Tom Salinsky

Doctor Who - Series 5 - Episode 13 - The Big Bang

Spoilers abound! Keep away if you haven’t seen the episode.

I wrote last week that Steven Moffat had painted himself into a corner somewhat. This episode saw him not so much leap the wet paint in a single bound as redefine the notions of “paint”, “wet” and “corner”. This is a totally different episode to The Pandorica Opens in a quite remarkable way – so much so that at times it barely feels like a continuation of the same story.

Much of it is absolutely dazzling. The return to the time and place of The Eleventh Hour, the brief sketch of a starless Earth (recalling Asimov’s famous short story “Nightfall”), the reveal of Amy inside the Pandorica “Okay kid, here’s where it gets complicated” and that’s just before the titles roll. Some of it is genuinely affecting – Rory’s double millennium stint on guard duty is a beautiful conceit – much of it is terribly funny – “I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool. *toss* *zap* – a lot of it is both complicated and satisfying – Amelia is thirsty because the Doctor stole her drink in the past to give to her now because she’s complaining of thirst.

However, much of it is also very dry. As the Doctor bounces back-and-forward in time, we delight in seeing the pieces of the puzzle come together, but it tends to feel more like completing a Sudoku than the catharsis of a dramatic narrative. Part of the problem is that stakes having been raised through the roof and then up another twenty storeys last week, many of the solutions come very easily this week. Moffat’s a rigorous enough writer to have provided one-line explanations for most if not all of the following gripes, but the fact is that none of them feel properly integrated into the story. A contradiction is still a contradiction, even with a throwaway pseudoexplanation.

• Last week the Pandorica was impossible to open and the Doctor was trapped inside it forever. This week it can be opened and closed at will simply by waving the ever-popular sonic screwdriver at it.
• Last week the Pandorica was a device which rendered the Doctor incapable of further action. This week it regenerates anyone put inside it.
• Travelling in time is difficult which is why so few people can do it and why the TARDIS is so valuable. The time bracelet is repeatedly described as crude and nasty, presumably in the hope that we will never notice that it is in fact pinpoint and to-the-second accurate every single time it is used, instantaneous and in general better and more convenient than the often-unreliable TARDIS in almost every way.
• The whole idea of a “restoration field” is bunkum. For an explanation as to why, see my future blog post on the difference between science and magic.
• Stone Daleks!?

It’s that last point that I want to address now. As noted in the blog last week, as well as elsewhere, the supervillain alliance is risible as soon as you give it a moment’s serious thought. Moffat’s solution to this problem is to simply not include them in part two. In fact, throughout this peculiar episode, he simply drops concepts when they have no further role to play; Amelia disappears in the middle of the museum sequence with – again – only a single line to cover, Rory is controlled by the Nestenes only when it is required that he should be and so on.

What this means, and what adds to the Sudoku-feeling of this episode, is that there is no charismatic and yet hissable villain in whose downfall we can rejoice. Yet, this is not peculiar among Moffat scripts. Here’s a quick recap of his stories and their “villains”.

• The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances – mindless nanogenes doing what they’ve been programmed to do.
• The Girl in the Fireplace – mindless clockwork robots doing what they’ve been programmed to do.
• Blink – characterless statues doing what their nature dictates
• Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead – characterless shadows doing what their nature dictates
• The Eleventh Hour – mindless police force hunting criminal by-the-book
• The Beast Below – political brainwashing system
• The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone – as Blink
• The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang – apparently an alliance of supervillains, but actually what must be overcome is not the alliance but the fact of the universe having been extinguished

Not one good villain among them. The Eleventh Hour probably gets nearest. Prisoner Zero him/her/itself gloats in a suitably villainous way, but isn’t the main foe. In the same time period, other writers gave us The Editor, The Dalek Emperor, Mr Finch, John Lumic, The Family of Blood, The Master, Miss Foster, Davros, the Dream Lord and Restac. What’s Moffat playing at?

Then there’s the list of things which simply weren’t explained at all – some of these were trailed into the next series but many were never even mentioned.

• Why doesn’t Amy remember the events of The Stolen Earth?
• Why should the TARDIS exploding extinguish every star in the universe?
• If the Earth is orbiting the TARDIS as it explodes, just where is that brick wall which River Song can’t get past?
• How does remembering the Doctor bring him back to life anyway?
• Who is River Song and what was she in prison for?

Now, all this may sound as if I didn’t much like it, but the fact is I really, really did. The lack of a good villain does make it hard for the Doctor’s victory to resonate, and the incomprehensible scale of the problem means that the solution seems intellectually interesting rather than emotionally satisfying, but there are moments of sweetness, tenderness, and even greatness at such frequent intervals, that as severe as some of these problems sound, they are mere niggles when you actually sit and watch the story unfold.

River Song’s extermination of the stone Dalek, the dying Doctor’s last words inside the Pandorica, “I escaped! I love it when I do that” followed by the horrible realisation that he is simply pausing on the threshold of death, and most spectacularly, brilliantly, jawdroppingly wonderful of all – Amy’s realisation that what her wedding is missing is Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed and Something Dimensionally Transcendental.

Then Matt Smith dances like a loon, a pair of married companions hop into the TARDIS for the first time ever and we’re off to the Orient Express it seems. Whew.

A fitting climax to a thirteen week run which was often astonishing, sometimes frustrating, but never (almost never) less than entertaining. I hope that next year the new production team will feel a little more secure in their roles, and some of wrinkles will be ironed out.

In the meantime, I’m going to see what else this blog is good for, but if nothing else, I’ll be back to review the Christmas special. Geronimo! Meantime here’s my summation of Series Five.

The Eleventh Hour: good introduction to the new team. 4/5
The Beast Below: didn’t really make sense, but I was captivated by the energy and oddness of it all. 4½/5
Victory of the Daleks: nadir of series five. 2/5
The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone: practically perfect. 5/5
The Vampires of Venice: better than the Dalek nonsense, but only just 2½/5
Amy’s Choice: slight but engaging. 3½/5
The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood: graceless but efficient with a killer ending. 4/5
Vincent and the Doctor: horrid. 2/5
The Lodger: flawed but enjoyable. 3/5
The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang: the best and the worst this series has had to offer, but more of the former than the latter. 4/5

Doctor Who - Series 5 - Episode 12 - The Pandorica Opens

Spoilers!

Now, let’s have a chat about season finales.

In the 1960s, Doctor Who was pretty much a year-round production. The first year saw 42 episodes produced and transmitted on a weekly basis, with a further four-part story (later edited down to three parts) recorded and then held over to start the new season after only a seven week gap. In the seventies, the workload was scaled back to 26 episodes a year (today we have half the episodes each year, but they’re double the length) but again, the practice of “holding over” one story to start the next season was maintained – so for example, even Robot, Tom Baker’s first story, was recorded immediately after work had finished on Planet of the Spiders and by the outgoing Jon Pertwee production team.

Throughout these years, the season finale was often nothing special. Sometimes, as with Planet of the Spiders or The Green Death, these end-of-season stories happened to coincide with changes in the regular cast, but equally such changes could happen in mid-season as with The Hand of Fear. More importantly, in all other ways these stories were not vastly different from those which were transmitted either side of them.

In the late seventies and early eighties, each season did tend to come to a fairly definite end, following which the production office would briefly shut down and then gear up again for the following year’s onslaught. This did mean that the final story of each season tended to have a fairly obviously defining characteristic. It was the one where they’d already spent all the money – Time-Flight being the most obvious culprit here. When Peter Davison left, producer John Nathan-Turner took the decision to move the regeneration story up one, so the season finale is not the regeneration, it’s the first full story of the new Doctor (and obviously done on the cheap).

It may also be worth noting that these two stories – Peter Davison’s final outing, The Caves of Androzani, and Colin Baker’s first effort, The Twin Dilemma, recently came first and last respectively in the Doctor Who Magazine poll of all stories ever. That these two stories, transmitted consecutively could be so wildly divergent is an indication of just how little quality control was being effected by the then producer.

In the new era, things are very different. With one person in the role of both executive producer – having overall creative control of the series – and head writer – contributing the lion’s share of the scripts – an entire season can be designed with a beginning, middle and end. Russell T Davies wrote an unprecedented eight out of 13 episodes for Series One, transmitted in 2005, including two out of the three two-parters, and including the two-part season finale. For the first time, a season of Doctor Who stories was itself telling one longer story. (Successfully, that is.) The “Bad Wolf” clues, dropped as early as the very first episode, coalesced into a hugely dramatic showdown between the new, battle-scarred Doctor, and an entire army of space-faring Daleks. It was an astonishingly climactic end to a season which looks a little ropey and uncertain in places today, but which five years ago did the impossible – it made Doctor Who viable again.

This was topped with almost effortless ease in 2006 with what might be my very favourite episode of the revived series to date. (No, it’s Blink. No it’s Midnight. Wait – I forgot about Human Nature.) Not for the rather implausible Torchwood business, not for all that nonsense about the Void being a cosmic hoover, not even for the fan-pleasing yet wittily-done Dalek vs Cybermen showdown (“this isn’t war, this is pest control”) but for the heart-wrenching, gut-aching Bad Wolf Bay farewell between the Doctor and Rose. A friend of ours brought her ten-year old daughter round a couple of days after Doomsday went out. She’d missed it, so we let her watch it as the grown-ups talked. As Rose struggled to cling on to that lever, we gradually stopped talking and began watching the screen. And by the time the Doctor was burning up a sun just to say “goodbye”, all four of us were sobbing uncontrollably.

This, of course, creates a problem.

Now, each season finale has to be bigger, more awesome, more show-stopping, more heart-tugging, and more spectacular than all those which preceded it. And ideally in a different way. In the 2007 series, Rusty got away with this, but only just. The return of the Master in Utopia is brilliantly handled, The Sound of Drums successfully gets our heroes into All Sorts Of Trouble, while pulling together strands from earlier episodes, and Last of the Time Lords manages to make the best of the inevitable reset switch with a couple of useful reversals, the sense that some of the participants at least have not been reset and so have paid a price for their endeavours, and for a real look at what being the last of your kind (such a Doctor Who cliché!) actually means. But, by now the cracks are beginning to show.

The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End are colossally self-indulgent and the return of Davros is muffled by the presence of too many other villains and allies all competing for our attention. Then the final episode shakes off any goodwill it might have accumulated by revisited and traducing that final scene in Doomsday. I thought the fourth series was in general very strong and I liked Donna enormously, but Journey’s End would have been a fucksight better without Rose in it. And probably without Davros too.

Which brings us (vaulting over The End of Time – this blog post is long enough as it is) to Mr Moffat’s first go. Which option will he take? Bigger and better – more and more old foes and returning friends, or something smaller, darker and more Silence in the Library-esque? Well, now we have our answer. Like The Hungry Earth, and The Stolen Earth before it, much of The Pandorica Opens is teasing. We all know, as if we haven’t guessed from the end of The Eleventh Hour, that the contents of the “Pandorica” will be revealed in the closing minutes of this episode. The question is not where will we arrive – it’s how entertaining will the journey be? But Moffat also has a second significant problem of expectations to overcome. The longer he puts off telling us what The Pandorica is and what it contains (and, as I say, he’s been putting it off for around ten episodes now!) the more fuckstaggeringlyawesome it has to be when it’s finally unveiled.

Let’s take the first of these problems first. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious that that the Doctor was the only feasible candidate for the contents of the Pandorica. After all this build up, it can’t just be Thorax Last of the Huggliubdiums, of whom we have never heard before. It has to be something reincorporated from earlier in the show’s mythos, and that probably means from earlier this series. So that very long pretitles sequence serves double-duty. As well as setting up the story that is to come, it also rules out a number of possible, if not exactly probable, candidates. River Song? Nope. Churchill? Nope. Van Gogh!? Not on your life. Liz Ten?? And then, fifteen minutes before the end, all the new series’ major monsters crop up, also (apparently) keen to see what The Pandorica contains. So, it doesn’t contain Daleks (classic or shit models), Cybermen, Sontarans, Autons, Hoix, Blowfish or Weevil either. And we’ve heard no rumours of returning companions (good, leave Rose Tyler where she is please) and it’s too early for a rematch with The Master so unless it’s the surprise reappearance of the Menoptra (you laugh, but who ever thought we’d see the Macra again!?) it has to be the Doctor himself.

What comes between the arrival at Stonehenge and the opening of the Pandorica is therefore, once again, just delaying tactics, but what delaying tactics they are, and how many other revelations are packed in to this? The Doctor and Amy’s hilarious and terrifying encounter with an amputee Cybermen, the striking reappearance of Roranicus, Amy’s remark that Pandora’s Box was her favourite book, the gorgeous set design and location filming, and any number of quotable one-liners (“I hate good wizards in fairy tales. They always turn out to be him.”), all add up to a thoroughly engrossing, exciting, suspenseful and fan-pleasing forty minutes.

The last five minutes does see Moffat painting himself into a corner a wee bit. As with The Master broadcasting to the “peoples of the universe” in part four of Logopolis, the need to raise the threat level to cataclysmic proportions comes at the cost of a certain level of credibility. The quadruple-threat cliffhanger (Doc’s in the box, Amy’s shot by Rory, River’s stuck in an exploding TARDIS and the universe itself is being extinguished) is written and staged with enough vigour and energy that I was just about able to buy it, but stop and think, even for one moment, about this “alliance” and what it means, and how it was brought about, and the whole thing quickly becomes laughable, as a number of hilariously satirical threads on Gallifrey Base demonstrate (“What did they all say while waiting to surprise the Doctor?”, “The Alliance Conference Call”, “What did they all say after the Doctor went into the box?”).

But, I have faith that Moffat can bring all this together, maybe even confront the reality of this alliance, as RTD confronted the reality of taking a young woman away from her family and friends on a tour of the universe. I have no idea how The Big Bang will resolve any of this, but if I know my Moffat, the clues are already in front of us. So here’s what I’ll be looking out for on Saturday night.

• “Amy, does it bother you that nothing about your life makes any sense?”
• The crack removing people from ever having existed
• What else does Amy remember – what else did the Doctor implore her to remember?
• What has Amy forgotten and why?
• What else is in Amy’s head?
• What was River Song in prison for?
• The Pandorica is a “fairy tale”, according to the Doctor
• 26 / 06 / 2010.

See you on Saturday!

Doctor Who - Season 5 - Episode 11 - "The Lodger"

Spoilers ahead, but as this is a week late, I shouldn’t think this is too big a problem.

So, Moffat rounds up all of his sit-com buddies and gets Simon “Men Behaving Badly” Nye to write an episode which turns out to be a rather nice little “bottle show”. He gets Richard “Vicar of Dibley” Curtis to write another, which pleased some with what they saw as its heartfelt artistic passion, but which so irritated me with its cack-handed monster that I couldn’t buy into the emotion of the climactic scenes.

So it’s left to Gareth “The Shakespeare Code” Roberts to give us Timelords Behaving Badly, also known as the Smith and Corden show. Unfortunately for Doctor Who fans, this was within days of Corden and Patrick Stewart making total twats of themselves at that awards ceremony, and so it was with a certain amount of trepidation that we approached this slightly unusual episode.

I thought that the set-up was fresh and funny. I like the idea of The Doctor having to spend several days passing as human, without the aid of a chameleon arch and a load of borrowed memories, without a companion to fall back on, and with the added complication of being dropped into a will-they-won’t-they-best-friends-each-too-scared-to-make-the-first-move situation. And, to his credit, Coren played his part with sincerity and wit and Daisy Haggard – so good recently in Psychoville – is also suitably vulnerable and yet not pitiable.

Add to this a wonderfully creepy mystery up the stairs and Karen Gillan making the absolute most of the pretty limited opportunities she’s given and we should be all set, right? Right? Sadly, this is yet another near miss, in a season which has been littered with them. I’ve long said that history will record that Russell T Davies’ chief contribution to Doctor Who, once it was actually back on the air, was the care that he lavished on every single script, whether it had his name on it or not. Some, he simply burnished up. Others, like The Satan Pit, he rewrote from top to bottom. When he didn’t perform uncredited rewrites, either for contractual reasons as with Fear Her, or due to illness as with Daleks in Manhattan, the results were generally unpopular stories which languished at the bottom of season polls. Possibly the reason that some of his credited stories were not so well received is precisely because only one mind is at work on them.

Moffat is thought to have a rather more hands-off approach to scripts. Pitching ideas to writers, suggesting plot turns here or character beats there. Protecting the tone through the production process, but nothing like the kind of top-to-bottom rewriting that the horribly overworked Davies indulged in. The result is that many of this season’s scripts – especially those without the name of the executive producer on them – feel a little undercooked, or have holes in the plotting which let them down.

The Lodger is let down in two different but equally serious ways. The first is that, with no passionately ranting Welshman babbling about “truth”, too many gags have made their way in which can’t be justified beyond “wouldn’t it be funny if…?” The Doctor’s omelette-making is overdone, his behaviour in Fatty’s office does nothing to earn the praise which Fatty’s boss lavishes on him, his lack of knowledge social niceties is totally at odds with the Third Doctor’s easy bonhomie with UNIT soliders and Whitehall penpushers; his bewilderment at the sport of football is hard to take following the Fourth and especially the Fifth Doctor’s fondness for cricket, and his inability to integrate with Fatty and Doe-eyes is almost impossible to accept as a continuation of the Tenth Doctor’s Christmas Dinner with Rose and her family.

All of which I could just about let go, if not for the fact that they fumble the climax so badly that it calls into question almost all of the preceding half-hour. Once Doe-eyes goes upstairs to her apparent doom, we the audience are well aware that the stakes are suddenly much higher than they were. But the Doctor has been steadfastly refusing to mount those stairs and find out what has been going on up there for days, letting innocents march to their death while he twats about on the football pitch or spits out wine or chats to Amy in the TARDIS. Suddenly, he has no reason to wait any longer, but all that’s changed is that Fatty’s caught him out. Any reason to wait still exists. If there was no reason to wait then he’s just let all those people die because… well, because pretending to be human was more fun!?

Pretty much all of which could have been avoided if he’d known it was Daisy Haggard up there, but he doesn’t. He and Fatty run up the stairs, not knowing who they’re going to find. The final scene is well-done and if the slack plotting didn’t ruin it for you, then Fatty and Doe-eyes’ eventual reunion is both neat, resolving both plots at once, and satisfying, but it’s a shame that the villain is yet another Moffat implacable robot on auto-pilot, a reprise of the Chula nanogenes from The Doctor Dances, the clockwork robots from The Girl in the Fireplace, or the Atraxi from The Eleventh Hour.

So, some funny lines. Some charming performances. A novel situation, but a lack of rigor, truth and care which left me more let down than entertained. Neither the disaster which this clash of genres might have been, nor the triumph given the talent on display. Three stars.

Doctor Who - Series 5 Episode 10 - Vincent and the Doctor

Spoilers!

Doctor Who is rightly praised for the extraordinary flexibility of its format. Not content with science-fiction adventure stories, the series can encompass political thrillers, bedroom farces, psychological horror, childish whimsy and pretty much anything else you can think of. Even when the series settles down and finds something it’s good at, like base-under-siege stories, a story like The Mind Robber will come along and upset the apple cart. Sometimes, like Troughton’s adventures in the Land of Fiction, these experimental efforts become generally very well-regarded. Others, fandom declines to clasp to their bosom quite so firmly, such as The Gunfighters. Still others remain controversial – loved by some, hated by many – such as Love & Monsters.

Vincent and the Doctor was certainly an experiment, tackling the psychology of depression while setting a beloved artist in his historical context, all shot through the prism of Steven Moffat’s “fairy tale” vision of the series, and including a few brief mentions of the ongoing series arc. I wholeheartedly support this experimentation with the formula. I also thought the results were almost totally unsuccessful.

This is of course, merely opinion, and rash is the critic who attempts to give mere opinions the weight of facts. It is not true to say that Vincent and the Doctor is unsuccessful. Good friends and respected critics found it profoundly moving and exciting (and it is, of course, much less risky and exposing to sit on the sidelines and grumble about how manipulative a piece of art is, than to express your wholehearted admiration and love for it). It does, however, remain my opinion that Vincent and the Doctor did not work for me at all.

The pre-titles sequence is almost identical to the opening of The Time of Angels, with The Doctor and Amy once again discovering something odd in a museum artefact and charging off to find out what’s wrong with it, only here it’s done without any panache or grace. It’s not at all clear why a visit to the Musée d’Orsay should be a special treat for Amy, not is it at all clear why there are in such a hurry to race back to 1890 given that 1890 will wait for them to get there for as long as they like. And the justification “I know evil when I see it” (one of a handful of poorly-dubbed Matt Smith lines in this episode) is paper-thin.

So, the titles haven’t even run yet and already we’ve got a slightly awkward juxtaposition of a brief art history lecture and a sudden mysterious urgency to investigate a monster. On arrival in Provence, things brighten up a bit. Tony Curran is excellent both in appearance and in manner as the troubled Vincent, and his Scottish accent is incorporated with a sly gag. Director Jonny Campbell recreates van Gogh’s paintings in his compositions without making too big a deal of it, and the story begins to settle down.

At this point, I would have been perfectly happy if this had simply been a story of what happens when van Gogh met the Doctor and Amy, but up pops an invisible monster to remind us that this is Doctor Who. Sigh. The Krafayis is generally rather poorly realised with the Doctor not even facing the same direction as van Gogh when attempting to attack it, bits of scenery occasionally falling over, but never creating the impression that a creature is moving around, and actors being hoisted up on wires or falling over in a slightly embarrassed fashion.

Why it isn’t killing dozens of people isn’t made clear, nor is there any real connection to the rest of the story. Between only van Gogh being able to see it (and paint it), the Krayfayis itself being blind and van Gogh’s impassioned rant about being able to hear colours, Richard Curtis obviously has something in mind about what one person can see and another can’t, but it never really comes together. I suppose allowing these two plotlines to merely touch instead of intersect is preferable to desecrating van Gogh’s genius with some science fiction nonsense about his visions of the world being due to an excess of midichlorians in his blood, but the overall impression is still of a perfectly good, if slightly patronising, story about Why Vincent Van Gogh Was Sometimes A Bit Sad But Still A Jolly Good Painter, rudely elbowed out of the way for some rather clumsy science-fiction slapstick.

And then the Krafayis is dead, stabbed with an easel if that’s supposed to make this feel like more of a piece, with 15 minutes to go, which means we get undoubtedly the most questionable sequence of all – van Gogh’s return visit to the museum. Firstly, this is – for my money – somewhat overplayed at best. To the soaring strains of emo-pop, we hear Bill Nighy eulogise van Gogh’s art while the poor man stands and listens. I know it’s meant to be an uplifting and heartbreaking and yet ultimately sensitive depiction of depression, but to me it felt glib and sentimental without really connecting with anything. Secondly, and perhaps more seriously, the Doctor’s attitude towards this troubled soul’s mental health seems to me to be wildly cavalier (being shown this kind of future might drive anyone mad) and the lack of impact on the rest of van Gogh’s life, while probably truthful, did render the exercise slightly pointless. Ultimately, I simply struggled to accept the reality of any of it – even within Doctor Who’s loose fantasy context. I knew what the scene wanted of me, but I just didn’t feel that it had earned it.

As ever, there are pleasures to be had. In the scene where van Gogh, the Doctor and Amy lie on their backs looking at the stars, we get a vision of what a more restrained, more controlled, more truthful version of this story might have looked like. I’d cheerfully watch Bill Nighy (uncredited for some reason) count backwards from 1000 and I’ve no doubt he’d make it a fascinating experience. Matt Smith is absolutely brilliant once again, even when the script only gives him falling over to do, it was nice to get that quick name-check for Rory and I loved the TARDIS being fly-postered, and those posters burning off in the vortex. Ultimately, however, this was my least favourite story of the series so far, with the sole exception of Victory of the Daleks, which slips lower in my estimations with every passing day.

Two stars.

Doctor Who - Series 5 - Episode 9 - Cold Blood

Spoilers below, read on with care.

Last week, I said I was going to withhold judgement on this two-parter until I’d seen how (and if) all the set-ups were paid off. I’m pleased to say, in general they paid off handsomely. But this was also an episode of two halves. We’ll get to the last ten minutes in a second, but let’s take the Silurian story first.

It’s Stephen Moore doing a portentous voice over! Fantastic way to get me in a good mood, straight away. Totally unexpectedly, one of my favourite actors – one of those wonderful British character actors who’s been in just about everything but never, until now, Doctor Who – starts intoning gibberish over a picture of planet Earth, and even though the voice over telling us the end of the story at the start of part two is a complete steal from Doomsday, I just loved it.

And, as I predicted, the episode kicks off with all the characters who had been held in stasis, suddenly springing into life. Amy finally escapes from her shackles, Ambrose goes mental with a taser and the Doctor rings the front door bell. From here on, it’s pedal-to-the-metal, will-they-won’t-they stuff all the way to the finish, with some lovely good-news-bad-news sequences and masses and masses of Silurians, swelling further the ranks of twenty-first century Doctor Who monsters represented by two-or-three fully characterised individuals with impressive make-ups and any number of interchangeable troops, their faces covered by helmets, masks or cowls (see also the Sontarans, the Judoon, the Sycorax etc).

Is it perfect? Of course not. The Silurian/Human peace conference is unbelievably shallow and glib, as is the absurd division of Silurians into completely compassionate, open, sensitive and friendly on the one hand (Eldane, Malohkeh), and war-hungry psychopathic ape-haters on the other (Alaya, Restac). But this is Doctor Who – bold, colourful, exciting, fast-moving. Not some turgid political play at the Royal Court. Sure, they are broad brush strokes, but with performers as strong as Stephen Moore and Neve McIntosh, the script can trust them to find the shades of grey. Particularly fine was McIntosh’s little gasp of regret and grief at the sight of her sister’s corpse.

And while I’m griping, the Doctor and Eldane’s solution is also both patronising and a cheat. Patronising because the solution to the problem of sharing the planet with homo reptilia is unlikely to be as simple as pressing the pause button and getting three people to start up a new religion. A cheat because the magic decontamination thing was in no way set-up. But amid the whirl and dash and energy, I still found it hugely enjoyable, even on a second viewing. Mo never grows a character, and Eliot seems to lose his – even his dyslexia’s not mentioned again, but Tony, Nasreen and Ambrose are all vividly written and strongly played. There are also hints that we haven’t seen the last of Tony and Nasreen either.

Then there’s the last ten or so minutes. First of all, after three crackless episodes, the crack is back. Then just as I was wondering how long he’d be around for – boom! – Rory dies. Two death scenes in three episodes is quite a lot, and it’s a pity that as far as we’re concerned, Amy’s already lost him once. But to lose the memory of him too is ghastly and the Doctor’s guilt will be unbearable. One assumes that The Pandorica, when it Opens will have Rory-Restoring powers but, in the third of this episode’s triple whammies, it certainly seems to have TARDIS-fragmenting powers.

Wonderful stuff, and as we race towards the end of Series Five I can’t believe so much has gone so quickly. Cold Blood on its own is easily worth four-and-a-half stars, but I can’t completely forgive the padded-yet-garbled The Hungry Earth, so four stars for the story as a whole.

Next week – Vincent van Gogh as written by Richard Curtis.

Doctor Who - Series 5 - Episode 8 - The Hungry... wait, what?

As ever, spoilers. Read on with care.

I’m quite tempted not to review The Hungry Earth at all until after Cold Blood has gone out. Not just because this review is so late, but also because I can only remember one other two-part story in the Modern Era which has had so much set-up and so little actual story in the first part. That story was the 2008 season finale The Stolen Earth. This very curious episode is structured so as to first remove the Doctor from the action so he can have some neither terribly relevant nor terribly dramatic backstory explained to him by a convenient galactic secretary. Meanwhile, we get reintroduced to all sorts of friendly faces from the past until finally the Doctor and Rose can be reunited and the Doctor blasted by a Dalek triggering the infamous faux-regeneration. What this means is that after about the first ten minutes and before the last five, the plot hardly advances at all, and we get thirty minutes of narrative “vamping”, with almost all of the actual story crammed into a bloated 65 minute denouement.

Of course, we classic fans are used to this. Many’s the four part story which is basically a pretty decent set-up in episode one, a pretty decent climax in episode four and an awful lot of running around, being locked-up, discovering a tiny smidgeon of plot and then being locked up again in the middle episodes. And god help you if your first experience of classic Who is one of the shapeless, swampy Pertwee six-parters. The Time Monster, be named-and-shamed; Colony in Space, let’s be having you; The Monster of Peladon, stand up and be counted.

Having seen The Hungry Earth – a Pertwee nostalgia-fest, lacking only a Brigadier-substitute – many younger fans may now be tempted to go at revisit some Pertwee stories, but thankfully Chris Chibnall has picked some of the better ones to pay tribute to. Here’s the obligatory roll-call of Pertwee elements making a reappearance here – Welsh miners digging up something nasty from The Green Death, domelike incorporeal barrier over the church and its environs from The Daemons, foolishly boring to the centre of the earth from Inferno, the Silurians from, er, The Silurians and being-set-about-ten-years-in-the-future from – oh look, let’s not go there.

But where’s it all going? Bafflingly, Doctor Who Confidential claimed that the rough-cut of The Hungry Earth was a full 15 minutes overlong, and implied that this was rather unusual. And the transmitted version does bear some signs of having had the hatchet taken to it at a relatively late stage, as so many of the scenes exist simply as obviously sign-posted set-ups. Some paid off in this episode, at least to some extent, others haven’t yet. Rory’s sudden and unmotivated desire to return Amy’s ring to the TARDIS is about as blatant a device for splitting up the TARDIS crew as I can remember, but at least we leave the episode understanding that the point of him returning to the TARDIS is to discover the subterranean grave-robbing with Ambrose and Elliot. But, on the other hand, what was the point of that? If you’re trying to establish that there’s something under the ground pulling stuff down then the Doctor and Amy have managed to tell us that rather more dramatically while you’ve just been standing around and talking calmly.

Worse is to come when Elliot announces in the middle of a tension-filled countdown that he is just popping off to reclaim his headphones and nobody even blinks let alone tries to stop him. Was Chibnall hoping no-one would notice, or was a more elegant version of this, with a little more justification present in the sixty minute cut and it only looks so crass now because the story has been stripped to the bone? Except it hasn’t. Apart from PC Rory’s deadend investigation of those graves, all of that fannying around with surveillance equipment also goes nowhere, and right at the end when the Doctor and Nasreen get in the TARDIS to take a trip down to the lower caves we spend several minutes with them being buffeted around as the Silurian sciencey somethingorother screws up the TARDIS controls before depositing them exactly where they had been trying to go. Why not cut some or all of these narrative “loops” (see Terrance Dicks on writing The War Games) instead of paring back the central plot to its most basic and functional components? Why not give Amy Pond, the ostensible second lead, something to actually do instead of removing her from the action and keeping her chained up in limbo until part two?

Maybe part of the motivation for this delaying procedure was to withold the revelation that the Silurians were responsible, but in that case nobody told the BBC continuity announcer who cheerfully blew the surprise while chatting over the closing credits of the previous programme. And it’s been an open secret for weeks in any case.

Other obvious set-ups which haven’t gone anywhere yet include Elliot’s dyslexia, the Silurian “dissection” of Mo, the future Rory and Amy glimpsed on the hillside, the blue grass (mentioned two-or-three times but it hasn’t amounted to anything yet), Tony’s sting wound, the Silurian barrier which just keeps coming and going and switching the lights on and off purposelessly so far, and the Doctor’s continual promises that he will bring people back / keep everyone safe / make sure nobody dies today. Does Chibnall really have no idea what he’s doing?

Well, other evidence makes that seem a little less likely. Once we finally arrive at where a Moffat, a Davies or even a Cornell might have delivered us in half the time – the humans having to stand guard over a defiant Silurian – the script suddenly takes flight. The moral ambiguity which the Silurian backstory invites bursts into life, the Silurian make-up is fantastic, and Alaya’s taunting of Rory, Ambrose and Tony with her prescient visions of her own murder are wonderful stuff, as is the spectacular reveal of the Silurian city, hugely raising the stakes and providing a marked contrast to the rather self-consciously small human cast (“all the rest of the staff on this colossal, record-breaking drilling project drive in and overnight it can be looked after by just one bloke reading The Gruffalo”).

Will all this pay off next week (i.e. tonight)? Well, I just don’t know, and that’s what makes it so hard to give this episode a definitive rating. In amonst these structural gripes, there are many moments of charm and grace. The benefit of a smaller cast is that the actors have more room to work, and four nicely-defined human guest characters are starting to emerge – Tony, Nasreen, Ambrose and Elliot. Only Mo is a little underdeveloped so far. The being-sucked-into-the-earth effects while not perfect are at least an improvement over the Dave Chapman video wipe seen in Frontios or the Colin Baker wiggle-your-tummy-into-the-sand manoeuvre from The Ultimate Foe. Ashley Way directs with vigour and elegance and Murray Gold’s music is at its lyrical best, so there is hope. But ultimately, I will be much more inclined to forgive the clunkiness of the setting-up if the paying-off is truly spectacular. So, for now I reserve judgement. A full review of the whole two-parter will be up in a day or two.

Doctor Who - Series 5 - Episode 7 - "Amy's Choice'

As usual, this review contains spoilers, so read on with care.

One of only two writers new to Doctor Who this year (both of them veteran sit-com hands with a wealth of other experience besides – this is no longer a show which can develop new talent it seems), Simon Nye seems at first glance a curious writer to pick, but actually he fits into Moffat’s fairy tale vision of the show very neatly. As most will know, this is the season “cheapie”, filmed last to the almost audible sound of barrels scraping and wallets straining. Sometimes the season cheapie turns out to be a little gem like the shamefully overlooked Midnight. On other occasions we get the more dubious Love & Monsters or Boom Town (to say nothing of The Horns of Nimon or Time Flight). Certainly, this puts more weight on ideas than on execution, but Doctor Who has (almost) never been about visual spectacle.

Nye’s script was a very simple idea – possibly too simple. Toby Jones’ Dream Lord offers the now three-person TARDIS crew a puzzle to solve. Which is the true reality? And for a while, I was actually interested to see which it would turn out to be – forgetting the almost cast-iron Rule of Story Choices. This rule states that unless we know in advance which is the right choice (such as who such-and-such is supposed to marry) that given X choices, the hero of a story will pick none of them, either because the choice is no longer necessary or because an X+1th reveals itself. And so it proves to be here. The story has one more twist before the titles roll though, and one Nye can’t keep from us. Having promised that the Doctor knows exactly who the Dream Lord is, we have to have an explanation, and fandom primed itself for the revelation of The Celestial Toymaker, The Master or even (Verity save us) The Valeyard. This all seems a little foolish now, but we live in a post return-of-the-Macra world, so never say “never”.

The reveal that the Dream Lord was the Doctor certainly made sense of a lot of the foregoing, with or without the slightly naff space pollen (to me very redolent of Star Trek The Next Generation, both in conception and appearance) but seemed to lack any kind of sting or bite, and while the adventures in the two realities had some fun and clever moments, the key moments of death in each world were curiously muted. Why can’t we be with the Doctor and Amy as they hurtle towards that cottage? Why can’t we see the TARDIS disintegrating and the void of space wrenching them apart? Instead we just cut away.

Nye’s structure means he has to keep cutting back-and-forth between Leadworth (sorry, Upper Leadworth) and the increasingly refrigerated TARDIS with nowhere else to go and he does a decent job of continually upping the stakes, I just wanted some kind of third act complication if only for variety. But while we keep just flipping back and forth it’s all too apparent that Leadworth is where the real action is, whereas back on the TARDIS, there’s little more than chat and ponchos. This means that the performances and dialogue have to really work hard, and luckily Nye, Smith, Gillan and Darvill are all up to the task, but while the ending was satisfactory and the concept neat, I felt the whole was just a little underwhelming, with the possible exception of Amy’s reaction to Rory’s “death”, which was beautifully handled by all concerned.

A few other niggles. Why is the Doctor’s savagely cheeky line “how do you stave off the, you know, self-harm?” talked over? Why is the exterior lighting/grading suddenly so flat and EastEnders-y after the lovely tones and shades we got in what is supposed to be the same location in The Eleventh Hour? Bad weather? Another eye on the end of a pseudopod? Really!?

Three and a half stars, but I’m in a good mood cos it’s the Silurians next week!

Doctor Who Series 5 Episode 6 - The Vampires of Venice

As usual, this review contains spoilers. Read with care.

So, Toby Whithouse, the writer who gave us School Reunion, the Doctor Who story in which The Doctor, his companion and her boyfriend infiltrate a mysterious school which is actually the operational base for a group of aliens disguised as humans, is back with a Doctor Who story in which… ah.

As full of familiar tropes as this was, the repetition isn’t the biggest issue and the first thirty minutes seemed rich, lush and full of witty lines. Arthur Darvill makes Rory a doofus boyfriend who is entirely different from Noel Clarke’s Mickey Smith, and the notion of sending Rory and Amy on a date is a lovely one (although Amy being the most important person in the universe seems to have taken a back-seat since the end of the last episode). Croatia, standing in for Venice looks absolutely fantastic, and Jonny Campbell’s camera prowls atmospherically around the architecture, costumes and actors. Murray Gold’s score may have been his finest to date – I particularly liked his new Doctor’s theme rescored for sonorous strings – and the supporting cast added gravitas and weight counterpointing the wit of the regulars.

But around the time that Isabella is fed to the fishes, freeing her father up to make a Noble Act Of Self-Sacrifice – yup, there it is – and especially following that NAOSS which firstly follows a second almost identical running through stone corridors waving torches at vampire girls sequence, and secondly effectively removes the major threat with almost twenty minutes to go, it all starts to seem a bit uneventful. At this point, the one-liners start undermining the jeopardy rather than counterpointing it. Rory’s fight with Francesco is terminally unexciting because of the constant wisecracking, and the stately camerawork is not suited to what should have been a fast-cut combat sequence. Further, Amy’s exploding Francesco with her compact makes no sense whatsoever – very disappointing given that the rest of the fish/vampire/alien business had been if not thoroughly worked out, then at least given some care and attention.

The following supposed climax never really has any power or energy and is apparently composed entirely of offcuts from previous episodes. As dark clouds of alien energy pour out of the Globe Theatre the Calvierri School, the Doctor has to climb Alexandra Palace The Empire State Building The Palazzo and rewire the Adipose Parthenogenesis Saturnynian Tsunami machine before finally looking up and seeing the skies clear of Sontaran gas storm clouds.

And this invites the nitpicking. Why do most of the Calvierri girls turn into vampires, but Isabella just gets a bit light-averse and Amy is entirely unaffected? What kind of vampire story is this when being bitten by a vampire is something you can just shrug off and carry on? Why does the Doctor make such a big deal of Rosanna not knowing Isabella’s name, but nobody notices that she calls him “Doctor” without ever having been introduced? Why does her clothing disappear when her filter fails (suggesting it is illusory) but then we see her taking off much of it before jumping into the lake (suggesting it is real)? Who’s going to mop up all the murderously hungry man-fish still in Venice’s lakes? Who thought it would bring this story to a rousing conclusion to have the chief villain obediently kill herself, saving the Doctor, our hero, from having to lift a finger?

Even more than the misguided Victory of the Daleks, which was ill-conceived but cheerful nonsense from very early on, this is a spectacular missed opportunity. Thirty minutes of creeping suspense, genuinely funny lines, strong character work from regulars and new cast members alike and rich visuals, which get thrown away not in an RTD-style whirl of bewildering last minute plot resolutions but in an excitement-free, drama-light, that’ll do muddle.

Compare the entirely pointless rewiring of the tsunami machine here to the almost identical scene at the end of Partners in Crime. Whithouse just has the Doctor pulling the plug on some bit of whizzy set-dressing and ends the threat there-and-then. RTD builds the tension by having the machine first neutralised, and then not, and then uses the renewed threat to build structure and character by having Donna produce the urgently-needed second capsule to the Doctor’s total delight. If you’re going to re-use an old sequence you have to do it better than the people you’re copying, not give us a watered-down version.

Two stars.

Doctor Who Series 5 Episode 5 "Flesh and Stone"

Right, all that election fuss and bother over with, let’s see if I can marshal some thoughts about Flesh and Stone before Vampires in Venice airs. As usual, beware spoilers!

Basically, this was fantastic. Building on the adventure and derring-do of the first part, moreorless wrapping up the villainy with a denouement that was mostly carefully-set-up-and-then-hidden-from-view-plotting and just a little bit RTD-style-magic-hoover-which-suddenly-appears-and-sucks-all-the-badness-away, then dropping some delicious hints about what the end of the series might hold and then having the companion trying to jump the Doctor on the eve of her wedding! What larks!

Not only that, but Moffat finally gives a major speaking character a proper death. The demise of Iain Glen’s stoic bishop is one of the finest deaths the series has given us, brilliantly freaking out Doctor and viewer alike, incorporating everything that’s wonderfully terrible about the Angels and providing a real, tangible sourness, which perfectly complemented things like the comfy chair gag.

And the much-talked-of fairy tale imagery really went into overdrive here with an extended sequence of Amy, eyes tight shut, wandering through a forest, dressed in red, while frozen monsters lurk behind every tree – how weird that the statues, freaky because we never see them move, become even more freaky when we do some them move!

As unbothered as I am by a companion with an honest libido, I’m equally unbothered by the last five minutes being an extended tease for the next episode – it’s a feature of the fifth series which I enjoy and I can’t think why it wasn’t included at the end of the badly-underrunning Victory of the Daleks. I’m faintly bothered by the previous five minutes largely being a tease for the end of the season, however. Moffat is asking a lot of viewer loyalty here, just as the summer kicks hold and the ratings start to dip. Still, it’s a different show than it was in 2005 and TV is a different thing now than it was in 1989. American shows like Lost, 24, Battlestar Galactica and The Wire have proven that an audience will follow a continuous narrative over many weeks, but I still worry that season arcs need to be all-or-nothing and that this piecemeal approach will not garner new viewers, as much as it might please the stalwart ming-mongs. On which subject, just what is happening around 17 minutes in as the Doctor comes back and pleads with Amy to “remember”? If you look closely, there’s a heck of a clue that all is not what it seems in this scene.

Finally, let us note that this is the last Moffat script of series 5 until the two-part finale. RTD was widely criticised for his cavalier rewriting of scripts credited to others, but an analysis of the DWM favourite story poll indicates that these stories are precisely the ones which are likely to be the most popular. RTD’s own scripts may have suffered from not having had that extra pair of eyes to spot flaws, burnish up dialogue and strengthen plotting. Rare scripts not by RTD or Moffat which did not have RTD’s input tended to fall flat, such as Matthew Graham’s widely-derided Fear Her or Helen Raynor’s Daleks in Manhatten (written while RTD was sick). (For a full analysis of this, see here, if you really must.)

We don’t know whether Moffat is rewriting other people’s scripts in the same way, but he’s certainly working very closely with other writers. So far, Gatiss’s script is the only one which has attracted anything other than general praise, either from me or from the Whogosphere in general. We wait with interest to see what Messrs Whithouse, Nye, Chibnall, Curtis and Roberts can conjure from their typewriters as well as to see what will happen on 26.06.2010.

Doctor Who Series 5 Episode 4 - The Time of Angels

Note: this review contains spoilers throughout.

The first two-parter of the season has been, since 2005, something of a graveyard slot. Aliens of London, Daleks in Manhatten and The Sontaran Stratagem all struggled to accumulate fans with Rise of the Cybermen, while not so widely disliked, still seen as one of the revived series’ weaker entries (maybe it benefited from sharing a season with the very controversial Love & Monsters and the generally derided Fear Her). After the very significant wobble last week, Time of Angels needed to pull something out of the bag.

This is also the point where the season starts hitting its stride (although these were the first episodes filmed!). Four episodes in, we can start to get a sense of what “The SmithMoffat years” are going to be like. A couple of themes are emerging here. One, slightly odd, one is floating outside the TARDIS. Currently, three out of four stories have featured such scenes, starring the Doctor, Amy and now River Song.

Another is recycling. I grumbled that much of both The Eleventh Hour and Victory of the Daleks was reused from earlier episodes, often early RTD episodes. Here we have Mr Steven Moffat hubristically giving us a double sequel to his very well-received Blink and his not-quite-so-rapturously greeted Silence in the Library two-parter. And yet despite very overtly recycling Professor Doctor Song and the Angels, finally this starts to feel genuinely fresh, energised and galvanised.

It helps that this is an adventure in the truest sense of the word. The threat in The Eleventh Hour was rather intangible, and part of the point of that story was to show the new Doctor effortlessly swatting a fairly feeble opponent. The Beast Below, for all its virtues, was a story about concepts and the moments of supposed jeopardy, mainly involving the Smilers, were the weakest aspects. Victory of the Daleks gave us Daleks which barely exterminated anyone, preferring to stage an impromptu fashion show for their mortal and defenceless enemy rather than gun him down. What’s satisfying about The Time of Angels is that by the time we get to that heavily-trailed cliffhanger speech, the Doctor and Amy are in All Sorts Of Danger.

But it’s not all scares. The pre-titles sequence is very Moffaty, and entirely implausible but artfully constructed and brilliantly paced, putting the viewer just far ahead enough to feel clever (and able to follow it) but not so far ahead that it feels predictable and boring. Cheeky jokes at the series mythology are always welcome, especially when they are played as brightly as Smith, Gillan and Kingston play them here. And if it seems early on as if that woman from ER is reading script pages from that David Tennant episode about the shadows, while on the set of Earthshock, that nagging feeling of overfamiliarity is extinguished entirely once we descend into the caves and the shoes start dropping one-by-one. The Angel on the videotape is not just an image… Amy is turning to stone… the statues only have one head… All beautifully mounted by director Adam Smith and played with total conviction by the entire cast – fuck me, that’s Iain Glen, that is! Only the Weeping Angels taking Bob’s voice seemed to bring back unwelcome memories of Silence in the Library (oh and that cartoon Graham Norton reprising the opening moments of Rose).

And it’s partly the grace notes that elevate this script – these aren’t Eric Saward’s stock mercenaries; they’re a bishop leading an order of gun-toting clerics. River Song is not just a flighty archaeologist with an extensive shoe budget, but an escaped criminal of some kind. And double extra bonus points for “the crash of the Byzantium” being one of the “have we dones” from Silence in the Library. Who knows what “picnic at Asgard” will turn out to be?

It’s always dangerous to judge a two-parter on the basis of part one, but Flesh and Stone would have to be ghastly to drag this episode down, and if it’s great – or even good – then this story could be one of the all-time classics.

Provisional rating: four-and-a-half stars.