At the end of the Russell T Davies era, a decision was made to have a year of specials, with David Tennant as the Doctor and a rotating cast of guest actors. The first of these specials is The Next Doctor and, to be honest, I am completely apathetic to this entire episode.
I don't think it's a problem with the script, from Davies himself, which is perfectly serviceable and has a lot of fun behaving as a simultaneous romp through Victorian London with the Cybermen and a character study for the man who thought he was the Doctor, Jackson Lake. It also has a wonderful villain, in the form of Miss Hartigan, a woman who clearly has some sort of horrible history behind her that has formed her into the woman that can control the Cybermen. It's a character that just works, in much the same way as Tobias Vaughn worked all the way back in The Invasion. But my problem with this is that it just doesn't quite work in terms of getting me involved with the story.
And I don't know why I just can't connect with this episode. Maybe it's the direction from Andy Goddard, which doesn't quite engage my attention in the same way that Graeme Harper or, to pick a future example, Rachel Talalay would. It feels flat, and doesn't really convey the dual beauty and horror of Victorian London. That this world could feel so warm at the beginning and be filled with the hidden horrors of workhouses where children are taken away, or women who are very poorly treated in a variety of horrible ways. Or maybe it's just the fact that I can't quite latch onto the potential of this episode, because once the tension of it being a story with a future Doctor is lost, it ends up just being a normal episode. And when we're dealing with specials, that's something that really needs to be thought about.
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