Generally regarded as the weakest story of the first revived series, The Long Game proves important for the season finale - but of course we only know this in hindsight. At the time of broadcast, it was simply regarded as being rather dull. Following Dalek probably didn't help.
Nor did the introduction of a new, male, companion in Adam Mitchell. He proves to be quite an interesting character in this, after failing to make much of an impact in his debut episode. Having a flawed companion in the TARDIS for a while might have been a good idea, had they handled it better than they did with Turlough, or Adric to an extent. A big problem is that this potential is squandered and he is never properly developed - ditched very quickly after just this story.
One problem, for me, is RTD's insistence that this series would not venture far from Earth - arguing that the audience would not be able to relate to "Zogs, from the planet Zog". Whilst we have some impressive sets here, and nice CGI of the space station, everyone looks far too normal. We're thousands of years in the future, and everyone looks like it's 2005. You can argue that fashion travels in cycles, but it just looks cheap. Dialogue does mention the lack of aliens, and a handful are said to be no longer visiting Earth, but you would have expected at least some different species. What about ones who had actually settled on Earth, or home-grown creatures such as Silurians?
The station uses news broadcasts to deliberately isolate the human race from the rest of the universe, but does so by fairly mundane, actual news items. Why not simply create one big false news item like a massive galactic plague?
If everyone has a chip implanted in their head, which the Editor can access and monitor, why doesn't the Jagrafess simply use these to achieve its aims?
Then there's the monster, which seems to be there purely to have a monster. RTD is clearly having a pop at the corpulent media mogul Robert Maxwell, but you just can't equate this slab of fat with the complex scheme it is carrying out. A human villain would have worked a lot better, and you've even got one there in the shape of the Editor. As the Jagrafess doesn't have dialogue, the Editor actually makes its presence redundant.
The Jagrafess has lots of sharp teeth, suggesting a carnivore, but it doesn't appear to eat anyone or anything. Its victims are merely rendered frozen zombies.
If terrestrial biology is anything to go by, the species with the longest life spans tend to be cold-blooded and so need heat to function.
Satellite 5 sits in space, so you would have thought that the Jagrafess would have sorted out this overheating business a lot more efficiently than simply pumping it through the station - instead of, say, channelling it into space?
Floor 500 is freezing, yet Suki doesn't react to the cold when she first arrives there, wearing nothing heavier than a blouse. And no-one's breath mists.
The satellite is monitored closely by CCTV, yet the sudden materialisation of a Police Box on Floor 39 goes unnoticed.
In the series finale, heavy sunspot activity cuts off all transmissions from the station. This episode is set a century before then, but the reported heavy sunspot activity (as seen on the "Bad Wolf" channel) doesn't seem to have the same effect - despite this being much older technology.
Going back to Adam, the Doctor thinks he will simply keep his head down and not cause trouble, otherwise he will find himself a laboratory specimen. But what happens if he has an accident or illness and has to go to hospital? What happens when he dies? The technology he has in his skull will eventually be found out, at a point in time when it shouldn't exist, and so the Doctor is tampering with human technological progress by leaving him in 2012 - doing the very thing he has accused Adam of doing.
Answerphones of 2012 employed a tiny magnetic tape cassette, so quite how Adam intended to use this to retrieve all the information about future technology he's acquired is anyone's guess.
Actually, the first big new development in computing is only a few years away from 2012. Who's to say it isn't Adam himself who is behind it? At the very least he could make a fortune on the stock market with the knowledge he has in his head.
The little forehead hatch opens at the sound of a click, and is said to be the default setting. In an advanced technological society you would be surrounded by clicking sounds, so it's a pretty stupid thing to have as the default. (It may be that users can train themselves to override this, but if that's the case then it is never stated).
Finally - hindsight again - the Daleks are simply going to bomb the Earth when they get there, so what was the point of playing the long game anyway?
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