Doctor Who: Partners In Crime

Prior to Steven Moffat opening the most recent (half) season of Doctor Who with the Doctor being gunned down and then Amy Pond shooting her own daughter, season openers for the new look Who tended to be quite lightweight. Fun frolics designed to ease the casual viewer into the new season. I can see why RTD felt this was necessary, although I always felt that the season openers were disappointing and lacklustre compared to the episodes that followed. And Partners in Crime is the worst of a bad bunch. It is, quite simply, dreadfully bland and utterly disappointing.

It has Tennant doing his Doctor-by-numbers routine, and Donna is still the shouty chav she was in The Runaway Bride (although this would change as the season went along, demonstrating in the process what a good actress Tate actually is). The direction is flat, and manages to even turn the supposed set pieces (the Doctor and Donna seeing each other across Foster's office, the larking around in the window cleaner's life) into something really flat - and it is further undermined by the jaunty incidental music that plays over many of the (supposedly) more dramatic moments. But it is the script that really lets this down. It is, quite simply, the worst thing RTD has ever written (from what I've seen of his work).

I once read that RTD thought that Partners in Crime should be used to teach script-writing. I can't help but think that this should only be the case if the lesson is how not to write an episode of Doctor Who. The first segment of the story is frightfully unfunny "comedy" as the Doctor and Donna fail to meet, pretty much doing exactly the same thing as each other (so we get to see everything happening twice, effectively) but just missing each other at the same time. It is the sort of thing that you would expect from an earthbound, unimaginative sitcom - not from the opening instalment of a series that has the whole of time and space at its disposal. It's crap, really - a trick I've seen countless times before being done in a lacklustre way.

Then we have the villains - Foster, who is played with some relish but never really amounts to anything more than generic female baddie with two meatheads at her side with very big guns. But nothing than compare us for the Adipose - lumps of fat designed to look cute. They're babies, basically, making their communicative ability even less than your standard Who monster. And they don't do anything other than toddle around, burble for a bit and then disappear. The Doctor even points out that their lethal potential - which we hardly see - is not their fault. The upshot? This is a Doctor Who story with no real sense of threat, either to the planet or to the protagonists. It is only later, in Turn Left, that we get a feel for the awful implications of Foster's scheme. Here, it is all a bit of a nothingness. Of course, not every Doctor Who story can, or even should, have a sense of constant threat and menace. But a complete lack of those things makes this into an edition of 2point4 children without the (albeit very limited) laughs.

There are a couple of nice moments - such as the conversation between Wilf and Donna on the hill closely followed by the Doctor talking to an empty TARDIS. And the return of Rose at the end of the episode was, at the time, a brilliant little twist that raised my dampened spirits. Yet, it wasn't enough then, and it isn't enough now. This isn't even a slight episode, it is downright disappointing. In fact, it is the worst episode since the show came back, and definitely in the top 10 of the show's worst stories.

NB: next week's Clunker review will be materialising on Friday because, at around about this time next week, they'll be something else to review...