Monday 9 November 2015

Doctor Who 9.08

Ye gods, they say never let the Doctor talk, and it's obvious why. The scenery won't survive.

This episode declines rapidly. We start with a mental confrontation (of course Clara can beat Bonnie, she's Special!), and a plane blowing up. Then the Doctor confronts some policemen... are they supposed to be Zygons? How did the Zygons get those officers there at that time? If not, they're just weird. And ultimately useless anyway. But then they reach the Black Archive, and it's talking, talking, talking all the way...

Hey, you want to know is Osgood is human or Zygon? Easy, the shapeshifters shapeshift clothing whenever they morph, so simply see if she can take a layer of clothes off. Or how about if she drinks Skarasen milk? Oh wait, that doesn't seem to be a thing any more (as Richard pointed out).

And then the ending... which is basically the end of Time of the Doctor again... so what was the point? Have we progressed anything? Has this story changed the nature of the universe or Earth or Human/Zygon relationships or... clearly not, if this is the 15th time, and clearly not as the end of the episode is in the same place as the beginning of the previous. Talk about your reset button.

So we could have skipped the entire two episodes? We should do that next time.


Next time: Didn't we just do a base under siege?

[END]

1 comment:

evildicemonkey said...

So I have only just seen it and I can say with confidence... what a huge waste of potential.

You know what would have been absolutely awesome? If they capitalised on the throw away line at the end "You didn't mind the last 15 times" or whatever it was exactly. How much cooler would it have been if the Doctor had been one step ahead of the Zygons for most of the first episode because he's faced this exact person 15 times before, they could have hinted at it by him knowing the lead Zygon's name before they interacted (and other things that I cannot come up with while writing this), and then when she takes over Clara then we have the Doctor start to misstep because this hasn't happened before but he sees an opportunity to make it end in the way the episodes actually ends because he has a new (unwitting) ally on his side.

*sigh*