Doctor Who s3 finale review

I’ll hold my hands up to the fact that, over the last three episodes, I’ve expended a little too much enthusiasm on the Who. There’s been extensive love for Steven Moffat and the T Davies, the odd ‘Kerblowee’, and far too many exclamation marks. Now they’ve all been thrown back in my face like so much word and grammatical vomit. Time for a list, methinks.

Biggest problem first: I’m always thoroughly annoyed when vague mentions of ‘faith’ are used to cover up plot holes in any programme, and the Doctor channelling people’s belief through the Archangel network was one of the worst offenders. I always thought the point of Doctor Who was that ingenuity and fighting spirit would win the day (which, incidentally, was exactly what Martha Jones was doing up to the end). But no; apparently, it’s about blind faith and some rubbish about psychic powers. That’s right, make the Tenth Doctor hover. That’ll help his God complex.

So, now we now how the world works, let’s give it a shot. Come on Den readers – at 11am on Wednesday, everyone think ‘Hover Nazis’. If we all say it out loud at once, then it’ll come true/help them regenerate/something like that! Wow. Humans are great, aren’t they? Apart from the ‘getting oppressed’ bit. We kind of suck at that game.

What was probably most annoying about the episode was how much it threw away. Really, can you remember how they wiled away 50 minutes? They didn’t give Captain Jack anything to do. The aged CGI Doctor was plain daft. And I really didn’t keep on top of what exactly the Master’s dastardly empire-building plan was, existing as it did exclusively on a couple of CGI shots of rockets.

And then there was the Toclafane. It was such a hypnotically wonderful idea that, after the Doctor wouldn’t shut up all series about humans keep on surviving everything, that humanity survived to the end of time – only to go mad and cannibalise themselves. The volume of ‘end of civilisation’ commentary to be wrangled out of it was enormous. But the entire topic was boxed in favour of – well, I don’t remember to be honest. Like Utopia will apparently turn out to be, the episode was something of a nothingness, designed to infantilise the human race.

Now Martha Jones has been kicked out of the Tardis despite being awesome (I could write something about the latent racism of the British viewing public – you know, the same one that annually kicks black contestants out of TV talent shows earlier than the white ones. I could. But I won’t.) Tennant hasn’t been shown the door. And, if that was the T Davies’ swansong, he sure managed to keep the worst ‘til last. They can officially count the Tardis one viewer lighter. I can’t be bothered with this lot any more.