Doctor Who, "Victory of the Daleks": Cookie, monster

A quick review of tonight's "Doctor Who" coming up just as soon as I enjoy a nice biscuit...

Perhaps because I came to the series with the Russell Davies reboot, I've never much cared for the Daleks, and in particular have grown frustrated in how frequently the series appears to kill the entire race off, only to bring them back almost immediately. So I was especially disappointed that Steven Moffat felt compelled to do this again, only three episodes into his tenure.

There were some fun things on the side of "Victory of the Daleks" - The Doctor's friendship with Winston Churchill, British Spitfires turned into space ships(*), The Doctor and Amy helping Bracewell embrace his programmed humanity - but the only portion of the episode tied directly to the Daleks that I found myself interested in was Amy not remembering the events of "The Stolen Earth." I'm assuming that will be part of the season-long arc with the cracks in the universe (which once again appeared as the TARDIS was leaving, making me wonder if The Doctor is somehow causing the cracks).

(*) Last week, there was some discussion of Moffat starting to incorporate a lot of specifically American references into this most British of shows, and here I saw a couple more of those: the Spitfire assault on the Dalek ship looked very much like the climax of "Independence Day," and of course the Union Jack gets raised like the American flag at Iwo Jima. Hmmm... On the other hand, Moffat's understandable Scottish pride continues, not just with Karen Gillan's awesome pronunciation of "Dalek," but the casting of Bracewell as a Scotsman.

Hopefully, the stupid pepperpots - now in their United Colors of Benetton look - will go away for quite a while so Moffat can focus on other things.

Keeping in mind that we are NOT going to discuss episodes that have yet to air here in America, what did everybody else think?

Doctor Who, "The Beast Below": Thar she blows!

A quick review of the second "Doctor Who" episode of the Matt Smith/Steven Moffat era coming up just as soon as I abdicate...

Even more than last week's "The Eleventh Hour," "The Beast Below" was a clear sign Moffat isn't throwing out most of what Russell T. Davies did. As Davies so often did around this point in the season, we travel to a far future version of Earth (or, here, a temporarily nomadic Earth civilization traveling the galaxy while waiting for their planet to stop burning).

But "The Beast Below" was also reminiscent of many Moffat-scripted episodes from the Davies era, not just with the "Everybody lives!"-style ending in which both the star whale and the ship were saved, but in the way it was overflowing with creative ideas: Starship UK itself, the Smilers and the weird martial law they practiced, Liz 10 and her hooded guards, the memory-erasing vote, etc. Some became strong parts of the climax, while others (mainly the martial law and the depressed, frightened populace) were largely forgotten. (Though an argument could be made that the horrible practice of torturing the whale led to all of society's problems, and that people would be happier now that the whale was free and a volunteer.)

This was a good Amy episode, establishing some limits in her relationship with The Doctor and also letting her save the day instead of him. And it moved along the season's continuing threads (Amy as runaway bride, the cracks in the universe appearing on the side of Starship UK).

Very solid second effort. "The Eleventh Hour" was no fluke.

Keeping in mind that we will not discuss anything that happens in episodes that have yet to air in the US, what did everybody else think?

Doctor Who, "The Eleventh Hour": Suspender animation

"Doctor Who" is back with a new man (young Matt Smith) in the lead role, and a new writer (Steven Moffat) running the show, and I have a quick review of the new regime coming up just as soon as I drink a bowl of custard...

"Hello, I'm The Doctor. So, basically... run." -The Doctor

At the time Matt Smith's casting was announced, I said that Moffat's previous "Who" episodes - which tended to be the highlight of each season - made me trust him implicitly, even though I had no idea who Smith was. By all accounts, Moffat had no intention of hiring the youngest-ever Doctor, but was so blown away by Smith's audition that he had to hire him - and Smith's work in "The Eleventh Hour" showed us exactly what Moffat saw in that audition.

Smith's young, yes, but there's a gravity to his performance that made it clear this gawky kid with the Flock of Seagulls haircut had, in fact, been around for hundreds of years and all the previous lives viewers have been watching for the last few decades. And just as David Tennant built on the character as played by Christopher Eccleston and made his Doctor less wounded and more exuberant, Smith's take on the character seems to have the enthusiastic eccentricity of Tennant(*) while playing the character as less reckless and prone to anger. Ten was arrogant, where Eleven is merely cocky.

(*) Smith also, like Tennant, seems to take great joy in saying certain words, here with the way he turned "laptop" into a five-course meal.

Smith also brings a great physicality to the part, not only in the slapstick like The Doctor's first few minutes at Amelia Pond's house(**), but in the odd, alien walk he adopts. Moffat's script certainly plays up Smith's rubbery features - when he asks Amy, "Do I even look like people?," the answer is clearly meant to be "no."

(**) I, frankly, would have watched at least 20 more minutes of Smith's Doctor trying and being disgusted by various foods in Amelia's kitchen.

And after playing Eleven as out of sorts for much of the episode, running around in the tattered remnants of Ten's wardrobe, Smith shows Eleven clearly getting his act together as he assembles a new (stolen) outfit. It's a great build-up for the character, and Smith owns every moment of it.

"Eleventh Hour" is also a great build-up for Karen Gillan's immensely likable Amy Pond, who has by far the most interesting, emotionally resonant backstory of the modern companions. There's an element of Donna Noble in there, in that Amy had to wait a while to get aboard the TARDIS (and in the end turns out to be another runaway bride), but it's one thing for a middle-aged woman to wait, and quite another for a little girl, who grows up with The Doctor at the forefront of her imagination. He has a powerful hold over her psyche, and that's going to complicate her obvious attraction to him (check out the look on her face as she watches him strip) and give this relationship elements of all three previous major modern companions.

For that matter, there were a lot of familiar elements in "Eleventh Hour." Amy's era-spanning relationship with The Doctor isn't dissimilar to the situation between Ten and Madame de Pompadour in the Moffat-scripted "The Girl in the Fireplace," and the Atraxi and Prisoner Zero felt like they could have been villains from a Russell T. Davies episode. (Moffat no doubt deliberately chose some more generic bad guys, so as not to distract from the establishing of Eleven and Amy.)

I know some "Who" fans who were dissatisfied with parts or all of the Davies era and were hoping Moffat would completely clean the slate and take the series in a different creative direction. Clearly, that's not going to be the case (Moffat, unsurprisingly, has nothing but positive things to say about Davies' run on the show), and what changes we see are going to be on a smaller scale. Moffat's both a funnier writer than Davies (here's just one clip from his insanely great Britcom "Coupling") and better at (or more interested in) creating an unsettling level of tension, but overall this is the Davies formula with a slightly different flavor. And as I loved most of the previous four seasons, I'm okay with that.

Very promising start to the semi-new era.

A few other thoughts:

• Moffat brings back a few elements from his previous episodes on the series with Tennant: The Doctor snaps his fingers to open the TARDIS doors, just as River Song told him he could back in "Silence in the Library," and at one point he uses the phrase "wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey," which is a phrase Ten used to explain the time-space continuum to Sally Sparrow in "Blink."

• The design of the Atraxi ships looked very much like the Kryptonian technology from "Superman: The Motion Picture," with bonus giant eyeballs.

• One notable change from Davies: Moffat and director Adam Smith attempt to show us how The Doctor sees the world, being aware of all angles and events everywhere he goes. How do you feel about him suddenly having Matrix-vision? True to what we know about the character, or a crutch in an episode that was otherwise designed to take away The Doctor's crutches (the TARDIS and the sonic screwdriver) to show him saving the world through sheer cleverness?

• In the UK, "Doctor Who" is seen as a family show first and foremost (Moffat once told me, "The entire point of `Doctor Who' is to frighten children"), and so Moffat had to play it safe with Amy's profession, claiming she's a "kiss-o-gram," when her embarrassment in that and other scenes suggests she does more than kiss when she's dressed as a cop, or nurse, or nun.

The UK is a few weeks ahead of us, and I'm sure some of you who live on this side of the pond have already watched additional episodes through extra-legal means, but we're going to stick with the usual "Doctor Who" spoiler policy around here, which means no talking about any episode (on any level) that has yet to air in the United States.

Keeping that in mind... what did everybody else think?

Doctor Who, "The End of Time" Part 2: I have been, and always shall be, your friend

A review of David Tennant's final Doctor Who" story coming up just as soon as I consider the lasers unfrazzled...

"I don't want to go!" -The Doctor

And we don't want you to go, Doctor, but this is how this particular game has always been played, alas.

The first half of "End of Time" was messy and confusing and over-stuffed, but Russell T. Davies beautifully righted the ship for the conclusion - to both this story and his run (and David Tennant's) on the series.

With the Master replacing all of humanity for most of the running time, we didn't need to deal with random characters like the Naismiths. John Simm's performance as the Master was toned-down just enough so that he still seemed crazy while not overwhelming every other character on screen. (That's an impressive feat, given that in certain portions of the movie, he was every character on screen.) And he was in turn well-matched by Timothy Dalton(*), who was able to convey the insanity, arrogance and sheer danger of the Time Lords circa the end of the Time War - and to explain why The Doctor would have been willing to exterminate his own race right along with the Daleks.

(*) A quick aside on Dalton: I think he gets a bad rap for this stint as James Bond. I thought he was actually a very strong 007, but stranded in two fairly awful Bond films. ("Living Daylights" had one of the drippiest love interests of the series, while "License to Kill" was an embarrassing attempt to modernize the series by taking its cues from "Miami Vice.") Stick him into "Goldeneye" or "Casino Royale" as his introduction, and his tenure goes very differently.

But really, what made "End of Time" part the second work so well was the same thing that was the highlight of last week's episode: the interaction between The Doctor and Wilf, and The Doctor grappling with the impending end of his life.

David Tennant and Bernard Cribbins were both great in the scene aboard the salvage ship where Wilf tried to get The Doctor to take his gun. And then after humanity was restored, after the Time Lords and Gallifrey were doomed once and for all, after the Master disappeared(**), we had the chilling moment when we discovered that the four knocks from the prophecy had nothing to do with the Time Lords or the Master - that it was poor, decent Wilf, trapped in a radiation chamber and needing to come out.

(**) Steven Moffat has said he's not interested in spending a lot of time on classic "Who" villains, so it's entirely possible this will be the last we see of the Master in any incarnation. But Davies left things vague enough that Moffat could use the guy again, should he desire.

And much as The Doctor raged against his fate (another superb scene for Tennant), it felt right that his death would come not from the Time Lords, or the Master, or aliens, or some other big enemy, but from his own love of humanity - and of this human (and his family) in particular. The Doctor has always stood out from his people because of his affection for these small, finite people of Earth, who don't have the power or the lifespan or the wisdom of the Time Lords but are capable of so much emotional greatness that The Doctor views them as giants, not insects. The Ninth Doctor died saving his human companion, and even though Ten wasn't exactly the same man, he was close enough that of course he would make a similar sacrifice in a similar situation, even if he was much less ready to die than Nine.

And by making the regeneration a bit of a drawn-out process, Davies was able to take The Doctor on one last tour of the universe he created over the last five years: rescuing Mickey and Martha (now a married couple) from the Sontarans, saving Sarah Jane's son Luke from an oncoming car, fixing a heartbroken Captain Jack up with Alonso from "Voyage of the Damned," visiting the granddaughter of Joan Redfern (from "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood"), buying Donna(***) a (presumably winning) lottery ticket with money borrowed in the past from her late father, and saying hi to Rose several months before she would first meet Nine (which allowed Davies to use Billie Piper without invalidating the conclusion to "Journey's End").

(***) It felt like Davies wasn't sure what to do with Donna through this two-parter. He wanted to use Wilf as the companion, which meant Donna couldn't be ignored, but all she does is run around for a bit, come close to remembering, then pass out while The Doctor's "defense mechanism" takes out the Masters around her. In the end, as with Rose, Davies didn't want to undo the events of "Journey's End," but he managed to give Donna a happy ending in spite of her memory remaining wiped. And I found it interesting that The Doctor referred to her as "my best friend." For this incarnation, I guess she was, since the relationships with Rose and Martha were too fraught with other emotional issues.

And then the Ood came to sing this Doctor to sleep, and he raged against his regeneration until it set the TARDIS on fire, and then... young, floppy-haired, manic Matt Smith. About whom we will have quite a lot to say later this year.

But for now, a final round of applause to Mssrs. Davies and Tennant, the former of whom brought the franchise back from the dead (and reimagined it enough to make it appealing to people like me who either didn't watch or didn't care for the original series), the latter of whom goes down, by all accounts, as one of the best Doctors ever.

Well done. As Nine would say, you were fantastic.

A few other thoughts:

• Davies wasn't big on throwing in references to non-"Who" pop culture during his run, but this one had a few really obvious nods to some big guns of sci-fi, with Wilf's stint as an asteroid laser gunner obviously modeled on Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon's turret guns in the original "Star Wars," Captain Jack's space cantina (featuring lots of Davies-era aliens like the Adipose and the Judoon) modeled on a similar sequence also in "Star Wars," and The Doctor's fate in the radiation chamber looked quite a bit like Mr. Spock's sacrifice in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." For that matter, the scene where The Doctor shut off all the systems on the salvage ship so the Master couldn't find it felt very much like a silent running sequence from any number of classic submarine movies.

• Apparently, the last line Davies wrote for the script was the one I quoted at the top, and he then handed things over to Moffat to write the introduction of the Eleventh Doctor. It's hard to judge from a brief scene - in a circumstance where The Doctor tends to be manic - or from the trailer that BBC America showed during the "Demons" premiere (since a trailer can be cut to hide a lot of sins), but I liked what little I saw of Smith. (Please do not discuss the actual content of the trailer, as that goes against the No Spoilers policy.)

• I'm assuming the woman who appeared to Wilf, and then was revealed as a Time Lord, was The Doctor's mother, but Davies left it vague in the end.

What did everybody else think?

Doctor Who, "The End of Time" Part 1: Master race with a Master face

A review of the first part of "Doctor Who: The End of Time" coming up just as soon as I try to make an Ood laugh...

"Even if I change, it feels like dying. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away. And I'm dead." -The Doctor

When I interviewed David Tennant back in the summer, he said he was excited by the challenge, in these final movies of getting to "take this immutable character to mutable places." The Doctor's fear of his impending death - with or without regeneration(*) - gave Tennant some of the best material he's had to play in his run on the series, and the scenes dealing with that fear were the highlights of "The End of Time" Part 1. Watching him in the cafe with Wilf, you understood just how much The Doctor enjoyed being this particular aspect - and also how much Tennant had enjoyed this role of a lifetime.

(*) Again, I came to the character as a newbie with Russell T. Davies and Christopher Eccleston, but when I asked in the past (particularly around "Journey's End") about how The Doctor usually reacts to the idea of death and regeneration, I was told it usually happens so suddenly that he doesn't have time to show any emotion at all. So Davies has created a relatively unusual circumstance for his leading man to play on the way out the door.

Beyond The Doctor's fear, and some of his other interaction with Wilf, I largely found this half of "End of Time" to be disjointed and overly busy. I don't know if BBC America made any cuts to what aired in the UK on Friday(**), or if Davies just tried to take on too much, or if my ignorance of the pre-Davies series just makes me less interested in the Time Lords and the Master, but it felt like there was too much going on, too many new characters being introduced (and not with the usual grace Davies gave to one-off characters in the series itself), and, as happened at the end of the third series, too much of John Simm chewing on the scenery (and on chicken bones).

(**) Even if they didn't make any cuts, the number and duration of on-screen bugs and billboards for other BBC America shows drove me nuts. How about letting us pay attention to the show we're actually watching for a few minutes, folks?

Of course, the first half of a big story has to spend a lot of time on set-up, so I'm still relatively hopeful for next week's conclusion. But I wanted to share Tennant's excitement for the whole shebang, and I only occasionally did.

What did everybody else think?

Doctor Who: David Tennant looks back

"Doctor Who: The End of Time, Part 1" - the first half of David Tennant's farewell to the role - airs tomorrow in the UK and then Saturday night at 9 on BBC America. I haven't seen it in advance, but I do have the transcript of an interview I did with Tennant at press tour back in late July, in which he looks back on his early days in the role, how his Doctor wound up wearing sneakers, how a childhood of pretending to be The Doctor turned out to be very useful when he got to play the role for real, and a lot more.

So read it after the jump, and whether you live in the UK or have, um, some means of accessing the episode after it airs there, please refrain from discussing "End of Time" until after I've seen it and posted about it, either Saturday night or sometime Sunday. Any comments referencing the content of the movie in any way will be deleted.

(Two notes: First, as mentioned, this was done back in late July, before Tennant was cast in his first American pilot, NBC's "Rex Is Not Your Lawyer," so at the end he discusses having early meetings with American producers and trying to gauge how much they know of "Doctor Who." Second, due to mechanical difficulties that I didn't notice until after the fact, the first five minutes of our conversation - most of it devoted to Tennant's recent experience at Comic-Con in San Diego - were not recorded. We pick up with Tennant discussing how he came to his interpretation of the iconic character.)

I'm not quite sure what decisions I made and what just occurred. Somewhere in between making a decision and going with the flow, you end up with a performance.

One of the differences between your character and (The Ninth Doctor) was that you were both sunnier and darker. You could get very angry. Was that something that was on the page when you were starting?

It's how I was interpreting what was on the page, certainly, but I dare say a different actor would have done it very differently. It's one of those characters that is open to personal interpretation in a way other characters might not be. Because he can sort of be anything. You have to just kind of see how it fits with you, I suppose. I love Russell (T. Davies)'s writing, and I respond to it very keenly. I had just done "Casanova," which he had written, and they felt in some ways like very similar characters. I mean, The Doctor does less shagging, but there's a brio, and there's a kind of passion for adventure which I think is similar in both characters. So I possibly brought some of that with me. And the way Russell writes both characters, there's an enjoyment of language and of thought colliding with each other faster than the speed of thinking. Which I've always liked. I like that kind of writing. I'm a big fan of "The West Wing," and the way Aaron Sorkin writes those people who can think and speak faster than the synapses can flash. I love characters who are clever and smart, and you have to run to catch up with. I think there's something very appealing and rather heroic in that. So it made sense that The Doctor should be like that, to me.

How much input did you have into things like the look?

The look was something that myself and the costume designer worked on hand in hand. Russell and Phil (Collinson), our producer, and Julie (Gardner), our exec producer, they would all have an opinion, but basically, Louise Page and I worked it out between us, and threw ideas back and forward and came up with 'the look' - which, again, from the minute you take over is what you're being asked about. And that's quite tricky, because it has to be of its time and yet timeless. And I always wanted a long coat. To me, it feels like The Doctor has to have a long coat, and that's something imprinted on me from childhood, because he always did. And there's something heroic in a flapping coat, but at the same time, I need to get rid of it sometimes and just be a scrawny guy in a suit that doesn't quite fit. So there was a sense of authority to him, but it's undermined by his own carelessness. He wears a suit, but doesn't wear it with proper shoes. Something about that felt right. But, again, we arrived at it slightly by accident.

And it has to be something you can run around in and wear every episode.

Absolutely. I was very keen on soft shoes. That was something I was always adamant about. That was the closest Louise and I had to a disagreement, and I was determined. In the first few episodes, they're my own shoes, because I wanted them to be old and battered and lived-in and falling apart. So until they did fall apart, I used my own shoes. And then, at the point when they didn't have any soles left, we got some new ones. For me, they were never as good again. I love when they were actually falling off my feet.

Someone asked me if you got to keep a pair.

The ones that were mine, we actually ended up selling for charity. So I don't know who's got them now. But I do have a couple of the pairs we used on the show. But there were hundreds of them.

When you're working with Billie (Piper), who'd had a pre-existing relationship with the other Doctor, how do you approach that as an actor, in terms of his feelings for her?

That could have been very tricky, because Billie would have every right to feel it was her patch. But mercifully, because Billie is so generous and so lovely, and such a great actress and wonderful human being, frankly, it was such a joy to work with her, and such a pleasure. Dramatically, that's what's going on between the characters, because she's having to rediscover this new man who's the same man she knew, and how she feels about that. But very quickly, I think we established that relationship that they had was as deep, and ran even deeper ultimately.

That's one of the things I've always wondered about the franchise: does The Doctor have the same feelings for people and things that he did before he regenerated? Does he have the same feelings for Sarah Jane that he did in the '70s?

Not necessarily, but with Rose, he certainly did. Meeting Sarah Jane again was deeply moving for him, I think. And what was interesting there was, he, in a sense, has gotten younger. That's The Doctor's eternal problem: he will always outlive his earthbound friends. And that's a great dramatic opportunity that you don't get in normal drama. You've got this character who's virtually immortal, certainly in terms of anyone from Earth, and how does that impact on those relationships? Even within a fantasy action/adventure scenario, you get to play these wonderful emotional beats. It's unlike anything else.

Patrick Stewart (with whom Tennant recently co-starred in a London production of "Hamlet") has talked about how one of the reasons he keeps being asked to play these iconic science fiction characters is that the training that he has through Royal Shakespeare allows him to give it a gravity and a reality, so it's not just silly men in funny suits.

Well, there's a similar trick - "trick" is underplaying it a bit - to playing Shakepseare and to playing this kind of work: you've got to play it absolutely real. But the language of Shakespeare is slightly heightened, and you have to serve it up. And there's a similar thing to that science-fiction/fantasy stuff, and you have to absolutely ground it in veracity, and yet just serve it up a little bit. I completely get what Patrick says, and I'm sure Ian McKellen might admit to a similar thing. If you can sell that you're the King of Scotland, or Henry V on a tiny stage in a studio theater somewhere, then you can probably sell that you're a starship captain or a time traveler. There is a similar skill there, yeah.

Obviously, when the two of you were working together, you had larger concerns in mind. But was there ever a point where you were able to talk about your shared experience?

We did a bit. He had recently acquired his Star Trek costume after spending years thinking he wasn't going to get it, and I was hoping for mine to arrive, so we talked about that. Of course, it's been a huge part of Patrick's life and my life - as has the Royal Shakespeare Company.

How was it to film your last scene as The Doctor?

Emotional. Thrilling, because the scripts are so exciting. You finally get - this character that we do manage to explore, an emotional life for The Doctor that you might not necessarily expect. Essentially, he has to remain unchanged at the end of each story that the series carries on - but when you get to the point where this version of the character is going to die and he knows he's going to die, the sands of time are running out and the bell is tolling and all those metaphors, you get to take this immutable character to mutable places, and that's very exciting. And emotional, as well. The character's coming to the end of his life, you're coming to the end of your life on the show, which has been all-consuming. Particularly back home, but all over the world, it's a huge deal. It's very important to people, and particularly to me, all of my life. So to be moving on from that - and I know I'll never say goodbye to it entirely; I'm sure The Doctor will travel with me as long as I'm on this earth - that's very moving and emotional, and it was to film it.

I assume you've had some conversations with some of your predecessors about this experience. Did they have any advice? Or thoughts on what it was like for them?

Just that it never really goes away. That it's so loved, you can try to get away from it, but you never will. That's to be embraced, not fought. But I'm still too close to it to really know. Maybe I'll need to be around when the next series starts transmitting before I really know how I feel to have moved on. And I feel hugely privileged to have been one of eleven.

I imagine that, having been a fan of the show as a child, it must be like growing up as a football fan and suddenly you get to play for your club.

I think it probably is very similar. And it's a weird mixture of emotions, because it's such a thrill, and completely surreal to believe you've ended up in this position. And then you get on set, and there's a job to do, and you have to just knuckle down and do it. You can't get too bothered about how absurd it is that you've ended up in this position. But it's still hugely thrilling. The peripherals that come with it are very weird: to be on a comic strip, to be a plastic figurine, to be on a t-shirt, and a cake and whatever else it is. They make everything now! They make soap, and anything you can care to think of. That's weird. That's not something you're prepared for at drama school, that whole side of it. Being a merchandisable commodity is peculiar. But a wonderful experience to have had.

Is this something that, as a child, you had ever fantasized about: 'One day I could be The Doctor'?

Yes, but never realistically. Never really. It was a sort of whim. Because, like, there are only 11 of us. I was much more likely to play Hamlet than I was to get to play The Doctor. And both of those were pipe dreams. There's only 11 of us, only 8 of us alive who have had that honor. It's a giddy reality to confront.

Were there certain parts of it that were either exactly as you might have imagined, or not at all as you had imagined? Like being in the TARDIS?

Being in the TARDIS never stopped being a thrill. It's such a wonderful set, and such an iconic thing. Anytime you did start to get blase about it, there'd be a new guest member of the cast who would come and get thrilled with it again. We all grew up with it. It's part of our race memory. You'd always be reminded, when someone new came on the show, how exciting it was. Everyone wanted to be photographed in the TARDIS, or to show their kids, or grandchildren - and, frankly, to be in it themselves. Everyone wanted to be by the TARDIS console, and with their arm around the Dalek.

And playing a scene opposite a Dalek or a Cyber-Man, that's got to be quite surreal for you as well.

Quite surreal - but really cool! The Daleks particularly. They have these operators inside of them, and they manage them so adeptly. And we have the voice on set - Nick Briggs - and it's wired up with cables, so the lights light up as he speaks. They happen, right there in front of you, all at once. Playing a scene with a Dalek, you can really immerse yourself in that reality. Some of the monsters are CGI or green-screen, and others are rubber head there, elements added afterwards, but the Daleks are live in front of you, happening.

But there was never, early on, a case of it being hard to focus on the acting because, "Hey, I'm in a scene with a Dalek"?

I'd say the opposite of that. Because if your formative experiences are pretending to do that on the playground, it's remarkably easy to just access that fantasy life again. I don't think that's underselling the process of acting. It's just an easier fictional world to surrender yourself to, because childhood memories are so potent. When you're being paid and allowed to, you can give yourself over to the fantasy very easily.

One of the themes, going back to "The Christmas Invasion," is that your Doctor can be a very destructive force. Donna says he needs to be controlled and all that. Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy in your mind? A mix of things? Something more complicated?

It's complicated. He's had some very difficult experiences, with the Time War that we hear snatches of. He was clearly there when his own people perished. That left him with emotional scars, and he does have this tendency - there seems to be a slightly alarming tendency to bloodlust, in there somewhere. It's quite well repressed. He's basically morally pure and righteous, but there's a possibility of hubris in there. And that's something we will explore in these final stories. There's an Achilles heel there that he isn't entirely resistant to.

Well, speaking of the Time War - when you play Hamlet, and you're doing a scene about your father's death, the character you're playing has experienced this directly. The Doctor that you're playing sort of was in the Time War, but again, sort of not.

We'll find out slightly more about that before the end. It won't be more explicit.

But getting back to what I asked about earlier, he's had these experiences that he didn't really have. How do you access the emotions of things that Eccleston experienced in the first season, or that the previous Doctors went through? Ten is a different character from them.

Yes, but he's the same man. It is a peculiar one. There's no right or wrong about it, I guess, and you pick and choose when you're the same man and when you're a different man, if we're being honest about it. Clearly, he's the same man who experienced this. He still lost every member of his own race. That doesn't change when he regenerates. That's still something he has to deal with, so I think he still feels those scars.

So something that happened to Paul McGann happened just as much to you?

Exactly. And when he meets Sarah Jane again, it's the same man as met Sarah Jane before. And that's how she responds to it. She might be disconcerted that he's younger, but she gets that it's the same man.

Well, speaking of youth, the three of you in this modern era are a fair amount younger than most of your predecessors.

Well, I'm a little younger than Chris (Eccleston), and Matt (Smith)'s a lot younger than me.

Do you feel that that version of the show that Russell's created and that Steven (Moffat)'s going to carry on almost requires a younger man, just because of the physicality of it?

I don't know. I think you could write the show to whoever was in the part. I don't think I'm wrong that Steven didn't intend to cast an actor as young as Matt. His instinct was to take it a bit older again. Clearly, it comes down to the actor. The Doctor can be anything, really. So I think you cast someone because they seem exciting and right and enthused and inspiring for the part, and that becomes what The Doctor is. The Doctor can be anything, and if you cast a decent actor, then he's The Doctor, and that's it - whether he's 73 or 23.

There were certain archetypal episodes that Russell would do: The Doctor goes back and meets a classic English author, Doctor on a space station, etc. Were there types that you were particularly fond of as you got that point in the season?

I would be fond of them all as they came up, to be honest. Because, unlike most long-running shows where you've got the police office set, and the cafe set, and you tend to visit them again, we have one standing set on Doctor Who. We have the TARDIS, and we're only in it for about a minute each week. So each episode had such a particular life about it - a particular guest cast, it looked different, we filmed them in different places - that each one lives very distinctly in my memory. We got to go to Rome to film the Pompeii one. And then some of them we would film completely in our studios in Cardiff. But each one feels distinct in my memory. The variety was absolutely the spice of it.

Do you feel, having been through Comic-Con, and having seen how The Doctor is perceived at least by some people here, that having done this role might give you more of an entree to doing things here if you wanted to?

Maybe. Certainly, it's been interesting being in LA for a few days, meeting people and seeing what response you get. But Doctor Who, it's a funny one. I think people who love it, love it, and are passionate about. And people who don't love it, don't even know about it. So we're in an interesting place here. And that's coming from Britain, where it's part of popular culture. I still don't quite get where we sit in American culture. But it's fun finding out.

Alan andreikirilenkotattoo may be reached at aandreikirilenkotattoo@starledger.com

Doctor Who, "The Waters of Mars": Wet wet wet

As I mentioned in the "Dollhouse" post directly below this one, we're at the end of a long week for me and I'm not physically or mentally up to doing a write-up of the penultimate "Doctor Who" movie with David Tennant, which started out as another story of The Doctor trapped on a space station whose crew get picked off one by one, and then became something very different in the final act.

So tell me what you thought, and in a week's time we can discuss (hopefully at more length) the first part of the final Tenth Doctor story, "The End of Time."

Doctor Who, "Planet of the Dead": It takes a thief

Because I'm out here at Comic-Con, I don't have much time to write about the latest "Doctor Who" special, save to note a few things: 1)Michelle Ryan remains much, much more interesting in her native accent than she was on "Bionic Woman"; 2)Special effects aside, "Planet of the Dead" felt much more like a regular "Doctor Who" episode than any of the Christmas movies (which all took place on a larger scale); and 3)Much more than "The Next Doctor," this one is offering hints to the end of David Tennant's tenure as The Doctor.

What did everybody else think?

The Doctor comes to San Diego

I can't exactly gauge it, since I was on stage for one and in the audience for the other, but the reception "Doctor Who" -- specifically, David Tennant, Russell T. Davies, director Euros Lyn and producer Julie Gardner -- received here on Comic-Con's final morning was nearly as loud and adoring as what "Chuck" got yesterday. Some panel highlights coming up after I remind you that "Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead" airs tonight on BBC America...

Among the highlights:

• Moderator Robert Lloyd (a writer for the LA Times and an obvious fan of the series) asked Gardner to deal with the rumors of a movie right off the bat. "We are not making any announcement about a Doctor Who movie," she said. "I'm really sorry. I don't know where the rumor started. But what it's made us think is it might be a good idea to do at some point. Is this something that you want?" The crowd, predictably, roared its approval.

• They showed a teaser trailer for Tennant's farewell movie, featuring the return of several characters from earlier in the Davies/Tennant run (I won't spoil it, but it's easy to find out if you want) that looked tremendous. At the end of the panel, they showed a trailer for "Waters of Mars," the special that'll follow "Planet of the Dead." Looked like a big-budget version of the various Davies/Tennant episodes with The Doctor on a space station with some kind of monster on the loose.

• A fan asked Tennant (a lifelong "Doctor Who" fan) about his memories of when the first Doctor he knew was replaced, and whether he could understand what fans are feeling as they prepare for the transition from Tennant to Matt Smith. Tennant talked about how much he revered Tom Baker, then said, "And I never forgot him, or loved him any less, but then Peter Davison came along, and within three weeks, I thought he was the best. I think what makes the show go on forever." He suggested, to some inevitable skepticism from the room, that within a few weeks, they'd all think "Matt Smith's the greatest thing that's ever been, which he probably is... I think change is part of the show. I'm very very proud to have been part of the history, but I'm very proud that we're handing it over in good health and that it carries on!"

• And speaking of fandom, Tennant said one of his favorite personal moments from playing The Doctor came during a table read of "School Reunion," involving Elisabeth Sladen: "Suddenly, this voice from my childhood was calling me 'Doctor.' When the 8-year-old boy met the 35-year-old boy and was still being called The Doctor by Sarah Jane, that was quite special."

• Tennant's version of The Doctor will appear in an upcoming "Sarah Jane Adventures" episode called "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith."

• A fan asked about John Barrowman's claims that he's been stealing items from the set, and what any of the panelists might have taken home. They all clammed up, and then Gardner said, "I think John Barrowman just stole things off the set so he could be strip-searched on the way out."

• A fan asked whether River Song would be returning, and Gardner noted, "We are now happy viewers to season five. We don't know anything you don't know."

• Tennant was asked if he might return, as many previous Doctors have, for charity specials or other events. He thought about it and noted that the series' 50th anniversary would be in 2013, then immediately cautioned the room, "That's not me making an announcement. There's no plan. Don't Twitter that! That's not a thing! Yet!"

I'll have a separate, extremely brief, post up tonight about "Planet of the Dead," so don't talk about it here, and I'm interviewing Tennant in a couple of days when we're both at press tour. I'm open to suggested questions if they're good.

Doctor Who, "The Next Doctor": Double vision

I offered up my thoughts on the latest "Doctor Who" movie in Friday's column (and if you didn't see it before, don't miss my Russell T. Davies interview), but I'm curious what your opinion was. The only thing I'll add to the original column is that the Mercy Hartigan character was terribly underwritten, and I say that having watched the original British cut.

Same rules as always applies to "Doctor Who": talk only about the episodes that have aired here in America. So no discussion about "Planet of the Dead," which ran in England back in April. Anything I consider questionable gets deleted. Clear?

Russell Davies Q&A on 'Doctor Who' and 'Torchwood'

In conjunction with tomorrow's American debut of "Doctor Who: The Next Doctor," the first of five "Doctor Who" specials that will conclude the tenure of both star David Tennant and producer Russell T. Davies (you can read my review here), I spoke with Davies about saying goodbye to the character he helped resurrect, and about the upcoming miniseries "Torchwood: Children of Earth," which BBC America will be airing July 20-24.

Davies called me as I was finishing up the third episode of "Children of Earth" -- an exciting, epic story in which Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and his team deal with alien invaders who can make our world's children do whatever they want -- and so our discussion begins with that.

What was the impetus behind telling this particular "Torchwood" story?

The main impetus came because in Britain, we were shifting channels. We'd been on a smaller channel as a sci-fi cult show, but this is moving it onto BBC1. It's the main primetime channel, so we needed to do something bit. Also, although I created "Torchwood," I'd been away from it for a while. I wanted to do something new, a different type of storytelling, to give it a big kick and stretch myself as well. So all of that thinking led to a new format. They've been doing this (miniseries) format quite a bit in Britain, where you'll do five shows in five nights. It's a new form of storytelling that I loved, and when the offer came to make "Torchwood" part of this five nights a week thing, I jumped at it. I loved it.

So do you think, if BBC orders another series, you'll stick with this format?

I think it's hard to revert to the previous format having done this, but if BBC1 says, "We want to do 13 weeks like before," of course we're going to do 13 weeks. We can do all sorts of things. The six-part weekly thriller is another standard British format that we haven't tried yet. That's what's nice in this digital world: the platforms change, the digital tier gives you new options, and "Torchwood"s been at the forefront of it, since we started on a digital channel.

"Children of Earth" seems more epic, both in its scope and in the production values, than anything you did in the first two series.

Glad you said so. That was the aim. "Epic" was one of the keywords that we used. And it's quite important for newcomers to the show to know they can watch it from scratch. We're going to give them this big huge story where they can understand everything important in the first five minutes and go from there. I love telling stories about scale, and it's a big international story. But at the same time, even if you make things epic, no matter how big the threat is, you've got to have great characters, great actors at the center of it, so everything works on a personal level. So we've got John Barrowman doing wonderful work as Captain Jack, Eve (Myles) as Gwen Cooper, and everyone.

But when you're making an event, five nights a week, it would be wrong to tell a small, detailed domestic story. It's a brilliant production team, because we didn't have any increase in budget. It just looks like we did because they simply worked like dogs. The cast have worked hard, and it's made by people who love this, and with real passion. And the end result shines through.

You said before that you love stories about scale, which anyone watching your version of "Doctor Who" would already know. Every year, it seemed like the finales got bigger and bigger. Is one of the reasons you're leaving that you realized you couldn't top yourself anymore?

There's always further to go. I don't just increase things in scale because I'm mad. With "Doctor Who," every year the finale got bigger, and every year the rating got bigger. We were adding, like, 2 million viewers every year. That's been a great joy, and part of the whole game of "Doctor Who" is that the public joins in, word spreads, and more people watch. Increasing the scale of the program has literally paid off. If the viewers had been deserting the show, I would have done something different. When we get to David Tennant's finale, you will not believe the scale of it. But it's all about the acting in the end. Wait till you see David Tennant in his last episode, and John Barrowman in his last episode of "Children of Earth."

I'm unclear on the timing of this: were these five specials always designed to end David Tennant's time in the role, or did that happen after you started doing them?

No, we always knew they were going to be his last specials. It was his choice. When Steven Moffat took over the show, of course David wondered if he should be continuing, because of course Steven will be the most brilliant showrunner in the world.

It's funny, we've now all moved on, for the most part. We all feel that we've done the right thing. There's not one moment where we'd want to use a TARDIS to go back in and do over again. It's been good, it's been healthy, no regrets. If the handover had gone wrong, I would have felt terrible. We've protected the show, and kept it enshrined for the people in the UK.

I've only seen two of the specials so far, but there's this recurring theme about The Doctor not wanting to take on a new companion because of what happened in "Journey's End."

Poor Donna Noble.

You're a bastard, by the way.

Ha ha ha! He just called me a bastard. Ha ha ha ha!

Well, is there a specific character arc to these specials?

It's what I love about "Doctor Who." It's 46 years old, and now in my final year, we discover there's still a brand new way of telling the stories, which is The Doctor traveling on his own, which was done only once in the old years, Tom Baker with "The Deadly Asssassin." it gives us a chance for him to have a different companion every time. In "Planet of the Dead," we have Michelle Ryan, and in "The Waters of Mars," we've got Lindsey Duncan as the companion; she's almost 60 years old, quite a brilliant actress, a different way than we've gone previously. In the finale, it's Bernie Cribbens, who played Donna Noble's grandfather.

The bigger picture is why The Doctor's traveling alone -- because he's heartbroken, because he loses too much in the end (each time). This is an arc over these last few specials, gradually, especially in "Waters of Mars," which comes up in November, we discover that he travels with a human because he needs a human. He's too powerful, and without that (human with him), he can become a dangerous man. Donna pointed that out to him in her very first story, "The Runaway Bride." That is a story we're telling. We're sort of all heading towards series 5 and the new Doctor and the new companion, played by Karen Gillan. I think it's a nice set-up for her, in that The Doctor needs a companion and we're going to understand why.

Given what you said before about the lack of regrets, I'm guessing the answer's no, but are there any stories you wanted to tell with this series that you didn't get to?

Not really. Obviously, because I knew almost two years ago that I was leaving, I started thinking about stories. Other dramas I wanted to tell. Every now and then an idea will come into my head, though. I think there's a very good "Doctor Who" story to be told about Twitter, about the idea of communicating in 140 characters. There's a story somewhere, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone on the (new writing) team is thinking of that. They don't need me anymore. And I cannot tell you how much I'm looking forward to being a viewer. Other than the movie (1996's American-produced "Doctor Who" pilot), the last time I got a chance to sit down and watch a brand new series was 21 years ago. So I'm dying!

So have you asked Steven not to tell you anything about what he's doing?

I can't help overhearing little things. I already know far too much. And one or two things he had to check with me to make sure we could overlap material. What I do know is so exciting.

I want to go back to when you took over the franchise. What was the mandate you had in mind for yourself?

Simply, the one very clear thing I wanted to do at the beginning was to get a new audience, and a permanent audience. Because of "Doctor Who"'s long history -- he ran on BBC1 for so many years -- I knew we would get some old viewers who remembered the character fondly, but that simply wasn't enough for me. The BBC is funded by the public in Britain. So we're making a very expensive show, paid for by the public, so I thought I had a duty to spend that money well, and get as many of the public watching as possible, This wasn't a time to make a niche show, and that's so foften what British science fiction is. I knew it had to be lifted out into the mainstream. There was no precedent for that ever happening in Britain.

I wanted children watching. I thought if you're going to bring back this character, you want him to appeal to children; you want a child who, in 40 years time, will be me, bringing the character back again. It deserves the status of being like Robin Hood or Merlin or James Bond -- those rare British cultural figures who just run and run. I worried that, if I'd fumbled it on this reusrrection, it would have been fumbled for a few decades.

And we got lucky in the timing, If we'd been five years later, we would never have been able to afford the program I wanted to make. I wanted it to be expensive. I'm not saying all good television is expensive, because I've worked on some of the cheapest shows in trhe world. But the ambition, and the big picture, and the epic intimacy demanded that. And then all of this was theory, and none of us knew if it would work, but we got on air, and it worked, and it's been wonderful.

And all of that money is very clearly there on the screen, where the original series always looked so incredibly cheap: lots of stories with only one or two settings and minimal movement, where you're all over the place with the action and the special effects.

I so respect those old production teams because having made the show, I can't imagine how they made it on 1/10th of the budget that I had. And they made something I loved all my life. They found different ways of launching themselves into children's memories.

Was Christopher Eccleston always only going to do it for a year?

That was always the plan, and then the plan got fumbled because the newspapers found out about it. Can you imagine what a shock that regeneration would have been if they hadn't known? We got better at that over the years, found ways to keep other secrets. Nonetheless, Chris Eccleston is just a blazing comet of talent, and we are lucky to have had him for even a short time. I'm so grateful to have had him.

And then you got David Tennant, who many people insist is the best Doctor ever.

We cast Chris, and we thought, "Brilliant, but what the hell do we do next? Surely, there's no one who can be on a par with Chris." And the gods were smiling with us when we found David. Just to see him do this, at the same time he's doing "Hamlet" at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I'm so lucky just to have caught hold of that man for a short while.

Was it a coincidence or by design that all of the major companions during your run were women?

It's by design, to be honest. The show has had male companions in the past, and there have been times when he's had three or four companions at the same time, but if you strip the show down to its essentials, it's one man, and one woman. I don't think I would have been happy if it was just two men in the TARDIS. In the year 2009, still, there aren't enough lead roles for women, anyway. At the same time, we introduced Captain Jack, who was a companion for a time before we put him in "Torchwood."

There was that moment where you revealed that Jack would eventually live so long that he'd become the Face of Boe. Was this something you planned all along with the character?

It wasn't exactly planned. I did spend a long time thinking about Jack's immortality, and one day it occured to me there was another immortal character on the show. It made me laugh. To be honest, on the screen, it's couched in terms that are not absolute gospel. There are these spin-off books and comic books, and every now and then I'll see a script for one where they say definitively that he's the Face of Boe, and I always stop those from being printed. I have my own personal theories, but the moment it became very true or very false, the joke dies.

In general, though, how much long-term planning was there in the series? You got a lot of mileage out of cutting off The Doctor's hand in "The Christmas Invasion," for instance.

I did, didn't I? It's hard to say. Some things are planned. There was never a rigid plan that I followed for five years and never deviated. But the important thing is, I was thinking about "Doctor Who" more than I should have every day. Even the strongest fan of "Doctor Who" will think about "Doctor Who" a lot, then go on to their regular job, and I was thinking about "Doctor Who" all day, every day.

It's like having a great big play shop, I would introduce things like The Doctor having his hand cut off, and I realized I could bring it back in "Torchwood." What you don't notice are the things I introduce that I don't bring back. It's a more ruthless process than it is whimsical. Actually, it's very diligent about what makes sense, and I'm very careful about not losing an audience. If their enjoyment depends on them emorizing a bit of dialogue for 40 episodes earlier, you're in trouble. But we cut his hand off in a special that aired on Christmas, that almost ten million people in Britain watched at the time, and I thought they'd remember that. I can't say that I ever knew that three years later it would end up saving his lfie, but the potential was there. I know my own mind and it's always prodding the idea and finding ways to push it forward. If "plan" means having everything constantly in flux, then that is what we had.

In terms of an idea that you introduced and didn't bring back, it's implied at the end of "Journey's End" that Martha and Mickey are going to join "Torchwood," but they're not in "Children of Earth."

That was genuinely a potential idea. We did actually investigate that, and we did plan to use Martha and Mickey, and then Freema (Agyeman) was cast in "Law & Order: UK," and she was absolutely fantastic in it, and this was before we could confirm the commission of "Torchwood," and it's 13 episodes a year instead of five besides, so lovely, lovely Freema has got a job for life, so of course she went and did that. We're friends, we're in constant contact, and we were able to adapt, so we brought in Cush Jumbo as Lois Habiba, who's kind of the Martha figure. She doesn't act like a Martha clone at all, she's much more innocent and out of her depth. It's plate spinning, it's like that, you just keep things spinning. It was a possible plan, didn't work out, but if there's a "Torchwood" 4, and Freema's available, maybe we could use her again.

Getting back to the idea of scale, one of my favorite "Doctor Who" episodes that you wrote was sort of the opposite of that: "Midnight," which was this low-budget but extremely creepy story with The Doctor stuck on the train with the woman who kept repeating everything and the paranoid passengers.

You'd be surprised by how not low-budget that is. That set is four walls, and a very robust set, and we had to book a whole cast every day for two weeks, because they had to be there all the time. Actors are normally split up, and that was very actor-intensive. We didn't do it to be cheap, but I thought with the great big epic arias at the end of that series, it was time to be more intimate right beforehand. I thought of that idea as I was coming to the end of my time on "Doctor Who." That idea had been in my head itching away -- "What if you spoke to someone who repeats everything you've said for the whole episode?" -- and I had to do that episode before I left. I had to see if it worked. And it worked. That's a great big token of the freedom that the BBC gives us. On a great big popular expensive show, they allowed me to experiment.

If you had to pick a moment, or several moments, from your tenure that you're especially proud of -- that exemplify what you were trying to do with "Doctor Who" -- what would you pick?

The problem is, there's hundreds of them. Because I was so stepped in the show, it's very interesting to go back to the very first episode -- and to be blunt, we hit the ground running with it. That episode is the template for everything we did since. It has the companion being as strong as The Doctor, it brings back an old monster. It's in modern-day urban London. The companion's family is important, the emotion is at the forefront, but there's comedy and chase scenes. Normally, you look at episode one of a long-running series and it seems ancient, and I'm very proud of it because I look at it, all your favorite (kinds of) moments are in episode one.

But there are so many. It ranges from Lesley Sharp in "Midnight" giving the most brilliant performance with David Tennant, to when we won the BAFTA Award. When they played the clips of the nominees for Best Drama in this big posh ceremony, those clips are very often people crying in the rain about serious issues -- Iraq war, or illness, or drug addiction, because that's what usually wins awards -- and in the middle of all this, the "Doctor Who" clip played of thousands of Daleks flying through the air, and then we won the award! It just showed that a program that is so much fun and has so many children watching and so much fantasy, to win a big proper televiison award like that was genuinely wonderful.

Can you go back and watch episodes that you wrote and produced and appreciate them as a "Doctor Who" fan? Or are you too occupied thinking of how the sausage got made?

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I've always been able to sit and watch my own stuff and enjoy it. Sometimes, I'll sit down and I'll just catch an episode by chance. I caught the Shakespeare episode ("The Shakespeare Code") by chance the other night and I thought it was magnificent. I really, really can watch it as a viewer. I always cultivated that in my head, you have to train yourself to watch it as brand-new, so you can see its faults and its strengths, so I've always been good at it. So I can watch it on repeats. I still love them. And thankfully, I love watching the old show as much as I did. I can still watch the old classics from the 70s and be as happy as I was when I was a kid.

'Doctor Who: The Next Doctor' review - andreikirilenkotattoo on TV

In today's column, I review "Doctor Who: The Next Doctor," the first of the five "Doctor Who" specials that will bring an end to the David Tennant/Russell T. Davies era of the series.

As both "The Next Doctor" and "Planet of the Dead" have already aired in England -- and have also therefore been illegally downloaded by many fans in America -- I'm going to remind you of the usual rule about how we're sticking to the American broadcast schedule in terms of spoilers. So no talking about any plot specifics of this movie (or the next one) in this post. I'll have a separate post up tomorrow night for discussion of "The Next Doctor" (and "Planet of the Dead" will still be verboten there). And you can read the transcript of an interview I did with Davies about "Doctor Who" and the upcoming "Torchwood: Children of Earth."

And the new Doctor Who is... this guy?

The BBC just announced the identity of the man who will take over the lead on "Doctor Who" for the new incarnation's fifth season, and it's... a 26-year-old named Matt Smith.

I'm going to profess ignorance on this, having never heard of Smith before his name joined the list of rumored candidates to replace David Tennant, alongside older, and better-known stateside guys like David Morrissey and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

If Ejiofor, or rumored front-runner Paterson Joseph, had been chosen, we would have had our first non-white Doctor. But rather than change The Doctor's ethnicity -- or his gender -- new showrunner Steven Moffat decided to go younger, with Smith easily the youngest actor to ever fill the role.

After his great individual "Doctor Who" episodes ("Blink," "The Doctor Dances," etc.) and his work elsewhere on "Jekyll," I trust Moffat pretty implicitly. But I'm curious for reaction from anyone who's actually seen Smith on stage or screen: do you think he has what it takes for the part?

Who'll be the new Doctor Who?

"Doctor Who" fan extraordinaire Ross Ruediger pointed out to me that David Tennant won't be continuing as The Doctor after the five specials that will air over the next year.

While Tennant has been superb in the role (even most old-school "Who" fans consider him one of the best Doctors ever), it does make some sense for him to move on now. Russell T. Davies, who resurrected the franchise a few years ago, is also leaving, and, as we all know, Steven Moffat (responsible for some of the best Davies-era episodes like "Blink" and "The Doctor Dances") will be taking over. We know that Moffat can write for Tennant, but it's a trademark of the franchise that a new actor takes over the role every few years.

Even before Tennant made his exit official, some fans were speculating that, whenever he left, Moffat might bring in one of his old leading men to replace him, with James Nesbitt from "Jekyll" and Richard Coyle from "Coupling" mentioned most often. I'm not incredibly plugged into the British TV scene, so let me open it up to you all: who would you like to see as The Doctor come 2010?

Doctor Who, "Journey's End": All together now

Spoilers for the "Doctor Who" season four finale coming up just as soon as I give myself a hand...

First, I want to thank all of you for exercising so much restraint last week in not attempting to ruin the "Doctor regenerates" cliffhanger -- even though the promo monkeys at Sci Fi couldn't be bothered to do the same. I know it's tricky to cut a promo for the episode without giving away whether David Tennant is still playing The Doctor, but it can be done. Hell, take a page from the way CBS used to do "Survivor" finale promos and not actually show any footage from the finale itself. Show a bunch of quick clips from these four Davies seasons (or even this season, if Sci Fi doesn't have the rights to the earlier stuff anymore), push it as Russell Davies' farewell and raise the question of whether we might have a new Doctor. Geez!

As I understand it, the BBC understood what to do and simply didn't show a promo at all, which raised a weeklong furor in the UK -- this despite the fact that all the advance publicity about David Tennant doing "Hamlet" and this forcing "Doctor Who" to do nothing but TV-movies for 2009 should have made it clear the guy was staying in the role. It's a measure of how good Tennant is in the role, and how much he and Davies have revitalized the franchise, that people bought into the cliffhanger and began wondering if they had been faked out.

Now, I'm not in love with the technobabble solution for the non-transformation, but I also didn't watch the original series and don't know how The Doctor usually reacted to his impending change. The Eccleston version of The Doctor was such a tortured soul that you could understand his desire to become a new man, even though it was clearly so upsetting to Rose. (If only she knew then how strongly she'd feel about his replacement.) Did previous Doctors get anxious about changing? Was it something they looked forward to? Something they simply treated as a fact of immortal life? Did the old series deal with the emotional implications at all?

Regardless, if it felt like a cheat, at least it was a cheat with a noble purpose. Again, Tennant seems born to play this part (and I say this as a guy who was annoyed for a really long time that Eccleston bailed so quickly), is so good at the disparate styles and tones of the franchise, so geeky and yet so dashing, that it would be a shame to say goodbye to him before finding out how Steven Moffat would write him on a weekly basis.

And it's not like the severed hand was only introduced a few episodes ago. It dates all the way back to "The Christmas Invasion," Tenant's first real appearance, and one the show has used for technobabble-y methods in the past. Beyond that, the severed hand led to the duplicate Doctor, which allowed Davies to give Rose a happy ending of sorts: he's not really her Doctor, but he's the closest she'll ever get who would be willing/able to love her and grow old with her. (On the other hand, the explanation for why Rose and the spare Doctor had to stay forever in Steel-world didn't really wash. Sure, he's hurt and genocidal and not dissimilar to Nine, but he's also mortal and doesn't have a TARDIS. What trouble would he cause? Why couldn't Rose -- with or without her mom and alterna-dad -- hang with him in our universe? It seemed mainly like Davies ensuring that Rose's story would end with his tenure.)

Though I imagine the Rose/Doctor 'shippers thrilled to the sight of Rose being all swooney with a Doctor (if not The Doctor), for me the finale's emotional centerpiece was the fate-worse-than-death suffered by poor Donna Noble. We knew something bad was coming, both because Catherine Tate only signed a one-year contract and because of how River Song reacted to Donna back in "Silence in the Library," but it was still brutal to witness Donna realizing how much she was about to lose. It's been suggested in the past that previous companions needed a long time to accept the return to normal life (see Sarah Jane in "School Reunion"), and I suppose an argument could be made that Donna is better off than if she had been banished back to Earth while remembering the wonders of the universe she had seen. I don't buy it, though, because at least Donna would have those memories, would know all the amazing things she had seen -- and, more importantly, had done -- and would have found some way to live a better life. Instead, she'll just go back to temping and cackling through girl's nights out, oblivious to the possibilities for both the world and for Donna Noble, and that stinks.

It stinks for Donna, not dramatically, I should say. As written, well and cruelly played, Mr. Davies. And Donna's lousy end was balanced by the more upbeat resolutions for Rose, and for Martha and Mickey, who presumably will be replacing Owen and Tosh on "Torchwood" season three. (Is Mickey any good with computers? I know he's mechanically inclined, but would Torchwood need to add another hacker on top of him?)

As for the rest of "Journey's End," I suppose there's a reason I've devoted so much space to either the resolution of the cliffhanger or the extended epilogue. I just don't have much to say about the body of the episode. I've long since lost interest in the Daleks -- and was gratified to read a Comic-Con dispatch where Moffat said he was going to steer clear of the classic villains as much as possible, as I'd like the screeching pepperpots to stay dead this time -- and while I acknowledge there's a lot of wicked kewl stuff going on that would feel even kewler if I was either a longtime "Who" fan or a 10-year-old boy, it ain't deep. I enjoyed seeing all the sidekicks work together and many of the more epic story beats, but when I look back on this season, my thoughts are going to turn more towards earlier episodes like "Midnight" or "Planet of the Ood" or the Moffat two-parter.

I also feel like these two episodes work better as a series finale than yet another chapter in an ongoing saga. Sure, this is basically the end of the Davies version of "Who," but the show has to keep going, and now Davies has left Moffat with a world where mankind has, in a four year span been witness to several overt alien invasions and a planetary hijacking that can't easily be explained as a mass delusion. Part of the appeal of The Doctor's interactions with contemporary society is that here's this extraordinary man wandering around a world so much like our own. What happens when every 21st century citizen he meets is jaded about the existence of extra terrestrial life, interstellar travel, etc.?

Moffat can, of course, choose to ignore this (goodness knows comic book writers do all the time; I'm not sure how an inhabitant of the Marvel Universe version of Manhattan would ever have the nerve to leave the house in the morning) or turn it into a background gag, or open up with some kind of reset button that winds up blanking the memories of everybody but The Doctor and his inner circle. But it does feel like Davies left quite a mess to be cleaned up, no?

What did everybody else think?

Doctor Who, "The Stolen Earth": Rose has got a gun

Brief spoilers for "Doctor Who" coming up just as soon as I find out why the Shadow Proclamation is so poorly-lit...

It's been a hallmark of -- and a source of criticism for -- the Russell T. Davies era of "Doctor Who" that each season ends with an apocalyptic showdown between The Doctor and one of his classic villains, with the fate of the Earth in the balance, and the threat level rising each year. So for his final finale, Davies ups the stakes yet again, with the Daleks (and their creator, Davros, last seen in the original series) relocate not only the Earth, but a couple dozen other planets from across time and space, and the threat is so big that all of The Doctor's allies from past seasons and present spin-offs -- Rose, Martha, Captain Jack and the Torchwood team, Sarah Jane and Luke, and even Harriet Jones (RIP) -- have to show up to help out.

And, as if that wasn't enough, Davies has to go and freak the whole world out by ending the episode with The Doctor getting shot only seconds before having a huggy reunion with Rose and starting to regenerate.

(And because of that cliffhanger, I'm going to put the usual warning about not discussing, or even hinting at, episodes that haven't aired in America yet, way up high. Do not, under any circumstances, make any reference to what happens in the season finale. I'm just going to delete any comments that are remotely suspect, and all you'll accomplish is annoying me.)

But what does all this noise, all these characters, all this danger really accomplish? Cool as it was to see Captain Jack hit on Sarah Jane, or Rose meeting Donna's parents, or The Doctor and Rose finally getting a good look at each other, this episode didn't have half the emotional impact for me of the stand-alone, FX-minimal, narratively-spare "Midnight" from a couple of weeks back. I know Davies loves these over-the-top finales, but I really don't think that's where his strengths lie.

I would ask for guesses on what's going to happen next, but I wonder if at this point there's anybody out there reading a blog entry about "Doctor Who" who hasn't already cheated and watched "Journey's End." If you exist, fire away, as there's an awful lot to speculate about.

One additional reminder: because the finale is extra-long, Sci Fi will start airing it at 8:30 Eastern next week, not 9. If you don't DVR it and intend to watch it live, plan accordingly.

What did everybody else think?

Doctor Who, "Turn Left": Ladies and gentlemen... the beetle!

Brief spoilers for the latest episode of "Doctor Who" coming up just as soon as I buy a raffle ticket...

Damn. Looks like Russell T. Davies is trying to make sure that his final season on the show doesn't get upstaged by the annual Steven Moffat script(s).

Davies follows the taut, Serling-esque "Midnight" with its exact opposite in the equally brilliant "Turn Left." Where "Midnight" was a claustrophobic, low-budget story with an implied theme about why The Doctor needs a companion (were Donna with him on that train to explain The Doctor's eccentricities to the terrified passengers, things would have gone very differently), "Turn Left" is an epic about just how badly the human race in general and Donna in particular need The Doctor.

What-If? stories where the world goes to hell because of a hero's absence are a superhero/sci-fi staple, but "Turn Left" felt fresh and moving because of the very human face it put on this alternate timeline. Working almost entirely without David Tennant (this year, Davies chose to do separate Doctor-light and companion-light episodes as opposed to one without either in it very much), Catherine Tate more than carries the load on her own as Donna has to suffer through a world that's broken for reasons she can't understand. She's particularly good in the "Children of Men" portion of the episode, once the Titanic destroys most of southern England and things really turn bad for the Noble family and for Great Britain.

(It was a clever touch, though, for the ruination of Britain to have a silver lining during the Sontaran invasion. Also, what happened with the Adipose fat cells, sans Doctor, would seem to put the lie to my theory that nothing bad would have happened if The Doctor and Donna hadn't disrupted the plan.)

Because Davies has built such a memorable and elaborate world over the past four seasons, he was able to easily conjure up a nightmare version of seasons three and four where the same menaces came and the likes of Martha, Sarah Jane and Gwen Cooper died to prevent (some of) them. And because one of the hallmarks of the Davies-era "Doctor Who" is the writers' ability to conjure great sympathy for doomed characters in only a few minutes of screen time, the moment where Donna says goodbye to her falsely-chipper Italian neighbor earned whatever tears it may have generated.

I did find the ending a bit of a cheat, in that Donna seems to be right about the old timeline reasserting itself and bringing her back to life. But Rose (who fit right in again, rather than evoking Billie Piper's new job) seems to know quite a lot about various versions of our timeline, so I fear there may be more bad things to come for my favorite companion of the modern series.

As always, usual warning applies: we are respecting the American schedule and will not discuss anything having to do with the season's final two episodes until after they air here. Any comments with spoilers about those episodes will be deleted by me.

What did everybody else think?

Doctor Who, "Midnight": Strangers on a train

Busy with press tour, so I'll be brief, but spoilers for "Doctor Who" coming up just as soon as I repeat myself...

When I saw the preview for "Midnight," and then saw that Russell T. Davies himself had written it, I assumed it would be a continuation of the disaster movie fetish he showed off in "Voyage of the Damned," or maybe some idea he originally had for "Voyage" before taking the Christmas movie off in a different direction. And though "Midnight" starts off in a similar vein -- The Doctor trapped on a badly-damaged pleasure craft with a group of colorful strangers -- it quickly veers off in a different, and much more interesting, direction.

I've been more scared by other "Doctor Who" episodes ("Blink," to name one), but I've rarely been as disturbed as I was by this one. It's a straight-up horror story, less creepy because of the monster than because of the effect she/it has on the other passengers. In some ways, the building paranoia and infighting reminded me of "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street," one of the best "Twilight Zone" episodes ever; there's a genuine alien threat present, but the bigger threat is what it makes the humans do.

What's interesting is the way this episode seems to take place in the future and yet in a part of the universe where humans haven't had much exposure to aliens. The characters were much more xenophobic than I'm used to seeing in The Doctor's travels.)

As always, we are going to respect the American broadcast order, which means no talk, however vague, about the season's final three episodes. Any comment that discusses episodes that have yet to air here will be deleted.

What did everybody else think?

Doctor Who, "Forest of the Dead": 'Tis a far, far better thing I do...

Spoilers for tonight's "Doctor Who" coming up just as soon as I take my daughter to the playground...

Due to a time crunch, I'm going to be briefer about this one than I'd like. The Steven Moffat-scripted episodes of "Doctor Who" are always special (though we'll see if he can maintain that quality when he's running the show in 2010 instead of parachuting in for one or two episodes a year), and there's a lot I could say about "Forest of the Dead" that I just don't have time for.

There were some complaints last week that "Silence in the Library" played a little too much like Moffat's Greatest Hits, with River Song's out-of-sequence relationship echoing Sally Sparrow from "Blink" (though the more obvious parallel was the one I made, to "The Time Traveler's Wife"), the Vashta Nerada as the new nanongenes, "Hey, Who Turned Out the Lights?" replacing "Are You My Mommy?," etc.

I don't know that "Forest of the Dead" is going to quiet that notion for the dissenters, as the finale -- with the souls trapped in the mainframe restored to their bodies and River and her dead crewmembers granted eternal life of a sort inside the repaired computer -- is very much in the "Everybody lives!" vein of "The Doctor Dances." (Even Moffat seems to have recognized that this is a pattern for him, and promised that there will be more permanent deaths once he's the showrunner.)

But in some ways, I compare what Moffat does to a great musician. There are enough recurring themes and stylistic elements in, say, a Bruce Springsteen song that you'd know it was one of his even if you put another singer in front of the E Street Band, but that doesn't lessen the impact of hearing the latest variation on the theme, because the innate craftsmanship is so good.

Take Donna's alternate life inside the computer. I've seen variations on this story before on other sci-fi shows (most famously "The Inner Light" from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," where Picard spent an entire lifetime and had many children and grandchildren in the space of a few real-world minutes), but the dream logic nature of that existence and Catherine Tate's performance as Donna began to realize that her kids weren't real made it feel like its own thing. And then Moffat went and gave the thing its own vicious kick by having Donna's computer husband turn out to be very real but unable to call out to her because of the stammer that he'd spent so much time establishing earlier in the episode. Take the size of the universe, multiply it by the number of eras that The Doctor can take Donna to on the TARDIS, and you have the odds of her ever running into her fella again -- especially since she doesn't even know to look for him. So cruel. So perfect.

Even The Doctor figuring out a way to save River (and to let her spend the rest of her days palling around with Proper Dave, Other Dave, Anita and the restored Miss Evanglista) wasn't quite the happy ending it initially seems. The Doctor did, after all, hand over ownership of the planet to the Vashta Nerada, so it's not like he can come and visit her whenever he's in a romantic mood. Obviously, he has the ability to go visit younger versions of River, and we know that he'll either seek her out or run into her again one day, but barring something incredibly clever, there will never be a moment in time where the two of them can be on equal footing in their knowledge of the other.

I really, really enjoyed this one. The Doctor opening the TARDIS with a snap of his fingers was practically worth the price of admission by itself, with all that it signified.

As always, a reminder: we're respecting the American broadcast schedule, so no talk, however vague, about things happening in episodes that have yet to air in America. Got it?

What did everybody else think?