I didn't bother watching "Love and Monsters" the week before. I had given up on writing Doctor Who reviews and was very nearly going to quit the show itself. More so than last year, Series 2 has proven that the team behind the scenes has yet to gain a firm handle on the quality of the scripts they film. With Russell T. Davies behind the wheel, you can see some of his own episodes possibly don't even go through a script reading.
I was going to skip Matthew Graham's "Fear Her," the last stand-alone episode before the two-part finale of Series 2. I went ahead anyway, and came away feeling at peace. It's not a great episode, but its a nice little segue for the big revelations to come.
The Doctor (David Tennant) and Rose (Billie Piper) landed in London in the year 2012 for the Olympics. In a nearby neighborhood, children began to disappear from within plain sight. The only clue to solving the mystery was a little girl named Chloe (Abisola Agbaje) who spent most of her time drawing pictures in her bedroom — some of which, strangely enough, were of the missing children. The Doctor found out that Chloe was possessed by an alien whose secret plan could wreck havoc on the Olympic games.
This was standard-issue X-Files, but it was a nice calm before the storm of the two-parter we will get starting next week. That being said, there are a few old issues that have bothered me throughout this season. The first of which is the vocalization of the language from David Tennant's Doctor.
In the original series (1963-1989), you got a sense of every word spoken regardless of the quality of that particular episode. For the new series (at least this current season) the show had suffered from a lack of clarity from David Tennant, who by choice of the production team or not, has been unable to get a script (except for "The Girl In The Fireplace") that allows his Doctor to be clear in his diction at every point in the plot. The ADD-like personality of the Doctor can be done to enrich the story, but not if it ultimately detracts from it. For this episode, the script had a bit of that near the beginning, but picked back up once the mystery deepened.
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