Christian Cawley's Blog, page 24

Here’s Why The God Complex is Your Most Underrated Series 6 Serial

James Baldock is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Doctor Who has always been about corridors. It’s partly a budgeting thing. If you have a TV programme in which the chase is a recurring motif, then enclosed spaces are the way to go, particularly when you can then use the same constructed length of space again, shot from a different angle, and pretend it’s another part of the building. A chair here, a wall sign there, and the illusion is more or less intact. And if it isn’t, who cares?

Corridors are a big part of The God Complex, although they don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re the conduit to dealing with your fears. This isn’t like any hotel, where the other rooms – and their occupants – are tantalisingly sealed. In this place, you’re actively encouraged to open up the doors until you find the one that happens to contain that childhood book with the horrible pictures, or the playground bully who abused you, or (if you’re a Time Lord) a large crack in the wall.

The first time we get wind of this, it’s because of a gorilla. The gorilla is large and roaring and sudden. The gorilla is enough to terrify a poor policewoman out of her wits and, in the process, unleash a fearsome (but unseen) adversary. The policewoman dies with a curious smile on her lips, and the psychological extent of this creature on the human mind is at least partially revealed, even if the creature itself is not. The gorilla vanishes.

It’s an electrifying moment, and rather than being one of those wonderful scenes in an average episode (see Listen) it sets the tone. There are many things to admire in The God Complex, but its biggest joy, as it turns out, is the direction. Nick Hurran has long since been a safe pair of hands, his ability to tease out a shot managing to enliven even Asylum of the Daleks, but his work here is frankly exemplary. The monster reveal shots in the hotel rooms are a jarring mixture of fast and slow. Jump cuts are abundant. The minotaur stalks the hotel accompanied by lurid lighting and grotesque, Hammond-driven muzak. Crucially, the first time we even come close to seeing it properly, it is through a glass darkly. It is a trick that would have dramatically improved Mummy on the Orient Express.

None of this would matter if the narrative didn’t go anywhere – even the best directors can’t polish a turd – but Toby Whithouse delivers. Whithouse has never been the most consistent of Who writers, but The God Complex is packed with ominous dread, cranking up the tension as the characters gradually succumb to the Minotaur, in the manner of a good Agatha Christie.

That’s as far as the murder mystery comparisons go, of course.

The story is a cross between Alien and the last three chapters of 1984, taking its stylistic cues from The Shining. There are only so many ways you can make that interesting, but Whithouse does this by introducing a smorgasbord of characters who all react in different ways – from David Walliams’ devious Gibbis (the physical resemblance to a rat cannot be a coincidence) to Amara Karan’s Rita, a strong contender for the greatest Doctor Who companion who never was. Rita is calm and logical without being soulless and it’s a shame, in a way, that her death sentence is sealed before it actually happens, when she agrees to go with the Doctor after the story is concluded – which, unless you’ve already been in all the publicity shoots, is the metaphorical equivalent of sleeping with Jack Bauer.

Curiously, The God Complex becomes – in its last ten minutes – something else entirely, by using one of the central relationship dynamics as a means to entrap the monster. There are no elephants within any of the hotel’s rooms, but there is one in the TARDIS – and the Doctor ultimately deals with it by forcibly breaking Amy’s faith in him so that she can concentrate on her marriage. It’s a gamble that doesn’t quite work, as Asylum of the Daleks proved, and it’s a shame that this later story leaves such a nasty taste in the mouth when The God Complex states so explicitly that Amy is relying too much upon the Doctor, and even more of a shame that in the end she can only make the choice when – at the end of The Angels Take Manhattan – her hand is forced.

Still, that’s all to come. Back in the hotel, the Doctor solves the riddle, confronts the Minotaur and gives it the release it so desperately desires. It’s an unexpectedly touching scene – the dissolution of the hotel’s walls, revealing the holodeck behind it, is a metaphor for the Doctor’s psychological digging, with the Minotaur’s request for death a direct parallel with the series arc. I’d normally find this painful, but in an episode in which deaths necessarily occur off camera, it’s something of a catharsis, irrespective of the wider ramifications. If the finale feels tacked on – a scene Whithouse was in all likelihood asked to insert in light of sequencing – then he gets away with it by keeping it relatively understated, at least by Nu Who standards.

In a way, part of the problem of the episode was its scheduling – existing, as it did, in a series where Things Are Happening seemingly every week. It’s an episode that deliberately doesn’t deal with the Doctor’s death or any of the mysteries behind it – at least on the surface – and I wonder if it’s never quite achieved the acclaim it deserves because everyone was so anxious to get on with the story and find out how the Doctor managed to get away from Lake Silencio.

Or perhaps we, like Agent Scully, had had enough of chasing monsters in the dark. And that’s a shame, really, because I love it. It’s an episode that’s almost as close to perfect as it’s possible to get, and for Doctor Who, that’s a fine accolade indeed.

The post Here’s Why The God Complex is Your Most Underrated Series 6 Serial appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

BBC Three Unveils New Logo for Online Switchover

Philip Bates is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

In case you’ve had your head buried in the sand for well over a year, you’ve probably heard that BBC Three is moving online. Cue lots of people shaking their fists in the air, shouting a bit, and saying the BBC no longer represents Da Yoof (because clearly we’re not intelligent enough to watch the other channels, preferring F*** Off! I’m A Hairy Woman! to Don’t Scare the Hare). The corporation has unveiled the first part of that move: their logo.

And it’s not gone down too brilliantly.

Ah well. Damned if they do; damned if they don’t, and all that. The Beeb are on it, though, controlling the backlash to some degree by acknowledging its W1A vibe. W1A is the comedy set inside the BBC, lampooning itself and the creatives, directors, and commercial morons supposedly moving and shaking behind-the-scenes, starring Human Nature/ The Family of Blood‘s Jessica Hynes and The Curse of the Black Spot‘s Hugh Bonneville (narrated by a bloke called David Tennant; ever heard of him?).

The logo itself is, in my opinion, smart and ‘Wiv It’, far superior to the previous fairly-hideous ones. Head of Marketing, Nikki Carr admitted:

“Thanks to W1A we’re cursed at the BBC when it comes to marketing and I don’t want to come across all Siobhan Sharpe but forgive me some lingo. The visual identity brings new BBC Three together – a new logo, new idents, new animations and new on screen presentation, all with a new colour pallete. This visual identity will underpin what we do in the future… New BBC Three is founded on three principles that underpin everything we do. The first is ‘make me think’ – hard hitting documentaries like Suicide and Me and thought provoking drama likeMurdered By My Boyfriend. The second is ‘Make me laugh’- distinctive comedy like People Just Do Nothing or new entertainment shows like Murder In Successville. The third, the exclamation mark, is ‘Give me a voice’, which is what we will do for young people.”

By mentioning W1A, there is an attempt at damage limitation. Twitter’s alive with comparisons to that show.

At least a few thought ‘outside the box’…

Not to be all Sarah Dales about this, but if you turn the new BBC Three logo upside down it says "ill".

— Steven Perkins (@stevenperkins) January 4, 2016

Naturally, we also get a few asking how much of OUR MONEY *ANGRY FACE* was spent on the logo. Marketing and branding? We can’t have that. Can’t the BBC just have an ident scribbled on a piece of paper?

Anyway, BBC Three, which used to screen Doctor Who Confidential before the channel lost its mind (more so), will jump online on Tuesday 16th February 2016.

The post BBC Three Unveils New Logo for Online Switchover appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Here’s Why The Doctor’s Wife is Your Favourite Series 6 Serial

Meredith Burdett is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

It’s one of those Doctor Who episodes that you watch and can’t help but enjoy, isn’t it?

From the ominous pre-title sequence, the nod to The War Games, jumping out of the Universe, the distressing moment when the Doctor discovers where the Time Lord voices are coming from, House’s charm and malevolence, the race around the TARDIS, the TARDIS graveyard, the makeshift TARDIS, the terrifying journey that Amy and Rory embark on, the incredibly cute journey that the Doctor and Idris undertake, the old console room, the Doctor’s wonderful trick he pulls to get back in control of the TARDIS, ‘Inside, you are just.. SO… SMALL’ and an ending that will make the hardest of the hard weep.

And that’s in under 45 minutes. AND I haven’t even mentioned so many other details that stick out.

What’s even more amazing about The Doctor’s Wife is that throughout all of these nods to the past, talk of Gallifrey in the old times and the Doctor’s beginning, the episode never ever feels like a continuity explosion. It’s one hell of a writer that can take all of those elements and more and create a vivid and entertaining piece of television drama without cornering the viewers into the world of Doctor Who mythos. You could easily slot this episode into an earlier season and it wouldn’t do any harm at all.

Strip away every single reference to Time Lords, Gallifrey, the show’s mythos and all these other glorious elements and you still have treats to behold.

Gaiman writes with eloquence and panache. His dialogue between the leads sizzles, especially between Idris and the Doctor. Their bickering is delightful and truly a site to behold. The Doctor and the TARDIS, talking. Yay!

In the bleaker times of the early 1990s (Dark Times, a small few of us guarding the series until the Doctor returned, for those of you under the age of 20, ask an adult about Doctor Who between 1990 and 2004 but be warned – it’s a story that’s as confusing and sad as it is terrifying) there was a rumour that if Doctor Who came back to our screens, the TARDIS may well be able to talk. Gaiman takes this element but, in his typical fashion, makes it not only integral to driving the plot forward but also incredibly heartfelt as well. If you’re not moved by the word that Idris is trying to find by the end of this episode then please take your dead soul and go and watch something a little more suited to you. We suggest Hollyoaks but that’s really up to you.

The Doctor’s Wife is truly, as previously stated by others, a love letter to our favourite show. An idea nearly 50 years in the making that shows just how wonderful relationships can be.

The post Here’s Why The Doctor’s Wife is Your Favourite Series 6 Serial appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Here’s Why Amy’s Choice is Your Most Underrated Series 5 Serial

Andrew Reynolds is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

We rarely get a glimpse into the psyche of the Doctor and for a large part of Amy’s Choice, it’s kept from us.

Much like the Doctor himself, we revel in the side of his personality that he wants us to believe in – the bumbling, charming, gregarious man who saves the universe – no questions asked. It’s not often that we get to see his self-lacerating side; a mean little impish man who pulls apart his ‘tawdry quirks’ and his penchant for taking on board young, female companions and discarding them with little regard for their lives outside of the TARDIS.

For a man who carries himself with such self-regard, he has a vicious self-lacerating streak.

In the form of Toby Jones, we get the perfect dramatization of this mirror Doctor. The demonic, puckish Dream Lord possesses the same disarming wit and flare for insight as the Doctor himself but instead of bringing people together, he harbours a creeping sense of unease with every cutting remark. He’s not a comfortable man to share any space with – he’s the Doctor’s alien persona built on driving a wedge between those around him with no regard for anyone’s personal safety – in other words, he’s the Doctor’s biggest fear made real.

In the opening moments, this fear is largely played for laughs – the Doctor turns up to the Williams’ idyllic village home, fails to notice how pregnant Amy is and gently prods at Rory’s vision of contentment as a boring humdrum nightmare he accidentally stumbled into – he basically lies to them about ‘checking in’ on his companions after he’s left them, although there seems to be no resentment from either party.

It’s this schism between Rory and the Doctor – and conversely, their relationship with Amy – that drives the rest of the episode – both worlds represent an ideal for both men, one features an impending disaster that could only be solved by the Doctor and the other has a pub and two shops – and in the middle of all of this the Dream Lord breaking down the barriers between the two with layers of doubt.

Although we’ve already travelled with Rory before in Vampires of Venice, this is the first time we get to see him as a fully-rounded character; someone who has a very strong emotional hold on the affections of Amy.

Sure, he cannot compete with the charming intergalactic hero, but, in his heart, he is a decent man – even if he does recognise his timidity in the face of adventure as a weakness, hence the ‘elephant in the room’ the ponytail.

It might seem like a throwaway gag – and a particularly weak one at that – but that flap of hair says something about his need to compete with the Doctor – sure it could be read as one last throw of the dice against impending fatherhood but, again, this is someone who’s partner has been enchanted by travelling through space and time – the fact that he sees the ponytail as a clear sign that he does have an adventurous streak is utterly charming.

Much like the Doctor himself, he genuinely cannot compete with his fellow combatant because he has nothing other than his belief in who he is to back him up – as the Doctor’s frustration with Upper Leadworth shows, it’s not an equal fight for either of them (the Doctor doesn’t do contentment in much the same way Rory doesn’t do adventure) despite Rory’s brief flirtation with a questionable hairstyle.

The whole episode serves to put to bed once and for all, the underlying sexual tension between the Doctor and Amy and ultimately, when the moment comes and Rory is turned to ash by the pressing horde of geriatric aliens (perhaps the episode’s weakness element – they’re too underdeveloped to feel like anything more than a gimmick), she chooses to settle for Rory.

What’s great about this isn’t that Amy makes a choice; it’s that the Doctor doesn’t argue with her. This is the important thing: as Amy gets into the VW camper van, hell bent on crashing it into their idyllic home and ending this reality, the Doctor doesn’t attempt to change her mind.

He could easily tell her she’s grieving and in shock, and the Dream Lord knows this too; in the best moment in the episode, the pair exchange a silent glance as the Doctor enters the van. The Doctor’s fate isn’t sealed by his actions but rather by his faith in his companion; something that even the acidic Dream Lord, with his self-immolating trial of the Doctor (and there was a brief moment where he could very well have been an embryonic Valeyard – and what a way to introduce him) cannot counter.

For one it’s the code in which he lives by and for his darker alter ego, it’s a weakness – both begrudgingly acknowledge the other as one world ends and an answer presents itself.

You could argue that the Dream Lord won.

Rory’s death posed a problem that the Doctor – with his lack of intervention and aloofness – simply couldn’t address. He knows he cannot bring him back or as Amy succinctly puts it: ‘What is the point of you?’ and therefore, he is broken.

He’s operating in a world where he has no control anymore and as he quietly asks Amy ‘how can she be sure?’ that this world is the dream world, he surrenders any sense of self to her. Once we are back in the TARDIS, he is back in control of the situation – the Dream Lord admitting he is defeated is just another level of subterfuge, a last desperate throw of the dice to stop the Doctor from ultimately regaining control. It’s doomed to fail.

Like I said, that look between the two of them is the best moment of the episode because it carries such potential and its testament to Toby Jones performance and Simon Nye’s script.

Some episodes are big on spectacle and live long in the memory for the damage they leave in their wake; others offer us a quieter, more thoughtful look at the world the Doctor inhabits and the people he chooses to surround himself with.

Amy’s Choice works so well because it gives us a chance to get to know our main characters – even if they are sharing details they would rather they didn’t.

The post Here’s Why Amy’s Choice is Your Most Underrated Series 5 Serial appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Here’s Why Vincent and the Doctor is Your Favourite Series 5 Serial

James Baldock is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

This is a hard one to write. There is so much in here to unpack. It’s like moving house; sat in strange new walls, fresh territory, surrounded by boxes, and not knowing where to start – so that, in the end, you do not. Where indeed do you start with what is quite possibly the most perfectly-constructed, moving and profound episode of Doctor Who since the show’s revival?

Vincent and the Doctor: your favourite episode of Series 5. With 28.45%, it beat The Eleventh Hour (18.97%), The Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone (10.34%), and The Pandorica Opens/ The Big Bang, which trailed into second place with 25.43% of the vote.

Vincent and the Doctor shares something in common with another of my favourite episodes, The God Complex: the obscured, sparingly seen antagonist, only visible in the briefest of moments. Unseen enemies can divide an audience. They disappointed my son, who was somewhat taken aback when I told him (after considerable badgering) that the Doctor would come face to not-quite-face with a gigantic invisible chicken. Children relish in the tangible; sometimes you have to give them something. Mine spent the episode’s aftermath in quiet, mournful contemplation, their minds racing with new possibilities: that everyone always leaves, that sometimes winning is no fun at all. This is a story soaked in beauty, but it carries a harsh truth at its core: the nightmarish thing that haunts the alleys and fields of Arles is nothing compared to the demons that live inside the artist’s head.

What’s striking (if unsurprising) about Vincent is how, given the comparative absence of the monster, the gaps are plugged elsewhere. Visual motifs of Van Gogh’s paintings are abundant, constructed carefully but by no means symmetrically, giving the impressionist eye room to work. The light from the reconstructed pavement cafe spills out into the evening, even before Vincent follows it. Shadows linger across the floor of the bedroom where the artist will eventually rest in torment. Crows take flight over a wheat field. And, in one of the most arresting moments, Amy sits outside the cottage, smiling from ear to ear even as her inner, repressed sadness gnaws away, surrounded by sunflowers, which Vincent himself describes as “always somewhere between living and dying”.

But ultimately this is a character piece, and Curtis sensibly keeps the characters to a minimum. The scholarly Dr. Black (an uncredited Bill Nighy, on fine form) is the twenty-first century enlightened human, while Van Gogh’s peers are reduced somewhat to sneering stereotypes – but this is necessary, in a way, in order to portray the pain of the artist. And even this has its subtext. The dialogue is comparatively colloquial, and Vincent’s exeunt from the cafe instantly recognisable: what future Van Goghs, Curtis appears to suggest, have we chosen to ridicule and demean in 2010?

Discourses on art aside, this is an episode about bipolar disorder, perhaps the only time the series has ever tackled such an area, and certainly the most direct. It would have been comparatively simple to take the sensationalist route, and Curtis deserves nothing but praise for managing to handle it without lapsing into the cliches that haunt some of his other work. This is one of the most sensitively observed depictions of clinical depression I’ve ever seen in a family show – and, despite (or perhaps because of) the evocative, bittersweet finale, one of the most satisfying.

It’s interesting that Van Gogh’s mid-episode breakdown, in which he confines himself to bed and demands that the Doctor leave, is triggered not by a traumatic incident but by a single careless line of dialogue. It’s a testament to the power of words to inflict wounds, and a cutting reminder that even the best of us make mistakes. Had the words come from Capaldi, we would have put it down to his brusqueness. But the Eleventh Doctor, while remote, is still good with people even when they do not understand him (cf. The Lodger), and this knowledge somehow cuts a little deeper – even more so when he tries to comfort the artist, only to simply make things worse.

The battle with the Krayafis is the story’s McGuffin, but Curtis gets it out of the way comparatively early in the third act, allowing time for a series of emotional denouements. Perhaps the most beautiful of these takes place as the Doctor, Amy and Vincent lie on their backs looking up at the night sky, which seamlessly transitions into The Starry Night. It is clear that Van Gogh’s ability to see the world the way he does – whatever the repercussions – is unique, but it is his ability to describe what he sees with words as well as with paintings that really comes across here.

“Brighter than sunflowers,” declares a tearful Amy in the epilogue, encapsulating both Vincent himself – doomed to burn twice as bright, half as long – and the paintings he created. “It’s colour,” he admits, earlier in the episode. “Colour that holds the key. I can hear the colours. Listen to them. Every time I step outside, I feel nature is shouting at me.”

But the Krayafis – orphaned and blind and fearful – itself becomes a metaphor, a testament both to the power of depression and those who do not understand it. As the three companions gather in silent homage over the creature’s unseen corpse, Van Gogh remarks “He was frightened, and he lashed out… like humans who lash out when they’re frightened”. Curtis fashions a monster that is both victim and antagonist, and as much a part of Vincent, in many ways, as his talent with a brush. It would have been comparatively simple to explain away the monster and, by turns, the artist’s mental state, with pseudoscience, but the writer does neither. There is a rational scientific explanation for the presence of the Krayafis – just as the rational scientific explanation for depression is a chemical imbalance – but this does not detract from its power to torment, or the fact that Vincent is the sole character who is fully aware of it.

Most tellingly of all, the Doctor is not able to ‘cure’ Vincent – nor, it seems, does he particularly want to. His decision to give the artist such a concrete vision of his future seems, at first, more than a little out of character, until the final scene in the gallery where it is revealed that the revelation has made only cosmetic alterations to Vincent’s life, with his suicide and eventual legacy untouched. Amy (and, by turns, the audience) is forced to learn the hardest of lessons: that the differences we make do not always amount to more than the sum of their parts. Crucially, it is Van Gogh himself who foreshadows this, when he admits that “On my own, I fear I may not do as well”.

Perhaps one of the nicest things about the episode is the reverence with which Amy and the Doctor greet Van Gogh, without ever lapsing into sycophancy. Even in the final, rather overstated gallery sequence, they’re content to allow Bill Nighy to do the talking. There is none of the giggling of Rose’s encounter with Queen Victoria, or the name-dropping in Donna’s meeting with Agatha Christie. Indeed, for a Curtis script it’s comparatively light on humour, which is perhaps sensible. Smith blunders in and out of the situation with customary Doctorishness (is that a word? It should be a word), making all the usual mistakes that people make when they don’t know how to talk to people with depression. Gillan is sensitive and radiant, although it’s Amy’s silent, inner turmoil in this first post-Rory episode – an unspoken sense of grief, without knowing why – that enables her to handle Vincent as well as she does.

I’m sure I’ve said it before, but the fact that Vincent and the Doctor manages to tackle such heavy subject matter and escape with its dignity intact is a credit to absolutely everyone concerned. It’s a credit to the designers and production team, who visualised nineteenth century France so vividly. It’s a credit to Richard Curtis – and Steven Moffat, who knew how to fashion and evolve his ideas into a script that delivers.

Perhaps most of all, it’s a credit to the series regulars, and also Tony Curran, whose portrayal of Vincent is breathtaking. It’s an episode that paints the stark sadness of loneliness and juxtaposes it with the brilliance of inspired creativity – as Dr. Black says, “Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world… No one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again.”

Vincent and the Doctor is a reminder that the world is more wondrous than we could possibly hope to imagine – but most of all, it’s a reminder of exactly what it means to be human.

The post Here’s Why Vincent and the Doctor is Your Favourite Series 5 Serial appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Here’s Why Planet of the Dead is Your Most Underrated 2009 Special

Andrew Reynolds is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

This is it.

The end of the Russell T. Davies era and goodbye to David Tennant and the Tenth Doctor. No really, this is the end. When compared to other subsequent specials, this is the last time we get to share any moment of levity without the omnipresent threat of what’s to come hanging over the festivities. And it’s your most overlooked of the 2009 specials, with 43.75% of the vote.

Planet of the Dead unfairly gets overlooked simply because it lacks the tragedy of, say, The Waters of Mars or the importance of The End of Time – no, what makes this episode stand out is that it’s the last time the Doctor gets to have a good day.

Sure, he has to abandon a potential companion and there’s also the small matter of Carmen’s prophecy that ‘he will knock four times’ which ultimately leads him down a path towards his demise but, for the large part, he gets to revel in the fun of just being the Doctor.

And it’s something at that point that we’ve lost from the show.

Now, under Moffat’s reign, the show leans heavily (and some might say disproportionality) towards serialisation – and specifically, the kind of Doctor centric serialisation that naturally doesn’t lend itself towards taking your foot off the gas once in a while to relieve the tension.

However, that’s not exclusive to this episode. Previous series have placed similarly light episodes nearer the start of a story arc; for example New Earth, which provided a gentle, fun re-introduction to the Doctor. But even those stories had, beneath the surface, something to say – albeit a theme buried under a very goofy surface.

The specials were ideally placed to tell these kind of stand-alone stories. They had the chance to explore a particular aspect of the Doctor’s personality just before we introduce the next incarnation – the show almost has to reset every time; making them ideal for at least one high spirited adventure.

You could argue that the Christmas Specials operate in such a fashion but they’ve almost always served as an epilogue to the previous series – and they usually, and perhaps crucially for this special, come heavy laden with a Doctor grieving for a departed companion.

There’s a brief moment in Planet of the Dead where this pain does rear its head again but it’s not dwelt upon: I’m not sure what stage ‘driving a flying bus with a master thief while space Manta Ray’s threaten London’ comes in the grieving process but even that’s not enough to shake the idea that, at this point, a companion isn’t for him.

No, what Planet of the Dead offers us instead is an extended look at the Doctor in his element: He smiles, he cracks jokes, he gets to do a funny alien voice, and he also gets to take charge of a situation that never really threatens to boil over into a crisis (there’s a wider planetary threat here but it’s largely in the background) in his own idiosyncratic, very Doctorly way.

In other words, the Doctor wins.

However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a darkness underneath the surface – I mean, just look at the title.

Perhaps the most telling moment of just how much this episode wants to avoid slipping into darker waters is when the Tritovores share the plight of the titular planet with Lady Christina, gamely played by future Bionic Woman Michelle Ryan, who instead of boding over the horror of literally treading on the remains of a once thriving civilisation, she complains she has dead people in her hair.

It’s not quite as jokey as that sounds – she’s understandably upset at the idea of washing lifeforms from her locks but – and this is perhaps the reason why the episode fails to land its most prominent blow – the Doctor gets his vitality from his companions and, as moral ambiguous thieves with a line in charming flirtatiousness go, Lady Christina lacks an emotional core necessary to really impress us.

And that’s ultimately what makes her unique, or unique up to this moment; we are supposed to be impressed by her – even the Doctor is occasionally impressed yet even as she willingly hurls herself down a shaft to retrieve a crystal, it never really works.

It’s one thing to make a companion relatable but it’s another to make one that truly impresses and, despite one such moment where the Doctor compares her ‘liberation’ of Aethelstan’s cup to his theft of the TARDIS, writers Gareth Roberts and Russell T. Davies never elevate her above her rather grand character description.

Conversely, even the moments where the Doctor draws strength from the kind of everyday people occupying the bus feel flat because, at this moment, he isn’t lacking in reassurances – he has a whole other previous incarnation where he took solace from ordinary people and the kind of mundane lives he couldn’t have; it’s perhaps the one crack in this episode’s considerable armour – the growing sense that the old ideas perhaps aren’t working anymore.

Maybe it’s a small mercy: How often can the Doctor launch into another speech about the ‘indomitable’ human race? No, if anything it lends to the feeling that this is a lap of honour; a sort of greatest hits package which showcases the strengths of the show (seriously, they took a double decker bus to Dubai! Madness! Wonderful, British madness!) while ushering in the end of something at just the right time.

The post Here’s Why Planet of the Dead is Your Most Underrated 2009 Special appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Here’s Why The Waters of Mars is Your Favourite 2009 Special

Jonathan Appleton is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

It’s one of the least surprising results from our series of polls to find Kasterborous readers’ favourite episodes from each run of Doctor Who since the series returned in 2005. There surely can’t have been many people who expected any episode other than Russell T Davies and Phil Ford’s Hugo Award-winning, Mars-set chiller to garner the most votes from the run of specials which saw out David Tennant’s time in the TARDIS.

But the fact that the other specials that year haven’t exactly gone down as classics shouldn’t make us blasé about the merits of what is a very effective modern spin on the base-under-siege storyline, one with a proper Time Lord’s moral dilemma at its heart.

Apparently, The Waters of Mars was originally planned as a Christmas special titled Red Christmas, and it’s fun to imagine a parallel timeline where viewers sat down by the fire with their Eggnog expecting to be entertained by a bit of sci-fi fun, only to be confronted by Lindsay Duncan shooting herself in one of the programme’s darkest conclusions ever. Happy Christmas! But Adelaide Brooke, commander of the pioneering mission to establish the first human outpost on Mars, knows that this is how events have to play out, even if a hubristic Doctor thinks he can change the course of history.

It was actually November that saw the episode’s original transmission and I’m not sure we ever had a more date-specific story in Doctor Who, that fixed point of November 21st 2059 being hammered home a number of times (the production team must have been cursing the scheduler who decided to put it out on BBC1 on the 15th of the month…). It’s a future that’s within reach and is set up effectively, teasing just enough information in that way Doctor Who often does to make us wonder how things could turn out as depicted, with the crew speculating that the Doctor may be part of a Philippine or Spanish mission or, worst of all, the ‘Branson Inheritance lot’.

No time is wasted in getting the plot moving. Five minutes in and the first crew member has started to transform, and the Doctor quickly gets us up to speed on just why the crew of Bowie Base One are so important, aided by some explanatory web pages. But as any good time traveller knows, some points in time are fixed and have to stay that way. The Doctor knows that Adelaide and her crew must die so that future generations will be inspired to further feats of space exploration, so he decides he has to clear off.

It makes for uncomfortable viewing to see him behaving so uncharacteristically and even well after the point at which it’s clear that something very disturbing indeed is infecting the crew the Doctor is still convinced that he must let history take its course.

Younger viewers may well have been more troubled by the unsettling transformation effect as crew members twitch and shiver before becoming water-gushing, cracked-mouthed zombies that can sprint fast enough to give the undead in 28 Days Later a run for their money.

The story isn’t perfect. There’s a little too much running and chasing, Gadget quickly becomes tiresome, and the notion, voiced by the Doctor, that a Dalek spared the young Adelaide because it somehow knew how influential she would go on to be in galactic history doesn’t really make much sense. But theses are minor quibbles and don’t detract from an episode that gives us much of what was great about the RTD era: plenty of action, a relatively simple, well-told story that moves at a rattling pace, and a big moral quandary for the Doctor to wrestle with.

The Waters of Mars is a story that explores the limits of the Doctor’s capacity to influence events. With the Time Lords gone, who is going to stop him changing the course of history? He’s taught a harsh lesson in the end as Adelaide, wonderfully played by Lindsay Duncan, takes matters into her own hands. Water always wins but the same can’t be said for the Doctor.

But what do you think? Did The Waters of Mars deserve to be voted best story in the 2009 serials? Let us know!

The post Here’s Why The Waters of Mars is Your Favourite 2009 Special appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Tell us What You Thought of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride!

Philip Bates is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Woo! Sherlock is back! Well, was back. Not for long, granted, but still, Sherlock!

And this time, things were a little bit different – or actually, business as usual. Feeling like a good mix of the original Arthur Conan Doyle novels and the 2010 reimagining. It was especially interesting to see Louise Brealey’s Molly Hooper in Victorian times, a character created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, intended as a one-off but who kept cropping up again as everyone loved her!

It’s been good to have Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (and co.) back, but what did you think of The Abominable Bride? Prior to transmission, nearly 150 people went to IMDB to give the special 10/10. Yes, that’s a bit pre-emptive. So tell us what you thought!

What did you think of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride?

Voted? Good-oh. Thanks. There’s a gorgeous comments section below and if you could expand on your thoughts there, that’d be great too. So is this how you’d like Sherlock to be every episode? Did you see this episode at the cinema? Was it worth it?

The post Tell us What You Thought of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride! appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

Remembering Those We Lost in 2015

Philip Bates is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Happy New Year, everyone. It’s 2016, but 2015 has been good to us, treating Whovians to 13 new episodes of Doctor Who, the successful Doctor Who Festival, and Big Finish’s NuWho license.

Alas, you can’t have the good without the bad, and we lost a sad number of people who have contributed to the show over the years.

Actor and comedian Toby Hadoke has put together the touching tribute to those who passed away last year, a celebration of some truly wonderful folks who will be missed.

This includes Snakedance director, Fiona Cumming; Barrie Ingham (The Myth Makers); stuntman Roy Street; Olaf Pooley (Inferno); HAVOC’s Derek Ware; designer Barry Newbery; Delta and the Bannermen‘s Richard Davies; and Script Editor Anthony Read.

Please take 10 minutes out of today to watching this beautiful tribute.

The post Remembering Those We Lost in 2015 appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

NuWho 10th Anniversary: What Is Your Most Underrated Series 7B Story?

Philip Bates is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

This year, Doctor Who has been back on our screen ten whole years. It feels like yesterday that the TARDIS materialised once more; suitably, it also feels like forever.

So join us as we celebrate a decade with the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. Let’s find out which serials are our favourites, and shine a light on the underrated ones too. Watch us run.

And then vote on your favourites. At the end of the year, we’ll find out which serials showcase our beloved show at the height of its game.

We’ve split Series 7 into two. There’s too big a tonal shift and so many new storylines to embrace. The Doctor has a secret, y’know. He has one he shall take to the grave. And it is discovered. The TARDIS is heading for Trenzalore, but first, a detour via Akhaten, a Russian submarine, the North, and Hedgewick’s World of Wonders…

James Lomond: Cold War

My most underrated episode from 7B is Cold War… Sadly some of the greatness of this seems to go unnoticed with the return of an Old Baddie. It’s a period piece but in more ways than one – the pitting of science and military against one another with David Warner’s Prof Grisenko against Officer Stepashin harks back to both the Doctor versus the Brigadier and every other benevolent, bumbling scientist that has stumbled into disaster and shown bravery and more sophisticated principles than their army-based counterparts. Mostly anyway. I’m thinking of the murdered scientist in Planet of Giants and lovely Rubeish in The Time Warrior – those goodly sorts. And more than that, Gatiss and Warner gave us such a wonderful series of character moments with a Soviet scientist who was a Duran Duran and Ultravox fan (!).

The rehabilitation of the Ice Warriors was one of the most successful since 2005’s Dalek. They added to both through their cultural history and biology. The catastrophic social faux-pas of Skaldak leaving his exo-armour, indicating how desperate he was, gave us one of NuWho‘s rare moments of Proper Science Fiction. Most of what we see on screen seems to be done to facilitate mystery plot-twists or to look good with the barest of explanations. Here was something that had been thought through and was effective within the narrative and WASN’T a timey-wimey plot-point.

Put together with Matt Smith at his height, some fantastic Actual Model Work and good performances all round, and an Ice Warrior ship in all its glory, and the HADS (hurrah!), this slice of Old-NuWho deserves more than a second look!

Jonathan Appleton: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

Not an easy task to pick an under-rated episode in what wasn’t a vintage series but I’ll go with this one, mainly for its concept (we’ve always wanted to see the heart of the TARDIS, right?) and the 2000AD feel which the opening, with its bunch of grungy space salvage merchants on the make, sadly didn’t follow through.

So much of the enjoyment of Doctor Who is about the anticipation and the first five minutes of this episode made me feel I was in for the kind of thrills I used to get years ago from the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, where the Doctor always seemed to meet dodgy types out to make a fast buck. Unfortunately the Van Baalens are not in the same league as the Freefall Warriors (now there’s a strip that would make a great episode…) and all that corridor wandering didn’t really lead anywhere very interesting. A missed opportunity, but sometimes it’s fun to reflect on what might have been…

Philip Bates: The Rings of Akhaten… and Hide

Oh, I know I shouldn’t really do this, but my New Year’s resolution is to be less decisive (or is it?), so I’m electing the two episodes of Series 7 written by Neil Cross. I make no secret of two things: Series 7B is vastly underrated (I truly believe that, in retrospect, the Eleventh Doctor tenure will be seen as a really classic era); and that Neil Cross is one of my favourite writers.

I think I first saw his work on Spooks, a show I love and one on which he acted as showrunner for a little while. You can download one of the scripts from the BBC Writer’s Room. Next must’ve been Doctor Who, and Luther, and his various (fantastic) novels. I greatly admire his range, his style, and his nerve. That diversity can be witnessed in The Rings of Akhaten and Hide, episodes that have very little in common, aside Matt Smith, Jenna Coleman, and true human beauty shining throughout.

Let’s start with The Rings of Akhaten, overlooked and sometimes mocked almost immediately after transmission. For years, there’s been call (likely jokily) for a musical episode of Doctor Who. This was an idea that instantly repelled me, but when it actually happened, it was wonderful, and everyone guffawed as “all the singing.”

I think it’s missing the point, though. This was something Doctor Who has ever done before: revel in the awesome incredibility of the universe. We get brief glimpses of that wonder, but as Clara’s first proper trip in the TARDIS, this was just the Doctor giving her something memorable and pretty mind-blowing. Normally, we’re distracted by the Monster of the Week, and although we do get that (numerous times), the first, say, 20 minutes is just finding humanity amongst this strange alien culture. Oh, I love Grandfather and the Old God and especially the Vigil, but getting to know a different society so completely is really special. It’s what made The Web Planet special all those years ago.

Added to this, we get some stunning performances, namely from Matt and Jenna, two of the best actors of our generation. The Doctor’s speech (and that lone tear) is breath-taking, and everything’s made better by Murray Gold’s powerful yet gentle score.

Powerful and gentle is a great way to describe Hide as well. It’s not as underrated as Akhaten, but it does tend to get overlooked and that’s concerning because it’s one of the strongest and most touching stories of Doctor Who.

Matt and Jenna are fantastic once again (and this is the first story she filmed too!), but let’s further highlight Jessica Raine and Dougray Scott who were astonishingly understated and honest. I’d like to particularly shine a spotlight on two intercutting interactions: Clara and Emma Grayling, and the Doctor and Alec Palmer – the former being an apt discussion about love (and notable for the cutting warning to Clara not to trust the Doctor because “he has a sliver of ice in his heart”); and the latter being a brief but beautiful examination of a grim fascination of death.

The reason Alec is looking for ghosts? “Because I killed, and I caused to have killed. I sent young men and women to their deaths, but here I am, still alive. And it does tend to haunt you – living, after so much of the other thing.” But what would he do if he could speak to the deceased? “I’d very much like to thank them.”

Torchwood had violence, and sex, and swearing, but this is proper adult drama.

Watch this and then watch The Stone Tape too, and you’ll further appreciate what a clever intricate script this is. I loved the sci-fi shift, and the change of scenery, and yes, the love story too. Hide teaches us about monsters, that they’re not always what they seem, and that’s special. There are too many grey areas, and in another notable scene whereby we see the Earth, from birth to death, we learn more about perspectives. And to some, the Doctor might be the monster after all.

Andrew Reynolds: The Crimson Horror

The threats presented in Doctor Who have to rise to the occasion – some do this by presenting a near impossible, impervious enemy for him to face, like the Silence. Others take away accoutrement such as the TARDIS or the Sonic Screwdriver in order to level the playing field.

So when it comes to the events of The Crimson Horror with its mad eugenicist and her symbiotically linked leech who threatens to launch a deadly toxin against all humanity, everything feels a little, well, small.

In creating a sense of jeopardy The Crimson Horror becomes less effective once the Doctor is back in business – not to mention the presence of the Paternoster Gang, who when combined with the Doctor, are more than a match for anything Victorian Yorkshire can throw at them.

No, what elevates this episode above the usual fare, are three things.

One, the performance by national treasure Diana Rigg, who brings a genuine bite and menace to Mrs Gillyflower; she may be just another over-the-top villain with a mad scheme to threaten the Earth, but Rigg revels in the character’s madness (if anyone can sell the genuine threat of an infernal leech attached to her chest, it’s her).

Another is the bold stylistic choices. The episode might have been so insubstantial as to be forgettable were it not for the Doctor’s absence from the story for about 15 mins (we are left with the entertaining and effective services of Jenny, Madame Vastra and Strax – you do wonder if the budgetary constraints of the make-up required to bring them to life means we’ll never see an impossible to resist spin-off for the trio), and the sepia toned grainy flashbacks.

It’s a welcome departure for the show. The quick snippets of plot happily dispense with story beats that even casual fans might have grown tired of seeing. What’s more, they’re genuinely fun and keep the energy levels high.

The last and by no means least intriguing development is Ada Gillyflower – our villainess’ invalid daughter played by real life daughter of Diana Rigg, Rachel Stirling.

Crushed by the cruel Victorian standards, she finds solace in her ‘monster’ – the crimson Doctor – who, once she is eventually rejected by her mother, and turns to self-pity, shows us another interesting facet to Matt Smith’s Doctor.

In labelling her pity as ‘backwards’, the Doctor implies a hitherto unseen value system behind his belief in the worth of all cultures – the Doctor recognises nascent cruelty in humanity and the dangers of abuse. He won’t let Ada be sucked into her mother’s primitivism but also, and perhaps crucially, he won’t take her vengeful step (in this case, a very literal step) and pulverise the offending leech.

A lot is made of the Doctor’s aloofness throughout this series and the contrast with his calmer approach to dealing with the fate of the parasitic enemy and Ada’s furious vengeful rage at what has been taken from her, makes a far subtler point out of a very silly joke than this episode has any right to make.

Drew Boynton: The Snowmen

I’m not sure if The Snowmen is underrated exactly, but I do think it tends to get overlooked.  (Probably because it is a Christmas special, and sometimes the less said about them, the better.)

This episode gives us our first real look at Clara, and there is real suspense to her character, as we’re unsure why a) she’s living in the past; and b) why she is living a mysterious double-life. The Snowmen also offers a creepy performance from Richard E. Grant, some voiceover work from the legendary Sir Ian McKellen, and an appearance by the Paternoster Gang. In fact, it’s the Paternosters, especially a humorously winning spotlight for Strax, almost steal the show from the Doctor and company.

The Snowmen is well-made entertainment, and for me, probably the best of the Christmas specials… even if they can get overlooked.

Those are a few of our most underrated serials from Series 7B. Now it’s your turn! Vote below for the most underrated, and we’ll find out the overall winner very soon…

What Is Your Most Underrated Series 7B Story?

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