Review: Doctor Who: Cold Blood

That was certainly an improvement. Chris Chibnall spends less time faffing about here, and what results is a tightly packed if albeit a bit rushed story. The first half of the episode is Doctor Who gold, balancing all the elements perfectly, with technobabble, drama and a deep anti-violence message. The second half felt a bit rushed and borrowed a lot of Moffat principles for the sake of argument...

So, some construction worker "Mo" and Amy are about to get dissected by some reptile guy but elsewhere in the city army reptiles find the Doctor and Nasreen, and so he is called away to examine the Doctor's alien nature. Amy swipes a remote device, allowing both to escape, and they wander around tunnels finding children and reptile warriors in cryosleep.

The Doctor discovers that this city of Silurians is being currently controlled by the army, who are the only ones awake. The other two burst in for an untimely rescue attempt and then all four are tied up and readied for excecution.

Meanwhile, on the surface, the alien hostage has poisoned the grandfather, who goes to ask her for the cure. Like the arrogant alien warrior stereotype she is, she refuses and says she prefers to be killed instead. Oh goody. Being a bit pissed at how she's treating her dad, Ambrose accidentally electrocutes the alien hostage, thus sparking the potential for a war.

Just before they're going to be excecuted, the Second Half kicks in and for some reason the Silurian President comes storming in (having provided voiceovers throughout the episode), saving all of their lives. Then follows some awkward negotiation with the surface where they ask to bring the hostage down, and some negotion scenes between the apparent representatives for humanity and the president.

And then the military lead a revolution and find out the hostage is dead, and so like another Matt Smith two-parter, the group become trapped in a control room. Here there's apparently some very simple solution involving everyone being told to sleep again, the drill being blown up and everyone escaping with their heads.

Then a crack appears and there's a Last Second Death by Rory who's then absorbed by the crack and erased from history. Good riddens. Dull idiot that while bringing some unique human drama had absolutely no chemistry with Gillian and got in the way quite a bit. Valuable to the overall plot, perhaps, but I would have preferred he stayed in his little village. His four episodes haven't really given him enough characterisation for me to care about his demise.

The prostethics are as good as ever, if a bit distracting, and the acting was top-notch if not Shakespeare. There are some brilliant one-liners, like "We're at the centre of the Earth, and there are lizard men." The episode sets up some future episode synopsise, with the Silurians destined to come to the surface in 3020, which I'm not particularly excited about, but there we go. It by far bettered the mess that was last week, because it took more than a paragraph to descirbe what acutally happened! It wasn't particularly meaningful, or at least not as meaningful as the 1970 story.

The erasure of Rory brings up some big questions. What appeared in place of the 2015 timeline in Amy's Choice? Who stood in as Amy's brother in Vampires in Venice? How can The Doctor have gone to Venice in the first place when Rory wasn't there to be going on a romantic trip with Amy? How can the crack exist if the wedding of Amy and Rory is the point at which time cracks? All questions that need to be answered, probably in the finale, but I do hope they are.

I found the entire story dissappointing; character development was few and far between, there were long periods where simply nothing was happening, the voice over was pretentious and stupid and it's clear that due to the rushed nature of his death/erasure he's likely to be resurrected later on. The synopsis had so much potential, but this fell down so dramatically that not even the wonderful prostetics and special effects stopped me from passing the occasional yawn.

Anyway. Next week we have a bad Van Gogh impression and a Gryffon-like monster. It's written by none other than Richard Curtis, writer of great comedies such as The Boat That Rocked, Love Actually, Notting Hill and Four Weddings. My hopes are up.

Thanks.