便の墓: September 2015

Sunday, 27 September 2015

Dalek Corn

So.... That was problematic.

That's my reaction after watching the Witches Familiar. After last week I was feeling almost positive about this new series of Doctor Who. Things seemed like they might be going in interesting directions. And they still might. It's not like this episode was an irredeemable failure on every conceptual level like Asylum Of The Daleks was. It had some good stuff going on. But there are many elements that just don't quite work. As I'm sure I've talked about previously there are levels of this you can tolerate or even forgive, but if stuff builds up there eventually comes a point when you just can't ignore it any more and you're yanked right out enjoying and sent hurtling into complaining in a rather abrupt fashion.

Now, there are several fairly significant things that need to be nitpicked in tedious detail. And we will get to those. But if I had to pinpoint one particular moment in the episode when the roped well and truly snapped on my suspension of disbelief, well, that's easy.

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Monday, 21 September 2015

Planes & A Snake

Okay, first things first. How many reviews of The Magicians Apprentice do you think are going to leading with a Snakes On A Plane joke or reference? It's got to be roughly all of them, right?

This is clearly all just egregious pandering to the internet. Assuming of course that, since it's a show about time travel, there's no such thing as a hopelessly outdated pop culture reference. You can always just go back to when it was still relevant.

As far as I can see the only real problem with this strategy is, sadly, that it WORKS. Clearly, despite some of the previous misfires the show is still managing to plug right into some portion of brain and make a connection. And I don't just mean in the way that it clearly KNOWS I'm going to want to make lame jokes about films I've never even actually seen and is generously indulging me whilst still delivering a rather damn fine episode.

See, like a lot of people writing about any part of pop culture I do occasionally indulge in the idle fantasy of wondering how it would be if the production team read my reviews. But after this episode I'm actually starting to get seriously worried that Steven Moffat is reading my MIND.

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