Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

One film that I’ve been wanting to write about for a while is Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, J. K. Rowling’s prequel and latest addition to the Harry Potter universe. Since The Deathly Hallows was released in 2007 the Potter machine has never truly stopped churning. The Wizarding World has expanded backwards, forwards, on-wards and outwards. Following the dual release of the Deathly Hallows novel and Order of the Phoenix film in 2007 there were three Potter films still to be produced and each of these adaptations took the opportunity to create new scenes and character moments that added to Harry and his world. J.K. continued to fill in the details of her myths by making announcements about characters' sexualities to the press and releasing titbits of information in the form of “““short stories”””” on the interactive e-cyclopedia Pottermore. By the time 2016 came round and the saga continued in the Broadway play The Cursed Child, it hardly felt as if Potter had been away. Harry Potter, the brand is a theme park, a museum and exclusive-to-Amazon Kindle publications. It is the multiple life-sized Hogsmedes built from rubber, plastic and broken dreams in Orlando, Osaka, London and Hollywood. You can taste Butter-Beer (TM) , see Sirius Black screaming from his wanted poster, smell the odours of the hog roasts mixing with the cheap construction material cooking in the hot Sun. I explored Hogwarts in The Chamber of Secrets PlayStation 2 game and built Hagrid’s Hut from Lego. The Wizarding World has never left, it’s grown ubiquitous in countless forms of media.* But the magic didn’t return until J. K. put fingers to keys again and brought Newt Scamander to life.

Fantastic Beasts is a far from perfect film but the most striking thing about it (besides the heartfelt performances of its leads) is the amount of love that J. K. Rowling has for all of her creations. Harry Potter’s is not the most detailed or consistent of secondary worlds. A re-reader of the series will note how dramatically the style of her writing evolves over the course of seven books. The earliest publications Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets read like imaginative children’s books by a deeply intelligent, knowing and funny author who also has a dark streak. Their forebears come from the pens of Roald Dahl, C. S. Lewis and Dianna Wynne-Jones. The secondary world aspect of the story is less important with the absurd world’s consistency coming second to the logic of fairy-tales and poetry. It seems strange that the Dumbeldore of later books would hire someone as cartoonishly inept as Guilderoy Lockhart but in the early books, he fits. He is that neccisary evil of all young adult literature - the representation of the foolish establishment to be fought against. By Deathly Hallows and the world-building of Pottermore her work seems to be emulating the detailed fictional historians who created Middle Earth and Westeros. It’s at this point that some of the world building shows its seams and becomes just that little bit less credible. Rowling’s achievements are incredible but examples of world-building like the name “Hogwarts” coming from a dream of Ravenclaw’s where she followed a “Warty Hog” to the location where the founders would build the school feels like a scathing Saturday Night Live parody as opposed to a believable piece of fantasy - more Muddle Earth than Middle Earth. For this reason, a Hollywood film is the perfect medium to continue exploration of the Wizarding World. Film is a far more impressionistic medium than books, the details which fail to gel don’t have to be mentioned, all we need to see is the characters being wizards. We don’t need to learn how they are wizards.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them explores the life of one of J. K.’s more obscure characters. Newt Scamander, the author of one of Harry’s textbooks who possesses a name that has been known in the Potterverse since The Philosopher’s Stone was published twenty years ago. Scamander’s fictional non-fiction book was released as a fund-raiser for Comic Relief, an Easter Egg for fans that was little more than a detailed list of magical creatures from mythology and Rowling’s imagination, complete with notes from Harry and Ron who show about as much respect for their property as they do for their Divination homework. The Scamander name again appeared in the family tree that Rowling drew on television in a documentary about her life and the Harry Potter series created to mark the completion of her magnum opus. In the tree she showed who all of the young Weasleys married and what their children were named. This postscript to a postscript also revealed that Harry’s school friend Luna would go on to mother the great-grandchildren of Newt Scamander, Lorcas and Lysander.

  

It is clear that for many years the characters of Fantastic Beasts have been cooking in the Great Rowling’s head. Whether or not she knew they would eventually be realised in the form of a 1920’s adventure in New York is another matter. It’s clear that she knows her world back-to-front and that this film was simply an opportunity for her to go and explore it a little more. Take, for example the character of Graves who is, in fact the dark wizard Grindlewald in disguise. So much about his characterisation, not only meshes with what we know of him from the original series but also adds dimension and depth to it. The presence of things in the script like his reference to Hogwarts and Albus Dumbledore, as well as his use of the symbol of the Deathly Hallows which feature prominently in the later Harry Potter books might appear to be cheap fan service to the casual eye but to someone well versed in Potter-lore their presence is an essential clue to the character's true identity. 

The Grindlewald story suggests so much about the mysterious back story of Dumbeldore, his implied ex-lover. Dumbeldore’s sister was a powerful witch, driven mad and forced to conceal her powers which become destructive and uncontrollable through her trauma. The same applies to the Credence character in this film. Could Grindlewald have been after the Obscurus (“Wizard Nuclear Bomb”) as far back as the days of his teenage tryst with Albus? The scenes featuring Graves (Grindlewald) and Credence are played like sinister seductions. Whilst both are grown men it evokes a powerful sense of grooming. Credence is the neglected child of a religious household and Grindlewald’s manipulation of him could well be a mirror which reflects the manner in which he once convinced an isolated teenage Dumbeldore that subjugating Muggle-kind was a god idea. These scenes are some of the most powerful in the film and hearken back to that nasty streak in Rowling’s writing which brought us the macabre Crouch subplot in The Goblet of Fire and those embodiment of despair the Dementors.

Meanwhile, on the Light Side, Rowling has created a ragged tag-team of wizards and Muggles from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The orphaned "career-girl" sisters Tina and Goldie encounter the peculiar "magi-zoo-oligist" Newt and downtrodden Muggle baker Jacob. Rowling’s protagonists always have been misfits, oddballs. It’s not always easy to remember whilst looking at the beautiful people that Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint grew into but Harry Ron and especially Hermione were the ugly ducklings of the Gryffindor common room - Harry with his ill-fitting clothes, Hermione with her books and large teeth and Ron who possess a smorgasbord of insecurities and inferiority complexes. In Newt and his unlikely gang of heroes we have a group of characters who naturally fit into the moulds of unlikely Rowling heroes. Eddie Redmayne is an actor who I have found at times to be intensely irritating. With his scrunched up "I AM ACTING(!) face" and proclivity for taking physical roles which often require more flopping-about than believable emoting I’ve found it difficult to connect with him. The role of Newt was rumoured to be dog-eared for my beloved Matt Smith and I was greatly looking forward to seeing his portrayal of a wacky wizard come to life. However, in 2015 Redmayne was awarded the Oscar for his portrayal of Steven Hawking and Matt Smith was in Terminator Genesis so my wish was not granted. My point is that Redmayne had a lot to prove in my eyes and it took him a while to do so.

Newt is not only the owner of an exceptional name, he is also a very unusual character to put in the lead role of a big-budget Hollywood movie. He is severely introverted, even displaying certain symptoms of Asperger syndrome - failing to make eye contact or even understand other people properly. For this reason it takes a good forty minutes before we get a sense of who the character is beneath his defensive shell. In these 40 minutes it was very difficult to connect with him or, consequently care very much about what was going on it isn’t until we get a look at Newt inside the confines of his magically-bigger-on-the-inside case come magical-petting-zoo that he comes into his own. In a way, Newt is like the fantasy ideal boyfriend that a fourteen year old might invent - he’s sensitive; he loves animals; he sees past the awkward, shy girl’s fringe and appreciates the REAL her; he is progressive (disapproves of the American “no fraternisation with Muggles” laws); he’s unconventionally attractive; he is brave and stands up for what he believes in. Newt is sort of like the male equivalent of Megan Fox’s character from the Transformers movies, a distilled symbol of what Hollywood thinks you want from a relationship. I’ll admit it. I have a bit of a crush too. Newt is a tough nut to crack but once you’ve put the work in you appreciate him all the more. The best scene in the film is the set-piece at the mid-point which is a great big CGI bonanza showing off him in his home-space the suitcase surrounded by his beloved animals. It is very touching to see the care and respect that he has for all living things. After watching this film for the third or fourth time I went back to watch a couple of Matt Smith Doctor Who episodes and was sadly forced to admit that even lopsided, love-able Smith couldn’t have provided such pathos in his portrayal of this character. Redmayne’s got a new fan. I’ll just have to make sure I don’t watch Les Miserables any time soon.

So I feel I’ve made it clear that I love this film. It is imaginative, it resonates with my childhood love of Harry Potter and its intricate continuity. The soundtrack by James Newton Howard is absolutely captivating. He is the fifth composer to score a movie about the Wizarding World following on from Alexandre Desplat, Patrick Doyle, Nicholas Hooper and, obviously John Williams. Whilst the score touches on Williams’ iconic Hedwig’s Theme his melodies are closer to those of Nicolas Hooper who wrote the accompanying music to the fifth and sixth films expertly evoking joy and dread with a moody impressionistic quality as opposed to the prominent melodies which John Williams crafts. In fact, the recurring Fantastic Beasts theme strongly reminds me of some of the more evocative tunes from the Order of the Phoenix soundtrack. It appears in the opening montage and the aforementioned suitcase scene. It’s joyous and makes a viewer delight to be visiting this secondary world again.

I found this to be a curious film in that the depths of its charms are not immediately evident. It, like its lead character, took a while to grow on me. The film is directed by David Yates, the director of the last four Harry Potter films and I director who I have had trouble with in the past. I am very fond of the fifth and seventh Potters, I don’t have much time for the eighth and there are things about the sixth which work well and some things which really don’t. There is a painful scene in The Half Blood Prince where Harry and his friends joke about how old Dumbeldore is and it ends with an extended shot of them laughing. It’s so clearly forced and unnatural, it’s a prime example of one of the ways in which Yates was unable to bring out the best in his young actors. The Yates films are bleaker in tone and also darker in colour, they also seem to really lack the energy and enthusiasm of previous films in the series. He excels at scenes with bleak undertones. The scene where Hermione and Harry dance their platonic dance to comfort each other after Ron departs in Deathly Hallows Part 1 is a brilliant representation of a male/female friendship and accentuates the difficulty of the times they are going through by having them temporarily distracted from their woes before the weight of the world comes crashing down around them once again. So too, in Fantastic Beasts Yates bring out the darker side of the Wizarding World. The horror of the American wizards’ death penalty (to be drawn into a murderous potion by one's fondest memories) and especially the Graves/ Grindlewald subplot which is helped by having the brilliant Colin Farrell portray the pernicious villain. Yates sadly lacks the skill to bring scenes like the Niffler bank-heist to screen effectively. I read the screenplay to Fantastic Beasts originally, not expecting to see the film at all, and this scene could have burst off the screen with energy and escalating chaos in every moment. What is finally delivered feels a bit like listening to someone, who isn’t funny, telling a joke that you know very well really badly. They know all of the components of the joke but lack the ability and the timing to put them together in an amusing manner. You see where they’re trying to go but they’re just not getting there.

I love the aesthetics of the American Wizarding community and the amount of detail on offer. We are so used to the black robes and hats of the British wizarding community that it is surprising but welcoming to see how differently the American culture has developed. The look of all of the characters running about in overcoats pays a satisfying visual nod to the robes but offers its own distinctive take on what wizards could be. It’s interesting to see free house elves polishing wands whilst the dialogue refers to the legal restrictions in New York befriending muggles. The contrast of having more equality for magical creatures (something which a grown up Hermione would still be petitioning for in Britain 80 years later) and yet there being far more stringent regulations on wizards’ interactions with fellow human beings speaks to the curious differences in cultures found all over the world. This film, and I hope the series will follow its example, is like a backpacking holiday to another country as much as it is a fantasy movie. The tone, fantasy dread aside, is lackadaisical which means you can really stop to enjoy the world of Rowling’s imagination. It’s a bit like the Walking Tour of New Zealand (Middle Earth) directed by Peter Jackson. It’s not hugely shocking or thrilling, it’s just here to be enjoyed and savoured.

Where to now? I feel that this first chapter in what will be a five-part film series is just a warm-up. It’s a relatively light story designed to test the waters, a chance for J.K. to flex her writers’ muscles and get used to these new characters. The potential is very great for these films to become more dramatic, far more emotional and a little more bleak (much like the Harry Potter series before.) The Second World War is coming up and the final duel between ex-friends and lovers Grindelwald and Dumbledore with it. The biggest tragedy is that we are unlikely to see the exquisite Colin Farrell playing the arch-villain instead we are to be subjected to the farcical Jonny Depp complete with silly voice, silly hairdo and silly merkin plastered to his chin. On the other hand there’s potential for new stories. Stories about Newt’s brother the war hero, Newt’s ex squeeze, the sinister Leta LeStrange and the story of how she got him expelled from Hogwarts. There’s even a chance that Newt’s story might begin to tie into the sister origins of Voldemort. He might even be that mysterious traveller from a distant land who brought Hagrid an egg which would hatch to become Hogwarts’ most enormous arachnid. I’m up for it, whatever J.K. and the team are planning.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a great prologue for what I’m hoping will become a beloved, dramatic and memorable film series. The imagination, characters and off-beat British charm are all present here from the best of the Harry Potter books making it the greatest spiritual successor to those original novels despite the “official” sequel, the West End play The Cursed Child being released in the very same year. The film is slow which sometimes means it offers a sumptuous opportunity to basque in a fully realised secondary world but it also means that at times the pacing of a scene drags or feels far too staged to maintain the audiences’ suspension of disbelief. All in all though, it continues the most important themes of J.K. Rowling’s work. It preaches the importance of acceptance and points out that everyone, no matter how peculiar has something special to offer. It’s like a return to childhood. I find it captivating.

*Easter Egg, I try to count the different forms of media that the Harry Potter story has either been expanded in or adapted into;

Novel, Film, Fictional Text Book, Video Games (PlayStations 1 - 3; X-Box and X-Box 360; Nintendo Wii; Nintendo 64; Microsoft Windows; Gamecube; Gameboy; Gameboy Advanced; Plastation Portable; Apple Macintosh; Nintendo DS; X-Box Kinect) Music; (Soundtracks by John Williams, Alexandre Desplat; Nicholas Hooper; Patrick Doyle and now, James Newton Howard, Also Wizard Rock by Harry and the Potters, The Remus Lupins, Gred and Forge and so on) YouTube videos (Potter Puppet Pals) Live puppet shows (Potter Puppet Pals tours); News articles about things J. K. Rowling said to make a political point (Dumbeldore is Confirmed for Gay: Daily Mail Article); Amazon Kindle exclusive e-books (Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists etc.); Original web content (Pottermore); Broadway play (The Cursed Child); Fringe Show (Potted Potter); Physically Recreated Environments (Universal Studios Hogsmede Experience); Theme Park Ride (Harry Potter and the Escape from Gingotts); Action Figures; Lego; Artwork; Fan Artwork; Fan Fiction… Sainsbury’s Butter-Cream Birthday Cake for Toddler.

J.K. is how rich?

Doctor Who: World Enough and Time Review

(Spoilers Oh my God Spoilers)

I’ve been spoiled. I’m a big little-boy who has been living through an era of television which is capable of tailoring itself directly to the needs of more niche groups of people to bring more satisfaction to more people through the production of far, far more content. I am spoiled, I am around during this fascinating and innovative period of Doctor Who’s history where the controversial figure, professional troll Steven Moffat gets to tinker, experiment and push at the history and the boundaries of the show I have a bit of an attachment to. I have been spoiled. Steven Moffat was reportedly furious when the news was released about John Simm’s involvement in Series 10 of Who. There is an interview with him available on YouTube where the interviewer brings up Simm and Moffat's little face goes from exasperated to distraught back to professional in a flash. So we have all been spoiled. We all knew the big shock reveal in this episode going into it. For reasons of spoilage I don't think that I felt the full effect of World Enough and Time. It didn't blow me away, but it was rather good.

Big shock reveals are not what storytelling is about but they are what many viewers tend to judge the success or failure of an episode on. As a 90's kid I have had it hardwired into my brain that The Master's return in Series 3 episode Utopia is the greatest reveal of all Doctor Who history. Professor YANA is actually The Master, is actually Harold Saxon PM. Since then, Doctor Who fandom (or at least the ones who stir themselves to barrage the BBC's Facebook wall with comments - Aye that Moffat is right shit why don't he write more like Sherlock that's an actual good show) has been hard wired to equate quality storytelling with shock twists. Shock twists which normally involve the revelation that X is actually The Master in disguise (although ironically these days numerous people seem to hold the dearest wish that Michelle Gomez's character Missy will be revealed to have not been the Master all along.)

It would be very interesting to watch World Enough and Time without foreknowledge of the revelations it holds. The episode is part story, part methodical removal of toys from a toy box, each more shiny than the last. The twists are like an overture more than plot points in themselves, an overture for the tenth series finale. It's no mistake that the "Next Time" trailer which followed last week's The Eaters of Light focused mostly on the playful twist of seeing Missy play the role of The Doctor. Once again this opening scene is merely a hook, a red herring to tempt viewers in whilst throwing them off the scent of what the story will actually be about. This scene was beautifully crafted to contain all of the best things about Moffat's comedy writing - the unexpected use of words and the reversals of expectations. He uses his third last episode to stick a spanner in the Doctor naming conundrum in place ever since Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell were credited as playing the character Doctor Who. The question is raised and then scrunched up in a ball and thrown in the rubbish bin with no-one any the wiser as to why those two words Doctor and Who are so regularly combined in this universe.

The comedy quickly gives way to horror as Bill finds herself short a heart, some lung and a good chunk of her spine. The stakes are set higher than ever before. Again, the series has trained us to expect a whole lot of tragedy and death foreshadowed for the companion of the day but for that tragedy to turn out to be little more than a technicality. Amy and Rory are separated from the Doctor but live full, happy lives. Rose is registered dead on her own world but makes it out of the series with all of her family and limbs in tact. Donna loses those things that made her a great person but ends up with a loving husband and a lottery ticket nevertheless. Even the very dead Clara gets to travel the universe for any number of years before throwing in the towel. The Bill story has been light hearted so far - a wide-eyed student with the best tutor in the world. Now she's one heart lighter. We should have seen this coming really.

Despite her seemingly incapacitating predicament this is Bill's story. Moffat pulls out all of the stops and brings concept after concept to the screen. The second-to-last episode of a series is traditionally bleak and puts the characters through the ringer and this is undoubtedly the case for Bill. Trapped in a hospital in a city which is nearing the end days, Bill discovers wards of patients surgically and technologically altered, crying out in pain. Her only friend is one Mr Razor, a vaguely simian and sorta ethnic orderly who peppers their interactions with macabre humour and opportunities to jump out from behind things. Their relationship is sweet at times, the audience never quite know what to make of him and his woolly hat. The makeup is excellent perfectly concealing the famous face of John Simm from the audience an, in world, the face of Bill's ex-Prime Minister. Director Rachel Talalay succeeds in making it as difficult as possible to get a good look at Razor whose odd movements and the use of shady lighting make it difficult to really understand who or what he is. The prosthetic nose and false teeth don't help either. Razor is so bizarre, so cartoonish that he sticks out in the episode. It was for this reason alone that one could work out that he is clearly the other promised Master hidden in plain sight. If the episode's biggest reveal hadn't been made 3 months in advance then I don't think that anyone would have connected razor with John Simm. It's no wonder Moffat was so irritated.

On the other end of the spaceship, The Doctor is still talking. One of the key elements of any Moffat series is the funny use of time as a plot device. Here the gravitational pull of a Black Hole (which The Doctor is standing closer to than Bill) is making time move more slowly for him. Whilst Bill mops floors, drinks terrible tea and looks into the hollow eyes of a fate worse than death, The Doctor is giving a very physical crash course in theoretical physics. There is a very nice contrast between the two strands of story, the hot-coloured, bright spaceship control room in contrast with the dark and eerie hospital. Both of styles of Who bring out the best in the other and emphasise the joy of an energetic Doctor and the cruel discomfort of a person in peril.

This episode functions like a macabre distortion of the romantic tragedy The Girl Who Waited crossed with the pacey brutality of Oxygen, earlier this series. These are good stories to draw inspiration from. The difference is that in those episodes victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat (well, it depends on how you look at them) here this is not the case. If anything this episode ups the stakes for those around it because it shows how dangerous life with the Doctor is, our characters are just one gunshot away from a hideous fate. This Doctor, the Twelfth, is particularly dangerous. He, like Clara reflected in him, is incredibly impulsive. He takes huge, risky actions with little thought for the consequences. Through this season alone he has lost his eyesight, nearly blown up the remainder of the human race and tried very hard to get himself trapped in a portal between universes for all eternity. This is, like Tennant's Tenth Doctor's arrogance, his fatal flaw. He has seen the deaths of three allies now, Danny, Clara (who was purposefully emulating his actions) and Bill who was acting out of friendship and trust for him. Moffat hasn't been planning this from the start, he didn't even intend to write this series or the 2016 and 17 Christmas Specials but he knows his character and it has resulted in what's looking to be a very solid, if very dark era of the show's history.

World Enough and Time is a good story in its own right. It shows brutal and gut-wrenching consequences for the actions of our hero and it offers both a moving end to Bill's story and a sickening Genesis for those Cybermen, one which far outstrips the 2006 alternate world genesis story. Series 10 has been solid so far, often teetering into the realms of greatness but sometimes stumbling back into mediocrity. A lot will depend on the quality of the finale, as ever, to bring all that has been set up to a head.

Doctor Who: The Eaters of Light Review

Series 10 has, like most of Steven Moffat’s series, put forward a group of episodes with a very strong connecting sense of purpose and tone. Series 10 is like an odd blend of the adventure of the Doctor/ Donna series with wide-eyed Bill; the wacky adventures of the Eleventh Doctor with Nardole’s slapstick gags and the darkness which has dominated Capaldi’s tenure. After the moody space-opera of Clara Oswald it has been nice to take a breather with down-to-earth Bill and it has been pleasant to see a bit of humour from the Twelfth Doctor who started off so aggressive and severe. Series 10 has also felt, to me like a bit of a “greatest hits” album. As a long-time obsessive who gnaws on each episode until I’ve experienced every bit of flavor it has to offer I saw repeated ideas in almost every story. This wasn’t necessarily to their detriment as the ideas were often reworked and re-contextualized so that they still felt fresh. With The Eaters of Light, the last stand-alone adventure for the Twelfth Doctor before his Christmas departure - I didn’t see any repeated ideas but I felt a return to the tone of some of my absolute favorite Doctor Who.

The tail-end of Matt Smith’s premier series was glorious. Whilst I’m not overly fond of Silurian two-part story The Hungry Earth/ Cold Blood I did love the location of the rain-spattered, British countryside. The isolated Welsh village and its family of inhabitants brought a sense of innocence to the show and grounded it in old-fashioned BBC programming. Vincent and the Doctor followed and it is one of the most unexpected, mournful and beautiful scripts to grace Moffat’s writing desk (although, reportedly he had a strong influence in the final drafts). And then we see Romans at Stone Henge.

Scottish writer Rona Munro brings a similarly home-cooked feel to this spin on the mystery of the Ninth Roman Legion - an army which marched off into Scotland, off the edge of the known world and vanished, never to return. Munro begins the episode with a little girl in waterproofs, running in the Aberdeen countryside, racing to hear the sound of music in the standing stones. Despite her brother’s trepidation she approaches the stones, a crow squawks Doctor and we see the TARDIS engraved in a Pictish pattern. Already she is setting us up for a campfire story - half fantasy and half truth. This story will stretch belief way back to a time before recordings, a time when anything could have happened. It’s a personal story for everyone which is nestled in childhood and family holidays in countryside cottages where rain batters the windows and The Doctor is at its heart.

Munro’s script isn’t flashy, it doesn’t rely on gimmicks or high concepts. Like Thin Ice before it is just relies on compelling storytelling and simple, believable, lovable characters. It sounds a little puerile to say but the female touch has been welcome in this series of Who. In contrast to The Empress of Mars, another story which featured armed forces far from home and far out of their depth, the side characters are simple but entirely believable. Once again the Doctor and Bill are split up but this time they spend the majority of the story apart from each other, meeting people and learning about the situation. The episode isn’t filled with twists and turns, instead taking a simple premise and exploring it from multiple angles. In fact, the majority of the story has happened by the time the TARDIS lands. Kar, a Pictish warrior woman and the defender of a rift in time which connects a hoard of light-eaters to our reality saw the Ninth Roman Legion march over her land, slaughter her people and, in desperation released the 1^st century equivalent of a nuclear bomb on her enemies. The Doctor is only there for clean-up duties.

Part of the beauty of the script is how mournful and reflective it is. Survivors from both the Pictish and Roman groups are connected by their youth and the extreme losses they have suffered. It is a wise choice to place Bill and the Doctor into the separate camps of these mortal enemies because it gives them a chance to do what the Doctor and his friends do best which is find the points of common humanity the people they meet. By the end of the episode the youthful supporting characters seem to have lived and breathed in a tangible world and we, the audience care for them both equally.

It’s a week for the companions as Bill and Nardole are doing what they do best here. The early days of The Doctor and Bill’s relationship is brought back to the foreground as the reason they have come to this time and place is to give the student a chance to challenge her professor’s theories. Bill is intelligent and enthusiastic and it’s endearing to see the TARDIS being used as nothing more than the tool with which to settle an educational wager. Nardole stands out in the middle of the episode. Munro jumps forward in time two days, for reasons of exposition and as a clever means to add some depth to the world and its peoples. Nardole lives out those two days in real time and when the Doctor reunites with him he has fully ingratiated himself and integrated with the Pictish people. Nardole is a character who never quite found the definition of other part-time TARDIS fliers like Jack or Rory who seemed to represent opposing ends of the masculinity scale but here his purpose is made clear. Nardole is affable, he’s nice to be around. People like him and he likes them, they make each other feel better. It’s simple but it works, he doesn’t need to be anything more.

For all of my gushing it’s not a perfect script. Some of the exposition is very clunkily delivered and I don’t quite understand why The Doctor decides to be quite so nasty to Kar. It seems their conversations boil down to a lot of baseless personal attacks, it’s a bit unnecessary. The script also fails to convincingly explain itself out of the problems it introduces. For example, The Doctor decides that it’s pointless to send another human into the rift to fend off the monsters, electing himself as the natural replacement because he just keeps living. It’s a nice addition to this Doctor’s character who seems to throw himself into situations with dire consequences as a hobby. In Oxygen, the loss of his sight is entirely his fault, in Extremis he decided to potentially sacrifice the eyesight of all his future regenerations so he can read a book and it looks as though this reckless character trait is the thing that will set him on the course to regeneration in the coming weeks. Within The Eaters of Light, however it is never properly explained why it is that sacrificing five Romans and three Picts is a natural alternative to sacrificing an immortal. Surely it will only take an extra few moments for the “locusts” to kill off the extra people and then we’re back to square one. The apocalypse is only delayed for a couple more centuries.

Logical inconsistencies aside, the frustrating imperfectness of this episode is not a deal-breaker as it successfully establishes a living, breathing world and pays pathos to it in 42 minutes (with a good five minutes at the end put aside for Missy shenanigans.) Its themes of young people being forced into adulthood through tragic loss speaks to the entire Capaldi era, making this an excellent choice for his final, stand-alone outing. Despite being the “oldest” Doctor he has always balanced his severity with a teenager-like sense of rebellion and recklessness. If his playing the guitar in his bedroom (TARDIS console room) wasn’t clue enough, his trademark hoodie and sunglasses should go some way to filling in the blanks. Capaldi’s Doctor, from his opening episode when he looks at a door, say “not me” then proceeds to jump out a window until his violent and extreme reaction to the death of Clara - putting himself through millenia of torture just to keep a secret from the Time Lords. His first series was set around the location of Coal Hill, a high school whilst his second mirrored the mad adventures of a gap year shared between friends. His third has brought him back to earth in a University in Bristol. The Twelfth Doctor’s has been a coming of age story. His is the first regeneration in a brand new cycle and this story is coming to an end.

Doctor Who: The Empress of Mars Review

Besides show-runner Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss is the last original writer of the rejuvenated Doctor Who to be writing regularly for the show. He’s had his ups and downs over the past twelve years. Gatiss brought Charles Dickens to life in the first “Celebrity Historical” - an episode which helped to establish the structure of a modern day adventure. Since then he’s struggled to recapture the glory days because Gatiss is, despite his irrefutably lovely nature, a writer who excels in a very specific niche. He is like a tinkerer, a hobbyist like Arthur Weasley playing with Muggle artefacts in his garden shed. Gatiss loves horror and proper English culture especially if it comes from a century or two in the past. He adores stories and characters and understands how they fit together but when he tries to recreate them himself he paints his brush-strokes too broad. A suitable parallel can be found in his acting. He’s great as the oily, English gentleman Mycroft but this role is more caricature than character.

Gatiss is good in his niche. He can write Sherlock because, at the end of the day, Sherlock is a post-modern deconstruction of the Sherlock Holmes myths as much as it is an update of the source material. He won over fans with his Doctor Who scripts set in the English past like Robert of Sherwood and The Crimson Horror because these scripts set out to entertain and nothing more. It is when he tries to spread his wings and do something different that he falls short of the mark. Victory of the Daleks was an early failure in Moffat’s tenure as show-runner. The script attempted to offer relate-able characters with pathos and introduce a twist on the Daleks which saw them as servants rather than conquerors but the contrivances which brought these tenuous premises to the screen bent the story too far from believablility. The effects were worse when he took the Doctor to far-out space to confront eye-gunk in the much-maligned Sleep No More. He replaced all of his crutches with found-footage gimmicks, Peep-Show-esque cinematography and the result was one of the least-loved Doctor Who episodes in years.

But what of The Empress of Mars? It’s a promising concept - Tomb of the Cybermen for the Ice Warriors. A group of naive Earthlings (here soldiers of the British Empire) travel to the stars to claim knowledge and land in the name of the Queen but awaken something beyond their understanding - a foe, returning to The Doctor’s life worse than ever before. The Ice Warriors are iconic figures from the show’s past and it’s not the first time that Gatiss has combined them with another previous story. His Cold War script bares numerous similarities to the Series 1 story Dalek. A lone Ice Warrior is dredged from the depths of the frozen North Pole and awoken only to escape its tormentors and wreak havoc in an enclosed space. The Ice Warriors have the potential to be far more interesting than the Daleks, and perhaps the Cybermen, as they are not represented as wholly evil creatures. They are intimidating and dangerous but ultimately they are defined, not by extreme loathing of other races but by a sense of militaristic pride in themselves. They can be reasoned with and they can be useful allies. This was a helpful factor in the conclusion of Cold War (if a little too convenient) but Gatiss is wise enough to weave this trait into the fabric of his story this time around. It’s not his only display of inspiration either.

The opening stinger is the highlight of the episode. In true Moffat style, Gatiss begins the episode with a separate mini-adventure. The Doctor, Bill and Nardole invade and undermine the prestigious space of the NASA control room. It’s a delight to see the three bounce off each other with some TARDIS-team banter up to the quality of Jack-Rose-Nine or Amy-Rory-Eleven and it cements the audience’s affection for this strange line-up. They’ve been growing together, suffering together and apart and now it’s time to see them have some fun. Gatiss’ slow reveal of the presence of stones spelling out “God Save the Queen” on the (until recently) hidden surface of Mars is a display of the cheek and cheese that the show can do so well when it’s not moping about or being overly dramatic. If the rest of the episode had lived up to the tone set here, it would have been an absolute belter.

Unfortunately, as the episode goes on we start to see Gatiss’ limitations hold back his interesting ideas. This episode ticks lots of boxes for things which should make a great RusselTDavies-esque adventure. The scenes are constructed well on paper - no sooner have our heroes left the safety of the TARDIS do they find themselves separated and in immediate peril. Nardole is flown away in a moody TARDIS, Bill falls to a lower level of the cave and our point of view cuts between her tense meeting with a mysterious space-suited man and the Doctor’s encounter with an advancing Ice Warrior. The Doctor soon discovers that the Warrior is named Friday, an ally of the English expeditionary forces and one of the most engaging concepts of the episode.

Sadly, very little of the fun that was promised up to this point is delivered and part of the reason for this is a lack of peril (our heroes are split up and placed in danger but the very next scene shows them drinking tea and sharing a Victoria sponge) and the other reason is the lack of engaging characters. There are many memorable guest actors present. Each of them has a role - one is commander with a dark secret, another the treasonous second-in-command, there is a young, naive minority wanting to marry his girl back home, and a cock-er-ney thief oddly named Jackdaw. A regular criticism of Doctor Who is that the disposable side-characters are rarely offered enough personality that their deaths incur meaningful reactions from the audience so it is admirable that Gatiss attempts to introduce us to a bustling British platoon but none of them feel the slightest bit authentic. The naive one never displays a hint of bravery so we can’t get on his side, the second-in-command never displays the slightest bit of conflict over his devious ways so we can’t enjoy his villainy, and as for the Commander - whose big character moment serves as the climax for the episode - none of the revelations made about him or his decisions were ever satisfyingly set up so watching him is just watching a bunch of stuff happening after other stuff. It’s a list of points with nothing to connect them.

Gatiss’ big addition to Ice Warrior mythology comes in the shape of a shouty, dread-lock haired, plastic-clad queen who does little other than issue commands and hate people until she doesn’t any more. The titular Empress of Mars really should be more of a character than that. Much of the promotion focused on her and the promise of the drama she would bring but a 3 second shot of her in a trailer is about as much depth and understanding of her as you get from the entire episode. It’s that superficial. She does make a distinctive impression however, with her green scales standing out against the red rocks of Martian tunnels, but it’s not a believable look. One is intensely aware at all points that they are looking at a costume designed by a BBC production team standing in a set. If there was a little more variety of locations in the episode then this problem might have been ameliorated somewhat.

The Empress of Mars is, for me, one of Gatiss’ better scripts. He’s playing on his home turf. There’s English soldiers, Doctor Who lore to be played with and enough banter to have fun with. I will watch it again, it has a lovely Easter Sunday family-movie vibe. It’s a bit Indianna Jones and a bit Pirates of the Carribean, a bit Zulu, a bit Jewel of the Nile. It’s got a strong sense of adventure but it’s also fluff. There’s not much substance to it. I just wish that Moffat had given the whole thing a script polish, injected a bit of comedy, romance and danger to turn it from a Big Mac, fries and cola into a steak dinner, roast potatoes and red wine. Gatiss is delightful, he tinkers with stories and pulls them apart and puts them back together but he doesn’t forge them into something truly brilliant.

The Lie of the Land, Toby Whithouse and Monks

I’m usually a fan of Toby Whithouse. He had a stellar pair of Matt Smith episodes entitled The God Complex and A Town Called Mercy these episodes were presented as stand-alone but he used the, perhaps, uninspiring briefs of “Do a Cowboy Episode” and “This one’s a bit like the Shining” to introduce well rounded minor characters, good jokes and reflect on not only the Doctor’s character but the series as a whole. Whithouse was the creator and lead writer of Being Human, a show with an incredible cast, funny, relevant writing and just enough horror to please a teenage me. The show was a magnificent re-imagining of vampire, werewolf and ghost lore which played contrasting and powerful emotions in its audience. It was responsible for giving Craig Roberts his breakout role, presenting Aidan Turner with his first chance to truly prove his abilities and it also brought Thin Ice writer, Sarah Dollard to the shores of Britain. Whithouse’s legacy in British television is secure. The Lie of the Land, whilst not bad or unsatisfying does feel like the work of a writer who has had his best ideas and is now, simply practised in presenting his old ones in shiny packaging.

The Lie of the Land sees off The Monks trilogy in true Moffat fashion. Much like his other show Sherlock the Monks have featured in three stories, loosely connected by a gentle arc. As ever, the Moffat script is the most experimental, most divisive and by far the most interesting. The middle episode feels inconsequential, a link between a strong start and a strong end and the final episode struggles to deliver on all of the wildly irresponsible promises made by its predecessors. The Lie of the Land sees Bill in a dystopian present-day England where colour has been privatised and consequently no-one can afford to use much of it and everyone wears long coats and drinks tea to get through the day. The Monks have installed great big statues of themselves in every major city just to remind everyone that they’re in this episode even though they rarely appear. The Doctor has taken to broadcasting pro-monk propaganda from a boat off the coast of Britain which means that Bill and Nardole - who has gotten over his poisoning last week - to track down the Doctor and rally the resistance.

There is a lot of imagination here. I was pleased with the almost subliminal representation of the Monk’s mind-controlling through the flashes of the “Truth” logo that recur throughout the episode. I also thought that Capaldi was on top form, relishing the opportunity to play a devious, authoritarian Doctor who preaches against the Doctor’s usual mantra. The episode’s opening scenes of the fake history lesson which writes the Monks into millennia of human history is a nice concept which plays to both the unpleasant reality of “alternative facts” and a certain comical twist on the horrific Monks who look absurd being presented as benevolent parents to humanity. It reminded me, personally of the Conservative political ad which suggested voting for David Cameron because he was watching his son’s football match. All the while Cameron’s smooth, ever-loosening face (the result of the loss of fat which hadn’t quite taken the excess cheeks with it) was making him look more and more like a crab person masquerading in human skin. Whithouse’s inspiration was probably not taken directly from said video. Fundamentally this episode is a series of very good scenes and ideas for scenes - Bill’s therapy with her imaginary Mum, the assault on the pyramid, Missy as Hannibal Lectre - but it doesn’t have the time to fully lead into or pay off these scenes in that connective tissue we call “story”.

The problem with the Monks trilogy (besides its eponymous and under-developed villains) is the fact that it is a trilogy with two first parts and one third part. Extremis introduced the villains and the notion that they would be invading soon. Pyramid introduced the Monk’s powers and their curious dependence upon a loving human host. Lie of the Land is a conclusion without build-up. A middle part of a story should take the concepts introduced and raise the stakes. It should introduce complications and take our characters to their lowest points. Steven Moffat has said that he doesn’t view these stories as a three-part story but as a trilogy, the distinction being that a three part story is one story, split but a trilogy is three stories connected. That said, none of these stories works in and of themselves. They are dependent upon each other. Extremis wouldn’t matter if it didn’t lead into a real life invasion. Pyramid wouldn’t have any weight if it weren’t setting up a post-apocalyptic earth-takeover. And Lie has the opposite problem because has too many underdeveloped concepts from the other stories to justify. This story is too big for 45 minutes. And, in brutal honesty, it isn’t original enough to justify two stories.

Once again in series 10 we see a story which is splattered with moments from other episodes. When Bill ties an unconscious Doctor down and says goodbye before attempting to wire her brain into a machine she is following in the footsteps of River Song in Forest of the Dead, although River’s death seemed to be a little more debilitating than Bill’s. The Monk’s mind-control techniques bare startling resemblance to The Master’s in the series 3 finale, although this time everyone broke free by thinking about Mrs Potts at once, as opposed to thinking “Doctor”. Even the Monks themselves, living in a pyramid, zapping soldiers with their finger-electricity bare so much resemblance to the Silence that it’s no wonder I’ve already forgotten everything else about them.

All in all, The Lie of the Land is not a bad episode of anything. It’s entertaining, funny and exciting enough but it comes in a mid-series slump of season 10 and it’s not strong enough to reinvigorate my enthusiasm for Who as a whole.

The Mummy - An American's Adventure Fighting An Egyptian In Iraq and London

(Spoilers, Nothing but spoilers)

The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise, New Girl, Blonde Girl, the new Girl Mummy and Russel Crowe is quite a few minutes of stuff which happens. It’s dark in terms of lighting and light in terms of plot. The film is the second attempt to launch a cinematic universe which will bring together the Universal Monsters (Dracula Untold being the first) although the Universal Monsters have previously been brought together in 2004’s Van Helsing. The film is directed and co-written by Alex Kurtzman, a friend of J. J. Abrams and frequent collaborator of Roberto Orci who also has a production credit on this film. Kurtzman and Orci previously failed to maintain a Cinematic universe when their script for The Amazing Spiderman 2 resulted Sony studio’s abandonment of that franchise and all planned films in that universe including a Sinister Six and Venom movie. Kurtzman litters his directorial debut with visual cues alluding to such films as The Dark Knight/ Avengers/ Skyfall as well as the previous reboot of The Mummy franchise starring Brendan Fraser. His script is full-to-bursting with moments where characters helpfully explain exactly what has just happened, what is happening and what will happen just in case the audience have taken a nap.

I went to see this film because a couple of students had invited Aimee and I out for dinner, to spend time together before we leave China next month. Upon completing our delicious meal we thought that we would continue the fun by finding something to see at the cinema. It was about 8:00 in the evening and almost all of the day's screenings had finished already. We tried to see Alien Covenant but there weren’t enough seats for all of us so we went to another cinema and bought tickets to the very last available film which was The Mummy. It had already started but no one cared. We wandered in to a modestly crowded theatre and Tom Cruise was playing Nick, in Iraq with Nick from New Girl playing someone else. They were in a lot of danger because there were bullets flying everywhere. The building they were standing on was destroyed but they weren’t so that was OK. I have been to see a number of films in China and the audiences have been universally badly behaved. Chatty, on their phones, elbows sticking over onto my seat, the sins go on. It is something that one just has to accept, writing it off in the list of cultural differences and yet, this audience was captivated. They were quiet, not once did I see a phone. It was surprising. Audiences took phone-calls during Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, they shouted at their children in The Lego Batman Movie, they chatted all the way through Logan but for The Mummy they behaved themselves.

Cruise and Nick’s destroyed building hits the ground and opens up a monolithic cavern beneath a tiny village. No one cares until a blonde scientist woman points out that there might be treasure in it. She and Cruise had sex but he stole her map so she’s annoyed with him. She isn’t embarrassed about the sex though and she wants to make sure everyone knows that. Cruise is working for the American military but he runs away from them sometimes to search for buried treasure with his friend, Nick.

Nick, Cruise and Woman all go abseiling into the cavern and they find lots of hieroglyphics and statues of Anubis at the bottom. In Iraq. Nick doesn’t want to be there because he’s scared. There is a sandstorm coming so the three steal a sarcophagus using one of the American army’s helicopters. Our heroes are flown away from the sandstorm in an American fighter jet with their new sarcophagus but Cruise is having bad dreams about an "ethnic" woman and Nick was bit by a spider so he loses the sight in one of his eyes and tries to free the Mummy in the sarcophagus but only succeeds in stabbing the Corporal and getting shot three times by Cruise. The American military plane is attacked by CGI birds which means that it falls out of the sky, crashing over London halting its trip from Iraq with the Egyptian coffin in its cargo hold. Cruise gives Woman a parachute and he dies in a plane which falls out of the sky but its OK because he comes back to life in a body bag without a cut or blemish on his skin.

Woman and Cruise get a drink but Nick isn’t quite as dead as we thought he was. He hasn’t taken death quite as well as Cruise, however, as he has makeup on his face and one of his eyes has a blind-contact lens in it. Cruise is attacked by rats and then he and Woman visit a church. The Mummy is there and she tries to sacrifice Cruise but luckily she doesn’t have the red gem in her special knife so Cruise and woman steal an ambulance and drive away. The Mummy uses magic and Cruise actually drove back to the castle so he drives away again and crashes the ambulance. It looks like The Mummy is going to kill him so it’s lucky that Dr Henry Jekyll has a squad of soldiers who catch The Mummy and knock out Cruise.

Cruise wakes up and meets Dr Jekyll. Jekyll has The Mummy chained up and Woman was working for Dr Jekyll because they were both interested in The Mummy. Woman thinks that she and The Mummy can have some grown-up-girl bonding time but The Mummy doesn’t so she gets a spider to crawl into a man’s ear who hits a machine with an axe that frees her. While this is going on Jekyll turns into Mr Hyde while Cruise is in the room. Cruise give him his insulin shot and he turns back.

The Mummy has escaped so Cruise and Woman run out of Jekyll’s secret base into a natural history museum in Glasgow into a street in London. The Mummy makes it windy so Cruise is almost hit by a bus which he avoids by jumping into its glass instead of its metal and he ends up in the London underground. Nick pretends to be friends with Cruise but isn’t really so Cruise runs away. The Mummy finds a red gemstone and wakes up some chain-mailed corpses of knights of the round table. She captures woman and takes her to the river which is under the London Underground when a train comes. The knights chase Cruise but he is chasing The Mummy who has managed to drown Woman. The Mummy now has a knife and a gemstone which means Tom Cruise could have power over life and death. He wants to bring Woman back to life so he stabs himself then beats up The Mummy in a very awkward scene of a man at the peak of physical strength grabbing a woman by the neck, throwing her into walls before holding her down and forcing her to kiss him. The kiss takes The Mummy’s life but Cruise gives that life to Woman.

Dr Jekyll and Woman stand in the secret base and say that Cruise is now a monster and Jekyll says a monster is the only way to fight a monster before winking at the camera and saying sequel. Tom Cruise is in a desert now. Nick says Thanks for bringing me back to life, Tom Cruise You are awesome and we think you are cool and Scientology is cool and the two ride horses towards the Pyramids of Giza.

The film ends.

People leave the theatre.

Half way to the door they forget what film they were watching.

Half way home they forget that they saw a film at all and wonder how they could have lost 33 Yuan, it was right there, it was right there in their pocket.

The Mummy’s curse has been lifted.

Post Script: Brendan Fraser feels that sweet buzz of schadenfreude. 

He may have been in Furry Vengeance but he was never in anything that bad.

Doctor Who: The Pyramid at the End of the World Review

Well that wasn’t very inspiring was it?

There’s something unique about a Peter Harness script. For him, the central drama comes down to a moral choice or an imaginative debate as opposed to a chase down a corridor or a supernatural mystery. His 2014 script Kill the Moon set companion, schoolgirl and an astronaut in the epicenter of a Pro Life/ Pro Choice scenario. The Moon, it transpired, was actually a space-dragon egg all along. Zygon Invasion/ Inversion was possibly his most successful story taking the contemporary issues of immigration, extremism and violent retribution and successfully contriving a situation in which Capaldi’s hippyish persona could successfully raise two fingers in a sign of peace and prevent a global war. Pyramid has elements of these other scripts but the conceit is not so strong and the conflict is not so consequential and in many ways it undermines the strong morals of his previous episodes.

Much like the The Veritas - a book which kills its readers - the titular Pyramid is simply a hook, something of a MacGuffin to draw in the viewer without having very much to do at all with the central story. The conceit that Harness brought to the table is a choice that humanity faces between global destruction and accepting the authoritarian rule of an alien power. Ultimately, much like previous entry in this series Knock Knock it doesn’t feel like all of the concepts completely mesh here. The Monks are distinctive visually but as conceptual creatures they are very thinly drawn. They kill with a touch, need the right kind of consent to control a planet, have a 5000 year old pyramid as a spaceship, run simulations through projectors, have blue wires, can alter reality. It’s hard to care about them because they’re just a list of things. There’s no solid rule or conceit with them which lessens the stakes. We know that literally anything could be pulled out of the bag at the last minute to defeat them because they themselves have pulled any number of loosely connected powers out of thin air in this and the previous episode.

The Pyramid at the End of the World is ambitious, which is something to be admired. The episodes this season have all had very distinct takes on the Doctor Who brand which is an improvement over seasons like 7B, Matt Smith’s final adventures, which were eight episodes of cookie-cutter run-arounds. Pyramid does bite off more than it can chew though. We are expected to believe in an international emergency that potentially pits the three greatest military super-powers against each other but what we are shown is ramshackle clusters of people standing in deserted land and offices. The eye never truly believes that numerous static shots of our regulars standing and looking in awe off camera are connected with a majestic 5000 year old pyramid. Maybe it’s my recent experiences on film sets but all I could see was an on-location film set.

The episode is riddled with strange character choices and leaps in logic. I wasn’t a fan of the fact that in order to save the day, The Doctor waves his hands in the air and says “Since it’s not war that’ll end the world it must be science. I guess biochemistry? I feel that” Why does he feel it? Is he just magic? There is a disagreement between the military leaders and the Doctor about whether or not to go for of the Monks’ offer. The Doctor says he’ll probably stop the destruction but if he had been “feeling” the wrong thing that day the world really would have ended. The military leaders were right not to trust him. I didn’t, and due to the set up of the episode, cutting between the clownish antics in a Yorkshire lab and the events in the Middle East I knew that he was right.

There’s a rule with horror writing - if the characters are stupider than the audience then the audience will not sympathize with them. The same, I’ve discovered goes for fictional scientists. The Laurel and Hardy/ Mott and Jeff comedy of errors featuring Erica (whose glasses were broken when she left them between a door and its frame) and Douglas, a man stupid enough to remove his safety hood, open up a container of toxic, life-destroying gas, scoop out a sample of infected earth and leave two quarantine doors open (oh, sorry, hung over enough to do those things) was more frustrating than dramatic. By the end of the episode, Erica is placed in the role of wonderful person/ potential companion but an act as simple as not insisting that her lab partner wear his protective clothing undermined the gravitas of her character entirely. As delightful as she may have been

There was good in the episode too, it would have, without doubt looked promising on paper. An alien menace who needs permission to invade is a compelling concept and the intention to write a sweeping, contemporary drama was an admirable one. At the end of the day it is probably not as bad as I have made out but the stuff going on in one’s life usually has even more of an effect on one’s enjoyment of an episode than the episode itself. The Pyramid at the End of the World just promised more than it delivered. It also felt like a second introduction in a trilogy which will conclude next week (so lets hope that Whithouse doesn’t disappoint or three weeks will feel wasted). The episode also lacks the internal sense of closure which was present in Extremis. The Doctor’s got his sight back, lets hope Moffat can get his eye back on the ball.