major_clanger | Doctor Who

...or Spaceport '07: A Poseidon Night to Remember as it should probably have been titled. I have a vision of a script brainstorming conference with RTD calling for suggestions of every maritime disaster movie trope committed to celluloid, scribbling them on Post-It notes and frantically assembling them into a plot outline on the wall. Because if that episode wasn't written like that, it jolly well should have been.

Random thoughts:

- The TARDIS presumably travelled a little in time between the end of 'Last of the Time Lords' and 'Voyage of the Damned' as the former doesn't IIRC take place at Xmas and in the latter London seems to have been evacuated for at least a few days. Actually, the Children in Need Special does a nice job of explaining this, as that messing around clearly moved the TARDIS a short distance into the future as a side-effect.

- OMG THEY KILLED KYLIE! But will she qualify as an Official Companion?

- It felt to me that RTD was writing a very deliberately Douglas Adams episode (and he did, after all, write a computer game, Starship Titanic). The banal corporate plot with awful fallout, the 'Earth expert' with wildly inaccurate knowledge, and even a '42'; was this RTD trying to write the Xmas Special that DA would have written?

Overall, about 6 on the Total Bollocks Overdrive score (0 = 'Blink', 10 = 'Evolution of the Daleks', and Torchwood is on a special scale with 'Cyberwoman' coming in somewhere near Avagadro's Number.)