Dinosaurs On A Spaceship: Rank - 274

  Dinosaurs On A Spaceship

(Series 7, Dr 11 with Amy, Rory, Riddell and, um, Queen Nefertiti, 8/9/2012, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Saul Metzstein)  

Rank: 274

In an emoji: 🚀🐲

Hello, I’m the 13^th Doctor and these are my new companions: Akhanaten, Bungalow Bill and Dan’s Nan. I’ve got a fam now! They kind of remind me of a gang I used to know once though...

Gee, let me think now. What was the plot of this one again? Oh wait...yes its coming back to me now...Something about dinosaurs. On a spaceship. Both of which look amazing by the way (the shots of Matt Smith riding a stegosaurus beat anything in the Jurassic Park franchise - and on a BBC budget too! Ditto the spaceships in the Star Wars prequels to be honest). It's just the plot that's, well, it's about dinosaurs on a spaceship. For 45 minutes. Only not that many dinosaurs either. It’s a funny one this story: when series six was winding to a close and showrunner Steen Moffat was looking for ideas for series seven he went to Dr Who’s special effects team The Mill and met up for lunch, asking them what sort of things they thought they could create with CGI that would look really good in the series that they hadn’t done yet and they said ‘dinosaurs’. And, despite being enough of a Dr Who fan to know the problems inherent with ‘Invasion Of the Dinosaurs’ back in 1974 (when the script was commissioned off the back of model company Westbury Design and Optical Ltd saying they could create really lifelike really cheap dinosaurs, honest) he went ahead with it, commissioning a full story from writer Chris Chibnall on his third ever script for the series after his two year stint helming Torchwood. Only there was a problem: not with the models themselves that are extraordinarily lifelike (computer graphics had come a long way to the point where you really can’t see the join at all) but with the cost. The original plan was to have the Doctor and co running around with dinosaurs for 50minutes or so, in a sort of Dr Who version of ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ (the 20th century’s most watched ‘factual’ programme by far, would you believe, with more viewers than even ‘City Of Death’ and therefore an obvious ratings winner) but the Coalition’s fake ‘austerity’ policies meant that there had been cutbacks across the BBC and there was a lot of kerfuffle behind the scenes in this era after series six sailed over budget in a way that would make even Graham Williams blush (there are other reasons, including promotion and allegedly personality clashes, but it’s one of the main ones why Beth Willis and Piers Wenger are out as executive producer and Caroline Skinner is in and why series seven ends up being split over two years because they can’t make thirteen episodes pay in one financial year and save money at the same time). This story would be lucky if they had more than five minutes of full-on dino action. The curse of ‘Invasion’ strikes again! Possibly feeling a right diplodocus having fallen in love with the marketing potential Moffat carried on anyway, asking Chibnall to fill the story out with a different main plot and as much padding as he could come up with. 

 And that’s where the problems happen. Chibnall is, as we’ll see when he takes over as showrunner in 2018, not a natural at writing enough material to fill an episode. Left to his own devices, without either the tight plotting of ‘42’ seen at every stage by Russell T Davies or the ‘recycling’ of ‘Hungry Earth’ (stolen wholesale from ‘The Silurians’) Chibnall is left to his own devices for the first time and turns in the most ‘Torchwood’ episode of the series in many ways, as well as a sign of things to come when he takes over properly. He crams the Tardis full of so many people (including the Doctor’s one-story ‘fam’ Queen Nefertiti, big game hunter James Riddell (originally a real person from history, Buffalo Jones) and Rory’s dad leaving them with no space to properly make us get to know them or feel anything for them, there’s a main plot about exploitation that’s not just mentioned as a bad thing but hammered to us over and over in a lecture as a wicked idea that should make us at home watching ashamed to be humans and to go to bed early without any supper to think about what our ancestors did, there’s a lot of people standing round talking not actually doing much (for a story about dinosaurs on a spaceship it’s amazing how slow and boring this story is, a few big set pieces aside!), there are unfunny comedy characters played by big celebrity names who really don’t fit, mentions of stories that happened off screen that seem a quadzillion times more interesting than anything we get on screen (why does Nefertiti owe her people’s lives to the Doctor? And how did he end up travelling with a hunter whose the antithesis of him and the least likely companion since Turlough?), everyone talks in clichés as if Chibnall thinks every line has to double as a slogan on a t-shirt, the plot seems to run out of ideas halfway through, there’s a resolution that hangs on a whacking great coincidence (that the Doctor just happens to have a father and son team along with him for the first time since the series began just when he needs them!) and though a god 90% of the episode is clearly designed with the child market in mind there are some really questionably adult lines that would make even a ten year old whose been hanging round elder children on the playground blush, suggesting Chibnall hasn’t shaken off his ‘Torchwood’ way of writing yet. The resulting mismash is tonally a mess, with big grand gestures that never amount to anything, a plot we can see coming a mile away and a curious combination of scenes not having room to breathe and others that are entirely too rushed. 

Admittedly not all of these problems are unique to the Chibnall era and, let’s face it, the central plot of ‘Jurassic Park’ – everything involving the Humans when the dinosaurs aren’t on screen – wasn’t any great shakes either. Mercifully this story just about keeps moving thanks to the bits that Chibnall is so good at, particularly that sense of the ordinary and mundane human world hitting the extraordinary scifi universe of the Doctor head on and which no author since original script editor David Whittaker can do as well I think. We’ll see it again and again in his era in one-off characters, Sarah in ‘Eve Of the Daleks’ (whose just trying to have a quiet day at work), Rosa Parks in ‘Rosa’ and glimpses of it in Dan (before he becomes a generic companion like the others): ordinary people who manage to hold on to that in difficult circumstances and so end up extraordinary. Some characters would only ever work in a Dr Who context (it’s hard to imagine bumping into Dodo or Jo or even Clara in an everyday drama of down to Earth people for instance, but that’s what Chibnall is good at, characters who feel as if they’ve walked in off the street. Brian, Rory’s dad, is easily his best example of these, though, a brilliant character, totally out of his depth and having an adventure he never expected to have (he only came round to change the lightbulbs in his son’s house!) and really gives us a sense of wonder and awe about the universe that’s been needed ever since Amy and Rory got re-written as jaded, experienced old hands. Chibnall, wanting a gang to fill up screen time, emailed Moffat and asked if it would interfere with continuity too much if he gave Rory a parent but thankfully the showrunner realised what a clever twist that could be: there’d been so much emphasis on Amy’s lack of parents and yet nobody had really stopped to think much about Rory. Mark Williams is a versatile actor who can mould himself into any shape (including a surprisingly deadly vampire in ‘Being Human’, the reason regular writer Toby Whithouse is too busy to write a Who story this year) but judging by interviews Brian feels like Mark is just playing himself, a decent bloke completely out of his depth. He very much looks like Rory’s dad and the script has a lot of fun placing dad where the son would normally be in the script and emphasising the similarities between them (coming prepared seems to be in the genes, given the amount of things both Williams’ carry around in their pockets). Every scene with Brian in it is a delight and the ending scene of him drinking a normal everyday cup of tea, his feet dangling from the Tardis, staring down at the stars, ought to be used as the ident picture for the Whoniverse on BBC i-player it captures the essence of the series so (one thing though: where was he during Amy and Rory’s wedding during ‘The Big Bang’? Okay, so Mark Williams hadn’t been cast then and despite working on a show where its second nature no one in the production team can time travel yet, but it’s a gaping hole I retrospect. Was he fixing something off screen with his trowel?) Alas my favourite Brian scene got cut in editing, the Doctor noticing him for the first time and doesn’t realise he’s Rory’s dad: ‘Not a bad cyborg I suppose, almost convincing, the ears give it away, and the eyes, dead behind the eyes, tell your makers they need to work on that!’ 

The trouble is Chibnall spends so long lovingly crafting Brian that by comparison everyone else feels like a one-dimensional cardboard cut out. Even Amy and Rory. There’s a reason why Big Finish have yet to commission a box set featuring the spin-off adventures of the 11th Doctor with Queen Nefertiti and James Riddell (even though Chibnall might well have got the idea from listening to the 5th Doctor’s companion Erimem, an Egyptian pharaoh who travelled with Nyssa in adventures set in the gap between ‘Timeflight and ‘Arc Of Infinity’ – given she and Nyssa were natural besties it makes more sense of why the Trakenite is so pleased to see Tegan when they never particularly got along the first time round). They just don’t work as characters. He’s a big shouty bloke with a gun used to subordinate women. She’s a haughty feminist used to ruling an empire. They don’t belong in the same universe at all, even with their different eras: Chibnall thinks these differences result in some sort of sexual chemistry, but they don’t. It’s more like the relationship between Adric and Tegan when she has to keep restraining herself from slapping him and of all the relationships to see recreated in the modern era that one wasn’t high on anybody’s list. He doesn’t belong with the Doctor either: he’s the antithesis of everyone the Doctor usually lets into his Tardis, someone who wants to see other worlds to capture them, not explore tham. Annoyingly the most interesting bit of characterisation comes in the stage directions and is not seen on screen (it’s a quirk of Chibnall’s that he so nails characters in descriptions and can’t do it with dialogue: part of it runs that he’s ‘the sort of man who loves nothing more than riding his horse onto a dinner table’). It helps that Queen Nefertiti simply disappears from history, so that she could legitimately run off and have adventures of her own and you do wonder if she really is going to come to a sticky end when she sacrifices herself for her new friends. Only they disappear in the Tardis at the end of the story and it’s never mentioned again what’s happened to them. Similarly there’s a brief moment near the end when Amy happens to choose a moment of great peril to have a deeply personal talk with the Doctor (as so many companions seem to do), fearing that she’s been replaced. She’s afraid that the Doctor is trying to wean them off him so he can disappear and have fun, while of course we know that it’s the other way round – that, in setting up the tearful mid-series finale, the Doctor is afraid that something bad is going to happen to his best friends and really he’s trying to wean himself off them. It’s another of Chibnall’s strongest suits, the idea of people hanging around in a dull and ordinary world waiting for magical things to happen and it’s the one part of the Moffat era he keeps with him when he takes over as showrunner, but it’s a moment, ignored for a different story altogether. It’s typical of this story to, that no sooner do we get a really clever inventive and expensive idea (the ship’s engine room looks like a beach! Technically just like Southerndown Beach in the Vale of Glamorgan, because, well, that’s where it was filmed: it’s also ‘Bad Wolf Bay’ in, umm, ‘Bad Wolf’) , that really proves to Brian that he’s in an alien spaceship (by, ironically, taking him out of a place that resembles an alien spaceship) than the moment is passed and we never go back again. All the money, time and emphasis is being spent on the ‘wrong’ things. 

 That story is one of exploitation and features cruel tyrant Solomon, played by David Bradley the year before he got the job as a superb William Hartnell in the Dr Who making-of drama ‘An Adventure In Time And Space’. Only this character isn’t a fully living three dimensional contradictory soul but your average shouty pouty baddy (he’s very much like Kazran when we first meet him in ‘A Christmas Story’ but without the character development). Weirdly Bradley plays him like Peter Stringfellow, down to the long hair and the mannerisms, which is a bit odd because last time I heard he wasn’t a big game hunter and you get rather distracted wondering when Solomon is going to open a club (I mean, you half expect the Silurians to be in captivity learning to play jazz). We talk a lot in these reviews about how its better to explore space as tourists not pirates and that’s what Solomon is: a lot of fans have wondered if he’s named for the Biblical character (King David’s son who ruled Israel back in the days when it was being fought over by different kingdoms…well, the earlier days when it was being fought over by different kingdoms) but actually I think it’s a twist on the idea of ‘Somalian pirates’, who were happily killing Westerners who strayed too far from home and either randomising them or murdering them outright for money (Brian, by contrast, is very much a tourist, his adventures inspiring him to go travelling round earth at story’s end). Solomon’s come across a cargo that can make him millions and gets pound signs in his eyes, with no thought to the welfare of the cargo, who to him are just objects. What most of our media forget is that most Somalians didn’t set out to become like this – they ended up that way out of hardship and saw it as an easier way to survive than any other, while half-blaming the West for their poverty in the first place. By contrast there’s no other reason why Solomon acts the way he does except greed, with no backstory as to why he became so obsessed with money he risks life and limb for it (he wasn’t to know, on boarding this spaceship, who was inside or that the Silurian passengers were in a deep sleep) and no sign of what he was going to spend any money on or, indeed, who he can actually sell a cargo full of dinosaurs to (I mean, they’re too big for a family pet or a petting zoo and would cost more to feed than you would ever get from visitors. And if he’s simply aiming to shoot them and sell their hides to big game collectors why doesn’t he offer to strike a deal with a man dressed as a big game hunter whose already proved he’s quite happy to shoot anything that moves – I totally thought that’s where this plot was heading the first time as there’s honestly no other reason for Riddell to be there). There’s an uncomfortable moment when you think they’re trying to make Solomon out to be a villain as a direct result of his injury (exactly the sort of thing that made Russell T Davies so queasy about Davros he gave the megalomaniacal tyrant his legs back, although Davros’ disability is self-inflicted and a side effect of his own paranoia) but thankfully they skirt round that – if anything he gets nastier when the Doctor heals his leg for him. Even so, he’s no substitute for the story it seemed we were promised from the title and the trail – tyrants are boring, dinosaurs are fun! 

 They are easily the best thing about this story, even in brief. The Triceratops that the Doctor tames and everybody rides on could have come straight out of a David Attenborough film and despite being an actual physical model mixed with CGI is very cleverly done (you can’t see the join, mostly because of clever camera edits that keep cutting away to the dinosaur’s cute feet). Of course the graphics of a pterodactyl in the distance are recycled from the ‘world gone wrong’ of ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ only a few episodes ago, while the T Rexes are actually ‘raptors’ built by The Mill for another project ‘Primawful’ (sorry, ‘Primeval’, a deeply odd series about a time anomaly that led things from the past and future to end up in the present day, which should have been a thrilling ‘Time Tunnel’ in reverse for the 21st century but just ended up another Torchwood knockoff with an even lower budget and even less believable characters. The fourth and last series was being broadcast in 2011) so they haven’t exactly splashed the cash the way it seemed from the trail. They look to scale far better than most similar programmes involving computer-generated dinos and feel like living breathing creatures in a way that, frankly, most of the humanoid cast don’t. Far from being the scary threat of ‘Invasion’ though they’re mostly treated as overgrown pets here, which again isn’t what we expected from the title and trailer at all (though it makes sense if the Siluarians have been specially breeding them as sort of overgrown puppies before the ones we’re used to seeing ran amok on land on their own and became feral again in the days before the humans came along, though not as in character as it would have been to have trained them as guard-dinos). Shockingly nobody thinks to stop and ask The Doctor why the dinosaurs died out (given the events of ‘Earthshock’ they could have really played up his guilt). One point that no one seems to have noticed though: how does Nefertiti even know what a dinosaur is? They didn’t know about dinosaur skeletons in Ancient Egypt yet she’s the least surprised of anyone to be confronted with a whacking great lizard. Even in Riddell’s day scientists hadn’t agreed on many things dinosaur so to him dinosaurs shouldn’t look quite like that (besides, given what they now think, most dinosaurs would have been covered in feathers – it’s just that the idea of scales is so ingrained into how we think of dinosaurs that popular culture haven’t caught up with scientists yet). 

 The dinosaurs are certainly more watchable than yet another unfunny pair of robots. Putting up with these two for the second half of the storey really tests your patience, which makes it doubly strange why someone with the impatience of Solomon hasn’t just stuffed them in the nearest airlock by now (yes he can’t get around very easily, but before the Doctor turns up why does he need to hurry anywhere? Plus one sulking robot would be easier to handle than two nattering and he isn’t the sort to concern himself with a robot’s feelings when he doesn’t even respect a Human’s). Having two grumpy knock-offs of ‘Marvin The Paranoid Android’, Douglas Adams’ most famous creation, running around really jars. Not just because Mitchell and Webb play them in exactly the same way they do all their characters together (sarcastic, basically) but because there’s no back story for why they aren’t like other robots and even have feelings to begin with. It feels like the ghost of John Nathan-Turner rose from the dead and cast exactly the sort of people he’d use if he was still running the show now, used to milk publicity rather than because they’re the right people for the jobs or even that their characters are necessary. Though not quite as bad or unnecessary as hawk and Weismuller from ‘Delta And The Bannermen’ or ‘Hasler and Pace’ in ‘Survival’ they do rather leave you scratcjing your head going ‘eh?’ Both men are funny in other things. Webb, for one, really knows his Dr Who (he was in the audience for Brian Cox’s interminable lecture on sciency wiency in Who). Mitchell would be a steal as a regenerated Professor Chronotis if they ever wanted to remake ‘Shada’ for the 14th time. But both these robots are so unfunny and just get in the way that you want to throw them down the nearest airlock, especially when they start randomly singing ‘Daisy Daisy’ just like the end of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (a meta joke too far, that: if you know the reference it’s so obvious you wish they hadn’t bothered and if you don’t it makes absolutely no sense at all). They look alright, but even there they’re a case of recycling and cutting corners, being the ‘Roboidz’ created for bonkers and short lived children’s gameshow ‘Mission 2110’ and painted a different colour. We know from K9 that inventors in the future like imbuing robots with a personality, but honestly who’d want that personality? In Hitch-Hiker’s it was a joke, a colossal mis-calculation by humans trying to make robots more human and not realising that a robot in a human world would be permanently depressed, but here the robots just talk like that because that’s what robots do in scifi post-Hitch Hikers (just compare with ‘Robots Of Death’ for how they used to be played, as scarily inhuman). Plus there must be a personality off switch. Solomon’s exactly the sort of impatient person to hit every button until he finds it and destroy them in a fit of pique when he finds out he can’t. 

 That’s the biggest problem with this story: the tone jars horribly. There are moments here, when the Doctor is playing ball with a triceratops or Brian is being everyone’s dad, that are the most child friendly Who has been in a long time – since the start of series five and ‘The Eleventh Hour’ even, when it seemed as if every Moffat script was going to be full of fairytales and magic. There are moments when it’s a little too child friendly, such as the robots admitting some ‘oil came out’ when scared, like the bad old days of farting Slitheens and burping wheely bins we thought had gone forever. And yet there are moments here that I’m amazed got past the censors for a Saturday teatime family show: Brian starts riffing about getting his balls grassy and Riddell boasts that he’s a ‘am of action with a big…weapon’ before trying to flirt with Amy. It’s as if Chibnall thinks he’s still writing for Torchwood, right down to the endless banter, the knowing winks to camera and the parts where everyone gets emotional without telling us what they’re feeling. It’s all ‘adult’, but it’s a twelve year old’s idea of ‘adult’, meaning its full of snickered asides and hints about things that they don’t seem to have the first clue about (Riddell is what you would nowadays call an incel, blaming women for his lack of success in the bedroom department and compensating for it by turning all macho; spare a thought for poor Rupert Graves, the down-to-Earth Inspector Lestrade in Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ Sherlock series, who ends up the uncomprehending butt of all the jokes again). There are no really adult themes here, no sense of responsibility or the weight of emotional baggage you carry with you as you age. Even Amy and Rory are back to being best friends again, the sub-plot of their divorce last time out in ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’ ignored altogether. And the plot ending, with a machine that can only be worked by a DNA matched pair like, say, father and son so Brian and Rory can have a family bonding moment is stupidly convenient. And unlikely: I mean, how many ships do you know that can only be driven by two family members? And when would that ever be useful? What happens if a spaceship needs to escape a menace that’s killing half the population, or dad just happens to be having a lie in at the crucial time or is down at the allotment at the other end of the ship? That’s not a safety precaution, that’s a means of getting killed.

 Well, there is one plot-beat that works at least: the very 2010s idea of exploitation. This is an era when people are seriously beginning to consider privilege for the first time, how rich white straight men have ruled over a world where women, people of colour. LGBTQA+ and working classes have a natural inbuilt disadvantage. Not everyone believed it, not everyone listened, but this is the era when some people at least tried to redress the balance, with American Indians are given a financial boost to say sorry for taking over their land, with a lessening of the gender pay gap and when gay people of both genders could get married and couldn’t be dismissed from the last few workplaces holding out like the army (though nowhere near enough in all instances). At times it feels as if the Doctor, once so careful about who he allows inside his Tardis, has thrown the doors wide to everyone suitable or not, so he can get someone of every demographic aboard (including the sort of rich shouty white men who keep chatting up the ladies he wouldn’t normally give the time of day. We only hear about it rather than see it but Solomon’s tales of how he threw the Silurians overboard to lighten the load of the shuttle and help him speed up his cargo of dinosaurs is straight out of history textbooks on the slave trade. It’s a rite of passage for most high school-kids alongside dissecting frogs and being forced to play rugger on a freezing cold Winter’s day: the moment they learn about the cruelties that man can force on another for money. You can just about fool yourself that Hitler was a one-off, that napoleon had redeeming qualities, that other people in history who did bad things did it for survival, but the idea that human beings didn’t just kill other humans to save themselves but in order to save money strikes most like-minded pupils as the single ugliest thing they’ll learn about in school. And it’s the one thing that all generations are taught about in British schools, at least who are alive now, the mainstay of the curriculum alongside The Romans and The Victorians. Chibnall has already written about the Silurians so, even though they’re not seen on screen, he’s up to speed with how Malcolm Hulke wrote them to be, of all the Dr Who ‘monsters’, our equals: intelligent beings with an equal if not better claim to planet Earth as our own. It’s one thing to have a monster whose tried to kill people thrown off the side of the ship and having it be humans ejected into space might have been too horrible but having it be Silurians being treated as animals, so soon after a two-parter that showed us that they weren’t, really hits home. 

And talking of animals, hunting for sport rather than survival is the other big theme. How can one life take another, for fun? How would humans feel if that was done to them by an alien advanced enough to look down on us as pets? For even if we ca convince ourselves that Solomon is an alien working to alien ideals, Riddell is human and doing much the same thing on a smaller scale. A big game hunter, who treats everyone (including women) as animals and possessions only underlines the point further that this sort of thing has been going on throughout human history. It’s a clever twist on perspectives that I wish the script had played up more: Riddell is just a less powerful, inexperienced Solomon, blind to any creature’s feelings besides his own/ But just in case we fool ourselves that he’s a relic from the past up pops an Egyptian Queen to remind us that history doesn’t always move in a straight line – for they revered animals and treated them better than humans in many respects. Hunting anything for sport is as unthinkable to Nefertiti as the idea of being her husband’s slave. She’s a much more potentially naturally sympathetic person to the idea of Silurians being like ‘people’ than even Amy and Rory in ‘The Hungry Earth’ and that might well be part of the reasoning behind her decision to sacrifice herself at the end (because sacrifice is a lot more noble for a Queen than being a trophy). Had this story played up the idea of culture shock more, of every era thinking they’re the height of civilisation, had we seen the very different perspectives of the Doctor (well travelled), Amy and Rory (catching him up), Brian (pure of heart with modern eyes), Nefertiti (pure of heart with Ancient eyes), Riddell (rotten with ancient eyes) and Solomon (rotten with futuristic eyes) and maybe thrown a futuristic pure of heart character into the mix, while spreading everything out it a two parter so we had time to get to know everybody and see how they tick, I’d have been all for it. However Chibnall doesn’t really make the most of this. Instead he’s too busy playing with innuendo and comedy robots. 

 ‘Dinosaurs On A Spaceship’ is, then, a bit of a mess. It’s a thin line between being fun and being silly and this story has one foot in both camps – and a leg in serious and earnest and another in lecturing mode in le of genocide to boot. No wonder it falls over: it just doesn’t know where it stands this story from one scene to the next. It’s a frivolous colourful romp with dinosaurs? Or a dark film noir tale of exploitation? It just can’t be both however hard it tries. Everything except the dinosaurs, the spaceship and Brian falls flat and those three things only take up part of the screentime between them. Like many a series 7 episode this one has all the right ideas but it’s sloppily executed, needing more time spent on it to make it sing. This is, to an extent understandable. Moffat is really finding the workload a lot of weight to bear in this era and unlike Russell T’s strong relationship with his executive producers (who, basically, took the weight of all but the really big decisions off his shoulders so he could write) Moffat doesn’t enjoy the same relationship with his. He’s a natural writer but not a natural showrunner (even when he did this before, as early as his breakthrough ‘Press Gang’, there was another person nominally in charge along with him – his dad Bill on that show). By now he’s so far behind time, after struggling to write the Christmas special and the season opener, that he’s really up against it for time, so he mostly lets his pals get on with it and not paying too much attention to what they’re doing. Chibnall is one of those writers whose brilliant under the right guidance and with the right team around him (as with ‘Broadchurch’ and the early days of ‘Torchwood’ before Russell got distracted) but needs another pair of eyes to help him make the most of his abilities. Put the pair together on a story with so many stipulations (the limited budget, the lack of dinosaur time) and it’s no wonder things fall apart the way they do. This isn’t one of those Dr Who disasters they should never ever have tried and what on Zog were they thinking (like ‘The Dominators’ or ‘Voyage Of the Damned’): no, it’s a great idea that, had they done it in another year when there was more money and more support, could have been brilliant. The idea of putting two things that shouldn’t go together from the past and future, is so very Who I’m amazed they hadn’t tried it before already: this is ‘The Time Meddler’ for the modern age, with a grand sense of scale that stretches across time and space that only this show can do this well. It’s just that there’s nothing more than this, nothing beyond the title to get the hearts racing and even that is through circumstances a very minor part of the script. In the end this story’s flaws end up pulling it down, the polar opposite of ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’: the models are what makes this story convincing, while it’s the script written around them that feels false and hollow. The result falls flat – and anything that falls flat with a Stegosaurus on the screen, in every meaning of the word, has got things very wrong. Writing, characters, casting, set design (this is a very generic spaceship), nothing quite fits together and not much that does is worth watching. Watch this story for the dinosaurs and Brian and be prepared to skip through the rest. 

 POSITIVES + RTD2 is talking about creating multiple Dr Who spin-off shows again. I know Brian Williams isn't one of his characters but please please pretty please can we get one of him please? Mark Williams, playing his namesake's re-action at being whisked accidentally into space is priceless and probably closest to what a 'real' Earthling would do that we’ve had in the series so far. He's also a great bit of characterisation, demonstrating just why Rory turned out the way he did too (not least his dad's ever-ready ever-practical toolkit). 

 NEGATIVES - Why no diplodocuses?!? Everyone knows they're the best dinosaur. I mean T Rexes are cool and Stegosauruses are sweet but a lovable oversized doofus of a lumbering big green gangly vegetarian being with a gentle nature and a big chin like Matt Smith playing opposite his equivalent in the dinosaur world? Yes please! 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘How do you start a triceratops?!’ 

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