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David Tennant and Catherine Tate are impeccable in a special that has been shrouded in mystery – and that will upset a very vocal part of the Who fanbaseThe lack of advance detail about this episode had led to wild speculation about it possibly featuring returning actors, characters and monsters, while Doctor Who magazine even had a redacted cast list last month. Some pondered whether Ncuti Gatwa might put in an early cameo as the Fifteenth Doctor opposite David Tennant. In the end, it was a multi-Doctor adventure of sorts, just perhaps not in the way some people had been hoping.Effectively a two-hander for Tennant and Catherine Tate’s Donna, it explored a theme we’ve seen before in Who during stories such as Listen or Flatline – that there is something nameless and shapeless lurking at the edge of our understanding of the universe, and it is coming to get us. This time, though, it came disturbingly in the misshapen form of Tennant and Tate themselves.The Hostile Action Displacement System of the Tardis was first introduced in 1968 Second Doctor story the Krotons, and barely mentioned again until it was the reason for the Eleventh Doctor and Clara to get stranded on a sinking submarine in 2013’s Cold War.The Fourth Doctor once told Romana in the Douglas Adams-penned the Pirate Planet that he had to give Isaac Newton “a bit of a prod” to discover mavity – by climbing up a tree, dropping an apple on his head, then explaining it to him “afterwards at dinner”.The actor playing the Doctor has faced off against themselves playing the villain before, notably with Patrick Troughton playing both the Time Lord and the evil dictator Ramón Salamander in 1967’s Enemy of the World, and Tom Baker getting made up to look like a cactus as the anti-hero in 1980’s Meglos. Continue reading...