Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned

A ship crashes into the Doctor's time machine: a liner drifting through space, called the Titanic. He mixes in with the holidaymakers and watches the voyage. Then sabotage sends meteoroids into the ship, and the survivors try to climb through collapsing corridors to the bridge. The film is not interested in science fiction. It is interested in choosing who will be saved: a small group dies one by one, the Doctor promises to save them all, and then cannot. The pain at the end is that. The form is the disaster-film template: collapsing sets, narrow corridors, a crowded cast and characters eliminated in turn. James Strong directed, from a script by Russell T Davies. It aired as the 2007 Christmas special and reached 13.31 million viewers in Britain, the highest figure for the series since its return in 2005. David Tennant plays the Doctor and Kylie Minogue the waitress Astrid. Minogue's guest role was the most discussed thing about the episode. Who it is for: viewers of Doctor Who and people who like the Christmas specials. Who it is not for: anyone new to the series. It introduces no characters, and the disaster template almost entirely smothers the science fiction.