Doctor Who:
Voyage of the
Damned
By Russell T.
Davies
“I'm the
Doctor. I'm a Time Lord. I'm from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of
Kasterborous. I'm nine hundred and three years old and I'm the man who's going
to save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below. You got a
problem with that?”
Its once
again time for another Christmas special and once again the Tenth Doctor is
without a companion. This time around
he is paired with Kylie Minogue who is more famous for being a pop singer. During the Summer and Fall all the
speculation was about whether or not the Titanic that crashed into the TARDIS
was the genuine article or a spaceship.
Well it turned out that it was of course a spaceship. The Titanic it turned out was a holiday
cruise spaceship that had tons of passengers traveling to Earth to experience the
Christmas holidays. Unfortunately The
Doctor shows up so you know what is about to happen next.
When this story
first came out I was a tad hesitant about it and thought that the premise
wouldn’t work and that it would not be a good story. But my worries were for not as it was an
entertaining story for the most part.
What we got was a story that had some elements of The Robots of Death
and The Poseidon Adventure. In other
words we had an homage to disaster movies.
RTD gives us a pretty good disaster movie with the spaceship getting
pelted by asteroids when the suicidal captain of the ship leaves the shields
down so he can kill himself. What ensues
next is a fight for survival as the robot Hosts have also been programmed to
kill anyone left alive on the ship.
Plenty of action in Voyage of the Damned to keep you interested.
Not lost
among the action was the character development.
You could really get a feel for the central characters of the story that
when most of them died you felt sorry for them. Well except one guy Slade
played by Gray O’Brien who was one character you were hoping would buy the farm
but unfortunately survives the story.
What is the deal with the Tenth Doctor that where ever he goes all the
girls fall in love with him. It
gets old real fast and thankfully this
doesn’t happen in the series that Donna is the companion.
The robots of
the story The Host were dressed as angels and turned out to be angels of
death. They eventually had their
programming changed and started killing people because Max wanted that to
happen and the disaster so he can save face and get his company back. The robots’ turning on people has been done
before and was done a lot better in the Tom Baker story The Robots of
Death. Plus the robots looked cooler in that story
also.
I liked the
way Voyage of the Damned worked out including the ending when Astrid sacrificed
herself to save everyone. Pushing cyborg
Max off the platform into the engines with a fork lift was pretty good and not
what I expected to happen. So no happy
ending this time around.
One of the
surprising things in Voyage of the Damned was how well Kylie Minogue was. This was another of the little things that
worried me way back when this one first aired but her performance did not disappoint
and did not bring the story down. That
distinction goes to RTD who did yet again another of his what was he thinking
moments. The stupid scene was the Queen
running out of Buckingham Palace and the waving at the ship going Merry
Christmas. Really, did we need that scene? I thought it was pretty stupid and an eye
roller.
The Voyage of
the Damned was an ok story with a lot of entertaining moments and was fast
paced and action packed that didn’t require any heavy thinking to enjoy
it. A nice mindless story that has some
faults like the angels lifting The Doctor up and flying up to the control deck
and well the whole reason Max did what he did and expecting Captain to commit
suicide was a stretch. But overall Voyage
of the Damned was a nice story to watch after Christmas dinner.
Grade B –
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