"Deep Breath" and "Into The Dalek" mini-Who Reviews

Before I begin, I want to make one thing clear:

Steven Moffat is full of himself.

There, now that that's out of the way, we can talk about Peter Capaldi's first two episodes as The Best Doctor Who Ever.

...you know, aside from [insert all your other favorites here], and Patrick Troughton.

Who Review: The Enemy of the World

You really miss something when you only get a dozen episodes of Who a year. Everything is just flung at you with no time for the plot to breathe organically or for the Doctor to really get involved in the setting into which he's been deposited.

The Enemy of the World is from Season Five of the classic series, which means it's in black and white and stars Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor. You might find a bit of Matt Smith in his characterization, especially at the beginning as he strips down to his long johns just to have a bit of a splash in the water. This harmless bit of characterization is probably overdone, but it works nicely because Troughton pulls double duty in this serial and also plays the villain.

Without giving too much away, the Doctor is approached by a resistance group that wants him to impersonate the villainous Salamander so that they (or he) can kill him, although a) not everything is as it seems, and b) the scheme seems to be overly complicated, given that Jamie at one point breaches Salamander's security all by himself. Despite that rather glaring plot hole, the script does move along at a solid pace, drip-feeding you information, innuendo and plot twists at just the right pace. You can watch the entire thing in one sitting without feeling its two-and-a-half hour runtime.

Obviously, goes the usual yarn, you have to make allowances for the shoestring budget and rushed schedule of the classic Who production. To be sure, there is a little bit of that here, but it shows up shockingly late in the serial. No, I'm not talking about the bit where they stick George Pravda in a hallway because they couldn't afford to build a prison cell. That's glossed over about as well as it is in any other serial. No, I'm talking about the underground fallout shelter, about which more later. But while I'm on the production values, I want to praise the team for taking the time to set up a complicated effects shot at the very end of the story, where both of Troughton's characters are in-shot at the same time.

Another amazing thing about this serial is the lack of black and white morality that certain other adventures, both classic and modern, have fallen prey to. To be sure, Salamander is an evil man. The show can never come right out and say this, but it's pretty clear from the subtext that he's taking sexual advantage of his food-taster. But his security chief turns out to be a decent human being, while his bitterest enemy is not quite the saint you might expect him to be. (Of course, the Doctor's suspicions are spot-on from the start.)

The script in general sings, crackling with little bits of characterization to breathe life into ordinarily dry info-dumps. It's astonishing to watch the first episode of this and think that it's written by the same man who wrote The Edge of Destruction, possibly the most boring Doctor Who serial ever. And Barry Letts slips behind the camera and delivers the goods - there's an amazing handheld POV shot from a helicopter taking off that looks like it belongs in a film, not in a notoriously cheap television show.

The pacing is unusually good for a black-and-white serial; it's basically the Doctor Who equivalent of Casablanca, or perhaps The Third Man, given the ambiguous morality of one of the main characters and the fact that a protracted sequence takes place in a tunnel. 

And that brings us to the one significant problem with this otherwise-magnificent gem of a serial. It turns out there are a bunch of underground proles that Salamander has duped in order to carry out his plan (because it's so evil he can't entrust his minions to do it - see what I mean about the unusual morality of this serial?). The problem is, we see these "oppressed underground proles" too often in other serials, and neither their costumes nor their performances are up to par with the rest of the serial. 

The action also gets a little bit confusing towards the end, mainly because they try to pull two switcheroos in a row, making us think in one scene that the Doctor is actually Salamander, and that Salamander is the Doctor in a subsequent scene. The first scene is utterly brilliant and so quintessentially Troughton, but I'm not convinced the payoff is worth the attempt to confuse the audience. The second time, it's pretty obvious what's going on given that "The Doctor" won't speak (Salamander speaks like Speedy Gonzales, and the Doctor mentions a few times that he's concerned he won't be able to master Salamander's accent in time).

These are ultimately minor quibbles. It's great to have this back in the archive after 35 years. Bravo to the people who found it, and double bravo to the people who made it. Final grade: A-.

Admin: Who Review List

Update on the episodes of Doctor Who I've reviewed.  I'll put the serials in chronological order.

Who Review: Cold War

In November of 1984, shortly before Gorbachev came to power, a Typhoon-class Soviet sub surfaced just south of the Grand Banks.
It then sank in deep water, apparently suffering a radiation problem. Unconfirmed reports indicated some of the crew were rescued.
But according to repeated statements by both Soviet and American governments, nothing of what you are about to see...

ever happened.

 

Wait, sorry, where was I? Oh, right, Davos Seaworth is a Soviet submarine captain, Edmure Tully is his political officer, and Chancellor Gorkon is some random scientist who likes listening to degenerate imperialist music. Oh, and he's dug up an Ice Warrior.

Gee, first the Great Intelligence and now the Ice Warriors. Hey, 2013 wouldn't happen to be, say, an anniversary year, would it? What's next? The Black Guardian? Yartek, leader of the alien Voord? Sutekh? Magnus Greel? (Downside to nuking Gallifrey: traditional anniversary villain Omega has to be a no-show, although he did get a shoutout in The Day of the Doctor.)

So it turns into Alien on a submarine, and the weirdest thing about the cast isn't the fact that the three main guest stars are extremely recognizable, but that they don't do frickin' Russian accents. But then, neither did Sean Connery, but then, Sean Connery was James Bond.

I'm going to review The Aztecs soon, and I was going to hold off on mentioning it until then, but it comes up in this episode: in very early Classic Who, before the Doctor was really a hero (remember, in the very first serial of the show, he was all set to bash a caveman's head in with a rock in order to get back to his ship*), every serial had to come up with some sort of contrivance to keep the Doctor and company from leaving before the plot was resolved. They'd be captured by cavemen, captured by Daleks, captured by Marco Polo, locked out of the TARDIS by a telepathic forcefield, lose the TARDIS in some Indiana Jones-style tomb, etc. So here as soon as the Doctor and Clara hop aboard the Red Onion, the TARDIS activates its emergency displacement system and jumps away to the south pole. (In 1983. Not sure how time works, but if I were the TARDIS, I wouldn't go to the place where my owner was destined to die for the first time three years hence. Wouldn't that leave a wound in time or something?)

*Yes, One called it "the Ship" far more often than he called it "the TARDIS."

The Ice Warrior gets loose and everything goes to hell. Edmure Tully turns out to be just as much a screwup in this universe as in Game of Thrones and gets himself offed, but eventually the Doctor and Clara are able to make the Ice Warrior understand this thing called mercy, so when his ship comes to get him he refrains from using the sub's nukes to start Operation Planetary Eradication. (OPE - yup, that's a Doctor Strangelove reference thrown in among my Hunt for Red October references.) In the process, the Doctor once again rehashes the whole Time War Thing And How It Relates To This Episode, just in case we'd all forgotten in the long gap since "A Town Called Mercy."

Let's get the obvious comparison out of the way. It takes place in XX83, during a cold war, underwater, with a returning foe, and has some sketchy effects. It is, basically, Warriors of the Deep done "right." (I confess, while the rest of Warriors was a mess, I liked the way it ended: with everyone dead. The Doctor's moral high ground can't save everyone if one side has no interest in salvation.) I disagree with the idea of doing the Ice Warrior's head in shockingly obvious CGI, especially when his hands were animatronics. We're twenty years on from Jurassic Park, which flipped between the two flawlessly, and yet you can still tell the difference on a TV budget. 

It is Doctor Who's most blatant attempt to do Alien ever, which is a) a good thing, because I was really afraid it was going to be "Dalek on a submarine" and b) quite amusing when you consider the following things:

• Ridley Scott was this close to being the production designer for Doctor Who's second serial ever. You know, The Daleks.
• Doctor Who did a serial in 1974, five years before Alien, with basically the exact same premise (minus Alien's most famous scene)
• Speaking of Alien's most famous scene, John Hurt shows up at the end of this season.

This is a tough episode for me to grade because I like The Hunt for Red October and I like Game of Thrones and there's plenty of appeal for me in it. But as I hinted above, the Doctor basically gets to do the exact same thing he did in "A Town Called Mercy." There's more for the companion to do this time (and Jenna Coleman looks damn fine in a military jacket), but... something just doesn't quite click.

5 out of 10.

Who Review: "The Angels Take Manhattan"

I've started off a few of my more recent reviews with something along the lines of "Steven Moffat has a problem," and I'm going to start this one off by wondering whether Moffat knows why the Angels were such a creepy, scary threat to begin with. So I wanted to preface this by saying that Moffat's easy prey right now since he's the showrunner, but that's not why I keep criticizing him. See, after "Blink" aired, I wrote a list of Doctor Who episodes I owned and a brief synopsis of each one, and at the end of the "Blink" synopsis I said something along the lines of "Moffat should be the next showrunner." Seriously, the first three years the show was back, Moffat consistently wrote the best episodes each season. He rightfully snatched a Hugo for "The Empty Child," beating out Battlestar Galactica's "Pegasus," and then his "Girl in the Fireplace" stole a Hugo from BSG's "Downloaded."

So I'm not trying to say that Moffat is the biggest hack on Doctor Who since Terry Nation. That's not what I'm getting at here. Nation was a guy who wrote (and snagged the copyright for) the Daleks, and yet the best-remembered Dalek serials (The Evil of the Daleks, Day of the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks) weren't written by him (Genesis is credited to him, but the whole concept was outgoing Script Editor Terrance Dicks's idea, and it was heavily re-written by incoming Script Editor Robert Holmes). In contrast, Moffat actually came up with several good monsters, it's just that he went and milked his most famous one far too hard.

Case in point: the climax of "The Angels Take Manhattan" involves the Doctor, River and Amy arguing in a graveyard while a statue points at Amy. The Weeping Angels work in dark rooms with flickering lights, which, admittedly the first half of the episode has in spades. The don't work outside in broad daylight. The tag at the end of "Blink" - showing a bunch of statues outside in broad daylight - worked as kind of a stinger because it didn't require us to think about it too much, and it was an effective capstone on the previous 44 minutes of pure terror.

Also... the decision to treat the Statue of Liberty like the T-rex when up until this point the Angels have been Velociraptors... it doesn't work.  The Angels aren't scary when the camera holds on them for a very long time, which is basically what happens with Lady Liberty in the background of all the rooftop scenes. It's hard to fault the director for not "getting" the Angels because there are parts of this episode that do work as well as the scariest parts of "Blink." In particular, the little kid statues that keep terrorizing Rory went a long way towards making the Angels scary again. (Although, how did those statues get Rory out of the basement and over to their farm? They didn't zap him through time...)

By far the most frustrating thing about this episode is the fact that 1938 is somehow a TARDIS-proof year. Daffy Duck was named, the March of Dimes was established, Hitler assumed control of the German military, and the Munich Agreement was signed. Okay, those are fairly important things. But hang on; back in "The Empty Child," the TARDIS managed to land in 1941. Ah well, different production teams, different rules, ri... oh, wait, "The Empty Child" was written by Moffat. Why couldn't the Doctor have popped back to 1941 and picked up Amy and Rory after three years? Because the plot demanded it?

By far the most ludicrous thing about "The Angels Take Manhattan" (and it's a close tie between this, the Godzilla Lady Liberty, and the Graveyard Scene) sees the Doctor running in slow-motion to recover the last page on the novel he was reading as if it's the key to resolving the episode's crisis and not just a little epilogue on the Ponds.

Still, aside from Martha Jones, Amy probably gets the most dignified companion exit of New Who, and I guess that's saying something.

6 out of 10.

Who Review: The Power of Three

Hey you guys, remember that show Star Trek: Voyager? Remember the "Year of Hell" two-parter?

Oh, you don't? Okay, the quick and dirty is that over the space of a year, Voyager gets the snot beaten out of it, there's actual tension, conflict and character development among the crew (and then the reset button is pushed, naturally).

So when I saw the preview for this episode at the end of "A Town Called Mercy," where Amy described the plot as "the year of the slow invasion... when the Doctor came to stay," I figured it could be something like that.

It's not.

The Doctor gets terminally bored with the slow invasion and wanders off on some other adventures, getting Amy married to Henry VIII in the meantime, before he returns, waves his magic wand at the problem, and makes it go away.

It's supposed to be about, I think, Amy and Rory deciding whether to live at home or keep traveling with the Doctor. You know, that decision they've been putting off ever since "Hotel Labyrinth" "The God Complex." Would you care to guess what they do here? Oh, that's right, they put the decision off again.

Meanwhile, Rory's Dad is back for a repeat performance, because hey why not, and he's knocked unconscious by the alien menace that's trying to kill humanity.  Knocked unconscious, rather than killed, by the alien menace who's trying to kill humanity.

The one thing the episode has going for it is that it finally came up with a role appropriate for the sort of child actors they can afford (as opposed to the ones Game of Thrones can afford, which are much better). Namely, a kid who literally does not speak, does not emote, does not have to do anything except act like a robot.

Three out of ten. I would rather Steven Moffat reduce the number of episodes per year (or, given his strengths and weaknesses, make fewer, longer episodes per year a la Sherlock) than dish out crap like this.

Who Review: The Day of the Doctor

This is an anniversary special unlike no other. Let's start with the obvious: in The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, and even, God help us, Dimensions in Time, efforts were made to represent all the Doctors.

No, no, please come back, this isn't another Classic Who rant about how Colin Baker should have been in it. When you have twelve Doctors, you will swamp the plot if you try to include them all. Hell, The Five Doctors is padded enough without an actual appearance by Tom Baker. And, well, look, between Baker's stock footage in that and Hartnell's cue-card-reading performance in The Three Doctors, it's fair to say that they've never, really, done a multi-Doctor story that adequately featured every incarnation of the Doctor, and oh well.

Speaking of padding the script, have you noticed that each of the previous anniversary specials just had the one plot? Some super-villain that requires the presence of all the Doctors, or else some super-villain who's deliberately drawn all the Doctors into his trap? Yeah, The Day of the Doctor doesn't even have a proper villain. Or a single plot. The latter is a staple of the show under Steven Moffat (a man who once said that Douglas Adams needed someone to stop him from including every wacky idea he had in the show). The former is... probably the first time this has happened since, oh, The Edge of Destruction.

Now you're going to needle me and say, "Look, the episode has Zygons and Daleks in it! How can you say it doesn't have a villain?" And my answer is that it doesn't have a villain. They're there, but... they're not.  The Zygon plot disappears, and the resolution to the story is basically the Doctors saving Gallifrey from themselves, rather than from the Daleks.

Okay, the plot, briefly. In the present day, Clara and the Doctor are taken to UNIT because there's a problem. The Doctor is shown a Gallifreyan painting - a moment frozen in time - that's either called "No More" or "Gallifrey Falls." It's called "Gallifrey Falls" because that's what's happening - begging the question of who made that painting - and it's called "No More" because that's what the Hurt Doctor carved on a wall with a laser-gun, for some reason. Then he went and stole the Moment, a weapon so sophisticated it grew a conscience.

Okay, remember when I did my review of "Asylum of the Daleks" in the (written) style of Chester A. Bum? Because I'm trying to picture Moffat pitching this script and not using that persona. "So there's this weapon that's so sophisticated that it actually grew a conscience - like Hactor from Life, the Universe and Everything, and it takes the form of Rose Tyler because, well, the fans just can't get enough of her.* And then Ten and Eleven are fighting the Zygons!"

*If Rose hadn't appeared since the end of Season 2, it would be perfectly fine by me. Just in case I never made that clear in any of my other reviews.

Anyway, Head!Rose (she calls herself the Bad Wolf, but, look, from the moment it's revealed that only the Hurt Doctor can see her, I've decided that Doctor Who and BSG take place in the same universe, or at least in universes that have the same God) tells the Hurt Doctor not to make everything go boom and then kind of does a reverse Christmas Carol. "Reverse" in both the sense that we only travel to the Doctor's future, and in the sense that it doesn't change him. After he witnesses Ten and Eleven sort out the whole Zygon thing (by having them negotiate for... what, exactly? Are the Doctors content to let Zygon shapeshifters live among us unsuspecting apes?), he decides that he has to go through with killing Gallifrey and the Daleks because... of... quantum.

10 and 11 go along with him, but then decide to take a third option by slotting Gallifrey into a pocket in time. They get the First Doctor to start the calculations (somehow) so that all the Doctors know what to do (somehow), but everyone except 11 and possibly 10 forget about their efforts because of the unstable timeline or some such. (Look, until "Time Crash," we never had a case of the Doctor remembering experiencing the events of a multi-Doctor episode from his younger self's perspective before. Now suddenly the show has to delve into fanwank to explain his amnesia . Joy.)

I think this is the part where certain fans whine about how saving Gallifrey undoes all the angst that Nine and Ten had. Piffle and Phooey.  1, raise your hand if you expected Gallifrey to stay dead forever. 2, raise your hand if you were sick and tired of hearing about the Time War.

I love how Hurt doesn't do the Espresso routine that everyone from Eccleston on has done, and that he is apprehensive at best about the prospect of turning into the excitable, overeager lads that are Ten and Eleven. I really hope that Peter Capaldi will be as laid-back as Hurt, but I'm a killjoy that way. (I'm overall torn on the whole concept of the Hurt Doctor. On the one hand, he throws the numbering out of whack, makes Matt Smith the twelfth regeneration, and forces the show to address the 13-life limit now rather than when Capaldi leaves. On the other hand, it's John Freaking Hurt, who, assuming we don't count the 60s Dalek films with Peter Cushing, is probably the most renowned actor ever to play the Doctor. And he frakking nails it.)

I also liked how the "use the same screwdriver to do the 400-year calculation" gimmick (even though 10 lost his on the moon and 11 certainly implied that his screwdriver was new) set up the resolution. Nice touch there. Moffat's getting better at this sort of thing.

As my recap might have hinted, it is not perfect. And it's not because of the lack of other Doctors - look, three are dead, four don't look like themselves anymore, and one probably won't touch this series again for anything short of the Crown Jewels.  I think we'd all rather our Doctors be represented by stock footage rather than by re-casting (though I'd love to know what the Hartnell fans thought of David Bradley in An Adventure in Space and Time), which means that stock footage is really what we're going to get.  ...And I'm not writing off the other Doctors just because I'm a Tom Baker fanboy and the man himself got a cameo at the end of this special. As I said in the AAiSaT review, I thought his cameo went on for a tad too long and wasn't vague enough as to who or what Tom's character was and what message he was giving Eleven. 

Now comes the part where I have to slap a number on this thing. It's hard to do this with the "special" episodes because they, even moreso than the normal episodes, are not aimed at me, a 25-year-old American. So if I had to nitpick, I'd say that this episode, being the fiftieth anniversary episode and all, is geared towards a broader audience, and it tells that broader audience that Doctor Who is silly, stuffed, and at times incoherent. Which is a pretty accurate description of the show right now, honestly. But it also tells them that Doctor Who is good fun, as it always was, and has decent effects nowadays too.

Well, with that in mind, I'd say that this is the second-best special the revival series has done, the best being, obviously, "A Christmas Carol." I gave that one... well, shoot, my review of "A Christmas Carol" was two sentences long. I hereby retroactively give that one a 9 and this one an 8 out of 10.

Who Review: An Adventure in Space and Time

It is fair to say that David Bradley has now emotionally destroyed the fandoms of both current TV shows I watch: first as Walder Frey, executor of the Red Wedding on Game of Thrones and then as William Hartnell, the tragic hero of the docu-drama An Adventure in Space and Time, which catalogs  the first three years of the show and takes a few, ah, licenses with history.

Now, I'll just get this out of the way, the waterworks were flowing pretty consistently from around the time Hartnell's granddaughter told him he said "gloves" instead of "drugs" and then came up with a beautiful kiddie explanation for why the Doctor would really need "anti-radiation gloves."  I thought the whole thing was utterly fantastic, and certainly more of an emotional gut-punch than The Day of the Doctor. (TDotD is gimmicky silly fun that - thanks in part to John Hurt reacting to 10 and 11 exactly the way Classic Who fans did - never takes itself anywhere in the vicinity of seriously.  More on that in a future post.)

Who Review: A Town Called Mercy

It's the one with the cyborg cowboy. He shoots a guy, the guy asks "Am I the last one," and the cyborg says "there's one more: the Doctor."

The Doctor arrives at a town called Mercy and finds a load of stones and lumps of wood. The cyborg is tracking him. Mercy may look familiar: it's the set of pretty much every Spaghetti Western ever. Mercy has electricity too early, and the Doctor mentions his Christmas list for the second time in two episodes.

Everyone in the saloon looks up when the Doctor enters. When he says he's the Doctor, the undertaker starts measuring him for a suit. Then when he says he's an alien, they pick him up and carry him out of town. And then point a lot of guns at him. And then the cyborg shows up. The townsfolk start praying, which has to be a first on this show. Then the sheriff - That Guy From Farscape - orders the Doctor back across the town boundary.

Inside the sheriff's office, the sheriff explains everything. The cyborg has erected a boundary around the town and kills everyone who crosses it. The Doctor works out that "the alien doctor" isn't him. It's a guy named Kahler-Jex. He crashed here, and he saved the town from an outbreak of cholera.  And he also rigged up the electric lights.

The Doctor decides he's going to take Jex out in the TARDIS, which is problematic because the TARDIS is outside the boundary. While Rory and Sheriff Crichton distract the Gunslinger, the Doctor rides off on a horse and we learn that Murray Gold can't do Ennio Morricone.

Jex tells Amy he'd rather stay in Mercy and help people.

Meanwhile, the Doctor decides he wants to stop and check something out. He finds a cable buried in the sand and follows it to Jex's spaceship, which appears to be singularly undamaged. It looks like a giant egg. Sonicing it sets off an alarm, drawing the Gunslinger away from Rory and Sheriff Crichton. Digging through Jex's files, he finds that Jex was a war criminal, which might explain his coming-and-going German accent. Then the Gunslinger finds the Doctor and reveals that he's out for "justice," which explains why he hasn't gone and shot up the town yet.

Jex holds Amy at gunpoint, but then Sheriff Crichton reads the script, realizes Jex is a bad guy, and saves her. The Doctor confronts Jex, who says he's a war hero. Jex's people had been at war for nine years, a war that had decimated half his planet. His cyborgs brought peace. Then he decommissioned the cyborgs, and one of them went rogue, because that always happens. Hey guys, don't make cyborgs or AIs, please. If every science-fiction story, ever, is anything to go by, they will go rogue and start killing people.

Jex notes that the Doctor is also a war "hero," although he thinks the Doctor doesn't have the nerve to do what must be done (and, again, having seen Genesis of the Daleks, I'm inclined to agree with him).  The TARDIS crew debates the good, the bad and the ugly of their current situation. Amy wants to forgive Jex, as does Sheriff Crichton, Rory and the Doctor want to chuck him out of town. The Doctor does that and then holds him at gunpoint, waiting for the Gunslinger to show up. Then Amy holds the Doctor at gunpoint. And won't take her frickin finger off the trigger I mean DAMN!

I have to pause the DVD and go into a rant now. I get that Brits are babies when it comes to self-defense and that they're perfectly happy relying on other people to save them when bad guys show up. Fine. Cultural differences. And I guess that explains why Amy doesn't know Gun Safety 101. But it's played for comedy, and that bothers me. Okay, back to the review.

The Doctor admits that he's treating Jax horribly because of his own guilt at not killing the Daleks or the Master or anyone - and I punched the air here - and Amy says he has to be better than him.  The Gunslinger shows up and holds Jex at gunpoint. Jex reveals that he remembers all the cyborgs' names. The Gunslinger shoots, but Sheriff Crichton pushes him out of the way and takes the bullet instead. He dies, telling the Doctor that he and Jex are both good men, they just forget it sometimes. (Okay, his character's name is Marshall Isaac.)

The Doctor sends Jex to his cell, and the Gunslinger says they have until noon tomorrow to hand over Jex or he'll kill everyone. Hey, Doctor, if you'd just gone and gotten the TARDIS like was the plan, Sheriff Crichton would still be alive and the town wouldn't be in jeopardy now.

That night, a gang arrives to take Jex and deliver him to the Gunslinger. There's a standoff that's not at all shot like a standoff. The Doctor gives a speech about how violence doesn't end violence - hey, Doc, tell that to Harry Truman.

The Doctor and Jax have a discussion. Buffy did this sort of thing as an art form - "whose problem are we really talking about here?"  He says "We all carry our prisons with us," and that gives the Doctor an idea.

High noon. The Gunslinger walks into town. There's a kinda-sorta-proper standoff this time, before the Doctor sonics the Gunslinger. Various decoys distract the Gunslinger before he cottons on and goes to the church. The Doctor tells Jex to run for it. The Gunslinger waves his arm cannon around before deciding not to kill anyone. Jex makes it to his ship and uses the tech he's wired up the town with to communicate with the Gunslinger. Jex blows himself up using the ship's auto-destruct, and an appallingly bad effects shot makes it look like his ship was hidden right behind a barn.

The Gunslinger decides to follow him because he's a creature of war with no role to play during peace. The Doctor says he does have a role: to protect it. So the Gunslinger stays as the town's Batman. Or RoboCop.

7 out of 10. Always nice to see the Doctor deal with the whole Time War thing in an episode that doesn't involve the overexposed fascist pepperpots. 

Who Review: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

Nefertiti is smoochin on the Doctor when he gets some sort of call. A ship the size of Canada is coming to Earth, sometime in the future. Neffi is with him for... some reason.  They have six hours until the ship gets within missile range.  And the guy from Sherlock is there too. He's a safari guy from 1902. And Mr. Weasley. Who is Rory's Dad. The Doctor abducts them all - by which I mean Amy, Rory, and Mr. Rory, and goes onto the ship with Lestrade (Riddell) and Nef. The Doctor says Hi to Brian (Mr. Rory) as only he can.  Amy's annoyed because she thinks Neffi and Udell have replaces her and Rory. A door opens and dinosaurs come out.

I can't decide to go with a Jurassic Park joke, or an Earthshock joke.

Riddell wants to shoot them, but the Doctor says no. Wait why did he bring this guy?

Anyway the Doctor uses his magic wand to make the computer talk to them, but then he ends up on a beach. The beach is humming. The Doctor has Christmas list. There's a floor under the beach. Some guy is watching them. He tells someone or something to "bring them to me."  Meanwhile, Amy, Riddell and Nef are having a spat about gender issues and Nef doesn't know how to high-five. And then they stumble onto a sleeping teenage T-rex. Then they see a shadow on the wall, just like in Jurassic Park. Lestrade makes his way over some obvious CGI and Amy says she's a queen.

It turns out the beach is the engine room. It's a spaceship powered by waves. Somehow. Then they're attacked by Pterodactyls. They can't teleport out because of technobabble. So they run into some cliffs. Which are a part of the engine-room-beach because plot. Then robots arrive. They're very cross with the Doctor.

Amy turns the lights on. Dino shadows chase them around. And then we see a Silurian on the video-record. The Silurians herded dinosaurs onto a space-ark, but one of the species wasn't adapting. And now there aren't any Silurians on the ship. Another spacecraft has boarded it in the meantime..

The Doctor calls one of the robots "Rusty." Heh. Speaking of Heh, after a Triceratops snifs Brian's balls and licks his face, the Doctor and company are taken to see Walder Frey/Argus Filch/William Hartnell. He's familiar with the Doctor, and his name is Solomon. He was attacked by Velociraptors and rescued by the robots, and he might be dying. And he's actually not familiar with the Doctor, he just thought the Doctor was a... doctor. And he wants the Doctor to fix his legs. When the Doctor gets nosy, Frey has Rory's dad injured by one of the robots.

Amy finally just calls Rory and tells him it's a Silurian ship.

Walder says he's transporting the ship to some colony. And then he scans the Doctor and finds out how much he's worth. Except that value is "nothing" because the Doctor doesn't exist. He's "no one." Hey, Walder, hopefully you'll be meeting another "no one" in the near future.

Anyway, Amy tells the Doctor that it's a Silurian ship. And the Doctor fixes Frey's leg and then asks what happened to the Silurians. He airlocked them. And then the ship autopilot dragged him back to Earth. The Doctor tells him about the missiles but he doesn't believe him. Because bad guys never believe the Doctor.

Anyway the Doctor escapes with Rory and Rory's Dad and they ride a Triceratops. It's a pretty silly scene, and I'm not at all clear that they saved any time doing it. Also the robots are slower than the Borg.

Riddell gets his hands on some firepower.  They're stun guns, so Amy approves. She sees the Doctor snog Rory full on the lips, and I'm not sure she approves of that.

Anyway Frey shows up again and decides he wants something even more valuable than the dinosaurs: Nef! He has one of his robots shoot the Triceratops because he's an evil snot. Then Nef, Amy and Ridell are transported to Frey. It was Nef's idea. And Frey straight-up says he's gonna rape her, and then takes her back to his ship.

The Doctor goes to the control deck. He magnatized the hull so Frey can't escape. Ridell gets a chance to go Robert Muldoon on the Raptors. And they flank him, obviously.

Rory and Rory's Dad have to fly the ship because of plot. Amy and the Doctor have a big "it's the end of the world and we're talking about our personal problems" scene.

Well, Riddell fared better than Muldoon, so he and Amy get to go fight Raptors again. He's a chauvinist but he's clearly enjoying having Amy shooting right alongside him.

The Doctor teleports to Frey's shuttle, and shorts out the robots. They sing "Daisy Bell" as they die. Nef turns the tables on Frey. And the Doctor leaves him him on the shuttle after he reconfigures the shuttle to emit the signal the missiles are chasing. And a million Game of Thrones fans cry out in joy.

Meanwhile Riddell and Amy have stopped all the Raptors. Day saved, Rory's Dad gets to see Earth from way the hell up in space. Space space, gotta see space. I'm in space.

But, hey, remember that time the Brigadier killed a bunch of Silurians? I guess the difference is the Brig was a generally decent person, whereas Walder Frey was... well, Walder Frey.

5 out of 10. Fun guest stars, but a tad overstuffed and more than a little incoherent.

Who Review: Asylum of the Daleks

Steven Moffat has this problem. He comes up with all these great ideas, and nobody stops him, tells him to parse it down to sense-making, which is funny because that's exactly what he said was Douglas Adams's problem on the City of Death DVD.

With that in mind, I would like you to read the rest of this post in the voice of Chester A. Bum.

The Doctor meets a woman inside a statue of a Dalek! And then it turns out that she is a Dalek! And then we find that Amy and Rory are getting a divorce, because they already did a pregnancy last season and Moffat wants to keep them "interesting"! And then the Daleks abduct everyone! And then they ask the Doctor to save them!

And then we meet the girl who's going to be a companion half a season from now, half a season early! And she's making souffles! And listening to music so she can't hear the Daleks squawking at her!

And it turns out that the Daleks have an asylum where they lock up the Daleks! And the Doctor points out the obvious problem, namely that the Daleks should just EXTERMINATE any problem they come across! And the Dalek gives a response that amounts to "yup, but this is the plot so roll with it!"

Who Review: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

(I'm doing Series Seven Buffy-style, sitting down with the DVD player open in one window and Notepad in another and just writing down a narration and my reactions. What's different is that what you're seeing here is my first impression, whereas with Buffy I've seen all the episodes before.)

Our episode begins with a starship cruising directly over our heads (Star Wars), going on for longer than you'd expect (Spaceballs), and then exploding. The Doctor is caught up in this, and ends up falling to Earth, desperately wrestling with something that will save him from dying the second he hits the ground (Moonraker - and by the way, Moonraker managed to look more real than this. This is not a good sign).

He gets saved by a woman who takes him into town to find a police telphone box.  It's Old Times, judging by the car.  Maybe 1920s-30s.  The Doctor can't see a thing because he put the helmet on backwards. 

So they get to the police box and the woman says her name is Madge.  After an incredibly long amount of time, we learn that the police box is not the TARDIS. This sets the tone for the entire story: things we know are coming take too long to actually happen.

Who Review: The Reign of Terror

...is phenomenally stupid, overcomplicated, padded, and schizophrenic.  Oh, and the animation on the two missing episodes for the DVD release is nothing to write home about.

So it's the Bloody French Revolution.  At this point in the series's history, we have to split everyone up, so the Doctor is knocked unconscious and Ian is locked in a separate cell from Susan and Barbara.  But he is locked in a cell with a guy who tells him to get in touch with a British spy named James Stirling, because Ian looks English and must therefore be a counter-revolutionary.

Stirling is undercover as Lemaitre, an official of some sort whose role is never clearly defined (he gets face-time with Robespierre but spends all the rest of his time hanging out in a prison, which already has a jailer), which is supposed to be a surprise, but a) Lemaitre is the only candidate, and b) Lemaitre's actions don't quite square with his "official" story, so something is clearly up. I will give the serial very reluctant credit for taking the usual "coincidence-driven escape" - that is, where Lemaitre, long before the reveal that he's Stirling, calls to the jailer to distract him at a crucial moment - and eventually using it as prove that Lemaitre is a good guy.

Anyway, Lemaitre/Stirling lets Ian go, ostensibly to track him and find out where Jailbreak Inc is headquartered.  In reality, he needs to know if Ian is against the Revolution before he helps him. Meanwhile, the folks at Jailbreak Inc have their own problem. Their names are Jules, Jean and Leon, and unfortunately Leon is the one who turns out to be a mole, so don't expect me to waste time telling Jules and Jean apart.

Meanwhile, the Doctor wastes one episode walking to Paris and getting waylaid by a work party, and another episode playing dress-up.  "Hello, my good sir, would you please give me that sash of office on the wall there, as well as a paper and pen with which I can forge my credentials? Thank you." Amazingly, the shopkeeper actually has a brain between his ears, but the person he tells is Lemaitre, who takes the Doctor to see Robespierre for, um, no discernible reason. 

You'll excuse me for skipping over the "exciting" part of the plot - that would be in the missing episodes, and I was distracted by the gratuitous crotch-shots the animators decided to give us. No, I am not making this up. Rather than attempt to recreate the shots as they existed in the original episodes, the animators decide to do basically everything in close-ups. And when characters sit down, for whatever reason we're treated to a close-up of a pelvis dropping into a chair.

The plot gets even dumber in Episode Six. Since Episode Five ends with the Doctor and Lemaitre dropping in on Jailbreak, Inc, and Episode Six begins with Lemaitre revealing that, yes, he is Stirling, you would think the story was over. No. Instead we have a pointless excursion to an inn so that somebody's cousin can put "Napoleon" on his C.V.  At least, that's the only reason I can think for it.

You cannot do Jeu des Trônes on a BBC budget. And, by the way, if you're going to try, you could at least make the filler as interesting as this.

Four out of ten. Three out of ten for the reconstructed version and its stupid animation.

Can Neil Gaiman restore the Cybermen to their former glory?

Asks io9.

The answer is, "is zero a number?"

Let me break this down real quick: every single Cyberman story ever with the exception of The Invasion for reasons I'll get to momentarily sucked.

The closest any Cyberman story aside from The Invasion came to being good was Tomb of the Cybermen, which was good for two episodes before it completely fell apart. You know, right when the Cybermen finally actually appeared and started talking, and you discovered that, as clever as their trap was, it was a really stupid trap disguised as a really clever trap. To break down the three stupidest elements of this trap really quickly...

1) The idea of the logic games to get into the tombs is to weed out the stupid people so that the smart ones can be upgraded into Cybermen. But the only person the Cybermen ever upgrade is Toberman, the dumb muscle. So... why did they make it so hard for dumb people to get there? They obviously could use dumb people as cannon fodder...

2) The Cybermen very politely leave a Cyberman-killing gun lying around upstairs for the humans to find.

3) The tombs are downstairs. The revitalizing unit is upstairs. There's a giant hatch between the two levels that can only be opened from upstairs.

And really every Cyberman story except for The Invasion is about as stupid as that one. The Invasion works for the exact same reason that Genesis of the Daleks works. The familiar monsters are relegated to the background, and a far more interesting villain is allowed to steal the spotlight.

And Moffat's quote disturbs me too. The Cybermen were almost never presented as an "awesome military force." The Moonbase featured a tiny strike force. Tombs featured the last remnants of a defeated civilization. Both Revenge of the Cybermen and Earthshock saw the... last remnants of a defeated civilization try one last time to get revenge. Furthermore, the scariest thing about them was not that "they could be right behind you without you knowing it," but that you could be turned into one of them.

Three years ago I couldn't imagine myself asking this, but does Moffat even understand Doctor Who?

Who Review: Vengeance on Varos

I thumbed through About Time before writing this, just to see what others have said.  And I have to admit that I'm amazed the authors never mentioned the Latin phrase panem et circenses. 

Now, granted, I'm not about to claim that this is the Doctor Who version of The Hunger Games, because it's not.  But somebody in this serial pretty much hit the nail on the head.

So there's this planet Varos, which exports this absurdly important mineral.  It's so important that it actually powers the TARDIS, so naturally it was/will be destroyed during the Time War and Eleven will have to deal with that at some point.  Yeah, right.  Anyway, there's a little green slug named Sil who's overseeing the planet, ensuring that the mineral is mined for a slave wage and televising executions either to keep the population entertained, or to sell the videos off-world, or both.  I can't tell which because I couldn't make out most of his dialogue.  He is, however, given a fantastic over-the-top performance that must be seen to be believed. 

Varos is nominally politically controlled by Governor Zaal'Koris vas Qwib Qwib, but if the people don't like how he's doing his job, he'll gets disintegrated.  Of course, direct democracy is like two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner, so it's remarkable he's lasted this long. 

Unfortunately, his psychotic Grand Vizier is in league with Sil to depose him and keep the planet poor.  The psychotic Grand Vizier is also the sole member of the judiciary branch, so he gets to basically re-write the law whenever the plot needs to be padded out a bit more by forcing the Governor to make a speech.  Also in league with Sil is the Phantom of the Opera (in case you can't tell, I've long since given up on trying to remember contrived sci-fi names), who is the chief Gamemaker.  There are various guards - who, by the way, have the best "evil fascist" uniforms ever seen on the show - most of whom defect to the good guys over the course of the story.

The "good guys" are a prisoner whose execution is supposed to be televised live, his love interest, their very doomed guard friend, and... some bloke in a patchwork coat who randomly hijacks the entire plot because none of the other "good guys" can act.  At least, not until Martin Jarvis becomes a "good guy." 

That's not entirely fair.  Colin Baker delivers his best televised performance here.  He's amazingly composed during the hanging sequence, and although the payoff is a bit of a letdown that shouldn't distract too much from the fact that for once, his part has actually been written as the Doctor and not some other lunatic. 

Basically the plot involves the Doctor and company falling into their usual series of traps and escapes, ninety minutes of running around tunnels with some subtext or another, the difference is this time we get to see what All The Viewers At Home are up to.  Apparently invisible cameras can follow the Doctor through the Punishment Dome (where the control room is just down the hall from the transmogrification room, which seems like a bit of an oversight to me).  The script is a tad too self-aware, and by a tad I mean it makes Troughton's Doctor talking through the security cameras all the time seem subtle.

One of the first visuals sets the tone for the entire story.  The rebel leader is being tortured by a device that looks an awful lot like a giant clunky video camera.  Unfortunately, it just gets piled on heavier and heavier from there.

6 out of 10.

Rebel Flesh/Almost People re-review

I wasn't in any way fair to this two-parter the first time around, I recently re-watched it, and I want to do it right.

First of all, let me point out that it's still a mess that would still belong at the bottom of the season's ranking if the rest of the season had actually been up to snuff. But honestly, all of Series 6 revolves around the anticlimactic revelation of who River Song really is, so the "arc" episodes are kind of lackluster and the "filler" episodes - with the exception of "The Doctor's Wife," which just feels tremendously out-of-place in this season - range from silly and done-before ("Curse of the Black Spot," "Closing Time") to boring and predictable ("The God Complex," "Closing Time" again) to, well, borderline unintelligible (this two-parter). Oh, and then there was "Night Terrors." Hooray.

The first time I watched "The Rebel Flesh" was when it was broadcast on BBC America with commercials interrupting the plot every 13 minutes to advertise Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica, two things from which the plot borrows just a tad. But I harped on that a lot last time. Watched all in one uninterrupted go on pristine DVD, the plot makes a tad more sense and it's generally easier to keep track of who's who except when the story is deliberately trying to decieve you.

Then I turned around and praised "The Almost People" for being better and having a clever plot twist at the end, when in fact the second episode is so busy having fun with the Doctor-ganger that entire plot elements just got left on the cutting room floor. What the hell happened to the shuttle that was supposed to evacuate them? (Oh, and I got confused following the sonic screwdriver around. I think it actually works out properly now.)

With all that in mind, the new problem with this two-parter is not that it's inane and confusing, but that there is absolutely no way the story as it was could have been told in just two episodes. There's too much going on.

So, criticisms first, because I want to end this on a high note.

Amy and Rory appear to wake up in a completely different room from the one they were last seen in before the solar tsunami hit. The term "solar tsunami" is stupid. It's not entirely clear why a) people are mining acid in the first place, and b) why they need to be physically present on the island in order to control the avatars I mean gangers.

The Doctor runs around insisting that the flesh-folk are just as legitimate as the humans, except that he exposes ganger-Cleaves by pointing out a key difference between gangers and humans. Cleaves's brain clot adds absolutely nothing to the story. The gangers can't seem to make up their minds as to whether they're gangers or humans. First they play Dusty Springfield and make a house of cards, and then they go nuts about their rights and survival. There's no decent explanation for how human-Cleaves got separated from the others.

The big one: the uber-evil ganger Jennifer gains new powers as the plot demands, because an insightful study of the nature of the soul isn't going to keep the kiddies interested.

The other big one: the story doesn't work because there's no protagonist. Contra virtually every other Matt Smith story up to this point, the Doctor knows eight zillion more things than he lets on and it turns out that this entire exercise was just so he could do something amazing at the end. Amy's not the protagonist, because she's seeing eye-patch-lady everywhere and we can't relate to that, she has Schroedinger's fetus gestating inside her and we can't relate to that, she's suddenly prejudiced against the Doctor-ganger, and since that's the big draw of the second episode we can't relate to that... and Rory is just alarmingly stupid.

The good: Matt Smith's double act, the twist ending, the fact that this covers more ground in the "validity of artificial people" department than Battlestar Galactica accomplished in its entire first season... (but only because BSG was still reading the Cylons as terrorists instead of Replicants at that point).

If memory serves, I gave "Rebel Flesh" a 2 and "Almost People" a 7. This is bloody stupid. Both parts get 5 out of 10. The first part is more comprehensible than I gave it credit for the first time around. The second part is more interesting, but also far too rushed.

The top 5 most undignified, anticlimatic deaths in science fiction

SPOILERS AHEAD

Dishonorable mentions:
Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (2nd time) and the Fourth Doctor. But this list is already overdosed with crappy Doctor deaths, and Starbuck at least got a very moving (if slightly unbelievable) death scene the first time she died. (As much as I revere Ron Moore, he's responsible for two deaths that make the list in addition to Starbuck's dishonorable mention. Ouch. On the plus side, he's also got an honorable mention and a solid entry on the "good death" list.)

5) Sam Anders
I know this one is going to be controversial. Or at least it would if anyone read this blog. I love Battlestar Galactica as much as the next nerd, but this was painful to watch.

It wasn't the death itself (which occurs just offscreen, as the most beautiful rendition of the original Battlestar theme Bear McCreary ever arranged plays) that bugs me about our favorite Pyramid-player-turned-resistance-fighter-slash-Final-Five-Cylon's demise. It's everything that led up to it. Sam was randomly shot in the head during a mutiny, spouted off the biggest infodump in the show's history, and then turned into a vegetable.

I know this plot was invented at the last minute because Michael Trucco was nearly killed in a car crash during the writers' strike, but... badass Sam Anders got randomly shot and turned into a vegetable. Then they stuck him in a tank and made him fly a ship into the sun. Not cool.

4) Boba Fett
He's not higher on this list because he's more popular with the Star Wars fanboys who take every single Star Wars novel as canon, in which case this death doesn't even count.

So a blind Han Solo accidentally whacks Boba's jetpack, causing him to rocket headfirst into the sail barge and fall into a giant ahem in the sand. Talk about your accidental discharges.

3) The Seventh Doctor
The cleverest Time Lord who ever lived doesn't bother to check his scanner before he steps out of the TARDIS into a hail of gunfire. Then he dies on the operating table because his doctor's too stupid to figure out he has two hearts. Amazingly, Sylvester McCoy started his run on Who on an even worse note...

2) The Sixth Doctor
The Sixth Doctor was certainly unpopular, but... the TARDIS gets shot down, he bangs his head on the console, he dies. Colin Baker refused to return for a proper regeneration story (not that anybody blames him), so we got this turd of a death instead.

1) Captain James T. Kirk
"Bridge on the Captain."

Who Review: Voyage of the Damned

I had the pleasure of watching this one with my good friend Tom, who once upon a distant time wrote a post or two for this blog. It was the first time he'd seen it, so I've taken the luxury of adding a few of his comments throughout this review.

The Titanic crashes through the TARDIS just cuz, and then it's not the Titanic, it's the starship Titanic, because the people in charge of this interstellar cruise line know nothing about history and it's kind of funny. (I also noticed that the tour guide thinks that human beings worship "the great god Santa," a good three years before Steven Moffat put it in an episode and I made it a running gag in my reviews.)

All right, it's time to meet our cast of characters this time around. Tom's comments are highlighted.

Astrid Peth - serving wench in an outfit that, as I recall, caused quite a stir. First time any companion's shown any cleavage while Rusty was at the helm!

Two fat people - comic relief. Wow, they're fat and they're eating.

A rich jerk - Yup, he's rich, so he's a jerk, what a surprise.

The aforementioned tour guide - Aaaargh, something that reminds me of Revelation of the Daleks!

Bannakaffalatta - Mini-Satan! Awesome!

They go down to Earth, which they can do because everyone's evacuated London because bad stuff always happens on Christmas. Hey, they finally realized that. But the honeymoon doesn't last long because this is Doctor Who and we didn't come to see everything go perfectly right.

Asteroids hit the ship and everything goes to hell, and angels start killing people (so it's Tron now). The Doctor maneuvers his company through a clogged stairwell. Hey, make the fat people go last. Hey, the rich guy said it! Why do I always agree with the rich jerks? The angels (excuse me, "Host") do this thing where they say "Information" at the beginning of every sentence. Information: kill. Hey, I called it! Oh, please, let Mini-Satan take down at least one of these things. Then I will be satisfied.

Then they get to that big wobbly bridge over a pit of death, because every ship has to have a big wobbly bridge over a pit of death. It's either that or chompy crushy things. There was a distinct lack of big wobbly bridges over pits of death in the Mass Effect games, but they made up for that with lots of fire, a horde of bad guys, and limited cover.

Fat person #1 abruptly falls to his death. Holy crap. I did not see that coming. Bannakaffalatta self-destructs, murdering the crap out of all the nearby Host. I believe Tom actually punched the air at this point. Fat person #2 ties herself to the one remaining Host and jumps to her death. Man, they're dropping like flies.

So then the Doctor leaves the rich guy, the tour guide, and the serving wench to go fight the villain himself because the plot demands it. Come on, Doctor, you need some more cannon fodder. At least take the rich guy with you...

So he meets the villain, who owns the cruise line, except not, so he's destroying the ship and the planet Earth as a means of revenge. He comes across as an unsatisfactory mix of Doctor Evil and Davros, and so Astrid grabs a forklift (aw, nothing along the lines of "get away from her, you bitch") and shoves him into a big fiery pit of doom. Okay, you better get out now... Only the brakes are gone so Astrid tumbles in as well.

The Doctor does the usual day-saving routine, which Tom kind of bought. And then he turns Astrid's ghost into atoms and leaves the inept tour guide on the planet with a million pounds. The end.

Satisfying, but not spectacular.

6 out of 10.

Who Review: Utopia

I'm glad I haven't gotten around to reviewing this one yet. The first time I burned through my Series Three boxset, I was more interested in watching John Simm's version of the Master go insane in the next two episodes than in watching this episode and paying enough attention to it.


And since yesterday marked the first time I'd seen this episode since... wait for it... I'd gotten hooked on Battlestar, I was highly amused by the very subtle BSG nod in "Utopia." No, not the whole plot about the last humans in existence trying to find a mythical haven, because there aren't enough clear parallels so I'm willing to give Rusty the benefit of the doubt on that one. No, I'm talking about the Memorial Wall. You see it for all of two seconds and its nowhere near as impressive as the one on Galactica, but it's still there, and I got the reference.

I like to give Rusty a lot of crap for his end-of-season shenanigans, and to be sure "Last of the Time Lords" and its Tinkerbell-Jesus conclusion is a clusterfrak. This is sad, considering the attention to detail he pays elsewhere. As I said in my review for The End of Time, when he juggles his balls correctly, the result is impressive. "Utopia" plays to these strenghths. You don't need to know that he's spent an entire season on Torchwood teasing Captain Jack's immortality; you don't even need to know who Captain Jack is. John Barrowman plays off David Tennant like they've been a double-act for years, even though this is the first time they've appeared together. Their conversation about why Jack is immortal is woven into the plot perfectly; while the Doctor's giving us exposition, he's also triggering Professor Yana's memories.

Professor Yana is also particularly well done (although You Are Not Alone is unnecessary). Derek Jacobi does a wonderful job with a character who is deliberately not very fleshed out. The fob watch chain is visible from very early on, but it's part of his anachronistic costume so you completely ignore it. Somewhat less impressive is his idiosyncratic assistant Chan'tho, but she's really just there to be a foil for Yana (and occasionally Martha), so we'll give her a pass as well.

And then there's the Doctor's hand, Chekov's Gun extraordinaire. It gets cleverly maneuvered into the TARDIS, where it will stay for an entire season, right under everyone's noses. For all his faults, Rusty is a master at moving puzzle pieces around and dropping them into place without you noticing.

The plot is fairly straightforward: it's the end of the Universe, and the Doctor fixes a rocket so the last remnants of humanity can escape Mad Max Vampire World. The guy who was fixing the rocket before the Doctor showed up turns out to be the Master, who escapes with the TARDIS and leaves the Doctor stranded at the end of the Universe (but fortunately he has Plot Coupon Captain Jack with him, so all's well).

The problem with the three-part season finale is that this episode gets cast aside as the "prelude" chapter. Let's face it, the John Simm version of the Master is just more fun to watch than an amnesiac Derek Jacobi. But the plot of "Drums/Time Lords" explodes into lunacy, whereas this episode is a nice, neat, relatively cheap bit that ties in so much that has come before - the chameleon watches, Captain Jack, Rose - without ever feeling dull or repetitive.

8 out of 10.

Random Dr. Who and Star Trek rumors

Okay, been out of the loop, lied about doing S3 reviews last week, bad me. Expect "Utopia" either today or tomorrow, just cuz.

Right, so, first things first. There's talk that Star Trek the Star Trek 2 will involve Khan. In other words, it will be yet another remake of Star Trek II: The Best Star Trek Film Ever Made. For those of you who were late to the party, Star Trek the Star Trek (which is what I'm calling the 2009 film to differentiate it from the Trek franchise as a whole) was essentially a remake of Star Trek Nemesis, which was a remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. What do I mean by that? Well, Khan and Nemesis both involve a villain who spent the last decade in an inhospitable environment nursing a grudge against the captain of the Enterprise. Eventually he breaks free and gets ahold of a powerful ship and a superweapon. A battle takes place in a nebula, where the Enterprise has trouble seeing the other ship. When his ship is too badly damaged, the villain activates the superweapon, requiring a Heroic Sacrifice on the part of the Asperger's character to save the day. Then Nemesis and The Star Trek both involved Romulans, hyperpowerful ships, superweapons, ships ramming other ships, and oh, yeah, a villain who had a grudge against one of the Enterprise crew.

Look, Khan has only been decently remade once, and that was as First Contact. (2009 was different enough for me not to call it a remake.) And First Contact was clever enough to change the paradigm so that the Captain Ahab character was the good guy this time around. Beyond that, Khan is easily the best Star Trek film ever (the only real competition being The Undiscovered Country). This is ironic, given the sheer number of things that could have gone wrong with it. (Note to self: write a separate blog post entitled The Sheer Number of Things that Could Have Gone Horribly Wrong with Star Trek II.) But just trying to recapture that magic seems like a horrible mistake.

This is, of course, from the same guy who thought re-casting Kirk was a stupid thing to do and that Star Trek the Star Trek would just be a heartless cash-in. I certainly didn't think it was the greatest science-fiction film of the last decade (I'd nominate the Battlestar Galactica minseries if I could bend the rules a little bit, but otherwise it's Inception or Wall-E), but it was still about ten times better than I thought it would be, and better than seven of the other ten films with Star Trek in the title to boot. So what do I know? They might surprise me.

Okay, next up is the David Yates Doctor Who film. There are essentially four things you could do: Doctor Who and the Daleks, The Enemy Within, Star Trek Generations, or Battlestar Galactica Razor. Here's what I mean by that:

Doctor Who and the Daleks was a 60s film that had absolutely nothing to do with the show's continuity. Doctor Who was the real name of a human who built a Tardis in his backyard. Then they re-enact The Daleks on the big screen. That's about it. I'm not saying that Yates should re-do City of Death or something, but that is one possibility: just cast a completely different Doctor and acknowledge that the film has nothing to do with the show's continuity. This will piss off the least number of fans.

The Enemy Within was the unofficial name of the 1996 Doctor Who telemovie. You know, the one starring Withnail's flatmate as the Doctor, while Eric Roberts drezzed for the occasion. The one that was made by people on the wrong side of the Atlantic with an aim to continue the show, which had been cancelled back in 1989. It was an absolute disaster. We all kind of pretend that it didn't happen. Yes, Paul McGann was the 8th Doctor, but he had a bunch of adventures we didn't get to see. Very sad. Even if Yates were to do a Who movie, it's unlikely that he would take this approach, for the very simple reason that the show isn't cancelled right now and isn't likely to be any time in the near future.

Star Trek Generations was the first attempt to put the crew of Star Trek TNG on the big screen. It was co-written by Ron Moore, and his failure to make it as good as his later output on some other show is the main reason why I rank it worse than Star Trek I on my overall list (which goes 2, 6, 8, 11, 3, 4, 1, 7, 5, 9, 10, in case you were wondering). It also served as the death knell for the TNG show, but that was for reasons other than the film's lackluster quality. As in The Enemy Within, somebody died as a means of passing the torch on, although I honestly couldn't tell you whose death was more ignoble. Since The Moff has categorically denied any plans to do a film, I think it's safe to rule out both the Enemy and Generations models.

Battlestar Galactica Razor was made just before Season 4 but set at the end of Season 2, and as long as you don't mind the minor spoiler that a certain death near the end of Season 3 isn't exactly permanent, you might as well watch it just before the end of Season 2. Though it more or less fails as a stand-alone film because it tries to tie in too many plotlines (which, come to think of it, is probably Moore's greatest fault as a storyteller), it could have worked. Eccleston's out, Tennant's probably running away, but my understanding is that McGann would still be game provided he didn't have to wear a wig. Of course, I say the words "Doctor Who film starring McGann" and everyone runs away. I'm speculating here. Basically, you could use this opportunity to tell the lost Doctor Who story, the one that you couldn't do on the show's budget or which just wouldn't work in the show's regular format.

Frankly, I'd like to see the Doctor on the big screen. I actually thought that last year's Christmas special (which I shouldn't have to remind you is in my opinion the best thing the show's ever given us since City of Death) could be adapted really easily to a film. (So there I go saying you could do stuff you couldn't do on the show in a movie, then I say that the Christmas special should have been a movie... but the Christmas special was a special instead of a regular episode. So there.)

So, should Star Trek 2 be a remake of Star Trek II? No. Should David Yates make a Doctor Who film? Why not?