Hello there! I began watching 2005’s rebooted Doctor Who from the very first airing of the very first episode, at the impressionable age of nine years old. I’ve since rewatched various seasons at various times in my life, but with the arrival of season 11 and Jodie Whittaker I’ve decided to (perhaps belatedly) rewatch seasons 1-10, providing short reactions to each episode. I’ll make one post per season and, just a warning, mild full spoilers are inbound. (I gave up filtering myself midway through this. I doubt you’d be reading if you’d never seen the show!)
Season 4 reintroduces Catherine Tate as the sassy and fantastic Donna Noble, the perfect companion for the Doctor. Someone he can just have a laugh with, a proper mate. Season 4 is an interesting one though, as rather than David Tennant continuing into Season 5, he decided to leave the show, resulting in four specials spread out over the following year and a bit that most of us can agree on being counted as Season 4 episodes. Are you ready for Christmas? Be ready for Christmas.
Episode Christmas: Voyage of the Damned
“There’s no WAY it’s that time of year already”
I really don’t have much to say about this episode. It’s enjoyable, but it’s also rather forgettable, in my opinion. I don’t know. It was fun? It’s one of the few Christmas episodes to not advance the show in some way, so I’m probably holding it against that expectation. I also found the whole idea of the nation being afraid of Christmas due to annual alien incidents to be a little too fourth wall breaking. Anyway, moving on.
Episode 1: Partners in Crime
Bother, I’ve made eye contact…
After all the romance, all the drama and all the darkness, this episode saw the show take a gentle right into more focused comedy. None of that other stuff goes away necessarily, but this episode was just unashamedly fun. I was smiling the entire time. This episode promotes the healthiness of a good friendship. I love it!
This deadlock stuff is getting a bit out of hand, though. They need the idea of a “deadlock” to circumvent the Doctor’s catch-all sonic screwdriver, I get that. But when you start throwing around terms like “triple deadlocked” and “deadlock the building”, I’m going to start rolling my eyes.
Episode 2: The Fires of Pompeii
WHAT YEAR IS IT?
Another brilliant episode, this time a little darker, exploring the concepts of predestination and the burden of being a time traveller. This particular episode is interesting in that it features two prominent Doctor Who actors before they returned for their respective roles – Karen Gillan is a soothsayer here, and Peter Capaldi plays a fairly major role, too. Both play significantly different characters compared to those they would later be cast as. See? Stuff like this is what makes rewatches so fun!
Episode 3: Planet of the Ood
That’s this season’s alien world budget!
This episode felt like a double-take on the Ood, last seen in The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit. “Hang on, we didn’t just create a slave race, normalise them, kill them off and move on, did we? We can’t be having that.” It’s nice that they addressed this. The villain’s fate was masterfully done, too.
Episode 4 and 5: The Sontaren Stratagem / The Poison Sky
OH my GOD!! It’s Martha Jones!!!!!
Another two-parter where the fate of the world is at stake. It was alright. The Sontaren are entertaining enough, and I always kinda liked their small juggernaut design. I don’t know. Is it a good or a bad sign when you don’t have much to say about an hour and a half of telly? I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t be in a hurry to watch it again.
Episode 6: The Doctor’s Daughter
So *this* is how babies are made!
At this point, I’m convinced that they’re writing episodes purely to cater to David Tennant’s ability to portray sadness and grief. Leave the poor man alone! He’s been through enough! It’s wonderful to explore his past, though, and his revelation to Donna that he used to be a parent is a fantastic scene. It’s also another fun episode for trivia, given that Georgia Moffett (who plays the Doctor’s daughter here) is Peter Davison (the fifth Doctor)’s daughter, and that she and David Tennant married some years after this episode. Timey wimey etc etc.
Most Martha Moment (it’s back!): Convincing her new alien best friend to wander the surface with her before falling into a bog, forcing him to give up his life to save her.
Episode 7: The Unicorn and the Wasp
SPIFFING EH? WOT WOT
I have never read an Agatha Christie novel, nor do I know anything about the author herself, so a lot of the references and contextual plot in this episode was lost on me. Plus, a murder mystery that has alien involvement doesn’t allow the viewer the knowledge to piece together the mystery themselves. However, this was a fun episode regardless, with nice comedic moments and interesting (if cliched) characters.
Episode 8 and 9: Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead
“River Song, lovely name.” Moffat, get your head out of season 6!
So much to say about this two-parter. Namely that this is the forefront of Steven Moffat’s version of Doctor Who, as soon-to-be prominent character River Song makes her final (see: first) appearance in the show. Kind of. If you don’t count that one time. Oh, man. We’ll get into it later. But for now all I’ll say is that the idea behind her character in this story is actually brilliant, but some things just haven’t aged perfectly and I knew from my first viewing that it’d be ambitious to believe that they could. Continuity can be tricky to maintain when you write the end in stone before you’ve written the beginning. Though I imagine one of the desired outcomes of this was that you’d get to rewatch this episode from her perspective years later, and that’s certainly true.
As for the rest of the story, it was fantastic. The villain, the setting, the premise, and the nuances behind the “dreaming world” were all brilliantly achieved. My one gripe would be that some of the technological stuff seemed a bit improbable regarding echoes and the entire way the CAL system worked, but you know, suspension of disbelief and all that.
Episode 10: Midnight
Man, the alien in this one is weird
One of the best episodes in the entire show, and it’s a bottle episode. It’s a study on the nature of fear, and the entire episode hinges on the performances of a select group of characters trapped in a bus in the middle of nowhere. This show has spent hours defining villains by their taste for destruction, by their lack of emotion, hell, one was even the literal devil, but in the end the scariest villain of all was an invisible and unexplained force, and the irrationality of human fear. How’s that for an argument for the power of the unknown?
Episode 11: Turn Left
In an alternate universe, this episode is called Turn Right
Oh, this episode is entirely my flavour of jam. Exploring the concept of the most mundane decision domino effecting into an entirely separate version of events? Exploring a parallel universe of the consequences of what would have happened if the day wasn’t saved on particular occasions? Sign me the hell up. It led to a fairly depressing episode in hindsight, and Murray Gold’s melancholic soundtrack didn’t help on that front. But man, what a ride. The timey wimey stuff at the end even makes sense if you think about it for long enough, which is an increasing rarity. Plus it was a fantastic lead-in to the finale, and that reveal at the end had my hype engines going into overdrive on my first viewing.
I’m starting to notice that season 4 was a bit of a good one.
Episode 12 and 13: The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End
Doctor Who: Infinity War
Goodness me, this was an ambitious finale, wasn’t it? Pretty much every companion or friend that the Doctor made from seasons 1-4 returned for this episode. Some people may call it the most ambitious crossover of all time! (Sorry, not sorry.) This double-parter is full of fanservice, and suffers a little bit from RTD’s continual need to top the stakes of every previous finale. That being said it’s fun all the same, and elevates the Daleks to the height of their destructive potential. It does go a little off the rails when it comes to requiring your suspension of disbelief, especially regarding the laws of physics during a particular climactic scene… but with a story of this scope, you have to expect a few plot holes, I suppose.
Donna’s departure was fucking heartbreaking, by the way. The name of the soundtrack for it is The Rueful Fate of Donna Noble, which I think is horribly fitting.
Episode Christmas Again: The Next Doctor
Pictured: The Doctor, Definitely Also The Doctor, Rosita
Surprise! There’s a gap between seasons 4 and 5 where they made a few specials leading up to Tennant’s regeneration, so I typically attribute them to season 4. So here they are!
Now, a cynic would say that this episode is a filler episode, with a misleading premise designed to attract viewers to the show during a transitional period. But I’m no cynic, so I’ll just go ahead and say that this was a fun episode that maybe went on for a bit too long and maybe it took me 3 days to get around to watching it. As with Voyage of the Damned, unless something substantial happens within, I’m just not a Christmas episode kind of a guy.
Episode Easter: Planet of the Dead
So that’s why the bloody thing was late this morning
I love this episode. It’s got a fun premise, Christina is an interesting character who challenges the Doctor in new ways, and it has elements of discovering what befell an old alien civilisation, which is something I’m always a sucker for. This episode leaves me wanting an antihero style companion for the Doctor, one we’ve never had to this day. Story-wise, I’m proper miffed that the Doctor turned Christina down as a companion purely because of his trauma. Show-wise, it obviously wouldn’t have made sense given the road they were taking regarding Tennant’s forthcoming regeneration, as reiterated by psychic lady. By the way, those psychic powers are never really explained, were they? They also contradict the show’s previous definition of ‘psychic’ – that being the restriction of not being able to tell the future. That’s right RTD, I pay attention! (It doesn’t really matter, if we’re being honest.)
Episode November?: The Waters of Mars
It’s volcano day.
Phenomenal episode. Possibly my favourite Tennant episode. Four seasons of trauma – from the Time War, to Doomsday, to Last of the Time Lords, to Journey’s End – all of it culminates in this episode, the straw that broke the camel’s back. The climax of this episode considers the idea of the Doctor giving in to that trauma and breaking the supposed rules of time, and the consequences of him doing so. Tennant and Duncan’s performance here is what really sells it, alongside the first airing of Murray Gold’s track Vale Decem, used as a farewell song for Tennant’s Doctor. Plus the great use of silence and juxtaposition that makes the final TARDIS landing just feel so atmospherically wrong. This felt like the beginning of the end of a long road that’s been patiently created and expanded upon over the last four seasons.
Episode Extra Emotional Christmas: The End of Time
I had planned on screenshotting every regeneration but… this felt more fitting.
The End of Time Parts 1 and 2 are, sadly, where things started to go a little bit off the rails. Over the last few seasons, the science behind time travel became less polished and more “wibbly wobbly”, and the entire logic behind the Time Lock and the Ood seeing through time has just never landed for me. Plus, as wonderful as it is to see John Simm reprising the role of the Master here… I’m not sure the ability to “burn up your life force” to super-jump, shoot lightning and eat people in seconds appears anywhere else in Time Lord lore.
But those are the nitpicks. As a send-off for Tennant’s Doctor, it was marvellous. Following on from the Waters of Mars, we see the Doctor’s continued trauma breaking through, especially in the cafe and spaceship scenes. His outburst when he discovers Wilf as the source of the knocking is painful, but it makes complete sense, a resurgence of the side we see of him at the end of the Waters of Mars that was never truly confronted. The emotional beats of his false hope before the knocking, to his radiation poisoning, to his “reward” in the from of a goodbye tour, and finally to his regeneration makes this departure one of the most heartbreaking ones in the show. So while the general plot of the Master Race and the Rise of Gallifrey doesn’t particularly land for me, it’s still enjoyable as an end of an era and a sufficiently cathartic departure for such an emotionally nuanced Doctor.
Season 4 Summary
That was one hell of a sneeze
Wow, a hell of a lot happened in this season. I’ve already discussed how amazing Donna Noble was as a companion, and both Tate and Tennant’s departures from the show. But I will mention that on this rewatch, I noticed two things. Firstly, that season 4 might be the best season in the entire show. The relationship between the Doctor and Rose was captivating, sure, but that wasn’t enough to redeem some of the bad episodes in the first two seasons. The dynamic that the Doctor and Donna had was at least equally if not more entertaining than the Doctor and Rose, and this season’s episodes had generally more interesting premises and locations. At a tally, I definitely enjoyed 17/19 episodes in this season, the only two failing being Voyage of the Damned and The Next Doctor.
The second thing I noticed was the difference between season two Doctor and season four Doctor. Before this rewatch, if you’d have asked me whether Tennant’s Doctor changed much between seasons I’d have said no, but now I see that he’s markedly more scarred by the end of season 4 than he was at the start of season 2. He acts similarly, but in season 4 his smiles are more forced, he’s become more evasive, and that thousand yard stare of despair (for want of a better term) pops up almost once an episode.
I was distraught when Tennant left Doctor Who, but after my previous rewatch I came to the conclusion that Matt Smith was my favourite Doctor, albeit by a small margin. They’re both just so excellent. There’s still so much good Who to go. So, shall we move on to Matt Smith and the Ponds, then? G e r o n i m o !
Perpetually Perturbed 