The Long Game has a lot on its plate as it continues Adam’s story as one of the shortest companion runs ever as well as featuring a huge new location. Satellite 5 is part of a vast empire that a lot of time is spent explaining to us but rarely actually showing any of it. Overambition seems to be this episode’s biggest problem. So much time is spent on exposition telling us about things we never see that the story ends up feeling really small scale as it only seems to be affecting the few rooms we do see so the scope is never really captured effectively.
Rose continuing to flirt with Adam is still irritating but surprisingly I enjoyed the scenes of Adam exploring on his own. Watching him abuse the situation for selfish gain is interesting as he just keeps going further and further down the rabbit hole. The Editor was an enjoyable character as well, not great or anything but he fills the villain role nicely. I think the mighty jagrafess looked cool when he is first revealed but he is just shown off too many times that eventually he just looks a bit silly and the cgi isn’t particularly convincing.
The story is about Satellite 5 providing all the information to the entire human empire but really the information is being altered and controlled by an alien being. Obviously there are parallels here to the real world as the news is altered all the time but the episode is far too on the nose with its message that it loses most of its intrigue. The story does have a big gaping hole in it though as the Editor ends up getting all his information about the Doctor from Adam which would then mean that during the trip in the Tardis from the previous episode to them arriving on Satellite 5 the Doctor told Adam everything about himself. This doesn’t ring true at all as the Doctor never really seems to like Adam so he definitely wouldn’t reveal his past to him.
There’s another problem I have with this world’s logic and it relates to the chips. Adam’s chip opens with the click of the fingers, but anyone can click their fingers to open it. It’s told that you can have anything like whistling and singing be the activation of your chip but the only logical thing would be that only the user themselves can open their chip. But no, anyone can open anyone’s chip, this creates a huge problem with this world as it just doesn’t make sense why this would be how it works. Another problem I noticed was the little room on floor 500 with all the corpses looked really cheaply made compared to everything else.
There is a really cool shot when the Doctor angrily approaches Adam towards the end of the episode, Eccleston really does look intimidating. His “I only take the best, I’ve got Rose” line feels a bit forced though. Finally, the episode’s ending is quite funny. Overall this episode is a very mixed bag, I appreciate its ambition and good ideas and Adam’s scenes are entertaining. The episode is never boring but also not very engaging and it doesn’t really do anything particularly well.
Mediocre episode – 5/10
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