Doctor Who: The season finale

[caddyman]

Here's what I don't get.

Viewers can accept time travel, they can accept a machine that is bigger on the inside than out, they can accept an alien who is able to regenerate instead of die. They can accept him being 900+ years old. They can accept 27 planets being hijacked and taken out of time. They can accept the concept of parallel universes and teleportation.

But the TARDIS towing a planet? Well that's just plain barmy. Taking someone's memory to preserve their sanity? Preposterous! Complaining because the lead character didn't die and become someone else, because that's acceptable and survival isn't.

Where the episode did fall down was, as ash1977law had it, too much storyline and not enough time to develop it, coupled with too many guest appearances from fan favourites and, taken as a two parter, two too many pointless guest celebs: viz Richard Dawkins and Paul O'Grady.

Given the concept underlying the show, odd happenings, bizarre and unbelievable, should be the norm, where the Doctor is concerned. He inhabits a world of magic and the fey. The Doctor's world is, by definition, bonkers and bonkers things should happen in it, but they need to be played deadly straight. The Doctor and his immediate allies and foes should do strange, inexplicable things and they way they do them, particularly the Doctor, should be largely indistinguishable from magic.

Where it all falls down is the way normal people - the so much ones not in the know - deal with inexplicable, earth shattering and frankly impossible events. So no, where the episode wobbled for me, was the reaction of the good citizens of earth once the rest button had been hit and once again Earth was third rock from the sun. Instant firework displays and news bulletins with "Earth back in orbit"? That is the bit that was unbelievable, because that is the bit that should not have required a suspension of disbelief.

Towing a planet home, why not? For once there are enough people to work the controls of a piece of magic Time Lord technology; who knows what it can do if there are enough people working it? The valedictory, all-chums-on-a-day-out-in-the-country method of portraying it was poor, particularly after the descent into parody in the way Doctordonna dispatched the Daleks.

And overlying and underpinning and any other metaphor for all that is the fact that it is, when all is said and done, a family programme focused on the kids. It is not and never has been hard science fiction, though sometimes the producers forget that.

In the end, there were three faults:

Too much story, too little time to tell it.

Too little self-control in some (parts of) of the production and performances.

Poor depictions of normality in the face of the incredible.

Not a jump the shark story by any stretch, if only because the format of Doctor Who allows for anything to happen at any time in any place, so it doesn't betoken the end of the franchise in the way that it would in a more traditional, linear format, but a deeply flawed piece of story telling.

Not a disaster, but equally, not a triumph.