TV REVIEW: Doctor Who - Dark Water

Dark Water is the first of the two part finale for this series of Doctor Who and it's a pretty barnstorming episode to kick it all off with questions and revelations in just about equal measure. The shocks come quickly with Danny tragically run over in the episode's moments. A grief stricken Clara to demand the Doctor to help him, threatening him with the loss of the TARDIS if he doesn't do so. The Doctor of course agrees to help and via Clara's strong psychic link with Danny's timeline, they end up at the mysterious 3W with Missy pretending to be a customer service droid. Meanwhile, Danny finds himself in the afterlife with Seb, toying with the decision to delete his consciousness and get rid of his memories forever. However, there hides something much more sinister within Missy's plan and it's not long before Cybermen start walking the streets of London. Again.

Whether or not you saw the twist coming, the Missy reveal introduces a whole bucketload of implications into the Whoniverse as well as bringing back one of the Doctor's most infamous nemeses. Chief amongst which is the idea of gender and regeneration. If Missy can come back as a woman, so too can the Doctor. I can't quite get rid of the nagging feeling that this is merely tokenism, however good Michelle Gomez is, (which is very - extremely - phenomenally good), a way to shut up those calling for more dynamic female characters or, whisper it, a female Doctor. After all, Missy's another classically Moffat mystery woman who just happens to be a Time Lord this time. Forgive me if I don't hold my breath for new and improved female characters.

That being said, I am loving the Clara that we've had this season. Much more interesting than simpering, without a mystery within her to be solved, she's simply just trying to get by as the Doctor's companion as well as navigating her relationship with Danny. The two contrasting scenes with the Doctor at the opening of the episode, first in the volcano and then back in the TARDIS were both expertly constructed. The volcano one in particular was masterfully done with the switching of power dynamics as the Doctor repeatedly called Clara's bluff and the quiet rage with which she dealt with him was solid work from Jenna Coleman. 

The second scene, in which the Doctor revealed he'd simply allowed Clara to act out that scenario, could have come across as another classic manipulation of her. Instead, it's much more emotional; he uses her fantasy to allow her to vocalise her grief before revealing that he'd do just about anything to help her. Given the disconnect and uneasy tension that there has been in the episodes leading up to this, it's a strong resolution for the pair and one which will clearly be tested in the second part of this finale.

The rest of the episode focused on the set up for the second part as we slowly learnt of Missy's plans. Some excellent comedy moments peppered the dialogue, particularly from the Doctor reacting to Missy or Seb's bureaucratic simpering, but the slow sinister reveal of the Cybermen was the strongest point. From creepy, gooey skeletons slowly turning their heads to that incredibly good shot of Clara sat in front of a standing Cyberman, completely oblivious to its existence, the episode utilised the inherent menace in its villains without playing its hand too easily. They've been a little guilty of overexposure recently, especially in the RTD years, but Moffat has been a bit more inventive, literally using an arm at one point to convey enough suspense without trotting out another clunking costume.

The greatest aspect of this episode though had to be the pace. We've often commented in these reviews that many an episode of Doctor Who would be improved if they had a little more time to set everything up or allow for a solid payoff. Too often, these things are rush and as a result, the quality of the episode diminishes. In Dark Water though, the pacing is spot on, the necessity of splitting the story into two parts allowing for everything to breathe a little and for the atmosphere to be carefully established. The emotional opening scenes soon give way to a mystery thriller and the episode felt much stronger as a result. When that cliffhanger comes around, it feels earned, not hurried. 

Next week sees the finale play out and Jen will be with you to see these reviews through to the end of the series. My two cents on the finale as a whole is that it's been a frustrating mix of highs and lows. It started exceptionally well with the uniform excellence of the first four episodes, but since then, it's been a little wobbly. When it hits the scary highs that it did with Listen, the thrills of Into the Dalek or the riotous fun of Robot of Sherwood, the series is fantastic and brilliantly entertaining. Dark Water harks back to that run and I hope it continues next week.

- Becky

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TV REVIEW: Doctor Who - In the Forest of the Night

In a slightly unusual earth-bound story, this week’s episode of Doctor Who, ‘In The Forest of the Night’, conceptually at least, was something a little bit different.  

One morning, the human race, and specifically for our story, those living in London (an interesting pairing with last week’s Bristol specific episode), wake up to find that the entire city and indeed the entire world, has been taken over by a giant forest, seemingly overnight. This includes Clara (Jenna Coleman) and Danny (Samuel Anderson) who have taken some of the children of Coal Hill School’s bogus ‘Gifted and Talented’ group for a ‘Night at the Museum’ style sleepover. It isn’t long before they realise that, not only is the outside world not quite how they left it the night before, but that they are missing a child, one Maebh, played excellently by Abigail Eames.

Maebh is in actual fact with The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) having found her way to him after being plagued by thoughts she can’t be rid of following the trauma of her older sister’s disappearance – a strong, complex idea to place in the hands of a child actor, but Abigail deals with it extraordinarily well. The Doctor, characteristically displeased that he, once again, appears to have been left babysitting one of Clara’s students, albeit a potentially interesting one, calls her, and in so doing beings the two groups of the story to the Tardis together, not to mention several more schoolchildren.

But what are the trees? What does their presence mean for the Earth? And what exactly has this got to do with Maebh?

The episode sets about to answer these questions, the first two of which are answered well, the latter lesser so. In concept, this was a strong episode, with ‘everyone’s nightmare’, of the dark forest (although this felt a bit of a steal from the common nightmares of ‘Listen’, earlier in the series) serving as just one of the fairy-tale tropes of an episode which also featured CGI wolves and a little girl in a red hooded coat. This glorious sense of the uncanny is heightened further by the lovely shots of vine covered London landmarks, as well as the escaped animals from London Zoo, which themselves blended in well with the episode's ecological ideas.

Speaking of which, I for one would have liked to have seen far more of those. The fact that The Doctor is unable to use his sonic screwdriver for help against natural organisms, including the trees themselves, citing, "Not everything can be fixed with a screwdriver. It's not a magic wand", added a strand of genuine peril to what was an otherwise monster free zone. 

Meanwhile, other areas of the episode just seemed to have been set up as giant solar-flare shaped plot devices designed to reveal the current state of the various relationships in the series at the moment, namely Clara, The Doctor and Danny. The endless lies and bickering about The Doctor, which seems to form the centre of Clara and Danny’s relationship is starting to grow tiresome, although fortunately it does seem as if she’s going to be forced to make a decision soon, if only when she’s finished her marking, whilst The Doctor’s view of Danny seems unchanged.

This was, however, an episode which gave plenty more opportunities for the consistently brilliant Capaldi to act alongside children, a rewarding running theme of this series, with him disappointed that they don’t seem especially interested in the fact that the Tardis is bigger on the inside. This showed us that, whilst in character, Capaldi’s Doctor is much harsher and colder than previous incarnations, in Tardis at least, he is much more welcoming.

The subplot of the missing child worked reasonably well as an emotional pull, but we weren’t left feeling terribly clear as to how exactly Maebh fit in with it all. I’m willing to bet that this will become a memorable episode in years to become, but as ‘that one with the forest’, rather the one with a missing older sister. 

Still, it was great to learn just a teensy but more about the link between Clara and the enigmatic Missy (Michelle Gomez), as we get the sense that this episode was very much positioned as the relative ‘calm before the storm’, next week’s episode being the beginnings of finale territory.  

All in all an enjoyable forty five minutes of television, just not necessarily the most successful and enjoyable episode of Doctor Who.

Although it seems we will FINALLY learn more about Missy next week to make up for it – look out for Becky’s review of the action…

Jen

@jenniferklarge

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TV REVIEW: Doctor Who - Kill the Moon

The Doctor, Clara and practically a stowaway student Courtney found themselves bound for the moon in this episode. After meeting up with Hermione Norris and her merry band of astronauts in their shuttle, they discover that the moon is decaying. A bunch of minors went missing ten years ago and ever since, there's been rumblings that something's not quite right on the big spherical cheese in the sky. The group were soon beset by weird giant spider things until they found a way to stop them. Then the Doctor dived into a crater and discovered there's actually something else going on, which he then leaves Clara to deal with by herself.

Kill The Moon is an odd episode. When it worked, it really worked and produced some of those tense or emotional sequences that we've come to expect from New Who. When it didn't work though, it was muddled and ever so slightly dull. There was simply too much going on in the episode, as if the writers had sat down and thrown loads of ideas into the ring and couldn't bear to part with all of them. The result is that it's a difficult episode to get a handle on, one that doesn't seem to have a thread running through it other than to test Clara and the Doctor's relationship to the utmost limit.

To begin on a positive note, it's about time Clara snapped. Whilst their witty exchanges have been amusing, there's always been a sense that Clara and this version of the Doctor aren't quite meshing. There's the consistently awful complaints about her appearance for one thing. He's been nasty on occasion, but never quite this vindictive and to have a companion call the Doctor on his less than stellar behaviour and actually storm away from him is something quite refreshing. The Doctor's experiment, letting Clara and her fellow beings decide on what to do about the moon-egg situation, was particularly cruel, even if it was carried out with the best intentions. Clara's final rant at the Doctor allowed Jenna Coleman to continue the fantastic work she's done this series and really let loose.

Leading up to that moment, there were also some nice elements to the moon story. The sequence where the group find the old Mexican mineral mine as well as a nicely cocooned Mexican astronaut was well done. It had a strong Alien feel about it in the way it showed the decay of the station and the noises of the germ spider creature lurking in the shadows. The use of sparse lighting, heavy shadow and the sound effects was effective, producing a good shock with the death of the second British astronaut. This in turn had more than a dash of xenomorph facehugger about it with the acid-like burn in the centre of his chest.

However, once the narrative became more focused on the fact that the moon was an egg, it really lost its way. The first absence of the Doctor meant that his second departure felt less effective and really, we always know the Doctor will be back. Clara's choice and her debate with the Captain was decent if not particularly sharp, but there was little tension there. New Who is too sympathetic to lifeforms accidentally causing destruction for Kill The Moon to suddenly change the pattern. Aside from the regular rogues' gallery, there's rarely any out and out bad guys now. There's always some hidden sympathetic side to them that the Doctor discovers before the episode is out.

The addition of Courtney also didn't help matters. The prospect of Clara having to look after a student in the TARDIS is an amusing one, but unfortunately, the character fell a little flat. The initial 'don't you think I'm special' conversation with the Doctor felt a tad forced and the chemistry between the cast felt off. I can't dismiss the importance of Courtney's inter-generational appeal though; it is good to have characters of various ages appearing in the series, but it didn't work out so well on this occasion.

Kill The Moon was the very definition of a mixed bag, reaching some of the heights that this series has soared to with its character development whilst also hitting a few wrong notes with the story on the way. The next episode looks very promising though and Jen will be with you for the trip on the Orient Express.

- Becky

You can read Jen's review of The Caretaker here.

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TV REVIEW: Doctor Who - The Caretaker

It’s often tricky to keep the pace going in the middle of a series (unless you’re Game of Thrones and you can just kill off six or seven key characters largely on a whim), and unfortunately ‘The Caretaker’ did little to disprove this of Doctor Who.

This rather bland and slow-paced episode was Earth-centric, set almost entirely in the school that Clara (Jenna Coleman) and Danny (Samuel Anderson) teach in. Dismissing Clara for a few days, The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) goes into “deep cover”, disguising himself as the new school caretaker named, of course, John Smith. Refusing to explain himself, he proceeds to crop up at inappropriate and awkward moments, fiddling with the electrics and generally being quite mysterious. Eventually, after a fairly amusing case of mistaken identity as The Doctor tries to guess who Clara’s boyfriend is, we learn that there is an alien residing in the local area, and, naturally, it plans to take over the world. 

Incidentally, said alien is a brand new monster for the show. Named the Skovox Blitzer, it is one of many things in this episode which just doesn’t quite hit the high mark so many other shows in this series have achieved. Quite Dalek like in appearance and attitude (“Problem, solution – destroy!”), it came off as a bit of a budget version of them. It wasn’t really anything we hadn’t seen before, and didn’t feel particularly imaginative. It was also wheeled back off into space and time without much of an explanation of what it was doing in an East London comprehensive in the first place.

This neatly summarises my main issue with it. Much as I love a character episode, and believe me I do, ‘The Caretaker’ felt far too caught up in the triangle between The Doctor, Clara and Danny and not nearly enough on the nearby alien killing machine. We were left feeling distinctly underwhelmed and unsatisfied when the credits rolled, as if we’d missed the scene where we found out about the alien and where it came from and what it was doing and, actually come to think of it, anything at all beyond its name and catchphrase. It seemed particularly unfair and strange to entirely gloss over this extra-terrestrial being when other areas of the episode, such as the argument between The Doctor and Danny, felt so arduous and over-done. 

On the positive side of the spectrum, whilst a bit too much time was spent on it, The Doctor and Clara’s relationship does indeed continue to flourish, and the episode was genuinely laugh out loud amusing in places, such as the discussion about Clara looking nice because she’s had a wash, or the two of them looking the same age. Their dynamic really is working very well, much as the show should now leave it alone as a job well done and show us less of Clara’s, I assume entirely Topshop sponsored, wardrobe, and more aliens. Although that said, I did enjoy the reference to both mine and Jenna Coleman’s home town. Admittedly there perhaps wouldn’t have been the opportunity for an “I thought you said you were from Blackpool?” conversation if they’d been running around a far-off planet dodging lasers instead of all standing around having a chat in a school hall.

Whilst we’re over here on the bright side, we were also treated to another sighting of Missy (Michelle Gomez) – our first in quite a few episodes now. Even more significantly than that, we were introduced to another new character in Chris Addison’s Seb. He seems to be some sort of afterlife-based receptionist, or perhaps secretary to Missy. Either way, he provided another darkly comic element, explaining to one of the Skovox Blitzer’s victims, confused as to how he’d survived, "I was coming to that. I'm afraid you really, rather didn't”.

Ultimately, however, and it seems only fair to quote The Doctor at this point, the show all felt a little too focused on “Boring little humans”, and not nearly enough on all the exciting stuff.

Never fear though, it looks like next week’s is set on the moon! Moons are cool.

Jen
@jenniferklarge

You can check out Becky’s thoughts on Time Heist  here.

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