Review: Doctor Who 11.2: The Ghost Monument

With all these extreme close-ups, it's a blessing this director
didn't work on any Eleven episodes.

Okay, now I'm starting to get worried. This series' premier had me concerned about some of the smaller details of the series' new production, and that the "crowded TARDIS" was going to cause issues with the way our characters developed. The Ghost Monument, ostensibly a race episode which leads to a conclusion where we first meet the new TARDIS interior, is a complete mess. The writing actively avoids tension for the whole runtime, and so the result is a messy hodgepodge of boring ideas poorly executed. Couple that with confusingly bad editing and cinematography, and Series 11 has already delivered its first clunker.

With the last episode leaving our heroes floating in space after attempting to use a teleporter to find the TARDIS, we find that two racing spaceships have scooped up half of the team each, with both ships crash landing on a barren planet called Desolation. The two racers, Angstrom (Susan Lynch) and Epzo (Shaun Dooley) are participating in the Rally of the Twelve Galaxies, run by Ilin (Art Malik) who promises a massive cash prize for reaching The Ghost Monument, which turns out to be the TARDIS stuck in a materialisation loop. Despite being a race, the whole six-strong cast travels together throughout the episode, and after overcoming obstacles they declare themselves joint winners and the remaining crew hop on board the new and improved TARDIS.

With the race element of the story being introduced a third of the way in, I expected some kind of tension, but instead the episode has the characters all travelling together at the same pace, explaining their backstories and motivations to the Doctor. Angstrom is a little coarse, but is trying to find her family. Epzo is selfish and ruthless because he comes from Space!Sparta. While the danger of the world is hyped up to no end, we never see any of the negative effects of their travels come to fruition: the water is deadly, they say, but we never get to see someone fall in. The air is poisonous, but nobody chokes. Nobody is thirsty or hungry after three days travel. The tell-don't-show nature of the episode's writing means that you're never genuinely worried for any of the characters, and that's poor storytelling.

Art Malik is wasted on a script that doesn't bother to give
him a character.

A large part of the episode is spent in an underground bunker, filled to the brim with boring robots and, later, intelligent murderous tablecloths that come out of nowhere and are dispatched with equal haste. A lot of emphasis is put on The Doctor wanting to find out why these people disappeared - something she makes a point of mentioning repeatedly. Does she find corpses or diaries, and work out what happened? No, because apparently someone wrote a big message on the floor in a language we can't read, leading the solution of that juicy story moment to be Jodie Whitaker staring at the floor for five minutes and explaining the lore to us. This carries through to the rest of the episode's ideas too - we never understand why Ilin is running the race, as he only appears for a few minutes. The androids and evil scarves could be extricated from the episode and nothing of value would have been lost.

And now we come to the continuing thread from my last review - how is Chibnall developing the characters, bearing in mind there's far too many of them? Ryan, who got by far the most development last week, continues to hold the spotlight as he struggles to climb a ladder. Graham's only real character beats are wishing he could go home and wishing that the 19-year-old who he has no relationship with would call him "Granddad", and Yaz... was here? The Doctor is also confusing here, shouting at Ryan for using a gun on non-sentient androids because she doesn't like guns, and then setting off an EMP bomb that kills them anyway. Later she aimlessly points her "Sonic Swiss-Army-Knife, without the knife" at a Scarf that's strangling Epzo, only for Angstrom to save him with her knife, leaving her looking rather silly. The Doctor's refusal to use guns and knives feels like someone watched the Tenth Doctor and decided to copy over a bunch of traits without thinking,and it feels hypocritical when Thirteen is willing to melt a person alive but having the Sonic cut things is too far? The only redeeming thing she did in this episode was the note of utter despair near the end of the episode when The Doctor believes that they're trapped on the planet without the TARDIS. Whittaker's exhaustion is palpable and it's a strong note in an episode otherwise without them.

Who turned out the lights?

There's a lot more I could nitpick and question, but I think my point is made. This episode's writing, editing and cinematography were all egregiously sub par. I know the second of every era ends up being a little dodgy, but this just doesn't feel right and it makes me really worried at whether Chibnall is the man for this job. He hasn't actually written any good episodes of Doctor Who yet, as far as I can reckon, and by writing so many of the episodes himself and by having too many companions he's really stacked the deck against himself. I will hold out hope that this series will improve in the next few weeks, but at its current rate it looks less likely to stride to the finish and more likely to shamble.

Thanks

Next Week: We visit the 1950s to meet Civil Rights campaigner Rosa.

P.S. Also, the new opening titles are rubbish. And so is the new TARDIS interior. Too dark, and the time rotor doesn't go up and down. Bleh.

Review: Doctor Who 11.1: The Woman Who Fell To Earth

This is late, but then so am I.

Thirteen (Jodie Whittaker) proudly brandishes her
"Sonic Swiss-Army Knife"

Well then. Doctor Who is back after a long wait, now with a woman in its lead role. Casting Broadchurch actress Jodie Whittaker as the new Time Lord was a genius decision, if only for the fact that it brought discussion of the show to an all time high as people of every background argued back and forth about what a woman would bring to the role. I was cautiously optimistic - I knew that the performance of any new Doctor was half performance and half writing, and with Chris Chibnall at the controls it was anyone's guess what the writing would be like. The result of this experiment desperately wants us to think that it's The Eleventh Hour but in Sheffield, but it fails to reach that level for a variety of reasons.

I'm not sure what Jodie Whittaker was aiming for with her characterisation of the Thirteenth Doctor. She's manic, brutally honest, and also breathtakingly human and vulnerable. It's hard to get much more than that because we get precious little time with the Doctor on her own to assess her as a character in her own right; instead, she feels like the leader of a gang of kids, which is what Chibnall seems to have been going for. A lot of her key character moments, like shouting at someone for attacking an already-downed foe, or her triumphant "I Am The Doctor" speech, would have been a lot better if not for the utterly pedestrian editing, which was all over the place and gave the episode an odd, out-of-place feeling. I am confident that she at least knows what she's doing, which is why I'm optimistic, but at the moment I'm struggling to get the same gravitas from her as from previous Doctors.

The TARDIS team (or should I say TARDIS-less for the moment) has been packed with three new companions - dyspraxic Ryan (Tosin Cole), his step-grandfather Graham (Bradley Walsh) and PC-in-training Yaz (Mandip Gill). Most of the episode's focus is on Ryan, as he struggles to learn to ride a bike in the Sheffield hills, with grandmother Grace (Sharon D. Clarke) and Graham watching on. After he discovers a bizarre alien pod in the woods, he calls Yaz, and the two of them eventually end up on a train with Grace and Graham as an alien attacks and an amnesiac Doctor falls through the roof. After heavy publicity around the three companions, Grace's increasing presence in the adventure was immediately suspicious - and, on cue, she dies near the end of the story, creating lasting drama for Ryan and Graham. The two male companions have got the most drama going on, and the most tension for future episodes (although the whole "Call me Grandad" thing is lame, he's 19, he can call you what he wants) which really leaves Yaz in the cold a bit. A lesson not learned from Season 19 here - three companions is far too many, and so far Chibnall isn't even running damage control by splitting them up; they're together all the time, which leaves Yaz with very little to do besides asking questions and making the occasional joke.

Bradley Walsh provides some unexpected emotion at
Grace's funeral

While I did enjoy the episode's villain, Tsim-Sha, and his creepy face, the episode did very little to extract tension from him until the end. Most of the episode is spent working out who he is, and the Doctor comes up with the wrong theory, and so the actual exposition is left up to the villain himself, who monologues extensively and then takes part in a chase sequence about 10 minutes later where The Doctor kills him by melting his DNA with his own weapons. We're treated to a bizarre shot where The Doctor shouts at Karl, the bounty hunter's intended victim, for kicking his remains off of the edge of the crane they were fighting on - right after The Doctor herself saved the day in a painful and gruesome way. I hope this hypocrisy isn't a repeated theme.

Aside from a few other things like some really quite nice cinematography and a cool cliffhanger ending with our leads floating in space, this episode didn't really feel like a triumphant return to form. The decision to have three companions is already causing issues, and the writing isn't making up for the problems that that many side characters brings. I also want to say that I really want to like this Doctor, but there are a few niggling doubts in my mind that I hope are settled in the next few weeks. Overall The Woman Who Fell To Earth was an interesting start to a new era, and I only hope that the show manages to iron out its few kinks by the end of its run.

Thanks.

P.S. It's good to be back! Although I only really wrote this review because I really wanted to discuss next week's episode, The Ghost Monument.

Top Ten Worst Moffat Era Episodes, Part Two

(Previous article containing entries 6-10 here).

Basing an entire season's drama on whether the title character
of a decades old series will die is an awful writing move.

5 - The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon (Series 6, Episodes 1 & 2)
Written by Steven Moffat

I went camping in Easter 2011 and it was terrible, just terrible. The worst aspect, for me, was not being able to see The Impossible Astronaut, a premiere I had been really excited for. In hindsight, this was to be the start of a lifetime of disappointment. When I finally watched this two-parter I was initially blown away, but as Season 6 went on, it became increasingly clear that the admittedly well-done setup of The Doctor's death and Amy and Rory's decision to hide it from his younger self were all for nought, and it was a very egregious example of the way that Moffat fails to write compelling mystery and suspense.

The Silents, introduced in this episode, have the inklings of a good idea. Moffat likes to play around with sight and memory, and so the gimmick of the Silents erasing your memory of them when you look away is quite spectacular. As time wears on, though, it becomes a bit of a tired meme, and holes start appearing in the concept - how did these things come to be, and how do they communicate? We're never given those details; neither are we very clear on why they are manipulating the Human race, other than some vague mentions of them blowing up the TARDIS last season and one of them killing a woman at random in a bathroom. For me and a few others, the story fails to convince the viewer that the Doctor's solution to the problem - brainwashing Humanity into committing a Silent genocide using the Moon Landing video - is anything short of barbaric and cruel, especially when the music and tone make it seem like a heroic and dashing thing to do with no moral implications.

Other annoyances in the episode bought it a place on the upper half of this list. Like Churchill before and after, the episode sees the Doctor palling around with war criminal Richard Nixon. (I look forward to Doctor Who in 40 years doing an episode where the 21st Doctor goes for dinner with Trump). In Moffat tradition, there is melodrama and death fake-outs, further damaging the credibility of the show's stakes, and River Song is here at her most annoying, clichéd self. It's also worth mentioning that as a whole, Series 6 is my least favourite of the revival for a number of reasons, and some of them are showcased here - poor writing, the really bad mytharc story surrounding River Song, and a feeling that the show is just being half-assed on every front.

Honourable Mention: The Wedding of River Song is the culmination of this terrible storyline and is just as muddled and poorly thought-out. It manages to barely escape the list by not including a genocide, and by being too similar to some other episodes already here.

Rory thinks he look intimidating, but he's also wearing a
Roman outfit for literally no reason and he looks like a stoned
hipster asking after his weed stash.

4 - A Good Man Goes To War (Series 6, Episode 7)
Written by Steven Moffat

I don't quite know where to start with Good Man. It feels quite unique, for both good and bad reasons. At the time I recognised it as fluffy in the extreme - heavy in style, light in substance. Now Meant to be the dramatic cliffhanger to the first half of a season unnecessarily split in two, the events of Good Man are so bizarre and ridiculous that sometimes I have to remind myself that an episode this bad even exists.

Never one for subtlety, the Doctor (the one famous for solving his problems with words and using violence as a last resort) blows up an entire fleet of Cyberman ships (which they apparently have now) to extort information about Amy's location. Rory thinks he's cool because he's wearing a centurion costume, and for some reason the soundtrack agrees. We find that Amy has been kidnapped by a military cult called the Silence; an offshoot of a Space Church that wants the Doctor dead. This army includes human soldiers, two gay characters who literally ask why they deserve to have names, and headless monks who never appear before or after and who make no sense. This trained army is disabled by a bunch of Silurians and a "good" Sontaran who talks about breastfeeding. After humiliating one of the Silence generals, it is revealed that Amy's baby is part Time Lord because she was conceived in the TARDIS, "in a bunk bed" and that River Song was Amy's baby after all. The bad guy gets away with Amy's baby, as the one they thought they rescued was a clone that melts when she leaves.

The moment I heard that Amy had named her child "Melody Pond" I knew what the twist was; I'm not sure anyone was particularly asking for that kind of twist, either. River Song's welcome was long overstayed, and tying her destiny even more tightly with The Doctor's feels uncomfortable for a show with a characteristically transitive nature. The loss of Amy's baby, something that should be traumatising to Amy and Rory, never gets the treatment it deserves in follow-up episodes, and this is where for me they cease to be characters and become delivery devices for cool one-liners.

Honourable Mention: The Almost People is nowhere near this list, as the two parter it closes actually has good ideas and executes them well, but the ending scene where Amy is revealed as a ganger and then we watch her being forced to give birth in captivity is traumatic and horrible. It has Moffat's hands all over it.

And billions died.

3 - Kill The Moon (Series 8, Episode 7)
Written by Peter Harness
Please read my review of this episode, it goes into much more detail on just how scientifically illiterate it is.

I have debated with myself about how high on this list this episode deserves to be; it was in second place for a while until I came to my senses. While it does deserve to be here, the reason that this episode is so bad is entirely down to its own writer, Peter Harness, who likes to bring right-wing political elements to his episodes. Kill The Moon fails on three fronts - the science that is so bad as to render the episode unbelievable, the anti-abortion message shoved into a show it does not belong in, and a general failure to make anyone in the slightest bit likable.

The central dilemma at the heart of the story, whether to kill the alien living in the moon, never has any weight because the science used in the episode is so laughable. The Doctor has been coming to Earth for thousands of years, and has only now noticed that the Moon is an egg?! Lines about there being no minerals or water on the moon betray the fact that Harness didn't seem to do a cursory Wikipedia search before writing this trash, and that lack of effort seeps into the episode. We're meant to be struck by the moral dilemma, and be taught that not aborting the child is the best thing to do in the long run, but unlike in the real world, Harness brings in magic nonsense that defies the laws of physics in order to avoid all consequences for that choice. That over all other things makes the polemic nature of this episode as clear as glass. The anti-abortion message is so woven into the episode that there's no hope of actually exploring sci-fi ideas, because everything is pointed towards making you hate the idea of abortion in every situation.

I really have to wonder how this got past the writing team. It's notable that Harness' later stories are co-written with Moffat, in a miraculous case of him making something better by being there. That would not be the case in the remainder of this list, with two Moffat episodes taking the silver and gold slots by a country mile...

Honourable Mention: The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion two-parter, also written by Harness, spends its first half going, "Did you know that all refugees are terrorists? Dangerous terrorists. Anyone of them could be a terrorist. Your mum could be a terrorist." It then spends its second half going, "How dare you suggest that refugees are terrorists!? All that terrorists need to stop terroristing is a good talking to." It was stupid, insensitive, and although the speech at the end is well performed, the whole exercise was a total disaster.

I would mention the amazing moment when Moffat kills off a
new black character so she can have been a white woman all
along, but that feels like overkill.

2 - Let's Kill Hitler (Series 6, Episode 8)
Written by Steven Moffat

This was originally going to be one step above its immediate predecessor, A Good Man Goes To War, but then I realised that it had Hitler in it as a joke character and it just shot up here. Let's Kill Hitler is, quite frankly, an embarrassment. The end of hiatus should be a time for a good episode to bring the audience back on side, but instead we are given this nonsense - more of everything Moffat; fake-outs, making The Doctor the centre of everything, River Song, sexism, and so on.

Let's Kill Hitler is a confusing beast because it expects us to take it seriously as Moffat abuses time travel and retcons to try and make River Song's story make sense. The deep trauma Amy and Rory would suffer at losing their newborn daughter is explained away; "She was with them the whole time," he says, "She was the immature friend they had, so really they helped raise her after all!" The simple fact is that, not only is this callous, it doesn't even make sense. The Doctor's personality changes drastically even across one life, and yet we're meant to believe that River's brainwashing lasted two lifetimes, even when one of them saw her being raised as a human child in Leadworth. Her character bounces around so much in this one episode that the "surprise" at the end when she decides to sacrifice the rest of her regenerations to reverse The Doctor's poisoning feels hollow, and, along with the time-travelling vigilante team, puts a focus on Moffat's hero-worship of the Doctor over all other things.

Trying to mix this shambles of a main plot with the biggest sci-fi cliche of all time is a big no-no, as is the entire threat of the episode. You can't have the Doctor's death lingering over us from the premiere and then expect us to care that he might die now instead of then. We all know he isn't going to die, but Moffat just resist using this trope over and over. What we're left with is an episode that really serves no purpose beyond dropping the hint for the solution to this season's grand gambit. It doesn't even manage to be fun, because it all rings as insincere and childish, and with a deep lack of respect for those watching.

Honourable Mention: The Big Bang, where Moffat... retcons the Universe? I should have seen it coming.

That's the worst Series 6 episodes gone, which can only leave...

The worst, most drawn-out regeneration. Even worse than the
one before. Yes, that one.

1 - Time of the Doctor (Series 7, Third Christmas Special)
Written by Steven Moffat
My review here from the time is really good, and talks about the plot.

Here it is. The worst story belongs to the worst Doctor. Since 2013 I have seen almost everything in the Classic Series, and I have been waiting for something to knock Time from its pedestal, and nothing has. In his attempt to culminate everything in the Matt Smith era, Moffat manages to encapsulate almost every shit thing about it. He makes the Doctor the centre of the Universe one last time, and simultaneously tries to brand his mark onto the show in a permanent and terrifying way. Not content to retcon his predecessor's main storyline out of existence, not content to retcon his terrible companion into every area of Doctor Who history, Moffat decided he also had to be the one to solve the issue of the Doctor's regeneration limit, despite being two Doctors too soon, just so they can write that Moffat woz 'ere.

I might not have minded Moffat's solution to the 13 life problem had it not been such a deus ex machina. Clara begging the Time Lords to help The Doctor is something that should not have worked, and only works because of her status as a magical plot device here in her first season. The paradox the Doctor's survival creates is one that Moffat never apparently realised, as without his death and grave to send Clara through time in Name of the Doctor, all of this never happens, and Series 7 never happened. Which seems to be the show's attitude as well, as apart from the Zygon two-parter, nobody has ever mentioned the events of this season after the fact.

Sexism and archaic attitudes to gender politics were rife throughout Moffat's era, especially in Smith's tenure, and that is one of the things I remember the most from this episode. Smith's Doctor is not a role model for children - he is a pest. The Doctor by this point in his life has literally no excuse to be unfamiliar with human customs and standards of reasonable interaction. He smacks Clara on the bottom and shows up to her house naked. Five episodes before this he sexually assaults a rape survivor in The Crimson Horror by holding her down and kissing her. He laughs when she slaps him, and tells her it feels good. It may seem like I'm demonising the Doctor here, but it's clear from elsewhere both in Doctor Who and away from it that Moffat simply doesn't see anything wrong with these things

Fuckety-bye!

I would go into more detail about the episode, but I think you get the idea. My review linked above is a lot more comprehensive, and has a fun drinking game. I wanted to take a moment to say something personal. There are episodes on this list which made me mad, Kill the Moon in particular being a big one for that. But no episode crushed my faith in Doctor Who more than Time of the Doctor. I was fully prepared to sit and wait for Moffat to leave the show before watching it again. So I have to thank Peter Capaldi and Brian Minchin, who managed to steer the show back into something that, although flawed, I wanted to tune into every week. Part of me is looking forward to the future of the show, because I know that however much I have disliked what Chibnall brought to the show before now, nothing can ever be as bad as this shitty, shitty farce of an finale.

Thanks

Top Ten Worst Moffat Era Episodes, Part One

I recently wrote a list of my favourite Moffat era episodes in order to shine to positivity onto what I saw as a bad time for the show. This is not that list. For all intents and purposes, this list is intended to be my final word on everything Moffat did wrong in his seven years with the program. Some episodes are on this list because they are truly bad; others because they encapsulate an aspect of the era as a whole that really ground my gears. I'll also include (dis)honourable mentions with each entry to highlight episodes that escaped being included here. Okay, here goes...

The original placing of this episode saw Amy larking about
on a pirate ship right after traumatically losing her child.
Small blessings.

10 - Curse of the Black Spot (Series 6, Episode 3)
Written by Steve Thompson.

Eleven, Amy and Rory are a trio who, in Season 5, were developed as a fun alternative to previous companions. Eleven wasn't the authority figure that previous Doctors had been; instead, he came off as a weird mate to two fun hipsters. While this worked in Series 5, in Series 6 it starts to become jarring. I started to hate Eleven's humour, and the way that the series would excuse some of his more morally questionable actions in the name of "fun" and spectacle. Soon, on top of the that, the individual episodes would begin to suffer when the series' mytharc began to colour every aspect of production. While we will explore more of that later, what comes first on this list is the painfully mediocre Curse of the Black Spot.

I was initially excited for this story - it's got pirates and magic, as well as Hugh Bonneville and Lily Cole (who at 15 I liked for two very different reasons). The episode's main concept actually works fairly well  - a pirate curse which sends a Siren to destroy those who are injured is, in actual fact, the workings of an alien medical system trying to heal members of the crew. The problems come in the execution. Everything goes well until we actually reach the alien ship and Rory is almost drowned, leading to a long, drawn-out scene where we are meant to be sad and actually believe that Rory is going to die, even though by this point in Moffat's tenure they had pulled this trick about six times. This is just one facet of an overall problem Moffat's era has with believable stakes, with Moffat's inability to actually kill a main character lasting into the final episode of his tenure.

And, on top of all that, the issue I and others have had is that it isn't particularly memorable. A lot of the other episodes in this season have had very iconic images, whereas the pirate theme is such stale window-dressing that I'm not sure people even remember it as "the pirate one". Maybe "the one on the boat with the supermodel". While it was initially this mediocrity that got it put on this list, the melodrama was what ensured it stayed here.

Honourable mention: Night Terrors, which is just as bland and ridiculous but at least tries to be scary with some competence.

How The Moff Stole Christmas

9 - The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe (Series 7, First Christmas Special)
Written by Steven Moffat.
"You and me, Cyril, we're weak. But she's female."

Doctor Who is cursed with bad Christmas specials, it's just the case. They've tried to offset this in recent years by having important plot things happen in them, but before they tried this, there was this episode. Doctor-Widow-Wardrobe is full of so many odd things that I'm actually surprised that the thing that immediately comes to mind when I look back on it was how exceedingly dull it was. This episode might be lower on the list if it weren't for its bizarre sexual politics and for the fact that this is the start of Series 7, the series that took two years to finally end.

It feels very much like Moffat trying to convince us, and not too successfully, that he is a feminist.
The climax of the episode has guest character Madge save the day because the aliens see her as the strongest member of the group. This is because she is a mother, and women are strong and better than men because they can be mothers. Aside from the fact that motherhood is not the only thing that defines a woman's worth, the outright statement of "we're weak, but she's female" is such a clear attempt to dispel the discussion of the thoroughly unpleasant things that Moffat wrote previously. "Look, he said that women were great. He must be feminist." That falls through though when we see the backstory, where the most romantic way he can think of having Madge and her husband get together is him stalking her until she is worn down by his constant harassment.

The episode does have some nice moments with Madge's kids, and with Bill Bailey's cameo. But the rest of it feels as wooden as the monsters of the week.

Honourable Mention: Last Christmas, whose wasted potential as a great send-off for Clara is tempered by a passable plot and a fun guest star.

8 - The Power of Three (Series 7, Episode 4)
Written by Chris Chibnall

It's an appearance by our next showrunner, whose writing for Doctor Who has always towed the line between okay and terrible. Chibnall had a big hand in the story of 2012's September Season, writing two of its five episodes and also writing online-exclusive prologues and epilogues (one of which included the Doctor sexing up a historical figure and "laying down some backing vocals" for Dizzee Rascal.) With the exception of its third episode, I really don't like the September Season very much at all, and of his two episodes I hate this one slightly more.

The Power of Three acted as part of the September Season's theme statement, with The Doctor acting as a random interjector into Amy and Rory's suburban life. While this departure from Who norm should have been an refreshing new take, it instead highlights just how much Amy and Rory had ceased to work as companions - why would they ever want to spend time in the TARDIS? The episode loosely follows an alien plot where millions of black cubes appear out of nowhere. Apart from letting us get to know Moffat's modern version of UNIT, the episode's main plot goes nowhere, with a forgettable alien villain with zero visible motivation. Instead, a lot of the runtime is filled with smaller ideas that never get fleshed out, leaving the main story deflated and unimpressive.

Part of my feeling on this is clouded by the fact that as the years have dragged on I have come to find Amy and Rory absolutely insufferable. Something about them feels off and unrealistic, possibly the way that throughout their tenure on the show they never react to trauma in the way that real people do, and they aren't allowed to when the stakes are never high enough for us to care either.

Honourable Mention: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, which I hate almost as much as this episode for its bland guest characters, weird rapey undertones and flashbacks to Pete, Part Two. It escapes this list by at least trying, and because I couldn't fit them both in when there's so much else that needs to be on here.

I have never hated a TARDIS team more. 

7 - Angels Take Manhattan (Series 7, Episode 5)
Written by Steven Moffat

We've moved one space in the list, and one episode along in the show. When the Weeping Angels first appeared in Blink they were scary and unique, and even though I didn't rate them much, I understood the novelty and admired its execution. Their next appearance in Season 5 was great too, enhancing their powers and reputation. Then came this. Angels Take Manhattan, like most of the Moffat mytharc episodes, is a mess. It wants to impress you with its cleverness, move you with its pathos, make you mourn for two companions who were, at that time, the longest runners in the revival series. Instead, I was left frustrated and confused, baffled at how this made it to the screen in its current condition.

The development of the Angels goes from the bizarre to the absurd - as weak statues, as cherubs, as the Statue of Liberty. At one point the script orchestrates a scene where an Angel is weak enough that it can't use the touch time-travel powers (the ones Angels are famous for using when they're, you know, weak) so that one can grab River Song's arm, leading her to, I shit you not, break her own hand out of love for The Doctor.

At the time I described Amy and Rory's departure as "the adult conclusion for these characters." Now I see them as being written out for narrative purposes - the September Season shows that there was clearly nothing left to do with them. Weeping Angel time travel nonsense is put in place to trap Amy and Rory in 1940s New York, where the TARDIS can now "never go", but no mention is made of them just getting a boat somewhere where the Doctor can reach them. It feels less like the Doctor has felt a great loss and more like he just gave up on his friends because he's a dick. What's worse is that, as I've said above for other episodes, them dying all the time and coming back robbed every single ounce of suspense out of their actual finale.

Rather than dressing up their departure in melodrama, it would have been far more effective and moving for them to leave the TARDIS permanently of their own accord, or even just to kill them. This half-assed crap makes important character moments feel weak. When I think of companion exits that just gut me, that make me miss them, I think of Tegan and "It stopped being fun, Doctor", I think of Sarah Jane stood on a street corner in Aberdeen with her luggage, I think of Jo, with The Doctor leaving her party and slowly driving away. There was so much potential in this but the show set itself up for failure time and time again, and this is the result.

Honourable Mention: Asylum of the Daleks because it began the utter mess that was the multiple-Claras arc and saw Amy and Rory divorce and then get together again for no reason. Also, Daleks don't have Asylums.

The biggest retcon, of course, is the idea that Ten would
ever go around with a floppy fringe.

6 - Day of the Doctor (Series 7, 50th Anniversary Special)
Written by Steven Moffat

It is no exaggeration to say that I had been looking forward to the 50th Anniversary for about 9 years, which at the time was over half my life. I expected something spectacular, and true to Doctor Who's long and varied history. What we got was the second part of the "of the Doctor" trilogy, Moffat's insidious attempt to imprint himself on every aspect of the show's history regardless of sense or reason. It featured so many retcons and bad storytelling decisions that it felt more like a monument to the Moffat era than anything else - and that includes all the foibles, including having no stakes, remedial attitudes towards women and having a piss poor conclusion. The only reason that is isn't higher on the list is because I am a sucker for nostalgia.

Day's worst crime is the Time War retcon. There were quite a few ways to write the Time Lords back into the series in a way which wouldn't rob the emotional core out of the revival's first four seasons, but instead, the Doctor's greatest regret never actually happened. The event that informed the character of Nine and Ten was a fake, according to this story. Also, there was a WHOLE DOCTOR between Eight and Nine that messes up the numbering, and his inclusion is my most contentious point. Moffat couldn't include Eight because the layman wouldn't know who he was, and couldn't include Nine because Eccleston refused to return (likely balking at the idea of his character's entire personality being a lie), so he just made up his own so he could have one more Doctor to contribute to the series. The War Doctor, while well acted by the late and great John Hurt, doesn't make sense as a character - he's supposed to be a regeneration designed to be capable of genocide, but he ends up not being able to do it, and Eleven is far more genocidal than he is.

Other elements of the episode also don't belong in a 50th Anniversary special. Ten's engagement to Queen Elizabeth I, admittedly a hangover from RTD, is made even worse by sexist writing, including a line completely ignoring the original irony of "the body of a weak and feeble woman". Most of the not-Time-War plot was taken up by a Zygon invasion of earth, which seemed an oddly specific callback to make and whose only real legacy was setting up the politically insensitive Zygon two-parter in Series 9. Among other miscellanea, the show also contained a random appearance by Billie Piper, not playing Rose Tyler; a Doctor Who superfan who would later go on to be killed by Missy, and Tom Baker as "The Curator", who is implied to be a future incarnation of the Doctor re-wearing Four's body.

Honourable Mention: Name of the Doctor also pulls off a spectacularly bad retcon when it tries to claim that Clara is responsible for not only saving The Doctor's life thousands of time, but for every good thing that has ever happened in the Doctor Who universe. Is not on this list because I already included two from the "...of the Doctor" trilogy on here.

I cut this article in half because of its length, so expect the top five soon.

Thanks.

Twelve Moffat Era Episodes Worth Keeping

After almost eight years in the driving seat, Moffat's time with Doctor Who is at an end. I have made no secret over the past couple of years how much I grew to dislike his time on the show, sometimes to the point of recommending that new fans skip entire seasons just so they don't get led down the same garden paths I did. But, now we've reached the end, I decided it would be charitable to pick some episodes from Moffat's six seasons of the show that I actually like; two for each series. They're not the only ones I like, but they are the standout few that I would recommend to people, and they are my personal highlights of what I consider to be a terrible part of the show. In order of broadcast...

The Eleventh Hour - Series 5, Episode 1 (2010)

It's easy to forget after all that followed just what a strong start the Eleventh Doctor had. After a lot of initial misgivings following the bizarre ending to The End of Time, Matt Smith's first outing was full of fun action and witty writing that reassured a lot of us about the show's future. Smith's Doctor is yet to degenerate into his later self-obsessed creep and is instead energetic and warm, giving us memorable post-regeneration moments like fish fingers and custard. The time-bending nature of the new companion's introduction strikes an innovative note across the new series, and more than makes up for the run-of-the-mill nature of the rather dull bad guy in the Atraxi.

As I said in my review of the episode, there was definitely a "moment" where the Eleventh Doctor clicked with me as the same character as the previous ten. What interests me now is that despite his actually fairly competent beginning, the bad writing for this Doctor as the show went on led to him becoming my least favourite version. That knowledge makes it difficult to watch the scene here with the same excitement, but I think it just about works. All told, I would say that The Eleventh Hour is the best first episode for any of the NuWho Doctors, and the irony is delicious.

Vincent and the Doctor - Series 5, Episode 10 (2010)

A show like Doctor Who often goes into the past for cameos from historical celebrities, but this episode stands out. Instead of simply placing said celebrity into a story and having events happen around him, this episode is directly aimed at establish Vincent's character and backstory. British comedy writer Richard Curtis uses Doctor Who's conventions in unconventional ways, taking a monster-of-the-week pseudohistorical format and using it to explore the depression of one of Europe's great unappreciated artists.

While the 42-minute format of a Doctor Who story requires that a lot of the real-world subtleties are smoothed over, the story's decision to look into mental health and the legacy of art makes something beautiful out of what would otherwise be an end-of-season filler episode.

The Doctor's Wife - Series 6, Episode 4 (2011)

This series is my least favourite of the revival show by a country mile - long arcs which constrain real story-telling, bizarre decisions like Amy's forced pregnancy and the Doctor's fake-out death, and the mid-season split that exacerbated all of the other issues. The only episode of the season that isn't affected by the all-absorbing tendrils of mediocrity is this one, written by acclaimed fantasy writer Neil Gaiman for the previous series and moved over to this one.

While at times the episode veers into fan-fiction territory, the discussion of the idea of the TARDIS as a sentient entity was a long time coming, and could not have been brought into reality more perfectly than by Suranne Jones. Add to that lots of nostalgic nods to both RTD and the Classic Series, a fab villain in Michael Sheen's House and a general sense of fantastic whimsy, and you have one of NuWho's best episodes.

The God Complex - Series 6, Episode 11 (2011)

So what if Toby Whithouse took the ending straight from The Curse of Fenric? I *love* The Curse of Fenric! And I love Toby Whithouse. Despite me saying that The Doctor's Wife was the only episode that had escaped Series 6's terribleness, this one is actually my favourite from the season, and the only one I consider worth rewatching. The unnerving hotel which exploits people's fears is such a fantastically Doctor Who kind of plot, and with the episode's well-realised cast of characters the episode hits every beat it needs to in terms of action and plot. I remember especially liking the fake-out companion Rita, even if the exchange "You're a Muslim/Don't be frightened" is even more tone deaf now than it was in 2011. And, although it wasn't permanent (it never is with Moffat), I loved the fact that Amy and Rory left! Needless to say that they had outstayed their welcome considerably by this point, and I was glad for the small hope that this was the back of them.

A Town Called Mercy - Series 7, Episode 3 (2012)

The only decent episode of the five episode "September Series" from 2012, A Town Called Mercy is another decent Whithouse episode, this time putting the Doctor, Amy and Rory into a Western town that has been infiltrated by an alien war criminal and the cyborg sent to bring him to justice. Aside from just loving Westerns, I liked this episode because of the fact it actually asked some moral questions. You know, like this is actually science fiction or something. While it has its goofy moments, and the main moral conflict isn't satisfied in a particularly interesting way, the fact that it actually inspires thought makes it an oasis of civilisation in a period of the show that was veering wildly out of control.

Cold War - Series 7, Episode 8 (2013)

Guys, I was so excited for Clara. After watching Amy and Rory's terrible writing for three years, I was looking forward to some Northern charm from Jenna Coleman's new companion. Clara is difficult to parse for me, because her three-ish seasons varied so wildly. In Series 7, she had little to no actual character that we could see, with a great deal more that was simply told to us by other characters without much evidence. Cold War, the third episode of the 2013 half of Series 7, is the best because it manages to take this and, for one episode, subvert it.

Finding themselves on a Russian submarine in 1983, the Doctor and Clara find themselves trying to pacify an Ice Warrior, making their first appearance since 1974. Clara is seen to be compassionate and empathetic, and is ultimately the solution to the episode's dilemma. I love the 80s soundtrack, the base-under-siege plot and the new-look Ice Warriors, who manage the difficult task of respecting the Classic Series and still feeling modern.

Flatline - Series 8, Episode 9 (2014)

True story: this list was almost a ten episode list, because I forgot Series 8 existed. Capaldi's first season suffers from writing that is usually more bland than painful, as the writers tried to make Twelve into an ambiguous moral figure. This has been attempted before, but the issue with this was more that instead of spending time showing Twelve making questionable moral choices, the end result felt a lot more like Capaldi being constantly grumpy and rude, and going "Am I a good man?" every other episode. The only upshot of this was that Clara seemed to gain a personality overnight and the relationship between her and Twelve became more complex and real as a result.

By comparison to the season around it, Flatline felt a lot more like an early Tennant episode - set on a council estate with some unique aliens and TARDIS hijinks. The standout performances of Jovian Wade and Christopher Fairbank as graffiti artist Rigsy and council worker Fenton respectively help to flesh out the premise of 2D aliens trying to enter our dimension by providing stakes we can work with. Add to that the element of The Doctor being trapped in the TARDIS and relying on Clara throughout the episode, and what could have been bland comes alive.

Dark Water - Series 8, Episode 11 (2014)

You will notice later that every one of Capaldi's eleventh episodes is on this list. Capaldi's finales have a flare for the ridiculous that usually start off on the right foot with a strong premise and go downhill in the second half. In this case, the episode actually culminates a lot of the season's slightly nebulous themes and brings it together in a way which threatens to change the status quo of the Doctor Who universe, as well as providing a double whammy cliffhanger that left me excited to be watching the show again after so many boring episodes.

Danny Pink is not my favourite NuWho character, especially as his relationship with Clara gave off some abusive vibes in the mid-season with Clara scared to let him know that she was with The Doctor for fear of his reaction. The finale worked with his character and gave us a side to his soldier past that felt three dimensional and worth the build-up. It also let us have the moment at the start of the episode with Clara and the Doctor where they finally have a stand-off, and it's great stuff.

This in turn leads us into the grander plot of the episode - the Nethersphere, and Missy's plot with the Cybermen. While I questioned whether some of the comments in the episode were wise ("The dead can feel it when you cremate them, lol!"), I really did like the concept and how it was executed. Missy is a bloody masterstroke - Michelle Gomez brings a brand new personality to The Master that is playful and unpredictable in a way that is more endearing than Simm's Joker-like performance.

The Woman Who Lived - Series 9, Episode 6 (2015) 

Season 9 had a number of gimmicks that felt a little off. The main one, apart from it being split up into two-parters, was a RTD-style keyword, The Hybrid, which fed into each episode in more subtle way than the previous series' inclusion of Missy in almost every episode's epilogue. Like most of Moffat's running stories, it ended in a copout, but it also gave us the character of Me, a character I genuinely thought was really cool. The only episode where that character gets the right amount of focus is this one, The Woman Who Lived.

Introduced in the first part of this loose two-parter as a Viking child who the Doctor hubristically resurrects by bonding with alien technology, we see her here as an immortal being, slowly losing her morality and memories, and desperate to be The Doctor's companion. I initially dismissed the casting of Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) as stunt casting, but she really can act. I guess it was hard to see that at the time, with her storyline in the 2015 series of Thrones mostly consisting of her wiping corpses and selling cockles.

The only bad thing I have to say about the episode is that it has one too many talking lions. And that is almost entirely negated by there being almost no Clara in it.

Heaven Sent - Series 9, Episode 11 (2015)

Because of this season's odd nature, the finale two-parter is a lot more loose than usual, and this is immeasurably for the better. Simply put, Heaven Sent is one of the program's finest episodes, way beyond the likes of Blink. And I mean it; unlike the previous season finale, where I have to overlook glaring faults, this is a really well-crafted story, with everything just coming together. It's essentially a Capaldi one-hander, seeing him trapped inside a bigger-on-the-inside Time Lord device which makes him relive the same sequence of events over and over again. The theme of persistence and certainty in the face of death is a strong one, especially with Capaldi at the helm, giving it his all, portraying a man so determined to escape that he repeatedly resigns himself to death just to make a millimetre's progress.

Oxygen - Series 10, Episode 5 (2017)

Due to personal goings-on in my own life, I have not reviewed Series 10 and I don't know if I will, but on the whole I enjoyed it. I liked the semi-reboot of the series and Bill Potts is a light shining down on the show. Oxygen was a great base-under-siege episode that had some good ideas, my favourite of which was the Adams-esque dilemma of the parent company making them pay for their oxygen. It's kind of a like a traditional Doctor Who Base-Under-Siege story where the enemy is the life-support system.

Unlike a lot of Base-Under-Siege stories in NuWho, it avoided the pitfall of not feeling like there were any stakes by seriously threatening the lives of both Bill and The Doctor. They both experience the vacuum of space and are choked and chased and electrocuted. Just when you think the status quo will be reasserted, we discover that The Doctor is now blind! This was a great way to end the episode, as well as a lead-in to the following three-part story where The Doctor's need to protect Bill is a major theme.

World Enough And Time - Series 10, Episode 11 (2017)

In the year-long hiatus between Series 9 and 10, I started listening to Big Finish audios - I've listened to about a dozen now, and when they are good, they are good. My favourite, predictably, is the Fifth Doctor audio Spare Parts, which takes place on Mondas and gives a very thorough look at the kind of world that would create the Cybermen. It's spooky and full gruesome moments. I bring it up because World Enough and Time borrows extensively from Spare Parts and it's legacy, even more than the supposed "adaptation" that was Rise of the Cybermen back in 2006.

The marketing was full of spoilers for the return of John Simm as The Master. I will admit that Simm's disguise fooled me for a good while; his reveal at the end to Missy is fantastic. I had always wanted a multi-Master story, and it was a real coup to get Simm back to the show after his ambiguous exit seven year prior. Not only was it fun from a fan perspective, but it was also the perfect way to highlight the character development that Gomez' Master had been undergoing throughout this weird and wonderful season.

For the first time in a while there was a palpable sense of horror in this story, as Bill Potts spent time in the creepy hospital at the base of a ship falling into a black hole, with The Doctor and Missy at the top watching her life pass on fast-forward. The most memorable parts of the episode are the parts that surround the Cybermen, with pre-formed cloth-faced bodies crying out for death, and the crushing blow at the end of the episode when Bill is transformed. I was annoyed that this amazing character had been given so tragic a fate, but the following episodes made up for that slightly. Scenes like the ones in the hospital are what I have been asking for for so long - actually exploring the body horror of the Cyberman premise and using it to bring nightmares to whole new generation.

Epilogue

I can't honestly say, now that it's over, that this part of the show was entirely bad. The Capaldi era feels like a much-needed improvement over the Smith era, which went downhill fast. I think the key difference is that during those first three or so years, the writing of the Doctor and his companions entirely focused on archetypes and "mysteries" which never amounted to anything resembling human behaviour. The Twelfth Doctor is much more of a complex personality, even outside the narrative constantly informing us without evidence that he's morally shady. Now that I've lended the era some charity and genuinely discussed episodes I liked, I think it's time to do a top ten worst list. This is going to be fun.

Thanks.

Doctor Who 10.X: The Return of Doctor Mysterio

Nardole looks as out of place on this poster as he does in
the whole bloody episode.

Doctor Who has been away from our screen for an entire calendar year, and we really needed something to bring the series back into the public consciousness. While the episode certainly tried to do this, you wouldn't know from the rest of it - the publicity for this episode was a damp squib. The trailers were badly edited, the premise looked ridiculous and most of my Doctor Who loving friends were completely meh about the whole thing. Which is a damn shame, because I actually enjoyed this episode. Its remarkably fun spirit, owed to superhero movies and general, also comes down to the fact that the superhero story is just a cover for a well-acted rom-com.
      The plot surrounds the flailing relationship between Lucy (Charity Wakefield) and Grant (Justin Chatwin, who had a bit part in Lost), the secret of course being that the latter was accidentally made a superhero by The Doctor has a child. The two's secret-identity relationship has been ripped straight from the Christopher Reeve superhero movies, with a love triangle between Lucy, Grant and Grant's alter-ego, Ghost. Despite the hackneyed ideas behind them, they are the most interesting part of the episode, with the actual threat of the piece being either confusing or boring or both. The bad guys are aliens who want to take over the world. They make lines in people's heads and replace their brains, and want to gather the world's leaders together by blowing up New York and pretending to be a safeguard against alien invasion. I immediately remembered the Aliens of London two-parter, except that had a lot more political satire and didn't just re-use a random special effect from the episode before.
     Grant could have come across as a bit creepy, and I'm sure many people thought he did, but for me I think he hit the balance perfectly and came across as genuinely charming in a kind of" "Andrew Garfield Spiderman" kinda way. Charity Wakefield was also wonderful as Lucy, who I hope will get more roles from this. I wish we'd have just focused on them rather than having this external alien story, because it brought nothing new and was actively dull at times. It didn't help that despite bringing aliens in from last year's Christmas special, no mention was made of them being in both, leading me to simply believe that Moffat had reused a special effect, something which is not particularly unlikely.

This sums up the Moffat era perfectly.. Why use fucking pockets
when you could store a loaded weapon inside your fucking head.

     Peter Capaldi was fantastic in this episode, which makes it all the more irritating that we see the return of Nardole (Matt Lucas) from last year's Christmas special. Quite like one of John Nathan Turner's mad whims, Moffat has decided that we all loved Nardole, so Nardole will be in this episode, and every episode of Series 10. The levels of wtf involved in this decision are baffling - there was no great love for Lucas' character, and he doesn't really add anything to this episode beyond very, very light comic relief that Capaldi could likely have provided himself. The main thing he seems to provide uniquely is an info-dump near the end about River Song, revealing that Capaldi spent 24 years with her before sending her to the Library. Seeing as I want River Song to go away, and go away now, this did nothing to endear the character to me, and seeing him in the rest of Moffat's finale season is going to be a chore.
     The Return of Doctor Mysterio pleasantly surprised me, but that felt very too little too late. You can make a bloody brilliant episode and it'll still fail to get the ratings if the publicity surrounding it is as lacklustre as was here. A few choices - the editing of the trailer, the general lack of advertising and the total lack of hype - meant that the return of The Doctor to our screens occured with a whimper rather than a bang. Capaldi doesn't deserve this level of apathy, this corporate assassination, and I often worry that his entire tenure is going to be draped with the same brush as Colin Baker's - a brash Doctor beset by decreasing ratings, pushed up against ITV rivals and absent publicity.

Merry Christmas.

News: Steven Moffat to regenerate into Chris Chibnall

Chris Chibnall will be showrunner by 2018.
Image from hypable

Yesterday was the home of a slew of news about the future of Doctor Who, with the main wonderful fact being that Steven Moffat, after producing his seventh season as showrunner in 2017, will be standing down from the position. His replacement will be Chris Chibnall, a man who on this blog has always had very mixed press - sometimes a powerful dramatic writer, but when writing for Doctor Who his scripts tend to be disappointments. The same news article in Radio Times later specified that there won't be any new Doctor Who on our screens until Christmas this year, which is disappointing even if it makes some sense.

Chris Chibnall is the writer of amazing ITV Drama Broadchurch and its short-lived American remake Gracepoint, the UK version of Law and Order, as well as some good episodes of Life On Mars, and a crappy Starz version of Merlin called Camelot retold for an adult audience. In terms of Doctor Who, Chibnall was the showrunner for the first two seasons of Torchwood, which are in my opinion the best of that show's run, producing great episodes like Countrycide, End of Days, and the heart-wrenching Adrift. On the parent program, however, he wrote less inspiring stuff - 42, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, Dinosaurs On A Spaceship and The Power of Three.

Chibnall's first three stories fell into the trap of trying to mass-produce an ensemble cast that we cared about, with his ability to do so decreasing with every attempt, from the genuinely likable crew of the space station in 42 to the caricature-laden pastiches that filled the screen in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. He also got a lot of focus in the "September Season", essentially writing Amy and Rory's arc over that period and writing prequel and sequel shorts which attempted to show them living a life of domesticity. He had some very strong concepts and usually managed to execute them well, but overall his ability with characters was sub-par. His work also, like Moffat's, occasionally contains a few sexist undertones, although thankfully with far more fewer frequency and less sheer revelry.

I'm not entirely sure where the show is going to go, so I'm not being optimistic or pessimistic either way. Chibnall would not have been my first choice; if you remember, the first thing I wrote about Doctor Who on this website was "Chris Chibnall is a bastard." (Something I later redacted, as it's fairly libelous.) I can go on all day about how a female showrunner would have been progressive and great, or we could have Toby Whithouse, whose episodes I love, but I think that's a bit pointless right now. All I can say is that I'm glad Moffat is finally leaving the reigns, and allowing NuWho to extremely belatedly leave its second era.

Thanks.

TV Shows I Watched In 2015

It's that time again, folks. Here is a list of the shows that I watched this year, some of which I watched live as they came this year, and some of which I just happened to binge and thought I'd mention here. Spoilers everywhere.

This image is, in itself, a spoiler. Unless you don't
watch the show. Image from sidekickreviews

Game of Thrones - Season 5, HBO/Sky1
Written 15th August.

Another season of Game of Thrones went by, and along with it another series of controversies, odd character decisions and an unhealthy obsession with victimising women. The show managed to cover pretty much all of the most recent two novels in G.R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire book series while also going more heavily off-book than ever before. This led to, as in last season, a lot being left out, as well as characters being moved around, killed off and generally manipulated in such a way as to confound anyone who knew the plot of the books.
    The best and most amazing storyline was also the one that went most off-book - fresh off the heels of killing his father, Tyrion Lannister is smuggled to the continent of Essos and is encouraged by his saviour Varys to seek out Dragon Queen Daenerys Targaryen. Along the way he is kidnapped by exiled servant of the Queen, Jorah Mormont, who happens to be heading in the same direction. Unlike in the books, however, Tyrion actually makes it, leading to several scenes of Daenerys and Tyrion together. A lot of the frustration with Dany's storylines in the first four seasons was their loose connection to the plots going on in Westeros, and getting to see Tyrion in that part of the world made the mythology tie together more physically - as well as putting my two favourite characters onscreen at once.

"Bring it." From Wikimedia

     Over in controversy corner, and the show continued its trend from last season of exploiting violence towards women and girls. Sansa, who at this point in the books has stopped doing anything, is shipped over to her home in Winterfell, where she becomes the wife and plaything of the disgusting Ramsay Snow. After spending four seasons building her up and delivering her the agency she always wanted, her character was derailed in a plotline designed to act as a redemptive arc for the tortured Theon Greyjoy. This culminated in a horrific rape scene, thankfully not showing the act but regardless framing the scene by making us watch Theon's face as we hear Sansa's terrified screams. This carries forwards to the storyline in the North, where, again off-book, Stannis Baratheon decided to use his daughter for a blood magic ritual, and again we get to watch his face as we hear his daughter's genuinely blood-curdling and upsetting screaming. The list of reasons why this doesn't make sense is long, but notably: killing his daughter makes half of his mercenary army rout the field; his wife kills herself because of her guilt; and now the guy who believes himself the "rightful king" has no heirs whatsoever. Which is why it didn't happen in the books.
     Now with the death of Jon Snow (or not, it's an uncertainty carried over from the book), and a great deal of material not covered by the series (leaving a few notable holes), the future of Game of Thrones is uncertain. HBO has guaranteed that the show will get another two seasons in order to conclude its story, and they've apparently been given notes from Martin himself. Despite all of the horrible ways that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss like to hurt female characters and mess up the story, I still enjoy Game of Thrones, and I want to see it get better.

Rick's group approaches the Alexandria Safe Zone.
From Wikia

The Walking Dead - Seasons 5B and 6A, AMC/Fox
Written between 15th August and 27th December.

The fifth season of The Walking Dead, now finished, can only be described as... sedate. Which is an achievement, for a show which is pretty sedate anyway. 5A had a few interesting moments, but its story progression was fairly slapdash and lacked focus. That lack of focus continued into the second half of the season, with Beth's death glossed over with the death of brilliant supporting character Tyreese. Thankfully, the season picked up again, following our characters into the Alexandria Safe Zone. Seeing our characters back into a suburban environment was really interesting, and would have been even better if they hadn't bogged it down with an off-book romantic subplot. I did however love Rick's descent back into savagery - it felt like a logical progression that after he killed two entire groups (the Claimers at the end of 4B and the Hunters in the middle of 5A) he would flip out upon being asked to trust a group of people who had stayed out of the whole thing. The final scene of the half-season, with Morgan finally meeting Rick again after two seasons, was the icing on the cake.
     I think one of my problems with The Walking Dead, starting this year, was the fact that there appears to be no end in sight. That's not a specific problem with TWD - this occurs in all fiction in this genre, with a number of different possible endings, none of which are going to be very satisfying. It doesn't really help that the show, like Game of Thrones, is adapting its source material somewhat faster than it can be produced. Five years into the show, we're seven years into the comics, and that's not even taking into account the extra plots grafted onto the show's canon. The thing that saved Lost's last few seasons was a definite ending point, and that gave the series a sense of purpose going forward, and a guarantee of sorts that everything would come to a head. Season Five proved that this is exactly what The Walking Dead needs, and what it currently sorely lacks.
     That was, of course, until the beginning of the Sixth Season in the Autumn, at which point the show suddenly shot up a gear. Having spent 5B establishing the people of Alexandria, their politics and the threat of a chaotic group known as The Wolves, 6A set about providing key character development, juicy plots and a refreshing pace. By far the saving grace of this season was the arrival of Morgan, whose philosophical differences with the rest of the cast allowed for some realistic conflict that didn't just descend into painful, "it's inevitable that we're all going to die" nonsense. It also provided quite possibly my favourite episode of the entire show, the phenomenal parable that is, "Here's Not Here" which has Morgan in the spotlight. With these things in mind, I'm a lot more confident about the show's future, and I hope that this movement out of mediocrity lasts for a long time.

Insert joke about the West Coast here.
From Forbes

Fear The Walking Dead - Season 1, AMC
Written 3rd September.

For some critics, this six-part miniseries preceding Season 6A of the parent show travelled far too slowly. I am not one of those critics. There is a certain lackadaisical pace to Fear which it has inherited from The Walking Dead, but there are several things it holds in its favour - characters we haven't been slugging it with for five years, the new concept of watching the apocalypse happening from the start, and the sense of tension as society slowly collapses. So much of The Walking Dead consists of wandering around empty countryside, with tension only mounting when the characters decide to explore an abandoned structure or something like that - here, the tension is constantly building as the world basically crumbles around our knowing protagonists. And that, for me at least, is more worth tuning in for than seeing what weird thing Rick is gonna do this week.

Hey Nicky, you so fine, you so fine you blow my mind
Hey Nicky! From zimbio

Orange Is The New Black - Season 3, Netflix
Written 15th August.

Where do I begin? I tried my best to avoid the hype train on this Netflix series set in a women's prison, mainly because I expected I'd have a great deal of Hype Backlash. Now that I have seen it... what was I thinking? This show is just as awesome as everyone said it was! Originally focusing around rich white girl Piper Chapman and her year in prison on drug-possession charges, the series opens up into a lots-and-lots-of-characters ensemble drama which takes the format of Lost (main plot in the present with an character-specific flashback each episode) and puts it into a format which is deliberately designed around binge-watching. It also manages to portray important issues like LGBT rights, trans discrimination, police and government corruption, sexual abuse and many more in a responsible and innovative manner. (With the exception of the show's solid refusal to say the word "bisexual".)
    I love this show for so many different reasons. The characters are all well developed, with everyone (except Dee, fuck Dee) getting several shades of grey to their characterisations. My favourite character is probably Red, played by the amazing Kate Mulgrew (better known as Captain Janeway). While I actually did enjoy Piper's story in the first season, I agree with the common idea that her storyline is less interesting as time goes on, and I think it's a sign of great writers that the show evolved to focus on a wider set of characters. I'm really looking forward to Season Four and I'm glad that I finally joined the bandwagon.

Sarah and her clones face off against Project Castor.
From screenrant

Orphan Black - Season 3, BBC America
Written between 16th August and 3rd September.

Despite some shaky moments, the third season of Orphan Black continued to demonstrate Tatiana Maslany's immense talent. The appearance of male clones played by Ari Millen threw several new factions into the mix, and proved to take the series in directions that were both positive and negative; positive in that the male clones allowed our sisters to finally discover their genetic origin and advance the mytharc, and negative because these new male characters just weren't as interesting as the pre-developed relationships. This made the beginning of the season feel a little messy, and the varying subplots didn't really mesh together until the very end.
     This season's main theme, tied into all of its storylines, was the importance of family - both actual family relationships and those forged in friendship. Alison ran for head of the local Schools board, funding it by running drugs through her mother's soap shop. Pregnant Helena was captured by the male clones (Project Castor to contrast the female Project Leda) and eventually rescued by Sarah. Sarah and her adopted mother Siobhan then followed several clues in order to find both Castor and Leda's genetic origin - Kendall Malone (Alison Steadman), Siobhan's birth mother, a genetic chimera with strands of male and female DNA.

     Season 3 was messy in places, and it didn't really find its footing until a few episodes in. But it's still not a series that can really be faulted. Tatiana Maslany is still the best actress working on television today, no question, and that didn't change. I can't really complain about the uselessness of the Castor storyline from the beginning of the season, or the random new love interest given to Cosima, when everything with T-Mas was so brilliant. From the discovery of the genetic original, to the introduction of new clone Krystal, the treatment of Rachel as she recovered from a pencil to the eye, and the amazing silliness of Alison's drug business, I kept finding something to love. I can't wait for Season Four.

Gemma Chan as Mia. From Channel Four

Humans - Series 1, AMC/Channel 4
Written 6th September.

By far this year's biggest surprise was the C4/AMC coproduction Humans, adapted from a Swedish series about an alternate Present Day in which human-like robots known as Synths have taken a valuable place in human society. Originally a focused character drama looking as the Hawkins family, the show spiralled out into a rich mythology and backstory while never losing that skill with its characters. In rifling through all of the ways in which robots have been treated in science fiction, the show managed to develop its cast of humans and sentient synths as a large set of distinct, well-developed and sympathetic by Episode Two. Add in phenomenal acting turns by Katherine Parkinson, Colin Morgan, Gemma Chan and newcomer Lucy Carless, and you've got one of the best newcomer shows of the year. (See here for my longer article on the show.)

These are two attractive people. From ibtimes

Outlander - Season 1, Amazon Prime/Starz
Written 6th September.

Carrying on the recent rise in online-only shows, this year I also watched the first season of Outlander, a show only available in the UK via Amazon Prime's exclusive premium on-demand service. Adapted from the series of books by Diana Gabaldon, the show follows 1940s army nurse Clare Randall as she is thrown back in time to 18th Century Scotland. There she is taken in by the Clan Mackenzie, a local lordship in opposition to the British throne, and she falls in love with the strapping Jamie Fraser. Forced to fight the evil ancestor of her 1940s husband, she must find a way to get home.
     Outlander often struggles with its balance of historical drama and sci-fi leanings. Like its obvious protegé Life On Mars (which actually succeeds the publishing of the books which inspired the show), it's often difficult to remember the fact that Clare is displaced out of time, at least once the "Fish-out-of-water" humour runs dry. Luckily, the plot is well-placed enough that a lot of the time you don't much care, and those sci-fi elements do raise their heads again. I did find a lot of the show's nudity and sex scenes a tad excessive (this show has more nudity than Game of Thrones, although it's usually a lot less bloody and violent) and I found it questionable that the two main villains of the this first season were both implied to be gay (and the same was not true of any other character.) But despite concerns, there's something strangely compelling and relaxing about the escapades of Clare Randall, especially in the second half of the season, when the series' mytharc begins to bear fruit.

Even on the poster it looks like she doesn't wanna be here.
From the BBC

Doctor Who - Series 9, BBC1
Written 27th December.

After being pleasantly surprised by Series 8, I had a lot of hope for my favourite show. Moffat was still here, of course, but there was something of a development in his writing style that seemed to me to be less about making offensive jokes and more about actual character development. Series 9 was very much one step forwards, two steps back. A lot of Moffat's old tropes returned, including an arc which didn't really go together very well, and the habit of retconning important parts of Doctor Who's history. However, the show did go the extra mile in taking some steps in new directions, especially when it came to the Time Lords.
     The most notable differences in this season came with the show's new format and aesthetic. Most all but two of the episodes in the season were organised as two-parters, which brought to mind the format of the Sarah Jane Adventures. I had hoped that it would allow a lot of the stories to become more developed, as they were approaching the length of Classic serials, but that didn't really come to pass as a lot of the time each individual part had a very different tone, pace and occasionally writers than the other half, meaning there was something of a lack of tonal consistency. This tied into another aesthetic shift for the show, with Moffat falling back into his misguided desire to make the show "cool" and "modern", exchanging the Sonic Screwdriver for a gaudy set of sunglasses and Peter Capaldi's Pertwee-esque costume for a hoodie and trainers. And the less we talk about that electric guitar, the better.
     Clara finally got to leave this series, although they had to ruin it again by giving us a passable if noble departure, followed up by a less believable resurrection and an open-ended departure off into space. Series 8 had her developing from a normal-ish human being into a character somewhat obsessed with taking on the responsibilities and identity of The Doctor, and that development did continue here, albeit a great deal more slowly. Unlike the previous season, which presented this as a noticeable flaw which Clara really shouldn't be working towards, this year it was just an accepted fact about who she was, including during both of her exits. I like that she carried on that development, but I still think that it would have been so much better to just let her leave in Last Christmas like she was supposed to.

I am going to break that guitar. From BBC America

      And, finally, this year was struck with a number of arcs and recurring characters. From the second episode we got not-so-subtle mentions of "The Hybrid", a retconning Time-Lord prophecy which spluttered to an unsatisfactory ending in the finale. Part of that developing arc was the reoccurring face of Maisie Williams as Ashildr/"Me", who didn't really impress in the role, with the exception of a more subtle turn in The Woman Who Lived. These recurring aspects did tie the season together into a cohesive whole, but the result didn't really gel very well because of the vast changes in tone and the fact that most of it is brushed aside for an arc with the Time Lords in the finale.
     For a series that tried very hard to be different, it's a shame so much of it failed in the execution. For the first time we got two female writers and both of their episodes were slated by fandom, even though they were two of the best episodes of the season. The Zygon two-parter, while dangerously stupid in its politics, was at least trying to be relevant and interesting science fiction. There's a sense of stuttering, of a car failing to start repeatedly. The question is, can Doctor Who recover before it burns out the clutch? And, if rumours are to be believed, is next year the last outing for both Capaldi and Moffat?

At least Miko's story turned out not to be as terrible as I thought.

Heroes Reborn - Season 1, NBC
Written between 30th October and 27th November.

I had a lot on the table for Heroes Reborn. Despite a lot of my misgivings about its parent series, I was still of the opinion that it could have really done with one final season to conclude the story and the journeys of these characters, as well as to explore that last cliffhanger in which the existence of Evolved Humans (now "Evos") is now a public matter of fact. When Reborn began I wasn't very impressed with the the way it reused a lot of the same character archetypes and themes to say a lot of the same things, but as the series went on I began to see how tightly the story has been written, avoiding a lot of the pitfalls that Heroes itself often fell into.
       Instead of acting as yet another cycle of Heroes' repeating storyline, the focus of the series around the aftermath of an orchestrated terrorist attack means that this Universe feels a lot more adult, with characters having to face the consequences of their actions as and when they happen. There are enough old faces to make the show still feel like you're watching Heroes, but for the most part the injection of new blood has very much updated the show, developing it past its mid-noughties chic and neatly avoiding a lot of the stink that the show had picked up by its fourth season. Its biggest improvement is in its time-travel story, which manages to be very tight-knit and cohesive, dotting all the is and crossing the ts to make an exciting and yet perfectly logical sequence of events.
     I wish I could have reviewed this week-on-week, but I really didn't have the energy to do so. I'd also have liked to see how it ended - but for some stupid reason NBC have decided to leave the final three episodes of the season in January, ending this year's run with an awkward filler episode and completely demolishing any and all momentum that the show has. People are not going to tune in in January to finish this thing off, and if they do, all of the tension will just be gone. It feels a little like NBC want to sabotage this show and make sure that Heroes doesn't end up coming back full time, and that's a real shame, because once this little mini-series got going, it really deserved a fair chance.

Luther is captivating but running out of ideas. From the BBC

Luther - Series 4, BBC1
Written 27th December.

Erm... Hi? I've loved Luther since it started, I think it's an amazing, unique take on the detective genre which combines gruesome villains with a charismatic lead, playing off of a number of detective show cliches while never actually feeling held down by them. It fell into a nice format of four hour-long episodes in two rhyming couplets, which worked, keeping the character's intensity in short bursts. The third season ended on an open-ended but satisfying moment, keeping it open for star Idris Elba's desire to take the series to cinemas. That's what makes this incredibly short two-parter seem a little... well, weird is the word. It's nice to see you, Luther, but why is this such a flying visit?
     Given the brevity of the series, I was expecting something huge from the two-parter, something which would fundamentally change the format of the series. While we shifted some of the cast around, replacing Warren Brown with Rose Leslie and starring a brand new messed-up killer who eats his victims and then leads the police to each of them with a trail of identity papers. It was a balance of moments both introspective and painfully tense, but it didn't really have the barnstorming, triumphant surge which made Luther work - there needs to be the catharsis that comes with watching Luther beat the shit out of someone. The second half also wandered off into very strange territory, and even with Luther's extraordinary stories it stretched my sense of disbelief. I would have much preferred that this be the first two episodes of a brand new series instead of this strange "event" show which didn't really feel like it made that much of a lasting impression.

This show would be at the top if this was a "Top 11 Shows" list.
From denofgeek

Jessica Jones - Season 1, Netflix
Written 27th December.

A late addition to this list, but I couldn't talk about 2015 without mentioning Jessica Jones, the latest of the Marvel spin-off TV shows appearing on Netflix. Running alongside the series of blockbuster films and two TV shows on Disney's ABC channel, Marvel moved its vast Cinematic Universe over to Netflix earlier this year, with the 13-episode series Daredevil starring Charlie Cox. I wasn't really interested in that series, but I was interested in Jessica Jones, a series about a superhero-turned-private-eye starring Kristin Ritter and David Tennant. And let's get this out of the way, because it's going to be the most controversial thing I say on this list - Jessica Jones is the best thing that the MCU has produced.
     The main themes behind Jessica Jones , are incredibly important, as they discuss a topic very rarely addressed in mainstream media - female agency. Jones' main villain, Kilgrave, is a super villain whose ability lets him make anyone do whatever he wants them to, and he used this to both physically and psychologically abuse Jessica for a number of years. The series doesn't shy away from the language surrounding the topic - Kilgrave is a rapist, he's a murderer, and he's also the most charming person in the room. The show is a testament to both Ritter and Tennant - Ritter for portraying the anger and strength of a survivor of abuse, Tennant for managing to deliver the most realistic portrayal of an abuser I've ever seen on television.
     But the brilliant thing is that those issues aren't the be-all and end-all - there are a lot of amazing action scenes, some great mysteries and intrigues, a heart-breaking romance subplot that doesn't feel insultingly shoehorned in. There's a charming noir feel that the series maintains with very little effort, but it also feels modern and engaging and almost beyond cliché. Of all the shows on this list, this is the one that I have to recommend the most highly - it's clever, consistent, breathtaking in its topics and just one of the best TV shows to come out in 2015.

Thanks.