Voyage of the Damned

This NuPoo Christmas Special obtained the highest ratings for any NuWho story, and tends to gain a mixed reception from fandom as a whole, but what are your thoughts on it?

I’ve outlined my thoughts in greater detail on the “series 4” thread, but to summarise, this is bollocks on every level- overblown, tonally inconsistent, laden with patronising caricatures and stereotypes throughout, and downright idiotic, this was quite possibly the worst Christmas Special of them all until the broadcast of The End of Time: Part 1 in 2009.

Poor.

I haven't seen it since 2007 and I remember it being really dull and tonally inconsistent (One minute, it aspires to be a massacre that would make Eric Saward cream himself and then you have shit like Banakafa-whateverthefuckhisnamewas). The Heavenly Host robots were just a rip off of the VOC's from 1977's Robots Of Death and the villain was very WTF.

This alone caused me to give up on the Christmas specials until 2012 and NuWho until 2009.

A new level of awful was achieved with this Xmas turkey.

Christ, New Who has always been shit, hasn't it?

iank wrote:Christ, New Who has always been shit, hasn't it?

An irrefutable truth that I too am starting to accept all the more over the passing of time. With a few possible exceptions, every NuWho story seems to get considerably worse upon reflection and age.

This era especially, mind.

It's dire on every level.
All the Christmas specials are especially shit.

Ronnie wrote:All the Christmas specials are especially shit.

Admittedly I'm quite fond of The Snowmen. Yes its ending is flawed and there is a lot of Paternoster shite thrown in but I have rather fond memories of watching it on Christmas 2012.

But yeah, all the others are giant turkeys....

I can only concur with Ronnie here. I think they’re all dreadful- the least egregious is likely The Next Doctor (mainly due to Morrisey's character and the side-plot associated with him, which RTD disregards halfway through anyway), but it’s second half is the usual loud, vacuous shite usually exhibited by the Christmas Specials.

I see it on the same level as The Five Doctors, a bit of entertaining television that shouldn't be subjected to too much scrutiny. Yet anyone who criticizes this wouldn't subject The Five Doctors to the same vitriol.

Really terrible.  I remember hating it at the time (though my wife, still besotted with Tennant, quite enjoyed it) VOTD is silly, soppy and unbelievably sentimental and contains every disaster movie cliche you can think of. The Host are a poor man's version/ripoff of the androids from Robots of Death and the whole angel motif was wearing a bit thin by this stage, coming not that long after the first appearance of the Weeping Angels in Blink. Even Clive Swift and Bernard Cribbins can't save this stinker, which was probably the start of my disillusionment with NuWho.

Very poor. Even by Nu Who Christmas special standards. Seemed to be full of very loud characters which in my mind seem to be onscreen representations of RTD himself. Plus it had one of those awful "I am the Doctor" speaches i disliked Tennant for.

In fairness i can't remember much about it now but the above is how i remember feeling at the time of broadcast.

Re 5 doctors: I am more than happy to criticise the bad points of that but the thing is it had more charm in its opening credits than Damned had in its entire 71 minutes. It reasonably fed off nostalgia for times and stories passed in an age when access to old stories and past Doctors were none to easy. In contrast "Damned" fed off Kylie Minogue's status as a disco icon and second rate pop singer of chintzy dance records. Not sthg to recomend the story imho.