The next episode, Bad Wolf, looks fun – Doctor Who meets Big Brother in space. Some fans are frothing at the mouth at the idea of contaminating their beloved show with the taint of reality TV, but I’ll reserve judgement until having seen it. I really enjoyed the audio drama The One Doctor, which featured Christopher Biggins as a con-man impersonating the Doctor to make money by rescuing people from fake alien invasions. Only then a real threat turns up, as does the real Doctor, and they end up having to work together to save the day. It’s really good fun, combining Hitchhikers-style humour with a pantomime atmosphere and some fun parody, including a sequence in which the Doctor and friends have to take part in a suspiciously familiar sounding quiz, with an acid-voiced quiz-mistress who sounded rather like Anne Robinson. This latest episode goes one better and has the real Anne Robinson voicing the Anne Droid in a deadly version of The Weakest Link! I won’t say more for fear of giving too much away, but as well as the fun parody, I hear that Bad Wolf has a rather more serious threat at work in the background, one that threatens the future of the entire human race…
(Don’t you just love being melodramatic?)
By the way, thanks for the comments on Revelation! I’ve added a comment of my own replying with some observations on prophecy, dispensationalism and my view of Revelation. The end of the world is nigh! Well, the end of this series of Doctor Who is nigh, which is perhaps only slightly less annoying.