Well, the new season of Dr Who premiered
last night, complete with new Doctor Peter Capaldi. The verdict at our house?
Overall, a resounding “meh”.
Baby Duck thought it was great, but his
logic works like this: I love Dr Who.
This was Dr Who. Therefore I loved it.
The Carnivore, about halfway through the
episode, said: “If this was my first ever episode of Dr Who, I’d never watch it
again.” Ouch.
I’m keeping an open mind about Peter
Capaldi. He spent a lot of this first episode dazed and demented from his
regeneration, so we don’t have a clear handle yet on how he’s going to play the
role. There were some amusing one-liners and a great rant that give me hope I
may one day come to accept the loss of Matt Smith (sob).
But the writers did him no favours, with a
pretty ho-hum episode. It started off quite promising, with the Tardis arriving
in Victorian London inside a time-travelling T-rex, which then chucked it up
into the Thames.
Cool! You can’t get a much more dramatic
entry than that. Plus, what’s not to love about a dinosaur in Victorian London?
I was intrigued to see where they were going with this.
Sadly, the answer was “nowhere”. The
dinosaur played no more part in a story that dragged its way through many
not-very-exciting conversations to arrive at last at a mildly interesting
cyborg plot.
The whole dinosaur thing reminded me very
much of how the advice to “start your story with action” is sometimes
misinterpreted by beginning writers. It can’t just be action for its own sake,
and it mustn’t be action that has nothing
to do with the bulk of the story which follows. No high speed car chases
that turn out to be dreams, or murder scenes which are actually something being
watched on TV by the main character.
No dinosaurs which have nothing to do with
the rest of the plot.
The writers of Dr Who are definitely not
beginners, which makes it all the more surprising. Let’s hope the rest of the
season only has surprises of the good kind.
Did you watch it? What did you think?
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