Doctor Who: The Robot of Sherwood

Well that was ok….

I’m never really on board with these kinds of episodes. Bringing Robin Hood into Who is a gateway to reach stupid levels of cheese, that threaten to undermine the shows point more than that Power of Three Episode and most of Series 2 combined.

Thankfully, while this episode does have some of that, Mark Gatiss manages to turn most of it on itself.

Tom Riley is doing a good job as Robin Hood, but as the Doctor even points out, men like this never existed. It would have been nice to see some shaking up of the character, if they were going to make him “real”. Take away some of the heroism, add some selfishness or something.

Ben Miller is also putting in a good performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham, with subtle comedic turns, based around him being a moron.

Clara just about stays in character, but her interrogation scene is a bit silly and risks sending her into Amy Pond levels of writer-personality tampering. Personally, I like Clara as a character and I’m not sure why many viewers don’t. Most of what she does is based around things that have already been established about her, rather than things that any given writer could add at any given time. However, the Clara suddenly knows Taekwondo bit is straying into that territory.

On that point, the Twelfth Doctor is like the Third in more in more than just dress sense, as he wins a sword fight with a spoon, at the cost of one of his buttons of course. I like the idea of this Doctor knowing how to fight, especially since it lends something to the “did he throw that guy out of that airship?” question from the first episode.

Soo, have you noticed what’s missing yet? Despite being the primary antagonists, the robots in this episode aren’t very well fleshed out. For the moment I’m hoping (since they’re going to The Promised Land) that that’s an intentional move. It could be that only robots who are dogmatic in their intention to get there are actually able to.

All in all it was good, a few missed opportunities, but a solid writer at the helm saw that a dangerously cheesey premise didn’t get out of hand.

Doctor Who: Into the Dalek

As follow-ups go, that was pretty alright.

So this episode does its job of following up on a strongish opening. As far as reviewing goes, there’s a few really interesting bits in it.

The plot:

Some humans are fighting some Daleks in an asteroid field and they’ve captured a damaged Dalek that seems to think that Daleks are evil and must be destroyed. As the Doctor puts it  “Morality is malfunction.”

With that interesting premise already in place, now we get the really good stuff  - shrinking people to tiny size and letting them explore inside the Dalek like it’s a ship or building. So we get the idea of a good Dalek and the opportunity to look around and gain more understanding on how a Dalek works.

That much is pretty cool. But what’s even cooler is watching the Twelfth Doctor handle it. At one point he practically kills a guy to gain an escape plan. This is something that would have enraged both Ten and Eleven and no doubt several fans. It makes us ask the question is this part of his new persona or is this just him going onto battle mode, like Nine discarding his no guns rule when faced with the Daleks.

The Doctor’s own hatred having an effect on the Daleks comes up again. This has been a constant theme in Moffat’s Dalek stories during his tenure. It’s good, but I wish it had been demonstrated as well in the past as it is in this episode.

Missy makes an appearance again, this time to welcome someone else who died because of the Doctor. Interestingly the other bit part (whom the Doctor didn’t like very much) doesn’t appear to have been taken to paradise.

There are problems though. It takes Clara to figure out how to stop the Dalek once it’s been repaired, but I don’t see how the Doctor couldn’t have figured it out himself. True, the Daleks bring out the worst in him; this case seemingly making him give up on anything but explosions. The Doctor’s main weapon over the years has been his cunning and the thought that the eventual solution would not occur to him at all seems a bit odd.

But that’s easily offset by the writing, acting and THE CAPALDI. As I said, this is an alright follow up. It’s better than many before it, but I can’t say that my attention was completely held throughout.

Doctor Who: Deep Breath Review

Well that was good…I think…

This is the problem with the way that Moffatt puts together a series; the formula is predictable. We get a first episode to introduce the core themes of the episode and then a set up for the series’ red herring (this case being the “promised land”).

The problem is I can’t figure out if that offsets the quality of the writing, acting etc. on an episode by episode basis. I’ve got some thoughts about what the promised land is and who that woman is, but I can’t say that I’m half a as curious about it as I was about the Pandorica or the Silence. So we’ll just have to see how this pans out; you never know; maybe Moffatt’s brave enough to put in a red herring that’s supposed to look like a red herring and is actually a red herring for a red herring.

Anyway, onto the episode.

We now have an openly Scottish Doctor, which leads to many new independence and moaning jokes; supposedly to replace the ginger jokes from Eleven’s era. I will say they’re pretty well put together and Capaldi (as ever) has a great talent for comedy. At the same time he avoids becoming Malcolm-Tucker-Doctor, as many had expected, by toning down the anger and upping the general confusion and quirkiness of the character.

The point at which things start to get violent is a really good example of how he can switch the character up. “I have a horrible feeling I’m going to have to kill you” is a line I don’t think any other Doctor could have delivered and that’s saying something considering that this is Capaldi’s first time out in the role.

I also like the way that the fan reaction is incorporated into the Doctor’s dialogue. He wonders out loud why he would now be older than his two predecessors, suggesting that he unconsciously chose a form that had “frowned lines onto” it’s face.

Jenna Coleman does a good job as Clara. Her reaction to a newly regenerated Doctor is a thousand times better than that of Rose in The Christmas Invasion. Clara remains unsure who the new Doctor is but (after some prompting by Vastra) accepts that it’s him and that he’s dealing with a crisis. Rose by comparisome appeared to take it a personal slight that the Doctor would change his appearance without first consulting her and sat around saying things along the lines of “yeah there’s an alien invasion happening by what about my problems?”

We have another goodbye from Matt Smith, which wasn’t strictly necessary, but was a nice way to resolve Clara’s issues with the new Doctor.

Overall, nice episode but the series set up we’re seeing is something we’ve all seen before.

What’s really going on with Barely Legal Drivers?

So I got round to watching the second series of Barely Legal Drivers, which, for those of you who don’t know is  BBC 3 show, following 12 (2 per episode) newly qualified or out-of-practice young drivers. It follows the formula of such shows as Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents, in that the participants are told they are being filmed for some other show, while the cameras are there mainly to allow their parents access to parts of their childrens’ lives that they would not ordinarily see. To add to that, they also bring in former traffic copper Judith and (for this second series) a top driving instructor, to make the actual assessment of the participants’ driving skills.

On the surface this would appear to be a show about entertaining people with the wacky antics of young drivers and focussing on the typical British family and how the idea of how the parent/child relationship shifts once a child has access to something as important as a car.

However something far more sinister actually lies beneath the surface of this programme. It is propagated on the same notion as that of Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents. The notion that it is perfectly acceptable for parents to lie to and spy on their children.

Now you could say that the whole issue of national broadcast date being set for a programme no matter what the participants think it is means they’re asking for this information to be made public. But that would miss the point I’m trying to make.

Consider how disrespectful it is to their children to lie to them about what’s going on, spy on them and then bring in a couple of external examiners to tut at them. This is linked to an overriding attitude that permeates the older generation in the UK.

It used to be that young people could be framed as disrespectful and unappreciative (“I didn’t fight a war, so you could speak to me like that”). However the generation that relied on that viewpoint has all but died off and been replaced by a generation that literally didn’t fight a war. This generation can’t legitimately frame their youngers as disrespectful so instead settles for going with dangerous.

Case in point, programmes like Barely Legal Drivers completely ignore older drivers who are awful behind the wheel, and are only interested in waggling a finger to young drivers and saying that their very act of getting behind the wheel of the car is a horribly dangerous thing that we should all be afraid of.

For example, one of this years’ participants was denied a car, given his propensity for driving at between 75 and 78 miles per hour on the motorway. Kids and adults alike, I’m going to tell you a secret; EVERYONE drives at 80MPH on the motorway. Unless they’re really bored the Police won’t even stop you for driving at 80 (usually because that’s how fast they’re going themselves). This was even pretty much said in the episode itself, with participants father pointing out that he usually drives about 80 on the motorway, only to be slapped back by his wife, who pointed out that their son was too young to be driving at that speed. Of course she was fine with her husband driving at that speed. Judith even dolled out some advanced driving lessons for this based on his being 8 miles over the speed limit. A speed limit that no one Judith’s age (or any age for that matter) respects.

The hypocrisy of this act is at it’s most evident in the next episode when Judith chastises another young driver for hogging the middle lane of the motorway and holding other cars up, by getting there and only driving at 70MPH. Well that’s all very well Judith, but in order to not be holding up the cars behind her up she’d have to be driving faster than 70MPH, which according to you is guaranteed to kill everyone using the motorway at the time. Incidentally I wonder whether the BBC will be offering advanced driving courses to everyone it recorded using the motorway on the occasion of my first example. While they only had a creepy telemetry box in the participant’s car, the fact that he didn’t collide with any of the cars in front of him suggests they were travelling at the same speed as him.

 

If these lessons really are being given out in the spirit of safety on the UK roads, then I’d say the BBC has an obligation ensure every single driver in their programme that’s been recorded doing something wrong should be educated about their mistakes.

Oh and to close out this point, if he was speeding so much, how did the camera car following him keep up? I mean it’s not like the camera car was speeding too? That would mean there were actually three different types of hypocrisy at work here.

So what’s really going on with Barely Legal Drivers? Am I just reading too much in to what the show’s agenda is?

Or is this a show (like Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents) that’s designed to promote and dislike and distrust of the young?