Yup, still behind on everything. Oh well, here's a review of the 2005 Christmas episode.
The TARDIS lands on Earth on Christmas Eve, just in time for a giant asteroid spaceship to descend, hypnotize a fair portion of the Earth's population, and hold their lives hostage until Earth's leader - the Prime Minister of Great Britain - surrenders the planet.
The PM? Not the President?
"You may tell the President, and please use these exact words, he is not my boss, and I won't let him turn this into a war." This from the woman who nukes the spaceship at the end of the episode. Bwa ha ha.
Anyway, the Doctor is no longer Mr Lots-Of-Planets-Have-A-North; now he's Captain Jack Sparrow, and if you think I'm kidding, listen to the "big button what must not ever be pressed" scene side-by-side with the "it's the honest ones you have to worry about because you can never tell when they're going to do something... stupid" scene. And on top of that, he swordfights. Sort of.
Because let me tell you, compared to, say The End of Time, the effects and stunts here are almost laughably bad. (Speaking of The End of Time, I'm kind of amused that pretty much the last thing 10 looks at is his fightin' hand.)
Anyway, this Doctor insists that he's a "no second chances" sort of man, even though nothing but nothing in that scene makes any damn sense. Why is there a trap door right there? Why can they even go outside the spaceship like that? What kind of civilization could possibly have a use for both a skeletizing energy whip and a freaking broadsword? How high up are they, because it looks like Rose should probably need an oxygen mask. How does Rose throwing the Doctor a sword not violate the "no interfering" rule?
Anyway, we have a no-second-chances Doctor get upset when a PM who's not going to turn this into a war vaporizes a ship that tried to enslave the planet. If that makes any sense to you, you'll probably like both this and some of the other inane excesses in Tennant's run. Yes, it's a Christmas episode - so what? Four years from now we're going to have a dire little spectacle as the Master turns every human being into a copy of himself and the Time Lords prepare to eradicate the Universe. Just because it's Christmas doesn't mean nobody needs to put any effort into it. "The Christmas Invasion" makes The Three Doctors look like Masterpiece Theater, when what it should really be doing is introducing the new boy. I wonder if it was in Tennant's contract that he, like his favorite Doctor (Peter Davison), had to spend most of his first story unconscious. Eccleston (and Smith) aside, the last time Doctor Who did a good job introducing its new leading man was back when Tom Baker took over in 1974.
Yeah, I didn't think too much of it. I don't think too much of most of Series 2, aside from "School Reunion" because it has Sarah Jane and Giles in it, and maybe "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" because it was Doctor Who finally doing Alien. I'm not going to give "The Christmas Invasion" a number out of ten because it's a Christmas episode and we just know that they couldn't possibly have been taking this very seriously.
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