Doctor Who - Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
Written by Chris Chibnall
Directed by Saul Metzstein
Broadcast on BBC One - 8 September 2012

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK preview of the episode.

It's impossible, when discussing a series placed in as many currents of criticism as Doctor Who, to isolate one's own impressions of an episode from the expectations and apprehensions which have been entangled in the threads of the internet. An episode written by Chris Chibnall raises particular concerns. Over the past few years, Chris Chibnall has come under attack for sexism (Torchwood's Cyberwoman especially), lack of moral compass (Malokeh's experimentation on sentient beings in Cold Blood, and the apparent endorsement of the Ood's slavery in Pond Life), inconsistent characterisation (Malokeh again, but also several Torchwood character arcs) and absence of a distinctive authorial voice. In such a context, Steven Moffat's recent praise for Chibnall's writing talent echoes Tony Blair's plea to a sceptical Labour Party that it must learn to love Peter Mandelson. For the leadership, Chibnall's involvement seems essential, but for many of the faithful his work undermines the foundations of Doctor Who.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, then, has considerable obstacles to overcome in the face of the entrenched attitudes of Chibnall's critics. Some overlook the essentially collaborative nature of television production and blame Chibnall for aspects over which he had no control, such as costume (controversial in both Cyberwoman and The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood). It's perhaps relevant that the amendments to the title sequence for this series include reverting to the 'Written by…' credit abandoned during The Gunfighters, an important qualification to the claims of the scriptwriter to the whole. For others, Chibnall is to blame for saddling productions with undeliverable concepts.

The title is the most stratospheric of high concepts. It obviously parodies Hollywood gimmickfest Snakes on a Plane (of which I know little), thereby courting one set of pop cultural expectations. These are met by the impressively cinematic variations in scale Saul Metzstein and his team realise, from the intimacy of the Ponds' front room, the claustrophobia of the spacecraft cockpits, to the warm firelight of a Welsh Africa and the sweep over a Southerndown Beach. The latter was a somewhat murky grey, but perhaps engine rooms are; and it matched the pterodactyls.

The other obvious appeal made by Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is to the perennial childhood obsession with dinosaurs. Furthermore, it's to a long-established representational tradition of the dinosaur. The dinosaurs in this episode are not the feathered proto-birds of some recent research, but the giant lizards of the One Million B.C. tradition and (to someone of Chibnall's generation) The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. They are large, threatening, relentless and predatory, with the exception of the golf-ball obsessed triceratops.

Dinosaur-related children's products seem largely to have been marketed at boys. In contrast to Asylum of the Daleks and the promise implicit in the series since Rose, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship seeks very much to be an adventure story for boys of all ages. For no clear reason except to parody A Good Man Goes to War, the Doctor assembles a 'gang', and here revels in being its leader. Rupert Graves's Riddell is full of barely controlled childlike appetites too; his facial expressions on telling the Doctor about the two disappointed dancers he was able to 'manage' by himself, and on anticipating the 'problem' he will investigate with the Doctor, are those of playground avarice rather than full-blooded lust. He's a character who points towards the debt dinosaur fiction owes to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century fiction, such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World; the casting of the latterday Lestrade is itself a metatextual reference.

The inclusion of Nefertiti brings with it vague associations with H. Rider Haggard's She, another tale of a lost civilization, and points to the allusions Doctor Who's Silurian and Sea Devil stories make to the entire Lost World genre, as brought out in The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood and reiterated here with the appearance on a screen of Richard Hope as Bleytal. The portrayal of Nefertiti's sexuality is troubling, though; she is introduced as more intoxicated by the Doctor's scent and general physicality than by the prospect of travelling with him. Matt Smith's Doctor has from his beginning drawn from a post-war tradition of British comedy performance and here he is a Kenneth Williams appalled by the attentions of Hattie Jacques in full matron garb. There is an unsophisticated smuttiness to the innuendo throughout the story which makes this viewer wince.

Nefertiti's more fruitful role in the story is to unsettle Amy and act as a harbinger of change. The Doctor might deny that Neffie and Riddell are the 'new us', but he has already been seen enjoying familiarising Neffie with the ways of the companion. It is Neffie who falls into the get captured/rescue pattern, though this is one twenty-first century Doctor Who has striven to avoid, or at least not to depict so obviously. Brian fulfils a similar function: the Doctor's response to his coming on board is to angrily reject the idea that he is a taxi service, but Chris Chibnall will have recalled the similar expostulation of the fourth Doctor close to the end of his tenure, suddenly surrounded by unexpected new companions. When the Doctor promises Amy that he will be around forever, the audience knows that forever, in their terms, only lasts three weeks. Those who remember The Sarah Jane Adventures's Death of the Doctor might also remember that the Doctor ultimately moves on from his human companions, whether he likes it or not.

One of the better character points in the episode is Rory's adoption of Doctor-like traits. He has pockets full of nursing supplies picked up on his travels, and tells untruths to make the difficult palatable to his companion - in this case, his father. There is perhaps a comment embedded about the Doctor's pose as the perpetual child: Rory can't afford that role and instead deploys quasi-Doctorish technology and wisdom, but for Brian he always will be someone for whom he needs to take responsibility. It is Brian who is the centre of the most evocative shot in the episode, his legs dangling from the sill of the TARDIS door over Earth, as through him the experienced TARDIS travellers have their senses of wonder reinforced or restored.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship reaches higher than it can manage, perhaps a dangerous thing for someone in mid-life who has only been out twice in eleven months to do, and as a result its joints lock. There are moments where the audience needs to care about Neffie and Riddell, but we have barely been introduced to them, and furthermore the episode does not seem to know the difference between suggesting character in broad strokes, and etching out stereotypes. As with The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, there is a curious submerged political agenda, here seeing Riddell and Neffie acting out fragments of a dialogue about colonialism, somehow triangulated with the activities of Solomon, but it's all too abbreviated to articulate itself successfully. The conclusion to the main plot appears to make the Doctor Solomon's murderer, and this is disquieting.

There could have been much more to like here, but Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is a confection which does not quite appeal to this normally sweet tooth. The Mitchell and Webb robots lack humour or the pathos which could have made them sympathetic or even entertaining; the importation of established comic personas was perhaps a mistake. The music recognised that this story was a chase narrative, with its similarity at times to Tom and Jerry; there was an emphasis on spectacle and running away from things not seen since the less-than-successful Aliens of London/World War Three. 'Siluria' as a concept is rather trite, with implications which could undermine Malcolm Hulke's concept for what we are stuck with calling homo reptilia. The script is at its most successful with its portrayal of the regulars and the hapless parent. Rory's 'I'm thirty-one!' reminded us just how much time has passed for the Ponds since the Doctor first became a tangible continuing presence in their lives. As his Torchwood work showed, Chibnall is probably at his best with more contained narratives. Nevertheless, he seems to have met Steven Moffat's brief, and it may well be that the problems this episode has are those of compressed storytelling in the age of the international audience, rather than those attached to a specific writer.

Doctor Who - Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
Written by Chris Chibnall
Directed by Saul Metzstein
Broadcast on BBC One - 8 September 2012

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK preview of the episode.

Like a lot of fans, when I heard the title of this episode, I said "really? Dinosaurs... on a spaceship? What is it actually called?" but no that was the title, so amid many raised eyebrows this episode bursts forth, and how, within minutes you've been whipped through multiple timezones and settings at such a dizzying pace that you feel slightly overwhelmed, but that's Doctor Who these days, keep up or turn over and watch The X Factor instead.

This may read as a criticism but it is not, with an episode this bonkers you need an appropriately bonkers start to hurl you straight in, the madness reflects the chaos that is The Doctor and the whirlwind that is his existence, but anyway on with the episode as The Doctor assembles a motley crew of an Egyptian queen, a big game hunter and the Ponds plus Dad to save a ship full of dinosaurs from being blown up by the Indian Space Agency. This is most definitely a story aimed at the family audience rather than "The Fans" but is that really a bad thing? It's hard to be cross with an episode that is just this much fun, the humour doesn't always hit, some of the 'Carry On' style jokes will have you groaning but the more subtle joking raised a laugh from me, in particular the lovely touches of the ship being powered by waves from an internal beach and the tantrum throwing useless robots, beautifully voiced by comedy duo Robert Webb and David Mitchell.

The tone is also helped along by the guest stars playing it absolutely straight, it would have been easy for them to mug at the camera, falling about and overacting but they're extremely believable, I particularly enjoyed Amy taking on the role of The Doctor with two 'companions' in Nefertiti and Riddell. Our regulars are on excellent form as always with Arthur Darvill really getting his teeth into the comedy aspects, Matt Smith is great, his face is mesmerizing to watch but also subtle, check out his little smirk when he goes unidentified by Solomon's scanner, however the stand out performance in the episode is that of Mark Williams as Rory's Dad Brian, I think we may have found a new Wilfred Mott in him, a man obsessed with golf who carries a trowel with him at all times who in the end of the episode just wants to sit quietly with a sandwich and a cup of tea and gaze down at the Earth, wonderful.

My fears that this episode was just using the Dinosaurs was just a gimmick were quickly allayed by the clever touch of having the ship be a Silurian ark invaded by a sneering villain in the shape of David Bradley's Solomon and here in lies some of the problem with this episode, while it's a ton of fun while our heroes are running about the ship, riding on very nicely realised dinosaurs once it gets down the core the episode becomes less interesting, Solomon is a pretty generic baddie, all full of threats and concern only for profit and the ending is a little pat with The Doctor casually blowing up his ship. Chris Chibnall has had a somewhat checkered history with Doctor Who, writing the good but not great "42" and the underwhelming "The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood", not to mention being largely responsible for the atrocious Torchwood series one. That being said I believe that this is his best work so far, a good, solid episode that's lots of fun but with some nice, deeper moments being mixed in, the little exchange between Amy and The Doctor sends hair standing up on your arms and gives us some heavy foreshadowing of what is to come and I'm ever so grateful he resisted the temptation of having someone say "I've had it with these *expletive deleted* dinosaurs on this *expletive deleted* spaceship!"

This is a story which is most reminiscent of episodes like "The Unicorn and The Wasp" and "The Lodger", an entertaining romp perhaps let down slightly by not having much of a plot to pin it all on to, that being said I enjoyed watching it tremendously and as a slice of Saturday night entertainment it can't be beat, I'm very much looking forward to watching it over again to pick up the little bits of dialogue I missed. In a series where Moffat promised us a blockbuster every week this episode certainly delivers.

In an episode all about multiple fears, and where the Doctor ponders whether young George suffers from pantophobia, it’s tempting to frame this review by referring to different phobias, both real and invented. With that in mind, perhaps this story will offer a cure for Gatissophobes still traumatised after Victory of the Daleks, though given its array of alarming lifts, nasty dolls, and recurrent darkness, it certainly won’t make comfortable viewing for phobophobes.

Gatiss has said that his brief was to make the contemporary scary, as per his excellent Crooked House. That, however, used portmanteau horror to give its present-day setting an overlaid creepiness, whereas this tale doesn’t have the luxury of different time periods and historically lingering spookiness to realise its threat. Instead, we jump straight into a repertoire of childhood anxieties, superbly realised via director Richard Clark’s use of shadows and complemented by a themed colour palette combining inky blues with sickly yellow-greens.

Since he is ostensibly a child of our time, I kept expecting George to have a remote-controlled Dalek or a collection of Character Options toys in his room: Bergerac exists in this universe, but not a television series called Doctor Who. Incorporating such visuals would have made this both more realistic and yet less real-seeming at the same time; a fiction pointing out its own fictional status. We are shown an Amy action figure, of sorts, in the form of her dolled-up version, but the episode resolutely avoids branded toys so that George’s collection of non-copyright-infringing, non-product-placement robots, dinosaurs, and themed wallpaper still end up looking like a strange, out-of-time BBC unreality. Despite refusing to permit any ‘meta’ appearances of Doctor Who toys, an episode centred on a scared child cannot resist referencing debates which have whirled through the series’ history: “may be… things on telly… scary stuff” should be blamed for George’s nervous state. It’s a knowing wink to the audience, but played lightly and without disrupting the story’s world.

This was one of the series six episodes produced by Sanne Wohlenberg, and though I’d not have a critical word to say about Marcus Wilson’s excellent work, this bears all the hallmarks of a very tightly, skilfully produced ep where key elements knit together well. Given the focus on paternity, and on Alex’s love for his son, Emma Cunniffe as Claire is rather underused, though Daniel Mays doesn’t put a foot wrong throughout and Andy Tiernan plays the sort of character his physiognomy seems doomed to enact – Purcell, a caricatured landlord, complete with Bernard the bulldog (surely a sly Quatermass reference from Gatiss).

Rituals are vital here, whether it’s switching lights on and off, putting fears away in the cupboard, or repeating phrases such as “please save me from the monsters”. Ritual holds and contains anxiety, and this theme is artfully reflected in Clark’s use of shots split up into angular sections; the housing estate which seems to box in its inhabitants; the serving hatch through which we observe Alex and the Doctor; doors and windows which frame various residents, and even the pile of bin bags which encloses Mrs Rossiter in a menacing reverse shot. Everything is constantly framed, bounded, and visually hemmed in, implying that characters may themselves have become shut in with what’s feared. And the episode’s editing also becomes almost ritualistic or incantatory at times, such as in the intercutting of slammed doors – wham, wham, wham! – on the Doctor, Amy and Rory.

Night Terrors poses a simple enough question: what can overcome a child’s fear? And the answer is an emotional one rather than a wodge of technobabble. Stories are one place of safety, such as ‘The Emperor Dalek’s New Clothes’ or the ‘Three Little Sontarans’. But even more powerful than storytelling is unconditional parental love: Alex is willing to embrace ‘his’ child, no matter what. This gives the tale an emphasis on human feeling that has always been at the heart of Who since its 2005 return, but it also feels a little off-kilter here. For one thing, why is the maternal so strongly written out of proceedings, as if Doctor Who’s natural constituency should involve focusing on a father-son relationship? And then there’s the matter of George’s alien identity as a cuckoo in the nest. Conveniently glossed over by the notion that he will adapt perfectly to life among humanity – i.e. he’s alien, but from now on, imperceptibly so – this seems all too rapidly and easily dealt with. Is Alex supposed to sit Claire down for a “by the way, dear, our sense of reality has been modified and we actually have an unearthly child” sort of chat on the sofa? Ironically for an episode about ritual, the ending feels rather ritualistic and by-the-numbers itself, observing the convention of contemporary Doctor Who that love and monsters are needed. 

Always visually compelling, this is generally atmospheric rather than downright scary, treading a fine line for the family audience. And as for those watching from behind the proverbial sofa, well, perhaps it’s just that Doctor Who’s viewers exhibit an unusually high level of cathisophobia.

Matt Hills is the author of Triumph of a Time Lord, and is currently reviewing Torchwood: Miracle Day for the Antenna blog