“Well, let’s ‘review’ the situation, shall we, Mr Capps?”

“Urrrgggggghhhhhhhhh…”

“Before I left the country for a period, I was assured that URP!’s review of A Good Man Goes To War would be posted in ‘two shakes of a lambkin’s tail’. My words, admittedly, but your sentiments. Instead, on my return from a literal and metaphorical holiday, I find no review, despite the episode reaction thread receiving more comments than any other this year.”

Okay, here’s the thing. We managed to not have someone tapped in advance to review “The Almost People” – and those who might have been available to do so are simply too busy this week to fit it in. Furthermore, when the episode aired, it became apparent that it was among the most “more of the same” episodes (the last few minutes aside, which we’ll come to) that there’s been. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I quite liked part one, and I quite liked part two, as well – but it does mean that there’s very little new to say about the ep that wasn’t already covered by Ben’s review of “The Rebel Flesh“.

And besides which, let’s be honest – that closing couple of minutes made it difficult to want to think about the preceding forty, because they made us all entirely obsessed and preoccupied with thinking about “A Good Man Goes To War” instead, didn’t they?

So, the short version is: we won’t be reviewing “The Almost People” (although there’s a vague consensus that it was “pretty good”, depending on whether you liked the first). But feel free to continue yammering about it in the broadcast discussion thread, or if you want to yammer here about your thoughts/theories/speculation regarding the mid-series finale, you can do that as well. And we’ll be back on Saturday, natch.

How many of you went into “The Rebel Flesh” with preconceptions of what the episode would be? How many of you went in with spoilers and foreknowledge and all that wonderful gubbins? I’m guessing a fair few of you – Doctor Who fans are an inquisitive lot, and it probably doesn’t help that the BBC have been a bit wobbly with spoilers this series. Meanwhile I’ve managed to stay relatively spoiler-free. With a few minor exceptions I haven’t really been exposed to much about the current series of the show prior to broadcast, in part because I haven’t been actively seeking it out, but mainly because I haven’t really had the time.

The upside is that I’m going into each episode of the show with no preconceptions or expectations, although “The Rebel Flesh” works fairly quickly to instill some preconceptions during the first ten minutes. It’s an episode that fits a familiar mould – the Doctor shows up in base where people are doing something they shouldn’t be and things go tits up. Only just when it looks like it might defy the expectations you didn’t know you had and pull the rug out from under your feet, it stops tugging and, like a Mortal Kombat player who’s forgotten how to do a Fatality, just kicks you in the shins instead.

Spoilers ahead, obviously.

It was almost exactly a year ago, when reviewing “Flesh and Stone”, that I said:
“The Pandorica?” he says, bringing this year’s plot keyword front and centre. “That’s just a fairy tale.” To which the only answer, of course – as Murray Gold’s lovely recurring bit of Harry Potter-esque score strikes up – is “Aren’t we all?” We know this is how Moffat sees Who (hasn’t he just hired the world’s foremost writer of fairy tales for series six?)…
Even when saying that, though, I’m not sure entirely what I expected of a Gaiman-written Doctor Who. Yes, his unique sensibilities seemed to fit perfectly with the sort of thing Moffat was doing on occasion last year – but even so, he’d be reined in a bit, surely? That Babylon 5 episode aside, he’s never really done “sci-fi” before, instead trading largely in (mythical and urban) fantasy. Sure, parts of Neverwhere – the parts with the Marquis de Carabas in – felt like a Who story that never was, but that was still very firmly a world away in voice and setting. Working on a time-travel adventure series rooted heavily in science and logic would surely require a shift in approach and tone – just to avoid the feeling that you’ve been shoehorned in just because of who you are, rather than because of your expected ability to write good Doctor Who – wouldn’t it?

Well, not if you’re Neil Gaiman. If you’re Neil Gaiman, instead of doing that, you turn out – wonderfully, gloriously, at least for people like this correspondent, who had their worldview irrevocably shaped by the discovery of Sandman in their mid-teens – the most Neil Gaimanish thing you’ve done in a decade. Good Doctor Who – great, almost peerless modern age Doctor Who – but also a great big fairy tale at the same time. “The Boy Whose Favourite Toy Spoke To Him.”

I’ll admit something here, I was already writing this review in my head a week before I saw the episode.  It was unavoidable.  I was all ready to waffle on about how these stand alone episodes are feeling increasingly out of place in a series relying more and more on complex story arcs.  I was resenting the mere existence of this episode before I’d seen anything beyond the trailer and I worry it coloured my fairly luke warm reception.  What I did get, though, were a few more plus points than I was expecting.  But not enough.

So when Julian talked last week about a sea change in what Doctor Who is and what it’s all about, I don’t think even he realised just how far that idea was going to go. Because now we’ve got the next step – stories that simply defy being written or talked about as individual episodes, that are inextricably linked with the bigger picture to an extent not yet seen in six years of the revived show. Just about everything worth discussing in “Day of the Moon” can only be discussed within the context of things we haven’t yet been shown or told – and the reaction coming out of the episode is so heavily buried in the frenetic excitement of trying to figure out what it all means, and what’s going to happen next, that I’m initially entirely unsure as to whether the preceding 45 minutes of television were actually any good in their own right or not.

It feels like sacrilege, really. Attempting to review “The Impossible Astronaut” on only one viewing seems somehow inappropriate. On the other hand, however, it’s quite possible that even a dozen viewings would leave one under-equipped to convey the full impact of the next stage in the evolution of Doctor Who as a television programme.

Setting aside the TV movie, the train that leads from “Survival” to “Rose”, via a decade of original, mature-readership novels, is clear. The faster storytelling of the last few seasons of McCoy is built upon, and the increased emotional complexity of the companion character made the linchpin of the series, not a welcome bonus. The key element is the re-use of a chance inclusion, with something very similar to Ace’s Perivale council estate retained to provide a permanent and identifiable backdrop to the Doctor’s more outlandish exploits.

Be warned that this review contains SPOILERS after the jump – so if you’re planning to go and see the show, we recommend you don’t read it until afterwards!

Growing up as I did in the wilderness years there really wasn’t a lot going for a seven year old with an interest in Doctor Who. With the likes of the New Adventures being aimed at an older audience and a lot of other media catering to those with a prior knowledge of the series it was hard to find an entry to the show outside of working one’s way through the UK Gold repeats. Oh to be seven now. Fundamentally, at its heart, Doctor Who Live is a show for the kids. This is not to say that there isn’t something for everyone within it, but the structure and presentation of the show are essentially accessible to even the most casual of young fans. And frankly, quite right too.

I loves me the time travel, is the thing.

It’s not the reason I originally got into Doctor Who – at least, I don’t think so. At the tender age I was when a Dalek chased Sylvester McCoy up some stairs, I wasn’t yet as hung up on the notion of time travel fiction as I’d later become. But the story possibilities offered by a central character that can hop around time are almost certainly among the reasons I’ve stuck around all these years. And it’s not something that I’m necessarily sure that RTD – for all the strengths of his run – shared. It’s true that the words that persuaded Rose to join the Doctor in the TARDIS were “It also travels in time”, but for Russell, the time travel was still more about the places (just places in the past and future) that could be visited. But considering that a number of my favourite films have words like “Back”, “Future”, “Bill” and “Ted” in their titles, it’s clear that what I like about a time travel story is the chance to play with the sequential – to wit, the sort of story in which a single changed event can create an alternate timeline, or the sort in which a character can influence their own present by pledging to use time travel to set up the past retrospectively.

And it’s clear from “The Big Bang” that Moffat – who’s always enjoyed playing with narrative order in shows that didn’t hand him the keys to a time machine – is a bit of a fan of that sort of thing as well.

So, after 11(+) weeks witnessing a story arc laid down by the THE GRAND MOFF, Lord King Master of all He Surveys, we have his delicious fruits laid bare for all to see with the first episode of the series 5 finale, The Pandorica Opens. It’s certainly fair to say that this has been the most talked about series arc since Bad Wolf, and despite the excellence of that series 1 finale, I think we were all hoping for a somewhat more meaty and satisfying conclusion this year.