Doctor Who: Smile

Another solid entry for the ‘Meh’

This was touted as the episode to solidify the new dynamic between the Doctor and Bill.

This new dynamic appears to be that she asks questions then attempts to psychoanalyze him…which exactly the same thing that all the other companions have done.

There’s nothing wrong with it; she has to act as he audience viewpoint for the Doctor so it makes sense. But I don’t know why she was presented as a massive change to the dynamic if she’s just going to act like every other companion.

The villains of the episode are robots that we initially think are suffering from a glitch, but we learn have actually developed sentience and become an emergent species.

The “we have created life and we’re not sure what to do with it” trope was played out back when Star Trek TNG did it and it doesn’t really bring anything new to the story here.

I don’t know if they’re setting up a theme or just being lazy, but once again, the villain is not aware of their own villainy. If this is going to be the go-to explanation for most of the episodes this series, there had better be a pay off at the  end.

There isn’t really mush to say; aside from the foreshadowing of a major cataclysmic event on Earth, this is very much a filler episode.

The cast are all good, the special effects do their job and the story is serviceable.

Doctor Who: Mummy on the Orient Express

A lot better than it’s title.

With a title like that, I was half expecting this episode to be this series’ “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship,” ergo it would make me very angry that someone got paid money to write it.

Thankfully Jamie Mathieson appears to know how to write a script that doesn’t rely on using up the special effects budget and being very loud. The result of this is an episode of awesome quality right where you’d expect to find filler.

To summarise, the Doctor, intent on taking Clara on a “last hurrah” after they epically fell out during the last episode, takes her for a ride on the orient express…in space. As an aside, with Jenna Coleman’s new haircut, I wasn’t immediately aware that it was her and wondered if the Doctor had just decided to pick up a randomer to be impressed by him.

But anyway, they quickly find that the passengers of the Orient Express are being killed off by a Mummy, which can only be seen within the 66 seconds that it takes to kill you.

This to what is possibly Capaldi’s most awesome fan moment of the series as he channels Tom Baker in order to have a conversation with himself. That along with a Jelly Babies reference adds a nice bit of nostalgia to the episode.

Moving on, we’re getting closer and closer to a villain with actual motivation. The Mummy in this episode is actually an ancient augmented soldier, who’s biological parts have died. Now he’s just the machine dragging around what’s left of the decomposing humanoid. It kills because that’s what it’s programmed to do. The other villain “Gus” who orchestrated the whole thing as a science experiment has the motivation of trying to reverse engineer the technology that the Mummy uses. Since the Doctor isn’t actually able to track down Gus by the end of the episode we’re no doubt in for a sequel involving him, maybe even next week’s episode.

Difficult to say anymore, going on the title, I wasn’t expecting a very good episode; well written, very well acted and absolutely recommended.

Wouldn’t it be great…

Smallville.

Wouldn’t it be great if Lex Luthor had only appeared in the last episode of the ever series of Smallville. What we got instead was a baby-faced Lex who went on a journey of dark side conversion that was so stupid that George Lucus could have written it.

But imagine if we had never seen Lex until the very last scene of the entire show; no need to even see his face. Clark accepts his destiny as Superman and then we see him flying around on multiple monitors, as the camera pans back to reveal that signature bald head. We all know who it is and it would have left the audience wanting more from the show. The actual show we got was one that ended because the audience was sick of it.

Miley Cyrus

Wouldn't it be great if no one had batted an eyelid at the “stunt” Miley Cyrus pulled –what’s it called “twerking”? all the public outrage from celebrities and member of the public alike is blatantly exactly what she wanted to happen. It was a textbook way of generating publicity (Justin Bieber did the same thing by tweeting a picture of himself holding a fake scrip for Batman vs Superman) and if you’re really offended by it the only way to make it stop is by ignoring it.

Doctor Who

Wouldn’t it be great if the Comic Con trailer for 50^th Anniversary Who was a massive red herring and deliberately edited (or even shot) to mislead everyone who saw it. I mean they could threaten their way to no one releasing illegal copies of it online, but they couldn’t stop people describing it. It would be awesome if the whole thing was intended to send the fandom in completely the wrong direction in guessing things story-wise. Plus, it would be just like Moffat to pull a stunt like that.

Mini-Reviews

Doctor Who The Bells of St John Prequel.

Enough of the Doctor meeting the companions as children! I get that the Smith-Doctor is supposed to exist in fairytale environment (rather than the sci-fi/drama/realism environment of Tennant and Eccleston), but change up the opening. He always accidentally runs into the new companion as a child, so she has a reason to be fascinated by him for a good couple of decades before she meets him again; the formula is getting old, so old that I knew who that little girl on the swing was as soon as she sat down!! The Easter return of the show had better be good; and there’d better be no dinosaurs!

Les Miserables.

This is without a doubt one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Sure the songs are good, but aside from Hugh Jackman’s character, no one gets developed beyond “in this movie.”

Epic tale of love and rebellion my arse. This is story about a man skipping parole and an overzealous Police officer, with a rebellion and love story happening in the background, but acting as though they’ve been happening the whole time. On that point, the love story is the laziest kind of love story there is; they are two characters that find each other similarly physically attractive and barely speak to one another.

Russell Crowe is horribly miscast and the only good thing about his appearance in he film is the sound effect his body makes when he commits suicide, as a result a result of being an absolute moron.

To summerise, this is a film (not unlike James Cameron’s Titanic) that is all about spectacle, rather than substance. It has been continually marketed as an epic about love and rebellion, when really all it is, is a story about Hugh Jackman skipping parole and being pursued by what appears to be the only police officer in France.  

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.