Doctor Who - The Angels Take Manhattan (S7E05)

 

Though the five-episode mini-season of Doctor Who that ends with "The Angels Take Manhattan" (but more importantly, will they take Berlin?) has had a few bright shining moments, it's largely felt like it was laying the groundwork for future stories rather than focusing on those being told in the present. Appropriate given the nature of the show, perhaps, but it hasn't made for the most satisfying run of episodes. After last season established that The Doctor was hitting the reset button on himself to counteract the way in which he had become "too big" - a criticism that could also have been levelled at the show itself - these episodes had to show what the ramifications of that might be. As River revealed in this episode, in addition to wiping The Daleks' memories of him from their collective database in "Asylum of The Daleks", The Doctor has been removing himself from every information source in the galaxy so that he will be able to operate under the radar again. It's that freedom that allows him to sit in Central Park with Amy and Rory, reading detective fiction and drinking coffee. Of course, trouble always finds The Doctor, and soon a Weeping Angel zaps Rory back to 1938.

Doctor Who - The Power of Three (S07E04)

A, let's face it, pretty easy visual approximation of my feelings whilst watching this episode.

There are two kinds of Doctor Who episode. Actually, that's so reductive as to be a lie: there are as many kinds of episode of Doctor Who as there are species in the universe that The Doctor has saved and/or doomed. However, when it comes to the typical construction of the show, there are two broad types: episodes that are carefully built around a core concept (think of "The Girl In The Fireplace" or "Blink" for great examples of this), and ones in which a couple of cool ideas are thrown out there whilst the plot merely acts as a way of connecting the disparate elements together. Both approaches produce good and bad episodes - heck, last week's "A Town Called Mercy" was one of the best the show has done in a while and was a prime example of the latter - but, in general, the former are consistently better because science fiction as a genre benefits from attention to detail, and ensuring that all the elements of the plot fit together in a way that fundamentally works.

Doctor Who - A Town Called Mercy (S7E03)

I've mentioned in the past that Doctor Who has a somewhat volatile, bordering on manic depressive attitude towards its own tone. Since the show has such a broad canvas - i.e. the entirety of space and time - it can weave sharply between tone, style and genre without ever losing its identity: As long as The Doctor is in it, pretty much everything else can change. In keeping with this idea, the show shifts from the silliness of "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" to the altogether more serious tone of "A Town Called Mercy" with a whiplash-inducing suddenness.

Doctor Who - Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (S7E02)

We can say this much for “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, it certainly featured dinosaurs, and they were definitely on some form of interstellar transport. Keeping with the traditional structure of following a thematically and dramatically heavy episode with a comparative bit of fluff, this week we saw The Doctor, Amy and Rory (as well Rory’s dad (Mark Williams), a big game hunter (Rupert Graves) and Nefertiti (Riann Steele) because why not?) travelling aboard a mysterious vessel heading on a collision course for Earth. Rather than let the ship be destroyed, The Doctor and his gang get on-board in the hopes of diverting its fatal course, in the process discovering that it is home to dinosaurs, comedy robots and Solomon (David Bradley), an old man who views everything – be it object, animal or person – purely in terms of monetary value.

Doctor Who - Asylum of the Daleks (S7E01)

The sixth series of the rebooted Doctor Who had its ups and downs. The show has always been inconsistent, so this was nothing new, but for his second series as showrunner, Steven Moffat experimented with a number of ideas which, whilst ambitious, often didn't work. The introduction of stronger serialisation concerning the creepy and mysterious order known as The Silence gave an undoubted drive to the show, as well some really quite startling images, it also made the typical structure of the show (a heady mix of standalone episodes and ones which move the greater plot forward) feel more awkward than usual. It didn't help that the series was split in two, so any momentum built up over the mostly excellent first seven seemed to have disappeared by the time the spottier last six aired.