So we’ve watched episode four of Doctor Who, and it looks like the entire government has been taken over by aliens, and the Doctor has been captured!

The effects shot of the ship smashing through Big Ben and crashing into the river was great. There were also some nice domestic touches with the Doctor proudly announcing that he’d brought Rose back home only twelve hours after she’d left, except it was actually twelve months!

As in previous weeks the fake web site created for episode one, ‘Who is Doctor Who?‘, has been updated for events in this weeks episode. There is also a rather amusing picture tied in to this weeks events in real life…

Anyway, Amazon are now listing the DVD’s of the new series. The basic DVD’s will be released fairly soon…

But I’m holding out for the box set come November… 😀

The BBC has confirmed that David Tennant will be the new Doctor Who, to appear in the second series due to start filming shortly.

This comes in the same week that we got the first of the Doctor Who is too frightening for kids complaints after last weeks Victorian episode with gas creatures taking over dead bodies. It actually reminded me of a comment that John Nathan-Turner made in a documentary, that he usually looked forward to Mary Whitehouse complaining about the show, as her intervention would usually result in an increase in viewers the following week.

The discussion even made it to PM on Radio 4 on Thursday, with Mark Gatiss, the writer of the episode called on to explain himself. The argument presented on the radio, and also by many other commentators is that Doctor Who is safe scares, and the new series is no different to the old series in that respect. As a child you were frightened, but the goodies always won in the end. I had a chat to Mum about this today, and she said the only thing she ever complained about was the final episode of Blakes 7 where the goodies didn’t win. As a number of people say on the BBC comments page on the item there are a lot more frightening things going on in the real world. To some extent I think that kids being frightened by Doctor Who, is much the same as the traditional telling of ghost stories around a campfire.

Anyway, tonight we have the most spectacular effects sequence of the series so far, with an alien spaceship crashing in London, taking out Big Ben on the way. Take a look at the Doctor Who Homepage for a preview.

Incidentally, if you’re a fan with a musical bent, take a look at the Whomix site, an entire site devoted to fan remixes of the main theme, with some versions that could grace the TV show!

So I’ve just finished watching episode three of the new Doctor Who. This week we had our first TARDIS ooops episode, where the Doctor was aiming for Naples in 1860, but the TARDIS arrives in a wintery Cardiff in 1869. Of course this being Doctor Who, the TARDIS has taken the Doctor to where the trouble is to be found, a race of gaseous aliens who need dead bodies, and are haunting an undertakers.

We again got a reference to the bigger plotline, with the aliens saying that their predicament is as a result of the Time War, could this be another pointer to the demise of the Time Lords? We also get a bit of Rose backstory, when the maid talks to Rose about her parents. Like the other references it gives a larger backstory that the fans pick up on, but is such that the new viewers aren’t totally bemused.

The effects continue to be up to scratch, with the whispy gas aliens swooping all over the place. There is also some really cool effects with the snow. If you missed the snow effect, watch the repeat on BBC3 on Sunday, and watch what happens to the snow sitting on the ledges on the TARDIS when it leaves. As the TARDIS fades it starts to fall, but rather than falling straight down it gets caught up in the rush of air into the space where the TARDIS has been!

So far I’ve been pretty impressed with the new series. There haven’t been any really duff episodes. It is definitely a new show, but then if you watch some of the old shows on UK Gold, it needed to be – time has moved on, as have audiences.

Whilst on the subject of Doctor Who, in an article praising his star, Russell T Davies has confirmed what I had heard, that he was aware of Chris Eccleston only doing a single series, but that the news was not supposed to be released before the end of the series.