Doctor Who: The Husbands of River Song

We can all relax; it was entertaining.

If we’re being completely honest, Steven Moffat’s first venture into writing a season special for Doctor Who was ok, his second was pretty bad and his third was pretty dark and kind of killed Christmas. I mean the Christmas specials have never been that good, given the difficult task of working in a continuing narrative, maintaining continuity and staying light hearted enough. The last point has always been Moffat’s problem. “A Christmas Carol” was essentially the Doctor accidentally pushing someone a day closer to death, every Christmas in order to save his friends.

This episode opts for a far more lighthearted turn…with the Doctor going toe-to-toe with a genocidal cyborg.

Alex Kingston is back as River Song, the twist; this time she doesn’t know who she’s talking to. As far as she’s concerned, the Doctor died/will die on Trenzalore, so there’s no possible way there could be another one of him. Err that doesn’t make sense, since that event was rewritten by the Time Lords, so surely the history that she based her knowledge on would have been rewritten too, meaning – you know what; it’s Christmas; Moffat can have this one.

Kingston and Capaldi have pretty good chemistry, which is good, given that Moffat seems to have taken to writing scripts as character focused pieces rather than stories. This is a good decision given the ending of the episode, although it does involve retconning a small section of Matt Smith’s tenure.

The comic talents of Greg Davies and Matt Lucas are much appreciated if a little underused (Davies spends half the episode asleep).

The ending does get a little bit serious, but in fairness, Moffat did say that he wrote this before his contract was renewed, so you can see why he wanted to essentially tie off everything he’s put together over the last few years.

So yeah…entertaining….

Doctor Who: Hell Bent

Does anyone stay dead in this series?

Steven Moffat is often compared to George RR Martin, for his penchant for killing off popular characters. I’ve never really understood this; he doesn’t kill off characters; Amy and Rory didn’t die, Osgood didn’t die; the only popular character he’s ever killed off is the Doctor.

It’s not that bringing Clara back doesn’t work; it does. But why does she survive and basically become the Doctor at the end of the episode? It’s just so annoying how writers for this show drum up heart wrenching deaths for the character and then chicken out. Davies did it in Journey’s end with Donna. It’s a cop out; it’s like Star Trek where only the redshirts die.

Aside from that pretty huge point, this a good way to end the series. Gallifray is back and the Time Lords up to their old tricks. Donald Supter is now playing Rassilon presumably as a result of the Timothy Dalton version being killed by the Master. He’s well played, ditching the outwards anger of his predecessor, for a more, conceited personality, whose anger is kept just below the surface.

Story wise, it’s a pretty good turn that the Doctor doesn’t actually know any specifics about the Hybrid and was just bluffing to get Clara back. The change of coat, to imply the move towards the Valyard didn’t need to be expressly stated however and would have preferred it to be a purely visual message. The General regenerating into a woman (although it comes of the back of the Doctor properly losing the plot) seems a bit gimmicky. Kind of like Moffat is saying, “look we made another female time lord.”

There’s a nice twist at the end with the bookend style and the reveal that it’s actually Clara’s flashback and not the Doctor’s, as he can’t remember her. One thing I would say is that this is far less epic than you would expect a finale to be. The idea that the Hybrid could be the Doctor and Clara combined is interesting, but doesn’t really have any time to be explained before we get to the emotional goodbye bits.

Overall, I’d say this is a bit like The Time of the Doctor for Jenna Coleman, where Moffat has written the story around saying goodbye, instead of fully making sense.

It’s not bad, just not what I was expecting.

Doctor Who: Heaven Sent

That was dark.

One thing that classic Who did was to nonchalantly approach the darker and more cruel practices of the Time Lords. In a reflection of the times, things such as killing a man for talking to the wrong species, were seen as things that the aristocratic class would just do. I mean, the Doctor would get pissed off about it, but then he’d largely just have brushed it off by the next time he ran into them.

But not this time (by the looks of it anyway).

Here we have the Doctor trapped inside a world that requires him to die over and over again in order to escape. It’s primary purpose seems to be force him to confess his darkest secrets. This is  a bit like a plot thread that popped up in the Joss Whedon series Angel, with one the characters being sent to a hell dimension to be murdered over and over again, with time resetting the scenario every…well actually, it’s exactly like that.

This is an episode that Capaldi has to carry all by himself, with Coleman only appearing as part of Twelve’s mind palace. If there’s one actor who can pull if a solo episode like this, it’s Capaldi. The Twelfth Doctor’s persona is built around an annoyed Scot talking to himself, so it’s a perfect fit.

My only concern (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) is that it’s not child friendly enough. It’s visually frightening, but the theme and some of the imagery is very adult. The state the Twelve is left in after his first final encounter with reaper is visually horrific. It doesn’t bother me, but I can see parents not wanting their kids to see it.

In terms of writing, it’s not a massive twist to the experienced Moffat viewer (I guessed it relatively quickly) but it’s nice to see him using straight forward time travel. Which is to say; the same time travel that everyone uses. I get the impression that he may have thought of this episode while he was on a comic con panel at which he asked Matt Smith “How do you imagine you got here from this morning?”

Anyway, this sets up the finale and it’s looking good. Personally I think the trailer is a red herring; I’m going to say the regeneration hinted at in it is the Master becoming Missy and starting the chain of events that lead up to this.

Doctor Who: Face the Raven

That was awesome.

So this episode came from the mind of Sarah Dollard, most well known (in the BBC that is) for her contributions to Merlin and Being Human. It’s more the Being Human experience that’s used here, with supernatural elements, explained with “science.”

Dollard also has a talent for making the audience want to see the darker side of the characters. Where most writers would play it safe and shoehorn in the “we must  be better than them” message, Dollard has us begging for the Doctor to unleash The Valyard.

To give a brief overview, Maisie Williams returns as Lady Me (now Lady Mayor) who is preciding over a hidden street of alien refugees in London. Trouble arises when Rigsy (another returning character) falls foul of the residents of the street and calls the Doctor for help.

Spoilers to follow.

So it turns out that everything that happens is all part of some elaborate plan by Lady Mayor, operating under threat from some unknown enemy, to teleport the Doctor away for punishment. Oh and the big twist; Clara’s essentially caught in the crossfire of their maneuvering and dies. This is apparently Jenna Coleman’s exit to the series and comes as full on shock. Usually, the Doctor would pull out a way to save a companion in these circumstances, but no; she’s dead. I mean I hope she’s dead; I like Clara as a character, but after the whole Osgood thing, I cannot get behind some characters being invincible.

Clara’s exit is marked perfectly by Capaldi. The Twelfth Doctor does not cry (like the 10^th and 11^th) or make empty threats (like the 9^th). He tells Lady Mayor that he is going to destroy everything she has built and ruin the lives of everyone she has saved. I get the impression that his promise to Clara (that he wouldn’t seek revenge) is the only lie he told throughout the whole monologue. As soon as Clara’s gone, he essentially tells Lady Mayor that the next time they meet he’s going to kill her. None of the other Doctors (of the revived era) could have delivered that message the way Capaldi does. that performance does take focus slightly from Coleman, as she acts out Clara's final moments.

The episode’s not perfect; Clara’s adrenaline junky phase is just annoying and laid on far too thick.

But those are minor quibbles in terms of a fine episode.

Doctor Who: Sleep no More

Err that was ok.

I’ve never been 100% on board with Mark Gatiss; his work on Sherlock is pretty good, but his Who scripts have been largely unfulfilling. He’s a good writer, but I’ve never really seen why people have him pegged as the next Executive Producer of Doctor Who.

This episode is the first hint that he might be up to the job. It’s a bit like Moffat creating the Weeping Angles or the crack in time out of something that crops up in every day life; namely, sleep.

The monsters are made of sleep dust…ok. Once you get past the initial silliness of that principle, the episode is alright.

I had no love for the found footage method of shooting, until Gatiss worked it into the story, both with the explanation of why it was there and the twist at the end. That was neat; it stopped it from just being a gimmick.

The supporting cast are fleshed out and not and Capaldi and Coleman are on usual form, particularly when they have to talk directly to the camera.

It’s not without fault; the basic principle is that anyone who has been inside the Morpheus machine gets a point-of-view camera installed in the corner of their eye. That’s all very well, but I’m fairly sure we see plenty from Chopra’s perspective, when it’s made clear that he’s never used the machine. They do make an effort to make his perspective more of a helmet cam than a point of view. But why would he have a helmet cam when none one else in the rescue team did?

Also, the twist at the end kind of just rips off The Ring, without any explanation of how it works and the episode in general is quite slow until about ten minutes in.

Aside from that it’s perfectly serviceable; a nice improvement from last week.