Tom Salinsky

Evil Monk 1: So, how did we fare in our simulated invasion of Earth?

Evil Monk 2: Oh, pretty well.

Evil Monk 1: Did we learn all we needed to about how to subdue the Earth people and take their planet?

Evil Monk 2: Yup. Pretty much.

Evil Monk 1: Good, good. And this “Doctor”, were we able to handle his interference?

Evil Monk 2: Oh yes. Well, I mean he was blind.

Evil Monk 1: What?

Evil Monk 2: Yeah, we made him blind.

Evil Monk 1: What? Why?

Evil Monk 2: Well, he’d just been made blind when we started gathering data for the simulation, so we thought…

Evil Monk 1: But we want the Doctor at the absolute peak of his powers. What’s the point in testing our invasion against a weakened version of the Doctor?

Evil Monk 2: Well, he wasn’t all that weakened. He had these glasses with a sort of heads-up display.

Evil Monk 1: Glasses with a what?

Evil Monk 2: A heads-up display. Showing him what he couldn’t see with his eyes.

Evil Monk 1: And what was he using to look at the heads-up display?

Evil Monk 2: Eh?

Evil Monk 1: If his eyes don’t work, how does a heads-up display help- oh, look it doesn’t matter. The point is, we’ve ironed out all the kinks in our invasion plan now, right?

Evil Monk 2: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was pretty easy once everyone started to commit suicide.

Evil Monk 1: When they what?

Evil Monk 2: Well, once they found the book, the er, Extremis, which told them that they were in a simulation and how to test it, then they just started committing suicide.

Evil Monk 1: How to test it?

Evil Monk 2: Yeah. Despite the fact that each subroutine controlling each of the billions of people in our simulation is fantastically unique and complicated, so much so that the simulations believe they are alive, we couldn’t think of a single way of using that rich, complicated and unique data to find an arbitrary starting point for a random number generator, so when they-

Evil Monk 1: Wait, stop, go back. You put a book in the simulation…

Evil Monk 2: Extremis, yeah…

Evil Monk 1: Telling the people in the simulation that it was just a simulation?

Pause.

Evil Monk 2: We did make it very hard to translate.

Evil Monk 1: But what was it doing there at all??

Evil Monk 2: Sort of like an in-joke.

Evil Monk 1: Acolyte, I’m hugely disappointed. You were clearly the wrong person to put in charge of this simulation project. I should have realised something was up when I watched the Doctor execute the Master and take the body away for safekeeping – and not mention that he was doing this for the second time.

Evil Monk 2: I’m sorry, sir. I failed you.

Evil Monk 1: Never mind. We’re in no hurry. We’ll build a new simulation and do it properly this time. After all, what difference does it make if we invade this week, or next week, or next year?

Evil Monk 2: Ah… well…

Evil Monk 1: “Ah well” what?

Evil Monk 2: You know how you said we should make absolutely sure that the simulation was connected to the Earth Internet?

Evil Monk 1: What? No, I said it was to be totally isolated from any other networks. It was to be totally air-gapped. Any other plan of action would be foolhardy to the point of self-defeating.

Evil Monk 2: Oh…

Evil Monk 1: Why???

And, scene…

Jamie Mathieson’s first two scripts for the show – Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline attracted near-universal praise, including from this blog, so expectations were high for his return in series ten. Were they met? Ah… nearly.

The set-up is largely great. Putting the Doctor and his – still very new – companion at risk of a terrible death in the icy vacuum of space is a great idea. The David Tennant episode 42, and in particular the sight of Martha Jones drifting off into nothing, is one of the very few things keeping me optimistic about Chris Chibnall’s forthcoming takeover of the programme. And who doesn’t like seeing Capaldi wandering around a deserted base making macabre quips, even if that kind of thing has been happening a lot lately.

The teaser is also very compelling, with the zombie colleague offing the newly-engaged couple and – look! – Nardole’s allowed to come. So what’s the problem? Well, there are too. One is a science niggle, but it’s such an important plot point that I can’t permit it to go unchallenged. For, I suspect practical production reasons, the cast don’t wear their helmets most of the time, but instead have a forcefield around their heads which keeps the air in. Thus even though the inside of the station is a vacuum, they can breathe normally.

But suddenly when they have to go outside the station, proper helmets are required. But either the station is deprived of air or it isn’t. As soon as there’s any opportunity, the pressure will equalise. You can’t maintain a thin atmosphere like on a small planet. And thus, either the forcefield can create an air-tight seal or it can’t. There’s just no way that the vacuum inside the station is more vacuum-y than the vacuum outside the station.

So, this rather takes the shine off the generally terrifying ordeal of the station inhabitants (as usually, poorly-differentiated, although the blue one is a nice sources of gags about racism, although played by a white actor I believe) and horrendous sacrifice – more on that later. The other, far bigger problem is that the episode is not so much rushed as absolutely stuffed. Whereas several recent episodes have had about thirty minutes of story and ten-fifteen minutes of running around and quipping (The Witch’s Familiar being the most egregious recent example) this could have certainly made a 60 minute special and is probably only one subplot away from being a two-parter.

So, when the Doctor’s blindness is easily fixed back at base, I’m intensely frustrated that such a brilliant idea wasn’t given time enough to be really developed and explored. Except of course – they aren’t done with that idea yet, are they! A lovely final twist to a thrilling and very well-executed episode.

I’ll quickly note that I don’t regard the profiteering algorithm as another automatic system gone awry for the simple reason that the algorithm was programmed by heartlessly profiteering bad-guys, so it’s not a benevolent system which becomes accidentally fatal, it’s a ruthless system doing exactly what it was intended to do.

4 ½ stars. Hurrah.

Okay, now this is more like it.

There’s a tremendous amount to like in Sarah Dollard’s script, which has much of the same atmosphere as her previous Face the Raven, but doesn’t spend so much time tying itself in quasi-legal knots to make the story work.

Bill’s role as the companion who questions all those things which we’ve taken as read for years continues to impress and delight, whether she’s 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’s an unqualified joy and Pearl Mackie’s chemistry with Peter Capaldi is amazing. This is quickly becoming my favourite TARDIS team since Tennant and Tate.

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 – 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’s a little simplistic by the standards of The Zygon Inversion.

What a tale of this kind needs, therefore is – hurrah! – a real villain, rather than an Automated System Gone Wrong. And Nicholas Burns is suitably slimy and selfish and – yes – punchable, effects work ever done, well it’s 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?

And what did I think of Knock Knock?

It’s 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’t 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.

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 – 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.

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’s 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’s her grandfather, everybody just stops mentioning it. It feels like a set-up for a punchline that never comes – maybe a fossil from an earlier draft.

But nobody in this story behaves like a real person. It’s 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’s 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.

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’t 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?

The whole thing is muddled to the point of near total nonsense, and because it doesn’t make any real sense, it’s impossible to buy into the emotion, which is a tremendous waste of the talent involved.
Director Bill Anderson shoots it and paces it nicely, and the Bill’s 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 – or who – the Doctor is keeping in that vault.

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?

Well, for some time now, my new role as podcast producer has made updating this blog very difficult, and in the light of the ghastly developments in UK and world politics, my half-assed views on TV shows and movie seem hardly relevant. But the world keeps turning and since I’ve been to see a few movies and things, I may as well try and keep up my record.

So, let’s start with the Doctor Who Christmas Special. One reason for my not reviewing this at the time is that it was basically fine. Nothing terribly wrong, but nothing terribly exciting either. As writer, Steven Moffat reigned in most of his worst excesses, Ed Bazalgette frames it all with professionalism and style, real (north) American Justin Chatwin and faux American Charity Wakefield are both convincing and Matt Lucas was far less irritating than we might have feared.

Even the one big error simply duplicates a mistake made in pretty much every superhero movie ever shot, which is the physics-defying fantasy of magic catching hands. A person falling off a building will hit the floor and be made to stop very suddenly, and the impact will cause them severe damage. The kinetic energy they give up when their acceleration towards the ground suddenly ceases has to go somewhere. However, in superhero movies and in The Return of Doctor Mysterio, no such problem exists if the thing which the falling person (or object) collides with is a person’s hands. When Grant catches the ship, it stops just as suddenly as if it had hit the ground, but mysteriously with no damage to Grant, the ship or any of its occupants. Other than that, absolutely fine. Four stars.

Next let’s turn to Arrival, the cerebral science-fiction slow-burn movie starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and directed by Dennis Villeneuve which depicts the international response to a number of alien obelisks which descend without warning on planet Earth. Putting so much emphasis on Adams’ painstaking attempts to decipher the alien language is undoubtedly gutsy and for me in pays off handsomely, drawing me in to the puzzle as the various military powers across the globe get increasingly twitchy.

The central twist is a little over-familiar for those of us who have seen more than half-a-dozen science fiction films, but it’s artfully concealed and bolstered by excellent performances, from a luminous Adams on down. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, of which more later.

And finally, let’s tick off Rogue One. I’m not really a devoted Star Wars nerd, which meant that the number of “Easter Eggs” I noticed was not excessive, although I gather that they come at the rate of about two a minute if you really know your Force from your elbow. The tactic of alternating “saga” movies (like The Force Awakens) with “anthology” movies seems like a smart one and by inserting a narrative into the gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope seems like an excellent way to start things off.

And so, this is not quite the Star Wars we’re familiar with. No opening crawl! No John Williams! No wipes! On-screen captions to identify the planets we’re visiting. And early on, it’s all a bit clunky, as we whip from planet-to-planet in search of the film’s plot. As the characters start to establish themselves, and the humour and adventure comes to the fore, things begin to improve, and the team assembled around Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso all get some great moments, especially Alan Tudyk as reprogrammed droid K-2SO, even if Jones herself can’t quite match up to the astonishing Daisy Ridley.

But the narrative momentum isn’t sustained, as the plot ties itself in knots to prevent us from getting to the last act too soon. I swear when they meet up with Jyn’s father, I can actually hear two different drafts of the film fighting each other, as the person Jyn trusted to deliver her to her father, whose message the rest of the film depends on her hearing, has a crisis of confidence and decides not to betray her by killing him anyway. Badguy Krennic then kills all of his men but not him and then rebel bombers blow him up anyway! Not exactly a clean narrative line!

In the final mission to get the plans out of the Imperial base, however, things improve enormously as director Gareth Edwards manages not just to summon up the spirit of the original trilogy, but to finally give his movie the singularity of purpose it seemed to struggle for earlier. And I have to admire both the commitment to the reality of the suicide mission and the neat plugging of the original film’s most glaring plot hole.

Everyone seems to have their own opinion about the digital Cushing and Fisher avatars which appear throughout the movie. For me, the brief glimpse of digital Leia worked fine. But the continual featuring of the CGI Tarkin stretched the envelope well-past breaking point. The dead eyes and weird mouth and imperfect vocal impression were a constant distraction and I was left with an appreciation of just how wide and featureless the uncanny valley truly is.

A full round-up of the 2017 Oscars will be here soon.

As well as snuggling down to watch Capaldi, Kingston et al on Christmas Day, I also flogged out to the BFI IMAX to watch the Force Awakens a few days earlier, so here’s your Boxing Day double-bill review. We’ll take the good Doctor first.

More than other episodes, except possibly the first few aired in 2005, Christmas Specials have to attract and entertain a wide audience. Not just the dedicated fans, but the casual viewers, the grumpy sceptics, their sleepy relatives and various other waifs and strays. Sometimes, Christmas Specials have basically ignored all other continuity and these have often been among the most effective – A Christmas Carol, Voyage of the Damned – although not always – The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe. Others have been bound into the fabric of the series, dealing with a new Doctor – The Christmas Invasion – a regeneration – The Time of the Doctor – or a new companion – The Snowmen. This year, Steven Moffat attempts a middle-ground. On the one hand, almost nothing that happens at least for the first 45 minutes is in any way dependent on the viewer ever having watched the series before. On the other hand, those first 45 minutes might be a wee bit confusing if you’ve literally no idea who River Song even is. The last 15 minutes… well, we’ll come to those.

This is very much an episode of two halves, or if not quite halves then certainly pieces. The first, longer, piece is hugely entertaining. A “romp” in all the best senses of the word – full of dash and wit and good will to all, with fruity performances from guest stars Matt Lucas and Greg Davies and some dazzlingly brilliant plot turns, such as the revelation that Scratch is planning on delivering the diamond to King Hydroflax as a tribute.

A lot is asked of the effects department here and they mainly deliver, cutting away from some of the more gruesome head-related activities no doubt both in the name of propriety and keeping the budget down to a manageable level. Even more than usual, the set design and dressing is absolutely gorgeous from the cheekily repurposed Trap Street to the claustrophobic surgeon’s table to the opulent decks of the ship Harmony and Redemption.

It’s when the Doctor and River leave the ship that the story starts to come off the rails slightly. Knowing the form of these things pretty well, and having thoroughly enjoyed the story so far, I had already thought to myself that what would elevate it to greatness would be a perfectly judged moment of pain, pathos or gloom. Actually, what happens is a little fuzzier than that. The clean plotting starts to fray at the edges when River and the Doctor take it in turns to pilot the TARDIS on and off the bridge of the doomed star liner, and the Doctor’s attitude to the widespread death and destruction seems uncharacteristically callous as well. Sure, there were a lot of rotters on board, but were none of them past redemption? And what about the cooks, cleaners, accountants, engineers and what-not?

It’s not like the script is fighting to pack every last detail into the remaining few seconds either. In fact, Moffat squanders the dizzying narrative momentum he’s built up and lazily coasts for the last ten minutes of the episode. It’s at this stage that we’re invited to consider the River Song flowchart in a bit more detail, and I’m not absolutely sure it makes sense. This was advertised as the first meeting between the two (from River’s point of view) and it’s implied that she’s borrowed TARDISes of earlier Doctors without them noticing. It also seems as if she recognised Tennant and Smith because she had publicity photos of them, not because she is able to sense who they truly are, regardless of what face they wear.

But she seems to have fallen prey to that old fan-trap of thinking that the twelve regeneration limit means twelve faces, when of course it actually means thirteen, so there’s no reason for her not to have a picture of Capaldi too. And then, it turns out that this is actually their penultimate meeting – next time will be the Library and then it’s all over. But, for some reason, the pain of this revelation doesn’t quite resonate. After he has targeted the correct audience with laser-like precision for most of the episode, we’re suddenly being asked to applaud the writer’s neurotic box-ticking as he reminds us of every detail of Silence in the Library. It’s a slightly limp end to an episode which spent most of its running time fizzing with invention.

Ultimately, however, the first three-quarters is so hugely enjoyable, from Capaldi’s antlers to his doing bigger on the inside “properly” to the demented Hydroflax story to the final “hello sweetie” that I can’t bring myself to knock off more than half a star.

On to The Force Awakens, which I saw at the BFI IMAX despite the best efforts of the Odeon website to prevent me from so doing. I don’t have the same emotional attachment to the Star Wars series as many of my contemporaries. A school friend took a bunch of us to see Return of the Jedi at the cinema when I was 11 and for him it was the most exciting thing in the world, but I was a bit bewildered about all the fuss. Of course, I saw the wretched prequel trilogy in the cinemas, and roundly detested every one of them, but like everyone else, I settled down with a growing sense of optimism to watch this new incarnation.

Is it any good? Well, compared to what? Obviously it can’t hope to equal, or even come close to the era-defining, cultural-warping, iconic cataclysm of the first film. But also obviously, no-one really expected it to repeat the colossal errors of judgement of the prequel trilogy either. What JJ Abrams has done, for sure, is to leave the franchise in a better state than he found it. Disney’s multi-billion dollar investment is certainly safe and the movie will probably stand up quite nicely to further viewings. But is this the work of a maverick genius, boldly reinvisioning the series and creating whole swathes of new lore? Hardly? For once, I find myself in perfect agreement with usually demented contrarian Julian Simpson who commented “It’s like someone lent JJ Abrams a priceless old Ferrari and, instead of putting his foot down and seeing what this fucker can do, he’s driven it round the block at 20mph for fear of scratching the paintwork.”

It might be worth pausing for a moment to reflect on JJ Abrams’s relationship with Stars Trek and Wars. Regardless of the necrophiliac karaoke gibberish of Into Darkness, Abrams was probably the ideal director to resurrect this ailing franchise – his TV background, obvious talent for character and action, and his success with Mission Impossible III allied with his total lack of any reverence for the Trek universe meant that he could create a new version of the series which would resonate with an audience of Trek-lovers and Trek-agnostics alike.

But Abrams loves Star Wars, grew up watching it, played with the toys, read the spin-offs and then suffered as we all did when the prequels came out. His challenge, a much greater one than he faced with Star Trek, is to recreate the series without feeling like he is treading on egg-shells.

As a movie, it works very well. Newcomers Daisy Ridley and John Boyega effortlessly carry the show, with new droid BB8 a worthy successor to R2D2. The Luke Skywalker map McGuffin does its job and the action sequences, especially in the first half, work very well indeed, with the Millennium Falcon dogfight on Jakku being a particular highlight. The one truly revisionist touch – Boyega’s stormtrooper defecting from the First Order – brilliantly sets the plot in motion, even if Oscar Isaac’s rather colourless Poe Dameron is clumsily removed from the narrative simply in order to be fed back in later.

As a nostalgia-fest sequel that’s been 25 years in the making, it also works fantastically well. Harrison Ford’s reintroduction with Chewie at his side gave me a warm glow and the use of Solo and Leia’s own off-spring as the chief villain (not to mention Solo’s untimely despatch) manages to echo the original trilogy without actually duplicating it.

However, an enormous amount of the run-time is devoted to things we’ve already seen in the original three movies. Most obvious and most egregious is that substitution of the Death Star with the basically identical only much bigger, but also far more easily-defeated Starkiller Base. Then we have the familial light-saber duel, a spin on the Mos Eisley Cantina, the Grand Old Jedi at the end of his years, etc and so forth. There’s not a lot wrong with this, but when the creative team is obviously so comfortable in the Star Wars universe, it’s a damn shame they didn’t do a bit more than just rearrange the furniture a little.

A few other quibbles – Finn’s reaction to the death around him on Jakku, conveyed brilliantly with almost no dialogue, is a wonderful motivation for his character. But he then proceeds to indiscriminately slaughter fellow stormtroopers from his initial escape onwards, with rather undermines his nobility. Captain Phasma’s wonderful name and high profile casting led me to believe that rather more would be done with her character, but in fact she gets three or four bland scenes which add nothing and Gwendoline Christie’s charisma is rather hard to spot under that chrome helmet. And if the First Order is, as the opening crawl implies, a rag-tag band of disgruntled former soldiers, why do they appear to have the full might and discipline of the former Empire?

Anyway, what we have here is a cautious new beginning, which nevertheless contains great jokes, wonderful action sequences, splendid new characters, welcome cameos from the old guard (and some unnecessary ones – I’m looking at you Anthony Daniels) and the hint of a new mythos which just might keep the franchise running for the next 25 years. It’s a very good job, if not quite the bold triumph it might have been.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Are there two Steven Moffats? And does the one who wrote Blink and The Girl in the Fireplace and The Doctor Dances and Heaven Sent know about the imposter who merrily bashes out nonsense like The Wedding of River Song, The Name of the Doctor and The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe?

The first Steven Moffat takes a single, strong, clear dramatic idea and focuses all of his considerable energies on to it, developing the consequences, teasing out the possibilities. Very often, a story will end in an intellectual catharsis, which can feel satisfying as the puzzle pieces click together, but his very best work also allows for an emotional catharsis: “everybody lives!”, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”, the fate of Miss Kizlet.

His rival leaps seemingly at random from setting to setting, plot point to plot point, rarely sticking with an idea long enough for us to determine whether it’s good or bad, clear or confusing, vital or irrelevant. The story will give enormous weight to a concept for a moment and then abandon it with shocking haste, and when the dust finally settles, the casual viewer might be forgiven for thinking they’ve just watched a 50 minute trailer for a seven hour movie and that it will all make sense once they’ve watched the whole thing.

SM#1 was in masterly control of Heaven Sent but he appears to have collapsed, exhausted, over the typewriter and left the job of wrapping up the whole saga to SM#2 who was in particularly ADHD mood. Let’s go through the whole jumble as briefly as we can so we can look forward to the Christmas special instead.

The Doctor is chatting to Clara in a mighty familiar looking diner, but neither seems to recognise the other, although the Doctor clearly remembers Clara and starts narrating the tale of his adventures on Gallifrey and beyond. Various Gallifreyan types learn of his arrival and are all of a tizzy. It’s not at all clear why, but it transpires they trapped him in the confession dial. So, did the Doctor produce this back in episode one in order that Gallifreyans could trap him? If not, for what purpose did he produce it? And Gallifrey, lost Gallifrey, unreachable Gallifrey at the end of the Universe, is able to – what call Ashildr on the phone and set all this up? Actually, that doesn’t seem too unlikely, since passing members of the Sisterhood of Karn can drop by any time they like – and lucky that Claire Higgins as Ohila did drop by because without her… the plot would be exactly the same.

There’s also plenty of talk about the Doctor having been trapped in the confession dial for four billion years, but of course, he will only remember the last “go-round” which for him was I think only a few days or weeks.

There follows a very, very strange sequence in which the Doctor mooches around his hut from Day of the Doctor and draws lines in the sand until everybody drops their guns. I don’t really understand what we were supposed to draw from this, but anyway the Doctor convinces Rassilon (now played by Donald Sumpter) and The General (Ken Bones) to use Gallifreyan technology to extract Clara at the moment of her death. Of course, the Doctor doesn’t want a last chat with Clara, he wants to break the laws of time to bring her back to life. Now the Laws of Time have been referred to many times on Doctor Who and it’s never been entirely clear whether they are Laws of Physics (you literally can’t go against them) or Laws of Propriety (it’s frowned upon to violate them). Usually, it’s stated that there may be dire consequences for the universe if they are ignored, and so generally they are obeyed.

Here, they are flagrantly disobeyed, there is much talk of the Universe unravelling but past a certain point, nobody seems to give a shit anymore and the Universe appears to carry on as it always does. What a wonderful dramatic climax to twelve weeks of television!

Then, to execute this plan, the Doctor motherfucking shoots Ken Bones to death with a Gallifreyan staser. Everything is wrong about this. That single shot of the Doctor aiming that gun and pulling the trigger is wrong. (SM#1 knows this perfectly well, hence the enormity of the cliffhanger of episode one of this series.) The Doctor’s assertion that death to a Time Lord is the equivalent of a bad cold is absolutely contradicted by every single time we’ve seen a Time Lord face death on this show. And it’s certainly been made clear that a Time Lord can fail to regenerate quickly enough and so die for good a long time before all thirteen bodies are used up, so we are expected to believe that Gallifreyan Palace Guards carry weapons which are effectively useless against Gallifreyans. It’s painfully obvious that the only point of this scene is to underline in red felt tip pen for those who haven’t got it yet that a female Doctor is possible within the rules of the show. As if Michelle Gomez hasn’t made that point abundantly clear already. Ugh. Horrible.

Following a quick tour of the Doctor Who Experience which is badly in need of a spring-clean, our heroes steal a pleasingly retro TARDIS and head off to parts unknown. Now the Doctor begins his desperate plan to bring Clara back to life, but to pull it off, he’s going to need a bit of magic kit to do a re-run of the trick he pulled on Donna, for which he had no need of the magic kit. And there isn’t a “this way up” on the magic kit so he doesn’t know if he’s going to zap himself or Clara. So we get the final switcheroo at the end – the Doctor has forgotten Clara (or at least what she looks like (or at least until he makes it back to the TARDIS)) and not the other way round.

Why? What’s the point of any of it? What does any of it mean?

Anyway… Jenna Coleman does much with very little, Peter Capaldi never once gives away that he’s speaking pure gibberish, it’s nice to see Maisie Williams again, even if like Claire Higgins, nothing she says or does affects the plot in any way at all, there’s lots of talk of hybrids, but we never meet one (or rather we meet various vague candidates for one, none of which really live up to the hype) and I think Gallifrey is back now, so hurrah, probably.

This isn’t quite as bewildering as The Wedding of River Song or The Time of the Doctor but it’s a big big let-down at the end of a by-and-large stunningly good season. I suppose it was never boring, and the retro TARDIS was a bit of a treat, as was the thought of Ashildr and Clara charging around the universe in it, but this was such a mess, I can’t possibly give it more than two stars. I probably enjoyed it more than the dreary Sleep No More, but season finales are held to a higher standard.

So, my final order is as follows…

1. The Zygon Inversion
= Heaven Sent
3. Under the Lake
= The Zygon Invasion
5. The Magician’s Apprentice
= Face the Raven
7. The Witch’s Familiar
= Before the Flood
= The Girl Who Died
= The Woman Who Lived
11. Sleep No More
12. Hell Bent

Once again, if I compare my ratings to the averages over on Gallifrey Base, we find the following order from best to worst…

1. Heaven Sent
2. The Zygon Inversion
3. Face the Raven
4. Under the Lake
5. The Witch’s Familiar
6. The Magician’s Apprentice
7. The Zygon Invasion
8. Before the Flood
9. Hell Bent
10. The Girl Who Died
11. The Woman Who Lived
12. Sleep No More

So, fandom at large was a bit happier with The Witch’s Familiar, and a bit kinder to Hell Bent, but took a bit longer to get on board the Peter Harness train than me. What these numbers don’t reveal is how much fandom (as measured by Gallifrey Base) adored Heaven Sent, which got 51% ten-out-of-tens. Wow.

Now the structure of the season starts to reveal itself. The over-familiar gibberish of Sleep No More is not going to be redeemed by a second episode which ties everything up. Actually, what we’re heading in to is a three-part finale. Just as well, the nonsense of last week is probably best forgotten.

But even if last week isn’t being referenced, events from earlier this season and indeed, last season, certainly are. Capaldi and Coleman practically waltz into the TARDIS, chattering happily about unseen adventures. This is a little on-the-nose – an even more extreme version of Ten and Rose’s smug self-satisfaction around the time of Fear Her, all designed to set up the tragedy of Doomsday. So it’s pretty clear what we’re heading towards.

Early on, though this is pretty much business-as-usual. In what is becoming quite a familiar Moffat-trope, the TARDIS lands in response to a telephone call from an old friend. This time it’s Joivan Wade’s chirpy Rigsy from last year’s excellent Flatline who is now in possession of an unseen wife and daughter and a suitably creepy countdown tattoo.

The search for the source of this is a little bit plodding, a little bit procedural, for modern Doctor Who. And I must slightly take issue with some of nomenclature. Including made-up details in factual compendiums to guard against copyright theft is certainly a real thing. A trivia book compiler invented the fact that Lt Columbo’s first name was Philip for a book he published in the 1970s which enabled him to show that his book had been ripped off by the makers of Trival Pursuit years later (although in fact he lost the case).

So, I’m perfectly happy that a street which is shown on a map but which you can’t walk down is known as a Trap Street, but it seems a little odd to use that same terminology to describe a street which is not shown on a map but which you can walk down. And anyway, as pretty much every fan in the world has noticed, the correct name for this street is Diagon Alley.

Here we find Maisie Williams returning as – are we really supposed to call her “Mayor Me”? And the true nature of the street is gradually revealed. It’s a refugee camp for stranded aliens and Maisie rules it with a rod of iron because she can’t risk any funny business. Most of this works, but it feels like Jenga storytelling to me – pull out too many of the pieces and have a look at them it all starts to fall apart a bit.

The aliens use the same misdirection trick as the street to appear human. But why? The point of the street is that they are all aliens, but the street is inaccessible to humans. They know they aren’t human and no human will ever see them. Also, why doesn’t the trick work on Anah’s second face which seems to be visible throughout? And what’s the point of sentencing someone to death, sending them home so they can set their affairs in order, but wiping their memory so that they no longer know they’re going to die? Maisie must have been very sure Rigsy was going to call the Doctor and that’s a bit of stretch. And how are we to square her protestations that nobody was supposed to die with her cold-hearted execution of the convicted criminal earlier in the episode?

The rules of the Chronolock seem to be that if person A is Chronolocked then Maisie has the power to cancel it. Person B can agree to have the Chronolock transferred to them at any time, but presumably can’t give it back to Person A again, and once transferred, Maisie loses the power to cancel it. Okay, I guess, but this all seems terrifically arbitrary and doesn’t really make any sense except to set up the ending.

But in the last fifteen minutes, none of this really seems to matter. Terrific performances from Capaldi, Coleman, Williams and Wade sell the emotional content of the situation and Clara’s death when it comes is really affecting, aided by some of the very best CGI that the series has ever used – that horrible black smoke curling out of the lips of the executed is totally convincing. Almost as chilling is the Doctor’s cold, muted reaction. He grimly straps on the teleport and disappears to…

So let’s finally have a quick chat about cliff-hangers. The point of a cliff-hanger is to leave the audience wondering “what will happen next?” This can be done by subjecting the hero to a mortal threat or by using the next surprise which the narrative has to offer. If you pick the latter, then you have two choices. You can pose only the question – have the villain take off his mask but then cut to the hero murmuring “You…?” before we smash into the credits. Or you can reveal the shocking answer and let the audience mull the ramifications for the next seven days. Obviously, the first of these is rather easier, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily less effective. It was a surprise to me that the credits appeared when they did. The confession dial returns at least, so maybe now we’ll have some kind of an explanation as to just what it was and why the Doctor sent it to Missy.

Okay, so a rather plodding first third, a rather muddled middle third, but a full-bloodied, totally committed final act. I’d certainly rather have it that way around. As an exit for one of the series’ longest-running companions it works very well indeed. (From first appearance to last appearance it’s been over three years if you count Asylum of the Daleks and she’s done 35 episodes, most of which were complete stories. Amy Pond counts 33 episodes over two and a half years and among classic companions, only K9, Sarah Jane Smith and Jamie McCrimmon come anywhere close.)

That’s four stars – on the absolute proviso that Clara Oswald stays dead. If they resurrect her in any meaningful way I’m taking off a whole star, maybe more. This is the first time a companion has actually, properly died since Adric and that needs to be given a little bit of respect. If Moffat tries to Rory her, I won’t be happy.

(Sorry this is so late – Heaven Sent is coming now.)

Another hugely promising opening episode. Could it be that we were finally about to… invert the trend?

Rather than being a story of two halves like basically everything else so far this season, Peter Harness’s script for part two (like The Woman Who Lived, co-written with the show-runner) keeps up the momentum inherited from the opener, only letting up just before the end in a scene which many are already calling a highlight of the revived series. And I agree!

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The opening scenes with Jenna Coleman in a bafflingly generic flat are very Steven Moffat (think Last Christmas or Forest of the Dead) but none the worse for that, and it’s a great way of keeping Clara “alive” and active while Bonnie gets all the best lines. The Doctor’s escape from the plane is absurd, but no more absurd than the Bond film that the Doctor’s Union Jack parachute is surely a nod to – and the Doctor and Kate Stewart are reunited.

Obviously Kate’s resurrection is a bit of a cheat too, but the lovely wink to the fans helps this potentially bitter pill slip down beautifully – the Harry Sullivan references were great as well. Along the way, the Zygons use some social media to spread fear and uncertainty among humans and invaders alike, in a scene which was maybe the only one to strike a wrong note. The make-up job seemed to keep coming and going and I struggled to care about the plight of this guy we’d barely even met.

But anyway, we’re all set for the grand show-down. It’s entirely appropriate that the Doctor impersonates Hughie Green early in the proceedings. This is the world’s deadliest game-show and the careful pacing which allows this scene to play out for (I haven’t timed it, sorry) something like 6-7 minutes is just one of the many things to admire about the writing and production of this fantastic two-parter.

I rewatched Day of the Doctor recently and pretty much stand by my review, although it seemed a little less frantic on second viewing. Clearly the Zygon accord and the methods by which it was achieved warranted a little more time however, and to be able to unpack all the intricacies of this peace-keeping was marvellous.

Pitting Kate Stewart against Bonnie and also the Doctor is particularly interesting. Daughter of a solider, but UNIT’s scientific advisor – inheriting the Doctor’s role, not her old dad’s – which side will she fall on? It seems more interesting somehow that she should continue to believe that offence is the best defence, but equally that leaves a rather sour taste in the mouth when I think of noble Nick Courtney. It’s a bit humiliating that she ends the scene collapsed and brain-wiped, but that’s better I think than the lie of her becoming a peace-loving hippie or the unpleasantness of portraying her as a warmongering psychopath.

Bonnie and Clara form a fantastic pair here, with Jenna Coleman doing her best-ever work in the series, and the details of the two boxes with their two buttons manage to be a genuinely interesting and credible bluff (as opposed to something which seems cool at first but then turns out to be utter nonsense – Doctor Who has always had a weakness for these).

But this would count for nothing if it was a mere logic problem, and exercise in game theory, a crossword puzzle. Having a mystery to solve elevates proceedings, keeping all the players off-balance as well as keeping the audience guessing, but the point – the real point – is that maintaining a peace means that those with the power to wage war have to actually want peace, really want it. The Doctor doesn’t need to outsmart Bonnie and her gang of murderous blobby things. He needs to change their minds. And Peter Capaldi relishes every glorious word of this magnificent scene. There have been quite a few climactic scenes like this is Doctor Who from Tom Baker’s impassioned appeal to Magnus Greel, to Sylvester McCoy’s infamous “CND speech” in Battlefield but this one might just be the best of them all.

Finally, Bonnie is reborn as Osgood 3.0 in a coda which strikes a suitably hopeful note, while never forgetting just how fucking difficult this kind of peace is to create and to maintain. It’s lovely stuff throughout, making hugely effective use of the series recent and more distant past, while creating a ripped-from-the-headlines adventure which doesn’t feel like it will date. Daniel Nettheim directs with the vigour the series is now known for and the rest of the production team is on top form.

So, as we pass the half-way point, this is the first cast-iron classic of Series Nine. I have no hesitation in awarding this episode and the two-parter as a whole five stars. Peter Harness for show-runner? He’s run Wallander. Just sayin…

In only the third story of the new run, Doctor Who presented one of its famous “romps” – a jaunt around Victorian Cardiff with Charles Dickens, undertakers and ghosts who turned out to be aliens trying to come and live on Earth. These aliens professed to be benign, but actually proved to be malevolent. Elder fans might have recognised this plot-line from The Claws of Axos among others. Some less nerdy viewers wondered if author Mark Gatiss was trying to say something rather Daily Mail-ish about immigration.

Then, last year, writer Peter Harness gave us the hugely divisive Kill the Moon which some chose to interpret as an anti-abortion tirade. Neither of these readings seems remotely plausible to me. And yet, here is that same writer, apparently wading into the same treacherous waters as The Unquiet Dead all over again.

Okay, let’s start with the null hypothesis. Let’s assume that the point of the story is not “No blacks, no Irish” and see where that leads us. I remarked at the time of transmission of Day of the Doctor that the Zygon plot-line deserved more room and probably fewer Doctors to explore it. Strikingly, the Big Finish range of audio plays has already explored the notion of Zygons who just want to live among humans peacefully, and Steven Moffat’s notion that a peace can be best negotiated by people who genuinely can’t be sure which side they are on is rather brilliant.

But, because this is storytelling, a peace like this can’t last – the Gelth must be up to no good, the Axons must be out for themselves, otherwise what we have is a sermon, not an adventure. Exactly how and why the peace has collapsed has not yet been made clear. What we do have are some classic science-fiction tropes assembled with a tremendous amount of style and care. This is Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Thing with a hefty dose of UNIT and Quatermass.

Then there’s Osgood. Far from being a cheat, the revelation that only one half of an Osgood-Zygon symbiotic pair was vaporised by Missy gives genuine emotional weight to the hijinks which follow. The early part of the story is largely concerned with back-story and exposition, but this is doled out with enough grace that it goes down easily enough. When Kate Stewart arrives in Truth or Consequences, the Doctor arrives in Turmezistan and Clara discovers what’s weird about the lifts in London, then the story really starts to accelerate. And there are a couple of quick references to immigration to reassure you that – yes, it is okay if that crossed your mind, and no, that’s not intended to actually be the moral of the story.

The Zygons’ shapeshifting ability creates two different narrative games for the script to play. As noted, neither is new, but both are well-used here. The first is to manipulate aggressors by pretending to be loved ones. The drone operator calling off the strike is a little thin, but undeterred, Harness tries the same trick again in Turmezistan and here it works wonderfully well – provided you don’t stop and think about what the Doctor and Walsh were doing while all this was going on. Wasn’t this long conversation exactly the diversion they needed to slip in the back way?

The other game is to manipulate the audience by revealing that such-and-such is actually a Zygon. A made a mental note of a particularly awkward line from Clara when she sees the Doctor off on his Presidential Plane. Why would she suddenly announce she has to go back to her flat? Ugh. Of course, by the episode’s end, the reason is obvious – she’s already been replaced by a Zygon copy. I thought it would be Jac, but how marvellous to see Jenna Coleman given the chance to play a baddie before she goes – even shooting down the Doctor’s plane with a motherfucking rocket launcher.

The supporting cast are all great too with regular UNIT stalwarts Jemma Redgrave, Ingrid Oliver and Jaye Griffiths now joined by Peter Capaldi’s The Thick of It mucker Rebecca Front as Walsh, but it’s impossible for me to see them as Malcolm Tucker and Nicola Murray. And Capaldi is still having a ball, even though the Doctor is a little on the back foot, a little passive so far.

So, how to rate this? I really wish I’d let myself suspend judgement as this is hugely promising stuff, but this season has generally been a story of awesome take-offs and disappointing landings. This is certainly every bit as good as Under the Lake, and far better paced than The Magician’s Apprentice but giving five stars to part one of two just doesn’t feel right. Four-and-a-half then.

Now – don’t screw up the conclusion!

Some wise soul, I forget who, (Tat Wood possibly?) observed that a great many problems with the production of Classic Who could have been solved with one modern-style “tone meeting”. At these august gatherings, department heads go through the script together, with the executive producer guiding the conversations, and duties are assigned not simply as a matter of avoiding doubling-up, but to ensure that the production is united by a common vision. Thus one avoids Johnny Byrne’s script describing a gloomy, claustrophobic undersea environment being shot with every single studio light turned up to maximum.

This excellent process should not be confused with creativity by committee. What’s key is that the executive producer (or show-runner) is the last voice that matters. Everyone else can have opinions, but Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat will make the final decision. With too many people having what they imagine is the last say, a production – or even a script – can end up trying to serve too many masters and end up a porridge of ideas.

Now, singularity of vision is no guarantee of quality. I didn’t like Vincent and the Doctor but I appreciated it as a singular vision of Doctor Who from a top writer. I absolutely hated The Trees Are Everywhere La Di Da or whatever it was called, but even I must grudgingly admit that I hope the series still has the balls to experiment with new styles, whether or not I happen to think the results are worthwhile.

The Woman Who Lived has quite a serious problem in this regard. Just what kind of story was it trying to be? It felt somewhat as if Catherine Tregenna had written two different scripts – one a deep and rather sad philosophical meditation on the nature of longevity, the other a childish romp full of dick jokes and prat falls – and then due to some sort of Jeff Goldblum-style transporter accident with Final Draft, the two scripts ended up fused together into some sort of ghastly hybrid. Now a mix of styles can be bracing and fun, but it needs to be handled with a great deal of care, and both styles have to be worth doing and appropriate. My problem is that I adored one of Tregenna’s scripts and hated the other.

This episode and its predecessor are clearly the odd ones out in Series 9. Yes, they represent the two halves of a two-part story but there’s far less connective tissue between the two episodes than is usually the case, and there are different writers for each half. It’s odd then The Woman Who Lived directly followed The Girl Who Spoilered in the running order when there was no need for this. Sure, it’s pretty obvious that we would be seeing Maisie Williams again, but it also seemed obvious we’d be seeing Georgia Moffett again at the end of The Doctor’s Daughter but that was seven years ago and we’re still waiting.

Having the Doctor turn up after only a week of viewer-time and immediately be tracking the same gee-gaw as Maisie was clunky and unnecessary. Far more interesting to let us forget about Arya Stark for a few weeks, and then play the first meeting from the Doctor’s point of view. Anyway, once they get together and start talking, much of what they have to say to each other is rather striking. Tiny details like the endless shelves of journals, Lady Me describing the lives of mortals like mayflies of like smoke, the pain she feels from having outlived her own children – it all works brilliantly and Maisie Williams sells it like a pro.

When the Cowardly Lion turns up and starts breathing fire, I can’t quite connect this to the rather wonderful adult science fiction I’ve just been watching. And during the Doctor and Lady Me’s break-in, where apparently the entire household has been struck with hysterical blindness and deafness, I began to wonder if I’d fallen asleep and woken up during a repeat of Rent-a-Ghost. (Hat tip to my mate John Voce however, making much of very little as Mr Fanshaw).

Rufus Hound is a good and likeable actor, and was well cast as a swaggering highwayman, but having him cracker-joke his way off the gallows was just ghastly. The solution to the crisis was neatly hidden in plain sight, and I don’t mind the Doctor Fendahling his way out of a proper explanation, but even Maisie Williams can’t pull off the ludicrously sudden volte-face which Lady Me is now expected to experience.

And the climax sets up an ending which is off-kilter in at least two different ways. Firstly, the Doctor has left Me in a worse position than he found her. Now she is still cursed with immortality but with no prospect of being able to bring someone else along for the ride. Secondly and more seriously, the notion that she is hanging around looking over the Doctor’s shoulder for every Earthbound story post 1651 is rather odd and presumably it also means that she will be bumping into Clara The Impossible Girl quite a lot. Just how many magical guardian angels does one Time Lord need?

So, for all the sensitive and detailed exploration of the pros and cons of Me’s situation, it’s a clear four. It can’t be more than that because it didn’t have time to go anywhere. For all the willy jokes and falling over, it’s a two and so that’s a three for the latest episode I’m afraid, and there’s no need for a score for the two parter because each half was very much its own thing.

Whether or not we see any more of Maisie Williams and whether or not that retcons this review into a more (or less!) favourable one remains to be seen…