Doctor Who: It's Showtime / The Great Detective / Vastra Investigates / The Snowmen

It's Showtime

There's something uncomfortable about Matt Smith's appearance as the Doctor in trailers for BBC1's Christmas Day strand It's Showtime.

If he's mid-way through production on the upcoming seasonal special, then he must be actor Matt Smith. However Rob Brydon addresses him as "Doctor". This ambiguity is exacerbated by his wearing his new costume from the episode, as he gets chased across the studio in it by Miranda Hart with mistletoe (and doing her falling over thing). Well, they're both at a (very cramped and unusually shared) TV studio anyway, where there may in fact be only other shows getting made, such as Mrs Brown's, who at one point gets a trip in the TARDIS. A few of the Call The Midwife cast are about too.

Well, let's ignore all this and just hope it goes away then.

The Great Detective

This is a Children In Need prequel, which despite appearing more canonical, is introduced by actors Matt Smith and Jenna Louise-Coleman as themselves on camera. Really, they're not even trying to suspend disbelief now.

The minisode features Vastra, Jenny and Strax in Victorian London attempting to enlist the retired Doctor's help with solving a case, and apparently failing. The three's, well four's, presence inevitably make this scene reminiscent of A Good Man Goes To War, which played out as such a tangle that reminders of it are probably not a good thing. All the same, I'd like to offer the trio (or quartet) a fresh start, but another brief darkly-lit cameo is not going to be much different. The script is light rather than funny, but even this potential is malletted into submission by the music. Sorry I said EVEN THIS POTENTIAL IS MALLETTED INTO SUBMISSION BY THE MUSIC. NO, THE MUSIC. MEW-ZIC. MUSIC. YES. NO MY MOOSE HASN'T BEEN SICK. I SAIDoh forget it. There's got to be a way of filtering that out, the fiftieth anniversary can't happen in the distance like this.

Well, that's that out of the way now. Let's hope there aren't any more Who-lite sketches like that one to go.

Vastra Investigates

Felt like I was watching K9, only it was even worse.

Still, at least they've stopped getting the actors to introduce these things.

Mind you, when it gets to the point when Dr Smith's trailing the main hour-long episode in the continuity junction immediately before it, I guess I shouldn't complain. The tenth Doctor kind of set a precedent for that with the premiere of The End Of Time. Long year? Some might say this one keeps getting longer…

The Snowmen

Doctor: "Meanwhile your previous governess is now a living ice sculpture impersonating Mister Punch."

Just as a Christmas stocking may contain lots of wonderful things plus a few that make your heart sink (eg. fruit), so it is with last year's Doctor Who Christmas special.

Among the goodies that are really worth unwrapping here would have to be the spectacular new opening credits. (I suppose that would more accurately be the equivalent of the wrapping-paper)

I mean I've long-since made my peace with the last lot of credits of the TARDIS getting hit by lightning slowly, but this set was just stunning, taking in so many different concepts. Space travel, time-travel, DNA, the classic 'time-tunnel' credits, and of course the ingenious use of the TARDIS doors to open up onto the new adventure at the end.

Best of all though would have to be the simple reinstatement of the current Doctor's face. I have never been able to fathom why they ever dropped that. Not so the name of the lead actor(s) though, that still breaks the illusion before we've even begun. After just one viewing I found I was muttering to myself "Greatest opening credits ever." :) !

(shame I can't same the same for most of these episodes' actual titles - The Great Detective, Vastra Investigates and The Snowmen - which are by contrast uninspired and dull)

One of the things that has always drawn me to the series has been its awareness of its own bigger picture, which again this story embraces by foreshadowing The Abominable Snowmen and The Web Of Fear.

Another would be its diversity, and as such it's great to witness the series going through yet another rebirth in this special. The new-look TARDIS interior was intriguing, although unlike in The Eleventh Hour we didn't really get to see it. I didn't mind the preceding set (anything is better than the cave before that), but I did like its split levels. I trust they will leave this room in The Doctor Who Experience unchanged, or alternatively work in the actual set there if it is indeed no longer needed for filming. (the events of The Pandorica Opens suggest there's more to come)

Then there's the TARDIS ex-terior. I'm sure it's only for one episode, but realising the Doctor as a man who lives in the clouds and can only be got to via an invisible spiral staircase leads to the sort of wonder that the series is so good at at the moment. That recurring guest-character Amy makes it all the way up to the TARDIS' doors but then chickens out of actually going in, was likewise a great moment of quitting before going too far.

The Doctor too has a great overall look here. Though there are terrific moments of comedy, the eleventh Doctor is really starting to look a bit old and world-weary, although his glasses unusually have the effect of making him appear younger. It reflects very well his decision to give up on saving the universe and to at last make good on his resolve in The Twin Dilemma to become a hermit.

Except that he's not really a hermit here, is he? I mean out of all of time and space, just why would he pick late nineteenth-century England to hole himself up in? Maybe it's because he seems to keep getting drawn back to this era, most recently in The Gunpowder Plot, The Eternity Clock and the IDW comicbook Prisoners Of Time. But it's most likely that he's simply going to visit his in-laws the Ponds the long way round.

Not that he ultimately needs to. For this place and time features a clone of the Amy clone from Asylum Of The Daleks. This Amy is accordingly the series' usual carbon-copy maneater, and instead of being a kissogram is hinted at being one stage further along...

Alice: "Captain Latimer wants to see you."
Amy: "Of course. Every day?"
Alice: "Twice on Saturdays."
Amy: "That's better."

I wouldn't normally expect a cross-species lesbian marriage in a family show at teatime on Christmas Day either, particularly after Vastra and Jenny's only other (brief) appearance in A Good Man Goes To War. When I watched that in 2011, I just saw an employer and employee. Then afterwards I was told by someone who hadn't watched it that they had been supposed to be lesbians. I watched the whole of the episode again with this in mind… nope, still nothing. I mean hints have to be trumped by facts, and I think anyone - male or female - will tell you that a relationship in which one party has to be perpetually subservient to the other is just never going to work out happily in the long run. It's Jack and Ianto all over again. Or are Vastra and Jenny just joking about their friendship throughout this? That would have to be more credible…

(Strax on the other hand is the best companion in decades)

Yes, we've segued into those presents from the stocking that somehow just perplex you. (eg. a handkerchief) You don't send them back to Santa, or complain about them, you just politely put them to one side and forget all about them forever, without any need for a memory worm.

Oh I haven't mentioned the story. Well, despite a lot of good ingredients, I didn't follow it. It had the usual zombies, although they fortunately never got as far as turning everyone on Earth into snowmen. (the ice zombie who the snow makes and then needs back again to copy rather than making another really confused me) It had the Doctor still pretending to be dead, and as usual being quite rashly brazen about his aliveness. It had the Doctor hilariously getting kissed as though this sort of thing doesn't happen to him very often, which it does. Four minutes in the middle of this episode include him kissing Amy, Strax the Sontaran, and Mr Punch. Who is the last companion that the Doctor hasn't kissed?

Jenny: "Madame Vastra will ask you questions. You will confine yourself to single word responses. One word only, do you understand?"
Amy: "Why?"
Vastra: "Truth is singular. Lies are words, words, words."

Wrong, truth is complex, so the fewer words you use, the less precise you can be. Hence Vastra's double-minded verbosity in this scene makes her look like such an airhead. The ambiguity of a single word is also a golden opportunity for comedic misunderstanding, surprisingly not mined here.

Oh, and Amy died again. Twice. Which is only once more than Strax. Was there an explanation in there for why he was alive again, other than because he was? Scratch that, was there an explanation for why he was there at all? He's a clone fer goodness' sake, he doesn't need to be resurrected to return! I'm pulling my own befuddled expression here…

Why the Doctor didn't save Amy from falling in a similar manner to how he saved River from falling in Day Of The Moon is anyone's guess.

Amy's death was good though, specifically that she did stay dead, eventually. I mean like the Jenny in The Doctor's Daughter she was doomed from the moment when the Doctor fatally invited her to become a companion. "Please stay dead…!" I found myself groaning throughout the final twenty minutes, as Strax brought her back, possibly in a similar way to how he himself had been.

I'm really interested to see where they go with the whole Doctor's deal with the universe thing, and how Amy fits into it, even though the last few years have taught me that author Steven Moffat will probably change his mind before he gets there, but all the same. At least some of what he writes ties-in which, sorry to say, is more than can be said for the previous fellow's scripts.

There's also a scene in which the Doctor pretends to be Sherlock Holmes, so there may well have been in-jokes in here that I missed, given how I've never seen that series.

And Richard E Grant finally appears in a real episode of Doctor Who. He's had an odd relationship with the series ever since it went off-air in 1989. He's played the Doctor multiple times in spin-offs, and apparently solely because they couldn't get his Withnail And I co-star Paul McGann. It makes much more sense to see him playing a guest role here.

I don't get how the snowman at the start had an adult's voice, when it could only reflect the child to whom it was speaking.

Lastly, this is an episode with extras, even before its release on DVD. The two minisode 'prequels' mentioned above both put me off the episode, which is the opposite of what they're supposed to do.

Well, thank goodness that's all over.

Except that it wasn't. In his most metaphysical moment yet, earlier in the day the Doctor popped up outside my window, somewhere in the vicinity of the shrubbery. I mean I didn't actually see him, but I reckon he must have been there briefly while I was engrossed in doing the Daily Mail crossword. You see, we watched this Christmas special last Saturday because we were celebrating my birthday. (in the best traditions of time-travel, these things never happen on the right day in our house)

I think the fact that I didn't spot him was why he later (from his perspective) told me about it…

So, is it all canon? Well, it's Christmas, and my birthday, or at least it was, so why not. This week everything's in.

Yes, even my crossword.

The Blues Brothers / Blues Brothers 2000

The Blues Brothers

Elwood: "They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God."

It's a well-loved movie. It's my friend Uncle Travelling Matt's favourite movie. 20 years ago I featured this movie's original soundtrack as the featured album on a radio show. So eventually, on 3rd January last year, I figured it was about time that I actually watched it.

I shouldn't have waited.

It all starts out gently enough, with Jake being released from prison and concocting a plan with his brother Elwood to reform their old band to make some money and save the local orphanage. (I think I have that correct) There are a few diegetic songs along the way, but after the first hour the narrative gives up on fitting them into their world, and starts to just drop into pop-video mode whenever it feels like it.

With the mysterious Carrie Fisher attempting to murder our heroes, things just keep on escalating, until the final ginormous car chase puts to shame anything The Dukes Of Hazzard ever attempted. This is, in my opinion, the best car chase in motion picture history, with chase being given by evil country'n'western singers, about a zillion Chicago cops, and the Nazis, and yet, just as I kept thinking that the film was about to end, even more factions kept on joining the fray.

I wrote most of this review about 15 minutes after it had finished, and in those notes I actually called it "one of my favourite movies of all time."

It being January 3rd 2012, I also referred to it as "the most insane film that I will see this year".

In the end I think it actually tied with The Muppets, so I guess well done common element Frank Oz!

Blues Brothers 2000

I watched the 2000quel this morning - a little over a year later - and discovered that, on the quiet, it is in fact a remake.

Well, I guess the best of us run out of ideas after the first 1,998 follow-ups…

Another release from prison, more Motown videos with big-name guest-stars, more movie-cops and other ne'erdowellers to stay on the run from…

Basically it's all tremendous fun again, start to finish, although with three key differences that combine to bring it in second:

1. A much, much higher element of impossible fantasy.

2. No enormous chase at the end. :(

3. The really obvious one. :((

Actually if I'm honest, it's only point two that made this underperform for me. After the first movie I couldn't imagine any film ever topping that amazing final act. The makers here seem to agree with me, and accordingly haven't even tried.

I dunno, but that sure seems to conflict with the movie's relentlessly optimistic message of 'you can do it'.

Elwood: "Stay away from drugs, gangs, and cyberporn on the internet and you can be President of the United States some day."

(available, probably minus the sign guy, here)

Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock

There are a heap of great things about this Doctor Who game for the (TARDIS) console, in fact the only thing that really lets it down is the story.

So I'll ignore that and plough in with my reasons for why I think it's so brilliant.

1. The audio. The music and sound effects on here are terrific, ably augmenting Matt Smith and Alex Kingston's very in-character performances as the Doctor and River. While the wonderful cut scenes are sadly kept to a minimum, their barrage of voice-over dialogue during the gameplay just never lets up, and mostly feels very in-keeping with the TV show. When, in Stormcage, River eerily gets rung up by the cloister bell, you gotta admit that looks like a Moffatism.

River: "Thermionic conduits - a quick blast, or a fiddle from your sonic, and Bob's your uncle. We can use them to climb up!"
Doctor: "Bob's not my uncle."
River: "So who is your uncle?"
Doctor: "'The Uncle.'"
River: "Is… that… a thing?"
Doctor: "It's a Time Lord thing."

Even the background extras make knowing remarks like "Unauthorised temporal engineering will not be tolerated."

2. Some of the visuals are awesome too. The recurring time-corridor game, despite forgetting to include River, is eclipsed only by the even more awe-inspiring Dalek flagship.

Doctor: "This is like no time-corridor I've ever seen before!"

3. The pacing.

4. The missions. When River has to break into the Silence lair and keep one of them within sight at all times on pain of the level resetting her with no memory of events, then you know someone's thought about how to do this.

Caption: "You've forgotten what you were doing."

There's even a huge missing scene at one point, following which our two leads realise that they must have been captured and separated by the memory-wiping fiends.

Unfortunately that's where I have to segue into the game's shortcomings, eg. why on Earth the Silence would separate our heroes instead of kill them. Maybe the Silent leader is in fact played by Mike Myers in a bald wig, whose son Scott Silent keeps pointing out the obvious holes in his plans to him.

Scott Silent: [SLOW BREATH]"I have a gun, in my room, you give me five seconds, I'll get it, I'll come back down here, BOOM, I'll blow their brains out! They'll NEVER remember THAT!"
Evil Silent: [SLOW BREATH]"You just, don't, get it do ya?"
Scott Silent: [SLOW BREATH]"But I-"
Evil Silent: [SLOW BREATH]"Silence."
Scott Silence: [SLOW BREATH]"I ju-"
Evil Silence: [SLOW BREATH]"Silence."
Scott Silence: [SLOW BREATH]"Y-"
Evil Silence: [SLOW BREATH]"Silence. Look, right here I've got a whole TARDIS of silence that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside…"

But it's not just the Silence though. If I didn't already have a big enough problem with the multiple depositing of artefacts in public places to be recovered several hundred years later, then River's total and utter failure to use her vortex manipulator throughout the entire game would still on its own be a spoiler of a different sort.

I mean if you've got one of those super-handy things, then why instead would you spend so much time and effort trying to get from A to B, hiding behind objects and using time corridors?

River: "Over there - another time-corridor!"
Doctor: "We need to get over the drawbridge to reach it."
River: "Then we need to find a way to lower it first."

And it's not just a plot hole, a great deal of this game, despite its three-dimensional appearance, is playable in only two. Right from the opening level, just how many times do the Doctor and River have to heave themselves up and over a tower of boxes or something instead of… uhm… just walking around them?

Doctor: "Who designed this place - Escher?!"

That said, all credit to the eleventh Doc, and indeed River, for displaying such Herculean abilities throughout this platform game of Super Doctor Kong. I remember once reading an interview with the sixth Doctor - Colin Baker - who explained how on the show they always portrayed how much things hurt. Not so here - this Doctor can now barely notice himself falling several storeys, repeatedly.

I gotta admit, as I sit here typing this afterwards, I'm filled with a renewed determination to get back down the gym. He climbs and hangs from those pipes so easily - I should be able to do that too!

A few other random notes:

- Devastated London is reminiscent of both City Of The Daleks (complete with Power Ranger Daleks), and Cardiff trying to look like London. Even the tube station doesn't have a proper Underground sign outside. Given that it's the 21st century, are we saying that London's below-ground rail network is now being run by TubeCorp?

Doctor: "Good to see they're starting as they mean to go on - with engineering works."

- River spends much of the game trailing around after the Doctor (and occasionally getting reset while he obliviously carries on) in much the same way as her mum in The Adventure Games.

- The Doctor gets doors unlocked by using his sonic Screwdriver. River does it by kissing guards, some of whom sound like Shrek.

- Given River's leather skintight catsuit, and the Doctor's bow-tie, they can look a bit like The Avengers. Well, some of the time:

- River: "This corridor looks abandoned, and too big for the house outside."

- There's a statue of the eleventh Doctor, that has been erected by 'Bess'. Um, shouldn't that be of the tenth?

- Ingenious perception filter minigame.

- It seems like every time zone contains long Irwin Allen-esque red ladders. I guess they never go out of fashion.

- Given that each of the Diet-Cybermen contains a human brain, there's a lot of death in this.

- The Silence say a bunch of things that - here in February 2013 - don't make a heap of sense to me. These include "You will break the Silence!" (huh?) and, to the Doctor, "Your silence will fall. It makes no difference to us where you die."

- Among other things, the Doctor refers to chronon-energy, and Sarah Jane.

- Zippy Dalek. If only he/it were voiced by Roy Skelton. :(

And finally, the script does a nice line in quotes that can be entertainingly recycled as cynical comments about the game itself. These include:

Diet Cyberman: "Halt! Prepare to be upgraded!"
Diet Cyberman: "Upgrade cancelled - delete!"
Diet Cyberman: "Delete! Delete! Deleeete!!!"
Doctor: "Nothing about this is good."
Doctor: "It all makes sense now."

Well, impressed as I am with the execution on this, I have to disagree with that last one. I'm lost. In fact, I found myself siding with what that Dalek was protesting towards the end…

Dalek: "WHAT IS HA-PPEN-ING? WHAT IS HA-PPEN-ING???"

(available here)

Doctor Who - season 32 review

*** Contains spoilers ***

It was the season when Steven Moffat stopped worrying what anyone else thought, and made his era his own.

For those of us outside the UK (eg. in New Zealand), this was really hammered home by the weekly opening monologue that the original BBC viewers had been denied…


Amy (V/O): "When I was a little girl, I had an imaginary friend, and when I grew up, he came back. He's called the Doctor. He comes from somewhere else. He's got a box called the TARDIS that's bigger on the inside and can travel anywhere in time and space. I ran away with him. And we've been running ever since."

There - it's not a show about a Gallifreyan from a junkyard any more. It's this new thing.

I guess it's difficult to review the series without looking at its story-arc. It begins with the Doctor's future death, introduces a terrifying new race, and - impressively - answers more questions than it asks.

I'm still unclear on River's history though. While growing up on Earth unaware that she was being raised by the Silence, and by Amy and Rory who were unaware that they were also raising her, with whom did she live? Although raised to kill the Doctor, she's fallen in love with him. Although raised to kill the Doctor, in the end the spacesuit she did it in could have contained anyone, and indeed he could have just been shot by a Silent without any need of an outfit, or a specially-trained assassin.

Explain later? He'd better.

And shooting such an unshootable target as the Doctor (witness all the soldiers who don't make any effort to in A Good Man Goes To War) with one or two simple gunshots is a bit unimaginative. How about a line of armed spacesuits emerging from the lake to surround him, each containing River at different point in her timeline, and all of them unable to later remember it? More leaning out from a spaceship above him to make sure he doesn't escape in that direction? The same below him under the sand, given the Silence's precognition of exactly where he will be standing at that moment in recorded history? He should at the very least writhe and suffer in agony at such a brutal assasination.

Nah, she just shoots 'im. Pfft.

Yes, it is a shame that episode one only mostly makes sense in the light of episode 13, but 'mostly' is a much better adjective to be using than the 'hardly' of the same dynamic last season. Just what motivated Canton's certainty of the Doctor's death in The Impossible Astronaut? Or River's statement after failing to shoot her younger self "No, no of course not"? Those statements seem to be going somewhere that the series didn't ultimately lead. Much like the prison behind the crack in Amy's wall in The Eleventh Hour, which twelve weeks later was flatly contradicted by The Big Bang.

At the outset, I was quietly hoping that this entire season might continue to unfold this single fascinating storyline about the terrifying Silence, but what we actually got was a six-part story spread-out among several self-contained ones.

Not to say that those shorter stories have been bad - The Doctor's Wife was great. A Christmas Carol and The Girl Who Waited were awesome! Night Terrors was simplistic but highly watchable in its execution. The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People (my least favourite story) and the self-conscious God Complex had bad points which were at least balanced by some good ones. And then bringing up the rear was The Curse Of The Black Spot, which just had very little going for it.

Many of the attempts to tie these independent episodes into the broader storyline have been tenuous at best, typically by just featuring the Doctor looking seriously at a TARDIS monitor in the final shot, and as such I found these one-offs a bit of a waste of time. Night Terrors and The God Complex were both about fear itself, a thematic clash which was an arguable goof on the part of the producers, although not as big a howler as their then rearranging the episodes to air them almost together!

All in all, this has definitely been a significantly better series than the last one though, and easily the best since the show's revival. It's all-time high point would have to be the central Let's Kill Hitler, which despite not delivering on the promise of the title (it barely even features the Führer), was a thing of joy start to finish. Something of a counterpoint to the misery of all the horror on display in other episodes.

It has also been the most prolific TV series that I've ever seen, barring the news. In addition to last season's computer games and his crossover appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures: Death Of The Doctor, the Time Lord has broken through his own horizons by expanding into an insane number of minisodes, guest appearances in other programmes and, via the theatre, even this world. And all this in addition to his regular haunts of books, CD adventures and comic strips. (Now if only he can meet the gang from K9...)

If the series continues to thrive and improve at this rate, then the next season but one (coincidentally the fiftieth anniversary when I suppose we'll get to Trenzelor) ought to be amazing.

Individual reviews:

A Christmas Carol
Space / Time
Bad Night
Good Night
The Doctor Who Experience
The Crash Of The Elysium
16th National Television Awards
Script To Screen 2011 / Death Is The Only Answer
The Impossible Astronaut / Day Of The Moon
The Curse Of The Black Spot
The Doctor's Wife
The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People
A Good Man Goes To War / Let's Kill Hitler
First Night / Last Night
Night Terrors
The Gunpowder Plot
The Girl Who Waited
The God Complex
Children In Need 2011
Up All Night / Closing Time
The Wedding Of River Song
The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe

Doctor Who: The Gunpowder Plot

NEW OBJECTIVE! Assist Fawkes.

I don't know the behind-the-scenes history of the BBC's online Doctor Who Adventure Games, but their production and publication have appeared consistently haphazard.

This is the fifth one, which is also the first release of the second series, and also the last one ever.

Oh, well, okay then. I guess that, like so many other online accompaniments to the TV series, this idea really didn't work out for you BBC, did it?

Nonetheless, it can be argued that this is a good one to go out on, because it's the weakest. Weakest? Well no, that accolade surely belongs to the minimalist third game TARDIS, but this one is the slowest, the longest and even the wordiest. (sheesh it's all starting to sound like a song by that movie-Chesterton Roy Castle)

All that would have been just one sentence in the first series! Well, most of the time:

In fact, I should really be citing this as an advantage. There is so much dialogue, story, and running around enormous locations in this, that it doesn't feel so much like another instalment, as an omnibus edition of an entire series. At one point you have to find and gather three different types of herb to get another character to mix into a potion to present to a third character to win their trust just to gain information from them. Not that anyone instructs you to do this - you just gotta figure that out for yourself. Is that a good or a bad thing? I guess it really depends on what kind of a gamer you are.

I hate to say this, but for me this epic also suffers from being set entirely in the past. I'm afraid I just don't get turned on by historical stories, even when they feature aliens, and especially when they feature author Phil Ford's favourite device of zombies.

At another point the Doctor remarks that the town crier's brain has shut down because he has no point of reference for seeing a lesion, however straight afterwards said crier explains that he has seen two of these before. Which is true?

Ultimately these are all minor aesthetic quibbles though. While I doubt that many players - kids or adults - would grit their teeth through this all the way to the end, the fact remains that its script and realisation are really going for it, even if the actual gameplay isn't.

As with the first series, the Doctor still picks items up by merely crouching in front of them and putting his hands together. The simplicity of earlier games made this sort of shortcoming in the graphics passable, but in the context of this epic I found it jarred. Conversely, it can be argued that Rory's awkwardness of motion here is entirely consistent with his character in the TV series.

At another point the Doctor is instructed to knock on the door of the Dog and Duck four times to be admitted, but in the event the action has him do it six.

Other nitpicks include:

- The Doctor appearing to remark "Oh, my God!" The subtitle was actually left on-screen from Amy's exclaiming it, but here the Doctor's lips are flapping with no dialogue of his on the soundtrack, giving the same impression. He's probably muttering "No, it's a Rutan" or something.

- When Amy is asking passers by for the gossip on the streets, some of them have the same voice and soundbite.

- Several typos (well, I noticed three).

- The audio. Stony and open-air locations sound like a box, and the vocal direction sounds quite theatrical.

- The cut scene in the drawing room is not letterboxed. Well, given how letterboxing goes elsewhere, that's not really such a bad thing is it:

Other zoomgrooms (I don't know the antonym for nitpick so I just made one up) include:

- I liked the way Rory defeated the Sontaran with the floorboard.

- I like the design of the Rutan ship interior.

- I liked the Jacobean Life facts. Seriously, despite my disinterest in the period, these really brought it to life.

I didn't spot much to place it within Doctor Who chronology. Having guarded Amy for the last thousand years of English history (including this one of 1605), even Rory's recognition of the Sontarans is to be expected. Despite the game's release after season 32 had ended, it is obviously intended to belong somewhere in that season. The Ponds seem to be less bickery which would push it later, and there's no appearance by Madame Kovarian either. Night Terrors struck me as very much a Halloween episode, so this Guy Fawkes night one may as well come straight after it.

Finally, the adventure's coup de grace has just got to be this credit at the end:

The Silence? Really? I don't remember seeing them…

Doctor Who: Return To Earth

*** Contains spoilers ***

Amy: "One day I'll enter a spaceship where the room I need to get to isn't on the other side of [a] death trap!"

Is this Wii game a sequel or a prequel to Evacuation Earth for the Nintendo DS?

They're both set on the SS Lucy Gray, both feature the ship's computer Ivy, and even feature some of the same mini-games and character-quotes, albeit rerealised. ("That was easy!") However while this story is set about 300 years later, for the Doctor and Amy it comes earlier. Well, that's time travel for you.

Not that you on any level need to play both games to get each story. For while I found the plot behind Evacuation Earth to be simplistic, here, it has to be said, there is barely any storyline to be followed in the first place.

Instead we have a great big jumble of different tasks and mini-games for our two travellers, which includes both the Diet-Cybermen and the Power Ranger Daleks, plus an entire game of dialogue spoken with the characters' mouths hidden. Yes, literally for the entire game.

Now, given the early-21st century technology, that might sound like a bit of a picky criticism, until you realise that even the Daleks' 'ears' don't flash to tell you which one of them is speaking. Now that's lazy.

And speaking of the characters' perpetual facing away from the player, Amy runs like a girl. Seeing so much of her skipping from behind is reminiscent of watching Anneka Rice presenting Treasure Hunt.

The Doctor and Amy aren't terribly well drawn either, although again they are encouragingly wearing the same clothes as in their other computer games. It's all looking a bit like the John Nathan-Turner years.

Such creative apathy is all a bit of a shame when you consider all the promise that there is on display here.

For example, the design is fantastic, and in places gorgeous. There are little droids (dispensers) that each have their own personality and who disappear into the floor whenever they're no longer needed. (one of them sounds like a CCPC) Several rooms feature a sequence of (quite impractical) floating platforms that you have to guide the Doctor and Amy across without letting them fall off - these look enthralling.

Some of the space visuals - including the all-important shot of Earth at the game's conclusion - are really beautiful, and together with how well some of the audio has been mixed, make moments like the opening of chapter 13 enchanting.

At the outset it didn't look so promising though, with chapter one featuring meteor explosion sound effects that a) were out of sync with the pictures, and b) we shouldn't really have been able to hear anyway.

Then chapter two included characters breaking the fourth wall to impossibly advise me on how to play.

"He's quite friendly, but if you get scared you can use the C button to hide!"

I get that it's a game, but it's also an entry into the Doctor Who universe. Bearing that in mind, other lines like this one make perfect sense:

"An extra life just in case."

Yeah, yeah an alien in the TV series could give Amy that.

I also admit that I was going to criticise the actress voicing Ivy for sounding like she was reading her lines, until I realised that she was portraying an artificial intelligence constructing sentences from pre-recorded syllables! I have to eat humble pie there - too often I wish that science-fiction shows understood that this is how it should often be done. (although not always) I kept expecting her to suddenly come out with "Change here for. Bakerloo line. And. Hounslow, Blenheim Centre."

Also, when I was a kid, I used to write and draw comic strips that featured Daleks and other characters with physical question marks and exclamation marks above their heads. Well, you can imagine my joy tonight at sights like this one:

The same author wrote some excellent dialogue for Evacuation Earth, and although the dialogue throughout this is fine, it mostly misses the sparkle of that game.

The exception would the final showdown between the Doctor and the non-flashing Dalek whom he confronts. Said Dalek gets a monologue of pure Dalek evil that is right up there with any words that Terry Nation ever put into their, uh, casings. Unfortunately it's all delivered to an off-camera Doctor, and dovetails into a conclusion so uber-lazy that it's on a par with the end of The Almost People…

Dalek: "WITH THE NEW TIME-AXIS OUR FORCES WILL SWARM ACROSS THE GALAXY. THE PAST WILL NO LONGER BE SAFE, AND THE FUTURE WILL BE MADE IN THE PRESENT. NO RACE WILL BE SPARED, NO PLANET LEFT UNBURNED. OUR WAR-FACTORY WILL REMAKE EVERY PLANET IN SKARO'S IMAGE! DESOLATION, DESTRUCTION, EVEN THE STARS WILL PERISH IN OUR WAKE! DOCTOR, YOU WILL GIVE US THE TIME-AXIS!"
Doctor: "Take it."
(DALEK PAUSES FOR 6 SECONDS, APPARENTLY IN SURPRISE)
Dalek: "EXTERMINATE!"
(THEY EXTERMINATE HIM. IVY AND AMY DROP THE WHOLE SHIP INTO THE SUN. NEXT SCENE, THE DOCTOR EXPLAINS HOW HE SURVIVED…)
Doctor: (OUT-OF-BREATH) "It worked. The capacitor crystal absorbed the energy."

And that's it. That's yer explanation for how the Doctor survived being exterminated and thrown into the sun. I'd like to think that maybe said crystal only absorbed the Daleks' energy beams and that he somehow escaped before the ship was destroyed, but there's just no scene that I noticed to clearly convey this.

Throw in villains who just never go after our heroes (in chapter 16 the Doctor picks the Daleks off one by one from the front without any of them firing a single shot, and all this after they have been given the order to "AT-TACK") and I'm afraid I found this sort of underwhelming.

Dalek (VERY late): "SONIC DEVICE DETECTED."
Doctor: "Well that was quick, but I'm quicker."

You don't say.

At the end of the day though, Return To Earth does do the job. You run about, you use your dexterity (wii game remember), and you get to blow up the Daleks, and all the while listening to the Doctor and Amy being cheery as usual. One of those sonic screwdriver design of wii remotes would probably work best here.

And that it ties in so well with that other game for the Nintendo DS is just brilliant.

Definitely not one to Return To Amazon!