![]() Surprisingly, the worst performance in “The Lazarus Experiment” comes from Tennant in a background position. She has great chemistry on-screen with David Tennant and in this episode, she manages to find the right balance between smart and resourceful and lovestruck young woman. Freema Agyeman does a decent job playing Martha as fairly conflicted. Even in this episode, it is hard not to see that Jones is having feelings and resisting them. “The Lazarus Experiment” has Martha Jones at her most overtly affectionate for The Doctor and that plays well to the crowd that wants The Doctor to have a romantic relationship with his Companion. Martha very cleverly gets a DNA sample by intercepting a handshake meant for The Doctor and that reaffirms the idea that she is smart and resourceful. Martha is disproportionately excited to see her mother (when she supposedly saw her the night before) and The Doctor flubs his way through niceties, realizing that he doesn’t really pay attention to the lives of his Companions outside his travels with them. There are some neat details in “The Lazarus Experiment” that work very well. ![]() It is, however, a very Doctor Who solution that is based more on brains than brawn (the final shot of Lazarus makes no real sense for the science of the episode, as explained). The final solution The Doctor comes up with is intriguing but hardly as scientific as the rest of the episode. While the Doctor Who episode does not explain Lazarus’s transformation explicitly as an intron activation, the jargon used is virtually identical. In many ways, “The Lazarus Experiment” is a Doctor Who remake of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Genesis” ( reviewed here!). Breaking up the party, at which Martha’s mother is told The Doctor is dangerous, The Doctor and Martha have to hunt down the creature Lazarus has become. Soon, Lazarus reveals himself to everyone the process de-evolved him and activates introns that make him into a new lifeform (while still maintaining much of his human DNA). Transformed, Lazarus confronts his financier (a liaison to Saxon) and he finds himself repulsed by her and her age. Richard Lazarus is unveiling a new device (which The Doctor suspects is sonic technology), The Doctor and Martha encounter her family, who are somewhat cold to The Doctor. Arriving at the black tie event where Dr. Lazarus promises to change what it is to be human. The Doctor, though, decides not to leave when Dr. Martha is let down by his willingness to just leave and finds that her mother calling to say that her sister is on television is more mundane than she is now accustomed to. Twelve hours after he first took her away for her “one trip,” The Doctor returns Martha Jones to her home. ![]() At this point in the season, the references to Saxon are being completely undisguised and in “The Lazarus Experiment,” we learn that he is the mysterious benefactor behind the research Lazarus is doing. The result is an episode that has a Mad Scientist feel to it and the Mad Scientist is the Creature Of The Week. “The Lazarus Experiment” blends the usual aging (or in this case, anti-aging) story with The Fly and the concept of Time Lords. “The Lazarus Experiment” might be a mundane episode of Doctor Who on its own, but it fits into the overall arc of the third season incredibly well. In the modern Doctor Who, the episode that focuses on that is “The Lazarus Experiment” and for a series that continually recasts its lead based on the nature of the alien protagonist, the concept of the episode is pretty well-executed. Rapid aging, reverse aging, these seem like very basic stories in science fiction. In virtually all science fiction series, it seems like there is an episode that involves some alteration to a character’s aging. The Basics: The Doctor and Martha Jones stumble into their usual amount of danger when they return to the present and encounter a mad scientist who is experimenting with reverse aging and it goes awry in “The Lazarus Experiment.” The Bad: Actors/special effects mix, Mundane story The Good: Moments of character, Serialized elements
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