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“Run you clever boy, and remember” – Review of Christmas episode of Doctor Who The Snowmen

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Show runner Stephen Moffat chose Christmas Day to reboot Doctor Who with a new title sequence, remixed music, new TARDIS set and a scary, funny, well written romp set in Victorian England. It sets up next year’s 50th anniversary perfectly and left me waiting eagerly for series 7 part two next April.

Review of Christmas episode of Doctor Who The Snowmen
The Snowmen Movie of the Week poster

In keeping with the style of the current run, The Snowmen was a “movie of the week” complete with its own movie poster. And cinematic it was with snow bound London skylines and the BBC’s usual attention to period detail. The BBC do Victorian so well don’t they?

Usually Doctor Who Christmas specials are a little cheesey and removed from the main series story arcs. Whilst The Snowmen displayed all the usual Christmas trappings, it was definitely part of the storyline this time. Matt Smith, as usual, expertly played the role, but this time he was withdrawn from the world and almost Scrooge-like, mourning the loss of his previous companions Rory and Amy. He’s done with saving the world. Done with giant robots and killer Christmas trees. All he wants to do is be miserable and live in the TARDIS he parked on a cloud. A cloud reached by a very Mary Poppins style spiral staircase.

Review of Christmas episode of Doctor Who The Snowmen

But scary snowmen with shark teeth are popping up and devouring Yuletide Londoners. These were well done though I believe earlier versions looked a little too like Rainbow’s Zippy. I would have liked to see them on screen more. Perhaps they could have eaten a few more people. But hey this is a family show.

The villain played by Richard E Grant is using the Great Intelligence to conjure them up whilst searching for the DNA of a nasty governess frozen in a pond.

Cue new companion Clara played by Jenna-Louise Coleman (flitting expertly between posh spoken Miss Montague and her other barmaid persona with a more streetwise way of talking) attempting to suss out the Doctor and persuade him to return to his universe saving ways.

Review of Christmas episode of Doctor Who The Snowmen

Also helping the Doctor (and protecting his current desire for seclusion without agreeing with it) are Madame Vastra (“Good evening. I’m a lizard woman from the dawn of time, and this is my wife”) Jenny and the Sontaran in a butler’s outfit, Strax. The latter gets the funniest lines in the story (“Try to escape and you will be obliterated. Can I take your coat?”)

And I loved the scene when the Doctor asks Strax to go and fetch the memory worm. When Strax comes back empty-handed the Doctor sighs with exasperation, “You forgot the gauntlets!”

Review of Christmas episode of Doctor Who The Snowmen

Despite this great comedy, and despite a slightly underplayed malevolent performance by Grant – though his brief resurrection as a zombie at the end was pretty horrible – the delight of this story really lay in the developing relationship between the Doctor and Clara.

Of course we the audience know he has met her before and when she mentions her love of soufflés the penny starts to drop. She was in the season opener “Asylum of the Daleks” back in September but of course in that one, Matt Smith could only hear her voice and her name was Oswin. Only after saving the city in a typical return to form did the Doctor begin to realise. As she died Clara’s last words were, “Run you clever boy. And remember.” The same as Oswin’s parting words in the earlier adventure.

And on her grave: “Clara Oswin Oswald”.

Matt Smith is now on the run to find his soufflé girl. With a new theme tune, new TARDIS set, new Victorian inspired costume and another fascinating mystery to solve, for the first time in 8 years of Christmas specials, being part of the ongoing storyline, The Snowmen leaves us desperate for the next episodes which are still four months away.

Over to you: Do you agree with my Review of Christmas episode of Doctor Who The Snowmen?Were you right about the Clara/Oswin link and where do you think it will go next? Please share your thoughts or give a link to your own reviews. Click below where it says “Leave a reply”. Go on – share!

Plane Crash TV and the Goldfish Effect

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I just watched a TV programme on C4 called Plane Crash. I’d seen the trailers and it looked fascinating. They were going to crash a real Boeing 727and watch the effects on the dummies inside.

Plane Crash TV and the Goldfish Effect
 
But the show ended up driving me mad. It was on for two hours with an ad break every 10 minutes. Before every break they summarised where we had got to. After the ad break they summarised where we had got to again.

Do the producers of shows like this think that we all have the memory spans of goldfish?

Actually that is unfair on goldfish. People believe that goldfish can only remember things for three seconds. so don’t worry about putting them in small bowls because by the time they’ve swum round they have forgotten where they started from. Of course scientists have proven that goldfish do in fact have quite good memories and tests show that they can learn what time of day they .

Plane Crash TV and the Goldfish Effect
photo credit: chefranden via photopin cc

Hence why my mother’s goldfish congregate at 4pm every day in the left corner of the tank – wide eyes and gaping mouths silently saying, “Come on then”.

But there seems to be a goldfish trend emerging in documentary TV shows. The next time you watch one just look at the narrative flow.

Take a clothes make over show. The intro will go something along these lines. “This week we meet Jane. She has no self-confidence. Over the next hour we are going to completely change her life. First thing we are going to do is give her a make over.

Then 10 minutes later as we approach the first ad break they’ll say, “So now Jane has had a full make over and although she started out the programme with no self-confidence she is well on her way to completely changing her life. Join us after the break when we move into stage two and revamp her wardrobe.

After nipping off to make a cup of tea during the adverts you return to the sofa to the reminder, “Before the break we met Jane who has no self-confidence but we have made a great start in completely changing her life by giving her a complete make over. Now it is time to have a look at her wardrobe.

Plane Crash TV and the Goldfish Effect
photo credit: Stephan Geyer via photopin cc

And so it goes on. Even the BBC with no ad breaks to fit this structure round are increasingly guilty of such recaps and “coming up” spots every ten minutes or so.

I have always been an advocate of the “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you have told them” approach. But do the TV programmes take it too far? They tell you what they are going to tell you then tell you a bit of it. Next they remind you of what they are going to tell you and the bit they’ve already told you, and so on.

Cut out all this summarising and recapping and the show would be half as long.

So rather than thrilling me, Plane Crash just made me want to go and do something relaxing like swimming round and round in a pool.

Over to you: Do you agree with me about plane crash TV and the goldfish effect? If so do me a favour and tweet this article.

Dark streets and skyscrapers – review of Doctor Who The Angels Take Manhattan

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The dark streets and skyscrapers of 1930s New York suit the “film noir” detective drama genre perfectly. Rain swept streets, shady characters in long coats and hats, shadowy corners and hidden menaces, majestic buildings with stone statues.

But what happens if those statues can move? And only move when you are not looking at them. Keep an eye on them and they are frozen and still. But then if you turn away. Or if you blink. Or if the light goes out. Then they move like lightning. The Weeping Angels have taken Manhattan – an atmospheric backdrop to the mid-season finale of Doctor Who.

Review of Doctor Who The Angels Take Manhattan
The Film Poster

This is the climax we have waited for. The Doctor parts company with companions Amy and Rory for good. We were promised an emotional farewell. And Stephen Moffat delivers tears.

Cynics would argue that the only reason for the New York setting was to allow the pre-credit sequence to culminate in the shocking reveal that the Statue of Liberty is a giant Weeping Angel towering over its victim with fangs bared. But the city that never sleeps is perfect for the story and the feel of foreboding.

I love the scenes in modern-day Central Park before the action shifts to the grim shadows of the 1930s. And Moffat ingeniously weaves the time travel element into the story with the Doctor reading from an old detective paperback describing past events so that he can interact, now, with events that happened 70 years earlier.

Of course the Angels kill people in a nice way by zapping them 50 years into the past so that they can live themselves to death. When the Angels dispatch Rory to that earlier age, Amy elects to allow the Angels to send her back as well despite the Doctor’s tearful protestations. We feel the sadness of knowing that Amy and Rory are dead but also realise that they still lived to a ripe old age and lived happy ever after. Sort of.

The regulars, including Alex Kingston returning as River Song, act their socks off. The Angels are as scary as ever. Especially the giggling little cherubs blowing out candles and the mother and son statue watching from across the road.

A fabulous finale which leaves me waiting in anticipation for the Christmas episode. After the credits roll we get a tiny glimpse of the festive story complete with new companion played by Jenna-Louise Coleman. How on earth will she fit into the narrative given we last saw her as a Dalek in the season opener?

Over to you: Do you agree with my review of Doctor Who The Angels take Manhattan? Were you sad to see Rory and Amy leave? Were there tears? What about the Angels? Still scary or have they been over-used? What about those cherubs? Share your thoughts and comments below.

Cubes on the streets – review of Doctor Who The Power of Three

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If you woke to find the streets littered with shiny black cubes what would you do? Pick one up? Try to open it up like a puzzle box? Take it home with you?

So began the strangest invasion stories in almost 50 years of Doctor Who.

What were these silent, innocent, seemingly harmless cubes that appeared simultaneously all over the world? “I don’t know,” said Matt Smith’s Doctor, “And I don’t like knowing.”

review of Doctor Who The Power of Three

The story took place over the course of a year. People took the cubes into their homes and work places; made book cases out of them, used them for golf practice or used them as fashion accessories. Lord Sugar, in a lovely cameo as himself, even set a cube based Apprentice task.

Then when everyone was convinced they were as harmless as a pebble you might pick up off a beach, they started counting down from 7 to one, with sinister blue illuminated numbers. The slow invasion finally got nasty.

Of course the cubes and their meaning were really just a backdrop to further explore the Doctor’s relationship with Amy and Rory, his long running companions who will leave the show next week. So we saw the humdrum side of their lives. When not saving civilisations, fighting mad Daleks or dinosaurs on space ships, they had to deal with daily domestic terrors like sour milk, dirty clothes and crises at work. These scenes were well acted and set the scene for next week’s emotional departure.

The director managed to make his audience accept the cubes, allowed us to sweep them into the background, concentrate on the characters, so that when they started to countdown, we suddenly remembered them again. The tension was scary.

Pity then that the very rushed conclusion with an under used Steven Berkoff in a Star Wars Emperor style mask proved that the build up did not end up with excitement cubed but rather satisfaction halved.

Over to you: Would you pick up a cube and take it home? I think most people would. Do you agree with my review of Doctor Who The Power of Three? Has it set up the departure of Amy and Rory really well? Share your thoughts. Please leave a comment.