Review: The Time of the Doctor

All things good or bad must eventually end, and Matt Smith's tenure as the iconic Time Lord from Gallifrey is no exception.  The reigns are handed over to Peter Capaldi in a tear-jerker regeneration scene you have to watch over and over again.  I honestly didn't think Tennant's departure from Doctor Who could be topped, but I am happy to have been proven wrong.

The episode opens with a narrator, who is later revealed to be the head of the Church of the Papal Mainframe, telling of a planet from which a signal is being broadcast across time and space, drawing all the Doctor's enemies to the world in fear of what that signal might mean.  Aboard the TARDIS, the Doctor receives a panicked call from Clara, who "accidentally" told her relatives that she has a boyfriend and that she needs the Doctor to play the part at Christmas dinner.  The Doctor arrives in typically comic fashion and he soon takes Clara off for what ultimately will be his final adventure.

THE BAD:

 Consistency problems, much?  Come to think of it: LOGIC problems, much?  Why does the Doctor choose to strand himself on Trenzelore when he could simply have used the TARDIS to evacuate the farming community?  Also, why and how can a farming community exist on a snowy planet where the days last only a few minutes?  Plants need sunlight in order to grow.  What the hell?

Again, some consistency from Moffat would be nice.  It's already been established in "The Day of the Doctor" that Gallifrey was frozen in time inside a pocket universe outside our own.  How, therefore, do the Time Lords manage to transmit a signal into the main universe in order to find out if it's safe to return?  Dammit, Moffat!

The hideous age makeup they used on Matt Smith.  It's even worse than that used for Karen Gillan in "The Girl Who Waited".  If they're going to make anyone appear to grow old, do it right.

The poor treatment given to Jenna Coleman's character, Clara Oswald, in the final scene.  The Doctor, regenerating and hallucinating, gives a tear-jerking eulogy to himself before transforming, and Clara is basically a bystander in the scene, rendered almost irrelevant by the appearance of a former Companion.  Bad call, Moffat!

A wooden Cyberman?  Seriously?

THE GOOD:

Sweet Jesus, was there a lot in this episode to love!  This episode should really be subtitled "The Time of Matt Smith", because he owned it.  Moffat may not be consistent as a writer, but when he writes a scene he knows how to make it work.  When the Doctor, stuck on the planet (which turns out to be a pre-war Trenzalore) for centuries, shows signs of aging, he explains to Clara that he has used up all his regenerations and is on his final life.  This combined with the poignancy of 'Handles', a Cyberman head the Doctor salvaged and reworked into a personal portable computer, deactivating for lack of adequate repair, really was touching.  And Smith's final scene really made me cry.

The matter of the Silence, the explosion of the TARDIS, the engineering of River Song, and the prophesy of the First Question...all of it is finally resolved.  Ten's partial regeneration was counted as a complete one by Moffat, who needed to explain how the Doctor can continue to regenerate with the Time Lords gone and all his regenerations used up.  Granted, the latex on Matt Smith looked as fake as it was, but his acting made up for it.  Moffat has stated that in his mind the Time Lords are dead and gone and not coming back, but even he realized that he had to resurrect them somehow in order to write himself out of the corner previous show-runner Russell T. Davies had put him in.  The way all this was resolved was actually brilliant.

The final scene in the TARDIS, when a rejuvenated Doctor must say goodbye to Clara before his regeneration, was perhaps the best Matt Smith has ever given us, and like I said, he owned it!  A surprise visitor from the past makes an appearance in the form of a pre-regeneration hallucination to send Eleven to his final rest, and despite a tearful Clara's pleas, it's time for Eleven to go.  Peter Capaldi makes his appearance suddenly and without further warning, foreshadowing the tone his tenure as the Doctor will adopt.  I'm looking forward to seeing Series 8!

SNAPSHOTS:

Screen captures from the episode.  Enjoy!

A Crappy End to Great Companions

I have to say that The Angels Take Manhattan could be considered one of the worst send-offs I've ever seen on Doctor Who.  Okay, yes, it was a tear-jerker and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the episode.  But the ending was incredibly weak, which is what we've come to expect from a bad writer like Stephen Moffat.

The story opens being narrated by a two-bit gumshoe in 1920s New York, Sam Garner, who is hired by wealthy mobster Mr. Grayle to investigate statues that move on heir own.  Garner thinks Grayle is full of it but for the money offered he isn't going to complain.  Going to a hotel called the Winter Quay, he finds a room with his name on it, an elderly version of himself inside, and Weeping Angels stalking him.  He manages to escape to the roof of the hotel when he turns around and sees the Statue of Liberty, which has been transformed into a 'Weeping Lady Liberty'.

Then it's on to the credits followed by a visit to modern day New York where the Doctor, Amy, and Rory are hanging out enjoying themselves.  The Doctor annoys Amy by reading aloud from a book, and he notices that she's wearing glasses, disturbed by the realization that the first face his current face saw is getting older.

The Doctor tears the last page out of the book, a cheap dime store detective novel, saying he hates endings and that by tearing the last pages out of books the stories can go on forever for him.  Remember this for later.  Rory goes to get more hot dogs or something and is hunted by a cherub-like Weeping Angel who zaps him back in time.  We then see Amy reading from the book, and she and the Doctor realize that Rory has somehow made it into the story.  They quickly deduce that somehow Rory got trapped in the past and the very book they're reading must have been written specifically for them so they can go back and find him, having realized that the female detective illustrated on the cover must be River Song, Amy and Rory's daughter and the Doctor's wife.

Unfortunately, the TARDIS bounces off of 1938, the year Rory has apparently been sent to, and they need help to do it.  River creates a temporal beacon for the TARDIS to home in on by having the Doctor go back and alter ancient Chinese vases at their creation so that they can get to Rory in the past.

From there all pretenses of actual plot fade and we end up with a monster-in-the-house story wherein the Doctor, River, Amy, and Rory must survive the Weeping Angels.  Apparently a bunch of them have created the hotel as a sort of pantry by trapping visitors inside and sending them into the past to feed off the time energy generated from this.  How they got there is never explained, as is typical of Moffat's inexcusably poor storytelling, but they're there and they've seemingly inhabited pretty much every humanoid statue in New York.

As a fan of time travel stories, I am constantly irritated by the disrespect so many of today's storytellers give the genre — especially in the area of paradoxes.  Very few have handled such tales well:  Robert Zemeckis' Back To the Future trilogy and Eidos' Legacy of Kain video game series being only two that come to my mind.  Moffat is arguably the worst of the lot of bad storytellers who disrespect the material, which is even more infuriating seeing as how he's head writer for a show that features time travel and its consequences as its central theme.

SPOILER ALERT: Our heroes escape the Weeping Angels by creating a fatal paradox that zaps the Doctor, River, Amy, and Rory back to the present — in a cemetery.  And it is here that the final, tearful goodbyes are said to Amy and Rory.  It's also where the story is at its weakest.  We're supposed to believe that once the future is known a fixed point in time is created and Bad Things Happen when anyone tries to change it.  But just minutes before in the episode we saw a "fixed point" created and prevented from ever existing, and in Series Six the entire story arc revolved around the Doctor getting around a fixed point in time and space to outwit the creatures trying to kill him and escape certain death, so obviously this new "fixed" point should mean absolutely nothing to the Doctor or to Amy.

What's more, there's also the cat, namely, Schrödinger's cat: the paradoxical moment before opening a box with a cat inside it following some random event that either kills the animal or leaves it alive.  Since we can't know whether the cat is alive or dead until the box is opened and we can observe it, this means the animal is in a state of temporal flux; is it both alive and dead, or neither alive or dead, until someone observes it.

So surely, having not actually seen Amy and Rory die in the episode's final moments, and having not seen the Doctor scan the ground underneath a headstone bearing Amy's and Rory's names, the Doctor can actually go back in time and rescue them, or just send River back to bring them out of the past, and as long as the headstone bearing his friends' names is still there, everything will be fine.  It's so obvious to anyone who has devoted even a casual amount of consideration to paradoxes that Moffat should have thought of it from the start and just filmed those extra few seconds' worth of footage showing an elderly Amy somewhere in the past.  Yet he doesn't seem to have bothered, having completely dismissed the intelligence of us viewers.

In any fictional story there is always a certain amount of disbelief that must be suspended, especially in the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy.  But one can only suspend so much disbelief, and then a poorly written story just becomes insulting.  That's what Moffat does: he regularly insults the intelligence of his audience, not caring one bit as long as he gets his paycheck.

Oh, and that last page of the book that sent them to 1938 to face the Angels in the first place?  River tells the Doctor she'll have her mother write an afterword for him, prompting him to rush back to Central Park to fetch and read it.  And Amy asks the Doctor to do something they both know he can never do: go back in time and tell Amy's younger self, the one who sat outside waiting for the Time Lord all night, all about her future adventures with the Doctor.  What.  The.  Hell?  No assurances that she and Rory found each other, no request for the Doctor to tell their families their kids are all right (albeit trapped in the past), but Amy asks the Doctor to violate laws of time to tell her younger self what will happen to her in her future.

BULLSHIT on a stick.

Doctor Who has given some crappy endings to companions' stories before, but this one arguably tops them all.  Not only is it an insult, but it shows just how wasted were the considerable talents of Arthur Darvill and Karen Gillan.  Darvill especially was much stronger in his role as wet blanket Rory than Gillan was as lead companion Amy, and both actors have had to struggle to make their characters' stories work.  Matt Smith has shined as the 11th incarnation of the Doctor, but with so little for the main cast to work with, no thanks to Moffat, the two and a half seasons of Smith's run have fallen far short of what they could have been.


Now, having written all this, there is one thing I did like a lot about this latest story involving the Weeping Angels: the notion that they are not strictly corporeal beings, but can and do inhabit existing statues and from those fashion themselves bodies with which to hunt their prey.  It's a very interesting concept and should be explored a bit further — but not by Moffat, who can only mess it up with some stupid throw-away explanation that he'll just toss out the window later on.

We fans should start a letter-writing campaign to have the BBC remove Moffat as head writer before he completely screws up the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.

For an alternate take on The Angels Take Manhattan, see Jayne Gudkov's review.

Who News!

Check it out!  Nonamei Scribe provides the voice commentary for this video evaluation of the upcoming first half of Series 7.  Tip of the hat to Jayne Gudkov for linking to the blog on The Doctor Who Zone blog.

You've GOT to be kidding me...

So we have the final episode of Series 6 (Christmas Special notwithstanding), and it's craptastic.  The Doctor pulled a switcheroo on everybody, and the oldest question in the universe is the name of the television show?  Seriously?

The Doctor has a date with death at Lake Silencio, but before he goes he takes a few detours.  One of those is a trip to the room where the Headless Monks -- who were featured in "A Good Man Goes to War" -- keep the heads of their members, to pick up the head of Dorium Maldovar.  The blue-skinned bodiless head tells him the oldest question in the universe, prophesying that "the 11th will fall when the question is asked and answered."  Stuff happens.  River rises from the lake, encased in the astronaught suit against her will, and defiantly depletes her weapons pack, creating a dying timeline in which all of history happens at once.  More stuff happens.  The Doctor gets River to let things play out as they should, and everything turns out okay -- the Doctor having tricked almost everyone by hiding inside the shape-shifting robot piloted by miniature people, which is what Rory, Amy, and River actually saw being shot.

You know, there are times when I really, REALLY can't stand cheap writing, and this is one of them.  After splitting Series 6 in two this year to help reduce production costs, you'd think Steven Moffat would have come up with something more dramatic, better written, and more epic.  But this episode felt more like an afterthought tacked onto the end of a really mediocre season.  And this alleged "slipping back into the shadows" thing, ostensibly to be less visible than he has been for more than two centuries, probably isn't going to last into Series 7, which may not even take place next year but in 2013, when the show reaches its fiftieth anniversary.

BBC, please please PLEASE replace Moffat with someone who knows how to write consistently well.  That is all.

Review: Closing Time

Tonight is the final regular episode of Series 6, so I thought I'd do a quick review of "Closing Time" before heading out to work on a student film project.

The Doctor is on a trip to visit old friends one last time before meeting his end in Utah, and his last stop involves dropping in on Craig, whom we last saw in "The Lodger" (Series 5).  He and Sophie now have added an infant son to their relationship, but the little tyke is more than either of them can handle.  Sophie is sent off on a much-needed holiday out of the house, setting up the events to come.  The Doctor and Craig save the world from Cybermen, and Craig gets a helping hand with his son, Stormaggedon, Dark Lord of All — okay, his name's actually Alfie, but he's a cute baby and he has his Stewie factor going on, so we'll forgive him his silly choice in self-naming.

What I liked about this episode was pretty much everything, including the running gag of a co-worker of the Doctor's at the local department store in which he's taken a temporary job misconstruing the relationship between Craig and the Time Lord.  The redesign of the Cybermats was pretty cool.

The only part I didn't like was the unexplained presence of the Cybus Cybermen.  How is it that they managed to crash a ship into Earth, in England, centuries before?  Time storm?  Maybe.  Crack in the universe from Series 5?  Probably, knowing Moffat.  I just didn't care for it.  I would like to see the Mondasian Cybermen meet the Cybus versions.  It might make for a really interesting clash of classic and new series.

Anyway, that's it for this review.  I'll write one up of "The Wedding of River Song" tomorrow after I've watched it.

Review: The God Complex

Only, what, two more 'regular' episodes left to go for Series 6?  Where DOES the time fly?  Oh yeah, in an alien-built hotel made to look like one from 1980s Earth, which is the setting for "The God Complex".  It's basically a retelling of the Minotaur story from Greek mythology, and Toby Whitehouse's script makes it an enjoyable one indeed.

I won't give too much away from the episode, for the sake of people who haven't yet been able to see it.  Suffice to say that it's a great stand-alone episode and a real heartbreaker at the end.  The character of the Minotaur, actually an alien in the story from a race of beings who literally feed on the mental energy generated by a person's faith, could have been portrayed as an irredeemable monster.  But just as in the Series 5 episode "Vincent and the Doctor", he's really just a victim himself, and proves worthy of sympathy.

It is here I will give away the most spoilers, because I really want to focus on the Minotaur.  Imagine a race of beings who feed off of certain types of mental energy, who roam from world to world setting themselves up as gods to be worshiped, feeding on the faith of their followers.  On a planet with thousands, perhaps even millions of followers, it is easy to feed without necessarily killing, except for the odd sacrifice every now and then.  One imagines this is what the Nimons were perfectly content with.  Somehow, however, one of their relatives got himself imprisoned in a labyrinthine prison with no escape, and a steady stream of faithful people from all over the universe brought in to keep it alive.  With so few to feed from, the Minotaur is forced by his survival instinct to take all of the energy from its victims, killing them in the process, something it may very well never have wanted.  But it can't help itself, and eventually, after many thousands of years, it is at the point where it no longer even remembers its own name.  It simply is, and it cannot help but run on pure instinct, full of sorrow at what it must do to survive but unable to end its suffering on its own.  Sooner or later a hero comes and kills him, ending the barbaric ritual of sacrifice to the half-god bull.

Clearly, the writer intended this to be the basis for the Greek myth, or a continuation of it, or some combination of the two concepts.  Whitehouse could have done a lot worse with his handling of the Minotaur myth, but he pulled it off splendidly.

Okay, I was wrong.  I gave away a lot more than I intended.  If I'm able after this weekend, I'll write my review of "Closing Time".

Review with Link: The Girl Who Waited

Somebody already wrote up a fairly decent review of "The Girl Who Waited", so I'm just going to link to it here and let you judge it for yourself.  What I write below is merely to add to what has already been written.

To begin with, I've never really understood the animosity some fans feel toward the character of Amy Pond or of the actress behind her, Karen Gillan.  Billie Piper's Rose Tyler was too weepy, and Freema Agyeman's Martha Jones spent most of her time making moon eyes at the Doctor while getting all silently angsty over his inability to notice her feelings for him.  It wasn't until Catherine Tate's turn as Donna Noble that I began to like the Doctor's companions again, since the dynamic of the on-screen relationship was such that I could really see some fleshing out of both characters without the annoying unrequited love thing taking over.

With the character of Amy Pond, I began to fear that the series was returning to the lovesick puppy routine, but that gimmick was quickly ended when Arthur Darvill's Rory Williams became a central figure in the show and the true focus of Amy's romantic love.  If Moffat's tenure as head writer can be credited with anything good, it's the strong supporting cast for Series' 5 and 6.  It is this context that I watched and liked "The Girl Who Waited", though it's not nearly as good an episode as it should have been.

I didn't like the throw-away explanation of why a person can spend literally years alone without food and water in an isolated environment while dodging badly programmed security robots.  Timey wimey, wibbly wobbly stuff aside, it's insulting.  I'd have preferred a better explanation of survival, maybe showing a fruit orchard that the older Amy has been raiding or something.  I also didn't like that she initially rejected Rory upon reuniting with him, rather than be overjoyed.  Rory literally waited centuries for her in a collapsing universe as a plastic recreation of himself who was continuously awake, retaining his sanity and love for Amy throughout all that time.  She couldn't return the favor for thirty-six years, especially given what she's gone through with him and the strengthening of their bond since "The Eleventh Hour"?  Come on, the writers can do better than that.

Still, for those faults, I did enjoy the dramatic dynamic of this episode.  The final, heart-wrenching scene was reminiscent of Russell T. Davies' superb ability to tear out our hearts, stomp them into greasy spots on the ground, pick them up and reconstitute them, put them back in our chests, and start the whole process over again for the next episode.  But then there was the logical question that sprang to mind: why is Rory so broken up when he has managed to rescue the Amy he knows and loves?  And that killed the moment for me as a punch to the gut.  (Now don't go complaining about a spoiler — if you don't know by now that the Companions, with rare exception, get a Hero's Death Battle Exemption every episode, you really should pay more attention.)

I give "The Girl Who Waited" a C-, which is a pretty generous grade in my humble opinion.  It's saved by the talents of Darvill and an ever-improving Gillan, but excellent acting can only go so far with a story this weak.

Night Terrors and Torchwood: Miracle Day

Okay, I'm writing this before I have to prepare for my DJ gig in a couple of hours that will be immediately followed by me leaving (I hope) for a friend's birthday party.  I'll start with a brief review of the Doctor Who episode "Night Terrors" and then begin my review of Torchwood: Miracle Day.

"Night Terrors" is so much better than "Let's Kill Hitler" that I wonder how Moffat can stand letting himself be upstaged by someone who actually knows how to write.  George, a little boy plagued by the monsters inhabiting his room at night, does a ritual chant for expelling them, calling out for someone, anyone, to "save [him] from the monsters."  His loving but frustrated parents don't know what to do, since his fears have pretty much paralyzed not only his life but theirs since they have to drop whatever they're doing at any given moment to reassure him, all to no avail.  George's call for help is so powerful, psychically, that it reaches all the way out into space and time to write his message on the Doctor's psychic paper.  Naturally, the Doctor is compelled to go help, and the episode kicks off.

Okay, sorry, I should have warned you about spoilers.  But bear in mind that what I just described above only takes place before the opening credits.  What I liked about this episode is that it was generally bereft of the convoluted storytelling Steven Moffat has injected into the show since he began his tenure as head writer.  As a stand-alone episode, "Night Terrors" really shines.  It deals with the fears every child has about the toys and other things that, while ordinary and friendly by day, turn into scary monsters at night.  Only in this episode, those monsters turn out to be very real, and the Doctor must help banish them.

There's a closet (or cupboard, as it's called in the episode) where all the things that frighten little George are locked, the better to help soothe his fears.  That construct becomes a central part of the story.  Even more integral to the plot is George's father, who as it turns out has fear issues of his own as he is confronted by his bullying landlord.  His hangups and those of his son are inextricably linked, and we learn why by the end of the episode.  As it turns out, George is truly the son his dad always wanted, and is like him in so many more ways than one.  I wish more had been told of the relationship between the boy and his mother, who is largely absent from the episode, but given the obvious constraints the show's creative team are operating under, this was understandable.

Amy and husband Rory, as usual, end up being chased around by the monsters and in their now-typical fashion lend both credibility as horror-story heroes and comic relief.  A lot of Who fans haven't caught on to Karen Gillan's Amy Pond, but the actress seems to be really growing into the role — less sassy, more realistic, maturing.  Arthur Darvill as Rory is brilliant as usual.  At times I think he is the real star of the show under Moffat's tenure, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing;  for the first time in many years, Doctor Who's Companions are more than simply damsels in distress weeping over the Doctor or being helpless in situations — they're smart, strong, and proactive, though they don't always know enough to make sound judgments.  I can now easily see where Moffat is going with these characters as the parents of River Song, and their influence on her is crucial to that character's development.  If Moffat has done anything right since taking over the show, it's creating, developing, and evolving these two characters.

I will tell you this about "Night Terrors": how it plays out was written a lot better than it probably had any right to be given the creative rut Moffat has put the show in.  I was pleasantly surprised by this episode, and I sincerely hope that Moffat stays out of the rest of the series so better writers can tell his overall story arc.

"The Gathering", the ninth episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day, is the second-to-last one of this fourth series that tells the story of Captain Jack Harkness and his friends.  A lot of things are reaching their climax now, and I can hardly wait to see next week's episode, which will wrap up the whole series.  I'll give a more thorough review of this and other previous episodes tomorrow, but safe to say that Russel T. Davies has much, MUCH more in store for us.