Doctor Who: The Snowmen Review

That was pretty good.

This episode allows Moffatt to do what’s needed to be done for a while. Reset the Doctor and his motivations. As with his series “Jekyll” the problem with Moffat’s Who is that the quality is extremely high for very short periods of time. The rest ends up as filler, sitting there in the middle of the series, cashing cheques and whistling while attempting to avoid your death stare. This, in theory should be a step up from the later T Davies days where there seemed to be policy of quantity over quality, leading to everything being bad. However, of late, Who has been suffering both a lack of quantity and quality  - what were they thinking with that dinosaurs episode?

This episode is an opportunity to break free from the bonds of what can only be described as a rut with bow tie in it and give some new life to the show. And we certainly get that.

We get a new companion, a new TARDIS, new costumes. This is basically the beginning of series 5 all over again, except nobody had to regenerate. But that’s also a bit of a problem. While I enjoyed watching the Doctor do his depressed recluse thing, it really wasn't very different from the 10-minute depression sequence from the tenth Doctor’s departure.

Also, looking at all the above points from another perspective, it isn't especially new; the Doctor, having suffered some great trauma, meets an “impossible” girl, in the process revealing his new TARDIS interior, costume and discovering a threat to the universe to continue through the whole series. Err…we’ve seen this before. In this respect, Moffatt’s just following a formula; a good formula, but it’s still predicable.

Looking at the episode more specifically, the new companion (as played by Jenna-Louise Coleman) is very good. Both her genius and personality agree with me far more than the loudness and “feistiness” (cough annoyingness) of Amy Pond.

Richard E Grant is doing a very good Scrooge-meets-Dracula act, but is vastly overshadowed, by the VOICE OF IAN MCKELLEN! – seriously, this episode could have been absolutely awful and all it would have needed is McKellen to show up at the end as say “Mordor” and it would have been saved. 

I personally hope he’s back in the upcoming series, as you do not waste that kind of presence on one voice acting job.

So…this episode is good…very familiar, but good, the new TARDIS looks pretty awesome, the new companion is pretty good and the “smaller on the outside” line is a very welcome change.

How to make Plot-Holes work - spoiler warning - Dark knight rises & Looper

Every film has plot holes. A gripe of internet folk is to complain to no end about them, making claims that they undermine the whole film. This is not true. It is wholly possible to have a film loaded with plot holes, that’s still a good film.

What’s crucial about whether a plot-hole can destroy a film is how it’s executed. For example in Star Trek: Generations, there’s a bit where basically everyone’s dead, but Picard, has the ability (god knows how) to go back in time, to any point he wants, in order to stop the bad guy killing everyone. He chooses to go back to the point a few minutes before the bad guy kills everyone. This is an example of very poor execution, as the entire outcome of the story pivots on Picard’s decision. There is no explanation for why Picard doesn’t choose to go back to a point several days, or weeks before the bad guy killed everyone and stopped the whole situation from happening.

The key to a plot hole not destroying a film, is it resulting from a more minor part of the film.

During this year, I have seen two films that contain significant plot holes, but that do just this.

The first is the Dark Knight Rises, which has some really big gaps in common sense. The biggest of these is the fact that Miranda Tate, is in fact Talia (one of the baddies) who becomes aware of Bruce Wayne’s return to Gotham before Bane does and (despite tricking Gordon into attacking the wrong bomb truck and informing Bane of the special forces team that got sneaked into the city) doesn’t tell Bane that his nemesis is back.

This significant hole is covered, by the fact that the story remains full enough, for us not to notice it right away. The important issues of the film remain forefront in the audiences’ mind and therefore, Talia suddenly forgetting to tell her friend that his about to get is arse kicked by someone dressed as a bat, gets pushed aside, so that we can enjoy the action and Anne Hatheway in a catsuit.

The second film I’ve seen that has a truly huge plot hole, is Looper. Time travel stories especially have the major problems with plot holes, as the only way to really do much with them is to construct paradoxes, which (in the majority of cases) don't ever fully make sense.

To this effect, the first time that the nasty plot hole in this film shows it’s head, is when we get our first example of what happens when you “let your loop run.”

This is shown through Seth, when is older self starts to lose body parts as a result of Abe cutting bits of his younger self off. This doesn’t work. If we are to assume that the injuries of younger Seth can affect older Seth, then we have to assume that cause and effect is the driving force behind it. We are saying here, that younger Seth is the beginning of the line and that older Seth is the end. Changes made to the beginning affect the end. But they don't just affect the end. Every part of the line would have been changed, by any changes to the beginning, therefore older Seth wouldn’t just lose body parts, he never would have had them; his younger self would have lived the rest of the line, without them. Given the amount of damage that is done younger Seth, older Seth would probably never even have been there, given that he would have been in no condition to have been sent back.

This same plot hole exists at the end of the film, as when young Joe figures out that he’s responsible for creating the Rainmaker, his older self’s entire perception of the events should have changed. As a HISHE parody as already said, the very knowledge should have been enough to alter the time lines, without him having to kill himself.

In a similar way to the TDKR, this film remains interesting enough for us to really be bothered, by this gaping inconsistency in the time travel rules. The differences in the priorities of the two Joes’ is the primary focus, making the holes in logic a secondary concern.

Err…so that’s how to make plot holes work.

Merry Christmas!!!