Spoilers. Yes spoilers. Lots of them. You have been warned.
Right, let’s get the science bit out of the way. No not the moonlight and diamonds stuff, that’s just pure bollocks anyway. Queen Victoria did not, technically speaking, have haemophilia – it’s a recessive trait carried on the X chromosone and hence women only have it if both parents carried the defective gene. She was however a carrier and passed on the gene to her children. For her to have been “infected” in 1879, long after the birth of her children would pose a problem. Unless we want to believe that she went wolf and bit [1] all her children [2]. So it looks like the scratch was just a scratch after all.
The episode opens with probably the best fight sequence in the 43 year history of Doctor Who. Not actually a very hard task. But why were the monks wearing red? Didn’t it occur to the production team that everyone watching would think of those terrible BBC1 channel idents? And a good old fashioned scream at the end of the teaser – that would have been the episode one cliffhanger in old year following a whole load of wandering around on the moors and getting the various characters to bump into each other.
Good stuff – Ian Dury. Maggie Thatcher. Doctor James McCrimmon. Naked Rose (not naked enough for a large part of the audience). Nice Bad Wolf reference. Queen Victoria shooting the monk. Superb work from the supporting cast, especially Pauline Collins. The “books are the best weapons” line (borrowing heavily from the Buffy research scenes?).
So so stuff – The ‘not amused’ running gag. CGI Werewolf worked well in close up but moved a bit odd in long shot. The Torchwood links could have been, oh, about a hundred times, more subtle. Typically dodgy science.
Bad stuff – Not much.
So the Doctor has pissed off Queen Victoria now as well as Harriet Jones, Prime Minister. After destryoing his home planet is RTD now making him unwelcome anywhere and anytime in his adopted home?
The implication that the Doctor and Rose are getting too cocky and actively seeking out danger looks like it will be this year’s theme. Should be interesting to see where this goes. The things that niggle me about Tennant’s performance might be sorted out if he has to portray a Doctor who gets shaken up by a big mistake at some point.
I’m giving this one 9/10.
[Updates]
[1] – Ah, there was a line to this effect but I missed it first time around because I was talking about the haemophilia bit being rubbish.
[2] – Not all her children. Just those that had the haemophilia gene (a carrier like Queen Victoria has a 50% chance of passing it on to each child) – Princess Alice, Princess Beatrice, and Prince Leopold. And despite all the inbreeding amongst her descendents the gene has not reached the current royal family. Unless, as the Doctor implies, the werewolf DNA multiplies within the host body over the generations and stops manifesting itself as haemophilia and starts manifesting itself as lycanthropy, but in that case Victoria wouldn’t have been doing any biting and so we go round and round in circles…
