Doctor Who -The Doctor Falls

Stuck In The Puddle With You

Doctor Who - The Doctor Falls
Airdate: 1st July 2017
BBC 1

Warning: Series finale spoilers in here… in abundance. 

Well this one was both spectacular and quite disappointing, to be honest. 

As a series finale it’s a bit of a dud because all of those little mysterious questions that the writer asked us to invest in at the start of the series were just thrown away, left unanswered. As this show started and the virtual village which was a part of the starship from last week was attacked by cybermen, I was pretty sure the little girl was going to grow up to be either Bill or Bill’s mother. Alas we never found out and, since The Doctor is obviously now going to conveniently forget about the constant danger to Nardole and the fleeing colony altogether, it seems unlikely that any kind of closure on Bill and her mother is ever going to come to us. Which is absolute rubbish.

So, okay… the good stuff. 

Well, The Master as played by John Simm and Missy as played by Michelle Gomez had some nice scenes together. And the fact that they ended up killing each other… with The Master presumably escaping to regenerate into Missy and with Missy supposedly finally dead… well, it looks like Moffat wasn’t that interested in leaving his successor much in the way of one of The Doctor’s main arch villains to play with. Or maybe it’s an easy fix… a writer writes.

We also have some truly nice work by Pearl Mackie in this one as we get to see her character as she sees herself… as Bill Potts… and also as the very first cyberman, which she really is now. There’s no going back for her from this but to have Mackie play much of the scenes as Bill allowed us some terrific emotional moments opposite Peter Capaldi’s always brilliant performance as The Doctor. And that great moment where she catches her shadow on the wall and it’s the shadow of the headpiece of a cyberman was terrific. Truly nice touch by Moffat and co. 

And so there was all of that. But...

Okay, so the episode was really not answering any questions pitched earlier in the series, as I mentioned before but, beyond that, there were some really niggly  things too… in addition to completely forgetting about basic Timelord biology, that is.

So, okay, the Mondasian cybermen really are an upgrade too far by the BBC. The more I look at these things, the more I realise that they really are just a caricature of the original 1966 versions. The proportions all look wrong. These are too refined and not nearly as clumsy and clunky as those brilliant originals, it’s sad to say. 

And then we have the upgraded cybermen somehow fighting alongside them and they’re just the same versions of them we last saw on the show. Oh really? None of the other gazillions of cybermen versions over the years? Just the last lot because, what the hell, they had all those costumes left over from last time, right? So, yeah, on the cybermen front I was generally disappointed all around. Not quite sure why composer Murray Gold waited for those versions to appear before he started weaving his cyberman theme into the texture of the score, either.

That being said, there was a genuine surprise near the end of the show that I didn’t see coming… and that’s always a good thing as far as I’m concerned. That being the reappearance of Bill’s alien water spirit, puddle lover from the first episode of this series, The Pilot (reviewed here) who  rescues Bill from her cyber existence to be her water lover from the stars. So that was… unexpected, at least.

And then we have the last scene where Capaldi’s Doctor, keeping his own regeneration at bay, comes face to face with David Bradley playing the William Hartnell first incarnation of the character. Yeah, was pretty sure he’d have to be turning up somewhere in this episode and here he was. Not sure how I quite felt about that, though, because I thought he looked somewhat less like Hartnell than he did when he played him last in An Adventure In Space And Time (reviewed here). Presumably this part of the story will be picked up later in the year in the 2017 Christmas special. Which, to be entirely honest, I’m really not looking forward to all that much. 

And that really is all I’ve got to say about this one. A short review but, then again, I did feel kinda short changed on all the story threads here. I need a bit of a rest from the current incarnation of the show, truth be told, so I am happy for the big gap. I will miss Pearl Mackie, though, because I think she did some very strong stuff here and I will definitely miss Capaldi when he’s gone. Especially since his previous series on the show was just so good. 

Doctor Who - World Enough And Time

Telos About Mondas

Doctor Who - World Enough And Time
Airdate: 24th June 2017
BBC 1

Warning: Yes, this one’s got big spoilers in it.

This review marks another little 'anniversary' for me. When I first started this blog the first Doctor Who story that aired live and which I wrote about at the time was the first Matt Smith story The Eleventh Hour (reviewed here) and since that first Doctor Who review I did, well... this is my 100th Doctor Who review for this blog (not including the odd book review and episodes of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane adventures, some of which you will also find here). And I'm very pleased to be still reviewing them now after all this time.

So, okay, this was a really great set up episode but, as has been pointed out by various critics over the last few years, Moffat’s really good at openings and really bad at endings... so we shall just have to see how the wind blows when the second episode of this two (maybe three) part story ‘sort of’ concludes next week.

This weeks episode, though, was a real humdinger...

World Enough And Time started off with the lone Doctor, supposedly injured, stumbling out of the TARDIS and beginning his regeneration process. And then the credits play and there’s no more mention of this sequence and we are left to assume that the rest of the story is being told in flashback. I'm still unsure if he’s going to be completing that process at Christmas, as everybody says, or will be regenerating next week... perhaps he’ll do it at the end of next week but still make an appearance in the Christmas special. Who knows? Apparently.

So the next thing we have is Missy being the new ‘Doctor Who’ (in a somewhat distressing shout out for fans who are probably all, like myself, hoping that Moffat hasn’t decided to make that The Doctor’s real name) as a test to see how helpful she is and to decide whether she has turned over a new leaf. So they go to the aid of a real distress call and it’s Missy, Bill and Nardole answering while The Doctor watches their progress from the TARDIS as they try and figure out what’s going on with a starship which is slowly reversing away from a black hole... with the time at one end of the ship going very rapidly as opposed to the relative time at the other end of the ship.

And then we get our next big shock as somebody blows a big hole through Bill’s heart and she falls lifeless to the floor before a bunch of ‘heads covered in rags’ patients take her away to repair her at the other end of the ship... while The Doctor, Missy and Nardole are left to wonder what’s going on... a few minutes passing at what is a rate of months for Bill as she is somehow revived and her heart replaced with a big cyberchest thing. Oh yeah, that’s right... we knew the original, William Hartnell cybermen from The Tenth Planet (reviewed here) were back and, by the end of the episode, Bill is fully converted into... the very first cyberman. Or cyberwoman, I guess.

And there were some nice things about the episode which were really well written.  For instance, as Bill stands there in shock and we see a hole the size of an extra large fist punched through her body where her chest was, we flash back to point where Bill is warning The Doctor about this whole ‘trial run for Missy’ thing being a bad idea and asking The Doctor to keep an eye on her safety... so a nice poignant moment there. Although, I’m still not 100% sure that she’s not talking to a version of The Doctor who has already seen her die... but I’m guessing that this would be too inappropriately ‘timey wimey’ for Moffat in terms of the sense of gravitas purveying the episode... which is really atmospheric and scary, in all honesty.

Bearing in mind the Mondasian* cybermen are held back until the very end of the show as a surprise moment, one has to wonder why the BBC announced they were going to be on these episodes at all... if you’re going to have a surprise then have a surprise, for goodness sake. Although, truth be told, these new costumes, while scary, aren’t a patch on the original costumes from 1966 and have some very marked differences, it has to be said. As it was, though, we were all just sitting around assuming Bill would be ‘converted’ at the end of the episode. I mean, not even Murray Gold’s music gave the game away in that... he didn’t use his cyberman theme once, it seemed to me.  So, it’s like they were playing the episode completely for a big surprise and then just decided to tell everyone a few months before it happened. Bit of a silly thing to do, if you ask me.

And talking of surprises, we have John Simm back as the previous incarnation of Missy... The Master... and I’m assuming well be seeing him regenerating into her before the end of next week’s episode, maybe? Now, again, Moffat plays it really clever here and, aided by John Simm’s quite remarkable acting skills, hides him in plain sight for most of the episode. And that could have worked really well, again, if the BBC hadn’t let the cat out of the bag about him being in this final story. As it was, though, I was still fooled by the tactic up until only five minutes or so before he pulled off the prosthetics and revealed himself. At which point I exclaimed... “You don’t think that’s John Simm in disguise, do you?”... to the rest of the room and was told... of course not. However... it turned out it was.

Never mind though because World Enough And Time was still a smartly executed episode and, as usual, Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, Matt Lucas, Michelle Gomez and John Simm were all doing some marvellous stuff here. There was also a nice little moment where The Doctor performs Venusian Judo (for the first time in decades in the show, I suspect) which ties in nicely, kinda, to the reappearance of the character Alpha Centauri a couple of weeks ago (I think Jon Pertwee first used this fighting style in the story The Monster of Peladon, right?). In fact, coincidentally, I was only talking about The Doctor fighting using Venusian Judo on a train back from a concert the other week so, yeah, it’s nice to have the reference.

Other than that, though... well I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that Moffat doesn’t screw up the season finale next week. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the conclusion of the story and I really hope he doesn’t forget to tie up all the loose story threads which he dangled in the first episode of this season. Especially since Bill deserves a lot better than the fate she has been given, to be sure. So, yeah, a nice episode, well put together and hope they don’t all screw it up next weekend. Fingers crossed for that, then.

* From the planet Mondas, one of the two worlds of cyberman legend, along with Telos.

Doctor Who - Extremis

Exreme Missy

Doctor Who - Extremis
Airdate: 20th May 2017
BBC 1

Warning: This one’s going to have to have spoilers in it right from the outset, I’m afraid. Apologies.

Well this doesn’t seem to have been a very well liked episode if my Twitter timeline is anything to go by. People are afraid the series will get cancelled if episodes like this are what they have to look forward to. I can understand that the casual watchers well might drift away with less than excellent episodes like this but, honestly, I think they already lost the most people they could lose two series' ago so I don’t think the odd poorly received episode like this is going to make that much difference. As I remarked recently to someone on an entirely different subject... you need to see the bad ones to appreciate the good ones. So there’s that.

As for myself... I didn’t see this episode as a disaster at all. Far from it. Although I do admit to being disappointed in the actual content and end games of the story.

Let me cover the good stuff first.

The story deals with an email to The Doctor from, it turns out by the end of the story, The Doctor. But not as we know him. The Doctor is still blind and he, Bill and Nardole are summoned by The Pope to enter the secret library in the Vatican and read from the forbidden text Veritas. Anyone who reads it will die by their own hand... and have been, frequently.

That’s the plot and there are some lovely bits in it. The atmosphere of the dark, musty, labyrinth of library corridors is good stuff and there’s also a load of humour in it. Meanwhile, we also have the startling ‘revelation’ that the Doctor has The Master, I mean Missy, in the Vault. Which is a real let down and it’s implied that’s where she is because The Doctor rescues her from execution but is duty bound to guard her body for a thousand years in said vault. The fact that she is still alive is neither her nor there to The Doctor. And then we have some scenes in The Pentagon and CERN which are... what they are... but the really nice stuff was in the library and, also, a scene where Bill currently lives at the start of the episode...

Bill has a hot date and the lady in question is back with Bill in the lounge area for a cup of tea and something more hotter later when the sound of the TARDIS can be heard coming from Bill’s bedroom, which she explains away as pipes. Then The Pope rushes into the lounge and starts talking excitedly in Italian and... the reaction from Bill and her date is priceless. This is a nice comedy moment and it’s probably the highlight of the episode... for me at any rate. Such a shame it’s not really Bill then...

Which of course leads me into the bad stuff.

Don’t worry, it was all a dream. Or rather, don’t worry, the whole episode was a computer simulation of our regular characters because a weird alien race build a shadow, virtual reality programme to run, unaware it’s not the real thing. to figure out how to defeat The Doctor and invade the planet. Which is a really old idea and, though it manifests itself in some, really not bad moments... like the way in which computers (at least old computers) can only generate pseudo-random strings of numbers... it really is “a load of old pants”. Which, I’m told, means something a bit less than good to the young audience out there. Or has that phrase been superseded already?

Another big problem of going down that route, of course, is that a) it made no sense and b) we absolutely didn’t need to have dodgy aliens stealing cardinals in the library because, really, what for? Also, there’s no way, surely, The Doctor can send an email from his sonic sunglasses to the real version of himself when it’s all just a simulation being run for the benefit of the aliens. And furthermore... how come computer glasses can allow a blind character to see where walls and people are but can’t actually display text in a book? That really makes no sense at all and these things - the email, the glasses, the fact that The Doctor can’t regenerate his eyes but he can grow new limbs at will - just seemed to me like lazy writing. I mean, when the technology and physics of the Whoniverse are being rewritten because they get in the way of story ideas... then it’s time to rewrite the situations which call for such preposterous decisions, not just say the technology or people can’t do that particular thing so the story can function sensibly. This was bad writing, I feel.

And then there’s the whole thing with it being Missy in the vault.

Really? What an anti-climax. I know a lot of people are disappointed in the so called ‘revelation’ of something they’ve made so obvious that there had to be more to it than that. Myself included.

However, a little part of me is saying, hold up. You don’t usually reveal what’s happening with something from the reverse end of the situation. We assume Missy is in there and, to be fair The Doctor is talking to Missy openly through the Vault doors. However, we haven’t actually seen the reveal from this end, have we? Is it really just Missy in there or is there going to be something far more spectacular and Moffat is just throwing us that bone, halfway through the series, to throw us off the trail. Or is it the case, as I mentioned in my first review of this series, that the whole vault thing is just a giant red herring to distract us from the real revelation coming later in the series. Let’s hope so, eh? Otherwise this is not exactly one of the the most clever seasons of Doctor Who written, that’s for sure.

There you go then. That’s all I’ve got on Extremis. It’s not the mess that everyone seems to think it is, I reckon but, as I think I’ve demonstrated, it’s not an episode that’s without its disappointments. Next week’s episode looks like it will be dealing with the real life fall out from this one so I can’t say I’m particularly looking forward to it but... hopefully I’ll be pleasantly surprised and the series will begin to perk back up again. Who knows? Apparently.

Doctor Who - The Witch's Familiar

Skaro Margin

Doctor Who - The Witch's Familiar
UK Airdate: 26th September 2015
BBC 1

Warning: Yeah, yeah. Still spoilers in this one.

Okay so... I haven’t got a heck of a lot to say about this second episode of the latest series. There’s good and there’s bad but... really nothing to refute the astonishingly good work set up last week and I’m sure most people will be fairly happy with this one.

The episode doesn’t quite pick up from the cliff hanger ending of last week’s installment... instead pushing it firmly into the background until it can be similarly revisited to bring back exactly the same kind of dramatic flourish towards the end of this show, slightly weakened in that we now understand more what is really at stake and with the people behind the camera, presumably, hoping the audience has really short memories. This tactic seems to work out okay and I can’t make up my mind whether it was edited into the end of last weeks show, when they already had a viable cliffhanger of the seeming death of Clara, in order to balance up the running time or whether the story really was structured this way. Not too sure and it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, I guess. In modern day film precedents it’s the equivalent of the end of the second of Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne movies actually being placed chronologically towards the end of the third movie. Which can sometimes make things interesting.

In terms of the bad stuff I mentioned in this episode... bad being a euphemism for stuff I don’t personally like... there were two things which really bothered me here. One is Missy... who was really consistently well acted and well written throughout the episode except... the madness part of her character which I lamented at the end of the last series and which didn’t really bubble up to the surface last week, is back in a few scenes. I really don’t need to see her dancing around for no apparent reason with the Daleks... it just makes her seem overly dramatic for the sake of it. Still, I’m sure people will be into it. The other thing which bothers me is the apparent loss of The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver and its replacement with a set of sunglasses. Now, hold on. There’s a few things wrong with this decision... if, indeed, it’s not just a decision being used to tease the audience and stir up viewer reaction with the pay off being a new look screwdriver at the end of the year or next year... which can then be reproduced as a toy to generate more cash.

They’ve tried this idea before. The sonic screwdriver has been a staple of the show since it was first introduced in the mid-1960s in various Patrick Troughton episodes, beginning with Fury From The Deep. Jon Pertwee’s redesigned one was a very popular contraption and I could never work out, as a child, why they didn’t make a toy of it in the 1970s. Had to make my own. The device was scrapped in the 1980s, destroyed by a Terilieptil in the Peter Davison story The Visitation, if my memory isn’t failing me. I think the idea was that the screwdriver had become an almost omnipotent device to get the writers of the show out of any situation and... yeah, maybe they had a point. Or, you know, maybe the writers could just have been a little more clever with their writing... there’s always that option open to them, I guess.

The thing is, though... the screwdriver is as iconic an ingredient of Doctor Who as the TARDIS looking like a Police Box and the theme tune. Get rid of that and you lose one of the key recognition factors of a show which sometimes really needs that if the key cast member turn over is as high as it’s been, by design, over the years. The Americans presumably realised this too because the sonic screwdriver reappeared in the Doctor Who TV movie with Paul McGann and has been reunited with The Doctor, in one design or another, ever since. Until now... where they’ve replaced it with a pair of sunglasses.

What?

There’s absolutely no need to do this and there’s especially no need if you’re going to take away what is, effectively, The Doctor’s magic wand and replace it with something completely different which does the same thing. This smacks of either tinkering needlessly with the things that work or, as I said earlier, aggressive fan baiting... so I shall watch the online reaction to this elimination of a key element with great interest as the weeks go by.

So that’s the bad stuff. The good stuff? Mostly everything else.

Not much here in terms of postmodernistic referencing to the past this week but there are some really great scenes between Davros and The Doctor which, if I’m not mistaken (but, hey, I probably am), are trying to hit exactly the same kind of emotional beats as the famous Batman/Joker ‘character analysis and shared joke scene’ which closes Alan Moore’s much loved Batman one-shot, The Killing Joke. Still, whatever its inspiration, it works pretty effectively and the added 'twist' that Davros is up to no good all along may seem pretty obvious, as does The Doctor’s knowledge of this... but it doesn’t make it any less effective and both Peter Capaldi and Julian Bleach do a fantastic job here.

As do Jenna Louise Coleman as Clara and Michelle Gomez as Missy... barring my caveat above. The comical chemistry between the two is pretty good and it’s quite well written. Not brilliant in some ways because you do always know what’s coming - Missy pushing Clara down a hole to test the length of the drop is beyond telegraphed in the dialogue, for instance - but this doesnt stop it being funny and the two seem to have an interesting dynamic between them.

As far as everything else in the story... it was sturdy. Nothing very “wow” but, again, nothing which let the side down in terms of the set up episode, as I was expecting it too... so pleasantly surprised there. This looks like an odd season we’ve got in store for us and I wonder just where show runner Steven Moffat wants to take us this time around. We’ve got to lose Clara at some point and, hopefully, restore Danny Pink to her to lend credibility to the Orson Pink timeline but... whether Clara will actually leave or whether she transforms into someone/something else, maybe a Dalek in Asylum Of The Daleks (reviewed here), is anybody’s guess. I also wonder about Missy (The Master) and the “tune out and you’ll miss it” comment that The Doctor gave a specific ring to her daughter... presumably a relation of The Doctor’s if he and Missy are... um... brothers. Time will tell, I guess.

And that’s as much as I can say about this one. Nice solid episode which didn’t have the wow factor of the opening episode but which concluded things in a way that it didn’t leave a bad taste in the mouth. Not a contender for a great episode as the first part was but... not a bad one either.

Doctor Who: The Magician's Apprentice

A Man Kaled Davros

Doctor Who: The Magician's Apprentice
UK Airdate: 19th September 2015
BBC 1

Warning: Oh yeah. You bet there are going to be all kinds of spoilers in this one... otherwise there’s not a heck of a lot left to talk about.

Yay! The Daleks are back...

... which, if you’re a regular reader of my Doctor Who reviews over the last five years, is probably not something you would expect to hear me say, given that I always keep banging on about how overused they are in the modern era of Doctor Who. However, for this episode at least, writer Steven Moffat does something fairly special with them....

So, following on from a fairly unremarkable Christmas special, the 2015 season of Doctor Who begins its broadcast with the first of a two part story, this episode being called The Magician’s Apprentice... and it has to be said it’s one of the best episodes I’ve seen in a while in the series. Probably since somewhere in the middle of David Tennant’s last year on the show. Opening with a brilliant and surreal opening hook set on a war torn Skaro, a young boy gets caught in a field of ‘hand mines’ which are hands which come up from under the ground and which can see you with an eye embedded firmly in each palm, grabbing you and pulling you under the surface, presumably to your death. In flies the Peter Capaldi incarnation of The Doctor to give the young boy a hand but, on learning that his name is Davros... he leaves him again to his fate. Which may seem a bit harsh if you’re not a fan of the show and know that the young boy will grow up to become the ruthless creature who mutated the Kaled race and invented the Daleks; a character created approximately 12 years after the Daleks first appeared on the show in 1963, opposite Tom Baker’s Doctor in his first season in the 1975 story Genesis Of The Daleks, before making regular appearances throughout the show’s long history. The eyeballs in hands, of course, now make perfect sense as an inspirational motif for the young evil genius when you realise their similarity to the eye stalks of the Daleks, only translated into humanoid terms.

After the credits, the story continues with Clara Oswald rejoining The Brigadier’s daughter in UNIT as a ‘returned from the dead’ Missy (aka the female incarnation of The Master) gets her attention and then teleports her away to grab The Doctor... who is in the year 1138AD, in a nice little reference to George Lucas’ magic numbers. They are then all transported to Skaro where both Missy and Clara are “Exterminated”... yeah, right... and The Doctor is left on a cliff hanger as he goes back to destroy Davros as a young boy.

Okay, so the story is fairly dark and, more importantly, darkly handled by director Hettie MacDonald, who last directed for the show on my all time favourite episode Blink... so no wonder she does a great job here. It seems the combination of Steven Moffat’s writing and her direction has given us what could, if we’re very lucky and the second part lives up to the set up, be another classic episode of the show. It’s downright creepy and atmospheric and, somehow, the emotional investment conjured up the actors delivering Moffat’s lines for this director seems to really help the audience believe that great things are afoot and... well they kind of are.

I’ve never really liked Davros as a character that much... my only interest in him being a symbol of what he stands for rather than anything any of the actors or dialogue have done for the character in the past four decades. Here though, as a dying creature who has summoned The Doctor for one final meeting, he is absolutely brilliant... seemingly relaxed and at ease on his home planet and, I dunno, just something about the way that Julian Bleach, who last played the character in the two part Tennant story The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, plays him in a much more relaxed manner here that really makes the character work and Moffat ,once again, proves himself as a writer of, at the very least, great starting point stories.

There’s a lot for regular fans of the show to love about this one too, with various Doctor’s who have come across Davros over the years either heard in dialogue clips or seen in video clips... including a major moment for Tom Baker’s Doctor... the famous “Do I have the right” scene opposite Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen is not seen here) as he debates whether he has the moral high ground when considering ending the Daleks before they are even properly unleashed on the universe. Something which this story has big echoes of, of course, with Capaldi’s Doctor being given the choice of saving him, leaving him to die or, perhaps, destroying him (although we know he won’t do that).

There are also some great dialogue references to the Tom Baker and Matt Smith incarnations of The Doctor by Capaldi, who also does some great guitar solos here, including a version of the Doctor Who theme. Music seems to be a key plot device here, in fact, with Missy using a variation of the 1982 chart hit Mickey, by Toni Basil, to grab UNIT's attention. Interestingly, The Doctor also plays a quick version of this on his guitar as a reference to Missy when they meet in this episode although, since he wasn’t around for that scene at the start of the story, one might wonder how he would know that Missy used that to identify herself to UNIT personnel? I’d like to believe it’s a Moffat clue to indicate that The Doctor already knows what’s going on and is one step ahead of the game at this point but... yeah, although he’s done stuff like that before I think it may just be a bit of sloppy writing here in that respect. Time will tell, I guess. Hope he proves me wrong.

Among other nice things for fans of the show is the reappearance of The Sisterhood Of Karn, who were first seen in Doctor Who in the 1976 story The Brain Of Morbius, before returning in a short web based episode prequel to The Day Of The Doctor 50th Anniversary special, giving Paul McGann the power to change into John Hurt’s War Doctor for the purposes of that story. They also reappear in a short web prequel to this episode, released last week. In addition to The Sisterhood and a whole load of other places and creatures from recent Who stories like the Judoon and the Ood, there are some great Daleks from the show’s early history featured in the story, which is great and, better than that, the famous monsters are in no way overused here and seem to be much more of a threat because of their lack of domination of the episode.

My favourite bit, though, was the ambient sound of the chamber in which Davros resides... which is a dead spit of the ambient sound used on the first of the mid 1960s Peter Cushing Doctor Who movies whenever the characters are in the Dalek city and, I’m pretty sure, dates back to the Daleks’ first on screen appearance at the end of 1963. That sound effect made me chuckle to myself when I noticed it.

So, yeah, all in all a well written, well directed and, it almost goes without saying, well acted episode, especially by the three leads Peter Capaldi, Jenna-Louise Coleman and Michelle Gomez, with the latter being little calmer in her delivery of the role (mostly due to the nature of the dialogue, I suspect) and, therefore, a little more lethal like The Master really ought to be. Some nice hits from Murray Gold’s score too with the Capaldi Doctor’s theme getting a little more prominence in the mix, this time around.... although saying that, why they were using it for scenes accompanying Clara rather than using a variant on Clara’s theme is anybody’s guess.

In general, though, The Magician's Apprentice is a truly triumphant season opener and I am keeping my fingers firmly crossed that the follow on and, presumably, lingering season long fallout from this episode set up, doesn’t let it down. Unlike The Doctor, I can’t travel in time anyway except very slowly forward, so I’ll have to wait for the answers to those questions but... a really strong opening here and I am looking forward to where the show goes from this, for sure.

Doctor Who: Death In Heaven

Carry On Up The Cyber

Doctor Who: Death In Heaven
UK Airdate: 8th November 2014
BBC 1

Warning: Yeah, I suppose there will be spoilers here, if anyone’s still holding out for a good season finale.

Not sure I have too much to say about this episode, following on, as it does, from last week’s overplayed Missy as The Master subplot which, to be fair, didn’t leave much breathing space for anything else. That being said, there were some excellent ideas and concepts which were, mostly, nice additions to the world of Doctor Who. My real gripe about this is that, for all its many parts, many of them good but equally tempered with things which were either dreary or compromising to good drama, this episode, like this year’s series, never seemed to become anything greater than the sum of its parts. Which is a shame because when some of those parts are somewhat broken or ill-advised, you’re left with a vehicle which will get you from A to B without too much trouble... just not in style.

There were some really great things about last nights episode. For example, the addition of the Cybermen coming back from the dead. The iconic idea of Cybermen literally rising from their own tombs and the symbolism of resurrection from the dead has always been a part of the show. When Troughton’s Doctor saw them rising from their tombs in spectacular fashion in Tomb Of The Cybermen, it was a much loved and remembered part of that generation’s audience for the show and I remember myself the impression the similar scenes in the Peter Davison story Earthshock had on me when I was in my teens. So even the title of this week’s show, Death In Heaven, carries on a long legacy of the Cybermen being associated with the imagery and terminology of death. This episode we had an excellent addition to that established continuity with the writer combining the cybermen with the classic imagery of films like George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead and subsequent movies in the “modern zombie” cycle (although perhaps it’s best to go back even further than Hammer’s Plague Of The Zombies, to the 1940s Universal Mummy franchise, to find where the idea of the undead rising from the earth first started on film). So the Time Lord hard drive returning the downloaded “souls” back into the dead as Cybermen and then having them burst out of graveyards was one of a few welcome additions.

Another was the appearance of an old Cyberman helmet from the Patrick Troughton/Tom Baker days... that was good. A bit of a throwaway reference but, so too, was another nice little highlight... the "painted" portrait of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, as played by the late actor Nicholas Courtney, on prominent display in a U.N.I.T aircraft.

There were, however, a lot of mis-steps.

Michelle Gomez incarnation of The Master was a little better but ultimately too little too late and, killing her off (allegedly) like that was a terrible thing. Although, I’m not 100% sure that when the Cyberman incarnation of The Brigadier vapourised her, it was simultaneous to The Doctor saying a set of co-ordinates that could have been a signal for someone to teleport her to safety... or at least get zapped into a... well.. a Time Lord hard drive, for instance? A case of “spoilers, sweetie” perhaps?

And also, as much as I like the homage to the memory of The Brigadier, I’m not sure the character would have chosen to be reincarnated as something he’d spent so much time fighting in the 1960s. I was kinda unsure how to react to the scene at his deus ex machina return at so opportune a moment. I guess we’ll never know what the late Nicholas Courtney would have made of it... I hope he would have at least liked the acknowledgment that the part he played, on and off, for so many decades and opposite so many Doctors, was so well loved and cherished in the series.

I do think The Master’s demise in this manner was preposterous in terms of making it hard for the writers when that character next returns. In the 1930s, the Flash Gordon serials kept killing off Ming The Merciless in the last episode and then had to skate around the issue each time they brought him back in the next serial because they’d kinda wrote themselves into a corner. You’d think that writers these days would learn from the mistakes of the past but, in this case, I think not.

The also killed off a very promising character who, by all rights, should have actually been a Zygon (since the storyline in The Day Of The Doctor - reviewed here - was never actually cleared up or properly concluded, if you’ll recall). I think this was a bit of a mistake but then, there’s always the Christmas special to undo things, it seems to me. I’ll get on to that in a moment.

There was a sense of real loss at the end of the episode and I was really congratulating the writers near the end of the show which saw a bitter Clara and a bitter Doctor both putting on a brave face for the other and both lying about what had just happened to each other... both thinking they were sacrificing a part of themselves for the other. They said goodbye and then that was it... a dramatic ending. Unfortunately, they couldn’t even do that right because we had a mid-end credits sequence where Nick Frost suddenly appears to The Doctor as Santa Claus and basically says this is not how it should be. Now, alright if they want to bring everyone back from the dead (Danny Pink’s great great grandson, or whoever he was, couldn’t have existed in this timeline, or MIssy’s, if these events were irreversible), but this was a seriously dramatic ending ruined by the fact that the BBC couldn’t wait to give us a hint. It’s only seven weeks until Christmas people. It’ll keep. Why pre-warn us in advance? That’s just dumb. And it also ruined the drama of the moment... no matter how much I want to see Nick Frost playing Santa Claus. It’s like the BBC saw a moment of real pathos unfolding in their drama and said... “Oh, we can’t have that. Let’s put in a jolly fat man to lighten the mood.” Pathetic.

Overall, this was not my favourite episode and nor was it my favourite season. Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson have all been outstanding in their roles and are always watchable... but the stories and plot devices they were left to perform seems to me to have left them bereft of something really great to make a contribution to. Still, if there is another season commissioned, and I sincerely hope there is because Capaldi is really right for the role and is knocking it out the park in terms of inhabiting te character and making it his own, then I look forward to it with interest. Despite my grumbles, it’s still one of the best and most well loved TV shows in British television history.

Doctor Who: Dark Water

Water Palaver

Doctor Who: Dark Water
UK Airdate: 1st November 2014
BBC 1

Warning: All the spoilers will be in here... although you might not think much of them once they are revealed.

You know, I really hate it when works of art like books, films, TV shows etc have the same title as another work... it just confuses things. So, the first episode of the two part season finale is upon us and it’s called Dark Water. Not to be confused with the many, many other instances of movies, TV shows and books also called Dark Water... okay?

This episode was a real humdinger of disappointment... not because the episode was consistently bad, it wasn’t... most of it was quite good... but because the big reveal turned out to be something that I personally thought that if Steven Moffat had gone with that option, then he would have been run out of town on a rail for trying something so obvious and anticlimactic... I’ll get to that in a minute.

The show opens strongly with the death of new series regular Danny Pink. Now while this was somewhat tempered with the “I’ve seen this all before” factor (Moffat did this at least once with Rory, from what I remember) and the fact that we’ve been seeing people dying and then returning to something of a life as a part of this season’s running story arc, it still had a certain dramatic weight which gave Jenna Coleman something good to work with and an impetus to threaten The Doctor... so that was good. Yes, you kinda knew the character would be back from the dead in two shakes of a lambs tail but, still, it kinda worked and drove the plot forward to Clara’s confrontation with The Doctor (even though there’s no way she would have done that when she’s, after all, lived many lives through The Doctors various incarnations). 

Then we had some great stuff with the novel concept of X-Ray water (presumably the Dark Water of the title) and, even though you knew it was the cybermen sitting in those tanks because, heck, the BBC had trailered it as such, it was still quite novel to see the moving skeletons and it made for some nice imagery and some nice gobbledy gook sci-fi talk with The Doctor and Clara. After this though, everything went a bit pear shaped, to be honest so... excuse me if this is a short review but I don’t have much interesting to write about beyond this point.

The thing is... I don’t mind seeing the cybermen again, even if they’ve been overused to death since they first reappeared in the Peter Davison years. I even liked the homage to The Invasion, as this episode gave a little nod to the cybermen coming down the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral like they did in the Patrick Troughton serial. No, the whole thing wrong with this was the reveal on Missy.

Now, the first reveal which came up early on in the episode... that she was an android software thingy... was an obvious blind put there to pad the running time, is my guess. Nobody was going to be fooled by that. However, it’s the actual reveal at the end of the episode which I really wish I was saying exactly the same thing about. It's like they deliberately put in a rubbish reveal to distract from the fact that the real answer to the mystery is equally lame. I really wish it was a red herring, to be honest...

To explain. The first thing everybody thinks of when they hear that there’s a character in the series called Missy is... “Oh, that’s Missy short for Mistress. So she’s a regenerated incarnation of The Master then?” And then you think to yourself and realise... no way can anybody be that obvious. It’s got to be a red herring because, frankly, it requires no thought at all and it’s a bit dull. All that does is set up that timelords can change sexes in the minds of the viewers to pave the way for a female Doctor at some point. There’s no way an adult is going to look at that for more than five minutes and think it’s anything but a bit of rubbish.

As I was reminded only last week on twitter, Doctor Who is a children’s show. Well, no it’s not actually... I think you’ll find it was always aimed at being a “family” show and, when you start putting it on after 8pm at night, that pushes that idea of its target audience even further. But you know what? Even a five year old these days would have no problem jumping to the conclusion of Missy = Mistress = Master in 5 minutes flat and would be equally dismissive, I suspect. Look at the sophisticated storyline twists on our cinema screens these days and compare them to what happened in last night's episode. This is not up to the calibre I expect from this show and it’s a pity because Peter Capaldi makes an excellent Doctor and Clara and Danny are more than up to the task too. There’s some great performances here and they’re being wasted on the whole Missy thing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Michelle Gomez, who plays Missy, in anything else but she seems pretty good as an actress too.. but the writing on this doesn’t give her much to work with, to be fair. 

And it’s such a shame because this could have gone to some very dark and interesting places... just like the promising opening of the episode was showing. So, a recap... 

Danny Pink dying = good, although not expected to be that lasting. Especially with his great grandchild or whatever roaming the universe in an earlier episode.

Clara VS The Doctor = good stuff (shame it was just a dream state illusion).

X-Ray water = a really nice idea befitting good science fiction.

Again with the Cybermen = tolerable, just.

Again with the Cybermen at St. Paul’s Cathedral = somewhat more tolerable.

Missy = total waste of time, doesn’t all quite make sense in terms of dead people actually dying... must do better. And I’m not even going to mention the incest implied in one scene by this so called revelation.

My one slim chance at a satisfying conclusion to next weeks episode has to be the twitter buzz that there’s more revelation on the characters to come. I hope so but I somehow doubt it. I would expect a failed suicide attempt from Clara (so she can join Danny and be talked down by The Doctor), a possible rescue on Danny Pink, some rubbishy loose ended timelord stuff which makes no sense, even in current revisionist continuity, The Doctor and Clara parting ways for good (until Christmas)... and a punchline of Missy being around for next year’s season, if the BBC doesn’t cancel the series in the meantime.

To be fair, I really hope I’m wrong on all the above points. I would be really happy about that. So let’s see what happens next, shall we?