Doctor Who - Joy To The World

The Joy Of Rex

Doctor Who -
Joy To The World
UK/USA 2024
Airdate: 25th December 2024

Warning: Some big spoilers here.

It’s nice having a Doctor Who Christmas Special to look forward to again. Now, admittedly, last year’s show which returned it to the Christmas Day slot was... well... a bit of a disaster and, as it turned out, kind of a harbinger of what was probably the worst series of Doctor Who in quite some time. However, it’s nice to be able to report that this year’s special, Joy To The World, was a pretty good return to form for the show. One can only hope that this signals a better season than the last one... although it was written by Steven Moffat so my expectations were that it would at least be interesting at any rate.

The plot involves an attempt to grow a star seed through various doors in a Time Hotel, which specialises in lodging its guests in different periods. So we have The Doctor and his companions visiting various places like the 1940s in London, the early 1960s on the Orient Express and they even at one point, almost get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Of course, once the star seed is finished it will go off and burn the planet to cinders to create a new star but, hey ho, that’s what The Doctor is here to stop.

So we have Ncuti Gatwa back as the main man and the beautiful Nicola Coughlan as new companion Joy. Gatwa is given a script he can do a good job with (including a companion saving scene which, I suspect, is inspired heavily by the scene between Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen in the Fourth Doctor story Ark In Space, reviewed here) and Coughlan is pretty good as his short lived companion (yep, all I’m saying is that she ends her story in a similar way to Kylie Minogue in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas Special Voyage Of The Damned).

Also very good in this episode is another companion who The Doctor spends a year with, named Anita, played by Stephanie de Whalley, who has really nice chemistry with the current incarnation and, all I’m saying is that they should maybe pick her up as a regular companion at some point. Some of the most moving scenes in this special involve her and The Doctor. And then there’s Joel Fry, who I really think a lot of as an actor anyway and who brings his particular comic timing to the story too.

There was some great writing involved as well. Moffat is maybe not taking things as seriously as some long term fans might want him to but, he has a lovely moment where, after a year of not cracking the password code to get Joy out of trouble, The Doctor merely remembers the code his future self told him it was, creating a nice temporal paradox. And then there’s the wonderful line from The Doctor... “Pardon my French but, what the French is going on!” Which was quite brilliant and he used the new ‘curse term’ French later on in the episode too. Along with yet another infuriating reference to Mavity. I mean, when the heck are they going to tidy up that loose end which dates back to the three David Tennant specials from last year?

My favourite moment, however, was a visual reference. Not only was there a costumer’s shop in the Time Hotel which evoked the name of Mr. Benn, but the costume in the shop was the red suit of armour which was from my favourite episode of Mr. Benn from when I was a kid. Nicely done sir.

On the negative side... because you knew I’d have some negative comments, right? Well I didn’t like it too much that the woman on the train in 1962, who turned out to be a lesbian (or must be bisexual right, since she shacks up with Sean Connery in Dr. No the same year)... was Sylvia Trench from the first two Bond films. But what's so wrong about this character appearing here is... the James Bond books and films are already established as fictional works in the WHONIVERSE... so how can she appear as a real character too?

Similarly, although it didn’t bother me too much, I suspect there might be a few noses bent out of shape with The Doctor witnessing the arrival of the three kings at Bethlehem at the end of the story. What did bother me was the fact that, even though they were the best scenes in the show, The Doctor waited around for a whole year from 2024 to 2025 to catch up to the Time Hotel again. Well, honestly, since there is now another incarnation of The Doctor on Earth at exactly the same point, why didn’t he just go and borrow David Tennant’s TARDIS for a little while? This is kind of a sloppy continuity error, methinks.

Still, I did quite enjoy Joy To The World and it’s certainly one of the best episodes Ncuti Gatwa has been in so, yeah, this was a nice treat for a Christmas evening and I am just keeping my fingers crossed that it won’t be the last Christmas special ever. I’m kinda expecting the show to get cancelled any month now unless someone comes to its rescue.

Doctor Who - Boom

Sunday Mundy

Doctor Who - Boom
Airdate: 18th May 2024
BBC 1

Warning: Some spoilers here sweeties.

Yay! Finally... the new series of Doctor Who has a pretty good episode... Boom... with a hidden surprise to it too, it has to be said. And, blimey! It’s written by Steven Moffat. He was a great Doctor Who writer during the Russel T. Davies era of Doctor Who but when he took over as show runner on Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi’s tenures, well it would be safe to say his writing went rapidly downhill. Now though, he provides a pretty good story  for the new show and, well, I guess Russel T must be the best editor for this writer, is what I’m thinking.

Okay so, The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his new companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) land slap bang in the middle of a war. I think the army, who are once again a religious army, with serving ministers and bishops etc instead of modern ranking, must mean it’s the same lot as in Moffat’s second Weeping Angels story for Matt Smith’s first season. Here there is no real twist as the fact that the army is fighting no enemy and are being kept fighting and dying because of capitalism of the war machinery merchants (and the soldiers’ own gullibility) is something that is telegraphed from very early on, I thought... or at least just very obvious.

So we have mechanical ambulances killing their own soldiers in the field because it’s not financially viable to give them a few weeks to recover from their injuries and, right from the get go, The Doctor steps on a ‘smart’ landmine and stays there for most of the episode while Ruby, who is pretty much shot dead under accidental circumstances about half way through the episode, tries to figure out, with the help of a few religiously impaired military types, a way to stop The Doctor from both blowing up and, because of his timelord anatomy, taking out pretty much half the planet if he shifts his weight or blood pressure one notch more.

But there’s lot’s of things going on here for what must have been a relatively cheap episode to shoot (it’s mostly set in that one location, which I suspect is one of the new backdrop screen thingies which Disney used on The Mandalorian and which seems to be rolling out through the entertainment industry). Including two surprise actors in this one.

Well, okay, actually the first one is no real surprise... I’ve been expecting Susan Twist to appear in every episode this year, as a different character per episode and, in this one she’s the personality of the ambulances. If the final twist of this year’s show isn’t to do with The Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, I’ll be surprised (although I was fully expecting her to make an appearance about six years ago and she didn’t show then).

As for the second guest appearance... well I would have been more worried about whether Ruby Sunday was going to come back from certain death or not had I realised that Mundy Flynn was being played by Varada Sethu. Who is back as Mundy next year, I believe (or maybe this Christmas?), as a new regular companion for The Doctor (alongside Ruby, I think... I suspect the marketing machine is being pretty deceptive with the facts at the moment). I’m somewhat relieved, though, because I really liked the character here and so I’m glad she’s back at some point.

Okay, so to be fair, the supposed ‘twists’ were all forseeable... although, did anyone catch Ruby’s age when the ambulance analysed her (is she really many thousands of years old or is that just because she’s maybe that far in the future?)... but it was all done with a certain panache and I even found myself warming to Ncuti in this one (thank goodness) so, I guess the darker ones fit him better, perhaps? Or maybe just me.

Once again we have the return of the ‘Ruby snow’ through one sequence. Which is another part of the ongoing mystery of Ruby Sunday and I’m all for that underlying arc (again, something to do with either Susan Foreman or Susan Twist, perhaps?). Time will tell and, not long to wait I guess, since it’s a ridiculously short season this year... well, unless they make us wait until Christmas or beyond, I suppose.

And I’ve not much more to say about Boom, to be honest except, next week’s ‘mostly Doctorless’ (if the publicity is to believed) episode is one I’ve been looking forward to for a bit and it looks to be giving us more intriguing flashbacks to the mysteries of Ruby’s past, for sure (the ambulance in this episode was completely unable to find her next of kin when it analysed her, of course). I just hope all the other episodes of this season carry on with this kind of quality going forward (if not even better). Liked this one a lot.

Dracula (2020)

Leaving Demeter Running

Dracula (2020)
Airdate: 1st, 2nd and 3rd January 2020
BBC 1 Three Episodes

Warning: Yep... spoilers residing within.
Don’t read this if you don’t want to know.

So this was unexpected.

As you know I find the work of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss a bit hit and miss... sometimes I find it brilliant and at other times, beyond irritating and disappointing. Well, I have to say, this one exceeded any hopes I had for it and managed to be quite spectacularly entertaining throughout each of the three episodes. Quite wonderful stuff.

Now I complained bitterly just recently and on this very blog, when the BBC did a free and easy excuse for an ‘adaptation’ of War Of The Worlds... mutilated more like it (which I reviewed here). I would almost have been much more happy to accept it, I suspect, if there had been at least one ‘straight’ adaptation of the novel before the BBC did what they did to it... possibly not because, it was indeed terrible but at least there would have been a history of adaptation so that people could now have a go at legitimately subverting the source.

Dracula is completely different territory. There have been lots of good adaptations already... not of the novel which, I suspect, still hasn’t been done properly, but of the 1924 stage version Hamilton Dean wrote from the Bram Stoker novel, which had major simplifications to the book and which he knew would play better as a visual spectacle. In fact, it’s quite likely that most of the versions subsequent to the two 1931 versions of Dracula from Universal are based on the John L. Balderston revisions to that adaptation, if memory serves.

So I’m not uptight about bothering to do the novel again and also, there have been enough straight adaptations now of the play that I can easily forgive people doing their own thing with Stoker’s fascinating Count. After all, how would I be able to enjoy movies like Son Of Dracula, Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein or Dracula Vs Frankenstein without being able to let go of the original. So, yeah, I wasn’t expecting to see a straight adaptation which is just as well, although Moffat and Gatiss have certainly infused this new version with a lot of the same plot points, often disguised and embedded into the DNA of the thing rather than ticking the boxes in a more conventional manner.

Also, they have been rather clever for people who have enjoyed various versions of Dracula over the years and, I have to say, they won me over really quickly. After the setting up of a ‘start to mid-point’ framing device in the first episode (a flashback and then forward technique which they use, to an extent, in all three episodes), the first ten minutes or so of Episode One is almost a straight remake of the early scenes of the two 1931 Universal versions. Right down to the line readings and arrangement of the dialogue. Honestly, the only things which were missing and, it has to be said once I’d seen what they were doing, pining for, were the girl quoting “Around the rugged rock...” and the appearance of a total non-sequiter of an armadillo in Castle Dracula. And, honestly, if they had actually put the armadillo in I would have been ecstatic.

As it was though, the way the story is done in the first episode as a recollection from the now ‘vamped up’ Jonathan Harker (played by John Heffernan) and Sister Agatha Van Helsing (played by Dolly Wells, who also plays her ancestor in the third episode), was absolutely ingenious and though a good deal of the ‘surprise’ moments were, actually, not all that surprising, Moffat and Gatiss do have a few moments up their sleeve and, especially at the end of the second episode, did manage to blind side me a couple of times... so that’s good.

The second episode was actually my favourite, which tells of the journey to Whitby on the Demeter but, with a wonderful twist at the end and, honestly, quite a different version of the voyage which was established cinematically, originally, in the 1922 version of Nosferatu (one of my two blog title namesakes). And, frankly, the final twist of the second... which has a much different line reading from when we see it again when revisited in the third (Dolly Wells is definitely delivering it as Agatha at the end of episode two and as Dr. Helsing in the third)... is bloody brilliant and reminded me of why I loved some of the early episodes of Sherlock so much.

There’s absolutely loads of good stuff I could say about the set design, the scoring, the way the camera frames some of the set ups, the graphic, artifical dream landscape glimpsed in the third episode etc but this would have to be a long review and that stuff is perhaps much better touched upon in a book about the show. But asides from some brilliant direction and top notch pacing throughout... often maintained by cutting the story in a non-linear way to break the flow and stop things from going on too long... we have to give credit, too, to the two brilliant actors who absolutely make this show their own.

I don’t know who Claes Bang is but his portrayal of Dracula and what he makes of the sometimes exquisitely playful lines he is given are absolutely first class. The chameleon shift from charming to brutal and back again really does help lift the show past what it might have been and you have to love this stuff.

But then... even he is upstaged in this. Dolly Wells’ performance as Agatha Van Helsing and her modern day equivalent (and sometimes a cross pollination of both due to Agatha’s blood-memory being in the blood the modern incarnation of her drinks), is absolutely fantastic. The way she pulls off the wit of the lines and matches Claes Bang blow by verbal blow is just incredible and I would love to see more of this lady in this kind of role. Van Helsing and Dracula have absolutely brilliant chemistry together... which is quite right, after all.

And of course, the other thing is, despite there being no armadillo, the way that Moffat and Gatiss pepper the show with both subtle and often quite blatant references to, not just Dracula’s cinematic and literary history but also other gothic or cinematically sympathetic moments, is wonderful and enrich the show for some of us who might be getting a bit tired of the abundance of Dracula at this point.

So yeah, asides from the Universal and Balderston parallels I mentioned earlier, we had the castle in the first episode actually ‘played’ by the exact same castle that F.W. Murnau shot his 1922 Nosferatu variant of the story in. There’s a wonderful moment in the first episode, where Harker runs into the full on ‘younged up’ version of Dracula which is absolutely an obvious homage to the ‘animal predator’ version of Christopher Lee’s wonderful portrayal from the Hammer Dracula movies... red contact lenses too (or some CGI trickery).

My stand out favourites, among other things you may or may not have caught, were the opening of the second episode being an homage to The Beast With Five Fingers, a version of Vincent Price’s sunglasses from the AIP movie version of Tomb Of Ligeia and a blue version of the carpet pattern from Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining adorning Dr. Seward’s wallpaper. My favourite one of all, though, was the hospital room Dr. Helsing is a patient in during episode three... AD/072... being a less than subtle reference to my all-time favourite Hammer Dracula movie, Dracula AD 1972. Wonderful stuff.

it was perhaps less than wonderful to see the guy fro the annoying Cineworld campaign show up as the Texan, Quincey, from the novel but... I guess it’s good that he’s getting work in the business and I wish him well. However, the supporting cast of loads of modern character actors that you never really remember the names of was also superb and there were even some ironic vampire names amongst the supporting characters too (cough... Lord Ruthven... cough).

Finally... and I know some people had a problem with it... but I also loved the ending. Not just the sacrificial romantic sentiment but also the way it was shot... which was an absolute dead steal from the movie version of The Final Programme (reviewed here) which is one of my favourite movies of one of my favourite literary heroes. It almost even kind of made sense at this point because this version of Dracula, transposed to modern times, was beginning to get a little more like Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character as the show progressed to its conclusion so, I’m absolutely convinced that Moffat and Gatiss would do something interesting with that character, should Moorcock ever give his blessing.

The only flaw I could find in the production... asides from Agatha’s floating dead body still being visible and 'out of time' in the shot as Dracula leaves his underwater coffin at the end of the second episode... was the fact that, at the end of the first episode... Mina definitely invites ‘Johnny’ into the chamber, specifically by name... and not Dracula. It could be argued, perhaps, that since Dracula was, quite literally, wearing Harker’s face at this point that he was also, in fact, Harker but I think that’s pushing it a bit. Still, there could be a case to be made so let’s just sweep that little slip up under the bloodstains and enjoy the production for what it is.

And that’s me done with the new Dracula. Absolutely loved it for many reasons and I’ll definitely be picking up the score CD at the end of January and the Blu Ray in a month or two. A solid and interesting effort and a worthy and blisteringly entertaining addition to the vast array of cinematic and television Dracula’s of the last 100 years. Beautiful work.

Doctor Who - Twice Upon A Time

Jodie Vivre

Doctor Who - Twice Upon A Time
Airdate: 25th December 2017
BBC 1

Warning: Here Be Spoilers... all of them.

Well this one was so much better than I thought it would be and I’m pleased Peter Capaldi’s swan song as The Doctor turned out quite as well as it did (with a few reservations).

Starting up with footage from The Tenth Planet (reviewed here) was something I didn’t expect because, right from the outset, it highlighted to modern audiences of the show just how wrong in design and voice the BBC got the reconstruction of the original cybermen at the end of the last series. So I don’t know why they chose to include specific footage of them along with the shots of Hartnell to contextualise where The First Doctor fits into all this. It does, however, work very well to get contemporary Who watchers up to speed as much as they would need and it had a lovely ‘merge’ moment where William Hartnell morphed, mid sentence, into David Bradley (not to mention The First Doctor’s then companions Ben and Polly transforming into different actors too). Bradley does a good job here and has great chemistry with Capaldi, it has to be said.

We then had him meeting up with Peter Capaldi’s incarnation of The Doctor (I refuse to call him The Twelfth Doctor anymore... War Doctor or not, every Doctor gets a number to help label them, in my book) at the end of the previous episode and we have both Doctor’s gabbling away and both refusing to regenerate. We then have a soldier 'plucked from time' on a battlefield during the First World War and accidentally deposited with both Doctors.

Now, I have to say, the identity of the mystery soldier, played here by Mark Gatiss, is really not that hard to work out once he talks about having a wife and children at home. It points to his relationship with another famous military figure who has been in Doctor Who history since his appearance as a Colonel opposite Patrick Troughton’s incarnation, The Second Doctor and, well, I’m not going to spell it out here but it did become fairly obvious at a certain point in the proceedings.

However, it’s a pretty good story with The Doctors coming face to face with a lady of glass who is part of The Testimony, a group of beings from the far future who record the memories and experiences of people just before their death and can become them. When The Doctor goes to a planet full of Kaleds it was, again, obvious that they were, of course, the Daleks but I have to say the identity of the person he was going to see actually did take me by surprise, for which I’m grateful. I just assumed it would be Davros but, instead, it was a character from very recent Doctor Who continuity from a couple of series ago, who made “its” debut in the episode Into The Dalek (reviewed here).

In Twice Upon A Time we get a nice conundrum about whether people are, in fact, the sum of their memories, the return (sorta) of Bill Potts and Nardole, a very atmospheric (and tear inducing) sequence set on a very specific night in World War One, a brief return by Clara Oswald (played by Jenna Louise Coleman) plus the restoration of The Doctor’s memories of what she looked like... and the whole episode is generally light on action and strong on ideas. Something which impressed me and which has been a key component of the show since it first started being broadcast 54 years ago. And I thought this was the story’s main strength.

There are a few intriguing issues within the episode though. For example, if the encapsulated memories of The Doctor could shatter the glass beings then... how come they already were able to show The First Doctor the memories of all the things he had become up to Capaldi's point in time? My best answer to that is his memories (and not even his ego) could not, or at some future point in time, did not... shatter them. Because they obviously already recorded him at some point in the future of this incarnation’s timeline, just before death. So that's a bit silly, to be honest.

Another intriguing and, potentially, quite annoying thing, is that the BBC look like they’ve destroyed the TARDIS at the end. Blimey... just like a woman driver, not 60 seconds into his first female incarnation and she’s crashed the TARDIS (thanks to my cousin for that comment). Of course, there’s no way they can let this happen, I think, without a) divesting themselves of a lot of fans of the show over the years and b) taking away from the basic essence of the show... being able to visit a different point in time and space every adventure. I’m pretty sure the iconic TARDIS will be back on our screens before long.

The worst thing about the episode was... Peter Capaldi’s protracted ‘death’ scene was a bit long winded, waffly and... I dunno... felt kinda clumsily written, truth be told. Still, his performance was never less than his best and he’s been a great Doctor whose time has, I believe, come too soon.

Two things I really liked about the show were...

The First Doctor’s blatant, inadvertent sexism and the other character’s reactions to it. When Capaldi kept highlighting to him that he couldn’t say things like that in the current PC environment (in not so many words) it was quite funny but when Pearl Mackie’s wonderful performance as Bill Potts kicked in and she took him on regarding that issue... well it made for some nice comedy moments.

The other great thing was.. hooray. We finally have a lady timelord in the shape of a new, female incarnation of The Doctor. It’s way too early to judge how our new favourite time lady Jodie Whittaker is going to do in the role but she was pretty good here and I hope I’m right in having a lot of faith in her from the outset. Of course, when I was 14 years old and the prospect of a lady Doctor was first discussed, around about 1982ish, I was mortified by even the vaguest suggestion of such a thing taking place but... times have changed and hopefully the male youngsters of today are more flexible and evolved in their thinking to be stuck with that kind of attitude in their heads. I think this is a really good move and will hopefully refresh the series a little.

And that’s my take on Capaldi’s last story... not the best he’s done but, certainly, one of the best and more than I had hoped for from writer Steven Moffat’s last crack at writing the character, for sure. Twice Upon A Time was a really "not bad at all" episode of the current version of the show and a nice treat for Christmas Day. Looking forward to seeing what Jodie brings to the table in the Autumn.

Doctor Who - The Pilot

Fore Play

Doctor Who - The Pilot
Airdate: 15th April 2017 BBC 1

Well this was a very strong start to the latest series of Britain’s most popular science fiction export (arguably more popular than Professor Quatermass, although I really don’t think it could exist without the good Professor clearing the path in the first place, so to speak). This episode introduces a new companion or, quite possibly, an old companion (yeah, alright, I’ll get to my silly speculation bits later) in the shape of lesbian character Bill Pott’s, played by the really very good Pearl Mackie, and also brings back the current ‘sort of’ companion Nardole, as played by Matt Lucas (who is also good... which shouldn’t surprise me but it does). This is the episode which had a preview scene released quite a while ago (over a year?) but I noticed there’s a heck of a lot less dialogue coming from Bill in the version of the scene as it was presented here so I can only assume that the character has undergone some ‘tweaks’ since she was first written in... well they’ve had a very long time between series’ to tinker with her, I guess.

So the episode starts off strongly for me, personally, because we have The Doctor, now seen to be a lecturer at Bristol University, explaining to students as to the nature of time. Time, he says, is an illusion created by seeing lots of static bits placed in such a way that the perception of them experienced one slice after another gives us a sense of a journey over ‘time’. This is nicely demonstrated with a moment which seems like it would better fit right in with Moffat’s other hit TV show, Sherlock, in that the film itself (although we’re really watching digital, right?) is sliced up before us as a metaphor for the explanation of the true nature of time. I’ve been telling people they’ve been looking at time all wrong for years... as a fluid rather than a static state accessed in a specific way we are mostly cursed with looking at it... it doesn’t exist. So it’s good that the universe’s premiere timelord has finally gone on record as saying this.

Okay, so we have a really good opener because it does what Doctor Who does best... gives us a mystery to work on. In this case there’s more than one because we have the introduction of Bill and the mysteries surrounding her and The Doctor’s mysterious ‘secret vault’... and we also have the writer running through the wet paint very fast to distract us with the mystery which gives the story its name. That of The Pilot... who appears as a manifestation of a permanent puddle which can chase you through time from one end of the galaxy to another and reflect your image back as a feedback the right way around, rather than a true reflection. This in itself is good stuff and this underlying plot, which I won’t detail here, helps explore the sexual diversity of the new companion and does it in a romantic way, full of wonder. So that’s all good then.

We also have another encounter with the Daleks which, fortunately, is only a minor appearance and doesn’t hook in with the main plot. There’s one of a few nice little nods to the history of the show which are found in this episode here in that the Movellans are seen with them. I couldn’t believe it because the last and, I suspect, only other time we saw them was in the Tom Baker serial Destiny Of The Daleks back in 1979. My joy was slightly tempered by the fact that the Daleks we see with them are a more updated design than they were when the Movellans were around but... oh, well... that BBC budget thing is getting in the way of authenticity, I suspect.

Another nice and, I suspect, ‘more important than they’re letting on’ reference came up in the scene where The Doctor was persuaded not to use a memory wipe on Bill. The implication of him falling victim of the very same thing in the last episode to feature Jenna Coleman as the deal breaker here was beautifully re-enforced by composer Murray Gold using his old companion Clara’s theme to support those moments... lovely stuff.

But there’s more than one mystery her to solve and, as is usual for the rebooted Doctor Who stories since the time of Christopher Eccleston’s reincarnation of the character, there’s an underlying puzzle thread to be solved which will obviously be an arc for the entire series. We know that Peter Capaldi will be leaving soon, allegedly during the Christmas special but, I suspect, the transformation may be a little sooner than that... after all the Mondas cybermen who are returning for the last two episodes of the series and who haven’t been seen in the show since 1966 saw the death of the William Hartnell incarnation of the character (who I suspect Bill is named after by the writer, in an affectionate tribute) and it would be a nice, fearful symmetry if they were to cause the death/regeneration of the latest incarnation too. But this is not the real mystery and nor, I suspect, is the vault which The Doctor is apparently guarding. He would know better than to have something precious locked up, surely? He’d hide it in plain sight I would have thought. It could be a TARDIS or a nursery even but, I suspect, something timelordy (especially if The Master is making a return) and so I think it’s about time I went into the ‘wild speculation’ section of this review. So I apologise if all this turns out to be silly...

We are used, over the last ten years or so, to seeing references to the previous episodes of the show and they are usually very brief, blink and you’ll miss them, shout outs. However, we have here a Doctor who has a picture of his 'late' wife River Song on his desk at the University along with a photo of his Grandaghter Susan Foreman, as seen in the first year or so of the original series. She was played by Carol Ann Ford and she left the show in the 1964 story The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, which I reviewed towards the end of last year here. And The Doctor keeps coming back to these photos throughout the episode rather than just have this as a throwaway shout out so... the writer wants us to notice something here.

Now I have several theories on the subject but this is my pet one at the moment. I’m betting on something similar to this but, please remember, I’m only one episode in so the pieces of the puzzle might not all have been revealed as yet...

What’s missing from this set of photos? We have The Doctor’s wife and The Doctor’s granddaughter... no Doctor’s son or daughter... whichever that was. That element is decidedly missing. We also have a new companion called Bill who The Doctor has suddenly taken an interest in and whose mother died when she was born. When she is now given some photos of her mother before she died, she spots the reflection of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor in a mirror taking the photo in one of them. And then she, and we, are all promptly asked to forget about it as the ‘puddle story’ takes up the heat for most of the rest of the episode...

However, if we don’t let ourselves get distracted we have the idea that we have The Doctor who knew Bill’s mum before she died and the idea of memory wipes represented. So my number one theory at the moment is that Bill’s mum was The Doctor’s daughter and, since Pearl Mackie doesn’t seem to be expecting to be staying around past this current series, I’m guessing her mind will be wiped a little and that she is The Doctor’s granddaughter and, when she regenerates into the familiar Susan Foreman incarnation of the character through televisual trickery at the end of the show, she will be left with an earlier incarnation of The Doctor (aka William Hartnell) and he will take her to Coal Hill School, sometime shortly before the very first Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child, takes place.

Well, that’s my most favourite conclusion at the moment, anyway. Although, if that really does prove to be the case, then the LGBT community will want Moffat’s head on a stick for having a lesbian character who regenerates into a character who runs off with a man at some point. So maybe not. But I like the idea that the new companion ‘may’ be Susan or, at the very least, in some way related to her so... lets see if she’s revealed to be in possession of two hearts anytime soon, eh?

And that’s that for me. Great opener and I can only hope the show continues at this quality. I guess I’ll find out next week.

Sherlock 4.1 - The Six Thatchers

Catching Mary Hell

Sherlock 4.1 - The Six Thatchers
UK Airdate: 1st January 2017 BBC 1

Warning: A big spoiler for this episode and a possible speculative spoiler for the third episode being broadcast in a couple of weeks. All this will be clearly marked in the text.

Okay, so we’re finally on what is being touted as the possible last series of the BBC programme Sherlock. I’ve been kind of a fan since the first episode although my level of enjoyment has been really hit and miss, to be honest. Usually, the easier I see the solution to the episode, the less I’m likely to enjoy it... although there have been some fairly interesting stylistic choices, coupled with some good dialogue writing, throughout the programme's run.

The latest episode is now, as I’m being continually reminded on Twitter and elsewhere by an audience who seem to be fast running out of patience with the last series, more of a soap opera rather than stand alone cases but, honestly, that’s part of the appeal for me. I always tend to value character development and progression above the content of a story so this show is absolutely doing something right for me... otherwise I would have stopped watching sometime in the first series, I suspect.

This episode is all about the perceptions of events, if I’m right about certain things...

For instance, we have John Watson being lured by a honey trap and there’s a certain feeling that the progression of what may or may not have happened between him and another, as yet unknown, character is somehow involved in a bigger end game than it first appears. In fact, the episode starts off with Sherlock Holmes being called to get rid of Moriarty and being asked what he will do about the very real ‘threat from beyond the grave’ of his regular nemesis. When he says that Moriarty is dead, I think he is right to a point but I suspect there’s a bigger end game which is ‘afoot’ here.

The episode was a rich in entertainment, if not quite as enthralling as I’d hoped, hotchpotch of absolutely top rate performances of all the usual suspects - Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Amanda Abbington (as Mary Watson, my favourite one in the show), Rupert Graves, Una Stubbs and Louise Brealey as Molly Hooper, who I’ll mention speculatively in my possible spoiler section. And, of course, we have Mark Gatiss playing Mycroft wonderfully and he also wrote this episode, with his usual display of good taste and furious pacing.

Okay, so all the red text below contains the big spoiler for the episode and also contains possible spoilers for the conclusion of the series...

When, a few weeks ago, Martin Freeman announces that he and Amanda Abbington had called off their long standing relationship I was somewhat disappointed (purely, I guess, because their on screen relationship is easily mistaken for their off screen one to casual viewers like myself and they make such a nice couple). It also signalled to me that there was a strong possibility that the Mary Watson character would be written out at some point in the near future and, as it happens, that’s what seems to have happened in last night’s episode. She knocks Sherlock aside and takes a bullet in the heart that was meant for him. And I was upset about this because a) I thought they’d wait until the final episode of the series to do this and b) I really love the character so much. However, after waking in the middle of the night where my brain must have been clearly occupied with this problem, I’m now beginning to think I was right... they might be waiting until the final episode to kill her off, or maybe not kill her off at all.

That is to say, and it may be very wrong and wishful thinking to say this, that I think there’s a strong possibility that Mary’s death could have been staged to help convince the real enemy that Holmes and Watson are no longer working together and then, in some way, get the villain of the piece to overplay their hand. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a character in the show has had their death faked. I might be wrong but... I don’t think we’re quite done with Mary Watson yet, to be honest.

I know it’s a wild theory and I kinda hope I’m wrong about it so my respect for Moffat and Gatiss goes up but... I think that the death was faked for reasons pertaining to a ‘long game’ Holmes is playing against Moriarty. And when I say Moriarty, I mean the person who created Moriarty in the first place. Now Molly was one of many at the big showdown and saw Mary Watson die. She’s even helping Watson with their daughter. However... isn’t she the first person we saw in Series One with Moriarty? Is she, and this sounds a little ludicrous as I type it but it’s just my fan theory so give me the benefit... but is there a chance the murder of Mary was staged specifically for her to witness and she could be, in fact, Holmes nemesis. After all, Moriarty’s ‘ghost in the machine’ seems to realise Holmes is still alive and Molly was the one who helped Holmes fake his own death at the end of Series Two. So maybe she is the mind behind the whole game, as it were? I don’t know and I’m probably going to be proven wrong about all this but at least I’m writing it here in this blog so, if it is just wild fiction on my part, you can all see me getting it wrong in public. Hopefully, if I am wrong, you won’t stop reading my reviews because of it. ;-)

End of spoilers...

And so that’s that for the latest Sherlock. We shall see where we are after next week’s episode, which I expect may be a ‘mostly’ stand alone story. I’m looking forward to it because it’s got Toby Jones in it and I think he’s a terrific actor. And I’ll try and get the review of that one up either on the Monday or, more likely, the Tuesday after it airs. So hope to see you here again in a week or so.

And for anyone playing this year’s cryptic movie quiz... I hope to get the results up either tomorrow or the day after. Hope you enjoyed playing.

Doctor Who - The Return of Doctor Mysterio

Whoperman Returns

Doctor Who -
The Return of Doctor Mysterio
Airdate: 25th December 2016
BBC 1

Well this is interesting.

Despite defending the odd preview and trailer for this episode a few weeks back... I seemed to be the only person I knew comfortable the idea of a superhero in Doctor Who (which is not unprecedented... remember the Patrick Troughton story The Mind Robber?). Everybody I know, pretty much, who ventured an opinion on the potential of this story said it was a rubbish idea. And, now the episode has actually aired, I’ve seen a few people on the internet so far, I’m sure there will be more, who thought the episode one of the worst Doctor Who stories ever.

And what’s even more interesting than that... to me at least... is not the fact that, once again, I seem destined to be in a minority. I’m well used to that. What’s interesting is that the episode, for me and, as it happens, for all the family members I watched it with, is one of the best in recent memory. Even topping the 2015 series in which, I think, Peter Capaldi and the team writing for him really came into their own and cracked the formula for his Doctor, after a fairly shaky start.

I’d like to highlight some of the bad things to be found in this episode but, honestly, I couldn’t think of any. It was all pitch perfect. I prefer show runner Stephen Moffat as a writer rather than head honcho, as my history of Doctor Who reviews over the last six years shows.... but when he manages to pull things off right he really does some wonderful work. This story was almost as good as his Doctor Who masterpiece story Blink and here’s why...

We all knew from the marketing that this show had a superhero bent to the plot and, low and behold, it starts off with the camera panning and entering the panel of a comic book. And, what do you know... the colour schemes in this episode are all very simplistic and beautifully reminiscent of the kind of four colour concoctions loved by all admirers of the form, whether they be kids or... you know... 48 year old, bigger kids like myself.

And the performances in this one are all brilliant. Just going to quickly shout that out here and say that the leads other than Capaldi (but obviously including him), especially Justin Chatwin as Ghost and his mild mannered alter ego... the appropriately alliterative Grant Gordon... Charity Wakefield as Lucy Fletcher (the Lois Lane to Grant’s Clark Kent) and Matt Lucas as Nardole... his head restored to his body after last year’s Christmas special The Husbands of River Song (reviewed here), did a lovely job. They were all great but, no surprises here, it’s the dialogue and story structure that wins out in this one.

We start off with The Doctor befriending and accidentally creating the superhero character featuring in this episode and, at the same time, we also find out right from the outset that the superhero of the title, Doctor Mysterio, is in fact, The Doctor. Something which I’m sure we’d all figured out when the title of the episode was first revealed a month or two ago but, you know, there’s always room for error on second guessing what Moffat is going to do with the story line.

From here we get a wonderful narrative which crosscuts between the current plot of an invasion of living brains scooping out human brains before replacing them with themselves and The Doctor visiting Grant at various stages of his life as the realisation dawns that he has been accidentally ‘gifted’ with his superpowers for the rest of his life. Everything is perfect and there are some wonderful reveals here alongside a truly super satire on the way comic books are written and the way the clichés of the format can be celebrated while still being used to help support the very DNA of the writing which is doing so.

There’s some great stuff near the start with The Doctor talking to the young boy version of Grant about Superman and Spiderman that had me almost laughing out loud. And, of course, throughout the show, which also took some great moments from the 1978 Richard Donner movie Superman The Movie as a template before gently playing with them, we have the eternal problem of the absolute travesty of Superman’s biggest disguise, a pair of glasses, being highlighted and then used as a running gag throughout the story. This was great stuff and not subtly done... if it had been more subtle then it probably wouldn’t have been quite so entertaining, to be honest.

We also had another shining score from composer Murray Gold and, all I can say about his wonderful music in this is... isn’t it about time Silva Screen records put out the soundtrack to the 2015 season already, so we can get another step closer to owning the score to this one? Surely it must be time by now?

There’s not really much else I can say about this one. Like I said before, if I could find something to complain about I would but... it was just so entertaining. Something I didn’t expect to be writing today. It even had a very melancholic passage where we realise that the Peter Capaldi version of The Doctor’s timeline has now gone past the point that we first met River. That is to say, he’s now definitely sent River Song back to die, when she personally met The Doctor for the last time (but The Doctor’s first time), in the library in the David Tennant era story in which Moffat first introduced her character. It’s a bitter sweet moment of realisation and both Capaldi and, surprisingly, Lucas, play this really well. Although, I still remember River’s ‘post-death’ words to Matt Smith in one of his last episodes so, you know... never say never.

And that’s that.

We had a trailer for the next series which, in all honesty, didn’t exactly grab me but I’m certainly looking forward to this starting sometime next year. Until then... I may have some old episodes coming up for review sometime soon so, if you like Doctor Who, be sure to check out this blog as I revisit some of the older incarnations of The Doctor once again. And if you missed this one, be sure to catch up with it. It’s one of the best things that’s aired on TV this year.

Sherlock - The Abominable Bride

Data Fiction’s Fatal Diction

Sherlock - The Abominable Bride
UK Airdate: 1st January 2016
BBC 1

Warning: If you hadn’t already figured out certain things from the way this episode was marketed then there are some big spoilers right from the start of this review.

Okay... so this special episode of Sherlock, The Abominable Bride, is both a roaring success and a huge disappointment at the same time but I’m definitely happy to be able to say that because, truth be told, I thought it was just going to be a bit rubbish. So I’m glad that it turns out to be a well put together episode, despite it’s slight pretensions to supposedly setting Sherlock back where the series has never gone before... in the original times and places pertinent to the original character. Disappointed, however, because there weren’t any real surprises in this one and any suspicions you may have had about knowing exactly where it was going all pretty much come to pass by the end of the episode... and also into the next series, I suspect.

Being as I’m an avid Doctor Who watcher, I’ve learned to distrust Steven Moffat’s pre-publicity - often delivered via false words from the mouths of his actors when interviewed - intensely. The number of times I’ve heard something was going to happen on the show and then it’s been overturned and denied before, as it happens, it actually coming to pass just like it was planned to after all is... well, lets just say there’s no way I take anything coming out of one of his productions with anything other than several grains of salt.

Therefore, when the news hit that the new special episode of Sherlock would be set in the past, I failed to believe that was the whole story and, although the various photos coming from the set did seem to suggest that the episode would be taking place in Victorian London, I couldn’t really see that as being the end game of this one and I was pretty sure it was all going to be tied up with the actual running series, possibly even addressing the last season’s cliff hanger ending at some point in the narrative. So I kinda believed for a long time that the show would ‘actually’ be set in the present day, following on from the last episode, and I just hoped they didn’t do the reveal as... “Oh, this episode was all a dream.” Then, thinking about how they could possibly do it I figured out that probably the most plausible version would be to have the majority of the episode taking place in Holmes’ head... in his ‘mind palace’... but I similarly hoped that this wouldn’t be the case because, frankly, that pretty much amounts to the same thing as the ‘dream’ scenario in terms of cop out thinking.

Alas, right from the opening of the episode, before it even started, we are treated to a recap of the previous three series and from that point on I was pretty sure we were going to be tying up to the previous episode in some way. About 15 or 20 minutes in when Holmes starts talking about how ‘The Bride’ of the story could possibly survive a bullet to the brain was when it was completely confirmed... I was pretty sure the character was talking about Moriarty’s exit at the end of Series Two and it didn’t take too long before the bleed throughs from the ‘real world’ of the present day started playing out to that scenario. Which is  kind of a shame but I really can’t blame the episode’s writers, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss for taking that route. When the ‘original’ version of Mycroft Holmes, played as convincingly as ever (and more so) by Gatiss himself mentioned the term ‘virus in the data’, which the writers tried to cleverly conceal in a list of other euphemisms which were actually ‘of their time’, then it was all but spelled out for anyone noticing it. Unfortunately, I also believe that it also spells out where the next series is going to be going too, once it’s written and aired.

So, okay... that was the really bad stuff about the episode but, you know what, there’s some pretty great stuff too and the whole thing was nothing if not entertaining. The way Holmes’ mind plays with the past in a way which makes use of the critical deconstruction of the original Conan Doyle stories as published by The Strand magazine is really rather brilliant and I just loved Una Stubbs portrayal of Mrs. Hudson as she punishes her famous residents for Watson not giving her character any lines in the stories and, also, loved the suffragette angle to the episode... which seems to have been misconstrued as a bad thing from what I saw of Twitter last night but I can’t think why. Perhaps I didn’t understand that stuff properly... there was me thinking it was a positive support for feminism but... apparently no?

Actually, from what I saw of Twitter last night, this has been the one and only single handedly derided and badly received episode of the show to date and I really can’t think why that would be. Especially since, as I said at the start of this review, there really were no surprises in this one. Or maybe it’s the lack of the unexpected that people are complaining about?

Anyway, all I can add is my own support to the episode by saying that the performances of all in this were glorious and the general clever visual and audio syntax which has become synonymous with the style of the series is still very much in place. I was worried, actually, that this wouldn’t be the case because a shift back to the past is often mistaken by writers and directors as something which needs to be told in the language and style of that point in history but, luckily, the team behind the show once more got to have their cake and eat it by explaining away the dynamism of the storytelling by not, actually, setting it in the past. So it’s not intrusive unless, I guess, you really didn’t know what was going on but I suspect most of the viewers weren’t particularly surprised by this one, once they’d seen the necessity of having a recap at the start so... there you go.

Frankly, the main problem I have with this is, as Holmes concludes at the end of the episode, there’s no way Moriarty escaped death by his own hand. That means, therefore, the Moriarty which has saved Holmes from exile is, in fact, an electronic simulacrum or, as Mycroft so aptly names, a virus in the data. So the only real question as to the reappearance of the arch criminal of the series is... is this a 'legacy' virus or is it being controlled by a human being? If the latter, is it a new super villain or, is it indeed Mycroft resurrecting the appearance of Moriarty himself to help his little brother return credibly to the fold after the events of the last episode in Season Three? I don’t know when we’ll find that out but I’m guessing it’ll be a while because they seem rarely able to schedule the actors in a time slot together to shoot each series, it seems to me... even if a series is always only three episodes long.

But there you have it... some bad stuff but tastefully bundled into a sweet confection of an episode and with a lovely bit of scoring from the usual suspects David Arnold and Michael Price to boot. Disappointing, yes, but certainly tremendously entertaining and a heck of a lot better than I was expecting from it, I can tell you. Still looking forward to the next series when it comes... even if I do think I know pretty much all the answers in this case. Sometimes, the execution and professionalism with which the obvious is presented... can be enough.

Doctor Who - The Husbands Of River Song

River Deep, Mountain Who

Doctor Who - The Husbands Of River Song
UK Airdate: 25th December 2015
BBC 1

Warning: Minor spoilers in here, I guess.

Well this is probably going to be one of my shortest Doctor Who reviews ever. Not because it’s the Christmas holidays and I need to be getting on with other stuff... I mean... well I probably do but this blog is my retreat and it always gets top priority from me, so I’ll write for as long as I need.

Nope, the reason is because there’s nothing much to complain about, again, with this episode of the show. It’s a pretty solid episode and, unlike a few over the past few years (and last year's also had this quality to it), it’s a bit of a romp. That being said, there’s also nothing much outstanding in the content of the episode either so... you know... liked it a lot and there’s just not much to say about it.

But... you know... I do have a little bit to say about it. ;-)

Okay, so there is some good stuff here and, maybe, just one bad thing but only bad because I wasn’t fully understanding the implications of it, I guess. Now, I hope you all don’t consider this as a major spoiler but, if you’ve got this far on your Doctor Who watching this shouldn’t come as any surprise to you. River Song is The Doctor’s Wife. She is also the daughter of two of his most cherished companions but I won’t say who here just in case people are only jumping on now. The first time the Doctor meets her, in David Tennant form in Silence In The Library, she sacrifices her life in the second part of the story to save The Doctor. After that, The Doctor continues to meet her out of order in time and space, and sometimes quite backwards, as they forge a relationship... one she’s already lived out over the years she has known The Doctor in terms of his first encounter, in his future of the timeline as we currently follow it.

This episode, for River, is set fairly soon after she sees her parents whisked away by the Weeping Angels and Matt Smith’s incarnation loses his two companions forever in The Angels Take Manhattan (reviewed here), although it’s not the last time The Doctor saw her... I’ll get to that in a minute or two.

This is, as I said earlier, a romp with one of River’s husbands in this being a diamond, lodged as shrapnel in the head of a cybernetic dictator of a planet and, once said head has been ‘lifted’ from the owner (in full working and noisy order) it’s all about getting the head back (for the malevalently pursuing body) while exploring how The Doctor and River get on in terms of Peter Capaldi’s current incarnation personality. As it happens, since River knows that a Timelord can’t regenerate for more than twelve incarnations, she has no idea that this Capaldi version is The Doctor. Of course, she doesn’t know what we, the viewers know, that The Doctor has had ‘a thing’ happen at the end of his last regular Matt Smith episode which allows him to carry on regenerating so, when The Doctor gets roped into Professor Song’s current shenanigans, she really doesn’t know who he is and, despite The Doctor constantly trying to make her realise who he is, doesn’t find out until pretty near the end of the story. This, of course makes for lots of humorous shenanigans as The Doctor tries and fails to spell out the obvious while River takes him for an idiot who needs to have things explained to him and, also, confessing a lot of stuff she certainly wouldn’t have told The Doctor if she knew who he was.

The best of these scenes for me was the ‘first entry to the TARDIS’ scene which writer Moffat has been trying to get around being similar to every other time a new companion 'does it' in the last 50 plus years of the show. He’s taken a lot of side swipes at it in recent years but this is one of the best because it’s The Doctor having to pretend it’s his first time entering a TARDIS... and he hams it up with relish and does it just as he’d like to hear it done, with a lot of sarcasm and at great length. Capaldi performs it beautifully, the direction of the scene and the way the camera captures it is beautiful and, of course, the irony is completely lost on River... which gives it a little extra punch. Nice stuff and certainly the best bit of the episode I reckon.

There’s also the ‘almost bad thing’ which is the poignant, almost downer of the ending where we realise that this is ‘the last night’ that River and The Doctor are together before he sends her back with a sonic screwdriver to meet his younger self (where she dies)... the punchline to that being that, on the planet where they are, night last for over two decades. So they have plenty of time to fix some of the unfortunate revelations about River’s perception of The Doctor’s character, revealed as the episode continues on. Now I found this last scene a little bit of a downer but also confusing because... well... if you all can remember back to the Matt Smith episode, The Name Of The Doctor (reviewed here) you’ll also know that she’s also met him again ‘after’ her death. Something which isn’t explained after her personality was downloaded into the library via the sonic screwdriver The Doctor gave her (apparently in this very episode I’m reviewing now) but which certainly means, as far as I’m concerned, that she can come back anytime in the series. Of course, since Moffat has left Orson Pink completely dangling as a loose end, it certainly doesn’t mean River will return again but... well... River Song’s a popular character. We’d all love to see her back again as soon as possible, I imagine. Preferably with The Paternoster Gang in tow but... that’s another issue.

But that’s about it from me on this one. Not much to say. Enjoyed it. A nice dessert to what has been one of the best series of Doctor Who in quite some time so... yeah... The Husbands Of River Song is a nice little story in the continuing history of the show. Nothing more. Nothing less. And as for next year... we shall see what we shall see, I guess.

Doctor Who - Hell Bent

Hell-Who There

Doctor Who - Hell Bent
UK Airdate: 5th December 2015
BBC 1

Warning: Plenty of spoilers in here, I guess.

Okay... I’ll be honest, this wasn’t the kind of season finale I was hoping for from this current series of Doctor Who... but it’s the one I was expecting. It’s not a particularly weak episode though and it certainly managed to tie some (not all) of the various plot threads together. There are things I quite liked about it and other things I am a little perplexed about (yeah, okay, not perplexed... downright angry) but it’s a fair enough conclusion to what has, in all fairness, been one of the best seasons of Doctor Who we’ve have for a number of years now... so you won’t find me complaining too bitterly about this one.

There were two clever things here which both occurred fairly early on in the episode and returned later in the bookend scenes which really impressed me a little bit and which writer Steven Moffat, Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman and composer Murray Gold all had a hand in making magical moments of television. These elements had me ‘on the side’ of the episode and wanting it to succeed in spite of some of the complicated things I personally felt it needed to do... some of which it failed at.

The two things, as I said, all happen in the opening and closing bookends which are, by all appearances, set in the same diner in Nevada that Amy, Rory and River Song all visited when they saw The Doctor die in the 2011 story The Impossible Astronaut (reviewed here). The first thing is, when we see The Doctor go to see Clara and tell her ‘their story’ of their (possible) final events together, at least in this episode... we, the audience (or at least, me the audience, at any rate... well done if you weren’t taken in), assume that The Doctor has the advantage over Clara who doesn’t seem to remember who she is. And what’s brilliant here is not the fact that there has been a reversal of the memory wipe thing that The Doctor himself did to Catherine Tate’s character Donna Noble at the end of their season together in the David Tennant era of the show (although it seems to work somewhat differently)... that’s kind of a rubbishy cop out, to be honest...

No, the clever thing about this scene, and it comes down as much to Peter and Jenna’s performances as it does to the writing, is that the rug is pulled out from under us in the end of show bookends, where we realise that it’s Clara acting dumb for the benefit of The Doctor who can’t remember who she is... and not the other way around. Clara has the advantage and, what’s more, runs off with Ahsilda (or ‘Me’ as she likes to be called now) to have her own adventures in time and space in the moments before her final heart beats before she dies... so she both dies and lives on and, if the writers ever wanted to do this, could be reintroduced into the show for guest appearances if required. There’s also a nice symmetry to this when it’s revealed that she’s stolen an old TARDIS which has its chameleon circuit stuck, perpetually now, in the shape of an American diner... just like The Doctor originally stole his TARDIS and has it stuck in the shape of an old London Police Box from a time the show itself, outlived long ago. Nice.

The second clever thing in this is a metatextual reference in that The Doctor plays a tune for Clara in the diner at the start and I jumped up in my seat when this happened and exclaimed to the people who I was watching it with... he’s playing Clara’s Theme. Oh yeah... nice breaking of the fourth wall moment here where Murray Gold’s leitmotif for the show is actually introduced into the show itself, transforming itself at the last bookend, when The Doctor names it Clara’s song, from a strictly non-diegetic musical motif into a piece of diegetic source. I really applaud this move and although most people watching the show might not realise the tune is a Murray Gold composition, which he introduced with the introduction of Clara into the show a few years ago, it’s a nice little credit to him and a bit of a thank you from Moffat, I reckon. Good stuff.

Okay, so bad stuff was the fact that the reintroduction of Clara (as we all knew was going to happen, right?) still doesn’t cover how she could get pregnant with the child of the now dead Danny Pink and have Orson Pink as a “time travelling runs in our family” character she meets earlier in the show... if she didn’t meet him then that stuff never happened and she didn’t arrive in this point in time, right? So that’s a big ‘temporal logic’ continuity  problem as far as I’m concerned. Honestly, it’s like watching Back To The Future Part 2 all over again.

The other bad thing is, no matter how much you have a moody, spaghetti Western styled post credits section set by the barn The Doctor grew up in... which featured in that very episode where we met Orson Pink, as it happens (and reviewed here)... and which also played a big part in the 50th anniversary special The Day Of The Doctor (reviewed here), it doesn’t hide the fact that the events of The Day Of The Doctor showed the thirteen incarnations of The Doctor (including Capaldi) hiding Gallifrey in a frozen moment in time... not somewhere at the end of time, which frankly makes no sense. And, as it happens, we still haven’t seen Capaldi play his part in that episode either, only from the point of view of his cameo debut guest appearance in that particular episode. So... I’d really like to know when this was supposed to happen please? Because it’s not holding a lot of water now, to be honest.

Okay, so apart from those two ‘dropped the ball’ ideas as I see them (Clara’s mishandled resurrection and the seemingly random return of Gallifrey) then the episode was pretty good, Notice it kept mentioning ‘the matrix’ which we first, in my memory, came across properly in The Deadly Assassin, which I keep citing as my best guess at Moffat’s inspiration for this current series... so that was kind of satisfying for me. Of course, it kinda goes hand in hand with Gallifrey lore but, you know, I reckon I saw that coming. Also, it was really nice to see the old TARDIS control room again after so many decades. That was cool.

The other thing that paid off for me, in a way, was the fact that I was correct in thinking that Moffat was just ‘winding up the fans’ with the introduction of the ‘sonic sunglasses’. Now, I realised the other week that any future incarnation of The Doctor would have to go back to using the sonic screwdriver because it’s what he gives to River Song before she dies while meeting The Doctor for the very first time (from his point of view, not hers). So it comes as no surprise now that The Doctor has a new sonic screwdriver and the cynic in me says that the new design of it will be in all good toy shops ready for next year’s television adventures. So, yeah, saw that one coming too.

But, all in all, I really didn’t mind this as an ending to what has been a much more ‘on track’ series of the show and, it has to be said, I do hope we’ll be seeing both Clara and Ashilda back in the show before long. Meanwhile, I’m really looking forward to seeing the Christmas Day special this year, The Husbands Of River Song, so you can expect me to have some kind of response to that here on either Boxing Day or the day after, depending on when I can actually get to see it over the Christmas period. No details of the next series yet but... I’m sure those will be pending. And please, in the meantime, come back here and check out some of my other reviews and upcoming articles... there’s some interesting stuff coming up, I reckon... plus some more old school Doctor Who reviews too including, I’m sure, a look back at The Deadly Assassin at some point next year.

Doctor Who - The Woman Who Lived

Stand and Delivery Charge

Doctor Who - The Woman Who Lived
UK Airdate: 24th October 2015
BBC 1

Okay, so this was pretty good but... I’m guessing it might not be a crowd pleaser. Not for the younger audience because there’s not really much in the way of action in this one... just sparklingly well written dialogue. And I suspect the very dark tone of this, while ideal for a viewer like me, to some degree, will probably put off some people... but time will tell on that one.

As for me... I thought this follow up episode, The Woman Who Lived, was absolutely marvellous and explored the anxieties and consequences, touched on by The Doctor when he brought The Girl Who Died back to life, in an absolutely beautiful manner. It gets very dark but not quite as dark as it could have got and the avenues it explores and the end game of the episode actually did surprise me to a certain extent. Which is good because I was sure it wasn’t an option the writers would even consider being on the table for this and, although it might seem a bit hum drum and a bit of a quick fix solution... I think it was handled, both in the writing and the performance, in as eloquent a way as possible.

The episode wisely ditched Clara for almost the entire running time, to give the relationship between The Doctor and the titular character, Ashildr, to play out in as much time as was needed to explore the themes and throw in the odd comic sequence for light relief. The episode also delivered just the right touch with Clara too because the longevity of The Doctor’s companions and the way in which they are left behind is something which is again thrown up as an element which we can now see in a different light... after a conversation which happens towards the end of this episode. Clara unwittingly brings closure to the conversation, even though she has no way of knowing what she’s doing and it makes for a really touching conclusion to the story.

I have to give a big shout out to Maisie Williams as Ashildr. She was pretty good last week but this week, playing someone who had been made bitter and numb to life due to the passage of, and emotional ravages of, time... well she was just astonishing. Given that the episode only lasted 45 minutes, she managed to convey all the bitterness and dissilusion turned into a more cavalier way of looking at life in a kind of shorthand way that was totally effective and I was so impressed by the depth of her exploration. She, like Jenna Coleman is able to do regularly, kept up with Peter Capaldi, who is frankly brillliant, and gave him a run for his money on screen. What a treat to see amazing writing performed so well on a weekly basis. We’re halfway through the series now (they chopped it down by yet another episode this year and are counting the Christmas special as this year’s thriteenth episode) and I have to concur that somehow the writers and show runner Steven Moffat have really been able to turn the show around. This is quality stuff here... but I’m still cynical enough to expect the inevitable fail at some point soon. Hope not but... yeah, I’m a little jaded myself.

Congratulations too, should go to Rufus Hound, who only had a few scenes to make me care enough about him as a character that the final end game solution of the storyline here finally looked like it was obviously the inevitable choice to take. I won’t spoil it here by saying what that was but... although, as I said, a bit of a hum drum option to stear the plot threads too, Hound’s performance as highwayman Sam Swift was one which stood up and delivered a means to at least make that final choice by the titular character an acceptable one. So that helps a lot.

There were some nice references to The Doctor’s past adventures here too, with a conversation including the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London implicitly naming the Terrileptils as the creatures who started the fire in Pudding Lane... as seen in the Peter Davison era story from the 1980’s, The Visitation. Captain Jack Harkness also gets a big shout out... which I’m sure a lot of people will be happy about. Of course, the sonic sunglasses also made a most unwelcome return... so there was something really bad about the episode. Maybe we can get that fixed somehow though? I understand there’s an on-line petition. Is Moffat just teasing us with this thing or does he mean to keep the sunglasses in? This really isn’t a good idea.

One last thing... Murray Gold’s score was absolutely brilliant... asides from a little ‘comedy romp’ music in a break-in scene perhaps. Truly beautiful with some nice, haunting piano work for a scene with Ashildr at the end and a nice little, light touch rendition of Clara’s theme too, all helped the episode weave its magical spell. Another short review but in terms of incident, the episode was fairly simplistic and the locations were not all that many... plus I really don’t have anything to complain about again so... sorry if you’re feeling short changed on the size of this one but I don’t have much else to say about this, other than it’s another one of the stronger episodes of the last five years. Looking forward to next week and seeing if that episode is set before or after one of the semi-regular characters was killed off at the end of last year and, also, whether this will lead on to The Doctor rediscovering Gallifrey or not. Time will tell so... another Doctor Who review next weekend, methinks.

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: Last Christmas

Frosty, The Snow Man

Doctor Who: Last Christmas
UK Airdate: 25th December 2014
BBC 1

Warning: Some spoilerage, I guess... although it was an extremely predictable episode, so I don’t see how I could really spoil it too much.

This is apparently the tenth Christmas Special since Doctor Who returned to our screens in 2005. Now, it has to be said, no matter how good or bad a particular series of the show is, the Christmas specials are usually pretty good... the exceptions being, for me, the last of the David Tennant Christmas transmissions (and his New Year’s Eve one which finished that particular story and brought his reign as The Doctor to a close) and last year’s The Time Of The Doctor (reviewed here).

So, yeah, unfortunately they can’t all be good but, I’d have to say, this years festive offering wasn’t nearly as bad as those two, although it would probably be third from the bottom on my personal list of Doctor Who yuletide treats. In all honesty, last night’s story (which I’ve only just seen an hour or so ago before I started writing this) was not a terrible Doctor Who episode. Alas, it also didn’t tick many of the right boxes either and was maybe a bit more miss than it was hit, for a lot of reasons.

There was, however, some pretty good stuff in the episode in terms of the special effects... which really did kinda hold up this time around. Which was a bit of a surprise because the creature effects and flying sequences (involving Santa’s sleigh pulled by reindeer) were quite ambitious but, even so, the special effects team managed to pull it off. More importantly, the performances by all the actors in this one, including Nick Frost as Santa Claus, were pretty amazing and they had some good dialogue to burn through as they got on with this rather energetic but, ultimately, pointless story.

Now, to take that further, one of my problems with the Capaldi stories so far is that he’s had some absolutely cracking dialogue to work with, as he and his fellow performers have in this one, but the stories have been mostly weak and predictable at best. Alas, I think Last Christmas just goes to support that view of things because, although the situations the main characters find themselves in are quite justified via the story in their derivation from other, more famous, science fiction phenomenon... the whole basic plot concept is one that you’ve seen done a gazillion and one times before, even on Doctor Who. That is to say...

It’s the old “dream within a dream” plot and when the cutaway to the first rescue by Santa comes, when our hero and his new companions find themselves in extreme danger, it’s pretty obvious by that point what’s really going on. The editing doesn’t lie to us about this... it just tries to blind you with it’s speed when you hopefully don’t notice that the shots didn’t match (which I have to say... I did). To further compound the folly of this course of action, writer Steven Moffat then deliberately tries to misdirect the audience by showing us an all to obvious fabrication of reality (using Danny Pink, of course, lest we forget... and I won’t, I’ll get to him later). The idea being that if we latch onto something which is obviously a fake, it will trick us into thinking the external frame of that literary device is a fake too but, alas, this one wasn’t skillfully enough written (or possibly it was and it was just badly directed or edited... not sure which, if any) to fool pretty much anyone and, by the end of the day, I was wondering why Moffat kept going with this stuff because, frankly, the whole Russian dolls plot within a plot felt like a bit of a waste of time.

The correct response to all this, I guess, is that this episode is supposed to be a festive piece of fluff and I guess, in some ways, if that’s what you choose to do with your Christmas special then that’s your look out. I did feel, though, that the episode was blindingly obvious and that Peter Capaldi (not to mention Jenna Coleman), deserved better than this. The only thing it does is to reunite The Doctor and Clara as main protagonist and companion again, as a quick fix for the appalling end to the last series which, if you think about it, had already begun this particular plot when Santa Claus arrived on the TARDIS.

Unfortunately, while this was all very nice and non-offensive and “safe”, I was a little annoyed that it didn’t, in any way shape or form, try to address the main elephant in the room of the previous series... Danny Pink. Basically, the time line on which The Doctor and Clara are currently travelling is such that they have both met the great, great, however many generations back, grandson of Danny Pink and Clara... since Clara isn’t pregnant with Danny’s child as yet, this still needs to happen. So either Danny Pink has to return, quite spectacularly I should say, from the dead or... and this one wouldn’t surprise me either, to be honest... Steven Moffat has left another big clunker of a plot hole which he can’t go back and resolve in a way that makes any sense within the universe of The Doctor.

And that’s really all I have to say about this particular episode, except to maybe mention that Murray Gold knocked it out of the universe again with a suitably appropriate and exciting orchestral accompaniament to the episode. However, while I kinda enjoyed this installment to a certain degree, I guess, this is really not a very good Doctor Who Christmas Special I’m afraid. For me, The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe (reviewed here) is still the greatest of the show’s Christmas themed episodes, for my money. This one is enjoyable enough, if you take it for what it is, but approach with caution because it’s a little like a rerun, in some ways, of the early Matt Smith episode Amy’s Choice (reviewed here) and, since the main “culprit” in that story served a similar function to the “dream crabs” in this episode, I’m surprised the writer didn’t just put Toby Jones' character back into the story. So don’t expect too much from this one, I’m afraid.