The Name of the Doctor

Howdy folks. Sorry to not have been around much with the ol' blog, my computer had conniptions, died, came back from the dead and two days later died again, for good. I've been away filming this weekend, and took possession of a new computer a few days back. I spent a good three days solid setting it up, but I have 3 stories to go to finish this blog, and I hope I can still get that done this year. As from next year, this blog may change a little to include more about Professor Who and the filming of it, planning and so forth, and when the next series rolls around in August-ish of Doctor Who, to review the new episodes. There are some episodes in January (ish) I want to reassess - The Tenth Planet, Enemy of the World, Web of Fear and the Ice Warriors principally. Since I reviewed these stories, either the episodes were returned (missing) or the DVD came out with animation for missing episodes. Anyways, today's blog is about the final episode of series 7, a rather spectacular story called 'The Name of the Doctor'.

Catrin Stewart and Neve McIntosh are back as Jenny and Vastra.

For any die-hard fan of Doctor Who, this was a bit of a love letter, wasn’t it? We see every incarnation of the Doctor thus far in this episode – albeit a couple of them are incredibly fleeting (Paul McGann especially). We have Clara popped into the various Doctor’s timelines with some pretty nice (although some think a little crude) special effects work. We have the Vastra/Jenny/Strax team back together (yet still no clue as to who brought Strax back to life) again, and they are always great and Dan Starkey is just brilliantly funny, Richard E. Grant as the Great Intelligence, Trenzalore, and thankfully the ‘name’ of the Doctor is not revealed, but in fact it’s about what he stands for, what he does. Because frankly if we ever learn his name there’s nothing I can think of that would make it that special – ie – ‘Ok, you’ve got me, my name is Bert!’ Not going to live up to expectations.

Richard E Grant is also back!

Was there much of a plot? Nah. It wasn’t that sort of episode. It was basically answering the question we’ve wondered since ‘Asylum of the Daleks’, ‘Who is Clara Oswald?’. And we get a bit of glee with Clara interacting with William Hartnell. Interestingly, the sets were pretty limited in this story. I imagine the working of Clara into old footage, and the colourisation of Hartnell must have cost a bit, so we don’t get a lot of different sets – although they weren’t needed. There isn’t a lot of location shooting either – I suspect that the house Clara lives in is a location, but aside from that it seems mostly in-studio. I guess it helps keep secrets.

So are we satisfied with Clara’s story? Look, the resolution was very good, I liked it a lot. The only issue I had with it was Clara’s willingness to jump into the time stream, admittedly aided by the fact that she had been told she was the impossible girl the Doctor had met twice before, but had she formed as strong a bond between herself and the Doctor to go ahead and jump? I wasn’t quite convinced, I felt there needed a bit more in the scripts, or indeed more time for that bond to be so strong like Rose or Amy.

Nevertheless, great stuff. Less unanswered questions than usual too for a series finale, which is nice. Would really love a two-part series finale though! And then the teaser for the 50^th anniversary special – the reveal of John Hurt as the Doctor! The captioning, they could have done without. Really it added nothing to the episode and generally Doctor Who has not done that sort of self-referential mularky in the past.

All in all, a fantastic way to end the series, lots of ‘squee’ moments for the fans, wraps up Clara’s storyline, I really enjoyed this. Series 7B has ended on a high with the last few episodes, after the first 4-5 episodes, solid as they were, for me failed to reach any great heights. Maybe Mr Moffatt was a bit unsure where he was taking the Series? The thing is, unlike the RTD era where we had oncoming menace that the Doctor would have to face at the end of the 13-episode run, Moffatt has chosen to arc series with a central question (with the exception of series five, which I think was the best Steven Moffatt series). In series 6 it was ‘does the Doctor die? And if not, how does he avoid death?’, Series seven it was ‘Who is Clara?’. I felt like RTD’s stuff built better because you got more pieces to the puzzle as it moved along – Series Three, despite its dreadful end, did this best of all.

As for the situation at the moment with split series and the like, Moffatt may feel that that won’t work so well. It’s easier to remember one single question during the mid-series break, than a whole set of elements that are building towards something more significant. Anyhoo, as an episode this one was great!

8.5/10

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, The Crimson Horror & Nightmare in Silver

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

Understandably, this was a much anticipated episode with most of it set inside the TARDIS. Audiences could finally get a real sense of the inside of the space ship – they’d had a glimpse of corridors in ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, but now they would see much more and the TARDIS had regenerated since that episode.

So, it was always going to disappoint really, wasn’t it. Corridors are corridors so what did they expect? An over lit ugly look that we had in the 80s when Bidmead decided to set half of every adventure he wrote in the TARDIS? Something like the mental hospital used to double as the TARDIS interior in ‘The Invasion of Time’? Surely this was better than those examples? I think it was. Some of it’s quite nice. Perhaps this is an example though of the reduced budget the show’s been running on since the Global Meltdown. I thought they realised it pretty well, it just didn’t blow my socks off and I’m not really sure how they would have achieved that anyway.

As for the story, ho-hum yes well. Reset switch, this time flagged as almost an in-joke, but essentially the whole resolution would not have been possible without it. Clara learns a whole lot of things including the Doctor’s name which she sees in the Doctor’s diary, and then the reset button takes her back to before it all happened. In fact none of the adventure happened and only the Doctor can remember, which to me is a bit like ‘What was the point of all that?’.

Then we have the 3 guest actors, playing brothers, who frankly, especially Javhel Hall playing the youngest brother, were very below par. Not that they had much to work on script wise, they weren’t exactly interesting characters to play. The idea that someone could be human but fooled into believing he was a robot is frankly, incredibly stupid.

I know that it disappointed a lot of people, but it’s not the TARDIS which was disappointing, it’s the whole damned story which goes right back to writer Stephen Thompson. Sorry.

3/10

The Crimson Horror

Diana Rigg as Lady Gilliflower

‘The Crimson Horror’, written by Mark Gatiss, was most welcome at this point in the season. I had been a bit underwhelmed to this point by the episodes that had gone before, but ‘The Crimson Horror’ – without a doubt Gatiss’s best contribution to the series, was wonderful. It’s light-hearted and comedic in places, but that didn’t bother me at all. I really loved it and was happy that it didn’t sag in the middle like so many of Gatiss’s scripts do.

Rachael Stirling as Ada.

We have Vastra (Neve McIntosh), Jenny (Catrin Stewart) and Strax (Dan Starkey) returning to light up the TV screens for starters. And they are in fine form indeed. We have the running joke of the man who keeps fainting throughout the story after being shocked – at Vastra first, then Strax and finally the TARDIS dematerialising.

Clara doesn’t get a lot to do which is the only negative that comes to mind in this story. Jenny is shown to be wonderfully dextrous when she fights

Being lowered...

off some men, the Doctor doesn’t appear in the first 10-15 minutes, we have a wonderful collection of odd characters such as the guy at the morgue, but best of all we have Diana Rigg with a red maggoty thing stuck to her bosom! What more could you ask for.

It’s just 45 of fun, a bit of a romp. Diana Rigg’s daughter plays… well her daughter on screen too. She’s great and gets her revenge when she squashes the maggot under foot in the end (Mr Sweet), her ultimate revenge!

Catrin Stewart gets feisty as Jenny

The director, Saul Metzstein, should also be commended. He uses a variety of techniques to tell this story including grading the flashback sequences with scratches and the like which was really a nice touch. I had a smile on my face all the way through this episode. More like this one please, Mr Gatiss!

9/10

Nightmare in Silver

We see the return of the Cybermen in this story written by Neil Gaiman. They have a lovely redesign, very nice work indeed. The design is slicker than the previous rather clunky design, and yet feels like it lends much from the Cybermen of ‘The Moonbase’ and ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’. When will they bring back the chest unit though?

Warwick Davis

Unfortunately the story is not nearly as good as ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, although it did improve on a second viewing. One disappointing aspect is that it is set in a giant amusement park, but it doesn’t utilise this location much at all. Just really one building and a castle, which they shot on location. Well, I guess they were always going to do that.

Matt Smith gets to wrestle with the ‘Cyber-planner’ inside his head and does a rather good job. That worked nicely and the partial Cyber-isation

on the face was a good effect. I think this suffers from trying to do too much for a single episode though. If we had more money and two-parts, there could be something really epic with people fighting the Cybermen in various locations around the theme park. As it was, the Cybermen just attack the castle. Any issue they have now they can get past with a quick ‘upgrade’, which really takes the fun out of it, I reckon.

Warwick Davis, who was in Harry Potter, plays the Emperor, and he’s very good. He’s the main guest star, however we do have two kids who not only are annoying to watch but actually appear to have been written that way in the first place. These are the kids that Clara nannies and they found out about the Doctor and insisted on going on a trip, which frankly was again poor scripting but that’s probably a Moffat thing. They don’t really serve any

function in the story – the Cybermen said they needed young minds but honestly that was not an important point. The story would have been better off without them. We again see how child-like Matt Smith’s Doctor is, although it is a bit funny too which helps when he doesn’t get to play chess.

The rumour is that Moffat had much less to do with this episode than ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, but I must say I think it was odd to get Gaiman to write this episode, what with Cybermen and many characters, it’s kinda the opposite to the previous episode he wrote. It is for the most part entertaining, at times light, at times dark. It is many things, but not as good as it could have been I feel.

6.5/10

The Doctor's Wife, The Rebel Flesh, The Almost People & A Good Man Goes to War

The Doctor’s Wife

Suranne Jones as Idris

Aunty and Uncle

The idea of having the TARDIS inhabit a woman is VERY fanboyish, isn’t it? Neil Gaimen, acclaimed writer steps into the Doctor Who fold for this episode, and he doesn’t disappoint with a wonderful bizarre world created, and the TARDIS embodied brilliant by Idris – played by Suranne Jones.

In fact, the entire cast numbers no more than seven including the three regulars, and Elizabeth Berrington as Auntie and Adrian Schiller as Uncle, who were both brilliant. Then we have the voice of ‘House’, provided by Michael Sheen. House is the planet they have arrived on,

The Doctor has mail. Groan.

somewhere just outside the Universe. An extremely interesting and creepy character who decides he wants to posses the TARDIS and going travelling the Universe himself. The story is for want of a better word, just plain barmy. It’s truly mad, but it also works. There are a couple of issues, of course, nothing is perfect. For one, the Doctor again mimics popular culture with a cheesy line before the opening titles roll – ‘You’ve got mail’, and the TARDIS corridors are not the most inspiring pieces of set – but hey, they are corridors. How amazing can they be, really?

Makeshift TARDIS!

Aside from those points, we really have an episode which is a dream. For fans mostly. The Doctor and Idris build their own TARDIS out of bits and bobs from the TARDIS graveyard. It spins like a ball or top through space. It looks amazing! Who hasn’t dreamt of building their own TARDIS from bits and bobs? And there’s wonderful humour here and there, especially with Uncle and Aunty, and then we have the affection Idris and the Doctor show for each other. It really is a love letter to the TARDIS. This amazing machine that has taken the Doctor on so many adventures.

And the TARDIS is a character in its own right. From day one it has been. I should know, I have one of my own. Kudos to Moffatt and Gaimen for this one, sometimes, not too often, but sometimes you have to give something to the fans.

9/10

The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People

This two part story about dopple-gangers is actually rather good, even if the initial premise seems a little ‘done’ so to speak. People are being created from a white goo as a double of a real ‘human’, so that they can do a dangerous job working with acid. If that body falls into the acid or has something else bad befall it, they just whip up a new body. Sound convenient? Well, it is I guess.

A pile of dead 'gangers'

But it’s about more than just that. It’s about very human fears, about the question – if we could give someone or something life, what restrictions would and should we place on it? Not easy questions to answer. We have the controller, Cleaves, (played by Raquel Cassidy) with a blood clot in her brain and yet a determination to keep collecting the acid for the mainland (this is set in a castle on an island). The writer (Matthew Graham) has made her very pig-headed and focussed, and then she softens. I didn’t like her character much, although the casting was strong, the writing was a bit one-dimensional for her.

Jenny (Sarah Smart)

Then we have Jimmy (Mark Bonner) who ends up giving his ‘ganger’ his blessing to take his life as he dies. After a massive flare strike on the place the gangers have become real. Then we have the aspect I really didn’t like – ‘it’s us and them’, like humans and gangers have been at war for fifty years. To be honest, even with the inevitable conflict, Graham didn’t need to be quite that blatant.

Nevertheless, lots to love. Two Matt Smith’s working wonderfully together. I really enjoyed this bi-play, it was a highlight although I do think Smith now continues to go for the comic choices too much. Then we have the script tackling prejudice in a general sort of way, with Amy refusing to trust the ganger-Doctor, only to find they switched at some point. She comes to the realisation she was wrong.

It’s a bit of a runaround yes, but some lovely characterisations in there, and Jenny (Sarah Smart) is one of the best, playing Rory for the most part as Jenny’s ganger. And Rory falls for it hook line and sinker! Amy gets a little jealous too, so they play around well with that stuff. It’s good because Rory gets something to do for a change which doesn’t directly involve Amy, and we see just how trusting he is. And then the moment at the end – Amy is a ganger and has been perhaps throughout the whole series, at least since the gap between ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ and ‘Day of the Moon’. The Doctor ‘sonics’ her (he is now using the sonic screwdriver to do just about everything and I am getting annoyed incidentally) and she turns to white goo. Now that’s a cliff-hanger!

7.5/10

A Good Man Goes to War

Frances Barber as Madame Kovarian

This was really one of those episodes which flies by and you think ‘What the hell just happened there?’ That was my experience anyway. To be honest, this one did not float my boat. Not even slightly. It was mad, it had a gazillion things in it, it had a sort of resolution kicking off a whole bunch of new questions, it had a baby turning to white goo, and it started to make me question the direction if the show and the direction Moffatt seems to be taking Matt Smith’s Doctor.

Revealing a headless monk.

So we have Amy hidden on a big space station called ‘Demons’ Run’, and the Doctor deciding the best way to rescue her is to attack the place. With a Sontaran (Strax, played by Dan Starkey), a Silurian, actually with a whole bunch of Silurians, and a big blue man called Dorian. Ummm. So this is a big statement by Moffatt. This is a complete change in every way to the Doctor’s character. Usually he’d go it alone. He’d use his noggin. He’d be clever. Not that he wasn’t clever in his way.

Then we have Madame Kovarian (played by Frances Barber). We’ve seen her pop up her and there so far, looking at Amy through a small window that appeared and disappeared very mysteriously in most of the previous episodes. That was the real Amy’s experiences seeping through to the ganger-Amy it seems. Who the devil is she? Why does she care so much.

The Anglican Church is also at Demon’s Run, that’s the Army version of the future (with uniforms of today) and there’s the headless Monks. Who apparently steal heads. But not to put on their bodies. They are, to be fair, mostly gimmicky. And everyone there apart from Amy and Lorna want to kill the Doctor.

Look I get it, many people hate the good Doctor. But really. A reason for it all is needed – and yet maybe given,

we will see what this year’s Christmas Special entails. AND River appears at the end to show the Doctor what he’s become. And reveal she is really Rory and Amy’s baby. Who is apparently a Time Lord, because she was conceived in the TARDIS. Strax dies, so does Dorian. it’s not very pretty. The Doctor then runs off presumably to be with River, saying he’s going to look for Amy’s daughter who was a ganger and Kovarian, who is involved in an endless war against the Doctor, or so

Neve McIntosh as Vastra.

she declares, has. Because the baby – who is River Song remember, is a weapon against the Doctor.

It’s a manic 45 minutes asking many more questions than it answers, there’s no real story in there it’s mostly questions and reveals, and to be honest I didn’t care for it one jot. It’s so manic that basically, well, I was disinterested. Oh, the pirates return for a brief appearance too from ‘Curse of the Black Spot’. The Doctor is again very child-like, but also is pretty okay with the killing too. Runs off and leaves everyone so I hope that is dealt with sooner or later. Meh.

2/10

Amy's Choice, The Hungry Earth & Cold Blood

Amy’s Choice

Toby Jones.

This is a nice little episode in the middle of the series with some great character work by the three principals and a great guest appearance by Toby Jones as the ‘Dream Lord’. The Doctor and companions have fallen asleep in the TARDIS and are presented with two scenarios, one is purported to be real, the other fake. One – they approach a frozen star in the TARDIS which threatens to freeze them to death, the other takes place in the future in Ledgeworth where Amy and Rory live, Amy is pregnant and the elderly people of the town have aliens with deadly gas inside them. These people go a bit crazy and start killing everyone. Except both situations are actually dreams.

And the dream lord is in fact the Doctor, and they dreamt it all because of some psychedelic pollen that got caught in the TARDIS. It sags a bit in the middle, but is a lot of fun and is quite an enjoyable episode. Amy discovers that she loves Rory (for sure now!) which is nice. It’s not the most memorable episode, it’s not epic in any way, but it shows that there is still a place for this type of story after the attempted grandeur of episodes 2 and 3 failed to deliver. It also features Rory and Amy smacking elderly people with planks of wood which is extremely good value in my book.

7/10

The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood

When I heard the Silurians would be featuring in this two-part tale, I was pretty excited. I thought they would be the perfect creatures to bring back for the new series. So imagine my disappointment at this load of rubbish!

The Doctor talks to Alaya (Neve McIntosh)

Am I being too harsh? Well anything’s possible, and to be honest ‘The Hungry Earth’ – the first episode, I thought was rather good but in the end we have to judge, as with ‘Victory of the Daleks’, on the whole story and the second part really didn’t hold my interest at all. The first part is creepy, we lose Amy early on as she is sucked into the Earth, we have poignant moments when the Doctor forgets Elliot who goes back home to get his headphones and ends up in the Silurian city with his Dad and Amy, the characters are for the most part well played and I had only minor quibbles.

Tony and Nasreen.

Then the second episode is a dull, predictable, no ULTRA predictable mess. In fact it’s a poor retelling of the original Silurian adventure back in 1970. And in some ways, it even feels longer. The writer, Chris Chibnall, writes a the young boy Elliot as dyslexic, which the Doctor relates too and all that seems a bit, hmmm, forced. Was he trying to make a certain point? We can all achieve despite things that might hold us back? Meh. We have the very forced romance between Tony and Nasreen, and they both stay behind in the Silurian city as Tony has been infected and goes into stasis. Honestly, it doesn’t feel natural at all and feels like it was added to the script because the script was missing something.

The Silurians, whose design I don’t mind but they certainly don’t resemble the originals (which were pretty poorly designed anyways), have a military who want to attack the humans and take back the Earth. Then there are the scientists who disagree. Meh. Again all a bit predictable.

The negotiations between Amy, Nasreen and the Silurians to try and broker a solution between humans and Silurians is painful, and as Amy and Nasreen don’t represent humanity as a whole, pretty bloody stupid. The saving grace is Arthur Darvill as Rory, who is a great character, the new Mickey in some ways. The ending is very dramatic, and the high point if the second episode as a crack appears Rory is erased from time. It’s wonderfully played by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, as she fights not to forget Rory.

Except that, she wouldn’t right? The Doctor explains that as he’s part of her life, she will forget him despite having travelled in time, and she does. But that’s a retconned reason to make the rest of the season work and doesn’t ring true. But nevertheless, it’s an amazing scene and kudos big time to Karen Gillan. Very powerful stuff, and Amy is a very likeable companion despite a couple of wobbly moments which were more down to bad dialogue (writing) more than anything else.

These dramatic moments lift the score a little, but on the whole this was dull, predictable and extremely disappointing. Just goes to show, never get your hopes up.

3/10