Tag: doctor who

I thought the way it started as a flashback type thing with Amy’s voiceover was going to turn out to be interesting. Bit of a shame it seemed to be mostly to let them make the lame pun of a title explicit.

This felt like quite an old school Who episode, what with UNIT and callbacks to the time the Doctor spent on Earth in his 3rd & 4th regenerations. K9 was mentioned, the Brigadier too. And still a more personal level of story, even if it was an invasion of the whole Earth – we’re still a step back from the universe destroying stories of recent seasons.

I liked part of the way the Shakri designed their pest extermination tools, it really is the way that would work – the initial worry & panic about the cubes followed by them just becoming part of the way things are. And then they switch on & do their stuff once we’ve relaxed. Perfectly designed. But other than that – why did they do a count down in arabic numerals, but not an Earth time unit? I mean either it was designed to tell us or it wasn’t.

I was also a little unclear why they were stealing people as well as doing their thing with the cubes analysing us. I mean, either the cubes did the scan/response tests/whatnot or they looked at the people they stole. Felt a bit like they stole people so that there was a way for the Doctor to go & stop them. Which felt resolved a bit too quickly to be honest, right up until the end I thought it was going to be a two-parter but then Doctor just waves his screwdriver & everything is sorted out. But there’s still a ship, and the Shakri presumably aren’t going to give up just like that. Maybe it’s going to come back in the second half of the season? Maybe they’re just going to become vaguely recurring enemies in future.

No fakeouts with “the Doctor” not being him this week – but then he spent years working for UNIT so of course they meant him. Nice touch having Kate Stewart do the scan, show us two hearts to remind us why the heart stopping device wouldn’t work on the Doctor for people who don’t just automatically know he’s got two.

The fakeout that did happen was when it looked like Rory & Amy were choosing to settle down. That was also one thing the voiceover thing did well, telling us how they were choosing between the two lives and showing what the choice was. They might even have done that too well, because the reversal at the end where Rory’s Dad persuades them to go off and adventure again seemed to come a bit quickly.

More anvilicious hammering home of the “sometimes companions die” thought. Which I suspect means it won’t quite work out like that, but it’s going to look like it’s going to. Or maybe I’m wrong, and one or both of Amy & Rory will die.

Interesting the “imprinting” of the Eleventh Doctor on Amy, I did wonder why these people were supposed to be different to any of his previous companions although that explanation does leave one wondering why it didn’t seem to work that way before. But I think that’s something we’re just supposed to handwave past 😉 (And it does work for Ten I suppose, as the Rose/Ten dynamic was also clingy).

Hmm, seems like I did have stuff to say 🙂 Overall I did enjoy the episode, but it feels like the weakest of the 4 we’ve had so far this season.

Where to start? Another good episode 🙂 I liked it right from the start with the voice over cluing us into the tone of the episode – a Western. Tho for all I know everyone across the US is wincing at how the accent was all wrong, but it worked for the Brit audience anyway 😉

Note the fakeout in the intro voiceover, too – the man who doesn’t die, who falls from the sky. And it’s not the Doctor. Also, another fakeout early on – it’s the “alien Doctor” that the cyborg is looking for to kill, and again it’s not the Doctor. Which resonates with three fakeouts I can think of from last episode: a) Solomon wants the Doctor brought to him when he overhears Rory calling him Doctor, but it’s because he wants medical attention, not because he wants “The Doctor”; b) the scanner that tells the value of everything doesn’t flag up the Doctor as interesting or even known; c) Solomon finds something “more valuable than the dinosaurs” and it’s neither the Tardis nor the Doctor, it’s Nefertiti. I’m not sure if this is season arc stuff or if this is more about aggressively re-educating our expectations – I’m sure I read somewhere that Moffat thought the stakes for Doctor Who stories had got too high, and that he wanted to pull back the scope of the stories to more personal ones rather than universe destroying ones. Certainly these last two episodes have fit that mould, and the fakeouts remind us that the whole universe does not, in fact, revolve around the Doctor.

I liked the way that the characters generally weren’t one-note this time. I say “generally” partly because I’m not sure whether to count the preacher as a “proper” character or not, he has a speaking part but he doesn’t really do much (and in not doing much doesn’t get characterisation beyond stereotypical “man of the cloth in frontier town who prays a bit”). Obviously Jex & the Gunslinger are set up to play with our expectations & sympathies, and set up to mirror & cast lights on the Doctor & his demons. But also Isaac – I felt clearly he did things in the war he wasn’t proud of and he was in some ways atoning for this by his protection of Jex. And “the kid” who ringleads the push to fling out first the Doctor then Jex to the Gunslinger – leading a lynch mob isn’t exactly a plus point, but he’s doing the best he can think of to look after his family and his town.

Jex in particular was well done, I thought. He was a manipulative little bastard (the “bonding” moment with Amy as a parent, the way he pushes the Doctor’s buttons, the way he clearly got Isaac onside), although he doesn’t always get quite the reaction he wants – not as clever as he’d like to hope he is. You could see how he managed to rationalise his participation in atrocities and how he justified himself to others. You could also see he was consumed by guilt, he knew he’d done wrong, but you could see the self-interest in his repentance – redemption for him wasn’t about atoning for the wrongs he’d done to others, it was about avoiding or ameliorating an afterlife that would be unpleasant for him.

Some nice callbacks to previous continuity like Amy having to do the “and this is why you need company” speech. I felt the Time War was the elephant in the room for a lot of the Doctor/Jex scenes but as well as that there’s more recent & on-screen moments like “A Good Man Goes to War” and “Waters of Mars” are clearly referenced in the “what holds you back is your morality” conversation where Jex is both manipulating and wrong – the Doctor has rules, and people who expect better from him, the Doctor left to his own devices in the past has acted like a vengeful & capricious god not like a moral person.

On a lighter note there’s also the “I speak horse” thing, like how he speaks baby in the cyberman one with the rom-com star (I can’t remember the episode name, or the famous actor in it, hopefully you can figure out what I mean!). And the horse being Susan and wanting his life choices respected gave me a good giggle, from the combination of the deadpan delivery from the Doctor and the preacher’s face.

Amy & Rory didn’t really have a lot to do here – Amy’s “you need us” moment aside. In fact Rory could’ve been elsewhere entirely & I don’t think it’d be noticeable. The end is noteworthy though for Amy also being keen to get home, things have changed again since last episode. The Doctor may or may not’ve been intentionally weaning Rory & Amy off him, but he’s certainly succeeding. Note also that he’s 1200 years old now, and at the end of last season he was 1100 years old – I presume that’s to show us how he’s stretching out his visits to Amy & Rory even more from his perspective. I had another thought about the “you’ll be here till the end of me” conversation from last episode too, is the Doctor trying in some ways to spread out his visits so that he doesn’t out live this set of companions?

Oh, and I’ve seen a few comments elsewhere on the web about how the Doctor wouldn’t point a gun at anyone coz he’s anti-violence … I think he’s actually a hypocrite and was so even in old school Who 😉 I ran across a link to this montage & it seems appropriate here:

Note that it’s got swear words in the music it’s set to, so perhaps headphones if you’re looking at it at work.

I’ll confess to being a bit anxious when I saw that it was a Chibnall episode – he was the show runner for Torchwood during seasons 1 & 2 and those weren’t exactly bastions of quality television, even though watchable. But I needn’t’ve worried, this was a fun episode & felt like there was some thinking behind it too.

Nefertiti was good, I liked the way the clothes & jewellery etc that she was wearing looked authentic enough plus also looking like they were something someone would wear. I also liked her characterisation as being competent and expecting to be taken seriously. Her ending up in Edwardian wherever it was was also kinda cool, coz it’s not actually known when she died – she just vanishes from the historical record, possibly dead, possibly in disgrace, possibly changes her name to Smenkhare & rules after Akhenaten dies. So why not time-travel? 😉

Riddell was amusing comic-relief, and faced with all these competent women he does seem to realise the foolishness of his prejudice – certainly in his future with Nefertiti I don’t get the impression that he’s going to be the one in charge 😉 The gender stuff showed signs of having been thought through in general this episode – there’s not just Riddell being confronted with women who are at least as useful if not more so than him, but also the by-play between Rory & his Dad. “What sort of man doesn’t carry a trowel with him?” … well, how about the sort of man that’s a nurse & carries a first aid kit. Both as useful as each other, and better to play to one’s strengths than some gender-defined role.

I liked the Indians as being the ones with the Space Defense Agency that was going to fire on the ship – 50 years ago when Doctor Who started it’d’ve been the US or the Russians but these days India or China make more sense, and India resonates more with a British audience. Particularly with Riddell as a tail-end-of-empire character to remind us of how it has changed. I don’t think we got reaction shots of him when he finds out it’s not just a woman in charge of the military organisation firing on the ship, but also an Indian woman. I suspect that would’ve broken his head even more than Nefertiti or Amy.

Solomon the genocidal pirate was a bit cartoon evil as the big bad, I think. He doesn’t have any redeeming features, just camp nannybots for comic relief (“ooh, you’re going straight on the naughty step” made me giggle). We know he’s bad news from the start – he hurts people to get himself healed, he thinks only of the monetary value of everything. We then find out he killed all the Silurians (and it was neat that Amy did the solving of that half of the mystery – her subplot was all about Amy==Doctor, companions & all). And then he explicitly objectifies Nefertiti, and kills the triceratops & frankly by the end we know he’s a worthless piece of scum with no “good side”. A shame there wasn’t something more nuanced about him.

I liked the dinosaurs, just coz dinosaurs are cool 🙂 But also making it a Silurian Ark ship gave them a reason to be there that felt like it made sense. And I noticed on wikipedia that Chibnall wrote the Silurian two-parter a couple of years ago, so kinda nice of him to bring them back (albeit dead off-screen). I particularly liked what they did with the triceratops – that first scene works all on it’s own as a comedy moment with the triceratops in the role of that sort of obnoxious dog that goes up to everyone & sniffs their crotches. But that also establishes that the triceratops wants to play fetch, and shows us two golf balls … setting up the next scene where they ride the triceratops to safety following the second golf ball. And both of those establish the triceratops as effectively a puppy. And thus Solomon is not just an evil bastard, but he kicks (kills) puppies too!! While I’d like more nuance to the big bad, if you are going to go for one-note character, you may as well go for it whole hog 😉

The combination of the name of Solomon & the sort of character Riddell was made me think of H. Rider Haggard & I did wonder if Riddell would turn out to be the name of one of his characters. But a quick scan of the wikipedia entries for King Solomon’s Mines and She turned up nothing. And H. Rider Haggard was writing earlier. But still, the resonance was there for me. (Tho I should say that I don’t think I’ve read any Haggard, so perhaps his explorer characters were nothing like the stereotype that Riddell was embodying, I wouldn’t know.)

I liked the Amy/Rory stuff this episode. The juxtaposition of the start with Amy’s indignant questioning of if they’ve been replaced and the end with Rory’s desire to go straight home shows the fault lines in their relationship again. Amy’s clearly only really happy when she’s out adventuring & fighting Daleks or accessing Silurian data records. She’d travel with the Doctor forever if she could, and that conversation with the Doctor was weird. Why’d he react so oddly to the idea that he’d outlive her – obviously he outlives his companions, that’s come up before, he’s 900 years old after all. So what does he know that Amy (and us) don’t?

Not a review, more rambly thoughts.

I’d managed to be almost completely unspoiled for this, so I wasn’t expecting Daleks & I’d forgotten that they’d shown pics of the new companion who arrives later in the season so I wasn’t quite as “wow” about that surprise as I think the showrunners would’ve liked 😉 Presumably it’s not been an elaborate fake-out & she actually will be the new companion later. Hopefully with (some of?) the same personality coz I quite like the idea of shaking up the Doctor/Companion dynamic a bit in New Who by having a non-21stC Earth companion & someone who considers herself as clever as him. (Yes, I know that River & to a lesser extent Jack probably fit into that category but I mean a full time longer-lasting companion.)

The plot itself was nicely creepy, I thought. Particularly when they’re first on the planet & they find the shipwreck. And with some well-done foreshadowing, like the eggs->exterminate bit.

I did like the twist about Oswin being a Dalek in one sense – once J’d reminded me she’s the next companion I really wasn’t expecting her to be converted & then exploded. But that whole side of the plot doesn’t really fit with Daleks – aren’t they all about race purity? So while I could buy into them converting people into tools & security systems (coz that’s not really a Dalek) I didn’t really buy that they would do a full conversion of anyone even a genuis. I’d think they’d be too blinkered to consider that someone of another species would be capable of being in any way as good as a Dalek. Effectively it felt Cyberman-y rather than Dalek-y.

I liked the Daleks thinking of the Doctor as “the Predator” and kidnapping him to deal with the problem they were too scared to deal with. I also liked the asylum idea & the finding hatred beautiful idea. Although perhaps I’ll not consider too closely how it fits in with previous Dalek stuff 😉

I also liked how the Daleks were made to forget the Doctor, yet more unravelling of the “Doctor is a universal celebrity” concept we’d ended up with. And because of how they were partly what they were through fear of/fighting the Doctor (but then don’t poke to closely at that, as they were genocidal pre-Doctor I thought). Though of course time travel makes that “forgetting” fairly useless longterm because he’ll just meet earlier Daleks, or given Daleks can time travel too (presumably) then earlier Daleks will tell later Daleks & the status quo will be restored.

Overall I was rather “meh” about the Amy/Rory plot, tho nice to see some sort of consequences of the stolen baby part of the plot from last season. And the bit near the start where Amy gives a running commentary on what’s going through the Doctor’s mind was rather neat.

I’m not really going to speculate about how we get that actress playing the Companion later – last season’s finale felt a bit limp to me coz I thought I’d come up with cleverer ideas to resolve the dangling threads of the season arc than we actually got on-screen. I suspect it’ll just turn out to be someone that looks like Oswin, not Oswin herself (which would be a shame in some ways).