Honestly, this is a story I love.

it's early in the first season of New Who, and is the first pseudo-historical. It does a good deal of establishing things for the series to come, getting rules of time travel out of the way, and having Rose dress up appropriately for the era. Plot itself is the sort of thing I could've seen Sapphire & Steel doing.

All the actors all around were putting on good performances. Gwen, in particular, was a standout, and Charles Dickens. The 9th Doctor is on form, and reminding me of exactly why I like him. The "happy medium" line, his ability to switch from jovial to deadly serious...

Gwen's talk with Rose was great.

The Doctor does have a brief reference to The Myth Makers, which is always nice to see.

And, of course, the scenes in the archway...

All in all, may be overrating slightly, but I just genuinely feel really good watching it.

I don't have very much to say about this story. I didn't care for it 10 years ago, and I don't care for it now. Something about the setting, the visual aesthetic of the episode, and the Gelth just do not hook me at all. Definitely not the worst episode of Doctor Who ever created, but one that I'm very comfortable calling "meh" at best.

Again, an episode which is worse than I remembered even though it is the only Mark Gatiss episode which is not a "one off" adventure and that follow the continuity and the arc of the season.

The Unquiet Dead was eh, boring at its worse and at least a bit goofy at its best. It's very uninspired. The characters are pretty flat and uninteresting, Dickens isn't even the central point of his own story and the Doctor is written pretty weirdly (It makes no sense that he got convinced that easily by the Gelth and it's weird that he gave the impression that he was that weak to the point where he felt threatened to the point where he felt like he would die by a foe that basic).

The Gelths aren't pretty interesting ennemis either. Their plan is pretty uninteresting and even though I kind of get the point Gatiss wanted to make, it's only ruined by their plot twist revealing they were in fact evil and wanted to invade Earth for seemingly no reason, which itself is pretty unmemorable and resolves itself within 2 minutes.

Overall it was pretty empty on the writing side, there wasn't really any moment that felt emotionally impacting or memorable even though I kind of like the interactions between Gwyneth and Rose and that the Doctor appears to be even more impacted by the Time War than during the previous episodes but other than this it was pretty mediocre and it isn't an episode I would recommend.

an unfortunately mid episode but i loved the accents

I absolutely hated this one as a child, I think it was the first ‘behind the sofa’ moment I had. As such, I usually skip it when I rewatch series one, but it’s still a good episode. Being scared by Doctor Who is good (sometimes)! It also marks Mark Gatiss’s first writing for the revival series, and it’s definitely a highlight of his nine-episode credits.

It’s our first of three RTD era episodes where the Doctor meets an author and drops references to their works into conversation, and Dickens at Christmas with ghosts, in a distinctly Bleak House, is a wonderfully silly-yet-spooky concept. Though that’s about as far as silliness goes. The whole episode, pre-TARDIS-landing aside, is far more serious than the previous two- the tone is darker, and even the sets are gloomier. There’s still plenty of lightness to the plot- the Doctor’s fanboying over Dickens, Rose and Gwyneth’s conversation about boys- any more than that would feel out of place.

This episode once again puts the characters at the forefront and develops the side characters wonderfully- Dickens gets his own little moment of heroism, and whilst Gwyneth having ‘the sight’ seems a little convenient, it gives the Doctor and Rose a perfect opportunity to clash heads.

The Doctor, in his post-war mind, feels that saving the Gelth is worth having a few zombies around, but Rose is concerned only with Gwyneth having a real choice, and is disturbed by the thought of the dead walking around. It’s an interesting argument, and the audience is left to make up their own mind despite the Doctor being proved wrong with his clouded judgement - if the Gelth really were few and good, would a few lively corpses be a worthy sacrifice? We don’t get that answer.

Instead, we get an explosion! Set ten years before Torchwood is even founded, Eve Myles is already making her mark on Cardiff’s infrastructure.

I can’t say I won’t skip it again in future, but it’s not awful, and certainly better than I remembered from the original broadcast.