Doctor Who: Ranking The New Who Openers From Worst To Best

By Partners in Crime, you can see a pattern with Russell T Davies' approach to show-running, particularly when it came to his openers. I like to call it the reset button. His seasons would start from scratch with a nice gentle set up, before slowly building up the momentum over the course of the series, until you reached an explosive finale. And then he'd start over come the following series.

Partners in Crime is definitely one of the better openers written by Russell T Davies, but it sadly shares all the common traits of being a daft romp, which has little consequence, and very few outstanding ideas. This isn't really a problem, but at the same time you want a sense of consistency, instead of odd drop offs in scale and concepts, with Partners in Crime coming across like a strange comedy about little fat blobs that are born through obesity.

When you have such a serious subject matter like obesity, it feels like a massive shame when its turned into a joke. Even the imagery of thousands of innocent people on the verge of dying, because of the Adipose' activation, it feels incredibly lacklustre and unimportant. There's just no real sense of stakes, or urgency, because the overall tone of the episode has been promoted as a comical journey.

Even when Donna is dangling off the side of a building, potentially moments away from falling to her death, you're left laughing because the script, and direction, make everything seem like a pantomime, made worse with its over usage of slap stick comedy.