Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion

Well, one has to wonder just what the Doctor Who Programme Guides of the future will have to say about this one…

The newly-regenerated Doctor collapses in front of Rose, Jackie and Mickey, who are all uninterested in the outcome of the Dalek invasion. Rose has forgotten that the Doctor has just claimed to have "given his life" for her. They all decide the best thing to do is to haul his unconscious body away from the TARDIS and up several flights of stairs, before undressing him and forcing him into a pair of pyjamas.

Rose cries that “her” Doctor has left her, which of course serves her right.


Meanwhile, the alien Sycorax know the Doctor is on Earth, so they send three spies dressed as Santa Claus to play in a brass band, and shoot at Rose and Mickey with their trombones. When this fails, they decide to attack them at their flat, by hiding a large Christmas Tree in their living-room and waiting a few hours until they have noticed it, whereupon it starts furiously spinning towards them, threateningly playing Christmas carols, and slowly heading towards the Doctor's room.

As everyone with A+ blood has climbed to the top of a nearby tall building, Prime Minister Harriet Jones goes on television and tells everybody in the civilised world about the Doctor.

Rose forgets that she has forgotten getting taken over by the TARDIS' vortex, and now appears to have total recall of the event, adding that she cannot do it again. No-one realises that Mickey or Jackie could instead, as indeed could anyone else on Earth.

The Sycorax then beam up the TARDIS and its crew within, because they are surprised when they detect the use of alien technology on Earth.

Rose then suddenly refers to almost every single episode last series.

The Sycorax, unable to speak English, understand her.

Finally the Doctor comes around and, unaware of events leading up to this point, rather rashly challenges the Sycorax leader to a fight, which he…err…wins. He just does. His new arm is good at fighting. That's it.

The assembled thousands of Sycorax dumbly do as he says and leave Earth.

Then Harriet Jones hilariously reveals that she could in fact have destroyed the Sycorax all along, and proves it by doing so.

Harriet is then deposed as Prime Minister through a vote of no-confidence, because after apparently saving the entire population of the world, she looks a bit tired, and the press have never said anything negative about her before.

And UNIT now has a department that does…err…the same thing that UNIT has always done. Needlessly blowing up the aliens at the end. Yes, yes that's what UNIT do. (a touch of overfunding there maybe)

The end.

N.B. What I really must emphasise here is that I really liked the new Doctor. Here he was playing the whole thing like a good sitcom. He treated the situation as serious, and the dialogue as comedy, and I realised towards the end that I was actually smiling. Heck, I don't want to analyse it any more. This Doctor was great, and like the old days, he was verbose.

Let's hope he gets some worthy scripts next season.