Quite the
middling episode in my opinion. Some
good scares, jokes, and character moments, but the actual plot is pretty
slapdash and sloppy, and the commentary is too on-the-nose for my taste.
Having
managed to get her new friends home, the Doctor isn’t quite as ready to take
off on her own as she professes, and an invitation to tea at Yas’s quickly
turns into a sci-fi creep-fest. Spiders
have been acting strangely all over Yorkshire; a few of them have grown way, way beyond their natural size, and they
seem to have acquired a taste for humans.
The investigation leads the Doctor and co. to a soon-to-be-opened luxury
hotel, the epicenter of the mystery.
The giant
spiders are suitably creepy, although I confess I was really hoping for a
Metebelis III reference and was bummed that we never got one. The episode does a good job alternating
between an eerie sense of foreboding and more outright freak-out moments. It also continues to solidify team TARDIS,
individually and as a unit. We get more
on Yas here, including meeting her family and learning a bit more about what
makes her tick, and Ryan and Graham have some nice moments together being back
in Sheffield for the first time since the events of “The Woman Who Fell to
Earth” (plus, there’s a background shot of Ryan making shadow puppets for no
reason at all during an exposition scene, and it’s positively delightful.)
The
Doctor is a near-endless source of great lines in this episode. Off the top of my head, my favorites are 1)
her attempts at small-talk with Yas’s family, 2) an amusing tangent she makes
about Ed Sheeran, and 3) her uncertainty when Yas’s mom asks if Yas and the
Doctor are “seeing each other” – I love, love, love that the Doctor isn’t sure
and looks to Yas for a yay or nay.
Additionally, she offers up handy spider facts and has zero patience for
Mr. Robertson, the brusque hotel-mogul-turned-politician (gee, sound familiar?)
who owns the unnaturally-infested hotel.
All that
said, as an episode of Doctor Who, it
doesn’t rate more than an “okay.” It
manages to feel underwritten and overwritten at the same time. The resolution is incredibly hasty, so much
so that there’s a moment where I thought we somehow skipped a scene, and there
are a few dangling threads that don’t get resolved at all. However, it also lays on other areas much too
thick, namely the Doctor’s guns-are-bad stance and the characterization of Robertson
himself. On the first point, it’s no
secret that the Doctor hates guns, and it’s certainly not the first time the
show has belabored that point. But it’s
only on occasion that it’s written in such a way that it feels too anvilly, and
this is one of those times – it feels pitched down a little bit, like it doesn’t
trust the kids to get it unless it’s spelled out more than once. And with Robertson… it’s weird, because he
doesn’t actually act much like Trump at all, but a bunch of the details
surrounding him are so Trump, and
even though Trump is way more outrageous than anything a fictional TV show
could dream up, it still feels like too self-conscious a reference.
I wouldn’t
say these flaws get in the way of the good, fun parts of the episode, but the
flaws are sort of threaded throughout this story, while the fun parts are
mostly individual scenes, lines, and moments.
As such, the overall impression made here is “not all that great.”
No comments:
Post a Comment