Doctor Who - Tooth and Claw

[angelophile]

The second episode of the new Doctor Who, Tooth and Claw has just finished and I gotta say...

Now THAT was more like it.

The left last week's average episode standing. Simply brilliant. From the sinister Shaolin monks, Queen Victoria's balls of brass, some top notch CGI graphics, horror, violence, thrills, humor and historical references, this baby was a good one.

From the moment it kicked off bith a pitch battle with warrior monks, to the tunes of Ian Dury's Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick and the usual TARDIS confusion of ending up in 1879 in the wilds of Scotland, instead of an Ian Dury and the Blockheads concert in 1979, this was going to be a good one. As soon as Queen Victoria appeared on the scene, then the coolness factor went up to eleven. What followed was a gothic horror story that grew steadily darker throughout as the seventh assassination attempt on Victoria turned into something a lot more otherworldly. Like The Unquiet Dead from Series One, this took a classic horror idea - werewolves - and turned it on its head.

The humor was kept to a minimum, mostly comments about Rose being improperly dressed for the time period and the Doctor's here one minute, gone the next Scottish accent (doubly an in joke since David Tennant is from Paisley). Mostly this was a rollocking good horror mystery. In parts it managed to be genuinely chilling and the violence level will probably lead to a few complaints to the BBC as the werewolf started to inflict some major damage on those trapped in a gothic house in the remote Scottish highlands.

Pauline Collins was both occasionally charismatic, but more often ruthless and snarky as Victoria, portraying her as a stone faced Emperess with more grit than any of the male leads. There was a sympathetic performance from Derek Riddell as the Lord whose house becomes a trap for Victoria. The real star of the episode, was the werewolf itself that was impeccibly CGIed for a TV series and will have genuinely terrified younger viewers. A great transformation sequence and possibly the best lookign werewolf I've ever seen onscreen.

They made sure to play up to a few cliches of the genre, with wolfsbane and the full moon all playing their part in the climax to the story. For added measure, they even threw in the Koh-In-Nor, (the Mountain of Light), the supposedly cursed jewel that is the world's largest diamond and managed to tie everything together in a great climax.

They even managed to set up Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off series that already got referenced in the Christmas episode, and namecheck the second Doctor's companion Jamie McCrimmon as well as tying into Bad Wolf.

Bloody brilliant and possibly the best episode of the new Who so far.