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It’s an adventure in Real Time (supposedly) as the Doc & Martha land on a doomed spaceship with only 42 minutes until it crashes into the sun. And hey, “42” is just “24” backwards, isn’t it? Plus, it’s this year’s “Not on Earth” story.

Plot Points – Landing aboard the spaceship S.S. Pentallian, the Doctor and Martha are immediately confronted by Captain McDonnell (Michelle Collins) and her crew, who claim that the ship has been disabled and is falling towards the sun (not Earth’s sun, by the way). McDonnell’s husband, it turns out, has been consumed by some alien force, and starts bumping off the crew, while growling, “Burn with me” like it’s his new slogan.

Doctor Who? – Again, the Doctor seems far too aware of pop culture minutia, has a (shifting) opinion on the popularity of the Beatles vs. Elvis, and is aware of the “Little Less Conversation” remix. And again, he’s nearly indestructible, surviving both a blast of 3000-degree heat and minus-100 degree temperatures (he insists the temp be taken down to minus-300, but the machine loses power before they get there), and near-direct exposure to the sun. Once he’s possessed by the alien-sun-energy-thing, he is terrified, something we rarely see the Doctor admit to.

Martha My Dear – Another step backwards for Martha, she spends most of this episode screeching like a banshee. Even the supposedly touching scene where she phones her mum as the escape pod is about to fall into the sun seems a little heavy-handed. Also (like Rose) Martha gets her own key to the TARDIS here.

Too Cool – The exterior design of the spaceship is kinda neat, and the falling-into-the-sun SFX are well done, as usual.

Rosewatch – Although Rose is not specifically mentioned, the Doctor does jazz up Martha’s cell phone, exactly as he did with Rose’s in 1.2 “The End of the World.”

Weird Science – Suddenly there are doors the sonic screwdriver can’t open? Huh. Convenient. Once Martha’s escape pod is jettisoned (more on that under Dumb Stuff), the Doctor thinks he can re-magnetize the hull (or something along those lines; Tennant tends to talk very very fast during these scenes), but he has to go outside the ship to do it – why are these important controls mounted on the outer hull of an interstellar spaceship?

Dumb Stuff – There are 27 big locked doors between the crew and the bridge, but thankfully (for the plot) the med-section is in the same chunk of the ship as them, and isn’t sealed off. Much hand-wringing is done over these locked doors, and how the crew must answer pub-quiz type questions to open them (leading to all the Elvis/Beatles stuff), but once we get past the initial gag, this ceases to be a issue, and the rest are opened with seemingly little effort. Okay, Martha is new here, but Riley is an experienced member of the crew, so why the flippin’ hell does he allow them to “hide” in an escape pod which the bad guy can – and does – jettison? Is he really that stressed out? That’s out of the frying pan and literally into the fire. And the Doctor stands there screaming “I’ll save you!” at Martha for what seems like an eternity instead of, oh I don’t know, actually doing something to save her.

Classic Who – Amazingly, not a single reference that I could catch, although the Doctor does obliquely mention regeneration when being put into the stasis chamber. And name-checking the Beatles could be an extremely vague reference to the 1965 William Hartnell adventure “The Chase,” in which a clip of a Beatles TV performance (“classical music” as then-companion Vickie referred to them) was played.

Lost in Translation – Michelle Collins is a big star in the UK, mostly for the long-running soap Eastenders. I hope she demonstrates more charisma on that show than in “42,” because she’s incredibly bland here. The Doctor chides the crew for their lack of “Dunkirk spirit,” a reference to the Battle of Dunkirk, a British victory in the Second World War.

Final Answer – Dull and unimaginative, “42” accomplishes virtually nothing it sets out to do. It doesn’t work as a thriller because the crewmembers are cardboard cutouts we don’t care about, and there’s too much dumb stuff (see above). The supposed real-time element is limited to the occasional cutaway to a clock counting down, and never seems to have much impact on the story. The dialogue is purely functional and utterly forgettable. It’s contrived at every turn (the Captain’s “I’ve done a bad thing, so I’ll sacrifice my life” is the hoariest of clichés), and everything seems to happen because the scriptwriter (Chris Chibnall, author of some decent Life on Mars episodes and some bad Torchwood ones) wanted it to, rather than because it made any sense. The “living planet” concept is a creaky one, but could have been used to good Who effect if suitably developed; unfortunately, here it’s just tossed out as a last-second answer to What’s Going On. “42” can’t even manage to be a Not-Earth story, because of all the cutaways to Martha’s mum and the growing Saxon sub-arc. Similarities to last season’s “The Impossible Planet” abound, both storywise (isolated human crew sitting at the edge of a potentially deadly stellar phenomenon; the problem-solving TARDIS eliminated from the script via a dumb plot contrivance; possessed crewmember spouting a gravel-voiced catchphrase) and stylistically (the sets look way too similar, and the Doctor dons the exact same spacesuit, just painted a different color this time) giving the whole affair a distinctly rehashed feel. “42” is not as aggressively idiotic as “Evolution of the Daleks,” and therefore not the worst of the season, but it sure isn’t good.

But never fear kids: we’ve weathered the worst of the storm, and starting next week, Series 3 gets really good.

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