If you're watching Doctor Who, but haven't yet seen the season finale that aired in the UK this Saturday, stop reading now. Major spoilers ahead.
Seriously. Last chance.
OK, well, despite being set up nicely by the previous episode, Turn Left (one of the highlights of the season), the double-parter that closed the season was a huge disappointment with a heavy emphasis on style rather than substance.
The narrative was largely incoherent and mired in technobabble (tell me again how the Doctor suddenly cobbled together than gun that was going to kill all the daleks? or why we suddenly had two Doctors running around?). There were too many characters to follow (at times it felt like a "Greatest Hits" of the characters from previous Doctor Whos), resulting in minimal screen time for each. In particular, the Doctor himself seemed almost irrelevant in the first episode. And while I was overjoyed that the Doctor didn't regenerate into someone new (I think David Tennant is one of the best Doctors there has been, beating my previous favourites, Tom Baker and Peter Davidson), I couldn't help feeling a bit cheated by the mechanic they used to explain why he didn't.
It wasn't all bad, I suppose. Davros was excellent (kudos to the BBC's makeup department), and Dalek Caan was delightfully unhinged. And best of all, they finally got rid of Donna Noble, surely the most annoying companion the Doctor has ever had. But overall it felt bombastic, chaotic and rushed.
