Ranked second behind Gridlock as best of the season... wow, quite the bold statement. I've ranked 42 5th best, behind Evolution of the Daleks and ahead of The Shakespeare Code. The episode deserved a solid 3 in my books... it's not good, but it's really not bad either.
The shots back to the clock were far too frequent in my mind. I could cope with the obscure times vocalized far more easily than I could handle the frequency with which the clock was shown.
And yet more stuff that's deadlock sealed... as much of a cheat and easy way out the sonic screwdriver is, this deadlock seal business is the opposite side of the same coin. Without the deadlock seal we'd not get the pub quiz questions I guess... which is worse?!?
Going back to the time/clock fracas, the worst part overall for me was how this thing was advertised as being in real time and what do we get? A countdown that starts at 42m27s initially, which is spoken at the 1m42s mark of the episode... at the 3m33s mark our counter is at 40m27s, so we're 9 seconds out there already... and that's only the second time the countdown remainder is spoken/seen! At 5m48s, a mere two and a quarter minutes after the previous countdown remainder, we're all of a sudden at 34m32s left. We've lost almost 6 minutes in that time! I mean, really, wtf? Do the editors not own a clock or something?
These are all cutaway shots and VOs, how hard is it to get the darn things correct? It's not like you can't *easily* fix that stuff in post! As soon as that time mark hit, the episode pretty much lost me and my interest. Get something as simple and easily fixed as that wrong and where can the episode go from there?
And the jiggery-pokery (albeit *different* jiggery-pokery) about the cell phone is a little tired. It would have been worse if Martha used the phone to call her mum straight away, as Rose did, but still... can we not think of a new device to meld the two worlds? Better yet, can we not just forget about the family?
The "monster" helmet... okay, there's one thing I did like about the episode. The solution was cheap, simple and effective, much like a good Doctor Who plot device should be. A bit much in appearance like Princess Leia's hat in her Return of the Jedi bounty hunter outfit, but that might be overly nitpicky.
As for the sinister woman, I'm thinking Warren hit it on the head as far as Saxon's team wanting to trace the calls from Martha. It seems to me if that was a possibility (after the fact no less!) why would they expect to see anything other than the source number of the call... which they would presumably already know? Does the universal roaming (ugh!) change the source mobile number? Please...
Steven is definitely right about the lack of classic series content in Confidential, and the throwback to some of the classic series ships was well received. The length of Confidential is, however, excessive even with the old series stuff thrown in this week's episode.
Human Nature... nope, it's not a dream... if you guys didn't see it, the BBC website podcast (the short clip from Confidential that gets posted every week) initially featured the snippet from Human Nature's DWC counterpart ("Alter Ego"), and it explicitly shows how things come to pass in Human Nature. I won't spoil it here, but suffice it to say the method in place really irked me and I look forward to ranting about it next week. I know you guys frequent Demonoid for most of your Who stuff, but let me know if that clip isn't there and you want to see it and I'll get it to you.
A word of warning, it shows a lot of The Doctor dancing... and no, not the sexual innuendo from 2 years ago... =)
Okay, I've just looked at Demonoid and a quick search of both 'alter ego' and 'human nature' yield no results. It is, however, on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3mwq7EU9_M if you want to check it out.
As for Torchwood, avoid the temptation!! =)
The Utopia clip looked silly at best, and Captain Jack sounds like such a whiny bitch in it, but yeah, I too think it'll be the cold opening for the episode, it just wouldn't fit elsewhere. As to Warren's assertion about Jack hanging onto the TARDIS, it's been shown (twice that I can think of at the very least) that objects have been attached to the outside of the TARDIS before a dematerialization and remained in place after rematerialization. The first was in Silver Nemesis, and the second was The Shakespeare Code/Gridlock, where in each circumstance an arrow was shot into the TARDIS and was still there after dematerialization and rematerialization. So, although it looks utterly silly to see Barrowman clinging onto the ship, there is precedent... not with living things, mind you...