Good grief, I didn’t realize it started tonight. It looks like they’re showing Christmas Invasion first - does that show the Doctor’s reincaration? Then the first episode, New Earth, follows.
My kids will be excited. This is one of the few shows we watch as a family.
I got home late last night from a week long business trip. My kids stayed up to see me. After Hugs and kisses all around, my 6 year old son Happily pronounces, “There is a Dr. Who Marathon tonight”. My kids are looking forward to this more than me and I am very happy about this for some reason.
Jim
Ooh, I am so stoked for the return of Doctor Who! I’ll miss Christopher Eccleston, though. He really grew on me.
EoA, thank you for the reminder! I can’t wait to see this and would have missed it were it not for you. I hear from my UK friends who have seen it that Tennant is good. Gonna miss Ecclestone, though. He was the best since Baker. (Tom, not Colin.)
Lousy not-havin’-SciFi-basic-cable package …
The Royal family is A+, who’d have thought! 
Must… not… gloat!
Ah, you’ll love The Christman Invasion (although watching it on Christmas Eve, with my little sister staring at the christmas tree for a good halfhour after the episode was over, was very good fun)! New Earth however, is, in my considered opinion, shite.
Agreed on both. I just saw them. New Earth was the worst episode of the new series so far. Christman was very good.
I loved the Arthur Dent reference. Got my hopes up a little when he was trying on clothes and lingered over the scarf. Silly me.
Jim
The suit looked fine, only I kept thinking it should have a hat with it. Oh well.
Also: Cat Women. Cat Women dressed as nuns. I"m getting some very strange associations here.
I think The Christmas Invasion bears watching twice.
During the first go-around, Harriet Jones appears to be little more than a damsel in distress waiting for The Doctor to save the day. During the second go-around, we know that she knows that Torchwood is perfectly capable of incinerating the invaders, but she’s trying to buy time until the Death Star Jr. goes online.
I don’t know how I feel about the ending. From what I’ve read, it probably resonates a little more with English people given the Falklands reference.
I don’t like the new outfit – it was fun to see him going through the wardrobe, but he wound up with pretty much ho-hum.
It does seem to be a little inconsistent in treatment of Harriet Jones. [spoiler]I thought he had said that she was a “great” Prime Minister or something like that, over a golden age. Now, that turns out to have been sarcastic?
She seems to be a different character from the prior episode: ordering the Secret Weapon to fire seemed out of character to me, compared to the woman walking through the wreckage reassuring people at the end of her prior episode. [/spoiler]
There were a couple of out-of-character bits that were jarring. It did seem odd that Jones blasted the alients (though I did love the way she kept holding up her ID card when introducing herself, as though she couldn’t believe she was PM).
However, the ending of New Earth came out of left field: why in the world did Cassandra – who spend the entire episode jumping from body to body in order to survive – suddenly decide it was time for her to die? More likely, she would have grabbed someone at that party and run off somewhere.
Also, she had to put Rose into a machine to take her over, but was able to jump from body to body at will later on. Very inconsistent.
I really liked Christmas Invasion but thought New Earth was really badly written. Cure with a touch? I mean, the plot wasn’t that bad, it was the solution I found cringeworthy. I hope that’s just a weak episode and not an indicator of what is to come.
I really didn’t need to see Cassandra again, either.
On the plus side, from Christmas Invasion…“no second chances.” I really loved the way Tennant delivered that line. In fact, his whole speech on the Sycorax ship was fantastic.
I just bought season one and am savoring my way through it. I live overseas though and will have to wait for season two to come out on dvd. 
Translator/aide: “…yes, we know who you are.”
Oh and The Doctor and his arbitrary sense of Time Lord justice can F-off. Is this the same Doctor who destroyed his own planet to defeat the Daleks or the the same Doctor who celebrates the Great Human Empire last season (although I suppose technically he isn’t)? What part of holding 2 billion people hostage and threatening to enslave half the Earth isn’t deserving of a Death Star ray to the face? Are we supposed to believe these aliens are bound by James T Kirk Law of Inter-species Single Combat? Their ruler took all of ten seconds to go back on his word.
I have to agree.
Shooting people who are leaving isn’t nice, but I can see why Jones felt compelled to fire. The Doctor isn’t indestructible (the other Time Lords sure weren’t), and he can’t be everywhere at once. An elected leader would be irresponsible to keep betting the safety of her country, much less the planet, on a last-minute clutch performance by a homeless, eccentric galactic wanderer and his ever-changing cast of sidekicks.
And I say this as a huge fan of the Doctor.
Is there any explanation of how the Eccleston Doctor died?
Was that the Tom Baker costume visible, on the left when the Doctor was leaving the wardrobe room after choosing an outfit?
I loved the Christmas-tree shaped hole in the wall of Jackie’s apartment.
New Earth wasn’t great, but I enjoyed watching Cassandra swap bodies. When Cassandra was possessing Rose’s body, I wondered if they were dubbing with Zoe Wanamaker’s voice or if Billie Piper was doing a pretty good impression of Zoe Wanamaker as Cassandra.
In the final ep of S1, Rose absorbed a lot of energy from “the heart of the TARDIS” to defeat the Daleks. The Doctor absorbed it from her to save her life and pretty much burned himself out in the process.
I was a bit disappointed in TCI. It seemed like Rose got kind of stupid. She had a lot of confidence in S1 and in TCI she came of very much like the silly gitty girl in distress. I’ve never liked Icky Mickey so his appearance was a big lead weight around the episode’s neck.
Agree completely that PM Jones acted correctly in taking out the alien ship. It makes no sense for the Doctor to get on his moral high horse about it, seeing as how he’d just gotten done killing an alien himself. It’s OK to kill one alien but not a shipful? Ludicrous.
Not at all. It’s the difference between acting the self-defense (the doctor had let the alien live; he then tried to take advantage and kill the doctor) and behaving preemptively. The latter is just not morally defensible.
Unless you want to subscribe to Charles Pelligrino’s belife that we should go to every planet in the universe capable of supporting life and nuke it from orbit, because there’s a chance it might evolve into a threat.
The Doctor nearly always takes the high moral ground (other than - arguably – “Terror of the Vervoids,” and he paid for that). He’d never attack an enemy that was leaving in defeat.
Even ignoring the moral issues, it was a stupid move. Earth has a defense. Isn’t it better to keep it secret from any possible invaders?
I disagree that Jones’ action was “preemptive.” She was dealing with a species which had declared its intention to enslave the human race or murder a third of it (true they were unable apparently to enforce that particular threat this time but can we be sure that Jones understood that?), whose leader demonstrated that he did not feel himself bound by the rites of honorable combat and with a champion in the Doctor whom she cannot rely upon. I have no quarrel with her decision.
There’s an enormous difference between “might evolve into a threat” and “came to your planet in force and tried to kill every third person on it.”
Who exactly among the invaders is left to tell the tale?