Just watched it and I'm with King Mob. I thought it was excellent. Truly excellent.

I can't agree that it was the best story ever although it was certainly an improvement on RTD's more recent efforts. I still think the best RTD story was 'The Christmas Invasion'. I may be alone in this.

I love the fact that it was left up in teh air. It's really bold to have it end up with the Doctor having no idea what had actually happened. I hope they don't spoil it by tying it up over the next three weeks.

RTD is at his best when he's writing about suburban people, like in Love & Monsters. The scenes where the scared people were working themselves up into such a state where they were ready to kill the Doctor was great.

I want to watch it again, and soon, but with Euro 2008 proving so utterly demented and absorbing I'm not sure when I'll have time.

A very, very good episode. It was also well directed - tight as a drum, and with good scripting. What would have been a mildly acceptable 45 minutes was, instead, a fine, compelling little tale.

Does anyone watch the 'Confidential' stuff on Three afterwards? Promotional puff pieces they may be, but they're interesting to watch.

Yeah, that was superb. My expectations of RTD had got really low, so I was watching rather resignedly, if anything; and then he comes up with that. Bonus.

I think PG may be right about RTD: that he's excellent at the small scale and the tight focus, but has a fatal fascination for the Grand Themes, which he handles rather badly.

I am very far behind in the series and just saw 'The Doctor's Daughter' Along the lines of;

Ginger Yellow wrote:

QUOTE:
the idea that there would be nobody who survived for seven days;

Why, if both armies are populated with clones designed to be peak fitness fighting machines, is one of them (The General) 50+ years old?

Duh. Don't you know anything, you ninny? As a general, he was obviously cloned for his tactical and leadership abilities, and his physical prowess was a secondary concern. That was like so obvious.

I did consider that but given all of the young, fit clones were inbred with the required fighting talents, why didn't they put his "tactical and leadership abilities" in to a younger model?

Well, I have to say, if the all-time ultimate evil that's going to affect every single dimension in the mutiverse is "The Darkness", well I'm not a great fan of Suffolk based retro-prog rock either, but I think that's a little bit harsh.

Just catching up . . . I agree Midnight was one of RTD's best, but it still felt like a good idea mishandled, partly because it could have done with being longer and partly because of Rusty's innate heavy-handedness. This:

QUOTE:
In some ways the ending was a little lacklustre and brief, but the episode wasn't really about that - it was more the morality tale about how when there's fear people turn to an easier target.

. . . was surely rammed home so unsubtly that even the seven-year-olds in the audience were slightly too aware of it. It's common for horror/disaster flicks to be spoilt by Flapping Woman Who Is Too Hysterical Even For This Situation, and Lindsey Coulson got that thankless role here. "Make her stop! Make her stop! Make her stop! Make her stop! ... Get him out! Get him out! Get him out!" She was wildly OTT to the point where I ended up thinking, oh shut up, it's only someone copying what you're saying. When Coulson accused the Doctor of being "an immigrant!" I laughed out loud, half-expecting RTD himself to briefly appear, tap his temple and then point at the camera saying, "A-haaa, do you see?"

I did like the parts where the Doctor was faced with having to justify his authority, which he usually acquires easily, leading him to the tempting but unwise "Because I'm clever!" But - perhaps because the running time wasn't quite long enough to do the story justice - the other characters' journey from tourists to murderers was absurdly fast, which banjaxed the whole story for me.

Turn Left, meanwhile, was just gibberish.

Suppose it depends who you were watching it with Horse, Young BL was screaming at the tele for Donna to turn left and was trying to get his head round the notion of what the story was trying to say - i.e for every choice you make there is always a "What if" angle - he tried it out at bed time with "What if I don't go to sleep" !

Are we going to have some god awful twist by the way that willsee Donna become the new Doctor or something??

Maybe I'm just too easily pleased, I enjoyed that one too.

I thought that was very slight. It rolled along innocuously enough but was transparently a case of just keeping the seat warm until things pick up again for RTD's latest effort at turning the Doctor into Jesus as a season finale.

It's a relief to know that this should be the last time we've been left twiddling our thumbs because RTD's been spreading himself too thinly.

Oh, and the main problem with constructing an entire episode around Catherine Tate is that you're constructing an entire episode around Catherine Tate. Not even (or perhaps especially not) the presence of Billie Piper could paper over that particular crack. And if anything, la Piper's mouth has started to look even wierder in the last couple of years.

Her mouth is now so weird, it's affecting her voice. What's going on?

Anyway, you can tell we're drawing to the end of the series - the usual portentous atmosphere and overblown silliness, as well as a few genuinely good ideas, executed appallingly. Some of the dialogue in "Turn Left" was so poor it wouldn't have made it into an episode of "Doctors", while some of that acting would have been rejected by "The Bill"; meanwhile, RTD made his own show look bloody ridiculous with all those campy suggestions of what would have happened without the presence of The Doctor, undermining the credibility of what supposedly did happen. Reminded me of a cynical wag saying "so hang on, you're telling me that if he hadn't happened to run into Catherine Tate, then..." and reeling off a deliberately ridiculous sequence of events complete with silly-ass mock news reports, until Who fans have to shrug and say "it's only a TV show, right?" Not sure what this was supposed to achieve.

The last thirty seconds was fantastic, though.

You fussy bastards.

Agree about Piper's mouth, she looked a bit weird. Looked much hotter in the