Series 8 DVD Box Set (Part One)

I've just recently gotten my hands on the Series 8 DVD Box Set of the new Doctor Who, and I'm about to give it the once over. I'll be posting my opinions here, quick, general impressions first, followed by more in depth thoughts on each episode as I watch them.

I've only ever seen these episodes once, back in 2014, when they originally aired on BBC One here in the UK. I recall being quite impressed with the performances of Peter Capaldi in his first season as the Doctor, and companion Clara Oswald, played by Jenna Coleman. I also remember liking most of the the twelve stories (although some more than others), with the exception of The Caretaker, which I didn't see at all first time around for some reason or another. It'll be interesting to watch The Caretaker for the very first time, and. I wonder if my opinions of any of the other eleven episodes will change on viewing them second time around.

I'll be making comments on individual episodes in a follow-up post, but here is a listing of the total contents of the box set.

Episodes:

• 01. Deep Breath
• 02. Into the Dalek
• 03. Robot of Sherwood
• 04. Listen
• 05. Time Heist
• 06. The Caretaker
• 07. Kill the Moon
• 08. Mummy on the Orient Express
• 09. Flatline
• 10. In the Forest of the Night
• 11. Dark Water
• 12. Death in Heaven

Special Features:

There are two long featurettes, and a number of shorter ones. Obviously, I haven't seen any of these before, so at least that's some more new material for me to watch. Starting off with the two longer featurettes, followed by the other shorter featurettes :

Doctor Who - The Ultimate Timelord
Doctor Who - The Ultimate Companion
Inside the New Tardis
Casting Peter Capaldi
Writing the New Series
What Is Doctor Who?
Why Watch Season 8?
Music video of Foxes performing Don't Stop Me Now

There are five discs in all, which should provide a lot of good viewing for several evenings at least. Further comments will be coming soon, as I actually watch the contents.

Christmas Special 2014 - "Last Christmas"

This year's Doctor Who Christmas Special wasn't too bad at all, particularly given my initial fears and misgivings. I feared the worst. When I first heard the title and saw the trailer with Santa Claus in it, I rolled my eyes and groaned in despair. I mean, a Christmas Special with the title of Last Christmas (strains of Wham! playing in the background)? And Santa, Rudolph and the rest of the gang flying around, delivering pressies? Please, not another piece of silly, irrelevant, soppy old Christmas nonsense! Oh God, spare us!

So I tuned into BBC One at 6:15pm on Christmas Day not expecting anything special, to be perfectly honest. Surprisingly, it wasn't too bad at all. Thankfully there was a reasonably intelligent story, which wasn't particularly fluffy or seasonal (despite the presence of Santa). It was even pretty dark and ominous in parts. Hell, there was even a (relatively) logical reason for the presence of Santa in the story. The aliens were pretty good, but derivative, right out of the film Alien. But Moffat managed to work a decent "facehugger" reference into the script as an acknowledgement of the original source, accompanied by a pretty funny scarcastic joking comment by Capaldi.

After all the rumours and the speculation about Jenna Coleman leaving the series ("will she or won't she?"), it was nice to find out that Clara will definitely be back as the Doctor's companion. Is it just me, or has there been a lot of Clara-hating going around in fandom circles? I know that she has taken a lot of criticism from fans, but I think that Clara has come into her own during Season 8, after an initial beginning as more of a plot device than a real character. In my opinion, she fits in better now with Peter Capaldi than she ever did with Matt Smith. I regard Jenna Coleman as a good actress, so I'm glad that she's staying with the show.

Overall, it worked out to be a reasonably good Christmas Special for 2014. Sure, it wasn't a mind-blowing entry in the annals of best Doctor Who episodes of all time, but it was definitely worth wasting an hour on.

Season Eight - Brief Overall Impressions

Now that Season 8 has ended with the two-part climax of Dark Water/Death in Heaven, what were my overall impressions?

Overall, it was a pretty decent season, the best we've had for several years now, and a good start for Peter Capaldi in his role as the Doctor. And Clara was written much better for Season 8 than Season 7, as I found her role in the Impossible Girl arc to be a bit of a plot device, reducing her effectiveness in the overall series plotline, despite Jenna Coleman's obvious talent as an actress and likability as a character. Season 8 sees her character written much more strongly, as a proper companion, not a mere plot device, with a bit of a tragic love affair thing thrown in between her and Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson).

We had a fairly decent debut/regeneration story (Deep Breath), a couple of light, fluff/filler stories (Robot of Sherwood, The Caretaker), one kinda lame episode (In the Forest of the Night), three fairly good but not amazing episodes (Into the Dalek, Kill the Moon and Death in Heaven), and five very good-to-excellent episodes (Listen, Time Heist, Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline and Dark Water).

That's a pretty fine batting average in my book. Only one dodgy episode out of twelve (and even that one wasn't exactly awful), five very good episodes, and the rest at least fairly decent, watchable stories. The final two-parter was marred slightly by the fact that the first part, Dark Water, was considerably better than the second, Death in Heaven, which let the ending of that story down a bit. But that was only by comparison, because Dark Water was so good, and Death in Heaven was still pretty decent by any reckoning.

All that I can say is that I wish every season of Doctor Who was as high in quality as Season 8. Let's see if Moffat and his crew can keep it up.

"Into the Dalek" - Some Thoughts

Into the Dalek, the second episode of Season 8, is definitely a stronger story than Deep Breath. It's also less light-hearted, definitely more serious, with less humour. The new Doctor has ironed out most of the regeneration craziness (although a few quirks still remain), and Peter Capaldi is settling nicely into the role, confirming my initial impressions that he will make a very good Doctor.

Clara is better written this episode, back to her brave, feisty self, especially in the scenes where she's helping to reawaken the Dalek's memory banks, while the troopers try to hold off the "antibodies". She's definitely interacting much better with the new Doctor, with no more of that ridiculous out-of-character nonsense that we had from her in Deep Breath. It also looks like there's an interesting relationship brewing between her and Danny Pink. There also seemed to be a bit of an interesting "soldier" sub-plot going on with both Clara/Danny and the Doctor/Journey Blue in this story. I dunno what the new Doctor has against soldiers. He's certainly fought alongside enough of them in his time. :)

Obviously the really big thing with this episode is that it is a Dalek story. It's only the Capaldi Doctor's second story, and he's already encountered the blobby little terrors, his most dangerous enemies. One would think that Moffat is doing a re-run of the First Doctor, William Hartnell, as they also featured in HIS second story. After all, Peter Capaldi is the new "first" Doctor, in this new cycle of incarnations, so maybe this was a conscious decision by Moffat.

The story itself is well-plotted and exciting although the whole premise of a "good" Dalek isn't a totally new one. Also, the Fantastic Voyage journey through the internals of a Dalek has also been done before in Doctor Who, both in the classic and the new series. And it has also been done many, many times before in other sci-fi series and films. But none of them ever had antibodies like those nasty little Dalek mofos.

But more than anything, Into the Dalek in some scenes reminded me so much of the classic Christopher Ecclestone story Dalek, particularly during the Doctor/Dalek interaction scenes, that parts of it seemed to be just lifted from the earlier story and rehashed in this one. A tribute? Yes, maybe. But a bit more originality might also have been appreciated (by me, anyway).

"Deep Breath" - Some Quick Thoughts

Deep Breath is, at its core, a fairly typical regeneration debut story. The story itself wasn't bad, but wasn't exactly anything special either. But a regeneration story has the primary function of successfully introducing the new Doctor to the audience. This is the single most important thing we needed from Deep Breath, to break in Peter Capaldi as the new Doctor, and, as such, the episode did an excellent job of it. Everything else is secondary, in my opinion, although there were definitely both plus and minus points.

As I've said, the story was nothing exceptional, not exactly setting the world on fire for me. However, there were some nice scenes in it. The character set-pieces and interaction were generally excellent (with the exception of one thing). There were also quite a few nice bits of humour in among all the sad bits, and I also really liked seeing Lady Vastra, Jenny and Strax again. I enjoy these characters a lot, and I think that Strax is absolutely hilarious.

On the negative side, the plot itself was definitely a bit thin, there were at least a couple of glaring plot and character inconsistencies, particularly Clara's aggressively negative overreaction to the new, older Doctor, which was TOTALLY out of character. Any other companion, yes, it might've actually been more realistic, but not the Impossible Girl. She's met them all. And even if, as some people argue, she has no memories of her other lives (which I disagree with), her reaction was STILL over-the-top and totally out of character.

Hey, she's already pretty familiar with regeneration and different Doctors, she's even been in an adventure with three different Doctors (Matt Smith, David Tennant and John Hurt), in The Day of the Doctor 50th Anniversary Special, and having already met (and liked) an older Doctor (Hurt), her overly-negative reaction to Capaldi because he is "old" is totally unrealistic and out-of-character.

The shame is that Jenna Coleman is a pretty good actress, and Clara, as a companion, is quite likeable. But Steven Moffat didn't come up with the writing goods for her on this occasion, writing her not as herself, but reducing her to some kind of a one-dimensional cypher, a dig at and representation of fans who can't handle regeneration and the replacing of "their" Doctor with a new one. In her defense, I have to say that this is NOT Jenna Coleman's fault, and the young lady can only deal with the scripts she's been given.

Another major plot flaw was actually one of the nicest scenes in the entire episode, the phone call from the Matt Smith Doctor on Trenzalore to Clara, said call obviously being made before or during the events of The Time of the Doctor. It's all very poignant, heart-tugging and well-acted, until you actually stop and think about it, and you realize that it simply couldn't have happened. It was was a major continuity flub and sloppy writing by Moffat. Nice, emotional, tear-jerking writing, but sloppy and wrong, wrong, WRONG.

MattDoc says to Clara that "the time is getting close", and "it's going to be a real whopper" (he's obviously referring to an "upcoming regeneration"). But remember back to what happened at the end of The Time of the Doctor. The whole crux of the story was that the Doctor was coming to the end of his final incarnation. There weren't going to BE any more regenerations. As far as MattDoc was concerned, for pretty much the ENTIRE episode, he'd run out of regenerations, and he was going to die. That was the whole point of the story. Which is what would've happened if Clara hadn't begged the Time Lords to save him, as they did right at the end, by popping up at the last minute and giving the Doctor a new cycle of regenerations. So Matt Smith's Doctor couldn't have made that phone call. He didn't know he was going to regenerate before it actually happened. Very sloppy continuity mess-up on Moffat's part.

Those were my two main gripes, and the rest I can live with. However, one thing I couldn't complain about was Peter Capaldi's performance as the new Doctor, which was excellent, top notch. I think he's going to be an excellent Doctor. For that reason alone, I'll give Deep Breath a B instead of the C that I thought the fairly average story by itself actually deserved.

Series 8 Starts Today!

We're into the early hours of Saturday morning right now, and the big event that every Doctor Who fan on the planet has been waiting for happens later this evening, when the first episode of Season 8 debuts on BBC1 at 7.50pm.

This first episode is the first of twelve, and is a 75-minute feature-length episode titled Deep Breath. I know absolutely nothing about it, as I've been very stringent about avoiding spoilers on the new season, other than the titles of the episodes, and that the last two episodes of the season are the two-part Season Finale.

The Season 8 Episode Listing is as follows:

1. Deep Breath
2. Into the Dalek
3. Robot of Sherwood
4. Listen
5. Time Heist
6. The Caretaker
7. Kill the Moon
8. Mummy on the Orient Express
9. Flatline
10. In the Forest of the Night
11. Dark Water
12. Death in Heaven

I've been eagerly awaiting the first full appearance of the new Doctor, Peter Capaldi, as he steps into the role he has inherited from the absolutely amazing Matt Smith. Peter Capaldi has some pretty big shoes to fill there, but I reckon he'll make a darned good Doctor. He's a very experienced actor, who has been around the acting business for many, many years. And the BBC have never failed yet to pick a good one to fill the new Doctor's role.

Something which I think bodes well for the show, in my opinion, is that he was also a big fan of the classic series when he was a kid, in particular the first four Doctors, up until the middle of Tom Baker's run on the show. All of which pretty much mirrors exactly my own childhood journey with Doctor Who. This love and respect of the classic series might serve him well as he slips into the role of the new Doctor.

Anyway, I'm actually really looking forward to this new, older, grumpier, darker Doctor, and to seeing how Peter Capaldi works with the current companion, Clara (played by Jenna Coleman). Roll on this evening, 7.50pm!