Tag: Donna Noble

Preachy, tiresome, but with a few fun moments, 7/10 – Doctor Who – The Giggle – Review

Where to start with this review? This episode was all over the place. It had some moments of brilliance, some moments of tiresome idiocy, some very promising moments, and some moments of what I can only describe as übercreep.

But first, Russell T. Davies would like us all to know that he’s very, very clever. Really, he is. He is very, very, very, very clever. He’s far cleverer than all of you, and he’d like you to know that.

It was clear right from the start that this was one of those episodes that’s going to have that gross, grotesque, ‘creep’ factor – in the form of those horrid dolls. This is certainly not the first episode to have that factor – S5E2 The Beast Below had it – with those horrid, disgusting ‘smilers’. It’s a thing that’s appeared in many other shows too. I think of this quality as being very easy to identify, but I don’t think it really has a proper name. I find it grotesque and repulsive, but these words alone don’t really emphasise just how perverse it always seems, so I think I shall call it übercreep. I find that kind of imagery – those misshapen dolls, with their malformed noses and rather noncy grins – to be uniquely repulsive. That’s the point, of course – to be creepy and repulsive – I guess some people find it entertaining – I don’t.

I think there’s this idea that übercreep makes for good television because it’s ‘scary’. But it’s not scary – it’s just repulsive. As such, it doesn’t really maintain any suspense. Things in a story are only really scary when the characters can’t do anything about them, but the only correct respond to these rather noncy dolls is to kick their fucking faces in and toss them in a skip, and preceding that to talk about how noncy they are. When tension is only maintained by a creep factor, you can cut through it with only words.

Some people like übercreep; I don’t – and it’s subjective, so I won’t mark the episode down for that.

Also, in case you missed it, Russell T. Davies is very, very clever. Did you know that? Very, very clever. And he’s going to remind you of that every two minutes in this episode.

We get some dialogue telling us that everyone in the world has suddenly started thinking they’re right all the time. The dialogue is absurdly expository (Jesus fucking Christ Russell, put some fucking effort in) and it’s also wrong. We see in that scene, as well as all later scenes, that people don’t actually just think they’re always right, they’ve just been driven into a state of mania where they’re very entitled, conspiratorial, and angry.

You see, what Russell’s doing here is very clever. Did you catch it? No of course not, because Russell is being very, very subtle here. He’s making an allegory for social media. Everyone always thinks they’re right on social media don’t they? And they’re always arguing with each other aren’t they? What an astute observation Russell’s made in 2023. (That was sarcasm, for the people at the back.)

Yep, this whole episode is going to be one giant allegory to social media. 

Now, I don’t dislike allegory. I’ve written quite a lot of allegorical stories myself, and hope to keep writing more. But as I’ve said before, it’s not good when allegorical stories come across as preachy or patronising. (I hope mine never do – I fear that it’s something one cannot detect in one’s own stories.) It’s also not good when the allegory is insanely basic. What Russell seems to have gone for here is ‘social media bad’. Wow – what insight Russell. No-one has ever made that observation before. Do expand on that. Oh, you’re not going to?

As I said, Russell is very, very clever.

We’re taken to Avengers Tower. Oh no wait it’s UNIT Tower. They look very similar. Russell’s really going for the original ideas this series. It’s nice that UNIT has been made sensible again – I could never keep track of what was going on with them in the Moffat and Chibnall years. (Also nice that we get a bit of that UNIT leitmotif back – they could stand to do a bit more of that.)

Jemma Redgrave is back as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. I can hardly remember anything of the Capaldi run, so I couldn’t tell you anything about this character’s backstory, but I vaguely recognise her. Jemma Redgrave performs the part very well.

Bonnie Langford is back as Melanie Bush. I’m not well-versed in Classic Who, but I could tell the second she appeared on screen that she was a classic character. Langford also by far gave the best performance of the episode, despite having quite a small part.

Wheelchair Lady is back. She’s fun. Did they ever tell us her name? I don’t know. They make a point, though, of, when Lethbridge-Stewart has her anti-spike Zeedex turned off, her angrily saying ‘I’ve seen you walking’ to Wheelchair Lady, and then apologising to her when her Zeedex is turned back on. An obvious allusion to the phenomenon of people online not always believing when someone is disabled. Isn’t Russell clever for putting that in there? Isn’t he clever? It definitely doesn’t pull you out of the story for a few moments.

Actually that reminds me, I don’t think I heard a single person in this episode ask anyone what their ‘preferred pronouns’ were. Bigots, the lot of them. That’s what Russell thinks, anyway.

We get some more wonderfully subtle, subtle, very subtle, totally-not-obvious allegory from Russell: ‘The world is now 100% online.’, ‘Everyone is connected.’, ‘For the first time in history, everyone has access to this – a screen.’, ‘Hating each other – you never needed any help with that.’. Tip of the fedora back to you Russell – this is top stuff. It’s said that the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed, well the dildo of unsubtlety is twelve inches too big and slathered with mayonnaise, and Russell is going to slap you in the face with it.

Tennant and Tate have seemed ‘off’ for the last two episodes. In this episode, they are right back to form. The Doctor and Donna in this episode seem like an exact continuation from series 4, which is good.

The Toymaker makes a return in this episode. I’m quite glad that they’re selectively bringing back things from Classic Who. He’s played by Neil Patrick Harris. Unfortunately Neil Patrick Harris always just seems like Neil Patrick Harris. He’s like Johnny Depp and Ryan Reynolds – he’s always really playing the same character. I felt like I was watching A Series Of Unfortunate Events – this rendition is basically just Count Olaf.

Also, Russell seems to be almost exclusively choosing gay, transgender, or “queer” actors for parts. Neil Patrick Harris, Nathaniel Curtis, Miriam Margolyes, Yasmin Finney, Ncuti Gatwa. Statistically unlikely to not be a deliberate choice. Is it even legal to hire people on those grounds?

There are some basic errors of continuity. The Doctor says ‘when he was young’ when referring to his last encounter with the Toymaker, but with all the Timeless Child nonsense, the Doctor was already old by the time he was the ‘First Doctor’. The Doctor also calls himself a Time Lord, but he’s not – he’s an unknown species. (Well, that’s my understanding based on what I’ve heard of the Timeless Child nonsense – I never watched the episode itself – only the reviews.)

We get some more übercreep. I don’t care for it. Donna has the right idea – she kicks it in the face. Count Olaf gives us a recap of several series’, including ‘The Flux’ – whatever that is. I don’t care Russell – I just don’t care.

Did I mention that Russell is very clever? He’s certainly not going to let us forget. ‘[The Doctor] The human race, back in the future, why does everyone think they’re right? [The Toymaker] So that they win. I made every opinion supreme. That’s the game of the 21st century. They shout and they type and they cancel.’

Oh clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp Russell. Oh how astute! Those people on the internet they sure do love to ‘cancel’ don’t they Russell? When will they learn? Surely after witnessing this delightlessly deft writing, Russell. Now get this mayo dildo out of my face.

We get a scene of Count Olaf dancing to the Spice Girls. It’s actually quite a visually spectacular scene – well made on a technical level. But it did just look like Neil Patrick Harris having fun dancing in a costume – I wasn’t sold on it.

‘[The Doctor] I don’t understand why your so small!!!’ – that’s ‘cause he’s far away dear – move closer and he’ll appear bigger.

We’re then introduced to a new thing: ‘bi-generation’. I actually find this idea quite interesting. The Doctor has essentially reproduced here. We don’t know what species the Doctor is, so we don’t know how it reproduces – apparently it’s by mitosis. (With all Russell’s polemicising about the universe being ‘non-binary’, it’s ironic that he’s chosen a method of reproduction that is distinctly binary.) Apparently it’s caused by the galvanic beam, so the Doctor could now reproduce indefinitely (though obviously that won’t happen, for the sake of the writers’ feeble hands).

Can’t say I’m thrilled to discover what kind of underwear the Doctor wears, though. I’d’ve thought a time-travelling, billion-year-old super-genius would’ve worked out that white cotton button-up boxer-briefs are a hard no. Might I suggest a polyamide-elastane blend for sir? (Also, the clothes being shared between the bi-generated Doctors and the Gatwa-Doctor wearing underwear means that the Tennant-Doctor is going commando. That’s not something I wanted to know.)

We’re given a bizarre moment of Gatwa embracing Tenant saying ‘I got you.’. God it’s weird. Here’s a rule of television writing for you: never have a younger character act like a parent to an older character. It’s weird and creepy.

The Master is apparently locked inside the Toymaker’s gold tooth, which for some reason falls out before he goes all origami. A hand picks up the tooth, in an almost exact replica of the scene from several series’ ago where a hand picks up the Master’s ring, which somehow contains his essence. (I think that’s how it goes – I can’t be bothered to look it up.) Who’s hand is that? Who was even standing there on that part of the platform? I don’t think anyone was.

The duplicate TARDIS is apparently wheelchair-accessible. Apart from the entire inside, of course – quite a few steep inclines. Isn’t virtue-signalling great?

Gatwa doesn’t really have enough of his own time in this episode to judge his performance – I guess we’ll wait until the next episode to see how that turns out. 

And that’s it. That was the episode. Gosh, it’s worse on the second viewing. 

There were some great moments in that episode – the structure made it fun, and there were some entertaining (if not good) performances – but there was also a lot of dizzying, preachy, tiresome, eye-roll-worthy nonsense. This could have been a great episode – I think it could have been a 9/10, if Russell had just had some self-restraint. I’d have to put it at a 7/10.

I was hoping that with these three episodes Davies would establish that Doctor Who had turned around – that it would no longer cling to the tropes of bad fan fiction. These three episodes have failed to do that. This really should be a lesson for all writers in the importance of not doing things that pull your readers or viewers out of the story. When I think back over the episodes, the things I remember most vividly are the nonsense: the gender-woo of the first episode, Indian Newton of the second episode, and the multitude of weird things from this one. It all pulls you out of the story, and when something pulls you out of the story, it’s like putting a spotlight on that thing. 

I don’t want to watch any of these episodes again. Not a good sign at all – especially since as I’m writing this I’d quite like to go back and rewatch series’ 1-4 of New Who. I’ll give Gatwa’s first full series a watch, but I am much less optimistic about it than I was.

Somehow both boring and chaotic at the same time, 3/10 – Doctor Who – Wild Blue Yonder – Review

Well that was all over the place.

Let’s start with the first scene – a truly bizarre scene that becomes even more bizarre when you realise it had nothing to do with the rest of the story.

It’s 1666, and we see a man exiting an old house. He chats to a woman briefly, in a cheery English fashion, and then goes and sits under an apple tree, scrawling something in a notebook. One of the apples falls on his head, and he has an idea.

It’s Sir Isaac Newton. But for reasons entirely baffling, Sir Isaac Newton is played by half-Indian actor Nathaniel Curtis.

*Sigh*

Now, these episodes of Doctor Who cannot escape the context in which they are being released. As I said in my last review, Doctor Who has had three disastrous series’ led by Chris Chibnall. It needs to show, now, that it is going to change course. It needs to show, now, that it is not going to make the same mistakes. If it doesn’t, it will be well and truly dead. 

One of the major errors of the show during the Chibnall Era (which I think henceforth I will refer to simply as ‘The Mistake’), was its relentless pandering to Twitter misosophy. Every bad idea that received applause from the seals of Twitter was rammed into the show. It is a virus that infected Star Wars, Star Trek, Amazon’s “Wrongs of Prime”, as well as Doctor Who. Doctor Who needed to show that the fever had passed – that it was not going to pander to these anti-sci-fi, anti-logic idiots anymore.

One of the symptoms of this virus is the idea of changing the ethnicity of established characters or (worse) historical figures – always from “white” (a word that is only valid in a North American context), or native British or native European, to black (another word that is only really valid in a North American context), south Asian, or arabic. (For some reason, none of the other ethnic groups in the world get a share.)

I say again here that these episodes cannot escape the wider context. The ethnicity of the actor not matching the ethnicity of the character is not always a bad thing. The show Merlin – on the BBC about 15 years ago now – a fantastic show – had Lady Guinevere played by Angel Coulby. No-one cared. But that was for two reasons. Firstly, the show established very early on that it was a ‘modernised’ telling of Arthurian Legend. There were loads of changes to modernise it – including making all of the characters young. And it remained consistent with this modernisation throughout. But secondly, that show was not being made in a time when rabid ideologues online were trying to make every historical figure black and ‘decolonise’ every book and fact in sight. Viewers trusted that there was no vicious ideology behind the change – it was just creative licence.

Nowadays, though, all of the great science fiction and fantasy film and television series’ have fallen into the hands of a horde of Hollywood lobotomites intent on destroying them (and succeeding). When characters and historical figures have their ethnicities changed nowadays, it is ALWAYS because of that ideology. So you must avoid it if you want to demonstrate that you are no longer deferent to that ideology.

This episode has not avoided it. In fact it’s put it front and centre, right at the start of the episode. This therefore shows complete adherence to this stupid, stupid, stupid ideology. It shows an orgasmic obsession with promoting The Message. This does not bode well for Doctor Who.

Any whole-brained person already knows why this case of ethnicity-swapping is bad, but for the slow people at the back, I’ll explain in more detail. Russell here is showing that he is completely on-board with this distinctly American ideology. It is an ideology that asserts that all Americans of European descent, as well as all native Britons and Europeans (who it erroneously labels ‘white’) are intrinsically bad, and that all culture and history must be edited to reduce their presence or remove them entirely. It’s an epitomisingly racist ideology. These ideologues go giddy when they see ‘white’ characters and historical figures changed to be ‘non-white’, but they would be apoplectic if it happened the other way round. (If we saw Martin Luther King played by Benedict Cumberbatch, or Nelson Mandela played by Eddie Redmayne, or Srinivasa Ramanujan (the great Indian mathematician) played by Daniel Day-Lewis, these ideologues would make it their life’s mission to exact revenge on everyone involved.)

Russell is showing that he doesn’t care about immersion. (Seeing a figure like Sir Isaac Newton played by someone who doesn’t look like Sir Isaac Newton pulls you out of the story (unless there’s an in-universe reason for it).) Any show about time travel has a great opportunity to explore history – Russell here is showing that he doesn’t care about any of that. History exists simply to support The Message. That is all that matters – The Message.

So instead of this being a fun opening to the episode, it just becomes two minutes of Russell desperately trying to appease American sociology professors.

The TARDIS crashes into the very tree that not-Newton was sitting under – how that weedy little tree was holding up the TARDIS I don’t know. The Doctor and Donna emerge, work out who the man isn’t, and make a joke about gravity. This, apparently, is the first time this random man has heard the word ‘gravity’. (Entirely ludicrous – the word ‘gravity’ was known about for centuries before this – but fine, it’s Doctor Who, whatever.) This random man is unable to recall the word just said to him, however, and accidentally remembers it as ‘mavity’. 

And that’s it – the scene ends. That was the first two minutes, and there was already that much wrong with it.

What’s worse, nothing in the rest of the episode had anything to do with it – well, with the exception of ‘mavity’. Later in the episode the Doctor and Donna sometimes say ‘mavity’ instead of ‘gravity’, suggesting that their short excursion to the past has altered history, and now everyone says ‘mavity’ (except the Doctor, sometimes). This is probably all setup for something later – which if it is, great. It does still make for a rather disjointed episode.

Now let’s get on to the actual story of this episode.

A lot of this episode was very slow. The first half of it after that opening scene was very slow. The characters talked much more than normal – with lines that added nothing. There were a lot of lingering CGI shots. Very few events happened, and the story did not set up a mystery or suspense well. In fact, the first part of the episode was so slow that by about half or two-thirds of the way through I started looking to see how long was left – that’s never a good sign.

This kind of problem is quite common in a lot of the Marvel and Star Wars shows on Disney Plus. Lingering shots – shots that are just too long or superfluous – and characters not getting anywhere – just kind of wandering around talking about irrelevant things. It’s very odd – and completely opposite to Davies’ normal style. Davies is normally excellent at using montages and music to increase the pacing, but here he has abandoned that. 

The pace of the episode does increase later. This episode did not need to be as long as it was – a lot could have been cut out – ten to twenty minutes of it, I think. It seemed like the script had been rushed – like it should have gone through several more rounds of edits to trim the fat.

At one point they refer to a thing called ‘the flux’ – I don’t know what that is and I don’t care to look it up – is that something they did during The Mistake? Don’t reference things from The Mistake, Russell, the returning fans neither know nor care about them. Treat The Mistake as though it didn’t happen. 

The basic idea of the story was okay: go somewhere where there supposedly aren’t any life forms, but actually there are. It’s been done many times. The whole which one of you is the real one has been done many times too – it was even parodied in Family Guy years ago. They’re not bad ideas – they’ve just been done a lot. 

The story did have a key flaw though. The Doctor suggests that the TARDIS brought them there deliberately to solve a problem (as it often does throughout the show – it takes them where they need to be). But had the TARDIS not appeared there at all, the problem would have solved itself. The ship would have blown up even if the Doctor and Donna hadn’t been there, killing the two aliens. The TARDIS didn’t need to appear there – and would have known this, given what we know about how the sentient TARDIS perceives time. This really is a script error – they just shouldn’t have had the Doctor suggest the TARDIS brought them there deliberately.

And then the episode ended with a glorious appearance from Bernard Cribbins. His character on the show remains incredibly popular – entirely because of Cribbins’ performance. It was a bizarre and sudden reversal of the tedium and nonsense of the rest of the episode. This episode would have been better if it had just been an hour of Cribbins and the Doctor chatting.

Unfortunately this moment was interrupted by explosions and stuff. We were also given the nightmare fuel of a plane falling from the sky and crashing nearby.

This episode was a mess. Before I started writing this review, I had a higher opinion of it. But this episode had ideological nonsense, slow pacing, lingering shots, boring dialogue, an overused core story idea, uninteresting set design and CGI, no memorable music, still a lacking vitality from the Doctor and Donna. The only properly good thing was Bernard Cribbins, and he wasn’t in it long enough. 

3/10

Almost good; marred by nonsense; 5/10 – Doctor Who – The Star Beast – Review

Doctor Who is dead. That was very much the status of the show by series 13. The show had been declining in quality for years, but the disastrous writing of Chibnall and child-in-oversized-wellington-boots portrayal of the Doctor by Whittaker made it unwatchable. Like Star Wars and Star Trek before it, Doctor Who had been killed, and Chibnall et alii were the Salisbury assassins who did it.

I tried watching series 11, but found it so bad that there was no point watching the last few episodes. I gave the first episode of series 12 a chance, but it was dreadful, and didn’t watch any more. Series 13 – not even a full series – apparently even those commissioning it knew something was wrong – hardly even registered as a thing. I had completely abandoned the show, with no intention of ever watching any more.

But then something utterly bizarre. It was announced that Russell T. Davies was coming back to Doctor Who. I couldn’t have predicted that. It’s so rare for writers and showrunners to return to things they’ve given up. But this made me optimistic for the show – Davies got New Who going, and all of the works of his I’ve seen over the years – Queer As Folk, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, It’s A Sin – were all very enjoyable to watch. He seems to be a very reliable showrunner.

Doctor Who needed to show that it was going to turn away from the Twitter misosophy that has dominated both it and Hollywood for years. Maybe the return of Davies was that. Maybe he was returning to undo all of the nonsense that has happened in the last few years? So this series (I’m counting these 2023 specials as series 14) gets a chance. I’ll give the show a chance of one whole series (unless it’s REALLY awful, in which case it’ll only get a few episodes). Maybe, like an actual Time Lord, the show will cheat death and regenerate.

(I.S.: In the unlikely event that Davies himself is reading this, if you really want to win fans like me back over, decanonise all of that Timeless Child bullshit. All it takes is a tweet.)

Everything in this post so far I have written before seeing this first of the 2023 specials – titled The Star Beast. I am now going to go and watch the episode.

Well, that was … almost good. To be more precise, that was a mostly enjoyable episode – fun, compelling, humorous (and not with that special new ‘Hollywood comedy’ that gets put into everything nowadays). But it was marred by these short fits of current-day nonsense. They were very, very distracting – I kept getting pulled out of the immersion.

The designs of the aliens were excellent – very contrasting with each other and very different to anything else we’ve seen in New Who. Using the appearance and sounds of the aliens to make the audience make assumptions about their benevolence or malevolence was excellent. I was unsure about Miriam Margolyes as the voice of The Meep at first, but she did the contrast between the good and evil Meep voices very well. The CGI of The Meep was also some of the best CGI we’ve ever seen in New Who.

The plot was compelling – crucial for Doctor Who. Dull plots was one of the main failings towards the end of the Moffat Era. The idea of a species turned mad by a sentient star is stupid – and that would have been so easy to change, given that it was just a line of dialogue – but it’s far from the stupidest thing that’s been in New Who. (I’m thinking of that star with an angry face – so fucking stupid.)

I VERY much enjoyed Davies bringing back some of his world-building elements: invoking the Shadow Proclamation, UNIT being made into something not-silly. The CGI for the time vortex is fun, but I wish they’d stick to one idea about what it actually looks like. The new TARDIS interior looks fantastic.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate jump right back into their roles almost as though no time has passed at all. (Almost. There is something slightly off about them – a missing vitality, or something – but it’s so slight you can ignore it.) Jacqueline King makes a flawless return as Sylvia Noble – her character is perfectly consistent. 

Yasmin Finney, who plays the new character of Rose Noble, is a weak link. Finney was not the strongest actor in the cast of Heartstopper, and gives a similar performance here. Finney’s delivery lacks personality – compare it to Billie Piper as Rose Tyler and I think it’ll be obvious.

The thing that let this episode down was the gender-woo. I had assumed that they were only going to reference this in passing – if at all – but they made it the core of the story. Now, in fairness, they did put it with an interesting idea: the ‘Doctor-Donna’ metacrisis was a metacrisis between a male and female organism; part of the energy of the crisis was shared when the containing organism reproduced – i.e., Donna had a child – meaning that the energy was now not too much to overwhelm them, allowing both to escape its catastrophic effects; but because the metacrisis was between a male and female organism, the offspring carried some combination of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’. That’s an interesting idea.

But the gender-woo interrupted the story every few minutes or so, and it breaks the immersion every time. One of the most egregious examples is Finney’s line of ‘You’re assuming “he” as a pronoun?!’, referring to the furry, gremlin-like alien known as The Meep.

It would take several long blog posts to fully explain why this line is stupid. Every assumption that goes into it is incorrect, and there are A LOT of assumptions that go into it. I don’t have the time to go through it all – either you already know why it’s stupid or you don’t. It stops the show dead for a few moments in order to show deference to a very recently-created ideology from Tumblr. It rips the story out of its setting and places it firmly on 2023 TikTok.

Towards the end, when Donna and Rose are about to release their extra metacrisis energy, we’re given the lines ‘It’s a shame you’re not a woman anymore, ‘cause she’d’ve understood.’ and ‘Something a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand.’. I am disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to see such rabid sexism in Doctor Who. If the sexes had been reversed for this scene and these lines, every media outlet in the western world would be screaming bloody murder.

Every time there’s a moment like that, it just pulls you out of the show, and you are agonisingly aware that you are watching actors read lines. The audience seeing an actor as an actor and not as the character they’re playing should be an actor’s worst nightmare. 

If it hadn’t had all that nonsense in it, this episode would have been a solid 8/10. As it is, it drags it down to a 5/10. As long as they don’t keep doing this stuff, the series may well be worth watching.