{"id":1134,"date":"2012-09-09T12:08:57","date_gmt":"2012-09-09T12:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2020-03-03T17:06:16","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T17:06:16","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-dinosaurs-on-a-spaceship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2012\/09\/09\/so-what-did-i-think-of-dinosaurs-on-a-spaceship\/","title":{"rendered":"So… What did I think of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When Russell T Davies brought Doctor Who back in 2005, his first concern was that it should be fun<\/em>. This is very smart thinking. The possibilities of the series are, after all, endless. If you have the entire universe of time and space at your disposal, and where you are isn\u2019t fun, then by all means find something more fun to do. We can do without a lot of tedious hand-wringing and hair-pulling. We need to get the mass audience back.<\/p>\n

The casting of Christopher Eccleston slightly pulled the stories in another direction, and the two strands of tortured lonely god and devil-may-care galactic adventurer were not always perfectly braided together. Much more successful was David Tennant, who pulled off the joie-de-vivre<\/em> with much more ease and comfort than his predecessor and so made the flashes of angst and pain more significant for being fewer and further between. And so a good series of Doctor Who can and should include heart-breaking episodes like Doomsday <\/em>and Human Nature<\/em> as well as those which are just a (horrible word) romp such as Partners in Crime<\/em> or Tooth and Claw<\/em>, but the Doctor is usually permitted one scene of headshaking moralising so it doesn\u2019t all seem too glib.<\/p>\n

This is what was so profoundly odd about Dinosaurs on a Spaceship<\/em>. First of all, it\u2019s a complete muddle. Silurians, Rory\u2019s dad, Queen Nefertiti, big game hunters, a sinister trader, comedy robots, dinosaurs \u2013 and, of course, a spaceship \u2013 assembled virtually at random with no sense of purpose, focus or theme. And it contains a number of things which we haven\u2019t seen before. The Doctor\u2019s new habit of dropping off Mr and Mrs Pond at the end of each adventure and then scooping them up again at the beginning of the next is bothersome. There\u2019s no particular reason for him not to do this, I suppose, but he\u2019s never done it before and I don\u2019t quite understand why he\u2019s doing it now.<\/p>\n

This is extended in tonight\u2019s episode in which he also takes Queen Nefertiti from the end of a previous (unseen) adventure and Rupert Graves\u2019 standard-issue great white hunter, not to mention Rory\u2019s dad. \u201cI\u2019ve never had a gang before,\u201d comments the Doctor, hanging a lantern on it. No, and there\u2019s no particular reason to have one now. Except of course, because it might seem fun.<\/p>\n

And for once, even the art department lets the side down, with the spaceship interior also a jumble of location work, exteriors (for no good reason) and then a very, very standard-issue spaceship set (possibly reused from an earlier story?). That\u2019s this episode all over \u2013 nothing is consistent and yet all the individual pieces seem very familiar. The dinosaurs are faithfully duplicated from the Jurassic Park playbook, even including a big game hunter triangulated by two raptors (if Rupert Graves had said \u201cclever girl\u201d I might have given up altogether). Indira of the Indian Space Association is no different from the countless other stubborn military types we\u2019ve seen before. David Bradley\u2019s Solomon is a carbon copy of venal traders from other stories and Rory\u2019s dad, while brightly played by Mark Williams, is exactly as we might have guessed he\u2019d be.<\/p>\n

This all might have played better if the stakes had seemed higher, but the drawback of the characters \u2013 especially the Doctor \u2013 treating the adventures which follow as a romp is that it becomes harder and harder for the viewer to take it at all seriously. If it\u2019s all just larks, then what\u2019s the point? And, then \u2013 right on cue \u2013 comes the Doctor\u2019s moralising speech to Solomon.<\/p>\n

By the end of the episode, everyone has been issued with their raison d’\u00eatre<\/em> \u2013 Nefertiti is a prize to be won, Riddell is necessary to fight off raptors, Indira\u2019s missiles will destroy Solomon\u2019s ship instead of the Silurian ark and, most limply of all, the flight controls require two pilots of the same gene\u2026 thing.. and that\u2019s why Rory\u2019s dad is there. So that\u2019s why the Doctor suddenly felt the need to assemble a gang. This is dreadfully clunky writing with the basic pieces assembled, but no attempt made whatsoever to smooth over the joins or create any sense of organic growth. And, most unforgivably of all, even having hired two famous comedians to provide the voices, the two comedy robots never say anything even remotely funny.<\/p>\n

Reading all this back, it sounds rather as if I didn\u2019t like it, but as bumpy and as clumsy and as over-familiar as it was, much of it was very charming. Matt Smith was as winning as ever \u2013 I particularly liked his line-reading of the word \u201crun\u201d, faced with the dinosaurs for the first time. Karen Gillan, although rendered rather redundant by the plethora of other characters, gave good banter and the lovely shot of Mark Williams sipping his tea while looking out over the planet Earth was worth any number of unfunny comedy robots.<\/p>\n

This is the trouble with \u201cfun\u201d episodes of Doctor Who. If you scoop up a pick-and-mix of characters and ideas that have worked before, fling them all at the page and keep everybody quipping back-and-forth then you might make a \u201cfun\u201d 45 minutes of television, but at the end of it \u2013 what\u2019s the point? If it\u2019s bracingly original, remarkably structured or features a truly astonishing turn from a major guest-star then it may not need to be high drama. But familiar components don\u2019t get any less familiar when you mix-and-match them and clumsy plotting is still clumsy plotting even if you\u2019re lucky enough to have Matt Smith reciting your exposition.<\/p>\n

And this still <\/em>sounds as if I didn\u2019t like it, but it was perfectly entertaining while it was on, it\u2019s just that \u2013 with the whole universe to explore, I\u2019m frustrated at being given hand-me-downs. But, you know what, if this is as bad as this series gets, then this could be regarded as a classic year. What worries me is that this is the norm, and that when Chris Chibnall inevitably takes over as show-runner (please, no) we\u2019ll get a lot more like this.<\/p>\n\"3\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Russell T Davies brought Doctor Who back in 2005, his first concern was that it should be fun. This is very smart thinking. The possibilities of the series are, after all, endless. If you have the entire universe of time and space at your disposal, and where you are isn\u2019t fun, then by all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[18,19],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-doctor-who","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-ii","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2477,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions\/2477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}