The Parting of the Ways: Saying Goodbye (For Now) to Doctor Who

January 20, 2020 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

This is an odd sentence to write:
I’m not watching new episodes of Doctor Who anymore.

There aren’t any other shows that I’ve been watching my entire life. Some of my earliest memories are very fractured fragments of watching the night sequences in ‘Image of the Fendahl’ and thinking “Spooky!”, which was somewhere around 1977-78, when I was three. Doctor Who has almost always been there for me – even in the 1989-2005 Wilderness years, when it wasn’t on TV. It’s had more of an effect on my imagination (and my desire to get stories out of my head onto paper) than anything else I can think of.

So getting to a point where I’m saying “Nope – that’s it for me…” is somewhat unprecedented.

But not entirely. One thing I was taught by my slightly nonplussed initial reaction to Doctor Who’s return in 2005 (I instinctively still want to call it ’New Who’ despite the fact that a show that’s been around for 15 years doesn’t qualify as new anymore) is that I don’t unreservedly love all of Who. In fact, in terms of quality roller-coasters and jumps between episodes I love and episodes I’ll happily never watch again, there are few shows as variable as Who, simply because of (a) its wildly shifting, experimental approach to what genre the show is, and (b) the fact that it’s being astonishingly ambitious on what is, even now, not a massively high budget.

I can’t think of a single season of Who that doesn’t feature one story I’d rank as at least a disappointment or a slight misfire, if not an outright mess. (Even the legendary ‘Gothic Horror’ era of producer Philip Hinchcliffe wasn’t immune to ups and downs). And of course, there’s also the fact that because of this wild variation in style and execution, every episode is someone’s favourite Doctor Who episode (except maybe ‘Fear Her’). There’s a very particular combination of storytelling flavours that I love, and that Who has sometimes been exceptionally good at – where the acting, the direction, the script and even the sound design all seems to click together, and suddenly what could have been absurd or ridiculous becomes gripping, thrilling and occasionally even profound.

And it’s not a combination I’m getting anymore.

There is also, of course, the problem that saying “I’m not watching Doctor Who anymore” at this point in history carries more weight and significance than it did, say, if you watched Sylvester McCoy’s first story back in 1987 and thought “This is rubbish, I’m out!” (For reference – ‘Time and the Rani’ is rubbish. Frequently entertaining and occasionally demented, but my goodness it’s a rough start for a new Doctor). With all the much-publicised online ‘rage’ about Jodie Whitaker’s casting as the Doctor, to the complaints about ’too much politics’ and ‘Who is too woke now’, it’s hard not to feel like I’m making a statement just by saying “Nope, I don’t want to watch this anymore.”

Honestly, it’s probably not a massive surprise that it came to this. Chris Chibnall’s appointment as showrunner was news I greeted with a hearty “Uh-oh…”, because having watched both seasons of Torchwood (aka, the seasons before it briefly became good with Children of Earth) and all his previous Who episodes, there was nothing there that made me remotely excited to see him taking the helm of the show. The previous Chibnall episode that I enjoyed the most was S3’s enthusiastic Alien/Sunshine rip-off ’42’, and I suspect much of that was down to fantastic direction from Who veteran Graeme Harper, and that it obviously got heavily rewritten by Russell T Davies. (He did this with virtually all the Who episodes he oversaw – apparently, aside from Steven Moffatt. There’s a bunch of details in RTD’s book The Writer’s Tale about the effect this had in terms of adding energy to an episode or scene.)

Chibnall was responsible for the Torchwood S1 episode ‘Cyberwoman’, which is genuinely one of the most misconceived and painful bits of Who-related media I have ever consumed. He was the man who thought a random, Godzilla-sized, pig-faced demon stalking the streets of Cardiff was a good season finale. And while Torchwood S2 was an improvement, and actually qualified as ‘watchable’, that was about as good as I could say for any Chibnall episode of Who. They’re watchable. They’re sometimes pretty good. There are some good ideas. Sometimes they hold together. Oftentimes they don’t. (S7’s The Power of Three is a good example – an episode that’s a collection of nice vignettes but which never becomes more than the sum of its parts.)

So, I went into S11 with very mixed feelings. And I watched it all. And after ‘Rosa’, which was an episode which I properly liked (while still having flaws), I waited for another example of an episode that clicked for me, and which felt like it was tapping into the flavour of Who that properly felt like Who. And I waited. And I waited.

It was around last year’s New Year special, ‘Resolution’ – in which a supposedly dramatic confrontation with a Dalek is resolved with the aid of a household microwave oven that one character just happens to be carrying around – that I started to suspect that the show had broken for me. And the opening two-parter, ’Spyfall’, proved it. I was so disheartened, so annoyed, and so generally dispirited by what I’d watched by the end of episode 2 that I finally reached the point where there just didn’t seem any point going on. (Especially since Chibnall’s big overall idea for this series seems to be “Hey, remember when the Doctor was a traumatised lonely outsider without a home? Why don’t we just do that again?”) There’s fandom, and then there’s watching something out of habit when you know there’s an almost 95% chance that you’re simply not going to enjoy it.

The specific reasons why I’m bowing out of Who for now are:

1: The storytelling. It’s just *so* sloppy. Who has always had a pretty loose attitude to logic, but most of the episodes of Chibnall’s era have fallen into the pattern of being a collection of interesting ideas with little to nothing holding them together. Even ‘It Takes You Away’, an episode which had some people declaring it the best in years, felt like three fifteen-minute shorts welded together at random. And Spyfall just took this to the maximum – I’m a Who fan, and I’d have difficulty explaining why almost *anything* in that story actually happened. (Like, why exactly did the villains need to store quite so much data? And what were they going to do when they ended up with a planet full of comatose bodies?) Added to which, the episodes mostly feel like they lack energy and punch, with a more muted approach to humour and characterisation that really makes me miss Moffat and RTD’s takes on the show – they could very often slip up, but at least they actually kept you wanting to watch.

2: The Doctor. I will happily admit that, as a four-decade fan of the show, there’s probably part of my brain that still rebels slightly at the idea of a female Doctor in a way that someone starting to watch the show now wouldn’t feel – but I really don’t have a problem with the idea of a female Doctor. Hell, the moment that Missy showed up, it was just inevitable that we would get a female Doctor. I just don’t like Jodie Whitaker as the Doctor.
It feels like a more extreme version of the issues I had with Chris Eccleston – I think he did a great job, but there were certain aspects of the character that he was better at than others, and the Ninth Doctor never felt like the Doctor to me in the way that Tennant as the Tenth eventually did (or like Matt Smith managed within about five minutes in ‘The Eleventh Hour’). It very often felt like someone trying really, *really* hard to be offbeat and strange (whereas someone like Tom Baker managed to make the Doctor’s strangeness feel utterly effortless), and that’s my main problem with the Thirteenth Doctor. It doesn’t really feel like there’s any connective tissue between, say, the Capaldi and the Whitaker version – to me, Thirteen feels like an over-enthusiastic children’s TV presenter who really wants everyone to know how quirky she is. I don’t begrudge anyone who likes her as the Doctor, but she isn’t someone who I’d want to go travelling through Time and Space with.

3: The companions. By the end of Spyfall, I’ve watched fourteen episodes with the current TARDIS team, and I still don’t know them that well. There’s a reason why the show mostly stuck with a Doctor/single companion setup over the years, because the more characters, the more you have to find things for people to do. There have been a handful of nicely played moments with Bradley Walsh as Graham (at least, up until that utterly unfunny ‘Laser Shoes’ scene in ‘Spyfall’), but with Yaz and Ryan I still don’t feel like I know them beyond the kind of details that would fill two sentences on Wikipedia. Plus, the show seems to have backed off from the idea of the companion as a co-lead – instead, they’ve been used in a very early-1980s style purely as audience surrogates and people whose job is to ask “What’s going on, Doctor?” and quietly listen as the Doctor abruptly remembers another massive chunk of exposition in order to paper over the cracks in the plot. Trimming the cast down just by one would immediately give the remaining cast more screen time, and probably benefit the show immensely – but they seem to be committed to the whole ‘TARDIS team as family’ thing, so, like most of the aspects of the show I don’t care for, they don’t seem to be going anywhere in a hurry.

(And as a sub-note: I don’t have a major problem with the more ‘educational’ bent of some of the stories, just in the way that they’ve been weighted in the overall tone of the show. Like I said – I liked ‘Rosa’, and I thought it took on the potentially tricky subject of racism and prejudice really well, in a way Doctor Who had never managed before. I just wasn’t expecting them to then do another heartfelt exploration of historical prejudice two weeks later (‘Demons of the Punjab’), and then follow that up with yet another one two weeks after that (’The Witchfinders’, which admittedly was far more Trad Who at the same time). It honestly did feel like a bit much, especially in a show that usually prides itself on shifting gears and genres every episode. Plus, it’s also worth remembering that yes, Doctor Who did start life as a semi-educational show (especially in its pure historical stories), but that side of the show was phased out after 1966 because audiences were getting bored and not watching anymore. It doesn’t mean you can’t do that kind of story – just that it maybe needs to be more balanced than what they managed in S11).

So that’s why I’m politely backing away from Who for now. I’ve been close before – there was a lot of S2 of New Who that I didn’t like, and the one-two punch of ‘Love and Monsters’ and ‘Fear Her’, followed by the fun but *really* OTT climax of ‘Army of Ghosts’ and ‘Doomsday’ had me seriously wondering if my time with the show was over – but it’s not like this era is going to last forever. Doctor Who’s one constant is change – there was always likely to be a point where the show turned into something I really didn’t care for, and it isn’t like the episodes I love have gone anywhere.

Honestly, making this decision has been a bit of a weight off my mind – especially as two episodes have already aired since I made the decision and I feel no need to watch them. With Chibnall at the helm of the show, there’s the possibility that this ‘pause for reflection’ might last quite a while – at least for the rest of Jodie Whitaker’s run, most likely. It’s certainly going to take a lot to persuade me back (especially since almost all the mainstream reviews of ’Spyfall’ were bewilderingly positive). But there’s so much good and interesting TV out there, it’s not like there’s going to be a lack of things to watch. Plus, it’s making me want to write again, to channel my thoughts into getting something positive out into the world, rather than watching something which is 95% likely to just have me thinking negative.

The TARDIS can just go on without me for a while. I’m sure the show will cope without me. And I’m pretty sure that one day, something will call me back, and my adventures in Time and Space will continue.

Until then, Who will remain my favourite show that I don’t watch anymore. And hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, that will change.

DOCTOR WHO – S11 E03: ‘Rosa’ (Some thoughts…)

October 22, 2018 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

Here come some thoughts on this week’s episode. Fear the spoilers…

– Celebrity Historicals have been a standard of the show since RTD brought it back, but I really wasn’t expecting what we got here, which is the closest we’ve come to the kind of ‘pure’ historical story the show used to do back in its 1960s early days, when the educational remit was still a strong part of Who’s backbone. There might be a mild sci-fi ‘changing history’ element driving the plot, but the time period and the event in question are the major stars here, which is rare. (Big Finish have done a bunch of these kinds of Who stories on audio, but I really didn’t think we’d get anything like this in the actual show). Aiming at this kind of historical event is daring, and could easily have gone wrong, but they pulled it off.

– Once again, production values are way up here, aided by the South Africa shoot. Who has faked America in recent years, but it’s always been a bit rough around the edges (no matter how much they try, Spain just doesn’t quite look like the USA). Here, on the other hand, the environment and the period detail sells the illusion extremely well, and the sight of the TARDIS parked in a 1955 Alabama alley really does tap into that pulpy ‘anything is possible’ vibe that Doctor Who is so good at.

– I liked Jodie Whitaker more here than I did in the previous two episodes, and she seems more comfortable in the role – which is weird, because The Woman Who Fell To Earth was shot after this one. Maybe it’s the largely more serious tone of this episode, or maybe I’m just getting more used to her.

– Who has dabbled with racism in history before – most notably with Martha in Human Nature/The Family of Blood and Bill in Thin Ice – but this is a whole different order, and I’m impressed with how effectively they portrayed the time. Again, this could easily have tipped into cartoonish caricature, and while it sure ain’t subtle, it does a great job of showing exactly how pervasive the attitudes are. Racism is essentially the main bad guy in this episode, and it’s handled in a way that doesn’t sugar coat the times in the slightest (even making it clear that Ryan could easily end up getting himself lynched), and which also doesn’t pretend that everything was sorted out once Rosa makes her protest. Again, this is the amazing thing about Doctor Who – it can go from last week’s running around from robot snipers and evil bits of cloth to this, and it can make this kind of history accessible and enjoyable for kids who might not even know who Rosa Parks is.

– It’s also just as well that racism was such a pervasive and convincing threat, as the actual villain of the piece was another weak, two-dimensional thug who barely makes an impression. He works in theory – I can see why they went that route (especially building in the ‘unable to kill’ element so he can’t just assassinate Rosa) but in practice, he’s a hopeless and unthreatening character who doesn’t ever feel like he’s going to present that much of a problem. There’s very little tension that comes from his presence in the episode (some of which may be down to casting), and the fact that he vanishes in the same ‘We’ll probably be seeing him again’ manner as the villain in ep 1 does not fill me with confidence.

– Thanks to this problem, the actual nuts-and-bolts storytelling aspects of the episode aren’t as exciting as they could have been. Krascow isn’t like the weird invisible Chicken-monster in ‘Vincent and the Doctor’, a throwaway threat to drive what’s largely a character piece – he’s the main antagonist, and he’s so lacking in threat that the episode doesn’t always build a full sense of drama, especially with some of the more fiddly ‘we have to get the bus more crowded’ story engineering during the finale (and particularly since he’s defeated so easily.)

– And talking of Krascow’s defeat – considering the Doctor didn’t seem remotely annoyed at Ryan stealing the Time Displacer and firing Krascow into the past, why didn’t she just do it herself and save themselves the stress? (Plus, isn’t firing a vengeful racist time traveller at random into the past potentially a rather bad idea?)

– Another note – considering her experience in time travel, the Doctor takes a loooong time to work out that Krascow might be changing the future by trying to nudge history in the right direction.

– Vinette Robinson is really strong as Rosa Parks, and once again, Bradley Walsh is the TARDIS team MVP, especially in the climactic sequence on the bus.

– Also once again, we’re still not quite getting to know the companions much more than we did in episode 1. A crowded TARDIS has its advantages, and the characters do get a reasonable share of the action here, but it still feels like they’ve got a way to go before they find the right balance.

– On second look, the TARDIS redesign is looking unfortunately like an explosion in a New Age shop, especially in that final scene.

– As pointed out by @ianberriman on Twitter, this is also possibly the most Quantum Leap episode of Doctor Who ever.

– There’s points where the storytelling does get a bit heavy-handed (and boy, I could really have done without the reprise of the song over the end credits), but the episode gets an awful lot right, and is the first to give me a sense of confidence about where the show is heading (which, for an episode that’s co-written by Chris Chibnall, is saying something).

– And yet… while I admire a lot about what the show is doing, the determined steer away from the majority of the show’s crazier side is a little cause for concern. An episode like this needed to be mostly hard-hitting in order to work, but the three episodes of season 11 so far have consistently been the least goofy and weird Who has been since… well, possibly, since Eric Saward was script-editing back in the Eighties (although feel free to argue if you disagree). The lack of decent villains so far is a definite problem, and while ‘Rosa’ has given me confidence, Chibnall’s version of Who still has some way to go before I’m completely sold on it. Of course, in terms of goofy weirdness, next week’s ‘Return to Sheffield/Killer Spiders’ episode may or may not prove to be what I need…

DOCTOR WHO S11 E02: ‘The Ghost Monument’ (Some Thoughts, with Added Spoilers)

October 15, 2018 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

We have a new episode of Who – and I don’t have time to do a proper review, so instead this is going to be a bunch of semi-quick-fire thoughts (which still ended up longer than I expected because, well, it’s me talking about Doctor Who). I don’t have enough time to do proper reviews right now, but I do want to put my thoughts down somewhere, and this way I can be honest about the bits I didn’t like without sounding like a grouch raining on everyone’s parade. At least, in theory. Onwards – and fear the spoilers…

– A new title sequence! It’s very pretty, (and feels very reminiscent of the Troughton title sequence) but also a little lacking in the kind of propulsive forward motion I’ve gotten used to in recent Who title sequences. And just a teeny bit lava lamp, as well.

– This is possibly the most visually gorgeous and cinematic Who episode ever broadcast. The way they’ve upped the production values and the cinematography is very hard to deny. The whole episode felt very big, and very evocative (in the manner of the way I always imagined Hartnell-era stories when reading the Target novelisations), and they used the South African locations really well.

– Another Chris Chibnall episode that qualifies as ‘Not Bad’! A step up in terms of memorability and energy from the season opener – it’s also genuinely exciting in parts, but still more of a frequently derivative collection of ideas than a genuine story, and doesn’t really add up to anything more than a slightly half-hearted ‘we are stronger together’ theme.

– Art Malik as a mysterious overlord/criminal-type person. I wonder if we’ll be seeing him again? (I’m almost 100% sure we will be).

– Both Susan Lynch and Shaun Dooley do a lot with not much here, bringing stock characters to life and pulling off some effective moments.

– A well-executed spaceship crash sequence, even if Ryan and Graham have obviously watched Prometheus too many times and don’t understand the ‘run to the side to avoid the crashing ship’ principle.

– Setting up the TARDIS as the macguffin that ends the race is a nice touch.

– I’m almost annoyed that nobody even attempted to make an Infinite Improbability Drive gag in the opening five minutes, considering how VERY convenient it was that two separate ships arrived to rescue them.

– Is it just me, or does Ryan’s dyspraxia seem to turn on and off as the plot demands it? And was I the only one who thought the ruined building they arrive at looked suspiciously like an abandoned Tesco?

– So, the Stenza are obviously being set up as this season’s big bad, to which my reaction was “Those guys? Seriously?” I mean, I already suspected that ‘Tim Shaw’ would be making a return appearence (even if I’m really not sure why), but it still doesn’t make them any less generic or forgettable. But then, this is Chris Chibnall, the man who thought a pig-faced demon and Captain Jack’s deeply underwhelming kid brother were effective end-bosses in Torchwood, so I guess you get what you pay for.

– I am unexpectedly finding myself more invested in the companions than the Doctor, which is kind of a strange experience.

– KILLER CLOTH FROM OUTER SPACE!

– Heavens, we have a ‘mysterious overarching plot arc’ in the form of the ‘Timeless Child’, helpfully told us by the randomly talkative Killer Cloth. First thought – are they pulling the ‘member of the Doctor’s family (potentially a daughter/son, considering someone had to have Susan) is still alive’ gambit?

– Again, it would have been nice to have just a slightly clearer idea of how the Doctor created that electromagnetic pulse, rather than it looking like she reached into a robot and pressed the convenient ‘Activate EMP’ button.

– What exactly was the point of ending the race at the ‘Ghost Monument’ if Ilinn isn’t timing it so that the TARDIS is actually making one of its semi-regular stops? Yes, it adds a brief bit of tension that the TARDIS isn’t there (and an oddly out-of-character bit of rapid defeatism from the Doctor), but it also feels an odd choice when the whole race is built around getting to a place that might not even be there.

– We have a new TARDIS! Very reminiscent of the 2005-era TARDIS, but with more hexagons and quartz (and money). The whole ’TARDIS dispensing Custard Creams’ thing was slightly blunted by not realising what it was, and only working it out when I looked at Twitter. (And what the hell is that teeny spinning TARDIS all about?)

– I suspect Jodie Whitaker’s going to be staying in the Christopher Eccleston category of ‘actors who are really good and who I just don’t buy as the Doctor’. The Doctor needs to be someone who owns every scene they’re in, and she’s good, but she’s not convincing me, and I’ve yet to get a moment that makes me think “Yes, that’s the Doctor,” or that has the sense of easy naturalistic weirdness that says “Doctor” to me. I think there are going to be plenty of echoes of the 2005 season here, as everybody else is going to be loving the hell out of it, while I’m suspecting that it’s just not quite for me. I’m enjoying it, but with LOTS of provisos, and I suspect it may stay that way (especially since Chibnall is either writing or co-writing BOTH the next two episodes).

– Big surprise – I think Bradley Walsh is turning into my favourite aspect of the new season, especially since his casting ranked up with Catherine Tate for levels of ‘Wait, they’re casting who?’ Graham’s turning out to be a really enjoyable, satisfying character and is the stand-out among the current crew – it’s still feeling like three companions is just too many (I mean, we’ve barely had a chance to get to know Yaz), but Walsh is pulling off some nicely nuanced acting, even if I also suspect that Graham’s difficult relationship with Ryan is destined to get sorted out by Graham pulling a tragic but heroic sacrifice in the season finale (I hope that’s not the case, but I’d also be willing to bet money on it happening.).

– Another observation – this version of Who so far is distinctly less goofy or weird than either RTD’s or Moffatt’s approach. It’ll be interesting to see whether the show is still capable of letting its freak flag fly and going for radically different tones (which is both the blessing and the curse of Who, depending on how those tones are executed), or if we’re in the realm of nuts-and-bolts SF for the foreseeable future.

– And next week, it’s celebrity historical time with Rosa Parks. I guess we’ll see how that turns out…

DOCTOR WHO: S11 E01 – ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ (An Unexpected Review)

September 27, 2018 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

Press launches are not normally a thing that happens to me. Therefore, when the stars aligned and I got asked by SFX to go to Sheffield for the first ever screening of the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who – the first time I’ve ever been able to write something professionally about the new era of the show, believe it or not – it was a considerable surprise.

And it was even more of a surprise when I got to Sheffield and fully understood how big a deal this was, with a red carpet outside the cinema venue and big crowds, and a general sense of being fabulously out of my depth. Inside was even weirder – imagine going to your local cinema, and instead of the usual posters on display, absolutely every image in sight is a Doctor Who poster – and I ended up armed with a massive free bag of popcorn, and accidentally found myself sat in a row directly in front of where the main cast were sitting and surrounded by BBC people, simply because I got into the screening early and there was nothing telling me that I couldn’t sit there.

There was a big introduction to the screening, followed by the episode itself and a Q+A with the cast, followed by drinks that involved lots of loud music and tons of people who I didn’t know. I made a relatively swift exit, heading for the station and back to Nottingham, but it was great fun overall, and a hell of a peculiar and memorable way to watch a Doctor Who debut episode (although watching S5’s ‘The Eleventh Hour’ in 2010 at a convention while sat next to the gorgeous girl I’d recently met (and who I’d eventually end up falling in love with) still has it beat).

THE REVIEW: (Which I’ve kept pretty-much spoiler free)

I went in with a healthy degree of caution, because while this new era for the show is big and splashy and has a ton of publicity and goodwill behind it, it’s also being overseen by Chris Chibnall, a man with a Doctor Who-related history that can be best described as ‘spotty’ and who’s never written an episode that ranked for me above ‘not bad’. Most of my Chibnall-related problems come from his place as showrunner and main writer on the first two seasons of Torchwood – i.e., the ones before it got genuinely good with Children of Earth – and especially the fact that he wrote the Torchwood episode ‘Cyberwoman’, which is one of the most wrong-headed Doctor Who-related pieces of media I’ve ever seen.

And the end result is an episode that is… quite good, with an emphasis on the ‘quite’.

There are a bunch of sensible choices that have been made here, most notable of which is that aside from a couple of small references (and stuff relating to the TARDIS), there’s basically no continuity and this is played as a completely fresh start. There’s also the fact that the show is properly based in the North now, with Sheffield functioning as the home town for all three of the new companions and giving a very different visual feel and style to the show. Plus, the cinematography has been given a serious upgrade, making the show look a lot slicker and more genuinely cinematic, and the new music takes a definite step away from Murray Gold’s sweeping and occasionally OTT orchestrations for something with a crunchier, slightly more electronic flavour.

Ultimately, the episode is a good jumping-on-point for new viewers, especially since it goes straight for a style and a characterisation that’s very similar to the first two seasons of New Who (except maybe not quite as broad), along with a certain amount of DNA from Torchwood (thankfully, it’s mostly taking from the bits that worked in S2). There are also more homages to The Terminator than you might expect from Doctor Who, but overall this is very much a story of ordinary people being swept up into an adventure, and plays heavily with the idea of weird sci-fi adventure happening in somewhere as gritty and down-to-earth as Sheffield in a way that is sometimes pretty fun.

The problem is that this is the episode’s biggest and most genuinely attention-grabbing idea. The story itself takes a while to coalesce, existing for almost half the episode as “An assortment of strange things happen in Sheffield just as the Doctor arrives”, and even once the main threat makes itself felt, it doesn’t feel like anything that’s in danger of capturing the popular imagination. It’s an entertaining but slightly generic threat, and while there’s a tenuous attempt in the script to make a parallel between the villain’s quest and the Doctor figuring out her new identity, it doesn’t really land or make this all feel less generic.

From certain perspectives, it makes sense to keep the threat relatively simple, considering the heavy lifting the script has to do – not only introducing a new Doctor to a potentially new chunk of the audience, but also introducing three companions (along with another character who essentially acts as an extra companion for the story). Anyone who’s seen any early 1980s Who will know full well that a crowded TARDIS brings with it the problem of giving everybody something to do, and while the episode does its best to spread the load of action around, the result is that not everyone gets the chance to make the kind of strong impression that can be made when there’s just a single companion.

Surprisingly, it’s Bradley Walsh as Graham who makes the most impact, after spending much of the episode playing the ‘perplexed father figure’ role – there’s a couple of scenes at the end that give a lot of depth to his character and make it properly interesting that someone like this is going to be travelling through Time and Space. Both Tosin Cole and Mandip Gill do good work as Ryan and Yaz, but they do run into the simple fact that they don’t quite get enough time to properly make an impression, as well as the fact that the script doesn’t always have the sense of spark, energy and polish that Moffat or Russell T. Davies were able to bring.

Moffat absolutely had his flaws and it was definitely time for him to move on, but it’s easy for some people to forget the level of craft that went into his scripts and the level of energy he was able to inject into even the smaller scenes. There’s not that much of that energy here, meaning that there are lots of what feels dangerously like dead air, or at least scenes that are perfectly functional and nicely played but which don’t do much else, and certainly don’t achieve the breakneck pace that Doctor Who can achieve at its best. If anything, the pacing is surprisingly leisurely in places, especially the opening half hour when the story has yet to coalesce into a genuine idea of where we’re going.

There’s also a couple of scenes that shocked me in exactly how classic 1980s Who they were. Companions in the ‘classic’ era of the show often complained how they were simply there to ask “What’s going on, Doctor?”, and the new era has been pretty good at avoiding that kind of thing, or at least making the big exposition scenes fun and accessible. Here, however, there’s one scene in particular that’s just a little astonishing in how much it cribs from the Classic Who playbook, with virtually every companion just firing “What does this mean?” questions at the Doctor and the Doctor answering them, without finding any way of subverting the whole “this is where the main character explains the plot” part of the episode.

Plus, the storytelling itself is rather murky, even by Doctor Who standards. I’m always willing to forgive a certain amount of hand-waviness when it comes to watertight storytelling in Who – it’s the emotions and the momentum that’s important, not whether every element adds up or makes perfect sense – but there are points in the episode where it gets surprisingly difficult to work out what the hell is going on. I’m still a little perplexed about how the Doctor actually managed to defeat the main villain, and there’s a number of other plot elements that feel like they would crumble if you examined them too closely.

There’s also the tone, which is darker in places than you might expect, and which often feels happier with the idea of being a nicely-played, slightly downbeat character drama than being an unpredictable, frothy sci-fi adventure. Certain moments play well, and other moments play like they’re not quite fitting together, and combined with the struggles the script has of balancing the material between the companions, the result is an episode that isn’t always firing on all cylinders.

And then there’s Jodie Whitaker as the Doctor. Aside from a few references, the new gender doesn’t play anywhere as big a factor as you might think, which is a good way to go, and she attacks the role with a serious level of energy and enthusiasm. She’s absolutely going to be some people’s favourite Doctor as soon as she turns up, and it’s a good contrast to go for after the more traditionally old-school and darker approach of Capaldi (who I loved in the role, but I can also understand why some people were put off by his rather gruffer, more cantankerous approach).

But… I ultimately ended up realising what she reminded me of in playing the Doctor, and it’s Christopher Eccleston. His Doctor was a big factor in relaunching the show, and having an actor of that calibre helped a lot in bringing Who back to prominence – but for me, Eccleston always felt like there were certain things in the role that he was more comfortable with than others (and he’s since gone on record saying that this was the case). Dark, stormy and angry scenes he could knock out of the park – quirky and fun, he was less accomplished at, and sometimes felt like he was trying too hard.

There’s a very odd (and extremely subjective) set of factors that make a good Doctor Who star. For me, probably because I grew up watching Tom Baker, it’s simply to do with being able to make the weird and the strange seem absolutely effortless – which is not something that everybody can do. It’s a throwback to when the performance of the Doctor was what sold the reality of the show (because it certainly wasn’t the special effects). When you see actors like Baker or Patrick Troughton at their best, they don’t feel like they’re acting – you can’t see the performance, they just are the Doctor.

And while Whitaker is really good in the role, there are an awful lot of points where I can feel the performance. She’s occasionally awkward with the more comedic moments, and she’s definitely stronger towards the end of the episode where she gets more dramatic, traditionally ‘Doctory’ material. It’s very possible that this is a performance that I’ll warm to, the same way it took me a while (actually almost a season-and-a-half) to properly like David Tennant as the Doctor. But she hasn’t sold me on her in the role in the same way that Matt Smith did in ‘The Eleventh Hour’, or Peter Capaldi once we hit the restaurant scene in the S8 opener ‘Deep Breath’.

It doesn’t help that for me, S5’s ‘The Eleventh Hour’ is pretty much the platonic ideal for introducing a new Doctor – an episode that was so packed with invention, humour and weirdly British thrills that it had me almost jumping up and down with excitement by the end credits. ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ is enjoyable, but it very rarely thrilled me, and it only managed a couple of laugh-out-loud moments, and is nowhere near the level of pace, invention or wit that Moffat managed in ‘The Eleventh Hour’. But then, with Chibnall at the helm, I didn’t really expect it to get there.

Ultimately, what we have here is an episode that’s a fun jumping-on point and an intriguing starting point for the rest of the season. It’s okay if Doctor Who isn’t entirely my bag for a while (I am, after all, a 44-year-old man who’s WAY out of range of the target audience), and I’ll be watching along for episode 2 to see where it goes. I’ll just also cross my fingers that maybe Chibnall can sharpen his showrunning skills and occasionally deliver something close to the high points that both RTD and Moffatt pulled off.

Schizopolitan: Episode 21 – Spectre of an Alien Doctor (The Alien Franchise, Doctor Who S9, James Bond and Spectre)

November 16, 2015 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

SHAKEN BUT NOT STIRRED! The Schizopolitan podcast roars back into view in its vintage Aston Marton DB5 to bring you another grab-bag of discussion, nerd chat, fierce opinions and big-time spoilers! First up, there’s a quick discussion of Ridley Scott’s recent (and rather odd) comments about the future of the Alien franchise, and whether or not there’s any chance of salvaging it after the good-looking mess that was Prometheus. Then, Saxon indulges in a quick burst of Who-related chat, as he examines the first half of Doctor Who S9, where the unexpected creative renaissance continues and Peter Capaldi remains scarily awesome. And after that, Jehan takes us through his full and spoilerific opinions on the latest James Bond film, Spectre! Is it a decent follow-up to Skyfall? Has it resurrected a classic Bond villain in a fitting manner? Is it just a very silly Bond film that’s attempting to play things seriously by having lots of people glowering? Are the answers to the previous questions “No,” “No,” and “Yes”? ONLY TIME WILL TELL!

Enjoy the podcast (please let us know in the comments if you do), and stay tuned for more episodes soon! And remember – you can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes! Share and Enjoy!

(The opening and closing music on the podcast is ‘Ouroboros’ by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

Schizopolitan – The Podcast: Episode 6 – Pax Americana, Doctor Who and Marvel’s Phase Three movies…

November 24, 2014 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

IT RETURNS! The podcast that EVERYBODY is talking about (well, everybody worth knowing) returns with another sense-defying episode to expand your horizons, transform your life and make you a better, sexier person. This episode, Saxon and Jehan take on a wide variety of subjects as they look at the recently concluded Season 8 of Doctor Who and also tackle the upcoming Phase 3 of Marvel films, sorting out who’s who, what’s what, and the kind of blockbuster madness that we can look forward to – while also finding time for a look at the more worrying movie developments with Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four…

Additionally, starting this podcast, we’re recommending a comic an episode – this time it’s The Multiversity: Pax Americana by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, and you can buy a digital copy of it here at Comixology.

Enjoy the podcast (please let us know in the comments if you do), and stay tuned for more episodes soon! And remember – you can now subscribe to the podcast on iTunes! SHare and Enjoy!

(The opening and closing music on the podcast is ‘Ouroboros’ by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

Schizopolitan: The Podcast – Episode 3 – Doctor Who, Gotham and Star Wars: Rebels

October 6, 2014 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

Schizopolitan lives! After a hiatus longer than we wanted, Jehan and I have finally succeeded in recording another episode of joyful rambling about film, television, comics and everything else that takes our fancy. This week, I do a brisk half-time report on Season 8 of Doctor Who, looking at how Peter Capaldi is shaping up as the new Doctor, and then we’re on to tackling two new US TV shows. First up is Gotham, the new series that’s using a traditional cop-show format to do a massive prequel story for the Batman mythos, giving us a sprawling origin not only of Batman and stand-up cop Jim Gordon, but also virtually every villain you can think of. We look at the first two episodes of Gotham – its highs, its lows, and its tonal weirdness – while the other show we look at is Star Wars: Rebels, the entertaining new CGI animation that’s also the first onscreen Star Wars material released since George Lucas sold the franchise to Disney, and an interesting sign of what’s to come…

Enjoy the podcast (please let us know in the comments if you do), and stay tuned for more episodes and less lengthy hiatuses! And please remember – you can now subscribe to the podcast on iTunes! Follow this link to subscribe – the first two episodes are already available, and episode 3 should be up there within the next couple of days…

(The opening and closing music on the podcast is ‘Ouroboros’ by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

Fifty Years of Who: Random Thoughts on Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary

December 4, 2013 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

One of the downsides of being so busy is that I haven’t been able to blog about Who’s 50th Anniversary at all. And now that I’ve got the time, it’s over a week later, and it all feels in the past now. So here’s just a chance to put down, in quick style, my thoughts:

In short, I’m happy. My love of Who has been through a very rough patch recently – this year’s clump of episodes was the weakest since the show’s return (I don’t even want to consider the trifecta of disappointment that was Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, The Crimson Horror and Nightmare in Silver), and Moffat’s approach to the series has a whole selection of problems that I feel may be a bit more entrenched and a larger issue than some of RTD’s flaws. However, The Day of the Doctor turned out to be overall great fun – it suffered from many of Moffat’s excesses, Clara is still a 2-D character mostly consisting of perkiness, and the plot frequently felt like it was in danger of falling to bits, and yet it never quite did. It managed to do something genuinely emotional with the multi-Doctor story rather than the understandable coolness of “Hey, wouldn’t it be great to get all the Doctors in a room together?”, and also managed to move the story on in a way that’s probably what the show needs right now. For better or worse, Who is able to keep going because it keeps changing. Sometimes that change is good, sometimes it isn’t, but The Day of the Doctor was a rambunctious bit of fun that mostly captured the best aspects of New Who, while summing up what makes Doctor Who truly unique.

There were also unexpected surprises – like the mini-episode The Night of the Doctor, with the unprecedented sight of Paul McGann returning to the role of the Eight Doctor on TV, and finally getting a regeneration scene (along with an awesome level of continuity references). There was also The Five-ish Doctors (Reboot), a wonderful half-hour slice of in-joke and comedy featuring Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, and which played like a cross between Galaxy Quest and Curb Your Enthusiasm. A little rough around the edges at times, but hilariously funny and weirdly touching at the same time.

However, for me, it didn’t matter that much how The Day of the Doctor turned out, because my 50th Anniversary needs had already been satisfied by the beautiful dramatisation of Who’s early years, An Adventure in Time and Space. I was misty-eyed within minutes (just the sight of David Bradley’s Hartnell staring with despair at the nearby Police Box was enough for me), and the whole thing was executed with a wonderful amount of style. There were occasional weaknesses early on – especially Brian Cox’s take on Sydney Newman, which felt a little *too* much like the classic cigar-chomping American – and some elements of the story just had to be folded together, or enhanced for dramatic purposes (the recording of the pilot episode was extremely rough, but it wasn’t that much of a disaster). But I can barely voice how wonderfully weird it is to see a story that I’ve known about for most of my life, which I first read about in articles in Doctor Who Weekly and books like Doctor Who: A Celebration, turned into an actual drama, and I was amazed at the way they managed to make it both a testament to the risk-taking that made Who possible, and a portrait of the tragic side of Who’s biggest strength – its capacity for change. From the farewell between Hartnell and Verity Lambert, pitched as a traditional Doctor/Companion farewell scene, to David Bradley being simply phenomenal as Hartnell finally comes to terms with what he’s losing, it was a stunning bit of drama, and the best tribute to the strange wonder of Who that they could possibly have managed.

And if you need me, I’ll be over in the corner, still trying not to think about how the 50th anniversary of Who means that the 20th Anniversary – which I can still remember – was thirty damn years ago… (*weeps for lost youth*)

Blog: Ice Cold (and Red Hot) in Prestatyn – The SFX Weekender 3

February 6, 2012 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

This Sunday evening, I returned from the wilds of North Wales where the weekend-long third annual SFX Weekender event was taking place. (And here is the point where I have to do full-disclosure and say that I’ve been writing in a freelance capacity for SFX magazine for the past ten years – I got a discount on the Weekender ticket price thanks to my SFX work, so you can take or leave whatever I say according to that, but hopefully you’ll see that this is as honest an appraisal as I can manage of the ups and downs of the weekend’s festivities).

Both me and my girlfriend ended up seriously tired (to the extent that most of the following Monday was taken up with recovery)– it was a good weekend overall, and a sometimes brilliant one, although there were some problems and snafus along the way. Hanging out in a Pontins holiday camp in North Wales in February may not be everybody’s idea of a good time – we knew roughly what we were getting into when we signed up, but it’s still a bit dispiriting to arrive in a place that looks more like a Communist work-camp than somewhere designed to actually be fun:

As you can see, what was soon less-than-affectionately christened ‘Prestatyngrad’ features lots of utilitarian architecture, and the chalets themselves could only really be described as functional, but ours was clean and didn’t have any problems, and it’s easy to see that an event like the Weekender really couldn’t be run in many other places at its current scale (not without cranking the expense up to ridiculous levels).

The Weekender is a loud, brash, entertaining con that packs an awful lot into two solid days (with an added Thursday evening for early arrivals), and it really seems to inhabit an interesting world between the commercial ‘please pay here to get your actor autograph’ conventions and the usually more genteel fan-run cons that I’ve been to in the past. It also, unfortunately, ended up a very good example of the “It’s a really really good con – but…” effect. No event is ever going to run perfectly smoothly – it’s a simple fact that problems are always going to come along – and for the 75% of the time when the Weekender was firing on all cylinders, it really was a tremendous amount of fun. But – there’s that 25% of the time, which resulted in my overall feeling about the con being “mixed, but really good”, and a lot of it comes down to first impressions.

Our journey to the site, for the Thursday evening ‘pre-show party’ was actually fairly smooth – we live in Manchester, so it’s an hour-and-a-half drive – and while I was a little nervous about some of the facilities (having heard horror stories about the accommodation at Camber Sands, the previous venue), I didn’t know exactly what to expect, and was looking forward to getting inside and exploring the con locations. Unfortunately, what we got when we arrived at Prestatyn at just before 5pm was a massive two-hour queue to check in, an hour of which was outside the main building in temperatures that rapidly went sub-zero. Annoyed is not the word, and it didn’t help that there was no communication, no staff members letting us know what was happening (or that the credit card machines had crashed, meaning they couldn’t process people’s security deposits fast enough) – just an hour in the freezing, FREEZING cold, and then another hour winding through a queue in a pretty small reception area, where there were only three check-in-windows. One of the only things that kept me going in the last half-hour was the idea of going to the chip-shop I’d spotted outside – the chalet was self-catering and we’d brought plenty of food, but I wanted something as soon as possible, so once we got our keys and found our chalet, I rushed off to get some food… and found that the chip shop had shut. At 6pm. I found out later that there was a canteen and a fast food ‘outlet’ (neither of which were incredibly appetising), and soon sorted myself out with something from the shop that I cooked back at the chalet… but it was the kind of massive disappointment that should have been avoided. Add to that a sleepless night due to a stiff and uncomfortable mattress, and my enjoyment of the Weekender took a major hit that took a while to recover.

There were, of course, certain other problems that nobody could do anything about – like the unexpectedly arctic weather, or the train derailment that ended up prevented several guests from arriving, and which delayed others. But there were organisational problems, and communication errors that could have been avoided – like the lack of any specific printed schedule or map in the ‘Welcome Packs’ we received, and the absence of a communal noticeboard where you could go to get updates, which left the whole event occasionally feeling a little vague frustrating.

It was only the avoidable problems that really bugged me. You don’t sign up to a con that involves staying in a Holiday camp chalet without understanding roughly what you’re getting into, but there were ways of dealing with problems like this, and (in order to let it all out and clear my head), here’s my constructive suggestions that I’d make in order for next year’s Weekender (which I am, despite the problems, still pretty damn likely to sign up for) even better:

1: The event doesn’t start for Weekender customers once they’ve checked in – it starts once they’ve arrived. Our journey only took us an hour and a half- there were people there who’d been travelling for much longer, and who had to queue for even longer than we did, and I dread to think exactly how annoyed I’d have felt if that were the case. At the least, there could have been more people manning the check-in counters, and staff there to handle the queue and generally communicate with people – a couple of explanations and heartfelt apologies for the delays would have gone a long way. At the best, there could have been hot drinks laid on for anyone who wanted them, or the check-in should have been opened much earlier than 5pm (going for a 1 or 2pm start would have definitely reduced the amount of congestion). The venue may not be perfect, but good service and first impressions are really important, and treating your customers like cattle isn’t a good way of getting them in the mood for a weekend of sci-fi fun.

2: Maps in the welcome packs, along with printed schedules. People need to know where everything is, and how to get there. My girlfriend had the schedule stored on her phone, but the whole point is that she shouldn’t have to – communication is vital. (Plus, all important information relating to the chalet should have been in the welcome pack – many people were complaining about having no hot water, when it was only because the water heater needed to be switched on, and the piece of paper telling you this wasn’t immediately apparent.)

3: A central ops area (or desk) seperate from the main reception area, where people can come with any queries or problems, and attached to that, a noticeboard of some kind where changes to the schedule can be posted. Yes, put the changes on Twitter as well, but you shouldn’t rely on social media and/or word of mouth at a place like this.

4: Try and improve the food options. Con food is very rarely spectacular (it’s one of the touchstones of the convention lifestyle), but there were very few options available, and most of them were very understaffed. It took me fifty minutes to queue for fish and chips on the Friday, and the fact that the chip shop wasn’t set up to open late into the evening (except on Saturday, where it stayed open till 8pm) was ludicrous. At the least, a selection of hot dog stands or burger vans would have fulfilled people’s emergency protein needs, or the chip shop should have been paid to open until at least 10pm. Either that, or it needs to be very, VERY clear in the Weekender literature that it’s vital to bring your own food for the entire weekend, especially with the town centre being a taxi-drive rather than a walk away.

5: Add a chill-out area – because while the noise and activity was mostly great, it was also – to be honest – pretty damn noisy. It’s a little like being in Las Vegas: the noise and activity is thrilling, but there comes a point where you want something a little quieter, and maybe the chance to sit and talk with friends or new acquaintances. The pub was always crowded and very noisy, while the main bar was directly behind the screening room, which late-at-night was showing a succession of horror movies, so not the most relaxing of environments. If the only opportunity to get something a little quieter and more peaceful is to go back to the chalet, there’s something wrong – and if it means losing something like the VIP bar (so that there’s more room for *everybody* to relax), then so be it.

6: Hang the DJ. Or, at least, make sure that the non-legendary Pat Sharp never gets within range of the music choice again (proving, as if it needed to be proven, that playing ‘Three Lions’ at a sci-fi convention is an excellent way of clearing the dance floor). Craig Charles’s DJ set was barnstormingly excellent, but the other DJ sets were sporadically good at best, and mostly featured an overload of the kind of bangin’ Nineties house that didn’t seem to be making masses of people want to dance. The music needs to be better…

7: Nametags. Meeting new people – and particularly meeting authors and writers – is a hell of a lot easier when everybody knows everybody else’s name. It’s a small touch that I really think would make a big difference to the social side of the event.

If they can pull off the options listed above, the Weekender might not be perfect, but it’d be well on the way to being genuinely great – because while the above problems were all there, and unavoidable at times, when the SFX Weekender got things right, it got them extremely right. Once you’ve gotten to know a few people, fan-run conventions can sometimes feel like a fantastic excuse to hang out in a bar talking to SF geeks and drinking, with panels and events as an occasional distraction, but the Weekender did a very good job of packing the schedule, resulting in very few bare patches, and plenty of moments where I was forced to choose between several enticing options. While I did end up missing some attention-grabbing events (thanks to the usual con excuses like ‘I have to eat’), my highlights include Sylvester McCoy prowling the audience and being fantastically entertaining, the epic Blastermind quiz where my esoteric knowledge of bizarre films helped my team get third place (out of dozens of teams) and won me a stack of cult horror DVD/Blu-Rays, and the incredible panel with Brian Blessed which was as deafeningly loud and hilarious as you’d expect, along with the realisation that alongside Blessed’s jaw-droppingly eccentric manner, there’s a passion for life and inspiration that’s seriously admirable. The Saturday night disco, featuring Craig Charles DJ’ing, stage dancers, illuminated stiltwalkers, angle-grinders and hallucinatory video projection was also amazing, and all the way through the weekend there was a brilliant atmosphere – the dealers room was the most active, energised and lively I’ve ever seen at a con, there were costumed Star Wars Stormtroopers and Daleks prowling the halls, and the level of cosplay from the fans themselves was truly epic, with people throwing an incredible amount of effort into some of the most entertainingly kooky costumes I’ve ever seen, and a whole selection of character-appearances I never expected in a million years.

Once past the initial organisational errors, on the whole it was a very welcoming con, and the SFX crew obviously worked their arses off in order to keep things running as smoothly as they could. Since Sunday, there’s been various posts on the SFX forums claiming that loads of people were hideously disappointed (as were everybody they spoke to, apparently), but aside from a few mild grumbles here and there, what I saw for the whole weekend was a gigantic crowd of people having a truly excellent time. There’s a lot that other, smaller cons could learn from the Weekender about the kind of fun and energy that will bring new people into the Con and fandom lifestyle. Ultimately, the issues that I listed above were only truly frustrating because everything else was so good, and the Weekender really did get close to being a top-notch experience crammed with weirdness and geekery. The high-points of this weekend certainly blew the hell out of any convention I’ve been to in the past (I’ve never laughed so loud or applauded so hard as I did at the Brian Blessed panel, for example), and it’s also excellent that they emphasised the literary and comic-book side of things as well as the more attention-grabbing TV stars, putting on a selection of panels that acted as a really good intro and discussion of many aspects of the genre. I just hope SFX and the organisers can take the feedback they’re getting onboard – as away from its flaws, the Weekender really is an impressive amount of fun, and is in serious danger of being the kind of con we need to see more of…

TV Review: Doctor Who S6 E09 – ‘Night Terrors’

September 14, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

Cast: Matt Smith, Karen Gillen, Arthur Darvill, Daniel Mays, Jamie Oram, Emma Cunliffe ~ Writer: Mark Gatiss ~ Director: Richard Clark ~ Year: 2011

[xrr rating=3/5]

The Low-Down: After the time-warping loopiness of ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, something calmer and more traditional – ‘Night Terrors’ has plenty of flaws, but sharp dialogue, strong atmosphere and another great performance from Matt Smith all steer this episode through to a fine conclusion.

What’s it About?: Summoned by an unexpected call via the Psychic Paper, the TARDIS crew find themselves visiting a dreary tower block, where a young boy is living in a state of permanent fear. Eight-year-old George is convinced that there are monsters lurking in his cupboard, waiting to claim him – and the Doctor is soon discovering that he’s frighteningly correct…

The Story: (WARNING: As with most of my Doctor Who reviews, the following contains a hefty load of spoilers…)

It’s not exactly a surprise that an episode like ‘Night Terrors’ has happened on Steven Moffat’s watch – no other New Who writer has been quite so dedicated to exploring childhood fears in such a specific way, and the only real surprise is that it doesn’t come from Moffat, instead being the fourth New Who episode to be written by prolific actor/writer Mark Gatiss. Considering Gatiss’ run on the show has been a bit on the inconsistent side (going from the quality of ‘The Unquiet Dead’ in S1 to the rushed pacing and garbled storytelling of ‘Victory of the Daleks’ in S5), it would have been easy to be concerned about this episode – but while Night Terrors is far better than his Season 5 outing (or the rather weak S2 episode ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’), it’s a curiously quiet and simple episode that settles for being solid rather than memorable.

Weirdly enough, ‘Night Terrors’ is also a semi-flashback to New Who’s history, with a council estate setting that’s like the grungier, less welcoming flipside to the Powell Estate where this latest incarnation of the show spent so much time. Considering how integral this kind of location used to be to the make-up of the show (especially in S2, where I occasionally felt like Who had transformed into a tour of Council Estates through the ages), it’s a refreshing jolt to find that for Amy and Rory, this is an unusual sight to find on the other side of the TARDIS doors, and shows exactly how much the show has spread its storytelling wings in the last few years.

Of course, much of this grunginess plays into the story of George’s fears (especially Andrew Tiernan as the bullying landlord), and the direction tries as hard as possible to amp up the menace, especially once the action arrives in the shadowy corridors of the dollhouse. It’s been a while since Who has tried this hard to be deliberately spooky, delivering the kind of safe-yet-unsettling child-friendly scares that the programme specialises in (especially in the Jan Svankmajer-inspired scene where the landlord is transformed into a doll), but if there’s an ultimate flaw in ‘Night Terrors’, it’s that it’s a little too deliberate and literal. The story itself is enjoyably presented but surprisingly simple – in a way, the simplicity is a relief after the convoluted histrionics of ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, but it ends up feeling like such a purposeful exercise in fear that there’s very little to it.

We’re on very literal ground here – plenty of Moffat’s scares in the past have been based on the idea that the monsters children are scared of are real (whether it’s shadows, the creatures under the bed, or something you glimpse out of the corner of your eye), so it’s not exactly a surprise when it turns out that George’s ‘monsters’ are very real. Who works best with layered storytelling, especially when it’s undercutting expectation, and while the “She can’t have kids!” is a tremendously effective revelation, most of the episode runs along very traditional, well-telegraphed lines. It’s a ghost train (a phrase Moffat’s used to describe this whole season), but one that never really feels in danger of being more than an entertainingly spooky spectacle. The mishappen dolls are creepy – but without a specific reason for them to be stalking the corridors of the dollhouse (other than “Well, dolls are creepy”) they’re a surface threat to drive the story, and not much else. (There’s also the simple fact that this is basically a standalone episode with no mention of the overall arc (aside from the slightly clumsy end shot) – it’s because ‘Night Terrors’ was moved from the episode 3 slot, replaced by ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’, but it does end up feeling weird that the seismic revelations of ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ don’t get any reference at all.)

At the least, the emotional pay-off of the story genuinely works. Once again, we have an episode climax revolving around a father and son bonding where one of them isn’t what they seem, but thankfully this is much more effective than the similar sequence in ‘The Almost People’. It’s a very New Who case of ‘love conquers all’, but one which doesn’t feel like a cheat, partly because the simplicity of the story keeps the focus on the characters. There’s also, of course, the subtext (which I didn’t spot, admittedly, instead first reading it in Adam Roberts’ great review of the episode here and then thinking “Oh, of course…”) that’s possibly the most subtle and effective use of what sometimes gets stupidly referred to as ‘the Gay Agenda’. In short, George is a kid who’s different (but doesn’t quite understand why), and that difference terrifies him to the extent of convincing himself his parents are going to reject him, and it’s only when his father finds out the truth and tells him that he loves him anyway that the crisis in George’s head is resolved. Add to that the fact that he’s hiding everything that scares him in the cupboard/closet (and the presence of a dollhouse, hidden away), and it’s amazing how blatant yet effective the subtext manages to be, hiding in plain sight and not battering the audience over the head with its own significance.

Ultimately, the episode works better as a spooky, dream-like psychodrama that the lead characters just happen to have wandered into, than as the scary thrill-ride it occasionally seems to want to be. There are some nice visual nods to Terry Gilliam’s cult classic kids adventure Time Bandits, while the support performances ride that New Who line between earnest, effective and a little too cartoony. Daniel Mays is mostly excellent with only a couple of weak moments, Jamie Oram does a pretty good job of maintaining a near-constant level of wide-eyed fear throughout the entire episode, and Andrew Tiernan yet again proves he’s the go-to guy for heavy-set and menacing villains.

It’s the leads who really make this episode, however. The kookiness of the Doctor/Amy/Rory team can feel overwhelming in an episode like ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, and yet here it livens the episode up (with even Amy and Rory feeling slightly alien and out-of-place in this setting), adding colour to the downbeat and grungy world of the council estate. More than anything else, though, Night Terrors once again proves that Matt Smith makes a downright fascinating Doctor, and is arguably at his best when he’s got a relatively mundane setting to play against. There’s something tremendously endearing about the way the Doctor wanders into the lives of George and his father, and Smith controls the leaps from comedy to drama with commendable skill (especially in the “You see these eyes? They’re old eyes” speech). Combined with some great one-liners and enjoyable physical comedy, Smith raises ‘Night Terrors’ up by several degrees, and leaves it as a fun and entertaining episode that’s certainly ahead of this season’s weaker moments, but isn’t likely to linger in the memory.

The Verdict: A solid, modestly enjoyable episode that acts as a good counterpoint to ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, this isn’t Doctor Who at it’s strongest (and does feature a couple of clunky moments, like the unconvincing ‘dragged into the cupboard’ sequence), but a combination of strong dialogue, charm and an effective emotional through-line leaves ‘Night Terrors’ as a quiet but satisfying example of Who storytelling.

Previous Doctor Who Season 6 Reviews:

S6 E08 – ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’

S6 Eo7 – ‘A Good Man Goes to War’

S6 E05/E06 – ‘The Rebel Flesh’ / ‘The Almost People’

S6 E04 – ‘The Doctor’s Wife’

S6 E03 – ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’

S6 E02 – ‘Day of the Moon’

S6 E01 – ‘The Impossible Astronaut’