lostcarpark

Almost didn't realise it started today, but my sister set me straight. Popped over to see her and saw it there.

If I'm not mistaken, this is the first episode not set on (or orbiting) Earth. Of course it's another planet called Earth, but still a step forward.

This is another great story. A year into the show, the writing seems to have settled down nicely. There's quote a lot packed into the episode, with the Face of Bo summoning the Doctor, Cassandra body hopping and the Cat sisters and their medical zombies. Somehow the episode still manages to feel paced - fast enough to keep your attention, but not feeling rushed.

I really liked the whole Cassandra hopping about bodies thing. Apart from both Billie and David adapting to her character brilliantly, it carried a whole transgender/transsexaul undercurrent, with Cassandra revealing secrets that both Rose and The Doctor might prefer she didn't. Her character grows through the story, eventually recovering some of the humanity she'd left behind so long ago when she enters the body of one of the desease carriers. Eventually she ends up in Chip, her loyal clone servant. Although referred to as "he", Chip is an incomplete entity, I suspect gender neutral. She also suddenly seems okay about dying. This could be because Chip is bredfor a short life of servitude, and is programmed to be content about it.

The science, I'm afraid, is well dodgy. Dr Who has never been particularly strong on science, and it's not really fair to nit-pick it. So I'm going to hone in on a few key problems, rather than the dozens I would undoubtedly find if I felt inclined. The first is the hospital itself, and the cures and even the diseases. Now I find it hard to believe that we won't conquer just about any disease. As we saw in this episode, Cloning and mind transfer are both available. It should therefore be a simple matter to cure just about any disease just by cloning your body and transferring in. That's if nanotech doesn't provide an easy way to rebuild any body damage. So the idea that the sisters are able to cure all these uncurable diseases seems far-fetched to begin with, as such a future shouldn't have any incurable diseases.

But as we dig deeper, we find that they developed the cures by cloning people and infecting them with the diseases. Sorry, but how is infecting someone with every known disease going to find a cure for one specific disease? The fact that the people can live (even if only temporarily) with every known disease suggests that they must build up an immunity, but doesn't tell us anything about how the cures work. It would seem much more efficient to produce a limited number of clones, infect them all with one disease and then try out cures on them all. Once a cure has been developed, any surviving clones can be treated and either reused to test another disease or released. The alternative would be that they were developing one serum to cure everything, which would mean infecting people with every known disease, but only the ones that there weren't working cures for would manifest themselves, and clearly the sisters had lots of different serums.

But the dodgiest science bit of all was where the Doctor took all the IV treatments and put them in the lift disinfectant system (which happens to be in a handy open-topped tub on top of the lift car). The point of an IV cure is that it has to get into your system. Showering in it isn't going to work. But the Doctor manages to take it further. He actually turns it into a disease, that can be passed from sick person to sick person by touch.

Oh, and let's not forget Cassandra's mind transfer. The first transfer has some element of plausability, as Rose has stepped into the machine, but from this point on, it seems Cassandra is free to hop from mind to mind. I find this far fetched to say the least.

Science aside, I thought the ending was a bit too simple, and very similar to the "Just this once, everyone lives" from The Doctor Dances.

But apart from these minor quibbles, the story works and works well. It's by no means the best episode ever, but it's not a bad one either. It bodes well for the new season, and any fears that David Tennent might not live up to Chris Eccleston would seem to have been dispelled.

Edit: Note that I started writing this on Saturday evening, but got distracted...