Tonight I watched Dr Who for the first time in a few weeks. The return of Martha was interesting, nice to see some more aliens brought back from the old series (though didn’t the Sontarans used to be bigger?) and the clone in the green goo was done well … but is it just me or are all of the alien invasion episodes getting a bit samey?
Also they backed themselves into a corner a bit by having these massive plots involving the whole world in danger pretty early on in the new series so they are stuck with nowhere to go if they want to up the ante. It seems to be that in the old series quite often these alien invasion plots were thwarted before anyone much had a chance to notice, except perhaps in one particular location, but in the new series every one seems to bring yet another global emergency – after numerous incidents like this it begins to lose it’s impact a bit.
Having seen the whole season already, you’ll find that they do indeed have somewhere to go to “up the ante” in the season finale. Shan’t spoil it for you though. I’m not a fan of the whole-world-in-peril approach by this Doctor Who, nor by his fame (it seems numerous people know who he is, which is surely a problem in the future when previous incarnations of the Doctor intervene in the world). But David Tennant is brilliant and I thought the last few episodes of this season were pretty good. Even the last one with it’s “every story that we’ve done thrown in” mindset isn’t as bad a jumble as it could have been.
I’ll look forward to the rest of the season. I certainly enjoyed the library one this week.
I liked that they had him meeting someone who has already met him in their own past- I always found it annoying that he and the master’s many encounters seemed to be in chronological order – an extraordinary coincidence for two time travelers. It’s good that they’re making use of time travel in an interesting way. Of course, being chased by a skeleton makes for good TV too.
I’m not so worried about the Doctor’s fame, he’s bound to get noticed a bit (surely you remember Tom Baker’s face carved into a cliff face in the old one?).
In some ways I like that they have people in general on Earth aware of the various invasions in that it is being honest with the audience rather than just ignoring it or writing it off as mass hallucination or something. There are plenty of future stories where Earth people are aware of aliens so it has to happen some time. The thing is, once they do this it is all taking place in this sort of parallel world rather than our own (not the literal parallel world that was shown in the series) – the Doctor’s present day adventures take place somewhere that looks like our world, but the difference is that everyone knows about a handful of alien invasions. This lessens the impact of stories set in the present time a bit. My concern is just that perhaps they ramped things up a bit too quickly, otherwise I think it is a reasonable way to go.