So, the production team have themselves in a bind. Thanks to blithely ignorant contract management, the regulars will not be appearing in this week's episode. So instead we're given 25 minutes of Secret Agents in Space as a means of setting up a forthcoming monster 12-part Dalek story...
...wait, what? Oh, it's apparently not 1966. Well then.
The production team have themselves in a bind. Thanks to the Christmas special messing up the number of episodes and an impossible-to-renegotiate contract with the regulars, one of the regulars will barely be appearing in this week's episode. So instead we get to follow the adventures of the other regular as she deals with an alternate timeline featuring the death of the Doctor and gives us a taste of what's to come in the season finale...
...oh, hang on, it's not 2008. Let's try again.
The production team have themselves in a bind. Thanks to the Christmas special messing up the number of episodes and an impossible-to-renegotiate contract with the regulars, the regulars will barely be appearing in this week's episode. So instead we get to follow the adventures of a nice young person as she gets terrorized by statues and manages to save the Doctor, who's stuck 38 years in the past.
...oops, apparently it's not 2007 either. Once more:
The production team have themselves in a bind. Thanks to the Christmas special messing up the number of episodes (which somehow no-one saw coming) and an impossible-to-renegotiate contract with the regulars (which somehow no-one thought would be a problem), the regulars will barely be appearing in this week's episode. So instead we get to follow the adventures of a tragically hip young person as he stalks Rose and finds twoo luv with a slab of concrete. Oh joy.
Let's get one thing clear: the reason I hate this episode has nothing to do with the fact that the Doctor's not in it. I just listed three other episodes that either don't have the Doctor in it or barely feature him, and none of their flaws add up to the monumental pile of crud that this story is. I hate this story because it is seriously the most godawful piece of nonsense I'd ever had to sit through until I got to "Fear Her." It's a story so bad that I didn't give Buffy's "Storyteller" a fair chance after I realize that, like this one, it was primarily about an annoying blond yakking into a camera for 45 minutes. Hell, this story gave me misgivings about Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. That's how bad it is.
Next thing to get clear: I'm not faulting the acting. With the exception of the Abzorbaloff, everyone's on decent-enough form - well, if you can call Jackie's attempts at seduction "decent," but I choose to believe she was written that way - and even when he's Victor Kennedy, the Abzorbaloff is simply mildly annoying.
So here's the plot in a nutshell. Elton is recounting, via his dance-along vlog, his adventure of that one or three times he met the Doctor and also that time his mother died. He meets a group of fellow conspiracy theorists who all turn out to be decent people, and they hang out having fun in a library's basement until the sharp-dressed villain shows up and ruins everyone's parade. Elton develops feelings for Ursula, another member of the group, but she kinda sorta dies before he can get anywhere with her (and the notion that he got anywhere with her after that... squick. Thanks, Rusty). Well, Elton gets chased by the Abzorbaloff, gives up when he runs into a dead end, and prepares to accept death. But the Doctor shows up out of nowhere, actually refuses to save Elton, and gets his absorbed friends to do it for him. The Abzorbaloff goes poof, and Ursula gets saved in concrete-slab form. Elton muses on how everyone around the Doctor gets screwed, and wonders how long until it's Rose's turn.
Things that don't make sense: 1) they can play rock music in the basement of a library. 2) Rose doesn't call often enough for Jackie's liking, but she evidently calls twice in less than 24 hours. 3) Elton can't be bothered to tell us that he first met the Doctor on the night his mother died. Gah!
(On a side-note, I'm really annoyed to find that the thing that killed Elton's mother was a "living shadow." Yeah. This piece of crud spawned the Vashta Nerada. And slab-Ursula probably inspired the "flesh aspects" in that same story.)
Okay, now if I were in charge, and knowing that I was headed to a finale that would essentially be a backdoor pilot for Torchwood, I would have made this one a Torchwood story (and moved it past "Fear Her" so that this led into the two-part finale). Elton gets traumatized as a kid when the Doctor (apparently) kills his mother. Later, he's recruited by Torchwood to help track him down, but it turns out that his superior is an alien infiltraitor. Or something. Anyway, Elton gets the opportunity to either kill the Doctor and let the alien escape, or to catch the alien instead, and, being Our Hero, chooses the latter. The Doctor reveals that no, he didn't actually kill Elton's mother, and then goes off to investigate this Torchwood thingy. That's a much better story, and a much better lead-in to the Torchwood setup. It could present Torchwood as a serious threat to the Doctor, instead of a stale repeat of Van Statten's private army (cf. "Dalek"). Elton's allies could be interesting and original characters instead of a knockoff Scooby gang.
Look, my point is that Rusty did this a whole lot better two years later when he actually linked it in with the season finale. Moff can do a Doctor-lite that's gripping and engaging, but "Love & Monsters" honestly doesn't feel like Doctor Who. We already had our knockoff Scooby gang whenever we went back to Earth in the form of Rose, Mickey and Jackie.
We know from "Turn Left" and "Blink" that these stories don't have to suck. Unfortunately, we've got a thong-wearing booger-monster who talks like Fat Bastard, a number of pointless dance scenes ("character touches"), and, since we know Elton's going to live through it all (and we know from early on that everyone else is going to die), absolutely no emotional investment in these characters.
But all that's scraping the surface. The big problem with this episode is not that the Doctor's not in it, but that there's no reason for the Doctor not to be in it. In "Blink," he's stuck in 1969. In "Turn Left," he's dead. There's no tension in this episode partly because of what I just discussed above, but also partly because there's absolutely nothing at all preventing the Doctor from showing up at any second and saving the day. The plot also requires Earth to have been apparently infiltrated by two alien races in as many years (and we will forgive the Master for doing it the following year because he's been doing it since 1970). Part of the Doctor's mission statement is to prevent just this sort of thing. Instead of doing that, he's presented in this story as a flighty wizard who shows up at the end to sort everything out not because "save planets" is very prominent in his job description, but because Rose's mom thinks she's being stalked by a loser.
1 out of 10.
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