Doctor Who: Last Christmas

“Last Christmas” is the tenth Doctor Who Christmas special in as many Christmases — a decade of Russell T. Davies’s and Steven Moffat’s annual systematic warping of holiday traditions and iconography. The ongoing Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” aside, holiday TV has surely never seen anything quite like it. A single Who holiday outing might be something for a fan to pull out and view every year, but ten of them!? To the newbie binge-watching the entire run in the middle of the summer, the fixation must seem absurd (for instance, there are only five regular episodes between 2011’s “The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe” and 2012’s “The Snowmen”).

But for the diehards, they’ve become more and more a big part of our yearly celebrations, and under Steven Moffat’s guidance, the Christmas specials are increasingly integral to the continuing story line. This latest outing is a proper dramatic coda to season eight, which back in November left us emotionally hanging (not to mention drained) as to the fate of the intense, complex friendship between the Doctor and Clara — a pairing that seemed in jeopardy of dissolving due to rumors that Jenna Coleman was leaving the show. Well, now we know the score: Not only is Clara sticking around, but she’ll be traveling alongside the Time Lord for the duration of season nine. Anyone who read my recaps for season eight undoubtedly knows that I am giddily delirious at the prospect of another full season of Clara Oswald, which itself is a pretty special Christmas present … but boy, did Moffat make me work for it.

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Doctor Who: Death in Heaven

Picking up from the various precarious cliffhangers we were left with last week, “Death in Heaven” goes pretty silly for the first 10 or 15 minutes. In the peculiar pre-credits sequence, Clara dives into an extended deceptive riff about being the Doctor in disguise so as to avoid deletion by a Cyberman. Even stranger is the decision to put Jenna’s eyes into the credits where the Doctor’s should be, which I guess extends the joke. This goes on for several scenes, and if nothing else, it’s sort of amazing to find out exactly how much she knows about the Doctor – maybe more than any other companion.

Last week I cracked wise about whether or not the Londoners would care that they’re being invaded, and it turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark: Selfies. Oh, if poor Karen Gillan was watching, she must have cringed. Speaking of cringing, how about that Cyberpollen? Doctor Who often does weird stuff to get from Point A to Point Q or whatever, and after last week’s set-up, I was curious as to how Moffat would have Cybermen rising from the grave. Never fear! Magic Cyberrain, made up of exploded Cybermen, pouring down on the cemeteries of the world somehow transforms dead bodies into living Cybermen. Surely it didn’t take long for the show to lose loads of viewers based on this process alone (some of the vitriol going around the net seems to confirm this). Don’t expect me to explain it all; I’m not even sure Moffat could explain this beyond what’s on the screen.

UNIT, in the form of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), her asthmatic scientist sidekick Osgood (Ingrid Oliver), and a bunch of soldiers arrive outside of St. Paul’s. They quickly secure Missy and the Doctor, taking the pair to a hangar, wherein resides Earth Force One. By this point in the episode, it’s pretty clear the stakes are high, and that this is big, big, big stuff. But it gets even bigger when it’s revealed that the world powers have named the Doctor the President of Earth, should an alien invasion occur – placing him squarely in charge of everyone, and specifically the military. The Doctor becomes the thing he’s railed so hard against throughout the entire season.

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Doctor Who: Dark Water

Let’s not bury the lede here, and please allow your recapper a bit of gloating. All the way back in my recap for “Deep Breath” I posited that Missy was short for Mistress – the feminine of Master (though to be fair, I was only one of many who did), and of course, it is. Beyond that, I’ve since been in an almost weekly dialogue with numerous fan friends who’ve thrown out a dozen different predictions and possibilities as to who Missy really is, and never did I give up on that initial instinct. It was never going to be anyone else, but to say it’s anticlimactic is to miss the rather innovative point of it all.

For several years there’s been a vocal contingent calling, often rather loudly, for a female Doctor. The only reason people are even able to demand such a development is because it could in theory occur, given how Time Lord physiology appears to operate (really, on no other TV series could one insist that the sex of the lead character needs to change). But just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you must; there has to be a strong narrative reason behind such a radical shift. Within the series, there’d previously been only one confirmation that a Time Lord could change sex, and that was in “The Doctor’s Wife,” when the Doctor offhandedly referenced a Time Lord named the Corsair, who at some point was a woman. That was a big moment, but this development just dwarfs it.

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Doctor Who: In the Forest of the Night

If there’s one thing that continues to amaze me about Doctor Who, or more specifically its fans, it’s all the wildly different reactions — most of them valid — to any given episode. I make no claim to offer up definitive interpretations or reactions in my recaps, and likewise it’s frequently baffling when someone insists that a particular episode is awful or without redeeming qualities. Doctor Who often plays its points of view broadly enough that it inevitably leads to differing readings. Pick the greatest and most hailed episode of the series — "Blink," for instance — and somewhere out there is somebody who’ll explain to you how it’s indulgent, poorly written garbage riddled with conundrums, and they might actually have a point. This is a big reason why Doctor Who is great TV: It means something different to every person who watches it, and no two people see it the same way.

With those qualifiers out of the way, "In the Forest of the Night" is the first episode of the season that, for me, doesn’t work within the thematic framework of the ongoing storyline. Yet looking at it objectively, say as a standalone story not related to the bigger seasonal arc, it feels cruel to pick on it or pull it apart. It’s like tearing into Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are for not playing to the adults in the house. This season, which has been so fraught with interpersonal conflict, has been a pretty specific thing, and all of a sudden for this one episode it feels like something that it wasn’t before (and judging by the preview for next week, doesn’t look like it will be again). It’s jarring at this particular juncture, coming right before the finale in which all hell (or perhaps heaven) is about to break loose. It’s too cute, too syrupy sweet — like this season’s been a charging locomotive and here it suddenly runs into a wall of Jet-Puffed marshmallow creme.

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Doctor Who: Flatline

Honest to Pete, it’d be nice if this season could deliver just one truly awful installment, so as a recapper I could have a little fun tearing into the show for a week. (Somewhere out there someone’s saying, “Dude, you had your chance with “Robot of Sherwood” and you blew it.”) “Flatline” continues this unexpectedly wonderful season of Doctor Who by delivering an alien threat unlike anything the series has ever showcased. It simultaneously harkens back to Tom Baker’s swan song, “Logopolis,” in which the TARDIS shrank with the Doctor inside.

The episode demands attention from its opening sequence. A man places an emergency call, frantically babbling about “they” being “everywhere” only to disappear mid-sentence and reappear as a smeared painting on the wall behind where he was standing. The way the camera moves and tilts to reveal his face is like one of those street paintings that only comes into focus when you see it from a certain angle. Sure enough, “Flatline” centers on an alien invasion from a two-dimensional universe, and in ours their deadly handiwork ends up looking like street art – a bizarrely weird idea worthy of Moffat himself, but dreamed up by Jamie Mathieson, who also penned last week’s outing.

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Doctor Who: Mummy on the Orient Express

After last week’s episode, aspects of which seemingly half of Whoville had big problems accepting, it must be reassuring for disgruntled fans to get back to the basics with the far more plausible idea of an invisible mummy stalking people on a flying space train. What’s been so wonderful about this season so far is that no matter how outlandish the plots have been, the emotion-driven, personal aspects have been thoroughly down to earth and relatable. A communication breakdown – the inability for two people to understand each other’s position – must be one of the most common causes of emotional stress and pain, and Doctor Who is seemingly devoting an entire season to exploring it through the lens of the fantastic.

After Clara’s blowup, there was every reason to assume she might not feature in “Mummy,” and all of the publicity over the past week seemed to confirm that. Shrewd marketing BBC and BBC America folk, keeping Clara entirely out of the picture, right up until the episode aired and she stepped from the TARDIS alongside the Doctor, both dressed to the nines. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, can somebody please release some proper publicity shots of Jenna looking so magnificent and classy in her flapper garb? We want those to make memes out of to share back and forth on Facebook. The silver PJ’s were pretty keen, too. I should go ahead and say this if it isn’t already obvious: I am in companion love with Clara, which hasn’t happened for me since Rose Tyler (and long before her, Sarah Jane Smith). Companion love is potentially dangerous, because you become so invested in the fate of the character, that you begin finding it difficult to imagine the show without her, which is never a reasonable place to be as a Doctor Who fan.

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Doctor Who: Kill the Moon

Doctor Who is no stranger to outrageous, unbelievable plots. One could even say the show has practically been built on them. “Kill the Moon” is cut from a cloth that emphasizes emotional wallop and wonder over hard science, and for some folks that could be a difficult hurdle to overcome. If you’re one of the yeahright people (as in “Yeeeaah, right!”), there’s a good chance this episode left you wanting something a little more grounded in reality. But if you’re a Doctor Who fan, and surely you must be or you wouldn’t be reading this, you’re used to suspending pachyderm-sized amounts of disbelief. If you can do that with “Kill the Moon,” it’s a dazzling foray into the beautiful, demanding, and strange, cobbled together around a thrilling sense of uncertainty.

Right off the bat it grabs the viewer with an utterly compelling pre-credits sequence. At first it seemed a function of the script to join the proceedings mid-adventure—as if we’ve been thrown into the middle of a real time episode: 45 minutes are on the countdown timer, Clara and her student Courtney are in the midst of something perilous, and the Doctor is nowhere to be found. Surely he’ll show up to save the day? We’ll find out soon enough that "Kill the Moon" isn’t nearly that predictable. Indeed, whatever criticisms one might have of the episode, predictability surely can’t be one of them (except for one thing, but we’ll come to that).

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Doctor Who: The Caretaker

However you might react to “The Caretaker,” hopefully everyone will at least agree that, given the setup of the season so far, it’s a story that needed to be told, and halfway through the season seems a good time to tell it. We’ve been frustratingly teased with the Doctor/Clara/Danny triangle for the past four episodes, curious to know where it’s headed. Where opinions will differ, I imagine, is over the manner in which the story is told.

The bulk of the triangle’s tease has revolved around Clara’s deceptions, which crumble entirely in "The Caretaker," thanks to the Doctor covertly scheduling an alien invasion intervention in Miss Oswald’s backyard, Coal Hill Secondary School, and finally coming face to face with her boyfriend (and vice versa). One of the cheapest-looking aliens the new series has unveiled, the Skovox Blitzer is attracted to the area because of all the artron emissions, which were likely left by the Doctor himself since the TARDIS materializes and dematerializes at the school regularly, not to mention his numerous other visits to the area in his past lives. The invasion storyline is so rote and B-movie in scope that it must exist only to serve as a basic introduction for Danny to the world of Clara and the Doctor. In any case, the Doctor either hasn’t considered that he may actually be responsible for the alien’s presence, or he has and has chosen to take care of business and not mention that part (to Danny he outright denies it). Either is a real possibility with the Twelfth Doctor.

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Doctor Who: Time Heist

Show of hands: Who else guessed the identity of the Architect as soon as the premise was thrown out there? It wasn’t that there were any particular clues, but with an episode that, per its title, involves time travel, and with X amount of characters on display early on, it seemed sort of obvious. But more detrimental to the perception of this episode is that it arrives on the heels of the groundbreaking “Listen,” which the internet quickly declared one of the best Doctor Who episodes, evah! (It was pretty brill.) Having said all of that, there’s plenty to dig about this episode, starting with Clara’s clothes dryer, and the Doctor being mesmerized by it, which strikes me as quite comical.

It’s that simple domesticity versus unimaginable adventures in time and space that fuels much of the Doctor/Clara dynamic right now. She’s perfectly happy at home, doing Clara things, such as going on a second date with Danny Pink. He’s bored traveling alone, enough so that staring into her dryer holds more revelations than visiting the Crab Nebula. So when the TARDIS phone rings and Clara hasn’t left for her date yet, of course he’ll answer it, at which point they’re instantly propelled into an adventure they know nothing about, alongside two people they do not recognize, Psi (Jonathan Bailey), a cyborg, and Saibra (Pippa Bennett -Warner), a shape-shifter whose look might be modeled on Grace Jones in A View to a Kill.

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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.

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Doctor Who: Listen

Part of the genius of Season Three’s benchmark “Blink” is how utterly standalone it is, which is why it’s often the go-to installment to show to newbies: The ride can be enjoyed with virtually no knowledge of the Who mythos. “Listen” comes from a different direction; our protagonists are front and center throughout the episode, and far more so than “Into the Dalek,” this feels like a proper introduction to the world of Danny Pink. Whereas “Blink” was about Sally Sparrow and angels that nobody had seen before, this is about the Doctor, Clara, Danny, and ghosts that nobody will ever see.

Perhaps the real difference between the two is where Steven Moffat is as a Doctor Who writer. Back in season three, he was a scribe for hire, likely eager to make another defining mark, but now he’s been the showrunner for five years. Moffat may no longer have any interest in telling a Who story that doesn’t involve the mythos he’s created or is in the process of creating. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as long he can occasionally churn out an episode this inventive. Surely one of the most unexpected, abstract episodes the series has produced since Moffat took over as head writer, “Listen” is the sort of fare that should have the torch-wielding villagers ceasing their charge…well, until the next episode, anyway. The show can’t tell stories like this each week, or everyone’s kids would end up in therapy.

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Mark Gatiss: Robot of Sherwood Interview

Mark Gatiss writes and acts, and we could have an intense debate over which he does better. You’ve seen him onscreen in Game of Thrones as Tycho Nestoris, of the Iron Bank of Braavos, a role he’ll be reprising next year. Even more prominent is his ongoing stint as Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s devious brother in Sherlock, the series he not only writes for and stars in, but also co-created and co-produces with Steven Moffat. Yet we rang up Gatiss to chat about Doctor Who, Moffat’s other series, for which Gatiss wrote this past weekend’s episode, entitled “Robot of Sherwood.”


I had a great laugh — many laughs — watching “Robot of Sherwood.”

Oh, good!

As much as I love Doctor Who, I can’t say that it’s often that I have a big grin across my face through an episode.

The whole intention was to write a kind of romp, really. I’ve always loved the Errol Flynn movie. I love Robin Hood, actually, but that film particularly. To me, the essence of Robin Hood is that it’s a fairy tale. I’ve never had much patience for the muggy, grim versions because I think they’re missing the point, really [laughs]! So the chance to do Robin Hood meets Doctor Who was a bit irresistible.

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Doctor Who: Robot of Sherwood

Season Eight has been dark so far, but I don’t think I realized exactly how dark the first two episodes were until I started watching “Robot of Sherwood,” an episode which triggered a huge grin that refused to go away throughout the episode. And it was sort of a relief, because perhaps we needed to be reminded that this show is still capable of and not shy about making us laugh. This is no slight against all the other episodes, but I can’t recall the last time I had so much unbridled fun watching a new episode of Doctor Who. Here the Doctor declares he detests banter. Thankfully writer Mark Gatiss does not, because this episode overflows with witty repartee.

The series hasn’t had a celebrity historical for quite some time. Nothing in season seven unless you count Hugh Bonneville’s Henry Avery. Season six made a joke of Hitler and Nixon figured into its opening two-parter. But there arguably hasn’t been a proper one of these since “Vincent and the Doctor” way back in the fifth season. At that time, based on the strength of the material, I wondered if writer Richard Curtis had maybe “ruined” the format by making the definitive example of it, but here comes “Robot of Sherwood” to thankfully prove me wrong. Maybe the gimmick just needed a good rest, as there have been times when it felt positively strained (I’m looking at you “The Unicorn and the Wasp”).

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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.

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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.

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