Doctor Who – Page 9 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 1 – The Magician’s Apprentice

“Davros made the Daleks. But who made Davros?”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

After a divisive first season for Peter Capaldi’s abrasive, sometimes hard to like Twelfth Doctor, Doctor Who was back this week with a busy episode that was an obvious fan pleaser. Continuity references abounded, even outside a main plot that featured Davros, the Daleks, Missy and UNIT. Being a fan, I enjoyed it hugely. Trouble is, will the casual viewer even understand what all this is about? Continue reading “Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 1 – The Magician’s Apprentice”

Doctor Who–Last Christmas

“Do you know why people get together at Christmas? Because every time it might be the last time.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

Do you know what, for me, is the biggest disappointment when I’m reading or watching a story? When it ends with some variant of “he woke up and it was all a dream”. For me it cheapens and discredits everything that went before, however good it might have been. It also provides licence for some very dodgy writing, with the inevitable defence that, if it’s a dream, it doesn’t have to make sense.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 12–Death in Heaven

“Turns out the afterlife is real – and it’s emptying. Every graveyard on Earth is about to burst its banks.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

One of the frequent (and justified) criticisms of Steven Moffat’s tenure in charge of Doctor Who is that he tends to undercut the sense of jeopardy by presenting death as something that can always be revoked. He even made a running gag of it with the many deaths of Rory Williams. But now, in a story that was far darker and far bleaker, he’s confronted the reality of death – and its consequences – head on.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 11–Dark Water

“You asked me what we’re going to do. I told you. We’re going to hell.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

After a very divisive season of Doctor Who, we’re finally at the endgame, where all those seeded themes throughout the year may (or may not) pay off. It’s been a new approach for Steven Moffat; while there was an overall plot arc, it was kept very much in the background. Meanwhile, the real arc of the season has been its main characters, and how they’ve developed. The new Doctor, abrasive and hard to like, questioning whether he’s “a good man”; Clara, recast from part one as a “control freak” and more believably fallible as a result; new boy Danny Pink dragging her back to the real world in a kind of relationship many have interpreted as passive aggressive manipulation.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 10 – In the Forest of the Night

“The forest was in all the stories that kept you awake at night. The forest is mankind’s nightmare.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

“A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and no-one lived anywhere else…”
Much has been made of Doctor Who’s tendency, under the aegis of Steven Moffat, to veer explicitly into fairytale territory. Stories like The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (also largely set in a forest), overtly recall the sometimes darkly magical tales we’re all told as children. However, In the Forest of the Night is an interesting attempt to not only evoke a traditional fairytale forest, but to analyse and explain the archetype and its place in folklore.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 9 – Flatline

“I am the one chance you’ve got of staying alive. That’s who I am.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

On writing duties for the second week in a row, Doctor Who newbie Jamie Mathieson is on a roll, producing yet another excellent episode after last week’s Mummy on the Orient Express. Presumably serving as this year’s ‘Doctor-lite’ episode, Flatline boasted an imaginative and scary monster of the week concept, some well-fleshed out guest characters, and most interestingly, thrust Clara into the spotlight as a Doctor-substitute, allowing the script to examine (and gently poke fun at) the Doctor’s usual method of operation.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 8 – Mummy on the Orient Express

“There’s a monster on this train that can only be seen by people about to die. If you do see it, you only have 66 seconds to live.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

Fun fact – the very first horror movie I ever saw was set on a train. 1970’s Horror Express is a chilling tale of a preserved prehistoric monster menacing the passengers of the Trans-Siberian Express (including, inevitably, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee), in the early years of the 20^th century. It’s not the best horror movie ever (and certainly not the most scientifically accurate), but it still works very well due in large part to that setting – a moving railway train on an epic, lengthy journey from which there is no escape when the monster comes for you.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 7–Kill the Moon

“An innocent life versus the future of mankind. We have forty five minutes to decide.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

It was another moral dilemma for the Doctor this week – he seems to be getting a lot of them of late. In the past, this was the show’s way of presenting the philosophy of its hero; perhaps the most notable example being the Fourth Doctor’s agonising decision over whether to save the universe from the Daleks by committing genocide against them before they were even created. As a moral dilemma, it’s hard to see a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer to that one clearly, and in fact the script for Genesis of the Daleks cheats by having the choice almost immediately taken out of the Doctor’s hands.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 6–The Caretaker

“You can’t do this. You cannot pretend to be an actual person among real people.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

When an episodic TV series has been running (on and off) for fifty years, it’s hardly surprising that some episodes instil a feeling of déjà vu. Terry Nation, notoriously, wrote the first Dalek story again several times, changing a few names and locations but keeping the same basic plot. That same feeling of déjà vu was very much present in The Caretaker. The concept of the Doctor trying (and comically failing) to fit in with everyday life on contemporary Earth has become a bit of a trope in recent years, most notably in the work of Gareth Roberts, who set the template with The Lodger and revisited it with Closing Time.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 5 – Time Heist

“Today is a good day to be a bank robber.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

One of the things I’ve been noticing about this season of Doctor Who is that there’s been very little unanimous like or dislike of any of the episodes. None have achieved the near-universal acclaim of Blink, or the near-universal derision of Fear Her. Even last week’s Listen, which was pretty widely acclaimed, has a number of fierce critics among my friends, either for its ambiguity or its deliberate slow pace.

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