Okay, now we're gotten that out of the way, wasn't that a good episode? A fairly solid piece of Doctor Who, with a lot of really good ideas and nice atmosphere. And Puns. I wasn't really sure what to expect from the episode as I generally try to avoid any big spoilers. But really, I'm not sure anyone was expecting the whole thing to be based around 2 puns.
Yes, 2. Obviously the episode title "The Bells Of St John" referring to the TARDIS phone is the obvious one. And hats off to Mr Moffat for the cunning ploy there. But it isn't until the very end where the bad guy is finally revealed that we come to realize the second gag. The one that drove the entire plot and was probably the original inspiration for the whole thing. After all, we have an unexpected follow up to The Snowmen where it's revealed that The Great Intelligence is using the internet as part of it's evil scheme. I GUARANTEE you that the working title for this was "The World Wide Web Of Fear".
Anyway, moving on....
The whole bit about downloading people through the internet is, admittedly, rather flakey.
You kinda get around it by the internet thing only being used to identify targets and the actual harvesting being performed by the gloriously titled Spoonheads. But it is also stated that they need fairly intelligent minds to suit their evil purposes. Leaving aside for a moment exactly how you can judge someones IQ from hacking into their porn collection, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that people who go around randomly connecting to dubious unsecured networks are perhaps not exactly the cream of the crop.
Whether or not this means they deserve their fate of being trapped on Youtube until they get eaten by Richard E Grant is up to the viewer to decide. But it's probably yes.
Seriously though, despite the wi-fi gimmick the episode manages a lot of genuinely creepy atmosphere. The idea of editing peoples personalities is pretty scary, as is the idea that pretty much anyone can be controlled. Really it's a shame to have blown them in the one short episode, as these are things that warrant a lot more exploration. Still, maybe we'll luck out and the Great Intelligence will be a recurring theme for this series.
I suppose many of the issues I have with the episode simply stem from not being as connected to the whole social media bullshit circus as everyone else apparently is. Whilst I liked that they used something akin to actual social engineering hacking to identify the location of the enemy I do really have to question why exactly it was that the evil organisation gave everyone webcams. You can't really say it's to creepily monitor the staff since all of the staff are, you know, MIND CONTROLLED. Come to that, why the hell do mind controlled drones even need facebook accounts?
Actually, don't answer that.
And whilst some of the ideas with the brain hacking and such are pretty cool, there is one thing that REALLY isn't. Now, to be fair, this isn't a problem solely confined to this episode, this series, or indeed anything else. It just seems to physically impossible for anyone to do hacking acting. I mean, I'm no expert in this field by any means. But I'm pretty sure there's more to it than just randomly hitting the same 5 keys over and over and over and over. I guess it's like driving acting. No matter how good the actor is at either acting or driving their character is still swerving straight into a hedge at the earliest opportunity. And if you give them a keyboard then they're just going to hammer on the home keys. Such is life.
One thing I particularly liked was the balance of light and dark with the Doctor. You need to maintain both the air of an enthusiastic small boy and a man you DO NOT want to fuck with to keep thing properly interesting. And whilst the Doctor does gad about being kind of dizzy for much of the episode he's also pretty damn ruthless come the climax. What's especially great about this is that it's overtly acknowledged on screen by the hero that not everyone is going to just get magically better once the bad guy is defeated. Because I absolutely HATE THAT SHIT. For a bad guys actions to have any weight or threat they need to have consequences. Those who are eaten need to stay eaten. The obvious example here is The Idiots Lantern, which The Bells Of St John clearly takes some degree of inspiration from. People having their essence sucked out and trapped in a screen to be eaten by the bad guy. Although to be fair I'm not sure which was scarier: The silent screaming faces of Lantern or the inane video blogging of Bells. Do you suppose there's a comment section in limbo?
Anyway, constant nitpicking aside this was a really strong episode all around. Miss Kislet manages to be a far scarier adversary than a lot of other so called monsters simply through her casual, businesslike attitude towards everything. And her final fate? Beautifully creepy. The Doctor get's to be very Doctory. There's clever ideas and big fun set pieces like that whole plane crash bit. Can't help but wonder how that'll play to the Americans, but it really does illustrate the scale of the threat and sheer bastardry of the villains. And finally of course we have the introduction of the new companion. For the third time. Whilst there will no doubt be all kinds of speculation over apparently minor details and how they relate to the ongoing plot for this half of the series, it's Clara Oswald that is the big theme. It's to early to tell much about her, save that true to her prior appearances she's obvious companion material. Perhaps a little TOO OBVIOUS?!?!?
Seriously though, for all I want her to secretly be the Myrka in disguise the only thing we really know about the mystery so far is that there is one. Finding out what exactly it is should be pretty fun.
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