Doctor Who: The Lazarus Experiment

(S03E06) It's almost inevitable for any good series to hit a slight dip when it reaches the half-way point in a series, and Doctor Who isn't immune to a lull in pace.

I honestly wasn't expecting much of "The Lazarus Experiment", and even though the special effects were of a reasonably high standard, the whole story was somewhat disjointed and hurried.

A few weeks ago, I made a point of suggesting that someone would soon have to start explaining why the Doctor bumps in to trouble everywhere he goes (apart from driving TV viewing schedules), and this episode finally started to indicate that something might be causing our favourite time-traveller to wander in to the path of out-and-out trouble everywhere he goes.

Sometimes, it seems that the Doctor Who writers have a 10-sided dice (or is it die?) with which they establish the basics of plot; past, present or future? Earth or space? Science or supernatural? Monster or alien?

Check boxes: 'present', 'Earth', 'science' and 'monster' for this week's episode.

It was good to see the return of Mark Gatiss in a Doctor Who role (this time in front of the camera, rather than in the background), but this was nothing on a par with the quite brilliant "The Unquiet Dead" from Series 1.

Gatiss played the part of an aging professor who demonstrated a machine designed to make people young again -- by placing himself into the contraption and emerging as a youthful, arrogant man who just so happens to have developed mutating genes which transform him in to a massive scorpion-like creature that needs to eat people to survive.

Of course, the monster had no real bearing on the plot, other than to place people in peril for the Doctor to save. The real key to the plot was a mysterious character who warned Martha's mother that the Doctor is dangerous, and that death followed him wherever he went.

I can't honestly say I was surprised at the ending, because I wasn't. It was fairly predictable stuff, and most die-hard viewers would agree that it was probably just a filler before the big story arc kicks in over the next few weeks.

Of course, there was no Doctor Who this week, thanks to the utter shambles of an event known as The Eurovision Song Contest, which displaced the best sci-fi show in history for one week to allow idiots from dozens of European nations make fools of themselves pretending to compete for the best-crafted song of the year.

However, we were given a lengthy sneak preview of not just the forthcoming episode, but of all eight forthcoming episodes of the remainder of the series, including a scene of the mysterious Mr Saxon (John Simm), sitting in the Downing Street cabinet room wearing an oxygen mask, tapping out a beat on the table, while others lie unconscious around him.

For more on Mr Saxxon, visit his blog or the campaign website.

I'm going to give this episode a 4, seeing as how it really wasn't up to the usual standard.