Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Review: The Magician's Apprentice

The first episode of Series 9 of Doctor Who's revived format, the first of many two-parters this season, aired on Saturday, and enough time having passed for stragglers to catch up, I thought I'd do a review.

The Doctor is sought out by a mysterious snake-creatures named Colony Sarff, who has a message for the Time Lord: Davros, creator of the Daleks and "Dark Lord of Skaro", is dying after having been killed off at the end of Series 4's Journey's End.  Davros knows and remembers something pertaining to the Doctor, namely, that his latest incarnation refused to help Davros out of a weird 'hand' minefield in which hands with a single eye in the middle of their palms spring up from the ground to drag people underground, when the Kaled future despot was just a child.

Missy, aka The Mistress, aka The Master, appears again after getting the world's attention by freezing every airborne vehicle in time, in order to arrange a meeting with Clara Oswald.  Missy hijacks Clara in time via a stolen vortex manipulator and the unlikely pair are off to locate the Doctor, who has been throwing himself a three-week going away party in Medieval England.  Sarrf inexplicably appears to take the three time travelers to see Davros for the Kaled's final confrontation with his age-old enemy.

As is typical with head writer Stephen Moffat, no proper explanation is given as to how Davros and Missy survived their deaths at the end of their respective, prior episodic appearances.  This is what irritates me, as a writer, to no end: Moffat has an extremely annoying tendency to completely ignore previously established canon in order to tell his story, and never offers up any good reason for anything.

Next week's episode, The Witch's Familiar, had damned well better explain things adequately.  I'm just about fed up with Moffat's piss-poor writing.

Low Points:  The anachronistic biplanes firing lasers at people on the ground, the 'hand minefield', Colony Sarff

High Points: None, really.

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