I didn’t expect much from this based on the trailer, but thoroughly enjoyed it. Best Monster Of The Week episode for ages!
Some great lines:
“Every lonely monster needs a companion.”
“Ignorance is Carlisle.”: Humph! I lived in Carlisle for three years, and really liked the place!
And it looks like Clara is finally getting along with Sexy!
I really enjoyed this one too. Actually genuinely creepy in parts, bet the youngsters aren’t sleeping well tonight. Which is just as it should be.
I liked the companion/assistant joke.
It was… OK. It started better than it ended.
I think that Clara is still enjoying the adventure of travelling with the Doctor, but I don’t think she trusts him at all. Probably with good reason.
He’s more interested in the mystery surrounding her than looking out for her best interests.
While the same could be said for other companions, she’s the first who has seen just how clinical he can be this early on.
A blue crystal “All the way from Metabelis-3” that enhances psychic abilities. Nice shout-out to the original series, even if it was originally pronounced met-a-BEEL-is-3.
And the bit of dialogue between the psychic and the Doctor: “Will it hurt.” “No, not really, well probably…a lot”, was that a deliberate homage to dialogue in “the Doctor’s Wife” or did the writer just brazenly steal it?
But apart from that one re-used line, I enjoyed that quite a bit. Compact, creepy and some real tension. Liked Clara’s speech about being a “phantom” to the Doctor - somebody who’s been “dead for a billion years” to him. That’s an interesting way for a companion character to have (as well as obliquely reference the mystery surrounding her.)
Also, can’t wait until next week’s episode. I have a particular fondness for the last episode of “the Invasion of Time”, “Logopolis” and “Castrovalva” - the three serials that depicted the deeper interiors of the TARDIS.
It’s beginning to seem that the Tardis’ attitude is simply reflecting the Doctor’s feelings. He’s distrustful of Clara.
I liked most of the episode until the end. They made such a big deal that it was almost suicidal for the Tardis to go into the Time Bubble. Then the Doctor takes it back in again on a whim to save the monster guy. You can’t have it both ways. Rescuing the woman time traveler nearly cost the Doctor his life. So what the hell, lets jump back in again? On an impulse?
I really saw the difference between 10 and this Doctor. 10 would have gone in to a long speech about how much he loved humanity when Clara asked him if all people were ghosts. This Doctor practically acknowledged that people were just dead reflections in time. A really harsh Doctor.
But of curse they aren’t consistent. The Doctor does nearly die (again) to save just one human. Just like he did for Wilf in *The End of Time. *
This is the first episode I’ve really loved this season. That was great.
I always love it when Doctor Who stories change direction mid-stream and end up somewhere you could never have predicted during the first 10 minutes, and this did that really well. Started out as a moody 1970’s period-piece ghost story and ended up a tale of of pan-dimensional monster love, by way of universe-hopping rescue adventure and an existential tour of the history of the earth.
The 70’s setting was really well done, and reminded me - in a really nice way - of both the Pertwee era (the scientific Doctor dealing in weird phenomena, and his companion - I mean, assistant) and the gothic horror era of the Tom Baker years, especially stuff like “Image of the Fendahl”. The actress playing the empathic woman was fantastic.
I still feel Clara is a bit undefined - there’s not really much to her yet, outside of the central mystery of who she is. But I did love the scenes of her and the TARDIS working together to fly in and rescue the Doctor, especially as it led to this exchange:
TARDIS interface: “I am programmed to select the image of a person you esteem. Of several billion such images in my databanks , this one best meets the criterion.”
Clara: “Oh you are a cow, I knew it!”
My son was shouting “Be careful! You accidentally killed a psychic with that crystal once!”
It was the perfect allusion to old Who. You didn’t need to know anything about “The Green Death” or “Planet of the Spiders” to enjoy the episode. But, if you know the history of that piece of rock, it makes everything seem so much richer.
What’s funny is that the original episodes about Metebilis 3 aired the same year this episode was set.
She was even dressed not unlike Sarah Jane Smith.
Yes.
No, he jumped back in to rescue a person. Humans might be the Doctor’s favorite aliens but he sees other species as people just as much as he sees humans as people. He wasn’t jumping back in to save a monster, he was jumping back in to save a man trying to reunite with his girlfriend/wife/whatever.
I also liked the use of the TARDIS to get pictures of the “ghost” over billions of years of time - we don’t see time travel used for research very often.
Did anyone else think that the scientist looked a bit young to be a WWII veteran haunted by dark memories, in 1974?
Dougray Scott is 47. Lets generously scale him up to 50. That would make him 21 in 1945.
You may be right.
There were people fighting and dying in WWII as young as 15 (usually via lying about their age to enlist). A lot of war was waged by people 18-20. Sure, on the young side but plausible.
Fair enough. I thought the guy looked 40-45, but as the actor is 47, I can accept that the character was about that age, and that that fits the WWII background.
Two plot holes I noticed;
The major states that there aren’t any wells they can find on the property, even on the oldest maps. I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure that people in the 16th century still needed to drink water now and then.
It’s made clear that the “ghost” is frozen in the same pose every time she’s photographed because time is flowing at a much slower rate for her than on Earth - and yet, as soon as the Doctor enters the pocket universe, events there apparently start transpiring in real time, such that he spends several minutes there and comes back several minutes later as opposed to half past the heat-death of the universe.
Overall, though, it was an enjoyable MOTW episode (not as good as last week’s, but still good), and it reinforced my belief that the TARDIS is mad at Clara for calling her a snogbox.
I think the psychic portal somehow brings the two different time flows into a sort of synch while it’s open. Remember all the clocks around Emma, and how some are going forward and some backward? It’s a “psychochronograph” which implies something timey-whimey.
If this episode had been as underwhelming as “The Rings of Akhaten,” I was going to start wondering why the heck this Neil Cross fellow had been invited to join the party. Happily, this one worked out pretty well for me. I officially grant him permission to write more episodes. (He will no doubt be very pleased).
Over on Gallifrey there’s a long thread about The Doctor mispronouncing Metabelis several times. It was apparently pronounced differently in the classic episodes.
Perhaps it was deliberate? Steven Moffat is a big classic Who fan. He would have caught an error like this. A clue perhaps? <shrug> I don’t really know.
The Tardis Umbrella stand is another classic reference. Some seem to think its odd the Doctor can’t recall where it is.
Just passing this along. My classic Who knowledge is minimal. I never saw an episode with a Tardis umbrella stand or a Metabelis crystal.
Behind the scenes of Hide.
The production team called the monster the Crooked Man.