I would feel the loss of him and Amy more keenly.

It’s generally been quite a strong half-season, although nothing has absolutely hit it out of the park so far. We began with the impressive and vibrant but rather uneven Asylum of the Daleks followed by the rather clunky Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, redeemed by the thoughtful if not perfectly-realised A Town Called Mercy and the excellent, save for the hasty ending, The Power of Three. I think ultimately The Angels Take Manhattan is far more successful than Dinosaurs, but far too flawed to get the four-star treatment meted out to Asylum and so I think three-and-a-half stars is fair. But I want to watch it again, and I shall be interested to see what commenters make of this one. I’ve a feeling it may divide opinion.

Doctor Who is often at its best when it focuses on just one thing. There’s a Rutan in a lighthouse. Who created the Daleks? Don’t blink, blink and you’re dead. Trying to juggle too many different ideas, concepts, points of focus can easily lead to muddle, especially when you’re trying to deliver a movie-of-the-week in 45 minutes.

Sometimes an episode can suffer from being over-ambitious and yet the parts which work work so well that I’m prepared to forgive a bit of muddle. School Reunion never does anything interesting with its alien invasion plot beyond a bit of amusing undercover work from the Doctor in the first five minutes. But the return of Sarah Jane and K9 and the amazing meeting-of-companions past and present means that the underdeveloped melodrama never gets in the way of the relationship story which delivers handily.

Writer Chris Chibnall’s best script for Doctor Who is easily 42, which follows the principle of Keep It Simple Stupid. By contrast, the Silurian two-parter has barely enough material for 60 minutes, let alone 90. And Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is an obvious first-draft with no care or time taken to smooth over the bumps and properly bed-in the plot points (despite Moffat’s claims in Doctor Who Magazine that the script was “perfect” as delivered). How would The Power of Three measure-up given that it was trying to balance an alien invasion plot with a Ponds-eye view of The Doctor?

By and large, it worked very well indeed.

The sudden arrival on Earth of countless identical smooth black cubes is a delightful and arresting image, which works extremely well as a point of focus, providing The Doctor, Rory, Amy and not forgetting diligent Brian, with a deep mystery to explore, providing time for The Doctor’s impact on the Ponds’ lives to be examined. As well as including the traditional first-person narration by a shortly-departing companion, the story is full of incidental pleasures – The Doctor’s demented need to fill time by playing keepy-uppy, doing the hoovering and painting any available fences; an RTD-style series of celebrity cameos; the return of UNIT, now re-oriented (“science leads”) and led by daughter-of-the-Brig Kate Stewart played by bloody Jemma Redgrave; and the now apparently obligatory side-story, this time involving Zygons and Henry VIII.

All this time, we get only a couple of hints at the cubes’ necessarily malevolent nature and this too is a dangerous game. The longer you leave it, the more you spin out the suspense, the more jaw-droppingly amazing must the reveal be when it finally comes. Chibnall again plays it clever here by initially making the actions of the cubes when they come to life bewilderingly inconsistent, but when they do strike, it’s fierce and hard.

It’s really only in the last ten minutes that the careful balancing of timing and theme slips through the story’s grasp. While it’s an enormous pleasure to see Steven Berkoff snarling his way through the lines, Shakri’s plan and motivations were pretty standard-issue, and The Doctor’s solution seemed to amount to little more than a bit of sonic-ing. Here’s also where, in his zeal to build up the excitement and whack up the stakes, Chibnall hugely over-reaches himself. As soon as you announce that around a third of the Earth’s population has suffered fatal heart attacks, any half-awake viewer is going to recognise that a reset switch is about to be thrown. And while I’m grateful that a) we didn’t actually rewind time and b) the solution was properly bedded-in to the story and not grafted-on at the last minute, the timing is way, way off. Even given that the cubes, which are designed to find live, beating hearts and administer a fatal shock, can be reprogrammed with a flick of the sonic to instead find only those hearts which have already been stopped and administer a shock sufficient to get them going again, The Doctor still has only  something like two minutes to zap the victims before permanent brain damage is inflicted. Not the many minutes of Berkoffing which we actually got. And that’s generously drawing a veil over the fact that you can’t shock a non-beating heart back into life anyway, only correct the rhythm of a heart which is not beating properly. And while I enjoyed the sight of The Doctor struggling through with one heart out of action, I was frustrated at how quickly and easily this was resolved. Surely, if anyone is going to defibrillate The Doctor in a hospital, it should be medically-trained Rory?

So, if the climax was a bit skimpy, the Pond/Doctor story generally made up for it, with Brian’s final speech sending the Ponds back to the TARDIS I thought particularly effective. It’s an essentially unbreakable rule of scriptwriting physics that the more screen-time you give to your personal drama, the less you have available for your alien-invasion plot, and it’s to Chris Chibnall’s credit that he balanced both demands as well as he did for as long as he did.

Elsewhere, the production team is not tested to breaking point, but ably rises to the occasion. The make-up job on the two creepy orderlies is fine (if a bit reminiscent of The Empty Child), Douglas Mackinnon’s camera consistently frames the story in interesting ways and Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill prepare to send the Ponds off  to their final reward in fine style.

For the first half-hour, I honestly thought this was going to be my favourite of the season so far, earning four-and-a-half or even five stars until the last ten minutes, but that slightly limp resolution sees The Power of Three stuck on four, roughly even with Asylum and Mercy but still a tremendous improvement on the dreadfully clumsy Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.

For the 2012 Season, Mr Moffat has promised us a mini-movie every week, but so far neither has really lived up to the billing. Not only because of the presence of the archetypal returning foe, in the shape of the Daleks, but also because of the shenanigans involving Jenna Louise Coleman, and the ongoing Rory/Amy soap opera, Asylum of the Daleks, good as it was, felt much more like the latest episode in a continuing saga. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was much more self-contained, but it just felt too ordinary to earn the title of “mini-movie”. A Town Called Mercy might just qualify however.

It helps that we get to drop the Doctor and co into a fresh genre. Westerns have only been attempted rarely by the series, with the most notable version from 1966 carrying the reputation in some quarters as the worst Doctor Who story ever (this is probably unfair). Last year’s season-opener included some Western set-decoration but was concerned with other things entirely. This genuinely was a Western with all the swagger, morality-plays and suspense that implies. The Doctor’s arrival in Mercy was especially pleasing and accurate. Whereas last week, Chris Chibnall’s script doled out achingly familiar icons one-by-one as if they were astonishing innovations, this week Toby Whithouse dashes off Western clichés in a flurry, but with a knowing wink, and with efficiency bordering on haste. You want a Western? Okay good, here’s the border town, swinging saloon doors, piano that stops playing as soon as strangers enter town, just like you asked for. Now let’s do something more interesting.

And more interesting it certainly was. Instead of a simple good-vs-evil, we get a satisfyingly complicated mix of self-interest, tribalism, ends, means and justifications. Jex is arguably a war criminal, even though his actions ended a war which would no doubt have cost further lives. The Gunslinger is arguably bringing justice, but in his single-minded pursuit of Jex and his colleagues, he is bringing more suffering, not ending it. Now, none of this is especially innovative, and it maybe needed an extra twist in the final ten minutes, rather than having Jex simply solve everyone’s problems by obediently committing suicide at the first opportunity, but it’s refreshing to see Doctor Who attempting to tackle some of these issues, and the Old West setting and the Doctor’s uncharacteristic lapse into vengefulness I think means that the team pulled it off, assisted by lovely performances from Adrian Scarborough and especially Ben Browder – a neat bit of casting that made the character wrongly seem invulnerable, making it all the more shocking when the Gunslinger guns him down.

I do have niggles though. Very unusually, on Moffat’s watch, the rules aren’t especially clear. Will the Gunslinger risk collateral damage or not? The answer “sometimes” is rather unsatisfying. And the business with the town’s rocks-and-bits-of-wood border was very confusing. I initially assumed that the Gunslinger was incapable of crossing the barrier due to some bit of Kahler magic, rigged up at the same time as the lights and the heating. Yet, when the time comes, the Gunslinger simply marches over it, as if he and Jex had simply been playing a game up till then and the Gunslinger had now opted to change the rules. Oh, and Rory is rather poorly served. Remove him entirely and the plot is scarcely affected.

Hardly perfect then, but a huge improvement over last week and easily deserving of four stars, but it’s a bit frustrating, that especially after such a long wait, the script wasn’t given that final polish which it needed.

A few additional stray observations.

• Having criticised the usual indefatigable design departments last week, I have to take them task again this week for the very derivative look of the Gunslinger, whose make-up was exactly half-and-half Borg from Star Trek The Next Generation and Tony from Total Recall.
• Lots of good jokes this week too, especially the Doctor’s tea order and Susan the transgender horse.
• As well as the Gunslinger’s willingness or not to injure others in the crossfire, the business with the squiggly tattoos confusing its targeting system was undercooked and far less relevant than you might think given the amount of attention it got on-screen.
• Can we have a rule that you can’t do robot POV shots any more unless you think of something new to do with them? The Gunslinger was already in the habit of speaking commands aloud to himself. Did we have to see them on a heads-up display as well?

When Russell T Davies brought Doctor Who back in 2005, his first concern was that it should be fun. This is very smart thinking. The possibilities of the series are, after all, endless. If you have the entire universe of time and space at your disposal, and where you are isn’t fun, then by all means find something more fun to do. We can do without a lot of tedious hand-wringing and hair-pulling. We need to get the mass audience back.

The casting of Christopher Eccleston slightly pulled the stories in another direction, and the two strands of tortured lonely god and devil-may-care galactic adventurer were not always perfectly braided together. Much more successful was David Tennant, who pulled off the joie-de-vivre with much more ease and comfort than his predecessor and so made the flashes of angst and pain more significant for being fewer and further between. And so a good series of Doctor Who can and should include heart-breaking episodes like Doomsday and Human Nature as well as those which are just a (horrible word) romp such as Partners in Crime or Tooth and Claw, but the Doctor is usually permitted one scene of headshaking moralising so it doesn’t all seem too glib.

This is what was so profoundly odd about Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. First of all, it’s a complete muddle. Silurians, Rory’s dad, Queen Nefertiti, big game hunters, a sinister trader, comedy robots, dinosaurs – and, of course, a spaceship – assembled virtually at random with no sense of purpose, focus or theme. And it contains a number of things which we haven’t seen before. The Doctor’s new habit of dropping off Mr and Mrs Pond at the end of each adventure and then scooping them up again at the beginning of the next is bothersome. There’s no particular reason for him not to do this, I suppose, but he’s never done it before and I don’t quite understand why he’s doing it now.

This is extended in tonight’s episode in which he also takes Queen Nefertiti from the end of a previous (unseen) adventure and Rupert Graves’ standard-issue great white hunter, not to mention Rory’s dad. “I’ve never had a gang before,” comments the Doctor, hanging a lantern on it. No, and there’s no particular reason to have one now. Except of course, because it might seem fun.

And for once, even the art department lets the side down, with the spaceship interior also a jumble of location work, exteriors (for no good reason) and then a very, very standard-issue spaceship set (possibly reused from an earlier story?). That’s this episode all over – nothing is consistent and yet all the individual pieces seem very familiar. The dinosaurs are faithfully duplicated from the Jurassic Park playbook, even including a big game hunter triangulated by two raptors (if Rupert Graves had said “clever girl” I might have given up altogether). Indira of the Indian Space Association is no different from the countless other stubborn military types we’ve seen before. David Bradley’s Solomon is a carbon copy of venal traders from other stories and Rory’s dad, while brightly played by Mark Williams, is exactly as we might have guessed he’d be.

This all might have played better if the stakes had seemed higher, but the drawback of the characters – especially the Doctor – treating the adventures which follow as a romp is that it becomes harder and harder for the viewer to take it at all seriously. If it’s all just larks, then what’s the point? And, then – right on cue – comes the Doctor’s moralising speech to Solomon.

By the end of the episode, everyone has been issued with their raison d’être – Nefertiti is a prize to be won, Riddell is necessary to fight off raptors, Indira’s missiles will destroy Solomon’s ship instead of the Silurian ark and, most limply of all, the flight controls require two pilots of the same gene… thing.. and that’s why Rory’s dad is there. So that’s why the Doctor suddenly felt the need to assemble a gang. This is dreadfully clunky writing with the basic pieces assembled, but no attempt made whatsoever to smooth over the joins or create any sense of organic growth. And, most unforgivably of all, even having hired two famous comedians to provide the voices, the two comedy robots never say anything even remotely funny.

Reading all this back, it sounds rather as if I didn’t like it, but as bumpy and as clumsy and as over-familiar as it was, much of it was very charming. Matt Smith was as winning as ever – I particularly liked his line-reading of the word “run”, faced with the dinosaurs for the first time. Karen Gillan, although rendered rather redundant by the plethora of other characters, gave good banter and the lovely shot of Mark Williams sipping his tea while looking out over the planet Earth was worth any number of unfunny comedy robots.

This is the trouble with “fun” episodes of Doctor Who. If you scoop up a pick-and-mix of characters and ideas that have worked before, fling them all at the page and keep everybody quipping back-and-forth then you might make a “fun” 45 minutes of television, but at the end of it – what’s the point? If it’s bracingly original, remarkably structured or features a truly astonishing turn from a major guest-star then it may not need to be high drama. But familiar components don’t get any less familiar when you mix-and-match them and clumsy plotting is still clumsy plotting even if you’re lucky enough to have Matt Smith reciting your exposition.

And this still sounds as if I didn’t like it, but it was perfectly entertaining while it was on, it’s just that – with the whole universe to explore, I’m frustrated at being given hand-me-downs. But, you know what, if this is as bad as this series gets, then this could be regarded as a classic year. What worries me is that this is the norm, and that when Chris Chibnall inevitably takes over as show-runner (please, no) we’ll get a lot more like this.

What is Doctor Who about?

I don’t mean what are its themes, its preoccupations. The answer to that is simple – whatever it likes. I mean what is constructed out of? What do its various writers and, in the modern era, it’s “showrunner”, need enough of to make an episode?

Classic Doctor Who is about incidents (and, on a good day, dialogue), from the early 1960s to the late 1980s with very few exceptions, it’s just about setting up a situation and then stringing together enough incidents to get through the allotted number of episodes. The Daleks, the second-ever story, contrives to strand the TARDIS crew on the planet Skaro, introduces malevolent aliens and fills the remaining time with incidents until the Doctor and his companions can finally depart (or almost fills, at any rate). The need for radiation drugs, navigating a deep chasm by rope, the final attack on the Dalek city – incident follows incident with only enough character development to get to the next incident. There is a theme of some kind – pacifism can’t defeat totalitarianism – but it’s scarcely what viewers are tuning in for.

Survival, the last story of the classic run, works in exactly the same way. The Doctor and his companion are wrenched away from contemporary Earth and the safety of the TARDIS and transmitted to an alien world, complete with malevolent foes and the script now fills the remaining time with incidents until the Doctor and Ace are returned to the TARDIS (over-fills, if anything). Even the very best stories of the classic series, such as The Talons of Weng-Chiang or Inferno, conform to this model.

But the Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who wasn’t made out of the same stuff. Sure, there still were exciting incidents – the astonishing motorway chase in the The Runaway Bride, the showdown with Mr Finch in School Reunion, the Ood going rogue in The Impossible Planet – but the episodes now existed to put the characters through the wringer emotionally, in a way much more akin to most narrative fiction from soap to Shakespeare. The point of Doomsday is not that the Cybermen and Daleks are banished to the void, the point of Doomsday is what it feels like to lose a loved one. The point of Midnight is not watching David Tennant and Lesley Sharp lip-sync, it’s how small groups of people can make very bad moral choices. Russell T Davies Doctor Who is about emotions.

But there’s another strand to this era of the programme, which began back in the early 1980s. Contemporary Doctor Who is also about moments. The point of Earthshock isn’t the death of Adric – insofar as that is dealt with at all, it’s handled in the following story. The point of Earthshock is the reveal of the Cybermen at the end of part one. The point of Rembrance of the Daleks is the Dalek going up the stairs, and Davros popping up at the end, and that spaceship landing in the school playground. And so, at least part of the point of Doomsday is actually the Cybermen fighting the Daleks, as they have in playground after playground since 1966. You only have to look at some of the episode titles to see this – The Doctor’s Daughter, Let’s Kill Hitler and so on.

Since taking over as showrunner, Moffat has embraced this wholeheartedly. But these moments, untethered from emotion, don’t always work. Rory, facing an army of Cybermen , asking “shall I repeat the question” as the entire Cyberfleet immolates behind him, is either punch-the-air glorious or hideously smug, depending completely on your mood as you watch it. And it’s a far bigger problem for Moffatt than it ever was for Rusty, since Moffat isn’t nearly as interested in emotions as he is in concepts. His model for Doctor Who isn’t the whirl and sacrifice of The Caves of Androzani (probably the nearest the classic series gets to the RTD style), it’s the wit and dash of City of Death, with its multiple time zones, endless copies of the Mona Lisa, constant quipping and preposterously high stakes.

This can let him down badly, as it did at the end of the last series, where dozens of complex ideas furiously orbited a hollow centre, and ultimately didn’t even make any narrative sense, let alone have any emotional resonance. Whether as part of a long-held plan, or in response to negative feedback on the last series, Moffat has promised to “throw the lever back the other way” this time and give us 14 stand-alone stories instead of attempting a single series arc. Asylum of the Daleks is the first of these movie-of-the-week episodes. Was it any good?

Well, actually, yes it was. Especially as a season-opener, it worked very, very well. It doesn’t have the scope or ambition of A Good Man Goes To War or Doomsday, but neither is it groaning under the weight of a year or more’s worth of ferociously complicated plot. The opening, complete with portentous voice-over and atmospherically shadowy figures, tells even the newest viewer everything they need to know about these tinplated gravel-voiced foes and then we’re plunged into the story proper, pausing only briefly to scoop up Rory and Amy along the way.

The three of them are then inserted into the titular Asylum on the flimsiest of pretexts, but the place looks gorgeous, from the amazing snowy exteriors to the gloomy caverns beneath. A bit of shame though that “every Dalek ever” have all been lit with the same orangey glow, rendering them all looking the same as the bronze 2005 model, which now apparently is the default. (Part of this of course, is to excuse the hideous redesign from last year, and pass it off as just another variation.)

One of the benefits of Moffat’s concept-first approach is that he is very, very thorough at mining each of those concepts for everything they’re worth. The Weeping Angels from Blink (still possibly the finest episode the new series has produced) seemed to fit the confines of that Swiss watch of a script perfectly, and yet when they reappear in The Time of Angels he wrings fresh nuances out of the same basic idea. Asylum of the Daleks is likewise full of ideas we’ve seen before, but each is given a lick of paint, a new angle or simply a placing in the narrative which manages to make them seem brand spanking new.

We’ve seen human-controlled Daleks before, from the second-ever Dalek story in fact, but we’ve never seen them presented quite so viscerally, with eyestalks and gunsticks protruding from their very flesh. And we’ve been confronted with the horror of being converted into a Dalek before – most shockingly in the form of Arthur Stengos in Revelation of the Daleks. But here, just when it seems as if Amy’s fate is to lose her humanity and turn on her friends, it transpires that the author (and the Doctor) had another agenda entirely. Thus we are (at least I was) totally unprepared for the horrible fate of the other guest artist of the week.

Okay, now hang on a minute. Wait one goddamn moment here.

Steven Moffat has been perfectly clear in interview after interview that these five episodes are his goodbye to the Ponds, and that we will meet Jenna-Louise Coleman playing “Clara” (probably) in the Christmas special. And yet I’m pretty sure, no I’m very sure, actually I’m positive, in fact there’s her name is in the credits – that’s bloody Jenna-Louise Coleman right there on my telly, right now, playing someone called “Oswin” and now she’s a Dalek and now she’s been blown up! Just what the hell is going on here? No doubt, in five episodes’ time, some monstrously convoluted timey-wimey backstory will explain, but for the moment her presence in this story was just confusing, and an unnecessary distraction from what was by, and large, a rather artful balancing of the demands of incident, emotion and concept.

Anyway, whoever she turns out to be, Coleman gave a very good account of herself, and the regular cast were also on very good form, with Matt Smith in particular finding a slightly firmer, stabler reading of the Doctor which I thought was very effective. Possibly the Asylum itself wasn’t quite as Dalek-y as it might have been, but that’s the inevitable problem with Doctor Who vs the Daleks – have him surrounded by swarms of them on a regular basis and their failure to pull the trigger becomes a bit awkward for everyone. In fact, various Dalek “puppets” had ample opportunity to swiftly and suddenly exterminate all three regulars, but they were generally too busy pretending to be human and/or dead – apparently only for our benefit. The set design was wonderfully Dalek-y, though and I did like the shot of Rory and Amy peering out through the mesh surrounding the prison in which they first find themselves, in exactly the manner that Dalek operators do to this day.

And while I like, I very much like, the notion that any memory of the Doctor has been erased from the collective Dalek consciousness, I am also acutely aware that this was exactly what all that screwing around faking his own death was supposed to have achieved at the end of the last series.

So, if not scaling the very heights of what the series can achieve, then this was certainly an effective relaunch of the show for 2012, thoroughly entertaining and exciting, more-or-less making sense most of the time and neatly avoiding the worst excesses of the previous series. I’m still not quite sure why the Doctor keeps feeling the need to return the Ponds to their suburban home at the end of each adventure though. Does he want them as travelling companions or not?

Yes, I know, I’ve left it weeks and by now you can probably barely even remember it was on. But on it was and I feel I should say something. Part of the reason that this review is so late, other than simple disorganisation on my part, is that I generally try and watch each episode at least twice before committing my opinions to Her Majesty’s Internet, and I just haven’t felt like re-watching this one. That already says a fair bit about it, doesn’t it?

Not that it was bad exactly. We’re spoiled these days, us Doctor Who fans. The programme has reached a consistent level of quality in almost all areas which we would have killed for back in the 80s. The production design, lighting design, camera work and FX are all absolutely first rate, as usual. Matt Smith knows exactly what he’s doing in the leading role, and the show can now attract guest stars that would be the envy of pretty much any other show on British TV.

So each week we tune in, hoping not that the sets and the monsters will be up to the vision of the scriptwriter (I’ve just been watching Barry Letts and Paddy Russell talk about Invasion of the Dinosaurs – poor old things) but conversely that the script will be worth all the time, talent and money which will be lavished on it.

And was it? Well, there was certainly some good stuff in it. The delightful feint of Claire Skinner picking the lock of a real police box was tremendously funny, the portal into a Christmas world of snow and trees was delightful, the inevitable reunion with Alexander Armstrong (never has a piece of casting given away a supposed plot-twist more clearly!) was suitably moving and the genuinely surprising reappearance of Amy and Rory was a lovely little Christmas present for the regular viewers.

But what on earth was the point of it all?

There are two basic approaches one can take to long-form storytelling. One is the classic three acts. Set up your problem, make your hero suffer, resolve the problem. See Blink, Midnight, The Empty Child, or actually – most successful stories. All of the events are connected to the main problem in some way.The other approach is to use the narrative just as an excuse for a lot of fun and games of a different kind. See most musicals, Marx Brothers movies, James Bond and so on. In these stories, the resolution of one problem creates another one, and so a more episodic feel is created. Splitting the difference, creating a series of related set-pieces, runs the risk of feeling episodic. I took Moffat to task for this with The Eleventh Hour which seemed to me to scarcely know what it was about despite being a lot of fun – but this is worse by far.

It’s about the Doctor’s relationship with Madge. No, about it’s the Doctor’s Christmas treat for her children (which, as the episode goes on, looks more and more like a sinister trap for whichever proves to be the most curious of her brood). No, it’s about those funny tree things. Oh look, it’s Arabella Weir. Hey, now Claire Skinner’s gone all magic.

To be blunt, this was a fucking mess. There are some delightful ingredients in the mix, but the artful constructionist of A Scandal in Belgravia has apparently assembled them using a blender. Of particular note is Claire Skinner’s blithe acceptance of pretty much all the batshit-craziness which visits her Christmas. It’s rather charming and funny until you realise how unbelievable it is and what a narrative short-cut it represents.

So, I’m starting to have deep misgivings about Steven Moffat’s reign at the head of the Whoniverse. While he’s undoubtedly capable of writing magnificent stories, I feel he sold us down the river twice last year – once by not noticing how distraught Amy Pond would be to have her infant daughter irrevocably ripped from her, and again by entirely failing to provide a coherent explanation for the Doctor’s death on the shores of Lake Silencio. If I’m dazzled by how clever everything is, then I may not notice that the characters are thinly drawn. If the emotions are big and important enough, then I may not notice that the plot doesn’t quite work. But you can’t fail at both and expect no-one to notice. This would have been a good moment to bounce back and prove that running both Doctor Who and Sherlock isn’t spreading Steven Moffat too thinly. So, far it looks like Sherlock’s gain is Doctor Who’s loss.

Two stars.

Oh, that Steven Moffat can write a Doctor Who season finale, can’t he? A weird vision of Earth – all familiar elements but jumbled up in delightful ways, a storyline which jumps back and forth in time, revisiting events from earlier episodes and seeing them from a new angle, set ups from the very first episode of the season now being paid off, old friends and enemies popping back for a visit, a quick appearance of a Dalek just for fun, Rory nobly in uniform bravely protecting Amy who has forgotten who he is. Some of it was a bit of cheat, sure, and I’m not quite sure I understood what the Doctor did at the end there, but it came with such a huge emotional wallop I really didn’t care. Four stars.

Unfortunately, that’s last year’s season finale I’m talking about. And this year’s slavish emulation of last year’s is the least of its problems.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way. As irrelevant and idiotic as it was, the vision of the 5:02 universe was bracing and superbly well-realised – what a pleasure to see Simon Callow back as Charles Dickens. The Doctor with a beard is a fun image and the Silents are as effective as ever, albeit rather under-used. Amy’s office-on-a-train is all sorts of awesome and her execution of Madame Kovarian finally gives some heft to the baby-kidnapping plot which has been treated in such an off-hand manner since the series returned. The punch-line with The Doctor (like James Bond at the beginning of You Only Live Twice) believed dead by his enemies is a good way of modestly rebooting a series which was rapidly disappearing up its own probic vent. The tribute to Nicholas Courtney is touching and appropriate.

Okay, now the minor niggles.

The whole story requires the Doctor to be constantly talking to other people about how clever he is being, which is dramatically weak, despite Moffat’s best efforts to ramp up the tension by having Churchill’s palace progressively invaded by Silents. When Churchill is abandoned, a not-very-convincingly decapitated Dorium Maldovar takes over the role. The last thing we need at the end of this Moebius Pretzel of a series is the set-up for another arc, let alone one derived from Silver Nemesis of all things. Could we not have even a little bit of closure for once?

My need for a good, hissable villain and some genuinely malevolent monsters is fed by the reappearance of Madame Kovarian and her army of Silents, but her reappearance doesn’t achieve anything (except her satisfying death at Amy’s hands, as noted) and it’s not at all clear to me what, if any, role the Silents played in her plan to turn Rory and Amy’s offspring into a custom-made Doctor-killer, nor really how the events of The Impossible Astronaut and A Good Man Goes To War are even remotely connected.

Simon Fisher-Becker needed to keep his head a lot stiller in that box to avoid looking like he was wearing it on his shoulders (which of course, he was). And on the subject of dodgy effects, the sight of Mark Gattiss (for it was he) being chewed up by those skulls was just embarrassing.

Right.

Since 23 April 2011 – 161 days ago, 23 weeks, over five months – we’ve been told that the Doctor dies at Lake Silencio. Canton Everett Delaware III intones “that most certainly is the Doctor and he most certainly is dead.” Now, shortly before the series finale, news reached us that filming on the Christmas Special with Matt Smith had begun, so if even a scintilla of doubt remained that the Doctor would in fact survive this encounter, those doubts were swept away. We all knew, sitting down on 1 October – as in fact we know every week – that this was not the end of Our Hero. The question was not “whether?” but “how?”

And after this much build-up, after cranking up the stakes this high, after making us wait nearly half a year and then making the Doctor increasingly pessimistic, resigned, fatalistic and gloomy as his certain death approaches, the answer that was provided needed to clear a pretty high bar. To be clear, it needed to be…

• Surprising. If it’s predictable, what’s the point?
• Set up. The solution needs to be hiding in plain sight (to coin a phrase), not some magic new whoosit we’ve never seen before. Note that these first two are in apparent conflict, and yet Moffat has proved himself a master at this kind of sleight-of-narrative in the past.
• Not a cheat. It must not contradict anything we’ve already heard, or rely on anything brand new. Agatha Christie rules. It’s only satisfying if we have enough information to work it out ourselves. It must be consistent.
• Come at a cost. If it’s too glib, too easy, then who cares? The apotheosis of this is the Doctor’s despatch of the Daleks into the Void in Doomsday. The solution is apparently a little too easy, but the cost of carrying out this plan, turns out to be heartbreakingly mighty. As noted in paragraph one, The Big Bang rescues the glib nonsense of its ending with the emotional punch of the Doctor’s goodbyes and Amy’s resurrection of the TARDIS using the wedding rhyme – something old, something new…

In my view, the resolution of the death of the Doctor in The Wedding of River Song fails in every one these. Let’s take them in order.

Was it surprising? No, not really. As I noted in my review of Let’s Kill Hitler, we now have not one but two sources of Doctor-Dopplegangers to take that supposedly fatal blast by the shore of Lake Silencio. This in itself is poor plotting. Just as The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People ought not to have needed two different crucibles of magic goo serving different purposes, Series Six ought not to have need two different magic people-copying technologies. If the surprise is just a matter of guessing which of them is needed to accomplish the switch, then it’s hardly a surprise at all. In fact, the heavy favouring of the Tesselecta in the “previously” gives the game away almost completely.

Now actually, for me this is the least important of the four. It will never be a total surprise anyway, because we know the Doctor won’t die, but making the resolution so totally predictable puts even more pressure on the other elements. Unfortunately, they all fail too.

Set up. Well, insofar as we have seen the Tesselecta before, I suppose this is set up – at the cost of surprise as noted above. But when we consider point three – is it a cheat? – we begin to see just how poorly set up it is. Almost nothing about what the Tesselecta is required to do is set up in its earlier appearance in Let’s Kill Hitler. Although able to mimic humans, clothing and even motorbikes (although not glasses, bizarrely), it nevertheless renders them rather stiffly and bloodlessly. It carries a human(oid) crew which can react, albeit not very quickly, to fresh stimuli and all of whom are apparently necessary for its operation.

However, the Doctor we see at Lake Silencio is not stiff and awkward, he’s not slow to react, he’s just as quicksilver, lithe and supple as ever. When the astronaut zaps him (with what weaponry, by the way?) he then appears to regenerate, despite the Tesselecta having shown no ability to regenerate and no known ability to simulate the appearance of such a thing. Steven Moffat’s slightly grumpy Twitter reply to a fan who raised this – very fair – point is as follows: “If it can simulate a human being to the last detail, a light show is nothing. We can do that NOW – ask the Mill.” Sadly, all three of these points are wrong. It has been set up as being unable to simulate a human being to the last detail, it’s simulations have always been depicted as flawed and imperfect up till now. But even if it had been depicted as able to replicate humans perfectly, it does not follow that it perforce has the ability to simulate a uniquely Time Lord attribute. It’s like rebutting a complaint that a hero had shown no previous ability to hold his breath for ten minutes by pointing out that he is very good at skiing, so holding his breath for a superhuman length of time would probably be easy – no? Finally, The Mill may be able to overlay a flat image of a regeneration effect on a flat image on a TV screen, at a modest resolution and given sufficient rendering time. Neither they nor anyone else can make such a thing appear, in three dimensions, visible from all angles, in real-time, around a moving human.

Finally, the Tesseledoctor “dies” and is burned. So all the exquisite machinery which drives this phenomenal robot is burned up and at no time is anything resembling a mechanism revealed. Everyone who witnesses the pyre continues to see burning flesh and bones, and not the charred remains of circuits, gantries control panels – oh, and while I’m at it – the burned and useless remains of the machinery required to return the Doctor back to his regular size. And presumably the rest of the crew, all willingly risking their lives too. Or does the ship only require one operator now?

Now, no doubt it’s possible to invent explanations for all of these apparent contradictions, but that’s not my fucking job. It’s the writer’s job, and when the writer fails, it’s the show-runners.

Finally, what’s the cost of all of this? Absolutely nothing! And who is it for exactly? Either time – all-powerful, all-knowing TIME – requires and insists that the Doctor meet his death at Lake Silencio or it will be 5:02 forever, or the universe will end, or some fucking thing. OR time merely requires that four random individuals witness something which looks a bit like the Doctor being murdered and the Doctor knows that and so can cheerfully stage a fraudulent version of the supposed event whenever he wishes with a minimum of soul-searching and companion-torturing. But not fucking both. If he could have sent a Flesh avatar or a robot double in his place at any time, why didn’t he just do that and get on with it? Quite how these four eye-witnesses turn into the entire universe knowing of the Doctor’s death is also not remotely apparent.

By the time River was switching between “I can’t stop myself” and “hello sweetie” for no apparent reason at all, I was ready to abandon the whole enterprise. Consider what we are being asked to swallow here – a robot double of the Doctor from 200 years in the future, controlled by a miniaturised Doctor, summons Rory, Canton, a Flesh avatar of Amy and one version of River Song to watch another version of River Song dressed in a spacesuit for no reason, hiding in a lake for no reason, to pretend to execute him and then burn the robot body because a nursery rhyme told him to. For fuck’s sake.

So, that was Series Six. I can’t give the finale more than one star. It’s worth at least two, maybe even two-and-a-half. Technical standards are high, performances are faultless, lots of good jokes. But the one thing it had to accomplish was to pay off all the set-ups and after this much waiting, it just wasn’t good enough. This is a particular shame, since Series Six has been in general a huge improvement over the vertiginously variable Series Five. Whereas last year gave me disappointment after disappointment in the form of mis-fires like Victory of the Daleks, Vampires of Venice and Vincent and the Doctor (yes I know you liked it, fair enough), and a competent but unremarkable piece like the Silurian two-parter seemed magical in comparison, this year we’ve had a much higher average, with even minor disappointments like The God Complex and Closing Time still seeming fresher and more confident than much of the previous year, and the best this year was some of the best the series has ever done. I suppose what I’m saying is that a creative team that can come up with The Doctor’s Wife, A Good Man Goes To War and The Girl Who Waited is surely capable of a better season finale than this. Apparently not.

Final ratings…

• The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon – The Silents are a brilliant creation, and this is vibrant, funny, challenging stuff. Four stars.
• Curse of the Black Spot – Soggy. Two stars.
• The Doctor’s Wife – perfection. Five stars.
• The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People – didn’t quite deliver everything it promised. Just scrapes four stars, largely for the Doctor/Doctor double act and the shattering ending.
• A Good Man Goes To War – propulsive, kinetic stuff. Some of Moffat’s very best writing with Strax and Colonel Runaway. Five stars.
• Let’s Kill Hitler – Again, this is so structurally awkward that I want to downgrade it to three stars but it’s just so winning. I think the finale has tarnished it a little. Three-and-a-half stars.
• Night Terrors – not the very best of the best, but everyone involved knows what they’re doing. Especially if you ignore the series arc, four stars.
• The Girl Who Waited – outstanding stuff. Proper science-fiction, proper acting and proper tear-jerking. Five stars.
• The God Complex – a better start than Curse of the Black Spot, but exactly the same damned low-stakes, who cares, ending. Three stars.
• Closing Time – amusing but uneventful. Two-and-a-half stars.
• The Wedding of River Song – colourful but entirely vacuous. I feel rather betrayed. One star.

I like Gareth Roberts’ stuff enormously as a rule, and although I felt some of the humour in The Lodger was over-done, I liked the Craig character very much and was genuinely invested in his relationship with Sophie, so I was perfectly happy to see them return. As it happens, the splendid Daisy Haggard is bundled out of the door with unseemly haste, so we can explore the relationship between The Doctor, Craig and of course Stormaggeddon.

I’m really not sure what this episode was about. One of the issues I had with The Lodger was the way in which the Doctor, purportedly desperate to discover what was happening in the flat above Craig’s, was perfectly happy cooking omelettes and playing football for the most part. Likewise here, while I’m pleased to see Cybermats again, and pleased that they still fly through the air as unconvincingly as ever when on the attack, I don’t have any real sense of who these Cybermen were, what they were doing there or what they wanted, or what the Doctor was doing there.

There’s plenty of fun and funny lines along the way. The play on the word “companion” is delightful, exploiting always-amusing male homosexual anxiety without being too On The Buses about it. Matt Smith excels at making the Doctor’s bizarre behaviour result in having people who have never met him instantly like and trust him, and Craig’s fumbling attempts to recreate Time Lord charisma makes for a fun set-piece.

But surely nobody believes even for a second that when that dodgy-digital Cyberskull closes around Craig’s chubby head that he will never be seen again, or even be affected in the least by his encounter, so the climax has no real suspense or power or energy at all. Worse, after the Farpointing of last week’s minotaur, Craig’s demolition of the Cybership is only a millimetre away from the horrendous Star Trek cliché of confusing a computer to death (not that Doctor Who has always successfully avoided this trope either). Hanging a lantern on this by having Craig make fun of it doesn’t make it go away either.

In what has been a remarkably strong run of episodes, navigating the mid-season bridge very effectively, this penultimate instalment unfortunately feels cheap, second-hand, uninspired and not at all thought-through. Presumably Moffat was too busy making sure that episode 13 was going to be a total barnstormer. Again, the most effective part of the episode is the coda, which has nothing whatever to do with the episode-of-the-week plot, but is sowing (and reaping) seeds for the season arc, confirming that – yes indeed – it was River Song herself in that sub-aqua spacesuit. And providing the welcome return of the genuinely villainous Frances Barber complete with her Travis-style eyepatch. Now, if she turns out to be a misunderstood automated medical program, I really am going to be pissed off.

Apparently I gave The Soggy Pirate Rubbish three stars when I first reviewed it. This is an obvious error. That story goes down to two stars, which gives me room to give Closing Time two-and-a-half.

Bring on Lake Silencio!

First of all, I’m aware how horribly late this is. It might be a bit briefer than normal, as I try and crank out this and some thoughts about Closing Time before the finale starts.

To begin with, I’m not a huge Toby Whithouse fan. School Reunion was lovely whenever it was about Sarah Jane and K9, but I detect the jolly Welsh hand of Russell T Davies in much of that material, and I honestly couldn’t have cared less about the standard-issue and barely coherent science-fiction plot it was grafted on to. Did those silly bat things want to eat the children or harness their brains? What was the Skasis Paradigm anyway? Why do I care?

Vampires of Venice was one of a number of stories from series five which I thought suffered badly from being composed largely of left-over-bits and pieces of other (generally better) stories, and so I wasn’t really looking forward to this one much. However, once it began, my wariness began to evaporate. I always enjoy stories confined to a single location – I appreciate the economy and the look forward to seeing the results of a creative constraint. The direction is particularly stylish and energised, with text flashed up on the screen to dramatise poor Lucy’s collapsing mental state.

The Doctor and co. arrive and meet a fairly standard-issue gaggle of cannon-fodder types who explain the horrible secret of this hotel with its shifting walls. I say standard issue, but actually they’re for the most part clearly differentiated, written with wit and played with style. David Walliams as eager-to-surrender Gibbis is terribly funny and Amara Karan makes a huge impact as never-was companion Rita. The large ensemble cast sidelines Rory and Amy a little but the central conceit of the rooms which hold your worst fears is a lovely one.

However, not all of the characters are as fresh or as interesting. Joe is well-played by Daniel Pirrie, but just serves as Basil Exposition. Howie is a tedious cliché, and among a lot of rather uninteresting “worst fears” (PE teachers, spouting hand-me-down lines about “doing it in your pants”, old monster costumes pressed into service, shouty parents who feel disappointed) his is the least interesting by far. An awkward teenage boy afraid of girls. What a waste. A brilliant mechanism for probing each of these characters’ deepest, darkest fears and we get this miserable shop-worn collection. We don’t even get to see what the Doctor’s was, which might have seemed sly and smart if everyone else’s was gangbusters, but here it just seems like a lack of imagination.

And then, as mysteries are replaced by answers, the whole thing completely falls apart. The scene of the Doctor talking to the minotaur is shot splendidly – I imagine there was deep concern here that the thing looked immobile, awkward and not a little ridiculous and consistently shooting it through other semi-transparent objects is a wonderful solution, but what on earth did the explanation mean?

Two new clichés of twenty-first century Doctor Who are pressed into service here. I mentioned Encounter At Farpoint when writing about The Soggy Pirate Rubbish which has basically the same dénouement as this episode. Star Trek, in most of its recent incarnations has suffered a bit by “Farpointing” all of its best enemies. Not content with putting a Klingon on the bridge, DS9 we had jolly Ferengi and in Voyager we had to put up with a friendly Borg. But the best movies – Wrath of Khan, First Contact – are the ones with genuinely evil villains who have to be destroyed. It might be more sensitive and new-age to make your villains well-rounded and understandable, but it’s much, much harder to bring your adventure story to a thrilling conclusion if all your bad-guy wants is a hug.

Then we have the other dominant cliché of modern Doctor Who – say it with me – The Automated System Run Amok. Not only do we have this for the arguably fifth time this year, here it doesn’t even make any sense. As with the leathery Anthony Head things in School Reunion, I’ve absolutely no idea who gains from having this demented prison operate in this bizarre way, nor why the minotaur was so powerless to stop it, not what the Doctor did to bring about its end. It reminded me a little of the Cylons in the (generally excellent) rebooted Battlestar Galactica, whose plan – as it was revealed – appeared more and more to be designed less to bring about what the Cylons claimed to want, but instead to be designed to create maximally dramatic psychological suffering for a small handful of humans. It’s fun for viewers to watch people face their worst fears (or it would have been if they had been more interesting) but what purpose does it solve?

Possibly the best scene in the whole episode was the Doctor ruthlessly dismantling his companion’s faith in order to allow his plan to work. This however, is a near-identical replication of a scene from 1989’s The Curse of Fenric, which uses the neat idea that vampires may be warded off by crosses, not it’s not the object itself that matters but the faith of the person carrying it.

A very frustrating watch – lots of wit, invention and energy, especially in some of the supporting cast, but a central idea which is poorly exploited and a resolution which fatally lacks energy or coherence and – despite Nick Hurran’s extremely accomplished direction – a very ropey looking monster. And then – that coda.

Rather like the Flesh two-parter, a rather run-of-the-mill script, redeemed by some excellent direction, is suddenly elevated by a single stunning scene which ties the events of the preceding story into the fabric of the season as a whole. The Doctor dropping Amy and Rory off in suburban luxury is not shocking in the way that Amy’s milky disintegration was, but it still calls the whole nature of the Doctor/Companion relationship into question in a profound way. I don’t think the Doctor has flung anyone out of the TARDIS since he locked the doors on Susan in until-recently-Dalek-occupied London. Yet, I imagine we’ll see Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill’s names in the credits next week, and I know they will be on the shores of Lake Silencio, so just what is happening here? Is this a genuine departure, with just a few loose ends to tie up, or is it a feint? Is this Adric on the bridge of the freighter his presence in the Radio Times listings for Time Flight notwithstanding, or is it Tegan at the end of that same story, apparently left behind, but picked up again before the next story is over?

In any case, The God Complex earns three, rather generous, stars.