Rate and Discuss: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

[SiHart]

Well there are some dinosaurs and they're on a spaceship. How can this possibly fail? You tell me...

[Rob McCow]

I am so g****mn tired of these m**********ing Dinosaurs on this M*****ing spaceship!

Already.

[Dino]

Aww, no Moschops in the poll! Moschops, as well as being a charming stop motion lunchtime series in the 80's, they were also an actual dinosaur species.
Even Speilburg, Spielberg, speelullburrg didn't bother to put them in his film!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moschops (And the page is taking me an age to load up. Hopefully it should be about it's discovery in 1911)

And less than half an hour to go!

[J.R. Southall]

Well, here's my review for Starburst... it might ruffle a few scales, and that's a fact!

[MinaHarker]

Boooooooooooooriiiiiiiiing!

[SiHart]

Loved it! Great fun- best Chibnall script so far!

[Dino]

Solomon was excellent. We got more spaceship than dinosaurs. But we got drama. We had comedy. And yet the two comedians were really phoned in voice overs! We had moments where I thought the internet would burn out on lesser Doctor Who forums. We had a pretty good story. We had drama.
*highlights and deletes that sentence
I voted 9. David Mitchell got a part. That's my only objection.
Now imagine if this was the first episode of the series?

[Larry]

daft in places but still a lot of fun..

7/10

[Andrew Curnow]

Rightly or wrongly, and if it was always the same it would be dull, but that is pretty much how I like my Doctor Who. Nonsensical, funny, spectacular, unlike anything else, comfy, twisty, and on a Saturday night on BBC1!!

Yes, I'm sure the two 'guest companion' characters were probably typically flat Chibnall types, and no doubt Triceratopses didn't really behave like dogs, and maybe not everybody likes camp robots, but personally I enjoyed that even more than last week's Dalek opener. So many lines and moments that really DID make me laugh out loud - particular favourite at the moment, "This is comedy gold, where's a Silurian audience when you want one?"

Ha-ha, geronimo, loved it!!

[duncan]

Those robots soon became annoying and were far more menacing when they kept the gobs shut. I enjoyed Mark Williams as Rory's Dad but Amy was back to her irritating self again.

I'll give this a 7. Nowhere as good as last week.

[Nyder]

Phew!

If you want the best definition of "romp" then look no further than this episode!

A thumbs up from me! It's good to have one delightfully silly story in a season and this is it! Although there's still some dramatic moments - it's clear the Doctor knows that the end of the Ponds is nigh. I'm liking Rory more, but I'm liking Amy less. Her increasing sassyness is getting irksome.

The jury is still out for me on the camp robots - even though they frequently turned from prissy to nasty.

My fave scene was Brian sat on the TARDIS floor looking down at the earth - simply wonderful.

I know Solomon killed a shedload of Silurians, but did the Doctor really leave him to die??

Talking of Solomon, there was one shot of him that reminded me so much of Pat Troughton:-

[Utermazan]

It was all right, but no where near as good as last weeks.

The robots were just a bit... childish. The whole story was a bit silly, but it did have some interesting bits.

The Silurian Ark idea was a good one and a quite believable idea to explain an otherwise fantastical premise.

The Doctor leaving Soloman on the ship was surprisingly dark. Indeed, the scene where the dinosaurs were shot down by Amy seemed a bit out of place. Granted the guns were loaded with tranquilliser, but it was a bit of a shock to see the companion gunning down enemies.

The end scene was great. There is no question about that.

I'd give it a 6/10. It was too silly for my liking, and I'd like some more serious stories seeing as we are so close to the Pond's departure.

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

10/10 from me. It was clearly always going to be a fun episode and I can't fault it for that. A great romp with great characters.

Very pleased we've not seen the last of Brian

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Awful. Absolute mess with pretty much no proper direction or anything. Stupid Scooby Gang recruiting phase with yet more Doctor-fancying, stupid gun-toting Amy trying to be too cool moments, and then to top it all off it ends with the Doctor murdering the bad guy in cold blood! Atrocious.

Maybe doesn't quite deserve 1, but I probably overrated last week's episode so I'm not going to feel too guilty for awarding it that.

[Utermazan]

I guess this is very much a Marmite episode. Again it seemed a weak plot just so there could be a joke (in this case dinosaurs, last week "Doctor Who!!??"). I hope this isn't a continuing theme.

[Nyder]

Brian Williams - now there's a guy who really knows where his trowel is :-)

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

and then to top it all off it ends with the Doctor murdering the bad guy in cold blood! .

As does The Ribos Operation which I also adore even though the Doctor's morality in blowing up the Graff Vynda-K is equally questionable.

[brandynigma]

I thought the Doctor's actions rather mirrored River's "Mercy" scene with the Dalek in The Big Bang (and the parallel to Ribos is another good one).

Let it not be forgotten either that the Doctor ASKED Solomon to leave and told him not to take Nefertiti. Questionable: yes. Wrong: maybe. Saving more innocent beings from being exploited or killed: definitely.

And is the ISA the International Space Agency or the Indian Space Agency? I was sure I saw some non-Indian crew, but given the setting it's hard to be sure.

8/10 for me!

[Philipnet]

The Indian Space Agency

And presumably they can employ non-Indian nationals

[Alex Me]

Well I was not expecting much with it being a chibnell script, but I was pleasantly surprised.

A nice fun adventure, and Chibnells best script yet.

Not everything worked, some of the supporting characters were a bit flat, but overall very enjoyable and very silly (like the best of doctor who). 7/10

[brandynigma]

Thanks Mr Ludlam!

[Nyder]

I never thought Argos would get a mention in Doctor Who!

[Jason Thompson]

I wasn't very impressed at the start. I felt the 'comedy' was being thrown at us to cover the fact that we are suddenly presented with the Doctor rather uncharacteristically rounding up a gang to investigate something for some unknown reason, and then having too much thrown at us. Once everyone was spearated and things settled down a bit it got a lot better. I enjoyed the moment of misdirection in the middle when we find out that it's a Silurian ark, then find out that there are no Silurians aboard and the threat is from someone else entirely. I thought it rattled along quite nicely.

Mark Williams was great. So great that you can almost overlook the massive fudge that the Doctor just happened to pick Amy and Rory up by materialising around them for the first time and thereby accidentally picking up Rory's dad on the very occasion it turns out that they need two genetically related pilots for the spaceship....

As to the criticism of the Doctor killing the bad guy at the end, this is hardly an unusual thing for the Doctor to do, despite his claimed abhorrence of such acts. Off the top of my head:

The End of the World (beaming Cassandra back and watching her dry out and explode, even if it did turn out a year later that she wasn't dead)

The Christmas Invasion (making the Sycorax leader fall off the ship to his death)

The Ribos Operation (as already noted)

And probably a number of others I don't have the time to think of right now. Yes, it's not 'nice', but it's not like he didn't give Solomon every chance to get out safely.

[Dino]

And even the "Urgh! Boys are stupid!", "Ugh! Girls are stupid!" conversation (When you boil it down) wasn't all that bad. Pretty bad. But not episode killing.

I was more "..." about Solomon's crutch getting kicked than being left behind to die.

[Junkyard]

Well, here's my review for Starburst... it might ruffle a few scales, and that's a fact!

Great review! But I found the robots rather less funny than you did.