In the bleak midwinter

It's the right season for it, out here in NZ.

So anyway, I suppose the last thing I ought to do before I start posting about the new series of Who is blog about A Christmas Carol. On the face of it, this was a rich and engaging story with some nice lines and moments and at least one extremely well examined supporting character. Great work from Michael Gambon, and Katherine Jenkins turned out to be a pleasing actress too. I'd certainly compare it favourably with previous Christmas specials, although that's a pretty low benchmark achievement - I'd compare bloody Timelash favourably with some of the Christmas specials we've had. At least a 7 out of 10 for this one, but subject to the following observations.

So, here we see the most extreme example yet of Steven Moffat's favourite gimmick - interfering with linear causality - as the Doctor changes Kazran Sardick's past in front of his very eyes in order to manipulate his personality. There's a spaceship full of people that's going to crash in the next hour or so, and the Doctor's solution is to nip back in time and spend... days? weeks? months? having jolly adventures with the young Kazran, in the hope that it'll make him a more malleable person. I dunno, as a narrative ploy it kind of works and it kind of grates. It also gives free will and self-determination in the DW universe an unlooked-for kick in the recreational facilities.

In the end, though, it turns out to be for nothing: firstly, Kazran's still a git, only now he's a git because the Doctor's interference led him into a heartbreaking doomed relationship rather than because the plot flatly demands that he be a git; and secondly, he can't operate the weather control machine post-interference because the machine is apparently stuck in the original timeline and doesn't recognise him any more. So the Doctor's manipulated his past, hasn't actually redeemed him to any significant extent, and hasn't even achieved what he wanted. Although this somewhat undermines what's gone before, it's an interesting development. The Doctor's last-minute solution is to defrost the love interest so that she can save the day, then enjoy her last few hours of life with crusty old Kazran.

The character of Abigail is thus reduced to the status of a tool, firstly as the means by which the Doctor softens up Kazran, and secondly as the means by which he ultimately resolves the plot. She's just a beautiful young woman in a freezer who can be wheeled out to sing when the story demands it. I'm reminded of the subornment of Amy's character (if "character" is the word) to the requirements of plot and the crass gratification of viewers (and presumably the writer as well) in the 2010 series.

The broader topic of Steven Moffat's use of female characters is one that I warmly hope fan writers will have some fun with in the fullness of time. Whatever you do, folks, do not get me started on the subject of this year's charity scenes.

Incidentally, since we're dealing here with a Doctor who's prepared to use the TARDIS to solve his problems within a story, why does it specifically have to be Abigail, down to her last alloted day of life, who saves the day by singing? All right, so the Doctor may not be able to think of anyone else on the spur of the moment, but since Moffat's set a precedent - and within this very same story too - there's no reason for him not to nip back a few years and stage a singing contest, or even found an operatic school, and then take his pick of singers to save the day. Or he could just pop back to Earth and bring back Kiri Te Kanawa, friend of the rich and famous that he is.

That's another thing worth noting: the one supporting character that we're particularly encouraged to sympathise with is the morally suspect rich industrialist. Even Abigail's unspecified terminal illness is presented as something that affects poor(/rich) old Kazran more than as something that affects her. Is it a bold subversion of the usual good/evil character dichotomy, or a blatant and terrible example of bourgeois classism? (Answers on a pamphlet.) Note again that the Doctor here is the kind of time traveller who hangs out with Frank Sinatra and gets "accidentally" married to Marilyn Monroe. Note also that there's never any suggestion that Kazran has or will let out any of the other serf-sicles he's got locked away in his basement as insurance against his dodgy loans to the poor. The Doctor sends him off on one last magic shark-drawn carriage ride with Abigail and seems to assume that everything will work out in the end - echoes of the way he merrily buggered off after failing to "bring down the government" as promised in The Beast Below. That last shot just doesn't sit right with me.

Doctor Who has some time since lost its radical heart; I think that's what I'm trying to say.

On yet another related note, viewers may not have given any thought to the other serf-sicles at all, simply because the only one given a voice is the one who's actually benefited from being banged up in Kazran's freezer, the one whose family has worked the dodgy loan system to spare themselves the cost of her medical care. In her specific case, being pawned as loan insurance and kept in cryogenic suspension is a good thing. I feel that this isn't an entirely wholesome dimension to the story.

Dammit, this happens a lot with Moffat-era Who, doesn't it? I enjoy it on a basic level, but as soon as I start to pick at it to any extent I find these gaping depths of horror staring back at me. Moffat's id and mine clearly aren't compatible. I hope some sort of roaring invisible Id Monster smackdown doesn't result.

Time to be a bit more positive. It was nice to see a bit of self-referential tomfoolery, with all the business of Kazran watching the Doctor change his past along with us - Kazran himself as the viewer. And I suppose one might argue that Scrooge pretty nearly acted out the part of the theatre-goer in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, so it's in keeping with the source idea. And there were several noteworthy dialogue triumphs: "In 900 years of space and time, I've never met anyone who wasn't important" was the winner for me; "I keep 'amazing'... out here" was a nice one, if the delivery was a bit off; and of course, "I'm a mature, responsible adult..." being the lie that breaks the psychic paper.

Yes, for all my grumbling it's at least on a level with Voyage of the Damned. High praise indeed, readers! Ho, ho, ho. Coming soon, real soon, some blogging about this year's DW episodes.

Have you tried switching it off, then switching it on again?

Well now, that's better.

And what's more, most of it made some kind of sense.

I see a couple of non sequiturs (or nons sequitur? or is it the same in singular and plural?) around the Pandorica. Last week it was an inescapable prison; this week it doesn't merely hold its prisoner in stasis (which makes perfectly good sense), but actually exudes some sort of healing radiation that allows Amy, the Dalek and (presumably, after he's been exterminated) the Doctor to come back from near death. It also flies. The idea that the inside of the thing, isolated from the collapsing version of the universe, could potentially be used as a back-up template for the universe as it used to be, seems fine to me, but I'm not sure about the rest of it. I'm also not clear on whether the Doctor's still meant to be flying it in the scenes when he gets to briefly stop off in previous episodes and set up his return.

The only other thing I'm not absolutely, entirely happy with is the bit where River Song pulls the now hackneyed “Look me up” trick on the Dalek, which promptly begs for mercy. I don't really know why, but that just doesn't sit right with me.

Otherwise, a satisfying finale. The Pandorica Opens still doesn't feel like the first part of this finale, more as though it was just what needed to be shown to set up for this, the proper story, the tale Moffat's been waiting all series to tell. I think of it in the same way as I think of Utopia, the set-up for 2007's finale, and I probably ought to promote it from a 6 to a 7 out of 10 to bring it into line with that. The Big Bang, meanwhile, is pretty darn tantalisingly close to being a full 10. I just don't know if it really deserves the top mark. But it is a magnificent bit of Who.

I probably ought to be mortified by it. After all, it's the biggest reset button the show has ever seen – not just the final episode, but the entire 2010 series (and potentially some earlier bits) has now no longer happened except inside the heads of the leading cast. And even though it's a reset that still allows for continued character development, I don't feel that Amy's developed at all – there doesn't seem to be any change whatsoever between ep1 Amy and ep13 Amy. (This is something I may pick up on in a separate blog post.) Funnily enough, Rory has changed, which just rubs it in more. But the big reset obviously fits in with the “fairy tale” theme Moffat's been pimping to anyone who'll listen, and (in the nicest possible way) I think it's right for the 2010 series.

Among the many things I liked:

• The fossilization of all the villains who locked the Doctor into the Pandorica. It's a neat alternative to having them flip-flop in and out of existence in a time paradox kind of way, and it's very evocative.
• On that note, the stone Dalek. Yes, I know I'm easily disgruntled by never-ending Dalek returns, but as long as they do interesting and unusual things with them, I'm happy. And although arguably the Dalek's role in this episode is not hugely different from the Cyberman's role in the previous episode, it's handled with sooo much more flair.
• The opening few minutes of the episode, which were just perfect Who. Now, if there'd only been some way of having this bit at the start of the two-parter...
• Tying the TARDIS in with “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”.
• The Doctor's appearance at the wedding reception – it just wouldn't have been right any other way.

So there it is – best episode of the year. The rundown looks something like this:
The Big Bang
Vincent and the Doctor (a close second)
The Lodger
The Time of Angels
Flesh and Stone
Amy's Choice
The Eleventh Hour
The Pandorica Opens
The Vampires of Venice
The Hungry Earth
Victory of the Daleks
Cold Blood
The Beast Below
A series of extremes, I think, but then aren't they all? Further mumblings about the series as a whole may follow in due course.

Open the Box!

No, on second thoughts, take the money.

I have to say, The Pandorica Opens has not filled me with the love of Who and wowed me back into the Radiophonic Age. It has not sent me spinning off into space like a straight six into the pavilion. It strikes me that there's about five minutes of real plot in here, cushioned in forty minutes of set pieces and heavy vamping.

(Some may say that that's what we got in 2008, too. That's not a good thing as far as this episode is concerned. Some might further suggest that Moffat is spoofing the RTD finale. That's not a good thing either – unless it's very, very obvious that you're taking the piss, deliberately creating tat just leaves you with tat, and worse, tat that isn't aspiring to anything greater. The likelier possibility, I think, is that Moffat is genuinely trying to cater to an audience that now expects the Who series finale to have this frothy texture, either by his own choice or at the behest of BBC execs who are nervous about changing a formula that they find winning. It's also possible that this is just how Moffat writes finales. We'll find out in the fullness of time.)

For instance, there's not a lot of point in spending all that time at the start tying back in with Vincent van Gogh (who apparently now has full-on psychic powers, and tops himself because he's seen the TARDIS blow up – bit cheap, that), Winston Churchill (who must be informed in his London bunker immediately about any paintings found in French attics) and the Pearly Queen (2000 years older and still going Mockney). The Doctor – and the viewer – already knows perfectly well that the TARDIS is going to blow up. It's a pretty contrived way to get River Song onto the scene.

Then there's the set piece with the knackered Cyberman, which has “padding” acid-etched all over it and very obviously serves no purpose except to wake us up in the middle of that monumental longueur in the basement beneath Stonehenge. I mean, I like Cybermen too, and it's interesting to see this new take on the idea of them as body-snatching rogue technology, but it doesn't belong in this story. A sentry, indeed; hacked up by Celts, I'm sure; pull the other one, it's got a dessicated head in it.

And who's grooming the monsters, ready for the Monster Parade? The execution's immeasurably better than Dimensions in Time, but the basic idea looks to be pretty much the same – dig out whatever monster costumes we've got available until we've got enough for a crowd scene. The Silurians are there, for some reason. So's that thing that was caught up in the Scooby-Doo chase scene in Love & Monsters – I hadn't realised he felt so strongly about it. (Couldn't spot them in the episode, but publicity shots even included that well-known race of galactic conquerors, the Weevils from Torchwood. Hmmm.) In principle, the idea of all these alien fiends teaming up to fight the Doctor is extremely cheesy; the idea that they're doing it because he's going to destroy the universe and they're going to save it is brilliant; but there's a part of me that instinctively recoils from the old pile-everything-on finale moment regardless. At least that bit of the episode was brief.

And how did they all get there? Did they hitch a lift with the Daleks, or are they all time-travellers now? Or did Moffat just really want Romans in this one and to hell with explanations?

I have a couple of other questions. Are we now to assume that the Nestene carry their own supplies of plastic around with them, since there's no way they'd be able to source the stuff in Roman Britain? And it's possible that this may be addressed in next week's episode, but I do wonder how Rory remembers everything up to his death if he's based on “psychic residue” the monster alliance picked up at Amy's house.

And yet, and yet. There is something of an epic feeling about it all. And even though it wasn't hard to guess who was going to end up inside the Pandorica, it was still a neat idea. Top moments of the episode for me include:

• The scene in the prison after River escapes.
• “I said off the wrist...”
• The clever twist that, after the Doctor's repeated his bit about the Pandorica being “a fairy tale” and then found the real thing, it turns out that it is a fairy tale after all, lifted from Amy's book.
• The incidental music abruptly cutting out as everything vanishes.

But by and large, I found it entertaining without being particularly memorable. Usual first-part-of-a-two-parter caveats apply, but I'm tentatively giving The Pandorica Opens 6 out of 10.
(Edit: On further consideration, 7 out of 10. This puts it on a par with The Eleventh Hour and Utopia, both of which I think compare aptly.)

As I Was Going Up The Stair

Obvious choice of title this week. It's either that or very obscure Bowie references.

So, The Lodger. Another good episode, I think. It may basically just be 45 minutes of Matt Smith being wacky, but this isn't the worst thing in the world (he's still the most right thing about this series). Can't do that every week, obviously, so it's as well that they work it for all it's worth while they are doing it.

Highlights include the Doctor's antics in the call centre – wish fulfilment for us all, I dare say – and just about the entire five minutes after the Doctor first enters the building. I imagine the business with the football match might grate with some fans, but it doesn't seem out of place to me. After all, Old Who had Peter Davison taking part in – and outrageously dominating – a cricket match, and for much the same reason of getting some light-hearted mileage out of the star's hobbies. (See also Sylvester McCoy and spoons, or Jon Pertwee and motorised vehicles.)

I've mentioned before that there's a tradition in DW of sending up other programmes, so it was only natural that a sitcom episode would turn up sooner or later. It's surprising that it hasn't been done before. (The show nearly included a spoof of George and Mildred in the mid-1960s, but I'm not sure it would have been such a success as this more general parody. Edit: ignore this bit, I'm talking bollocks.) Naturally the Doctor sees straight through the situation, just as the viewers at home can and the characters in the situation can't, and naturally he comments on it right from the start. I'm sure if we looked at this episode more closely, we'd find a lot of clever things going on, but we'd probably need to be a lot more familiar with real sitcoms to spot them all, and I'm probably better off just enjoying the episode as is.

There's a mystery left hanging as to whose time machine that actually was, but for what it's worth I don't think we're ever going to find out the answer. (Maybe next year I'll be proved wrong.) We're given all the information we need for the story to work, and besides, the script didn't labour the point in an arc-related kind of way. Plus I've seen the Internet scuttlebutt and... well, Gareth Roberts has a sense of humour... the intended identity of the missing pilot has been “revealed”, and it's pretty obviously a joke. The loose thread might be picked up at some later point, but it's not that important to the story.

Other points of interest. Last week the Doctor understands the vocalisations of an alien that seems to fall more into the category of “animal” than of “sentient being” – this week we see him getting some very specific information out of a cat. Hmmm. And what the hell was up with that second victim? Had she been out working the streets, or just partying really hard?

There's not much more to say. It's a light episode, after all. A nice complement to the heavier Vincent and the Doctor – they make a fine pair of episodes. I think it's another 9 this week – a lower 9, but certainly not an 8. At last, a Gareth Roberts episode that I like!

Next week, every old monster they could dig up. The omens are iffy.


This seems like a good point at which to check back on those recurring themes I listed a few weeks ago. Some are still going, some aren't, and there are a couple of new ones to add:
- Cheesy Voiceovers -
I'd thought the nursery rhyme voiceovers in The Beast Below were a one-off, but then came the rotten reminiscences of Werther's Original Silurian in Cold Blood. Arguably, we might include the reprise of Rosanna's dialogue at the end of Vampires of Venice, but that might be pushing the point. It'll be interesting to see if this one pops up in the finale. Notable previous instances include Moffat's own Forest of the Dead. A few of RTD's episodes had voiceovers too, but the only one I can think of that didn't turn out to be in-story was Rose's voiceover in Doomsday.
- Old Faces of '63 -
We've had the montage in The Eleventh Hour, the library card with Hartnell's face in Vampires of Venice, and a sudden burst of activity in the last two episodes – the faces of Hartnell and Troughton gratuitously displayed last week, and another montage this week. You can tell they've got a new set of action figures to sell, can't you? The old Doctors – gotta catch 'em all, kids! Surely a safe bet for the finale.
- Memory -
Well, this has practically become the entire basis for the series, what with all the business in Cold Blood about Amy needing to remember Rory. I don't think the last couple of episodes have added anything to this beyond Amy not remembering Rory and the Doctor discreetly worrying about it. Watch this space.
- Fairy Tale -
In The Lodger, the Doctor tells Craig he's a “dream”. Possibly significant. By and large, though, there hasn't been much more on this apart from the vague fairy tale resonance you'd usually expect from DW.
- Your Television is Watching You! -
All quiet on this front since Flesh and Stone, at least as far as I've been able to notice. Just a general Moffatism, then.
- Eyes -
To this list, add the mouth-eyeballs of the pensioner monsters in Amy's Choice, and the major theme of perception in Vincent and the Doctor. (And the Silurians' third eyes – oh no, wait, fumbled that one.) Plenty of malarkey with “perception filters” in this series too, but that just seems to be part of the standard schtick now, along with the psychic paper and “sonicking” everything. It may yet prove significant, it may not.

At Eternity's Gate

I'm not sure if I'd give Vincent and the Doctor a perfect 10, but it's pretty close. It's at least a high 9. At this point in a decidedly variable series of DW, it's very welcome.

I've only seen four real criticisms raised about the episode, and can only see the same four myself:

- Everybody except the museum curator – even Vincent himself – pronounces his name “van Goff”.
I suppose old linguistic habits die hard. The authentic Dutch pronunciation of “Gogh” would sound more like the German “hoch”, I'm told. Still, it could've been worse – we could've had the American (and somewhat word-associational) “van go”.
- The monster's just a big four-legged chicken.
My first thought on hearing this was, “Sounds like a gryphon – it's just a bunch of fans being silly about a gryphon.” But no, it really is a big four-legged chicken. Eh well. It's not the first time DW's featured a silly-looking monster – this series alone we've had giant flying eyeballs and shambling evil pensioners – and it really wasn't all that bad. Besides, it's strictly a secondary concern in this character-driven episode.
- That scene near the end is a bit trowelled on.
Well, a teensy bit maybe. The music is surplus to requirements (just be thankful they didn't use that Don McLean song). Perhaps the rave about van Gogh is a bit overdone, although we can argue till we're blue about personal artistic preferences, and to be honest I'd expect the curator of a van Gogh exhibition in the Musée d'Orsay to be enthusiastic on the subject. It's also a rather lovely opening up of the curator's character, tucked away underneath the much more visible opening up of Vincent. So on the whole I'd stand by that scene.
- He'd actually already painted the Sunflowers two years earlier.
Oh, shush, you.

There may be an element of sharp relief here, coming after two weeks of the Chibnall Devastation, but it's surprising just how much of this episode works and how little of it irks.

It's a wonderful character piece, a “historical celebrity” episode that – very unusually, these days – develops the character of the famous guest personage in some depth. Pretty well all the other “historical celebrity” episodes since Easter 2005 have simply caricatured their focal characters, camping up their dialogue and sticking them into situations that spoof the works they're known for. They've been like little video souvenirs from the gift shop of the Extruded Historical Experience Theme Park (“titles available in this range include Dickens, Shakespeare and Christie”). Vincent and the Doctor has an element of this, granted, but it goes beyond it and resists the urge towards egginess as far as it can. The Doctor and Amy don't merely gawp at the famous person and get him to do his party pieces – they actually get to know him as a person. That this is a story about an artist rather than an author may possibly help – better suited to the visual media, y'see. But there's really no excuse why other episodes of the type shouldn't strive to be at least as rounded as this one.

It's only right at the very end that Richard Curtis really lets the cheese out, with a dedication to Amy appearing on the Sunflowers. But that's set against a broader ending that's emotionally honest and extremely uncheesy – a couple of days of adventure and friendship haven't magically sorted out Vincent's problems, and the last weeks of his life play out as before. There's just a pile of good things and a pile of bad things, and the Doctor and Amy can console themselves that they've added to the good things.

That said, there isn't really enough room in the episode to properly explore Vincent's madness/depression, and a Saturday evening family show probably isn't the best place to try either. I understand that an “If you've been affected” message was run after the UK broadcast – I wouldn't have thought the issue was handled strongly enough for that to be necessary, although presumably the Beeb would rather be on the safe side. I didn't feel that Vincent's depression (if such it was in reality) was handled badly or dishonestly, just ...lightly.

Which brings us to the notion of the monster as a metaphor for Vincent's mental illness. Or is it? Yes, there's something to be made out of him fighting his literal invisible demon, but killing the monster doesn't actually do anything to help Vincent psychologically. And for all that it's a thing composed in equal parts of brutality and hurt, it's also a literal invisible alien creature that kills a number of rustic French girls – a part of the plot that wasn't addressed in any great detail – and there's no reason to believe that anyone around the real van Gogh ever died because of his issues, literally or figuratively. It seems unlikely that Curtis would have written the story this way and not intended us to read this into it, but ultimately it's... well... only partly successful? pleasantly ambiguous?

(One small side thought occurs to me about the invisible chicken monster. It's interesting that the Doctor is (nearly) able to understand it, and vice versa. Presumably this ties in with the usual business of a “Time Lord gift” or the TARDIS' telepathic circuits translating for everyone in the vicinity, although on this occasion Amy and Vincent seem to be left out. But then again the Doctor can't exactly hold a conversation with the monster. Perhaps it's awkwardly positioned on the threshold between translatable sentient creature and untranslatable animal. I imagine there's a fanzine article in this, for the enterprising fan who (unlike me) has the time and the videos to check back through the old series for instances of the Doctor apparently communicating with animals.)

But as I've said above, the monster is secondary to the real focus of this episode, the characters. With some nice location settings and minimal special effects – and how about that Starry Night? Eh? How about that?! - the Who team have presented us with a simple but affecting tale of three friends (one of whom happens to be a manic depressive Impressionist). Really great script, too, and tip-top acting throughout. This is the episode that's charmed me most this series, and indeed it's the first episode this series to really do so.

Next week, it appears that the Doctor lands in the middle of a romantic sitcom – could be interesting.

Down, Down, Deeper and Down

Across the land, storm clouds gather and terrible omens are reported. Brave men weep and women wail and rend their garments, and possibly vice versa. Horses whinny and dogs howl, unable to understand or express any more than that something is amiss.

The Doctor has just learned that Malohkeh, the Silurian scientist, has spent centuries abducting human children from the surface world and experimenting on them – and as we know from the cliffhanger, even though he's noticed that his human captives are wearing artificial fabrics that could only be produced by an intelligent species, he's quite happy vivisecting them. He's the Dr Mengele of the Silurian world. Was he acting alone, or as part of a group, the Doctor asks? In a group at first, but lo these many years alone, replies the scientist. And the Doctor says, I rather love you, and they bump fists.

This is a horrific mis-step for Doctor Who. I'm inclined to view it as less grievous than the Doctor's plan to lobotomise the whale in The Beast Below, if only because the entire resolution of this story doesn't hinge on it; but at least then the Doctor himself acknowledged, within the script, that he was doing something grossly out of character, and at least he voiced some criticism. Here the Doctor doesn't even seem to notice what's going on. He sees in Malohkeh a fellow loner, another solitary man of science – at least, that's how I assume we're meant to read the scene – and somehow this blinds him utterly to what the guy's done to who knows how many people, including two other characters who are right there in the same room. Of all the things wrong with Cold Blood, this is the one I find most startling. And it's one little scene that could so easily have been re-written at any time, even while they were filming it – it astonishes me that Steven Moffat could have failed to do anything about it as much as that Chris Chibnall wrote it. D minus, detention, Doctor Who.

Other problems with the episode are less easily remedied.

Permeating the whole script is the idea that Ambrose (human = sympathetic) can be forgiven for her actions, yet she's far from redeemable. Her killing of Alaya might be considered manslaughter rather than murder, but she's obviously prepared to torture Alaya to get what she wants, and never mind the “I don't want to do this” bullshit. That taser sure as hell didn't walk into that church crypt on its own – see also last week, when her first instinct was to reach for the surprising range of weaponry she has at home. She also threatens the entire Silurian community with the mining drill, with Tony Mack's assistance – an act that requires malice and calculation, not the panicked act of a hysterical mother. What we're shown in both episodes is that she's a premeditating aggressor, and not the sympathetic character the writer wants us to believe she is.

The Doctor's initial reprimand of her, and his later smiling admonishment, constitute one of the limpest slaps on the wrist I've ever seen in this series. She's threatened to destroy the entire Silurian city and she's killed, yet she will never be held accountable for either because no one outside her village knows what a Silurian is. She's getting away with murder, if you like. But the Doctor doesn't come out and say that, presumably because somebody thought it would be too strong for teatime family viewing. Given the personalities involved, there's every reason to assume that by the end of the week, her husband and son will have forgiven her, the whole incident will have come to seem like a kind of game or a dream (even if the time crack doesn't erase it outright), and she'll be no better than she was before. Certainly, she can look back on it all and say that she achieved exactly what she wanted – she got her family back and she made the scary lizard people go away for (as good as) ever.

I've seen it suggested that we should consider Ambrose and Restac as parallel characters, but the whole way they're handled is just too different. Restac (non-human = unsympathetic) is written to be an out-and-out psycho – she kills Malohkeh out of sheer spite, and her revenge for her twin's death is to chase through the tunnels, even at the cost of her own life, just so that she can kill whichever of the retreating humans she gets a shot at. Now, it's an easy and cheap cliché to depict military commanders in dramatic fiction as psychos, and it's common enough in children's programming, but it's far from honest – people don't get promoted into positions of strategic responsibility just by being murderously deranged. (Although having a political leader who's prepared to patronise her in front of foreign visitors might not have done her any psychological favours.) It's just dodgy characterisation. Restac's motivation may be broadly similar to Ambrose's, but while the script is busy pulling the viewer in one false direction with Ambrose, it's pulling equally hard in an opposite but equally false direction with Restac.

In a story that metaphorically touches on issues of colonialism and/or immigration (depending on how you choose to interpret the Silurians' situation in general), it's a valid (if cynical) choice to show our sympathetic characters reacting in a blinkered and aggressive way towards the Other, provided the Doctor – the show's moral touchstone – gives us some indication of what ought to happen instead. In 1970, he continues to press for peace between the two species until the Brigadier goes behind his back and blows up the Silurian base, to which his response is, “But that's murder!”. In 2010, he suggests the Silurians all bugger off like a good, docile minority for the next thousand years (which their leader agrees to!) and hope that things change for the better in the meantime. So who's going to change – the Silurians, out of sight and out of mind for another millennium, asleep the whole time? The humans who, in the Silurians' absence, aren't going to have to get used to the idea of sharing the planet with them? I hope you see the problem here – action replay in 1000 years' time.

(I realise that we might imagine other isolated pockets of Silurians popping up in the intervening centuries, but this particular group is presented to us as the “entire civilisation”, and there's no reason for the average viewer to believe otherwise.)

Now, I know that there's a good argument to be made that you can't have the Silurians cohabiting with humanity in a present-day setting, even if time is in flux, for the practical real-world reason that it would hobble future production teams. For the sake of internal believability, they'd have to include Silurians (or at least mention of them) in any given contemporary story; in doing so they'd lose external believability, because lizard people aren't a part of regular, everyday life in contemporary reality. The solution, of course, assuming the writer wants to do something positive and (perhaps more importantly) original with the Silurians, is to set the story in the future – but The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood isn't set far enough into the future. It's a half-arsed ten years away, for no obvious reason except the spurious scene where Amy and Rory wave at their future selves. Even so, there's no reason why we couldn't have left the Welsh villagers and the Silurians tentatively getting to know each other, while the Doctor briefs Elliott on his adult role as the first human co-chair of an inter-species equivalent of the UN, in a safe twenty or thirty years' time. All right, that's not the story Chris Chibnall wanted to tell. But Malcolm Hulke already told the story Chibnall wanted to tell forty years ago, and for my money he did a much better job of it.

A few smaller gripes now. The voiceover – and that's something I've missed off my list of series motifs – is cheesy as well as unnecessary, especially in the negotiation scene. Which I disliked, by the way - “But if we let the Silurians reclaim the bits of the planet we can't live in, what's in it for us?” (Very modern ethics there. How about “not being killed in an inter-species war” for a start?) Some rather nasty cod dialogue throughout that scene, and elsewhere there are some horribly glib lines from Amy. Cutting back to the voiceover, apparently Eldane is yet another character who inexplicably knows all about the series arc and what the Doctor's got coming to him. In the control room near the end, I noted the Star Trek bridge noises, which at least fits with the new Silurian make-up. Amy getting hold of that gizmo from Malohkeh's pocket is a bit... hmm... and why is it that you need the right genetic code to unlock the medical specimen cubicles, but any fool can open up the Silurians' hibernation cubicles and steal their guns? Oh, and somewhat stupid of the Doctor to tell Restac that the last time a group of Silurians woke up, the humans wiped them out.

The best bit of the episode was the series arc stuff grafted on to the end, a state of affairs that doesn't exactly reflect well on the episode itself. Rory's death scene was so-so, but I did very much like the scene afterwards of the Doctor trying to persuade Amy not to forget him – the montage, the music, the whole general thing, the sudden jolt that wrecks the situation. Interesting to see how Amy's Choice foreshadowed both big moments at the end of this episode – the death, and the explosion shrapnel.

I'm inclining towards a 3 out of 10 for Cold Blood, but this may tilt into a 4 by comparison with The Beast Below. It's gone beyond merely mediocre and into bad, but even so.

I haven't had the chance to sneakily watch any whole or part episodes after this one on Y**t*b*, so it's virgin viewing from here on in. Next week's episode looks like a good 'un.

It's Not Easy Being Green

The Hungry Earth is an episode that borrows widely and quite heavily from the Jon Pertwee era of Old Who, but only in superficial ways. There are little images and echoes, but none of the social or political awareness that the Pertwee era was soaked in, and – of most relevance – none of the subtext and debate one might expect of a sequel to The Silurians. I know that some of this will crop up in next week's episode, but I'd better not go into detail about that at this point. I'll add it to what is already shaping up to be a long review for next week.

This first half of the story was pretty superficial all over, being mostly set-up, quite a bit of waiting for things to happen and a small portion of action. The human characters aren't very well developed, and we haven't even met most of the Silurian characters yet. Essentially what we've got here is an episode composed of thumbnail sketches, not just in terms of the cast but in narrative terms as well. The Lovely Jo complained throughout about clichés in the script; I'd certainly agree that it's a perfunctory bit of work.

In particular, some more background on Dr Choudry and her team (and by “team” I mean Tony Mack) would have been nice, since she seems to be the most significant guest character. Any hint of motivation would have been appreciated too – it might have made her activity in this episode seem less like a series of leaps and more like a continuing journey. Oh look, now she's got a thing with Tony Mack! Now she trusts the Doctor completely! Now she wants to explore underground!

What's going on with the drilling project? Eh, it's just a big drill. There's some story about unusual mineral deposits turning the grass blue, but I don't see how that translates into a project to drill further down into the Earth's crust than ever before. Some sort of soil analysis would seem a more obvious course of action, if grass is involved. And who's paid for this monumental project? Does Dr Choudry report to a board of directors, or perhaps to a Minister for Science? Is she funding the operation out of her own private fortune? (And after all, would anyone else stump up – at a guess – billions of pounds to drill through 21km of crust just on the offchance of finding some mineral deposits?)

My other question (and The Lovely Jo's) is, where are all the staff? Wouldn't a project of this magnitude need more than two scientists and what looks like maybe half a dozen manual labourers working on it? Wouldn't it need more than one night watchman? And would the scientists really pack up for the night mere seconds after making their big breakthrough? Wouldn't they wait around for the first exciting data? Are they really such extreme clock-watchers?

A quick thought: “Cwmtaff”?! Seriously? Jesus.

I can understand the cricket bat and other improvised stick-type weapons, but I have to wonder just why the Welsh family's private arsenal includes a shotgun and a taser. Did they have to hunt for their food in the wild before the drilling project brought jobs to the valley? Were they previously employed by a dodgy private security firm? Are they just survival nuts? What's the story there? (I mean, yes, I know what the story's going to be, I just can't see the justification for how it got there to begin with.)

As with previous Silurian stories, there's an attempt to give the lizard people a generic name that backfires. “Silurian” was the first one, and although it's stuck, within two years Jon Pertwee was explaining to his companion that it was inaccurate and “Eocene” would have been more appropriate. Except that it wouldn't. Here, after briefly paying lip service to the geologically based misnomers of the past, Chris Chibnall contributes a biologically based one of his own: homo reptilia. I'm not sure which is the worse gaffe – suggesting that the lizard people originated millions of years before the dinosaurs even evolved, or giving them a taxonomic name that implies they belong to the same genus as humans. (Well, the back cover of The Silurians' novelisation back in the 1970s claimed that Tyrannosaurus rex was “the biggest mammal that ever lived” - perhaps it's all one big knowing joke?) The New DW Adventures, a range of original novels published by Virgin in the right-on 1990s, suggested “Earth Reptiles”, which is probably the best of the bunch. But to be honest, if they're not going to take the risk of giving the Silurians a cheesy sci-fi name in their own language, I'd rather they ducked the whole issue and just called them lizard people.

(EDIT: A quick suspicious flick through the pages of Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters reveals that in fact Malcolm Hulke used the phrase "homo reptilia" himself! As if calling T-rex a mammal weren't enough! So it's his fault and not Chris Chibnall's! Although I could've done without having it used on screen...)

The Silurian make-up is a bit of a let-down. The biggest and most immediately obvious change is the loss of the old third eye, surely the distinctive feature of this Who monster. It'd be like having a new Cyberman costume without the jug handles on the head; and now that I live in a country with a surviving three-eyed reptile species, I can merrily say that considerations of realism don't enter into it, if they ever would have. Just some lizardly contact lenses and some camouflage for the clearly human maxillo-dental area could have done wonders for the new look – a bit of green face paint isn't really sufficient. The Lovely Jo suggested that the more rugged looking masks the Silurians wore, with some articulation around the mouth, would have been a much better “face” than what we actually got, which seems to be the view of a lot of Who fans online.

And this year's award for the least subtle bit of plot telegraphy goes to: “I'm just popping down to the Silurian base – don't kill the hostage while I'm away!”

All in all, this is 45 minutes of passable Who, but nothing special. It's not notably good, but it's not notably bad either, so I'm inclined to give it 5 out of 10. Next time, as someone once said, I shall not be so lenient...

Night of the Nearly Dead

(Alternative title: You're the Doctor of my Dreams. But I worried that readers wouldn't get the reference to “Henry Kissinger”.)

I enjoyed Amy's Choice less than I was expecting to, based on reports from the UK. It's a concept with huge potential, but the execution felt too pat in places, particularly the ending, and the Dream Lord just ended up feeling corny.

I think it's in the delivery as much as anything. Written down in reviews and forum discussions, his bon mots seemed all right – even witty, some of them – but on the screen they sounded like the sort of smart-alecky barbs you'd expect a smug fanboy to have written. And this is surprising, because as far as I'm aware Simon Nye is a sitcom writer who happens to have scripted an episode of Who, and not a smug fanboy at all. It's one of life's mysteries. I'm inclined to blame Toby Jones' slightly affected performance.

This is an episode that wears its subtext on its sleeve – in fact, the text and subtext are damn near identical. Amy's choice is between daunting maturity, symbolised by family life with Rory in a cosy village where children are destroyed by evil old people, and a frozen childhood symbolised by the frozen TARDIS. She's the star burning cold, and the unchanging refuge for herself threatened by age. (It's tempting to make a connection between her inner child and the literal inner child she's on the verge of expelling in the Upper Leadworth reality.) By the end of the episode, she's chosen maturity – she's prepared to accept the reality of growing up as long as Rory's there, and the Doctor won't let her remain in stasis. Character development at last.

All of this is good, solid, back-of-a-cereal-packet-philosophy stuff, and it or the dark side of the Doctor's mind alone ought to have been able to support an episode. Together, they ought to be a phenomenon. I'm not sure why it doesn't quite work for me.

It's a little awkward watching an episode in which the Doctor cracks a joke about self-harm, our heroes encourage each other to beat up old ladies with lengths of wood, and a pregnant woman commits suicide. I don't think there was any outcry over any of this, and presumably “it was all a dream” is an acceptable get-out as far as any given viewer is concerned, but still. This may be part of my quarrel with this episode. It's also uncomfortable, if interesting, to re-read the Dream Lord's dialogue as a kind of confession on the Doctor's part. Although again, there's a get-out, that the Doctor believes no one could hate him as much as he hates himself, so really all of this is just abysmally low self-esteem. Still 'n' all, that's not the most inspirational line to take with the kiddies' hero. And the one-sentence summary of the episode would have to be “The dark side of the Doctor's mind forces Amy, through psychological manipulation, to choose between the Doctor and Rory”, which doesn't look too hot either.

“It was all a dream” even offers a get-out for the traditional narrative quirks like Rory taking ten times as long to die as any minor character, or the pensioner monsters failing to attack anyone convincingly after the initial threat is established. (Doctor in the minivan, picking up the terrorised citizens of Upper Leadworth: “Quick, while they're being rubbish!”)

As I write this, I'm starting to see this episode more and more as a dazzling post-modern masterwork that I personally just don't get – a sort of 21st century Carnival of Monsters. It's obvious on paper just how brilliant it is, I'm just not blown away by it on the screen. On the plus side, this was the week that Amy and Rory both finally clicked as characters for me. And Matt Smith, as ever, was tip-top.

I'm veering between 7 and 8 out of 10. I reason that it ought to be higher, but I feel that it ought not.

The Calvierri School for Finishing Girls

Astute viewers may notice some similarities between The Vampires of Venice and Toby Whithouse's previous Who script, School Reunion – voracious monsters disguised as humans; the low-key confrontation between the Doctor and the monsters' enigmatic spokesperson; the façade of a prestigious school; the companion's boyfriend playing lemon. By and large it all works well again, freshened up with a change of cast and a spot of location filming. Where it falls down is the ending.

The vampire girls have been dramatically dispatched, Amy and Rory have taken care of the Mummy's boy vampire, and all that's left is for the Doctor to talk chief vampire Rosanna into surrendering. Except that there's still ten minutes of the episode left to fill, so we have Rosanna switching on a machine that magically creates environmental chaos in Venice – including an earthquake, but not the tidal wave the Doctor says should follow – a bit of Batman-walking up the side of a bell tower, and the Doctor flipping the single switch that magically restores the Venetian environment to its former pristine condition. Switch the weather on, switch the weather off, sorted. Instant bobbins.

The episode was doing all right up until then. Nothing too taxing, just a pleasant spot of Hammer homage – ah, the old brushed-back hair and white shifts – and some pretty Croatian locations. (Well done, Croatia.) An innocuous, lightweight episode, a bit of a mid-season breather before next week's tricksy episode and the next two-parter.

Is it just me, or do all the best scenes in this episode have Rory in them? And yet I'd say it's not Rory himself, but the way the Doctor (and in the sword fight scene, Amy) plays off him that brings the scenes to life. I'm a bit hum-ho about Arthur Darvill, or at least about the way he's playing Rory – perhaps he'll grow on me. But the scenes are fantastic – the Doctor producing his ACME strip-light and awkwardly crashing the stag party are comedy gold, and there's some nice perceptive banter from Rory about the Doctor's character.

That's pretty much all I have to say about The Vampires of Venice. It'd be a fairly ordinary monster run-around if it weren't for the zingy comedy dialogue lifting it up, and the slack ending pulling it back down. I think it probably deserves a 6 out of 10.

Fallen Angels

Dear UK readers – thanks to the kindly souls who keeping sticking chunks of the episodes up on Y**t*b*, I've seen the episode you'll have seen this week, and I'm itching to discuss a scene that, quite frankly, has given me conniptions. No, not that scene. But restraint must prevail – this blog will review the new series of Doctor Who according to NZ's broadcast schedule, and we can't spoiler The Lovely Jo. (Be warned, I'll edit spoilery comments too.) But by cracky, I've got things to say about it. They'll have to keep for another four weeks.

So, Flesh and Stone. I think we're holding steady in the region of 8 out of 10. The episode trundles on at much the same pace as its predecessor, it holds together well (paradoxical bits notwithstanding), it has many exemplary scenes. Although the “gravity failure” resolution was signposted, it has in its favour the facts that it's simple, elegant, makes sense and – rarely enough in New Who – rests on a bit of science fictional trickery that hasn't been pulled out of a hat and veiled in babble.

More good work from the cast. Those clerics never did get much by way of character development, mind you, apart from the revelation that they're foolish enough to split up and wander off into the forest despite all warnings to the contrary. The scene where they go one by one to investigate the time crack and vanish from existence has a very dreamlike feel to it, like much else this series, which I like. The “tree-borg” idea is a lot of fun, and the forest inside the spaceship is a solid gold off-the-wall DW concept.

Yes, I can now see problems with the army of Weeping Angels, now that they're chasing through a series of brightly lit sets instead of dark caverns, and can thus unquestionably see each other. Also, while actually seeing the Angels move in that one scene is pretty cool, maintaining the conceit that our own viewerly observation could freeze the Angels was, for my money, cooler, and it's a shame to have broken that. The big turnaround I see here is the suggestion that the Angels aren't “quantum locked” by direct observation any longer, but merely freeze instinctively if they think you're looking. The flipside of that being that presumably they'd move around under observation if they didn't think they were being observed, which doesn't chime with what we were told in Blink and shown then and last week. So I think Steven Moffat has slightly outfudged himself here for the sake of easing this story along, although not in a way that affects my enjoyment of it.

Moving on to the paradoxical bits. Now, to some extent we have to just shrug and accept this as is, because that's the way of time-travel paradox stories; but at the end of the story the clerics (and presumably the bishop, once the gravity went) have never existed to make the expedition, the Angels have never existed to justify the expedition, and River Song is on a strange planet without a good excuse for how or why she isn't still locked up in jail, or how the spaceship behind her crashed with all on board dead. Obviously the effects of the erased characters' actions aren't completely removed from history, and by her own account River still remembers it all because she's travelled in time (with the Doctor, or as a Time Agent?). But unless her prison warder and anyone else she reports to are also time travellers and thus likely to remember the ex-characters, I don't see how she's going to convince them that she's “done enough to earn a pardon this time”.

I'm pleased that the time crack plays such a large part in this story. It's nice to see the series arc integrating with the episode storyline at this relatively early point in the series – both because it spares us from having mere tacked-on time crack cameos week after week until a big final episode reveal, and because it comes hard on the heels of two weeks of precisely that. It gives me hope that this series arc will develop, even flourish, in tandem with the weekly stories, to the benefit of both. We shall see.

I am slightly curious, though, as to how the big voidy crack that can only be closed by pushing temporally significant things into it ties in with the big gateway crack in The Eleventh Hour that could be closed simply by “opening it all the way”, and which didn't erase things from history. Hopefully that'll be addressed in due course too.


Five episodes into the series, a number of recurring themes have emerged, and just for a laugh I'll list out here what I've noticed and can remember. We'll see how many of them prove to be significant.
- Fairy Tale -
Amelia Pond's name in The Eleventh Hour is twice described as “something in a fairy tale”; the nursery rhymes in The Beast Below, and the episode overall, have the feel of a fairy tale about them; this week we're told the Pandorica is “a fairy tale”, to which River's intriguing response is “Aren't we all?” This is obviously leading somewhere (not to mention that Moffat's been pushing the “fairy tale” angle mercilessly in interviews for months now) – but where?
- Your Television Is Watching You! -
First we have the Atraxi on every TV in the world in The Eleventh Hour, actual giant eyeballs looking out from inside the box; then, in addition to the Orwellian stuff, we have the voting video in The Beast Below, which includes a “Starship UK” logo transparently based on ye olde BBC logo; the Dalek Supreme on the TARDIS screen in Victory of the Daleks is a borderline case, as is River's black box message to the Doctor, although we could include both as examples; most recently and most blatantly, we have a recording of a Weeping Angel emerging from a TV screen. I suspect this probably isn't going to play a part in the finale – it's something that Moffat just seems to be obsessed with (qv the DVD “easter egg” in Blink, or Mr Hyde's message to his “daddy” in Moffat's Jekyll series) – but then again...
- Memory -
The wilful act of Forgetting in The Beast Below was the prime example of this until now; we've also had Amy not remembering the existence of an entire room in her house and not remembering the Daleks; now we have the crack in time and space removing characters from memory, and the Doctor insisting that Amy “remember what I told you when you were seven” (which was what, exactly? something for the finale?). This is already visibly tied in with the series arc, so it's a definite biggie.
- Eyes -
Slightly tenuous, but we've had all that business with eyes in this two-parter (“the eyes are not the windows of the soul, but the doors”, the importance of not looking the Weeping Angels in the eye, the Angel lodging in Amy's mind's eye but appearing (to us, at least) in her physical eye and shedding dust through her eyes) to add to the Atraxi, the elements of surveillance in The Beast Below, and the now obligatory Dalek point of view shots that show us the inside of the Dalek's eye.


Oh yes, I had a theory to share about that final scene. Within the story, it explained itself and, in context, neither Jo nor I thought there was anything particularly wrong with it. Might surprise some younger viewers, but hey. Outside the story, I'm wondering if perhaps this was Moffat's way of trying to discourage “shippers” (fans who are obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with the idea of a sexual relationship between the Doctor and his companion) through a kind of shock therapy. He has a track record of trying to separate the Doctor and the companion romantically (Comic Relief sketches notwithstanding):

• in the Empty Child two-parter, he introduced Captain Jack, who (briefly) swept Rose off her feet, while the Doctor suddenly became more awkward
• in The Girl in the Fireplace, running completely and very noticeably counter to RTD's romantic story arc between the Tenth Doctor and Rose, he had the Doctor getting involved with Mme de Pompadour and Rose chumming up with her notional boyfriend Mickey
• in the Silence in the Library two-parter, he introduced a character who's been presented to us as “the Doctor's wife”, which surely must be the ultimate “hands-off” to all companions from here on in

But still the shippers ship, and the only way Moffat can escalate matters further is with this narrative atomic bomb. Not that it (or, indeed, anything) would ever work, but I wonder if that was the intention.

Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set

Damn it, Mr Moffat, you're giving the younger viewers mixed signals with your Weeping Angels! First you tell 'em to keep watching - now you tell 'em that staring at a Weeping Angel on a telly screen is the worst thing they can do! There'll be interdenominational purges in the playground, I can just see it.

I think the new series has just about clicked for me now. The new theme arrangement started to feel right last week, and now we've got another good episode to follow it. Hopefully this is where the series finds its feet - it's generally taken the full first half of the run for any given series of New Who to get really good, the exception in my eyes being the 2006 series which had a pronounced slump in the second half instead. Fingers crossed for no slump this time round.

It's a provisional top-end 8 out of 10 for The Time of Angels, although as usual with two-parters I'll reserve final judgement until I've seen the other episode. It's a good 'un, but like the Silence in the Library two-parter it's coming on like Steven Moffat's Greatest Hits. No catchphrase cliffhanger, thank goodness. 51st century again, though, which means dead characters talking again. Obviously River Song vs Weeping Angels was going to happen sooner or later.

It's good that Moffat's trying out something new with the Weeping Angels, but it's equally good that he has the Doctor commenting on it, otherwise it'd look a bit odd next to their behaviour in Blink. They're clearly trying to manipulate the Doctor into doing something for them, but what? (They've shown an interest in the TARDIS before - hmm... And now it looks as though they might have an agent on the inside, so to speak - hmm...) Some interesting hints on their origins - ideas that took on a life of their own, you say?

Alex Kingston doesn't seem quite as zingy as River Song as she did the last time. Maybe she's just acting a more abrasive, less mature River, who knows? Something seems a bit off. Nice to see Moffat playing about with her story a bit - keeps things interesting. I did have a theory about her, but it doesn't sit too well with her criminal past. Presumably all will be revealed in the series finale.

The "blue stabilisers" scene deserves special discussion. It's a problematic little nugget of script. On the one hand, it's a great throwaway line, a hilarious gag at the Doctor's expense and a novel way of boosting the significance of River's character. On the other hand, it makes no sense. The TARDIS makes that noise because the Doctor leaves the brakes on? So hang on, every Time Lord seen in the show's long history - and they designed the damn things, let's not forget - has left the brakes on? When the Time Lords sent the Jon Pertwee Doctor the missing engine parts for his TARDIS, those parts had brakes and the Time Lords left them on? It'd be the perfect bit of dialogue for a charity skit, but as a canonical part of the show's mythology it's just stupid.

We might also wonder who taught River how to fly the TARDIS (and how to write in the Time Lord equivalent of Latin) if she's not joking about the Doctor being busy that day.

That's my only particular gripe about this story so far, and it's a gripe about a comedy scene, so overall things are looking good. Nice bit of James-Bond-in-space stuff at the start - we could use some of that more often. Although they haven't really come into their own as characters yet, some nice material around the Church's paramilitary wing. Nice teleport effect for their arrival. And the dead-character-talking stuff, for my money, was better than the dead-character-talking stuff in Silence in the Library. And the whole scene around the recording of the Weeping Angel was just great.

And oh look, a big crack in space and time - in the trailer at the end. Looks like it starts to get more serious next week.

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

Before we start dismantling Victory of the Daleks, let me just say that I'm going to give it 5 out of 10. It's bright and brash enough to be superficially entertaining, it has a couple of nice comedy moments and a decent supporting cast, and it's pacy. Right then. Bring in the power tools.

A lot of this episode has been built on reconstituted video product – grab bags full of war film references and clichés and a sprinkling of Star Wars visual effects (there's a fair bit of Star Wars about this series...). The young woman crying over her lover who “didn't make it back”, whose name I didn't catch – she's not there for the companion to talk to and empathise with, as would have happened in previous years, she's just there as a cipher, a bit of recycled war film imagery. The air raid warden is pure Ealing comedy.

Perhaps we shouldn't expect the Blitz to get any special treatment from Who – DW's historical stories are generally adventures in the Pop Culture Historical Experience rather than in history itself (from The Next Doctor's urchin-eriffic trawl through a hyper-Dickensian vision of Victorian London at Christmas, all the way back to Billy Hartnell meeting Marco Polo in China or witnessing the gunfight at the OK Corral). Winston Churchill's role in this story therefore isn't to be the centre of a fascinating examination of his end-justifies-the-means morality (would he really collaborate with the Daleks, if he knew what they really were?), but simply to be a historical celebrity. On the one hand this is a shame and a waste; on the other, it's just what the series does.

Incidentally, a quick Internet search reveals that “If Hitler invaded Hell, I'd give the Devil a favourable reference” is indeed (or nearly enough) a quote from Churchill himself. Sounded like it might have been. So, more surprisingly, is “Keep buggering on”.

The focus of the episode is quite definitely on the Daleks. If I had to guess at the mission statement for Victory of the Daleks in its entirety, it'd be “introduce the new-look Daleks”, with the World War Two material and the fun stuff with the “Ironsides” serving tea strictly incidental. But pretty much all they do, once introduced, is line up for the big Christmas shopping fashion shoot and then scarper. Admittedly there's not time for much more after the build-up, and that didn't feel particularly drawn out either – as I've said, it's a pacy episode. But it's a pretty shameless way of plugging your new spin-off merchandise.

There's really nothing I can say about the new Dalek design, because it's all been said already. Power Rangers, air fresheners, council recycling bins – I think the only epithet I haven't seen used is giant kulfi. I did briefly wonder if they might launch into a barbershop quartet quintet number, but no such luck. Probably the easiest way to rationalise them is to tie them in with Moffat's grand vision of DW as myth. They're giant Wagnerian Jotun-Daleks – bigger, boomier, in brighter primary colours than before. And with ironing boards in their backs. I think the underlying reason why this new design has come in for some flack is that it looks like exactly what it is: a brightly coloured plastic/fibreglass moulding. You could believe the 2005 model might have been made of metal; the old series Daleks may have looked like painted wood, but squint and you could kid yourself. Not a hope with these. Perhaps the idea is to make it as easy as possible for the toys to look like the real thing, by making the real thing look like a toy.

Nice and roomy for the operators, mind you. They can probably stand up inside those things.

I have three major gripes about the plot. Gripe number one: The Dalek “progenitor device”. So the Jotun-Daleks create a load of these and spread them across time and space, presumably as insurance against the Time War. The old series dealt once or twice with the idea that even Daleks created by Davros himself might not be considered “pure Daleks” as he just couldn't stop tinkering with them, and obviously during the Time War this happened again. The Jotun-Daleks seem to have anticipated this. But rather than give the progenitor device sufficiently vague parameters that it would respond to a modified Dalek, they instead set it so that it can only be activated if the Doctor is around to independently confirm the operator's identity. This is just asking for trouble. In fact, it's not clear why they wouldn't just set the things to aim for a planet and go off wherever they landed, spawning new-old Daleks all over the place. Or at least, wherever there's a dry ice machine, some disco lighting and the doors from the set of Stars in Their Eyes.

Gripe number two: Stopping the bomb from exploding by persuading it that it's human (or at least encouraging it to indulge in human feelings). In itself this isn't an absolute no-no – it's quite a DW thing to do, and a very New Who thing to do – but it needed some sort of explanation. Just a line or two of technobabble would have covered it, really. Just having the situation resolve itself that way with no set-up at all didn't feel very satisfying. Also, the Doctor had better be very sure that bomb's not going to start up again.

Gripe number three: Somehow, in the space of ten exegetic minutes, we go from Prof Bracewell telling Churchill about his “gravity bubble” idea to a dogfight in space. So that's: establish the plan and work out what materials are needed; have the materials delivered to the war bunker; actually construct the “gravity bubble” machinery; transport the machinery to an airfield, either with Bracewell (in which case add more time for him to return to the war bunker) or an assistant (in which case add more time for Bracewell to explain everything to him); fit it to a handful of Spitfires; find some pilots who haven't already been sent up against the incoming air raid and brief them, possibly allowing extra time for the pilots to laugh/freak out/refuse to listen to any more of this bally nonsense about space-Hun; get them from the ground into low Earth orbit; and wait for them to locate and arrive at the Dalek ship. All in ten minutes. My disbelief has just reached the Earth's core. It's probably as well that the episode didn't go into this in any detail, as the montage hasn't been cut that could take the job on.

But ultimately, it's all balanced out for me by the cracking “For Victory!” Dalek propaganda poster and the whole business with the Dalek offering tea. Yes, Matt Smith's very good again; so is Karen Gillan, although she didn't seem to get that much to do; Ian McNeice and Bill Paterson are great as Churchill and Bracewell. Yes, the thumbnail sketch glimpses of war-torn London we see are well realised. But it's the Dalek joke scenes that win me round. So this episode gets a steady 5 out of 10.

And oh look, a crack in space and time again. Just in case we'd forgotten.

I Wonder If It Will Be Friends With Me?

Quite apart from the whole business of “forgetting the last five years”, it's tempting to interpret The Beast Below as a comment on a certain type of post-2005 DW story. You've got your big, impressive idea, visual moments and one-liners huddled together inside, but no engine. The answer – so obvious! - is to take whatever's lurking below the surface, that big quasi-magical lump of emotion and psychology and metaphor, and force it to do the work of the plot. Don't look too closely though, or you might notice that the whole thing's flying through space on the back of a fricking whale!

The Beast Below doesn't have quite that problem – there's an engine, but it's clapped out. Some parts are missing, others have been kludged together with second-hand materials, and the whole lot's on the verge of breaking down. It keeps making unpleasant clunking noises, although I should point out that the grinding sound is coming from my teeth. After last week's promising start, it's a let-down.


Let's start with the acting, because I've got something nice to say about that. Matt Smith's really dazzling, a great Doctor after just two episodes – strong echoes of the old black-and-white Doctors, but distinctive in his own right. Karen Gillan's great here as well, and sparks off Matt very nicely. Otherwise it's a bit ho-hum this week. Sophie Okonedo gets by as Queen Liz 10, but whose decision was it to have her use that rotten Mockney accent? (Is Starship UK ruled by the Pearly Monarchy?) Terence “Demon Headmaster” Hardiman's role, although major, is pretty nondescript. No one else sticks in my memory, apart from the grating child actor delivering the rhyming couplets on that screen in the pre-credits.

The script is just... what happened? It's Steven Moffat, for goodness' sake! Now I don't know what to believe! It wasn't all bad – there were a couple of nice lines at the start for the Doctor and Amy - but it was a near thing. Some of it was too schmaltzy for my tastes. I'm thinking particularly here of the rhyming couplets at either end of the episode, and the suggestion that miraculous, world-saving aliens are uniquely motivated by the tears of little children. (I believe babies' smiles and the first flower of spring are also efficacious in certain cases.) I even thought the incidental music was going to turn Disney at one point. Some of it was extremely ham-fisted, notably the use of the space whale (couldn't they even try to make up a silly sillier name for it?) as a metaphor for the Doctor. Let the court record show that, at the moment when Amy made an even less subtle attempt to compare the space whale to the Doctor, the jurors turned to each other and, as one, made sarcastic gesture-comments – Jo the side-to-side “trowelling it on” hand movement, I the overarm “sledgehammer”. And some of it was just bloody awful. I include all of Liz 10's dialogue under that heading.

Let's pop the hood and take a look at the story. The inhabitants of Starship UK are free to discover their nation's dark secrets whenever they like, or every five years, whichever is the more frequent, and they willingly, consistently choose to forget about it. Those who don't are immediately dropped through a hole in the floor, which is just bound to raise questions (although presumably as soon as anyone goes into a voting booth to find out the answer, they simply agree to forget it again). Why don't the voting booths offer the choice but just mindwipe everyone? Simpler system, fewer suspicious disappearances, nothing to police. Alternatively, with the system as presented, you'd end up with a society that self-selects for ignorance and low curiosity, so again nothing to police. The big question, of course, is: Why tell everyone about the big space whale at all?

And then you've got all the under-achieving schoolkids who are sent down to feed the whale, except the whale refuses to eat them, which apparently leaves them cluttering up the Demon Headmaster's brain-lasering chamber. This is a pretty remarkable situation – the secret overlord of Starship UK tripping over stupid kids every time he gets out of his chair. We might wonder why he doesn't just send them home, but perhaps if they're “too young to vote” it's because they're too young to be mindwiped. But doesn't he get sick of having more of them constantly filing into his secret lair? If he knows the whale won't dispose of them, why does he have them sent down at all? Are the education facilities really that poor? (Well, yes, apparently they're all taught by a scary fairground automaton in a box with terrible people skills. I think even present-day Britain is managing to do better than that.) It's just another completely pointless set of suspicious disappearances.

About the Smilers. ¿Que? They apparently can provide surveillance and enforcement on behalf of the Demon Headmaster, but it seems their chief purpose is just to freak people the hell out. As if the unexplained disappearances wouldn't do that anyway. It's obvious why Moffat included them – they fulfil the presumed need for a monster in each episode, and of course they look cool, the raison d'être for so many things on TV. But I'm struggling to understand what they actually do that couldn't be covered by some discreet cameras and a corps of discreet human minions, both of which the Demon Headmaster apparently also has. The Winders (but what do they wind? the Smilers?) then turn out to be “half Smiler”, whatever that means. Well, it ticks the “looks cool” box again. Doesn't actually serve any real purpose.

The big plot solution is so thunderingly obvious, it beggars belief that the Doctor could have overlooked it. It's pretty surprising that anyone on Starship UK could have missed it, come to that. “For centuries, space whales had been turning up whenever space-faring humans found themselves in trouble and helping them out. But when this one turned up in the same way exactly when we needed it, we weren't sure of its motives, so we thought we'd better drill a hole in its head and start frying its brain. And then make ourselves forget all about it.” The Demon Headmaster's had the answer staring him in the face the whole time – he can't have failed to notice how the stupid kids he keeps tripping over are playing with the space whale's deadly tentacles and not getting killed. The entire set-up of the story depends on the rank stupidity of all but the lead characters.

We'll never know why Starship UK was built without engines.

And finally, a gripe about the aftermath. Not five minutes after telling Amy that he unequivocally holds her responsible for a decision she doesn't remember making, the Doctor walks away from Starship UK leaving the Winders (and, nominally, Liz 10) still in charge. Nobody's been brought to book or held responsible for the space whale's suffering, for all the fuss the Doctor made about it. Liz 10's promised there'll be “no more secrets”, and the Doctor seems satisfied with this, but then she has the same excuse Amy had – she'd allowed herself to forget the truth (or quite possibly, she'd been intimidated into it by the Demon Headmaster and his freaky minions). The Winders don't have even this excuse, although they do still have – for all that we know – a big laser aimed at an exposed section of whale brain, and an army of sinister fairground automata. So much for “bringing down the government”, eh?


I'm actually wondering whether I should mark this episode as low as Fear Her, my only 2 out of 10 thus far. Fear Her was just bland as much as anything, whereas I find The Beast Below actively bad; and while I could at least appreciate the entertainment value of the 2008 series finale or Evolution of the Daleks as mindless spectacle, I can't even say that much about this episode. There's too much about it that irks me. I just know there's more that I've forgotten to mention above, but it looks like this post is long enough already. The only thing I see in this episode's favour is the performance of the leading duo. I'll give it 3 out of 10, subject to further consideration.

Eyeballs in the Sky

He's back, and it's on Prime! So it appears we're going to be able to watch the new series of Doctor Who a mere four weeks behind UK transmission, and not the months we'd feared, which is nice. What's less nice is having to watch it on a commercial TV station. This is, of course, something else we're going to have to get used to – it's that or we wait a year for the library to get the DVDs in – but any readers of this blog who were outraged by last week's Unexpected Graham Norton in the cliffhanger, I tell you, you got off lightly.

Admittedly Prime's “Next” caption doesn't include any animated bits, and the station ident is just about transparent enough to be ignored, but we've got this every single week, plus five minutes of adverts every ten minutes. Now that's distracting. I don't know how normal, TV addicted people cope with it. Dear British readers, complain about the Norton incident for all you're worth and treasure the BBC while you've still got it.


A few general thoughts before we proceed to the episode itself. We've watched some of the material released online – and I've been soaking up spoilers like a good 'un – so the new theme arrangement and title sequence didn't come as a complete shock. Jo loves them, although I'm still getting used to them.

I get the impression Steven Moffat wants to see fans dancing to the TV theme at convention discos. Perhaps he wants to dance to it himself. It's a lot more four-to-the-floor than it used to be, and note also the little high-pitched “club” motif in the middle of the new bit at the start. That new bit threw me on first listening, incidentally – sounded almost atonal until the main theme kicked in. Liking the ethereal quality of the main tune, a bit doubtful about the choral bits. I quite like it as a whole, but so far I haven't got used to the idea that it's the actual TV theme and not just some novelty cover version.

I'm getting distinctly '80s vibes from the new title sequence. '80s comedy horror, to be precise – the actors' names appearing in a flash of lightning reminds me heavily of Young Frankenstein or The Man with Two Brains, I'm not sure which. Given comedy and horror appear to be Moffat's strengths as a Who writer, this may be more appropriate than at first it seems. Not sure what to make of the billowing clouds that have replaced the time tunnel. I do particularly like the way the “DW” logo turns into the TARDIS, although my cynical mind wonders if we can read anything into this – the brand image becoming the hero's vehicle, the marketing now central to the show. (I think about this too much. Nobody should feel the urge to analyse the title sequence.)


Moving on to The Eleventh Hour itself. Eyebrows were raised at the pre-credits scene. The “Tiggers don't like” food scene was tremendous fun, although this and the pre-creds seem to have been written with the intention of winning over the youngest viewers first. But then the companion-to-be is seven at this point – when she re-appears aged nineteen, she's working as a kissogram and we start to get jokes about Jeff's laptop and Rory being made to dress up as the Doctor (context open to supposition). This is either a crafty synthesis of narrative register and character point of view, or a rather awkward granularisation of the show's humour.

Some in-story emphasis on the “fairy tale” aspect of the show, to go with the heavy emphasis Moffat's been giving it in interviews for months now. (Might be best not to dwell on the fairy tale resonance of Amy being menaced by a gigantic dream-snake that's forced its way through a crack in her bedroom. The Brothers Grimm have got nothing on Moffat, I tell you.) There is, I suppose, something of a fairy tale atmosphere to the young Amy part of the episode, but otherwise nothing much out of the ordinary for Who, which has always had fantasy leanings. The biggest change in style from the last five years that I can see is that the Doctor's visited present-day Earth and we haven't seen a single council estate block or any of Amy's family (what happened to the aunt?). Apart from that, it felt like a pretty typical RTD episode, except that the monsters didn't look like men with animal heads.

I'm not absolutely sure how the Atraxi turned up in Earth orbit. The Doctor claims that they followed him, but I'm not sure how they would do that, especially since theirs is apparently the only species in the galaxy that doesn't recognise him, and since he closed the crack they might have tracked him through. (I'm also not at all clear on how/why the crack links Amy's room to the Atraxi prison, given developments later in the series, but woops! I'm not supposed to know about that yet, and besides, it may be explained even later on.) But hey, they're giant flying eyeballs! And, er, hm, yeah. Giant flying eyeballs with big snowflake spaceships. Very pretty.

Matt Smith – top notch. He's settled right into the role of the Doctor, and we here have no complaints. Karen Gillan seems to be doing all right too, although I've seen the following interesting point made about Amy – at the end of the episode, when she becomes the companion, we don't actually know her. We're introduced to seven-year-old Amelia, but then we're whisked twelve years into the future and the adventure kicks off before we can really get to know nineteen-year-old Amy. And even then we nip forward another two years before she joins the Doctor right at the end. All we honestly know about her is that, thanks to the Doctor, she has some psychological problems, or at least she did two years ago relative to the next episode, since when she's been proven right about him and may not even have that defining descriptor any more. But it does look as though she's connected in some way to the crack in space and time, which may very likely be the reason the Doctor's come back for her. (Very nice final scene, by the way.) So this episode introduces her more as a plot point than as a character. Rory – hmm, early days, we'll have to see how he develops in later episodes.

Time for gripes. If Prisoner Zero can dissolve completely into a kind of mist, why does it need to worry about disguising itself? Especially if it takes so much time to create a link with a human mind. And why does it cover the sonic screwdriver in clichéd monster goop? Why does it stick around instead of making a run for it, since the Atraxi are so rubbish at finding it and won't arrive on the scene for another twelve years? When the Atraxi are retrieving those pictures of monsters the Doctor's protected the Earth from, why do they come up with some that haven't been anywhere near Earth? (A simple gaffe, of course.)


By and large, a fair episode. Generally well acted. Well directed, with notable moments. Pacing was good – it felt like sixty minutes was the right length for it, which is more than can be said for some of the extended New Who episodes. As far as the story is concerned, the jokey bits and broad plot strokes tend to distract from the slightly creaky bits, and as season openers go it's pretty solid. Nice intriguing bit at the end to lead into the rest of the season. 7 out of 10, perhaps? Let's say 7.