The Doctor, Rose and Adam travel into the far future and land on satellite 5, a TV satellite broadcasting to the entire Earth Empire.
So this was the first time that Adam arrives in a strange place after hitching a lift in the TARDIS after the Dalek episode. The arrival was nicely handled, Rose being the old hand and explaining things to Adam. The Doctor was back to his whimsical best, joyous at arriving somewhere new. He had a brilliant line "Time travelling is like travelling in Paris, you have to dive right in there..." then something about using the wrong words and kissing strange women. Funny, and bizarrely quite true (no one in Paris will speak English to you even if they can!).
Then slowly the scenario is revealed, they are on a satellite which is the news hub of the Earth Empire. Enter Simon Pegg as The Editor. If you read this blog regularily you'll know that I think Simon Pegg is wonderful, a comedic master. In this episode he was suitably creepy, a bit nasty and still at times amusing. Wonderful.
Not much new for The Doctor and Rose this episode but a wonderful twist that I didn't see coming, Adam turns all selfish. He's thinking about himself from the start and borrows Rose's specially doctored (groan) phone to call home with details of the future. Not your typical companion. He gets The Doctor and Rose into trouble and then at the end of the episode gets booted off the TARDIS! Back down to one companion. I like that, never expected it.
The episode as a whole was reasonably standard Who plot with big nasty alien getting sorted out, but the atmosphere was pretty cool, a bit bladerunner mixed with cockney marketplace (but done on the cheap). Also a nice amusing/shock ending. Overall I enjoyed it, despite one super slow plot moment (going up to floor 500 took so long to play out). Once again Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper were excellent, there's a great chemistry between.
The BBC site has loads of stuff online as usual (4 new video diaries and 2 photo stories).