Dinosaurs On A Spaceship

I wanted to love this episode.  I really, seriously did.  Dinosaurs on a spaceship is the most perfect concept you could put in this show.  But the execution is just awful, and I'm finding myself very sadly having a much more Hobbesian view of things when I wanted desperately to be as awed by the ideas as Calvin.

Okay, so here's what happens in this episode: in 1334 BC, the Doctor saves Ancient Egypt from destruction, and then impulsively brings Queen Nefertiti along with him.  Meanwhile, a space ark launched by the Silurians millions of years ago is boarded by a pirate in 2367 AD who ruthlessly murders all the Silurians with his cheap robots, then finds he can't pilot the ship and it's returning to Earth. The ISA, presumably the India Space Agency but in practice the 24th century equivalent to UNIT, calls the Doctor in to solve the problem before they're forced to destroy it with missiles.  After getting instructions from the ISA, he then picks up Edwardian hunter Riddell for some reason.  Then he picks up Amy and Rory... along with Rory's dad by accident.

So, to sum up, this episode includes the following:

• Dinosuars on a spaceship
• A Silurian space ark
• A psychotic space pirate who commits genocide against said Silurians
• A pair of Douglas Adams-ish robots
• A successor to UNIT
• Queen Nefertiti
• A Great White Hunter
• Amy and Rory getting picked up again since they aren't regularly traveling with the Doctor.
• Rory's dad.

That's too many concepts for 90 minutes.  In 45, nothing works properly.

Well, except the dinosaurs on a spaceship.  It would have been nice if more had been done with that, but they work well enough.

Let's start with Nefertiti, since that's the one that really irks me.  She's all flirty, first with the Doctor, then with Riddell.  That, actually, is pretty much her entire characterization.  She's flirty and she's a Queen, so she has a power thing going.  She barely has any lines in the story, and has no function whatsoever until the climax, at which point she is captured by the villain for the final crisis.  She then waits around until the Doctor arrives to save her, then finally decides to save herself.  At the end, she goes off to be with Riddell for some reason.

It's a sloppily-detailed, half-formed characterization for a character who, frankly, could have been cut from the story entirely.  That would be bad enough without the moral problem, but this is a family show.  See, she clearly identifies herself as the wife of Amunhotep.  It's part of how she defines herself.  However, she tries to seduce the Doctor, then goes off to be with another guy at the end.  But that's okay, see, because she thinks her husband is boring.  I know they're much cheekier these days, but playing off infidelity as nothing more than a joke is just offensive.

But then there's the fact that she's Nefertiti.  One of the great historical icons.  And Chibnall gets nothing right.  The few details we do get about her are completely wrong.  This is one of the most fascinating figures of ancient history, and Chibnall can't get the three things he does say about her right.

Nefertiti and her husband, Amunhotep IV, led the Aten cult, a group of Egyptians who believed there was only one god, Aten, the disk of the sun.  In 1348 (give or take a year), Amunhotep changed his named to Akhenaten, still the name he's most commonly known by.  He and Nefertiti reformed the entire Egyptian culture, changing the Pantheon, the Capital city, even the style of art.  And they created the first monotheistic state religion, and were members of one of the first two monotheistic religions to ever exist, alongside Judaism.

Nefertiti had an unprecedented level of power for a queen, being nearly a co-regent with her husband.   She also deeply loved Akhenaten.  Then, in the 12th year of his reign, 1340(ish), she simply disappears.  After this, things get fuzzy, but at about the same time, a mysterious figure named Smenkhare appears and becomes Akhenaten's coregent, then Pharaoh after his death a few years later.  There may also have been a Queen named Neferneferuaten somewhere in there.  Those two may have been Nefertiti herself under different names, or maybe just the second one was.  Or maybe neither, and she died in 1340.  But the idea that she was both is the popular theory amongst amateurs like me.

Changing the state religion, unfortunately, drew the ire of the old priests, who had lost much of their power.  They took advantage of Akhenaten's preoccupation with his religion, and ensured that the Egyptian kingdom fell apart.  There was lots of intrigue and power struggling.

Eventually, the priests quietly managed to get back their power, and once Akhenaten's son (probably his, anyway) Tutankhaten, later Tutankamun, popularly King "Tut", came to power as a kid, they got him to return the throne to the old capital and restore the old gods.  Two pharaohs further down the line, orders were given to have the entire period erased from history so nothing like it could ever happen again.  Bits of the period resurface, but details are sketchy.  What we do have, however, is one of the most dramatic periods of ancient Egyptian history, and at the center, Nefertiti.

So if you're going to put her in your story, you should probably put her in a story that actually has enough time to give her some dues.  But even if you're not, you could at least get something right.  The Doctor picks her up in 1334, at which point Akhenaten was either dead or dying.  If she was alive, she was about to become sole ruler of Egypt (or already was).  Also, she had at least two living daughters (who later became Tutankhamun's wife) and possibly four.  So leaving her to abandon her post and her children with no motivation whatsoever is hard to take.

And she's bored with her husband?  The guy who tried to turn his world upside-down?  The guy she clearly loved deeply from every depiction we have of them?  And above all, she calls him Amunhotep.  13 years after he changed his name.  I mean, that one's just weird.  Anyone who's heard of him knows he's Akhenaten.  Even the 15 seconds of research required to come up with the right century and her husband's name would have turned that up.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti play with their daughters.

This is largely nit-picking, but it's an example of how sloppy the whole thing is.  Nefertiti is jammed into the story, but she's done so utterly wrong she fails as a representation of the real person (actually a bit of an insult, really, to one of the great women of ancient history).  That would be totally forgivable if it was a memorable characterization, but it's a pretty lousy one.  And even then, there might be something to be said for her mere presence and name if she actually accomplished something in the story, but her only actual purpose is to get captured by the villain for the sake of the climax.

This sloppiness pervades the entire script.  Like the way the Doctor mentions that they can't use the transports at one point because they shorted out, but they inexplicably work (multiple times) for the climax.

The sexual politics are just obnoxious.  Look, I have nothing against feminism.  I'm about as feminist as a male American conservative gets.  One of the things I love so much about this show is the presence of characters like Barbara Wright and Sarah Jane Smith being strong, independent, powerful women long before it was popular.  But the presentation here is terrible.  Riddell and Solomon are totally sexist, and Nefertiti and Amy are constantly putting their equality in their faces.  Riddell and Solomon become strawmen sexists, and frankly, Nefertiti and Amy come off like the sorts of characters Kate Beaton was satirizing in her Strong Female Characters comic.  Every time it comes up, it's cringe-inducing.

And there's Rory's dad.  Mark Williams is perfect, and the character gets a couple of nice moments, but when you bring in a previously-unseen relative, you should really make their relationship the emotional center of the story, or at least have a decent emotional arc.  He's a credible depiction of what you'd expect Rory's dad to be like, but he has nothing really to do.  Like Nefertiti, he's just sort of grafted on without any real thought to how he impacts the story (or doesn't).  It's a waste of a nice performance.

Riddell works better than the other two on the sheer fact that the Great White Hunter is such a brilliant trope it's almost impossible to screw up, and such a simple one you can just let it play in the background.  Even in otherwise weak adventures, that character adds tremendous fun to a story.  Think Connery's Allan Quartermain in the otherwise lame League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or (my favorite variation of the trope) Ernie Hudson as "your Great White Hunter... who happens to be black" in the extremely uneven Congo.  And Rupert Graves certainly plays it with all the charisma you'd expect.  He's got a particularly great moment where he calmly insists he can take down an ankylosaur with his pocketknife.  But far too much of his screentime is spent belittling the women long after they've proven their competence - not to mention long after the joke wears thin.

With so many things fighting for screen time (and losing), it's not much surprise that the actual story, which isn't bad (if a bit cliche), doesn't have time to actually develop.  To be honest, it feels like we missed all the good parts and just stumbled into some of the less interesting parts of the ending.

The bit with the guns at the end is particularly poor.  Riddell has the villain dead to rights, but he's stopped because he's using a gun.  A stun gun.  It seems like it's just the usual New Who anti-gun thing, but here's the thing: not only is it non-fatal, but it would solve the problem.  Immediately.  There is literally no reason in the Time-Space continuum not to just shoot him with the tranq gun.  There's nothing stopping him.  He's a Great White Hunter, villain in his sights, at point blank range.  Well, okay, there's the robots.  But so far as I can tell, they won't do anything that the villain doesn't tell them to do.  Once he's dead, do they do anything?  It's just a poorly thought-through showdown.

And it's not like the Doctor has a problem killing the guy.  He's pretty cold-blooded about it, actually.  So what's with the big anti-gun thing?

Speaking of which, though, the robots are great.  In the Douglas Adams tradition, they're the lower-quality models, meaning instead of being great kill bots, they're barely adequate kill bots who spend all their time bickering with each other and their victims.  It's a delightful bit that tragically lacks a punchline, but still represents one of the few things in the story that actually works.

As for the Doctor, he's... fine.  Matt Smith is great as ever, but Chibnall seriously overdoes the quirks.  The running joke about the Doctor being parts of music recordings is really tiresome by now.  His interference in creating minor parts of history is charming in small doses, but gets annoying after a while.  Note to Chibnall: quirks are charming.  QUIRKS are incredibly off-putting.

Amy spends too much time bickering with Riddell, but otherwise, she's good.  It's fun to see how well she handles the situations she's handed.  She really is a pro at this stuff.  She also gets a short but effective conversation with the Doctor about the way he picks them up and then disappears for months at a time, and how she can't stand to have to hold down a job in the meantime.  Rory is similarly fine but unspectacular.  All of his lines and scenes are good, but he's not around much.

There are moments where it comes together and works.

Rory: "Where are we?"
The Doctor: [sticks his tongue out] "Well, it's not Earth.  Doesn't taste right.  Too metallic."

 But on the whole, it's a typical Chibnall story: good ideas, not-so-good execution.

RATING:

* * 

SIDENOTES

•  Why didn't Rory's dad meet the Doctor at his son's wedding?  Was he not there?  Shouldn't this have been addressed?
• The implication with the ICS is that India is the dominant world superpower in the 24th century.  Yet another good concept that's completely trampled by its brevity.  I totally missed that until a commenter mentioned the agency's name.
• So, given the presence of the Ankylosaurs, Triceratops, T-Rex, and overgrown Velocoraptors, the Silurians must have launched their ship in the late Cretaceous.  This is extremely strange, as every prior appearance suggested they came from other time periods. 
• In The Silurians, they went in hibernation when they thought the Earth capturing the moon would cause massive geologic upheavals.  We can set aside that the current scientific consensus is that the moon formed from a collision between the earth a Mars-sized object (a theory with massive problems of its own that will probably be replaced by a better one, as such holey theories generally are), which is forgivable since I believe the capture theory was the consensus in 1970.  The point is, if that was the case, they would have existed around 4.5 billion years ago, which is problematic for reasons I probably don't need to mention.

But here's a pretty picture of it by the great Chesley Bonestall.

•  However, the title of the story suggests they existed around 430 million years ago.  This doesn't work since terrestrial life was limited to coastal plant life.  At any rate, the Doctor later claims the name is a misnomer...
• ... in The Sea Devils, where he says they should more rightly be called Eocenes.  This comes much closer to making sense given who the Silurians are, placing them between 56 and 34 million years old.  If they truly ruled the world, that would be about the time period that fits best.
• But dinosaurs had been extinct since 65 million years ago.  It's possible a small number survived the K-T extinction event, but not by that long.  And on the other hand, the Silurians are said to have ruled the Earth, which is unlikely in the Mesozoic because, you know, dinosuars.
• All of which is to say, I dare someone to come up with a coherent, unified theory of the existence of the Silurians.  Give it your best shot!

Torchwood: Countrycide

I don't like tearing into Chris Chibnall like this.  I mean, I enjoy the part where I sit down and write 1500 words about a spinoff of a cult TV show and then publish it where anyone in the world can read it because I can.  I enjoy analyzing a work of art and why it does or does not work, in my opinion.  And when I'm tearing a movie or TV show a new one, I enjoy coming up with the sarcasm and the fake outrage because I didn't enjoy a TV show.  All that stuff is fun.

But the further I go into this - and it's only going to get worse before it gets better - it feels almost like an attack on an incredibly hard-working writer.  Chibnall has been a fan of Doctor Who since he was a kid, and grew up to get a chance to not only write for that show, but be the lead writer for its spinoff.  And he wasn't lazy about that - he wrote almost a third of the episodes produced while he was there.  Nor are all of them awful.  Two of them are excellent, in fact.  And I can't wait for his Who episode on Saturday.  I mean, it's titled Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.  That's pretty much the best title for any work of fiction since that blind guy improvised a pair of 150,000 word poems about dudes killing each other while their gods screw with them.  So I don't want to come across like I'm attacking Chibnall the guy, or that I hold anything against him personally.  If someone creates a beautiful work of art, it only adds to the beauty of the world.  Chibnall has at least one episode of this very show that qualifies.  And if someone creates art that sucks, it doesn't hurt anything in the world, because one day it's forgotten while the beautiful work shines through.

But bless his heart, he created a lot that sucks.

As always, he starts somewhere interesting.  The idea for Countrycide is to violently yank the Torchwood team out of their comfort zone by having them confront villainy that's neither supernatural nor extraterrestrial.  It's a cool sort of experimental episode to break the mold.  Episode six of the first season is the wrong place for it - the show really hasn't settled down into an actual mold the break.  I mean, despite the opening title being about fighting aliens, so far they've mostly just fumbled around, creating problems by messing with alien tech they should be treating less stupidly.  But still, conceptually, it's a nice idea.

Unfortunately, Chibnall hinges the entire thing on ruining his characters, starting by lobomizing Owen.  Early in the episode, Owen causes the team tremendous grief because he leaves the car keys in the ignition.  Of the high-tech vehicle of a top secret organization.  And Chibnall seems to revel in his stupidity, giving him cartoonish dialogue.

OWEN: What is that smell?
GWEN: That's grass.
OWEN: It's disgusting.

Up until now, Owen was incredibly unsympathetic but seemed mostly competent.  This is now the second time in six episodes the various events of the episode are at least partly his fault.  (and for the record, that's 4/6 where the Torchwood team is partly responsible for the mess they get in)  And he's not the only one.

Ianto is now for some inexplicable reason part of the team out in the field. I mean, it’s not like he was a field guy before, but after Cyberwoman, he shouldn’t even be on this show. But despite the fact that every single thing in Cyberwoman was entirely his fault in every conceivable way, he still tries to guilt-trip the others about it (and succeeds!).

Tosh isn’t much better. Out of nowhere, the episode tries to graft action hero onto her, (which is pretty much the first thing they've tried to graft on her) then throws it right back out the window when, after kicking the villain in the balls, she waits for him to recover rather than, you know, running or capitalizing on it in any way. Then, when she finally does find a moment to run, she trips on a pile of leaves – you read that right – and gets caught again.  Tripping on a pile of leaves is, at this point, far and away her most memorable moment in the series.

But worst of all is Gwen. For most of the episode, she’s sort of okay. It’s not entirely clear why she’s attracted to douchey Owen and his constant sexual harassment that's bordering on assault at this point, but that could be set aside because, hey, sometimes people are just attracted to strange things. But then, there’s the final scene, and in just a single shot, the show kills every likable thing about her. She was one of the only two characters in this whole show I cared for, and now she’s just a whiny little girl who cheats on her perfectly nice, supportive boyfriend just because.

With Owen.

That leaves Jack, and he escapes with his dignity mostly intact. I don’t care for the climax where he rescues the team by kneecapping all the bad guys (with a shotgun, no less) instead of just, you know, killing them. In a gunfight. When they’re shooting at him, too. I mean, this isn’t a guy who has a problem with killing when necessary. It's one thing to put little references to whatever film or show inspired you; it's quite another to just straight rip off one of the most iconic scenes from the most iconic action movie of all time without even making sure it makes sense in context.  And even the Terminator didn't kneecap that room with a frickin' shotgun. (like the occasional shots of the actors having conversations on top of buildings for no reason, it seems to exist to make the characters ultra-cool, and failing because trying to be cool is the one sure-fire way to not be cool)

This is at least partly balanced out by the great revelation about his past when he was well known as someone particularly talented at torture; it adds nicely to his dark, mysterious background.

But all that aside, what is the Torchwood team doing on this mission anyway? The entire purpose of Torchwood’s existence is to fight alien threats. It’s one thing to stretch to the supernatural, but this is just regular serial killer stuff. There’s nothing at the start to indicate this is anything less than human, and it’s then revealed that it is, of course, just humans.

And finally, there's the actual plot.  Basically, the Torchwood team stumbles into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Which, as movies to rip off your plot go, it's an incredibly bad choice.  Not because putting a spin on an old horror movie plot is a bad thing - Brain of Morbius basically approches the plot of Frankenstein with the serio-comic-horror tone of Bride of Frankenstein, and that's one of the greatest Who serials ever.

But Chainsaw is not a great horror movie because of its plot, or its themes, or its characters.  It barely has those.  No, Chainsaw is a great horror movie because after a few subtle but well executed shocks in the first half, the second half is one of the most harrowing, nightmarish cinematic hell rides ever created.  The horrifically discreet violence of the earlier scenes gives way to an endless night of pure terror as the heroine desperately runs, getting steadily more exhausted while a man wearing a human mask chases her through unfamiliar woods and houses with a running chainsaw.  And by filtering the film through a docu-drama aesthetic, Tobe Hooper makes it feel absolutely real.

All of which is to say, Chainsaw is a classic horror movie because of its style, not its substance. (or, more accurately, the style is the substance.  I'm of the opinion that great style can, in itself, be great substance, though, admittedly, that may just be me trying to excuse what a huge De Palma fan I am.)  So ripping it off gives you nothing to work with, leaving the audience with nothing but a reminder of how much better that thing you're referencing was.

It doesn't help, though, when the plotting is so poorly thought through.  Why does Torchwood stop at the side of the road to go camping? Why do the villains just tie up their victims by the hands, leaving them free to easily escape?  And so forth.

What’s really frustrating is that right in the middle is one superb scene where Gwen is blasted with a shotgun and Owen has to field dress her then and there. It would work even better if Owen wasn’t such a prick, but still, it's tense, dramatic, and crisply written.  And given how good the actors are with bad material, it's no surprise they shine with a genuinely good scene. It’s not really clear why Gwen is so energetic and all running around and such after taking a shotgun blast, even to a less-than-vital area, so the effect of the scene doesn’t last. But still, for one brief, shining moment, it’s great.

It's really not like Chris Chibnall is incapable of writing good stuff. His “Pond Life” shorts last week were delightful, and Saturday brings "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", which the trailers assure me does, in fact, includes dinosaurs on a spaceship.  How could that possibly be anything less than the coolest thing ever?

RATING:

*

• Without Owen leaving the keys in the car because he was too busy sexually assaulting seducing Gwen apparently, the list continues.
• Number of plots largely caused by the incompetence of the Torchwood team: 4/6. 
• Number of Torchwood Incompetence Plots caused by Owen's douchbaggery: 2/4.

Torchwood: Small Worlds

Small Worlds has a beautiful opening: an old woman walks through a dark forest late at night, speaking into a recorder that she doesn't want to wake "them".   Finally, we see what she's referring to: fairies.  They're a wonderful visual effect, accompanied by Elfman-ish strings, enhancing a truly lovely scene.  And then, the music gets scary, and they morph into laughably bad monsters.  Because we're obviously too stupid to figure out that they're creepy when they start killing people later.  Jumping the gun on the music ruins any chance of creepiness and actually kills the magic, too. The lousy CGI demons are only the final nail in the coffin.

I don't know who, exactly, it was that ruined that opening.  It could have been in Peter Hammond's script, but given what a good script it is on the whole, I sort of doubt it.  My suspicions tend toward Chibnall; in fact, I suspect most of the significant flaws were his additions or changes.  But I don't know that.

And that's sort of how Small Worlds goes.  It's a story both wonderful and terrifying that powerfully delivers on Torchwood's promise for the first time.  But there are massive, fundamental flaws in the execution, many and possibly all of which came not from writer PJ Hammond, but from the production team themselves.  Still, given what leaps and bounds this is above everything before this (and after for a good while), I can't be too hard.  After all, on the whole, I really liked this episode both times I watched it, even if a couple of key scenes are inexcusably blown.  For the first time, this actually feels like we’re somewhere in the Doctor Who universe. (and a good TV show)

First off, Gwen is finally used well.  So far, she's been a good character with little to do except be the new girl.  Here's, she's a full-fledged member of the team, and a good one. She’s whip-smart, totally staying with Jack no matter how ambiguous he’s being about things without being unbelievably clever. Jack has a little too much brooding, but for the most part, he’s also nicely shaded and given good material. The other three members barely appear, but since Owen’s the kind of guy who uses date-rape alien pheremones just for the hell of it, Ianto is apparently a lobotomized 12-year-old girl, and Toshiko has the personality of a particularly dull rock thus far, it’s no loss.

The Fairies are a wonderful idea, and the mythology is fantastic – dark, mysterious, and wondrous. In Fairy mode, they also look quite beautiful. Unfortunately, when they turn into demons, they just look like lazily-designed CGI demons. I'm generally pretty forgiving of low-budget effects when there was no other way to effectively tell the story, but there weren't needed at all.  Every scene they’re in would have been vastly more effective if they weren’t shown at all anyway. The scene near the end where they kill the guy by growing flowers in his throat (a brilliant and uniquely creepy idea) would be terrifying if we simply saw the man struggling,

Not that the script is perfect. It’s never really explained why the fairy-demons kill the old lady, given that their other two victims are a) a pedophile, and b) the little girl’s pointlessly evil stepfather.  Their entire M.O. seems to be to kill those threatening the girl, both of whom are irredeemably cruel. Maybe if they hadn’t gone out of their way to make the stepfather a one-dimensional jerk, it might have worked as they killed anything that threatened the girl in their eyes, innocent or not.  But as it is, the killing of the old lady is just gratuitous.  It's one thing to be ambiguous, it's another entirely to be simply contradictory.

Further, her death is caused when, after not only telling Jack that a bad demon is after her, but being told by Jack to be careful, she walks outside in the dark.

Where the demons are.

As rough as some spots may be, however, it's a compelling story that builds up to a genuinely brilliant final scene.  After all the build-up, it turns out the fairies aren't threatening the girl - they want her to become one of them.  And she wants to.  And while Gwen tries desperately to find a way out, Jack simply holds her back, asks for an assurance that they won't actually hurt the girl, and then lets them have her.

And that's where the show hits its full potential.  In one moment, we have Gwen, arguing to do the right thing, and Jack, arguing to do the only thing they can do.  And then Jack wins, and does something horrific because he sees no better way out.  It's a chilling moment of astounding moral complexity that punches you in the gut.  Hard.  It asks a difficult question and then gives an even more difficult answer.

So why doesn't the rest of the season approach this level of quality?

I think, honestly, it's the flaws in this story that show why.  The Demon CGI should never have been attempted in the first place; clearly they should be off-screen.  It's not like Who, where kids are watching and might be disappointed if a monster didn't pop up every once in a while. (I would dispute that, but it's at least a valid argument) This is adult sci-fi; we can figure it out.  But once it was obvious that it wasn't looking good, they should have cut them out anyway.  Somebody somewhere on the production team - director Alice Troughton, producer Richard Stokes, exec producers RTD and Julie Gardner, or producer/lead writer Chris Chibnall - should have realized that.

As for the characters, once the team is reduced to Gwen and Jack, everything clicks much better.  No douchebaggery or incompetence or sexual harassment from Owen, no whining from Ianto, and the two competent, intriguing characters get to do their thing.  And the one-dimensional stepfather?  Honestly, that's something Chibnall or script editor Brian Menchin should have weeded out.  (Honestly, I half-suspect Chibnall made him so awful in the first place.) 

So the problem, actually, is that this show has the wrong production team.  Chibnall has the Terry Nation problem of great ideas but an extremely uneven ability to accomplish those correctly.  For ever clever line he writes, he writes a dozen plodding ones.  RTD seems to indulge in his flaws.  RTD has a great concept here, but the only time they really get a solid hit is when they outsource it to old pro Peter J Hammond.

Oh well.  Again, Chibnall has the ability to write well.  Maybe he'll get the next one right.



RATING:

* * *

SIDENOTES:

• The cinematography is a minor detriment - the colorful opening scenes look nice, but afterwards, it's just a generic grayish that doesn’t really tell anything storywise. This is very much an X-Files sorta story, and could have taken a cue from that show and used deep shadows in the colorful settings.  But no, it takes a too-modern popular tact of looking as bland as possible.  Granted, shooting on video is never going to look as good as the high-quality film used on X-Files, but it could at least try.

Asylum of the Daleks

The Moffat era has one systemic flaw that just won't go away: it won't expand its episodes worthy of 90 minutes into that length, instead making its stories abrupt and cramped to make way for all those filler episodes.  Which, in the case of Asylum, is really too bad, because at 90 minutes, this would be up there with Genesis, Remembrance, Power, Master Plan, Parting of the Ways, and Doomsday as among the all-time great Dalek stories and one of the best Doctor Who stories ever, period.

Of course, even with that, it's still damn good.

It opens with the Doctor walking into a Dalek trap on Skaro, which... why... does Skaro exist?  The Doctor blew it up four regenerations ago.  It's not like this is some obscure point of arcana; this is one of the centerpiece stories of the series.  I guess if you go to the novels, there was some way Skaro came back, but then I think (I could be wrong; I've only read a couple of the novels) it was destroyed again, and I'm pretty sure it was destroyed a third time in the Time War.  I'm pretty sure it's more destroyed than the Earth at the end of Mostly Harmless.

Admittedly, it looks cool.

And it's not even necessary to be there.  It's just... a slap in the face to knock you off-guard for a much, much bigger one: apparently, Amy and Rory are getting divorced.

I've gotta be honest, even with Chris Chibnoll's Pond Life series, that doesn't fly.  There have been undercurrents of tension between them in the past, but for all the complexity in their relationship, they've been happy.  Emotionally, all the last few times we've seen them, they were really happy together.  It's an incredibly jarring way to open the story even without the Up Continuity line. (which I'm convinced Moffat put in for precisely that reason.)

It's a real problem because one of the two emotional cores of the episode is the Amy/Rory relationship.  Their actual scene where they discuss their breakup and get back together is nicely written, and the already brilliant Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill always bring their performances to a whole other level with director Nick Hurran, so it hangs together, but only by its fingernails.  It really needed time at the beginning of the story to properly set up the emotions.  As it is, it isn't unconvincing, but it's nowhere near as moving as it should be.  The six-minute pretitle sequence needed to be about 20 minutes.

The end of that sequence is a knockout, with the Daleks demanding the Doctor "Save us!"  But it would have been an even bigger punch with more build-up.

But enough complaining.  Outside of the Ponds, it's more a minor problem.  Moffat and Hurran could have done more with the concept, but it's an absolutely fantastic concept - the Daleks who are too insane for the regular Daleks.  It would have been nice to see more variations of insane in amidst all the ones who are just low on power, but it's still brilliant.  It's framed in a twisty plot, and there are lots of great set-pieces - Moffat wisely gives Hurran suspense and character pieces rather than action ones, and Hurran knocks those out of the ballpark.

And while Hurran may be a bit clumsy in the few bits of actiony stuff (check out the too-obvious camera and editing tricks for the "rising" platform), he gets sterling performances out of the cast and he might be the greatest visual stylist the series has ever had.  This has some of the most dazzling and iconic imagery in any Doctor Who story - the giant Dalek statue, the cramped Dalek corridors, and Oswin's spacecraft interior. (I'm not certain he's the best - Graeme Harper certainly gives him a run for his money, and if Camfield and Maloney had made anything with modern technology, they might have outshone him.  But that's good company to be in, even in only one category)

The real genius of the episode, though, is the aforementioned Oswin, played by the endlessly charming Jenna-Louise Coleman, who takes Moffat's already witty dialogue and makes it shine like a Blue Star.  The character is a work of art, and the character's climactic moment is a brilliant sequence that packs an  emotional wallop.  The finale is tremendous.

And, of course, there's all the things that are always wonderful about Who these days.  Matt Smith has that extraordinary ability to move from funny to threatening to philosophical, all while being accessible yet delightfully alien.  (Seriously, I think he's from whatever planet Tom Baker beamed down from.  Or at least the same solar system.  That chin is about as human as Baker's ears.)  Moffat's dialogue sparkles with wit and character, his stories are whimsical, scary, deeply dramatic, and dripping with imagination.  The visual effects are as good as TV effects get, and the cinematography is gorgeous.

And Moffat is the best writer the show has ever had at one thing in particular (even better than Robert Holmes): the shows relation between dialogue and action.  See, unlike many sci-fi shows - even really great ones - the dialogue isn't a way of stringing together the action scenes.  The action scenes are a way of stringing together the dialogue.  The great part of Dalek Invasion of Earth isn't where the Doctor destroys the Daleks by creating a volcano in Southern England, it's the part where he tells them they will never be masters of the Earth.  Asylum has all kinds of tense showdowns and a couple of beautiful explosions, but its climactic scene is a quiet, character-driven conversation.  Involving a Dalek.  That shouldn't work.  But it does.  It's one of the best Dalek scenes the show has ever had.

 As I say, at 90 minutes, it's a contender for best Dalek story ever.  And even at 45, it's an absolute blast.

"Rescue me, Chin-Boy, and show me the stars!"

RATING:

* * * ½

• Best Dalek line: "Eg-eg-eg-eg-eg... Eggs....  Eggggggsss..."
   
• Blue stars (O-Class) have the brightest luminosity of any star.  I was going to make a pun about her having "Sirius luminosity", but I realized that A) Sirius is actually an A-class star, and B) I don't make puns.  At any rate, I am so terribly, awfully sorry.
• The advertising made a big deal out of this having every Dalek ever, and I was overjoyed that the Special Weapons Dalek was finally, finally returning... and it shows up in the background of a couple shots.  What a waste, man.  On second thought, I'm actually convinced Moffat hasn't even seen Remembrance of the Daleks, because no one would intentionally waste the Special Weapons Dalek.  Right?

Left of center, between the Centurian and the Dalek actually doing something.

• Seriously, though, what in the Unholy Living Void was Skaro doing still existing?!

Torchwood: Cyberwoman

Excuse me a moment.

Torchwood: Ghost Machine

Okay, so, let's be fair.  Sometimes, episode 2 doesn't quite work out.  The show's still trying things out, fumbling in the dark.  I mean, Doctor Who had The Cave of Skulls trilogy, and even people like me who like it aren't exactly crying out that it's a lost classic.  But eventually, you've gotta settle on something.  For its third story, Doctor Who came up with the Daleks.  And with Torchwood, the signs should be good: it's written by Helen Raynor, who was a script-editor on the very strong first two seasons of New Who and was now script editor on Torchwood, and the director, Colin Teague, went on to do a very nice job directing The Fires of Pompeii and the second and third parts of Last of the Time Lords.  So it should at least be decent.

It's not.  Not only do we have a lead writer who has good ideas and is completely lost at actually getting those ideas working properly, but we have a script editor whose contribution to the season is a muddled, boring set of the usual cliches.

What's striking to me on the second viewing is how all the little details are wrong.  Every now and again, there's a nice touch, like Owen finding the "ghost" in the phone book.  But mostly, it's just really sloppy.  Take the opening, when Gwen takes the mysterious alien object that could be a weapon or a bomb and just immediately pushes one of the buttons at random.  Yes, she's new, but she's not stupid, or at least she's not supposed to be when she's written correctly.

There are other ways to get to this point.  You could be simple, and she touches it accidentally when she picks it up, though that veers a little toward the incompetence scale.  Better, she could bring it in, and they could all examine it in their various ways, allowing for nice character development and interaction in a plot-driven scene.  After looking at it, they could eventually decide that it's definitely not directly dangerous, and then decide to push the button.  Done that way, they come across as professionals.

As it is, they come off as amateurs.  Gwen actually is, but Jack pretty much lets it slide, which would be fine if he didn't let everything slide. (This will only get worse.)

A story can get all the little things wrong and still work if it's slick and compelling in the big picture - Revenge of the Sith is a good example.  For all the flat dialogue and uneven characterizations, it still offers a complex, human, and deeply powerful story with a truly staggering sci-fi/fantasy backdrop.

But Torchwood is a fledgling, low-budget show.  It can't afford to be slick (or it hasn't figured out how yet).  So it has to rely on good stories, good characters, and things that set it apart from every other sci fi show out there.  But this story goes through the most basic motions of a ghost story with a sprinkling of sci-fi without ever coming up with its own twist on things.  The characters are still good actors in search of a script worth half their talents.

And if all it can do is serve up are the same old cliches, it's not terribly compelling.  Up to this point, the show has yet to come up with a single idea that sets it apart from any of a hundred other sci-fi shows, possibly excepting its approach to sexuality.  Which, as we saw last episode, it doesn't really pull off the way it means to.

Ghost Machine isn't bad.  It's basically competent.  There's just nothing interesting here.

The next episode, though, is definitely... interesting.


RATING:

* *


SIDENOTES

• Yeah, the scene where Jack teaches Gwen to shoot, and there's supposedly all that sexual tension and stuff?  Incredibly forced and way too obvious.  Look, conceptually, the concept isn't that bad, but it just plays out terribly.

Torchwood: Day One

Jack: "We all make mistakes.  Get over it."

If the first episode of a show is about introducing what the show is and who the characters are, the second episode is about showing off what this shiny new show can really do.  We know the characters, we get the premise, we slogged through the exposition.  Now we can really get down to business.  So what sort of program do we have?

The Torchwood team investigates a meteorite strike that releases a gaseous creature who feeds on orgasmic energy.  So, naturally, the gas inhabits a young woman and starts sexing men to death.

Which is the sort of thing you'd expect from a Cinemax sci-fi show, but Chris Chibnall approaches it from the right directions: he focuses on the emotions of the possessed girl, Carys.  Her confusion and loneliness after her boyfriend leaves her drives her under the power of the alien being to embrace its power and later to use it against her ex.  It's an intelligent way to make it an actual story.

Except Carys, for all Sara Lloyd-Gregory's impassioned acting, never becomes a character defined beyond "girl who just got dumped."  She gets in a nice line about that - "I wish I was dead.  No, I wish you were dead.  Call me back."  But there's nothing else to her, keeping us from actually feeling the emotional roller-coaster she goes through.

The episode would still basically work, though, as long as the stuff with the Torchwood team itself was solid.  Again, Chibnall's underlying idea is an old but solid-enough concept: Gwen saves Carys by understanding who she is as a person instead of treating her as just another case, like the others do.  But his writing is completely ham-fisted, as though he doesn't trust us to understand what's going on.  He shows how Gwen is still connected to humanity by basically just giving Gwen and Jack a couple of speeches saying exactly that, and then having her tape up a bunch of baby pictures of Carys to remind everyone that she's a person. 

Which might be somewhat forgivable if Chibnall got it all basically right, but other than fitting Gwen into the team because she's the only one still connected to humanity, he pretty much fails to make the team compelling even on a basic level.  Gwen comes off as a pretty ordinary heroine.  Owen continues to be an incompetent ass.  Toshiko and Ianto can't have a dozen lines between them, none of which are remotely interesting.

But it's Jack who suffers most from Chibnoll's pen.  One of the things that made Jack interesting in the first place was his completely uninhibited pansexual promiscuity - he was even a little shocking to Rose, who comes off as pretty sexually liberated herself.  But if every character is a promiscuous pansexual, it kinda takes away the entire point.  And Owen showed himself to be far more so than Jack in the previous episode; while Gwen's makeout session with Carys is apparently motivated by pheromones, she seems pretty comfortable with what almost happened.  When the show finally gets around to remembering that Tosh and Ianto exist, the same goes for them.   Torchwood is so bent on being a sexually liberated show that it fails to show any actual range or depth in its sexuality, making it in a way just as close-minded as the cultural norms it tries so hard to upend.

Even with that in mind, Jack should still be a cool antihero for us to follow.  But his actions here don't speak well for him as the Torchwood leader.  He sends brand-new team member Gwen to interrogate a murderous prisoner completely unsupervised or even observed.  Even after the events of Everything Changes, he can't keep Owen's paws off the alien tech, nor does he do anything about his behavior toward Gwen, which is clearly harassment.  Harassment can be difficult to define sometimes, but Owen's clearly way, way over even a somewhat nebulous line.  And Owen's harassing Gwen directly causes the events of this story.  Jack either doesn't notice or doesn't care.

And then there's the whole business with the hand in the jar, which is not only Anthony Perkins-level creepy if you know where the hand came from, but leads to Jack letting the murderous alien get away because it threatens to harm a dismembered hand.  And his strategy for getting her to back down?  "That's valuable to no one except me!"  That's gotta be the single worst negotiation ever.

All in all, Jack is a portrait of an incompetent leader whose team actually makes things worse, then sloppily cleans up their own messes only after several deaths.  It's a waste of a good character and a charismatic actor.  I love Jack on Doctor Who, but here, the only things he's good at are standing in dramatic poses and dying.

Chibnall's plotting is pretty sloppy, too.  After getting captured, possessed Carys secrets insane pheromones that lure Owen in and then doesn't have sex with him or kill him because... he's one of the main characters, I guess?  I know she's desperate to escape, but she's also starving and insane, and it's literally the only way she'll survive.  (also, where did the handcuffs come from?) It just seems like a cheap contrivance to make jokes about a naked dude.  Which might be forgivable if they were really, really clever jokes, but they're incredibly lazy.  ("Are you all right now, or are you still feeling a bit of a cock?" is really the best they could come up with?)

The details, in general, aren't well thought out.  Carys secrets pheromones that attract woman, but her mating doesn't work with them?  Even though she gets her charge from "orgasmic energy"?

Finally, the tone never really clicks.  Parts of it are trying to be a fun romp (and failing, mostly because of the weak characterizations).  Other parts are going for an X-Files-ish serious sci-fi yarn both creepy and sad (and failing for largely the same reason).  In all, it's a mess.  Without particularly competent characters or interesting dialogue, the lazy, cliched plotting thuds along pretty uninterestingly.  It takes a Skinemax premise, approaches it from fundamentally the right angle to make it a compelling story, and still ends up as a dull, self-serious softcore porn without the actual porn.

It does have very strong acting in its favor, both from the regulars and guest star Gregory, but there are good shows with that.  It's obviously a very low-budget show, but it uses what little money it has wisely, focusing on good actors and making the important effects - in this case, the gaseous form of the alien - really good.  But without good storytelling, those are utterly wasted.  If this is the best the showrunner can do to showcase what will make Torchwood cool and interesting and unique, we're in trouble.

RATING:

* *



SIDENOTES:

• Owen complains “The amateurs got here before us.”  Having seen Owen’s contributions to the rest of the season, that’s absolutely hilarious.

• Owen's harassment causes Gwen to release the alien.  After the plot of Everything Changes also came directly out of the actions of the Torchwood team, we might as well start a counter:
• Number of plots directly caused by Torchwood’s incompetence: 2 out of 2.
• Number of Torchwood Incompetence Plots in which Owen’s douchbaggery is at fault: 1 out of 2.

• How does Gwen get cell reception in the Hub's Silence of the Lambs prison?

• Good Jack line: "You know, strictly speaking, throttling the staff is my job."