Doctor Who Series 7 Episode 3 Review

So what do you do with a war criminal who’s reformed and is seemingly now applying his skills for the benefit of others. Well apparently that’s not something we should ponder, as people like this are likely to blow themselves up, to avoid the dilemma.

That’s the major issue I have with this episode, the position we take say if we find a Nazi hiding out, is to try them for their crimes regardless of what they’re doing, who their friends now are and how many kittens they save in a year.

The moral message of this episode is undermined by the suicide of the secondary antagonist. This is no doubt a consequence of Toby Whithouse realising that the difficult questions he was asking…err…kinda weren’t difficult to answer.

The concept of the characters arguing over what should happen to this guy, is really weak. The answer is easy; he gets punished for his crimes. But instead of this, Whithouse contrives a way into the plot for him killing himself and avoiding being tried for his crimes in a “heroic” self-sacrifice. But we’ve established as canon, that in the Who universe you only get one life; when it ends, that’s it; there’s nothing.  

I doesn't matter what this guy believed would happen to him if he killed himself, when we know precisely what will happen and that it doesn’t involve being punished.

In order to make any real conflict, the Doctor goes massively off the rails in this episode, I got the impression that they were trying to make him more dangerous and unpredictable, but the whole concept was undermined by how out of character his was. And trying to say, it’s because he’s been travelling “alone for too long” doesn’t count; I’ll take the protagonist’s character development on screen thank you.

Having the Doctor rearrange his personality for the convenience of the plot, in my mind, is a stone’s throw away from him turning up fully regenerated and saying “yeah this happened between episodes.”

Rory is relatively back in character, but as for Amy, so many of the writers have taken liberties with her personality that I have no way of knowing whether anything she says in this episode is in character.

To credit the make up department, the Gunslinger looks pretty badass, but when he starts talking he kind of loses most of his malice. He is at least at far easier to take seriously than that bloody Minotaur he gave us in “The God Complex”.

While this episode is definitely an improvement on last week, there’s nothing particularly great about it. It doesn’t repair the damage of the low quality of “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” in the same way as “The Doctor’s Wife” did for that truly awful pirate episode.

The plot is exciting enough at the right bits, but, as is his problem, Whithouse doesn't have the eyes for filler and banter, so it drags in between action sequences.

I commend an attempt to use Who as some sort of discussion board for important moral issues, but the one that’s being brought forward here is an old one that we figured out the answer to a long time ago.