Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
Sep. 30th, 2012 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatThat was fun.
Chris Chibnall is much maligned as a writer. I'm not sure his bad reputation is entirely deserved. His work for both Doctor Who and Torchwood has been pedestrian. I can imagine he's a writer with a reputation for delivering the goods - a script that arrives on time, and is filmable, with enough action and so forth to keep it moving. I would also say his stories have a bad tendency to have characters do stuff that is just plain stupid simply in order to further the plot. Occasionally characters have been known to do a complete about face, similarly in order to carry us towards the next plot point.
So I was actually pleasantly surprised here that no one did anything monumentally stupid or out of character. It possibly helped that the story was clearly intended to be, primarily, hectic and fun. So we had dinosaurs. We had Rupert Graves as a big game hunter. We had Queen Nefertiti. We had Rory's dad. You don't really need a great deal of plot to sustain that lot over 45 minutes, so the need to bend them out of shape reduces. What is more they were all attractively written, if in broad brush strokes.
Chibnall came in for a lot of flak after his Cyberwoman episode of Torchwood. Not just because it was stupid, but also because the eponymous Cyberwoman's outfit made her look like she'd just stumbled out of a fetish-wear store. On the assumption he didn't write in the script "The Cyberwoman is wearing a metal bikini and high heels", I'm inclined to let him off that. However he has gained something of a reputation for misogyny in certain circles. This did make me wonder if Riddell's sole purpose was to answer Chibnall's feminist critics. I, personally, have a lot of time for Rupert Graves in period costume but ultimately all he did was make sexist remarks so the rest of the characters could point out he was being sexist. Oh, and he got to hook up with Riann Steele's Queen Nefertiti whose sole purpose appeared to be to act as a straw feminist (a strange mixture of apparently uncontrolled sexuality and ball-breaking attitude who eventually got relegated to the damsel in distress role) and so undermine whatever point Chibnall was attempting to make about being a forward thinking, right-on feminist type of guy. I thought, actually, there was a lot of potential in both Riddell and Nefertiti (more in Riddell, to be honest) and Amy as proto-Doctor with Riddell and Nefertiti as her companions had promise. But they had so little screen time and were competing with dinosaurs and Rory's dad that I ended up a little disappointed with both of them.
Mark Williams, as Rory's Dad, was much better served, but he had a far more natural link in with the regular cast. Moffat, I observe, continues to be interested primarily in father-son relationships where Davies was more interested in mother-daughter relationships (yes, I know, River and Amy, but an awful lot of Moffat-helmed episodes involve fathers and sons).
Then we have the ending. I'm going to go on a limb here and say I liked it. I'm not sure it was a good ending for a Doctor Who story because what the Doctor doesn't do is set out to kill people. On the other hand, with the various dark Doctor and lonely god strands, we've seen him do far more questionable things. He manipulated the Daleks into destroying their own home planet for instance (even if it subsequently appears to have gotten better) and although he gave them a "let out" he did so in a way that meant they were never going to take it. Of course there are many fans of the show who, perfectly legitimately, think that the dark Doctor/lonely god characterisation was a huge mis-step. However set against that, there was something refreshingly honest about the Doctor's recognition that Soloman was unrepentant and that he would, without hesitation, wipe out hundreds of people again if he saw a profit in it. Killing him in a business-like fashion without speechifying, self-justification, or attempting to shift the blame onto Soloman himself seemed like a step towards a greater responsibility for the Doctor's own actions. Of course, this was a Chris Chibnall script and it could easily have been mere thoughtless characterisation of the "at the end the bad guy dies" variety. Only time will tell.
Ultimately, though, this episode did exactly what it said on the tin. There were dinosaurs on a spaceship. It was a frothy romp and, on those terms, it delivered.
Chris Chibnall is much maligned as a writer. I'm not sure his bad reputation is entirely deserved. His work for both Doctor Who and Torchwood has been pedestrian. I can imagine he's a writer with a reputation for delivering the goods - a script that arrives on time, and is filmable, with enough action and so forth to keep it moving. I would also say his stories have a bad tendency to have characters do stuff that is just plain stupid simply in order to further the plot. Occasionally characters have been known to do a complete about face, similarly in order to carry us towards the next plot point.
So I was actually pleasantly surprised here that no one did anything monumentally stupid or out of character. It possibly helped that the story was clearly intended to be, primarily, hectic and fun. So we had dinosaurs. We had Rupert Graves as a big game hunter. We had Queen Nefertiti. We had Rory's dad. You don't really need a great deal of plot to sustain that lot over 45 minutes, so the need to bend them out of shape reduces. What is more they were all attractively written, if in broad brush strokes.
Chibnall came in for a lot of flak after his Cyberwoman episode of Torchwood. Not just because it was stupid, but also because the eponymous Cyberwoman's outfit made her look like she'd just stumbled out of a fetish-wear store. On the assumption he didn't write in the script "The Cyberwoman is wearing a metal bikini and high heels", I'm inclined to let him off that. However he has gained something of a reputation for misogyny in certain circles. This did make me wonder if Riddell's sole purpose was to answer Chibnall's feminist critics. I, personally, have a lot of time for Rupert Graves in period costume but ultimately all he did was make sexist remarks so the rest of the characters could point out he was being sexist. Oh, and he got to hook up with Riann Steele's Queen Nefertiti whose sole purpose appeared to be to act as a straw feminist (a strange mixture of apparently uncontrolled sexuality and ball-breaking attitude who eventually got relegated to the damsel in distress role) and so undermine whatever point Chibnall was attempting to make about being a forward thinking, right-on feminist type of guy. I thought, actually, there was a lot of potential in both Riddell and Nefertiti (more in Riddell, to be honest) and Amy as proto-Doctor with Riddell and Nefertiti as her companions had promise. But they had so little screen time and were competing with dinosaurs and Rory's dad that I ended up a little disappointed with both of them.
Mark Williams, as Rory's Dad, was much better served, but he had a far more natural link in with the regular cast. Moffat, I observe, continues to be interested primarily in father-son relationships where Davies was more interested in mother-daughter relationships (yes, I know, River and Amy, but an awful lot of Moffat-helmed episodes involve fathers and sons).
Then we have the ending. I'm going to go on a limb here and say I liked it. I'm not sure it was a good ending for a Doctor Who story because what the Doctor doesn't do is set out to kill people. On the other hand, with the various dark Doctor and lonely god strands, we've seen him do far more questionable things. He manipulated the Daleks into destroying their own home planet for instance (even if it subsequently appears to have gotten better) and although he gave them a "let out" he did so in a way that meant they were never going to take it. Of course there are many fans of the show who, perfectly legitimately, think that the dark Doctor/lonely god characterisation was a huge mis-step. However set against that, there was something refreshingly honest about the Doctor's recognition that Soloman was unrepentant and that he would, without hesitation, wipe out hundreds of people again if he saw a profit in it. Killing him in a business-like fashion without speechifying, self-justification, or attempting to shift the blame onto Soloman himself seemed like a step towards a greater responsibility for the Doctor's own actions. Of course, this was a Chris Chibnall script and it could easily have been mere thoughtless characterisation of the "at the end the bad guy dies" variety. Only time will tell.
Ultimately, though, this episode did exactly what it said on the tin. There were dinosaurs on a spaceship. It was a frothy romp and, on those terms, it delivered.
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-30 10:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-30 10:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-30 10:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-30 11:34 am (UTC)Okay, so it's never going to go down as one of the more deep and dark and meaningful episode, but, as you say, it wasn't meant to. It was a fun adventure, and as such it succeeded brilliantly. It's certainly one of my faves for this series so far (for 'favourite' read 'most rewatched').
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-30 01:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-30 11:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-30 11:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-30 01:25 pm (UTC)I know I've seen Invasion of the Dinosaurs since, but I recall little about it and what I do seems rather confused with Robot in my mind which I have watched fairly recently. This is a rather different sort of story to Invasion, in particular it's not trying to be about anything other than an over-the-top mash-up of ideas. Bad dinosaurs would have been totally fatal to it in a way they probably weren't to Invasion, even though they may have dragged it down.