"Attack of the Cybermen"

What could be more appropriate for this blog than to start a foray into reviews of the Classic Series by looking at none other than the second ever Sixth Doctor serial? For some reason over the ages the Sixth Doctor has received an absurd amount of stick from some people for one reason or another and I cannot fathom why. I am certainly a Colin Baker fan. He's definitely the best of the Eighties Doctors, and while some would argue that's not saying much I'd have him up with the first four, P McG and the Smith in terms of Doctors who are more or less unimpeachable in my mind. People will have a big whinge about how his personality's too bombastic or his outfit is too ridiculous but you know what? His personality's that of the Doctor. So's his dress ensemble. Honestly he doesn't go wrong, and his performance in this serial is absolutely spot-on. He captures the sense of magnanimity, which is to say 'justified pride' as it were, perfectly, for which his appearance and expressions are completely perfect, yet he's also deeply compassionate and deviously clever. I'll get to all that.

Anyway, the Doctor and Peri show up on Earth and devious deeds are afoot. There's a lot of stuff about trying to find some kind of alien signal which might be a distress call and might not and isn't coming from where they think it is and it's being relayed and someone's watching to see who shows up and so on and it's not very well explained but it's covered up by lots of excellent banter between Peri and the Doctor as they stride about looking around which is rather funny and touching and does a good job of making you feel like something important's probably happening. I think it's meant to be that Lytton had been stealing stuff to build a transmitter for... some... reason...? It has something to do with sending a distress call to the Cryons for whom he was working but I'm not sure why he was doing it since they lacked the means to rescue him anyway. I'm not going to lie, the plot's pretty messy. There are these guys who want to steal the time ship the Cybermen have captured but it hasn't actually turned up yet, there's stuff about Cybermen wanting to blow up Telos as part of a science experiment and there's a rather awkward continuity tie-in where the Cyber-Controller is trying to prevent the events of "The Tenth Planet" from happening and while it's implied at one point that doing so would cause a paradox no one seems terribly bothered about the whole issue and that really it's a matter of the Cybermen being up to no good and the Doctor having to save the day. These elements have their place though. The plot with the Cryons raises the stakes regarding Telos. Similarly the two prison escapees, Stratton and Bates, as unrelated and pointless as their plot seems to be especially since they never encounter the Doctor and get shot and killed without ever impacting the main plot in a serious way despite quite a significant amount of screen time, do permit a nice exploration of life under the rule of the Cybermen, where failed Cyber-conversions are forced to perform mine-laying work in quarries which, as the Classic Series always does, somehow manage to convey an inexplicable sense of extraterrestrial alien wasteland.

There are some pretty brutal moments in this serial, and I'm not surprised that it had people whinging back in the Eighties when people thought it was just a kid's show. The diseased, mad Cybermen who are covered in sickly green mold and stumble around attacking even their own kind are pretty horrific to watch and the scene where Lytton's hands are crushed by the Cybermen so that blood runs down his fingers and he collapses in pain is fairly intense. It's all very satisfying, actually. There's a pretty high body count and as usual any bit where a Cyberman gets killed is rather shocking. The effects of the green fluid squirting fountain-like from their bodies, the small explosions which break out everywhere along their limbs and torso and they way they moan, spasm and stagger about can be extremely grotesque and it all rather effectively conveys how much the Cybermen have made themselves into monsters. The bit at the end where the Doctor runs into Cyber Control and mows down about four Cybermen, including the Controller and Leader, on his own are pretty visceral and intense and it's disturbing to see a real situation where the Doctor's completely run out of options and it's kill or be killed.

The Cybermen are pretty well performed in this one, and with the addition of the black-coloured Cybermen along with the guards at the dig site, the operators on Earth, the corrupted ones in the Tombs and the ones in Cyber Control you get a feeling like this is a serious operation going on without needing to see masses of them all at once. The Cyber Controller and the Leader have plenty of good opportunities to say "Excellent!" and rub their wicket-keeper hands together with logical glee and the Cyber conversion process is made to look as unpleasant, undignified and degrading as ever. The bit where the Cyber Controller walks in at the end seemingly victorious and declaims without preamble that "Emotion is a weakness" to the Doctor is classic Cyberman behaviour and right on the money as far as the tone of the episode is concerned. Indeed I would have even liked more exploration of the issues surrounding Cyber-conversion but as such larger-than-life, self-assured villains they are perfect foils for the Sixth Doctor. It also only makes it funnier when, for instance, the Cyber Leader takes Peri away from the others for the express purpose of letting her get warmer clothing to wear on Telos or when, after discovering that the Vastial supplies are about to explode right at the end, one Cyberman makes the universally-recognised hand gesture to "leg it" to his buddy and they both plod out as fast as they can before an enormous explosion destroys Cyber Control. One thing which I found a bit confusing in the second episode is it's never entirely clear where the Tombs are in relation to Cyber Control. Are they directly underneath or connected by caves and tunnels over a certain distance? It all seems to depend on how quickly they want someone to get from one location to another.

Regardless the set-pieces are all done well, particularly the Doctor's frustration at the Time Lords for manipulating him into arriving and the scene where the Doctor and Peri take out the Cyber-converted Policemen, which is both funny and exciting. There was even a part when Lytton was grabbed by the Cybermen which genuinely made me jump. One thing I'll say about Lytton, though, is that while it's nice to have an alien on board and to have the Doctor thinking he's misjudged someone I'm not entirely sure how honourable Lytton's commitment to the Cryons was. I mean yes he was helping the underdog and not allying himself with the Cybermen the way he did with the Daleks but it's still implied that he was doing it for an absolute truckload of diamonds or access to the time ship, not just out of the goodness of his heart. I guess the point is that he stuck to his guns and was willing to help a noble cause for a price? Nonetheless it seems like helping the Cryons is a rather peripheral side-benefit to the fact that he's going to nab himself a time machine. Either way it was a very effective way of making the Doctor question himself and his normal behaviour. Lytton himself is well performed and manages to stop the fake heist scenes at the beginning from being too boring or annoying and he's a good addition to the episode.

As for other characters, I'm not sure how charitable I can be to the Cryons. I like their design, even if the costumes are a bit cheap-looking, and while I can imagine that people who lived in cold might move and speak rather slowly, at times they come across as kind of weird and inscrutable for no reason and it's not really clear what their motivations are. At times they seem kind of suicidal and like they've accepted the loss of their planet and the fact that it'll be blown up and at other times they want it back from the Cybermen. It's not really helped by the sheer complexity of the plot and the fact that it just doesn't get enough explanation. In spite of this you still have a reasonable sense of what's going on, and it does make me feel that the two forty-five minute parts is a good length for a story. That, however, is especially due to the complete change of setting from London in the first episode to Telos in the second which makes the scenario seem expansive and prevents the locations, especially the inevitably dull back streets and sewers, from becoming stale.

There's also Peri to be mentioned, and I really feel like there couldn't be a much more suitable companion for the Sixth Doctor. Although she fulfils the classic companion role of asking a lot of questions so that the Doctor can provide us with exposition her curiosity is well-lampshaded by the Doctor's occasionally exasperated responses and her conversations with the Doctor are, as I stated, very enjoyable to watch. She doesn't really have much of a role plot-wise besides as an observer but she does go above and beyond the call of duty by very generously being incredibly easy on the eye and working with the Doctor rather than complaining or second-guessing him too much. As I implied at the beginning, however, it's Colin Baker's performance as the Doctor which is the real stand-out and is what makes this episode so good to watch. The plot may not make too much sense but at least it's there and it's very watchable, and while the "The Tenth Planet" stuff is too much continuity the jokes with the Chameleon Circuit are nice nods to early concepts which were integral the show and grounded the Sixth Doctor well for his second adventure. I think that, rather than the obvious choices, and story issues aside, you probably couldn't go too far wrong with "Attack of the Cybermen" as a quintessential piece of Doctor Who and that it's a pretty strong indicator of how much more Colin Baker deserved in the lead role.

"A Good Man Goes To War"

Big.

That's a nice, neutral adjective with which to accurately describe "A Good Man Goes To War", and it certainly does feel big, this episode. It's not really big in the season finale sense of the entire universe being at stake, and indeed I'm not entirely sure what was at stake in this episode, but it did indeed feel big. You feel like there's a lot in it. That doesn't mean that there's a lot of story or a lot of content but just that it's crammed with... stuff. Now I for one have never been a particularly strong proponent of the artistic merits of spectacle even when it's done properly and I've got to say that it's not exactly happening in a great way here. Sure, there's a lot of action and we're fed a lot of new characters and concepts but it comes across as purposeless and rather self-involved. It's an episode which is big for its own sake and while it's not without good elements it's fairly disappointing in my opinion to see Doctor Who wasting its time on these kind of stories. I think my problem is that I love the current characters and their actors but I simply don't appreciate the way modern television writing operates and I think my ongoing dilemma with this series has been that I want to see the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory getting to do their thing in Classic Series-esque serials which give them room to breathe and aren't all about arcs and recurring elements so that we can just appreciate the show's strongest aspects together. Maybe last series felt more like that story-wise, and maybe that's why I haven't enjoyed this series as much.

Sadly however I can merely dream of greatness as far as Doctor Who is concerned and must instead content myself with that with which Moffat chooses to feed us each week. What does this episode do well? Firstly the acting's great of course, it answers a few questions and it has a few cool moments. What does this episode do badly? The story's not exactly very, well, good, it doesn't answer enough questions and it doesn't make its points strongly enough.

The problem is that we're meant to spend our whole time going "Damn, that was cool!" every time something happens and while there are some nice set pieces it all feels kind of insubstantial and like nothing is actually happening. We know the Clerics have kidnapped Amy so that they can raise this child with a time head and use it as a weapon against the Doctor but it doesn't feel relevant. It feels like it's just about the Doctor defeating this army for essentially no reason. Yes, it was a dick move to kidnap Amy and it's all very dashing that the Doctor didn't cause any casualties to rescue her and so on but it doesn't really have that much to it. Amy's been kidnapped, the Doctor and Rory go rescue her. That's basically the entire story of a whole forty five minute mid-series finale and I just found it a little hollow. There's a lot of faffing around gathering allies and tricking armies and so on and while it is in some respect impressive there's only really so far that the rule of cool should be applying. Maybe it's too much of me to expect speculative fiction like this to actually deal with issues or strive for some kind of artistic meaning every week but I just feel like Doctor Who's premise and characters are wasted on these kinds of epic episodes, because there's no place for a statement amid the bombast and frantically-arranged set-pieces.

The allies, too, are a little unimpressive. Having a Victorian-era Silurian sleuth, a Sontaran nurse and that fat blue guy from "The Pandorica Opens" just seem like they're meant to be weirdly incongruous and mismatched for the sake of it, possibly so that an action figure set of "The Doctor's Army" could be released with the Doctor, Rory in the Roman garb he wore again for rather weak reasons this episode, the Silurian detective and her maid, the Sontaran, fat blue man and maybe like the Pirate captain who has a totally arbitrary cameo and one line. His presence would have been way cooler if the episode he'd been in hadn't been so crap. Speaking of which, how did the eye patch lady, Madame Kovarian, escape with the real baby if Captain Avery and his annoying son had the ship? Maybe it'll all get explained in the next half of the series as that the Silence did it and made everyone forget or something. Then we'll see a Silent walking away from an explosion in slow motion adjusting his tie while the James Bond theme plays.

In this way even more questions were raised. So what is in Melody Pond's future? Yes, we now know River is Amy and Rory's daughter and that she is indeed in possession of an apparently rather curly-haired time head, but we still don't know what the dealio is with the Doctor's death or the astronaut or whatever. I know Moffat wants people to keep watching but shouldn't he be doing that by making people go "Wow, this show is really good, I want to see more" rather than "I wonder what happens next time"? I realise cliffhangers and unanswered questions are a big part of maintaing interest but doesn't it seem like the easy option rather than the best one? I suppose it's not really Moffat's fault. If it's what he wants, and what the BBC wants, and what the public wants, and with the combination of those three things means that the show will keep going then it makes sense. He's not been taking the outright piss by having the Doctor in love with his companion or writing his lead like a complete buffoon or having the Daleks responsible for every damn thing that happens but it's still a shame that it can't do something more experimental. I suppose in a sense this wasn't like your average episode of Doctor Who, but at the same time it wasn't what it could have been. Again, however, it's pointless to speculate. This is what we've got, and while we've got three cracking lead actors and at least a bit of restraint it has its place. I guess I just have unrealistic expectations.

Anyway. River's Amy and Rory's daughter. Big whoop, I'm afraid. It wasn't exactly a surprise, but I guess we have to say fair dos to Moffat for actually giving us an answer even if it was a bit of an anticlimax rather than spinning it out even further into realms of speculation and mystery. We're not watching "Lost" yet. They also suggest that her regeneration powers, as presumably witnessed from the same girl in "Day of the Moon", are a result of being conceived in the TARDIS, which is another reasonable bit of explanation. I find it odd that they beat about the bush so much regarding the term conception but are willing to have a cross-species lesbian cunnilingus joke featuring the Silurian and her maid and two guys called the Thin Fat Gay Married Anglican Marines or something which, apart from beating us over the head with the whole "homosexuality will be accepted in the future and our contemporary heteronormative society is so horrible" thing which I think Moffat pushes not out of concern for the issue in question but rather because he wants to annoy people and get cheap laughs, suggests a bit of a mixed message about sexual liberation in this series. It's okay to crack gay jokes but we can't be open about the scientific nature of the process of human reproduction? Bit odd in my opinion.

Anyway what else is crap in this episode? The Headless Monks are pretty stupid. I would have liked an explanation of how they work and it was extremely predictable that the Doctor would disguise himself as one of them. There's also something kind of dull about having the Clerics as the army stealing the child. I know it represents the fact that humanity in the future has turned against him but there's just something incredibly incompetent and naff about the Clerics which I find unappealing. Maybe that's the point - even the weak fear him. The Headless Monks' power swords are ripped straight from Warhammer 40,000 in case anyone was interested. There's a lot of guff about the Doctor not giving a straight answer about whether he's ever had kids even though he obviously has, his very first companion was his granddaughter for heaven's sake, and he scarpers at the end alone without much reason. I guess answers will be forthcoming. Oh, and one other thing - that warehouse where they seem to film every vaguely military-industrial human setting of the present or relatively near future these days? It's overused and boring. I honestly do not believe that a futuristic asteroid base would look like that inside. Then again, why do the Clerics dress like modern day soldiers? I doubt that current military fashion will survive the next two thousand years. That's quite a long time. Maybe, assuming it's the 51st Century when every damn future story takes place and where the Clerics from "The Time of Angels" originated, and at that battle with the Sontaran at the beginning it's the 41st Century and they're wearing 17th Century garb somehow fashion runs in cycles? Who knows. Also, "The Battle of Zarathustra"? Really? Sounds like something from Warhammer as well. One last thing - where does this whole army of Silurians come from which the Doctor uses later? Was the detective woman keeping them in her airing cupboard or something? The Judoon show up for literally about a second too and then waltz off. It's weird.

Anyway what does this episode do well? I'll tell you what it does well. The freaking Cybermen. That bit where the Cybermen are stomping around in their spaceship is just cool and I know I like to hate on the cool stuff but it of all things did convey an accurate sense of scale. Lots of narrow corridors and windows onto space and light tables with no actual visible buttons or anything? That's the kind of Doctor Who future technology I like to see, simple and understated, although they could do without the big vats in the background which make it look like they're just standing around in a factory rather than on the bridge of an advanced Cyber ship. It is however helped by the fact that in spite of retaining the Cybus design their lack of logo and large fleet, coupled with their Classic series style round control desk suggests that these are my buddies the real Mondasian Cybermen, which hopefully is made clear at some point. The bit where the ship is wobbling and the Cybermen somehow manage to look bothered in a constipated kind of way brings a warm feeling to my heart as well. I'm not going to lie, I just love the Cybermen. Plus this brief cameo lets us have an awesome scene with Rory being bad ass. It's very nice to see how much his character has developed. Rory and the Cybermen? I'm not sure there could be anything better.

I would have really liked to have seen some scenes of the Doctor and Rory together in the TARDIS figuring out their plan because I really don't think they get to engage with each other enough as characters. In many ways I think it would have been better if the Doctor and Rory had managed to use their shared centuries of knowledge and experience to attack Demons Run on their own without these newly-invented allies but it was nice to see Amy bigging up Rory to her baby, and it was a very clever subversion of the traditional New Who melodramatic waffle about the brilliance and amazingness of the Doctor, which we unfortunately did receive later from the rather unsatisfyingly predictable Lorna Bucket. Wouldn't it be more interesting and supported Moffat's argument better to have someone who had met the Doctor briefly and rather than being fascinated by him and affectionate for him was deeply afraid of or antagonistic towards him and the Doctor had to deal with that? Rather than just have River tell us that armies turn at his name and so on, why not have weak and vulnerable individuals characterised for us reacting to the Doctor with fear or antipathy and see how distressing that could be? Imagine if instead of desperately wanting to meet the Doctor again, he'd run into Lorna and she'd freaked out and begged him not to kill her or something. I'm just speculating here but that could have put the message across better. While I like that Moffat's now playing up the Doctor as an object of fear and terrifying rumour rather than the baseless, undeserved and nauseatingly sycophantic adoration and worship which was used for the Tenth Doctor, I just feel like it could be played up more effectively. Did the Clerics really leave purely for fear of the Doctor? Not really, more because they were disarmed and had just been massively ambushed by a huge army of Silurians. There was just something more to be done here. I'm probably going to be saying that forever, though.

Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are all as good as ever, especially in the scenes where they're all together with the baby, and the performances generally are good. The Doctor's desire to rename Colonel Manton as Colonel Runaway is portrayed with vicious intensity, Rory's strength and determination are believable developments and we see Amy as a natural mother. There are laughs and memorable moments. I won't deny that there's still something missing, however. It's just not as cohesive and expressive as it could be. Again, character drama can't be everything in a good show. What's more, next episode is called "Let's Kill Hitler" of all things. That sounds like dubious ground for me, but I suppose the Doctor's no murderer and there'll be more to it than meets the eye. I just want something which works without the wait.

"The Almost People"

Well, at least Matthew Graham's absolved himself of "Fear Her". This conclusion improves upon "The Rebel Flesh" in a number of important ways, although it continues to make some of the same mistakes. The character development and thematic content are improved but the story becomes pretty insubstantial and they still can't get the companion balance right. It also concludes with a cliffhanger which, while an impressive spectacle, emphasises perhaps more than ever how stealth-soapy this series has been. Nonetheless it's probably one of the best episodes so far along with its prior episode but is similarly hampered by the occasional dryness of the plot, although there's a fair bit less faffing around in this one than there is in the pevious part. It certainly fits the inconsistent and never-quite-right mood of this series pretty well.

So first of all we have a duplicate Doctor, which can be done well in situations like "Meglos" and can be done abominably badly in scenarios like "Journey's End". This one is an example of how to do a duplicate Doctor properly, and seeing Matt Smith getting to act with himself is a pretty impressive dramatic opportunity and one he fulfils with his usual aplomb. There's some weird stuff in the pointless section before the titles, however, involving a lot of needless screaming and dramatic chords from the Ganger Doctor for essentially no reason. While it's nice to hear the Fourth Doctor's voice, and to know that Tom Baker recorded that line especially, and not especially nice at all to hear the Tenth Doctor's voice, it seems pointless. He has different vocal chords. Why would his Ganger need to deal with the regenerations or whatever as well given that it's based on the Eleventh Doctor's genetic structure, which would be unique to him? It's also a bit duff that he's given the "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" line as a nod to the Third Doctor because while I know it's a sort of lame Who in-joke it's just a bit of a clunky and rather unsubtle reference to give. I did like the slightly misquoted First Doctor line, however. Anyway, the interactions between the two Doctors are really satisfying to watch and when it turns out that they pulled the old switcheroo on Amy, if we really want to stretch the friendship, it was reminiscent of some of the manipulations pulled by the Seventh Doctor.

What about our valiant companions, however? Well last week it was all about Rory with Amy frustratingly sidelined, so this week they bungle it yet again and make it all about Amy with virtually no Rory. It's nice to see Amy's offhand prejudice against the Gangers emphasised but Rory starts to just seem gullible. Nonetheless Amy's interactions with the Doctors are good and it presents an interesting argument in regards to how people will tend to favour what they consider truth even when the distinction is barely relevant. I did notice, however, that Amy barely interacts with the other characters at all and she seems weirdly distracted from the action, mostly just worrying around the Doctors when not looking for Rory. It's a bit of a strange incongruity and it kind of reinforces the feeling this episode has of being slightly fractured.

That notwithstanding some of the others get their time to shine. I'll deal with Jennifer first, because unfortunately she is a complete ham and cheese sandwich and all her rubbish about war and "it'll destroy them all" and all this sort of cackling-villain absurdity, coupled with that incredibly irritating accent, make her very hard to take seriously. Her motivations seem so abstract and idealistic as to be unbelievable and while it's nice to see the role of antagonist shifted to her from the increasingly grounded and ultimately rather interesting Cleaves it's done in a fairly silly way, especially when she turns into a big monster which briefly, mid-transformation, looks like the Spitter from Left 4 Dead 2. The CGI's pretty atrocious and I don't know what it was really needed for unless they realised they'd done a whole parter without any visibly-recognisable villains and panicked that having action figures of all the workers in those power-armour acid suits weren't going to sell enough on their own. Speaking of which, it looks so lame when, having marched up to the door in slow motion in their acid suits with the poles raised like standards and so on, the Gangers stop in front of the closed door, notice it's closed, don't even bother testing it, shrug their shoulder and walk off. The absurdity is reinforced when once the group inside have conveniently escaped they then manage to easily ram the door down.

Anyway, now that I've dealt with the annoying one, what about the two stiffs? First off, there was Buzzer. Who on earth made the decision to waste Marshall Lancaster in this story? Why did they throw him away on a handful of lines and no good chance to interact with a Ganger of himself? While he does get the occasional funny moment he just feels like an arbitrary thug and his presence is disappointingly limited. As for Dicken... wow. I mean seriously, this guy was completely pointless. He even loses his sneeze, his one character trait from the previous episode, and does absolutely nothing except sacrifice himself for basically no reason to slow Monster Jennifer down so that various duplicates can have a massive chin-wag at the second door. Even his Ganger is only purposeful so that Ganger Jimmy doesn't have to admit to being Flesh when they make the story public. Didn't Dicken have any reasons to want to be accepted either? His character is not developed in the slightest and his presence is virtually needless.

Jimmy, alternately, gets to do more good stuff here. It's especially good when Ganger Jimmy sees his son and decides to halt Jennifer's plan, presumably to save the "real" Jimmy, and while I think human Jimmy's death scene was dragged out a bit too much nonetheless it was good to see the fulfilment of the Ganger's claims to humanity and parenthood from the previous episode come through. Isn't it convenient, though, that the acid crisis he ran off to stop seems to just stop itself while he's cradling his primogenitor on the floor? Nonetheless it's done well and it's a good way of developing the theme of what it means to be human substantially more. It seems to have been a big thing in Moffat Who so far, with Bracewell and Auton Rory fulfilling similar roles. Cleaves is also developed much more effectively than last episode, translating smoothly from a bothersome obstacle to a much more balanced and interesting character due to her continued interactions with herself. We probably would have benefited from seeing more of that in the previous episode. It does, however, make Ganger Cleaves' sacrifice seem a bit unnecessary and I think Cleaves would have been a good character to have had return to society with a Ganger duplicate. The fact that no duplication exists at the end of the story I found to be rather frustrating and I think it would have been a much more challenging notion if they'd had at least one pair have to deal with some kind of consequences at the end.

As I said at the beginning, however, there are parts much like last episode where it can feel dry or dull, not helped by the uniform orange jumpsuits, dim lighting and dreary stone interiors, as much as I'm sure this was to an extent deliberate. The plot just isn't as snappy as it could be, and at times it cuts too often between Rory stumbling around, the humans with the Doctors and Amy, and the Gangers having repetitive discussions about survival or tapping at computer screens. I almost feel like it was a good idea which could have been done in one episode. Altogether "The Rebel Flesh" and "The Almost People" are about the length of an average four-part story of the Classic Series and while they have some reminiscent aspects in terms of atmosphere and storytelling they lack the richness and complexity of narrative which a good Classic Series story could often manage. It's probably not helped by the small but still partially underused cast and the rather limited objectives of the episode. What everyone's trying to achieve certainly seems to become very vague, abstract and slightly irrelevant by the end and when the TARDIS, and hence the end of the story, just spontaneously shows up from conveniently sinking through the right amount of acid into just the right tunnel you can't help feel like the episode has been trying to get its point across without bothering to express it through an interesting story with distinct parts. It's not helped that the whole issue of Rory's compassion and concern, which was so played up last episode, is given relatively little attention, and his feelings of betrayal or their consequences are not exactly dwelled upon with any great focus. Once again it's a tick for message and a mostly a tick for character but the story box isn't checked. A relatively neat point of comparison is, say, "The Robots of Death", which does all three of those things, or to give a more modern example, say, "The Beast Below". I think it's often in the nature of these New Series two-parters to drag a bit, and I think Moffat has the right idea where he makes stories like "The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang" and to a lesser extent "The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon" where while the story is relatively continuous the two parts are radically different. It's interesting to note with that in mind that "The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone", while a Moffat two-parter, is a bit dry and padded out like most New Series two parters tend to be.

Regardless, it's a good conclusion to the previous episode and together they form a relatively high point for this series. It's just a shame they couldn't have been a bit pacier. We're still having an awkward time of it this series and while I hope things step up I'm rather worried that at the end of the year it'll be this episode and the one prior, despite their noticeable dryness, which we'll look back on with slightly forced fondness.

"L.A. Noire"

No, it's not a scathing critique of an episode of a TV show I purport to love. It's a video game review! L.A. Noire is, of time of writing, basically the "next big thing" and is getting a lot of attention in the game community and elsewhere. It's pretty innovative as they go, combining the popular open-world sandbox gameplay typical of its publisher, Rockstar, with the normally rather niche concept of the detective game. It's set in Los Angeles in 1947 and you play (mostly) as Cole Phelps, an uptight by-the-book detective newly promoted to the ranks after returning home from the Second World War. Over the course of events you work several desks within the police department, investigating Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson cases. You get called out to crime scenes, have to find evidence, interview witnesses and interrogate suspects, and often you'll get involved in shootouts with crooks or car chases with felons hell bent on escaping justice.

It's an interesting game in that unlike most sandboxes you're on the side of law and justice, so while it's certainly possible to drive recklessly and damage public property you are also protecting the public and so you can't just run around killing people in a wanton fashion. Nonetheless the huge world map and its enormous levels of detail greatly enhance the realism and sense of place in the game. You won't find many cars on the road if you're called out to a scene at 4AM, for instance, and you experience a wide variety of weather during various cases. The city has apparently been recreated from thousands of photographs of LA from the period and it certainly seems evident in how incredibly full and devoid of placeholder or repetition the streets are. Similarly, entering buildings reveal clearly lived-in, believable environments with discarded clothing, full drawers, an immense variety of patterns and styles of architecture and products, photographs, paintings and so on. It's obvious that a great deal of care and attention has been put into building this game's setting. Everything is accompanied by a period soundtrack heavily composed of Jazz and scores reminiscent of old-timey films, as well as genuine contemporary songs and programmes on the radio when you're driving any of the game's hundred real cars. In this sense it's an extremely impressive game, and one of the biggest points in its favour is just how very atmospheric the whole thing is. It really feels like 1947 LA, from the fashions and speech patterns to the heavily war-related themes and the numerous nods to broader historical events.

The story can be frustrating at times, however. While the cases themselves are internally quite interesting and can be even moreso when, normally at the end of a desk, cases begin to be linked together into an overarching narrative or in relation to a wider crime spree, there are several strange incidents. Perhaps the most notable of these is the point at which Phelps elects to cheat on his wife with the German femme fatale Elsa. This happens with little to no explanation for why it occurs and is present in the story regardless of the choice of the player. There are implications in the one major scene featuring Phelps and his wife that the trauma of the war has left him in a state where he no longer feels for his wife but we see nothing of his home life and while his hard-assery can be argued as deriving from the guilt he felt as a result of his brutality and ruthlessness during the war it leaves a fair bit to be desired in terms of believable character development. Too much is left to the imagination and it feels rather jarring and incongruous. A similar narrative issue results from the fact that with three cases remaining in the story the player switches to controlling non-police investigator and Phelps' old war rival Jack Kelso. While Kelso himself is an interesting character and playing as him can come as a welcome relief after having to participate in the downfall of the increasingly unlikeable Phelps it feels as if we are alienated from the original structure by the end, almost as if we are playing a different game. Similarly while Phelps and Kelso both fulfil the traditional Noir style, more or less, in being the one or in this case two "good men" in a corrupt world they lack the smoothness and charisma of great Noir protagonists like Philip Marlow or Holly Martins and in Kelso's case we simply don't spend enough time with him to fully get to grips with his character. Nonetheless the minor street crimes which you can help solve during the course of main cases do reinforce the sense of the 'Mean Streets' but again these are not present when playing as Kelso and towards the end of the game the actual detective work seems rather sidelined in favour of action-packed car chases and gunfights. The motion capture and the acting are all very good and work in the favour of enhancing the story and the believability of the world, however, so it's ultimately a bit of a mixed bag. Additionally, the storyline, like many crime dramas, becomes a bit bogged down with names, locations and faces you're supposed to be familiar with across an overarching plot but might start to become confusing if you don't pay detective-like levels of attention to the various persons of interest in the cases. It really doesn't reward a particularly casual approach, although I suppose this is arguably a point in its favour. Nonetheless it can become irritating when the cops all start discussing some case or suspect, sometimes even ones which are part of a backstory in which you yourself were not involved, and you're expected to keep up with what's going on and immediately rush off to question someone about people or events you may have forgotten in the intervening time or not actually experienced firsthand.

I suppose this leads us rather neatly to the gameplay. Apart from the fairly unchallenging task of walking out of the police station at the beginning or your assignment and driving your car wherever you want to go it's essentially divided into three components, which are clue-finding, interrogation and action sequences. Now that I mention it though, the police stations themselves can be annoying, especially when you're dumped into a new one you've never entered before at the start of Vice and Arson desks and are expected to know the way out or where the interrogation rooms are based on squinting at tiny little in-game signs which are not easy to read on a normal low-def TV. Anyway, moving onto the main activity of the game I'll mention the action sequences first as they're not as ubiquitous as the other two components and are arguably less important. Fighting is pretty good, and generally happens with guns. You take cover, lean out of cover to shoot the bad guys and nab weapons from dead enemies. One bothersome element of this is the awkward behaviour of the minimap during gunfights, which shows your enemies as red dots but doesn't seem to orientate in the direction you're pointing so that often you have to judge the position of crooks based on the direction your character is pointing in cover rather than where the camera is facing, which is difficult because the camera likes to give you a nice dynamic side-on of your Hat Man while you're lurking behind crates and concrete columns. Nonetheless you regenerate healthy pretty easily and once you get the hang of it it's pretty fun. Again, it's really just one of those things which requires patience. Fistfights are also quite enjoyable, as you both put up your dukes like you're in a Victorian bareknuckle arena and do the diarrhoea dance until you take a pop at your enemy with your huge manly fists. You can also dodge, which looks pretty bad-ass if executed properly, as well as take out your enemies with a big whack or a headbutt if you've done enough damage. One annoying thing I would mention, however, is that (on the Xbox 360 at least) you have to hold down the left trigger to stay in "Brawl mode" or whatever it is called or otherwise Phelps will stand there like a lemon getting hit. It's pointless since there's nothing else you can really do in the fistfight situations anyway and it can be rather frustrating the first time you enter one as a detective when you haven't been in one since a single incident as a patrolman in the tutorial section of the game several cases earlier and have forgotten what to do.

The much more irritating action element are the car chases. While it's quite cool to hare down the street with no regard for traffic laws while your partner fires a handgun wildly out of the passenger side window and shouts encouragement, let alone permission, for you to ram the fugitive's car keeping everything under control can be quite difficult and the runners seem to have pretty perfect steering until the point where the game elects that the chase has gone too long and has your criminal get hit by a tram or something. For your own part it's easy to gun at top speed after the bad guy, thankfully with a siren you can blare so that civilians get out of your way, and then immediately crash into a tree, barely-visible chain-link fence or inexplicably rock-solid hedge and have to restart the chase from the beginning. Even in a chase you have to be reasonably slow and cautious. I guess it's just another way that the game rewards patience but it can seem like a stretch when, after an enjoyable but inevitably fairly staid investigation, a bit of white-knuckle rubber-burning can seem like a welcome relief yet you still have to tone it down if you don't want to have to repeat the sequence several times to get it right. What's more, if you fail the same action sequence several times the game rather condescendingly asks you whether you'd not feel a lot better if you just skipped the whole thing and moved onto the next cutscene. It's a not entirely subtle way of the game suggesting that you're impatient, uncoordinated or both. That notwithstanding when it does come together it can be pretty fun, and both the same complaints and same compliments can be offered to the on-foot chase sequences. There are also related stealth sections where you have to follow a suspect without drawing attention to yourself and these can be frustrating for similar reasons in that you can't get too close or too far away or cause any ruckus, and while that's all fair enough it'd be a lot more reasonable if suspects didn't somehow notice you running a red light two blocks behind them or adjusting your fedora from your stalker nest behind a parked car at the other end of the street. Again, there are times when the game seems to cross the line from encouraging patience to being fairly arbitrarily fiddly and reliant on trial-and-error tactics to reach the goals.

What about the investigations, then? Well there's clue finding for a start, which normally involves ambling around a crime scene which can be littered with debris, footprints, dead bodies and so on while 'evidence music', often a rapidly repetitive series of low bass notes, plays in the backround. Phelps will look at everything from victims' wounds and the contents of their pockets and wallets to footprints, blood spatters and dropped items to completely unrelated pieces of junk like discarded beer bottles and the decorations in people's houses. Everything with which you can interact is indicated by a musical chime and a vibration of the controller, so while there can be obvious sources of evidence it can also be the case that you end up just brushing up against every solid surface in the room hoping for vibrations until the evidence music stops, indicating that you've found everything there is to find. Of course you can turn these options off so that the game doesn't tell you what's active and what isn't but it doesn't change the fact that you're not really left to draw your own conclusions, which is something I'll discuss further in the interrogation section. It's entirely possible to miss or ignore evidence if you so wish and this can affect the case later but often you can't progress further until you've found everything. There is also one moment, in the final homicide case, which relies on you identifying landmarks using rather literal references from Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" and if you haven't encountered those landmarks in your exploration of LA up to that point, resulting in them not being marked on your map and therefore the corresponding descriptions, or the fact of their mere existence, not being obvious, you literally just have to drive around doing nothing for several minutes until Phelps figures it out for himself.

The problem is that the cases inevitably drive towards a pre-set conclusion, and while sometimes there can be two suspects from which you have to choose the game essentially tells you where to go and what's going on. Of course there are obvious lines of inquiry in a real case but at the same time it can feel like you're just going through the motions, steering Phelps between a series of pre-set incidents with your own impact on how they play out feeling increasingly limited as the game continues. It's not helped by the fact that besides having to choose one suspect or another to charge the only other consequences of a given case are a ranking based on how much evidence you found, how many interrogations you got right and how much you minimized costs to the department. It's all seems rather forced and odd that the game keeps tabs on how much of the evidence you find as some of it is certainly less relevant than others and surely in a real case conclusions could be drawn from a variety of sources. It's not helped by the interrogation system. Every time you question a suspect or witness about an issue pertaining to the case, you have to choose three responses to their answer. You can elect truth, essentially accepting their testimony, doubt it if they seem to be hiding something or are obviously lying, or lie if you have a solid piece of evidence which blatantly disproves their statement. At the end of each interrogation it tells you how many questions you got 'correct'. Am I the only person to whom this doesn't make much sense? How can a question be right or wrong? Often it's very unclear which option you're "meant" to pick or, in the case of lie, which particular piece of evidence of several seemingly relevant ones you should choose. It's not helped by the fact that sometimes when a witness just seems to be holding back and you want to give them a nudge in the right direction and pick doubt Phelps flies off the handle and starts hurling threats and dark insinuations at them. It's also frustrating that people who are doubted when they're telling the truth, for instance, always always become super defensive and are never intimidated or apologetic. Surely a lot of these average joes and young people would be quite scared of police questioning? There's also the fact that if you accuse a suspect of lying they inevitably go "Where's the evidence?" like they're the voice of the game telling you what to do next. They never just get flustered or don't know what to say. It gets even weirder when you pick Truth and it's the wrong choice and witnesses make these weird cryptic remarks about you being naive or that essentially you're doing something incorrectly, and often what 'Truth' actually means becomes pretty fuzzy. Often the only difference between Truth and Doubt is that in the former Phelps is fairly friendly and in the latter he starts chewing the carpet. You often have to judge statements based on facial reactions which are well captured using the motion scan technology employed in the game but even these can be misleading or difficult to read. Again, it encourages patience, although sometimes it can still be irrational or confusing and the 'correct question' can seem very arbitrary.

Ultimately I think L.A. Noire is a step in the right direction. While the detective work itself can feel rather restrictive and limiting at times and the story and characterisation occasionally feel overcomplicated, vague or fractured, it's compelling and incredibly atmospheric and its relative novelty and exciting case narratives cause its good points to generally outweight its more frustrating elements. What it arguably does best is make a very strong and critical message about the aftermath and consequences of war for the individual and I would propose war as really its central theme. In this way if none other it could be recognised as a work of art. Games in the future need to build on this game's aesthetic and intellectual quality with innovative and artistic gameplay and if it's true that a sequel might be in the works we can only hope that something truly phenomenal could be built on these rudimentary yet nonetheless inspiring foundations.

"The Rebel Flesh"

"It was like a boring episode of the Classic series," argues one of my esteemed colleagues in Doctor Who fandom, and that's a pretty concise summation of this first part. The good points are that it actually has a bit of a science fiction concept for once, which we haven't really seen this series, that the Doctor has been toned down a bit again, that Rory gets plenty of time to shine and that it takes itself seriously enough to not seem self-parodying, unlike other recent episodes. The bad points are that the science fiction concept is far from fresh or innovative, that the plot is rather predictable, safe and quite slow at points, that the secondary characters and the setting are not amazingly well developed, that Amy is clumsily sidelined and that the general scenario is one we've seen in New Who two-parters many times before.

I'll start with the bad points, I suppose, in an effort to end the review on a positive note. I suppose to people who go into the show just expecting silly run-arounds and broadly-drawn emotionality the idea of replicants receiving identities must seem a pretty novel one but to any sci-fi audience worth its salt it all seems terribly old hat. Didn't Blade Runner do this? Didn't Star Trek do this? Indeed, didn't Doctor Who do this during the Classic series? "Spearhead from Space", anyone? Maybe it's been too long since these ideas were refreshed, and that makes their presence here seem more reasonable, but at the same time there's not much in the way of discussion here. The Doctor and Rory think the Gangers deserve to live, Amy and the orange jumpsuit cyphers are pretty iffy about them, and that's about it. It's not really presented in a very challenging way. Compare this to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? where killing androids, living things with their own identities, can be a way of life, and a profitable one at that, where they aren't seen as living things in need of protection or monsters but rather are completely denied their subjectivity by society who sees them as objects. We get the idea that the Gangers are tools or vehicles but it's never really played up in a challenging way. Maybe if one of the Gangers had casually been killed by Cleaves after the Solar Storm and the rest of the human crew didn't bat an eyelid it would have been more effective. Perhaps then the Doctor could have sided with the Gangers and they had to fight or negotiate their way out or something, I don't know. But no, instead, after a lot of faffing around in the middle where nothing really happens, Cleaves kills Ganger Buzzer and everyone's very shocked and the Gangers and the humans decide to 'go to war' or something which all sounds implausibly melodramatic from these stoic Northern and Scottish people. This sets up the showdown for next episode where presumably the humans and the Gangers will slowly be killed off through a number of encounters and so on. This effectively encapsulates my second bad point too, that the plot is safe and familiar. They had a chance to do something new here and they didn't. It'd be nice to see these clones try to integrate into society or something for once. The middle drags a lot as well, and while the opening is rather brisk and nice and the ending is reasonably pacey there seem to be large chunks in the middle of the episode where it mostly just has various characters wandering around not doing very much. Is it worth noting that the writer of this episode was Matthew Graham, who also wrote "Fear Her"? This isn't nearly as padded out but you can still feel those heavy areas where the characters seem to be twiddling their thumbs a bit.

This neatly segues into my discussion of the characters introduced for this episode. Jennifer's the token wet fish, Buzzer and Jimmy are the belligerent dudes, Cleaves is the textbook ruthless leader and Dicken's only character trait is quite literally that he occasionally sneezes. Now we do get some insight into Jennifer through the ganger but she's so mopey and desperate and pleading that she's more annoying than anything and she just feels like the arbitrary sympathy character until she turns nasty at the end. Hopefully that's developed properly in the next episode. Cleaves reminded me of Thawn from "The Power of Kroll" for some reason because she seems to hate the Gangers for basically no reason and is a motiveless authority-based antagonist. It's also amusing to watch the scenes where every time it cuts back to her she seems to have her mouth twisted into a different position of distaste. On the other hand the commentary by Ganger Cleaves on her human version are rather intriguing and we could have used some more of that, just as it would have been effective to have actually shown the search being conducted by Jimmy and Ganger Jimmy together. As I've said Dicken seems to be there solely for the sake of an extra body although I imagine the sneezing will play a role in the next episode and Marshall Lancaster, one of the best performers from Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, is rather wasted in the inconsequential role of Buzzer. He just comes across as a stereotypical money-grubbing slightly grumpy Northern bloke. The characters just aren't very lively and it reinforces the bland, grey atmosphere of the setting, although I'm not sure if it was intentional. I suppose ordinary people just aren't very interesting. Speaking of the setting, though, as I've said it's not very well developed either. We know we're on an island somewhere and seemingly in the nearish future but apart from that it's all pretty vague and it gives a rather unpleasant sense of absence. What's the acid for? Why are 'solar tsunamis' happening? How was the Flesh technology developed? I would argue that all this dreariness and vagueness in character and setting is meant to reinforce the themes of identity becoming a grey area and so on but I think that would be drawing far too long a bow; what's more likely is that we just don't have an amazingly strong script.

This brings me to our main trio. The obvious star of this episode is meant to be Rory, and it shows. Arthur Darvill does compassion well - he knows what it's like to be an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. He also knows what it's like to be a facsimile of himself, having been an auton. His performance is incredibly naturalistic, and he gets some very funny and endearing moments which have been denied to him in previous episodes. It's really the solution to what I've been talking about in earlier reviews this series. Here a companion is being given a proper role, not just being a plot device or a source of cheap gags. You'd think I'd be overjoyed with this, but they fumbled it a good deal in dealing with Amy. She's barely present in the episode, with what seems like a handful of lines and virtually no involvement in the plot, spending most of her time just looking for Rory. It also becomes implausible to think that Rory would go running off to help a Ganger and ditch his wife when he's been so uxorious in the past, and unless this is some fresh character development, and while it's nice to see him not being clingy, it seems like a very inelegant way of playing up his role. They seem to be struggling with making the husband/wife companion dynamic work. It's a step in the right direction but they really need to be doing this with both Amy and Rory.

What about the Doctor? Well as I mentioned he's been reined back a bit in this one, and you can tell that it's when the silliness has been toned down a tad and the eccentricity's less arbitrary that Matt Smith really gets his time to shine again. His character in this one is much more consistent with last series and his commanding presence and great endowment of the Doctor with inner strength and conviction are once again evident. He does get to be funny, true, but the humour's been toned down to an appropriate notch and there's a bit more gravitas. The pointless rambling and rapid-fire hand-wavey explanations are gone and it all feels much more true to the Eleventh Doctor we came to know last series. I hope he sticks around. I also hope they use this Ganger Doctor well, although honestly, who didn't see that one coming?

Overall the lack of flippancy and silliness benefits this episode a great deal compared to recent offerings but at times it seems to overstep the mark a bit too far and it can feel a little dry and stale. It captures some of last series' sincerity but could have been a bit more interesting. These stumbles don't stop it from being a step in the right direction, but the rather noticeable change in tone does tend to reinforce the wobbliness of this series. Moffat had better have something amazing waiting in the Doctor's apparently-fatal future...

"The Doctor's Wife"

Moffat's big gun this series besides his own script-writing weight was the fact that this episode was penned by none other than Neil Gaiman, who in a big first for the New Series is actually a science fiction and fantasy author rather than just a sitcom or soap writer with delusions of grandeur or a BBC hack. That being said, it doesn't mean this episode is a masterpiece or anything, and a lot of its kookiness is fairly predictable. I think some part of me really wants a good talkie episode and you'd think they'd use Gaiman for that but a lot of this involves manic rushing about and breathless scares so that's so much for that, then. Am I being unnecessarily harsh? I don't know. I just feel like Moffat's team has let me down somehow this series. Of course The Smith hasn't, and Karen Gillan hasn't, and I can't imagine a world in which Arthur Darvill could ever disappoint anyone, but I almost feel like Moffat pulled out all the stops to carry people over from the previous era last series and now he's kind of content to let the show wallow in self-indulgence and banality. None of this is to say that "The Doctor's Wife" is bad; it's certainly better than last week's offering. It just feels a little dull and kind of like it's insisting on itself a bit, as if personifying the TARDIS, having a couple of weird, creepy people speaking in funny accents, getting the Doctor to make some cheeky jokes and having a red herring 'recovery of the Time Lords' plot hook somehow will just instantly make everyone fall in love with the episode. The design comes from the Tim Burton school of grit, Idris aka The TARDIS looks like a friendly version of Bellatrix Lestrange, and Rory has yet another fake/imaginary death for the bajillionth time. Can't it happen to Amy for once? I guess they really want to hit us over the head with the whole 'Amy cares about Rory' thing so they keep having to pile on the hastily-aborted grief. If something happened to Amy, like it did in "Day of the Moon", we'd expect Rory to be pretty cheesed, but apparently Moffat and co believe that we're not certain of Amy's fidelity yet or something.

It's nice to see the corridors of the TARDIS even if they are extremely bland and kind of claustrophobic; it would have been even better if they'd shown us some of the other rooms but I guess the budget only extends so far. It's also nice to witness the deletion of the uninspired Eccly/Tennant console room for the sake of a relatively minor plot point. It seems odd that House wouldn't be aware of the hard-wired emergency programme of the TARDIS, though, or that he didn't shut it off when he turned off the other safety precautions, but there's a fair whack of hand-wavey in this story. In fact in many ways it feels like a Classic Series story of a good four episodes or so crammed uncomfortably into a straining forty-five minutes. There are a lot of ideas here about how House fixes people, about Aunt and Uncle and Nephew, who Idris is, why House eats TARDISes, who House is and what his motivations are and so on, but they're all kind of swept under the carpet as the story rushes to its climax and it feels like this episode had more potential than just the Doctor getting to have a flirt with his time machine. I'd even go so far as to argue that giving the TARDIS a face and a human identity was the least important or even the least meaningful of the avenues of thought in this story but obviously as I've already attested they want to play the character drama angle up pretty hard in this series. Indeed I almost thought of this story at one point as sort of the Eleventh Doctor's "The Girl in the Fireplace" only, y'know, with an infinitely superior Doctor and companions and believable character dynamics.

What about this Time Lord thing, though? The term 'Time Lord' gets thrown around in this episode like it's going out of fashion and the Doctor's convinced he's found 'the Corsair' and a bunch of other chappies whose names presumably start with 'the' and end with increasingly esoteric titles. Surely 'the Corsair' would be some kind of Time Lord pirate? Perhaps one who used his TARDIS to board other people's ships and so on? That could have been cool. But no, rather it's all just a trick and we're supposed to be excited that we've seen the return of the message box technique the Second Doctor used in "The War Games". I guess that's kind of cool, but really why bother? They could have saved time exploring something interesting without having this whole 'maybe some Time Lords are still alive' malarkey, and it just seems like a cop-out to play it up so much only to then simply ditch the entire thing and rapidly forget about it. The bit where the Doctor builds a TARDIS console room was kind of cool and seemed reminiscent of what the Third Doctor was up to in "Inferno" but a lot of these little continuity nods don't really seem to serve much purpose. All the episode really cares about in the end is how much the Doctor loves the TARDIS and how at last the TARDIS gets to say the same thing and while it's all deeply touching and so on it doesn't half leave me feeling a little bit unsatisfied. As I keep saying, there was more to be done here but it was just abandoned for two of Moffat's loves - one we've seen since the beginning of the New Series, which is to say cheap horror gimmicks, and one which seems to have developed recently, which is to say this kind of awkward sentimentality he's started playing up. Matt Smith plays it well so it doesn't come across with the same kind of wet melodrama in which a Tennant sob story would wallow but it still seems kind of limited and safe compared to the challenging issues we could be exploring in these stories.

I suppose some mention must be given to the House, who is a reasonable villain and whose voice acting is pretty good but as I've said we are given virtually no indication as to his motivation as an antagonist or why he does anything and he starts to feel pretty arbitrary by the end. They do a good job of characterising this faceless villain in a way which seems interesting but we really needed more; again, this was probably something which could have been explored if the whole Time Lord diversion had been removed. Again the phrase 'murder your darlings' comes into my head and it seems like a lot of the ideas which Moffat and Gaiman probably thought were dashedly clever and special were really prioritising hype and suspense over telling a complete story. Oh, and whose idea was it to have yet another Ood villain? I notice they didn't even bother explaining how Ood are easily mind-controlled in this one; can't anyone see what a wasted opportunity it is by consistently having the Ood as enemies of the Doctor rather than his allies? His appearance also feels, in many ways, like a pointless nod to stories gone by and the Doctor's completely nonchalant remark about "Another Ood I've failed to save" only serves to reinforce how little we care by this point. You may as well have had a mildly placid Dalek as the servant for all we're meant to care about Nephew's destruction. How does House mind-control people anyway? It just keeps coming back to the limited explanation present in this episode; in many ways the story and the mystery becomes completely derailed for the sake of the Doctor-TARDIS interaction scenes.

As I keep saying this series Amy and Rory don't have nearly enough to do, spending most of their time running around or having mental games played on them and their relegation to the level of plot contrivance to get the Doctor into action is fairly disappointing. At least they're kept together in this one. Also, why does the Doctor not even care about who Idris was before she was shunted out of her body and replaced with the TARDIS' 'Matrix' or whatever? House says "Goodbye, Idris," in a particularly scathing tone of voice at the end and it feels like there was meant to be something there which we didn't find out about. I'm led to believe that this episode was heavily rewritten due to budgetary constraints and it kind of shows. Idris/The TARDIS also said something about "The only water in the forest is the river," at the end, presumably some kind of reference to River Song and perhaps the last name 'Pond' as another water source. So, resorting to dropping RTD-style cryptic phrases are we Moffat? The deliberate speculation fuel is tiresome in the extreme, much like the heavy-handed pieces of dialogue between Amy and Rory which keep being inserted about the future Doctor's death in "The Impossible Astronaut". Speaking of which, I wish the Doctor would stop using the term 'impossible'. With everything he's seen you'd think he would have abandoned the concept by now. What's more, Tennant didn't require much more than the sight of someone patting their head and rubbing their stomach or doing a reverse park to start shouting "Impossible" like he had some kind of Bewilderment Tourette's, and I'd prefer not to be reminded of his mannerisms. Back in the day the Doctor used to rock up and suggest improvements to some machinery and all the gormless humans/humanoid aliens would say it was impossible or call him a genius. Are we really supposed to believe any of the hand-wavey fairy-story silliness which goes on in the New Series is impossible, or feel any kind of suspense in these situations, when it seems like wishful thinking is everything the technology of the future needs to function? What this distracted me from, though, is this dropping-little-clues thing Moffat has fallen for, and you can tell he's just waiting for people to start arguing on the forums and stuff. It's populist and moron-pandering and honestly I expect better of him. The revelations at the end of this series will have to be mind-expandingly amazing to reconcile me to any of this.

I've probably been more negative than I honestly feel. I enjoyed this episode, and while a lot of it left me feeling disappointed and unsatisfied there were times when it made me laugh, and Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are as watchable as ever. I just feel like the spark which invigorated the previous series got lost somewhere and Moffat's fumbling around in the dark trying to relight the candle. He got Neil Gaiman in to help him look but their combined efforts really didn't achieve much more than a kind of low flicker. It's worth watching, and fans will probably appreciate some of the references, but there's just so much more which could be done here and it's the wasted potential more than anything which grates on this episode and the series as a whole thus far.

"The Curse of the Black Spot"

Sometimes reviewing Doctor Who is a challenge. It's not always astoundingly easy to heap praise upon art, or offer constructive criticism to a solid piece of work, and it's especially hard to be funny about what you admire. It's for that reason, I suppose, that my reviews of the previous series of New Who were not as verbose as those which came before, because being what I, with blatant passion, basically consider a thirteen episode borderline masterwork, I was often pressed for things to say. Occasionally, as I pondered what to write about a game-changing televisual experience like "The Eleventh Hour" or "Amy's Choice", and in times since, I would think to myself that if there was anything I would miss about Tennant and RTD it would be how unbelievably easy it was to review the episodes because practically every week we were being served up unsalvageable piles of plotless, unscientific, melodramatic populist drivel which it was both simple and fun to absolutely destroy. Moffat and co must have been listening to these mutinous thoughts with some kind of mind-eavesdropping device from one of those 'dark fairy stories' because they kindly offered up "The Curse of the Black Spot" for my examination.

I'll get straight to the point now. This episode is a mess. It's astoundingly derivative and unoriginal, the dialogue and characterisation are sloppy and the plot has more holes than a pirate ship after being on the receiving end of a full broadside. The writer of this episode, Steve Thompson, is to my surprise the same person who wrote "The Blind Banker", the serviceable second episode of Moffat and Mark Gatiss' currently-running Sherlock TV series, and if anything is obvious it's that he should probably stick to longer-format works, and more realistic genres like detective fiction, rather than trying to tackle forty five minutes of sci-fi.

Once again, for the millionth time, we have some kind of alien creature which looks like a nasty thing from folklore showing up and terrorising people in the past. It's mind-numbing that they just can't escape this trope. The explanation for the Siren is fair enough, if a little rushed and predictable, but there are some weird things. Why can't it cure people? For the sake of dramatic tension, apparently. Why does it go all red and demonic when people try to interfere with what it's doing? Lack of imagination, I suppose. If it takes people to its sickbay by touching them, how come the Doctor, Amy and Captain Avery don't end up there straightaway when they get touched? Who knows. How does it travel through reflections? Possibly on wishful thinking, because no science holds any of this episode together. The Doctor rattles off a lot of guff about colliding realities and mirrors which is basically meaningless and it sounds a lot of the time like his dialogue was being written with Tennant in mind, especially when he says "Sister, you are good!" to the Siren.

Amy and Rory are again, and astoundingly for the two other stars, woefully underused, and apart from some pointless swordfighting with Amy and some cheap anaesthetised laughs from Rory that's about it. Why do Amy and the Doctor feel the need to drag Rory all the way from the hospital bed to the TARDIS before performing CPR? The whole 'CPR' thing is so unimaginative that I can't believe it was used, especially for the protracted bit before Rory coughs the water up. Is he just going to keep getting sort-of killed? They really need something fresh to amp up the drama here, and while I suppose they have it in this story Moffat's running with the little girl and so on it seems like in the filler episodes they don't really give a damn.

That's what this episode feels like - filler. Why did Henry Avery become a pirate? It's not really clear. He likes gold, apparently, but he seems like such a nice guy his lust for treasure doesn't fit at all. Is he really a murderous cutthroat? He doesn't seem to give the Doctor too much trouble. His son also serves as one of Moffat's Arbitrary Annoying Children and I wish to say no more of him. Incidentally, is it really plausible that a seventeenth century ship captain could ever really figure out how to pilot a futuristic alien spaceship, and incidentally, how did they get it moving if it was stuck, thus becalming the pirate ship and the TARDIS?

There are a couple of other weird plot holes too. The greasy-haired pirate who wants to scarper gets slashed by Toby, the little kid, in a needless act of unpleasantness, and tries to barricade the door. However, when Avery and the Doctor show up a few minutes later, he's completely vanished. Where did he go? Is there a scene missing? It's never mentioned. And if the magazine on the ship is "as dry as a bone", how come there's a huge, full barrel of water in there, and why does Toby take the lid off? Speaking of which, wasn't there meant to be only one barrel of water left on the ship? Because they open another one on the deck to let the Siren out towards the end. It's blatantly lazy and inconsistent and devoid of any kind of explanation.

A lot of the lines Hugh Bonneville gets saddled with as Captain Avery are absolute ham and cheese of the most elevated denomination, going on about "ships laden with treasure" and calling people "scurvy dogs" or "bilge rats" or whatever, although he does his best with what he's given, and the 'walking the plank' scene is so needless as to be borderline parody without being aware of the fact. It's like they wanted a pirate story but they blew the budget going to America so they couldn't afford a big pirate battle or anything so just stuck in some guff with Amy waving a sword around and a bunch of guys with beards and tricorns guffawing. They also totally missed several opportunities to make some kind of 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' reference too. It's also astounding how for almost the whole episode they do such a good job of holding Rory back from approaching the Siren yet repeatedly when the injured sailors are confronted by her the most that happens is the Doctor or Avery paws ineffectually at one of their coat tails for a brief second while staring gobsmacked at the apparition. It's never explained how or why the Siren takes the TARDIS, either. The whole episode is absolutely full of random incidents to cause strife or drive the plot forward with absolutely no explanation or rationale behind them.

The problem is that there are some good ideas lurking back here somewhere - the Captain torn between his reputation and his greed, the medical program carrying out its function without thinking (albeit very similar in many ways to the plot of "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances") and the implications of that kind of utilitarian attitude, Amy and Rory's relationship and so on, but they're all so hotch-potch and insubstantial that they ultimately can't be reconciled into any kind of meaningful or even interesting structure. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are of course all doing their very best with what they're given, and as I've said Hugh Bonneville's performance is as strong as you can expect with such a lamentable script. The whole thing was in dire need of editing and its overall cheapness and lack of polish make me wonder if the division of this series into two parts caused Moffat to focus on two things, which is to say his own story arc following the little girl and the Silence, and the presence of Big Name Neil Gaiman as a writer for an episode, and permit the remainder to just be quickly-churned-out irrelevant pap. It's just so average and flimsy that it's really quite valueless, and the galloping plot holes in particular make it a very dubious offering. It's really a shame, because this is probably quite obviously the bottom of the heap for Matt Smith and Moffat's run so far, and it's disappointing to see this get through in such an incomplete and unsatisfying state in what has otherwise, up to now, been a pretty impressive tenure.