Doctor Who: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

“Don’t get in a spaceship with a madman!”

Interesting one, this. It seems to have divided opinion. No one thinks it’s awful and, to be clear, it certainly isn’t. But people are either enthusiastic or relatively lukewarm. I’m afraid I’m one of the latter.

It isn’t that the story itself is anything less than excellent. Much as I dislike reset buttons, this time it is earned and I liked the twist that the strange lava-like creatures were possible future version of everyone on board, consumed by the Eye of Harmony in the heart of the TARDIS. The reset button was used well, allowing Clara not only to learn about the time war but also the Doctor’s name (story arc alert!), while the Doctor gets to ask Clara the question he’s been longing to ask only to be told that she’s just Clara! She has no idea that she has ever lived before. Steve Thompson gets to have his cake and eat it, as all this is said without consequences for anyone but the viewer.

Also impressive is that the chief antagonist in this episode is not some dastardly, moustache- twirling baddie but simply three soulless brothers just out for a profit. They have so little poetry in their souls that they take sibling bullying to a new level, making the younger brother think he’s an android

What makes me question the episode a little, and it’s a tendency much seen of late, is that there’s an awful lot of fanwank here. I know it’s the fiftieth anniversary year, but is the general viewer really going to be interested in lines spoken by original companions Susan and Ian in the very first episode, or in sequences which are clearly a remake of the last episode of The Invasion of Time? Still, it’s good to see the library and the swimming pool. I was also impressed with the clever trick of allowing the same section of corridor to look different by the judicious use of lighting to tint the scenes in red or blue. Arguably, the fact that the corridors recall the Daleks' city from way back when is intentional.

Aside from the obvious arc stuff, it’s tempting to see the stuff with the star in The Rings of Akhaten as foreshadowing the climax of this episode. One thing I’m not sure of is whether the dislike the TARDIS holds towards Clara is explained; surely it was not only Clara who was fated to turn in to a lava beast? Another little niggle concerns the book detailing the history of the time war: if both the Daleks and the Time Lords were made extinct, or near as, who exactly was left to write it?!

I enjoyed it, I really did. And I’m enjoying this half of the season. I’m just beginning to worry a little that things are angled slightly to far towards the fans and not enough towards the general viewer.

Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall

“Don’t be dead. Will you do that just for me?”

OK, I’ll say it straight up: THIS POST IS RIDDLED WITH SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE EPISODE THEN LOOK AWAY NOW. SERIOUSLY. I MEAN IT.

Right, now that the formalities have been dispensed with… that was excellent telly. Superb, in fact. Steve Thompson has come good at last. Even so, it wasn’t quite as good as either of the Steven Moffat scripts (it lacked the spark and wasn’t quite as clever), or as good as Mark Gatiss’ The Great Game (the cleverest of them all). That’s to praise with faint damn, of course, but Thompson is no Steven Moffat. Similarly, we Doctor Who fans know all too well that Toby Haynes is a first rate director (I bet the Nina Simone stuff was played back during recording. Nice.), and he's done a first rate job here. He’s no Paul McGuigan, though. Then again, who is? Actually, let’s not allow the fact that other episodes of this superlative series are even better distract us from how bloody good this is.

The framing device, with the first scene being John telling us that Sherlock is dead and the story then unfolding in flashback, is utterly predictable, but that’s the joy of it. And yes, even the fact that it’s undercut in the final scene by a blatantly not-dead Sherlock is predictable. But again, that’s the joy of it. The cleverness is in the little things and the characterisation.

A lot of stuff pays off here, from Donovan’s suspicions about Holmes to Holmes’ relationship with the lovely Molly; at last he finally says something nice to her, and a bloody good thing too! I just want to hug her whenever she’s on screen. I suspect she had a lot to do with how Sherlock faked his death, although there’s quite a lot to be explained. There was a body! It was buried! And yet today we find out that a new series is on the way. Yay!

Both Cumberbatch and Freeman are extraordinary here, giving us a much wider emotional range than they’ve previously been called upon to show. But it’s Andrew Scott who’s the revelation here, managing to square the circle of being suitably and terrifyingly psychopathic without crossing the line into pantomime villain territory. This is Moriarty as the Joker, and it works. He’s a very disturbed individual, with a death wish because he’s “bored”. He defeats Sherlock, yet he’s the one who is, seemingly, genuinely dead. His own life means less to him than the silly little game he's playing. He’s clever enough to virtually warp reality itself, creating a world in which Sherlock is a fraud, but what does it bring him in the end?

Interestingly, this is an episode in which all the clever people fail. The fall of Sherlock, the apparent death of Moriarty and the accidental betrayal of his brother by Sherlock can perhaps be set against the humanity of John and, arguably, Molly, who finally gets at least some appreciation from the man she loves. Even Donovan and the journalist (it’s great to see Katharine Parkinson, but even better to see the tabloids getting skewered)) are arguably portrayed as too clever for their own good. This is the triumph of the ordinary. Appropriate; this episode is clever but, compared to other episodes, not too clever. But it certainly has heart.

Still, I thought last series ended in a big cliffhanger… how will they get out of this one? I suspect empty houses may be involved somehow…

Sherlock: The Blind Banker

“I thought bankers were all supposed to be heartless bastards…”

Firstly, I should point you to this, which I discovered by means of this excellent blog, which I heartily recommend to you. These two links deal with this episode’s dodgy ethnic stereotyping far more eloquently than I could, so I’ll be adding little more than the odd comment on the topic. Interesting, though, that while there are some ethnic groups for whom this sort of blatant racial stereotyping would, quite rightly, never be allowed to reach the screen, there seems to be something of a blind spot concerning Chinese people. I certainly don't recall any media comment at the time.

Plus, this is, notoriously, the not-as-good-as-the-other-two episode of Sherlock, written by Steve Thompson. I’m aware of his stuff for the theatre, but I’ve only encountered him before via his Doctor Who script, which was a bit meh. Actually, though, there’s lots of good stuff in the script here; the plot is clever and well-structured, the dialogue and characterisation are generally good, and Thompson does one thing particularly well. I remember watching an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe in which he interviewed several of his favourite television writers, and hearing Russell T. Davies explaining that scripts often fail to take into account that people never really listen to each other in real life, with a given dialogue actually being two monologues which only sometimes intersect- all very Pinteresque. Anyway, Thompson is rather good at this here, especially in scenes between Sherlock and John. It’s just a shame that these genuine good points are outweighed by the ridiculous and camp stereotypes, which pretty much spoil the episode.

Anyway…the early scenes with Sherlock (inexplicably fighting a bloke with a sword in Baker Street) and John (getting on with those self-service thingies about as well as most of us do) which nicely remind us of the character traits of these people who we have, after all, known for only an episode. We’re reminded that Sherlock is, well, Sherlock Holmes. But John, with his addiction to excitement, is a far more interesting and deep character than the Watson of screen tradition.

We’re soon involved in the mystery, interestingly via an old mate of Sherlock’s. We’re also introduced to Detective Inspector Not-Lestrade, played by the bloke who played Eugene in Torchwood: Random Shoes. Not-Lestrade is young, recently promoted, and rather amusingly made to follow a character arc from scepticism to finally becoming Sherlock’s bitch. Sherlock gets some wonderfully arrogant lines to aim at him: “This investigation might move a bit quicker if you were to take my word as gospel.”

The whole investigation, and the pace of revelations, is rather clever, and nicely interspersed with character moments. John gets a job and an asbo. Unfortunately, though, we soon find ourselves at a rather clichéd shop full of Chinese ethnic stuff, and we eventually get to meet Soo Lin (wasn’t she in Blake’s 7?) at the museum. Her exposition is basically a load of Fu Manchu silliness, including old-fashioned references to “tongs”. Still, her fate is awfully tragic. She’s worked hard to escape from her awful past yet here it is, catching up with her, in the form of her own brother.

We get a brief glimpse of the girl who fancies Sherlock from last episode, and this time Sherlock quite deliberately flirts with her just so he can get into the morgue with Inspector Not-Lestrade. Interesting.

Oh, and what’s Sherlock up to with this searching for the book upon which the code is based? Surely he ought to have made a list of each victim’s books first, found which ones they both owned, and narrowed things down considerably? He may be a genius but you wouldn’t want him doing the filing.

There’s some nice comedy arising from Sherlock inserting himself as the gooseberry between John and Sarah (will we ever see her again, or has nearly getting killed led her to dump John?), but essentially the last third of the episode is largely taken up with awkward ethnic stereotyping.

There’s no getting away from that, really. And it’s a shame, because otherwise this episode is much better than I remembered, with lots of clever touches.

Doctor Who: The Curse of the Black Spot

“What kind of rubbish pirates are you?”

Phew. A more normal, less arc-heavy episode. That means less typing for me.

I was only aware of Steve Thompson for his slightly disappointing middle episode of Sherlock with the possibly dodgy ethnic stereotypes. I thought this script was ok, but pretty ho-hum on the whole. Still, the whole thing certainly looks great and this is a good point in the season for a bit of untaxing fun.

So… pirates. Night-time. The TARDIS crew accused of being stowaway. It all feels a bit Enlightenment, innit? And Matt Smith’s more than a bit Troughton in his facial acting just before the titles.

So, we have a pirate ship. We have lots of fog. We have Hugh Bonneville, of whom I’d better say nothing. We have Lily Cole as a siren who takes people who suffer the slightest injury, with the black spot foretelling their certain fate. And you have to love the fact that we waste no time at all in getting the Doctor to walk the plank while Amy gets a rather cool cutlass fight. Never mind that the Doctor is in imminent danger of dying (with her husband almost certainly next; of course she’s going to stop and put those piratey clothes on. It’s set piece vs. plot logic, and that’s a fight that’s always going to end one way.

We start getting some actual plot once Rory gets scratches and sees the black spot appear; suddenly, someone we actually care about is in danger. Any Amy seems decidedly miffed at his obvious temptation by this other woman, but of course, unlike Random Pirate Bloke, he isn’t disintegrated. After all, this is Rory. It’s not as if he dies all the time or anything.

From this point on, random redshirt pirates are gradually whittled down by the siren, with only the Doctor and his mates, Captain Avery, and Avery’s stowaway son Toby, are immune. We see more evidence of this Doctor’s “Ignore all my previous theories” thing in this episode than any other during the first two-thirds of this episode. There’s some good stuff, though. I love this Doctor’s thing for hats, another thing about him that reminds me of early “I would like a hat like that” Troughton (“Worried because I’m wearing a hat now?”). It’s all very dangerous, and in a relatively arc-lite episode we get a distinctly arc-related reaction from Amy to the Doctor’s “We’ve all got to go sometime.”

RTD once said in an interview, in DWM I think, that scenes in which people are introduced to the TARDIS are great, and enormous fun. The Doctor allowing notorious pirate Henry Avery into his Ship may be a bit Peter Davison Years, but it certainly proves the truth of this. His blasé reaction is well hilarious (Wheel. Telescope. Astrolabe. Compass. A ship’s a ship”).

Meanwhile, in the magazine, Avery Junior is threatening some mutineers with a cutlass. To this user of subtitles, this scene proves two things: the redshirts are definitely all doomed; and Red Bee Media Ltd don’t know how to spell “blackguard”. Tut tut.

It seems that the ships of both Avery and the Doctor are becalmed. If we conveniently ignore the stated fact that Avery has murdered thousands of innocent people, I think we’re supposed to see some sort of parallel between them.

The arc interposes yet again as the Eyepatch Lady from last episode appears to Amy and informs her that “It’s fine. You’re doing fine. Just stay calm.” At this point I shall do as I did in my review for last episode and pretend that I haven’t seen A Good Man Goes to War yet. It’s less complicated that way.

After some comic relief with Avery barking orders to Amy and Rory which sound as though they’ve come straight out of one of Patrick O’Brian’s splendid Aubrey / Maturin novels (“What we really need is some sort of phrase book”), Rory goes overboard. He’s going to drown.

Suddenly the Doctor seems to make a not-quite-convincing intuitive leap, and firstly releases the siren to get Rory, and then insists that Amy, Avery and himself succumb too. I can see why Amy would do this (as per Amy’s Choice) and Avery (his son has been taken), but the Doctor seems to be taking a crazy risk.

It turns out that the siren is just some sort of computer avatar space doctor thing from a “ghost ship”, piloted by now-dead aliens, in a parallel universe (which seems quite accessible; not exactly consistent with what we were told in the RTD years) and that no one has actually died (very, very consistent with Moffat’s scripts in the RTD era). We end with Rory nearly dying (again!) and Avery and his crew being trapped aboard the ship, fated to travel the stars…

We end with a reminder that “Schrödinger” is still a good name for a baby…