Season 2 2006 DVD Review

While the flimsy packaging annoyed anyone who ordered the first series set online, it’ll be of relief that the 2 nd series box set is a lot more sensibly packaged.

There are reviews of the episodes already, but I still enjoy Tooth and Claw the most on this set. It’s a great script combined with some extraordinary visual effects. It’s Doctor Who on television’s first attempt to do a werewolf and the results are truly stunning. It’s an unexpected, brilliant story and probably one of the best the series has ever done.

The content is spread across six discs, the first includes The Christmas Invasion and New Earth and the extras that aren’t David Tennant video diaries. The rest of the discs have three episodes each on in consecutive order while on disc 6 include Confidential and Tennant video diaries.

The most innovative extra is the in vision commentaries which are varyingly successful. They are all worth listen, but outside of the one for The Christmas Invasion, there is no real need for any of them to be visual. The reason given is to show which person is talking, but you could do that by having subtitles for the commentaries.

Complaints aside, the best one is for Doomsday and The Christmas Invasion where you can (either tragically or brilliantly depending upon your point of view) see the participants wearing party hats while doing the commentary.

The other commentaries vary. New Earth, School Reunion and Love & Monsters have probably the best commentaries, while the most dull are probably those for The Idiot’s Lantern and Rise of the Cybermen. There are one or two errors in the leaflet, Ed Thomas is not on the commentary for Tooth and Claw while Nina Sosanya is either absent or very quiet from the commentary for Fear Her.

The episodes of Doctor Who confidential are the cut down versions rather than the full length versions on BBC3. This is a shame as there has been efforts made to make Confidential justify its timelength and episodes like From Script to Screen have been cut to pieces to fit the DVD length. My personal preference would be to use the material that Confidential get and fit into making some short featurettes. You could do one on all aspects of production such as casting a new Doctor, creating monsters and a focus on the special effects. There’d be far more likely to find some material not used on Confidential and would be a far better way of presenting the stuff.

The deleted scenes are quite interesting, though you can tell why all of them havebeen cut, the genuine outtakes from the set are amusing for those that like actors messing up while the fake ones are just surreal. Especially seeing a Cybermen playing football and running round like a bird.

I’m not that fond of the Children In Need scene, but that’s a personal preference. It’s also not as broadcast with a sound effect missing. More interesting among the first disc’s content is Billie Piper’s video diary. While she appears obsessed with a spot that appears on her forehead throughout the shooting of The Christmas Invasion, there’s some fascinating stuff in here mostly covering the first block of filming.

The other video diary comes from David Tennant which is so comprehensive it could e the making of the entire series with the amount of material in here. It’s a detailed look at being the lead actor of the series and is partly let down by the chapter breaks that are thrown in every few minutes.

Minor pickles aside, this is a rather good DVD set and only people out of their mind can dispute that this is good value for money. It’s just could be a lot better than it already is.