I liked it because it was good and the monsters were good and I liked Sarah Lancashire and I liked Catherine Tate and I have seen some old Doctor Whos too and they were good.

The Guardian, there.

QUOTE:
A cool efficient capitalist killer, Lancashire delivered a far better performance that John Simm as the Master last year.

About the only bit I agreed with, but the phrase "damning with faint praise" springs to mind.

QUOTE:
As is Nyssa

Still no mention of the fact that Richard Dawkins will be making a cameo appearance as himself later this series?

I so hope they include Lalla in the background.

It'll be like all the other cameos. It'll be in the last two episodes, and he'll be on the news talking about whatever invasion it is this time, and then again after the Doctor presses the reset button that saves the world.

I'm not so sure, this time. I reckon he might be more integral to the plot.

Well, I thought that was very very good. Classic stylw Doctor Who, done very well. There was probably scope fo rthat to have been fleshed out and turned into a two parter, but for what it was it was a definite success. And on the strength of that performance and characterisation I may have to eat my words about Catherine/Donna.

I thought the jokes were funny, too.

Rolled together I think these two episodes have been excellent. Already, so far, we've had two denouements that (oh, okay, SPOILER ALERT) show the Doctor not to be completely homicidal ("Aren't you going to blow it up?" "Why? They haven't done anything wrong, they're only children." "Hah, not like last time, then") and tonight ("They all have to die, it's history. I can't change that. There's nothing I can do!" "You HAVE to save at least some of them. You CAN! You HAVE TO!").

The 'ghost' of Rose in episode one worries me, though. Poignant as it is, it runs the risk of becoming too complicated a sub-plot for me to be able to explain to my 5 and 6 year old daughters. They just like Doctor meets baddy-baddy kills people-Doctor saves the day at the last moment. In a neatly wrapped 50-minute episode. Like, I have to say (and I think this is where Russell T Davies is getting much of his inspiration from) the original series of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Hmm, it didn't do a lot for me, though it was a hell of a lot better than last week. But what was that stuff about Romans not knowing about volcanoes prior to the big Vesuvius eruption? Surely Etna had already been fairly active?

I guess it's pretty fair to say they couldn't have known that much about volcanoes, or they wouldn't have built Pompeii right underneath Vesuvius.

Or indeed rebuilt the place as Neapolita afterwards, thinking "well that won't happen again ..."

We know lots about volcanoes now, and we still build towns near them. Fertile soil and all that. Anyway, it was much, much better than the first one, although there were the inevitable cheesy moments. Still far from convinced about Tate, though.

And, Rogin, Vesuvius itself had been dormant for a long long time before that 1st century eruption. But they certainly knew about the concept of a volcano already. It took me just two minutes to check, and Virgil wrote about an Etna eruption (and he lived 1st century BC). Tsk, BBC researchers...

It kind of disproportionately annoyed me too, because they used that just for an unconvincing little moment about the inventing of the word volcano.

Why was that unconvincing? Vulcan is the source of the word volcano, surely. Just from other Romans, rather than ones in Pompeii.

I once heard an estimate of 7 days to evacuate Napoli, if Versuvius goes up again. Current vulcanology might give a few hours warning, max. Knowledge of volcanoes doesn't prevent people living near them.

A really good one, I thought. A very cleverly constructed story, developing quickly without any magic RTD leaps and intertwining nicely with real history, in terms of both the eruption and the phenomenon of cities in thrall to local soothsayers. Catherine Tate was fine, although I don't think she should play Donna as a Cockney, because when she gets animated she turns into Lauren. My only cringes were at the stupid coda, and the miscasting of Phil Davis, who just wasn't crazy enough at the start or angry enough at the end.

Good running gag with Latin phrases, too.

"Unconvincing" because I could see through the cracks of the programme to the writers trying to be "clever" at that point. ("Did you know the word volcano comes from the Roman god Vulcan?" "Ooh, let's put that in, let's put that in." "But Etna?" "Oh who cares, it'll sound good.")

But, forgetting that, I prefer the episodes that have a bit of pause for thought. That is often best found in two-parters admittedly. These all-action ones feel very rushed, with no real time for character development.

And a lot of it is just David Tennant running around doing his annoying gurning and tics. (Ok, I like him less and less as the Doctor as it goes on...) It is a worrying thing for my liking of Doctor Who when the best episodes of the last series (by some distance) were one where Tennant hardly appeared except on a DVD recording, and a two-parter where he played a schoolteacher for most of the duration (showing he can actually underplay a little if he tries...)

Finally, caught this one on BBC3 (we were on Filey prom during the first showing). All a bit breathless, a few rough edges and moments to wince at, and some largely superfluous monsters, but otherwise, exactly the kind of inventive, emotional, thought-provoking drama that shoud be shown on Saturday evenings and at which classic Who stories used to excel. And as a bonus, I hardly noticed Murray Gold's incidental music, which was sweet relief.