Peter Capaldi – Page 3 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 3 – Under the Lake

“So, we are fighting an unknown homicidal force that’s taken the form of your commanding officer and a cowardly alien, underwater, in a nuclear reactor. Anything else I ought to know, someone got a peanut allergy or something?”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

With ratings juggernaut and offence to human culture Strictly Come Dancing once again dominating Saturday evening (to the tune of two bloody hours), this week Doctor Who found itself ignominiously shoved away from its traditional teatime slot to the graveyard depths of 8.25, by which time many of us would normally have gone out. Cue the usual ill-informed bunch of Moffat-haters claiming that drastic drops in the overnight ratings heralded that The End is Nigh? Continue reading “Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 3 – Under the Lake”

Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 2 – The Witch’s Familiar

“Imagine. To hold in your hand, the heartbeat of every Dalek on Skaro. They send me life. Is it beyond the wit of a Time Lord to send them death?”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

I’ll admit, last week I was a trifle surprised to find that Steven Moffat had the chutzpah to open the new series of Doctor Who by writing, effectively, a sequel to Genesis of the Daleks – a story regularly voted the best the show ever did. Yet for me, he pulled it off surprisingly well, building cleverly on the themes, characterisation and philosophy espoused by both the Doctor and Davros in that first meeting. Continue reading “Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 2 – The Witch’s Familiar”

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 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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