Doctor Who – “42”

9/10 – The edge of my seat … literally.

Plot - After a week off mid-season, Doctor Who came back with a very strong “real time” episode in which the Doctor and Martha find themselves on a spaceship 42 minutes away from crashing into a sun.



To make matters worse (and that really is what Doctor Who does best) they are immediately cut off from the TARDIS, find that someone has sabotaged the engines, and a security lock-down closes the (28 or 29) doors that lead to the auxiliary control area.



Oh, and one of the crew, the captain’s husband Korwin seems to be infected by the sun itself and begins picking the crew off one by one. His eyes blaze with light and vaporize the crew into smudges on the walls saying “burn with me.”





The Sun is alive and in pain (?) because the crew have been using fusion scoops to extract the energy for fuel (illegal in the 42nd century, apparently.) Martha and this guy Riley eventually get cornered in an airlock and are jettisoned into space toward the sun. the Doctor must risk everything just to save her.










Rant – Well, this was quite good. I can’t even complain that the plot was almost identical to the Tom Baker story “Planet of Evil” or that the sets were all the same/similar to last years “Impossible Planet/Satan Pit.” It could have been worse -- for example, they could have reversed it … and used the plot from “Impossible …” and the costumes from the 1975 “Planet of Evil” ...

THEN ...


NOW ...



Also, there was the ever so cheesy title “42” which cannot help but remind fans of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and the real time aspect which is “24” (an inversion of the numbers.) These seem to be the sticking points for most of the fans, but frankly they are surface issues. The story really had a gripping pace and the Doctor admitting he was scared was pretty well shocking.

Review – The frantic pacing of this story gave the viewer little time to think about what might or might not be wrong about the story. There is a small, but vocal group of fans out there who immediately bashed it as terrible, but they were soon overwhelmed by the “norms” (or the “not we”) fans and viewers who pretty much thought it was great. As a TV viewer I thought the pacing and characterization was solid and as a fan, I thought it was quite traditional Doctor Who with a bit of extra juice. The special effects – and this is always a shocking statement for Doctor Who – were on par with the program thus far (i.e., excellent). And, there was no actual villain … even more interesting.







In fact, in the group of episodes we can call “modern” Doctor Who, this one lingers on very few of the “personal” moments that, frankly, seem shoehorned into the program to appeal to female viewers. This is all about 42 minutes until the ship crashes into the sun. How could there be room for anything else? This is the first time I can ever remember sitting on the actual edge of my seat for a few minutes. When I realized this, I sort of couldn’t believe it. “That cliché actually means something?” I thought.