There are many, many drafts of things sitting in this blog’s slushpile: there’s a review of Skyrim which is mostly about plates; discussions of House, The West Wing and Community and all the other TV shows and films that I’ve watched, books I’ve read, games I’ve played, but as yet, I’ve been unable to write anything of length or substance about any of them. Which is why I’m instead going to talk about Ivor the Engine.

Not very long ago, in the top left hand corner of Wales, there was a railway. It wasn’t a very long railway or a very important railway, but it was called the The Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited; and it was all there was.

And in a shed, in a siding, at the end of the railway lived  the locomotive of The Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited, which was a long name for a little engine, so his friends just called him Ivor.

Some of you might be unfamiliar with Ivor, the little green locomotive belonging to the Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited. He’s the title character for the first production of Smallfilms, the collaboration between Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin whose later works included Noggin the Nog, Bagpuss and The Clangers. The series began as a series of black-and-white hand-crafted animations for ITV, which was then later made into a series of hand-crafted colour animations for the BBC.

As a child, I knew none of this. In fact, at the time I first encountered Ivor, I don’t think we even had a television. I used to spend all my free time reading and listening to story tapes. One of my favourites was a two-tape box, a double-bill of Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog.

The tapes are no longer around – my mum gave ours to a charity shop, I think, and the best substitute I’ve been able to find is what appears to be a rip of the first story, which can be enlistened here. The story is a condensed version of the first 6 episodes of the black-and-white BBC series. (until recently, the rest were thought lost, until someone found them in a barn somewhere). It’s about Ivor’s quest to sing with the Grumbley and District Choral Society, after hearing them one evening, from the hill overlooking the town, singing Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah, which to this day is my favourite hymn. There’s a moment when Postgate, with his wonderful resonant voice, is speaking over a beautiful rendition of the song:

Then he heard the singing. Oh! it was lovely singing. It was the Grumbley and District Choral Society, practising in the congregational hall. Ivor listened, and it seemed to him as if the hills and the valleys, the streams and the trees and the gasworks were all singing together, singing their praises to the golden evening sun.

To this day, a chill goes up my spine when I hear it. When I heard it (for the first time in years) a few weeks back, I cried. No, really.

Everything about the stories seems suffused with the ever-so-dreamlike quality that memories of childhood (or, at least, my memories of childhood) seem to possess. There’s no question of realism – you don’t really care that there’s a sentient railway engine, or a dragon called Idris. It has the rare charm of something made wholly by hand, by people who put something of themselves into the endeavour. Bill Watterson once said of Calvin and Hobbes that he took a particular pride in knowing he’d drawn every little detail and lettered every speech bubble, and I’m fairly sure it’s the same with the Smallfilms team here. Everything from the hand-drawn and animated characters of Jones the Steam, Dai Station and Evans the Song to the chuff-chuff sound that Ivor makes was made by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, and it really couldn’t be any other way.

I recall, in 2008, watching the children’s TV episode of Charlie Brooker, and learning of the death of Oliver Postgate. Brooker, as those of you familiar with his writing will know, is the sort of arch-cynic who appealed to me as a younger teenager, but when I listened to the enormous affection with which he talked about all of the Smallfilms productions, I realised they affected him in exactly the same way as they affected me. There’s something about Ivor the Engine which cuts through all the accumulated deadening of years, bypasses my inner critic. Even Doctor Who, my favourite television programme, something I’ve loved for about as long as I can remember, can’t do that. I think it can evince no cynicism because it contains no cynicism – it’s genuine, enthusiastic and lovely from top to bottom, an uncommonly pure viewing experience.

There is genuinely something special about it. Something magical. Ivor the Engine tells a simple story about a railway engine who lives in the top-left-hand-corner of Wales. I guarantee it’ll brighten your day. Go, now, listen or watch.

this is what I have been doing

I notice it’s been a couple of months since I’ve posted on here. I’m not dead (as I so frequently have to reassure my mother), just busy. Since that last Who review, I’ve moved to Brighton, where I’m now sharing a house with blog-associate S Chladek, and started university, which is great, but time-consuming. In any event, almost all my free writing time has been spent chipping away at the vast edifice of Atomic Golem, but I’ve also taken over writing duties on Wych Wolf , the (awesome) webcomic drawn by my dad. For the blog, I’ve started about five or six different pieces, none of which have been finished yet. Oh, and I’ve been playing loads and loads of Skyrim (one of those unfinished pieces, by the way, is a review of Skyrim which has about three paragraphs on why the spirit of the game is exemplified in the ability to pick up wooden plates). For more timely (and frequent) updates from me, you could do worse than following me on Twitter. That’s it for the moment. See you again at Christmas/when the book’s done (so probably Christmas).

ACTION SHOT

More like Doctor fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu-

But which is camper? There's only one way to find out...

Right, let’s get this over with. It’s certainly an odd one. The closest to RTD that Moffat has ever come, quite possibly – but in a good way. I mean energetic, early-new-series RTD rather than tired tiresome late-period RTD. So we’ve got a really crazy, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink beginning, which they must have paid for out of the last few weeks budgets – Steam trains through the Gherkin! Hot-air-balloon-cars! Pterodactyls in the park! (and a nice little cameo for Callow) – before we settle down to jowly Ian McNeice as Caeser-Churchill, and his Silurian assistant. They summon the Doctor* who proceeds to launch into what may – at the risk of sounding thick – have been a slightly overcomplicated explanation.

A whole new meaning to 'giving the finger'...

That’s not to say that what was being explained was itself complicated, just that the manner of telling – the nested framing devices, which seemed to get confused in places (when was he talking (or rather, what was he recounting) to the Teselecta and when to that hilarious Mark Gatiss rubber-faced Viking…thing?). This means he ends doing several things sort-of at once- playing live chess with the hilarious Mark Gatiss rubber-faced Viking…thing (that’s how I’m putting it EVERY TIME, just you try to stop me) who then gets eaten by skulls (also hilarious – they looked like they were on strings, like a faux-gothic Supermarionation sort of thing) and the Doctor has a chat with the head-in-a-box of Dorium, the fat blue guy. What this all amounts to, in the end, is that the Doctor’s death is a ‘fixed point’ in time, a phrase we keep returning to, and The Fields of Whatever It Was, the Fall of the Eleventh (sounds very RTD, doesn’t it) is where the Question Will Be Asked. The Doctor steals the head-in-a-box, and is about to run off, away from his fate, but then he gets a ‘phone call telling him The Brigadier has died, and so the Doctor decided to go and die now. Well… top marks for working real-world events into the story, Steven, but I’ll be damned if I can work out the logic behind that decision. That his death made the Doctor realise everyone’s got to go sometime? Not quite sure about that.

"I have my hair slightly too long now. Slightly-too-long hair is cool."

Then we’re back to Churchill, and there are some Silence in the rafters, then Amy and some soldiers break in and shoot the Doctor. But it’s a stun-gun, then there’s some stuff on a train, and Amy sort of remembers the ‘real’ timeline, but Rory doesn’t – he’s a soldier, in a role which does rather fit the character, especially as shown over the latest series. For some reason, there’s a secure facility in which they’re keeping the Silence, AND their control room and secret survival plan. Sensible. So inevitably, the Silence break out, make a gag about Rory dying and get shot by Amy (when apparently all the soldiers shooting them did sod-all). Not to mention all that ostentatious posing before zapping people. The eyepatches are external hard drives for your memory which let you see the Silence – well, when those preview shots with everyone wearing them came out, that became obvious (well, the seeing-the-Silence thing. Not so much the ‘external memory’ thing… oh you know what I mean), and they’re also rigged to kill or (for some reason) cause incredible pain (well, I know the reason, it just seems a little silly). And Amy sticks Kovarian’s back on**. Crikey.

"The pirate episode was the first half of the series, guys"

There’s a bit more here, actually. River’s back, being very camp and arch (though thankfully nowhere near as bad as Let’s Kill Hitler***) and she’s co-ordinating the operation. Earlier in the episode, we had a cut-away to the Doctor’s death from The Impossible Astronaut, and we now see the whole of it – River in the spacesuit, the Doctor telling her it’s fine, and initially, River refused to kill the Doctor, which lead to the creation of this parallel reality, and it seems that if the Doctor touches River, they flash back to the lake. I’m honestly not sure why they bother capturing River and putting her in the spacesuit if at that point her conditioning to kill the Doctor had been broken (apart from making her feel bad). If it’s the spacesuit doing the heavy lifting, why not just use the spacesuit? Or why not have Kovarian do it? She’s the one who’s obsessed with killing the Doctor. Then again, maybe these are all questions which are going to be answered later, seeing as we’re continuing with the Silence thing

"No, I'm not sure what purpose this serves either"

Then we go up on the roof****, where the Doctor tries to persuade them he has to die, and wouldn’t be missed if he did (I’ll say that’s an indicator of the Doctor’s mental state – he’s convinced himself no-one wants him around – almost suicidal. Quite interesting, really.) but it turns out River’s been sending out a message saying that the Doctor needs help, outside the ‘bubble’ which Earth’s trapped in (not quite a Chronic Hysteresis, but a distant cousin – history crammed into a few repeated seconds) and they’ve all come to say they will help, they do want the Doctor around and… the Doctor changes his mind. We’re never actually shown any of them, we’re just told, so River could just be making it all up, really. Then the startlingly abrupt, perfunctory wedding, considering it’s what gives the episode its title, and we’re back. Amy sipping some white wine with River in the garden, and… it turns out the Doctor’s still alive (and Amy’s his mother-in-law). Well, of course – and it was the Teselecta, with the Doctor inside which got shot on the beach, so he was there, just inside the Teselecta, as him. Makes the Doctor’s salvation a literal deus ex machina, right?

"Eaten alive by carnivorous skulls! The ignominyyyyy..."

Now we have the most interesting part of the episode – it appears to be doing a ‘soft’ reboot, in perhaps the cleverest way possible – the Doctor’s still around, and all the continuity is still there, but everyone thinks he’s dead, so he hopefully won’t be able to carry on pulling that speechifying, run-away-I’m-so-great bullshit (of which Moffat has been the worst proponent). The next episode is the Christmas special (I confidently predict ‘average to poor’, as seems to be the way with all Christmas specials since The Runaway Bride (The Christmas Invasion was actually rather good) – not that far away now, which is an odd thought – then Series 7, which should be OK, provided we don’t have River as a permanent companion. More importantly, as the Doctor returns the head of Dorium to its place in the Headless Monks’ crypt, though, we finally find out what The Question is. ‘Doctor Who?’. For goodness’ sake.

INTENSE FACE

I liked this episode – as an episode. As a finale, however, it did fall a little flat. Seriously, two series buildup for a knock-knock joke? I’m starting to wonder whether we’re actually seeing the Chris Carter Effect in action here. Mind you, there was never going to be a particularly satisfying Question, and this is probably the best we’d have got. Now we’ve got foreshadowing for the fall of the Eleventh (the Eleventh what? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it’s probably not ‘legion’) at ‘Tranzelor’ (good grief, it’s almost Shadow Proclamation territory. Wait, I’ve mentioned this). The potential return to something a tad more low-key is a welcome prospect, especially where the finales are concerned. So, the conclusion stands thus: very good. Certainly problematic, but it was entertaining as an episode, and not ‘interesting’ as part of the Big Story. Jolly good show. Let’s Kill Hitler had me worried, but I’m now looking forward to the next series. Roll on Christmas!

"Until next time..."

*by the way, those of you who complained about RTD doing the whole messianic-imagery thing, at least he never gave us Jesus-Doctor.

**Is this the first time Kovarian’s been named in-episode? I’d also like to know how they captured her, but she’s dead now, so who cares really?

***Weirdly enough, after re-watching Let’s Kill Hitler, Rex’s line from Episode 3 of Miracle day about not liking people in their forties behaving like they’re in their twenties sprang to mind.

***Anyone remember the CITV morning show Up On The Roof? No?

Can’t think of a pun for this week, but hopefully River will die next week, in which case I can use ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead.’

One criticism which has been (fairly) levelled at me is that I have a tendency to highly praise things which are serious, and the more serious (and grim and depressing), the better – my feelings about Children of Earth, for instance, can be cited as evidence, especially the ending – but at the same time, I’m not averse to a bit of silly fun – ‘mild peril’ rather than ‘sustained threat’ and that’s exactly what this was – a bit of lighthearted, silly, fun, the calm before the proverbial storm.

OK, I’ll admit, at times, I found myself thinking ‘are they going to kill the baby?’ or, during the conversion scene ‘Is Craig going to be properly converted only to have all the Cybermen fail because he’s useless?’ Or better yet ‘is he going to be too fat for the cyber-armour to fit on?’ Instead, once again, the enemies were defeated by the power of love (nicely lampshaded by the Doctor’s dialogue), and it was quite entertaining that their heads literally exploded. I feel a bit sorry for the poor old Cybermen, though. They haven’t been a genuine threat in ages – probably not since the Series Two finale, and even then only until the Daleks showed up and killed them. Mind you, the Cybermats-with-teeth were quite good.

The episode was clearly not taking itself seriously, and was, in places, genuinely funny – the baby language thing, ‘Stormageddon’, shushing people, though not so much the hilarious recurrent gag about Val thinking the Doctor and Craig were gay, and the broad-brush store staff ‘old lady’, ‘chav girl’, and ‘security guard who’ll get killed off pretty quickly’ served their purpose as far as one-dimensional gags/corpses-waiting-to-happen can, but then again, this episode suffers from the curse of modern Who, namely that it’s difficult to tell a complete, satisfying and complex story in 45 minutes, a problem most clearly visible with the ‘and then love, for the umpteenth bloody time this series, caused the Cybermen’s heads (and ship) to explode’ ending, lampshaded though it is. That’s not to say it’s complete cop-out, or deus-ex-machina, or anything, just that it smacks a little of ‘right, now we need this sorted so we can have River arseing around in an astronaut suit’.

The Doctor/Craig dynamic was just pleasant to watch – genial, friendly, quirky without being kooky – and James Cordon manages to once again play a character rather than a caricature, though some of the credit must surely go to Gareth Roberts’ writing – they makes Craig likeable, where it would’ve been all too easy to slip into ‘blokey’ nonsense, and while there’s a smidge of that (gosh, I’m using a lot of italics this week), especially where his ‘oh, I can’t cope with the baby’ stuff, he mostly manages to come across as just a nice guy. This is also the Doctor’s going-to-die-soon episode, so we had him delivering the speech to Craig only for Craig to fall asleep, and the scene with the baby and the stars, where the Doctor eased from odd (not as overplayed as it was in The Lodger) into weary old man. The Amy/Rory cameo was another nice moment – although I do wonder how the Doctor has managed to miss that poster before if he works in the shop. Also, if the perfume Amy’s advertising is Petrichor… well, is anyone really going to want to smell like dust after rainfall? Also, stetson and envelopes.

In the end, I liked it because it had a decidedly (perhaps unabashedly) feel-good atmosphere, and much as I might revel in the dark and gritty, I appreciate 45 minutes of well-crafted levity – Doctor Who isn’t The Wire*. Even though it was the last hurrah, it didn’t have the funereal tone of something like Logopolis, which really layed it on thick. It was, as with the last episode, the story of the Doctor saving a few people from a few monsters – not so much an invasion as an invasion-ette – and didn’t succumb to overemotional melancholy. The only lapse was the rather clumsy foreshadowing (actually, I think ‘foreshadowing implies a degree of subtlety which certainly wasn’t present) wasn’t very welcome, facilitated as it was by the Doctor’s sudden decision to soliloquise to a group of random children on the street, who evidently weren’t taught Stranger Danger**. Or maybe I was just annoyed to see a good episode spoiled by yet another needless appearance from everyone’s least favourite tiresome bore River Song. Still, a pleasant diversion.

Next week, the first one-part series finale. I was about to say ‘should be interesting’ but it involves River Song so ‘should inevitably be tiresome and carry over to the next series’ would be more like it. For goodness sake.

*though perhaps Torchwood should aspire to be

**contrast with Remembrance of the Daleks

Not that complex…

…but still surprisingly good! I mean, not a patch on last week’s tour de force, but good nonetheless. A good celebrity appearance (though probably improved by Walliams being buried under layers of latex), a good monster, and a  The Horns of Nimon reference – find me another episode which does all that! Thankfully, my earlier Twitter joke came to pass – it seems Mr Whithouse has managed to get out of his rut whereby he wrote the same episode over and over again* – no heroic tertiary character blowing up some explosive barrels to save the Doctor et al. Thank goodness.

Before I get started, some real-world stuff. I think the filming order has rather messed up the Doctor’s wardrobe change – either that, or these episodes are ‘out of order’ (with regards to Let’s Kill Hitler), which would be … interesting, to say the least. Possibly Moffat’s playing a ‘costume continuity’ game, as with Flesh and Stone, with the whole series? It might explain why everyone’s suddenly stopped giving a shit about River. Or maybe they all realised that I was right, she’s an annoying psychopath, and decided they were just better off without her. The other thing : a genuine question here  - was all the music this episode recycled? I could swear it’s all been used in other episodes.

The idea at the heart of the episode – a monster that feeds on faith – was quite interesting, and as it began with the ‘fear’ concept, and managed to do it far more interestingly in the first half than was managed in all of Night Terrors. While some of the rooms were just (entertaining) window-dressing (the clown, the PE teacher, the man in the gorilla suit), the people’s actual fears (doctor lady’s father**, Amy’s fear of being left behind) were done surprisingly well (and the Doctor’s… well, I think we can probably assume it’s him, can’t we? Him or the Master or something like that. I mean, I’d like it were it something less obvious… any ideas?).

Then, it turned out it’s really about faith, though they adressed it in a nice, non-judgemental way – the Muslim doctor lady’s faith was presented as a strength, only subverted when it was taken to extremes – when overriding fear forced everything else out, and the same with Amy’s faith in the Doctor  It was wonderfully constructed - the whole episode was seeded with Amy reassuring everyone that the Doctor knew how, the Doctor would be able to save them, and then, in order to save her, the Doctor had to break Amy’s faith in him, to admit that half the reason he has people following him around is so he can be told how wonderful he is, and that he needs to let her go before she gets killed.  It was an episode about the small – a few people trapped in a hotel/holodeck being picked off one-by-one, rather than galaxy-ending catastrophe, as highlighted by Rory’s line ”I’d forgotten that not all victories are about saving the universe.”

It was also very funny in places – the Silurian in a shirt and tie picture on the wall in the background made me laugh, for instance, but the David Walliams character – who just wanted to be invaded and subjugated (‘we just finished planting trees, so the invading armies can march in the shade’) – was really tremendous. As I said, a celebrity cameo which works (perhaps the first since John Cleese). I’m still not sold on the idea (that episode with Kylie still weighs the scales pretty heavily against), but this came together admirably, and for once, the talent of the guest could be utilised without it feeling like it’s been tacked on (qv.Katherine Jenkins).

Problems were fewer, but still present – Whithouse still suffers from broad-brush characterisation issues – this is most noticeable where the ‘conspiracy theorist computer nerd who stammers and is scared of girls’ character is concerned. I also felt some aspects of the episode didn’t make a tremendous amount of sense – not that it affected the episode itself tremendously, but I did wonder why, for instance, the place looked like a hotel, how the Minotaur’s food was chosen, why, if the people who used to worship it stopped, why did they bother keeping it alive and fed – feeding off apparently random people (though they all had faith)?

Then we had the ending. Another great ending – this time, lonely-Doctor-fade-to-black. Rory and Amy have a house and a car*** (one of them will presumably have to find a job at some point, unless the Doctor’s left a stack of cash in one of the rooms). It’s nice, in a way, to see a conclusion, albeit a temporary one****, to Amy and Rory’s story with the Doctor. As their relationship has developed from rather poorly drawn earlier on to actually really good (especially over this series’ run, culminating with the last episode). 

Next week: Craig! Cybermats! Cybermen! See you then!

*well, twice, but permit me a little rhetorical leeway here

**I’d just like to point out that if she got onto a medicine course with a B in maths, she’s obviously doing something right.

*** “How did you know this was my favourite car?” “You showed me a picture of it once and said “This is my favourite car”

****An awful lot of people seem to be saying that this is ‘the end’ for Amy and Rory. This would seem to be a rather foolish assertion. Not only have Gillan**** and Darvill signed on for the next series, the Doctor said that this isn’t the last they’ve seen of him (‘bad penny is my middle name’), they’re clearly just getting rid of them for another Doctor-and-Craig episode, and the finale, let us not forget, is called ‘The Wedding of River Song’.

*****Go back through my reviews and see how many times I’ve accidentally written ‘Kieron Gillen’. Go and do that.

There was so much awesome packed into The Girl Who Waited that I didn’t manage to fit all my observations and opinions into my review. Here’s the extra stuff: 

• One of my favourite little details in the episode was the reason Amy got delayed and ended up in the different timestream was that she’d forgotten her ‘phone – which she then used to create her sonic probe.
• Didn’t they do the ‘one person rapidly aging’ thing with Amy and Rory (admittedly not at this length or with this quality) near the end of The Doctor’s Wife?
• That thing with the Mona Lisa being smashed over the robot’s head – I meant to make a ‘This is a copy’ joke, but forgot.
• What did Robot Rory hand to real Rory? [EDIT: My dad informed me it was the glasses. I evidently wasn't wearing mine*. He did raise another point, though, namely that if the robots eyes are in their hands, and this robots hands have been removed, how did it see the glasses? Drawing on a face doesn't confer facial characteristics.]
• I liked Robot Rory.
• That garden had very Tim Burton-looking trees, didn’t it?
• Some of the ideas in this thing warrant whole episodes to themselves, don’t they? I mean, the idea of a plague (which only affects binary-vascular species) which kills people in one day being responded to by creating an environment which accelerates the person’s like, so they effectively live the rest of their life in one day? Wonderful!
• I thought the robots themselves were a bit lame, but had a good premise as antagonists, namely that they were trying to help – in many ways, robots lunging at you shouting ‘this is a kindness’ are more worrying that the ones shouting ‘exterminate’.
• I think Kindness would have been a better title for the episode, though I can see why they changed it.
• Discussing the episode on Twitter with associate K Hawes and she said ‘She’s old. Bummer’. That’s pretty much a three-word episode summary right there.

Well worth the wait.
Crikey. That was remarkable. The first episode since The Doctor’s Wife that I’ve enjoyed unreservedly (or at least, as close to unreservedly as I can manage*). The highest compliment I can pay this episode, I think is that the thought “Oh look, a white-box-on-the-cheap episode” only passed my mind when the TARDIS first landed (that and ‘oh look, the Doctor’s switched back again to the new coat’, though that’s a broadcast-ordering issue). I was honestly surprised how much the episode managed to pack into its running time – the minimalism of the initial sets (and cast, this being a Doctor-light episode) belied the depth and intricacy of the story.

After the last two episodes, which I disliked so much on initial viewing, I had to retrospectively re-evaluate them in my head afterward to try to find some redeeming features (which goes some way to explain why those reviews read like they do), I liked this episode so much that my brain is refusing to believe it and is retroactively finding problems with it, or rather, is negatively reassessing things I noticed were problematic at the time but I simply didn’t care about, carried along as I was on a wave of enjoyment. For instance, though he didn’t age while doing it, Rory waited 2000 years for Amy at the end of the last series, and he gets shouted at because he took 36 and a bit years? Really? The robots were interesting – the stuff with the hands especially, though I thought if they were really intended to be kind, their open heads looked rather worrying – but terrifically flimsy – one was destroyed by having a painting smashed over it (though it was the Mona Lisa)  I also found the ending (for Old Amy) predictable, though that would have been nigh-on impossible to circumvent and in no way undermines its emotional impact.

I criticised Let’s Kill Hitler for resembling Boom Town in the wrong ways, but The Girl Who Waited did it the right way – taking the key concept of Boom Town i.e., asking ‘why does he think he has the right to do these things’ and doing it properly – not through the prism of his enemies, but rather his companions – questioning how he treats those who matter most to him rather than those who matter least. Old Amy’s line about the Doctor “… flying through time on whimsy.” and Rory’s “You should look in a history book once in a while – see if there’s an outbreak of plague or not!” remind us, that the Doctor’s merry dance through time might seem quirky and charming, but has real consequences**, and not just for those who happen to cross his path, like  Better yet, this manages to be properly considered without taking a whole episode, indeed, not even being the main focus of the episode – since this is a Doctor-light episode, as I mentioned, the primary focus is the relationship between Rory and Amy.

I don’t usually comment on acting in these reviews unless someone’s been monumentally awful so it’s nice to make an exception here and say wow! Karen Gillen pulling double-duty as Young and Old Amy was truly astonishing (I’m almost out of my hyperbole key words here) – I believed that Old Amy was distinct from Young Amy, and this was especially noticeable in their scenes ‘together’ (I’ll give the makeup team credit for some of that – but despite the  tremendously convincing face, no grey hair? Really?) and the vocal and posture coaching clearly didn’t go to waste. Equally strong here was Arthur Darvill – Rory being the keystone on which this episode rests – going ably from anger to sadness to utter despair, especially at the end when he was faced with his dilemma, he says to the Doctor  ”This isn’t fair. You’re turning me into you” – followed by his unwitting use of the Tenth Doctor’s “I’m so sorry” catchphrase. Pretty much the only other ‘character’ in the whole thing was the Interface, voiced by Imelda Staunton (This is the series’ second superb standalone episode in which a very respected and well-known actor appears in voice only. Weird, huh?) which was fine, and served its purpose without being overly obtrusive.

The first thing that occurred to me after the frankly inspired downbeat cold close (though I suspect there’s a DVD extra for that’ll add an extra-unnecessary coda to that) was that Moffat wouldn’t have been able to write that. The way Tom MacRae*** dealt with Rory and Young and Old Amy’s relationship was remarkably adept – being able to write a ‘feelings’ episode without having it descent (too much) into tiresome schmaltz and bad dialogue is very impressive. The interactions felt genuine. Had Moffat written it, the episode would’ve been entertaining enough but all the emotional depth, heart and impact would’ve been undermined by his tiresome tendency to slip into lazy sitcom writer territory by stuffing it with smutty remarks (cf. Space /Time and any River Song episode where she’s required to meaningfully interact with the Doctor). While I think he’s a marvellous writer and showrunner, I don’t think he’s quite able to write a story with this much sincerity. There were so many moments – the lipstick thing, for instance, just… happened, but no attention was called to it, and it wasn’t mentioned again, it was there, then it was done – that felt authentic, that conveyed a genuine emotion. This is weird for me – usually I’m on the Moffat side of the divide – I have an aversion to this sort of thing, since it’s so often terribly done, but here it was done well enough that I was completely with it.

This episode was the best this series. Better than The Doctor’s Wife. Better than The Big Bang, Vincent and the Doctor, maybe The Eleventh Hour, possibly even better than Blink. It was just superb. I’ll leave you with something to think about for the series finale that the Doctor said as a casual aside toward the end of the episode. ”Sometimes knowing your own future is what enables you to change it”.

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited can be watched on the iPlayer here.

EDIT : There were a few other things which didn’t quite fit in the review, so I’ve given them an addendum here

*funnily enough the worst thing about this episode wasn’t actually in the episode. it was the continuity announcer’s attempt to ‘join in’ with the beginning. When I come to power, this will be banned.

**Well, in-the-story real consequences. Oh, you know what I mean.

***Incidentally – Tom MacRae, man! Is this really the same man who wrote The Age of Steel?

Preview our redesigned UCAStv video site going live on 15 Sept http://t.co/8nUWUzo – tell us what you think

What I think is that they should be spending a little less money on fancy video sites, and a little more on making sure their site’s up when people actually want to use it. Or better yet, ditch the video site and stop sending me so many bloody adverts. Not only that, but couldn’t they have (possibly) taken some of the money and hired some web designers who’d make something vaguely functional?

It might not be immediately obvious to anyone who hasn’t applied for a place at university in the last few years, but the UCAS site design is ghastly, and its information delivery is dismal. Unnecessary, pointless rubbish swamps the course info, and if you do want to find something useful, like, say, grade requirements, it’s buried three or four layers down, for no good reason. Not only is there no way of easily accessing useful data, which you’d think would be the bare minimum for a site designed to help students make important, life-changing choices, there’s not even a comparison tool, or anything like it, so you can’t, for example, get it to list English Literature courses from all universities, ranked in order of grade requirements or alphabetically, or something. You just have to keep lots and lots of tabs open. Which is, to be frank, a right pain.

Let’s use a specific example, shall we? So, say I wanted to find out what grades I needed to do (for instance) Maths at the University of Brighton – one of the most important factors in one’s choice of university. This, of course, assumes that you know what university you’re looking for. If you don’t… well, rinse and repeat the following, with some minor variations, for as many as you’re looking at.

After finding the various flavours of Maths the UoB has to offer (not as easy as you’d think, but at least the course selection isn’t as utterly hateful as what follows), I choose vanilla Maths. Any sign of the grades on the course page? Nope. Institution code? Start dates? No, I don’t care, I just want to know what combination of letters will grant me access. Below the boxed-out ‘information to complete UCAS application’ bit (how helpful!) we’ve got a plethora of options which may lead us to the answers we seek. “Entry routes”, “Prospective students”, “Student life”… let’s guess “Entry Routes”. Now, another mess of options – but thankfully it’s a tad easier – “Course Specific Requirements”, that must be it. See how obvious and easy it was? That’s from someone who knows what they’re doing because they’ve been through the process – goodness knows what some poor unfortunate coming to it for the first time would think. Even if it were more obvious, it’s still cumbersome and pointless.

I just find it hard to believe that such an apparently  (but I’m no expert on UCAS financial arrangements, please comment if I’m mistaken) well-funded institution can do such a shoddy job. Were I Alex Leng (my Tory pal), I’d say insufficient competition were the cause of such inadequacies, but since it would be very difficult to introduce competition to the university admissions system without making things even more insanely weighted against students from lower-income backgrounds. I’d say it’s simply a case of insufficient focus on what the student wants from their system.  Fortunately, it would seem to be eminently resolvable, if only they’d actually bother.

This probably come across as rather retributive, but at almost every stage of my university application process, UCAS have done just fine, which is why it’s so irksome to see them fall headlong over these ankle-high hurdles into pits full of bears on fire. To my mind, it’s obvious that your website should be geared to allow easy access to important information, that these days, there’s no excuse for your website to go down due to entirely predictable traffic, and if I’m forced to sign up to your service to apply to university (and pay you for the privilege), I really don’t care that you haven’t passed my details on to advertisers, you’re still sending me unsolicited advertising. Ultimately, I did pay for this, and I’d probably be a little less annoyed if it appeared as though you were at least putting a in bit of effort in these areas, rather than pissing money away on ‘UCAStv’ and the like. £14+ million isn’t chump change, and with resources of that magnitude, you should be able to fix these problems with ease! Just do it, as one of your adverts said*.

*There wasn’t actually a Nike advert, I just though that was a funny joke.

]]> http://adamenglebright.com/2011/09/08/ucashing-in/feed/ 0 Engles Photo on 20-08-2011 at 17.24 http://adamenglebright.com/2011/09/03/review-doctor-who-night-terrors/ http://adamenglebright.com/2011/09/03/review-doctor-who-night-terrors/#comments Sat, 03 Sep 2011 23:13:46 +0000 Engles http://adamenglebright.com/?p=2251 Read More

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More like Shite Terrrors.

Crikey, that was bad. Like a cross between Fear Her and The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, but with none of the sense of fear that typified the latter or… well, I didn’t really like Fear Her, so that probably just about fits. Considering that Mark Gatiss loves horror movies so much, how was he able to make something so non-scary? The only thing that even came close to being scary was the man-turning-into-wood thing, but even that wasn’t nearly as scary as the transformation sequences in Empty Child.

That the scares weren’t scary was one big problem with the episode. Strip out the ‘spooooooky’ elements, and we’re left with something closer to a cross between The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People and The Curse of the Black Spot -that is to say, the people-as-aliens stuff (here thankfully confined to the father’s worrying about his son’s being an alien*) from the former and the coma-inducing tedium of the latter. Unfortunately, I was too busy laughing at the writer and director’s clunky attempts to scare the audience to fall asleep.

Though the actors gave good accounts** and Gatiss’ writing wasn’t as awful as it might have been***, the episode still falls down otherwise in the ideas area. The alien that the child is isn’t really explained or expanded upon in any real depth or detail – in a way, the whole thing feels like it takes place in a bubble just separated from the big events of the series. When’s Miracle Day happening, anyway? Sometime in 2011, and if I remember the timings of this episode, this is also sometime in 2011. Hmm. Maybe they just missed it.

While detachment, taking a minute from big, universe-ending calamities to tell a small story about a scared child (who’s actually an alien) can potentially work very well – though neither this nor Fear Her, the last episode to try this, did, I found this episode too dull to pass muster. Not to mention the second episode in a row where people are shrunk and find themselves inside a simulacrum of something the usual occupants of which have become a defence mechanism. Not that I’m suggesting they’re running out of ideas.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed had this been third in the series, swapped with The Curse of the Black Pearl Spot, as it was apparently intended to. I think that’s what sums up the episode, for me. Dispensable. Interchangeable.  Had you taken the ‘The Doctor Is Going To Die’ monitor shot off the end and had Eyepatch lady leering through a hole in the wall (bring on the wall!) in the middle, I wouldn’t have noticed the difference. I’ve said before that the Moff’s way of doing things punishes this sort of episode, but in all honesty, Night Terrors isn’t good enough as it is. Neither fish nor fowl nor scary nor particularly interesting. But next week, we have Old Amy! Space diseases! Other Stuff! Who knows what’ll happen? See you then!

(On the other hand – and this is my big caveat to everything above – I might not have been too bothered by the ‘ooh, scary’ stuff, but I’m a cynical 18-year-old, of the sort who are meant to scoff at such things. When I next get the opportunity, I’ll find out what some actual children 0this episode’s target audience – thought of it, because though I might have found it interminable, it wasn’t for me. Who knows, it might be their Empty Child. If this turns out to be a big hit with the kidz, whatever I thought, it’ll have done its job.)

*I’ll say this for it – the dialogue is much better than ‘But who are the real monsters’. By the way, was anyone impressed I managed to get through my Let’s Kill Hitler review without any footnotes?

**of admittedly dull characters – ‘scared child’, ‘unpleasant landlord’ ‘angry father’ and ‘old lady’ being all the personality they were given.

***While I remain unconvinced of his ability to either write Doctor Who or act, I rather liked Nebulous, his Radio 4 comedy programme.

]]> http://adamenglebright.com/2011/09/03/review-doctor-who-night-terrors/feed/ 0 Engles d11s02e09_wallpaper_08 http://adamenglebright.com/2011/09/03/review-doctor-who-lets-kill-hitler/ http://adamenglebright.com/2011/09/03/review-doctor-who-lets-kill-hitler/#comments Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:54:00 +0000 Engles http://adamenglebright.com/?p=2241 Read More

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Let’s…not.

Quickly, go and look out of the window. Can you see any blimps? Adverts for Pete Tyler’s health drink? A man with a scar, a beard and an eyepatch? Anything at all which might suggest that you’re in a parallel universe? Because I certainly seem to have found myself in one. After watching Let’s Kill Hitler, I checked the usual online locations wherein bien-pensant Doctor Who Opinions can be found and… they were all singing its praises. Praising it to the high heavens. Nothing at all to suggest that it was rather dull, self-indulgent and poorly-thought-through. Maybe I should go back and watch it again to double check. Hold on.

Nope, I was right. However, I think I’ve worked out what my problem with the episode was. Apparently, everyone other than me thinks River Song isn’t an utterly awful, hateful character who should be subjected to the fires of Hell. Yes, she’s stopped saying ‘spoilers’, thank goodness. That doesn’t mean she’s stopped being annoying – the overacting, the hammy, campy nonsense and the horrendously inconsistent behaviour is all still there. When someone referred to River as a psychopath and Amy began to refute them, I found myself shouting at the television ‘No, she is, she really, really is a psychopath’. You know how I realised who Mels was? She elicited exactly the same reaction, the ‘oh for pity’s sake, get of the screen’ feeling. I cheered when she got shot. Therefore, I suppose, an episode centred around a character I hate with the fury I usually reserve for whatever Chris Chibnall did last wouldn’t do a tremendous amount for me.

I suppose it was inevitable. I really do hope all that stuff Private Eye have been printing recently about Doctor Who budget difficulties is true, if only so I can think to myself ‘Well, Moffat must have been worrying that the show would collapse under its own weight when he wrote… that’. Thinking about it, this has been the first episode Moffat’s written that I haven’t liked. I mean, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead weren’t great, but they weren’t bad, not like this. The worst parts of the episode reminded me to an alarming degree of something bad RTD would have written. The gun-switching scene in particular reminded me of Boom Town, which would be a damning indictment of any episode, let alone one written by the man who’s written the best episodes of the series thus far.

It wasn’t all bad, though The things (apart from Small Rory, who was excellent, and the return of Small Amy, who’s always a welcome addition to the cast) weren’t all that plentiful, sadly, but among them, the sidelining of Hitler – yes, the title was a neat bit of misdirection, well done, second time in one series, and it did seem like a pointless distraction, but on the other hand… lines like ‘Rory, go and put Hitler in that cupboard’ do seem to make a figure of fun out of, well, Hitler. Reminds me of that David Mitchell bit on the phrase ‘rape and pillage’ The Numskulls-a-like person-full-of-lots-of-other-people-justice-bot … thing was pleasingly stupid, although I wasn’t sure why a) they didn’t bother checking where they landed before trying to torture Hitler, b) why the ship was full of the stupid-looking-poorly-thought-out-jellyfish-defence-mechanism-thingies, or c) why the heck they were concerned about River when the Doctor is pretty well-known to have been responsible for the annihilation of at least two whole species if not more, and a whole lot of stuff besides. Never mind if they’re allowed to ‘look in his file’ – this sort of thing is apparently common knowledge (q.v. Silence in the Library and almost every episode Moffat’s written since). On the other hand, they might just find River as annoying as I do.

There were some interesting bits about the Big Story Arc, namely that the Silence is a religion, rather than a species, and that ‘Silence will fall when the question is asked’. With an arc phrase like that, how could we possibly be setting ourselves up for disappointment? Where River’s concerned, she was named after herself. Fine. I really don’t care, though probably because of my dislike for the character more than anything. Note that this revelation was done much better in Terry Pratchett’s Johnny and the Bomb. As for the regenerations ex machina… well, the best I can say is that at least when she’s killed, she’ll be dead for good.

I know this took a while to get done (as I’m writing this, it’s half an our before Night Terrors starts) but I needed to consolidate my opinion a little more. Glad I did. Now I can move on to a ‘scary’ episode written by Mark Gatiss. Won’t that be a treat?

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