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The same doctor, but a new assistant in a decidedly bi-polar series
Doctor Who series three is a batch of episodes so variable in quality that the series as a whole feels almost schizophrenic, particularly given the clustering of the good and inferior work. The series opens promisingly enough, with a young woman traveling to work in London's busy rush hour, while juggling mobile phone conversations with her bickering family about her brother's impending twenty-first birthday. The opening segment of Smith and Jones, in which trainee doctor Martha Jones meets a mystery man, is a little too reminiscent of Rose from series one, but there is the compensation of Anne Reid hamming it up as a vampiric alien, and an almost episode stealing cameo from Roy Marsden as the consultant Stoker. Once the hospital is whisked off to the moon and chaos ensues, such comparisons are easily forgotten. The Doctor is impressed with the way Martha keeps her head while all those around her are losing theirs. As a reward, the Doctor offers her one journey as his passenger, and they travel back to meet Shakespeare. Sadly, the quality of the early episodes cannot be maintained, as the time travellers then hurtle forward to the year five million and fifty three to New New York, which is now Gridlocked. Martha is kidnapped by a couple desperate to use the multi-oocupancy lane in another of Davies' ham-fisted extrapolation of current trends. For the two-parter Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks, they travel back to the 1930s, in the latest installment in what is fast becoming a soap opera, in a story mixing social history with The Island of Doctor Moreau. The Lazarus Experiment saw the return of the Jones family in a decidedly inferior cocktail of Frankenstein and the Picture of Dorian Grey. The presence of Mark Gatiss and Thelma Barlow as guest stars seemed to emphasize that Doctor Who was in danger of becoming a star-obsessed parody of itself. Series Three was rapidly bottoming out, and its nadir was Chris Chibnall's 42, a not-so-clever variation on the live TV concept of 24. The Doctor and Martha have just 42 minutes to stop a spacecraft from plummetting into a star, in a feeble attempt to provide a roller-coaster ride of a script. Part of the problem with both this and the previous episode was they not only simply rehashed other plots, but were contra-scientific, badly planned fantasies wrapped in goobledygook like sun-particles (Chibnall had clearly never heard of hydrogen or plasma) Many discerning viewers began to wonder in the UK press whether Doctor Who had already peaked, and was descending into second-rate drama. Fortunately, the two-part Human Nature / The Family of Blood by Paul Cornell was an abrupt and delightful return to form, featuring a Doctor in hiding in 1913, and was without doubt one of the very best half-dozen stories of any of the three series. Stephen Moffat's Blink was a chiller from an offbeat point of view, a mini-tradition started by Gods and Monsters in series Two, and which maintained the return to form. Utopia was the first segment of what was effectively a three-part finale, culminating in The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords, in what was without doubt the best finale to any of the three Doctor Who series. At it's very best, Doctor Who continued to be the very best television on offer in the UK, and the good episodes bear repeated viewing, but there is an increasing tendency to be preoccupied with guest stars and series arcs, at the expense of quality. The danger signs are there for series four.
The copyright of the article Doctor Who Series 3 in Sci-Fi TV Episode Summaries is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Doctor Who Series 3 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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