Let's Kill Hitler. Review.

Gadzooks! The world's longest-running sci-fi show's back!

And that means it's time for not-quite-the-world's-longest-running-blog to cast off its mothballs, dust itself down, straighten its bow tie and fling itself once more into the Time Stream.

Needless to say the show returns with a mix of confusion, camera angles and flashbacks as the Doctor, Amy and Rory find themselves joined against their will by Amy's never-before-mentioned ever-present childhood friend Mels who holds the Doctor at gunpoint and demands he takes them back in time to kill  Hitler.

It turns out Mels is not the only one with that thought, because a robot controlled by tiny people who live inside it's out to do the same. Basically it's a cross between Robert Patrick's shape-shifting Terminator and the Numskulls from The Beano, with a control room that's clearly a nod to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Unfortunately Mels' plan's foiled as the TARDIS crashes into the room just as the deed's about to be done, thus saving Hitler's life. Hooray!

Or, then again, perhaps not.

While Hitler surviving may or may not be good news, one thing that definitely is good news is that, in the melee, the mind-bogglingly annoying Mels is hit by a stray bullet.

The not so good news is she promptly regenerates into River Song, leaving it clear that Steven Moffat's determined to inflict her on us at every possible opportunity. Having been brainwashed by the bad guys, she poisons the Doctor by kissing him, then leaves him to die as she sets off to cause trouble in 1930s' Berlin.

Unfortunately for her, the crew of the Terminator/Numskulls robot decide to have a go at punishing her for killing the Doctor, as Amy and Rory find themselves aboard it and facing death at the hands of its mechanical anti-bodies. Happily it's all sorted out as River gets a fit of conscience and saves Amy and Rory with the TARDIS then cures the Doctor by giving him the rest of her remaining regenerations. With River recuperating in the best hospital in the universe, the Doctor and his mates go off in search of yet more adventures.

It's the sign of a good critic that they have a strong opinion on everything. Needless to say, I don't have a strong opinion on this episode. It was OK. It wasn't terrible. It was a little irritating in places, especially early on - the Numskulls robot feeling particularly gimmicky - while Moffat's obsession with River Song has long-since drifted into the realms of self-indulgence to a degree that makes you wonder if he thinks he's making the River Song show.

Still, for once with a River Song story, it manages to avoid throwing up too many new mysteries. I think the only addition we get here is the nature of the oldest question in the Universe, which apparently lies at the heart of everything that's going on. Of course, the question can be relied on to involve the Doctor, as the show's become so insular that everything in Moffat's Who Universe ultimately comes down to the current cast of characters.

While the episode didn't throw up too many new riddles, it did little to remove any old ones, effectively leaving us none the wiser about anything. Alex Kingston's clearly enjoying herself, Rory still seems to have no purpose other than to be a sidekick to a sidekick, and Moffat gets to do his usual thing of killing a character before bringing them back again. I suppose we just have to accept we're going to keep getting  River Song story lines until Moffat finally decides he can be bothered with concluding an arc that clearly interests him a lot more than it does some of its audience. While Let's Kill Hitler's all harmless, time-passing fun for the seasoned Who viewer, you can't help wondering how an episode like this'd strike someone who's never seen the show before.

Still, next week looks to be non-River Song related, and the monsters look suitably creepy, so hopefully we'll be given simpler fare before we're flung again into the endless world of the Silence and their endless machinations.

Dr Who Season 6b trailer for 2011 released. Spoilerish.

Steve Does Dr Who breaks its awesome silence to belatedly notice the BBC have released a trailer for the second half of this year's Dr Who Season 6. There's a few too many familiar monsters for my comfort but fortunately there's one or two new ones and we do get an intriguing shot of River Song. It looks like Amy's getting handy with swords again and who doesn't want to see minotaurs?

The main question I suppose is will the second half of this season finally wrap up all the loose plot strands or will it all spill over into next year's series? When will we finally know what's going on? When? When?

A Good Man Goes to War. Review (Mahoosive spoilers).

Dr Who's first mini-series of 2011 comes to an end with a story that no one with any sense ever thought would tie up all its loose ends, and surely everyone knew would create new ones.

Having decided to rescue Amy from the evil eye-patch woman and her lackeys, the Doctor recruits an unlikely army of Silurians, a Sontaran, a blue man and some pirates before setting off to get her back. After a daring raid on the bad guys' asteroid, it seems he's succeeded but, while he frees Amy, in his over-confidence he fails to realise until too late that he's not rescued her baby, leading to the deaths of a number of his accomplices and giving River Song a chance to hand him a Davros-style lecture about his nature before she finally gets round to revealing who she actually is.

To be honest, the River Song revelation's not that big a shock - there weren't that many people she could be and still have it mean anything in context of the show, and I think most viewers had noted the similarity between the names Pond and River. So, when it comes, it feels a bit lame especially as we're exposed to the unlikely sight of Alex Kingston claiming to be Karen Gillan's daughter. Still, at least we've finally got that mystery out of the way.

If the thing has the air of an epic and is clearly in some places in debt to Star Wars, its main triumphs are ones of characterisation, as we're introduced to what must be the only Sontaran nurse in the universe, a lesbian Silurian Victorian super-sleuth and a young woman who's joined the bad guys purely so she'll get the chance to meet the Doctor again after once encountering him as a girl. Steven Moffat really does like to have the Doctor first encounter characters when they're children, doesn't he?

Did we ever think we'd encounter a likeable Sontaran? Probably not but Dan Starkey plays the part of Commander Strax beautifully, fully exploiting the ludicrousness of a character who cheerfully threatens to kill you while also giving you helpful health advice, and you have to love his dying words to Rory; "A warrior? Rory, I'm a nurse," giving Rory as much of a reality check as the Doctor's had to receive. The episode's full of such neat ironies, including Amy's part Time-Lord baby being put in the Doctor's old cot. There's also the revelation that the Doctor can allegedly speak Baby Language.

That aside, the amount of build-up the Doctor gets in this episode's quite startling and there's no denying that, clearly starting to believe his own publicity, he needs to be taken down a peg or two - although it's hard to see how the writers can possibly turn the Doctor away from seeming like the deadliest being in the universe after all the triumphs against ridiculous odds he's had over the decades and all the ones he'll inevitably have  in the future.

Probably the weakest element character-wise is the sight of Rory being bad-ass with the Cybermen. It doesn't matter how hard Arthur Darvill tries, it's still impossible to see him as anything other than amiably inept.

If Russell T Davies got accused of sometimes trying to cram too much into his epics, Steven Moffat takes it to a whole other level as he tries to pack an entire RTD style two-parter into just 45 minutes. Largely he succeeds. Despite so much having to be fitted in, the pacing mostly feels right. At times it all seems a bit too pumped up for Dr Who - especially the Doctor enjoying the Spitfire attack on the base a little too much for comfort - but, in fairness, that issue's addressed with River Song's lecture.

So, the Doctor's succeeded and he's failed. What next? We still don't know who's actually behind the scheme to nab Amy's baby - although there's an obvious set of suspects - and how does Hitler fit into it all? We'll have to wait a couple of months to find out.

But just what was that post-credits shot all about?

The Almost People. Review.

Just as last night's Champions' League final was a game of two halves - with a lot more of interest happening in the Manchester United half than the Barcelona one - so, after a first part that left the story with seemingly nowhere to go and threatened to give us forty five minutes of barely more than people shouting, The Almost People somehow manages to be an improvement on The Rebel Flesh.

Despite a paper thin plot - the original staff are in one room and decide to move to another - it throws in enough twists, turns, details and deaths to keep us going, as the Doctor teams up with his duplicate to try and get as many people out of the acid factory alive as possible.

The ganger Jennifer. Sometimes adrip but
rarely a drip.

Granted, none of the twists are actually surprising, and the revelation that the Doctor and "John Smith" have swapped places is about as unexpected as the "shock" revelation at the end of Part One but it all keeps the story moving. Plus, Matt Smith's clearly having fun playing two parts at once. The right people get killed along the way; the original Jennifer really was a drip, the world didn't need two Jimmys going on endlessly about their son, and the charmless Buzzer was always asking to be eaten.

The exception to the right people getting killed was the ultimate survival of the original Cleaves who'd been a thoroughly unpleasant and block-headed individual all the way through. I suppose we have to put her unpleasantness down to the blood clot in her brain, and her later personality change down to its removal. But why do I get a feeling the duplicate Cleaves and Doctor will be back before the end of the series?

If it was mostly an entertaining episode, and the factory staff turned out to be more interesting than in The Rebel Flesh, the main downsides involved the assistants. Rory really is spectacularly stupid in this half, trusting "Jennifer" to a ridiculous degree, even when she's acting in a manner that should set alarm bells ringing in the emptiest of heads. Happily operating machinery, without the slightest clue what it's supposed to do, really doesn't reflect well on a man. As for, "This wheel's way too hard for a girl to turn," Argh!.

Amy, meanwhile, is consistently stupid and unpleasant, tactlessly insulting the duplicate Doctor who's trying to save her, and, for no good reason, blurting out that she's seen him die. I suppose we could put it down to her being a  duplicate and not the real deal but sadly her stupidity and ignorance here aren't out of character for the original Amy.

And that brings us the climax that threatens to overshadow the whole episode, as we get the reveal that the Amy we've been following for the last few weeks isn't Amy at all but a ganger, while the real Amy lies in a room somewhere, about to give birth, as Frances Barber shows off her taste in lipstick.

Compelling a revelation as it is, the ginger ganger is the episode's real problem. After two episodes of the Doctor telling us that gangers are real people too and should be allowed to live, he then, at the tale's climax, whips out his sonic screwdriver (where did he get that from? He's already given it to his lookalike) and ruthlessly destroys the fake Amy for no reason at all. I assume this section was written by Steven Moffat rather than Matthew Graham and it seems that either Moffat hadn't at that point read Graham's script or simply didn't care about it, as the Doctor's action here takes the philosophical point Graham's just spent two episodes making, screws it up and throws it in the bin.

So, Amy's about to give birth. But to what? Will it be the space suit girl? Will it be River Song? Will it be to a football team that can actually take on Barcelona? Only next week will tell us. Will we be there? Of course we will. Will we have a clue what's going on? Don't bet your bow-tie on it.

The Rebel Flesh. Review.

The Rapture having bypassed my house completely, it's time instead for the TARDIS to take us where angels fear to flap, as we plunge into the depths of space and go further than we've ever gone before.

Up North.

It might not've been the end of the world on planet Earth but in the TARDIS it's feeling a little Apocalyptical as, blasted by a solar storm, the Doctor and his mates are forced to emergency land on an island-based factory employed in the creation of a wildly corrosive acid. In order to reduce the risk of them being dissolved in their own produce, the staff - who all seem to be from north of Watford - create mindless copies of themselves, called Gangers, that they control mentally in order to get them do the dangerous work.

Unfortunately, during the next burst of solar activity, the Gangers gain wills of their own, and the original staff and their duplicates soon find themselves at war with each other, as the Doctor deals with lookalike problems of his own.

After last week's determinedly offbeat offering, we're back with that old Who standby the base under siege. The twist being that the base this time is under siege from itself. The Rebel Flesh is an episode that keeps hovering on the brink of developing into something genuinely interesting but never seems to have the will to do so. The opening - with its depiction of Life On Mars/Ashes to Ashes' Marshall Lancaster being dissolved in acid but not being that bothered - holds out a promise that we're going to be given a dark comedy.

But then we aren't.

Later, with it not being clear just who's an original and who's a copy, the show threatens to become a The Thing style venture into paranoia.

But then it doesn't.

Next it threatens to become an exploration of the ethics of creating lifeforms purely to do the dying for us.

But then it doesn't.

Next it threatens to become an exploration of what it is to be human.

But then it doesn't.

Finally it threatens to become an exploration of the nature of identity.

But then it doesn't.

The fact that none of these potentially interesting directions are more than passingly explored, as the tale settles for just being about some dull people versus some other dull people, means that while it's not an actively terrible episode, it's also not very gripping. In fact, the most interesting thing to me is that Rory finally acknowledges his own personal elephant in the room by joking about his alarming tendency to die on a regular basis.

Amy, meanwhile, has her own elephant to deal with as she yet again runs into the eye-patch hatch woman. If only the Doctor would tell Amy about the phantom pregnancy. If only Amy would tell the Doctor about the eye-patch hatch woman.

Among everything that's going on, there's a member of staff who keeps sneezing. My in-depth knowledge of sci-fi cliché tells me this may prove to be the story's pivotal point. Do the lookalikes lack an immunity to the common cold that'll see them off? And is there significance to the fact that the workforce haven't heard from the mainland for a while?

With its refusal to focus on more interesting themes and its similarity to previous Nu-Who stories like Waters of Mars, The Impossible Planet and even last year's Silurian two-parter, The Rebel Flesh seems a little too familiar to fully intrigue, and at times comes dangerously close to feeling like it was written by the ten deadly fingers of Chris Chibnall. Moreover, with its extremely limiting setting and it's not overly compelling threat, it's hard to see where the tale can go in the second half. It's therefore worrying that the trailer for next week seems to consist not of plot developments, twists, turns and intrigue but almost entirely of people shouting. We can only hope the BBC're simply keeping the best bits from us.

The Doctor's Wife. Review.

Hiring Neil Gaiman to write a Dr Who episode was always going to be a risk. Despite the acclaim that's been heaped on him over the years, the truth is Gaiman's never totally mastered many of the basic skills of story-telling, such as plot, character and endings. He also has a tendency to go for style over substance to a degree that can leave his work teetering on the cliff edge of total pointlessness. In a comic book these weaknesses can be overlooked and even become a strength. Comics are a visual medium - and an abstract one to boot - in which a writer can get away with plenty as long as his scripts give an artist the ability to weave a certain kind of magic. No one ever accused Stan Lee, for instance, of being the world's greatest writer but that didn't stop his comics being classics.

Television, on the other hand is a more demanding mistress. There's no artist to fill the chinks in a writer's armour, and the use of real people and sets, rather than stylised drawings, gives it a literalism that demands a whole other mindset.

Receiving what appears to be a message from another Time Lord, the Doctor leaves the universe and lands on a living planet called House - but not before House steals the TARDIS' matrix - its "soul" - and put it into the body of a woman called Idris. After the Doctor's had the chance to meet the annoying locals, House's life-force leaves the Doctor and Idris behind, takes control of the TARDIS' physical shell and sets off to wreak havoc in our Universe. Can our hero catch up with him and restore the TARDIS' soul to its body before it's too late?

Of course he can - it'd be the end of the show if he didn't - but not before he gets to spend time with the woman the TARDIS has now become.

It's hard to know what to make of it. On first viewing, the thing's so inept in its story-telling that it feels like we've been TARDISed back to the grim days of Sylvester McCoy, while the actors playing Auntie and Uncle produce some of the worst acting you'll ever see on a TV screen. In fairness, as they're acting just like you expect Neil Gaiman characters to act, I suppose you have to absolve them of blame and assume they're simply doing what they've been told to.

If in the episode's first half, Gaiman at least pays lip service to trying to tell something that resembles a story, in its second he gives up altogether as we're given the Doctor trying to build a TARDIS from scratch while Rory and Amy run around corridors for what feels like an eternity. For fans of fake deaths, we also get the sight of Rory seeming to die and then being alive again. There's a novelty.

It doesn't help that, as House, Michael Sheen delivers all his lines with the vigour of an "I Speak Your Weight" machine, guaranteeing that Gaiman's inevitably weak - and hard to follow - ending is even less involving than it needs to be.

On second viewing, the first half does feature some neat foreshadowing that relates to events in the second half, and the episode's real saving grace, Suranne Jones' performance as Idris, shines through, meaning it's not the complete disaster it initially seemed but, after the poor Neverwhere and now this, should Gaiman be allowed to write for TV again?

Probably not. His weaknesses are simply fatal in such an on-the-nail medium and his strengths have no way to express themselves amid such literalism.

But that's for Gaiman to worry about. For the viewer, the main concern has to be that, after a hugely promising debut, each episode of this current series has been weaker than the one before, and the trailer for next week's really doesn't look promising at all. Steven Moffat's proven he can write Dr Who but the worry is that, as show runner, he's threatening to be the man who steered the ship straight at the iceberg. The Doctor found his way back to our universe but can the show find its way back to where it needs to be? Or was my feeling that I'd been transported back to the late 1980s disturbingly apt? Will subsequent episodes bring a stirring turnaround or merely the beginning of the end?

Steve McDonald's The Doctor's Wife. Vital news!

Hello. Just popping in to make a quick announcement for anyone who might be on tenterhooks awaiting my pronouncements on Neil Gaiman's The Doctor's Wife. Thanks to it being a matter of life or death that I watch tonight's Eurovision Song Contest (come on, Jedward!), my review of said episode won't be posted until tomorrow (Sunday).

In the meantime, I have no doubt at all that Jedward will bring the bacon home for Blighty.

They are representing Blighty, aren't they?