Faint praise, but this one's a lot better than the first part of the story. The "farting" aspect of the farting aliens is significantly downplayed in favour of things that are actually interesting.

The emotional core of the story is the Doctor and Rose each coming to terms with how dangerous life with the Doctor is, and the effects it can have. I'd forgotten that Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North comments on how flippant Rose is about death, even at this early stage (too early?) of the series.

There are plot contrivances all over the place - the UK's nuclear codes are controlled by the UN! You can hack the Royal Navy's submarines and launch missiles from your home PC! But I'm pretty forgiving of stuff like that, as long as the emotional core of the episode is solid.

I think this part 2 is much better than part 1. its a bit more grounded on the characters, there's a bit less of the fart jokes, but it's still got some good action and comedy.

How terribly designed are those neck braces if they can transmit a massive electric shock over... presumably radio? still, cheap easily resolved cliffhangers are par for the course with DW

On dialogue - there are some great quips from the doctor in this episode. The dialogue from the slitheen is a bit cheesy - but it actually fits well considering they're a rag tag bunch of criminals playing big bad.

The unit computer has "buffalo" as a password. Ugh. this does remind me the bbc had a series of flash games and one of them was this interface that you could play "hacking" into. that was fun. all we get from media tie ins these days is some funny gifs on social media, if we're lucky.

The political play here is actually quite clever. If i can theorise, i would guess getting the earth to destroy itself with its own weapons would skirt around any shadow proclamation rules outlawing their behaviour. Allowing the slitheen to operate a bit more freely and profitably.

That harriet jones being the pm for 3 terms got retconned fairly quickly.

Mildly amusing: watching the "previously on Doctor Who" I could tell pretty much when I tuned out of the previous episode. At some point, I switched to scrolling through my phone while listening to the episode. It was really only the final scene with the electricity effects, which is decent considering how much I didn't like the last one.

Farting aside, the comedy is improved here. "I think you'll find the Prime Minister is an alien in disguise ... That's never gonna work, is it?" Elsewhere, the good to bad ratio is just a lot better than the first half. Jackie always adds some heart and Harriet Jones gets to do more than hide in closets and grimace about farts. She's a likeable character whose solid introduction sadly wasn't really capitalized on given future timeline changes. The Doctor's memory of her ("Elected for three successive terms. The architect of Britain's Golden Age.") is much better than what he ends up doing to her Prime Ministership.

We get some additional mentions of how young Rose is, which always kind of throws me. Billie Piper of 2005 is already into her second career and has been a public figure for seven years. Her music career started when she was just 15 and ended at 18, so even though she's already been retired for five years, she's still only 23. Still, she's not entirely believable as a 19-year-old, which is probably for the best given she ends up with a significantly older man.

The absolutely-no-budget alien explosion is very fun: the cutaway and throwing blobs of practical guts around feels like something out of Red Dwarf. It looks as obviously cheap as it is and that makes it timeless, because it looked like that from day 1. Contrast that with the CGI which must have looked a lot less pokey to viewers 20 years ago.