It is sadly time for the first weak story of the new series as we
venture back to modern day London with yet another episode written by Russell T
Davies (in the first series he pretty much wrote a lions-share of all 13
episodes). This is also the first two-parter so obviously there is more time to
develop the story so lets see where that takes us. This is ‘Aliens of London’.
After travelling 5 billion years into the future to witness the
end of the world and then travelling to 1869 and visit Charles Dickens, the
Doctor and Rose finally returns back to her hometown but they find out the
Doctor went a bit too far so they land in 2006, a whole year after they left.
At around the same time an alien spaceship crashes into Big Ben and then lands
in the river and that is our premise.


This is also the first time we find out the Doctor’s age which is
apparently 900… but this is not the first time the Doctor was 900 years old as
the seventh doctor revealed his age to be 953 in the episode ‘Time of the Rani’
from 1987 so basically, this episode did not even manage to keep track of that
very basic continuity. Although there is one even more basic continuity that
was only established three episodes ago… In ‘Rose’ the Doctor could apparently
read at a super fast speed but here in ‘Aliens of London’ he reads at a normal
pace for some reason. Well it is not like we should expect the same writer and
the same director to remember such things; I mean that was three whole episodes
ago and they were filmed roughly at the same time.
The government takes in the Doctor and Rose as they are gathering
all the experts in alien knowledge. I have to mention that I use word
“government” loosely as whenever Russell seem to write for them they come
across so cartoon-y that they even say that they are the government of Great
Britain… it is called the United Kingdom, Russell… not “Great Britain” as that
is just the bigger of the two islands and not a political entity.
The cliffhanger of the episodes is kind of well handled though as
it is well shot and the music is great – but the Slitheen themselves look
terrible and not threatening at all which ruins the tension because you just
end up laughing at their baby faces. What also ruins the cliffhanger though is
that just a few seconds later… we get the next time trailer which completely
spoils what is going to happen to these characters.
There are not many good new characters in this story but we do get
more insight into Mickey and Jackie and I can honestly say they are both better
and more interesting than Rose is. Noel Clarke’s performance as Mickey is a
standout for the season as he nails every line of dialogue he is given (and
most of them could easily come across as incredibly whiny and annoying).
Eccleston finally sort of works alone as well in this episode which was great
to see and I wish we would have seen more of it before his departure from the
series.
Overall though this is the
worst episode of the series thus far and combined with the second part it is
probably the worst out of all the series 1 stories. It has major tonal problems
throughout, the conflict established in the first five minutes is suddenly
dropped, everybody acts stupid in order for the plot to move along and the
Slitheen are one of the laughable creations of the new series.
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