Voyage of the Damned

Oh dear, whatever were they thinking!? This Christmas 2007 special edition of Doctor Who was a dire disappointment, devoid of any of the classic characteristics of the best Doctor Who stories, a failure made even more pertinent as it followed a superb three parter regenerating the Master back into the Doctor Who universe.

This Voyage of the Damned episode was simply a remake of the Poseidon Adventure (and even that latest remake was a disappointment) set in orbit above the planet Earth, with some breathtakingly inept scenes. I appreciate that Russell T. Davies concluded that the last series was too dark and wanted to inject some humour into the episodes, no doubt his reason to reintroduce Catherine Tate into the next series (on which the jury still has to be out), but having the Doctor overshoot Buckingham Palace whilst flying the out-of-control Titanic with the Queen waving her gratitude beneath was simply laughable, not funny. The James Bond franchise suffered a similar collapse of credibility by mocking the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in one of the Roger Moore films, before that franchise had to be reinvented twice, once with Timothy Dalton and then again with Pierce Brosnan.

So what was Davies thinking? Probably that he wanted to create a feature length Doctor Who episode that could reach beyond the show's captive audience, but in doing so he left us addicts reminiscent of the taste of turkey fat scraped from the bottom of the Christmas basing tray; cold, rank and a mere reminder of the genuine article.

Voyage of the Damned started with the Titanic crushing into the hull of the Tardis. Now, not trying to be nerdy, but the inside of the Tardis is actually outside of time and space, so it can't be 'crashed into' by anything. Leaving that aside, the taster at the end of the 'Last of the Timelords' was mouth wateringly magnificent, and left the viewer gasping to find out 'what happened next'. What wasn't expected was the Titanic that appeared to be the original ship, being transformed into a space ship. To plagiarise James Cameron's script from Titanic, "Half the passengers will die", "Not the better half", there was simply no better half to this particular episode, it sank  without trace.

The basic plot was as follows:

Highlights:

Seeing David Tennant back as the Doctor.
The end credits.

Lowlights:

The preceding hour and a half.

Doctor Who Online's verdict: One Star out of five. A real Christmas turkey!