*did too, lots*

In my defense, I'm a mushy sentimentalist.

"Raaar! We have space demons because some cock got rid of the Time Lords and we need to enforce some form of causality. Why space demons? Who knows. Not us. We don't tie up loose ends or indeed give a shit as long as Billie Piper gets another chance to look like a panda-eyed sentimental chav in lieu of actually acting."

Side effect of being a wanky Eng Lit graduate with too much interest in deconstruction and Barthian analysis, I suspect.

Not entirely. I have a lot of interest in deconstruction and Barthian analysis. But just because something's postmodern doesn't mean that it's also crap.

Rose isn't gonna die. Jackie is. *nods* I'm convinced.

I have utter confidence that Rose won't die, no matter how coy they're getting with the hints. It would be interesting if done well, but they're not gonna go there.

I may be newer to this Doctor Who thing than you are, but even I know that "making sense" doesn't figure into the equation at any point, really.

I rather like Rose most of the time, and Jackie is...funny, usually. I think the overarching plot this season has been just handled really clumsily to the point where it's eye-rollingly annoying. Obviously a lot of it has been a set up for Rose to go at the end, having Learned Something and Grown As A Person after spending time with the Doctor but Not Actually Getting To Experience Kinky Tie!Porn Sex with him no matter what the fanfic says.

But for the build up to go somewhere, someone has to die or almost die, and they wasted their "bring people back to life" cards last season. They won't kill Rose because the fanbrats will cry, so it has to be Jackie to give Rose a reason to leave. With nothing. Because that's what happens when you date have UST with flirt annoyingly with get close to the Doctor.

> put the winner of a Blue Peter design-a-monster competition onto the screen, so I guess they could only work with what they had.

The concept of a monster which absorbs its victims while allowing a part of their personality to remain in existance is actually quite a good one with a lot of potential for plotlines.
And while it did look like Fungus The Bogeyman, so did the Vogons in the original series of Hitchhikers Guide.
I think the kid did a pretty good job in giving them a workable monster.

What went wrong was that RTD couldn't get past the fact that the designer was nine years old, so he kept treating it as huge joke instead of a valid story idea.
All that stuff where Elton and the Doctor kept getting the name wrong, for example, had no purpose other than to say 'This is a silly name. Look at the silly name, everyone!'

I'd say that this one was less bad than his other two.

No. The other two didn't have the air of something "meta" to distract people from how bad they were; and even without that they were by no means as fucking awful as this one. There was nothing to this episode but a lot of self-referential piss-taking and Peter Kay being badly miscast. The piss-taking would have been fine if it were done with style, rather than as something that wouldn't make it onto a Benny Hill reject tape.