Day 4983: Doctor Who: Breathing (Obligatory Kate Bush Reference)

Saturday:


Doctor Who returned, as an irrepressible, outrageous, furious Peter Capaldi.

I loved it. But not everyone did. And I loved every moment of it while it was on-screen, but afterwards have found myself struggling to puzzle why.

So in a most curious way, "Deep Breath" exists in two states simultaneously: one has dazzling effects, moving acting, subtle and clever script; the other has alienating continuity, no concessions to the viewer, and reiteration of the wrong plot points.

You can’t say the Mister Moffster doesn’t learn from his mistakes. Au contraire, Blackadder! He learns whole new ways to remake them.

Not taking enough time over the stories? Fine, we will stretch it to eighty minutes!

Clara doesn't have a personality? Not a problem, let's give her a brand new one!

Worried the audience might not connect to the new Doctor? Let's make it really obvious that the central idea of the story is the paradox of Trigger's Broom.

Change is continuity. So the metatext become the text.

We have a story where in-episode viewers complain about the quality of the special effects; a story about rebuilding things from stolen spare parts is made of stolen bits of other stories, including the main plot – and monster – lifted from "The Fire in the Girly-Place" (hat-tip Lawrence Miles); where the Doctor himself is sure he's seen this episode – or this face – before, he just can't quite place it; a story that answers "is he still the Doctor" with a blizzard of continuity and quotes from "here we go again" to "you've redecorated" to the whole "shall we go for chips" scene from "The End of the World" (retold more awkwardly, because in Moffat men are always more awkward); a story so keen to let you know it's reflecting on who is the Doctor that it hits you with more mirrors than Paul McGann in a room full of mirrors yelling "Who! Am! I?!?!".

If these moments resonate for you, if you feel that all these quotations amount to meaning – and I do – then you'll love "Deep Breath". If they don't, if maybe you don't have that history in your blood, then you better be pleased by a distracting dinosaur of Godzilla-sized, credibility-stretching proportions.


Let start with what was unashamedly good about this.

Capaldi delivered. That's the single most obvious but most important thing.

Sure, he had nothing to prove – unlike Matt Smith turning in a tour de force in "The Eleventh Hour" – and nobody seems to have doubted he had it in him. But boy is he a pro. Terrifying, cowardly, arrogant, compassionate, infuriating… and that's before he gets out of his pyjamas.

There was a lot of Tom Baker in the performance, at his most enigmatic, aloof and alien; his first line out of the TARDIS – "shush" – reminding me instantly of Tom's "not today, thank you". The dialogue – Moffat seems to have gone "school of Dicks" and written generic Doctor, or just "Matt" – was full of the swerves and scattershot that could easily have been delivered by the eleventh Doctor but delivered in very different style – particularly, say, "I don't like being wrong in public; everyone forget I said that" coming across much more Malcom Tucker than Matt Smith.

His defining scene, naturally, the confrontation at the climax taking him from icy calm offering the villain a drink to a face full of teeth as they struggle as we see the possibility of a Doctor fully in control of himself and his powers and responsibilities, no longer hiding behind "tawdry quirks" and a youthful mask. Though my favourite moment may have been the – immensely Tom in "Robot", too – glimpse of childish glee on rejecting the door as "boring; not me" and spying the window: "me!"

Then there's the episode length.

Some people have said that it dragged, or at least that it didn't find its feet until the scene where Clara meets the Doctor in the restaurant. I don't agree. And it would hardly be consistent of me if I did, having last year said that Moffat's problem was too short a running time, and that he was generally better with the longer frame of the specials.

And a double-length episode means we in fact are getting the same bangs-for-your-buck's worth in twelve weeks as a season as the "usual" thirteen normal-length episodes.

You get to have your season-opening two-parter all at once!

Though I'd say that this is, essentially, an entirely laudable effort to reinvent the old four-parter.

There are clear demarcations between what could have been episodes – part "one" has the Doctor in his nightshirt and a "cliffhanger" where he jumps off Westminster Bridge; part "two" has him in the tramp's coat and focusses a lot on his and Clara's "finding" the Doctor, before the second "cliffhanger" when their table at the clockwork restaurant goes all "Live and Let Die" on them; part three has the new Doctor and Clara becoming a team again, and him coming into his own as a person, finishing in the fatal fall of the half-faced man; and the fourth part is the aftermath, and looking forward, where he is entirely his new self and Clara has to accept he is the same person, and we get a nod to what is surely the arc of the season (Missy, Mistress, Master? Nah…).

In a way, then, like the way "Inferno" slips a parallel Earth story into the middle of its run, "Deep Breath" is a two-part adventure with the clockwork droids – reimagined in delicious Gothic style with heavy doses of Justin Richard's novel "System Shock" – in the middle of a two-part regeneration story, with the Doctor's recovery in the first part and Clara's acceptance in the fourth.

And for me, it really worked, giving a lot more time for developing character. The Doctor's "regeneration crisis" – and that dinosaur – are largely confined to the first twenty minutes. Afterwards he's playing on people's confusion and lack of expectations about him… (particularly "that" scene with Clara…).

The second "episode" has a "next morning" feel about it (not the only thing "Deep Breath" has in common with "The Sensational TV Movie", by the way). The Doctor's scenes – with tramp Barney touchingly played by Brian Miller – are all about him discovering who this new face is. Where do the faces come from is a particularly interesting question (suggested by a conversation with Russell Davies, apparently), and this too holds hints that there may be something in it this time, a message, though why Caecilius (or Mr Frobisher) we have yet to understand.

There's also time to expand on the characters of the returning Paternoster heroes, and for the first time I really felt that Vastra and Jenny were in a real relationship (no, not because of – in fact almost in spite of – the heavy-handed "we're married" refrain that kept being hammered home). Strax may be becoming a bit of a one-note joke, but there are the odd interesting thing slipped in among the gags: he notices, for example, that Clara has good lungs – which comes in handy shortly – and you have to wonder (Miranda moment: I don't think we do!) what the "young men doing sport" in her subconscious are about after her strenuous assertions that she could flirt with a mountain range. And the funniest bit in the episode is the slapstick flooring of Clara by the Sontaran "sending up the Times".

But mostly the second act puts the focus squarely on Clara, on how she feels about the Doctor now, and how clever she is. It is after all she who works out the clue in the newspaper. OK, the Doctor does too, but he's supposed to be that smart and it is Clara that we see doing it.

Former teacher Steven Moffat has clearly brought some history to Clara now. The great use of classroom flashback to show where Clara gets both intelligence and sass to use against the clockwork villain.

Now, however, we're getting to the parts that are more brilliant/awkward than purely brilliant.

I loved all that character stuff for the Paternoster Gang, but at the same time I can see that it's really asking a lot of someone tuning in for the first time. They might be Moffat's satirical updating of the old UNIT family but they're still a bit… weird to just take as read (in a way that "straight" archetypes like the Brig and Sergeant Benton are not). Of the prehistoric lizard lady and the Victorian ninja maid, is their marriage the thing that you most need to make clear to the audience? (OK, actual complaints to Ofcom about the kiss suggests that yes maybe it is.) And while I think that the "reverse Emperor's clothes" of Vastra's veil – seen only by those whose prejudice won't see her, another re-echoed theme – is ingenious, is this "introducing" episode really the best place?

(Oh, and one little flaw in the direction, that seems to have been widely praised: Vastra and Jenny drawing their swords is clearly supposed to be a two-shot that demonstrates they are equals in spite of the rôles they cosplay, so why is the camera only on Vastra, cutting Jenny out?)

Clara is the first companion since Rose actually to experience a regeneration, and in the case of Rose the Doctor's change made him more the sort of young, dashing man she expected, more "her boyfriend", perhaps trying to satisfy Rose’s "inner fan" was the start of his making that mid-lives-crisis mistake.

Something we've not seen really since the 'Eighties is the "hang-over" companion, the assistant perfectly suited to a Doctor who then unfortunately dies and leaves them with a very different successor: think Adric, sorcerer's apprentice to Tom Baker's ageing wizard who winds up with the youthful Davison; or Peri whose energy and enthusiasm clearly go with Peter One*'s curiosity and gentlemanly vim, but who gets stuck with the crazy shouty man; or even underrated Mel who is loud and direct and proactive and just perfect for Baker Two, but who is entirely unsuited for the complex manipulations of Sylv's master chessplayer.

[*Alex note: This makes the Lord Cushing: Peter Zero :^]

Clara, on the face of it, seems so much more the companion for the eleventh Doctor who she absolutely did not fancy (Miranda moment: she did fancy him). But twelve could be the making of her.

Clara slightly out of her depth and on the edge of panic, Clara clearly pissed off with the Doctor messing her around, these are good, believably human traits for her, and bring out some strong acting chops from Jenna Coleman.

But where's it come from? How is this the same character, the same Impossible Girl, we've followed for a year or more? And you might say that Clara is a control freak – second-funniest moment in the episode: "Nothing in this room is more important than my egomania!" – but did anyone honestly think that of her before?

Though never mind the switch from last year's Clara (who for no readily apparent reason dived into the Doctor's timeline without batting an eyelid, and then without breaking into a sweat persuaded not one but three Doctors to save Gallifrey because that's the man they all were); what about the one between one side of the new title sequence and the other? From "He's [the Doctor is] right here" to "The Doctor is gone!"

Moffat likes to make his writing ambiguous (or "clever") so that you read it one way only for a later twist to make you re-interpret. An example would be the "translating" of the dinosaur's lament which also refers to the Doctor, as made clear by the reiteration of "just see me" from the end of the bedroom scene to after "that" phone call (and yes, just like when he translates the minotaur at the end of "The God Complex").

I think the Grand Moff is trying to do the same thing with Clara's reaction to the regeneration: it's supposed to have a superficial reading of "whah he's got all old", as a rebuke to the widespread supposition that the Twenty-First Century Doctor needs to be young and pretty to appeal to the audience, and then it turns out she's fine with his age but thinks something else has gone wrong.

Except it falls flat on its face, because Clara expressly says "why's he old?" and says nothing to suggest an alternative interpretation (until she tears Vastra off a strip). So what was she moping about?

I'd suggest that there are two or three possible ways they could have gone to clear this up.

My first thought, and perhaps simplest: just a line to say "I've seen all of his faces; this isn't one of them!" It would take people's strongest objection to Clara's reaction – that she more than anyone else ought to be au fait with regeneration – and turn it on its head; her very familiarity is what makes this new face, this stranger's face so upsetting to her.

Secondly, and possibly connected to that, play more on the "Power of the Daleks" question of: "is he really the Doctor?" Could this be a completely different Time Lord sent to take his place? After all, Clara saw "her" Doctor blow up. And then this guy appears in the TARDIS. By making this more of a mystery through the episode it would also have added extra strength to the phone call ending, where the new man turns out to know what the Doctor said… proving he is the same fellow at last.

Thirdly, and maybe what they were trying to allude to, Clara does say at one point "it's gone wrong", though it is sadly a bit lost between flirting with the "big lady" and "maybe you should wear labels". It's possible that Clara thinks that either the Doctor is supposed to "renew" into a young body and age normally (as, to be fair, she saw Matt's eleventh Doctor do), or possibly she's taken aback by his post-regenerative trauma. But this feels unnecessary to us when even casual viewers know that he goes a bit dippy after regeneration, and to the fans this is one of the least disturbed new Doctors. He doesn't try to strangle anyone!

…well hardly anyone. …well he pushes them out of a balloon… or doesn’t…

The possible "darkness" of the Doctor comes to the fore in the "third" part of the story, playing with the notion that he might have gone a bit "sixth Doctor" (or a bit "first") when he seems to abandon Clara, only for it to turn out that he's really channelling the "seventh": throwing his companion into peril to "fix" her flaws, make her "better".

Does he murder the half-faced man? The blatant ambiguity here – even before mad woman in the coda hangs a lantern on it – is obviously set up to keep fans arguing forever: did he or didn't he.

But, to coin a phrase, that's not the right question.

Does he steal the tramp's coat? He's distinctly cagey about it; his first answer is an outright lie, and then he says he traded his watch for it. Which may be true. But we know the Doctor steals clothes: the third, eighth and eleventh all raided hospital lockers for their first outfits, and the first committed outright burglary on an (all right, somewhat dubious) merchant in Jaffa. We've just not previously seen him steal clothes from someone who is actually wearing at the time. It's awkward, isn't it, it feels more wrong. And it may be in there precisely to challenge our pre-conceptions about what this alien thinks is moral. That's where ambiguity works.

The final part of the story sees us having come through the change and looking to the future. The Doctor is finally dressed in his own clothes – if you think about it, he's got a change of costume for each "part": first the nightgown (or first Matt Smith's costume before the titles, then the nightgown); then the tramp's coat; then the droid's Victorian suit (and face!); and only finally his own understated third Doctor duds. And he's redressed his TARDIS too.

In a way it's a shame that – in the move between Upper Boat and Roath Lock – they regenerated the TARDIS console room back in "The Snowmen". It means the "redecoration" doesn't have the impact here, doesn’t in fact seem that different at all, ironically, just making it pinker and warmer. Imagine instead going from Matt Smith's original bonkers golden fishbowl to Michael Pickwoad's austere steel engine; that would stamp the new Doctor's no-frills frills all over the show.

And because we're looking at taking what's come before and moving on, we perform that neat little restaging of the "chips" scene from the end of "The End of the World", where Rose and the ninth Doctor first properly bonded, but with the Moffat-twist of the Doctor now being awkward and not huggy. (And while we're at it, it's also referencing "The Hand of Fear" by way of "School Reunion" with Sarah revealing that the Doctor took her "home" but missed a bit, only this time he 'fesses up and Clara is fine, because she's not leaving.)

"Deep Breath" is a regeneration story and thus much more like "The Christmas Invasion" (or for that matter "Castrovalva") than a first adventure like "The Eleventh Hour" or "Rose". And regeneration stories are always a bit weird, as though "regeneration" forces its way into the story, forces the story into being about regeneration. And it ends up pulling in two ways – both about newness and about everything being the same.

Thus change is continuity. And so the metatext become the text.

Sometimes it seems like everything is quotes.

Next Time: Oh look, the quotes continue with a scene from Rob Shearman's "(Into The) Dalek". What would the ninth Doctor say about this voyage? Fantastic…

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...

Day 2232: DOCTOR WHO: Primeval

Saturday:


Daddy Alex is warning me about this, but I am going to let Daddy Richard do another review.

Cross my tusks and wish for luck!

For the last couple of weeks I have been walking through Bank tube station, on my way to work, past a couple of posters for "Coming Soon" ITV drama Primeval. On Friday, the day before the series was due to launch, and with the immaculate timing that only ITV seem able to achieve, these posters were replaced by ones of a woman in her knickers.

So was Primeval really pants?


Well, no… but it tried really hard to be.

Like last years ITC-wannabe pilot The Outsiders, it really struggled against its ITV-ness: a need to have rather bland, demographic-friendly characters who interact in entirely predictable ways and use dialogue as though it comes straight from a manual.

Although billed as "ITV's Doctor Who" it's really ITV's Torchwood – the small team of slightly anti-establishment "characters" investigating their own little magic door in time. (Add to the list of Star Trek crimes the introduction of the phrase "time-space anomaly" to the English language). But where Torchwood's problem is that all of the characters are turned up to eleven, Primeval has everyone set to mute.

There's the ruggedy slightly older one (leading man Professor Cutter); the nerdy one; the thinks-he's-so-cool one (actually, tragically, I suspect the writers think he's genuinely the cool one, rather than just the wears-the-leather-jacket-with-all-the-hair-care-products one); the not-too-threateningly-attractive-career-woman one; and the ditzy-but-brainy blonde one (who would actually be quite endearing if she wasn't paired with the "cute" flying dinosaur discovered by obligatory cute kid, Ben).

The basic premise – man meets dinosaurs coming though mystery door from the past – is good, and sets up plenty of room for spectacle and set-piece action especially since the special effects are up to the challenge.

The choice of monsters from the Permian, a Gorgonopsid and a Scutosaurus, seemed rather peculiar, though. If your USP is "Look! Dinosaurs!" you should stick some of the "classics" into your episode one. It may be clichéd, but there's a reason for that: people love to see those creatures. Why not a Stegosaurus and an Allosaurus, or – if you're feeling more Cretaceous than Jurassic – a Triceratops and everyone's favourite Tyrannosaurus Rex. It's almost as though the decision was dictated by the latest CGI models being the "Walking With Monsters" ones. Surely not…


But there seemed to be a basic sloppiness to the thinking about how to translate this idea to the screen.

Rather than sending, say, a group of game wardens or animal experts to investigate sightings of a "monster" in the Forest of Dean, the Home Office appears to have sent a single female civil servant whose strategy appears to be to wait in the hotel and see who tries to chat her up. So, on the whole, it's lucky for her that Professor Cutter arrives.

Mind you, Professor Cutter and his chums seem woefully unprepared for tracking a large and aggressive wild animal too. (They might not know it is a Permian-era therapid reptile, but they can see the damage it can do to truck and fencing). They aren't armed – which you could say is fair enough – but neither are they carrying any equipment with which to document the animal, in fact their only camera appears to be the one on the nerdy one's mobile phone.

We're told that the thinks-he's-so-cool one is a world class animal tracker, which maybe he is, maybe he isn't. But if he is, surely he'd resist the nerdy one being along with him to scare off all the animal life with his flapping around and complaints? Though, to be honest, why would a palaeontologist have an animal tracker as his assistant? It's not like the bones he's looking for a likely to go walking. (Well, okay, the premise of the series is that they do, but isn't it just too astoundingly handy that Cutter is tooled up for live dinosaurs in advance.)

Someone really needed to think about the logic of all this.

Surely it would have made more sense for lady-from-the-Home-Office to come to Cutter and say: "look, we think there's this thing that needs finding, and yes we know you're an expert in things that have been dead for millions of years, but we have reason to believe that you're still the right guy for the job. Oh did I not mention it's in the place your wife disappeared eight years ago."

Then the Home Office are behaving sensibly, and the coincidence-a-tron is not set to overload.

Cutter brings along his student – hence the nerdy one – and our animal tracker is supplied by the government as an expert hunter or possibly ex-army type. You can even play off that as an excuse for some internal tension in the team: Cutter and Mr thinks-he's-so-cool could play off each other rather than be improbable best buddies.

But we're thwarted again by the lazy stereotyping: the guys from the Home Office have to be bumbling civil servants™ and the rogue, independent team have to be the get-go guys.

The government ought to be in a position to throw resources at a problem like this (something that was another of Torchwood's problems – why are there only five of them?) and to be fair to Primeval they do seem to be getting this across towards the end of the episode, with a largish camp and soldiers surrounding the time portal. Of course their investigation technique seems to be a little slapdash: oh, let's just let a couple of guys wander though. Something a bit more methodical surely should be in order – try sticking a camera though first, perhaps? Establish that you can go though and come back. Set up some sort of camp on the other side and only then let the professor go wandering around looking for his wife.

Oh, and when the nerdy one realises that the doorway is closing, did no one think to stick their head though and shout "come back!"?

Ah, but Prof Cutter was on a quest to find his lost wife by that point. Cutter says that he'll do anything to find her. Except, you know, hang around in the Forest of Dean at all for the last eight years. How long did he spend looking for his wife the first time? Not very long it would seem. We discover at the end that this time portal thing comes and goes – clearly wifey went though and the door closed behind her. But then it must open up again on a fairly regular basis or there isn't going to be a series. So why wouldn't Cutter have found some evidence of something – not necessarily from the right time, but something – to make him keep searching until he found the portal?

Unless, of course, the portal is not a natural phenomenon at all, and someone is controlling it. That's plausible, from the way that his disappeared wife was able to leave him a little present and slip off into the night again at the end. Either that or she has impossibly good timing.


There were a couple of terribly weak comic moments, both derived from the "adults don't believe children" school of laughs: Ben's bedroom is torn to pieces by the Gorgonopsid and mum comes in and demands he tidy up the mess – "hello: half the wall missing and the bed chewed up!"; later it may be Ben or a different boy is in detention and sees the monster tracking towards the school – "There's a dinosaur in the playground miss!" (The fact this visual "gag" is a direct steal from Godzilla, down to the beast's tail flicking out of view just as the teacher turns her head, should tell you everything you need to know.)

And both of those moments lead into the other major failing: no one died.

Have you seen what the body count is in many episodes of Doctor Who? People get slaughtered and exterminated left right and centre. Primeval really pulled its punch on this.

There are in fact three deaths in the show: one unfortunate cow, discovered half-way up a tree; one unnamed gentleman, conveniently skeletonised many years before being discovered by the Professor on his jaunt to the Permian; and the unlucky Gorgonopsid itself.

But no people. No one we've met gets munched on. When the Gorgonopsid attacks the boy's bedroom, no one on the street comes out to see what's happening and get eaten for their troubles; the school is conveniently empty of tasty screaming children and teachers. Most improbably, even Mr thinks-he's-so-cool survives. When the hungry Gorgonopsid is trying to get into the classroom – and golly, don't they make those school doors tough these days – he lures it away using himself as live bait only to be cornered, knocked through a door and knocked unconscious. At which point the hungry monster that has been hunting him… loses interest. Phew.


But I'm painting you a picture that this was no good at all, and that's not right.

There was a lot of potential here, and much to enjoy. It's got a great deal of verve and does (just about) manage to overcome the ITV drag factor. The pacing was good, or at least it kept ticking over, though I'd have rather had more monsters for my buck (and your average Doctor Who episode would have left it standing). The directing of the action sequences generally top notch (give or take: the Gorgonopsid may have been changing size to enter the school, but the smash and grab raid on the boy's bedroom was Jurassic Park quality).

Several of the actors are worth mentioning for giving us something worth watching. Ben Millar is always watchable, even when required to be crapped on by an extinct species, and he invests his government trouble shooter character with a twitchy cynicism that is charmingly creepy. And there is also kudos for Andrew Lee Potts as "the nerdy one" (it's easy to say he's just Shaggy from Scooby Doo, but he invested a dumb script with some enthusiasm) and Hannah Spearritt as "the ditzy blonde one" (it needs a lot of natural charm to rise above having to be the one who acts with "Godzuki", especially when the script works even harder to make her look dumb: look, it tells her to take the rare and precious reptile she's just discovered out into the forest so she can lose it. Inspired!)

And the effects, as I said, were terrific. The CGI monsters looked great, hardly ever cartoon-y (except when running, really), and if you'll forgive the whole "pet dinosaur" thing, at least it looks convincing.

And the monsters are really what this is about so far, so tissue thin backstories about mysterious missing wives and clichéd motivation that has people doing things because it's the TV thing to do rather than because a real person would do them is really neither here nor there. It did, mostly, what it said on the tin, and I'm sure I'll give it another go next week, even with the prospect of giant creepy-crawlies.
Though, of course, it's rubbish compared to Doctor Who.