Boom Town actually had quite a lot of depth.
How so?
I felt that Blon Slitheen's conversation with the Doctor was both thought provoking, and quite chilling. Too often on television we make light of death and killing, but here the Doctor (and to a lesser extent, his companions) are faced with personally handing over someone to be tortured and executed. While it is very easy to sit back on your couch and shout, "Just kill her!" at the television set, in reality such an act might be much more difficult and gut-wrenching than we think.
And so the Doctor gives Blon one last meal, during which she pleads for her life. She tries (humorously) to kill the Doctor a few times at the start of the meal, and then settles in to the only arguments she has in her favor:
*The Slitheen family raised her to be how she is today. She'd have been killed as a child by her own father if she had tried any other path.
This argument is very reminiscent of the dilemma our own legal system faces. Is a person's childhood and environment in anyway to blame for a person's outcome, especially when that outcome is a violent crime? I teach at an inner-city school, and what I see and learn about some of my student's lives has sent me home absolutely shaken. They live in, and were raised in, an environment very different than our own. While this is no excuse (many of my students disappear from class, and I learn from others that they have been arrested and are in jail), it is still a factor.
It is pitiable that someone should be born into such an environment, but at the end of the day you are still responsible for your own actions. This is what the Doctor decides, but he has also learned something neither he nor the audience was expecting: Blon is pitiable. We have pity for her, and though she still must die, we feel a sense of sorrow. That's one element that I would describe as depth.
*Blon's next argument begins with her telling the Doctor about how she let a young woman live just the other day (a scene we witnessed). The woman was pregnant, and Blon couldn't bring herself to kill her. Blon argues that there is some good in her, but the Doctor disagrees. The Doctor tells her that letting one go every now and then is how you live with yourself when you kill hundreds. Unphased by this assessment, Blon agrees with the Doctor. You're right, she tells him, every now and then you let one go. But the Doctor won't let Blon go.
Here we have an interesting duality between Blon and the Doctor. The Doctor's assessment of Blon might also be an assessment of himself. Not that the Doctor kills hundreds of people, but he does take others lives into his own hands, often with deadly results. Here, he literally holds Blon's life in his hands, and whether he lets her go or not, someone will die. And so the pain we see in the Doctor's eyes might well be over himself. Whereas Blon can let one person go every now and then in order to live with herself, the Doctor in this situation cannot; he cannot live with himself. Keeping in mind that this is the 9th Doctor, who often appeared to suffer from survivor guilt, I found this scene very powerful as well.
In the end, the Doctor was right. He told Blon that if he let her go then she'd just go on to kill again, and she soon has an opportunity to crack the Earth open like an egg in order to get a quick ride home. But the first thing to break is the TARDIS, which looks into Blon's soul and chooses not to kill her, not to punish her, but to give her a second chance. She is regressed back to an egg, and the Doctor gives that egg to a new family to raise properly. A second chance.
I always felt Boomtown was very deep and very powerful. It took the comical farting Slitheen, and an almost non-existent plot about blowing up the Earth, and sandwiched between these two things was a powerful discussion about morality, capital punishment, redemption, and most of all responsibility.
Blon was responsible for her actions, but had the Doctor dropped her off to be executed, then he'd have been responsible for her death.
Anyway, that's just my own personal interpretation.
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