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Wacky Reviews: Doctor Who

The Zygon Inversion - Bonnie (Evil Clara) is still hot. She exposes a human disguised a Zygon (and there's some kids watching who don't react to it at all, for some reason? I mean maybe they're supposed to be Zygons on Bonnie's side but there's no wa to know that!) and films it. She also has an internal battle going on with good Clara, which is why her bazooka doesn't quite kill the Doctor. Hey, this is already better than part one!

The Doctor and Osgood escape the plane with parachutes, but I guess the pilot and anyone else onboard died. We get Osgood as the Doctor's companion for most of the episode and it works well. I didn't like Osgood as much as everyone else back in 'The Day of the Doctor' because I don't really like these type of meta characters who stand in for the audience and making constant continuity references. But they tone that down here and the actress is good so it works!

Kate survived her apparent death by...shooting the Zygon who was going to kill her. It's about as anti-climactic of a cliffhanger resolution as you're ever going to get.

It feels like a lot was changed after writing the first episode. Like Moffat looked at the script for it and said "right, I'm rewriting part two to have a great speech from the Doctor!" Rebecca Front's character from part one doesn't appear at all in part two which seems like a huge waste of a guest star (and they didn't even make a The Thick of It reference in part one!)

I'm not really sure why there's two boxes and why it's treated like such a big deal. One box with two buttons would have worked fine? But I guess it's because it reveals that the Doctor has seen all this coming and dealt with it before and leads to the big speech...

And it is a great big speech! It gets better as it goes on as Capaldi gets more and more emotional. It's probably his best performance yet as the Doctor (and possibly ever.) I've seen people call it his defining moment as the Doctor and it's hard to argue! It's just a shame that it comes in this story? Like the rest of the two-parter had been this good, if it had seemed to be building up to this, it would obviously have been one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever. But as it is it feels like the big speech is kind of thrown in there to save the rest of the story. Which is nearly does!

I find the whole "Osgood won't say if she's human or Zygon!" thing a bit annoying, and Bonnie then turning into another Osgood. Because it's like they're saying we can only like Zygons if they have Osgood's personality? Like the point seems to be it doesn't matter if a person is a human or a Zygon, but they don't show any good Zygons in their natural Zygon culture doing Zygon stuff. The only time we see good Zygons are when they're being Osgood (and okay that one guy who wanted to live in peace and died quickly.) So if you're different and you want to live somewhere you just have to act like someone the audience already knows and likes and then you'll be accepted. Just don't be a scary looking alien, no one will like you then.

And also if Kate's memory has been erased sixteen times does that mean Bonnie's was too? Or was it some other Zygon each time? Why does the Doctor decide that this, the sixteenth time, will be the last time? And seriously why hasn't he gotten Kate Stewart replaced as leader of UNIT yet? She's tried to nuke London sixteen times. He got Harriet Jones fired for less (though I guess that didn't work out well with the whole Harold Saxton thing.)

Anyway it's a hard episode to rate because it has one of Capaldi's best moments as the Doctor. And the Clara/Bonnie stuff is pretty good and in general it's a better episode than part one. But it still has a lot of baggage from that first part and it's still a bit of a messy story and the it doesn't do that great of a job of using the Zygons as foes and telling us what they actually want. So I don't know?

SCORE: 7.5/10
 
"Truth or Consequences" is a really dumb phrase and they say it like 5,000 times and it's bad every time.

There was that one bit where The Doctor's like "HEY KATE STEWART HOW DID YOU ESCAPE" and it cuts to Kate shooting the Zygon because apparently we the audience needed to see that instead of her just saying "I shot it obviously".

ALSO FUCK THESE EPISODES for making Harry Sullivan a war criminal who developed anti-Zygon nerve gas. What
 
Sleep No More - Found footage. It seemed to be everywhere for a while. I don't have a problem with it if it's used for a reason. For most of this episode we don't know why it's being told in found footage, and it's just a bit annoying and feels pointless. It isn't really used for any story-telling reasons, not until the twist at the end. So for most of the episode all it means is we get some shaky camera work, which a lot of people dislike.

The guest characters are as generic as they come, more so than in 'Under The Lake'. There's a woman who says "pet" a lot, who is annoying. There's the first trans actress to ever appear in Doctor Who, who plays some kind of mentally challenged army mutant who the male character finds disgusting whenever she says he's pretty. Which is kind of distasteful. Not casting a trans actress, but casting her as...whatever she's supposed to be. And there's some other guys. And Reece Shearsmith who spends most of the episode pretending to be scared. There as unintersting a bunch of characters as you're likely to see in Doctor Who.

Anyway it turns out Shearsmith's character has invented a machine that removes your sleep (a good sci-fi concept!) but using it has cause the dust that build-up in your eyes to all come together and turn into monsters (that's a terrible sci-fi concept!) It's so ridiculous and not in a fun way! I mean, maybe they were trying to do for sleep dust what 'Blink' did for statues? But while I can imagine children watching 'Blink' and then being scared by statues, I can't imagine that literally anyone watched this and was then terrified at the sight of the sleep dust in their eyes. It's just too silly. Plus the sleep monsters look like big walking poops. They could have used the found footage format to hide the monsters, only show them briefly or in the shadows. But no, we get clear looks at them several times and they're not the worst looking Doctor Who monsters or anything but I don't see why they didn't use the found footage thing to their advantage and keep them vague.

Clone/grunt sacrifices herself to save a total arsehole and I guess we're supposed to be happy?

It turns out ever little spec of dust is actually a camera and that's what's been filming the found footage. This should be an "ah-ha!" moment but again it just makes you think "how the fuck can specks of dust work as cameras?"

There's a bit where we find out Clara is infected and the Doctor says "I'm sure you'll be fine!" and it never comes up again.

Near the end the Doctor says "this doesn't make any sense!" right around the time the viewer is probably thinking the same thing. The Doctor seems to be figuring things out. He's going to reveal the twist and stop whatever the real plan is, right? Nope! He leaves without figuring it out and Shearsmith tells the viewer the whole story. It was all a trick to get people to watch because watching the footage is what turns you into sleep dust. I think. And he's actually a creepy dust monster himself and finally gets to go full villain in the last thirty seconds. Reece Shearsmith is a good actor who definitely could have been a memorable Doctor Who villain but his appearance is mostly wasted on acting scared.

So just to recap what happened here, humanity was wiped out by sleep dust monsters. Apparently. There's no bit where the Doctor comes back and saves the day. The Doctor might as well not have been in the episode, he made no difference to the story in the end (and Clara did even less than him.) You could say this is a brave choice, but ALL OF HUMANITY being wiped out by fucking sleep dust isn't how you should end an episode of Doctor Who. It needs a follow-up but it's never going to get one because the episode was so poorly received.

A twist ending should make you look back at the rest of the episode and feel differently about what you've just seen. You should be thinking "Oooh, now I get it! That's why that thing happened!" There's none of that. All you're left thinking is "Wait, what? That's the ending? That's dumb." Maybe it was trying to make some metatextual point about storytelling but if it was then it did it really poorly! It's a very bad episode. Maybe not the WORST EVER but not one anyone could really enjoy.

SCORE: 3/10
 
Can we all agree perhaps that the majority of Capaldi's tenure was a train wreck... with the exceptions of "Heaven Sent," "Hell Bent" and most of season 10?

A pitiful waste of a good actor.
 
Capaldi's run is weird because he was great in all his episodes but he never seemed to have a proper defining moment as the Doctor. Maybe the anti-war speech or the episode I'll review after next would be closest. It also feels like he was the Doctor for a much shorter time than Matt Smith's even though they both did about the same number of episods. Smith seemed really young when he started and felt a lot older when he finished so probably help create the feeling that he really went on a journey as the Doctor (and he deserves a lot of credit for being able to act like a much older version of himself by the end.)
 
That's a good point -- with Capaldi's age and look, he was The Doctor at maximum level from the start -- which also spoke to how much Capaldi enjoyed playing him, but it didn't leave room for that kind of arc that Smith got to go through.
 
The first time he used it worked in the context, every time after that just seemed more and more self indulgent.
 
Face The Raven - The episode has a pretty interesting set-up. Rigsy from 'Flatline' returns and he has a mysterious tattoo. "Retcon" from Torchwood is mentioned and the Doctor uses his cards from 'Under The Lake'. The Doctor has Clara dangle out of the TARDIS (for flimsy reasons really but she enjoys it!) to find a hidden street in London. It takes some good old fashioned investigating to find the street, but that just builds up the intrigue as to what's going on. Ashildir/Me is running the street and has weird tattoos. She claims Rigsy commited a crime. The street is full of aliens disguised as humans. It's all very interesting so far! How can all these different species live together without fighting or anything? They've managed it for a hundred years until Rigsy came to the street. But why would he kill someone?

To keep the peace, anyone who commits any crime in the street is executed by some kind of magical space raven (luckily someone else is due to be executed right before Rigsy, just so we get a demonstration of how the raven works!) Clara tries to be clever by taking Rigsy tattoo for herself, thinking that will save him and there's no chance she will die. The Doctor works out that this is actually all about him and that's where I kind of start to have misgivings. I was enjoying the story as a straightforward mystery, but from here it switches to being another complex plot against the Doctor. The murder victim is actually still alive in a stasis pod and the Doctor has to use the TARDIS key to get her out (he's cuffed as a result.) Me thinks everything is fine since no one will be hurt (but the Doctor will be sent to someone mysterious) and is willing to remove Rigsy's tattoo. But Clara has it now...and Me can't remove it from her. For some reason? It's pretty contrived. If she can remove it from someone who is innocent, like Rigsy, why can't she remove it from somene he passes it too? (They do give a reason, it's just a bit hand-wavey.) I mean the point is that Clara must pay the price for taking such a stupid risk.

So now the episode switches to its third phase, the "Clara saying goodbye" phase. It's all very emotional and well acted and they play a sad version of Clara's theme music. And it goes on quite a while. I think if this actually was her real death I'd be fine with that, but even the first time I watched it I thought "but there's still two episodes to go and she probably isn't really dead." And I was kind of right! But again, it's a good scene to watch as a scene. Clara tries to make the Doctor promise not to go out for revenge or do aything crazy but you know he's not going to go along with that. She stands with her arms out like Jesus and, umm, her breasts stuck out (look, it's hard not to notice) and dies. There's a nice bit after the credits where Rigsy (remember he was in the episode?) has turned the TARDIS into a memorial to Clara.

So the thing about this episode is that it really feels like two episodes stuck together. And that's because it is! Writer Sarah Dollard was writing a standalone story about the alien street when Moffat told her to put Clara's death in it. Or so I read. A couple of years ago. Maybe I'm wrong. But it does feel like that. The first half is all about the murder mystery and trying to figure out what happened with Rigsy on this weird street and it's very entertaining. Then Clara takes the tattoo and it becomes clear that most of the first half is pretty irrelevant as it's all a plot to catch the Doctor, so all the stuff about the fragile truce between the aliens and the murder is forgotten. It's kind of a shame! But it's not like the second half is bad, it's actually very entertaining too. Clara's "death" probably would have been a good death for her if they'd decided to just keep her dead, so I can't really fault the episode for what happens in the next too. So I don't know, it's a good episode all the way through, it's just has that pasted together feeling that stops it from being a classic.

SCORE: 8/10
 
Heaven Sent - Basically it's an extra long episode where the Doctor is all alone in a spooky castle, being chased by a mysterious hooded figure. It's also the best written, best directed and best acted episode in a long time and is up there with the very best of Doctor Who! I don't know if it would have worked with any other Doctor than Capaldi. He's really good at talking to himself (or imagining he's talking to Clara.) He's a really good "talking to himself" actor, as well as just being a really good actor in general. The episode is never boring and while that's also due to the writing, directing and the music (Murray Gold can still good stuff!) none of it would work without Capaldi.

But yeah this is Moffat's best script since...I don't even know. 'The Eleventh Hour'!? It's been a while anyway. I can't help but compare it to 'Sleep No More', another episode with a "twist" ending. This episode does everything right where that one did everything wrong. The twist in that one just made you think "what was the point of that?" whereas the twist in this one is just brilliant, making you look back on the whole episode differently and revealing so much about the Doctor's character. That's why this one is so great, it's not just a super clever, high concept science fiction story, it's also the best story for the twelfth Doctor as a character. It really is a super clever high concept science fiction story too, of course! The Doctor spends two billion years living the same day again and again, punching his way through a diamond. And it doesn't feel silly or too much (as some of Moffat's stories have, TO ME) it feels perfect. It feels like it matters.

Director Rachel Talalay makes it all really good looking. Even the lake of skulls (they're all the Doctor's skulls!) looks good and creepy, and it's the kind of thing Doctor Who has struggled with in the past. And man that montage after the twist reveal. That's epic montaging.

The stuff where it cuts to the Doctor in the TARDIS when he's trying to figure something out does feel a bit like something from Sherlock, but that's fine because it works so well in the episode. In fact it works better than similar scenes in Sherlock do.

Then he's on Gallifrey at the end and it turns out he was in his confession dial all along and now you really want to see what happens next.

So I have no complaints about any of this!

SCORE: 10/10
 
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