"I don't usually live like this- one day, after another, in the right order..."
I love blogging Doctor Who.As far as this blog is concerned... well, that's how it all started with this blog. I was doing a Doctor Who marathon with a group of people on Outpost Gallifrey between 2008 and 2010, from An Unearthly Child to The Pandorica Opens, uploaded all my entries to this blog, and then... kept on going with new Doctor Who, along with soooo much other stuff. This blog has now been going for so long that Doctor Who comprises only a small part of it, but it will always be the beating heart of this blog.
This time I'm doing something different, though. Because yes, I watched this yesterday; yesI paid attention; but... I didn't take notes, as I almost always do, because I was with my family for Christmas. Also, while by no means further in that a couple of glasses of wine, I'd started on the booze. So this blog post is more of a memory test than usual, especially as I'm deliberately basing it on the one viewing and haven't read or seen any other reviews.
So... with one reservation, which I'll come too... i liked this a lot. It has all the wit we might by now expect from Steven Moffat, but also the brilliant concepts (the Time Hotel; using time and a suitcase to birth a star) and the very clever way it all fits together. It's standalone, funny, and the complexity is well explained and accessible for a slightly sozzled Christmas Day audience.There's Villengard, and a character who just simply happens to be a Silurian, but continuity does not loom large.
There's a heart tothis, though. Joy may seem in the surface to be nice and unthreatening, but her story is truly heartbreaking, and I loved Moffat's anger at the "one rule for me and one for thee" aspect of the lockdown parties. No doubt culture warring lockdown sceptics will decry this as "woke", whatever that is, but no one cares hat they think.
Nicola Coughlan is excellent.Yet, as ever, Ncuti Gatwa is simply superb. This is a very lonely Doctor who has just said goodbye to his companion and could do with a reminder that he needs a friend to travel with. Yes, I know; we've seen this before. But it's well handled here, with the Doctor taking the "slow path", as Reinette would have said, spending a year working in a hotel and making a good friend. and more than that... he learns again what friendship truly means. And the importance of chairs. That especially.
All this and a Mr Benn reference.
That said... the big reveal at the end that Joy and the others had become the Star of Bethlehem wasa bit much, one step too far. But it's Christmas, dammit. And this sort of episode is exactly what we need in this increasingly worrying world.
No comments:
Post a Comment