Doctor Who: Deep Breath Blu-ray review

Wait a minute! Wasn’t this just on my TV a few weeks ago!? Yes, the feature-length season premiere of Doctor Who, entitled “Deep Breath,” has already made its way to Blu-ray (and DVD), and to entice you into picking up a copy, the BBC has added a few nifty extras that we’ll get to shortly.

The 80-minute Victorian-set, steampunk infused adventure that properly introduced viewers to Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor has already been reviewed here at STARLOG by Matt Delhauer, who had mixed feelings about it, although I wrote a gushing recap over at Vulture, because I’m really rather in love with the whole thing.

The one caveat worth adding at this point is that “Deep Breath,” despite being the beginning of a new era of the series, is probably not a great place for newbies to start. It’s far too rooted in much of the lore set up over the past few seasons to make much sense to someone unfamiliar with the series in recent times. Therefore if you’re a budding Whovian, resist the urges to skip ahead blindly into Capaldi’s maiden voyage as the Doctor.

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting STARLOG.

Doctor Who: Into the Dalek

After 50 years of Dalek stories, it cannot be easy coming up with something that hasn’t been done before — something that can also be realized on the TV screen. Having exhausted our view of the Daleks from the outside, the show takes viewers inside of one, in an episode that is less about Daleks and more about soldiers and what the cost is for being one; pretty weighty fare by Doctor Who standards, to be sure, though the episode never takes it quite as far as it could’ve.

“Into the Dalek” begins in the middle of an epic space battle, inside the ship of Lieutenant Journey Blue (Zawe Ashton, easily the stand out guest star). Seconds before her death, the Doctor materializes the TARDIS around her, saving her from certain destruction. After threatening him, and the Doctor smooth talking her into saying please, the pair head for her nearby space station of origin, the Aristotle, where the Doctor’s disdain for the military is evident (“Dry your eyes, Journey Blue. Crying’s for civilians…how we communicate with you lot”). Finally, the hook: a war torn, battled-scarred Dalek that is hurt and in pain…yet has somehow miraculously turned “good” via its hatred for all things Dalek. Can the Doctor repair it, the crew wants to know? (It’s never explained whythey care.) One thing’s for sure: He can’t do it alone.

Read the rest of this recap by clicking here and visiting Vulture.

Doctor Who: Deep Breath

Since last we spoke, loyal readers, it’s been eight months of equal parts anticipation and dread. The former because it’s a new Doctor played by an enormously talented actor whose TV résumé dates all the way back to the time when Peter Davison was still playing the part. The latter because the head writer and lead creative mind on the show is still Steven Moffat, who last time we checked in with him at Christmas proved that even he can cock-up the end of an era that he spent four years shepherding. Would he actually be able to deliver on all of the promises he’s made in the intervening months that we’d be getting a new, reinvigorated version of Doctor Who?

With only one episode down, it’s impossible to answer that question, but based on this 80-minute opener, the future looks tight. To rework some classic dialogue from the Master, an entire season of this level of quality scarcely bears thinking about. Here we’ve been blessed with an episode of Doctor Who that feels like cinema. The scenes play out for four and five minutes at a time. The script isn’t in a rush to get to the end. The performances feel as though they’re building toward something fresh and new, rather than being built upon something that previously existed. The amount of quotable dialogue could make up its own recap. And yet it’s never, ever an “everything but the kitchen sink” type of affair. It has to be one of Moffat’s finest, most restrained and well thought out Who scripts.

Read the rest of this recap by clicking here and visiting Vulture.