Doctor Who: 42

The Doctor and Martha found themselves trapped on board a spaceship falling into a star, with only 42 minutes to avert disaster in tonight's frenetic, action-packed, real-time episode of Doctor Who.

The homage to 24 was surprisingly minimal - except for the occasional countdown from the ship's computer - the real time element was lost amidst the running about and frantic scrambling to escape terminal sunburn.

However, the story did crib atmosphere and plot from sources as far ranging as Doctor Who's own Impossible Planet, Sunshine and Alien, with its crew of working class stiffs in a near-derelict spaceship on a collision course with certain death.

Although the Doctor had a key part in saving the day, this was very much the episode where Martha proved her worth - even though she had ably handled the sonic screwdriver in The Lazarus Experiment - and earned her "frequent flyer privileges" (a universal roaming mobile phone modification and her own key to the TARDIS). She even managed a fleeting romance with someone other than the Doctor and got in a number of calls home.

Thankfully her calls to her mother, already very hostile to the Doctor, were not as cheesy as the ones we used to suffer between Rose and Jackie, but Martha's mother is a better developed dramatic character than Jackie ever was. The fact that she appears to be in league with the henchmen of the sinister Member of Parliament Harold Saxon only adds to the building excitement for the final two-parter of this series, when , one presumes, Martha drops back in for a cup of tea on Election Day.

My gaming buddy Nick said of 42: "Definitely Who-by-the-numbers this week. They never get the 'hard sci-fi' episodes right. Redolent of the demon-planet story [The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit] last season."

While over on the Midnight's Lair message boards, PMikey said: "There's some huge plot holes in this episode... and some fast-and-loose interpretation of the laws of physics, but a fun romp nonetheless."