N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
There’s something of the difficult-second-album syndrome about Series Two of twenty-first century Doctor Who.
“One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.”
Reinette, The Girl in the Fireplace
There’s still plenty of good stuff, but there’s also some not-so-good stuff; there’s some stuff that’s experimental, and some stuff that tries to emulate the successes of the first series. So you know, classic second album in the manner of say, The Stone Roses’ Second Coming.
The good — The Girl in the Fireplace — well, it’s very good — arguably better than anything from Series One. The not-so-good — Rise of the Cybemen / The Age of Steel — is similarly worse than anything from the previous series.
But the traditional — The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit — and the experimental — Love and Monsters, Fear Her, the minute-long TARDISodes that preceded each week’s episode — are never anything less than worth watching.
David Tennant’s Doctor is instantly likeable — even with that streak of lonely god arrogance — and Billie Piper as Rose is possibly even better than she was in the first series. So I have no problem with Series Two being that difficult and uneven second album, even if its main theme — the love story of the Doctor and Rose — is, as I mentioned in my previous post — something ultimately I can’t get on board with.
Next up, it’s a side-step to Cardiff for the first of twenty-first century Who’s spin-offs: Torchwood.
