Evolution of the Daleks
So did the Daleks have a plan?
Russell - Yes. Just not a very good one. It may be cliché, but I think trying to make more standard Daleks would have been better. We could even have had era-appropriate Daleks in an Art Deco style. Still, the Human Dalek, the Pigmen and the “Robomen” will all make nice action figures. I know I’ll definitely get one of the latter – their guns were the perfect mixture of Tommy Gun and Dalek gun, of the sci-fi and period elements. A little more of that would have been great.
Mo - For about a minute or so yes, but I suppose the double-cross and the mutiny made things a bit more interesting - than another stereotypical villain that the human-dalek could’ve become I mean.
James - Yes, but it was rubbish. I agree with Russell that a more straight forward Dalek story would have been more effective, even just using one Dalek like the first series would have been a better choice than the rather sad trio we got and their awful Doctor Frankenstein experiments.
Mark – It had possibilities, but the actual plan turned out to be silly and I think this wasted the opportunities for the Cult of Skaro.
The Doctor on Broadway - what did you think?
Mo - I think a ‘Gene Kelly’ moment from the Doctor would’ve made it a perfect episode. The Doctor can dance, but can he sing?
Russell - The Doctor Sings! After all, Tallulah did suggest that he was into Musical Theatre!
James - Thank god he didn’t sing.
Russell - Overall, I think the period and the location were better in theory than in practice. Again, a better merging of the elements might have helped – You could have had the recovering Pigmen being welcomed into the abandoned and lost of Hooverville, or a mass Dalek attack on a crowded theatre.
Martha - Doctor or just Damsel?
Mo - She’s still giving the impression of sidekick instead of equal, which isn’t helped in this episode by the Doctor trying to sacrifice himself every chance he can get.
James - Yet to really find her feet, I think. It’s difficult to play because the writers are still sounding her character out, but we’ve all come off the back of Rose completing her character story. Hopefully she will get more to do in future episodes.
Russell - Martha is settling in quite nicely. She may not reach the heights of a Sarah Jane or a Benny, but she’s definitely no Adric.
Mark – They need to give Martha more opportunities to shine and show she is not a damsel in distress. They need to show us the Martha of the first episode more.
Special effects.
Mo - A little let down by the lack of a Dalek army sweeping across New York but ‘tv budget’ so still acceptable.
James - The human Dalek hybrid is messed up whichever way you look at it, I’m sure the kids are rather more scared of it than they are of a Dalek to be honest. Well, until the point it got chained up and shot. Flying Daleks were handled quite well, I think they benefited from night-time attacks rather than the daylight swarms from the end of the last series.
Mark – There was some nice interplay done with the Daleks, but the attack never really came across as ferocious and Squid head did nothing for me.
Russell - Overall, good. The Dalek attack on Hooverville is a particular high point, and the mixture of the New York and Wales footage was well done. (Except for the base of the Statue of Liberty. They went on and on about the match between the two walls in Doctor Who Confidential – yeah, they’re the same colour, but one of them was brick and the other was stone!).
Mark – Using the same shot of New York with the poorly done boats didn’t work for me either.
Overall feelings about the two parter?
Mo - Generally it was very good, but I think some time might be needed before the episodes can be judged objectively.
James - This could have been better if the story had been more of a period piece rather than a Dalek episode. I think I might have preferred last year’s Cybermen episode just because it had Cybermen in it, this seemed like a waste of a menace with lots of good intentions but lacking any real conviction in its strengths. A Disappointment.
Russell - It was fun. Definitely the weakest of the Dalek stories so far, but an improvement on the two-part Cybermen storyline from last year. Casting actual Americans would have gone a long way toward smoothing over some of the bumps, as would a more straightforward Dalek plan.
Mark – I have to agree with James that it would have been better with more done using the period. There really wasn’t any menace to the Daleks this time and despite some good character work in the first part I felt the supporting cast were mostly wasted.
The Lazarus Experiment
Was the experiment a success?
Russell - Yes. An over the top story with a mad scientist is often welcome, and this one was no exception. Mark Gatiss made a good impression in his old and younger roles, and I hope this doesn’t stop him from returning in the title role someday. Was Thelma Barlow good in her role? Well, I don’t really know.
James - only if you want to fit a load of crappy cliches into 45 minutes. Mad Prof/Monster presumed dead but rises to kill again? Check. Old man pervs over younger woman? Check. Silly chases? Check. Denouement in church to emphasis episode title? Check. Bag of arse? Check.
Mo - Well, that depends on what result Mr.Saxon was after I suppose. Unless that was a clever way of referring to the episode, in which case it should have failed based on the individual elements but was saved by Tennant and Gatiss.
Al - Pretty much. Good basic idea, Gatiss was excellent and the ‘Which Martha Do We Get This Week?’ wheel swung back to the smart, interesting one. There were problems (Lady Thaw? The point of her was what exactly?), not the least of which was that the series has clearly suffered from taking a month-long plot arc holiday. ‘Bad Wolf’ was so subtle that several references were missed the first time whilst this year we get Spunky Mchenchman walk up to Martha’s mum and say ‘Excuse me, we’ve never met before but see that spindly chap with your daughter? He’s eeeevvviiiiiillll.’ Not subtle. Conversely, the final conversation between the Doctor and Lazarus in Southwark Cathedral was not only a fine piece of acting from both guys but also a nice tip of the hat to the Quatermass Experiment.
Did the CGI manage to rise from the grave?
Russell - Like a lot of monsters, the less you saw of this one, the better it looked. The face looked almost stuck on at times, like it was wearing a Mark Gatiss mask cut out of a Cornflakes box.
James - The beastie looked like a rubbish character from the Doom games. Seriously, Goldeneye on the N64 had better facial mapping than this thing. Like a crappy Scorpion King. And the Scorpion King was crappy to start with.
Mo - This kind of stuff always annoys me, like as James says, the Scorpion King in The Mummy 2.
Mark – The one bit I did think it worked well was the bit where he lowered himself from the ceiling.
Al - Yeah it was pretty good, nice and organic and just enough of Lazarus left to be unsettling.
Was the Doctor a dead duck?
Russell - Tennant has settled into the role now, and is almost an old hand. Fewer cheeky grins and a little less flirting and we’ll be there. Mind you, Tom Baker grinned a lot too, and he’s not exactly unpopular.
James - Not exactly a feeling of threat pervading this one despite the monster of the week shenanigans.
Mo - Well he seemed more in control than he should’ve been.
Al - Not at all. Tennant’s Doctor is even more of a geek than the previous ones and he had some crackers here. My favourite has to be the best pre credit sting so far with ‘Sorry, did he say redefine what it means to be HUMAN?!’
Mark – This did seem to be one he was there to enjoy, with Gatiss along to give him someone to play off on the acting stakes. It was a fun Doctor performance.
Martha - another family of stiffs?
Russell - So far, the most interesting thing about Martha’s family is their interaction with Saxon’s people. Other than that, they seem to be pretty much a waste. Can the next companion please be an orphaned only child? We’re going to have a lot of contemporary Earth stories anyway.
James - I still think it’s early days on this lot, they aren’t too bad, the real interest comes from the Saxon link. I find the mother slightly irritating already though, and I think we’ll have to put up with the lot of them come the season finale.
Mo - Actually, the family weren’t so bad, and nice to see some face-slapping, harks back to the Eccleston days.
Al - Depends who you’re talking about. I could stand to see a lot more of both Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Reggie Yates, if nothing else because it makes a nice change to have family members react to the Doctor in a positive way. Adjoa Andoh as Mrs Jones on the other hand I’m rapidly getting sick of. Jackie at least had valid reasons (Twelve months of them) for not liking the Doctor but Martha’s mum seems to just be an intensely irritating, pushy and fundamentally bland character.
Overall - a phoenix or a zombie?
RH - Overall, not too bad. The upper levels of average.
James - Not great, horribly cliched in places with some pretty bad FX, but rescued by The Doctor, Martha and Mark Gatiss.
Mo - A zombified phoenix. You don’t get to say that often.
Al - Not quite a phoenix but far from undead.
42
The story - a blazing success or just slightly tepid?
Russell - Good enough. Not enough was really made of the “real time” element, and the crew members never really felt fully formed to me (Unlike the crew in last year’s The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit two-parter), but it still worked. There were some great moments with the sun-possessed people in their “welding masks”.
James - Like the previous episode, horribly cliched in parts. The welder masks were terrible. I would have killed for just one of to loom in a menacing manner over one of the crew and instead of raising the visor - they welded a dead dog to the victim’s face.
Russell - Does Doctor Who need Dogwelder more than Dogwelder needs Doctor Who?
Actually, there was a character in the comics called Dogbolter, although it was just a name. Nobody tell Garth Ennis, he’ll be pitching that to RTD before the week is out.
On second thoughts… get him on the phone!
Mo - Actually, apart from the generic monster moments and cliches, it was pretty good. If the ‘infected’ men had just been walking around with their eyes closed it would’ve been much scarier than the masks.
Al - Some great ideas, none of which ever really connect. This should have felt like we’d been dropped into an episode of Firefly with the freighter crew all having their own dynamic personalities and agendas and the SF laid over the top of that. Instead it felt, oddly, like the TARDIS had landed in the worst excesses of old WHO with slightly dodgy sets, self conscious dialogue and the flat out worst cast New Who has had to date. Michelle Collins should be ashamed of her work on this episode and the rest of the cast were little better. New Who has always suffered from quality drop off in the C-list characters, but here it’s the A-list down with Collins turning in terrible work, the rest of the crew (with the notable exception of Martha’s escape pod buddy) faring little better and Agyeman herself turning in her worst performance to date. To be fair the script writers clearly have no idea how to write Martha but I’m getting awfully tired of waiting for someone to figure it out.
Mark – I’m not as disparaging as Al about the episode, but there were huge logic gaps particularly around the sun and its effects on the ship. There was seemingly no gravity for one. When the masks went on the monsters I thought they might conceal the Beast from last season, but alas not.
The Doctor - was that fear we saw?
James - Seemed to be, but coming off the back of threatening to burn everyone, I see it more of an understanding of who he is coupled with what he was infected with equating to an unleashed version of the Doctor we last really saw when Eccleston nearly murdered that Dalek. A possible foreshadowing of what would happen if someone like the Doctor wasn’t a good person but was unleashed with no human behaviour to anchor him. Well handled, I thought.
Russell - Pretty much. Mind you, if you knew you were going to stalk around a spaceship burning people to death before dying yourself when crashing into a sun, you’d be scared too. Also, despite the problems he faced, there was a distinct lack of “NO No NO No NO!”, which is a definite improvement – that sort of thing often ends up being annoying, and anything but “fantastic”.
Al - You know what, I’ve got two answers to this one and they’re both equally valid. The optimistic one is that the Doctor was terrified of his darker impulses and the fact that the Sun was giving him the opportunity to let them out, a hint, perhaps at what the future holds and who, or what Mr Saxon actually is. The cynical answer is that it was David Tennant working harder than he ever has before because, quite frankly, he was one of only two cast members to actually show up for work that week.
Mo - ‘The darkness within’, they seem to be hinting at that more than usual. Some future signifance perhaps?
James - I thought this episode was a great improvement as it separated her from the Doctor for extended periods, allowing her to emote to someone who is willing to listen. It will be her relationships with people other than the doctor that will allow us to invest in her involvement with the Doctor. I could have done without the screaming though.
Russell - I know I am. She’s smart and can take charge when needed, and she comes with a useful skill set. Once again, the interesting meeting between her Mum and Saxon’s people – not sure why they needed to put her mobile phone in an evidence bag though. Won’t that make listening in on any later calls a bit difficult if she doesn’t have the phone to answer it?
Mo - I think so. The escape pod moment was especially good.
Al - No because it’s not the same character. The Martha we got in ‘Smith and Jones’ was smart, intelligent, had useful skills and an interesting reason for travelling with the Doctor. This Martha is fitting a Rose-shaped hole, designed to do nothing but run, have the plot explained to her and look decorative. Case in point; the ship’s doctor can’t understand the readings on Corwin. Does Martha offer to help? Or show any interest at all? No because she’s too busy sticking a vacuum cleaner to the same bulkhead door twenty bloody times in a row and helping out with the stupidest security system in all of Christendom. Remember when she was a Doctor? Remember when they said she’d be an equal to him? Remember when she didn’t moon over him every bloody episode? Remember when she was FUN?
CGI - hot stuff or not?
James - I thought the space effects were very well done, the ship looked great floating into the sun, and the sun itself was quite well done although probably lacked a certain air of impending doom.
Russell - More than passable. The spaceship and sun both worked, which is enough.
Mo - Very good, the suicide ballet moment and the escape pod falling away were the highlights for me.
Al - The ship looked lovely. The sun looked lovely. Neither of which could over up the episode’s legion of flaws. On a related note, painting an MRI red and calling it a stasis chamber just means it’s an MRI that’s been painted red.
Overall - has Chris Chibnall written a good episode of a Who related show?
James - Better than everything he has ever touched on Torchwood. Up and down within its own timeframe, some of the characterisation was good, other parts were awful. No real sense of tension despite the supposed real-time element (I bet most people didn’t even realise that was being attempted). Still massive room for improvement.
Russell - Pretty much. This is obviously the Chris Chibnall that wrote for Life on Mars, rather than his Torchwood-running evil twin.
Mo - He’s fallen into the standard monster stereotype but if that were ignored the rest of the episode was good.
Al - No. I’ve warmed to Chibnall a lot, his Life on Mars work was great and this is still head and shoulders above his Torchwood work but it’s still not very good.
Mark – Better than I’d expect from him, but still sloppy.
Human Nature
So we have this new series all about a school teacher called Smith and his lovely maid, Martha - discuss.
Al - Bloody hell. After six weeks of variable quality this hits the ground running and never, not once, lets up. Cornell’s WHO work is never less than impressive, always colossally ambitious and always, somehow, much more English than a lot of the other stuff. Also, after last week’s abysmal acting this is one of the strongest casts New Who has had to date with Jessica Hyne in particular working wonders with a very buttoned down, shy character. Her interaction with Smith was utterly unforced and natural and the potentially tragic element of their relationship should hit all the harder as a result.
Mark – This is the story I’ve been waiting for all year. Even more than the return of Captain Jack. Paul Cornell adapting perhaps his finest New Adventures novel and then seeing how it would change for the screen. I’ve got to admit that I miss the original justification for the Doctor becoming human in the novel which was to try and humanize himself after becoming so cold hearted and Machiavellian. Given the actions of the Doctor since Rose left him I do think that could have been played with. However, in terms of the story the rational behind why the aliens are after the Doctor works much better this time.
This Doctor - different to Smith?
Mo - Different in many ways. I thought we might still get the shouting and the over-the-top facial expressions but the Smith performance was subtle and well done.
James - The accent was the first thing that surprised me. One thing for sure is that Tennant is very good with his vocal ability. And the clumsiness and awkward behaviour around Joan was nicely handled. I liked Mr. Smith, so they were obviously doing something right.
Russell - A very different performance from our Mr Tennant. As Mo said, a little more subtle. Let’s hope this leaves a mark on his portrayal in later episodes. A less manic Doctor could be a joy. I especially loved the little touches – the appearance of pre-Eccleston Doctors in Smith’s journal, and the reference to his parents, Sydney and Verity.
Al - Definitely. Liked the fact that Smith embraced the class system, liked the combination of clearly being the nice teacher at the school and his blase acceptance of both the military training and the class issues, racism and capital punishment of the time. Much more subdued than normal and reticent and oddly, rather charming as a result.
Mark - Tennant performed well, but Sydney and Verity (named for Sydney Newman who first developed the show and Verity Lambert, the first producer) as well as the journal with the pictures of the older Doctors were the highlights. That showed real love for the past. The Syndey line I believe was Russell T Davies’ addition to the script. The show shouldn’t be scared of its past.
Disappointed Tennant didn’t use his real accent though, especially given Mr Smith in the book had a scottish accent as he was the Sylvester McCoy Doctor.
Martha - stalker or saviour?
Mo - She’s doing what she was told, though there are moments of over-protectiveness.
James - I wasn’t sure at first if Martha had no idea of who she was as well as The Doctor. Once that was resolved it was handled nicely, Martha keeping an eye on Mr Smith whilst having to endure him not being totally aware of her, and the kicker - watching him fall in love for the first time. With another woman.
Russell - Unlike James, I think it was fairly clear from the outset that she was well aware of what was going on and who the Doctor really was. For once the recurring idea of Martha fancying the Doctor while he remains oblivious seemed to have an actual purpose. Nice to see that the negative reaction to her appearance wasn’t brushed under the rug.
Al - Saviour, pretty much. This, right here, is how she should be written. She’s smart, she’s on the ball, she’s desperately worried about him and she’s tough. The institutionalised racism of the school was well handled by all concerned as were the class issues and crucially, for very nearly the first time in the entire season, someone has remembered she’s actually a Doctor. After ragging on her performance in 42 this, for the first time since Smith and Jones, sees Agyeman be given something to play against and she absolutely nails it. Loved the double bluffing of the posessed maid in particular.
CGI - Scarecrows, Aliens, spaceships oh my…
Mo - The effects were very good, if excellent. The ‘possession’ moment with the green tendril of smoke was nice and scary.
James - The alien spaceship was a real budget-saver, mysterious green light and then it’s invisible. The scarecrows are a masterpiece, they are really creepy and should scare the living daylights out of the kids watching. This is what Doctor Who has done for generations, and this is one of the best examples.
Russell - Like James said, although possibly cheaper than some, the spaceship effect was still very well done. As for the scarecrows, absolute genius and probably quite scary for the kids in the audience. Good. They were a briiliant mixture of costume and performance – already I can picture little kids practising the walk in the playground, and older fans suddenly knowing exactly what costume they will be wearing at their next convention.
Al - Yeah this one was all bells and whistles and they all worked. The scarecrows are iconic in the same way as last year’s clockwork robots and deserve an action figure straigh away. However, for me, the most impressive effect was the Doctor’s diary. Just stunningly well designed, beautifully drawn and I’d be lying if I said the sight of McGann amongst the other Doctors didn’t give me goosebumps…
Overall - what did we think?
Mo - Ah, Paul Cornell, where would Doctor Who be without you? There’s always a nice mixture of british stuff colliding headlong with extraordinary events, and a Paul Cornell episode is always a highlight. No complaints.
James - Best episode of the third series so far, and probably one of the best since the re-launch, I haven’t read the original novel, so I’m really looking forward to the conclusion. The basic premise is a great one, make the Doctor human and let him experience what it’s like, whilst putting all the responsibility onto the companion. And having Jessica Stevenson in adds bonus marks.
Russell - In years to come, this will be remembered as “The one with the scarecrows” in nostalgic pub conversations. Definitely the highlight of this season, and at least equal to the best of previous seasons. A wonder and a joy. Paul Cornell should be very proud, and I will happily buy him a drink should I see him again.
Al - An absolute belter of an episode on every level. Well shot, well acted, well plotted and hugely ambitious. Favourite episode of the season so far.
Mark - Long anticipated and it didn’t disappoint. Enough new touches to make it fresh even to those of us who know the story. Better than Girl in the Fireplace - well next episode will decide that. It’s very possible this could be the best Who story of all time. It already was the best novel.