{"id":2024,"date":"2017-05-13T17:09:53","date_gmt":"2017-05-13T17:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2024"},"modified":"2017-05-16T17:34:57","modified_gmt":"2017-05-16T17:34:57","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-thin-ice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/05\/13\/so-what-did-i-think-of-thin-ice\/","title":{"rendered":"So… what did I think of Thin Ice?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Okay, now this is more like it.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a tremendous amount to like in Sarah Dollard\u2019s script, which has much of the same atmosphere as her previous Face the Raven<\/i>, but doesn\u2019t spend so much time tying itself in quasi-legal knots to make the story work.<\/p>\n

Bill\u2019s role as the companion who questions all those things which we\u2019ve taken as read for years continues to impress and delight, whether she\u2019s pondering how her presence will change history, or how people will react to the presence of the TARDIS and the melanin in her skin, she\u2019s an unqualified joy and Pearl Mackie\u2019s chemistry with Peter Capaldi is amazing. This is quickly becoming my favourite TARDIS team since Tennant and Tate.<\/p>\n

The central mystery is clearly presented, with adorable ragamuffins who narrowly stay on the right side of cloying, pointing the Doctor and Bill in the right direction, even if that means one of them gets sacrificed to The Beast Below<\/i> \u2013 which, yes, this story does stand as a less-bonkers version of. But whereas the Matt Smith story was about morality on a colossal scale, this story is much more about personal morality. The Doctor and Bill have two exchanges, which bookend her questioning whether traveling with him is any sense right. In the first, exquisitely painful interaction, she makes him confront the fact that his presence costs lives. In the second, slightly less successful one, his clear-minded speech wins her back round. Capaldi beautifully underplays this, but it\u2019s a little simplistic by the standards of The Zygon Inversion<\/i>.<\/p>\n

What a tale of this kind needs, therefore is \u2013 hurrah! \u2013 a real villain, rather than an Automated System Gone Wrong. And Nicholas Burns is suitably slimy and selfish and \u2013 yes \u2013 punchable, effects work ever done, well it\u2019s certainly no Skarasen either. I will note in passing that once again, Matt Lucas is completely sidelined. Did he film all of his scenes for the season in a weekend?<\/p>\n

And what did I think of Knock Knock?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the turn of another Proper Writer to have a go at Doctor Who, which either means they will bring a completely new perspective, or it means they will blunder into all the cliches and traps which they don\u2019t know are there. Sadly, Mike Bartlett needs a new sat-nav because this is pretty ropey, samey stuff, until the end which is almost gibberish.<\/p>\n

The set-up is okay, I suppose. Bill is now a student and is doing the student thing of finding people to share a house with. One thing you must give Steven Moffat \u2013 he can do jokes. But the tour of awful shared houses is woefully unfunny, very unlike the usual high standard of comedy which modern Doctor Who is capable of.<\/p>\n

So, the largely indistinguishable bunch of cannon fodder shows up ready to move in to their totally not suspicious at all giant gothic mansion, only to discover David Suchet apparently going out of his way to be evil and mysterious. Bill seems determined to hide the fact the Doctor is a lecturer at the University and that\u2019s how she knows him, even though it was established in The Pilot that he is well-known on campus and his lectures are very popular. When no-one believes that he\u2019s her grandfather, everybody just stops mentioning it. It feels like a set-up for a punchline that never comes \u2013 maybe a fossil from an earlier draft.<\/p>\n

But nobody in this story behaves like a real person. It\u2019s completely unclear how any of these uninteresting students knows each other or for how long, and it utterly beggars belief that they would leave one of their number locked in his room like that. There\u2019s also no particular reason for the house\/woodworm\/daughter\/mother to pick them off one at a time, let alone have so much time elapse between the first devouring and all the subsequent ones, during which time, the inhabitants could think better of it and get out of dodge.<\/p>\n

Finally, the revelation, although beautifully played by both Suchet and Mariah Gale, makes no sense whatsoever. If the space bugs eat people, then why didn\u2019t they just eat Eliza to begin with? How did Suchet find out that he could keep Eliza alive by feeding them people? Why six people every twenty years instead of a more regular diet? Why do they come back to life at the end if their energy has already been consumed. And at exactly what point did she start thinking he was her dad?<\/p>\n

The whole thing is muddled to the point of near total nonsense, and because it doesn\u2019t make any real sense, it\u2019s impossible to buy into the emotion, which is a tremendous waste of the talent involved.
\nDirector Bill Anderson shoots it and paces it nicely, and the Bill\u2019s continuing exploration of Doctor Who lore are as delightful as ever, but this is an often dull, rather forgettable instalment, which may ultimately only be noteworthy for the clues as to what \u2013 or who \u2013 the Doctor is keeping in that vault.<\/p>\n

Three stars, and I will also note that we have so far has an alien puddle which eats someone, swarms of nanobots which eat people, swarms of glowing bugs under the ice which eat people and now swarms of insects in the walls which eat people. From the look of it, next week we have space suits which eat people. Is this the new Automated System Gone Wrong?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, now this is more like it. There\u2019s a tremendous amount to like in Sarah Dollard\u2019s script, which has much of the same atmosphere as her previous Face the Raven, but doesn\u2019t spend so much time tying itself in quasi-legal knots to make the story work. Bill\u2019s role as the companion who questions all those […]<\/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":true,"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":[18,508],"class_list":["post-2024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-doctor-who","tag-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-wE","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024","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=2024"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2030,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions\/2030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}