The Empty Child

I have come to several conclusions about the new series. Firstly the two part stories are just going to disappoint. The Empty Child closely follows Aliens of London in being disappointingly bad despite the amount of potential it has. Both episodes had so much dramatic potential within the original idea for them but somewhere along the way it all becomes lost. The drama and possible tension, and scare factor, is replaced by needless humour, poorly scripted sequences, one dimensional characters and even worse characters who show some signs of being interesting are killed off or just written off.

My second conclusion is that Christopher Eccleston will constantly revert to the smiling idiot of earlier episodes, as scripted by Russell T.Davies, at every opportunity possible. Instead of showing some diversity in his performance and displaying emotions relevant to the situation he decides, instead (and probably at the request of Davies) to approach every scene with a great big grin smacked across his face. Why? It totally ruins the scene. When he could be curious, interested, worried, concerned and create a really good scene he instead decides to ruin it all by grinning. It’s totally annoying, childish and makes me feel that everyone involved with the production of this series clearly feels that this is a children’s show instead of a family show. It all strikes of dumbing down and approaching it all smiling, like those constantly smiling children’s television presenters, so the little kiddies don’t get frightened! I’m sorry but its what you tune in for, isn’t it?

And that leads me onto another point. Apparently cuts have been made to this episode as producers felt it was just too horrible and scary for young viewers. Well there wasn’t anything scary. Nothing. It was all ruined by a lame script, duff performances and awful special effects. Anything that may have been remotely scary now comes across as cringe television. We were promised a scary episode and I feel utterly let down, again. But will the second part, as with Aliens of London/World War Three, manage to turn things around?

Yet more criticisms I’m afraid. Dreadful, awful, terrible, cringe-worthy special effects. There was nothing remotely good about them. They looked totally fake and computer generated, they just didn’t feel real at all. In every review I’ve done so far I’ve moaned about the lack of believable special effects and so my rant continues. If you are going to do an episode that heavily relies on special effects, and this one did in the air-raid sequences, then the effects have to look real. You’re audience has to believe them otherwise they won’t engage, or believe, in what’s happening. Now at this point people will moan about budget restraints. Well Battlestar Galactica manages to have excellent, and believable (!), special effects on a very limited budget, so why can’t Doctor Who? And as I’ve said before if you can’t have good special effects, as the new series quiet clearly can’t, then have episodes which are driven by storylines/plots and will carry much better on screen than those heavily reliant on showing the special effects which producers seem to think are brilliant. I really do think that the new series needs to return to Doctor Who’s grass routes of episodes focused on the plot, but that’s just my opinion.

The script in this episode was bad throughout, there were one or two good bits, but for the main part it was dreadful. The flirting sequences between Jack & Rose were extremely cringe-worthy. What was the write thinking off? Surely he could have come up with better scenes than that? However, Jack briefly flirting with the RAF person was quite good. The Doctor moaning to the cat about companions who wonder off was good and Nancy was good, though that actually maybe because the actresses manages to turn a awful script into a good performance. Jack is a good character but suffers from poor scripting. The episode it self once again has too much humour, or maybe just bad jokes. “What am I going to arrest you for, starving?”. A terrible, childish joke which one expects to see in a CBBC drama not a Saturday night family show.

How long did that air raid last for? Surely air raids didn’t last that long? If they did then the bombers must have come in waves of attack instead of the continuous attack that seemed to be happening on screen. The attack seemed to last for a long time and one’s left wondering what had happened to the RAF. Why weren’t they defending London? It just seemed ludicrous that the Germans would launch a raid lasting that long because A) Fuel would be limited B) It’s night time so poor vision would be a problem C) British Fighters would have more time to attack and destroy the enemy.

Richard Willson is good as Doctor Constaine but he’s killed off too early. Why couldn’t he have survived into the second part? What’s the point of killing off a character played by a talented actor after only minutes of screen time. He seemed a very promising character but instead the writer just kills him off.

However, the war time setting is a good one but I think that it would have benefited from a better storyline, or just a better script. The idea of Time Agents protecting and guarding time after the destruction of the Time Lords is an interesting concept. Hardly original though, is it? Didn’t the books set up a similar scenario after they wiped out Gallifrey. It slightly feels that the series are taking events that happened in the books and then using them in the television series, claiming their original ideas, because so few have read the books. Seeing as the books have continued Doctor Who during the many years it spend in the wilderness I think a little more respect should be given to the book range.

Captain Jack looks set to be an interesting and dynamic edition to the Tardis crew, if he gets better scripts, and hopefully his bisexuality won’t be ignored. It’s the first time Doctor Who has tackled sexuality and I hope they don’t back out from fear of critics and the Mary Whitehouse’s (RIP) cronies who watch the airwaves and complain about anything that doesn’t conform to their rather narrow-minded view of life.

Marks out of 10? On first viewing it has to be 4/10.