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Even more than ‘Kill the Moon’, this is Doctor Who as fairy tale. Whether it works for you depends on two things: how keen you are on that idea, and how willing you are to be led past main characters being completely stupid for the plot’s sake, without noticing
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There’s a lot of fresh ideas turning up this year, and I like it. Elements of ‘Into the Dalek’, 'Listen’ and 'Kill the Moon’ have all been particularly surprising, and now we get 'Flatline’, a story full of elements you’d think would have turned up
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I loved this story. I had forgotten what it felt like to go back and replay my favourite moments obsessively during the week. ‘Mummy’ reminded me. I was initially terrified… not of the Mummy, but that they were going to brush off the argument from last week. I was intensely
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This was different. There’s a lot of differences between this year’s Who and last year’s Who, but I don’t feel it’s ever been as stark as in ‘Kill the Moon’. Perhaps not since 'Midnight’ have we had a story that is so simple and
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> The human superpower: forgetting. If you remembered how things felt, you’d have stopped having wars, and stopped having babies. — The Doctor, ‘In the Forest of the Night'
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At times, ‘The Caretaker’ seems to be explicitly trying to be 'the funny episode’, with that sort of 'funny’ music they play on TV when everyone’s sneaking around acting slightly out of character. I didn’t like these bits that much. Capaldi’s Doctor does an awful
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I’ve never been so freaked out by new-Who than when the unfortunate bank-visiting gentleman turned his bald head to reveal that it was now concave instead of convex. Yeesh. This serves to make the Teller a much scarier creature than he otherwise would be… and he would have been
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As the fine folks on The Incomparable’s TeeVee podcast [http://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/] pointed out, this is a story with a pretty weird structure. In a way, it’s sort of reminiscent of some of Moffat’s crazier breakneck stories in season six, like ‘The Impossible Astronaut’. Short
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I have a meh-hate relationship with Mark Gatiss’ Doctor Who scripts. At their best, they’re tolerably pointless. At their worst, they’re accidentally horrible, like ‘The One Where The Doctor and His Friends Shot a Crazy Old Lady and then Crushed a Defenceless Slug Creature’ [https://thegreatescapism.com/post/
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I knew this story was going to involve a crazy plot where the Doctor is shrunk and goes inside a Dalek. I did not expect it to be spliced with a mixed-up and brilliantly acted romantic comedy plot. This alone reminded me of the freshness in Russell T Davies’ first
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Nine episodes in, I’ve realised that I’m really loving Doctor Who again, for the first time since series five, if I’m honest. As a result, I now feel like I should have been saying something about it. But I haven’t been. Well, not online, anyhow. So…
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So, firstly, relief. They didn’t actually try to tell us the name of the Doctor. I was reasonably confident that they wouldn’t, after the whole issue last season when they said that the Doctor had definitely died, and it turned out that he’d been wearing a crazy