Anyway, enough of The Beast Below.
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| +HAHA! IS FUNNY, YES? YOU USE SARCASM AND INNUENDO FOR SATIRICAL PURPOSES, YES? IS JOKE! HAHAHA! FUNNY JOKE!+ |
There's no denying the similarities, of course, but this time it's not a criticism. TBB was undoubtedly an episode that needed another draft (Moffat considers it his weakest script and notably refilmed half of it because he thought the original was so crap) so why shouldn't they remake it and get it right this time?
The Emojibots are far superior to the Smilers: they seem to have been built for a purpose beyond looking creepy to small children, their changing expressions aren't utterly baffling (how can a two-faced mask have three faces, anyway?) and they can actually harm people. They even have proper motivations, and the scenes with them being pleasant and friendly as well as ominous stalking predators of death give them an unsettling demeanor - I defy anyone real or fictional to look at Starship UK's robot overloads and not instantly twig they are pure evil on first sight.
Another improvement on Matt Smith's sophomore episode is that unlike the Eleventh Doctor shouting Sherlock-style deductions and conclusions at an audience who haven't had the slightest chance to spot the clues, this one has both Capaldi and Bill exploring and discussing their new landscape and coming to conclude answers at a rate the viewer can appreciate. While we do get Amy's gut instinct save the day and the Doctor's soul etc., it's undeniable that Bill gets the better episode. She continues the optimism that sums up her first appearance by looking at the world the Doctor offers and considering it something to have good dreams about, unlike her current life. She wants to see the future to know there are good days ahead rather than Rose's off-the-cuff suggestion, or the Doctor showing off to the newbie.
The Doctor's relationship with Bill is a vast improvement on that with Clara and definitely makes me sad we won't get to see him travel with more Non-Impossible Girls. He is slightly uncomfortable around the young woman, respecting her intelligence but not wanting to get too close to her, summed up in the brilliant scene where he gets her to stay out of trouble by keeping her giving directions on a wall-mounted map. She eventually decides to take a photo of the map with her phone then join the Doctor directly; and he lets slip that he expected her to do that sooner. It gives him the slightly trickster-mentory-tropes he needs to impress Bill, as well as ensuring his explanations actually make sense - no "explody-wody timey-wimy" will settle for Bill or the audience. Probably for the first time since the black and white days, I actually felt more knowledgeable after an episode as the Doctor compares the colonists' MO to that of viking raiders.
The opening half of the episode is everything Silence in the Library wasn't - again, our heroes explore an eerily-deserted locale where microscopic shadow swarms have reduced people to bones but here there isn't the same "punch in the face" tactics which demand we be utterly terrified when nothing happens in empty rooms. Instead we are allowed to let the unease rise as it becomes clear that there has been a massacre and, more frighteningly, that it only occurred a few hours before the Doctor and Bill turned up. That they then have to pretend not to be afraid to stay alive is a far more daunting task than um, counting the shadows or not blinking. I found for the first time watching this that I myself started to smile uncomfortably with the characters as they tried to grin their way to safety, as did my family. Impressive.
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| Yes. It's very impressive. We love it. We're happy. We don't want to die. |
Two problems, however, mar this story. The way the story starts, with its echoes of the infamous Twilight Zone adaption of It's A Good Life - a world where people must live in happiness or else be banished to a fate worse than death in a mysterious cornfield which, um, is pretty much what we get here - is ruined by the appearance of Goodthing, a character played by Mina Anwar. Now, she was good in The Thin Blue Line. And probably in The Bill. But ever since she's been playing gormless, sing-song-voiced morons in need of a slap. She was the malignant tumor of The Sarah Jane Adventures and while I am glad the empty-headed brain donor dies horribly in the pre-credit sequence, she manages to be hands-down the dumbest thing NuWho put on our screens since Lady Christina's cunning "art crime" in Planet of the Dead.
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| fig 1: Too Dumb To Live - actual footage |
See, Goodthing (a weird name that doesn't seem common even in this far distant future) has discovered the Emojibots are killing anyone who isn't happy. Now, for such a fundamental world-shattering thing like that to occur, you can probably forgive the character for not thinking clearly but what she does with this information is so stunningly moronic I don't even have words to hurl against the idiocy of it.
Learning that those outside the city are safe from the Emojibots, she immediately... calls everyone indoors into the killing zone, runs up to them and screams that everybody's dead, Dave, including your mummy who never loved you, etc, and you must smile. This, oddly enough, upsets the people she's talking to, and instantly makes them targets for the Emojibots. Perhaps if she'd said something like "smile if you want to live" or "the robots have gone mad" and THEN listed the death toll, she might have had some success. As it is, I'm almost tempted to pretend she was actually some kind of death-seeking anti-humanist who was deliberately betraying her kith and kin to the robots. But no, she's just a moron. Thank god she perishes.
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| The last survivors of mankind. Extinction suddenly seems so welcoming. |
Also turning up is Ralph "Almost as Gormless" Little who is probably more famous as the obnoxious biscuit-obsessed twat from Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet of Crisps who somehow got to bonk Sheridan Smith out of sheer passive aggression, but to me he will always be Ben Chatham from the Robin Hood episode Angel of Death where he discovers the most easily-cured biological warfare in the history of history itself. And then gets poisoned by it. While screaming all chavs must die and he has a degree.
That said, he does play his role of hot-tempered moron perfectly and he's representing someone not thinking things through rather than not thinking at all. His plan to destroy the Emojibot and take over the colony isn't actually stupid, just unnecessary and he's intelligent enough to listen to the Doctor once he gets more than "I'm sure I'll work something out" - so maybe Goodthing was also well-written and it was just the actress who ruined it all. Certainly the idea she has family who might miss her is the most far-fetched part of the ep.
The other issue is that there seems to have been a rather vast rewrite that doesn't quite sync up with what we've seen. From everything we'd been told about Smile, it would be about one of the first human colonies with an actual setting on a potential colony world. Yet, there are two suns, the name of that colony world NASA use is never mentioned and there are heavy implications that the human exodus to this planet is entirely down to the Solar Flares. The Doctor even claims they are thousands of years in the future.
So...why is mankind hiding out on one of its first colonies? Surely this place would be close to Earth and most probably already be full of well-established colonists not eager to take on a planet-full of refugees, and dramatically, it's like an apocalypse in Canberra forcing the people to live in Sydney. It's very close and surely already uninhabited. Unless something else happened to this planet.
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| Plot-holes make Bill cry. |
That said, it's a lot easier to retcon than Frank Cottrel-Bryce's previous episode In The Forest of The Night which you could just about get by until the trees vanish in front of everyone and somehow repair all the buildings they've destroyed and never ever get mentioned again. But even so, I liked that particular story even though there isn't much to say about it. It's another #malfunctioningtech episode which has been pretty much key to the series ever since Clara left, but if we can hold up seasons of bases under siege and Hammer Horror remakes up as awesome, why not this?
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| Yeah, doesn't really appeal to me, either. |
I was, however, more disappointed with the following installment of Whovians. They're clearly just not quite sure what to do with self-contained eps like this and Adam Richards crosses the line between "annoying camp fat bloke who is a fan" to "someone I'd hit IGNORE on GallifreyBase" as he starts ranting off conspiracy fanwank theories that are simply moronic.
The idea that Missy wants to kill the Saxon Master to create herself is exactly the sort of timey-wimy paradox Moffat is trying to avoid, and also ignores the fact that the last we saw of the Saxon Master was he was already dying, seemingly in a stroke-crippled body unable to talk let alone stopping himself turning into a blue skeleton. The Doctor locking either of them into a vault doesn't convince me, especially compared to the more creative prisons we've seen him use.
But then AR's quasi-Avatar bullshit that TARDISes are wild beings who have to be "broken" by Time Lords (which explains why the TARDIS works better in NuWho) was rightly rubbished by other panelists. What kind of sub-Lawrence Milesian bollocks was AR trying to pull? Didn't he miss the fact that the end of the episode has the TARDIS land in the wrong place, proving beyond all doubt it's not "broken"?
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| Taking no chances, Bill makes sure everyone knows where her G-spot is. |
That said, the other fans don't have the in-depth knowledge I'd expect. Peter Capaldi has worn his wedding ring ever since his first full episode but only now has anyone noticed and they think it's some kind of blooper? Rove's comparisons between the Vardi nanobots and Vashta Nerada would carry more weight if he could pronounce either of their names correctly, and the fact no one mentioned The Happiness Patrol once even though the Kandyman was pride of place in a youtube clipshow is almost as bizarre as someone ranting that the Doctor regenerating into a woman would be hard to explain to children. Um, don't you just point to Missy or General Ollistra (who regenerated from a bald old badass into the poor man's Dayna Mellanby on screen?). Like the Thirteenth Doctor's auditions, there is the feeling everyone involves has a lot of affection and respect for Doctor Who but no actual knowledge beyond the vaguest glance at wikipedia.
Which, given its constant "we are what you hardcore fans want" memes, is a bit weird.
Is there an emoji for that?
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| Adam Richards has entered the building. |
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