Doctor Who is back for it’s third season since its rebirth. I’m practically relaxed now. Gone is that nagging anxiety that everything is about to fall apart. A new episode arrives and I can comfortably wait for sheer hours before watching it. But does this familiarity breed contempt? Am I getting sick of Doctor Who?

Not really. Because every time Who comes back, you can see that technically, they’ve gotten better at actually making it. If you compared ‘Rose’ to ‘New Earth’, ridiculous plot devices aside, there was a notable improvement in the pacing and the humour. Comparing ‘New Earth’ to ‘Smith and Jones’ is just as obvious an improvement. Russell T. Davies has clearly decided that any new season has to begin with a light, entertaining, action-packed romp of an episode — and ‘Smith and Jones’ might just be the best example of the breed yet.

The Doctor’s all on his lonesome, but he’s still going about and investigating. Like in ‘Rose’ he’s in the middle of things when he runs into a more-helpful-than-most human. Her name’s Martha Jones, and she’ll be our companion for this season. Rose had to deal with a big CGI blob and plastic dummies; Martha has to take on a trip to the moon, suffocation, snogs from Time Lords, plasmavores, slabs, and of course, giant rhino-monsters!

It’s all about the monsters, really. The show has gone through several original creatures by now — as well as bringing back the old stalwarts — but none of them have really been home runs. The Judoon, however, are fantastic creations. For a start, they’re not evil, which is a huge bonus for any monster. Instead, the Judoon are stupidly logical and bureaucratic policemen, searching the galaxy for intergalactic criminals and transporting entire hospitals across space to allow themselves jurisdiction. And squeaky black marker pens. If we never see these guys again, it’ll be a tragedy.¹

The peculiar motivations of the Judoon allow the plot to become somewhat more complicated than the usual runaround. The Doctor gets to be reasonably cunning when undoing the plasmavore’s evil plan, which is always nicer than him pulling an orange crystal out of his pocket and blasting everyone to hell. There’s a cute moment between the Doctor and Martha book-ending the episode, which makes it feel more complete than some. It’s consistently funny, but unlike ‘New Earth’, it doesn’t lose the drama as a result.

There’s the occasional irritating touch. The plot towards the end falls victim to a pointless exaggeration of the threat; I’m not sure why it’s necessary to threaten the lives of 3 billion people when there’s 1000 perfectly sympathetic people hanging around locally to be saved. All it does is stretch the credibility of the MRI-as-doomsday-device plot element just a little further than was really needed. Martha Jones’ parents are borderline cartoon characters at this stage, too — but after Mickey and Jackie, I’m not about to write them off.

Oh, Martha, Martha, Martha! I almost forgot. New companion! Very exciting. Depending on who you ask, Martha’s either identical to Rose or completely different to her. Ultimately her plot function’s the same, but she does seem to have a more challenging, sarcastic streak which seems like it might keep the often hyperactive Tenth Doctor in check. Freema Agyeman has the once-thankless task of grounding the show with enough reality to keep the ‘Mums’ interested² — and she looks like she’ll be doing a good job. Though I must say, I preferred her put-downs for the Doctor to her “Oh my god, I’m on the Moon” moments.

Season Three has got me quite optimistic. This ‘Vote Saxon’ business looks like being the best one-word season arc the show’s done yet. Martha seems like a welcome breath of fresh air, and one that hopefully won’t cry all the time. Tennant’s Doctor seems to be retaining his good, non-shouty form. And Shakespeare’s about to turn up. Everything’s coming up roses.³

1. Also, they’ve got cunningly characteristic rhino-head shapes, so that even though only one of them takes his helmet off, one rarely thinks “that’s just a man in a suit.” And, they can run. I like a monster that can run. ↩
2. By ‘Mums’, I really mean ‘people who think fantasy and science fiction are far too silly and that people on TV aren’t real people unless they come from the same time as you and think in roughly the way you do’. See how ‘Mums’ is shorter? I mean no disrespect to mothers in general. ↩
3. Or not, as the case may be. ↩

This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Sunday, April 8th, 2007. It concerns such pressing issues as Doctor Who, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.