Doctor Who: Last Christmas

Alien, The Thing and Inception. Being self-aware of where you’re getting your ideas is ok, but I’m not sure about this one.

So, I liked this episode…kind of…I liked the claustrophobic sets, I liked Nick Frost’s Santa and I liked he self-aware references to all the films that were making a more than significant contribution to the story. The problem is that if you’ve seen one of those films, the big twist of the episode isn’t really a twist. In fact, if you’ve seen “Amy’s Choice” then the third act twist won’t be a surprise at all.

But that aside, this is pretty fun to watch, Santa is a pretty good addition and watching Nick Frost run through the logistics of Christmas Eve is quite fun.

Capaldi is on top form as always. He seems to be toning down his Scottish accent and using a Tom Baker voice for some parts, which is an interesting choice.

Coleman is on similar form, though she doesn’t seem to be able to do a old-person voice.

The rest of the cast are all fine, but seem to fade into the background a little bit, one of them being a red-shirt.

But the purpose of the episode becomes more evident as it goes on. This is about resetting things to the way they were before the events of “Death in Heaven”. That’s slightly disappointing, since Moffat crafts a pretty good and suitably emotional way to write Clara out in this very episode. In fact you get the impression that he was among those who didn’t know whether Coleman would sign on for another series.

But anyway, everything’s back to normal aboard the TARDIS and back in place for series 9.

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.

Doctor Who Christmas Special Review.

It was ok…but that’s kind of a bad thing…

So after what I thought was a good but underwhelming series finale we had this. It was alright  - but there was something missing. Throughout everything he writes, Steven Moffat has always gone against the grain, constantly attacking common conventions in whatever genre he’s penning for, but always in a bantering, playful way.

But this episode has little of that  - it’s got the doctor somehow getting dressed into a space suit while falling through the atmosphere yeah, but that’s about all.

Great amounts of this episode were spent with me waiting for Doctor Who to show up. Not the Doctor himself but the feeling of Doctor Who (anybody who’s listened to the podcast for “Forest of the Dead” will know who I stole that turn of phrase from).

This episode, while being a good story could have been in any show  - and considering that it came from the same man who made “A Christmas Carole” (a self-aware take on the classic tale, which somehow managed to have moving love story and a brilliantly silly premise co-exist) it just seems disappointing that this take on the Narnia formula gets so tied up in the very Avatarish feel that gets thrown around.

Even at that, it’s too much about the family at the centre of the story  - last year worked because it was all about saving a large amount of people by resolving the issues of the characters. In essence there was always a goal  - this episode was just about the Doctor doing something nice for someone who’s been nice to him. All very well, but if I don’t happen to be able to empathize with those characters then there’s no real threat for the audience to get involved with.

That’s the problem with for me; I didn’t really find Madge Arwell particularly interesting. Its nothing to do with the way Claire Skinner plays, it’s just that there’s nothing new about the character.

Bill Bailey provides the comic relief for this episode and it’s without doubt the best bit. But it does fall a bit flat and the bit with the subordinate crying along with Madge really didn’t agree with me and fell a bit flat.

The whole episode in general seems a bit underdeveloped and everything seems far too simplistic and shallow. There’s only so much that can be done with trees after all. Oh and if they grew everything themselves where did they get that metal crown?

The twist of the forest wanting a “mother” ship is a much desired and lonely piece of Moffat writing.

This was an alright episode, but not something I’d expect from Steven Moffat.