Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Code

Ah. The difficult second episode. In the 2005 series we travelled to the extreme far future and met Cassandra, the face of Bo and others for the first time in 'The end of the world'. It was an episode with lots of effects but not much story to it. Last year for the second episode, 'Tooth and claw', we travelled to Victorian Scotland and fended off an alien werewolf, whilst trying to set up the premise for 'Torchwood' - lots of effects, story a bit slight. This year the second episode again featured lots of big sets, costumes and some effects, but the story was once again a bit on the thin side.

The problem I have with supernatural stories in Doctor Who is that they can't let them actually be supernatural. They have to find some technobabble sci-fi explanation for the apparently magical goings on. Which cheapens it a bit.

And the witches looked like Zelda from the Terrahawks (see right if you can't remember the 80s), which was a bit naff.

But it wasn't bad. The sets and effects were nice, it was a bit silly, it would have been scary for my 5 year old (if I'd let her watch it, which I hadn't), the script was reasonably entertaining and the actors were all fine. The actress playing the lead witch, Christina Cole, seems to have made a career playing witches and murder suspects, and she does a really good evil cackle. She was quite good here, so I hope she can find some bigger roles on the back of this. But she did have a blink-and-you'd-miss-it role in the last Bond film, so maybe her career's on the up.

Next week's Doctor Who episode looks good - quite 'the fifth element' but that's a good thing in my book.