Impressive! I thought they might have dropped due to the storylines possibly getting more convuluted due to three series worth of back story that can be referred to, thus putting casual viewers off. But maybe I was given the wrong impression by watching last night's episode. Like I said before, watching the end-of-season finale is not the best way to start off, is it?

Oh, I don't know, it means that every other epsiode you watch will be an improvement.

QUOTE:
They've held up brilliantly and the series has been in the national top ten most watched programmes 4 or 5 times. It only once got beaten in its own timeslot and that was by Britain's Got Talent

The Final thereof.

It gets better:

"Unofficial figures show that the final episode of Series Four, Journey's End, was watched by 9.4 million viewers, giving it a 45.9% share of the total television audience.

Not only was the programme the highest rated on Saturday, beating the second placed Casualty by nearly 4 million viewers, it is currently the highest rated programme of the week. If no Sunday programme manages to beat it then this will be the first time in the series' long history that it has ever been the top rated programme of the week"

Season two's figures dropped alarmingly as it ran into a very hot summer, prompting some newspapers to speculate that the show was already a spent force.

Ah, we like to knock 'em down, don't we.

Again, I disliked the finale less than many of y'all. "Good in parts", I thought it was. Tennant plays the Emotionally Wounded Doctor very well; far better than he plays the manic end of the character's bipolarity. Donna's story really was desperately sad, and in an interesting way. And Other Doctor whispered "I love you" to Rose, which pushed all those buttons in me that make me a fan of things like Dolly Parton and Puccini.

On the other hand, it was very, very flawed, even at the "emotional" level that RTD fondly imagines he's made his own. You just can't have Real Doctor saying to Other Doctor "What have you done?" because Other Doctor's just committed Dalex genocide, tapping into an ethical theme that's been there, and part of who the Doctor is, since Genesis of the Daleks, only for him to be perfectly cheerful in the next scene. That's leaving aside the more basic, but more superficial, "Why did you have to do that?" moments like the way, when your planet's being towed through spacetime by the Tardis, your crockery might fall off the mantlepiece but that's just about it.

Candidate for bad science spot of the week: the way you can see the whole surface of the Earth when it's in deep space, only for the nighttime side of it suddenly to go dark when it's back in orbit around the Sun. Never RTD's strong suit, the science--and fair enough, except that this was once something the show used to have a fair crack at.

On the genocide thing, I sympathised with Rose and reformed-Doctor in the first couple of seasons of New Who, but frankly, I'm starting to struggle to see what's wrong with it in this instance. The Daleks (or RTD, anyway) have made perfectly clear that a) they intend to wipe out every other living thing, and b) they have the means to do so, no matter how defeated and contained they seem. Furthermore, with the exception of the human-corrupted ones, the only emotion they experience is hatred. Given those facts, what exactly is the moral argument against wiping them out? By not doing so, you're basically inviting the genocide of the entire universe when the Doctor's not looking.

Reluctantly accepting the moral argument for something and being the one to carry it out isn't quite the same thing, but yeah, you'd expect a time lord with such superintelligence to be a little bit above the squeamishness that us lesser mortals might feel for such a necessary act.

Lawrence Miles latest blog is up, same link as before - http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/ - haven't read it myself yet, but he does point out a glaring continuity error with season 1 episode 5 in his graphic in the top right corner.

Wait till I submit my script "Doctor Who and the Categorical Imperative".

Ha, that's really funny in all sorts of ways, but words can't express how much I can't be bothered to list them.

QUOTE:
Back to crappy, wanky audition-based shit shows with Andrew Lloyd-Webber's smug, punchable features smirking at me, I suppose.

How sadly true. Because no matter how bad Dr Who is (this was confusing and a bit deus ex machina even for RTD), it's still a billion times better than Britain's Got Desperate Twats Wanting Fame In Musicals Academy.

So, looks like we may have our two new Torchwood recruits as well.

Miles is being a bit less bitter and a bit more constructive than sometimes.

Yes - Miles is a funny old sod, and often talks a lot of nonsense (not least because he's powered by total bitterness) but there's not that much there to disagree with. Some of those points are very, very good ones.

I didn't read the 25 suggestions, but the intro is a mix of wild speculation, and him confusing his own opinion with that of the public's. "Nobody in the "real" world would consider James Nesbitt to be a serious actor . . ." Well, yes they would, millions of people would.

His stuff about Doctor Who's ratings seems to be predicated on its ratings having drastically fallen, which they haven't.

Actually I read the first suggestion. It was as above.

Millions of people would consider Britain's Got Talent to be great television, and read the Sun, although I can understand why you'd think the intro is shite.

I'd actually agree with about 21 of the suggestions. And most of them have either been said on OTF before, or haven't despite the fact that they're really obvious.

QUOTE:
Millions of people would consider Britain's Got Talent to be great television, and read the Sun

Well, yeah. I'm not sure what you're driving at. He's not saying people shouldn't think James Nesbitt is a good actor (or, later, that Catherine Tate was a good companion). He's saying that they don't.

I thought the Miles article made a lot of good points too, I must say.