rory | the m0vie blog

Doctor Who: The Hungry Earth (Review)

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Darren

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the longest-running science-fiction show in the world, I’ll be taking weekly looks at some of my own personal favourite stories and arcs, from the old and new series, with a view to encapsulating the sublime, the clever and the fiendishly odd of the BBC’s Doctor Who.

The Hungry Earth originally aired in 2010.

Oh look! Big mining thing! Oh, I love a big mining thing. See, way better than Rio. Rio doesn’t have a big mining thing.

– the Doctor looks on the bright side of arriving in not!Rio

The Hungry Earth represents the biggest structural shift of Steven Moffat’s first season of Doctor Who. The writer would indulge in a number of radical structural changes over his time running the show, but his first season as showrunner conforms to the pattern of Russell T. Davies’ four full seasons. There’s the introductory present/past/future trilogy, the two mid-season two-parters and the gigantic two-part season finalé. The content of Moffat’s season might have been markedly different (actual romantic snog! a season building an arc that isn’t just references and easter eggs!), but the format was carried over faithfully.

Moffat’s following two seasons would get more experimental. For one thing, both seasons would be split in half. This allowed Moffat to offer the first genuine cliffhanger in the revival’s history to last more than a week, with a gap of several months between A Good Man Goes to War and Let’s Kill Hitler. His second season would feature the first two-part season opener (and first one-part season finalé) of the revived television show. His third season would feature no two-part episodes, spread across two calendar years.

However, sitting at the tail end of his first season, The Hungry Earth feels like the strangest structural element of Moffat’s first year in charge of Doctor Who. It’s what would traditionally be the first two-parter of the season, pushed back towards the end of the year.

Balancing the scales…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: bbc, doctor, DoctorWho, Earth, Fifth Doctor, future, gothic, Gothic architecture, Hungry Earth, matt smith, Moffat, rory, rory williams, russell t. davies, science fiction, Silurian, Sontaran Stratagem, Species, steven moffat, Subcultures, tardis, Time Lord | Leave a comment »

Doctor Who: The Vampires of Venice (Review)

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Darren

The Vampires of Venice originally aired in 2010.

Tell me the whole plan!

…

One day that will work.

– the Doctor

The Vampires of Venice is interesting because it looks very different in 2013 as compared to when it was originally broadcast in 2010. In 2010, it looked a bit overly familiar, a collection of the tropes and storytelling tricks that we took for granted in the show under Russell T. Davies. The elements felt, at the time, a little over-familiar. Indeed, it seemed like Toby Whithouse’s script owed a great deal to his earlier adventure School Reunion.

However, Doctor Who looks very different in 2013. The show has definitely radically changed, so that these familiar plot points don’t seem quite so familiar any longer. Whereas The Vampires of Venice didn’t feel so strange after five years of Russell T. Davies, it does seem a bit more unique after three years of Steven Moffat. It doesn’t seem so much an attempt to repackage these story elements as it does one final celebration of them, a fond farewell to many of the narrative bits and pieces that we’d come to take for granted.

How times change.

A late-night bite…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: amy pond, arts, bbc, christmas, Davies, doctor, DoctorWho, Earth, Eleventh Doctor, Parting of the Ways, Philip Hinchcliffe, rory, rory williams, russell t. davies, science fiction, steven moffat, tardis, Time Lord, Time War, Unearthly Child, Vampires of Venice | Leave a comment »

Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan (Review)

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Darren

The decision to build Steven Moffat’s third season of Doctor Who around a series of done-in-one stories has been a bit of a mixed blessing. Asylum of the Daleks was suitably madcap Saturday tea-time telly, and A Town Called Mercy was an affectionate homage to Americana, but Dinosaurs on a Spaceship barely had room to breath, overloaded on cool moments with little room left for plotting.

The Angels Take Manhattan suffers the most from this sense that it is being compacted. Watching the episode, it feels like Moffat is trying to cram too much story into a single forty-five minute episode. It makes the viewer long for the days when Russell T. Davies would gleefully run his episodes over the allocated forty-five minute slot. Here, Moffat’s big high-concept “timey wimey” ideas and his farewell to his two companions eating up so much of the run-time that the plot itself still feels like an afterthought, running on contrivance and coincidence rather than anything more substantial.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t an affective farewell to Rory and Amy, or that it doesn’t draw fantastic performances from its central quartet, but it does mean that The Angels Take Manhattan is never quite as sturdy as it should have been.

A walk in the park…

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Doctor Who: The Power of Three (Review)

Posted on September 22, 2012 by Darren

The Power of Three is Chris Chibnell’s best Doctor Who script to date. While a little heavy-handed in the way it deals with the relationship between the Doctor and Amy and Rory, it’s still a nice change of pace. It’s a thoughtful episode exploring the Doctor’s relationship with time. (And that shared by his companions.) While the alien invasion seems a little tacked on, to the point where it only seems to serve the final pun, The Power of Three is still a solid penultimate outing for this trio of adventurers.

Thinking outside the box…

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Doctor Who: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (Review)

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Darren

You know when Amy and I first got married and we went travelling…

To Thailand?

More the entirety of space and time… in that Police Box.

– Rory and Brian Williams share some truths

There is a strange listlessness to the seventh season, despite its position on the cusp of the big anniversary year. In many ways, the seventh season feels awkwardly positioned between the “timey wimey” ambitiousness of the sixth season and the “new beginning” aesthetic of the eighth season. The fact that the seventh season is split in half doesn’t help matters; it feels like an epilogue to the story of Amy and Rory, and a prologue to the story of Clara. It feels very much like a “light” year, which is a strange way to head into a big anniversary celebration.

There is a curious sense of idleness to all this. There is, for example, no clear story that links both halves of the season – Jenna-Louise Coleman’s role in Asylum of the Daleks notwithstanding. The seventh season has no real purpose beyond clearing out the ensemble and building towards the anniversary. As a result, it can feel more than a little rudderless and indulgent. Steven Moffat has described the “blockbuster” aesthetic of the year, and long stretches of the season feel like the show is just doing stuff because it can.

Gone to the birds?

Give Amy and Rory a five-episode coda? Sure, why not! Actually shoot a western in a country that could pass for the United States? Go for it! It’s been a while since we’ve seen the Ice Warriors, hasn’t it? Throw them in there! Neil Gaiman wants to write a Cyberman episode? Ah, go on! Develop those quirky supporting characters from A Good Man Goes to War into a part of the show’s ensemble in Victorian London? It just makes sense! Richard E. Grant as a villain from two Second Doctor stories? We’d be crazy not to!

There is a sense that the seventh season is a victory lap for the show and many involved in the production. Deservedly so. What is the point of an anniversary year if you can’t go a little wild? That is the kind of thinking that leads to Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, a simple “because we can!” story. After all, one of the stock cringe-inducing Doctor Who images is the dinosaur special effects from Invasion of the Dinosaurs. What’s the point in turning the show into a hit if you can’t take an episode to prove how far your dinosaur effects have come in four decades?

Locking horns…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: amy, amy pond, bbc, Brian Williams, Chris Chibnall, Dalek, David Bradley, doctor, doctor who, harry potter, league of extraordinary gentlemen, Nefertiti, Police, Pond, Riddell, rory, rory williams, Rupert Graves, Thailand | 1 Comment »

Doctor Who: The Wedding of River Song (Review)

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Darren

The Wedding of River Song originally aired in 2011.

“I had to die. I didn’t have to die alone.”

– The Doctor

That was a really crammed 45 minutes. If I’m ever looking for an example of how much plotting Steven Moffat can fit into a single regular-sized episode of Doctor Who, I think I only need to look back at The Wedding of River Song. It’s a piece of very smart science-fiction writing, bristling with ideas and tying up quite a lot of the questions that Moffat raised over the course of the last two years, while raising even more.

It’s something that Moffat’s Doctor Who seems to struggle with, balancing the show’s appeal and accessibility with long-term arc-based story telling. It’s a conflict that’s playing out across a variety of television shows, building off the massive success of Lost, and demonstrating that television shows with serialised plot elements can draw (and, for the most part, keep) large audiences.

It’s still a risky gambit for any television show, particularly one like Moffat’s Doctor Who, where the episodes are so few and so far spaced across the television season. Arcs like this run the risk of extending some of the problems with the season as a whole, rather than playing up the individual strengths of the episodes.

Death of the Doctor…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: amy, amy pond, bbc, doctor, DoctorWho, Girl Who Waited, God Complex, Moffat, River Song, rory, russell t. davies, star trek, steven moffat, the wedding of river song, Wedding of River Song, White Guardian | 10 Comments »

Doctor Who: The God Complex (Review)

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Darren

The God Complex originally aired in 2011.

It’s time we saw each other as we really are.

– The Doctor

It really is like the McCoy era all over again, isn’t it? The Impossible Astronaut gave us a scheming and manipulative Doctor. Night Terrors felt like it was drawn from the same cloth as Survival, with the faintest trace of Paradise Towers. Here, we get to revisit the ideas at the heart of The Curse of Fenric. Moffat’s second season has really been about the writer defining his own way of making Doctor Who, following a debut season that followed the same structure as the four years overseen by Russell T. Davies.

Here, Moffat is deconstructing the myth of the Doctor, in a way that draws on and contrasts with Davies’ “the Lonely God”, without going to the excess of “the Time Lord Victorious.” Indeed, with the whole dynamic between the Doctor and Amy drawing on one careless miscalculation the character made, changing a young girl’s life forever, one can’t help but wonder if there was more than a hint of truth in what the Doctor confessed to Amy to break her faith in him. “I took you with me because I was vain,” he tells her, “because I wanted to be adored.”

More than ever, it seems there’s a bit of truth in the Doctor’s admission that, “I’m not a hero.” Russell T. Davies has the Doctor follow a similar trajectory, albeit on a larger scale – episodes like Midnight and The Waters of Mars represented massive failings on the part of the Doctor. Moffat draws on the same sort of idea, but renders the Doctor’s failures much more intimate. It isn’t so much that the Eleventh Doctor fails to save the world or defeat the monster, it’s that he fails the people close to him so frequently and thoroughly.

You can check out any time you like, but you may never leave…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: amy, Amy's Choice (Doctor Who), bbc, doctor, Doctor (Doctor Who), doctor who, Doctor's Wife, DoctorWho, matt smith, Moffat, Paradise Towers, review, rory, russell t. davies, Sarah Jane Smith, tardis, Television, The God Complex, the God Complex (Doctor Who), Vampires of Venice | 5 Comments »

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited (Review)

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Darren

You always said that for Christmas dinner, you wish there were two of you.

– Rory tries to look on the bright side

The Girl Who Waited might just be the most Moffat-esque Doctor Who script that wasn’t written by the man himself. “Timey wimey” hijinks, killer robots, glitchy technology and cultural misunderstandings all tie together one of the best episodes of the show’s sixth season. Writer Tom MacRae even throws in a juicy character dilemma to add flavour. Offering a fairly explicit example of why travelling with the Doctor might not necessarily be a good thing, despite how much fun it might seem, The Girl Who Waited serves as a prelude to The God Complex, while continuing the season’s exploration of just how tough it is to be the companion.

The waiting room…

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Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes to War (Review)

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Darren

A Good Man Goes to War originally aired in 2011.

Demons run when a good man goes to war.

Night will fall and drown the sun, when a good man goes to war.

Friendship dies and true love lies,

Night will fall and the dark will rise,

When a good man goes to war.

Demons run but count the cost.

The battle’s won, but the child is lost.

A Good Man Goes to War is pretty much the epitome of Moffat’s “let’s cram as much as possible into forty-five minutes” approach to Doctor Who. This is the episode directly following Matt Smith’s last proper two-part adventure, and it firmly sets the status quo for the rest of the Eleventh Doctor’s tenure. Moffat doesn’t opt for two-parters after this point, and you can see the roots of the “blockbuster” approach he adopted for the show’s fiftieth season.

A Good Man Goes to War has enough crammed into it to sustain a bombastic Russell T. Davies season finalé. There’s character arcs, betrayal, redemption, heroism, continuity, twists and radical game-changers – all bursting at the seams of this episode. There’s a staggering amount of ambition powering A Good Man Goes to War, and even attempting to do all this in the course of a single episode earns Moffat a significant amount of respect.

What’s even more impressive is that A Good Man Goes to War manages to carry it all off.

The Doctor goes with the flow…

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Doctor Who: The Almost People (Review)

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Darren

“How can you both be real?”

“Because we are.”

– Amy & the Doctor

Hm. That was a vast improvement on last week. And I say that as someone who enjoyed last week’s episode a lot more than most. It’s very formulaic Doctor Who, with the team running around gothic corridors (“a maze,” as the Doctor describes it) and bright lights fleshing, while continuing the series’ key theme: as a race, humans can be absolutely horrible… but sometimes, just sometimes, absolutely brilliant. Throw in a fairly substantial cliffhanger and larger elements from the season-long mythos, and you end up with an episode that feels like it’s filled to the top. Not everything’s golden, and not everything gels, but it works consistently enough to make for entertaining tea-time telly.