“Blink:” Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who Masterpiece Forces The Doctor Almost Entirely Out Of The Show!

The Good: Engaging adversaries, Cool concept, Good tension, Good pacing, Most of the acting
The Bad: No real character development
The Basics: “Blink” is considered one of the best episodes of Doctor Who, but it is incredibly plot intensive as opposed to being a truly impressive hour of television.


Among Doctor Who fans, there are few episodes that are more universally lauded than “Blink” from the show’s third season. “Blink” was one of the early episodes written by Steven Moffat and it is one of his most creative. But for all the alleged greatness of the episode, “Blink” is very much like the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok” (reviewed here!); it holds up less-well on rewatching. “Darmok” was a high-concept episode and while it has a fairly high “wow” factor, it belabors its concept with a lot of explanation of itself. “Blink” is very similar.

As one who has an objective series of standards for their ratings, “Blink” seems less extraordinary because it loses points for character development. The episode is almost entirely devoid of The Doctor and Martha Jones. Instead, it introduces an entirely new protagonist, Sally Sparrow and follows her encounter with a new alien invader. The Weeping Angels are one of the creepiest Doctor Who creatures ever. The episode is well-executed with defining the Weeping Angels, but it does very little other than create tension around the new aliens. Given how viewers have no real investment in Sally Sparrow, it is hard to get truly invested in the tension the way some of the other Doctor Who episodes engage.

Sally Sparrow breaks into an abandoned house where she sees writing underneath some peeling wallpaper. Peeling back the wallpaper and reading the message, Sparrow ducks and avoids getting hit by a rock thrown, supposedly, by the statue of an angel from the garden. The next day, Sally and her roommate Kathy Nightingale return to the abandoned house where they are interrupted by a visitor. The visitor is Kathy Nightingale’s grandson and claims to have been told to arrive at that exact time and place. Sally looks around for Kathy, but she is nowhere to be found and the letter delivered by the grandson informs her that she was teleported in time to 1920, Hull, where she lived out her entire life.

Sally recovers a key from one of the angel statues before going to visit Kathy’s brother at a DVD store where she sees a DVD Easter egg of the Doctor talking about time. Sally goes to the police where she is told about various vehicles from the abandoned house that have been recovered over the years . . . including the police box! The police officer she meets there is suddenly taken away by the weeping angels and moments later, she gets a call from him. He is at the hospital, old and dying, having lived out his life in the past. Clued in by her policeman friend that there is something significant about the DVDs, Sally realizes she is common element (the seventeen DVDs are the only ones she owns in her personal library). Recognizing that the message is for her, Sally and Kathy’s brother go back to the abandoned house where they watch the easter egg, learn about the Weeping Angels and have to outwit them to get access to the TARDIS and return it to The Doctor.

“Blink” moves along exceptionally fast because Sally almost immediately notices that the Weeping Angels move whenever she is not looking at them, though she does not understand exactly why. “Blink” seems engaging, but the viewer and Sally are spoon-fed all of the answers and information they need. Sally is not particularly clever or interesting, she is just given all the answers to the problem she is encountering.

Similarly, Carey Mulligan is not given much room to perform. While she does not play Sally Sparrow as stiffly as she plays some other characters she has played, Sally Sparrow is hardly an incredible role. Sparrow barely reacts to the extraordinary events surrounding her. Sally’s best friend disappears and she barely bats an eye when she cannot find her and has to read the letter from the past. Sally witnesses the death of a man who has been hanging on for years waiting for her and it doesn’t even cause her to tear up. In fact, Mulligan’s best performance moment is probably reacting to the naked brother of her best friend. This is hardly an extraordinary role.

The result is a creepy episode of Doctor Who that introduces one of the most conceptually-frightening creatures of the franchise . . . without doing much more for The Doctor or fans.

[Knowing that single episodes are an inefficient way to get episodes, it's worth looking into Doctor Who - The Complete Third Season on DVD or Blu-Ray, which is also a better economical choice than buying individual episodes. Read my review of the second season of the Tenth Doctor here!
Thanks!]

For other works with Carey Mulligan, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Gatsby
Drive
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Public Enemies
Pride And Prejudice

7/10

For other Doctor Who episode and movie reviews, please visit my Doctor Who Review Index Page!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Somewhere Between Brilliance And Idiocy Is "The Witch's Familiar!"

The Good: Moments of character for The Doctor and Davros, Performances
The Bad: Clara is portrayed as an utter moron, Very predictable reversals
The Basics: "The Witch's Familiar" pits The Doctor against Davros while Clara falls prey to Missy on Skaro.


With Doctor Who's new season getting off to a good start, it has been quite a week of anticipation around my house. My wife has gotten into the new Doctor Who and taken me along with her enough that I actually care about what is going on. The new season has a fairly inventive concept; it is made up of small arcs with virtually every pair of episodes being a two-parter that is directly connected. As a result, the season premiere "The Magician's Apprentice" (reviewed here!) leads directly into "The Witch's Familiar." The second episode of the new season picks up immediately where the prior episode left off and it is impossible to discuss the episode without some minor spoilers about plot events from "The Magician's Apprentice."

In the week between "The Magician's Apprentice" and "The Witch's Familiar," I began to feel like the follow-up episode would have a sense of familiarity to it. After all, the plot progression of "The Magician's Apprentice" concluded in such a way that it seemed like "The Witch's Familiar" would have some strong similarities to last year's episode of The Flash, "Rogue Time" (reviewed here!). "The Magician's Apprentice" climaxed with The Doctor having the opportunity to right the wrong he perpetrated at the outset of the episode. "The Witch's Familiar" takes an annoyingly unlinear detour from the last scene of the previous episode in order to tell its story and lead, somewhat inorganically, to where the viewer knows it has to go.

Clara awakens upside down while Missy is sharpening a stick. Using an example from The Doctor's life, Missy finally explains how she survived the assassination from the Cyberman who was The Doctor's undead ally. Clara realizes that Missy teleported the two of them using the Dalek's energy beams. While The Doctor hijacks Davros's chair, Missy shoves Clara into a Dalek sewer, which is coated with the Dalek sludge that is the rotting, but alive Dalek essence. The Doctor holds the Dalek's hostage to try to get them to bring him Clara, believing she is not dead.

When The Doctor is captured by Colony Sarff, he is reunited with Davros. As Davros dies, he plays his endgame to attempt to trap The Doctor using The Doctor's own compassion. In the Dalek sewer, Missy entraps a Dalek and then plugs Clara into its armor. The Doctor must thwart both the machinations of Davros and Missy to save himself and Clara.

While Missy dominates much of "The Witch's Familiar," her part hinges on Clara being recharacterized as a complete moron. Clara is dropped, thrown into a pit, handcuffed and then plugged into a Dalek's armor all by Missy. Clara lets Missy turn her back on her and allows herself to be plugged into the Dalek all the while accepting the premise that she and Missy have to work together to save The Doctor. There is something unsatisfying about the episode lacking as "You first" response from Clara when Missy opens the Dalek's armor and tells the Companion to "get in."

When the somewhat ridiculous, manic subplot with Missy is not on screen, "The Witch's Familiar" is an engaging series of scenes that are basically The Doctor and Davros talking. Davros attempts to tempt The Doctor utilizing a tether between Davros and his Daleks. Davros slowly builds his manipulation of The Doctor through simple conversation and the scenes are surprisingly engaging. The closest science fiction analogy is the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Duet" (reviewed here!) and while "The Witch's Familiar" does not quite rise to that level of depth, it is similarly intriguing to watch two people needle at one another for about half an hour (the Clara/Missy subplot is a real time eater).

The performances in "The Witch's Familiar" are homogeneously good. Poor Jenna Coleman is given the role of a rube to play, but she leaps into it without any apparent objection to how radically simple her character has become. There is not even a hint in Coleman's performance that Clara has any idea she is unquestioningly following the orders of the woman who killed the man she loved. Michelle Gomez perfectly hits the same one note of Missy's insanity each and every time.

Peter Capaldi and Julian Bleach play off one another amazingly as The Doctor and Davros. As Davros moves toward death, Capaldi's wordless performance in reaction to his co-star is impressive. In the moments leading up to the laugh that Davros and The Doctor share, Capaldi is intense and amazing. Bleach holds his own opposite Capaldi and he plays the part as if he was born for it!

"The Witch's Familiar" does a decent job of laying and springing the traps from The Doctor's enemies, but it continues a number of annoying trends in Doctor Who. First and foremost of these is that "Day Of The Doctor" rewrote the end of the Time War. Davros provides the viewers with a unique opportunity to explore the Dalek perspective to the end of that war. How did these Daleks get revitalized or saved? The closest we get is Davros's explanation that these Daleks built Skaro out of their own love of home. Having not been a Doctor Who fan for long, I'm unsure if Davros's last minute Time Lord Prophecy was a previously-established thing, but the idea of a Time Lord and Dalek hybrid should make The Doctor hesitant to leave Missy among his enemies.

Ultimately, "The Witch's Familiar" is much like many second parts of a two-parter. It resolves what is set up in the first episode, but the promise of "The Magician's Apprentice" was for something greater than this episode delivered.

For other works with Peter Capaldi, please check out my reviews of:
Paddington
Doctor Who - Season 8
World War Z
In The Loop
Fortysomething
Smilla's Sense Of Snow

[Knowing that single episodes are an inefficient way to get episodes, it's worth looking into Doctor Who - The Complete Ninth Season on DVD or Blu-Ray, which is also a better economical choice than buying individual episodes. Read my review of the sophomore season of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor here!
Thanks!]

6.5/10

See how this episode stacks up against other episode of Doctor Who by visiting my Doctor Who Review Index Page where the episodes and seasons are organized from best to worst!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Doctor Who Returns! (And So Do I With) "The Magician's Apprentice!"

The Good: Character development, Plot concept, Performances
The Bad: The narrative gap, Incredibly insular set-up story
The Basics: Peter Capaldi's tenure as The Doctor continues with "The Magician's Apprentice," which finds The Doctor wrestling with the consequences of a past decision that now may lead to his death.


Following a bit of a hiatus, Doctor Who has returned for its ninth season since it returned to television. I've had a bit of a hiatus of my own, in the form of a very cliche midlife crisis (you can read about that here!), but now both Doctor Who and I are back. The new episode is "The Magician's Apprentice" and after a shaky first season for Peter Capaldi (reviewed here!), "The Magician's Apprentice" provides Doctor Who fans with almost all we could wish for. Capaldi is electric, Clara is somewhat minimized and Missy returns and is already known and established as the latest Regeneration of The Master. "The Magician's Apprentice" is good, but it is an obvious set-up for a more significant episode and accepting the start of the new season forces viewers to accept a narrative leap that is entirely unfulfilling.

Last seen in "Last Christmas" (reviewed here!), The Doctor and Clara were put in a narrative quagmire that forced considerate, attentive viewers to question the entire prior season of the show. "Last Christmas" was a reality-bending episode where The Doctor, his Companion Clara Oswald, and a handful of other people found themselves at the mercy of Dream Crabs, creatures that feed on unconscious people while placing their victims in a shared dream state. The episode smartly has The Doctor observing that people are still at the mercy of the Dream Crabs when they wake up and do not have any damage to their heads where the Dream Crabs inserted their feeding tubes into the skull to digest the brain. That makes perfect sense and at every stage where the Doctor realizes that and awakens from that level of the dream state, he discovers he and Clara are still in the dream, at the mercy of the parasites. It makes sense, but the huge, glaring flaw with the episode is that at the final iteration, neither The Doctor, nor Clara have any form of wound on their head where the Dream Crabs attached and attacked them. So, there is something preposterous about the episode that acknowledges an important technical detail, then hopes viewers will overlook that detail at the episode's climax. Between that and the somewhat ridiculous "Santa Claus exists" final shot of the episode, the reasonable conclusion from a viewer would be that The Doctor and Clara are still in the dream state, under attack. It is possible to go back through the entire eighth season of Doctor Who and pull out clues that imply that the entire season is a dream (Capaldi's first season could be as The Dream Doctor, with the interpretation that Matt Smith's Doctor is actually infected on Trenzalore!). Regardless, "The Magician's Apprentice" entirely neglects "Last Christmas." The Dream Crab attack is not even obliquely alluded to and the story has leapt ahead an indeterminate amount of time (while Clara alludes to having met Jane Austen there is nothing in the episode to state that the meeting occurred after "Last Christmas" - there were montages in the prior season that showed multiple adventures with The Doctor that could easily have encompassed a time when The Doctor and Clara visited Austen, after "The Caretaker," of course). So, once one accepts the incredibly unsatisfying idea that the story has leapt forward and is utterly ignoring the idea that The Doctor and Clara were not really freed from the Dream Crabs at the end of the prior episode, "The Magician's Apprentice" is actually a very satisfying set-up episode.

Opening with a battlefield, a child steps into a field of hand mines, where he screams for help. The Doctor appears, tosses him his sonic screwdriver and encourages him to come toward him. The Doctor, however, is horrified to discover that the child he is trying to save is Davros. Flashing to the present time in our universe, a powerful servant of Davros, Colony Sarff, hunts for The Doctor. He is trying to find The Doctor to get him to return to Davros for one final confrontation, because Davros is dying. On Earth, Clara Oswald is teaching at Coal Hill when she notices an airplane outside suspended in the air, unmoving. The world, it appears, is under attack, by someone who is merely holding the world hostage as opposed to doing real damage.

Clara reports to UNIT where it is quickly revealed that the planes are frozen in time above the Earth by Missy. Missy gets Clara to come to her and she reveals her current scheme. The Doctor has sent her the equivalent of a last will, which will open upon The Doctor's imminent death and Missy is determined to find The Doctor before he actually dies. With Clara's help, Missy and Clara find The Doctor partying in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, traveling there allows Colony Sarff to find the trio and abduct them. Returning to Davros's side, The Doctor has to face that by abandoning Davros in the mine field, he might well have created the monster who created the Daleks!

"The Magician's Apprentice" does a lot more right than it does wrong. In fact, outside the narrative time leap, the only real problem with the episode is that Davros is, apparently, an idiot. It might seem like a little detail, but Colony Sarff goes out into the galaxy on Davros's orders, scouring the universe for The Doctor. Colony Sarff fails to find The Doctor and returns to Davros, who informs his minion that the way to find The Doctor is through The Doctor's Companion. One would think that a dying guy who is unsure just how long he has left would send his minion out the first time with all the information he needs to actually achieve his objective.

Beyond that, "The Magician's Apprentice" does what it promises. It sets up an immense conflict that relies almost entirely upon the follow-up episode for its resolution. The Doctor is given a compelling conflict, though most of the episode is spent with Clara and Missy trying to find The Doctor and understand just what he is running from. Davros is presented in "The Magician's Apprentice" as a scared little boy and an old man who never truly grew out of being that scared child. The concept behind the conflict in "The Magician's Apprentice" is one that makes a lot of sense: the current incarnation of The Doctor interacted with the child Davros and as Davros is dying, he recognizes that version of The Doctor and knows that this version of The Doctor is the one with whom he must have a reckoning.

Clara is not annoying in "The Magician's Apprentice," though the episode once again illustrates the severe problem with the concept of her character. The Companions are often treated like the audience and allow The Doctor to bounce ideas off them. The Doctor has to explain things to the Companions, which makes them clearer to the audience (with some Companions, one Companion explains things to the other). In the case of Clara, Clara Oswald has gone up and down the entirety of The Doctor's timeline to keep him alive: it is the entire idea behind her as the Impossible Girl. The problem is, that forces the writers to use her in a different way, but Steven Moffat has not adapted to that. So, in "The Magician's Apprentice" Clara has every reason to recognize where Colony Sarff has taken her, The Doctor and Missy by the architecture . . . and she should not need Missy to tell her where they are or the significance of that planet. Similarly, it seems somewhat ridiculous that - even initially out of context - one of the three characters who will recognize the planet based on the architecture fail to recognize the architecture when they first see the "hospital."

So, while the writing for some of the characters is not nearly as smart as the characters are supposed to be, the acting in "The Magician's Apprentice" is phenomenal. Peter Capaldi is energetic and sarcastic as The Doctor and in "The Magician's Apprentice" Capaldi finds the perfect balance between snark and the weight of responsibility that is appropriate for the character. Michelle Gomez is delightful and wacky as Missy and Jenna Coleman is sympathetic as Clara. In fact, Coleman's performance makes the best argument for a decent amount of time passing between "Last Christmas" and "The Magician's Apprentice;" she plays Clara as unphased at the mention of Danny Pink being dead and she is offended by Missy getting the Confession Dial, when their relationship was so much more tenuous when last we saw them.

The effects in "The Magician's Apprentice" are pretty impressive. Colony Sarff is one of the coolest villains to grace Doctor Who and had he not been rendered so well, it would have been one of the cheesiest.

Ultimately, "The Magician's Apprentice" does what a season premiere ought to do: it gets viewers legitimately excited about the return of beloved characters, while making them feel like they are watching something new. "The Magician's Apprentice" is an excellent next chapter of Doctor Who!

For other works with Julian Bleach, please check out my reviews of:
The Avengers: Age Of Ultron
Les Miserables
The Brothers Grimm

[Knowing that single episodes are an inefficient way to get episodes, it's worth looking into Doctor Who - The Complete Ninth Season on DVD or Blu-Ray, which is also a better economical choice than buying individual episodes. Read my review of the sophomore season of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor here!
Thanks!]

8/10

For other Doctor Who episode and movie reviews, please visit my Doctor Who Review Index Page!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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