Regression

Hadn't watched any of this Doctor Who series before the weekend. After Christopher Ecclestone quit, I figured, it would quickly descend from last year's impressive heights and become the sort of silly-but-innocous drama the BBC spits out without trying. How wrong can one cynic be? Saturday's episode reached an truly epic, monumental level of silliness.

They found the Devil. That's not bad for a storyline, is it? No more tired old Daleks this time. Lucifer Sam himself. And please note, any theologians: he doesn't live in Pandemonium or the darkest recesses of the human heart. He's in the centre of a planet which orbits a black hole. Be told. Given that he's awoken by a team drilling through the planet, it could also be a useful campaign slogan for environmental groups. Open that mine, they could tell the government, you won't just destroy a precious eco-system, you might rouse the Devil. And we're not speaking metaphorically, either. We really do mean the Devil.

Mind you, he might turn out not to be the Devil after all. This series has the Scooby Doo approach to anything supernatural. The only difference is that the hoax is generally perpetrated by carniverous aliens, rather than the owner of the old fairground wanting to sell the site for housing. But the thing rising up through the ground looked right. He had the laugh. And he could possess people, giving them cabalistic writings all over their skin, glowing red eyes and the ability to breath in a vacuum. If he's not the Devil, I don't want to meet the man who is.

The Doctor's other problem is that he's lost the Tardis. He always seems to be doing this these days. Given how distraught the prospect makes him, you'd think he'd take more care of the damn thing. Insisting on valet parking wherever he lands, for example. Not just dump it in a broom cupboard for it to be hit by an asteroid and pushed into the centre of the world. AA would tell him the same thing.

That wasn't his main concern by the end of the episode, however. It was that he was about to die horribly. I'm glad that about the return of some proper Doctor Who cliffhangers. Several simultaneous scenes in which everyone is about to die horribly. And just as things are at their absolute worst, the theme tune kicks in. Even though I knew at the start of the next episode the Doctor would quickly save them by fiddling about with his sonic screwdriver, it always used to scare the bejesus out of me. It's nice to report that nothing has changed.