Doctor Who Club of Australia

[dean69]

Now that's what I call great Doctor Who! Had me on the edge of my seat the whole way through. Just became better and better towards the end. The acting was superb and the directing spot on. Catherine Tait really excelled herself and Billy Piper demonstrated her underlying breadth of talent. All the elements of great Doctor Who seemed to come together in the one episode. Can't wait for next week!

Dean

[Amano07]

next weeks look awesome i almost stopped breathing watching the trailer!!

[Miss Smith]

That episode was good. Made awesome by that ending. I literally punched the air when I saw Bad Wolf written over everything. The Cloister bell gave me chills. Coz you just know its very very bad when you hear that.

When I saw the first few seconds of that episode (that opening shot), am I totally looney in feeling like I was watching an episode of Firefly? It made the episode cooler and also make me suspect RTD is a browncoat.

[Greg]

Hmm. A whole episode of Catherine Tate... with not much to leaven the impact. I was pleasantly surprised that, mostly, she managed a good performance. However, she still lapses too far into comedy acting for my liking (such as in the scene where she's lost her job...) and the whole 'I'm so surprised my jaw's dropped open so I look like I'm posing for a life-size inflatable doll for over a minute' - well, someone should have stopped her.

Overall, though, the story was well-written and paced. Looking at the impact of the Doctor on the world is something that hasn't always been done, so it is welcome. The design helped to emphasise the deterioration of the country, and was markedly at variance with the offworld marketplace.

The whole bit where the Doctor dies wasn't well-handled, however. The Doctor can't regenerate because he wasn't ready to do it? That doesn't fit with the regenerations of the 6th and 7th Doctors at all! Why would Donna tell Rose that the body was of 'someone called the Doctor'?Outside of Doctor Who, no one is called the Doctor as a name. And I don't think it is likely that someone caught in a flooded tunnel, the water rushing in, fished out, placed on a stretcher and carried will have managed to keep hold of something as small and light as the sonic screwdriver for that long!

I was also disappointed that It wasn't Brigadier Bambera. Ah, well.

I wonder how long the next episode is going to be? With the number of returning characters, if they all get their names in the opening credits, that'll cut a fair whack of time off the running length!

[Panecea]

[Tegan]

[Hiruma]

A Great episode.

I think more than any other episode you notice David Tennants eyes in this. He seems to give a lot of emotion just through eye dilation and movement of his eyes. The multi face shots in the final act go to prove that, you could feel the almost desperate need to find out who the blonde woman was. Then boom, he was gone, to the 'hurry' music

I really enjoyed that episode. It did not suffer from the lack of the Doctor, and I think knowing the Doctor can be defeated if a Companion IS NOT there, is interesting. He needs an advisor.

All in all a great episode.

[meglos]

Excellent. Catherine Tate was fantastic and I am very excited by the trailer for next week

[FredDag]

What a brilliant episode!!!! This has to be the best episode so far this season, I just hope the next two are just as good. I just found myself so caught up in the whole story which was brilliant and Catherine Tate's Donna is becoming my favourite companion in the new series. It was great to see Rose, I hope there's no luvvy duvvy stuff between her and Doctor when she returns. I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat yelling out, "nooooooooo" when Rose told Donna she was going to die. I walk around for about a half an hour after this episode saying the F word and wow!

I was wondering if we'd see what happened if the Master got earth without the Doctor there and kept wondering why he wasn't in it, then I remembered he used to the Doctor's TARDIS to get to earth, so without the Doctor there and Martha, he's still the kind old Professor. Anyway, roll on Episode 12, lets hope it's as good if not better then the this one!

[Sulp Niar]

So 'Midnight' shows us how the Doctor's influence can be a bad thing; 'Turn Left' shows us how a Doctor-less universe is a bloody scary thing.

...and, worse, a believably real thing.

I'd compare this to 'Inferno', in a sense; it had the same feeling of slow-building gloom (though 'Inferno' is, you know, a fair bit longer!), it was an alternate universe story, and both had Doctor-less universes.

What amazed was how RTD managed to take some of his least successful episodes - 'Voyage of the Damned', 'The Runaway Bride' - grab them by the balls, and make them amazing. In 'The Runaway Bride', the Doctor flushing the spiders down the hole just felt average to me. In 'Turn Left', a flashback of that scene makes it scary, and powerful.

Incidentally, Russell seems to have a dislike of turning right. I watched 'Sontaran Stratagem' again, and a woman at the start dies because her car turned right. The horror of it all.

Then there's that ending. The TARDIS had "Bad Wolf" graffitied on it in Series One; this time it's the actual sign on it. Brilliant image. Though I wonder if this means, like in Series One with the kid, the Doctor will get Rose to scrub it off.

Notice that the companions all banded together in his absence. I'm guessing we'll see that exact same thing happen on-screen in the finale.

This was just great. And scary. And a whole different level of scary than 'Midnight'.

If it wasn't for the fact that the next story looks like 'Doomsday' Part 2, I'd be licking Russell's boots right now.

[Davros]

[FredDag]

I only have one niggle about the final two part story. It looks like there are thousands of Dalek ships flying around. I guess it's going to take something "magical" to resolve the story. I'd like to see the Doctor do something cleaver rather then rely on some great power to save the day as he has in Parting of the Ways and Last of the Time Lords. What do other people thing?

[Davros]

[Hiruma]

[Ickabod]

[paisley-sage]

I enjoyed Catherine Tate in this episode although the dialogue between her and Rose was unnecessarily cringeworthy. If Rose was meeting her on a parellel planet she could of at least offered more help information-wise than that of the "cryptic ghost" wanting help in a thriller movie .....total bollocks IMHO

[Speckled Jim]

I've watched Turn Left and The Stolen Earth in one setting, which I think might've given me a broader view of the story the season's going to finish on and shone a different light on them as individual stories. Still, Turn Left as a standalone episode I thought was really good.
It's odd with ol' RTD. I really can't stand most of the standalone stories he pens during the early parts of the season - well, at least, that's the way it's worked for the last couple. I find them awful, cloying, infantile and really unimaginative. And then - and this goes for Season 3 as well - he pulls out something totally surprising and wonderful as a wrap-up.
Having said that, the three-parter to end Season 3 had plenty of flaws - and so far, so has Season 4 - but when I compare his season-ender stories to, say, Gridlock, or the atrocious Partners in Crime, I see a real sense of playfulness, ambition and cunning that's absent in his earlier work.
I was pretty stoked with Midnight - and same goes for Turn Left. I gotta say, I'm a sucker for the dystopian, apocalyptic stuff, and he did it really well here. The revision of the season's various stories, while a little tip of the hat to the fans, was used cleverly - as a foundation for the story, rather than some self-congratulatory in-joke. And the story really arced up, especially with the Titanic wiping out London, the refugee camps, America being devastated by the Adipose (uuurggh.. although I still cringe inwardly when I think of that episode) - it became quite seriously dark stuff. Nice one.
As for a Catherine solo effort, well, she acquitted herself fine, only I can't really say Donna Noble has been too memorable a character at all. It's not that I dislike her; I just can't find anything to like about her. She's so bloody beige - and the only times she's burst out of this persona is when Catherine Tate thinks she's back on The Catherine Tate Show and does that chin-jutting, pucker-lipped, eye-rolling, hair shaking, hands-on-hips caricature thing that she does for just about every character on TCTS. Which is fine on a sketch comedy show, but really naff on Dr Who.
And yeah, didn't get why Rose had to be so cryptic either. How about just coming out and saying "You've got a rather large scarab on yer shoulders, innit?"
(... oh, and being a child of the 70s, I loved the fact that the scarab looked a bit plasticky. Reminded me of the oh-so-plasticky Wirrn.)
(.... and is it just me, or did Billie Piper mumble the majority of her lines into her collar??)

[Theta Sigma]

First of all I immediately recognised the Fortune Teller as Chipo Chung who had played Chanto in Utopia.

After brief appearances in Partners In Crime, The Poison Sky & Midnight, Billie Piper finally makes a substantial appearance as Rose in this season not to mention seeing her name back in the opening titles albeit this time with the "And" credit.

Turn Left is this season's Doctor-lite episode however it is quite different from Love & Monsters & Blink. Turn Left serves as a contrast to the previous episode Midnight. Whereas Donna appeared briefly in Midnight, Turn Left is the complete opposite with the Doctor appearing for a few minutes in total. We see what happened if Donna did not meet the Doctor with her turning right instead of left and the result is just devastating.

This episode has been uncomfortable to look at but at the same time it has been brilliantly done and Donna certainly interacts well with Rose. Also a very good lead up to the end of the season.

If nothing else Turn Left should serve as metaphor for all viewers of whether one's life could have been for the better if one got to Turn Left at a critical point in time. On a personal irony if I got to Turn Left in my life I probably would not be a Doctor Who fan. Well that's an irony of life.

[Commander]

Thought this episode was pretty good, but Billie Piper is so bloody wooden - you're right Jim she does mumble most of her lines, and she was doing that in season two as well - I really don't see what the hype about her is all about, and I know im going to regret the decision to bring her back in seven days at the earliest, and a fortnight at the latest.

Interesting to note that RTD didn't want to do a multi-Doctor "actors parade", as he put it, yet we're getting just that with the companions...

...still the next two episodes look good, as usual for anything with Dalek saucers.

It just goes to show what good writing can do with a character - Donna has gone from being the worst thing that happened in this series to surely the best companion since 2005. Maybe it has something to do with her being the first one NOT to have the hots for our Mr. Doctor.

If nothing else, I pray that the season finale does one thing - kill off Rose - pretty please.

[Ickabod]

I thought it was great....I love Grand-Dad....was kinda sad when S-JS was reported to have died but overall....great....and yep I reconized Chipo Chung straight away.....

Rose/Billy was wooden and did mumble......and looks so different without her make-up.....at least the roots weren't a different colour this time and there's something wrong with her mouth and the way she kinda lisps or is that just me.....it's like her teeth are too big *shrug*

and the preview for next week was awesome