Good Bye Doctor Who (for now) An Overview of the Last 4 Years
Mr Blackett and Mr Morgan were horrified when I accidentally mentioned that I wasn’t entirely up to date on everything Who-ful, so they suggested I should sit down for every spare minute possible and absorb as much of the latest four seasons as possible, hip hip wooray.
A review of the whole of Doctor after the break – but no spoilers, coz if any of this comes as a shock, shame on you.
For anyone who has swallowed a ret-con pill recently, the Doctor is a Time Lord, who travels in his TARDIS saving the world(s) zillions of times over, accompanied by his companion(s). In the last four series, the main characters have been the Doctor (Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant), Rose, Martha and Donna the companions played by Billie Piper, Freema Agyemen and Catherine Tate, and other minor companions such as Sarah-Jane Smith, Jack Harness and Mickey Smith (Elizabeth Sladen, John Barrowman and Noel Clarke). The head writer for the first 4 series was Russell T Davies, but now he’s handing over to Stephen Moffat.
My thoughts so far – Christopher Eccleston (him of the alienly huge ears) is not as amazing as David Tennant (him of the incredible hair), however he’s good to start off the re-introduction of the Who-niverse to 21st Century popular culture. My favourite episodes are ‘Blink’ (very scary) from series 3, written by Moffat, ‘Midnight’ written from series 4, by RTD and ‘The Fires of Pompeii’ by James Moran from series 4.
My favourite monsters are the clockwork, masked androids from ‘The girl in the Fireplace’ in series 2. Or possibly the adipose from series 4, but not sure if these (below) count as monsters!
There are 3 Christmas specials (so far, oooooh) ‘The Christmas Invasion’ with the first sight of David Tennant, ‘The Runaway Bride’ where we first saw Donna Noble as the Doctor’s companion, and ‘Voyage of the Damned’ where Kylie, yes Kylie, the Major Minogue, played the companion, a waitress on the starship Titanic called Astrid Peth.
The fourth of the special Doctor Who themed things was a concert in November 2006 for Children in Need, featuring suites of incidental music from the first 2 series conducted by Ben Foster (swoon).
The final episodes of series 4 were broadcast last Saturday, and have been aired many a time on various BBC channels this week, so I won’t accept any complaints about not getting a chance to see them. In a list of adjectives it was happy (rose gets back to the doctor), sad (“death” of Donna), funny (Harriet Jones, we know who she is), serious (Davros’s reality bomb demonstration), brilliantly clever (Doctor Donna), and wonderfully simple (the Daleks speaking German in the scenes in Berlin), with some fantastic examples of acting (Wilf Noble played by Bernard Cribbins topping the list for me). The end of the last episode was very moving for me – Donna losing her memory of all the adventures of the last series and going back to being a ditzy office temp, and not caring about the Doctor leaving (sob), but the very brief preview of the Christmas special got my hearts pumping again…heart, heart pumping again 
The replacement for Saturday evenings is a drama called ‘Merlin’…we shall judge
Aloha, you’re friendly neighbourhood Mark
