Liam Trim reviews episodes 2 and 3 of the new series of Doctor Who…
Warning: Spoilers!
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
Sadly I don’t have the luxury of time travel and I can’t hop back seven days to ensure my thoughts on Dinosaurs on a Spaceship make it online on time. I can summarise my thoughts on the lunacy of the second episode here though, before I tackle the third, A Town Called Mercy.
Unfortunately Dinosaurs on a Spaceship didn’t have many surprises tucked away. It really was as dependent on the gimmicky title as it seemed. However, there were a few nice touches to relish. Rory’s Dad was wonderfully played by Mark Williams, and the casting team must be applauded for recruiting such an impeccable actor to shed light on Arthur Darvill’s comic performance as Amy’s soul mate. The explanation behind the vast and out of control spaceship (and its strange cargo) was also interesting. A Silurian arc, the size of Canada with wave powered engines, drifting through space since ancient times, and presumably, the disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs.
David Bradley’s villain, the intergalactic merchant Solomon, was also refreshing. He is a small fish for the Doctor, not threatening world domination or the destruction of the universe, but simply looking to make a quick buck. The fact that he was a bit ordinary seemed to make him all the more dangerous, menacing and revolting to the Doctor though. The Doctor could not cope with his greed and his completely selfish outlook. He could not tolerate Solomon’s deceit after the Doctor had healed him. Solomon represented all that was bad in lesser beings than the Time Lords.
When Solomon told Nefertiti that he would break her in, the dark sexual and perhaps racial undertones were completely inappropriate. The line, along with his kidnapping of the Egyptian queen, is presumably intended to justify the Doctor allowing Solomon to die at the climax of the episode. This felt out of character, but clearly the Doctor’s morality is a theme Moffat and co are targeting this series, given the way A Town Called Mercy follows on from Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. Personally I think this is a good thing. The fact that the Doctor is a good man, but also effectively a mass murderer, is understandably glossed over most of the time but is a subject ripe for character development and explanation. However, clearly any story arcs tackling the Doctor’s dark side must be handled sensitively.
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was an exercise in pure fun, but its paper thin premise undermined its adventure. The odd assortment of characters the Doctor collects to form his gang don’t really work together with such little background. It is an interesting and plausible idea that the Doctor often romps through history with colourful and famous figures like Nefertiti and African explorers, but here everything is thrown together too hurriedly. And I am a huge Mitchell and Webb fan but their bickering robots simply weren’t funny. In many ways they summed up an episode that tried too hard to be crazy and hilarious.
A Town Called Mercy
Last night’s episode, despite being a crude imitation of a classic Western at times, marked a significant step up in quality from episode two. I should start by apologising for an error some of you spotted in my Asylum of the Daleks review: sections of that episode, and this one, were filmed in Spain, not America. Clearly I was just too convinced by the production team’s efforts. Upcoming episodes featuring the unforgettably scary Weeping Angels are set (and filmed) in Manhattan though.
Unlike Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, A Town Called Mercy started small and built towards a big, morally complex dilemma. Initially the Doctor was just up against an isolated town, besieged by one mysterious, and notably alien, gunman. Toby Whithouse delivers a script full of the weighty dialogue he is adept at delivering in his BBC Three series Being Human. By the end the Doctor has gone from dizzy enjoyment (“has someone been peeking at my Christmas list?”), to determined killer, to defiant protector and back again.
At first the Doctor himself appears to be the target of the cyborg gun-slinger circling the town of Mercy. Then it emerges that the town doctor, complete with otherworldly face tattoo, is the real focus of his formidable anger. The sequence in which the Doctor is thrown out of the town’s boundaries, and the cyborg flashes towards him via a series of teleports, is genuinely chilling. Matt Smith and Karen Gillan are excellent throughout this episode, and in this scene their helplessness is infectious.
There are some nicely cinematic moments in this episode which again support the claims of the production team that each episode in this series has a blockbuster scale. However the trappings of this episode, enjoyable as they are, with the Doctor rushing out of town on a horse and squaring off at high noon against a terrifying opponent, feel hollow compared to the more substantial moments. The Western bits are lacking in originality but the moral crisis which drives the episode delves deep into the character of the Doctor.
The Doctor initially agrees to rescue the imprisoned town doctor, clever alien Kahler-Jex, with the TARDIS but Amy and Rory are rightly sceptical about the simplicity of his plan. Rather than rush straight to his blue box, the Doctor checks out Kahler-Jex’s own egg shaped spaceship. Inside he discovers files that expose Jex’s past. The cyborg gun-slinger is one of Jex’s creations. Jex experimented and operated on countless prisoners on his home planet, transforming them into cyber soldiers to end a long, destructive war. Many of his subjects died in screaming pain when the transformation failed. The gun-slinger has malfunctioned and gone rogue, gradually killing off each member of the team that stole his old life and butchered his friends and family.
There are nods to the Holocaust and other ethical debates from the past, with Jex effectively being the equivalent of a sinister doctor at a Nazi concentration camp. The Doctor (our doctor that is) explodes with rage at his discovery of Jex’s deceit, and demands he is thrown out of the town to save its citizens from the gun-slinger. Justice must be done. But in another scene ready made for the actors to show off, Amy steps forward to give the Time Lord a damn good telling off, albeit in a 21st century way: “this is not how we roll, and you know it”. In another great line, she tells him “this is what happens when you travel on your own for too long”.
We rarely see the Doctor like this, vulnerable and illogical because of the weight of the regrets upon his shoulders. Jex forces him to stare into a mirror: a part of the Doctor must think that he, too, deserves to die for his past crimes. Could his increasing ruthlessness link into Moffat’s wider story arc about that all important question, Doctor Who? Since the universe assumed the Doctor’s death, he has shown less mercy. Could it be that he no longer feels he has a reputation to live up to? Or that he wants to quickly establish a new one? Any questions about the Doctor’s emotional identity and background are endlessly fascinating.
The episode wraps up in the usual fashion, with the Doctor saving the day and good humour and smiles restored. There is a typical Western finale, which is entertaining but far from inspiring given the substance of what went before. Perhaps the episode’s finest moment is when the theme of morality and the Western setting combine, courtesy of superb acting from Matt Smith. After coming to his senses thanks to Amy’s reprimand, the Doctor defends Jex when the townsfolk try to take him away in the night. He talks down an eighteen year old threatening to shoot him in a moving and impressive manner. That’s the Doctor we know, using words not weapons. But the companions need to remind him that’s who he is now and again.
The next episode looks like classic Moffat-era Who: clever, psychological, epic and baffling.
Check back next week for Liam’s thoughts on The Power of Three.
You can read his review of Asylum of the Daleks here.
Liam Trim
