Reaktion Round-Up: What You Thought of The Girl Who Died

David Power 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.

Finally! This episode’s been hyped up for so long that I was starting to wonder if it’d ever get here. Anyway, it’s time to find out what you all thought of Maisie on the Orient Express. Oh, wait, my mistake. I meant Monty Python and the historically incorrect Vikings.

Oh, whatever, you know what I mean!

Heavenly 21.04%  (77 votes)

Mathieson lives up to his reputation! (That’s good.) 45.63%  (167 votes)

I… don’t know. 17.49%  (64 votes)

I expected more. Lots more. 10.66%  (39 votes)

What. The. Hell. 5.18%  (19 votes)

You guys seem pretty mixed about this one. And I kind of agree. I was looking forward to this episode, not because of the set up really, purely because Jamie Matheison’s two episodes last year were some of the best of that season (in fact some say the very best!). I was so looking forward to seeing what his new story would be like, plus Maisie Williams was in it, and as a Game of Thrones fan that was pretty cool. I just assumed it would be great and patiently waited.

At the beginning of the episode a Viking (whose helmet doesn’t actually bother me) breaks the Doctor’s sonic sunglasses. Good start. Then the Doctor and Clara are isolated from the TARDIS by at least two days, leaving them to survive on nothing but their wits. Suddenly the Doctor’s training a village full of farmers to fight off a mighty warrior race led by a being claiming to be “Odin”. Wow, that’s a really cool set up. So why am I not into the episode?

It’s strange, but the episode feels… off to me. The pacing’s weird and scattered, it tries to fit a two-part episode into a one part which leaves no room for us or the episode to breathe. “Odin” and The Mire looked cheap, and Odin is acted very poorly (I also wish I never knew that Odin was meant to be played by Brian Blessed. God I wish I lived in the reality that got that episode). As to be expected, an episode co-written by Jamie Matheison and Steven Moffat is full to the brim with jokes. And while the jokes themselves are quite funny, the editor doesn’t seem to understand comedy pacing so for me a lot of the genuinely funny jokes just didn’t hit well.

There was a great script here, just buried under a bad production.

The ratings received quite a boost from the previous week, probably due to this episode being advertised more than any other episode this season. Overnights increased from 4.38m for Before the Flood to 4.85m. Overall figures also improved from 6.05 million to 6.56 million. It got an Appreciation Index score of 82, one less than Before the Flood.

So, what did you more vocal K readers think?

Next week we’ll have something interesting indeed. The second half of two-parter being written by a different person. And not just any person. Catherine Tregenna! How exciting. Let us know what you thought of The Woman who Lived!

The post Reaktion Round-Up: What You Thought of The Girl Who Died appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.