Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 817: Night Terrors

Dear diary,

So. The arrival of the TARDIS is nicely shot, innit?

Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve been sort of dreading this one, because I simply have nothing to say about it. When this episode first went out, I can remember thinking that it was a bit of a rehash of Fear Her (which in my memory had been rubbish in itself), and that I’d not be rushing to revisit it any time soon. In fairness, watching it today I can safely say that it’s not in any way a rehash of Fear Her, but that hasn’t made me love it any more.

This is actually the second entry I’ve written for this episode, because putting together the first version earlier on, I found myself simply typing as I mulled over the episode, and slowly realised exactly what my problem was with it. The closer I came to the conclusion, the more I found myself getting annoyed by it, and consequently the score today is probably lower than it should have been, as marks dropped off it (not many marks, to be fair, but all the same). Does it deserve such a low score? Well, no, probably not. For one thing, the direction really is rather nice in this one, and there’s some especially nice transitions from shot to shot, but even those can’t save it from the big issue at its heart.

Specifically, the last two stories have been about Amy and Rory suddenly discovering that - shock horror - they’ve got a baby. It’s one that they weren’t really expecting, since Amy hadn’t broached the subject with her husband before being kidnapped and replaced with a living Flesh duplicate. As you do. Just when they think that everything is back to normal and that they can actually come to terms with the sudden arrival of a child in their lives, the kid gets snatched away again, and they have to head back home to await news for their baby’s well being.

Mixed in with all this is the discovery that a woman they’ve shared several adventures with and who their time-travelling best friend has a bit of a thing for has actually been their daughter - albeit grown up - all along. As if all that wasn’t enough, it then turns out that the same woman was also their childhood best friend but in a different body, so they’ve actually been growing up alongside their daughter all this time. I’m sure you’ll admit that it’s quite the roller coaster of emotions for a couple to experience, and it’s probably rather clever that the next story to be broadcast after this little mini-arc is one all about how difficult it can be to act as a parent. There’s so much that you can explore here with Amy and Rory coming to terms with everything that’s just happened.

But that’s not really what happens. In fact, the events of the last couple of episodes don’t even warrant a mention, while Amy and Rory only appear in the same scene as the child of the story briefly towards the end (and Amy’s made of wood by that point). It felt like an odd decision on first glance, but is actively annoying me the more I think about it - why waste such an obvious opportunity to explore the depth of the situation they’ve just been through? Over the next couple of stories, we’re going to be building towards Amy and Rory’s first exit from the TARDIS, and it just feels like this should have been an important step on that journey. A real shame.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 816: Let’s Kill Hitler

Dear diary,

In principle, I think I quite like the idea of splitting a season of Doctor Who into halves. As much as I love having an uninterrupted three month run of the programme (and, it has to be said, returning to that format for Series Eight last year felt wonderful), I can’t help but agree with the argument Steven Moffat made when the split was first announced - that you’re never more than three months away from some new episodes of Doctor Who coming on the telly! Of course, that’s not quite how it worked out in practice (we went on to have a huge break for nine months after the Christmas Special), but in theory, I’m quite keen on the idea.

That said, I still maintain that the first half would have been better had it ended with the reveal that Amy was a Flesh duplicate, and with the Doctor and Rory heading off to find her. Something just doesn’t quite sit right about the fact that A Good Man Goes to War concludes with the Doctor confidently saying that he knows where to find Melody, and then this episode opening with the admission that it’s been several months and he’s still had no luck in tracking her down. Now, I could be generous and say that he’s not actually been trying to find Melody, because he knows that they’ll all bump into her again at some point in the very near future, but that’s not really how it’s presented on screen here.

Oh, but this episode is mental, isn’t it? I mean, there’s so much being thrown at the script that I really don’t quite know where to look. We’ve got a trip to Berlin to meet Hitler, which would be enough for a fair number of stories, but on top of that there’s a shape changing alien justice machine which is operated by the Numbskulls, a half-human-half-Time-Lord hybrid who regenerates into a character we’ve known for several years, the Doctor’s ‘death’, cameos from Rose, Martha, Donna, and Amelia… and all packed into 45 minutes! There were points where I simply didn’t know what was going on, and while it was interesting enough for me to simply go along with, I have to admit that I came out of this episode feeling a little off. I think it was generally a feeling of simply not knowing what I’d just watched…

One thing I can confidently say about it, though, is just how nicely directed it all is. This is the first (and, sadly, only) outing for director Richard Senior on Doctor Who. Even more impressive, it was pointed out to me today that this was the first full television episode of anything that Senior directed! And it’s brilliant! There’s so many really clever transitions (chief among them being the change from a toy TARDIS being thrown onto a bed to the real thing crashing through the skies of Berlin), and some beautiful shots. It’s something of a crime that he’s not come back to the programme, because he’s very quickly notched up towards to top of my ‘favourite Doctor Who directors list…

It’s been a little while since I’ve given you any of my own pet theories, but today’s episode is the perfect opportunity for another one. This one has been superseded by the programme itself (in this very episode, in fact), but it’s something I was quite keen on at the time. River Song. Oh, there were so many theories flying around about her true identity. It always seemed most likely that she was the Doctor’s wife (though, as she herself says in the Angels two-parter, wit the Doctor it’s never that simple), but there were so many other theories floating about. Was she the Doctor’s mum? Susan? Susan’s mum? A future incarnation? A female Master? The Rani?

My own theory was that River Song was simply… well, River Song. Not some old character with a new face, but the Doctor’s biggest fan. She’d dedicated her life to researching the Doctor’s adventures through the history books, and that one day we’d see her younger than ever before, stood in front of a class, giving a lecture about the Doctor and the blue box he travels in. Suddenly, from the back of the room a voice would pipe up; ‘hat’s not quite how it happened…’, and it would be the Doctor himself! Leaning against a pillar, and ready to invite River aboard the TARDIS because he needs her for something.

That wasn’t my favourite bit of the thinking though. I had a theory for how she would go on to become ‘the woman who killed the Doctor’. When Smith’s final episode rolled around, they would be facing down the biggest threat that they’d ever faced. Heck, it could have even been the siege of Trenzalore in retrospect. Either way, they’re there, and the Doctor is woefully out of his depth. He simply doesn’t have what it takes to save the day. ‘I’m sorry,’ River tells him, ‘but you’re not the Doctor I need right now. Your next incarnation would have the strength…’… at which point, she shoots him! A new Doctor born in the terror of the moment, and with the personality to do whatever it was that the Eleventh Doctor couldn’t. She would kill him simply to get to his next incarnation. Okay, it sounds a bit silly when I type it all out on here, but for a few months in my head, I loved that idea. As much as I enjoy now knowing more about River’s story, and being able to piece together her timeline (my own attempt at that can be found HERE, by the way), I do miss the days when it was all still a mystery, and I was able to invent my own River story in my own head…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 815: A Good Man Goes to War

Dear diary,

First thing’s first: I seem to be bringing it up over and over again at the moment, but the opening hooks to episodes this series are very strong, aren’t they? Today’s might be the crowning glory, though, with Rory turning up to question a fleet of Cybermen, while the Doctor blows them up in the background to underline the point. Brilliant!

This is a brave episode, isn’t it? In terms of being an episode of Doctor Who that’s billed as something of a ‘season finale’, there’s some very brave choices made here. Outside of the ‘previously’ clips, we don't see so much as a silhouette of the Doctor for the first tele minutes, and he doesn’t appear in person for over a quarter of an hour. That’s a third of the entire running time! That entire first act of the story is used to set everything up, move all the characters into the right places, and prepare us for the story to come. And yet, somehow, it never feels like they’ve had to rush everything else to accommodate a fifteen minute set up period - it’s all perfectly natural as a part of the narrative.

However. While I’m on the subject of narrative, this is the perfect time to return to my major bug-bear of Series Six - all the arcs and ‘mythology’ stuff. It simply doesn’t sit right with me, and I think it’s all to do with the format of the season. Having a three month gap between halves of the series was an interesting experiment (and one which I think worked much better with Series Seven), but it forces this episode to be a kind of finale, when things really aren’t ready for such a story. For all I’ve praised the cliffhanger to yesterday’s episode, it does come a little bit out of nowhere. The Doctor realises that there’s something wrong with Amy at the end of Day of the Moon, and we get a few glimpses of him looking at the scanner screen and her alternating pregnancy test, but until we reach the end of the Flesh two-parter, there’s no real indication that the Doctor is pricing things together and starting to track down everything that’s happening.

It feels like this would have been the perfect time for the Doctor to get those cryptic hints that people so love to drop around him, slowly putting together a picture across the entire season that there’s something wrong with Amy, hitting that two-parter right before the big finale at the end of the run. As it is, he seems to drop it for a bit and then announces that he’s worked out what’s going on, and where to find Amy. That was easy! There’s a great concept for an arc in here, but it’s just not been given the right space to develop, because the format of Series Six has forced it into an odd shape. Perhaps it would work better if the first half of the series ended with the reveal that Amy is a Ganger, before the Doctor and Rory go off looking for her during the ‘break’ in between halves?

Overall, though, I think my favourite idea in this episode has to be the way that the Doctor goes around ‘collecting’ people to build an army. It feels like a natural step for the Doctor - after Davros made him so aware of the way he uses people during The Stolen Earth - that he should decide to use these people when he needs to. I think this sequence is also home to my biggest regret from the entire Eleventh Doctor Era: I think I’m right in saying that Captain jack was originally to be among the people the Doctor called upon, but filming on the fourth series of Torchwood prevented John Barrowman from appearing. In some ways it might have felt odd to have Jack hanging around from a previous ‘era’, but equally, I’d have loved to see him with the new Doctor!

It’s also somewhat strange to think that this is the first appearance of the Paternoster Gang, and that actually they’re not even that yet, but just several different characters created for a one-off appearance in this episode. They didn’t make a reappearance in the programme for another 18 months (though it’s going to be little over a week from my point of view in this marathon), but they so quickly established themselves as simply being a part of this era, that it’s odd to see them here so far into Smith’s tenure as still only half-formed! I capped today’s episode off with the Two Days Later mini episode which explains how Strax manages to ‘die’ on Demon’s Run before accompanying Vastra and Jenny back to London, and it has to be said you can really see the difference in the personalities between this episode and the later reappearance… but I can’t help but love them all the same!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 814: The Almost People

Dear diary,

Yesterday, I praised Matthew Graham’s ability to create a very ‘real’ world, and to populate it with character who felt true to life. We’re given lots of lovely little moments and comments which can feel like nothing, but all add to the overall texture of this story, and make the characters and the situation all the richer. That trend continues through into today’s episode, and you realise just how important all of that is, because it helps to strengthen the battle at the heart of the story - the dislike for the unlike, while also having the trouble of that ‘unlike’ being so incredibly close to home.

Something that I’m finding a bit distracting lately is waiting for moments that I know are coming. Because I’ve not seen any of these episodes since their initial broadcast, I can vaguely recall a few key bits and pieces, but not everything. More and more, I’m finding myself just waiting for these things, and that’s sort of distracting me from enjoying the episodes as much as I should. I spent most of yesterday and much of today, for example, waiting for Jennifer to turn into the giant Flesh monster which only turns up at the climax of today’s episode, and that’s had a detrimental effect on all of her scenes throughout the story - because I keep wondering when she’s going to turn into a monster.

It’s also been the case today with the two Doctors. I knew that they’d swapped shoes, but kept waiting for the moment when they revealed this. In my mind, it was almost as soon as they’d done it, and was presented in the form of ‘how do you know which of us is which? We could have swapped our shoes’ leaving some confusion even to the viewer as to which Doctor was the ‘real’ version and which was his Ganger duplicate? I certainly remember some speculation at the time that the real Doctor is the one who got left behind here (even though we see the Ganger version dissolve), meaning that the Ganger went off to face the death at Lake Silencio… Once again, it just proved a little distracting to me, and I’m hoping I can kick this habit before long and just get back to enjoying the episodes ‘as new’ again - it’s only something that’s started happening in the last week or two.

Still, in spite of that, knowing the ending to this episode doesn’t do anything to weaken its impact. Back in the TARDIS, safe and sound… and then it turns out that Amy is a Ganger, too! Not only that, but she’s been a Ganger for the majority of this season (the Doctor suggests that she was taken just before ‘America’, but it was terribly clear, watching that two-parter back, that she was taken during the three months between episodes). As cliff-hangers go, it’s not bad, is it? I’m not entirely sure it all feels right yet (I’m sure I’ll touch on this more tomorrow, once this line of plot has been resolved), but it certainly made for an interesting and unexpected development!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 813: The Rebel Flesh

Dear diary,

The other day, I was banging on about the Eleventh Doctor, as I think of him, as finding ‘glee in the threat of the adventure. [Getting] things wrong. He quips. He twirls, and dances, and is generally quite frenetic.’ When I think back on the Eleventh Doctor’s tenure, that’s specifically the image of him I have in mind. From time to time, I find myself moving in ways that tele entirely ‘Eleventh Doctor’, without even really thinking about it. It’s always interesting, then, when we get to see a different side to the man. There’s plenty of the twirling and dancing in this episode, but we really get to see just how much of an act it all is. When the Doctor slips off on his own to investigate the Flesh and to gather the information that he’s after, he’s almost completely different. He’s cool, and collected. He’s on a mission, and he’s simply focussed on getting it done. At times, there’s something almost scary about the Eleventh Doctor we see creeping to the surface here, and it’s all because that facade we’ve been so used to has started to chip away. I’d forgotten that he came to this spot specifically to investigate the Flesh, but it adds another interesting dimension to the proceedings.

First time around, this story made very little impact on me. I can recall both episodes ending, and then wandering off afterwards and more-or-less completely forgetting everything about them (well, mostly. A few months later I attended a wedding held in the main castle location for this story - several of the rooms were used for the reception - and found myself telling anyone who’d listen that the Bride was probably a flesh duplicate. It didn’t go down all that well, if I’m honest.

Actually, though, there’s quite a lot to like about this one. Very quickly, you get a sense of the world this story is set in, and I’m buying into the characters very quickly. Matthew Graham isn’t always considered the strongest Doctor Who writer ever, but he’s done a very good job here of setting up the world and the characters largely via the dialogue and leaving me with a sense that it’s all fully formed.

The real beauty of the situation is that you can see both sides of the argument. I can appreciate why it’s so troubling to the humans to have their Ganger duplicates suddenly up and running around (and trying to kill them), but at the same time I can see how the Gangers are technically just as ‘real’ as the humans that spawned them, and why they have to fight for their lives. It also ties in quite nicely to another aspect of the Eleventh Doctor - he’s the negotiator. A bringer of peace. He set up negotiations between humanity and the Silurians last season, and he’s trying to find inroads to doing a similar thing between humans and Gangers here, too. I’m not sure entirely why, but it suits this Doctor to be the man who’s trying to unite different species… 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 812: The Doctor’s Wife

Dear diary,

A few years ago, in a Doctor Who Magazine poll, the Fifth Doctor’s swan-song *The Caves of Androzani was voted to be the best Doctor Who story ever made. In that same poll, The Twin Dilemma - the very next story to be broadcast, only a week after Androzani, was voted to be the very worst Doctor Who story ever made. It always fascinated me that Doctor Who was so flexible that stories right next to each other could be considered so far apart in terms of quality. Of course, The Twin Dilemma is far from being the worst Doctor Who story ever, but that’s an argument for another day.

We’re in a similar situation here. Whereas yesterday’s episode, The Curse of the Black Spot is often considered rubbish and rated rather low, The Doctor’s Wife always seems to come out near the top of polls, and often crops up in discussions regarding the best ever episodes. In the most recent poll, this story was placed number 37 - with only three Eleventh Doctor stories above it, which makes it almost the polar opposite to yesterday’s episode. And yet, I’ve never been able to get a handle on why this one is so loved.

It’s one of those occasions where I watch an episode, find that I’ve not particularly enjoyed it, then go online to find that everyone else loves it. Happens from time to time, most recently with Flatline last year, which didn’t grab me in the slightest, and received a rather luke-warm preview from me on this very site. I can’t say it particularly bothered me at the time. As I’ve said recently, at this point, my interest in all things ‘current’ Who was running at an all-time low, and the fact that I’d not enjoyed it was hardly the end of the world. There was plenty else to keep me entertained, after all! In the years that have followed, I’ve not given it a great deal of thought - it’s simply an episode that exists somewhere in the greater Doctor Who world.

But all the same, I sat down today looking quite forward to the story. After all, the first three episodes of Series Six have proved quite strong for me, and that’s always a nice sign. It opens nice enough, with the Doctor getting a message from another Time Lord, and being all excited because there’s another living Time Lord out there somewhere (‘one of the good ones,’ he says, presumably because the Master has been locked away in the final day of the War), which is a lovely contrast to his reaction to similar news in Utopia, where he simply knows who it’s going to be… On the whole, it’s very exciting! I remember the speculation, too, when it had been announced that something would be making a return that hadn’t appeared in the show for a very long time (the ‘mind cube’), and the hints of another Time Lord in a pocket universe… oh, the theories about Romana!. Everything about this hook is simply marvellous.

And then it just gets about as boring as can be. Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve really tried, but I simply cannot see what everyone loves about The Doctor’s Wife. There’s lots of great concepts in here - the TARDIS made ‘human’, the archived console room, the building of a TARDIS from the remains of a hundred others, using the temporal and spacial physics of the TARDIS as a deadly mind game - but none of them really feel like they’ve got the room to be explored properly. I think that’s the problem I’ve got with this one - so many great ideas end up being thrown away just too quickly.

The Doctor hears the other Time Lord voices: there’s lots of Time Lords close by… and oh, no, they’re just more cubes. Righto. That only lasted a few minutes. Amy and Rory are trapped like rats in a maze… but no, there we go, that’s over with, too fairly quickly (and, it has to be said, Rory ‘dying’ is starting to get old now. I remember all the jokes about it at the time, but I don’t think it really bothered me all that much on first watch). The Doctor’s got to build a new TARDIS… and he’s done it. Easy. I think this story, more than any other for me, really warrants being extended. I’m not sure it would stretch to two full episodes, but it simply needs a little bit more room to breathe.

I’m not going to carry on, because I know people won’t be keen on my reaction to this one, and I’ll just continue being a bit grumpy about it. Believe me when I say that I really want to like this one, but it’s simply not working for me.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 811: The Curse of the Black Spot

Dear diary,

Oh, Curse of the Black Spot. What did you ever do to rankle fandom, so? In that Doctor Who Magazine poll last summer, you were ranked number 227 out of 241 (with only two other Eleventh Doctor tales below you), and when you were first shown on TV, I remember everyone complaining about the massive dip in quality between the opening two-parter and this story.

But you know what, I love you, Curse of the Black Spot. Well, no, perhaps not. ‘Love’ is a very strong word, and it implies certain attachments and commitments that I’m not sure I’m willing to make. But, still, I certainly like you a lot. As much as many other episodes of Doctor Who. You’re certainly stronger than some of the tales I’ve sat through on this marathon, and actually I’ve rather enjoyed you tonight!

What’s not to love! It’s Doctor Who meets the Pirates, and it seems somehow perfectly fitting that the Eleventh Doctor should be the one to engage in such an adventure, as his child-like glee is simply right for turning up on a pirate ship. Actually, it’s the Doctor who really makes this episode for me - I don’t think I’ve ever been more enamoured with Matt Smith’s incarnation than I have been here today. Everything seems to come together to create the perfect example of what i think of as being the Eleventh Doctor: he finds glee in the threat of the adventure. He gets things wrong. He quips. He twirls, and dances, and is generally quite frenetic. It all simply works.

The thing I really enjoy is the fact that he gets things wrong. Three times in this episode, a theory that he’s put forward is shattered, and he’s forced to tell people to ignore everything he’s suggested so far. It helps to enhance the threat of what could otherwise be a rather mundane story, and it means that when you stumble into a new situation (such as arriving on the moored alien spaceship), it genuinely takes you by surprise.

I’m also rather keen on the look of this episode. It’s become almost traditional for me in the last month or so to comment that all historical stories have been ruined for me by how good The Shakespeare Code looked, but this one manages to buck the trend, because it looks just as good as that one did! Has there ever been a Doctor Who story with more night shooting on location (off the top of my head, only perhaps the Empty Child two-parter could tie for it)? The ship looks great, and even though I know they shot it right at the side of the docks, i never for a moment was less than convinced we could be out in the middle of the ocean somewhere.

The only big downside, for me, is the disappearance of one of the pirate crew. He threatens to leave, so the captain’s son cuts him to ensure that he’s just as helpless as the rest of them. Great. Fine. Got all that. But then… he’s gone! Hah! Vanished, and never even mentioned again. I presume that the Siren came and took him at some point, but you’d think that the others might have mentioned that at some point. To be fair, on first broadcast I didn’t notice a thing. Couldn’t have told you that anyone vanished between scenes, and it wasn’t until someone pointed it out online afterwards that I was even vaguely aware. Now I know, though, it sticks out like a sore thumb, and it’s a very big letdown in an episode I’ve otherwise really enjoyed.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 810: Day of the Moon

Dear diary,

Steven Moffat is very good at opening hooks, isn’t he? We had some absolute stellar ones to round out the season finale at the end of Series Five, and we’re getting them at a great quality here, too. In yesterday’s episode, the Doctor’s friends are gathered together to watch him get killed! In today’s one, we pick up three months on from the last cliffhanger to find someone we thought was an ally chasing down and eliminating our regulars… only to have them wake up in a cell with the Doctor and we discover that it was all a ruse! Say what you want about the man, but you can’t deny that he’s good at grabbing you for a story…

This is perhaps also my favourite example of something Steven Moffat is very keen on - starting the second episode of a two-parter somewhere other than where you left off the previous week. Giving the impression that while we’ve been away for seven days getting on with our lives, the Doctor and his friends have been getting on with the adventure, too. It’s great because it means we can pick up today with the characters far more informed than they were, and we’re given all the information without it feeling too much like a great big info dump.

It serves as a good way of introducing the Silence to us, as well. You get a fairly decent idea of the way they operate during The Impossible Astronaut, but everything being confirmed here during scenes set in the TARDIS is rather well done. And actually, they are quite scary, as Doctor Who monsters go, aren’t they? Last year, I did some graphic design on postcards for the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff, and part of the project involved dressing an actor up in full Silent costume so we could hold a photoshoot. Once he had the mask on over his head, and was standing there a good seven feet tall in front of you, it’s not hard to find them somewhat unnerving! The same is true of this episode: when Amy’s trapped in the orphanage, and looks up to find the ceiling filled with the creatures… I think I even felt a twinge of fear. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been scared by Doctor Who, but this particular moment, drawing on my own memories of what the costumes are like up close and coupled with the helpless situation that Amy’s found herself trapped in… yeah, it’s probably the closest the programme has come to actively scaring me… and I knew what was coming, too!

The big downside to this story, though, is that it sets up the major points of the Matt Smith era arc - and specifically the elements that are going to keep on recurring through Series Six, and there’s elements here which simply don’t square with the information I can recall from later on. Specifically, it’s said that the Silence here have been on Earth for millennia, and have been nudging the human race in the required direction all this time. Specifically, the Doctor points out that they needed a spacesuit, so they made man go to the moon^*. But then later on we discover that the Silents who’re working with Madame Kovarian (which presumably these ones are, since they’re all tied in with the little girl in the spacesuit and kidnapping Amy) have travelled back in time to carry out the mission (the little girl has been brought to Earth from Demon’s Run, for example, because they want her to grow up in the ‘right’ environment)… so they’re not the ones who’ve been here since the dawn of time… Oh, it’s giving me a headache!

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that there’s bits of this arc which already are sitting ill with me, and I worry that the more I try to make sense of it as I go along, the more the series is going to suffer as a result…

*Actually, no, sorry, I’m going to have to take issue with this while I’m thinking about it. I was always under the impression that the little girl was kept inside a modified Nasa spacesuit because it was the best thing to adapt as a life support suit on 1960s Earth, but why does it have to specifically be a spacesuit if the Silence can nudge humanity into simply creating any old thing to keep the girl safe? Am I missing something?

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 809: The Impossible Astronaut

Dear diary,

This was the last episode of Doctor Who to air before I moved to live in the home of the TARDIS - Cardiff. Specifically, it aired the night before I made the track across the country. The next day, upon arriving in Wales and having - for the first time - no intention to return ‘home’ any time soon, I took the family out to a little diner in the Bay to celebrate and have some food… and then realised that it was the very same diner that had appeared as part of the Doctor’s adventures the night before. That’s the kind of welcome you want when coming to Wales - a bold statement that says ‘you’re in Doctor country, now…’

Before we set out on Series Six, I have to make a confession. This series has long been my real nadir of Doctor Who. For whatever reason, I simply failed to ‘click’ with the programme, to the point that I didn’t see some of these episodes until a little while after they’d debuted on TV. For whatever reason, Series Six simply didn’t connect to me in the same way that the previous five (and a whole slew of the ‘classic’ run) had. That’s not to say that I’d gone off Doctor Who in general - I still dutifully bought and enjoyed the DVD range each month, and spent every spare moment engaged in some TARDIS-based discussion (I even wrote a book with a friend, Nick Mellish, in which we made our way though all the Eighth Doctor’s fantastic adventures. And The Creed of the Kromon) - but certainly 2011-vintage Doctor Who simply wasn’t my cup of tea at all.

That’s fine, in many ways. Part of the beauty of Doctor Who is that it’s always evolving. It completely reinvents itself every few years into something that’s superficially the same programme, but for all intents and purposes might as well be something completely different. Only yesterday I was saying how A Christmas Carol felt a million miles away from The End of Time, and I love that about the show, Crucially, I tried to avoid publicly ‘rubbishing’ the series at this point, because while it wasn’t to my tastes, I knew it appealed very much to people who perhaps hadn’t been enjoying the show for the last few years while I had. The downside to all this, though, was that it coloured my opinion of the Matt Smith years as a whole. Series Six is his middle season, and it’s the one which resonates strongest with his overall arc. Bits of Series Five and Series Seven tie into it, yeah, but the majority of the stuff you need it in here. Because this wasn’t my cup of tea, it put me right off large swathes of the arc. But that’s been the charm of The 50 Year Diary! I can watch these things again and see how my opinions have changed, and in the best of times, they’ve changed for the better. Here’s hoping the same is true of this next couple of weeks…

Certainly, we’re not off to a bad start here. As season openers go, we’re a million miles away from something like New Earth, which feels almost provincial next to this one. Fifteen minutes in, the Doctor has been shot (and we’re repeatedly told that he’s dead, no coming back from this one), and then a younger version of the Doctor arrives on the scene, and the TARDIS has been parked on the rug in the Oval Office. I don’t think any other season opener in modern Doctor Who has hit the ground running in quite the way this one does. We’ve thirteen weeks to tell a story; let’s get on with it!

It’s also the first tine that we’ve had any real filming in America for the programme, and they really make the most of those locales to give us some stunning vistas here. As with Planet of the Dead a few years prior, they’re really making sure that they’re screaming at you about the fact that they’ve actually travelled all that way to tell the story. It’s impressive, and it looks gorgeous on screen. Even when we’re back in Cardiff, they still don’t let up - I’ve been enjoying comparing Doctor Who’s Oval Office set with the one from The West Wing. 

Something else I’m impressed with is the inclusion of Canton as a kind of ‘fourth companion’ for the story, having already established how important he was by inviting him alongside the ‘proper’ companions to witness the Doctor’s death. It’s an interesting approach (as is pushing our resident historical celebrity - Nixon - into the background to largely be set dressing), and one I really enjoy - there’s something quite fun about watching his reactions to things, and pairing him off with Rory for many of the big revelations certainly provides some needed levity to the story.

I’ll not go into any detail about the Silence or the story arc at this point - I’ll reserve judgement on all of that until tomorrow - but for now… it’s a decent start to the series, and that gives me hope for the future…

Manufacturer: LEGO

RRP: £19.99

Release Date: November 2014

Reviewed by: Doctor Who Online

Review Posted: 20th March 2015

For the second set in our LEGO Minecraft review series, we are looking at ‘#21113 The Cave’.

You’ve been digging your way deeper underground, block by block, in the search for some much-needed resources, and all of a sudden there’s an opening in front of you. You’ve just reached the LEGO Minecraft Cave!

Things are pretty scary down here! Whilst you can see the precious ore’s that you’ve been looking for, there are cave spiders and zombies to contend with!

It may not be a particularly large set, but almost everything you’re familiar with from the in-game caves in Minecraft have been lovingly recreated here by the LEGO team.

There are lava flows, water, ore blocks and even a TNT block, and the set is spread out on varying levels to add to the adventure. Perched on the highest level (providing you can get past the Cave Spider and the Zombie) is a treasure chest with some much needed bread!

The Build:

There are 249 pieces in The Cave set, and we clocked the build time around 30 minutes. Although fiddly, the ore blocks were particularly fun to build, and once complete look just like the in-game blocks. The cascading lava flow was also gratifying to complete and with the see-through orange blocks, it adds to the overall look - especially when the light catches them.

Finally worthy of note is the Cave Spider, which consists of 24 pieces and once combined (including the articulated legs) form a near exact replica of the in-game mob.
[youtube:6LA8JKNk1bE]

+  Click Here to buy 'The First Night' from LEGO for £19.99!
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[With thanks to LEGO]

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 808: A Christmas Carol

Dear diary,

I remember thinking it at the time, and it’s turned out to be true of this viewing, too: it’s hard to believe that this episode came a year after The End of Time. The style of the show has evolved so massively in that time, and I think a blind ‘taste-test’ of the two episodes to an unknowing audience would have them guess that they were much farther apart in broadcast than just a year. For starters, the entire look of the series by this point is far more filmic, and while there were several elements in The End of Time that I had to single out as simply not quite working for me (out of keeping with the majority of the Russell T Davies era, it has to be said), this one fares much better in that regard.

I spent a fair bit of time during The Big Bang calling it some of the best use Steven Moffat ever made of the whole ‘time travel’ element to Doctor Who, but I might be revising that statement already, because he takes a similar concept and does something really rather elegant with it here. I think I’m right in saying that the basic idea at the heart of this episode (the Doctor alters someone’s past to make them a nicer person) was used in an earlier Moffat short story, but it’s very nicely suited to the format of A Christmas Carol. 

There’s something really great about the way that the video of the young Kazran starts to play, and then the Doctor pops up in it! New memories forming as the Doctor changes the time stream. It’s such a simple way of really showing the process of changing history, but really effective. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that they’ve got an actor of the calibre of Sir Michael ‘Dumbledore’ Gambon to come and play the part of the older Kazran, which really means he sells the idea that his history is being rewritten in front of our eyes. When he turns to see the painting has changed, and digs out a box of photographs that didn’t exist until the second he needed them… oh, it’s all really rather lovely, and a lot better than I think I gave it credit for at the time.

Something else I’d not given credit to in this episode before now is the way that the visuals really help to inform the story, and add extra depth to it that might be missed on a simple post-Christmas dinner viewing (and certainly were, by me). Chief among them is the use of bow ties (the icon of choice for the Eleventh Doctor) to symbolise the way characters feel about the Doctor - appearing when they’re enamoured with him, and then being undone and taken away when he’s fallen from favour. It’s something simple - tiny - but my university professors would have spun entire essays on that subject alone.

One thing I do have to gripe about (well, I mean, I don’t have to gripe about it, but the more I dwell on the issue, the more it’s bothering me…): Abigail’s family. We see them at the start of the story (let’s say in ‘2010’, simply for the sake of ease), appealing to Kazran (who is 70-ish at this point - again, for sake of ease, I’m going off Michael Gambon’s age). Later, during the Doctor’s adventures with Abigail and the young Kazran (around, what, 18? 20?), she requests to go and see her family on ‘this’ Christmas Eve. It’s definitely contemporary to the young Kazran’s time, because Abigail’s sister makes reference to him being the son of the chap building the cloud machine… but the family is all exactly the same age that they were a good half century later! Am I missing something? It simply feels like a really big oversight in an otherwise very tightly plotted story, and the more I think about it the more it’s irritating me!

Still, that’s just me being picky, really, and this is certainly the most I’ve enjoyed a Christmas special in a while, now…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 807: The Death of the Doctor

Dear diary,

Has there ever been more of a love letter to 'classic' Doctor Who in the 21st century programme than The Death of the Doctor. I mean, for starters, it's part of an entire spin off created around 1970s companion Sarah Jane Smith, features the inclusion of the current Doctor, and the return of Jo Grant, and it's filled with references and clips to pretty much every story from Terror of the Autons to The Hand of Fear. As if that wasn’t enough, the final scene gives us a wonderful glimpse into the lives of some other former companions, going right back to Ian and Barbara and thievery beginning. There’s something a little bit magical about that.

The real highlight of this story for me has to be the interaction between Sarah Jane and Jo Grant (now Jones). Oh, they’re a riot from their very first greeting to the moment Jo leaves Bannerman Road. They simply work together, and the vast majority of my notes for these episodes pertain to little moments the two of them share. Both so utterly in character, and both wonderful together. It’s such a shame we didn’t get the chance to see them share the screen again.

I’m not entirely sure, though, that Matt’s Doctor really fits here. Oh, he certainly suits the environment of a show aimed more firmly to children, and his twirly, kinetic Doctor really fits nicely in that respect, but he simply feels a little bit out of place. During the third series, when David Tennant put in an appearance, it simply felt right that the Doctor should rock up and park the TARDIS in Sarah Jane’s attic. This was the Doctor who’d met Sarah Jane during School Reunion, and inspired her to carry on the good fight after all these years. He’d cropped up again when the Earth got moved, and on that occasion he got the chance to interact with Luke, too. In all, Tennant felt like a part of this world very nicely.

Smith, on the other hand, feels out of place. We’ve never seen him interacting with these characters before, so whereas Sarah Jane can be re-introduced to the Doctor’s world by dropping her into one of the Doctor’s adventures, it simply doesn’t quite gel for the Doctor to be reintroduced to her world by dropping in on hers. Smith himself doesn’t seem all that comfortable with the appearance, either, and there are some moments - most noticeably when the other characters piece together who he is - where he simply doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing with his performance, and is left looking a little bit lost.

It also doesn’t help that in many ways, The Sarah Jane Adventures feels like a hangover from a bygone era. It made sense to see into Sarah’s adventures when she was popping up in Doctor Who from time to time, and when this show was running alongside the parent series and Torchwood, it felt like there was one big, shared universe all working together rather nicely. Now, though, with the next series of Torchwood sent off to America and being largely unrecognisable from what had come before, and with only a handful more Sarah Jane Adventures to come because of Lis Sladen’s untimely death, this series no longer feels right within the world of Doctor Who.

This is the last excursion into the world of spin-offery that I’ll be taking as a part of The 50 Year Diary, so it’s somewhat fitting that it’s something which celebrates lots of things I loved so long ago, and a bit of a shame that it also feels a little off-key.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 806: The Big Bang

Dear diary,

I'd never noticed before just how small scale this episode is as a season finale. I mean, yeah, it's got the entire universe being destroyed at every moment in history and all that, but for the large majority of the running time, we're really only dealing with four characters, and they're all our regulars. Considering that the last season finale was The Stolen Earth, in which everybody under the sun came back to the programme, this feels oddly small. That doesn't mean that it's not very good though, and it's almost certainly the very best example of using time travel as a plot device that Steven Moffatt has ever given us. Forget how cleaver Blink is and all that, because this one is just brilliant.

The best part about it is watching how everything comes to pass. The Doctor arrives at Stonehenge with a fez and a mop. Then he's gone. Then he's back again, but without the mop. Then he's gone again. Things get posted through Amelia's door, and stuck to the Pandorica, and we get to see how all of that falls into place as the Doctor rushes around trying to piece it together himself. On top of all that, the reveal that it's Amy locked in the box instead of the Doctor is simply fantastic. Perhaps the best bit, though, has to be that after all of this madcap running around, the Doctor then zaps back in at the top of the stairs, burnt and dying. It's powerful stuff.

Over the years, I’ve often seen this two parter described as being one of - if not the best season finales that 21st century Doctor Who has produced, and it’s not hard to see why people love it so much. I’m not sure if, for me, it packs quite the same punch that we get with something like The Parting of the Ways or Journey’s End, but it certainly works as a very fitting cap to this run of adventures, and as with the little vignettes of characters in the opening to yesterday’s episode, I can’t help but love the Doctor moving backwards through his recent past to interact with adventures we’ve already seen. Chief among these moments has to be his arrival in the Weeping Angel forest, and the other half of the scene from Flesh and Stone, in which the Doctor comes back to speak to Amy. I mentioned at the time that it sparked some debate online, and this week I’ve been digging back through the forum to take a look at it. In retrospect, people very quickly hit on the idea that it could be a future version of the Doctor coming back through the time stream, but there’s lots of great discussion on the way to deciding that was the most likely scenario (and some great discussion afterwards, too, while people try to work out what the other options are.

In all, I’ve rather enjoyed Series Five this time around, and it’s great to see how nicely wrapped up the overall themes of this run are with this episode. We’ve been watching a fairy tale about the madman in a box, who comes to save a little girl from danger and simply never stops. Amy ‘remembering’ the Doctor back into the universe at the end is rather lovely, and very fitting for the style of Doctor Who that we’ve been presented with over the last thirteen episodes. I didn’t really care for this run at the time, but given five years’ distance, I can certainly see the appeal all the better… 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 805: The Pandorica Opens

Dear diary,

Just before I get on to talking about the rest of the episode, I want to take a minute to point out how bloody cool the pre-tites sequence is for this one. I love the idea of all these people from across the last season interacting as they work to get the Doctor to the right place at the right time. It's also somewhat amazing that they feel like they're being drawn together from across a proper era rather than from just the one season of adventures. I think it's somewhat of a testament to how well the first of Steven Moffat's series really strikes out to be its own thing - still recognisably the same programme that we've been watching for five years previously, but also being its own unique branch of that universe.

Right. Now. Main thing: I'm confused. Largely, I'm confused about Rory. I think I know what's going on here, but I'd really like to sound out the way that I think things are happening in this episode and then either have you all comment to say 'you've completely understood it correctly, Will, you're such a clever and handsome diarist' or, failing that, 'nope, you fool, you've completely misunderstood it all. Go back and watch The Dominators on a loop for the rest of the marathon'…

So; Something (presumably the Nestenes, but either way the information worked its way back to the Nestenes) went to Amy's house in Leadworth and took a kind of psychic print of Amy's mind. Doing this meant that they had a link to her conscious mind (this bit isn't actually said, but it's the only way everything else makes sense, so…), so that they could create an accurate and up-to-date scenario at Stonehenge which would tempt the Doctor and her to the location. Because Rory was in her mind (as a suppressed memory, which is why she found herself crying for seemingly no reason in Vincent and the Doctor), he automatically becomes a part of this scenario, and is implanted with the memories taken from Amy's mind, and that brings us to what we see in this episode.

Is that right? Because I've spent most of today trying to wrap my head around it all. It seems fairly simple based on the information we're given on screen (it's presented as 'Something takes a 'snapshot' of Amy's memories from her bedroom, hence the romans and the box, and Rory is there as a Roman because of the picture tucked inside a book of him dressed as one'), but then that nice neat version hints snags when you have to account for the fact that Rory can remember 'dying' in the Silurian episode. That's why I assume they link to Amy's conscious mind, because they'd have the up-to-date information about… Oh to hell with it. It makes for a nice moment in the story where the Doctor notices that Rory is still a real living person (even if he's made of plastic), and I'm probably obsessing over it too much.

Something else about this episode that I've obsessed about in the past is the nature of The Alliance. It seems clear to me that they were formed in the skies above Trenzalore, when all these same races would gather to answer the mysterious signal emanating from Christmas (and in retrospect, I'm guessing that's where they got the idea for the stones here sending out a signal on a loop, too)… but such a thing felt like a line missed out from The Time of the Doctor! I only mention it here because I'm still trying to piece together the overarching plot of the Matt Smith era, and I know I'm going to need this note when I come to the regeneration… 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 804: The Lodger

Dear diary,

For a long, long, time now, in response to this episode, I’ve always said that I preferred the original Doctor Who Magazine comic that it was based upon. Something about forcing Mickey to put up the Tenth Doctor for a few days really clicked with me, and it quickly became one of my favourites. I never really felt that it worked as well in substituting a well-known character for a complete stranger, and trying to add in a more definite threat upstairs. Oh, I never thought this one was bad, just that I’d have rather it be kept as a comic.

But actually, watching it back today, there’s loads in here that I’m really rather fond of. And of course it doesn’t harm the story to swap Mickey for Craig, because we know more-or-less everything we need to about Craig by the time he rushes to answer the door to the Doctor with a great big ‘I love you’ (the first of several times I laughed loudly during today’s viewing). If anything, that’s the real success of this story - it takes Craig and Sophie, and in the space of these 45 minutes it completely brings us into their world. I feel like they’re characters we’ve known for a while now. There’s hints of their back stories, and their wider social circle, and it really does feel like it’s the Doctor crashing into their established world, as opposed to them simply popping up for a single week in the Doctor’s universe.

It certainly helps that James Corden is so perfectly cast as Craig. He bounces off Matt Smith so well (and in a way that I don’t think he would have done with any of the other Doctors. Even though Tennant’s incarnation was very human, he simply doesn’t fell as suited to this as Smith does), and watching them together is just a delight.

As for adding in the threat of the upstairs… Actually, it’s nicely done. Looking back on it, it’s easy to simply think of it as being a ‘Silent TARDIS’, and forget the mystery that we’re presented with in the build-up to that reveal (and even then, we only get the information that it’s an attempt to build a TARDIS, no more information than that). The slow build up of the mystery, and then the fantastic reveal of the ship, with the camera pulling back from the seemingly normal doorway is all brilliant. 

It also marks the starting point of the thing I’m perhaps most looking forward to throughout the Eleventh Doctor’s era - the on-going arc. In 2013, The Time of the Doctor wrapped up threads that had been dangling as far back as this season, but I’ve not been through all of these episodes since then to watch as things slowly draw together. We’ve already had the mystery of the cracks and the Pandora - one of which will be over and down with in the next couple of days while the other will go quiet for a bit before rearing its head again at the end of this run - but this is our first step towards the Silence, and the recurring elements of Series Six.

Which brings me to my next point. There’s a moment in this episode, with Amy in the TARDIS, where she seems to see something, get very scared, and then forget about it. It could be her reacting to the bad news she’s just received from the Doctor, but she very much seems to be looking at something just off camera… was this intended to be a ‘Silent’-esque plot thread which wasn’t later picked up, or am I simply reading too much into things?

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 803: Vincent and the Doctor

Dear diary,

Watching this series on original broadcast, my interest had dropped off a little bit by this point. It was nice weather out, I had a lot going on… making sure I was home on a Saturday night ready for Doctor Who felt like more of a chore than it ever had before. It didn’t help that when I was catching up with stories like The Vampires of Venice and Amy’s Choice, they simply weren’t grabbing me in the way I hoped they would. Eventually, I’d stopped even trying to be home on time, and I’d simply catch up with the new episodes a day or two later on the iPlayer. The night this one aired, I happened to catch the first ten minutes while I was getting ready to go out, and couldn’t help thinking that of everything for a good month or so, this was an episode I’d rather like to stay home and see as it went out.

Vincent and the Doctor is a very different kind of Doctor Who story, isn’t it? When the series manages to pull in a writer like Richard Curtis, you very much think you know what kind of story you’re going to be getting, but then this script goes out of its way to present you with something that completely goes against all your expectations, and really leaves you with a lot to think about, even when it’s finished. It’s a bold move, and one that I think is pulled off very well - managing to create something that’s both deep and thought-provoking, while also having enough action and drama to keep you riveted throughout.

In many ways, this story takes lots of things that I’d enjoyed with the Unicorn and the Wasp, and filters them differently. Whereas the likes of Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, and Shakespeare were very sure of themselves during encounters with the Doctor (even if they tend to get that knocked during the course of the adventure, both Christie and Vincent are presented as being flawed. As being human, in fact. I also like that this tale doesn’t shy away from showing what that can mean. There’s no pussyfooting around the fact that Vincent’s troubles and depression led to his suicide, and the story makes sure to portray that in a sensitive, yet hard-hitting way. Any’s reaction upon reaching the gallery to find that Vincent still took his own life at a tragically young age is absolutely heart-breaking, and the Doctor’s response is one of my favourite lines from Doctor Who. I could quote it verbatim at the drop of a hat, because it’s so beautiful, and poignant, and very true; 

THE DOCTOR

The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. Hey. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant.

I don’t want to dwell on the sombre tones of the story too much, though, because there’s an awful lot of humour and levity sprinkled throughout the script which is far more what I was expecting to find from Curtis, and really helps to make the whole thing. For starters, I love the adaptation of the Unicorn and the Wasp gag, in which the titles of Christie’s books being inserted into the script is substituted for visual gags based upon Vincent’s work. The interactions between Vincent and Amy are wonderful, too.

I’ve very little else to say about this story, really, and there’s so much to like that I don’t really want to dwell on the few let downs (once again, the CGI seems to falter a bit in this one), so I’m going to leave it there for now. Not the kind of story that Doctor Who could tell very often, but one which works perfectly as a nice one-off.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 802: Cold Blood

Dear diary,

I’ve never quite known what to make of the ‘new series’ Silurian design. On the one hand, there’s that image of a concept sculpt for this story in which the creatures look like an updated version of the ones we had back in Doctor Who and the Silurians, and I half think that I’d love to have seen that design on screen, but on the other hand, I do like the way these ones look - especially when the soldiers have their masks on, which is a lovely bit of design. I suppose my issue is that these are such a departure from what went before - a more drastic change stylistically than we’ve had for any other monster making the transition from the ‘classic’ era to the new stuff. I think I know what the answer will be, but what does everyone else think? Do you like the modern Silurians, or would you prefer something more ‘traditional’?

If nothing else, I can’t imagine Madame Vastra with the face of a ‘classic’ Silurian…

If there’s one thing I really like about this story, it’s that you’re left not really liking lots of different characters. Right the way through, and especially in today’s episode, I’ve found myself really irritated by the way that Ambrose has behaved. And yet, I think part of the brilliance in that is that she’s behaved the way that most of us would do - out of fear, and selfishness, and sheer ignorance. There’s something really nice about the idea of her failing to be ‘the best Humanity can be’, because I think many of us would fall into similar traps. And yet, on the other side of the fence, we’ve got Silurians that aren’t the best that they can be, either. That said, I have to take issue with the Doctor pointing out that when he met Silurians before, the humans attacked and killed them… while conveniently neglecting to mention that said Silurians had just tried to wipe out Humanity with a big old plague…

Something else that I just wanted to touch on - how much I’d like some kind of follow-on to this one. The Doctor rigs the Silurian alarms to wake them again in a millennium, and we’ve even got a couple of guest characters readily built in for the revival. I’d be keen to see the two sides trying again in a futuristic setting, and perhaps seeing what kinds of struggles might crop up that time. In this story the talk is largely about making room on an already crowded planet, but in a thousand year’s time, with humanity moving out among the stars… well, I reckon there’s a story in there somewhere, and I’d be keen so see it.

Manufacturer: LEGO

RRP: £39.99

Release Date: November 2014

Reviewed by: Doctor Who Online

Review Posted: 13th March 2015

Having run the largest Doctor Who server on Minecraft for over 3 years now, we have received constant requests from our visitors to start doing reviews for the LEGO Minecraft sets. Not being ones to disappoint, and grabbing the nearest possible excuse to play with some cool toys, we are thrilled to kick off our very first review for set ‘#21115 - The First Night’.

Before you get too stuck in, exploring caves and mining for diamonds, you’re going to need to build a little piece of home to base all your endeavours from, right? Well, what better way than building your very own Minecraft LEGO house!

The First Night is a lovingly thought-out set, incorporating many elements from the in-game world in LEGO brick form. Details such as pixelated swords, axes and pickaxes also throw a knowing nod to the Minecraft world, whilst adding the practicality and functionality of a playable LEGO set.

Speaking of functionality, there are some great features here; from an opening and closing front door and pig pen, to the hinged access to the house interior. The inside of Steve’s house is a thing of beauty with lots of details that further work as a touchstone to Minecraft. There’s a crafting table, an item frame (with removable pickaxe), tables, flower pots and a treasure chest! 

You can easily combine the set with others in the LEGO Minecraft range, and with the included ‘inspiration’ manual, there are a couple of other alternative tweaks you can make to the way it looks.

The Build:

With a total of 408 pieces, this is a set that you can easily build within an hour. It’s a genuinely fun and rewarding set to put together - from the foundations right up to the tree-laden roof terrace, there is immense satisfaction in building the house, brick by brick.

It’s also neat near the end of the build where the three separate elements cleanly slot together, and with set '#21114 The Farm’ (sold separately), you can add to this further as it slots in to the rear-right of the house.
[youtube:XzU1mVpzklE]

+  Click Here to buy 'The First Night' from LEGO for £39.99!
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[With thanks to LEGO]

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 801: The Hungry Earth

Dear diary,

Ooh, I love the title of this episode. It’s that great line from Frontios, isn’t it, about the Earth being hungry? I bet anything that somewhere along the line either Steven Moffatt or Chris Chibnall had that in mind when it came to putting this one together. Like Day of the Moon, its one of those titles that really just chimes with me as being perfect. Speaking of which, this is the episode when I first decided that Matt Smith was a perfect casting choice for the Doctor. It wasn’t actually the episode which convinced me, but rather the production of it. I’ve mentioned before that I tried very hard to avoid spoilers for this particular series, but the one bit that I did end up seeing was a short clip (no more than a minute or two) of Matt Smith pacing up and down outside the church used in this episode, obviously trying to learn his lines. It was being shared all over Facebook, and I ended up watching it. Instantly, there’s something just so right about the way he moves. Little movements he makes with his hand, the look he gives when he’s trying to concentrate… oh, all of it. From that moment on, we were in safe hands.

And I love the way that the Doctor is written in this episode. This is perhaps the first time all series that he’s really been presented as being a madman, and that’s largely because he’s been thrown into a situation where his regular companion is taken away from him very early into the narrative, and he’s left to try and prove himself to her boyfriend and a group of strangers who quite rightly think he’s mad. The only thing which does feel like a missed opportunity is making not of just how young he is in this incarnation - it would have been interesting to see that as yet another obstacle that he has to overcome.

As for the episode itself, well this morning I couldn’t have told you a thing about it. Nothing. Nada. I knew it was ‘that Silurian two-parter’ from Series Five, but I couldn't have told you anything of the story. As the episode went on, though, I found more and more of it coming back to me, and I found myself rather liking it, on the whole. Oh, it’s not close to being a stone-cold ‘classic’ (and I’m not sure it has the atmosphere yet that prevailed the original Silurian origin story), but there’s enough in here to enjoy. The introduction of the threat is nicely dealt with, and there really is a feeling of tension as they rush to set everything up in the short amount of time they’ve got (although we’ve got the same problem here - though not on the same scale - as with Victory of the Daleks: we’re told there’s only x number of minutes remaining, 12 in this case, and they get a lot done in that time. I get that making it such a short time frame is what helps to ‘up’ the tension, but I can’t help think that it would have felt a little more believable had they had a half an hour or so…?)

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 800: Amy’s Choice

Dear diary,

Some days, writing this blog is easy. Within a few minutes of the episode starting, I know exactly what I want to say, and as the episode goes on I simply find more and more that chimes with what I want to say. I enjoy days like that, because it makes going from the episode to the writing all the more fun for me.

I thought today was going to be one of those days, because almost immediately, I knew what I wanted to say: this isn’t an episode that works in Series Five - it’s one that would sit better in Series Seven. Lovely, simple. I could write about that without problem… but then as the episode played out, it became more and more apparent that I was wrong, and that point was almost totally shattered. So, instead, I’m going to tell you firstly why I thought this story would work better later on, and then tell you why it also wouldn’t. If that makes any sense at all.

Largely, I didn’t feel that this story sat right here because the whole premise of trying to decide which world was real simply rings hollow for me. Obviously, as a viewer, I know that Amy and Rory are going to be travelling with the Doctor for a while yet, so it was always going to seem obvious that the TARDIS-world was the real one, but… I think that’s the problem. Had this been set during that first part of Series Seven, where there’s a running theme of the Doctor coming back to visit the Ponds while leaving longer and longer gaps between his visits… oh, this would have worked wonderfully as a concept there! Has it really been five years since his last visit, and he’s now checking in on a couple of Ponds who’ve settled down and are about to have a child, or has it only been a few months since their last adventure, and they’ve been caught in the TARDIS. Do you see what I’m trying to say? That feels so much better for me than what we’re given here, because the last scene of the previous episode was about ‘let’s go and have some adventures’, which makes suddenly coming to a situation where the Ponds have settled down feel wrong to me.

I was fairly set on this view for much of the first half of this episode (and, actually, I’ve not abandoned it completely. Despite what I’m about to go on and say, it would work better as a concept in that first half of Series Seven, where it really could be either of the two dreams, as opposed to so clearly being the one). As the episode went on, though, I finally picked up on that emotional core. The choice between the Doctor or Rory. Of course it’s an episode that needs to sit here in series five, because it’s the key moment for Amy’s character, and she even makes a point of saying that she’d never been entirely sure that she was doing the right thing until this very moment. It’s massively important that we get this character beat here so that she can go on to marry Rory at the end of the season. You can see the spanner in the works - on the one hand I really want to argue that this story is in the wrong place… but on the other hand it’s in exactly the right place!

That’s not enough to really save it for me, though. Despite the fact that there’s a nice emotional heart in here, and it serves as such an important beat in Amy’s story, I simply could not connect with things, and it does all come back to the fact that I never really believe in the threat. I’m sorry to say that I just don’t get the love for this one…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 799: The Vampires of Venice

Dear diary,

I don’t know if it’s still a lingering hang-over from just how good The Shakespeare Code looked back in Series Three, but the location work for this story never really felt… right to me. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s some lovely footage in here, and some great locations used to represent Venice, but something feels… I don’t know. Off about it all. Maybe it’s because everywhere is quite washed out whereas The Shakespeare Code and The Fires of Pompeii really used colour to make a point in their locations? The Vampires of Venice always seemed to be a little beige by comparison. It also flags up a problem I had with Series Five at the time that I have to admit I’ve been somewhat struggling to find this time around - the feeling of things looking a bit cheap or empty on screen. I think I was probably recalling the Dalek spaceship in some ways, but the scene when the Doctor confronts Rosanna looks really bare. They’ve simply placed a throne prop into an otherwise empty room, and it just doesn’t have the impact that the designs for those other historical I’ve mentioned did.

It’s also a little bit of a shame that having gone all the way to Croatia to get some nice locations for bits of this story, it gets let down by some of the weakest CGI the programme has seen for quite some time. There are a few shots where water has been added in to represent the canals which really doesn’t work (I still don’t know if - five years on - we’re at a point where realistic CGI water can be done on a TV budget), and the clouds during that final sequence are so laughably bad that I’m almost astounded they were actually signed off for broadcast. It’s a good job that Doctor Who has a bit of a history of dodgy effects, because this episode certainly places on the scale somewhere quite high! That said, there’s some nice moments where the human characters are morphed into their CGI counterparts rather convincingly, so perhaps it’s just a case of the money being spent in different places?

All of this somewhat marry the story for me, because I’m too busy looking at elements of bad effects, or musing on how empty some of the shots look, to really get caught up in the events of the narrative. Oh, there’s some very nice moments in here, and it feels as though the writing team have finally landed on the way to write the Eleventh Doctor (this is perhaps the first time that there have been sequences that feel tailor-made for Smith), but I’m just not able to get sucked into the tale the way I have the past week or so. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either - it’s, again, just a bit beige.

If I had to pick a highlight from this story, then it would have to be Rory. First time around, I never really got the love for Rory as a character. H was alright, I supposed, but he wasn’t anything especially special. This time, though, I can see that that’s exactly his charm - he’s the character that we’d all be if we were suddenly thrust into the Doctor’s lifestyle. The Eleventh Hour, The Best Below, and Victory of the Daleks all went out of their way to make Amy look like perfect companion material, but this story does completely the opposite for Rory - making him a bit weak, and a bit silly, and a bit bumbling. His trying to fight off a ‘vampire’ with a broom, and making a mess of trying to get Amy into the school are exactly what makes him work - and I’m looking forward to seeing if I connect better with him on this watch through.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 798: Flesh and Stone

Dear diary,

Yesterday, I mentioned that the Weeping Angels were progressed quite nicely in this story from what we were given in Blink, and watching it again now makes that even more obvious. Have to admit that when this first episode went out I wasn’t overall keen about the various additions made to the ‘lore’ of the creatures, but the more I’ve thought about it over the years (and especially in re-watching this story in the last couple of days), the more I can’t help but notice how clever it all is especially when the Doctor realises what’s happening to Amy;

THE DOCTOR

A living mental image in a living human mind. But we stare at them to stop them getting closer. We don't even blink, and that is exactly what they want. Because as long as our eyes are open, they can climb inside. There's an Angel in her mind. 

I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated before just how much scarier that makes the Angels. We’ve spent three years by this point thinking of them as being so easily defeated by simply being watched, and then this story comes along and makes even that part of their danger! Brilliant! It’s no wonder they’ve caught on as being the monsters of 21st century Doctor Who with gimmicks like these.

Something else which didn’t particularly work for me first time around which I’ve loved today is the sequence in the forest where we start to see the Angels move. I’m not entirely sure why, but when this was first broadcast, something about that moment felt really off to me. I sort of felt that seeing the statues move somehow lessened the fact that they can move so rapidly when we’re not looking. Actually, though, it’s really creepy, as they all start to realise that Amy can’t really see them. The fact that they start to move so slowly really helps to enhance the terror of the moment for me. It also sort of brings back to something I read recently which I’m starting to think may have been a real missed opportunity - in the original script for The Time of the Doctor, when we get that great shot of all the spaceships gathering over Trenzalore, there was supposed to be a brief shot with the shadows of the Weeping Angels flying past one of the ships. That, for some reason, has always struck me as very scary, and this sequence certainly plays into that same area.

There’s something in this story that surprised me first time around, and it’s done it all over again here - the Doctor starting to work out the mystery of the crack so early on into the season. When I got to see the scripts in the build-up to broadcast, I was only able to read as far as this one (and just outlines of everything to follow), and it struck me as being strange then. Throughout the Russell T Davies years, I’d become so used to the underlying mystery being teased across the series and picked up again when the finale rolls around. Now, suddenly, we’ve had a few weeks of the crack being very heavily used in the final shots of stories, and suddenly the characters are given the chance to use it! The crack - the running theme for the series - is integral to the whole plot of the episode! The Doctor even gets to work out what it is and start describing it.

There’s also that wonderful moment of the Doctor coming back to speak to Amy (who can’t open her eyes) and having his jacket on. The script specified that this was the Doctor from the finale (and the other scripts all featured bonus scenes with various characters who’d be integral for the opening sequence to The Pandora Opens), but I have to say I did enjoy the sheer fury that this moment caused on the forums at the time! People were so convinced that it was a massive production error, and a sign that the new team weren’t paying enough attention… oh, the fun when all was revealed a few weeks later and the humble cake had to be passed around at quite some speed…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 797: The Time of Angels

Dear diary,

When it was first announced (In Doctor Who Magazine, possibly?) that the Weeping Angels were to be making a return for Series Five, I can distinctly recall in-depth discussions with a friend about the ways they could be reintroduced. In the end, we decided that the story ‘had’ to revolve around Wester Drumlins - from Blink - being renovated. The new owners, or possibly the workmen on site, would move one of the four statues in the basement out of position and the Angels would be free to roam once more. If I’m honest, I think this discussion mainly stemmed from the fact that we genuinely wondered what the Doctor’s back-up-plan would be if such an event happened. I don’t think either of us expected what we actually got from this story - an adventure which takes what we know about the Angels from their first outing, and goes on to develop that, and add new facets to them. I’m sure I’ll come back to this more in-depth with tomorrow’s episode.

I can also distinctly recall being a bit non-plussed that River Song would be making a comeback. As I said a few weeks ago, I’d simply not taken to her during Silence in the Library, and the prospect of having her come back to the programme didn’t particularly excite me. Somehow, though, I completely bought into her from the second she appears in the story - which is right at the start, before the opening titles have even kicked in. Watching it again today, I can’t help but think that it’s because she’s just so much fun in that scene. Flirty, dangerous, packing weapons, and using that very Steven Moffat trope of playing with the format of a Time Travel programme to summon the Doctor. The way she catches his attention here is so much better than simply sending a message over the psychic paper, and I love watching both halves of this little narrative play out in tandem. Hello, sweetie!

It also doesn’t hurt that Alex Kingston and Matt Smith have such a great chemistry together from the off. Oh, sure, David Tennant played opposite Kingston very well, and when I watched their two episodes recently I was completely won over in a way that I simply wasn’t in 2008, but there’s something about the way that matt behaves when they share the screen together. I’m wondering if it’s simply because I know that it’s these two who’ll go on to play out the rest of the Doctor/River relationship, or because something just works between them, but it’s already a great dynamic that I can’t wait to watch evolve over the next month.

On the subject of which… we’re four episodes in, now, and i’ve not really mentioned Matt Smith’s performance as the Doctor. I’d love to say that I’ve been waiting for today as this episode contains the first scenes he filmed and thus made a fitting point to bring it up, but if I’m honest it’s simply because he’s so recent in my mind as the Doctor that I sort of forget that I’ve not mentioned it! Frankly, he hits the ground running, doesn’t he? He’s fabulous in this episode, and by the time he gets around to stories like Victory of the Daleks he’d really nailed down the way he wanted to play the part. There’s something about his energy that really resonates with me, and simply makes him feel like ‘the Doctor’. As his era originally played out, I couldn’t help thinking that his performance lost something from Series Six onwards, when writers stop writing simply ‘the Doctor’ - which Matt then filters in his own unique way - and start writing ‘the Doctor as played by Matt Smith’.

Everything started to feel a little bit more forced as his tenure went on, whereas here he’s fresh, playing it the way he thinks is best, and perhaps mores than any Doctor since Tom Baker, you get the impression that he’s simply opening his mouth and surprising even himself with the way he’s choosing to do certain scenes. I can’t say that I was against casting someone so young as the Doctor (but, equally, I can’t say I was overjoyed by the choice - I just sort of felt nothing), but when you watch him even in his earliest episodes, you completely understand how he changed Steven Moffat’s stance on wanting to cast an older Doctor - Smith is just so right for this part. I’m actively anticipating the chance to watch him develop the character now, and see if I was wrong first time around about it feeling more forced as time went by. I really hope I was wrong, because he’s won me round all over again, now…

Publisher: Lulu.com

Written By: Darren M. Bane

RRP: £7.99

Release Date: 23rd January 2015

Reviewed by: Doctor Who Online

Review Posted: 7th March 2015

Every week we get a good number of Doctor Who related goodies dropping through the letterbox here at DWO Towers, but one particular goody piqued our interest this week, and it came in the form of Darren M. Bane’s new parody book ‘Dr U Who’.

Join Darren as he attempts to bring an answer to a very important question; “What really happened to prompt the mighty BBC to finally return our hero to prime-time television”?

In doing so, a whole barrage of amusing issues are tackled including the ‘truth’ behind the Missing Episodes and why aliens speak perfect English - to name just a couple!

You’re taken on an accidental journey backwards and forwards in time, with many side trips along the way that will have you sniggering uncontrollably and tittering left, right and centre! 

Through the parody, you will be surprised at how many childhood memories of the show you’ll have jogged, in what can only be described as a lovingly crafted, gentle prodding at the show and the powers that control it.

Clearly, the title isn’t aimed at the younger fan, but anyone who has followed both the classic and new series of Doctor Who will appreciate everything that has gone into Dr U Who.

Highly recommended!

+  Dr U Who is Out Now, priced £7.99.
+  Buy this book on Amazon.co.uk. 

+  Follow DazzaBane on Twitter.
+  Follow DrWhoOnline on Twitter.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 796: Victory of the Daleks

Dear diary,

I think it’s generally accepted, now, that the Paradigm Daleks were a mistake, isn’t it? I’m speaking specifically the design of them, not necessarily the idea of introducing a new type of Dalek. When I went off to see the scripts for this series early in 2010, someone showed me a photo on their phone of one of these new Daleks, and I honestly thought they were joking. Surely not? By the time they made it onto screen a few months later… nope. Just didn’t quite sit right with me. The 2005 design of Dalek manages to take the initial shape of the original, and update it convincingly to look like a little tank. It somehow manages to look exactly the way you always thought the Daleks looked, while also presenting a perfect step forward in the design. The Paradigm models feel like someone has set out to keep something that’s vaguely shaped like a Dalek, but at the same time is altered just that bit too far. Over the years, I’ve seen people claim that this or that is what makes them simply fail to work, and I’ve seen plenty of slight tweaks to this design which do, somehow, make a world of difference. Perhaps the most telling thing of all, though, is that this model goes on to make a cameo briefly in the next season, and play a small part in Asylum of the Daleks (alongside many of their predecessors), and then that’s it - over and done with. In years to come, I suspect this will be looked back on in commentaries with the same kind of bile as Colin Baker’s costume is these days…

But are they the sole reason that this episode generally doesn’t fare too well with fans? It placed at number 193 out of 241 stories last year when Doctor Who Magazine did their poll of people’s favourites (though, in fairness, five other Matt Smith-era stories rated below it). Well, I’ll be honest. I was expecting to write this entry very much from the stance of 'the new Dalek design is a big factor, but the episode is just generally rubbish, too'. Actually, though, it's a bit more complex than that.

The first fifteen minutes or so of this episode are brilliant. They’re dripping with just the right kind of suspense - we know that Bracewell’s Ironsides are Daleks, and therefore that they’re evil and probably up to no good, and the Doctor knows that, too… but everyone else simply can’t see it. The stakes are raised by the fact that we also know that Churchill is right; if these Ironsides are willing to serve the Allied forced, then the war could be over in a heartbeat. When we get as far as the Doctor asking for Amy to tell the Prime Minister about the events of The Stolen Earth and she doesn’t have a clue what he’s on about, the mystery is only heightened. The stakes feel high because it’s the world vs the Doctor, and the Daleks are there for good measure. That sense of unease and intrigue runs right through the first third of the tale, up to about the point that Bracewell is revealed to be a robot (Oh, and actually, isn’t that a brilliant moment? No, we created you! Wonderful!). All of this is heightened with some really brilliant direction by Andrew Gunn which means we often got shots of the Daleks gliding past in the background, and there’s simply no other word for it - they’re skulking. Little glimpses of the eyestalks twitching, and tiny movements that make it absolutely clear that they’re watching the Doctor, and biding their time.

After that, though, my interest more-or-less completely dropped off, and that seems to coincide with the arrival of the new Daleks. Now, it’s not entirely down to the appearance of the new guys (I’ll get onto them in a moment). After that Daleks have teleported up to their ship, all the tension and dread simply evaporates. Suddenly, where everything felt like the stakes were high and there was a lot going on, I find my ability to believe in the story wavering. The absolute pit of the problem has to be the moment we’re told there’s only ten minutes until German bombers reach London. Fine. We’re then remind (a few minutes into this) that Bracewell had plans for ‘Gravity Bubbles’, which would put a plane in space, though he reminds us that it’s only a theory. Fine. It’s all science-fiction nonsense, obviously, but I’ll buy it. But then, as the planes reach the East End of London (presumably around about that previously mentioned ten-minute-mark), Bracewell arrives to announce that they’ve put the Gravity Bubbles into action, and the planes are ready to launch.

I’m sorry, what? I get that Bracewell is Dalek technology, and therefore the Gravity Bubbles are probably Dalek in design, too, and thus he’s able to cobble it together quicker than usual, but the implication is that he’s managed to take it from a theory of something that could work and put it into practice across three planes in under ten minutes. I probably sound ridiculous complaining about something so trivial, but it lets down the entire episode massively for me, because it feels completely false.

The same is true, then, of the later revelation that Bracewell is a bomb. It feels as though the script was finished before someone pointed out that they were running five minutes short, and thus needed to stretch it out a little bit longer. Nothing feels real (or, at least, as ‘real’ as can be expected in a story about robots from oder-space hiding in the Cabinet War Rooms can), in the way that those first fifteen minutes did, and that’s a real pity.

As for the new Daleks themselves… well, I don’t think it helps that they arrive on screen at the same point the episode starts taking a nosedive. They suffer simply by association, because it feels like they show up and a promising episode goes to the dogs. But, equally, the design really is rubbish. I’ve already praised the direction in this episode, and I think it’s fair to say that it does a wonderful job of making the old Daleks here look like metal. The single bronze one on the ship looks lovely, and the two Ironside models are great. They’ve possibly never looked more like metalling beings. But then the New Paradigm turns up, and the daleks have certainly never looked more like they were made of plastic! It just helps to show up the flaws.

Oh, I could go on all day with a back-and-forth on ‘things Victory of the Daleks gets so right’ vs ‘things Victory of the Daleks gets so wrong’. Seriously, I think I’ve made more notes about this episode than any other in ages. I’ve not even begun to mention how great it is when the New Daleks destroy their predecessors because they’re inferior (and the fact that it’s a great little nod to the Daleks destroying Davros back in the day - the new breed will always destroy their creator, because they’ve been designed to think they’re superior), or how rubbish bits of the Dalek ship look - even if I completely get why it would be so empty. In the end, I think Victory of the Daleks needs another couple of drafts. Also, an extra fifteen minutes or so. Give it room to breathe a little, so that we don’t have to have ridiculously complex inventions made reality in a handful of minutes (seriously, even an earlier line in which Bracewell said ‘we’ve got these in development right now’ would have made it better! It would have made the drama more real, too, in the sense of ‘In theory these work, but we’re still only half way through!’), and then try something a little more traditional with the Dalek revamp… This really could have been a classic. Possibly the biggest missed opportunity that the 21st century Doctor Who has ever had.

(Oh, it was heading for at least an ‘8’ with that first third! I’ll stop banging on about it now, though…)

Last week, DWO brought you a story about the current status of The Underwater Menace DVD (originally due for release in 2014, and rescheduled for 2015), and the fact that it has been removed from the 2015 schedules for the time being.

We were awaiting an official statement from BBC Consumer Products on their intentions with the title and the future of the Classic Series Doctor Who DVD range, and are pleased to report we now have that statement:

“We appreciate that some Doctor Who fans are disappointed that we have not yet been able to release The Underwater Menace on DVD. We would like to reassure everyone that we are currently reviewing the best way to bring fans more Classic Doctor Who titles. Please bear with us - we’ll let you know more as soon as we can.”

A recent petition from fans showing their support for The Underwater Menace DVD to be released, has now acquired over 1000 signatures.

+  Discuss all the Doctor Who DVD releases in the DWO Forums.

[Source: BBC Consumer Products]

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 795: The Beast Below

Dear diary,

Every so often in this marathon I find myself approaching a story that I just know I’m not going to like. Usually it’s because I’ve seen it before and it’s left a less than favourable taste in my mouth. When these episodes come along (thankfully, it’s a rare occurrence), I find that one of two things happens. Either the episode ends up being even worse than I remembered (as was the case last week with Planet of the Dead, which went from being one I didn’t remember fondly to being one that I really didn’t enjoy), or it swings the other way and ends up being rated probably a little above what it deserves because I’m so taken aback by the fact that I’ve enjoyed it. I’m pleased to say that today’s episode has fallen into the latter of those two categories.

I wasn’t at all expecting to like this one. First time around it felt like crashing back down to Earth after the highs of the previous week’s massively confident start to the new regime. Since then it’s simply occupied a place in my mind filed away with other stories that I never really intended to watch again in a hurry. But actually, there’s quite a decent little story tucked away in here! Oh, sure, it’s not ever going to win prizes as being the greatest episode of Doctor Who ever made, but it’s a perfectly serviceable one to pass 45 minutes, and if we take Series Five as being intended as a new start for an audience unfamiliar with Doctor Who (which is certainly what the production team seem to have been thinking in places), then it provides a crucial tent-pole in that regard.

We’re introduced to the idea that the Doctor is a Time Lord and the last of his kind. There’s none of the mystery built up around it that we had in The End of the World, because it’s not needed - from the point of view of an established audience, we already know what happened (roughly). From a new perspective the description of the Time War as ‘a bad day’ simply fills in enough to keep the conversation moving. The story gets a little less subtle towards the end when trying to about the point about the Doctor and the Star Whale being very similar (they make the point twice in the Tower of London, and then just in case you don’t get it, Amy comes to find the Doctor again and spell it out as plainly as she can), but on the whole it works.

There’s also some rather nice design work in this episode to help set it apart from the tone of Doctor Who from the last few years. One of the things that felt a shame first time around was that this story didn’t feel like it was following the same fresh new look established with The Eleventh Hour, and while it’s certainly true that this is perhaps less honed in places, it certainly does have its own unique style, and it’s really rather lovely. I’d never noticed, for example, the way that the elevators are designed to resemble the London Underground - right down to the tiling on the walls outside them. That’s a nice touch.

And while I’m on the subject of design, I’m going to mention it, because I know I’ll never get around it it otherwise: the new TARDIS. I remember not being all that fussed on the white window frames and shade of blue on the exterior when it was first revealed. I didn’t dis*like it, I just didn’t particularly love it, either. Now, though, I have to confess that I really *do like it. The interior… maybe it’ll grow on me this time around, but I was never that fond of this console room. Something about it just felt that bit too much like a set, in the way that the previous version of the room didn’t. It just doesn’t quite gel with me in the way that the coral did immediately. Not to worry, though, because the greedy Eleventh Doctor gets two console rooms, and his next one is much more up my street…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 794: The Eleventh Hour

Dear diary,

In the weeks leading up to the broadcast of The Eleventh Hour, I couldn’t have told you the last time I’d been more excited for the start of a series. I’d largely managed to avoid ‘spoilers’ throughout the 2009 filming, so the trailer released after David Tennant’s departure really did a good job of whetting my appetite ready for the new run. But then, in early 2010, I was working on a project which meant I had to be completely up-to-date with Doctor Who, so that the material would still be relevant by the time it hit the shelves. This meant having to do the most exciting thing in the world - go and be locked in a room at the BBC and read some of the scripts, as well as a general outline, for Series Five. All that work avoiding spoilers was for nothing, because this was the ultimate spoiler. I found, in the long run, that it hampered my enjoyment of several episodes on broadcast, because I’d spent months imagining them one way in my head only to be disappointed when they were presented differently on screen.

Largely it’s because I couldn’t have predicted the unique way that matt Smith would play the part, and I don’t think any of us could have predicted the huge shift in tone that the series undergoes from this episode on. Just look at that long shot which looks around Amelia’s garden before leading us to the scared little girl in the house. It’s like a film! And it doesn’t stop there - Adam Smith is one of my favourite Doctor Who directors, and I wish he’d come back to do more than the handful of episodes he was responsible for in this series. The rest of the episode looks completely unlike anything we had in the Russell T Davies era - it properly starts out confident and strong, proclaiming itself to be the start of something new.

Even to this day I can’t decide wether that’s the best thing or not. Everything has changed at this point. New Doctor. New Companion. New Man-In-Charge. New TARDIS interior. New TARDIS exterior. New Sonic Screwdriver… before the series is out we’ll be able to add New Daleks to the list. This is getting on for as bigger a shift in direction as the one between Seasons Seventeen and Eighteen in the ‘classic’ run, and I don’t think we’re a million miles away from the big change of Seasons Six to Seven. In some ways, I like that it’s such a confident casting off of what went before - a programme in a new form which is proud to stand up and be its own thing. On the other, as the original broadcasts played out, I couldn’t help but think it came across as a bit of a middle finger to the five years immediately preceding it, almost as a ‘you did it wrong’. With hindsight, I think it works, and it’s certainly not any kind of disrespect to the things which came before. It’s simply Doctor Who reinventing itself almost totally, which is just what it’s good at.

So, as for The Eleventh Hour as an episode… oh, it’s good, isn’t it? I’d spent so long dying to see what it looked like on screen and then in the run up to the broadcast, I found myself booking a date for the same evening. Even as it was being arranged, there was a little voice in the back of my mind that said ‘You can’t see her that night! That’s the start of the new Doctor Who season!’. Oh we’ve all been there. And what do you do? How do you choose? I went for the simple option - have your cake and eat it. Let’s get pizza at mine and watch the new series of Doctor Who. Yes, that’s romantic. I’m not entirely sure if she was at all keen on Doctor Who by the time the episode had finished (she certainly hadn’t been before hand), and was probably a little put-off by the fact that the date ended early so I could sit and watch the episode again later that night (I know, I know, priorities), but she did return for episodes sporadically throughout the rest of Series Five, so it wasn’t a complete bust!

Oh, but it was good. Immediately after broadcast, the figures of the Eleventh Doctor (in a two-pack with a ‘raggedy’ version) and his new Sonic Screwdriver were released. I’d managed to pick up my figure earlier in the day and took great delight in adding him to the shelf alongside all the other Doctors. Matt Smith had won me over completely, and we were standing at the dawn of an exciting new era. That’s the best feeling in the world…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 793: The End of Time - Part Two

Dear diary,

I can’t make my mind up as to wether the Tenth Doctor era has gone by quickly or not. I’ve spent more episodes with David Tennant’s Doctor than I have with any other since Peter Davison, but in some ways it feels like this Doctor has only just arrived on the scene. In others, it feels like he’s been around for ages. When I think back to specific episodes - anything from Series Two, for example - it feels like a lifetime ago, and the fact that Tennant physically aged quite a bit in the part makes that feeling all the more pronounced. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel all that long ago since he was promising trips to Barcelona, or bringing down Harriet Jones’ government.

But there’s no denying what an impact the Tenth Doctor made - had the profile of the programme ever been higher? Even now, with the show simulcast around the world to the biggest possible audience, it doesn’t feel like it’s at quite those dizzying heights of around 2007/2008, when you could barely move for Doctor Who. It was on the cover of the Radio Times every other week. The shops were stuffed with products of every kind. There were two sister shows running throughout the time of the year when the main show wasn’t… and everyone, even people who didn’t watch Doctor Who seemed to agree that David Tennant was one of - if not the - best Doctors ever.

And after all that… oh, I still can’t help but think that this finale is just a bit nothing for him. As with yesterday, I’ve found a lot more to enjoy in today’s episode than I was perhaps expecting to, but something about it just doesn’t gel with me. I wasn’t all that connected to the episode while watching, and nothing really spurred any particular excitement in me. I think it’s still the hangover of that feeling in 2009 of being a spectre at the feast, just wanting this Doctor to hurry up and clear off so we could get to the new chap. It certainly didn’t help that immediately after the broadcast of this episode a trailer for the upcoming Series Five appeared on the BBC website, and it was fifty times more exciting than anything which happened in this story.
Something I am pleased about, though, is that I’ve changed my mind about the sequence of the regeneration itself. For years now - ever since broadcast, really - I’ve thought that the Doctor should rage at Wilf, the final words of the Time Lord Victorious. He should scream, and shout, rage against the dying of the light, and then when Wilf tells him to simply go… he should. Okay then. You’re right. My life is more important than yours. See ya! I always thought that he should go and get his reward at that point. Venture off and see all his friends one last time. Martha, Mickey*, Jack, Sarah Jane, Rose… all those shining people who kept the Lonely Angel going. Kept him fighting. And then he should return for Wilf, who’s sad and alone in the booth, tell him that it’s his honour to give his life for such a man, and then we should pick up with the sequence as seen. Largely, I think I’d always thought of that as a better narrative because it means we can have the Doctor regenerate in the box - the Doctor uncurls from that foetal position and it’s Matt Smith! - but watching it today, I’m happy to admit that I was wrong; it works just fine the way it is, and the emotional beats hit at just the right points.

I’ve brought it up a few times in the last couple of weeks, but I can’t let today’s episode pass without giving one final mention… Bernard Cribbins really is wonderful, isn’t he? Can you imagine that there could have been a version of Doctor Who where he only made that on brief cameo appearance in Voyage of the Damned and then that was it? Horrible thought. A real pity that he had to step back into the programme in circumstances where another actor had passed away, but what a tribute to give - one of the best performances the show ever has. I’m so glad that he was given such a prominent role to play in these final episodes of the era, getting to really showcase his range and make you laugh out loud (‘God bless the cactuses!’) and tear up (‘I don’t want you to die!’) in equal measure. He really steals the show from Tennant in his final episodes, and I don’t think anyone could mind.

And now, we’re off into a bold new era! At the time, I found the Matt Smith years (well, the first couple, at least) far less to my liking than the previous few years of Doctor Who had been, and I’ve never really gone back to give them a second chance. With the exception of tomorrow’s Eleventh Hour and the 50th Anniversary special in a few weeks, I’ve never rewetted any of this era, so it’s like seeing it fresh and new, which is a very exciting thought.

It also means that I’m drawing to the very end of this mammoth project, and so I need your help! I need to decide how I’m going to be ending things. The original plan, way back in January 2013 when The 50 Year Diary kicked off was to stop with the 50th Anniversary. Nice and neat - hence the name - to cover every story from the programme’s first half-century. But then Matt Smith went and left just one episode later, so I thought I’d include that one, too, just to round off the era nicely. But now I’m wondering - with Series Nine only a few months away, and having enjoyed Series Eight so much when it was broadcast last year, do I carry on for an extra fortnight and do those episodes, too? That way, I’ll have covered all the episodes of Doctor Who. Let me know which approach you’d rather in the comments; do I finish with Time of the Doctor, or Last Christmas?

*I’m trying not to complain about the things I’m not so keen on in today’s episode, because it’s nice to keep things a bit nicer for a Doctor’s departure, but I have to grumble about the Mickey and Martha pairing. Not because I’ve specifically anything against the two of them getting together, but because it’s just another notch in that belt of Martha’s character being a bit rubbish after Series Three. She first gets engaged to a bloke she met in an alternate timeline for about 24 hours, despite showing very little chemistry with him in the first place, and then suddenly ditches him to marry a bloke she aired only a couple of scenes with in another episode (did Micky and Martha actually speak to each other in the Series Four finale?). It just felt so odd at the time, and it still doesn’t sit right five years on…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 792: The End of Time - Part One

Dear diary,

At the time, I recall being really disappointed with David Tennant’s exit from Doctor Who. I mused the other day that knowing almost a year in advance who his replacement was going to be and only having a few scattered episodes here and there (of varying quality) meant that by the time this two-part story rolled around I was just ready for the new Doctor. The regeneration was just another thing in the way of getting on with something different, and frankly more exciting. Then this story aired, and I wasn’t keen, and the same was true for almost my entire circle of friends. The general opinion among us was that the brilliant Russell T Davies era had gone out really feebly, and it was a pity after five years which had brought us some really brilliant television.

So I was pleased to find that today, there’s lots that I’ve found to enjoy about this one. The Doctor arriving on the planet of the Ood at the start (still not quite as impressive as the matte shots, but certainly a more interesting area than the basin of ‘snow’ the TARDIS put down in during Series Four), and the fact that he’s spent such a long time running away from his summons (I really wish they’d gone with the suggestion Davies makes in The Writer’s Tale, though, that the Doctor should emerge from the TARDIS with a few flecks of grey in his hair, as though he’d done anything and everything to put off this moment). In fact, everything on the Ood planet is rather nice, and I love the design of the ‘Elder Ood’. it serves as a nice way of bringing the audience up-to-speed with the events of the Master’s last story, too, while making it feel part of the narrative.

For some reason, last time around, I took issue with the Master’s resurrection, but I can’t for the life of me remember why, and I can’t say I’ve got any problem with it here - again it’s something I’ve rather enjoyed. And then there’s everything between the Doctor and Wilf, and that beautiful moment where the Doctor ruminates on the fact that people have had to wait centuries to meet him again, and then Wilf manages it in a single afternoon, as though he’s drawing all the threads together in his own mind…

But not everything is working for me, and I’m perhaps not surprised to find that the same things are bugging me this time around that did last time. The biggest one has to be the Master’s ‘superpowers’, for want of a better word. I just find that they’re taking me out of the narrative every time they crop up. It’s not the skeletal part which bothers me (last time, I know I wasn’t keen on that, but this time around that aspect kind of works for me), it’s the mega jumps which are causing me an issue. It’s most distracting just after an incredibly powerful scene between the Doctor and the Master, in which our hero realises that the drums in his foe’s head are real… and then the Master uses his energy to propel himself into the air like Iron Man. The entire beauty of that scene was completely shattered for me by that final moment. I’ve not even got an issue with the Master going berserk at that point - it’s very in character for this incarnation - but the ‘flight’ just doesn’t work for me at all I’m afraid.

The other thing that I’ve always found so off-putting that I can’t help but look out for it and notice it even worse now if the Vinvocci make-up. For some reason, the green of the faces was added digitally on this occasion instead of as regular make-up, and it doesn’t match with the bits of prosthetic at all. It really stands out like a sore thumb, and it’s a real shame that such a botched experiment occurs in - of all episodes - David Tennant’s final story.

Oh but enough with the whining, because you know what? That moment at the end, with the big speech about the return of the Time Lords, where we pull back from planet Earth and pan round to see the Narrator, catching sight of a Gallifreyan collar only a fraction of a second before he announces who they are… it’s so beautifully executed, and is probably the best cliffhanger of the entire Russell T Davies era. Now that’s one to go out on…