Category: Doctor Who
The Sarah Jane Adventures episode 50: The Curse of Clyde Langer – Part One (10/10/2011)
‘Every one of my friends has been turning against me.’ This is more like it: as dark and disturbing as anything this show has done, as a curse turns Clyde’s friends and family against him, until he has nothing left. What’s impressive is how brutal it is – none of it’s played for laughs, there’s a real viciousness in Sarah Jane and Rani’s hatred of Clyde, and resigned, determined disappointment from his mother. Clyde can’t joke his way out of it, or appeal to his friends.
The Sarah Jane Adventures episode 49: Sky – Part Two (4/10/2011)
‘It was supposed to make her laugh. Boy, does this feel familiar.’ Everyone has to explain things to Sky in a very simple way, which has the effect of making this feel much more simplistic than the previous series. And knowing that Sky’s adventures will end in four episodes’ time makes it hard to invest much in her as a character. As a result, this is only mildly entertaining as we wait, once again, for the Bannerman Road gang to reconvene at a factory and get everyone to play nice.
The Sarah Jane Adventures episode 48: Sky – Part One (3/10/2011)
‘She is no child. She is a weapon.’ The Sarah Jane Adventures return for a final, curtailed season that was broadcast after the death of Elisabeth Sladen. This casts a shadow across these episodes, although none of that’s evident either in the script, which sets this up as a fresh start for the team, or in Sladen’s performance, which is as energetic as ever. She’s joined again by Rani and Clyde, and Mr Smith.
Doctor Who: Death is the Only Answer (1/10/2011)
‘A genius like me needs better than this old trash.’ A four-minute children’s scriptwriting competition winner starring Matt Smith and Nickolas Grace. Seen as a story it barely makes sense – the Doctor drops a fez through a time window (very Day of the Doctor, that) and Albert Einstein picks it up and appears in the TARDIS, turns into an Ood with a terrifying message (‘Death is the only answer’), then turns back when he walks into a squiggly energy field. Meanwhile, a green slime creature crawls towards the console like the Master’s jellied snake from the TV Movie. Baffling, although still more coherent than most of Series Six (I jest).
Doctor Who episode 799: The Wedding of River Song (1/10/2011)
‘Hell. In high heels.’ So, here it is, the grand finale to the series-long arc. Focusing on the positives: the idea of history collapsing into a single minute is neatly done, making the most of returning cameos and existing CGI (the Torchwood pterodactyl, presumably), plus including references to Rose Tyler, Captain Jack and the Brigadier to make this feel genuinely big tent. Some of the other big ideas are equally audacious, particularly the Silence referring specifically to the Doctor’s silence. Steampunk London looks great. Amy’s final confrontation with Kovarian is overdue but needed. ‘Pond, Amelia Pond’ is superb.
Doctor Who episode 798: Closing Time (24/9/2011)
‘You blew them up with love.’ The 11th Doctor is on his End of Time stye farewell tour, dropping in on old friends before his inescapable fate at Lake Silencio. No wonder it’s called Closing Time. I like how Roberts handles this, largely avoiding maudlin introspection, but never letting the audience forget that this is the Doctor’s last adventure. Fittingly, it riffs on the first episode of the revived show – this isn’t Henriks, but it might as well be. Even the open is the same – as Shona stays behind in the shop while her colleagues dash off, to finish up. Like Rose, she’s confronted in the dark by something frightening and alien – but the Doctor isn’t there to take her hand and tell her to run. It’s a taster of what the world will soon be like without him, and a perfect scene setting.
Doctor Who episode 797: The God Complex (17/9/2011)
‘Amy, with regret, you’re fired.’ Another solid episode that’s more interested in getting the behind-the-sofa basics right than doing anything timey-wimey. If anything, this wears its classic Doctor Who influences even more overtly than anything in Night Terrors, explicitly connecting back to (of all things) The Horns of Nimon, with a ‘god complex’ instead of a ‘power complex’ but the same shifting walls and minotaur monster. And it’s no coincidence that the climax comes in Room Seven, surely a deliberate reference to the way the eleventh Doctor breaking Amy’s faith in him replays the seventh Doctor having to shake Ace’s faith in him to defeat Fenric.
Torchwood episode 41: The Blood Line (15/9/2011)
‘I’ve seen some crazy shit with Torchwood but now I’m at the limit.’ Miracle Day ends with a whisper, a breath that goes around the whole world, bringing back death to humankind. The lead-up to this is typical RTD (albeit co-written with Jane Espenson), with the lead characters trapped in a room, talking their way towards the resolution. It reminded me of nearly all of RTD’s Doctor Who finales – the verbal confrontation with the villains, the impossible choice (Esther’s life for humankind’s mortality), the tinge of magic, the soaring music, the last-minute reveal of the heroes’ secret plan. It’s Martha activating the Archangel Network as the tenth Doctor becomes Space Jesus, or the Bad Wolf / the Doctor-Donna emerging from the TARDIS.
Doctor Who episode 796: The Girl Who Waited (10/9/2011)
‘I’m going to pull time apart for you.’ Frustratingly, this one belonged in the first half of the series when its lesson – that you can’t have your cake and eat it; that for the young woman to escape the old must be sacrificed – could have foreshadowed the fate that would befall River Song if the Doctor saved Melody Pond. In fact, it seems like such an obvious parallel that I’m amazed no-one comments on it in the episode. Surely the whole reason this episode exists is to explain the Ponds’ inexplicable indifference to their baby’s fate.
Torchwood episode 40: The Gathering (8/9/2011)
‘Well, we can’t be too careful, Mam. It was only yesterday there was a raid on Oystermouth Road. They took two people away for the ovens.’ RTD is obsessed by the possibility of the West sliding into fascism. It crops up in Doctor Who: Turn Left, it’s in Children of Earth and Years and Years, and here it is again. Thanks to the economic challenges of the Miracle, people in Britain now live in a police state, and Gwen’s own dad is hidden in a secret annex like a geriatric Anne Frank until the day his luck runs out and he’s carted off for cremation. And through all of this, Amy, Rory and Mels are mucking about in cornfields like Teresa May, suggesting that Torchwood now exists in some dystopian parallel universe from its parent series.
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