This is one that I haven’t rewatched in a long time. There’s lots of good scottish actors in this one. The plot is good. It’s not one of my go-to standout episodes, it’s not the most exciting, but it holds up okay.

The fantasy story of werewolves is something I could easily see them having done in the recent series. Something that shines through in this episode is some of the DNA of doctor who as an educational vehicle. I didn’t know about her survived Victoria’s assassination attempts or that she had a disease. Some of the comments made me look up when wolves were last seen in britain - about 200 years before victoria. More than enough time for folk stories to evolve about them. We really need to reintroduce them back to our country, there’s far too many deer. They mention a great comet, but I can’t figure out which one it would have been in 1540.

I really like the way Queen Victoria is played here. It would have been easy to go full pomp for a story about royals but its very understated. Which plays well considering she is in mourning. But she is still willing to stand up to the Doctor’s nonsense when he starts babbling. When she starts talking about tales from the beyond, it’s nice to compare this to the Doctor who has also lost his species and is in mourning, who you have to imagine would also be desperate from some kind of message.

I was preparing myself for some ungodly CGI, but actually it’s pretty good. The transformation is creepy, and the actual wolf design looks great, if a bit blurry. The split-screen screen with doctor and wolf listening through the doorway was really nice.

Character-wise it’s nice to see Doctor catching himself being rude, and getting used to his new self. Rose is shown competent, taking charge, which is nice against all the women cowering at the beginning. The women eventually take on some strong action later in the episode. The running “not amused” bit is some nice levity, and continues the kind of humour that Rose had with 9, but it feels a bit more playful or flirty (?) to me when she does it with 10.

Plot annoyances:

• When in human form, the monster has the same desire as the assassins - go after the queen. When in wolf form, it can break out of the cage easily. Why is it even in the cage to begin with?
• How did the wolf get out of the mistletoe library doors that the doctor closed?
• The chase scenes went on possibly a little bit too long for my liking

Fun facts:

• On BBC iPlayer, the sub track for this episode has the continuity announcer’s dialogue on-screen for a fraction of a second when the episode starts.
• Doctor makes a joke about “Balamory”, a Scottish kids TV show which was cancelled just as Doctor Who was being revived. Doctor who is now effectively cancelled, but in this year “Balamory” was revived with new episodes.
• The bad wolf meme rears itself again.

This one’s a step up from “New Earth”, but still not one that I think of too fondly (or at all, really).

Warrior monks! Neat! Unfortunately, their sweet martial arts are ruined in the edit, so I guess that’s that.

I’m honestly not sure what to say…it’s pretty paint-by-numbers, for the most part. RTD dips his toes into the supernatural-folklore-but-actually-they’re-aliens well, which…I think I preferred the approach in his most recent run, just letting magic be magic.

The CGI werewolf actually looks pretty great - good design, well-animated, and kept in the darkness to paper over any jankiness. My only complaint is that it seems pretty weightless at times, which is a common issue.

The cast is good. The story is contrived-but-serviceable.

As for the theme of the episode, with the Doctor and Rose not taking the situation as seriously as they should…it almost feels like this episode should come toward the end of the series, after they’ve had more adventures together (of course, it’s entirely possible that they have had more adventures together, but we didn’t see them). You could swap this with “Fear Her” and it would seem better-placed within the series.

Mind you, that would have meant that I had to watch “Fear Her” this week, and I don’t know why I would do that to myself.