(707) Boom Town

Russell T Davies made a critical and important decision. He realised that a good portion of the budget for the show should be spent on the final two episodes and so sacrificed any special effects money from a single episode and sent it to the series finale. So this is the cheap episode. I use the term cheap loosely because no episode of Doctor Who is cheap and an argument could be made that there were less visual effects in the previous two parter but that’s for another blog.

There is a reminder of what happened in Aliens of London and World War Three which leads us into a nice pre-title scene showing that Annette Badland’s Slitheen somehow survived the blast on Downing Street. With this being a ‘cheap’ episode it means that it’s more of a character piece. What makes it different is that the character in question is the Slitheen. She starts the episode by killing someone and then just as she’s about to kill a nosey journalist she has a change of heart.

The Doctor plans to take Margaret Slitheen back home but she is going to be executed when she gets back and so it then becomes a question as to whether the Doctor can basically send someone to their death and it tests the Doctor’s morality. There is a great scene with all of them in the TARDIS about who is actually the monster and there is a great stare down between Margaret and the regulars and Margaret wins each time. When Margaret and the Doctor go out for a meal it’s a wonderfully tense part of the episode because Margaret thinks that just because she let one person live that means she is able to change. It’s a great performance from Badland and it’s a shame that she didn’t get more of the screen time in the Slitheen two-parter because she really is a very good actress and she more than holds her own against Christopher Eccleston.

Mickey joins the team which is making this seem like the Scooby gang. Mickey does seem to be more of a comedic Mickey. The relationship between Mickey and Rose is still boring and when they were having there scene by the bay I just wanted to be back with the Doctor and Margaret. I was so fed up with it they made ME hate Trisha Delaney. Mickey moans that Rose will always pick the Doctor over him and to be honest, with the amount of whinging he does, it’s not hard to see why she would make that decision. It’s a shame that Noel Clarke seems to have been reduced to this because he deserves better.

There is a lovely amount of comedy and there are too many to mention but for some reason the comedy works to the stories advantage and its one of the things that I like about it. However when it needs to stop, when things a bit bombastic then the comedy makes way for the drama and  the shift in tone happens in quite a seamless way.

Margaret is defeated by looking into the heart of the TARDIS and going back to being an egg and she gets have a second chance at life which is quite a clever way to get the Doctor out of a particular problem because he doesn’t let Margaret go and he doesn’t take her to her death and so the episode is ended in a satisfactory way. It’s been a fun episode an a largely unappreciated episode of the new series that lives within the constricts that has been imposed by the executive producer and writer of this very episode rather well. Now the finale has arrived and this is when things start to get ramped up and more importantly the beginning of the end of the Eccleston era.