After the peaks and troughs of the previous series, Doctor Who finally seems to have found some consistency. The more of David Tennant's material I see, the more it's evident that Ecclestone's stories were largely an experiment to see what the audience reacted to the best.

Thus, in "Tooth and Claw" we have a broad attempt to recreate the popular gothic chills of "The Unquiet Dead". There are some broad similarities, such as the historical celebrity, but it's very much its' own story.

The trailers did this one a disservice, as the "bullet-time" scenes of red-clad monks made it look like this one was going to blend werewolves with kung-fu (the fight, as others have noted, looked disturbingly like a BBC continuity trail), which probably would have been just too silly. As it was, that bit was out of the way quite quickly.

While Russell T. Davies' scripting has certainly come on in leaps and bounds since the dire last three Ecclestone episodes, there's still some of his old vices here - it's mainly prominent in the lashings of bad comedy, notably the irritating "Are you 'not amused'?" joke, and the facetious "Royal-family-are-werewolves" ending (yeah, I'm sure he was joking too, even without the historical trouble that Victoria had given birth to all her children by then, but it was still a bum note).

That said, his storylines have really improved. The whole set-up of the house is a marvellous piece of scripting (well researched, too), with some wonderful touches.

Sadly, the biggest problem stands with the acting and characterisation. David Tennant is a wonderful Doctor, but much like Tom Baker his magnetism allows the character to get away with being a facile idiot at times… While it's been suggested his cockiness is setting up the Doctor and Rose for a fall later in the year, I'm not too sure whether it's not just RTD's smugness filtering down… Time will tell, I suppose. Billie Piper has her first real off-day - to be fair, every regular in the series' history has had at least one, but here she's largely just cardboard aside from when she's in the cellar with the house staff. This may well be because for once Rose is actually rather underwritten, doing little else beyond flapping ineffectually in the Doctor's wake, and acting as a comic foil. Pauline Collins is incredibly bland as Queen Victoria - the costume's actually doing the acting, we think she's a convincing Victoria because she's dressed as Victoria, with Collins putting minimal effort into things.

These misgivings just go to show how well constructed the episode is, as it's still terrific fun. There are a couple of other bad moments (such as Captain Reynolds' noble sacrifice being rendered pointless by Rose stopping to watch him die), but it generally holds together really well. The alien is very well realised, and is kept threatening. The pace is break-neck, which allows a couple of things to be rushed past us (like the bizarre reaction of the Royal carriage when a blue box presumably materialises in front of them and two people step out, or what exactly happens to the monks), but also keeps everything moving beautifully, and keeps the alien threatening. The period detail was superb, as were the rest of the supporting cast.

Also, hopefully the leaden "We have a spin-off named Torchwood on the way" reference will be a one-off…

Despite all these misgivings, "Tooth and Claw" stands up as an exemplary thriller. The first two episodes are really a foundation for a series in the new quasi-serial set-up, and this one continues the upwards trend.

Review written: 08/05/2006