ANDREW'S
DOCTOR WHO REVIEWS 
This is a pretty terrible Doctor Who story, the first time
I’ve had to say that in ages. There are a few good funny bits early on, but the
plot is dull, the resolution of it is even duller (and unforgivably silly) and
all in all this is a story I wasn’t looking forward to viewing.
Clara is finding it hard to balance her life with the
Doctor, her teaching at Coal Hill School and her relationship with Danny Pink
who is becoming a little suspicious of her, suspect she has another life he
doesn’t know about. The Doctor tells Clara his next mission has to be one he
does on his own and then he turns up the next day at the School having been
employed as a temporary Caretaker.
The Doctor is here because there is a weaponised robot
nearby, the Skovox Blitzer, and he wants to prevent it from causing any damage.
He has been placing devices around the school to send the robot into the future
where it can’t cause any harm. However, Danny has been watching the Doctor and
Clara and does not trust this strange man, so he has interfered with the Doctor’s
device and when it is activated the robot is only sent 74 hours into the
future.
So now the Doctor, who is furious with Danny and decides he
hates him because he is a soldier, has to find a new way to defeat the Skovox
Blitzer. Danny reciprocates the hate considering the Doctor to be the worst
kind of ‘General’ and storms off. In the meantime the Doctor is being followed
by one of the students, Courtney Woods (Ellis George) who follows him to the
TARDIS (and when let inside is so freaked out she throws up). Meanwhile the
Blitzer has rematerialized and is about to detonate when Danny (performing an
unlikely backflip over it) distracts it long enough for the Docto to deactivate
it.
The Doctor and Clara fall out over Danny’s status as a
soldier and Danny warns Clara she might need to make a choice. Meanwhile Clara
insists the Doctor makes Courtney feel special as he has told her she is
nothing special, so the Doctor takes her aboard the TARDIS.
Basically, this story is a load of old nonsense. The Skovox
Blitzer is a rather poor robot and not very menacing, the whole story gets lost
in a bunch of Danny vs Clara vs the Doctor discussions and the Doctor going
overboard with his sudden dislike of soldiers (what, like the Brigadier or Sgt
Benton for instance?) with Danny responding in kind and being extremely
unreasonable. Poor old Clara, stuck in the middle, is treated badly by both
parties. What little menace exists in the story is frittered away amongst all
of this stuff.
Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson do their
best to make this material engaging but everyone seems to be doing very
unconvincing things and reacting in bizarre ways and it just doesn’t work. And
I’m sorry, but Danny’s backflip over the Blitzer is corny as hell and badly
realised, to quote the 10th Doctor, “no, don’t do that”.
Add to all of this the annoyance of the Courtney character
who really adds nothing to the plot or anything much else and you have a story
that is best forgotten and by quite a long chalk the worst thing to come from
the Moffat period of Doctor Who.
NEXT UP: KILL THE MOON
© Text copyright - Raving Loony
Productions and
Andrew J. Müller,
Roy Barton
and Shaun Runham
© Photos and Artwork - Andrew J. Müller
© Web Design and Layout - Andrew J. Müller
2022
