I have been meaning to do a blog post about my thoughts and feelings on Brexit and the possibility of a second referendum for a long while now, but as it seems to be still such a divisive issue I've instead opted to tell you about a 2017 trip to the cinema...
You see my generic and fictional mate Dave got on the What'sApp group chat and posted "Does anyone want to go to the cinema tonight?" Gotta say I was well up for it. My equally generic mate Tom was up for it, Dick less so, Harry really hates the cinema, Tim not a fan but felt it was better than just lazing in front of the TV all night thinking about how his Polish girlfriend has left him, Doc up for it, Barry never text back. Terry meanwhile did not want to go to the cinema at all. So just about, most of us decided we'd go to the cinema.
Dave immediately left the What'sApp group and made Terry the admin.
Few minutes later Terry texts the group chat again. "Ok guys, I've got tickets to Transformers: The Last Knight at 6:30."
Woah woah woah! I know I was up for going to the cinema but now I have to see Transformers, that's fucking mental!
"You have to respect the will of the What's App Dan!"
Harry is fuming. He doesn't even like films and now he's got a ticket for fucking Transformers. Tim is fine with it. He says the film is shit but anything is better than that whore of a Polish girlfriend who dumped him. Barry's like "well if I knew it was Transformers I would have text back 'no' and then we wouldn't have gone" No one cares Barry, you had your chance! Tom's still up for it, but oddly Dick is coming around to it as he's heard Anthony Hopkins is in this one so it's got to be good right? (Spoiler: its really not)
Guys, settle down. This group chat is getting out of control. Terry! What the hell do you think you're doing? There's so many good films out at the moment, why did you pick Transformers?
In this very simple of circumstances you'd think deciding to go to the cinema is one question, but if people say yes, you should find a list of the films on and then ask what film people want to see.
And here's the thing...what Tom? Yeah I know the ticket prices are stupid and popcorn is a rip off...well we've got the tickets now because you said you wanted to come to the cinema. You knew the price of popcorn before you texted back 'yes' that information was readily available, there's no point in complaining about it now.
Ooh, new message from Tim: "If we're going to the cinema tonight, I guess we're not going to Mick and Larry's joint birthday party tonight." No chance. We don't mind Mick but we don't really like Larry tbh. "Oh, ok, it's just Tam, who is organising the party, says we still have to pay for our share of the cost of the stripper because at the time we agreed to all put money in, we hadn't decided to go to the cinema instead...is that unfair?"
"Look we're going to see Transformers: The Last Knight at 6:30 ok!" texts Terry.
That's really soon Terry, doesn't give us much time to get in and eat after work. Why did you just arbitrarily decide to get the earliest showing? Surely we should have decided on the film before you just randomly set a time to go.
"6:30 is fine, there's plenty of time. By the way, is everyone happy with me as Admin of this group? I think we should spend at least an hour deciding if you're all still happy with me as Admin."
Christ Terry we don't have time for this! You're wasting time that could be spent getting a refund and tickets to a better movie.
Turns out most of us don't want Terry to run the group but we now have to run for the bus because he's pissed about with his stupid popularity contest this whole time. "Ok guys," he texts, "I'm going to make Patrick an admin on the group too."
Not racist, homophobic Pat! He's racist and homophobic and only has like 2 friends!
"None the less, I need him to give me a lift to the cinema tonight, so he's a group admin. Also is there a money tree/cash point en route guys as I owe him £100 for petrol?"
I thought you were skint! Mate you should have just cut across that wheat field out the back of your house, you'd be at the cinema in minutes.
"Oh Dan, you're so naughty."
I have to say Terry, I really think we should have been told you were going to see Transformers when you asked about the cinema and let us choose the films.
Here's the thing Terry, if there's no good films out, it might have been better for us all to stay at home watching a repeat of Mock The Week thinking about Tim's ex-girlfriend.
"You have to respect the will of the What's App Dan, we wanted to go the cinema!"
Yeah, I do, and even if I didn't want to go to the cinema, I would say "hey it'll be a nice night out, I'll get behind it, if there's a half decent film on offer, but if it's Michael how-can-I-fuck-up-ninja-turtles Bay the cost is too damn high. None of us voted for Transformers. Deciding to go somewhere and deciding what you do when you get there are two different things Thers---Terry!" Asking a follow up question doesn't ignore the first question or insult the people who asked it, it just gets us closer to choosing a film that everyone is happy with. I don't understand how you've managed to make asking the What's App group "Is everyone happy with the film I've chosen?" sound like it would be an insult to the What's App group members.
It's not a best of three situation. We accept that going to the cinema is what most people want to do. But I really wish we could all have chosen a film together. Wonder Woman and Baby Driver were both out that week, and I just realised the first series of GLOW came out that week too, something I didn't know at the time Dave asked the original question because it turns out as time moves on we learn more things, so I really should have stayed in.
I should say in all of this Jerry was on my side, but since his argument seemed to basically be "Well, we let all of our granddad's in the group and it was them who chose to go to the cinema and not to be nasty but they'll probably be dead before the end of the trailers," I thought, wow Jerry is a real cunt and I don't want him on my side.
Frank Davies claims that as his day started he hadn’t even
thought about 1999 teen romantic comedy She’s All That once this century.
But when one journalistic website offered him the chance to
see what the cast of She’s All That looked like now, Mr Davies said “I just had
to know.
“I knew that it would be unbelievable, because it said it
would right there in the link to the article, so how could it not be?”
Upon clicking the link, Mr Davies was disappointed to
discover simply a picture of what Freddie Thingy and
The-Woman-Whose-Name-He’d-Forgotten looked like on the original VHS cover.
After scrolling past the image and several adverts, he found hope for more with
a ‘next page’ button.
Mr Davies pushed the button only to find a brief summary of
the film’s plot, and all of the same adverts again. After closing the large
advert that covered the majority of the page, he uncovered another ‘next page’
button.
The following page just contained the same advert multiple
times over and a ‘next page’ button. “By now, my interest in what they looked
like now was well and truly piqued. This was a mystery I had to get to the
bottom of,” said Mr Davies. “Of course, it occurred to me I could have just
googled it at any point in the last eighteen years, but I was too deep now,” he
said so he clicked a ‘next page’ button again only to find a brief and
factually inaccurate summary of Rachael Leigh Cook’s career outside of the
film.
Mr Davies first became aware it was a problem when his wife
returned from work to find him glassy-eyed and tapping at an iPhone whose
battery had long since died. Mrs Davies took the iPhone from his hand and lead
him to bed. Only to find his hands doing the same series of motions in his
sleep.
“It was the perfect pattern,” she said, “Close the pop-up,
scroll, click next, close the pop-up, scroll, click next.”
A statement on New-Media Advertising Corp website reads,
“There’s one simple change that you can make to rid your life of clickbait.
“The simple change takes just two minutes [read more].”
The cast of She’s All That look around two decades older
than they did at the time of the movie.
PARENTAL GUIDANCE: As this blog is on a personal matter, I'm sure there will be some mums, dads and nans reading it, so to avoid offence later on, I should say I swear a bit in it. Please ask your young children if it's ok for you to read this
I doubt anyone reading this will not already know by now but back before Christmas, I got engaged! Continuing the tradition that I think dates back to Victoria and Albert's wedding, we have a website and a blog. So this is my first entry in the story of planning the wedding: The Proposal.
First question that comes up often - it's the first thing that many people ask and it's something Leigh has asked me too - is "when did you decide to do it?" and in all honesty I don't really know. I couldn't put a date on it. I guess in my head around the age of 27/28 is when I think of people as getting married but that's clearly not a thing. Looking at The Independent's figures on it, apparently 32 is the average age, (but then The Independent has repeatedly told me I wouldn't believe what Lisa Kudrow looks like now on Facebook and I always have). The Independent is quick to add that that's the average for their first marriage too.
So over the course of about a year, it just gradually crept into my mind that I might get married. There's a couple of milestones in the last year too. We'd been living together a year and not killed each other, we'd got a cat and that hadn't died either, by now we've met most of each other's friends and family, been on a few holidays and been to a lot of weddings. That's just what happens in your late twenties. This is the first year that we have not been able to attend all the friend's weddings we were invited too as there were just too many going on. And driving home from weddings we always end up discussing what we liked and what we would do differently. So it just got in my mind that this might be a thing.
So The Plan, First thing we needed was the date, for a proposal. Being modern lefty types, we both flip the traditional gender roles in that I always remember the anniversary of our first date while she forgets until the day itself arrives (It was Thursday 21st November 2013. It's hard to forget the anniversary of what you love most in the whole world, so I do Doctor Who's 50th Anniversay - 2. I missed a very good biopic of William Hartnell for that date. I definitely don't regret it, but it makes me sad to think of all the couples who were perfect for each other who never got together before iPlayer). So our anniversary would be a nice surprise (option #1) and I'd also started dropping hints that we should go away somewhere around her birthday next year (option #2).
The Problem I have with option #1 is a proposal on our anniversary seems to me a little bit like saying "Well, we've been together four years...we might as well..." Like, "your four year free trial of relationship has now expired. If you wish to continue please hand over your credit card details." or "to be honest, it's been four years and Tindr is now huge, is Tindr even what the kids are using now? Let's face it, it's far less hassle for us just to get married now. It's been too long to be single." I didn't really fancy that subtext. Anyway, Leigh got a tour of the Harry Potter studios for her birthday and started planning to book it for our anniversary. Now, I like Harry Potter as much as the next man, but I don't love Harry Potter and I'm certainly not linking a huge moment in our lives to the franchise by proposing in the Chamber of Secrets. So that was that out.
Option #2 around her birthday on holiday was a nice idea. But presented problems. I know people who did the whole weekend-in-Paris proposals and you ask them how they proposed "Oh, it was perfect. We went to Paris............" Oh. That's the end of the story. Paris is the story. I didn't want the reaction to my proposal to be "oh, that's great. I hear Bruges is lovely." Yes, Bruges is lovely, but I am lovelier. This story is supposed to be about me!!! and to some extent about her too, I guess.
Plus the thing about a holiday is, to be honest, you then have to do it somewhere special and public. Getting engaged in the Premier Inn round the corner from Notre Dame is just shit, and if you're going to do that you may as well just have a long weekend at South Mimms service station on the M25. But I am not a fan of the public proposal. Some lad got engaged on the telly during the Ashes around the time I proposed, and it seems like the question there is less "will you marry me?" and more "how prepared are you to have everyone in this stadium think you are a dick?" You should never propose in front of anyone who doesn't know the full context of your relationship to date. So either do it somewhere private or take documentary and video evidence to share with the audience.
So with these options buzzing around in my head and the anniversary date coming close, I still hadn't made a decision. But I began reading a book by one of my favouite comedians Alex Horne called Wordwatching, in which Alex Horne tells the story of how he tried to get a word added to the dictionary. One such word he invented is Tkday. It means your ten thousandth day alive. Alex Horne also mentions being twenty-seven at the time of writing - the same age as us. I had very little time left before I turned 28, but I found a website that calculated these things, put in Leigh's date of birth and found out that her Tkday was 1st December 2017.
This felt like a perfect date. Alex Horne is one of my favourite comedians. And on an early date in our relationship we went to the Curzon cinema in Soho to see a documentary made by one of her favourite musicians Nick Cave documenting a day in his life when he was 54 years old - that film was called 20,000 Days on Earth. So it had relevance to our relationship and to each of us individually and it definitely still held the element of surprise. It seemed like it would be something nice and significant that I knew about her that she didn't know herself. And so it was decided.
It was decided near the start of October, giving me a little under two months to plan it. So the plan. As I said, I didn't like the emotional blackmail of a public proposal. So if we went out to 1) The pub we had our first date or 2) a fish restaurant she likes in St Albans. I'd either have to wait till I got home to do the ring or find a quiet, out-of-sight spot on the way home, but I worried that asking Leigh to follow me into some bushes or a graveyard at night might seem like I was proposing something very different (at best sexual intercourse/at worst murder (I wonder if in a post-wedding blog, I'll reverse those)). Although once I realised that there was a graveyard near both the restaurants, the temptation to rewrite the song Damnit Janet from our mutual favourite musical Rocky Horror was strong. Sadly I skipped all the poetry bits of my Creative Writing degree and so "fuck me, Leigh" was the best rhyme I could come up with. So at home it was.
My first idea was...I got her a make-up revolution advent calendar for Christmas the previous year which fell down behind the bookcase at some point on the 1st December 2016 and so still had 23 unopened doors. So plan A was to fish the advent calendar out and remind her of it in December 2017 with a 'replacement item' in Day 1. When she opened the door the ring would be cellotaped inside. Yep, that's right plan A involved buying the most expensive piece of jewelery I will ever purchase and cover it in cellotape, bluetac or even glue to get it stuck. I told you I was a genuis (not in this blog, but if you know me I've probably mentioned it).
Then I had a pretty evil but funny thought. That I should open up that advent calendar, stick the ring in day 24 and reseal it. Then when she opened the door on 24th December 2017, pretend I'd put the ring in it in 2016 and completely forgotten about it. I would pretend I'd been waiting for well over a year and had had to cancel some kind of flashmob at the last moment the last year and pretend to be horrified like the last year had changed my mind. As tempting as this was, Day 24 remains firmly shut until 2018 at the earliest.
In the end I decided to go with a simple, 10,000 day mock-up birthday. I got a hand made/decorated photo frame from a Christmas craft fair at work and put in my favourite picture of us and I stalked her Facebook to find an old photo of her in her goth-phase and photoshopped it into a mock up of the 20,000 Days on Earth film poster, which I sent off to Moonpig.
(Sidenote*: have you seen the Moonpig advert where the woman is like "I love that you can write in it yourself"? Congratualtions on spotting the one thing that isn't remarkable about Moonpig cards, now go hang around with the woman who "didn't even know Oral B made a toothpaste." What did you think they did?! She's getting a lot of work off the back of that advert "I didn't even know Apple made an iPhone!")
*Sidenote means "stand-up routine not quite funny enough to tell an audience"
My favourite photo of me and Leigh by the way. It looks posed for but actually I had been drinking Whisky and couldn't keep a straight face to pose. The blonde hair dates this happiness as the early part of our relationship.
So then I had to go and buy the ring. In order to keep my plans secret, which was essential in case she said no, I had to go somewhere outside of Welwyn Garden City, because I always bump into her parents whenever I go to Welwyn Garden City shops. Her family are decent and lovely people, so I made the assumption that I wouldn't bump into them in Stevenage new town, so that's where I went. I found one of Leigh's rings in the house and borrowed it so I knew the right size and had a look at a few pictures of rings online to see what styles I liked and that Leigh might like too. She doesn't wear much jewelery and the ring I had borrowed reflected her inner-goth and supposedly skulls are not appropriate at weddings.
When I got to Stevenage town centre, I quickly realised I was out of my depth. When I went into the first Jewelery shop I found all the rings I had liked in my reseach were dirt cheap. In other words, I have no taste whatsoever. Apparently you are supposed to spend three months' wages on a ring. Sorry Leigh, but fuck that! If I had three months' worth of wages just lying around I wouldn't have got the bus to Stevenage, I wouldn't be renting I'd have put a deposit on a house, at the very least I wouldn't be drinking Co-op Own Brand Cola ("Co-op Own Brand Cola: Pepsi for people willing to overlook that their urine is that colour" TM). So yeah, we are generation Rent, because our age group is obsessed with that musical and generation Andrew-Lloyd-Webbers-Chess fucked the housing market for us. So I figured three months' wages was unlikely, but also £32 - which the rings I liked cost - wasn't likely to get the answer I was hoping for. So I compromised on roughly a month's worth of rent - I went over that budget a bit but that was a nice guideline. For those who don't know: a month's rent in Welwyn Garden City for a two bed house is £1,000,000, 4 pounds of flesh, 4 pints of your blood, sweat and tears, and a human soul + £6billion or 2 bitcoins in council tax (extra if you want your recycling bins emptied).
I eventually found a ring that suited and went in and asked about it. The fella showed me it close up and I was speechless. I mean that I was literally too awkward to know what I should say when looking a ring. "Erm...that's nice." I should have paid more attention to this stuff on the Antiques Roadshow. I honestly had no idea if it was a good ring or not. It was round. It was shiny. But then so were the evidently shit rings I had liked before. He measured the goth-ring and said that he'd have to order in the ring in the right size - and that I had got lucky, the ring was more expensive online but he hadn't got around to updating the shop signage yet, "excellent news if the value ever comes up in conversation," I said. He said I should come back in about a week to 10 days (29th November, worryingly close) to collect the ring and that they would put it in one of these little wooden ring boxes for me. That was the moment! I was too stupid to know the quality of the ring but that box was pretty stylish. I don't know what I would do if someone proposed to me with that ring, but I knew that for anything that came out of that box I would say yes.
So I handed over my money, and took the receipt. In a way, it was quite comforting that the ring wouldn't arrive until a day or so before December first, because I wouldn't have to hide the ring around the house. I wouldn't be spotted looking nervously at the top of the kitchen cupboards or in the attic. All I had to hide was a simple paper receipt. NINE DAYS LATER...Where the hell did I put that receipt? It's not on top of the kitchen cupboards. It's not in the attic. I'm hoping Leigh hasn't noticed that I occassionally open a drawer and rummage around and then close it and walk off again. Where is that reciept? Let me think. Ah...habbit is a fucking awful thing isn't it? Unless you're a nun on a cold day. Whenever I go to Stevenage, I visit HMV, CEX, Comic Book shop, Primark and come back with bags of shopping and pockets stuffed with receipts and train tickets and I always grab everything in my pockets and dump it straight into the bin at Welwyn North station. I have just thrown away a recipt for the most expensive single peice of jewelery I have ever purchased. On the one hand I hate what a fucktard I am. On the other hand, I'm so glad they didn't give me the ring that day and I hadn't put it in my pocket. Fortunately I warned the fella who phoned me to say the ring was ready that I'd done something stupid and got served by the same guy who had served me in the first place. I made sure to wear my Doctor Who scarf too, so he would remember it. I can't imagine he served many men in Doctor Who scarves. I can't imagine many men with Doctor Who scarves knitted by their mums are in long-term relationships with anyone but their mums to be honest, and that's from a guy whose got one.
So then the day itself comes around, and Leigh had to work on Sunday the 3rd which meant she got Friday off. Excellent news for my plan. Once again, advent calendars were a spanner in the works. Specifically the cat's advent calendar which contained catnip treats. As I prepared for the most romantic moment of my life, the cat got high as a kite and went absolutely mental at the crucial moment of asking, and began tearing around the house and jumping all over the furniture.
People keep asking if I was nervous. I wasn't really at first. I had planned what I was going to do and had a rough idea what I would say. We'd been to weddings a lot in the last couple of years and discussed this kind of thing and not to be unromantic about it, but I suspect 90% of men know what the answer will be when they propose. A relationship that's got to that stage is pretty close and hopefully you feel the same way about each other. So I asked the question and THEN started shaking. About halfway through "do you want to ma..." I thought...what if I'm in the 10% who don't know the answer to that question? And the question was asked. And the cat was mental. And there was tears. And she said "are you joking?" Which wasn't terribly reassuring. She asked if I was serious, she asked why, she said she was overwhelmed, all of which was very very very nice but none of which was definitively 100% "yes." Eventually like a less well paid John Humphries I pushed her for a definitive yes/no answer and got the one I was looking for. And I assume after all that hard work that's the end of the planning and big decisions and huge expenditue of honk...
As his time as head writer on Doctor Who comes to an end, it’s time to look back at a definitive*
ranking of Steven Moffat’s episodes. 10 of the best, and 5 of the worst.
*By definitive I mean ‘as chosen by me on this particular day, ask me tomorrow
and I may have a totally different opinion’
There’s a million of these on the internet already. But
Steven Moffat has been properly divisive. Anyone who runs a very popular show
on TV, especially as boldly as he has, for as long as he has, is going to split
opinion. There are many criticisms of his time in charge, and I’m sure some
will be glad that it’s over. I’ll address some of those complaints in doing
this list, but should state my personal opinion that I think he’s been bloody
brilliant. Not 100% of the time. But he’s written a lot, and I think he has a
decent track record.
Obviously as head writer he has been involved in the
commissioning, pitching, editing and rewriting of every episode since 2010, but
to qualify for this list, it has to be one of the 40 or so episodes on which he
is actually credited as the writer or a co-writer. For the record, as I write
this The Empress of Mars is the most recent
episode to air (so there will be a few more, including John Simm's return to consider later) and I included the mini-episodes that aired online or for
Children In Need – Night of the Doctor and Time-Crash both did well, but missed
out on the Top 10.
Here we go with the best:
10. Silence In The
Library/Forest of the Dead 2008. David Tennant, Catherine Tate
& Alex Kingston
A young girl called Cal dreams of a huge library. Her dad
calls a psychiatrist called Doctor Moon to come and speak to her about it. As
she describes the library that she sees when she closes her eyes, she gets very
agitated. There’s someone in her library. Someone’s trying to break in. In her mind,
in burst the Doctor and Donna.
The Doctor tells Donna that this is the biggest library in
the universe, it’s literally a whole planet artificially created to be a
library. But it’s very quiet, even for a Library. The whole place looks
abandoned. Until a group of archaeologists arrive led by Strackman Lux whose
family owned the library and Professor River Song (One of Who’s best lines:
“I’m a time traveller, I point and laugh at archaeologists”). River wants to
“do diaries” with the Doctor but soon realises he has no idea who she is. He’s
meeting her for the first time, but – wibbley wobbley – she’s met him before.
Doctor Moon tells the little girl that “the real world is a
lie, and your nightmares are real.”
River says the Library was abandoned many years ago, the
last message Earth received from the Library said “4022 saved, no survivors.”
Nobody knows what that means, but the Doctor soon discovers the alien threat in
the Library. “Nearly every species in the universe had an irrational fear of
the dark. But it’s not irrational. It’s the Vashta Nerrada.” Tiny creatures.
Living shadows that hunt in packs and can eat a person in seconds.
On the run from the Vashta Nerada, the Doctor tries to
transport Donna to safety back in the TARDIS but something goes wrong and Donna
never materialises, instead her face ends up on one of the creepy
statues/computers that are around the Library.
There’s a good mystery at the heart of this one, that is
difficult to work out but not impossible, all the info you need is right there.
Things that give the story an emotional weight also play to the intellectual
mystery story and vice-versa. The telepathic communications circuits that
capture a person’s last thoughts and get stuck on a loop when damaged are a
horrible idea and a real nasty motif when someone dies. Miss Evangelista trying
to get out her last thoughts after she died is heart-breaking, but then that
plays later into the story when you realise a character has been repeating
themselves and is, therefore, dead and has been replaced by Vashta Nerada in
his spacesuit.
Donna spends the second half of this episode living out an
alternative life in a fictional world that we glimpse on Cal’s TV and where
time works the way it does in a TV show (ie. You say you’re going to bed, you
immediately find yourself in your bedroom, just assume anything in your life
that would be cut out in the movie of your life doesn’t happen). With so much
going on, this is little more than a subplot that gives us a bit of information
to help with the mystery in the Library – especially when Doctor Moon turns up
– but it is so well done that you can get invested in it properly. The reveal
that everything’s fake when someone points out all the kids have the same face
is a good and nasty reveal and Catherine Tate proves to be a talented straight
actor in the scene where she loses her own kids.
This is the first time the Doctor meets River, but the last
time she meets him. While it was nice to get to know her and finally discover
her proper relationship with the Doctor in later episodes, this first
appearance is by far her most successful. She runs rings around the Doctor, and
it’s nice to see him on the back foot in this relationship, but her *spoilers*
death is still emotional, their relationship is nicely established in just 90
minutes. There are some clever slight of hand plot twists and Moffat’s classic
“the monster is already in the room” twist (more on that later). Also how
awesome is the bit where the Doctor says “I’m the Doctor and you’re in the biggest
library in the universe, look me up!” and the army of shadows starts
retreating?
9. The Magician’s
Apprentice/The Witches Familiar
2015. Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman
& Michelle Gomez
Steven Moffat writes the best opening sequences in all of
Doctor Who. Sometimes those involve a beautiful assault on the senses taking in
all of time and space, but the opening scene of series 9 is both smaller in
scale and absolutely huge simultaneously. We start with a little child lost in the
middle of a muddy battlefield, with ‘handmines’ (don’t worry for now)
surrounding him that might kill him if he moves. The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver
comes flying through the air as the hero music kicks in and it lands at the
little boy’s feet. Out of the fog and smoke, the Doctor calls to him and
promises to rescue him. The Doctor asks what the little boy’s name is and he
says “Davros. My name is Davros,” and then the Doctor is gone. Leaving a little
boy, alone, surrounded by handmines.
On Earth, the Doctor has sent his confession dial –
essentially his will – to his oldest friend – The Master – which will open and
reveal it’s contents in the event of his death. Realising that means something
serious - the Doctor actually believes he isn’t coming back from this one - The
Master recruits the Doctor’s companion Clara to go in search of him. Meanwhile
the Doctor is hiding in medieval England, from Colony Sarff, a henchman of Davros.
The Master, Clara and Colony Sarff all find the Doctor and
take him to Skaro to meet with a dying Davros.
In a way how could this episode fail? It’s like a greatest
hits. The Doctor vs The Daleks, Davros and the Master at the same time. And
although Capaldi brings a brilliant performance as always, it is the villains
who really steal the show in this one. Julian Bleach reprises his role as
Davros and brings more depth and vulnerability to it than we have ever seen
before. The best bit of any story with Davros in it is the few minutes where
the Doctor and Davros get a chance to sit down and have a chat. That goes right
back to Davros’ first appearance in Genesis
of the Daleks when after torturing the Doctor’s companions for information,
he asks the Doctor to sit with him and discuss things as scientists. In that first
episode Davros poses the question if the Doctor saw a child that would grow up
a terrible dictator could the Doctor kill that child? That is not lost on
Steven Moffat or Davros now we know the Doctor left him to die. Those few
minutes chat are the best bits in any Davros episode, so here Moffat delivers
essentially a whole episode of that. The other thing universally true of Davros
episodes is that the Daleks are always playing second fiddle to their creator.
That’s definitely the case here. With Davros, the Master and the really great
design and CGI work on Colony Sarff, the Daleks really feel like little more
than fancy guns. It’s all about the Doctor and Davros and there are some real
touching and sad moments between the two of them in this one.
With a very serious, ponderous Doctor, it’s up to Michelle
Gomez to pick up all the funny lines. In plot terms, she keeps Clara busy while
the Doctor is chatting, but some of those gags are great. “Davros is your arch
enemy? I’ll scratch his eye out!” This story establishes how unhinged her
version of the Master is. Crazy, unpredictable and completely amoral, she may
not do much in this one, but she still owns the screen.
There are some rushed bits at the end and more talk of this
hybrid I never cared much about, but how cool to have a whole 45 minute episode
based almost entirely around established characters? And that sunrise scene is
excellent.
8. The Impossible
Astronaut/The Day of the Moon 2011. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan,
Arthur Darvill & Alex Kingston
Series six gets off to a cracking start in this one. All of
our heroes are bought back together at Lake Silencio in Utah, where his friends
witness the Doctor being shot and killed by an unseen figure in a space suit
that came out of the lake. They burn his body on the lake in a Viking style
funeral.
Later, they meet the Doctor at an earlier/younger point in
his life. Keeping his future death secret they head to the White House in 1969,
where a scared little girl has called President Nixon because a spaceman is
trying to eat her. Meanwhile in the toilet Amy sees one of the Silence, and
then forgets it as soon as she looks away. The Doctor and his team – joined by former
FBI agent Canton – track the girl to Florida. Where Rory and River find a whole
group of Silence, and forget them as soon as they look away. While a spacesuit
– the one that killed the Doctor – comes towards The Doctor and Amy, sensing an
opportunity to save the Doctor’s life, shoots the spacesuit, only to see too
late that it’s occupant is a little girl.
Part 2 opens 3 months later with another really exciting
opening scene. Amy is on the run and Canton and the FBI are chasing her. She
had strange marks, like tallies, on her skin and a marker pen around her neck.
Canton shoots Amy. Across the country, he chases Rory also covered in makings
too and shoots him. And River Song is at the top of a New York tower block when
she encounters a couple of the Silence and takes a marker pen and adds them to
the tallies on her arm. She soon forgets them when Canton arrives threatening
to shoot her, to escape him she jumps out of the window.
At Area 51, the FBI are building an impenetrable box around
the Doctor, and the two body bags with Amy and Rory inside are bought in and
the prison is sealed with The Doctor and Canton inside. Once it’s closed and no
one can get in or out, Amy and Rory get up from pretending to be dead and they
escape in the invisible TARDIS, saving River halfway down the building.
The
Silence are everywhere. You can only remember them when you see them, and while
you’re looking at them you can be influenced by them, but as soon as you turn
your back you forget all about them. They’re a brilliantly scary idea for a monster and the look
of them is terrifying. They share some commonalities with the Weeping Angels
but there’s so much uniqueness in the idea that it’s never a problem. The way
some scenes are shot from a character’s perspective so you don’t actually see
the Silence, but you notice the tally marks on their arms is so well done and genuinely
creepy. Speaking of creepy, who doesn’t like an abandoned orphanage in a horror
story? Everybody, everybody hates that. They track the little girl to an
abandoned orphanage swarming with the Silence, where the owner has seen them
and forgotten them so much he has lost his mind. There’s thunderstorms,
messages in blood on the walls and Silence everywhere. One of the best scenes
has Amy walk into a room with no pen on her, and get to the other side
completely covered in tallies. Then she has to walk back through a room full of
them to escape.
Rory had been an on/off character
in the previous series but now he’s full-time and quickly establishes himself
as the best character. His fake-death scene at the start is the one we care the
most about, because he seems so much more vulnerable than the others, and so
much more normal! The companion should always be like a normal person that the
audience can relate to in this mad world, but any companion, by their second
series, is so used to the aliens, danger and facing death they lose a bit of
that relatability. Amy has by this point, Rory hasn’t and never does.
Throughout the whole series he holds the Doctor to account and never falls in
love with him as so many do. This episode he delivers a powerfully angry response
when his wife is kidnapped, does some proper comedy when he breaks a NASA model
and plays broken heartedness so well when he thinks Amy is talking about her
love for the Doctor (even though it’s painfully obvious to everyone in the
world, she’s talking about Rory). He is definitely the best of the regulars
here.
President Nixon is played for laughs by the American
magician from Jonathan Creek. A children’s TV program on Saturday tea-time
isn’t the time and place to go into the full complexities of Tricky Dicky, but
there are some funny allusions for grown-ups who like that sort of thing. Nixon
is a great comedy character who strolls into the strangest scenes with a sense
of pomposity and importance. The Doctor’s plan to stop the Silence is very
clever and uses their power against them. He hides a message that mankind will
forget but be influenced by in the “One small step for man…” speech that every
human being will see, telling them to kill the Silence on sight. It’s a really
clever bit of writing. One little idea I think they missed. They could have
done it “One small step for – you should kill us all on sight – man…” which
would have meant that Neil Armstrong never got his lines wrong, we just all
forgot it. How annoying would that be for Neil?
7. Heaven Sent/Hell
Bent 2015. Peter Capaldi & Jenna
Coleman
I decided in this countdown to
count any two-part episodes as one story. The reason I bring this up now is
because this story makes the Top 10, but to be honest 90% of the work is being
done by Heaven Sent (Part 1). (Arguably it’s a 3 part story with Face The Raven
as part 1, but y’know, lets keep it easy(ish)).
Heaven Sent is an absolutely stupid idea. It’s a
one-man-show with Peter Capaldi being the only speaking part (well, one line
from Jenna Coleman that’s imaginary anyway). In the previous episode The Doctor
has witnessed his companion die and finds himself transported to empty castle.
As he appears something else appears, a hunched, cloaked, grim reaper like
figure trudges through the castle towards him. Never speeding up, but never
slowing down and never stopping. The Veil is surrounded by flies and it’s
arrival is always effectively signalled by the sights and sounds of some flies
buzzing around before it appears. It’s not a villain as such. It doesn’t do
much, just walks towards the Doctor, but it’s an effective monster.
When it catches up to the Doctor he realises that if he confesses
a secret the whole castle rotates and changes layout so the Doctor can start
running again. He gives it a few confessions over the course of the episode,
but what it really wants to know about is the hybrid. The hybrid is an idea
mentioned throughout the series and a secret the Doctor is definitely not going
to share. If I’m honest, I don’t care about the hybrid – which probably
accounts for my not liking Hell Bent as much – but I do want to see the Doctor
survive and keep his secret. So the Doctor has to find another way out of this
prison/torture chamber that seems to have been created especially for him.
Luckily there has been a previous occupant whose skull is attached by wires to
some machinery in the transporter room and who appears to have written the word
‘bird’ in the sand in his dying moments. Not much of a clue to go on,
especially when nothing else makes sense.
Peter Capaldi is obviously the highlight here, showing every
facet of the Doctor. We get vulnerable, grief, anger, rage, detective, cunning,
cleverness, excitement, despair, depression and that complete unpredictability
we sometimes get with the twelfth Doctor. One particularly great scene sees him
throw a stool out of the window and then jump head first out behind it. We then
cut to him walking into the TARDIS in his ‘mind-palace,’ yes this is an idea
Moffat has borrowed from his Sherlock stories, but who doesn’t want a glimpse
into the mind of the Doctor? Perhaps the only real significant confession we
get from the Doctor is this mind-palace where he imagines he’s talking to
departed companion Clara because he needs to talk out-loud and show off to make
the magic happen and come up with the plans. The Doctor works out how to get
out of this as he hits the water and finds loads of skulls in the icy depths
under the sea.
The reveal will be worked out by some viewers but surprise
others. We get some truly bad-ass moments from the Doctor when he works out how
to get out without confessing the hybrid secret, but only after another great
scene where he contemplates giving up. We see some of the Doctor’s lowest
moments in his mind-palace and a really cool shot where all those lights in the
TARDIS go out one by one as he loses consciousness.
Hell Bent then is just a bit anticlimactic. The Doctor
arrives back on his homeworld of Gallifrey, where he’s wanted to be since the
show came back in 2005. The military are sent to kill the Doctor but they see
him as the hero of the Time War and so they drop their weapons and help him
overpower the Timelords and the president. The Timelords still want to know
about the hybrid, and the Doctor tells them that in order to answer their
questions he will need to consult with his friend Clara, so they pull her out
of time in the second before her final heartbeat, she is now living purely
between her penultimate and last heartbeat which is a beautiful and romantic
notion so don’t think about it coz it doesn’t work at all. They then go on the
run. The Doctor plans to wipe her memory to make it easier for her to hide
(somehow) but ends up wiping his own memory instead. He tells the story to a
waitress in a diner as he tries to piece together what he can about Clara, but
the one thing he can’t remember is her face. The waitress of course is Clara.
There’s some good stuff in this episode, it’s good to see
Gallifrey back, albiet too fleetingly and playing second fiddle to Clara and
Ashildr. There’s some allusions to classic westerns and the Doctor silently
staring down a firing squad is powerful. Massie Williams is good as she had
been 3 times before this series, I’m just not entirely sure why she’s here in
this one. I also have a new found love for the old plain-white TARDIS
interior of the classic show, which I always found dull until it was revived in
this episode in glorious HD.
I said my love for this story was 90% Part 1, to be honest a
further 8% is Jenna Coleman in a waitress outfit, and 2% is the initial
excitement of it being back on Galifrey. The second half is really not pulling
it’s weight here but Heaven Sent is so good. Part 1 would easily get in the Top
5 without Part 2.
6. A Christmas Carol Christmas Special 2010. Matt Smith,
Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill & Michael Gambon
I should declare an interest. I love a Christmas Carol by
Charles Dickens, with or even without Muppets. I have the book, and DVDs of the
Muppets version, Patrick Stewarts version, the Jim Carey Cartoon, the musical
with Kelsey Grammer (Yes, I don’t watch that one so much), the CD of Radio 4’s
I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Christmas Carol and two separate audiobook readings of
the novel (one by Who’s own Tom Baker). It’s one of the greatest time travel
stories ever told and I can’t believe it took 47 years for Doctor Who to do it’s take on it.
This is a great retelling of the story, that has a lot of
fun along the way and puts it’s own distinct Doctor Who spin on it. Michael Gambon is the Scrooge, in this
version called Kazran Sardick. He owns a machine that controls the cloud layer
above a planet. Amy and Rory are on their honeymoon aboard a spaceship that
gets caught in the planet’s atmosphere and will crash unless the Doctor can
convince Kazran to turn off the cloud machine.
When Kazran is unwilling, the Doctor takes on the role of
the ghost of Christmas past and travels back in time to Kazran’s troubled
childhood to give him a wonderful adventure. He tries to alter Kazran’s past to
make him grow up a better man. When Kazran’s school was attacked by the fish
that live in the clouds, Kazran wasn’t there so the Doctor tries to bring the
fish into his bedroom, but unfortunately overshoots and they end up fighting a
shark in Kazran’s bedroom. (This is years before the seminal classic
‘Sharknado’ dealt with the issue of flying Sharks). The Doctor and Kazran
realise that a woman’s singing calms the shark. In the vault under his house
are loads of people frozen in stasis chambers that Kazran’s father takes as a
deposit – when he gives a family a loan, he takes a family member to freeze in
stasis until it’s paid back. The Doctor tells Kazran he hopes he doesn’t grow
up like his dad. They wake up Abigail (Katherine Jenkins) and go off with her
for an adventure in the TARDIS. Every Christmas Eve as Kazran grows up the
Doctor returns and the three of them have another adventure. Michael Gambon has
a thankless task of sitting in a dark room, as new memories form in his head,
it’s a strange thing to act, but Gambon does it well.
The Doctor, Kazran and Abagail go on a series of fun little
adventures. As Kazran gets older and becomes a teenager, he and Abagail begin
to fall in love. Kazran gets to see how the other half live, when they spend
Christmas Eve with Abagail’s poor family – the Crotchett’s of this story. But
when she went into the ice, Abagail was dying. After a few years, she has just
one day left to live. Kazran is angry and sends the Doctor away.
Next up it’s Amy’s turn as the Ghost of Christmas Present.
She uses holographic technology to show Kazran what’s going on inside the
crashing ship. Everyone is singing Christmas carols because they’ve been told
it will calm the clouds. It isn’t working but no one has told them so that they
wont give up hope. Amy makes an impassioned plea for their lives.
Back in the vault, an even more bitter Kazran tells the
Doctor he wont save the lives of the people on the ship, because he simply
doesn’t care. But the Doctor has got a surprise up his sleeve when he takes on
the role of the ghost of Christmas future. The ghost of Christmas future twist
is all-of-the-feels. I did not see it coming, it’s perfect for the moment, one
of the best twists in Doctor Who and
something only Steven Moffat would come up with. It’s also Gambon’s best scene.
This is as funny and poignant as any version of Christmas
Carol should be. I especially enjoyed the long scene at the start where the
Doctor comes down the chimney and is in full Doctor-fast-talking-mode. He runs
around the room, having fun, quickly establishing any exposition that needs
doing. It’s a great comedic foil for grumpy old Gambon to play off, and given
that there’s probably a load of people who only see the Christmas episodes,
it’s a good introduction to the new lead. Matt Smith is on form here and gets
opportunities to play the fool throughout. Gambon plays Scrooge wonderfully
sincerely no matter what the script throws at him. Katherine Jenkins is very
good as the singing bits. Her character is a little too dull to be honest but
perhaps that’s because Jenkins doesn’t display a great deal of acting range.
That’s my only quibble with this one.
As we hit the half way
mark: lets look at the 5 worst Steven Moffat episodes
5th Worst.
The Wedding of River Song 2011. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan,
Arthur Darvill & Alex Kingston
Let me start by saying this: the opening 5 minutes of this
episode are the absolute best of Doctor
Who. The best. Some of the finest Doctor
Who you will ever see.
The episode opens with a shot of a steam train coming out of
a tunnel through the middle of the Gherkin on tracks in the sky. There are cars
flying on hot air balloons on their way to work. In a park, kids playing are
interrupted by an attack of pterodactyls. As a Roman centurion waits at the
traffic lights he reads on a newspaper that the War of the Roses has entered
it’s second year. On TVs in a shop window, BBC Breakfast is on as Bill Turnball
asks Charles Dickens (Simon Callow) if he thinks he can top last year’s
Christmas special (“All I can say now, is it involves ghosts in the past, and
the present and the future, all at the same time”). On the other channel a
different newsreader says “Crowds lined the mall as the holy Roman emperor
Winston Churchill returned to the Buckingham Senate on his personal mammoth.” A
Silurian doctor is giving Churchill a check-up while he talks about his affairs
with Cleopatra. He asks the Silurian what time it is. It’s 5:02. Churchill
responds “It’s always two minutes past five. Day or night. It’s always two
minutes past five in the afternoon. Why is that? And the date is always 22nd
April. Does that not bother you?” “The date and the time have always been the
same.” Churchill asks to see the soothsayer. A dishevelled man in chains is
dragged in. Long hair, unshaven. “Tick tock, goes the clock as the old song
says. But they don’t. The clocks never tick. Something has happened to time.
That’s what you say what you never stop saying. All of history is happening at
once. But what does that mean? What happened? Explain to me in terms that I can
understand. What happened to time?” The soothsayer looks up. It’s The Doctor.
He says: “A woman.”
In fact there are many great moments in this episode. The
moment where Amy Pond takes her brutal murderous revenge on the woman who
kidnapped her and stole her daughter is awesome. Also anything where all the
characters walk around in eyepatches and wearing either black or tweed meets
with my approval. That’s just a rule I have for how to make good drama. Oh and
I just remembered the Doctor trying to flirt “She’d love to meet up for texting
and scones.”
So how does an episode so good end up on the list of the
worst? Well firstly, it says a lot about Steven Moffat’s writing that I rate an
episode with so much going for it so badly against his other work. But also,
all these great moments really don’t come together. And the series finale
brings the whole series together badly. The 22nd of April is when
the first episode of series 6 aired, and at 5:02 the Doctor was shot and killed
at Lake Silencio in Utah (see best episodes list). Now we learn that River Song
was put into the spacesuit and forced to kill the Doctor, but she over powered
the suit and her conditioning to save the Doctor. Sadly a paradox was created
and all of time and space was damaged. The Doctor now needs to touch River to
short-circuit the timeline and take himself back to the lake and die to restore
history.
For one thing, even the most convoluted Bond villain would
stop and go “wait, that’s your plan? Kidnap his friends’ daughter and have her
kill him? That’s your best plan? I mean you have guns! Just shoot him mate, or
at least put someone who actually wants to kill him in the suit.” Series 6 was
split in two down the middle to make room for Torchwood series 4 to air. So episode 1 was shown in April, this
was shown in October. That’s six months of trying to solve this mystery.
Obviously the Doctor will survive, but how? In the end though we didn’t really
have a chance. Spoilers: Earlier in the series we saw a spaceship called The
Teselecter which could disguise itself as a person with a crew of tiny people
inside. That ship turns up again in this one and ultimately the Doctor hides
inside it and it’s the spaceship disguised as the Doctor that is shot, not the
Doctor. Except that they actively tell us that isn’t how he did it. The captain
of the ship asks if he can help and the Doctor says no. The scene cuts away.
Later in flashback, we would see the Doctor come back and say yes. That’s not a
twist. That’s just lying to the viewers. It needn’t be blatant. Maybe in the
episode with the Teselecta earlier in the series it could ask if there was
anything it could do to help and the Doctor says “there is one thing…” and it
gets all ambiguous. River trusts the Doctor when she sees the inside of the
spaceship and a little Doctor when she looks into his eyes. But again the
audience aren’t given the opportunity to work that out. As it’s their wedding a
simple line like “River, I need you to look
me in the eyes and tell me you love me” and River suddenly trusting him
would have given us a clue. Me and some Who-fan friends sat up late one night
discussing theories and trying to solve the mystery only for it to turn out we
didn’t really have a chance. The fact that the Lake Silencio scenes are shot on
green screen instead of at the actual lake suggests they didn’t know they were
going to be filming there again when they did the first episode. It feels a bit
like they were winging it. The Silence were such a good concept for a monster
and looked terrifying so it’s sad that they are so ineffectively used in this
episode and not involved in the twist.
Oh but I just remembered the bit where the Doctor learns
that his old companion the Brigadier has died, as a tribute to the actor who
had died in real life. I can never hate this episode, because about every 5
minutes there’s a really cool bit, but all together it’s a bit of a let-down.
4th Worst.
The Husbands of River Song Christmas Special 2015. Peter Capaldi, Alex Kingston & Matt Lucas
This Christmas special sees River Song become the Doctor's proper companion - although many would argue she already counted as a companion, she was always alongside someone else playing the main companion of the time - and the introduction of future companion Nardole played by Matt Lucas.
The Doctor arrives on the human colony Mandolax Dellora (prepare yourselves, this episode is packed full of unlikely and rather silly sci-fi names) where Nardole mistakes him for the sugeon his boss River Song called for. River - The Doctor's Wife (see above) - has called for a surgeon to help her with her husband, who turns out to be a giant cyborg called King Hyrdroflax. King Hydroflax has a diamond burried in his head that River wants to remove and sell. When Hydroxflax learns of her plans he removes the head and sends his body to kill her. In the ensuing struggle the Doctor steals the head and they make an escape. River at this point doesn't know who the Doctor is because she's never seen him with Peter Capaldi's face. River steals the TARDIS and heads to a ship filled with criminals to try and sell the diamond. She realises that she's been double crossed by buyers loyal to King Hydroflax, but planned for it. As the ship is hit by a meteor strike and crash lands on the planet Darillium, something she knew would happen when she arranged the time of the meeting.
Being from the Doctor's future River Song has the upper-hand on the Doctor and can often run rings around him. When we first see her in Silence In The Library this involves her hinting at things to come and being disappointed the Doctor isn't as powerful and great as she knows he will one day be. It's an interesting dynamic. And on her second appearance she pilots the Doctor's TARDIS better than him, finishes his sentences and seems to know more about the Doctor - it's a good way to show she's got the upper-hand again and over the next couple of series that dynamic gradually shifted as the Doctor started to know more about her than she did about him.
In The Husbands of River Song though, we're straight back to the River we first saw in Silence In The Library and The Time of Angels which is appropriate to when the story is set, but it does make her extremely smug. She is a smug know-it-all whose familiarity and cockiness around the Doctor is actually just rude and disrespectful. She is really hard to like in this episode, which wouldn't be a problem were she not the main companion. Her role includes a responsibility to be the eyes and ears of the viewer, and she's difficult to like here. Also the joke that she doesn't know who the Doctor is goes on far too long.
The rest of the episode is pure Panto. The plot feels more at home in a series of Red Dwarf than in Doctor Who. Though in it's defence, you should remember this is a Christmas Day episode. It's created for a full-up, tipsy audience distracted by a sack full of colourful new toys. It's also - if my home is anything to go by - being watched by family members who only see Doctor Who once a year when they're forced to. I bet those people were grateful for a silly knockabout with Greg Davies doing his 'head in a bag' routine instead of some excellent two hour dialogue about the origins of the Mondosian Cybermen. Greg Davies is excellent comedy value, but no more threatening as a big scary robot than he is as host of Taskmaster, meaning the main alien of the show isn't really a threat this week. Matt Lucas also scores some good lines as Nardole, but at the time he wrote this Moffat wasn't planning on making Nardole a regular character (that only happened when he saw how good Matt Lucas was) and so the characterisation is a little thin on the ground here, but the jokes are good.
Finally, a word on the ending, the Doctor takes River to the singing towers of Darillium, which is a reference to the moment in Forest of the Dead where she says "you turned up on my doorstep with a new haircut and a suit. The towers sang and you cried," because he knew it was the last time he would see her before she went to the Library where she died, and the Doctor gives her the sonic screwdriver she had in that story. It's a sweet moment, but completely shifts the pace and tone in a direction the episode didn't need. Some Who fans will be glad to have that gap filled in, but it didn't feel like we needed it. Also, remember those people who only watch once a year at Christmas? This scene relies on you remembering in 2015, something mentioned in a mid-season episode from 2008, otherwise it's just two people having dinner for ten minutes after the story has rounded up. It has nothing to do with the King Hyrdoflax/Head-in-a-bag gags that we've seen 50 minutes of before it. A nice moment but it could have been a seperare mini-sode online or for the DVD (in fact they already did it as a bonus feature on the series 6 DVD) but here it's just emotional baggage after 50 minutes of silly fun.
3rd Worst.
Time-Heist (Co-written with Steve
Thompson)
2014. Peter Capaldi & Jenna Coleman
This one was co-written with Steve Thompson, the answer to
the pub quiz question “who’s the other writer on Sherlock?” And to it’s credit
is a pretty decent mystery. It’s a middle-of-the-road, middle-of-the-season
episode from Peter Capaldi’s first year as the Doctor. The Doctor, Clara, and
two other people wake up in a dark room and appear to have consented to having
their memories erased. The Doctor, Clara, Psi (a human enhanced with technology
who has lost some memories as a result) and Saibra (a shapeshifter who turns
into whoever she touches) are given a mission by a strange unseen man
instructing them to break into the vault of the most secure bank in the
universe. The bank is guarded by a creature called the Teller that can
literally take people’s minds, so the stakes are high.
The Doctor guesses that
their memories have been erased so that the Teller can’t probe their minds and
work out what they are trying to do. They are given six devices that appear to
be suicide devices that cause the user to disintegrate. Over the course of the
episode both Psi and Saibra are forced to use their devices, The Doctor even
tells Saibra to use hers because it will be a less painful death. This plays
into the series’ “Am I A Good Man?” theme, with Clara questioning why he isn’t
more fazed by this, which might be the episodes main failing. I know they were
trying to create this grey area with Peter Capaldi – is he a good man? – but it
felt like this episode really went to effort to establish the fact that the
Doctor can be nasty sometimes. It had already been the main theme of the first
two episodes of the season and is explored much more subtly elsewhere. By this
point in the season it just felt like overkill. Eventually the Doctor discovers
two of the items they are sent to get. One contains Psi’s original missing
memories, the other contains a medicine that will help Saibra keep one shape.
The main vault is sealed, but when solar flares cause power failures the Doctor
uses the opportunity to get through the door. He realises this has been planned
by someone who knew that would happen at that exact moment. Inside he is
captured by head of security Ms. Delphox and discovers she is a clone of the
banks owner Madame Karavaxos. The Doctor tries to free the Teller realising it
is a prisoner here attacking people against their will. Psi and Saibra turn up
revealing the disintegration devices were transporters. When he realises he has
six of them, the Doctor works out that the Teller isn’t the only one he is
meant to save, and the Teller is only doing their evil bidding because they
have his wife prisoner too. He saves them both but before he teleports out of
there he gives Madame Karavaxos his phone number and says to call if she has
regrets when she gets older. Meaning she was the one who gave them their
mission and the Doctor deposited the items for Psi and Saibra in the bank to
convince them to help him.
It’s part Hustle – certainly very stylish – part Oceans 11,
part Wizard of Oz. It’s pull-back-reveal twist is very good but benefits from a
second watching to work it all out. A little too much time is spent discussing
how trustworthy the Doctor is and every time they tried to make the Doctor less
likeable this series, I found myself liking him more, in a kind of Breaking Bad
way. Maybe it’s because it made him a more interesting character, or maybe it’s
Stockholm syndrome from years of watching Malcolm Tucker. There’s also very
little room for red herrings or any bits of fun outside the main mystery. This
makes for a tightly plotted episode but one that lacks any real stand-out
moments. Although I’m sure the Teller makes a good action figure and the
collapsing skulls is particularly grim.
2nd Worst.
The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe Christmas Special 2011. Matt Smith,
Claire Skinner, Karen Gillan & Arthur Darvill
The Doctor owes Madge Arwell a favour after she helped him
when he crashed to Earth. Shortly before Christmas Madge receives a telegram
saying that her husband Reg (Alexander Armstrong) – a fighter pilot – is
missing presumed dead after his plane was shot down in the war. They get away
from London for the Christmas period going to a mad old uncle’s house, which
the Doctor has made into a huge fun house for the Children, with a special
present under the tree. Madge hasn’t told the children the news yet so as not
to ruin Christmas for them and the Doctor plans to give them the best Christmas
ever. The present is a portal to the wintry forest where the trees are alive –
I mean all trees are alive, but you know the trees are aliens. Maurice can’t
resist and goes through the night before Christmas and gets lost. Forcing the
others to go and look for him. The trees are looking for a pilot to help them
escape the planet and Maurice unwittingly becomes that pilot. Meanwhile
deforesters are planning to drop acid rain on the forest to melt it down and
absorb it’s energy as a power source.
The deforesters are played by Bill Bailey, Paul Bazely and
Arabella Weir who are all, of course, hilarious and their scenes – together
with the Doctor’s tour of the house – are definitely the highlight of this
episode. But sadly no-one would feel threatened by them. The tree’s don’t speak
except through the mouth of other characters they possess. They look like
wooden weeping angels, but don’t really have an agenda and aren’t very
threatening. They’re wooden in every sense of the word (sorry).
Eventually Madge wishes really hard that they’ll get home
(there’s some fantasy jargon about time streams and vortexes here that I might
forgive in a stronger story) and they get home.
Finally as Madge prepares to have that serious discussion
with her kids, the Doctor discovers that she was distracted by thoughts of
being reunited with her husband when she was wishing hard and his plane was
caught in the time vortex and bought home with them. Now nobody wants to see
the host of Pointless die on
Christmas Day, so I will cut them some slack (second last, it would so be worst
if it wasn’t Christmas!) but what was the point in this episode if he doesn’t
die? It’s not a punch-the-air moment, it’s not even that joyous.
Finally, I hate Maurice. Sorry. Everything in this episode
is his fault and I can’t stand the little boy actor who plays him. Sorry.
Worst. The Angels
Take Manhatten 2012. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan,
Arthur Darvill & Alex Kingston
Oh this one. It should have had everything going for it. The
departure of Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill, who had played popular characters
since their introduction in 2010, the return of the most iconic modern series
monsters, the Weeping Angels, and a guest appearance from Mike McShane. But
somewhere it all goes wrong. None of those great things come together. Mike
McShane is a member of Paul Merton’s Impro Chums – one of the best live comedy
shows in the UK in my humble opinion – a brilliant comedian, great improviser
and singer, none of which is put to any use in a forgettable and totally
straight role.
The episode deals with a situation where the Doctor realises he
is powerless to prevent his companions’ fate because he’s already read it in a
book and if that book isn’t published it would create a paradox. They get
caught up in a Weeping Angel plot to send people back in time and live off
their potential energy in some kind of “battery-farm” where Rory sees himself
die as an old man. Rory realises that if he kills himself as a young man, it
will create a paradox and the whole building and Weeping Angels within it will
cease to exist, but Amy refuses to let him die alone and they jump off the roof
together.
The Doctor, Amy, Rory and River find themselves all alive
and back in the TARDIS in the present day. The TARDIS is in a grave yard and
Rory spots his name on a gravestone. Suddenly a Weeping Angel appears and zaps
Rory back in time to the 1930s. Amy is left staring at the Weeping Angel which
can only move when she’s not looking at it. She makes her goodbyes and looks
away so that she can be zapped into the past and join her husband and her name
also appears on the grave stone.
The problem is, while I think he’s a great writer, this
episode breaks one of the most important rules that anyone with half an English
lesson can tell you ‘show-don’t-tell.’ When Amy and Rory are sent back in time
at the end, the Doctor says he can never go back to that point in time, but
without ever giving us a satisfying reason why. He can’t stop it because he’s
seen their graves and that creates a paradox, but Rory just created a paradox
moments before and instead of ending up as a pizza on the pavement, they all
just went home, so what’s the big deal? We're told that Rory jumping off the building and creating a paradox will kill the Angels and we just have to go with that. Also in the series finale, a few months
later, we would see the Doctor’s own grave and then obviously that had to be
undone, so this rule seems to apply only in this episode. Amy and Rory stopped
travelling with the Doctor briefly at the end of The God Complex when the
Doctor sends them away so he wont have to deal with them dying at some point,
Amy is heartbroken but Rory thanks him. It’s a much better ending. In the
episode right before this, The Doctor moves in with Amy and Rory, Amy has been
asked to be a bridesmaid and Rory is offered a great new job, they have to
decide whether to stay or travel with the Doctor again. Both of these are more
satisfying than this episode which has so many plot holes and unanswered
questions that it makes you certain if the Doctor hadn’t been grumping and
moaning about how unfair his life was for 45 minutes he could have done
something.
Back to the best now
and here’s the top 5 Steven Moffat stories.
5. The Pandorica
Opens/The Big Bang 2010. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan,
Arthur Darvill & Alex Kingston
Remember when I mentioned that no one does the opening five
minutes of an episode better than Steven Moffat? This is one of those. This is
one that spans all of time and space and takes us back to various locations
we’ve seen throughout the series. In France 1890, Van Gogh (Episode 10s big
guest star) is screaming and having a breakdown and his latest painting is
described as “even worse than his usual rubbish.” In London 1941, that same
picture has been discovered and bought to Winston Churchill (Episode 3s guest
star) because “it’s obviously a message and you can see who it’s for.”
Churchill gets on the blower to River Song in Stormcage prison in 5145 (where
she was held in episode 4). She break out and goes to the Starship UK where she
steals a painting from the royal gallery of Queen Liz 10 (location and guest
star from episode 2). Meanwhile the Doctor is going to see a cliff-face on
which the oldest message in the universe is written. It says “hello sweetie”
and some co-ordinates. The Doctor follows them to Roman Britain, where he meets
“Cleopatra” (River) who shows him a painting of the TARDIS exploding.
That’s just the opening five minutes. This is where Doctor Who presents it’s theory for what
Stonehenge is. Underneath Stonehenge is a box called the Pandorica, a myth said
to contain “a goblin, or a trickster or a warrior, a nameless terrible thing,
the most feared being in the cosmos,” and this box – obviously a reference to
Pandora’s – was built to be the perfect prison for it. Impossible to open from
the inside. It even keeps the prisoner alive so it can’t even get out by dying.
It’s being guarded by an old, damaged, one armed Cyberman
but it’s not long before all the Doctor’s worst enemies turn up in orbit around
Earth – Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, the Sycorax, the weird guy with a blowfish
for a head from Torchwood – all the costumes and CGI monsters from storage come
out for a cameo as the Doctor faces the biggest army he’s ever seen. And even
manages to keep them all away with a really epic speech (“remember every black
day I ever stopped you”) of the kind that Matt Smith did so well. Elsewhere
Rory is back from the dead. But having been completely erased from ever
existing a few weeks ago, Amy has no memory of him. River has taken the TARDIS
and ended up at Amy’s house, where she finds out all the Romans helping the
Doctor are fictional, in a book Amy read as a kid. Her bookmark is a photo of
Rory, meaning he too isn’t real. They’re Autons!
As the TARDIS is pulled off course by an unknown force, the
Doctor is surrounded by Autons and the Pandorica starts to open. Spoilers. The box is empty. The
Pandorica is a prison built to hold the Doctor. It’s a good twist, that I
really should have seen coming. All his enemies have got together to lock him
away.
Russell T Davies gradually increased the scale of the
cliff-hangers in his finales, and Steven doesn’t take a step backwards. With
Amy remembering who Rory is just before his Auton programing kicks in and he
shoots her. The TARDIS is exploding and it will destroy the whole universe, the
only person who can stop it is locked up inside the ultimate prison, and the
camera zooms out to show every star in the Universe exploding simultaneously.
It is huge! But packed with emotion, particularly in Amy and Rory’s story, that
keeps the story grounded in it’s characters.
Part 2, sees all of history collapsing around them. The
Pandorica has been moved to a museum with increasingly few exhibits. As have
some fossilised Daleks. There’s a lot of time-travel and jumping around to deal
with here, but it’s worth paying attention to because it is very cleverly
plotted.
The Doctor – to steal a phrase from Red Dwarf, which I think best explains it – is going to “jump start
the second big bang” by flying the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS and
restoring the universe and the timeline.
This episode is a perfect summary of the eleventh Doctor’s
“mad-man with a box” description. It’s his first episode with a fez, and his
very clever complicated plan sees him running around like mad, but always in
control. But it’s the quieter moments that really sell this episode. The Doctor
reuniting Amy with the mum and dad she never had feels as important to everyone
as rebooting the universe. Rory refusing to leave Amy’s side is the first of
many awesome moments for him. And the Doctor’s bedside story to the young
Amelia before he ceases to exist, is a beautiful scene, it’s emotional but more
restrained on the weepiness than all of David Tennant’s finales – not
criticising those, but it is a welcome change.
Of course, it all ends with a big wedding and that story the
Doctor told Amy as a child contains all the clues she needs to bring him back,
with a simple idea that’s hidden in code. It’s a big episode that finds time
for the smaller moments, and references all the episodes in the series before
it. Usually the penultimate episode is a lot better than the last because the
last has to fix the mess the penultimate caused. Here the second half is no
hanger-on. The whole thing is over-flowing with cleverness – it even reveals an
earlier continuity error spotted by pedantic fans like me, was no such thing.
Pay attention and this episode will reward you.
Plus, of course, I have the Van Gogh painting on my wall,
because it’s a beautiful thing.
4. The Empty
Child/The Doctor Dances 2005. Christopher Eccleston, Billie
Piper & John Barrowman
This is Steven Moffat’s first proper Doctor Who script – not counting the brilliant 1999 Comic Relief
spoof episode The Curse of Fatal Death
– it’s also sadly the only time he wrote for Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor.
This one is a period piece set during the Second World War.
Something dangerous has come crashing down to London with a very loud bang and
the Doctor is looking for that particular needle in a very large haystack.
There’s a genuinely creepy monster in the form of a small child with a gas mask
over his face asking “Are you my mummy?” It’s nice to have an episode that
isn’t built around an ‘alien’ as such, although there are a lot of questions
that need raising about this child. The Doctor and Rose separate. The Doctor
meets Nancy, a young lady looking after a bunch of children living rough who
didn’t get evacuated. Nancy and the kids are straight from a Dickens novel.
Nancy is the really important character here, but you can’t help but love all
of the kids’ personalities in the short time we spend with them too. That’s
true across this whole two-part story, even the smallest speaking roles reveal
something of a personality however briefly they appear. The owners of the house
Nancy robs get some character comedy moments and Dr Constantine (Richard
Wilson) has some backstory but only two scenes (“Before this war, I was a
father and a grandfather, now I’m neither but I’m still a doctor”). Everyone
the little boy touches becomes like him, with a gas mask welded to their face
and a scar on the back of their hand. “Physical injury as plague” is an
intriguing original idea that shows a first, brand-new series where the team
are having great fun experimenting. It also created a zombie like crowd with
super-human strength looking for their mummies. Terrifying. “There isn’t a
little boy in the world who wouldn’t tear the world apart to find it’s mummy.
This one can.”
Rose has got herself stuck to a barrage balloon during an
air-raid in a union Jack T-Shirt. She is rescued by the dashing and handsome Captain
Jack Harkness – a former time agent turned conman – and the rest is pretty much
history there. Jack is the stereotypical cool sci-fi hero, with a proper
spaceship, ray gun, all the gadgets and a long flowing hero coat. The second
half of this story deals with the Doctor’s jealousy as his not-so-cool
weirdness is challenged by a much more conventional leading man, (When Jack
pulls out his sonic blaster and asks what the Doctor has “it’s sonic ok, does
it matter?”) Ultimately the Doctor’s brains save the day with the help of a
little of Jack’s brawn.
The gas mask zombies are creepy, and there’s a brilliant
cliff-hanger to part 1 that is resolved a week later, not with action, but with
a really solidly funny joke at the start of part 2. Nobody could be disappointed
with the joke resolution in part 2, but in case you are, don’t worry because
the joke comes back to bite the Doctor, Rose and Jack in the arse in a great
scene later. There follows a spoiler for
how they get out of the cliff hanger: The Doctor and co are listening to a
tape recording of the child being questioned, answering “Are you my mummy?” to
any question. The Doctor and his companions are chatting and they realise that
the tape finished about a minute ago but the voice is still speaking and they
turn round to see the child standing there. Moffat does this reveal that the
baddie is in the room already so well in many of his episodes. Its really
scary. In the Girl in the Fireplace a broken clock hides a clockwork robot in
the room, the Vashta Nerrada steal space suits and characters start repeating
themselves and everything about the Silence is basically screaming “the baddie
is already in the room!” It’s a Steven Moffat favourite and it’s particularly
effective here.
Every character gets a mix of funny and serious stuff to
deal with, but on the whole it’s a light hearted episode that’s full of hope
and ends on a purely joyous moment, probably the happiest Christopher Eccleston
has ever appeared on screen – a real departure for him. There’s not a word
wasted in this script and if you put all the clues together you should work out
what’s going on. It’s a straight forward mystery by Moffat’s standards, but
compelling.
3. The Eleventh Hour 2010. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan &
Arthur Darvill
Matt Smith’s debut is the most confident – both in the
writing and acting – of any new Doctor.
Following on from one of the most popular Doctor’s and the
departure of the writer who bought this show back from the dead, Moffat and
Smith had a lot of pressure here. But after this first hour viewers would be
asking “Who? Russell Tennant and David T Davies? Did they used to be in this?”
That’s an exaggeration but it hits the ground running. But that said, it
shouldn’t feel so speedy, because the whole first 20 minutes is a two-hander:
The Doctor and new companion Amy (mostly as a child). It’s an inventive way for
us to meet the new Doctor and companion and gets a lot of information through
about both characters. And while it takes a bit of time to get to the monster,
that’s not important this week and nobody would think it was dragging.
A prisoner with shapeshifting abilities has escaped through
a crack in time and space and it’s guards are coming to get it. If the Doctor
can’t find and return prisoner zero to the aliens, planet Earth will be
incinerated. The Doctor has no TARDIS, no Sonic Screwdriver and just 20 minutes
to save the world. The new Doctor is still finding himself. It’s a quirky
performance, and Matt Smith wearing the tattered remains of David Tennant’s
costume gives it all a bit of a shambolic quality, but after Tennant’s final
episodes went very bleak and he went a bit god-like, it’s nice to have a
back-to-basics rambling fun adventure story.
The Doctor and Amy are on screen – together – virtually the
whole time. And Rory is bought in too. There’s a “complex” relationship between
them, especially when it leaks that Amy considered the “Raggedy Doctor” an
imaginary friend and made Rory dress up as him. Amy is a mix of emotions:
loving the adventure, angry that the Doctor screwed with her life, embarrassed
by everything around her. All her family and friends seem to reveal more
embarrassing things about her.
There’s a fun cameo from Sir Patrick Moore as the Doctor
joins an international conference call of NASA experts. The Doctor has a clever
plan, putting together Rory’s phone which he swiped earlier and the team of
experts hacking all the computers in the world. A final highlight of the
episode comes after the Doctor has saved the day, and he calls the Atraxi back
to Earth to have a go at them. As he strolls confidently down a corridor, he
steals his new costume, and gives the Atraxi a piece of his mind in what is the
first of Matt Smith’s big powerful “I am the Doctor” speeches. As the faces of
all his previous incarnations flash up and Matt Smith steps through, with his
bow-tie on, for the first time in full costume, it’s a really powerful moment
and leaves you in no doubt the show is in good hands for the next few years.
Plus there’s a nice reveal in the last second of the
episode.
2. Blink 2007. David Tennant, Freema Agyeman
& Carey Mulligan
Of course this was going to be near the top of the list! Of
course! It’s the episode that bought us the Weeping Angels, who are obviously
the most iconic monsters of the new series and gave the world future Oscar
nominee Carey Mulligan.
At the time, Doctor
Who were doing a Doctor-Lite episode each series. One where David Tennant
wasn’t in it much to free him up to work overtime on other episodes. Moffat was
originally supposed to write the Dalek two-parter earlier in the series but had
to pull out so took this one as a punishment (the previous year’s Doctor-lite
episode had not been well received).
This one delivers the bare-minimum of Doctor, but just
enough to hook you into the episode. It’s a haunted house episode in which
Carey Mulligan’s character Sally Sparrow goes to explore an empty house, and
finds a message written under the wallpaper. A message for her, from the Doctor
in 1969. The Doctor has been trapped in 1969 with the TARDIS still in 2007.
He’s carefully left clues for Sally to find including a strange DVD bonus
feature, in which he appears to have half a conversation.
We quickly get into the characters of Sally and her friends.
There’s some nice little jokes and bits of business between Sally and her
friend Kathy, who is touched by a Weeping Angel and finds herself in Hull
decades ago. Her transportation is skilfully written. Kathy’s really creepy
grandson turns up with a letter explaining what happened, while it’s still in
the process of happening. Sally meets DI Billy Shipton and there’s an instant
attraction there until he’s sent back in time too. The next time Sally meets
him, he’s old and dying in hospital, and Carey Mulligan has to act alongside
two different actors in the same role. She and they, and the writing, sell them
as the same person and – despite only having one scene each – give his death a
poignancy.
The Doctor may not be present but he makes his presence
felt, he feels like he’s masterminding everything. When Billy goes back in time
he meets the Doctor it’s almost exactly the half way point of the show, just
when we would start to get bored if he didn’t turn up. And his Doctor Who daft quirks are dialled all
the way up to 11 to make him the most Doctor-ish he could possibly be. All of
which makes for a great episode before you even consider how good the Weeping
Angels actually are. They’re statues when you look at them and that’s
maintained for the audience, we never see them move either. It makes the
ordinary scary which all the best Doctor Who does.
Can you guess what won?
1. The Day of the
Doctor 2013. Matt Smith, David Tennant,
Jenna Coleman, Billie Piper, Jon Hurt (+ Tom Baker & Peter Capaldi)
This is the big one. The 50th Anniversary
Special. I know from reading interviews that this one drove Moffat mad with
worrying but it totally pays off in a great celebration of Doctor Who.
This is full of nods to the past and in-jokes but really is
just another, slightly more important, episode that stands up in it’s own right,
and moves the overall story of Doctor Who
along.
A first thing to note is that Steven Moffat attempted to woo
Christopher Eccleston into returning, but he declined. While I would have loved
to see Christopher Eccleston back, the way they got around this by bringing in
John Hurt as a previously secret version of the Doctor was not just a good bit
of publicity but became the heart of this episode. For the most part the
War-Doctor’s story is what holds this episode together. He has had enough of the
Time War and has stolen the ultimate weapon to end it all, but is given a
chance to see what he will become if he uses it.
Matt Smith is on form here too. Although John Hurt is
well…John Hurt, and much of the story is from his perspective, and David Tennant
is so popular with the fans, Matt Smith has enough charisma to remind everyone
that this is still his show at the moment.
Although it centrally revolves around an old pacifist,
turned warrior, contemplating a double genocide, it’s pretty much a light
hearted romp from start to finish. There’s a sense that everyone is having fun
making this. It’s packed full of jokes and references for fans of all ages. The
biggest joke pay-off is the tenth Doctor’s relationship with Queen Elizabeth I,
a running joke first established in 2007, that here becomes a massive plot
point.
When the three Doctors meet up, they have a combative
relationship, starting with a joke about the sizes of their respective sonic
screwdrivers, but become quick friends and find common ground more than
differences. David Tennant is slightly more weighed down in the guilt and the
anger at what John Hurt’s Doctor stands for. Matt Smith is a few hundred years
on and recovered a bit more. John Hurt’s Doctor falls between the 8th
and 9th Doctor, and between the old series and new, as such he
represents the older fans sometimes. He comments on the overuse of the sonic
screwdriver (“What are you going to do? Assemble and cabinet at them?”) and tuts
at the modern Doctors snogging. Tennant gets a lot of snogging in this one too
and Matt Smith is berated for wearing a fez and waving his arms around. In
other words, there’s a whole load of jokes at the expense of the show’s recent
past that should delight fans and those forced to sit through it with fans
equally.
The Zygons are back, having only appeared in one episode of
the classic show, but they’re pretty good. The Doctor kind of resolves the
story with them but we’d have to wait a couple of years for them to properly
resolve it in another episode as there’s so much going on that we have to move
back to Gallifrey to end the Time War.
To their credit both Rose and Clara hold their own well
acting alongside three Doctors. Clara especially gets enough to do, basically
keeping these three aliens grounded in some kind of humanity.
The episode rounds off ongoing themes that have been present
in the series since it’s return in 2005, it doesn’t delve into much that
happened prior to the shows return but that’s to it’s credit too. This is no
greatest hits package. It’s about where the show is now and where it’s going
next. Matt Smith gives more of his triumphant powerful speeches, but this time
around he shares those with David Tennant and John Hurt, finishing each other’s
sentences. There’s some stylish shots, where the three Doctors are very cool,
especially a moment where they step into and stride out of a picture of the
Time War. There’s so much stylish action throughout this, the writing, acting
and directing is so good and inventive. There’s some really good scenes of
montage between the various Doctors and scenes in the Time War. And it moves
between lots of different time zones and places which gives it all a huge sense
of scale, appropriate to the 50th birthday. There’s punch-the-air
celebratory moments when the Doctors come up with a plan too. Plus a cameo from
new Doctor Peter Capaldi which is so small but so exciting, and the line “You
know, I really think you might,” will send shivers down the spine of anyone who
avoided spoilers.
So those are my 10 best and 5 worst stories written by
Steven Moffat. I open it up to the internet to tell me how wrong I am.
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