Day 6517: DOCTOR WHO: How Many Family Dramas can you pack into one spaceship? And then eat it?

Sunday:

Mr Chibbers is continuing his high concept drama of “let’s prove we can do trad Doctor Who using Russell’s model.”

Russell set the standard for his revived series with present, future, past and back to the present stories. And didn’t much vary from that for four years.

So after three weeks of cracking Dr Who episodes…

the “look what effects we can do now” one,
the “moving historical” one
and the “Holy Freekin’ Giant Spiders scary” one

…the model says we should be on to the “this year’s Dalek one” one.

Oh. We’ve skipped to “The Long Game” instead.

I guess I picked the wrong week to give up not reviewing Doctor Woo...

No relation...

Actually I liked this. The design, the direction, the acting were all really good. The regulars gave us more reasons to love them. I love that the Doctor got taken down a peg for acting selfishly and took it like a woman. There was more of the Ryan/Ryan’s father backstory, nicely used, and more bonding with Graham. Yas uses a staser, drop-kicks a Pting and still somehow hasn’t had the scenes that I think she deserves.

This wasn’t outstanding.

But Doctor Who can’t always be outstanding. And already this year we’ve had the beautiful direction in “The Ghost Monument”, and the scariest scary spiders ever, in “Arachnids” and all of “Rosa”. And spellbinding writing – if not always plotting – every week. I think we can cut “average” a decent break this episode.

So, Millennium is being a bit harsh comparing “the Tsuranga Conundrum” to 2005’s under-loved “The Long Game”.

But it probably is fair to say that this is Chris Chibnall trying to show he can do Russell Davies-style “relationships” writing, in a space setting, only with a plot that actually resolves itself properly rather than pulling a deus ex machina out of its hat.

(In as much as the two perils established are the monstrous cute Pting and the remote explosion of the ship, and each turns out to be the solution to the other.)

We have:

The brother and sister who cannot tell each other they love each other because their pride is getting in the way. Complicated by the weird alien android/clone consort.

The young man having to face up to fatherhood when he thinks he’s not ready. Complicated by weird alien – and to a certain value of “hilarious” – “hilarious” biology.

The junior medic thrust into being in charge by the death of her superior, the only person who trusted her.

What we have linking them here is people doubting each other, underlined by the severe lack of trust shown by Tsuranga’s Rhesus Station who would rather kill everyone on board than risk an uncontrolled danger reaching them, and by the mentions of “dark times” in the tricky middle of the sixty-seventh century.

We also see everyone falling into worrying about their own troubles even in the face of the Pting, which is pretty much the definition of an environmental catastrophe, particularly in the confined space of the ship.

It’s a subtler metaphor for our times than last week’s Trump-lite.


As usual in Doctor Who, hard science is first to be blown out of the airlock.

You could use anti-matter for a power source, because matter + anti-matter makes a lot of boom.

But you certainly wouldn’t make it on board. Not even in a miniature CERN. In fact especially not in a miniature CERN.

Because whatever you are using to power your atom smasher must be putting at least as much power in as you’d get out from the anti-matter it creates – that’s just what E=mc2 means! – so why not just plug that directly into the drive and cut out the middle positron?

(Or, Mr Writer, you say that the anti-matter is being created from a portable rift into an anti-matter universe – and incredibly dangerous way of doing it, but one that gets you your anti-matter “for free” to fuel the matter/anti-matter reaction for the drive.)

Of course, it’s very trad Doctor Who, going right back to the years of Ian and Barbara for us to take a moment to say “so, Ian, we’re in the future, so what is this week’s science spot?”. Not to mention all those black holes, and the pop-science-inspired stories of the Seventies, from artificial intelligence to body language, and that’s just Leela’s first two adventures.

Meanwhile, the Pting appears to be able to fly through space, overtake a ship travelling (we presume from the maps) faster than the speed of light, penetrate the shields and hull, without any visible means of propulsion.

Yes, it looks a bit “Slitheen” – do not go there.

(It also appears to be bigger on the inside, from the way it swallows objects its own body size. Which suggests some seriously fan-baiting possibilities for its origins.)

But we better hope that it’s seriously blissed out from the bomb it swallowed, because booting it out an airlock (and not very far outside the Rhesus station) is not going to stop it if it can do all that.

What we do see is another example of season 37’s “villain walks away” syndrome – getting so obvious even the RadioTimes has commented on it.

Much speculation abounds that we are going to see someone from this list return as “big bad” for the season (or all of them in an Alliance of B-List Monsters to rival Moffat’s “Big Bang”!). Maybe we will.

But I’d like to suggest an alternative reading.

The Doctor’s faced adventures this year that are, more than even is usual, stamped with great big metaphors: if we skip “The Woman Who Fell to Earth”, we get “Selfishness”, “Racism”, “Corruption”, and this week “Doubt” or you might prefer “the System”.

Most often in Doctor Who, the Doctor will deal with a baddie (monsters or villain) who will get their comeuppance.

But dealing with the “big issue” problems, that can be the trite answer.

By leaving our villains this year to walk away, we could be saying that look the big problem remains whether we have some false closure with this little bad guy or not. So, let’s not pretend we’ve solved something as difficult as “racism” by making sure that Rosa Parks is remembered for where she was sitting when she rode the bus.

Overall, a moderate Doctor Who episode is actually nice. It’s nice to see a TARDIS crew who are happy being there, doing what they’re doing. And a Doctor who’s enjoying being the Doctor. “That chapter in the book of celebrants. More of a volume, really.”

It’s like a return to the days of Tom Baker, when the Doctor bestrode the universe, dealing with diabolical masterminds for breakfast and just having fun with best-friend Sarah, Leela and the tin dog, or Romana. It’s like the joy is back.

Next time: we’ve seen segregation in America. Let’s try partition in India. And with more of Yas’s family, will she finally get to shine?

Day 6489: DOCTOR WHO: The Woman Who Rose to the Challenge

Sunday:

The name is Bond… Jane Bond!

Don’t knock it. This week Doctor Who went where no man has gone before. And about time. And she did it in “Casino Royale” style with a little more of the WooWho theme added each time she stepped closer to remembering just Who she fully was.

Fearless confrontation with aliens… build a new sonic… heroic action sequence… turn their own weapons against them… never cruel, never cowardly, always there to help… and you’re really going to wear that?

The Doctor’s back baby, she’s back.

And so are we. Here’s Daddy’s new Who review.

“All of this is new to you, and new can be scary.”

The first impression was that this was very new. The cinematography was more sweeping. The pacing was more measured. The focus more on the ensemble cast – like the opening of “Rose" but paced like Broadchurch not a pop video. The music was less frenetic. The colour palette was more naturalistic, at least for the daytime work.

Let’s hope that “naturalistic” means “grim up north and dark” for one episode only, and that alien planets will be different. The posters for this season have been so vibrant and colourful, and Doctor Who should look different to anything else on TV (again!).

There are clearly two ways to handle the transition from Doctor to Doctor: the companions to hold your hand approach as you experience their shock, bewilderment and acceptance with them – “Power of the Daleks”, naturally, but also “Robot” or “Deep Breath”; and the all-change method, where the whole team are new and you experience the Doctor brand new for the first time all over again: “The Eleventh Hour”, “Rose” or “Spearhead from Space” or even arguably “An Unearthly Child”.

But in a lot of ways this was also a step back to something hugely “trad” – not exactly 20th Century Who, but what that might have evolved into along the lines of other British drama.

We’ve had ten seasons of New Who with emphasis on the “New”, both Russell Davies era of fast-cutting, high octane, high contrast based on American series like “Buffy”, and the Steven Moffat’s puzzle-box genre, in darkness and actinic blues. Right now, something old-school is the radical departure.

And I’m reminded of Sir Humphrey’s advice in “Yes, Prime Minister” – if you’re going to do something really radical, Prime Minister, announce it from the most traditional wood-panelled library with leather chair and mahogany desk. Everything you can do to comfort people and tell them it’ll all be fine.

Because holy crap the Doctor is a woman and half the Internet have lost their minds.

“I’m looking for a doctor”

Which of course is absurd, because the Doctor is still the Doctor and Jodie Whittaker is brilliant.

(Mind you, for a series that defines itself by change, we are talking about a fanbase that has difficulty recognising “the Welsh series”, who thought “The Deadly Assassin” was the death of the magic, that colour was maybe a step too far, or that it was all downhill once those two schoolteachers appeared…)

Of course, it’s early days, and we’ve got the excuse of post-regenerative discombobulation to handwave any cuts and trims as writers and actor find the performance. But what we saw on the first night was, let’s quote the trail, glorious.

We acknowledge the gender swap with “Why are you calling me madam?” but it makes no difference to the Doctor taking charge like she owns the place, same as the Doctor has always done.

A defining scene was aboard the train, as Yas tries to assert her authority as a police officer (or cadet PCSO), and the Doctor effortlessly takes charge, not by bullying or physical threat but by posing the pertinent questions and showing she’s the one with the answers.

Jodie’s performance gave me a bit of Tom in, say, the “that nap did me the world of good”, and some lovely squidgy-faced expressions as emotive as Sylv, but most reminded me of Matt, with the physical discoordinations and the eccentric distractedness. And the complete confidence in the dress-sense. Which is also very Colin.

But played, and I think quite rightly, with an absolute confidence in her own authority, not arrogance, but certainty.

And kindness.

The seventh Doctor went to the funeral in “Remembrance of the Daleks” but only the thirteenth would stay.

And thankfully after the “am I a good man” gloom that beset the twelfth Doctor, Jodie felt like a Doctor unburdened. Able to offer a helping hand and stand up for fair play because she’s – literally – got the spoons now to do so.

“There’s echoes of who I was, and a sort of call towards who I am.”

Possibly unsurprising given that this is Chibnall, he’s chosen to sample some of his favourite Who moments, made a montage from some of the series’ quintessential touchstones: the Doctor’s speech about family from “Tomb of the Cybermen”; the forging of the new sonic – from spoons and a bit of alien spacepod – harking back to the third Doctor’s gadget building, if way more epic; the crane reminiscent of Sarah Jane climbing the Thal rocket in “Genesis of the Daleks”, or the Doctor and friends teleporting between adventures as in “The Ark in Space” or again from the end of “Genesis…” with added floating in space effect; the Doctor looking for “a doctor” as Peter Davison was in “Castrovalva”; possibly a nod to David Tennant in “The Christmas Invasion” as the Doctor recovers on the sofa exhaling artron energy; even the first glimpse of the new female companion is in police uniform like Amy (thank god this time she’s not really a stripper!). “Will he ever call me grandad” was a line given to Graham, but was planting a flag for the series’ roots right back to “An Unearthly Child”.
But Chibnall wasn’t afraid to subvert the expectations either: two aliens arrive – one tentacle-y one in armour – the Doctor guesses two alien races at war… immediately I’m thinking Sontarrans vs Rutans… but no, he’s not afraid for the Doctor to guess wrong, and the aliens – on the same side after all – turn out to be the Jem’Hadar… no, sorry the Stenza.

Well, there’s a whole new meaning to “toothy grin”, that Terrance Dicks can’t have thought of. Possibly Chibnall has been studying too many serial killers for writing “Broadchurch” (yes, I know they didn’t actually do serial killer) with their gruesome souvenir-collecting habits.

The tentacle-y thing, meanwhile, was wonderfully Cthuloid. We wondered if it had assembled itself a form from train cabling, incidentally, and might it have build different, more industrial bodies later at the crane site.

And as an aside, I thought it was good that Ryan was able to own his mistake in “granting access” too.

The Woman Who Fell

So, let’s look at the supporting cast, who I thought were great.

Of the non-Time Lord regulars, it’s interesting that Ryan (Tosin Cole) is clearly the audience identification figure, starting from his vlog as we do. That also makes him the voice of the author for part of the story. And it’s his action that incites the incident.

I’m slightly less sold on Bradley Walsh’s Graham yet. He’s no Wilf. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt if only for the gleeful expression as he detonates an explosion in the season’s trailer.

But of the three, I’m favouring Yas as the stand-out, Mandip Gill bringing a bright intelligence and curiosity to the role. Though something that makes Yas a Moffat-style companion (something else other than she’s wearing a police uniform – she’s earned that uniform!): she knew Ryan in childhood and suddenly finds him again because of the weird stuff he shows her and she doesn’t believe!

Not joining us on voyage, Karl Brian Wright, crane operator and “valuable person” was sweet in his own way, and I liked that he said thank you and left (yes, like Derek from “Survival”), though the plot demanded that – like, Alex tells me, the book of “Survival” – the monsters come after him in the end. Nice that the Doctor gave him a ticking off for booting the beaten villain off a crane (though not the full Harriet Jones destroy his life!).

But my favourite was Grace, for all that – curse you the spoilers of pre-publicity – knowing she wasn’t a series regular was as good as hanging a “doomed” sign around her neck. She was funny and brave and curious and had as much character as the other three put together. Basically, she’d have been a great companion in the Evelyn Smythe tradition. Several times, I thought she was about to buy the farm, so making it to the last act was almost an achievement, but then it was “No Graham, let me go sticking the probulator into the electric death-ball up the crane”, and fate was sealed.

Grace’s fall give the episode title poignant double meaning – in retrospect highlighted by Ryan from the beginning telling us that the woman we think this is about isn’t the woman who this is about.

Chibnall here strikes a balance between Russell, having people challenge the Doctor afterwards on consequences, and Moffat saying if you wish hard enough there are no consequences at all, (so if you die you just can’t have been special enough); he’s learnt from writing a long and harrowing detective show (and maybe from reading some PD James) that when people die it has a massive effect on other people, rarely beneficial, sometimes catastrophic, because every person is the centre of their own story with their own web of connections and consequences.

And if Grace is the point of the first episode, is this an author’s nod to the US remake of his Broadchurch called Gracepoint?

Next Time

The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us that the probability of being rescued from the vacuum of space is 2 to the power of 276,709 to 1 against, which as we all know was a telephone number in Islington in the late ’Seventies. So will someone with an Infinite Improbability Drive be along in a half a minute to rescue our heroes?

And looking longer term, are we going for a “quest for the TARDIS” season story-arc (what, the show-runner might have fibbed about all separate stories?!)

And the big question: Will we get a title sequence?

Day 4283: DOCTOR WHO: The Power of Twee

Saturday (flashback):


It's possible that I may have been unkind to Mr Chris Chibnall, back at the start of season two of "Torchwood", when I suggested in my review that Russell Davies had written "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" for him.

It becomes clear from "The Power of Three" that he can at least write a very good pastiche of RTD. All the tropes are here: the emphasis on character; the way they stand around and emote heavily at each other to tell us how very special they are; the kisses to the fans; the adoration of the Third Doctor/UNIT era; the failure to do the research; the hand-wavy non-resolution; the implicit xenophobia...

Let's start with the basics: if you want to call your story "the power of three" and especially if you want to finish with that as the valedictory line, then you really, really need a resolution that depends on a contribution from all three leads. Ideally, something unique to each of them, that proves how vital is the contribution each one makes, but failing that at least have each of them do something.

It is surely not beyond the wit of man to think of something. How about an invasion from the second dimension – moving shadows! – but which can be trapped when approached from three directions at once.

You would be better off calling this something like "Real Life (Interrupted)" or "How the Doctor Couldn't Sit Still" which at least would draw attention away from the largely-irrelevant invasion plot.

Because what we have here is just a bog standard invasion plot (and, judging by starship design and alien make-up, it's an invasion from the "Babylon 5" universe); it's the Master's "plastic daffodil stratagem" without the plastic daffodils. Or the Master.

Certainly, the cubes start off as intriguing. They spend a year carefully waiting, infiltrating human society, scanning us to identify our key vulnerability (which disappointingly does not turn out to be a weakness for the Apple company's product design), and then take advantage of that to suddenly wipe out a third of the human race.

(Handy, incidentally, that it's a third. So you can have the Doctor – who can survive it – get zapped and let his two companions be the "other two thirds". Though no one else who gets actual screen-time is among the casualties either. Brian, of course, has been conveniently kidnapped otherwise he'd have certainly been watching his cube and been killed by it. But we don't even get the horror of seeing someone we've "met" – the married lesbians, say, or Rory's friend from the hospital – collapse. Even without the absurd "nobody dies" miracle ending, this is shying away from the truth of the plot.)

Almost it would be better if there was no explanation. They do their thing and just as mysteriously vanish.

Sometimes, awful things just happen.

Thematically, that would go quite nicely with Brian's conversation with the Doctor about what happens to former companions, and would neatly foreshadow the events of next week, while at the same time being an almost literal "you could be hit by a bus tiny black cube tomorrow; you might as well get out there adventuring".

And, hey, after the events of "Miracle Day" maybe the cubes were just reversing Earth's massive overpopulation problem. Whadda ya mean 'how could Chris Chibnall be expected to follow plot developments in "Torchwood"?'. Oh...

Instead, we veer off sharply into a string of the most dreadful Who clichés: the ancient and terrible foe, known in the legends and bedtime stories of Gallifrey, who we hear of for the first and probably last time when the Doctor pulls an "oh, I know all about you" out of his fez; and their motive to unravel human history, to prevent humanity colonising space… we make the universe messy.

And they would have been unstoppable too so long as no one from Earth could make it onto the command ship and have the entire plot explained to them and then be left alone with the "off" switch... oh. These aliens are so dumb they don't even deserve to have nearly gotten away with it except for those meddling kids.

(Actually, I'm now regretting making that throw-away remark about "correcting" the events of "Torchwood", because the next biggest Dr Who cliché is of course the ancient and terrible thing from Gallifrey left behind by the Time Lords, because the Shakri are just begging to be renamed the Mother's Little Helpers of Rassilon.)

Given the brief "life with the Doctor from the Ponds' point of view"; given that this is the last adventure before their last adventure, couldn't we have had something more about what makes the Ponds so special to him, rather all the dialogue just saying they're "oh so special to him!"

Rory in particular is back to being badly served (a shame as one of the few good aspects of the dire Silurian two-parter from 2010 was that Chibnall handled Rory quite well).

Rory is exactly the guy you want to be stood next to when your heart gets stopped, because he can fix you... but he's been sent off to another part of the plot. (One which, for all its intriguing cube-mouthed orderlies, will just peter out and vanish).

But still – by an unbelievably massive coincidence – he's also the guy in exactly the right place to tell the Doctor where the portal to the alien ship can be found and... instead gets removed from that plot too and the Doctor just finds the portal anyway (and indeed rescues the now-unconscious Rory with a wave of his illicit smelling salts).

Amy doesn't fare much better, being all doe-eyed and "you're so wonderful, Doctor" a lot of the time – yes, yes, "I'm running towards you before you fade from me" is a lovely scene, and Matt acts it beautifully, but still – and of course she kills the Doctor stone dead with a defibrillator. Oh no wait, it's a magic defibrillator that doesn't work like any other defibrillator on Earth and can restart a heart that's stopped while not stopping one that's working properly. How clever is that!

(Seriously, folks: the clue is in the name – a de-fibrillator is used to normalise the pulse of a heart that is in fibrillation i.e. firing irregularly. If your heart has stopped you need CPR and pretty damn quickly too. It's quite bad that Amy doesn't know this, but when Nurse Rory suggest "mass defibrillation" as a response to all those people who've been cardiac arrested by the cubes... well, you wonder just how much professional training he's skipped while having larks in time and space.)

The fan-pleasing moments (Zygons under the Savoy aside) are, of course, the return of Mark Williams as Rory's dad Brian and the (re-)introduction of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in the appropriate setting of UNIT's secret base under the Tower of London.

Or possibly an impressively-badly-done green screen of the Tower of London.

Kate is a lovely character. Not quite consistent with her single-mum appearance in the BBV story "Downtime" (aka the The Worldwide Web of Fear), but as a scientist leading the military, certainly a step on the way from the Brig's "action by havoc" UNIT to the "zen military" that the New Adventures repeatedly imply they evolve into. Played perfectly by Jemma Redgrave with a dry sense of humour that really did seem like she might have inherited it from the late, much-loved Nick Courtney, it would be nice if she was intended as a recurring character. If there's any truth in the rumour that Chibbers is being groomed as the next show runner (or at least is one of the possible candidates, along with Toby Whithouse and Mark Gatiss), then Kate may be "his River Snog".

But even if it's not Mr Chibnall setting out to create a recurring character (or Mr Moffat, for that matter – he too has form) I would like to see more of Kate Stewart and her UNIT bloodhounds. And her Ravens of Death.

It's sad that we're almost certainly not going to see Mr Brian "Pond" Williams again, as in just two appearances he's made himself the Wilf de nos jours. Grounded and dependable, occasionally the butt of the joke, but clear-sighted enough to cut through the Doctor's blether and speak it how it is.

I also rather like that he seemed to be able to stay awake for forty-eight hours solid watching the cubes while in the TARDIS. A property of the timelessness inside the time ship, or just "dad power"?

Brian, of course, is the one who first puts his finger on what's going on when he asks the Doctor about how companions leave.

That's the underlying sadness to this episode (which again is totally opposed to the "everybody lives" cop out of the conclusion). This is clearly playing out as a tragedy.

There's a wistfulness on the part of the Doctor: you can see that somehow he knows that this is his last time with the Ponds. He's already confessed to Amy in front of that green screen that he can tell they'll soon be going their separate ways. And from the moment of his conversation with Brian which is immediately followed by asking if he can stay with Amy and Rory, he does not want to leave them alone because – it seems – he is certain that the next time they part it will be forever. That's why he tries to wish them a hearty farewell at the end and, ironically, it's Brian himself who then urges them into the TARDIS for the fateful trip to New York that is coming.

Some people have taken this apparent foreknowledge to suggest that these first five episodes of season thirty-three are in the "wrong" chronological order, that, for example, the Doctor in "Asylum of the Daleks" is actually from after the events of "The Angels Take Manhattan".

I think that there is a possible case for the suggestion that "A Town Called Mercy" takes place within the seven weeks away during Amy and Rory's wedding anniversary party. (One episode inside another – how very "The Time Monster"!) A throwaway reference to King Henry VIII – Rory leaving his phone charger in the Tudor monarch's bed-chamber – takes on a different resonance when we see our heroes hiding in said chamber. Sloppy script editing or a sly tie-in? I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt in this case and accept that these are the same incident seen from two angles.

The case for "Asylum" being out of order is weaker. That the Daleks might kidnap Amy and Rory from earlier in their time stream is not impossible, collecting the 21st Century versions rather than the strictly contemporaneous back-to-the-20th Century Ponds, and thus "filling in" a gap in their lives that the Doctor had skipped over, namely Amy and Rory's temporary divorce – though I still cannot see how that fits with their characterisation in any other episode.

But otherwise... no, I think that these stories have to take place pretty much in broadcast order. Brian meets the Doctor for the first time in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" and the Doctor meets Brian for the first time in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship"; it's not a tricky timey-wimey thing. They know each other in "The Power of Three" so those episodes must be in the right order. And, although it's not explicit, it would diminish the tragedy of Amy and Rory leaving on their final trip after Brian give them his blessing for them to pop back several more times. There's not really any coming back from "The Angels Take Manhattan".

So I think that the Doctor's behaviour is more a matter of being old enough and wise enough to see the cards on the table, perhaps with a dash of Eighth-Doctor prescience thrown in.

On the subject of relative time though, there is Amy's unexpected reference to having spent ten years of her (and Rory's) life with the Doctor on and off. Which seems like an awful lot of unseen adventures. Certainly the Moffat-era creators are far more willing to embrace the idea of lots of life being lived off-screen than almost any earlier era. The Troughton stories, for example, on occasion seem to take place all on the same afternoon, such is the tightness of continuity between episodes; while the UNIT era definitely appears to take place in "real time", despite disagreements about how far into the future said time is taking place.

It's possible that this explains Rory's "I'm thirty-one" remark in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", although not Brian's lack of incredulity, if Amy and Rory have been "doubling up" their time by having the Doctor return them to Earth "later that same day".

(And isn't that at least bending the Laws of Time? Oh well, there's no one left to spank him now. Except his wife!)

So what we have here is a mash-up between a series of character vignettes without a plot and a crude cartoon of old-style Doctor Who each getting in the way of the other.

(Was it just me, by the way, who thought that "Pond Life" was made from off-cuts from this episode? The fact that the first four "minisodes" are a minute each and that this under-runs by about four minutes? But it's not like "The Power of Three" needed more Ood-on-the-loo related fun, so why was Chibnall writing this instead of a much-needed explanation of what happed to the cube-faced porters or why they were kidnapping patients from Rory's hospital? And, whatever the reason for kidnapping them, the victims are definitely left behind to get exploded along with the Centauri cruiser Shakri spaceship. Which is a bit harsh.)

The character scenes are trying to tell us about death or separation being forever and that's directly contradicted by the Moffat-lite "everybody lives" invasion story. And lovely as Kate Stewart is – and she is lovely – she's still a bit of sleight of hand by a writer tossing some continuity red meat to the wolves of fandom to cover his lack of coherence.

Finally, if this was the power of three, why make such a fuss about the significance of seven? Seven minute countdown, seven portals, seven Shakri ships (which we never see). And why, like so much in this episode, does it not go anywhere?

It's not awful, but it is a mess. A sign of a writer, and a series perhaps, in transition, not yet either one thing or another.

Next Time... Angels 3... Doctor nil. Yes, it's time to "Blink" one last time, as River narrates her own flashbacks and the Ponds finally get permanently killed by living happily ever after to death. Prepare to be clubbed over the head with the meta-textuality of "The Angels Take Manhattan". Also, the Statue of Liberty... give me strength!

Day 4269: DOCTOR WHO: One Million Years P.C.

Saturday:

On the shiny new DVD of "Vengeance on Varos" there's an (unbroadcast) French and Saunders sketch, using the "Trial of a Time Lord" set, in which the duo appear in costume as aliens from Planet Siluria. Oh, how fans laughed at the ignorance of the Not-We not getting that the Silurians come, not from "Siluria", but the alien planet... Earth!

So, the Doctor's postcard from "Siluria" at the end of "Dinosaur Writes a Space Script" is a gag about another gag, itself a gag about "Trial" which, in turn, makes Mr Chibnall gag. And the wheel turns full circle...

A teenage Mr Chibnall dreams of the day he can write Doctor Who PROPERLY.

With Big Guns.

And Knob Jokes.

Mr Christopher Chibnall first made a name for himself by appearing on the telly being quite rude about "The Trial of a Time Lord" to the then current writers of Doctor Who.

And some might argue that his entire subsequent career has been a case of "Well, if you think that you can do any better..." and largely demonstrating that he can't. Given that the writers he was berating were Pip and Jane Baker, you can see where in my esteem league Le Chibnall usually resides. Two diabolical seasons of Torchwood, one dreadful one of Camelot and the unspeakable "The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood" have all contrived to place him there. "42", I will concede, was a brighter spot amid the gloom.

So, you can imagine my quandary when assessing this episode.

On the one hand, he does appear to have actually constructed it well: given a shopping list by Moffat of "dinosaurs" and "spaceship" he's made the fact that this is a spaceship that has dinosaurs on it central to the plot: it motivates the villainous Solomon and drives the conflict with the Doctor. And he's actually got a very good in-series reason for combining those elements by making this the Silurians' very own Ark in Space (and always good for sucking up to the boss, as it's said to be Mr Moffat's favourite story).

But on the other hand we get a series of crude innuendos – the Doctor's psychic paper getting a honk-honk ringtone when Nefertiti (yes, that Nefertiti) presses her advances; the big game hunter flourishing a stun rifle and boasting of the size of his weapon; and Mark Williams as Rory's dad, Brian, mustering all the dignity he can to respond to the question "What have you got in your trousers" with "only my balls". I swear, at that point I very nearly began to implode with embarrassment.

It's not that the jokes aren't funny – though they aren't – or even the generally disparaging attitude to women – because Chibnall tossing in an aside about gender politics isn't funny either – it's the cringing inappropriateness, like your dad suddenly making knob jokes. At a children's party.

Jenny seems to have had similar difficulty with the episode's ambiguities, labelling it "passable", while Simon was much more willing to give it credit as a comedy romp.

And I'm reluctant to mark it down for the cringe-worthy moments, because there is much here to enjoy, not least the eponymous dinosaurs, finally redeeming "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" with some lovely CG renderings and excellent models – bonus marks for Ankylosaurs, Alex's favourite dino. The fight with the raptors was exciting and well-staged – and let's say they're Utahraptors which really are person-sized, rather than the infamously turkey-size veloceraptors. The pterosaur attack was nicely done, too; lovely moment where the Doctor tells the Williamses that "they're not kestrels" just after I'd remarked that "that pterodactyl's getting a bit close", even if it was yet another return to Bad Wolf Bay, a location that is becoming as ubiquitous as the Temple of Peace in Cardiff.

I do like the idea of powering the ship with waves. It might even work, if the water is somehow collecting the kinetic energy from planets as the ship orbits and releasing it for use it in flight. Although the idea of a basically tidal power system being constructed by the Silurians ought to be unlikely if you remember that their reason for launching the ship in the first place is that in their time the Earth has no moon, and so no tides.

On the subject of technology, though, I'm afraid Solomon's robot sidekicks didn't do it for me. Their bickering dialogue was, I felt, neither clever enough nor funny enough to be worthy of the talents of Mitchell and Webb. And the fact they suddenly couldn't shot the broad side of a triceratops was enough to break the suspension of disbelief. (They should have made a joke of it and had them miss Brian when ordered to shoot him at point blank range.)

But I liked the rest of the guest cast. Riann Steele as the Egyptian Queen, once we got past Chibnall's cack-handed reprise of Moffat's equally cack-handed "Amy throws herself at the Doctor" scene, demonstrated steely competence (pardon my pun) while Rupert Graves as big game hunter Riddell (does Chibnall not know that Allan Quatermain is well out of copyright?) gave the role both barrels and was clearly having a whale of a time playing what M would no doubt call a sexist misogynist dinosaur (pardon my pun again). Personally I'd have thrown in a world-weary "Oh, all right" on being made to use stun guns on the dinosaurs, and I'd rather have reversed the positioning in the final shot of Riddell and Nefertiti so that she is the Queen of the African veldt and he is her nubile tent-slave, but if you can't have all the gender politics you want I'll settle for Amy demonstrating that she's the equal of the Doctor and then saying she's worth two men.

The scenes where Amy gets to be Doctor with Nefertiti and Riddell as her companions gave something back to the character that had been taken away last week. It was good to make use of her history with the Silurians too to help her figure out what's going on (although, as Alex said at the time, those carefully sculpted-to-fit masks make it painfully clear that they've only got two actors who can "do" Homo Reptilia). The "show me the difference between then and now" was a reasonable shorthand for a proper Doctor-ish investigation (better, actually, than Mr Sonic-Waver manages these days) though it did leave me feeling "Yeah, but in the sixty-five plus million years this things been up there, there may have been more than one thing that's changed...". Also, it doesn't half make it obvious how the mobile phone would have short-circuited a lot of "classic" era Doctor Who.

And to be fair, there were lovely moments for Rory and for his dad too: the Williams boys bonding over the things they keep in their pockets; Rory getting to be a nurse; and the moment of Brian sitting with a sandwich gazing out at the Earth. Brian's postcards from all over the world, having overcome his fear of travel, were a happy return to the idea that the Doctor makes people better.

Although the whole business of the Silurians programming their ship with "from the same genetic path" rather than "is Silurian" that meant Rory and his dad could between them fly the spaceship raised "contrived" to new levels. Sure, you can post-facto justify by saying the TARDIS recognised the ship and worked out what would be needed, and hence chose to pick up the Ponds from a time when they had a parent and child to hand, but really... wouldn't you choose to pick up Amy and River in that case, at least one of whom actually can fly a spaceship?

There's also the question of Rory's age – apparently he's thirty-one now (and too old for a Christmas list).

However, his (misprinted) hospital I.D. back in "The Eleventh Hour" was dated 1990 which many take to be his year of birth, so if he's thirty-one "now" then the year is 2021, and the Ponds are just back from waving to themselves in "The Hungry Earth". (Presumably this is the 2021 where both of them still exist.)

Given that "The Big Bang" firmly establishes Amy's wedding day as 20 June 2010, and hence the events of "The Eleventh Hour" as 2008 for grown-up Amy and 1996 for seven-year-old Amelia then, by reversing the calculation, Amy is twenty-one in season five/thirty. Rory's been at school with Amy since childhood, as seen in "Let's Kill Hitler", and can't be more than a year older or younger than her. (A birthday in 1990 would see him six when she is seven, which is consistent.)

But even if Rory's two years older, so twenty-three when not dead in season five, it's difficult to see how eight years could have elapsed for the Ponds (and if he's younger, it's even more). Particularly given Amy's complaint that "it's been ten months this time". Of course there could have been many, many unseen visits in the meantime, but still.

Having said that, the ten months could be indicative of the Doctor's feelings towards the Ponds having cooled – a possible connection to the Daleks "deducting love" last week.

And, in that vein, I do find interesting the Doctor's current choice of companions. He denies to Amy that Nefertiti and Riddell are "the new Ponds", and in a way this is true, because he's clearly picked new travelling companions who have a moral compass somewhat South of "Twenty-First Century".

Does the Doctor have a problem with mercy now, following his decision to give Amy his protection from the Daleks' nanoswarm?

There's been a lot of comment on the Doctor's treatment of Solomon. (Though I notice that no one at all seems concerned that he murdered the Mitchell-and-Webb-bots almost in passing. Honestly, does no one watch "The Measure of a Man" any more? They clearly pass the Turing Test, so they're alive. It's as bad his dismal treatment of Drathro – never mind the monkey-racism; the Doctor never seems to give a fig for synthetic lifeforms!)

I did quite like what we saw of David Bradley's Solomon, his scenes with Mat Smith crackling with energy. Alex particularly liked the first time we saw him standing, weirdly gaunt between the two hulking robots – he looked (appropriately enough) like a drawing of an evil old wizard come to life. But I don't think he was given enough time to develop into a truly memorable villain. You kind of need a reason to secretly root for a really good baddy, but all Solomon's moments were unlovely, whether shooting the Trike or threatening Nefertiti with his bladed crutch, and it rendered him rather shallow, which in turn made the Doctor's despatching him seem somewhat over the top.

A deal of the speculation has suggested that there'll be a Moffat "everyone lives" moment later in the series when it is revealed that the Doctor got Solomon off the ship before the missiles hit. In just that way that he couldn't when it was Adric.

I've also wondered if the Doctor's rather heavy emphasis on the missiles locking on to the Silurians' signalling device wasn't supposed to be giving him a chance of the "Just chuck this out the window, mate" variety.

But mostly, it seems, the Doctor just murders him.

What happened to "The Man Who Never Would?" Regeneration aside, this is the guy who wanted to take the Master off for cuddles and counselling after slaughtering half the Earth. This is the guy who couldn't bring himself to execute Davros, or to destroy the Daleks at their creation.

The case that seems to keep being brought up is the Graff Vynda-K, who is exploded by his own bomb after the Doctor slips it into his pocket at the climax of "The Ribos Operation". Well, the thing is, that's poetic justice there – the Graff left the Doctor with the bomb because of a prophecy that "All but one would die", so giving the bomb back to him is in-story apt. It's fairy-tale logic – do as you would be done by, or be exploded as you would explode. There's no such aptness to Solomon's execution. The Doctor could, quite easily, have offered him the choice to get off his ship and face the consequences or stay on it and try to avoid the missiles – and that would have been very Doctorish.

Nor does he seem exceptionally wrathful. The Doctor's not beyond meting out punishment when he's really pissed off.

The massacre of the Silurians (about whom the Doctor has deep-seated and on-going guilt issues) and the slaughter of an innocent Triceratops right in front of him, added to the objectification and abuse of his friend Nefertiti, might all combine to put him into one of his "good men don't need rules" moods, much as the Family of Blood push him too far in, well, "The Family of Blood".

But we need to see that on screen. We know that Matt is as capable as Davy T of delivering the towering rage of the Time Lord, so someone between the script writer and the director forgot to tell him to turn it on.

And nobody calls him on it either. Ever since he contemplated a wounded caveman and a rock back in "The Forest of Fear", it's been implied that the Doctor, as a Time Lord, needs human companionship to help him with "human-scale" morality. Tom Baker's Doctor contrasted walking in eternity with Sarah's human (read "mortal") concerns. When the fifth Doctor used the Movellans' virus to destroy a force of Daleks, it took Tegan's departure to show him the error of his ways. It featured strongly in the seventh Doctor's era, particularly once they got into the New Adventures. And even more recently, when he destroyed the Racnoss and again when he was going to leave Pompeii to its fate, Donna was there to remind him that that's a bit off. This week: nothing.

So the episode appears to say that it's okay to kill people just for being "bad". And I accept that some people, many people, do think that that is true. It's just that the Doctor is unequivocally not one of them.

Given who is writing this, and added to all the inappropriate humour, it reminds me all too much of the morality of Torchwood. Particularly (ironically) its humourless first season, which equated "adult" with sex, violence and swearing.

If this were a one-off (yes, I know what Moffat says), then I'd put it down to Chibnall having all the moral sensitivity of Eric Saward on a bad day. But given the events on the Asylum last week and given that I know that next week's episode is called "A Town Called Mercy", I wonder, I speculate, is Moffat trying to do a character-based arc – possibly to demonstrate that he can - where the Doctor is shown to be lacking and needs to go find himself a companion. (Again.)

Next Time...The Doctor's brain has crashed and he's dreaming he's in the Wild West with Farscape's Ben Browder. Sigh, Ben Browder. Or possibly Mr Pritchard from Upstairs Downstairs. Can Kryten compile a dove virus in time to cure him in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse"... hang on, I think I'm getting confused...