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.