& just in case you were interested.... what we thought of Dr Who

Forgot to blog this on Sunday.
Molly, Louise and I settled down to Dr Who on Saturday night. It was episode 4 of series 3. Daleks in Manhattan; the one with the Cult Of Skarro turning humans into pig/human hybrids and looking at ways to evolve the Daleks.
Molly was scared as usual. But obviously, that's scared in a good way. Exactly the way small children are meant to get scared. And coincidentally exactly the way that small children don't seem to be allowed to be scared anymore. Too much pampering. I say it's time to dust off all the old fairy stories and scare them all over again.

But Louise and I thought it was a really bad episode. It just failed on every level as far as we were concerned. I know it was a two parter but there was just no tension. The story built up to the much advertised reveal that the Cult of Skarro were behind all the disappearance in New York.
Then it got frankly silly. The idea of the Daleks evolving was good in theory. I like the idea that these four remaining Daleks are specially engineered to be the Brian Eno or Edward De Bono of intergalactic conquest, but I really have to question their methods.
What exactly is the image of a zoot-suited, spats wearing human with a dodgy plastic blob stuck on instead of a head meant to do?
Fill us with fear and awe at the next generation of super-intelligent machine-organic consciousness?
Or have us sniggering with disappointment and filing this moment as the point where it all went a little bit wrong.

Interestingly, as if the TV was trying to prove a point, Molly flicked to UKTVGold on Sunday morning to watch the Christopher Eccleston episode - Bad Wolf. So much better. I read somewhere that people were beginning to think that the BBC don't have the confidence that Tennant can carry off dark as well as Eccleston could and have adapted the character accordingly. Certainly Bad Wolf seems to support this. It was a great episode and only served to highlight how bloody bad Daleks of Manhattan had been.

Of course, one of the fun things about the new era Dr Who is the great use of the web. Try here, here, here, thanks to a Google-bomb campaign just Google "vote Saxon" or if you want it spelt out for you - click here.
Based on the previous excellent episodes in the last two series I think the best thing is just to get next weeks Dalek Zoot episode out of the way and enjoy the rest of the series. God knows, it can't be as bad as the episode we saw last weekend.