Doctor Who: The Next Doctor

It's a year later and the nightmare Voyage of The Damned is forgotten, thanks to the sheer, seasonal brilliance of The Next Doctor. Bereft of stunt casting of gay icons and plots recycled from hackneyed disaster movies, this year's Doctor Who Christmas special was a glorious return to form with a straight-forward, fun adventure and mystery story.

No sooner has our Doctor arrived in Victorian London - at Christmas, naturally - than he meets a gentleman claiming to be "The Doctor" (David Morrissey), who seems to know a lot about Time Lords, regeneration, sonic screwdrivers, the TARDIS and so on.

While our Doctor wonders if this new Doctor is a future regeneration, only bookies and readers of the tabloid press could seriously think that David Morrissey's character was really going to be David Tennant's replacement.

The clues to the mystery have been with us from the start - with Morrisey's Doctor speaking and acting like the 10th Doctor (when have any two of the Doctor's other iterations sounded alike?) - but nevertheless this sub-plot is magnificently unravelled by Tennant's Doctor, who treats Morrissey's Doctor with an enormous amount of compassion and humanity.

The mystery of the "other" Doctor's identity is only part of The Next Doctor though, as the episode's main plot revolves around a band of cybermen, ejected from the Void after the reality-collapsing events of Journey's End - with stolen dalek technology.

These stranded cybermen are trying to take over the planet with the aid of the strong-willed Miss Hartigan (Dervla Kirwan), a handful of cyberwraiths (cats and dogs augmented with cybertechnology, I believe) and the spectacular Cyber-King!

The Cyber-King was the episode's pièce de résistance, a multi-storey, steampunk, mecha robot that rose out of the Thames and threatened to stamp all over the city.

This did lead to my only slight issue with the story - albeit a very geeky one, that will perhaps be addressed in a future 'special' - how come no one in the future knew about this monsterous metal man (who owes a lot of his appearance to Ted Hughes' seminal Iron Giant) or even remembered it? What this actually a parallel Earth and not our Earth after all?

The Doctor acknowledges this point in passing, but offered no solution, which does make me think it will be revisited at some point.

Not that it matters at the moment though because this was a genuinely brilliant episode of Doctor Who; perfect family viewing for Christmas Day - with slight touches of cheese and silliness.

It also makes you realise just how much we will miss David Tennant when he finally vacates the TARDIS.