(703) The Long Game

I have a friend who really has a dislike for Rose Tyler and for the past ten years I have never really understood this but yesterday’s episode and todays episode have started to make me understand his point of view. This is the second (and final) episode to feature Adam and this is an episode that really kick starts the whole Bad Wolf story arc. The setting for todays episode is the same one that gets used in the series finale and the events in this episode shape what happens in those episodes. Rose gets to show off to her new boyfriend by pretending to be cleverer than she normally is. Even this scene is annoying me and it’s only the first few minutes. There are plenty of things that are annoying me about Rose and Adam. Rose decides to make the wonderful idea of giving Adam her phone and he uses it to ring home (like an annoying ET) and also the TARDIS key. When Adam isn’t around then Rose is less annoying but only just.

Before he was Scotty in the new Star Trek movies, Simon Pegg was slumming it in this episode as the Editor. He is quite good as the white hair and eyebrows gives an impressive visual for a baddie. Although the Editor is not actually the boss. It’s a rather reigned in performance from the ones that Pegg gives in movies and tv shows that he has appeared in. It’s quite funny that Pegg appears in this episode and yet it would be nearly a decade before Nick Frost would make his appearance.

The performances from Christine Adams (Cathica) and Anna Maxwell-Martin (Suki) are quite good. Suki comes across as a shy nice girl at first but then shows her true self before being ‘killed’ by the monster with the longest name in Doctor Who history. Cathica does save the day but on a couple of occasions she moans that she should be promoted and even when the transferring the heat up towards floor 500 she says she should have been promoted even though she would have ended up like Suki. It’s a mentality that I just don’t understand.

The monster with the longest name in Doctor Who history is called the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe. As a creature it’s rather good design and even after the last decade, the effects are still impressive. Even the brain port thing is rather good and even though there are some ropey moments its still good by todays standards. I would have like more of it but that’s the downside of the forty-five minute format.

The final scene sees Adam get his comeuppance when he gets dumped at home and told that if he shows that hole in the head thing of his he will get dissected (sadly not in the literal sense). I haven’t been this glad to see the back of someone in the show before. Even with Dodo and Adric I felt that there was something to like about them and so their departures weren’t 100% happy ones. This episode wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be when I woke up this morning. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and it only exists to serve the purpose of setting up the final two episodes. I don’t think that the next episode is going to go down well because its another episode which what Rose wants is the most important thing. The Tyler family backstory really starts in this episode. Sigh!!