Wacky Reviews: Doctor Who

[CaptainWacky]

The Crimson Horror - Another good Mark Gatiss episode! That's two this season! And two in total! This episode is silly and fun. I like how it goes almost full League of Gentlemen in embracing the Victorian penny dreadful style. Diana Rigg is very good as the villain. Okay she's just pure evil, but she's very good as pure evil. This is probably Strax's best episode so there's that too! Jenny gets more to do than usual and Catrin Stewart has a likable prescence (and looks good in her ninja outfit and yes good sonic erection joke.) Does this count as Doctor-lite when the Doctor's only absent for the first fifteen minutes? Maybe? Also...once the Doctor wakes up and explains everything in (very well done) flashbacks it kind of makes all the stuff with Vestra investigating pointless. But whatever, it's a fun episode and has a blind girl (Diana Rigg's real life daughter, fact fans!) refusing to forgive her dying mother then smashing an alien worm thing to death. That's good stuff.

(The worst part is the end scene where Artie and Angie blackmail Clara into letting them travel through time, but I have a feeling this wasn't written with the rest of the episode and was just stuck on there. It's really stupid (why doesn't Clara just let them tell their dad she's a time traveller? He won't believe them!) but at least it has Clara playing with a Galvatron toy!)

SCORE: 8/10


Nightmare In Silver - Okay Neil Gaiman is one of my favourite writers. Sandman is the best comic series ever and I've read most everything he's written. So I'm a bit biased into wanting to defend him for here. I remember him answering questions on tumblr about the episode and I got the impression he wasn't very happy how it turned out. It was going to have Victorian Clara and the Victorian kids originally (though I also read that it was going to be an Amy episode even before that) and we ended up with Artie and Angie instead and they're terrible. The "put me down I hate you!" line wasn't in the script and its delivery is terrible anyway. And I wonder how much of the Cybermen stuff was mandated by the BBC ("they should be able to run really fast now! But only once an episode!")

But there's no getting around that it's just not a very good episode. There's a lot of ideas but none of them reach their potential. The new Cybermen are too Borg-y. It's supposedly set in an amusement park but we don't get any amusment park stuff! The "comical castle" isn't even comical. The stuff with the Doctor facing off with evil Mister Clever Doctor is good thanks to Matt Smith but it could have been a lot better really. And Clara seems out of character in how confident she is at taking control of a military situation and it makes me believe that it was originally written for Amy. I mean the "impossible Clara in the tight skirt!" bit at the end is really similar to a bit about Amy that I can't quite remember the details of.

There is good stuff though! I like the idea that the soldiers are all on punishment duty and not good soldiers and the "stop, I'm in the army!" line is genuinely very funny. Warwick Davis does a good job playing the emporer (of course it's really obvious who he is.) So yeah it's not a low point of the show or anything but it's very disappointing.

(The Doctor "erasing himself from history" is mention so that's still a thing!)

SCORE: 6.5/10


The Name Of The Doctor - This episode...these Moffat finales...I wish I didn't always have the same problems with them but I always do? I mean this one is better than the Wedding Of River Song...I think? It's hard to judge it as an episode on its own becaue it's an episode made up of stuff stuck together and some of that stuff is awesome and some just leaves me cold.

Seeing Clara (with many different haircuts!) interacting with all the Doctors is on the aweomse side. The "INTRODUCING JOHN HURT" ending is probably the thing everyone remembers and it is awesomely done!

BUT it feels like Moffat's arcs are just "introduce a question, have the Doctor mention that question a lot, reveal that the quetion was kind of wrong, then quickly ask another question before anyone notices what's going on." And they're always a convoluted plan to kill the Doctor (well okay the most recent finale was a convoluted plan to give the Doctor any army of Cybermen.) The episode feels kind of lacking in plot. Partly becuase the Great Intelligence hasn't been featured nearly enough for his big speech at the Doctor to work. Richard E. Grant does a great job with the speech, but I don't buy at all that he's been defeated so many times by the Doctor that he wants to kill himself to "find rest" or whatever. He's only really been in one episode before this and about ten seconds of another (I know the character was in the old series too but I'm not reviewing that.)

Also everything's set up to seemingly fit the criteria Blue Guy's Head laid out about why the question of the Doctor's identity must never be answered. The "fall of the eleventh" could be the TARDIS falling to the planet, the answer to "Doctor who?" is how the GI gets inside the TARDIS to end the universe...but this isn't the resolution to that arc! That won't come until Christmas. So this is just another situation that could end the universe by asking "Doctor Who?" that happens to take place on the same planet...or maybe this is the one Blue Guy was warning him against...I don't know. It's not satisfying to me.

And River's there and she doesn't really need to be? It's not one of her more annoying appearances and the scene where she and the Doctor say goodbye is well acted but is she just there to flesh out an episode that doesn't have much plot?

And the WhisperMen are pretty half-assed Moffat concepts (complete with their own spooky nursery rhyme!) "They can't kill you until you hear them!" Okay? They look cool though.

And Clara's sacrifice would work better if her character wasn't written so generically.

And I keep starting sentences with and.

AND YET it's still an episode that moves along well and has good acting and a giant TARDIS and great use of archive footage and John Hurt (whose identity as the Doctor has nothing to do with why the question of "Doctor Who?" must never be asked even though this episode makes it look like it's connected?) so I DON'T KNOW.

SCORE: 7.75/10

 

[The Tomtrek]

I'd definitely rate The Name of The Doctor over The Wedding of River Song. I love the scene where The Doctor hears "Trenzalore" and just breaks down, it's a really good bit of acting from Matt Smith, with a nice bit of Murray Gold music in the background.

[YOUTUBE]P8Tkqln-l4s[/YOUTUBE]

Plus I remember all the amazing whining when the title "The Name of The Doctor" was revealed about how Steven Moffat was TOTALLY DESTROYING ALL DOCTOR WHO CANON by DARING TO REVEAL THE DOCTOR'S TRUE NAME and of course the answer that the episode gives to "What is The Doctor's real name?" is "It doesn't matter". People are dumb.

 

[CaptainWacky]

The Day of the Doctor - It's fifty years since Doctor Who began so the BBC celebrated with a special extra long (one hour and sixteen minutes, I think it even beats out Voyage of the Damned!) episode. It's a big, good looking episode. Early on there's a scene showing the final days of the Time War that looks genuinely impressive and shows that the BBC have spent some money on this thing. It was shown in cinemas and there's quite a few bits you can tell they put in there just because they'd look cool on the big screen: Clara riding into the TARDIS at the start, the part with the three Doctors shooting the Dalek with their sonics. But Doctor Who's about the Doctor, not fancy special effects, and (as I just indicated) this one has three of them in central roles!

There's the ever reliable Matt Smith, of course. There's David Tennant, a very popular Doctor who's very good here and used to his strengths. Very little gurning! I like how they make fun of his "I AM THE DOCTOR" speeches by having him give one to a rabbit. He does get off with a girl (Queen Elizabeth the First, finally tying up that loose end from 'The Shakespear Code'!) but it's very funny and he thought she was a shapechanging alien. And there's John Hurt as the War Doctor. At the time I remember questioning why the War Doctor was really needed just because his existence being a secret doesn't actually change anything. It's treated like a big reveal in the previous episode, but he didn't do anything we didn't already know about (the Doctor destroying Gallifrey to kill the Daleks has been known about since back in the Christopher Eccleston days.) HOWEVER, John Hurt is great in the episode and totally believable as a "lost" incarnation of the Doctor. And I think having him in the episode works better than having Paul McGann would have (no disrespect to him!) Him being a secret is another way of showing just how ashamed the Doctor is of what he did so it works inthat way. Still wish they'd got Christopher Eccleston though!

I like how the three Doctors get on well. Smith and Tennant being mates makes sense, but even Hurt's Doctor is just a bit grumpy with them rather than being openly hostile. It's great seeing them work together rather than having them constantly bickering and being dicks!

Billie Piper appears as The Moment, a weapon conscience. She looks like Bad Wolf and doesn't act like Rose Tyler at all and does a good job. I'm not sure why we needed both Tennant and Piper though? Maybe a missed opportunity to use someone from the original series BUT like I said Piper does a good job.

Clara isn't neglected at all and gets two really great scenes: one where she talks to John Hurt and one where she reminds all three Doctors who they are. It's impressive just how important Clara is to the story and Jenna Coleman is always excellent. Clara's also a teacher now so that's a thing! (Maybe she was training to be one before and it was never mentioned.) She works in Coal Hill secondary school which looks nothing like it does in poorly received spin-off series Class.

It's Clara's speech to the three Doctors that leads to the obvious best moment of the episode as all twelve Doctors...sorry, all thirteen Doctors (just seeing Peter Capaldi's eyes gave me chills!) work together to save Gallifrey. It's great stuff. I liked how the solution was foreshadowed earlier when they were trying to escape the Tower of London too.

Then there's the adorable appearance by the adorable Tom Baker. It's a perfect little scene.

THE ONLY weakness with the episode comes with the Zygon subplot. It's good for the most part (and the Zygon shapeshifting transformation looks great) it's just the ending that doesn't quite work. Kate Stewart has a room of secret UNIT weapons (kind of like Nick Fury making secret SHIELD weapons in The Avengers maybe) and she's willing to nuke all of London to stop the Zygons from having it. Okay, I can buy that, but she's still going to nuke all of London even when THREE Doctors show up. Come on, Kate. You're head of UNIT, you know that one Doctor would be enough to handle a Zygon invastion let alone three. It just makes it look like she really wants to nuke London. The Doctor's solution (making them forget which are humans and which are Zygons) is great, it's just that the set up is a bit too contrived.

But this is a great episode and a great celebration of fifty years of Doctor Who. I can't see why anyone would dislike it, really!

SCORE: 9.5/10

 

[The Tomtrek]

It's actually pretty crazy just how well this episode pulls everything off, instead of it just being a nostalgia-fest it's an actual good plot with the nostalgia elements worked in organically.

 

[whisky]

I never take theis off my sky box amd watch it every few months or so, its my favourite episode.

I love John Hurts character, but he only exists because Christopher Eccleston turned down the chance to come back.

 

[CaptainWacky]

This is the closest we'll ever get to Eccleston coming back I guess (a message to a sick child last Christmas.)

 

[CaptainWacky]

The Time of the Doctor - This episode has a lot of baggage going in. We first heard "Silence Will Fall" in the first Matt Smith episode and this is the final Matt Smith episode so it's about time we found out what it means! But there's a lot to get through first...

So there's the Papal Mainframe and its head is a woman named Tasha Lem who is a lot like River Song. I mean she's a middle aged woman who flirts with the Doctor and has a "psychopath" inside her AND knows how it fly the TARDIS so it's hard not to think of River! Was Alex Kingston supposed to be in the episode and wasn't available? We find out there's a crack in space again and the Timelords are sending a message through it to attract the Doctor. It's transmitting "the oldest question in the universe" which is "Doctor Who"? and no that still isn't the oldest question in the universe. They have to call it the oldest question in the universe because it was called that in an earlier episode. There's a "truth field" on the town of Christmas which means the Doctor has to tell the truth and say his name so that the Timelords know it's really him and it's safe to come through. Did the Timelords put the truth field there? Does that mean they came through the crack, set up a truth field, then went back through to ask the Doctor if it's safe to come through? Or is it meant to be a huge covenient coincidence that the crack is in a place where a truth field was already set up? I DON'T KNOW! Also the planet is Trenzalore but the Doctor didn't know that until Tasha tells him even though he's been there before. The Papal Mainframe have a faith change and it turns out "silence will fall" actually means the Doctor's silence, so that he'll never answer the question and so the Timelords won't come through. It's pretty obvious that was never the plan before this episode. Back in series 5 it was pretty clear that the "silence" was the end of the universe since we had an evil voice cackling "silence will fall!" after messing around with the TARDIS and causing the explosion that would end the universe. Then it was changed to "silence will fall when the question is asked" but even then the question was supposed to relate to a mystery concerning the Doctor's identity (he told Churchill as much back in 'The Wedding of River Song'.) And also originally Trenzalore was the place where you cannot lie and cannot fail to answer, but the "fail to answer" part was left out here because the Doctor has to be able to fail to answer for the episode to work. This is a really long paragraph let's have a new one.

That's the problem with making up a huge story arc as you go along: it's always going to feel contrived and a bit unsatisfying when you get to the answers. The episode does a reasonable job of wrapping everything up, considering how much there is to wrap up, but imagine if it had been planned out better and we were thinking "OOOOH, that makes sense!" rather than "okay, sure, the Silence needed to incfluence human history for thousands of years to get that spacesuit because, umm...what?" We find out here that the Silence are priests and you can confess to them then forget instantly which is quite a clever explanation (but why doesn't Clara try to kill them on sight?) Kovarian was part of another Papal Mainframe faction and it would have been nice if she'd appeared in this episode but at least she's mentioned. Of course if the Silence can time travel why didn't they just travel into the future and see if the Doctor ever answered the question? If they were trying to stop him for the greater good why did they always seem so damn evil before this episode?

AND YET this is still a good episode! It has a lot packed into an hour but it's well paced. It's a good final episode for Matt Smith because gets to do a lot of varied stuff here. He gets to be serious and funny, sad and optimistic, he gets to kick some bum and make some speeches (and yes, flirt with a hot middle aged lady.) He's great throughout. He makes everything seem important. His final speech ("I will always remember when the Doctor was me") is pretty perfect for Matt Smith's Doctor.

Jenna Coleman is always great too, of course, and we see Clara's family here. Her gran's okay but her dad and evil stepmother aren't characters I'd like to see again (I don't think we ever do.)

There's lots of good individual scenes: the comedy stuff with the Doctor and Clara at the start is good. The wooden cyberman is cool! Handles is a nice one off wacky companion and it's sad when he dies. Even though the character's a bit like River, the actress who plays Tasha Lem does a really good job (and yes she's hot okay) and I wouldn't have minded seeing more of her. There scene where she's fighting the Daleks is very good. It's appropriate for Smith's Doctor that all the Christmas stuff feels like a fairy tale.

SO YEAH on the whole it's a good episode. It suffers from having to make sense of three years of a meandering story arc but it's a lot better than Tennant's overly long final episode. I'll miss Matt Smith. He was a dude.

(Why doesn't Gallifrey just come through at the end after all the villains are dead? I guess maybe sending the Doctor's extra regeneratiosn through meant the crack was closed and couldn't be opened again...for some reason.)

SCORE: 8.5/10

 

[The Tomtrek]

Yeah I haven't watched this episode in a while but I do remember that it has a big feeling of "Oh shit, Matt's leaving, better wrap up EVERY SINGLE STORY LINE IN ONE EPISODE".

I kind of feel that this episode could have benefited by being two, like The End of Time was (although ironically those episodes would have been fine as just one!). That way all the exposition of who the silence were and why they were there and what Trenzalore was could have been fleshed out a bit more in the first episode, and the second episode could expand a bit more on what the Doctor does during his hundreds of years there. As it is I feel that montage doesn't quite show just how long he was there for (although Matt Smith's old man acting is amazing), especially as the town and it's people don't really change that much visually. I mean, yeah, there's different actors playing different people but you don't really get to know any of them enough to see the difference!

They could have also used that time to better introduce the idea that Matt Smith's Doctor was in fact the last of his regeneration cycle, as it gets introduced pretty much out of the blue - and it's a pretty major moment in Doctor Who history! I don't actually mind the change into it being his last one; it always annoyed me that The Doctor stopping his regeneration in Journey's End didn't seem to count as him using one up, so I was glad that it was confirmed here that it totally did.

The regeneration scene was pretty much pitch perfect - Amy in a wig, The Doctor's speech, even the super-fast regeneration itself. I have no problems with that, really.

It's a good episode. Although it does try and tie up literally every loose end, it does a pretty good job of it.

 

[CaptainWacky]

I liked it a lot more this time than on Christmas day THREE YEARS ago.

 

[whisky]

I get the feeling that the false ten regen, would not have counted if they could have got Eccleston back for the 50th, then there would have been no need for the Hurt Doctor, and there would still be two more doctors to go without this last life nonsense.

 

[CaptainWacky]

Of course once we got to the 507th Doctor the debates would start again...

 

[CaptainWacky]

Deep Breath - 'Rose' is an episode I always feel I kind of underrated, because while it has terrible special effects and poor direction and plastic Mickey and a burping bin it did a good job of introducing a new Doctor, a new companion and the concept of the tv show "Doctor Who" to a new audience. 'The Christmas Invasion' suffered from having new Doctor David Tennant spend most of the episode in bed. 'The Eleventh Hour' was great, the best season opener and a brilliant introduction to Matt Smith's Doctor and new companion Amy Pond. It was full of energy and exciting all the way through. This one...

Well, firstly it's a ridiculous one hour and seventeen minutes long. That would be fine if the story needed it, but it really doesn't and there's quite a bit of padding. It starts off with the TARDIS being spat out of a Godzilla sized t-rex. Why is it so big? I suspect because Moffat wrote "a t-rex spits the TARDIS out of its mouth" in the script then realised a t-rex wouldn't be big enough to fit the TARDIS in its mouth and had to make it Godzilla sized. The t-rex then stands around in Victorian London for hours (not eating anyone or anything?) before dying. The Doctor is really upset about its death but it doesn't really work because it was just a silly CGI dinosaur that we didn't get to know it. It's weird. There's a lot of comedy to fill time in the first half, including a comedy "boink!" sound effect when the Doctor goes to bed then again when he falls down a tree. After the Doctor runs off we get some comedy stuff with Clara and Jenny/Vastra/Strax that feels pretty off. Strax does a medical examination of Clara for some reason. Jenny thinks Vastra is painting her in a scene that makes literally no sense. (By the way, did you know Jenny and Vastra are married? Don't worry, they tell you six times in the first twenty five minutes of the episode!)

The Doctor has amnesia at first and is being a bit crazy and while Capaldi is good at this (though not as good as he is at other things) and I just wanted it to be over so we could get to know him when he's acting normally.

It gets a lot better in the restaurant scene, though the episode does seem to have an oddly high number of moments where characters tell Clara all her faults (She's a control freak! An ego manica! Ageist! A flirt! A sex maniac apparently!) It's like Moffat's saying "see, Clara has faults!" after she was criticised for being too perfect in the previous series. But it would be better to just show those faults instead of having characters list them. Anyway, the restaurant scene is good and the villains are quite creepy even though they're just the clockwork robots from 'The Girl In The Fireplace' but trying to turn themselves human now. The whole "don't breath" thing is a lot like "don't blink" as well, but the scene with Clara trying to escape the robots in a single beath is very tense and good. Clara calling the robot captain's bluff is also a very good scene and really at this point it's been a much better episode for Clara than the Doctor.

Vastra, Jenny and Strax show up and have a REALLY BAD fight scene with the robots. Seriously it's all close-ups and cutting away every few seconds. The restaurant takes off using a hot air balloon made out of human skin and wow they must have killed literally thousands of people to make a balloon that big! That's pretty dark. Capaldi does by far his best acting of the episode in the scene with the robot captain. I like how it's ambiguous if the robot killed himself or if the Doctor killed him. Though really, even if the Doctor did kill him it wouldn't be any worse than Tennant killing a guy with a tangerine in his first episode and wouldn't necessarily make this Doctor more "dark" than the others.

Matt Smith's cameo is great.

I never got the impression before that Clara thought the previous Doctor was her boyfriend but that seems to be a thing now. I get her finding it weird that he's old now whereas he looked young and cool before but they didn't need to do the boyfriend thing.

The robot ends up in the "Promised Land" with a lady at the end so I guess we'll be seeing him again!

So, as a first episode for Peter Capaldi's Doctor it could have been a lot better. For the first half of the episode the Doctor's too crazy to relate to, but he's very good once he gets stuff to do. But it's really tempting to compare it to 'The Eleventh Hour' as that one was also written by Moffat and Matt Smith was Doctor-y for the whole episode there. This one is too long and unfocused, but the key relationship stuff between the Doctor and Clara is good. We just have to get through a lot of weirdness to get there.

SCORE: 7/10

 

[CaptainWacky]

Into The Dalek - The thing about Clara last year was that she was kind of generic. She was nice, pretty, a good companion and very well acted by Jenna Coleman, but because of the "impossible girl" mystery it felt like they were holding back on telling us anything about her as a person. We saw less of her life away from the TARDIS than any companion before (since 2005 anyway, I have no idea what it was like in the olden days.) She never had any romantic encounters. Well, that changes here with the introduction to Danny Pink, but I find his meet cute scene with Clara rather odd! A child asks him if he's ever killed anyone who wasn't a soldier and he starts crying in front of his class. This is nearly the first thing we see him do. It's feels like far too much too soon and to be honest when he starts crying it reminded me of a Simpsons scenes where Skinner would have Vietnam flashbacks. Then when he talks to Clara for the first time he thinks she knows about him crying and it plays out like a comedy scene as in "haha, I thought you knew I cried about all the people I killed!" I find it weird! But the two actors are pretty good together and at least we're giving Clara a real life now...

So it's a Dalek episode and the problem with the Daleks is there's only so many times you can show them shooting people and shouting "exterminate!" You need something else as well. While this episode does have a lot of the traditional shooting it also has the Doctor, Clara and some soldiers shrink down to a fix a "good" Dalek who has been helping the soldiers. There stuff with them inside the Dalek is fairly straightforward stuff with them being chased by Dalek "anti-bodies" (a bit like Let's Kill Hitler) but it's where the most interesting part of the episode happens. The Doctor doesn't believe that a Dalek could be good and is happy when he fixes it and finds out it's still a normal Dalek...even though that means they're all going to die. Clara slaps some sense into him and teaches him the real lesson, that a Dalek can be made to be good under the right circumstances. It's good stuff as the Doctor brought Clara along with him to be his conscience. He tries to make the Dalek good again by mind melding with it, but the Dalek just learns to hate other Daleks because that's what's in the Doctor's mind. It's a good ending, but I don't know if it totally works: the Doctor was genuinely trying to help the Dalek so surely the Dalek should see that in his mind too rather than just blind hatred?

I'm not a huge fan of the Doctor asking Clara "Am I a good man?" and her not knowing how to answer. Yes he's rude and sometimes pretty brutal, but he did save Blue's life and he is trying to help them with their Dalek problem, so surely the obvious answer is "yes because you do good things even if you aren't always nice about it." She does pretty much say that by the end of the episode but I don't know why she wouldn't have said it right away.

It's definitely a good episode for Capaldi's Doctor though so he's fully settled in now and not doing the amnesia/wacky comedy stuff of Deep Breathe. "He's on the top layer if you want to say a few words" is a brilliant cruel but funny line (to Blue after the other soldier is disolved in the Dalek.)

So yeah it's a good solid episode with some good philisophical moments!

SCORE: 8/10

 

[whisky]

You never saw much of companions family at all in the old days, I would have said never, but I think Nissa (the flight attendant) was with her mother shortly before she started travelling with the Doctor, and that was the exception rather than the rule.

 

[The Question]

(Why doesn't Gallifrey just come through at the end after all the villains are dead? I guess maybe sending the Doctor's extra regeneratiosn through meant the crack was closed and couldn't be opened again...for some reason.)

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11334460/1/The-Meaning-Of-The-Doctor

(Not a real answer, but maybe it's close enough to satisfy.)

 

[CaptainWacky]

Robot of Sherwood - It's the comedy time travel episode! A bit like 'The Shakespeare Code' but with Robin Hood. And not actually as good. It starts off with the Doctor fighting Robin Hood with a spoon, which I actually quite like. It does seem a bit weird after the last two episodes of him going "am I a GOOD MAN?" and brooding to have him suddenly having wacky comedy fun, but I don't want the Doctor to be a git all the time. Robin and his Merry Men act exactly like the stereotypical characters of legend. So much so that the Doctor thinks they're not real. Turns out the Sherrif of Nottingham's (played by Ben Miller, who's fine but no Alan Rickman) men are robots. The Doctor, Clara and Robin are captured and Robin and the Doctor keep arguing in the dungeon. Robin's pretty fucking annoying! The Doctor is funny reacting to him at first but it goes on too long and gets annoying. Seriously the Doctor and Robin are in the dungeon for literally ten minutes. Clara outsmarting the Sheriff is better. Actually it's the best part of the episode.

It turns out that robots are trying to get to the "Promised Land" like the robots in Deep Breath so I guess there's some story arc about a robot promised land, eh?

The big reveal of the episode is that Robin is actually real and not a robot! So why does he act in such an unbelievable way? He just does, I guess! The Doctor, Robin and Clara then shoot the robot spaceship with a golden arrow and that saves the day...for some reason. Robin compares the Doctor to himself and there's some kind of message about stories being more important than the men behind them which is nice but it feels a bit muddled because the Robin in this episode is exactly the same as the Robin of the stories. I get the impression we're also supposed to think the Doctor didn't want Robin to be real because that means heroes are real and would mean the Doctor is a hero...but that's not exactly clear either.

There's a girl who appears in two scenes then at the end it turns out she's Maid Marian. So, umm, yay?

This episode is not very good. A comedy episode should be funny. It's not particuarly funny outside of Capaldi's good annoyed acting. It drags quite a bit in the middle. The Robin Hood stuff is kind of flat? It's just a load of cliches and it doesn't do anything interesting with them until like the last two minutes when Robin shows some depth. Put it this way, that TNG episode where Worf said "I am not a merry man!" was better and funnier than this.

SCORE: 5.5/10

 

[CaptainWacky]

Listen - This episode feels really fresh and unique, which is rare at this point in any series. Even the best episodes usually remind me of some previous one, but this one doesn't. That's good! It's an episode that explores the Doctor as a person, something Moffat has done before with mixed results. Usually there's too much stuff going on, too many twists, there's Hitler or River being annoying or Churchill as Empire of Rome for some reason, and we kind of lose track of what it means for the Doctor. In this one there is a twist, kind of (that the invisible creatures were proably imagined by the Doctor...probably!), but it's a twist that changes our understanding of the Doctor's actions, rather than just some crazy shock moment. It's an episode that ends with us seeing that the Doctor was once a crying little boy sleeping in a barn afraid of the dark, where Clara showed him compassion and maybe changed him or made him who he is. It's nice.

Of course there is a plot with Clara and Danny too and their scenes together are a lot better than in 'Into The Dalek.' "He'll probably dig for it!" when the waitress offered them water made me laugh. I don't think I'll like how their relationship ends up (unless I change my mind) but it's good and believable here. Orson Pink is different enough from Danny to be a decent character.

It's well directed too. I should really remember to look at who the director is. The scene in the children's home with the boy/monster under the cover is very tense!

So yeah this is good.

SCORE: 9/10

 

[CaptainWacky]

Time Heist - This episode has a really cool, intriguing set up: the Doctor and Clara's memories are wiped and they find out they've agreed to rob a bank! It's a great way to start an episode, but it would be hard for any episode to live up to that...and this one doesn't quite do it. Their heist crew consists of a shapeshifting lady and a cyborg hacker. They're pretty standard characters but they're likable enough. They all do a slow motion walk into the bank together because all heists need one of those. There's a monster who reads memories and caves in a guy's skull, which probably would have scared me when I was a child! There's a good looking lady in glasses as the villain who doesn't appear in the episode enough to be a good villain.

It's when the actual heist starts that the episode becomes disappointing and a bit dull, because for a while they don't do much except run around a a bit and hack. It's a bit of a lull. Even when the two guest characters "died" I thought "they're probably not dead because there would be no point in the characters if they were." Turns out they teleported away and this is actually a TIME heist because everyone time travelled! These are okay twists but not particularly unexpected.

What saves the episodes is that the ending makes sense and is pretty satisfying: the Doctor was the one behind the heist all along after glasses lady ask for help and he's trying to save the brain eating alien and its mate. I think it would have been better if they'd made it more clear that the brain-eating alien was a slave who didn't really want to eat brains and if glasses lady had been in it more so that we had some context for her change of heart (from what we get in the episode she was basically completely evil...then got old and felt bad about it?) But it's a good enough ending. It helps that Capaldi is getting better at playing the Doctor with each episode and can sell the "the aliens were in love!" thing like it's important.

Also Clara wears a suit and looks really hot.

SCORE: 7.5/10

 

[The Tomtrek]

I liked how half way through the episode they're like "Oh yeah by the way these solar flares are actually going to destroy the bank" like it was a fact they all knew but no one had ever mentioned it before then.

 

[CaptainWacky]

That had so little impact on the plot that I forgot about it instantly.