Gryphonic

First off, the elephant in the room. This is the first season for a very long time that we have no idea when or even if we’ll see another season after this one. We even know that there won’t be a Christmas special this year. So already that’s a pretty weird feeling right from the get-go.

Now the episodes, starting with The Robot Revolution. On the surface it didn’t seem too bad immediately after watching, although certain things niggled me straight away. The longer I had to think about the episode, more things troubled me about it.

During the episode itself, the very first thing that stuck out was the power cut that the Doctor caused in the hospital. This was more than just an “oops, my bad” gag as I immediately wondered what that would do to all the patients who might be on vital life saving and supporting equipment. We didn’t even see any backup generator kick in. That’s really far from an “oops”. Why mess with the sonic anyway here? Surely he could have got out the Psychic Paper and get the information he needed that way.

I am starting to think that this Doctor may be far more accident prone than his predecessors. After all, he accidentally stepped on a mine, and also broke a fairy circle.

Were we supposed to care about the people we met on the Missbelindachandra planet? They barely got anything close to even passing character development there. Sasha-55 was someone the Doctor had known for 6 months, but other than a few lines she was gone too soon to even make the Doctor’s tear – which we now know from a recent RTD interview is all Ncuti’s doing rather than being scripted – even feel believable. About the only other person I remember from the planet people is the ‘obstinate muscle’ guy who was quick to blame Belinda for everything.

Belinda herself getting all uppity at the Doctor when he scans her DNA “without permission” at the end also didn’t sit right afterwards, as she threw the whole of the little rebel group under the bus by reactivating that stupid little “Polish Polish” robot. (I swear that if my robot vacuum went around saying that all the time, I’d hurl it out the window) The entire purpose of that robot seemed to be to lead the big robots to the rebels, and to vacuum up the “egg and sperm” that Alan was reverted back to.

The fact that the Doctor seemed positively gleeful when that happened made me wonder if this was still the Doctor, because that is such an un-Doctorly thing to do.

And at the end of the episode we have yet another case of it being “destiny” that the Doctor and Belinda have met with the allusion of their timelines being connected somehow. I’m getting Deja vu here again…

Onto Lux, which is yet another offering of the Pantheon gods. While I liked this more than The Devil’s Chord, I am still extremely on the fence about the whole of this Pantheon storyline. Certainly, the idea of having a living cartoon character face off against the Doctor is an interesting idea, and is both fairly well executed in terms of the animation as well as the voicing by Alan Cumming, returning to the show again from being King James in The Witchfinders. 

Yet I remain confused as to the motivation behind this character. With Maestro it was pretty cut and dry – they wanted to take control of all the music in the world, and was pretty obviously villainous. For Mr. Ring-a-Ding slash Lux, it seemed that their purpose was to absorb as much light as possible – which is what ultimately happened of course, giving us a confusing ending of being ‘defeated’ by giving them exactly what they wanted, and making them infinite? I guess what Lux did to the moviegoers who were trapped in film was some kind of hostage thing to get projectionist Reginald Pye to keep playing movies to ‘feed’ them, but then was nice to the guy by giving him his wife back. So I suppose not as evil as Maestro, but manipulative.

I felt that they maybe could have done more with animated Doctor and Belinda, but even a Disney assisted budget can only stretch so far.

My biggest niggle about this episode was when it got too meta with the Doctor and Belinda climbing out from a TV to a room with ‘fans of the show’. While this was no doubt RTD having a good poke at fans, it doesn’t really sit well with me that this series is increasingly going out of its way to say that the Doctor is part of a narrative that people somewhere are watching… which also ties into Mrs. Flood’s surprise appearance towards the close of the episode. While not technically a fourth-wall break, it really does feel that we have a trend where she’s both a character as well as something of a narrator, and that makes me think that she is quite likely to be another member of the Pantheon.

Side-note to the meta-scene, Belinda’s unimpressed comment about Blink, being a story where “you’re not allowed to blink” where “that sounds like an absolute epic” was most certainly the standout moment here.

Anyway, I’m still turning this episode over in my head, so I’ll just finish with it by saying that the Doctor has regeneration / bi-generation energy left this far in this regeneration is quite surprising, and it felt that RTD was struggling for an idea here.