Christmas Dr Who

SPOILER WARNING

I finally caught up with the full Christmas Dr Who episode and was a but underwhelmed. After seeing the full trailer weeks ago I was almost certain that David Morrisey would not be a future incarnation of the Doctor, but an impersonator of some sort and I was proved correct. He was just too insistant on identifying himself:

"I'm the Doctor. Simply the Doctor. The one, the only and the best!" The real Doctor would never identify himself so freely and be so boastful, would he?

As soon as the infostamp was mentioned then I realised what had happened, especially as the body of the supposedly deceased Jackson Lake had never been found. It had to be him, with his mind altered by the infostamp somehow.

It was a realy nice touch to view all the (known) faces of the Doctor in the images from the infostamp, they even pictured Paul McGann, which they should!

But, even after the "truth" was revealed about Jackson Lake, I still feel that there is scope for the Doctor to become him at some point in the future. It could be that this is a double bluff, to get all the speculation about the real "next" Doctor away from Neil Morrisey. If you noticed, Jackson Lake's "son" never actually acknowledged his "father," he might not have recognised him (being in shock), or it could be that he doesn't know him and that Lake IS really the Doctor from some future point in time and couldn't let the "present" Doctor know it for some reason. And, right at the end, it could have been a little clue when the "present" Doctor said to Lake;

"If anyone had to be the Doctor, I'm glad it was you." If that is not affirmation of a fellow Doctor then I don't know what is! Have I made any sense? Probably not. I'll have to talk it through with Tim tonight while we are having drinkies.

Overall I did think that the whole story line was very formulaic:

Human sells out her own race to aliens and gets conned by them, Doctor makes her realise the error of her ways just before she "dies." Companion, Rosita, saves the Doctor a couple of times (in small ways). One local (usually a young man and a bit handsome, i.e. Jed) helps the Doctor defeat the baddies. Etc etc.

I wasn't keen on the "giant robot" Cyber King or the Cyber-Puli beasts either. Many of the effects looked like effects (the robot, the Doctor swinging on a rope etc), and I hope, now that I have said that, that Tim didn't work on them! Oops if he did!

Dirvla Kirwan was one redeaming feature in the episode, playing Miss Hartigan, and I hope that she returns at some point, maybe from a time before she became involved in the story.

Hopefully the next episode, "Planet of the Dead" will redeam the "series" of specials that is replacing a normal series this coming year. We shall have to wait and see, at least until Easter when I believe the next special is to be shown.