So, on Friday, I attended the meeting of the Legion of Rassilon, the Bay Area Doctor Who fan club, and we watched the first two episodes of Season 3 of Doctor Who: "Smith and Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code". Thought I'd give a few impressions here. My intention is not to give major spoilers, but if you want to avoid information about settings or bad guys, you might want to skip this post.

"Smith and Jones": This one goes to eleven. We start the episode with new companion Martha Jones, on her way to work, receiving cell phone calls in rapid succession from every member of her family, complaining about each other. By this we establish a) that Martha is the Responsible One and b) she has good motivation to want to get away from present-day Earth for a while.

And then the Doctor runs by, and does something inexplicable for no reason any of us can determine. And then she gets to the hospital and there are creepy guys in motorcycle helmets, and a daft old lady with a salt deficiency. And the Doctor. The it starts raining upwards, and then the hospital is on the moon, and then there are rhino-headed leather-clad space cops hunting aliens, and oh-my-god the Doctor's an alien! And there is running up and down corridors, and the daft old lady starts sucking out people's blood with a bendy straw. And there is modification of X-ray and MRI machines for lethal purposes! And genetic transfer, which is apparently another word for snogging! And the Doctor saves the day and everyone is back on Earth just in time to keep from dying of oxygen starvation.

And you think, "I really don't quite know what happened there, but I think I liked it." I'll need to watch it again to be sure. I can't wait for Jacob over at Television Without Pity to recap this one, just because doing it sensibly will be such a feat.

The episode ties up with a nice scene of Martha entering the TARDIS for the first time. And then they are off on their first trip through time. Which brings us to:

"The Shakespeare Code": Shakespeare! Witches! Woot! That's really all you need to know. I think the episode is marred a bit by a little too much self-conscious humour. The first time somebody quotes a bit of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare says, "Oooh, I like that. I think I'll use that!", it's funny. The third time - not as funny. (Although the bit where the Doctor quotes Dylan Thomas, and then has to explain to Shakespeare that he can't use that bit, is pretty funny.) The first Harry Potter joke was funny, but the use of "Expelliarmus!" as a magic word at a critical point struck me as a bit too much. (Though it does provide for an interesting experiment in the durability of pop culture. Given the track record of Doctor Who, we can probably expect that fans will be watching this episode 50 years from now. Will they know who Harry Potter is?) Martha gets to flirt with Shakespeare, which is perhaps some consolation for the fact that the Doctor is intermittently being a jerk to her, because he's still not quite over losing Rose.

It'll be interesting to see how the writers deal with that over the course of the season. I like that the new show has actually been exploring the emotional consequences of the Doctor-companion relationship, in contrast to the "once you leave the TARDIS, we will never speak of you again" practice of the old show. But I think it's going to get old really quickly if the Doctor keeps bitching about how Martha isn't as good as Rose, while Martha is quite clearly awesome in her own right. I'm guessing that the writers know this.

Overall impressions of season 3: It's off to a good start. They've definitely achieved heights of over-the-top hectic Doctorishness rarely seen before. One of the folks at the meeting on Friday declared, "This is finally proper Doctor Who." I'm not sure about that. If the best episodes of Seasons 1 and 2 weren't "proper" Doctor Who, I'll take my Doctor Who improper, thanks very much. But there is a certain sense in these episodes that the writers and the actors have really gotten a grasp on doing what's best about old school Doctor Who in a new school television format.

And now I've got to wait a whole month to see the next two episodes. (Well, no, I don't. They've already aired in Britain, and I could BitTorrent them easily enough. But there actually is something really cool about watching brand-new episodes of Doctor Who with a bunch of other fans. Especially when you all break into applause over the closing credits. Which we did for both episodes on Friday. So I'll wait.)