Doctor Who Series 6 Episode 8 Review.

So that was pretty damn good. I’ll admit I wasn’t impressed with the way the first part of this series ended, but I think this is proof that anything can be saved, provided Steven Moffat writes something in the middle of it.

I had the joy of being at work when this was on, so resolved to watch it at half-past one in the morning instead of it’s scheduled time. That didn’t have any impact on the enjoyment, however a slight tiredness may have lead me to be unduly harsh at first with the character of Mels. I felt that she came out of nowhere (which she did) and that just saying that “oh this person exists in Amy and Rory’s lives’ but we’ve never seen her before because she hates weddings” was a bit of a cop out. 

But the positives of this episode far outweigh this little quibble and the it’s obvious why she just came out of nowhere in light of who she turns out to be. On that point, it’s kinda neat to have River’s life and upbringing be a circle  - she gets her parents together in the guise of Mels, who then serves as the namesake for herself  - but I don’t know if it was really necessary. Having her appear like this really opens up a lot of questions, like why the hell they didn’t mention her before. Was she always there or did she only start to exist in their timeline, when the events of this series started?

Moffat takes this opportunity to tie up some loose ends old and new; we get an answer as to why the River Song in the Library didn’t survive, we establish that the Doctor never bothered to fix the temporal grace defence on the TARDIS and that the little girl was indeed River and not some other Timelady.

He also raises a couple more questions about the Silence and the whole religion and the question etc. Another possible question he raises is which Doctor Matt Smith is. When the Doctor’s dying on the TARDIS, he’s told that his regeneration has been disabled  - now it could be that the poison that River used disabled his regeneration (which would make sense if was designed to kill him) but it could also mean that he doesn’t have any regenerations left. Is Moffat revisiting the finale of series four, where the tenth Doctor seemingly wasted a regeneration? Did River using up all her regeneration cycles to save him, give him a couple more?

Moffat’s also firing off teasers like crazy  - the TARDIS is registered as stolen, but not because the Doctor stole it, because the Justice Department seem to think that River’s the one who’s in possession of it. Did we see the future Doctor from the very first episode fly the TARDIS? Did he even have it anymore?

I really don’t have much to say about this episode. It’s good, Amy’s annoyingness is dialed back, Rory seems to have finally found an effective medication for whipped-windging-little-pussy-itus and there are pretty solid performances all round. And I don’t care what people say, I like Alex Kingstone as River Song. Her flirtatiousness, I’ll admit does get a bit edgy whenever she comes into contact with the Doctor, but in this episode it takes on a kind of malice that gives her a bit of a black widow feel.

Granted, I’d have liked to see a bit more of her previous incarnation  - it would have built more parallels between her and the Doctor, if we’d seen a more full personality in Mels and then had it transformed in the same way as the Doctor’s personality is transformed, when he regenerates. Hell, I’d have even liked more than one episode with Mels, to get this done.

Something I really liked about this episode was a little bit of self-awareness that crept in when Rory and Amy got on a motorbike. Now I have in the last few weeks been reviewing the new series of Torchwood and my interpretation of episode six of that series saw me very angry that Gwen, suddenly dropped character and blew up a military complex and road off on a motorbike. Gwen doesn’t ride motorbikes  - it’s not something her character would do. Rory is similar and having seen the trailer for this half of the series, I was expecting to have the same reaction.

Accept when Amy asks him if he can even ride a motorbike, he gives an answer that practically says “for the purposes of this scene, I can.” It’s nice to see this kind of self-aware humour in the scripts  - you don’t know how many times in Tennant years, I spent wishing someone would just look at the Doctor, walking in slow motion or growling at what could have been the Devil, and say “excuse, you guy’s are aware how stupid this looks aren’t you?”

Before I close out, let’s discuss the elephant in the room; Omega  - but wait, first we’ll talk about the Nazi dictator in the room or in the cupboard, as it seems. I unashamedly laughed out loud, at the line, “Rory, take Hitler and put him in the Cupboard.” That was a really nice piece of comedy writing and kinda blindsided me a bit. What didn’t blindside me was he fact that this episode wasn’t all about Hitler  - the more I though about it in the build up to this episode, the more I figured it would be impossible. The title was a good red herring though; I really didn’t expect another River Song episode so early on.

Now let’s talk Omega…gonna be honest; I don’t know that much about him – in the words of youtuber SFDebris ‘you gotta reign the fanboy in somewhere, else it isn’t long before you’re speeding away from Comi-con with Peter Davison tied up in the back of your car.”

Basically, Omega was the very first Timelord; he figured out how to travel through time and space, he came up with the TARDIS, he was erased by his awesome plan etc… I only mention him because apparently the mark of Omega has been seen all over various episodes in background Vote-Saxon style. All I’ll say is that anything’s possible, it’s be interesting to see an old character come back like that, but I honestly doubt that he will. Moffat does infuse his incredible plots with common sense and if the villains had the first and greatest Timelord of all on their side, they wouldn’t have gone to o much time and effort to make River Song.

That’s all I’m saying  - good episode  - evokes thought and is very fun to watch.

Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 7

Certainly an improvement on last week. In fact the more I think about episode 6 the more I dislike it. Rex and Esther were agonizingly incompetent and Gwen became a terrorist. And for anyone who was all like, “yeah, you go Gwen  - explosion yeah” consider that Gwen was trying to expose a concentration camp on UK soil, by blowing up. “Look everyone; a Nazi-esque solution to the present problem…err but don’t bother looking for any evidence of it, cuz I blew all of it up.” Whistleblowers get taken seriously, investigators get taken seriously, but people who respond to things they don’t like by blowing them up DON’T. The character of Gwen Cooper knows this, why would she blow a giant military complex up. Her actions, in my opinion are horribly contrived and kinda insulting to the audiences’ intelligence.

But enough about last week; this week’s better and sees the return of the Gwen who isn’t violent and is motivated by moral dilemma, rather than sudden psychopathy.

It’s also nice to see the overall narrative going in the right direction; last week was mostly internal storylines, but this week we start to get to the point of the story. The flashbacks are good and it’s nice to see Captain Jack as an immortal again. However, the love story does get a bit slow and how it links to the end of the episode is quite predictable. I’d have preferred to have this flashback in an earlier episode, to make the ending more effective. We see a bit more of the show being used as social commentary, in the discussion about religion and homosexuality in one of the flashbacks.

It’s been stated in both Doctor Who and previous series of Torchwood that when you die, you simply cease to be, a particularly good quote for this comes from a 2005 Moffat episode of Who which describes life as “the Universe’s way of keeping meat warm”. It’s nice to see that Jack doesn’t take the hardline atheist approach to the religious argument; at no point saying that he has actual knowledge that there is no God or heaven, within the Doctor Who universe and that setting yourself by a religion is pointless. 

This has the effect of making the altercation more of an argument and the fact that Jack isn’t willing to just tell Anjelo that his religion is completely off the mark is quite a good way of showing that he cares about him enough not to start dismantling his beliefs, but only questioning the most harsh parts of them. It also gives a fair bit more depth to their romantic relationship, easily topping Jacks last onscreen relationship, which seemed to revolve around demanding sex off Ianto, then getting it.

To stay briefly with the element of homosexuality in television and in particular Torchwood, I can say categorically that this episode is going to be a far better measure of whether BBC complainants are actually homophobic or not. Basically there’s a gay sex scene in this episode; now last time there was one of these, the Beeb got quite a few complaints about it. That last one was intercut with a heterosexual sex scene, as Jack and Rex got respectively laid, within their own gender preferences and had people crying at the BBC’s door (or at least the complaints section of their website). This episode  - no heterosexual love scenes, so lets see who complains. Before it wasn’t clear what was being complained about, whether it was the gay sex scene or just the sex scene in general, but this episode will lead to a far better picture.

Either way, the complainants don’t hold much water in my opinion. If they’re saying that the scenes shouldn’t exist because of the homosexual parts, while it’s not fair to say that they’re homophobic, they don’t really have a leg to stand on. Let me try and explain that a bit more; simply because they’re more comfortable watching a heterosexual love scene than they are watching homosexual one doesn't mean they hate gay people. I don’t consider myself homophobic, but I wasn’t comfortable watching John Barrowman get it on with Anjelo and I admit that the sex scene from an earlier episode between Rex and Vera didn’t make me uncomfortable. 

The difference between the complainants and myself is that I didn’t feel comfortable with that scene, but I knew that the writers had every right to put it in the episode. Torchwood is a post-watershed program; there are limits on how much sex, violence etc can go in them, but in the 21^st century we have to accept that sex is sex and whether it’s sex that makes the majority of people uncomfortable or not is irrelevant. I should point out that the BBC has already responded to the complaints with a politely worded but fairly strong “fuck you” and it is positively thrilling to see them do something like this, especially given the sheer ridiculousness of some of the complaints they’ve entertained in recent years.

Well this discussion’s gone on for a bit longer than I thought it would. Back to the episode I think. So we finally start to get some answers to how the miracle started; we don’t get them precisely, but there’s a scene in this episode that I think pretty much gives away how it started (it involves an old Italian lady and a small bottle). 

Other than that and the flashbacks, most of the episode takes place in a car. It doesn’t quite manage to replicate the tension from episode 2, as the threat of death is significantly less immediate, but it does the job alright and serves as a platform for Gwen to get back to normal.

The exchanges between Gwen and Jack are also quite good and show some pretty good development on the part of both characters. Rex and Esther spend most of this episode in the background, which is a shame, given that Esther’s killed her first person and Rex just lost his love interest. I was kinda hoping for a bit of development on both counts but who knows, maybe next week. One thing I will say is that, while she’s far more in character, Gwen seems less intelligent than normal; you might be able to tot this up to being emotionally involved with the situation, but I just thought she really acted a bit dumb.

So there you have it, not much to say, it’s better than last week and we start to get some answers. Recommended.

Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 6

So another alright one…not really much else to say.

A good set up from the previous episode, gets this one off to a pretty good start. Although, to be honest, while I liked it, seeing what we’ve already seen through the eyes of new characters, who are presumably not ever going to be seen again may come across as a bit of a waste of time to others. Also, (spoiler warning) when the guy commits suicide (or joined the “45 Club”) at the beginning of the episode, I couldn’t figure out if it was because he’d found something new and terrible in the site just outside Shanghai or the oven system that we already knew about from the previous episode. If it’s the latter, then I don’t really see the point in having the whole he thought it was so terrible he had to jump off a building thing, as we were all made aware of how bad the situation was at the end of episode 5.

Anyhow, it may turn out to be the former, in which case there could be some awesome new shocks to come in the future.

One thing that kinda irked me about this episode was how crap Rex and Esther seem to be at being CIA agents. I mean Rex collects all that evidence the divulges it to the head of the camp thing as soon as he’s captured; he tells him everything, without so much as attempting to find out whether this guy’s in league with the bad guys or not. And (surprise, surprise) that turns out not to be a good idea.

Another thing that really annoyed me was Gwen’s apparent split personality. 

For anyone who didn’t notice this, she goes from being a compassionate, contemplative person, to someone who blows up an entire military base and films it for the internet in the space of an hour. This is majorly out of character for Gwen; she’s always been a character who would always try to talk her way out of something, frequently trying to get hostile forces to see reason, rather than taking the aggressive line, as Jack and other characters would. So the idea that her first response to what are effectively concentration camps being built on British soil, is to grab some C4 and engage in some light terrorism, is one that I find a little bit dumb.

Also, the shot of her riding off on a motorbike is stupid. Eve Myles does not suit a motorbike and I never figured a character, who spent a first few minutes of series 2 lecturing Owen about driving at the speed limit, while pursuing a giant talking blowfish through Cardiff, would be a fan of a high speed getaway on motorbike.

Also, to spoil the end a bit, one the whole thing’s been exposed, there’s a bit with US politician on TV, justifying their actions by saying that it would be their response to any state of prolonged worldwide emergency. That just seems a bit contrived for me, I know looking for realism in a Sci-fi show is pretty much a fools game, but do you honestly think a politician would say to the people who vote them, that the standard response to world wide emergency is concentration camps and culling?

Other than that, this is a pretty watchable episode, Barrowman does quite well in his seemingly non-action role for the episode and the supporting cast all put in believable performances. It’s interesting to see the character of Gwen put in a position where she’s so closely linked to the threat of the story, but as I said I didn’t like the way that particular arc ended.

All in all, watchable.

Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 5

Well that wasn’t bad at all. It was nice to finally have an episode that wasn’t already explained in the previous week’s trailer.

This was good, clearly raising the bar from last week and working quite nicely to give the characters something else to do. I will say that my prediction of Gwen needing to have a personal connection to overflow camps paying off didn’t come true. Although it gives Eve Myles some emotions to work into the character, story-wise she doesn’t really do anything in Wales that she couldn’t have done in the overflow camp in America.

I got the impression that Wales only featured in this episode to keep the UK fans happy. I will say that it was refreshing to see her at the beginning of the episode arriving at Cardiff Airport, which makes more sense than episode 1, when Rex flew into Heathrow then drove all the way to Swansea; He knew Gwen and Reece were in Wales, but presumably touched down in London because the majority of the new American audience would be more familiar with the English capital over the Welsh. But now that Davies seems to be comfortable to make a good deal more sense with his storylines maybe we’ll see even more improvement next week.

But then again, as I said, there wasn’t actually a narrative reason for Wales to feature in this episode and the involvement of Gwen’s dad seemed to indicate that the writers didn’t really have anything to do with her, so they had to have her doing the same thing as everyone else, but in a different place.

But that’s just a little quibble. The positives of this episode make up for such aspects.

We get a lot more definition to Oswald Danes and a speech (and some actions leading up to it) that really hammers home how we’re supposed to feel about the character.

Plus we’re introduced to a character who I hope features in the episode next week for good comeuppance.

Still no real elaboration on the main villains, but the ending really starts to put some serious dark vibes on them.

So that’s about all; Five episodes left now people  - scary stuff!

Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 4

At last, some progression! We know some stuff now.

There were some things about this episode that I really liked. For example, showing the two ends of the extreme, by having Oswald Danes, juxtaposed with a fundamentalist, distinctly religious looking woman, who is leading the ‘dead is dead’ campaign.

This was a nice change to the habits that T Davies generally exhibits when writing a series. The best of these is that neither of the parties concerned in the fight could be construed as right. This is evident earlier series’ of Torchwood and especially in series 1 to 4 of the revived Doctor Who, where we typically have one character who’s dogmatically correct, while the bad guys are always wrong.

This episode works by having the story of Oswald Danes largely separate from the Torchwood mission. 

On that point, the Phicorp assault is quite good and done in a relatively realistic way. Although there’s no secret as to which film they lifted the security settings, for Phicorp’s server room, from.

The personal dilemma of Esther is alright, but felt a bit frustrating and I wondered if she was heading towards the Amy Pond level of annoyingness, based on her seeming inability to listen to anything that Rex tells her to do.

The bad guy for this episode is also a bit of a stumbling block. He seems a bit wooden; I wondered for a while whether he was supposed to be parody of Haratio Caine from CSI: Miami.

One thing I did like about it was the way that when he started monologing, the first thing that happened was that Gwen started taking the piss out of him.

We also find out that the Miracle is something to do with Jack giving the as yet unknown villains something in the past. Was this done, during that period when he worked as basic Torchwood muscle? I mean, during this time, he sold 12 kids to an alien race, because Torchwood told him to.

Is this the building of a Torchwood theme, of the darker parts of Jack’s past coming back to hurt the whole world. It could be a Torchwood version of the old actions have consequences concept.

The personal interest in the overflow camps for Gwen, didn’t really seem necessary, but it looks like it’s gonna be important next week.

On that point next week marks halfway point in this series, so hopefully, we’ll see some 24-style mixing up of the story.

Until then, this episode is more than watchable, a really nice improvement on last week.

New Doctor Who Trailer thoughts.

So there’s been a new Doctor Who trailer out for a while now and I’ve been having some extreme geek outs about it.

It opens with some loud music, some running and Hitler. The last one of those is a big risk, as the only line of dialogue he seems to have is “thank you, I think you just saved my life.”

Of all the historical figures to pick as a possible sympathetic guest character, Adolf Hitler is probably securely in the NO category. But who knows, maybe they’ll manage to pull it off.

At about 27 seconds in, we see River wearing an eye patch, like the one that evil lady wore. Does this mean that River and evil lady are the same person? I personally don’t think so, it’s far more likely that the eye patch could just be a symbol of authority on whatever planet the little baby River was taken to. It could alternatively mean that River’s built up some sort of maternal relationship with one-eyed lady (but as there’s another character at about 34 seconds in who wears the same eye-patch as well it’s more than likely some sort of symbol.  

29 second – both the Silence and the Weeping Angels are back  - not necessary a good move, as they’re both better as minimal villains  - and I’m getting kind of worried that the Angels might become the new Daleks; reappearing whenever they need a ‘scary’ episode, up until they lose all of what made them threatening.  

We get couple seconds of monster doing monster stuff (growling, teleporting, breaking shit etc…)

At 36 seconds, we get Rory punching who assume is Hitler, which is almost worthy of Quintin Tarantino and at 37 seconds we get Amy with some swords.

Oh and something’s happening to time  - but then again that happens every series.

The trailer ends with some assurance that the impossible astronaut threat is going to be resolved, before the already approved 7^th series.

I’m reasonably excited about this…not as eager as I was to see the return of Doctor Who after the fifth series, but still…