Okay, so "Dreamland" was pretty weak, except for a few funny bits where David Tennant brought a smidge of his typical wit and sparkle to the role. It was hard to take the computer-generated animation seriously, and the story pretty much made no sense whatsoever. But considering it was aimed at little kids and shown via the "red button" service and the children's BBC channel, it's best to take it on its own terms, as a fun bit of fluff. Who didn't want to hear David Tenant spout ridiculous Shakespearean puns like "Some are born crate, some have crateness thrust upon them?" And for me, it was pretty much worth it to watch the "grey" aliens with headbands and machine guns fighting Tractators/xenomorphs.

What did you think?

This recap contains maximum spoilers for last night's Doctor Who. If you're waiting to watch it on BBC America next month, you should stop reading now. Or a funny robot will come and tell you secrets of the future, which you're not supposed to know about.

"Waters Of Mars" was by no means perfect — the scenery-chewing was a bit ferocious for my taste — but it did feel like one of the better Doctor Who stories of recent years. More than that, it felt like a payoff, after all this time, on the promises that Russell T. Davies started making us back in 2005. The Doctor's loneliness, the burden of being the Last of the Time Lords, the boredom, horror and glory of it all... it finally feels like it was actually leading someplace interesting and moving, after a few years of going in circles. Like Davies actually did have a plan for the Doctor's development as a character all along.

Honestly, this is the kind of delving into the Doctor's hearts that I was hoping for all these years — not so much moping after Rose, but dealing with his feelings about the death of his people and his resulting lack of any external compass. You always knew the Rose storyline was never going to end up anywhere interesting, because it couldn't. These kinds of huge questions about the Doctor's place in the universe, though — there's so much potential in them.

There were really only a few episodes in series four that hold up on repeated viewings — "Fires Of Pompeii," "Midnight" and "Turn Left" — and this felt like a mash-up of all three. In a good way. The Doctor arrives at the scene of a huge historical event that he absolutely must not change, and feels torn about it. And he's alone in a tense, claustrophobic situation with no companion to help smoothe things over. And then we get a glimpse of how badly things go when the Doctor isn't around.

But "Waters Of Mars" was more than just a combination of "Pompeii," "Midnight" and "Turn Left" — it was a pretty great story in its own right, building on the themes of those three stories. In a nutshell, the Doctor arrives on Mars, and it turns out to be the day that the first colonists on Mars all die in a horrible incident involving terrifying water zombies. (And I really did like the water zombies — they were a great menace.) The Doctor knows he can't change what happens there because it's an important — until, finally, his compassion and egomania both combine to drive him to change it anyway. And we get a glimpse of how easy it is for the godlike Doctor to go off the rails.

It's interesting, because we're deliberately told that a lone Dalek almost killed the captain of the Mars expedition, Adelaide Brooke, when she was a little girl — but spared her life. Because even the Daleks understand, on some level, that certain things are fixed in time, like Adelaide's death in 2059. (Although presumably, if the Daleks' plan to wipe out the universe had succeeded, Adelaide would have died anyway?)

So "Waters Of Mars" gives us a Doctor who's changing an event that even the Daleks are too scrupulous to touch. I'm reminded of the bit in "Remembrance Of The Daleks" when he chides Ace that even the Daleks, "ruthless though they are, would think twice before making such a radical amendment to the timeline." (Ace almost accidentally leaves a super-advanced boombox behind in 1963.)

The thing that surprised me most about "Waters Of Mars" is that the Doctor actually makes a choice all on his own. I figured it would be the standard plotline, where he's trapped and cut off from his TARDIS, and finally, he's left with no choice but to intervene, just to save his own life. But instead, the Doctor actually makes a clean getaway. And then he stops and thinks about leaving those people to die, and wonders why he can't save them even with his immense power. And then he goes back.

Sadly, it turns out the Doctor really can't save Adelaide, or rather he does such a bad job of it that she winds up offing herself. Of course, you can't help wondering why the Doctor didn't just take Adelaide forward 100 years so she could see that things turn out fine in spite of the Doctor saving her life, and her granddaughter still goes on to be a great pilot. That final scene between the Doctor and Adelaide is frustratingly meta, with the Doctor spouting off about being the "Time Lord Victorious" and Adelaide giving off aphorisms about absolute power. The thing I was wondering that nobody brought up was, how would Adelaide and her crewmates explain the fact that they were back on Earth safe the same day their base blew up? Wouldn't Adelaide be painted as a deserter instead of a hero? We never explore those questions, which you'd think Adelaide would be wondering about. I kept expecting the Doctor to drop the three survivors off in the 19th century, or the 23rd., where they couldn't do any damage to the timelines.

Over the top as that final scene was, it was a fascinating glimpse at what happens to the Doctor when he stops playing by the rules. This is the Doctor we glimpsed back in season one, when he was totally fine with populating Victorian England with thousands, maybe millions, of reanimated corpses. Just because it didn't happen in Rose's timeline didn't mean it wasn't meant to happen.

Normally, you think it's the companions who rein the Doctor in and keep him anchored to humanity, but the reference back to the "Pompeii" episode reminds us that if Donna had been there, she would have been shrieking for the Doctor to save these people. On the other hand, can you imagine how Donna would have reacted if the Doctor had started talking about the "little people" in front of her?

No, the Doctor really needs his fellow Time Lords to keep him from going too bonkers. Otherwise, he starts feeling as though the rules really don't apply to him, and he starts playing God for real. It's really fascinating that just as the Doctor comes the closest he's ever gotten to being like the Master, the renegade Time Lord, he's about to have a reunion with the Master in Tennant's two-part final story, "The End Of Time."

I mostly loved "Planet Of The Dead," which is just as well since it's the last new Doctor Who we'll get until November's scary-water episode, "The Waters Of Mars." POTD was pretty much everything you've come to expect from Russell T. Davies' Who: crazy adventures, slightly cartoony characters, clever dialogue, moments of sheer silly fun, a childlike solemnity, a miraculous save, bombastic music, and one woman who's held up as being the most special person ever.

It didn't hurt that POTD had all the elements of a cracking good story: The Doctor and friends trapped on an alien planet, on the other side of the universe, with no easy way to get home. Alien creatures who might be hostile. A deadly swarm coming to tear our heroes apart. And UNIT on the other side of the wormhole, trying to come to grips with this almost unimaginable threat.

It felt like a bit of a mash-up of "Midnight" with "The Impossible Planet," with a dash of "The Daemons" in the UNIT stuff. (Was I the only one who thought of Osgood when Malcolm started talking about oscillations?) Luckily, "Midnight" was one of RTD's best scripts in ages, and "Impossible Planet" was also among the best episodes in recent years, so I'm happy to see them recycled a bit.

The main weak spot, for me, was Michelle Ryan's character, the Lara Croft knockoff Lady Christina. She was the first RTD heroine who actually filled me with revulsion, although she did have some great moments: the bag full of every possible gadget, the clever "heist" where she grabbed the crystal stuff in the ship, the fact that she knew what a Faraday Cage was. But the clip above pretty much sums up why she annoyed me: She's just learned that an entire alien world, full of unimaginable beauty and teeming with life, was wiped out - and she's grossed out that its remains are getting in her hair. WTF? Oh, and she's willing to sacrifice the lives of everyone on Earth to keep her gold cup intact. In general, her smugness annoyed me and felt like a throwback to the early 1990s, when every female character had "attitude." (Attitude, meaning cuteness, pouting, a constant smirk and no genuine personality.)

I was actually stoked when Lady Christina got arrested at the end, and after she got away, I started fantasizing that the police shot down her flying bus in a burning pile of scrap metal five minutes later. Everyone has to have a dream.

Oh, and one other giant nitpick: Captain Mogambo was absolutely right that Oswald, I mean Malcolm, should have closed the wormhole as soon as he figured out how to. At the very least, I didn't get why only three of those swarm creatures made it through the wormhole when there were thousands of them right behind the bus, and the wormhole was still open for a good minute after the bus came through. Enough swarm monsters should have made it through the wormhole to strip the Earth bare. So yes. I am getting a bumper sticker which says "Mogambo Was Right."

All in all, though, it was a pretty solid adventure with a reasonably cool set of monsters. And the fly people were actually sort of cute once you got past the boiler suits and the funny heads. And David Tennant was on pretty great form, dishing out the technobabble and being serious and awestruck when the situation demanded it. Once again, he connected with the "regular" humans by learning about their average everyday lives - chops and gravy! Fantastic! Rainy night! Catching a cab! Fantastic! - and made wild, possibly-not-realistic promises about getting everyone home safely.

Oh, and the Doctor is now UNIT's main recruiter. I'm starting to wonder if there's a small army of UNIT privates who were all recruited to the organization by the mysterious time traveler, and they run around getting almost killed by alien menaces and cursing the Time Lord under their breath. That sounds like a spin-off!

And then finally, in the end, we had the obligatory bit of foreshadowing, where the psychic woman tells the Doctor his song is ending (in a callback to the Ood Doomsaying) and that "he" will knock four times. Oooh! I can't wait to see it.

So what did you think?

So. As you might have guessed beforehand, Morrissey isn't actually playing a future Doctor in last night's episode — although the show did a good job of teasing the possibility that he was a Doctor who'd lost his memory. Instead, he was Jackson Lake, a Victorian gentleman who lost his memory after the Cybermen killed his wife and snatched his son. He happened to look into an "info-stamp" about the Cybermen's enemy, the Doctor, and it imprinted on his mind. So he turned himself into a kind of Doctor-manque, complete with sonic screwdriver, TARDIS and companion.

It could have been tongue-in-cheek, but instead it was heart-rending, thanks to Morrissey's performance. He was, in a sense, the RTD-era version of the Doctor writ large — full of jokes and bravado, but with a terrible loneliness and grief lurking just under the surface. Just when I thought Davies couldn't wring one more story out of the idea that the Doctor is terribly sad and lonely, he goes and finds one. And it's quite a good one.

(It almost felt a bit unnecessary when the Doctor gave that speech at the end about why he always ends up alone. And yet, in a way, it capped off the episode's theme nicely and showed how some things never change.)

Sure, it's sort of a retread of the previous episode, where Donna got imprinted with the Doctor's knowledge and became the "Doctor-Donna," and it's also pretty close to the "Family Of Blood," where the kid had the fobwatch that whispered to him about the wonderfulness of the Doctor. But who cares, when it's this well done?

To be fair, David Tennant was also on rare form here — handling his "other self" very carefully and with a strange respect. His behavior towards the "other Doctor" changes only gradually, as he starts to realize this isn't actually a future self he's dealing with. He undermines the Morrissey Doctor here and there, but never outright starts to condescend to him. He takes to the "companion" role quite well. And even though I've heard Tennant say "I'm so sorry" a hundred times by now, he seems to mean it more than usual when he points out that Jackson Lake's luggage is too much for one person.

So, okay, David Morrissey isn't really playing a future Doctor here. Whatever. He could still take over the role when David Tennant leaves, right? I mean, there's precedent for it. Romana was so impressed with Princess Astra, silly name and all, that she chose to look just like her when she regenerated. It makes total sense for the Doctor to feel the same way about Jackson Lake. Right? Okay, probably not.

Oh, and there were Cybermen. Honestly, that part was sort of forgettable alongside the much more interesting "two Doctors" plot. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it. Dervla Kirwan was great fun to watch, and the whole Dickensian child-labor factory setting was cool. And, as various people have already noted, there was a cool "steampunk" vibe going on with it. Especially the ginormous engine with the huge gears. But it really only captured my attention in the last ten minutes, when the Cybermen suddenly turned into Megatron. Which, how can that be bad?

(Still — and this is really my only complaint — RTD's tics were in full effect here. Once again, you have a terrible enemy of the Doctor who is operating on "low power," or words to that effect, thus forcing them to turn people into pigs, or hide behind a game show satellite, or turn dogs into Cyber-shades and use infostamps, etc. etc. etc. I'm also a bit tired of the too-close links between each Dalek/Cyberman story, so that we're constantly meeting refugees from the previous battle. And then once again, the Doctor stops the Cybermen by forcing full awareness on (one of) them. These are fairly minor quibbles, but they're things that I'm not going to miss about the Davies era.)

In any case, back to praising the episode, which reminded me why I often love Davies' writing for Who. It was crazy and over-the-top and ridiculous and jammed full of fruit. But at its heart, there was a really moving, genuinely human story that managed to find something new to say about the Doctor. That's a pretty great achievement, after four seasons full of variations on a theme.

I'm sure people will put down last night's Doctor Who finale by calling it fanfic, but it was actually much worse — and somewhat better — than that term implies. Russell T. Davies left no fannish button un-pressed, and made so many ridiculous logic-flops in his epic storyline, that he practically elevated fanwank to a new artform. I couldn't help comparing it to last year's finale, which was also ridiculous but didn't require a PhD in Who-ology to follow.

There were things that happened in last night's episode that I read about weeks, or months, ago. But I didn't stick them in morning spoilers, or downgraded them to "crazy rumors," because they just seemed too ridiculous. In particular, the Doctor's regeneration resulting in two David Tennants, one of whom is "human." And then the "human" David Tennant is sentenced to go off with Rose and be her boytoy. I honestly thought even Russell T. wouldn't give Rose such a ridiculously contrived happy ending.

Doctor Who is taking a break next year, with just a few one-off specials instead of a full season. Ostensibly, this is because David Tennant wants a year off, so he can star in Hamlet with Captain Picard. But it's pretty obvious, after this latest season, that the show needs a rest anyway. Even with Davies leaving and new showrunner Steven Moffat coming on, a year off would give the show a much-needed chance to rethink and recharge.

When Who came back in 2005, it was fresh and different than anything that had come before, and it was also accessible to new viewers. But recently, the show has been stuck in a tired formula, and it's giving in to the temptation to reference its own past more and more often.

Take last night's episode: I was startled by how continuity-heavy it was. It was like a clips episode. And I had vaguely wondered, in advance, if the show would mention that Sarah Jane Smith had met Davros, back in 1974. But the show didn't just mention that fact — it went on and on and on about it, in one of Davros' 100 boring speeches about destiny and souls and stuff. (Was it just me, or did Davros talk for about 20 minutes?) Likewise, the episode didn't have to bring in the fact that Torchwood's Gwen Cooper is played by the same actor as the psychic maid in season one's "The Unquiet Dead," but why not? It's not as if there's a story that's being stopped dead in its tracks while we obsess over minor fannish details or anything.

By the way, I don't think it's an insult to call an episode like this "fanfic." I love fanfic, I've written fanfic before, and it fulfills an important purpose. Fanfic is how we get to explore some of the corners of a universe that the "official" canon will never get to. It's exactly where you should have a scene where Davros meets Sarah Jane again and they talk about their first meeting 34 years ago. Fanfic also lets us have the kinds of happy endings we wish our favorite characters could have, but which we know deep down would have us hooting with derision if they actually happened: like getting a magic duplicate of the Doctor for Rose to spend the rest of her life with. (Until she gets sick of him following her around and talking like Catherine Tate. I give it a week.)

So why do I say this almost elevated fanfic to an artform? It's sort of the way Torchwood season one created the most brilliant crystalization of slashfic in television form, actually. It was every fanfic cliche, from the multiple Mary Sues, to the shipper happy ending, to the Doctor suffering emotionally and getting hurt and needing comfort, to the endless processing of minor plot details from old stories. It's like Roy Liechtenstein turning cheesy comics panels into huge paintings — by blowing fanfic up to a huge size and making it larger and more colorful than life, we see what's beautiful about it.

There was a lot to love about this episode, including Catherine Tate having the time of her life as a hybrid Time Lady/human, Daleks shouting in German, the lunacy of the Haagen Dasz device and the dwarf-star-necklace both turning out to be useless, K-9 showing up to save the day for a second, the Annihilation Wave reality bomb being such a ludicrous plot device, the naked Doctor-clone, Captain Jack having some no-doubt-delightful fantasy involving the half-Time-Lord Donna and the two Doctors. There was a pretty great splashy finale buried in all that excess and fannish drool.

Really, this should have been Donna's episode, all about her own Bad Wolf-ization. It's too bad she got a bit lost in the crowd of old companions and random supporting characters. In particular, it's clear now that bringing Rose back was a mistake. She added almost nothing to the past few episodes, except for one or two cool big-gun moments and some random shipper fodder. She was incapable of actually saying a complete sentence without sounding as if she was about to swallow her own tongue, and she drained all the energy out of every scene she was in. The gritty, determined Rose I liked in "The Satan Pit" and a few other episodes was nowhere to be seen, and it was pretty clear that she was only there so she could get her pet faux-Doctor at the end.

I've mentioned that Donna has been growing on me this season, so I was bummed that she got screwed over so badly. I mean, she gets a half hour of being a semi-Time Lord, which seems to involve imitating David Tennant's mannerisms. And then she's dropped back right where she started, being the person who doesn't even notice that the Earth got moved across the universe and dropped into a hole in space/time. Not only that, but she's in a completely untenable situation: nobody can ever ask her what actually happened on her wedding day, or her head will explode. That's going to work out great.And it's all the Doctor's fault, because he was too vain to regenerate normally. He wanted to keep his current cute hairstyle for a while, so he used the severed hand, and condemned Donna to being a ticking time bomb for life. Oh, and did it feel like a Bad Wolf rehash to anyone else? Plus the fact that we were told she would "die" and then it turned out to be a metaphorical death, just like in "Doomsday"?

That's what the Doctor should feel guilty about, not the fact that Sergey Brin sacrificed himself back in the Sontaran episode. Who cares about Sergey Brin? He was a schmuck, and he didn't actually sacrifice his life for the Doctor, he died to save the whole human race. The Doctor would have to be a collossal egotist to think Sergey Brin died for him alone. (Okay, I can believe that.) After a couple of years without pretty much any character development for the Doctor, it's a tad weird to reach for the guilty-Doctor schtick from Paul Cornell's Timewyrm: Revelation. Especially since we just saw, two weeks ago, that everybody including Sergey Brin would have been toast without the Doctor. It's a no-win situation for Sergey.

And what was all that about the Doctor-dupe being emotionally scarred by destroying the Daleks? I literally didn't understand what the Alpha-Doc was going on about there. And the idea that the clone-Doc was in the same state that Christopher Eccleston's Doctor was in at the start of season one was also baffling — wasn't the ninth Doctor supposed to be scarred by years of the Time War, and the destruction of his own people? Not just ten minutes of pushing buttons to make some random Daleks explode? And why was Beta-Doc scarred and not Alpha-Doc? I know, I know, it's just an excuse to let Rose go off with the I-can't-believe-it's-not-the-Doctor. But it felt like the most random thing in a totally random episode.

Finally... I only have one question about Dalek Caan: Why has nobody uploaded a funny rap video to Youtube yet, featuring Grandmaster Melle Mel's rap from Chaka Khan's "I Feel For You," only about Dalek Caan? You know: "Dalek Caan, let me rock you, let me rock you Dalek Caan, let me rock you, that's all I wanna do..." Oh, I have one other question: prophecies? Prophecies?? Is this Battlestar Galactica all of a sudden? Seriously, it was just annoying when Davros kept talking about Dalek Caan the prophet, but then the Doctor started doing it too. I get it that Dalek Caan saw the time vortex (the same way Rose did, and the Master did?) so now he has special insights. But doesn't the Doctor Who universe feature free will? Isn't the future still mutable? Also, the idea that Donna's transformation was so important that echoes stretched backwards in time seemed a bit piffle. Time-travel and timey-whimey are not magic. (Well, maybe they are. But in the Doctor Who universe, they're not supposed to be.)

Okay, to sum up: You pretty much expect one of RTD's season finales to be ridiculous, include a huge deus ex machina, and make no sense. And this one lived up (or down) to your expectations. But it wasn't nearly as much fun as the dancing-Master/Doctor-Gollum episode last year. There was too much standing around and talking, for three or four hours. And too much fan-service. And as for crying... I cried like a drunk toddler during Wall-E, but I mostly laughed during this ep. It really could have been 20 minutes shorter, and woul dhave been much better for it. What did you think?

Actually the thing that was new about last night's "The Stolen Earth" was the feeling of being a cross-over between three different shows in the Whoniverse. It really was like reading an issue of a comic book like Final Crisis or something. Like, meanwhile at Titans HQ, the Teen Titans react to the crisis, while at the JLA Watchtower, they're fighting Gorilla Grodd. Etc. etc. And hey, it was nice to see Luke, Gwen and Ianto finally in the Who universe proper, and vaguely interacting with the Doctor. (And maybe Gwen will get exterminated next week? We can only hope.)

Apart from that, it felt like the same deal as the previous big finales, only bigger. Crazy shit happens, and you just have to go with it and switch off your brain a little bit. So basically the Daleks stole the Earth because it's a component in the Crucible, their mega-weapon thingy, and they've hidden it in a fold of space-time. And the Daleks are swooping down and harvesting the human race. And Laurie Anderson and her army of rhinos are pissed.

I loved all the silly plot devices and loopy plot twists. Code Red! ULTIMATE Code Red! MEGA ULTIMATE Code Red! Maximum Extermination! Don't activate Project Indigo! Oh, okay, fine, you can activate Project Indigo after all. But really, don't use the Häagen-Dazs Device! Just don't! But meanwhile, we can make our telephone signal go really really far by making every telephone in England dial the Doctor's number at once. (Wha? Huh?) As long as you don't stop to worry about the fact that Cardiff's space/time rift was in a physical location that Cardiff no longer occupies, you'll just run with it. (Oh and by the way, the Doctor's phone number is out of service. Bah. If this was an American show, that number would have led to a viral-marketing rabbit hole, with three websites. And a cake, with a time machine inside. I'm just saying.)

Oh, and I loved the fact that Dalek creator Davros, one of the greatest scientists who has ever lived, was unable to figure out how to cultivate genetic material from himself without slicing his own torso up a whole bunch of times. Rock on, Davros, you crazy science guy. Rock on. Actually, even though Julian Bleach starred in the worst Torchwood episode ever, he was pretty great as Davros. He captured the character's mixture of curiosity, manipulativeness and mania better than anyone since original actor Michael Wisher. (Although I still think Davros should have stayed dead. And why does he have such a lame homepage?)

So here are some stock questions that it's handy to ask after watching part one of the giant whipped-cream-factory explosion that is a Doctor Who finale:

Is there a reset button in sight? Yes. Actually, there are at least two reset buttons — Dalek Caan traveled back into the Time War to rescue Davros. And the Time War was supposed to be "time-locked" (huh?). So maybe everything Davros has done since than can be undone using a double reverse time lock. Also, Earth is in a fold of time, away from the rest of the universe, so maybe time can be unfolded or something. But I honestly think Harriet Jones has to stay dead, because we need closure on her character or something.

Does the Doctor get fucked up? Yep. He "regenerates" at the end of the episode — similar to the way last year's finale had a cliffhanger of the Doctor being super-aged. I'm assuming there will be something similar this year, with the Doctor being messed up for part of next week's finale (in a botched regeneration?) and then restored somehow. Or maybe those old rumors about a regeneration which produces a second David Tennant (thanks to his severed hand) are true.

Is there (finger snap) drama? Yeah. There was the huge sniffly, forehead-kissy moment when the Daleks first start chanting over everybody's speakers. And there was the hilarious sequence where Rose gets all pissy because she doesn't get to have her own square on the companion-scope. All because Wilf wasn't allowed to have a webcam! So Rose is reduced to sitting there and mumbling (still sounding weird btw) about how she was there first! And who are all these other riff raff ruining her big comeback! Poor Rose.

Is there super-heroics? Yeah, lots and lots of it. Rose with a giant gun! The UNIT soldiers going down fighting! Good old Wilf (this season's most valuable player) taking on a Dalek with his paintgun! Gwen and Ianto needlessly sacrificing their lives so Jack can go off and have fun! But most of all, there was the glowing nobility of Harriet "one joke" Jones, giving her life so Dumbledore the Doctor's army could assemble. I totally would have voted for her. (And even though I was glad we'll never hear anyone say "I know who you are" to her again, I was glad she was able to turn her usual schtick into a moving speech of defiance. (It sorta reminded me of the Controller in "Day Of The Daleks": "Who knows? I may have helped to exterminate you.")

Do all those little easter eggs add up to anything? Well, sort of. Yeah, we see the Medusa Cascade, and there's an explanation for the bees disappearing, and we meet the Shadow Proclamation, etc. etc. And the missing planets from previous episodes randomly — in the whole huge universe — turn out to be among the 27 stolen planets here. It's not as if you could have guessed anything about this episode's plot by paying extra-close attention to the earlier stories, though. And I still have no clue why everything went "BAD WOLF" at the end of the previous episode, except that Russell T. thought it would be cool. And we still have no clue what's going on with Donna — except did she have two heartbeats in that scene where we hear her heartbeat and zoom in on her face? (Right before she says the thing about extra missing planets.)

Are we excited for next week? Yeah, I think so. I mean, come on. It's Russell T. Davies, who's sort of the gay Michael Bay*, going further than he's ever gone before. Who wouldn't want to see that? It won't make any sense at all, but it'll be underpants-hat crazy. And we've already had the obligatory "everybody saying the Doctor's name" moment (via telephone!) so that probably won't turn up next week. And the final cliffhanger did leave me with that awesome WTF?! feeling, like I have no clue how it could be resolved, even using crazy RTD logic.

* - Yes, I know Michael Bay is a director and RTD is a writer. But RTD is in an industry where writers have actual power, unlike Hollywood movies. And RTD really does seem to channel Michael Bay a little bit in his Who season finales.

Of all the things that have annoyed me about this season of Doctor Who, Donna's mom has been in the top 10 or maybe top 15. She barely made any impression on me in the "Runaway Bride," the Christmas special where we first met Donna. But her appearances earlier this season didn't impress: too much bickering and nagging, without any real dimension to her. She seemed like a weak copy of Jackie Tyler, without any of the saucy warmth. At least last year, Martha's mom got a paper-thin subplot that turned out to be vaguely important.

But wow, this time around Sylvia Noble made an impression — by being a total psycho bitch. First there's the excruciating scene where Sylvia talks Donna out of taking a "posh" temp job in the city by convincing her that no upwardly mobile man would ever want her. (With a little help from a space beetle.) But it just goes downhill from there, after Donna loses the job her mom steered her into. There's a totally excruciating scene where the mom says, with a flatness that's uncharacteristic of the operatic Doctor Who, that she's given up on Donna. And then there's the above clip, where Sylvia seems like she's just dead inside, and Donna's out of focus in the background. Scenes like that elevate a standard-issue "evil alternate universe where everyone dies" story into something more memorable and horrible.

It also fulfills the early promise of the RTD era, by showing us the ground-level impact of all the disasters and monsters the Doctor fights. We're seeing everything from the point of displaced people, refugees stuck in cramped living conditions. It's the kind of post-apocalyptic world you don't see as often — the post-apocalypse as Great Depression times ten. There are vague references to an Emergency Government, and later on we see the relentlessly cheery Italian guy (channeling Roberto Benigni) being sent off to a Labor Camp. But mostly the big stuff seems very far away, and there's just grinding, boring awfulness. (Although did anybody else think Donna was a bit dense that it took her like five minutes to figure out "labor camps" were not a beach holiday?)

It reminded me a bit of the evil-alternate-universe in last year's Master two-parter, except that there was no manic villain gloating and dancing around this time. And no shrinky-dink Doctor to steal the focus from the ordinary human misery of all those people crammed into houses. And yet it sets up future plotlines in a pretty neat way, with "the Darkness" and the stars going out. We get to see the future as well as the present of this alternate world.

One reason I was so harsh about Doctor Who season four for a while there was my sense that Russell T. Davies, and the rest of his crew, were getting a bit bored. I was getting a repetitive storyline injury. A lot of the humor felt increasingly forced. But with last week's "Midnight" and this week's "Turn Left," I get the sense that RTD is ready to write small, bleak dramas involving a few actors in a room together. So he's left behind the big, blustery high-camp that's been his signature style on Who, at least for a couple of weeks. At least, both episodes were way more understated than I normally expect from RTD.

Of course, there's another reason I might have liked "Midnight" and "Turn Left" better than most of this year's eps: neither episode has that many scenes between David Tennant and Catherine Tate. It could just be the combination of his manic grin and her brassy bluster that I'm happy to get a break from. Although I've liked their interplay in some episodes, most notably the Pompeii one and the Ood one.

Sadly, the Annedroid was right about Rose back in "Bad Wolf" — she is the weakest link. At least she was this week. I couldn't tell if Billie Piper was having trouble getting back into the role, or if she just couldn't carry off being in the "Doctor" role for a change. But whatever it was, Rose seemed weirdly muted and spoke her lines with absolutely no conviction whatsoever. Worse yet, there should have been awesome chemistry between the two companions, and there was none whatsoever. It felt as though Catherine Tate was acting opposite a tree or something. I begin to see why Russell T. Davies thought a Rose Tyler show was one spin-off too many. (Update: People are actually speculating actress Billie Tyler might have had dental work, so weird was her delivery in this episode.)

I also had to exert a huge effort of good will to ignore the Sinister Oriental at the start of the episode. The whole Planet Kowloon sequence was a bit excruciating, with the mock-Chinese music and the bustling hutong full of scrappy space Asians haggling with passers by. But the evil Chinese fortune teller — I guess it's good that she wasn't a gypsy? — was pretty insane. I just had to banish her from my mind, so I could enjoy the rest of the episode.

I didn't really understand the giant cliffhanger at the end — why does "Bad Wolf" mean the end of the universe exactly? Did Rose put the words "Bad Wolf" everywhere? And if so, how did she have the power to do that? Does this mean we're finally going to get some kind of explanation of Rose's magic hand-wavy powers at the end of season one? Or (much more likely) was this just something that RTD thought would be a cool moment, and who cares if it makes sense?

Anyway, next week we're back to full-on crazy big RTD, with probably lots of histrionics punctuated by extreme silliness. And pretty much every guest star ever coming back for a giant hootenanny. Based on the previous season finales, it will be extreme and make no sense — and it'll be incredibly fun to watch. Basically I'm expecting it to be like "The Five Doctors" on crystal meth and E. With just a hint of ketamine, for seasoning.

Either way, watching "Midnight" should put to rest any idea that Doctor Who is just a "kids show." It's a family drama, and has been since the early 60s (when it regularly featured things like a fur trapper trying to rape Barbara, and the Doctor manipulating a race of pacifists into fighting the Daleks on his behalf.) And the show has often been at its best when it's done episodes like this one — a horror story that has as much to do with the evil that people are capable of as it does with an external monster.

That's why I chose the clip above, by the way. Not only is it the best moment in this story, it's also the moment where the story shifts seamlessly on its axis, from monster horror to people horror. Suddenly, just like that, the people are the monsters. I was crossing my fingers and holding my breath that we wouldn't get an ending that explained that there was some sort of mind control or demonic influence or psychic nastiness. And thank goodness there wasn't.

Instead, these characters were just bastards in a crisis — under enough pressure, they were willing to commit murder to survive. It felt very much like an old Twilight Zone episode, or a knockoff of Sartre's No Exit.

The thing that was really amazing about this episode was that it used all of Russell T. Davies' usual tricks — except a lot darker than usual. You have the random cast of people, each of whom gets a little character moment to establish them: the bitchy mom, the blustering dad, the goth son, the wounded lesbian, the control-freak flight attendant, and then the pompous professor and his exploited grad student. Everybody gets to be just well rounded enough to be a decent caricature — and then later, Russell T. twists the knife. Like the moment when the exploited grad student, Dee Dee, decides to prove she's clever by showing them how they can murder poor Mrs. Silvestry. And then a while later she protests killing the Doctor, and her boss Professor Hobbes puts her in her place.

(By the way, Professor Hobbes was played by David Troughton, the son of the second Doctor. This was his second Doctor Who role, after 1972's The Curse of Peladon. Little trivia moment. But according to Wikipedia, he's not related to Alice Troughton, who directed the episode, though.)

And a lot of the episode had RTD's trademark quirkiness — but it totally creeped me out instead of being campy. Just imagine if someone had described this episode to you: "Their 'bus' breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and there's a thing banging on the walls, and then it gets in and takes over a lesbian who looks like Jackie Tyler. And she starts repeating what everybody says, like a parrot. And then finally she's saying stuff at the same time as them, and then it's only the Doctor. And at last she's speaking first, and he's repeating her." You would think it's another exercise in silliness — but in practice it's scary and disturbing, and the longer it goes on the more jarring it gets. You can see why the other humans start wanting to kill her.

Even the little funny touches, like the peanuts and juice pack and pop music and cartoons towards the beginning, end up contributing to the weirdness because they anchor the episode with their banality. (Oh and I should add: I don't always hate RTD's "funny" episodes. I loved the one with the ordinary people investigating the Doctor, where they turn into an ELO cover band. And there are a few other silly RTD outings that I've enjoyed. When it works, his humor is fantastic — it just gets a bit tired after the tenth fat-people monster.)

The other thing I loved about the episode was David Tennant's performance — for once the psychic paper doesn't get him anywhere, and he can't simply take charge of the situation. He's still the cleverest person in the room, but he doesn't know everything that's going on. And watching him try to take charge, you realize how much his "take charge" act depends on motion. He'll say something like "follow me," and start walking at top speed in some direction. But he can't do that in this episode, because there's no place to go, almost nothing to do except wait for rescue. A motionless Doctor, apparently, is a much more helpless Doctor. And yes, he did channel Peter Davison's super-vulnerable Doctor a bit. And the climax, where he's paralyzed, helpless and unable to stop repeating the evil lesbian, was amazing.

(By the way, are we supposed to think that the fact that Mrs. Silvestry starts saying things like "molto bene" at the end means the Doctor is fighting back the only way he can — by feeding her his weird vocabulary? Or is it just random?)

So yes, we're all monsters, and we're all ready to do the worst possible thing in a crisis — although, this time around, it turned out to be the right thing, sort of. It's one of the bleakest takes on humanity I can remember ever seeing on Doctor Who, and what makes it so great is that all of those characters also have moments of compassion or nobility in the same episode. They don't turn murderous and that's it — they keep veering towards murder and then away from it again.

Finally, I'm glad that we didn't get some kind of glib explanation of what the creature was, and why it was so ebil. And the Doctor didn't suddenly bounce back and crack a giant joke at the end, as if this experience actually got to him a bit.

To answer the question I sort of posed in the beginning, I don't think I liked this episode just because it reminded me of old-school Who, of which I remain a huge fan. This wasn't old-school Who by any means — it still had all the trappings of the RTD era, and was better for having them. I can't quite imagine any previous era of the show doing a story quite like this one — there would have been a rubber monster at some point, and some kind of explanation, and chances are the characters would have been a bit more straightforward. It would have been the crew of an exploraiton ship or something, with a few explorer archetypes on board. Anyway, no — this was new Who at its best, only without quite so much money, campiness or sentimentality. Molto bene. What did you think?

Okay, so what on earth is actually going on in this clip? First we have Donna, who's been turned into a total pile of mush by two utterly generic children — children who are so generic, they literally are copies of every other child in the world. And yet Donna's so attached to them that even after the truth is proved to her in the universe's most incontrovertible, she still won't believe it. What is going on with that? I was waiting, through the whole episode, for Donna to have a moment of awesomeness where she not only accepted her situation, she also discovered a way out. Or at least found a way to make a difference. Instead, she just gets rescued. Bah.

The other participant in the scene, of course, is Miss Evangelista, who is comically ugly. Last week, she was incredibly beautiful (and wearing 10,000 times too much makeup) and so stupid she kept mistaking the escape pod for a toilet. I sort of rolled my eyes at the sexist caricature, but assumed she was just a throwaway character, or else Moffat was going somewhere with it. Like she was just pretending to be stupid. But then we get this — she becomes a super-mega-genius, but at the cost of her looks. Because you can't be pretty and smart. It's Asimov's law. Worst of all, Miss Evangelista intones some mock-Victorian rubbish about how you can only see the truth if you're unloved. She's in a virtual world. Can't she look like whatever she wants, or whatever the computer wants her to look like? Isn't any "love" inside the virtual world just an illusion? Why didn't Doctor Moon give Miss Evangelista her own fake husband anyway?

The other major female character in "Forest Of The Dead," meanwhile, is River Song, the Doctor's old friend whom he's never met. And I still really, really like her and hope we get to see her again. But I did start to have some misgivings. Mostly about her ending, actually. First she sacrifices her life in the most contrived and cliched way possible, the same way Sergey Brin sacrificed himself a few episodes ago (thumping the Doctor and taking his place.) I wasn't really clear on why someone needed to sacrifice his/her life anyway, because the script suddenly got very techno-babbly. And then it turns out she's not really dead, because the Doctor's future self left an escape hatch. Instead, she can be resurrected inside the world's most boring virtual reality scenario, trapped forever with the crewmates she showed no sign of liking earlier. And she gets to look after the little girl whose brain is hooked up to the computer, plus the two generic children that Donna was mothering earlier.

Let's just unpack that for a sec: She's stuck mothering three little kids, two of whom are basically scraps of junk code and none of whom will ever age — forever. This is what the Doctor came up with for her? He had hundreds of years to figure out a way to save her from frying her brain, and this is the best he could come up with? I think the words "fate worse than death" floated into my brain at some point. But at least she's not ugly, so it's fine. Oh, and hey — Miss Evangelista's suddenly not ugly any more either! Happy ending!

I only have one more criticism before I mention some things I actually liked about the episode — and I liked a lot about it, really. I mentioned last week that a lot of the story elements felt a bit similar to previous forays into the Moffat-verse. For example, I had an inkling that the whole thing about people's conscoiusnesses being stored, and the missing people being "saved," would turn out to be similar to the way the medicinal nano-genes in "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" turned out to be the key to the whole gasmask mutation, and to saving everybody. I figured it might wind up being a bit similar, but I wasn't expecting an actual repeat of the "Everybody lives!" line from "The Doctor Dances." Not once, but several times. It's a bit worrying for 2010, when Moffat takes over as the head writer for Doctor Who, if he's already repeating himself like poor old Proper Dave.

But oh yeah, before I get devoured in seconds by a swarm of angry shadows, I should mention what I actually did like about the episode. I liked, once again, the hints about the Doctor's future and how awe-inspiring he's going to be. (Although I hope we never actually see that version of the Doctor, since his adventures might be quite boring.)

I was definitely intrigued by the mystery about the Doctor's real name, and what were the only circumstances under which the Doctor could share it with another sentient. I'm assuming it's a sound that a human mouth can make, so is there a reason it's hard to say except under controlled conditions? Also, why is his name so special? (Were Borusa, Spandrell, Kelner, Romanadvoratrelundar, etc., those people's real names, or not?) Anyway, it was intriguing.

And I felt like this episode was sort of groping towards a really interesting metaphor — the library is supposed to be the sum of all human knowledge, but more than that, it's supposed to be all our stories. And yet the physical medium on which those stories are reproduced lets us down. You can print them on paper books, but then they get infected with evil shadows and stuff. (Or in the case of the little used bookstore near my house, actual weird-smelling mold.) You can store them digitally, but you run into storage problems — which is why Donna's "fictional" children are so rubbish. The only way for stories to stay vital is for living people to keep telling them. Or maybe I'm just pulling that out of nowhere. Anyway, I was on the edge of my seat for large parts of this episode because I felt like the library planet, and the books, and the shadows, and the virtual reality, and the creepy Doctor Moon, and the fake kids, would all connect up in some brilliant way. They didn't, quite, but they managed to feel like they at least belonged in the same story, which is pretty great.

Bottom line: I enjoyed it a lot, but the weird stuff with Donna and Miss Evangelista (and River Song's truly bizarre "happy ending") marred it a bit for me. Plus, Moffat is showing dangerous signs of running out of gimmicks. But it was still an engaging and entertaining romp, and it made me curious about the Doctor for the first time since mid-season one. And I'm still (somewhat cautiously) excited to see what Moffat does with the show when he's got the magic show-controlling gloves on. What did you think?

I was actually a tad nervous about the two-parter that begins with "Silence In The Library," becuase I (and others) had built it up so much. Writer Steven Moffat, the writer of "Blink" and "The Empty Child," would come save us from the dreariness of Doctor Who season four with a lovely return to form. Luckily, Moffat pretty much delivers, with an episode that feels like a slow burn at first, until it starts unleashing plot twist after plot twist with terrific dexterity.

The stakes were even higher this time around, because we all know Moffat is taking over as the show-runner of Who in 2010. So it's hard not to see this episode as giving hints to where Moffat's version of the show might be heading.

Most obviously, the new character of River Song (Alex Kingston from ER) has a huge "recurring character" flag over her head. She's had some kind of intense relationship with the Doctor in his future (and her own past), and now their timelines have crossed. I would not say no to a few years of Doctor-and-River adventures, based on this one episode — she seems like a good foil for the Doctor, almost his equal in knowledge, but also independent. She's comfortable in the Doctor's world, but can obviously also do without him. And he's trusted her enough to give her his diary and his sonic screwdriver.

(And I would bet that the next time we see River, we'll get the reverse of this scenario, where the Doctor now knows her, but she doesn't know him. This is the sort of thing the Blinovitch Limitation Effect is supposed to prevent.)

But including River in the episode also opens up the Doctor's story in all sorts of other ways. Like: he's young for a change. I've lost count of how many times in the RTD era we've heard the Doctor refer to himself as old. (Or someone else referring to the Doctor that way.) It's a refrain. Now, all of a sudden, his best years are ahead of him — which is really a much more interesting way to pitch the show, if you think about it. (Of course, if he's really only got three more lives left, then objectively, he is old.) The idea of the Doctor getting hints about his own future has only been played with a few times before on the show (most notably in 1989's "Battlefield") but it's exciting to get hints about adventures we haven't seen yet.

And, of course, it's nice for the Doctor not to know everything for a change as well. Plus all the talk about "spoilers" and how bad it is to peek ahead, was obviously very gratifying.

The main story of the episode, of course, is only tangentially about River Song and the Doctor's future relationship with her. Instead, it's about a deserted library where sentient shadows are killing everybody. All of the stuff I'd heard in advance about "count the shadows" and "data ghosts" had sounded very similar to previous Moffat outings, especially last year's weird rules in "Blink" about not being able to close your eyes, or the stone angels will move. Actually watching the episode, however, it didn't feel like a retread at all, and the business with the shadows moving around felt sufficiently creepy, and yet logical, that it worked as a threat. Especially the moment where Proper Dave suddenly has two shadows, which made a nebulous threat suddenly very, very concrete.

And then there are the "data ghosts," stored brain patterns which continue to function for a while after death. They're a terrific metaphor for the slow realization that someone is gone forever — you think you can still hear them, still talk to them, for a while after their vital signs are wiped out. It's a nice way of twisting the knife of the show's two deaths, by making us linger over them. And then it makes Proper Dave much more scary, in a very "Are you my mummy?" way, once he's lurching around repeating his last words over and over again.

(I kept wondering if the "data ghosts" would be like the nano-genes in "The Empty Child" — a throwaway gimmick that turns out to be the key to the whole mess. Obviously people are being stored somehow, the way Donna has been "saved." We know Donna can't be dead. Probably.)

The other big mystery of the episode was the not-too-empty child, apparently in present-day Earth, who sees the library when she closes her eyes. Is she actually in the real world? Or is that just a Matrix-esque simulation that her consciousness has been ported into? Is she the library computer, or just connected to it somehow? I kept changing my mind about what role she was playing in the story, either innocent victim or secret ally of the Doctor — until the end, when she announced that Donna had been "saved," and she agreed to help the creepy Dr. Moon "save" the others. Which probably means she's part of the problem — even if unwittingly. Did she put all the humans, including Donna now, into some kind of electronic storage to save them from the living shadows?

Anyway, it was a lovely change of pace, and even the stuff that could have felt run-of-the-mill (new love interest for the Doctor, monster with weird arbitrary rules, child who can see the Doctor through her fireplacetelevision) somehow didn't, because the execution was awesome and you still couldn't tell where it was really going. Still very, very hopeful for the Moffat era of Doctor Who in a couple of years.

This was basically the latest in a line of historical-writer episodes, including the Dickens episode and the Shakespeare episode. (The show even winked at the fact that we'd been here before, with Donna joking about meeting Dickens at Christmas time, with ghosts, not realizing that had actually happened.) The latest iteration, the Agatha Christie episode, worked about as well as the Dickens episode and the Shakespeare episode, except that the concept is a little less fresh now.

The main thing that's slightly annoying about all three of those famous-writer episodes, actually, is the way they try to pay homage to the writer's work by building the plot around it. I was able to forgive a lot in the Dickens episode because the plot about the "ghosts" actually sort of made sense, and I liked the fact that Dickens came up with the way to destroy the ghosts, using science. That was a really nice bit. The Shakespeare episode was more silly, but at least there was a reason the "witches" wanted to put their jargon into the manuscript of Shakespeare's lost play "Love's Labors Won." (They wanted to use Shakespeare's hold over his audience to open a rift in blah-dy-blah, whatever.)

Actually, thinking about it, the Dickens episode had one other thing the Dickens and Christie episodes didn't — there's a moment where the Doctor and Rose are trapped in the cage in the basement with the Gelth, and they realize they're going to die. And the Doctor apologizes to Rose for getting her killed. The moment drags out a little too long, but it's still something Doctor Who made an effort to do back in its first season, and no longer bothers with.

Anyway, back to the Christie episode. Here's the plot, and why it was nonsensical. So there's this alien wasp creature, which comes to Earth in human form. And it meets a lovely young Earth woman and falls in love with her. They get together and make a half-wasp, half-human baby. The woman gives the baby away, but keeps a jewel that is some kind of psychic activator for it. And then one night, she's reading an Agatha Christie novel just as the half-wasp half-human chimera gets "activated." So the creature is psychically bonded with Agatha Christie. And it decides to kill the people who learn the truth about it, in the manner of a Christie novel.

Why wouldn't the creature be bonded with its mother? You know, the person it shares genetic material with? And the one who was actually wearing the psychic jewel thingy when it was activated? I know, it's just a way to have an episode with a monster and an Agatha Christie-style set of murders.

But I'll stop picking nits now. In general, this was a fun bit of fluff, and it really worked because of the cast. I pretty much suspend my critical faculties any time Felicity Kendall is on screen, and Fenella Woolgar was great as Christie as well. Christopher Hugh has been in so many great British shows in the past, including Who once or twice, that it's fun to watch him do anything, and his bizarre metatextual flashback involving remembering sitting in a chair remembering the can-can girls was just so demented it fell into wonderful.

Oh, and I just remembered: I loved the starchy reverend starting to become upset and saying "zzz" more and more, until he turned into a giant wasp. Best moment ever. No idea why I loved it so much, I just did.

Sadly, Catherine Tate annoyed me a bit more than usual this time — the constant "Copyright Donna Noble," the rudeness to the poor servants, and the gratuitous kiss were all way too grating. She's starting to have the same problem that Rose did in season two — because she's got this amazing privilege of traveling with the Doctor, she's all detached from events and can laugh at everyone and everything around her. It makes her not very sympathetic, and also makes me hate the Doctor a little bit. They're like obnoxious tourists.

Oh, and I just remembered one other thing that bugged me slightly: we're told at the start that Agatha Christie vanished for 10 days and then reappeared with amnesia. And then the Doctor is instrumental in making that verison of events happen. Even though at one point he throws in a pro-forma thing about how things may happen differently this time. Which is it? Is the Doctor just making things happen the way they're "supposed" to? It feels like another example of the show trying to have things both ways.

Bottom line: I liked this episode quite a bit despite the nonsense plot and the feeling that I'd seen it all before. It works quite well as fun fluff, and the cast totally carries it. I probably would have liked it a lot better if it hadn't been the latest fluff episode in a season full of fluff, but that's not the fault of this episode.

But before I get into the eponymous "daughter" at the heart of "The Doctor's Daughter," I should address the overarching message of the episode. Here to explain it to you is Puppet Boy George (from TV's Spitting Image satire show.) Take it away, PBG:

Now that we've got that out of the way, I felt like this episode was a bit of a tease. Not because we were promised the Doctor's daughter, and instead we got the Doctor's cobbled-together supersoldier semi-clone. Who's all cute and chirpy despite being bred only for war. I expected something like that. (Even though it made no sense to me that Donna and Martha didn't get "daughters" of their own. The explanation of why only the Doctor was copied seemed very hand-wavy. And it would have made the episode much more interesting if all three travelers had had to deal with sudden immaculate conception.)

No, instead, the episode was a tease because for the billionth time, we see the Doctor working through the exact same issues, and not getting anywhere.

This episode wasn't really that much about fatherhood — the daughter in question was a convenient receptacle for the Doctor's angst, and didn't really have that much personality of her own. Instead, the episode was all about the Doctor's grief for the dead Time Lords, and his PTSD about the Time War. Back in season one — in the scene where Christopher Eccleston brandishes an enormous gun at the disabled Dalek, and then breaks down — I had high hopes for delving into the Doctor's grief and PTSD. And when the Doctor finally found another Time Lord and it turned out to be the crappest Time Lord possible — the Master — I felt for him again. But this time around, it just felt sort of cheap.

Although, to be fair, I'm holding out a glimmer of hope here that this recent surge in "violence is bad, guns are stupid" moralizing from the Doctor means that his PTSD is finally reaching some kind of peak and we're going to see a crisis of some sort. I'm not sure what form that crisis would take — whether it would be the Doctor getting even more reckless and prepared to sacrifice his own life more and more needlessly, or the Doctor getting more heavy-handed in his meddling. I am prepared for there to be an arc here.

But I'm not holding my breath: the show seems to prefer doing episodes like this one, which engineer a situation designed to elicit an emotional crisis, which is "resolved" by the end of the episode. Despite vociferously admiring Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the makers of the new Who don't have the same flair for building character points week on week.

But even though I've just excoriated the episode for being a bit of a cheat, I mostly liked it. Georgia Moffett was fun to watch as the pseudo-clone of the Doctor. If you take it as just, "the Doctor's got a magic daughter! And she's cute! And she does backflips through lasers!" It worked pretty well. She was cute, and we didn't really need her to have hidden depths. On that level, the show worked quite well. I wouldn't even mind if we get the inevitable Jenny comeback, although I'm really not sure there's any more to her character than we've already seen.

The main reason I sort of liked this episode despite its manipulative and contrived main plot was that the whole business with the endless war, which turned out to have lasted only a week, was pretty great. It was also sort of contrived and clever-clever, but it was just plausible enough not to bother me. I found myself wishing, while the Doctor kept struggling with the non-dilemma of whether to accept his cute gymnast kid, that we could spend more time on the war, and the process of indoctrination that had managed to convince these people they'd been fighting for aeons, and the society that produced this conflict in the first place. Plus, the Hath were cute!

Other random observations: the thing about the TARDIS bringing them there so they could meet Jenny, but first the Doctor had to create Jenny, made no sense, even by Doctor Who's dodgy time-paradox standards. So I just ignored it. Once again, Martha was criminally underused. I really do think Donna is showing a surprising range, and she's definitely growing on me.

I don't really have much more to say about this episode. It was another fun piece of fluff, and as long as you ignore all of the sledgehammery hints that we're actually supposed to care about Jenny, it's a fun romp. Judging from the previous two seasons, we're almost at the end of the "fluff" portion of the year. At this point last year, we were on the verge of the underrated "42," followed by "Human Nature"/"Family of Blood," "Blink" and then the final three-parter. The year before, the second half had the awful "Fear Her" but was otherwise pretty great.

So I am keeping my fingers crossed that soon I will be able to write Doctor Who recaps that aren't just a variation on "Well, it's not that bad, if you ignore the plot and most of the characters." Coming up next: the Agatha Christie episode written by Gareth Roberts (whose The Highest Science may be my favorite Who novel), and then Steven Moffat's two-parter about a sinister library. I live in hope.

I wasn't sure at first why I liked "The Poison Sky" better than "The Sontaran Strategem." I think it's just because last week's installment was just lots of nonsensical investigation. And this week's was lots of nonsensical battles, which are just inherently more fun to watch. There were just more fun moments this week, which is all you can really ask for a lot of the time. (Sorry this is late, by the way — partly I wanted to ponder it a bit more, but mostly I just got swamped thinking of ways to obliterate campiness. This episode provided a few hints in that department, of course.)

I liked almost everything about Donna in this episode, which surprised me — except for some of the interactions with her family. Donna's mother is still not working for me as a character, and even though I love Bernard Cribbins, I'm getting tired of the way the schmaltzy music comes on whenever she has a heart-to-heart with her grandfather Wilf. The thing of the companion staying in touch with her Earthbound family worked pretty well when it was Jackie and Mickey (as annoying as they sometimes got) but it just doesn't seem to have that much life left in it now.

Besides Donna getting to be a hero and take on a Sontaran single-handed, the much-maligned paramilitary organization UNIT finally got to kick some ass as well. The first half of the story had me wondering why UNIT had even been included, and I was ready for part two to be just a litany of scenes where the Doctor tells the toy soldiers not to engage the aliens — along with the occasional moment of UNIT disregarding the Doctor and learning the folly of violence. So I was stoked when UNIT actually turned out to be competent — and I liked Colonel Mace's rousing little speech about showing the aliens how advanced humans can be in the killing department.

So, yes. Fun shooty action and nice use of the SHIELD helicarrier UNIT airship in the giant battle. Although, the final bit where the soldiers all cheer and the hawt female science-nerd/soldier smooches Col. Mace — maybe a little too much. But it's Doctor Who, so "too much" is always on the menu.

And yet. All the things that didn't make sense in part one still didn't make sense in part two. The Sontaran scheme still seemed way too fancy for the galaxy's most unstoppable warriors. Why not just swoop down, have a fun afternoon killing all the humans, and then transform the planet into a clone farm? It's better strategy, plus it's the warrior way. The Sontarans must have done this to planets a thousand times before, so why would they need to use cars to convert the atmosphere to clone feed? They should have a "Sontara-forming" device on their ship to do that for them.

I was also sad about Martha — when she turned up on Torchwood, that show suddenly became twice as watchable, and the Torchwood team started being good at their jobs. But Doctor Who reaped no Martha boost, mostly because she was sidelined in the random clone plot. I sort of got that the Sontarans needed the Martha-clone to infiltrate UNIT and stop the nuclear launch. But did they really need her to keep pressing a button on her iPhone every few minutes after that? Couldn't they have just rigged a little button-pressing machine? Mostly, it just seemed like a waste of the amazing powers of Freema Agyeman.

And then the scene where Martha talks to her dying clone literally made no sense to me. Why were we supposed to be sad that her (apparently) smelly clone was dying? Was Martha confronting her own mortality through her clone's death? No clue, sadly.

Actually, now that I think of it, I know why I liked part two of the Sontaran storyline better than part one: there was a lot less of Sergey Brin, or whatever his real name was. His character continued not making much sense to me. He was like like stock character #27: the misunderstood genius who teams up with the bad guys because he believes their empty promises. And then they suddenly but inevitably betray him. (He had maybe just a dash of Adam from season one.) Even the wacky "breeding program" scene felt like a random stereotype. ("I'm cleverer than you! I'm cleverer than EVERYONE!!!") Plus did I miss a scene that explained about this new planet the Sontarans were going to give him and his ten other breeding partners? It was mentioned, like, twice.

The only way Sergey Brin could have surprised me is if he hadn't sacrificed himself at the end. The misguided geniuses in league with monsters always sacrifice themselves, either to redeem themselves or to punish their former allies, or just because there's five minutes left.

Another thing that bugged me, of course, was the deus ex machina device, the fancy atmosphere-fixing machine that we'd seen for a split second in the first episode, which miraculously turned out to be the key to solving the killer-smog problem in the second episode. Of course, the new Who is known for its deus ex machinas, so it's par for the course. And the alternative, to have the Doctor MacGyver a new atmosphere neutralization whatsit out of spare parts, wouldn't really have been much less cheap. Just slightly less cheap.

Oh, and the Doctor being willing to sacrifice himself, just so he can offer the Sontarans one last chance to quit? Sort of great, I guess — except he knows what the Sontarans will choose. Is it really worth giving up his life — all his remaining lives? — just to offer them a last chance that he knows they won't take? And then it turns out the Doctor is bluffing anyway. So he's throwing away his life on a bluff that he knows won't work. (Or, more cynically, he's manipulating Sergey Brin into committing suicide on his behalf.) It felt like it happened not because it made sense, but because the story needed one last tense climax.

So in short, I liked part two better than part one, mostly because I'd already swallowed the ridiculous set-up and the ridiculous resolution was more fun. Looking at the two parts as a whole... it was a forgettable but sort of entertaining romp. Better than the Daleks/pigs/Depression/New York storyline by the same author last year, but still a bit scattershot. If I had to explain to someone how the ruthless warriors, the killer car fumes, the global military organization, the geek wunderkind, the mind controlled soldiers, the cloned companion and the aborted nuclear launch all fit together, I think I'd have a brain embolism. Better to think of it as a collection of cool moments (Donna alone on the Sontaran ship) and blah ones (Martha watching her clone die, Sergey Brin describing his breeding program) than try to view it as a story.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed "The Sontaran Strategem," and it was much better than last year's Daleks-and-pig-people two-parter from the same writer, Helen Raynor. I mean, yay, the Doctor's paramillitary playmates from UNIT are back, Martha is still awesome, the Sontarans are still being nasty, brutish and short, and it's all good fun. And we get Sergey Brin doing a little world-beat dance with the evil Sontarans, in the above clip. Somebody needs to make a "Sontar! Sontar!" music video, including other bits from the original series where Sontarans appear to be dancing. (If you make such a video, I will most definitely post it here.)

It just all felt a bit... routine. The story zipped along, hitting the usual notes: there's a new diet pill, or ghosts are popping up, or there's a new car thingy, and everybody loves it. But it's secretly a naughty conspiracy. The Doctor and companion investigate, and the new companion gets a moment of proving she's really smart. Everybody oohs and ahhs. We reconnect with the companion's family and there are some emotional moments (supplied here by the world's most random montage. What was that about?) The villain does a silly dance. And then the pace slows wayyyyy down for the final cliffhanger, because we have to be sufficiently impressed with how fatal the danger really is.

It doesn't help that this is one of the most continuity-heavy episodes of the new Who so far, referencing not just tons of events in the previous three seasons, but also things like UNIT and the Sontarans from the original show.

I don't mind if the Davies Doctor Who era is going to be characterized by extreme campiness much of the time. It would be foolish, at this point, to expect a Who that takes its villains or storylines seriously, outside of a few notable exceptions. And I'm happy to take the show on its own terms, instead of hoping for it to be something else.

But there's nothing worse than recycled camp. Camp should be fresh, imported directly from the source on the wings of gilded nightingales.

Last year's Master three-parter was intensely campy and completely ridiculous, but it was also fun and engaging, and I got totally sucked into the storyline and wondering how exactly the Doctor was going to win this one. This didn't feel nearly as fun, nor was I nearly as engaged in whatever the plot was supposed to be.

I was underwhelmed by the Sontarans, who seemed a bit wimpy. The Doctor even points out that they're being uncharacteristically weak-kneed. Just like last year's New York Daleks story, where the Daleks skulked in a basement creating pig-people instead of just getting out and exterminating everybody, the super-warrior Sontarans are acting like Slitheen. (But to be fair, this is a two-parter, and there will no doubt be some clever explanation next week.)

Also, minor nitpick. The chief Sontaran makes a wisecrack about how talking is for women — one of the defining characeristics of the Sontarans is that they're cloned, and they have no concept of gender. In their first appearance, the Sontaran warrior Lynx examines Sarah Jane with puzzlement, because he can't understand why her "thorax" is built differently than the men. (And I know Helen Raynor remembers that scene, because she riffed on it in this episode.)

I did really like the interplay between Martha and Donna. It was cute that the Doctor was expecting them to fight, because that's what happened last time with Rose and Sarah Jane — and instead they made friends instantly. The bit where Martha told Donna about what happened to the Joneses was underplayed and super-moving. I would happily have had more of the former-companion-bonding and less of almost everything else in this episode.

I also liked the thing of the Doctor teaching Donna to steer the TARDIS, and Martha calling him back home using the cellphone he left her. And any chance to see Bernard Cribbins as Grandpa Wilf is always a major treat. It was pretty funny that everyone in Donna's family had met the Doctor.

There was also some extreme dodginess, like the Doctor talking the computer into self-destructing. Would Sergey Brin, let alone his alien masters, be dumb enough to program a computer that does the opposite of whatever you tell it? The computer's trying to kill the Doctor, not contradict him. It made no sense at all. And I actually cringed when Donna demanded that the Colonel guy salute her. Also, I hope somebody points out the Doctor's hypocrisy, the next time he depends on those naughty men with guns to save his life.

So to sum up, I'd say there was nothing wrong with "The Sontaran Strategem," except that it felt a bit too deja vu. And the second episode will have to do an absolutely brilliant job of explaining this whole cars-smog-GPS-evil-computers-genius-school-clones-invasion plot, or this episode will retroactively look a lot worse. Based on past experience, the show is probably hoarding all of its really fun, heavy-hitting stuff for the final few episodes. Plus, of course, the probably awesome Steven Moffat two-parter.

I'm trying real hard to be balanced and not excessively harsh here. For another POV, here's former Doctor Who novelist Lawrence Miles:

Well, for now, let's not dwell on the seemingly-endless tedium of "The Sontaran Stratagem". Because as I write this, it's 6:45 on Saturday night: I've been out for a wee twice, I've put the dinner on, I've tried walking up and down and stroking the cat in an attempt to make time go faster, but the damned thing isn't even half-finished yet. The worst part is knowing that it's a two-parter, and that we're going to have to go through all of this again in seven days' time.

I do wonder if we're going someplace really interesting with Donna, played by Catherine Tate. In her first appearance, a couple years ago, the emphasis was all on how ignorant and silly she was. She didn't even notice the giant spaceship flying over London and crashing into Big Ben, or the other giant spaceship over London that made half the people climb out on the rooftops. Or the huge battle between the Daleks and the Cybermen. It seemed pretty obvious we were meant to contrast her lack of curiosity with Rose's inquisitiveness, so we'd realize how rare and wonderful Rose had been.

But now Donna's not just a throwaway character, so she's showing more initiative. She investigated the weird doughy alien baby conspiracy — although we were told she was only doing that so she could reconnect with the Doctor. And last week, she pressured the Doctor to save some — if not all — of the people in Pompeii from the volcano. She was the voice of compassion. This time around, though, she sees injustice on an almost unimaginable scale, and pretty much the first words out of her mouth are: "I want to go home." Which is a reasonable reaction. But I wonder if we're supposed to see the Doctor teaching her something or other, much as the Seventh Doctor took his companion Ace through hard lessons back in the 1980s, all the name of grooming her to become a Time Lord. Or maybe Donna's characterization is just inconsistent.

Anyway, I thought the Doctor's point about slaves making Donna's clothes was actually pretty valid. Who does she think made all the lovely cheap clothes she wears?

I am glad the show decided to revisit the Ood, who remained sort of a mystery after their first appearance a couple of years ago. You have this slave race, who are naturally docile and mildly telepathic, and who seem perfectly happy to serve humans. It seemed perfectly reasonable to think there was more to their story than what we'd already seen.

My main problem with the story can pretty much be summed up in the phrase: "They're born with their brains in their hands!" After laboriously pointing out how a "slave race" couldn't naturally have evolved, because it wouldn't be very good at surviving on its own, the show then reveals the Ood in their natural state — and they're even less fitted to survive. I'm glad they're also born with little mittens on, so they can keep their delicate brains nice and toasty.

The other huge problem with this story, of course, is the easy ending. You can't set up this horrible oppressive future society — with millions of Ood enslaved on various planets across three galaxies — and then say, "Oh well, now we've turned off the forcefield around this giant brain, so the Ood will all be coming home." Wha huh? It felt very much as though the writer realized the episode was almost over, so it was time to wrap things up one way or another.

But like I said, there was a lot to like about this episode. The fact that the evil humans stayed totally evil throughout the episode — including the PR woman, who I was sure was going to have a moment of conscience — was a nice gutsy move. I liked a lot of the interplay between the Doctor and Donna. The very end was intriguing, with the business about how the Doctor's song must end soon. Another hint for the season finale, I guess.

Some minor points:

• This isn't the first time the Doctor has set the TARDIS to random coordinates — but there must be some safeguard so the ship doesn't just materialize in space 99 percent of the time. Or on a gas giant. Or in a black hole. Etc.
• The hint that the Ood were somehow related to the Sensorites, the incredibly silly bald telepaths from way back in 1964, was blatant fan-service, but just subtle enough that it didn't matter.
• The psychic paper has really worn out its welcome as a plot device. And the "we're not married" running joke involving the Doctor and Donna is already way past unwelcome.

It's actually a really valid question, and one the show has waffled on quite a bit, ever since 1964's "The Aztecs," where the Doctor merely throws a hissy fit about the idea of Barbara trying to save the Aztec civilization but never explains why that would be different from stopping the Daleks or the Voord. The obvious answer is, "Because the Doctor spends so much time in one particular version of 20th./21st. century Earth, and he wants it to be the same whenever he goes there." But there's probably more to it than that, since he does occasionally meddle in Earth's past as well.

And so now we get a bit more of an explanation, and it's one which raises a bunch more questions — which is a good thing. The Doctor sees history as either fixed or in flux, and when he comes to a point that's fixed, he can't (or mustn't) disturb it.

And this episode actually gave me a reason to love Donna, who was one of the dozen or so things that annoyed me in last week's episode. She, more than any other recent companion, actually stands up to the Doctor. And she keeps doing it long after he's explained himself, and given his passionate speech, and shouted her down. She listens to all the Doctor's reasons, and then keeps telling him he's wrong. It's meant to be refreshing after the relatively worshipful attitudes of Rose and Martha, and it is.

I sort of assumed that the whole "we can't save Pompeii" plot would be dropped about two-thirds of the way through the episode, to make way for the real plot, about the rock monsters who want to do something or other. But then I was really happy to be proven wrong. The rock monster plot, as flimsy as it was, was simply there to advance the "we can't save Pompeii" plot. Which was a brave choice, and a really good one. In the end, because the rock monsters are averting the volcanic eruption that's "supposed" to happen, the Doctor actually has to take responsibility for his choice to let everyone in Pompeii die.

And the other reason it works so well is because the actors sell the story: You actually believe that Donna and the Doctor are anguished by this choice, instead of just sort of tossing it off.

And then there are all the little hints dropped in the scene featured above — like the thing on Donna's back. Is it, as some have speculated, something to do with the Racnoss, those spidery creatures we met in her first adventure? (In which case it wouldn't be the first time the Doctor's companion had a spidery thing on her back, since that happened all the way back in 1974's "Planet Of The Spiders.") Is the business about the Doctor's real name actually going to be significant? Are we going to learn his real name at last? (And no, I'm guessing it's not "Theta Sigma," the nickname he was called by in one episode years ago.) And then of course the hints that the return of Rose is significant to the overarching plot of the season.

And then there's the dangling plotline at the end, the family the Doctor finally chooses to save from the volcano. The one time he actually listens to Donna and does the nice thing instead of the smart thing. I will be horribly disappointed if that decision doesn't come back to smack him in the forehead in a future episode.

So — as I and many others predicted — this episode was a vast improvement on the fat-people-weird-babies episode last week. It definitely wasn't perfect. I couldn't quite tell you what the rock people's plan was, except that it involved circuit boards, and the mountain, and psychic people being turned into rock people. And the rock people were ridiculously easy to stop — with a water pistol, no less. But as I said earlier, the "main" plot of the episode was so transparently just an excuse to get into the issues the episode wanted to talk about, so it hardly mattered. Oh, and there was campiness, but it worked with the story. So yes, I'd say it was pretty decent, all told.

(And to those of you who are going to say it was better because Russell T. Davies didn't write it — his signature was all over it, including lots of little touches of humor. (The zany thing where Donna's Latin sounds like Celtic to the Roman people.) I wouldn't be surprised if RTD rewrote this script extensively — this is just an example of what RTD and his writers do well: a somewhat silly, fluffy story with an actual idea at its core, and an emotional crux that the characters actually get engaged with. It's only when he serves up pure fluff — and it's not even good fluff — that I get annoyed.

The comparison between this weekend's season premieres of Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who does the latter no favors, unfortunately. BSG was all fresh, dark and conspiracy-minded, with lots of throat-cutting and screaming action. Who was at its absolute campiest, schlocky and backward-looking. It honestly felt kind of old-school compared with BSG.

As with the old Lois and Clark Superman series, the new Doctor Who tries to invert the traditional Doctor-companion relationship, putting the companion in the starring role. And as with Lois and Clark, the device feels a bit hollow, because the Doctor is still the one we're invested in, the person who saves the day.

The shocking twist this time around is that the companion, Donna, isn't in love with the Doctor. She pursues him and desperately needs him to fill an emptiness in her life — but it's a need for adventure, not love. It's not as much of a difference as I'd hoped, because her life is still totally worthless without the Doctor, as we're shown at great length. The only reason she's even investigating the evildoings of Adipose is because she hopes the Doctor will show up there too.

Whether you think this new spin on the Doctor-companion dynamic is enough to sustain a whole season may depend largely on how much you like the clip above, where the Doctor and Donna have a mimed reunion while they're both spying on the same barely-a-supervillain. My sympathies are entirely with Miss Foster, who wants to know if her evil scheme is interrupting their long ASL processing conversation. But to be fair, the plot of "Partners In Crime" is so thin, there's not that much for the Doctor and Donna to interrupt.

Speaking of being fair, I made a resolution last year, after I watched the end of season three — the bit where the Doctor suddenly returns to youth after being aged 900 years — and levitates — because everyone on Earth believes in him. That moment was simultaneously so amazing, and yet so awful, that it totally destroyed my critical faculties. I decided that you can't really judge Russell T.'s work based on any normal standards of good or bad. You just have to take it on its own terms.

But even if you judge "Partners In Crime" on its own terms, as a "jolly romp," it's just barely okay. It doesn't quite ever muster enough verve to be a real romp. And the jollity is a bit forced. A lot of the clever bits feel a bit rehashed, as if Russell T. is running through his greatest hits. Especially the relationship between Donna and her mom, who feels entirely like a stock character made up of pieces of Jackie and Martha's mother. And the main plot, with the fat people who make farting noises and then have babies burst out of them, is literally a rehash of the Slitheen. Except that this time it's not evil aliens pretending to be fat people, it's innocent fat people who give birth to evil aliens. And the alien babies are actually babies this time, instead of just looking baby-like.

I take comfort in the fact that the previous two season openers were also paper-thin: the one in the hospital with the cat-nuns, where the hospital gets sealed off and there's an evil secret. And the one in the hospital with the Judoon, where the hospital gets sealed off and there's an evil secret. Russell T. has a record of tossing out his fluffiest episode first, and then getting into the heavier stuff later. And indeed, everyone who's seen next week's Pompeii episode says it's miles better than the army-of-babies one, with Donna actually showing more emotional range.

Meanwhile, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the episode sets up some mysteries for the season's overall arc. The main one, of course, is the Rose-ghost whom Donna tells about the car keys in the rubbish bin. (Which, if I was Donna's mom, would be grounds for disowning her, by the way.) Then there's also the question of where Miss Foster got her own version of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, but there's a good chance we'll never find out. And then it's possible there's some significance to the fact that Donna and her grandfather Wilf both met the Doctor separately, a year apart. But it's probably just a coincidence. (And why wasn't Wilf at the wedding anyway?)

But, yes, it was a jolly romp, and it was nice to see David Tennant jutting his chin and shouting, "Oh, yes!" again. And a still-impressive 8.4 million Brits tuned in. So even if you hope (like me) that we're reaching the tail end of the RTD era of Who, the phenomenon still seems to be going strong. And I'm pretty sure there are better episodes ahead. What did you think?