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

“That’s new!” And as a slogan for series seven, surely those words are appropriate enough. Despite revisiting familiar monsters and set-ups (Daleks, dinosaurs and the Western), Doctor Who continues to ring the changes here. Asylum of the Daleks introduced a companion like no other, and The Power of Three puts an intriguing new spin on the old alien invasion plot, as well as utilising a time-frame and a structure that are highly unusual. Superficially, this reads like Russell Textbook Davies -– it's all celebrity cameos, newscasters, and shots of international landmarks. All families, and homilies, and voiceovers, and underground bases, and tributes to the great human spirit. It’s a Greatest Hits package on an epic scale. Except it’s also infused with Moffatesque tropes: things like the throwaway Zygon incident (including cabbage cameo) and the Henry VIII adventure-as-punchline, not to mention the Doctor’s difficulty with life in the slow (i.e. ordinary) lane, the Doctor-Amelia relationship, and more gags than most sitcoms would settle for.

What’s curious about this Davies-Moffat hybrid, of course, is that despite offering the best of both worlds – a meeting of minds and eras – it’s written by neither showrunner. Instead, it’s Doctor Who’s own third way; the power of three produced by fusing two different dimensions and eras of the show. Chris Chibnall plays an absolute blinder, proving that he can rise to the challenge of almost any commission. But while Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was a title in search of an episode, this is an episode in search of a title. Cubed would have been a contender for the dullest story title ever committed to screen; thank God for the late rethink. But The Power of Three isn’t much better. It doesn’t really have anything much to do with the story: after all, this is about physical cubes, not a mathematical process of cubing (adding a line about block transfer computation might have covered it, but c’est la vie. It’s hardly as if the episode is light on fan service). Instead, The Power of Three is a title that barely makes sense unless you interpret it in the light of this episode’s place in the overall series – it’s The One Before The Ponds Leave, and so is meant to reinforce the team’s togetherness just before tragedy (presumably) strikes. It’s ironic that in a run of single-episode stories allegedly light on arc matter, we get an episode title that’s pretty much pure arc. Year of the Slow Invasion would have been my personal choice, but I expect any executive producer worth their salary would have had a heart attack in response to a title involving the word “Slow”. Saturday night prime-time telly can't afford to imply any sort of sluggishness.

I could grumble that Steven Berkoff is ludicrously wasted as the Shakri propagandist, and that the global attack is resolved quicker than champions can solve a Rubik’s cube. And how many different mythical evils are Gallifreyan children told about? This felt like lazy Who – a clichéd short-cut to narrative significance that hadn’t been earned. But such complaints miss the point, I suspect: this episode isn’t really about the Shakri. It isn’t even really about the cubes... and here’s hoping that they aren’t released as Character Options merchandise. A featureless black cube that does absolutely nothing: Worst. Toy. Ever. No, it’s character stuff all the way down from seven to zero, with Brian getting some great lines and some hilarious bits of business. In fact, this whole episode is hugely quotable, whether it’s chat about Yorkshire Puddings, or watering the plants, or “welcome back, lefty!”. The dialogue consistently sings out; it dances and zings without ever feeling overly wacky or forced.

Chris Chibnall gave Brian pretty much the strongest moment in Dinosaurs – sitting on the TARDIS threshold drinking tea and watching the world turn – and he’s at it again here. This time Brian’s everyman figure gives his blessing to Amy and Rory’s time-travelling exploits in a heart-warming sequence: “save every world you can find”. Brian’s Log is also comedy gold, as is his moment of recognition that Amy and Rory have changed outfits. It’s a great shame that presumably we’ll lose Brian along with the Ponds – Doctor Who feels stronger and more rounded when its main characters reach across generations, and like Wilf before him, Brian adds a light touch of complexity, and a sense of real groundedness.

Kate you-know-who Stewart is another well realized character, and Jemma Redgrave turns in a stellar performance even though she doesn’t always have a huge amount to work with. I’m not sure how convincing a reformed and scientifically-led UNIT actually is, mind you, but nevertheless Redgrave’s chaste kiss at the episode’s end is a delight. The Brigadier is honoured via Kate’s inclusion. If the mark of an impressive script is that it leaves its audience wanting more, then this definitely hit the mark for me: I was left wanting more of knockabout, resolute Brian and more of earnest, intelligent Kate.

In the past, Chris Chibnall may not always have won fans’ admiration. The fact that series one of Torchwood had to be filmed when it basically wasn’t 100% ready didn’t help his cause, and The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood also have their detractors, though Chibnall’s scripts there were hardly well served by last-minute budgeting issues and poor design choices. If there’s blame to be attributed then I suspect weak exec production should attract more commentary rather than Chibnall’s output alone. But writers make good targets for critique – executive production is rather more amorphous, more awkward to pin down. A screenplay… that’s probably easier to lambast. And more recently, Dinosaurs garnered brickbats for its treatment of Solomon. But again, shouldn’t stronger exec production have picked up on the Doctor’s behaviour as a problem?

At the risk of courting controversy, this episode – along with non-Who work such as United, and Torchwood’s Adrift – helps build a strong case for Chibnall as a writer who can deliver something that few other current Who writers can: a genuine diversity of story types. Like Davies, Chibnall can convincingly tug at the heart strings – effortlessly melding the ordinary and the fantastical – but he can also write trad gothic horror and big, frothy adventures, and kitchen sink realism. Sometimes fandom values writers who play the same tricks over and over again – isn’t this what shows us we’re dealing with a proper auteur? – and in turn devalues writers who can hit the brief, turn the commission into something startling, and deliver a true range of stories. Somehow we assume this makes a writer more anonymous; a gun for hire or a plodding dinosaur in the TV industry rather than a voice bursting uniquely off the page. But I think that Chris Chibnall’s authorship lies, increasingly, with his ability to take the best bits of Davies and Moffat and make them anew. Without ever feeling like pastiche or slavish imitation, The Power of Three has a maturity and an energy and a sheer fittingness. It takes Moffat’s original and, let’s face it, rather vague idea and fashions it into something electric. We're given Davies’s core vision plus Moffat’s comedic vitality plus Chibnall’s chameleonic virtue… yes, it really is Who raised to the power of three. This episode is an innovative, worthy addition to Doctor Who's ever-unfolding C.V.

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

North America's cultural influence is woven around Doctor Who like a double helix. The programme was born to a British public broadcaster already reliant on Hollywood for much of its output, and which had charged an iconoclast from Canada with the task of taking its native dramatic forms and reshaping them for a medium where the United States spent most and shouted loudest. Doctor Who could be characterised as the child of a secret encounter between the American adventure story and the classic serial. Selected American television westerns were thought by the BBC in the early 1960s to be unsophisticated material suitable for late afternoon viewing, although when under the purview of the old Children's Department, violent incidents were carefully removed. Doctor Who at first sought not to be the simple morality play British broadcasting creatives perhaps imagined the American western to be, though its influence was evident early on: Marco Polo had strong elements of the pioneer caravan form, and there is some irony in that The Gunfighters, an anti-western set in the American west using characters and situations borrowed from the genre, almost bookends the start of a period where the Doctor becomes much more like the nomadic cowboy than he was before, solving problems as an outsider rather than becoming embedded in his host society, and slipping away before that society can find him a role in its future.

Production office and subsequently fan mythology stated that The Gunfighters had shown that the western was not a genre Doctor Who did well; and yet for part of the 1970s, in the shadow of that 'Wagon Train to the stars', Star Trek, several Doctor Who stories could have been told in the western genre with minimal alterations beyond setting. Perhaps the reasons Doctor Who never visited the western after The Gunfighters were not only that the BBC wouldn't risk dressing a quarry or a Television Centre studio as a late-nineteenth century American town and invite unfavourable comparison with American film series, but that it would also draw attention to the programme's similarities to a genre from which it needed to differentiate itself for reasons of cultural identification (as a 'BBC' production) and of audience suspension of disbelief.

Once the programme was liberated from the multicamera studio, the western became a genre for Doctor Who to slay, once the time was right. In the 1990s, Philip Segal listed a remake of The Gunfighters among his possible scenarios for a Doctor Who series. When Russell T Davies drew up his guide to Doctor Who's format before production on the revived series began in 2004, his 'adventures in the human race' described potential space adventures in terms of human pioneers, language reminiscent of the American frontier.

It's taken seven series to reach the American west, and it is already one self-consciously filtered through European eyes and hands, in the shape of the western sets of Fort Bravo and Oasys near Almeria in Spain, known from the films of Sergio Leone and others. This might create expectations of a more cynical, unidealised depiction of the western setting, and to a limited extent these are met. It's to the credit of A Town Called Mercy that it acknowledges the moral uncertainties and ambivalences of the characters, something for which Dinosaurs on a Spaceship had little room.

A Town Called Mercy's setting combines preoccupations of the classical western, religious faith, social stability and the development of the community, with some self-aware historical contextualisation. The town of Mercy draws on a cultural commentator's view of the western as American nation-building device. In Isaac's words, it is five years after 'the War', presumably the American Civil War. In Mercy, people can find second chances; it encapsulates the new America of the frontier as imagined by later generations, seeking to create a better future by breaking from past divisions. Although these are never specified, making the town's preacher African-American is shorthand for one of them. It also distances A Town Called Mercy from a purely white vision of the United States, even if only at a token level. More successfully, the presence of a transgender horse satirises the heterosexual heroism of the traditional west and (through the name Susan) acknowledges that this is an old, old target, with its echoes of the song 'A Boy Named Sue'.

The preacher's prominence is important less for his ethnicity than for his presence as a marker of the role of religious belief in this story. The luckless Kahler-Mas is told in the pre-credits sequence to make peace with his gods, and Kahler-Jex later shows that his outlook on life and death is shaped by his religious conception of guilt and the afterlife. The Gunslinger, when challenged, says that the Kahler gods are no longer his; is this simply because his faith has been destroyed by the betrayal which turned him into a cyborg, or because faith is for those of the flesh, or because Jex had assumed the mantle of a creator-god? As the Gunslinger - Tek - regards himself as a 'monster', perhaps it is the latter, Jex having reduced Tek's rank in the order of creation.

If Mercy is an American utopia, a small town somehow surviving in the desert with little obvious means of support, its siege by the Gunslinger is a powerful image of later American dystopias. The Gunslinger's debt to RoboCop and the Terminator is obvious. His prosthetics are material expressions of the brutal combat experiences endured by Rambo and the friends of The Deer Hunter. In Doctor Who, this kind of war is to be imagined or viewed from the sidelines, but the screams of the unsuccessful victims of Jex's cyborg conversion programme are more than enough to help us. The Gunslinger's name and roboticness owe much to Yul Brynner's character in Westworld, but his poncho-like outfit recalls Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name from the Dollars Trilogy, as does the post-Civil War setting.

The Gunslinger suffers too because he has had another's dual nature imposed upon him: Jex's name and profession suggest Dr Henry Jekyll, from a gothic storytelling tradition. The American utopia has been made possible by his scientific expertise. Without Jex, Mercy would be low-tech even by the standards of 1870; it doesn't appear to be a railroad town. However, like Jekyll, Jex has been avoiding the truth about his own nature, and when this repressed side emerges it is sneering, supercilious, and callous. The result of his interference in Mercy is its isolation within what is in appearance and effect a magic circle.

A Town Called Mercy is an accomplished construction of histories and fictions received and revised, into which arrive the Doctor, Amy and Rory. The solitary Doctor of the first shot momentarily points to the debt the Doctor owes to the lone stranger of western myth, but Amy and Rory then appear, to remind us that the Doctor likes company, as the Daleks recognised two episodes ago. The Doctor begins this episode uncomfortably balanced again between the childlike and the childish, a Norman Wisdom or Eric Morecambe sure that he knows how to behave in a western saloon bar but unconcerned if his conduct is, after all, out of place. After two episodes where the Doctor's external insouciance seems to be vindicated, it is welcome to see him be made uncomfortable by his dilemma and have to work out what the right course of action is.

Isaac tells the Doctor that both aliens are good men who just forget that sometimes. Though there is no speech in which the Doctor agonises about the Time War, Jex's experiences and defence of his actions recall the trauma the Doctor shared with the audience in previous years. Jex might have decided where his debt was to be paid; so, perhaps, has the Doctor. Isaac's death temporarily removes the Doctor's outsider status; as marshal, he becomes part of Mercy and upholds justice against the temptation to be cruel and cowardly. This is all played successfully as credible character development. The lives and motives of human beings are depicted as focused on the smaller picture and shaped by fear of the unknown; no wonder the Doctor would prefer to deal with a Dalek any day. Matt Smith is always watchable but his Doctor is at his best when he gets to show his range. There is more room in this story for contemplation of the grey areas of existence, and that saving people isn't just about running around wisecracking amidst explosions. The sequence where the Doctor persuades Sean Benedict's Dockery (definitely a kinsman of Unforgiven's would-be gunman, the Schofield Kid) from a moral misjudgement is quieter than much of what we have seen this season, and the better for it. The episode as a whole is seemingly slower than Dinosaurs, but this is an illusion of pacing, and a further indicator that Saul Metzstein is an asset to Doctor Who's directing roster.

This is a good though problematic episode for Amy. Karen Gillan's performance is increasingly reminiscent of Elisabeth Sladen's Sarah, and her costume's leather jacket is reminiscent of Sarah's early outfits as well as the mature Sarah of The Sarah Jane Adventures. As Sarah often was, Amy is here the only female character with a substantial part. Mercy is a town of patriarchs: it has an Abraham (Garrick Hagon, fussily and methodically measuring light years from his youthful Ky) and an Isaac (Ben Browder, dirty in desert dust but clear-sighted and confident in his faith in his town's mission). Yet it is women who tell its story and foster identity. Gender stereotyping it may be, but this is what Amy successfully does in this story, recalling the Doctor to what she has learned from him, and overruling Rory's emphasis on expedient action. We could probably have done without the stirring music as Amy makes her 'we have to be better than him' speech, though.

Murray Gold seems to enjoy drawing from a musical tradition he's not yet exploited in Doctor Who, with guitar strings referencing Ennio Morricone's scores from the Dollars trilogy. Once inside Jex's spacecraft, there is a riff on 'Journey of the Sorcerer' too, perhaps a nod to the ship's Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy-like graphics. The Doctor's farewell theme borrows from earlier in Gold's corpus, for another tale of pioneer idealism undermined from within, The Doctor's Daughter. We may have been here before, but A Town Called Mercy is the more coherent of the two and more confident in its use of motifs.

This episode perpetuates the electric bulb motif seen in stories earlier this season. Within the context of the episode's plot, it suggests the fragility of Jex's electric lighting system and informs Jex that the Doctor has found his intact spacecraft. However, there are other fluctuations which are less easily explained in this way, which include one where Amy explains that she, Rory and the Doctor were on their way to Mexico and the Day of the Dead. The Doctor's face is sorrowful here; like Henry in Steven Moffat's oft-cited inspiration, The Time-Traveller's Wife, he might have foreknowledge of the end of the most important relationship in his life.

Toby Whithouse's writing has often relied upon awareness and exploration of the stories people tell themselves and each other to confirm their senses of self and get through life on a day-to-day basis. A Town Called Mercy is a good example of this. It is sustained by a unified visual sense, with strong cinematography and design. In its play with the history of places and people and the representation of that history in fiction, it is a great advance on 2010's The Vampires of Venice. In its blending of western and fairytale genres it restates Doctor Who's magpie nature and reinforces the programme's claim to be identity-myth itself while proving that it can be at home in the imagined American past and thus viable in the globalised present.

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

Amongst the best episodes of the last series of Doctor Who was for me Toby Whithouse's The God Complex, a beautifully made piece of television that was happy to steer the Doctor towards much darker places. Whithouse has history with Doctor Who, having also previously written School Reunion and The Vampires Of Venice. But with A Town Called Mercy, he's put together something very rare, a Doctor Who Western which actually works, the previous attempt in the shape of "The Gunfighters" is not an all together well regarded effort, this is a vastly superior episode.

And this is a slightly darker proposition, too. After the comparable lightness of Dinosaurs On A Spaceship, A Town Called Mercy pushes the Doctor to more uncomfortable emotional places than we've seen this series thus far. The cracks and strain on the Doctor are starting to show. Series 7 has demonstrated the comedy skills of Matt Smith extremely well and we also get to see his strengths when things go more serious. Smith is just terrific, his faux swagger as he asks for something strong (a cup of tea with the bag left in) while he nearly chokes on this toothpick is in wonderful contrast to his rage at Jex (him shouting at him to sit down nearly caused my eyebrows to fly off my forehead). Its also interesting to compare Jex and The Doctor, deep down they both seek the same thing.

The Doctor, being shown this reflection of himself can't cope and does something that may make some fans uncomfortable, it takes a simple statement of "this isn't how we roll" from Amy to bring The Doctor back to Earth and to remind us that The Doctor seeks his redemption through the actions of his friends. Gillan and Darvill are still at their best, with another unspecified period away from The Doctor our companions relationship seems once again to be on an even keel but if the episode has one major flaw its that Amy and Rory don't get a great deal to do, this very much being a tale of The Doctor's conflicted nature. This being said it does bring Amy Pond a little further forward than we've seen her the past week or two. It also exists pretty much as a standalone piece, even though there's the odd hint of undercurrent developing, Jex's comments on motherhood being both touching and ominous.

The production values ate absolutely terrific, Doctor Who has taken on three different genres this series so far, and each of them has looked outstanding. That's no small feat, and A Town Called Mercy looks the best of the lot so far. The wild west landscapes look appropriately sunblasted and desolate, A Town Called Mercy is the most cinematic of the three episodes we've seen this series to date.

As for the episode itself, Whithouse certainly knows his onions when it comes to westerns. He throws in a few more ingredients, too, with a sense of The Terminator in places, and a tip of the hat to the mighty Westworld in The Gunslinger with a healthy dose of humour chucked in, the horse who really prefers to be called Susan especially amusing. The early part of the episode, where he's having fun with the genre and exploring it, is arguably when A Town Called Mercy is at its strongest, as the episode progressed I found myself wondering why The Doctor didn't just use the TARDIS to solve the whole problem, this is addressed somewhat within the episode however its a little dissatisfying, much as in "The God Complex" Whithouse tends not to let a slightly shonky plot holes get in the way of the message he's trying to get across.

There is a small sense for me that there was a slightly better episode that could have been made out of the mix of ingredients here. That's not to say A Town Called Mercy is a bad piece of Saturday night telly, far from it. As it stands, though, A Town Called Mercy is a very good episode, with some excellent moments, all draped in utterly lush visuals, another success for the much vaunted "flexible format" of Doctor Who and another blockbuster delivered with confidence and appropriate Wild West swagger.

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Has the internet melted yet? Because Asylum of the Daleks may well be the greatest piece of Moffatesque misdirection that Doctor Who has ever enjoyed. “Every Dalek ever!” screamed the advance publicity, promising scale and spectacle and scope. And sure enough, we got all that. But the hype was just a smoke screen set up to protect the real heart of this episode, and its audacious, incredible use of one unexpected character. Rarely has a series opener been as memorable and as history-defining as this, at least in terms of Doctor Who’s overarching mythos. We’ll not see Asylum’s like again: this is a one-shot trick, introducing an important human character only to then mount a stunning, gobsmacking reveal. Almost an inversion of Rob Shearman’s Dalek in places, this time the difference between human and monster is explored from the other side. “Remember me,” the Doctor is told, and I’ve no doubt he will, along with millions of fans.

Asylum of the Daleks is testament to the production team’s impressive ambition, and Moffat’s desire to find new things to do with the Daleks. There’s plenty of life left in the old icons yet, whether it’s the fact they now have a Prime Minister and a Parliament (were all the different Daleks referred to as a ‘Coalition’ in any earlier drafts, I wonder?), as well as an innovative and brilliantly visual way of commandeering puppet humans. The zombie sequence is surprisingly nasty for contemporary Who, veering sharply into horror territory despite its lack of blood and gore.

Along with ringing the changes, Moffat’s script appears to blatantly ignore plot points from ‘Victory of the Daleks’. Though he’d already expounded the view that the Dalek Paradigm were an “officer class” (something that hardly makes much sense of red “drones”), for series seven the showrunner goes right ahead and reinstates popular Davies-era bronze models. In DWM 451, Moffat argues that this “isn’t a continuity error”, and of course he’s right. It’s no error. It’s a deliberate, conscious continuity blanking or resetting after ‘Victory’; a discontinuity aimed at recharging and revitalizing the pepperpot psychopaths. Sometimes ignoring Who’s continuity can enable a brilliant story possibility, or facilitate startling TV spectacle, and Asylum surely provides ammunition for that viewpoint.

After last year, I wasn’t at all surprised that Nick Hurran was allocated to a number of Moffat scripts. I can imagine Moffat watching a cut of The Girl Who Waited and muttering to himself “I’m having some of that!” (although my imagination is fairly warped, I’ll concede). And Hurran plus Daleks doesn’t disappoint; a number of sequences are incredibly tense. In directorial terms, everything just works, as the episode rockets along towards its devastating conclusion with plenty of visual panache.

There’s also some crafty word play – another hallmark of a gold-standard Moffat screenplay. Childhood jokes or mispronounciations of eggs-term-in-ate won't ever be seen in quite the same light after this. And there’s a characteristic mash-up of prior Moffat motifs (he really does seem to love writing a strange, transformative kind of quasi-fan fiction based on appropriating his own previous scripts). On this occasion, it’s back to ‘The Empty Child’/’The Doctor Dances’ for a nano-cloud, Skarosian remix of the nanogenes, mixed with an aspect of 'Let's Kill Hitler'. But on the all-round strength of this showing, if Moffat's ‘new’ ideas amount to shiny rearrangements of old ideas, then so be it.

Weak spots? I’m not sure there are very many, although with so much to cram in, Amy and Rory’s storyline seems curiously rushed, condensed to its essential plot beats. And Moffat’s “feisty” female characters all seem to speak in the same quickfire, gimmicky manner which grates ever so slightly to my ears. Whatever faults one might have attributed to Russell T. Davies’s series openers, he always sketched out convincing characters incredibly well. Even minor figures could take on a dense weight of realism. By contrast, many of Moffat’s characters carry an air of stylized unreality, something which I’d say has been true of Amy Pond in the past, and seems true yet again of the major new character here, thanks partly to things like the “chinboy” and “beaky” shtick.

Akin to ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ last year, this episode helps set up a host of questions, as well as cleverly integrating the “Doctor Who?” business into its events. Forget series five’s partial misfire, because Steven Moffat already has. This episode is the real 'Victory', thanks both to its Dalek depictions and its unprecedented contributions to Who's history. Did you think you’d ever see an introduction quite like this? Unexpected, unpredictable, and utterly, utterly brilliant. You can tick “Daleks” off the list; when is Steven Moffat going to write a proper, full-on Cyberman story?