Um, China is in the list, if you go back and listen. Russia isn't, it's true, which I managed to miss at the time. Even more odd. Have I forgotten some plot point in New Who that would explain why the world's second largest nuclear arsenal isn't being used?

Israel's nuclear weapons are apparently "undeclared", so when they were rung up by UNIT about the Sontarans they probably just said "Nuclear weapons? We should be so lucky."

The North Koreans, on the other hand, seem to have been surprisingly cooperative.

QUOTE:
Have I forgotten some plot point in New Who that would explain why the world's second largest nuclear arsenal isn't being used?

Everyone in Russia is a wolf of Abo-Fenran?

To my enormous surprise I thought that was excellent. Every single one of the regulars gave what was probably their best performance yet. The script made me laugh and cry and the baddy sounded just enough like Ian Paisley for it to have been deliberate.

Oh, yes, that's a lot more like it. It started off looking like an updated 'Face of Evil', but ended up being a lot, lot more. Great little digs at the Troubles, Creationsim and Religion in general.

Echoes of the TV Movie at the end, where Jenny dies and comes back to life the same way as the Doctor does. I take it this means another spinoff series?

Yeah, I couldn't help but ponder what's going to follow Jenny's "regeneration", especially as she flies off a super-cool sports spaceship. A spin-off, probably for kids' TV(*), looks a nailed-on certainty to me. I did think for one surreal moment that Jenny would regenerate and become Rose, but that would have been too much, I guess ...

(*because the main Doctor Who isn't Kids' TV. Oh no.)

Was I the only one who recognised the actor playing the baddy? It was distinguished thesp Nigel Terry. I don't think he's done anything on the screen since the role I know him for - playing the most authentically West Country King Arthur of all time in Excalibur .

I enjoyed that as well. I'm beginning to think that the better stories are the ones that stay away from contemporary earth.

Now there's an idea. Quick, call the production office.

An exceptionally good episode. Intrigue, humour, plot twists and a genuine sense of escalating tension. It was pleasantly exhilarating to be excited by, rather than ashamed of, a story for the first time in awhile.

I think I may be the lone dissenting voice, but that was distinctly ordinary. Better than the last couple, but not one of the highs of recent series'.

They barely scratched the surface of the parent/child relationship (on either side), which is not surprising if you're also trying to fit in a normal episode's worth of action, but it just left all of the characters feeling like sketches. The Doctor and his grieving for lost children, Martha and her bottle-faced dolphin friend, the two-dimensional Jenny character and what felt like a rushed plot that could've been more fleshed-out as well. I mean, I still enjoyed it, but it was too busy and pulling in too many directions.

The were alot of avenues left unexplored, which is understandable given that Jenny was only one thread in a story already struggling to tell itself in 42 minutes.

For one thing, the Doctor seemed to accept quite glibly that a pseudo-Time Lord had been created from his own DNA. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if he'd seen the clone as a freak of science that shouldn't have been allowed to survive, and spent the episode trying to destroy it.

Clearly, if this had have been an old-fashioned four-parter, episode one would have ended on Jenny's emergence from the cloning machine (a cloning machine which presumably still contains the Doctor's DNA sample and could churn out more Time Lord clones if necessary).

I'm kind of with Crusoe. I kept feeling it should have enjoyed it more than I did, but it kept being held back by silly little things: the crappy guns with enormous muzzle flash but next to no damage; the idea that there would be nobody who survived for seven days; despite the shortage of deaths during combat scenes; the fact that Jenny looked and sounded exactly like one of my former colleagues; the whole quicksand scene. Then there was the obligatory OFFS plot hole - the idea that you could break open a container with enough methane, ammonia and other chemicals to terraform a planet in an enclosed space and not asphyxiate.

Well, you know, sometimes if you pick at the threads of a story it will unravel pretty quickly (and Larry Miles, in lieu of having anything more constructive to say this week, does just that), but the whole seems more than the sum of the parts. I couldn't help but be swept along by it.

If anyone has good reason to dislike this story, surely it must be Liz Sladen.

I'm totally with Crusoe. It was deeply ordinary and riddled with holes.

Tonight's so far has been so self-indulgent it's wallowing in it's own shit.

I'm sorry, but if we wanted a "Doctor Who meets Agatha Christie" comedy, do it as a Comic Relief Special, for fuck's sake.

My daughters have just asked to go to bed. Unprecedented.

Daleks, the Master ... come on.

Yeah, it was terrible. Excruciatingly bad. Didn't convince for a second. And I hate all the "we're so clever" crappy jokes they keep putting in in the historical episodes. Murder at the Vicar's Rage - bloody hell. It pulls you straight out of the story each time they put one of those in...

Still think the Ood one was the best of a bad series so far.

P.S. Agree with Crusoe, Horse and GY about last week's episode too.