Reviews – Page 55 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Series 6, Episode 2: Day of the Moon

“You should kill us all on sight!”

I hate having summer colds! Still, I roused myself from my sick bed to watch the exciting conclusion of this opening two parter, which presumably sets out Steve Moffat’s stall for what’s going to happen this series. And while I did enjoy it, I had some – if not too many – reservations.

The pre-title sequence (one of the longest they’ve ever done, I think) immediately plunged us back into X Files territory with its ‘3 months later’ schtick avoiding an easy resolution to last week’s cliffhanger. It’s an audacious thing to attempt, though I had actually become rather tired of its use in American shows; still, along with the overall more adult tone, this season does seem to be aiming for a more American flavour. They certainly managed that, with some epic, if rather gratuitous use of big locations in Arizona and Utah, although I was slightly reminded of the similarly gratuitous extended sequences of Paris in City of Death.

Still, the time jump cleverly played with our perceptions of Mark Sheppard’s usual, more villainous, onscreen persona. We’re used to seeing him as bad guys, so it made it easy to believe that Canton Delaware had been taken over by the Silence. Of course, it was all an elaborate ruse to enable the construction of a totally isolated environment and get him and our heroes inside it with the TARDIS. Nice to hear the mysterious material described as ‘dwarf star alloy’, a nod back to classic serial Warrior’s Gate, but the whole ruse was itself reminiscent of the Doctor’s similar scam in The Invasion of Time – act like a bastard till you’ve built your snoop-proof room, then reveal your actual plan.

Mind you, it’s fair to say that most of the audience watching this probably don’t remember The Invasion of Time in that kind of detail, and if they do, then like me they should probably get more of a life. Probably more recognisable was that shot of the bearded, shackled Doctor surrounded by soldiers – that was almost a direct lift from the beginning of Pierce Brosnan’s last Bond movie, Die Another Day.

Enough with the references though – how well did it work as a conclusion to the story? Well, as predicted, it left as many questions hanging as were actually answered. First of all, if the Silence were the all powerful bad guys of the last season, would they have been defeated so easily? It was a very neat resolution, effectively using them as their own executioners, though it seemed a mite convenient that the injured one in the Area 51 cell should say something, on video, so precisely applicable to the Doctor’s intentions.

It also seemed a little easy that President Nixon became, effectively, the Doctor’s Get Out of Jail Free card. Those sequences were fun – especially the well shot reveal of the Doctor fiddling around inside Apollo 11’s capsule – but I did wonder why the Doctor, having been so reticent to allow Churchill too much knowledge of the TARDIS last year, would so blithely allow one of history’s dodgiest democratic leaders to travel hither and yon so easily. Given that the US were mired in the Cold War and Vietnam at the time, I’d have expected Tricky Dicky to at least try and nab an Owner’s Manual from the TARDIS bookshelves. Lucky the Doctor threw it out because he didn’t agree with it. Also handy that he got Nixon to tape everything in his office…

Stylistically, we were in effective X Files pastiche mode here, never more evidently than in the genuinely creepy sequence of Amy and Canton investigating the deserted orphanage. The message of ‘Get Out’ scrawled in what looked like blood over every surface was unnerving, but not half so unnerving as Kerry Shale’s shellshocked performance as Dr Renfrew. And the flashlight beams in dark, eerie rooms were much in evidence as Amy prowled the building. The concept of the Silence editing themselves out of your memory was used to give some cool reveals, most notably Amy’s discovery that they sleep hanging from ceilings!

At least from Amy’s perspective, the sequence became more and more dreamlike, almost David Lynch in style. Who was that mysterious woman with the eyepatch who stuck her head through a non existent hatch to proclaim “she’s dreaming”? What was going on with the little girl’s room, and that photo of Amy holding a baby? There were no answers here, but I’d say this sequence is pivotal to the story as a whole, and worth watching a few times to pick out clues. I’m going to have another go when I’ve finished writing…

Also in classic X Files mode was the ‘alien abduction’ sequence, with Amy (wearing a dark, Scully-like suit) strapped to a chair while a big light shone in her face and the aliens leaned menacingly towards her. The Silence look like a lot of things – Munch’s The Scream, the Gentlemen from Buffy episode Hush – but here they were most reminiscent of the classic Greys as often depicted in The X Files.

Character wise, we had some nice development here too. I thought Steve Moffat was trying to up Rory’s uncertainty about Amy’s affections again, but it was genuinely heartwarming to learn that the ‘stupid face’ she wanted to see rescuing her from the aliens was Rory after all. And Arthur Darvill played it beautifully, reflecting Rory’s doubts with a genuinely tense repression of emotion. I think I may be falling for him a little bit!

Equally touching was River’s lack of certainty after kissing the Doctor, realising that, from his perspective, it had never happened before. “There’s a first time for everything,” the Doctor gasps, but River’s heartfelt, “and a last time”, made you realise that, from her perspective, this might never happen again. I’ve never read The Time Traveller’s Wife – the novel from which this plot obviously takes its inspiration – but I wonder if it’s this moving.

But mentioning River brings me to possibly the biggest problem I had with this conclusion. The Doctor, while not actually helping, stood back to back with her as she systematically gunned down the Silence, after having admitted earlier that he does sort of think she’s cool for doing that sort of thing. That doesn’t really sit well with my conception of the Doctor – he’s been responsible for plenty of death, but he usually tries to avoid it, and never becomes as directly responsible as that.

Think of McCoy in The Happiness Patrol, taking down a totalitarian regime without firing a shot and actually talking an executioner into laying down his weapon by saying, “look me in the eye. End my life.” Or think of Davison at the end of the otherwise execrable Warriors of the Deep, staring miserably at the carnage and saying , “there should have been another way”. I’m not at all sure I like the idea of the Doctor wanting to resolve a situation like the hero of a Tarantino movie, even if I do like Tarantino movies. It’s not what I want from a character I think of as a man of peace above all; especially after having come up with a neatly conceived twist to defeat the Silence on Earth overall.

Ok, so that was my major gripe. Other than that, I thought it was a pretty good conclusion; more action packed than the first half while still retaining plenty of the creepy atmosphere that marked out this season’s beginning as far less kiddie-orientated than the last.

And those unanswered questions – the Silence may have gone from Earth, but what about the rest of the Universe? We know they have at least access to TARDIS-like technology from them having the same control room seen in the faux TARDIS from last year’s The Lodger – which I think I was the only person not to clock last week!

And given that we’ve been told the Silence don’t actually invent things themselves, where did they get that from? Could it be from the little girl who seems to somehow be at the centre of it all, who can apparently regenerate? Could she be the Doctor’s daughter from the episode of that title back in 2008? The Silence engineered man’s trip to the Moon solely so that humanity would invent them a spacesuit, it seems (which does rather cheapen one of humanity’s proudest achievements). Did they want it to imprison the girl, or did the girl, controlling them, make them get it for her? And is Amy pregnant or what????

So many questions, and while I like Moffat’s Chinese puzzle approach to plotting, it would be nice to get back to some straightforward adventure. Thankfully the show can still do that it seems – next week, for the first time since 1965, it’s pirates!

Series 6, Episode 1: The Impossible Astronaut

“A lot more happened in 1969 than anyone remembers. Human Beings. I thought I’d never get done saving you.”

So, a two parter to open the season, for the first time since Doctor Who returned. With that, a mid season break and a one part finale, Steven Moffat seems to be introducing some much needed variation into the increasingly formulaic structure of Doctor Who seasons. I think that’s a very good thing, as I don’t like knowing what to expect – but it does come with the risk that, as a setup for a second part, the season opener might not be as gripping as in previous years.

And was that the case? Actually, I don’t think so. Certainly The Impossible Astronaut set up many questions without answering them, but that’s the nature of a first episode. Nonetheless, this was gripping, atmospheric stuff, helped to achieve an epic feel by the advantage of some expensive (looking) US locations. And it started with a bang, with the much hyped spoiler about the death of a main character resolved in the first ten minutes. That, more than any other element of this first part, set up the biggest question to be resolved in the second part – if indeed it is. I have the feeling that a lot of the issues set up in this season opener are going to play out over the season as a whole, rather than being sorted out next Saturday.

The answer to the much hyped spoiler/poser about which main character was going to die was a genuine surprise. I’d inferred that it couldn’t be River, as we’ve seen her die already later in her timestream, but it could be either Amy or Rory, with most people’s bets being on Rory. However, with Arthur Darvill’s name now in the opening credits (excellent), this seemed unlikely.

Such was my uncertainty as the Doctor was shot by a mysterious figure in a spacesuit, I actually wondered if the production team had pulled off a major coup and sprung a surprise regeneration on us! I had conflicting feelings about that for a second, until the Doctor was, actually, shot dead. A Doctor, we later discovered, who was from some 200 years into his own future.

Yet again, then, it seems Steve Moffat is going to take us on a ride through ‘wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff’. The Doctor seems decisively dead, but in his current body. Since I can’t imagine that the BBC want to rule out the possibility of any more Doctors after this one, there’s going to have to be a very clever way out of that. After the last couple of years, I trust Steve to be clever enough to make this work, but it might cause a few ructions among those who already feel his plotting is a little… overcomplicated.

That aside though, what of the episode itself? From the outset, it seemed to be taking a different style than last year’s deliberate ‘fairy tale’ approach. We were into dark territory here, reminiscent in many ways of the better years of The X Files. The director obviously picked up this feel from the script, giving a very X Files visual feel to the story – aside from the epic Monument Valley locations, we saw the American corridors of power, spinning tape reels, and most notably, a creepy deserted building with our heroes using flashlights to penetrate the darkness.

There were plenty of memorable images too. The Apollo astronaut rising improbably from a Utah lake was unsettling, if surprisingly reminiscent of the similarly suited and armed Kraal androids from the mostly awful Android Invasion of 1975. But the most disturbing –and X Files like – image was of the new monsters, the Silents (or is it ‘Silence’?). Obviously tied into last year’s unresolved master baddy in some way, they were very creepy to look at, combining the Men in Black suits with a shrivelled, skull-like take on the classic alien ‘grey’ frequently reported in the close encounters that formed the backbone of The X Files.

And the concept that, as soon as you look away from them, you forget they’re there is an inventive twist on the perception-influenced Weeping Angels, another Moffat creation. The scene in the White House restroom as an innocent bystander was wiped out by one (“her name was Joy”) was deliciously creepy as she kept forgetting it was there the instant she turned away – until it vapourised her. Mind you, I suspect the White House cleaning staff may wonder what those peculiar bits are all over the floor…

Ah yes, the White House. The Oval Office set was superb, every bit up to the standard set by shows like The West Wing. I was fairly surprised to learn, from Confidential, that it was built especially for the show – it seemed so good that I had assumed it was a standing set used by various productions. But no, although it seems odd that no such standing set exists. I know there’s one for the House of Commons, I went there once!

Mention of the White House brings me to the guest cast. Since it has returned, one of the standard tropes of Doctor Who has been the episode eulogising a significant historical figure – Shakespeare, Dickens, Churchill, Van Gogh and so on. Richard Nixon is rather harder to eulogise, history having a fairly uniform perception of him as the bad guy. The Doctor did at least mention that he’d done things other than Vietnam and Watergate, at least. Stuart Milligan did a passable imitation of ‘Tricky Dicky’ from under more mounds of latex than Anthony Hopkins had to endure when playing America’s least loved President.

But the story’s not really ‘about’ Nixon. In fact, thus far there is only one fleshed out guest character, but he’s a doozy – the cynical hard bitten former FBI agent Canton Everett Delaware III. It’s almost a stereotypical role – with shades of The X Files again- but Moffat’s script and particularly Mark Sheppard’s performance bring it to life. Sheppard’s a bit of a genre legend, what with his appearances in Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and, yes, The X Files. I did wonder about the logic of bringing a British actor, based in LA, over to Wales to play an American – but it was great to finally see him in Doctor Who, so I could hardly quibble. And as if that wasn’t enough, we got the added bonus of his father, the legendary Morgan Sheppard, playing the character in old age. I loved his line – “I won’t be seeing you again. But you’ll see me.”

Mark Sheppard in Firefly, and Morgan Sheppard in Max Headroom

The dialogue in general had that flair of wit we expect from Moffat, who knows very well how to strike the balance between humour and chills in Doctor Who. Matt Smith was given some marvellous lines, which on a second viewing complement his actually distinct performances as the older and younger Doctors. The older was still somewhat playful – “ I thought wine would taste more like the gums” – but has an almost resigned, doomy air to him. By contrast, the younger one has all of the manic energy we’re sued to, bumping into the invisible TARDIS and memorably referring to River as ‘Mrs Robinson’. (“I hate you.” “No you don’t.”)

The relationship between the Doctor and his companions is now very strained by the secret they have to keep – the secret that they’re all there because of his death. That’s going to have an interesting effect on the drama from hereon in, depending on when he gets to find out. And find out he obviously will, as when he confronted the ‘astronaut’ he was obviously expecting what happened.

So, questions, questions, questions. Who was in the spacesuit that killed the Doctor? Could it be River, who hinted last year that her prison sentence was for killing a much-loved man? Could it be the Doctor himself? And who is River? Since Amy’s pregnant, could she be Amy’s daughter, adrift in time? Or perhaps even Romana in a future incarnation? Knowing Steve Moffat, the answers won’t be nearly so obvious.

Overall then, a good, atmospheric season opener, with a nicely dark new tone along with the customary wit and humour. The involvement of BBC America doesn’t seem to have diluted the show’s Britishness – in fact I wondered how American audiences would take to the Doctor’s assertion that two of the Founding Fathers had fancied him! A pretty good ep – though not as good as last year’s earth-shaking Eleventh Hour – but hard to really say how good until we’ve seen the conclusion. Decisive opinion next week…

The Shock of the New

This week, I have been mostly surrounded by sex.

No, I’m not living in some hedonistic fantasy of nonstop orgies – but my television is. At least that’s what it seems like, as the new TV season gets underway with the return of some old favourites and some distinctly dubious new ones.

To start with, historical rumpy pumpy fest The Tudors is back for its final season. In the mists of time, when this purportedly “85% accurate” portrayal of Henry VIII’s court first started, I theorised that it would have to end when the historical figures in it stopped looking photogenic. Not so – in its increasingly tenuous relationship with actual history, the series has taken the approach of, basically, letting the characters not age at all.

Henry by now should be grossly overweight and diseased; in the show he still looks like, well, Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Which is pretty good for a bloke in the 16th century who’s over 50 years old. Granted, they’ve let Jonathan grow his hair a bit longer and have a slightly bushier beard, but that’s it as far as aging goes. And as to the gross obesity, this Henry still appears to go to the Tudor equivalent of the gym every day, judging by his still frequent sex scenes.

The aforementioned sex is now with wife number 5, Catherine Howard. As portrayed by Tamzin Merchant, Catherine, it seems, was some kind of a giggling imbecile. All right, I know she really was only 17 years old, but she can’t have been this dense, surely? Meanwhile, she’s been getting flirty looks from pretty young courtier Thomas Culpeper (hobbies: rape and murder). This already doesn’t look like it’s going to end well – and since we’ve got one more wife to cram in by the end of the season, even if you don’t know the real facts you can probably work out that it’s not if Catherine’s going to end up on the block, it’s when.

Meanwhile, the Seymour clan is now entirely represented by ex cast members of Hollyoaks – namely Max Brown and Andy McNair as Edward and Thomas Seymour. Henry Cavill, gamely sporting a bigger beard than Henry’s, is still around as Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. But for my money, the cheesy drama lacks something cast wise compared with previous years when we had the likes of Sam Neill, Jeremy Northam, Peter O’Toole and Max von Sydow hamming it up as caricatures of real historical figures. Still, it remains watchable, and will hopefully remain close enough to real history for Henry to actually die on schedule – rather than, say, living on to steal a Nazi Enigma machine for Winston Churchill.

Fortunately for fans of realism, Skins was back too. Oh, all right, not actual realism – the show’s defenders refer to it being a “hyper-real” portrait of contemporary teenage life. Nonetheless, in the past it’s had endearing characters and veered unstably from genuinely moving drama to ill-considered base comedy. But it’s always been watchable, and the gimmick of changing the entire cast every two years – when the teenagers finish their A Levels and move off into the real world – has kept it pretty fresh.

So, this year, we get to meet teenage gang number 3 – and a pretty likeable bunch they are on first impressions. I’m sure they’ll end up having just as much naughty fun as the previous gangs, but in a week of naughtiness, this was a surprisingly low key season opener. Eschewing the full on shagging, drug use and, er, bottom tattoos of previous cast introductions, this first episode focussed mainly on androgynous misfit Franky Fitzgerald, engagingly incarnated by Dakota Blue Richards out of that dull Philip Pullman film. Franky has just moved to Bristol after a traumatic time in Oxford; unwisely, she makes an enemy of the nastiest girl in school, and soon enough unflattering Facebook pictures are popping up all over the walls. Franky doesn’t like this, so she’s off to have some fun with her gun…

The new guys…

It’s actually nice that it looks like this season’s going to focus a bit more on the misfits rather than the implausibly good-looking, anarchic heroes of previous casts – remember Nicholas Hoult’s Tony, or Jack O’Connell’s Cook? There’s an oddball guy who spouts pretentious nonsense at Franky while she’s trying to concentrate on shooting things, and he’s nice to look at but on limited evidence not the best of actors. But this first episode mostly served to introduce Franky, who eventually ended up doing a bit of moonlit swimming with fellow misfits Rich, Alo and Grace. Rich is an old-fashioned metalhead – I didn’t know there were any of those left – who I look forward to seeing a bit more of, while Alo is an engaging, if distinctly unattractive redhead boy who seems to live in a van with some weed and a stack of porn. Grace was less of a misfit, but is obviously going to be faced with the dilemma of choosing between the cool girls and the oddballs she actually likes.

As a season opener, it’s not going to grab viewers like the previous ones did – the very first episode in particular springs to mind, which had droolworthy shots of Nicholas Hoult in his underpants, copious drug usage, a house trashing party and ultimately a stolen Mercedes sliding into a Bristol lake. But I already like this new gang more than the second cast, who never engaged me as much as the first. With parental/teacher guest appearances already from the likes of Gordon Kennedy and John Sessions, this year looks promising.

But if you’re aching with nostalgia for the original characters and that very first episode, you can have a look at MTV’s virtual shot for shot remake of it, relocated to “somewhere on the North American continent”. Oh all right, it’s Vancouver again, but as usual they’re pretending it’s somewhere in the United States.

Actually, the American Skins is a little hard to fathom – as it seems to have pretty much just recycled the script of the British one, the reasons for remaking it seem sketchy at best. Still, I remember thinking the same about the American Queer as Folk, until it ran out of British episodes to remake and became an entity of its own – at that point it became a genuinely good drama, and maybe this will too, when it finds its own identity.

Spot the difference – Brits (left), Americans (right).

It hasn’t yet though, and for anyone familiar with the British version, it’s hard to shake your memories of the ‘real’ cast. Tony is now the somewhat less likeable James Newman, Sid (called Stanley in this version) is played by shaggy haired Daniel Flaherty, who lacks Mike Bailey’s gauche charm, and worst of all Maxxie has been replaced by a lesbian cheerleader, Tea, who has implausibly retained most of the same lines.

That last change is symptomatic of the apparently watered down approach of the US version – is it because even progressive American teenagers find a gay woman less threatening than a gay man? And the swearing’s been watered down too – there were two uses of the word ‘fuck’, but each was bleeped (although I gather some networks leave the dialogue uncensored).

Because we’re so used to seeing slews of light drama shows from the US featuring groups of angst-ridden, implausibly good-looking teenagers – the very thing the original Skins was trying to be the antithesis of – what this ends up feeling like is a slightly more risque version of The OC, with worse weather. But it’s still too near the knuckle for US moral guardians the Parents’ Television Council (a group who make Mary Whitehouse look like Linda Lovelace). As soon as the first episode was finished (and quite possibly without actually watching it), they were attacking MTV for the exploitative nature of the drama, and actually tried to file charges of child pornography with the Department of Justice. Which should help the ratings no end, I imagine. Heaven knows what they’d have made of the British version.

And Heaven knows what they’d make of Channel 4’s new advice/documentary show, The Joy of Teen Sex. Shakily walking a tightrope between information and exploitation, this purports to be an investigation into what British teenagers are really doing sexually, interspersed with practical sexual advice from the likes of James Corden’s sister. So, this week, we got an expose of the practice of “vagazzling” (sticking fake jewellery around one’s shaven vagina, for reasons that are hard to fathom), some eye watering close up photos of sexually transmitted diseases (to encourage the use of contraception, naturally), and a queue of sexually dysfunctional kids seeking advice.

A girl and her mother dropped in for an encounter session to try and curb the girl’s promiscuity, which of course ended in much crying and hugging. Meanwhile, a teenage drag queen tried to conquer his fear of being the receiver of anal sex, leading to very anatomically detailed descriptions of how exactly that works – though for some reason, nobody asked if he’d just considered being a top instead. And an inexperienced lesbian had some questions about the best ways to pleasure another girl.

As sage advice was given out, and the teenagers looked suitably appreciative, said advice was shown in reconstruction by various (far better looking) actors. Anyone getting their jollies from this, however, would soon be put off when the next close up of a disease popped up – this week, a very close look at a visibly uncomfortable young man with a bump in his scrotum.

It’s hard to know what to make of The Joy of Teen Sex. Is it information, or titillation? It seems to have the best intentions, but this kind of show always attracts viewers for quite the wrong reasons. And it’s made with the kind of earnest, patronising tone that TV producers always seem to come up with when trying to get “down with the kids”. With only four episodes, it’s unlikely to be around long enough for anyone to take too much offence. I expect somebody will, though.

Still, one show that wasn’t reeking with hormones this week was the return of BBC3’s sublime Being Human. Well, unless said hormones were the result of masses of violence being perpetrated by vampires or werewolves.

Being Human has, like Misfits, now been saddled with the burden of being a cult hit, with all the expectations that that comes with. So the third season has a lot of work to do, particularly to try and recapture the nice balance of humour and horror that the first season had and the second season rather lost.

It’s hard to say, from the first episode, whether it has. A move from Bristol to Barry Island has certainly changed the feel of the show’s locations, and the gang’s new digs – an old B & B – seem like a down at heel version of Angel’s Hyperion Hotel. And there was plenty of darkness in the subplot of a group of insalubrious vampires (led by a bleach haired and rather terrifying Paul Kaye) kidnapping werewolves for gladiatorial fights with humans. Oddly, they were defeated by stern werewolf patriarch Robson Green and his son – played by This Is England’s Michael Socha, who looks disconcertingly like a male version of his sister Lauren, who plays Kelly in Misfits.

Spot the difference 2 – Michael (left), Lauren (right)

But there was fun to be had, as George, looking for an unobtrusive forest glade in which to transform into a wolf, inadvertently got himself arrested for dogging (oddly appropriate, that). The presence of Torchwood’s Kai Owen as the genial swinger in charge of the whole thing led to a certain amount of confusion as to which cult show I was actually watching, but the subplot led to a funny resolution as Nina turned up to extricate George from the cells before he transformed and ripped Kai to shreds. “He’s got a medical condition”, she stammered, trying to resist her own transformation and generally looking as mental as she claimed George to be. Apparently somewhat unperceptive, the cops took her at her word.

But the heart of this season opener was Mitchell’s quest into the afterlife to retrieve Annie, condemned to limbo at the end of the last season. This ended up as a sort of quest for redemption, as mysterious spirit Lia (a sublime Lacey Turner) took Mitchell on an extended tour of some of his greatest hits of wrongdoing since he became a vampire.

I’m not sure that continually exploring the mythos of the show does it any favours – the tantalising hints as to the nature of the afterlife in previous episodes are better left for the viewer to imagine, rather than being actually shown to us. And Mitchell’s homicidal past might also be best left to the imagination – nothing visual is likely to live up to what we’ve imagined.

Be that as it may, though, Annie’s back and the gang is back together. And Mitchell’s trip left us with some intriguing hints as to where the show’s going this year – it looks like he’s going to end up romantically linked with Annie ( I’m finding it hard to keep track of whether she’s corporeal enough to touch things, but she can still make tea). And there’s obviously some vampire/werewolf hostilities on the horizon. Could be good, and hopefully better than the similarly themed Underworld.

With all that sex and violence filling the small screen, the return of Top Gear actually seemed to inject some sanity into the week. Sanity in the sense of dropping a VW Beetle out of a plane from a mile up, to see if a Porsche 911 GT can beat it to the impact point from a mile away on the ground. It was business as usual for Jeremy, Richard and James, although James had the unusual duty of test driving a very fast car – in this case the new V8 Ariel Atom. Top Gear has become as comfortably familiar as a pair of old slippers, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

With such a glut of new shows, it looks like I’m going to be spending more time in watching the telly for the next couple of months – hopefully I’ll get to write on this blog a bit more frequently! In the mean time, if you’re after yet more sex, apparently Channel 5 have adopted the not at all gimmicky approach of asking former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to investigate the world of pornography (presumably not on expenses). The mind boggles…

The most wonderful time of the year

“Everything has to end some time. Otherwise, nothing would ever get started.”

Ah, Christmas. The time of year which, for the British at least, is sacrosanct. It has to be absolutely perfect – the tree, the presents, the family gathered together in some mythically perfect pseudo Charles Dickens fantasy of non existent Victoriana. To make Christmas perfect, the British will go through anything – witness the savage consumer competitiveness of Christmas shopping, the weeping and rending of garments as the snow disrupted everyone’s plans for this to be ‘the best Christmas ever’. I sometimes wonder if, put in the position of having to, the British would actually kill to make it the best Christmas ever, as if the holiday was capable of improving its Christmassiness indefinitely, its zenith ultimately unattainable yet tantalisingly in sight. All of which may make me seem a little, perhaps, like that ultimate Christmas monster, Ebenezer Scrooge.

Which brings me neatly to this year’s festive Doctor Who offering, the derivatively titled and plotted A Christmas Carol. Not that the qualifying adverb ‘derivatively’ means it wasn’t a lot of fun. It was as intricately plotted as you’d expect from a Steven Moffat script, making full use of the show’s intrinsic timey-wimeyness to put a fairly novel spin on the Charles Dickens classic.

This meant there were moments when the use of the time travel concept led to some trademark Moffat jaw dropping moments. I absolutely loved the moment when the Doctor popped out of Sardick’s office to suddenly appear in the home movie he shot decades ago. The story also brilliantly subverted your expectations, based on the Dickens original, of how the Ghost of Christmas Future would work. “Are you going to show me that I die alone and unloved?” the elderly Sardick sneers, which is exactly what Dickens’ ghost does to Scrooge. “Everybody does.” And then we see that, for the boy Sardick, the present we’re seeing is a future he’s seeing. Mind warping stuff, for a family Christmas show on at six in the evening.

It was a show full of brilliant concepts, realised with some stunning visuals from the Mill. A planet covered in ice clouds, through which swarm beautiful fish, its climate tamed by the weather machine that was controlled by Scrooge-lite Kazran Sardick. Which also led to the fan-baiting dialogue about the machine’s ‘isomorphic’ controls – a claim the Doctor made for the TARDIS console in 1976’s Pyramids of Mars. “There’s no such thing!” exclaimed the Doctor, fiddling with the machine to comical effect. This probably made the hackles rise for many an earnest, humourless fanboy – and I dread to think how much they frowned when Sardick hugging his younger self failed to yield the expected explosion from ‘shorting out the time differential’ (1983’s Mawdryn Undead, and 2005’s Father’s Day, for that matter).

All of which, besides being a laugh for fans who don’t take the show as seriously as all that, underlined the point that a Doctor Who Christmas special doesn’t really have the same agenda as a normal episode. It’s a bit of fun, a romp, with a yuletide flavour. Po-faced fanboys shouldn’t expect a serious exploration of the show’s labyrinthine, already inconsistent continuity. Particularly not from the man who coined the scientific phrase, “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.”

And a fun romp it indubitably was. We had some well-realised set pieces – who’d ever have thought you could have a terrifying shark attack in the safety of your own bedroom? Or a sleigh ride through the clouds with the aforementioned shark in place of the traditional reindeer? It’s a mark of the continuously improving CGI from the Mill that these looked as good as they did, though I think we’re still some way off from when CG on this budget looks indistinguishable from the real.

A fairly small cast also shone, giving Moffat’s sparkling dialogue the delivery it deserved. Matt Smith, in particular, is fast becoming one of my favourite Doctors ever, with his weird physicality and studied eccentricities. He got some terrific dialogue with which to emphasise this, unsurprising from the man who used to write Press Gang and Coupling. “That’s got me written all over it! Well, it will have me written all over it, with a crayon and enough time…” Or “You know what boys say to fear, don’t you? ‘Mummy’.” All of which delivered at breakneck speed, as though Smith’s Doctor is continually thinking of something new before he’s finished vocalising what he’s already thought.

He also got some memorable philosophical sound bites, in keeping with a character who, in 1969, told us “Logic, my dear Zoe, merely allows one to be wrong with authority,” and countless others. Besides the line quoted at the beginning of this review, he memorably described Christmas, and Sardick, as “Halfway out of the dark…” and best of all, said “in 900 years of travelling through time and space, I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important!” Which immediately recalled, for me, Dr Stephen Daker’s plaintive enquiry to a ruthless corporate shark in 1988’s A Very Peculiar Practice – “Isn’t everybody important?” Dr Stephen Daker was, of course, portrayed by Peter Davison.

Michael Gambon was, unsurprisingly, brilliant as Sardick. In keeping with some fairly emotionally complex writing, he made someone who initially appeared to be a one-dimensional monster increasingly layered and full of the contradictions feelings give to people. The character was also well-served by a great performance from his twelve-year-old counterpart, whose name I didn’t catch but who gave a more charming performance than Laurence Belcher as the teenage Sardick. Not that Belcher was bad – and very nice to look at – but the boy got all the best lines and scenes.

Katharine Jenkins was also surprisingly good, considering that, as an opera singer, she’s not exactly experienced at acting. Her character, Abigail, didn’t get that much to do, but great use was made of her voice in a beautiful musical moment as she sang to the storm to calm the clouds. What a great concept! It’ll be another memorable track on Murray Gold’s next soundtrack CD – although the music may generally be better remembered than the dialogue, considering that the dialogue could often barely be heard over the score. Sweeping and cinematic is fine, but that sound mix still isn’t right, and I think it’s probably worse if you’re not watching on a 5.1 surround system.

With Amy and Rory largely sidelined, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill managed to still give us some memorable – though mostly comic – moments. The judicious reuse of two of their more incongruous costumes from the previous series was a hoot, and I couldn’t help but what wonder what kind of kinky role play would result from a scantily clad policewoman meeting a Roman centurion!

With carol singing, a planet that seemed to be modelled from idealised Victoriana, and the conceit of the Doctor not only coming down the chimney but appearing at every Christmas Eve from then on, it certainly matched Steve Moffat’s promise to be ‘”the most Christmassy episode ever”. And, as I alluded to in my introduction, this could well prove to be an insurmountable challenge. If each year’s festive offering has to be “more Christmassy” than the last, where can next year’s go? Where will it end? The logical extrapolation is an hour of television in which the TARDIS constantly circles a giant Christmas tree, chasing a reindeer driven sleigh and dodging friendly giant snowmen. Christmassy, to be sure, but less than thrilling.

I’m carping – a little – because, while the episode was a lot of fun, and had some dramatic and scientific concepts that boggled the mind, it left me, in the end, curiously unmoved. And that, I think, was because it was obviously trying so hard to be moving. There’s a lot of criticism one can level at Russell T Davies’ Christmas episodes – and God knows I have – but he did genuinely know how to make a moment tug at the heart. The emotional moments here seemed so dramatically contrived that I could actually see the strings trying to do that, and when I can see the emotional manipulation at work, it just doesn’t have any effect on me. I realise that, for a lot of others, it worked very well, but maybe I’m too much of a cynic. Maybe I need my own Ghost of Christmas Past to visit…

Still, another good effort from Mr Moffat, with Matt Smith as excellent as ever, and the glimpses of the series to come were tantalising. The ‘Next Year’ trailer did seem to focus very heavily on the Doctor’s much publicised trip to the USA, but it still looks plenty exciting. Sitting at the President’s desk in the Oval Office, meeting X Files style aliens, wearing a stetson – “stetsons are cool” – and growing a beard a la Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day. Though that last did make me wonder when the Doctor actually finds time to shave, given that he’s always immaculately clean shaven. I think I’d always assumed he just didn’t grow facial hair! There’s the po faced fanboy inside me coming out…

Before I end this – as usual – lengthy piece, mention should be made of this year’s other great science fantasy festive special. Hastily commissioned but steeped in the show’s usual impudent quality, the Christmas episode of Misfits was a thing of wonder. It’s at the other end of the family friendly scale from Doctor Who, but how can you not love a Christmas special which includes the lines “Fuck me, Santa!” and “I’m going to kill Jesus.”? The second series of Misfits has built beautifully on the first, enlarging a concept that seems initially VERY silly – young offenders gain superpowers after a mysterious storm – into a show that incorporates imagination, drama and humour. If you haven’t seen the Christmas episode, I’d urge you to seek it out on 4OD. Just beware – you shouldn’t watch it with granny and the kids like you can with Doctor Who!

Lucas, Sarah and Jo

“Do you have a hobby?” the spiky haired, unconvincingly American hacker girl asked Lucas in Spooks this week. Of course he does – Lucas’ hobby is brooding. Although he also enjoys scowling, and thumping the steering wheel of his car.

Reliably barmy as usual, this week’s episode saw a group of cyber terrorists from the Russian and Chinese secret services compromise the Grid. This caused Ruth’s usual pinched frown to virtually collapse in on itself as she tried to communicate this information to Harry without the Cybermen seeing. The voyeurs themselves were based in the usual empty high rise office with full length windows that nobody looks out of. Except Lucas when he’s brooding. Quite why Section D doesn’t maintain a special database of empty offices with big windows I have no idea. Perhaps because it would make the episodes shorter?

This season, Lucas has more than usual to brood about. After three years on the show, he’s been confronted by a shifty looking Iain Glen, who knows his secret identity. Apparently, before he was Lucas North, he was Guy of Gisburne. Or something. Anyway, in order to prevent this becoming public knowledge, Lucas has framed an office junior at MI5 and allowed the aforementioned hacker girl to bleed to death so she didn’t spill the beans about the Albany file that Glen is so keen to get his hands on. But he’s getting his hands on it from Malcolm! Yes, the least cool and yet most lovable techie the series ever had has come back to hint that he knows more than we thought he did. Or something. Which leaves me torn between wanting him back on the grid full time, or sticking with the less lovable but much prettier Tariq.

Also in the pretty camp is new boy Dimitri, played by Max Brown. You can tell Max is quite a talent from his background in Hollyoaks. But he is nice to look at, and sensibly, the writers don’t give him much to say. His usual function is to defuse bombs, which he seems to have done in every episode he’s been in. So, logically, this week he was practicing defusing bombs. With an actual bomb. As you do. Still, this came in handy when the cyber freaks locked the Grid down and Dimitri was able to blow his way out. Or something.

Without even a brief pause for the audience to figure out how he did it, Harry was onto the cyber agents in a flash, displaying the customary cool that’s left him the only original cast member standing. But as yet, he knows nothing about Lucas’ treachery, all for the love of Laila Rouass, with whom he shares no chemistry whatsoever. The flaringly nonsensical and yet compellingly watchable saga continues next week…

Meanwhile Laila Rouass was also busy as an equally treacherous UNIT Colonel in this week’s guiltily enjoyable Sarah Jane Adventures. This series has gone from strength to strength, with some intelligent, perceptive writing acted by a talented cast who deserve to go on to bigger things.

Joe Lidster’s season opener The Nightmare Man was one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever seen in children’s television, bolting its dream haunting bogeyman (played with astounding creepiness by Julian Bleach) onto a character heavy story that directly and indirectly summed up the tumultuous changes when children grow up and leave the nest. Luke, played by the sweet Tommy Knight, was written out as he went off to uni, and the script cleverly drew on his, his friends’ and Sarah Jane’s fears to enhance an ethereal, Neil Gaiman like tale of a creature who wants to destroy the world’s dreams. One of the most talented writers working on the show, Lidster too deserves to go on to bigger things.

After this haunting, Sapphire and Steel like opener, Phil Ford’s follow up Vault of Secrets was a broadbrush comedy romp that felt far less sophisticated, with aliens, android Men in Black and a comedy UFO group ‘amusingly’ called BURPSS. Still, it was just a brief interlude before the story all fans were talking about – Russell T Davies’ Death of the Doctor. (Not The Death of Doctor Who – that was episode 5 of 1965 serial The Chase).

So, how would new boy Matt Smith bond with Sarah Jane, who’d already forged a real chemistry with David Tennant? In order to make it even more challenging, Russell upped the ante by bringing in yet another old companion – none other than the much loved Jo Grant, played by the incomparable Katy Manning.

As makes sense for a show revolving around one of the Doctor’s companions, it was the companions themselves who had the lion’s share of the action – the Doctor didn’t even show up until the end of part one! That gave Katy Manning the chance to… well, be Katy Manning. Scattily running around spouting enthusiastic nonsense while knocking things over, it didn’t seem like there was much actual ‘acting’ involved. It was a joy to see Katy again, and she managed to perfectly upstage Lis Sladen at the funeral, leaving her gaping speechlessly. Although, a more cruel mind than mine might have assumed Sarah Jane was simply jealous at the far larger amount of work Jo had had done to her face.

The Doctor noticed too. “You look like you’ve been baked,” he cried, with his usual marvellous lack of tact. Matt was as excellent as ever, and if anything forged a better chemistry with Jo than he did with Sarah Jane. Fittingly, the script allowed Jo the most screen time with him, and while it was basically a retread of the similar scenes involving Sarah Jane in 2006’s School Reunion, the interplay between Matt and Katy did bring a lump to the throat.

The Doctor was also more satisfactorily involved in resolving the plot than he was in his previous Sarah Jane appearance, where he just ran about and frowned a lot while caught in a parallel timeline. This time, it was a joint effort – the Doctor, Sarah Jane and Jo were all instrumental in defeating the less than convincing giant vultures’ plan to break into the TARDIS.

And what a joy to see so many and such well-chosen flashbacks. Hopefully the kids of today are already asking their mummies and daddies about Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. It was of course, a typical Russell tear-jerking stunt, and you could say that there were, well, rather too many flashbacks, actually. But it’s hard to carp about that when the resolution of the plot depends on an overload of memories. And I can forgive Russell – just – for having Jo officially remember her visit to Karfel as referred to in that 1985 trash heap of a story, Timelash.

But, as I say, a romp and a good tearjerker. As a piece of writing, it wasn’t up there with Joe Lidster’s opener, but as a fanboy wet dream it was second to none. The cherry on top was Sarah Jane’s final eulogy to every Earth based companion still – in the show’s continuity at least – alive and kicking. Especially affecting were the references to Harry Sullivan and Ben Jackson, both sadly no longer with us in real life.

So, typically of Russell, the tale was “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. But good fun, nonetheless. I can’t help feeling that the next three stories will have very hard work not seeming like an anticlimax. Perhaps Sarah should meet Lucas North and Harry Pearce? Or something…

Series 5, Episode 13: The Big Bang

“Nothing is ever forgotten. Not really.”

Phew. All week long, I’ve been saying “I do hope it doesn’t all turn out to be Amy’s dream”. Yet in the end , that was exactly what it was. The entire universe is now Amy’s dream. And, typically for Steven Moffat, a concept that should have been a total copout was the most cleverly worked out solution to the unfathomably complex puzzle box of a plot he’d been constructing since The Eleventh Hour.

Having seemingly written himself into a corner the likes of which even a Davies Ex Machina wouldn’t get him out of, Moffat instead presented, step by step, a perfectly logical (if mindwarping) series of temporal paradoxes which neatly tied the whole thing up, without resorting to quasi-magical solutions. Time, after all, is what the show is all about, and Moffat has been the writer who has really addressed it in previous scripts like Blink and The Girl in the Fireplace. It doesn’t hurt that he can deal with the complexities of time travel while also telling a thrilling story populated by rounded characters that we actually care about.

Of course, there were really only four characters in this episode, but they’re the ones whose emotional journey we’ve been following all season. In a lovely full circle back to the beginning of the series, we were back with nine year old Amy in her bedroom, just where the story began. All a dream, it seemed. But no. As time started to take a different path, we saw a creepily different world, a world that, it soon became clear, was the only one left in the universe.

Amy’s teacher’s uncomprehending declaration, “there’s no such thing as stars” sent a chill down my spine – a fundamentally scary concept that showed the universe to be all wrong. And as Amy explored the national museum that formed the bulk of the episode’s setting, we saw other weird little hints – African penguins, dinosaurs in the Arctic. As the post it notes guided Amy towards the Pandorica and it then opened to reveal the Amy we knew, I think I actually heard my friend James’ brain implode.

And plastic Rory was still with us. I’m now even more in love with Rory than I was before, after his beautifully romantic decision to stay guarding the Pandorica, and Amy, for two thousand years. The fact that he was still, indisputably, Rory despite being an Auton duplicate was the first hint we had that Amy could be the one who could reshape reality – his personality had been taken from her head by the Nestenes, and they’d got more than they bargained for. Still, I did also chuckle at River Song’s admission that she once dated a Nestene replica and it was never dull because of the interchangeable heads!

Oh yes, River Song. You could see it as a bit of a copout that she didn’t explode with the TARDIS – that was an awfully convenient time loop. Still, it’s in keeping with the nature of the show that the TARDIS would have that kind of safety feature, and it does fit in with the story’s exploitation of the possibilities of time travel. And anything that keeps River around is a good thing, because it’s plain her story is far from over. In keeping with her original appearance in Silence in the Library, her story with the Doctor is one totally out of chronological sequence; from his point of view, the first time they met was when she died, and from hers she always knows what the future holds for the Doctor – because she’s already seen it. It’s a neat idea for a continuing plot thread, and Alex Kingston is great fun as the flamboyant femme fatale (if such she is). According to her, the Doctor will soon meet her for – from her point of view – the first time. I’m looking forward to it.

And so to the Doctor himself. Matt Smith has been an absolute revelation this season; I knew he was a good actor from shows like Party Animals and The Ruby in the Smoke. But he’s been amazing as the Doctor, building a character who’s much more like the traditional Time Lord we knew from the original series than the confident, super cool Doctor of David Tennant. With the sort of deceptive bumbling reminiscent of Patrick Troughton and the alien qualities of Tom Baker, he’s been consistently excellent – funny, charismatic, and occasionally scary.

And now heartbreakingly brave, as he refused to be put off by even his own apparent death at the stick of a petrified Dalek. Then flying off in the Pandorica itself to collide with the explosion and, as he put it, “reboot the universe” (basically, turning it off and on again). It’s not the first time he’s sacrificed himself to save the entre universe – the Fourth Doctor died under just those circumstances, in the similarly mind boggling story Logopolis. But this time the stakes seemed higher somehow. Not just the whole of existence was at stake, but so were the characters we’d come to care about – a fact that Rory forcibly reminded the Doctor of by punching him in the mouth!

OK, so the Pandorica’s hitherto unrevealed ability to restore patterns and then actually fly is a bit of a deus ex machina, despite that I’d like to think Moffat avoids the pitfalls of Russell T Davies’ writing. But it’s really no more than a McGuffin; a plot device that enables the Doctor to sacrifice himself and Amy to rebuild the universe. As the Doctor careered back through his personal time stream, I was pleased to see the attention to detail that had gone into seeding the clues into previous episodes of the season – none more so than his unexpected appearance, wearing his jacket, in Flesh and Stone. That one I actually spotted, and maintained it to be part of the plan even when friends said the appearance of the jacket (lost to the Angels in a previous scene) was just a continuity error.

So, having rebuilt the universe, Amy’s saved the day again. But I can’t find it in myself to object – the Doctor was every bit as instrumental, and ultimately, she brought him back too. The wedding was a perfect happy ending – Amy ended up with Rory no matter how much she fancied the Doctor. Probably a good thing too – one of the things I’m glad we lost with Russell T Davies was the Doctor-companion relationship always having to be a pseudo-romantic one. And the TARDIS really is, as Steve Moffat no doubt noticed years ago, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”. Its triumphant appearance at Amy’s wedding reception was just one of many moments that brought a few tears to my eyes. As was the marvellous final farewell, Amy and Rory waving goodbye to Earth and off to new adventures with the Doctor. It’s great that, for the first time since Rose Tyler, we’ve got a TARDIS crew that’s stayed together for more than one season.

The Big Bang, then, was everything the title promised (except, thankfully, in the sexual sense!). A thrilling season finale that cleverly used the potential of time travel as the central tenet of the series, with witty dialogue, a few monsters, and a clever and honest resolution to an incredibly complex plot. I know the change in the show’s direction hasn’t been to everyone’s liking, but for me, Steven Moffat has brought back a real feeling of magic to a show that had become jaded, and even in four years overburdened by its own legend. And the plot still isn’t fully resolved. Who was really behind it? Who was the mysterious, malevolent voice declaring that “silence must fall”? For the first time since the show returned, there’s a real sense of a plan that extends further than just the end of the season itself. I can’t wait for Christmas!

Series 5, Episode 12: The Pandorica Opens

“Everything that’s ever hated you is coming here tonight.”

Wow. That was simultaneously riveting, exciting, and really intricately plotted. In fact, we can now finally see all the intricate plotting throughout the whole season beginning to pay off. It also fulfilled the now obligatory requirement for a season ending to be massively spectacular, but unlike some of the season finales of the past, it didn’t provide spectacle at the expense of plot or intelligence. And that has to be the best cliffhanger the show has ever done!

A massive pre-credits sequence – possibly the longest ever – tied the season together in a way that’s never been done before, by bringing back most of the really memorable characters we’ve met as the year has progressed. Van Gogh’s still mad, Churchill’s still huge, and River Song’s still… well, still River Song. I wasn’t entirely surprised that so much of the season finale revolved around her (even without the spoilery revelation from Doctor Who Magazine that she was in it). Steve Moffat (her creator, after all) obviously sees her as his version of Captain Jack Harkness; she’s the larger than life occasional companion who pops up at crucial points, with a flamboyant personality and dress sense to match. Alex Kingston was great as ever, though I suspect some fans will find the character’s over-the-top personality and ‘Hello sweetie’ catchphrase a bit much to take.

And Rory was back too! There are plenty of Rory-haters out there, but I was over the moon to see Arthur Darvill, if not entirely surprised. OK, so he turned out to be an Auton replica like all the Romans, but any Rory is better than no Rory. And he got that cracking scene with Matt Smith as the Doctor failed to notice that his return was anything unusual; a funny scene comically timed to perfection by both actors. Not to mention the heartbreaking moment when Amy remembered him just as he unwillingly shot her, the first shock in an exponentially increasing series of them that led to THAT cliff-hanger…

But it was still a classic Who story, and like every classic Who story, it had monsters. Lots of them, in fact. When the Daleks faced off against the Cybermen at the end of season two, it was great fun but seemed like, in the words of the lamented Craig Hinton, fanwank. But here, Steve Moffat managed to pull off bringing back virtually every opponent the Doctor has faced since the series returned, and not only did it seem credible and entertaining, but it was also only a part of a massively complex plot. I’d had forebodings since the Daleks’ makeover that the finale would yet again revolve around them; but while they were back, so was everyone else, and the Daleks were just one element of a massive alien alliance that was itself not the main villain of the piece.

Having the monsters involved more peripherally meant they could have some fun doing unusual things with them, too. That whole sequence with the dismembered Cyberman managed to be both memorably gruesome and blackly funny. The writhing metal tentacles of the dismembered Cyber-head as it crawled towards Amy managed to be reminiscent of Tetsuo the Iron Man and John Carpenter’s The Thing, and as it then popped the head back onto its damaged body, I was reminded of nothing so much as the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact. That struck me as a pretty fair steal, given that the Borg have always seemed like ripoffs of the Cybermen in the first place!

In keeping with a new style of production team, the finale also has, initially, a very unusual setting. Since the show returned, each increasingly epic finale has taken place either on contemporary Earth or the far future. Here we had our heroes roaming around Roman Britain, itself a key piece of the puzzle that’s been building all season. And the Pandorica itself was under Stonehenge – a nice use of a British location rather more interesting than, say, Canary Wharf. As the Doctor stalked around what seemed to be a very large version of the puzzle box from Hellraiser, muttering about the massively destructive individual contained therein, I began to guess that the only messianic/destructive creature to live up to that description was the Doctor himself. Mind you, I’d thought that, in keeping with the theme of disjointed time throughout the season, it would be a future version of the Doctor already imprisoned. It was a good bit of misdirection in the script to give you the hint that the Doctor was inside and then reveal at the end that he would be – just not yet.

A similar bit of misdirection was the rousing scene in which the Doctor, armed only with a transmitter, seemingly sees off a massive fleet of spaceships belonging to all his greatest enemies. Matt Smith played it well, going in an instant from his ‘young fogey’ persona to a believably godlike, ancient alien. It was a scene that almost felt like it was written for David Tennant, so reminiscent was it of Russell T Davies’ style, and yet it turned out to be more sleight of hand from Mr Moffat. The aliens weren’t leaving because of their terror of the Doctor, as they would have done in previous seasons – the Doctor, it turned out, was exactly where they wanted him.

Meanwhile, River was taken by an increasingly shaky TARDIS to the fateful date of 26 June 2010, and all the pieces of the puzzle started to slot into place. As the script juxtaposed the increasing peril of River in the about-to-explode TARDIS with the Doctor being clamped into the Pandorica and Rory cradling Amy’s (apparently) lifeless body, some excellent direction skilfully ramped up the tension. The pacing of this episode was superb, with revelation after revelation building to a massive climax. The alien alliance think the Doctor is responsible for the cracks, and the impending erasure of the universe from history. But it looks like they’re wrong, and they’ve just caged up the only being who can stop it. As the familiar crack appears yet again, this time in the screen of the TARDIS, is the malevolent voice croaking “silence must fall” the real villain? Then just who is it?

Steven Moffat has always been excellent at writing very complex, deceptive scripts that misdirect the viewer with the skill of an excellent magician. Even when he was writing Press Gang, his very first TV show, that was evident. But given the whole of space and time to play with, he’s taken intricate, puzzle-piece plotting to a new level. This episode showed the stakes he’d been hinting at throughout the season – not just the destruction of the entire universe, but its, and all other universes’, erasure from time entirely. The stakes have never been so high in Doctor Who, and we still don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. But with this episode climaxing with the apparent death of two of the main characters, the perpetual imprisonment of the other and the apparent destruction of all universes and time itself, you have to admit that’s one hell of a “how’s he going to write his way out of that?” ending. With Steven Moffat writing, I can’t wait for next week to find out.

Series 5, Episode 11: The Lodger

“All I have to do is pass as an ordinary human being. Simple. What could possibly go wrong?”

Last night, the nation was glued to its TV screens, watching a much anticipated clash of two mighty teams on the football pitch. And as it turned out, the Doctor was a pretty good striker.

Doctor Who fans and football fans have never got along very well, despite the obvious similarities – encyclopaedic knowledge of statistics, glued to the TV on a Saturday and a tendency to wear silly scarves. But last night, Matt Smith (a former footballer himself, of course) tried bravely to bridge the gap between Who-nerds and soccer-nerds. Which ones do you think will be most upset?

I’m being facetious, I know, but a lot of Who fans were outraged when they saw pictures of their beloved hero playing football! Gareth Roberts’ The Lodger did actually have more to it than just a football match – though not a lot more. In the ‘cheap’ slot of the season previously reserved for stories with few appearances by the regular cast, it broke with tradition by being all about the Doctor, and featuring Amy quite a bit too. But it was a slight story, even though the budgetary limitations were put to good use in its convincing contemporary setting.

Gareth Roberts’ writing has been the cause of some contention among fans, but I’ve enjoyed his work back from when he used to write for the Virgin New Adventures series. He has a great sense of comic character and dialogue, and previously his work on the TV series has been prestigious historicals like The Shakespeare Code and The Unicorn and the Wasp. The Lodger gave him a chance to flesh out a story previously written as a comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine, and like the strip was enjoyable without having much actual substance.

The central schtick was, of course, the Doctor’s efforts to blend in with what we know as everyday life – pub football matches, flatshares, working in a call centre. Even the setting of Colchester seemed deliberately drab and provincial, not like all those world shattering alien invasions that take place in that London. The actual sci fi part of the story was almost incidental to all of that, and in fact was never a part of the original comic story.

Nonetheless, the ‘something at the top of the stairs’ plotline did manage to be moderately creepy. The ever-changing, faceless figure in the top flat was an obvious homage to Sapphire and Steel, and the rationale for his existence as an automaton killing people off in an attempt to repair his spacecraft seemed very similar to the central concept of Steven Moffat’s Girl in the Fireplace. Derivative or not, though, its placing in such a humdrum, ordinary context was enough to bring a little chill.

But it was the humdrum context that was at the heart of the story, and the deliberate juxtaposition of the Doctor (“weird”) with the lives of two ordinary Earth people in a situation that’s familiar to all of us. There can’t be many people who haven’t experienced the fun and frustration of a flatshare at some point in their lives, and the script captured this very well. It also invited us to think about how an extraordinary figure like the Doctor can’t really have that kind of life, and how he might envy it – a theme that’s been touched on several times since the show came back.

There was much unease in fandom about the casting of James Corden as Craig, the Doctor’s flatmate. I didn’t see any problem with it even before the show was aired; I’ve been watching Corden for many years in various shows, and despite his (and Matthew Horne’s) recent awful sketch show, I know he’s a capable comic actor. And so he proved here. Craig was written well, and Corden invested him with a believable sense of being quite out of his depth with this eccentric new flatmate.

With Amy stuck in the malfunctioning TARDIS, the main interaction was between Craig and the Doctor; Corden and Matt Smith formed an amusing ‘odd couple’ double act, which made the episode seem oddly more like a sitcom than a sci fi drama. It was difficult not to laugh when the Doctor upstaged Craig at football, turned up at his work when he was off sick, and even tried to defend Craig against the monster while brandishing an electric toothbrush and clad in nothing but a bath towel.

Craig’s unspoken love for his best mate Sophie, and their cosy nights in together (“pizza-booze-telly”) were shaken up by this puzzling new lodger, as the Doctor once again showed his bafflement at all things human and ordinary. Matt Smith has really nailed this aspect of the character better than anyone since the show returned, and used it here to comic effect, blithely giving Craig £3000 in cash (“That’s a lot, isn’t it?”), unable to grasp why Craig might want some ‘space’ with Sophie, and completely ignorant of the game of football (“That’s the one with the sticks, isn’t it?”).

The love story aspect of the plot was another new addition from the original comic story, but did tie in neatly with the sci fi part of the episode. Daisy Haggard was again believably ordinary as Sophie, and it was fitting, if very schmaltzy, that the Doctor was the one who made these two ordinary people realise that they could be extraordinary, and that they belonged together.

Ultimately, though, while The Lodger was a nice bit of fun, it felt very insubstantial – as if there wasn’t quite enough story to fill the running time. As the ‘cheap’ story of the season, it did provide some worthwhile entertainment, but didn’t take the opportunity other such show have had to be wildly experimental with the format – just look at Love and Monsters, Blink, Midnight and Turn Left. A bit of fun, then, but not much more.

Still, with next week’s big finale approaching, we saw a few final clues about what’s going to happen – portents, even. For the second episode in a row we saw flashbacks of all the Doctor’s past selves – is that significant? There was a postcard of Van Gogh on the fridge, and aside from the entire episode about him, we’ve seen his pictures appear in this series before. And Amy’s Crack was back, a problem that could be far worse for Craig than the mysterious dry rot on his ceiling. What does it all mean? We’ve only two more weeks to find out…

Series 5, Episode 10: Vincent and the Doctor

“Art can wait, this is a matter of life and death!”

I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. Since Doctor Who came back in 2005, there’s been a trend for episodes that focus specifically on one historical figure, most often an artist of some kind. We had Dickens in The Unquiet Dead, Shakespeare in The Shakespeare Code, and Agatha Christie in The Unicorn and the Wasp. You could almost add Winston Churchill in Victory of the Daleks, but he was sadly sidelined in favour of the new Day Glo Daleks.

And now, in Richard Curtis’ much vaunted debut for the series, we get Vincent Van Gogh. I really don’t know much about art, but Vincent is one of those artists that even a philistine like me is aware of. Curtis is obviously a fan, which is a good thing – imagine if we’d been treated to a story on the life of Vermeer, or Mondriaan. A lot fewer people would have got the references there, I suspect.

Vincent and the Doctor (the title presumably deliberately riffing on the film Vincent and Theo) was an enjoyable episode, but as with Simon Nye’s Amy’s Choice, it somehow didn’t quite feel like Doctor Who. Curtis is undoubtedly a talented writer, though since Blackadder your enjoyment of his work is dependent on your tolerance for sickly sweet romantic comedies, almost always starring Hugh Grant. But like Nye, he’s not a fan of Who particularly, and clearly has an outsider’s idea of how the show works.

In this case, it leads to an interesting episode. The focus on Vincent pretty much excludes any other character, and even the Doctor and Amy take second place to everyone’s favourite tortured artist. On the positive side, Tony Curran’s portrayal of Van Gogh was stunning, a brave performance the likes of which you rarely see in Doctor Who. As promised, Curtis didn’t shy away from the issue of the artist’s depression and mental illness, and this must be the first time a Who episode has been followed by one of those “If you’ve been affected by the issues in this programme” helpline ads.

But the depression, realistically shown by a hostile, hallucinating Vincent attacking the Doctor and Amy, wasn’t made the central point of Vincent’s character. He was shown as a talented but self-effacing man, who kept referring to his work as rubbish and trying to barter famous works of art for another drink. His flirtatious byplay with Amy was a delight, particularly the “Are you Dutch too?” line, which referenced his undisguised Scottish accent. And it was perfectly believable that the now single Amy would fall for him a little bit too, although she didn’t much care for the beard. Presumably the repeated exhortations to shave it off caused a razor accident involving his ear…

Thankfully, despite Curtis’ obvious veneration of Van Gogh and his own previous history, this was not a romantic comedy. Indeed, compared with Simon Nye’s delightfully barbed dialogue in Amy’s Choice, it was barely a comedy at all. The obligatory marauding alien was present and correct, though as with previous ‘great historical figures’ episodes, it seemed almost like a perfunctory afterthought. Still, some effort was made to give the Krafayis creature interesting characteristics; I liked that it could only be seen in mirrors, or by Vincent himself, who somehow “sees differently”. And it was interesting, though a little obvious, to make the particular example here a deliberate parallel to Vincent himself, abandoned because it couldn’t see and an outcast from its race.

However, the episode wasn’t really about the alien, and he was conveniently despatched about two thirds into it. And that’s where Curtis’ usual style really showed itself, as the self-doubting Vincent was taken to the Musee D’Orsay in 2010 to see an exhibition of his own work and be worshipped (albeit unknowingly) by the ever-excellent Bill Nighy. The dialogue here was actually rather cringeworthy as the art expert declared that, in his view, Van Gogh was “the greatest painter who ever lived”, but the performances sold it in an amazing way. Nighy’s dry delivery and Curran’s gradual descent into tears brought an undoubted lump to my throat regardless of how cheesy the dialogue was, and it ended up being a rather magical little scene that was well worth getting the alien out of the way to leave time for.

When you’re directing an episode about one of the greatest artists who ever lived, it must be a challenge. Jonny Campbell rose to the challenge admirably, producing a visually stunning piece of television that deliberately referenced many of Van Gogh’s most famous works. The literal translation of Cafe Terrace at Night that enabled the Doctor to track Vincent down was nicely done, as was the scary sequence of The Church at Auvers that started the whole story, but the real magic was reserved for the scene in which the night sky transforms into Vincent’s well-known work The Starry Night. The Doctor’s worshipful eulogy of how Vincent sees the world was a little much to take, but the visuals more than made up for it.

Vincent aside, there was a palpable tension in the Doctor’s relationship with Amy this week. Obviously uncomfortable at her loss of even the memory of Rory, the Doctor’s been doing nice things for her, and she’s wondering why. This wasn’t gone into with any depth – indeed, may well have been a post-hoc contribution from Steve Moffat himself – but was nicely played by Smith and Gillan as a prelude to something more. No sign of Amy’s Crack this week, mind…

Still, Amy did try to cheer Vincent up so that he wouldn’t kill himself, and learned the same lesson about changing time that Barbara did way back in 1964’s The Aztecs. But her attempt to brighten up his garden with hordes of sunflowers “you might want to, you know, paint them…” did turn out to have inspired him to create probably his most famous work, Vase with 12 Sunflowers. Although something tells me the real one doesn’t have ‘For Amy’ written on it. Again, it was a heartstring tugging moment, though slightly less successful than the one with Vincent in the museum himself. And as a ‘subtly altering time’ plot point, it reminded me of nothing more than that really silly episode of Quantum Leap where Sam has failed to prevent Kennedy’s assassination – “in the original history, Jackie died too…”. Yeah, right.

Still, cynical though I might be, this was an out of format episode that worked quite well. Richard Curtis still can’t resist the pull of pure sentimentality, but overall it was a heartfelt piece lifted by an amazing performance from Tony Curran as Vincent, and some great direction from Jonny Cambell. We’re obviously just treading water before the big climax at this point, but if all treading water episodes were this entertaining I’d say it was worth ditching story arcs altogether.

Series 5, Episode 9: Cold Blood

“There are fixed points in time, but this isn’t one of them. This is a tipping point.”

After last week’s prolonged set up, this week we got action aplenty – almost too much to cram into one episode, but a satisfying conclusion to the thorny problems established in part one. Humanity vs Homo Reptilia – both had a legitimate claim to the Earth and neither were monsters. Both were right, and wrong. It’s the kind of tricky moral problem that gives each new Doctor a chance to show us his own moral strength by attempting to resolve the dilemma; like Tom Baker in Genesis of the Daleks, or most notably Jon Pertwee in the original Doctor Who and the Silurians.

Chris Chibnall has said in interviews that the first thing he did to prepare for writing this story was to read Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of that original story, published as Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters (the very first Who book ever bought by a very young me, fact fans). You can tell; what he’s done with the Silurians here is create the exact same set of character dynamics. Just as in Hulke’s original, we have the wise, moderate elderly leader, the young, hotheaded warmonger and the dispassionate scientist. The scientist this time turned out to be sympathetic to humanity, taking care of their young, which was a nice touch. Mind you, it was difficult to square this with Mo’s assertion at the end of the last episode that he had been dissected while conscious. I would have preferred it if Malohkeh had started off unconcerned with these mere animals but gradually persuaded that they were intelligent creatures with as much right to dignity as he did, rather like Zira in Planet of the Apes. But there was so much story to pack in that the niceties of such subtle development would have had little room to grow.

Stephen Moore played wise old Eldane with the perfect degree of sympathy, though he was perhaps a little too sympathetic to the humans from the outset, given the scenario. His voiceover at the opening of the episode (a very Russell T touch) undercut a lot of the tension immediately by demonstrating that the Silurians, and he himself, would survive the proceedings. I’ve never cared for this kind of portentous voiceover, even with the deliberate attempt to mislead the audience. But Moore’s mellifluous tones did at least lend the story a real gravitas from the outset – even to those of us for whom he is, inescapably, the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android.

Neve McIntosh built on her fearsome performance last week to give us not one but two aggressive warmongers. Alaya got the martyr’s death she so obviously longed for, but her role as chief antagonist was supplanted this week by Restac, an even bolder performance as the scar faced warrior chief. Chris Chibnall seemed to be working towards the same ‘caste’ system shown in Warriors of the Deep, when Silurians were the leaders and thinkers and Sea Devils were the warriors. It was actually better developed here (though it could hardly have been worse than Warriors of the Deep), and we got a glimpse at a society that had some real depth – politics, a caste system, a scientific and aesthetic culture. It’s just a shame that such depth had to be represented by only three characters, although to be fair Chibnall managed to show more of the Silurian society than Malcolm Hulke did with the similar limitation of three representatives. The Sea Devils got even shorter shrift in their debut story – only one of them had a speaking role!

Restac was most obviously reminiscent of Star Trek’s Klingons in her impassioned warmongering, and the other end of the scale was nicely represented by Eldane and Richard Hope’s almost cuddly Malohkeh. Still, it was hard to see how a balance of power was maintained with masses of warriors and no other scientists or politicians in sight. The big reveal of the city at the end of part one had led you to think that here was a very well-populated settlement of Homo Reptilia, but we then discovered that comparatively few had awoken from hibernation, and all the hibernating reptiles were warriors. The script didn’t extrapolate, but I for one would like to know why they had such a huge army millions of years before humanity was any kind of threat. Perhaps they weren’t quite the noble civilisation the Doctor like to portray them as.

And neither was humanity. The debates were handled well, with the Doctor, as before in the original story, trying his best to act as intermediary. But as with the original story, we got the sense that the Doctor was being a little too idealistic in his bigging up of humanity. So it proved, with Alaya being killed to almost provoke the war she was so keen on by Ambrose, whose well-meaning attempts to protect her family almost doomed the planet. It was a nice portrayal of the road to hell being built on good intentions, and Ambrose’s obvious remorse did show humanity to have more of a conscience than the reptile warriors, but it was obviously all going to go as badly as it did in 1970. At least there was no Brigadier on hand to blow them to smithereens this time.

The resolution was satisfying without being as dramatic as I’d hoped. Once again, the Doctor, this time with the Silurian leader’s agreement, decided that neither species were ready to live together in peace. After halting Restac’s CG-driven palace revolution with a handy gas decontamination procedure (another nod to Warriors of the Deep? Surely not), Eldane put his people back into hibernation with the alarm set for a thousand years time. The voiceover at least implied that this would be successful, presumably with the aid of young Elliot in spreading awareness of their existence – although UNIT have known about them for a long time and don’t seem to have bothered telling anyone. It’s rather a heavy burden for one little boy to prepare the planet for peaceful co-existence.

All the character arcs were at least nicely resolved. Tony Mack would stay with the Silurians to be cured of his venom infection, and Nasreen would stay with him, building on the hints of romance between them in the first part. Robert Pugh and Meera Syal played both parts well, particularly Syal who managed to balance her usual comic persona with some real drama. Nonetheless, I had to wonder whether they knew what they were letting themselves in for. Perhaps a sequel story could show the far more epic emergence of Homo Reptilia in the future, with the baffled Tony and Nasreen acting as ambassadors? Nice thought, but probably unlikely to happen.

The conclusion to the story proper was somewhat undermined, however, by the appearance, yet again, of Amy’s crack (chortle). Not that this wasn’t, in itself, a very dramatic sequence, it’s just that when the pace is at its highest, this sequence seemed to rather unbalance the dynamic of the story. It’s unlikely to be any fault of Chris Chibnall’s though, and this scene did at least neatly tie in to the actual story with Rory sacrificing his own life to save the Doctor from the dying Restac.

Even though it didn’t arise from the story proper, the ultimate fate of Rory is, I suspect, going to the most memorable sequence in the two-parter. Surely even those who initially disliked him must have warmed to the character by now, and his sudden death was totally unexpected. And not just his death; with the time energy leaking out of the Crack, he’s been erased from ever having existed. The sequence of the Doctor desperately trying to keep his memory in Amy’s mind was a real lump in the throat moment, as was the moment on the hillside when she clearly had forgotten Rory was ever there. But that engagement ring’s still in the TARDIS, and we’ve still to resolve the issue of the Crack. I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility to imagine that Rory will be back, and it’s a measure of how much I liked the character that I really hope he is.

So, Crack aside, what we got was a workmanlike and occasionally inspired remake of Doctor Who and the Silurians. And there’s nothing really wrong with that; an actual sequel would, like Warriors of the Deep, have had the additional problem of explaining the concept to a new audience. Effectively revamping their origin story was a far easier approach, and I liked that Chibnall kept the ‘approaching Moon’ plot point as the reason Homo Reptilia went into hibernation. I also liked that the script, at least in this episode, always referred to them as Homo Reptilia; while I’ve read that it may not be entirely taxonomically correct, it’s a sight more valid than ‘Silurians’ or ‘Eocenes’. And it was apparently Chibnall that specified that their guns should look like the ones from The Sea Devils. I like that attention to detail.

Better than last week, though the two-parter as a whole was rather badly structured, Cold Blood was an enjoyable episode, and one of Chris Chibnall’s best scripts, though somehow I was expecting a more epic conclusion than the traditional Pertwee-style explosion. But it was thoughtful, well-acted and left the viewer with a lot to chew on, and that’s the mark of a good story. Not a classic, at least in my opinion, but certainly good. And with the big reveal that the Crack contains bits of the disintegrated TARDIS, some ominous foreshadowings of things to come…