Waiting for Godot with the Doctor (On New Doctor Who)

Waiting for Godot with the Doctor

by Cynthianna

***Spoiler Alert!***

Heaven Sent is mistitled. Moffat obviously hasn't done his research into Roman Catholic tradition. His story is set in Purgatory, the place between life on Earth and eternal life in Heaven, and the Doctor is being punished for his sins, or at least he's being tortured until he makes a confession. Of course, we won't know who is doing the punishing until the very last scene, so let's hope his torture chamber is at least an interesting place to spend an hour, right?

Alas, this simply isn't the case. With a beautiful setting of a Baltic-styled castle that can rotate its rooms and floors about like a gear-work clock and the dapper Peter Capaldi--dressed elegantly once again without the black hoodie under the velvet jacket--you'd think you could spend an hour gazing into the Doctor's handsome face easily and not grow bored. How I wish I could say this was true. The predictability of the inevitable ending only brought back memories of boring theater coursework in college and being forced to sit through a performance of Waiting for Godot. If you've never seen the play, don't worry. You have much better things to do with your time.

So, we have a Time Lord all by himself who can "live forever" taking an eternity to figure out what needs to be done to get out of his own personal hell--designed with his childhood phobias in mind. As a short story, the premise might have had more punch, but as an hour-long television program the energy lagged almost from the start. The over-orchestrated soundtrack gave an early clue to the story's weaknesses of pacing and tension. The music seemed to say, "Stay awake! This is supposed to be exciting!" But how exciting can something be if you have to be hit over the head with loud music and told that it is?


The entire season seems devoid of emotional connection that one felt in the RTD days. (Who didn't cry when Donna Noble had to have her memory of the Doctor blanked?) Heaven Sent comes across more like a video game with the Doctor being your "first person shooter" as he goes from room to room or level to level. When your shooter "dies" of course you can always continue on with the game--you have more "lives" saved up, right? Dramatic tension is pretty much not expected or needed in video games, and if you get stuck on a level oftentimes you can hit a button to give you verbal or printed helpful hints to help you get to the next level. Sound familiar? (The faceless Clara at the chalkboard is playing the hints giver.)

So, like a video game, I give points for the lovely photography and intriguing sets, and points to the gorgeously photographed Peter Capaldi as the Doctor who gives it his all, but not many points to a weak script lacking in emotional resonance. Last season gave us the stronger scripts of Flatline, Mummy on the Orient Express and even the enjoyable frivolity of Robots of Sherwood. This year we're stuck with the dust in which the Doctor scribbles clues to himself in his haunted castle. Let's hope the season finale isn't any drier.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below, and check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this season of Doctor Who:

Face the Raven  
Sleep No More
The Zygon Inversion (or Inversion of the Zygons)
The Zygon Invasion

The Woman Who Lived

The Girl Who Died    
Before the Flood

Under the Lake

The Witch's Familiar

The Magician's Apprentice

Classic Who on Retro TV

More Style Over Substance (on new Doctor Who)

More Style Over Substance (on new Doctor Who)

by Cynthianna

***Spoiler alert!***

We were out of town this past week, so we didn't get a chance to catch Mark Gatiss' episode Sleep No More until now, so this will be a very short review. One word of caution: if you are looking for images or information about the episode on Google, you'll come across an apparently adult off-Broadway play by the same name. It's definitely not something you'll want your kids to come across.

The Blair Witch or "found footage" set-up and the Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians story line aren't anything new, but the nasty "Sandmen" monsters are pretty cool and the creepy space station is a fun "video game-like" set. Gatiss knows his monsters, and these are the new rivals in scariness for the Weeping Angels, in my opinion. Peter Capaldi plays the Doctor  heroically and mugs it straight to the camera with Colin Baker's intensity along with the mania of Tom Baker's Doctor. Plus, there are lots of nice camera shots for those of us who really enjoy gazing upon Peter's handsome visage. (Sigh!) 

With a nasty monster and with such great footage of Peter Capaldi, one would hope to find this episode a bit more memorable, but it seems to play it by the book and doesn't really venture into any realm of science fiction that hasn't been done before and done well. Probably its saving grace is that Gatiss didn't try to expand the little actual material he had and make it into two episodes. Short and sweet and simplistic, lacking in sophistication or subtlety, the story comes across a bit disjointed at times without any apparent reason behind the logic gaps other than poor script editing. It's a style of writing which seems to be commonplace in the Moffat era and what my author husband has named "The A.D.D. School of New Doctor Who Writing" and why he no longer cares to watch it recently.

Thank heavens Retro-TV is still showing the classic series so he can get his fix. The Jon Pertwee series wound up this past week and Tom Baker's mostly well-written series are awaiting us over the holiday season. A very nice Christmas gift indeed.

Resurrecting a Classic Who Monster (on New Doctor Who)

Resurrecting a Classic Monster (on New Doctor Who)

by Cynthianna

***Spoiler Alert!***

You gotta love those suckers! I’ve been a big Zygon fan since the early days, so I had great expectations for The Zygon Invasion. Fortunately, some of those expectations were delivered.
The Zygons have not gone through a “make-over” for the hundredth time like the Cybermen—and for this I’m glad. How can you improve upon a ruddy, sucker-studded, walking-squid-like humanoid creature which can act like a chameleon and become any person you know and trust? You can’t really, can you?  They are Doctor Who monster perfection at its finest.

But you can change their back story a bit, and for this I’m not quite as pleased. The intrepid Osgood in her Classic Who accessories is dead—she was sucked out of an airplane at 30,000 feet. We weren’t very happy about that bit of  wanton cruelty in last season’s episode, and apparently the fans got very vocal and protested her treatment to the BBC. Lo and behold, Osgood’s alive! Or is she? Zygons in classic Who could only change themselves to look like a living human, so is this Osgood the Doctor meets the real thing? She won’t say, but she hints that Zygons aren’t limited by keeping their originals alive to copy anymore, and they are all hybrids now. Hmm, if you take away their Achilles’ heel, you sort of take away the best way the Doctor can conquer them. Perhaps not such a good plotting choice in the dramatic sense, but we’ll see in part two.

The locales this time out are a breath of fresh (desert) air: a fictional ex-Soviet central Asian republic and Truth-or-Consequences, New Mexico? Well, if you lived in a dryer part of the world (like I have), you’d probably want to get out and invade the planet eventually, too. So, good marks for settings outside of London, but bad marks for sending the Brigadier’s daughter out on her own. Uh, it’s called “back up." We both couldn’t visualize the Brig ever going anywhere far away from UNIT headquarters without at least his two right hand people—Sergeant Benton and Captain Yates—to watch his back. But Ms. Lethbridge-Stewart doesn’t seem to have much training in tactics, so she goes off to New Mexico alone where, of course, she’s going to be captured by the Zygons. Doh! With all these good women, and all the main UNIT positions are now filled with females, you'd think she could have had picked the cream of the crop to come along with her? (How progressive the U.N. has become! Or are all these actresses cast as intelligent, authority figures to make up for the less-than-feminist characters Moffat has been accused of writing in previous episodes?)

The idea that the Zygons numbered twenty million (whew!) and were allowed to stay on Earth after their last run-in with humanity seems a bit far-fetched as well. Twenty million? Uh, if countries in Europe are currently having conniptions over thousands of refugees pouring across their borders, then how do you think twenty million aliens would be handled and kept quiet throughout the world? Not very well! This logic gap is bigger than the Grand Canyon (to stay with the desert analogies) and needs filling in the second part.

Clara acts particularly acerbic in this episode, and it is revealed at the close why her behavior has been “off." One wonders if this hasn’t been the reason why she’s seemed disconnected from her emotions in earlier episodes, or if this was just tossed in to explain her actions in this particular episode. Either way, a countdown seems to have started for her character. Is her final departure nigh?

Peter Capaldi’s performance is spot on again with his Tom Baker-like Doctor. He’s mischievous yet involved, cautious yet not afraid to take action. The way the story opens, we’re not sure what his relationship with Clara is since she’s not there—she’s not a “Sarah Jane” who lives in the TARDIS between adventures. He’s more of a David Tennant-loner type of Doctor who comes and goes more than stays all the time with his companion. Possibly this is the reason behind his dark character? But why take the airplane when you have a TARDIS, Doctor? Surely you remembered what happened on board to Osgood last time?

Over all, The Zygon Invasion is an enjoyable adventure with a few niggling plot points that don’t take away from its overall entertainment value. We can't wait to see what those sucker-critters get up to next week.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below. And check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this season of Doctor Who:

The Woman Who Lived

The Girl Who Died  
Before the Flood

Under the Lake

The Witch's Familiar

The Magician's Apprentice

Classic Who on Retro TV