purplecat

I'm behind, so sue me.

( All the things under the Cut )

OK, so The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death didn't make a lickspittle of sense, but I'm not sure why anyone thought it would. Well, I suppose, we had vaguely hoped that RTD might have learned a bit of restraint and matched it with a stronger sense of plot coherency but, honestly, nothing about the season up to this point had suggested "restraint".

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Anyway, it was fun. It would have been nice if it could have been a bit tighter and had more of a logical thread through it, but I wasn't really expecting it to so I wasn't really disappointed.

73 Yards and Dot and Bubble are very much a pair - high concept, Doctor-lite. I liked this one much the best of the two and it may be my favourite episode of the season, managing to maintain an overall internal consistency that I'm not sure any of the other stories achieved.

( Spoilers under the Cut )

Every so often, RTD, lets the mask slip and reveals, I think, that he fundamentally thinks the human race is awful and that we don't deserve the Doctor. Dot and Bubble was one of those moments and it was pretty stunning.

Yes, I'm behind.

Whatever you think of Boom and, broadly speaking, the Internet seems to be positive, there was a subtle sigh of relief when Doctor Who returned to something a bit more normal-for-Doctor-Who - though the fact that a high-concept episode like this felt like a return to normality says something about the two episodes that preceded it.

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It was a very solid episode. At the time many people were confidently talking of it as the highlight of the season, but given what has come since, I think it will in retrospect look like something of a filler episode. High-concept Doctor Who but not as high-concept as any of the stuff that surrounds it.

A surprisingly low key start to the new Doctor Who season - and surprisingly silly as well.

( Spoilers Under the Cut )

Nothing about this episode was average, but in the grand sweep of Doctor Who stories I'd probably rate it somewhere in the middle. However, given I was anticipating being a bit `meh!' about RTD2, I'm happy to be thinking "fun, but silly".

I really wanted to like Legend of the Sea Devils, the Doctor Who Easter Special. Marmalade Sparrow, who is largely unimpressed by Chibnall Who, expressed some doubts at the concept of spending an hour watching it but relented after I said "but pirates" a few times.

( If only but pirates were enough... )

All that said, I think I liked this more than many. It was mostly fun and it looked good. It functioned just fine as a run-around. Part of the problem in fact, is that for one of a handful of stories we're getting this year and something billed as a "special", I'd have liked a bit more than a run-around. Mind you, thinking about it, it's also better than Planet of the Dead, so I suppose it's the best Easter Special the show has ever given us and on those terms a success.

It was fun. Spoilers follow.

Given I thought the New Year episode, Revolution of the Daleks, was only fine and "passes the time well enough", this was a definite step up. It was fun, exciting and reasonably well-paced albeit rushed towards the end.

All that said, I thought the two standalone episodes, War of the Sontarans and Village of the Angels were much the strongest of the series. Most of the rest of the story felt like too many ideas crammed into too small a space which may, of course, have been a result of shortening the series because of Covid. Chibnall has form in long-running story telling so, unlike some of the story's other faults, I'm more willing to ascribe this to the shortening of the story than inate flaws. But while the multiple threads kept everything moving, I think, overall, they were confusing. I mean, I've spent a lot of the past couple of weeks carefully not thinking too hard about the finale because I'm pretty sure it doesn't make much sense and has plot holes you could drive several double-decker buses through. Chibnall's mostly not too bad on the plot hole front so I suspect having to cut material is the culprit here.

Some of the story's other flaws are ones we've seen before: a tendency for people to spend a lot of time standing around telling each other things - Once, Upon Time, which I think of as the info-dump episode, particularly felt like it suffered from this; and a tendency for things to be set up as significant and then not utilised - whatever was going on with Azure before Swarm "rescued" her.

Some of the other problems its hard to call. Di seemed oddly under-utilised, the reasons for her kidnapping were obscure, and we were only told about her discoveries in the passenger we never saw her make them. Similarly it wasn't entirely clear what the Grand Serpent was about or how his activities on 20th century Earth fitted with his meeting with Vinder. For the big guest star of the season, Vinder was a lot less interesting than Bel.

Everyone seems to love Dan. I thought the first episode tried way too hard to make him likeable (really? he volunteers at a food bank, and moonlights as a tour guide to show of his enthusiasm for his home city, and has a disabled almost girlfriend he treats perfectly, and is good with children, he even has a dog (sort of)). I thought he was better after The Halloween Apocalypse but for at least the first half of that episode at least he felt more like a walking list of virtues than an actual character.

Carvanista was a triumph though - almost quintessential Doctor Who from the innate silliness of the concept through to the slightly dodgy costume.

So I liked it. I wish it had had two or three more episodes to allow the arc plot to breathe. I shall even rewatch it some time soon to see if my suspicion that most of the final episode doesn't make sense is true or not.

Tame Layman vetoed The Faceless Ones when we did the Randomiser for reasons that remain obscure to me. I had vaguely planned to revisit the question once we got to the end but by that point the animation had been announced so it seemed better to wait.

I had mentally class The Faceless Ones as a "weird early Troughton" which placed it in the same category as The Underwater Menace and The Macra Terror but actually this is a very different beast. It is much closer in feel to the more realistic Avengers-like atmosphere of The War Machines. Much is made of the Gatwick setting - at least in the first episode which we watched live-action and Tame Layman was impressed enough to comment on the location work. While later episodes do seem to spend an awful lot of time with people sitting outside the Chameleon Tours office, it's only in retrospect that that becomes obvious and, at least viewed an episode at a time, the story progresses at a reasonable pace.

I was genuinely amazed and impressed at the shots of an airplane landing inside a spaceship. I mean, I've no idea what this would have looked like with 1960s model-work but the animation looked great and really added to the feel of ambitious scale to the story. Tame Layman really enjoyed the way the story unfolded. Again, in retrospect, there's quite a lot of running around to no great purpose, but there are several clever ideas along the way, particularly in the later episodes, and its nice to have a resolution in which the antagonists are sent away with slapped wrists rather than being destroyed.

I was a bit disappointed in Pauline Collins' Samantha Briggs. As a character being tried out as a potential companion she ultimately seemed rather superfluous to the action. I'd expected her to be more obviously proactive somehow. However the story did effortlessly pass the Bechdel test partly as a result though, in fact, there are no less than three other one-off female characters in the story, which is more than can be said for many 1960s episodes.

I'm a little surprised this story isn't spoken of more often and more highly in Doctor Who circles. Obviously the fact only two episodes exist mitigates against it, but its a lot of fun as well as being an interesting look at the kind of story the early Troughton years were trying to tell, and the show's initial attempts at telling contemporary tales, before it got side-tracked into endless bases under siege.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati seems to have received a hugely positive reception in my corner of fandom which makes me feel extra curmudgeonly right now. It's not that I disliked it, but I'd rate several stories this series higher than this.

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The Haunting of Villa Diodati is fine, good even. There's nothing here that I think is bad or particularly objectionable but, honestly, I think I'd have liked it better if it had been more self-contained.