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Thanks people!

As odd as it sounds – coming from us at least – there were a few incidents that reminded us of classic Who and offered a glimmer of hope that things might have gotten better.

They were few and far between but it’s only fair that we list them. This shouldn’t take too long…

Dalek – The Doctor Gets Scared
This was genius! The reintroduction of the Daleks in series one of new Who, needed to tick so many boxes that it was always going to be difficult.

The job of introducing them to a new, younger audience was never going to be straightforward, things have moved on since the sixties. The Daleks seemingly hadn’t though, their design remained resolutely the same as always. Lights on the head, an eye stalk and plungers and egg whisks for weapons.

It was going to be tricky conveying the menace and power a Dalek held, when they still looked like this.

So with an unchanged design what was needed was a bit of the old acting! Which is what Christopher Eccleston gave us. In spades!

Thanks to Eccleston’s mad, scrambling fear at coming face to face with just one Dalek, the kids – who, this was all new to remember – were going to be under no illusions; Daleks are evil!

Blink – Easter Eggs!
Everybody loves Blink. Everybody. Ask them their reasons for loving it and we’ve no doubt they’ll say it’s the Weeping Angels.

Now as good a villain as they are, they’re not the reason it rocks so hard. No, it’s the easter eggs that solidify this storyline.

Those easter eggs are so neatly tied together and underpin the episode so well, that – as mad as it might sound – you often don’t really notice their criticality to the plot!

Another reason for the success of Blink is Sally Sparrow (played by Carey Mulligan), she more than makes up for the absence of The Doctor and thanks to her it never feels like we’re being short changed.

You see the reason why The Doctor and Martha appear in it so infrequently is that, in order to save the pennies, this episode was filmed simultaneously with another one (Human Nature). Cutting costs on a flagship show? It could only be the BBC!

Blink won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form and Carey Mulligan received the Constellation Award for Best Female Performance in a 2007 Science Fiction Television Episode. Both awards were thoroughly deserved.

The Doctor’s Daughter – The Seven Day War
Now this was very neat, very neat indeed. Two warring factions engaged in a never ending struggle that neither side can remember the reason for.

The two sides have been going at it for generations and it’s only thanks to Donna’s mathematical genius – which also enabled her to pick up the Dewey Decimal system in two days, ho hum – that The Doctor works out exactly what’s been going on.

You see this never ending, ever lasting war has in reality – thanks to cloning and accelerated growth – has only been going on for seven days. Brilliant!

Silence In The Library – River Song, Echoes Of The Future
This is River Song, by all accounts you’ll be seeing more of her.

That little book she’s reading from? That’s her diary, a diary that looks more than a little like the TARDIS. Here’s a closer peek.

You see the implication here is that River Song has already met The Doctor, although as The Doctor can’t remember this having happened we can only assume that she’s met a future regeneration. How cool is that?

It’s a lovely little twist and we must admit that we’re amazed it hadn’t happened sooner.

Rise Of The Cybermen – Rose Tyler (In A Maid’s Outfit)
Phwoar! We know it’s bringing the tone down but come on. This is fantastic stuff, Rose, dressed like a maid! Knick-knack-noo!

Let’s leave it there shall we?

Enough of all this spiel, let’s get on with the curious case of Void material…

In Doomsday we discover that anyone that’s been in the Void gets covered in Void Material. The longer you’re in, the more gets stuck to you. Simple. How do you detect if you have any of this Void material on you though?

Well the only way to detect Void material is by the use of a complex series of detectors that unravel all the tightly knotted dimensions of space that surround the target and count the number of positive hits from the particles of Void material as they struggle to return to their own dimension.

Either that or just put on a pair of cheap 3D glasses.

This is yet another example of Davies’ piss-poor writing for Doctor Who and his lack of imagination. He just goes for a very cheap and unsatisfying gimmick that runs the length of the show until the disappointing reveal at the end.

It’s as if we’re supposed to sit there watching The Doctor running about in 3D specs and think that it’s just The Doctor being all whacky and out-there.

The problem with that is that we always know that if The Doctor is doing something whacky and out-there, sooner or later it’s going to become a plot point. It never actually is The Doctor being a little eccentric, every time he does it, it’s being done with a higher – albeit entirely unfathomable – purpose.

Remember when he used to eat Jelly Babies? There was no particular reason for that other than plain old eccentricity.

Davies just can’t help himself though, he has top go for some goofy nonsense that he thinks is funny over something that just might possibly have some basis in actual science. Why do we let him away with this shit?

This isn’t the only issue we have with the concept of Void material. The very mention of Void material makes us cringe, it makes absolutely no sense! Void – when used as a noun, as it is in this case – means an empty space, material is the substance or substances of which a thing is made or composed. Consequently Void material is an oxymoron.

We have to doubt that Davies intended for it to be an amusing oxymoronic pun – like, pretty ugly or organised chaos – he just used it because – undoubtedly in his usual over enthusiastic, adjective strewn manner – he thought it was clever, witty, dangerous, imaginative, sexy, mysterious, etc. etc.

To make matters worse though The Doctor calls Void material; Void stuff. It’s the usual terrible inverted snobbery that is often displayed in these situations; when Davies is trying to present a piss-poor idea as a high brow scientific notion. If The Doctor needs to simplify it for us; it must be complex!

After a perfunctory and deeply unsatisfying explanation of what Void material is, we are then told that anything that travels through the Void becomes tainted with Void material – in this case that’s the Daleks, Cybermen, Rose and The Doctor – and that this Void material acts as a magnet drawing everything covered in it back to the Void, should the void become exposed through a rift or some such.

Which as luck would have it they have the technology to create. All of which ultimately means that there’s a very simple way to rid the Earth of the Cybermen and Daleks! Open the rift and Bob’s your uncle back to the Void the Daleks and Cybermen go. Huzzah!

Unfortunately in order to create tension where none exists, there has to be a catch. In this case it’s that Rose and The Doctor are also covered in Void stuff! Oh no. What will happen when they open the rift? Well, as ever, Russell T Davies has stitched it all up in a tight, well written bundle, so you needn’t worry about it.

They used two mega-strong magnetic clamps – that just happened to be lying around – to anchor themselves to the walls. Deus ex machina for the win!

Writing isn’t just a job that stops at six-thirty… It’s a mad, sexy, sad, scary, obsessive, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There’s not the writer and then me; there’s just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.

First off Russell you’re British – unless living in Los Angeles has made you forget where you’re from – and we British don’t put commas before the and at the end of a list. Oh, and one more thing, enough with the adjectives, there are only so many we can process.

Still, looking at him I doubt he’s that bothered.

Really though what an atrocious piece of self aggrandization!

It was culled from The Writer’s Tale, where by the grace of Davies himself you can download copies of the Doctor Who scripts. We can see us having some fun with those.

The thing is, paragraphs like that are usually reserved for septuagenarian stage actors or authors on the South Bank Show. Not deluded Welsh homosexuals with messiah complexes.

If his writing was really that important to him, you’d think he’d actually have spent some time learning to do it properly, wouldn’t you?

Or is that just us?

Can you just imagine how shit it would have been? How could the two universes possibly have been reconciled using only Russell T Davies second rate writing skills?

It would mean the Daleks, Cybermen, Sea Devils, Sontarans and, let’s not forget, Time Lords all sharing the same universe as the Borg, Klingons, Ferrengi and Vulcans?

It is possible, just slightly, that it would make it would have made for a fairly interesting show but why stop at just Star Trek Russell?

Why don’t you look to get Aliens, Predators, ET and the creatures from Signs in on the act? Fuck it, let’s keep going! Get Jabba the Hutt, the Blues Brothers and James Bond involved!

As per usual, Russell – not being a sci-fi fan – doesn’t realise that it takes great skill to write for long running and respected franchises.

The BBC might have been happy to let him piss all over Doctor Who but we can’t see Paramount being that keen on letting him trample clumsily all over Star Trek with his usual bluster.

When sci-fi universes work well, they work well for a reason; coherence. Star Trek is one of the better examples, even the new film – which reset practically everything within Star Trek history – maintained canon with clever use of a time travel.

The only reason the Russell T Davies would ever have thought that a Star Trek and Doctor Who crossover would be great is because he has no series bible.

He has – or rather had – no idea from one day to the next where The Doctor was going or what he was going to do.

Ironically he quite literally had no clue where The Doctor’s future lay.

This is clear from the fact that he even considered this crossover. If he was a proper writer, the outline for his entire tenure would have been written within months of him signing on to the project.