Heh heh heh. I didn't notice in the credits who wrote the ep, but it was blatantly obvious by about three minutes in that it was RTD. 20th-century pop culture stuff all over the place - the aeroplane cabin, the Eurovision song (or whatever it was), the cartoons, the slippers and earplugs and "may contain nuts" - doh. I don't dislike pop culture references on principle; I like them when they tie into the story, like the Weakest Link/ Big Brother/ What Not To Wear episode, but I'm not keen when they're quite as incongruous, and as likely to date badly, as this.

RTD checklist, then.

Pop culture references, check. "Gay agenda", check. Evil Older Woman, check. Rose Tyler, check. Caricatured characters, check. Weakness for exotic or important locations and times, check. (There was no need for this episode to have taken place on a previously unexplored part of a remote diamond planet - it could just as well have taken place on the London underground.) Lots of ironic segues - check. Messianistic imagery, sort of, when Sky was all lit up - check. Heroic self-sacrifice, check. Jab at contemporary politics ("immigrants") - check.

For all that, though, I didn't hate the episode. I love talky episodes, for a start. And talky episodes about the power of words? Win. The synchronised talking was very clever, and they didn't cheat with the extended two-shot sequences with the Doctor and Sky, that I could see. I think when I watch it back, it'll all match up pretty perfectly, in terms of who is repeating who when. It was interesting to see the Doctor try to defend his ideals to a carriage full of terrified people who don't know him - he's not very good at it. Last week he was threatening entities who didn't know him, in order to save the Library and the "saved" people. His words had no effect - he had to refer them to the encyclopaedia in order to convince them. This week, when he's trying to persuade people not to kill, he's got no weapons but his own words - and again they aren't good enough, and this time he has no back-up. And then his words are stolen from him altogether.

Despite the fact that he "wins" in the end, and most of the travellers are rescued, I read this as a tale of the Doctor's impotence, almost irrelevance. (Is it significant that he's less powerful on his own? Probably.) Right at the start, the Doctor can't even persuade his companion that this amazing planet is more interesting than a spa. We come out of the story not knowing much more about the alien creature than we did at the start, and the Doctor didn't show a particular desire to find out. The realisation at the end of the episode that nobody knew the stewardess's name was nicely executed - I hadn't noticed they hadn't named her - and paralleled the fact that none of the other travellers knew his name, but I thought "we didn't know her name" could equally have applied to the alien.

He refused to kill anyone, but his arguments had little effect on any of the travellers - and at the end of the episode, nobody had developed noticeably from their starting point apart from the stewardess, and she'd developed all the way to death. We're used to the Doctor having a huge impact on people's lives, even those he only meets briefly, so that seemed unusual. And, of course, he had nothing to do with the discovery of the alien, with the dispatching of the alien, or even with calling the rescue crew. There were a lot of words from the Doctor this episode, but very little driving of the story. And nearly half of the people in the carriage died, which isn't a great success rate, although he didn't seem too worried about the driver and the mechanic.

I suppose that explains why, when he meets up with Donna again, he looks so depressed and bedraggled - because I've seen him far, far happier after far, far worse days. (And I'm assuming he phoned Donna to tell her what happened, or something, given her reaction to him.)

I've mostly liked Donna this series, far more than I expected, but I have to say I didn't really miss her this episode. Does this mean we'll have another episode that's all Donna and no Doctor; is that how they're getting round the shooting blocks problem this year?

Obligatory plot hole complaining - you're designing a public passenger vehicle, and you know that the atmosphere on the planet will kill anyone. So you make the doors openable by pressing a very large, obvious yellow button. Doesn't seem sensible, even if there is a six-second failsafe thingy that I didn't really understand, and crucially, that *doesn't stop people being sucked out into the lethal atmosphere*. Ah well.

In other news, Russell T Davies got an OBE. Yay, I suppose, though I've just checked wiki and the last three eps are all written by him, and my heat sank slightly to discover that...

Edit: *headdesk* I forgot to take the "gay agenda" phrase out before I crossposted to doctorwho, and now there is multi-post wank. Although fairly good-natured so far.