The Battle Of Canary Wharf
Rewatching Doctor Who on my PDA I recently revisited ‘The Army Of Ghosts’ / ‘Doomsday’ two-parter. Thinking about it, I think it may well be my favorite tenth Doctor two-parter. He was utterly fantastic and given plenty to play. After the loss of Rose he became much darker, and rightfully so, but it makes the other two-parters a little less fun I think.
Don’t get me wrong, any chance to see Captain Jack, The Valiant, Sarah Jane Smith, and K-9 I relish but the Canary Wharf duology was much brighter. Daleks and Cybermen trash-talking alone could mark this as the best two-parter perhaps of all time. And frankly the schemes of The Master and Davros became so outlandish that, while fantastic in their own right, seemed to lack the human dimension of the second season ender.
Also the solution was more grounded. It was a flaw in their plan, not some reverse-the-polarity nonsense.
Okay, technically he DID reverse polarity but it made sense.
Waitaminute, speaking of reversing polarity I think I just figured out an in-joke from Transformers: The Movie.
When the autobot shuttle is under attack by Galvatron Kup mentions that it reminded him of another battle. Springer asks how he got out of it.
“I’m trying to remember, there were a lot of casualties that day” said Kup, “oh yea, we inverted polarities“
They try it and it doesn’t work. Could this have been a dig/nod at a certain Doctor who refused to spout technobabble instead always just saying he “reversed the polarity“?
