Doctor Who: Before the Flood.

Get the impression that some people aren’t going to like the opening, but honestly I find Peter Capaldi playing the theme tune on his guitar awesome.

This was a pretty good episode, based around the bootstrap paradox. It’s nice to see a show about time travel construct most of it’s drama out of actual time travel concepts.

It’s interesting to see the show regressing towards the classic era in terms of structure. We’re four episodes in and broadly speaking, the solution to the problem in all of them has been the same. The Doctor anticipated his opponents’ strategy and already had a plan in place to counter it.

It’s nice to have he idea of the Doctor as the chess master again, but the problem that this trick had in the classic era could easily come up again. In basic terms, it get’s tiresome pretty quickly. In fact, in Steven Moffat’s first outing as a writer for who (“The Curse of the Fatal Death, albeit it a Comic relief parody) he made fun of the Doctor’s ability to guess any strategy of his enemy’s.

The supporting cast are all pretty good, but it would be nice, if the two neatly separated couples didn’t both romantically pair off. I know this is a show about a Scottish guy traveling time in a phone box, but can I ask for some realism. Not every female and male in the same space are there simply because they’re in love with each other. Would it be too much to say that Bennett was upset about O’Donnell dying because she was his friend? It’s pretty old fashioned to say that just because one friend is a man and the other is a woman, their only motivation for working together is that at least one of them is secretly in love with the other. The same can be said for the identical trick that’s used to neatly tie off the Cass cares about Lann subplot. I mean come on; he’s actually her interpreter; yes they should be friends, but why do they have to be secretly in love? I mean, I suppose this happy resolution for those two at least lightens the fate of the Ghosts and the fact that the Doctor let someone die to test a theory. But again, why did the surviving person have to be in love with the dead one? Would he have just brushed it off it had it been a mere friend who’d been killed for the sake of an experiment?

The Fisher King is pretty good as a villain; he’s a little bit stupid, but (like Khan  - from Star Trek 2) this can probably be totted up to his hubris. He falls victim to a very simple trick, but that fits with what we see of his personality. Of course he’d assume that the Doctor would risk cracking the Universe open to stop; he’s that much of a big deal.

So yeah, bit clunky in the sub-plots but overall another good episode.

Doctor Who: Under the Lake

Not bad. this is going to be short one...for all the right reasons.

So I’m not exactly a fan of Toby Whithouse, I often find his who scripts to be too wordy, to the extent that the action put in to the episodes feels out of place. This episode, I’m happy to report, seems to finally having him striking the right balance.

I mean I’m still not 100% onboard with the back to back two-parters, but this one actually does a better job than Moffat did in The Magician’s Apprentice. The set-up is good, the humour is good, the vilains are especially good and the cliffhanger is good.

There’s really not much else to say; I was going to complain about how Clara’s personality had been re-written for the sake of the episode, but then Whithouse addressed that. Totting it up to her using the Doctor as an escape from her thoroughly destroyed life. I did think it was a bit odd how she brushed off Missy still being alive in the previous two episodes, when she was ready to kill her at the end of the previous series. This explanation makes a lot of sense in terms of character development and might work up nicely to the reason Clara leaves at the end of the series.

Capaldi is also in his element for this episode, especially with the comedic parts; the cue cards scene is particularly good. It’s a bit like Sherlock, which I doubt is a coincidence. By contrast he leaps well to self aware humour in the handbrake scene in the TARDIS. I get the impression that a lot of script are written with the idea of testing Capaldi’s range.

There’s not really much else to say, it’s a good episode; I only hope the payoff is as good as the set up.

Doctor Who Series 7 Episode 3 Review

So what do you do with a war criminal who’s reformed and is seemingly now applying his skills for the benefit of others. Well apparently that’s not something we should ponder, as people like this are likely to blow themselves up, to avoid the dilemma.

That’s the major issue I have with this episode, the position we take say if we find a Nazi hiding out, is to try them for their crimes regardless of what they’re doing, who their friends now are and how many kittens they save in a year.

The moral message of this episode is undermined by the suicide of the secondary antagonist. This is no doubt a consequence of Toby Whithouse realising that the difficult questions he was asking…err…kinda weren’t difficult to answer.

The concept of the characters arguing over what should happen to this guy, is really weak. The answer is easy; he gets punished for his crimes. But instead of this, Whithouse contrives a way into the plot for him killing himself and avoiding being tried for his crimes in a “heroic” self-sacrifice. But we’ve established as canon, that in the Who universe you only get one life; when it ends, that’s it; there’s nothing.  

I doesn't matter what this guy believed would happen to him if he killed himself, when we know precisely what will happen and that it doesn’t involve being punished.

In order to make any real conflict, the Doctor goes massively off the rails in this episode, I got the impression that they were trying to make him more dangerous and unpredictable, but the whole concept was undermined by how out of character his was. And trying to say, it’s because he’s been travelling “alone for too long” doesn’t count; I’ll take the protagonist’s character development on screen thank you.

Having the Doctor rearrange his personality for the convenience of the plot, in my mind, is a stone’s throw away from him turning up fully regenerated and saying “yeah this happened between episodes.”

Rory is relatively back in character, but as for Amy, so many of the writers have taken liberties with her personality that I have no way of knowing whether anything she says in this episode is in character.

To credit the make up department, the Gunslinger looks pretty badass, but when he starts talking he kind of loses most of his malice. He is at least at far easier to take seriously than that bloody Minotaur he gave us in “The God Complex”.

While this episode is definitely an improvement on last week, there’s nothing particularly great about it. It doesn’t repair the damage of the low quality of “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” in the same way as “The Doctor’s Wife” did for that truly awful pirate episode.

The plot is exciting enough at the right bits, but, as is his problem, Whithouse doesn't have the eyes for filler and banter, so it drags in between action sequences.

I commend an attempt to use Who as some sort of discussion board for important moral issues, but the one that’s being brought forward here is an old one that we figured out the answer to a long time ago.