Doctor Who: Boom Town

I remember Boom Town being quite a disappointing, chatty episode of the first season of Doctor Who and while it has improved, slightly, with age, it still feels more like filler than a full story.

Modern day Cardiff and the TARDIS is "refuelling" from the rift that we first learned of in The Unquiet Dead. So the crew have some time to relax and Rose meets up with her old boyfriend, Mickey. It isn't long, though, until the Doctor, Jack, Rose and Mickey discover that a former enemy, one of the Slitheen, long thought dead, has set herself up as Mayor of Cardiff and has engineered some wild scheme to build a nuclear power plant over the rift and use the resulting explosion to "surf" her way home!

The dialogue between "Margaret" (the Slitheen) and The Doctor about the consequences of his actions is very telling, and shows Russell T Davies character-centred strengths as a writer, but - even with some world-threatening fireworks at the finale - this episode still seems to be lacking in genuine dramatic tension.

Of course, given what has happened to The Doctor this week in The Sound of Drums, the power at the heart of the TARDIS to regress "Margaret" to an egg, may come in handy (if it can be better controlled).