Doctor Who Series 4, Episode 8

I love the way SM layers his stories.  You see one of his episodes and the creative, twisty storytelling leaves other episodes in the dust in terms of what can be done with this format, how rich and unexpected it can be.  I love the Doctor and Donna being the “monsters” bursting into the little girl’s dreamworld, upsetting the viewer’s expectations of what is real right from the start.  I love repeating the encounter from the Doctor and Donna’s point of view, which produced the one true moment of horror for me in the episode – the Girl being the security camera, which the Doctor then inadvertently pained through his examination.  I really enjoyed the part of the story involving the Girl and Dr. Moon – suitably intense and mysterious, and I can’t wait to see what’s really going on and if my guesses are right.  I’m looking forward to the resolution of the Vashta Narada/the Girl/River Song, and how those mysteries interact.  The Doctor’s attempts to find out information being translated into a ringing phone and the TV screen – clever.  The Girl pressing all those buttons at the bottom of the remote that you never use trying to reach the Doctor, Donna kicking the door down, the Doctor’s happiness about the Shop, Donna figuring out that the Shop is always on the way out, i.e., near the exit – all fun stuff.  There were a lot of those small moments that I really enjoyed.  I also really appreciated the time they spent on Miss Evangelista’s death – death is so common on Who, I liked the acknowledgement of how horrible and just wrong it is, every time.  And while it seems a bit controversial, I really liked the Doctor trying to send Donna out of danger, because it made sense – why would he let Donna linger in a deathtrap if he could get her out of it?  I hate the stupidity of horror movies where people hang around waiting to be killed for no good reason.  Plus, DT’s performance when he saw Donna’s face, and realized she had been “saved,” not saved – man, that was powerful.  The Doctor really loves her.  That was hands down the big emotional moment of the episode for me, and it was a good one. 

But then, there was the rest of the episode.  I feel like the story was let down a lot by the execution of the central idea of the shadows being the threat.  The atavistic fear of the dark is a great threat to exploit and visually, it could have really rocked; but it just didn’t scare me at all in this story, mostly because the Doctor, Donna et al kept walking in and out of shadows for a good part of the episode and nothing much happened except when it was time for them to be scared.  The skeletons made it even less frightening, due to their plastic-y appearance.  And why would the shadows need to take over the spacesuit to chase the Doctor etc.?  There are shadows all over the library!  I really feel this is a good idea that was let down by the visual expression.  (I think this is similarly true of the Girl's home setting: according to either the commentary or the Confidential, SM described it in the script as relentlessly normal or something along those lines, which would have played up the creepiness of the moment when Dr. Moon told the Girl that her nightmares were the real world very well.  Instead, the set decorators made it sort of spacey and a little too futuristic to really make it feel like reality was crashing down with Dr. Moon's words -- it already looked a lot like what a computer would think would be a little girl's home.)  
 

Lack of suspense wasn't the main reason I was disappointed, though.  Blink is the only SM episode that actually scared me; GitF had that moment of the clockwork droid under the bed, and that was it, and the gas mask folks in TEC/TDD didn’t scare me at all.  So, SM episodes don’t have to frighten me for them to work, but they do have to have something else working – namely, pacing and character.  This episode, for all the purported scariness, felt slow; there are shadows all over the library, and the Vashta Narada apparently number in the “million million”, but they don’t really make much of a move for quite a long time.  Are they all around?  Could they be all around?  I know they’re any shadow, not every shadow, but why aren’t they chomping down until the Doctor figures out what they are?

The worst part for me, though, was the expedition characters.  I love ensembles, and one of Who’s biggest strengths, IMO, is quickly introducing and making the viewer care about a collection of characters – we may only know them for the space of an episode, but we care about who they are, what they want, whether they’ll survive or not.  The Impossible Planet is the gold standard for that, IMO.  And this is really bad compared to TIP and other episodes, which also contributed to the slow feeling.  We’ve got River Song, the jerk rich guy (wow, how original), the pretty dumb girl, and the other three – Proper Dave, Other Dave, and Anita.  And all we know about the other three is that Other Dave and Anita bully the poor dumb girl.  So not only have I not been given anything to know about anyone other than River Song, I’m actively disliking at least two members of the crew for laughing at the poor dumb girl.  Hey, you know what?  I couldn’t care less what happens to these folks.  Die or not – whatever.  This is really disappointing storytelling to me, and while I don’t want to extrapolate Who under SM from this one episode, I’ll be sad if we lose the richness of RTD’s ensemble characters in the future.  Plus, there’s a really weird thing going on with the almost unbelievably dumb girl.  We’re meant to feel sorry for her due to the way the others treat her, but then her death is in large part because she wanders off alone from the group, apparently never having seen a horror movie in the 51^st century.  Proper Dave, in contrast, gets it simply because he’s unlucky – he doesn’t do anything the rest of the group doesn’t do, unlike pathetic Miss Evangelista.  So – we’re supposed to feel sorry for Miss Evangelista, but she sort of dies because she’s Darwin Award level dumb, going through a door in a dangerous place alone for no reason.  Umm…what?  I really hope this is going somewhere in the second part, cause otherwise it looks like SM is kind of bullying this character himself.

Plus, and I hate to say it – I really didn’t like River Song.  I loved Nancy and Reinette, and I wanted to like River Song too -- if she’d been introduced as simply someone the Doctor met and was intrigued by, I think I would have.  But the way she was introduced – the smugness, the constant, grating, “I can’t tell you but I Totally Know Things, about which I will continually drop blatant hints” – I seriously, seriously wanted Donna to smack her.  The idea of a time traveler having a relationship with someone out of order isn’t original enough to make up for the way the character annoyed me – forget The Time Traveler’s Wife, I read this in Piers Anthony when I was 13.  Either talk or don’t, but geez, knock off the smirky “Yeah, I know everything ever about you and your personal life, but no spoilers!” b.s.  I really, really hope the explanation for “River Song” (what a name) is more clever than it appears to be.  This feels like forcing a character's importance, not letting the audience invest in her naturally. 

So, for me, a lot depends on part two of this story.  I hope the answers to the mysteries are satisfying; I hope the suspense is, err, a lot more suspenseful; and since I don’t really care and/or actively dislike the majority of the character introduced, I hope there’s a lot of development for the Girl, Dr. Moon, the Doctor and Donna.  That’s a bit of a faint hope re: Donna, as SM doesn’t appear interested in her, but you never know.  The first parts of two parters are usually the set-up, so I hope the next episode provides the fireworks, and that I’m making a much more positive review in a week.

I also have to mention, though, that this episode for all the good and the bad did give two of the cutest moments ever in the Confidential: DT acting out his scene in the TV with the young actress playing the Girl so she would have someone to react to, and DT putting off going to the set so he could win a hand in the card fest the group had going (but still be behind CT, as seen on their scoreboard).  OMG so cute!  Sorry, just had to get that out ;-).