The Cardiff Experience

Way back in February 2011, I went to one of the opening days at London’s Olympia when it hosted the Doctor Who Experience and shortly after I managed to blog about here. In terms of a compare and contrast exercise two years on, there is one big difference you would be hard pushed to miss: scale. Built in a bloody enormous custom-made warehouse on Cardiff Bay, there is a sense of scale and space that adds hugely to event with high ceilings, lots of room and ample scope for adding things as time goes on.

I have to confess that the walkthrough adventure remains very much the same event. Not that this fact is, in any way, a bad thing: quite the opposite is true. The experience bit is completely identical but still as immersive and entertaining and the kids absolutely love it, almost as much as the grown ups. The exhibition bit features many of the same costumes, monsters and props although bang up to date with the inclusion of Oswin’s outfit from Asylum of the Daleks, and even four costumes, a snow-globe and a snowman from “The Snowmen” shown less than two weeks previously.

The little shop is a lot more impressive than the London based one. Bigger (as far as I recall) and with a good selection of contemporary merchandise, some of which was at sale prices. It also had some brand new stuff (for example, some very impressive posters printed on wooden boards that I hadn’t even seen before, and the new range of domestic goods like aprons, espresso cups and tea-pots). I was also pleased to see the Universal Remote Control Sonic Screwdriver and the Big Chief 12-inch Matt Smith action figure among the higher-end goods. The only minor gripes I could possibly make were two-fold: (1) The absence of any completely unique exclusive product (other than the multitude of teeshirts), unless I missed it. I was thinking that something akin to the little Amelia Pond action figure might be in attendance. And (2) A selection of classic merchandise, the kind of which you might find in a comic or specialist shop or at a Collectormania-style event. I told you that they were “minor” gripes.

All in all though, a step up from the Olympia based event and a must visit location for any Doctor Who fan worth his or her own salt in this golden year.

1,000 Pieces

 

 

Completed my Christmas holiday challenge this evening…..

 

Now, I’m no expert about such things but I found it to be a very high quality product and a step up from the standard of jigsaw that I recall from my youth. The colour reproduction is great, the artwork is actually very impressive (apart from the decision to include a TARDIS in what is essentially a villains and monsters image). It’s not exactly the most dynamic or sociable way to pass the time, but I found the whole exercise to be rather therapeutic and a complete change of pace from all the usual festive running around and over-eating. Hats off to Ravensburger for finally creating a jigsaw that’s more than the typical 60 or 80 piece efforts that appeal solely to the young fan base.

Happy Who Year

We are now in Doctor Who’s golden year. Strictly speaking the fiftieth year of the show began on 24th November 2012, but poetically I prefer the assumption that 2013 just sounds like it’s fifty years since 1963 and that any year of celebration should begin right now on 1st January. I am expecting news, brand new telly adventures and events aplenty over the next 12 months, so I thought I’d stoke up the old blog and do something with it. I am quite sure that I don’t have any regular readers given my complete lack of blogging recently, but if I did, I would now be telling them how sorry I was for not writing anything here since 24th September and not even bothering to write up my review of last week’s Christmas special, “The Snowmen” let alone last autumn’s Pond farewell (in “The Angels Take Manhattan”). I would also be making earnest promises to do better in the future and provide, what I assume is still called, regular content.

So, there are two episode reviews in the pipeline. Then, this weekend I will be making my first visit to Cardiff’s Doctor Who Experience since its relocation from Olympia… a review of that will be forthcoming too. I have also subscribed to Big Finish’s second series of Fourth Doctor Adventures starring Tom Baker and the late Mary Tamm. As if that wasn’t enough, the first classic DVD release of the year is coming this Monday as “The Legacy Boxset” makes its debut. So plenty to get my creative writing juices flowing. New year, new start. I wonder if I can keep this up?!

The Power of Three: A Review

I think that this may have been the best episode of the four that we’ve seen in Series Seven, so far. On the surface it was a simple tale: there were no headline acts here: no dinosaurs or cowboys, no Daleks or Angels, but what it did have was a soul and, both figuratively and literally, it went for the heart. Of course, it wouldn’t be Doctor Who without an alien threat of some description [Well, it wouldn't be Doctor Who since the purely historical tales of yesteryear] but the simplicity of that ‘invasion’ part of the plot seemed to be designed so as not to detract or distract from the core material. That core material being the drawing together of the ongoing narrative that has been developing since the Doctor bought Amy and Rory a house at the end of “The God Complex”, providing us with more insight about the impact of these double lives that the Ponds are living and setting us up nicely for their departure when the Angels take Manhattan this Saturday.

In a “Town Called Mercy” we had a little voice-over narration bookending the episode as the descendent of the little girl in the town spoke of what had happened, and here again we get a similar device used as Amy tells of the year of the slow invasion when the Doctor came to stay. Theme spotters will have also noted the fourth consecutive appearances of flickering lights and mentions of Christmas. Although there may have been a slighter longer standing callback in play. Perhaps it was the contemporary, Earth-bound setting; or the style of direction; or the revisit to the Tower of London not seen since 2005′s “Christmas Invasion”; or even the use of news channels, cameo appearances and images from around the world, but “The Power of Three” seemed for all the world to be a bit of a throwback to the Russell T Davies era. And not in a bad way. It was an effective hook to which the audience could relate.  This was a good old fashioned alien invasion story that probably would have sat perfectly nicely in any era of Doctor Who.

The black cubes, while also being an obvious avenue for creating the dullest piece of merchandise you could possibly imagine, successfully established themselves as being suitably mysterious. Where did they come from? What were they doing? What was going to happen to them? These were all questions that happily kept both the characters and the viewers pre-occupied, while at the same time, the fact that they didn’t do anything at all for quite a long time allowed for the dialogue to take centre stage, and Chris Chibnall delivered some of his best work on the show to date. There was even opportunity for further ‘adventures-within-adventures’ and the trio popped back to thwart an off-screen Zygon infiltration of a posh London hotel and to, presumably, rescue Rory’s phone charger from Henry VIII. The writers of future fan fiction will forever be thankful for all the huge gaps in the chronology presented by the ten intervening years that were referenced.

One of the highlights of this show, since its 2005 return has been the quality of the guest cast on display and recent top form continued here with the first of the Redgrave dynasty to put in an appearance in Who with Jemma turning up as none other than Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart’s daughter, Kate. She was pretty magnifient in her own understated way and has gone straight to the top of many a fan’s “Must Return” List. Also, a second outing for the instantly loveable Mark Williams playing Rory’s dad, and once again stealing the show: the look on his face as he was being wheeled away from the just-revealed Shakri on the spaceship was priceless. Speaking of whom, the criminally underused Steven Berkoff, replete with a wonderful prosthetic, made all too brief an appearance.

Unfortunately, Mr Berkoff found himself at the centre of the episode’s weak point. Once the black cubes revealed their danger by inducing cardiac arrest in the nearest victim, it was inevitable that an incredibly rapid solution to the danger was necessary if these lives were to be saved. Many would argue that the story didn’t pull this off in a believable way… the Doctor’s left heart goes in to arrest, they identify the problem, head from the Tower of London to Rory’s hospital, neutralise the droid on guard, find the worm-hole to the spaceship at the back of a good’s lift, rescue Rory and Brian, get all the exposition about the why’s and wherefore’s of the nefarious plan off the evil Shakri who turns out to be a hologram, re-programme the cubes, save the day and escape the conveniently exploding spaceship in the nick of time. On the one hand it felt as though the resuscitation took way too long to have realistically been effective, serving to trivialise the heart attacks suffered by so many of the population. On the other, the speed at which these final events unfolded felt like it was jamming way to much in to too short a period of time at the end of what had been up until then, a well paced episode. It was a difficult balance that didn’t quite come off.

However, it was a small price to pay because, as I said, the alien invasion was not the core element of the story. Amy and Rory living their real life (as opposed to their ‘Doctor Life’) and coming the point when they have to choose between the two was the crux of “The Power of Three”. Rory and Brian’s separation from The Doctor and Amy allowed us to be treated to one of the great Doctor/Companion scenes that I can recall* as the two of them sat on the wall overlooking the Thames and talked about life, the universe and everything. The Doctor’s words as he sat there, looking and sounding every one of his 1,200 years old: “I am not running away from things, I am running towards them. Before they flare and fade, forever…. You were the first. The first face this face saw. And you are seared on to my hearts, Amelia Pond. I am running to you and Rory before you fade from me.” Beautiful words, beautifully delivered by Matt Smith. If that kind of scene doesn’t strike at the very heart of the matter then you might just be watching the wrong programme. [* The possible exception being Wilfred and David Tennant's Doctor in the cafe during the episode "The End Of Time", talking about dying, which remains impossible to watch without getting a lump in the throat].

Here’s a funny thing. Once you know where this episode ends, when you’ve seen the Doctor and Amy talking by the river, and you’ve discovered that the Shakri work for The Tally who are the pest controller of the galaxy, and once you know what the cubes are doing and you’ve seen Brian encourage Rory and Amy to go off on more adventures with the Doctor. Once you’ve seen all that and decide to watch it a second time, all the little problems with possible rushed endings and all-too-brief cameos and the lack of any headline baddies seem to dissipate away and what you’ve got left is a kind of perfect episode of Doctor Who: a puzzle to solve, an emotional core and this mysterious stranger who loves humanity but can never be a part of it.

Rate the episode? 18 out of 20 for me.

And the Golden Anniversary Countdown = 437 days to go.

A Town Called Mercy: A Review

I’ve never been a fan of westerns. To be frank, I don’t have huge amount of enthusiasm for movies at all, 90% of the time I would prefer small screen entertainment anyway, but even so, westerns have always left me little cold. I started watching “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” recently after it turned up on some Sky Movies channel or other and it was jarringly bad. Yes, it was atmospheric, it had an iconic musical score, it was reasonably well acted, and it was visually dramatic but I couldn’t get through much more than 20 minutes before it all got too much. it  It’s one of those films that seems widely lauded as ‘best in class’ along with other examples of the genre like “True Grit”, “Unforgiven” and so on, but for me it just served as an excellent reminder to myself why I shouldn’t bother with the genre any more.

Having said that, I’m sure there are quality tales out there that would appeal to me and I’d happily take some advice if you’re willing to proffer it, but I tend to get to the end of films like this with nothing but a numbing realisation that there’s two hours of my life that I’m never getting back. Even TV series with western settings used to bore me rigid, and I grew out of things like “The Lone Ranger”, “Bonanza”, and “Alias Smith and Jones” by the time I’d got to high school. So, when I heard that Doctor Who was dipping its toe in the dusty, scorching heat of Almeria to deliver us a wild west tale, I could almost hear the tumbleweed rolling past whispering “Meh!” as it went.

There was no pre-amble to “A Town Called Mercy“, with the Doctor, Rory and Amy just wandering up to the edge of town without so much as a by-your-leave and finding themselves embroiled in the adventure. After my niggles with the previous episodes after which I ended up wondering what was the point of dropping companions off at the end of episode “A” just to have to have them picked up again at the start of episode “B”, we now get the slightly peculiar feeling (following the lack of any introduction) of trying to establish exactly how and when the Doctor went to collect the Ponds. If nothing else I am getting the impression that their impending separation is to be a long, drawn out affair.

I do think that this playing around with established process is quite good fun. Since the return of Doctor Who in 2005, we’ve had to get used to companions returning for extra episodes (Martha in the “The Poison Sky” and “Doctor’s Daughter“, Rose in “Turn Left“, etc) and the not-quite-companions (Wilfred Mott, Adam Mitchell, Brian Williams, et al), which collectively muddy the previously clear waters of (1) Companion joins TARDIS, (2) Companions has adventures, (3) Companion leaves TARDIS. There’s also been enough huge gaps established within the Moffat-era chronology for all sorts of off-screen adventures to be imagined in the intervening years. It all leads to a more organic realisation of what it must be like to move from the mundane to the fantastic and back again.

As I think about the three-fifths of this September run of episodes, especially after the previous wibbly-wobbly series arcs of Amy’s pregnancy in Series Six and the crack in the wall from Series Five, I find myself looking for linking themes or motifs that have some broader meaning. Each of the three episodes has a mention of Christmas. Each episode features flickering light-bulbs. The last two episodes have featured someone looking for the doctor (and a slight wink to the audience to make us think, erroneously, that it was ‘our’ Doctor they were after). Someone even pointed out to me that the title sequence is getting darker each time but I haven’t checked that out yet. [Edit: had a quick look and it does indeed seem as though the 'tunnel' is getting darker with each episode]. The point of all this being that the sledgehammer approach of previous arcs has either been replaced by a far more subtle one, or that this is just the production team having some fun, or, and I am reminded here of the words of the eighth Doctor, that we’re all seeing patterns in things that aren’t there. And that is never more true than with Doctor Who fans as we try to get our heads around these, essentially stand-alone stories. May be there’s no arc at all and we just have to accept that.

Anyway, back to this town called Mercy. The plot revolves around an alien called Kahler-Jex, portrayed with aplomb by Adrian Scarborough, who had been living among the townsfolk for ten years providing them with electricity, curing their ailments and generally being a gentle old chap who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. However, the town was taken under siege by a cyborg Gunslinger who demanded that the residents turn Kahler-Jex over to him. The residents though, were showing loyalty to their friend by refusing. However, rather than being the crash-bang-wallop cowboys versus aliens romp that may have been expected, what we got was a much more engaging morality tale in which the wild west setting was just the added layer over the core of the story.

It came as little surprise that the good guy/bad guy dynamic got turned on its head leaving us sympathetic to the cyborg and casting the alien doctor in the role of Nazi war criminal. The subsequent quandaries of truth, justice, sacrifice, vengeance and mercy were played out not only among the guest cast but also between the Doctor and his on/off companions. We have previously seen David Tennant’s incarnation going off the rails towards the end of his tenure as he travelled alone during his Time Lord Victorious period, and we again revisit these problems caused by the Doctor’s isolation from his companions. Last week we saw Eleven show a distinct, albeit arguably justifiable, lack of compassion when it came to sealing Solomon’s fate and in an even more cold-hearted and out-of-character way, we see him here take Jex to the literal and figurative edge, until being reminded of the right way of doing things by Amy, in a continuation of her Doctor-esque role established with Nefertiti and Riddel last week.

There were some good cameos in here too, especially from the young townsman who threatened the Doctor with a duel in the middel of the episode, before his wordless yet playful renaissance right at the end who, along with the Preacher and the Undertaker, collectively added a sense of immediate peril and realism. I think that Toby Whitehouse needs to be credited with creating a multi-layered tale that will be enjoyed time and again through repeated viewings and I have certainly found that both my initial concerns about the (lack of) pace and my apathy towards the western setting, were somewhat misplaced. Visually it ticks all the boxes that you could want from an episode set in an American frontier town and the soundtrack was, as ever, expertly composed from Murray Gold.

As for this week’s rating, I am going to score this on a par with last week’s dino-fest and give it a healthy 14 out of 20, which is two or three marks higher than I might’ve given it on Saturday night.

Which just leaves me to leave you with the Golden Anniversary Countdown = 437 days to go.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship: A Review

You’ve seen Jurassic Park, well now get a load of Silurian Ark. You can imagine the fun that was had in the early stages of development of this episode; the child-like glee of a taking a much-talked about movie title and Doctor Who’ing it. “You know ‘Snakes On A Plane’ right?! Well, instead of a plane, it’s a spaceship! And instead of snakes, it’s dinosaurs! Now, off you go and contrive something akin to a plot out of that lot”. To be frank, if this doesn’t titillate and excite the geeky neurons in your brain from the outset, then you’re probably watching the wrong show and Chris Chibnall clearly went away with great enthusiasm and dreamt up the details of this episode: in the process creating the absolute definition of a Doctor Who “romp”. There were no concerns about arc stories or forced references to ongoing continuity and only the merest aside hinting at the forthcoming departure of Amy and Rory, instead we just focussed on the story and having a right good slice of family fun. Of course, one imagines the writers of “Snakes on a Plane” also went with this title first, story second contrivance but thankfully the results here are much better than that celluloid turkey.

There were echoes of Matt Smith’s Doctor putting his army together for the battle of Demon’s Run at the start of the tale, when Neffy, Riddel and the Ponds were all collected together in the blink of an eye and taken to the eponymous spaceship, with just the briefest of stops at the Indian Space Agency to establish the details of the problem that needed addressing. The jury is definitely still out as far as I am concerned when it comes to the current flavour of the month for gathering together companions at the start of the story and dropping them off again at the end. On the one hand, it seems like a monumental waste of time and an ever so slightly contrived way of doing things. On the other hand, they were brilliantly executed little scenes, especially the how-many-ponds-does-it-take-to-change-a-lightbulb one, which introduced the awesome Mark Williams playing Brian. I am guessing that the Doctor’s intermittent visits to Rory and Amy will pay off in the build up to their departure (in three weeks’ time) but at the moment it bothers me for some reason.

It would be nigh on impossible to write a review of this story without references to Jurassic Park (indeed, it only took me four words to get there earlier). In both tales the creatures themselves are pretty much innocent victims of the greed of humanity. On screen, we get to checklist the most popular species: The pack-hunting velociraptors, the friendly triceratops, the menacing (mostly off-screen presence of) T-Rex were all here. We even got Rupert Graves’ character being an obvious nod to Bob Peck’s game warden from the 1993 blockbuster. Finally, the anachronistic settings for the dinosaur playgrounds: Park and Ark respectively, was probably the final similarity and the point where, happily, the storyline’s diverge, although not before the good guys get separated into two groups but that is the case in many a good movie and plenty of terrible ones to boot.

Firstly, we have the Doctor being whisked away with Rory and Rory’s dad to the ship’s “hyrda-engines”, which bore a remarkable similarity to the place where the Byzantium crashed. There are some quarters in which the episodes of Doctor Who penned by Chibnall are frowned upon but I happen to think that there are a lot worse efforts than 2007′s, real-time “42” and I would go as far as to say that the re-introduction of the Silurians in “The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood” two-parter was pretty bloody impressive. Here, the dialogue on the whole is jolly and devil-may-care, which, on occasion, detracts from the peril within which our protagonists supposedly find themselves, although it eventually counter-balances well with pure evilness of the yet-to-be-revealed bad guy of the piece. However, the highlight of the script is the father/son relationship between Brian and Rory, it’s so good that it makes me wish that we had seen the elder Williams introduced much earlier in the series (at his son’s wedding, perhaps). On the matter of teleports, “Ah yes, thank you Arthur C Clarke” was a put-down that had me chuckling through the next lines of dialogue and forcing me to rewind.

The happy-go-lucky lightness of “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” continued with the introduction of the Mitchell and Webb-voiced Robots. I have a deep down ambivalence towards cute robots with OTT personalities and this pair did little but irritate me throughout and the casting of M&W (despite my fondness for the pair) brought memories of Hale and Pace casting shuddering back. Thankfully, we were soon to meet Solomon. I am struggling to remember a villain since the series returned in 2005 that was played with such sinister, unmitigated evilness as David Bradley’s rogue trader. Of course, many of us are used to seeing him in the Harry Potter films as Mr Filch and, fleetingly but even more impressively, as Walder Frey in Game of Thrones, as well as a host of other cameos, so we are used to his brand of malevolence. His initial appearance here, oddly, echoed that of Oswin’s bow in last week’s show, as a piece of classical music, in this case “Fantasia in F-Minor for four hands” (that again, the Doctor claimed he had actually played himself) was the Doctor’s first introduction to the character.

While the Doctor and Messrs Wiliams Snr and Jr were off getting confrontational with Solomon and escaping on the back of a Triceratops, Amy was taking on a very Doctor’ish role for herself while working with her new ‘companions’: the flirty Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and big-game hunter Riddel. This little role-reversal was a nice touch and showed a growing maturity in Amy’s character. It was also good to see that Neffy and Riddel were more than bit part players, despite in all honesty not having much to do, thanks in no small part to the excellence of the acting on show. It was not until Solomon’s demands to kidnap Nefertiti that all the cast were reunited and the pieces were put in place for the conclusion. The sinister, leering comment made by Bradley’s character, that he would enjoy “breaking” her spirit, seemed to imply some very post-watershed kind of abuse that he had in mind. And it was this comment, that seemed to spur the Doctor into implementing the plan that would ultimately lead to Solomon’s death. There is a question mark against whether the Doctor should be seen to take actions that, so directly, result in someone’s death but the justification was comprehensively laid out throughout the preceding forty minutes.

It wasn’t a faultless tale. For example, I can normally forgive this time travel show when the perennial question gets asked of “Why can’t the Doctor just go back in time and correct things?” because we would normally dismiss this with an aside about not being able to interfere in his own timeline but here, after hearing the problem detailed by Indira inside the Indian Space Agency and being given six hours to save the day, the good Doctor promptly pops back to 1902 to collect Riddel thus, may be, nullifying the argument. Also, some minor irritations dampened my spirits: in no particular order (i) the aforementioned robots, (ii) the pervasive Carry On humour, (iii) the effective but too oft repeated use of looking out through the screen with the actors looking directly back at the viewer, and (iv) the instance of style over substance when choosing to escape two slow moving robots by jumping on the back of a slow moving dinosaur (visually, both fun and impressive but logistically lacking). However, the denouement more than made up for any of these teeny-tiny niggles with Brian’s packed lunch high above the surface of the Earth and the postcard from the Doctor on the new planet of Siluria with all its newly homed dinosaurs.

Overall, I’m plumping for a 14 out of 20 score but this could quite easily be plus or minus 2 points depending on my mood when I am watching it.

Last week I linked to a selection of my favourite reviewers for their comments too. You could still do a lot worse than digging those out but instead this week, I will point you Lindalee Rose’s video blog. In case you missed Steven Moffat’s tweet earlier in the week pointing out Lindalee Rose’s review of Asylum, then you’re in for a treat when you watch.

Golden Anniversary Countdown = 440 days to go

Asylum of the Daleks: A Review

Spoilers ahead, Sweetie. You’ve been warned.

252 days passed between the previous episode of Doctor Who, “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe” and Saturday’s first instalment of series seven. Of course, that is assuming that you are discounting the Blue Peter special “Good As Gold” and this week’s quirky online/red button curtain raiser “Pond Life“. Whether or not you do discount these offerings, they probably didn’t satiate the desire to sit down in front of the now familiar 45-minute slice of Moffatian goodness. Before launching in to my review of “Asylum of the Daleks” it is probably worth giving “Pond Life” a quick mention. The collection of daily, mini episodes last week only ran to about five-and-a-half minutes in total and, right up until the final moments, it seemed set to be little more than a comic diversion. However, the sit-com feel turned slightly melancholic as it became clear that the happily ever life of the Ponds was going through problems of its own. It might have just made us ready for the fact that AotD wasn’t going to be a laugh a minute affair. “We need you, Raggedy Man” said Amy, and so did we, the viewers.

During the build up to the forthcoming 14 episodes we were promised no two-parters, no strong linking arc of stories, and fourteen, standalone movie-style episodes with a sense of scale and drama that would sit well on the silver screen let alone being labelled as a kid’s show and stuck on your early evening tellybox. And if that hype wasn’t enough, we were also promised that we were going to be Dalek’ed up to our eyeballs in episode one and that the series’ Dalek mythology was getting a good kick up the plunger too. Happily it delivered… for the most part. Before the nicely redesigned titles sequence got to roll, we saw the Doctor being called to Skaro as part of a Dalek ruse to kidnap him. Skaro itself was looking even nastier than we might ever have imagined and there was a great, opening panning shot of a gigantic yet decrepit Dalek statue in which the Doctor’s trap was set. Ever since Rose, we’ve come to expect a dramatic opening shot in the first episode or a series to set the scene, this was arguably the best of the lot and definitely helped deliver a sense of that promised scale. In slightly less dramatic fashion, Amy and Rory, still clearly struggling through a tricky time in their marriage, were similarly kidnapped by this new kind of Dalek-ised “Robomen”.

On a scale of one to ten, our heroes were in eleven kinds of trouble as they arrived on the spaceship known as the Parliament of the Daleks. These deranged pepperpots have never struck me as being a particularly democratic bunch but the Prime Minister had brought the ship to its destination: the Asylum, into which the Doctor and his trusted companions were to be flung, in order to switch off a force-field to enable the Parliament to destroy the Asylum and stop all the *really* mad Daleks from escaping. A task which the Daleks themselves were apparently too scared to undertake. I suspect that, rather than being too scared of the Asylum, the real intention was to use this as a way to get rid of both the Mad-Daleks and the Doctor in one fell swoop but that was never mentioned on screen, and I was left with a feeling by the end that the Asylum wasn’t as scary a place as we’d been led to believe. Back in the parliament, I assume that the Chief Whip had had to persuade the Dishonourable Member for Skaro West about the virtues of this plan in order to get the vote passed. The 1922 Community probably insisted on getting the wording of the plan’s White Paper changed at the last minute, which in turn had led to heated discussion and a few exterminations during PMQs. However, like it or lump it, the set-up was there and as soon as the trio were pushed into the chasm, I was fully expecting this romp to burst into life.

I have been trying to avoid all the bigger spoilers from this series, especially since the press screening of Asylum a couple of weeks ago and I had happily sat down to watch this episode completely unaware of the big surprise that the new companion, Jenna Louise Coleman, had a role to play in this tale. A bit of after-the-event Googling showed that this fact had not been kept entirely secret from the internet dwellers but had, thankfully, not been revealed in any mainstream way. After about ten minutes of arguing with myself (“Is that her?” “No. It can’t be.” “It is you know.” “Well, I guess it looks like her.” “If it is her, ‘Oswin’ is a bloody terrible name for a companion!“, etc), I finally started to try and work out what was going on with the plot. The Daleks in the Asylum all seemed to be a little rusty and slow and not really anything much to worry about if you happened to be a fully oiled up and pristine Dalek MP on the spaceship above, but they were menacing and creepy and a suitable threat for Rory, Amy and the Doctor. Whichever way you look at it, Sakro’s finest definitely moved away from their “cuddly” nature that Steven Moffat has said he was fearful that they might have become.

The inclusion of Oswin gave what might have been a running-through-corridors-by-numbers segment a frisson of excitement and intrigue while the development of the Amy / Rory relationship pulled on the audience’s emotional heart-strings. The conclusion of that section where we get to the episode’s big reveal that Oswin appears to be a Dalek was magnificently directed from the camera swinging over Matt Smith’s shoulder to show the enchained monster, to the blending of the dialogue between JLC’s Oswin and Nick Brigg’s Dalek voice, and the fourth wall breaking, “Run, you clever boy. And remember“. There were great, quotable segments like this littered throughout the episode. Another favourite being the self-destructing Dalek hopelessly screaming “Forward. Forward” after being thrust in to reverse by the Doctor.

By the end of the episode, there were three strands to the story had all reached significant points but none of them seemed to be entirely resolved, and I say this as a good thing. Firstly, the Doctor’s relationship with the Daleks had taken a dramatic sidestep. Having had their “sort-of hive mind” reprogrammed to forget about the Doctor altogether, they began to wonder (in a beautifully Dalek way) as this manic bow-tied stranger lectured them, “Doctor Who?“, echoing the final words of Dorium Maldovar at the end of the last series and reminding us that the Fields of Tressalor (sp?) still await us. This cannot have escaped the attention of Eleven either, who pranced around the TARDIS veritably singing it to himself at the end. I’ve found myself looking forward to the next Dalek meeting with eager anticipation to see how these facts might change the dynamic. I suspect that the wait won’t be as long this time.

While the Dalek element, as ever, was a story of hate, the second strand, which centered around the marriage of Amy and Rory, was one of love. It’s intriguing to think that even though the marriage seemed to have been steadied by the end, the issue of Amy being unable to have children (courtesy of the events at Demon’s Run) was left hanging. We know that the child that she does have, River, is coming back soon, so I’m sure it’s not the last we’ll hear of this and I guess that the final departure of the Ponds in a few episodes’ time will have a pregnancy/baby/motherhood dimension to it.

Finally, the third strand is the most puzzling of all. Who was Oswin, apart from Junior Entertainment Officer on the Alaska? Was she really a Dalek? Will she be the new companion? Did she really die at the end? Could she be converted back from Dalek in to a human? Is the “Alaska” spaceship, the same spaceship as the one in next weeks dinosaur-ridden tale? Will we get to see JLC again before Christmas? Why does everyone seem to think that JLC is playing someone called Clara, and if so, why does Clara have the same face as Oswin? These questions are exactly the reason that I love Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who. The creativity of the speculation alone is a marvel.

The theme of love and hate was literally spelt out for us from early in the episode as Amy’s appropriately tattooed knuckles punched outward towards the viewer during her photo-shoot. The love of Amy and Rory’s marriage was tested by their break-up and reconciliation while conversely even the hate of the Daleks was tested by their inability rid themselves of the Asylum’s inmates due to the ‘beauty’ they saw in them. Even the basis for the hateful trap set for the Doctor at the start was one based on a mother’s love for her child. The other theme that intertwined with this throughout was the recurring one in recent Doctor Who history: that of memory. Whether it be the Doctor asking his kidnapper whether she remembered her life beforehand, or Amy’s forgetting details and conversations when the nanocloud began its reprogramming of her, or Oswin wiping the Daleks memory of the Doctor, or finally Oswin’s plea to the Doctor (and the audience) to remember her. This question of how much our memories define what we become is not new to Moffat’s Who and is not one I see ending any time soon.

So in conclusion, using my patented Marks-out-of-Twenty system, the series seven opener “Asylum of the Daleks” get an impressive 17 out of 20

As ever, some of my favourite bloggers and journos have beaten me to their reviews, which can read here…..

From The North (yer actual Keith “Telly” Topping)

Feeling Listless (Stuart Ian Burns)

Telly-Centric (Gareth Bundy)

Cathode Ray Tube (Frank Collins)

The Medium Is Not Enough (Rob Buckley)

The Telegraph (Michael Hogan)

The Guardian (Sam Wollaston)

Golden Anniversary Countdown = 447 days to go

Who’s Back?

Ah, the good Doctor adorns the cover of the Radio Times once again. This can only mean one thing and, unless this is the only Doctor Who website that you have added to your RSS reader, you are already well aware of the fact that our favourite show returns to BBC1 screens this Saturday at 7:20pm in “Asylum of the Daleks”. By the way, if this IS actually the only Doctor Who website that you read, then (a) you really cannot label yourself as a “fan”, and (b) you probably think it’s six or seven weeks since anything noteworthy has happened. In fact during that time, new series production has continued apace, more DVDs have been released in the classic range, Doctor Who Magazine celebrated its 450th issue, Ian Levene was spectacularly interviewed by DWOnline’s WhoCast, cast and crew have been whizzing around (on both sides of the Atlantic) being interviewed and attending press launches, Big Chief released the first of their high-end 1/6 action figure range, Character Building released four new sets of its marvellous Lego-y range, the trailers have started and the first two episodes of the online prequel series, Pond Life, have been released. And I blogged about none of it… I’m nothing if not consistent.

Anyway, here’s the deal. “Who…“, as the RT’s massively unoriginal strap-line points out, “…is Back” and each and every Saturday in September we’re getting a brand spanking new episode of Whoish loveliness….

• “Asylum of the Daleks” – 1st Sept
• “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” – 8th Sept
• “A Town Called Mercy”  - 15th Sept
• “The Power of Three” – 22nd Sept
• “The Angels Take Manhattan” – 29th Sept

By the end of which we are promised tears before bedtime and the end of the Pond’s adventures with the Doctor. And, after each and every broadcast, I am going to write about it, just like I used to do in the good old days. Bet you can’t wait.

Golden Anniversary Countdown = 453 days to go

Mary Tamm – (1950 – 2012)

I was gutted yesterday when I heard that another of Doctor Who’s alumni, Mary Tamm, companion to Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor, passed away after a battle with cancer. Sympathies, of course, go out to all her friends and family. A revisit to the Key To Time might be in the offing.

Golden Anniversary Countdown = 484 days to go

 

496 Days To Go – Conventions

Golden Anniversary Countdown = 496 days to go

I have never been a big convention goer. There have been two notable exceptions to this rule: firstly, in 2007, I went to a one-day Invasion con in Barking, and then secondly, earlier this year when I ventured to Cardiff of the Official Event in March. As I sit here today seeing my RSS feed, Facebook wall, and Twitter time-line fill up with news, pictures and stories about the San Diego Comic-Con, I think I may be starting to get the bug. Last night, on a completely separate subject, Mrs F and I popped over to Fareham (Ferneham Hall) to watch a friend performing in Chess: The Musical (and jolly good it was too). However, in the foyer of the theatre, where you might have expected a giant chess set or somesuch, I saw this fella….

Apparently there is to be a Power: Reimagined convention running there on 1st September. I might just pop along. It was actually great fun to sit there for a few minutes and watch all the theatre goers point, smile, chat about and have their pictures taken with Skaro’s finest, while queuing up to go and see a musical about a Cold War chess match, written by the blokes from Abba. This Doctor Who thing has widespread appeal, ya know.