Day 805: Time Heist

The first half of Peter Capaldi's first series as the Doctor consisted of writers who were all old hands at the series. The aim is clearly to show that Capaldi can handle doing more 'traditional' Doctor Who stories, before moving into the newer voices for the second half of the series, of which a few will become more prevalent through the rest of his time as the Doctor. You've got two episodes from Steven Moffat, as well as one from Mark Gatiss, both of whom have been involved with the series since Eccleston. Of the other writers, one of them hadn't written much for the series before but had been very involved with a variety of spin-offs, another had written several episodes for the series as well as a range of books, audio plays and even a stage production, and the other one was Steve Thompson.

Steve Thompson's not had the best track record in terms of episodes. There was The Curse of the Black Spot, which had some good ideas but was weakened by some poor direction. Then he came back for Journey to the Centre to the TARDIS, which again had some good ideas, it's just that it didn't completely hold together, and there were also severe problems in terms of direction and acting. So now, we get what is possibly his last episode for Doctor Who: Time Heist. And Time Heist, to its credit, does have some good ideas. The Teller as a creature that can suck people's brains out is a nice and creepy concept. The entire idea of a time travelling heist is also strong, if a little bit hampered by the method through which Thompson decides to execute it. It could have been better if the time travel element were introduced sooner, giving the entire procedure a certain air of uniqueness, rather than the generic science fiction that we're left with for the majority of the story.

But the main problem that I have with Time Heist is that it never really wants to do anything. It feels like Thompson's just writing the story to deliver the brief and then leave; there's no sense that he wants to do anything special with the story, to go anywhere new or to make it feel exciting. And so that means that, no matter how good the direction or the acting wants to be, it can't quite rise above the generic nature of the script.

Still, at least Capaldi is good in it. And that's the main bonus of these first six episodes: we get to see what Peter Capaldi's like when he does things that could have conceivably been done by any other Doctor. Tomorrow, we'll get the last of those episodes before we dive head first into something new.

Day 795: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

The TARDIS is one of the best science fiction creations ever conceived. It's a time machine disguised as a blue box, that whilst it looks fairly small on the outside, inside it is infinity itself. And stories where we go inside the TARDIS have typically been rather interesting, just for the joy of seeing that infinity after being confined to the console room for so long. In these corridors, you can see all manner of splendid and odd rooms, suggesting that the TARDIS is even stranger and more magical than once thought, creating unforgettable stories.

So, with all of that in mind, I was actually quite looking forward to Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. The chance to see TARDIS corridors and rooms, an ability to get a handle on what is at the very core of the TARDIS itself, all of these things excited me and made me anticipate this episode when it first aired. And, unfortunately, the story ended up being a bit of a disappointment. There are a lot of ways in which this story proves to be a let down, from the acting of Mark Oliver as Bram Van Baalen, who manages to be completely unconvincing, even when he's falling off a ladder. There's the fact that the entire story is literally fixed with a reset button, undoing all of the events of the past half hour or so, including a crucial development in the Clara story arc that, at this point in the series, is beginning to drag a little bit as everyone's come to the conclusion that Clara is in fact a perfectly normal person and not the weird space time event that the Doctor thinks she is (at least, not yet). And there's the scene where a man has to debate cutting either a piece of metal embedded in his brother's arm, or cutting his brother's arm off, which is a debate that really doesn't need to happen (it does happen, though, because of the fact that the man doing the cutting has convinced his brother that he's an android for a variety of reasons, none of which are at all acceptable). It's just not a very good story.

But, I still kind of like it for what it does well. There are time zombies that rampage through the corridors of the TARDIS, that are eventually revealed to be future echoes of the Doctor, Clara and the salvage team helping them, but with destroyed bodies. That's a fantastic idea, using the temporal weirdness of the TARDIS to great effect, and the reveal of this is a surprisingly strong moment. I also love that, as written, if quite achieved on screen, writer Steve Thompson tries to do cool things with the TARDIS interior, showing off weird rooms and playing with the idea of the TARDIS as an ever-shifting labyrinth. But, as much as I like these things, I still can't truly enjoy this episode.

At the heart of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, we have an episode that should have shown the TARDIS as something weird and wonderful, but ended up showing the TARDIS as something average, with all sorts of problems that distract from what could have been something interesting.

Day 773: The Curse of the Black Spot

The Curse of the Black Spot was a complete disappointment for me. I went into it knowing that it had one big issue about it, which I'll go into later, but otherwise I was expecting a fairly nice romp with pirates in it. Instead, what I got was something that was just boring.

The pacing of this episode is really poor. Every other moment I'd look at the time and be shocked that I was still only a very small portion of the way through the episode. It's partially because the story is written with the intention that it be all about building up tension between scenes, with the constant threat of the Siren ever looming. The problem is that this never comes across on screen, because the Siren never comes across as particularly threatening. It could have perhaps worked if the actors playing the pirates were directed to be more paranoid or worried about the Siren's effects, but they weren't, so we're left with a story that just consists of the characters hiding in rooms aboard a pirate ship.

Meanwhile, there's also the big problem that is the Boatswain. The editor of this story made a huge mistake, because they removed an entire sub-plot from the final episode. Well, that's not strictly true, moreover that they removed half of a sub-plot, which makes the situation even worse. The character of the Boatswain, a secondary character in the story who gets a few scenes with the main cast, disappears halfway through the episode, only to reappear at the end in a completely different setting with no explanation as to how he got there. It's an awful mistake because it shows that the editor doesn't care about the story, instead opting to remove scenes that they feel are superfluous instead of paying attention to the story as a whole and the effect that removing those scenes would have.

And all of that is still only scratching the surface as to how this episode is really bad. It manages to deliver one of the worst renditions of first aid that I have ever seen in any form. The ending of the episode relies on the fact that, provided that you can guess where the wheel is on a spaceship, you're qualified to pilot it. The direction never takes advantage of the fact that they are shooting on a real sailing ship, with it instead looking like a cheap studio set in Cardiff. It all ends up producing one of the worst Doctor Who episodes of the revived series, and a real curse of an episode to watch.