WHO REVIEW: Destination: Skaro

 It's a bit odd to be sitting down and reviewing a five-minute skit from Children in Need, but here we are. There's already been a minor explosion in online discourse about this silly thing, thanks to its gleeful rewriting of Doctor Who continuity.

Look, the thing about Doctor Who is that it's been going for sixty years, has been written by dozens of people, many of them gleefully contradicting their own material, let alone everyone else's. And that's only if you watch the actual TV series and ignore all the expanded universe stuff. It's fun to try to make it all fit, but it's essentially impossible, because it is, after all, made up.

At the end of the day, this is a bit of fluff, nothing to take to seriously, even if RTD has declared it canonical. I rather enjoyed it - a fun skewering of the Daleks, who are wonderful but also very silly. It's our first proper look at David Tennant in his return to the role, and from what little we've seen so far there's no difference between the Tenth Doctor and the Fourteenth.

Julian Bleach does a good job in his old role of Davros, seen here presumably some time before his terrible injuries. I understand that RTD didn't want to continue to depict Davros as a disabled character who was therefore considered evil and monstrous, and this is one of Doctor Who's Victorian fiction holdovers that probably doesn't have much place today. Still, it's not always a good idea to mess with such an iconic character. Then again, a few minutes in a charity skit is hardly going to overwrite the popular image of the villain, any more than this story will overwrite the actual events of Genesis of the Daleks.

Mawaan Rizwan is great as Davros's previously unseen colleague Castavillian (cool name), and there's a pitch perfect impression of Peter Miles's Nyder off screen, and there's even a brief hint at the Daleks' oneday taking on the name Klade (as seen in the far future history of Lance Parkin's works). When it comes to it, though, this is a very limited story only ever intended to be a bit of fun, and that's what it is. And if it distorts Doctor Who's long history for a moment? Why not? This is a show about time travel, after all.