Gridlock
Two weeks late, but anyway:
Doctor Who Series Three, Episode Three: Gridlock is, as anyone who follows this kind of thing will know, is this year's entry in the 'Year Five Billion' sequence started in the second episode of New Who in 2005. Taking Martha to New New New .... New York, rather than the gleaming spires we might have expected from last year's glimpse, they instead end up in the bowels of the city, where an endless traffic jam circles and something very old and very agressive is lurking down below the fast lane.
I knew from quite a while ago that the Macra (from way back in a Patrick Troughton story) were going to be returning in Gridlock, but hadn't expected them to be quite such a sideline to the 'real' story. They worked though - it could have just been some nameless new menace down in the smog, but this was a nice way of making it clear that this is still the same universe as Old Who, while they carried on telling their new and updated narrative. The story worked well too, with one of those narratives that are driven by The Doctor and companion being dragged into events created by the scenario, rather than the "Something strange is going on, we'd better investigate" school (cf Daleks in Manhattan a week later).
Separating The Doctor and Martha gave an opportunity for Martha to show some independence and resourcefulness, and the story did a good job in showing The Doctor's determination to retreive her while showing off the effects team's capabilities. I've seen people complain that the 'twist' that everyone was trapped in the motorway was too obvious, but as far as I can tell it wasn't meant to be a twist at all, just the basic situation. The actual (and actually very effective) twists all took place in the city's Senate, where we discovered that the whole upper city is dead, that The Face of Boe is still hanging around, and that his final message to The Doctor is "You are not alone", which it's now pretty much common knowledge sets up some startling revelations coming up towards the end of the series. The closing scene, of The Doctor coming clean to Marth about his past and his singular status, was well done, even if it did feel a bit like it was mostly an opportunity for Marth to have heard the word Dalek ahead of the following story.
I really enjoyed Gridlock - a few people I know have described it as the best Sylvester McCoy story ever, and likened it to Paradise Towers in particular, which I can sort of see, but it's also its own story, and one which featured an elderly lesbian couple and an inter-species relationship in the 'family viewing' 7pm Saturday slot, which not every series can claim...