23 April 2013

Who you gonna call? (Review: 'Doctor Who' 33.9, "Hide")

(I was supposed to have these go up 48 hours after UK airing – my apologies. This will hopefully not happen again)

 

This one was clearly meant to be a spookier tale and might have been better watched live or late at night; I watched it at 11am on a Sunday morning (day trip), so this might colour my judgement.

 

·         A lot of great dialogue in this between the Doctor and Clara; the “Ghostbusters” joke at the start was brilliant.

·         I can’t help but notice there were only five actors in this episode – one of which wore a monster suit.

·         Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor was on even better form than usual; he’s great when he’s speaking at a thousand miles a minute, going on tangents in a middle of a sentence.

·         Clara was also superb – it’s not escaped attention on Gallifrey Base that her weakest performance was in the episode penned by Steven Moffat, who should be the best at writing her – as he created her!

·         I liked the orange spacesuit (which has been worn by the Doctor before), but the Metebelis Three crystal seemed a bit tacked on. When did he get that one?

·         The ‘ghost’ had a science fiction explanation – this is common for the show and worked better than if it was an actual ghost.

·         The TARDIS Voice Visual Interface was fun for a one-off gag, but let’s not have it too often.

·         The Alec and Emma relationship is clearly meant to partner that of the Doctor and Clara – although the names are rather reminiscent of The Avengers or Sapphire and Steel.

·         The overall twist was good; but it’s the sort of thing this show has done a lot.

·         It’s been a while since we’ve had so much TARDIS travel in a single episode – we didn’t even get an interior scene in last week’s episode.

 

Conclusion

 

While there were a lot of enjoyable moments, this kind of lost something towards the end. Not the best ‘spooky’ story by a long chalk.

 

7/10

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