Tennant's first proper episode as The Doctor, in which he sleeps a lot, Rose is inconsistent and aliens rock!
Angelic Oddjobs, Kylie and handicap shaming. It must be Christmas!
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What-ho, Podcastland! Christmas comes early this year, and this time none other than Kylie Minogue herself joins The Doctor.
Picking up with the cliffhanger that ended the previous episode — Spoilers — the Titanic has just smashed into the TARDIS. No problemo, Doc grabs some Gallifreyan plaster, patches the whole in his ship and boards the intruding vessel.
It’s not the Titanic we’re familiar with, though, it turns out, but rather an unfortunately named space cruiser, and Doc joins the festivities.
Coincidentally, the robot angels that make up part of the staff are going haywire and the Captain’s about to put them in the path of some meteors. And not only that; they’re orbiting the Earth on Christmas Eve and may or may not — guess — crash into it any moment now.
Thank goodness Kylie Minogue is aboard the ship as well, sporting a French Maid uniform and ready to arouse the Doctor into forgetting all about that former companion of his, whom he probably wouldn’t have remembered anyway.
Oh, and guess who makes a brief appearance! Donna Noble’s grandfather, Wilfred Mott, played by Whovian legend Bernard Cribbins, that’s who!!
Mayhem, bloodshed, fat jokes and handicap shaming ensue. Happy Christmas, everybody!
Overall a fantastic episode with a few small nitpicks.
It starts a bit slow. Based on the title and the ship’s name, something terrible is about to happen. Get to it! Next point, Doc doesn’t need to explain himself to the host (“Tell me again cos I’m stupid..”) it’s a friggin robot.
We get going and the story really moves well, adventure, excitement; I care about the characters and despise Mr Snobby Moneybags. As per my usual, I love David Tennant! He is appropriately brilliant, heart-broken, or jubilant. I find Astrid charming and giggled when she called Doc a Time King from Gallibee. Nice plot point about Bannakaffalatta being a cyborg, which comes around later to inform Max’s motivations. Not even sure if ol’ Doc recognizes the implications of anti-cyborg bigotry, seeing as Astrid had that interaction with Bannakaffalatta solo. She is clearly a really decent person. BTW, I notice it’s “ladies, gentleman, Bannakaffalatta”. Is this character a third gender? Getting shit for being a cyborg, and non-gender conforming, I could understand him wanting to at least have his name said correctly.
Finishing up- While I like the poignant ending, I am sad Astrid didn’t get to be a companion. I feel worse however for Mr Copper who *asks* to be a companion and Doc is like “yeah, no”. Only pretty young women then? Would Mr Copper have been happier with the doctor than changing his name to Bucket and marrying Hyacinth? I guess we’ll never know.
Rating: Velvet!
Given the praise for City of Death, and Douglas Adams in general as he relates to Doctor Who, I was surprised you didn’t mention him in connection to this episode. While you did mention that the Episode “42” is bit of a nod to him and the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy (and I was really annoyed they wasted that title on such a banal story), this episode pays much more homage to him.
1) the name of the ship should have been a dead giveaway, what with “The Starship Titanic” novel by Terry Jones and Douglas Adams.
2) Some of the robots in the book are in the form of angels, based on the goddess Titania.
3) The phrase “Sir, Madam, Thing” is used by the various steward, lift, and desk robots. Apparently the only way JotD could work it in was to make the cyborg appear asexual.
4) The vast pit over the engines, and especially having people falling down into it taking an extremely long time to do so. I think you mentioned in the episode it happens 4 times. It’s taken straight from the book.
5) Wrecking the ship for the insurance money. In the book, this is planned before its maiden voyage, as it devastated the economy of the planet that built it, so they cut costs in preparation of its launch, by using cheap materials and leaving out the lifeboats. But they did plant a bomb on board.
Bonus: although it’s not used in “Journey of the Damned”, the title ship in “The Starship Titanic” is powered by a captive black hole, which is later revealed to be the same as the TARDIS in “Journey to the Center of the TARDIS”.