I was going to drop you off for fish and chips but then things happened. There was stuff and shenanigans. Wonderful word: shenanigans.
This story is often derisively referred to as "The Pudding People" two-parter. That is both a bit harsh but also a somewhat apt description when you look at the effects in how they brought the gangers to life. My initial recollections for this one are of a story that had some decent promise but that fizzled out into a generic monster story with some unanswered questions. I also recall it feeling a bit drawn out and not quite worth a two-part entry. But my memory could be off and influenced by negative comments that surround it. Let's see what a second viewing does.
Plot Summary
The Doctor, Amy and Rory are caught in large solar flare which drives them down to Earth in the near future. They land outside a medieval castle that has been converted to a factory to process large volumes of acid. They enter and find four workers linked to machines. Those same workers enter the room when an alarm sounds, along with a fifth.
The Doctor poses as a representative from the Meteorological society, come to inspect things after the flare and warn them about a second. The leader, Cleaves, takes the Doctor to a vat where a substance known as "flesh" is kept. The liquid is poured into a vat and when a worker is hooked into a machine, it forms into a body that is controlled while keeping the worker safe from the acid. Cleaves has the fifth worker, Jennifer, demonstrate by hooking herself up. The Doctor is wary, sensing the emotions and intelligence the flesh has absorbed from them every time they hook themselves up.
A quick surge alerts the Doctor to the approaching solar storm. He warns Cleaves to abandon the factory but she declines to do so, not wanting to extend the tour. The Doctor runs out to disconnect the solar array from the power grid but he is electrocuted while doing so and the flare knocks out everyone else in the facility as well as knocking out the power.
The Doctor wakes up an hour later and re-gathers everyone. Everyone has disconnected from their machine but their flesh bodies are not where they remember being. They examine the crew quarters and find things disheveled there. The Doctor informs them that the power from the flare has given the flesh the spark it needed to become independent, harnessing the emotions, memories and thoughts that were poured into it from the workers.
Jennifer is the most affected by the event and runs to the bathroom, thinking she will be sick. Rory goes after her to help in case she is sick. In the bathroom, a piece of flesh falls off Jennifer revealing her to be a ganger. She lunges at Rory, demanding to be left alone and he runs away. Ganger Jennifer runs after him.
In the quarters, the Doctor microwaves some food and hands it to Cleaves. He then tells her the plate is hot and she drops it, but her reaction was too slow and she is also revealed to be a ganger. She too runs off to join the other gangers, who have assembled in the acid room. The group then splits up. The Doctor goes looking for both Rory and the TARDIS. Jimmy and Amy head out for supplies while Buzzer and Dicken go to get the acid suits.
The Doctor heads down to the flesh pool and triggers something within the pool. He then heads out to the TARDIS to find that it is sinking into a hole caused by a pool of acid. That pool has spread and is now melting his shoes so he retreats back into the building barefoot. Buzzer and Dicken find the acid suits gone and head back to the crew quarters. Amy splits off from Jimmy to look for Rory when he heads back with the supplies.
Rory and Jennifer reconnect and Rory feels compassion to her appeal for help. They head back to the quarters to get help from the Doctor. The Doctor then finds the gangers in the acid room and convinces them to come back to the quarters so they can negotiate a peace between the two sides. As a carrot, he offers to use equipment in the TARDIS, when it has been fished out, that will help stabilize their bodies into a fully human form as they have been oscillating between normal and white flesh.
The gangers come back to the quarters where they tentatively agree to work together. However the original Cleaves, who had been hiding, emerges and declares a state of war. Ganger Buzzer approaches her and she shocks him, stopping his heart. The gangers flee the room as the Doctor grabs the electrical equipment from her. The gangers retreat to the acid room where ganger Jennifer takes command and declares war. Original Cleaves also declares war and the group retreats to the flesh room, which is the most well defended part of the castle, the gangers having seized the weapons.
As the gangers approach the room Rory runs off, having heard the original Jennifer screaming, to help her. The rest are forced to barricade themselves in where they find themselves with a ganger version of the Doctor. The ganger Doctor has trouble adjusting to the download of information from the previous iterations of the Doctor but eventually stabilizes with a set of the Doctor's original shoes while the original Doctor wears a pair borrowed from the factory workers.
With the gangers breaking down the door, the group slips into an air duct and the Doctor seals the entrance behind them with his sonic screwdriver. They pass through the lower tunnels of the castle but are blocked by clouds of gas formed by the acid interacting with the stone. They head to the tower with the communications equipment where Cleaves and the Doctor are able to reactivate the power and get the radio working.
Ganger Cleaves is aware of what they are doing but opts not to engage, knowing it will be too well defended. Instead they monitor on their own equipment and try to break up the radio transmission. Cleaves does manage to get through to the mainland and requests both emergency evacuation and destruction of the facility.
Ganger Jennifer meanwhile makes her way down to the thermal controls but can't access the codes since she is not human. She makes her way back to a bathroom and calls out to Rory, who is nearby. Rory enters and finds two Jennifers, both claiming to be the real one. One is limping and pulls up her pants to show a burn. Rory immediately sides with her, assuming her to be the human one. Angered, the other Jennifer attacks the first one. They fight but the second Jennifer is knocked into a pool of acid that is leaking from the floor and her flesh form quickly dissolves.
In the communication tower the ganger Doctor has a fit, responding to emotions from the other flesh bodies. Amy, who came to check on him, is terrified when he confronts her. She retreats back into the room and refuses to have anything to do with him, already feeling biased against him.
Rory and Jennifer make their way to the thermal controls. Jennifer tells Rory that it will clear the air and has him deactivate the controls. She then takes him to a pile of discarded flesh bodies, viewed as defective and left to rot but still with sentience. Rory is appalled and offers to help show the world how the flesh is being treated.
In the tower the group becomes aware of the deactivation of the thermal controls, which destabilizes everything. The factory has now become a bomb. Worse, the rescue shuttle signals that the atmosphere is too unstable for them to pull the people from the communications tower. Cleaves signals for them to land in the courtyard but the system shorts out before she can finish her transmission. Monitoring, ganger Cleaves finishes the transmission, correctly guessing the code word Cleaves had set up.
While the rest of the group make their way to the courtyard, the ganger Doctor and Buzzer go looking for Rory. They find the body of human Jennifer when Buzzer knocks the Doctor out. He heads down towards the courtyard but is distracted by a noise. He finds ganger Jennifer soothing the pile of discarded flesh bodies. She then attacks and kills him.
The rest of the party is intercepted by Rory who leads them down to the acid room and then locks them in. He had intended to show proof of the discarded flesh but he is soon surrounded by the gangers and ganger Jennifer. He realizes he has been tricked as she drags him away. Cleaves then offers a taunt to her ganger, noting that she will die soon anyway as they are both suffering from a fatal blood clot in the head. Trapped in the room with the acid beginning to boil over, the group tries to buy themselves time by lowering the cap on the reservoir.
In the crew quarters, Rory reacts angrily to Jennifer's trickery. He lashes out at the Doctor as well who distracts him with a received telephone call. The call is one the Doctor had reserved earlier to Jimmy's son. The Doctor asks the boy if he wants to talk to his dad and he starts to call for him. Ganger Jimmy recalls all the emotions and memories and bolts out of the room to rescue the people from the acid room. Thwarted in her desire for a war, Jennifer also storms out, vowing revenge.
Ganger Jimmy opens the door while the humans are trying to seal the tank. The lid ruptures under pressure and human Jimmy has acid projected on him, burning through to his heart. As he dies, he gives his ganger his wedding ring and tells him to go be a father. The whole group returns to the crew quarters and ganger Jimmy talks to his son with the Doctor encouraging him.
With the site nearing critical, the group tries to get to the courtyard but is cut off by Jennifer who has morphed into a more bestial shape. The group retreats to an inner chamber but the door lacks a lock. A second door further down the hall does and human Dicken runs to close it. It is stuck and though he does manage to close it, Jennifer attacks him before he can lock it.
Ganger Cleaves and the Doctor hold the door shut while the ganger Doctor points to a point in the ceiling. The spot gives way and the TARDIS fall though. Ganger Jimmy and Dicken head inside along with human Cleaves. Rory urges Amy but Amy insists that the Doctor come too. It is then that he reveals that the Doctor and the ganger Doctor had switched shoes to learn more and test Amy. The real Doctor tosses the ganger Doctor the sonic and bids him good luck. Ganger Cleaves also insists on staying behind. The rest enter the TARDIS and disappear. The two gangers open the door and as Jennifer moves on them, the ganger Doctor activates the sonic, turning all three of them into puddles.
In the TARDIS, the Doctor stabilizes the gangers, allowing them to stay in their human forms permanently. He also gives Cleaves a vial of liquid that will clear the blood clot in her brain. They drop Jimmy off with his son and then take Cleaves and Dicken to their corporate headquarters where they will explain what happen and advocate for better treatment of gangers.
As they prepare to leave, Amy doubles over in pain. The Doctor takes her and Rory into the TARDIS where he tells Amy that she is going into labor. Amy is confused as she is not visibly pregnant. The Doctor then tells her that he and Rory will find her and to not worry. He points a new sonic screwdriver at her and her flesh body dissolves.
Amy wakes lying in a white tube with a large pregnant belly. A panel slides open above her to reveal the woman with the eye patch whom she had seen randomly ever since The Impossible Astronaut. The woman urges Amy to push and Amy starts to scream.
Analysis
A retread of the territory of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Android Invasion, this is a decidedly mixed story. For just about every positive thing you can say about it, there is a countering negative. That in and of itself is not bad but the fact that it is a two-part story and one that gave a huge reveal about Amy at the end makes it feel like we should have expected more that what it is.
My single biggest gripe of the piece is the convoluted story. The set up through the first half of The Rebel Flesh worked well with tension and a real sense of unease. There was even the good set up where two of the crew had already been replaced with their ganger versions. But after that it starts to fall apart. Cleaves and Jennifer had been replaced by gangers but where were the human versions. We are shown Cleaves hiding and then discovering the group while Jennifer comes limping out of nowhere to be attacked by her ganger. Where were they and why weren't they part of the group of humans that were clustered in the control area?
Things get even more convoluted with the almost schizophrenic difference between human Cleaves and ganger Cleaves to force the fight between the two sides. Ganger Cleaves is shown to think just like her human counterpart but she is also more rational, thoughtful and empathetic. Human Cleaves bursts in and threatens the gangers without any consideration of what is going on and overreacting while her ganger version sits back and lets it happen. The ganger version also lets Jennifer take control where the human Cleaves barely let the Doctor take charge. There is a difference in Jennifer as well but given the mutations ganger Jennifer was undergoing, you can head cannon those into the idea that Jennifer became the primary outlet for the flesh's anger and she was its personality rather than Jennifer's.
All through the remaining parts, characters are constantly doing things that serve the plot. Rory may have compassion for Jennifer but would her well-being overcome his affection for his wife and the desire to be safe? Rory's separation and his manipulation by Jennifer drives most of the action in the second part but it involves him being especially dumb. Why does the Doctor need to get Amy to trust the flesh Doctor when she herself is in a flesh body that it going to be destroyed by the Doctor? Exposing Amy as a "flesh racist" does nothing for the plot other than give her something to do. In fact, the flesh Doctor is mostly unnecessary except that it allows a version of the Doctor to be in both camps.
Consistently, it felt like their were too many characters or versions of characters and they were being pushed in ways to drive the plot, but with bits left hanging. Dicken has exactly one line per episode and mostly stands around doing nothing except to killed by Jennifer in the final attack. Jimmy gets the emotional arc of his son but is also otherwise just there for a body. Buzzer's ganger is killed to start the war while his human counterpart is ganger Jennifer's token victim before becoming a full monster. A larger cast makes sense with the running of a factory, but it makes for a very crowded story, especially when you insert four additional characters in.
It was also rather disappointing that after all the hullabaloo about racism and the definition of what it means to be human, the story ends with just another monster coming at the group. Jennifer goes warped and comes at them like a beast. Keeping everyone looking human and letting the threat be from within would have been a lot more interesting of a resolution. I think it would have actually amplified the tension rather than defusing the situation by giving everyone an ugly bad thing that we all can oppose.
That is a lot of negativity to start things off. So on to the positives. I thought the story was well acted. Those that had enough lines and development to get fleshed out characters (pardon the pun) were genuinely interesting, even if they diverged from what you are conditioned to expect. While the Doctor, Amy and Rory's behavior might have been a bit strange at times, they were all well performed and you genuinely believed in their emotions, especially the enraged outburst by the Doctor that set Amy off against him. I thought it a well controlled bit of acting.
The location and direction was nice as well. The use of the color pallet especially really helped set the mood of the situation. The only real drawback of the location, which looked very nice, was that some of the audio might have been affected. There were several points where I had trouble hearing what was being said and I think that was because the audio was oddly affected by the location. It's a small quibble but when you're having trouble keeping track of why someone is behaving as they are, it goes a long way in influencing the overall mood.
It's frustrating to see a story that has so much potential be wasted. It's not bad at its core but there are so many wanderings, dead ends and loose threads in the plot that it just gets frustrating to watch it rather than enmeshing you in the story as you would hope it would. It is pretty to look at and well acted so it's not a slog to get through. But when you get through a story with that amount of frustration at the plotline, you can't mark it particularly high.
Overall personal score: The Rebel Flesh - 2 out of 5; The Almost People - 2 out of 5
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Monday, March 5, 2018
Tenth Doctor Summary
The Tenth Doctor was a real up and down case, due mostly to the whims of Russell T. Davies. He is probably the darkest of all the Doctors and one of the quickest to resort to lethal violence. More than that, he seems to relish the violence once he has been tipped into it. It can go to a further extreme when you also contrast it to the very bubbly and happy personality that he tries to keep on most of the time. All of which make for an interesting and complex character that draws you in to his world.
But you also have some of the dumbest and most self-aggrandizing stories at the same time. You have to deal with the Tenth Doctor-Rose relationship which not only is the most annoying in terms of the romance but also with their smugness. There is the pining of Martha to deal with, which undercuts some rather good story premises. It's really not until Donna that the Tenth Doctor settles in to just having adventures and even then there is the constant joke about them being a couple.
As annoying as the romance can get, the real problem with the Tenth Doctor is the Jesus moments. Before the era of the Tenth Doctor, the Doctor was just a guy bumbling around the universe, exploring and trying to help out. This ultimately became a quest to save everyone from every evil imaginable and his legend began to take on messianic tones. This is both contrived (the messiah metaphor is overused in many forms of media) and washes out the character of someone who just gets caught up in things.
But on the other hand, there is excellent writing with the Tenth Doctor. There is also genuine drama, apart from the series finales, in most episodes. RTD, in contrast to Steven Moffat, didn't seem to have a problem taking well liked characters that passed through the show and either killing them or giving them terrible resolutions. A viewer when then be invested in the peril of the character because there was a real chance that the bad thing would stay bad: Rose was left in the alternate dimension, alternate universe Jackie stayed dead after being converted, most of the likeable characters on the Titanic died in their escape attempt, etc. One of the great complaints against the various series enders and the end of the Tenth Doctor in general is that RTD went back and tried to undo some of his most dire consequences.
As far as overall feel goes, my watching of the Tenth Doctor era depends on my mood. For darker, more dramatic stories, definitely the Tenth Doctor era. Good adventure runarounds and the occasion psychological thriller, also good for the Tenth Doctor. Not great if you want something lighter and comedic and the era was not immune from shake your head silliness either. But overall, I like the Tenth Doctor and his era a lot. It's fun, engaging and a good balance between what the show is capable of, even if it does fall on it's face here and there.
Highest Rated Story: The Waters of Mars - 5.0
Lowest Rated Story: Last of the Time Lords - 0.5
Average overall rating: 3.26
The Christmas Invasion
New Earth
Tooth and Claw
School Reunion
The Girl in the Fireplace
Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel
The Idiot's Lantern
The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
Love & Monsters
Fear Her
Army of Ghosts/Doomsday
The Runaway Bride
Smith and Jones
The Shakespeare Code
Gridlock
Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks
The Lazarus Experiment
42
Human Nature/The Family of Blood
Blink
Utopia
The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords
Voyage of the Damned
Partners in Crime
The Fires of Pompeii
Planet of the Ood
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky
The Doctor's Daughter
The Unicorn and the Wasp
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
Midnight
Turn Left
The Stolen Earth/Journey's End
The Next Doctor
Planet of the Dead
The Waters of Mars
The End of Time
But you also have some of the dumbest and most self-aggrandizing stories at the same time. You have to deal with the Tenth Doctor-Rose relationship which not only is the most annoying in terms of the romance but also with their smugness. There is the pining of Martha to deal with, which undercuts some rather good story premises. It's really not until Donna that the Tenth Doctor settles in to just having adventures and even then there is the constant joke about them being a couple.
As annoying as the romance can get, the real problem with the Tenth Doctor is the Jesus moments. Before the era of the Tenth Doctor, the Doctor was just a guy bumbling around the universe, exploring and trying to help out. This ultimately became a quest to save everyone from every evil imaginable and his legend began to take on messianic tones. This is both contrived (the messiah metaphor is overused in many forms of media) and washes out the character of someone who just gets caught up in things.
But on the other hand, there is excellent writing with the Tenth Doctor. There is also genuine drama, apart from the series finales, in most episodes. RTD, in contrast to Steven Moffat, didn't seem to have a problem taking well liked characters that passed through the show and either killing them or giving them terrible resolutions. A viewer when then be invested in the peril of the character because there was a real chance that the bad thing would stay bad: Rose was left in the alternate dimension, alternate universe Jackie stayed dead after being converted, most of the likeable characters on the Titanic died in their escape attempt, etc. One of the great complaints against the various series enders and the end of the Tenth Doctor in general is that RTD went back and tried to undo some of his most dire consequences.
As far as overall feel goes, my watching of the Tenth Doctor era depends on my mood. For darker, more dramatic stories, definitely the Tenth Doctor era. Good adventure runarounds and the occasion psychological thriller, also good for the Tenth Doctor. Not great if you want something lighter and comedic and the era was not immune from shake your head silliness either. But overall, I like the Tenth Doctor and his era a lot. It's fun, engaging and a good balance between what the show is capable of, even if it does fall on it's face here and there.
Highest Rated Story: The Waters of Mars - 5.0
Lowest Rated Story: Last of the Time Lords - 0.5
Average overall rating: 3.26
The Christmas Invasion
New Earth
Tooth and Claw
School Reunion
The Girl in the Fireplace
Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel
The Idiot's Lantern
The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
Love & Monsters
Fear Her
Army of Ghosts/Doomsday
The Runaway Bride
Smith and Jones
The Shakespeare Code
Gridlock
Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks
The Lazarus Experiment
42
Human Nature/The Family of Blood
Blink
Utopia
The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords
Voyage of the Damned
Partners in Crime
The Fires of Pompeii
Planet of the Ood
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky
The Doctor's Daughter
The Unicorn and the Wasp
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
Midnight
Turn Left
The Stolen Earth/Journey's End
The Next Doctor
Planet of the Dead
The Waters of Mars
The End of Time
Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks
I am a human-Dalek.
This is what putting off unpleasant things does to you. I had not intended to finish the Tenth Doctor with the Series Three two-parter involving the Daleks but here we are. These two episodes were very poorly received by the fans, enough so that they somewhat poisoned the well for the Sontaran two-parter in Series Four. When the writer, Helen Raynor, went back and read comments about both stories, she turned about face and never wrote for the show again. I don't recall enjoying this one that much but I also don't recall having the avowed hatred that some fans did.
Plot Summary
In 1930 New York, a man named Lazlo is wishing good luck to his girlfriend Tallulah as she heads on stage for a performance. He is distracted by a noise and follows it down to a store room where he is attacked by a humanoid pig.
The Doctor and Martha arrive on Liberty Island two weeks later where the Doctor is immediately keyed in to a series of disappearances in the Central Park shantytown called Hooverville. In the shantytown, they observe a man named Solomon breaking up a fight between two people. The Doctor notes his leadership and asks him about the disappearances. Solomon acknowledges them but they had been unable to do anything as they happen too fast and the authorities don't care about missing vagrants.
Meanwhile at the nearly completed Empire State Building, the lead engineer, Mr. Diagoras, is threatening the foreman to finish the spire of the building by that night. The foreman refuses and Diagoras tells him to take it up with the new bosses. A Dalek emerges from the elevator with two pig-men who seize the foreman and take him below. The Dalek then orders Diagoras to bring in additional labor.
Diagoras arrives at the Hooverville and offers money to clear a blockage in the sewer. Curious, the Doctor volunteers, joined by Martha, Solomon and a young man named Frank. The four journey into the sewers under the Empire State Building but find no blockage. Instead, they find a glowing sample of alien tissue. The Doctor is unsure of what it is and pockets it. They then see a pig-man sitting in one tunnel. The Doctor goes to examine him but is surprised by a larger group of pig-men who emerge from the shadows.
The mutants chase the group down the tunnels until they find a ladder. The Doctor unseals the manhole cover and he, Martha and Solomon climb to safety. Frank, who had lagged behind to fend off the pig-men, is grabbed off the ladder and dragged away. The Doctor prepares to plan to go after Frank when Tallulah emerges with a gun, demanding to know where Lazlo is.
After setting the workers to install the new panels on the spire, Diagoras is summoned to the lair of the Daleks in the basement. There he is confronted by Dalek Sec, leader of the Cult of Skaro, who escaped with three other members of the cult after their defeat at the Battle of Canary Wharf (Doomsday). Sec sees potential in Diagoras and orders him dragged to a holding cell while the plan is carried out.
After admitting she is using a prop gun, Tallulah tells the Doctor of Lazlo's disappearance from the same theater she performs at. That theater has an entrance to the sewer in the prop storage room, which is where the Doctor, Martha and Solomon emerged from. Martha stays with Tallulah while the Doctor cannibalizes some equipment to examine the alien tissue. Solomon heads back to Hooverville to rally the men to a defense and possibly rescue Frank.
Tallulah goes on stage while Martha watches from the wings. On the other wing, she sees a deformed man watching from the shadows. She tries to sneak across stage but trips over a dancer. She points out the man who then runs off. Martha runs after him but is grabbed by a pig-man and dragged back into the sewers.
The Doctor discovers the tissue is artificially constructed with Skaro DNA. Realizing that the Daleks are involved, he goes to look for Martha but Tallulah tells him that she has disappeared. Suspecting that she was taken, he runs into the sewers with Tallulah insisting on following him. In the sewers, they are forced to hide as a Dalek roams around on patrol.
They discover the disfigured man hiding nearby. It is Lazlo who managed to escape before the transformation is complete. His mind still functions but his features are a blend of human and porcine. The send Tallulah back through the sewers for the safety of the theater but she gets lost on the way. The Doctor and Lazlo find Martha and Frank being herded by two Daleks to the laboratory for further experimentation. The Doctor slips in between them while Lazlo poses as a pig guard.
The group is brought into the lab where Dalek Sec has taken Diagoras into his casing. The Daleks announce their new evolution and from the casing emerges a bipedal creature, calling itself a human-Dalek. Sec orders the humans to be processed with the other Daleks but the Doctor shows himself, distracting the Daleks. He creates a noise through a radio that induces pain in the Daleks and the pig-men and he and the group of humans flee through the sewers.
The return to Hooverville and the Doctor urges everyone to flee New York. Most resist, with no where else to go, and the camp is attacked by pig-men. The humans beat the creatures back but two Daleks come after them and begin to destroy the camp. Solomon steps forward to try and negotiate but the Daleks kill him.
The Doctor, angry at Solomon's death, offers himself up but Sec orders the Doctor taken alive. As he is taken away, the Doctor gives Martha his psychic paper. He is then taken back to the lab where Sec explains how he intends to blend Dalek and human DNA in people who have become empty shells and lay in stasis. The power for this will come from a gamma ray infused lightning on the spire of the Empire State Building. Seeing a glimmers of emotion in Sec, the Doctor agrees to help.
In Hooverville, Martha realizes that the Daleks needed a workforce and would lure men with the promise of work. Frank tells her that most men were hired to work on the Empire State Building. She, Frank and Tallulah use the psychic paper to get into the building and up to the planning office near the top. They find a set of blueprints that had just been updated and comparing them with an older set, they realize that the Daleks have installed extra panels on spire of the building.
The Doctor and Sec finalize the serum to infuse the human shells with the hybrid DNA. However as it flows, an alarm goes off and they realize that it is pure Dalek DNA being pumped in. The other three Daleks have rebelled against Sec for threatening Dalek purity and order him and the Doctor seized. The Doctor is grabbed by Lazlo, who had also summoned the elevator. When it opens, the two dash into it and head up to the top floor.
At the top, Martha tells the Doctor where the Daleks have installed their panels. He orders Martha, Tallulah, Frank and Lazlo to fight off the pig-men pursuers while he removes the panels. Lazlo collapses, the mutation designed to end the life of the pig-men after a few weeks, leaving them a man down. Martha then realizes that with a lightning strike, she can electrify the elevator by channeling the bolt through sets of metal tubing. She and Frank work to set this up.
On the spire, the Doctor removes one panel but drops his screwdriver before he can finish removing the second and third panels. Unable to remove them, he wraps himself around the spire as the lightning hits. It electrifies him and passes through the building. The pig-men emerging from the elevator are electrocuted while the human shells injected with Dalek DNA come to life. The Daleks arms the humans and send them through the sewers to ambush sites throughout the city. Martha wakes the Doctor, having passed out after the lightning strike and they head back downstairs.
Needing a large space, the group breaks into Tallulah's theater and the Doctor alerts the Daleks to his presence with his sonic screwdriver. The Daleks dispatch a group of humans to destroy them along with two of the three Daleks, dragging Sec in tow. The Daleks move to kill the Doctor but Sec stands up and steps in the path of the beam, killing him. The Daleks order the humans to destroy the Doctor but they refuse to fire, questioning why. The Doctor tells the Daleks that he infused a small amount of Time Lord DNA into the mix, giving them the ability to question orders.
Angered, the Daleks start killing the infected humans who return fire. The Daleks kill several but the shots overwhelm their armor and both Daleks are destroyed. Seeing the humans rebel Dalek Caan, who had taken over the leadership role, activates a self destruct in the hybrids, killing all of them. The Doctor return to the lab, offering Caan compassion as the only Dalek left. Caan instead activates an emergency temporal shift and disappears.
Martha, Frank, Tallulah and Lazlo enter the lab and Lazlo collapses, nearing the end of his adjusted life cycle. The Doctor however grabs genetic equipment from the lab and develops a serum to counteract the shortened span. In the morning, they take Lazlo to Hooverville and Frank arranges for Lazlo to stay there. The Doctor and Martha then depart, the Doctor sure Dalek Caan will emerge once again.
Analysis
Because Doctor Who is a family oriented show, you expect plots and stories to come along that are rather silly. Many of these are made more palatable for adults with comedy, witty writing and good acting. The downfall of stories that are poorly regarded is a general deficiency in these areas. Unfortunately, Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks falls into that category. The plot is generally silly but I can take that is certain doses. Where the story really falls flat is in the annoying nature or ambivalence generated towards the various characters.
This story puts the shoe on the other foot in terms of understanding how British people feel about Dick Van Dyke's accent in Mary Poppins. The accents in this story are atrocious. To disguise their own British accents, the characters are all adopting extreme versions of the New York gangster accent that is usually associated with James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson. But those accents have become a joke in and of themselves and to hear them taken a level further shifts it from just being tired to outright annoying. Frank has a southern accent but it is also done in an exaggerated fashion that feels fake.
The one exception on the accent front is Solomon. He is more understated in his American accent and that plays better. But he has other drawbacks. He is painted as the natural peacemaker who abhors violence but a number of his characteristics come across as tropes that have been done many times before. Even his death falls into the cliché. A true subversion of it would have been if the Dalek had shot him mid-sentence, cutting things off. Instead, he is allowed to finish his speech and deliver the full weight of his nobility to Sec.
As silly as the human-Dalek Sec was in his appearance and his initial delivery of lines, he did start to grow on me as Evolution of the Daleks progressed. His halting speech wasn't great, but I wonder if some of that was because the actor couldn't breathe under the mask. But in a similar fashion in Dalek, the infusion of humanity and the realization of the horror of their purified existence made the modified Dalek become more sympathetic. It's still not a particularly good adaptation but it at least it creates a certain level of interest and drama in an otherwise boring character.
As this story is in the first half of Series 3, it lingers quite a bit on the Martha pining for the Doctor plotline. This does generate a couple of amusing lines from Tallulah, suggesting that the Doctor is gay, but other than that, it is just as tedious as the other times where Martha complains about the Doctor not returning her affection instead of appreciating his friendship or the adventure they are currently on. I also didn't care for the leap of logic that she had to make to find the Doctor at the Empire State Building once he was taken. That whole scene just played out like writer's convenience, to say nothing of the silliness of hearing Martha and Tallulah saying "Dalekanium" every couple of minutes.
I did enjoy the Doctor's performance. It was probably one of the few things I genuinely enjoyed in this story. There is a certain level of gravitas that the Doctor brings that feel genuine no matter how silly the situation or the level of acting around him. He conveys deep emotion as well as intensity, which can go a little off the rails at times. He did get a tad over the top when swearing to save Lazlo but it was only a quick scene and easily overlooked.
Unlike The Angels Take Manhattan, this story didn't really use New York. It was fairly obvious that the whole thing was just a series of sets and that the skyline and backdrop pictures of New York were taken by a second-unit crew, sans actors. This didn't bother me but it did feel like they missed a trick as a quick shot of some of the characters in a real New York location would have been a nice touch. Still, the setting and overall layout was actually done fairly well and was one of the stronger parts of this story.
I've railed on the acting quite a bit but I can't dismiss the writing either. Its not bad, but its also not particularly good either. There is no real spark in the dialogue and the lofty talk of Solomon is built more on clichés and sincerity of the actor. I found some of the timing and set up with the Dalek's plan needlessly overdone. There was no need for the run around story about getting the Dalekanium pieces put on the spire at the last minute. That was just a device to give the Daleks a weakness in their plans as well as kill some time.
I think it's the time thing that gets me. This did not feel deserving of a two-parter. Fat could easily have been cut and if you combine a few scenes and reduce the amount of doubling back, this could have been a tight 42-minute story that would have really zipped along. It would have reduced the exposure of some of the lesser actors and let the Doctor and the Daleks go hard mono-y-mono. But with bloat comes drag and exposure of the lesser elements and that certainly happened here.
I think it's safe to say that this is the worst of the two-parters from the Tenth Doctor era. There are some ideas here but they mostly cover ground that's been gone over before and then a large amount of bad acting and silliness get tossed on top of it. I hate to end on a down note but I think I was right in wanting to avoid this story as its just not one that is worth revisiting on any kind of regular basis. Even if it does have an early Andrew Garfield sighting.
Overall personal score: Daleks in Manhattan - 1; Evolution of the Daleks - 1
This is what putting off unpleasant things does to you. I had not intended to finish the Tenth Doctor with the Series Three two-parter involving the Daleks but here we are. These two episodes were very poorly received by the fans, enough so that they somewhat poisoned the well for the Sontaran two-parter in Series Four. When the writer, Helen Raynor, went back and read comments about both stories, she turned about face and never wrote for the show again. I don't recall enjoying this one that much but I also don't recall having the avowed hatred that some fans did.
Plot Summary
In 1930 New York, a man named Lazlo is wishing good luck to his girlfriend Tallulah as she heads on stage for a performance. He is distracted by a noise and follows it down to a store room where he is attacked by a humanoid pig.
The Doctor and Martha arrive on Liberty Island two weeks later where the Doctor is immediately keyed in to a series of disappearances in the Central Park shantytown called Hooverville. In the shantytown, they observe a man named Solomon breaking up a fight between two people. The Doctor notes his leadership and asks him about the disappearances. Solomon acknowledges them but they had been unable to do anything as they happen too fast and the authorities don't care about missing vagrants.
Meanwhile at the nearly completed Empire State Building, the lead engineer, Mr. Diagoras, is threatening the foreman to finish the spire of the building by that night. The foreman refuses and Diagoras tells him to take it up with the new bosses. A Dalek emerges from the elevator with two pig-men who seize the foreman and take him below. The Dalek then orders Diagoras to bring in additional labor.
Diagoras arrives at the Hooverville and offers money to clear a blockage in the sewer. Curious, the Doctor volunteers, joined by Martha, Solomon and a young man named Frank. The four journey into the sewers under the Empire State Building but find no blockage. Instead, they find a glowing sample of alien tissue. The Doctor is unsure of what it is and pockets it. They then see a pig-man sitting in one tunnel. The Doctor goes to examine him but is surprised by a larger group of pig-men who emerge from the shadows.
The mutants chase the group down the tunnels until they find a ladder. The Doctor unseals the manhole cover and he, Martha and Solomon climb to safety. Frank, who had lagged behind to fend off the pig-men, is grabbed off the ladder and dragged away. The Doctor prepares to plan to go after Frank when Tallulah emerges with a gun, demanding to know where Lazlo is.
After setting the workers to install the new panels on the spire, Diagoras is summoned to the lair of the Daleks in the basement. There he is confronted by Dalek Sec, leader of the Cult of Skaro, who escaped with three other members of the cult after their defeat at the Battle of Canary Wharf (Doomsday). Sec sees potential in Diagoras and orders him dragged to a holding cell while the plan is carried out.
After admitting she is using a prop gun, Tallulah tells the Doctor of Lazlo's disappearance from the same theater she performs at. That theater has an entrance to the sewer in the prop storage room, which is where the Doctor, Martha and Solomon emerged from. Martha stays with Tallulah while the Doctor cannibalizes some equipment to examine the alien tissue. Solomon heads back to Hooverville to rally the men to a defense and possibly rescue Frank.
Tallulah goes on stage while Martha watches from the wings. On the other wing, she sees a deformed man watching from the shadows. She tries to sneak across stage but trips over a dancer. She points out the man who then runs off. Martha runs after him but is grabbed by a pig-man and dragged back into the sewers.
The Doctor discovers the tissue is artificially constructed with Skaro DNA. Realizing that the Daleks are involved, he goes to look for Martha but Tallulah tells him that she has disappeared. Suspecting that she was taken, he runs into the sewers with Tallulah insisting on following him. In the sewers, they are forced to hide as a Dalek roams around on patrol.
They discover the disfigured man hiding nearby. It is Lazlo who managed to escape before the transformation is complete. His mind still functions but his features are a blend of human and porcine. The send Tallulah back through the sewers for the safety of the theater but she gets lost on the way. The Doctor and Lazlo find Martha and Frank being herded by two Daleks to the laboratory for further experimentation. The Doctor slips in between them while Lazlo poses as a pig guard.
The group is brought into the lab where Dalek Sec has taken Diagoras into his casing. The Daleks announce their new evolution and from the casing emerges a bipedal creature, calling itself a human-Dalek. Sec orders the humans to be processed with the other Daleks but the Doctor shows himself, distracting the Daleks. He creates a noise through a radio that induces pain in the Daleks and the pig-men and he and the group of humans flee through the sewers.
The return to Hooverville and the Doctor urges everyone to flee New York. Most resist, with no where else to go, and the camp is attacked by pig-men. The humans beat the creatures back but two Daleks come after them and begin to destroy the camp. Solomon steps forward to try and negotiate but the Daleks kill him.
The Doctor, angry at Solomon's death, offers himself up but Sec orders the Doctor taken alive. As he is taken away, the Doctor gives Martha his psychic paper. He is then taken back to the lab where Sec explains how he intends to blend Dalek and human DNA in people who have become empty shells and lay in stasis. The power for this will come from a gamma ray infused lightning on the spire of the Empire State Building. Seeing a glimmers of emotion in Sec, the Doctor agrees to help.
In Hooverville, Martha realizes that the Daleks needed a workforce and would lure men with the promise of work. Frank tells her that most men were hired to work on the Empire State Building. She, Frank and Tallulah use the psychic paper to get into the building and up to the planning office near the top. They find a set of blueprints that had just been updated and comparing them with an older set, they realize that the Daleks have installed extra panels on spire of the building.
The Doctor and Sec finalize the serum to infuse the human shells with the hybrid DNA. However as it flows, an alarm goes off and they realize that it is pure Dalek DNA being pumped in. The other three Daleks have rebelled against Sec for threatening Dalek purity and order him and the Doctor seized. The Doctor is grabbed by Lazlo, who had also summoned the elevator. When it opens, the two dash into it and head up to the top floor.
At the top, Martha tells the Doctor where the Daleks have installed their panels. He orders Martha, Tallulah, Frank and Lazlo to fight off the pig-men pursuers while he removes the panels. Lazlo collapses, the mutation designed to end the life of the pig-men after a few weeks, leaving them a man down. Martha then realizes that with a lightning strike, she can electrify the elevator by channeling the bolt through sets of metal tubing. She and Frank work to set this up.
On the spire, the Doctor removes one panel but drops his screwdriver before he can finish removing the second and third panels. Unable to remove them, he wraps himself around the spire as the lightning hits. It electrifies him and passes through the building. The pig-men emerging from the elevator are electrocuted while the human shells injected with Dalek DNA come to life. The Daleks arms the humans and send them through the sewers to ambush sites throughout the city. Martha wakes the Doctor, having passed out after the lightning strike and they head back downstairs.
Needing a large space, the group breaks into Tallulah's theater and the Doctor alerts the Daleks to his presence with his sonic screwdriver. The Daleks dispatch a group of humans to destroy them along with two of the three Daleks, dragging Sec in tow. The Daleks move to kill the Doctor but Sec stands up and steps in the path of the beam, killing him. The Daleks order the humans to destroy the Doctor but they refuse to fire, questioning why. The Doctor tells the Daleks that he infused a small amount of Time Lord DNA into the mix, giving them the ability to question orders.
Angered, the Daleks start killing the infected humans who return fire. The Daleks kill several but the shots overwhelm their armor and both Daleks are destroyed. Seeing the humans rebel Dalek Caan, who had taken over the leadership role, activates a self destruct in the hybrids, killing all of them. The Doctor return to the lab, offering Caan compassion as the only Dalek left. Caan instead activates an emergency temporal shift and disappears.
Martha, Frank, Tallulah and Lazlo enter the lab and Lazlo collapses, nearing the end of his adjusted life cycle. The Doctor however grabs genetic equipment from the lab and develops a serum to counteract the shortened span. In the morning, they take Lazlo to Hooverville and Frank arranges for Lazlo to stay there. The Doctor and Martha then depart, the Doctor sure Dalek Caan will emerge once again.
Analysis
Because Doctor Who is a family oriented show, you expect plots and stories to come along that are rather silly. Many of these are made more palatable for adults with comedy, witty writing and good acting. The downfall of stories that are poorly regarded is a general deficiency in these areas. Unfortunately, Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks falls into that category. The plot is generally silly but I can take that is certain doses. Where the story really falls flat is in the annoying nature or ambivalence generated towards the various characters.
This story puts the shoe on the other foot in terms of understanding how British people feel about Dick Van Dyke's accent in Mary Poppins. The accents in this story are atrocious. To disguise their own British accents, the characters are all adopting extreme versions of the New York gangster accent that is usually associated with James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson. But those accents have become a joke in and of themselves and to hear them taken a level further shifts it from just being tired to outright annoying. Frank has a southern accent but it is also done in an exaggerated fashion that feels fake.
The one exception on the accent front is Solomon. He is more understated in his American accent and that plays better. But he has other drawbacks. He is painted as the natural peacemaker who abhors violence but a number of his characteristics come across as tropes that have been done many times before. Even his death falls into the cliché. A true subversion of it would have been if the Dalek had shot him mid-sentence, cutting things off. Instead, he is allowed to finish his speech and deliver the full weight of his nobility to Sec.
As silly as the human-Dalek Sec was in his appearance and his initial delivery of lines, he did start to grow on me as Evolution of the Daleks progressed. His halting speech wasn't great, but I wonder if some of that was because the actor couldn't breathe under the mask. But in a similar fashion in Dalek, the infusion of humanity and the realization of the horror of their purified existence made the modified Dalek become more sympathetic. It's still not a particularly good adaptation but it at least it creates a certain level of interest and drama in an otherwise boring character.
As this story is in the first half of Series 3, it lingers quite a bit on the Martha pining for the Doctor plotline. This does generate a couple of amusing lines from Tallulah, suggesting that the Doctor is gay, but other than that, it is just as tedious as the other times where Martha complains about the Doctor not returning her affection instead of appreciating his friendship or the adventure they are currently on. I also didn't care for the leap of logic that she had to make to find the Doctor at the Empire State Building once he was taken. That whole scene just played out like writer's convenience, to say nothing of the silliness of hearing Martha and Tallulah saying "Dalekanium" every couple of minutes.
I did enjoy the Doctor's performance. It was probably one of the few things I genuinely enjoyed in this story. There is a certain level of gravitas that the Doctor brings that feel genuine no matter how silly the situation or the level of acting around him. He conveys deep emotion as well as intensity, which can go a little off the rails at times. He did get a tad over the top when swearing to save Lazlo but it was only a quick scene and easily overlooked.
Unlike The Angels Take Manhattan, this story didn't really use New York. It was fairly obvious that the whole thing was just a series of sets and that the skyline and backdrop pictures of New York were taken by a second-unit crew, sans actors. This didn't bother me but it did feel like they missed a trick as a quick shot of some of the characters in a real New York location would have been a nice touch. Still, the setting and overall layout was actually done fairly well and was one of the stronger parts of this story.
I've railed on the acting quite a bit but I can't dismiss the writing either. Its not bad, but its also not particularly good either. There is no real spark in the dialogue and the lofty talk of Solomon is built more on clichés and sincerity of the actor. I found some of the timing and set up with the Dalek's plan needlessly overdone. There was no need for the run around story about getting the Dalekanium pieces put on the spire at the last minute. That was just a device to give the Daleks a weakness in their plans as well as kill some time.
I think it's the time thing that gets me. This did not feel deserving of a two-parter. Fat could easily have been cut and if you combine a few scenes and reduce the amount of doubling back, this could have been a tight 42-minute story that would have really zipped along. It would have reduced the exposure of some of the lesser actors and let the Doctor and the Daleks go hard mono-y-mono. But with bloat comes drag and exposure of the lesser elements and that certainly happened here.
I think it's safe to say that this is the worst of the two-parters from the Tenth Doctor era. There are some ideas here but they mostly cover ground that's been gone over before and then a large amount of bad acting and silliness get tossed on top of it. I hate to end on a down note but I think I was right in wanting to avoid this story as its just not one that is worth revisiting on any kind of regular basis. Even if it does have an early Andrew Garfield sighting.
Overall personal score: Daleks in Manhattan - 1; Evolution of the Daleks - 1
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Robot of Sherwood
This is getting silly.
Usually whenever there is a new Doctor, there is one story early in their first series that doesn't quite seem to jive with the stories around it, usually because it feels like it should have been written for the previous Doctor. Robot of Sherwood is generally regarded as that story. It also happens to be an out and out comedy, bordering on farce, which seemed to sit at odds with everyone's expectations of the new Doctor's personality. I think my opinion of this one on the first run was higher than that of most fans, but I do recall it having a very different feel than the others. It also is written by Mark Gatiss and that puts a lot of folks on edge right from the beginning.
Plot Summary
Giving Clara carte blanche on their next trip, Clara opts to visit Robin Hood. The Doctor reluctantly sets the TARDIS to this location, fully believing that Robin Hood is a myth. Upon landing, he goes to show off nothing being around when the TARDIS is hit with an arrow, shot by Robin Hood. Robin vows to steal the TARDIS but the Doctor fends him off by dueling him with a spoon over a stream span. The Doctor knocks him off but is pulled in by Robin afterward as Clara watches.
In the village, the Sheriff ransacks the houses, taking peasants to toil in the castle and also stealing gold while leaving other treasures behind. One villager tries to resist the Sheriff's abduction of his daughter and the Sheriff kills him for his insolence.
At Robin's hideout, Clara is introduced to his fellow outlaws while the Doctor tries to figure out what everyone is, refusing to believe that they are the real merry men. Robin reveals to Clara that Marion was taken from him when he was declared outlaw and he keeps trying to prove himself not a coward by fighting the Sheriff. Robin also reveals that he intends to enter an archery tournament to prove himself the greatest archer in the land. Clara meanwhile encourages the Doctor to try and keep an open mind about things. The Doctor is still not convinced and notes that the weather is unseasonably warm for Autumn.
At the tournament, the contest is narrowed to the Sheriff and Robin in disguise after several rounds. The Sheriff hits the bulls-eye but Robin splits his arrow, winning the tournament. Before he can claim the prize, a golden arrow, the Doctor splits Robin's arrow, superseding him. The Doctor tosses the golden arrow aside and goes to interrogate the Sheriff when Robin splits the Doctor's arrow. The two fire additional shots, trying to one-up the other. The Doctor finally gets irritated and causes the target to explode with his sonic screwdriver.
Stunned by this, the Sheriff orders their arrest. Robin reveals himself and Clara jumps in with a quarterstaff. Robin hacks the arm off one of the knights but it is shown to be mechanical. The faceplate parts and a robot face is revealed, which grabs the Doctor's immediate attention. The robots begin to attack the crowed with lasers but the Doctor orders immediate surrender. Robin orders his men off as the three are taken to the castle and the robots pulled back.
In the castle, the robots drive the enslaved peasants to haul gold into a smelter where it is melted and poured into circuit board patterns. One peasant collapses, exhausted. The young woman taken earlier begs for him to be allowed to rest but the robots vaporize him instead. She is then put back to work.
Elsewhere in the dungeon, Robin and the Doctor get into a pissing contest while chained to posts. Clara orders them to both shut up and a guard enters a moment later. The guard takes Clara to see the Sheriff. The Sheriff wines and dines her while asking whether she is from space. Clara defers the question, noting the Sheriff is the one with a robot army.
Robin pretends to be sick, attracting the attention of the guard. The Doctor convinces him that Robin has a secret message for which the guard can get a reward. As he leans in, Robin knocks the guard out. Both men fumble for the guard's keys and accidentally knock them into the sewer. However, with the door open, they are able to lift the block they are chained to and carry it out to a blacksmith's iron and break their chains.
The Sheriff, under Clara's urging, tells the story of how the robots crashed in their ship and he had a castle built around it. They helped him and he aided them by scouring the countryside with gold, for which they need to repair their ship. As an additional carrot, the robots promised the Sheriff that they would help him become king of England itself and then the world. When the Sheriff presses Clara for her story, she demurs and rejects his romantic advances.
The Doctor and Robin find the bridge of the robot spaceship where the Doctor discovers the robot's need for gold. He also determines that the damage to the engine is too great. It is leaking radiation into the atmosphere (hence the warm climate) and will explode if they take off. He also believes that the robots have created both the Sheriff and Robin as a means of blending in. The Doctor shows Robin the databank which includes archived retellings of the legend of Robin Hood. Robin is both stunned at this and incensed at the accusation that he is in league with the Sheriff.
The Sheriff interrupts their banter with Clara in tow. The robots move to kill Robin but he ducks the laser blast, which blows a hole in the side of the castle. Clara rushes to Robin's side to check on him. He grabs her and they leap out the hole into the moat. The Sheriff has the Doctor knocked out and clapped in irons while Robin and Clara swim to shore and head back into the forest.
In the morning, Robin wakes Clara and demands she tell him about the legend of Robin Hood and of the Doctor. Also in the morning, the Doctor wakes and works with the young woman taken from the village to free his chains and to create a plan of attack against the robots. When a robot comes over to put the Doctor to work, he reveals his free hands. The robot fires a laser at the Doctor, but the Doctor reflects it with a polished gold plate. The other prisoners produce polished plates and reflect the lasers back at the robots. The robots destroy themselves and the Doctor urges the prisoners to flee the castle.
Seeing this, the Sheriff comes down to kill the Doctor. The Doctor confronts the Sheriff about Robin being part of the scheme but the Sheriff convinces the Doctor that both he and Robin are real and existed prior to the arrival of the robots. Robin then enters to save the Doctor. He and the Sheriff cross swords as the Sheriff insists on taking Robin alone. Robin climbs to a beam above the gold smelting pot. The Sheriff follows and disarms Robin. However, when he moves to kill Robin, he dodges the blow and knocks the Sheriff into the molten gold with the trick the Doctor used on him.
The three flee the castle as the robots launch their spacecraft. Knowing they didn't have enough gold to get into orbit, the Doctor grabs the golden arrow and explaining that if they fire it into the ship, it might give enough of an energy burst to get the ship into orbit. The Doctor, Clara and Robin work together and fire the arrow into the engine duct, sending the ship into space. In orbit, the engine goes critical and explodes, destroying the ship.
Clara and the Doctor prepare to depart, the Doctor giving Robin some begrudging respect. Clara notes that the Doctor likes Robin and the Doctor tells her that he is leaving him a present. As the TARDIS departs, Marion is revealed to be behind the TARDIS. She and Robin reunite and Robin calls out thanks to the Doctor.
Analysis
I don't dislike Robot of Sherwood but the whole tone of it doesn't match well with the nature of the Twelfth Doctor in Series 8. I think this was written with the Eleventh Doctor in mind and that his light-hearted disbelief would have played much more comedic-ly. The brusque Twelfth Doctor instead just seems to get angry and scenes that should be funny become more uncomfortable than anything else. He also seems uncharacteristically thick given that he keep looks for an excuse to make Robin not real.
All that being said, I enjoy the performance of the Doctor in this story. He's angry and thick at points, but he is still witty and yet gets a comeuppance here and there. Robin knocking him into the stream is a direct rip off of the Little John story while the point where the Sheriff points out the flaw in the logic of having Robin be a robot is also rather amusing. He is pompous but in a way that you can't help but enjoy, though it gets to be a bit much after a while.
Clara is pretty good in this, being forced to play mom in-between two sniping children while also trying to be a fan girl. She functions rather well as an audience stand in given that when she gets frustrated is about the same time that the audience is getting fed up with the squabbling and also revels in meeting the real men behind the legends. But you also see the beginnings of some of the characteristics that drive me away from Clara. The scene with the Sheriff is a bit clichéd and I'm not sure she would be as bold about her answers than a normal person would be. Yet there is still a tinge of fear and trepidation in her voice so that brings it closer to a normal reaction.
I like the idea of Robin more than his execution. He's a bit more brash than I enjoy. I know he is putting on a front to keep up the bravado, but it comes across as trying a bit too hard. I wouldn't go so far as to call it over-the-top, but the portrayal is more like playing the legend that is Robin Hood, than playing the man Robin. Playing it up with the Doctor makes sense, but I think his moments with Clara and his own men should have been quieter. There is only the briefest of these moments when he demands answers from Clara. I would have liked more of those to temper his clear dick-waving contest with the Doctor.
The Sheriff himself wasn't bad as a villain, but he was distinctly one-note. I also got a bit disappointed when his plan devolved into the just the stereotypical taking over the world. Using the robots to become king of England, I can understand. But how an eleventh century mind would even fathom taking over the world seems a bit much. There was also a rather famous bit of cut footage which demonstrated how the Sheriff had been "repaired" by the robots. The Sheriff makes a passing mention of this but the scene was cut due to the episode's airing in proximity to a beheading incident by ISIS. In the scene, Robin would have cut the Sheriff's head off, revealing him to be a cyborg who puts his severed head back on. This would have added a touch of depth to his character but probably not enough to properly flesh him out.
As for the overall plot, it's very silly and one's enjoyment of it is going to entirely depend on whether you're in the mood for a farcical comedy. I think it's greatest hindrance is that it was written with the Eleventh Doctor in mind and while adapted for the Twelfth Doctor, it looses that silliness that would have been easy with the Eleventh. The jokes ultimately revolve solely around the Doctor not believing that what he is seeing is real. If the Doctor is questioning constantly in a light-hearted fashion while also trying to one-up Robin in a playful fashion, that works. But someone getting angry in his confusion over things and belittling when he is trying to make himself better doesn't come across as funny. The most genuine moment for the Doctor is when he stops the archery contest by proclaiming that it is getting silly. That felt like the Twelfth Doctor's natural reaction, not the contest itself.
Then you have the very contrived ending. In the prior forty minutes, the robots are shown collecting gold, smelting it and pouring it into circuit breaker molds to repair their engines. However, they don't have enough and they try to take off with insufficient power. So how does dropping a random piece of gold into the exhaust give them the power boost to get into orbit? In terms of hand-wavium, I think this rates up with killing Cybermen by slingshoting gold coins into their chest. It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It gives the overall story a feel as though the writer just ran out of time and opted for the "wizard made everything better" ending.
To can't call this a good story, even if there were parts of it I did enjoy. But the overall tone became grating after a while, the villain was flat, it wasn't as funny as I wanted and the ending was just dumb. It's not as bad as In the Forest of the Night, but I wouldn't have a problem putting this story as the second worst of the series. Again, maybe not as bad as some fans proclaim it, but definitely not a story I'd run back to for repeat viewings.
Overall personal score: 1.5 out of 5
Usually whenever there is a new Doctor, there is one story early in their first series that doesn't quite seem to jive with the stories around it, usually because it feels like it should have been written for the previous Doctor. Robot of Sherwood is generally regarded as that story. It also happens to be an out and out comedy, bordering on farce, which seemed to sit at odds with everyone's expectations of the new Doctor's personality. I think my opinion of this one on the first run was higher than that of most fans, but I do recall it having a very different feel than the others. It also is written by Mark Gatiss and that puts a lot of folks on edge right from the beginning.
Plot Summary
Giving Clara carte blanche on their next trip, Clara opts to visit Robin Hood. The Doctor reluctantly sets the TARDIS to this location, fully believing that Robin Hood is a myth. Upon landing, he goes to show off nothing being around when the TARDIS is hit with an arrow, shot by Robin Hood. Robin vows to steal the TARDIS but the Doctor fends him off by dueling him with a spoon over a stream span. The Doctor knocks him off but is pulled in by Robin afterward as Clara watches.
In the village, the Sheriff ransacks the houses, taking peasants to toil in the castle and also stealing gold while leaving other treasures behind. One villager tries to resist the Sheriff's abduction of his daughter and the Sheriff kills him for his insolence.
At Robin's hideout, Clara is introduced to his fellow outlaws while the Doctor tries to figure out what everyone is, refusing to believe that they are the real merry men. Robin reveals to Clara that Marion was taken from him when he was declared outlaw and he keeps trying to prove himself not a coward by fighting the Sheriff. Robin also reveals that he intends to enter an archery tournament to prove himself the greatest archer in the land. Clara meanwhile encourages the Doctor to try and keep an open mind about things. The Doctor is still not convinced and notes that the weather is unseasonably warm for Autumn.
At the tournament, the contest is narrowed to the Sheriff and Robin in disguise after several rounds. The Sheriff hits the bulls-eye but Robin splits his arrow, winning the tournament. Before he can claim the prize, a golden arrow, the Doctor splits Robin's arrow, superseding him. The Doctor tosses the golden arrow aside and goes to interrogate the Sheriff when Robin splits the Doctor's arrow. The two fire additional shots, trying to one-up the other. The Doctor finally gets irritated and causes the target to explode with his sonic screwdriver.
Stunned by this, the Sheriff orders their arrest. Robin reveals himself and Clara jumps in with a quarterstaff. Robin hacks the arm off one of the knights but it is shown to be mechanical. The faceplate parts and a robot face is revealed, which grabs the Doctor's immediate attention. The robots begin to attack the crowed with lasers but the Doctor orders immediate surrender. Robin orders his men off as the three are taken to the castle and the robots pulled back.
In the castle, the robots drive the enslaved peasants to haul gold into a smelter where it is melted and poured into circuit board patterns. One peasant collapses, exhausted. The young woman taken earlier begs for him to be allowed to rest but the robots vaporize him instead. She is then put back to work.
Elsewhere in the dungeon, Robin and the Doctor get into a pissing contest while chained to posts. Clara orders them to both shut up and a guard enters a moment later. The guard takes Clara to see the Sheriff. The Sheriff wines and dines her while asking whether she is from space. Clara defers the question, noting the Sheriff is the one with a robot army.
Robin pretends to be sick, attracting the attention of the guard. The Doctor convinces him that Robin has a secret message for which the guard can get a reward. As he leans in, Robin knocks the guard out. Both men fumble for the guard's keys and accidentally knock them into the sewer. However, with the door open, they are able to lift the block they are chained to and carry it out to a blacksmith's iron and break their chains.
The Sheriff, under Clara's urging, tells the story of how the robots crashed in their ship and he had a castle built around it. They helped him and he aided them by scouring the countryside with gold, for which they need to repair their ship. As an additional carrot, the robots promised the Sheriff that they would help him become king of England itself and then the world. When the Sheriff presses Clara for her story, she demurs and rejects his romantic advances.
The Doctor and Robin find the bridge of the robot spaceship where the Doctor discovers the robot's need for gold. He also determines that the damage to the engine is too great. It is leaking radiation into the atmosphere (hence the warm climate) and will explode if they take off. He also believes that the robots have created both the Sheriff and Robin as a means of blending in. The Doctor shows Robin the databank which includes archived retellings of the legend of Robin Hood. Robin is both stunned at this and incensed at the accusation that he is in league with the Sheriff.
The Sheriff interrupts their banter with Clara in tow. The robots move to kill Robin but he ducks the laser blast, which blows a hole in the side of the castle. Clara rushes to Robin's side to check on him. He grabs her and they leap out the hole into the moat. The Sheriff has the Doctor knocked out and clapped in irons while Robin and Clara swim to shore and head back into the forest.
In the morning, Robin wakes Clara and demands she tell him about the legend of Robin Hood and of the Doctor. Also in the morning, the Doctor wakes and works with the young woman taken from the village to free his chains and to create a plan of attack against the robots. When a robot comes over to put the Doctor to work, he reveals his free hands. The robot fires a laser at the Doctor, but the Doctor reflects it with a polished gold plate. The other prisoners produce polished plates and reflect the lasers back at the robots. The robots destroy themselves and the Doctor urges the prisoners to flee the castle.
Seeing this, the Sheriff comes down to kill the Doctor. The Doctor confronts the Sheriff about Robin being part of the scheme but the Sheriff convinces the Doctor that both he and Robin are real and existed prior to the arrival of the robots. Robin then enters to save the Doctor. He and the Sheriff cross swords as the Sheriff insists on taking Robin alone. Robin climbs to a beam above the gold smelting pot. The Sheriff follows and disarms Robin. However, when he moves to kill Robin, he dodges the blow and knocks the Sheriff into the molten gold with the trick the Doctor used on him.
The three flee the castle as the robots launch their spacecraft. Knowing they didn't have enough gold to get into orbit, the Doctor grabs the golden arrow and explaining that if they fire it into the ship, it might give enough of an energy burst to get the ship into orbit. The Doctor, Clara and Robin work together and fire the arrow into the engine duct, sending the ship into space. In orbit, the engine goes critical and explodes, destroying the ship.
Clara and the Doctor prepare to depart, the Doctor giving Robin some begrudging respect. Clara notes that the Doctor likes Robin and the Doctor tells her that he is leaving him a present. As the TARDIS departs, Marion is revealed to be behind the TARDIS. She and Robin reunite and Robin calls out thanks to the Doctor.
Analysis
I don't dislike Robot of Sherwood but the whole tone of it doesn't match well with the nature of the Twelfth Doctor in Series 8. I think this was written with the Eleventh Doctor in mind and that his light-hearted disbelief would have played much more comedic-ly. The brusque Twelfth Doctor instead just seems to get angry and scenes that should be funny become more uncomfortable than anything else. He also seems uncharacteristically thick given that he keep looks for an excuse to make Robin not real.
All that being said, I enjoy the performance of the Doctor in this story. He's angry and thick at points, but he is still witty and yet gets a comeuppance here and there. Robin knocking him into the stream is a direct rip off of the Little John story while the point where the Sheriff points out the flaw in the logic of having Robin be a robot is also rather amusing. He is pompous but in a way that you can't help but enjoy, though it gets to be a bit much after a while.
Clara is pretty good in this, being forced to play mom in-between two sniping children while also trying to be a fan girl. She functions rather well as an audience stand in given that when she gets frustrated is about the same time that the audience is getting fed up with the squabbling and also revels in meeting the real men behind the legends. But you also see the beginnings of some of the characteristics that drive me away from Clara. The scene with the Sheriff is a bit clichéd and I'm not sure she would be as bold about her answers than a normal person would be. Yet there is still a tinge of fear and trepidation in her voice so that brings it closer to a normal reaction.
I like the idea of Robin more than his execution. He's a bit more brash than I enjoy. I know he is putting on a front to keep up the bravado, but it comes across as trying a bit too hard. I wouldn't go so far as to call it over-the-top, but the portrayal is more like playing the legend that is Robin Hood, than playing the man Robin. Playing it up with the Doctor makes sense, but I think his moments with Clara and his own men should have been quieter. There is only the briefest of these moments when he demands answers from Clara. I would have liked more of those to temper his clear dick-waving contest with the Doctor.
The Sheriff himself wasn't bad as a villain, but he was distinctly one-note. I also got a bit disappointed when his plan devolved into the just the stereotypical taking over the world. Using the robots to become king of England, I can understand. But how an eleventh century mind would even fathom taking over the world seems a bit much. There was also a rather famous bit of cut footage which demonstrated how the Sheriff had been "repaired" by the robots. The Sheriff makes a passing mention of this but the scene was cut due to the episode's airing in proximity to a beheading incident by ISIS. In the scene, Robin would have cut the Sheriff's head off, revealing him to be a cyborg who puts his severed head back on. This would have added a touch of depth to his character but probably not enough to properly flesh him out.
As for the overall plot, it's very silly and one's enjoyment of it is going to entirely depend on whether you're in the mood for a farcical comedy. I think it's greatest hindrance is that it was written with the Eleventh Doctor in mind and while adapted for the Twelfth Doctor, it looses that silliness that would have been easy with the Eleventh. The jokes ultimately revolve solely around the Doctor not believing that what he is seeing is real. If the Doctor is questioning constantly in a light-hearted fashion while also trying to one-up Robin in a playful fashion, that works. But someone getting angry in his confusion over things and belittling when he is trying to make himself better doesn't come across as funny. The most genuine moment for the Doctor is when he stops the archery contest by proclaiming that it is getting silly. That felt like the Twelfth Doctor's natural reaction, not the contest itself.
Then you have the very contrived ending. In the prior forty minutes, the robots are shown collecting gold, smelting it and pouring it into circuit breaker molds to repair their engines. However, they don't have enough and they try to take off with insufficient power. So how does dropping a random piece of gold into the exhaust give them the power boost to get into orbit? In terms of hand-wavium, I think this rates up with killing Cybermen by slingshoting gold coins into their chest. It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It gives the overall story a feel as though the writer just ran out of time and opted for the "wizard made everything better" ending.
To can't call this a good story, even if there were parts of it I did enjoy. But the overall tone became grating after a while, the villain was flat, it wasn't as funny as I wanted and the ending was just dumb. It's not as bad as In the Forest of the Night, but I wouldn't have a problem putting this story as the second worst of the series. Again, maybe not as bad as some fans proclaim it, but definitely not a story I'd run back to for repeat viewings.
Overall personal score: 1.5 out of 5
Friday, February 9, 2018
Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
So that's who.
This is another story that seemed to suffer from the hype machine. Fans of the classic series always looked for any tidbit of the rest of the TARDIS to explore and a story that seemed set on getting into the real guts of the ship seemed quite promising. In addition, the title was a clear reference to classic Jules Verne stories which promised action and adventure. The resulting story ended up in more of a mixed camp.
Plot Summary
Attempting to get Clara more comfortable with the TARDIS, the Doctor turns off the shields and sets it in basic mode to allow her to try and fly it. Unfortunately, this makes the TARDIS visible to a passing salvage ship who activate their tractor beam and haul it in. The power of the beam damages the internal mechanisms of the TARDIS. The Doctor rushes to fix it as Clara is distracted by a device rolling across the floor, which burns her hand as she picks it up. The Doctor is unable to stop things and an explosion occurs in the console room, blowing Clara backwards through the corridor.
The salvage ship is manned by two brothers, Gregor and Bram and a flesh covered android named Tricky. They attempt to cut into the TARDIS but have no luck. Gregor suggests blowing it open but Tricky notices the Doctor lying unconscious under the TARDIS. Gregor starts to panic and decides to flush it back out into space when the Doctor walks in on their conversation. He promises them a great salvage if they help him find Clara in the TARDIS. They reluctantly agree.
Clara wakes in the corridor, finding her way back to the console room blocked by a fire sealed off by a blast door. She runs away from the fire and ends in one of the storage bays where the Doctor keeps mementos from his prior versions. She is then alerted to a couple of grey creatures that emerge from the shadows. She runs off, passing several other rooms and locks herself in the TARDIS library.
The Doctor and crew enter the control room where the Doctor vents the poison from the atmosphere. He then seals the ship and sets the self-destruct to force the crew to help him find Clara in thirty minutes. They decide to split up to cover more ground, the Doctor going with Tricky while Gregor goes with Bram. However, once split up, Gregor sends Bram back to the console room and orders him to disassemble it in order to find things for sale.
Gregor is lured by a hand held evaluator into a central room of the TARDIS where he finds a tree-like object that can create any machine. He moves to take one of the orbs but the Doctor and Tricky arrive and warn him not to, telling him that the TARDIS will fight back. Gregor takes the orb anyway and a subtle change comes over the ship with a door initially disappearing to trap them in and then reappearing to let them out.
In the library, Clara examines a book on the Time War when she hears a noise. She spies one of the creatures but gets past it when it lunges past her, hearing another noise. She runs through the corridors and finds what she thinks is the control room. However, it does not have a door to the outside. She goes back into the corridors and finds the control room once again, only in a different spot.
The Doctor, Gregor and Tricky wander through the corridors, walking in circles as the TARDIS refuses to let them leave. Gregor refuses to give up the circuit orb, even when Tricky tells him too. Fearing the TARDIS defenses, Gregor signals Bram to be careful. Bram doesn't hear them as he is climbing into the console at that moment. He contacts the control circuits, is shocked and falls to the floor. Partially stunned, he sits up and is attacked by one of the creatures that was hunting Clara.
A second creature, one that appears to be a conjoined body, attacks the Doctor and the other two. They race away and find a copy of the control room. The Doctor realizes that the TARDIS is making a safe space, trying to protect him from the creatures. He also hears Clara walking around and realizes she's in another control room copy. In her control room, Clara prepares to leave and finds one of the creatures outside. It chases her back into the room and corners her against the wall. The Doctor, hearing her screams, grabs Gregor's value scanner and links it to his sonic. He creates a bridge between the two phases of reality and pulls her through to his version of the control room, away from the creature.
With Clara saved, Gregor insists that the Doctor turn off the self destruct. The Doctor laughs and tells them it was a trick and that he had only turned on a countdown timer. He goes to turn it off but discovers that the engines are, in fact, damaged and could blow the ship up. He then opens an access panel in the wall and the four head down to get to the engines and repair them.
In the hallway, the group gets separated and Clara finds herself confronted by herself speaking things from before. She also sees the Doctor thinking. The regular Doctor then grabs her, telling her that the engines are leeching time so that instances of their past and future selves will randomly appear in the TARDIS.
As they hurry to catch up to the others, they hear an explosive decompression as the holders for control rods fail. This sends rods into the corridor. The two race to avoid them and discover Gregor and Tricky, where Tricky is pinned against a way by one of the rods. He insists that Gregor cut off his arm to free him and that he'll get a new one at their next docking. Gregor can't bring himself to do it and reveals that Tricky is not actually an android, but in fact his younger brother whom he tricked into believing he was an android so that he could become captain after their father died.
Gregor frees Tricky and the Doctor leads them to the engine corridor room. He rushes through and unlocks the door on the far side before running back to pull everyone through. As they enter the room, the creatures emerge at both doors, trapping them in the middle while radiation from the Eye of Harmony falls on them. Gregor scans the creature at the near side and it identifies as Clara. The Doctor reveals that the creatures are them if the time stream continues unchecked. He also lets slip that Clara has died before.
Gregor runs to the other side and one of the creatures grabs the circuit in his backpack. Gregor rips it off and the creature falls off the bridge and into the star. A two headed creature follows it and the Doctor realizes that if he keeps Trick and Gregor from touching each other, he can disrupt the flow of time. He urges them apart and Tricky rushes the creature, knocking it off the bridge. He tips over and Gregor rushes to help him up. The Doctor and Clara rush past but as Gregor pulls Tricky up, they burn and become a new version of the two-headed creature.
The Doctor seals the door and he and Clara rush into the engine room. It appears as a cliff face with fog covering the drop. Unsure, the Doctor interrogates Clara, demanding to know what she is. He reveals that he has met her and that she has already died twice but she is completely in the dark about what he is talking about. Convinced she is telling the truth, the Doctor guesses that the TARDIS is protecting the engine room with an illusion and urges Clara to jump with him into the abyss.
They jump and land in a white room with bits of junk suspended in space. The Doctor realizes that the engine of the TARDIS has already failed and that it has frozen time to contain the damage. But as time is leaking out, the damage can't be contained forever. Clara grabs the Doctor's hand to comfort him and as she does so, he feels the burns on her hand. The burns are words and he realizes it's a message to himself.
The Doctor grabs the magnetic beacon, which will nullify the tractor beam, and runs to a crack in the control room, leading back to the moment when the TARDIS was first grabbed by the tractor beam. He etches the same message on Clara's hand into the beacon and steps into the crack with it. The beacon rolls to Clara's feet as before and she drops it once again. The Doctor, alerted by his earlier self, grabs it and activates it.
Activating the beacon resets time, but with some effects. The salvage ship flies by but with Tricky not being tricked into thinking he's an android and respected by Gregor. The TARDIS is in good shape and Clara emerges from having taken a shower, not remembering any of the events that had happened. The Doctor does remember and shoos her off to get some rest while he preps for their next adventure.
Analysis
In concept, this is not a bad episode. Parts of the execution are also not bad. Where it fails is in two major points: the poor acting/underdevelopment of the salvage brothers and the overly complicated behavior of time with a Deus Ex Machina ending. I think the story can be enjoyed but it will fall short on certain levels and that will have an unsatisfactory feeling for a lot of people.
One of the best parts of this story is when it's in horror movie mode. The burned future selves that pursue the characters are constantly kept in shadow and partially off-screen. The shots are tight on the faces of the pursued, especially Clara which produces moments of genuine fear. If you throw in the fact that Clara's two earlier deaths had not yet been explained, there was some proper fear for her as it was not out of the question that she could die again.
I quite liked Clara in this story. I actually liked her better than the Doctor, although he was good too. It felt like she was genuinely afraid and panicked, both by the creatures but also by the Doctor's reaction to her. I do wish the director had not indulged in the trope of her outrunning the fire after opening the door near the beginning of the story. It just looked dumb and I think it would have worked better if she had slammed the door shut after seeing the fire, then slumped on the wall and said "Bad idea" rather than quipping the same while standing their and having the fire rush towards her. But that's a directorial quibble, not an acting quibble.
The Doctor was good, although a little angrier and darker than you're used to seeing the Eleventh Doctor. Still, he's funny and enjoyable to be around. His dark moments almost seem scary because you're not used to them. I do wish the sound had been cleaned up a bit because at the rate of speed the Doctor talks, it's hard to make out what he is fully saying while running and shouting. In a story as complicated as this, that is a serious drawback at times.
The guest actors were terrible. They mumbled and gave flat performances. The closest you got to real emotion was when Tricky is injured and then realizes he's not an android. Then you start to see emotion and evidence of a real actor under there. His portrayal as an android is just bad. Gregor and Bram are also terrible in their delivery and at no point did I ever care about them because I could never see the character, only the bad actor. That they got very little character development on top of that didn't help either. When Clara was terrorized by the burnt future selves, you cared because you liked her. These three, not so much.
Unlike some fans, I enjoyed going through the TARDIS and was not disappointed that most of it was corridors. There were glimpses into rooms of the past and new rooms that we got to indulge in. Going through corridors of the TARDIS is just par for the course both since corridors have made up the bulk of Doctor Who and even the other major "depth of the TARDIS" story, Castrovalva, was not much more than corridors. The Invasion of Time had a few more rooms but given that they were filming in a hospital and couldn't shoot normal corridors, that makes a bit more sense.
The storyline was a neat idea, but I'm not sure it was executed properly. It feels like the first half of the story is wasted in the hunt for Clara and the horror movie attack of the burnt future selves. Only in the last fifteen minutes do we go for the proper journey to the center of the TARDIS. What's more, you are dealing with a time loop and possible future outcomes attacking the present. I think a couple more minutes of explanation would have been useful there. I also am not overly fond of endings where one timeline intrudes on another to avoid the mistakes made and thus wipes out the prior timeline. It can be done but if rushed, it feels cheap.
I think what I would have really liked is that when the brothers enter the TARDIS, the Doctor locks them down and then notices the engine failure. He tells them that the engines are exploding and that forces them to look for Clara as well as get to the center of the TARDIS. The Doctor could have explained things a bit more as they moved on, consolidating a few scenes which would have given a bit more time for explanations and perhaps even made the ending feel a bit less rushed.
Overall, I'd say there is a fair blend of good and bad. Neither is enough to dominate. I wouldn't say this episode is particularly good, nor would I say that it's particularly bad. You're left with an ok feeling, an adventure that you didn't quite get but was mostly enjoyable with a few rocky moments. I'd say that's a pretty middle-of-the-road course, which isn't bad in the overall scheme of things.
Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5
This is another story that seemed to suffer from the hype machine. Fans of the classic series always looked for any tidbit of the rest of the TARDIS to explore and a story that seemed set on getting into the real guts of the ship seemed quite promising. In addition, the title was a clear reference to classic Jules Verne stories which promised action and adventure. The resulting story ended up in more of a mixed camp.
Plot Summary
Attempting to get Clara more comfortable with the TARDIS, the Doctor turns off the shields and sets it in basic mode to allow her to try and fly it. Unfortunately, this makes the TARDIS visible to a passing salvage ship who activate their tractor beam and haul it in. The power of the beam damages the internal mechanisms of the TARDIS. The Doctor rushes to fix it as Clara is distracted by a device rolling across the floor, which burns her hand as she picks it up. The Doctor is unable to stop things and an explosion occurs in the console room, blowing Clara backwards through the corridor.
The salvage ship is manned by two brothers, Gregor and Bram and a flesh covered android named Tricky. They attempt to cut into the TARDIS but have no luck. Gregor suggests blowing it open but Tricky notices the Doctor lying unconscious under the TARDIS. Gregor starts to panic and decides to flush it back out into space when the Doctor walks in on their conversation. He promises them a great salvage if they help him find Clara in the TARDIS. They reluctantly agree.
Clara wakes in the corridor, finding her way back to the console room blocked by a fire sealed off by a blast door. She runs away from the fire and ends in one of the storage bays where the Doctor keeps mementos from his prior versions. She is then alerted to a couple of grey creatures that emerge from the shadows. She runs off, passing several other rooms and locks herself in the TARDIS library.
The Doctor and crew enter the control room where the Doctor vents the poison from the atmosphere. He then seals the ship and sets the self-destruct to force the crew to help him find Clara in thirty minutes. They decide to split up to cover more ground, the Doctor going with Tricky while Gregor goes with Bram. However, once split up, Gregor sends Bram back to the console room and orders him to disassemble it in order to find things for sale.
Gregor is lured by a hand held evaluator into a central room of the TARDIS where he finds a tree-like object that can create any machine. He moves to take one of the orbs but the Doctor and Tricky arrive and warn him not to, telling him that the TARDIS will fight back. Gregor takes the orb anyway and a subtle change comes over the ship with a door initially disappearing to trap them in and then reappearing to let them out.
In the library, Clara examines a book on the Time War when she hears a noise. She spies one of the creatures but gets past it when it lunges past her, hearing another noise. She runs through the corridors and finds what she thinks is the control room. However, it does not have a door to the outside. She goes back into the corridors and finds the control room once again, only in a different spot.
The Doctor, Gregor and Tricky wander through the corridors, walking in circles as the TARDIS refuses to let them leave. Gregor refuses to give up the circuit orb, even when Tricky tells him too. Fearing the TARDIS defenses, Gregor signals Bram to be careful. Bram doesn't hear them as he is climbing into the console at that moment. He contacts the control circuits, is shocked and falls to the floor. Partially stunned, he sits up and is attacked by one of the creatures that was hunting Clara.
A second creature, one that appears to be a conjoined body, attacks the Doctor and the other two. They race away and find a copy of the control room. The Doctor realizes that the TARDIS is making a safe space, trying to protect him from the creatures. He also hears Clara walking around and realizes she's in another control room copy. In her control room, Clara prepares to leave and finds one of the creatures outside. It chases her back into the room and corners her against the wall. The Doctor, hearing her screams, grabs Gregor's value scanner and links it to his sonic. He creates a bridge between the two phases of reality and pulls her through to his version of the control room, away from the creature.
With Clara saved, Gregor insists that the Doctor turn off the self destruct. The Doctor laughs and tells them it was a trick and that he had only turned on a countdown timer. He goes to turn it off but discovers that the engines are, in fact, damaged and could blow the ship up. He then opens an access panel in the wall and the four head down to get to the engines and repair them.
In the hallway, the group gets separated and Clara finds herself confronted by herself speaking things from before. She also sees the Doctor thinking. The regular Doctor then grabs her, telling her that the engines are leeching time so that instances of their past and future selves will randomly appear in the TARDIS.
As they hurry to catch up to the others, they hear an explosive decompression as the holders for control rods fail. This sends rods into the corridor. The two race to avoid them and discover Gregor and Tricky, where Tricky is pinned against a way by one of the rods. He insists that Gregor cut off his arm to free him and that he'll get a new one at their next docking. Gregor can't bring himself to do it and reveals that Tricky is not actually an android, but in fact his younger brother whom he tricked into believing he was an android so that he could become captain after their father died.
Gregor frees Tricky and the Doctor leads them to the engine corridor room. He rushes through and unlocks the door on the far side before running back to pull everyone through. As they enter the room, the creatures emerge at both doors, trapping them in the middle while radiation from the Eye of Harmony falls on them. Gregor scans the creature at the near side and it identifies as Clara. The Doctor reveals that the creatures are them if the time stream continues unchecked. He also lets slip that Clara has died before.
Gregor runs to the other side and one of the creatures grabs the circuit in his backpack. Gregor rips it off and the creature falls off the bridge and into the star. A two headed creature follows it and the Doctor realizes that if he keeps Trick and Gregor from touching each other, he can disrupt the flow of time. He urges them apart and Tricky rushes the creature, knocking it off the bridge. He tips over and Gregor rushes to help him up. The Doctor and Clara rush past but as Gregor pulls Tricky up, they burn and become a new version of the two-headed creature.
The Doctor seals the door and he and Clara rush into the engine room. It appears as a cliff face with fog covering the drop. Unsure, the Doctor interrogates Clara, demanding to know what she is. He reveals that he has met her and that she has already died twice but she is completely in the dark about what he is talking about. Convinced she is telling the truth, the Doctor guesses that the TARDIS is protecting the engine room with an illusion and urges Clara to jump with him into the abyss.
They jump and land in a white room with bits of junk suspended in space. The Doctor realizes that the engine of the TARDIS has already failed and that it has frozen time to contain the damage. But as time is leaking out, the damage can't be contained forever. Clara grabs the Doctor's hand to comfort him and as she does so, he feels the burns on her hand. The burns are words and he realizes it's a message to himself.
The Doctor grabs the magnetic beacon, which will nullify the tractor beam, and runs to a crack in the control room, leading back to the moment when the TARDIS was first grabbed by the tractor beam. He etches the same message on Clara's hand into the beacon and steps into the crack with it. The beacon rolls to Clara's feet as before and she drops it once again. The Doctor, alerted by his earlier self, grabs it and activates it.
Activating the beacon resets time, but with some effects. The salvage ship flies by but with Tricky not being tricked into thinking he's an android and respected by Gregor. The TARDIS is in good shape and Clara emerges from having taken a shower, not remembering any of the events that had happened. The Doctor does remember and shoos her off to get some rest while he preps for their next adventure.
Analysis
In concept, this is not a bad episode. Parts of the execution are also not bad. Where it fails is in two major points: the poor acting/underdevelopment of the salvage brothers and the overly complicated behavior of time with a Deus Ex Machina ending. I think the story can be enjoyed but it will fall short on certain levels and that will have an unsatisfactory feeling for a lot of people.
One of the best parts of this story is when it's in horror movie mode. The burned future selves that pursue the characters are constantly kept in shadow and partially off-screen. The shots are tight on the faces of the pursued, especially Clara which produces moments of genuine fear. If you throw in the fact that Clara's two earlier deaths had not yet been explained, there was some proper fear for her as it was not out of the question that she could die again.
I quite liked Clara in this story. I actually liked her better than the Doctor, although he was good too. It felt like she was genuinely afraid and panicked, both by the creatures but also by the Doctor's reaction to her. I do wish the director had not indulged in the trope of her outrunning the fire after opening the door near the beginning of the story. It just looked dumb and I think it would have worked better if she had slammed the door shut after seeing the fire, then slumped on the wall and said "Bad idea" rather than quipping the same while standing their and having the fire rush towards her. But that's a directorial quibble, not an acting quibble.
The Doctor was good, although a little angrier and darker than you're used to seeing the Eleventh Doctor. Still, he's funny and enjoyable to be around. His dark moments almost seem scary because you're not used to them. I do wish the sound had been cleaned up a bit because at the rate of speed the Doctor talks, it's hard to make out what he is fully saying while running and shouting. In a story as complicated as this, that is a serious drawback at times.
The guest actors were terrible. They mumbled and gave flat performances. The closest you got to real emotion was when Tricky is injured and then realizes he's not an android. Then you start to see emotion and evidence of a real actor under there. His portrayal as an android is just bad. Gregor and Bram are also terrible in their delivery and at no point did I ever care about them because I could never see the character, only the bad actor. That they got very little character development on top of that didn't help either. When Clara was terrorized by the burnt future selves, you cared because you liked her. These three, not so much.
Unlike some fans, I enjoyed going through the TARDIS and was not disappointed that most of it was corridors. There were glimpses into rooms of the past and new rooms that we got to indulge in. Going through corridors of the TARDIS is just par for the course both since corridors have made up the bulk of Doctor Who and even the other major "depth of the TARDIS" story, Castrovalva, was not much more than corridors. The Invasion of Time had a few more rooms but given that they were filming in a hospital and couldn't shoot normal corridors, that makes a bit more sense.
The storyline was a neat idea, but I'm not sure it was executed properly. It feels like the first half of the story is wasted in the hunt for Clara and the horror movie attack of the burnt future selves. Only in the last fifteen minutes do we go for the proper journey to the center of the TARDIS. What's more, you are dealing with a time loop and possible future outcomes attacking the present. I think a couple more minutes of explanation would have been useful there. I also am not overly fond of endings where one timeline intrudes on another to avoid the mistakes made and thus wipes out the prior timeline. It can be done but if rushed, it feels cheap.
I think what I would have really liked is that when the brothers enter the TARDIS, the Doctor locks them down and then notices the engine failure. He tells them that the engines are exploding and that forces them to look for Clara as well as get to the center of the TARDIS. The Doctor could have explained things a bit more as they moved on, consolidating a few scenes which would have given a bit more time for explanations and perhaps even made the ending feel a bit less rushed.
Overall, I'd say there is a fair blend of good and bad. Neither is enough to dominate. I wouldn't say this episode is particularly good, nor would I say that it's particularly bad. You're left with an ok feeling, an adventure that you didn't quite get but was mostly enjoyable with a few rocky moments. I'd say that's a pretty middle-of-the-road course, which isn't bad in the overall scheme of things.
Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
The Doctor's Daughter
Donna, I've been a father before.
The Doctor's Daughter closes the three part Martha interlude in Series Four. It is also one of the least regarded stories of the series. I don't remember it being terrible but with as provocative a title as that, it led a lot of fans to think one thing and what they ended up with was so far away that they grew resentful of the difference. That we're well removed, is it still worth all the disdain?
Plot Summary
The TARDIS is pulled through the time tunnel with the Doctor, Donna and Martha all clinging for any kind of support. They arrive in a tunnel scattered with debris and are immediately set upon by three human soldiers. The soldiers grab the Doctor and force his arm into a machine which extracts a tissue sample and uses it to create a new female soldier, genetically descended from the Doctor.
While trying to process this, the squad is attacked by a group of humanoid fish called the Hath. The two sides fire at each other while one sneaks around and grabs Martha. With two soldiers down, the squad leader detonates explosives in the tunnel, collapsing it and trapping Martha on the other side. He then takes the Doctor and Donna to see General Cobb.
On the other side of the tunnel, most of the squad was killed in the explosion. Martha tends to one with a dislocated shoulder. She pops it back into place as a second squad comes up. The Hath whom Martha tended to stops the others from killing her and together they take her back to their own headquarters. Because of her compassion in healing them, she is welcomed by the group.
At the human headquarters, General Cobb relates how the humans and Hath had come to the planet together, hoping to forge a new society. Things broke down and they have been fighting a war for generations, the origin of the war long since forgotten. The Doctor is shown a map of the complex and he is able to extract additional information, hoping to find Martha. Cobb however sees that the map is showing the lost temple where the Source is located. Believing that it will be the ultimate weapon to destroy the Hath, he decides to mount an expedition in the morning to recover it. He then orders the Doctor and Donna locked up because of their protests to the fighting. Not wanting to take chances, he also locks up the soldier extracted from the Doctor, now named Jenny, fearing her fighting spirit having been taken from pacifist stock.
Unbeknownst to any of them, at the same time, the Hath had been showing Martha the map, trying to explain where they were. They also saw the additions the Doctor extracted and form up to also head for the Source. Martha is left behind with the Hath she healed, who points out where they are going. He also rotates the map to 3-D and Martha realizes that it would be faster if they went outside. The Hath brings up the atmospheric conditions but Martha figures that she can survive the exposure for the journey and makes her way to the outer hatch.
In the prison, Donna talks the Doctor into accepting Jenny as his daughter, demonstrating that she has two hearts just as he does. The Doctor does accept her but relays his own genocidal past in trying to explain how killing the other side is simply wrong.
Jenny teases the guard and grabs his gun, allowing them to get out of the cell. They sneak into the outer tunnels and follow the Doctor's map, trying to reach the Source first. As they progress, Donna notes that each room they were in holds a serial number that is steadily going backwards.
They enter a new room just as Cobb discovers their escape and launches a raid after them. They are blocked by a series of lasers set up in a hallway. Jenny doubles back to cover them but the Doctor insists that fighting isn't the answer. Cobb calls out for Jenny to join them but she instead shoots a pipe creating a steam barrier. The Doctor temporarily shuts off the laser barrier allowing him and Donna to get through. Jenny, caught up in the euphoria of refusing to kill, hesitates allowing the lasers to cut off the path again. She however performs a series of acrobatics which allow her to get through the hallway, separating them from the Cobb's pursuit.
Martha and her Hath companion reach a hatch to the surface and open it. The Hath hesitates but follows Martha out the hatch to the surface. They make their way towards the spire of the central building. As they approach, Martha looses her footing and falls into a pit where a tar-like liquid has pooled. She is trapped and begins to sink. The Hath follows her down and tries to pull her out but can't reach her. He then jumps into the pool and pushes her out. This however causes him to sink and drown in the pool. Martha cries out for him but then crawls back to the top of the pit and continues towards the spire.
The Doctor, Donna and Jenny reach end of hallway just as they hear General Cobb break through the laser barrier. The Doctor finds a door and they enter the Temple, which is actually the control center of the ship that brought the settlers here. They find a log which details how the captain died and a power struggled formed between the human and Hath colonists. Donna also finds a clock and determines that the numbers etched into the various rooms are completion dates from when the robot excavators finished each section. From this they determine that although the war has lasted for generations, it has actually only been going on for a week of actual time.
They move further inward of the control room where they find Martha, having just entered from an exterior hatch. They also hear Cobb's men trying to break through and see the Hath cutting through another door. They also smell flowers and follow it to a center location where the Doctor discovers a terraforming globe, designed to rework the surface of the planet once the colony was established. Both armies converge on the site but the Doctor stops them, pointing out that their ancestors worked together before to create life and they can do it again. He then breaks the globe and the chemical compound moves out and begins to rework the planet.
Both sides lay down their arms but Cobb shoots at the Doctor. Jenny, seeing Cobb's movement, jumps in front of the bullet, killing her. Cobb's men disarm him and hold him down. The Doctor hopes for a minute that some of his regeneration energy passed through her but she remains dead. Angered, the Doctor picks up Cobb's gun and points it directly at his head, holding there for a few seconds before dropping the gun and pointing out that he never would and that should be the credo of their new civilization.
The humans and Hath join camps and lay Jenny out in a funeral ceremony. The Doctor, Donna and Martha then slip away in the TARDIS. They drop Martha off at her home before journeying on. However, back on the terraforming planet, a small burst of regeneration energy does trigger and Jenny leaps off the bier she was laying on. She takes a small ship and launches into space, determined to explore the galaxy.
Analysis
I don't think this story is as bad as it is often made out to be but it is a story of wasted potential. I happened to watch this one for the second time in two parts. By coincidence, it was just before the laser barrier scene and that is a bit of a key marker. Before that point, you could see the potential of the story: two races locked in a bitter war, people created just to be soldiers and perpetuate the war, the Doctor angry at the creation of an offspring that only reminds him of all that he lost. That all sounds really good. However, when the story picked back up, all the depth went out the window and the story became running, silliness and a slapped together, schmaltzy ending.
For the most part, I enjoyed the acting. The Doctor and Donna were the best both with the light teasing and the seriousness that developed when the Doctor opened up. Martha was pretty good, especially since she was interacting with a non-verbal group and had to carry most of that load herself. Most of the side characters, like Cobb, were also pretty good.
Jenny was a less good. When obeying orders and acting like a genuine soldier, she worked well. Her interaction with the Doctor was less so. I think she couldn't decide just how child-like she was supposed to be. Her enthusiasm for doing anything that pleased the Doctor seemed very much like a toddler that has just gotten praise from their parents. It made her sacrifice later seem unearned, though it did play in with the tumble through the lasers.
Let's just get it out of the way now, I hated the tumble through the lasers. It was ridiculously stupid especially as the Doctor had already cleared the path. Jenny could easily have come back after refusing to shoot just as the Doctor shut down the lasers. They beat a quick path through and just make it as the lasers come back. The worst offense of the scene though is the fact that it took what had been a somewhat thought provoking story and turned it into a cartoon. From that point on, everything they did seemed disingenuous as though they were trying to get back what they had lost. They didn't try that hard but that's a different point.
As noted above, it was after this point that the story took a different tone. Martha's little adventure was completely pointless. The story needed to have someone go to the Hath to show them where the temple was and set up the race. But Martha's overland journey and the death of her Hath companion did nothing. My impression was that they wanted to show the Hath as having similar values to the humans, including self sacrifice, but the Hath had already been established as that with their fair treatment and acceptance of Martha after healing one of their own. Martha could have been taken along with the patrol and reunited with the Doctor when the Hath showed up. It was going for an emotional punch but it just wasted time. If Martha had gone with the main group, she could have continued to show kindness and compassion with the Hath. As told, the main group could have easily assumed that Martha killed the Hath who was with her and then ran ahead to warn the Doctor to create a trap.
And that plays into the slapdash ending. I liked that the war had been going on for only a week but that the death of generations had destroyed that memory. It made for a nice twist. But I don't see how the Doctor pointing to a swirling green ball that's going to terraform the planet encourages both sides to lay down their arms. The Doctor could have dropped the ball releasing the gases and still had both sides start shooting at each other, determined to take control of the new world for themselves. Instead, they lay down because the show was nearly over.
Jenny's death was also hastily done. I think they were going for poignant sacrifice but her range of emotions had been all over the map so far that there wasn't much of a connection to her. It also felt like a very stagey death and I couldn't help but draw mental comparisons to Talia's death in The Dark Knight Rises in how silly it felt. Then what little emotion had been established, especially in the Doctor's threat of Cobb, it thrown completely out the window by Jenny's healing regeneration and liting out into space. That especially felt slapped on and out of place as it felt like she had been completely self aware of everything around her, knowing that the war had ended and that the Doctor had left. What little goodwill I could have had for the death scene was just washed away in that moment.
I hate to be so negative but there was a good amount of potential for this story in the first half and it all just fell apart in the second half. Now, I don't think it's the horrible thing and stinks up the series the way many fans do. It's an ok watch and if you're in the mood for something silly and light, it'll be fine. It's just a whiplash in terms of the tone. I will say that I think it's the worst of the series and if going through, I'd be eagerly looking forward to The Unicorn and the Wasp, which might explain some of the bad feeling on that one too.
Overall personal score: 1.5 out of 5
The Doctor's Daughter closes the three part Martha interlude in Series Four. It is also one of the least regarded stories of the series. I don't remember it being terrible but with as provocative a title as that, it led a lot of fans to think one thing and what they ended up with was so far away that they grew resentful of the difference. That we're well removed, is it still worth all the disdain?
Plot Summary
The TARDIS is pulled through the time tunnel with the Doctor, Donna and Martha all clinging for any kind of support. They arrive in a tunnel scattered with debris and are immediately set upon by three human soldiers. The soldiers grab the Doctor and force his arm into a machine which extracts a tissue sample and uses it to create a new female soldier, genetically descended from the Doctor.
While trying to process this, the squad is attacked by a group of humanoid fish called the Hath. The two sides fire at each other while one sneaks around and grabs Martha. With two soldiers down, the squad leader detonates explosives in the tunnel, collapsing it and trapping Martha on the other side. He then takes the Doctor and Donna to see General Cobb.
On the other side of the tunnel, most of the squad was killed in the explosion. Martha tends to one with a dislocated shoulder. She pops it back into place as a second squad comes up. The Hath whom Martha tended to stops the others from killing her and together they take her back to their own headquarters. Because of her compassion in healing them, she is welcomed by the group.
At the human headquarters, General Cobb relates how the humans and Hath had come to the planet together, hoping to forge a new society. Things broke down and they have been fighting a war for generations, the origin of the war long since forgotten. The Doctor is shown a map of the complex and he is able to extract additional information, hoping to find Martha. Cobb however sees that the map is showing the lost temple where the Source is located. Believing that it will be the ultimate weapon to destroy the Hath, he decides to mount an expedition in the morning to recover it. He then orders the Doctor and Donna locked up because of their protests to the fighting. Not wanting to take chances, he also locks up the soldier extracted from the Doctor, now named Jenny, fearing her fighting spirit having been taken from pacifist stock.
Unbeknownst to any of them, at the same time, the Hath had been showing Martha the map, trying to explain where they were. They also saw the additions the Doctor extracted and form up to also head for the Source. Martha is left behind with the Hath she healed, who points out where they are going. He also rotates the map to 3-D and Martha realizes that it would be faster if they went outside. The Hath brings up the atmospheric conditions but Martha figures that she can survive the exposure for the journey and makes her way to the outer hatch.
In the prison, Donna talks the Doctor into accepting Jenny as his daughter, demonstrating that she has two hearts just as he does. The Doctor does accept her but relays his own genocidal past in trying to explain how killing the other side is simply wrong.
Jenny teases the guard and grabs his gun, allowing them to get out of the cell. They sneak into the outer tunnels and follow the Doctor's map, trying to reach the Source first. As they progress, Donna notes that each room they were in holds a serial number that is steadily going backwards.
They enter a new room just as Cobb discovers their escape and launches a raid after them. They are blocked by a series of lasers set up in a hallway. Jenny doubles back to cover them but the Doctor insists that fighting isn't the answer. Cobb calls out for Jenny to join them but she instead shoots a pipe creating a steam barrier. The Doctor temporarily shuts off the laser barrier allowing him and Donna to get through. Jenny, caught up in the euphoria of refusing to kill, hesitates allowing the lasers to cut off the path again. She however performs a series of acrobatics which allow her to get through the hallway, separating them from the Cobb's pursuit.
Martha and her Hath companion reach a hatch to the surface and open it. The Hath hesitates but follows Martha out the hatch to the surface. They make their way towards the spire of the central building. As they approach, Martha looses her footing and falls into a pit where a tar-like liquid has pooled. She is trapped and begins to sink. The Hath follows her down and tries to pull her out but can't reach her. He then jumps into the pool and pushes her out. This however causes him to sink and drown in the pool. Martha cries out for him but then crawls back to the top of the pit and continues towards the spire.
The Doctor, Donna and Jenny reach end of hallway just as they hear General Cobb break through the laser barrier. The Doctor finds a door and they enter the Temple, which is actually the control center of the ship that brought the settlers here. They find a log which details how the captain died and a power struggled formed between the human and Hath colonists. Donna also finds a clock and determines that the numbers etched into the various rooms are completion dates from when the robot excavators finished each section. From this they determine that although the war has lasted for generations, it has actually only been going on for a week of actual time.
They move further inward of the control room where they find Martha, having just entered from an exterior hatch. They also hear Cobb's men trying to break through and see the Hath cutting through another door. They also smell flowers and follow it to a center location where the Doctor discovers a terraforming globe, designed to rework the surface of the planet once the colony was established. Both armies converge on the site but the Doctor stops them, pointing out that their ancestors worked together before to create life and they can do it again. He then breaks the globe and the chemical compound moves out and begins to rework the planet.
Both sides lay down their arms but Cobb shoots at the Doctor. Jenny, seeing Cobb's movement, jumps in front of the bullet, killing her. Cobb's men disarm him and hold him down. The Doctor hopes for a minute that some of his regeneration energy passed through her but she remains dead. Angered, the Doctor picks up Cobb's gun and points it directly at his head, holding there for a few seconds before dropping the gun and pointing out that he never would and that should be the credo of their new civilization.
The humans and Hath join camps and lay Jenny out in a funeral ceremony. The Doctor, Donna and Martha then slip away in the TARDIS. They drop Martha off at her home before journeying on. However, back on the terraforming planet, a small burst of regeneration energy does trigger and Jenny leaps off the bier she was laying on. She takes a small ship and launches into space, determined to explore the galaxy.
Analysis
I don't think this story is as bad as it is often made out to be but it is a story of wasted potential. I happened to watch this one for the second time in two parts. By coincidence, it was just before the laser barrier scene and that is a bit of a key marker. Before that point, you could see the potential of the story: two races locked in a bitter war, people created just to be soldiers and perpetuate the war, the Doctor angry at the creation of an offspring that only reminds him of all that he lost. That all sounds really good. However, when the story picked back up, all the depth went out the window and the story became running, silliness and a slapped together, schmaltzy ending.
For the most part, I enjoyed the acting. The Doctor and Donna were the best both with the light teasing and the seriousness that developed when the Doctor opened up. Martha was pretty good, especially since she was interacting with a non-verbal group and had to carry most of that load herself. Most of the side characters, like Cobb, were also pretty good.
Jenny was a less good. When obeying orders and acting like a genuine soldier, she worked well. Her interaction with the Doctor was less so. I think she couldn't decide just how child-like she was supposed to be. Her enthusiasm for doing anything that pleased the Doctor seemed very much like a toddler that has just gotten praise from their parents. It made her sacrifice later seem unearned, though it did play in with the tumble through the lasers.
Let's just get it out of the way now, I hated the tumble through the lasers. It was ridiculously stupid especially as the Doctor had already cleared the path. Jenny could easily have come back after refusing to shoot just as the Doctor shut down the lasers. They beat a quick path through and just make it as the lasers come back. The worst offense of the scene though is the fact that it took what had been a somewhat thought provoking story and turned it into a cartoon. From that point on, everything they did seemed disingenuous as though they were trying to get back what they had lost. They didn't try that hard but that's a different point.
As noted above, it was after this point that the story took a different tone. Martha's little adventure was completely pointless. The story needed to have someone go to the Hath to show them where the temple was and set up the race. But Martha's overland journey and the death of her Hath companion did nothing. My impression was that they wanted to show the Hath as having similar values to the humans, including self sacrifice, but the Hath had already been established as that with their fair treatment and acceptance of Martha after healing one of their own. Martha could have been taken along with the patrol and reunited with the Doctor when the Hath showed up. It was going for an emotional punch but it just wasted time. If Martha had gone with the main group, she could have continued to show kindness and compassion with the Hath. As told, the main group could have easily assumed that Martha killed the Hath who was with her and then ran ahead to warn the Doctor to create a trap.
And that plays into the slapdash ending. I liked that the war had been going on for only a week but that the death of generations had destroyed that memory. It made for a nice twist. But I don't see how the Doctor pointing to a swirling green ball that's going to terraform the planet encourages both sides to lay down their arms. The Doctor could have dropped the ball releasing the gases and still had both sides start shooting at each other, determined to take control of the new world for themselves. Instead, they lay down because the show was nearly over.
Jenny's death was also hastily done. I think they were going for poignant sacrifice but her range of emotions had been all over the map so far that there wasn't much of a connection to her. It also felt like a very stagey death and I couldn't help but draw mental comparisons to Talia's death in The Dark Knight Rises in how silly it felt. Then what little emotion had been established, especially in the Doctor's threat of Cobb, it thrown completely out the window by Jenny's healing regeneration and liting out into space. That especially felt slapped on and out of place as it felt like she had been completely self aware of everything around her, knowing that the war had ended and that the Doctor had left. What little goodwill I could have had for the death scene was just washed away in that moment.
I hate to be so negative but there was a good amount of potential for this story in the first half and it all just fell apart in the second half. Now, I don't think it's the horrible thing and stinks up the series the way many fans do. It's an ok watch and if you're in the mood for something silly and light, it'll be fine. It's just a whiplash in terms of the tone. I will say that I think it's the worst of the series and if going through, I'd be eagerly looking forward to The Unicorn and the Wasp, which might explain some of the bad feeling on that one too.
Overall personal score: 1.5 out of 5
Friday, January 12, 2018
Twice Upon a Time
Oh, Brilliant!
At long last we come to the Christmas special, the end of the Twelfth Doctor era and the end of the Steven Moffat tenure. We also get a full edition of David Bradley as the First Doctor, something speculated at ever since An Adventure in Space and Time but only realized now (coinciding with the release of new Big Finish adventures with David Bradley as the First Doctor). The previews have hinted that this will a comedy so I'm not expecting anything as dramatic or as deep as we've seen with the first couple of Twelfth Doctor Christmas specials. Personally, I'm hoping for something closer to The Husbands of River Song rather than The Return of Doctor Mysterio.
Plot Summary
The First Doctor stumbles out of the Cyberman shuttle and towards his TARDIS, determined not to regenerate. As he moves, he hears a voice out of the snow and moves towards it. He sees the Twelfth Doctor struggling to not regenerate but does not realize it’s a future iteration, though he suspects him of being a fellow Time Lord. As the two talk, time suddenly freezes with snowflakes held in the air in suspension.
Out of the mist of frozen fog stumbles a British Captain from World War I. He had been in a shell hole face to face with a German soldier when time froze for him. He had been approached by a transparent female form and then scanned. However, instead of time reverting when she finished, an error occurred and he was thrown forward to the point of the two Doctors meeting.
The two Doctors take him into the TARDIS, although the First Doctor is shocked when he sees that it's not his TARDIS. It is only after seeing this and further interaction with the Twelfth Doctor that he realizes that the Twelfth Doctor is his future self. Before they can continue their discussion, the TARDIS is grabbed by a crane and hoisted up into a ship hovering overhead.
Upon being deposited into the bay, the First Doctor steps out to investigate while the Captain and Twelfth Doctor monitor from the inside. The transparent female silhouette appears, identifying him as the Doctor of War, to which the First Doctor is appalled. The female figure identifies herself and the ship as Testimony and promises to allow the Doctor to visit with someone if he cooperates with them. Bill emerges from a side corridor and the Twelfth Doctor bursts from the TARDIS to greet her.
Enthused as he is to see her, the Twelfth Doctor is suspicious that she is not the real Bill. Bill explains that Testimony travels through time, gathering the thoughts and memories of people just before their death. It had done so with the Captain but an error occurred causing his time jump. Time would remain frozen until he could be returned to his proper location. The two Doctors conduct their own investigation, suspicious of Testimony's motives and the First Doctor notes that the glass form is modeled after a real woman and not computer generated. This means there is a source behind it all.
The two Doctors, the Captain and Bill release the winch holding the TARDIS and shimmy down. Testimony corrects the fault and begins to haul it back up again. But it is still low enough to the ground that they are able to jump to the ground. The group then enters the First Doctor's TARDIS where the Twelfth Doctor feeds it coordinates to follow.
They end up on the planet Villengard, near the center of the universe. The two Doctors head out while Bill and the Captain stay in the TARDIS. Time has unfrozen in this new location and the Doctors come under fire from a tower. The Twelfth Doctor shows himself and tells the occupant to scan him and realize he is already dying. The firing stops and the Twelfth Doctor heads up while the First Doctor stays below.
In the TARDIS, Bill is revealed to a glass figure just as the lead figure of Testimony, but with Bill's memories up until he was transported away with Heather. She calms the Captain and then leaves the TARDIS where she talks with the First Doctor.
In the tower, the Twelfth Doctor finds Rusty, the Dalek he and Clara "healed" so many years ago, now having created a trap to destroy Daleks who come to kill him. He allows the Doctor access to the Dalek database where he learns that Testimony was a project set up by a scientist on New Earth to collect the memories of the departed so that they could learn and archive them. The Twelfth Doctor is shocked to find their is no malicious intent and then notices that time has frozen again.
Bill comes up the stairs, though the Twelfth Doctor still refuses to recognize her as anything but facsimile. But with no evil to thwart, the two Doctors agree that they must return the Captain to his death. The Captain goes with the Twelfth Doctor in his TARDIS to act as a guide for the First Doctor's TARDIS, as the navigation controls haven't been repaired yet. As they near the point of the Captain's death, the Twelfth Doctor gets an idea.
The two TARDISs land and the Doctors promise the Captain to look in on his family for them. He tells them his name is Archibald Lethbridge-Stewart (grandfather of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart) and the Twelfth Doctor promises that they will look on his family quite a bit. As the Captain settles back to his spot, time resumes and he faces down the German across from him. Before either can fire, they are distracted by the sound of singing from the German lines. A few moments later, the British start singing as well. Men from both sides emerge from the trenches and start interacting. The Captain puts down his gun and whistles for a medic. Germans come over and carry the wounded man back to their lines while the Captain's men help him back to their lines. The Twelfth Doctor had come forward in time by a couple hours, dropping the Captain off just before the start of the Christmas truce, saving his life for at least one more day.
Having talked to both the Twelfth Doctor and Bill, the First Doctor elects to face his fear and subject himself to regeneration. He reenters his TARDIS and uses the fast return switch to return to the south pole. He opens the doors briefly to allow Ben and Polly in before reactivating the TARDIS and collapsing to the floor to regenerate.
The Twelfth Doctor continues to watch the truce, unwilling to regenerate, tired from all the fighting and saving that needs to be done. Bill talks to him about his work, changing her appearance to Clara as well for a short time. A second avatar in the form of Nardole also appears. The two avatars, the first having resumed the Bill form, embrace the Doctor and encourage him to keep going. The Doctor walks back into his TARDIS, leaving them behind.
Seeing more trouble on the monitor, the Doctor tries to keep himself motivated, but decides to give himself over to regeneration for "one more go around." He reminds himself of things the Doctor stands for and things to focus on and regenerates into the Thirteenth Doctor.
The Doctor stumbles forward and sees in the monitor that he has become a woman. She is intrigued by this but on trying to take control of the TARDIS, it rebels. The TARDIS rocks violently with the central column exploding. The Doctor falls backwards and is thrown out of the TARDIS. She falls through the air while watching the interior of the TARDIS continue to explode while hovering in midair.
Analysis
I'm having a slightly difficult time processing how I feel about this episode. I did enjoy it, though I think I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't had all the BBC America commercial breaks inserted in. But for all the run-around that was done, the was very little plot and an even thinner reason to why the Twelfth Doctor was trying to stop his regeneration. It just felt a bit out of place.
It is my understanding that this story was a last minute stopgap. Because of the work on Broadchurch, Chris Chibnall was unable to take over Doctor Who until 2018 so Steven Moffat was asked to produce Series 10 and did a fine job in my opinion. However, Moffat clearly had things wrapped in such a way that the Doctor would regenerate after being mortally wounded as shown in The Doctor Falls. But it seems that Chris Chibnall asked to not start off his tenure with the Christmas episode, preferring to start from scratch with Series 11. That's fine, but you can see the hole that Moffat suddenly found himself in and I'm not sure he quite gets out of it.
I have no problem with the hesitation of the First Doctor in his regeneration. It fits his personality and he has never regenerated before so a fearful defiance and needing to be coaxed along makes sense. The Twelfth Doctor, by contrast, is the first of a new set of regenerations. He has been almost cavalier with regeneration energy in past stories and given his renegade attitude, he would seem to be the most open to giving up and letting the next version come forth.
I'm also unsure how the Twelfth Doctor could be so energetic as he moves around while trying to repress regeneration. He was blasted with the Cybermen energy weapons and essentially had to have Bill restart the regeneration process for him after he blew them and himself up with the level. This feels a bit more like the regeneration that the Tenth Doctor funneled into creating the hand clone Doctor. A wound that bad has to be dealt with and I have trouble seeing how the Twelfth Doctor could allow the regeneration go forward enough to prevent immediate death but then suppress it enough to have an adventure with his prior self. Yes, explanations are offered, but the seem a little thin to me and it just casts a bit of a shadow on the story.
From a performance standpoint, I highly enjoyed it. The Twelfth Doctor was his usual entertaining self, wanting to embrace Bill but also with a simmering anger at Harmony's synthetic Bill trying to justify herself as the original Bill. I really enjoyed his interaction with the First Doctor, who was done as a nice echo of William Hartnell by David Bradley. I enjoyed it, especially the anachronistic jokes made at his expense. I did wish there could have been a bit more emphasis placed on the First Doctor's better qualities as it was easy to let the sexism or curmudgeonism take point.
I did like David Bradley's version of the First Doctor. It is different than William Hartnell but still good. Bradley is softer and less pointed than Hartnell though I felt that Hartnell held a deeper level of emotion. Bradley always felt like someone playing the Doctor while Hartnell simply was the Doctor. They are both good in their own ways and I thought Bradley played well against the Twelfth Doctor.
Bill was enjoyable but I sided with the Twelfth Doctor that she wasn't really Bill. The avatar Bill was always relaxed, calm and confident. Bill as we knew her in Series Ten was always a roil of emotion: excitable and fearful, filled with wonder. This Bill was much closer to the post regeneration by Heather. It was subtle and an excellent job by Pearle Macke but still a different performance than the Bill we know.
Though he didn't do much, I also enjoyed Captain Lethbridge-Stewart as well. He was mostly the object of distress, though not quite the damsel that is typical of this story. I didn't see it coming but I could see the inspiration from the Brigadier once the name was revealed. He was very much the "stiff upper lip" type that you would expect to be the Brig's grandfather and he was fun to be with especially as he slowly rationalized himself to accept his forthcoming death.
The return of Rusty was amusing but it didn't really have a whole lot of point other than as a neat bit of trivia and a place to run to to avoid Harmony. In fact, the lack of a villain was another small point of problem in this story. There are a number of good stories that don't have villains but this one was trying both to have a villain and not a villain at the same time. Harmony came in and they are initially perceived as hostile, though they change to complacent quickly. Then you have Rusty, who is only a villain while shooting at the Doctor. Then he becomes a reluctant ally. So the story was constantly trying to have someone in the villain role but then pulling the rug out from under it. It didn't quite work for me and it gave the overall story a feeling of running around for no real reason.
Like the Tenth Doctor and the departure of Russell T. Davies, I thought the Twelfth Doctor's regeneration was a bit long and self indulgent. I know they wanted to give him a good long speech to have his final say, but I thought it should have been a bit shorter. As entertaining as his final speech to himself was, I thought it would have been more fitting for the Twelfth Doctor to have had a little say and then regenerate after, "Well, what's one more lifetime?" The Twelfth Doctor was arrogant and self possessed but it would have felt more in character to have accepted his fate and left when the decision had been made. As good as the speech was, I thought the moment lost poignancy by lingering as opposed to the Eleventh Doctor's regeneration which gave itself one lingering moment and then moved on.
All that being said, I did enjoy the regeneration and I loved the fact that the Twelfth Doctor's ring dropped off. There was a suspicion that would happen and it was one of those things that was truly symbolic of the passing of the Doctor. I liked the Thirteenth Doctor's appearance and especially the wait for the reveal of her change of sex. I also like that it seems she will keep her native accent, although that could be a problem for me if I'm not fully paying attention. Because of the low tone, I swore she said "Of Berlin" rather than "Oh Brilliant." I'm not sure why the TARDIS took that moment to explode and reject her the way it did but it was reminiscent of the Eleventh Doctor's start so I'll be curious to see what they end up doing with that. I am going to be highly annoyed if the Doctor falls all the way to the ground and then just gets up a la the Tenth Doctor in The End of Time as it would continue to make a mockery of the Fourth Doctor's death in Logopolis but we won't find out until the Fall for that.
Overall, I think I enjoyed it well enough. Moffat's true goodbye was The Husbands of River Song and this was more of an extended coda. Self indulgent and not quite getting out of the holes that had been dug, it was still an enjoyable experience to be with these characters and it gave out the appropriate feels for the season. Most importantly, it whet the appetite for Season Eleven and that's the most important thing.
Overall personal score: 3 out of 5
At long last we come to the Christmas special, the end of the Twelfth Doctor era and the end of the Steven Moffat tenure. We also get a full edition of David Bradley as the First Doctor, something speculated at ever since An Adventure in Space and Time but only realized now (coinciding with the release of new Big Finish adventures with David Bradley as the First Doctor). The previews have hinted that this will a comedy so I'm not expecting anything as dramatic or as deep as we've seen with the first couple of Twelfth Doctor Christmas specials. Personally, I'm hoping for something closer to The Husbands of River Song rather than The Return of Doctor Mysterio.
Plot Summary
The First Doctor stumbles out of the Cyberman shuttle and towards his TARDIS, determined not to regenerate. As he moves, he hears a voice out of the snow and moves towards it. He sees the Twelfth Doctor struggling to not regenerate but does not realize it’s a future iteration, though he suspects him of being a fellow Time Lord. As the two talk, time suddenly freezes with snowflakes held in the air in suspension.
Out of the mist of frozen fog stumbles a British Captain from World War I. He had been in a shell hole face to face with a German soldier when time froze for him. He had been approached by a transparent female form and then scanned. However, instead of time reverting when she finished, an error occurred and he was thrown forward to the point of the two Doctors meeting.
The two Doctors take him into the TARDIS, although the First Doctor is shocked when he sees that it's not his TARDIS. It is only after seeing this and further interaction with the Twelfth Doctor that he realizes that the Twelfth Doctor is his future self. Before they can continue their discussion, the TARDIS is grabbed by a crane and hoisted up into a ship hovering overhead.
Upon being deposited into the bay, the First Doctor steps out to investigate while the Captain and Twelfth Doctor monitor from the inside. The transparent female silhouette appears, identifying him as the Doctor of War, to which the First Doctor is appalled. The female figure identifies herself and the ship as Testimony and promises to allow the Doctor to visit with someone if he cooperates with them. Bill emerges from a side corridor and the Twelfth Doctor bursts from the TARDIS to greet her.
Enthused as he is to see her, the Twelfth Doctor is suspicious that she is not the real Bill. Bill explains that Testimony travels through time, gathering the thoughts and memories of people just before their death. It had done so with the Captain but an error occurred causing his time jump. Time would remain frozen until he could be returned to his proper location. The two Doctors conduct their own investigation, suspicious of Testimony's motives and the First Doctor notes that the glass form is modeled after a real woman and not computer generated. This means there is a source behind it all.
The two Doctors, the Captain and Bill release the winch holding the TARDIS and shimmy down. Testimony corrects the fault and begins to haul it back up again. But it is still low enough to the ground that they are able to jump to the ground. The group then enters the First Doctor's TARDIS where the Twelfth Doctor feeds it coordinates to follow.
They end up on the planet Villengard, near the center of the universe. The two Doctors head out while Bill and the Captain stay in the TARDIS. Time has unfrozen in this new location and the Doctors come under fire from a tower. The Twelfth Doctor shows himself and tells the occupant to scan him and realize he is already dying. The firing stops and the Twelfth Doctor heads up while the First Doctor stays below.
In the TARDIS, Bill is revealed to a glass figure just as the lead figure of Testimony, but with Bill's memories up until he was transported away with Heather. She calms the Captain and then leaves the TARDIS where she talks with the First Doctor.
In the tower, the Twelfth Doctor finds Rusty, the Dalek he and Clara "healed" so many years ago, now having created a trap to destroy Daleks who come to kill him. He allows the Doctor access to the Dalek database where he learns that Testimony was a project set up by a scientist on New Earth to collect the memories of the departed so that they could learn and archive them. The Twelfth Doctor is shocked to find their is no malicious intent and then notices that time has frozen again.
Bill comes up the stairs, though the Twelfth Doctor still refuses to recognize her as anything but facsimile. But with no evil to thwart, the two Doctors agree that they must return the Captain to his death. The Captain goes with the Twelfth Doctor in his TARDIS to act as a guide for the First Doctor's TARDIS, as the navigation controls haven't been repaired yet. As they near the point of the Captain's death, the Twelfth Doctor gets an idea.
The two TARDISs land and the Doctors promise the Captain to look in on his family for them. He tells them his name is Archibald Lethbridge-Stewart (grandfather of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart) and the Twelfth Doctor promises that they will look on his family quite a bit. As the Captain settles back to his spot, time resumes and he faces down the German across from him. Before either can fire, they are distracted by the sound of singing from the German lines. A few moments later, the British start singing as well. Men from both sides emerge from the trenches and start interacting. The Captain puts down his gun and whistles for a medic. Germans come over and carry the wounded man back to their lines while the Captain's men help him back to their lines. The Twelfth Doctor had come forward in time by a couple hours, dropping the Captain off just before the start of the Christmas truce, saving his life for at least one more day.
Having talked to both the Twelfth Doctor and Bill, the First Doctor elects to face his fear and subject himself to regeneration. He reenters his TARDIS and uses the fast return switch to return to the south pole. He opens the doors briefly to allow Ben and Polly in before reactivating the TARDIS and collapsing to the floor to regenerate.
The Twelfth Doctor continues to watch the truce, unwilling to regenerate, tired from all the fighting and saving that needs to be done. Bill talks to him about his work, changing her appearance to Clara as well for a short time. A second avatar in the form of Nardole also appears. The two avatars, the first having resumed the Bill form, embrace the Doctor and encourage him to keep going. The Doctor walks back into his TARDIS, leaving them behind.
Seeing more trouble on the monitor, the Doctor tries to keep himself motivated, but decides to give himself over to regeneration for "one more go around." He reminds himself of things the Doctor stands for and things to focus on and regenerates into the Thirteenth Doctor.
The Doctor stumbles forward and sees in the monitor that he has become a woman. She is intrigued by this but on trying to take control of the TARDIS, it rebels. The TARDIS rocks violently with the central column exploding. The Doctor falls backwards and is thrown out of the TARDIS. She falls through the air while watching the interior of the TARDIS continue to explode while hovering in midair.
Analysis
I'm having a slightly difficult time processing how I feel about this episode. I did enjoy it, though I think I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't had all the BBC America commercial breaks inserted in. But for all the run-around that was done, the was very little plot and an even thinner reason to why the Twelfth Doctor was trying to stop his regeneration. It just felt a bit out of place.
It is my understanding that this story was a last minute stopgap. Because of the work on Broadchurch, Chris Chibnall was unable to take over Doctor Who until 2018 so Steven Moffat was asked to produce Series 10 and did a fine job in my opinion. However, Moffat clearly had things wrapped in such a way that the Doctor would regenerate after being mortally wounded as shown in The Doctor Falls. But it seems that Chris Chibnall asked to not start off his tenure with the Christmas episode, preferring to start from scratch with Series 11. That's fine, but you can see the hole that Moffat suddenly found himself in and I'm not sure he quite gets out of it.
I have no problem with the hesitation of the First Doctor in his regeneration. It fits his personality and he has never regenerated before so a fearful defiance and needing to be coaxed along makes sense. The Twelfth Doctor, by contrast, is the first of a new set of regenerations. He has been almost cavalier with regeneration energy in past stories and given his renegade attitude, he would seem to be the most open to giving up and letting the next version come forth.
I'm also unsure how the Twelfth Doctor could be so energetic as he moves around while trying to repress regeneration. He was blasted with the Cybermen energy weapons and essentially had to have Bill restart the regeneration process for him after he blew them and himself up with the level. This feels a bit more like the regeneration that the Tenth Doctor funneled into creating the hand clone Doctor. A wound that bad has to be dealt with and I have trouble seeing how the Twelfth Doctor could allow the regeneration go forward enough to prevent immediate death but then suppress it enough to have an adventure with his prior self. Yes, explanations are offered, but the seem a little thin to me and it just casts a bit of a shadow on the story.
From a performance standpoint, I highly enjoyed it. The Twelfth Doctor was his usual entertaining self, wanting to embrace Bill but also with a simmering anger at Harmony's synthetic Bill trying to justify herself as the original Bill. I really enjoyed his interaction with the First Doctor, who was done as a nice echo of William Hartnell by David Bradley. I enjoyed it, especially the anachronistic jokes made at his expense. I did wish there could have been a bit more emphasis placed on the First Doctor's better qualities as it was easy to let the sexism or curmudgeonism take point.
I did like David Bradley's version of the First Doctor. It is different than William Hartnell but still good. Bradley is softer and less pointed than Hartnell though I felt that Hartnell held a deeper level of emotion. Bradley always felt like someone playing the Doctor while Hartnell simply was the Doctor. They are both good in their own ways and I thought Bradley played well against the Twelfth Doctor.
Bill was enjoyable but I sided with the Twelfth Doctor that she wasn't really Bill. The avatar Bill was always relaxed, calm and confident. Bill as we knew her in Series Ten was always a roil of emotion: excitable and fearful, filled with wonder. This Bill was much closer to the post regeneration by Heather. It was subtle and an excellent job by Pearle Macke but still a different performance than the Bill we know.
Though he didn't do much, I also enjoyed Captain Lethbridge-Stewart as well. He was mostly the object of distress, though not quite the damsel that is typical of this story. I didn't see it coming but I could see the inspiration from the Brigadier once the name was revealed. He was very much the "stiff upper lip" type that you would expect to be the Brig's grandfather and he was fun to be with especially as he slowly rationalized himself to accept his forthcoming death.
The return of Rusty was amusing but it didn't really have a whole lot of point other than as a neat bit of trivia and a place to run to to avoid Harmony. In fact, the lack of a villain was another small point of problem in this story. There are a number of good stories that don't have villains but this one was trying both to have a villain and not a villain at the same time. Harmony came in and they are initially perceived as hostile, though they change to complacent quickly. Then you have Rusty, who is only a villain while shooting at the Doctor. Then he becomes a reluctant ally. So the story was constantly trying to have someone in the villain role but then pulling the rug out from under it. It didn't quite work for me and it gave the overall story a feeling of running around for no real reason.
Like the Tenth Doctor and the departure of Russell T. Davies, I thought the Twelfth Doctor's regeneration was a bit long and self indulgent. I know they wanted to give him a good long speech to have his final say, but I thought it should have been a bit shorter. As entertaining as his final speech to himself was, I thought it would have been more fitting for the Twelfth Doctor to have had a little say and then regenerate after, "Well, what's one more lifetime?" The Twelfth Doctor was arrogant and self possessed but it would have felt more in character to have accepted his fate and left when the decision had been made. As good as the speech was, I thought the moment lost poignancy by lingering as opposed to the Eleventh Doctor's regeneration which gave itself one lingering moment and then moved on.
All that being said, I did enjoy the regeneration and I loved the fact that the Twelfth Doctor's ring dropped off. There was a suspicion that would happen and it was one of those things that was truly symbolic of the passing of the Doctor. I liked the Thirteenth Doctor's appearance and especially the wait for the reveal of her change of sex. I also like that it seems she will keep her native accent, although that could be a problem for me if I'm not fully paying attention. Because of the low tone, I swore she said "Of Berlin" rather than "Oh Brilliant." I'm not sure why the TARDIS took that moment to explode and reject her the way it did but it was reminiscent of the Eleventh Doctor's start so I'll be curious to see what they end up doing with that. I am going to be highly annoyed if the Doctor falls all the way to the ground and then just gets up a la the Tenth Doctor in The End of Time as it would continue to make a mockery of the Fourth Doctor's death in Logopolis but we won't find out until the Fall for that.
Overall, I think I enjoyed it well enough. Moffat's true goodbye was The Husbands of River Song and this was more of an extended coda. Self indulgent and not quite getting out of the holes that had been dug, it was still an enjoyable experience to be with these characters and it gave out the appropriate feels for the season. Most importantly, it whet the appetite for Season Eleven and that's the most important thing.
Overall personal score: 3 out of 5
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