Doctor Who; The Zygon Invasion Part 2

Stop trying to make this show about everything! For Pete sake; was this salvaged from a Gene Rodenberry script?

 

The Doctor, Clara and Osgood looking bored....like the audience

Yes IS are bad. Trouble is I came here to watch some aliens shoot lightning at a Scottish guy who’s wearing sunglasses in the dark.

Up until this point, this series has been in the category of “a tad too wordy.” This episode crosses the line into stage play levels of dialogue. I’m not looking for blockbuster explosions here, but there’s a talking scene (without so much as some music) that feels like it goes on forever. Incidentally, during this scene, the Doctor makes the same point about 3 times. I’m no expert, but I think they could have shaved some time off that scene, by having him make it once.

Oh, and that point that he makes; we should just try to talk and negotiate to avoid more killing. If we all just learnt to get along, we’d all be safe and sound.

Thank you Mr Harness and Mr Moffatt; but please explain further this “negotiation” thing of which you speak; I don’t think we’ve ever heard of it.

I get that there are children watching this and we have to keep the more weighty messages simple, but does it have to come at this cost? The message of this episode is so patronising; everyone just sit down and talk and work this out. I think the real situation that this is drawn from might be a little more complex than that.

What would have been so wrong with giving the Zygons a religious motivation and highlighting the need to end religious influence over politics in all corners of the Earth? What would have been so wrong with suggesting that UNIT was trying to control the Zygon population and caused an uprising?

The revealed Zygon motivation: they’re just angry young people with no long-term plan. Because that’s what they needed to do, patronise the younger audience too.

The one good thing about the episode is the casual reveal that this is the sixteenth time that this has happened and the Doctor has been wiping everyone’s memories. I mean, it’s only good given that the comical delivery of the line by Capaldi makes you forget what a stupid solution it is.

And finally, “what matters is that Osgood lives.”

Go away; I’m fighting not to type some profanity here. I’ve always like the way that Moffatt gives characters the George RR Martin treatment and this line of fan pandering is really unacceptable.

Why should I care about any character in this show, when I know that death isn’t the end for them? I mean unless they’re Danny Pink (because it sucks to be Danny Pink). As long as the fans moan enough, they’ll be back.

This episode is disappointing, patronising and the exact thing that nearly sank Star Trek the Next Generation.

Doctor Who: the Zygon Invasion

Peter Harness presents 24, WITH ALIENS!!

A consistent problem with this series format has been the decision to make every episode a two-parter. While it gives Moffat and his team more time to develop story, it has lead to 30 minutes of snoozing for every opening episode.

Case in point, The Zygon Invasion should be an all out action episode, but Harness has to stretch it to two making it entirely too wordy for a family show. Other issues show themselves through this problem; the world is in peril so the Doctor abandons the TARDIS for the far slower UNIT plane, with some stupid explanation. He could get inside the Zygon base in a matter of seconds in his ship, but he decides to take a plane for the sake of meeting the episode’s run time.

Look, I’m sure that this is going to pay off in next week’s episode, but I’m really tired of that being the way it is. Why should I, or any loyal viewer, have to sit through a load of set-up lines and plots that are going to end up making up 50% of the series? The stupid thing is that this is the mid point of the series and actually the ideal place for a two-parter. But as it happens, I’m now so fed up “to be continued” that I can’t tell you whether or not the episode suffers majorly for this issue.

No, scratch that actually I can tell you; I would not be complaining about the two-part nature of this episode, were it an isolated incident. Harness does everything right for a continuing story; he sets up the stakes, he delivers a cliff-hanger and he establishes the villains. But the whole thing is undermined by the notion that you as a viewer are just going through the motions; it makes it task to sit through the episode.

I take major exception with some other issues in the episode too. Osgood is back, which I see as an incredibly cowardly move by Moffat. In American TV shows like Arrow, Smallville and Star Trek, titular and popular characters have what are referred to as character shields. This basically means that an extra can be killed with one punch, but Oliver Queen can get impaled and survive (spoiler alert by the way). I didn’t expect such lazy fan-pandering from Moffat and I was very disappointed when it was announced that Osgood would be returning. This isn’t because I didn’t like her, but precisely because I did like her. Killing off a character you like is a really good way to keep the audience emotionally involved (look at Game of Thrones).  Aside from that there’s a pretty significant alteration to the way that the Zygon abilities operate that’s also given a premium BS explanation.

But, like I said, these are things I could probably get over were I not aware of the annoyingness of the format.

Not really much else to say; ably performed by the cast and crew; not a bad episode by any stretch, but suffering for the larger decisions at play.

Doctor Who: The Woman who Lived

Refreshingly dark.

This episode is an adventure comedy rolled up in a dark parody…and it’s awesome.

The Doctor stumbled across a thief who turns out to be Maisie William’s Ashildr (though she doesn’t even remember that name) from the previous episode; now immortal. This is where it really comes into its own; in the Davies days, she would be an amazing saint like figure, courtesy of the Doctor and if the Moff was penning the script she’d be some sort of impossible mystery courtesy of some time travel stuff. But with one of the big men long gone and writing about fruit and vegetables for Channel 4 and the other on proof reading duty, Catherine Tregenna gets to explore the darker side of immortality.

Ashildr (now renamed as “Lady Me”) is now so old that she requires several journals in order to remember her life; though it’s hinted that, much like the 11^th Doctor, she simply can’t bear to remember all the nasty events that have befallen her. It’s especially brave of Tregenna to explore the fact that Ashildr has now outlived her own children. This whole concept was kind of explored before with Captain Jack Harkness (who gets a shout out), but this was in the days of the Tenth Doctor, where saying he’s done anything bad or irresponsible was strictly forbidden in the writing room.

Capaldi and Williams have good chemistry and do a pretty good job of building a mentor to learner relationship.

The episode is not without fault; we’re supposed to like Rufus Hound’s Sam Swift, for some reason and his gallows humour stand up show seems a bit contrived. The main villain is so irrelevant that I can’t remember his name and the fact that someone as assertive and clever as Ashildr/Lady Me would be taken in by his lies doesn’t fly for me.

The selfie at the end (with what must be a competition winner?) also feels shoehorned, but I suppose there are only a few ways that you get across that Lady Me is still about.

On that point, I doubt it’s the last of character; she doesn’t say who told her all about the Doctor, but she uses more than one of Missy’s nicknames for him, so I expect they’ll both be in the finale.

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Died

Meh.

So apparently this is a very important episode in terms of the series as a whole. But yeah, as exciting as it was, it was still riding off the back of a guest star. Maisie Williams stars as Aryra  - I mean Ashildr – a Viking, who, though being a girl in a time period where all females were baby incubators, is a respected and rebellious tomboy. No idea where they got that idea.

The episode is another collaborative effort from Steven Moffat and Jamie Mathieson and the quality of structure shows as well as the witty banter. The Doctor coming up with nicknames for the Vikings is a high point, but the whole subplot with a baby figuring out (or helping to figure out) a defensive strategy is juts stupid.

The bad guys are practically filler; some Odin impersonators trying to get high of testosterone…another idea cribbed from a different show. But I can give them a pass for that, as that show was Torchwood, the particular episode of which guest starred Peter Capaldi.

The defeat of the villains comes across as a bit stupid, but then again their essential purpose was to set up the whole Maisie Williams as a semi-regular character thing.

Overall, I really don’t have that much to say about this episode. Its not bad (though a tad derivative with it’s titular character), but it just about gets by.

I’m hoping that it mirrors the series opener and improves by association to it’s sequel.

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.