The Return Of Dr Mysterioso
(Christmas Special, Dr 12 with Nardole, 25/12/2016, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Ed Bazalgette)
Rank: 294
Slower than a speeding bullet on a tortoise, less powerful than a locomotive replacement bus service sent through a wormhole, able to fall off tall buildings in the simplest of cliffhangers, look up there on sky (or BBC One) it’s…The Return Of Mysterioso
Hear that, dear
reader-viewer? It’s the sound of a passing bandwagon. You might not have heard
that sound before because, well, Dr Who doesn’t jump onto other bandwagons. It
is, indeed, the bandwagon that other lesser series jump on. It’s something Dr
Who had never ever resorted to in all its fifty-three years and counting: I
mean, much as I’d have loved to have seen the 2nd Doctor and chums
in a 1967 style Monkees romp (admittedly ‘The
Underwater Menace’ comes close) or the 5th Doctor battling Omega
on a space-hopper while wearing deely-boppers and solving a rubik’s cube (about
the only strange thing he doesn’t do during ‘Arc
Of Infinity’) or the 10th Doctor running around a Minecraft type
world (though that would at least explain why ‘The Impossible Planet/Satan’s Pit’
turned out as weird and unlikely as it did), while Dr Who kind of invented that
whole ‘more than just a sexy vampire used slightly ironically’ thing that
everyone praised Stephanie Meyer back in 1981 with ‘State Of Decay’, Dr Who had
never actually stooped that low before. So
it was something of a disappointment to see ‘The Return Of Dr Mysterioso’ cashing
in on the contemporary trend for Marvel superhero movies with as blatant
rip-off as you will find anywhere. I really don't understand the sudden
surge of popularity in superhero films the past decade. I mean, they're all so
bland and blooming boring. Half the time you can guess where the plot goes just
from the superhero names (and if there's an incredible hulk, does that mean there
are lots of credible hulks around?) Not like our Doctor: unpredictable,
fallible, saving the universe not with special powers but a screwdriver,
sometimes a robotic dog, maybe a pocket vegetable. While you could argue that
Dr Who was originally created as a sort of meta channel hopping, of putting the
‘Dr Who’ element into other shows you might have been watching (mostly
historicals - see ‘The
Gunfighters’ in particular – but occasionally tales of giant ants and
things too, see both ‘Planet Of Giants’ and ‘The
Web Planet’) at least those stories are true crossovers, with a plot that
wouldn’t have happened without the Doctor. This one might as well not feature
the Doctor for all the good he does and all the effect he has on it (his
relevance to the plot is basically accidentally causing the super powers at the
start and a pep talk in the middle). Usually when we talk about two very
different worlds colliding on this show that’s meant in a good way, but this
one is just way too alien and strange, two very opposite bedfellows that should
never have been allowed to meet.
For instance superheroes
have to be ‘all good’. They defeat villains that are ‘all bad’. That’s the whole
point of those stories: not are they going to save the day, but in what way are
they going to save the day that hasn’t done before? Generally speaking
superhero stories take place in a world that’s only very vaguely recognisable
as our own, where the rules of everyday living have been bent and normal
situations don’t apply. The best superhero stories make sure that it’s only the
goody and baddy for whom the usual rules don’t apply, so we can still identify
with their world, but basically when you enter a superhero world of logic
nothing ‘normal’ applies. Science fiction, for all the ‘fiction’ in the name
and the occasional bit of gobbledegook, is rooted in science, in ‘real life’.
The things that happen in the show have never, so far as I know, actually happened
but the assumption is that one day they could (and indeed might have been
happening under our noses without us noticing). Mostly, though, it takes place
in the ‘real world’, where decisions aren’t always clear cut, where baddies
often set out with the right intentions and get blown off course by
circumstances and where nobody is all good and all evil (I mean, even The
Master has his good days). The motivation is set in stone in superhero stuff:
people do stuff because they’re evil, with no other reason given – there’s no
back story and very little tension because you know the goodies will save the
day. Science fiction isn’t like that and especially Dr Who. Occasionally the
bad guys win. If you want to know the big difference in a nutshell it’s this: when
Peter Parker met a radioactive spider he ended up with specials powers that
enabled him to ‘fly’ and spin webs. When The Doctor met a radioactive spider he
ended up in a forced regeneration in as Buddhist parable about guilt and ego
(see ‘Planet Of The Spiders’). In many
ways Steven Moffat couldn’t have picked a worse genre for this series to be
bedfellows with: they just don’t belong together. A ‘true’ Doctor Who superhero
story would have been about how not all heroes wear capes and no one hero can
ever be all ‘super’.
There is, at least, good
reason for why the showrunner was jumping on a bandwagon; just for a change,
behind the scenes Dr Who was in chaos. Steven Moffat had already wrapped up
what he thought would be his time on the show with ‘The Husbands Of River
Song’, a story that closed out several arcs and was in many ways the perfect
ending. The writer was worn out after five years of constant work (the same
amount Russell T clocked up before he left) and thought he had already paved
the way for a crossover to his successor Chris Chibnall who’d agreed to take
over the show. Only there was a problem. Since saying yes the ratings for
Chris’ own show ‘Broadchurch’ (a home for various Who alumni, not least David
Tennant, Arthur Darvill and Jodie Whittaker) had come out and they were huge:
obviously the BBC didn’t want to lose out on that so they’d asked for another
series. Maybe another two. Suddenly Chibnall was busier than he’d ever been in
his life. He didn’t want to lose out on either so bashed out two series in
relatively quick succession across 2015 and 2017, even though it was the kind
of detective drama with a plot twist that you can only pull off once (the first
series was okay, if you can get over Tennant being all grumpy and nasty to poor
old Olivia Colman from ‘The Eleventh Hour’,
the weakest of his many acting moods, but the other two were dreadful.
Spoilers: the first ends with – you’ll never guess – Jodie Whittaker standing
around looking aghast doing nothing as someone close to her betrays her. Just
like every 13th Doctor story). However both that and planning the
first Dr Who season took longer than Chibnall expected. Luckily he and Moffat
were friends so they hatched out a plan: take a ‘gap year’. Moffat, worried the
ratings might fall and the show might die, offered to write up one last story,
perhaps a Christmas special to keep the lucrative slot. Only by the time he
wrote it everyone realised it still wouldn’t be enough time and Moffat was
persuaded to write another year.
Luckily Moffat gets his
mojo back for series ten (and how!), freed from all expectation and
responsibility and basically play-acting all the things he always wanted to do.
However for this series he’s sick and tired of Dr Who. He has very few ideas
left that he hasn’t used and is utterly bored of science fiction. He can’t
think of anything at all. He’s still trying to think of what to write during
the Dr Who worldwide promotional blitz of series nine when he tags along with
the cast heading to a big event in Mexico at the tail end of 2014. Now, you
might not think of South America as a natural ‘home’ for Dr Who but the
following has always been large, with screenings of Dr Who episodes from as
early as 1968 (when Hartnell and Troughton episodes were shown, dubbed). As so
often happens, though, the name was changed in translation: the idea of a
mystery Doctor’ doesn’t always make sense when translated literally into
foreign languages. So in China for instance the series title translates as ‘The
Strange Man From Another World’ and then there’s my favourite ‘Ki Vogy Docy’,
which translates as ‘Who Are You, Doc?’ in Hungarian (sadly ‘Dr Who’ doesn’t
change to ‘Dr Von Wer’ in German, the way The Doctor improvises in ‘The
Highlanders’, a missed opportunity if ever there was one). In Mexico Dr Who is
titled ‘Doctor Mysterioso’, a fact that tickled Peter Capaldi hugely. He took
to using the name as his nom de plume, using it to book into hotels and
jokingly insisting to Moffat that he ought to ignore fifty odd years of British
continuity and rename the main show that (the deep growly voice he uses when he
gives that name is also his impression of the Mexican continuity announcer). Then
when Moffat was sitting at his laptop looking for inspiration he suddenly
thought: why not give the Doctor an alter ego, the way comic book heroes do?
This then led to a plot that isn’t actually about The Doctor but about the
people he meets, hinging on a 'wish granting gemstone' swallowed by an eight
year old superhero nerd who dreams of having super-powers, which is a downright
silly plot even for a Christmas special. The gemstone is, technically, an
‘intuitive crystal’ the Doctor is tracking, which happens to be accidentally
eaten by said lonely small boy who feels ‘thrown away like a piece of rubbish’
and which gives him ‘magical powers’ (and not at all like the opening to
‘Superted’ no way; if only Jon Pertwee had still been alive for a cameo as a
spotty best friend). In the end The Doctor doesn’t need his alter ego at all,
but it helped in inspiring the script and ended up in the title. Well, I bet it
made Capaldi laugh anyway.
Anyway, Dr Who's predictable
attempt to cash in on this superhero phenomenon is pretty lame to be honest.
It's basically Superman with childcare issues. There’s no getting away from it:
this is one of the single dumbest plots Dr Who ever did. Moffat isn’t
interested in the back story of the ‘intuitive crystal’ (even though it could
so easily have come from Metebelis 3 and added to the ‘Spiderman’ references),
he just produces it from his pocket while hanging off a window ledge in New
York where he wakes up a small boy. Not that small a boy though: aged eight
should be plenty old enough to know not to eat something glowing you’ve just
been shown by a mysterious stranger who says its dangerous (and I don’t buy his
spiel that he thought this man really was ‘a’ Doctor; he thought he was Father
Christmas a minute earlier in the episode’s sole festive reference). There’s a
throwaway line that the ‘intuitive crystal’ is forged from a dwarf alloy,
something that in almost any other Who script would be the central point: where
is it from? How did it get here? What form does it really take? Dr Who has used
that plot device twice before, in two of the most inventive and original
stories the series has ever seen: ‘The Pirate Planet’ (where it’s used to
shrink planets) and ‘Warrior’s Gate’ (where normal time doesn’t exist). Instead
Moffat just moves on at speed (but not enough speed, given hos much the story
slows in the second half). The boy then ends up with powers of levitation and
superhuman strength. A crystal that powerful should have played a far bigger
role in the Whoniverse than this: The Daleks should have been destroying worlds
for it, The Cybermen should be clunking their metallic ways across parallel
universes for it, The Master should be dying to use the power it would give him
(literally given what seems to happen to him at the end of stories nowadays).
Why, too, would levitation be a side effect of anything? Or super lazer-vision?
Shouldn’t he be more likely to develop a migraine? Oh well, it is Christmas,
the one time of the year you can get away with this sort of thing. I’m sure the
rest of the plot will make total sense.
Only then enters the
generic baddy, Brock, a sleazeball in charge of the Harmony Shoals corporation
(you know, the headless wonders from ‘The Husbands Of River Song’ who can move
body parts around). His scientific laboratory base isn’t quite underground but
in every other respect it’s every comic book stereotype come true. It’s a base
from which he intends to…take over planet Earth, wahahahahahahahaha. There’s
even a girl reporter getting the lowdown on his dastardly deeds and needing to
be rescued when she uncovers a bit too much, like Penny was originally meant to
be in the first draft of Russell T Davies’ ‘Partners In Crime’ who is as close
to Lois Lane as copyright will allow. Good job it’s a quarter century around
and in the neighbourhood of that little boy, who by now has grown into the
powers The Doctor warned him not to use and is using the most rubbish superhero
pseudonym I’ve ever heard, ‘The Ghost’ (why does he call himself that? Because
in every day life he wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance at doing anything
interesting?) At least as a boy Grant was cute and clueless. As an adult he’s
just gormless and clueless. He’s scratching out a living as a nanny of all
things, still dreaming of being a superhero but too helpless to do much of a
job at everyday life stuff. Just to ram the point home he’s described as being
‘mild mannered’ and also now wears big chunky Clark Kent type glasses he never
needed as a kid (did the child actor refuse to wear them? Can’t say I blame
him) that make him ‘unrecognisable’ to
those that see him in his guise as The Ghost, even those who know him well.
He’s not like Superman though but more like Spiderman, a kid out of his league
who doesn’t really know what the hell he’s doing, only without the
self-referential humour that went along with Pewter parker’s antics. He’s meant
to be a lovable dork in a Dr Who nerd type way, but unlike, say, The Whizzkid
(who is, rather unfortunately, familiar) or Osgood, he never for one minute
seems like ‘one of us’. He’s not a scifi fan with dreams of saving the world
from monsters because it’s the right and moral thing to do. He’s not burning up
with curiosity to see different planets and explore different cultures and
experience a universe so bigger than his tiny little life, like all true Tardis
blue Whovians. He’s just doing it to try to impress a girl he’s secretly
fancied for years and yet who has been friendzoned faster than you can say
‘Jack Harkness Robinson’. There is a brief moral that anyone can become a
superhero – by growing up and taking responsibility as a husband and dad,
learning new strengths and skills, but the difference between this and, say, ‘The Lodger’ is that you know Craig really is
changed by being around The Doctor and try his hardest even if he fails,
whereas I give Grant and Lucy about three months if I’m honest. They’re just
not in this love story for the right reasons and it’s all a sham.
The biggest problem with
‘Mysterioso’? Saving the universe gets put on hold while we get the will they?
Won’t they? We don’t care romance centre stage, a ‘love triangle’ of Grant
pining for Lucy pining for The Ghost, solved in the easiest possible way
because Grant and The Ghost are one and the same. It might well be the worst romance
the series has ever done (and heck, did you actually see ‘Orphan 55’?!) Grant and Lucy do not
belong together in anyway. He prefers the quiet life, while she’s off
investigating in a Sarah Jane type way. She’s actually pretty cool for all her
obvious good looks and Romana style haughtiness, courageous and plucky like all
the best companions and incidental characters (just as Lois Lane is actually
way more interesting than Superman ever was), but she has no interest in Grant
whatsoever when he’s ordinary and only starts getting the hots for him when
he’s ‘special’. As for Grant he does what he does to impress her, to get the
glow of love and admiration from a girl he’s secretly fancied for years but
never been brave enough to actually ask out. You can see where the problem
lies: ‘Our’ series is all about how you can be brave and save the world if you
get the chance but it takes real guts to stand on your own two feet and be
yourself, to take charge of your own corner of the world and make the most of
it. The Doctor admittedly does give a rather good pep talk to Grant on this,
urging him to be himself, which he finally does in the de facto happy ending
(on a rooftop, naturally, because that’s where all superhero films do the big
reveal for some reason), but stop to think about this for a while. How long is
this romance going to last? She falls for Grant because of who she thinks he
is, ignoring all those years of who he was (and still is, deep down). While he
learns the lesson that only by showing off can you get the girl of your dreams.
I don’t know about you but I preferred the series’ other romantic lessons, of
Ian and Barbara learning new love and respect for each other after so many adventures,
of Jamie pining for Victoria out of a desperate need to rescue her even though
more often that not it would be her rescuing him, of Rory patiently waiting for
his Amy for a thousand years while she commits suicide in her dream world
because she can’t bear the thought of being without him. By contrast, using the
super-powers you only gained by doing something stupid in the pre-credits
sequence to save a crashing spaceship to show off to your girl is not in the
top or even mid tier of human romances. Because neither of them is being their
‘true’ selves there’s nothing really to get a handle on and Grant stops being a
fully rounded character the minute he grows up (something which, admittedly,
happens to lots of adults in real life). However he should be more interesting
with super powers, not less. The vast majority of the plot is taking up by
these two and, frankly, I couldn’t care less if he’d accidentally crashed the
spaceship into her house and killed the pair of them. This is, remember, by the
writer of some of the greatest romcoms telly has ever seen so it ought to be a
plot right up his street (His best? No it’s not ‘Coupling’, which was kind of
okay, but ‘Press Gang’). It ought to be so much better than this. One other
point to: where’s Grant in all the stories set after this one but within his
lifetime in the Whoniverse? You’d think he’d be using them for good and pulling
his weight in stories like ‘The Power Of the
Doctor’ ‘The Giggle’ or ‘Praxeus’ but nah, we never see him
again. Not that I’m complaining about that fact you understand.
So why, if this story is so bad, haven’t I listed it
right at the very bottom, with the dregs of the series, the ‘Voyage Of the Damned’ ‘The Dominators’ and various 13th
Doctor stories? It’s the dialogue. Moffat
might have fumbled the ball badly with the plot but he’s sharp as a tack when
it comes to the actual words. The baddy actually tells jokes, quipping that –
as he moves alien heads like some evil Worzel (what is it with all the Pertwee
references this week? – that ‘I’ve changed my mind’). The Doctor quips that
everyone else on Earth calls themselves a doctor to look clever because they
want to be like ‘him’. It’s taken a couple of years to get there but Moffat
really understands the 12th Doctor by now: he’s not a William
Hartnell substitute, an old grump with a twinkle in the eye. Instead he’s a
permanently exasperated tutor, one who’s annoyed when his pupils can’t keep up
with his speed but won’t make any concessions to slow down for them. He’s also
grieving after losing River Song on top of Clara, on his way to become the
distant walled-up defensive professor we meet in ‘The
Pilot’ and Capaldi’s a lot better at this sort of a darker Doctor than the
goofy one he was in his first two years. Capaldi seems more at home in this
universe than you might expect (he will end up playing Gaius Grieves aka ‘The
Thinker’, a failed lawyer who’s turned to a life of crime ad invented a
‘thinking cap’ that gives him telepathic abilities, in the 2021 Marvel
superhero film ‘The Suicide Squad’, their own tired mind-numbing entry that
more or less killed off enthusiasm for their franchise). He’s brilliantly funny
in this story, often without ever meaning to be, convinced that he’s so smart
everyone else might be really thick, even when he misses out on some things so
obvious even Nardole has to point them out. Nardole himself is the story’s
quiet hero, rewritten to be slightly less annoying and passive than he was in ‘Husbands Of River Song’, but still quirky
and weird. While everyone else is being po-faced he’s puncturing their
pomposity (such as breaking his ‘cover’ in the Harmony Shoals press room to ask
for the loo or pointing out The Doctor’s mistakes); when everyone else is
over-earnest and pre-occupied he nonchalantly strolls through the whole thing
making quips. Weirdly enough, for a character without a backstory who had to be
re-assembled since the last story and is still halfway between a clone and an
alien, he feels like ‘our’ representative across this story, making all the
jokes The Doctor can’t say and pointing out how dumb superhero shows. Matt
Lucas’ deadpan delivery is never better than here and he deserves a lot of
credit for a lot of lines that were, apparently, improvised between him and
Capaldi. The surprise is that Nardole wasn’t in this script until the last
moment: everyone had enjoyed filming ‘River Song’ with him and he’d got along
well with cast and crew, so when he mentioned he was available and happy to do
anything they might want him for in the future, however small, Moffat began
writing him into his next series. Then,
realising that ‘The Pilot’ spent a long time introducing Bill but that viewers
would have forgotten who Nardole was, he got added to this special
retrospectively too. Admittedly
‘Mysterioso’ is pretty darn low on my list anyway, but without Nardole there
this story would be a good ten places lower.
I have mixed feelings
about the location filming. It seems remarkably quickly to be back in New York
again – not least because it ought to be the one place The Doctor can’t go back
to (to cover the ending of ‘The Angels Take
Manhattan’ that stranded the Ponds in the 1920s; it might be significant,
given the behind-the-scenes events, that the first thing Moffat does after
being asked to stay on is pick over old continuity and start to undo it). We’re
also back at the Empire State Building again for the third time (though the
first without the Daleks: see ‘The Chase’ and,
sensibly enough, ‘Daleks In
Manhattan’), with an oh so obvious I can’t believe they did it shot of
Grant ‘climbing’ the outside (when he’s clearly lying down; they were making
fun of the Batman TV series for doing this back in the 1960s). On the one hand
it gives this story a slightly different, more filmic feel and makes a nice
change given that pretty much all previous Christmas specials have been set in
England and/or Wales. However it also reminds you even more that you’re
watching a watered down version of the Hollywood films that are routinely set
here and it smacks even more of jumping on someone else’s territory: a ‘true’
Dr Who superhero story would be set in the least glamorous and cosmopolitan
part of the world and have the big news event covered not by a press
conglomerate but by a few yokels from a local gazette (think ‘K9 and Company’). It doesn’t help that,
for reasons of budget, only a few establishing shots were actually filmed in
New York anyway: the rest were filmed in Sofia, Bulgaria, on a Manhattan mockup
that had been created at Nu Boyana Studios for European moviemakers on the
cheap: admittedly it looks more like New York than Wales would have done, but
it still doesn’t look quite right. The interiors were done in Wales as
normal, only even then Dr Who had lost
its pecking order and budget cuts meant they were reduced to swapping sets with
Welsh soap opera ‘Pobol y Cwm’, with rabid Dr Who fans getting a sneak preview
of, erm, Grant’s flat and Lucy’s flat. Be still my beating hearts. As for the
accents they’re about as American as apple pie – apple pie made in Gregg’s that
is. Nobody in this story’s vaguely cosmopolitan cast is American if you
couldn’t already tell: Justin Chatwin (Grant) is Canadian, Charity Wakefield
(Lucy) is English and Tomiwa Edun (Brock) is Nigerian. Capaldi ends up sounding more convincingly
American than the lot of them, despite a Scots accent being to an American one
what a Skaro one is to a Sensorite. Justin, by the way, is the estranged elder
son of Tom Cruise in the ‘War Of The Worlds’ movie, so he should be better at
scifi than this (even though he admitted to not knowing what Dr Who was till he
got the part).Charity, by contrast, was a huge Whovian who’d been watching
regularly since the McCoy days after her dad got her into the show (now you
see, that’s what being a good parent consists of). Oh and given I’ve run out of
space to put it anywhere else, why the hell is there a Primal Scream song
randomly on the soundtrack? At least go with a band from New York not one from
Scotland!
Some superhero movie this
is: I feel like I've been drained of all my strength. I’d have been happier with a story about the Karkus (Zoe’s favourite comic
character in ‘The Mind Robber’). At
least he came in more dimensions than this and actually did stuff without
stopping to kiss every five minutes (though who knows what happened in that
story when we weren’t looking. There’s nothing to say The Land of Fiction
doesn’t have a ‘Mills and Boon’ section) . This is easily the laziest script by
in many ways Who’s most original inventive and imaginative writer, a script
that feels as if Moffat reached out into the ether for something else without
understanding quite how it worked (though he was a big comics fan and wrote the
Superman and Spiderman references in from memory of comics of his childhood
read in between Dr Who target novelisations. Note the references to two
childhood heroes, who weirdly enough are given a sex change when Brock refers
to his bosses, a ‘Miss Shuster’ and a ‘Miss Siegel’, the male writer and
artists behind Superman, perhaps an in-joke too far). Director Ed Bazalgatte,
in publicity for the story, told reporters how impressed he was that ‘the story
barely changed from the first script to his filming script. Yep that’s the
problem right there: it needs another half dozen rewrites to make it interesting
at least. I haven’t even mentioned yet that it’s all so blooming slow: just
take the opening nine minute pre-credits sequence: a record at the time (‘Eve Of the Daleks’ might have beaten it, but I
need my stopwatch) that honestly made me think when I first saw it that it was
the end credits it had dragged on that long. Every scene lasts twice as long as
it needs to, every single one. The romance. The baddy revealing his plans. The
pep talk. The showdown. All of it feels dragged out in slow motion, as if
Superman was flying round the Earth the wrong way round in order to make time
go in reverse (about the only cliché we didn’t get: weird given that it’s the
most scifi-friendly trope in the superhero franchise).
Superhero films and bad
romances really are Dr Who’s kryptonite it seems. They’re never popular at the
exact same time (peaking in popularity in the late 1980s, when Who was taken
off the air),perhaps because they have such different sensibilities. It maybe wouldn’t
have mattered so much (It’s good that this show still tried this, even when
they don’t work) but after a year gap since the last story broken only by the
uninspiring spin-off series ‘Class’ (Grange Hill meets Fresh Prince of Bel Air,
with rubbish aliens), literally a ‘substitute teacher’ filling in the hole
where our master tutor should be, that made this story seem all the worse after
all that waiting. While the ratings had begun a gradual slide ever since
Capaldi’s second episode and this one technically did a little better than
‘Husbands’ nevertheless I see this as the moment when more gradual audiences
forgot about Who, with far fewer turning in for the next series perhaps because
they’d been so bored by sitting through this one. I still remember the reaction
after that year’s annual ‘sneak peek’ of the Christmas episode on that year’s
Children’s In Need’ (always shown in November): there wasn’t one. The social
media platforms reverberated to silence, punctuated by the occasional comment
that maybe it won’t be as bad as it looks. It was. No wonder people stayed away
– I nearly did too. Maybe the general audience, less loyal to Who, realised
what deep down we all knew though: that once a series starts copying what’s
popular instead of being so darned good it becomes what’s popular, you’re in
trouble. It happened before, in the mid 1980s too and even though things will
get better, quickly, once your fickle general TV audience gets the sense that you’re tired they move
on. Honestly after this episode I can’t blame them. Thankfully things will get
better.
POSITIVES + Just when
you’re giving u hope comes that rather good discussion between the Doctor and
Grant about what it really means to have super powers and the weight of
responsibility that goes with them. Capaldi judges this scene to a tee, the old
wise hardened old man trying to get this impressionable young pup to sit still
long enough to listen. By the end of it Grant comes out of the scene with a
better understanding of what he needs to do to grow up and be brave if he wants
the life with Lucy he craves – and that doesn’t involve putting on a suit the
way he thought. It’s a lovely scene punctuated by lots of jokes and comedy
misunderstandings. Had the rest or the script been up to this one scene it
would have been a favourite.
Previous ‘The Husbands Of River Song’ next ‘The Pilot’
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