Doctor Who - Twice Upon a Time - A Mess of Sentiment and Self-Indulgence

[SPOILERS]

My review of the previous episode: The Doctor Falls.

I feel like if you looked up the definition of placeholder in the dictionary, this episode would be right there.

That's not entirely anyone's fault. Steven Moffat always intended Peter Capaldi to regenerate at the end of series 10, but when incoming showrunner Chris Chibnall refused to start off on a Christmas episode, it was left to Moffat to come up with some reason for Peter Capaldi to stick around for an episode.

As it is, he pulls a few good moments together and coats the rest in sentimentality and a boatload of nostalgia. That's always an enjoyable experience, I guess, if you shut your brain off. If there's anything clear at the end, it's that Doctor Who is desperately in need of new ideas, and Steven Moffat is out of gas.

Doctor Who Series 10 - The Doctor Falls - Episode Review

My review of last week's episode: World Enough and Time.

(This is a long review. You have been warned.)

Well, here we are. And I'm conflicted. On the one hand, The Doctor Falls is perhaps the clearest, most concise Steven Moffat finale that we've seen. But on the other, it's deeply unsatisfying.

Mostly because of Bill. Moffat wrote Bill Potts into a corner so dark that he couldn't break her out of it without a Deus ex machina, and that's a problem.

Doctor Who Series 10 - World Enough and Time - Episode Review

My review of the previous episode: The Eaters of Light.

Holy crap.

You know, there's a part of me that hates this type of episode. It's the first of a two-parter, and since this is Steven Moffat, I really doubt that he'll be able to pull off a safe landing, especially to a story as ambitious and twisty as this one. But boy, does he make me hope (and that's hard to resist).

Doctor Who Series 10 - The Pyramid at the End of the World - Episode Review

My review of the previous episode: Extremis.

[Sorry for the lateness: spent the last two weeks settling into my internship in Washington D.C. - in related news, keep an eye out for my writing at The Weekly Standard.]

If anyone was wondering which part of this episode Steven Moffat wrote, it should be pretty obvious when Peter Capaldi starts monologuing self-seriously about death. It's pure Heaven Sent. There's a kind of Moffaty gimmick at the center of The Pyramid at the End of the World, too: the concept of all-knowing aliens who can pinpoint world disasters and prevent them. On first viewing, I had rather a hard time coping with the idea of a benevolent invasion, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.

Doctor Who Series 10 - Extremis - Episode Review

My review of the previous episode: Oxygen.

Oh, Moffat.

Steven Moffat is one of the greatest visionaries in Doctor Who history. He’s written multiple classic episodes and pushed the boundaries of the show in ways that no one has before. But there's a reason "Moffaty" exists as an adjective. And Extremis is very Moffaty.

Doctor Who Series 10 - Oxygen - Episode Review

My review of the previous episode: Knock Knock.

Series 10 had been taking it pretty easy up till now. Slowly introducing us to Bill, dropping hints about what's inside the vault, giving the Doctor (and the show) a new lease on life. All of that changed with Oxygen, an episode heavy on plot, message, and thrills, complete with a game-changing twist in the final scene.

Doctor Who Series 10 - Knock Knock - Episode Review

My review of last week's episode: Thin Ice.

Knock knock...

...Who's there.

Bill’s TARDIS adventures don’t appear to have gone to her head: she’s back to her usual life, looking for a place to stay with a group of friends (or more accurately: a friend and a group of her friends). When the Doctor gets involved, Bill’s not happy about it, though why, or how strongly, she wants to isolate this part of her life isn’t quite clear.

Doctor Who Series 10 - Thin Ice - Episode Review

My review of the previous episode: Smile.

Thin Ice is just about everything I love about Doctor Who, from its compelling, evocative setting to its epic, spooky monster to its deft mixture of the serious and the silly. It's easily my favorite of this season, one of my favorite Capaldi episodes overall, and a welcome second installment from promising newbie Who writer, Sarah Dollard.

Bill and the Doctor arrive on the frozen Thames in 1814. When a street urchin steals the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor and Bill chase him out onto the ice, only to watch as the boy is sucked beneath the ice by mysterious green lights. Why? Well, it turns out a massive creature is sleeping beneath the Thames, devouring unwary Fair-goers and turning them into a super-powered fuel. A predatory aristocrat is promoting visitors to the Frost Fair to amp up production.

Doctor Who Series 10 - Smile - Episode Review

My review of the previous episode: The Pilot.

Bill and the Doctor arrive in the distant future, where a group of mood-sensitive robots have gone rogue and slaughtered the crew of a small human colony. The main thing Bill wants to know about the future: is it happy?

Doctor Who Series 10 - The Pilot - Episode Review

Basically anyone can tell you that I'm obsessed with Doctor Who, and have been since...roughly...last June. I tore through all of the rebooted show (2005 - now) last summer and fall, then dove into the Doctor Who Silmarillion: the vast expanse of Classic Who. I'm nearly finished with Tom Baker's seven-year run as the Doctor. I dressed as River Song for Halloween and special ordered jelly babies from Ireland for Christmas. Considering all of this, it's surprising that I let something as trivial as finals and internship paperwork get in the way of reviewing the show's new season, but...here we are.

Better late than never, right? That is certainly in the Doctor Who tradition.

One of the things I love about Doctor Who is that it renews itself so often. Every few years, we get a new leading man, and a completely new style. After ten years, the rebooted show is probably due a makeover, and that's what we get with The Pilot, a double entendre title which emphasizes both the show's soft reboot of itself, and references a plot point in the episode.

Sherlock - The Final Problem - Episode Review

My review of the previous episode: The Lying Detective.

Who is Sherlock Holmes? I don't mean Benedict Cumberbatch. I mean Sherlock Holmes. The deerstalker. 221B. The legend of the Great Detective. Who is Sherlock Holmes?

Arthur Conan Doyle wasn't particularly interested in telling us. When we meet Sherlock in A Study in Scarlet, we learn almost everything we need to know about him in his first appearance. He's charming, polite, and a brilliant detective. Beyond an atypical big brother and an unremarkable background pieced together from hints, Sherlock is without a history.

Obviously, in these postmodern times, we can't just leave it at that, so Sherlock sets itself the task of unraveling the mystery of Sherlock Holmes. This is the Great Detective's origin story.

Sherlock - The Lying Detective - Episode Review

My review of The Six Thatchers

Just when I thought Sherlock couldn't surprise me, it comes out with this. While The Lying Detective isn't quite to level of the show's highs, it corrects almost all the problems I had with the previous episode and turns the series back in a positive direction. Whether that will last is up for grabs, but I'm feeling optimistic.

Sherlock - The Six Thatchers - Episode Review

My review of the Christmas Special

The Six Thatchers is like six different stories at once. On the one hand, you have the teasing of the Moriarty revelation at the beginning, with Sherlock being a jerk to a bunch of civil servants (you know, as I write that out, it seems less annoying than it was - and it was quite annoying). Then we jump right back into the regular routine as Sherlock solves a series of cases. A dizzying montage climaxes with a rather unlikely murder case, which is notable only because it leads Sherlock to notice the theft of a plaster bust of Margaret Thatcher.

[Spoilers]

Sherlock - The Abominable Bride - Review

My review of the season 3 finale

Objectively speaking, The Abominable Bride is quite bad. It’s the sort of mess of fan service, self-indulgence, and petty delay which has become a hallmark of Sherlock since The Empty Hearse. But that’s not to say it isn’t enjoyable, in all its illogical absurdity.

The episode begins with a lightning recap of the first three seasons which reminds long-time viewers of a few series high points but does little to enlighten new fans. It then gives us a “what if” transition into an alternate universe. It’s 1895, post-Reichenbach, and Watson and Holmes are returning to 221B from a case. They’re just in time to meet Lestrade, who needs Holmes’s assistance on a murder.

It all began (he informs them) when the titular bride, Emelia Ricoletti, went mad and started taking potshots from her balcony at passersby, before blowing a hole in the back of her head. Later that evening, on his way to identify her corpse, her husband was stopped in the street by a creepy-looking woman in a wedding dress.

You can see where this is going. Emelia removes her veil and plugs her husband full of lead before evaporating into the mist. A series of similar murders crop up around the country, meaning Lestrade and Watson immediately think ghost rather than copycat murderer. Thankfully, Holmes is here to remind us several times ghosts don’t exist, and poetry is never true unless you’re an idiot. Hashtag the Enlightenment. Neil deGrasse Tyson would be proud.

Coroner Hooper (Louise Brealey with a stache) confirms that the Bride is most certainly dead, so it’s even more puzzling when Holmes and Watson are referred by Mycroft (satisfying canon with extreme girth), months later, to a wife who reports her husband, Sir Eustace Carmichael, is seeing the Bride. First of all, he receives orange pips in the mail, obviously a threat (Sherlockians will recognize the reference to The Five Orange Pips), and then begins to ramble on about seeing the Bride, who has come to exact revenge for some secret sin. When Holmes and Watson visit Sir Eustace, however, he denies the accusations, dismissing his wife’s story as female hysteria (hashtag misogyny).

Sherlock - His Last Vow - Caring is a Disadvantage

My review of last week's episode: The Sign of Three

[Originally posted at Longview]

After the highs of the first episode, and the lows of the second, I really wasn't sure how to approach His Last Vow. I shouldn't have worried. It's a really tightly scripted episode, with impeccable pacing and a bundle of surprises, if somewhat lacking in dramatic tension compared to last season's finale.There shall be spoilers.

Sherlock - The Sign of Three - Episode Review

My review of last week's episode: The Empty Hearse

Warning: spoiler-filled rant ahead.

And…apparently the game is not on. It’s tradition that the middle episode of each season of Sherlock will be the weakest, but The Sign of Three is possibly my least favorite episode of all three season so far. The tragedy is, I know Steve Thompson – the writer – can do better. While season one’s The Blind Banker was corny, season two's finale The Reichenbach Fall was excellent.

But let’s get down to it: the first thirty minutes are great. We’re thrown back into the swing of things, as Sherlock starts to deal with the idea of life without single John. “It changes people, marriage,” says Mrs. Hudson, widow of a double-murderer. The wedding itself starts about twenty minutes in—naturally we completely skip any proceedings inside the church and fast-forward to the reception. A group of amusing flashbacks show Sherlock organizing the wedding, warning off Mary’s ex-boyfriend and having a brief Iron-Man-3-esque personal cute kid. Sherlock has a conversation with Mycroft which, once again, emphasizes how much the wedding is going to change the Watson-Holmes relationship.

Then comes the speech, which I expected to last about five, maybe ten, minutes. My first mistake.

Sherlock - The Empty Hearse - Episode Review

(Originally posted at Longview.)

Okay, so yeah, I'm going to be talking about everything that happened. And what happened last season. If you want a spoiler free review...go elsewhere, and good luck. However, I will attempt to keep the third season spoilers above the break. If you’ve come here looking for a review pointing out some hitherto unnoticed aspect in a well-crafted, tightly edited essay, you’re looking in the wrong place—this is just my impression, over-long and rather self-indulgent. But fun to write.

So let's face it, we've been waiting two years to find out how Sherlock fell. Was it worth it?

The short answer is: yes.

The long answer? Well, it was always going to be a little anticlimactic to those who had spent any time immersed among the wildly varying internet fan theories. It turns out, my guess was pretty much completely correct…they didn't throw us a last-minute curve-ball, they didn't unveil a brilliant, unexpected solution, they aren’t smarter than us (we do, after all, outnumber them by a few million). The great thing is, though, that they are quite aware of that, and so decide to mess with our minds in other ways.

Doctor Who is a God - Science Fiction and the Worship of Man

[You know how sometimes you write dumb stuff when you're younger and then get over it? That's basically the definition of this piece. I'm keeping it up for human interest, but I'm an enormous Doctor Who fan now.]

I've come to two conclusions about Science Fiction. First, if there's any chance of enjoying things like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, one must embrace the inherent campiness of it. Chewbacca? Alien octopuses in robotic shells that have no emotion but hate? Yes, please. The other conclusion? Stay tuned.

Over the last few weeks, I've watched enough New Doctor Who episodes to get a pretty fair grasp of the show. I know not to call him Doctor Who, but The Doctor. I can hold my own in a conversation that throws around terms like "Cybermen" and "Daleks" and "Time Lords" and even (ugh) "Slitheens." 

For those of you who don't know - Doctor Who is about a 900-year-old shape-shifter who travels through space and time in a ship shaped like a 1950's police-box and saves various realities from malign species, accompanied by amusing, usually female sidekicks. He never dies, but regenerates every few years into another member of RADA. And yes, it's about as campy as it sounds, but there are moments when it transcends its genre.

Here's the thing: I really wanted to like this show. I really did. And I did like it, through the first season. It was season two that killed it for me. (I am compelled to add, however, that season 3 pulled me back into the fold, thanks mostly to Donna Noble.) After what I realized watching the second season, it can never be quite the same.