Doctor Who: Partners In Crime

NB: Couple of things for any regular readers to be aware of: a new season of Doctor Who has started, so there will be a least on post a week on that subject on this blog. If you're not a fan, then you should skip this post and find a more typical one, probably where I suggest Gordon Brown is an old Anglo-Saxon word for a private part of the female anatomy. Also, there will be spoilers ahead - if you haven't seen the episode in question, then don't read this before you have.

And so it started again. A new season of Doctor Who, another 13 weeks of David Tennant lurching around the universe in his battered TARDIS like a hyperactive puppy, another 13 weeks of adventures that vary in quality quite dramtically. And whatever tone you read into this paragraph - and whatever I think of the episodes - I'll love it.

Which is just as well because the first episode out of the box - Partners In Crime - wasn't great. The enemy, if you can call them that, were little balls of human fat that turned into half cute, half creepy aliens. And alien babies at that. They weren't menacing at all. I kept on half expecting them to turn into snarling beasts, like the toddler aliens in Galaxy Quest, but they didn't. The waddled around right until the end of the piece, when a Close Encounters of the Third Kind style space ship took them away. They weren't terrifying alien nemesis of the Doctor - frankly, a Dalek would have just trundled over them all without batting an eyestalk. Yes, there method of birth was painful, and yes a fat bird bought it when several of the Adipose came into being. But it wasn't their fault (in fact Donna inadvertently caused the fat bird death) and they showed no malice whatsoever. The real villian was Mrs Foster, and she was a surprisingly helpful, non-homicidal nemesis. The Doctor didn't even break into a sweat kicking her butt. It was difficult to fear Foster - it was easier to find her midly irritating*. This wasn't an adventure, by Doctor Who standards. It was a mildly diverting detour to Earth.

And yet, even within what was quite a lacklusre effort, there were moments of genius. Donna's conversation about the Doctor with her grandfather (a wonderful turn by Bernard Cribbins) was by turns funny and moving. When she first sees the Doctor again (and he first sees her), there was a great comedy scene where they mouth and mime at each other, before they realise that the aliens have seen everything that was going on.

But the best scene was right at the end, when Donna was looking for someone to tell her mum where the car keys were. You think it was just an tedious bit of padding; a demonstration that Donna is very practical etc. Then the camera pulls back to reveal who the random woman Donna was ranting at - Rose Tyler. A breath taking twist that helped to redeem the episode.

So all in all, a lacklustre start - but the series hasn't jumped the shark (yet). And with rock monsters, volcanoes and Pompeii to come (plus, hopefully, an intelligent debate about why the Doctor can't just history but happily changes the present and the future) next week, here's to the quality of the programme going up again to the standards we are used to.

*Although a great unanswered question from the script: where did she get her Sonic Pen from? And why didn't the Doctor worry about a random alien having something that looked a lot like Time Lord technology?