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Having decided that everyone could do with a holiday, the Doctor takes Graham, Yasmin and Ryan to a luxury resort for a spot of rest and relaxation. However, they discover the place where they are having a break is hiding a number of deadly secrets.
Was it a relaxing holiday or full of adventure?
Let us know!
Hopefully everyone's enjoyed it and it's just me who's grumpy but...
It seemed to have been made up as it went along - oh she's got a bomb, and actually she's her daughter now, and really the Dregs have a base just down a few stairs behind the ventilator in the main hotel complex but they never choose to attack that way when the shield is down, and nor do the humans use it to nip down one night and slaughter them, and now the son has stropped off for no real reason, and luckily the ingredient for the teleport can be made by using the virus that's in the system and.....
And then there's the end. Doctor Who can of course always be used to comment on real-world issues, but there's a difference between sci-fi as allegory and whipping out your sledgehammer to batter some poor nut to death. "So it actually was Earth all along" and somehow global warming has not only made the planet radioactive but it's turned us into CO2 breathing creatures... I'm not running down the warnings about the environment that we all hear regularly, but it's a huge leap from that to a race of mutant killers (which, incidentally, I think Primeval had already done and better 10+ years ago).
And, again, poor Jodie is given so little to work with - I hate to say it, but I don't think travelling with this Doctor would be all that much fun, she's so judgy!!
Also, I've only noticed it tonight but..... Isn't the 'Police Public Call Box' sign the wrong way around inside the TARDIS? I would expect it to be 'back to front' from the inside, but it's not, it's readable (ie, left to right). It's a small point, but it's now niggling the heck out of me!!
Cut out the sabotage character (maybe give Yaz more to do?) and it would have worked better. Too many characters introduced then discarded.
First dud of the season. Hopefully from here it's back to climbing heights.
Enjoyed it, but I'm going to knock it down a couple of points to 6 for a lot of ham-fistedness: Hyphen-with-a-3 (was it?) with a wig that was so obvious it reminded me of the comedy wig me and a friend often resorted to in a series of very amateur humourous videos we made over 30 years ago; more bad parenting issues, brought to us by the writer who brought us bad fathers last series but turned into bad mothering for the sake of balance balance can be achieved, wokeworld Who - you're doing it again with two more big-name scientists later in the series!); Ryan discovering that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have been thwacked round the ear with a wet cliché at all; the Invisible Yaz; the also-aforementioned wrong-way-round TARDIS door; and a basic plot premise - humans environmentally at fault for their mutations - handled more subtly by The Curse Of Fenric. Oh, and the done-to-death cliché of the son who knows more about his dad's job than his dad does. And why am I thinking of Dean Stockwell? oh yes, a boy with green hair's been done before too!
Still, the monsters are very good, and once the story's got going, there's a very good air of tension through to the end. Now that they've had the ending to last week's episode, we've also now managed to see a change in Jodie's Doctor at last a more sombre character somewhat formulaicly so, but early doors; always time to work on it. (It's taken two years to get this far with her though, so we shall see...)
It's pretty clear that the fans who've never seen Trial really like this episode and the rather heavy handed ending seems to have resonated with younger viewers. However, I have seen Trial and unfortunately after enjoying the episode for the first half hour or so, the scene when the planet's true identity was revealed spoiled it for me.
In hindsight it's a shame as this was nearly a very good episode with one of most well-realised original monsters we've had since 2005. There are lots of other ways the trope of revealing the planet to be Earth could have been done (eg the Doctor tasting the soil) but the clichéd device of a subway station instantly reminded me of Ravelox and there had been no prior clues about Orphan 55. If the reveal had been layered with clues from the start of the episode rather than coming out of nowhere it would have been a lot more effective.
Yes Doctor Who has dealt with environment issues before and rightly so but it shouldn't have been so on the nose. After a strong start to the series, this episode failed to live up to its potential.
Considered after remembering I'd watched The Sontaran Experiment the previous day: "Red Square's over there."Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Brinck-Johnsen
I was pretty disappointed by this one, it started well but then a large section felt like filler, and the ending was handled in a far too clunk and patronising manner. 5/10
