The Empty Child

Visually this reminded me of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the screen adaptation of the thirties comic books vision of the future: all barrage balloons, tractor beam rays and such like. The CGI was shoddy. I mean, come on you Brits, we produce computer games with better graphics than that! Don’t take offence, its just that I guess Hollywood has set my expectations too high, and the more backwards countries just can’t compete.

Now this is the first episode of this show I have watched, and it seemed odd to me to wait until the end to bring on the Doctor. Isn’t he meant to be the hero or something? Old and infirm, he quickly succumbed to being turned into one of those fly-people and he just came across as a throw away cameo actor: Captain Kirk he aint!

Which reminds me: It was neat to see homage to Star Trek, the TV show that kicked off the whole science fiction thing, in the naming one of the minor characters after Mr Spock. I just wish this Mr Spock, a time agent who worked for that pretty English Rose, had a less strong accent because I could not understand him (is he Australian?) and this made it hard to follow the plot.

Sure the whole thing was cheap fun, in a thrown together kind of way, but there were huge continuity problems. In one shot Rose and her assistant were in a big room, that looked like something out of Farscape, and in the next they stood outside one of those traditional blue phone box things: If this is British humour then I just don’t get it.

To sum up, this show is what you get if you mix up Sky Captain, Star Trek, The Fly, Monty Python, Farscape and Oliver Twist together: a mess! Well done the BBC for trying, even though you got it wrong at every turn.