Doctor Who: The Return of Doctor Mysterio

Underwhelming.

So that was apparently what we’ve all been waiting for since last Christmas. A slow paced, over talky piece that takes the premise of merging Doctor Who with a classic comic book narrative and makes it really…boring.

I spent the entire episode waiting for something to happen. The ending payoff isn’t worth the time and the subplot involving the Doctor and River Song only seems to come into play randomly at the end to give him a reason to leave.

Anyway, the plot:

Following the events of The Husbands of River Song, the Doctor is building some strange machine in New York in an effort to repair all the damage to time there that he caused at some point. During this, he accidentally gives a child super powers and then makes him promise never to use them.

The way that this sequence is edited, cutting from past to present, is really jarring and also over explains The Ghost. It’s the same mistake that Man of Steel made; overdoing the hero’s back-story. We didn’t need to see him at high school; we didn’t need to see more than one scene of him accidentally flying. The sequence also shows the Doctor periodically checking up on him, so how is this the ‘return’ of Doctor Mysterio? It’s more like the ‘regularly scheduled visit’ of Doctor Mysterio.

The body-snatching villains are also woefully underdeveloped. They want to take over the world…That’s it. Oh and they’re going to use a plan that the Siltheen already used to convince the world leaders to surrender control. Of course, by the point that you get to their explanation, you’re so bored that it doesn’t really raise any excitement. The intense focus on Hank’s (The Ghost’s) love life and super hero career tells you that the villains aren’t really a threat.

The cast are all doing their best with what’s being given to them, but they’ve literally got nothing to say. Matt Lucas, for example, reprises his role as Nardole, but doesn’t seem to have anything to do. It seems like he was just there as he was vaguely popular in the last Christmas episode.

I’m honestly getting bored writing about this episode now. I can’t see how they could spend so long on it and only come up with this.

I could go on and analyse the comic book references and in jokes, but there’s really no point.

It’s not very good; if you haven’t seen it, I wouldn’t bother.