shawThings.net : a collection of shaw things ...

A very satisfying conclusion to last week's episode with a clever resolution to the empty child and the symptoms as plague, as well as lots of humour and clever spookiness and dialogue. And for once, nobody dies. And the Doctor is delighted that everyone lives; a reminder that death and destruction normally follow him around. All in all, a very good pair of episodes.

A very good episode with lots of humour and eeriness. The Doctor and Rose follow a time machine back to London during WWII. There they meet Captain Jack Harkness, the spooky, empty child of the title, searching for its mummy and a hospital full of patients with symptoms just like that of the empty child.

Lots of good stuff in this episode. The Doctor decides to look for alien technology on foot. Rose wants him to do a scan. The Doctor, who did do this in the past (as the Fifth Doctor), doesn't want to. Rose is then delighted when Jack does.

Jackie would often tell Rose (as a child) stories about her wonderful dad and how much he would have loved to see her grow up. Rose asks the Doctor if she can see her father while he's alive. They travel back to her parents' wedding and then to the day her father was killed. Things go awry when Rose rescues her father from death. Reapers come down to Earth. As the Doctor, Rose (grown up and as a baby), her family and others hide in a church, the two Rose's come into contact and the Reapers enter the church. The Doctor sacrifices himself to save the others.

The Doctor, Rose and Adam (picked up in Dalek) journey to Satellite 5 in the year 200,000. It orbits the Earth (which now has five moons and a population of 96 billion) and is supposed to be the hub of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. But something's not right - there's no high culture and multitude of aliens.

The daleks (or at least one dalek) return for the first time in the new series. The Doctor and Rose are drawn to an underground bunker in Utah in 2012 where they find an amazing collection of alien artefacts. One of them turns out to be a powerless dalek. Rose accidentally re-animates it with her DNA by touching it and it escapes. A battle ensues with the dalek basically victorious, but when presented with the hopelessness of its existence - it's the only one left and it has no orders - it chooses to self-destruct.

We pick up where Aliens of London left off. Another small break with the past; giving a Part II its own episode name. The resolution is fairly standard Doctor Who, although the much improved production values give it a great boost. The Slitheen are eventually seen off (or are they - there seemed to be an opportunity for escape) in a sequence involving attacking 10 Downing Street with a missile and relying on the Cabinet office for protection. Seems plausible enough :)

Rose returns home for the first time since she began her journeys with the Doctor. The Doctor has told her she's only been away 12 hours, but naturally he hasn't got it quite right, so when she arrives home and her Mum is overwhelmed and Rose sees all the missing persons flyers, she doesn't understand. Then the Doctor bursts in and apologises, it's not 12 hours, but 12 months.

An entertaining romp through history with some pretty scary ghosts. The Doctor meets a depressed Charles Dickens who's wondering if he's wasted his life. Some marvelous conversations ensue about which of his books the Doctor liked and those he didn't think much of. We see Rose enthralled with the idea of a Christmas past and her shock at a servant earning 8 pounds a year - a year! - and she would have been happy with six.

The Doctor take Rose billions of years into the future to witness the death of the Earth (thus The End of the World).

Lady Cassandra is a marvellous comment on the culture of thinness taken to the extreme: a wafer thin suspended skin with a face. Genius.

The story wasn't that great, but I liked the mix of aliens (eg. an evolved tree).

The new series of Doctor Who returned to TV in Australia last night after a long hiatus. It's a wonderful mix of old and new. The single episode format was a little disappointing, but the production quality has been boosted. Too early to make a call on the writing, but the first episode, Rose, was pretty good.