Saxon Bullock

S6 Eo7 – ‘A Good Man Goes to War’

TV Review: Doctor Who S6 E08 – ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’

September 3, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / 2 Comments

Cast: Matt Smith, Karen Gillen, Arthur Darvill, Alex Kingston, Albert Welling, Nina Toussaint-White ~ Writer: Steven Moffat ~ Director: Richard Senior ~ Year: 2011

[xrr rating=2.5/5]

The Low-Down: You certainly can’t accuse Doctor Who of not coming back with a bang. ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ is many things – fast-paced, imaginative, deeply nutty and at times very funny. The only thing it isn’t, though, is satisfying, and this latest batch of episodes looks set to continue being highly divisive…

What’s it About?: Months have gone by, but the Doctor still hasn’t succeeded in tracking down the missing Melody Pond, who’ll eventually grow up to become enigmatic archeologist River Song. Then, however, an encounter with one of Amy and Rory’s friends results in an unexpected trip to 1938 Berlin, and a confrontation with Adolf Hitler that’ll reveal some exceptionally bizarre truths…

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

As the credits rolled on ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, I experienced a very unfamiliar feeling. I’d felt it before, quite a few times during Russell T. Davies’s run on Doctor Who, and I’ve already felt it often during Steven Moffat’s ambitious but far from perfect run on Who so far… but this was the first time I’d felt it following one of Moffat’s own episodes: actual, genuine, no-holds-barred disappointment.

Yes, despite the largely positive reception the episode seemed to get online (including some absolutely gushing reviews from people like SFX), I found myself scratching my head and actually realising “Oh dear, I don’t think I enjoyed that…” At first, I wasn’t even certain why – it’s not as if ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ doesn’t feature a ton of fun and enjoyable elements, or that it isn’t also crammed to bursting with some genuinely excellent dialogue. There are daring concepts, imaginative touches, and at least one storytelling gambit which (despite earlier reservations) did impress the hell out of me. And yet, by the end of it I was perplexed, baffled, and ever-so-slightly vexxed, which certainly wasn’t the reaction I was looking for.

I suspect this is partly because, in going for his most deliberately comic episode ever, Moffat’s actually crafted the closest he’s ever managed to a genuine RTD crowd-pleasing episode – with all the flaws and annoyances that come with that concept. This is very much a “Look at all the STUFF!” episode that’s absolutely determined to batter the audience down with how entertaining it’s going to be, but also suffers from some wild tonal changes, occasionally clunky dialogue (especially from River Song) and a general feeling that we’re watching lots of fascinating ideas thrown together in a heap rather than an actual story. Moffat’s storytelling often revolves around finding interesting and unusual ways of wrong-footing the viewer and subverting expectations, but ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ is so busy subverting expectations that it never seems to actually stand still long enough to engage as a story. Instead, of being a story, it’s a romp – a chance for the regulars to run around 1938 Berlin shouting at each other, without any real sense of progress or threat (except from the Teselector Antibodies – and, oh dear oh dear, whoever decided to do mechanical jellyfish tentacles should feel very apologetic, as the ‘menacing light-fitting’ attack was some of the least-impressive practical effects I’ve seen on New Who).

Of course, some of this is simply the weight of expectation, as well as the weight of the ongoing story. Moffat has said that the River Song storyline is going to get wrapped up this season (although how conclusively it does this is something we’ll have to see), and this is a very good thing, as the big arc this season has only been intermittently succesful. Many people have waved the ‘Too complicated for kids’ flag, which is nonsense – I have nothing against complicated, but I do have issues with unsatisfying, and that’s what Who is in danger of turning into. The overreaching arc since The Impossible Astronaut (and, in part, since The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang) has gotten insanely twisty and complex – comparisons have been made with Lost, but what Doctor Who is actually in danger of turning into is the modern version of Battlestar Galactica, at least in terms of the central overarching ‘mystery’. In the same way that the Cylon’s ‘plan’ and the general approach of what in the Galactica universe passes for ‘God’ ended up feeling like a loose excuse to string together a series of unconnected and improvised plot concepts, the current Who arc is so determinedly abstract that we’re eight episodes into this season and we can still only barely explain anything of what’s happening – and so much of what has happened can seemingly be summed up by simply saying “Well… Because! That’s why!”

‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ doesn’t function at all as a self-contained story – it’s part of a sprawling arc, but the arc itself is failing to be satisfying for the simple reason that we don’t know what’s going on. We do know that the Doctor is destined to die at the hands of the Impossible Astronaut, and that River is actually Amy’s daughter, and that she was created and programmed in order to be a weapon for killing the Doctor. We don’t know why any of this is happening (and, most frustratingly, nobody onscreen is actually asking). We don’t know why anyone would go to these kinds of insane lengths (like apparently detonating the entire universe in order to contrive the creation of a new Time Lord child) in order to create a plan with so many variables, and yet which currently seems to come down to “Get a psychopath with poison lipstick to kiss the Doctor”. Considering how many people he’s already kissed in New Who, it makes you wonder why they bothered going so complicated…

(Quick theory time: There is a possibility that the events of ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ happen because Melody/Mells escaped from the Silence with some of her mental programming still intact – she’s trying to kill the Doctor in this episode without realising that (as I suspect) she’s already done it, back when she was a child in the Astronaut suit. It’s the best explanation I can think of to solve certain problems – although it doesn’t explain what the Astronaut’s doing in 2011, or why River knows why she’s locked in the Storm Cage facility for and yet doesn’t seem to remember the events surrounding the Impossible Astronaut. (It’s possible she’s lying in that episode, of course, but it’s one hell of a cop-out). I am really hoping it doesn’t turn out to be yet another temporal loop-style “Oh, it happened that way because the Doctor knew the future and so made sure it would look that way” in the same way that River Song only becomes River Song because she’s told about herself. And yet, it wouldn’t completely surprise me…)

There’s a difference between mystery and obfuscation, and after a while the deliberate holding back of details (and the twisting complicatedness of the details we are given) starts feeling like being complex simply for it’s own sake. Like with last year’s finale, it’s the spectacle of concepts, rather than visuals – it’s IDEA! IDEA! IDEA! but the arc isn’t supporting it, and is tremendously difficult to relate to. Amy and Rory’s story arc should be taking them to some very dark places, but Moffat seems to want to throw difficult ideas in (like Melody’s abduction) and then just gloss over the consequences – most especially, in the case of Mells.

If there’s one aspect of this episode that fully displays the weird disconnect between sheer narrative ballsiness and dissastisfaction I experienced, it’s the character of Mells. On one hand, it’s a daring bit of writing, and the reveal of the regeneration (and her identity) did at least seem to justify the way she’d been crowbarred into the overarching story in a not-especially convincing way. But, for a writer whose main talent has been structure and forward planning, the way Moffatt has done this is downright bizarre – after all, there would have been plenty of opportunities to set Mells up as a character earlier, or at least vaguely mention her beforehand, instead of simply going “Oh yes, there’s this character we never mentioned before who’s one of our best childhood friends and who was constantly obsessing about the Doctor equal to (or even bigger than) Amy, and OH CRAP she’s got a gun!” It’s so ridiculously quick that it’s very difficult to swallow (and certainly doesn’t feel like good storytelling) – and it’s one of the elements where I honestly feel that ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ would have worked much better as a two-parter. If we’d had at least an episode to get to know Mells, she wouldn’t have felt quite so much like a comedy sexed-up bad girl thrown in for no other reason to get the plot moving in a very contrived way – as it is, we’ve barely registered her before she’s shot in the gut and then Alex Kingston is unwisely allowed to go rather over-the-top as the newly-born River Song.

(As a complete aside – I actually spent the entirety of ‘A Good Man Goes to War’ utterly convinced that Lorna Bucket, the mysterious ‘Amy Pond that wasn’t’ girl, was going to turn out to be River Song – that she’d die in the end, and regenerate. I was so convinced that I was genuinely nonplussed when it turned out she wasn’t, and I’m left suspecting that this actually would have been much better (and more satisfying) than the revelation we ultimately got).

On top of this, there’s the head-spinning logistics of it all – how did Mells/Melody get from late Sixties New York to Mid/late Nineties Leadworth? Why did she feel the need to hang out with her parents in secret while growing up? I presume Mells had parents – who the hell were they? How accurate are her memories? (And how did she know about Amy and Rory in the first place, considering she’s been abducted as a baby?) Is it all part of the plan, so that she can basically be a ‘sleeper agent’ and wait for the Doctor to turn up? Why didn’t she just kiss the Doctor immediately, rather than pulling an incredibly contrived “Hey, let’s use your time machine as a getaway” plan? How on earth did the TARDIS end up in Berlin 1938, when I would have imagined the Doctor’s response to a female gun-wielding psycho saying “I want to kill Hitler” would be to get her as far away from the Third Reich as possible? And exactly how many sexy-crazy alpha female bad girls is a sleepy village like Leadworth supposed to produce?

And, at the heart of all of this, there’s Hitler. There’s a certain admirable cheekiness to giving him only three minutes of screen time before throwing him in the cupboard, and yet it’s also uncomfortable because it is glossing over and trivialising a massive, massive subject (and using fascism as a backdrop for a light comedy romp and some “Gosh, isn’t it sexy to dress up in Nazi uniform” play from Alex Kingston). Also, the whole title of the episode ends up feeling like a serious con. Throwing the ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ title in at the end of the previous run of episodes set expectations, and the resulting episode doesn’t satisfy any of them – especially since instead of a Hitler-centric adventure, we get something altogether looser, flabbier and less interesting. It’s feeling dangerously like Moffat came up with the title, and then had to leap through all kind of narrative hoops to even vaguely justify it (and attach it to where he wanted the River Song story to go next), while the device of yet again having the Doctor on the verge of death (leading to several sequences that felt like photocopies of scenes from last year’s finale) led to not much more than Matt Smith howling and crawling on the floor like a hermit crab. And at the end, we’re left with exactly the same status quo as before (the Doctor and companions keeping secrets from each other – except this time there’s NO REASON for them to be doing this), and no real sense that we’re barrelling towards a significant ending. Season 5’s arc was occasionally clumsy, but at least felt like it slowly built towards a climax – Season 6, so far, is feeling like a wild collection of imaginative stuff that doesn’t hang together, and which – I’m sad to say – I suspect ain’t going to get anything resembling a satisfying conclusion.

I’d really like it to. I’d love to know who the ‘Silence will Fall’ voice from ‘The Pandorica Opens’ was. I’d like to know why the whole ‘blow up the TARDIS’ plot happened, and who’s responsible. I’d like to know what the Doctor did to annoy the Silence so much, or why their grey-faced servitors (words cannot sum up how frustrating it is to discover that – oh- they’re not called the Silence after all) went to such lengths to control human history just so they could get their hands on a space-suit. I would, in short, like it all to add up to a conclusion that draws a line under this whole section of the show. I just don’t have much faith that I’m actually going to get one.

Please, Steven Moffat. Prove me wrong.

The Verdict: An episode that ping-pongs wildly between inventive and sloppy, ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ has many high moments, but it’s also unfortunately ended up as my least favourite Moffat-written Doctor Who episode so far. My hopes were relatively high for this batch of episodes – they’re not so high anymore. But I’m at least hoping that a return to darker and scarier material, with the upcoming Mark Gatiss-written episode ‘Night Terrors’, might see the series get its storytelling mojo back…

Previous Doctor Who Season 6 Reviews:

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

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

TV Links: The Doctor Who Tube Map

July 17, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / 1 Comment

There’s something about the map of the London Underground (aka the Tube) – it’s got such a distinctive visual style that if you apply it to anything else, the results are almost always eyecatching. There’s plenty of examples I can think of over the years, but one of the most fun is here: the interactive Doctor Who Tube Map, which maps out the entire history of Doctor Who with all his villains and adversaries as stops on the London Underground. It’s the creation of Crispian Jago, a freelance IT consultant and self-declared ‘Godless Cornish Git’, and it has to be said that he’s done a splendid job – there are some typos (which apparently have been already highlighted to him on Twitter), but it’s always cool to see this kind of fan project, especially with the level of dedication that needs to go into it to get it right. So – anyone up for a trip to Judoon, taking in Cybermen, Zygons and Arcturus?

TV Review: Doctor Who S6 E07 – ‘A Good Man Goes to War’

June 6, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / 5 Comments

Cast: Matt Smith, Karen Gillen, Arthur Darvill, Alex Kingston, Frances Barber ~ Writer: Steven Moffat ~ Director: Peter Hoar ~ Year: 2011

[xrr rating=4/5]

The Low-Down: The finale to this first chunk of Doctor Who‘s season 6 is exactly the kind of big, broad and expansive adventure that we needed. A Good Man Goes to War may still leave us with plenty of questions and is arguably a little shapeless in places, but it also delivers satisfying adventure, well-timed twists and some truly brilliant dialogue, while finally casting some light on one of Who’s biggest current mysteries…

What’s it About?: Making the Doctor angry is not a good idea. With Amy Pond having been abducted, the Doctor and Rory are battling across time and space, calling in old debts in order to carry out a daring rescue on the asteroid known as Demon’s Run. What they don’t realise, however, is that they’re walking into a trap that’s been waiting for the Doctor for a long time – while it’s also finally time for River Song to reveal who she really is…

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

Yes, I saw it coming. It helped that I’d seen the idea bandied around as a theory online following the broadcast of Day of the Moon, but it was a concept that fitted all the facts, especially with the very obvious touch of both characters having water-based names (I can remember thinking “Pond? Why on earth is her surname Pond?” back when the companion was first announced. Now, of course, it all makes sense). Once Amy announced that her daughter’s name was Melody, it was pretty much on the wall – but all credit to Moffat for still managing to throw in a couple of moments of doubt, from the Doctor’s abrupt “It’s mine” line (when talking about the crib), to the point where we’re briefly left thinking “Wait a minute – ye gods, they’re not seriously going to have River turning out to be one of the Doctor’s family, are they?”, and all the serious Luke-and-Leia-style wrongness that might mean.

But, they weren’t. After a whole lot of waiting, we finally know that River Song is Amy and Rory’s daughter, and that her part-Time Lord DNA led to her being utilised as a weapon to kill the Doctor (which led eventually to her imprisonment in the Storm Cage facility). And while SF-savvy viewers will have unpicked Moffat’s complex web of plotting, the fact remains that this is still tremendously ambitious storytelling for a Saturday night family-aimed show, and that Doctor Who is still aiming high in terms of demanding storytelling and narrative twistiness.

(It’ll also be interesting to see exactly where the relationship between the Doctor and River goes from here, and what the ultimate resolution for him is (as we already know for her) – one of the quietest bits of characterisation is the nicely played sense of sadness from River Song when she realises the point in time that she’s reached, and that the period of the Doctor not knowing who she is has come to an end (and it also, in retrospect, makes the flirting between them that’s happened up until now a lot more poignant – River has always known exactly where this was going, and that her relationship with the Doctor was going to completely change once her identity was finally out in the open. Things will be different – but exactly how different?)

Naturally, of course, there are already people online moaning that the revelation of River’s identity was all rather predictable (simply because, as I’ve said before, moaning comes rather naturally to some Doctor Who fans), but while A Good Man Goes to War wasn’t perfect, it’s given S6 the injection of adrenaline it needed and ended this ‘pod’ of episodes on a serious high. It’s also possibly the most deliberately referential and continuity-crammed episode we’ve had yet (even managing to beat The Impossible Planet/Day of the Moon), and yet did succeed in getting most of the relevant information across in a way that’s still accessible, lively and fun.

It also leaves the weaker episodes of this run – especially Curse of the Black Spot – looking even weaker by comparison, simply because Moffat at his best is able to fire new concepts at the viewer at a rate that’s almost dizzying. Not only does he take the time-and-galaxy-spanning action of The Pandorica Opens and crank it up even further, but he also throws in a selection of new characters that do that wonderfully Doctor Who storytelling trick of hinting at a scope of adventures far beyond what we’ve seen. Top of that, of course, is the jaw-droppingly improbably yet hugely enjoyable Victorian duo of sword-wielding Silurian Madam Vastra (Neve McIntosh) and her maid Jenny (Catrin Stewart), who turned out to be one of the highlights of the episode. I’m still not sold on the Silurian make-up (less human-looking eyes would make such a difference) and initially thought “What the hell?!?” on Vastra’s first appearence, but was rapidly won over. McIntosh gets to have much more fun here than in last year’s tepid Silurian two-parter, and the banter between them combined with some choice innuendo pack a whole lot of life into the story (while once again showing that despite RTD’s departure, the so-called ‘Gay Agenda’ that a small minority of fans still complain about is alive and well.)

Even the deliberately comedic take on the Sontarans – played even more for laughs than they were in S4’s two parter The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky – managed to grow on me, with Commander Strax’s eventual fate turning out to be surprisingly touching, and Moffat keeps the tone shifting throughout, going from laugh-out-loud funny to emotionally intense. It’s how Doctor Who should always be – funny, fast-paced and deliriously inventive – and once again proves that Moffat is seriously good at delivering the goods when it comes to the big show-stopping episodes.

He also does the sensible thing in keeping it driven by emotion, while also being prepared to pull off some pretty dark moments – from the Doctor’s burst into all-out anger (brilliantly delivered by Matt Smith), to the horribly brilliant revelation that Baby Melody had been switched for a Flesh/Ganger duplicate. The baby disintegrating in Amy’s arms into a puddle of the Flesh is such a fantastically unpleasant image and packs a serious punch, and it’s good to see that Moffat still has a good sense of how far he can push things – that Who shouldn’t be too nasty, but that it also shouldn’t be too safe either.

There’s barely a weak link in the cast, and especially notable was Christina Chong as the mysterious Lorna, giving a really compelling performance despite the fact that you’re barely told anything about her. Both Karen Gillen and Arthur Darvill did great work, giving more nuances and levels to Amy and Rory’s relationship (and making the chemistry-free mess that was their initial relationship last year feel like a very long time ago), but the episode completely belongs to Matt Smith, who takes the Eleventh Doctor to some very dark and angry places and yet still manages to be kookier and more eccentric than ever (especially in the scene where he’s awkwardly discussing with Madam Vastra when Amy and Rory’s daughter “began”).

A Good Man Goes to War romps along at a fast pace and delivers the most enjoyable and genuinely satisfying ‘blockbuster’ episode since last year, along with some impressively mounted Star Wars-esque SF production design – but it still manages to notch up a few problems. A couple of Moffat’s narrative ticks are a little predictable (especially the reveal of the Doctor), and the Headless Monks themselves are initially intimidating yet ultimately end up as slightly unsatisfying villains, with the end action sequence not quite carrying the punch it needed. Frances Barber does a good job with her surprisingly short screen-time as the eye-patch-wearing Madam Kovarian, but I was expecting to learn a lot more about her than we got.

Naturally, this is the mid-season cliffhanger so there was no way Moffat was going to tie off every plot thread, but we’ve now got another set of bad guys whose motivations we don’t entirely understand – and, just to make things even more complicated, they’re bad guys we previously met (presumably in the future) as good guys (or at least guys who didn’t start their conversation in The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone by saying “Oh, by the way, sorry about that time we mounted an incredibly complex plan to try and kill you…”).

Using the Clerics from S5’s two-parter is an interesting yet odd choice, and we really need a slightly clearer motivation for this astonishingly big-scale plan (which obviously involved the Silence) than River Song’s end speech where she makes it clear that the Doctor’s impact on the Universe is now coming back to bite him (Does Kovarian have other paymasters than the Clerics? Is there another big bad waiting in the wings?). There’s also the fact that we really need this to tie together with The Impossible Planet’s 2011-set scene of the Doctor’s death (Was the astronaut-suit-clad Melody brought back from 1969 specifically for this reason? How does this fit in with the rest of the story?)

In short, Who has a gigantic number of questions that still need to be answered – but at least, with River Song having finally unburdened her secret, there’s the chance for genuine answers (and hopefully we’ll get them, rather than more questions). A Good Man Goes to War does end up feeling a little shapeless thanks to this lack of meaty explanations for the story’s backdrop, but Moffat’s dialogue, energy and inventiveness means it’s still full-tilt SF entertainment – big, bold, confidant, and not afraid to be just a little insane.

The Verdict: A thoroughly enjoyable mid-season finale that shows Moffat hasn’t lost his touch when it comes to emotionally engaging SF adventure, this is an episode where the minor problems and the flapping plot-threads aren’t enough to spoil the rollicking entertainment. It’s certainly hard to work out what on earth Moffat will have in store for us in the next batch of episodes – all we can do is wait for September, the aftermath of all these revelations, and the hilariously titled next episode “Let’s Kill Hitler”…

Previous Doctor Who Season 6 Reviews:

TV Review: Doctor Who S6 E05/06 – ‘The Rebel Flesh’ / ‘The Almost People’

May 30, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / 2 Comments

Cast: Matt Smith, Karen Gillen, Arthur Darvill, Raquel Cassidy, Marshall Lancaster, Mark Bonnar ~ Writer: Matthew Graham ~ Director:Julian Simpson ~ Year: 2011

[xrr rating=3/5]

The Low-Down: Showing that the deeply traditional base-under-siege Doctor Who story ain’t always as easy as it looks, The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People make up a potentially interesting two-parter that’s let down by some major pacing problems and misconceived villains, although is ultimately saved from total mediocrity by some interesting concepts, Matt Smith being brilliant, and one hell of an ending.

What’s it About?: Running into a solar tsunami, the TARDIS ends up making a sudden landing at an industrial station on a future Earth, where a dangerous acid is being mined with the aid of ‘Gangers’ – artificial duplicates of the mining crew, used in dangerous environments and casually disposed of when broken. However, when a second solar wave hits, the Flesh that makes the Gangers becomes self-aware, and it’s up to the Doctor to prevent the situation spiralling into bloodshed, especially when one Ganger starts preaching revolution…

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

It was never going to be easy following The Doctor’s Wife – which was not perfect, but did feature the kind of fast-paced inventiveness that Who does really well – and as I said in my last review, Matthew Graham wouldn’t have been my first choice to follow up Neil Gaiman, especially after the less-than-impressive S2 episode Fear Her. Well, the resulting two parter is definitely a much stronger story than that infamously weak episode, and also holds together better and more consistently than last year’s Silurian-themed two parter The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood… but it also shows that out of all the reactions Who should be aiming for, the very worst is a middling kind of ‘meh’.

This isn’t a story that thrives on the shock of the new – whether it’s a fresh take on an old Who enemy, or an odd, attention-grabbing twist we haven’t seen before – and in fact, up until the deeply surprising final two minutes, it’s engaginglyy played but very rarely surprising. We’ve seen this kind of story done plenty of times before, ever since S2’s The Satan Pit, but there isn’t enough pace or invention to distract us, while the plot also manages to echo S4’s Planet of the Ood (with the unfair exploitation of a race that yearns to be free) and especially the S5 Silurian two-parter, directly throwing humanity up against a dark mirror and showing what happens when we’re confronted with our own natures.

The central concept of the story – the Gangers themselves – is an interesting one, and the way the story deals with political subtexts is sometimes very effective (even if it’s also a little bit too subtle for its own good). Trouble is, we’ve seen Ganger-like duplicates before, and the fact is that they (and the twist of a Ganger version of the Doctor) aren’t quite strong enough a concept to hang a whole 90 minutes of television on.

While much of the character-based drama is well-played, it simply isn’t quite gripping enough, and it’s hard not to think how much stronger and focussed the story could have been if it had been a single episode. Added to this, you’ve got the slightly murky approach to the Gangers themselves – the potential was there for a ‘who’s the double?’ tension-fest in the manner of The Thing (which does seem to have been the initial intention), and in certain ways its good that they do try and explore the different levels of the Gangers, ultimately proving themselves to be just as worthy (and as flawed) as the humans.

The problem is that this doesn’t make for very dynamic bad guys – a necessity for Doctor Who to work – and it also undercuts the story’s tension. With large chunks of the plot involving various characters regularly switching sides (making it worryingly reminiscent of the 1970s Who story Colony in Space, much of which consists of miners and colonists capturing and recapturing each other ad nauseum), it’s like the story never quite catches fire. There are some excellent lines, and yet there are also some deeply clunky ones, and the lack of scale (with the perspective of the story completely confined to the Island monastery) meaning that the threat never quite feels big enough.

Given this, it’s a surprise how much of the story does motor along in an entertaining way. Despite the lax pacing, the direction pulls out plenty of atmosphere, the performances are largely strong (aside from a couple of exceptions, including an especially unconvincing child actor), and Matt Smith once again proves that he’s one of the most gleefully eccentric actors ever to get his hands on the role of the Doctor. Emerging from the TARDIS and exclaiming “Behold, a cockerel!”, he’s a delightfully kooky presence who brightens up even the less exciting scenes, while there’s also some nice nuances and depth given to Amy and Rory’s relationship (although I suspect some dialogue about Rory’s reasons for being able to sympathise with the Ganger Jen – thanks to his 2000-year-old experience as an Auton duplicate – may have been cut, and would have helped a lot).

Both episodes, despite their flaws (and a couple of especially weak CG shots), have more genuine invention and cleverness than The Curse of the Black Spot, although they’ve also got their fair share of logic errors as well (like exactly why it was necessary for the Ganger Doctor to sacrifice himself (other than to tie up a plot end), and where exactly did the second sonic screwdriver come from?). Ultimately, it’s an episode that’s a little too busy exploring the human condition to deliver the kind of adventurous scariness that Who does so well (and which The Doctor’s Wife pulled off with aplomb). A medium episode of Doctor Who is still good fun – it just has the danger of possibly not sticking in the memory, which is something you can’t say about most RTD episodes (even if they were sometimes only memorable for being extremely bad…)

Some of these problems (especially the ones of scale) are obviously down to money. The cuts in the show’s production budget were relatively obvious last year, and the gap between the blockbusting episodes and the smaller-scale stories does seem to becoming a little more extreme in Season 6 (with this being the second story this year to revolve around a small number of characters trapped in a relatively confined environment – and from the looks of things, there’s at least a couple more to come).

The end result is that the storytelling needs to get sharper and more imaginative to compensate, and while the budget could only stretch to a handful of shots of the surprisingly nasty Japanese horror-style mutant Jen Ganger in the climax of the episode, I can’t help feeling that this two-parter would have been much more gripping – and a hell of a lot more fun – if they’d eased off on exploring the human condition and just given us a cracking ‘The Thing’-style monster story.

However, while there is a lot of online grumbling about this initial slate of episodes (One thing Doctor Who fans never run out of is things to complain about), it’s worth remembering that last year had its own fair share of middling or not hugely impressive episodes. S6’s strike rate isn’t as initially strong as S5 – but then, I just end up looking at the major quality wobbles in the first seven episodes of S2 (excepting The Girl in the Fireplace, of course), and remind myself that creative teams are allowed to stumble a bit from time to time, and can sometimes take a while to truly get to grips with how difficult Who can be to pull off.

Some of this grumbling is, of course, because of the intricate story arc (and, simply, that Moffat is comitting the cardinal Who sin of – shock, horror! – attempting something that’s new and ambitious and not like what’s gone before), but the arc elements actually play into The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People rather well. We have the fact that the Doctor now knows more detail about his death in The Impossible Astronaut, there’s the slightly over-fast line that states we possibly may not have seen the last of the Ganger version of the Doctor…

…and there’s the ending.

Curiously enough, the last-minute revelation that Amy has been a Ganger duplicate for months (potentially since the appearence of the Silence in the White House bathroom?) is another mirroring of the Silurian two-parter and its sudden execution of Rory, although at least this feels a lot less tacked on and a far more organic part of the plot. The slightly hazy morality of the scene in question – the fact that we’ve spent the whole story establishing that Gangers should be treated humanely, and the Doctor essentially kills Amy’s non-self-aware Ganger – only really hits once the episode is over and you’ve had a chance to think about it (rather like the pregnant dream-suicide in Amy’s Choice). It’s still a magnificent twist, though, as well as a fantastically disturbing one, and it does raise the stakes massively for next week’s mid-season finale.

It’s also a natural evolution of Who storytelling – going from simply having something like ‘Bad Wolf’ turn up (and jerry-rigging a slightly convoluted explanation at the end of the season), to experimenting with full-on arcs that demand a lot of attention. There are potential risks involved; I think some of the episodes in this half of the series could have been stronger, and I’m also hoping that enough explanations are coming next week for this to feel genuinely satisfying – but I’m not about to start bitching about Moffat daring to do his own thing and approach the show with some serious ambition. I just feel like sometimes his cerebral approach doesn’t always suit the material, and that tonally S6 should possibly have had a little bit more fun upfront, and a little less dark and spooky character-driven soul searching.

The Verdict: A two-parter that does entertain but mostly leaves the needle firmly stuck on ‘average’, The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People is really just the latest in a long line of trad-Who two parters that didn’t quite come off (from Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel to Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, and even The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky). It does, however, set the scene for next week’s mid-season cliffhanger, and certainly has me hoping Moffat is going to have something seriously big to deliver in ‘A Good Man Goes to War’…

Previous Doctor Who Season 6 Reviews:

TV Review: Doctor Who S4 E04 – ‘The Doctor’s Wife’

May 17, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

Cast: Matt Smith, Karen Gillen, Arthur Darvill, Suranne Jones, Elisabeth Berrington, Michael Sheen ~ Writer: Neil Gaiman ~ Director: Richard Clark ~ Year: 2011

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

The Low-Down: It’s ‘The One Written By That Bloke Who Wrote The Sandman’. It’s the episode with one of the most fan-baiting titles of recent years. And it’s also about the most inventive, fun and consistently excellent single episode of Doctor Who since S5’s The Eleventh Hour.

What’s it About?: An impossible message sends the Doctor to a junkyard asteroid outside the universe, where he encounters eccentric patchwork people and the parasitic House. But there’s also someone else – a woman named Idiris, who’s actually someone the Doctor knows extremely well…

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

I’ll be honest – I was a little worried about The Doctor’s Wife. Neil Gaiman writing Doctor Who did sound like a match made in heaven, but I’ve learned never to trust sure things where Doctor Who was concerned. Plus, there was that title – a fan-baiting proposition if there ever was one, especially in the wake of S4’s The Doctor’s Daughter (and its anti-climactic resolution in the story in question) along with the general speculation about exactly who River Song was going to turn out to be. Also, there was Suranne Jones – an actress whose first Who-related appearence was as a brassy, gun-slinging Northern version of the Mona Lisa in a not-exactly-astounding edition of The Sarah Jane Adventures. On top of this, the opening of S6 had been… well, not exactly shaky, but a little too arc-heavy, a long way from the confident energy of last year’s The Eleventh Hour, and backed up with an episode (The Curse of the Black Spot) that can only safely be described as ‘lacklustre’.

I needn’t have worried. Not only does The Doctor’s Wife bring a serious level of inventive fun and energy back to the show, but it’s also a stone-cold classic that features a tremendous amount of continuity that’ll enchant long-term fans without talking over the head of new viewers. One of the advantages of Doctor Who having such a long history is that certain writers can play off this history in imaginative ways, and Gaiman does this in such a wonderful manner, giving a new slant on a relationship that’s been there since the show’s beginning and yet has never quite been expressed like this.

The identity of Idris – that she’s the Doctor’s TARDIS in human form – is a brilliant twist (one that I didn’t predict in the slightest), and not only does it set up a pulpy, ferociously enjoyable episode, but it also gives us a wonderfully oddball relationship of the kind you could only ever pull off in Doctor Who – someone the Doctor has known for 700 years, and yet never properly met. The interplay between the Doctor and Idris is energetic, fast-paced and brilliantly done (from her initial outbursts of “My Thief!” to his complaints about the TARDIS’s reliability, to the final, heartbreaking “Hello” line), and what could have been over-kooky or twee is pitched at exactly the right level, aided by simply brilliant performances from Matt Smith and Suranne Jones (whom I’d never have recognised from her Sarah Jane Adventures appearence).

It’s an episode that’s utterly Gaimanesque, with plenty of gothic flourishes (especially with Idris herself, who heavily echoes Delirium from Gaiman’s The Sandman), but which also is steeped in Who mythology, utilising the background of the show in a number of imaginative ways and even giving us a long-awaited look at the TARDIS interior beyond the control room (with the dim, slightly creepy hexagonal corridors giving the dingy, atmospheric feel that the story needed).

What’s most surprising about the story, however, is that while there’s a brilliant pace and a cerebral edge to it, it also doesn’t feel like it would have been completely out of place in the Russell T Davies era – there’s an expansive big-heartedness to much of the episode that’s tremendous fun, and it also doesn’t fall into the trap of overdone sentiment that Vincent and the Doctor arguably did at its climax. Overall, this is Gaiman getting the chance to play with as many elements from the Doctor Who toybox as he can get his hands on – and while there are areas where budget has obviously come into play (the TARDIS-set sequences are never able to cut loose with the kind of mayhem that House would have been technically able to unleash), this is still a tremendously inventive and creative episode, giving us a style that feels modern while still capturing the pulp weirdness of Doctor Who at its best.

Slickly directed and well-played by everyone involved, it’s the kind of story where the tiny flaws only really stand out because there are so few of them. The TARDIS-pursuit sections never quite feel as if they fully live up to their potential, and it is unfortunate we ended up with yet another ‘fake death’ for Rory (although the proximity with ‘Curse of the Black Spot’ wasn’t planned, as that was originally to be episode 9 of this season, and the sequence in question was genuinely unsettling, with the disturbing graffiti giving it a seriously dark edge for Who). Yes, there are certain moments when the pace is a tad too fast, or we’re getting important information shouted at us over some slightly deafening sound design, but they’re over so quickly that they barely seem to matter.

What’s more important is the sheer quality of the writing, and how much of a difference it makes after last week’s somewhat unimpressive effort – while Moffat’s era of Who is still somewhat uneven, at least the highs are still turning out to be magnificent ones. As always, Who lives or dies on the quality of its writing, and Gaiman has set a new benchmark, giving us another episode that leaves you thinking “My God, why can’t it be that good every week?” He’s also given us the most genuinely satisfying episode of S6 so far, and yet more proof that despite its inconsistency, Who is still capable of being one of the finest SF shows on TV when it really hits the mark.

The Verdict: An engaging, funny and magical episode, The Doctor’s Wife will make it impossible to look at the Doctor/TARDIS relationship in quite the same way again. A seriously classy act, it’s not going to be an easy one to follow – and now’s not the time to mention that next week’s episode (the first of a two-parter) is from Matthew Graham, the same writer who gave us the abysmal S2 episode Fear Her, is it?

TV News: Comics No More (Wonder Woman and Locke and Key bite the dust…)

May 13, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / 1 Comment

So, the much-kicked, much-derided Wonder Woman pilot has, in the end, not been picked up by NBC. In certain ways, this isn’t surprising – the network initially passed on the script, and it’s fairly clear that it only really got through to production because of the fact that it’s a well-known and recognised property, meaning NBC were dipping their toe in the water but with no commitment to diving all the way in. Naturally, there’s lots of victorious braying from certain areas of comics fandom, convinced that this project was a guaranteed disaster from the start, but I can’t quite work up the same enthusiasm and relief I did when Robert Zemeckis’ ill-advised motion-capture remake of Yellow Submarine got tanked. That’s mainly because Wonder Woman is a character where there’s so much manuevering room that you can do different takes on her (especially in a network TV show, which was highly unlikely to go the ‘Amazonian Goddess fights mythological beasts every week’ route). Now, I was never entirely convinced by what I heard about Kelly’s WW concept – it sounded like the kind of thing which could either work fairly well, or end up embarrassing – and some of the casting had me raising question marks (Liz Hurley as the main bad guy? Really?), but there was enough there to at least have me intrigued, and I was willing to give the project the benefit of the doubt until I’d actually seen it. And, from reports of people who’ve seen the pilot, the episode isn’t a disaster and has some strong elements (quotes used have been ‘ambitious’ and ‘well-crafted’), but the focus-groups and execs weren’t convinced.

Now, however good or bad lead actress Adrianne Palicki was as Wonder Woman, the series isn’t going to happen, and yet another version of Wonder Woman has failed to make it into becoming a genuine commercial spin-off. Fans may be breathing a sigh of relief, but this is likely to make another Wonder Woman project a lot less likely to happen for while, if only because producers may be slightly uneasy about a fandom that’s going to lash out with a borderline insane amount of venom unless they get a version of Wonder Woman that’s exactly like the comics in every conceivable way. And as we’ve seen plenty of times in recent years – sticking exactly with the comics isn’t always a good thing. Like I’ve said before, Wonder Woman is a tricky character to get right in a manner that will appeal outside comic-book fans – there’s a reason why so many WW film projects have failed to get off the drawing board – and it’ll be interesting to see if anyone can ever solve the Wonder Woman problem…

The WW pilot misfire is, of course, the big TV news – but the one that’s made me a lot sadder is that Fox have passed on the pilot episode of Locke and Key, an adaptation of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s brilliant dark fantasy comic (which is slowly approaching the end of its run). With a brilliant cast and an absolutely corking director for the pilot (Never Let Me Go helmer and music video supremo Mark Romanek), it was top of the list of shows I wanted to see happen – although I was a little concerned that Locke and Key is pretty damn dark, a pitch-black twist on a traditional ‘kids adventure’ tale, and it felt like the kind of work that would fit much better somewhere like HBO or AMC than on a mainstream network (added to which, Fox have not exactly always been kind to genre shows). Added to which, word is that the pilot episode is really, really good – but it’s fallen victim to being viewed as ‘too complex’, and in a showdown between Locke and Key and new JJ Abrams-produced mystery Alcatraz, Abrams was the winner. There’s always the vague chance it might get shopped to another network, but I’d be surprised – five years ago, Locke and Key would have stood a much stronger chance as a TV show, but mainstream US TV seems to be largely moving away from long-form mysteries and complex arcs (leaving it more for the pay-on-demand HBO crowd). Seems very likely that Locke and Key is going to be left as yet another fascinatingly incomplete footnote in SF/Fantasy TV History, worse luck…

TV Review: Doctor Who S6 E03 – ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’

May 11, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

Cast: Matt Smith, Karen Gillen, Arthur Darvill, Hugh Bonneville, Lily Cole, Lee Ross~ Writer: Steve Thompson ~ Director: Jeremy Webb ~ Year: 2011

[xrr rating=2.5/5]

The Low-Down: A lacklustre excursion into Pirate-infested waters, The Curse of the Black Spot isn’t the worst New Who episode by a long shot, but it’s certainly never in any danger of being the best.

What’s it About?: Following a distress signal, the TARDIS lands onboard a becalmed Pirate ship, but the crew are in fear of something out there in the water – a Siren (Lily Cole), who’s already killed most of their number. But, with Rory falling under the Siren’s spell, can the Doctor figure out what’s really behind this mysterious curse?

The Story: It isn’t always good to be prejudiced against certain writers – especially since expectations can often prove to be wrong – but unfortunately, there are also times when I’m proved completely right. When I initially heard that this episode was going to be written by Steve Thompson, the man responsible for the deeply lacklustre middle episode of last year’s Sherlock (The Blind Banker, aka The One With The Chinese People That Felt Like A Filler Episode), the chances of a brilliant standalone episode seemed pretty remote, and what we get is a long way from being brilliant; an episode that’s fun enough to be distracting, but never quite good enough to be truly memorable, and lacking the kind of insane invention that Doctor Who thrives on.

In fact, most of the problems with the episode can be laid at the script’s door, because after a relatively hearty start, the story soon runs out of interesting things to do with pirates (and it certainly doesn’t help that the story essentially gets smaller as it goes along – it only really feels in any way like the ‘spooky romp’ the trailers promised in the first ten minutes). The episode also runs into the problem that we’ve seen this story a few too many times now in New Who – the ‘supernatural threat turns out to have an SF explanation’ tale is almost as much of a staple as the Celebrity Historical, and while Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon subverted that kind of episode (giving us a very atypical adventure featuring Nixon), there’s no real subversion here at all. Even the leap from the boat to the space-ship (which is very reminiscent of 1978 Classic Who adventure The Stones of Blood) doesn’t carry any real sense of frisson or drama, and ultimately we spend far too long in the episode waiting to get past the ‘supernatural shenanigans’ and onto the meat of the story.

Another issue that’s rather more in evidence is that of budget. Who has, over the last couple of years, undergone some relatively strong budget cuts, and certainly isn’t quite functioning on the same scale as it was in S4, for example, but still has to somehow pull off epic adventures every week. Certain episodes are managing it, but others aren’t quite so able, and with its restricted scale The Curse of the Black Spot does feel distinctly like a ‘bottle’ show, with the regulars spending most of the story trapped in one location, while the spaceship has the same slightly threadbare feel that the Dalek craft (aka the redressed factory) had in S5’s Victory of the Daleks.

Of course, budget isn’t everything – but it does mean that you need really good writing to distract from the flaws. Robert Holmes, back in the classic run of the series, was a master at writing so well that the audience didn’t really notice that not much had actually happened in his stories, but Thompson isn’t anywhere close to his league. The script is pretty low on invention (and arguably throws in the ‘Amy in tricorn-hat-wearing swordfight’ scene a bit too quickly), and also seems unsure as to whether it’s playing it for laughs, being historically accurate, or going for all-out spookiness, ending up stuck somewhere in the rather unsatisfying middle-ground.

Indeed, it’s the kind of story where you almost wish RTD would rush back in and inject it with a bit of energy and some OTT pirate gags. Especially as it’s essentially going for the Pirates of the Caribbean route (in the same way that the Phillip Hinchcliffe era in the 1970s hi-jacked classic horror films), a little bit of exaggeration and luridness would have done this episode the world of good. Instead, there’s a deliberate ploy for historical texture rather than all-out pirate fantasy, and the results are… middling. A mildly distracting adventure that has a couple of nicely handled moments, but rarely gets the needle above ‘average’, shown by the fact that even Matt Smith can’t make the material he’s given work, sliding a bit too much into eccentric hand-waving mode here.

There is at least a fine performance from Hugh Bonneville as the Captain, giving the story more gravitas than it deserves, and while the ending is manipulative, nonsensical (exactly how is Rory suddenly drowning again?) and another example of Rory almost dying (which they could have gotten away with if they’d actually acknowledged it onscreen), I was actually surprised by how well the Amy and Rory relationship played in the latter half of this episode. It’s especially interesting to see Amy finally being unequivocally in love with Rory and letting down some of that rather brusque, inscrutable front of hers – the scene in the medical bay is surprising simply because it’s one of the first times it actually feels like Amy is Rory’s wife, and that the writers are succeeding in moving the relationship on.

Of course, there are the massive gaps in logic, the bizarre slip-ups, the strange decision to have the Siren catapult into the air every time she appears, and the frankly unforgivable error of cutting out the final fate of the Boatswain (Lee Ross), who gets deliberately injured and ‘marked’ by the Siren, and then isn’t seen again until appearing in the episode’s final scene. But these aren’t the largest problems to ever have appeared in a Doctor Who episode – plenty of RTD stories got away with a hell of a lot more, and The Curse of the Black Spot would be easier to forgive if it wasn’t quite so average.

However, for those taking this as a sign that Who’s in trouble – with a slightly overcomplex two-part season opener and a middling third episode – I’d just say, go back and look at Season 2. There, the season didn’t properly start firing on all cylinders until episode 4, The Girl in the Fireplace (and there wasn’t a huge number of highlights after that) – Season 6 has gone for the longer game, setting up stuff that will pay off later on, and while it hasn’t delivered an absolute slam-dunk classic yet, the quality is still pretty high, and if Curse of the Black Spot is the weakest episode of the season, that’s something I could definitely live with.

The Verdict: Light on the arc, The Curse of the Black Spot pulls off a few effective moments, but won’t be troubling anyone’s ‘Top Five S6 episodes’ lists. Here’s hoping that Moffat has some stronger standalone adventures coming, and that the next episode – the long-awaited Neil Gaiman-written episode ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ – sees S6 finally kicking into top gear…

Previous Doctor Who Season 6 Reviews: